Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com. It is, of course, home of the ambitious upstart. And today I’ve got with me actually a guest and the person who introduced me to the guest. Christophe, good to see you, man.
Christophe: Hey, how’s it going, Andrew?
Andrew: So usually the person who introduces me to the guest doesn’t get mentioned. I should maybe, I guess, but I don’t want to cram too many names and too much information. But you happened to be in the office of the person who you suggested I interview. Why are you in his office?
Christophe: Because I work there. I work at Linux Academy. I’ve been there for about nine months now.
Andrew: And why’d you think that I should have him on?
Christophe: Because this is an awesome company and we’ve grown so much and I just thought it fit perfectly with the style of the show. I’ve been a huge fan of the show for probably a year and a half or maybe two years and a half or something like that. Yeah. I thought it would be a great fit.
Andrew: Yeah. And you actually took my up my suggestion that if anyone is listening to Mixergy and wants to come by the office they should. You came to the office, right?
Christophe: Yeah.
Andrew: Did we have a drink?
Christophe: We did. It was Thursday night.
Andrew: Thursday night we had a drink, and then we went out the next day and sat and worked outside right next to AT&T Park here.
Christophe: Yeah. That’s awesome place to work at. I did not expect that at all. Beautiful day too, San Francisco, that was my first time going there. It’s such a chill place. I really enjoyed it. Thanks a lot.
Andrew: It really is. And nobody goes there. No one realizes how nice it is and we got to spend some together and work there. Well, thanks for making the introduction. We’re about to start the interview with him.
Christophe: Thanks, guys. Good luck.
Anthony: Thanks, Christophe.
Andrew: And the person that you guys are about to meet, his name is Anthony James. This really is an incredible story. Anthony James decided that he wanted to create a website for … actually, it started out as a Linux site, right, Linux-focused website?
Anthony: It did. Yes.
Andrew: And then it expanded. He is the founder of Linux Academy. They offer online training and certification in Linux, OpenStack, big data, Azure, DevOps and AWS. I’m going to get into how you started this company, why since you were doing so well and grew it so well, why did you decide to take in funding and the struggles of letting go as an entrepreneur who does so much within the company.
The whole thing is thanks to two great sponsors. The first is HostGator, which Anthony and I were talking about before we started. And the second is Pipedrive, which will help you close sales. I’ll tell you more about both of those later. Anthony, welcome.
Anthony: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to come on the show. It’s great to meet you.
Andrew: What kind of revenues are you guys doing now?
Anthony: So that’s something that we generally don’t talk too much about it. However, I was kind of told you were going to ask that question.
Andrew: Yeah.
Anthony: So I decided to maybe make a special occasion. If you tell me how much you’re doing in revenue, I’ll share with you how much we’re doing in revenue.
Andrew: I’m definitely doing less than you are. I’m doing so little that we wouldn’t be on Mixergy with the Mixergy story on Mixergy. But I don’t want to push you to say what you’re not comfortable with. I want to make sure that I get revenue in to the point that you’re comfortable with but not beyond that.
Anthony: So I’ll be happy to touch a little bit on it. Last year we did $2.2 million, and really almost the entire year we had three full-time staff members and two part-time staff members.
Andrew: That was it?
Anthony: That was it. And then today we have 26 full-time staff members. So we absolutely have grown substantially at that point.
Andrew: Fair to say more than double?
Anthony: Fair to say pretty close to that. Yes.
Andrew: Okay. I’m going to leave it there. By the way, the reason I don’t do that is I think when is started doing Mixergy, I decided that everyone else who was interviewing entrepreneurs about their companies was asking how much funding they took on and that was the big focus. I said, “You know what, that shouldn’t be the focus. It should be how successful is the business. Why don’t I be the first person to start asking about revenue since TechCrunch wasn’t doing it?”
The reason I didn’t want to start getting into what my revenues were was I don’t want to create a site where we are talking up big successful companies and showing how you too can be rich and I’m getting rich by telling you that you can get rich. I’m not in the Linux space. I’m in the business space, and it’s a very fine line between telling a really good story and getting into that shadowy part, the grey part of the internet space where you feel a little disgusted.
Anthony: I appreciate that. That’s great.
Andrew: All right. And my focus is to figure out how you started this business. Why don’t we go back to the business that was a precursor to this, the one that you actually started when you were in high school?
Anthony: I did.
Andrew: What was that business?
Anthony: It was Pinehead.com. It’s evolved a little bit. So we have our Penguin here, if you see the logo. His name is Pinehead the Penguin. So I wanted to have some roots to it. But it was essentially a Linux and PHP tutorial website. So we did a lot of kind of what we do now except for it was a blog post. If you were to look it up back in the Wayback engine, you would judge me very, very severely on my grammar.
Andrew: I did. It was like a message board platform that you were using, right?
Anthony: Very similar. So you had the post, and then you had comments and then you also had the ability to send messages to each individual person on the site. Really it came about because I wanted to learn how to write a platform. So that platform is actually written from scratch using PHP. That was my first PHP app. That’s why there’s not really big use to be able to message users across a tutorial website outside of comments. We’re talking about private messaging. But it was my ambition to learn how to do that, and that was actually my first way of doing it.
Andrew: And how well did it go?
Anthony: It went very well. It went very well. I didn’t know it went very well. So we had about 180,000 visitors every month. Slashdot has linked to it, some articles. We had a lot of linking relationships and people in the community that I communicated with all the time. I didn’t realize that was actually significant. If I would have realized how significant that was at the time, I was 16, I would not have turned it off.
Andrew: You know what? I never realized how significant Mixergy is. I remember once saying to Jason Fried of Basecamp, “It’s just not big enough.” And I saw him shake his head in the interview like, “Andrew, you’ve got to recognize what you’ve got here.” I wonder why you didn’t recognize it. For me it’s because I always want more. So whatever I have doesn’t feel significant enough. What was it about you?
Anthony: So I’ve got to tell you, everything about Pinehead.com really encompassed my passion. I was able to develop. I was able to work with Linux. I was able to teach people, and I was able to work with people. So I just really have a passion for helping and working and teaching people.
I would also say I was a 16-year old kid in high school, and I was chasing after and spending a lot of time with what I thought my first true love was and, you know, made maybe a bad decision when she said, “Hey, I’d rather you spend more time with me than time on that.” And I said, “That makes sense.” But I don’t know if it really made a lot of sense. It doesn’t make sense now if you were to ask me. That’s why I did it. I’ll touch on that.
My wife now, the reason I’m able to do Linux Academy is because she absolutely kind of supports that passion and we can share it together. Linux Academy is a lifestyle. So we’re able to do it and I’m able to participate and teach and help do those types of things. Having that support is so important. Who knew? I didn’t know at the time that especially when you have ambitions or whatnot, but who knew that’s important to look for in a partner as well? Sorry. I kind of derailed a little bit.
Andrew: No. I think that’s important. Was there ever a time it was hard for her to support you? It feels to me like, “Why wouldn’t she support you?” The business was doing well. It didn’t cost you that much to run it. It’s not like you were going to bankrupt the family. Was it ever challenging?
Anthony: So for Linux Academy absolutely. So the reason that we were able to grow how we did was because I did it on nights and weekends from my full-time job. So I would come home and work on Linux Academy, and I would spend all day Saturday and Sundays. I’d come home, get home about 6:00 and spend until about 12:00 in the morning. Especially when we had just gotten married at that time, we just did spend a lot of time together.
