Zack Blum on Fleetsmith's Secure, Cloud-Based Mac Management

Zack Blum of Fleetsmith - Podcast Transcript

Scott Orn:	Welcome to Founders and Friends with Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting, and before we get to a great podcast with Zack Blum of Fleetsmith, just a couple of shout outs here— the first is to our company Kruze Consulting, we are the number one startup accounting firm in the country, we have 160 clients, we’re up to 22 people, growing fast and having a lot of fun while we do it, so if your friend has a startup and needs a little help or your startup needs a little help on accounting, finance, HR, taxes which our coming up on September 15th, then we are a great firm to reach out to, give us a shout, go on our website at kruzeconsulting.com, that’s Kruze with a K. And second, shoutout to Gusto, they’ve been doing a great job of claiming R&D tax credits for our clients, we prepare the R&D tax credit and we’re finding our companies are saving lots and lots of money on their payroll taxes because of this, but Gusto has made it easy for us to submit that claim, so thank you Gusto. And before anything else, let’s get to the interview with Zack, thanks. Welcome to Founders and Friends podcast with Scott Orn at Kruze Consulting. My very special guest today is Zack Blum from Fleetsmith. Welcome Zack.
Zack Blum:	Thanks Scott, it’s great to be back, I love being here.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, so we’ve worked together for long time, we also developed a great friendship, I love working with you. And Fleetsmith just launched and so I was like hey, I’ve actually been bugging you for like six months to come on the podcast, but now you’re out there in the world.
Zack Blum:	I’ve got some time now and the time was right.
Scott Orn:	Yeah. And I’ve checked out your product, it’s awesome, I’ve actually forwarded it over to a bunch of my friends who are in IT world; maybe you can just talk about Fleetsmith and where the idea came from, and retrace your career a little bit too.
Zack Blum:	Happy to do that. And plug for Scott man, Kruze is amazing, really, really great.
Scott Orn:	Thank you, that was unpaid folks.
Zack Blum:	So yeah, Fleetsmith is secure, cloud based, Mac management with a deep G suite integration, and in brief, what that means is you can do everything from inventory, new higher provisioning, application and OS patching, and security. So that’s Fleetsmith, and Fleetsmith was created to kind of scratch my own itch really, originally. Before Fleetsmith I was at Wikia, rewinding a little bit there. My first professional IT job was at UC Davis in college—
Scott Orn:	Go aggies.
Zack Blum:	There you go, go aggies, I like it. I needed a job, so I found a professor who needed an assistant, great guy Dr Andy Jones, and he asked me for some tech help over the course of that job, and I had never done anything professional, but super happy to help him with all these tech needs. So after a little while there, he had a friend who ran a small department called The Teaching Resources Center, 13 people on campus and they were looking for an it manager, and he said you know, why don’t you go do that.
Scott Orn:	Were you like that’s the kid who knows, like “the kid knows computers”, because the old people didn’t really know how to do anything?
Zack Blum:	I was one of those annoying, borderline millennials they always talk about. Yeah, I was just always into it, I had a computer, we had an original Mac SE, had a really old 386 and I just always gravitated to them; but in college, I did liberal arts, I did art history and political science.
Scott Orn:	No way, I didn’t know that. Oh man.
Zack Blum:	Yes, so anyway, I got the job at The Teaching Resources Center, and that was the very first IT manager job, 13 people, I had no idea what I was doing, but learned a lot on the job, for those old school folks out there we hosted our website on an X serve, being the hardware server market that was awesome.
Scott Orn:	And you basically were like I’ll do anything it takes to keep your infrastructure up and running, basically?
Zack Blum:	Yeah, exactly. And you know, help desk tech support, and all you have to do is know a little bit more than the experts.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, I was going to say, how did you, because even the internet wasn’t like fully built out then, did you like, were you searching like— if you have a problem, were you just like googling it and trying to figure it out, because you know, you’re resourceful?
Zack Blum:	Yeah, I mean, Google was around, they were still young, but yeah, I ‘d google it, I had a few friends who knew more than I did and so just try to figure it out, read the manual, I read the manual man.
Scott Orn:	That’s a good thing about life, read the manual.
