Jim Masterson Podcast Transcript
Jim Masterson joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Jim Masterson with three decades of experience in telecommunications and technology, Jim Masterson brings extensive leadership, insight, passion to his role as chief executive officer at light edge prior to joining the company.
Back in 2004, Jim held several founding executive positions in some of the most successful and respect companies in telecom and tech at the time. Including rhythms, net connections, U. S. West enterprise data networking and U. S. Internet working. His vast experience has provided a deep understanding of an incredible foresight into major trends into wireline and wireless telecommunications, managed services, hybrid hosting and co-location after successfully raising new capital and executing on a fresh vision and course for the organization 2 decades ago, Jim was able to establish LightEdge as the company, you know, today, a pioneer and compliant cloud and co-location headquartered in the Midwest.
Well, good afternoon, Jim. Welcome to the show!
Jim Masterson: Thank you, Brian. Thank you for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Jim really loved this both Midwesterners here. I know you’re hailing out of Denver at the moment, but just love to get on somebody that get on a podcast with somebody that’s here in the Midwest typically Kansas City would be obviously the great conversation we can have over some coffee, but, but I love just you making the time, and Jim, we’re going to jump right into your questions when I, when you took the helm at LightEdge, you executed a new vision that significantly transformed the company.
Could you elaborate on that vision and the strategic moves that were key to establishing LightEdge as a pioneer and compliant cloud and co-location?
Jim Masterson: Absolutely, Brian, actually, it’s a, it’s a very top of mind subject for me right now, because we just literally had our 2024 sales kickoff and I was kind of walking the team through some of this so that they could feel some ownership in the.
In the company, even if they hadn’t been here for a while, but it is humbly speaking, I will tell you that. It is a it is a unique story. I believe it is starting with the fact to your point was we are based out of Des Moines, Iowa. So, we were this what we believe is you know, world class, you know, cloud and colocation company based out of Des Moines.
And when I moved to Des Moines to take over the company what, what became apparent was we needed to practice what really is kind of, in my mind, I would call the art of the pivot, And we have pivoted multiple times over the last 20 years that I’ve been the CEO, and I believe you have to do that in a technology industry that is evolving and changing the landscape all the time.
And so, when I first landed in Des Moines, the company was a business. So, it was basically a point to point, you know, Internet service provider. And they had basically created, if you will, a kind of an architecture for that network. That was mostly a hub and spoke. They call it network, which basically meant that they were providing data communications for about 1000 businesses in Kansas City and in Iowa and Nebraska and in that area.
And my thought was, well, what else? Could you in effect quote unquote host in the network that these remote sites for these headquartered companies in the Midwest might come normally the headquarters for. And the 1st thing we did was pivot to hosted PBX, hosted voice over IP and the, the business took off.
It was very successful. We were 1 of the 1st to deploy what they called a broad soft PBX. In the network, and we began to offer PBX functionality across the network to all of these businesses in the Midwest and was very successful. And we ended up selling it for a very, very nice valuation at the time.
But that was never the long-term vision. The long-term vision was ultimately to pivot again to hosted it. And today they call it cloud. We were frankly, it was interesting prior. We were so early on in this cloud business that we actually service marked the term cloud computing. But we were We were just not in a financial place to afford to take it all the way through trademark, which is kind of unfortunate today.
But we were early on in this. And so, we began to deploy hosted it services infrastructure as a service. They call it today in the network. And we began to offer services on a monthly basis. And that, too, began to take off and however, we had to pivot again and we pivoted again to we needed to get into the data center and the real estate business.
And we never intended in doing that. But we realized that if we were going to have a true enterprise message to the, to the marketplace that we were capable of handling the most sophisticated IT platforms that the customer might require, we were going to need some top quality. Physical real estate to actually host those data centers in so we pivoted into the, into the real estate business.
And the other thing I should say is that these, this art of the pivot is also including what is the company need to look like to support the new call it go to market focus. And that includes things like. We learned early on that a telecom sales force, which is what started the company to begin with.
Really wasn’t adept with their skill sets at selling it services. It’s just a different technology space and it was not something that we really had a lot of success and converting the company to do. So, we, in the middle of all of that pivoted a sales force with a completely different skill set. And then once we pivoted into the real estate business, we, we, we realized that.
It landed pretty nicely in the market because what the adoption curve back in those days, and even today still looks like to some degree is that customers make choices from 1 end of a spectrum to the other end of the spectrum in what they can buy from a company like LightEdge. They can, if they have kind of an initial risk profile that just says.
