The following interview is a conversation we had with Joshua Aaron, CEO of Aiden, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $3 Million Raised to Build the Future of Software Packaging and Deployment
Joshua Aaron
Thanks a lot, Brett.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. Excited to have you here.
Joshua Aaron
So, before we can talk about what.
Brett
You’Re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Joshua Aaron
Sure. Well, I started out lights in professional way as an industrial engineer. I went to University of Michigan out of college. I was going to probably go work for a Wafer fab in Salt Lake City with National Semiconductor. But I decided instead of the last minute to switch and go into consulting in New York. And I worked for a company that basically had us in very large It infrastructure projects, designing data centers and trading floors. I did a very large one for Credit Suisse First Boston, which at the time was the largest one in New York City. And then I went on and did a bunch of other things like that. I founded my own company in 1997 called Business Technology Partners. We did a lot of those large It infrastructure projects. We even moved the New York Board of Trade, which exchange floors don’t typically move like New York stock exchanges never moved.
Joshua Aaron
So that was a very marquee project. And other out of the ground buildings like the Trump Soho Hotel in New York and Reuters three Times Square. Then we got into being a managed service provider and we started to acquire other managed service provider companies and we got in really into the It support service side of things. I then spent seven years as a CIO in healthcare for the New York Foundling, a child foster care and developmentally disabled adult services organization in New York with about 4000 people. From there I went back to Business Technology Partners to do more consulting for a little while and then left to go be the CTO of our largest customer at the time. And I worked in private equity for two years as a CTO in the Bay Area and that’s where I met my technical Co-Founder and Aiden, Sean Maloney.
Joshua Aaron
And we started this journey together in May of 2020.
Brett
Wow, sounds like a very exciting career. And two questions we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and as a leader.
Joshua Aaron
What CEO do you admire the most.
Brett
And what do you admire about that’s?
Joshua Aaron
A great question. I was on the Global Board of Entrepreneurs Organization for almost seven years, and I have met through both Entrepreneurs Organization New York, and that a lot of great leaders and CEOs and founders. The one that always sticks out in my mind to this day is Ted Leonzas. I don’t even know if your audience would know who that is anymore. He’s not as popular as he used to be, but he was one of the founders of AOL, and he went on to build a great company called Monumental Sports and Entertainment. He’s a billionaire, and he wrote a book called The Business of Happiness. Always really resonated with me. He talks a lot about business, family, personal, and how he started his companies to make people happier and more successful. And that’s exactly why I started my company. So I feel I’m making people happier and more successful with their technology.
Joshua Aaron
But it’s really about being well rounded in your life and having a good center and having good foundational practices with your family and your loved ones and everyone else. And I just feel like his journey has been really a touched, special, blessed journey. And when I hear him talk and I’ve read his book, it’s always resonated with me. That’s the kind of leader and entrepreneur that I want to be in the world.
Brett
Nice. Very interesting call out. I’ve never heard of him, to be honest, so I’ll be digging into that. Something else I wanted to zoom in on there is that it’s EO. So a couple of years back, my brother was deeply involved in EO, San Diego. So I spent a lot of time going to events, and it’s such an incredible organization. So being part of EO, what would you say is the number one thing that you’ve really learned from the organization?
Joshua Aaron
I think you learn how to get the business school of light. Not only do you make great friendships and a great network, but many of us who are entrepreneurs didn’t go back and go to business school. And in EO you find a lot of people like that. Of course, there are some who did right, but I never did. And I really feel like going through the tour of all the different content and speakers and great people that they bring in, plus the experience sharing that you get from your fellow founders that are in your forums and things like that. It’s just been this incredible journey that helped me go. I like to say it like, dialed up my CEO DNA tremendously by being in that organization for over 17 years.
Brett
Amazing. And I saw that we shared a connection with Alex Pellegrino, and I was wondering how you know him? But that makes sense now. It’s that it’s their EO.
Joshua Aaron
Yes. Alex is a real estate entrepreneur and investor and great guy. A lot of fun to be around. One of my favorite people in EO, actually.
Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. Now let’s talk about books. Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder? And this can be a business book or a personal book?
Joshua Aaron
Yeah, well, I hope this isn’t too long of answer, but I always say there’s three books that really had an impact on me in my journey as being a Founder. The first one was Scaling Up and actually why I joined Entrepreneurs Organization in the first place. I saw a presentation by Verne Harnish. Then I read his book scaling up. The whole concept of getting your whole business down to a one page strategic plan and really simplifying and giving people a way to focus on the vision and the strategies and the priorities and then what he calls the rocks and the goals and the things you’re going after. That just really was very helpful to me in building my first company and all the companies I’ve been involved in. And then Death by Meeting, which I don’t care if you’re a Founder of a startup company or you’re running in a large organization.
Joshua Aaron
Understanding meeting rhythm. That book is by Patrick Lencione. He’s written a bunch of other great business books, but I think The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is another one of his great ones. But Death by Meeting, I just really found I made my entire team read it at every company that I’ve ever been part of because I want them to understand the importance of cadence and Meeting Rhythm and those rituals in the organization and how to run better and more effective meetings. And I leave everybody feeling fulfilled when they come out of the room. And then the last one is good to great. I’m sure a lot of people bring this one up, but Jim Collins and the part of it that I have always just kind of clung onto is first who, then what? And getting the right people on the bus. I mean, I’ve just always felt like you get the right people in the organization will go where it needs to go.
Brett
Love that. Such a good classic book. And on the topic of Verne is such an incredible speaker. I’ve seen him speak maybe two or three times, but he’s so good, he’s so powerful. I love his new of the world.
Joshua Aaron
Every time I see Vern speak, I come away from the experience feeling fired up, ready to go, and take all the lessons from that experience back to my business and just make it grow from there.
Brett
100% agree.
Joshua Aaron
Growth guy.
Brett
Yes. Now let’s switch gears and let’s talk about what you’re building day at Aiden. So can you tell us just about the origin story behind the company?
Joshua Aaron
Sure. Well, I mentioned first who, then what. I really feel like that’s part of the reason Aiden is here today. When I was working as a CTO in private equity. I was a customer of my Co-Founder, Sean Maloney. Sean had a great library of automations for Microsoft Windows, and helped our company. We had something like over 11,380 critical and high vulnerabilities showing up on our vulnerability scans with a product called Tenable. And we had consultants and advisors in from large cybersecurity consultancies like Stro Spreadberg, which are now part of Aon, and everybody who’s concerned about this issue. Sean’s technology helped us remove those vulnerabilities in the enterprise and get down to under 300 in less than a month. That was when the light bulb first went off. And at that point I realized he really had something special. Not only did he have something special, but he was a special person.
Joshua Aaron
He consistently would get reviewed by my team on the internal side. He was a consultant to us at that time, and he would consistently get reviewed as the most valuable player on our entire It staff. Right? And so I just knew I wanted to do something with Shawn. And then when the opportunity came up, he came to me with an idea over the summer of 2019 about building an AI bot to sort of meet him. More automation in the automations he had already created. And it was just an idea at that time. And I decided to resign from private equity and go on this journey to build Aiden. And we launched Aiden in May of 2020. And that’s really how it all started. And we just started bringing in other great people into the organization.
Brett
Wow. May 2020. Some interesting stuff was happening in the world at that time.
Joshua Aaron
Yes, absolutely. Funny enough, I mean, true story, I resigned in November of 19 and gave my former employer three months notice. So I couldn’t start until February of 2020. And if you recall what happened in February of 2020, all of a sudden the world changed. Right? COVID hit. Everybody was talking about it, but it actually put us in a great position to put our heads down and focus on product. And we spent that first year really building the product out, filing our patents, testing things. We did take over two customers, my company and another private equity firm that he had been working with. So we had some proving ground, let’s say, when we first started. But that forced us to really build and test and validate everything were doing in our approach before we launched the AI bot product in the beginning of 2021. And so we knew a thing was bulletproof before we even launched.
Brett
And talk to me about the psychology just going through your brain in February 2020. Were you thinking, oh s***, should I try to go back and get that job that I just left? Or were you just heads down, ready to charge full speed ahead?
