What The Funk?

0:00 What the fuck is back? We've got Dave Levitt today. Got a beautiful sunny day here end of May. I'm looking forward to taking a little bit of time off heading with the family to Delaware. Tomorrow,

0:12 see my wife's out of the family, get a little beach time, relax a little bit, lots of travel. I mentioned on the last podcast that I did was in Europe. So spent time in London and Paris, which

0:23 was fantastic. And then last week spent time in the London and Paris to the United States, Oklahoma City and Dallas. So, you know, very, very complimentary in terms of rich history, kind of.

0:37 But super happy and excited to have Dave Levitt. Dave, we've never actually met in person before, but I've been tangentially aware of you and your accomplishments in the oil and gas tech arena.

0:50 Kurt Coburn referred to you as a legend, Levitt the legend. So had to have you on the podcast And of course, kindred spirits with. me, I've been in oil and gas tech sales, marketing, all that

1:01 stuff for about 16 and a half years. You've been in it for a minute and I really just kind of want to get to know you, let the audience get to know you, talk about some of your past, and I'll just

1:12 sort of start it off, Dave, with the question I ask everybody, who are you? Who is Dave Leavitt? Well, curious people want to know, apparently What

1:23 a tremendous amount to say, necessarily, I grew up in New England, Western Massachusetts, in a pre-revolutionary war town, a town that still has homes that was settled in the 1600s that have

1:40 tunnels out to the Connecticut River with dungeons from this revolutionary war. Paul Revere bells in the churches, that kind of old New England town Yeah. It's called Long Meadow, went to Syracuse

1:55 University to for newspaper journalism. Sadly, this was in the pre-ESPN era. I was a sports writer. Nice. Was already in several newspapers during high school.

2:13 And Syracuse was the obvious choice for me. Of course. Unfortunately, upon graduation, I learned that the market space for journalism depended on people's

2:29 commitment to being philanthropic. I got offered a job at The New York Times and they offered me8, 300. And I thought that was for the year. I mean, for the summer. And they told me it was for

2:43 the year and I just laughed.

2:47 And they said, Son, they used to hate when they did that There's a line out there a mile long who will do this job for free.

2:58 And I said, well, that may be the case, but it is now one person shorter because I just don't have that intrinsic reward viewpoint on needing to express myself on print for such a charitable amount

3:18 of money.

3:20 So I didn't take the job. I decided to go on to grad school for an MBA at George Washington in Washington, DC.

3:30 And my advisor there was on the board of directors of IBM. When I told him I wanted to get into sports management and at

3:41 the time, all the teams were family owned. And he said, are you intending to marry the owner's daughter? And I said, not that I know of. And he says, well, then you'll be selling season ticket

3:53 your whole life Is

3:56 that what you want to do? He said, Go into technology, it's about the boom. This was in '78, '79, '80, that kind of time frame. And I think that's the area you should go into. And

4:16 he said, You're a real renegade, you've got some talent, but you need discipline. So let me hook you up with IBMand it'll teach

4:24 you some discipline So ultimately, I go on an interview for sales. And

4:33 at the time, there was no digital marketing. So marketing meant sales from a work standpoint, unless you wanted to be some staff marketing person, which was not my intention. They teach an MBA

4:48 school for marketing to be vice president of marketing. You call a product on Gammel and guess what you find out? already have one. And they don't need a 25-year-old one taking that person's place.

5:02 So they send you into sales until you can't understand marketing until you've been in the marketplace. So I go in the interview with IBM and I come back and I said, Professor, I may need that kind

5:17 of discipline, but I'm not mature enough to accept it. Where do people who flunk out of IBM go? And at the time they were going to that super renegade company Exxon, that's a joke, but they had

5:34 an ill-fated office systems group, they had assembled a series of technology companies combine them into what they called Exxon office systems to take on IBM and ATT

5:50 So it was all X IBM people who didn't like the superstructure. of IBM. So it was a great experience. But one, I outgrew fairly quickly. And so I had a friend who worked for the World Wrestling

6:09 Federation.

