The Futurum Group – Techstrong Group Acquisition with Daniel Newman (Part 3)

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel, and we're back here on Techron tv. You know, this is episode three In a, a continuing discussion.

I've been having, uh, we've been having around the, the, uh, announcement of Textron joining the Futurum Group. I'm joined by Futurum, CEO and Co and founder Daniel Newman. And in the middle here is our Chief Content Officer, Mike Ard.

tv. Go have a look. Good stuff there.

We're really discussing kind of the state of the industry, state of the technology world, why we think this is a, a great thing for you, not just for me or for Daniel or for everyone else, but a great thing for you in this segment. I wanna focus on content. You know, content, content today isn't the same content that I used to do when I was, you know, co-founding companies, or when I was writing for a network world back in the day, or, or even doing contract work, consulting work for many cyber companies, security companies, content today.

The way we consume it, the how we consume it, the kind of content we want to consume has all changed. Mike, I'm gonna imagine you've seen a similar Yeah, I Trend probably longer than me. I haven't thought about this in years, and I started laughing about it, as you were mentioned that, but back when we went to school, right?

We had everybody who was like a print journalist, was in one track, and everybody who was a video journalist was in the other track, and there were other people doing some other stuff. And then you had a couple social media folks. And today you have to be confident in all of those mediums to succeed, right?

There isn't this notion that we're gonna have a specialist for a text and a specialist for video. It's just content and information and the sharing of ideas. And you gotta be comfortable in all these mediums.

And I think part of the challenge that I see with some of my compatriots is they're only comfortable in one medium. Right? And I think you need to be able to work across all of 'em.

Well, they're children of their times. And you know, Daniel, you, you took a very different path than like a traditional media company, right? You guys didn't start a big website with a community portal or something to that effect.

You went right to the media platforms Sure. To the YouTubes and the Twitters and LinkedIns and so forth, bypassing, building out your own kind of domain, if you will. Well, I'll give you a parallel that I think a lot of the Textron, uh, TV and Textron community can understand.

But, um, a lot of companies decided not to build monolithic software. They decided instead to contribute and build apps that went into app ecosystems. The bottom line is those communities you mentioned, YouTube and Twitter, now X Facebook, meta LinkedIn are communities that have been aggregated and a lot of the community collection has been created.

Mm-Hmm. It's kinda like developing an app for an iPhone. Yeah.

It's like you could build a game, a monolithic game that could be run on any sort of different compute machine and try to centralize and sell it. But most app com and most, um, you know, popular applications now started maybe on one platform. They built an app for iPhone, they built an app for Android, they built something for, you know, Mac or whatever it is.

And the point is, it's kind of the same here, is you look, we built, uh, really credible relationships with the biggest press media and journalists. And I always laugh, I always say, you know, um, in the world that we're in, you know, there might be 10 or 15 or even 20 million people who influenced buying in technology. Like really, like real budgets.

I'm not talking about someone that, you know, whispers in their parents' ear at dinner. Mm-Hmm. Someone that has real money.

And so the idea that they're all just sitting around clamoring for my opinion, or any opinion of any analyst, is pretty unrealistic in this distracted era that we, we we live in today. And, and the other thing that though about it for me was, you know, we do all the media, we do all these appearances. Now we say in the end, Hey Mike, I just went on CMBC and I went outside to Walgreens and not one person recognized me.

No. You know, the truth is, is nobody is just sitting around staring all day long at their tv. And we did hundreds of the appearances.

And you know, I averaged thousands of views on each tweet that I put out and thousands of views on every LinkedIn post I put up and lots of reads. I write on MarketWatch and Forbes. I contribute on these big platforms.

Platforms that if you were writer on Forbes 30 or four years ago, people know your name, you write for Forbes. Sure. Now there's a thousand contributors on Forbes.

Maybe more, actually, probably more. The point is though, is we've seen this change. So there is two sides of the story.

And what I love about this collaboration and this partnership between Future and Techstrong is, I always said in the beginning is, you know, is I want to be the media as much as I want to, to own and create the media, and I'm gonna use every media to get there. But now it's kind of a combination is we use Shared to build really strong influence, but then now we've come together and we've built a really strong own. So Futurum had good readership, you know, we had, you know, hundreds of thousands of people visit our website.

com, security Boulevard, dedicated people that are participating in a buying journey. You have real data that says real people with real roles inside of big companies that have hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of revenue. And I always envisioned having all of that.

So the bolt-on the combination of what we do makes so much sense. We built influence through shared platforms, and now we take that influence to owned platforms and Alan, Mike together. We help companies, we help technology companies.

We help and, and, and buyers and consumers of technology come together for better outcomes. And man, that makes me happy every day. You know what else I learned from, you know, 10 years of doing text junk, I, maybe three years ago, it took me seven years for it to get through my skull, is that part of our mission isn't just to help them buy, but it's the education, the upskilling.

