Building The Future Show - Radio / TV / Podcast

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Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the show today. We have Paul Singh. He's the chief revenue officer at Tada cognitive solutions. Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Singh: Hey, thank you. Thanks for having me, Kevin.

Kevin Horek: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on the show. You've done a ton of stuff and I'm really fascinated to learn more about everything that to does doing, but before we get into all that, let's get to know you better and start off with where you grew up.

Paul Singh: Sure. So, I mean, a lot of times people ask me where do I grow up? Immediately they asked me the next question, where did I spend my, my time? I have spent probably the longest time in Silicon valley. To some extent, that's home while I was born and grew up and got all my education india, I grew up in Delhi and that's where I went to engineering school and then came to the U S to do my masters and started in Louisiana.

Kevin Horek: Okay. So sorry. Before you dive into that, what made you want to go into engineering?

Paul Singh: I think, I wouldn't say that I had some great visions, but it was more like in the days that while I was growing up, there were two professions that people went to when they did well in school and one was to go into medicine and the other one was to go into engineering.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay.

Paul Singh: I knew that I could not be a good doctor.

Kevin Horek: Out of curiosity.

Paul Singh: I hated blood cell.

Kevin Horek: I'm the same way I got it. A hundred words. I got it. Okay. Keep going. Sorry.

Paul Singh: In fact, they put me in the class to study biology because automatically it was decided, Hey, you have more marks. You go in there and I was like, no, no, I don't want to do that. That'd be, you got to get your parents to write us a note that you actually don't want to be in biology. So, yeah, that's how I ended up in engineering.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay. Keep going though, through your journey. You're you go get your master's in Louisiana?

Paul Singh: Actually, I didn't finish in Louisiana. I started in Louisiana. Okay. As the luck had it and there was no scholarship available in summer and I didn't have the money to pay for it because, my scholarship used to pay $400 a month and three 80 was my expense. With $20 for 10 months, I didn't have enough savings to last, through the summer.

Kevin Horek: Interesting.

Paul Singh: I have to make a decision of what to do.

Kevin Horek: Sure.

Paul Singh: I knew somebody, one of the relatives in New York and I approached them and they said, yeah, sure, come on by. I stayed with them, worked in their business, in fact, helped them put together the first computer system in the business and then decided to stay back in New York. I finished my master's in New York actually.

Kevin Horek: Okay, fascinating. You get out of school, walk us through your journey. Maybe just some highlights or along the way, because you've done a ton of stuff, but I, I definitely want you to cover the mentorship kind of the teaching aspect and then kind of some of the jobs you've had along the way.

Paul Singh: So, my first job after I graduated wasn't San Francisco.

Kevin Horek: Okay. How'd you get that? Just out of curiosity,

Paul Singh: There's a thing called classified that used to happen in the newspapers these days. It was like the smallest possible ad I saw in New York times. Wow. I was like, I don't know, but let me apply anyway, what the heck? I got a call from somebody and they talk to me and then they said, oh, by the way, this job is in San Francisco, do you have any problems with it? I'm like, no, I would love to know what that place is like. So sure.

Kevin Horek: Amazing. So you'd never been,

Paul Singh: No, I've never moved. I have only been by this time I had only been in the south and then in New York city.

Kevin Horek: Fascinating. Okay. Keep going. Sorry to keep interrupting you.

Paul Singh: Yeah, no. But, so then I came here for the interview, loved the place, got a job, designing electrical systems for the railways, Which was not something I started in for my MBA, but it was what I studied in my engineering. I had to become an engineer again for awhile. That's where I realized that, Hey, I think I'm in the wrong industry construction industry, and this is not the future. The future is what's happening down south, about 30 miles, 40 miles away from me. That's when I decided, Hey, I got to go move to Silicon valley. Interesting got my first job there in three com corporation, which was the leading networking company at that era. And I just moved to Silicon valley.

Kevin Horek: Okay, fascinating. So how did you get that job? Did you just apply or walk us through that?

Paul Singh: So, while working at this company, I actually became the person who would write all the computer simulation software.

Kevin Horek: Fascinating.

