The Hardtech Podcast - Altium Episode
Guest: Justin Sears, Head of Product Marketing, SaaS, Altium
Hosts: DeAndre Harakas and Grant Chapman
Recorded in person at Glassboard, Indianapolis

Note: this was recorded in person and the source only diarized two channels,
so speaker labels are approximate and blend the hosts and guest in places.
Names in the raw audio were auto-transcribed and are unreliable.

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[00:00:00] Speaker 2:
Welcome to the podcast.

[00:00:08] Speaker 1:
And everybody, welcome back to the Hard Tech podcast. I'm your host DeAndre, with my usual suspect, Grant Chapman. Hey, everyone. This has been one a long time in the making. It has been. So this episode here comes all the way back from our time at Kinetic in Silicon Valley. Justin Sears from Altium, welcome to the podcast. Oh, it's so good to be here. Thanks for inviting me. And I'm really looking forward to this. Yeah, you and I mean, going back and forth on webinars and zoom calls and all this stuff, planning this and a few other events  that we got coming up we'll talk about here in the podcast. But  I'm glad today is finally today. Yes. It's so good to be here in your headquarters. Yeah. You had a tour of facility and and we spent three hours with the car going to go tomorrow. So, you know, Justin, if you see him again after this podcast, it means he survived. Yes. And for all of you guys listening, we actually just dropped a collaboration video. That all team was actually here in person at the Glass Porch Studio. They put it on with our work with Clear Object. That was a super cool video.  Can you tell us a little bit about this, like the Altium stories in general? I'm just kind of curious there. Well, that was led by Benjamin Kitzinger on our team, and I call him the Steven Spielberg of videos because he really likes telling stories. And, you know, my job had Altium is to tell stories about what we help people build. And so if you're looking at it from a technical perspective, a schematic is only so interesting to a certain person. If you talk about what we're building, then it really brings it to life. And so I know he had a great time here, because you guys  actually got out on the road and showed something that is going to save lives. And that's why we do what we do. Whether you're an electrical engineer or a marketing guy like me, you like to think that you're making something happen in the real world. Yeah, and it was a really cool opportunity for us because Clear Object is one of those rare clients that wants their story told. Most of our clients are we're all under lock and key and NDA, and we do great work. And we know we did great work, but the world doesn't get to see it. And the timing that, you know, just the stars align, that you guys are wanting to do some, some good, you know, marketing video pieces with Benjamin, I had clear object. He wanted to tell a story. So we had to tell all three sides, the, you know, end client product side of the story, how the sausage is made at glass board and the shoulders of giants. We get to stand on that Altium makes. And I think that's a really cool through line for us to be able to tell. So call the Lincoln, you know, the link to the video, be in the description of the podcast. We're super lucky to have you here in person. Obviously all team being the brand that it is and  our team here at Glass Board using the platform. And it was like almost serendipitous the way it came together. We managed to get Grant into this dinner out at kinetic, and can you guys just tell me a little bit about like, how did this all come to be? I get draft drafted to this dinner. That honor is like, hey, Grant, you're going to go to this dinner alone? I couldn't get myself a seat because, you know, a title. Finally, CEO zone. And I was like, okay, who's going? He's like, I don't know. I was like, okay, cool. I'll go do the thing. So I, you know, I'm in there. You know what? Shaking babies and kissing hands or whatever you do when you're networking and  I get down and I'm like, you know, the last seat at the end of the table, and Justin sits down at the head and I'm like, oh, hey, hi, Justin. My name is Grant. And you know, we're introducing each other and we find out that you're the one hosting the dinner. And I didn't even know how I got well. And I'll add to that, that was organized by Duro, which is a company that we recently acquired. So they had actually organized it. And I got to that dinner a little bit like you did. Grant  said, hey, there's this event, I'm in the San Francisco Bay area. It's not a hard trip for me to make, and my bread and butter is getting to know customers and the role I have now, I only have so much opportunity to do that. So I was like, heck yeah, let me get out there and and to tie it all back together. Design service companies are a big segment for us. If we could only understand who they are and learn what their reality is like, and meet some of them and get them to speak on our behalf and sit down next to you? Yep. And then you had to listen to flooring. And I talk about, you know, Europe versus US immigration and all that for the first 20 or 30 minutes. And then we finally got into what we did. It was all good. And Florian, from all the wise also, you know, somebody that we're talking to not telling their story as well. Yeah. Because we've said  11 hour with Duro  Florian, you myself,  what was that, early September. Yeah. It was for you tech. Yeah. Yep, yep. And as we're recording this right now, we have a webinar that will start in approximately two hours. So not when this was you know, you're going to hear this podcast, but you can go watch the recording later. That'll be super fun. You and I were joking earlier that the video, the customer video, we never really know when that's going to be ready or finished or and so perfect timing. Now people are listening to this podcast. Can watch that too and get the full picture. Absolutely. It's always better to be lucky than good, right? Justin, one of the first questions we have for you is  you came into electronics from cloud software and big data. And what surprised you the most about how hardware teams work and what's changed since you got here? Well, yeah, that was probably a leap of faith for the folks that hired me, because I had never worked in hardware before. Software, software, software since the year 2000 and so. But what's been consistent for me, I'm a guy who's never designed hardware and never written a line of software code in his life. So I come to this from looking from the outside in and try to understand it. So  it's been great since I joined the  team because before I was serving manufacturing companies, hardware companies with data software. So I was at court work, which is Apache Hadoop Big Data 2010 to 2020.  And so I learned through that again from the outside in. How does data help manufacturing do things better?  And so what I've learned about hardware is that I look for the similarities, like people talk about their software and there's hardware. And what we all know is embedded software is the fuzing of those two things. The difference is just man made, like those things need to work together, and we're starting to see a lot of that happening. I mean, I know you guys work in that area. Well, I think the neat part is you, having come from a software company who is serving manufacturers, means you actually understand what hardware means. It means lead time ordering, logistics. You have to actually make something to test it. You can't just hit compile and see if it works. And so you you joined Altium with this quasi real knowledge of what hardware actually means. So I bet you that transition was less of a jolt for you than it would have been for someone who have truly only come from the pure software space, like a social media company or, you know, a pure online web web dev thing. That's exactly right. And one of my customers at that big data company I mentioned made hard drives, and I talked to him about his use case, and he said they tested each one of those drives for six months before they rolled it off. And then they threw away 90% of the data because it was too expensive to store, and those drives got returned. They made a lot of drives. So even if you have a very low return rate, they were looking at tens of thousands of drives returned every month. And they had no they lost