https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-weis-b331982

This is a great interview with Gary Weis, the CEO and CTO of Sonic Foundry. Sonic Foundry’s video solution, Mediasite, helps organizations capture, publish, edit and distribute videos. For example, a college professor could use Mediasite to capture and publish a video lecture for students or a company could use Mediasite to live stream an event.

Gary also has a rich technology background. He led large divisions at both IBM and ATT.

Sonic Foundry is based in Madison so I was lucky enough to interview Gary in person.

Here are some other things we talk about:

-How do you learn to lead 5,000 people?
-How did you become CEO of Sonic Foundry?
-How do your customers use Mediasite?
-What’s Mediasite’s pricing?
-As CEO, how do you communicate with your colleagues?
 
 
Transcript

Dave Kruse: Hey everyone. Welcome to Flyover Labs and today we get to interview Gary Weis. Gary is the CEO and CTO of Sonic Foundry. And Sonic Foundry is product media site that allows organizations to publish their videos and make them interactive. This could be a college capturing publishing videos taken with a lecture or a company running the live stream event. And Sonic Foundry is based here in Madison, so I’m lucky enough to interview Gary in person.

Gary also has a quite a rich technology background, including time with IBM and AT&T, which we’ll hear about. So let’s get going and Gary, thanks for joining us today.

Gary Weis: Happy to do it.

Dave Kruse: So before we get into Sonic Foundry and what you are doing now, can you tell us a little bit about your background. How eventually you got to Sonic Foundry?

Gary Weis: Sure. I like to kid people and tell when they ask me what my core competency is, I usually say being bought and the reason for that is that I started my career at Sears Robert and Company, where I worked with the management to build a technology utility company. They basically did – all they did was the cross communications for Sears family of companies. When Sears decided to split apart, they sold that business to IBM and that’s how I got into IBM originally.

When I was at IBM I had joint responsibility with running the IBM’s network leader at the time that was called Advantus. When IBM decided to globalize that network, I became the General Manger of the IBM Global Network and I actually built the IBM Global Network in about 22 countries. We were the first IBM organization to actually have direct control of the resources in the country as opposed to the usual IBM management structure. The reason, I’m sorry go ahead…

Dave Kruse: Well, I was just going to say, how does the network look? Like I know that you are very familiar with the server, the client model. Back then what did the network mean?

Gary Weis: Back in the good old days.

Dave Kruse: As some of your listeners might realize, IBM had a technology called Systems Network Architecture (SNA) and that was kind of the predominate enterprise networking standard before IBM, before the internet. So much of the network that we built and operated was SNA based, global network, global reach.

The reason that IBM decided to do that was basically to eventually sell that network in a bidding process and so AT&T wound up buying the IBM Global Network for about $5 million and we then became part of IBM. So that’s the second time I was sold and we took about 5000 IBM employees and moved them to AT&T.

So we then ran that network inside AT&T and extended it. I eventually wound up being the CEO of the company called Concert, which was a partnership between AT&T and British Telecommunications and then eventually AT&T dissolved that partnership and decided to sell itself to Southwestern Bell and that’s when I got off the train and no longer was being so. So I retired from AT&T at that time.

Dave Kruse: Okay, and what year was that about?

Gary Weis: Oh! Time flies when you are having fun, probably about 2005, 2004.

Dave Kruse: Yeah, you should write a book on all your experiences. That would be a pretty good study on technology through the years. So you have a lot of experiences. I was curious if you had one or two that really kind of were especially like inspirational or meaningful or educational to you like throughout your career that really was interesting to you?

Gary Weis: Well, I think given the background I have, a portion of it has been technology, a portion of it has been management. Answering the question from a management perspective, I think developing the skills that it takes to lead a 1,000 or 5,000 people into following you into changing companies is a pretty challenging and developmental kind of activity. I think that my experience anyway was the only way that you could real make that work, was by being honest and sincere to the people and make sure you explain well what was going to happen and how it was going to happen and so forth. So that was a, that was a management perspective. I think it was a very challenging aspect.

