Jeston George 0:00
Being entrepreneurial minded, you have to be a learner… every step of the way. That means, that’s all you’re doing. You have to be extremely curious. Can’t be set in your ways you can’t be arrogant about anything, right? So at all times, I am learning and that is extremely fun for me.

Nate Disarro 0:15
Hey, it’s Nate Disarro and welcome to Titans of Industry, the podcast where I talk to industry leaders and innovators who are at the top of their game and leading the pack in their fields, uncovering some of the best stories in today’s business landscape. In this episode, I speak with Jeston George, CEO and founder of Apptegy, an education technology and marketing startup, Jeston realized the need for Apptegy when he wanted to receive the latest news from his nephew school. Realizing the gap that existed in public education, marketing and communications, he created Apptegy to offer app-based solutions. Apptegy is now booming with 350 employees in multiple countries, a spectacular new office space, and a culture that values customer relationships and innovation without sacrificing quality. Now let’s get to the episode. But before we do, let’s talk about content, strategy and video for marketing your business. Our team at content Titan is committed to great storytelling, no matter what industry you’re in, it’s crucial to engage, entertain, inform and captivate your audience. And video is the best way to do it. Having worked with people and organizations of all shapes and sizes, our team has the experience to deliver the right content at the right price. We are easy to do business with and we know how to get you results. Visit content titan.co to learn more. Now, here’s the episode with Jeston George. Jeston George, thanks so much for jumping into the podcast with us. I guess we’ve known each other for several years. But it’s been a while in your your new office space now and can’t wait to kind of dive into the story of how you guys ended up going from a small startup in Little Rock, Arkansas to Now, essentially an international company. I think you’re operating in what 46 states you have clients or something like that.

Jeston George 2:11
Yeah, we’re in all 50. Now all 50!

Nate Disarro 2:14
So why don’t we just start with with kind of give me the background? What Where did you get started in your career? And then ultimately, how did you decide this was a company that needed to happen?

Jeston George 2:23
It was there’s actually a running joke here that I found that at a very early age, I was a bad employee. So I had to start companies. And so that’s what led me to this. Most of my background has been sales or sales management in some way, shape or form. But really serial entrepreneur at heart had a direct marketing business before this is your big your stereotypical small business, right? We were five employees extremely profitable. You couldn’t quit it. It was doing too well. But it was a nightmare to run it and a really interesting story, a business broker locally that knew about us came by and said, Would you ever sell I’ve had people ask about you. And we were like, Heck, yeah, we would never heard anything. And then six months later, this guy shows up with three offers. And so like we took the all cash offer, it’s like, let’s get out of this as quick as we can. So I feel like we’ve kind of got a little bit of a lucky break there. But from then it was just like, obviously, for me being an entrepreneur at heart had to figure out what’s next. And really interested in software technology. I don’t know why I’ve never written a line of code. And I set up a little agency and started actually taking on some web projects and hiring out the work. And around that time I found out what startups were. So when I say startup about Silicon Valley style tech startups, this is really intriguing to me, but didn’t have an idea. And then shortly after that, was around the time of my my nephew’s mom would call up my wife and I and say, Don’t forget Aiden has a play today. Alright, and has a play tomorrow. And we’re like, you gotta be kidding me. There’s gonna be a better way to keep up with this kid. Does this school not have an app? And that question, basically started this entire journey.

Nate Disarro 3:51
I love it well, and give me a timeframe. When was that conversation

Jeston George 3:55
2013. So I actually don’t know the exact date. And so I had this webpage that set up and we actually transition that into Apptegy. So there wasn’t an end date of that and a starting date of, of Apptegy. So it was around 2013, about mid 2013.

Nate Disarro 4:10
So mid 2013, iPhones have been out now for what, like six years. And apps are a normal thing on everybody’s phone. And everybody’s starting to adapt this technology. And there’s not an app at your nephew’s school to help communicate extended family or even immediate family of what’s going on. Yes. So you see a niche, and you what is your mind say like I can do better? Or I need to go find somebody that can develop this or as an entrepreneur, how do you take that first step to solving that problem?

