Data Hurdles

Chris: Welcome to another Data Hurdles. I'm Chris Detzel and I'm Michael Burke. How you doing, Chris? And I'm good. It's warm here in Dallas, Texas. And it's nice outside. It's really cool. By the way, I'm going to go get to see you here in another week or so, Mike, I'll be in Boston.
Chris: I'll be at speaking at a conference, but then you and I are going to run the 5k Boston. Absolutely. My wife is running the Boston marathon, et cetera. So I'm excited.
Mike: Yeah, the BAA 5K, that's gonna be a good one. I can't wait. Yeah, me too. So today we're excited to have Colin Graves from North Labs on the call.
Mike: Hi Colin, how are
Collin: you? Guys, pleasure to be here. Jealous of any sort of Boston running event. That'll be awesome. And Colin, where are you based out of? Sunny, sunnier, some of the time Scottsdale, Arizona. So we are enjoying the last couple of months here of normal temperatures before we enter hell's gates.
Mike: Yep. [00:01:00] Absolutely. We go up to Scottsdale. We used to, my previous company where Detzel is right now, we used to go up there for our offsite. It was always a fun place.
Collin: I was just there three weeks ago or four, and I
Chris: loved it. It was awesome.
Collin: Yeah.
Mike: Walk outside and that heat just hits you like a train. It's amazing.
Mike: How
Collin: strong is it? It's moving from Minneapolis, it is quite the change of extremes. So we're slowly getting accustomed, but there's, at the end of the day, there's not much you can do except seek air conditioning and plenty of shade. Try not to melt.
Mike: Absolutely. Collin, you are the current CEO and founder of Northlabs.
Mike: Can you just give us a little bit of background on how you got into the data space? And maybe summarize with what is Northlabs for our audience today?
Collin: Sure. Yeah. I have a weird roundabout story that I'm happy to get into, but I've been in the cloud computing space for 17 years. I got my start with Amazon web services back in [00:02:00] 2007.
Collin: As you can imagine back then cloud was not a household name like it is today. There were two AWS services. Now, obviously there are well over 200 and I learned about it from a news article. My father sent me while I was walking the flight line of Ellsworth Air Force Base in the frigid cold. Amazing.
Collin: And if you knew my dad, you'd find that ironic because my dad is a, He's a laggard in the technology space. This is a guy who still likes to navigate with a King's Atlas, just got his smartphone not too long ago. So the fact that he serendipitously sent me this article I remember vividly reading it as I was walking to a plane to go turn some wrenches on the B1.
Collin: And I thought to myself, this is really cool. This is something I need to learn more about. And here we are all these years later. It was It was quite the moment in time. It's [00:03:00] all I know at this point. So thankfully I hitched my cart to a pretty fast horse. That's great. Yeah. And as far as Morphlabs, I started my career doing a lot more foundational cloud it work.
Collin: We helped a lot of organizations get to the cloud, run their DevOps, do a lot of application modernization and stuff like that, and, Right around 2017, I had sold a previous company, signed my life away with a non compete and I started North Labs in 2016. I knew that data was the next quest for me. I find that it's a lot more tangible and it's a lot more interesting for business leaders to talk about because there's just more ROI attached to it.
Collin: And so I started North Labs to be an all in AWS data and analytics partner. And so today we help mostly industrial organizations or organizations with supply chains, whether that's CPG and [00:04:00] retail oil and gas, anything in between helps set that data and AI strategy that can pragmatically serve their business needs, as opposed to just kicking the tires on the latest and greatest topic of the day, right?
Collin: So we take a very methodical approach to smart. Data and AI adoption. And that's where I think our reputation lies today.
Mike: Oh, that's excellent. That's really great. And I'm sorry, I cut out there for a minute. I think my internet's a little bit choppy today, so apologies. When we look at North labs today and I was on your website, it looks like pretty interesting stuff.
Mike: I love that you have, you're a veteran. It sounds like you really are solving some difficult problems in the space that nobody else is really touching on North labs. I was on your website earlier and it seems like you guys solve a ton of really interesting problems, right? I love that you're veteran owned.
