On the Edge

Stephen Brown (00:01.39)
Welcome to On The Edge brought to you by Elite Sales Edge with your host, Stephen Brown. In the series, Getting to Know Your CXOs, we'll be diving deep into conversations with various C -level executives. We'll explore the formidable challenges they encounter, the critical decisions they make, and the lessons that have left a lasting impact on them. Sit back and prepare to gain some insightful knowledge from the leaders who shape the business world.

Stephen Brown (00:38.318)
Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of On the Edge. I'm your host, Stephen Brown. And today our guest is Dan Picker. Dan is a seasoned technology executive with more than 30 years of experience in wireless infrastructure and devices, medical devices, software, and application design. He has held various leadership roles in prominent technology companies, demonstrating a strong track record of success in each position.

Dan served as the head of wireless platforms for Nokia's industry -leading CDMA phones. As the CTO of PureWave Networks, he helped pioneer the world's first high -performance small cell base stations. He has also held CTO roles at Redline Communications, Mercury Networks, and Incego. Dan served for two years as the chair of the International Wireless Industry Consortium, small cell working group.

and has worked with the U .S. government to help develop better international wireless standards for secure manufacturing, input, and export. Dan is currently the CEO of Blue World Solutions, Inc., a technology consulting and product development company he founded in 2014. The company provides executive leadership consulting services to wireless technology companies and to large pharma companies working on medical devices.

Known for his deep background in wireless technologies, Dan has always worked on the leading edge to drive product innovation. Dan holds a PhD and MS degrees in electrical engineering, communication theory and systems from the University of California San Diego, and a BS degree in electrical engineering from UC Santa Barbara. He also holds over 20 wireless technology patents and publications.

His broad range of expertise and experience has consistently delivered the best possible results and quality for his clients. Dan, welcome to On the Edge. We are glad to have you. Stephen, thank you very much for having me today. You bet. Well, that is a serious resume, sir. Would you like to take a few minutes and introduce yourself on the informal side to the audience? Sure.

Stephen Brown (02:55.79)
Well, thank you very much again for having me today. And that was a generous introduction. Thank you. You know, all I can say is that I've worked, I've tended to work towards CTO roles for a lot of my career. If it wasn't the title, it was what I was doing because I love the technology, but I love the technology, seeing the technology get transformed into a product.

So, you know, I'm kind of anybody who knows me knows that I'm kind of a little different than some CTO types in the sense that I kind of like people as well. So I like to understand, you know, as well as technology. So I like to understand what kind of makes people excited. I've always thought that innovation is is kind of.

Building a product or a concept that people didn't know that they couldn't live without, right? So they may have never thought of it before, but once they've seen it, they've said, my God, I can't live without this. That is the sort of thing that has always driven me and driven me to either consumer oriented companies or companies that support consumer oriented technology. Very cool. That's the key. You know, technology is one thing, but.

unless it's relevant to people, it's just going to collect dust on shelves, right? And how fun is it to watch people's eyes light up when maybe they're seeing something for the first time or, you know, you're presented with a tough challenge and you deliver it, deliver it to them. And that's, that's awesome. Well, thanks for that, Dan. So let's, so let's get right into it. So, you know, a person out there is, is starting their first posting as a CTO.

What advice would you, would you give them about getting into that role to start off on the right foot? Yeah. Well, you know, that's always a big day. The first day new company as the CTO, a lot of responsibility, a lot of weight on your shoulders, but boy, a lot of excitement to come. So, you know, what I always say in this case is the first thing you have to do is assess your assets, right? What are your assets? What do you have to work?

Stephen Brown (05:16.718)
What is the technology that the company has already developed? What is the roadmap that they've already developed? Do they have customers? Do they have a potential customer base? Interview people around you. Meet the team, obviously, but especially talk to the sales team, if there is one at that point. Talk to the sales team, understand.

the technology and the products, what's selling, what's not, what's hitting the mark, what is not hitting the mark. Understand the current strategy because your job as a CTO is going to be to develop the strategic plan. And you should be able to start working towards what a strategic plan will be once you can understand the current strategy.

