2025-12-08_brainforge_x_cta_okta_solutions_3baeedfe

Meeting Title: Brainforge x CTA: Okta Solutions! Date: 2025-12-08 Meeting participants: Samuel Roberts, Katherine Bayless, Uttam Kumaran, Jay Heavner

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WEBVTT

1 00:00:14.320 ⇒ 00:00:15.370 Katherine Bayless: Hello!

2 00:00:18.260 ⇒ 00:00:18.860 Samuel Roberts: Hey.

3 00:00:19.390 ⇒ 00:00:20.649 Katherine Bayless: Thanks, Sam. How’s it going?

4 00:00:21.780 ⇒ 00:00:23.459 Samuel Roberts: Pretty good. How about yourself?

5 00:00:23.850 ⇒ 00:00:26.880 Katherine Bayless: Pretty good. Like, I’m curious for a Monday.

6 00:00:26.880 ⇒ 00:00:30.269 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, it’s a big Monday for me, I’m playing catch-up from the last…

7 00:00:30.600 ⇒ 00:00:30.990 Katherine Bayless: Oh my gosh.

8 00:00:30.990 ⇒ 00:00:32.970 Samuel Roberts: Giving through now, so, yeah.

9 00:00:32.970 ⇒ 00:00:33.930 Katherine Bayless: Welcome back, welcome back.

10 00:00:33.930 ⇒ 00:00:35.440 Samuel Roberts: Thank you, thank you, yeah.

11 00:00:36.050 ⇒ 00:00:48.810 Katherine Bayless: I’ll wait, there’s the John. I was gonna say, I’ll wait to say that, Jay, I think, is gonna be maybe, like, 20 or so minutes behind me. He had to take his brand new puppy to the vet. Not for a bad thing, just for a, like, you know, first visit, you know.

12 00:00:48.810 ⇒ 00:00:55.159 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, of course. All that kind of stuff. I realize that could be a really scary sentence. Yeah, I guess I assumed it was okay if it’s a new puppy, but yeah.

13 00:00:55.160 ⇒ 00:01:08.960 Katherine Bayless: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, so he’s taking him in for his, like, first checkup, and so I think the appointment was at 11, so he said he’d join as soon as he got back to his desk, but I figured there’s probably stuff we can use the time to talk about anyway, so no need to reschedule. Cool. So, hello, good morning.

14 00:01:08.960 ⇒ 00:01:26.030 Uttam Kumaran: Good morning, I gave Sam a little bit of the overview, but I think I wasn’t… I also didn’t have, like, tons of details, so yeah, maybe, like, we could use a little bit of the beginning just to prep for that. The only, probably, thing on the data side to call out is Ashwini had some questions about the remembers data.

15 00:01:27.320 ⇒ 00:01:31.149 Uttam Kumaran: Just, like, matching up some of the relationships that you mentioned.

16 00:01:31.300 ⇒ 00:01:33.040 Uttam Kumaran: In the report.

17 00:01:33.210 ⇒ 00:01:40.600 Uttam Kumaran: Basically what we’re basically trying to do is, like, leverage that report as, like, a first test for end-to-end BDT.

18 00:01:40.740 ⇒ 00:01:46.000 Uttam Kumaran: So… That’s what we’ve, he just sent a note there about that, so…

19 00:01:46.340 ⇒ 00:01:48.660 Katherine Bayless: Okay, okay, yeah, let me… I’ll…

20 00:01:48.770 ⇒ 00:01:51.989 Katherine Bayless: send him a note. Truthfully, I think…

21 00:01:53.420 ⇒ 00:01:58.080 Katherine Bayless: I’m like, honestly, maybe I’ll take a first pass at helping him get set on the right direction.

22 00:01:58.080 ⇒ 00:02:01.619 Uttam Kumaran: Well, I also said you could just… you could just plug us with their numbers, too.

23 00:02:02.310 ⇒ 00:02:04.920 Katherine Bayless: Well, yeah, I mean, yeah.

24 00:02:05.050 ⇒ 00:02:07.890 Uttam Kumaran: Or we could go directly to the report.

25 00:02:08.160 ⇒ 00:02:10.649 Katherine Bayless: Well, I guess mainly it’s like, we’re just trying to…

26 00:02:10.780 ⇒ 00:02:14.390 Uttam Kumaran: Find out if we’re using the right join keys and places like that.

27 00:02:14.980 ⇒ 00:02:26.960 Katherine Bayless: Yeah, so that’s why I’m like, I think I might be able to answer, depending on what exactly he’s stuck on, I might know more about the join keys than the folks in-house, and the remembers folks are difficult.

28 00:02:28.750 ⇒ 00:02:29.280 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.

29 00:02:29.470 ⇒ 00:02:37.409 Katherine Bayless: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I’ve done a few, implementations of remembers for, like, the YWCA and for the,

30 00:02:37.410 ⇒ 00:02:49.640 Katherine Bayless: Textile Rental Services Association, because there’s one of us for everything. And so I, like, I’m pretty familiar with the data model on the back end, and it is… it is an odd one. Like, it’s a little convoluted, but…

31 00:02:50.250 ⇒ 00:02:50.930 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.

32 00:02:50.930 ⇒ 00:02:51.630 Katherine Bayless: No.

33 00:02:51.860 ⇒ 00:02:54.540 Katherine Bayless: So yeah, I’ll follow up with Ashmini.

34 00:02:56.880 ⇒ 00:03:13.259 Katherine Bayless: Oh, and then you had a question about Fridays at 10.30? Totally great for me. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Fridays are actually usually a pretty good day to catch me for the most part, because, like, everything else tends to be kind of quiet. Sometimes. Sometimes. But yeah, 10.30 this Friday is perfect.

35 00:03:14.700 ⇒ 00:03:24.810 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, cool. And then, yeah, I mean, I guess, do we want to just jump into the Okta stuff? You wanna… do you want to set the stage for that, and then maybe we can…

36 00:03:25.100 ⇒ 00:03:29.470 Uttam Kumaran: start to talk about it, and that way Jay doesn’t have to do that, he can just hop right in.

37 00:03:30.180 ⇒ 00:03:38.129 Katherine Bayless: Yeah, so I can… I can at least give a little bit of the basics. Definitely Jay’s gonna have the deeper, sort of more technical, bits, but,

38 00:03:38.230 ⇒ 00:03:39.739 Katherine Bayless: At a high level.

39 00:03:39.770 ⇒ 00:03:53.790 Katherine Bayless: I mean, truthfully, like, it sounds silly, but, like, the chief complaint bringing us to the table today is that I’ve never had to enter my password as much as I do here. Like, enter, enter my password. And other people are sort of complaining about the same thing.

40 00:03:53.790 ⇒ 00:03:59.910 Katherine Bayless: like, I have to enter it twice, or, you know, I’m entering it after I’ve put in the two-factor thing already, right? And so it’s like…

41 00:03:59.930 ⇒ 00:04:04.539 Katherine Bayless: It’s just this, like, a lot of friction around logging in.

42 00:04:05.230 ⇒ 00:04:06.180 Katherine Bayless: Which…

43 00:04:06.250 ⇒ 00:04:27.089 Katherine Bayless: there’s a lot of friction in our systems in general, and so when there’s something that’s friction-full around such a basic piece, I mean, the pitchforks, they come after Jay very quickly, and I know he’s been trying to disentangle a lot of the stuff in Okta, but, like, I’m like, let’s just… let’s bring in some help, right? I mean, I think, you know, instead of waiting for you to get 5 minutes here and there to keep troubleshooting.

44 00:04:27.090 ⇒ 00:04:29.869 Katherine Bayless: Like, let’s see if we can get, like, a holistic look at this.

45 00:04:30.640 ⇒ 00:04:46.870 Katherine Bayless: As far as I understand, the challenges come from sort of, like, two main things. One is that we are using Okta to authenticate, username and password authenticate, everyone who comes in contact with our systems, which means all 150,000 people registering for CES,

46 00:04:46.870 ⇒ 00:04:51.319 Katherine Bayless: have to have a username and password in Okta in order to get in to register.

47 00:04:51.460 ⇒ 00:04:54.499 Katherine Bayless: Yeah, exactly, that’s the right eyes for that.

48 00:04:54.500 ⇒ 00:04:54.820 Samuel Roberts: Okay.

49 00:04:54.820 ⇒ 00:05:07.359 Katherine Bayless: Yeah, right? And so, like, I think we have two tenants now, one that is for, like, internal staff and, like, known entities that do need to interact regularly, and then one that is for this larger audience.

50 00:05:07.360 ⇒ 00:05:18.130 Katherine Bayless: But they’re still both using username and password. In my experience, implementing authentication and stuff like this, you would use, like, a magic link sort of setup for everybody who’s not dealing with you on a day-to-day basis, just because

51 00:05:18.460 ⇒ 00:05:25.360 Katherine Bayless: handlier. Interestingly, our Google Analytics actually show a little bit of the

52 00:05:25.840 ⇒ 00:05:38.210 Katherine Bayless: trouble this is causing for people trying to register for CES, because we actually see the Okta dashboard as one of our, like, top referrers to registration, but they’re only landing there because they got stuck in some sort of forgot password hell, right?

53 00:05:38.210 ⇒ 00:05:39.120 Samuel Roberts: Right.

54 00:05:39.300 ⇒ 00:05:50.649 Katherine Bayless: So there’s that piece, I think is… long-term, we need to figure out how do we stop username and passwording all these people, probably, but I’m not sure where and how that gets disentangled.

55 00:05:50.870 ⇒ 00:05:57.140 Katherine Bayless: Then the other challenge is the rules that are, like, determining access and level of access.

56 00:05:57.250 ⇒ 00:06:07.020 Katherine Bayless: I think some of them are… just kind of… need to be a little tender, love, and cared, right? Like, an order of operations problem, but I think Jay is also sort of…

57 00:06:07.230 ⇒ 00:06:08.110 Katherine Bayless: his…

58 00:06:08.270 ⇒ 00:06:24.679 Katherine Bayless: I think some of his understanding of the challenge is that, like, the rules need to remain, but they’re causing problems. Like, so it’s a CTA preference and policy that makes sense when somebody talks, but once you put it into code, it’s, like, a pain in the ass, frankly.

59 00:06:24.680 ⇒ 00:06:28.369 Katherine Bayless: And so, it might be the case that we can’t

60 00:06:28.540 ⇒ 00:06:37.499 Katherine Bayless: fix some of those things, but that’s where my brain goes to, like, yes, but a third party has told us our policy is causing problems. Would we like to change it now?

61 00:06:37.500 ⇒ 00:06:53.559 Katherine Bayless: Right? And so, like, I’m thinking the goal is kind of like, if there is stuff we can fix-fix, awesome. If there’s stuff that’s like, no, it works the way you want it to, I’m just not sure you should want it to work that way, then that becomes kind of like a brief we can give to leadership to say, like, come on, guys.

62 00:06:53.670 ⇒ 00:06:57.759 Katherine Bayless: So yeah, that’s kind of the high level, if that makes sense.

63 00:06:58.150 ⇒ 00:06:58.720 Samuel Roberts: Okay.

64 00:07:00.210 ⇒ 00:07:06.150 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I feel like my thought, Sam, overall, is, like, we just… I would love to hear from Jay on, like.

65 00:07:06.390 ⇒ 00:07:20.799 Uttam Kumaran: yeah, like, what was the assessment on Okta? And then maybe it is, like, we put together, like, a little memo, and like, okay, what can be done here? Like, whether if it is investigating MagicLink, or can do stuff within Okta, maybe you just… our team can take

66 00:07:21.200 ⇒ 00:07:25.529 Uttam Kumaran: You know, we can just, like, put something together, like a write-up on, like, what’s possible.

67 00:07:25.810 ⇒ 00:07:31.219 Uttam Kumaran: That way, like, centralizes, sort of, everything around the problem. I think it… and then…

68 00:07:31.690 ⇒ 00:07:37.319 Uttam Kumaran: Kinda go from there. You know, we do a lot with auth, and I think even

69 00:07:37.420 ⇒ 00:07:41.890 Uttam Kumaran: Sam, like, Surf on our side has done a lot with off, too, so we can loop people in.

70 00:07:41.890 ⇒ 00:07:42.980 Samuel Roberts: Anyway, so, perfect.

71 00:07:42.980 ⇒ 00:07:46.069 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, we can loop people in as we figure it out, so I think…

72 00:07:46.570 ⇒ 00:07:52.139 Uttam Kumaran: that’s… is that, like, a… probably a good, like, if we were to time box… I know stuff is urgent, so if we were to time box…

73 00:07:52.440 ⇒ 00:08:00.779 Uttam Kumaran: something, like, that’s probably what I would say, Catherine, like, this week we just drive towards, like, let’s just do some discovery and then put something together for things to try.