Andrew: I see.
Anthony: And she was passionate about the fact that she saw that passion in me and that ignited her and she just enjoyed that support and we were able to … bless her heart, I probably talk way too much about Linux Academy to her than I should. She’s just a great support partner for that.
Andrew: When you guys are out on the weekends, do you ever wear the shirt you’re wearing now, the one that has the Linux Academy logo on it?
Anthony: So a little bit of a secret, my Chief Operating Officer, you met him a little bit ago, he likes to say I Zuckerberg it because during the summer I wear basically sport shorts and we have Linux Academy hoodies and I wear them everywhere we go. It’s coming in to fall so I now wear jeans and a Linux Academy shirt. So anywhere I go, I have either the hoodie or the shirt on at all times.
Andrew: Really? Even on the weekends?
Anthony: It’s so easy. I just grab any shirt. If you look at my closet, it’s lined up between the undershirt–so I got about 12 undershirts, about 12 Linux Academy collared shirts and then about 12 Linux Academy hoodies.
Andrew: I see that.
Anthony: Everything else was from college.
Andrew: It’s been how many years now that you’ve been doing this?
Anthony: Five years.
Andrew: And you still have the same passion for it five years in after having done this even in high school?
Anthony: So that’s a great question. I can answer that by saying I do now, but as early or as recent as July, I actually came in the office one day and said, “I kind of don’t want to be here. This is tough for me. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t like it like I used to.” July was a challenging month. A lot of things changed with that. I had to let go of a lot of things. It doesn’t mean I couldn’t be involved with it, but wrote a lot of our platform, I taught a lot of our courses. At some point, you just have to let people come in and you can guide and lead. There can be burnout.
Andrew: Were you getting close to burnout?
Anthony: I was absolutely burned out.
Andrew: You were burned out.
Anthony: Absolutely. There was one day I remember leaving the office and my Chief Operating Officer, his name is Jonathan, lives close to me and he was driving back from lunch and he texted me and he said, “Are you going home for the day?” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “I figured. You were smiling in the truck when you saw me.” That’s literally after I saw that, it kind of dawned on me if I feel this way, there’s got to be some point in the future that my team is going to feel this way.
I kind of had the option. I could have quit. I could have gone back. What I realized is I had to make an adjustment. My role is going to be ever-changing. So what is my new role with 26 people on staff and continuing to grow? What is that new role, and why am I unhappy?
I took that and I basically spent some time around it, went to a leadership conference. I learned that my role is to ensure the culture of Linux Academy in that people around here, our staff feed off of the leader’s passion. So if I’m negative and I’m not passionate, there’s no way that they’re going to be happy. And one of the quotes from that conference was from Bill Hybels and he said, “You are responsible for reigniting your passion. It is not anybody else’s job.”
Every time we see a student pass, it gives me a big high uplift. It’s almost an addiction. I just love seeing it. But so many changes around the office, it’s more than a lifestyle company where it was basically last year a lifestyle company. We did it because we loved it, and then now we have investors and things are a little bit different.
Andrew: What month did you take investors?
Anthony: The process started in February, and it closed in March or April.
Andrew: I see. So soon after you got the funding, you hit burnout. And what you did, you’re saying, is you found a way to reignite your own passion, but you also started to process on more of the work to other people.
Anthony: Absolutely. So you have to empower your people to know what the core values are. So as CEO it’s my job to say, “Hey, this is our culture. This is our core values,” and help people understand how to be successful here, to make sure that we’re putting the student first and to make sure that the people that we bring on a team truly have an irrational passion for making sure that the student comes first. And then also making sure that they are passionate and that they’re well-taken care of.
So part of it was we just grew really fast. We like to have a very minimum hierarchy. We bring on really senior people in the industry that have managed teams. So it’s a little bit different. We bring on high quality, high level people that have experience because we’re training people that run clouds, right? So we have to also be experienced. It was a challenging environment to go from essentially 7 people, as of January 1st, all the way up to 26. That time in July was about 15, 16 people. It was just an adjustment for me.
Andrew: Do you think you’re out of the burnout stage now?
Anthony: I am. So you have to … I took that it’s up to you to reignite your own passion.
Andrew: So how did you do that?
Anthony: Multiple ways. So one, kind of offloading a little bit and empowering people. So, when we put processes in place, when I made sure that my team was empowered to know that when in doubt, student always comes first. When it doubt, do this. So we took the opportunity to empower it.
Two, we started spending more time … Before we spent all day every day on Skype. Sometimes with three people last year or this time last year it was three people when we just started hiring. It was really fun. You developed relationships. Then as you grow, you can’t do that anymore. Those people who were here originally have to become leaders with their own people.
So I started being intentional about playing games. We were playing Overwatch with some of our helpdesk people we had just hired, going out and doing things, inviting them over to the house for barbecue, kind of spending that time with them. That rejuvenated me. It made me feel connected.
When you grow large, that’s one of the things that … I won’t say we’re large, but it’s definitely bigger than the three full-time people we had this time last year. You kind of lose those relationships. What you have to take away from that is that those people also value those relationships. So if I feel like I’m missing it, my team’s got to be missing it, and it’s my responsibility to go in there and make sure that we all have those relationships with each other.
Andrew: I see. So that’s why when our producer asked you about what you to for fun, how you celebrate, you brought up game days where everyone except support in the company will get together and play StarCraft or some other multiplayer game.
Anthony: Support is included in that. What it is, is everybody gets together and then we joint do support. What I mean by support is we provide instructor help to our students. So if you have a question, you can ask us that question. So if it’s during our regular operating hours, we’re going to respond to you very quick. It’s not waiting for emergencies or something to break. It’s also providing help to the students.
So what we do is everybody gets on there. Then after a level–if you do StarCraft, after we go lose, which is generally what happens, I lose–we’ll stop and we’ll check out the community. We’ll check out the ticket systems. It happens every 30 to 35 minutes.
Andrew: And then you go back into the game.
Anthony: Absolutely.
Andrew: I see.
Anthony: Go ahead. I’m sorry.
Andrew: I was getting close to burnout last year too, maybe even hit burnout, I don’t know, and that’s why I started leaving the office. That’s why when Chris said, “Hey, can I come back after scotch night?” the next day to work together, I said, “I’m going to be out of the office. Let’s go …” And I told him where I was working and that’s where we sat. I found that just leaving the office helped.
Anthony: Absolutely.
Andrew: But it is up to us, and it kind of sucks because you know what? If you are not an entrepreneur and you had a boss, you could reasonably expect your boss to come in and sit you down and help reignite you and maybe even send you off. I know my wife works for Yahoo. When she was going through a tough period, her boss helped out, just jumped in and said, “Here’s what you should be doing.” We don’t have that as entrepreneurs.
Anthony: No. Nobody was really there along the way. My fault, I probably should have spent more. It wasn’t until I went to that leadership conference. I see where mentorship becomes important. And I just really didn’t know. It was a hard lesson, and if I would have done more before when I did, before it was problem, I probably would have known how to handle it and known also how to rejuvenate my passion.
Andrew: What was the event?
Anthony: It was called the Global Leadership Summit by the Willow Creek Institution. It’s kind of broken off. It’s called the Global Leadership Summit. They have Patrick Lencioni, they have Ford’s CEO, they have a lot of people come and talk every year. It’s rejuvenating. I walked away really excited. I went there and it just reenergized me.