And I would say a really important thing when you're assessing your assets and assessing the products that you have and how they're hitting the mark or not is to look for some low hanging fruit to start out with. Right. So, so some low hanging fruit will help to get your momentum going. It'll help to establish that'll buy you some credibility with the company. You get your team working with you and rather than saying, who is this guy? Right. Or who is this person?

who's in the role right now. And I think that's also important to understand, you know, different companies kind of put a CTO in different boxes. There's the pure CTO strategic and work on the technology and hand it over to engineering and then VP of engineering kind of takes it from there. That's a fundamental difference. A CTO owns the technology, a VP of engineering executes on that and turns it into

products, but it's rarely that delineated. Usually those two roles work very closely together and cross paths with each other, or it's very common that the engineering department is underneath the CTO as well and reports. There's different ways of doing that. But I would say that that pretty much covers it. Nothing earth shaking there. I think that one of the big takeaways is,

Stephen Brown (07:35.758)
Learn what you need to be able to improve the roadmap from what it exists today, whether it's a technology roadmap, product roadmap or both, and look for those low hanging fruits. Yeah, that's great. I picked up on something early you said, and having worked with you, I've witnessed this. And that's talking to your salespeople because there's a big problem that I see with a lot of companies that, and I call it the lost in the value chasm.

because there's the product and the vision around what the CTO and engineering has put together and maybe even what the other executives want to what the sales team actually starts trying to sell and if you're not aligned on that and have a really good message to take to the market that can be problematic. You know I'm glad that you're kind of highlighting that because you know I have and I think I've you know.

I don't know how much I've done this specifically with you when we've worked together in the past. We have visited customers before but I've gone on road trips with sales teams from customer to customer just trips. I mean one memorable one was done you know in Iowa in an RV for a week but we went from customer to customer just understanding what works what doesn't work.

What could be better? Hello, I'm Dan. I'm the new CTO of this company and I'm here to make things even better than they are today. And I think you build trust with the sales team by doing that as well. Yeah, absolutely. Good stuff. Yeah, and giving customers direct input on the product's direction in the beginning, I think, gets everybody's buy -in. So...

Having the right leadership team and people in place is critical to any any companies or you know team success Can you talk about in your mind what makes a good leader and how you go about building a team? Yeah, so obviously Obviously the team is where all the importance is right you can never put any one position or one person So the worst leaders, let's start with that. The worst leaders are the ones that

Stephen Brown (09:57.966)
who already have all the right answers. true. The worst leader. I can tell you a question, right? Exactly, right. The worst leaders feel that they don't really need a team and are in fact a little bit annoyed by the fact that they have a team at times, you know, do anything but get their coffee for themselves. So really the best leaders have a view.

And in fact, one thing you'll know as you're talking to CTOs is a CTO always has an opinion, always. That's how they got where they are, by talking and having an opinion. And eventually somebody says to, you know, to kind of put your money where your mouth is. And, you know, if you're going to talk the talk, then walk the walk. But so it's important to understand that a CTO has an opinion, but...

That opinion should be challengeable. They should not be the only opinion. And so a good leader and a good technology leader really wants to expand the innovation by bringing in the points of view of everybody. And that doesn't mean just the technical people, right? We're building products and my love is to build products for the consumer. And therefore you want input from everybody.

So you want to get a team put together that thinks that same way. So they should be innovative people who want to collaborate, who want to work together, and who believe that the customer and the consumer has a part in defining what the products are that will be important. So now, not to get this wrong, this is not about consensus. Ultimately, ETO is going to be responsible for that technology plan and roadmap.

But it's about bringing in all of the information, leveraging your assets. Your people are a huge part of your assets. And then lead by example. And that means both respecting your team, but also respecting them enough to tell them when you believe that they're on the wrong track or they're not working to the degree that you would expect them to do.

Stephen Brown (12:19.118)
And this is how I think you drive a successful team. You should build a competent team, but you shouldn't be afraid to say, hey, get up out of your seat and let me show you what I'm talking about here. Once you're able to do that, then your team will respect you. The other aspect of building a team that I think is very important is getting the right balance of the scope of the team and...

kind of the strength or the power of the team, the scope being, you know, how diverse does the team need to be? How much does it need to cover in your space of technology? We need an AI expert, we need an electronics expert, we need a software expert, we need, then there's the strength of the team. We don't just need one of each of those, we need actually 10 AI engineers, we need a hundred electrical engineers and so forth, right? You need to get that balance right.

of the right scope and depth and strength. And I think it's very important to do that. It's also very important to be very picky. So, you know, having, you know, fewer teammates than you would like to have is not as bad as having more teammates where some of them aren't pulling their weight or aren't the right fit. So if you can bring in pre -vetted people, that's even better.

