A CEO's Insights on Mental Health, Leadership, and Utah's Tech Scene | Adam Edmunds of Entrata

Healing in San Clemente Bradley Cooper like that raspy deep voice like you better dig deep down into your soul and you better believe what you say that was a good impression of it do you like that yeah that's great or your audience will know yeah that's probably the my main piece of advice to leaders is like whatever you believe deep down inside your soul whoever you are is going to come out how'd you end up in Entrada I don't know that that story has been fully told to the community has it at least I don't know you probably know and you know a few people but uh yeah going back to um before that I was at podium for almost five years um and my wife and I in 2019 had like this midlife crisis which I'm so glad we had and we just we had a bunch of friends down in San Clemente California and we just picked up our family and left um and just moved down there for a couple of years um my health it's a beautiful place too it's a special part of the world um and when I went there and left Podium I was emotionally energetically spiritually physically bankrupt like I had nothing left to give the world um you remember the movie The Pixar movie Soul and it shows you know in the soul World those lost a lost soul is this kind of just big Dark Cloud of energy that's trying to just it's just kind of wandering around yeah and you know that it'll still in the real world it's like a hedge fund manager or something I was one of those um I just had kind of lost my joy for life and we went down there and that place kind of brought me back you know it healed me I rode my bike a lot um asked myself a lot of questions it was interesting to go through that process um of being you know in the thick of building businesses for almost 20 years and then one day your phone stops ringing yeah and you delete slack and everything goes really silent which at first is kind of terrifying because it made me feel very very this is this is a terrible word dude word teams but it's truth I felt irrelevant interesting and it was it was not comfortable yeah for me to go through um but for me I think it was really necessary it helped me kind of reset um my priorities what I wanted to spend like the second half of my career doing when I when I I originally was like I don't know if I'm ever gonna work again yeah I just was so so burned out um and you know over the course of several months and you know I started seeing like an executive coach and started doing counseling and you know really spent a lot of time trying to figure myself out and um you know I didn't miss the commotion so much like I remember telling people back then I'm like it's so nice to not walk into a building on a Monday morning and have all these people waiting for me to make decisions um but during that time I started to get texts from people yeah that I'd worked with over the previous three companies I was at sure and they would just send me these little notes of hey remember this conversation we had or you took a big you know gamble on me when you made this decision or gave me this promotion or you know thanks for this one thing you probably don't even know how how much you meant to me and I realized what drove me is those relationships and I had an executive coach that I remember her after she got to know me well she Opportunity at Entrata verbalized it to me that way she said Adam you're your currency in life is relationships and I never thought of myself that way um and I just missed the people I just yeah I missed the relationships I missed building with people I missed watching people grow I missed watching people get promoted and make more money and have success and struggle and figure things out um and so I decided I was going to get back into it I thought I was going to start a business um and I actually came back to Utah uh to visit I was going to meet with you know the all the local CEOs Ryan and Josh and I was going to pitch them on my product it was kind of a sass play for um for B2B companies and my goal was hey I'm gonna get you all to invest and you have to buy my product and then I ended up meeting uh Dave the founder of Entrada and he was like hey there's this great business here I don't really have any energy or desire to kind of take it to this next level why don't you come and do it and at first I was like that running a 2500 person company is the last thing I want to do yeah it's a big company in my life I have never I'd never seen that scale yeah um Podium was maybe a thousand when I left um because I got in started to learn about it it was just clearly a Monster yeah that nobody knew about yeah um and so yeah joined almost three years ago now um and I've just loved it like you know I always wanted to be that cool founder entrepreneur guy yeah um but I started to kind of figure this out at podium and now I've really figured out here I'm one of those boring operator guys so as much as I want to pretend I'm a cool founder I'm a very mediocre founder I'm a pretty good operator that's not true uh you you sold a company right to Merit CX yeah I started two on my own silent whistle which I sold it on nine and then allegiance that I sold in 14 and they were great I love them and that's where I learned it all of the hard things that I had to go through sure you know you look financially at them they were both like okay yeah um not anywhere near the last couple that I've been involved with um I love those businesses but you know Founders are I know and I've worked with some of the best they're nuts they're crazy yeah they're obsessed with everything they Why so burnt out? want to make every decision and that that's what you have to do to be a great one yeah I'm more of like my love language is like Revenue growth and customer acquisition metrics and yeah running board meetings and raising money and um it's okay I've come to accept that that's what I am I'm one of those boring operator guys and I'm okay that's incredible man why do you think you got so burnt out probably because I didn't know why I was doing what I was doing um I was actually our you know Mutual good friend Susan Peterson has a podcast and she asked me a question a few months ago on that about what drives me like you know people like you what what drives your this inner engine you have yeah and I just spit these words out and it was kind of shocking to me and I've thought a lot about it since I said I'm not really running to success