6:12 And they were looking for someone to write a magazine for them and organize that and bring it in house, work for Vince McMahon. And I laughed. I thought it was silly. But one great thing about

6:28 writing for a wrestling magazine, you can decide in June what happens in December. Yeah, exactly. You know, they were still flirting with the notion of is it entertainment or is it sports? And

6:43 so they weren't really ready to commit to its entertainment. So they're a very secretive company. And even And still, they have a unlisted. phone number. What multi-billion dollar company has an

6:58 unlisted phone number? I mean, it's, I mean, Vince is an interesting character to say the least.

7:07 But that was short lived, came back to Texas, and got back in technology. And ultimately,

7:16 you know, did that for 40 plus years. Now split between direct sales for companies such as Seaball and Data Logics and SAP, and

7:30 then reinvented myself. When my daughter went off to college, I decided I wasn't done parenting. So I went into sales leadership and spent the last 15 years or so in sales leadership, first

7:46 creating a business unit for oil and gas for salesforcecom. And

7:51 then ultimately joining a startup. called Liquid Frameworks where we grew it almost 60 times over a period of nine years and exited three times in that time period. So it was a good run, stepped

8:09 off from that, watched TV for a year and formed a partnership to and created what we referred to as Moic Partners, multiple uninvested capital to help small software companies create more robust

8:30 sales and marketing engines so that they can get a better multiple at exit. So it's been fun. We've been doing that for about six months. That's awesome. Well, great story and you didn't know

8:45 this about me. I'm a New England guy as well. Grew up in New Hampshire, went to Brandeis,

8:51 to summer camp in Palmer, Massachusetts, you're probably one of the only people that's been on this podcast that actually knows where Palmer is. And my wife's cousin is also from Long Meadow, his

9:03 last name is Levitt, which is also kind of interesting. Really, it's his first name. Rob. So you have her brother, Jeff? I don't think so. I think he's got sisters, no brothers though. Oh,

9:15 and I knew an Amy Levitt and her sister Cindy, but I'm a lot older than you So it's anyone's guess. But we're going to a gun quit soon. So we spend the summer in New England. And so we're leaving

9:29 next Wednesday. I mean, that's the move if you live in Houston, right? Get out for the summer.

9:36 Absolutely. No, this is good. And of course, yes, Syracuse, right? I wanted to get into sports reporting, sports writing too, right? That would be the move, but like you said, 8, 300 in

9:48 New York City. whenever this was 30, 40 years ago, I wouldn't get you very far. I don't think 80, 300 a year will get you very far during Revolutionary War times in New York City. So I'd be

9:60 better off being a migrant.

10:04 So yeah, right. So yeah, a lot to unpack here. And obviously a lot that that I like. So I want to talk about technology in the late 70s and early 80s, like I really started my career in

10:18 technology and sales. And day one on the job, you know, you mentioned Salesforce, I was, I worked at a company called Left Hand Networks here in Boulder. And first day on the job, literally,

10:30 they gave me a couple scripts and they said, here's a site called salesforcecom and you're going to log in here and you're going to record all of your tasks. And you know, you're going to send us

10:39 reports at the end of every day. So we can know what you do. So so day one, You know, I was given access to a CRM. The internet was already kind of a thing and and wasn't Challenging for me to

10:53 pick things up, right? Here's your script. This is where you record it. Go get it What was it like though in the late 70s early 80s when you're going out and selling tech like were you recording

11:03 stuff by hand? Were you using computer? Was there internal internet like what was that? I'm trying to think about what was that like? Well, it was pre-internet for one It's pre-email for two And

11:17 so communication was really and it's really pre-cell phone Yeah At that

11:25 point so technology consisted of stand-alone word processors

11:34 Fax machines and memory typewriters mainframe computers What is now the cloud was then time-sharing so it's sort of gone full circle So, And then the emergence of the PC in the early '80s changed a

11:51 lot of

11:56 around technology and then networking and client server and the rest of the sort of history into the cloud around the year 2000, the internet emergence. So you were probably making a ton of phone

12:12 calls. Did you ever make any phone calls like from a phone booth type of thing? Like a sales call from a phone booth because you had to get a hold of somebody and you were lost getting to a meeting

12:21 or something? Like what was it like? Constantly, absolutely. I could tell you where every phone booth was in the east side of Houston,

12:30 it was unbelievable. It was a different era altogether. We would

12:35 use the technology to create regular mailers, not emailers, but we'd send mailers and then we'd follow up on the phone with those mailers You know, it was just Flintstones-level technology.

