WEBVTT
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The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are
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solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not
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Churchill said, those who failed to learn from history are
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condemned to repeat it. Kevin helen n believes that certainly
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applies to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at
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W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com
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and now your host, Kevin Helenn.
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Thanks for joining in again today.
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I'm Kevin Hallanan and welcome back to Winning Business TV
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and Radio on W four cy dot com. We are
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streaming live on talkfour tv dot com. That's the number four,
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in addition to live on Facebook and that's at Winning
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Business Radio and of course at YouTube on our channel,
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and we available in podcast after the live show wherever
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you get that content again, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple Again,
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wherever you like to go. The mission of winning business
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radio and TV, as regular viewers and listeners know, is
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to offer insights and advice to help people avoid the
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mistakes of others, right to learn best practices, the how tos,
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the what toos, the what not tos, to be challenged
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and hopefully to be inspired by the successes of others. Consultants, coaches, advisors, authors,
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founders and owners, entrepreneurs, people with expertise. Well, every successful
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person I've ever had a chance to talk to is
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had some form of failure in their lives and careers.
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So while we all have to keep our knee skin
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once in a while, I'm driven to keep those scrapes
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from needing major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history
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so we don't repeat it. I've spent the better part
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of my career equipping businesses to grow from solopreneurs to
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small and medium sized companies all the way up to
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the Fortune fifty, and I've seen some of those companies win,
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and to varying degrees, i've seen some of them fail.
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I've had the opportunity to rub elbows with some of
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the highest performing people around in with some who probably
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should have found other professions and my own businesses. I've
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had lots of success, but some failures too, and I
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like to think I've learned a lot from those experiences.
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So sure you're going to hear from me, but mostly
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you can hear from our guests, those experts, consultants, coaches, advisors, authors,
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founders and owners and entrepreneurs. And today's no exception. Today
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my returning guest is rapist Quality, entrepreneur, founder and president.
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And here's his bio. Rapist Quality is the president and
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CEO of Unified Office. He spent the last twenty five
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plus years as an entrepreneurial technology professional. Has extensive sales
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and customer engineering experience, along with proven management team leadership
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in dynamic, emergent emerging technology companies. In recent years, he's
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played a key leadership role in professional and customer services,
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business development, pre sales, and technical marketing. While at Saunast Networks,
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a market leader in voice over IP technologies, Ray was
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a founding member of their service organization services Organization, recruiting
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many of its most senior members. In fact, from ninety
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six until ninety nine, Ray was a key technical leader
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in Sales consultant for Cascade Communications worldwide sales organization, and
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during his tenure they were purchased by as Send and
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Assend as a leader in remote access technologies for the
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Internet market, was subsequently absorbed or subsequently I Can Talk
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absorbed by Lucent in a merger. Prior to ninety six,
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Ray was with Digital Equipment Corp. A company excuse me,
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including positions as Senior Consultant for worldwide network Operations and
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technical leader and Senior consultant for the Network Products Group.
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Ray's commitments to excellence and ideas were recognized by Digital
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who received a Customer Satisfaction Award, Storage X Excellence, Yeah,
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Storage System Excellence Award, and Delta Ideas Recognition and Award.
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He's attend of the University of Maine. Ray, Welcome to
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Winning Business Radio and I really appreciate you taking time
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to be here and how busy.
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That's good.
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Good to be here again. And if you mix it
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in there, some of that was I did a lot
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of engineering work as well. One of the first people
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that actually built and the Internet network without actually having
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touched a router, that ry on the Internet protocol back
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in those days, those early days back in the late
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nineties or mid nineties, I should say, when the Internet
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was finally coming to life. It was being delivered for
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free on the Unix Berkeley distribution, and I was a
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digital We had this thing called deck Net that was
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all rage, and I remember telling people, you know, when
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something is given away for free, even even as inferior
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as it might be, people are going to try to
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use it and lo and behold they did. Well here
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we are, right, So it's going to be back, Kevin.
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It's been a.
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While, it has it has now. You're largely self taught.
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That's true.
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How does that happen? That's very technical.
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Well, it turns out that, you know, you don't necessarily
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have to go to school to be smart. Apparently I
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in high school, my mom, unbeknownst to me, enrolled me
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in a experimental program, was a college level program beginning
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in my sophomore year, which is interesting because I was
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playing in bands then at nightclubs at the young age
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of fourteen thirteen years old. That's funny telling me that, Yeah,
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trying to help my mom pay the bills, divorced mother
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of three boys, right, but yeah, so there was Those
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are interesting times. But you know. I did go to
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University of Maine after that. But my point is, in
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high school and I graduated. The principal said, you know, Ray,
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you could have graduated as a junior. You don't need
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to come back for your senior year. And I said,
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why is that? You are in an accelerated program that
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your mom put you in. You to a college level
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of mathematics. You did all I did? Okay, I slept
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through half the classes. Apparently I did well enough to graduate.
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So yeah, when I went to you in the University
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of Maine, I didn't graduate there. But the first mathematics
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course I took was advanced algebra and something else. I
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believe it was a mixture of calculus and Trigg. And
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I said, you gotta be kidding. I had this in
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high school.
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Yeah, so yeah.
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I'm you know. Anyway, so I decided to have children,
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dropped out, went to work at goat a computer company,
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and the rest is history. Taught myself by reading things
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called books. They had these things called libraries back in
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those days. Strange was there was no googling of anything.
