Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, born and raised in Silicon Valley. I'm here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder, the journey they're on, the products they build, the problems they face in an effort to make our lives better. I'm excited to have with us today Nick Bonfiglio, co-founder and CEO of Syncari. Nick, welcome to the show.
Nick Bonfiglio: Thank you, Jake. Appreciate you taking the time to do this with us.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, thanks for joining. A little bit more on Nick. He leads Syncari, which drives Agentic master data management—Agentic MDM—to modernize enterprises with unified, accurate data for AI and automation. Previously, Nick led as EVP of Global Product at Marketo, acquired by Adobe, and founded Aptrinsic, acquired by Gainsight. Nick, you got a great background and we're going to dive into what inspired you to become what you are today. But before we do that, where are you joining us from?
Nick Bonfiglio: I'm actually on this call from Scottsdale, Arizona, which I where I currently reside these days. Way outside.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: When I started this podcast, I had this vision to go behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder in Silicon Valley, where I'm born and raised. And weekly, we dive deep in the trenches to find the wins, the losses, and the lessons learned with the hopes that it helps you run a better startup. But here's the thing. If you've gotten any value out of these conversations or been inspired at all, hit the subscribe button. And I get it. Your podcast feed's probably overflowing. But to stay up to date what's going on in Silicon Valley, stick with us because at the end of the day, we're all just trying to build something that matters and we're better when we do it together. So, hit that subscribe button and follow us wherever you find your podcasts. Now, let's get back to the show.
Yeah, I was on a trip last summer to the Grand Canyon. Went through Arizona and it was actually during the eclipse. So, as we were driving down the road, it was getting dark on the on the road, Route 66 or whatever it was, I forget now. But anyway, it was really fun to to to go through it. It was the first time I'd been in Arizona to really sightsee and just a great place to be and yeah, a lot going on there. We also drove past all the buildouts of the data centers and Amazon and like a lot of chip manufacturing. So, in a lot of ways, it's kind of the epicenter of what's happening right now with AI and and what's kind of behind it. What what inspired you to move to to Arizona?
Nick Bonfiglio: Yeah, that those are all the unfortunate things. So, I I you know, I grew up in the Bay Area most of my life in the you know, the the peninsula and you know, the beauty there is the redwoods and you know, you go up up north there, it's it's Tahoe and those kinds of things in Nevada and but Arizona has its own beauty. So, we had a a vacation home here and I I was looking for something rural like I had in Woodside and moved to Arizona for something rural again as as Redwood City and Woodside got very... a lot of people moved into it. And now with what you just mentioned in Arizona, it's like I feel like I'm... it's encroaching here as well. So, you sort of can't get away from, you know, urban sprawl, I guess, for lack of a better term. But yeah, there's a lot of great things happening here. The chip plant is incredible. Starting to bring jobs of different types. It's also, you know, the construction boom that's happening here is fueling a lot of those types of jobs in the market. So, yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really cool. Well, you've got a storied career here. Let's go back a little bit in in your past and kind of as you were brought up, you know, you're shaped by different experiences. It could be your parents or different role models, but ultimately you're in technology. What were some of the things that shaped you into becoming a leader of a company and an entrepreneur in technology?
Nick Bonfiglio: Well, I think first thing is I was an immigrant, so having moved from another country to this country sort of already makes you a certain... have a certain chip on your shoulder, I guess, for lack of a better term to say it. And so I think we we... the growing up through that. I also tell people that a lot of what shaped me is after coming here is, you know, with American sports, I played football and I wrestled most of my high school and some college. And I'll say that playing football, and I just told this story to someone else, really makes you a great team player and be able to work with a team and make sure, and as a middle linebacker especially, you're you're sort of running a lot of the defense and and that gives you how to execute as a team. But I wrestled and I was probably a better wrestler than I was ever a football player. And and that teaches you that when you're on the mat it's just you and the other person. So you you there's no one else to sort of pick you up, you better understand what you're doing, how you do it etc. I think a combination of those two things are a big part of who I am.
