RICHARD YU

>> Craig Gould: Richard Yu, thank you so much for joining me this week on the podcast. Richard, you are the chief product officer at LucidLink. LucidLink is, the storage collaboration platform that frees creative teams to work together from anywhere. And I’m going to rely on you to explain that in a little bit more detail. But, Richard, I’d love to start these conversations with one common question, which is, Richard, what are your memories of your first job?

>> Richard Yu: Yeah, that’s a great question, Craig. And, and by the way, please feel free to call me Rich. Most of my friends do. So, feel free.

>> Craig Gould: All right.

>> Richard Yu: You know, my. My first job, my first real job was actually as a, what we call, what they call it, a flyer, sales associate at a department store in California called Macy’s. Obviously, Macy’s is a nationwide chain, but, you know, it was a job where I took the job and, you know, my job was to go to any department that was a bit shorthanded on any given day and to help bring up the cash register for customers. Now, I will say, being a flyer, I was one day in men’s ties, the next day in housewares, and then maybe a third day in another department. And of course, being relatively young, I really didn’t know much about anything. So this job was quite interesting and a good lesson for me in sort of learning on the fly. I recall there was a very nice lady who came into the house, the houseware department, specifically pots and pans, and started asking me the difference between stainless steel and copper pots. And I tell you, I had no idea. somehow I muddled through it, and somehow she purchased something, I believe a set of stainless steel pots and pans.

>> Craig Gould: Basically like a substitute teacher. Right. I mean, you could be dropped into a math class or an English class or whatever, but, you know, different parts of Macy’s. And I imagine that by the end of it, you. You had a better holistic view of the entire store than if you had been planted into one spot.

>> Richard Yu: Yeah, I think the substitute teacher analogy is a very good one. I did have a pretty good perspective of the store in the various departments. And I think the one lesson that I took from that is at the end of the day, people trust in relationships, right? The very nice lady who came by and asked me questions that I had no answers to. You know, I try to help her the best I can, but at the end of the day, we sort of just had a, very honest conversation where we looked at the different pots and pans together. And I think she Kind of figured out I, wasn’t a houseware specialist very quickly. But she, I guess to her credit, you know, trusted me to explore the question with her. We looked at all the literature that I had on hand about, you know, the all clad versus the, I don’t know, the copper stuff. I can’t remember the brand specifically and you know, talked about things like, you know, the thermal conductivity and the heat retention properties and you know, whether it was stain or not stain and you know, is it going to work on an induction stovetop versus burner? So you know, we sort of talk through all that together and that’s the one thing that I carry with me today is, ah, is that you know, when you’re in a situation where you’re not sure what you’re talking about, it’s best to be upfront and authentic about it. And that’s what engenders trust. So try to carry that lesson through. You know.

>> Craig Gould: Did you find yourself drinking from a fire hose when you showed up at Lucid Link just because you step into a company that’s in its fifth year, give or take of life, and were responsible for answering some of those questions. I mean, what was that like for you?

>> Richard Yu: Yeah, absolutely. I mean it was very much a, drinking from the higher fire hose or jumping into the deep end of the pool experience. Now that said, just quick clarification. LucidLink has been, you know, growing as a, as a business and you know, acquiring customers and revenue for about five years, but the company has been around nearly 10 now. the technology and the origin story goes back to almost ten years ago. but back to your question. Absolutely. fortunately for me there is a, I, I’ve been in this situation probably three, four times over now where, you know, in my career and we can talk about more, explore this if you like. I’ve taken on a bit of a, I guess a sweet spot role in terms of just coming into companies that have great product market fit, that have demonstrated business traction and customer traction and are looking to really scale up to the next level, whatever that next level may be, double, triple digit, millions of revenue even north of that. And I’ve kind of built this toolkit for myself and some frameworks to really help these companies or companies like Lucilink get to the next level. So although it was brand new product, brand new customers, brand new industry, I had these specific tools to lean on, if you will.

>> Craig Gould: So what kind of tools are in the toolkit, if you don’t mind me asking? Or is that, or is that going to be in your first book in five, 10 years?

