Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:36
So it stays. It’s kind of real time. Then it just updates real time.
Mike Palmer: 09:40
And that is the beauty, right? All of the data that we’re talking about here is live. All of this is happening in what’s called sort of live query. So we’re not caching anything. We’re not removing it from your underlying warehouse.
So this obviously improves accuracy. It improves the granularity because we don’t have to aggregate it in order to fit it into your laptop Excel version. And it improves velocity because we’re working together synchronously on this work. So we’ve taken a lot of the best of spreadsheets and platforms like Google Suite, the best of by platforms, and things like charting the best of your skill set as a person that you’ve been building for decades in doing things in spreadsheets, and lately we’ve added the best of the ability to build custom designed applications and just put them into this one platform. That critically means you, as an end user, do not need technical skills to do any of this.
There’s no certification here. There’s no code. Right there is just your ability to manage your own productivity by yourself.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:53
Talk about clients and the evolution of clients. How has that ideal client changed over the years? Or maybe it hasn’t.
Mike Palmer: 11:00
It definitely has. And in fact, I think this is another way of asking a question like, how do you grow a business? Because we are pretty adamant that the best way to build software is to start in the mid market. And so the ICP for us, or the ideal customer profile for us has evolved. We built a product for originally, you know, for the mid market customer who for the most part was building their business in the cloud and wasn’t coming from a legacy product.
They were simply making an assessment. That was I don’t have preconceptions when I deploy something in a public cloud, and I deploy a snowflake or a Databricks, for example. What’s the best product to take advantage of those technologies? And inevitably, the answer was more Sigma than any preexisting software application that had been around for 10 or 20 years. And so we really were thoughtful about things that we thought the world was going to become large data volumes, security concerns that need to be better managed, real time collaboration, and then more democratization, which is a term that’s been used in data and analytics for a long time but never really realized.
We’ve realized that I can give you some stats later, but we wanted to build the product in that mid market space where people’s thought process was 100% forward looking and not trying to mimic their past. Now, obviously we’ve evolved the company quite a bit since then. So our customers now include, you know, JPMorgan and, you know, the largest of the large banks in the world all the way to a huge base of those mid market companies. And that’s the natural outcome of continuing to build features and capabilities over time.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:46
Where does chicken ERP fall into that?
Mike Palmer: 12:50
This is a conversation we had as a side. You know one of my one of my passion areas is that it’s fun to walk, you know, sort of tell your mom, you know, JP Morgan Chase Bank has thousands of users on Sigma. It just feels good. Everyone knows who the bank is and they understand it’s hard to sell to those banks. So have you achieved something right?
But I think the thing that we should be equally proud of, if not more proud, is customers. We have a customer who is a poulterer. You know, they raise chickens and they’ve built an entire ERP system on Sigma. It includes managing transportation, managing chickens and their coops, the density, the age it manages, the feed It manages the weather patterns. They’ve put together an ERP for raising chickens.
No software company was going to build this product for them, right? No one goes out and says, like, you know, I am the SaaS product for poultry. But these businesses are everywhere in the world, and certainly in America. They have every need, just like another matter of fact, they have more of a need than other businesses to create automation because they don’t have the time to spend, you know, updating spreadsheets and mailing them around and just trying to keep the back office of their business moving. And the fact that it makes me very proud, the fact that these businesses look to Sigma and think, hey, this is a platform that was built for my ability, who raised chickens so that I can now use technology to make myself more efficient?
That is tremendous.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:22
I mean, I’m just curious how they even found you and why they started using it. Do you even know, like, why were they even looking to create this? How did they stumble across Sigma?
Mike Palmer: 14:34
Well, here’s a funny thing. I don’t even know this customer. I know this from the metadata of what they’ve built. So I don’t know the answer to your question. I can abstract your question and say that a lot of the customers that find their way to Sigma, they do so because of that original statement.
They have moved on to a cloud data warehouse, and they’ve asked the question, what should I do next? What takes advantage of this change I’ve built on this thing? So what do I do now? How do we become a better company? How do I rethink what I’m doing as a business, and not just continue to do the things that I was doing 20 years ago?
