JOSH ROGERS

>> Craig Gould: Josh Rogers, thank you for being my guest on the podcast today. Josh, you are the CEO of Precisely a, company that operates behind the scenes of some of the world’s largest organizations, making sure the data they rely on is accurate, contextual, and trustworthy enough to act on. There’s a lot that I want to talk to you about, and I think you are going to have opinions on a lot of the things we’ve been talking about over the course of this series. But, but Josh, I’d love to start with one common question, which is, Josh, what are your memories of your first job?

>> Josh Rogers: Well, thanks for having me. It’s great to be on the program. I appreciate the opportunity. first job, we’re going way back. Had my, 30th college reunion, back in June. So I, just think about this. My first job, I was an investment banking analyst, for a regional kind of, investment bank that was really focused on M and A. And I think about my kind of key learnings from that job. you know, the first was kind of a couple of tactical things that have been super useful to me. You know, I spent about 80 or to 100 hours a week, you know, essentially building spreadsheets and doing PowerPoint presentations. I got as a result, really good, at spreadsheets and PowerPoints. And I have found that that is a really powerful skill. And that doesn’t. It’s not something that kind of ends when you move away from an individual contributor or analyst role. It continues to be super useful. If anything, it becomes, I think, more useful the more senior you become. on the Excel side, it just really gives you a facility with data and how to analyze it and understand it. and on the PowerPoint side, it really forces you to think about how do you convey, how do you construct a, a story and a message and then how do you deliver it? so those were. They sound tactical but super, super important. For me, I think the second thing, that I would say was I learned this is hard at the time, but like, there’s an immense kind of challenge in working as much as I worked for the first two years of my career, but also like the ability to understand one’s capacity to attack a problem and like, make progress in a short period of time. and so, you know, kind of with an intense focus, which, is what that job required, particularly in these M and A deals. And so I think that has also helped me kind of through my career. When you get into a situation where there’s a Deadline, and you’ve got to make big decisions and you’ve got to do a bunch of work in a short period of time. You know, understanding that you, you can do that and you can, kind of organize around that, not just you, but, you know, a team. so those are a couple of takeaways. and then there was just a m. Massive amount of learning around all these businesses that we analyzed. And so certainly it was a strong foundation from that perspective as well.

>> Craig Gould: So did you ever dream, when you’re in that role, just how many mergers and acquisitions you’re going to have your hands in?

>> Josh Rogers: Personally, yeah, it’s interesting because I did this investment banking job for a couple of years, and then I worked for a private equity firm and I analyzed businesses, probably hundreds of businesses over those first four years. And then I transitioned after grad school into the software world. And my goal was really to figure out, could I, you know, ultimately get to a point of leadership and, in a business, and specifically the software business. And you know, as I, as I moved into particularly Precisely you know, what I, what I saw was an opportunity, not only to run, you know, the core business, but also to think about growth through M and A. And so certainly that, that early career experience has been super useful for me, you know, probably more useful than I would have envisioned when I, you know, first made the transition to software. and then the, you know, Precisely It’s been owned by a series of different private equity investors over the last, you know, since I’ve joined the firm, which has been 17 years. and so I think understanding how they think about their investments and being able to communicate at a board level, in those terms has also been super useful. So it’s, it’s certainly I learned a lot in those first four years, and it probably has been a bit more useful than I ever could have imagined in the role that I’ve played here. Precisely

>> Craig Gould: My impression is there, there have been a number of private equity investors that have been involved with. Precisely And, you know, you mentioned how they think. Do you find that there’s a general consensus about how private equity thinks or, or does it vary from firm to firm? You know, one has a particular focus versus another or is, at the end of the day, is the evaluation, the analytics kind of standard from one to the other?