Where I got to, how I got here, I would say it's... look, I've been in doing this for what 40, 35 years now. Started off as an engineer and worked all the way through all the different fa- facets of what was going on during telecom and all those pieces. And you know, I would say that all of my experiences up until this point prepare you for what it means to be a CEO of a startup company and be with a board and and all those things. And I I actually feel bad sometimes for, I think of myself as a 25-year-old or 26-year-old being an entrepreneur starting a company and going like, "Wow, what I, what would have happened had I done that at 25, but I had the experience to go do it?" And kudos to some of these younger folks that can actually pull it off. But I also understand for some of them it's it's it's a bridge too far early in their career that way. So I don't know if that helps.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. We all come from different areas in the world and you know Silicon Valley is a great place to be around proximity but once you have those connections you could really build anything anywhere. So as you've continued in your career, you know, we met with you and your company, you know, four or five years ago and Syncari, and, you know, as we've seen things evolve, it seems like you've been in the right place really at the right time for this huge AI transformation. Talk a little bit about what inspired you to create Syncari. Like what was the initial idea that you thought there's a market we could actually build around here?
Nick Bonfiglio: Yeah. Well, you know, we, I was at Marketo for a long time and going from 3 million to 330 million there and learned a lot about data and, you know, the kinds of challenges that come with data, especially around the go to market. And we saw that a lot of our companies were struggling with traditional iPaaS implementations and all kinds of different things that they were doing with our APIs that just didn't always work. But one of the claim to fame that Marketo had is we built a sync engine there that literally married sales well, CRM and Marketo together and created one unified set of data across those those two things. And I thought you know what, this is the right way to think about integrations and how to actually get to master data sets that go far beyond the go to market use case.
So we started the company with the simple notion of we had sales automation, we did market automation and that we wanted to do data automation for folks in order to get to the next level. Because you know, to pick on some of these 25-year-old iPaaS players, but they were built for a different era and a different thing. And it's taken the world a long time to realize that, you know, those things have utility but the utility that they have is not the same as what's needed in this AI world that we find ourselves in. So we almost... when we built the company, it was always built around this notion of getting to clean canonical data that you can build off of no matter what your go to market systems are, but always make sure that every domain in your... in the... domain meaning like accounts, contacts, opportunities, product master, etc. and so forth, manufacturing items, etc., are all congruent across the entire business.
As we, we always had this notion of having a machine learning layer that we could potentially automate for folks that were starting to do you know, you know, prediction and and propensity and things like that inside of their with their data. And right when we were working on those things like this whole AI boom happened. Um and so it's all of a sudden AI... AI became... sorry, machine learning became AI and AI became the umbrella word for the piece that owned machine learning. And so we sort of landed in the right place at the right time with some of the things we were doing. And it's it's working out really well.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, I'd say I mean, you know, we're helping you add people and we could see the growth and exciting times. Talk a little bit about the company itself. So, you started it. You've got a co-founder. Is it one or two?
Nick Bonfiglio: One co-founder. Neelesh is... I mean I would consider more than a co-founder. He's like a brother to me. It's one of the things I learned from my Aptrinsic days is like the co-founder relationship matters a lot. And he and our, I I would I would say we're close more like family than we are co-founder relationships.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, you started it together and as a company now talk a little bit about... there's a lot of conversations around AI companies getting funded in large amounts and some companies that you know, it's it's taken them a little bit to get there. But talk about your funding journey.
Nick Bonfiglio: Well, I mean, from what perspective, I guess, Jake? I mean...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Hard it was or how easy it was or how much. Yeah. Like where where are you at now as a company in terms of series A?
Nick Bonfiglio: We just closed our series B. And one of the things that I'm super excited about is the series B was led by a gentleman who I really admire. He was the former CEO and founder of a company called Altair and just recently sold that company to Siemens for 11 billion. So he's a huge success and I think this time around with him coming into the company he likes to think of it as like the Victor Kiam, like because he came in and and did a huge investment in the company and so he wants to be the Victor Kiam of of data, which is kind of cool. And so I've got this super experienced operational leader now that is giving me advice on how to actually go to the next level. And I am, cannot tell you how appreciative I am of him, and not taking the leap and doing the series B with us, but also to being more active in the company today.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, it's interesting because it's not always about the money. It's about like what does that investor bring to the table? Whether it's connections or strategy or coaching or mergers and acquisitions. Like there's there's got to be something more than just the money because there's a lot of dry powder out there and you can get money if you're, if you put the name, you know, AI in the last part of your company name. And you know, we've seen some crazy stuff. So the the company now you've you've raised capital, you're growing. What's the as as you look at the market, has the market opportunity changed for you?
