André Sluczka grew up in Germany where he loved to climb up a mountain and fly down on a paraglider. Nowadays, he heads up a consulting company, Datagrate, that helps their clients build, manage, and scale the world's best application integration platforms solving the most complex integration challenges.

Join Jim and André as they talk about how to establish a meaningful strategic partnership on day one, and how to navigate the shift from consulting services to building products and software. 

3 Key Takeaways

• Striking the Balance Between Growth and Quality: For solopreneurs who are expanding for the first time, growth might inadvertently lead to compromising on quality. To dodge this bullet, hire talented individuals with the experience and skills required to scale the company with minimal supervision. Remember, scaling isn't a race. 
• Growing A Business Is Like Raising Kids: The problems never go away. They just evolve into new forms, posing new tests and demanding different solutions. Entrepreneurship and parenting are transformative experiences that require continuous adaptation and a mindset geared towards problem-solving. 
• Have the Right People in Place Before the Demand Arises: Preemptive hiring allows time for seamless onboarding, integration into your company culture, and ability to prevent major growth challenges before they arise. No last-minute rushes. Prioritize finding the right fit over quick fixes.

Resources

Datagrate’s website: https://datagrate.com/ 

About Our Guest 

As the Founder and CEO of Datagrate, André Sluczka has more than 15 years of experience in designing and building scalable enterprise integration platforms. He is a recognized leader in the field of cloud-native integration solutions and strongly believes that Kubernetes and Apache Camel are the foundation for such solutions, particularly as demand for more vendor and cloud-agnostic approaches continues to rise. André is also the inventor of the jetic.io iPaaS platform, which has gained recognition for being the industry's first low-code platform that effectively handles enterprise-grade requirements. The platform's innovative architecture enables it to handle complex integration scenarios with ease while providing users with an exceptional level of customization and control. Through his work with high-profile clients such as Urban Institute, Judicial Council of California, GE Transportation, Bayer, US Cellular, and FIS Global, André has solidified his reputation as a leading figure in enterprise integration and cloud-native solutions.

About The Dirt Podcast 

The Dirt is about getting real with businesses about the true state of their companies and going clear down to the dirt in solving their core needs as a business. Dive deep with your host Jim Barnish as we uncover The Dirt with some of the world's leading brands.

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For more information on how we dig into the dirt check out our other episodes here: https://www.orchid.black/podcast

About Our Company

Orchid Black is a new kind of growth services firm. We partner with tech-forward companies to build smarter, better, game-changing businesses. 

Website: https://www.orchid.black 

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André Sluczka - Raw Transcript

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All right, welcome André. Let's dig right in. Who is André and what is DataGrate?

Hey, first of all, good morning, Jim, and thanks for having me on your show. I think it's kind of my first podcast, if I'm not mistaken. So I usually do like things like webinars and give conference talks. So yeah, I'm excited to, to, to kick this off.

Wow. I feel honored. Yeah, me too. Me too. So let's let's dig right in. Talk to me about talk to me about data. Great.

Yeah, so DataGrade, we're an IT consulting company, a very traditional IT consulting company. We founded DataGrade back in 2016. Before I used to run a company in Germany because that's where I grew up. So we're traditionally in the enterprise application integration space. So basically what we do is we help our customers connect their systems and automate their processes.

That's what I've been doing, I would say, my entire career. I started up as a Java software engineer, very typical engineering career. And I graduated from school in Germany, spent a couple of years, and then, accidentally, I think that's probably for the majority of people on how these things happen. You don't plan them out. I ended up doing integrations. That was kind of my first.

first engineering task I got. And yeah, now it's like, I don't know, 15 years later, almost 20 years later, I'm still doing the same thing.

And in your early days, you guys had a strategic partner that fueled a lot of the early growth in your company, right? You mind talking a little bit about that?

Correct. Yeah, so once I started working as just a consultant, as an independent contractor, I basically ran into, and they used to be, I would say, a startup at that time. Back in the days, they had maybe 200 or 300 people. It was a company called Talent. They had an IPO in, I think, 2016. But when we started working with them, they were a very small company. And yeah, I accidentally ran into them.

And we kind of did some projects together, some good projects. And for me, it was for me, it was a really good starting point because I was basically a solopreneur. I was just running my own independent business. And, you know, it's it's not easy to get in touch with enterprises and larger corporations if you're just the small guy. And so with the collaboration of of talent.

I was being recognized and recommended into these organizations and that really helped me a lot to accelerate my career. So I'm really thankful for that partnership up until today.