Paul Singh: Because there was nobody there who was doing that. I used my background of writing basic and Fortran, the two languages that I had learned at that time and developed some programs to run on the computer. I mean, in those days there was no even DAS yet we used run on it. We used to run on em, the CPM operating system, computers and stuff. I wrote some programs, so we automated a lot of stuff. When, I knew of a friend who worked at three comm and he said, oh yeah, I think we're looking for lots of people. Why don't you give me a resume? I got interviewed for running a developer program inside of three, calm.

Kevin Horek: Cool.

Paul Singh: That was my beginning in Silicon valley and, never looked back and loved every moment of it. Stayed in that part and, worked for, I'd say about 10 plus years in various companies all the way from three come to sun, Microsystems to television and so on. It was a time to say, Hey, I need to do something different.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Paul Singh: I, I've always been kind of thinking about, I need to do, so I started out as a consultant working for a couple of companies and, but I felt that, Hey, as a consultant, I can only have so many hours. Once the hours are over, I can't do much except for optimizing or increasing my fees. Increasing the fee is not really viable beyond a point. So let's build something. And so I was lucky. I'd gotten a team that I'd worked with a challenge them to a problem that I had discovered was there when internet was coming in, that PEople are going to have a problem in how to connect to internet security. We focused one segment first, which was the old NetWare segment that existed, NetWare had almost 70, 80% market share in those days. Right. So we tried to fix that problem. That's what my first startup did called internet rail.

Kevin Horek: Okay. Walk us through how that played out.

Paul Singh: I think that played out really well for the first company, because, we made some great progress. We've built some customer traction started to sell the product. Were in the midst of having a term sheet as well as a couple of acquisition offers at the same time.

Kevin Horek: Awesome.

Paul Singh: We decided, because most of the founders have never actually seen an exit, let alone done a company yet. Were all, thinking, okay, at least this is a shorter thing versus let's take the money and build it. Went in the direction of saying, okay, let's take the acquisition offers. We ended up, selling the company and joining what was at that time called quarter deck that got bought by Symantec. Now of course, Symantec is bought by somebody else, but yeah,

Kevin Horek: Sure. Very cool. Okay. So keep on your journey. Cause this is it's interesting.

Paul Singh: I think after that, I did another startup , continuing in the security space, but it was, we worked on it for about two to three years. We ended up selling it. It was an okay exit, but then it was time for me to say, what, I know how to build small companies. Why don't I try to build something that will last beyond me.

Kevin Horek: Okay. Interesting.

Paul Singh: I thought about it, I had to figure out, Hey, is there a big problem I'm going to solve? Even though we talked, the first problem were solving was big. It really was, but we just, I guess bailed out too soon. The big problem that we saw an opportunity we saw is that the market was changing from the old, circuit switch environments of telecom to packet, switch environment.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Paul Singh: I E the voice in those days, having voice travel or IP was a challenge today, we assume video travel over IP as a normal thing. We said, why don't we enable that? And, the telecom industry was deregulating. It was a great opportunity to get into that market. I also felt that this was a time if I am going to do this company, I have to go and recruit a team of people that have the same goal as me, that they are really looking for. They want to build a large company and really be in that journey with me. We got, basically three of us started this company and we built a voiceover IP switch for the operators.

Kevin Horek: Interesting.

Paul Singh: I think that journey, I'll give you a couple of highlights of that journey because that's, we, some of those might be related to the times we are, we're just entering these days. Were kind of in the Google years when we raised our first round, it was the internet.com boom was like coming. And so were part of the.com boom. Were doing really amazingly well by that measure because we had raised a lot of money. We had hired a lot of people. We had built, distributed teams in Dallas and, in San Jose and elsewhere, and money was no object. We had, a lot of customer traction and were trying to look for a mezzanine round to go public.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Paul Singh: Came the giant.com bust with nine 11, the last coffin in the nail. And suddenly the financing environment froze. Nobody wanted to fund anything. People who had multiple purchase orders froze them. In fact, we had already committed more than half the round for our next round before going public. And most of the investors backed out. Were left with a pretty dire situation to say the least.

Kevin Horek: Sure. Okay. So keep going, sorry.

Paul Singh: I think that was, I still remember that it was a very difficult day for all of us. Also it was kind of our first experience when we finally sat down with our investors and they said, what? There are a lot of our companies, which we have no problem in shutting down, but you guys have actually built a amazing amount of technology. You have customer traction, so we want to keep your life. We want to fund you.