Nick Bonfiglio: Yeah, I I I think the market's in a wonky spot, Jake. I'll be I'll be honest. There's a lot of seed and and pre-seed and even some series A investment. And there are some exceptions of companies that are doing some amazing things and growing growing super fast. You know, a lot of these companies have been around maybe one or two years and we don't know the full aspect of how this is going to shake out. What the moving of capital, first of all, in two ways. One to hyper-centralized positions in larger AI plays, meaning the LLM players in in the market has has taken a lot of the powder out of the market that you were just talking about. You're talking billions and billions of investment in these companies. And then there's the the the app players that are in the AI space that are trying to find a niche using AI in the markets.
So you obviously there's mixed reviews around some of that. There's clearly utility here. So I don't want to please don't misunderstand as I'm not poo-pooing on AI because we're using AI ourselves in our in our platforms and we're empowering AI projects inside of companies, right? But it's more of a reality of like you know, the hype, I think, of the hype cycle. I hate using the word. I hate talking about the lifecycle. But we're in a situation where we don't exactly know how impactful the utility is going to be to the ROI of a business and the growth of a business. So, so I look at it as like we're...
One thing I do know, Jake, is in AI, in any AI project, data is at the heart of all these projects. And the fact that we're a data platform that allows you to build unified, congruent, clean, canonical data that not only is able to be used at the head end, but is actually able to be synchronized statefully across the entire operational systems that you use in your business, makes it a sort of a gamechanger for the accuracy of co-pilots in these operational systems, the accuracy of your MCP connections into this data, etc. and so forth. And so we're trying to power sort of this next-gen usage of data in this AI world that we find ourselves in.
Fundamental belief that I have, Jake, is that yes, Anthropic and OpenAI can connect to multiple MCP servers at the same time. But if you're trying to stitch together for multiple data sets from multiple MCP connections from these LLMs in order for their reasoning engine to give you some support with the context that you're giving it, it's a lot. We found that there's varying results of doing multiple MCP connections versus one MCP connection directly into Syncari with that unified canonical data. So think of it as like most of those approaches I would consider them centralized approaches like a data warehouse where there's a bunch of different tables inside of a data warehouse. It's a place where but how these tables are all connected and inter-interoperate who knows, and whether... and so trying to point your AI at a bunch of different disparate tables doesn't really work.
Contrast that with what we're doing at Syncari, which is we have like, take the account object for example. We think of it as unifying an object for accounts of everything that you know about an account into one wide record. That's what unification and data you know unification means in in our parliament. In other people's parliament just mean centralizing tables inside of a data warehouse. That's what I call centralization. Unification is one wide record for accounts, for opportunities, for contacts, for leads, for you know, whatever they may be, item masters, etc. Healthcare records, etc. And when you feed that to an LLM through one MCP connection, the amount of information accuracy increases pretty significantly is what we found. So your ability to interrogate that data and I what I like to say is argue with your data like Socrates as opposed to... is is a lot more accurate and a lot more beneficial from an ROI perspective. So we want to push this into the market a lot more. Help people to understand that it's not about centralizing your data. That's a, that's a, that's a play that has been around for 20-25 years. It's about how you unify that data and stitch it together in [clears throat] order for the results from your AI to actually be more meaningful to your business. And that's kind of what we're up to.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. So when you're in the market and you're talking to companies, what's their biggest pain point and who are you selling to in that company that really gets it?
