See Full Transcript
Welcome to Beyond SaaS. I’m Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos, we’re a growth agency. And for over 20 years, we’ve been accelerating tech company growth through strategy, branding, lead gen, and conversion. Check out tethos.com slash podcast for a free report summarizing what nearly 20 amazing tech leaders have shared on how to grow your company.
Today I’m excited to explore how to grow a tech company with Mark Rickmeier. He’s the CEO of TXI, which is Technology Experience and Innovation, which is a digital project consultancy that solves complex problems with bespoke software, which includes web and mobile apps, infrastructure, chatbots, and more. And beyond building data-driven products, Mark’s passionate about a culture of innovation. He founded Kermit Collective, which I referenced, and I’m sure we’ll talk about.
where consulting firms can learn from each other. And he also founded Walkshop. And I love this idea of leaders being able to walk together outside fostering leadership and professional development. I try to do that with my wife once in a while to get past some of those hard conversations. So think walking is great. So welcome, Mark.
Mark Rickmeier You
Thanks very much. Yeah, it’s weird to see that both the right brain left brain side of my like part of my world is very digital part of my world is incredibly analog out in the woods, both of which are valuable.
Jason Niedle I love that and that seems to be a recurring theme in the last few episodes. So I think I’m going to have to ponder more on this technology meets humanity connection here. Before we jump in on the hard questions, do you have a golden nugget for us today?
Mark Rickmeier So one of the best interviews I’ve ever seen was an interview where they were talking to two titans of industry. They was talking to Warren Buffett, well-known investor, and then how he views the world. And then Bill Gates thinking about how he views the world. And the question was a simple one. was, show me your weekly planner. Like, what does your little to-do list looks like? And Bill Gates was, man, I’m talking to this person. I’m in all these different meetings. I’m helping to steer the direction of all these different things.
And Warren Buffett had like one thing on Thursday and he looked at Bill Gates. He’s like, you were doing it wrong. Busy is the new stupid. Like you’re not supposed to be doing all these things. Time to think, time to reflect and to think of where we’re going is the more valuable thing when you get to a certain level in your career.
Like you don’t want to be sandwiched in between meetings and sending emails and invoices. Like that actual time to think that you give yourself that explicit permission. That’s been one of the most important kind of nuggets as I thought about my own career and where I’m going. It’s part of the reason where Walkshop came from is I can put myself in a totally different physical environment where I have no email. I have no connection to the outside world. I just have five days of walking out in nature with
brilliant leaders and CEOs, I can pick their brain over a period of five days. That is a massive gift I can give myself. And I think if any nugget I could say to take away would be think about how often you were looking at your calendar, bragging about how busy you are versus how much time you’re actually just giving yourself permission to think.
Jason Niedle I don’t want to hang any past guests out to dry, so I won’t name names, but I did just have a conversation where we were talking about how he didn’t want to be like his dad who worked too much and then literally in the next question he was really proud of working 16 to 18 hours a day. And I debated about challenging it, but I thought, okay, I don’t know you quite well enough yet, but it’s absolutely something to think about. It’s a key…
Mark Rickmeier You
Jason Niedle Like, why are we doing this and what is the root? And are we allowing the space to really allow the things to percolate and get handled that need to be handled at a higher level?
Mark Rickmeier And it’s…
And I’m not saying I’m good at this. Like there are definitely anti-patterns if you look at my calendar, especially during COVID, because it got so easy to get booked back to back to back to back and Zoom meetings, you no longer have commute or wait times where you’re walking to conference rooms. So you literally can be completely scheduled. And it is a terrible way as a leader to have all of your existence. I mean, there’s value in spending time with your team and spending time with clients. I don’t deny that. But if that’s all that you do.
It’s not a healthy practice. And so I’ve been trying to think about where can I be spending that time learning and what safeguards do I have to put around my own calendar or my own time to protect that? Because if you do not protect it, it will get eaten. It is really hard to do.