You know, we need to get out of our 4 walls. They will make a decision just to move to 1 of our colocation spots. They may want to offload the entire amount of risk and give everything to us to manage and maintain and have responsibility for and they will purchase services at the far right of the spectrum, which is all cloud-oriented services.
That’s completely outsourced and managed for the client. So, we really have for the last, probably 15 years, offered a set of services. That range from that continuum based upon what individual customers profiles might demand that they want to purchase. And if we call it the customer journey, and we’ve been very strict about that for the last 15-20 years.
And that’s kind of how we pivoted this company over time. And that’s kind of where we sit today.
Brian Thomas: Thank you for the backdrop. I do appreciate that. And Jim, as I mentioned earlier, before we hit record, your company has called on. A couple of my companies when I was leading the charge there as CIO. So, I appreciate all that you do.
And I, I see the vision and I love your story about pivoting and continuing to innovate to stay alive and, and move the company forward. I really do appreciate that. Thanks, Brian. And Jim, can you share your personal leadership philosophy and how it has guided you through the complexities of the cloud and technology sectors?
Jim Masterson: Well, I love your questions, Brian, because you, you really hit the nail on the head for me. Personally, this, this particular subject is, is extremely deep in my, in my soul. And then my heart, because my personal story in, in being where I am today was what I call a crooked path. I, I did not take the typical path to become a CEO.
I frankly started as a. As an entry level rep service rep for the phone company way back when and out of college and I had to basically work my way up through the, through the phone company. And when I left there, I was chief of staff to the, to the CEO of the phone company of 40,000 people.
So, it was quite a journey, but it was something that allowed me through that journey to appreciate every. You know, every role within the company, I mean, I had dozens of roles through those years until I reached that that point in time. And so, I have a great appreciation for each individual, each, each position in the company.
And I have a tremendous amount of respect for, for what each person does have to accomplish and how they might be feeling. In those roles, you know, whether that’s, you know, they’re in a zone and they’re really doing well, or they’re scared or whatever that is. And so, my philosophy, if you will, has developed from what I like to call the root of the tree.
And as I explain it to our employees, I want them to know the root of my tree. Because they may not always, you know, be part of making a decision or understand what a decision is that I’m having to make within the company, but I want them to know that if they understand the root of my tree and where I come from, then they’ll know that the branches off of that tree are hopefully sound.
Now, I’m not going to make all the right decisions, but I am going to be making decisions based on what I believe is a high character profile of that root of the tree. And so my philosophy, frankly, really does stem from. A lack of ego and it’s a big thing in our company, which is check your ego at the door.
I’ve seen and been a part of a company back in the day that that failed miserably when it didn’t have to, but it failed because it had the wrong CEO and that CEO is making decisions based on what was best for him at the time. And I, and that’s actually, to be honest with you, Brian, how I landed in Iowa, because I.
I remember saying to my wife, there’s just got to be a better way to do to lead a company. And so, I just decided it was time to become a CEO and try something new, which was frankly, be a person that rallied the organization and the individuals to be part of something that was that was great and give them an opportunity to kind of be the folks that led us there.
All I was going to do is just not get in the way. But my philosophy stems from. You know, really being a grinder. I, I really believe that if you get up every day with passion about what it is that you do. And if you have a sense of urgency that matches the, what the organization’s trying to accomplish you’re not, you may be very, very successful.
But if you, even if you’re not, you’re probably going to have some joy in your life. And I really believe that if an individual doesn’t really want to be at the company, because it just doesn’t fit their, their profile, that’s okay. And I really want them to be here if they want to be here. And if it excites them.
So, my philosophy stems from that kind of the root of the tree, and it really is at the root of it. It’s just a humility.
Brian Thomas: I really love that. In, in Jim, I embrace that philosophy as well, you know, hire the people that. We’re trained and skilled to do the things that they do best and get out of the way.
And, you know, again, I’m kind of taking a page out of the notebook of Steve jobs, but I think we all understand egos have no place in the workplace. So, I appreciate the share and Jim next question with 3 decades of experience, you’ve witnessed the cloud landscape undergoes significant changes. What major trends have you observed and how have you how have these influenced light edges offerings?
Jim Masterson: You know, it’s interesting I thought about that question Brian and the way that I think about it is that there’s a lot of companies out there that can provide infrastructure as a service and they can provide different levels of cloud. And there are a lot of companies that do it. Obviously. I think that.
I think what we have found, and even now it’s, it’s much, it’s much more straightforward for us because we actually are quite mature in our controls and our capabilities, but it really has to do with the delivery and the go to market strategy for the associated technologies. I mean, we, we leverage the piece parts of strategic partnerships with organizations like Dell or Fortinet.