all the data on that initial test so they couldn't. So I'm not an engineer, but you can see that that's a problem. And how do you solve that problem? How do you think about solving that problem generally for a lot of main factors. Yeah. And I think it was more from just tech products like hard drive, like how do you track a manufacturing method or a failure mode or your test data when you validated the medical device? Right. You have to legally keep that test data around to show that, yes, this is safe and here's why. And do you guys have to do that? Yes. For clients okay. Yep. Yeah. So we have to have data retention policies. And the nice part is we aren't the manufacturer of record. So we're not the one that's registering with the FDA to build this product. But we are the ones assembling all the tests and the paperwork and the checkboxes. This is this is what we say. It's good enough to pass. And then we go with the client to go file for, let's call it their five 10-K with the class two product and get that approval. Or I'm going to say the wrong word is clearance  from the FDA to market that product that we had done enough engineering and safety testing along the way, and then that manufacturer and our client, in the years going forward, have to maintain testing every X number of devices to make sure it passes. Every time they change a batch process, they have to go retest these tests, and we get to go have the fun job of making those calls and working with the quality team to justify that. Yes, we've met the requirements of insert ISO standard here that this product needs to mean. Yeah, I'm sure we'll talk about it later in this conversation. But all things cloud platform, the fact that it captures all of that we hear from our customers, that makes it a lot easier to show what was done. You're nailing it. Yeah. It's like git for software, right? You can see all the check ins of who checked in, what line of code, when and what comments were there and who tested it afterwards and who accepted it. Altium go into that cloud database allows that same traceability of which engineer made the change. When did it happen? You can see in the timeline. Oh cool. This happened in January of 2022. We started making these in February of 2022. Cool. This was the version that was definitely used in this batch that had a failure. Let's go find out what changed. And that traceability is so nice compared to the paper records, right? Whether it was true on paper or emails or word docs got saved, what versions where that don't always get updated because humans are imperfect. This is a great way to have a secondary source of that data and the primary source. When you're building the timeline, and you may never need to go back to it, but it just helps to know that it's there when it's it's even expanding beyond just compliance for FDA. I think one of the things we are seeing now is parts is coming again.  You know, we all knew it was coming for Ram in the last six months. We are starting to see the pickle  down to all aspects of the electrical supply chain. And it's like Covid again, and we're getting lots of requests from clients to go reengineer products, to go get things that are out of stock for the next two years after the product, and put things that they can go buy a bulk order up into the product. And we're giving these, you know, stationary CAD files, right? Hey, this is the best snapshot we have. And it would have been so nice to have gone through and see when every change was made by their engineers. Who did it, was it logged in their quality system? Was this revalidate it so I don't need to go retest this thing, but we're not there yet. So I'm very hopeful for the right future where everyone is on the time standard of phrase ability, which would make all of our lives a lot easier. Being archeologists, digging through the PDFs and the email chains that we get forwarded of, I it's one of these three versions of the circuit board. Can you guys figure it out? I love course that would make us very happy at LPM if that future comes here. So we'll do our best to point the way to folks so they can take care of that trades and building challenge, because it's a big one and it's one that they don't necessarily think about while they're designing and developing. But you need to you need to be thinking about the full life cycle of the design, and no one wants to do it. I think this is  one of the areas that we were all talking about for we got on camera that is so powerful. Is these modern tools, AI included, but definitely the modern Altium tools. All their goals are to take away the boring part of the job. Right? And some engineers will get like, get off my lawn. I want to do it my old fashioned way, but I trust it, and this is the way that I know. But these tools are doing such a good job of taking away the boring work or the work that gets missed that isn't glamorous, and allowing these engineers to stay in the tool to stay in layout, stay in schematic and stay in really like intentional design work. And they can just be more effective than I think. Just so excited about that. Yes for sure. Just one of the questions I had for you is a lot like you. I jumped from software even though I had a brief stint into into hardware.  The first company I started a company in college in the sports technology space was mobile. And so whenever I joined glass into the world of hardware, either foolishly or not foolishly, depending on who you ask,  it was surprising to me of this whole concept of a product development firm like glass bought a firm that's got electrical embedded, mechanical ID all in one house. Really, it's a product firm. And if you look around the country, there's a few of them per, you know, state, for example. I'm curious, you mentioned earlier that like Design Services was a segment you guys were particularly interested in. I'm curious why what opportunities are you guys seeing in that segment that is interesting to you guys? Well, I was telling Grant about this as we walked around and got the tour this morning. Pardon me. The  most of our clients use Altium in-house to produce 1 or 2 products. And so that is a lumpy utilization curve of Altium. They really use us heavily during periods of time, and then they don't use us during certain periods of time. And that depends on how much, how many projects they have going now for design service bureaus or design service companies  like Glass Board and Grant was giving you specifics on this. You're always working all day because you're serving 25 clients at one time, 100 clients over the year, whatever that number is. And so what we want to do is especially with the newer stuff that we're bringing in the market, we want a lot of people to know about it. You all are serving a lot of companies that are hearing about maybe they've already heard about Altium, but they're experiencing all of them for the first time as a client of Glass Board. That's a really great way. We're very excited about what we're bringing to market with our product. We want more people to get their hands on it. We do have a free workspace where you can try it free for 30 days, but that is convincing people. There's some marketing that has to go into getting people to do that. We much rather do it through glass board or other design service bureaus that are using us to provide better service. I say it's one of those things there's tell, show and then do when you're talking about like interacting with a new product, you can have someone tell you about it, which is general marketing. There's webinars where we can show someone how something works. And then there's do, which is, I think, what we  are the gateway drug dealer for you guys. We invite them into our old team space. They can get free access to the viewer to make comments to to drive the tool a bit. And it's like the first hits free. It's not a 30 day trial where you have to convince an engineer to spend hours trying a tool for no purpose, because if it doesn't get adopted, there's no purpose in trying the tool when they're working with us there, at least giving design review feedback something we would have done over PDFs or meetings or emails anyways, which is way more boring, way less traceable, and way less efficient. They're going to do something more efficient, and seeing the inside of this new tool that they didn't know they need it. It's one of these things when you're trying to sell a technical tool, that  someone do a job that they're very deeply seated in. I've been doing this for n number of years. I am the expert at my firm or my company. The way I do it is the way we we do it, and it's so hard to convince someone to try the next tool or the new toy if they're not already. The early adoption curve, which anyone that's doing that has already tried your tools and is excited about it, how do we get that middle part of the average user in? And it's a forced experience that is not for no purpose. I think that's the magic that you and I are talking about, that we unlock, that. We don't do it on purpose. All team in class would have no other deal for commissions or kickbacks other than we market with each other because we think we're cool.  