We live in a world where even our, even though our audience, they're technical, whether they're c-level, which is like 11% or 12%, I forgot the number, you know, 54% are managerial. And the rest practitioner, every one of those people is looking to better themselves, is looking to get more chops, better chops. And so part of the mission has to be education, which is why even like our webinars and, and a lot of the virtual events, we call them learning, Textron learning because people today are learning all the time when the pace of technology is so fast, the pace of technology change is so fast, everybody's gonna be upskilling.

Right? Right. That's a word upskilling all the time.

Um, you know, I'm happy we were able to take over or continue the upskill upskilling monthly, uh, things. We, uh, virtual events. We used to do a DevOps institute.

Um, this is another important part of the mission, right? In, in their buying journey, they also need to improve their skills. We All do.

I mean, aren't we all sort of, you know, in the old days we go to high school, you go to college, you learn something, you go to work, you're done. You know, and maybe every couple years you get sent back to training. You know, it's kinda like maybe a pilot or a Mm-Hmm.

You know, you'd get, you're type rated on a, on a piece of equipment every so often. But we're, it's amazing. 'cause we're actually in an industry where the people that get roles in these companies often have no formal training or have training that was actually more or decades old.

Right, right. When you went and got a computer science degree, what did you learn? Cobalt.

Yeah. I mean, what did you learn at the time In Okay, I get it. No, you're right.

I didn't even, I learned punch cards. Right. So what I'm saying is Python and, you know, learning, you know, Java and these different languages that are being used for heavy app development or AI and machine learning, uh, tools or AI frameworks, learning Cuda or Jax or PyTorch.

What I'm saying is most of the people that know how to do this didn't go to school for it. No, sir. They had to have some sort of ongoing, you know, I think they talk about Agile a lot in DevOps.

'cause Agile's like, look, what we're doing today very likely could be different tomorrow. And I think in a past episode, Mike, you brought up the whole idea of content that takes years to generate, to help someone make a buying decision, when by the time it actually hits the market, it's no longer relevant. It's the same thing as education these days.

Yep. I think what we do is a, is essentially a privilege because we get paid to learn. Yeah.

Now, the cost of that privilege is to make sure that we share it, and that's where all the outlets and the cons and the content distribution comes from. Yeah. Yeah.

I, uh, that's, that's very altruistic. I'm noting that. I'm noting your privilege.

I'm joking. Um, but no, I mean, I do think that, you know, how many things do you know about, discuss, have the opportunity to participate in, like most of us came out of a certain maybe side of technology. Maybe you were a chip person, maybe you were a cloud person, maybe you're, or infrastructure, maybe you were an applications, uh, side of the house.

But now, because everything is so interconnected, meaning really from, I always say from chips to SaaS, there's a reason. I mean, why do cloud companies put out all these different architectural instances running on different hardware? Why are they doing serverless and DevOps?

Why are they, you know, building analytics tools and databases? It's because it used to be these different silos. And by the way, each company did one thing.

Mm-Hmm. And now you've got one company or a series of one companies doing all the things. And that's, by the way, the only way you can really help people is you have to be tying these threads together.

And I look at Mike, your job as the head of content and global head of content for, for Techstrong and also the analysts on our team. Our responsibility to the market is to really connect all these threads. Help People understand that no, there's, how does It drive value?

How does it drive productivity? How does it bring efficiency? How are you helping companies be more successful and people to have a better, more frictionless experience with technology?

I agree with you 150 times over. Say it again because I I struggle with this frankly, right? Because as a, as a CEO, you're worried about the bottom line.

And why are we running all of this news or features for, you know, promoting vendor stuff that aren't paying us well, because there's a public responsibility to inform the end user about what's going on in his or her world. And, and it's something we do take seriously. The other thing I'll, I'll tell you about it, and again, I think it's something that the text on Futur think can really capitalize on, is that it's, it's a, the technology world today is a giant Petri dish, right.

Of constantly evolving constant new stuff. And as a content provider and content distributor, we need to be nimble. I don't wanna use agile 'cause it has that agile development thing, but nimble, let's call it where hey, ai, AI looks like it's gonna be big.

We, we started texturing ai what about nine months ago, three months after. I'm gonna, I'm, I'm gonna throw a line at you, you probably haven't heard in 30 years ago. Go ahead and educated consumer is Our best Customer.

Si SIM says that. Right? No, but, but it's our job to educate that consumer too.

Yeah. Right, right. Um, I think that is part of the Futurum mission for, for those folks watching this maybe who are very familiar with Futurum, but maybe not as familiar with Textron.

Right. Check out the, what we bring end to end from rum to Textron now. And that we're talking about, as Daniel mentioned, hardware, chips and hardware infrastructure, DevOps and Agile and software development, cloud, cloud native, cybersecurity, ITSM, digital transformation, ai, what's next?