So what are you guys doing differently today as an organization at DataGrate than you were when you first started out doing all this work partnered with Talent?

Yeah, so I would say the most important thing what happened since then is that we kind of learned a lot. So the way we tackled and approached consulting business was way different back in the days because we didn't really have the experience. So what I had was some sort of technical expertise, but I had no idea on how to handle business customers and business account large.

And I think we got really good at it. We got good at like setting the right expectations, managing expectations, and then also full like delivering, right, which is the next thing you need to do. You need not only to acquire new customers, but then you also need to deliver, which is, I think, way, way different from when you handle like a product business, you know, where you basically ship out the product once you're done.

You have your customer success and you take care about them. But for consulting, the work really begins the day you acquire the customer. Really, that's when you have to prove that you're able to kind of deliver.

So, Talend was able to provide that to you guys in the early days. The expertise around managing large enterprise customers, you guys got really good at it and now you do definitely work with them as well, but a lot of direct work, direct outbound relationships.

That is what it was. Yeah.

Yeah, that's exactly it. So we learned a lot from them by kind of looking at how they handle things. Although they're not a traditional consulting company, they're a software vendor, but still they were, they were handling these kind of large accounts. And that kind of gave us some, some, some insight into how this, how this gets done, right from starting from a paperwork perspective, all the way down to, to managing these, these accounts. So that, that gave us a lot of insight. And I.

I would say I, as a founder, learned a lot from that and I had the ability to talk to all these types of people and personas and different personas in that organization. Because if you're starting as like two, three people company, then you might only have the technical expertise. That was the case for us. We only had the technical expertise, but we're really good at solving the technical issues. That's basically what helped us get into this ecosystem.

Right. Because we had the knowledge on the technical side. We were like eager to solve these kind of challenges and technical challenges. But I mean, at the end of the day, we had no idea about enterprise and how to do that. Right. We didn't know how to market. We didn't know how to hire. We didn't know how to recruit. And so these were all things I and we as a very small team had to kind of learn. And it was a challenge.

Yeah. Yeah.

So what was, what was the hardest one of those to solve for? One of the hardest, one of those challenges to solve for.

Scaling. So if you think about it, that you start as a solopreneur, that you start as just being yourself and you can be really good at certain things, right? For me, it was the technical delivery aspect. So you're really good at doing something and your customer or your early adopters, if you want to call it like that, right? They like you and they want to buy more from you. So what you end up doing is you have to hire people.

right, which you haven't done before, right, because you're just by yourself. And then you have to hire people. And that's usually when you, I guess, fail for the first time. Because what the customer expects is basically they expect you to or others to deliver the same quality, you know, expect to the rate, like deliver the same quality of work like you're doing. But then you are hiring, you might not have the budget to hire the, you know,

the experts, the seniors, right? They might not even wanna work for you, right? Why should they? Because they're really good at these things. So they can do them by themselves. They don't need you. So that's kind of the challenge you have to solve. And I think it's still the case for if you grow, you still run into the same issues, maybe on another scale, but you run into the same issues. So that's really what it was for me, kind of finding good talent, finding good people.

and then have them to deliver at the same quality as what you are doing. So looking back, I mean, I think we lost a good amount of customers, to be honest, right. We just lost engagements and customers because the people I brought in were not able to kind of deliver the same same as what I was doing. You know, so that that was a that was a game changer for me to kind of learn. OK, that there is now other things.

which are important that I need to take care about than what I did in the past. And I think that's true for going from like a very small, one people company going all the way to like, thousands and tens of thousands. I'd like to compare it with like children going up, right? Where the problems don't go away, they will just change. I don't know if you have kids, but you always feel like it's getting better.

But at the end of the day, it's not getting better. It's just changing, right? The problems are just changing, but there is still there just on another scale. And I think that's the case for the business as well. So when I think about the problems I had 10 years ago, it's kind of the same problems I'm facing today.

But it sounds like you've learned a lot from some of those early challenges, right? And a lot of business owners, they'll hire cheap because they need to. And in a consulting organization where you're being brought in as the expert, that's especially challenging, right? Because you're expecting...

Yeah, exactly.

You're putting a lot of pressure on yourself at the end of the day, because a good CEO either hires really great or trains and motivates and drives people really great, excellent CEOs do both, but, but if you're finding people, you can't afford to hire the best people. And so what you're doing is you're trying to groom and, and, and, and grow people, right? The parent reference, if you will, that you mentioned earlier, um, you, uh, you have a

a challenge in front of you that is trying to get people to the point where they are the expert as soon as possible. So what, what, what did you like, what, what were the things that you did to solve for that?