Zack Blum:	Right, so yeah, so after that, little while passed and I wanted to move up to San Francisco, so called around and I decided I’ll take the first job I can get, I don’t care what it is. And it turned out that Wikia gave me a call back, and what I thought was going to be a short stint turned into five year—
Scott Orn:	Oh wow, I didn’t know you were there for five years.
Zack Blum:	I was there for a long time, yeah.
Scott Orn:	Wow, so you were pretty early then, like how big was the company when you joined?
Zack Blum:	Wikia was 65 in San Francisco, a small group in Poland as well, and you know over the course of my stay there we grew from that size to over 300, we had offices on three continents, seven or eight offices, amazing place, and I started not in IT, I was the front desk office assistant.
Scott Orn:	No way! That’s awesome, that’s such a great life lesson, take the first job, start at the ground floor, work your way up.
Zack Blum:	Washing the dishes, little humbling, not going to lie, but really nice people there, and that’s what drew me to it.
Scott Orn:	I think we talked about this, but I actually lost the deal with Wikia, like, Gil Penchina was the CEO a great guy, got to know him through that, and it was obvious like you guys were growing super fast, and I was like ok how do I do this, and he ended up going someone else was totally understandable, but like I remember I think Wikia was about that size when I was talking to Gill. You guys have kicked ass.
Zack Blum:	I mean, the community that they have built over time, they are focusing on, now they are called fandom and they built an amazing fan community, video games, movies, TV shows.
Scott Orn:	I was reading some Game of Thrones links on that the other day.
Zack Blum:	The SEO is incredible by the way, you look for something in pop culture, you’re right there.
Scott Orn:	So you did that for five years, did you learn like every trick in the book kind of thing?
Zack Blum:	Yeah, you know over time I got promoted to IT guy, and then IT manager and then eventually IT director, and had a little team working under me and I actually learned a lot from the CEO there, Craig Palmer, and one thing he really emphasized early on was this isn’t about you buddy, you know, you’re here to provide great customer service to the employees, and to make them more efficient and make their lives easier. And that was a great perspective that informs everything we do now at Fllethsmith.
Scott Orn:	Don’t you feel like once you have a job like, I was a waiter in college, and Vanessa and I always talk about it, because Vanessa was a waiter too, it’s like you learn these lessons on how to be a good service provider, and it makes you more polite, it makes you more resourceful and it makes you better dealing with people; like that had to be an amazing part of that job.
Zack Blum:	Totally, and, how do you want to be treated— I mean, treat people the same way, it’s simple right. And also, I think IT folks have gotten a bad rap over the years and probably deservedly, I think kind of that stereotype of antisocial person in the dark room has held true a lot, and that advice that Craig gave me right away, kind of really forced me to say to everybody hey I’m here to help you. We tried to totally turn that on its head and I think people responded so well to that.
Scott Orn:	Well now when you talk to like the Fleetsmith customers, I’m sure you have a ton of credibility with them, because you’ve essentially done the job that they’re doing right now, and you can talk the talk with them, right?
Zack Blum:	That’s exactly it. We built Fleetsmith to kind of solve a problem that we personally face, so we were kind of the original customer. And I think, when you’re thinking about entrepreneurial folks out there if you want to start something, like what’s a problem you’re facing, and how big is that problem; does everyone else have the same problem, and so, this was kind of a great organic process where as we were growing really quickly and had these distributed offices, we needed to inventory or computers, right, I mean you need to keep track of your assets— Scott what do you think about a good computer inventory, from a finance perspective?
Scott Orn:	I actually, it’s funny to say this because— so you guys are Mac only, and we unfortunately because the accounting world is on Windows so we have to be on Windows, I actually had a conversation about inventory tracking today, because we’re getting big enough to need to do that and it’s actually a best practice; and you don’t even think about these computers all cost two or three thousand dollars, there’s a 100 thousand dollars walking around in and out your door every day, you want to know where this stuff is. And then even more importantly, you want to know that, again, I am getting a little ahead of myself, but the software patches and making sure everything is updated is super critical. As someone who now runs a business, we actually just started doing, we have better virus protection, and things like that, and I was shocked at the crap that was on people’s computers; and I was like what, it is always like the most polite, nicest person has been watching bittorn over the weekend and watching Game Of Thrones, and you’re like what are you doing dude, you can’t have this stuff on your computer. So to me actually, knowing where the assets are is really important but also make sure everything’s updated and protected, and so we don’t have some wicked virus rip through our office.