I'm running from failure interesting um and as I've thought about that and really learned more about myself that probably encapsulates my whole life you know I I joke around that one of my superpowers is like shame like I really have been on a mission since I was a little little kid to prove that I'm not a loser yeah and uh here's the problem with that though that I'm still figuring out and why I got so burned out you know if you can figure out how to run to success figure out how to run to happiness [Music] you can be done at some point yeah um if you're always running from failure and shame and being a loser which I think is more common than not sure you know I've talked about this with some of my peers and you know our common friends yeah I won't speak for anybody else but I think we're all wired in a similar way but you don't ever get to be done if you can't make that switch you're gonna always be running for failure you can have all the success in the world but if you're running from failure you're gonna keep going and burn yourself out and wonder why you even did it all so I'm still in that you know kind of personal journey of doing for the things for the right reason um yeah so where do you think those expectations come from like like I don't want to fail I don't want to be a loser I don't like were you getting that from like family growing up were you getting that from like pressure in just general Society or that just comes from within us where does that come from I think it's in me I think look I grew up in South Jordan Utah I grew up in the Mormon religion like I think there's a lot of not just in the Mormon religion I think there's religious constructs um that can maybe contribute to it and I already have to say like my mom will be listening to this and be sad because every time she hears me talk about this stuff she's like I tried my best but my parents are amazing so that it wasn't them like I never had crazy unreal expectations placed on me by my parents or anyone around me I didn't have like older siblings I was trying to like outdo that I could you know it was just it was just in me um and for for a while once I started to identify what it was I I kind of felt shame about my shame like why do I have this like why can't I be one of those people who runs to success and then about a year and a half ago dude we're going deep you've always gonna need man um I realized one night I was actually talking to my exact coach and she asked me like what purpose is that shame serving for you I thought a lot about that and then I realized I'm like here's the weird thing my shame creates everything I like about myself creates my drive it creates my work ethic like I'm a really good dad like I'm a really you know good friend to people I try to be loyal I try to be you know good in in my job I don't want shame to be the reason that drives me forever but um I've got this you know kind of almost appreciation that that is what um kind of created a lot of that and I think I I ended up writing that kind of this this thought up about you know that realization I sent it to a friend of mine I'm like okay what do you think who's a super successful person as well and he he said he said if you replaced shame with anxiety for me it's like he's like yeah this is the exact same thing I feel so you know I think we all just have our little inner workings and it's it's we're all on our own personal Journey To Figure those out and I'm still trying to figure my out yeah I mean what do you do like how do you overcome that because yeah as you How to find inner peace and balance know like it's been a crazy couple years on my end too and like figuring that out like how to like stay balanced and not like let the anxiety and stuff consume you it's pretty wild I don't think that I figured out have you figured out any like cool tricks to do this um for me biking's good like um exercise is unbelievable very much yeah so if it's running or biking my wife's a yoga person like if I go up American fort Canyon on my bike at 6 a.m and nobody's up there I can just get to this Summit up there you're at 8 200 feet or whatever and I can just breathe for a minute and like find that that balance just for a minute but it's like we all have it in us like you can find it and for me I have to go find it it doesn't come naturally yeah like I've got a son who's just he's far more resilient than me he he's just easy going he's he doesn't have these like inner demons always talking to him and um I think just acknowledging that I'm just not like that I have to go find it um I've got like a special playlist of songs that help me kind of get to that headspace and when I start getting really fired up angry anxious whatever sometimes I just get in my car or on a plane and I just put my headphones on and I just turn those songs on and breathe you know and just try and find that spot um but if I figure out like the permanent solution I'll I'll let you know but the stress of just life is crazy and then when you're running an enormous company like you are like you said like this is a really really big company and it could be the biggest ever come out of Utah I mean it's kind of like it's tracking in a really interesting way and and we'll get into that uh later but like the stresses and like the various things that come up that you don't plan for and uh the you know like everything that takes to run a company I mean I have no idea what it takes around a company that size but I'm sure it's insane like that on top of just life itself which is insane yeah that's a lot that's a lot to deal with just right there yeah yeah the the part that gets tough for me is uh one of the the one of the things I think people like about working with me is I'm pretty balanced and they can bring me Good News Bring me bad news like they can always come to me and they're gonna get like um balanced calm like measured help and or just a listening ear or whatever and when I get spun up on my own and can't be that as well for them that's that's tough yeah um and then it kind of puts everyone into their own little frenzy because when they start to notice if I'm off then they stop coming to me yeah and like I said that's that's one of probably my best skills um is I'm pretty open and pretty approachable and I can think through problems with people so it's something I try and be pretty aware of because I don't think any of us probably realize how easy it is for those around us yeah to read our energy yeah um and I've