From a technology perspective, I think that in the networking business and even in the Sonic Foundry business today when you have hundreds or thousands of customers and you are running remote systems, being able to collect data from those systems and use it to improve the customer experience and to provide input to the customers about what their problems are and how you are going to fix their problems was pretty challenging.

More challenging probably 20 years ago when some of the technology that exists today wasn’t camouflaged, but that would be I guess the challenge that I had on the technology side of the business is developing remote instrumentation systems and to be able to collect and mange and ensure that they are there.

Dave Kruse: Yeah, right now is the IOT which is even could be a broader or a huge issue to try to collect all that data and make sense of it. So I’m curious about the leadership, how do you get ready to or how do you train yourself to lead 5,000 people? Yeah, is it the kind of stuff you learn on the job, do you have mentors, like how did you figure it out?

Gary Weis: Well, in my case it was really never by formal education. I really don’t think there was a class you can take that prepares you for that. I think it’s a combination of experience moving from managing 10 people to 50 people to 500 people and so forth. And at the same time having people who you can emulate and who were inspirational to you as you were being led and I think most people have had the experience that they have some very positive experience in that light and some negative experiences. And you kind of learn what not to do from the negative experiences and what to do from the positive experiences.

Dave Kruse: And before we move on, I’m curious on kind of like more of the intangible. Do you have to always have like a certain level of confidence that you have to project. I mean do you think like this type of energy you give off for most in order for people to actually lead or follow you, because you are meeting lots of people and they have to somehow get in line to a certain degree and one of its communication, but do you think there is more intangibles behind a good leader?

Gary Weis: Well, I think one of the cardinal rules is never panic, because if you panic, all those people are going to panic. I think sometimes any leader has to deal with a certain amount of adversity, but you have to be five parts honest to be able to share with the people what some of the risks are in a manageable way. But then you have to be five percent inspirational or 50% inspirational to convince them that if they all do their job they well come out okay in the end.

Dave Kruse: And did you have a touch circumstance where you had to tell people, you had to lay off a lot of people, things aren’t working out well?

Gary Weis: I actually was very fortunate that in my progression of career I never had a situation where there was any large layoff. But I think if you think about it a minute and if you think about the difference in benefit systems and management systems between the company like Sears or IBM or AT&T, convincing people that those changes are going to be good for them personally and manageable for them personally is not the same challenge as laying people off, but it is a challenge.

Dave Kruse: Or you were just that good, so you never had to lay people off? That’s obviously the answer you know. All right, and the last question was around your career, like what you have – you kind of in your life lessons, would you have done anything differently looking back. Like would you have taken a different role of would you have made a different decision or – I mean there is always…

Gary Weis: Well, a very funny story. When I was in college, my aspiration was to become a career force pilot and so I, starting out I had a very different view of a career than I wound up doing. And as you can see from being here in person with me, my visual equity probably was not the best choice for potential careers to want to be a career pilot in the air force, but never the less I started out on a very different track right.

I think part of your question though is, as you progressed along that track are there any circumstances where you might have learnt lessons that would cause you to do differently than you did. I don’t think that anybody could say that that wouldn’t be the case. I mean we all learnt from past experiences. I guess I am fortunate that I was able to get through that progression with nothing that would have caused me to want to change my career direction or my way in which I progressed through that, but I think I learned a lot of lessons from other people that I worked with about how to improve my communications, how to improve my management stuff.

Dave Kruse: Got you, okay. Well, let’s talk about Sonic Foundry and can you give us a little bit of an overview. I did a poor job in the intro. So a little bit of an overview and just how you got to Sonic Foundry and why you came here?

Gary Weis: Well, I got to Sonic Foundry probably in a very different way that you might think. I was a member of the Board of Sonic Foundry. About probably 11 years ago or so I joined the board and as we progressed through managing the company, the company was changing a lot and the experiences I have had or the places like I’ve been at AT&T really led the Board to decide that I could play a role in leading the company as opposed to just being a board member. So that’s how I became the CEO and CTO of Sonic Foundry.