Mike: When you were founding this company, how did you identify the problems that [00:05:00] needed to be solved in the cloud space? And really, who is that target customer that you're going after today?
Collin: Yeah, I think North Lab started originally, and I'm going to be fully transparent with you guys, I didn't know I was going to get back into the cloud space.
Collin: For the first six months of its life, North labs was going to be a startup incubator, right? So I had started this cloud company before and sold it. And the two years of my non compete time leading up to starting North labs, I was doing a lot of consulting in the cloud space, but for high growth tech companies on the West coast some household names.
Collin: I'm going to, I'm going to refrain from saying them, but. Video games and some that do transportation that you're wrong with that. I was really advising them on how to take advantage of the cloud. So when I started North labs, I thought, yeah, maybe I'll take my product lessons I've learned and help these startups really scale [00:06:00] up.
Collin: That didn't last too long. And I quickly realized like, Hey, where the cloud is today, relative to the stone ages, when I got started with it, it really evolved into something truly special. And I would say that my, my network helped me form where we were going to go. I still had a ton of contacts and colleagues in the space.
Collin: So I sat them all down and said, what are you seeing? What are customers focusing on? I went to my AWS leadership folks and I said what's the next frontier? And overwhelmingly the answer was customers, whether fully cloud enabled these days or not, are in a position where they really need to understand how to leverage the data being produced by their systems to drive more efficient insights.
Collin: Make better decisions and create ROI with that, that digital data footprint that's being churned out from all of these systems that they have. So that was a pretty [00:07:00] organic shift for me. I felt a lot more at home than starting a startup incubator. And here we are now, six, seven years later. And I think we've cemented ourselves reputationally, at least as one of the top AWS partners in the world.
Mike: That's amazing. That's really cool. And I noticed on your website too, you had some stuff about comparing yourself to Snowflake, a fraction of the cost way faster. I love this. As somebody who was always skeptical of the Snowflake model, to be honest, and embraced more of the AWS model, how does that work today?
Mike: How do how do you compete against some of these monstrosity size companies? And how does the business model work compared to, your typical all ingest, which is how Snowflake, at least when I left that business was working, you put all your data in and it's really hard to get it out and it costs you a ton of money, but they support all the scaling and operations.
Collin: Yeah. And to be [00:08:00] frank, we still do quite a bit of work with Snowflake, right? We're a services oriented company. So we use best of breed tools to build these systems. And Snowflake and AWS have formed a bit of a healthy competition, right? They have their better together campaign. The majority of Snowflake workloads run on AWS.
Collin: But my whole take on the situation was if Snowflake is the sun in our solar system, it's the, it's a bright shining star, right? Everyone likes to talk about it. AWS is the Milky Way, man. Yeah, , like all roads lead to A-W-S-A-W-S is the mothership. And so for us, there was a moment in time where we said, okay, do we put all of our eggs into the snowflake basket and just be that snowflake partner and really go as deep as possible there?
Collin: Or do we work in support of snowflake in instances where it makes sense, but really [00:09:00] continue to double down and triple down on our alliance relationship with Amazon? And to me, the answer was clear. Most of the time in our space, you could have a really sharp snowflake services company that doesn't have all of the jazz from the AWS side.
Collin: We decided it was more pragmatic for us to flip the script. We want to be seen as the unequivocal AWS experts who also have snowflake chops. That served us well. And the way our model works is we're a professional services and managed services organization. Most of the groups we target, which is mainly the mid market, don't have extensive IT and data and AI.
Collin: Teams internally, right? And so our whole shtick is to act as an extension of their team, help them see through that strategy, and then serve as either the lone wolf, building out these capabilities for them, [00:10:00] or working in conjunction with their internal personnel and just helping them stay ahead of the curve and stay clear of any icebergs.
Collin: It's
Mike: so interesting and, coming from large enterprise, primarily in my career and fairly recently, we're going on about a year in the startup space. It is amazing the challenges and how vaguely different they are. They're starkly different from, when you build something, you are the ops team, right?
Mike: You are the customer care. You are the support. And you better design something that's not going to suck too much of your time because you've got to continue to innovate, right? And you have to focus on creating new features rapidly. To me, it's an area that I don't know if anybody's really cracked that nut for the smaller companies.