12:51 Totally. You know, who knew we would end up, you know, in the Jetson-style technology. But at the time, it was the Flintstones pretty much. I didn't get my first cell phone until '88.

13:07 And that was still pretty early. Yeah. I was very much an early adopter It was a thick Motorola brick and

13:20 it was something. But it was better than nothing. And it was expensive, I bet, to make calls, right? That's when it was like a buck a minute or something. So you had to be really judicious

13:28 about making those calls. Yeah, I'm not that judicious. I spent a lot on cell phone bills. And the companies would only reimburse a certain amount. And there was that back and forth But it was a

13:44 -

13:50 You know, it changed everything from an outside salesman's standpoint, being able to call ahead, where are you, I'm late. You know, it reduced a tremendous amount of stress having that

13:60 communications medium for sure. It was

14:05 great. Interesting, 'cause on the flip side, I feel like my cell phone gives me a lot of stress. Ever since I got one, it's like, man, I don't know how I feel about people being able to reach

14:16 me all the time. Like, when you just had a home phone and you were out, you were out until you got home, right? Unless your parents called you or somebody called you, said you got a message or

14:29 somebody called for you, you're out of pocket and that was kinda nice. I can't hide now, man, my phone's blowing up right now. Yeah, there's no place to hide, there's no doubt about it But you

14:39 know, my mindset was if 711's open, I'm open. Um, not having a phone, you know, leave and you need to communicate to someone for some reason creates a tremendous amount of stress. Um, and yes,

14:56 we all have this reflex where we look at our phone six million times a minute. So we've gone kind of the other extreme, but, um choice the, given, uh,

15:07 I would rather that extreme of always available, always possibly available and choosing when not to be versus choosing when to be available. Yeah, no, I, I get that. Um, so, so walk me through

15:23 like a sales meeting, right? So it's 1981 and you're walking into a somewhere in Houston, right? To take a sales meeting. Were you at that point showing things like, like power points? Or are

15:35 you writing things on a chalkboard? Like, how are you presenting stuff and then, you know, pursue it to that? How do you follow up? Cause like, think about how I was trained. right? Sales

15:44 reps are trained today. All right, you have the meeting and you need to follow up with an email. Do you follow up with a letter? Like a handwritten note? What was your process? Like what are

15:51 meetings like? What was your follow-up cadence like? So let's just take the example. You know, I was pretty early into the notion of sending real mailers every week and following up on them every

16:04 week, you know, to generate pipeline And so you follow up on a phone, you'd set meeting times, you'd go out there.

16:15 You know, I didn't do a lot of letter follow-ups. Maybe if they bought something, I would send a card or something, but ultimately, but generally you follow up by phone. There was no such thing

16:31 as PowerPoint. If I

16:36 needed to do a presentation of some sort, it would be an overhead projector with transparencies.

16:44 Or we do a live demo in front of people, no way to project. Yeah, don't huddle around. Right, right, right, it's sort of a, now you see it, now you don't think. And if it was a fax machine

16:59 demo, I'd have two fax machines and I'd fax from one to the other. Amazing. Type of thing, just to make the point.