Um, like fake it till you make it. Kind of right. Um, yeah, you have to, I mean, you have to figure it out. Um, I mean, we, because you have no other choice, right? If you ultimately, if you want to grow your business, that's what you, what you have to go through. You have to figure it out. Uh, if you don't figure it out, you're not going to grow your business and you're not going to be successful. Uh, because at the end of the day, business is, is, is all about your team and is all about the people.

Yeah, thanks for the honesty. Appreciate it. Yeah.

And I really believe in that because really as soon as we, let's say, had some money saved, right, just to put it very simply, we were able to kind of hire better people. I gave it more time. I think that is very important. I gave it more time. So instead of hiring when you need the people, you really need to hire in advance. And that is, I think, one of the early mistakes I...

So, thank you.

I made, I waited too long. I just waited too long. And then you come to a point where you're like, okay, we have so many, you know, contracts, so much business right now, we need to hire, we need to have these people. And that's when you make the mistakes because, you know, then you're forced to kind of hire, you know, the next best guy. And that's when everything gets south. So you need to really plan things on the hiring side in advance.

and make sure that you give it enough time to find the right people and to find the talent. And it does work. So that is something I, that is something really I learned, that if you give it the time, it does work. So it's not that you're not able to find these people just because somebody might think like, hey, I'm a small business. Nobody wants to work for me. I'm an unknown company. And that's not true. It's really all about the, all about

you and the culture in your company and that can make a difference. So if you have the time to kind of show this and to convince other people that that you're a great organization, that you have a great culture, that you have a great team, they are willing to join. People are willing to join. It's not that everybody just wants to work for a large company. That's not the case. But to find these people just takes time. And if you have the time and if you give the time, you can you can.

really built a great team. And that is, I think, what we got right in the last couple of years. So the team I have now, I'm really proud of it. It's still a small team, but I'm really proud of it. And everybody pretty much knows what they need to do. And they were a great fit. They fit into the culture. But that took a long time. And what I know is...

to scale the company from here is again gonna take the time. And I think that's kind of the pressure you have. And that is what I saw, for example, with a partner I used to work or still work together with with talent. If you grow that quickly, you will have to make the same mistakes as I did in the early days. You will have to hire people that quickly and you're not gonna be successful. It might just work because you're at such a scale, maybe.

Mm-hmm.

But it's going to be expensive. You're going to have to replace people in order to get the team right. And you might want to burn a lot of cash and lose a lot of time by doing that. And I think that's a problem, especially for venture capital, right? Where you just have, where you all of a sudden get a massive amount of money, like massive for the size you are. And then you have to scale.

thinking myself, how would I do that? How would I find and keep the culture I build in my team? How could I scale that? And I think it's very hard. I don't wanna say it's impossible, but I think it's very hard and you're gonna pay a price for that, for sure.

So you mentioned this word culture a few times, right? So when you think of the culture at DataGrate and the employee value proposition, if you will, or the value to people, new employees, current employees that you're bringing on board, what does that mean to you?

Yeah, it's a good question. So, and it's hard to answer because there is no easy answer to that. It's like, I don't like to call it family because we're essentially a business, not a family, right? We're here to do business. We're here to make profits and money and earn salaries. So I know that that's everybody's goal. And that's okay. That's okay. But outside of that, I think it's important to think about the future.

that the people can work together and have the right mindset. So for us, for example, it's very important that you have this kind of entrepreneurial mindset. Because we're a small company, it's like really, we don't have super crazy established processes. Like you might maybe find at a large company where they have this process and they just can plug you in and say, okay.

Here's our ticketing system and please answer the, you know, we don't have that type of structure. And so what that basically means is we have to find the people who can deal with that type of environment and not everybody can do that. And this is what we really make clear from the beginning when we're going through the interviews and our recruitment processes, that we really make sure that the candidates understand that.

This is not going to be a typical 9 to 5 environment where you can just take your work, do it and go home. This is not the case. We're too small for that. So if you're looking to do that and there is many people who want that type of environment, that's OK. But that's something you will probably find at a large established organization. That's where they really have that type of job. We don't. We don't have that. And I don't think we will have that for the foreseeable future.