>> Richard Yu: Right. Yeah, I have very little aspirations to write a book, but I do have aspirations maybe become a lecturer or maybe a guest lecturer at some point. So that would be fun to your question. I’ll go through some of those, tools with you. so first of all, I think there, the first thing is all about the people. I think there is something that, you know, a new leader like, like me, when, when I come to an organ, come into an organization, you know, people are sometimes a bit scared, anxious, intimidated, or even worried about what’s going to happen. You know, is this guy Rich going to come in and fire everyone and, you know, bring in a bunch of new people? Is he going to completely destroy all the ways that we do our work? And, you know, just to be upfront, that’s not who I am. I think the one thing that’s really important is to be very, very curious, as you said earlier, and respectful about what’s been accomplished. You know, I’ve been very fortunate in terms of stepping into opportunities and companies like Lucid Link and really just being able to learn a lot from the people who have paved the path, if you will. And these companies are very successful.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Richard Yu: I, you know, there’s product market fit. There are clearly customers who are excited and finding value in the products that are being offered to them. so it’s always really great starting point for me to start from asking a lot of questions. Who are our customers? Why did they like our products? Why did they find value and how did they use our products? I am an engineer by education and backgrounds. My brain sort of thinks in terms of systems and, you know, operations and components of a machine, if you will. And I try to figure out what are all the components that makes a machine like LucidLink run as well as it does today. And then after that, I start thinking about, well, what are the tweaks we can start making to those components of the machine? That’s sort of my approach. So that’s one thing I would maybe advise anybody who might be in a similar situation is to start with a degree of humility and humbleness and a lot of curiosity on how a company has gotten to where it is currently.

>> Craig Gould: You mentioned product market fit, and that insinuates that you, you have found, you found some customers that are raving fans that you, you have found some people that have really grabbed onto your product and have really made it kind of a core of what they do. And so when you, when you step in and your boss has charged you with, you know, we, we still need to grow, we still need to innovate and take this to the next level. Is it difficult to distinguishing between feeding the dog’s dog food versus stretching it in ways they can’t imagine?

>> Richard Yu: It’s a great question. I think it’s sort of how much do you listen to and act on the specific feedback and comments from existing customers versus how much you kind of provide a vision and paint a future for those customers and frankly for customers who we don’t have yet.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Richard Yu: And industries that we don’t serve yet. It’s a really, really good question and it’s at the crux of this, how do we scale as a company topic? For me there’s a couple of things. One is I absolutely do listen to customers and you know, one of my first activities usually is to just try to speak to as many customers or proxies for customers as I can, meaning our salespeople, our customer success and account managers, or like I said, perfectly directly to customers and just to get a sense of what they think and how they’ve embedded a technology like LucidLink into their workflows and into their business operations. I think the really tricky part of this is that with a fairly successful company like Lusalink, there’s usually many, many customer voices to be heard. And sometimes those customer voices tell you lots of different diverse, things. Customer one wants a specific feature, Customer two wants a very specific capability, and so on, so forth. I think the hardest part in terms of, and this is one of the other tools I have in my toolkit, if you will, that one of the hardest parts of the process is to really figure out what is the true signal from the noise, meaning everybody is going to have something that they want from their product. and if you try to listen to every single one of them and build every single feature that’s been asked for, well, with all due respect to Microsoft, you end up with Excel. And Excel is the most feature rich product arguably in existence. But I’ll bet you maybe 5% of the total feature set gets used on a regular basis.

>> Speaker C: Right?

>> Richard Yu: so, that’s one of the things I focus on and it’s a concept that I’ve learned about and try to really embrace. It’s a concept that’s sometimes called outcomes over output. Building features is an output. Delivering a new button or new click or a new capability is an output. But the real question is what sort of outcomes do those specific outputs drive or lead to? And those outcomes are typically in one or two categories or measured by one or two dimensions. It’s either a customer outcome where there’s greater adoption and usage and regular and consistent usage of certain features. And then relatedly there is a business outcome for the company where we continue to see customer loyalty, customer expansion and retention, and hopefully acquisition of new customers. So really the key point here is to focus on these outcomes and really start with outcomes or desired outcomes or goals and objectives or KPIs or whatever we want to call them, using all the different parlance out there, and then to work backwards into what sort of output we need to produce as a company, taking customer feedback into consideration to really move those outcome metrics. It’s a fairly simple concept and I’m sure there’s lots of different ways it’s been described, but it’s one that’s very hard in practice, for especially strong technology driven companies like LucidLink and where it’s very easy to just say we’ll build another thing, we’ll build that feature. Yeah, we have great engineers, we’ll build it all. Oftentimes you build something and they don’t come right. So that’s the key topic there.