17:09 But, you know, totally different environment Obviously, but

17:16 I did get some good training in terms of understanding how to interact with people face to face, how to have a good cadence, how to, you know, so all the discipline I rejected when I was in front

17:36 of those folks at IBM, I was more or less adopting just I was doing it on my timeframe. Instead of their time for if I've been a little more mature or it had a little better guidance or had a decent

17:48 mentor I probably would have taken that IBM job and be better off for it, but But that's the

17:58 way they operated to except they did a lot

18:04 of Face-to-face cold calling, you know like you're the Avon lady. Yeah, I didn't do much of that I thought return on effort was too low and You know, I just didn't feel like getting door slammed

18:18 to my face by reception. So day long Yeah, like I think I don't know I take a lot of pride in my my Ability to be an empathetic sales person and I always think about Okay, what would the other

18:31 person want and I feel like the last thing they'd want is me showing up unannounced to their office wearing a suit Ready to meet with them. It's like oh god this guy was this guy here and now there's

18:42 So, let's go out and send me the. That's why it was sort of unusual to send the letter in advance, or now send an email in advance because the people aren't just sitting around waiting for you to

18:54 come by, you know, whatever you call, they're doing something else. So it's automatically an interruption Yeah, yeah, leave me alone. So I want to talk about the, you know, your evolution,

19:11 right, obviously going from sort of moral school to now new school tactics and, and eventually mock partners but I also want to talk about about CRM So the advent of CRM using CRM, what were the

19:23 initial tools that you used, where they just, you know, when you were given a PC, you mentioned Siebel, did you have CRM and was it kind of similar to how people track their logging activities

19:37 and opportunity pipeline as it is today.

19:41 No, not really. Back then, CRM was more like contact management,

19:49 keeping almost a electronic rolodex of sorts. But then I worked for Seabull, and Seabull was the pioneer of CRM.

19:58 Tom Seabull and Mark Benioff had worked together at Oracle, Tom left, formed Seabull systems. They were the first CRM system for corporations and to embrace multi-level, multi-channel, CRM,

20:18 email, phone, e-commerce, all the different channels in one integrated system, call centers. And so I worked there six years and it was definitely trailblazing because companies,

20:39 the sales reps didn't want it because they thought a big brother was watching. management was too lazy to use it, because it required their involvement. They couldn't just call the rep and ask,

20:50 you know, so that hurt adoption. And so if neither side wants it, the only people who want it are the senior executives. And so the big challenge wasn't selling senior executives. That was

21:09 relatively easy. The hard part was getting people to use it and see what's in it for them at all levels, at the sales rep level, at the management management level, at the executive level, it's

21:23 obvious, and they see it instantly.

21:27 But it's a change management project disguised as a technology project. And the sales reps feel like all that data is theirs. They don't feel like it's the companies. Back then, they did not

21:44 accept that the contacts were the company's contacts. They felt they would, that was their leverage with the company that they own the customer relationship and you can't have it. So it was

21:60 definitely trailblazing in that era of right around

22:07 2000, the Siebel era before Salesforce came in.

22:15 And now we got all the forget. Yeah, Mark was an investor

22:20 in Siebel. 'Cause he and Tom were friends and he used that money that he made at Siebel's system, many millions from that stock. It was a prolific stock at the time to start salesforcecom. And

22:35 there are,

22:39 Seebull even had an online tool called salescom that Tom was not interested in selling Tom Seebull because he thought that it could cannibalize his on-premise license business and mark

22:57 whether or not he used salescom or created his own He liked the idea and changed. It

23:05 was a big proponent and really a trailblazer of his own in cloud computing.

23:14 And so going from a CRM standpoint from

23:21 Seebull who was the market leader by a long shot, then I helped SAP get more serious about CRM

23:31 as part of a special SWAT team for the senior leadership. and then went to salesforcecom and started a, you know, their business and energy, which they didn't understand at all and frankly, never

23:46 really liked because they're California

23:52 oriented. Right. And now it's, they've got a 200 something million dollar line of business and energy. So they probably do like it.

23:60 No, they don't. They tolerate it. They don't, they don't.

24:08 But they want the revenue, but it's not something. I mean, they've, after I left the, they,

24:18 at some point, they disbanded the energy group, then they put it back together, then they disbanded again. So I mean, they're the political views inside Salesforce conflict with market needs in

24:33 certain industries and it's it creates conflict inside a company like Salesforce.