So we need to find these people who are willing, you know, to go, let's say, above and beyond, really, and think things really through. That's the type of mindset we need to have, because it's not that you come here on day one and start in, you know, there is your handbook, and now you just have to follow the rules and do what I'm telling you or what your manager is telling you. You need to come up with your own stuff.

And that's challenging, but there is people out there who love that type of challenge and that's the kind of people we would love to hire and want to have in our organization and then things really work out very well. That's, that's what I learned. If you have the right type of candidate at this position, you don't have to do anything. I'm not, I'm not here to train somebody, right? I mean, maybe if we hire somebody for an internship, that's something different, but I'm not here to, to train you on the job. Uh, that is, that's not, that's not my goal. I w I.

I need to have people and I think that's true for everybody in especially smaller organizations. You need to get these types of people who will basically tell you what to do, right? That's essentially what I'm looking for. I'm trying not to be like the, and I'm absolutely not the type of micromanager where I come in and say, so these are your tasks, please do that and follow the rules. I'm absolutely not that type of person. And I think I never will. So I'm looking for the people who come here and kind of...

you know, tackle these challenges by themselves. And we have a great team. Now we have a great team. It took a long time, but we have a great team where I know that, you know, where I can trust everybody. And I know they will do that even without me being in the room or monitoring them or doing stuff like that. They will just do it and make sure it gets done from start to end.

What's, what's one of the problems that you guys are solving for clients or a client that, um, makes you the most proud of.

how you know, you mentioned the team and, and the way that they interact in the way that they're, they're driven together. Like, are there any particular use cases that you can think of with a client that they come to mind of you just like took a step back and you were like, wow, you guys killed it.

Um, that happens all the time. Yeah, that happens all the time because, um, what we are all about is the technical challenges. Um, that's basically what I was talking about earlier where I said, well, I think as a, as a contractor, I was able to kind of solve technical challenges really well, and that's what I'm proud of what my team is capable of doing. Um, so like I said, we're in the integration space and, um, I'm sure we can talk about that later, but, um, there is.

there is a huge variation of different requirements you have to fulfill. And we love to be more on the technical, deep tech challenging side. That's where we excel. That's what we love. So like sending an email, if you get a new client in your Salesforce coming up, that's not the type of challenge we are looking for, right? So we wanna build the large scale integration systems.

We want to do and we love to do the complicated stuff. And I think my team, the type of engineering personas I have here, they're really capable of doing that. That's what we're proud of. And that's really the kind of compliments we usually get from our clients is that we come in when nobody else was able to get it done and we somehow got it done. And that's my team. That's really what I like.

Can you give me an example or give us an example of one of those technical challenges?

I don't know if I have something, but I mean, usually the challenges are around dealing with legacy systems and connecting legacy systems, because everybody can call a REST API and handle some JSON stuff. That's the easy part. You know, that's almost standardized and it's good that it is standardized.

But there is still so many variations of older legacy systems out there that you have to connect and have to deal with, where the regular engineer might turn their head around and say, what is that? And things like that, things like security, complicated security things. And yeah, I would say today it's all about scaling. That's the biggest type of issue. How can you build a system which...

works at scale, which is efficient by doing that. So I think getting the balance right, that is a hard part. And solving that is not very easy, because you can easily maybe solve it on a small scale, like have one API request coming in and handle it. But if you get thousands, tens of thousands, that's really where you have to get into the details.

you know, where you have to get in the like in the dirt, right? That's where you have to dig deep and have to have a good understanding of like the whole system and the whole approach. It's not enough to just know your integration system. You might have to go deep into things like networking, things like security. And that's where you have to have a good picture of the engineering.

So, Talend, who helped you guys scale in the early days as a strategic partner, obviously one of the leaders in Ipass and has been for quite some time. But do you guys work with other, now that you're not dependent on Talend for DealFlow, are you working, are you platform agnostic in terms of how you work or is it still all around the Talend platform?

That's a good question. So talent has been challenging for us in that regard, that they have been not the perfect partner for us. So they were a very good partner for the early days to kind of scale our business. And like I said, I'm very thankful. But when it comes to solving technical challenges, the talent platform is when it comes to

application integration is not the Mercedes out there. It's not the best one. So that's kind of challenging. So we were really struggling kind of solving particular problems with that type of platform. The good thing about the Telen platform and what we as a team always liked about it was that they are based on an open source, that they basically use open source technology under the hood. And so...

the longer we worked with talent, the more exposure we had to open source technologies, Apache is a good community here. So they use a lot of Apache technology. So what we did is we started using these kind of open source technologies, trying to solve our customers problems without having this traditional software provider. And that's where we got really good at, where we got good results with. So...