>> Josh Rogers: Yeah, what I’ve seen is certainly they all have the basic common goal, which is to, you know, make an investment at some certain value and then, and then increase the value of that investment and then Exit that investment. That’s the fundamental business model. But each firm has a different approach, to kind of achieving that value creation. you know, some may be more focused on organic growth, some may be more focused on inorganic growth or M and A. you know, some take a very hands on approach in terms of a playbook if you will, in terms of how to, the changes you would make in the business to optimize it and increase value. And others, you know, will take a more hands off approach, says hey, we’re going to hire the great, a great leadership team and that’s going to be their responsibility. And so you know, I’ve seen a bunch of different models and frankly I think at least for our investors, you know, they’ve all got amazing track records even though they’ve had different kind of approaches along the way.

>> Craig Gould: You’ve been in the C suite 17 years, CEO. In the last 10, 11 years we’ve talked about these mergers and acquisitions. Tell me, what are the challenges in trying to manage the integration of new assets, new teams, new technology, new data and try to fold that in in a way that things work. Because I mean the core of your business is data, integrity. But things have to work right, not only on the business system side but culturally. Like how do you, how do you fold in technology, business systems and people in those situations and it be successful?

>> Josh Rogers: Yeah, yeah, it’s a, it’s a very good question. I think you know one of the things that we have done well is we paid a lot of attention both in the kind of diligence, phase and certainly in the integration phase to the people side of things. you know my, my premise has always been that if you have a, you know, relatively small organization software business, that has been around, most of the companies we’ve acquired have been, you know, not startups. They’ve been around for you know, decade, a decade or more, that in that organization for them to be successful in enterprise software for that long, that there’s some really good people. And you know, I’ve always felt like it’s really important for us to understand, you know, who those folks are and to not only create an environment and approach and integration plan that, that retains them, but to also think about how can the broader Precisely benefit from their experience. Not just to run the piece of the, the target or the acquisition that we’re making, but you know, to play a bigger role on a bigger stage. And I think that’s something we’ve done well. And I’ve always felt like that sends such a positive signal to both organizations, particularly the acquired organization that, you know, we, we value folks and we, and we see real value not just in their technology or their customers or the revenue, but, but in their people and their ideas. and, and so I think we’ve done that well. I think we’ve also tried to instill a cultural approach that is, you know, our job. We, we’re buying this business because we really like the business and we like the people in the business and we like the, the space and the products and the technology, in that we want to. And we don’t have everything figured out, at Precisely And so we want to learn, we want to learn what you’re doing, what works. And how can we apply that to the broader business? Sometimes that’s in the form of, you know, talent taking on more roles. Sometimes that’s in the, in the form of, you know, changing kind of processes or approaches that we might have, inside of. Precisely And I think we’ve done, a good job of that. And then the last piece is we tend to try to drive, particularly on the organizational side, integration of the organization into our, broader team very quickly within the first kind of two weeks to 30 days. And I think that has served us well on the product and technology side. in some ways that’s a bit the easier part. You got to do important diligence. You got to figure out what the integration points are with the broader, portfolio. How would you take it to market? Do you kind of continue to focus on the way they’ve been taken to market? Do you put it into a broader go to market channel? And then the hardest actually piece has really been, the system side, which is how do I move their data and their processes into our environment. And While we’ve done 20 acquisitions where you do, run on one set of systems, and then ironically, the hardest part of that system challenge is actually the data. And so that’s something that I feel like helps us really understand what our customers are going through and obviously is an opportunity for us to use our own technology, on those, you know, kind of those data challenges internally, and we use that as a forcing function to make our product better.

>> Craig Gould: For those folks that aren’t one of your 12,000 customers, how would you describe the services you provide? Tell me more about data integrity.