got this really annoying personality trait where the worse I'm doing the quieter I get sure because I don't want to bother people with it yeah but I've noticed I do that too I never even thought about that it's so annoying that's interesting and then people but then they have artel they know yeah and so what do they do they go quiet too yes they don't want to bother us because they know we're not doing well yeah so it's it's like a vicious cycle what I've what I've tried to do a better job of is I just tell people and I'm not great like I went through a bunch of um like blood transfusion things last fall and I'd never done anything like this I told my board and I told the exec team at entrata because I didn't want them my usual would be don't tell them yeah but then they would just notice like Adam's like gone for big blocks of time what is going on is he and I'm always I've learned that if I don't communicate with him they it's too easy to interpret that behavior as disengaged I've lost my energy um I'm not interested I don't care or I'm mad and those are all bad so I just try and tell them like hey this is what's going on with my health this is what's going on my personal life and it's that's not comfortable or normal for me oh yeah at all um so it's important to have like those open relationships I think with your team and with my board you know whenever I'm doing really bad I've got Todd Peterson on board and I know I can call Todd day or night yeah and just say I don't need any answers for me bro I'm just gonna dump a bunch of stuff out on the table here and then we can wipe it up and go back um and then like I said I've got an exact coach I see a therapist once in a while I just I I have spent my entire life Coaches and mentors being closed up yeah same still for me it's trying to Prime myself opening you have to do it you're on your own like yeah no one can come and do it for you um who's your exact coach can you can you say is that uh it's a local person here her name's Rachel I've worked with a few different exec coaches my last one was like a PhD from Stanford in Psychology focused like a CEO coach Rachel what she's good at is she's I color like my energetic coach we talk about like just how I'm feeling and like when I go talk to her it's not about like how do I run an exec team meeting better or a board meeting better it's like I am really angry and I don't know why let's get to the bottom of like where is that anger coming from um because that's like that's that's more helpful for me than like hey I actually want some like business coaching so for me that's what's what's been how do you process like the worry because there's always a million things to worry about again just in general life and then add a 2500 person company on top of it how do you like process that how do you like here's what I'm going to focus on today and I'm going to forget all the other things that are kind of like overhanging you know um it's probably this is I don't know annoying answer for them to hear I try to Outsource worry to the execs that I bring on yeah I don't do well with worrying um but if you like our cro my CTO our chief operating product officer they worry about everything it's amazing because then I don't have to yeah um so for me it's just I have to and I've learned this slowly over 20 years um I have to just have really really good people around me yeah because otherwise the worry turns into exhaustion for me What you learned along the way really really quickly sure um I've just like in Toronto we're lucky we've got amazing people there not just like at the exact level but we've got amazing VPS and uh managers like all over the place and so the worry oftentimes doesn't even make it up to me like it's been resolved and yeah um I feel really fortunate too I love so many great people like that you've been there for three years at Entrada um kind of coming after like this uh kind of like sabbatical almost right um what have you learned about leading a company about growing a company because Entrada was a monster when you got there it's even bigger now it's growing Inc I mean again like it just doesn't slow down and you recently acquired a company I mean what have you learned here um yeah I was always like the small startup guy you know I started to Podium was like you know less than a million in revenue and I got involved there um I kind of knew that like wild west let's just kind of get a pack of Engineers and a pack of sales people and go figure everything out I've learned a lot more about um structure um like the vision of a company is easy to explain when you can get everybody in a conference room yeah the company we just acquired when we went um and did the All Hands to announce it to their uh company it's like 90 people in one room and I walked in I told him I'm told all of them I'm like this feels more natural to me yeah than what I'm doing um but I've really enjoyed the ride um you have to be really structured and measured and be a you have to communicate far more clearly um you have to um be more balanced and diverse in thought and team building and Company building I mean you've got a lot of eyeballs a lot of lenses on you um one thing that you know I have learned like politicians probably know this already but you'll never make everybody happy yeah um just with that many people everything every decision you make there's probably going to be a cohort that it's they're not super pumped with that decision yeah um I I genuinely try to always make the the best decision for everyone but that's it's just a number people pleaser so it's hard to not have an approval rating of 100 oh yeah for sure um but yeah I've become a lot better at those kind of things I was always more of just like hey let's just go fast and people will figure out the vision as we go and we don't really need to care about that kind of stuff but you know we we really clearly talk about what our goals are from a revenue uh a growth standpoint profitability we have really good metrics we try and be super transparent with those as we go forward um and I've never worked the other thing that's been fun about Entrada I've never worked in vertical SAS I've always been in like horizontal Marketing Solutions where one day I was selling to Delta and the next day to American Express and the next day to Disney and then Chili's we only sell to multi-family property management companies and what's cool is we do everything for them yeah we are their accounting system their