743 AI Revolution in IT: Jay McBain and Bobby Jacobs Explain

[Uncle Marv]
Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast coming at you live from Orlando. We are at the Rosen-Shingle Creek Resort and day two of IT Nation here on Orlando. We have survived the overnight Flo Rida invasion and it is fantastic.

Our show is presented by Threads and we are coming with you powered by Rhythms, the internet in a box. And I'm joined here by leading industry analyst, the voice of the channel, is that how we can say it? Jay McBain from Canalys.

Jay, how are you?

[Jay McBain]
Well, thank you so much for having me back. Glad to be here.

[Uncle Marv]
Glad to have you back. It's been a while. We've not chatted and lots, lots has happened in the channel since then.

But before we get into that, let me go ahead and ask obligatory questions. How's life? How are you enjoying Orlando?

Family here, all that good stuff?

[Jay McBain]
Yeah, we love Orlando as a family. We're Disney annual pass holders. The kids are here.

My wife, Michelle, with SonicWall is here. And I think we've got Harry Potter tonight and then Disney on Saturday. So we try our best to kind of blend work and home life and balance the two.

[Uncle Marv]
And it's great. It's easy to do when conferences are here in our state, right? That's true.

Yes. Did you guys drive up early? We drove up late last night.

Okay. All right. So you didn't see the flow rider?

[Jay McBain]
We did not see. I've seen him a number of times, but it's always a great party.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. So Jay, one of the big things that happened, of course, the keynote here, ConnectWise, they announced a ton of stuff and used a bunch of data, which I wondered if it was your data and you confirmed that, yeah, it's Canalys data. So let me first ask, when they're coming to you guys for this data, are they looking specific or are they just asking you, hey, what's happening and you tell them?

[Jay McBain]
No, it's pretty specific. You can talk at a very high level about 2025 being $5.4 trillion in terms of what businesses and governments will spend. You can break it down.

There's $1 trillion in hardware, $1 trillion in software, $3 trillion in services, which happen to be growing faster than the hardware and software. So MSPs here, the 7,000 at this IT Nation event are actually growing faster than the vendors they represent. So that's when you double click.

Let's talk about the buyers. Let's talk about the industries they're in. Let's talk about the segments they're in.

Let's talk about how it breaks down regionally, country by country, state by state, province by province. Let's talk about the different layers of the tech stack. There's thousands of them.

Let's talk about the different models, subscription, consumption, managed, and all these new models coming in. So you can start breaking down the data to the decimal point, six, seven, eight different ways. And that's the questions they're asking us.

[Uncle Marv]
Now, how far back lag time is that in the data? I mean, is it close to real time? Are we going back last quarter, last year?

Yeah.

[Jay McBain]
So, you know, when you look at data, I mean, we probably collect data 100 different ways. Much of it is quarterly. Okay.

You know, you rely on what the industry is doing and when, you know, results come out and, you know, Microsoft will grow at 33% last week and AWS at 19 and you start to make, you know, the trends that are happening, you revert back to kind of the heartbeat that's going on. Right. So I always explain, you know, no one predicts the future.

No one has a crystal ball, but everything that's going to happen in the future, in the next 10 years, let's say, the trains are already on the tracks. They're already picking up speed. All we're trying to do as analysts is not predict the future.

What we're trying to do is just, where's that train going to be? How much speed are they going to pick up and where are they going to be at a certain amount of point in time? So, you know, we could talk about generative AI.

We could talk about a new millennial age buyer by the end of this year. It's a demographic conversation. We can talk about this new platform economy, which has taken over everything at this ConnectWise conference.

We can talk about the new economics of partnering. So of all the trends that are happening, again, let's revert back to the numbers. What does that mean?

What does it mean for ConnectWise? What does it mean for our MSPs? Right.

What does it mean for the industry? And then that's the conversation that we can double click into.

[Uncle Marv]
So one of the big things, of course, the marketplace, the platforms, some MSPs like it, others don't because they're worried that it's going to allow end users to go direct in a lot of places and stuff. So it's interesting. Are you getting any feedback like from MSPs when they come across you at these conferences?

