VC Investor Yon Hardisty, Founder of Healthtek Incorporated, joins Yadin on the podcast to share his advice for CIOs and his perspectives on long-term investing. They discuss navigating board and executive staff conversations, and how current tech trends are impacting the way people invest.
VC Investor Yon Hardisty, Founder of Healthtek Incorporated, joins Yadin on the podcast to share his advice for CIOs and his perspectives on long-term investing. They discuss navigating board and executive staff conversations. They also dive into lessons from the gaming industry that can help improve preventative healthcare, and vice versa
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“The thing that I would do is as a CIO, I would let the board members know that I know who their customer is as well as they do. And what I bring to the table is I also know technology better than they do.”
“It's not about the technology. It's about the human.”
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Timestamps:
(01:00) Yon’s approach to long-term investing
(07:41) Managing shareholder value and short-term pressure
(12:49) The connection between games and healthcare
(15:29) How did Yon introduce game concepts to healthcare?
(18:45) Guiding the board towards long-term investments
(22:08) How are tech trends changing the way people invest?
(27:29) Advice to a CIO pitching to a C-level executive
(28:28) Advice to CIOs for conversations with the board and executive staff
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Yadin Porter de León on Twitter
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0:00:00.7 Yon Hardisty: I believe very heavily that by nurturing people, by nurturing your investment and thinking about it in decades, as opposed to in quarters, we're all going to do a lot better. We're going to build better technology, we're going to build better profitability, we're going to build better teams, we're going to build abundance that's shared amongst the teams.
0:00:23.9 Yadin Porter De León: Welcome to the CIO Exchange podcast, where we talk about what's working, what's not, and what's next. I'm Yadin Porter de León. In this episode, I speak with VC investor Yon Hardisty, the founder of Healthtek Incorporated. We dive into Yon's perspective on long-term investing and his advice for CIOs as they think about their own investments and navigate conversations with the board or with the executive team. Yon's investments are in two seemingly unrelated spaces, gaming and healthcare. And we also chat about how each of these sides of his career informs and influences the other and what both industries could stand to learn from the other.
0:01:02.9 Yadin Porter De León: Yon, as a VC investor, you have a unique perspective on how CIOs should be operating to invest with a long-term time horizon. What is your approach to long-term investing, and why do you think it's been so successful for you?
0:01:16.3 Yon Hardisty: Well, I come out of technology, and began as an engineer, working in that kind of world. And the concept of taking a piece of software or a product in itself and iterating on it and growing it and mentoring it and kneading it into place so that it becomes something that... For the most part, I didn't start thinking it was...
0:01:35.8 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah, it's how it starts.
0:01:37.4 Yon Hardisty: It evolves into something that's quite new and quite intricate, has a market, has a purpose. That takes time and that takes iteration and that takes resilience and all those good catch phrases that are out there in the world. But as engineers, we're tied into wanting to put things together and get them out there in the world and get them moving as fast as possible. As an investor, we're geared towards trying to put money into a place and have it returned to us in some kind of meaningful amount of time. Usually, that means short.
0:02:09.3 Yadin Porter De León: But not too short. Do you feel like that's investors in general or you and your colleagues have this kind of feeling?
0:02:18.6 Yon Hardisty: No, I think it's investors in general, I think that there's this... But it's not just investors, it's humans, a human thing to want to be able to take a risk and then see a reward very quickly. Right? But when you're dealing in technology, when dealing in small-business investment, and where we've found a lot of really great success and had a lot of fun with it as well is tamping down that need for initial fast reward. Or really doubling down, tripling down on the concept of iteration and the concepts of resilience and working with our teams internally, also the small companies that we invest in, to give them a pathway for growth. Understanding that there's no straight line to that profitability, there's no straight line to that purpose, and that takes time. And so I've always really enjoyed the concept of running a small business as kind of a bakery, where it becomes a family business, and you're handing it down from generation to generation to generation.
0:03:13.9 Yadin Porter De León: I love that, I think that's fabulous because it can be... The bakery is one concept that people think... And they think of that family business, but software as a bakery or technology as a bakery, I think that's a really unique and interesting concept that most people don't really apply when it comes to this industry.
0:03:29.6 Yon Hardisty: True, true. And that's something that should be. I mean we should be thinking about this as a multigenerational long-term concept. And given, we all grew up in this launch and this expansion of technology, this wave of technology, and so we would like to think that things churn and burn really quick, but what we want to do is really enhance the churn and leave aside the burn.