>> Craig Gould: It’s kind of core to the business to figure out exactly what the key differentiators are. you have people that are wanting to come, up with a really rich feature set, but understanding what’s sticky and what gets people excited. You know, when you have people within one organization that all of a sudden, for whatever reason move to another company and now they’re, that person doesn’t use your product, but they’re now your internal advocate. Like I can’t do my job unless I have LucidLink. Right. You know, that’s the sort of relationship you want with your customers. Right. And so to, to figure out what those key differentiators are, it takes a lot of, a lot of listening. And so are there, are there surveys or is it, or is it very anecdotal? I mean, I guess the question is what, what’s the qualitative versus the quantitative aspect to, to figuring that out?

>> Richard Yu: Great question again, Craig. to your, to your point about, you know, forming those relationships with customers, it’s, it’s interesting. Just coincidentally I had a customer panel just recently and one of the customers is one such, as you described, where they use lucid link at their prior company. They brought lucid link into their current company and Odds are they’re going to bring lucid link into their next company.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Richard Yu: So then those kind of customers, those types of customers and those types of ongoing relationship is absolutely what we foster. to your question about the qualitative versus quantitative research, the key thing is you have to do both. You have to, or at least I feel like, you know, as a company we have to do both. You know, you, we have to open the aperture of the feedback and I think of it as a, maybe a funnel where the top of the funnel is as wide as possible. We want to capture every signal possible.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Richard Yu: Whether it’s a, you know, customer, comment, it’s a suggestion they provided via our, our product, the feedback, you know, capability of our product. It’s something that they asked to their customer success team members and, or it’s something that perhaps we’re seeing from competition.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Richard Yu: All those points of feedback are really important for us to take in. the challenge is as I said earlier, to synthesize all that down into actionable signals that we sort of can work with in a product strategy and a product roadmap and prioritization. that’s where I think the qualitative is really important. There’s nothing more helpful in my experience and more rich than a very context, full conversation, face to face, in person, in real time, with a customer.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Richard Yu: It’s the boss we should call it. It’s a day in the shoes of type of experience where you sit with your customers and users more and more now virtually there are lots of tools and helpful products, that can help us do this at scale. But for me personally that has to be complemented with some real in person, one on one conversations. You just get so much more context and so much more just situational information and awareness. that’s why like I said, I just spent quite a bit of time, you know, in person with customers just recently. And you know, it’s something that I really believe in and something that I try to coach my teams to do on a regular basis.

>> Craig Gould: Well, you know, we’re pretty good chunk into this conversation and I really, I really haven’t given listeners an opportunity to understand what the product is. So if you were sitting next to somebody at a dinner party and you were trying to explain to them what lucid link is, what lucid link does, how do you explain it in the most simple terms to the person next to you that isn’t technologically savvy?

>> Richard Yu: Yeah, it’s a, it’s, I Have to admit it’s a bit of a challenge, but I will try to do it quickly. I’ll give you the 60 second elevator pitch here. You know, Lucid Link is really the universal file system for the cloud. we make data instantly and securely available and accessible from everywhere for everyone. Now let me try to de jargonize that a little bit for you. what that really means is nowadays there’s so much availability and usage of cloud storage. You know, I’m sure all of us have some data stored in the cloud, whether you use a product like, you know, Google Drive or Dropbox or Box or any of the common products out there. And there’s obviously many, many more, you know, versions of that or, different types of cloud storage like Amazon S3, Microsoft, Azure Services. So the challenge with most of these popular services is that the data stored there in those clouds have to be synchronized or replicated to your device in order to use the data. So if you use Dropbox, you’ll know that there’s a Dropbox app and it kind of runs on your computer and it keeps the files on your computer synchronized with the files you have stored in the Dropbox cloud, if you will. Now that’s okay for most customers and most users, but you have some use cases where if it’s a very large file or if it’s a very rapidly changing file, or if it’s a file that’s being collaborated on by many, many users across the world, that’s a challenge because that synchronization process can take time and it takes potentially a long time with large files and it can get out of sync where user number one is updating the file and user number two is trying to use that file, and user number two doesn’t have the latest and greatest. So LucidLink solves that problem because we work on a principle of there’s only one source of truth for that file, and that, and that source of truth is what’s stored in your cloud. And the magic, if you will, of Lucid Link is that our technology allows every user who’s, who needs access to that file to use that file as if the file was stored locally on their computer or on their device, their phone, their tablet, what have you. And we make that happen without the need to download or the need to synchronize that file. So I’ll pause there to see if that makes sense.