Jeston George 4:44
So if you’re talking about an entrepreneur, it should always be as a delusion entrepreneur. What are you doing? And so I think back to all the things that I thought I was going to do, like I realized how ridiculous it was right? It just happened to work. Right? So for me, it was an interesting problem. So offers like, Hey, can I actually do something here. And at the time, I was really interesting startup and I was reading this book called Startup owners manual by Steve Blank. He’s kind of the godfather of the lean startup methodology. And it was really intriguing. And one of the big things it said was, you’re not gonna ever build anything, sit behind your computer, right? Get out and talk to the customers, I just kind of took that to heart and just started traveling. It’s like, I have this idea. But let me just go talk to the people that would be using it. So I actually drove around to school districts across the state of Arkansas and talk to school superintendents and technology coordinators and communication directors, and tell them what I was thinking it was coming. And just to hear what they would have to say, right? It was pretty interesting, right? We were going to build this mobile framework and made it easier for them to have native apps, whereas the opportunity that they really had a really html5 app, html5 or glorified web apps really wasn’t a great solution. So it was going to happen as mobile was next. But the big incumbents that already sold to the school districts were that was going to be the next way that they were going to monetize them. Whereas we felt like there was an opportunity to create a great solution. I’ll go out and I’m talking to the school leaders, and they’re like, You got to be kidding me. Like, we have no idea how we’re going to update another system. Right? Our staff is already overwhelmed. We know mobile is next. But and so really what it is a situation where as more and more technology comes out, the schools don’t get additional staff, but they have to figure out how to be everywhere at all times. And so it kept getting the same pain point over and over again, about all the systems that they had pretty interesting, because I kind of had that same problem as a small business previous I was using one system for accounting, another system for invoicing, another system for proposals. And so that’s where the idea of brochure came about. It’s a single place for schools to manage and distribute their content, you know, put information in our system, and it automatically updates our website, iPhone app, Android app, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, sends push notifications, text messaging, and voice calls, all from one system. And then we also did the mobile app and the website for the schools.

Nate Disarro 6:45
Now, here’s where the rubber meets the road. You had had your own small business with a handful of employees was doing well. Now you are at the helm of a company with what 350 employees Yeah, 350. Yeah. The product side is one thing, the people side, the growth side, the scaling the financial side, that’s a whole bunch of things to figure out along the way. And I think that’s the true heart of what entrepreneurship is. So I want to talk a little bit about sort of what that journey has looked like for you as, as the guy with the idea, and still at the helm of this company. And I want to start with what’s been the biggest challenge that you face throughout this whole thing.

Jeston George 7:29
The biggest challenge has been every step of the way. It’s been the whole journey, right? You talk about entrepreneurship. And as an entrepreneur, you come up with the idea, but this is what’s fun for entrepreneurs, right? It’s having to figure things out, getting to drinking from a firehose at all times. And that actually being fun and exciting for you. Right? If you’re not excited about being overwhelmed, or that stresses you out to where you can’t operate, then entrepreneurship isn’t for you, right? Luckily, for me, I found my calling like this, this is what I want to do. I need things to be on fire at all times. So I couldn’t have signed up for anything more suited for me than this. It’s so interesting, I think back to the early days, and how little I actually knew, right? But again, this is what I wanted to do, right? I want to drink from a fire hose and figure out what is this next thing that I need to learn, right? As far as the biggest challenge, no matter what you do, that you have success with, you never get to rest on your laurels. Because that next level or that next size that you’re going to get to some of what you did that worked excellent for you may work again. And some of it may not. And there’s nothing that tells you ahead of time, what’s going to work continue to work and what’s not. Right. So it is it’s hard for me to identify a single problem, right? Product Development, and scaling the product engineering team was just more of a challenge I could imagine, right? At a time where engineers are becoming more and more art attire, right? Sales. That’s great. It’s real cute in the early days when I’m driving around to schools and making a few sales. But now there’s an entire sales organization. That’s extremely difficult. How do you scale lead lead generation as you as you’re growing? I think the biggest challenge for me has been transitioning from hands on doing everything operationally into leading other leaders and be and stepping out of the way. Right. I was a control freak and felt like I needed to have my hands and everything. And that transition is happening. Right. And it’s and the great thing about it is I’m actually enjoying that piece of it as well. But leading other leaders versus being an entrepreneur in the early days and having your hands and everything and making every decision are two very different animals. And that transit transition has been a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be originally. And it took me a lot longer than it should have to do it.

Nate Disarro 9:44
Do you still find yourself as excited to get up every day and come manage other leaders and work with other leaders as opposed to the early days were you kind of involved in a little bit everything

Jeston George 9:55
I have. I have so it’s it’s I’m as excited as I’ve ever been in the business. And so we’re venture backed and great conversations with our, with our partners. And one of the conversations they have with with me is that, you know, how are you always How are you feeling? Like, is this what you want to be doing? Right? And another question that, that you talked about in the early days is that these phases of the business are extremely different. And there are certain parts that are suited for you. And there are certain parts that are not. And something interesting, something unexpected for me has happened is that I’ve liked the next phase, that has happened as much or more than I’ve liked the previous phase. And I, that’s another thing that’s been extremely surprising, I really thought that we were going to get to a size I was like, Okay, this isn’t for me, but every new challenge, like, Oh, this is fine.

