#525: Gary Hoberman on No Code for Enterprises

Gary Hoberman is CEO and Founder of Unqork. Gary was formerly Executive Vice President and CIO of MetLife. In this conversation, we discuss automation, creativity, the no code movement, financial services, how recruiting will change, and why no code is the future. ======================= OKCoin.com is the leading crypto exchange for both beginners and experienced users. You can fund your account in under 2 minutes, and get access to the most advanced trading engine, all while paying the lowest trading fees in the industry (0.1%). Visit www.okcoin.com/pomp and open your account today. ======================= With 10M+ users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell 100+ cryptocurrencies. The Crypto.com Visa Card gives you up to 8% back instantly, and 100% back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, Crypto.com lets you earn up to 8.5% p.a. on BTC, and 14% p.a. on stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App with code "pomp". Download the App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/pomppodcast2021 ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 150,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Gary Hoberman is the CEO and founder of Uncork. Gary was formerly Executive Vice President and CIO at MetLife. In this conversation, we discuss automation, creativity, the no-code movement, financial services, how recruiting will change, and why no-code is the future. I really enjoyed this conversation with Gary, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is my friends over at OKX. Crypto moves fast and many crypto-focused companies can't keep up. Crypto exchanges that cut through the noise are the ones that give you access, wherever you are in the world, to the cutting-edge projects emerging in this new asset class. If you're looking for an industry leader

• 0:55Anthony Pompliano?

  that gives you access to a huge variety of crypto assets, tools, and services, I'd recommend OKX. Whether that's access to a wide variety of new crypto asset listings that follow industry trends, like NFTs or DeFi these days, or access to sophisticated trading instruments like Bitcoin futures or other crypto derivatives, or if you're not into trading, a suite of crypto-earning tools where you can securely deposit your crypto and earn interest, or a learning and insights hub to help you understand and stay on top of the crypto trends, OKX is your one-stop-shop. Even though OKX is primarily a crypto-to-crypto platform, meaning you trade one cryptocurrency for another, I like that they offer an easy entry point for the many people who are trying to be new in this asset class.

• 1:36Anthony Pompliano?

  On OKX, you can easily use your credit or debit card to buy top cryptocurrencies with almost 40 different fiat currencies, including euros, Canadian dollars, British pounds, and many, many others. Go ahead and open an account today at OKX.com/pomp. Again, OKX.com/pomp. Go check them out today. Next up is Crypto.com. With over 10 million users, Crypto.com is the easiest way to buy and sell over 100 cryptocurrencies. You can download the app at Crypto.com and get $25 with my code POMP. When it is time to spend your crypto, nothing beats the crypto.com Visa card, which pays you up to 8% back instantly and comes with amazing perks at Netflix,

• 2:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Spotify, and Amazon Prime subscriptions, along with airport lounge access for you and a guest at hundreds of airports around the world. And of course, the crypto.com Visa card gives you all of this with no annual or monthly fees to worry about. Get $25 when you download the crypto.com app today using code POMP, or you can use the link in the description, crypto.com. Go and use the code, get 25 bucks and use their new Visa card. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 150,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down each complex topic into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various

• 2:57Anthony Pompliano?

  aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, that's pompletter.com. All right, let's get into this episode with Gary. I hope you enjoy this one.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by POMP or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by POMP as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:40Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Gary here with me. Thank you so much for doing this, sir.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me on, Anthony. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 3:47Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. You are deep, deep, deep down the no-code rabbit hole. We're going to get to that in a minute, but you, before this, had a very long storied career in the traditional finance industry. So walk us through kind of what you did before you started on Quark.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, if I go way back and we could do the wavy lines, would be literally back in fifth grade, Queens Public Schools, the days you Could actually leave school and go home for lunch, which I can't even imagine my kids leaving school and going home for lunch. So in those days, I used to walk out of school myself with great and walk to my father's publishing business, which was a few blocks away in Queens. And I would sit and play with punch card punch card machines, index my comic books. I ended the next year in sixth grade, he had Pascal and Portran and and I was loving this idea back then. That I could communicate and make a machine do something, the art of the possible. What what could you do if you imagine it?