The average customer, that’s what they’re doing when they come to Sigma, they’re asking that set of questions.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:17
Yeah. So they’re maybe, you know, have a cloud data warehouse or like what tools can I use to actually make decisions. Kind of like what you were saying before, increase my productivity. Have something I can look at and they find Sigma. But also what’s true is like there’s people have been built on top of Sigma too, it sounds like.
So, yes. How did that ecosystem come about then? There’s thousands of apps built on your product.
Mike Palmer: 15:46
That is correct. And those apps range from automating internal departmental processes. Jefferies is a well-known publicly traded company that actually also trades public equities. That does trade reconciliation in Sigma all the way to companies that are doing building their actual business on Sigma, which means their interface to the world, you know, is through Sigma. This could be companies that are monetizing data or whose core business is data, where let’s say they’re an asset management company, and they need folks to be able to, as LPs, to go manipulate the data that they’re providing on their investments.
We’ve got customers who like DoorDash share their information with their suppliers. Think about Walmart and McDonald’s through Sigma, you know, so they they’ve taken it as a platform, which is effectively what we are, and they’ve taken it the last mile to make it customized to their business, to their processes, and customized it so that it is, in effect, theirs and use that, you know, as a, as a fuel to not only take advantage of technology from a data point of view, but us working with them also means that they’re counting on us to continue to innovate. So on their behalf, you know, so that their product gets continuously better by virtue of our product getting continuously better.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:10
You know, Mike, when I look at this, we’re looking at the company page, right. You have, you know, Sigma leadership. You have the board of directors. You also have some of the investors. Right.
And so I think, you know, it seems like it’s a perfect fit that snowflake would want to invest in you. And so I do want to talk about your — I’ve heard you talk about acquisitions before and like you have so much growth like you don’t time for acquisitions. But on the flip side, I’m curious from the investor standpoint, you know, how did you go about I mean, raising capital is like another full time job, right? And so talk about that journey a little bit and how you went about the companies that you wanted to have invest and be a part of Sigma.
Mike Palmer: 18:02
It’s a great question. You know, you mentioned that it’s a full time job. You know, what’s interesting about raising money is that the amount of work that you have to put into the actual fundraising activity, I think, is directly corresponding to the performance you have, right? Or better said, it’s inversely proportional. If your performance is great and I think great performance means you have growth.
You’re efficient in getting that growth. You’re good at managing your data so that you can share it with others. Fundraising is actually not that difficult, right? Because people have signals, right? They look and they understand okay.
Top growth rate getting more efficient over time. Great customer feedback on the product. It doesn’t take much effort. Then you know everyone.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:47
Are they asking you then why are you raising money. Because you don’t need it. You grew to a X amount.
Mike Palmer: 18:52
You know, that’s a great question. And the answer for that is actually usually quite simple. It is in our model of sales led software growth. The answer is always doing sales expansion. And it takes money to do that because you have to hire and ramp those reps.
And if you’re doing that at scale, you know it costs money. And that’s why investors exist, right? That’s why they want to participate. So raising money is you know, it’s not focused on customers and it’s frankly not focused on product, which is what I like to spend my time. But it’s necessary.
It does provide the world with a marker on your performance, right? Because you’re getting this outside validation. And it’s also an opportunity to bring new help to the company. One of the things we focus on when we raise money is who’s best positioned to help us for the next few years, which is why we’re constantly bringing 1 or 2 new investors into the fold every round, because we think they’re better positioned to add, you know, to the team.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:00
I love to hear your thoughts on acquisition because I could see, okay, you know, if Sigma computing overlays on top of snowflake as they grow we’re going to grow. So like we have an invested interest in this thing. If you look at like the top people who have built applications who are successful on Sigma, you could probably do the exact same thing. But talk about your mentality around acquisition.
Mike Palmer: 20:27
You know, I think it’s first of all very there are multiple types of acquisitions. And if the core of all acquisitions has in the past been around technology and product and in software, it’s very difficult to integrate someone else’s product. We are very user, experience focused, and it’s easy to get to a Frankenstein. You know, even if someone else has a really nice other product, it’s not your product, you know? So taking their great product and your great product, putting them together can make a bad product.