And this is such a fun relationship for me because I get to go show my clients. I'm on the tip of the spear that my team are using the greatest and the latest tools. We've done all the trials to find out what are the best tools. We do them every single quarter or month or a year, and how fast the tools are moving to make sure we're efficient. We're doing the right stuff, because the more product I can make for people, the more referrals I get in. Because down run go to market board and this podcast we're all listening to as part of our motion to get people to know what we do. And it's very hard, like you said, lumpy to sell  product development, just like you sell software that does product development. They need you when they need you, and that window is very short. And then they pick the path and they're on that path. What about three years? Is that about your experience? Yeah. And and we're known for all team designers. So for people that don't know the history of Altium, founded in Tasmania, Australia in 1986 or thereabouts. So there are a lot of people have been using Altered Designer, but that is a segment of the people that need to design. We were walking around here, Grant, and you were the Messer over here, the eds over there, the  but it's all in their software. So what we are providing now and this is where the cloud comes in, we're providing a way for all those people to come together digitally and work together rather than and for us, the reason why I like talking about different audiences because we electrical engineers no authority. PTB designers, no. Sorry. Yeah, there are 5 or 6 times the number of people that are involved in a given hardware development project that also get to benefit. They're not using it every day, but they want to come in and they want to look at a schematic. They want to look at a layout. They want to be able to shift left and provide some insight into design before it gets dropped on their desk. Yeah, and it's that CategoryAsian too, like our mechanical team runs on shape, which is all in the cloud and all team and Onshape recently shook hands and now have some integrations that are really cool. So my mechanical engineer can click on the connector, drag it left on the circuit board the two centimeters he needs to make the hole in the box field and send that to the electrical engineer like, hey, can you route this? Is this an acceptable electrical layout? Because for me, mechanically, this is perfect. And they can do that without having to take screenshots and ask them, which way did you move it, left or right? Well, which way is the board? Up or down? And you have everybody in one building. But for clients of ours that are  oceans apart, that type of digital interaction collaboration is very valuable. Grant, you mentioned something that I want to dive into a little bit more, and this kind of picks off the narrative that you were mentioning around how Glass Port helps is the bleeding edge. We're kind of introducing some of these companies that might be on a legacy tool to Altium. And you mentioned something along the lines of  like some of those engineers that are kind of hard trot in their ways. They don't know what they don't know or they don't know why. They don't know what they're missing. That's right. What in your experience at Class board amongst the team were the things that you didn't know that we were missing. Now that all team has been introduced with what's like the other side of that equation look like,  oh, I think the  number one is that we because we've been on all team for a very long time. I think we were an original Eagle before Autodesk bought them back in the day. We couldn't afford when we were tiny and young.  Helpful hint if you guys have a startup program, promote it, do it. That's how you get the companies that grow up into customers one day.  But we were we had an alternate for a very long time, all team designer. So for even listening this is the desktop client. It runs on windows only. Please make a mac version  or cloud version like Onshape does, but it runs on windows and you install it like any CAD tool that we might all know and love. And you download your libraries and your files and your templates and you work from them, and you can save  just the design files, or you can export the full design, which is a copy of the library, and copy of all those parts that made up that design. And they're not very portable. So we had built our own git repository system that you would check in all these copies of the files into, so we'd store them outside of just that one engineers computer and date it. But we did manually manage this, and it was a mess because Altium didn't know it existed. We had to go get the files back locally on your machine and overwrite what Altium thought was there to get the latest versions. And then all of a sudden drew came in and kicked my door in. One day it was like, hey, Grant's got the phone, the Altium, and they had this new like 83, 65 stuff. That is like going to make my life way better. And like, oh, tell me, tell me how much they want to kick me in the teeth for pricing. It's like, well, they don't because it's new and it's great. And so we talked about it and we started to adopt it. We didn't know how good it was. We just thought it could be a help for it. Less overhead. In about three months in, we start realizing that we're having less meetings to go over design reviews. We're having less scheduled time with the client to click through every single net on the list and get them to approve it. The email traffic is far down, and it's because it's happening in the tool, and the engineer can access the tool right then and there to make the change or to comment back. No, go look at pin 32 next to the one you're commenting. That's why we did this. And that just decreased friction in the unglamorous, the unsexy part of the design, which is what we want. We want to make that go away and let the design stuff shine through. So I think that was our big  unlock moment. And you are speaking what I believe is the main value here as well, because I started my career in 2000, was marketing a SaaS product before. The term SaaS exists to become an ASP application service provider, but the getting to the end user and allowing people to interact digitally around something that's complicated, like hardware development, and that unlocks a lot of things. And what I want is more people to understand what you you had to understand that by doing it and learning it,  and it helps  for you to explain it rather than me, who's the software vendor to explain it, because you live it every day, and that's why it's so good for me to come and walk around your building and see how it's actually being used. I think it's so important as well, because it's so authentic, right? It's actually really how things are happening. I think the second question on a piggyback off that for you, Grant, is what's like a practical, real example of this  best case scenario we mentioned earlier around, you know, you have all team, you have this large enterprise that maybe is on some, you know, like a legacy system. We start working with them. How do you actually see that evolve practically. Like how have you actually seen that move. Well of course we get the  the first interaction is always negative. Right. Team is going to have to okay that you upload their data to the cloud. I'm like, Bob, you emailed me this and I use Google. It's already in Google Drive. It's on a cloud provider. Like let's let me go meet with it. And we walk them through how terms of service work and all the things that we sign to make sure that your data is protected, because this isn't the first rodeo. So we get past that first one. And so now we can use a 365 with their data, and their engineer  gets the the first time they get to go do a design review. And they're all excited. They get super stoked and they come in like, hey, this is so cool. How do you do all this? And we end up having to waste half the client meeting that week to, unfortunately, shill Altium for Altium sake. Because we know let's show you how we do this. Yeah.  