 Boom. What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sokian. Very excited to continue being doing interviews at COFES, the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software, for our second annual partnership with them. We are now speaking with Pete Wells. Hello. Hello. Thanks for coming on to the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Very excited to chat. Pete, along with a ton of other things, he's on the board of directors at COFES Institute for the last two and a half years. He's also for the last 17 and a half years. He's the president and CEO of Smart to Market. And prior to that, 18 and a half years at HP, doing regional sales manager. And he's also for 23 years as a volunteer firefighter, which is so cool, like you were saying earlier, a completely different part of neural circuitry. And this is so interesting to be able to smash together things like different life essences together into what is your life. Now, Pete, let's talk about this, your journey. You know, how did you pick up your interests as a kid and start molding into who you are today? Yeah, good question. And, you know, a lot of it comes down to, I think, curiosity. As a small child, I probably got in trouble more than not for taking things apart and not being able to put it back together. And I always wanted to help things work. And I think that curiosity drove me to look into, you know, what I wanted to do when I went into college, honestly, going into college, I didn't really have a clear plan of where I was going to go after I got out of school. But that's definitely a big part of what led me into engineering. I got my degree in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, met some great people. And the door opened from there just at that time period. It was a great time to be an engineering discipline. I remember we had we had to pick the litter and it came to interviews and companies we got to meet with versus, you know, not long after I was out of school, they went to a lottery system where, you know, they selected some number of people that actually got to interview with companies we went to the list and just picked the ones we wanted to talk to. And it was it was a great time to, you know, to go after that. So I don't know if you want to get into the stage or not. Well, this is well, this is good. I want to just take a quick a quick moment to say that the amount of of young people that we know that we're exposed to tinkering at young ages. And like you said, taking things apart, understanding how it works, putting things back, trying to sometimes put things back together and having, you know, mentors, parents involved in and helping with that process is so critical to a lot of the engineers that we know today. So I'm glad that that was one of your your really powerful young moments. Yeah. And I'm honestly envious of kids today that have, you know, all the robotics programs and the technology that's out there to play with today is pretty cool. And yeah, that's part of what, you know, stepping way ahead to cope as, you know, we look at the opportunity that we have as a community to get people interested in technology. You know, arts are important too, but, you know, today's problems, tomorrow's problems are completely, you know, beyond complex and having solutions to those problems is going to take a bunch of smart people in that next generation that are, you know, going to be tackling those. Yes. Yes. So and we're really fortunate to have, like you were saying, like things like first robotics are these really great engineering simulation softwares that we're able to now use to really enable the maximal amount of human creativity to to to come into play and solve these challenging problems that we're facing. So then how did how did the work and it was Georgia to Georgia Tech? How did how did you, you know, pick up, you know, post Georgia Tech where you went? Yeah. So that was also by luck more than design had a chance to interview with a number of companies, you know, back in those days, they did plant trips, the flight across country, you know, to all these great places. I remember General Dynamics in in Texas was building the F 16 first fly by wire military jet at the time. And so really cool technology. It happened to be about a week before my interview with Hewlett Packard, they don't went to General Dynamics and that was a lot of really neat people. I love the people there. They're great planes are so cool. I would have loved to have been, you know, I would have been an in-flight test engineer. But everyone I talked to was bragging about these brand new HP automated test systems they're getting right. And it's like, oh, HP and I was familiar with them. But this was like the, you know, they were talking about that more than they were, you know, the job at General Dynamics. And so I interviewed with HP and really the company is a great company to the people, you know, that I got to work with great start to a career did start out in technical sales and consulting. And that era, I was always interested in graphics, I just love, you know, graphics again, the stuff that's available today, I would have just been, you know, going crazy about. But back then, you know, we had one graphics lab in school. There wasn't a general graphics curriculum in school yet. And I took advantage of, you know, whatever I could, but HP had some really cool graphics, you know, on some of the earlier desktop computers. It was, it was, you know, it was a lot of fun. I just had a real passion for it. And that led me into a part of HP that developed engineering software. And from that point forward, I was always plugged into that that part of the business, to a point where HP at one point, had a product that was called Solid Designers, a 3d modeling system, that they decided to split off as a separate company that became co create. And I was a part of that launch. Director of marketing, taking this, you know, entity out yet from HP, a very large company into the time of about a 600 person, smaller company with this great line of products. And I got to do a lot more things as a director of marketing in that role. That would have probably never done in the career at HP. I mean, HP, you have a great resources and you can depend on, you know, this, this breadth of, of talent that is focused in PR, content development, you know, you're looking at the marketing and all the parts of HP, this smaller company co create, we had to do a lot of things, you know, every one of us, you know, wear