Nate Disarro 10:39
So as far as you know, as far as you’re concerned, the conversation you have with your venture partners. That’s not always the case. Right? A lot of people end up to that next level. And they’re like, no, no, take me back. I just want to be the CEO, or I want to be a VP of something and not run this whole company. How do you ensure that you have the right skills and tools to then move to that next set? What’s your educational process look like?

Jeston George 11:06
I don’t know if I have an actual process. But again, being entrepreneurial minded, you have to be a learner every step of the way. That mean, that’s all you’re doing, you have to be extremely curious. Can’t be set in your ways. You can’t be arrogant about anything, right? So at all times, I am learning and that is extremely fun for me to learn, right? The other thing is you got to surround yourself around with people or at least a network of people that have been at those next stages and have conversations with them about what’s coming. What are the things that I’m not going to realize that I’m have to face? Have those conversations, figure out what that means for you figure out where you need to grow or figure out who are the people that you need to bring on to be able to handle those and the rights?

Nate Disarro 11:43
Well, as Jamie was giving me the tour, which I mean, I mentioned the last time I was in yells office was probably 2016, or somewhere around there. And it was in, you know, one of the towers downtown, which is what I refer to as a little rock startup. And then I came to this office. And now we’re in a Silicon Valley startup, right. That’s what kind of goes through the mind as we see the gym and the catered lunches, and all the things that kind of are representative of what we think of as sort of the more Silicon Valley tech startup. And so as you continue to, you know, use the vision that you’ve got to expand the company, what are your biggest hurdles that you think you still have to overcome with growing this this organization?

Jeston George 12:28
It’s taking what we’ve done and figuring out the next level of scale for it. It’s interesting, like, we’ll change up a process or something, because we’re getting to a certain size. And what we did before won’t work. By the time that gets implemented, it’s time to change it again, right? So hiring and finding the level of talent that we need to find at the velocity that we need to that’s what’s really hard, right. So if you need to add 200 employees, that’s great. But if you need to add two employees in nine months, that becomes really, really difficult, right? And so scaling challenges is what we are paranoid about. We’re paranoid about all the things that has worked for us up to this day, not working, moving forward. And there’s just a lot of decisions. The other thing I’m really worried about is kind of losing that entrepreneurial spirit as we get bigger, right? Because you do have to have more processes and systems in place, you do have to get organized, but in that how do we not lose that sense of hustle that we had of just by any means necessary, you figure it out? So those are some of my concerns, it’s scaling issues and losing that entrepreneurial spirit as we get to a certain size.

Nate Disarro 13:29
I read something where you mentioned that one of the skill sets that you didn’t think you would need in order to scale his business was creativity. Yeah. Talk to me about why you said then what that means.

Jeston George 13:41
Yeah. We have a saying here that processes and systems are easy. And everybody else has the people are the hardest thing about business. So we think people are really hard when we think creativity and originality is the hardest thing about business. I think with marketing, everything turns into a playbook. Right. And and so there’s different ways, this is how a successful company has done something in the past, and you can take their playbook and you can do it. Now people ops has become really important and culture is being important. Now there’s playbooks on how to do that the correct way. As soon as there’s a playbook around creativity, it’s no longer original, right? And so that we put a big emphasis on creativity and originality as the kind of the heartbeat of our business from the very early days. If you don’t separate yourself, then you and everyone else are playing the exact same game with the exact same spreadsheet and the exact same metrics and you’re looking for those little tiny pieces of incremental improvement over somebody else. The only way to truly separate yourself is through creativity. And if you ask me what would have been one of our biggest competitive advantage in the very early days over everybody else, I would never would have thought it was going to be creativity. Right? But we do a very good job of separating ourselves from everybody else that we compete with, by just being creative and original and willing to take chances on things. I read an article, an essay very early on that influenced me. It’s by Paul Graham. founders of Y Combinator is called do things that don’t scale. So everything about a tech startup is about scaling. So how do you in your mindset, be okay with doing things that don’t scale, and kind of our framework around it is that we come up with an idea to do something. And to be creative, you don’t have to come up with things that no one else came up with, you just have to do things that no one else is willing to do. And that’s actually what creativity is. So we might have an idea around how we’re going to approach our customers. And it’s nothing that our competition ever came up with. It’s just that when they built the model, and when we built the model, the return on investment said, this makes absolutely no sense. When we see something that makes absolutely no sense, we get excited, because for us, it’s not that there’s not an ROI. To us, that’s evidence that the competition won’t do it. We know how everybody else runs a business. And it’s through the spreadsheet. And so when something goes against the spreadsheet, that’s a guaranteed way to separate yourself into stand out. And what we’ve realized is that if we’re willing to take those chances and do that, the gains from separating yourself from the competition, more than makes up for any short term loss and return on investment.

