Testing the Waters | Luke Freiler from Centercode

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Luke Freiler 0:00
Two or three years from now, the level of frictionless video conferencing experience that you and I have is going to feel nothing like today.

Alexander Ferguson 0:15
Welcome to UpTech Report. This is our Founders Journey series. I’m joined here by Luke Freiler, and he is the CEO of Centercode, this is part two of our discussion, definitely check out our first part where he dives a little bit deeper into their platform and managed service for those who want to connect their companies to their customers, those who are running beta tests, Delta tests, and you just want to be able to do a lot better, faster. This really cool thing what they’re doing with their new bot that they’re launching soon. So definitely listened to part one. But this section, I want to hear more Luke on your story, your journey, 20 years, 1920 years coming up? How did you get to where you are today, we set a code.

Luke Freiler 0:59
Yeah. Again, so so many stories to tell, but but the favorite that it kind of starts with is when we decided to do this. And we started in 2001, which is, you know, a masochistic time to begin a company in the tech space. Nobody had any faith in technology, we were all, you know, on the verge of going back to sticks and twigs. But I had this idea, I fell in love with it, I saw it as an opportunity that I could build something great around, it just seemed to check every box. And when I when I had the idea, I had a great job. I was, you know, very well paid for my age. And, and this was crazy. It was nuts to leave that company, which was Erickson, fantastic company. And I had the idea, and I was selling some friends on it. And it was actually became real when I was dating this girl. And it was getting serious. We’re, you know, year and a half or so into our relationship. And it was time to meet her parents. And we’re going to fly up to northern California and meet her parents. And we did so. And her dad and I met and we got the talking the usual, you know, what do you do? And I told him about this. And he fell in love with it. And he said, Look, I would be happy to fund your living expenses while you build it. And we’ll turn this into a company. And keep in mind I was about 20 at the time. So very young, very naive. And I loved it. And I you know, the idea was, I could leave my company and go do this. So I convinced at the time two guys, that worked for me, guys, Nathan and Neil to my best friends. And I convinced them, they were on my team, I convinced them, Hey, let’s go do this thing and make it real this guy’s gonna pay for it’s going to be amazing. And I convinced them to leave their jobs and do this. So the three of us and this gal I was dating, got any U haul and we moved to Northern California. And the day after we got there. Literally, I’m not exaggerating the day after we got there. She and we’re living in a place that her dad funded.