The one other thing I realized was important was also having something I’m super passionate about that’s outside of Linux Academy. As you grow, inherently you’re going to be dealing with things that aren’t always the fun part. Teaching, helping students, that’s the best part. But when it comes to running a business, there’s a lot of not fun things. So I picked up with actually my Director of Business Development, he was big in it and he got me into Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
Andrew: Really?
Anthony: I don’t ever really feel bad after going and doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu for a day. So it’s definitely interesting.
Andrew: Yeah. That’s something that’s helped me too. That’s one of the first things I learned from Tim Ferriss. He said, “Find something that if your world at work sucks completely, it’s not your whole world that sucks completely.” So I’m looking at older versions of your site. It seems like the courses were up there from the beginning, right? The original model, am I right, was about courses?
Anthony: So everything has been about courses from the start, right? So we came on with the assumption of how do you learn? Really I started it because I was working and building streaming platforms on EC2, Amazon EC2, and I wanted to go get certified. I don’t read books. When I read a book, I can read it. If it’s a technology book, I just kind of glaze over. It’s not like reading a leadership book where I can easily grab the concepts. So, for me, it’s a lot of hands on.
So I wanted to gain more experience. So I developed the original Linux Academy learning management system, ran part of it on AWS, and then also taught the Linux Professional Institute Level I course. So that’s how it kind of went and came on. It was designed around the labs and the hands-on experience and the fact that there’s study guides. Everything I used to prepare is on the site for it.
Andrew: You were shooting the videos yourself?
Anthony: Absolutely.
Andrew: Using what? Was it video of you or just screen capture?
Anthony: So, just screen capture. Still to this day we still just do primarily screen capture where it shows the screen. I know the research shows differently. I just don’t know if there’s a lot of value seeing my mug everywhere. Maybe for the intro courses, which is where we’re trying to, “Hi, I’m Anthony,” where we introduce our stuff, maybe having the video on there so you can see what we look like.
Andrew: I find that it helps a little bit. When we do courses at Mixergy, I want the person on the screen a little bit at least because there’s something about seeing the person’s face that helps connect with the content. It was that. You also mentioned labs. You had labs from the beginning?
Anthony: Absolutely.
Andrew: What are labs, and when did you add them?
Anthony: So you were able to start a Linux server, a real server. It’s basically a virtual machine, and that was actually one of the primary reasons I did it because I thought it was so cool to be able to do that. So all of the courses followed along on that Linux Lab server. So fortunately LPIC just required that one server at the time. Now we have six and OpenStack Labs and AWS Labs and every other thing. But you’re able to follow along hands-on in that environment.
Andrew: And actually do it.
Anthony: And actually doing it. So I’m doing the same things in the videos as you’re doing. So not only that, you remove the issues of having multiple distributions. I remember the first time I started Linux just installing it. I was 14, way back in Slackware days, just installing was like, “I’m kind of done.” So if you could reduce the barrier to entry and get people on there doing the fun stuff and realizing what it is really helps with that learning experience.
Andrew: How did you set that up?
Anthony: The labs?
Andrew: Yeah.
Anthony: So our labs run across multiple cloud providers. It takes a cloud provider’s capability to scale. We have probably about 8,000 of them running at any given time and the ability to scale but a lot of code. So how do you shut them down? How do you rid of them when the user is no longer using them and stuff like that? So it just is a lot of code.
Andrew: I see. Even back then they had a way for you to do that, to tie into their system so you can create one of these experiences, a lab for each student.
Anthony: Absolutely. I kind of took what I learned about … I built an autoscaler for a streaming environment for a church. I took what I learned from that and I applied it there. So that’s when APIs were really, really coming into the limelight. This was about 2010 when I started development on it, early 2010.
Andrew: All right. Let me take a quick commercial break and then I’ll come back to the story. The sponsor I want to talk about is Pipedrive. The first time, Anthony, that I started to get really like fed up with running Mixergy was when I was doing so much that I would do the pre-interviews, I was finding guests, I was finding the guest’s email address. It was just like all these different things.
One of my interviewees, a guy named Max Teitelbaum talked to me about Pipedrive and how it helped streamline his sales. I said, “You know what? Maybe this will help me with my booking at Mixergy. He loves Pipedrive. Let me try it out.”
So I signed up for it. Immediately Pipedrive says, “What are the steps to closing a deal?” That’s all we want to start off with. So I had to think about it. Well, first step I have to come up with a few suggested guests. Second step, I have to find their email and so on. One of the steps is do a pre-interview. Final step is publish the interview on the site.
So Pipedrive forced me to lay each one of those out in a different column. For Max, it would have said, “What are the different steps for closing a sale in your business?” and forced him to create columns. Whatever people are using it for, it says stop and think what are the steps to getting it done?
So the next thing Pipedrive said is when you add someone, create a card for them and put them in the suggested column in column number one, so I did. I went onto TechCrunch at the time and I said, “Who was acquired? They’re going to be great guests.” I found someone. Actually what I did was I did a search on TechCrunch for people who were acquired a year or more previously, because if they were acquired recently, they often can’t talk about it. But if it’s been a year, then it’s still fresh in their minds and they’re willing to talk about it.
So I found a whole bunch of those people and I put them in column one. Then I found their email address, moved them to column two after I found their email. Then I sent out an email invitation, etc. Then I said, “All right, I don’t have to do all this myself.
Now that I have a process for finding people, let’s hand that to an assistant.” And she did and she started filling up that first column. Now that I have a system for finding email addresses, let’s hand that to an assistant. Each one of these steps was then passed on to an assistant.
The great thing about Pipedrive is it organized the way we were all getting together to close deals, and it forced us to stay systemized and if for some reason, Anthony, you weren’t taken care of for let’s say a week because maybe stuff came up in your life or whatever, maybe in our lives, Pipedrive would say, “Hey, Anthony has not been interacted with in a week. Is that okay? If it’s okay, fine. But if it’s not, deal with it.”
Anthony: So let me ask you this. We actually have been working and hiring lots of salespeople recently. Is Pipedrive something that might fit our … You kind of see how our architecture is. We work on sales and sell to teams. There are subscription models. Is that something that Pipedrive …
Andrew: Yes. If you have a process that you want to go through, it’s really helpful. Then everyone gets to visualize their process.
Anthony: Okay. That’s very cool.
Andrew: I thought you were going to say, “Is it also going to help us hire guests?” And I think yes. It’s not made for hiring, but it will because it keeps your process organized. The nice thing too is that, for me, it integrates with all these other products. For me, I use Zapier integration so that as soon as I’m done doing an interview with you, I just click a button on Pipedrive to say, “My part is done. Let’s move Anthony’s card to the done column.”
Well, Zapier then knows that I’ve finished with you and sends automatically an email to my editor saying, “Hey, Joe, Anthony’s interview is done. Go find it.” And it has a link in the email so he knows where to find it. Anyway, it’s really a well-done product.
Anthony: So part of our process is that we have an outbound salesperson and inbound sales and then a dedicated team relationship person where we kind of hand it off. So it sounds like Pipedrive would fit well and that process that the customer kind of goes through all the way to where their accounts are set up and making sure that we’re able to service their needs.
Andrew: Right.
Anthony: Very cool.
Andrew: Exactly. And then at some point let’s say you’ve closed a deal and their account isn’t set up because your people moved on or because the person closed the deal but stuff happened in his life, their card turns red after a certain amount of time, so you know this guy needs attention.