0:03:58.3 Yadin Porter De León: I like that. Less burn, it's less burn.
0:04:00.5 Yon Hardisty: Yeah, less burn because certainly as an investor, I want to hear "less burn."
0:04:05.5 Yadin Porter De León: Absolutely.
0:04:07.6 Yon Hardisty: By changing the mindset as an investor, changing our mindsets, to say that we don't need that immediate reward, that immediate profitability, but if you can give me 10 years of regularized profitability or 20 years of solid continual growth, that's really where we not only enrich ourselves, but we enrich the cause that we're building a product for, the purpose, hopefully the team, hopefully the environment. And it's a great way to think about technology as evolving. We had this couple of decade experience where it was, Get in, turn around investment as fast as you can. And maybe that's what was needed. But in the area that we really like to invest and really like to think about it, it's more about how we're going to see the next wave, what's coming down the pike, who's going to give us the insights into doing that? And I believe very heavily that by nurturing people, by nurturing your investment and thinking about it in decades, as opposed to in quarters, we're all going to do a lot better. We're going to build better technology, we're going to build better profitability, we're going to build better teams, we're going to build abundance that's shared amongst the teams.
0:05:25.7 Yadin Porter De León: Yes.
0:05:25.7 Yon Hardisty: I know that's one of the core concepts that we play with, is that it's not about a very limited, small group of people making profit happen. And I think this fits in with your audience as well. Is that we're not talking about huge, massive infusions of cash, we're talking about, in many cases, personal income that's being infused into a passion or a profound technology that you want to see do some good and some change.
0:05:56.5 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah, I think it's interesting, too, so with that long-term view. And I liked how you talked about nurturing the team and nurturing the investment. And going back to that analogy of the bakery, if you're a technology leader, even if you're in a Fortune 500 company, it's almost impossible to wrap your head around this part of this much, much bigger thing being something that could be handed off to another generation, another wave because there's always going to be new people coming into the organization, new people adding talent, the next generation of developers or architects or sysadmins, who are going to be inheriting what you have built.
0:06:33.0 Yadin Porter De León: And to think about it as, I hand-laid all the tile and I put in the bread oven, and this was me, and this was like my hands, and my blood, sweat, and tears went into this. Looking at it that way changes... I would imagine for you, especially, you've experienced it changes the way that you make decisions, it changes the way that you upskill people, it changes the way you hire, it changes the way you build strategy. But I imagine there's also forces like in your world, you have some VC investors who wanted that quick out. And then of course, let's say in the technology world, you have shareholder value that you're trying to create and that next quarter that you're trying to hit and the next product you're trying to help with a sales team you're trying to enable. How do those reconcile... Or how do you reconcile those?
0:07:18.3 Yon Hardisty: Yeah, it's always a blend and you need to hold that yourself.
0:07:23.9 Yadin Porter De León: What does that help? It's like with your bare hands, like holding it on... It's like Spiderman, how he's like stopping the train from going off the tracks. That's just with grit and determination.
0:07:37.0 Yon Hardisty: It's definitely about drawing investors and drawing partners and clients, as well as customers, that you can build expectations for. Being very clear about what your goals are as a business and as an investor, and then sharing those goals with your customers and ensuring that they see what is coming down the path and how it benefits their community or their need as well. And I think that if we as investors look at our investment partners, those who... Some of their needs are fast. Right? Some of their needs are quick turnaround and some are longer term, and then you find people... So blending that together is where I think we've focused a lot of time. Now, we're very clear with most people that we work with and certainly amongst the partners internally, is that we are focused on long-term investment, on decades-long investment. But that certainly doesn't mean that we would turn away some vast opportunity.
0:08:30.5 Yadin Porter De León: If it's the right thing, you're like, "That looks good."
0:08:32.6 Yon Hardisty: Yeah, but that's not something that we would also task or trickle down to our teammates or our businesses or the communities within the businesses. Right? We, as humans, I believe, we want that stability, we need stability, and so it's really the stability that we'd step forward with when it comes to the internal team. And even if I were to take on and we were to take on partnership that was wanting a quick turnaround or a quick return, it would be really, really stratified, it would be really focused, it would be a niche part of a greater offering. So we might have the opportunity to serve up a product for an individual customer who's willing to really juice that investment. Right? We would spread that amongst the team and make sure that everybody within the team knows that they're still working on that long-term goal, that long-term post, and we would... And, say, we as founders or leaders in a corporation would really work to blend that together with the short-term opportunities.
