Interviews > ExtraMile Video series

We would go to brain share and just being surrounded by the people solving the technology problem. It was just this really cool mix of hyper intelligent people, humble people, problem solver people. And even though I wasn't at the time, I wasn't technical yet. 

I didn't really have a very technical background. I definitely fell in love with the IT industry and the people. And I just knew at that point that I wanted to be around it. 

So, from there, the next challenge was, okay, you're going to be in the IT industry. Now you got to get some street cred if you're going to be a leader in this industry. And definitely that's where I wanted to go with it. 

So, then there was a whole other journey we could speak to around how do you get that technology base and background so that you can actually know what you're talking about, not just be solely a business mind in the IT space. I wanted to be much more than that. So getting that experience was, I think, probably the second challenge after figuring out what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be with. 

Host: Amazing. Moving on, as a CEO, you have to make crucial decisions that affect the entire organization. So, can you share a challenging decision you made and what was your thought process behind it? 

Ryan: Yeah, I think as CEO, you really have to drive vision for your organization. And early on in the company, that's tricky because you also own all of the tactical aspects of the business as well, and nothing can fall down. And so, I think early on, when you own a lot of that stuff combined, sometimes it's hard to separate how you divide and conquer the needs of the business across those two things. 

As the business matures and grows and you have people that you trust to kind of handle the tactical stuff, even the vision stuff and the strategy behind the broader disciplines of the business, then you get to move more and more into the vision of the company. And that's definitely where I feel like I'm at and I really enjoy that space. But to really answer the question, I think the number one challenge across all those phases of the business is to understand what is the next market transition and to stay ahead of it. 

So, there's a lot of things you can do to actively understand what the market transition is and how to stay ahead of it. But that's the number one challenge because if you miss a market transition, the best technology in the world becomes old really fast. And that's only accelerating in terms of how quickly these market transitions come up on you and hit you. 

Host: I agree with you. It just keeps evolving and you have to keep up with it. Do you believe that intelligent document and record management helps businesses streamline their operations? 

Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. But I think that's kind of payable stakes. And where we see technology going is, of course, we had a very strong start on the print side and we sell more print licenses every year. 

In fact, we sell more print management licenses to our existing customers every year on average. So that's kind of an interesting thing where we've talked about paperless for years and years and years. And at the same time, the reality of most businesses is they're dealing with paper and printing. 

And in some cases, it's actually accelerating. If you have label printers, we help manage those and those are growing by 40% a year. So, it's multifaceted. 

And I would say that analog physical experience of doing business still exists. But as you move into those printers, those multifunctional devices, becoming not just a printer and spitting out paper and physical stuff, but also being that docking station where you scan a document and it has to become, to your point, not just an image, but an intelligent document where you know what's going on, what the data is behind it, how to index specific fields on that, and where and how to route it, that becomes kind of the next challenge as we live in this world right now where that printer is doing both of those things, both spitting out physical documents and intaking physical documents to make them digital. 

And so, I would say that when I say it's table stakes, it's table stakes to be able to make a dumb document, resurrect the data on that and make it intelligent. That's table stakes for the space that we're in. I think where that market transition is going is how do you actually take that document and move it into an intelligent workflow? 

Not just make it be an intelligent document, but move it into an intelligent workflow. And in that context, you now start to say, how do we move it into an intelligent workflow that incorporates AI? Because just knowing data and indexing fields has been done for a long time. 

Moving it into an AI model and having the ability for the flexibility. Like one AI model might be really great today, but it might be overtaken tomorrow by a better technology. So now you've got to say, how do we drive really simple integration into being able to switch up AI technology and get the most out of the latest, greatest AI technology as you move a document through workflow? 

And those are some of those market transitions, those challenges, the competitive advantages that businesses are going to need that we're really striving towards and creating great partnerships. I think partnerships becomes a really important part of that, like being good partners with AWS, Microsoft and Google, obviously, and having tight integrations into the AI models that they're building, obviously. But then you have a whole other group of kind of not so big names that are creating really neat, specialized models and having a broad array of partnerships across that group of AI providers is kind of what goes beyond intelligent document and into like really intelligent workflow. 

Host: That sounds very fascinating. So, as we all know, you and your team serve multiple clients globally. So, what strategies do you use to keep clients satisfied while addressing their concerns and supporting their business growth simultaneously? 

Ryan: Well, number one is listen, you know, I'm always fascinated and there's a way to do it, right? There's business models where you have essentially CFOs that become CEOs and their job is to identify and create an M&A strategy where you go out and you acquire other technologies that might not be accelerating so that you can capture the market, so to speak, of the customers that are stuck on old technology. And then you start to aggregate those and then you try to squeeze the net income out of the customers and the technology, right? 