Nate Disarro 16:02
So pretty much everything you just said right there. There’s a number of people in the world that understand that and get that and are willing and able to execute on that. But there’s the majority of people that don’t, it doesn’t compute, they don’t execute on it. How do you take that mindset and something that you sounds like you understood early on from NASA, you read, you know, whatever the case may be, you get that. And as the company scales, you’re able to cast that to the leadership, and then implement that same principle.

Jeston George 16:32
This is that other piece about the challenge of moving forward, I am very worried that this is part of losing that entrepreneurial spirit. How do we make sure this stays a part of our DNA as we scale, right. And another thing that happens as you’re growing is you bring in really great talent, with a lot of amazing experience. And these people have been extremely successful doing what they do, then they come here, and we challenge every piece of that. And so we’ve got to get people that are comfortable with knowing that they’ve been extremely successful, successful, but open to thinking a little bit differently, or potentially doing things our way. So this is a current challenge. And I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be a pretty big challenge. Challenge moving forward.

Nate Disarro 17:11
Let’s, let’s talk about some general philosophies. I love to dive into this with people and kind of understand from a philosophical standpoint, you know, where you stand and how you kind of look at things. But do you have any general philosophies that you follow, either in life or as a entrepreneur, which probably cross check both boxes for you? But you know, are there any specific marketing systems or productivity systems or frameworks that you kind of look at and say, Alright, I know this is going to work for me and my team, and I’m going to implement this at all costs.

Jeston George 17:48
I think as far as philosophical way of looking at things, first principles thinking, is I think that defines a lot of what we do. One of the things that we say here is that we’re going to challenge the status quo, and absolutely everything. We’re okay with the answer being status quo, we’re okay coming back to it, but only after it’s been challenged. And I think in business and in life, most of the things that there’s data around, there’s no context, right? And when you start to break down what the real problem is, like, what are we actually trying to solve? And then you build back up using first principles and asking why 100 times, what you realize is you’re now you start to wonder why on earth did people do it the other way, right. And a lot of times, they did it the other way, because that’s what the person before them did it. And that’s the way the person before them did it. And you don’t ever get to those if you accept the way that business is supposed to be done. And so for us, it’s using first principles thinking to challenge status quo. And just to see what do we uncover? Right. And sometimes what we uncover is, the way that it’s being done is the best way to do it. A lot of times what we uncover is, we have no idea why people are still doing things that way. And so I think that’s a big thing for us as freshmen as well thinking every every any chance possible.

Nate Disarro 18:57
Yeah. I completely agree with that. I think there’s so much, especially in the world that you guys live in with, you know, constantly evolving tech, and you guys can’t get left behind. You’re the first organization that you I mean, that would assume us today, that you guys have to be at the forefront of every new thought concept idea. Because if you’re not somebody else is gonna come in, where do you place the ideas and execution of your team versus looking out at the horizon of what your competitors are doing? You know, are you trying to stay a step ahead of them? Or are you not focused on them, you’re focused on just constantly creating the best products and services, we’re more

Jeston George 19:36
focused on creating the best products and services for our customers, right? The very early days. I don’t know where I read this, but the way we think about it is what should the future look like for our customers? Right? What’s the best experience for them five years down the road? What would that look like? And how do we build towards that? Right? If you follow your customers, they may or may not be moving towards that right just because they get a feature that’s better than yours and they use it in the sales process. That’s not getting us to that end state in five years, then it doesn’t matter. And it’s so easy to get thrown off. Right? And so, we are more interested on what is this long term vision that we’re trying to accomplish for our customers? And how do we make sure that we’re going towards that kind of have blinders on to what most of the competition is doing? Obviously, you know what they’re doing, because we’re competing with them, you have to know how to sell against them. But we want to do our very best not to get influenced by them, because they might not be going to the ideal direction of what’s best for a school leader.

Nate Disarro 20:33
Alright, I like to ask this question as well. Ideas, execution and culture. If you have to rank those three, in order of importance. How would you do so?

Jeston George 20:45
For me last place is ideas. That’s easy, right? It’s just so easy to come up with a bunch of ideas, right. And I think a lot of ideas get thrown away, because somebody didn’t execute. They blame the idea. It wasn’t the idea it was you. So for me, one A and one B is execution and culture, right. And and I think the reason culture has to be number one is if you have a bad culture, you’re not going to execute. So because culture is needed in order to execute, I’d say culture one execution two, and ideas have far far, far down number three.