So very difficult to think about a product oriented acquisition. And without product, it’s very difficult to think you’re going to do another type of acquisition, which is usually like buying a customer base or some other sort of team. So, you know, we’ve never done an acquisition. I think that the only type that really would appeal to us would be what’s everyone calls an acqui-hire. But, you know, this is more of a great team of people that want to join our mission.
And we are more than open to those discussions. But almost to the 99th percentile, it would be we would just shut the project down that they were building.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:37
Yeah. I mean, I’ve heard you talk about it and it makes sense because when you’re growing at the clip, you’re growing, just focusing on the energy on what you’re doing as opposed to divert energy to integration. It’s, you know, diverts the attention.
Mike Palmer: 21:53
So you can ruin both. Actually, you can ruin your own growth and the integration.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:57
I want to talk about some pivotal decisions throughout the journey. Obviously, when we talked on the front of the interview, it’s been tremendous growth over the past three years. But there was a point where it was like, I think when I was listening to you, it was maybe 800,000 in revenue. It was kind of staying the same. So talk about that point where you came in and where you started right before the inflection, where it started, the growth, what was going on at the time.
Mike Palmer: 22:27
So as I mentioned before, on the positive side, the idea that fueled the company is the very same idea that fuels the company today. So there was no need to change the mission. You know, the mission was solid. The opportunity was there. In fact, I think one of the things that helped us was that while the idea was great, the market that was making customers think differently and that was the adoption rate for things like at the time it was redshift and Snowflake was gaining a lot of momentum.
And if you put yourself back into that time frame, you remember snowflake was the largest and I think remains to this day the largest IPO in software history. So you could really like this was the group of people who were not just buying, but they were deploying data. And it takes some time to do that. And they’re starting to think differently, you know, okay, so now we’ve got a great idea, a great mission statement with a market that is maybe willing to listen. So if you have these two things, the one you have to add to that is your product.
Great. And to the credit of the team that was here when I joined five years ago, and in particular to the co-founders, it wasn’t great if the mission of the company was to sell to every single person, regardless of their skill set. Your product has to be simple, and our product had three parts to it. You had to move from part one to part two to part three and back. That’s far too complicated for the average person.
They are not going to adopt that product. So you have to put yourself into the mindset of a founder that is five years into the work. They’ve got 40 employees and maybe about as many customers. And the first decision we make is set it down right. Start over.
And that but that’s what we did. And you know I credit Rob and Jason. I credit the board. You know, who is now in the sixth year of that investment. And so we shut it down in terms of adding features in June of 20.
And we released the current version. Well, better said, like the seed of what we have today in June of 21. And I would say that is really the marker, which is your reference point over the last 3 to 4 years where we’ve gone from effectively 0 to 100, and getting the product right is the highest leverage decision that a team makes at a company. You know, you can fix the finance process. You can fix the sales team, you can change the marketing, but your product is what customers are going to renew year after year.
So getting that right was the most important decision we made. It was the inflection point for where we’ve gotten to today. And it remains, you know, to this day, the core of most decision making at the company.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 25:12
I’m curious, like how you communicated that, because when I think about it, it sounds so obvious now looking back. But like, if I am a developer and I spent like five years doing this and you’re like, hey, we’re scrapping everything, build this from scratch, I’d probably start pulling my hair out, right? And be like, wait, maybe we could just tweak maybe and talk about how do you communicate that so that people aren’t like, oh, all this work I put into this starting over.
Mike Palmer: 25:42
I don’t think it was difficult at the time. Number one, because it’s not like we were on fire anyway. But number two, what was interesting, and even before I joined the company, I had known some of the companies that had used Sigma, and the same comment kept coming out, you know, which was, this is a great idea. I can’t believe someone has not built this already. And when you keep hearing this, you’re like, okay, you know, there’s a need, you know.
It’s so obvious, this need that they can’t believe that someone’s not already done it. So then you just have to hold yourself accountable. It’s like, are we really delivering that, though? You know. And when you stare that down and you see the huge opportunity in front of you and you take an honest look at what you’ve built, it doesn’t take a lot of communication.