Like that's one strategy. And there's a large group of folks out there who make a lot of money doing that. And I think that that does at the end of the day, a lot of times that does the customers a disservice. 

So having CEOs and that's what I love. I talk about market transitions. You have more and more CEOs that are technologists that are able to keep up on the business side and go out and sit and be with the customer and listen to them and hear that challenge, that next market transition. 

They have all of those answers. So, I think I think it's important as people look at, you know, making technology decisions that they really are paying attention to the leadership of the organization and the strategy of the organization and find innovative companies with innovative engineering minds at the helm that are truly listening to the customers. So, that's kind of I would say step one is it's one thing to say we listen to our customers. 

This is another thing to be able to actually interpret what they're saying and be able to then provide the engineering behind how to create that for them. And I think that's step number one. Step number two is you've got to have a follow the sun model. 

And what is brilliant is here you are in India and we're doing a podcast and we have such powerful technology. And if everybody is willing to kind of sometimes I get up early and sometimes they get up early, you know, or stay up late, if we're willing to do that, you know, in just enough proper cadence, we really can just serve our customers needs from a support organization with a follow the sun model. And, you know, for a company our size, we have about 400 people in our organization. 

That would be really difficult in the past. That would be a really difficult thing to do. So, it's just cool that we have the technologies where we can create a really powerful support model following the sun, finding engineers from all over the world that are best in class. 

I mean, we have engineers in Ghana. We have and they do an amazing job supporting all of kind of the EMEA Europe. And then we have a really strong group of engineers in the Philippines and they support all of Asia. 

And so just being able to forward deploy, you know, we obviously we have engineers in country, too. But in terms of a really strong support model where they're in that time zone, taking advantage of technologies and the fact that there's brilliant people all over the world, that's kind of key to giving and delivering real support. So, you know, that'd be kind of a two-part answer to that question, I think. 

Host: So, moving on, what do you think will be the biggest challenge and innovations in the print automation industry like in the coming years? And how is Vasion preparing for them? 

Ryan: Well, I don't I don't see a lot of challenges so much as I see opportunities. The reality is, you know, the print server has been around for a long time. It's been the status quo. 

It's been the way people have just done printing. We've had hashtag print nightmare. It's exposed some of the security issues that come up with having physical devices or even virtual devices spread across your network. 

And then having all these jobs run through it. And so, I think I think there's just an opportunity where people have an awareness and awakeness to those security challenges. And they're rethinking that print server just as a as an architecture. 

You know, I would say that that early on as we built the business, we built the business. If you look at kind of the innovators curve, we built the business on that early there were the early adopters and the innovators that kind of lived in that first 16 percent of the curve. We built a business around those folks. 

But then you have to cross this chasm. And it's really hard to do to cross this chasm to get into the early majority of the market. And we lived for a long time, you know, not being able to cross that chasm. 

But when COVID hit, all of a sudden, the fact that we had torn our software down, we had built a cloud native application that was fully immutable with, you know, everything, everything designed to really produce and provide a zero trust environment in the print context. As soon as COVID hit, that was like dump trucks just came and filled up that chasm overnight. And we were able to just drive straight into having a conversation with that early majority. 

And now we're getting deep into the late majority where we're kind of becoming the de facto way that you do printing. And so, from a end user print management, I think that's one of the best opportunities is organizations are recognizing the challenges of maintaining print servers. And for us, it just feels like this really great conversation that we're having with lots of folks about how to simplify that. 

The other opportunity that we see is there's another context of print management that's traditionally been called output management. And we see an opportunity to change that category where output management is typically instead of end users printing from Excel or from a browser, you have SAP, for example, just creating and generating a print job and sending it directly to a printer. There's a lot of logic that goes on when you send a print job like that. 

Like you got to know, hey, did it get there? If it didn't get there, reroute it to another printer. And yet you have to have kind of essentially a workflow on the back end that says, what do we do if this doesn't happen? 

And then you need to report back. So, in that context, the challenge is most of the output management print software is focused on like mainframe software doing mainframe print jobs. And a lot of the technology is kind of that old. 

And so another opportunity for us is to take a modern cloud native piece of software and pair that up on a truly fast environment that is mapping to when you look at an SAP, when you look at an Oracle, when you look at an Epic in the healthcare space, when you look at a Cerner, all of them are starting to move their customers more to a cloud version of things. So I think one of the little tricks of the trade that we're seeing out there is instead of software companies going and actually doing the hard work and re-architecting and rebuilding their software, they're taking their old stuff, throwing it up in the cloud and saying, hey, we have a fast solution. And inevitably, from a security perspective, that just falls so short in terms of what IT organizations are actually trying to do moving forward. 

