Re: CryptCD 5.0 Enterprise Edition With 14
Latrisha Adan
Piyush 0:15
Hello, I'm Piyush Poddar. And you're listening to Humans Behind DX Podcast, where I talk to leaders from Digital agencies and organizations delivering awesome digital experiences. And today, I'm going to talk to Michael Meyers, Managing Director at Tag1 Consulting. Welcome, Michael.
Michael 0:41
Wow, that's a... (laughs.) Start from the beginning, I guess. I grew up on Long Island in New York, just about 30 or 40 minutes outside New York City. My parents and a lot of people in my family are educators or teachers. I have an older sister, who is amazing and has really helped me, you know, get to where I am, you know, with a lot of support. And she has two amazing daughters that I love. Really great nieces. I recently got married, I had a pandemic wedding, we had to, you know, cancel our actual wedding plans, but have a really unique story, you know, we got Zoom-married. So, you know, trying to make the most of a difficult time, but, you know, I think we're doing okay. And recently, I spent most of my life in New York City and had the opportunity to live in many cities around the world, but spent over 20 years in New York City, and recently moved to the Southern Berkshire mountains, the Southwest corner of Massachusetts, and we live in the woods, and it's just serene and beautiful. I never thought I would live outside New York City, and certainly didn't think I'd be living in the woods. But we fell in love and, you know, are excited to make this our long term home.
Piyush 2:22
Now, let's look a bit about, look at your professional career. I know you have, you know, worked with some great companies, you know, and well done amazing products and developer teams and stuff like that. But I would really like to hear out from you in terms of how, you know, maybe start with, you know, post-graduation, you know, your first job, and then, you know, which were the main pivot points, and how did you reach here, where you are today.
Michael 2:58
I want to go back just a little bit further real quick. I've always been really motivated and driven. I think that some people work to live. And, you know, for whatever reason, I have always lived to work. It's been a very fulfilling and exciting part of my life. You know, even in high school, I had a job, I ended up working for the school district and system. And I would install closed circuit and cable TV systems throughout the various different buildings. And, you know, I was making almost $15 an hour and this was, I don't want to date myself, but well over 20 years ago. And, you know, I mean, I was, you know, two floors up in a genie, you know, like a platform that goes up and down with a hammer drill longer than my leg, you know, going through brick walls, totally unsupervised breaking, I've imagined a large number of child labour laws. And, you know, so I, you know, I really, I really enjoyed that and, you know, got more interested in in television, and ended up going to school for television and radio and you know, the same thing, you know, in school, every summer I had a job. My first summer I worked in New York City for this guy Judson Rosebush, and he was you know, one of the early computer graphics pioneers. His previous company you know, did Tron and pretty much every major computer graphics and effects in the 80s. And, you know, was a paid job, you know, got to work on. This is like the CD ROM days. I even on a three quarter inch floppy disk for CBS, the broadcasting company did like an interactive schedule. And, you know, during semesters, I went to Ithaca College and they had these great programmes where you could go to Los Angeles for a semester, and they helped you get connected with companies and where everybody was doing internships, I got a job for a company called iNSCAPE, a video game company, a startup, and was helping them product manage Tales from the Crypt CD ROM, this is like the missed days where you could like, you know, advance to a place kind of spin around in a circle and then advanced somewhere else. So by the time I graduated college, I had, you know, years of experience, you know, more experience than most people had, you know, three, four years out of college. And so, you know, it was really, you know, it gave me, you know, great opportunities. Michael 5:35 The first company I worked for, was called eXtraActive. And they had another company called, what was the name, it was a hosting company, I can't believe I can't remember the name of it, but they, you know, the reason I wanted to work for them is because I graduated in '98. And, you know, almost every webpage out there was static brochure where that that really did nothing, it was very, very simple. And I did tonnes of searching, and they were building interactive applications, like an intranet for like a major financial company. Whereas like a client, you could download, you know, perspectives, information, you know, things that today are, like, you know, dead simple and common. And we were building on top of Lotus Notes. And we were like, the