Marathons, Skydiving, and Engineering Leadership with Frank Livaudais

Summary

In this episode of Automox Insiders, Maddie Regis interviews Frank Livaudais, Senior VP of Engineering at Automox. Frank shares his journey from software engineering to executive leadership, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and continuous improvement in technology. He discusses his unique experiences, including his time at iFly indoor skydiving and his passion for marathon running.

Transcript

Maddie Regis: Hey everyone, this is Maddie Regis, paid media manager at Automox, and I'm back bringing you a new episode of IT Insiders, which is Automox's podcast that introduces you to the people behind the product. This month, we are talking about working with executives. So who better to join us than Frank Livaudais who is the Senior VP of Engineering here at Automox. Frank, thanks so much for joining us.

Frank Livaudais: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Maddie Regis: Awesome. All right, well, let's get into it. Tell me a little bit about your career background. I think you started in software engineering, but kind of take me through how you got started to where you are today.

Frank Livaudais: Sure, so I've always been into computers. started, I wrote a Bulletin Board software when I was in junior high school and then took the high school computer science classes as easy A's and then learned how to write cheats for video games so I could make my players do whatever they wanted to do, learning how to kind of hack the games. Then I went to school, I've got a degree in economics as well as computer science from the University of Texas at Austin, so Hook 'em. Glad that our football team's finally back and not being terrible anymore.

And then I started writing assembly language code for modems and multiplexers back in the mid 90s where you had no screens. And so your debugging was consisted of toggling lights on to see where you got to. And then if you messed it up, you had to reflash your ROMs and try it again. So modern technologies with the IDEs where we've got Copilot and Sonar, they're telling you how to code and how to where you messed up is just mind blowing for me. still.

Every day I'm still amazed that stuff like that exists. So it's awesome. And we're trying to roll that out more here at Automox to make our engineers be more efficient and get going. And so then I went from kind of software engineering, you know, writing an assembly code. So then I took, you know, working on point of sale systems, wrote a touch screen for a gas station. And then I started my first company in 1996. And so that you really kind of wind up learning how to do a bunch of things that you wouldn't have gotten exposed to when you're worried about meeting payroll. So.

Like, right, how do you iterate fast? How do you figure out what your customers want? How do you get somebody to pay you for what you're doing? And then after that, I've kind of been acquired multiple times. I usually wind up helping lead engineering teams for the acquiring companies. So kind of done the gamut from being a two person tech team where I do all the backend and my friend does all the front end stuff to running multiple global engineering teams across a couple, know, multi-billion dollar public companies.

I really like to stay at the  size company that Automox is. think it's a really fun, we've got product market fit. We just have to get better at executing. So we've got the, you know, we've got a really good team. We've got a really good idea of where we need to go. And now it's just a matter of how do we go execute and actually do it. So it's a really fun time to be here.

Maddie Regis: Yeah, for sure. Lots of exciting things coming up. And I think I'm sure for you, running your own business gave you lot of extra perspective outside of just, you know, the sort of like technical side of things. So.

Frank Livaudais: Yeah, you really learn to focus on like you do your you work on cool things on your own time. You don't do cool things necessarily. You're like, I need to do something that's either going to make us more money, make us more efficient. How do you make sure that everything you're spending your resources on is driving help for the business? Because that's how we all stay employed and keep people with jobs and provide value for our customers.

Maddie Regis: Sure. So I did look at your LinkedIn and I know you also, you mentioned this to us when you were introducing yourself to all of us Automox-er's but you worked at iFly indoor skydiving and I just have to ask what that was like because that's definitely not something you see on many people's resumes.

Frank Livaudais: Yeah, that was actually a really a lot of fun. So it was like, was an experiential retail company and the CEO had been trying to get me to go there for a couple of months and I just didn't really get it. was like, I don't know anything about fluid dynamics or wind dynamics and how to run wind tunnels. Like I'm not your guy. And he's like, I don't need that. I have that solved. I'm looking for somebody to kind of upgrade the technology because there was about 90 locations and kind of unify everything, build out data warehouses and things. And then when I got there, they were like, no one from corporate has ever learned how to fly upside down.