0:09:35.1 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah, and I think that parallels really well because you want... I like the idea of stability that you talked about, there's a foundation of stability that you want within, whether that's income stream, whether that's investment return, whether it's time horizons. And let's say if you're leading a technology team, you want that stable, Okay, we want our five nines of uptime, we want stable software supply chains. But at the same time, there's going to be exciting opportunities. Hey, let's infuse this new piece of technology. Let's spin up this new project. Let's do some experimentation, and we want to see well, how... Let's iterate super quickly and let's see what we can get back super fast and see if we can get success, and then maybe turn that, like you say, blend, then evolve that into that stable foundation that you've built. Is that how you're looking at it?
0:10:21.5 Yon Hardisty: Exactly. Exactly. And I think I talk a lot about longevity, about those many long long-term investments, and I think a lot of that is because as we stepped into this part of the software world, all we found was short-term turnarounds. Well, I should say the vast majority of what we found were people who were looking to invest and get short-term turnarounds. And so I leaned very heavily on speaking about the long-term, on pitching the long-term, on building teams around long-term investments. But I think you're exactly right, you hit the nail on the head. You have to bring those two together, there has to be a mix of it. And we do that in a number of the investments, we invest in a gaming company and we invest in a healthcare company. Well, a healthcare company is a long-term, steady-slope business. Right?
0:11:09.6 Yadin Porter De León: I think that's... By the way, I think that's just fascinating that you've put those two together, and we're going to drill into that really quickly. Gaming company and healthcare. I mean continue, but I'm going to double click on that in just a second.
0:11:22.4 Yon Hardisty: Sure, sure, sure. Well, just to round that thought out, is that you move passions. Right? Is that the gaming company is a hit-driven environment, it's spirit, it's engaging, but it's also really, really creative and fast and powerful and utilizing technologies that are cutting... Not even cutting, bleeding edge. And if you have somebody that's burnt out on one segment or you have an investor, to be more specific, that's burnt out on one area or just doesn't see growth happening fast, well, you can move them over into something that's a little bit more bleeding edge and you want to take a try at, say, the latest AI or the latest machine-learning option, you can move them back.
0:12:01.4 Yon Hardisty: We do the same with our teams, is that if somebody burns out in one segment or is feeling like they're not being creative... They don't have a creative outlet, well, let's go make a game. Let's do something over here and try this for a period of time. And then if you feel ready and you've learned something, you've gained a new technology or you've gained a new perspective on life, bring it back to the slow and steady and let's blend that together.
0:12:24.4 Yadin Porter De León: That's fantastic, and I think that embedded in everything you just said, too, is that human element because you're really, ultimately dealing with individuals, you're dealing with people, and you're not dealing with numbers and stats. And ultimately, there's outputs of all that stuff, these things go into spreadsheets and PowerPoints and quarterly reports. But you're really looking at the human element in how you're approaching this long-term investment view. Let me go back to the game and healthcare dichotomy. You started out creating games, investing in games, fostering games, and then suddenly you decided, "Okay, I'm going to do healthcare now." You've convinced me, too, that there's a really powerful connection there, too. And I wanted to dig into that connection and what the benefit is of. And you've already touched on a little bit of having those two sides of the house combining in one. But talk about just really quickly how you transitioned from working on games, developing games, hit-driven to healthcare, steady state. What was that like, and why did you feel like that was natural? Or maybe it was just more serendipitous?
0:13:25.6 Yon Hardisty: Well, I think I lived what we're talking about, it's just I had been working with my company for about 10 years at the time that we... I burnt out, basically. I reached a level where the ebbs and flows, the rapid ebbs and flows of the gaming industry really hit me hard. And it hit my body hard, it hit my mentality hard, it put me in a bad place, and so I needed to take a sabbatical break from doing that. And what I chose to do, strangely enough, was step into a healthcare company for a short period of time as a contractor and juice up their product line. And this company, it's a company called UnitedHealth Group, and they had a vast amount of products that were out there.
0:14:07.6 Yadin Porter De León: A little company called UnitedHealth.