74 00:08:01.220 ⇒ 00:08:03.799 Katherine Bayless: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

75 00:08:05.570 ⇒ 00:08:26.849 Katherine Bayless: I should also say, part of what seems, at least to me, maybe Jay would be like, no, those are unrelated, and you just are noticing them together, but, like, what seemed to kind of kick off the cascade of increased frustration was we did finally, I think, complete our migration from Active Directory to Entra, and it feels like that improved some things, but then also, like, surfaced more of the

76 00:08:26.850 ⇒ 00:08:31.509 Katherine Bayless: squiggly bits, it seems. Like I said, he might be like, those are unrelated. I know they’re both auth-related.

77 00:08:31.590 ⇒ 00:08:32.679 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, yeah.

78 00:08:32.860 ⇒ 00:08:41.130 Katherine Bayless: And then this also kind of downstream trails into, I think, the Shopify challenge that we have, which is…

79 00:08:41.130 ⇒ 00:08:54.699 Katherine Bayless: I think Jay’s pretty convinced it’s user error. I’m kind of like, well, at a certain point, the data suggests something different. If our users do manage to brute force their way through everything else, but Shopify seems to be the one that is, like, just killing people.

80 00:08:55.030 ⇒ 00:09:03.340 Katherine Bayless: We have this setup where they can purchase, like, reports and research that we sell via Shopify.

81 00:09:03.570 ⇒ 00:09:13.990 Katherine Bayless: and I think they get delivered via our AMS. There’s some sort of loop between Okta and Remembers and Shopify that, like, it gets…

82 00:09:14.530 ⇒ 00:09:33.110 Katherine Bayless: funky somewhere in there. And so, like, what’ll happen is people will, like, log in, try to download, try to buy something, and then the download won’t work, or vice versa. And so now we have this, like, Slack channel set up where people can send in, like, report download issues, and Jay built, like, a Gleam agent, like, a workflow to troubleshoot.

83 00:09:34.560 ⇒ 00:09:49.049 Katherine Bayless: all that’s really happening is people are just no longer using the Slack channel or the Glean agent, and instead just cursing his name under their breast when he’s not present, right? Like, I mean, I… but I’m like, there’s some of these, like, death by a thousand cuts things that I’m like, I think we could just fix them.

84 00:09:49.050 ⇒ 00:09:56.760 Katherine Bayless: And so, I’m cautiously optimistic that disentangling Okta might solve Shopify, but there’s also a possibility Shopify’s got its own issue.

85 00:09:57.060 ⇒ 00:09:57.740 Samuel Roberts: No, yeah.

86 00:09:57.740 ⇒ 00:10:05.499 Uttam Kumaran: So, I guess on that side, Catherine, like, what’s… if… I think it’s probably the Okta, and if the Okta thing is a priority for this week.

87 00:10:05.750 ⇒ 00:10:07.389 Uttam Kumaran: I did speak…

88 00:10:07.660 ⇒ 00:10:20.480 Uttam Kumaran: Also to serve Sam about this Shopify thing, but that’s honestly closer to a lot of the work that we’ve done. Basically, Sam, it’s like a dig… it’s a digital asset that they’re… that the team is selling through Shopify.

89 00:10:20.480 ⇒ 00:10:21.670 Samuel Roberts: Right. And then…

90 00:10:21.670 ⇒ 00:10:29.230 Uttam Kumaran: there is a, like, login process. That’s kind of what the related link is. Maybe, Catherine, do you think it’s…

91 00:10:29.970 ⇒ 00:10:33.869 Uttam Kumaran: Should we ask Jay about the Shopify setup as well?

92 00:10:33.970 ⇒ 00:10:36.730 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, so then we can just talk about both those things.

93 00:10:36.910 ⇒ 00:10:37.440 Katherine Bayless: Yeah.

94 00:10:37.440 ⇒ 00:10:39.580 Uttam Kumaran: one… I guess the Okta thing is…

95 00:10:39.830 ⇒ 00:10:45.909 Uttam Kumaran: probably higher priority, but I would basically say, for each of these, like, we would just try to drive towards, like.

96 00:10:46.070 ⇒ 00:10:58.489 Uttam Kumaran: some type of discovery document. Yeah. That way, you can… like, for example, if it’s, like… that way, you could use that to also, like, send that to people, be like, is this right? Like, does this cover the set of problems? And then we can scope that out, like.

97 00:10:58.870 ⇒ 00:11:09.509 Uttam Kumaran: that’s just, like, what… what I would need to also to just, like, see… see everything, and then we can also… we can also basically be like, okay, we’re just gonna go discover everything that’s happening.

98 00:11:09.740 ⇒ 00:11:12.699 Uttam Kumaran: On the Shopify side, I have… I’m… I’m, like.

99 00:11:13.210 ⇒ 00:11:16.329 Uttam Kumaran: Not as concerned, we just do a lot of Shopify stuff.

100 00:11:16.490 ⇒ 00:11:20.610 Uttam Kumaran: But yeah, the Okta thing is, like, touches both, so…

101 00:11:21.930 ⇒ 00:11:31.830 Katherine Bayless: Yeah, and I think part of the trick, and I think I very much agree with what you said about prioritizing Okta, and in part also because Shopify is a little bit…

102 00:11:31.830 ⇒ 00:11:45.509 Katherine Bayless: ambiguously owned, so, like, it sounds like it was set up by the previous, like, VP of marketing, because they were tired of dealing with the authentication challenges with remembers, which is where we used to sell and deliver all these products through.

103 00:11:46.120 ⇒ 00:11:51.300 Katherine Bayless: so they brought Shopify in, so now marketing is still the, like, system owner for Shopify.

104 00:11:51.810 ⇒ 00:11:55.759 Katherine Bayless: But they don’t really know what to do with it, and, like, nobody over there is really involved.

105 00:11:55.830 ⇒ 00:12:12.010 Katherine Bayless: the stuff that’s being sold in Shopify is produced by the market research team, but they don’t own Shopify, and then the authentication wrapper is Okta, so that’s Jay. So that’s why I’m like, yeah, I mean, we’ll definitely get further on Okta than we will probably on Shopify faster, but yeah. Okay.

106 00:12:12.010 ⇒ 00:12:12.499 Samuel Roberts: That makes sense.

107 00:12:12.500 ⇒ 00:12:20.840 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, and I think also, Catherine, this would help you be like, if you’re gonna take this scope on, then, like, at least you have us to do the muscle.

108 00:12:21.060 ⇒ 00:12:21.620 Katherine Bayless: Right.

109 00:12:21.620 ⇒ 00:12:27.200 Uttam Kumaran: Because, yeah, without that, without the muscle, then I wouldn’t take it. I wouldn’t sign up for…

110 00:12:27.330 ⇒ 00:12:31.899 Uttam Kumaran: Right? This is the Shopify piece, because, yeah, the way you’re describing it, like, it’s just in the ether, and

111 00:12:32.050 ⇒ 00:12:36.179 Uttam Kumaran: I truly know how you’re feeling. You’re like, I could probably fix this.

112 00:12:36.610 ⇒ 00:12:40.679 Uttam Kumaran: But then I will, like, mentally explode, so…

113 00:12:40.680 ⇒ 00:12:42.600 Katherine Bayless: Yeah. Right.

114 00:12:43.090 ⇒ 00:12:46.090 Katherine Bayless: Exactly, exactly, yeah. I think…

115 00:12:46.090 ⇒ 00:12:53.680 Uttam Kumaran: I hope, Sam, like, kind of the context is just, like, if we can give Catherine a little bit of our understanding on, like, our list and our confidence.

116 00:12:53.850 ⇒ 00:13:00.910 Uttam Kumaran: And I think it gives her some ability to say, like, okay, is this something that we can take on? Or is this something worth taking on right now?

117 00:13:00.910 ⇒ 00:13:01.480 Samuel Roberts: Right.

118 00:13:01.480 ⇒ 00:13:02.070 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.

119 00:13:02.600 ⇒ 00:13:03.420 Katherine Bayless: Great.

120 00:13:03.570 ⇒ 00:13:21.069 Katherine Bayless: Yeah, a potential long-term use case for Shopify that, like, would benefit my world is this, like, we have all of this data sharing stuff that we need to do that’s, like, contractual, like, delivering the lead gen badge scans and stuff like that after the show, and right now it’s a SharePoint site.

121 00:13:21.180 ⇒ 00:13:36.649 Katherine Bayless: I would like it to be literally anything else, but, like, part of me is like, I mean, Shopify might make sense, like, if you could put the products in there in, like, a hidden way, but then, like, give it to, like, okay, you know, XYZ company, this is your URL, this is who we’ve, like, set up, then…

122 00:13:36.650 ⇒ 00:13:43.770 Katherine Bayless: go in and buy it, buy the product? Yeah. I’m not sure, but it seems like a logical way to maybe handle that.

123 00:13:44.670 ⇒ 00:13:45.500 Katherine Bayless: Yeah.

124 00:13:47.190 ⇒ 00:13:48.140 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.

125 00:13:48.140 ⇒ 00:13:50.660 Katherine Bayless: Yeah, lots of opportunities.

126 00:13:50.660 ⇒ 00:13:51.310 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

127 00:13:53.650 ⇒ 00:13:57.440 Uttam Kumaran: The other thing I owe is a meeting with Polytomic.

128 00:13:57.760 ⇒ 00:13:58.669 Katherine Bayless: Hmm, just a sec.

129 00:13:59.930 ⇒ 00:14:00.729 Uttam Kumaran: Come on here.

130 00:14:03.000 ⇒ 00:14:07.059 Katherine Bayless: Yeah, I was kind of floating earlier today, the whole Cvent thing, and, like.

131 00:14:07.740 ⇒ 00:14:19.379 Katherine Bayless: still kind of trying to figure out, like, where the edges are, like, does anybody really like Cvent, or can we just kind of… because I’m… I think Polytomic, you said, has an EventPoint connector, or was interested in building one. I can’t remember.

132 00:14:19.380 ⇒ 00:14:20.929 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, and like, so they’re…

133 00:14:21.210 ⇒ 00:14:26.180 Uttam Kumaran: So, yeah, basically the difference between them and Fivetran is, like, they’ll just start… they’ll build it for us.

134 00:14:26.480 ⇒ 00:14:35.160 Uttam Kumaran: As long as, like, they… they do have endpoints that aren’t just, like, fake endpoints. So that’s the advantage with… with working for them, working with them.

135 00:14:35.280 ⇒ 00:14:37.340 Uttam Kumaran: So for most people.

136 00:14:37.460 ⇒ 00:14:44.170 Uttam Kumaran: like, who we put both of them against, they tend to go to Polytomic. Some clients are using Fivetran for, like.

137 00:14:44.350 ⇒ 00:14:46.969 Uttam Kumaran: Super mission-critical stuff.

138 00:14:47.120 ⇒ 00:14:47.960 Uttam Kumaran: Hey, Jake.

139 00:14:47.960 ⇒ 00:14:48.560 Katherine Bayless: DJ.

140 00:14:48.560 ⇒ 00:14:49.080 Samuel Roberts: Nope.

141 00:14:49.320 ⇒ 00:14:49.790 Uttam Kumaran: A.

142 00:14:51.580 ⇒ 00:14:52.649 Uttam Kumaran: Nice to see you.

143 00:14:53.160 ⇒ 00:14:54.199 Jay Heavner: Nice to see you.

144 00:14:56.350 ⇒ 00:15:00.010 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I mean, Catherine, I can… yeah, I can let you take it over.

145 00:15:00.210 ⇒ 00:15:10.529 Katherine Bayless: I mean, I’ll talk for 3 seconds, and then I’ll step down. So I was gonna say, we all kind of met briefly on the call where Jay was helping set up some of the access stuff, but basically, I just…

146 00:15:10.530 ⇒ 00:15:21.130 Katherine Bayless: I’ve given them a little bit of the briefer on, like, Okta has challenges, because we’re authenticating everyone in our world with username and password, and also probably some of our policies are

147 00:15:21.130 ⇒ 00:15:24.890 Katherine Bayless: Doing what we want them to, but we probably shouldn’t want them to do that.

148 00:15:24.890 ⇒ 00:15:33.330 Katherine Bayless: And so… and then the potential downstream Shopify piece, but I will now let Jay explain all the things more correctly than I ever could.

149 00:15:33.330 ⇒ 00:15:42.649 Jay Heavner: Okay, so we have two Okta instances. We have a workforce instance for staff, we have a customer Denny instance for customers.

150 00:15:43.340 ⇒ 00:15:51.549 Jay Heavner: the customer instance is pretty simple. We need, SSO. We don’t care that much about

151 00:15:51.720 ⇒ 00:15:57.700 Jay Heavner: we’re not protecting anything super valuable there, but we wanted SSO because we have so many partners in the…

152 00:15:58.050 ⇒ 00:16:02.449 Jay Heavner: CES, Member Universe, and just allowing them to.