Nate Disarro 21:15
So I’m curious, what would you put above ideas in that equation of how companies kind of have to have this balance of operations, creativity? You know, I mean, all the things that kind of fall into it? What would you put above the idea of peace,

Jeston George 21:32
relationships with your market and your customers, we’ve done a really good job of building a relationship, it’s more than just customer support and customer service. Our it’s interesting, we take a lot of our competitors, customers away from them. And when we do, they have no idea until they finally get a call that they’re switching over to us. Right. So they were surprised. And what we’ve set up is how do we build enough of a relationship that we’re never surprised if someone leaves us? Right? So we have 99%, customer retention, which is kind of unheard of in software, right? It’s usually 94 is considered good. But so we really emphasize building relationships. We do that with our customers. But we also do that internally in the culture that we’re building. And that’s why, for example, we’re morning in office and we are remote.

Nate Disarro 22:15
One of the things I’d like to talk about is this idea of doing business better. And I think, coming out of the pandemic, a lot of people have had to kind of rethink how do we do business? How do we operate? How do we execute? And a lot of people had some bad practices that they were forced to correct. And for various reasons. So just generally speaking, using that phrase doing business better, how would you say that you guys are doing business better?

Jeston George 22:41
Oftentimes, I get asked about what’s the, what’s the most important thing you need to get? Right. Right. And for us, what we realized early on is, there’s actually nothing you can get wrong. Right? And so for us doing business better means that we have to build multiple organizations, right? Whether it’s our medium content organization, whether it’s our sales and distribution organization, whether it’s our people ops organization, whether it’s our client support, and whether it’s our product and engineering, right. So we focus on building amazing successful organizations at every part of the business. And there isn’t one part of us that I think that really stands out a lot of times, there’s a narrative that we put out there, and it makes one side look like it’s, you know, it drives everything. And another time, it’s a different narrative. But we have really focused on building a great business. And it’s actually less about building an edtech company even, right, so the fact that we’re in education is kind of icing on the cake. It’s it’s about building a great business. And I think another thing that we’re trying to keep going is we’ve been very authentic and how we do things. When you’re authentic, it. It’s much easier, right? I think, for example, as a culture, right? It’s become this buzzword that everybody uses every interview you go to. So when culture works is when you create a culture that’s authentic to who you are. And that’s something that we did in the very early days. And an example of that is that why am I doing this? A lot of people that build an edtech company will say that I’m passionate about changing everything about education for the better, it’s like, then you should probably become an educator. Right? They could actually use you right now. Right? And so why did I do this is because I love business, right? And when we think about business, and what successful business means we think about all the stakeholders in the business, your employees, your customers, your community and your shareholders. And we think some of the best companies in the world sacrifice one or two other stakeholders in order for for the betterment of the other two. We said in the very early days, what gets us excited, and what we’re passionate about is how do we build an extremely large successful company where we don’t sacrifice any of the stakeholders. And that’s been authentic to us from day one. And because it’s been authentic to who we are, it becomes easier when you when the rubber hits the road. You have tough decisions to make. But that’s been kind of our driving force and what’s carried us through and so authenticity is really hard in business because there’s so many challenges and it forces you to make decisions that you don’t think it’s truly who you are. So next year we’ll have been in business or since I found it for 10 years. We’ve been operating really for about seven and a half years. Now. You years, and up to this point, fingers crossed, we’ve been able to be extremely authentic to who we are, which allows makes it easier for us to pull off the culture that we’re trying to pull off.

Nate Disarro 25:09
I love it. And good friend Mitch Bettis, publisher of Arkansas business, he kind of has his philosophy around that idea of the five legged stool where all stakeholders have to be balanced and perfectly equal for it to all work out. Yeah. It’s very similar mentality. And you don’t have to give up one for the other and correct. All right, another thing you guys do really well, I think, and because of the nature of your clients, and the fact that, you know, historically, schools and school districts haven’t really had to market themselves, you’re sort of placed into a school based on where you live. And through school choice initiatives and other things. There’s reasons now that schools have to market, but they weren’t really built to market, and they don’t really know what they’re doing. So you guys have to put out your own thought leadership on what that looks like, and how have you been able to become the expert and ultimately, educate your clients and potential clients on how to market their own school district.

Jeston George 26:04
It’s really interesting as far as educating our client base is that this is literally what we do every day, right. So the the thing that they struggle with, that they have to do today that they weren’t trained on, is literally what we’re best at. In the private sector of branding, and marketing. And perception is top of mind in everything that we do. This is the world that we live in, right? Every single day, we’re competing for dollars tied to a customer, every time a customer leaves, there’s $1 amount that leaves, that’s the world that school leaders live in. It’s unfortunate, but it’s reality of it. When they gain a student, they gain funding when they lose a student, they lose funding. So we’re, for us, it’s a very easy conversation, because this is the world that we live in every single day. And the easier that we can make this for school leaders, the quicker they can get back to focusing on the student, the teachers, the principal’s pedagogy, and the things that matters instead of trying to worry about how do I market? And how do I compete for a student? Yeah.