• 4:39Speaker 03

  And that's kind of how I grew up in life, which was could I actually continue to go down this journey of communicating with machines in different languages that someone cryptic made up that looks like ancient Greek? And instead of doing the entrepreneurial like my whole family had done, I actually said, wouldn't it be exciting to work on Wall Street? I got the Wall Street bug and I'm a New Yorker by heart, stayed in New York my whole time through college. And then, of course, Wall Street was a natural progression and I spent about twenty years on Wall Street, creating technology solutions, communicating with machines to do trading, to do execution, to do mutual funds, sales performance, accounts receivables. And and just, again, the art of the possible was always what I loved to do.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  I had about six patents in financial services, five of them are still in production today for Citigroup, a Fortune fifty company where I worked. And then I joined another Fortune fifty company in MetLife as Global CIO. And I walked into a role in two thousand twelve with ten thousand developers in forty seven countries, you know, spending over a billion a year. And going back to where I started, what I missed when I started that role and what I missed even in Citigroup was the art of the possible seemed like it was gone. So the days when you would sit there and and create a solution for a business and solve a problem, it seemed like we were spending more and more money with less and less output coming out.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  And and it wasn't just me, it was you'd hear from my peers in the industry, all the consulting groups would say. Ninety-three percent of the the projects being worked on fail to deliver any value. So so Anthony, like if you're in business, you talk about two metrics to the board. You talk about, and I've done this hundreds of times, you say, are we delivering on time or on a value, on dollar, basically? And that's what they call it, on time or on budget, two things. And, you know, it means nothing. It's like walking into a furniture store and saying, hey, I like the couch and like I'm gonna uh buy it. It's yes, it's twelve ninety-nine. I'll purchase twelve ninety-nine. So that's the price I paid and I want it shipped next week and it arrives next week. And it gets into your house and it doesn't fit. And it's just the wrong couch and it's just you're miserable.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  The reality, what I saw in technology for twenty-five years before creating on Cork was the business was pretty miserable as to what was coming out because they didn't know what they needed until that couch walked into the house. And when it walked in, it was too late. So the metrics of on time and on budget mean nothing. And that's created on Cork to basically to fix the world, let's call it. And just a a small little challenge there. We're we're we're going after a five hundred billion dollar total addressable market, and that's the start. We'll go above that after, but that's kind of where where the journey's been on.

• 7:17Anthony Pompliano?

  That's awesome. And so you guys are in the no code business. What the hell does no code mean?

• 7:22Speaker 03

  So I love the question because everyone's like, there's code somewhere. We show us the code, show us where it is. And and the reality is um I have a team of engineers. I've got about a hundred of the top engineers I've ever met in the world. And like I worked with four hundred thousand people at City Group and seventy thousand at at MetLife and you know, we collected about a hundred of the best engineers across all industries. They code. There's no question that they're coding. But what they're coding looks to a user, what we call a business engineer, is the term we came up with, as a legal block. And so it's their coding and basically hiding the code from someone to say, oh, you want to basically do a a payment using Stripe. I mean, what an amazing story this week on Stripe and the results.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  You want to use Stripe to basically get a payment for a new subscriber in your company. You could drag in, you know, a text box for first name. You could drag in Stripe as a component. We already work with them and integrate with them. Oh, you want to use your bank account for your plaid? And all these components, we code the usable component that you'd simply drag and drop in. So it's a visual designer tool. And what's different about us than a Wix, maybe, which is no code, Wix is no code, and people have been using it for a long time for building websites, is what we drag and drop could replace the most complex trading platforms, transaction systems, 20 million transactions of second-type systems, exchanges. At this point, we look at financial services where

• 8:47Speaker 03

  we started, and public sector, and healthcare, and we look at these sectors and say, we could basically handle 100% of what they're doing today with code, without a question, with the most complex use cases you could imagine, without anything more than dragging and dropping. And so, so no code specifically is, there's no ancient Greek, there's no, and for the first time, you're getting scale at IT. And we don't generate code, we don't let you inject code, and, which goes against all principles. Everything that's out there today, and all the technologies supporting engineers coding, we're basically saying, it's a whole new way to create software.

• 9:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So, really what you're doing is, if somebody kind of uses a consumer example, something like a Squarespace, I want to build a website, I don't know how to code, I can go in, I can drag and drop, I can add functionality, really what I'm doing is kind of taking these containerized snippets of code, and I'm adding that functionality, you know, kind of as I see fit to my customized needs, but really what's happened is, it was almost like the code was pre-written for me, and therefore I can just use that to do it without having to have the technical knowledge to actually write the individual codes. Is that fair?