153 00:16:02.720 ⇒ 00:16:06.690 Jay Heavner: authenticate effectively. Plus, before Okta, people were just…

154 00:16:06.880 ⇒ 00:16:13.709 Jay Heavner: rolling their own authentication. Like, all of our vendors had their own, you know, authentication methods, so now…

155 00:16:14.020 ⇒ 00:16:20.399 Jay Heavner: They have that. We’d like them to use the access tokens and the benefit of OIDC, but

156 00:16:20.720 ⇒ 00:16:23.150 Jay Heavner: A lot of our partners are not…

157 00:16:24.210 ⇒ 00:16:29.459 Jay Heavner: incredibly mature, so that’s… that’s tough for them.

158 00:16:29.980 ⇒ 00:16:40.770 Jay Heavner: So that’s that part, and it really is, you know, it’s basic authentication, it’s username and password. We’re not enforcing anything there, we’re not requiring two-factor MFA, any of that, it’s just to get them in.

159 00:16:40.930 ⇒ 00:16:45.810 Jay Heavner: On the workforce side, that is only for staff.

160 00:16:45.960 ⇒ 00:16:49.720 Jay Heavner: Contractors, official folks that we allot into our tenant.

161 00:16:49.990 ⇒ 00:17:06.939 Jay Heavner: the challenges there, we have a couple challenges there. One, last year at the audit committee, my board told me, hey, we were talking about BYOD, and I’m like, I can’t get BYOD across the finish line. Just, I don’t have the hard power to enforce it, and…

162 00:17:07.210 ⇒ 00:17:18.680 Jay Heavner: They’re like, let’s get it done. So we started it, that project got shut down at a certain point by the president, because one of the SVPs said, you will not put a profile on my personal phone.

163 00:17:18.859 ⇒ 00:17:23.679 Jay Heavner: And I’m not going to use your corporate device. And they’re like, alright, well, we just won’t do this.

164 00:17:23.819 ⇒ 00:17:29.449 Jay Heavner: And that is a lot of the problem with the policies we have set up, is we have

165 00:17:29.790 ⇒ 00:17:36.970 Jay Heavner: best practice policies, but then we are forced to carve out exceptions for certain people or certain groups. Or, like, we want to use

166 00:17:37.760 ⇒ 00:17:45.500 Jay Heavner: Okta uses something called FastPass, which is sort of their main passwordless-less… passwordless?

167 00:17:46.060 ⇒ 00:17:47.770 Jay Heavner: methodology.

168 00:17:48.240 ⇒ 00:17:56.519 Jay Heavner: It’s pushed to everyone’s computer at this point through Intune, but not everyone has enrolled in it, so we’ve got inconsistent enrollment there.

169 00:17:57.170 ⇒ 00:18:07.089 Jay Heavner: We’re also using something called Collide for… Okta doesn’t do great device assurance. They’ve got some baked in, but it’s really rudimentary, so we’re using something called Collide.

170 00:18:07.450 ⇒ 00:18:12.299 Jay Heavner: that, does a much better job of device assurance.

171 00:18:12.690 ⇒ 00:18:17.380 Jay Heavner: But again, folks have to enroll a device in that thing, so…

172 00:18:17.530 ⇒ 00:18:25.740 Jay Heavner: it can be used as a factor, right? So if you logged in and you don’t have the right updates, or you don’t have an encrypted hard drive or whatever.

173 00:18:25.870 ⇒ 00:18:36.050 Jay Heavner: It can mourn you and help you remediate it and get back to fixed state, but we’ve also had some inconsistency with getting that fully rolled out to people, because

174 00:18:38.350 ⇒ 00:18:47.279 Jay Heavner: for a variety of reasons, it’s… it takes a little bit of effort for the end user to do this.

175 00:18:47.430 ⇒ 00:19:04.479 Jay Heavner: and people will get a new device or something, and they… they don’t want to do it, or they forget to do it, or… it just… it’s too much friction for them to do it. We did have, like, occasionally cloud services go down, so at one point, Collide kind of stopped working for, you know.

176 00:19:04.890 ⇒ 00:19:12.360 Jay Heavner: They had a bug, so that kind of set our… set us back a bit, where people, like, well, it doesn’t work, I’m not gonna use it, and like.

177 00:19:13.130 ⇒ 00:19:14.240 Jay Heavner: Okay.

178 00:19:16.390 ⇒ 00:19:23.369 Jay Heavner: What else? I mean, that’s… that’s… that’s really it. You know, it’s a lot of it, like, if… if we could get 100% compliance.

179 00:19:23.370 ⇒ 00:19:24.999 Uttam Kumaran: It’s, you know…

180 00:19:25.000 ⇒ 00:19:42.600 Jay Heavner: it’s pretty easy, but when… you know, we had people who won’t do Windows Hello because they think the government is stealing their fingerprints, right? Like, and I’m like, this is not how this works, people. It’s not your fingerprint, it’s a digital hardware token that’s saving in your…

181 00:19:43.140 ⇒ 00:19:50.319 Jay Heavner: what is that, the TPM module on your processor, you know, blah blah blah, but yeah, it’s… so just a lot of FUD around that.

182 00:19:50.600 ⇒ 00:19:51.140 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.

183 00:19:53.250 ⇒ 00:19:59.550 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I don’t know, Sam, if you have any initial questions, or if you want to sort of just, like, play it back, and we can discuss.

184 00:19:59.890 ⇒ 00:20:02.060 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, so I guess the…

185 00:20:02.350 ⇒ 00:20:07.780 Samuel Roberts: The piece that I was thinking about first was the non-workforce one, the customer side.

186 00:20:08.690 ⇒ 00:20:13.850 Samuel Roberts: It seems… So I guess I was… so Okta was chosen because of the…

187 00:20:14.060 ⇒ 00:20:18.730 Samuel Roberts: this different vendors issue, and the… the different authentications, is that basically it? Okay.

188 00:20:18.730 ⇒ 00:20:27.389 Jay Heavner: Yeah, and so, yeah, and we’ve had it since 2018, and the head of marketing at that time is the one who brought it in.

189 00:20:27.770 ⇒ 00:20:31.539 Jay Heavner: If it had been me, I would have brought in,

190 00:20:32.840 ⇒ 00:20:35.220 Jay Heavner: Who is it that they just brought? Auth0.

191 00:20:36.160 ⇒ 00:20:39.889 Jay Heavner: owns Auth0, and we had a conversation with them about that.

192 00:20:40.310 ⇒ 00:20:45.320 Jay Heavner: And they’re like, you know, the juice probably isn’t worth the squeeze to convert from

193 00:20:45.600 ⇒ 00:20:54.450 Jay Heavner: Okta to Auth0, it’s a lot of work, and you’re probably not going to save any money. Like, Auth0 used to be a much less expensive product.

194 00:20:54.450 ⇒ 00:20:54.960 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, that’s.

195 00:20:54.960 ⇒ 00:20:57.800 Jay Heavner: No, it’s pretty expensive, yeah. Okay.

196 00:20:58.530 ⇒ 00:20:59.900 Jay Heavner: Yeah.

197 00:21:00.310 ⇒ 00:21:05.929 Katherine Bayless: Auth0 was what we used at the startup I worked for, so it did have a big spike in price.

198 00:21:05.930 ⇒ 00:21:08.790 Samuel Roberts: I’ve touched on in the past, but I have not recently since then.

199 00:21:08.930 ⇒ 00:21:09.690 Samuel Roberts: Okay.

200 00:21:10.960 ⇒ 00:21:15.779 Samuel Roberts: Alright, and… but there’s still, like, a lot of friction with the customers getting through the things, from what I’m.

201 00:21:15.780 ⇒ 00:21:23.769 Jay Heavner: Well, so, like, last year we had a… we had a… we had a bug last year, it was an Octobug, that they… their product team fixed for us, where…

202 00:21:25.320 ⇒ 00:21:31.560 Jay Heavner: We made… marketing made a bad decision several years ago, where they did not want to…

203 00:21:31.690 ⇒ 00:21:44.169 Jay Heavner: have customers authenticate their email address, because some percentage of customers… when you have 500,000 registrants, you have big number problems. So…

204 00:21:44.460 ⇒ 00:21:52.700 Jay Heavner: You know, 1% of 1% didn’t receive the email, so they decided, well, let’s not have people authenticate their email address.

205 00:21:53.100 ⇒ 00:21:57.059 Jay Heavner: And then, as Okta matured their product, and we went from…

206 00:21:58.140 ⇒ 00:22:02.760 Jay Heavner: whatever it was to their OIE platform a year or so ago.

207 00:22:04.160 ⇒ 00:22:07.379 Jay Heavner: They would not… if you created an account.

208 00:22:07.600 ⇒ 00:22:13.359 Jay Heavner: and you got to a confusing page of optional factors, if you didn’t press continue on that page.

209 00:22:13.470 ⇒ 00:22:18.790 Jay Heavner: It did… it left your account in a stage provision state.

210 00:22:19.020 ⇒ 00:22:25.410 Jay Heavner: Even though they had put their email address in, even though all they had to do was click continue, it didn’t work.

211 00:22:25.580 ⇒ 00:22:36.039 Jay Heavner: And so we went back and forth on them and said, you know, if you’re going to allow customers to not require emails… basically, they were staged because the email hadn’t been verified. I’m like, you know.

212 00:22:36.810 ⇒ 00:22:41.329 Jay Heavner: If we’ve intentionally said we don’t want email verification, which put that decision aside, good or bad.

213 00:22:41.330 ⇒ 00:22:42.359 Samuel Roberts: Sure.

214 00:22:42.500 ⇒ 00:22:52.059 Jay Heavner: then why would you leave these customers in this state? So we had to build some weird workaround using workflows that would just basically, if it found someone in this state.

215 00:22:52.380 ⇒ 00:22:58.599 Jay Heavner: it would programmatically deactivate, reactivate their account. So what we did this year was we…

216 00:22:59.550 ⇒ 00:23:03.390 Jay Heavner: We’d always been using just the default Okta,

217 00:23:04.240 ⇒ 00:23:13.619 Jay Heavner: I forget what they’re… their widget for login. So what we did was we replaced their Create Account widget with a custom widget that basically just

218 00:23:14.410 ⇒ 00:23:22.049 Jay Heavner: fix that thing for you. The other problem we had is, you know, CES is one week of year.

219 00:23:22.180 ⇒ 00:23:25.130 Jay Heavner: And customers don’t remember their passwords. Yeah.

220 00:23:25.360 ⇒ 00:23:28.629 Jay Heavner: week to the next, right? And so people aren’t using…

221 00:23:28.840 ⇒ 00:23:47.760 Jay Heavner: password managers, they’re not… they’re not using any of that. So we had a lot of problems with people just not knowing what their login credentials were. And Okta is primarily a security system, so it doesn’t give you a lot of information about why you can’t log in, right? Cryptic error messages. So one of the things we did this year was we overrode their widget.

222 00:23:48.320 ⇒ 00:23:58.010 Jay Heavner: we checked the error on the back end, and we were displaying a more intelligent error back to the customer. So we did that, and it fails, like, if it can’t…

223 00:23:58.010 ⇒ 00:24:11.919 Jay Heavner: if it can’t find it, it fails gracefully, because we had an instant… we host it in AWS, so that when AWS went down, it didn’t bring Okta down for us. It just, like, basically, it optimistically pushed the error message back to them, so they know. And we’ve dropped…

224 00:24:12.110 ⇒ 00:24:14.970 Uttam Kumaran: The last I heard, we had dropped.

225 00:24:15.090 ⇒ 00:24:19.610 Jay Heavner: customer support requests by, like, 80% by doing that, which is a pretty good number, right?

226 00:24:19.610 ⇒ 00:24:20.010 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

227 00:24:20.180 ⇒ 00:24:22.139 Jay Heavner: The other problem we have is…

228 00:24:22.420 ⇒ 00:24:37.070 Jay Heavner: And I tried to explain to people, even last year when we were getting customer service requests, they’re about 3%. That was our rate, which is still pretty good when you look at a customer-facing IDP that’s, you know, global.

229 00:24:37.280 ⇒ 00:24:44.489 Jay Heavner: Because a lot of the folks who have problems are… English is a second language. I do believe we’ve got,

230 00:24:44.900 ⇒ 00:24:58.279 Jay Heavner: you know, all the resource files in there, we translate most of what we can. And I’m like, you know, this isn’t a customer service problem, this is a large number problem, again, where you should always expect that some percentage of people will need customer support.

231 00:24:58.570 ⇒ 00:25:08.149 Jay Heavner: And that’s just a function of staffing customer support to what your metrics say. And no one wanted that. They’re like, no, no, we want zero customer support on this. I’m like, okay.

232 00:25:09.490 ⇒ 00:25:18.759 Jay Heavner: you know, we talked about using magic links, but again, that would require kind of the idea that you’ve got to verify the email. If it wants to be a factor.