many hats. And so that was a great experience and probably the foundation that that helped me think about, you know, starting my own company. Yes. That was a good swing for you from a how many thousands, 10,000 people. The time of what HP was time of HP was about 40,000. This was before they bought EDS and some of the other acquisitions down to what like 10 people? No, no, so, so the co create was about 600 people 600 600 600. Okay, that's still a massive yet decrease, but that's still wearing a lot of hats. And so, okay, now, now, you know, you were explaining to this, just about this a little bit ago, and I just want to hear your perspective on it. When you're, when you're there, when you're joining, you're hearing so many of the people talking about HP's goods, and then you're able to be there at the time. And this was what what year was this 80 81 81. Yeah. Okay, so 81, you're there. This is really the personal computing revolution. And so you're there. And then you're also really enjoying graphics as well at the same time. So tell us about just that like the coolness of that time period and what you were learning in distributing the personal computing out to businesses and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, so it was pretty cool. I mean, literally, in college, there was not a class that was a standard class, there was a special class that you got to play with these tectronic vector displays, you know, it was, you know, amazing how quickly the technology, you know, evolve into the in my first few years at HP. But I remember, you know, getting out of college, I, you know, I got a, I got a car, I got rid of my old beat up car after, you know, completing college. And that was a big step. But I remember putting in my car because we got to take these computer systems home with us, you know, the more we played with them, the more we knew and, you know, HP encouraged that. And I remember at the time my car was was worth maybe $8,000. And at the time, the graphics workstation, which was, you know, had a 12 inch display, I mean, this is nothing by today's standards, but it was a color graphics workstation in the 9845. And, you know, at the time, a bit slice processing and all this, you know, at the time, it's like this is amazing stuff. The cost of that workstation was about $80,000. And so I'm thinking it's like, okay, so I've got an $8,000 car. And I'm putting this $80,000, it's like, it was a little scary for, you know, at the time of a young whippersnapper out of college. I was a little concerned just kind of taking off of that much money in the back of my car or something like that, what happened to it. But anyway, that quickly evolved me every year. There were just amazing new developments that came out. The early CAD stuff that that we were working with HP work with, you know, a number of software companies. The earliest ones were actually mini computer based with, you know, RS232, you know, dumb terminals were the graphics systems that that were, you know, basically running the CAD systems back then. And then that evolved, you know, within a few years into, you know, what we cut to know today and, you know, the more modern technology of wireframe going into service modeling and then solid modeling and the compute resources, we're able to actually deal with that. But yeah, you know, looking back on it, you know, Moore's Law and everything else when it comes to compute power, but just really the ability to model and create things in a computer. Just again, this was a passion. I loved it. And that's why I stuck with it, I guess. Your story about taking the $80,000 computer into an $8,000 car. It's just it's a big testament to like now there's no computers that are more expensive than the cars. Yeah, it's so yeah, or maybe one quantum computer, right? But it's just crazy that that that's the Moore's Law. That's what's happened in decreasing the amount of cost increasing computational capacity. Then okay, so now that we're able to, you know, leverage all this computational capacity to take all these creative ideas and model and build, and that's very exciting. I want to know, you know, these kind of things happen at the same time, smart to market and the volunteer firefighting kind of happened simultaneously. How did those two things? Well, so I moved to Colorado with HP to become a part of this group that was creating, you know, these CAD solutions. And and then, you know, a few years after that is when they decided let's split off and create a separate company that opened the door for our products to actually be run on silicon graphics at the time, you know, which is a big competitor to HP would would not have been a possibility as we were a part of HP HP saw us as a way to sell more workstations. And so it was a really cool step to, you know, really wait just launched this new company called Co-Create and to be a part of that. And again, great people. I've been, you know, fortunate and blessed to have the people in my life. So again, more by luck than design, I think it just was really lucky to have that part of it. I don't know. Things would be a lot different if I people that influenced and were part of my journey had been, you know, something different. But moving to Colorado, I, you know, moved from, you know, a the time I was living in an urban environment in Atlanta, Georgia. And, you know, I had a lot of friends there. But I love Colorado every time we go on business trips to Colorado, which is where HP had a big plant, you know, skiing, obviously it was a big thing. First time I went there in the summertime, it's like, holy cow, the weather is incredible, you know, just if you like being outdoors, it's just a great place to be. So I went from a very urban environment, you know, to out working at the one of the HP factories in Colorado, and then living in a very suburban environment up in the hills, essentially. People used to joke, they say, yeah, you know, I don't know how you commute that every day. It's like a half hour drive. I'm thinking when I was in Atlanta, I'd have, you know, a 40 minute drive on a good day. And if traffic was bad, it could be, you know, two or three hours. And so 30 minutes driving through the hills around lakes and, you know, and it's, you know, it's like, it was therapeutic. Yes. But where we live is is also pretty remote. And they had a volunteer fire station there. And so I wasn't one, I always liked to, you know, tinker and play with things and, you know, curiosity led me into engineering. I wasn't one