first Lotus, you know, Notes, whatever five thing to write. And they, you know, they knew what they were doing, you know, they from day one, they were building a framework on top of Lotus Notes to cut out applications for customers, as opposed to building each application from scratch. And, you know, we worked really hard, crazy long hours, and at night, you know, they would play with their own startup ideas. I had my own startup ideas that I was playing with. And eventually they said, you know, clients suck, they're so difficult to deal with. And they, they took one of their ideas, and they said, we're gonna, we're gonna do a startup company, and they let everybody go, that they didn't think was a top performer, they kept a small group of people. And they launched a company called Afternic, which is still around today, I believe it's owned by GoDaddy. And we pioneered the market, the secondary market for domain names, you know, the idea that you can sell a domain name to somebody, and the original concept for the company was to create an, you know, an auction platform for intangible goods. And the first product and what we ended up only doing was domain names, you know, what is it worth, you know, it's, you know, it's very abstract. And I was a project manager, and I managed the development team, I did a little development. I remember, Christmas, one year, I implemented a chat application, like a chat room. I mean, they were, you know, they really indoctrinated me into the philosophy that, like, carried me through the rest of my life, which you could summarize is work your ass off. I remember, you know, staying in the office one night, because I, you know, I only live like three, four blocks away. But I was so exhausted that I literally rolled myself up in carpet insulation, because it was freezing, and slept on the floor. They were the embodiment of, you know, the startup culture. And it was this amazing experience, you know, just absolutely brilliant, wonderful people, you know, that push each other so hard. And in 18 months went from idea to acquisition by register.com, which at the time was the second largest domain name registrar, had just gone public and was flush with cash. And they acquired us and it was, you know, this this amazing moment in my life, where I said, Oh, my God, like, I want to do this. You know, and, you know, the hubris of youth, you know, believing that you could do anything, I went out and started my own company. And it was called NowPublic.com. I co-founded it with a friend from the, you know, that that startup I mentioned, and, you know, the idea was citizen journalism, you know, we pioneered the concept of crowdsourcing user generated content. And, and citizen journalism. The idea was that, you know, you could take a camera phone go out and broadcast the news live from the scene of the event, we wanted to disintermediate the the media industry, news industry. To give you a perspective, the only camera phone available in the States at this time was like a little Sony phone, and you had to like get the camera separate, and attach it to the bottom. You know, and so, you know, these are really early days. And I remember, you know, I remember pitching investors saying, you know, we're gonna build a billion dollar company, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna be the next CNN and I believe this with every fibre of my being And I think you have to, you know, I think you have to, you know, really believe in yourself and push yourself. And we, we ended up starting this on Drupal. And, you know, the reason we picked Drupal was because there were a lot of modules out there, you know, I went to friends, and no one would give us money, because they said, you know, we're not going to invest in an idea. So come back to us with a prototype. You know, you know, so we went off, we leveraged Drupal, we built a prototype site in three months and launched it. And, you know, because of all the modules and capabilities of Drupal, you know, we were able to take camera phone photos in and all these things. And I went back to these angels, and they were blown away, you know, they just couldn't believe what we were able to achieve in such a short period of time. And, you know, now, this is like, commonplace, but, you know, back then it was, you know, it was revolutionary, we ended up raising, you know, over $12 million, grew it to a top 500 website, sold it, you know, for a profit to the clarity Media Group, which owned Examiner.com. And I took over a CTO of Examiner.com. And we rebuilt it on Drupal, and grew it to a top 50 website, you know, it was bigger than the New York Times, you know, as far as news is concerned, from a traffic standpoint. And then I took a little bit of time off, you know, I was really, I was really burnt out. And, you know, the acquisition was not an easy experience, and we hadn't earned out and you know, the the acquirers made it extremely difficult to achieve that earnout. So it was a very adversarial relationship. You know, I was caught between my investors, you know, who