They're like, hey, Jay, what does this really mean for us?

[Jay McBain]
It does. And, you know, we just had an election this week and you kind of try to control the things you can control and manage the things you don't control. So we made one of the most accurate predictions I think we ever made was on marketplaces five years ago.

We saw this in the very early days where we said that we think they're going to grow at 86 percent compounded. And we didn't believe you. And it was a big mark because at 86 percent, it's almost doubling every year.

And so at that point, you know, a company like AWS and their marketplace would become a top 10 distributor in those five years. And now we look back, those five years are over and it happened. There's 45 billion now going through there.

AWS is a top 10 distributor. We're starting to ask now, you know, how many years is going to take the train on the tracks? It's only a few years before they're a top five distributor in the same conversation as TD Cynics, Ingram, Arrow, you know, etc.

So this is one of those marketplace moments. To answer your question, though, one thing marketplaces did is tell every end client we have that the value of resale is 3 percent. In the 1980s, I was selling PCs for, you know, IBM and Lenovo.

It was 40 percent. In the 1990s, it was 30 percent. Many markets are still 20 percent plus, you know, in terms of margins.

But they've gone and said, if you just collect the customer's money, take on the risk and the net 30, net 60 and go hire Biff to break knees and all the things like that it's not an easy thing to do. Right. But it's only worth three.

It's the same amount of money that's swiping your visa or a MasterCard at a restaurant. The movement of money is that's the value. But in the economics is no partners do so much more than that.

And MSP, they're consulting, they're designing, they're architecting, they're co-marketing, they're co-innovating. They're, you know, working around that marketplace. There's so much work that goes into procurement, configuration, pricing, loading, supply chain, capital credit facilities.

But then, you know, the magic of managed services is every 30 days forever. Every company is moving into this subscription consumption model, which fits perfectly in a managed model where you need a customer for life. So if you spread out all those moments, this economics of partnering actually fits really well in a marketplace.

If you collect the money, you know, you make that 3%. If you don't collect the money, there's still 17 or 27% of margin available in private offers. And then the multiplier effect, which is really where managed services needs to go.

At AWS, it's $6.40 that can be made for every dollar of product. At Microsoft, it's $8.45. At Salesforce, it's $6.19. That's what marketplaces do well is in terms of enable these margin and multiplier opportunities for MSPs to make even more money than you're making today.

[Uncle Marv]
Right. So to that point where services is a big area for us. I spoke with Peter Kajawa yesterday and he mentioned that for part of our space, even though everything's growing, we're slowing and a big part of that was wage inflation.

Now that's not a part of your numbers, but I was going to ask, do you actually include that anywhere?

[Jay McBain]
Yeah. Well, let's give numbers to the context here. Managed services next year, 2025, will be a $608 billion global business.

The North American makes up about 45% of it. So it's truly a global business. But to put that into context, this industry, managed services, is twice the size of the SaaS industry.

We hear all about Salesforce and ServiceNow and Workday and Marketo and NetSuite and HubSpot. We hear all about the hundreds of billions of dollars that they're worth on the stock market. You put that whole industry together with 250,000 ISVs, managed services is twice the size of that industry.

Right.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. But that's, when you say managed services, that's not just like the MSP space alone because there are other areas of managed services outside of the channel, right?

[Jay McBain]
Nope. Those are channel sold managed services, but they're not all sold by MSPs. There are 337,000 companies that sell into that number.

Of the 337,000, if you break it up by what percentage of their revenue is recurring, we always count MSPs as 30% or 50% of their revenue is recurring. There's 86,000 of them that fit the MSP model. But suffice it to say, the global system integrators, accountants, digital agencies, VARs, ISVs, there's 20 other partner types that are selling managed services into this big bucket.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So that's what we've got to realize because I think the MSP space does kind of think, well, it's just us, but no, it's a whole lot of other people.