She said, Hey, can we go for a drive? And I said, Yeah, go for a drive. And she said, this isn’t working out. And I said what’s not working out and she said this relationship. It’s just it’s not working for me. I’m not really happy being up here by my parents, I don’t really get along with them. And you know, she just kind of lost it. I was like, Wait, like, this would have been phenomenal information like 72 hours ago. You know, before we pack, the URI jumped everything and looked at everything and convinced my friends to quit their jobs and whatnot. So so we broke up and this wasn’t a makeup breakup thing, like we legitimately broke up, never got back together again. But we shared a bed for six months on polar opposite sides of that bed. It was terrible. And you know, part of the story I left out somewhat deliberately is when you say you’re moving to Northern California to start a company that sounds cool as hell like the Bay Area is phenomenal. This was not the Bay Area. So where we moved was a little known place called Crescent City, which is the very tip corner of Northern California a few miles from the Oregon border. And Crescent City is a very interesting place in that it’s about 5000 people, which is teeny tiny for California, you know, area our prior we came from Orange County, which had 3 million people. This little tiny area had had, you know, just a few 1000 people. And there was one form of local industry and that was Pelican Bay Prison. The most maximum security prison in California, which coincidentally, employees employs 1000s of people. So there were two demographics in this city. There was prison guards, and families of lifers who wanted to be near their, you know, murderous husbands and whatnot. And those are two demographics that do not get along. They hate each other. And therefore this entire city was like Twin Peaks, like awkward, terrible, and we’re young 20 Somethings looking to build a business And, you know, I we learned ecosystem, we lived in what would otherwise be an incredible place this house that we lived in. First of all, we he paid $40,000 for this house, which by California rates is, you know, a 10th of a 10th of what you pay for a house here now. But he said he bought this and we could walk to the ocean in three different directions and be there in two blocks, like we were on a peninsula in the ocean, it was incredible. But for me, that meant and again, not exaggerating, every night, I would just walk to the ocean and just scream at it, and then come home. And that was like how I got it out. Like I would just alone walk to the ocean scrape therapeutic, nobody could hear anything, you know, huge waves hitting sandy shores, or rocky shores. And I did that every single day. And on top of that, it rained every single day for six months, every day. And that’s you know, they we had a redwood tree in our front yard. It was just like, rain, you know, creates that. But it was beautiful. But it was just a horrible place. So yeah, we had six months of that living with her trying to build this thing. As soon as she broke up with me, which was literally a day in her father lost all interest in us. So I actually called back, you know, tail between my legs to Erickson and said, Hey, can I have my job back sort of part time remote, I’ll fly down, you know, and we’ll we’ll figure it out. And my boss at the time took me up on it, he let me do it. So that shifted to me having this sort of weird remote part time job while building this company with my friends who knew exactly what was going on. And it was just a nightmare. So eventually, we gave up after six months, we gave up and I went and begged for my job at Ericsson back and and I got my two guys with me. And all three of us went back and we pretended it never happened. And then about six months, or I don’t know, maybe a year later, I forget how long it was very clear that that division of Ericsson was eventually going to probably go away. It wasn’t succeeding. Ericsson was an enterprise company that was sort of dipping their toe in this kind of commercial, almost consumer space. So it was it was kind of awkward for them at the time. And we knew it was going away. So I convinced the boss that rehired me. I basically said, Look, man, I’m, I’m an engineer, I can build a product. That’s what I care about. But I don’t know anything about business. I don’t know anything about sales. I’m clueless about that stuff. So I would love to have you as my gray hair to come and start this thing with me. And he and I had gotten along very well. He kind of turned into a little bit of a father figure for me at the company. And he did it. He left we all left. And ultimately, you know, we started the company together. He was the CEO, I was the CTO. And then my two engineers were engineers initially. And yeah, it was it was a great time. So and you know, given the time we bootstrapped it. We didn’t raise any capital we just lived on, you know, the cheapest burritos possible, you know, true ramen lifestyle. And we made it happen. It was a lot of fun.

Alexander Ferguson 8:04
How many? How many years did you bootstrap and just kept natural growth? Have you always bootstrapped? Do you ever

