Joseph Landes On Raising $125 Million To Demystify The Idea Of Virtual Desktops

In a recent episode of the Dealmakers’ Podcast, Joseph Landes shared insights from his remarkable journey, transitioning from a 23-year tenure at Microsoft to co-founding the successful startup Nerdio.

His venture, Nerdio, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like MK Capital, Stone-Goff Partners, and Updata Partners. Joseph and his partner, Vladimirskiy, have also invested in the venture.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Deeply immersing oneself in foreign cultures fosters personal and professional enrichment, providing a unique perspective that transcends business practices.
• The leap from a 23-year tenure at Microsoft to co-founding Nerdio highlights the transformative power of leaving one’s comfort zone in pursuit of new challenges and opportunities.
• The invaluable role of mentors in providing guidance, perspective, and a sounding board for ideas, ultimately accelerating personal and professional development.
• Prior to significant career shifts, meticulous financial planning and the establishment of a safety net are crucial for reducing personal and family-related financial stress during transitions.
• An emphasis on the necessity of resilience and tenacity in the face of adversity, highlights that embracing discomfort is often a critical factor in the entrepreneurial journey.
• The addition of diverse board members with extensive expertise significantly contributes to a company’s accelerated growth and strategic decision-making, particularly during its growth stages.
• Perpetual recruitment efforts ensure access to top talent for rapid scaling when necessary, underscoring the importance of building and maintaining a high-performing team for long-term success.

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About Joseph Landes:

Joseph Landes is the Chief Revenue Officer at Nerdio–an innovative company that empowers Managed Service Providers and Enterprise IT Professionals to build and rapidly grow their cloud IT practices in Microsoft Azure through their ridiculously simple IT management platform.

Prior to Nerdio, Joseph spent 23 years at Microsoft, where he led cloud product management, international marketing and sales, and international business development teams.

Joseph has lived in India, Brazil, Russia, Germany, and Israel with a goal of visiting every country in the world (up to 107). He is working on a project to read every literary fiction book on the New York Times Notable Book list from 1981 to the present.

Lifelong Redskins/Commanders, White Sox, Bulls, and Capitals fan. Joseph will do anything for his three kids and loves watching them grow and conquer new life challenges.

Connect with Joseph Landes:

• Zoominfo
• ContactOut
• Crain’s Chicago Business
• LinkedIn

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today. We have a really amazing founder a founder that you know really, we’re gonna be learning about his journey. He’s a building this rocket ship that you know we’re goingnna really enjoy learning how they went about building it and all the good stuff about. You know, building building scaling financing and all of the above that we like to hear you know during these episodes you know I think that the story of how he made his cofounder raising around when you’re not looking for it and then also going about building culture and and hiring great people are going to be some of the topics that we’re going to be touching on this episode today. But again without further ado I like to welcome our guest today Joseph Landis welcome to the show. So originally born in the us so give us a walk through memory lane. How is life growing up in places like Chicago.

Joseph Landes: It’s good to be here Alejandra thank you so much for having me.

Joseph Landes: Yeah, memory lane. So I basically grew up in Chicago in Skokie Illinois and I decide to take a year off after after ah, high school I went to Israel for a year and studied there and then I went to college in Boston and after my third year college I got an internship at Microsoft it was a very odd set of circumstances that led me to Microsoft I wasn’t a technology kind of person but I went there for the summer and after I graduated college I decided to go back to Microsoft I thought I would stay for a couple of years and maybe go get an Mba. Ah, but I happened to be in a meeting with Steve Ballmer who you know was really the the chief operating officer at the time and I remember somebody asking him you know Steve do you think I should go back and get my Mba and he said you know he started yelling in typical Steve Ballmer Fashion you know Mba Mba this is your Mba right here. so what did I know so I decide to stay living in Seattle I stayed at Microsoft for 23 years and over the the last you know about 11 years or so of my time at Microsoft I was based abroad. It was probably the best thing I ever did in my life you know learning how other cultures operate not just from a business standpoint. But. Having to get things done outside the us I lived in India for three and a half years I lived in Brazil for 3 years in Russia and Moscow in in Prague and the czech republic and in Germany and and people always asked me. You know what was a like and I say I I definitely grew professionally but I grew personally even more.

Joseph Landes: And it was a super experience I then left Microsoft I was yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: And before that before that how how was that experience of um, being in so many different countries you know, obviously everything started with living abroad in Israel. But as you were saying you were like living all over the place still with Microsoft so how do you think I guess your worldview i. The way that your perspective and and about approaching things has shape and app as a result of having that type of worldview first.