Sure. Sure.

we started digging more into this open source thing. We were, at that point, we were obviously losing the kind of hand holding from like a bigger strategic partner, which brings its own challenges, but we were more independent. You know, we could, we were able to kind of go out to a customer on a green field and build, really build a platform.

using open source components without creating any kind of vendor lock-in or being more independent. And that helped us. So that's what we have been doing a lot. We started building our own products on top of that because we were seeing firsthand the challenges companies were having with these legacy providers, I would say. I mean...

15 years ago, they were the new thing and now it's now people are starting talking about the legacy providers already. That's how, how fast this market is.

So these new products, you picked, I don't know if you saw my ears kinda got a lot bigger when you said we've got new products. So you're evolving from simply a services organization, a consulting, expert consulting group who builds other solutions to having your own IP and software that you guys are rolling out. Wow.

Exactly. It's been always a dream, I have to say. So consulting is really nice on the revenue and profit perspective because it makes it really easy, I tend to say. I mean, I'm not saying consulting is easy in particular, but basically, if you get this hiring right, if you find the right team, the people will sell themselves. It just works.

over time, it just works. Scaling is hard because you cannot just hire thousands of people and it's kind of a challenge. You're not going to get any venture capital for it or anything like that, you know, because of the lack of scaling capabilities, which is okay. But it's easy to make profit, it's easy to make money out of it. And what was important for me is that we don't stay in the consulting business forever. So we have been like

When I looked into the strategic partner we had like talent, I looked into their, what like departments they have, like they have R and D, they have product management. And if I look at the slides and the kind of work they do, I love it. Because that is really kind of what thrills me building new products. And we have done that a lot, but always for our customers, right? We solve their challenges and build new products and innovate.

Thank you.

for our customers, but not so much for ourselves. And yeah, I think that's kind of what we kind of, the transition we're going through right now is basically, and I think that's a lot of people trying to do that. The transition we're going from like being a pure consulting company to becoming more like a software vendor. And yeah, that's the challenge we're facing right now and we're tackling right now and it's exciting.

So for others that might be going through that or might be a little bit behind you in their evolution of their own business from consulting more towards products and software, what lessons have you learned already in that transition that you can pass on to others?

I think you're in a... So if you start off with consulting, it might be the more boring part, right? Of the business in general, probably a lot of people will agree. However, it gives you a lot of insight because you're talking firsthand to your customers. And what we basically saw, and that's, I think, the advice I could probably give to others is what I was looking for is a pattern of issues, right? Because ultimately with a product you wanna solve

problems, right? That's why you would build and be able to sell a product. So by doing the consulting, you see and get the issues on your table every day. And if you're able to recognize a pattern in there, not a unique issue, you know, you can't make money out of that. But if you find a pattern like this particular problem comes up with like 80% of the clients we have, I mean, that's a good starting point. That...

That's a good starting point. And I think that's how a lot of businesses basically came up from consulting, got into product because they knew it and you have a few good relationships already. You have a good, so that's basically how we were able with our product. Kind of the first sales we got was in our network, right? We kind of knew that the people trusted us already. Our customers usually trust us. And so that made it easier for us to kind of pitch our idea.

Pitch our new product and say, well, would you like to adopt it? Although you know it's not being a well-known brand in the industry.

Mm-hmm. Got it. Got it. And as you guys are looking forward to the rest of this year and maybe a couple years down the road, how do you see that business evolving even more so towards software? Is it a couple different entities where you're going to carve out the software business? Is it?

you know, all one business where you're just gonna little by little start to drive more software revenue and, and, um, and evolve it that way. And any, any insight there?

Yeah, for us, it's the latter. So I think for us, the goal ultimately, and that might take us a few years from now, but ultimately my goal is not to run two businesses, like a service business and a product business, because I believe in what I learned for me, might be different for others, but I'm not particularly good at doing two things at the same time. So I wanna do one thing and do it right.

And I know that the service aspect of the business has its own challenges, right? And I want to tackle them, right. And if I were to grow this product business, I don't think I will have enough time or capacity to kind of work on the service business. So for me, it's a transition. And I mean, talking to my team, I think we're all.

eager to do that. So everybody in my team is up for the challenge. Everybody wants to do the product. Everybody understands that we have to do the service to kind of get the revenue and take basically bootstrap it, which we all like, bootstrap the product further. So we need to have that service revenue, but we don't need to have that forever. So what I could see doing us is

having like 80% right now on the service side and 20% on the product side, I could see that turn around into being 80%. That's my goal, being 80% product and 20% service, where the service is backed would basically just help the product succeed and not so much being the profit driver, if you know what I mean. So that's kind of the ultimate goal where we want to go in the next, I'd say, two to three years.