Nick Bonfiglio: Yeah. Well, that this is one of the challenges. So at the moment now that we're selling master data management or the next generation of master data management with agent capabilities is we tend to sell to in two ways. Either the business user is trying to solve a problem with their IT department and brings us in to try and help them solve this problem that their current MDM or their current iPaaS or their current spaghetti integrations that they have with their systems can't help them with, us in "I'm trying to solve this business problem," and then sometimes we come in more from an IT perspective where IT is going like, "Look, I need a platform to actually help me get all this data to be congruent, but also being able to use it, govern it, understand lineage, understand observability of that data and those kinds of things." So depending on who is searching out this solution is who we end up working with. So, but it's always a combination of, I would say, IT CDOs, CIOs, and the business leaders, CROs, heads of finance, heads of marketing, etc.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. So it's an enterprise sale. You got a lot of people involved in that decision. What's a sales cycle look like? Is it a three-month, a one month, a six month? What do what are we talking?
Nick Bonfiglio: Yeah, I I that's a great question. I I would say that "it depends" is how I always answer that question. The use case is what determines the time frame of all these implementations and the sales cycles. It is multi-stakeholder as you've pointed out, but I think that's a good thing because sort of because we get deeper into the strategic operating aspects of a business when we're in multi-stakeholder. There's no longer just one person who if they're gone, you're out. You have a a collection of people that brought you in and made you sticky in that business. So, we kind of like that, but it does extend the sales cycles as you pointed out. We've done some as fast as two weeks. We've done some as long as, you know, 90, sorry, nine months sales cycles. And so, it's somewhere in between those two is what I would answer, Jake. Between 3 weeks and nine months is kind of our sales cycle.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Sounds like a standard enterprise opportunity. Yeah.
Nick Bonfiglio: Lots of decisions and sometimes egos kind of turn things on their head and but at the end of the day if you have a problem that can be solved by a solution and it actually delivers, that's the word of mouth actually helps grow the company significantly which is I'm assuming which has happened with you guys too, which is really cool.
Nick Bonfiglio: Yeah. The thing I'm really excited about is we brought on a bunch of Fortune, I don't know if you read the press release, but we brought on a bunch of Fortune 500, 100, 1000 customers recently. And I'm super excited by that because we're starting to move upmarket and more and more enterprises, large enterprises, the Monotypes and those folks of the world, Altairs of the world, are starting to see that, "Hey, I do have a data problem. Hey, it is impacting my not just my business, but my AI project and aspirations in AI, and I need to do something about this." And we're starting to see more and more people come to us with like, "Yeah, we're not really interested in like the older MDM head-end plays that are in the market today. We're looking for something that's actually more complete and holistic in in the way that it does it in a more modern way." So, that's... they find us and usually when they find us, it's a, it's a great experience for them because, like, "I don't know where this thing's been all my life, but here it is."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. What's the big unlock that helped that happen?
Nick Bonfiglio: So I think the data unlock was I think AI has exposed the the missing data hygiene and strategy that exists in corporations. And we we have a couple customers, you know, you talk to people in Fortune 1000, they're like, "We have seven data warehouses. We have two MDMs in the PL. We have four iPaaS you know things in in the company." And so it's just been growing through osmosis, I don't know how to... and but that created a a significant challenge for most businesses to try and untangle this in order to get to the real valuable data. This is where we shine because we can run in parallel [clears throat] with those things and in some cases we even help some of those things operate better with the things that we can do in our platform. And so I'm excited. I mean I I I, you know, a lot of people sell by fear. I like to sell by, by "you can do things now you couldn't do before and you're going to do them a lot better than you were doing them before."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. really exciting. What's the biggest challenge for the company? We're in this like transformational period where AI is really prevalent everywhere. And you know, sometimes it's, you know, getting above the noise or your messaging on target for what you really deliver. It could be people, it could be funding, it could be the market. Like what's, what keeps you up at night?