233 00:25:19.020 ⇒ 00:25:23.839 Jay Heavner: you know, whether or not, like, you know, this is my thing with Okta, like, if someone puts it in there.

234 00:25:24.540 ⇒ 00:25:29.469 Jay Heavner: I get that you want to verify it, I totally get that, but in the absence of

235 00:25:29.610 ⇒ 00:25:33.099 Jay Heavner: Formal verification, just treated as such, and we went.

236 00:25:33.530 ⇒ 00:25:35.249 Jay Heavner: Kind of back and forth on that.

237 00:25:37.300 ⇒ 00:25:47.940 Jay Heavner: we were lately using SMS, because that’s something that’s approachable to people, but then they started charging for that. They got rid of their MSS, or their SMS provider, and like, if you want to use it, you have to bring your own in.

238 00:25:47.940 ⇒ 00:25:48.790 Samuel Roberts: Okay.

239 00:25:48.790 ⇒ 00:25:55.200 Jay Heavner: And… I think we did a little bit of research on looking at that, but not… not serious. So then it’s like…

240 00:25:56.130 ⇒ 00:26:07.180 Jay Heavner: you know, they’ll support anything. They’ll support Duo, or Google, or whatever, and you would think that for CES, this would be something familiar to most of these people, but it really isn’t, which is a little shocking.

241 00:26:07.380 ⇒ 00:26:07.920 Samuel Roberts: Okay.

242 00:26:07.920 ⇒ 00:26:08.980 Jay Heavner: So.

243 00:26:08.980 ⇒ 00:26:13.900 Uttam Kumaran: I feel like email is probably… email magic link is probably the most…

244 00:26:13.900 ⇒ 00:26:14.410 Jay Heavner: Yeah.

245 00:26:14.410 ⇒ 00:26:15.300 Samuel Roberts: Like… Yeah.

246 00:26:15.300 ⇒ 00:26:19.710 Uttam Kumaran: Universal, because everybody has to have an email, probably, for other…

247 00:26:19.820 ⇒ 00:26:20.730 Samuel Roberts: Exactly.

248 00:26:20.730 ⇒ 00:26:25.360 Jay Heavner: And, you know, for someone like me, that’s friction. I don’t want to wait 3 minutes to get an email.

249 00:26:25.360 ⇒ 00:26:26.950 Samuel Roberts: Oh, I agree, I’m the same way, yeah.

250 00:26:26.950 ⇒ 00:26:31.770 Jay Heavner: you know, app does this. I’m like, no, I have a password here, friend. I’ll just log in, but…

251 00:26:31.940 ⇒ 00:26:37.119 Jay Heavner: Yeah, no, I agree, especially for something where you’re only logging in

252 00:26:37.280 ⇒ 00:26:44.800 Jay Heavner: to register, and then maybe if you download the mobile app, right? So most people probably aren’t doing this a ton.

253 00:26:44.800 ⇒ 00:26:47.199 Samuel Roberts: Right, right, right. A few times a year.

254 00:26:47.200 ⇒ 00:26:54.350 Jay Heavner: Yeah, a few times a year. Part of it is our registration system, so I don’t know if Catherine’s explained this to you, but, like.

255 00:26:55.140 ⇒ 00:27:01.240 Jay Heavner: The only thing we really control is the website, CS.Tech, and it’s, like, this big of this universe, right?

256 00:27:01.240 ⇒ 00:27:01.620 Samuel Roberts: Sure.

257 00:27:01.620 ⇒ 00:27:07.530 Jay Heavner: So, and we talked years ago about, like, white labeling registration. Just, let’s white label, let’s bring it in.

258 00:27:07.630 ⇒ 00:27:13.800 Jay Heavner: And… their interfaces are really clunky. Like, last year…

259 00:27:14.160 ⇒ 00:27:22.180 Jay Heavner: you had two buttons, and it was like, click here to log in, and click here to register, and I’m like, you know, people don’t know, just have them enter their email address and say.

260 00:27:22.180 ⇒ 00:27:22.620 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

261 00:27:22.620 ⇒ 00:27:24.159 Jay Heavner: Bun kind of a thing.

262 00:27:24.470 ⇒ 00:27:27.850 Jay Heavner: And, like, this year… and they were also… everyone’s…

263 00:27:27.880 ⇒ 00:27:44.979 Jay Heavner: for the most part, they’re redirecting back to us for authentication, redirecting back to Okta. Like, you don’t have to do that. Like, you can white-label your own login for Okta. That’s perfectly supported, right? If you want to, or you can create your own customers. Now, we have requirements about that, because

264 00:27:45.450 ⇒ 00:27:54.229 Jay Heavner: We don’t allow… one of our security rules is customer service are not allowed to create one-time passwords because these are not sophisticated people.

265 00:27:54.590 ⇒ 00:27:59.600 Jay Heavner: They would get social engineered in a heartbeat, so the only thing they can do is send a password reset.

266 00:27:59.830 ⇒ 00:28:00.920 Samuel Roberts: And…

267 00:28:00.970 ⇒ 00:28:05.320 Jay Heavner: one of our providers, Map Your Show, was creating

268 00:28:05.860 ⇒ 00:28:08.810 Jay Heavner: new accounts with one-time passwords. Well.

269 00:28:08.810 ⇒ 00:28:10.430 Samuel Roberts: The problem with that is.

270 00:28:10.490 ⇒ 00:28:15.419 Jay Heavner: Even if they communicate correctly, which is really hard to communicate a password correctly, in my experience.

271 00:28:15.750 ⇒ 00:28:17.639 Jay Heavner: They expire in 7 days.

272 00:28:17.870 ⇒ 00:28:24.230 Jay Heavner: And then when they expire, they get put into a state where they must be acted upon by some kind of customer service agent.

273 00:28:24.900 ⇒ 00:28:25.750 Samuel Roberts: Okay.

274 00:28:25.750 ⇒ 00:28:37.049 Jay Heavner: Yeah, which is all… so we told them, like, don’t do that. You know, if you want to create new accounts, here’s the way you do it. You basically create it, you activate it, you send them the email that forces them to do the enrollment.

275 00:28:37.050 ⇒ 00:28:37.460 Samuel Roberts: Right.

276 00:28:37.460 ⇒ 00:28:39.689 Jay Heavner: They have a problem with email, then that’s…

277 00:28:40.080 ⇒ 00:28:53.430 Jay Heavner: that’s a bridge to cross. You’re always going to have some people… email is not… we still believe that email is a guaranteed form of communication here, and I’m like, if you realized how fragile SMTP was under the hood, you would never use it for anything, but it is what it is, right?

278 00:28:53.430 ⇒ 00:28:54.200 Samuel Roberts: Great.

279 00:28:54.200 ⇒ 00:28:56.520 Jay Heavner: So, you know, it’s a lot of…

280 00:28:56.800 ⇒ 00:29:00.810 Jay Heavner: It’s a lot of big number problems. It’s a lot of trying to…

281 00:29:01.290 ⇒ 00:29:07.579 Jay Heavner: Fixed for low percentage things and creating bigger problems by not really understanding the ramifications of it.

282 00:29:10.230 ⇒ 00:29:14.500 Jay Heavner: You know, just the idea that you’re always going to have some people.

283 00:29:14.680 ⇒ 00:29:18.700 Jay Heavner: who will require customer service. That’s… you can’t get away from it.

284 00:29:19.210 ⇒ 00:29:20.270 Samuel Roberts: Definitely, yeah.

285 00:29:20.750 ⇒ 00:29:27.050 Uttam Kumaran: And then, Jay, on our side, who is, like, owning the customer service piece? Like…

286 00:29:27.380 ⇒ 00:29:35.309 Jay Heavner: So the CES team, there’s a woman there named Alex Flex. I think she’s the head of customer service. The challenge is.

287 00:29:35.590 ⇒ 00:29:42.809 Jay Heavner: Alex worked for us in marketing years ago, left and came back, and they put her in charge of customer service. She’s never…

288 00:29:43.200 ⇒ 00:29:48.140 Jay Heavner: done a bit of customer service in her life before this. And so she understands

289 00:29:49.070 ⇒ 00:29:57.029 Jay Heavner: helping customers, but she doesn’t understand the data metrics of driving a customer service center, right? Like, the idea that you have…

290 00:29:57.130 ⇒ 00:30:09.259 Jay Heavner: Tickets, and change logs, and closures, and REITs, and all these things. That’s how you track success. To her, success is… Are these going through a ticketing system, by the way, or is it just going to, like, a password reset email? It’s just…

291 00:30:09.260 ⇒ 00:30:09.790 Uttam Kumaran: Report email.

292 00:30:09.790 ⇒ 00:30:14.630 Jay Heavner: Email or phone into… and it’s a third party, it’s largely a third-party system.

293 00:30:14.920 ⇒ 00:30:15.290 Samuel Roberts: Something.

294 00:30:15.290 ⇒ 00:30:24.160 Jay Heavner: I think they put front in front of it, which is good, because before they were all using one shared mailbox to access it, I think, which is another point of risk.

295 00:30:26.450 ⇒ 00:30:36.399 Jay Heavner: So yeah, and I don’t believe we could talk to her… I don’t believe there’s a ticketing system under the hood of that. I think it’s all just tracked through email. And then…

296 00:30:36.660 ⇒ 00:30:42.190 Jay Heavner: Tier 2 of that is… They will kick that back to us.

297 00:30:42.430 ⇒ 00:30:53.459 Jay Heavner: and me or one of the guys on my team will troubleshoot those issues. We built a little AI tool that you give it an email address, and it goes out and it tells you what’s wrong with the account.

298 00:30:53.610 ⇒ 00:30:54.920 Uttam Kumaran: That’s the glean tool.

299 00:30:55.680 ⇒ 00:31:03.230 Jay Heavner: Well, that’s one of them. That was for something else. We did another one just for this, and then I was trying to extend the thing, but I got a little bit, like…

300 00:31:03.480 ⇒ 00:31:08.669 Jay Heavner: I was trying to make a universal tool that I could pull, like, large-level mech, like…

301 00:31:08.820 ⇒ 00:31:15.940 Jay Heavner: You could zoom in on a customer, but then, like, if someone’s having, like, the macro issue we had last year, where customers would be putting in a stage state, like.

302 00:31:15.940 ⇒ 00:31:30.059 Jay Heavner: Could I get reporting on that out of this thing? Like, hey, who’s affected by this? And what’s interesting about that one was they had fixed it for us. They got it fixed right before CES last year, and then they had a problem in July

303 00:31:30.220 ⇒ 00:31:36.130 Jay Heavner: a bug that they issued, like, a thing for. When they fixed the bug, they undid our change.

304 00:31:36.420 ⇒ 00:31:42.839 Jay Heavner: Which I kind of thought was going to happen, because when you put these one-off changes into a codebase like that.

305 00:31:43.540 ⇒ 00:31:50.399 Jay Heavner: something’s gonna wipe it out eventually, you know? That’s… that was always my fear on the product, so… but it’s… it’s…

306 00:31:51.190 ⇒ 00:31:53.749 Jay Heavner: We’re getting a lot fewer requests this year.

307 00:31:54.100 ⇒ 00:31:57.559 Jay Heavner: We had one come in with someone who couldn’t get an email, and I’m like.

308 00:31:59.090 ⇒ 00:32:01.130 Jay Heavner: Well, the other thing we did with the email.

309 00:32:01.620 ⇒ 00:32:03.719 Jay Heavner: We were sending an email from

310 00:32:04.000 ⇒ 00:32:09.990 Jay Heavner: From Arteme. But we weren’t using a domain that we had properly warmed up and developed.

311 00:32:10.200 ⇒ 00:32:12.360 Jay Heavner: We just created a brand new domain.

312 00:32:12.360 ⇒ 00:32:15.069 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, you’ll get spammed. You’ll get put to spam immediately.

313 00:32:15.490 ⇒ 00:32:24.759 Jay Heavner: Yep, so then we switched over to using Octus, and we thought, well, you guys have solved this problem for us, but then they’re just using,

314 00:32:26.300 ⇒ 00:32:34.699 Jay Heavner: one of the big providers under the hood. I’m drawing a blank on the name. And the problem with that one is, it uses some economy of scale

315 00:32:35.800 ⇒ 00:32:45.329 Jay Heavner: send an email over here, it’s not going to try for ours, and Okta wasn’t giving us any transparency into it, right? There was no failure, like, hey, that email didn’t go to that person, they just.

316 00:32:45.330 ⇒ 00:32:45.830 Samuel Roberts: Right.

317 00:32:45.830 ⇒ 00:32:48.190 Jay Heavner: It was optimistic, and it died out there.

318 00:32:48.410 ⇒ 00:32:53.509 Jay Heavner: And I think they’ve gotten better with some of that stuff, but it’s Syndrid, that’s who they’re using, Syngrid.

