The Business of Tech Lounge - Wednesday, Feb 28 2024

[00:00:00] It's Wednesday, February 28th, 2024, and I'm Dave Sobel.

[00:00:17] Welcome to the Business of Tech Lounge.

[00:00:20] Our opportunity to get live, have a employees, over 6,800 MSPs, and 1.4 million endpoints. Now, if you remember, Ninja One just completed

[00:01:40] its Series C round and announced more than 17,000 customers. sold it into ConnectWise through that Tama Bravo integration and acquisition. That's what this is all about. Their board and investors are looking to grow this to the next level, decided that they needed a new direction and took it as such. Now, for those who always focus on this, let me tell you a couple of things that I think are important.

[00:03:01] First, we don't worry about leadership changes

[00:03:04] until they start making changes.

[00:03:06] Michael George is a known quantity, So I called it a breach, and a commenter said I was wrong. The comment specifically, connect-wise situation is an exploit slash vulnerability, not a breach. Humongous difference. Now I think broadly, I used the term correctly as an English language word, but this question

[00:04:22] is spot on to be read by someone else is read, right? So it's someone else accessing data or information they shouldn't have access to, therefore, violating the C of the confidentiality aspect of the CIA triad. Next question you asked was, when does an exploit become a breach? Well, an exploit is somebody taking a vulnerability. So let's say a patch for Screen Connect that hasn't

[00:05:40] been applied, taking that vulnerability and then exploiting that, which means someone

[00:05:44] has to take action. A threat actor, Dave, is the shared responsibility understanding of our world, right? That it's not purely me. I can't just be independent. There is some interdependency.

[00:07:00] And depending on what parts, SaaS platform services or infrastructure service, or maybe I appreciated being called out on the specificity of my words, and I welcome the feedback. By the way, we are going to be taking questions. If you've got a question, don't forget to put it into the chat. We will be doing those specifically during our question session. But if you've got comments on some of the stuff we're talking about today, please feel free to join in.

[00:08:20] Now, next up, I want to revisit our interview.

[00:08:23] Over the weekend, my interview with Tom Kehu

[00:08:26] dropped in the podcast a challenge on you. You're going to have to be the one to keep that engagement always positive, always ongoing and focus on the off hours rather more than the on hours. Any MSB can tell me what they're going to do for me before. Tell me your team behind the scenes.

[00:09:40] Tell me what your overnight staff looks like.

[00:09:41] Tell me what your holiday looks like.

[00:09:44] And if the network goes down at 2 a.m. on Thanksgiving, tell me how you're going to

[00:09:48] solve that. make sure you're listening to the customer pain points and making sure you're addressing them specifically. Because for different customers, different things are going to be important. He identified for his organization that one of the key areas is to make sure you're thinking about that after-hour support. But by the way, that's not important that Screen Connect discussion. The event is billed as tailored for those planning to transact within two to five years. I wanted to know a little bit more about what the objectives were. So I called up friends of the show Abe Garver from Focus to learn a little bit more.

[00:12:22] Abe, I gotta ask a couple of questions about MNA Nation.

[00:12:26] So it was announced February 21st It's just pulling people in kind of early in the journey. Now with that kind of a short turnaround, it also feels like that's a natural way of saying, like you've got to be at a certain size and maturity in order to respond that quickly. Is that a fair takeaway? And what is the attendee size that makes sense? Well, I think there's just so many, there are so many MSPs

[00:13:42] and 100% of them are going to have a transition,

[00:13:47] kind of ownership transition at some point look over and over and over for people, but just we're really trying to appeal to a group that is, it's not something that's as actionable. Gotcha. Now, if you're looking to sell, that isn't necessarily something you want to advertise broadly, but attending a conference sends a pretty clear signal

[00:15:02] that you're exploring this.

[00:15:04] How would you advise providers to navigate that tension?

[00:16:03] and Peter Kajawal kicking off kind of,

[00:16:06] we're calling it like who's in the zoo, like who are all the people, what's going on in the market.

[00:16:09] There's like for March here, there's 160 MSP buyers

[00:16:15] with a very strong conviction

[00:16:17] kind of on the buyer investor side.

[00:16:20] And then various sizes of MSPs that are coming to market

[00:16:24] and kind of, so I to sell and not be prepared. That's a great set of insights. Abe, thanks for joining me today. Yeah, thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me, as always. I always enjoy speaking with Abe. Notable out of that was the release to come

[00:17:42] of some of that new service leadership data.

[00:17:45] We'll be looking for that to come out.

[00:17:47] And I expect to have Peter on the show relates is, is there will be a question about whether or not ConnectWise via the managed services partners also has a responsibility to end customers. That's the question that was set at that point. So it would be tested if a end customer ends up pushing back and saying that there was an expectation of

[00:19:00] privacy to that, we'd see it be pushed out in the courts. I think

[00:19:05] it, Cody, I think you think there's a market for fractional AI officers or fractional AI MSP practices?

[00:20:22] Oh, a juicy one. And in fact, I've said on the show that I an industry because there's more than one way to solve that. I'll be including that Axios article and further discussion on the regular daily news show to dig into it a little bit further and what the buzz is there, but I noted it in preparation for this question. Again, if you've got any questions, make sure to put them into chat,

[00:21:40] or if you've missed this opportunity

[00:21:42] or catching on the replay,

[00:21:43] send it in at question at mspradio.com.

[00:22:42] practically how that would look. Like what do I need to do?

[00:22:44] Is it really no money down?

[00:22:45] Am I putting collateral down?

[00:22:46] Like kind of give me a sense of how that actually works.

[00:22:49] Sure. And I'm not going to be this fake guy

[00:22:52] pitching snake oil.

[00:22:53] So let me be very specific.

[00:22:55] You can absolutely do this,

[00:22:56] but not all deals that are done

[00:22:58] by independent folks are done this way.

[00:23:00] Sometimes you put 10% down,

[00:23:01] but you can put 0% down with other people's money.

[00:23:04] Here's what that looks like. dream business like Dave, you say, hey, I don't really want to put this 10% up. I'm already going to put a personal guarantee through this loan and I'm going to go run this business. So I'm putting things up in lieu of CAD. I would like you to put the 10% in. And for that, I'll give you a portion of the business. And the typical split is about 70% of the common equity goes to the entrepreneur

[00:24:22] buying the business. 30% goes to the equity access to that interview with Elliot right away, it's available for my Patreon supporters right now at Patreon.com slash MSP Radio. We can make sure to follow, like, and subscribe to the show in all the ways that you can find us and we look forward to

[00:25:40] talking to you next week.