Joseph Landes: Yeah, so first of all ajandra I’d say everyone should do it if you have the opportunity to live abroad and work abroad for your company. You should do it. There’s going to be a lot of people who tell you you shouldn’t do it. You know people said to me oh Joseph you shouldn’t go to Germany people are going to forget about you at Microsoft they’re not going to know. Who you are. They’re not going to remember you. You’re not going to get another job It’s not true. It’s going to be the greatest accelerator to your career and in the greatest personal accelerator you could ever you could ever imagine because you get to see how how people do business in other places. You get to learn how to acclimate to other people’s culture instead of them acclimating to you and in every stop that I made I took the decision that I’m going to be a person of that culture. So for example, when I lived in India I didn’t live in an expat enclave or anything like that I lived in an apartment building. With other indian families I celebrated the holidays you know with them I spent time talking to them I learned what it was like to be there in that country and that made it certainly easier to do business. But I think it it made my life a lot richer and it certainly made me I think a more diverse person and a more. And a person who really understands culture in a much different way perhaps than before.

Alejandro Cremades: and and I gotta say talking about culture. You know what kept you for so long in Microsoft 23 years I mean what? what was that future that you were living into that kept you.

Joseph Landes: Yeah, you don’t see it off and you certainly don’t see it often today when I interview people to come to nerdio most people have 2 your 2 year a random set of 2 wo-year stops that they’ve made right.

Alejandro Cremades: They’re you know within the same organization for so long I mean you don’t you don’t see that often.

Joseph Landes: I loved it. I loved Microsoft we’ll talk about nerdio and how we built a company on top of Microsoft Technology I loved it and I think what? what kept it fresh for me was doing all of these different interesting things so going to each different country doing different jobs. It almost felt like a restart every. Two and a half to 3 years similar to what you see people doing today and the next thing I knew I was there for 23 years and quite frankly I thought I would be there another 23 years but when I was introduced to my co-founder to vedim Vladimirky I knew that there was something else I wanted to do in life and I left but not because I was disappointed. Microsoft I I loved it. I also think that people who stay for a long time at a company. There is a certain amount of inertia that kind of pulls you to stay. You have a certain amount of tribal knowledge. You know how to get things done in a company and that creates a certain amount of inertia that is hard to break through. It was a very hard decision to leave Microsoft after so long and start a company with vadeem but I’m really glad I did it was it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life.

Alejandro Cremades: So how was that a journey like of meeting badim. How did that happen. How were you guys introduced.

Joseph Landes: So I’ve known someone for a very long time. A guy named Brett Maxwell who is one of the principals at Mk Capital Vc in the midwest in Chicago Brett and my father actually served together on a nonprofit hospital board in Chicago and one day when I was early in my career at Microsoft. Father came to me and said you know I have this friend Brett you should really meet him I think he could give you some good coaching and Brett and I established a friendship a relationship um a mentorship really for me where once or twice a year we would get together and I would ask Brett his perspective on things and he was hugely hugely helpful for me and it’s always good to have this. Personal board of directors that you could kind of reach out to around the world for different topics and Brett was certainly on my and continues to be on my personal board of directors Brett reached out to me as I was still living in Brazil and said you know I’m going to be at Microsoft Inspire Microsoft’s yearly partner conference and I have a portfolio company I’d like you to meet. So I said great. Let’s let’s get together long story short. He introduced me to vadee I actually did a demo of the product I said wow this is tremendous. Maybe someone at Microsoft should see this. It was a product that really helped manage service providers whose customers were s and b customers accelerate their move to the cloud. Someone at Microsoft must be interested in this and when I went back after the show I started poking around and saying who at Microsoft might want to see this technology and after a few more weeks vadeam reached out to me and said why don’t we get together and build a business together that was definitely something I was not expecting.

Joseph Landes: I ended up spending a bunch more time with Vadim I realized not only that we have a very shared perspective on business and on life. But we truly enjoy being with each other and and talking about life and business. So I took the difficult decision which in retrospect. Isn’t wasn’t that difficult. But at the time was difficult to leave Microsoft and invested you know my own money vee’s own money Brett’s money into the company. We raised our series a and we started nerdio.