Nate Disarro 26:57
Love it. All right, as as you think back to the early days. Obviously, you’ve learned a lot along the way there’s there’s an educational piece to any entrepreneur that every day, every month, every year, you’re picking up just tons of new experience and, and knowledge for all the young people out there that are interested in either their own business idea, or maybe they’re already into it, but they they’re struggling with something, what’s something you wish you knew early on, that you had to learn the hard way,

Jeston George 27:26
you got to make a lot of tough decisions, right. And I think you know this as an entrepreneur, but you don’t really until you’re in the weeds doing it right. You don’t get to wait for perfect information and data to make decisions. You have to get very comfortable making really important and impactful decisions were 20 or 30% of the information that that you need to make that decision. And I think this is very uncomfortable for a lot of people. I think it’s something that we actually do pretty decent. And having said that multiple times over the last four or five years, we have made a big company decision. And I’m kicking myself on why didn’t we make that decision six months earlier. Right. So even after I learned the lesson, you still catch yourself doing that I think that’s very, very hard for and also we’re becoming more of a data focused society, right, and that and the more you know about data, and the more data resources are available to you, the more information you want before you make a decision. And this is a crutch that I think is going to be really difficult for, that’s going to really set a lot of entrepreneurs back.

Nate Disarro 28:24
I was having a conversation once with John Tyson at third, the current chairman of Tyson Foods. And I asked him, if you had to boil it down to one thing, that’s the most important thing you could tell somebody about business just generically speaking, what would it be? And he said, the thing that that allowed Tyson to see the fastest and best growth years was they tried a lot of new things. But the second that one of those new ideas, one of those new efforts they put into play wasn’t creating a result. They dropped it as fast as they possibly could. And they moved on to the next one that goes back to your idea of, you know, ideas are easy, the execution is hard. So taking an idea going to execute on it. If it doesn’t stick, it doesn’t create an immediate result. Drop it and move on. And I think that boils down to making quick decisions and not lingering on something unwilling to

Jeston George 29:17
it does. And there’s another piece of this kind of excited brings up where we’re a little contrarian here. We think people give up on ideas and things that they’re trying to do way too early, because they feel like the data tells them to. And when you think about data and statistics, right, then these aren’t things that happen in a moment of time. It’s a spectrum, right? So if you have to you’re talking about baseball, right? You got two batters, right? They’ve had 100 at bats. One is batting 500 and the other one is batting 200. Which one do you want on your team? Everybody will say the one that’s batting 500 what they what? The numbers didn’t tell you is the guy that was batting 200 just had a family crisis, and was actually recovering from, you know, ankle surgery. And by the time they were at 1000, at bats, like either his batting 200 is now batting 333. And the guy was batting 500, his batting 200. Right, there was no, there’s no context that comes with data, and we get so reliant on somebody else making the decision for us, and that somebody else is the data. Because I think a lot of entrepreneurs lack the courage to make tough decisions, and then stick with them. Even in the lean startup methodology is to take something tested out and see and see how you assess that you can make stuff work, right? If we want it, we can be successful for the rest of our career, literally taking everything else that someone else builds in education and building it the exact same product building a better and executing a better business. That’s not our plan, right? We want to be creative and innovative as well. But I think there’s there’s this crutch out there called data and people give up on ideas way too early. Don’t do that, especially if you want to be an entrepreneur?

Nate Disarro 30:55
Absolutely. I think that’s a crucial piece. And you know, as a storyteller, as somebody who, who helps people take information and tell their story. I think that more than anything, sums up to many people is taking data out of context, and trying to move forward and, you know, making terrible decisions. And ultimately, what can become fairly finite decisions that, you know, can end a company’s existence. And it’s, it’s always sad to see people take that data, and encompass it as the whole story. So speaking of storytelling, how valuable is storytelling to your organization? And what do you guys do that you think is most effective?

Jeston George 31:40
For us on storytelling, it’s really about being different and authentic, right? How do we tell an authentic story, but come off differently than all the rest of our competition? So the good thing for us is, us being authentic makes us quite different, right? So I think to our customers, we really stand out. And it’s interesting, a lot of times people will research your company, investors will, and they kind of come back and tell you what they heard. And almost every single time they’re just like, these guys came out of nowhere, who are these guys, they’re just, they’re just a breath of fresh air, they’re so different than everybody else we deal with. And that’s how we know that we’re, you know, kind of getting the story across.

Nate Disarro 32:13
I’m a big believer in, you know, the different types of personalities and how they help make up an organization. And that you kind of have to have all different personalities, how much do you look at at personality types when it comes to leadership? And when you add new people to your leadership? Do you play the personality into it? Or do you just look at the resume and the skill sets?