Mike: I think medium size, we're there just about right. We have a lot more managed services and a lot more solutions where you trade on cost versus. Speed to market, but for the startups, it hasn't been until very [00:11:00] recently that I've started to see real products emerge out of the woodwork that can help us move faster, take away a lot more of that dev ops burden.
Mike: And scale right at that speed.
Collin: Exactly right. And that's where, I think and I'm sure you guys can relate to this, but so many tools that are being brought to market today, Their marketing message would have you believe that they are the panacea for all of your organization's issues, right?
Collin: If you just entrust us with everything, you'll have no more pain. And we know that's not the case, right? Tool sprawl is worse than it's ever been. There are half baked implementations of different technologies and platforms all over an average organization. The reason why I think our sort of AWS first approach works so well is because AWS recognizes that they are the snap on tools of the equation.
Collin: This is not entrust us on this one product to [00:12:00] solve all of your problems. Their philosophy is we're going to make the best darn wrenches, the best darn hammers you could ever imagine, And we're going to let you build the Ferrari or the F1 car. And so for us. As a result of that, many of our implementations, many of our managed services can be fully automated because that portfolio of tools communicate with each other bi directionally.
Collin: They can be automated in terms of how you stand them up and how you run them. And at the end of the day, I believe as the most biased person in the conversation, that brings far greater future proofing and far better economies of scale. To organizations of any size, let alone just a huge enterprise, right?
Collin: It gives you the ability to start small, really maximize your investment and then expand from there. And that's where I think that's where I think this landscape is going to continue to go. We can't possibly [00:13:00] continue to head in the direction of just a Just add another tool to the mix. Couldn't agree more.
Collin: The average tooling count has gone from something like 80 to 160 in the last eight years. It's crazy. An average organization. Are we good? We're what's the magic number? 240, right? It doesn't make any sense to me. I think the answer will continue to be, let's pull back and unify as much as we can somewhere that can allow us that future proofing and that extensibility we ultimately need.
Collin: Colin,
Mike: I couldn't agree more. And thank you for that feedback. This was really helpful. Can you tell us a little bit more about your role as a leader? Sure. And, I'd really like to understand also your time in the services and thank you for your service, by the way, and how that's really helped you become the leader that you are today and guide large teams and small teams through these processes and transformations, really, as they start to make [00:14:00] these steps towards.
Mike: Bigger and more robust automations in their ecosystem.
Collin: Yeah. The latter I can answer with one point in terms of how we handle it with customers. I think I've got a few additional points for how I run things as a leader of North labs for customers. The biggest thing that's lacking in my world is not technical prowess, right?
Collin: There are a lot of really smart people. In the industry who can be entrusted to build solutions. I think that the game changer for North labs in terms of how we relate to our customers. Is excellence in communication. How many times have you brought a vendor in, right? And you pay them a lot of money and you entrust them with your baby, right?
Collin: Your roadmap and communication ends up waning early on in the conversation. There isn't room for change management. There isn't room for training. [00:15:00] There's no opportunity to say, Hey Mike, let us teach you how to ride this bike as it currently sits in its bicycle form before it turns into that F1 car you ordered, because if you've never driven a car and I hand you keys to an F1 car, you will crash it.
Collin: And that's really become an issue in my space. And so for us, it's just about setting those standards of excellence, which excellence in all we do was a core principle of the air force that I really took to heart. And that's where I think we solve that now in terms of leadership in an organization.
Collin: And of course I have my time in the military. I have my continued ed, from various. Ivy league level institutions, and really they're teaching what the military already instills in everyone. There's three core principles. The first is struggling together matters, right? Business owners love to struggle in a vacuum [00:16:00] and the best thing you can do.
Collin: And what you learn in the military is that no matter how hard the mission is, no matter how hot it is out, no matter how many rounds are flying at your head, You're not alone and the ability to lean on the person next to you, even if you're the most elite of practitioner matters. I flew for a living with the most impressive people.
Collin: The military has to offer Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Marsok, Green Beret, pararescue. These are the top of the top. Army Rangers. Don't want to forget that one because I'll hear about it. These are the absolute highest caliber people that the military has to offer. And they all understand very well, it's not about me.