I think in terms of the business, we as you and I were talking before we starting to do the interview, Sonic Foundry really has two very different lives. It’s twenty eight one or seven years old from the start of Sonic Foundry. When the company began it was really focused on audio capture and adequate software, music, etcetera and sometimes in the 2003 timeframe we basically divested ourselves at that business to Sonic here in Madison and then a lot of new technology called Media site, which is the video capture and management technology that we sell today and so the company kind of ended one life and began a new life. That’s right about the time when I joined the board.

So the product and technology that we sell today is very much oriented around all aspects of video content creation and management. I think it’s safe to say that the predominate source of revenue today is from higher education, because higher education has a very great value to be obtained from capturing and recording lectures. It’s not just capturing in classrooms.

If you would have asked me five years ago the nature of the technology business, it would be recording appliances that capture video and audio in a class room. But what we found is that educators are moving beyond that and educators want to create and record their own content in the privacy of their home or their office and then publish that content to students and use the class time more for problem solving or interaction or discussion or quizzing, than they do just standing up and giving a lecture.

Dave Kruse: Interesting, makes sense. I would have never thought about that either. And so at what point did you realize that was an interesting use case?

Gary Weis: About five years ago.

Dave Kruse: About five years ago, right.

Gary Weis: And frankly had we stayed just a room based lecture capture company, we would probably no longer be in business. That market is too narrow to get the kind of growth and success that we are looking for.

Dave Kruse: Interesting, okay. Can you give us a little overview for like the number of employees, the revenue that you guys have.

Gary Weis: Sure.

Dave Kruse: Just to get a feel for it.

Gary Weis: Sure. We did – we acquired two other companies inorganically about three years ago. One was in Japan, a company called MSKK and that company was a distributor of our technology in Japan. The other company was called MediaMission in Holland. They also were a distributor of our technology in Holland. That took us – I mean if you go back five years ago, we were about a $25 million a year company. Today we are about $40 million, $41 million. We are planning to grow to $44 or so by the end of this year.

The number of employees probably worldwide is about 200 give or take. About 50 of those are in Japan, probably about 15 or so are in Europe and the rest are here in the United States. So probably the majority in Madison and the rest scattered throughout the United States.

Dave Kruse: So it’s a pretty small revision for you, 5,000 to 200. This is easy. You know let’s see, so you kind of gave us a use case, how customers use on the site; one of the professors or teachers using it like in their office and then distributing that video for students to learn. How else do you see your customers using it?

Gary Weis: Yes. There are many other use cases. That is probably if you look at our revenue based, the higher education segment that we were talking about for those use cases, it’s probably between 65% and 70% of total revenue. The rest of it is a combination of used cases. I’ll talk about a couple of them just to give you an example.

We have what’s called an events capture business and think of this as a corporation that wanted to have an offsite event at a hotel. They want to be able to capture what goes on at that event, both in the mainline sessions and in the breakout room sessions and they also wanted to screen the main sessions live for a hybrid category event. We run that business on a turnkey bases, we are contracted with companies for us to go onsite to capture and stream those events; that’s a growing portion of our business.

We also – this is another example, tend to solve our technology, our capture and broadcast technology to companies that want to facilitate executive communications. So if you are a large company and your management team is in one city, but you are spread across the United States or the world for that matter, and you want to be able to stream communications outbound to those employees, we support that. So those are two other examples of use cases.

Dave Kruse: And so like with events, you provide all services too. You have the people, you have Sonic Foundry employees or consultants go onside and record everything. It’s like you take care of everything.

Gary Weis: That’s correct.

Dave Kruse: Interesting okay.

Gary Weis: That’s correct. We have – we obviously use part time laborers as well in the company.