24:41 That's fascinating. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that perspective. Want to talk about liquid frameworks for a little bit. So liquid frameworks, obviously a great story. I think anybody would

24:53 enjoy 60X growth in three exits. But it's liquid frameworks first hit my radar, probably 2013, 2014. I was selling iPad based field data captured to pumpers, to lease operators, it's a

25:06 production form in oil and gas for seven lakes. And liquid frameworks was really this, as I saw it, a very versatile, malleable mobile platform. So tell me a little bit about that kind of whole

25:22 run. Like where did the idea of liquid frameworks come from, how did it evolve? And then how did you end up having such an amazing run that led to amazing growth in exits?

25:35 Well, let's go back to Salesforce for a second. One of the mark is a brilliant guy as it relates to vision, technology vision. And he recognized relatively early that their secret sauce was not

25:54 the CRM system. Their secret sauce was the development tools used to create the CRM system. CRM just happened to be what they knew Interesting. So they decoupled the application, sale, you know,

26:11 opportunity management, if you want CRM, from the development platform, rebranded the platform, forcecom, and created an App Store, the original App Store. In fact, when Apple created its App

26:27 Store, it violated Salesforce's patent, or trademark, and Mark, who was friends with Steve Jobs, This, as the story goes,

26:39 gave Steve the brand of App Store and then created the App Exchange for Salesforce. Yes. So they created an ecosystem where other vendors could create vertical applications where a Salesforce did

26:49 not have a direct solution. And there were hundreds of them. Some of them were horizontal, some were vertical. It just depended. It created ultimately a billion dollar business for Salesforce and

26:49 also created sort of a minor league system for them to see what markets were happening, what were growing, where do they want to invest themselves, who do they want to buy, that kind of

27:28 thing So I was familiar with the challenge that Liquid Frameworks was trying to address, having sold CRM into oil and gas for Seabull, for SAP. And I knew that for every sales rep, they have many

27:50 times over more cruise supervisors. And those cruise supervisors needed to be away from the internet virtually the entire time There are not Starbucks next to a well site, as you know. So there's

28:07 no internet connectivity, and

28:10 offshore, and the good news about oil wells is

28:19 that they're not muddling up downtown locations. The bad news from a convenience standpoint, they're not in downtown locations, right? They are away They are, you know, out there. And so

28:34 there's no internet. So the people, when they want to record their ticket information, you know, they had to do it, you know, on a napkin or they would do it in Excel or, you know, whatever

28:47 means they did, but it wasn't electronically into an integrated system. So I was familiar with this problem and I knew no one had a solution for it out of the big brands. I knew Microsoft had

29:01 nothing Seable Tribe, I did a deal with the largest oil field service company in the world globally and for sales and sales operations, sales order management. And when it came time for them to

29:17 exercise their option for field service, they pressed the synchronization button and it took six hours. Yeah. You can only imagine their tolerance for that So they wanted to develop. what they

29:32 called a lighter system than Siebel for field ticketing, and they cleverly called it field ticket light. Nice. So you fast forward 12 years, and I'm approached by private equity firm, and that

29:50 managing partner is now my partner at Moek, Chip Davis, and he said to me, Dave, he had tried to recruit me for other portfolio companies of his, and I've stayed pretty much a big company guy

30:04 over the prior, you know, they're at least mid companies. Seabull was

30:11 about 500 million when I joined, 2 billion when I left. SAP was about 500 million when I got there, 3 billion when I left the first time, and

30:26 Salesforce was 300 million when I got there and4 billion when I left. So I was used to a certain size company. with a certain trajectory. And he said to me, Day, look, this is everything made

30:37 for you. It's CRM, it's oil patch, and there office is a mile from your house. And I said, Chip, you got two out of three. He said, What did we miss? I said, It sails for us. I offer us out

30:53 of my home. Sounds like a grueling commute. So he said, Meet the founder Maybe you'll like them, and you guys will hit it off, and you'll want to do it. Because sails for us at the time was

31:08 getting awfully big and bureaucratic and changing the way they were doing things in a way that

31:17 lacked some alignment with me. And so I was vulnerable for a change. And so I met the founders - famous Travis Parisi, a brilliant guy, has an incredible blend.