In fact, it’s the opposite. People get really, really antsy about, like, this isn’t the best for us, right? This was learning and we’re going to use that learning. But this is not the best us. Let’s go build a better version of this.
And they get super excited about it. And that’s what we did here. And there are some just super remarkable people who are not just great technologists, but they’re great listeners and they’re humble. One of the best cultural attributes of Sigma is that criticism is never taken defensively here. It’s you know, what they say.
It’s feedback is a gift. Right. And but it really is. You know, if someone’s willing to tell you whether you could do better, you’re like that. Thank you very much.
You know, I’m going to go package that. And now I don’t have to guess. And we’ve done that really well from when I long before I started here, but certainly starting here and, and up until today.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:23
Yeah. I remember one of my old high school coaches, I got really mad at him because he was like, just laying into me. He’s like, Jeremy, when I stop letting you, that’s when you should worry because I care, right? And so I’m like, okay, I always think about the same thing, just like taking that feedback. So a pivotal decision was getting the product right, just starting from scratch.
What was another you know we’re talking going $2 to $100 million. What was another pivotal decision in that growth?
Mike Palmer: 27:51
Second decision is where do you build that growth. And because you can’t do everything right, you’re small. I’m a firm believer that the modern age of software is about user experience. Variance. And you have to remember, like those of us that grew up in software, remember things like education teams, systems, integrations, bills, certifications, like all the things that were like high barriers.
Modern software is about no barriers. And if you’re going to learn to build a no barrier product, you have to go to a customer that has no resources and that customer is a small customer, right? It is a mid-market customer. So what you do is you go to the teams with no preconceptions, but also no resources. They don’t have ten people on the data team and 15 people in the buy team in our case.
Right. They’ve got a bunch of people who are doing ten other jobs, so they’re going to look at your product and be like, look, if I can use it, I’m going to use it because it’s going to help me, but no one’s going to help me, right? And this isn’t my job. My job is this other job. And you make sure your product is so usable, so easily deployed, it would never be shelfware.
And it takes no overhead to maintain it. And then you just hone that, you know, and you make that a core value proposition is how great the experience is of the product. And then you’re mindful of that. You keep jamming features in, but you never lose sight of the fact that more features cannot mean more complexity. Right?
So you just get better and better at it. And while you’re doing that and the product is getting better and better, the other thing you’re doing is acquiring the logos, and you’re not putting your company in a place where one attrition, you know, in the logo base changes the financial trajectory of your company because you’re just piling up logos, you know, and that learning resilience, credibility, the references and the use cases. This is what allows you to do the second major decision, and that is in the end, all software companies are large enterprise software companies because that’s the economic reality. You need to have larger deals. You need to be able to sell more dollars per sales rep, and they need to renew at a very high rate.
And these are characteristics of large enterprise software sales. So then you have to know when is the time to go to large enterprise. Because when you do, you take your great product and you open the door to the 15 other things that every single one of these large enterprises is going to demand of you and all 15 are going to be unique. They will never be leverageable and you just have to take that tax on. But it does set you up for this new economic reality of growing the business.
So that was, I think, maybe the third most important decision that we made.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:40
Before you go to the big, big logos like, you know, JP Morgan, the other ones. How do you reach the smaller people at enough scale to get to. So you’re like, okay, now we’re ready for the bigger logos.
Mike Palmer: 30:56
That is a really good question. You know, and for Sigma, The matter of fact, I generally believe this of technology. You really have to know the three wise. You know why something why you why now? And if you really have these answers down, how you find your customers become a little easier in our world.
Why? Something was I’ve bought Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks, and I think there’s more opportunity than what I currently would put on top of it. That’s old. In fact, the thing that is old may actually limit my use of this new data platform because of its architectural constraints. And so therefore, we found our customers by virtue of understanding who their customers were, who was a customer of snowflake, who’s a customer of redshift, who’s a customer of BigQuery.