Nick Bonfiglio: I think what keeps me up at night is the uncertainty around what is going on all over the place in the world. The the finances, the the the the state of venture, the state of investments, etc. and so forth. I mean, that that's all scary because I talk to a lot of CEOs who we all need shoulders to cry on every once in a while, [laughter] you know, and we all cry on each other's shoulders, which is which is okay given the market we're in. Um, but I think what I worry about most is the noise in the marketplace. It's hard to get above that noise. Like you mentioned, the the analog I like to give people is like you're in a giant dinner party with a bunch of round tables. Everyone's talking. You can't hear anything anymore. And so the only people you decide to talk to are the people next to you on the table that you're sitting at. And that becomes the norm. And so you have to develop strategies where you're next to the people you want to talk to in order to build the relationships that you need in order to get the kind... above the noise or through the noise is a better way to think of it. So that's a me saying like you got to have more intimate events. You got to be next, shoulder-to-shoulder to people that you want to talk to and you have to be in in the events that you know your ICP is going to. And so I I don't think, you know, increasing your ad spend from you know, from 100,000 to 300,000 is going to yield a 3x improvement in your demand gen today. It's not. So you need to find other vehicles that are going to help drive growth. This is what we think about all day now at Syncari is how do we get shoulder-to-shoulder with the people that we know we can help, but they don't even know we can help them, for lack of a better way of saying it.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, I think proximity again is power and you know being at the table and being able to have those conversations makes a... it can be all the difference in the world when you're talking about getting an intro to a company or someone talks about your organization in an event. So it's important I think to be out there and having those conversations or having a good media PR strategy. When you look at the company, you know, you you're leading it and your employees look up to you as the leader and your co-founder Neelesh, and what can you share something about you that maybe they don't know that would be helpful for them to know as their leader? Like this is, this is something maybe you didn't know about me, but this is something that's helping our company or something that's, you know, a little bit more insightful about you.
Nick Bonfiglio: I mean, I [clears throat] I don't, nothing comes to mind, Jake, off the top of my head. I can I can tell you that a lot of them don't know that I'm a, you know, I actually just wrote a post on this on LinkedIn, is that I'm an INTJ from a Myers-Briggs perspective, right? And as a CEO, you know, I can be terse, I can be direct, I can be very dismissive or seemingly dismissive. And so I've had to learn to be more of an ENTJ or, you know, an ENFJ with folks because during this market that we're in, there's camaraderie that comes with being in a in a in a bad situation. And I think I recognize that my team has just survived one of these weird, you know, situations. In the same way that if you're in a football game, I'll just use another football analogy which most people don't care about, but it's like, you know, you're in a game and you're losing by two, three touchdowns and it's, you know, zero to 21 and you're going like, "Man, what the heck?" And but you, you know, you see it today. There's a lot of these comebacks that happened in the last three weeks where all of a sudden, you know, you put the right people together, you put the right, you you follow the right... as Phil Fernandez would always say, follow your own north star and go after that north star. You can come back from a 21 deficit and win the freaking game. And that's kind of, you know, how I like to think of what we're doing. I I love the people that I work with. I wish a lot of the ones that were no long... some, many of the ones that are no longer here were were here now again. But we're, you know, we're we're tooling for a different kind of business. And as you pointed out, we're not a prosumer, "Come sign up. Give me your credit card. I've got, you know, got $25 from this one person and I add them all up and times 12 and that's my ARR." That's not who we are. More of like "how are we going to build a durable business in this market that withstands any of these, you know, blips in in technology." And I absolutely fundamentally believe that data is not going away. So.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I agree with that. You know, as the company's evolved, the leaders have to evolve too.
Nick Bonfiglio: Yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: When you started the company and where you're at today, what have you feel like you've personally evolved and become better at?