• 9:59Speaker 03

  You, it's very fair. That's exactly right. Yep.

• 10:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So, as you think through this, most people know Squarespace, they know other sorts of what I'll call consumer-facing technology, right? Things that I want to build that have maybe not mission-critical elements to it. But my understanding is, what you guys are doing is, you're building these no-code solutions for some of the most important software, and some of the most kind of mission-critical software for our business, and for very important large, you know, businesses. And so, how does that change the way you think about building some of these no-code tools, and how reliable they have to be, how resilient they have to be, and just how, you know, frankly, usable they have to be from a user experience standpoint inside these large organizations?

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, actually, so the words are faster, better, cheaper, what we always hear. So Anthony, if you were in a corporation, you would hear, and you were my business partner, I'd say, and you'd say, Gary, I want you to build this great onboarding system to onboard new customers to our bank, and it's going to, it should be fast and efficient. And I basically would look at you and say, that's great. Do you want it faster, better, or cheaper? Choose two. So what we did was very unique. When we said no code means no code you could inject, no code you generate. Really what we're saying is scale and application for the first time, which means that you're on the same version of code. So you start building today. I'm going to make this up. You're going to start building an onboarding solution today for your customers using Encore.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  You're going to be using technology on the same version of software as every major bank, every major financial institution, every hospital, every healthcare provider and insurance company. You're starting where they already left off, which is the entire difference, fundamental difference between us and everything before us. What I mean by that is you could take any solution today. Take a CRM package, which is simple. Everyone's been talking CRM, software as a service for years and years. They provide CRM as a simple base, and then you code on top of it. Which means if you needed a CRM and your partner needed a CRM, you're both starting from 50% and you're coding 50%.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  And now you're locked in to a technology and you're not getting the benefit of what your partner did versus what you did. And basically, you could separate that into divisions of a company. Every company division is starting with ground zero. And they're not benefiting each other. They're not benefiting the company or the industry. What we did was we said, look, no one else could code but us. That's it. We're the ones coding the components. And what it does mean is that when a new business requirement comes in, for example, someone needed a slider to be able to do a loan. We built loan software to do loans. We built the rent relief software, just launched as a product last week. And so a slider is something you see on the screen. When you build a slider, someone needed it.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  When we created that component slider, every customer automatically got it. Because they can't inject code, so they're guaranteed to work on the latest version of software. They're automatically being upgraded. There's no more legacy. There's no more, hey, you're using Java, you're using C sharp or C plus or any other code out there. It's gone. You know, it's basically you're guaranteed to be on the same version of software, which means that you're going to benefit from the community of users all on the same platform, all testing, all cybersecurity testing and pen testing the same software. That's what no code means to us. That's exactly what it means and the difference for us.

• 13:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So how does this change kind of the software development process? So inside of an organization, obviously I still have software engineers. Now I have these new tools. How do I change the way that I build products?