Marketing System their CRM we do all their background checks we process all their payments we um like these is for taxes we have public companies using our accounting solution we do their utilities now we you know help their residents we have a suite of Resident um Services now like renters insurance and Reporting their rent payments to credit bureaus there's like these billion dollar adjustable markets all over the place um and that's that's super fun again you have to be really deliberate about how you build stuff and in what order and make sure you do it right because you only have you know there's 5 000 logos we can sell to yeah so when we put a market out it has to work because otherwise everyone knows pretty quickly it doesn't it didn't work so um yeah it's fun it's like you said it I think it's going to be you know right there with qualtrics I think it'll be one of the biggest SAS companies ever built here yeah um because of the industry we serve it's never going away it grows uh every year um if anything it's you know gonna grow even faster as home ownership gets more and more expensive um yeah isn't that fascinating yeah um and I feel really [Music] um deep responsibility to make sure this company is great like I'm not the founder I didn't I wasn't even there for the first 18 years of the company's history [Music] um but it's a it deserves to reach its potential like it just needs to and I feel like Utah needs that the people who built it deserve that the people who are there deserve that um you know whatever role I end up playing for this window um will be just a drop in the bucket but hopefully you know we have it on a path where it's going to be a company that people are working at talking about for decades um and and serving customers in a really important part of our of our world of living finding a new place um you know you move into a new apartment that oftentimes comes with really emotional events kids going to new schools uh marriages divorces graduations you move because a child gets sick and you need treatment in a specific City like if we can make our customers lives easier so they can focus on those events it's a really cool Mission it's really easy to Rally behind and like you said when I when I went there I just thought oh this is an apartment software thing yeah um but it's a yeah it's a cool it's a cool opportunity you mentioned Todd who is just the greatest guy in the world and so real and open and all that type of stuff what have you learned from him or other mentors and other members of your board and I mean these people who have built these incredible companies I mean vivint's just this incredible company that he built and worked on uh forever and turned it into like an iconic Utah success story yeah what have you learned from these guys even Ryan right like yeah um some of these guys who have been doing it for so long yeah Ryan and Todd got involved about six months after I joined they came and um helped kind of co-lead the round with Silver Lake and they've both been really great mentors I've known them both for years but I'd never worked with either of them yeah and they both have the same mindset that I'm never had as an entrepreneur um and it's why I think I'm you know an okay one not great but they think in terms of decades and like long-term sustainability and so they just they just look at problems a little more differently than I do sometimes where I'm focused on like oh but if we do this it'll help our growth rate next quarter or do this and they Todd especially is always the one in board meetings that's not not like hitting the brakes but reminding me that like hey like profitability matters and you know there's just certain aspects of the business that you need to keep really really healthy and to just not get overzealous and not like you know I heard this I heard this uh phrase um just last week that Ego cost people more money than anything else in life yeah and I think Business Leaders is the same way yeah there's just so many stupid ways to spend money and Todd's always a guy that's like you know kind of reminding me to make sure that like we're being smart with cash we're staying profitable and um you know there's a lot of different ways to grow a business when I first got to entrata and we raised that round we were profitable we were still we were growing well but we were really profitable and when I went out to all these investors you know this was early 21 like getting to the peak they're like why are you profitable go spend that and grow faster interesting um and that's just we kind of you know we we did spend a little more over the next year or so but it's funny now that you know things have come full circle it's like no no people love the profitability and you know you can grow organically which we have entirely to date um but you know if you have profit you can grow through acquisition you can continue to grow organically and it just gives you so much more optionality so um yeah Todd's always that angel on my shoulder reminding me and whispering things to me is is that the first round or at least institutional round or whatever you'd call it the intron has ever yeah it was a good one because I think like wasn't there just an angel in there no boo yeah yeah nope actually you introduced me to novu yeah yeah uh I think he put money in like you know 405 or something yeah who knows it yeah so he's still he's still he's still involved and somebody needs to tell his story uh has been a part of so many Utah success stories kind of behind the scenes for sure he's a prolific angel investor here in the state um so that was the first round and it was a massive round at what point were Reasons for raising money you like you know now we're on this trajectory where I need to find some sort of exit either go public or you know pay this back via dividends or whatever it is right like um you know were you like hey this is how we're gonna this is why we're doing this because like you said it had been profitable for 18 years just spinning out cash you know um what was the rationale for like hey let's really throw some gas on the fire yeah the company um before I came before that round it always kind of operated around break even the they really just kind of plugged every available dollar back into the business and they went through a really public lawsuit for about six or seven years honestly the company shouldn't even exist like it should have never survived those early years they had to Pivot and