Jason Niedle Well, what’s a quick tip?
How do you protect a little bit of that? What’s a tip for us?
Mark Rickmeier So I think I can do small, and large. So on the small side, I will actually put blocks in my calendar called either Do Not Disturb or literally called Busy is the New Stupid so people know not to book that time. I will occasionally then find ways, I find the change of environment helps me tremendously. So just last week, I went to a Gartner conference with four members of my leadership team to get out of the office and separate physically from the rest of the team so we could be in a new space around
topics of where is this industry going and just having an opportunity to learn more. And then the most extreme version of that is where we do the walk shop where I’m literally out of the country, totally offline, out in a trail with brilliant other people. when the trail is really wide, we have a good conversation in a group and then trail gets narrow and you pair off with someone one-on-one. And the idea of a walk shop rather than a workshop in a conference room with sticky notes is that you’re on your feet the entire time and you just think different thoughts when you’re moving.
and walking them when you’re sedentary and still. And so that kind of mental and physical separation opens you up to all kinds of new ideas. And I get to do that at least once a year where I’m not home, I’m not with my kids and I’m not a dad and I’m not a CEO with all the people at work. I’m free to be thinking about where the business is going, where my career is going in a very different kind of setting. And so that is the most extreme version of that I can take, but something that has, you
very rewarding for me, something I try to encourage and prioritize every year.
Jason Niedle really hope a lot of our listeners are inspired by that idea and I am for sure. And I don’t know that I would jump off the cliff into five days yet, but I think we can all start small and start with a day, right? And like make something happen.
Mark Rickmeier We had 10 CEOs that were all going to Scotland. I was so excited about this walk shot and we don’t even have like, we’re not carrying bags. We actually have a service that will deliver our luggage to the next bed and breakfast. So you’re literally going for a walk with nothing but the weight of the world on your shoulders. I don’t, yeah, if you choose to carry with you, out of 10, 70, 70 % had a breakdown in hitchhike because they were not capable of walking with nothing on there, just the idea of walking.
Jason Niedle Nice.
if you choose to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders.
Mark Rickmeier We are so used to sitting all day that if you’re like, yeah, you’re to go for 30,000 steps a day for five straight days, three out of the 10 could make it. Everyone else broke down to hitchhike. We are not used to this. so that is, I don’t know, it’s interesting to flip the script and rather than being sedentary and your mind going a million miles an hour, like, no, your mind is one thing. Dinner is eight hours that direction and your feet are doing all the work. And then you’re just open to different kinds of ideas. But yeah, is not everyone’s ready for it, even when they think they’re ready for it.
Jason Niedle Wow.
We’ll tell our listeners a little bit about TXI.
Mark Rickmeier So TXI stands for Technology Experience Innovation. We are what I call a product innovation firm, which means half of what we do is thinking about how do we build the right thing for our clients using design thinking to help guide what are the biggest opportunities, what are the right problems we can solve. And one of our favorite moments is when a client comes in and says, we really want to build a mobile app. And they have to say, great, don’t tell us the solution.
back up several steps, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve and getting really understanding about that, that we can guide them in the right path. So in addition to helping to build the right thing, we’re the company that also helps you to build the thing right. And so strong engineering culture and design principles and having an agile process that allows us to ship custom software to clients. So a lot of what we’ve been doing has been
I think a very creative act, finding the right problems to solve and the new ways of doing it, but being able to have a strong execution culture that can get things into market quickly.
Jason Niedle And as a marketing guy, I love your perfect sound bite, right? Build the right thing, and then we can also help you build the thing right.
Mark Rickmeier Yep, yeah, it’s an easy way to help frame the two different sides of our brain that we bring to the work.
Jason Niedle Love it. So your title is CEO, but what is really at the heart of that role for you?