31:33 of charisma, smarts,

31:37 technological sophistication, really an amazing person. And I meet him and I

31:46 say, so tell me about your company. And he tells me about field ticketing and how we supported slumberjays' effort to develop a field ticketing system. And we realized, so you're the one who cost

32:01 me 40, 000 users at Siebel, because you were involved in that development. So I instantly understood what they did, because I knew that business problem from my work at Siebel. And so I said,

32:18 well, show me your product. And he shows it. And I said, it was developed in. NET. He just transitioned to the cloud And I looked at it and I said, Look. You know, I have good news and bad

32:32 news. And he says, what's the good news? Good news is you obviously, you don't need me to tell you this. You have a clear understanding of the business problem and the develop the way to address

32:43 it.

32:45 And because there's revenue leakage that's happening out in the field because the people collecting ticket information were not using a system and they didn't, they left things off. And if you don't

32:58 build for it, you don't collect as time materials work. Yep. So they got most of it, right? But they might leave five or six percent off at a billion dollar company. That's50 million a year.

33:10 Just leaving dribble by the side of the road. So I said, and he said, what could possibly be the bad news? The bad news is, you know, I've come from Salesforce where the systems are really

33:23 pretty and this system, not so much

33:28 And he said, Why don't you. let me show you what we were doing at Salesforce. I showed him some of the custom stuff that pre-sales people had done for some of our oil patch customers. He says,

33:39 that's all great, but Salesforce can't support offline to the degree that we need it. And our 70 of our users are offline, 99 of the time. Sure. And I said, well, you're a really smart guy.

33:55 When you figure it out, call me back No, I'm not selling this. Yeah. And so a couple of months go by, Houston Ventures was investing in this company. And so I wanted me to come in when that

34:11 money was

34:13 invested. They wanted to invest in sales, among other things, and help bolster the company grow. The revenue was about half a million in revenue, software revenue at the time, so it was very

34:25 small in a very underserved market.

34:30 totally unattended, frankly. At the time, this was, you know, 2008. And so a couple months go by, and he calls me back, so I figured it out. And I said, Okay, tell me more. What do you got?

34:48 And he talked way over my head, technically, not on purpose. He just, you know, he was enthusiastic, and he understood the technology in great detail. The long and short of it was, he found

35:01 another technology that ultimately got bought by Salesforce to synchronize with Salesforce. So we could do all the configuration in Salesforce and have it render in this non Salesforce based

35:16 application to be used offline. Okay.

35:21 And he was so convinced, I I said, Okay, I'm in. And so we started, it took about a year to hash out an OEM relationship with Salesforce

35:37 and to rewrite the software into Salesforce. So we modeled along with that. NET product for almost a year, and we told customers who bought in some big name companies did buy, and we told them we

35:54 will migrate you to the next to our new product when we do it, we'll do it at no charge. We'll, if you commit to us now, we'll make that transition, help you with that transition. Sure. And

36:07 that was a pretty successful approach, relatively speaking. And then the company really took off once we had the product baked into Salesforce. Salesforce didn't have anything at the time, they

36:21 didn't have a field service product, They didn't have a sales quoting product. So our quote, the cash filled a vertical need for them into their energy customer base. Sure. And they didn't have a

36:35 competing product anyway.

36:38 So we were

36:43 very, very well received in the Salesforce community. Later on, somewhat less so when they bought companies in those spaces. Sure They competed with, but they

37:01 adjusted somewhat. Reluctantly that we were an orthopedic surgeon and they were a general practitioner. Sure. You know, they had a terrific system that could support a tremendous range of

37:13 industries. We had a very specific system for a very specific set of processes. Yep. And

37:22 some of them there accepted that and welcome there and embrace it. and sold around it, you know, other salesforce products around the center of the plate, if you will, and others fought it, but

37:36 that was okay. We had a spectacular record competing with Salesforce, but being on a Salesforce platform gave us, helped us gain a trajectory that I don't think we would have gotten given the other