Alejandro Cremades: Now 1 thing that is really interesting here is 23 years at Microsoft so I guess I have so many things come to mind. But I guess the the first one is you were at Microsoft through a really incredible amount of time you know they’re from. 95 you know all the way to the moment that you left you know? Officially, you know it was about 2018 I guess from experiencing an organization at that level that is that had such an incredible high performance in in unbelievable talent. What are like the 3 main. Things that you took away with you that you know you were going to be implementing at nerdio.

Joseph Landes: Yeah, so first of all ajandro I’d say you know you’re right I was there for 23 years I worked you know under the guidance of all three ceos. The only 3 Ceos Microsoft has ever had Bill Steve and Satcha and interestingly. I was living in India when sata became the Ceo. So if you can imagine Sata’s first trip to India as an indian born Ceo of Microsoft I always say it was sort of equivalent to the president of the United States coming to visit India we had to get security to stand around his parents’ house in Hyderabad. It was. It was a remarkable remarkable thing to be a part of I got to run some events with sata and spend a bunch of time chatting with him. You know you know something that that Sata said when he was on that trip to India he said to a number of it professionals and students that that I hosted an event with him at. That that really, you don’t get credit for the things you’ve done in the past you really get credit for the innovation that you’re going to bring forward and I think about that every day at nerdio you know I spend a tremendous amount of time with customers and partners I strive. Very much to spend at least 70 % of my time with customers and partners because I believe that’s where the truth is. That’s where I’m going to learn what’s going on really and what people perceive nerdio to be and the the mistakes that we’re making or the things that we’re doing well and I always tell my team that.

Joseph Landes: You know, hey maybe we’ve done some good things in the first couple years of the company maybe we did something great last year but people have very short memories. People are not going to give us a lot of credit for something that happened in the past they want to know how we’re helping them be successful today and and quite frankly, that was probably 1 of the biggest lessons that I took away from Satya. You know, certainly I would say the other lesson that I took away for Microsoft is that it’s all about the people people ask me and vaeem all the time. What is your biggest constraint in terms of growing nerdio. It’s certainly not the market opportunity. It’s certainly not any of those types of of things that you would think of when you’re building a startup. It’s about hiring grade people. It’s about finding people and helping them be successful and making sure that they are able to acclimate to the pace that we work at to the speed we work at to the way we work at a startup and if we can do that we’re going to continue to grow and we’re going to continue to double our business. Year on-year and and it’s why I spend so much time recruiting rere recruiting and spending time with people I would say those are really the biggest things that I learned at Microsoft and that I continue to share and and the drive me at nerdio.

Alejandro Cremades: So There is probably a lot of people that are listening now that are still in corporate you know working maybe for a big corporation and wondering What would it be like you know if they were an entrepreneur or they were to do something on their own. Maybe why don’t you share? What was your thought process because obviously you were speaking now with Butim you know and wondering what would be a world where you guys you know would be together so doing something of your own. But I guess what was that thought process you know all the way to you being okay and being at peace with. Launching you know or or or submitting your your your your resignation letter.

Joseph Landes: Yeah, there there were there were 2 things Alejandra that that I still think about today. The first thing I did was I created a spreadsheet an excel spreadsheet and I called it can I afford it. So I I basically mapped out for the next three years from the time I was thinking of leaving. What my expenses would be I have 3 children they were all getting ready to go to college I didn’t I didn’t want them to be penalized because their dad made some stupid decision and decided to leave Microsoft so I made sure to set aside enough money to pay for them for college I figured out what my other expenses would be and I got. Good with myself that I could afford to do this for at least 3 years assuming that you know it wasn’t going to be a success The second thing I did was I went to one of my great mentors a fellow named Soma Soma segar he is a managing director at Madrona out in Seattle he was a corporate vice president of developer tools at Microsoft and actually when I was in India he was a great coach and mentor to me and I asked him what he thought you know because he was now in the world of startups. You know, investing from madrona. And he said well Joseph you know one of 2 things is going to happen either. You’re going to go to to do this nerdio thing and it’s going to be a great success. Maybe you’ll make some money. Maybe you won’t depending on how you define success. You’ll learn a lot and that’ll be great.