Mark Rickmeier It changes based on the nature of the business. Where I am now, and I’m lucky enough, I’ve built up a phenomenal leadership team that can help to really scale the company. We have these four different disciplines. There’s an engineering practice, a design practice, a strategy practice, and a delivery practice. And those practice leads know a lot about the craft of what they do. And I have a wonderful chief of staff that can help think about the change management we’re doing within the company and a COO and operator that grows and scales the business.
So my job is really to not run the business anymore, but to grow the business. My job increasingly is to find new partners we can collaborate with and new clients that are interested in big new challenges. And so I, as CEO, there’s a part of the job which is setting the vision for where we want to go and what the company should be doing.
I really get to focus more on growing the business and then trust the team to run it.
Jason Niedle Cool, and how big is your team, roughly? Okay, and so you’re obviously past startup. What needed to change when you went kind of from that bootstrap startup, let’s get this going, to a more mature company? What had to change in you as a leader?
Mark Rickmeier About 70 people.
The company was run by Red Wine and Thai Food. Like we’d all be working billable during the day. And then at night we’d sit down, order takeout, open a bottle of wine, like, great, what do we need to fix? What do we need to work on? It was very inclusive, but not in any way efficient. So when something was wrong with recruiting, we’d all try to figure out how to fix recruiting. And so after a while we’d been doing this, we started reading the book.
called Traction. It’s a very boring but very helpful book, all about popularizing a concept called EOS, or the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And it’s a playbook for how small businesses can better operate to be far more efficient. so we’d made the first major change was actually coming up with a more robust playbook for running our company, built on accountability and transparency and clear roles for who’s doing what. And that was very different than the we’re all going to eat high food and talk about things together.
It was like, okay, you’re gonna be driving sales and you’re gonna be driving operations and you’re gonna be driving delivery. It was the first fundamental change we brought to bring more structure and a bit more discipline. That has evolved over time, but I that was the first big pivot is going from this council of elders, everyone kind of hanging out together and talking about what needs to be changed to having a structure that would be providing frankly greater transparency and far more efficiency in the work.
Jason Niedle Great. So what do you wish other leaders knew right now, now that you’re down the road a little bit about growing a tech company?
Mark Rickmeier Well, I think, especially in the technology space, although I think this is not just true to technology, one of the things that everyone has to make sure is a high priority is having a very strong learning culture. If you don’t, if you don’t have the opportunity to be looking at new technologies, new ways of working, heavy focus on experimentation, accepting a failure and learning from it, not as a thing to be punished, but as a thing to be able to increase your learning cycles, you’re going to have a really hard time staying relevant. The amount of change
happening right now is so dramatic that if you don’t have a culture that is excited about learning, experimentation, adopting new things, you’re going to be disrupted by someone else who is. if you do not have a really robust learning culture, you need to make some serious pivots because there is just too much happening too quickly to not be able to focus on that as a core part of your business.
So it doesn’t have to be just technology, any business right now that’s not seriously investigating and thinking about how to create a stronger learning culture, is setting themselves back.
Jason Niedle I tell my 10 year old this all the time. Like the only thing that you really need to know is that change is constant and if you’re not growing then you’re falling behind because there’s no way to predict what his world looks like in 20 years from now. He has to just be ready to grow with it.
Mark Rickmeier No, I mean the amount of…
So it’s interesting, we were at this conference and we were talking about, we all thought we knew what the world was gonna look like. We had this impression of what users using software would be and it was the minority report. That’s what we thought the future was gonna be, expert user, infinite canvas, seamlessly working between applications and looking at data. And that is not at all what the world is gonna look like. The world is gonna look a lot more like her.
If you remember that movie where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his phone and Scarlett Johansson as the voice of the bot. There’s no screens. There’s no crazy interactions. He is talking to an agent and like an AI agent saying, I’m feeling really overwhelmed. And the AI agent was like, great, I’ll go through your entire inbox, archive all the unimportant stuff and just bring you the top 10 things you should pay attention to. Like this is a totally different way of engaging with your systems in your applications and your users. And I think the world that many of us had pictured
Jason Niedle Yeah.