>> Josh Rogers: We use the phrase data integrity to represent kind of what I think every enterprise is focused on, which is getting to accurate, consistent, contextualized data they can use to make better decisions. and so we don’t play in the database space, we don’t play in the kind of a business intelligence space. We play in a set of capabilities, both software products as well as data products and consulting services that allow organizations to integrate, govern, improve the quality of, enrich, their firm generated data assets, to get to the highest fidelity data they need to answer the questions they want to answer. And of course today that’s not just for analytics and decision making by humans, it’s also to power AI systems. So I often use the plumbing analogy where that plumbing that sits, kind of between all those source systems and kind of your key analytic and operational, systems to make sure that you have clean, high quality data flowing through those pipes and Precisely uniquely has this broad set of capabilities across not just the software kind of pieces, of that which Gartner covers in different magic quadrants, probably five or six magic quadrants, but also these data products. And then finally we have not just consulting services that help you implement our technologies, but we have, data strategy consulting. And so that’s a really unique value proposition for organizations where they can come to one place and they can get not only the software technology, they can actually get data assets and they can actually get, expertise that allows them to not only implement the technology but actually fashion a strategy, of how to achieve their kind of data integrity ambitions.

>> Craig Gould: It seems to me that the value proposition for your services has been evolving. Right. You know, because, I mean, for years, you know, enterprises talked about data as a decision support tool. Right? So like, can I trust my instruments engages so that I can fly the plane based just on the instruments versus now with AI, we’re asking more from data, right. You know, can I trust it to be able to have the autopilot land the plane? Right. I mean, you know, can you talk about how you woke up one day and data, meant something totally different to a market?

>> Josh Rogers: Yeah. And it’s interesting. It’s, it’s, I think I might describe it a little differently, which is it’s not so much that the role of data has changed, it’s that it’s expanded into every corner of every piece of the operation. And so what I mean by that is if you go back 15, 20 years ago, you had a set of dashboards that some small subset of the team would refer to on a weekly or monthly basis to kind of get their arms around things. And if you look at it today, it’s Every single employee is making decisions every day and generally in real time based on this, you know, kind of, on data that needs to be highly accurate. And you know, the latest and newest trend is that it’s not just employees that we’re asking to make those decisions. It’s machines. It’s the, you know, I call it the AI machine. It’s you know, with the gentic AI, what you’re really saying is I would like to have, you know, these models, and these, in these core kind of, AI systems make decisions at scale. And so you’re just increasing the stakes, about having, making sure that data is accurate. and so it’s, to me, it’s taking a fundamental concept that used to be used by a few people and putting it into action, you know, every second of every day, in every corner of the enterprise. And so, obviously great opportunity for us. And, you know, data integrity just becomes that much more important.

>> Craig Gould: What about data enrichment? I only have within my organization, I only have so much access to so much data. I wish I had more. How does Precisely help with that?

>> Josh Rogers: Yes, so this is something that I think the analysts don’t fully cover this kind of data space the way that they probably could, which is, if you look at enterprises today, they certainly take a lot of effort and make a lot of investments in technologies and software products to harness the data that is generated in their core systems. But really, if you look at what they’re doing, they’re also spending an incredible amount of money acquiring data sets from a broad range of organizations. And then they are stuck with the challenge of how do I fit those two things together? Right? I’ve got my customer file of 100 million PNC customers, and I’ve acquired a bunch of different disparate data sets around, let’s say the properties I’m insuring. You know, where these, properties are, what, you know, what the risk is, what the age is. and I’ve got this challenge of I’ve got to take this disparate set of data that I’ve acquired and figure out how do I match it up with my 100 million customers. That’s a really, really hard thing to do. And so we think there’s a really big, you know, strong value proposition for organizations where we a frame. The problem is, hey, you want to get the maximum amount of attributes that you can get, not just what exists inside your enterprise, but all the attributes available in the world and be able to line those up, against Kind of whatever domain you’re focused on and get the most accurate answer you can. Which means you’ve got to be able to harness your firm generated data assets, but you also need to be able to integrate acquired data assets. And so we’ve taken great pains with a lot of the innovation we’re driving to make that really simple for customers. not only can we help you clean up your data, organize it, improve the quality, observe that quality, but we can sell you data sets that give you additional attributes and use through, technology we call the Precise cid. We can provide you a cross reference to other common data sets that you probably already own from folks like D and B. and so that dramatically streamlines the process of getting to that kind of ideal attribute set to describe a customer or a property or a vendor. And so we think that’s a really unique value proposition and it maps more to some of the broad challenges that our customers are facing.