Because we think they’re ready to be challenged by this opportunity. And we went to market with those partners to really communicate with customers what that opportunity was and why it was better for them and frankly, why it was better for the partner. Also. Right. As customers find new use cases to adopt their platforms, that was a fundamental part of building the not just the early business.
It is today still a fundamental part of building the business.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:19
So rebuilding the product, making just keep improving it, really zeroing in on ICP and then just finding out where all those people are living. And then it’s going to the next phase, which is larger deals, larger clients. I don’t know if JP Morgan was that pivotal point in the journey.
Mike Palmer: 32:42
You know, one of the things that you find about selling, what do they say? You know, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Right. And venturing into that gain is a very significant commitment for a small company. You do not sell these deals in six months.
You sell them over years, and after the years of effort and building and selling and features, you get a very small deal. That’s your reward. And from that small deal, if you do the right things, you can get huge deals. And so the decision had to be we’re going to go down this path because we can do lots of things. And those things probably would have generated more revenue at that time.
But we are now confident enough that we’re not going to die. You know, we are going to do okay. And we can start, you know, effectively kind of like we’re going to save for our retirement now. We’re going to we’re going to, we’re going to put away some people time, some development time, and we’re going to start investing, and we’re going to invest it in things that won’t pay off for three years. Now they started to pay off for us about a year ago.
You know. And the annuity on that is really significant because we’re not now deploying, you know, ten, 50, 100 licenses. We’re deploying 6,000 licenses at a time. And those companies do a lot of diligence. They’re very smart.
And as a result of all of that, they also don’t change their products every six months. You know, the changes that we’re making at these banks, they’re coming from products that have been there for 20 years. So you have to get to that point where you’re not living day to day anymore as a company, that you are able to sustain your necessary day to day growth while putting away or investing for growth. That won’t happen for 2 to 3 more years, but when it does happen, it’ll be fundamental to making sure that that growth rate continues in those years, because if you don’t do that investment, it becomes almost impossible to sustain a high growth rate.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:49
Talk about the evolution of the team over the past couple of years.
Mike Palmer: 34:55
Past couple of years, because that is a five-year journey for me. It’s not the last two years, you know, and. One of the hard things about being leaders at these companies, all of us on the team, is that there was a big debate, by the way, a few years ago. I think it was from maybe Robin Hood. I don’t want to misattribute the whole debate was like, you know, are your employees part of your family?
And I can just say they’re definitely not, you know, in fact, I think everyone has to look at their job. And if they’re a manager, you know, their team’s asking really one question, you know, is can is this person the right person for the next 2 to 3 years? Not forever. And you keep asking that question. And some people are amazing.
They evolve and they become the right person for the next 2 to 3 years. And that’s magic, because they’re carrying all the history and they’re changing and they’re learning and they’re adapting and they’re giving you all those benefits. And there are some that just aren’t. And they’re either aren’t by skill or they’re aren’t by interest. Some people are like, look, I really want to work for a company that has like fewer than 100 employees.
And after that it’s bureaucratic, you know, whatever, you know, like, great, go do something else. So changing the team is a question of two things. You know, it’s asking that question. And then I diverge from a lot of people’s philosophies when it comes to leaders in this thing. I’m about to say, a lot of people say the words like you need to, you know, invest ahead, and I don’t.
I wait until long past. It’s necessary to have a leader in the seat before I put a leader in the seat. And I do that for one reason, and that is really smart. Leaders want to have impact. And if the area in which they’re being hired to lead is not one of your two most important things, then inevitably that leader will be a distraction.
And this is what you cannot afford when you build a business. So the key to that is just knowing what your top two things are, making sure those top two things have the best people and kind of suffer through the other areas and just accept that consequence. And then when it becomes one of the most more important things, then you hire that leader and then you just help. Help them like crazy, you know, get up to speed as quickly as possible.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 37:20
What about on the sales front? How has the sales team changed?