do some crazy things and over three years at one point they had to replace their entire customer base their entire Revenue base um but uh it never had really had a bunch of fuel going to to really try and get grow maybe you know build out the r d team a little bit more and so that's always been the plan in terms of like what the exit was I knew within a few months of joining like that's not going to matter at this business some businesses that is matter that that does matter like you kind of have a finite you know some businesses just will never make good public companies yeah um this is the first one I've really been confident like this can be a big public company for a long time we have predictable Revenue it's Enterprise software you know great retention rates um we still don't really talk about that or think about that too much like at the board level like we're we're getting ready to be a public company at some point but there's no hurry um particularly right now yeah makes no sense yeah it's it's there's no reason to go rush to be public right now yeah so um if and when that time comes we'll be ready to do it there could actually never be a reason to do it you know like uh in the same way where like investors were like in 21 they're like hey just spend a ton like there's there's some real advantages to staying private right where you're not as focused on well we gotta get these quarterly numbers to look good for right you know and you can think more long term like like Ryan and Todd do yeah yeah that's kind of interesting too yeah like this company we just acquired up in Logan great business rent Dynamics we um I didn't have to think about what's the market going to think of this I didn't like that wasn't a thought process it was like hey let's what does the what does the board think what does the exact team think can we make the numbers work do is this going to be a creative to us and then we just go um yeah it's we've got a lot of public company experience around the table at entrata and all those with that experience are like you yeah you don't want to rush into being fun yeah yeah Why is Utah so great at this you have people on your board who have you know gone through some interesting things what do you think um in terms of Utah and the growth I mean you've been a part of so many interesting um fast-growing companies and now like this monster company in andrata but even with like Podium being there for as long as you were in your own startups that that you did before that with Allegiance and then becoming into Merit CX and all of that type of stuff um how do you why do you think Utah is this way like why do you think we're so good at this I mean not to Pimp My Own uh uh podcast here but no this is what I wanted to go no I started that that fourth node podcast because I asked myself that same question when I started getting into this world 20 years ago it's clear like Utah punches way above its weight classic we're right there with Austin and even Chicago Atlanta like you could even argue New York you know in some areas and we really shouldn't be like we don't even have an NFL team we can't get Major League Baseball here without like a lot of work it's it shouldn't really be the case and I um I've done when I got into Tech I was going to be a doctor my whole life so I had no idea what that meant I didn't know anything about running a business um so I just became a sponge for learning how businesses are built um and I started to hear about these companies Novell and Word Perfect and alteris and Josh was just kind of getting going with omniture and um I just became fascinated with them and if you keep pulling on those strings you go all the way back back to 1969 when the University of Utah was selected as the fourth note of the internet yeah and David Evans and Ivan Sutherland kind of building a computer science department for the first time ever and then they went and recruited these amazing students from all over the country and these amazing professors from all over the country um and it was really like Stanford UCLA and Utah had these computer science that wasn't even a thing it was just part of the College of Engineering computer science wasn't a thing it's like now if you had an AI Department that's not really a thing it's part of computer science and you go look at it those those students who were there in the 60s and 70s at the U I mean Ed Campbell that started Pixar and John Warnock at Adobe and Alan Ashton that went on to start were perfect with Bruce Bastian and um just the uh Atari guy Nolen Bushnell like yeah a ton of them it's crazy they were all there at the same time they're all in their 20s and like Tom stockham Tom stockham's dad who invented digital audio was there and it's these Utah at the time though didn't know how to commercialize any of it sure so that's why a lot of those guys bounced they went to the Bay Area yeah and like you know we we had we talked to Tom about his dad and he said he's like none of my dad's companies really ever did anything because Utah wasn't ready to commercialize it yeah and no money here yeah and even when I started in 03 it was early like no money no free either you not really mostly the execs at omniture and even qualtrics they imported them from other parts of the country what I'm most excited about for Utah is that's not the case anymore yeah if you need a CFO who's done an IPO there are people in Utah if you need a CEO to replace a founder and there are people who've done that in Utah if there's a ton of money here you can go raise money from anywhere in the world um you can still pull people to move from other parts of the country but it's just not necessary like it was even five or ten years ago and that's what excites me I think it's like a flywheel of talent and you know that's one of my favorite things about entrata is and what I know I'll get the most joy out of The 4th Node Podcast is in 20 years and I go surfing LinkedIn or whatever the LinkedIn of the 20 years from now will be and look at like oh that you know the CFO this public company he was at Entrada and yeah cro here that was one of the Entrada people and um it's it's it's exciting for me to just see how much talent we're building and people can go repeat this and do it again and again by the way I highly recommend people listen to your podcast I love it I think it's such a genius idea in fact I've been talking for years like somebody needs to write a book somebody needs to get like these a lot of