Right. So your, your assets also have their assets. So if you go to your team and you say, Hey, you know, bring in the best people you've ever worked with, that is, you know, can't go wrong. Awesome. Now, you know, it's interesting, right? Cause I mean, getting the right people, you know, quality, you know, error on that side versus the quantity side. You know, the other thing I went to this exercise years ago on this, and on a leadership team that I was on and.

We were, we did, we were asked to do a disc profile before, before we got there. So a disc profile, it's all about a, basically a personality type of a thing, right? What kind of a driver and we were all, all without exception, high D's, right? So kind of hard charging, high D guys. Well, that's problematic because if you got to everybody's all high D well,

Stephen Brown (14:40.718)
better be right because there's nobody to challenge the questions or stop, right? It's, you know, you need those differing opinions, sometimes almost those quiet voices that pipe up every so often go, well, are you sure about that? You thought about this and, you know, kind of challenge that thinking, you know, to create balance. And I found that very, very eye -opening for me.

Yeah, it's funny when they do those personality tests like, you know, Myers -Briggs or whatever, you know, and these various things, you know, teams, I, I've been through several companies that have done this and the companies really are looking for a diverse set of people through them, right? They don't want too many of one versus the other because you need that compliment. So yeah, the tension of two. Awesome. Yeah.

All right. Well, one of the unique things that I think the ramifications of this are going to be rolling out for probably years to come. We're going to continue to learn from it is we were at a company and we were leading through a very difficult time, a global pandemic. So leading and making tough decisions is challenging enough. Then you throw in a global pandemic on top of that. It adds a whole nother degree of

challenge for you. But just, can you take the audience through, you know, when you, when you're making your decision making approach, you know, and then in general, and then maybe when you're up against a challenge and you have to make a tough call, do you have a, do you have a frame of reference you use for that? Yeah. And boy, I remember, I remember the pandemic.

You know, and one thing that kind of stands out in my mind about that.

Stephen Brown (16:39.918)
is this is not very profound, right? But there are a lot of lists of options, right? You know, from every decision we need to make, do we abandon our current roadmap? And do we focus on a short term roadmap that is both trying to help people during this pandemic, as well as try to take advantage of opportunities that may arise.

from this situation and what are the risks of doing that? There were simple things like, you know, do we let all of our employees work from home? When do we need to start bringing them back and to what degree and so forth? And there were all these possibilities and we would, as a team, debate each of these, put a risk factor associated with them and make decisions based upon that. And I have to say that for me,

taking the heart out of a decision and putting more analytics to it has always helped. So when I'm faced with a difficult decision and a number of different paths or choices, I tend to kind of write down, jot down the list, jot down the different paths that how things could go and identify where something can go wrong.

And then if I can't figure out a way that I would mitigate that, if that were to happen, then that's probably not a good path. And if you could do that with, again, leverage your assets, right? Take your team, bring them into a room, bring out your whiteboard and start charting this process out. I know it sounds boring. It sounds cliche, but this process works. And, you know, and it brings me to a line of talking that I do often, which is in the medical device field.

which is one of the fields in which I work, the cost of a mistake can be very high. The cost of a mistake can simply be very high. And because of this, you tend to build this rigor in your decision making. If something is going wrong, do you proceed down that path and hope that you can rectify it later? Or do you immediately start looking at how do we mitigate this issue and get to the quickest?

Stephen Brown (19:04.622)
you know, solution you can. And you start to do that preventively way early on. Now, you can't predict, you know, a difficult situation such as a pandemic is going to happen. That's very unusual. But that's one extreme example of many difficult positions you can be in. The better you can be ready for those before they happen, the better off you are. So I would say that.

a CTO and a CTO's office should not be a stranger to risk matrices, which means assessing what are the things that can go wrong and how do we mitigate those things and look at them ahead of time. And what you'll see is when you lay your decision paths out, you'll immediately be able to knock some of them off in that way. And then even on the paths that are left, you'll make some choices.

together as a team and you'll follow them. But when something goes wrong or when you encounter something, chances are you've already pre -thought through some of how you're going to deal with that. And I think that that can be, that can be very helpful. So my, my final statement would be to reiterate, to make it less about gut feel and more about. Yeah. No, I get that. Yeah.