Mike Palmer: 37:27
Man, it’s the exact example. You know, we had a CRO and well, better said we, I hired a CRO who was here for a year or so and kind of outgrew that person and brought in a second one who was here a couple of years and helped build the early part of our enterprise business. And kind of outgrew him and now have an amazing CRO, Marcello Gallo, who brings a wealth of experience, you know, from companies like MongoDB and BMC and is a, as I like to call it, a disciple of. We call this disciple of the Godfather. You know, who is John McMahon on our board, who is four times CRO very well known anywhere around software.
And in sales we had to follow the ICP. So that meant really building a very strong, increasingly shortening deal cycle around mid market acquisition. And then, you know, while that team was crushing it. And by the way, you should only make changes at a business when you’re crushing it. You should never make changes.
When you’re you have trouble then you’re already in trouble. So invest. And we started to hire sales leaders into the large enterprise space. But we gave him a lot very low quotas because we wanted them to be successful and we knew it was going to take time. And so we’ve been building that team in parallel.
We had to build fuel for all of those teams. So we built a strong partner organization. Now we’re investing increasingly in marketing, which is something we’ve avoided in the past. So we brought a new CMO on board just a couple of months ago, even, you know, already at $100 million not having one. Fred Studer is doing great.
So, you know, brought a CFO on last year. You know, we’re very thoughtful, very incremental about the way we add leadership so that we have a chance of making them successful and we don’t put the company through whiplash.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:29
Mike, I’m wondering what are your expectations for a CRO? Like if someone’s right now listening, they’re like, okay, we definitely need a CRO or we need to hire a new CRO. What are when you go into it, what are you thinking? What are your expectations?
Mike Palmer: 39:46
A couple of things. You know, one of them are the things that I would hope they would expect from me. You know as well, you know, which is like listening. Crows. We want them to bring some skills.
Like we look for med pick, for example, or medic as other some other people use, like that’s that process. We is our sales philosophy. We want someone that knows that and has implemented it and knows how to manage it. We don’t want to train that. We want that person to train the team on that.
But what that person is never going to know is Sigma. So they need to come here thinking, I need to learn about this product and this team, these customers. So I take this knowledge that I’m bringing in, I’ve got to combine it with something that it’s going to take me six months, maybe more to acquire. So learning is so key. And then we also have to change when this person comes on board.
So we have to learn. It’s not like we are what we are and they just have to assimilate. We all change all the time. So I think that’s key. I think the second one is I use this term all the time.
Most people know this term, which is broken windows. I am an adamant sort of broken windows believer if you’re not familiar with the term. This was the police commissioner of New York talked about dealing with quality of life crimes in New York City back in the Rudy Giuliani days. And if you were around New York at that time, if you stopped at a red light, someone would hop out and try to start washing your window and then hit you up for money. And it was just like little, you know, little things that just made life worse.
You know, in New York. And I applied to work here. And I want to Crowe who’s like, look, I’m not going to tolerate records, opportunity records that are not updated for five days like something happened. Why isn’t it in the record? Because when we operate this company at scale, it can’t be through word of mouth, right?
It has to be documented. Forecast accuracy. Stage accuracy. Another thing that we are very adamant about, which is maybe unique to us in the way that we think about sales leaders, is they are product managers. Our salespeople are product managers.
We want to know what use case are you selling? Who is the buyer? You know, what did they say? How did they think about the competitor or what was their call? You know, like what was their best alternative?
Give us what feature we were missing? What would have made this happen faster? We don’t just want the deal. We want to be educated by the deal so that that can be incorporated into the product or into the process, and we can make every other rep better, and that we can put ourselves on that flywheel of being better over time. And I think that is maybe a little unusual.
You know, when we talk to our sales teams about being product managers, but it is key focus for us.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:29
I remember I think it was in the tipping point, kind of what you were saying. Also Malcolm Gladwell’s book where like they were looking at those small little crimes that were whatever, jumping over the turnstile in the subway, that when they crack down on those, it led to big changes. So I totally get what you’re saying with that. You know what’s interesting, Mike, about your journey is, you know, it’s it’s pretty random when I think about it, okay? Because, you know, you studied, you know, biology and Spanish.
You went on to teach for America. So, like, at that point in your life, what were you thinking you wanted to do?