• 13:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great point. So today, if you step into an organization and say, hey, how are you building software today? You're going to have a business analyst that writes a Word document. They're going to give it to an engineering team who's going to work with the chief architect to come up with a schematic, a blueprint, and here's the technology we'll use and the integration points. They'll start coding. And you'll develop test plans off to the side and the test plans will be based on what the business requirement said. The test plans will start and basically find out that technology after a year of coding didn't deliver what they thought they'd get. And this is in what we call the waterfall approach, traditional waterfall approach. And then at the end of the year, technology would be on a, become lawyers. I've done it. Where you become an attorney, you're like, well, business, let me show you, this is what you said you wanted. This is what I did.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  You know, you didn't tell me you needed a button on the screen to submit and save. So we didn't put a button on the screen to save, so the application doesn't save. Like, that's what's happening today. And I know it's a little bit extreme. On the agile approach, which I was one of the first pioneers of agile in large corporations and the idea of moving faster in the businesses at the table. It's really good for delivering incremental value, but it gets to the point that we celebrate success. Hey, we built this. And as a business partner, you go, but it doesn't do anything. You know, it's not yet what I need. I needed that other stuff that's in the backlog. So with Encore, what we've done is, if you think about coding, we replaced the coding aspect. And now business users could be technologists, the people coding could be.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  The reality is the person writing the Word document could now do eighty percent of the work in OnCork without any help. They could actually start to configure the screens and the rules and the integrations and they could do the design. They then work with a technologist to do that last piece all in OnCork. The integration mapping, the data mapping to the legacy systems, to the core systems, the books and records. All the complexity around that that's done in on inside OnCork and outside as a unified platform. And the reality is what we're finding is we're shortening the coding time with two hundred times faster than a Java developer. We could sit down and show you if a Java developer was taking this long to do it, we're two hundred times faster than that. Overall, because you're still doing requirements gathering.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  You're still doing testing, you're still doing test plans, you're still. Most importantly, the business is changing requirements on the fly throughout the entire program. And that's that's expected. That's so all that results in we're finding about a three times faster agile project. Agile as in it's going to be incremental, let's go as fast as we can. And there's no risk to deployment, no risk to change. If you didn't get it right the first time, we'll get it right the second time immediately here. That's what's different. It's also resulting in three times cheaper is what we're hearing back from customers than anything they've seen. So that's three times as a metric no one's ever achieved in technology before. You've you heard thirty percent better or fifty percent better sometimes, but three times. But most importantly, Anthony, what we've actually now done.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  We came up with what we call a line of code equivalency. So if you were going to code this a traditional way with, you know, JavaScript or Node or HTML or whatever you're going to use. We actually came up with a way to take an OnCork app and generate the estimated lines of code it would have taken. And so in today in production, we're running for customers, you know. Eighty, ninety million lines of code equivalency already with three hundred and fifty million lines of code in U A T. And about a billion lines of code equivalency in staging, but all going through to production. But we were able to use that to estimate defects. And a defect, people don't talk about defects, but for every like 50 lines of code, there's one defect traditionally that's available there. I mean, squidly brackets are hard to get right

• 17:12Speaker 03

  and semicolons and it's, it's names and everything's case sensitive. For those who don't know, it's hard to code. I mean, I look at banks that talk about, you, you could read about banks telling they're, that they're going to train their traders on Python. And I look at that and I'm like, you want sympathy from them. You're trying to basically create sympathy. Just, it's nothing to do with productivity. It's like you want them to feel bad for you because it's hard to code. That's not what this answer is, but, um, but reality is it's hard to, that one line of defect, one defect for every 50 lines of code is an estimate. We're 600 times higher quality. So the faster, better, cheaper, it's three times, three times and 600 times higher quality. That's the difference that we bring to the table versus everyone else in software today. Every other company out there.

• 17:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you think about the differences that you're making, it's really on the backend, it's in the software development process, it's in the integration into the business. Do the users of the software, if I'm somebody who's signing up through that payment flow, if I'm somebody who's leveraging it as an internal or external customer, do I tell any difference between code that was kind of custom written versus the no-code product?

• 18:20Speaker 03

  No, so we are so proud to be invisible to the world. So you might be using us in a bank today. You might be using us, you know, in healthcare, you might be using us in public sector or insurance. We're completely invisible. You'll never know on Quark exists. There was a really cool charity I joined as an advisor called Play On where they performed CBS. The end of the year, last year, there's a primetime special we put on with all the best music stars, Jon Bon Jovi and others. The entire site called playonlive.org is 100% on Quark. And you would never know it's there, except we put for the first time Powered by OnQuark. It's the first stamp we ever put on any site because it was a charity that we helped create.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  But, um, but you'll never know it's us other than that. And so the idea is we're a platform to create software. No one ever should know that we exist. You shouldn't know we're storing your data. We're encrypting your data. We're doing it in a way which, um, banks trust us with their customer data when they wouldn't trust any other technology. And because we come from that world, we understand that world. And so, so with that, um, it's done very differently. We, we don't exist. We take on your experience, your user experience. Um, so in some cases, Anthony, like so New York City. I think it's the best case, you know, how fast we can move. So you've used as a consumer, you used products like GoFundMe and Seamless Web before. I guarantee I'm on those products both all the time. Great consumer products.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Here we are, we had a New York City call from the Commissioner of Common March 6 last year and said, how quick could Encore stand up a COVID tracking system to track all 20 million tri-state residents that might call 311? And all consumers who want to self-report symptoms? Because this COVID thing's come. And this time was, we were joking before the call, I think, but like this time I was just coming back from presenting at Encore Research in California. I was coming back to LA, there was people wearing masks and I thought they were crazy. I'm like, what's, what's going on here? So, so we actually received a call on Friday at 5pm. On Monday morning, we demoed a production-ready secured system that already went through pen testing, vulnerability assessment, performance assessing to handle all 20 million requests.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  And we became the system of record. And we basically worked with New York City to deploy that within that week, which is unheard of, to go without one line of code. And then what happened was it succeeded, and this is typically why we have like 145% net dollar retention, which is incredible. Succeeded and we have a call to say, um, how quick could you create a donation tracking system like GoFundMe? So we created with them, we enabled New York City to create on our platform. Within three days, they created GoFundMe equivalent donation site to collect 150 million dollars of donations. Without one engineer standing up. And the coolest thing was, and this is what I get to tell my kids about, which was, um, you know, you're, they came back and said, we need to get food to senior citizens.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  And if you were in New York City, which you were, if you ever saw a National Guard loading a box into a taxi at any point, there's all these hubs in Brooklyn and New York City. And that was powered by Encore, 100%. We basically created the equivalent of Seamless Web. The company and New York City created it on UnCork. They, New York City was able to hire about eighteen thousand delivery drivers that were unemployed to basically deliver food to seniors in need. And I think the number I heard was it delivered seventy-five million food orders. Seventy-five million. So whenever I see on Amazon, which was like, we delivered fourteen million meals. We actually, and UnCork enabled seventy-five million meals in just a few months that it was, you know,