Zack Blum:	Are you open into a role in sales or marketing?
Scott Orn:	Well yeah, but I’m saying I am living this problem right now, you have to do this kind of stuff so that’s why I’m such a big fan of the product.
Zack Blum:	That’s awesome, thank you. Inventory is key, new hire provisioning, so when you hire are you growing quickly, how long are you taking to manually set up everyone’s computer?
Scott Orn:	Oh Zack, so this is maybe it’s a war story for me, but I used to have to come in the office every Sunday before we hired a new, because we always have people started on Mondays, and spend two hours setting up a stupid computer, it was like my Sunday, it was such a waste of time. You guys have like an automatic way of doing that, right?
Zack Blum:	Yeah, that’s a core part of our product, where just through the core product itself you’re able to configure the absent settings that you want installed and enforced on across your fleet, either for every computer or just maybe per department; and then once you install our agent, that gets automatically installed, and with no additional work on your part kept completely up to date.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, I have literally, we have 22 people so I’ve spent over 40 hours setting up people’s computers, and not only is it not glamorous, it’s frustrating because things don’t boot right, or something doesn’t get out as right, so doing that automatically is amazing. Tell the story about how you built the company, prefunding, because I think this is an amazing lesson for people.
Zack Blum:	Okay, yeah, so I was at Wikia, and had this problem of how do I manage these computers, and a guy who worked on my team at the time said hey, I know the guy at Dropbox who rolled out computer management there, internally, he started with the Macs, and then he actually did Windows too . And let me ask him what he did at Dropbox. I had no idea about any of this at the time. And he came back after talking with this guy at Dropbox and said, you know what, they actually use open source tools that were kind of originally meant for data center configuration, devops folks, really sophisticated stuff. And the particular one they use is called Puppet for config management, and they also use an open source project out of Disney by a really amazing guy named Greg Neagle, called Munki, and it works really well for them, and it’s super powerful, what do you think about us trying that here? And I said well, I don’t know Puppet let me learn it, and you know Wikia was always great about employee growth, and I was able to go to a Puppet bootcamp and learn about that. And boy, what a powerful tool, it really is. And so, I came back and started rolling out kind of an internal POC and realized pretty quickly—
Scott Orn:	You learned it, like how long did it take you?
Zack Blum:	I think it was a two day bootcamp, and I was a novice, but just enough to be dangerous and stack overflow in google and friends, you know. So yeah, we started rolling it out, just the basics, and we realized really quickly we’re not Dropbox, and we don’t have the resources to kind of both do this right, but then host the servers, keep them up, it’s critical infrastructure right, maintain the servers, maintain this, go to every software vendors website, find the new versions whenever they release them, download them, repackage them. throw them into the system and push him out across every apple wanted to do, every time they update it, it was daunting. You know, and then security right, so at the time, I didn’t really understand corporate security at the level that you would probably want to, if you were going to do this for other companies as a vendor. I knew certain best practices and we did all those, but you really want an in depth knowledge, it’s huge.
Scott Orn:	It’s big stuff, if you guys mess up your security then it’s like you know how can people have confidence in you.
Zack Blum:	Totally. And the scary thing is, even if you are doing this internally, attackers kind of know that if you do manage your computers, but it’s insecure, if they go for that, they’ve got access to everything. So you got to do this right.
Scott Orn:	We’re laughing, but it’s scary.