319 00:32:53.770 ⇒ 00:32:55.169 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, so it’s a Twilio.

320 00:32:55.170 ⇒ 00:32:57.280 Jay Heavner: Yeah, SynGrid’s a perfectly fine tool.

321 00:32:57.650 ⇒ 00:33:03.270 Jay Heavner: You know, they put a little endpoint up that would let you try to resend the email.

322 00:33:04.220 ⇒ 00:33:15.539 Jay Heavner: by calling it API endpoint, but it’s still, like, we couldn’t get any sort of analytics, and I haven’t looked lately to see if they changed it, but there was zero analytics on what the delivery of that was, so…

323 00:33:15.650 ⇒ 00:33:21.860 Jay Heavner: You know, we probably should pull it back in, but to pull back in, we’d want to have a domain that is

324 00:33:22.270 ⇒ 00:33:27.880 Jay Heavner: appropriate, and warmed up, and ready to go, and someone’s really looking at that thing, because that’s a… that’s…

325 00:33:28.110 ⇒ 00:33:32.840 Jay Heavner: It might not be a full-time job, email deliverability, but it’s… it’s work.

326 00:33:33.000 ⇒ 00:33:48.189 Katherine Bayless: Yeah. I mean, I will say, like, just as a side corroboration, like, email deliverability in general is something that’s on my radar for next year, because I think we do not get anywhere near as close to the inbox as we would like to, and there’s a lot of room for improvement, but…

327 00:33:48.190 ⇒ 00:33:52.089 Jay Heavner: Yeah. That’s through SXMC for, like, marketing emails.

328 00:33:52.090 ⇒ 00:33:53.130 Katherine Bayless: Yeah, yeah.

329 00:33:53.420 ⇒ 00:34:05.479 Jay Heavner: Yeah, we have a perf… ces.tech. We own that domain. We don’t use it for hardly anything, like, we’ve got a domain sitting there. And even when they were sending the emails from Okta, they were using, like.

330 00:34:05.810 ⇒ 00:34:11.369 Jay Heavner: some other random email that they just pulled out of nowhere, and it’s the same with Marketing Cloud. They’re using

331 00:34:11.940 ⇒ 00:34:13.290 Jay Heavner: like, CTA…

332 00:34:13.290 ⇒ 00:34:14.769 Katherine Bayless: dash tech.org.

333 00:34:14.770 ⇒ 00:34:17.520 Jay Heavner: Yeah, and I’m like, why would you do that? Like…

334 00:34:17.520 ⇒ 00:34:30.499 Uttam Kumaran: Basically, you’ll have to just separate out, like, transactional versus marketing, and then marketing emails, you’ll have to… you should just try to rotate. Yeah. Like, even for us, we have, like, a lot of similar Brain Forge domains that we use for, like, we do cold email, we don’t do a lot anymore.

335 00:34:30.569 ⇒ 00:34:41.799 Uttam Kumaran: But that’s very common, but then we still use Brainforge for just, like, transactional stuff. But the risk is, is, like, if someone sends, like, a million emails through your CTA.Tech, and you get put into spam, very…

336 00:34:41.999 ⇒ 00:34:43.929 Uttam Kumaran: Near impossible to…

337 00:34:43.939 ⇒ 00:34:45.239 Jay Heavner: recovered.

338 00:34:45.239 ⇒ 00:34:47.420 Katherine Bayless: That’s exactly what has happened, yes.

339 00:34:47.429 ⇒ 00:34:52.979 Uttam Kumaran: transactional emails to multiple hundred thousand people-sized audiences that were not transactional.

340 00:34:52.980 ⇒ 00:34:57.100 Jay Heavner: And let’s step outside of this for a second. We also have with,

341 00:34:57.390 ⇒ 00:35:13.490 Jay Heavner: We maintain a lot of inter… we maintain a lot of distribution lists for members and committees and all these people. We’re running that through our O365 instance and using ct.tech to send those. And it hasn’t killed us yet, but

342 00:35:13.880 ⇒ 00:35:18.580 Jay Heavner: you know, years ago, we would be… HP would blacklist our entire domain because…

343 00:35:18.790 ⇒ 00:35:25.789 Jay Heavner: Of a distribution list where someone was spamming a distribution list, and they flagged us, and then someone’s calling them, hey, please take us off the blacklist.

344 00:35:26.300 ⇒ 00:35:28.969 Katherine Bayless: This happened with Panasonic a couple weeks ago.

345 00:35:28.970 ⇒ 00:35:38.270 Jay Heavner: And it’s like, we need to get those distribution lists out of our core tenet of email, but it’s free.

346 00:35:38.490 ⇒ 00:35:44.139 Jay Heavner: And they don’t have to do any work, so why wouldn’t we continue to do this? Yeah.

347 00:35:45.310 ⇒ 00:35:53.009 Jay Heavner: Recently, we onboarded a tool, it’s called… something that does… we were using it for…

348 00:35:53.440 ⇒ 00:36:02.670 Jay Heavner: what were you… DMARC reporting. And we bought, like, a proper license that it can do DMARC, DKIM, SPI, SPF, all these…

349 00:36:03.390 ⇒ 00:36:05.799 Jay Heavner: The DMARC stuff, we’re still, like.

350 00:36:06.140 ⇒ 00:36:16.449 Jay Heavner: everybody wants to dance around DMARC, like, no one ever really wants to turn DMARC on or off, so we’ve been running it in monitor mode now for 30 years, and no one’s really looking at that, but yeah.

351 00:36:16.840 ⇒ 00:36:21.850 Jay Heavner: And all the Salesforce Marketing Cloud stuff, none of it’s passing.

352 00:36:21.990 ⇒ 00:36:23.680 Jay Heavner: Any of it, like…

353 00:36:23.680 ⇒ 00:36:24.200 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.

354 00:36:24.200 ⇒ 00:36:25.629 Jay Heavner: Bless its heart, you know, it’s…

355 00:36:25.630 ⇒ 00:36:26.250 Katherine Bayless: Right.

356 00:36:26.580 ⇒ 00:36:27.340 Katherine Bayless: Right.

357 00:36:27.700 ⇒ 00:36:43.629 Katherine Bayless: I know. I mean, yeah, so yeah, leave email deliverability writ large is definitely a problem. And I mean, I think the downstream, you know, piece, too, is, like, we get a less than 1% response on our surveys, and I’m like, well, yeah, because probably only a fraction of people even get the survey in the first place, right? Yeah.

358 00:36:43.630 ⇒ 00:36:54.859 Jay Heavner: I mean, last week, I got 3 emails forwarded to me by internal staff from their points of contact with emails that came out of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Is this email legit?

359 00:36:55.160 ⇒ 00:37:02.129 Jay Heavner: And clean, like, members of our corporate board, like, hey, is this a… I don’t know… I don’t recognize this domain, is this a legit email? .

360 00:37:02.430 ⇒ 00:37:19.529 Katherine Bayless: The good news is that the guy in marketing is very on board with my world domination plans of, like, everything that goes out that is not a one-to-one or one-to-few individual conversation should go through Marketing Cloud, and, like, once that’s the single outbound channel for this organization, then we can finally start.

361 00:37:19.530 ⇒ 00:37:20.240 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

362 00:37:20.240 ⇒ 00:37:25.929 Katherine Bayless: and solving these problems. So, like, the room is open next year, but yeah.

363 00:37:26.410 ⇒ 00:37:26.950 Jay Heavner: Yeah.

364 00:37:27.590 ⇒ 00:37:28.220 Katherine Bayless: Yeah.

365 00:37:29.430 ⇒ 00:37:35.209 Uttam Kumaran: I think in terms of, like, initial kind of thoughts, I’m just taking some notes. I think one is…

366 00:37:35.330 ⇒ 00:37:40.219 Uttam Kumaran: I mean, on our side, Sam, I just… I shot you some couple things, but one, yeah, I mean.

367 00:37:40.440 ⇒ 00:37:51.440 Uttam Kumaran: one, I would love to get us in the sample registration flow, so we can start to map out each of the flows. So basically, I would love to just create, like, sort of like a process diagram of, like.

368 00:37:51.720 ⇒ 00:37:58.549 Uttam Kumaran: what different cases hit you, get you into what different flows. It’ll be really clear for us to find the loops.

369 00:37:58.760 ⇒ 00:38:03.960 Uttam Kumaran: I think there… I think it’s gonna depend on, like.

370 00:38:04.400 ⇒ 00:38:18.940 Uttam Kumaran: what… what we find and what’s possible. I don’t know, Jay, I think it seems like we have evaluated from other vendors. There’s still maybe some things to explore, like, potentials within Okta. Like, do you think we should continue to, like, push on Okta to see…

371 00:38:19.090 ⇒ 00:38:21.340 Uttam Kumaran: what’s possible? Do you think we should just…

372 00:38:21.550 ⇒ 00:38:27.130 Uttam Kumaran: like, look outside for potential solutions? Like, I guess, what… where is your, like, gut on this?

373 00:38:28.010 ⇒ 00:38:29.900 Jay Heavner: with Okta, I’m…

374 00:38:30.380 ⇒ 00:38:44.150 Jay Heavner: So, for workforce stuff, I’m very happy with Okta. It’s a great tool. If I were going to market today, would I pick Okta for our customer data platform? Probably not. You know, it’s overkill for what we’re trying to do here.

375 00:38:44.330 ⇒ 00:38:52.429 Jay Heavner: I have not looked at that landscape in a long time, and, like, if we were…

376 00:38:52.900 ⇒ 00:39:02.940 Jay Heavner: if we were using our JWTs and our access token, there’d be a lot more value there, and I just can’t get these VIN… like, we had a call with the mobile app people, and they’re like, can you push…

377 00:39:03.230 ⇒ 00:39:09.160 Jay Heavner: our ID into your claim. Yeah. And I’m like, but why?

378 00:39:10.050 ⇒ 00:39:15.399 Jay Heavner: Help me understand what you’re trying to do here, because you don’t seem to understand OIDC.

379 00:39:15.580 ⇒ 00:39:28.889 Jay Heavner: And so, we’ve had this… we had to go on site and help some of our vendors implement OIDC flows. I mean, I’m at the point now where I think I can build one in 8 minutes. I’ve done it so many times, right? But, like… like, guys, this isn’t hard.

380 00:39:28.970 ⇒ 00:39:35.599 Jay Heavner: You’re hitting an endpoint, you’re getting a token, you’re exchanging token for code, or whatever, or code for token, and, like, it’s…

381 00:39:36.260 ⇒ 00:39:39.690 Jay Heavner: It’s… it’s not hard, and then you just… you use that, and, like.

382 00:39:40.000 ⇒ 00:39:50.409 Jay Heavner: And we’re still… all these vendors are sideloading data between one another. I’m like, you don’t need to do that. You… you know who’s in front of you, you can pull just that person’s information. You don’t need to pull

383 00:39:51.100 ⇒ 00:39:56.369 Jay Heavner: you know, 180,000 records out of database and try to sync those every day. Like, this is…

384 00:39:57.330 ⇒ 00:39:59.560 Jay Heavner: We solved this problem decades ago, guys.

385 00:39:59.590 ⇒ 00:40:00.510 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, yeah.

386 00:40:03.370 ⇒ 00:40:11.360 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I’m surprised that Auth0 wasn’t the ticket out here, personally. Well, we took a hard look at it last year.

387 00:40:11.660 ⇒ 00:40:15.690 Jay Heavner: And I still… if it… I think the problem’s gonna be…

388 00:40:16.080 ⇒ 00:40:20.770 Jay Heavner: If the cost is the same, and there’s implementation, and people are afraid of implementation.

389 00:40:20.770 ⇒ 00:40:21.370 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

390 00:40:21.370 ⇒ 00:40:24.060 Jay Heavner: I do think it’s… if we were picking the day.

391 00:40:24.320 ⇒ 00:40:30.729 Jay Heavner: prob… probably the right thing. I’m supp… there’s gotta be… As expensive as it is.

392 00:40:31.010 ⇒ 00:40:35.390 Jay Heavner: I’m surprised there’s not something else out there, even like an open series thing. There are, there are…

393 00:40:35.390 ⇒ 00:40:38.250 Uttam Kumaran: There are a few more that I know, I just, like…

394 00:40:38.930 ⇒ 00:40:44.479 Uttam Kumaran: This is just funny, I’ve, like, followed a couple of companies in this space. Auth0 is one of them, but Clerk is another one.

395 00:40:44.480 ⇒ 00:40:45.179 Jay Heavner: Oh, I haven’t heard that.

396 00:40:46.050 ⇒ 00:40:46.410 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

397 00:40:46.410 ⇒ 00:40:48.790 Uttam Kumaran: Clerk.com,

398 00:40:49.140 ⇒ 00:40:59.389 Uttam Kumaran: Sam, that’s the only other one I’ve heard of, because we do a lot of work with fast products that do… that are, like, launching consumer apps that do a ton of auth, and Clerk is the only one

399 00:40:59.630 ⇒ 00:41:01.940 Uttam Kumaran: that I’ve heard of recently that is, like.