>> Craig Gould: Yeah, I think it does make sense because, you know, when, when I was trying to learn a little bit more about Lucid link. The, you guys have a couple of great videos. I mean it’s obvious, that you know, the, the big use case that really appears to have gotten you guys a lot of traction is this the capability to edit really large media like video in the cloud in, in kind of real time around the world without someone having to download a 2 terabit file and then try to upload it back while somebody else is, thinks they’re also working on the same file, but they’re not. So the ability is you’re, you’re really enabling people to work with really enormous files real time, collaboratively in, in a secure environment and kind of manage access in a way that you’re able to maintain, the authentic version out there in kind of real time.

>> Richard Yu: I think that’s. That. That’s right. That’s right, Craig. And if I may maybe help illustrate with an actual use case and a customer, case would maybe that would help, you know, clarify and sharpen that even even further. So imagine your favorite streaming show. pick, pick your network of choice and pick your show of choice. I’ll offer the Bear on, you know, on Hulu, you know, great show. I’d love it personally.

>> Craig Gould: Comedy or a drama?

>> Richard Yu: It’s, it’s a little both. It’s comedy, drama, tragedy, you know, some episodes. But yeah, amazing show, right? You know, award winning show. so imagine you’re, you know, part of the whole entire team making the Bear. So how does that work? Well, first you have to shoot the, the actual, you know, the camera, the camera footage. You know, there are sets, you know their locations, you shoot it. And nowadays you’re shooting it with multiple cameras, multiple angles, simultaneous, you know, kind of shots, and all this incredible amount of footage, or I’ll call it raw data is being generated on, you know, like you said, kind of near terabyte, you know, kind of at a time. And all this data has to then feed a lot of, you know, what’s called post production processes. So the production is basically shooting and the post productions is everything else you think about. The editing, the visual effects, you know, the, you know, color grading, the translation, even to make it into, you know, kind of internationally available. All that work happens. And all that work happens nowadays more and more around the globe. These productions have collaborators from everywhere nowadays. So this is a real challenge because if you didn’t have a single source of truth for all that, you know, raw footage that’s being produced every day, you are probably in trouble because people are going to be editing and making mistakes. people are going to be doing visual effects and not working on the latest versions. So in the past what happened was there was actually, you know, some technology group that took every day’s raw footage, replicated it on portable flash drives, and then sent those drives by Federal Express or some other courier service to all the locations around the world where all this post production process was being done. Imagine that. Imagine the delay and the frustration of doing that. So now cloud storage makes storing all this massive amounts of data in one place, pretty much relatively easy. And, but there was still a challenge because to work with those files, every one of those remote locations had to download terabytes and terabytes of data, which if you’re not in a, you know, place where you have high speed, and even if you’re in a place where you have high speed Internet, that still can take hours and hours. And you know, these productions, you know, for these productions time is money, right? They have to shoot, they have to produce the dailies for their, you know, their directors and their, you know, producers to review. Then they have to maybe reshoot and then they have to make sure that they stay on schedule and on budget. So every minute counts in these, you know, high pressure environments. So Lusalink really got a bit of, you know, kind of an inroad into this, with the quote unquote Covid effect, right? When sadly Covid hit and everybody was sort of sent home and we had kind of the initial pandemic lockdown and whatnot, production still had to go on post, production had to go on. So we started being, I guess discovered as a solution for working through still the post production process from a single source of truth in the cloud. And so allowing efficient and effective work to be done around the world.

>> Craig Gould: We’ve, we’ve identified a use case that is, you know, a perfect product market fit with that industry. But that’s not the only, only industry that could benefit from having real time collaboration on, in really enormous file sets, correct?