Nick Bonfiglio: [snorts] Legal. No. [clears throat] No. That's important. You know, you know, raising money is a legal process more than anything else. I would say that I've learned patience because it's really tough sometimes in a startup. And perseverance during that patience is is tough, like you know you have to... you know we we came out of a market where it was like, "Hey go spend all the money you want, grow fast." Growth sort of went away. "Don't spend any money, become efficient." And it's caused a, I'm going to say like a whiplash or schizophrenic reaction from a lot of folks in the market, right? And we have to get through... And the the thing that I've learned is that you have to get through that with intentionality. You can't just get through it hoping like, "Oh well, I made it or I didn't make it or or whatever." It's, it's you have to have a plan. You have to go execute on that plan. You have to have intentionality on how to get to the other side. And I think we did that, man. I think we did that very well. And I think the team recognizes that we did that very well. And you know, again, this this is the part where the football is like a team sport. Money very much felt like an individual, you're on the mat by yourself sport. And so both of those were done and I I am so thankful and grateful to the team that is here at Syncari, to my co-founder Neelesh and the the the sheer endurance and tenacity they had to endure some of the things we had to go through and here we are. We're still here and you know I've had to suffer with competitors saying nasty things about us in the marketplace while we were going through it and you know this is kind of a one-finger salute to them in many ways as well. [laughter]
Jake Aaron Villarreal: It's interesting, you know, we have the perspective because we work with hundreds of startups, kind of the bird's eye view of the new companies that, you know, are three people in a closet, you know, launching an AI organization and, you know, they quickly got funding and they have this idea might be, you know, growing or they're going through this trans, you know, trying to get into market. Not a lot of battle scars there. It's more like, you know, "the sky is blue, we have all the wind in our sails, we we we've got funding. We're like new to this, you know, market and it's great." And then we have a whole lot of companies we worked with too that were on the beginning of it before AI really hit and they've pivoted and transformed and evolved to be part of the opportunity in the market and they're growing. But like that that that process, there was a lot of ups and downs kind of like what you're talking about that they went through and it almost feels like when you come out of that, you're, because you're battle tested, it's like you have a different level of strength. You have like a different perspective of competing and and winning. And when you have that, I think your mindset shifts, too, because as a leader, like you mentioned, you don't, you know, you cry on each other's shoulders when you need to. And it's lonely at the top, but it's only lonely at the top when things aren't good. It's not very lonely when things are great. So, to kind of see companies go through that, I just really respect it. And also, I'm really invigorated by what you go through to get to where you're at because now it's like you're in the flow with a lot of opportunity and it's in some ways almost easier because you can take the ups and downs differently.
Nick Bonfiglio: Yeah. I mean, you're you're spot on. I mean, the the the scars you wear are what make you who you are. And this was this was a a challenge that a lot of companies weren't up to and some were. And we were one of the companies that was up for that challenge. And I again can't thank my team enough for what they've had to endure as well. And you know, well, you know, this this run to efficiency was was interesting. But now we're back on the growth path. And you know, I'm just trying to get the company over 30, 40 million in the next few year, couple years or so. And that's really what I'm focused on now. Now it's just like, how do we kick up growth again? And how do we become that dominant player in this in this market? And you know, I I'm I'm hopeful that people will start to realize that the incumbents may be incumbent, but they aren't necessarily the best choice anymore. So, you know, not to pick on a name, but you know, the leading master data company just is going off to Salesforce and becoming part of that ecosystem, which is great, you know, but it also opens up opportunities potentially that, you know, success rate of of acquisitions over there has been mixed. And so we're we're, you know, kind of thinking that, hey, it could open up some some avenues for us to to help people understand that like, "Yeah, that was what we did 25 years ago. This is what we should be doing now in AI" and sort of turn that around.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's really good. I'm going to switch gears a little bit here. Let's talk about people. We're in the business of people and we help companies grow and scale and hire. And, you know, we like to look at it in a way that we can help organizations find the right people that map to what their needs are in the lifecycle of that company. And so we look at, you know, what's when companies come to us and say, "We need to hire a team that does X, Y, and Z." Like, you know, number one, what's the competency that person needs to have? So we're clear on that. What skills do they bring to the table? Second part is, you know, what's the character of that person like? And is it somebody that fits into that company? Do they, can you trust them? Do do you believe that you could work for them at some point? Like we try and understand what they can do today but where they could go. And then what's the, I guess the chemistry with the culture. You know, do they fit into that culture? Are they an ex-football player, an ex-wrestler, do they have to have that? Maybe they don't.
Nick Bonfiglio: Yeah. I'm an engineer, so keep that in mind.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So so those are those are the things that we look, we try and keep it really simple because I think it filters out a lot of the essence of what someone can bring to the table. But companies have different things that are important to them. For you, when you look at bringing people on, what are what are the things that really you're focused on making sure it's the right fit for for Syncari?