Mark Rickmeier is there is a space for that kind of minority report engagement, but that’s not where the world is going. And I think thinking about software interaction, business interaction, and agentic AI is something that is going to change business dramatically. And it’s a lot of learning for many of us to think about a totally different way of engaging going forward.
Jason Niedle super random and this is kind of an aside but I relevant to what you do since you deal with interfaces so much. CEO the other day told me that he sees himself as his company’s UI and I thought okay that’s pretty interesting way to look at yourself.
Mark Rickmeier Tell me more, why was it the UI?
Jason Niedle because he’s the face of the company. He’s the thing that the external people see.
Mark Rickmeier he’s the thing that everyone interacts with? Yeah. All right.
Jason Niedle Yeah, I’m like, that’s an
interesting way to see it, right?
Mark Rickmeier So I would challenge that. don’t think I would actually I’m purposely trying to not be that my I’d like to be the one that people get to hear about us, but then I want them to actually meet the team. Like if they’re buying me, they’re only interfacing with me and they’re not actually getting time with the team, then they don’t really see the true skills and capabilities that we have. My job is to help you like think of me as not
CEO like like CIO chief introductions officer I can introduce them to the right people in the company They should be the face of the company. They should be the ones they’re interacting with So I like actually having more of the team be present in those kind of sales calls and having them understand who they’re engaging with
Jason Niedle He was
more startup phase.
Mark Rickmeier That would make, well that makes sense for more, think that’s a fair place to be in the startup.
Jason Niedle So as a more mature company, what are you looking at as growth? What are your growth goals?
Mark Rickmeier I think we’re starting to see now our best path towards growth is being much more specific about the industries that we start in. I think there’s a temptation when you’re younger to be more generalist and just work in lots of different places and have lots of different kind of case studies. And as we grow as a business, we’re seeing the best path towards growth as being really specific about certain domains and having a lot more expertise that we can be more strategy led. We don’t want to just bring capability to a company. We want to be able to bring
ideas and this is what we think you should be doing and to do that we have to be knowledgeable about their business, their domain and the industry at large and you can’t do that as a 70% company. We can’t do that across every industry. We’ve got to pick our lanes and say this is where we’re to be really knowledgeable and so growth for us means far more strategy-led engagement specific to certain domains or we have a lot more knowledge about the kinds of problems that that industry is facing and whereas in the past
We might go to like a technology conference, so like a Ruby on Rails conference, example. Nope, now we go to manufacturing conferences and industrial conferences to know what’s their world going through so we can learn more about that and provide more
Jason Niedle love all these inherent things that feel like contradictions. So how do you grow bigger? Focus smaller, right? You’re literally focusing in a niche to grow larger. And I understand it and I understand how it works, but I like that there’s like some inherent little tension in that concept.
Mark Rickmeier Yeah.
Intention is the right word because one of the hardest things to do as a business owner is what do you not do? What do you say no to? And I think one of the challenge especially in sales is when you can qualify out something that’s not the right fit for you. And that’s hard especially when someone has money they want to give you to build a thing and you can say, just better people for that than us. This is what we do. We can refer you to someone that does that maybe and that’s their primary focus.
Jason Niedle So what are you doing in terms of marketing and sales to reach these new niches and to grow?
Mark Rickmeier Like I said, is showing up in certain communities. Mostly what we’re focusing on are these manufacturing industrial type companies that maybe are not early adopters of technology, but are making large capital bets. They generally think about the long run of things. so not only are we trying to show up at those kind of events and those conferences and that’s writing content around things that will help them. So around digital twins, for example, to be able to change
your smart floor and think about smart manufacturing and think about your operations differently. But the other is actually trying to provide them ideas that they might not otherwise have. And so this was a big thing. For example, in 2023, there is a company that makes, they manufacture and they sell rail cars, they lease rail cars out. And for them, their maintenance of rail cars is very important because if you can extend the life of that rail car by 10 or 20 years, because you’re taking really good care of it, that’s a lot more money you can have when you’re leasing it out.