>> Richard Yu: That, that is absolutely right. So, we’re very fortunate and maybe, you know, also environmental factors helped us find our initial product market fit in the media production. and I will extend that to like you said, overall creative production, workflows. So think about large, you know, files being shared by marketing teams within, you know, the large companies around the world, with large creative agencies and advertising agencies and marketing agencies that are out there. I mean, same thing happens, they’re producing video, they’re Producing print. you know, they’re collaborating around their global offices, on all this production work. They have the exact same challenge as your favorite, you know, streaming studio or major motion picture studio out there. we also have customers who are in the same situation if you will, where they have a large single source of truth data set that lots of people around the world have to work from. So I’ll ah, share the example of the architecture and engineering construction, industry.

>> Craig Gould: That was one of the first things that came into my mind.

>> Richard Yu: Exactly, exactly. So you think about somebody building a skyscraper, right? Or somebody building a, you know, a hydroelectric dam or you know, a wind power generation ah, facility. You know these are massive engineering projects and there’s so much information that goes into what to how to put one of these together. and you know these large construction engineering companies, they have a single source of truth to maintain integrity of all that information. So we work with some of these customers to help all their downstream, collaborators, basically specific people at the sites or the multiple sites, doing their jobs to make sure that they have constant access to the single source of truth. again very large files and you think about big huge blueprints or architectural renderings where it’s extremely high fidelity. It’s not just the blueprints, but it’s also the 3D animations and visualizations of what the next largest skyscraper might look like, from the inside, from the outside, etc. So this is exactly the same use case. Excuse me, exactly the same use case except for it’s in a slightly different or completely different industry, but still the same notion of a large centralized source of truth set of data, that needs to be collaborated on and also needs to be held extremely secure. I didn’t mention that. You know, some of our our media creation customers really enjoy the level of security that Lucid Link provides. Again, this is a little bit of our magic, where even ourselves, we do not have access to the content and the data. Only the authorized user with the right encryption keys and decryption capabilities can actually get to the data. so this is some technologies that are similar or if not even superior to technologies being used for password keepers and password vaults and things of that nature. And we have that as a part of our core capabilities. So there are customers who are extremely sensitive about leaks before shows drop. And we have other marketing teams in companies where they have one product announcement per year and they’re extremely sensitive about any leakages of that product announcement. Before the actual scheduled event. So they trust luciling to make sure that their data and the work that they’re producing is completely held, confidential.

>> Craig Gould: So how do you develop and maintain that trust? Because, I mean, it’s, you know, it’s not just about security. It’s all also guaranteeing that there’s not going to be any data loss, maintaining that there aren’t any version conflicts. There are so many ways, a customer could have anxiety about relying so much on LucidLink. How do you establish trust?

>> Richard Yu: Yeah, it’s a great question. And it’s a little bit of, I would say, to the credit of our amazing sales team and our sales engineers, to really help our customers try our product. So, you know, we have the capability and we offer free trials of our product to all of our customers. you can actually go to Lucilink.com right now and sign up for a free trial and see how the product works. but moreover, you know, we have a very capable solution engineering team that will help our customers not just try our product, but really, do, you know, what we call, you know, proof of concepts within their internal workflows? How does it, how does lucilink really fit into what they do and let them, you know, over a period of time, really experience the product, the capabilities and the security for themselves?

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Richard Yu: Obviously we have a, you know, lots, of the accreditations regarding, security and privacy, and we continuously lean on that. And of course, there’s nothing better than a customer testimonial to show the next potential customer or to help reassure the next potential customer of what lucilink is capable of. I think to get beyond that, I’ll get a little bit more technical, if that’s okay. we are obviously helping customers manage their cloud storage of very important data. so as such, we both partner with really arguably the most, leading supplier of cloud storage, Amazon aws, for, reliability, scalability and kind of very, very trustworthy storage. Highly performant. and we also have the capability of allowing our customers to use LucidLink’s technology but on their own cloud storage. So they can, if you will, bring their own cloud storage from their trusted vendor of choice and then apply LucidLink’s product on top of that. So we have a number of different models that really can hopefully reassure our customers that they can trust LucidLink as a service.