Jeston George 32:31
I think I think that that’s really hard about culture, is when especially when you’re bringing in leadership is, you know, you want to assess for this is a really popular thing, culture fit, right? And you have to be really careful. Because really what you’re you’re trying to see if they aligned exactly who you are. I’ve heard like you want to go grab a beer with this person. And I just don’t think those are good exercises, I think that you need to find people that are really smart, talented, hungry, and curious. If they’re willing to be curious and feel like they can learn from you as much as they can teach you, then your culture should be able to influence them. Right. And so when we think about culture fit, it’s like somebody has to have the right culture already to come to your organization, I think is the wrong way to think about it. So for us, it’s like smart, talented, hardworking, have the right experience, but extremely curious and wanting to learn, but also teach us versus just wanting to come show us how they’ve done it at a bigger company, right? If you get those things in your culture can influence them in the right way, then there’s probably some more things you need to look at internally.

Nate Disarro 33:30
Man, you’re you’re full of sound bites. I don’t know if you know that. But don’t know that. You’re, if you haven’t written a book, I think you should. But it’s so seven and a half years. And when you look ahead, you look another seven years down the road. What’s next for this company? This organization? Where do you go from here?

Jeston George 33:50
Yeah, so one of the negatives about selling in the education market specifically and K 12. public schools in the United States. It’s a it’s a fairly limited market. Right? If you build software like Salesforce or HubSpot, you know, it’s every SMB in the world and enterprise, right. So it’s unlimited opportunity and education that’s a little bit different. So it’d be high growth, when you have a limited addressable market becomes really difficult, right. And so there’s things that we have to do which are, so for the first seven years, we’ve been one product, one market. So this year, we have rolled out our second product called rooms, which is taking a lot of the general communication tools that we built originally, and we’re going into the classroom, parent, teacher, chat, class, other classroom assignments, very, very competitive space, we think we’re gonna be really successful at it. But so this is the first year that we have a second product. So that’s really exciting. Right? So as far as expansion, and this is also the year that we’re gonna go international. So we have an office in Monterrey, Mexico, a lot of engineers, not fully engineers, but that’s not a sales office. This lottery last week was our first few hires in Birmingham in the UK. And so we’ll actually start international sales this year. And so it’s that journey from Single Market single product and multiple market multiple products and multiple geographies. And we’re going to attempt the start of all of that this year. And hopefully it’s a big part of our success next year in the following years.

Nate Disarro 35:10
And for you, I assume that means you get even more excited because there’s more fires coming your way that you get to put out and deal with and, or is it more sleepless nights,

Jeston George 35:20
sleep is not a problem for me. I so excited about the challenges, right? Like, like, this is fun, right? Half of what we’re going to do this year is things that we’ve never done in our history. I’m as excited today as I was seven years ago when I’m getting this going.

Nate Disarro 35:36
Alright, as we kind of start to wrap things up, one of the things that’s really impressive to me and I think is valuable for you to explain is you walk in this building, and from the outside, it’s a little bit unassuming. But you come in and all of a sudden, it opens up and it feels like a Silicon Valley or Austin, Texas Tech startup. Explain to me kind of what the mindset was with putting this place together. And some of the features and elements that you guys have here. For anybody that might be looking for a new job out there, because apparently you’re hiring.

Jeston George 36:08
Yes, yes, we are. Alright, quite a bit. As far as the layout of the space, it’s we got, we worked with the PSW, the architect, firm, local, and they came in and we’re like, I’m sure everybody tells you they want to cool off, it’s right, and probably ends up looking like the inside of a Gohan catalog. Even though that’s extremely nice. That’s not what we’re going for, like we really are a little bit different, a little bit different of an animal, especially for the area, we want the space to reflect that. It was really funny because one of the really architects said, Can I do angles? Like no one lets me do angles, because I wait because you waste space, like knock yourself out. And so this is a really cool looking space. But we actually did it very inexpensively with the use of angles, and paint. Right? And so you see all the crazy paint everywhere and, and there’s no, there’s not that many 90 degree angles in straight lines, which just throws everybody off and looks extremely different. But those little touches just made it right, hey, we want to come off different when somebody comes in here for an interview or somebody comes here to visit, they just have to have this feeling of like, okay, this is not what I expected. And this is a little bit different. And that goes back to how do you create intrigue on the marketing side, we do the same thing, right. So it’s kind of our version of creativity is it’s not what you expect, and it starts to make, it just makes you start to think and that’s what we were going for. And I think that we pull that off

Nate Disarro 37:27
a little bit. All right. Every successful person in my book has other people around them. Who are some of the people I like to call them titans in your world that have kind of been there for you to help you out or that you’ve looked up to and said, you know, they did it. I can do it, too.