0:14:09.6 Yon Hardisty: Yeah, a little company, and it was a great company. I mean it's very... It's an interesting... At the level I was in, it's a lot of people trying to do a lot of good in the guts of it. And I realized really quickly that what I had learned or what I had experienced in gaming, of giving free and easy access to a community and then engaging that community and holding on to that community and then bringing them through to how you utilize these services in healthcare, it's a gaming pathway. In healthcare, they call it "a health journey," in gaming, we call it "a gaming journey."
0:14:39.2 Yadin Porter De León: That's brilliant, that you bridged those two, I mean it's just brilliant because it is, it's like it's human interaction, it's engagement. "Engagement," I think that's the key piece, though. And when you're in healthcare, you don't hear a lot of people talking about engagement, they talk about patient care, patient outcomes. Engagement though is the means by which you get a lot of those outcomes, and that engagement drives that experience.
0:15:01.2 Yon Hardisty: Yeah, and healthcare, rightfully so for the most part, is really focused on the critical issues and the provision of service once you really, really need it. Right? The area that I stepped into and sussed out and have grown with over the past 23 years is preventative, is that world where we try to engage people in their own health prior to needing that critical.
0:15:24.4 Yadin Porter De León: And that's the hard part, that's where it's harder to get people motivated, but now you're introducing this game theory, this game design engagement into that preventative healthcare. How did you approach that, especially from delving into the investment piece, too, is this, This is how you transitioned in and this is how you started to say, "Hey, lookit, I might think about starting to invest in this area?"
0:15:50.5 Yon Hardisty: Right, well, I saw the steady growth of that area, for one, from a business... So there's always the creative and then there's the business side of life. In living that process, it really was living... I burnt out in one area and I needed to go and find my purpose, I needed to find why I had just done this decade of effort, creative work, and how I could apply it for the future. And I was able to find that in healthcare. And then even better, I was able to step back with my business partners in Healthtek, in Monkey Byte... It was called Monkey Byte at the time.
0:16:22.5 Yadin Porter De León: I love that, Monkey Byte.
0:16:23.4 Yon Hardisty: Yeah, Monkey Byte, that was the gaming company name. Encouraged them to understand that we could utilize our knowledge of gaming and our knowledge of engagement services and creativity to build something that was really needed in healthcare. And so from a creative human standpoint, I traveled that path that we were just talking about of hitting a wall, but being able to then go focus on something else for a little while and then come back to your creative purpose. Right? As a businessperson, when I put on my business hat, what we were able to do is we were able to see opportunity in an industry that had this slow, regularized, steady growth, and marry that to an industry that has a very, six-month, up and down, ebb and flow business model, and together, you build stability. You blend that together. Which rolls back to what we were talking about with investments. Right?
0:17:16.8 Yadin Porter De León: Yes.
0:17:18.5 Yon Hardisty: Investing for the immediate reward is akin to in healthcare, investing in just the critical services...
0:17:25.7 Yadin Porter De León: I love that.
0:17:26.0 Yon Hardisty: But not thinking about the preventative part of this.
0:17:29.1 Yadin Porter De León: No, and that's one of the things that gives you a lot of perspective and like, Hey, lookit, if I want to invest in the long-term, that's what I'm doing as I'm like in healthcare, I'm investing in that preventative care, I'm looking at what's the future going to be? If we change this behavior, if we do this now, we can save ourselves a ton of headache, whether that's an implementation, whether that's migration from an IT standpoint, or with ourselves, "Hey, lookit, we're going to prevent having these health problems." And it's tough because we can't see that, and it's not necessarily on the quarterly report or the PowerPoint presentation of, Hey, I think we're going to have this thing in the future, and we need to start investing in it now because we're going to be handing it to that next generation, whether that's the team or whether that's leadership.
0:18:14.9 Yadin Porter De León: And it's tough, I would imagine, going back to putting your CIO hat on, it's tough to then sell that story to the E-staff, to the CFO, to the board of directors when you say, "Hey, lookit... " And I had this great conversation with Rob Carter, CIO of FedEx, who got in front of the board and said this, "Hey, lookit, this is our infrastructure, we can't innovate off of this, we have to start thinking more long-term, we have to build something we can innovate off of." How would you... If a technology leader came to you and said, "Hey, look, I'm struggling with telling that story, with convincing the board," how would you guide them on that journey?
0:18:49.3 Yon Hardisty: One of the first things that I would say is, "Let's not focus on the technology. Let's step back from that and let's be comfortable with throwing it all away, with saying... "
0:19:00.8 Yadin Porter De León: You're freaking... You just freaked everyone out, Yon. Everyone's freaked out.