Kevin Horek: Wow.

Paul Singh: However, we can't afford the burn of 180 people.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Paul Singh: Can you come up with a plan with 60 people?

Kevin Horek: Wow.

Paul Singh: It was like, oh my God. How so we had to actually kind of go back and say, okay, what is it that I'm not going to do first? If I don't have the money here out of the things that I had so many initiatives that I had started, let's first figure out what initiatives I'm not going to do. That kind of gave us a good, 60 to a hundred people that, I know I can live without.

Kevin Horek: Wow. That's gotta be a hard call though.

Paul Singh: Oh, it was really tough. The last 10 people of who goes on this side versus that side, none of us slept for sure.

Kevin Horek: Wow.

Paul Singh: Right. Everybody was negotiating, oh no, this person is better. No, that person is better. No, we cannot do this. No, we cannot do this. Right. Right. We had to make a call and this is, it's a very sobering moment. The good news is we did that and we raised money. Along the way, we ended up buying another company out of Israel and we built rebuild the business. And in 2007 went public.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay. Okay.

Paul Singh: It had a very happy ending long tenured journey, but a good result.

Kevin Horek: Sure. You've been through pretty much every high, low, and everything in between that you can go through because you see you sold companies. I think also just having to build a big company, lay off a bunch of people and then still IPOA right.

Paul Singh: Yeah. We've got a 450 people when we IPO.

Kevin Horek: Okay. Interesting. Very, very cool. Maybe quickly walk us through the rest of your journey. Maybe some of the teaching stuff you've done. I want to dive into what you're doing today.

Paul Singh: So, after that, I decided that it was time for me to move on because I'm 10 years. I had already told the board when were going public, that I don't want to be a section eight officer. In fact, all three of us, we're not going to be part of the team moving forward. One of the founders are already moved on and the other founder and I, we both made a decision that, Hey, we need to try something new. We've done this enough. We are going to move on, but we had a good team in place. So we just moved on. I mean, our company did well for a while. Unfortunately they tried to, they sold the company to, or merge the company with somebody, which was, I think, a disaster and something I would have not approved of, but anyway, things happen. I, I had, I wish that the company would be alive today, but unfortunately it's not alive today in that form for sure.

Paul Singh: It's now part of some PE firm and so on. Yvette, I, I say normally companies go to die. Why do you say that out of curiosity? I agree with you, but I mean, I think that are, I think there are new models now, but in the olden days it was pretty simple that, somebody just wanted to get the, suck, the cash out of the system so that they never lose money. When you suck so much cash out of the system, you just make company pay for the debt so much that even if the company was going to survive, it just doesn't get to survive. I see. I mean, I think the new crop, a lot of the firms are way smarter and much more, trying to focus on the growth, but in the olden days, that was not the case. Got it makes sense. I joined another startup that I had also done some funding on and, we were a little too early in the market and we didn't make it.

Paul Singh: It was a kind of a rude awakening after saying I'm coming out of this success and then suddenly you see a failure. Right. I think it's, it kind of sobers you up and you learn what you did right. And what you didn't do. Right. And so on. I think that was, not was a good experience, but not a great outcome, even though we did build a lot of customer traction and so on, but we just couldn't monetize it. Interesting. Okay. Keep going. This was where, a lot of it, were kind of, were doing a mobile app before its time and, iPhone didn't have had not come out yet. Nokia series 40 and 60, what are the real smartphones? Fast forward, I, after that company, I, did some investments and worked with a few startups and then joined a startup in the mobile backend as a service company, which we sold to CA which now is part of Broadcom.

Paul Singh: Cool. The last few years I been working with various startups in helping them figure out things, helping them scale. I feel personally, and I believe in that the entrepreneurship is kind of a way to cure if you might, a lot of the word problems, because if, if you create new opportunities for people, whether they are in the form of, jobs in some people making more money, it really creates, a lot of the poverty problems can be solved by having that. I believe that I need to kind of, in my own ways, help the cause of entrepreneurship, the cause of the entrepreneurs. I started, I joined an organization whose mission is fostering entrepreneurship organization called tie. I joined the Silicon valley chapter and have been mentoring, various startups, helping and in that ecosystem. Then, I also teach entrepreneurship, I've done Northeastern and the UC Berkeley, and I'm also part of a Google launchpad and a few other things.