But every minute the rail car is in the yard is a minute it’s not making any revenue. So you want to think about how do you optimize that maintenance cycle? And so for us, knowing that we said, why don’t we walk around your rail yard with a data scientist and an AI engineer and a designer and a strategist, and we’ll bring you some ideas. Maybe you already have seven of these ideas, but we might give you three or four new ideas of how to see the world differently.
These are the things I’d like so much about the industrial sector. It takes about 60 some odd days to repair a rail car. If you can get that down to 50 days, that’s $15 million of savings a year. Like there’s a massive investment if you can operationalize that efficiency. And when you see the world through data and through design, you think of the world differently than when you see the world as a rail mechanic and as a manufacturing floor operator.
The downside is, as a marketer, you can’t come to them talking about digital twins, because they won’t know what you’re talking about. But if you can come to them saying, let’s talk rail cars, let’s talk about what’s happening in your actual shop floor, that’s the thing they can understand. And so again, being really understanding of that domain and being able to speak to their business pains.
You can always talk about your eventual solution later, but you can’t start with, let’s talk digital twins, because it won’t resonate.
Jason Niedle So you’re heading out to trade shows, to communities, to other areas. How else are you reaching these kind of top of funnel people?
Mark Rickmeier Like I said, time at those events, making the offer to say, can walk around your operations together free of charge. Let me just come back to you with ideas and see what you think if they’re valuable. Done that in a few cases. A lot of what we writing about and the things we’re talking about are things that will resonate with those kinds of buyers. So rather than talking purely about technology and about AI in general, it’s more about what can AI do for manufacturing companies? What can design do to improve?
outcomes in industrial and supply chain companies. So just creating content that these people will more naturally understand and see their own world in. And so it’s really talking in their language that they all, you know, about.
Jason Niedle What’s the biggest obstacle to getting to these people?
Mark Rickmeier In some cases you think about like LinkedIn is a great example where you would generally want to find people and engage in their content and help promote whether you see what they’re writing about a lot of these kinds of companies do not use LinkedIn they might be on it occasionally, but they’re certainly not writing the non-general content and When you come and start talking with a lot of industry jargon about like industry the industrial rev 4.0 revolution industry 4.0
or IOT, they’re like, I don’t know what you’re talking about, like Gartner does, other consulting companies do, but you need to be able to speak more about their world. And so it’s difficult sometimes to get a sense of what’s going on in those companies, because they tend not to be on LinkedIn, and they don’t always have a heavy social presence. So that’s why you need to go to the events and the conferences to see where those kinds of issues are coming out from more to the forefront, because it’s not the same as
I’d say like pharma or healthcare or other places that tend to have more of an online presence.
Jason Niedle So if you had some magical wand, how would you reach them? it, do you like and enjoy the in-person? Would there be some better way? you know, this question is ongoing.
Mark Rickmeier I think you have to be, mean, I mean, look at the
So people are just getting bombarded with messages and emails and campaigns and sequences and LinkedIn that gets insane. think the way that you can actually, if I could weigh the magic wand, I want to, I want to meet people face to face. It is far easier to be able to build some trust, build some relationship and stay in someone’s memory.
when you have an actual human interaction. The problem is that, especially after COVID, not a lot of people do those things. You conferences used to have over a thousand people, now have 200. So it’s not easy to do, but I find if I could wave a magic wand, it would be to encourage more actual human interaction, more face-to-face opportunities to talk, than to have a, you know, a new outbound script or to have, you know, another email campaign.
Jason Niedle Get real meetings.
Mark Rickmeier I think so.
Jason Niedle Are there any marketing or lead gen wins or strategies that have surprised you recently?
Mark Rickmeier Yes, this was a bit of an out there idea. So we were actually out at an event. So think of like it’s a manufacturing event and there’s a whole bunch of different exhibitors. Everyone’s got a booth. And I was trying to think about how do we really maximize the value of this event? And I went to a conference last year where I met a woman who was talking about her business as a professional wing woman. I said, what is that? I’ve never heard of this term before.