0:19:02.8 Yon Hardisty: Yeah, I know, I know, I know, but this is the thing, is that... And as a technologist, in the world of CIO work, we tend to really love what we've learned and what we know, and we know it very well, we spend a lot of time focusing on it and building it and want to see it work well. But it doesn't always mean, especially in healthcare. And this is what I've loved about taking game concepts and applying it to healthcare, is because in healthcare, it's not about the technology, it's about the human, it's about this customer. And you can take that concept and apply it to any business structure, any startup that you're working with. If you can step aside, if you have the ability to say, "Look, we're gonna subjugate our ego about the technology, and what we're gonna look at is exactly where the customer is and what it is that they need. And from that point, we'll start thinking about what technologies we can employ." What we found in our investment quite a bit is that we get... And we do this ourselves as well. We come in with very high technology, we've got AI, we've got Avatar Systems, we've got NFTs that we can employ, I mean...
0:20:08.3 Yadin Porter De León: Just say "Kubernetes," Yon, and everything will be fixed.
0:20:12.2 Yon Hardisty: Yeah. Yeah, that's the beauty of gaming, is it's testing out and touching all of these wonderful cutting and bleeding edge technologies. Right? But there's a whole ton of business in between the QR code and the AI. So figure out where your customer is, and if they need a QR code, frigging build them a QR code generator overnight and then build them a roadmap to how you're going to step them step by step by step over the next five years, from the QR code into an artificial intelligence. That is what stepping back into the healthcare industry did for me, is it let me see that there was application for the customer. And us as high-end technologists might be running a little too fast sometimes. And by keeping an investment leg in gaming, it's allowed us to continue running ahead and being as creative as we can find ourselves and wanting to be. But at the same time, having a leg into or a foot in the healthcare industry has really spread out and broadened the investment possibilities because I can see where the healthcare industry's gonna be in 10, 15 years from now in games.
0:21:22.4 Yadin Porter De León: So you can see where healthcare's gonna be in 10, 15 years because of your experience in bleeding edge, cutting edge gaming? I just wanna make sure I got that.
0:21:32.6 Yon Hardisty: I'd say it's two-form, yes, because of what we see really talented creative gamers and individuals doing in the technology of gaming and in the experience of gaming, we can see where we can speak to the healthcare industry and create a roadmap for them to build that engagement. And I know one of the things we were gonna talk about a little bit was like how we see and where we see artificial intelligence, and where we see machine learning fitting into this world as well.
0:22:03.1 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah, 'cause we've got those two worlds here. Like one foot, as you say, is in steady state. One foot is in cutting edge, bleeding edge. How are you seeing those technology trends changing the way that people are investing, like yourself or like technology leaders?
0:22:12.4 Yon Hardisty: So machine learning feels now like the old guy in the block.
0:22:20.4 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah. Machine learning. Oh, that was old. Yeah.
0:22:20.5 Yon Hardisty: It's still so extremely important and extremely a basis for, a pillar for what we're doing. Artificial intelligence is the new thing, but artificial intelligence from a gaming standpoint for us leaps back to early gaming, of computer player games.
0:22:36.0 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah. Wait, before we get to that too, 'cause when we say "AI," too, I mean that's an overarching world. Machine learning is kind of a subset of AI. I think you're talking about transformer architecture, large learning models when we're talking about next-generative AI or just LLMs in general?
0:22:53.9 Yon Hardisty: Correct. Correct. Yeah, and there's a lot of fast money in there.
0:22:54.1 Yadin Porter De León: Yeah, there's a lot of fast money right now.
0:22:56.1 Yon Hardisty: Right, so for me, as an investor, I don't look at that, I look at how businesses I might invest in, or we do invest in, we work with in our businesses, utilize those tools. Because we're looking for longer term and really drawn out investment possibilities and profitabilities, that's not an area for us. An area that is really interesting for me now is the hardware. And this has always been in gaming too. You create the games and you push the limits of how many polys you can throw up on the screen and how fast you can render, and then that pushes the hardware forward, and let's Dell sell more computers. Right?
0:23:35.7 Yadin Porter De León: It's helped Nvidia out a lot, I think.