Zack Blum:	Yeah, it’s a scary laugh. So anyway, that’s the open source side and I think it’s great, and I actually love the open source community and if you are interested and have the resources to do it, I think it’s incredibly valuable and worthwhile. And you know, Puppet, Chef, Munki, these are great projects and there are other great ecosystem projects too. And I really only have the most positive things to say about both open source and the community, the people who do this stuff are awesome. So then, we were just a little too small for that and a little too sort of new to the game, so we looked at commercial options, and I think a lot of companies either do kind of just a spreadsheet and then walk around and manually do this, which is kind of what we were doing before, or they will do open source or they’ll go buy a commercial thing, and we were frustrated to be honest, from the minute we started looking around on the commercial side, the buying process, it’s kind of the old enterprise sales game and we were a cloud native company and we just wanted something quick, self serve that worked. Then, once you got over the sales process, than actually using the product, sometimes kind of clunky stuff and then didn’t have the answers I wanted on the security side. So I got mad at the world Scott, and I went and built a prototype.
Scott Orn:
Zack Blum:	That’s amazing, so you were still working at Wikia, you just did it at night. Yes, so I was working in Wikia, I did nights and weekends and I actually shared with my boss, I kind of wanted to have something to show him, so as soon as there was anything you could see, I actually showed him, and by the way, if anyone’s listening and you’re working nights and weekends and you have a good relationship with your managers, I super encourage you to get the feedback, I mean, he gave me such good feedback from business perspective that I never would have had.
Scott Orn:	Yeah. Wikia has that kind of DNA too, because Fastly was spun out of Wikia too, people there are creative, they work on this kind of stuff, but that’s like also what makes Silicon Valley special is like you can have a side project or do something and end up changing the world, you know that’s what everyone dreams of.
Zack Blum:
Scott Orn:	I loved it and I just kind of got obsessed with it, and so built this prototype, and at that point I said hey, the guy who worked for me at time, I said hey, can you reconnect me or actually connect me to that guy at Dropbox, I want to show him this and just get his feedback, he’s done this internally there. So we met for coffee, and it turns out that this guy at Dropbox is Jesse Endahl — Oh no way! Jesse is the co-founder at Fleetsmith.
Zack Blum:	So, Jessie later told me that he came to the meeting prepared to sort of say ah whatever and maybe see if he could refer somebody; he’s an amazing guy and he had so much work at Dropbox, so much responsibility, he was there relatively early too, and he just had so much going on, so he didn’t have the time frankly, even if he wanted to. But the second he saw it, just the prototype really early, he said oh this is what it should be, and we had a total shared vision of where Mac management could go. Just computer management in general, the experience of using it, of buying it, everything we talked for a long time, and it was clear that we had to work on it.
Scott Orn:	So then, did you guys start working on it together or how do you suck Jesse into the project?
Zack Blum:	He just said I want to work on this and I was kind of looking for someone to work on it with, so there was no sale on either side it was great, he had great domain experience. He is also just a great guy, he’s my friend, he’s great.
Scott Orn:	And you guys did it for like a year, right; talk about VCs versus customers.
Zack Blum:	Totally, so we got some advice that told us you might be able to go out and raise the seed ground now, this idea is good, the market seems potentially quite big, and there’s a need and the team has got the domain experiences right, both on understanding the pain intrinsically and then being able to do something about it. But, if you were to build something good enough to actually sell, even as an early private data and then you want to talk to investors, it might be a different outcome for you, and so that’s what we did, we took that advice and so for a good year we were working on the nights, on the weekends, and I’ll tell you that was a lot of hours, and the context switching actually was actually harder than hours, I still work a lot of hours, but switching from a job to job, that was tough.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, but it’s like an investment in your future, I actually use you guys as an example all the time here at Kruze Consulting, like when you really want it, that’s the kind of stuff you do.
Zack Blum:	You do crazy things, you do silly things. But yeah, we became obsessed with solving this problem at any cost to our sleep.
Scott Orn:	So instead of going to VCs, with hat in hand, with the powerpoint slide basically you decided to go to customer— build it, go to customers, get the validation. And how did that go?
Zack Blum:	It went really well, and I think that just speaks to what’s out there and people were hungry for something a little different. I think the cloud native folks, the people who love cloud based products, who’ve made that jump already, it felt so smooth to them in terms of just intrinsic understanding of how you might sign up for this, how you might use it, there was no mental bridge to jump, they were there already, and we were there too.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, they were looking for the solution and you just appeared, that’s amazing. So you got a couple of customers, and then— then how did you do the VC stuff, like what was your process?