Joseph Landes: The other thing that could happen like happens to many startups as you’ll go. It’ll be a incredible failure. You’ll probably still learn a lot of things that you could take forward with you and probably Microsoft is still going to be there and you could probably get a job at Microsoft or many other companies because of this new experience. You have. And when you sort of think about it that way that one of those 2 things can happen. It kind of gives you great peace in terms of taking a very difficult decision. So I decided to do it. You know of course I spoke with my family. My parents thought I was a little bit you know crazy they had to come out to Seattle and say like you’re leaving Microsoft. You’re starting a company called nerdio what’s wrong with you. You have 3 kids getting ready to go to college. But but all of that was was important but it really came down to those 2 things could I afford to do it now and and really what what were the possibilities that could happen and after I spoke with some I felt really quite good about it. And then of course you know, knowing that I was going to be working with vadee every day that was why I did it? Yes so I took the leap of faith I took about a month off to decompress for Microsoft.

Alejandro Cremades: So then you finally take the leap of faith What happened next.

Joseph Landes: In in my personal life I’m a very big traveler I traveled around for a bit with just a very small suitcase just kind of think and and reflect on my time at Microsoft and and such and then I joined Vade now Videm was running a managed service provider in Chicago called adar. After some amount of time being together. We decided to sell adar to a a private equity company called stone golf and then you know a lot of the employees who are part of that managed service provider went with that company and and continue to run that organization today. Ah, few of the folks joined us and we incorporated nerdio and we started and and you know you you ask sort of you mentioned before people who are thinking about maybe going from a big company to a very very early stage startup. You know what’s it like or what do you think about. Yeah, the thing that that really stuck with me and sticks with me every day is it is hard. It. It requires a tremendous amount of grit I know grit is a sort of very overused word now in the startup. Ah ecosystem. There are huge huge disappointments. You know all the time and you have to find a way to sort of power through those and keep going and keep going and making progress when we started the company I mean we had. We had no revenue we we had raised money. We raised our initial $8000000 series a with mk capital and and with the money that we invested.

Joseph Landes: Ah, but we really had no revenue and we just had to really go out and build it brick by brick by brick you know these sort of um you know presentations that I do I probably gave the same presentation 4000 times in the first year over and over and over. And you have to stick with it and you have to refine it and you have to stick to the things that you really believe are going to work but also be willing to adjust and and and not everyone I think can do that I certainly at the beginning found it very very hard to adjust to that kind of way of working. Um. And that’s the advice that I give folks who are really thinking of coming over from a more established company to a startup so you know we we built things we started going. Um, you know the technology that we have our Dna is really around ah a topic called desktop virtualization. So really, you know, allowing anyone to work from anywhere on any device they have we build on top of a native product for Microsoft called azure virtual desktop and windows 3 65 and we had this idea to to. You know when we launched the company. We had 1 product that was really targeted towards managed service providers who were thinking of building a cloud practice in Microsoft with their s and b clients but we had this idea that there would be a lot of enterprise companies that might like our technology as well.

Joseph Landes: So in late 2019 we started developing an enterprise product. We released the product on March Twentieth Two Thousand and twenty now unbeknownst to us Alejandro and in March Two Thousand and twenty every company in the world needed a remote work product. We got incredibly busy which I think is another lesson of working for a startup. You know you you could you could plan all sorts of things but sometimes you need a little bit of luck as well. We had a great product at the right time. Nobody ever wants to say that they you know they were successful necessarily because of covid but we were very lucky. When covid hit. We had a product that a lot of people wanted and then our business really exponentially grew from you know, 2020 until today really with both products that we had and then in um, late december. Ah, we raised our series b of one hundred and seventeen million dollars with updated partners and that’s really taken us, you know to where we are today in October Two thousand and thirteen twenty three excuse me.

Alejandro Cremades: So now obviously the serious B I mean they I guess just the total amount just to make sure that people get it. What was the total amount raise for the company too late.

Joseph Landes: Ah, hundred and twenty five million dollars

Alejandro Cremades: So 125000000 I know that the serious b was a not something that you guys were going after so how did this series b come out of the blue.

Joseph Landes: You know the demon I were very much always aligned as was our board that we would we would take investment from someone who really could exponentially grow our business the de and I try to double our business every day as many b two b saas companies. Do. And year on year. We tried to double our business and and we knew if there was someone out there that could help us in an unnatural way achieve that escape velocity. We wanted to meet those people you know in a way when you’re a founder. It gets a little bit distracting once you start to have a little bit of success because many people are reaching out to you. To try to give you money to invest to buy a stake in your company to partner with you vedee is our Ceo bore the the the large brunt of that responsibility. He was getting tons of solicitations. To the to the extent that we finally went to Brett from our from our Vc partner and said can you take this and start investigating who some of these folks are and Brett came to us and said you know we we met these folks updated partners. They’re an incredible growth equity company. They’re based in Washington d c. Ah, and and they have an incredible track record of growing companies like yours. We really think you should meet them and then that sort of led to a series of meetings where we really grew to like each other very much we understood that they were not looking to come in and and and change what we were doing. They were just looking to.