said, you know, you don't, you know, make us more money, we're, you know, we're gonna make sure you never do another startup again, you know, we'll never give you a reference. You know, and on the other side, were, you know, these, these, you know, executives that acquired us, who said, you know, we're gonna play a shell game and constantly changing the rules, you know, try and make it impossible for you to be, you know, successful on that front. And so, you know, is a really, really stressful time. You know, and at the end, I, I decided to take some time off and try and figure out where I wanted to go, because, you know, you nothing tasted as good anymore. Like, I loved building applications. I, you know, but I had been through to successful startups, I built the top 50 website, I was like, What the hell else is there to build? Like I, you know, I was, you know, I'm a problem solver. You know, I want to sink my teeth into something I want to take on a really hard problem to solve. And I just felt like, you know, what is there that I haven't done on the web front? And, you know, Dries approached me and because, you know, he was an advisor to not public and, you know, we made major contributions to Drupal. You know, Examiner launched on Drupal 7, six months before the release, you know. Nathaniel Catchpole, catchword for us. He was the number one contributor to Drupal 7, we contributed probably, you know, 25-30% of Drupal7, you know, and Acquia, probably, you know, another 20%, you know, define the model by which 7 was released that 8 and 9 have followed. So, he approached me and he said, Look, you know, Drupal 7, has really, you know, seen a lot of enterprise adoption. But there's this problem, you know, that he's talked about many times the tragedy of the commons that people just download and use Drupal, and they don't contribute back. And so, he said, how are we going to get companies to make an investment in Drupal, and he said, you know, I want you to come on board at Acquia should work for me, and I want you to solve this problem. And I was like, holy crap, I have no idea how to do this... (laughs.) And, and he was like, I don't even know if this is a solvable problem. And, and that, you know, really energized me, you know, I, you know, the idea that, you know, that this might not be solvable, the idea that no one had solved it, you know, and the opportunity to do so, you know, energized me again, and came on board and, and we created large scale Drupal, which was an initiative to engage, you know, executives, technology executives, that our clients and, you know, really tried to engage executives at technology companies in, you know, working with each other, you know, we tried to show we created like it, you know, executive forums and conferences in the hopes that, you know, if we could foster collaborations with each other, you know, they would be willing to form you know, basically an informal strategic alliance and we had some success, you know, We got companies like NBC Universal and Disney Interactive, you know, who are competitors to come together and make strategic investments in, you know, things like content, staging, you know, the ability to preview content on a different set of servers and environment and push, you know, different scenarios live at different times. But, you know, we, you know, we raised millions of dollars, but But we, we looked at the problem, and we said, in order for this to be successful, we need to raise 10s of millions of dollars, and I, you know, I didn't see a path to reaching that order of magnitude, you know, certainly not in the timeframe that we needed. And so, we, we pivoted, you know, we turned large scale Drupal into the customer advisory board at Acquia, you know, you know, these relationships with these executives, to help us with our products, you know, and to better help them. And, you know, Acquia at the time, you know, their success has been selling to the C suite, you know, to executives, and, you know, I think competitors, like Pantheon have done an amazing job of winning the hearts and minds of developers. And, you know, so, you know, Acquia was losing deals, you know, in certain scenarios, because of that, and, you know, they wanted to, to address that. And so we started, you know, a developer, you know, relations programme, for the first time, we launched a development products group, did developer marketing. And so I took all that over and worked there for a while, five years. Time flies, and, and then, you know, took a little time off, and that's a theme in my life, you know, I work really, really hard to the point of burnout and, and then need to take like, a year to recover. And it was great. You know, I did, I put together a list of things and did everything on it and play golf with my dad every day, pick my nieces up from school. It was it was a really wonderful time, and enabled me to kind of do some of the things that I had long neglected, and get a little healthier. And I put a lot of weight running around the world for Acquia and working such crazy hours.