>> Craig Gould: I know that regulation and compliance often feel like friction. And how do you see compliance as an opportunity to drive better data practices? I mean it seems like compliance can kind of push people towards making a decision to use. Precisely

>> Josh Rogers: Yeah, sure. I mean we do a lot of work in that space. first of all, I think a lot of, governments around the world have said, hey, we’re collecting a lot of data on a lot of things and maybe we should have some regulation around how that can be used. And I think that’s very good. I, think privacy is really important and I think we’re moving, you know, in a direction that protects you, and me and our personal data and certainly our customers, our inter, Our customers, customer. And I think those are good. The challenge is that these are, there’s not one set of regulations for the globe. There’s not only is there a different set of regulations in every country, there’s a different set of regulations in the US and every state, and they’re changing all the time. And so certainly, you know, we have a set of capabilities that allow customers to make sure they’re complying with those regulations and understand where they aren’t and what they need to do to correct those, challenges. And so, yeah, I mean that’s just one, I’d say driver of data integrity, which is, hey, I need to know what data I have, I need to make sure it’s used by only people that can use it. And you know, I need to know, you know, how it’s being used and where it’s coming from. and you know, that’s, that’s kind of what our data integrity kind of set of capabilities, particularly through the Data Integrity Suite make. Much simpler than kind of trust, trying to knit that, that process together either manually through a bunch of different disparate tools.

>> Craig Gould: Precisely is a really interesting company. It hasn’t always been Precisely but it’s, it’s always been a private company. It’s one of the older software companies. It reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a, gentleman named Erik Becker who had recently written a book about Centurion companies that were able to exist 100 years and beyond. Your company is, is now 60 plus years old, I, think give or take, or right around there. What is the secret to a technology company or any company to be able to exist that long and you know, just within your tenure be able to not just sustain, but to see, you know, I think what’s like 10x growth in ARR. In your tenure. Right, right. How does a, a company of that age sustain and grow and stay not just relevant, but a leader?

>> Josh Rogers: Yeah, great. question. So, yeah, we’re 58 years old. So founded in 1968, the original organization, was known as Sync Sword. It was a mainframe software business that, that originally focused on kind of processing, data efficiently inside of mainframes and then expanded into integrating data from mainframes into other, downstream, systems. and then we’ve, you know, through organic and inorganic growth have expanded, you know, dramatically, particularly over the last 10 years, into this kind of end to end set of solutions around data integrity. you know, I’d say the first is that we have a really keen focus on solving hard problems for complex enterprise customers and then being very loyal to making sure that we support them. And so we have customers that we have had, you know, for 58 years. There’s not a lot of, in fact, you know, we just dramatically grew one customer this year or last year, I guess now, in 2025, that, that you know, was one of our first customers. And so we’ve, we’re really proud of, you know, that kind of dedication to our customers. I’m really thankful from our employees and the team to be so customer focused. And so I think that’s the first thing is I think we’re a trusted provider of these solutions. the second thing is I think we, we really focus on understanding how the market is changing and how do we continue to evolve. Right. So we’ve gone from mainframes to distributed systems. We’ve gone from distributed systems to the cloud. Now we’re layering in AI, and really understanding you know, how each of those technological changes is going to kind of impact how customers want to use data, where data lives and how to make it easy for them to kind of navigate those changes. And then the third thing which is probably a little more unique in our industry is that we’ve been profitable the whole time. And when you’re profitable you, you have more degrees of freedom to you know, navigate ups and downs of markets, you know, make long term decisions. and, and I think that’s been really powerful. Now with that comes a set of kind of trade offs and disciplines around how you make decisions, how you choose to invest. and so we certainly, I think if it built a set of processes and culture that’s very focused on balancing both, you know, investment and innovation with profitability. but that’s, you know, those are the, probably the three things that I would say is we’re really, really focused on our customers and continue to be long term partners to them. Really focused on understanding the market we serve and how technological changes are going to impact our customers so we can innovate to make sure that we’re relevant. and then third we’re profitable every year and we focus keenly on that.