>> Craig Gould: I have a lot of listeners that, are concerned about trying to, trying to get to the C Suite, you know, maybe VPs, SVPs, they’re trying to figure out how to get from where they are to where they want to be. You know, some, some people I talk to, have kind of climbed corporate structures. Others are CEO, founders. You kind of worked your way up through companies. I’d love to hear your take on what philosophies or what, what mantras have assisted you in getting from a consultant or you know, or product engineer to a cpo. What, what advice can you give to somebody who’s looking to try to make that climb?

>> Richard Yu: Yeah, that’s, that’s a great question. And I can only speak to my personal experience here. I think I’m obviously I’m not a, you know, a founder, C suite person, nor do I really think of myself as a quote unquote, corporate ladder climber. my career is a little bit, I’ll call it atypical in that I’m not actually a software engineer or computer scientist by education or background. I’m a mechanical engineer and actually started my career doing more mechanical engineering. Things like building factories and production lines around the world for a manufacturing company. I pivoted into software and I was very fortunate to have been given the opportunity by a group of serial entrepreneurs who were building a new company back in the dot com boom days where it was all about B2B and B2C commerce and how the Internet was going to disintermediate and revolutionize the way commerce was done. And I was bright eyed, bushy tails and super excited about that. So I jumped on board and also had a slightly atypical experience in that I spent over 14 years with that first job. and yeah, and it’s something I look back on with a lot of fondness and a lot of appreciation and gratitude towards because that group of leaders, one, they were very smart and very capable, so I learned a lot from them. And two, they gave me the opportunity to really take on a number of different roles over the period of those 14 plus years ranging from product management to product marketing, to go to market roles like solution engineering and solution selling, to very customer oriented roles like running a professional services team. And then over time as I gain more experience and you know, hopefully a little bit more trust, I, was given and afforded more leadership opportunities to build more products, to lead bigger teams and then also to you know, start driving, I think, new lines of business for the company. I will say that I think my key thing about my career is to try to be true and authentic to who I am. I’m very curious about product. I’m very curious about how people use product. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, being a mechanical engineer, I think in terms of systems and machinery and the cogs and the gears and how things turn in that machine and you know, for whatever reason that’s also mapped pretty well to thinking about users and their specific scenarios and use cases and moreover their workflows, how we can be a part of, or my products and be a part of their workflows. So I’ve tried to stay true to that and really think about, you know, with any given product, for any given industry, you know, how I can apply that set of skills and sort of that set of, you know, question asking questions and really being curious about what people are trying to do with our products. apply that as a general sort of, you know, framework if you will, to discovering product opportunities and figuring out how we can drive business and customer outcomes. so as such my career has been a little bit everywhere I’ve worked, like I said, for a startup that went from zero, for 14 and a half years and we were very fortunate to have had a great milestone and took the company public. Along the way, I’ve worked at larger organizations where I’ve sort of dropped in as a product leader and really to try to better shape overall strategy. I’ve gone back into very early stage zero stage companies where I kind of wanted to try it again, see if I can make the magic happen again. and I’ve done that across different product areas and product spaces. Marketing technology, mission critical, ERP technologies, analytic products, collaboration platforms, and now with Lucid Link, storage technology and storage acceleration magic if you will. and I’ve done it at all sizes of companies so I don’t find myself looking for any specific magical fit that’s going to help me get to the next step in my career. I just sort of followed what made sense to me and where I really felt like I can genuinely add value to what the company needed. And that’s how I’ve sort of settled into this, specialization if you will, of helping companies that have found product market fit, who have demonstrated good market traction and business traction and are looking to scale to the next level. So this is my third one and hopefully it’ll be a successful one.

>> Craig Gould: How do you accomplish that scaling? Does this go back to your toolkit? Because I mean, I feel like sometimes we just assume that it’s a matter of throwing marketing dollars at something we’ll throw marketing dollars at it and we’ll just make sure that we buy enough server space that, you know, we can handle the load. But I’m sure it’s more, intricate and complicated than that.