Luke Freiler 8:09
go, so we’ve actually raised capital twice. And we have a very unique process of raising capital in that we don’t look for it. And we ignore most of it. And once in a while, something weird happens. So the, you know, we actually bootstrapped for about 15 years, and we were very much sort of a boutique company, we were doing okay, we were, you know, obviously, paying ourselves and whatnot pretty well, but we weren’t really growing. And that really could be attributed to the different levels of ambition between me and that other co founder, scanning of rich, he had a background that was in finance in sort of operations, very, very conservative leader, whereas I was, you know, the crazy enthusiastic kind of visionary wanting to go solve, you know, all the technology. So at a certain point, and much longer, interesting story, we decided that we would swap well not swap roles, but shift roles, and I would take over CEO, he would move into a finance and ops position, one of my original founders would take over ctoc There’s a little bit of musical chairs. But by shifting that stuff around, I then got much more aggressive. And we started to grow. And you know, for me, the initial thing, which is a whole 12 podcast episodes on its own was sort of my early discovery and love of marketing as a as a hobby. And that was what allowed us to grow the company. And then at a certain point, things were getting really good. And I was standing outside of our office in Laguna Hills, and I was waiting for my CTO to come down to lunch. And again, best friend good guy waiting for him. And this guy walks up to me older guy. Shouldn’t say that, because you might hear this late 50s Maybe. He came up to me and said, Hey, you and your buddy are driving much nicer cars nowadays. What’s coming on upstairs and I didn’t know this guy total stranger. And I said, Well, you know, sort of coincidence, I had a goal that if we hit a certain number of quarters of growth under my reign, then I would go buy a Tesla. And this was when Tesla’s were brand new, the S model, the original. And I hit those goals. And then I kept doing it for another year, and I went and bought a Tesla. And at the time, Tesla’s were hard to get I was on a waiting list for nine months, it was a pain in the ass, they delete it, like over and over again. So I bought this Tesla. Well, the day I got it, my CTO fell in love with it. And he went to order one. And they just happened to have one sitting there, that somebody hadn’t picked up, and they offered it to him, and he just drove it home. And in any other world, we would have never bought matching cars or colors. But it just happened to be the same one I waited nine months for. So people from the outside looking in or looking at this and going Oh, cute. These cofounders bought matching cars. How cute like, No, it was, he stole my idea. So So anyway, I told him that story. And I And he really latched into the we’re doing well part. And he said, Well, I run a software fund, why don’t we go to lunch sometime, maybe there’s a real you know, something to happen here. And I did not take it seriously, I kind of blew it off. But you know, free lunch, we walked down to the sports bar at the end of our little campus and we ate and by the end of lunch, he said I’d love to put some money into this. And it was interesting, because we were not actually their target. They do work exclusively in b2b software, which which does fit us, but they really look for distressed companies and do sort of acquisitions, turn them around and resell them are doing really well. You find people who are in trouble. And and they do full acquisitions, they don’t do minority investments like like we were potentially interested in it again, we weren’t looking for money in any way. This was not in our cards.

You know, because because in our past, there was two times we consider raising money 2001 Bad idea. And then 2009 Bad idea. So we just sort of figured raising money was cursed for us. And we would just do it our own way. But yeah, so I basically told him, Look, I’m interested. But the you know, the rule is, this has to be quick, and it can’t consume a lot of my time. You know, I happen to know that raising money. And running a company at the same time is an incredibly challenging endeavor. And frankly, I’m not that good. So I wanted to focus on the company, I was really happy with where it’s going. And he promised me that it would be painless, and we’re neighbors and it’d be easy. And he was right it was and to this day, we have a phenomenal relationship with him and his firm. And you know, we’ve done well wasn’t through them. So So we raised capital there, then again, while we were doing that someone else met us, the guy, a guy who runs a firm. So that firm, just throw their name out there is parallax capital, awesome dudes. Another guy who ran a firm out of New York, named Argentum was an old friend of the guy, Jim, who ran the first firm. And he met me during this process. And he wanted in he wanted to buy a piece too. And I wasn’t willing to sell more. I wanted to get a valuation up if I was going to do it again. So I told him, No. He tracked me for a few years. And about four years later, last year, actually, he reached out again, and offered again. And at first I said, No, I wasn’t interested in and he pushed and I will tell you, this is amazing. The thing he said that got me over, because I was happy. We were doing well, we had cash in the bank, things are good. The thing he said that got me was, Hey, man, you don’t have any idea what the economy looks like next year, who knows what will happen? And, and it kind of kept me up at night? Because I definitely, you know, I wasn’t really a fan of the political situation that was going on over the last four years. And, you know, I was kind of nervous that anything could happen. And I’ve never concerned myself with macroeconomics in that way. But it was, you know, as you grow and have more mouths to feed, you think more about that stuff. And and he basically convinced me that a cushion would be nice, and that the valuation, you know, could be pretty strong. And he was damn right. You know, I have to thank him for that. Because I can say that that for COVID times, we went in with plenty of cash in the bank. And we were in a better situation than a lot of other companies. Now, that doesn’t mean COVID hasn’t been rough and didn’t have to change targets and everything else and have to rethink the world. But it could have been worse basically could have been held a lot worse. You know, so many companies got completely thrown asunder. We didn’t. So that’s good.

Alexander Ferguson 14:37
It’s almost seems fortuitous in several places that certain things happen. You meet the right people, which is just it. You can’t say that’s going to happen anybody like I’m going to start a company may happen to me.