0:23:35.8 Yon Hardisty: Yeah, Nvidia. Yeah, they're a little company that's doing a little bit of stuff. So if I were to look at investment in that area, I'd be looking specifically at the hardware and what would be driving... What's to come next because we've seen a leap forward in technical, in the software and the digital side of it. And now it'd be interesting to see how the hardware catches up and enhances what we found there. And I can draw that back again to early virtual reality, when in the 19... What was it, the 1980s? No, early 1990s, when we started doing gaming, our gaming was virtual reality, literally came out of a company called Virtual Reality Labs, that did rasterized USGS maps of Mars and the world. And the software is, was brilliant, rendered like just beautiful scenes, but it took three days.
0:24:31.8 Yadin Porter De León: That's a little too long, three days.
0:24:36.2 Yon Hardisty: Yeah, yeah, for a frame to boot, and so there was the need for the hardware to catch up. And so this new kind of influx, this new wave of virtual reality that has been happening and that kicked off a short while ago, it was really interesting to watch that come off of headsets, of a new hardware. Right? And actually lesser polys than we've been doing back in the 1990s.
0:24:58.5 Yadin Porter De León: And when you say "polys," what is that? What do you mean when you say "polys?"
0:25:01.7 Yon Hardisty: Polys are how worlds are generated inside of 3D spaces. We used to do a thing called rasterization, which was bit-tracing on a screen. Polys, let's say you jump into Quest, Facebook's Quest, and you see a lot of triangles and boxes and basic shapes, those are based on a number of polygons, a number of drawings. And so it's been interesting to see the hardware now catch up. And all of a sudden, virtual reality gets a second breath.
0:25:30.6 Yadin Porter De León: Yes, it has been... The hardware advancements now allow people to create something just greater on top of that that just wasn't physically possible. Laws of physics weren't there from a hardware perspective.
0:25:42.3 Yon Hardisty: Yeah, and I'm excited now to see how software in that area now steps it up because now we have hardware that's untethered, that's more powerful than we had back in the '80s, '90s. Okay, now software guys, we did bleeding edge work there, and we got wiped out by the gaming industry because games came in and had better PCs. Right? So it's really exciting to see how that works. When I look at artificial intelligence and machine learning today, I say, Okay, well, now we've taken... Just like in the early '90s, the software took a monumental leap forward and is doing some pretty exciting, interesting things. I can't wait to see what a quantum computer's gonna do next.
0:26:23.2 Yadin Porter De León: Oh my goodness, it's crazy. Just look at Black Mirror and you'll see what it can do.
0:26:29.3 Yon Hardisty: Yeah, and so you have these successive leaps. And so when I'm investing in something, I'm looking for not what the initial quick spend is, but, What's that long-term spend? In that case, what's the hardware? And I credit stepping back into healthcare, which is a much more conservative, a much more slow paced but very capable business model teaching me how to work in gaming, how to run a business in gaming. And I credit gaming for teaching me how I could work in healthcare industry and really bring engagement in utilization and ease of access to it.
0:27:08.3 Yadin Porter De León: I like that balance from so many perspective, we go through each of those layers of how that balance creates and how those two feed into each other, how the output of one feeds into the input of another and how you're taking learnings and cross-pollinating between the two of them.
0:27:23.2 Yon Hardisty: It's been a good ride.
0:27:25.9 Yadin Porter De León: Has it been? Yes, it sounds like it's been a really good ride for you, Yon.
0:27:25.9 Yon Hardisty: It's been a good ride. Yeah. Well, and to loop it back to your original question of, What would you say to a CIO who is pitching into a corporation or to a C-level person? Is, Throw away the technology first and think about all of this cool hardware and software that you have at your fingertips. And think about what the customer wants. Build a pathway, build a five, 10 and 15-year roadmap for how you're gonna utilize today's technology for that 15 years from now. And if you can build that, we call it... In our business, we call it "minding the gap."
0:28:02.1 Yadin Porter De León: Minding the gap, I like that.
0:28:06.5 Yon Hardisty: If you can build that pathway, then you've got a good, steady business that you can at least begin to structure for. And as an investor, you've got a really great way to look at decades, instead of quarters.
0:28:16.7 Yadin Porter De León: Nice. And so that's, I guess, a natural flow into our section of the ticket to the board section of the show. How would you say, advise those technology leaders then to convince... Maybe not convince but start that conversation with the board, with the CFO, with the e-staff?