>> Craig Gould: How does a company like yours maintain a North Star that is specific while still having the flexibility to stay agile and able to pivot.

>> Josh Rogers: Part of it is knowing what you’re good at, what you’re not good at. So we really want to stay in this data space and in this, I’ll call it the plumbing space. I talked about some areas we’re not in that I don’t think we’d be particularly good at and they’re not as attractive in my opinion. You know, database space is an interesting, is an example of that. so I think we’ve tried to stay really true to you know, what we believe, where our expertise lies. and then the second is you know, kind of back to customers. If you can build the right level of relationship and partnership with customers, you know, they’ll, they will tell you not only what they need but what they believe you’re uniquely suited to be able to solve for them they’re not seeing elsewhere in the market. And so there’s really good insights there. So if you can kind of have a good understanding of hey, this is our lane and what we’re really good at and where we have differentiated expertise and Then you can kind of work closely with customers to refine that into you know, markets and products and features that not only are going to be useful for your customers. Being unique in the marketplace, I think that serves us well. That’s what we try to stay really attuned to.

>> Craig Gould: Well how do you foster an environment where you’re able to get those inputs and trust them? I mean are you communicating directly with customers or have you set up an organization where your boots on the ground, face to face guys are capable of sharing those insights upstream stream in a way where things don’t get lost in ah, a game of telephone.

>> Josh Rogers: Yeah, so we put a big focus, not just with our salespeople obviously, but with the entire kind of leadership team. We have a senior leadership team we call the slt, which is kind of my direct reports and their direct reports. and we put a very big focus on all of them being engaged with customers. in fact last year my entire direct set of leaders had a specific goal for number of customer calls. so yes we want to be, we want, not only, we want our organization broadly connected with customers, but we want our senior leadership team directly, connected with customers because that’s our lifeblood. And then the second thing is that we want to be always seen by our customers and this is particularly true on the commercial side as reasonable. and so there’s a lot of things that we try not to do. you know in software there’s, there’s plenty of room because your, your product’s so mission critical. There’s plenty of room and there’s certainly organizations, you know, the last 30 years that have leveraged that in a way that I think really frustrates customers. We try not to do that. and then on the on the technology side we try to be, you know, very reactive. We solicitate input on our products and we do that through things like customer advisory boards and surveys and communities. but then we also try to demonstrate, you know, that we are, that we are listening and that we are also agile. and so you know, we do a lot of proof of concepts with customers where frankly in that we don’t necessarily have all of the features they need, but we’ll say hey, we’ll build this feature that you need so long as it’s, we think it’s representative of need in the market, and do that. And we do a lot of that. I mean there’s dozens of those types of kind of engineering efforts going on at Any kind of particular time. And that’s just served us well because you’re building to real customer requirements.

>> Craig Gould: As I mentioned earlier, you’ve been in the C suite Precisely for going on 17 years, 10 plus years, as CEO in today’s day and age. That is an extremely long tenure for a, CEO. You know, maybe it’s about being a private company and the horizons being different. I’d love to hear your feedback on how it is you’ve been able to sustain a long tenure, how it is that you’re in a company that can appreciate that long tenure. And what do you think the circumstances are that cause shorter tenures in other large companies? What pressures or considerations are influencing those, those shorter tenures?