And then their engineers are really invested in giving good feedback because this is the first time didn't feel like pulling teeth. So now, you know, fast forward a couple of weeks later. Now we're in the groove. We're in the pocket. The it is figured out. They now know how to use the review tools. And this is a little bit of a  dip back into a negative territory where they get over reviewing and the clients want their fingers in the whole design, and they're treating us more like staff hog trying to manage our process, our engineers, and we have to very politely get firmly remind them they had to. They called us for a reason. Let us leave this process and will teach you how we do it along the way. But don't try and micromanage us the way you would your employees because you hired us, because we're different. And then we get back into the pocket. And that's where it's like often the sunset. And the best case scenario is if in 2 or 3 years we're working with them and their teams now, 365 they've grown their internal practice because they learn better practices, and they're using us for maybe the early research or cutting edge work that's still better done outside of corporate environment because we can, you know, colloquially move fast and break things. And then we get the zines to 50 or 80% done wherever their quality team is most comfortable with their team taking it on, then they take it to production through their verification validation tests, making the design for manufacturing tweaks for their factory all in the same Altium files. There's no loss in translation. All the moves are tracked. They're there. If it's a medical device company, their design history file you can rewind to day one when we opened up the schematic for this product, which is very cool, and that must help them with all the regulatory. Speaking of  medical, we work with a lot of medical device companies and  they design the product better, faster, but they also have a long digital trail that they can share with regulators about how can I don't get me started with the acronyms and how many rules they need to meet. I've forgotten them all already, but they live with those every day, and it helps them to meet those rules as they roll that product. Yeah, I think this was Dan or you know, we're talking about this that yeah, every software has this  moment, this magic moment or every product has this, you know, this over many hardware products too. But there's this magic moment in in product development and marketing we are both hunting for what is the magic moment of this product? What is the one thing that makes it go click? And the user is like, this is what I need in my life for for this moment. We all know when we're prepping for this episode, we were like trying to make the analogy. And the one I came up with was the Google Docs moment, right? I know when we all started working and emailing word files back to each other and 18 was in your inbox, you were like the first year we on who updated this last final note. Final. Parentheses one. Parentheses one. You know tomorrow's date. You know, backdating today's date. Yeah, but no, I think that's the there's this moment in 8365 that started to unlock that. Right. You started to have this, you know, in real time collaboration with someone writing a comment about one thing. Well, someone else is working on something else over here. And that became this Google Docs moment for me of like, oh, someone's finely crafted. I remember Autodesk tried this with fusion three 61st and they they were the first mechanical Cat program to have the Google Docs moment. But e-card. No one had started. Even  mCAD now really mature and we'll call it the Google Docs moment. Onshape is fully live on the internet. Fusion does that. Everyone is starting to make more versions of things that do that. But in the cat, it was really crickets for a while until you guys started with 8365 at least storing the design file. So product data management cloud. But I think we're every six months or a year as we see the new release notes come out, we're getting even more features. And we've we've frost that Google Docs moment where the sun can never set on a design, and no file has to be shared with anyone outside of the tool. And you guys were talking about the challenges, convincing people to do something new. That's that's my job for the last 20 some years. Sure. But the what we're seeing is there are the the ease that have been doing things the same way for 25 years. But as new people come into the marketplace now and start doing these things, the younger engineers, they have no patience for the old ways and their and their digital native or whatever you want to call it. They know in their bones how efficient and effective they can be with collaboration, and they really won't accept any other way of doing things so that that will help this transition happen because people get better work done. I've got more of a question. This might have been on the initial brief, but just around adoption of from clients as the older generation has timed out a little bit in terms of like how keen they are on technology. Also, with AI adoptions kind of increasing in general, I'm curious what has been that evolution and what are you seeing now like, to your point, folks like me are I'm very interested in things that help me right now. And if it just because we did it that way before, it doesn't mean it's the right way. We just did it. And there's a there's a better way. I'm, you know, much more apt to adopt. And I'm curious, is that what you're seeing in the aggregate or how is it how is that really looking for that, that adoption bell curve? Well, you get people that change in 1 or 2 ways pain or pride and so pain of doing things the same way. We've seen a lot of examples of that. Covid tariffs, Strait of Hormuz, these external shocks that come in and you can't really do things the same way because there's some disruptor that is forces you to change. So that's one way to do it. The pride is I'm going to adopt some change here. It's going to be uncomfortable. But because I want to get to a better place. And so we're trying to provide stories for our prospects and our customers. Make the pain better. If you want to go the pain alleviation path, or if you're shooting for the moon will help you, it seems like it's a big change, really. As you pointed out, Grant, once you get into it, it's not that you're not doing things too differently, and you get this huge upside just from making a little bit of change. That's where we want people to lean into. And I think I'm trying to  lead this narrative here at Glass Board about change. And outside of Altium, all systems are changing at the speed of light right now with AI, how fast AI is making software development happen, how everyone's rushing to features out in tools, whether that is Google or Onshape or Altium or any of the other tools that we use. Some of the the friction that I think the team feels is  like they don't know enough, like there's too much new data to ingest at once. What is the thing I should try first? Because they don't want to. No one wants to do anything wrong. Right? There's the there's always inherent risk in changing what you do. Sometimes it's risk worth taking. But how do you judge what risk to take when there's so much new you don't know where to start? And I think there's this, this vision that I have for all this new technology is we shouldn't go trace. Trace the technology that takes away the part of your job that you love. Yes. Right. Because everyone the mind vetted software team went through this whole rollercoaster of, like, denial of, you know, only I can do my right, this kind of code. And then I got really good. And now we're going through the transition of like, how do we use the tools to write the best code, even if your fingers aren't writing, if space, then space.  