Joshua Aaron
Well, I’m an entrepreneur at heart, and I had the advantage of the fact that I do have another company in New York business technology Partner so I guess you could say because I had somewhat of a backstop, I wasn’t panicking too much and I really was passionate about this journey. In fact, COVID only made me more passionate because I realized that what were building could have tremendous implications in healthcare in the future. There are so many Microsoft Windows endpoints in healthcare and the task of managing them in an environment where you’re always worried about the next critical emergency and things like COVID if we can automate things in that space, and we’re starting to a little bit now, I think that’s so impactful in the world. And so that actually got me even more excited.
Brett
Nice. It’s a good entrepreneurial mindset to have. Now what about traction? Can you share any numbers or metrics that show the type of traction that you’re seeing with customers?
Joshua Aaron
Sure. We actually had a press release about this, I think a year ago that we grew five X in 2021 and really added a bunch of great customers this last year. We’ve grown three X in the last year. And in the face of tremendous economic headwinds over 2022, we’re still growing on unicorn path. And we’ve also got tremendous validation of financial services industry with four out of the five top private equity firms already using Aiden and a whole bunch of other financial companies. We have a bunch of life sciences companies now and some law firms involved and we’re starting to broaden horizontally into other industries. We even have a building materials company that makes immense siding and things like that. So we’re proving the point that any company can benefit from this kind of It automation that we’re building.
Brett
And when it comes to market categories, how do you think about your market category? Is this It automation? Is It software packaging and deployment or what is the actual market category?
Joshua Aaron
That is a great question. I mean, kind of if you look at typical Gartner categories, there are It automation and software deployment, there’s also vulnerability management, cybersecurity angle. We don’t neatly fit into any one of those categories. We span a little bit across all of those categories, including a new one that’s being heavily touted digital experience management. Because when you make the endpoint run better, the end users have better experience with their technology. So Aiden has implications in all of those areas.
Brett
And what are your thoughts when it comes to engaging with analyst firms like Gartner? Is that something that you’re actively doing or going to do soon or how do you view the impact and influence of analysts?
Joshua Aaron
I think in what we’re doing, analyst validation is really important because the CIOs, CTOs and CSOs that we tend to market to are reading those reports and using them to build their case studies and ROIs and proof points for their executive leadership when they’re selecting new technology. Plus, we ourselves can learn a lot from those analyst firms that are doing research in the industry about our go to market and what they need and what they want and where to take the product and the evolution of the vision of aid in the future. Certainly important and a big part of what we’re doing. We are at early stage, so we’ve only recently engaged with Gartner a little bit. They did cover us in a recent report. On November 16, were brought up in a report called how to Maximize the Benefits of Windows Modern Management. And when we read the report, we really feel like that has nailed it in terms of the sweet spot and why Eden is so important.
Joshua Aaron
One of their biggest sort of findings at the beginning of the report is more than 85% of companies are going to move to Windows Modern Management over the next three years. And they even state that 83% of companies have already started making tremendous investments in that area over the last year. So Aiden is designed to automate a tremendous amount of the work, and particularly the tedious and repetitive work that goes into executing flawlessly with Microsoft Modern Manage. They mentioned us a couple of times in the back of the report, which was great coverage for us. And we’re just getting started on that kind of analyst chart.
Brett
Nice, makes a lot of sense.
Joshua Aaron
And what are you doing, do you.
Brett
Think, to rise above all of the noise that exists in the market today, to stand out and land customers in the way that you are?
Joshua Aaron
That is a great question. I mean, this is innovation selling effectively because we are a paradigm shift in the way that Windows Modern Management or software deployment and patch management and building machines has ever been done before. The typical approach is an agent based approach or imaging, which is cloning computers. And we are neither. We’re an AI bot that programmatically builds machines and updates them to keep them and put them into desired state configurations based on reading the company’s policies in plain English. So we’re using AI and natural language processing to go and execute. And we have to not only get over sort of fears about AI and all those things, we have to educate people on how this is a new and modern approach to doing it and why it’s better and frankly, more secure because we’re not agent based. And some of the biggest challenges we have are we’re selling into people that are doing a lot of this work the old way, the manual way.