• 21:55Speaker 03

  there, which to me, software, it's back to the art of possible. It's got to enable us to live a better life. I kind of feel like software today is like middle school years with acne. Like it's, like, it's uncomfortable. You walk into a hospital or a doctor's office, you're given paper and a pen, still today.

• 22:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So how does, how does this change the recruiting, right? So when I start to think about exactly what you're talking about here, normally if you wanted to build this type of, uh, kind of reach, this type of efficacy inside of any sort of software-related company, you'd have to go hire, uh, not a hundred engineers, you'd probably have to hire, you know, a thousand or two thousand engineers. So not only are you at UnCork not having to have as big of a team as maybe you would have had to have, uh, but also then you're going to these companies and you're saying, hey, we can actually lessen your dependence on, uh, kind of your core engineering team, those with the software skills themselves. And so is this something that becomes prevalent enough to actually make a dent in recruiting where, uh, the software, uh, engineers, they're still valuable, but now there's this like business engineer position that becomes super valuable?

• 22:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Or how do you look at that from a personnel standpoint and the impact of the customers that you guys serve?

• 23:02Speaker 03

  It's, it's amazing, I think. So I come as a CIO, right? So I actually ran Fortune fifty technology groups my whole life. We're selling to the business about eighty percent of the time today. And so the business is basically saying, we need a solution. We have never seen a solution. We've been waiting years for the solution. This is the solution. I could get in in three weeks, four weeks, and I'm done. So a lot of times, that's actually how we see the sell. Now, with that said, um, you could look at our investors, Goldman Sachs, Little Series A, they were an investor before. You know, capital G with Google, Little Series B, BlackRock, Little Series C. We have, um, when you look at our clients that we talk about, like Liberty Mutual was our first client ever, and it's a, you know, Fortune one hundred company.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  And you look at Maman's Medical Center is our first healthcare company provider, and they're the largest employer in Brooklyn. We always started with the most complex and biggest companies to solve, so everything else is easy. In those cases, I mentioned, the technologist. Realized that their their value is to deliver technology as fast as they can to the business. And they're visionary technologists who say, I know that if you could do this, you could do ninety percent of what I do today. Then I could devote a hundred percent of my engineers to something better than they're not doing today. So I I definitely, there's no shortage of engineers. Anyone saying a shortage of engineers, it's just the wrong technologies. That's what it comes down to. However, I also wouldn't say that we're going to um

• 24:29Speaker 03

  be the cause of fifty thousand engineers in a bank to disappear tomorrow, because the reality is those fifty thousand engineers in a bank could be creating the new algorithms that we can't even envision yet. And what's the art of the possible if you were able to take someone who's moving a button around the screen? And has a master's degree in computer science with ten thousand hours? What if you took that person, him or her, and made him responsible to build a new algorithm to detect fraud? You know, or detect, like, that's where the, that's what they should be focusing on. So the way I see it is like, we're empowering the engineers to basically take on bigger and better responsibilities, freeing them up to do things they should be doing, instead of what I would call the misery that they're loaded down with today.