Dave Kruse: So with like a corporation of communications employees, why would they use you guys are like let’s say you know link or something. Yeah what do you guys offer or what …?

Gary Weis: We I think differentiate ourselves in terms of the quality and the editing or the capture. So this is not – this is not just a kind of screen it and take what you get. This is capture it, edit it, put it into a showcase so that the customers’ users or viewers can see the only content they want. Front end it with the registration systems that maybe helps the customer charge for access to the content. We don’t sell that as part of our – we don’t have that as part of our core technology, but we’ll bundle other registration systems in front of our technology.

Dave Kruse: Got you, okay. And this is you know a kind of innovation tech podcast, so I’m curious if you can kind of describe the architecture, how you need the sites built to text back or whatever you want to – whatever you can share that’s not too confidential.

Gary Weis: The concepts are never confidential.

Dave Kruse: Yeah exactly.

Gary Weis: The trick is in the lines of code that actually regulate it.

Dave Kruse: We don’t have to talk about that.

Gary Weis: So let me give you a kind of a high level view of it. First from the standpoint of an appliance that captures what goes on inside a room; that’s an important component about technology. That device is a PV form factor technology, meaning it’s assembled with PC kind of components. We don’t manufacture our own raw circuit boards or things like that.

The operating system technology in that device is what we are seeing, the Windows 10 and then the value that we offer is a very sophisticated set of applications that run in that environment to manage the capture of up to five streams of video slides audio, and then once its captured, publish it in a unit to our server technology. So that’s kind of the first layer of the technology if you will.

We then have server technology which runs in a Window Server environment that basically takes all of the published content or ingested content. So for example, if a customer has content that they capture outside of the media site system, we can ingest that content and make it available in our content management library if you will and that server has a very wide range of function. It has some functions that are specialized to be administrators of the system, to manage the security, the access the migration of content to what our cost storage unit etcetera.

The other part of it is customer facing. So obviously once you get the content stored in one of the industry standard formats, you now want to make it available to the viewers of that content. And I think a very interesting element of the technology is that when we started this five or six years ago, we relied on our component software called Silver Bite that was provided by Microsoft as wells as Windows Medium.

Microsoft has moved out of that world and today we are the in technology is HTML5 implemented by anybody’s browser and so we’ve migrated to that board. It’s probably still as different companies fight the browser wars out there in terms of who’s got the best position to do HTML5, it’s not really yet fully implemented by everybody. So that keeps us on our toes to make sure that our technology can adapt to run on any of the browsers, whether it’s Microsoft Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Firefox, etcetera. So that’s the player side of the solution.

And then finally we have a set of products that generally go on to the hitting on my media site that allow the individual person to capture content in their own client environment and then publish that content up into the same server environment. So I think that’s probably enough as you can tell for it to be landed.

Dave Kruse: No, that’s great. And so I’m curious, how much of video do you stream each year do you think. Do you have like a…

Gary Weis: We have two measurements if you will. We have a hosting environment where if the customer doesn’t want to license our product for onsite running in their own server farm, we will host it for them in our computer science. We have redone the computer section and I don’t think of it as us having big buildings or anything, because we rent a space and operator on servers.

In that environment we have had a huge growth in the amount of content that we stream and capture. We tend to measure it more by number of terabits under management, because that’s an easier metric and I think in our hosting environment I’m going to say somewhere around 100 terabits. I’m looking at Tammy, because she probably knows the numbers better than I do.

But our customers then also run our product in their own baby centers. One of our largest customers is the University of Leeds in the UK and so they manage their own, their storage and so forth and we have less visibility of how much data or how much video streaming that they do in that environment. Leeds just for an example tends to capture over 400 lectures a day, just to give you a gist…

Dave Kruse: Just the one university, wow! Okay. So yeah, I’m curious, how do you reach out to customers. I know you talked about channel partners and you bought some of those, but do you still work through channel partners as all direct or a combination?

Gary Weis: Combination.

Dave Kruse: Combination.