these are still alive right yes and like somebody really needs to get this recorded and down and the fact that you took on that that project which is no small project yes I I've looked at that thing starting up podcast is hard it takes so much time but it's fun it's been really rewarding um just seeing Tom stockham talk about his dad who his dad's been gone for 20 years yeah seeing the Novell early Founders talk about um Ray norda who's he passed away almost 20 years ago uh Bruce Bastian like his stories most people don't know Bruce's story yeah um he I mean he he built Word Perfect and from with no money they sold that thing for one point something billion dollars they never took any money on and it was that one in particular I was really proud of yeah he does not do a lot of interviews no it's hard to get him to stuff and most of what he's done he told us that he said most of what I do is is gay rights um type of interviews he's like no one's really ever asked me to tell my story with wordperfect and so it was just it was really fun you could tell it meant a lot to him it meant a lot to me to a lot like I'm not a reporter we're not trying to report anything absolutely it's just like you said a lot of these people are getting older and um like even Alan Ashton's kids they were thrilled that we captured their dad's story and um yeah we've got we've got some more in the hopper and we just we decided we're just gonna start with some of those early businesses and start to work our way forward and weave in like you know I I don't even think most people in Silicon slopes today under the age of 35 probably know what omniture did yeah for sure I don't think any of them probably even heard of alteras so no just probably not telling those stories and it's it's been fun we'll see how long it lasts I have a lot of respect for you um for how much content you put out I got a lot of respect for Bill Simmons starting a podcast because that guy produces dozens of hours every week I don't know how he does it's amazing just by the way he doesn't need to do it either right that's what's fascinating yeah like he sold the ringer for like 250 million which is great and he can Bounce from pop culture to sports to just it's movie It's amazing yeah that's interesting I haven't listened to Bill Simmons in a while now now I feel like I have to um have you talked to Josh yet uh about what on the podcast about we're scheduling Josh uh Greg Butterfield's on the on the docket Dave spafford uh megahertz I bet most people have never heard of megahertz um we interviewed the president of the U yesterday um Randall Randall um he's an incredible yeah incredible yeah president you are so lucky to have him there I think we have these incredible University presents here in the state of Utah but yeah and they're all amazing like President two minutes is like the greatest person ever and like we can go down the list the president Randall he's the right man for that particular University I didn't know this like I'm a BYU guy so I didn't really know him or his background and he said yeah I'm the first you grad to be the president of the U in 50 years and the first one from Utah I'm like that seems so dumb yeah seems like they should all be from Utah and have graduated from you like I know you're looking for a diversity of thought and everything and people who run universities but like I want someone who cares about Utah yeah um this is where they live this is their home so and he he started the masters of business creation program which is the first ever yeah right and I think that'll be like it could it has the potential to be like when Harvard started the NBA right yeah and that could be really cool another kind of feather in the cap for the University of Utah yeah we talked about that how yeah students just make good entrepreneurs for some reason we have nothing to do you don't have mortgages to pay for whatever reason I mean that's when I Going to Podium started my first business you look at a lot of the companies here they were started by people in or shortly after college back when I was there a lot of them I ended up graduating but most dropped out because the curriculum didn't match up with starting a business yes and that masters of business creation we discussed on the podcast which is let's build a curriculum for entrepreneurs like your assignment is not a stupid test it's running a board meeting yeah that is genius yeah um like it's I I didn't know they were doing that it's amazing I think that program is is incredible like you know I never want to go to school again but I was like that would be cool that'd be a fun one to do I like that that's pretty cool um what led you to Podium Podium uh so I had just sold Allegiance yeah I remember we had lunch and you were uh you just gotten out of that and uh you weren't sure what to do next and then I think it was like a couple months later you ended upon yeah I I remember taking both Gavin Christensen to lunch and Sid Chrome and hook and I was like hey guys I just stole my company I have to I'm gonna be here for a year after at Merit cxi had nothing to do I was the chief strategy officer for that year and I like no one reported to me it was weird so and I'd never experienced that so I think I hit you up like looking for like yeah I'd heard that you know it was any was that your company yeah yeah like I was like I was just trying to network with maybe some people who could help me hack some products together or whatever I had a few ideas I was toying with and then independently Gavin and Sid both mentioned like oh we just put this little seed round together for this company called rep drive and Sid's the one who who introduced me to the two Founders Eric and Dennis um in early 2015 just getting started they were still selling the product door-to-door at businesses alone like I don't even have sales team yet um I just fell in love with it like it was it was pretty close to what I had done at Allegiance like it was an industry I got really quickly and then like I said it was the first time I became like The Hired Gun operator guy yeah and they already had product Market fit and then I just got to go in there and just go build and hire the exec team and start you know raise money and um I I had the time in my life have we ever had a company girl that fast I guess Divi no no they didn't we went from one to a hundred in four years yeah the only company we knew that beat us was Slack wow yeah it's probably been beaten since