• 25:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, this is the whole idea that basically machines will uh replace all the rudimentary kind of elementary tasks that uh we have, and what it does is, you know, as it as it has done many, many times over uh the history of human uh existence, is it will free humans up to do the more creative, harder to replicate uh type work, right? So whether you look back and you say, hey, farmers, uh it used to be like ninety plus percent of the population had to be farmers. Well, now we've got kind of the mass production of food, and so that freed people up, it didn't make them uh not be able to make a living and freed them up to actually go do more creative things that machines had a harder time doing. And so that's essentially what you're saying here is, of course, going to remove a lot of the the elementary or repetitive type work.

• 25:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Instead, those same engineers now can go do the more complex things that maybe Unkork hasn't gotten a chance yet to build no code.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I always tell the story of like, I guess it's the 1500s when a queen was presented by a inventor of the new sewing machine called the yarn, you know? And she's like, what are all my, what are all the people doing this today going to do for work? So she exiled him to Paris to die in poverty where he did. And that's a true story. Like in reality, that it's time to move forward with this because for 30 years, I still look back at the punch card machine I was indexing comic books on or the Pascal and Fortran. Nothing's changed. It's still, even with all the discussion of cloud computing. Cloud computing, it's amazing. It's scale at the infrastructure level. It made infrastructure a software problem. That's it.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  The reality is you're still coding. You know, the cloud computer companies are still saying, host your code in our cloud. They're not saying, here's a way to get rid of the code. And so it's time for a shift because we make cloud computing irrelevant. We actually, we host it for you. The database is done for you. There's no more security. There's nothing else to worry about. It's just, it's all out of the box.

• 27:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so when you start to think about kind of the big challenges moving forward, what are the biggest obstacles you guys face?

• 27:10Speaker 03

  So, so number one is this, the category that was created years back, low code, no code. Absolutely. Every company that's 15 years old is suddenly rebranding themselves and remarketing themselves to be in this category. And the category itself is not defined properly because the category has historically been plagued by a concept that if you enable the engineer to code, that's a feature that's needed. And that was true 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You know, the reality is we've proven that, you know, it's not true anymore. It's actually the harm. So I would say like this whole concept of categorizing software and fitting software into buckets is incorrect. And you know, it's kind of like the iPhone. The iPhone was a divergence convergence

• 27:55Speaker 03

  device. And the first iPhone reviews were horrible. I mean, they were literally like, this guy's nuts. This is no one's going to use this device. We're kind of at that point right now where, you know, everyone's rebranding themselves as a smartphone around us in many ways. And reality is, we're saying, everyone's looking at the wrong category. We're actually, it's not just a tool and a tool bolt for an engineer to do what they did yesterday, do it tomorrow. It's to free up the engineer to do something completely different. So to me, it's around the categorization is what I'm really fascinated by. And that's where we're, I'm really interested about what we enable in the future, Anthony. So my, my view is I left the corporate world to basically fix it. It was what can we do once we actually fix the problems out there and what experience? To me, it's about imagine

• 28:40Speaker 03

  if data quality was perfect, and it was entered only one time. That's it. And everything worked. Meaning, meaning you were born and your, your son or daughter was born in a hospital, and on cork was the system of record used to create the birth certificate. Immediately, I should be able to go to your insurance company and say, hey, you use an insurance, we're going to add your daughter to the policy. And by the way, would you like a Gerber Life Insurance Policy? And by the way, would you like to add them as a beneficiary to your will? By the way, would you like? And I could continue that journey to say the congratulations, they got a driver's license. Would you like us to add them to the policy here, the insurance, you bought a home, would you like? And I just think about how disconnected the world is right now. And the data, I mean, there's nothing

• 29:24Speaker 03

  more than the pandemic to show us how we are not digital. We are definitely in seventh grade with acne, as far as it goes in technology. And that's, that's what we're excited to change.

• 29:37Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think out 25 years from now, is everything no code? Where does this go? What does that world look like?