And I'm super competitive. So I was the wrong person to kind of give that message to. And my house is, you know, within five, 10 minutes from the Austin indoor skydiving tunnel. So I spent a lot of time going and learning. so now I can fly upside down, throw flips and do all those things, which is a skill that has no value once you get out of the wind tunnel, but sure was fun. And then again, trying to figure out how do you maximize revenue? You know, we realized that it might, me and my team were flying during customer hours. So I got my engineers certified on how to drive the wind tunnel.

And one of our IT people had used to be an instructor, so we got him recertified so he could be our instructor. And we would go open up the tunnel at 7 a.m. on Wednesdays, and then go fly for a couple hours and then go to work so that we could still get all of our fun in without taking minutes away from paying customers.

Maddie Regis: I love that, that's awesome. Well, may not be the most useful skill, but a very cool and fun skill nonetheless. So, you know, when you're not Senior VP-ing, what do you get up to outside of work?

Frank Livaudais: Super fun. I really like traveling. I run a lot. So I've run 257 marathons or longer across the world. So I've done one in every US state. think I have 12 or 13 countries, four of the continents, and eventually we'll plan on getting all of the continents. And so it's a really good way to kind of, you get a ground level view of what a city looks like. And then my wife will be like, all right, tell me the parts that are interesting that we can go, that I, that I want to go see because she does not run. and then you go to different towns that you probably would never have gone to. like a lot of the smaller places in the US we would have gone, would not have gone to if there wasn't a marathon.

And then you get to meet interesting people. I like to eat a lot. And so that's also partially why I have to run so much so that I can keep eating so much. But, I always run in a University of Texas cycling jersey. So I've run, I've been running for 20 years. And so I see people that I'll run with, you know, 10 years ago, that'll be like, Hey, do you remember when we ran this? This is so great. Just cause I'm always in the same outfit. And so you get to, it's an interesting community where nobody cares if you're a janitor or a CEO, everybody just wants to talk about like, what are you training for? How are things going? It's like a very open community. So it's really fun to hang out with.

Maddie Regis: I love that. Well, if anybody listening is a marathoner runner, keep an eye out for for Frank's Jersey when he's out there doing his thing. Love it. OK, so let's get into a little bit more, more technical, more business chat here. So, you you've been on both the technical side and the executive side and like sort of a combination of the two sides of business. So what would you say is a valuable lesson you've learned from each side, technical and exec that you still use in your role today?

Frank Livaudais: Yeah, I mean, think the biggest one is you want to fail fast and continue to improve and that you're way better off doing nine one month projects than one nine month projects because your assumptions change the world changes so fast. Like what you think you're going to be doing in December when you start the year is probably not what you're going be doing. So if you're originally focused on that, you'll miss the mark of where your customers want you to be.

You want to be able to pivot when economics change, global markets change, when we had the Ukraine invasion that changed a bunch of things. And so you had to kind of pivot to figure out what you're going to do there. And if you're super, super rigid, you'll miss out on opportunities. So you want to be able to have the flexibility to say, actually, we're going to stop doing this thing we said we were going to do because we now have a better opportunity. Let's go get this done. Showing customers continuous improvement as opposed to making them wait.

is more likely to keep them happy. And that's one of the things we're trying to change here at Automox now is making our releases much more frequent, doing kind of let's try to end every week better. If you see something that when you're in the code that can be improved, just go ahead and improve it. You don't need permission to go make things better. Let's just continue to give, if we see little things, at the end of the day, maybe you can make a UI look a little bit better that wasn't necessarily planned, but you see it it's annoying and it doesn't make sense. Let's go ahead and fix it. So continue to try to just stack a bunch of little improvements.