Zack Blum:	So we had a few people we knew just from being around town, and so kind of started there, and also friends in IT and security hey, do you know anybody who’s been a co-founder before, and just sort of asked around and just got a couple meetings, it’s much easier when you send an email and say hey we’ve got a few customers who are actually using this right now.
Scott Orn:	In a demo or a link or something that they can check out?
Zack Blum:	Yes, and we don’t have a deck, you can actually just, we’ll show you our actual product that customers are using, that’s a better solution.
Scott Orn:	That is like gold for a VC, that’s amazing.
Zack Blum:	And I loved it too, because I love this stuff, and so with the folks that we ended up going with in the end, we could just feel that, I mean, they are amazing, Index Ventures, Ilya Fushman is awesome, and Michael Dearing at Harrison Metal, other great investor and a few really great strategic Angel investors. And like, all these folks are just they just got it right, and that was really important to us and they of course bring Ilya and Michael product and understanding the SAAS area, I mean they’re just the best.
Scott Orn:	Michael is also like a brilliant business teacher, actually Vanessa is taking his class I think like in two weeks or something like that, I met him a couple of times, he’s one of the nicest people you ever meet in your life, but he is also like a deep thinker and knows how to scale an organization, so he’ll be like, I think Ilya will be the same way but like those two will be super valuable for you for many, many years to come.
Zack Blum:	I hope so, and I hope it’s mutual, I’m optimistic about it, as far as Michael, yeah he is one of the next guys you will ever meet, and boy, what a background in being able to communicate the really important parts of scaling business, getting product market fit. Ilya is such a great product thinker and really has helped me personally, really focus on what is super important, to what are we really focused on next, and he has been super helpful and amazing, so he is just great.
Scott Orn:	You’ve got a good board my friend. So you ended up raising money; I happen to know some details so I can vouch that the valuation unit of getting was very different than what like a seed stage company with no product would ever get right, if I showed up in a VC’s office with a power point, it’s not going to have like a rich deal, not that you guys have a rich deal, but like it really paid off for the company.
Zack Blum:	Yeah, and I just think if you get the right team who really understands the problem space and can do something about it, and you’re solving a big problem, elegantly, and people have already validated it, it’s just such a better position to be in as a founder and like you said, I think for VCs too, I think it just derisks it so much, I would imagine.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, those guys are happy to pay a higher valuation because they know it’s derisk, they know the classic dogs are eating dog food kind of situation, it’s like it makes their life so much easier.
Zack Blum:	Yeah, and to be clear, there’s so much more to do even then we’ve done now in the Mac management space, but yeah, that was just a great solution.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, this could be a really big company, that’s what’s so exciting about it, like the problems you guys are solving are, I mean, how many computers does Apple sell a year, I mean, 20 million or 50 million or whatever, it’s like a huge number, and all those computers need this kind of management.
Zack Blum:	Yeah, and especially as more and more Apples are sold into businesses, I think that’s the trend, it’s really interesting on the Mac side for us, because you’re seeing, we’ve seen somewhere between five and ten percent enterprise Mac market share, and it just is starting to feel even outside of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, are starting to see some, you might have a big company that was all Windows and all of a sudden, there are five to ten percent Mac. And what do you do, you’ve had all these Windows only tools, we can help a lot of different types of organizations, I think it’s a good takeaway.
Scott Orn:	And now you guys are shifting into a different mode, you are publicly available; you actually have a pretty interesting pricing strategy, can you talk about kind of your offer to the market?