[Jay McBain]
Kindrel just came out of IBM. They're not selling to a flower shop down the street. They're selling to banks and insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, galactic large managed services contracts, tens, hundreds, in the case of governments, billion dollar contracts.

And that's all included in this number as well. So it's a really big industry. It's actually almost twice the size of the hyperscalers combined as well.

Nice. And we hear a lot about Microsoft, AWS, and Google every day, but we don't hear how great managed services is because it's almost twice the size.

[Uncle Marv]
Very interesting. So it sounds like we've got a nice, healthy path in front of us. Let me ask another question as we wave at people going by.

The session just came up. And I just lost my train of thought. How about that?

I was going to ask you, oh, private equity. So of course, we know there's always M&As happening, private equities coming in. We just heard about the CompTIA event that happened.

How much of PE is playing into the growth right now? Because I imagine they've got to see there's money there. There's growth there.

So that's got to be one of the driving factors that they're coming into our space, right?

[Jay McBain]
Well, they do. The world economy, the global GDP this year is $105 trillion, broken into 27 industries. The tech industry, which makes up about 5% of it, is the fastest-growing industry, has been for a long time.

Only at 5%? Well, it's 5% of the size of the world economy, but it's the fastest-growing size. So when I'm a money person and I'm trying to buy a bigger yacht, you're looking around and saying, am I going to put more of my time and effort, money, capital dollars, into pharmaceuticals, banking, insurance, automotive?

Where is my opportunity to get the best shareholder return? Right now, the tech industry is growing by double to triple what the world economy is. Managed services is growing by double that.

Things like cybersecurity are growing at the same level, 12% type of annual growth. Generative AI is growing at 59% annually for the next 10 years. So there seems to be a lot of money people that look at the model of managed services.

It kind of, for their thesis, looks a lot like SaaS, which is a recurring, sticky, very valuable because of the customer relationships and the way it delights customers. They're looking at this going, the valuations for the two, in terms of getting a return for my shareholders and me buying a bigger yacht, seem to be really good. So that's the roll-ups we've been seeing for 10 years.

This is, how do I take CompTIA's news to say that there's a $180 million certification business, this A-plus certification that came out in 1993, with more capital, with more arrangements, like one of the buyers actually owns ConnectWise as well, and they own a bunch of security companies. Yeah, they own a lot of... And they're looking around and looking at the opportunity and saying, if we take some of this money, which couldn't be generated by CompTIA as a not-for-profit, given their constraints, but what if we juiced that?

Could we go and find a way, that $180 million, to get it to a billion in the next five years? Because if we did that and then made it public or combined it with something and made that public, whichever exit we choose, we're going to make everybody involved a lot of money, which is kind of the first rule of capitalism. I'm going to make myself a lot of money.

And again, we are the place where people with money can come and make money today. So that's what's happening.

[Uncle Marv]
So one of the questions I got in a side hall group was, these PE companies come in, they make a company, they do an IPO, and then everything starts to be driven by stockholders and stuff like that. And it kind of loses the shine of what made it great in the first place. I know you probably don't have numbers to validate one way or the other, but is that something that goes into the analysis, though, when you're looking at stuff?

[Jay McBain]
And we do have numbers. You do. So keep in mind that this industry, managed services, is 25 years old.

The SaaS industry is 25 years old. There's a lot of history here. So when you look at 250,000 SaaS companies, or if you look at 337,000 net NSPs, there's a lot of what we'll say numbers behind what they do.

And it's all in a thesis. And in any thesis, you're not going to hit 100% of the balls. But if you hit 20 out of 100, you'll go to the Hall of Fame.

So the way private equity works and the way they set up these theses is that over time, it's like the house in Vegas. They're always going to win. The house is going to win, right.

So, yes, when private equity becomes involved, they inject more money. When more money and more engineering, more marketing comes in, there's a natural tendency for all these companies to go up market. Hey, look, we can start winning in mid-market.