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But you know, I worked a lot alongside a lot
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of very very smart people, and you know, in those
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days to mentor people because you just weren't churning people
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out of school with these degrees in networking. Again, it
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was relatively new, but yeah, I know, I'm self taught,
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did all kinds of cool stuff like digital. I oh
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him quite a bit a gratitude towards that company. If
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you wanted to learn and advance, Digital never held you back.
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So did that. And then I went to these things
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called the startup company because I saw these people driving porsches,
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for sure, and I saw a digital go out of business.
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You know, one hundred and fifty seven thousand person company
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that invented interactive computing could go out of business, and
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they did call the PC. I remember Ken Olson, God
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bless him, took us into a meeting at the Mill
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Mill Cafeteria. Maynard he would take all of the groups
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through the cafeteria and he had an IBM PC sitting
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on the table and he said, basically, I'm paraphrasing, go
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back and do really good stuff at Gordon Bell's VAS platform,
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because nobody's going to do serious computing on this thing.
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And we walked out of the I remember looking at
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this guy Amos who was working with me. I said amos,
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I think we're in trouble, and we were anyway, So
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that long story short, I was a really big of
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the networking. I then left and went to Cascade Communications,
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which was a high flight startup in the Westward area,
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building ATF and frame relay switches, which was supposed to
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replace routers in the I said, well, ability out of the
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router business because ATM is going to kill it. LATM
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did well. It didn't wipe out the router business, but
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it did extremely well. And I did very well at Cascade.
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That's where I really I was a sponge. You want
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to learn how to be an entrepreneur, you get you
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work with entrepreneurs and you listen. I was just watching
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everything they did, emulating the behavior, and all of us
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went through sales training. By the way, I think I
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told you this once. Everybody, including the janitor that we
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actually had a custodian, he went through sales training. Actually,
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there wasn't anybody in that company that you couldn't talk to.
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The understood why Cascade was in business and what it
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meant for the industry. That was I got to tell you.
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When I went in front of I was there for
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like three or four weeks and it would give you
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a case study, a fictitious case study, designing network of facts,
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a fast pack at facts Network nationwide. And here's the budget, right,
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so you had to work within the budget. And we
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had a marketing guy and a team of four people,
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and you went into this big room and they had
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all these lights and camera. It was really done out.
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It was very very intimating that the founders and CEO,
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Dan who was now my biggest investor and best friend
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and my chairman of the board, was the CEO at Cascade,
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and they were all looking at you, and you got
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to get up there and sound intelligent. I'm not so
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sure I actually sounded better intelligent. In fact, I don't
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think we won the prize for that. But it was
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really a good experience and I owe a lot to Cascade.
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Cascade was amazing and Dan, and then we'll wrap this up.
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You can ask you sorry the questions. But I remember Dan,
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I worked in professional services there.
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He founded that group. Right. Oh no, that was a no, that.
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Was anest So the professional services at Cascade was really
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an overlay marketing, sales and engineering group. So if engineering
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was too busy to implement a feature, we would do it.
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If we were too busy doing no marketing was too busy,
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we would chip in and do marketing and so on.
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And I helped build a demonstration laboratory that used. In
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the very early days of internet television, a company called
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Precept out of California had an IPTV streamer. It was
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the first of its kind, and I remember calling the
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CEO and she let me. She gave me a free
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copy of it, and I would use that to demonstrate
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quality of service by playing a CNBC interview of Dan
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on squad box, and I'd put it up on three
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screens and then I would introduce network and gestion, and
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so all three screens would go bad, and then I
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would go ahead and lift a screen up at a
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time into an elevated priority and that would work fine,
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and the other two was still degraded. And that became
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a visual demonstration of quality of service, which up until
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then was just a belief that you had to have right.
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But in any event, I remember Dan asking me, Hey, Ray,
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I like to introduce you to the CEO of Chipcom
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A three Com rather three Colm was a big network
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manufacturer back in the late nineties, and I'd like you
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to you know, give him a tour of Cascade and
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tell them all the good things that we do. And
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I'm like, okay, all right. So I would do that,
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and then, you know, two or three weeks later, Damn
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would come to me and say, Hey, Ray, this is
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Mari Edgebob. He's the CEO of a Send Communications in California.
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Did you take him around, introduce me to the company,
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tell him why we're important and all that. I'm like, okay,
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another CEO? Really, what am I doing? And little did
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I know that a couple of months later we get
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bought by Assent. So I said, oh, okay, that's all
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that one I was up to. Yeah, but that that
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was very empowering to be the CEO of this Cascade
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had that kind of faith in me. You know, this
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professional services guy right to you know, spend time with
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these CEOs, both of which were intending to purchase Cascade.
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I didn't know that at the time. I'm glad I
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didn't know that, but that was very empowering for me.
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And Dan did a lot of those things, and so
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it was a very special company. And the Assent acquisition,
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of course, and then loosened twenty four billion dollars year. Yeah, unbelievable.
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Made some very strong friends, got good relationships to this day.
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But you know several of the executives, In fact, one
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of them has become a very good customer of mine
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very early. So yeah, that's kind of the And then
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the Sonus Networks the Voice thing. I knew nothing about
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Voice except I didn't like answering the phone after eight
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o'clock at night. That was an interesting play in the
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market that we took that public of two thousand. I
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got there, it was about a year old. They already
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00:13:11.639 --> 00:13:14.679
had probably fifty people something like that, maybe a little