Jeston George 37:43
Yeah, I think our investors have been really influential here, whether it’s conversations that are experiences they had with companies that are larger than us or making the right introductions. And also when you’re with a venture group, you also get to meet all of the other companies in their in their portfolio and just having those conversations about what’s next.

Nate Disarro 38:00
That’s great. Perfect. Okay. All right, I want to move into some kind of quick hit questions. And I think these are kind of fun to just kind of get get behind the curtain of Jeston and who he is. So what’s the best or latest book that you’ve read?

Jeston George 38:16
I’m a really big fan of the Steve Jobs autobiography. Right? I really like books written by the entrepreneur or about the entrepreneur, right? There’s a lot of other books I like as well. But if it’s somebody that’s done it, it’s interesting. So anything but Ben Horowitz has a couple of books out those types of books. Yeah.

Nate Disarro 38:32
What’s part of your daily routine that you can’t miss?

Jeston George 38:36
A morning coffee. It’s easy.

Nate Disarro 38:40
All right, what’s a relatively newly formed habit?

Jeston George 38:43
This is probably a very common one, but much more aware and thoughtful about what I’m eating. Right. And so starting with portion control and trying to have healthier eating habits, yeah,

Nate Disarro 38:53
podcasts or Spotify.

Jeston George 38:56
Who depends on the mood, but I’m, I’ve listened to quite a few podcasts. And I’m a big music lover. So both five to pick one. Let’s go Spotify.

Nate Disarro 39:11
All right, Favorite musician or artists? What’s the next concert you’re going to?

Jeston George 39:14
Oh, next concert. The guy’s favorite artists. I grew up on hip hop. So it’s my probably say my favorite but favorite artist or this style of music is probably like Prince, right? So rock and soul combination is my favorite. next concert, if I could go to someone a would probably be some old school hip hop artists that I never got to see when I was younger. I’d go in and see them you know, they’re like really old right now.

Nate Disarro 39:38
It’s just still Biv DeVoe, maybe

Jeston George 39:40
those types of ones. There’s, there’s an old group called Diggable planets that I was a big fan of and they’re still touring, right.

Nate Disarro 39:46
best piece of advice you’ve either given or received.

Jeston George 39:50
One of the big piece of advice that we talked about here internally a quite a bit is that you can do both. And I think in in business, if you think about the business, case studies that are done, it’s On the biggest companies in the world, and we take that as entrepreneurs and study from that, and think that that’s the way to do business at our size, and even though we’re successful and we’re growing, it’s nothing like Amazon or Walmart, where you have millions of transactions a minute, right? And but yet, those are the companies we follow as far as how to do business. And when you’re trying to increase quantity, you may have to give up on quality then. And so for us, when we say you can do both, is it we don’t have to compromise quality. If we want to increase quantity. If we want to do customization, it can still scale our values of thoughtfulness and high performance. Like we love it when there’s friction there. And so I think that it’s a common piece of advice that we give her regularly at the companies that we can do both Netflix or the news. Oh, Netflix, I haven’t watched the news in so long. I used to watch the election night, right? I haven’t stopped doing that now. Right? And so, yeah, I then till someone comes and tells me or if it pops up on my on my Apple app, I have no idea what’s happening in the world. So

Nate Disarro 40:57
do you do you miss it? Do you miss the news? Do

Jeston George 40:59
you not one bit that I’m not interested in which way one group is going to influence me one way or the other?

Nate Disarro 41:06
I know you’re you’re newly formed habit is portion control and being cautious. But when you can go out and eat anywhere you want any meal in the world, what are you going to get? What’s your favorite food?

Jeston George 41:16
Home for Indian food is for me is? It’s obviously that’s where I’m from, right? I don’t get it as often as I would like, right for me, mom or dad cook Indian meal is my favorite.

Nate Disarro 41:29
I love that. Jeston, what have we missed? What part of the story have we not told that, that you think is most important for people to hear?

Jeston George 41:37
I think one of the exciting things for us here internally. And it’s kind of hard to say this, get this through to employees, because it sounds like it’s the soundbite. But it’s like, when we think back many years now, like 90% plus of everything that we’re going to do is actually from now forward, right? Like the what we’ve done up to this date is this going to be right now was 100% of the story. It’s going to be one to 10% of the story. And it’s like, and so I think that’s the part that excites me. And I think it’s a part that’s kind of hard for a lot of our employees to see because they see that they’re a big part of the early days and how much we’ve grown but like, Yeah, this is gonna be a very small part of the story what we got so far.

Nate Disarro 42:15
It’s really cool. Jeston, thanks so much for taking the time to sit down and have this conversation.

Jeston George 42:21
It’s been a blast and I appreciate it. Thank you!

Nate Disarro 42:26
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