Joseph Landes: Ad expertise and and I could tell you from the day that we met them until today. That’s what they’ve done. They’ve added tremendous expertise to our company tremendous expertise to the things that I do as a cro every day you know I can go to them with any topic that I have you know it could be something as as simple as quota setting. To recruiting to modeling out different ways of doing business and and they’ve done it for many companies before and as a founder. That’s what you want you want this sort of collective expertise this kind of database of knowledge that they have and that they could bring to bear on your. Ah, company and that’s exactly what we’ve received from up data. They’ve become great partners to us have joined our board obviously and and and really I think have raised our game. You know I think I’d say something else Alejandra that I think was a very interesting thing in the. Ah, in the history of nerdio that I’m sure other founders that are listening to this or other entrepreneurs have done. Well we started the company when vide and I started the company. The board was made up of Aee our Ceo Brett from our Vc and Brett had nominated another independent director Harry Obberman that was our board.

Joseph Landes: Um, point after about a year and a half a demon and I got together and said you know we we always need to find a way to raise our game. We need people to keep challenging us and and pushing us and pushing us and pushing us and I think there’s a little bit of a danger that when you’re too comfortable with your board or you’re too comfortable with the people who are around you. You’re not raising your game every day it doesn’t mean that our board wasn’t pushing us. They were definitely pushing us super hard but we both felt that we wanted to keep adding people that would raise our game. So the team asked me if I knew of anyone in fact, I did one of my former bosses at Microsoft a guy named Andy Lees I’d worked for him 2 or 3 times. He was a president at Microsoft a lot of us at Microsoft who had met with Andy who had presented to Andy. We often likened it to going to math camp. So I reached out to Andy I hadn’t talked him for a while and sort of long story short Andy joined our board which was great. And then sometime after that we knew that we wanted to make much bigger investments in the channel we reached out to Gabriela Shuter who was Microsoft’s departing channel chief and a huge expert on diversity equity and inclusion. She joined our board as well. Was a little bit before the update investment and now I think if you go to our board meetings and you attend our board meetings and you and you look at the value that our board gives us. It’s immeasurable. It’s it’s hard to put a price on how helpful our board has been to us a lot of people think it’s a tax.

Joseph Landes: We don’t view it as a tax. We view it as something that really has helped us accelerate our business.

Alejandro Cremades: So now I guess when it comes to also hiring people. You know how do you typically go about getting the best talent possible like how do you do that.

Joseph Landes: Yeah, there are some lessons I learned from Microsoft one of which is you you always have to be recruiting even when you don’t have an open position. You have to be recruiting and I tell my managers that all the time you have to have people on the bench people you know people you’ve worked with. You know, two years ago as I’m sure many who are listening know it was much harder to hire people. People were were coming in with with perhaps experience that did not match the extraordinary demands that they had on smaller companies like ours and you know we would be in situations where people had multiple offers all the time. Things have changed two years later as we sit here today. There’s a lot more people who are looking for work and we’re able to find or at least choose from from even a greater pool of great people I spend a tremendous amount of time recruiting I do a lot of time interviewing a lot of my time interviewing. Helping my team ah recruit folks and interview. You know, just as we’re recording this podcast today I think I have 5 other interviews that I’m doing I’m always working with external recruiters to find great people and to just meet people to know them. Even even if we don’t have a need today. You know who are some of the great people doing marketing out there who are some of the great people that run inside sales organizations who are some of the great people that are amazing either individual contributor or sales managers just to get to know them to sit down with them and understand what makes them so successful. So that when we do have a need. We can. We can.

Joseph Landes: Go after them and see if they’d like to come work for Nerdio So it’s a big big investment of time not just recruiting new people. But then rerecruiting the people who are in Nerdio who we want to stay because we know that we’re only just getting started.

Alejandro Cremades: So I guess obviously when it comes to raising money or to bring you know great talent as you guys are doing vision is a really big one. So let’s say if you were to go to sleep tonight Joseph and you wake up in a world where the vision of nerdy is fully realized what does that world look like.