Paul Singh: My actually worked with a lot of startups as well, both in, in their board or advisory roles and helping them kind of figure it out, both the, what I call the art of startup, the art of start as well as the art of growth, because both of those are hard problems to solve for most companies. And, we have some lessons that we can use to help them.

Kevin Horek: Fascinating. How do you decide which companies to work with then? Like, cause you must get requests all the time, especially if you're teaching it.

Paul Singh: I do get a lot of requests and there is only so many hours in the day because, I decided to, I met this entrepreneur out of Peoria, Illinois of all places, which was fascinating to me. One of my mentors introduced me to, and I looked at the company and I said, oh wow. You know, the technology is amazing. We'd built a digital twin technology focused at the supply chain business. And, but the company was coming out of services and trying to make a transition into becoming more and more a product company. I thought that was a interesting challenge. I joined about a year and a half ago to said, okay, I'm gonna help the company in that transition. I think we're kind of making some good progress. I know I didn't answer your question of how I decided. I think time, I don't have enough time anymore.

Paul Singh: I think one of the things is to see, Hey, if I have a previous relationship with an entrepreneur and I know that, I can help and they know my style and all that, then I, figure it out if I can find time. Because one of the things I tell entrepreneurs a lot of times is that if you're coming to me, as I'm not going to give you a, sugarcoated stuff and say, yeah, you're doing great. Because if that's what you want to hear, then you don't come and talk to me because I'm going to be critical. I'm going to challenge you to see why your things are not going to work. I want you to defend it because if you cannot defend it with me, you won't be able to defend it with your investors and you will never get funding.

Kevin Horek: Smart. Well, and to be brutally honest, that's what people need to hear. Whether they want to hear it or not. Right.

Paul Singh: They don't, it's, they got a lot of advisors who just are yes. Men to them, right. Park. I'm like, no, I mean, that's not the value I want to add. I want to challenge you to see if you have really talked to these issues or not. If you haven't, I want to force you to think about it.

Kevin Horek: No, that I think that's super valuable in itself. If people don't realize that the sooner you can figure that out as an entrepreneur and know that how astronomically important that is the better off you'll be. The, I wish I would've learned that a lot sooner than I did.

Paul Singh: You will be surprised out of the 10 entrepreneurs I give this feedback to, I probably don't get more than three calling me back afterwards. Right. Wow. In the sense that, and then sometimes I will encounter somebody who will meet me like few years later and they say, you told me such and such, and I actually did it, but I never contacted you.

Kevin Horek: Oh, wow. Why?

Paul Singh: I don't know. But, but I did it, but I never told you. Now I just, that I saw you. I remembered.

Kevin Horek: Wow.

Paul Singh: So it's a, it's interesting.

Kevin Horek: Okay. I really want to dive into that in a second, but you mentioned something I want to highlight again while I are clarification on, so you mentor and teach and had been doing this and been very successful at this for many years now, but you mentioned something that I think is very important is you still have mentors. Did I catch that correctly?

Paul Singh: Of course. Yeah, absolutely.

Kevin Horek: Okay. I just wanted to reiterate that for people if they miss that, because I think no matter where you are in your career, having many mentors is very important and obviously he would agree with that.

Paul Singh: Oh yeah.

Kevin Horek: Why do you think that's so important? Do you have advice to actually get some mentors? Because I think that can be really challenging.

Paul Singh: I think what happens is when we are going in our own things, we kind of lose track of, as I said, separating forest from the trees.

Kevin Horek: Yeah.

Paul Singh: You want somebody else who is not walking in your shoes every day to tell you something is not right.

Kevin Horek: Sure.

Paul Singh: That only a good mentor can tell you who doesn't, who's not really part of your day-to-day business,

Kevin Horek: Right. A hundred percent, any advice for getting them though. Cause that can be challenging. Like people like yourself super busy want to help. Can't help everybody.