>> Richard Yu: Unfortunately it is. Right? It isn’t just doing marketing dollars. I think it’s a combination of thinking very strategically and acting very tactically and trying to find the balance of both of those. on the strategic side, I mentioned a little bit earlier that one of the biggest call it tenants that I try to stick to is to focus on the outcomes versus the output.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Richard Yu: And the outcomes, you know, need to be driving some customer success and also driving business success. So it’s often the case in the technology company or software company where in the early days it’s, you know, the starter, the startup CEO, a founder, if you will, is some super passionate and visionary technologists. They see something that no one else sees and they’re so passionate about that that they essentially will it into existence. And, and I have so much respect for those founders and visionaries because without them, you know, we would never change, we would never think about a different way of doing things. So that’s absolutely necessary. In the early inception days and probably the, what, 0 to, to 10 kind of days as 0 to 1 for sure. And, and then maybe 1 to 10 as they call it. Those phases of a company, you need that passion, you need that vision, you need that conviction to convince customers, early adopters to come along. I think the trickiest part of the transition, the scaling, is to go from that vision and passion driven phase to one that’s still very passionate and still very vision driven, but at the same time is tempered by sort of a, I’ll call it a business outlook and a maybe, a business sobriety almost right, to, to really think about, okay, we can build these great things, but is the market really asking for it or can we realistically lead the market into yet another phase of early adoption? so it’s really finding that balance between, you know, being a visionary and being very, very pragmatic about what we build and the directions and the markets we try to enter into.

>> Craig Gould: I heard somebody giving a similar example the other day when talking about Apple. Obviously Steve Jobs was a visionary founder that was crazy about product and visionary product, but wasn’t great with the operations, the logistics. That’s the reason the Lisa was a dumpster fire. Jobs goes away and comes back in Apple With Jobs 2.0, the PlayBook wound up being different and it was because he had you know, somebody like Tim Cook managing this supply chain and managing, you know, that operational efficiency to actually execute on that vision.

>> Richard Yu: I think that’s exactly right. It’s a great example. I mean I, I do believe Jobs, was an incredible visionary. and he pushed people very hard. From everything that I can understand.

>> Craig Gould: I keep hearing stories.

>> Richard Yu: Yeah, there’s so many stories. I mean being from the Valley, I think, you know, it’s one of the, the legends of the Valley, Apple and Steve Jobs, that is, and I think you’re absolutely right. Jobs needed somebody like Tim to really, I guess keep everything on track, right. To make the hard business decisions, if you will, and to make sure that the operations ran and ran well. So, you know, you can make an argument that one without the other would not have, you know, made Apple what it is today.

>> Craig Gould: And I think some people that, that look at the market and look at you know, the multiple that Apple’s trading at and it trades like you know, a visionary technology company, whereas nowadays it’s, it’s not so visionary but they’re, they’re still executing at a high level and it’s bound to be hard to, to try to balance both those things, especially when you get to trillion dollar market caps and you know, distributed manufacturing. Where is it, like a thousand different components in an iPhone or something. I mean, it’s just, I’m sure the mechanical engineer could appreciate that. Right?

>> Richard Yu: Well, I’m trying to put that picture together in my head already with a thousand different components kind of coming together to make an iPhone. I think certainly it’s a very, very different level of the stratosphere that a company like Apple is operating in. And I can only imagine the complexities and the sophistication that, that they have from a overall perspective.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Richard Yu: To keep those balancing that vision and you know, a new iPhone every year with new innovations and capabilities. And it’s not just about the consumer products, right? It’s about the business products. There is amazing amounts of hardware being developed. I think Apple made an incredible move to go from more of like a, you know, an end consumer oriented product in terms of their computing and hardware device capabilities to now a leading, business IT hardware company. I’m speaking to you on my MacBook Pro, and I would say for the first three decades of my career I was a Windows person, and both because of the companies I work for and really just with a great appreciation to the incredible user experience of the products. I’m not a devout Apple Mac User. So that’s just been great. It’s another one of those strategic moves that’s just been amazing to watch and to maybe kind of dissect with hindsight on them making that move from being a consumer brand to now just an overall brand dominating in all sectors. Yeah. I will also share, Craig, that this is where I find myself leaning back on my sort of personal authenticity kind of mindset. I don’t think I can operate in that stratosphere personally. I’ve sort of figured out what I’m good at and in what situation, environment I add the most value and I’m sure I can do some good at Apple. But I think to really maximize, you know, my personal sense of satisfaction, if you will, and productivity, I find myself, you know, working in maybe a little smaller organizations. You know, business challenges and questions I think are no less complex. But somehow there is a greater agility, right? And oh, I feel there’s greater agility and ability to make changes and to, to make a bigger impact more quickly. And maybe the decisions are even more crucial to get right in a smaller organization because they can be make or break decisions all the time. Whereas there’s a lot of momentum in a company like Apple and no one decision I think is going to make or break the company.