thinking, I want to be a fireman when I get older as a kid. But it's been a, it was more a matter of utility, really, to, you know, be contributing in the environment that we're in. You know, it's all volunteer. And it, it's been actually an amazing learning experience, just, you know, a whole different side of your brain. We're, we're a wildland fire only. We don't do structures. We don't go into burning buildings, which is fine with me. But the other thing, which has been a lot of fun and actually personally rewarding is part of our training is also emergency medicine. So, oh, cool. Becoming an EMT was, it's kind of cool. It's like going back to, I went back to college again, you know, and I was in my 40s and, and got my EMT and, and, and just, yeah, I mean, that's the kind of thing where, you know, literally you can save lives and, and, and knowing that kind of stuff is, you know, just great, just from a personal perspective. Yes, yes. You know, friends and family, you know. Yeah. You never know when and what you might need to, to know. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's cool that there's the EMT training also comes with the volunteer fire training. This transition to, to Colorado is, is actually a major one then. The huge, huge. And then, of course, you're describing at the same time how, as you get more and more into the, the, the split for with HP, it was co-create, co-create, co-create, co-create. That kind of also gave you a little bit of the entrepreneurial roots that you wanted for smart to market. You know, so teach us about kind of that part now. Yeah. So, you know, getting my hands into a lot of different aspects of, of marketing and business, you know, through the co-create journey was part of it. The other part was just this continued, like we're here at COFA is a connection with a very tight community. You know, we, you know, you go to events and, and, and meetings and, and, you know, the, the people, the faces are the same. The name badges change sometimes. But it was, you know, another part I think I really enjoy besides, you know, graphics and, and, you know, the engineering type stuff. The community that we have is just amazing people. And, you know, coming to COFES is over the years before it was, you know, donated as a nonprofit at the COFES Institute. You know, you feel very small when you come to this event as the brain trust that, that is a part of COFES is, is inspiring. It was always just a great, great event. But the people that I connected with in that journey with co-create, you know, and the, you know, editorial folks that are, you know, writing stories about new technology and developments. The analysts that, you know, are the thought leaders, the partner programs, you know, across hardware platforms and other software companies. It was just a great ecosystem. And I just really enjoy the people part of it too. And, and I'm a people person. So having that connection was, was an important part of my journey for sure. But those connections and knowledge, you know, was the other part of it besides the business learnings and launching this company, co-create, getting the connections and stuff and being able to think about, you know, could we do more of things I really enjoy doing and, you know, stepped outside of co-create and went from, you know, HP 40,000 person company to co-create a 600-ish person company to a one person company that over the years has gone to about 12. So nice. It's, you know, it's, and it's still fun. I mean, this is a big part of it, you know, it's strategic about smart markets offering. So we're pretty broad in our offering as far as what we do in the, in the marketing space we're delivering very high level strategic planning, messaging, branding type solutions and consulting all the way through, I call it the grunt word of marketing. You know, we're developing websites, white papers, digital marketing, PR campaigns. So we're, you know, unlike just a consulting firm, we actually do, you know, execution of marketing. Some of our clients, we act as what we call as a virtual director of marketing. So we bring a team, you know, that have all these different disciplines that can, you know, basically be a marketing department at a much lower risk to a client than having the staff and manage and fund, you know, not just the direct cost, but there's, you know, there's the need to have the right people and train and manage. There's a lot of, you know, to have an effective marketing team, there's a lot of cost and energy that goes into that. And we can kind of deliver this as a, you know, as a service, as a package for engineering software or for more fields. So our focus, so we're very broad range of services, but yeah, our focus with few exceptions is clients that are in this engineering solution space, including hardware. So we've worked with, you know, big companies like HP and Microsoft, but there's solution space in the engineering focused areas and AEC too. Gotcha. Okay. So all, so all engineering solutions, you're helping them on that intelligently figure out how to go to market, websites, sales, all different aspects of marketing, this type of stuff. Yeah, we say, we say, you know, we help our clients know, reach and motivate their target customer. So who is your customer? You know, and what do they look like? Yeah, how do you make contact with them? And when you're in contact with them, how do you motivate them to see what you do brings value and, you know, ultimately get them to, you know, be a customer. And give us an example of an engineering solution that you've worked with that has got, you've helped get into the right hands of people. So actually one that kind of ties to this area of that several years back was a company called Engineered Intelligence. And they were a small company that actually was one of the few that we work with in Colorado. Most of our clients are somewhere else in the US or the world. But engineer intelligence was a company that had a really interesting solution for high performance computing and cluster computing. They basically had a virtualization of clusters. So you could have a machine that looks like a cluster. So people that are developing for parallel processing type applications had a simple single way that they could develop code for. It was separated from the actual hardware environment. And they did very well. They got VC funded move to California here to the Bay Area. And then later were acquired as a part of the exit strategy. But that's one of many examples. But