Anthony: Okay.
Andrew: And then another thing that I like about it is I like to see: How long has somebody been in our process? How long does it take us to close out a deal? Before Pipedrive was really streamlined for us, it wasn’t uncommon for someone to go through our process and spend a year in the system, a year of like waiting to be pre-interviewed, a year waiting to go on the site.
So we get these overall stats that tell us how long it’s been. For me, I can tell that you were in this current stage, meaning waiting to be interviewed by me for 36 days. That’s too long. That means I need to open up more interview slots.
Anthony: Better than a year.
Andrew: Sorry?
Anthony: It’s better than a year.
Andrew: It’s better than a year. It also took us 14 days for somebody to say, “Anthony should be approved for an interview.” That’s probably because we had too many interviews at the time that were scheduled. But all this data on you really helps me out. If you emailed somebody on the team, I’d know about it. You and Ari did a pre-interview on the 19th.
Anyway, all that stuff and so much more, I should say, if you guys are into it, go check out Pipedrive.com/Mixergy. They will give you a bunch of free time so you can really try it and see if it helps your business. If it doesn’t, you cancel, you don’t pay anything. If it does, you’ll love it and you can continue. Go to Pipedrive.com/Mixergy.
Anthony: That’s very cool.
Andrew: How did you get your first customers? I know you could teach these courses, but how do you sell?
Anthony: So it was really interesting how it happened. I had wanted to bring back Pinehead.com. Another lesson I learned was don’t let domains expire. I didn’t have $5,000 to buy it back. So I brought back Pinehead.tv. I could register that. It was available. I started doing the tutorials on the blog again, something similar.
Not very good, but I started doing the videos and on the videos, what happened was jQuery Mobile started picking up some of the videos when jQuery Mobile first picked up. And then I combined wanting to do the Linux Academy with that, and then basically I just put a little ad out on Pinehead.tv, which doesn’t exist anymore because it’s put on there. We were charging $5 a month. We actually still have our very first customer. It was very cool. He just went in there and signed up. We only accepted PayPal for probably the first two years.
Andrew: And it was just your videos that you put on. Why wouldn’t this person who signed up just sign up for one month or maybe three months and then just move on?
Anthony: Absolutely. So what we wanted to do was we wanted to say, “Hey, this is where you start and we want to take you all the way in to the advanced level,” which is how we work well inside of team environments and with some of our larger customers and even with people brand new.
So one of my favorite testimonials was somebody in New Jersey, who owned a food truck, and six months after studying our content, our original content we put on there, after we had the entire complete Linux Professional Institute, went to work as a system administrator at Major League Baseball. They actually just reached out to me on LinkedIn again to say hey, and they are working at LearnVest, not still a customer, but still my favorite story.
Andrew: And the idea is that you want them to not just learn the one thing they came in for, but to keep improving so they can keep growing as professionals.
Anthony: I might have lost you a little bit there. I apologize about that.
Andrew: No problem. Are you still there?
Anthony: I am here now. Yes.
Andrew: Good. So the idea is you want to encourage them to not just learn the one thing they came in for but to keep on working with you and keep improving themselves throughout their career.
Anthony: Absolutely. Let’s look at technology. I come in and I get certified. That’s great. Certification covers a wide breadth of stuff. But let’s face it. Inside of a real environment, you might only need a little component of that Linux certification, but you might need some virtualization experience, which means maybe you need Azure. Maybe you need Google compute, AWS, OpenStack, VMware. Most of that we covered, some of that we don’t.
With that, what web server are you going to be running? Is it a web environment? Is it an NFS environment? Do you need different types of technology? So with that, now that you know your basics, let’s teach you to go to the more advanced level. So it becomes more custom to how you need to do your job. Not necessarily how you need to do your job but the tools towards every day system administration life, which you might encounter.
But with that, it changes so often, AWS had, I believe, it was around 357 updates in 2015. That’s more than an update every single day. So how many features have they released? Maybe it’s a better, easier way for you to do your job. Maybe using their web application firewall versus spending thousands of dollars to put one in front of your environment, you can reduce your costs. So part of that is part of the continuous learning environment that we try to create at Linux Academy.
Andrew: What do you do when AWS updates? Do you update the video? Do you create a brand new video?
Anthony: So, yes. Essentially to answer your question, there’s multiple ways we do it. First, is it a certification course? So have the certification requirements changed? If so, absolutely. We have to change that. So one thing that we have learned is not all … and I’m not saying any names. I’m saying not all places update their certifications as quickly as technology comes out.
If you look at requirements for LPIC for example, it’s still covering stuff that’s not required anymore because of the systems replacement. So they don’t update as frequently. So we first evaluate does it cover for the certification objective. Then we determine what content is out there at which becomes obsolete or needs to be updated.
So the lifecycle of content, especially for cloud computing, more specifically Linux can live a lot longer. Cloud computing, we’re on our fourth AWS certification course. So we actually had our first AWS course before the certification came out. The certification came out, so we had to update it. Then of course almost every year at re:Invent it becomes obsolete.
Andrew: So that makes sense. They change certification requirements. You have to change your course. What if they add another feature? What if they change a feature? So there’s a ton of features inside of there. So if the certification requirements change–and this is actually where our short content initiative has come in.
So you have your certification training, which is honestly kind of long. You spend six weeks, ten weeks studying for a certification. What about all those new features that come in and change. What about the new load balancers that were just launched? The certification might still–I’m not saying it does. I don’t want to break NDAs, but it may still cover–this is a hypothetical–may still cover older how it was, the elastic load balancer. But on the website you’re looking at the web application load balancer and now the legacy.
So that’s where we put out either a short course is what we call it, a course that’s two hours or less or a nugget. That nugget teaches you that information, and we can associate it with your training material. So we have people that are coming for the certification training, where most of those concepts don’t change, but what happens when there are those types of discrepancies.
So we had to be very careful on how we present it and also make sure that we’re able to satisfy those requirements of somebody being able to do their job, having the tools in their toolset in order to do their job for their company.
Andrew: You used to charge $5 a month, which seems laughably low.
Anthony: Yes.
Andrew: Today you charge how much per month? $29 per month. And one of the things that you do that I think is especially interesting is you also sell to teams.
Anthony: Yes. We do. We have an enterprise product specifically.
Andrew: Talk about when you decided to do that. How did you figure out to add that?
Anthony: So, what’s interesting about our product in the pipeline, I have been hyper focused towards the customer. Most of our features have come about because of customer requests. Most of our content has come because of customer requests. So what happened was after I first went full time in Linux Academy, after I quit my job and went full time on it, that January, I quit in December, that January we had somebody saying, “I have people training here. How can I manage their payments for them? How can I see their progress?”
So that’s where the first team product came about. Then about 14 months ago, a customer came to us and said, “We’re going to train 700 people. How do we manage those individual teams?”
So it’s an evolution from those people coming here. I wish I could say I could predict what was coming, where a lot of it is we just want to work and make sure the customer has the tools to be successful. So if it’s an individual, what’s your goal? Is it to pass a certification? We’re going to help you be successful. Are you an enterprise customer? Your goal is … I apologize about that. I don’t know where that’s coming from.
Andrew: I don’t even think the mic is picking up on it.