Hey, look, we can start winning in the Fortune 2000. Oh, look, we got our first few clients in the Fortune 500. Then you get all excited about nabbing these massive Fortune 500 companies that you start to lose track, where SMB is now just a strategy, where it's what grew your company.

It's the grassroots of your company, like an IT nation over 20 years. This is your community that you've built this massive thing into. And you might even be a billionaire, like the founder of ConnectWise, founders walked away as billionaires.

The founder of Datto walked away as a billionaire. We have several other billionaires kind of in our chatter right now. There's a lot of money to be made in terms of the industry we built together.

But again, the MSP, which the average MSP is eight people, it's a family. And when you watch your family members then have money come in and start to move away, and you're now just a strategy on the side, we always have to be nimble as an industry in making sure that we're aligning ourselves, because there's 35,000 vendors who would love to know us and work with us. And if we feel that one of our tried and true vendors that might have fueled our business for 10 or 20 years is moving away from us, we just always have to have our head on a swivel.

Yep, time to shift. Making sure that we have the right stack for our customers, we have the right stack for us, we can be profitable, we can delight our customers, we can be repeatable. And again, someday when we want to exit, maybe it's a roll up, maybe it's private equity, you'd never know, in terms of your own business, how everything's going to end up when you want to retire, and obviously get the fruits of your labor.

[Uncle Marv]
So Jay, I want to say this. If I were to just simply look at the reports that Canalys puts out, I couldn't read them. But listening to you explain them, I think is one of the reasons people love having you explain them.

Because we understand, and you speak our language, you're in our world, you understand exactly what it is we need to hear to explain what's happening out there. And the analogy of where's the train is going, how fast it is going, that's fantastic, I love that. So thank you for what you do, and I keep saying this, we got to get together more, but your family travels a lot.

[Jay McBain]
I mean, it's a wonderful industry. But last March, we all got introduced to generative AI. We've watched the hyperscalers add trillions of dollars of value.

This morning, NVIDIA became the richest company on the planet, because they're selling all the chips, they're fueling it. But while we're reading magazines and watching TV and watching billionaires become trillionaires and things like that, we're all tech people, and we're all running a business, we're all employing people who are paying mortgages. We look to ourselves, what's our opportunity?

And that's the research we write, is the trillionaires are going to become tens of trillionaires, and that's just the way the model's built. But how do we draft behind that? How do we become millionaires?

How do we become 10 millionaires? How do we become 100 millionaires? But more than capital, how do we change the world in our locality?

How do we change our customers' lives? How do we change our employees' lives? Somebody has to tell the story from these really big trillion dollar numbers, down to what it means in my town in Wichita, Kansas.

And let's have that conversation, and while all this is growing and we're the number one industry in the world and stuff, everyone, all boats should rise. And that's a community-led research model and model that we see here at IT Nation.

[Uncle Marv]
I appreciate that. You guys have been touting that for years. I love it.

I think just about everybody is starting to understand all boats, all tides rise, all ships.

[Jay McBain]
All boats rise.

[Uncle Marv]
Jay, I appreciate you stopping by the booth. I know that you're probably in high demand here on Meteor Row. What do you think of Meteor Row?

I love it. This is kind of a cool... I love your camera facing outwards as well, getting everybody walking by.

Again, it was good to see you. I'm sure I'll see Michelle. We'll have seen her three weeks in a row at conferences.

And you had mentioned earlier that we see each other more on the road than we do at home, but...

[Jay McBain]
You know, there's 270 tech conferences a year. You could go to more than one per day, every business day.

[Uncle Marv]
Yeah, you could, but who would want to? Michelle and I, I guess. I guess so.

All right, Jay, it was great to have you, folks. Jay McBain, Canalys. And if you want to know where we're going as an industry, they're the place to find it out.

So I'm going to turn off the cam here. You guys can watch us. We'll be back with more from IT Nation.

We'll see you soon. Holla! Hello, friends.

Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, and we are streaming live from Orlando. We're at the Rosen-Shingle Creek Resort at day two of IT Nation. And this show today is presented by my guest, Thread, here in the house.