Paul Singh: Yeah. I think that's, I don't think there is, I know that there are many companies that try to create these mentor networks and so on and so forth. None of them really work in any regular fashion if you might. I'll tell you, like in the organization that I mentioned, Thai Silicon valley, for example, and we have a lot of people who are willing to mentor because the whole idea of the organization is if you've done well, you're willing to give back. Right. So, but people are willing to give back and they're going through their life in a way. Let's say somebody has a one year break between the two different jobs. At that time, they are very active and suddenly they find a full-time position somewhere or start another company and you can get enough hours from them anymore.

Kevin Horek: Right.

Paul Singh: So it's, it's a process. I, I don't know because many of the people who tried to build these networks, they're not really constant. Because it is still a volunteer job for most people so that they don't spend the time. And, I think there is a movement in the industry for, instead of the mentor people have come out as coaches, which is, good it's if somebody gets paid to do it and therefore they have a reason to do this with you in a way, however, there are many coaches who coach something that they've never experienced.

Kevin Horek: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Singh: I, I just, w when you hire a coach, just try to understand, Hey, have they done something? Have they actually been a part of living through that? Because it is really important when you go through those emotional ups and downs as a founder and as a, C-level executive in a company, you've got a very different perspective than somebody who just reads a book.

Kevin Horek: Nope. I couldn't agree with you more so that I think that's a good segue into your role as chief revenue officer at Tada. What made you, while you, can you talk about it, but what do you do at the company and what exactly is to die?

Paul Singh: So, as a company started out in the supply chain management consulting, so there was in a business for a number of years, and then the founder said, Hey, what, we go into different customers and we keep on doing the same thing again and again, and there has to be a better way, we could use technology to solve that problem as opposed to adding more and more people. That's kind of when he started to work on a platform to develop. And, and so they, the platform really came to be like, you have lot of, data everywhere, not a single insight to use.

Kevin Horek: Yeah.

Paul Singh: That was the the core premise that, Hey, just having data alone, isn't sufficient, you've got to, you got to create the magic out of data, which allows a person on the shop floor to do his job, or her job, a person in the supply chain executive to be able to look at what is happening, a person on the logistics side, to be able to see what inventory is there in their system and how do they optimize and improve. All of those things were kind of needed if you might. That's all of those problems were trying to solve in the technology, as opposed to the brute force of, let's add more people or let's add just technology for the sake of adding technology. Right?

Kevin Horek: Right.

Paul Singh: I think our goal as a company was, Hey, all this data everywhere in the supply chain businesses there. If you had the right data at the right time to the right people, you could make some really good decisions. The data, how do I bring that magic of data to you? When you say the word magic comes up, so that's how the word to document. Cool. When I came into the company, I said, what differentiates us? A lot of people say they can create magic from data. Sure. In all the conversation, there was one common theme that emerged, and that was, you can get the magic of data from somebody else. If you give them two, three years, we'll give you the magic of data in weeks or days as opposed to months and years. I said, oh, that means let's add the word now. That's where we added up with our new website and everything, which is turned on our.com.

Kevin Horek: Okay. How are you doing that so much quicker than your competition, I guess, without giving away your kind of secret sauce?

Paul Singh: So I think it's a good question. So, so I think there was a basic premise that we used, which was likely different than what most of the industry was on.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Paul Singh: Was you have to look at the problem in a different way. If you keep on looking the problem in the same way, doing more of it, you're not going to get any better. You're going to get incremental improvements. And then you max out,

Kevin Horek: Right?

Paul Singh: The industry is kind of trying to solve this problem by having, building a data model first and data models keep on changing, things keep evolving. They're always in this constant flux of trying to change,

Kevin Horek: Right?

Paul Singh: Instead we start with building what we call more like digital twin of the organization of the supply chain. We model every person in the chain, every product in the chain, every, warehouse, factory, all of those are modeled as like we create a digital twin of each of those and connect all these personas into a large network. None of those seem to change from one industry to, from one company to another very minor change occurs between two companies, the business, and manufacturers work the same way. Healthcare hospital system works the same way and so on. Once you build that model, then put the data around it. It's much easier to look at all the changes. Because we build this, what we call data fabric, where we take the data from everywhere and bring it together. You are able to now connect all these systems together. Now it's easy for you to take our no-code platform.

Paul Singh: You can build any kind of applications for any persona that you need to have because you have access to this data from everywhere and it is brought together for you. Because you built kind of the digital twin model, which we call digital duplicate. You are able to actually, look at running. What if scenarios, you have digitized the whole operation. You are able to do a lot more than you could do with any other system.