Anthony: Okay. With that, an enterprise goal is different than an individual goal. So they may not want to get certification training but they may have different certification requirements. So we had a customer say, “Hey, how can I pull individual sections from a certification course? That’s great you covered DynamoDB, but really what we need is a lot of EC2 and S3 and we don’t want people wasting time.”
Andrew: I see.
Anthony: So we developed a product called Custom Learning Paths. So you can build your own custom curriculum, test your students when they’re done, test your employees.
Andrew: And you create the tests?
Anthony: Absolutely. So we don’t create certification tests. We have two types of testing products. We have one, the practice exams quiz system. And then two we launched something called challenges. Now a challenge is deploying out a real environment. It deploys out a Linux environment and soon to be cloud–AWS support is our first one coming–and it gives you a task.
So it could be a preset set of functionality. It gives you that task or scenario depending on the company. We actually work with companies from pre-hire assessments and it says, “Go do this.” So you’re doing it hands on in a real environment. You click Complete. It has a history record of everything that’s going on, and it sends it to whoever issued the test. Is it a team? And then it instantly grades it and says, “You have been successful,” or, “You have been unsuccessful.”
Andrew: Got it. I see. And you create these tests for each individual client? Can clients hire you to create custom tests for them?
Anthony: So here’s the really cool thing and it’s part of something that we’re doing later next year. We’re always excited about stuff that’s going on. The really cool thing is that we go to our customers and say as long as it’s within our six categories–AWS, OpenStack, DevOps, Azure, Linux, etc.–as long as it’s within those categories, we will work with you to build that test base off your environment. It’s free, but the caveat is we want to make it available to everybody on Linux Academy to use.
Andrew: I see. Okay. So you create it once and then you have the ability to use it multiple times.
Anthony: Absolutely.
Andrew: And you have great clients. Rackspace is a customer?
Anthony: Yes.
Andrew: MailChimp is a customer. Who else is a big name customer?
Anthony: So we are very cautious to respect privacy rights. There are NDAs between different customers. So those people on the front of our website are ones that have explicitly given us permission to put on there. So Rackspace, again, MailChimp, Associated Press, Linode, a cloud hosting provider, I know there are several other ones on there that I can’t think of the names.
Andrew: I see actually, I hit the little button on the bottom of your site and I see that there’s University of Alabama, University of Arizona, University of Alaska. So you also have an EDU program.
Anthony: Yes.
Andrew: How did you come up with that?
Anthony: So that was actually a relatively new program. Each year around August we receive requests from professors that say, “How can we use your curriculum within our course?” And I can tell you right now that a school, if you look at a university, at least the university I went to, I had to buy all of my material. I don’t really think a university is going to buy a 5,000 person team account and then manage each individual person on there. What we did is we said professors that want to use this in your curriculum. One, you can have it at no cost, right?
So we’re going to give it to you at no cost, and then we’re going to provide a tool for your students to be able to use the student discount but still join as a team, as an enterprise product, still use our study groups feature, still use all of the features of Linux Academy, but it allows the professor to have the power to do that versus relying on the school and the process to go through that.
Andrew: So let’s go back to how you got customers in the beginning because that’s what helped build up your customer base, your reputation base and then allowed teachers to say, “We want our students to do this,” and got businesses to say, “We want our employees to use this.” You talked a little bit earlier about some of the ways you got discovered. Did you do anything more proactive to get the word out, to get people to understand what you were building?
Anthony: No. It was a lifestyle company. That’s what my Chief Operating Officer likes to call it. We were just blessed and excited to be able to come in and do what we love all day, every day. It was the coolest thing ever and it still is. I mentioned the three of us before. Up until about 14, 15 months ago, a little bit earlier in 2015, 100% of everybody that came to our site was word of mouth. We didn’t do any advertising. We didn’t do anything whatsoever.
To be honest with you, it was a little bit of fear. I still have a little bit of insecurity. You’re putting yourself out there. This interview is very, very hard for me. You’re putting yourself out there. Honestly I was a little afraid of criticism at the time. What I realized was, one, we’re going to get criticism either way. It’s how you grow. It’s a welcome thing and we should encourage and work with it.
Two, part of it was having confidence in what my team has put together, not just in myself. So it was a little bit of an adjustment and then we started working and doing some advertising and earlier this year hired a Director of Marketing.
Andrew: What was the first bit of advertising that you did that worked?
Anthony: Twitter and Facebook.
Andrew: Buying ads on Twitter?
Anthony: Google ads don’t work for us. I’m sorry?
Andrew: Buying ads on Twitter?
Anthony: Absolutely.
Andrew: Wow. Which ones? What kind?
Anthony: So you can target keywords on Twitter. So we would just create a tweet that said a little bit about Linux Academy. “Hey, AWS certification training. Get started for $29 first month,” whatever it was at the time. Now it’s a seven-day free trial. It would just target those people on there.
Andrew: And show them that tweet if they were within the target.
Anthony: Absolutely.
Andrew: Interesting. So before that, was it the blog that worked well for you before you were buying ads?
Anthony: In 2015, we didn’t launch a single blog post. Every ounce of energy was put towards developing the product.
Andrew: Really?
Anthony: The platform is built from the ground up.
Andrew: What about the partnerships? I think we talked before we started about how you have a partnership with the Linux Foundation. Was that started before?
Anthony: We do. The Linux Foundation partnership came about right about August of last year. The one where we jointly came together for subscription service was earlier this year, and then we were training partners with Linux Professional Institute and then CompTIA. CompTIA actually came in and approved us as a quality content training provider, which means they come through and review the material for their certifications and that material, once quality content approved, can actually be issued as training material in other schools so instructors can use it. We were able to get listed on CompTIA as approved and that did help too.
Andrew: I see. Wow. So you really weren’t doing that much at all.
Anthony: No.
Andrew: It was just organic and you still hit what you told me … I have the numbers and I don’t want to accidentally say the wrong numbers here. I don’t want to reveal the numbers you gave us in private. Whatever you said that you did last year, that still came all from organic?
Anthony: Yes. So again, there are things .. I was just hyper-focused. I just love coming into work. We had an accountant. We didn’t look at the numbers every single month. I’m generally very overall conservative person. Obviously, things are different today than they were back then. I was also surprised that we hit that number as well.
Andrew: All right. Let me do a sponsorship break again, my final one and then I’ll tell you what I’m seeing now when I’m trolling around to see where you’re getting your customers. All right.
But the advertiser is HostGator. If you’re out there and you’re looking to host a website or start a new website, go check out HostGator because they’ve got good support, good uptime and a really good service. You, Anthony, have had experience with HostGator you told me before we started, right?
Anthony: We have. One of my first jobs I actually worked with somebody who was key in helping … I don’t even remember his name. I’m embarrassed at this point, but worked at HostGator when it first started and just the amount of stuff we’ve heard from them and one of my jobs was using that for hosting at the time, so it was just great.
Andrew: Using them for hosting?
Anthony: Yes.
Andrew: One of the things I’m discovering is a lot of businesses that need to develop websites for their customers will just set up an account with HostGator for each of their customers or one big account that allows them to manage all of their customers’ accounts because they know with HostGator, the site will just be up. It will work. If they ever have any issues, either they or their clients can call up HostGator and get great support.
If you’re listening to me and you don’t like your hosting company, well, you shouldn’t suffer through it. Switch. HostGator will make it really easy for you to switch to them. You’ll see why so many people who I’ve interviewed have signed up with HostGator, have run their businesses on HostGator. Many of them say that they’re still building and growing their businesses on HostGator because HostGator will grow with you.