Luke Freiler 14:49
The unfortunate fact that it sucks to say it to entrepreneurs, but it’s true, but the best time to get money is when you don’t need it. And that sucks man like having been there. Times in 2008 and whatnot where everything’s rough. You know, everybody, when you talk to VCs and whatnot, and you’re not ready yet you think you are they think you’re not. You know, they’re basically telling me well, if you go get 12 quarters of growth, give us a call. And I’m, you know, at the time, your entire attitude is, man, if I have 12 quarters of growth, I don’t need you screw off. You know, so, so for me, I never looked forward to going out and finding money because, again, we’ve only looked for money in really inopportune times. It is amazing. We’re not looking for money. Now. It kind of fits our theme. Very happy. We’re not. But yeah, it is definitely. You know, I, there’s challenges in bootstrapping, all day long. But it’s got some really nice benefits as well. So

Alexander Ferguson 15:48
there’s, I can already have what you shared there several points of ups and downs, lows and highs. Instead a hard question, if you’re if you’re open for it. What was the most difficult time in the past 20 years? And what was the lesson you learned from that?

Luke Freiler 16:06
getting dumped the day after I moved 900 miles to start a company was pretty rough. Um, yeah, that that was that was very difficult. And, you know, the lessons there, no one else should be dumb enough to have to learn is, you know, I just I did, I took some risks, that I don’t know any other entrepreneur that has taken those same risks. So it’s not a great, it’s not a universal warning. Let’s put it that way. That was a big one. The The other thing is, it’s been a challenge all along. It’s just, it’s so cliche, but it really does come down to talent and knowing what you don’t know. You know, I’ll tell a story that I love to death. And it’s absolutely true, but there’s so much to unpack from it. And I’ve spent years of my life thinking about it. When we started this company, I knew what we wanted to be, we wanted to be a software company, we created our services division, out of market demand. And it turned out to be a really good choice for a lot of reasons. But but at the end of the day, I think of myself as an engineer who wants to build things. And software happens to be my thing. That’s what I know. So, so I want to build software. And I wanted this to be a product that we would just sell online, people would buy it, you know, just you know, early SAS before SAS was a thing. So I was thinking about building this platform, and I was expecting to sell it for a couple 100 bucks a month. That was my idea back when we started. And I threw up a really simple crappy website, when we were just starting the company to kind of advertise what we were doing to the world. And just make sure we’re in Google and whatnot. And the first company to call us was was Sun Microsystems, which at the time was an enormous company, you know, kind of owned the Unix market to some degree and was huge. They have since gotten bought by Oracle and absorbed into that, but at the time, they were an enormous entity. And they called us and wanted to learn about our platform and potentially buy it. And I’m thinking a couple 100 bucks a month, here’s is my price point. Well, I wasn’t comfortable going into that call. They weren’t my target market. I was thinking the many, many, many, you know, SMBs. Well, I did a smart thing. And then I got a guy who had many, many years of experience in sales in enterprise sales to join the call with me, he was someone I had worked with at, at Samsung. And he had spent 30 years at IBM in executive up to the highest levels of executive sales positions. And I told him about this call, and I get them on the call. And we hadn’t really got in depth as to what we were going to do it we were playing it by ear, and we get to the commercial discussion and sun, you know, says well, what’s it cost? And again, in my mind, it actually I left out an important part, I spent the first 15 minutes of this call trying to talk them out of buying it. I was overwhelmed. I was intimidated. I was like 21. And I’m basically I’m telling them all the reasons they shouldn’t buy it. I’m literally saying, Hey, guys, the software is not done yet. We’re still building it. And they were like, well, that’s awesome. We can help influence the roadmap, we can take part in that that’s great. Like I’m objecting to everything I can and they’re objecting to my objections. So we get to the commercial discussion. And they say what does it cost? And again, in my mind a few 100 bucks a month. And the guy brought on the call, literally, I’m not exaggerating. Anyway, he said it’s $300,000.60 1000 a year in for support after that, straight faced and they said that sounds fair. We can do that. And and that was it. It started and wow, I would be on an entirely different trajectory if I had not brought in someone who knew what he was doing. And if I had handled it my way, and I learned an enormous amount from it. You know, he’s he’s an awesome guy. So, so yeah.