um because that was that was true software ARR yeah yeah that is fast it was nuts it was nuts and so um why leave it like that that's that's an incredible you know again like this really cool ride you got there pretty early I mean it was still called the rep drive right like um they just start they started it just right down the street yeah at the bike shop um why leave it that's where I got that's the burnout point I would just yeah I was just trashed yeah just trashed I um I like didn't I didn't have answers anymore to like how to get myself back I remember talking to our the head of sales there my good friend Dan one day and I'm like I feel every day like the day before I did a 100 mile mountain bike race like my I just I have nothing and I couldn't figure it out and so I went into the Christmas break in 2019 like okay I'm just gonna have like two weeks I'm just gonna like sleep and get better and then I ended up getting like bronchitis and influenza and then bacterial colitis or something crazy I was in the hospital and I remember I was in the hospital like on January 2nd in the middle of the night with someone um getting over like a a drug addiction in the room next to me screaming at the top of their lungs at like 3 A.M and I was just like this is I'm gonna be like rich and dead and someone else is gonna be like spending my money and sleeping with my wife and sitting in my Jesse's I'm gonna be dead so the next day I called our partner at Excel and I'm like hey dude I'm out yeah like in not like in six months I'm out and flew back to Utah I was in California and told you know Eric and Dennis and get team and everything and it was hard yeah to leave that business the way I did it was very abrupt yeah I felt a lot of guilt um for a long time um it took me it took me a while to get over how abruptly I left that I did I felt like I didn't do it on my own terms yeah I didn't leave um leave it in a place where everything I was doing could easily be divvied up and taken care of right um but you know you live and learn and well in the end you did what was best I mean what choice do you have yeah right like at some point when I was in the hospital for my heart thing I was like f everything I'm not doing anything ever again everything make a t-shirt out of that app everything this is pointless what am I doing all this for yeah that's interesting that that you went through that experience is your health okay now yeah I'm good um I've got like a few things I figured out you know I got diagnosed with Celiac a few years ago so like Diet I've kind of gotten dialed in knowing how I've got a little my youngest son also has that so he was pumped when he found out that I was going to be gluten-free with him um yeah I do a better job of balancing it um you know it's it's like a necessary part of me having a job like I remember when I got my when I hired my EA I'm like your job's to make sure I don't quit which involves my health and making sure I'm like being a good dad and all that kind of stuff like but that was like how I kind of positioned the job is I've got to be healthy and I've got to like stay on top of my family stuff or yeah I know I'll have another outcome where like just one day I'm just gonna leave and I can't like go through that mentally again yeah what do you want your legacy to be oh gosh have you thought about that I just want people to I've got a lot of um care inside my heart um for people yeah and there's times I worry that that gets misread or um people don't like they put me in a box because of my title of like oh just another one of those like annoying Tech CEOs um I just want people to like if you know if I got hit by a bus I just want people to say he was just a good guy that was there for people yeah like that's honestly all I would ever want my legacy What does Utah look a decade from now to be um I don't need like fame or things named after me or any of that I just want to have a lot of friends that were if they just say Adam is always there for me that's all I could ever hope for well you've got that my friend I can tell you that I don't know anyone who who doesn't say that exact thing about you um what do you think Utah looks like 10 20 years from now um it's a good question I think we're going to look more diverse in the types of companies we start to build um when we acquired that business I actually quoted you in my LinkedIn thing in the last interview we did a few years ago I you asked me what the next step was for Utah and I said we need to most of our companies we we build and they get sold to a platform outside of Utah and we know we now need to start building platforms and with qualtrics spinning out of sap I think we've got platform yeah I think katrata is going to be a platform I think with pluralsight with Vista behind them I think they can they can become a platform that you know lasts for decades um we know how to build SAS platforms I'd love to see us start building other kind of businesses too um you know we've got just a lot of Biotech energy like what my buddy Nate walking Shaw's building um you know renewable energy out of Utah like there's there's gonna be more businesses than just like we're really good at B2B SAS really good at it maybe as good as anywhere in the world yeah we know how to sell it we know how to build it like we're really really good at that um and I'm not the one to lead us there like I only know how to do B2B SAS so but luckily we have smart and you know Brave entrepreneurs you know a guy like Nate he's a tinkerer he's an inventor you know he's uh he was at that company is so cool it is cool it's great like Work from home or in person? using a 10 000 pound piece of metal to spin around really fast to create energy and like I don't I I don't know how you figure that out I don't know but it's cool yeah that that actually is incredible yeah we need to build like Legacy businesses that are here for General like generational companies right I think that's what you and I talked about it's like how do you build generational companies yeah what has your experience been post covid and you know the big debate around like should you do hybrid work work from home in office you have this beautiful office up on the top of the hill there in Lehigh what is your experience yeah well I know it's shocking but people just seem to make this such an extreme debate which is just so annoying like everybody went all remote yeah all back in the office I just felt the whole time like it depends on the