Joseph Landes: You know, a lot of times alejandro when I do interviews people ask me, you know where do you see nerdio in 3 to 5 years and I answer that a few different ways. You know the first way I answer it is. It’s a little bit hard to know in a fast moving technology space like we’re in which is desktop as a service desktop virtualization. Where we’re going to be in 5 years in fact the space that we play in is really reforming now a lot of the ah the incumbents in the space citrix and Vmware have undergone massive changes being bought by private equity or are about to be bought by Broadcom laying off many many employees. Ah, so I always start by saying my vision is to double the business every year if I could grow 100 % every year I’m going to have a tremendous business and of course as you get bigger. It gets a little bit harder. But I think that’s what people are counting us to do that’s what our investors and shareholders are counting on us to do is to keep growing the business 100% or greater a year which we’ve been able to do. Um, ah you know I would like to see nerdio be the de facto solution for anyone who’s looking to virtualize their desktop so when we when our vision is fully realized I would like to see nerdio software being used for any virtualized desktop in the world now. We’re certainly a ways away from doing that. But when you look at the investments that Microsoft is making in desktop virtualization in desktop as a service and the fact that we’ve bet on Microsoft and we’re the only company out there that has bet exclusively on Microsoft today I feel like we’ve got a really good glide path and the tam the opportunity.

Joseph Landes: Ah, is certainly there for us.

Alejandro Cremades: So obviously here we’re talking about the future. So I want to talk about the past but doing so with a lens of reflection now imagine looking back if I was to put you into obviously you pin at it now for about 5 years you know at this so incredible lessons learn an incredible you know path that you guys have been a going and and journey that you.

Joseph Landes: Yep.

Alejandro Cremades: Embarked in but let’s say if I put you into a time machine and I bring you back in time you know, maybe 2 2018 when you were starting to think about like what would it be? You know if you were to venture on your own if you had the opportunity of having a chat with that younger Joseph Landes: and. Giving your younger self one piece of advice for launching a business. What would that be and why given what you know now.

Joseph Landes: Well first of all Andra I love the fact that I could go back 5 years makes me feel much younger. So. that’s that’s super you know once you cross 50 years old you you always want to go back in time for sure you know something that I was probably not very good at at Microsoft. That I think I’ve become better at at Nerdio is not caring so much what other people think at at Microsoft I was very worried about that and I think I I underwent a process in 2018 when I joined up with vedeem where I had to sort of break through this this challenge I had of caring a little too much. About what other people thought and and and why do I say that because when you’re at a startup you’re making many decisions very very quickly. You don’t have a lot of time for reflection and you can’t always think about well what are other people going to think about what I’m doing. That’s not to say that you know you should wake up every day and act like an ass or something right? Nobody wants to deal with people like that. Um, but but worrying too much about what competitors are going to think worrying too much about what others in the industry might think I think slows you down a little too much. A definitely a mistake that I made. Ah, when we started the company in 2018 was thinking way too much about another company in our space that was you could say competing with us. They were a little bit the incumbent and I would wake up every day thinking about how am I going to go after that company and and what are they doing and every time they would post something to social media.

Joseph Landes: I would dissect it and worry about it and think about it and I was getting great advice from people that said Joseph don’t do that? Yeah like just worry about yourself worry about what you’re doing at Nerdio and it’s taken me a ah long time I’m certainly not past it I think I was very conditioned at Microsoft to think about the competition. Ah. But you know that company that I was worried about in 2018. They’re out of business. We put them out of business and and it was because we did a good job and we focused on ourselves and I would say Alejandra that is probably the number one thing I would go back and change is don’t worry so much about what’s going on around you worry about yourself worry about. Creating a great product going to market in the way you want to go to market and delighting your customers and partners.

Alejandro Cremades: I love that so Joseph for the people that are listening that will love to reach out and say hi. What is the best way for them to do so.

Joseph Landes: Well, certainly on Linkedin Joseph Landy on Linkedin I always give people my email Alias Jay Landy J L A N D E S at getnerdio.com I love talking to people I love meeting folks and I love learning you know I think something sata. Taught us at Microsoft is to be a learned it all person not a know it all person and I think in every interaction you have as someone there’s an opportunity to learn. So if there’s anyone listening who wants to reach out and maybe share some experience. You’ve had that that could benefit us or I could share something that would help you I’d love to chat with you.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well hey Joseph thank you so much for being on the deal maker show. It has been an on earth to have you with us today.

Joseph Landes: It’s been great to be here. Thank you Alejandro.

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