Collin: I'm a small cog of a much larger wheel. And I know that if I embrace the suck, and help those around me get through the suck, we're gonna get through it. [00:17:00] If I act as a lone wolf, and abandon the mission plan, we're and decide to do something, extraordinary on my own and be a superstar, it might end up, I might end up becoming a statistic in the campaign.
Collin: So that's huge. The second is delegating, right? The reason why the military, the department of defense is considered something like the 35th largest world economy, yet can move so fast. in its operations is because the military has maximized its ability to delegate as far down the totem pole as possible, right?
Collin: So decisions are made at the top for sure, only in terms of general trajectory in terms of operational, tactics in terms of, Hey, you need to figure out how to solve for this. That gets delegated downward. In fact, all the way through to, [00:18:00] the enlisted ranks where I was. It's not just officers making those calls.
Collin: I had a lot of decision making power toward the later stages of my military career, where I was influencing an entire aircraft or an entire fleet of aircrafts operations in the former Soviet Union and in Africa, right? So getting really good at delegating. And how does this relate to business owners?
Collin: You hire the smartest people you possibly can, right? We insist so much on CVs and resumes and certifications and real world experience, yet have a tendency to stick people in boxes and say, Chris, if you get out of that box, you're going to get slapped on the rest. And I'm going to force you back in that box.
Collin: My philosophy is and always has been hire the smartest people and get the hell out of their way. The only time you should get in their way, Is when you need to jump on a grenade for them, right? Because these [00:19:00] people are smart enough to make decisions that are better than your ability to make decisions.
Collin: Yeah,
Chris: there's a book called, and I'm sure everybody knows about it, but called Good to Great, and, it talks a lot about, Wells Fargo in this instance, hires back in the day, the best people might not have a position for them specifically, but, if you just hire really good people and you know that they're going to do well, we'll find a spot for you and, like you said, Micromanaging really isn't, the best way to manage in my opinion, but yeah, no, it's a very good point.
Chris: I like
Collin: that. Yeah, I think the biggest thing is just as long as everyone understands the mission and the why behind the mission, that gives them enough to do their job and complete their part of the mission. Where I have fallen down in the past is getting shiny object syndrome and going, Ooh, this would be a departure from the mission, but it sure is shiny.
Collin: Everybody does. And you run the risk of people going, okay, but what's our why now? Because this [00:20:00] fundamentally changes our why. And that's an issue. And the third piece I'll say is being gentle, but having fangs, right? In the military, when you serve with people of the caliber that I did, these are soft spoken, often God fearing Folks who seems so, they're not aggressive on the outside.
Collin: They're gentle giants. They're kind, they're passionate. They're good at forming relationships until the fangs need to come out. And that, for me, I think in leadership is really important. If you rule with an iron fist, you will lose people and people will become jaded to your mission and jaded to you as a leader.
Collin: But if you can be compassionate. And show people support in their role and in their growth and reserve those fangs for when you need to have them come out not necessarily for your employees. But to help your employees get through [00:21:00] sticky customer situations, for example that's a really important sort of thing to have in the hopper.
Collin: Yeah,
Mike: absolutely. And I feel like with everything, it's a balance, right? You have to drive the vision and the mission forward. And in doing so it's, I always, I'm aligned with you. It's more to me about inspiration and pushing forward that vision of where we're getting to and having everybody excited and passionate about what we're Achieving that goal than it is about, driving the whip.
Mike: And I know there's all different types out there, everybody has their own leadership style, but it is so interesting to see how different companies form and the culture of that orientation forms. And it really, success can be in any fashion, but the culture can be completely different, irrelevant of success based off of those fundamental values.
Mike: Exactly. Looks like you guys are, I was just doing a little bit [00:22:00] more research on LinkedIn, a relatively small company. I said it was like around 20 or 30 people. Is that right?
Collin: Yeah, like into the mid thirties. Yep. Yep. And with
Mike: that kind of management, and it looks like you offer a lot of support, you're doing a lot with data, you're helping these customers grow.