>> Josh Rogers: Yeah, I mean, obviously I’m very grateful to, you know, the investors that I’ve had along the way for all their support, and certainly to, you know, my team and the team members I’ve had along the way. because in some ways, you know, I’m just a product in my experience, just a product of all the support and hard work that they’ve provided. I think I’ve done a couple things. Well, one, is, you know, I spend anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour every morning going through data, on our business and you know, naturally curious and kind of poke at all corners. And we’ve built out a 200 data products and 2000 dashboards. And so it’s a, it’s a well instrumented machine. and so I think one of the things that I’ve done a pretty good job of is having a good sense of what the trends in the business are and being able to spot, hey, there’s something over here that doesn’t look right. Let’s go understand that and figure out how we take corrective action. I think I’ve also been good at being transparent about those findings, both to my organization but also, to the board. And I think that’s built a lot of trust. and I think that’s in confidence. obviously we’ve had a good record of growth and value creation and that’s obviously fundamental. But I think along the way I’ve been seen as someone that is trustworthy and transparent, both by the employees and by the investors. and that’s probably given me, that allowed them both to give me a little grace when we didn’t exactly nail the execution side of things. that’s probably the most fundamental thing. And I’ve seen other scenarios, where for example, either somebody missed something, there was some Big problem. They didn’t recognize it, or it might have been a problem, and they talked to some people about it, but they didn’t want everybody to know. and what I found is, if you really study and you really understand the trends at a product level, at an employee level, every key metric, and you monitor those well, you won’t miss big things. and then on the transparency side, what I found is if you just tell everybody the same thing, it’s a lot easier because then you don’t have to remember how you’ve compartmentalized messages. and so I don’t want to make it sound like I’ve been transparent just because I’m lazy. But what I found is it builds a really healthy culture around how to understand an issue and then how to mobilize resources to kind of address it.

>> Craig Gould: My impression is that, a large part of your workforce these days is remote. Can you talk about the challenges of culture in communication, in cadence when dealing with any workforce these days, but especially one that is dispersed?

>> Josh Rogers: Yeah, I mean, look, I think there’s trade offs either way. obviously we all learned a lot through the, the pandemic. And, and I think my takeaways might be slightly different than some of my peers, but my takeaways where we went, but this really kind of shock, external shock to the system that was so horrible and just disruptive for everyone, you know, really in March of, of 2020. And you know, we were developing all these plans for like, what happens if we lose, if a renewal rate drops in half or, you know, new business goes to zero. you know, we closed all the offices everybody’s working from, from home, literally over the course of a week. And you know, as we kind of set our plans and like, our leading indicators, we were watching to figure out if the whole thing was going to implode. And you know, this is an oversimplification, but what we were found was like, oh, it’s fine. Like, yeah, new business was a little bit softer. Renewals were totally fine. New business started to come back. you know, some expenses went away, travel and obviously unused office space. And I was like, okay, this is interesting, kind of unexpected. And then what we found, we, you know, we do an engagement survey with our employees every six months. And we, kind of started that process, during this time. And what we found is people really valued the freedom and the, you know, and the flexibility of working from home. And so as we continued to poll folks through 21 and 22, what we found was that people didn’t want to come back in the office full time, because in many cases, you know, they’re chewing up lots of time on these commutes, etc. And so we’ve really been a remote first organization. We have a handful of offices. They’re not they don’t support the entire employee base of 2600 employees by any stretch. but they do represent landing spots and we have some you know, partners that allow us to use you know, temp space when, when we want to do team meetings and that type of thing. And so we’ve, you know, my, my basic approach has been my employees really like the, the flexibility. you know we’ve transformed and the business has grown significantly. We’ve done acquisitions, we’ve hired thousands of, you know, hundreds of people, really thousands of people in this remote setting. and boy, it seems like there’s a lot to like about that now. There are some, some downsides, right, because I think in personal, in person interaction is valuable, and does build trust and does allow you to, to share and collaborate in ways you can’t, virtually. And so we’ve, we tried to create a cadence for the business from a communication perspective that is virtual, that gets the key messages out to everybody in a very structured way. And certainly big piece of that is happening in the month of January M. But it happens every month, and every quarter on a structured way. And then we really support teams, you know, getting together in a cost effective way. so that we have a regular set of, you know, kind of occurring in person interactions. And what we found is that that’s created a culture that we get you know, really strong marks, on our engagement story. Ah, engagement, surveys based on industry benchmarks. we have you know, six and a half percent voluntary attrition, which is about half the industry average. and we have really, you know, long tenures of employees that seem satisfied. And so I think we’ve figured out a model that works. there certainly are some trade offs, but this is something that works well for us.