So I’ve got an offer here for 50% off. If you use my special URL, you will also get everything that ordinarily comes with HostGator, including unmetered disk space, unmetered bandwidth, unlimited email addresses, 24/7/365 tech support, 45-day money back guarantee in case I’m just full of it and you’re not happy. You can leave, 45 days, money back guarantee. They’ll also give you a $100 AdWords offer. They’re going to give you $100, $100 ad offer comes with it, $50 search offer for Bing, Yahoo. The $100 is for Google. I don’t think I said that.
Anyway, really easy to get started with them. Go to HostGator.com/Mixergy. And of course if you’re not happy, email me, let me know or if you are happy, email me and let me know. I want to make sure my sponsors are doing right by you. My email address is Andrew@Mixergy.com. That’s my personal one. That’s the one my wife uses. That’s the one everyone uses, Andrew@Mixergy.com HostGator. And I’m grateful to HostGator for sponsoring.
So here’s what I see. I’ve got an account with SimilarWeb, which tells me where traffic is coming from. I see feedly as like the number one non-search, non-social source of traffic, which means that your blog is really popular. Then the next thing I see is the Linux Foundation. That’s how I knew about that.
Then I see stuff like–where is that, StackSocial, which was a company whose founder was here to do an interview with me. They offer discounts on courses and other products on other people’s websites. Are you even on top of this stuff anymore, or is this something that now someone else is doing?
Anthony: No. Absolutely. I don’t participate as much in writing the blogs. We have technical writers on our staff, and instructors actually participate in writing the blogs. I will be doing in terms of my course in the subjects, for example, I’m doing the chef certification training. So my blog posts will be about that.
In terms of StackSocial, there was one point in time where we actually had a promotion on StackSocial. Because our content actually had a lot of labs in it, it generated more confusion for students since it didn’t really send over to our platform. But we did enjoy working with StackSocial.
Andrew: What do you mean? Why does the lab cause a problem?
Anthony: So, when you go to Linux Academy, our training environment is very custom to the individual. So, of course, it’s only about 40% video. So the rest are exercises, which you use labs on. Then we have our assessment engine that instantly grades your exercises and provides feedback. So don’t waste time looking at the solutions. So then you have your practice exams and you have your study guides.
One really cool feature that we just launched not too long ago was a notecard feature what’s cool about that is the instructors have their official notecard decks and a student can consume that notecard deck. You can also view other notecards that other students are creating and you can fork their cards and make changes and put it in your deck, but it gives the student that created it, reputation.
So, how do you show quality content to a user is kind of the problem that we’re trying to solve. So it allows for a lot of different ways of looking at content. So what we truly believe is, especially when it comes to technology, that there’s more than just videos required to be successful.
A lot of people can watch just videos. I personally can’t. So it’s that combination of tools that help you be successful. So in order for us to put our courses up on Udemy or on StackSocial, because they have their own LMS now, it’s a little bit more challenging because we believe in that total stack of training.
Andrew: I see. I didn’t realize that StackSocial had the courses now hosted on their platform. I thought they were selling memberships on your platform.
Anthony: Originally that original one they did, but not anymore.
Andrew: I can see how that would be a problem. It seems also like maybe they’re starting to create like a Udemy-type platform for themselves by piggybacking off of the partnerships they’ve had.
Anthony: Absolutely.
Andrew: Interesting.
Anthony: Which is really a brilliant idea, to be honest.
Andrew: Right? Offer discounts on courses that lead to other sites, then bring the courses to your site, then eventually create a monthly membership fee that gives people access to all the courses that our on the platform. That is a good model. They’re really running a smart company at StackSocial. If anyone is out there listening, you should go check out the StackSocial interview. It was really well done with a long-time Mixergy fan, so he knew what we were getting at. He was as open as he always wanted the guests to be when he was listening.
I’m also seeing like Linux.com. What I’m wondering is how much attention do you spend on where you’re getting traffic, where you’re getting customers? What’s your part in that?
Anthony: That’s not my job.
Andrew: It’s not?
Anthony: It’s not. And it’s not something I was good at before. I recognize that. So one of the first things we did in hiring is hired everybody on stuff that I just wasn’t good at, which didn’t really help me offload things for a while. My job is to make sure that we’re taking care of the student and that they’re able to achieve their goals and then taking care of our team and making sure that culturally everybody’s happy, everybody fits in, everything is happening how it should.
Andrew: So, if you’re not good at that, how do you hire someone to be good at that? How do you manage someone who’s good at that?
Anthony: Honestly, it comes down to hiring people that are smarter than you–I know that’s cliché–because I don’t know. Our Director of Marketing was Senior Director of Marketing or Senior Marketing at Dell and worked at Das Keyboard. She came in and part of that in the interview process says, “This is what you need to be doing.”
Another point of that is knowing what we did wrong. At the beginning of this year, we hired out a marketing firm. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but contractors are extremely, extremely expensive and learned a lot of hard, expensive lessons along the way and really learned how not to do things.
Andrew: Like what? What did you learn that you shouldn’t do?
Anthony: Well, first off they were spending time marketing in ways that don’t reach our actual customers. So we should be out there inside of Quora. So we encourage and actually offer little bonuses to our staff to, outside of hours, go contribute. It’s not the contribute to advertise. It’s contribute to actually give to the students.
So when we hired the marketing firm, what they said is our goal is to make you money. That, believe it or not, actually goes against our core value on how we operate. I was in a demo because I’m doing demos right now, team demos. I was in a demo and the first thing the person said for the company said, “Help me understand how you can offer this product at the price that you’re offering it.”
And my response is we’re not going to gouge you on pricing. We do have investment. But we accepted investment very strategically and with that, we basically said this person working and investing with us needs to also have the same values with us and also making sure that we can still incorporate our values with that. Does that answer your question?
Andrew: Yeah. It does. The challenge that I have is that if you’re not good at marketing and you hire someone who’s good and they run into a roadblock, they can inevitably come back to you and say, “It’s the product that’s not right. It’s your thinking that’s not right.” And because you don’t have enough experience with marketing, you can say this is an excuse or you’re not aware of what we do offer that you should be able to market. You can guide them back.
I feel like a lot of people do need that guidance back, just like we said earlier that if you were burned out and you had a boss, your boss would have the job of helping guide you back on track. Now you’re the boss and if the marketing person has a problem, it’s your job to get them back on track, to help guide them to what works, or to understand when they’re making excuses to themselves and to you, but you can’t, so what do you do?
Anthony: So I wish I can say I was less involved in some of those overall processes that I am because marketing is new. Our business development is a little bit new. Like I said, I’m doing demos and I’m still involved in that. The first thing that you have to do when hiring somebody is determine: Can they fit in, in your culture? What I mean by culture is: What are our priorities? What is our core competency? I keep saying it over and over again, but you can’t fake sincerity and if somebody doesn’t care, like truly genuinely irrationally care about the success of a student, you can’t train them.
So, with that, our company culture is a little bit different. With that, when we encounter problems, we go and we work in brand new technologies and we develop brand new features and tools that haven’t been developed before. With that, we’re going to encounter challenges and we’re a training company. So inevitably, whenever that happens, it’s how you communicate with the people. It’s how you work together to solve a probably.