Mike: Yep. How do you guys maintain the customer service aspect of the business, right? Because, like any company, I feel like that can be such a burden sometimes. Things can go wrong, you can get overloaded. How do you make it work?
Collin: That's a great question. I think the biggest thing I've learned over the years is to be really hyper focused on the right fit.
Collin: From a customer standpoint, right? We say no to a lot of projects. And some people will listen to this and go, are you crazy? You could be hitting growth numbers. But I remain steadfast in growth has to come in a very deliberate [00:23:00] manner. If you allow growth to happen indeliberately, meaning you just say yes to everything, that's not sustainable.
Collin: And eventually something has to give. And typically that's going to be your excellence standard. It's going to be your culture standard. Both things of which I want to keep ironclad in our organization. So, and then the other thing is. setting standards in terms of how you deliver, right? I love the fact that of my 35 employees how much, average revenue per head we carry per employee, because we have standard operating procedures for every single thing we do.
Collin: This is not a culture of, Oh, this organization wants things. Just this slight tweak from how we usually build things. Can we accommodate it? Our space with a relatively immature buyer, the [00:24:00] opportunity is there for us to say, here's our standard and why our standard is successful. And if you agree to our standard, you can have realized value much faster and you're going to have that future proofing and that extensibility.
Collin: That you're hoping for but you need to follow our lead because we're the folks you brought in to build the thing And we've done this more than a thousand times In the companies, it's like being
Chris: Prescriptive that's exactly
Collin: it doctor.
Chris: Here's a description. That's what you need to do Yeah,
Collin: yeah, if you come at it from the opinion of hey chris I'm the creepy guy on the corner with the trench coat selling off market cigarettes.
Collin: What brand do you want? Then you become an order taker. And that's one way to, that's one way to do things. Hey, we want this built exactly this way because someone on our team who may not be here in three years thinks it's the best possible route forward. And we generally end up [00:25:00] combating that a bit and going, okay, compare what you're saying to this standard and tell us where your approach.
Collin: is superior for your organization's use case. And sometimes you don't win that battle and that's okay. But for those who do agree, you end up having a long tenured, very successful relationship. With organizations who are willing to preach your name to anyone who will listen and that becomes a growth mechanism, a deliberate growth mechanism in and of itself quick
Chris: question.
Chris: To go back is 1 of the things that you mentioned is sometimes we turn down business or, Is it, you turn down business because, your solution is not a fit for a certain industry or is there a specific, because you mentioned that there's three or four industries that you are really good fit for.
Chris: So I, can you give an example of why you would turn something down? I was just very
Collin: curious. Sure. The biggest one is. Hey, we want to [00:26:00] do this thing, but we must use this technology that you don't have any experience in. We see that all of the time, right? Chris, have you acquired the technology yet?
Collin: No, but we know we want to use it. Explain to me, right? Let's go through the pros and cons of why this solution is seemingly superior than an alternate route. I just really like it. I get along with the sales guy. I've enjoyed kicking the tires on it. Okay. Yeah. That's like saying that you really enjoy a specific brand of door when you're building a house and you're going to determine how to architect the house based off of the door you want.
Collin: That's a way to do it. It's just not the way that we, subscribe to. The other thing would just be. Hey, we don't really need a team to come in and serve as our strategic partner in this. We just need to fill some butts and seats. That's a common one too. More of a staff og relationship, right?
Collin: We just need a couple of really smart AWS engineers, [00:27:00] principal level, 10 plus years experience, most of them with PhDs in what they do, to sit in on this and stroke the keys, right? Do the Stevie Wonder. And for me that, that doesn't work because there isn't any inherent scalability there, there's no ability to enrich the internal economies of thought that occur because you're not leading that strategic discussion.
Collin: So those are the two varieties. Where we'll say, Hey, it's just not going to work. Thankfully, I've been in this space a long time. We've got a little black book of those partners. We really deeply trust who do equally good work to us. Who will accommodate that sort of work?
Chris: So I have another question and it's thinking around you guys use aws solely and 100 and I really love that, but as you grow and look at the future do you see you guys using like the the googles or azure things like that, or is [00:28:00] it just hey look I don't even think we're going to go that route because when I think of You Even some of the companies that you work with oil and gas, or, when you think of these older school companies, a lot of them use Azure, because they are Microsoft shop only.