>> Craig Gould: What do you look for in a team member? What do you look for when you’re hiring for a new position or you know, it sounds like with those, with those marks, maybe there’s not a lot of hiring that people stick around, but what do you look for in filling those critical roles at the top of your organization?

>> Josh Rogers: Yeah, I mean kind of across the organization. But I’ll certainly speak to the, the senior leadership I mean you, you want someone that has the right set of experience for the position you’re hiring for. Obviously, we, we certainly care a lot about kind of cultural fit and our cultural values are around collaboration and transparency, you know, doing what’s right for, you know, the customer and then. Precisely And then the, the team. and we want to make sure that, that we you know, hire to those, someone that’s curious, someone that wants to, you know, probably listen more than they speak. and someone that you know, we, we run at a very high profit margin. So there’s not a lot of slack in the system. And so, you know, any individual hire is precious real estate and precious, you know, kind of resource. And so we want to make sure we’re hiring somebody that as I like to say, can do things. you know, my, my dad had a business years ago and I asked him for advice one time and he wouldn’t tell me and eventually he gave me two pieces of ice. and one of those pieces was hire the doers and fire the talkers. And so I think we try to stick with that. but but that’s, those are some of the key things. you need a good cultural fit that’s going to be someone that’s trustworthy, transparent, kind, collaborative, but also is combined with, you know, expert, the expertise you’re looking with and then are looking for, and then someone that works hard. I mean we work hard. and that actually is a pretty kind of rare combination. It’s not always the easiest thing to suss out in an interview process. I think we’re pretty good at that. but one of the things we focus on is frankly is promotion. because that’s, you know, internal promotion. That’s, that’s where you, you already have a lot of that data. And you know, we really want to be a place where people can grow their career. And I, you know, I always use myself as that example. I mean I came in, my first job here was running a piece of the America sales. and so it’s, you know, changed my life, changed my kids life. And so if I can be a, build an organization that creates, an opportunity for folks to grow their career, certainly that’s, that’s a key goal that we have.

>> Craig Gould: What advice would you give somebody who is in middle management? maybe they’re a vp, maybe an svp and they’re, they’re looking at trying to figure out how to get that, that last 10 yards to, to get to the C suite. What, what can they do to equip themselves to get noticed? What advice can, can you provide for, For a game plan for somebody like that?

>> Josh Rogers: It’s such a good question, and it’s, it’s easy to have an answer that sounds, you know, very bland. if you’re a vp, you’ve probably already demonstrated enough in your other roles that you can work hard and that you can produce things. What I have found the biggest limiter to someone taking on more responsibility is not their intellect. It’s not their willingness to work hard. it’s not their ambition generally. It is their ability to build and sustain really healthy relationships with their peers. And how does someone become that person that people trust they want to work with, they want to work for? they believe that that person’s out to help them, not out for themselves. You know, at the end of the day, there’s someone that they want, people want to follow. so that’d be the first and most important thing is how are you interacting with your peers? How are you building relationships where you can both disagree but also, you know, continue, to have a really healthy relationship. The second thing is I always look for folks that really understand the company’s strategy and can contribute ideas and be willing to go above and beyond their current scope of responsibility to help move those ideas that are, you know, that folks have support for forward. That’s so important because it’s a, it’s, it’s, it’s a bit rare. I certainly have, you know, encountered lots of leaders where it’s like, boy, I come away from a conversation saying, do they really understand our strategy? second, you know, you see folks that are like, hey, that’s not my responsibility. And it may be a, hey, I don’t want to do that, but it also could be a, I don’t even notice. Realize that, that I have the ability, ability to do that. But the folks that say, hey, I see this problem over here, and I don’t think that’s in line with our strategy. And I want to. I got an idea of how we could solve it and I’m going to go, you know, reach across functional areas to kind of help align folks, but that is just gold. and you just, you know, that person, not only can they do that and kind of step outside of just their specific responsibilities and good ideas that are, that are aligned with the company strategy, but they can mobilize peers to help kind of them, progress that those are really good signs that they can take on more responsibility and be super successful.