400 00:41:02.600 ⇒ 00:41:07.039 Uttam Kumaran: People seem to like it, but, like, that’ll be up to us to figure out.

401 00:41:07.250 ⇒ 00:41:16.970 Uttam Kumaran: I still think maybe worth us just, like, rehashing, or, like, at least rehashing what the cost of OptZero could be, so at least that… we just can assume that’s, like.

402 00:41:17.840 ⇒ 00:41:19.630 Uttam Kumaran: the baseline, right?

403 00:41:20.030 ⇒ 00:41:20.570 Jay Heavner: So…

404 00:41:21.090 ⇒ 00:41:27.690 Jay Heavner: And we’re paying, at this point, like, a little over a quarter million dollars a year to have our customers log in.

405 00:41:27.860 ⇒ 00:41:31.769 Jay Heavner: A lot of that is because we only sign one-year contracts.

406 00:41:32.040 ⇒ 00:41:41.790 Jay Heavner: So that thing has gone from probably $80,000inyearzeroto$260,000 in year… what are we now, 7 or 8?

407 00:41:41.790 ⇒ 00:41:47.969 Uttam Kumaran: And is that priced on just a user basis? Not on, like, any sort of, like, time box? Like, is there volume for CES, or…

408 00:41:47.970 ⇒ 00:41:51.739 Jay Heavner: Okta… yeah, Okta does this weird licensing thing where it’s…

409 00:41:51.990 ⇒ 00:41:55.250 Jay Heavner: Monthly users. So we pay for…

410 00:41:55.390 ⇒ 00:42:02.239 Jay Heavner: 900,000 annual users. And so, I count if I…

411 00:42:02.240 ⇒ 00:42:03.539 Uttam Kumaran: You sub it in.

412 00:42:03.750 ⇒ 00:42:15.109 Jay Heavner: if I log in 3 months of the year, I hit it 3 times. I guess $900,000. So, and it’s every month, and it sucks for us. We’re a trade show. All of our logins are in January, right?

413 00:42:15.110 ⇒ 00:42:15.450 Samuel Roberts: Right.

414 00:42:15.780 ⇒ 00:42:23.199 Jay Heavner: So, and I was… I was just talking to my rep last week, and she’s like, you could probably turn this thing down, because what used to happen…

415 00:42:24.110 ⇒ 00:42:29.130 Jay Heavner: Is… we used to get… A million registrants a year.

416 00:42:29.760 ⇒ 00:42:41.129 Jay Heavner: And the number of no-shows from that is a lot, because we didn’t get a million attendees, but we got a million… because registration is often free. There’s no harm in just signing up for an account, so that’s a user on our system.

417 00:42:42.700 ⇒ 00:42:57.200 Jay Heavner: you know, I think if there was just a little bit of friction in front of registration, we would get probably closer… you at least have intent to come to this show. Like, you’re not registering on the idea that you’re probably not going, but maybe if, you know, you happen to be around that weekend, you’ll go.

418 00:42:57.510 ⇒ 00:43:11.850 Jay Heavner: But yeah, the pricing model… I mean, frankly, no licensing works for a trade show. We have the same problem with, like, my M365 licenses, because every Q4, we bring in a bunch of temp staff, and it shoots my license numbers up.

419 00:43:11.980 ⇒ 00:43:16.840 Jay Heavner: And I go back to vendors, I’m like, this isn’t real. They’re all going to be gone by February 1st, so…

420 00:43:17.370 ⇒ 00:43:33.830 Jay Heavner: ignore the blip, and I try not to have anything licensed around that time. Like, all my licenses usually come in… my renewals are, like, March to September. I’m trying to keep it doing a low volume piece, and, you know, they’ll call me, like, we need to do a true-up. I’m like, you know, new phone, who dis? Like, I’ll push them on.

421 00:43:33.830 ⇒ 00:43:34.819 Samuel Roberts: Wait, wait, yeah.

422 00:43:34.820 ⇒ 00:43:36.010 Jay Heavner: Yeah, yeah.

423 00:43:37.280 ⇒ 00:43:38.899 Samuel Roberts: Okay, good to know.

424 00:43:40.720 ⇒ 00:43:55.969 Jay Heavner: But yeah, I think… I think replacing that with something that’s as effective, and again, we don’t need all the bells and whistles of an Octa for customers. We’re not… we’re just not doing that. Right. You know, that would be a big win. I mean, that’s… that’s real money we could save.

425 00:43:56.410 ⇒ 00:44:00.469 Uttam Kumaran: But then talk to me, Jay, about, like, rolling something out. Like, let’s say it isn’t something…

426 00:44:01.600 ⇒ 00:44:06.359 Uttam Kumaran: super… simple? Like, are we okay with the friction of having people

427 00:44:06.880 ⇒ 00:44:10.790 Uttam Kumaran: Go through another thing for registration? And, like, what is this sort of…

428 00:44:10.790 ⇒ 00:44:13.260 Jay Heavner: Do we have, like, a timeline? Yeah, I…

429 00:44:13.260 ⇒ 00:44:14.139 Uttam Kumaran: not offer that.

430 00:44:14.140 ⇒ 00:44:20.569 Jay Heavner: Well, I think so. So, in terms of timeline, we’re looking at… let’s back up. So, if registration launches…

431 00:44:21.960 ⇒ 00:44:31.040 Jay Heavner: Labor Day, plus or minus 2 weeks, probably. And we do this thing that we call, like, a soft registration. Guys, if it’s on the internet, it’s not soft, it’s real, but you do you. Whatever you believe.

432 00:44:31.040 ⇒ 00:44:31.690 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

433 00:44:31.690 ⇒ 00:44:38.739 Jay Heavner: You know. So, then you back up from implementation for all of our partners. We probably want to give them.

434 00:44:39.630 ⇒ 00:44:43.560 Uttam Kumaran: 90 days or 120 days to do whatever.

435 00:44:43.680 ⇒ 00:44:57.910 Jay Heavner: When we looked at it last year, you know, we could have… we probably could have done it pretty quickly, but I was really worried about every single vendor in the chain, because everybody has to convert. That’s the tough part. Everybody’s got to do it. So we’d probably want to…

436 00:44:59.030 ⇒ 00:45:07.039 Jay Heavner: in February, start communicating the change to all of the vendors so they have all the time they need.

437 00:45:07.280 ⇒ 00:45:11.070 Jay Heavner: You know, in terms of friction with customers.

438 00:45:12.120 ⇒ 00:45:23.179 Jay Heavner: I think we could probably find a way to easily onboard existing customers, especially the ones that were there. We went through a big cleanup effort, over the summer, because we…

439 00:45:23.670 ⇒ 00:45:26.420 Jay Heavner: We don’t like to purge old records either.

440 00:45:26.640 ⇒ 00:45:34.509 Jay Heavner: And I’m like, guys, let’s go through and let’s just get rid of a lot of the noise in here, because a lot of these accounts are in non-workable states.

441 00:45:34.790 ⇒ 00:45:40.059 Jay Heavner: let’s just purge it. You know, let’s go back, I think I said, well, 2 years.

442 00:45:40.280 ⇒ 00:45:46.310 Jay Heavner: You know, 2 years of act… anybody who’s logged in the last 2 years will keep that account, and everybody else

443 00:45:46.720 ⇒ 00:45:52.780 Jay Heavner: come back in. But, you know, I think… I think moving that could be good.

444 00:45:53.050 ⇒ 00:46:02.040 Jay Heavner: One of the problems we have now is we don’t allow people to… we made the decision to make email username, which, it’s easy, it’s convenient.

445 00:46:02.410 ⇒ 00:46:09.549 Jay Heavner: it’s not immutable, right? You get married, your email changes, create a new account. Like, that’s not awesome.

446 00:46:09.760 ⇒ 00:46:13.499 Jay Heavner: Yeah. Okta supports that, we don’t support it.

447 00:46:13.700 ⇒ 00:46:17.220 Jay Heavner: We would support it, our downstream vendors can’t support that, right?

448 00:46:18.200 ⇒ 00:46:19.030 Jay Heavner: So…

449 00:46:20.290 ⇒ 00:46:30.449 Jay Heavner: And I still go back and forth on that one, because I hate places that don’t let me use my email address, but I use a password manager, it’s fine, but if you’re not using your email address, you’re never remembering that thing, you know?

450 00:46:30.450 ⇒ 00:46:34.779 Uttam Kumaran: I mean, usually the solve here is people are now going to SMS only.

451 00:46:34.780 ⇒ 00:46:35.210 Katherine Bayless: Like.

452 00:46:35.210 ⇒ 00:46:39.010 Uttam Kumaran: Like, some of the new event platforms are only SMS, because…

453 00:46:39.250 ⇒ 00:46:43.560 Uttam Kumaran: It just got a little bit easier to do transactional stuff over email over the past, like.

454 00:46:43.740 ⇒ 00:46:47.130 Uttam Kumaran: you know, a few years… over… SMS over the past few years, and so…

455 00:46:47.310 ⇒ 00:46:51.719 Uttam Kumaran: I’m seeing… I’m seeing that and email as sort of, like, interchangeable.

456 00:46:51.830 ⇒ 00:46:58.569 Uttam Kumaran: with a lot of places going direct to SMS, because you’re… that is something that’s not often An age.

457 00:46:58.700 ⇒ 00:47:04.710 Jay Heavner: when I’m president, you’ll have a Fido key embedded in your arm here to try to solve this problem.

458 00:47:04.710 ⇒ 00:47:05.859 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

459 00:47:05.990 ⇒ 00:47:06.730 Uttam Kumaran: Shit.

460 00:47:07.220 ⇒ 00:47:07.790 Katherine Bayless: I won’.

461 00:47:07.790 ⇒ 00:47:08.450 Uttam Kumaran: Wow.

462 00:47:08.450 ⇒ 00:47:30.010 Katherine Bayless: mRNA joke. Actually, the SMS thing, I mean, there might be more of an open door, than we realize, because we did just go through the whole process of getting legal to approve and put all the things, and we got Verizon to approve our sender and everything, and so, like, the marketing team is ready to start doing SMS for marketing next year, which I know is different, but some of that groundwork might be.

463 00:47:30.010 ⇒ 00:47:36.739 Jay Heavner: Yeah, well, I think there’s also FUD around the international audience. Yeah, so that’s why WhatsApp…

464 00:47:36.740 ⇒ 00:47:40.779 Uttam Kumaran: you’ll have to support other… Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly what I was gonna say.

465 00:47:40.780 ⇒ 00:47:41.180 Katherine Bayless: Yeah.

466 00:47:41.180 ⇒ 00:47:41.630 Jay Heavner: So.

467 00:47:41.630 ⇒ 00:47:41.990 Uttam Kumaran: No.

468 00:47:41.990 ⇒ 00:47:43.789 Jay Heavner: that WhatsApp, I mean…

469 00:47:44.130 ⇒ 00:47:48.740 Jay Heavner: what’s the big one in Korea now? I forget it, but, like, you know, I’m guessing if you…

470 00:47:49.680 ⇒ 00:47:57.590 Jay Heavner: And again, you will have some outliers. It is the nature of large number problems, so… .

471 00:47:57.590 ⇒ 00:48:10.279 Uttam Kumaran: But again, even for the outliers, as long as we’re… the other point I want to mention is, one, we need to consider something, Sam, for just, like, some type of alerting, and then, ideally, something for, like, basically to triage for the CX team to, like.

472 00:48:10.660 ⇒ 00:48:14.770 Uttam Kumaran: Do they prioritize tickets, or categorize, like, what to work on, and…

473 00:48:15.030 ⇒ 00:48:15.950 Katherine Bayless: Okay.

474 00:48:15.950 ⇒ 00:48:19.629 Jay Heavner: Well, and so that’s been… that has been on my…

475 00:48:19.680 ⇒ 00:48:23.229 Jay Heavner: I’m not gonna call it backlog, because it’s further back than that, but, like.

476 00:48:23.240 ⇒ 00:48:43.119 Jay Heavner: you know, Okta does really, really verbose logging. We’re not dumping a lot of that anywhere, because it’s going to get expensive to maintain, but it would be nice to proactively be going through those logs and identifying those customers and trying to sort them out before frustration and escalation and all that.

477 00:48:43.400 ⇒ 00:48:49.449 Jay Heavner: Or at least see what the numbers are. Does it bear fruit to go down that effort, right? Yeah. I think that’d be good.

478 00:48:50.530 ⇒ 00:48:55.000 Jay Heavner: And then, the Shopify thing specifically is…

479 00:48:55.540 ⇒ 00:48:58.760 Jay Heavner: Captain, did you give me any backstory on Shopify and the disaster that it was?