And she’s like, when I do this, I go with my executive, like, know, the CEO that hires me or that firm, and I will go out and meet people at the event to learn what they do. And if they’re an ICP match, I will bring them over and make the introduction. It’s like,
how I met your mother game like have you met Ted and so she is great at helping people meet the people she’s with and she’s like I don’t pretend like I work for them I say like my job is to help professionally network and help establish new connections but like if you think the value of going to event is maybe meeting five or ten really good prospects in person her whole pitch is like what if I can bring you 50 what if I can help you meet a lot more people
Anyway, so literally this week we had our very first professional wing person spend time with us at an event and the team that went said it was incredible. They’re like, we’ve never had so many good, authentic, organic conversations.
It was a very valuable investment we did to have someone go to an event with our team to help them figure out how to work the floor.
Jason Niedle That feels super valuable to know. That’s amazing. early on I wasn’t asking about AI, but it comes up every single call. So what should we know about AI?
Mark Rickmeier advice I got, which I thought was interesting, was that for every salesperson you have, every BD person, every marketer, should have probably about five AI agents behind them. Like that’s the ratio you want. They want to be using tools to that level of adoption. And so if I’m right, and you don’t want to be presenting your services or your case studies, you don’t want to present your solutions, what you want to do is talk about that customer’s pain points.
Jason Niedle Or…
Mark Rickmeier And the way to do that is you should use tools like AI and maybe one agent knows a lot about your company, your case studies, your service offerings. And then another agent knows a lot about the industry that you’re spending a lot of time in. And then the third agent, you can feed information about that company. And then you get the three of them to talk to each other and say, what do we think is the most likely problem at this company that our company is uniquely capable of solving? And you use that to help coach the salesperson to know how they’ll go about saying, I bet you’re having this problem. And if you’re curious, I bet you we can help you solve it.
And this is where you don’t see the growth of the large language model. Frankly, it’s the small language model being very domain specific about a particular topic. But you’re trying to be able to be as customized and insightful, as helpful as you can. And you’re not using this
to brag about your own products, your own services, because no one cares. So you use AI wisely to figure out more about the pains that companies probably are having. And if you can name and articulate that pain really well, then they want to talk to you. And I think that’s a creative way to use AI far more efficiently than just like scaling your outreach and bragging about your services.
Jason Niedle So is anybody executing on this concept, or is that one of your next apps?
Mark Rickmeier Probably the single biggest industry trying to figure out AI adoption is in sales and marketing right now Trying to help people figure out how to get tighter messaging find the right TAM earlier try to find a way to qualify out things earlier
Interesting. We think about sometimes as technology helping people to do more, spend less to do more. And I actually think the right answer, when we were talking to Gartner is actually spend less to do less. Like I don’t want to spend so much time to reach out to 10,000 people. What about AI? I could spend less time, but only reaching the right hundred people. Like the idea is not to spam things out like crazy. I want to figure out the right people. So I’m spending less time talking to fewer people, but getting more leads, getting more outcomes. I think that’s the trick with AI is.
Jason Niedle Which even applies to your wing woman, like with humans, right? That’s the same concept that you had at the trade show where you’re getting to talk to the right people instead of just every generic person who walks by you.
Mark Rickmeier spending less
yeah, it was great. love that. The human connection is a service. I that such a cry. Never heard of that concept before and I love it. I’m a huge fan. So if you’re listening and you want a connection to a wing woman, hit me up. I’ll be able to send you some contacts.
Jason Niedle cool.
There you go. What advice would you give to an early stage CEO?