Nick Bonfiglio: That's a great question. So we always, Neelesh and I always look for a few things. We look for people that are more competent at the thing that they're doing than we are. So they have to be smarter than us, period. Full stop. They also, we also have like this no filter. And people, like, I'm sorry if you have to bleep that out, that's fine. But we don't like to work with people that, you know, maybe either have a chip on their shoulder or something like that, or just don't come off as genuine, transparent, you know, directness matters here. And you will find that this culture at Syncari is highly supportive of one another in in many ways because I'd say everyone is, you know, at the, close to the tippy top of their of their game and it it it breeds more people wanting to be that. And so if you hire, what what stands out is when you hire somebody that doesn't perform very well here because it it comes out immediately within the first few weeks of the person being here, month of the person being here, and we just have to deal with those right away because they're just not... So everybody knows like, you know, "Look, you're either going to come in and..." and I don't want to use the word assimilation, but you can't come in and start rocking the boat and causing problems and not even having a plan yet of what you're going to do that everyone's bought into. And so I don't know what to call that filter, Jake, but it's that that filter that we try to filter out for. But other than that, it's you just got to be great at what you do for the thing that you're doing.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that makes total sense. Well, you've got a great team. I know that you've gone through this journey and you're at where you're at today, which is on the up and up. What are you excited about from the product perspective over the next 6, 12, 18 months?
Nick Bonfiglio: I mean, and I got a lot of plans. I mean I don't know how much of these I want to talk about here but just think about if you had a clean canonical data set that is shared across your entire organization, that's distributed you know truth across every operational system, what could you build on top of that data that would take it to the next level? And I know the the immediate thing that comes to people's mind are assistants and things like that, of course we're going, we have some of those now, we're going to do more of them. But it's it's how do you think about deploying you know, agents as apps would be the best way to sort of think about that. And how do I make that agent development less complex than than what it is today where, you know, the the connection, the the data manipulation, all of that is part of the the the agent you're building. But what if that was already all done and all you have to do is focus on like, "How do I do these things from a from a process perspective?" And right now people that have a lot of agent builders in the market, people are stumbling with more the connectivity of the data layer and the processing of the data layer as opposed to "okay, that's all done. Now what do I want this workflow to do? What do I, what automation do I want to have and be able to maintain that in a very simple, easy to maintain way where, I would say, business users can operate in that environment as much as an engineer or somebody like that could."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Nicely said. Well, Nick, I know we've been working together here for four or five years, but you know, give a shout out to potentially open opportunities you have at the company. I, we help, we've helped you find people that you've hired, but you know, what other roles do you think you want to hire in the future that if people connect with you and you guys hire them, that's that's a good thing for you?
Nick Bonfiglio: Yeah, I mean, you caught us at a good time, Jake. So, obviously, we've got product, marketing, engineers, a lot, a lot. We're hiring in almost every department at this point. So I think it's a question of like, if you believe in data, you believe in AI, and you believe in agentic capabilities for those things, come check us out. The jobs are, some of them are listed on the website. There are going to be a lot more being listed soon. And you know, anything you can help out with, Jake, we we can talk about that, too. But I would say that in this market, there's enough dry powder of people that I like that that recruiting is not as challenging as it was in the heyday. Yeah, I'll just leave it at that. It's just there's a lot of people that are looking for something to do.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, Nick, if anybody wants to find Syncari or find you, where do they go?
Nick Bonfiglio: Syncari.com. There's a "contact us" and my emails. You can find me on LinkedIn. It's Nick Bonfiglio on LinkedIn and hit me up either DM or somewhere else and I'll I usually connect with pretty much everyone unless there's, unless there's an immediate pitch in the in the in the invite and then I kind of... [laughter]
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Whether I need it or not. We all get, we all get a lot of those pitches. So I I totally hear you. But anyway, well I want to thank you for coming on, Nick, and and sharing your time with us today, and for the listeners for listening. It means a lot to me. You spent it with us on this beautiful Friday. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to catch up with you all in the next episode. Until then, Nick. World.
Nick Bonfiglio: Thank you. Take care.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen, and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.
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