Chris: You probably run into that a lot with some of your kind of, so I'm just wondering if that's a potential possibility or you don't want to say, I don't know, just
Collin: Curious, I'll put it this way. If an organization is already using a platform like Azure.
Collin: Yeah. We can come in and say, and they say, I don't care if you bolt AWS on next to it. We're a multi cloud company anyway. Then there's a possibility in instances where customers say we're Azure or die. I have it tattooed on my neck. This is hell or high water. We're using only Azure.
Collin: Probably not a good fit. And that's a good way for us to understand, right? This is not going to fit into our standard operating procedures. Even though the clouds have parity at the server and [00:29:00] database and networking level, we just we can't offer you the same level of excellence that we could in the AWS cloud because we've delivered a thousand solutions in AWS and a small fraction of that in Azure.
Collin: Now, for your example, specifically, Most oil and gas companies say, Hey, we're a Microsoft shop in terms of we use, 365 and we have Microsoft databases. Then the conversation turns to, do you know which cloud provider, AWS or Azure runs more Microsoft workloads than the other? And they say Azure, obviously.
Collin: And the answer is AWS, right? And we are a Microsoft workload partner for AWS. And so for a few years in the past, we had the highest win rate in those competitive situations, bringing Microsoft oriented companies over to AWS. Yeah. Again, not [00:30:00] everyone's going to go for that and that's okay. Because if I know anything, is that we are a tiny speck in the total addressable market of AWS.
Collin: And I don't think we're going to run out of cannon fodder anytime soon. Probably not.
Mike: Colin, this was really great. Thank you for joining us today. Chris, I don't know if you had anything else you wanted to wrap up with or any final questions.
Chris: One final question because I'm curious. When you look at three to five years out.
Chris: Where is Northlabs, how do you see yourself, what kinds of things are you doing with AI, ML, I know it's a big question, but, what are you thinking, what are you trying to accomplish here at the end of the day, three to five years out?
Collin: That's a great question.
Collin: Today the focus is on, right? Obviously the conversation is around data and AI strategy. What's this gen AI thing? It seems so cool. Our philosophy since I started my first company was, let's do this stuff pragmatically, right? You [00:31:00] remember in 2010, 2012, when every organization in the world was saying to their shareholders, we're just going to move everything to the cloud tomorrow.
Collin: It doesn't matter. That didn't last very long. People said to themselves this was crazy. We ought to have been more selective about how we do this. And that's really where we're helping shape up organizations today. We want to use Gen AI. Cool. I'm, we are not going to come in and say, we're going to have you Gen AI all of the things, right?
Collin: Instead, it's much more critical if you use that, the home building analogy, right? We want to pour that concrete and lay that rebar so you can build a second story on top. So you can build a third story. But if you're just fixated on that game room upstairs, and you're going to build your house on sod, right?
Collin: You'll never get the chance to actually recognize the utility of that game room upstairs. So we take a very holistic approach in terms of or the foundation really unify our analytics capabilities, [00:32:00] get things humming along from a programmatic standpoint. If we want to add the cherry of GenAI on top, fantastic, but we're going to do so in a way with a use case that we know could drive measurable ROI for our customers.
Collin: Five years from now I want Northlabs to be the non GSI, right? I any group that isn't named Accenture, Deloitte, or, McKinsey Cognizant, right? God bless them for being large and in charge. I want North Labs to be the partner that sort of sits in that non GSI category as it relates to data and AI for AWS customers and the surrounding ecosystem.
Collin: That's the mission. And we're slowly chipping away at it. Love
Chris: it. And it's big and lofty, but you have to be, you have to think big to be able to hit those goals and make it happen. Absolutely right. Colin, thank you so much, for coming on to data hurdles and We'll get this published out as soon as possible.
Chris: But thank you for our listeners for coming in I'm chris detzel
Mike: and i'm [00:33:00] michael burke and don't forget to rate and review us. Yeah, that's a good one.
Chris: Take care colin
Collin: Thanks y'all