And we are powered by Rhythms, the internet in a box. That's how we are streaming with you. But let me introduce the gentleman sitting next to me or the pirate sitting next to me, Bobby Jacobs from Thread.

[Bobby Jacobs]
How are we? Thanks, Marv. Great to be here.

Love getting IT Nation connected with everybody. Obviously, love hanging out with Uncle Marv on the podcast. It's good to be here.

[Uncle Marv]
Good to be here. Good to have you. So I have been announcing other shows where I said, you know, presented by Thread, winners of last year's Pitch It competition.

So let me just ask this question out of the box. How has the last year been as, you know, king of the throne, per se?

[Bobby Jacobs]
It's been awesome from a lot of perspectives, the partnership with ConnectWise, you know, you guys, all of the attention that we've gotten, and really just the ability to tell more MSPs about the impact that we can make. So it's been good. I mean, from a product perspective, it's exploded.

AI Service Desk is our new thing.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay, so we've gone away from Service Magic to the AI Service Desk.

[Bobby Jacobs]
The Service Magic is a huge part of what we do. It's super important. What we've really transitioned from is talking about ourselves as a customer experience platform.

Okay. We still care a ton about customer experience, but the AI Service Desk, I think, is just more encompassing. There's a lot of workflow automations, a lot of back-end things that we do that, you know, service experience just wasn't quite covering at all.

So it's not that we're doing anything less. We're just trying to be more holistic, and the amount of AI customer-facing things that we've been able to release that are making just a massive impact on service gross margin and everything an MSP does has been huge.

[Uncle Marv]
Now, you guys have always had AI kind of embedded in there. So with the new announcements, are there new features? Are there new services tied to it?

I mean, more stuff?

[Bobby Jacobs]
Yeah, absolutely. So to date, our AI has been focused on what the technician would do. So, you know, I think we're best in class in setting type, subtype, item priority, summarizing what happens, doing automated time entries.

What we've come out with is customer-facing. Okay. So now, you know, with chat, people are always worried about, how am I going to respond fast There's a lot that we do to mitigate that.

But now our AI will respond first, and it'll either say, hey, I need more information, or it'll gather all of the things that someone would typically need to fill out a form. So now when the ticket gets to the technician, all the context is there. Or when the ticket gets to an RPA tool, a technician never had to touch it.

It's already gathered all the onboarding info, so the RPA can go to work, and no technician is touching that ticket. Interesting.

[Uncle Marv]
Did you guys add any more, you know, integrations for the RPA, any more tools outside of the ConnectWise family?

[Bobby Jacobs]
Absolutely. So the way that we've launched it, you can connect to any webhook of any automation tool. So it's very open platform, you can work with whoever you want.

Now we are about to launch a formal Roost integration. You can already do almost everything you'd want with Roost with our tool, but the integration will just make it easier. So Roost, Power Automate, you know, working with Microsoft, and then there's a lot that would make sense for us too.

Whether it's PIA, ConnectWise's RPA, you know, things like SIP, Immy Bot, tools to do password resets, anything that you have doing automation, we'll gather the information for and kick off that workflow. Nice, nice.

[Uncle Marv]
I want to go off base before I forget, because I walked by your stuff yesterday, so you technically have two booths.

[Bobby Jacobs]
We do, yeah.

[Uncle Marv]
But I want to ask about the booth out front. What's up with that little tent thing where people are smashing stuff?

[Bobby Jacobs]
Absolutely. We hate tickets. That will never change.

I'm a pirate with a sword because we say, death to the ticket. Tickets are no way to treat somebody. And so we have two themes at each, we have one theme at each booth.

The outside booth is our death to the ticket theme. And you can take out your anger on the ticket by smashing plates. You can write whatever you want on the plate and smash it with a baseball bat or a TV or a monitor.

[Uncle Marv]
Was there any liability concerns? Did you have to get waivers from the hotel to do that?

[Bobby Jacobs]
Absolutely. Yeah. One, we work with an awesome company that's doing the Rage Room for us.