480 00:48:58.760 ⇒ 00:49:02.040 Katherine Bayless: I gave him a little bit. Well, a little bit.

481 00:49:02.040 ⇒ 00:49:18.109 Uttam Kumaran: And to give you Jay, some background, like, we do a lot of work in e-com. We have a lot of experience in Shopify. Definitely surprised that you’re using it for a digital asset, but, like, I know it’s also, like, kind of, like, without sort of ownership right now.

482 00:49:18.110 ⇒ 00:49:19.510 Jay Heavner: So, yeah.

483 00:49:19.510 ⇒ 00:49:22.000 Uttam Kumaran: It’s, it’s… so, I will tell you.

484 00:49:22.000 ⇒ 00:49:25.920 Jay Heavner: This is the fourth or fifth store product we’ve had since I’ve been here.

485 00:49:26.290 ⇒ 00:49:30.759 Jay Heavner: this one’s been in the longest, and when they finally got ready to do it, I’m like…

486 00:49:31.170 ⇒ 00:49:37.999 Jay Heavner: And we used to sell physical things. These used to be physical reports, or t-shirts, or coffee mugs, or whatever, so it made

487 00:49:38.140 ⇒ 00:49:46.489 Jay Heavner: a little sense. But then, you know, you pick our partner out of New Zealand that we can’t forget, and really, I don’t think they…

488 00:49:46.590 ⇒ 00:49:51.860 Jay Heavner: We picked a firm, That is subcontracting all the code out to an individual.

489 00:49:52.150 ⇒ 00:50:02.259 Jay Heavner: and so trying to get anything done was nearly impossible. They did not want to bring it into our platform, they wanted to keep it as a separate thing, and I’m like, well, that’s kind of weird, why would you do that?

490 00:50:04.860 ⇒ 00:50:20.290 Jay Heavner: it’s… yeah, the implementation is half-baked. Like, I went through it with Claude Code, because it was also written in Ruby, and we don’t support Ruby internally, but I’m like, hey, I need you to go through this gym and figure out what it’s doing and why it’s not…

491 00:50:20.900 ⇒ 00:50:28.240 Jay Heavner: When someone hits the thing, it’s not hitting the endpoint to see if they’re authenticated or not.

492 00:50:28.370 ⇒ 00:50:31.800 Jay Heavner: And it gave me, like, two lines of code, and I’m like, oh, well, let’s…

493 00:50:31.930 ⇒ 00:50:38.589 Jay Heavner: let’s see if I can break this thing, we push it up, and so we’ve gotten… we’ve gotten fewer things, but it’s still really brittle. Just…

494 00:50:39.160 ⇒ 00:50:40.049 Jay Heavner: It’s not great.

495 00:50:40.050 ⇒ 00:50:45.429 Uttam Kumaran: how… I guess, like, my question there is, also for, like.

496 00:50:45.770 ⇒ 00:50:50.190 Uttam Kumaran: for CES this coming year, like, how important is this, like.

497 00:50:50.390 ⇒ 00:50:53.840 Uttam Kumaran: To get fixed, because even for both of these items.

498 00:50:54.170 ⇒ 00:51:01.210 Uttam Kumaran: we’re gonna find some things that we can’t do within the timeframe, and some things that we can do, so I do want us to… I do want y’all to…

499 00:51:01.210 ⇒ 00:51:01.540 Jay Heavner: Yeah.

500 00:51:01.540 ⇒ 00:51:08.479 Uttam Kumaran: take advantage of us to think about both, but I also will… that’s how we’re gonna try to frame, like, what options we have.

501 00:51:09.050 ⇒ 00:51:16.970 Uttam Kumaran: Certainly, like, in order to… like, creating a system of selling these digital assets on a CTA-owned infra is actually, like, not that.

502 00:51:17.130 ⇒ 00:51:18.800 Katherine Bayless: Difficult these days?

503 00:51:18.800 ⇒ 00:51:20.909 Uttam Kumaran: So, like, I actually am less…

504 00:51:21.610 ⇒ 00:51:29.960 Uttam Kumaran: Overall, I’m, like, less worried about this, like, long term, because we could do this on Stripe, you could do this pretty easily. But, like, yeah, talk to me about the short term.

505 00:51:29.960 ⇒ 00:51:37.569 Jay Heavner: Yeah, I think doing anything before CES, like, people just… whenever you have FUD,

506 00:51:37.880 ⇒ 00:51:42.560 Jay Heavner: You have all this evaluation of risk that isn’t

507 00:51:42.620 ⇒ 00:52:01.479 Jay Heavner: based in reality, right? And so now, we are at the point of where it’s like, alright, knives down, hands up. We’re not touching anything between now and CES, and we absolutely have to. So, I think that’s your biggest… even though CES and Shopify have nothing to do with the Shopify thing… am I wrong here, Catherine?

508 00:52:01.480 ⇒ 00:52:15.420 Katherine Bayless: not… I mean, I wouldn’t say wrong, but there is the trends report thing, which is why it’s been on my radar lately, and so, like, that’s… yeah, yeah. But I will say, like, to Jay’s point, the Shopify thing, it’s a noisy problem, but it is a small problem.

509 00:52:15.420 ⇒ 00:52:17.659 Samuel Roberts: As a reminder, like, what is the real… what are the numbers we’re talking about?

510 00:52:17.660 ⇒ 00:52:19.200 Katherine Bayless: A couple hundred people? Yeah.

511 00:52:19.200 ⇒ 00:52:19.950 Jay Heavner: Whoa.

512 00:52:19.950 ⇒ 00:52:20.460 Katherine Bayless: Yeah.

513 00:52:20.510 ⇒ 00:52:39.149 Jay Heavner: And this is the problem. It’s always been, well, we’re not selling market research because we have a bad store, a bad platform. We’re not doing blah blah blah blah blah, but we’ve never put any real success criteria to this and measured back to it. Like, should we even have things for sale?

514 00:52:39.840 ⇒ 00:52:42.199 Jay Heavner: You know what I mean? Like, give it away to members.

515 00:52:42.760 ⇒ 00:52:47.709 Jay Heavner: Like, I would love to know how many things we actually sell and don’t give away.

516 00:52:48.660 ⇒ 00:53:00.890 Uttam Kumaran: I’m guessing the juice is not worth the squeeze. But again, even that, like, there’s things like… I don’t know, Sam, have you used, like, Gumloop before? Or, it’s not Gumloop, there’s… Gumroad. There’s other tools. Yeah, Gumroad.

517 00:53:00.890 ⇒ 00:53:02.170 Samuel Roberts: I know what you’re talking about, yeah.

518 00:53:02.170 ⇒ 00:53:03.870 Uttam Kumaran: you know, when you buy e-books and PDFs.

519 00:53:03.870 ⇒ 00:53:04.640 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, yeah.

520 00:53:04.640 ⇒ 00:53:10.910 Uttam Kumaran: solutions for this, but even then, like, Jay, you can put Sprite behind this, sell stuff for $0, and at least you see

521 00:53:11.750 ⇒ 00:53:13.870 Uttam Kumaran: the broadest come in, and also, frankly.

522 00:53:13.870 ⇒ 00:53:14.280 Samuel Roberts: Right.

523 00:53:14.280 ⇒ 00:53:15.420 Uttam Kumaran: This is something that you could…

524 00:53:15.530 ⇒ 00:53:19.390 Uttam Kumaran: like, I, like, knock on wood, you’ve probably run in parallel.

525 00:53:19.570 ⇒ 00:53:25.800 Uttam Kumaran: You know, and, like, maybe the way you guys get adoption is, like, hey, we went ahead and, like, this is the same exact thing.

526 00:53:25.800 ⇒ 00:53:26.460 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

527 00:53:26.460 ⇒ 00:53:33.730 Uttam Kumaran: And so, like, the process is a lot easier. This side of the house, now we have reporting. Like, you can go into Stripe and see, like.

528 00:53:33.900 ⇒ 00:53:39.620 Uttam Kumaran: how many customers are buying stuff. Catherine, we looped this all into your data, and it sort of, like, drives.

529 00:53:39.740 ⇒ 00:53:41.850 Jay Heavner: itself, because you’re like, hey.

530 00:53:41.850 ⇒ 00:53:44.050 Uttam Kumaran: We don’t have anything from the Shopify side.

531 00:53:44.050 ⇒ 00:53:44.490 Katherine Bayless: Yep.

532 00:53:44.490 ⇒ 00:53:45.670 Uttam Kumaran: You know?

533 00:53:45.670 ⇒ 00:53:54.249 Jay Heavner: Where I’d really like to unpack is our space selection process in Las Vegas, because it is,

534 00:53:55.220 ⇒ 00:54:09.439 Jay Heavner: the most manual thing you’ve ever seen in your life. Two years ago, I caught a member of our membership team trying to write someone’s credit card number down so she could get back to her room and bill. I’m like, no, no, no, you can’t do that!

535 00:54:09.440 ⇒ 00:54:19.979 Jay Heavner: And she goes, well, what am I supposed to do? And I’m like, not that. And we came back, and I went to… at that… we have new leadership. So at that point in time, our COO, CFO, and I’m like, hey.

536 00:54:20.060 ⇒ 00:54:39.209 Jay Heavner: we need some kind of payment system there so they can process these things in real time. And she’s like, no. They have a process. I’m like, but they don’t. Like, the process is walk them to a computer that is a rented computer, and have them put their information into that thing. And I’m like, I wouldn’t put information to a rented computer in Las Vegas.

537 00:54:39.460 ⇒ 00:54:40.740 Jay Heavner: Credit card number.

538 00:54:40.740 ⇒ 00:54:42.479 Katherine Bayless: I barely use the ATMs out there.

539 00:54:42.480 ⇒ 00:54:44.349 Samuel Roberts: I was gonna say… Yeah. Yep.

540 00:54:44.350 ⇒ 00:54:45.000 Jay Heavner: like…

541 00:54:45.480 ⇒ 00:54:51.739 Jay Heavner: Yeah, we’re doing a training tomorrow on staff to say, don’t use anything that’s not yours. I mean, so yeah, why would it…

542 00:54:52.790 ⇒ 00:55:02.170 Jay Heavner: Yeah, they put kiosks around and want people to use these things. I’m like, guys, have you never, like, read the articles about Black Hat and what they do to those things when they’re out there? Like.

543 00:55:02.170 ⇒ 00:55:03.110 Uttam Kumaran: Two and a half.

544 00:55:04.420 ⇒ 00:55:04.850 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

545 00:55:04.850 ⇒ 00:55:05.420 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.

546 00:55:05.670 ⇒ 00:55:10.470 Uttam Kumaran: I actually feel more comp… I mean, maybe, Sam, I’ll let you go off, but I feel…

547 00:55:11.070 ⇒ 00:55:20.289 Uttam Kumaran: I feel more confident on the Shopify side, of course. But I don’t know, Sam, like, what do you think about some of, like, the next steps I described?

548 00:55:20.470 ⇒ 00:55:26.840 Uttam Kumaran: on the auth side of the house. And actually, the part of the Shopify stuff we can also probably do in parallel.

549 00:55:26.840 ⇒ 00:55:27.240 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

550 00:55:27.420 ⇒ 00:55:30.030 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, maybe, like, I’ll let you go first, and then kind of.

551 00:55:30.030 ⇒ 00:55:46.279 Samuel Roberts: Yeah, I mean, I’m curious to dig into some of the other providers and see, like, especially pricing-wise, like, I… I… Office Zero, like I said, I touched in the past, but I hadn’t touched since, like, they’ve been absorbed into Okta, so I don’t, like, I didn’t know all the different changes there, so I would love to do a little bit of a, kind of, discovery on some of that and see.

552 00:55:46.280 ⇒ 00:55:54.269 Samuel Roberts: because I know some of the tools that I’ve used, but it’s been more for, like, startup stuff and more for, you know, not the numbers you guys are talking, so I don’t really know the, like.

553 00:55:54.610 ⇒ 00:56:07.169 Samuel Roberts: how that scales for certain, you know, I… like, clerk, I don’t know, I’ve heard something… people say it’s expensive, I’ve heard some people say it’s perfect for what you need, like, if it… so I don’t know exactly where those are gonna settle based on the numbers, and what else is out there.

554 00:56:07.170 ⇒ 00:56:15.969 Jay Heavner: So, what I like about Clerk is they charge you on real. They’re charging you 2 cents per MAU, the first 10,000 are free. Yeah.

555 00:56:15.970 ⇒ 00:56:16.650 Samuel Roberts: That’s new.

556 00:56:16.650 ⇒ 00:56:22.870 Jay Heavner: I’m… I’m a much bigger fan on pay for the customers you have, not the customers that you want, you know? Yeah, totally.

557 00:56:22.870 ⇒ 00:56:28.600 Uttam Kumaran: The other thing, Jay, is, like, this is the one thing we do, we negotiate with a lot of vendors, and so we’ll come in and be like.