• 29:46Speaker 03

  So I'm hoping it's five years out, but 25, it's going to be interesting to see. I'm 25 years, we gotta have had jets and cases. Come on, like that's, I'm waiting for like the jets in case you open them up, you jump in it, you can fly somewhere. Um, I keep waiting for that day and my youngest eight year old says he's going to invent the real flying car and it's going to be powered by lightning. I love this idea, but uh, that's what I'm hoping 25 years is, but reality is, as it comes to code and no code. You know, even in five years from now, I would hope that we start to look back and look at a company and say, first off, what are you doing to address your legacy? So on cork is the first solution, there is no more legacy. Me, what I mean by that, Anthony, is if you created a solution today on cork.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  And tomorrow, there's a holographic interface for you to interact with your bank. When we create that one interface in a holographic device, you automatically got it with no change to your application. You're automatically going to be moved. So we moved all customers over from angular to react because react was better performance to the client. Not a single customer knew it even occurred for the first time. That project in a bank guaranteed is 20 million dollars and it fails every time. We moved all customers from Docker to Kubernetes behind the scenes to do and better deployments faster. No one knew it even occurred. It's just invisible. So we could migrate customers in one fell swoop to the latest technologies, to the more legacy.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  I look back at what's happening today in corporations and I think about robotics, RPA. And it's a, it's a technology that's been around for 20 years. It's putting a layer on top of the technology that's there, the legacy and saying, let's push it under the cover further. And pretend it's okay. So I'm hoping in 25 years, there's no more legacy. That's what my wish for the world would be, you know what? Companies need to start being, their stock price should be evaluated based on how quickly they address legacy technology. Because it will impact that stock price guaranteed in five years or 10 years. If they just can simply keep hiding it behind technology instead of addressing.

• 31:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Are we at a point now where basically everyone has to have a no code strategy? Right? You know, I talk a lot in the crypto world of like, everyone needs a Bitcoin strategy. Is it now that every corporation needs a no code strategy?

• 32:01Speaker 03

  It's so, it's so funny. You, you, you want any boards? I gotta ask, you're, you must be, uh, but a few, so, so.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  As a CIO who used to present to public boards, I could tell you what's happening right now is the boards are starting to ask their CEO and their leadership team. So what are you doing about this low code, no code space which popped up? And you know, it's, it's what are we doing there? And what the technologists who I will call, I'm going to call them more technologists who are more worried about their job. Then they are worried about the shareholders and the customer. Will basically very quickly look to pick a solution in that space, which enables them to continue doing what they're doing today. Which is code. So they'll look for a solution that lets them inject their code in that system. And, and Anthony, the best way to say it in cloud computing, which everyone knows cloud and the idea behind it.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  It would, it's basically like me taking an old server from downstairs. That's 10 year old Dell server with 20, you know, 32 core CPU. And it's a great server, but I'm going to pick it up and drive it to Amazon's data center and ask them to rack it for me in their cloud. And no one would ever do that. No one would ever think like, if I give them this server, could they rack it for me? I know there's no spare parts. It's going to break. It's going to be insecure. It can't be patched, can't be supported. No one knows how to support it. It won't be compliant or compatible. Why would I ever do that? And yet that's exactly what we're doing today when we take our code and host it in someone else's software. It's exactly the same thing. Here's my legacy code, go put it in your legacy environment.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  So when you think about what's happening today in that space, to me at the board level, they're saying, yes, what are we doing here? We're seeing technologists select software that keeps them employed more than changes the company and revolution. We had a client yesterday go, I could keep with my incumbent low code provider, a CRM tool, and I could keep with that. Or I could choose on Quark and revolutionize the business. That's the difference. And I love the conversation. I love the battle there. And with that, I would simply ask the business, anyone listening from the business to your, to your podcast, I would simply say, ask the question. Simply ask the technologists, you know, number one, if we choose that solution. Is it going to upgrade automatically to the latest technology? Or are we going to have legacy tomorrow here? That's it. One simple question.

• 34:19Speaker 03

  And there's only one technology at the end of that that doesn't, which is us. So it's pretty cool to be in that spot.

• 34:24Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a good question for you then, if they ask.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  It's a good question for me. We're gonna try. Yeah, I mean, Anthony, the other question, which I love is, you know, board members, if you think about how businesses get compensated, or like product managers get compensated, it's based on delivery. It's based on outcome. It's based on value. If you think about technologists, at least historically, what I've witnessed is technologists are compensated based on a budget size. How many people work for you? How big is your budget? Is the more money you personally make at the end of the year bonus? It's exactly contrary to productivity and efficiency. And it has nothing to do with value. So if we change the way we actually compensate to say it's based on your value, you bring the company, technologists will stop trying to hire engineers for the sake of headcount and budget size.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  That's kind of where, so, so it's my own, it's my own belief there. That's a personal belief that I've seen in the past. I'd love to see change.