So we have a lot of smart people here, the Director of Business Development, my Chief Operating Officer who has a lot of experience with startups, then also the Director of Marketing. We get together and you hash it out. There’s nothing wrong with passionate conversations. The other side of that is: How do you know you’re wrong until you’ve tried it? Then if you’ve tried it and you’re wrong, there you go.
So a lot of it is honestly figuring it out. We hired a marketing firm that came in and said, “This is how you market to your student.” What we learned, again, was that when you’re doing it wrong, when you’re focused around money, not about focusing about what we are and what we actually care about, I tell everybody here our key KPI metric is the number of students that pass. It truly is.
Andrew: What is that number?
Anthony: Our reported pass rate is running around 98% combined on all of our certifications.
Andrew: Which is huge.
Anthony: It is.
Andrew: It seems almost too good to be true. You’re saying 98% of people who take a course from beginning to end and then go take a certification test will get certified?
Anthony: So here’s the question with that. So to think about in terms of marketing and engagement, how many of your students are completing the course and taking the certification? So when we looked at that–and again, that was one of those things that I actually didn’t look at.
I just loved dealing with the people who submitted tickets, working in the community, helping students creating the content for them. I was really focused around those that were engaging us, which is great but the problem is what about those that are having problems but don’t speak up? What about those that can’t get committed to it and need help with engagement?
So the key to that–that’s one of the things to look at. We’ve been looking at it over the last few months. The Director of Marketing really kind of helps say, “Hey, that’s it. Maybe in a way that we’re truly actually failing those students. They come here and they look for us to help get them going. Maybe we were failing.” That’s actually one of the questions that she had too–how do we calculate that? So, we went and looked at all the data. That’s part of our initiative now.
Andrew: To get more people to complete. So was I right in my theory that you guys were looking at how many people completed the course and took certification and then of those how many people passed?
Anthony: Yes.
Andrew: Now what you’re saying is …
Anthony: Passed the first time.
Andrew: Passed the first time. Oh wow. What you’re saying is we should look at how many people start but don’t finish and see if we can increase that percentage and how many people sign up but don’t even start and increase that percentage.
Anthony: Absolutely. We were looking at people’s success and not necessarily … It’s not a failure, but helping them get started. Maybe it was just too overwhelming. So our statistics are still good. Seventy percent of all of our users have logged in, in the past two weeks, which is really awesome.
Andrew: That includes people who have had their courses paid for by someone else?
Anthony: Absolutely.
Andrew: I see.
Anthony: That’s every active user we have.
Andrew: Anthony, the business was doing well. You were making money. You were making customers happy and changing their lives. Why take on funding?
Anthony: That’s a great question. Earlier in this interview, I mentioned I’m an overly conservative person. The last thing that I ever want to do is get in a position where we’ve over-hired, we’ve made bad decisions and I have to let somebody go because maybe for financial reasons. I don’t want to let somebody go because of my irresponsibility. I never want to be in that position.
So, with that, I was overly conservative. We did $2.2 million last year and we only had three people. We were taking it and putting it in the savings account. What do you do with that? But the problem is … I’m not sure how familiar you are with United States taxes, but when you’re doing that, you’re looking at about a 40% tax rate. So you are just throwing away money that you could use to help others, the features that we’re able to develop, the courses we’ve been able to develop since we’ve done this.
So a venture capital firm reached out to me. We said no to them. They reached out to me again. We said no. They reached out. We flew them out and we actually had a conversation. So it was just kind of a very, very minority stake. We’re able to still have full control of everything. So we’re able to ensure that somebody doesn’t come in and say, “You know, it’s more about profits than it is about people because it’s not.”
So we accepted that minority stake, which we put in a savings account. We said that’s there for emergencies or opportunities. Now let’s go ahead and take our operating cash flow and help continue to improve our service for our customers and making sure our students can be successful.
Andrew: And you’ve used some of it to grow the number of people at the company and you now had to become more of a leader and you told our producer before this interview started that your very first weekly address to the team, there was someone, a guy named Scott, who was a new Ruby developer heard what you said–what did you say and what did he come back and say to you?
Anthony: So, part of that July when I was really feeling bad, when I was about to give up, essentially–and I went to the leadership conference and one of the things the leadership conference–and I’m going to shout them out again because it was truly life-changing–one of the things they said was it’s cruel and unusual punishment not to tell people where they stand.
When we looked at bringing on all the new instructors, we didn’t tell them what success looks like. Where we’re really instilling the core values, we look at it and said, “You’re a culture fit. You love people. You have a passion for this. Come in here.” We didn’t say, “This is what makes a Linux Academy course special.” Those are the things that we were missing is we were missing processes.
I mistakenly took and said a flat hierarchy means no processes. But envision if you came into a job, you were working and had no idea if you were meeting expectations. If somebody says to you, “Great job,” but is it? So in the absence–and this is what Scott said–because we’re a distributed team, we have an office in Dallas, Texas, where 15 of our people are and the rest of them are remote.
So I do this weekly video. That’s part of the culture thing is making sure everybody knows what’s going on and feels what’s going on. I explain what’s happening. Scott comes up to me and says, “If you do one thing, do that.” In the absence of an actually review sheet, truly knowing–and he was only here for three weeks at the time–in the absence of truly knowing how I’m doing, I rely on the voice in my head and I am my own worst enemy.
So believe it or not, by not officially going down and saying, “This is what success looks like,” you are meeting those expectations. By not doing that, I was actually causing him more stress. Where I thought a relaxed environment was the way to go, I was actually stressing him out inadvertently and hurting the culture at Linux Academy. Imagine if you had to come to work and not know if you were doing a good job.
Andrew: That’s something I have to learn for myself too. I want to just stay out of people’s way and let them do their thing, but I realize that they need that kind of feedback. They need that kind of structure. Otherwise, the way that Scott said it to you, that without really feedback–and I highlighted this for myself–without real feedback, I rely on myself to judge and I’m my own worst enemy. I thought I was doing a horrible job is what he said to you. I can see that. I can see people thinking that way.
You then told our producer, the very next thing you said to her was, “I haven’t hired anyone to take off my load. I used to do everything–all the coding, support, etc. I feel like I should still be doing that. I’ve hired a lot but I haven’t hired anyone to take off my load.” Why aren’t you hiring people to take your load off? What does that even mean?
Anthony: So I’ve done a lot of the content. I’m not sure if we were on live when I mentioned before, but I had done all the AWS certification training. I was a substantial amount of the Linux training. I was a substantial amount of the DevOps training. I still run some of the infrastructure. I still write a lot of our lab code. I really said, “Let’s bring people in to continue providing for the student in ways that I can’t do that.”
It’s less of that now because what happened was because I was focused on still doing those things, that culture shock, that me feeling, “Why am I unhappy?” That happened. I wasn’t able to take care of my team. I looked at it. We always have a hyper-focus on the student. We’re always taking care of the student. In the absence of letting that go and taking the responsibility of what a CEO is supposed to do.
I don’t like even calling myself that. I don’t feel like I have it, so I do it reluctantly. But I have to do it and say it’s now my responsibility to ensure that culture, to ensure the people. So I had to offload. And Christophe was just key in that. He’s helped me so much. I just had to let go. It doesn’t mean I can’t be involved.
But if I’m the only one and I have to do this and I have to do that, I’m a single point of failure and issues come up and our students are not taken care of and our team isn’t taken care of. Then what happens, you have chaos and everybody’s unhappy and that’s not where we should be.
Andrew: What does Christophe do for you guys?