Alexander Ferguson 19:46
Having the right talent. It’s yeah,

Luke Freiler 19:48
so that’s one that I had I handled that differently. We might not be talking right now. That was where I would be at this point. But yeah, and son was an incredible customer for nearly a decade. And it was great.

Alexander Ferguson 20:03
All right, for that whole concept of building the right team that allows the the growth to happen. What have you seen are common mistakes one could make when it comes to hiring

Luke Freiler 20:15
friends, you know, for me, it’s worked out more often than it hasn’t, I will admit. But it’s, it’s created challenges and problems and difficult conversations, you know, the bigger you get, the less you want to do that. Even worse than that is hiring relationships. You know, if you’ve got some people, and unfortunately, as you grow, they just naturally form I mean, in the modern work environment, you know, your social network is more office than anything else in our world. So so they formed but that’s definitely been tough. Trying to keep things professional has been really a big challenge. Because you start off as a family, like you just, you put so much time and energy and you’re all aligned with the passion. And as you grow, that family grows and everything gets more complicated. So So that’s, that’s probably the the best answer I have for that is, you know, find the right talent. But it’s, it’s challenging to hire strangers when you’re very small. But the perspective they bring is pretty amazing. The other thing that I kind of tell everyone is, there are no silver bullets in business, at least that I’ve experienced, or at least nothing predictable, right? Yeah. And you may have heard the adage of like, it’s, it’s you can work to become a millionaire, but you can’t work to become a billionaire. Like, you can’t be you can be smart enough to be a millionaire, you can’t be smart enough to be a billionaire, that some amount of luck has to happen numerous times. And I very much believe that. I believe a lot of people expect this one thing is going to have this enormous impact and change everything. And that’s not what it is. It’s about constantly recalibrating and dialing things in and just getting better and learning and willing to admit your mistakes and willing to roll with the punches. And I think there’s a lot of success gained from those things. You can become, like I said, you can just win lotto and become, you know, pretty wealthy, but you can’t rely on that. And relying on on things like, you know, again, silver bullets is a mistake. I’ve seen way too many times.

Alexander Ferguson 22:09
It’s you said you took up earlier marketing as a hobby. Yes. And I find that interesting statements. I’m curious on from the marketing side, like what, what’s one of the biggest tactics that had worked or Takeaways over the years that have helped you grow and scale

Luke Freiler 22:24
easy, literally my shower thoughts this morning, we’re sure write a book about my experience in marketing only because not that I in I’ll take it in a weird journey, I didn’t plan to go down. But the reason I was having that thought is not because our think our marketing has been immensely successful. And we’ve turned into a bajillion dollar company. It’s because I think our approach to marketing got us over some early humps that I think a lot of people run into and don’t know what to do. So I don’t think our approach to marketing is what makes somebody a $50 million company. But the tricks I learned, I think, could take someone from a one or two to a five or 10, pretty reasonably predictable, which, again, I don’t think there’s enough content out there that addresses that middle point where things really get challenging, I think everything that I’ve read, at least is you know, the Warren Buffett’s of the world that are very inspirational, or the people that are pretending the Warren Buffett’s of the world, but a very inspirational but they’re not helping you through some of those initial challenges. It’s such a big picture. So the short version, and again, storytime.