And so that's another opportunity. It's like taking people away from and being stuck in this kind of output management mainframe mindset and moving them into a true SaaS solution and what we call output automation. Because the second you start to move away from output management, how do I manage the output? 

And you move into saying, I'm going to take this output that's coming out and I could automate it in a thousand different ways. I could move it into a workflow. I could ask for approvals. 

I could run it through an AI model before it even goes to print. Those are some of the fun things that we're innovating around and the opportunities that we see massive opportunity just in the print space by itself. 

Host: Speaking of challenges, what challenges are IT leaders facing in balancing digitalization with increasing security demands? And how can automation help them manage these pressures? 

Ryan: Well, it's funny because you say, how can automation help? And I think you've got to get really clear on what is automation. So, like when we talk about automation, we see it in kind of three different phases. 

First, there was digitization, which was not even an automation phase. We were just like, you know, you used to type on a typewriter and I'm old enough to I learned to type on a typewriter. And then all of a sudden these word processors came out and you learned how to move that into a digital experience on a computer. 

And you had Microsoft Word, for example. So that was kind of like the digitization process. Immediately after that, once it started to get digitized, we started hiring developers to go drive automation. 

And I call that task automation. So, an email comes in, it hits an inbox. You have a developer say, recognize that that hit and now automate an email response. 

That was really early on, but we were requiring a lot of developers to do that. What it evolved to in kind of the state of the union right now is it's evolved from this task automation into what Gartner calls hyper automation. And hyper automation, just simply put, is an organization automating everything, every process that can be automated. 

And we were part of that with our printer logic products, right? What did we do? We hyper automated everything related to printing and Salesforce.com did. They hyper automated everything in relation to what a sales process would look like. NetSuite hyper automated everything that you could think of with relation to accounting software. And the list goes on and on and on of these applications that were hyper automated. 

So, to answer the question is what are the main challenges and security challenges that people face? While hyper automation has been a positive thing and a move in the right direction, we're definitely starting to get into the limit of this hyper automation state, which is how do we now, because all of those things are living in silos. So, printer logic doesn't naturally talk to Salesforce.com. 

We have to build these things together and it still requires development. We've got iPads coming in to help shortcut that. It still requires quite a bit of work to tie all this stuff together. 

So those silos create a lot of costs, a lot of expense. And in addition to that, with all of those integrations comes security challenges. So I would say that just the natural state of hyper automation is, while it's really good and we're all doing good things to move into the future with it, we need to move away from hyper automation and we need to move into what we call orchestrated automation, where we start to build platforms that reduce the number of point products required to do the table stake stuff. 

You shouldn't have to have a separate application for an e-form and for a digital signature and for a workflow and to manage your storage or to ingest a scan. You should have a table stake platform that does all of those things. So, you're not having to create integrations with which also open up security attack vectors. 

And then once you have a good platform like that should help you understand what automations you have from a single pane of glass, like what is the automation that I have and how much do these automation cost me? That's orchestrating your automation. From there, that platform needs to do a really good job of very simply connecting and clicking into third party applications or AI models without developers having to get involved. 

So those are where the security issues start to arise. And I think an orchestrated automation platform is the answer to simplify that stuff and reduce the number of attack vectors that come from those custom integrations, so to speak. 

Host: As we're all aware, innovation is key to success. How do you encourage a culture of innovation at Vasion? And what steps do you take to ensure new ideas that are supported and implemented? 

Ryan: Well, I think number one, it comes down to values. And we have a very interesting, a very intentional set of we don't have a ton of values, but we have four core values that we really try to drive internally. I don't know that now is the time to kind of go through those individually. 

But I think the concept of having a core set of values that everybody can rally around is really, really important. I didn't see that early on as an early entrepreneur, kind of like the values were just instilled in the people that you hired. But as you get bigger, certainly actively paying attention to what makes you tick as an organization and driving conversation and rewards around those values occurring is a big part of that. 

And yeah, I think that's kind of the number one thing is knowing who you are as an organization, having values that drive that and then actively paying attention to those values. 

Host: Lastly, what advice would you give someone who wants to start their own business? Is there a formula for achieving rapid success? 

Ryan: It's funny. Obviously, I get asked these kinds of questions quite a bit. And my answer is always the same, which is, I think the secret to being like there's kind of two ways to be an entrepreneur. 

One of them is to find a commoditized product and figure out a better process to deliver that commoditized product more efficiently. And a lot of people make a lot of money doing that. And that could be a service, it could be good, but something that is kind of ubiquitous. 