Yeah. We bring it all and we really do connect, and I think it's really important that everyone understands this is, I I think I'm gonna say it on every video. Go ahead.

I, I, it's EDE empirical to ephemeral. And that's what we really need to deliver. Yeah.

Get the T-shirt that says that people need, well, people wanna make decisions based on insights from people they trust. Mm-Hmm. The analyst is the trusted provider of insights.

But for them to stay relevant and be con compelling, it comes from a combination of this really qualitative insight. We talked to hundreds of c-level executives are the biggest tech companies in the world. And we get access to understanding not only what they're building, but what their customers are experiencing.

Qualitative. We also do constant intelligence polling through future of intelligence of the decision maker data. We call it our future of intelligence decision maker dashboards.

And we, we, we are pulling them on how they're gonna invest in ai, which chip sets they're using, how they're spending on, we're doing DevOps right now. We're doing a new one on that. We're doing a cybersecurity panel right now.

And so our intelligence platform, it's a SaaS based subscription, but it's constantly fully. And one of the things I loved about the combination though, is that you have built this kind of pulse, uh, through Textron research, which, you know, we'll see exactly how that, you know, that expands and grows and integrates. But Textron is able to pull this readership and this community of practitioners, implementers, and executives to ask them what they're doing.

So now you've got this kind of, to your point, this kind of maybe two, three time a year sort of decision maker data that we're pulling real time, by the way, with real time queries. Not just a stack of paper you can actually query. It's a SaaS.

You can ask it questions, it'll give you answers, building generative AI right into it. So it can give you readouts from qualitative insights. But then you build these pulses where we can be asking every day about important things that it practitioners and CIOs and CISOs are doing as it relates to, you know, securing their, uh, their solutions, building and developing applications, deploying workloads, um, and meeting expectations.

I mean, even when it comes to meeting goals like sustainability, we can ask them how they're doing in real time. It's gonna be an incredibly powerful platform that can go from that empirical data driven all the way to that ephemeral, easy to consume, easy to digest, interesting content on shared and owned platforms. I think the challenge is getting people to the empirical because there's so many events that we are at and we have a privilege of going to that.

And you guys do a great job with about Tender. Yeah. Tender is what, I Guess you guys do a great job with those little short videos that you kinda like, like say, here's what we learned in a couple of minutes.

I think our challenge is there's a lot of research data that supports the ephemeral conversation. We need to kind close the loop a little bit and say to folks, we're having this talk about this here now, but there's more data to support this over here and here's where to find It. Yeah.

I mean, look, we want to use a kind of what I call a co-op distribution. com and Security Boulevard and Techstrong AI through the analysts. I think the analysts being publishing their own corners there.

Mm-Hmm. Providing kinda that shorter form, uh, high impact analysis that can come there. But we also want, you know, we see a lot of value in Textron using a lot of the data that the future from Intelligence Platform has the testing data that we're getting out of our laboratory from standing up systems, and of course as thoughtful, um, on the journalistic side, pulling other data points from across the industry so that we don't become too insulated from what's going on in the world.

'cause we wanna make sure that we're being checked. I mean, look, as analysts, we have a hard time admitting when we're wrong. No.

But, But at times we are. It's hard for you to believe that, that sometimes we get it wrong. And if you check my Twitter, I never publish any repeats of the things I get wrong, but you'll see a trend of me continuously reposting the things I got.

Right. Exactly. com era, and you understand this well, um, you only have to be right once.

That's Right. That's right. And it is true.

You know, we do, on My side of the house, we live for change, so I don't really care if you're right or wrong today. As long as you fix it tomorrow, I got another story. Well, sometimes I say I might be early, but I'm not wrong.

Just still too early. You know, it's funny, we do a virtual event every January call Predict where we ask analysts to make their predictions for the year. And so many times I'm tempted to run last year's predict and then, you know, give them a scorecard of, of what was right or wrong.

But as Mike says, it's not about what's right or wrong in that, in, in, well it is, but it, it's going to be Right. It's always better to be right than wrong. It's, you know, lucky and smart.

But, but it changes. It changes. And I think the important thing is you make your decision based upon, you know, Donald Rumsfeld said, you go to war with the army, you have not with the army you want, and you make a decision based upon the facts you have at your hand, at your fingertips, then not the facts that may come out six months from now.

Right. And, and you know, I think that's part of the analyst thing too, is that, you know, there's a little crystal ball and navel gazing involved. And I think it was son too who said the opposite though.

He said, no plans survives first contact with the enemy. That's Right. That was a good pull from there, Mike.

I like it. Anyway, hey guys, we're, we're over time. Mm-Hmm.

Um, this was a great episode. We, we probably have one more in the can that we'll be, uh, running here on Textron tv. Daniel will join us, Mike Ard as well.

Stay tuned. Until then, though, this is Alan Shemel for Text Drunk tv.