558 00:56:28.720 ⇒ 00:56:31.280 Uttam Kumaran: We’re gonna… we’re considering switching.

559 00:56:31.670 ⇒ 00:56:47.820 Uttam Kumaran: you need to make this, like, worthwhile for us to switch to you, and especially, like, so that’s something that I think we’re… once I get an understanding of the features, we’ll start to just put these folks against each other, because they’re gonna want the business, and the Octave person, whoever is gonna…

560 00:56:48.120 ⇒ 00:56:52.279 Uttam Kumaran: is basically gonna lose all that, so they should throw in OptZero for free.

561 00:56:52.700 ⇒ 00:56:55.299 Uttam Kumaran: You know, we should push them to start doing these types of things.

562 00:56:55.300 ⇒ 00:56:55.890 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

563 00:56:55.890 ⇒ 00:57:02.540 Jay Heavner: Yeah. And, well, yeah, I’ve been… so, Okta, in… They’ve gone…

564 00:57:02.940 ⇒ 00:57:18.329 Jay Heavner: I don’t know, I was really, really impressed with them, and they still are the market leader, I think, but, like, they’re not nearly the company they were 3 years ago. Yeah. You know, we’ve had a lot more problems with them. I was shocked that Author was going to be so expensive, but then they charged us, like.

565 00:57:18.890 ⇒ 00:57:37.999 Jay Heavner: I have to pay support twice. There’s a lot of double charges, because we have both workforce and customer, and I’m like, well, should we just roll it all into the customer, Denny, and then I’ll save the 60 grand on the workforce? I’m like, well, no, but you have adapt… you don’t have some of the SKUs there, so then you have to spend that money, and I’m like, you’re really nickeling and diming me for…

566 00:57:38.370 ⇒ 00:57:51.809 Jay Heavner: what it is, and we threatened to go with intra. I was never gonna go with intra, but we threatened it. They gave me, like, a 40-page white paper while it’s free, it’s not free, and I’m like, yeah, I’m… I have no interest in trying to manage back to…

567 00:57:51.980 ⇒ 00:57:54.599 Jay Heavner: The nice thing about Okta is…

568 00:57:55.030 ⇒ 00:58:01.619 Jay Heavner: we don’t spend any time really managing it. And it’s intuitive and simple enough now it’s gotten a lot more complex than what it used to be.

569 00:58:01.620 ⇒ 00:58:04.829 Uttam Kumaran: I think you’re right in that they own, they own this, like, enterprise.

570 00:58:04.830 ⇒ 00:58:05.569 Jay Heavner: Oh, dang.

571 00:58:05.570 ⇒ 00:58:09.750 Uttam Kumaran: single sign-on, but you’re right in that I don’t think they were innovating nearly as fast.

572 00:58:11.380 ⇒ 00:58:23.609 Jay Heavner: And they keep making changes, and the changes break things, and they’re not always intuitive, and like, we weren’t really looking for complexity, right? We’re looking for simple to manage, too, and…

573 00:58:23.610 ⇒ 00:58:24.110 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.

574 00:58:24.110 ⇒ 00:58:31.019 Jay Heavner: they’re really into the public sector now, and like, when I talked to my rep, she goes, basically what we do now is we do everything public sector first.

575 00:58:31.020 ⇒ 00:58:31.400 Katherine Bayless: Hmm.

576 00:58:31.400 ⇒ 00:58:37.740 Jay Heavner: And because they always have the toughest requirements, then we come behind that for business, and I’m like, yeah, but then you’re doing things that I don’t care about.

577 00:58:37.740 ⇒ 00:58:39.780 Samuel Roberts: Right, it’s just a lot of overkill.

578 00:58:39.780 ⇒ 00:58:43.640 Jay Heavner: Lot of everyone. Yeah. Yeah. Like, they’re really into,

579 00:58:44.590 ⇒ 00:58:50.640 Jay Heavner: oh, some kind of governance now, and I’m like, you know, that’s just not where we are. We don’t care about governance.

580 00:58:50.950 ⇒ 00:58:54.509 Samuel Roberts: I mean, once you come all the way to the customer side, it’s like, yeah, yeah.

581 00:58:54.510 ⇒ 00:58:55.050 Jay Heavner: Yeah.

582 00:58:55.260 ⇒ 00:58:59.040 Samuel Roberts: Through workforce to customers, like, yeah, from… yeah, I see exactly what you’re saying.

583 00:58:59.860 ⇒ 00:59:00.690 Samuel Roberts: Okay.

584 00:59:01.430 ⇒ 00:59:02.590 Jay Heavner: Alright, cool. Yeah.

585 00:59:03.340 ⇒ 00:59:16.969 Uttam Kumaran: So I feel like, Catherine, like, kind of where we’ll land is, like, I think, Jay, what I mentioned is, like, we’re just gonna drive towards, like, basically putting, like, a memo together. Maybe have a mix of, like, things we discover on the Okta side.

586 00:59:17.370 ⇒ 00:59:24.249 Uttam Kumaran: vendors that we can evaluate. I basically was like, let’s timebox it to, like, the end of this week, where we just put, like, a bunch of stuff we’ve learned.

587 00:59:24.530 ⇒ 00:59:25.330 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.

588 00:59:25.540 ⇒ 00:59:31.889 Jay Heavner: Let’s be honest, you could rewrite our store, Fastions Graduate, a memo, if we’re being really honest, there’s not a lot of.

589 00:59:31.890 ⇒ 00:59:38.739 Uttam Kumaran: I guess it’s not… it’s not really about the memo, more in, like, I… we need to… we have an opportunity to find out…

590 00:59:39.000 ⇒ 00:59:41.789 Katherine Bayless: Yeah. Past, present, future, and so we’re just, like.

591 00:59:41.790 ⇒ 00:59:44.180 Uttam Kumaran: Write something down so that…

592 00:59:44.450 ⇒ 00:59:45.670 Katherine Bayless: We… we…

593 00:59:45.750 ⇒ 01:00:02.070 Uttam Kumaran: And then that’s also an artifact that, if we need to get budget or approval or something, where the team is… we’re the most, you know, knowledgeable in the room about it, that’s more of the reason. I don’t want to do, like, a month-long discovery on something we don’t need to do, but even for us, just to understand, like, what is the…

594 01:00:02.320 ⇒ 01:00:10.919 Uttam Kumaran: what’s the end of it, you know? But you’re… I mean, yeah, I feel like, definitely. On the Okta side, a little bit, obviously, on the Shopify side, yeah.

595 01:00:10.920 ⇒ 01:00:11.700 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

596 01:00:11.700 ⇒ 01:00:15.320 Uttam Kumaran: They’ve made it very, very easy to sell stuff on the internet, you know?

597 01:00:15.320 ⇒ 01:00:16.250 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

598 01:00:17.390 ⇒ 01:00:21.370 Katherine Bayless: But I think, I mean, yeah, like, that was kind of what I was saying earlier to Jay, too, is like…

599 01:00:21.720 ⇒ 01:00:46.520 Katherine Bayless: there is meaningful utility in the asset of just, like, being able to give, like, third-party opinions on, like, you’re just doing this kind of dumb, guys, right, to leadership, right? Like, I think we can continue to make the case that, like, we need to invest in better technology, and technology generally, but yeah, like, we need to be able to kind of show them the death by a thousand cuts that we’re living because of these, like, seemingly innocuous decisions around

600 01:00:46.520 ⇒ 01:00:48.210 Katherine Bayless: Legality and things like that.

601 01:00:48.570 ⇒ 01:00:49.070 Jay Heavner: Or.

602 01:00:49.070 ⇒ 01:00:49.520 Samuel Roberts: Right.

603 01:00:49.520 ⇒ 01:00:52.049 Jay Heavner: Yeah, the one-off exceptions, because…

604 01:00:52.830 ⇒ 01:00:58.379 Jay Heavner: security is… is hard, but it’s not. If you give me… We spend 7 minutes together.

605 01:00:58.870 ⇒ 01:01:16.780 Jay Heavner: and I’ll help you with it, then you can have passwordless login, yeah, you’re gonna have to reboot your computer occasionally, and there might be some things that it’s gonna say, hey, you can’t… you can’t do that, or you have a patch that’s due, but, like, my wife works at AWS. I watched her do a unbox a computer a few weeks ago, and she has to…

606 01:01:17.020 ⇒ 01:01:20.000 Jay Heavner: 100% herself. She cannot get any help with it.

607 01:01:20.210 ⇒ 01:01:25.760 Jay Heavner: And… it was a little arduous, but I’m like, you know, she’s not a technical person, she’s a meeting planner.

608 01:01:25.970 ⇒ 01:01:31.739 Jay Heavner: So, there are opportunities here to improve this stuff and just, you know, drive back to a

609 01:01:32.130 ⇒ 01:01:44.610 Jay Heavner: realistic baseline. If you’ve got to carve out exceptions for senior, senior leadership, that’s fine. We carve out those special cases, we put them on the risk register, but then 99.9% of the staff play through normal things.

610 01:01:47.600 ⇒ 01:01:48.430 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

611 01:01:48.430 ⇒ 01:01:48.860 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.

612 01:01:48.860 ⇒ 01:01:49.460 Samuel Roberts: Okay.

613 01:01:50.580 ⇒ 01:01:52.710 Katherine Bayless: I feel very excited by this conversation.

614 01:01:52.710 ⇒ 01:01:53.340 Samuel Roberts: Yeah.

615 01:01:54.190 ⇒ 01:01:59.739 Uttam Kumaran: Let’s see what we can… yeah, let’s see what we just… I think it’s a totally achievable…

616 01:01:59.740 ⇒ 01:02:00.170 Jay Heavner: Yeah.

617 01:02:00.170 ⇒ 01:02:12.590 Uttam Kumaran: I think it’s totally achievable, you know? So, yeah, I feel like if we can nail it for you guys and sort of take some of that off your plate, like, more than happy to, you know. At least we’ll do another round of, like, thorough discovery to kind of see what the options are.

618 01:02:12.830 ⇒ 01:02:14.059 Jay Heavner: Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

619 01:02:15.020 ⇒ 01:02:20.020 Jay Heavner: Yeah, everyone here thinks it’s rocket science, and it’s like, no, it’s just making sandwiches, guys, we’re not doing anything really that hard.

620 01:02:20.020 ⇒ 01:02:21.480 Samuel Roberts: Right. Yeah, yeah.

621 01:02:23.090 ⇒ 01:02:23.769 Samuel Roberts: I understand that.

622 01:02:23.770 ⇒ 01:02:27.610 Katherine Bayless: Jay, I did add you to the Brainforge channel.

623 01:02:27.610 ⇒ 01:02:28.110 Jay Heavner: all that.

624 01:02:28.110 ⇒ 01:02:30.810 Katherine Bayless: So that way, if there’s any back-and-forth thing, yeah, like…

625 01:02:30.810 ⇒ 01:02:31.300 Samuel Roberts: Perfect.

626 01:02:31.300 ⇒ 01:02:33.299 Katherine Bayless: Welcome, welcome, welcome.

627 01:02:34.890 ⇒ 01:02:35.660 Jay Heavner: Cool.

628 01:02:36.290 ⇒ 01:02:44.170 Uttam Kumaran: Perfect. Alright, then we’ll get back to you guys, and then Catherine, I will message you, I’m from Polyatomic about rescheduling.

629 01:02:44.170 ⇒ 01:02:44.740 Katherine Bayless: Okay.

630 01:02:44.740 ⇒ 01:02:46.539 Uttam Kumaran: So, I will message you as well on that.

631 01:02:46.540 ⇒ 01:02:48.010 Katherine Bayless: Okay. And then…

632 01:02:48.010 ⇒ 01:02:51.319 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, anything you can help us, Srini with on that, remember.

633 01:02:51.320 ⇒ 01:02:51.680 Katherine Bayless: person.

634 01:02:51.680 ⇒ 01:02:52.350 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, great.

635 01:02:52.350 ⇒ 01:03:02.229 Katherine Bayless: I’ll send him a note now and see if maybe, like, if he wants to hop on a quick Zoom, I’m sure I can probably either point him in the right direction or realize, like, oh yeah, okay, no, let me get you somebody who knows. Yeah.

636 01:03:02.230 ⇒ 01:03:03.170 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, perfect.

637 01:03:03.470 ⇒ 01:03:04.370 Katherine Bayless: Okay.

638 01:03:04.370 ⇒ 01:03:06.560 Uttam Kumaran: Alright, thanks you all, I really, really appreciate the time.

639 01:03:06.630 ⇒ 01:03:07.880 Jay Heavner: Thanks, guys, appreciate it.

640 01:03:07.880 ⇒ 01:03:08.470 Uttam Kumaran: Are you?

641 01:03:08.470 ⇒ 01:03:09.439 Jay Heavner: I don’t expect.