37:52 development choices at the time Today, we would have chosen Salesforce, maybe we would have chosen Amazon, maybe we would have chosen

38:04 HANA, Azure, who knows what we would have chosen if them was now, but then there weren't that many good options and Salesforce gave us a great way to get up quickly and help our customers get up

38:19 quickly. And there were a lot of Salesforce CRM customers that I've been involved with in the oil patch. that needed that field application. They knew it, we knew it. And so it was really a good

38:36 choice for us. I think at the time and a good marriage between liquid frameworks and Salesforce. So that was exit one? So the first exit, well, it took six years. You know, the world business

38:54 has its ups and downs as you know. And we rode through those. So it took a little longer for the first exit than I think any of us would have liked. We sold to a private equity firm

39:10 called Luminate out of the West Coast. And that was a

39:16 pretty successful exit. But

39:21 Travis and I decided that we stayed on. And they wanted to grow the company more. We didn't think we were finished. And then three years later, we sold it again, this time to a larger software

39:34 company also in the Salesforce space called ServiceMax.

39:40 And then ServiceMax got bought a year later by PTC out of Boston, which ironically, if you wanna go full circle here, you're a Boston guy It's a New England guy. So I worked for Prime Computer for

39:57 six years, who was based in Nadek. Now, Prime bought a company called ComputerVision and became a large computer-a-design company transitioning out of the mini-computer space. Ultimately,

40:11 parametric technologies, PTC,

40:15 who rose to fame and fortune in the '90s, designed with 3D computer-a-design,

40:23 plot computer vision. Yeah. And, um, and as a, as a result of prime getting bought out, they, when I was there, they instituted some poison pills tactics to make it difficult to be acquired.

40:39 And one of them was a pension plan for people like me who had been there for

40:48 a long time. So here we are for, you know, long time later Yeah. And the very, and, and now PTC, which bought ServiceMax, which bought Liquid Frameworks is paying me a pension. That's

40:60 hilarious. You got to love the symmetry.

41:06 That's incredible. Oh, man. Well, no, it's, that's in kudos to you for sticking around, right? I think a lot of, you know, founders or, you know, equity shareholders in these companies,

41:17 right? You get acquired by private equity All right, I'll stick around for however long they tell me that you need to stick around. But then I'm going to go do something else. had the wherewithal

41:25 to say, You know what? We're not done. The market's still now coming to us. And frankly, the field ticketing space is still pretty open. So much paper in the field where there could be

41:37 optimization. I'm curious to see how AI plays out there. But again, it takes a little bit of foresight and wherewithal to stick through that Well, and in fairness, I'm still not that

41:52 philanthropic. And they incented me significantly to stay and take to the next exit. Because they had a whole period, typically of about four to five years. And they were able to sell us in three.

42:13 So they were delirious and got a very good multiple for it.

42:21 And so it all worked out for everybody. But It wasn't totally to do, to my commitment to see things through just to be fair, but I accept. I've got a few more minutes here. I want to ask you some

42:38 kind of bigger picture questions, right? So you've done a nice job sort of outlining your career, the full circle nature of it, spending time in CRM and an oil and gas and how it all came together

42:49 So, you know, what advice would you give to younger Dave Levitt, the eager guy right out of Syracuse, like, what would you tell that guy as he starts doing park on his career?

43:02 Well, you know, I think that I got really good mentorship along the way. I was able to, especially when I got to both, you know, even at Exxon, there were people, the advice I would give is

43:19 find people who care about you as a person. And the technology business is a little bit of a crony business. And so people travel in packs. So picking good mentors is really useful for everybody.