Joshua Aaron
And sometimes people are concerned about job replacements, right? And the other thing that’s a big challenge is it’s a paradigm shift over what I call the status quo. The way things are going, people will say, oh well, we somehow are building our computers or we somehow seem to be getting all of our patching done and they often don’t even realize how much it could be improved in their own process. And so a lot of it is about education. A lot of it is about proving ROI from other customers we’re working with and showing case studies and results. Like we see companies reducing their vulnerabilities even when they’ve been in the middle of a big patch management program putting an aid and getting as much as a 97% reduction in CVDs and vulnerabilities across their Windows enterprise, or a 95% reduction in the amount of man hours that they’re spending managing their computers and building computers.
Joshua Aaron
Or 75% reduction in help desk tickets that are attributable to patches or Windows issues or application issues in Windows. So it’s really about making those results highly evident and then really talking to.
Brett
People and educating makes a lot of sense. And as I’m sure you’ve experienced on this journey, going to market with an innovative product is never easy. What’s been the greatest challenge you’ve faced so far, and how did you overcome that challenge?
Joshua Aaron
Well, I think the biggest challenge that we’ve had so far that’s a great question. It’s probably just getting our new aid envision reporting system out into the marketplace. When we first started Aiden, our customers told us that they would effectively do their own reporting. And so we had this great bot that was going out and updating their computers, but there wasn’t a lot of visibility around it and they couldn’t really show people. And so when we realized that, we launched this project to build something called a Vision, which we just released into public preview in November. We’ve had it in beta since April with nine of our customers, and now it’s with all of our customers. And all of a sudden we got the observability visibility and transparency into their environment. We saw the adoption of Aiden bot in these enterprises. Even companies that are our customers that were using it already didn’t realize there were places that they could be using it more.
Joshua Aaron
And so the adoption just spiked and went through the roof. And now that’s giving a lot of companies the validation that this thing works so well. And so I think that was a big learning for us, is that people may know something to be true, but they don’t always have a way to show it. And we had to develop something that would help them easily show it in one pane of glass.
Brett
Amazing. Last question here for you. Let’s zoom out into the future. So, three years from today, what does Aiden look like as a company and what’s your impact on customers?
Joshua Aaron
That’s a great question. We have a Bhag in the company big Harry OTA’s goal of aiding, ultimately running on every licensed copy of Microsoft Windows. And the next three to five years is really about automating more and more parts of the process. We’re an It automation company and being able to scale both the reach of the product and the intelligence in the product. So everything we’re doing now is things like we still have application packaging engineers in our organization that has to look every patch Tuesday and figure out what new software came out, package it, added to the libraries and repositories so that the bot can go and deploy it. We want to automate more and more of that ingestion of the software updates so that we don’t even need humans doing that work. That can be done with automation as well. And we’re actually just in the process of filing a continuation patent.
Joshua Aaron
We have a patent that we filed in July of 2020. We received it in September of last year, 2022, and we are now filing another patent about all of this. We have a lot more technology that we’re building and there are many more parts of the process that we can automate over the next couple of years that’s going to lead to more product led growth and faster adoption of the aid and bot.
Brett
Aiden
Joshua Aaron
Aiden solution set.
Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. And that’s certainly exciting. Dr unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today’s interview before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as you build Aiden up, where’s the best place for them to go? Yeah.
Joshua Aaron
Aiden stands for AI for desktops and enterprise networks. Meet aiden.com. And also you can find us on LinkedIn. You can find us on Twitter. You can go to my LinkedIn page. And there’s plenty of social media about the company now.
Brett
Awesome.
Joshua Aaron
Well, thank you so much for taking.
Brett
The time to chat, talk about what you’re building, and really share this vision. This is all incredibly exciting and we look forward to seeing you execute on this vision.
Joshua Aaron
Thanks so much, Brett. It was great talking to you today.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
Joshua Aaron
You too. Bye.
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