And I think we're going a good path right now.

So let's shift, you bring up some things happening from a market perspective, you bring up some things happening internally in your own evolution. One thing I wanna talk, I wanna spend some time on is the evolution of the sector that you operate in, which I think is really interesting. And I don't think enough people really truly understand the impact that integration platforms that I pass.

um, is, is having on ongoing transfer me digital transformation on, you know, data ops on all sorts of things. So when you look at, um, the, uh, the, the general trends shaping the future of I pass, uh, as a whole, the IPass market, um, how, what are those and, and how can, how can businesses stay ahead of the curve given that it's such a rapidly evolving sector?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so I think what you have to understand is that if you look at the technical aspect, really what we're trying to solve here is nothing really that new. So we're essentially, we're connecting systems, right? So and that kind of, you're going to have that type of issue as soon as you, and you might know that from your own business or from making podcasts. So as soon

You somehow have data in you. You already have two data silos, right? So you're kind of creating two silos and you're creating your, your new business processes for your podcast, for your business, for whatever. And that's basically when you start having that type of issue. So, and just going back, I mean, you can go back to the, to the seventies. So basically when enterprise IT became a thing.

You know, maybe SAP, for example, was a player back in the days. So they were trying back in the days, they were trying to solve every aspect of your business in one platform and how they were able to succeed. How a company such as SAP was able to succeed with that. And I think it was in the 70s, maybe 80s around is that they were saying that all the different aspects of your business, like finance and warehouse.

that they will be integrated, that they will be integrated in one system. So you don't have to print out what you created in your finance and bring it over to the warehouse team. We have that all integrated and businesses love that because it made them, it made it so much easier in it basically. And that's what we're trying to do still today. It automated things. And now as you look back, how the landscape evolved, companies are having

hundreds of systems these days, right? It's not, I don't know any company anymore who would say, well, we only have this one system. Let's say it's SAP or Salesforce and we're gonna do everything in that one system. That it doesn't work like that, right? Because you wanna pick the best products for your problem, right? So in a warehouse system, there might be a different player out there which is better than maybe SAP or whatever, right? So you wanna pick.

bast of breed, essentially. And that's why the landscape grew so much, right? Because first of all, it's easier for SaaS startups to kind of create a business. That was not possible in the 70s. I mean, it was just impossible. Today, everybody can solve a particular business problem pretty quickly and build a new product and market it and go to market with it. And if you found this pattern I was talking about earlier,

Right.

and you can solve it, people are going to buy it. So that ultimately led to this kind of huge variety of different applications, even if you're a small company, have. And that's great because that gives the business a lot of opportunities to save costs and to be more efficient, make things faster and better for their clients.

But ultimately, it leads to this issue, well, how am I going to integrate all these different applications now? How am I going to make sure that the data silos are integrated, that I have like, you know? So it creates all these types of issues, as you can imagine. And so basically, that is what we are trying to solve in the iPaaS space. We're trying to solve that type of problem.

If you look into the marketing strategies right now, they were talking about process automation, automation, robotic process automation is a big thing. I don't know exactly where it's going. AI will obviously come up into that picture as well. But yeah, right now we're connecting all these different systems basically to automate your business and to make things more efficient.

the

Yeah.

Right. That's usually not the case. And the problem has grown that big that I would say almost all of the companies I'm talking to today, the larger corporations, they have more than one integration platform to solve that issue. So you would think they have one big platform in the middle end, but no, that's not the case.

I mean, they even build their own silos and integration silos within the organizations, which again creates more problems on that end, right? So scaling is becoming more and more a problem because or an issue we have a challenge we have to tackle because the number of systems and the amount of data going through it has grown tremendously over the last, I would say, 10 years.

you know, these days everybody wants to build their own API. You can even sell the data. You can sell your business processes. You can automate it. And that's the big trend we're seeing. And yeah, there's no way back.

So as, as, as data privacy and security concerns, which you've brought up a few times continue to grow, how do I pass providers and other folks like yourself in the ecosystem ensure the protection of that sensitive information while also facilitating seamless data integration? Like how, how do you play that? How do you play that balance?