And I think we're we're through this interesting transition with that team. I'm glad they got to do it first, because  it helped all of us understand the language, to use the tools to use. How do you go objectively review a new piece of technology, whether it's AI driven or not? Does it bring you joy? Does it make you more efficient? Does it make you faster? Does it catch things that maybe you would have missed in a way that doesn't drag down your work product? You and I work on this all the time is like, how do we take large amounts of data and just in your data, guys, maybe this will resonate. How do you use the tools to filter down the data that you and I need every day? Right. Only the data needs. We looked at all the data available you and I would still be reading. We'd be scrolling on that same page to see all the humans we were trying to recruit for the Rolex, or what city they all lived in. And how do you use tools to filter down to give you access to data that makes you really good, and also that brings you joy, right? You and I are always looking for ways to build a tool or a picker tool for each other. Like, hey, which one of these things do you want to do more? Let's go through this whole data set together. And I think that there's this huge mission that we all have as people at the forefront of technology to try a lot out, filter it down for the people that I think this is the thing that will give you joy. And how are you guys viewing that at all? Team, when you're picking what features to highlight when you're marketing, because you guys put out more features than any of us could ever read in one morphine release? Well, I see part of my role and part of the marketing team role is to bring those moments of joy to life. And I don't know, to be honest, I don't know how much of that gets back into the backlog for an engineering team, but that's where they should be paying attention, right? Because there are features that look good to an engineer and those features that feel good to the end user. And it's always a balance. Right. But I think of, we talked about data and I was a big data company called Hortonworks in the, in 2013 to 2017 period of time. And I remember talking with a guy who was very far in his career and was a cancer research doc, and he talked about data and connecting it to various forms of cancer. And he said, it's like you're in a dark room and you have a little candle and you're trying to find out more about the genome, and you just have to go to where the lamp is, and then you pull your Kindle out. But there's this massive area of unknown information and start talking about it. And you could see again that moment in his eyes. It's like, now I don't have to do that, whatever that is. In his case, it was munching the data so he could find out what the problem was. He had the data now, so he said he said, I'm a thousand, maybe a million times more effective as a cancer research doctor because they don't have to do that other thing. That's the moment that we're trying to provide for Altium customers. They're not sending emails, they're not stuck in their second meetings. They're actually focused on. And so, yeah, any technological change, you're going to have to give something up. But I believe and believe that what's on the other side is much better. More time getting to design, develop, tinker, create the new thing and not having to do the overhead or the paperwork as much because the platform will take care of all of that with them. Yeah. When you when you said you like you guys have highlighted moments of joy of folks on the all team platform. Are there are a few that that are top for you that you love to kind of come back to and think about as you. Yeah. Oh boy. It's a long list. The well, the video that we made with you guys, I wasn't involved in making it, but the, the clear object founder and and and team. You could tell by watching the video. I do recommend people take a look at it, that there's an idea that those folks had, and then to be out on the road testing it and seeing it happen.  You can tell in the founders eyes that that is what they were looking at. So  that's a good example. I'll give Stories has a lot more of those type of examples available. But that's where frankly, with my job in marketing, that's why I get out on the road as much as I can and will be at the SMC show  tomorrow. That's where the makers come up to our booth there and tell us how they use our platform or, or we tell them how they might use our platform. And then you for the bug that they wish was fixed, that just plugging them specifically. Yes. And there's always that. But we hopefully we've shown as a company that you stick with us and we'll get the bugs cleared eventually, but we're on to the next thing so that we can help people create more, better hardware. Yeah.  Curious to we talked about AI a little bit. I feel like we have to talk about AI more for. Yeah. Fortunately or unfortunately, what have you. What areas of you guys have so much data like we mentioned? Right? You guys see all these engineers doing projects, seeing how they're using the tool? Obviously, I'm sure from a product and a marketing perspective, you guys are thinking about how can we begin to implement this? What areas are you seeing from your perspective? Or is all team thinking about on how AI can be implemented more into the, you know, the engineering process of some of your users? You know, as VS will know better than I who've never designed a board using AI. We want to be able to make recommendations about how to make design better, but it's such a dense area of understanding and think of a multi-layered board with a it's it's hard to solve that. It's a lot of compute, let's put it that way. Well, that and it's also a dark art. Like the one thing about like layout right. Schematic is a little bit more straightforward layout. Those books aren't complete. Right. Like when you go learn a lot of engineering college, you actually don't learn how to become a good layovers. You learn how to become a good layout artist because someone who did it before you were to the place that you go to work and they teach you  and you are, you actually have to route these two things far apart, or put up a ground plane between these two kinds of trade and these things that actually never get written down, just like RF engineering. And I think that's where AI is going to fall short, because AI needs training data.  It needs written data to train on. And I think, Justin, what you were right on is like, you can't actually give  an electrical engineer an AI that will design the product because we're rejected. It'll be wrong 20, 30% of the time right now because that's where the tools are. That's enough. I'm just gonna do it from scratch. Right. And that's where that AI like in any application at some things, it will completely replace the human being if it's a low skill, low knowledge type of activity. But like we were saying before, AI will free engineers up from doing the other stuff so they get to look at and move more quickly in the things that really matter. And so back to how alchemist's thinking about that we did not jump into. We're just going to vote AI on top of it and hope for the best. So me as a marketer, I've been yelling from the rooftops for a year and a half like, let's get our AI story out there and the engineers cooler heads in mind and like, let's figure out how to do this right. And so you're going to start to see some of that coming out next year. We already do have AI around requirements. So so that's what I was going to bring out the best place to start. And so you better than me. Tell me why. That's the best place to start. Well hey it's all written down. B requirements documents have been written down for all of eternity because they're a requirements document, and it's a singular source of truth where you track what changes over time an AI is really good at. Is this different than the last one, and can I ingest transcripts from the meeting notes? Can I, in just the comments that came out of the layout and make sure that none of these things someone mentioned might go against one of the requirements or might change one? And all we need the AI to do is flag that to a user instead of make the change. Today we aren't good enough that AI is replacing people. It's actually just becoming a really good filter net of what should bubble up to the top of their attention. What of the 10,000 changes that might have gone on on this board in the last six months of design, iteration and requirement generation? Do you need to deal with today in the you and I was joke with our our files we sent back and forth like the pickers. It needs to be a binary. Yes I want to look at this later or no. So you can go through this big long list of potential changes. The I found like a almost like Tinder fast boom boom boom boom boom. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. And once you do that, you free up the engineer from him to keep that in his ram or her ram in their head of like, oh, I need to remember to go move that one thing, because it broke ISO 60601 and that one connector in the review last week. Capture all that data, give me a great to do list, and I'm going to go use my engineering talent to implement that change. And agile teams, the platform that I manage to go to market for has requirements portal as part of it. And so you can start from the documents you have, you upload it, it'll change each of those requirements into a parameter parameter tries requirement that you can verify and validate and then associate with your design. And then you can tag it into the schematic or into the layout file, so that when your testing is like it used to pass here, like this is where we need to do webinar on this. This is really cool. Let's let's do that. I mean we we let me just put it this way. The customer is understand this. It blows their mind because they're like, we've been doing it the other way, the hard way, the hard way. And and then once you upload those initial requirements and you filter through all the stuff, it's asking, is this, this, is this, that. And then no, that's an don't ignore that but like go through. But then the kicker is did I forget anything. Right. Because those requirements are never right. So like so that's where us being on cloud. And we're very careful about protecting each of our client's data. So that's partitioned. Right. But if you if they can learn from the corpus that belongs to any one of our clients how to make that requirement better, here are my templates. Here are the other five projects I'm working on within the status set. And  let me ask the obvious question. So I'm a consultant. I need a firewall between clients. Can I do that within your system? Can I can I make projects that are firewall from each other? Yes. Amazing. So I think this is the this is where I should lean in today is I call it the garbage collector. Right? AI is awesome to throw in the garbage collector mode, and it's just going to go parse through. And what changed? Why did it change? Should we change this? The next one I'm really excited about is data sheet management. I want every file, every single part we make in all team in our library to have a data sheet PDF that we have to upload from the vendor. And then I want an AI agent to go check that vendors version of that data sheet once a quarter, once a week. I don't care how often for errata, updates, etc. and flag that because everyone thinks electrical engineers don't like read a lot because they're engineers and they're doing math and design, electrical engineers read more than anybody I know as fast as anybody I know, because they're just reading a gazillion data sheets to pick one part, and they do that for a gazillion. Partizan aboard. You walked right into a conversation we've been having because we have an octave part. I did hear that rumor. And so  I always get the number one, got millions and millions of parts. Right. And each of those components has data sheets, right. And  of light. We haven't even talked about Bomb Manager yet. And that's what you and I talk about all the time we get together. Yeah. Yeah. And so making that getting back to data like how do you keep that data current and important at scale is a it's a very interesting challenge, one that we're trying to work with because we do want we want to make that job of reading data sheets, finding the right data sheet to read, comparing. And that's I think that's a great segue into the bond management  tool. Because our task. Yeah, because, I mean, it's  everyone thinks bond management thinks you do at the end. Right. And the weird story is it's the thing you do at the beginning, middle and  throughout a product lifecycle. Yes, at the beginning and design, we build a bond, we build the first version. Does it cost right? Does it meet the user needs great in the middle. When you're doing DFM and getting it ready for your factory build first time the bomb is the file you hand off back and forth like a football between you and your vendor. You source all these parts, yes or no, but at the end, once it's in production, someone should be checking that bomb on some cadence because people don't make the same part for the rest of their lives. That part only exists for iPhones, only exist for one year, right? And then their last year's model, and then they're done after that. Resistors, capacitors, ICS, ram connectors all age out. And someone's job has to be to check that. And it's a mess. Not to mention supply chain disruptions. I mean now is having flashbacks to Covid when you couldn't get anything. And now there's other reasons that you can't get the things you need, right? Or I don't know how long your average project last, but you might make a decision on bomb early on. Everyone's lost. That's never happened before, right? Never done that? No. And then you go to ship or your client goes to ship and. Oh, did anyone check years to end of life? Oh, no. Oh, yeah. We checked that. That was that was supposed to be end of life in 2030. Wait, did you get the email from, you know, insert vendor here that they're choosing the end of life that part next year because they're no longer making half the product lines because they can't get fab time. And that's where you mentioned somebody has to check. Well, the beautiful thing about alchemy is we have third party data feed that we're checking that automatically all the time. So we tell you, can we put those agents in that scrub all the designs and alert. So this leads into another question because again we've we touched on bomb management. It is amazing. We use I'll finish the story. We go to the next one. But we use bomb manager all the time I'd say what 20% of the work we get request inbound right now. Or can you fix my end of life circuit board? Because we're in the part shortage of yes and for not small company obviously. Yeah. The  and the timelines are I needed done yesterday and they they give us a bomb and like hey do you you know it's always in Excel. These orange columns are the ones we want you to fix. So we'll take that. And we don't trust them. We instantly import it all. Time to go to a bomb, check through octa, part in the bomb and you can go check supply. And we find 50% more components that need to be replaced right now because the the end of life date is just after when they had their surge. Right. We're looking into like, when is this really going to happen? If we're going to read this board and won't even be out for six months, what would the life EOL distance be at the daily launch? Right. And all right, we're going to fix most of the things now and even then, invariably between when we start an end of life update project and when that board goes to file production, we are making no our changes as long as we can sneak them in before validation to make them even more current, because things are going to all even faster than ever, or just out of stock, even if they're in in in production. 52 weeks lead time. Yeah. And Apple makes a new iPhone every year. We serve clients that design products that have a 30 year. Service history. Service history. And so you really didn't know those parts are going to be there 15 years. You know, that's kind of an impossible challenge, but having as much visibility, visibility into the future as possible and making, we say shift left a lot at all, because you should be thinking about supply chain as part of your design process. I was just on another webinar with supply Chain now, and they were talking about that like, if you're designing, you're designing for supply chain as well as function. And it's so hard for us. Our designers are pure designers. They are their racehorse. They're meant to go sprint it. They're there. They are not the marathon runners. And it is in today's environment. We are having to either lean on our clients, supply chain people in every meeting or make our our team who's supposed to be doing the latest and greatest. Pay attention to what the crystal ball says about the future. Where is this coming? But yeah, the bar manager helps us do that like crazy. So the theoretical question I have with all this great new data between bond manager and integration into requirements management and 65 and comments, the one fear that you and I share with all the great data being generated, how do we get this to a person that doesn't burn them out? How do we not? You know, my phone buzzes, I don't know, every five minutes. The Andre's that probably the lowest amount of distance between buzzes, between all the notifications. I mean, five minutes is way too long. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but truly, my phone's in my pocket. I have  probably turned it off. I did for this. Yeah.  It'll just sit there continually go and I watch will continually go. We call this Anxiety prime on your watch because it just tells you all the things you're missing. So the Amazon Prime it delivers a hot and fresh. But you know, how do we filter out these notifications to users so they don't burn out? Because I just don't even look at notifications on my phone like my family texts me. That's gone. There's that's a that text went into a shredder somewhere because I don't I don't get the notification. And then I'll go read my text messages and go after the people I like, but I'm not going to get anywhere again. How do we make sure the noise floor is not so high that no one listens? Well, you can. There's two ways you can have the user set their own tolerance for that. That's on consumer products. At Altium, we definitely take the design idea of putting the information in context, because if you get non contextual information, you have to do the work to put it in context to determine whether it's important or not. Within all the  teams there are alerts and updates and you can configure those with our templates and our workflows. But if there's one people working on a project, not all ten people need to see all those dates. It's about the part of the design or the part of the project. And and you can contextualize that to the people who need to know. You can do that with permissions. I know you guys love to talk about this a little bit. You're serving your clients and you mentioned it earlier in this conversation. You don't want them asking you if they 10,000 to 1 question. If they can't see in to what you're doing, they're probably calling. You said, how's that design coming? What am I going to get it when I get now? You almost have the opposite challenge, which is they can come in and they can look at it. And how do you pull my resistors lined up on grid? What do you mean you can't make them perfectly aligned throughout the circuit board? That isn't straight. Yes. And you have to. And it sounds like you've found a good way to balance that. How have you managed the client management of that? So that they can have visibility? They can. What we wanted I'll give is them to get involved in the design process for the right amount. But there's a place that's too much.  How do you how do you manage that? We hire engineers. So we joke that, you know, I'm interviewing. If people look me in the eyes, they're probably better for sales role. If they look at their own shoes, they're probably good engineer, but maybe not for us. I need the the engineers to look at my shoes when we're interviewing. This middle ground is perfect. We need our technical team to have really some real people skills and some soft skills to lead a conversation with confidence that this is how we are going to do it. Be open to feedback, because sometimes clients are right, and that's not once in a blue moon. Some of them are really brilliant at their area of expertise and how to navigate this conversations. And it's that interpersonal boundary that you just  it's like a moving line in a war. It it ebbs and flows as it should throughout a program. And the only way we found to do that well is get really great people that are engineers and deeply technical and talented at their craft, that are also not afraid to defend their ground and know when to give ground  to a client request of something silly. And it's it's all soft skills. So I think the good news is the AI agents won't take us over because they probably won't replicate that. Well, well, and as you and I were walking around your headquarters in, I see people heads down doing their thing. That's what they want to be doing more of that, less of the other thing. The question is, how do we make the heads downtime more valuable? By providing that asynchronous collaboration and connection through our platform so that when they're working on the thing, whatever they're working on, they're not worrying about what what is this client going to think, and when do I have to get their feedback? Or oh, my, Tuesdays and Thursdays are just meetings. I didn't get to open Altium other than to show a client on a zoom call. Right. Our goal is to reduce those meetings to. I'm so excited to show the client everything we've gotten to do from the feedback. They put it all up and I've got this more time on it because it wasn't. One of the things I think is really interesting that I finally put two and two together is even like for the service firms that listen to our podcast, which is not a small number. Yeah. Basically the the team platform kind of introduces the concept of the Uber map when it comes to your clients, like why was Uber so successful, amongst other reasons, hyper funded, etc.?  Well, whenever you wait for a taxi, you never knew how long it was going to be. And that unknowing this that unknown was uncomfortable. It was pain. And so they introduced the Uber map, which is very simple, but from a behavioral science perspective is quite genius. And so all of a sudden I am actually more comfortable to wait 20 minutes if I know it's going to be 20 minutes versus a taxi. Even if it's ten, that ten minutes is really uncomfortable. And so from that same perspective, when it comes to the service firms, you mentioned it right off the bat. If I'm having a customer paying us, you know, X amount to do this Y project, and our only touchpoint for them is to talk to them every single week and in a one hour meeting. And that's it. Yeah. In a one hour meeting and say, hey, don't worry, it's on its way. We can't give you access to the tool. See anything? But don't worry, we're working on it. You know, cross our fingers with Altium. They see the progress. So even though you are managing like, you know, you're going to have your kind of micro  microcontrollers or what have you.  You still have that opportunity to show them the progress you're making on the project. Tell me how that has helped your team provide that visibility. We'll leave out the people that are too much in your. Yeah, the micro managers who I met,  most of the people, probably that controller is fitting for this conversation. That's a good point. I actually I stumbled into it. Oh, accident. Whatever. Well, I think the the balance is again is back to that ebb and flow that some people are going to use that for the right amount of  involvement. Some people are going to over index, which is fine. We have some people that actually are the knowing how because again e design there's a lumpy progress process. Right? You spend a lot of time in the internet just researching data sheets. And the schematic doesn't change for like days. You don't write it down because you want them to know you're not just out of the beach or right, right. But but the Altium stuff won't update yet because we are just doing early stage review, and it's all like a flow chart and like a whiteboarding tool that we use. That's not even in all team, because it's higher level than that. And they get really itchy, like, hey, why aren't we? Why aren't making design updates yet? And then they see all this progress all at once. Gets built, the very first layout board outline gets done, and the mechanical guy puts the connectors down and they're like, you guys are wizards. And then it gets lumpy again because we're waiting for new circuit boards to show up. And there's been no design updates and they're like, hey, like, where's the program? Like we're it's hardware. We're waiting on physical goods to get here to test. So it's, but