Kevin Horek: Okay. Walk me through like, okay, I'm onboarding my healthcare startup or my financial company or whatever. It doesn't really matter. Walk me through how do I get started and then how that tie into no code. Because I think that's where one of the real, most powerful things that I think some people know about, but I think is really coming to be, and people kind of expect these days.

Paul Singh: I think first of all, so my first job was to figure out which industries we are going to go after, which ones we're not going to.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Paul Singh: At least in phase one.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Paul Singh: In the phase one, we are going after manufacturing. Okay. Anybody who's doing discrete manufacturing and CPG and little bit of retail. Okay. We added hospital systems into the mix.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Paul Singh: We don't go after Fintac and other areas at this point.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Paul Singh: The question is, okay, so what is the process that we come up with? We've built some off the shelf solutions that you can start plugging in because we built the industry models for a manufacturer. We've built the digital twin of a manufacturing system all the way from start to finish. Once we take your inputs, we can give you that output through our system. We also built a whole no-code environment where, so if, for example, you want to do something with SAP or even with Salesforce, sometimes you can't really write any extensions and make changes without having to write some software code.

Kevin Horek: Totally. Yep.

Paul Singh: In our system, we wanted to get away from it and build a model where you can, once you are trained, you can do point and click and you can build something. The tool set is very much already there and it just walks you through a bunch of menus and then you can create an application.

Kevin Horek: Fascinating. Okay. Like that to me is the future of kind of a SAS business is allowing your customers to basically build their own little applications inside of your application. Do you agree with that? Or what are your thoughts around that?

Paul Singh: I think I would say that probably the manufacturing sector isn't quite ready for it today.

Kevin Horek: No. Okay. Interesting.

Paul Singh: Because most of the manufacturing companies don't have a very large it staff.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Paul Singh: Even though you don't need an it staff to develop applications, but I think in manufacturing, a lot of people have been there for a very long time. The younger generation hasn't yet adopted the manufacturing as a career.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Paul Singh: It is coming, but it is not yet happening in large scale.

Kevin Horek: Okay.

Paul Singh: A lot of times, they're looking for, I want a solution, give me something that works. As I get comfortable, yes, I will continue to customize. I will add more things, but I don't want to be in the software development business, even if it's a no code.

Kevin Horek: Got it. Okay. Fascinating. Then, but then you mentioned this to me earlier is there's a ton of opportunities in this space then, and fair to say,

Paul Singh: Actually it is. I'm actually fascinated because to be very Frank, I've never worked in manufacturing before. Okay. I love my startups focused on different areas. I've focused on telecom and focused on, the it side of the house. This was the first time I started to look towards the manufacturing side. Even though I've been advising couple of startups that have been working in this area. It was fascinating to see that there are a lot of differences in that sense, but the, with the supply chain challenges that everybody saw very, if I had used the word supply chain, maybe three, four years ago, people would have said Rory, I mean, and today, every politician uses the word supply chain and every day you hear maybe at least a hundred articles written with the word supply chain in them. Right. Right. It became a household name because everybody kind of experienced when supply chain is not right.

Paul Singh: This is what happens to me.

Kevin Horek: Right.

Paul Singh: And, but I think there are more deeper reasons why supply chain is going to continue to grow because to some extent, manufacturing industry is probably not at the leading edge of this thing. It didn't digitize faster than other industries or maybe not even at the same rate.

Kevin Horek: Right.

Paul Singh: That is an opportunity, which I think COVID kind of woke people up border COVID and the post COVID and political situations and everything else just brought a new focus to this whole supply chain manufacturing things. I think my feeling is that this is going to bring in a lot of new opportunities for the young folks who are entering the, the work area now, something that was on a decline and it is going to go up.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. For people that are maybe looking to get into the space, what do you suggest, or what advice do you give to them? Because if the industry's had a kind of a challenge, maybe recruiting younger people, how do you get younger people into the actual space so they can leverage the data and the technology that you guys are building?