>> Craig Gould: Well, one last question, Josh. That is, what do you see on the horizon? What is exciting you or intriguing you? Because I mean you, you’re demonstrating a skill set of being able to see things at, least one, one or two steps ahead and respond accordingly. What is getting you excited? what’s out there that you are spending a little bit more time thinking about the possibility of?

>> Josh Rogers: Yeah, I mean it’s amazing. We’ve had this conversation for whatever it is, it’s been 45 minutes and we haven’t really talked about AI that much. That’s probably the area and it’s a curiosity of how, how it all develops. but in particular I’m really interested in agentic AI and how our customers are going to use that. I think it holds a lot of promise that I think will be very powerful and very positive. I actually don’t believe we’re going to be eliminating all sorts of human resources. I think we’re going to be making some of the more tedious components, of their jobs better. but I think it’s going to be a bumpy ride. and I think one of the big bumps is going to be data. And so I’m most interested in understanding both how our end customers are going to implement magentic AI and what those data challenges are going to be. We’re seeing certainly involved in a bunch of projects, there. and I’m also interested in how that kind of gets plays out in our partner ecosystem. We have great partners and folks like databricks and Snowflake and in aws. And so that, how that all comes together and matures is super interesting to me. and somewhere I’m spending a lot of time and we’re implementing a bunch of identity features in our products and it’s just really interesting. I think the possibilities are so exciting. I do think the road to real value, consistent, trusted, kind of agentic AI is going to be a little bumpy or a little longer than folks think. But it’s super interesting. And so that’s, that’s somewhere where I’m spending a lot of time and our whole company is spending a lot of time because we think, you know, data integrity is so fundamental to success with agentic AI.

>> Craig Gould: So is it possible that my company, I have my agents doing things for me, but then everyone else, you know, if, if a gentic AI becomes what we think it is, everyone is going to be interacting with my system, you know, through what, what’s essentially A third party. Right. And is it possible that those are our customers, our visitors, agentic AI? Is it possible it can make our data a little bit more murky because it’s not the actual user? Or is it, is it just as clear because they have been sent on a specific mission by, by that person?

>> Josh Rogers: No, I think, I think there’s. There’s. That’s where the, the risk and kind of my curiosity is right is it’s. There’s a lot of nuance to data and, into making that decision. And there’s only, you know, you need the right context and there’s two sources of context. There’s data and there’s human intervention. and so I think the stakes are high to make that work. And I think that’s where A, our basic kind of expertise and capabilities and current technology is super useful. But I think, B, so we have an opportunity to drive innovation with our partners and with our customers to make it really easy to make sure that you can scale these systems and get error rates that are acceptable, and manage the downside and capture some of the value, of, you know, the automation that again, I believe will, will benefit, not only the companies but also the employees. Because I think it’s going to be most useful in, in areas that are pretty tedious today. and so I think it’s an exciting time. I think it’s a really interesting problem to solve and I think it’s going to be hard, but I think, you know, with collaboration with our customers and our partners and some good, you know, hard work on innovation, I think we can do it.

>> Craig Gould: Well, Josh, I, I really appreciate your, your time today, your willingness to, to sit there and be peppered with all my questions for almost an hour and man, if, if folks wanted to keep track of, of you, Precisely what you guys have going on, if there. If we’ve piqued the interest of someone who feels like they need help with their data, where should we point people?

>> Josh Rogers: Sure. Precisely.com is our website paid, a good amount of money to get that URL, so certainly you can come there. I’m Josh Rogers on LinkedIn, CEO of Precisely and I’m pretty active on LinkedIn and try to be responsive to outreach and so I’d love to hear from folks.

>> Craig Gould: Wonderful. Well, again, Josh, I really appreciate your time today.

>> Josh Rogers: Thank you so much, Greg. Enjoyed the conversation.

>> Craig Gould: All right, thanks.