And they're insured and do all that stuff. The hotel did come up when we started yesterday and wanted to go through a bigger risk review. You know, they didn't care too much about SOC 2.

They were more focused on insurance and those types of things.

[Uncle Marv]
Well, yeah, because I'm watching the plates and stuff. I mean, shards of plates are flying all over the place. All the people had was a little goggle for the eyes.

[Bobby Jacobs]
They had a little more than that. They have some gloves. There's some protection.

We passed the security review. So we're good to go. Come by the Thread booth and smash stuff.

Get your anger out. People have been angry at tickets for too long.

[Uncle Marv]
Whose idea was that?

[Bobby Jacobs]
It was Mark's. Our CEO. Mark's a visionary.

A core value of Thread is being radical. So we also had some live tattoos going on last night. We had about 15 people get real Thread-related tattoos.

So we're all about being radical.

[Uncle Marv]
I missed that.

[Bobby Jacobs]
It was pretty awesome.

[Uncle Marv]
Very nice. Very nice. Okay.

So you talked about all the attention you've gotten and stuff. And I know that winning the competition was a big boost. But I have to imagine that having all of these integrations, having all of these things pushed through the RPAs, making life easier, I assume that word of mouth is also got to be key.

[Bobby Jacobs]
Yeah. It is. Especially with, you know, there's so many different types of groups of MSPs.

Whether it's peer groups, you know, I was at Evolve right before this. That's a place where we're really starting to get a lot of traction and word of mouth. And then, you know, with all the new private equity groups out there, those are basically peer groups.

So getting into Lyra, New Charter, all the groups like that too. You know, there's a lot of new strategy that vendors need to think about because the referral is huge for two reasons. One, it's a lot more affordable to meet people through referrals, which means we can put more money into the product.

But it also holds a lot more weight, right? When it's not just us at a booth telling people what we do. It's an MSP that someone respects their opinion.

So yeah, that's been huge.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. Now, let me ask the question that you probably don't like to hear a lot and don't get asked in public. Okay.

In terms of the AI automation, I assume there's got to be some human intervention to make sure that if things get categorized wrong or sent to the wrong place, how much work did you guys have to do to, you know, make sure that didn't happen? And if it is happening, how is that being resolved?

[Bobby Jacobs]
Absolutely. I mean, we work on it constantly. We're changing prompts, what versions of OpenAI we're using.

You know, every automation tool in our product could be using a different model from OpenAI. And we're changing those. Sometimes 3.5 still works best for specific things. Sometimes 4.0, 4.0 mini, whatever. So there's a lot that we do there. Nothing's perfect.

There's things that are going to get categorized wrong. And the biggest thing that we do is, one, we're constantly comparing our tickets with other tickets to look for opportunities where something could have gone wrong. And we're bringing in the technician when it's appropriate.

So when a new ticket comes in now, you'll see that the AI is working on it. And it'll ask for a technician to come review something if it needs to.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. That's good. So how much is actually being pushed to RPA where companies are saying, I don't need to hire that extra tech now?

Do you guys have numbers on that?

[Bobby Jacobs]
I mean, the biggest thing that we've done so far is dispatch. So we had a new partner the other day that their dispatcher quit and they didn't hire a new one. And that was like right out of the gate within two weeks of having threat.

We've seen large MSPs be able to not hire five new dispatchers, 10 new dispatchers. So that's the first place where we're making the biggest impact.

[Uncle Marv]
Before you go on, I want to say, did that dispatcher quit because of Thread?

[Bobby Jacobs]
They did not quit because of Thread. Now, ideally, you can turn a dispatcher into a level one tech. It allows you to put them in a role that they're more excited about.

No one likes doing dispatch. So to be able to level up your team, that's what we typically see. Okay.

All right. And then, sorry, the other piece on that is for the technicians. We don't have a lot of data because we are just launching it.

Okay. But if you look at your types and subtypes, anything you're doing with RPA today, onboarding new users, password recess, all types of things like that, those can now be zero-touch ticket clips. Nice.