Early on as I took over CEO, we were doing no marketing, the guy that I was raving about earlier, who’s awesome in sales, sales was his background. And he was one of those salespeople that had never really done a lot in the marketing space. So because he was my leader in that area, and there was a big hole in marketing. We were kind of cold calling and very traditional sales. Well, obviously, I have a love of the internet and what enables and I was convinced, you know, as this engineer CTO, I was convinced that there must be a better way. And and this is again, true story. It happened exactly like this. I was sitting in my office one night at about seven o’clock. And I it is, you know, a decade ago probably but but I was very interested in how we could theoretically leverage Twitter to better our company. And and Twitter was a relatively new idea. And it was kind of the new hotness, but it was very clear to me that it worked very well in a consumer capacity. But the idea of b2b software and targeting the right people there, it wasn’t common then it was a brand new thing. So I did whatever he does, and I went and I Googled, you know, leveraging Twitter and b2b or something like that, and I got this this ebook I you know, filled out this form download of this ebook, literally called in leveraging Twitter in the b2b environment. And for whatever reason, this is a weird part of the story, but for some reason, I like to tell it, I decided to print that book like it’s seven o’clock I’m tired. I want to lay on my couch in my office, and I was just gonna print it and as it was printing my phone rings I pick up the phone, which even to this point, I have no idea why it isn’t ever installed. But if it’s a phone, and this guy says, Hi, my name is whatever, I just, I know you I saw you just downloaded this book. And I was thinking maybe I could answer your questions and save you some time and reading. And he said, If you, if you like what I have to say, then then maybe you give me a few minutes to tell you about what we do. And I again, I don’t know why I was sort of feeling generous, it was interesting. And I said, Sure, it was top of mine, right? And I said, Okay, what do you do? Or sorry, he, we walked through sort of Twitter and b2b and some things and then I got to the, you know, he said, Do you mind if I tell you what, and of course, you’re gonna be polite? I said, yeah. So he said, Well, what we do is the process you just went through. And I said, Okay, what does that mean? He said, Well, here’s what happened. You had a problem. You had a question, you went to the internet to Google to solve that problem, you typed it in? We worked really hard to be the answer to that problem. It didn’t look like that to you. But you saw our book, and, and you download it, well, you thought you were getting that book for free. But you really weren’t, you gave us your contact information as a currency. And you traded that contact information for that book that we worked really hard to write. And then as soon as you did that, I got a notice that said, hey, there’s a new lead that’s thinking about what we do call them. And he said, Yeah, this whole thing. It’s called inbound marketing. And we are HubSpot. And this is what we do. And this is, you know, an interesting way you can grow your business. And he gave me some some tips that just have stuck with me the whole time of, you know, you need to think of your company as a publisher. And don’t worry about secret sauce, publish everything, everything you learn every problem you solve, produce content, you know, you don’t have to worry about gaming the system just produce good content, and the system will work, it’ll bring people to you. And aside from that, I’d had an interesting call with someone a VC out of the UK, who purely focused on investing in Bootstrap companies, bootstrap tech companies, and he said to me, Hey, what you need to do is go hire a kid straight out of college with a marketing degree who’s never had a budget before and doesn’t know he’s supposed to get one. And you need to set them on, you know, wild online and just let them go out and build awareness that way. And at the time, even that sounded crazy. And it was a random call. But but all of a sudden, I put these two ideas in my mind, and I just need to find someone one role, I can afford one cheap person to just start building content for us and and put up these landing pages and do this stuff. And, and I did that and the first guy I hired didn’t work out it was a train wreck. Second I hired was awesome. And, and we did that. And we started working together to collaborate on building this content. And it completely changed the company. You know, it turned it from Yeah, we had a website, and we got one or two sort of Bluebird good leads a month. And that was it. And within a couple months of doing this, we were getting like five a day. And it was just a different world. And it really was, it all just makes sense. People have problems. Everybody goes to Google for your solution. It’s just a ubiquitous thing. So it made sense to me. And I fell in love with it. And I started investing enormous amount of time into it. And I brought a resource on and we started collaborating, and he was kind of the right hand at this stuff. And, and that that really did prop up the company and became our primary channel for awareness and Legion. To this day,

Alexander Ferguson 28:24
what would you say in today’s world? Now everyone, because it COVID Like there’s no conferences, no trade shows and everyone’s digital and the amount of content that’s being created? There’s so much distraction, I what do you what do you see is then the challenge, then going forward? How do you overcome that?