job there's some jobs you like take like a an outbound sales rep that's just generating calls the most important part of that of success for that job is uh their initial ramp up which you can't do remote you have to be like in this kind of Bullpen environment hearing other people make dials being able to ask your neighbor like what works what doesn't work being able to like practice um that has to be in the office yeah it can't be remote um there's uh and there's other jobs like we have a bunch of jobs that are totally fine being done from home we can track productivity easily remotely Engineers uh we were a little fortunate at Entrada because the company kind of had been remote from the beginning because a lot of our engineering efforts out of Pune India and our sales team was all over the place their their field reps so we kind of knew how to do it but as we've you know discussed internally we're we're number one we're too big to like have any edicts of you have to be in the office X number of days a week so we've just kind of rolled it out by department and there's some teams that they're in the office every day yeah there's some teams that have decided like two days in the office is fine and then we have some teams that are completely hybrid remote because um we know how to uh manage remote yeah um and I think it's it's important to at least have some flexibility in how you design that strategy and going one way or the other like there's a lot of data you know I talked about this with Sid Tetro about a month ago there's a lot of data showing how many more women are entering and being successful in the workforce because of hybrid and remote work yeah and if you turn that off you turn that talent pool away too so you got to know you're turning that entire talent pool off yeah How will AI disrupt Entrata um and that's important to us to keep that going so um there's just it's it's you know you just on LinkedIn Twitter Twitter everybody just runs to one side of the room so quickly and for me I I it's the answer just it depends yeah and especially depends on the role and how good you are at managing oh for sure what about AI how is that going to disrupt you guys um I don't think it'll disrupt us but it's going to accelerate us um yeah so you think of how people find apartments it's very similar to Google like you start out with a search online you're like looking at a bunch of different choices you have to go make a bunch of phone calls or send in emails does it do allow pets do you have this do you have that anything like that that has lots of question and answer return is perfect for AI yeah and so we've already had like uh for the last few years we've had an AI technology that helps deflect phone calls coming into our customers um they can answer a lot of these questions in an automated way but I see a future five or ten years where like I look at my 20 year old he pays for gpt4 just for person search because it's so much better than Google for him and so for him I think in five years he's not going to apartments.com or any of these places anymore to find an apartment he is writing into his GPT for prompt I need a two-bedroom place in Salt Lake City that allows a dog within a mile of the University of Utah yeah and there they are and then he asks automated questions what about this what about this what about this and he's it's done so for us it's pretty exciting because we we have we have a real big opportunity there um you know we have 14 million residents Advice for leaders that live in our units we have a huge audience trying to interact with our customers at the property managers which are small staffs um dispersed all over the place anything we can do to automate make their jobs easier is has a huge impact yeah finally I I see you as like this great leader and I don't know anyone who would disagree with that I wonder if you have any advice for um I mean this is a tough time to be running a company right now right AI disruption the interest rates going up like I mean there's a million things you could point to it's like it's kind of weird time you have to some some companies have to do layoffs some companies have to do the opposite of that right like what advice do you have for leaders who are in your shoes but in you know different companies and like kind of handle this and to be a leader during all of this gosh it's hard um what I wish I could tell them all is go have a midlife crisis and move to San Clemente for a couple of years because honestly that's that's what it took for me to go figure myself out I would say you remember that in A Star is Born there's a scene where Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga they're on the roof and she's about to go on stage and they're looking at a billboard with her picture on it and Bradley Cooper like that raspy deep voice like you better dig deep down into your soul and you better believe what you say that was a good impression of it do you like that yeah that's good or your audience will know yeah that's probably my main piece of advice to leaders is like whatever you believe deep down inside your soul whoever you are is going to come out yeah employees people investors they're everybody's smart now everybody sees through the bull crap everybody sees through the cliches you can't like um buy Time by just spinning things a certain way to try and get yourself through difficult situations it just takes honesty authenticity knowing what you're good at and not knowing what you're not good at and you have to just have like really really good people around you and if you can't like if I saw this um I I can't remember who said this last couple of weeks it was a sports situation but it was if if people won't follow you you're not a leader you might have a title that makes you think that but if people aren't going to follow you like I'm sorry there's there's nothing you can do about it um so I don't know if that's makes sense or helpful but that's kind of how I look at leadership is you've got to mean what you say you've got to like back it up and that's why for me like the the second I can't give it anymore I'll have you know I'll have to go take another break in San Clemente yeah because people figure it out like you can't fake it yeah for sure Adam thanks so much for coming on thanks for the invite man seriously and thanks for everything you've done and uh you've got a monster on your hands man just keep just keep writing that thing appreciate it bro okay thanks [Music]