Gary Weis: We have a sales force for higher education that deals with the top 200, 250 higher education accounts here in the United States. That is a very close direct relationship with those customers, so our folks are in there selling across the different schools in the Universities. We also have channel partners, channel partners actually do two things for us; number one, in some cases they find the customer; meaning the customer will approach them for the inclusion of or technology in to their classroom buildings or whatever.

In other cases they act as a facilitator or integrator. We may have sold the customer directly, but the customer needs to install cameras and other pieces of audio visual equipment and we will work with our partner to do the installation.

Dave Kruse: Oh! I’m sorry. I noticed, I think it was the California education system or something like that. I saw that and so how – and that’s large. So how in the world do you actually implement that? Like how do you start, because you know it’s put like probably 10,000 cameras across the entire, all the institutions. So like how do you, how’s the client going to start working with you to keep going?

Gary Weis: Sure. Well let me start by acknowledging that the selling cycle in higher education is pretty long and I’ll give you three examples I guess just to make the point. North Carolina State University is one of our larger customers here in the United Sates. And the first sale to North Carolina was probably about eight years go now and it was to a single school in the University in the Engineering School. And so we began by equipping I think 20 classrooms in the engineering building at the North Carolina State campus.

Then we went to another school. Then the CIO decided that he wanted to do a camps wide implementation and it’s up the point of some 200 plus classrooms. So that took eight years. And so it’s very much incremental right, as you go through and each individual school usually in the University has its own funding challenges to decide how and when it’s going to make an investment in this kind of technology.

The other extreme probably would be the University Of Leeds, where the professor that had responsibility for education basically got funding from the Chancellor of the University to do it all at once. So that went from an RFP in the spring to a full implementation by September. So those are the two experiences right, a long selling cycle with a long rollout and a short selling cycle with a very fast rollout.

Dave Kruse: Yeah, wow!. And I’m curious do you guys have, do you use any filters or any technology, like computer vision to – is there anything inappropriate. I assume you don’t get much inappropriate material you know being streamed. And is it all, is pretty much all the material probably reviewed. Like have you ever ran into a circumstance where there is inappropriate material that you had to remove or monitor.

Gary Weis: No, I think we stay out of the content side of those mostly. The customer is responsible for their own content and so I would say in our case our customers are all either corporate enterprises or higher education institutions, so we’ve never had any exposure to any concern about that problem.

Dave Kruse: And that do you probably disclose you’re pricing. Like how do you price, is that…

Gary Weis: Well, as you might guess, we tear our pricing.

Dave Kruse: Yeah, yeah. What’s an example for, I don’t know a mid-sized university or…

Gary Weis: Let me see if I can give you a couple of examples maybe. Clearly, a customer like NC State or Leeds will get the best discount. We tend to price off of a price sheet and then discount off of that price sheet and the more you buy, the higher the discount which is standing in just about any business right.

I think if you are a small customer and you maybe have 10 classrooms and that kind of an environment, in fact I think the example we sometimes use is 20 classrooms, the price for that might be somewhere around $250,000 to $300,000 dollars upfront and then there is a support fee associated with that all right, usually somewhere between 15%, 20you’re your support.

Dave Kruse: Okay, got you, that’s helpful. And so I have more questions for you specifically in your role, but before we do that, I’m sorry if I didn’t ask you for a long time – those on the phone for many years. You guys have always operated and now you guys looks for your time. Primarily you operate at a loss, and like for a while I understood it, because you are trying to grow, but I’m still curious why you guys are always operating on a loss. And this is a variability question. I don’t work here because I understand the income statement, but more or less like do you have like other projects you are working on that you are trying to develop or you know what, what are you continuing?

Gary Weis: We tend to be a small public company and we have an obligation to our investors to balance profit with revenue growth. And we have tended in the last five years to not do a lot of investor head kind of stuff that has a high class profile to it. We’ve instead done some very tapered acquisitions. We’ve done some very focused investments with relatively low cost and a lot of leverage on our existing technology.