0:28:31.2 Yon Hardisty: The thing that I would do is, as a CIO, I would let the customer know, the board members know, that I know who their customer is as well as they do. What I bring to the table is, I also know technology better than they do. And so whether you... You're probably never gonna know their customer exactly as well as they do, but the effort. It's like speaking in the language. You walk into another country, and at least you're making the effort to know what the customer and what the pain point is and you know this broad sense of technology. Right? You've maybe become an expert in a sliver of technology. Because you've done that once or maybe many times, you know that you can apply technology. I'm doing air quotes, "technology."
0:29:14.8 Yadin Porter De León: It's good to say that when you're on the podcast, "air quotes."
0:29:20.0 Yon Hardisty: Yeah. To whatever that customer needs. Right? And that's where you bridge the gap. A special capability is not knowing how to talk engineering or just knowing how to talk to a C-level staff but knowing how to take engineering concepts and make them palatable to a C-level staff.
0:29:39.3 Yadin Porter De León: Is that what you mean by "the gap" in your mind? "In the gap?"
0:29:43.7 Yon Hardisty: Yeah, absolutely because any C-level staff that is looking for long-term growth or steady long-term growth is gonna wanna know how you are going to apply technology for their roadmap, but you recognize that they're at the QR code today and they want to get to the AI 15 years from now. And you are the one who can walk in the door and mind that gap for them, create that pathway, and it all seems logical. In doing so, you convert a corporate structure that's also very focused on quarterly responses into thinking about a 10, 15, 20-year plan. Right? You give them the technology tools, the little gems, the little, "Oh yeah, yeah, no, no, we're thinking about it. Yeah. Oh yeah, it's on the roadmap. Yeah. Yeah, it's coming, it's coming." Right. You give them the tools to be able to go back to their investors and convert their investors from being quarterly quick-turnaround reward investors to being decades-long investors. And with that, there's stability, there's room for creativity, there's time for creativity, and you can trickle that down to your community and the kind of culture of your business, as opposed to, "This quarter, we must turn something around." Right.
0:31:00.7 Yadin Porter De León: Churn and burn. Churn and burn.
0:31:00.8 Yon Hardisty: Churn and burn. Yeah. And it's nice to burn things sometimes, absolutely...
0:31:07.2 Yadin Porter De León: To move fast and break things.
0:31:08.0 Yon Hardisty: But not necessarily investment.
0:31:10.9 Yadin Porter De León: Yes, if you don't move fast in.
0:31:13.1 Yon Hardisty: Yeah, and the nice thing is, when you give time for that creativity and there's not the extreme pressure for quick turnarounds, you have the ability to take team members and to take investors and to take even customers and move them into these quick churn and burn, try it break it environments. But you've built the expectation, it's not, If this burns, we're all done, it's, This may burn, but we're gonna learn something. And boy, if it doesn't burn, oh my God, now we've got something for that roadmap.
0:31:43.1 Yadin Porter De León: That's fabulous. Well, Yon, this has been a fascinating conversation. I think the analogies that you're putting forward to the minding the gap, the steady state versus quick iteration I think are really powerful. Where can people find you out in the world? Can they find you in virtual reality? In the metaverse? Where can they see what you're working on, what you're doing?
0:32:03.4 Yon Hardisty: I try to exist all over socials just because it keeps me in touch with my kids.
0:32:08.3 Yadin Porter De León: There you go.
0:32:08.4 Yon Hardisty: So that's a good place. Healthtek Creative or Healthtek Incorporated is our newest business, and it's certainly a passion for us and brings together, blends together that technology and healthcare and purpose, so that's another place to find us as well.
0:32:23.4 Yadin Porter De León: Fabulous. Well, Yon, it's, like I said, great conversation, and thank you very much for joining the CIO Exchange Podcast.
0:32:30.5 Yon Hardisty: Thanks for helping me crystallize even my own thoughts, I learned a lot during this podcast. It's awesome.
0:32:32.5 Yadin Porter De León: Oh, this is good, this was two-way here, this was fabulous, I love it when I can make that happen.
0:32:37.0 Yon Hardisty: Absolutely, absolutely. I'm gonna ruminate for some time on this.
0:32:46.7 Yadin Porter De León: Wonderful. Excellent, well, thank you so much.
0:32:46.7 Speaker 3: Thank you for listening to this latest episode. Please consider subscribing to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and for more insights from technology leaders, as well as global research on key topics, visit vmware.com/cio.