Mm.

It's complicated and it kind of needs a lot of different departments to work together. So from what I've seen, what we would be able to do on the integration side, right? Like thinking about creating new products by building APIs, offering new services. We're oftentimes handcuffed that like, Hey, we can't do that. We're not allowed to do that. Legal says we can't offer that type of service. We can't take.

that data into account and help another customer. You know what I mean? So we're handcuffed, but that's not a problem we can solve on the integration side. That's obviously a legal problem. It's probably a good thing that you're handcuffed at some point, right? That you can't do everything with all the data, you know, that there is like legal limitations. But...

We have to work together. We have to work together with the different departments to make sure that what we are creating here and what we are doing with the data is basically legal.

And how do you guys address the challenges of handling and processing?

you know, what I can only imagine is like an ever increasing volume, exponential increase in volume of, of data generated by the businesses and consumers. Like how does that play a role into the same equation?

Yeah, that's a good question. Because really that's kind of the, one of the biggest issues we see with our clients is, as I said earlier, you can do it on a small scale. It's easy. You might only need like one, you know, one guy who can somehow handle it. But once you have to scale it, and at some point every business wants to scale it, it becomes very challenging on the technical side. The good thing though, is that the...

The progress we made over the last 10 years on the technical side is really good. And we can in the iPaaS market, and that's basically what we are doing with our products, we can take advantage of it. So one thing is cloud, obviously. We basically try to get every customer we have somehow into the cloud because that makes it so much easier to handle it. One big topic is we're working on is Kubernetes.

So Kubernetes is really going to be the platform which for us on the integration side solves almost, I don't wanna say all issues, but almost solves the scaling issue because it makes it now so much easier to kind of build and maintain a system on a large scale. You can scale it up and you can scale it down because that's the other side of the things.

not only you have to scale it up, you also have to scale it down because it's expensive. The cloud infrastructure servers, that is an expensive part of your business once you start scaling it. So what we see is companies reaching out to us and saying, well, how can we do that efficiently? Like, okay, we scaled it and now we have like 50 servers here, but we're having this massive amounts of bills getting from, you know, companies like AWS or Azure. And it's just,

It doesn't seem to be right. What can we do? And luckily, there is now, you know, Kubernetes became a thing. It's now widely adopted. It's now the industry standard, I would say, which is important in the enterprise IT world, that if you invest in something, you want to make sure that it's the standard, that you can keep it, that's going to be around for 10 years. Because like I said, the...

The market is evolving that quickly and you really need to be careful that you don't dip into the wrong technologies, you know, technologies that don't exist tomorrow anymore because they seem to be the latest and greatest thing today, but not tomorrow anymore. And I think what we got now with Kubernetes and the cloud providers, all managing that is that we have that type of technology where we can bat on, where you can put your money on and make sure you get this return on investment over the next 10 years and it'll be still around.

And that really helps a lot of customers love it. So as soon as we migrate them over and start doing these containerized, you know, microservices and put these things into Kubernetes, that's really when they excel and when they love it. And we we haven't had any issues with that type of technology. So we're we're pretty happy to have that our platform JETIC. We built it on top of that.

And it's been very successful with a lot of our customers.

So as you guys look into the next couple years and you mentioned AI as kind of a, you know, obviously one of the hot trends going on right now in general, but also playing a role in

whether it's AI or machine learning, how do you see the role of AI and ML in the development and enhancement of these iPad solutions?

That is a very good question. And that depends on how the AI technology will evolve in the next few years. So let's put it like that. If you would have asked me that question six months ago, I would have probably said, well, we're not there yet. So now I'm playing around with Chet GPT, and it kind of blew my mind. Because right now, I'm like, do we even need an iPaaS solution in the next five years anymore?

Yeah.

I mean, what I was talking about, right? Like, hey, we create these hundreds and hundreds of SaaS applications, right? Where you have like, think about a Salesforce CRM application. Wouldn't it be great to have your own AI model and network where you just dump all the data and then instead of having like a BI tool building these reports, you can just ask it, like, do it for me. And it knows how to do it and will do it. So maybe we won't even have tradition.

additional databases anymore. Maybe the network itself, you know what I mean, will be able to kind of store that data. And if that's the case, I don't need an iPass anymore. I mean, seriously, because everything will be in one, you know, maybe we can go back from having hundreds and hundreds of applications. Maybe we're going to scale it down again because the AI network and model will be able to solve a majority of the issues where I have to pull out hundreds of applications, right?