>> Craig Gould: Let me ask you this. How long did it take for you to figure out the alignment of what you enjoyed, what you were passionate about? You know, basically, you know, we talk about product market fit. You know, this is you know, almost like employee role fit, right?

>> Richard Yu: Yeah, that’s a great analogy.

>> Craig Gould: How long did it take for you to figure out that product that was your niche, that’s your fit, taking a product market fit organization from here to there. When did you figure out that this is my sweet spot?

>> Richard Yu: Yeah, it’s a great question. Candidly, I think to your broader question, maybe your meta, question of how does one figure out one’s purpose in life? I’m candidly still working on that. but in terms of this sort of place that I really enjoy operating in the product market fit and scaling up type of situation, I think it’s really something I’ve arrived at in the last, I would say, you know, five to seven years. You know, early my first job and early my career, I, you know, as I said, I had this really fortunate run for a very long time, with one company and we had an outcome that was quite positive and you know, we’re celebrating, so that, that led me to feel like I Can, you know, frankly do anything. and you know that that wasn’t a good mindset to be in because I jumped right into another zero stage startup and it did not go quite as smoothly. I’ve also been tempted in my career to jump into large organizations where, okay, you’re going to have hundreds of people reporting to you with large spans of control and we’re talking about budgets in the double or triple digit millions, revenues in the billions type of situation. And that can get to your head. Right? That’s kind of a very, kind of ego, ego feeding type of situation. so I really, but honestly I didn’t enjoy those situations quite as much. I really started enjoying more and more as I found myself into these types of environments. I’ve had now for three jobs ongoing. One, the ability, like I said, to really feel like I make a big difference, I can contribute and really help. two, the intimacy I have with my peers on the executive team, being able to have daily conversations with my CEO, my CRO, my cfo, and to really just work through the hard questions and strategic discussions and tactical topics that we have. I think I, that’s something that, you know, I sort of arrived into. And I also will say it’s been a bit of good luck. I was the first one of these that I did. I didn’t really go seek it. It found me.

>> Speaker C: Right.

>> Richard Yu: And I found myself feeling really good about that job and that role. And then, you know, after that I sort of thought, well, maybe I should find another one like it. and I was fortunate enough to find another one like it. And then again, you know, with Lucid link, it was, now is more of a pattern. Right. You know, you know, one is a, one is a data point, two is a trend, and three, I guess makes for a career now. So, so, so it did take me a long time to arrive at where, where I am today with some more clarity about, you know, my role as a product executive.

>> Craig Gould: Well, Rich, if folks wanted to keep track of LucidLink, if somebody is listening to this and saying to themselves, oh my gosh, this is the solution to us dealing with, our gigantic collaborative file sizes that are driving us crazy. Where’s the best place for folks to find more information about LucidLinq? And I guess, where’s the best place for folks to connect with you if they wanted to, reach out to you, directly?

>> Richard Yu: Yeah, thank you for that, Craig. so finding information about LucidLink is easy. Just come to LucidLink.com, there’s plenty of good information, and as I mentioned, there is a free trial. You can sign up and check it out for yourself and, see our magic at work. To connect with me, I’m on LinkedIn, so feel free to just send me an invitation. I’m happy to chat with anybody who, you know, would like to hear more about my story, and, you know, anybody I can help, I’m always happy to do so.

>> Craig Gould: And, you know, if anybody wants advice on, you know, the difference between, the copper and the. The steel panels, you know, they can. They can reach out to you directly.

>> Richard Yu: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll look it up and I’ll share with you what I know and what I don’t know.

>> Craig Gould: All right. Well, Richard, I. I really appreciate your time today, and I. I appreciate you being my guest. It’s been. It’s been a. A, great conversation, Craig.

>> Richard Yu: It’s been a lot of fun for me, too. Thank you for letting me ramble for a better part of an hour here. And, like I said, I really am grateful for the opportunity.