Mike Palmer: 43:13
Who knows? Honestly, I can spin this anyway. You know, first of all, I’m from a really small place. I grew up next to a dairy farm. And where I’m from, you, you know, you were.
The professions were doctor and lawyer, you know, teacher, there really wasn’t much else. And so I didn’t have any idea you could use the term business, but that was like this amorphous thing that you could do anyway. So went off to college. I had no idea, to my sort of discredit. Like I went through college thinking maybe I was going to be a doctor because like, that was one of the things you could be.
And I never learned anything else. So I still didn’t know. And I actually took a fifth year at college, still trying to figure that out. And I got this grant so I could do it for free, which just allowed me to kick the can down the road a little further. And I still didn’t know after the fifth year, which is why I wanted to teach for America.
So two more years of still kicking that can down the road now to credit teach for America. It’s a tremendous program. I tell everybody that if you want to learn how to engage an audience, try teaching physics to English as second language students. In the seventh period of their day.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:26
Physics to anyone. But yes, exactly.
Mike Palmer: 44:28
Exactly. You know, in the school that I taught at, you know, people would show up, Kids would show up as having just emigrated or immigrated to the US like the day before. And this would be like, I don’t know, February 20th and there would be a new person sitting there. Do you think they cared about physics? I mean, they’re just like trying to figure out where they are.
I had a tremendous time teaching those two years. I learned a ton. I hope the kids learned something. What were some.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 44:55
Of the things that you remember? I’m sure it’s similar to leadership principles that you were using to get their attention, to teach them. What were some of the things you were doing now, then, that you you do now?
Mike Palmer: 45:08
Well, actually, that’s a really good question. One is, it’s all in the preparation. You know, the thing about kids that some of the schools like this is. You have to be organized. You cannot allow them to get up from their chairs and do something randomly because bad things happen.
Right. You have to like, I know how I’m going to get this person, this group of kids, to get this equipment to this place at this time. And you have to think through that, you know, and really understand how this is going to happen. Everyone thinks that teaching is this inspirational thing, and I do want teachers to believe they’re inspirational. But the reality is that 90% of teaching is logistics.
And then you get 10% of inspiration. So logistics is number one. Get the logistics right. Because kids want to know like what’s expected. What do I do right now?
If you give them space to not know, they will fill that space and it won’t be good. Second thing is when you’re presenting, you’re entertaining. Like be physical, move around. You know, like it’s hard for kids. They’re sitting in desks.
They’re doing this seven hours in a row. It’s terrible. Honestly, we have so learn how to present in a way people care. Even today. One of the things that I keep in mind is when I give a presentation, 80% of what people remember from that presentation is, did I like him or not?
Not the message, you know. That was the third thing that I took away from that. And I actually learned this honestly, many years later. There was a student that called me many years after. I’ve not told this story to anyone on these sort of forums before, but she wanted to talk to me and she wanted to thank me.
She and I had had a conversation where, you know, she was contemplating suicide, and I had no idea at the time I had I mean, this person was telling me the story many years after I was a teacher, and this person is doing super well now. I almost fell out of my chair, you know, and I was 23 years old. I had no clue, but what I remember even today is how impactful things that we say to people can be in a way that sometimes it’s hard in the moment. We have to process in the moment more than what we think these moments can be, you know? And the more senior you become in an organization, the more some of these words matter.
And sometimes, by the way, sometimes they’re misinterpreted almost intentionally, at times misinterpreted. I feel like I remember this lesson a lot. I’m a pretty blunt person. It’s not like I pull punches, but it does. It lingers in the back of my mind.
You know that I’m only blunt for the purpose of helping somebody. I am never blunt to tear them down. And I really want to believe that if I’m honest with them and direct that I’ve given them maybe a tool to be better. And I always want them leaving. Like my this was all supportive.
You said this earlier in the call. You know, I earn this a podcast, right? I am giving you this feedback because I care, right? If I wasn’t giving you. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t tell you anything at all.
I wouldn’t waste my time. So these are some of the things that I think about. But it was a very formative time.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:33
With that person. Was there something that stuck out to them? Was there something direct feedback that you gave them or what was it?