Paul Singh: Yeah. I mean, obviously we are hiring, so. Probably always a good place to start, but, I think we're seeing a lot of people looking for, a lot of young folks to join in the manufacturing supply chain side of the house. I think the part that the younger generation hasn't been interested in it, but not realizing that because of the change of digitization that is happening in this industry at this time, the opportunity is to make a difference, to learn something new and to contribute. It's just amazing. I would encourage, young people to look at this field just like they look at other fields.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Okay. Do you maybe give, want to give some examples of kind of maybe some of the stuff that they can do that maybe would entice them to maybe look into this field? Because I think to your point is you're almost at the beginning of this digital revolution in this space. Nevermind. Just I think in general.

Paul Singh: I think it's a data problem in the end, right.

Kevin Horek: Okay. Sure.

Paul Singh: I mean, people are working any data analytics, data AIML, all those companies are getting a bunch of interest from younger people. This is the application of data in real life. That's what a supply chain is all about. Supply chain is really about having the right data at the right time to the right person. It seems very simple when I say it, but it's a very complex, ecosystem because your supply chain doesn't exist in vacuum.

Kevin Horek: Right.

Paul Singh: It has to connect to the ecosystem everywhere. That's why when people build these siloed system, they work really well. But, but it doesn't give you the end to end visibility and, the level of collaboration and things that you need to succeed.

Kevin Horek: Well. I think even just to prove your point is nobody predicted basically any of the things that happened in the last three years, right? Like how many factors have changed everything, right. For pretty much everybody good, bad, or other things have changed so much for everybody on the planet in the last three years. That, and if you guys can provide a solution that the data is updating live, obviously I need to give you guys a good data, but if you're, once you have data and you can start producing that, but to your point is there's really not that many industries that you can actually make that big of a difference instantly almost right. Is that fair to say?

Paul Singh: I think it is fair to say, in fact, let me give you an example. Maybe that'll put this in perspective. We had one of our customers who came to us in the early onset of COVID and said, Hey, I'm seeing problems that my suppliers from China are not able to deliver. Pretty soon my suppliers from Europe and us and everywhere else. So I can't wait. I need to solve this problem. Now, can you guys help me with this digital transformation that we've undertaken? Went in and we work with them for weeks at a time and solve this problem. The end result was that most of their competitors missed out the forecast and couldn't build enough products, but they were able to build the product that they had put in their forecast and met the targets.

Kevin Horek: I see. Interesting.

Paul Singh: So that's the difference, right? The CEO now can go in front of wall street and be proud of what his team has accomplished versus having to go in and saying, oh, I got excuses because I just didn't meet my numbers.

Kevin Horek: Yeah. Fascinating. No, that makes a lot of sense. Well, and I think example of probably, and I know they have challenges, but like apple seems to be a good example of that as well. Right. Where other tech companies have not been able to produce product, but I can still go get an iPhone or a Mac book pretty easily these days. It might not be the exact version I want today. I'd have to wait a few weeks or a month or two, but for the most part, I think they've done very good at what you just outlined agreed.

Paul Singh: Yeah. In fact, this is thanks for bringing that up because one of the things I was at a conference Tycon and there was this comment that came up, which was that, Hey, we need to see some successes of supply chain bringing out, there's a club supply chain people. I said, well, you've got a CEO who came from the supply chain business and that's the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world and that's happening.

Kevin Horek: Sure.

Paul Singh: How much more do you want to see? I mean, he's done an amazing job of being from the ranks of being a supply chain leader in apple.

Kevin Horek: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like you argue with that, right? No. Interesting. No, none of that. I think that's really good, but sadly we are out of time, I feel like we could probably go for another hour, but how about we close the show with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself to dada and any other links you want to mention?

Paul Singh: Sure. I think there's only one link. I'll give you two down, out.com and you can find anything and everything about us, about me, about anything else. If anybody wants to connect with me, I'm on LinkedIn and you can find me as our pulsing. Again, I want to thank you, Kevin, for giving us this opportunity. I'll just say that, supply chain is happening. It's the right time to, leverage that market for everyone. I think the future is in digitizing the supply chains and, major changes in how supply chain was done versus how will it be done in the next five years. And so therefore the opportunities are planting.

Kevin Horek: No, I a hundred percent agree with you, but Paul, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show. I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your day, man.

Paul Singh: Thanks a lot, Kevin.

Kevin Horek: Thank you. Okay. Bye.

Paul Singh: Bye.

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