https://youtu.be/pTY2RIuxNDs
Rob Hirschfeld is the Founder and CEO of The RackN Digital Rebar platform that helps organizations scale their automation efforts. We discuss ways to turn customers into raving fans, the fastest way to build trust in your business, and the pros and cons of open-source software.
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Groom Customer Champions with Rob Hirschfeld
Our guest on the show is Rob Hirschfeld, who is the founder and CEO of RackN, a digital rebar platform that helps organizations scale their automation efforts. Rob, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
Well, I'm very curious about you and your business here. So we're going to dive right in. So tell me a little bit about your journey. How did you end up founding a company that does Digital rebar of all things?
Oh, my entrepreneurial journey for RackN started over 20 years ago when I was doing standard IT work and I was consulting. And at the time, I just kept having the same issue over and over again, which is an operations issue. I could write software. It took me as much time to deploy, install, get everything working as it took to write the software. And I found that incredibly frustrating. And that led me to starting my first startup, which was a cloud, one of the very first cloud companies.
My co-founder and I actually patented cloud back in 2001. So it's a rare distinction. I'd never made any money on it. We were way too early. It's always a challenge of being an entrepreneur. And, you know, a lot of ways what RackN does with Digital Rebar is exactly the same part of that journey. It's asking that same question of “Why is it so hard for us to do the backend stuff, the, you know, running the infrastructure, making things work, you know, having that automation not take as much time as it takes.” It's been a frustration of mine going all the way back. And, you know, RackN is my latest foray into trying to solve that problem as a product.
Well, you know, as I was getting ready for this interview, I was looking into your product and into your website, it says digital rebar. Let me Google that to see what this is exactly. And all the, you know, all the information I kept coming in was all about reinforced concrete and metal rods that are used in reinforced concrete. And the only info source that came up was your website about it. So I guess you coined that thing as well, right?
It's definitely nice to have a product name that is unique in the industry. So Rebar, so for people who don't know, Rebar is the steel that people put into concrete to make it more durable and ductile. It's a core. It's actually the absolute core requirement for buildings, skyscrapers and buildings and bridges. And, you know, digital rebar for us as a name accomplish two things. One is, it is actually a good description of what RackN provides, which is the foundational pieces for building infrastructure and all the things that you build cloud applications, IT businesses around, which is really our focus.
But it's also an homage back to the original name of the product, which was Crowbar. And so when we started this journey, we started with an open source project that we named Crowbar, being the first tool that you use in— there's a Half-Life video game— and the first you start with a crowbar and no other tool. And so the idea was that you would use a crowbar to get your infrastructure built. And when that name— when it was time to sunset that name, the team wanted something that people in the know, wink and nod, would understand that was a reference back. And so Rebar accomplished both purposes. It turned out to be quite a good name for us.
Okay, well, definitely interesting and we're gonna get into this a little bit more. I have more questions, but before we go there, let's talk about the framework that you're bringing on this show. And I think we call it the build an internal champion framework or build internal champions framework.