Mike Palmer: 48:42
I’ll be honest. If she told me in this call that I’m referring to, I was so stunned that I don’t remember.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 48:53
It was just something of your influence that helped.
Mike Palmer: 49:00
I don’t know what I said. I honestly, I don’t know. I to this day. And if she told me, like I said, I was probably still processing 99% of my thoughts were, oh my God, if I had done something differently, this could have been a different outcome. And like I, how did I not know, you know, sort of thing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 49:18
But we never know what people are going through when we’re talking. You don’t. Yeah.
Mike Palmer: 49:24
You don’t know, and I, I mean I want people, as I said earlier, like when they work here. Whether they are here next year or two years or three years from now, I don’t know. And I have and we all have to make decisions about that. I do want them, though, to be better under all circumstances. If they’re still in the chair here, or if they go somewhere else, they’re going to be better people.
Having worked here, I really, really want that and I want them. To benefit from the best that we can give them, which doesn’t always matter of fact, many times isn’t making them feel great or feel like pushing them and knowing that they’re learning is really that goal.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 50:07
Mike, I know we only have a few minutes left. I have one last question. First of all, thank you. Thanks for sharing the lessons in the journey. It’s really amazing to hear this.
And people can check out SigmaComputing.com to learn more. My last question is just about resources, mentors, and this could be mentors that helped you throughout your journey. From a business perspective, it could be distant mentors, just like books that you learn from as well or combination. So what are some of the resources and mentors that have influenced you?
Mike Palmer: 50:45
Really has changed? You know, through the course of my career, I did a lot. I never went to business school. I ended up learning all of the, and I quote, business school lessons out of books. So I was like, no, I’m not going to have the chance to be taught this.
I’m going to have to learn it. And so at some level, mentorship just has to be self-motivated. And I will be to my discredit. Again, I am the sort of person that needs to put my hand on the burner. Even though someone told me it was hot, I need to feel the pain to really internalize the lesson.
So I’m a terrible mentee. I’ll be honest. Having said that, I am pretty good at assimilating not just the things that people do well, but the things they don’t, you know? So I’m like, okay, you can learn something from everybody and you. I write down these lessons, I have stories, I have a whole thing of anecdotes, you know, that I just remember, you know, and as a reminder to myself, it’s almost like my daughter’s auntie, what’s she call it feels like an inspiration page.
And, you know, like Pinterest, for example. It’s like I have almost like that in words in any way, but I will credit, you know, for the last five years I have you’ve you’ve flashed them up before. We have really amazing board members and they have seen a lot, you know, they’ve seen failure and still pursue it, you know? They still are mostly failing, but the successes they had are tremendous. I had an hour long conversation with a board member this morning.
You know, who is giving me the best of the way? You know, his thoughts and the way he sees the world. And I appreciate every one of these conversations. They will never realize how much I remember, you know, from them. In fact, I told one board member a story about another board member, something he told me three years ago.
It was one sentence, but I have never forgotten it. And I’ve never taken offense. I have one, you know, Mike Spicer’s a legendary investor. He’s not nice to me.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 52:54
But for instance, in the picture, actually.
Mike Palmer: 52:57
He like that in real life, you know. But it’s not. But it’s never like I want Mike to be nice to me. I don’t want Mike to be truthful with me and direct, you know, because that sets me up for success. Brad, who’s what I was talking to earlier today, you know, I don’t want him to tell me things that I want to hear. I want him to tell me things that are going to kill me if I don’t, do, you know, pay attention to them and things he’s seen with other companies that are further down the road than we are, and we have a chance to do something differently than they did.
Those I will, I, I often wonder whether I expressed the appreciation for these learnings. Like I never pushed back. Like I was like, tell me more. I can always decide myself whether to take advice, but what I can’t decide is whether I get it, you know? So I want to be as open as possible in getting it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 53:42
Love it. Mike, I want to be the first one to thank you. Everyone check out SigmaComputing.Com to learn more and we’ll see everyone next time. Mike thanks so much.
Mike Palmer: 53:53
Thank you, Dr. Weisz. It was a pleasure.