Luke Freiler 28:40
Yeah, I mean, that the challenge is obvious. And and we, you know, I did, I did another a webinar earlier this week for another company, someone that we’ve done off and on over the years. And they have an awesome market, and they have an awesome presence and reputation. And I noticed that they had like a third of the usual attendees to that webinar. And, you know, similar topic, I don’t think it was the topic. I think people are just saturated. And, you know, right now, I’m very deep in 2021 planning. And of course, we’re thinking, Okay, well, we’re not probably expanding Europe, and we’re not going to travel to meet new customers. And we’re not going to host our road shows, and we’re probably not going to have a physical conference this year. And it’s like Check, check, check, check, check, check. And at the end of the day, you’re like webinar. And that sounded good, because it’s cheap, and it’s easy, and like they’ve been good for us in the past. They’ve been very valuable. But now that I’m seeing like really proven organizations that are good at this, or even having trouble getting people to show up, I’m concerned. So, you know, unfortunately, the short answer is I don’t have the answer yet. Maybe we do this again in a few weeks.

We, you know, I I’ll give you the answer, and it’s a non answer, but we’re all going to have to get creative. And for us, that’s exciting to me. I like creativity and do weird things and do different things. You know, I got an invite a couple days ago for this, like digital lunch thing, it was another executive setting up to have a digital lunch and and what I thought it was is I was like, Oh Is somebody like sparking these and they kind of pay for lunch and you both eat lunch together. And I was like, that’s actually kind of neat, I would do that. And then I realized, no, it just sets a meeting on account. So I will say, there has to be incredible opportunity out there to help companies solve these problems and whatnot. Like, I’ll tell you one of the challenges we’re working with, it’s a dumb challenge in the grand scheme of seen, but it’s a grand scheme of things. But it’s important to us, is like our company culture is in this is gonna sound stupid, but we’re very party based, like we have a lot of really incredible parties, at least once a quarter, we try to do some sort of event at least once or twice a year, we do something awesome. And we do creative, weird things, and we have fun with it. And this year, we can’t and it’s killing us, like we can’t and, you know, to the point where we had worked something out that we thought was gonna be a great socially distanced, really unique party. And even that’s illegal as of this week. Like, we can’t even do that one. So, so we started looking online, and there are amazing businesses that host virtual parties and do really creative, cool, inexpensive things. And these companies didn’t need to exist a year ago that, you know, nobody would have had their Christmas party on Zoom, if they could avoid it. But it is the handwork we’ve been given. And, you know, I’ve said it before it talking to a lot of peers and whatnot. You know, COVID is terrible, people are dying like that, you know, doesn’t need to be said at this point. But it is forcing all of us to think differently, it is forcing us to be more creative, it is forcing so many more interesting relationships to develop and new things to happen, it’s going to change the way that we do business moving forward. And to me, I like new and weird and change. And, you know, I also like the fact that we are all sharing this experience like never in our lives that has that happened to where we’ve all had a global experience. Like we could all talk about 911 When that happened, that was horrible, too. But it wasn’t nearly as global, it wasn’t nearly as extended, it wasn’t, you know, this is a whole different level of terrible. And, you know, in some ways, troubles brought us together and made us creative. And I love that that’s cool. And and on top of that, I’m going to stop talking soon, I promise. On top of that, technology is in arguably the hero of COVID. Like, you know, the fact that remote school sucks, we all think about school sucks, but we can do it. Like, you know, our kids can continue to be educated without getting sick. Like that, in itself is a major accomplishment. It’s it’s certainly a glass half full look at it. But it’s also, you know, I was thinking yesterday about how, you know, Zoom is awesome. They’re also a customer of mine, so I have a lot of love for them. But this immense rise is going to put so much new r&d into this type of meeting. And two or three years from now, the level of frictionless video conferencing experience that you and I have is going to feel nothing like today. Like, it’s just going to get fierce and competitive, and it’s going to produce amazing products that are going to be great. And and that, you know, frankly, while I did like traveling, in some respects for business, I would spend two days have traveled for four hours of meeting at most, and lose a good chunk of my life. That doesn’t happen anymore. Like you know, and it’s gonna be real hard to give this up in some ways. So. So yeah, it’s not answer, I wish I had the magic bullet. But I think people are gonna have to get a lot more creative, they’re gonna have to get a lot more human. I mean, we’re all experiencing each other in our own homes and environments. And there’s just so much we can do with that, that’s going to be really cool. So I’m looking forward to all the ideas that come out of it.