just having the ability because we talk to our clients a lot about you don't need an all time designer seat for those people out there. No. Yeah. They just need to be a viewer. They can just view and comment. Does that set them at. Even if they. So if they don't use it, they know it's there. Yeah. So I think my, my answer on the lumpiness is we have 10% of the clients they get to micromanage 10% of the clients. They get to worry wart because they do or don't see progress happening. The other 80% is the best things in place. Bread, right? We're in the Google Docs moment. We're instead of throwing PDFs back and forth over email or just presenting a PowerPoint doc in an update meeting, everyone's in it live. All the stuff is in context. Just as you said earlier, the in context of the tool you're in is so important. You can ask a question about why is this cap over here? And the engineers point to, oh, we have a power plane here. We can't even root that cap where you want it. From a  visual perspective, it has to be over here for a technical reason. That's a great moment for your engineer to show expertise. They're not going oh, what? Oh, well, he just dumped it there. I'm sorry bud, they could say they can show how good they're doing. And then I'm sure that it helps. And and it it great. It creates great dialog with great clients. It highlights the friction with the ones that are going to make or be micromanaging. And you can just choose to go fire those people. We don't work with people that are jerks,  and it helps me filter them out faster, which is even better. But really, again, as I was indexing the negatives just to show the vast difference between and for the other interests and people, this is like the future is here. Google docs for iChat is coming, and we are in the early days where yes, you can't do everything in the cloud yet, but we're very hopeful and we're so excited for the data collaboration. I just think it's so compelling for a services firm to I mean, what's the most important piece you mentioned earlier for a services firm is either going out and finding clients and maintaining ultimately that's your job. That's what you're doing as a company. And with all time, you're actually able to focus on retention through the tool, which is like why that Uber map idea was so important. There is like, yes, you're getting all the advantages of the collaboration, the tool, the development, the actual engineering of the product. And you're you can deliver on retention and keeping clients as well. I mean that's pretty valuable. I think that's that's a cool piece that I'm glad we pointed out. That's such a good point that I had never thought of the other thing that it does that isn't Altium Designer that only ever engineer would ever open. This tool is so user friendly. We're getting project managers and program managers involved in product managers and marketing, and we're getting clients with roles and titles. Would have never seen this this early, never been able to be a part of it. Which Russ is awesome because it exposes glass board to another part of this company's ecosystem that is usually outside of the project team that we're on. So again, drug dealer model first is free and land and expand for us as a marketing tool. It's fantastic because more people see the great work that we do for Altium. It's also fantastic  out there as the  the the guy in the front line drug dealer model. First, it is free getting this great visibility and this great tool into the hands of people that aren't traditional electrical engineers. And that makes me so happy because every one of our clients we talk to, they say there's a lot of different people that need to come together to create the thing that we're trying to create. And then I say, would you have how many tools does it take to build this thing or bring them all together? Anywhere between 7 and 35? Yeah, the list goes on. What about if you could just all come into the same secure workspace and look at things together, and you get to control in a way by permissions, like who gets to do what, what projects share the same libraries, etc. all of that. But but then and the library, I mean, there's certain things that you can share across many libraries. You have a here's my home base library that I maintain in each one of my clients has the subset that is there that can borrow an import from my main base. Yeah. And then if you go to buying and this is less for something like yours and more for a company that's, that's producing products in their own product over years, they can scale the use of that. You know, we have  clients or customers who they had different groups maintaining different libraries, and they're all buying 10,000 units of the same part, 5 or 6 different times without volume pricing, without volume pricing. And then sometimes that's just what  you can roll it all up, like, you get huge price of it because nobody knew that they were buying 100,000 or 1 million of that part because all of their divisions. Right? Right. That may have different purchasing departments and all things. The word division in that case is very apropos, right? Like they're divided, they can't see the same data. And there's lots of advantages to having everything in one place. And everybody plans in the same thing from the same hymnal, so to speak. Yeah. No. Again, it's this going back to data. Your your history and what we're all been talking about is lots and lots of data is great. Accessing lots of data in a way that makes it user friendly is what changes the game. This is what the modern SaaS tools have been doing for years. Getting more data in the right places with the right UX, UI, what modern CAD tools have all been driving towards? How do I open up the data set outside of a shared zip folder? We have to throw back and forth over email, or maybe a PDM. You have to have a log into and get files in and out of. How do we just make this organic where the tools connect all team and Onshape, you know,  email and all these things. How do we how do we connect these tools together? I think  my favorite part about the AI race is MCP. Just taking the word API that's been around forever and blowing the front doors off of it and saying, hey, we need ways to connect all these disparate tools together in a way that is safe, permissioned, and access, but really easy to mix and match data sets to the right user at the right time. Yeah, because when you go to your work, you don't think about what platform am I using right now? What app is it? You just want to get the work done. And the more we can abstract that make an  auto magical. Yeah. Just, you know, don't mind the man behind the curtain. All the data is in the safe, secure place. You can see each data lake, but how can you access them together? Just go design something. Yeah. Just go. Just go design something. I think that's a great. That's the best anyway. Or head to podcast. That's great. Any Justin, again, thank you so much for being on the show. Super excited to have you here in person in Indianapolis. I'm looking forward to jumping up to Chicago. Any kind of closing thoughts from your side  on the podcast? I just I would just encourage everybody to try out what we have to offer because it's, you know, you guys have said better than I ever could what the benefits are because you do the work. And so we want more people to try it out. You can try our solution experience free trial 30 days, test it out with your team, get people from all sorts of different functions on the platform, not just the but the project manager, the requirements manager, mechanical  mechanical engineer like you can actually try and that solution experience that we have available online. It comes with preloaded synthetic data. So you don't need to bring your own data. You don't need to worry about if anyone else is going to see the data or it has to approve it. We made it all up for a drone that you're never going to see in the real world. And then you could just after 30 days, it all goes away. It's really a sandbox. And so we really want people to try that out because you're sharing some of the joy, some of the excitement that comes from being able to work together better as a team. And that's what really gets great products made. Phenomenal. Everybody. This is the hard tech podcast. I'm your host DeAndre Grant. Justin. Thanks, guys. Thanks for coming in. Yeah. My pleasure. Take care.