Zack Blum:	Totally, happy to. Yeah, so our original availability was in November last year, early November, and it was pretty restrictive and so we wanted to make sure two things, we wanted to make sure that Fleetsmith was available for everybody, and because that’s part of our mission, right, we wanted to democratize this really powerful and secure Mac management product for everybody, but also for really sophisticated shops or you know, just shops that can take advantage maybe have the resources to take advantage of some additional tools or extra security needs, we wanted to make sure that they were served too. And so, what we did over the course of the months between November of last year and just about four weeks ago, is we worked on making Fleetsmith available for everyone including smaller companies and then also making it even more powerful for bigger companies, so we launched Fleetsmith free, and Fleetsmith free is the full product, so you can use Fleetsmith for inventory, new hire computer provisioning, app and OS patch management security, for up to ten devices for free; and if you’re a small company just starting out, we would love you to use it and it’s completely free, forever. Once you get above ten, then it’s just really, really simple straightforward pricing, it’s ten bucks a month per computer or a hundred bucks a year. So Fleetsmith free is amazing, because it lets people either use it for free or give it a real good shot for as long as you need to.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, and we were talking before we turned the mics on, like a couple of days ago on a Sunday someone signed up and it’s like the classic thing, like they’ve got a problem that’s bugging them, they can’t figure out how to solve this, they discover you and it’s like hobby time for them, or down time in front of the computer and they can sign up for Fleetsmith without actually having to pay any money, they can test it out, then get a couple of their team members to test it out, it’s just beautiful, it’s like so simple. And I think one of the best themes about Fleetsmith is you’ve always let the product do the talking like you have the product did the talking to VCs, now you’re letting it do the talking to potential customers, because you guys have built something special, it’s a really good feeling.
Zack Blum:	Thanks, we are definitely a customer first company, which means the product has to work for a customer, is not other way around. And that was born from our own initial frustrations, so it’s always been that way.
Scott Orn:	Yeah but it’s like, someone who may or may not even realize they have a problem can test out the product and then realize that it can make their life so much easier, and that’s pretty special. Absolutely, and part of Fleetsmith free too is that there’s a like I said, that deep G suite integration.
Zack Blum:
Scott Orn:	I’ve seen that in action, that’s actually really— so for people who don’t know, you can actually just go to the home page right, and you can just go click and there’s like a little, like google icon, it’s like how you sign into like other things and you just click it and I was amazed that you could actually like enable Fleetsmith just by clicking the button, basically.
Zack Blum:	Yeah, funny story about that— when we said to people before we launched Fleetsmith free, hey it’s super quick to sign up, you can just do it though G suite, it’s hard to convey that, so we actually made a screen cast, so if you go to the homepage now, fleetsmith.com we literally have video and I think it’s six or seven seconds, it’s in real time to actually show you the process of clicking sign up with G suite, you say okay to the little google oauth permissions dialogue, and we create your account and you’re in.
Scott Orn:	It’s so easy. And you guys have also developed kind of like an ecosystem, because you’re letting everyone deploy their software through Fleetsmith, right, so like how did you go out and talked, I don’t know, last time I saw there was like a ton of icons on the page, where like you could deploy this, this and this, like how did you go, did you reach out to all those companies or how did you build your ecosystem?
Zack Blum:	Yes, that’s a great question. We talked to some of the companies, some of the companies for example ones where the apps were kind of gated behind authentications, obviously we wanted to talk to them and you know, make sure that was all kosher, but in terms of many of the apps, they are just some are open source, a lot of them are free downloads and have public download endpoints, public links, so we just used some of the best practices around kind of automating all that stuff, and went out and created a catalogue for people.
Scott Orn:	It’s like your own little app store, it’s pretty neat, it’s like you just oh I want to have that, I want to have that, and it’s loaded on your computer, it’s amazing.
Zack Blum:	Part of the launch was we just did a bunch of security and devop apps, so Fleetsmith free and then we also did a security and devops focus, so for those bigger companies or companies you just need the extra power, apps like OS query which exposes your entire fleet as a sequel like interface, or config management, like Puppet and Chef, and so if you need the extra power and you want to extend Fleetsmith, we can handle the really secure bootstrapping and deployment part, but then you can go kind of instantly deploy that stuff across your whole fleet worldwide securely over the internet. Yes, so I think like we just wanted to be different on the buying process with Fleetsmith free, we wanted to kind of be different on having a really great easy to use products with a beautiful almost consumer like UI, it’s just elegant, it’s really fast, and then on security— can I boast, we’re the most secure Mac management product out there.
Scott Orn:	Wow, that’s awesome, and again, as someone who owns a business now it’s like that’s super important, like that’s actually probably the most important thing, people might put up with a poor UI or maybe less performance, as long as it’s secure, but the fact that you guys are the most secure is amazing.