Alexander Ferguson 33:55
Last question for you. What kind of tech innovations do you predict we will see them in the near term? Next year. So because this environment you’ve already mentioned, one, especially comes to, to video video calls, but even the long term 510 years from now, any What do you predict? We’ll see.

Luke Freiler 34:12
Um, I mean, keep in mind that that I am assuming that we’re not going to be living in COVID for you know, too long. What I’m, what I’m assuming is that the world is going to go back to normal. I don’t know if it’s, you know, six months or 24 months, but But it’s going to go back to normal, meaning we can go out to dinner again. But I think we’re going to get hooked on some of these things. I think we’re going to get hooked on videoconferencing in a way that we wouldn’t have otherwise. So it’s going to change some things I think it’s going to make education very different and hopefully much better. I think education is one of those areas that has been slow to adopt old technology for a lot of reasons. They just don’t have a choice right now. So trial by fire. I think technology is gonna gonna really invade education. government I think is going to have I mean, the mail and balloting and all that stuff like, you know, I think we’re just going to find better ways to engage with the government. And in a way that is going to be very interesting. Again, just technology being invasive. You and I briefly touched on this the first few moments we met, but I’m a big fan of virtual reality and augmented reality, I think those are spaces that have a lot of opportunity. I think they’re in their absolute infancy right now, like we’re barely, barely scratching the surface. Like, maybe there’s, you know, half a billion dollars in r&d in those spaces. So far, that’s gonna go crazy. And we’re gonna start to see some really, really neat things there. And that’s going to open up just entirely new ways to engage with people to, you know, the one I think I mentioned to you, that is very true. And most people outside our little space, don’t see it. But for me, VR was the savior of exercise, you know, we do my wife and I both use VR for fitness. And there are incredible fitness programs that happen exclusively in VR, and frankly, are way more exciting than walking my neighborhood for the 12,000th time, which is what I’ve done during COVID as well. So are what I was doing before I got bored of it. So yeah, I think virtual reality is one that is going to change things, not just in gaming. I think, you know, I think that was one of the smart things that Facebook saw in picking up Oculus was they weren’t buying a gaming company, they were buying a new technology platform that could go in any direction they you know, they wanted it to so they may not have been the best one to buy it in many people’s opinions. I’m actually pretty indifferent. But I do think that they saw the vision of where that could go. So that’s a big one for me.

Alexander Ferguson 36:40
Luke, I really appreciate the the lessons learned here the story, this journey that you’ve been on, there’s so much insight, I know, we could probably talk for another three hours, and he does his war story. So thank you though, for sharing. This has been awesome.

Luke Freiler 36:54
Happy to man. It was great to meet you Alex, and it’s a good time, I’d be happy to do this anytime.

Alexander Ferguson 36:58
For those that want to learn more definitely check out part one of our conversation to hear more about centercode or go to centercode.com to check out their platform and their managed services. Thanks again for joining us on this founders journey of apptech. Our sponsor for today’s episode is TeraLeap. If your company wants to learn how to better leverage the power of video to increase your sales and marketing results, head over to TeraLeap.io and learn about the new product customer stories. Thanks so much. And we’ll see you guys next time. That concludes the audio version of this episode. To see the original and more visit our UpTech Report YouTube channel. If you know a tech company, we should interview you can nominate them at UpTech report.com. Or if you just prefer to listen, make sure you’re subscribed to this series on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcasting app.