Anthony: Christophe is amazing. So Christophe, actually, we hired him on as an instructor/developer. He’s primarily an instructor now. So he’s taken over and works with me on lab code that was part of the way of offloading. We’re going to be hiring somebody full-time to kind of manage our labs as we continue going forward.
But he’s taken over and joint striked that with me essentially is what I like to call it. He’s doing the AWS certified DevOps engineer professional level certification. That was on my plate. He came and said, “Man, why don’t you just let me do this?” And he did it. That course is labs, instructor notes, practice exams. It’s a two and a half month thing to build and very stressful. He did that and he likes to say, “I haven’t seen you smile that much for a long time.” I’ve been able to focus on those other things and that was a big thing for me.
Andrew: Yeah. I noticed before the interview started when I suggested we bring him on camera, you were happy about it. You were excited about it. I like video, not because the audience prefers watching the interviews. I know they prefer listening to them. But I like it because I need it to get a beat on the person.
I saw you were really excited to have someone who was working for you on camera, where for many entrepreneurs, they don’t want that because it takes away some of the control. It takes away some of the attention. It also, very legitimately, could screw up the messaging. Now we didn’t start with what the company is about. We started with who this guy, Christophe, is, right? I was wondering why, where that enthusiasm is coming from.
Anthony: So, when we were talking about putting video on the–why isn’t there video on the intro course? And I said I just don’t feel like there’s value in somebody seeing my face. I could be wrong. With that is I’m not Linux Academy. We have 27–I’m losing track now. I think it’s 25, 26. We have somebody starting today and we have somebody starting in two weeks. That’s where I’m losing track. We have those people on staff.
I’m not Linux Academy. It takes all of those people and Christophe has taken ownership in a way that I haven’t seen somebody take ownership and really kind of reminds me where I was. He just reminds me of him. He comes in and he truly loves the people here. He truly loves the students. He truly loves teaching and he truly loves the technology. He is literally kind of the example that I would set if I were to say somebody culturally speaking, somebody who really just loves everybody and that’s Christophe and he’s attitude towards it.
I’m not that smart. I created Linux Academy because I needed multiple ways to study. I needed video. I needed hands on. I needed labs. I needed all of that because it took me a while to study. So these people not only helped me kind of be able to come in and be happy again, honestly, number one, and Christophe was a big part of that, but they’re here helping the student and they are Linux Academy and if I’m not here, if I get hit by a bus or something, Linux Academy is going to be able to provide for the student.
The culture is going to be here for them because of people like Christophe being here. It honestly just warms my heart and makes me happy. He moved from South Carolina to Texas and there is–I like to tell everybody this–there’s a special place in my heart for somebody who moves across state to come be in the office when you don’t have to be in the office.
Andrew: Because you want all your instructors to be in the office, full-time people.
Anthony: No. They don’t have to be. Absolutely not. So we have a lot of remote people. So just under half our team, 15 are in the office, the rest are remote except we’re hiring people here.
Andrew: Do you hire all your instructors? I’m looking on LinkedIn and I see this guy, David Smith. He’s been an instructor with you guys for a couple of years. He’s full-time, right?
Anthony: He is full-time. Everybody’s full-time.
Andrew: So, you guys are full-timers.
Anthony: Everybody’s full-time. We can’t help the student and answer questions if people are not here to answer those questions.
Andrew: Meaning after he records the course, David Smith is there to answer a question that somebody has.
Anthony: Yes.
Andrew: All right.
Anthony: And he is the one answering the questions.
Andrew: Let me close this out with this question. I wonder if you regret a little bit naming the company Linux Academy, because maybe it limits what you can cover. Maybe it limits how people think of you. You’re smiling a little bit as you say that. Do you kind of think if you had the $5,000 it would have been better to have bought Pinehead.com?
Anthony: Not at all. So it’s the perspective on the problem. Linux Academy implies a very niche focus. What happens when we want to get in different categories to support our customers that are requesting those items? What it is, is an opportunity to develop multiple brands that can provide value to everybody within those areas, which is something that we’re actually doing over the next 12 months. I’m very, very excited about it. That’s why I’m smiling.
Andrew: So there will be another Academy. It might Swift Academy, for example.
Anthony: Something like that, yes. We actually have two things in the works I’m very excited about, yes.
Andrew: And did you get permission to use the name Linux before? I didn’t even know Linux, by the way, was a registered mark until I looked at the bottom of your site, then I Googled it and it turns out it is. Does that mean you had to get permission?
Anthony: So, technically speaking, it’s part of the Creative Commons, not necessarily the Creative Commons–lots of lawyers talk in here, but it’s common use policy. So, Linux Foundation allows people to use Linux in their domain names–Linux Today, Linux.com, which is now Linux Foundation Project. However, in my early days, super paranoid, I did. I did a sub-trademark from Linux Foundation.
So we were able to use it. The last thing I wanted to do–I mentioned before we want to respect NDAs. We want to create relationships with companies, especially ones that want to work with us. By doing that, it requires us preaching what we would want somebody to do to us. So, we don’t overcharge and we don’t charge a lot just because we can for profit because I wouldn’t want somebody to do that for me. That’s kind of the staff–I don’t want them coming in unhappy. So I did a little bit of a tangent there on you.
Andrew: I get it. It gives me a sense of how you think too. You really are more of a conservative thinker than more of the entrepreneurs that I’ve interviewed here, but I can see how your company benefits from that, especially when you’re talking about education. You don’t want to screw around because if I have a can of soda, I know instantly whether the soda is good or not. I’ve tasted it. If it doesn’t make me sick, I’m fine. But with education, if you screw something up, you won’t know it for a while. Frankly, it impacts people’s lives dramatically.
All right. The website is LinuxAcademy.com for anyone who wants to check it out. If you forgot who my two sponsors are and you need a reminder, the one that will help you get the right web hosting package is HostGator.com/Mixergy and the one that will help you organize your sales team and really close sales as a team and in a structured way, it’s called Pipedrive. Go check them out at Pipedrive.com/Mixergy.
I’ve also been ending these interviews with a thank you to a guy I interviewed, Quin, from Swiftype. A few years ago my site really stunk for search. It just was impossible to find anything. We used the built in WordPress search. It didn’t work. We used Google search. It didn’t work. We used tons of different things.
Then this guy was starting a company. He helped us out. He connected us with his product, which was Swiftype. He made it easy for my guys to code up–excuse me, my guys to do special code using his search software at Swiftype and he’s been helping me since then I really appreciate it. Quin from Swiftype, thank you so much. And if anyone out there needs better search for their site, they should check out Swiftype.
All right. That was a big long thing about Swiftype, wasn’t it, Anthony? He’s gone out of his way.
Anthony: It was really good.
Andrew: Sorry?
Anthony: And that’s just it. Believe it or not, that was one of the things that the Marketing Director came in. Her name is Colette and she was like, “You should pay attention to your search traffic and your site speed, believe it or not.” So that type of thing is very important. So it’s absolutely worth pointing out.
Andrew: And it’s tougher than I thought. I thought site search was a solved problem. I thought that was easy. It’s not.
Anthony: It’s not.
Andrew: It’s still something we always have to keep improving. Anyway, Quin, thank you for helping me with that. Anthony, congratulations and I’m glad we got to meet.
Anthony: Thank you. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
Andrew: You bet. Thank you. Thank you all for being a part of it. Bye, everyone.