I think the thing is if you get like 1 % better every day, you're like 357 times better or something absurd by the course of a year. It's like something amazing. So you don't have to solve everything all at once, but just continue to get better and kind of come up for air, look and see what's happening. Has anything changed in your assumptions? And then just go continue to execute. And really that's what people want is they want to get to the predictability. If you say you're committing to something, you know that the team is actually going to hit it. Cause then you have, cause on our company,

engineering builds things and then everything else happens downstream. So all the go-to-market teams are dependent on us actually doing what we say and they can't make plans if we can't hit our dates. And so it's a matter of how do we get more predictive so that the rest of the company is empowered to do their roles.

Maddie Regis: Yeah, I love it. It's like that saying, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? part of that. yeah, mean, like we were saying, technology especially has evolved so quickly. just like you were talking about how it was at the start of your career and then even to now, with AI coming onto the scene, it's definitely evolved super rapidly with that. So you got to adapt and keep up with it.

Frank Livaudais: Thanks.

Maddie Regis: Okay, now we'll get into a little bit more of fun stuff. I always ask on this podcast what you would give or what you would name our company if it wasn't called Automox. So super curious to hear your answer on that.

Frank Livaudais: So I'm definitely more on the engineering side than the marketing side. So I would probably come up with something super boring, like, you know, Amazing Patching or, you know, Guaranteed Patching is going to get it done. I actually liked the name and I love the logo. I love Otto. I, like when I was really young, I learned how to draw like a square based robot. And so I, and people, all my friends know like I'll draw it on everything. If you're having to put something on a wine glass to differentiate it's yours. I draw my same robot that I learned when I was like three or four years old. So finally working for a company where the logo or the mascot is actually a robot is really exciting. And so getting to meet Otto in person at AWS was pretty funny to see people come up and see like, is he a real robot? What's happening? So I don't think I could come up with something as cool that would also have a great name for Otto for the mascot.

Maddie Regis: love that. Well, yeah, I agree. We love Otto here. And yeah, if you didn't know if you ever get to go to any of our trade shows in person, we do have an actual I think he's like a seven foot tall working robot. So he's super cool. And yeah, I think it's it's it's fate, right? You've been drawing robots your whole life and now you're working in a company that has one.

Frank Livaudais: That's right. And I have my Otto action figure, so I'm pretty excited.

Maddie Regis: Love it. Yep. That's a collectible for sure. Okay. Well, I've just got one last thing for you, which we always wrap with a little game. So I've just got a couple of questions for you around executives and bosses in pop culture since we're talking a little bit about executives and tech and IT. So the first question is a little bit around the execs, a little bit around your marathon running.

If you had to pick from these four famous fictional bosses or execs to run a race against, who would you pick? And I've got Michael Scott from The Office, Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, Miranda Priestley from The Devil Wears Prada, or Don Draper from Mad Men.

Frank Livaudais: I think I could beat them all, but I would probably pick Don Draper so at the end we could have a nice whiskey.

Maddie Regis: Love that. Awesome. Okay. And then another fun one. Grand Canyon University compiled Google search results from each state across the U.S. to determine their favorite fictional boss. So I'm going to give you three options and you tell me which one do you think your home state of Texas picked. So A is Darth Vader. B is Tony Stark or Iron Man from Marvel and C is Dumbledore.

Frank Livaudais: I feel like Texas would probably pick Tony Stark because we we're into aviation and NASA and a bunch of other things.

Maddie Regis: You know, I really thought that too. I was surprised. It's actually Darth Vader, which I was, that was a fairly popular one across the country and I was kind of surprised about that. It's an interesting choice.

Frank Livaudais: They're the favorite boss? That's crazy that you picked Darth Vader to be your favorite. Interesting.

Maddie Regis: Yeah, I can't say I would necessarily want him to be my boss, but you know, to each their own. all right, well, thank you so much for coming on, Frank. And to all our listeners, follow us on YouTube, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts, and stay tuned for new episodes from the Autonomous IT Podcast Network every Tuesday and Thursday. Frank, thanks for your time.

Frank Livaudais: Thank you so much for having me, Maddie.