So just type and subtype should give you the insight you need to be able to do the math on it.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. All right. I had another question, but I'm going to let it go.

[Bobby Jacobs]
Well, we talked about pitching earlier, and I got away from that a little bit.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay. Well, so we talked about, you know, the fact that, you know, you were last year's winner. You apparently coached this year's winner.

I did. So, of course, people are going to be like, is the fix in? Or, you know, let's just go back and talk about what was involved in, you know, being on this side of pitching and having to help.

[Bobby Jacobs]
Well, just to push into that conspiracy a little more, it's now four winners in a row have coached the next winner. So there's some legacy happening there. All right.

Cam from AlertOps was my coach who won the year before. And so, yeah, working with Zach and the Senteon team was awesome. You know, they know way more about their product than me.

I'm not that technical. I don't know that much about security. Although, having been in the LionGuard world, their product makes a lot of sense to me.

Yeah. What I think I was really able to help with was distilling the messaging down to something that was digestible in five minutes.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[Bobby Jacobs]
Just to say, like, this is why it matters. And this is the pain that we solve. That's what we spent most of our time.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So helping them perfect the pitch. Were you involved in all six weeks of that boot camp?

Or 16 hours?

[Bobby Jacobs]
Yeah, I mean, pitch it is like 16 weeks. I actually was able to kick off pitch it. I was the first, like, cohort class, I don't know, whatever, you know, speaker, I guess.

Okay. And so I was involved at that point with this class. I wasn't involved a ton between then and when the finalists were selected.

[Uncle Marv]
Okay.

[Bobby Jacobs]
You know, I was tracking. I was keeping up with people. But once the finalists were selected and I got to start really working with Senteon, then Zach and I spent a lot of time together.

And it was awesome. Nice, nice.

[Uncle Marv]
Did you have to report back on how you spent their money?

[Bobby Jacobs]
Yeah, absolutely. Really? Yeah.

And it's because ConnectWise wants to make sure that you're going to get the most out of it. Right. So it's more that they help you put together a plan for it, think through the best way to use it.

You know, we go to a lot of ConnectWise events. They certainly made sure that we were using it efficiently as far as their events went and helped us go to more events. And, you know, Sean Lardo is awesome.

And he got us into more things than we've done in the past. Right. So ConnectWise is a great partner there.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. So you basically finished your two-year cycle. So what's next?

[Bobby Jacobs]
I'd love to stay involved and pitch in any way that I can. I'm always happy to work with any startup and talk about messaging or any of that stuff. But, yeah, I mean, we've grown a good bit.

We're hyper-focused on helping MSPs provide service magic.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Can you guys ask them to pitch in and help with the budget for the steak knives?

[Bobby Jacobs]
I think we might. You know, LionGuard sponsored PitchIT this year. They did, yes.

Which was awesome.

[Uncle Marv]
Yep, I haven't found Michelle yet, but I wanted to chat with her about that.

[Bobby Jacobs]
Yeah, yeah. So that was great. I mean, she was on stage at PitchIT and all that.

So, you know, maybe there's something there where there's some opportunity for us.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Or maybe we'll talk about getting your name higher on the board there.

[Bobby Jacobs]
That's right. We certainly love partnering with you.

[Uncle Marv]
All right. Well, Bob, I'm going to say thank you for stopping by. I know that you guys are all over the place here.

It's a fast-moving conference. So as people can see, stuff's moving pretty fast here. So thank you for taking some time.

Am I still meeting with Mark this afternoon? I think that's right. All right.

I haven't met him, I don't think.

[Bobby Jacobs]
Mark's a visionary, man. He's going to talk about the future of MSPs and AI. There we go.

It's going to be a good time.

[Uncle Marv]
It should be good. So good to see you. Appreciate everything you do, Mark.

Thanks for stopping by. There you go, folks. Bobby Jacobs from Thread.

Check him out. If you want to kill those tickets, that would be the way to go. So we'll be back here more from IT Nation.

We'll see you soon.