But that remains to be seen, right? I mean, we're not there yet. I don't know. So I think for the foreseeable future, what we see internally or what we think might work very well, and we're kind of exploring it right now a little bit, is how can it assist, right? How can it assist a developer or an engineer to be more efficient? Things like data.

things like regular expressions, you know, the kind of details you need to work out. Where like you as an engineer, you need to go into the documentation of the software and really read through it and, you know, figure out all the details and then go back and forth with your software. That takes a lot of time. And we were already able to use Chatchie PT for these types of scenarios that we said, Can you just generate me an expression which does X, Y, Z?

and it would do it and I would copy paste it and put it into my integration platform. So I think that's good. That's going to help the developer. We'll still need the developer. I don't think they will become obsolete in the next few years. We will still need him, but I think he will be able to have a greater output, which is very good because we're low on developers as everybody knows. So having the engineer being more efficient with these types of tools will help. So I can see.

us, for example, plugging in AI capabilities into these kind of strategic areas where we know it takes the developer a lot of time to figure it out, where it can kind of generate something on the fly.

I love your passion and knowledge on the subject, so we're going to have to do a part two where we focus on vector databases and AGI and some of these efficiency and effectiveness that you're talking about and the way that development is done. But for now, I'm going to hop into our Founder 5 because you've given so much value today. I want to tie us off on a great note. So first question for you as part of the Founder 5 is...

drum roll, the top metric or KPI that you are relentlessly focused on. Yep.

I would say for us, the top metric is cash and revenue. It's that easy. I don't have anything more to say about that. I think once we go more into this product and maybe have some product growth, then there will be other factors. But for us right now, we're bootstrapping. So that's what I'm all about. I wanna bootstrap this product business and what I need for that is cash. It's as easy as that.

So as long as we have cash in the bank, as long as we do revenue and our customers are happy, I know it'll keep us going and we have more time to work on a great product.

All right. Top tip for growth stage founders like yourself. Love it. All right. Favorite book or podcast aside from the dirt, of course.

I think we talked about it a lot and for me it's really about hiring. Become good at hiring. If you're not good at hiring because you can't solve everything by yourself, it's not the idea of a business, so become good at hiring.

that's helped you to grow as a founder.

Yeah, same topic. There is a book out there. I think it's not super well known, but I think it's a great book and it's called Recruit Rockstars. And it's a practical guide on how to hire people. And it gave me a lot of insight and it's a great book. I think it's written by a recruiter who worked for large companies doing that and he kind of...

came up with a strategy on how to do it, and it gives a good insight. It's recruit rock stars.

Yeah, I've actually never read that one, so that's going right on my list. All right. Piece of advice that counters traditional wisdom.

Mm-hmm. Cool.

I would say don't do what everybody else is doing. And by that, I mean, if everybody else is doing what the other people are doing, we have no progress, we're not moving forward. You know, if you were to ask, if your business idea is a good idea, if you want to move forward with it, you're going to get so much negative feedback. You can see it online. Everybody is, you know, if you look at...

Elon Musk, for example, right? There is, whenever I pull something up on social media about Elon Musk, there was so much negativity in the comments. Right. But he achieved something. So, you know, be that somebody.

Love it. All right. What is going to be the title of your autobiography when you've set out and achieved everything that you set out to do? All right. Well, let's say it's a biography then and somebody else writes it. What would that be called?

Yeah, that might be a little bit disappointing because I'm not going to write one. I'm just not good at writing. I kind of hate writing books or something like that. So there is no title because there will be no book. I don't think there will ever be.

No, who would write a biography about me? I mean, I don't know. Thank you so much.

I'll write it for you, André. Awesome, yeah, awesome, man. All right, well, you've given a ton to our listeners today, so time for a little bit of self-promotion. How can those listening help you and the DataGrate team out?

Yeah, I mean, it's about our product. So as we talked about, we think we figured out a very good approach on how to solve the scaling issue, the vendor lock-in issue on the integration market. So whenever you wanna build an integration or know somebody who has issues on how to automate and connect their systems, integrate their things.

Yeah, feel free to reach out.

And what's the best way for folks to get in touch with you, André?

Um, probably email. Um, so my email is basically first name dot last name at data grade.com. That's, that's a good way to reach me.

So it's andrei.sluzka at datagrade.com.

CZKA, yeah, that's a complicated part of my life, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

and

Rock on, everyone. Keep grinding.

Thanks for having me, Jim.