But you learn how to deliver it more efficiently and better the market. So that's one way to be an entrepreneur. And I don't really speak to that a whole lot. 

I think I could probably figure that out, but I haven't lived in that space a lot. The second way to try to show up as an entrepreneur, I think is to innovate and produce something novel that didn't exist or solve a problem that hasn't been solved before. And I think that's where we as a company have really lived for a long time and where we continue to live. 

And as long as I'm around, we'll continue to live into that space. And it's funny because I get this question a lot. What is the roadmap for you to be an entrepreneur? 

And how do I do it? How do I accelerate that? And I would just say that if it's your first time through, I don't like number one, it's all about your original thinking, your primary thinking. 

It's like you're going to have to produce your own song. And I don't think that there's a formula for that. It's like asking, why are the Beatles really so amazing? 

Or why do so many people love Elvis? It's like, we don't know. But they had a way of writing a song that was unique and provided something special to the world that people could not listen to. 

And so, I think that that's something to pay attention to as an entrepreneur, is to know which category you live in. Are you that person who is going to drive that original thought? Or are you somebody coming up with a commoditized thing and you're going to deliver it in a better way? 

So that's step number one, because I see a lot of people trying to be original thinkers that probably would do a lot better in process and vice versa. Some people trying to build process-driven businesses that should definitely be innovators and thinkers. And that makes for a really long road and frustrating road because you're not in your natural habitat, so to speak. 

So, I would say that's step number one, is just pay attention to how... Some people love the asymmetric nature of that original thinking and some people hate it, but they don't want to end up in that wrong habitat. So that's number one. 

Number two is shifting on to the space that I know more about. Once you have that original thought or the original thinking going on and you're good at that, I don't know the shortcut. I've been on this journey since 2012 on this particular opportunity. 

And while we're having kind of meteoric sales and growth acceleration right now, it's all built on the backs of two guys in a shared office space saying... I remember when Jarrett and I first sat down together. And I think this would be one of the keys. 

I remember that one of the first things that I said when we decided to... We wrote the business plan and we decided to sit down and kind of go after it. I turned to him and I said, look, I know that you're the CEO and I'm the president and COO, and those are our titles. 

But the reality is you're a system engineer and I'm an account executive and we got to figure out how to crack the code on how to sell this stuff. And then we went from there. So, I think step number two is be humble. 

Don't fake it till you make it. Don't try to overdo it. Be authentically where you're at. 

And that doesn't mean you don't wear a lot of hats and doesn't mean you don't try to cover a lot of ground. You have to cover a lot of ground. And you can't look so small that nobody can trust you. 

And I understand all of that. And that's a game that you have to balance and play as a very early entrepreneur. But I see people overdo it and try to look like there's a Lamborghini king or whatever. 

And I very rarely see that be effective. Just slow down. We were back in Jarrett's old F250 up to trade shows and jumping out with our stuff and running into the trade show floor before the union bosses could stop us and setting up our shop to try to save a buck. 

Don't overspend. Don't buy the fancy cars. Just be humble in that, especially always, but in that first stage. 

People will respect the authentic state that you're at and that you're coming at it as truly a problem solver instead of just a sales organization. And you'll get more customers early on that way. You'll be surprised how many folks will actually respect you for that and be excited about you showing up that way. 

So those would be the two main pieces of advice. Know which habitat you belong in. And if it can be this innovative thought, be humble and be authentic. 

Don't try to overdo it. 

Host: That's some solid advice. So just to end this on a fun and a light note, if you could have any superpower, what would it be and why? 

Ryan: Oh, man. Any superpower? Well, I think one thing for me would be, well, I mean, honestly, I used to have this reoccurring dream where I could jump really high and kind of like just hover in the air. 

I just still get it every once in a while. I love this dream. And I would love to just be able to actually do that. 

Just jump and kind of hover and then almost fly a little bit. Definitely get to fly every once in a while. So, if I could live that dream out, and I probably am in some alternate universe somewhere, if we can still believe in string theory. 

I don't know if that's getting a little beat up these days, but maybe I'm doing that somewhere out there. But that would be really cool if I could do that on Earth at some point. 

Host: Thank you so much, Ryan. It's been a pleasure talking with you. 

Ryan: It was a hoot. Yeah. Good to meet you. 

Thanks for your time. 

Host: Thank you, everyone, for tuning in to this episode of ExtraMile by SecureITWorld. I am your host, Sayali, signing off. Stay tuned for more insightful episodes with industry leaders. 

Until then, keep exploring, keep learning. Thank you.