I think from a cash flow perspective we have been cash positive for the last three years and the intricacies of GAAP accounting and reported profitability, obviously tell a different story. But from the standpoint of sustainability of the business and the health of the business we’ve been cash positive for a number of years.

Dave Kruse: You guys have such a large upfront payment too, depending upon all GAAP forces you to recognize that, we don’t have to go in to that, but yes that makes sense. Okay, yes good point about the cash flow.

Gary Weis: Yeah, it really is though a matter of balance of growth with profit and we’ve not done anything aggressive like investing and building a technology that costs a lot of money upfront and then hoping we can selling. That’s not the method that we’ve done.

Dave Kruse: Okay, got you. So I’m curious to learn a little bit more about your role and what you do. So as CEO, can you kind of tell us about your priorities? Like, you know overall grand vision, you know what does the board expect you to do?

Gary Weis: Well, I think it would be fair to say the board expects more growth and more profit, with my PF.

Dave Kruse: That’s the next goal.

Gary Weis: But that’s the way it should be, right and so I think probably a substantial amount of my time is spent coaching and developing the team that we have, to try to get the absolute best performance that they are capable to the front. I think we’ve developed a very good team of people. I think the other role I think I invest a fair amount of time is as a role of CTO to make sure that we are doing the right deployment of technology, to make sure we provide good customer service, good customer satisfaction.

It kind of goes back to what I said earlier that there are some very interesting things you can do to know what your customer is experiencing and be ahead of any of the challenges they might see in using your product. And you have to have the technology to do that, but you also have to implement the discipline to get your team to react to the data as its available. So I spent a fair amount of my time doing that as well.

Dave Kruse: Okay, and how do you communicate with the employees. Well, I know you probably talk with them right, but you know like with your direct reports, do you have regular meetings set up. I’m always curious how people you know in your position kind of operates. Everyone does it a little differently and so like how do you communicate with your direct reports? How about like the entire organization? Like how do you facilitate that and do you have a schedule or is it more ad hoc or…?

Gary Weis: Sure. There is a lot of ad hoc, but I think any organization that’s global and of the size that we are, you have to have a minimum out of formality to make sure that you are covering all the basics right. So I’ll give you a couple of small examples.

We have what we called Senior Leadership team meeting twice a month, that would provide a way for all of my report corrects and a few other people to make sure everybody is on the same page and understands any of the issues or has the opportunity to resolve any of the issues to finding system in the business.

Dave Kruse: Who is a part of that? What senior leaders, what titles?

Gary Weis: Sales leader, the finance leader, the engineering leader, the guy who runs the events businesses, the collection of probably 10 people that make up that group.

The other thing we do is once a month we have a customer impact meeting where we go through and look at what have been the metrics around service delivery to our customers in the last month. A different group of people entirely, more of the customer service and engineering people responsible for the product and the delivery service to the customers.

Once a year we have a sales meeting and typically we have our sales force here come into Madison and usually around that same timeframe we’ll do an all employee meeting which we capture using obviously our technology. So that’s available to people who are in Japan for example or other places. So it’s really kind of that set of management that goes into running the company.

Dave Kruse: Got you, and then lots of ad hoc just like you said; there is a issue which probably you should resolve. And so you’ve probably interviewed a lot of people over your days; how – I’m thinking more of the intangibles. How do you get sense to get to know somebody? It could be a fair share amount of time you know. It might be over like a month or two, but you know have you learnt anything about what type of intangibles are important that make somebody a good fit. I know it’s not really a question, because like CFO has different tangibles and then like the Head of HR versus the engineer. But yeah, do you have any at least thoughts or general advice about hiring?

Gary Weis: I think you are correct in pointing out that the way in which you get to assess somebody depends upon what capabilities you are interviewing for. I would say that the easiest for me interviewers, interviewing a technical person, because it’s pretty easy to have a dialog and ask questions that could pretty quickly get you to understand whether the person really understands some technology and trying to get them to…

Dave Kruse: How do you dig in, all right. I mean you start just asking general questions, or you say hey, this is a scenario that we have like or what do you think or…?