Let the data drive your decisions, right? Because point of view and opinion will get you not very far. Data will get you there. Absolutely. So the next question I have is about AI. And that we could probably have a whole session just on AI. It's just, to me, fascinating. But what are your thoughts on AI? And I mean, again, knowing it's a broad topic, but...

Just what do you think about the impact it's going to have on us in business and even in our personal lives? yeah. I mean, OK, obviously, I think AI now is what the internet was 25 years ago, right? The kids in school, their teachers wouldn't let them use the internet. And then they wouldn't let them use Wikipedia and so forth. No, you need to learn to use an encyclopedia. You need to go to the library and...

Stephen Brown (21:22.126)
And then pretty soon, right, it was like, okay, well, obviously, you know, it's, it's, it's an amazing asset to have. AI is kind of there right now, right? There's some abuses, it's being abused and you want you to write your own essay and don't let it do the, you know, all that's going to wash out because what it's going to do is it's going to lift the platform way up, right? From which we innovate, from which we work, right? It's not going to.

prevent us from making progress, it's going to lift that platform we're standing on to be that much higher for us to innovate from. So I think it's super exciting. It's a little scary here and there as well, but it's super exciting. It's super exciting. What I found, so I've worked with AI a considerable amount already in my career for very specific use cases.

But one of the things that I think is interesting about AI for a more general business use case is AI can be very good at quickly analyzing and finding non -intuitive correlations in data. So if you have, you know, you have facts and data and stuff that you brought in, if you're in a technology company, maybe you've gone out and you've tested things in the field or you've tested it with customers.

and you've brought back all kinds of data, rather than sitting there and looking at AI can be very good at really looking at data in different ways and from different angles and finding correlations that a human being may not find in a much shorter amount of time. So I think that could be taking data back from the field if you have field deployments, if you have testing, customer feedback.

KPI, so key performance indicators related to your product and so forth, and even analysis of market data. So set it loose, you know, analyzing the market, right? Sure. God, I mean, there's so much that I think you could do with that. And then it can collect data. So I've worked in computer vision before. That's a form of collecting data.

Stephen Brown (23:42.286)
and alerting and so forth. And it's funny, you know, dashboards have always been a big thing, right? Everybody in business likes dashboards, right? I have to admit, you know, 20 years ago, I even thought about starting a company that just specialized in doing dashboards for companies. Dashboards are great, but you know, it's even better than a dashboard and intelligence that just lets you know when something goes wrong. So you don't have to wait all your time.

Looking at all the things that are going right, right? And making sure you don't miss when something goes wrong. It's great and AI is great at that. AI can track all this stuff, keep, you know, and let you know when something goes wrong. So, you know, you can tell I'm excited about AI. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, me too. I mean, I'm obviously I'm on the sales side of things, but to me it's...

The elevation part, I think is so key, right? It's gonna allow, I think it's gonna free up so much time for people to really start focusing on the stuff that matters and use those tools to help you. It's gonna geometrically improve lots of things in our lives. And yeah, we'll get by the Skynet fears and all that other stuff, just like we did with the internet and everything else that was gonna kill us. But yeah. There it is. And I think people,

You know, people are going to come to terms with it. I saw a meme the other day that said, I don't want AI to write my essays for me. I want to do my dishes and do my laundry so that I can have more time to write my essays myself. Right? Right. Nice. Trying to figure this thing out. But, you know, everybody's going to come to terms. Yeah, that's awesome. So,

So you served on several companies. Tell us about some of your most memorable experiences and what you took from them. Yeah, well, you know, I've had good and bad experiences. You know, I would say, you know, I could give a few examples. I think I already gave one today where I spent a week driving around in an RV with a salesman.

Stephen Brown (26:03.694)
That's great. That was a fun one, I gotta say. Mostly. But, you know, I've had some interesting things. I had a company that got called in to a meeting with a potential customer who's a very large company, one of the largest companies in the world. They called us into a conference room and they basically said...

I was ready with a pitch deck and ready to explain all that, all of our technology to them and hope that maybe they'd become a customer or a quire or something. They were a big company. And they just stopped me short and they said, we already know everything about your roadmap. We know everything about your technology and your roadmap and so forth. That's why we called you here. We don't want the product that you built. We want you to make a variation of it for us for a print.

for a project that we're doing. And like we were saying with AI, you've already brought the technology to this height. We just need you to bring it now a little higher and a little skewed to the left for what we need. And that was really interesting. And they came through with a lot of money to back us up and to do this and so forth. And I think that was a pretty wonderful experience. I mean, it had its ups and downs through the project.