Mark Rickmeier It depends on where they are in their journey, but I’ve often been too slow to hire someone that I thought would be overhead. So whether that was a head of talent in HR or CFO or a chief operating officer or as we got bigger, a chief of staff. And every single time I waited to hire someone, I realized once they got going, I was like, oh, that was too late. I should have done that a year ago. And so I get it. Like when you’re running a smaller business, you feel this hesitancy of
I don’t want to take on the overhead. I want to keep things lean. And every single time I’ve hired someone who’s smarter than I am that can do that job really well, I stop having to be a jack of all trades and can focus and specialize in the things I’m uniquely good at. And every time I’ve done that, I’ve done it probably about a year too late. So that’d be one of the things I would really recommend is think about the things you’re uniquely good at, delegate everything else to people who will be uniquely good and better at the things that you do not so well.
Jason Niedle Mm.
and take some long walks.
Mark Rickmeier Yeah, seriously, when someone says take a hike, it’s not always a bad thing. Get out there. Get out in the woods.
Jason Niedle So the news feels really turbulent and chaotic. What trend should we be thinking about as we think of how to grow our company?
Mark Rickmeier I think there are certain trends we’re seeing around the rise of agentic AI. I get it. At first it was everyone should look at large language models. And then three months later, I was like, everyone look at RAG. And now it’s three months later, everyone’s like, now look at agentic AI. I’m sure it’ll be some, by the time this comes out, I’m sure there’ll be a new thing to be all in on. It’s hard to keep up. And I wish I had better advice, because it feels like every time you learn a thing, there’s a new thing that replaces that thing.
I do think agentic AI is going to mean a meaningful difference to businesses. I start, I think things that were done previously by a large army of humans will be replaced by people who know how to use these tools. And so if you were starting a business or thinking about how your business will operate, you really have to be thinking about how will this business operate with these tools more efficiently? Because if you’re not someone else’s and like look at, imagine you’re on a legal firm and you used to have a whole bunch of paralegals at $400 an hour.
summarizing documents and doing research and now all of that can be done in a half hour. You can’t operate the same way. And so at all levels you have to think about how do I build in these tools to make my teams more efficient? And I know there’s lots of debate on how people feel about this and how they think it has impacts on energy and the environment. Like there’s a lot of concerns, but you can’t afford to not be learning and investigating this and experimenting with it. So I would say right now, I would say learn more about Agentech AI.
Jason Niedle And the way it gets back to your earlier advice where it’s just continue to grow, just keep learning.
Mark Rickmeier Yeah, no matter what we do, think the amount of change that’s going to be happening is going to be accelerating. So that learning and experimentation culture is going be pretty critical.
Jason Niedle Well, I’ve learned a lot today, Mark, so thank you very much. Where can our audience find you?
Mark Rickmeier Several places, I suppose. So on LinkedIn, I try to be open and engaging with some of the things I’m learning, mistakes I’m making often and the places I’m going to learn more. Obviously, you can look up TXI to see a lot of the content we’re writing and what we’re learning there. We try to publish a lot of the stuff we’re learning and playing with to be more relevant in the community. If you ever want to go as leaders, about once a year, we go off hiking with a bunch of excellent, brilliant people around the world. This year, we’ve got a group of 14 people.
from around the world going to Japan on one of the long Shikoku temple pilgrimage. To do all 88 temples would take six months. We’re gonna do about 11 of them over the course of a week, but if you ever wanna go hiking with some other brilliant folks, you can check out walkshop.io as well to see the other hikes we’ve got coming up in the future.
Jason Niedle Awesome, so for our listeners out there, that’s walk, like walkingshop.io and it’s txidigital.com and you can look up Mark Rickmeier on LinkedIn. Mark, thank you so much for being on Beyond Sass. For leaders in mid-stage tech looking to grow, we drop episodes twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays and you can find me, Jason Niedle, at tethos.com, that’s T-E-T-H-O-S.com. We can also grab a free report on how to grow your tech company.
Mark Rickmeier Mm-hmm.
Jason Niedle at tethos.com/podcast
of course, as always, drop any questions for me or for future guests. Comments and feedback below. I really appreciate it. And until next time, this is Beyond SAS.