Gary Weis: I don’t do this anymore. But people who work for me, right would maybe even go through the three step process that we have a one on one interview. Maybe have the individual talk to other team members and then maybe even go to the extreme of giving an individual a problem and asking them to come back and tell them how they would solve that problem. That’s pretty analytic. I mean either you know the subject or you don’t know the subject. I think that also applies to finance. I think it’s harder when you get into sales and marketing, because I kid with people and the hardest thing to hire is a sales person, because sales people by definition.

Dave Kruse: Know how to sell.

Gary Weis: Tell a story right and so you have to assess their, I’ll say relationship skills because our business is a relationship selling business. You don’t sell a widget and walk away from it. You sell a technology, you sell a service, you have a relationship that you want to build on over time and that requires a set of sales skills that you probably are a little bit different than your average product sales. So that I will fully admit that assessing those skills is more of an art than is a science.

Dave Kruse: Okay. So let’s talk a little bit. We are near the end. Let’s talk a little bit about the future and you know kind of where you want to take Sonic Foundry over the next three years. Any new products or just kind of continue to grow the education and corporate market.

Gary Weis: I think video technology and the kind of capabilities that we inherently have as part of our products can offer a lot of value to a wide range of customers when they are integrated into the business of the customer. So up until this point we’ve sold a fairly generic platform. Meaning we sold servers, recorders, software that we pretty much rely on the customer to install and operate in their own institution to do generic things like lecture capture or corporate communications.

We have a customer that we closed last year called Noordhoff Health and this is kind of the example of a partnering model as opposed to a just selling a technology and letting the customer implement it. Noordhoff Health essentially runs a business that helps hospitals in the Netherlands and in Germany to gain accreditation or maintain a accreditation so they can post content which involves video, which they sell to their customers on a subscription basis, and if they want to enable their customers to capture their own content in their own individual hospitals.

So we’ve done a deal with them where we – its actually licensed our technology and our hosting services to build video into that business proposition for their customers. So the customer that’s buying the solution is buying a Noordhoff Health solution. They don’t know which media site, they don’t its – they just are buying an end use solution. We provide the technology under the covers. Noordhoff pays us and we think that’s a very good growth model for the future.

Dave Kruse: Yeah, I mean like you said videos. It’s been taking off the knots, but you know what people need and some people think ‘oh! Video, that’s been done,’ but I think it’s going to just be more and more involved in our life.

Gary Weis: I would add that video as a raw technology has been done. I mean we saw those two boundaries. But how you integrate video into the value proposition you are trying to sell to your end customer. Not us, but Noordhoff as an example, to their end customers, that’s still an interesting challenge and its more about an application level packaging than is a raw technology packaging.

The last thing I would make in terms of the future, we did the distribution agreement with China about two years ago and we see that China market has a big potential growth element and so we look for that to a geographic element to the strategy as well to grow the business.

Dave Kruse: Interesting. Have you gotten much inroads into China?

Gary Weis: Well, again it’s a matter of our partners developing the inroads right and we are very fortunate to have a very good partner, originally a partner who used our technology in China and now independent it’s been now called [Inaudible]. The gentleman who runs it is very experienced in both education and technology and he’s doing a great job of developing the applications of the technology inside of China.

Dave Kruse: Okay. Well, I think that just about does it for this interview. So Gary, really I appreciate your time and you have a rich and a good experience, so I learned a lot and I think I hope everyone else did too. So I appreciate your time and your thoughts.

Gary Weis: You bet Dave. Thanks for talking to me.

Dave Kruse: Definitely and as always, it’s exciting to do an in person interview. That makes it for me a lot more engaging and thanks to everyone else for listening to another episode of Flyover Labs. As always, I definitely appreciate it and we’ll see you next time. Thanks Gary. Thanks everyone.