Zack Blum:	Yeah, it’s a core value of ours, from everything we do internally with employ practices from how we built our infrastructure to how we built the application and then what we let other folks do. Jesse is kind of security background and I can praise Jessie he’s not here, Jesses is a security guru, really see into everything we did from day one, and so we just built it, secure by design from day one.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, he’s a great guy. What’s the next step for Fleetsmith, like you guys have now made it publicly available, what are you looking forward to?
Zack Blum:	Totally, well I’m really excited about what we just launched, I think with Fleetsmith free, so many more people have already started using it and like I nerd out this stuff, like I want this problem solved, so that’s really gratifying. And then, we’re just getting started really, there’s so much more to do even in just Mac management alone, there’s just so much more to do.
Scott Orn:	I’ll put it a little plug in for the Windows world, so whenever you get that going let us know.
Zack Blum:	Yeah so Scott you’ll be the first one to know.
Scott Orn:	I’ll be there, the first tester right here.
Zack Blum:	And you know, there’s some really great customers using it right now, Hacker one, Patreon, Century, Signal Sciences, so there’s like a huge breath of companies blurb self publishing platform you have devops security publishing, we actually have a bank whose is using us, I am not eligible to name the bank, but yeah, I mean really, if you have a Mac fleet and you want it secured, I think it just speaks to this is a universal problem, right, and also I like the security companies trust us to make them even more secure, it’s pretty cool.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, and if a bank is using you, that means it’s the real deal, like those guys can’t mess around.
Zack Blum:	Yeah, compliance is a big deal and I think being able to help people like sign up for something to get them compliant in about six seconds, literally, is pretty cool.
Scott Orn:	Yeah, well you guys have an amazing story, like you and Jessie doing this at night, building the company and it’s been fun for us to be part of the journey, and we have many, many more years of Fleetsmith to go here. Maybe you could tell everyone where they can find you and if they want to reach out, or give you feedback on the product, or how do they buy the product?
Zack Blum:	We love feedback, so please as much as you want and as much as you can, let us know what you want to see, how you like it. So fleetsmith.com, is a really great place to go, you can also check out our blog, blog.fleetsmith.com it’s really great stories, we just started a couple security articles on how to secure your Mac fleet, which I think are great and things I wish I had when I was at Wikia. You can find us on Twitter at @fleetsmithhq.
Scott Orn:	You also have the cutest logo, what’s the background on that, it’s like a very cute dog, for all the dog lovers out there.
Zack Blum:	Thank you, I love that. Yeah, we just felt a lot of IT and kind of techy stuff was real sharp and cold and you know, dogs are friendly and so are we, and we just wanted to try something that people felt a connection to and they could feel a worm feeling about it, not cold, and that’s kind of who we are.
Scott Orn:	There is also like some subconscious, like you know dogs protect you and are keeping an eye on you, I don’t even know if you guys thought about that, and I also know you are very dog friendly company, because I’ve been over to your office and you have dogs, it’s a great environment; whoever did the art on that is amazing, they did a great job. So, to recap, Fleetsmith is at fleetsmith.com?
Zack Blum:	Yeah, fleetsmith.com.
Scott Orn:	Awesome, and if you have a Mac or you have a Mac fleet you need to secure, you want to do the quick deployments, highly recommend it, you guys are kicking ass, it’s fun to be working with you.
Zack Blum:	Thanks Scott, I got a plug, I got to say we’re hiring too.
Scott Orn:
Zack Blum:	Yes, who are you looking for? A couple open jobs right now, catalog ops engineer help us add more great software and settings to our catalog for our customers, and director of growth marketing, so we are doing awesomely right now, and you know, we’d love someone to come in and join that party with us.
Scott Orn:	Hit the gas pedal a little bit, that’s awesome. Zack, thanks so much for coming by, check out fleetsmith.com and we’ll be seeing you out there in the market. Thanks.
Zack Blum:	Thanks Scott.

Zack Blum of Fleetsmith - Secure Cloud-Based Mac Computer Management

Explore podcasts from these experts