I think we attained a level of technology that we never believed we would because we were pushed by a customer who believed in us, by a customer that we respected, who also showed a tremendous belief in us and what we had done technologically. And that not only was it an ego boost, but it was a motivation boost, right? It made us feel like, wow, they believe we can do this. And we think this is impossible, but I think we can push forward. And we achieved.

probably what we had thought a year before was impossible when they approached us. I think that was a great learning experience for me as a leader in the company that we embraced it. I had to bring back that meeting to the rest of the company and have them all in turn tell me it's impossible, but we worked through it and we made it happen, achieved great things. I think that was great. I've talked about one bad thing since we're on this.

Stephen Brown (28:26.99)
And this goes back to good leaders slash bad leaders. I once had a CEO that literally that used to tell tall tales, I'll be generous to him and say he's the tell tall tales to customers, prospective customers. And then he used to kick me under the table when he thought there was even a chance. I may come through with us with a kernel of truth. Right? Literally, literally, physically.

kick me or step on my toes and so forth. And if he sees this podcast, he'll know who he is. good. Good. Well, they should. I mean, that's a terrible way to be. You got the whole game, the whole ball of wax is here. You're going to see everything in your career. So, yeah. Well, I think, Dan, I think it's probably going to be refreshing for people that watch this.

and see leaders at your level that it acknowledged that, look, there's a right way and a wrong way to do things. And the majority of leaders that you come across do the right thing. They want to, they're there to serve, they want to serve their people, they want to serve their customers. But man, there's just no reason to mislead anybody anytime, period. Right? You know, it's going to catch up with you, right? You've got the technology, you've got a good path, a good strategic path.

which is the domain now of the CTO, right? You have nothing to hide, right? You just, you know, the most you can do is say, okay, we're going to miss this opportunity because it's not coming up fast enough. Better than not achieving it and having lied about it because chances are a customer, a potential customer who says we need something sooner, their timelines are going to push out too. And eventually they're going to be there. So. Yeah.

As a sales guy, you know that. Yes. Yes. Well, that's where I think there's a good partnership to be told there because stuff does kind of, you know, priorities change, customers priorities change, things happen. Sometimes a company can be in the middle of a project and have a leadership change. Yeah. Well, that's fine. You know, if a sales person or a team is not in tune with that and can keep that project on track and...

Stephen Brown (30:49.87)
provide that feedback, you know, you can, you know, projects can get lost or go off the rails or whatever. But the key thing though, I think is just, just to operate with integrity. And what's the old saying, right? If you tell the truth all the time, you don't have to remember what you said. Exactly right. That's the hard way. Exactly.

All right. Well, just one final question here before we wrap up, Dan. What advice would you have for sales folks today? OK. So, you know, I would say, and I think I covered some of this. It's that thing about, you know, when you believe something, you're just going to keep saying that it's the truth, right? So I think that a good C -level executive is always going to have an opinion.

No matter what, they'll have an opinion. They're not afraid to speak out. They're not afraid to make their views known and they're going to do it pretty forcefully. In most cases, don't let that scare you. Don't let that make you back off. That's how they got their role. That's where that's why they're there. That's why they're where they're at. You need to expect it. You need to challenge them and they would expect nothing less. They want to be challenged or a good.

C level executive wants to be challenged, right? Because that's how new ideas emerge, right? That's how they create that, you know, they create that tension and a new ideas emerge from it. And it's like, you know, it's like when you have, you know, you have a negotiation between.

between any two folks. It could be in sports, right? You know, the negotiation for a contract, right? And it's going to get ugly and it's going to get back and forth contentious. But once it's done, you're all best friends again, right? You'll make money together and so forth. And that's, that's how I think you need to handle this sort of relationship. Don't let anybody intimidate. Don't let anybody walk over you. Everybody's got a right to their opinion. Everybody's got a good opinion. And that's how something

Stephen Brown (33:10.894)
better will emerge, right? That's my take. That's great, Dan. I appreciate it. Well, thank you for joining us today on On the Edge. This is, as you know, part of our Getting to Know Your CXOs series. And I know your time's valuable, and I appreciate you sharing some of it with us. So thank you, Dan. Thank you very much, Dan.