of starting a software company around information management. It was pretty much exactly 20 years that I'd been working in the industry on the IT or digital design side. 0:07:29 - (Randy Wilburn): So, you can make the argument and say that TonicDM was developed in a lab of real practice for 20 years and what we see now with this new company that you're about to talk about is the culmination of your experiences at these two firms. 0:07:47 - (Reg Prentice): And I think about it as a career path. It's always easy to say, man, if I just started this 20 years earlier it would be huge now. 0:07:56 - (Randy Wilburn): Or like they say, overnight sensation. 0:08:01 - (Reg Prentice): But I’m not sure that you can do that because the point of the tech company right now is the culmination of having just sat, and it's a very slow process to sit with people at their desks, watch what they're doing, watch them click through things, help them come up with different solutions and try them and try an enormous number of available commercial solutions before actually stepping into it myself. 0:08:30 - (Reg Prentice): So in one way I beat myself up like I could have started this so much earlier. In another way, I feel like if I had started it earlier, it wouldn't have been this, it would have been probably just the same as all the other tools out there, and there isn't much point in just creating another version of what's already out there. 0:08:48 - (Randy Wilburn): Well, I mean, I think the reality is that you would have still had to iterate through several processes and several evolutions of what you've now created. It's just that you were that much further along when you decided to create TonicDM, and it was fully formed. And so that's the beauty of it. You're not a noob as far as this is concerned. When you created TonicDM, you were ready to rock and roll at that point. 0:09:16 - (Reg Prentice): Yeah. And I think a differentiated point of view is something that is, I remember from our leadership courses at Gensler, it's important to have a differentiated point of view. And I think that's also true not just for, let's say, leaders in architecture firms, but also for leaders in technology firms. And so four things came out of my time in firms, the primary one being the value of simplicity being tasked with training and rolling out systems in firms, and just seeing how even something that appears simple, is not simple to the person whose process has to change. 0:10:03 - (Reg Prentice): And the time spent learning software by staff, it's already maxed out. It's not a good thing to come in with a software that might be incredibly amazing, but also requires a huge amount of learning because people just don't have the bandwidth for that. They don't have it now. I'm not sure they ever did. 0:10:25 - (Randy Wilburn): Yeah. 0:10:26 - (Reg Prentice): So just realizing things like whatever we deliver has to be really simple. It has to be functional, but it can't be unnecessarily complex. So there are just things like
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