• 35:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Makes, uh, makes sense to me. Before I let you go, ask everyone the same three questions and then you'll get to ask me one to finish up. The first is, what's the most important book that you've ever read?

• 35:26Speaker 03

  So, I mean, look, enjoyable book is Ready Player One, just because I love the eighties and I love the idea that that was the whole book premise. But as far as a book recommended, I do like Barking Up the Wrong Tree. Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric. I just, you know, this idea that every, every day we're actually going to wake up and there's going to be a new problem to solve. Make the game about problem solving. Make it fun to solve problems. Make it so that we actually, that's, it's actually what life is about, is solving problems, solving puzzles. My mornings, my morning started off with me doing Kentan or Sudoku at the hardest level possible, just to basically say, my brain's going to get a little bit activated and I know that I might not solve the problem. I might have to give up, but I'm going to try my best to do it and I'll try again tomorrow if I don't.

• 36:08Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Next question is brought to you by our friends over at Eight Sleep. I used to sleep five or six hours. Now I sleep on their thermo-regulated bed. I turn it basically as cold as I possibly can, like an ice cube, sleep eight or nine hours. And they have fully converted me to this like. Sleep religion and how important it is. What is your sleep schedule and how has that changed over time?

• 36:29Speaker 03

  So when I created Unquark, I probably wasn't doing that. I was probably doing about two or three hours a night of sleep. And I do remember those well. And of course, with three kids, you remember those days also. I could tell you I am a six to eight guy. So I need a minimum of six and max eight. If it's more than eight, I don't feel great and I need that coffee in the morning. If it's six, I'm kind of okay and seven is probably my max number. I do one thing as a routine though, Anthony. So I mentioned Ken Ken in the morning. Like to me, I'm Candy Crush right before bed because there's no game. You could basically reset your brain, then Candy Crush where you don't have to think. And it's probably the best life lessons in Candy Crush, which is, you know, it's about luck. It's about trying the same thing over and over again. You're going to basically go insane.

• 37:11Speaker 03

  This definition goes, if you keep thinking it's going to get a different result every time you try something, it's the definition of insanity. And, uh, and you know, it's basically just something to watch things explode, which is nothing wrong with that before going to bed.

• 37:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Last question you get asked me one is aliens. Are you a believer or non believer?

• 37:28Speaker 03

  Believer and non believer. I, I have to believe that we are not the only civilization out there at all. So absolutely. And I would be excited by one day being able to see that there are, are they coming down to earth? I can't see why they'd be here. They'd be here with masks and COVID right now. So why would we ever? But, uh, but absolutely believe that we are not the only civilization for sure. What do you, Anthony? Go ahead. And that, that question I got to hear.

• 37:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I'm definitely a believer. I, I don't know if we're going to see them, uh, but for sure. We, uh, we definitely are not the only intelligent life in probably our galaxy, let alone all the other galaxies.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  What, what is your favorite book? Can I ask?

• 38:04Anthony Pompliano?

  What is your? Um, so favorite is probably a little bit different. I always say like the three most impactful books for me were Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Richest Man in Babylon and Think and Grow Rich, but those were. Like personal finance type books that I wrote when I was younger. Uh, now I would say that, um, probably the most important book and most impactful book, I almost think of it as like the Bible of investing is, uh, the Tao of Capital, uh, written by, uh, Mark Spitznagle. So I want to say, uh, a great one.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  I'm gonna go order that. I haven't heard that. That's an awesome one. Very cool. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. It's just tons of fun.

• 38:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Where, where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Uncork?

• 38:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. So uncork.com, U N Q R K dot com. And just so you know, it's not a wine company. We disappointed a lot of investors early on. You can imagine we're walking into do the pitch and they're like, wait, you're not consumer goods. You're not, um, and so we, we were all about uncorking the competitive advantage that lies in great companies. So we don't compete with you. We enable you to basically do better and uncork. We couldn't afford the seat, which was half a million dollars to buy the domain. And instead it was a 1495 purchase of GoDaddy. And, um, and that was, that's kind of where we are. And of course, everyone's welcome. Look me up on LinkedIn. I would love it. Connect with me on LinkedIn and, uh, you'll find me there. Awesome.

• 39:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, Gary. Listen, thank you so much for doing this. You guys have built an amazing company. I'm a big fan, so keep it up and we'll do it again in the future.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  Uh, can't wait. Thank you, Anthony. Thanks again. Have a great day.