You know, these are organizations that are very good at what they do. Cool. And we don’t make anything as an organization in the services business. What we do, and what we have to be very good at is we need to be able to put those Lego pieces together in such a manner that it provides the greatest you know, consistency and feature functionality that our clients want to purchase with a tremendous customer care story around it.
And I will say that. The architecture of that is critical. And so, to be able to do that, how far do you want to go in in building and spending the kind of money it takes to do it at the level we do it. And the things that I would point to that would be indicative of that is that, you know, we, we take very seriously.
Once a customer enters 1 of our data centers or 1 of our cloud environments, and they ultimately, especially today are almost always buying. Thank you. A service associated with disaster recovery in today’s environment, as you can imagine, as, you know, from your background and so how you deliver that is absolutely critical.
And for us, it doesn’t just start with. You know, the server or storage platforms, it starts with the data center itself and then how you interconnect those data centers to provide geographical types of disparity for customers. So, we have from the very get go. We didn’t lose our DNA associated with the network DNA that we came from.
We leveraged that DNA and we still do today to the point where we interconnect all of our data centers with a triangulation in and out of every 1 of our markets. So not only the carrier hotel access, but a private backbone that we build and we maintain and we operate for our clients. They don’t have to bring their own network between their sites and their production sites.
We do that for them. We manage all of the IP addresses for them. So, it’s a very elegant type of solution. So, it’s really, on one hand, it’s a, it’s an, it’s, it’s, call it, you could call it innovation. On the other hand, it’s a quality-oriented service delivery model that has to be really well thought through and very well tested and, and, and maintained.
And the final thing I would say, in the spirit of what do we need to see and what a clients need to see in the future. Is in the spirit of it’s all about the delivery system and the delivery capabilities. We really do need when I say, we not only LightEdge, but every provider out there does need for the client today a more elegant way of.
Accessing their security profiles and their DR and their Infrastructure as a Service profiles on a single pane of glass. And I know you’ve probably heard that for in your career as well. And it’s still something that people talk about. And it’s not something that is readily available today. I don’t even know anybody that’s doing it at the high level.
We are on a. A hell-bent path to deliver a service this year that would take that to the next level. So, a customer, you know, at the drop of a hat with, you know, at their own control can truly understand, you know, what their profile looks like, what their security posture is at any given moment and what resilience is at any given moment.
But doing that all in a multi cloud environment, which is truly the, the state of the state today and multi cloud to be able to do that for a client right now is to me. What they call it the innovation needs to be at the next stage for customers to further and further adopt cloud capabilities.
If that makes sense.
Brian Thomas: Yeah, I appreciate that. And you impact quite a bit there as far as. How you can maintain a high-level service offering, but also that peace of mind with business continuity and disaster recovery. So that’s near and dear to my heart. I appreciate the share. And Jim, if you could briefly share in your last question here, looking ahead, what emerging technologies or innovations do you believe will have the most significant impact on infrastructure and cloud services and how is LightEdge preparing to integrate or leverage these advancements?
Jim Masterson: Yeah, I think to be honest, you Brian, it’s that it’s that multi cloud management capability. Its customers are deploying and I’m not completely convinced that they in many cases need to a lot of businesses, you know, get caught up in the. You know, in the, in the, in the, in the craziness, and people start talking about multi cloud and 3 locations and data and that sort of thing.
And that may very well be the case that is required for many, many customers, but other customers, they’re probably, you know, jumping into the deep end a little bit quickly. But that is going to ultimately be where this lands, which is you’re going to have workloads in multiple locations, public, private, multiple private premises, the whole the whole shebang in different application type environments as well.
They’re going to need. This true dashboard and portal to allow the management of those workloads, the security and the and so for us. That is our innovation path right now is to bring the market that kind of capability and it’s a front and center requirement for what clients are asking for right now.
And so that that, to me, is the innovation. I mean, you can just imagine if you’re an it professional, and you can come into your workplace on it in the morning, pull up your, your portal, and you can have full access to every 1 of your workloads and all of your security profiles around those workloads. And that that to me is the innovation that will take cloud adoption to the next level.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really appreciate that. And again, I know you, you’re always looking at that customer 1st outlook. You know, you’re looking through that lens and I really do appreciate that continually innovating and making it better for your customer. So, Jim, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Jim Masterson: Brian, thank you very much. I appreciate your professionalism. Thank you.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Jim Masterson Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