43:40 Did a relatively good job of that. But where I stopped was that there was a point where I became kind of a high-end mercenary You know, sales is

43:52 addictive to a certain degree, the independence, the autonomy, the economics. It can be a great lifestyle. And I had been encouraged by several people that I respected a lot to go into management

44:09 earlier. They thought that I had a coaching style, nurturing style that would transition from being control-free sales rep to empowering sales leader. And I waited a long time to do that, and I

44:27 think that

44:30 if I was doing this over again, I would have given up some of that money and autonomy to get into leadership earlier. I've built a nice coaching tree, if you will, a lot of my former reps are VPs

44:46 of sales. I get a lot of satisfaction out of that I think had I gone into it earlier, maybe I would have made even more money from on the equity side, had I done leadership earlier, taken a few

45:02 more chances versus staying with the more established companies. I

45:10 didn't know that I would be an effective sales leader You don't know what you haven't done necessarily and I knew I was effective as a high end sales rep and I should have. listen to that advice

45:25 earlier. And I could have made a bigger impact, I think. Yeah. On others and other companies, had I listened to that advice. I like that a lot. And that's something that I think about too.

45:38 It's sort of like, I wanted to get into sales management sooner. But those opportunities just weren't there. So at some point I wrap my mind around, well, I guess I'll just be a mercenary. I

45:48 mean, that's sort of what the deal is. And that ultimately led to me starting my own company because you can have impact, right? If I'm doing consulting with 10 different companies and trying to

45:59 help create revenue opportunities for them, then there's more impact that can be made, you know? Like with Moic, right? I think it's kind of cool what you guys are doing, but talk to me a little

46:10 bit about your approach and why should some of these software companies that are growing but may lack some process, expertise, connections in the sales universe, Why should they work with MELIC?

46:24 I think what happens with a lot of small software companies is that they're very effective early on selling to the founders' Rolodex of contacts and the early adopter market. Unfortunately, that

46:41 early adopter market has a ceiling and these companies at one point, maybe it's at 5 million ARR, maybe it's at 10, they're going to hit a wall where they run out of founder contacts and their

46:56 customers' contacts and they're going to need to scale the business and what worked for them, selling to early adopters, might not work for them, selling to what's commonly referred to as the early

47:11 majority and what helped us at liquid frameworks, I think, was that I was used to selling to the majority so we came in with process. playbook that I had used as a sales rep that we used at

47:27 Salesforce, that I was using at Liquid Frame, I brought into Liquid Frameworks, was could just easily been used at Salesforce or SAP. It

47:38 was a big company-style process that was focused on ROI-based selling and certain leading indicators that they're going to drive deals and drive scale, and it's effective because larger companies are

47:56 more scrutinizing, and they don't just take the founder's word for it. I mean, they want to see a process, they want to know that you can be there to support them. So, I think what we bring to

48:09 the table is the experience associated with

48:15 breaking through the early adopter market to the early majority market, so that they can be, they can. they cannot hit that wall and have a better exit. Ultimately, a more robust company and

48:32 being able to have a better chance of skipping selling to a financial buyer and selling straight to a strategic buyer, which pays more and they look for different things, but giving them the chance

48:49 to develop the metrics, they're going to be attractive to a strategic buyer and not just to a financial buyer. Yeah, I like that. And to go back to something you said, maybe 10 minutes ago,

49:02 cronyism, right? You guys know people at this point, right? So you can connect the dots quickly for some of these guys and as we know, that's a big deal. Dave, where can people find you? Like

49:14 if somebody wants to reach out to you, pick your brain, obviously you've got a wealth information to offer whether it's young salespeople or executives. And of course, you know, looking to gain

49:25 more business at MOEC. Where can people find you Dave?

49:29 Well, we're trying to hide. No, I'm kidding. Obviously Email is Dave at MoEC partnerscom. MoEC stands for multiple uninvested capital So it's designed to help people think about the exit. So

49:46 Dave at MoEC partnerscom We have a website MoEC partners very cleverly named and And I'm linked in We publish a blog which I think is good reading for people in the sales business. It's getting some

50:01 good traction and you know Excited to work with Small sask a medium sized sask companies who are trying to take the next leap Now that's exciting stuff. Well, Dave. I enjoyed this both on a

50:17 personal and professional level. You've you've got a lot of stories, insight, history. to share and it seems like you made some of the right moves in your career, but I'm sure there were missteps

50:29 as well. So I appreciate you sharing your story. And thanks for coming on with the fun, man. You bet, thanks for having me.