kind of cool. It started with a very small organization. They got funded. They made the big move. And went on to other great things. And then, Pete, what would you say have been some of the, as you've been doing this for what is it 18, 18 years now? Crazy. With engineering solutions. What have been some of the trends that engineering solutions are moving towards? Well, clearly, you know, today cloud. And it's interesting to talk to you with Tom McElaney with On Shape. Of course, they have a really cool cloud solution for design and engineering. And it wasn't that long ago. If you were to talk to companies and organizations and individuals, especially engineers, you know, the idea of, you know, not having your data on your, you know, workstation and, you know, keeping the control of it. That was, you know, a serious cultural, you know, the conversation 10 years ago, you know, if all the technology were there to do what it could do today, the mindsets were, you know, very opposed to, you know, putting data out in the cloud. And so there's a generational thing going on now. Obviously, technology has moved where, you know, we have, you know, personal devices that have access to compute power that's just beyond, you know, we might have imagined, you know, 10, 20 years ago. And, of course, that's driving a lot of change. And, you know, in our space here, in the engineering software space, you know, everybody is either there or moving to there with some part of their solution, if not all of the solution, you know, in the cloud. So that's clearly a platform enabler that's making some big changes. You know, the other things that I've seen that are exciting just over the years is the usability of solutions. And so Joe Walsh, the assess project that he's leading, is looking at how, you know, simulation is not for just the analysts that, you know, know how to create a finite element model, but really bringing that kind of capability to the masses. Yes. And SOLIDWORKS, one of our clients, has got some really cool things with their simulation products where a designer, you know, has a great toolkit, you know, that not that long ago, you know, your general engineer designer would probably not be able to, you know, use those kinds of functions effectively and confidently. That's the other thing is, you know, having some confidence in the results that you get at the end of the process. Yeah, this these solutions that you're listing right now are are, you know, democratizing the one's ability to do generative design or to do simulate engineering simulations, taking that and giving it to the hands of kids or young adults, adolescents and and collegiate students. And then having their creative potential roll off with it is such a crucial part of this. Also, yeah, all of the all of what you were saying with with algorithms that are now running our computations in the cloud. It's a very it's a much crazier thing than what we thought was just going to be happening locally. How do we know our data secure all these types of questions arise from these questions from these from these new processes. So now, okay, so now you're you're following you're following these engineering solutions as they're as they're building up and you're you're providing them with, you know, really powerful marketing, marketing ways to waste to market. In this sort of, you know, this two and a half years now board directors cofess cofess is, you know, aggregating this these beautiful community of leaders and engineers software community. What is what is, you know, you gave some examples of what Joe Walsh doing with us initiative. And we were just talking about some other ones. Where is this where is this converging? Where is this converging and going towards, you know, democratization, all these other things. But where do you really where do you feel that the essence of this is moving us in the direction towards. You mean you're talking about cofess or you're talking about the industry cofess plus what cofess is able to highlight from industry. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, cofess now as a nonprofit under the cofess institute is, you know, it's important that we look at, you know, our ability to encompass more than just, you know, the CAD software space. And and that's clearly where cofess began and the AEC and the product development CAD software space. The challenges that are, you know, faced by people developing products or buildings today are getting more and more complex, obviously. Yes. And so the kinds of things that cofess can do as a community and the people that come together, whether they're the analysts, thought leader types, the people that are developing, you know, the actual engineering software, the visionary users, the editors that are writing about it, the VCs that are, you know, funding, you know, the next great thing. They all come together to cofess. And so the conversations that happen here clearly go well beyond CAD. It's it's this is what the convergence theme was about this year is, you know, augmented reality, virtual reality, machine learning and AI, autonomous vehicles, IOT, all these elements of different parts of technology have created brand new opportunities that, you know, were, you know, not there, you know, not that long ago that when you're developing a product or building. And by the way, I see those lines blurring, you know, what, you know, is it AEC or is it product development, where there's, you know, there's smart buildings. Yeah. There's tons of mechanical and product innovations that go into buildings beyond just the architectural design. And so there's just, yeah, there's a culmination of this convergence across all aspects of what we're talking about. So from the Institute, COFA's Institute perspective, we want to, you know, make sure that we're casting a broader net that incorporates all that takes advantage of this brain trust that comes to COFA's and really get discussions going around, you know, what is truly the future of engineering software that, you know, needs to be addressing these challenges and, you know, take advantage of the new opportunities that are there with, you know, all of things like IOT. I mean, yeah, who would have thought, you know, 10 years ago, the things that are connected, that are connected today and, you know, thinking ahead five years from now, the numbers that were shared of how many devices will be connected are just, is like, just beyond the number of people in the world. So it's, it's pretty amazing. And it's just, I don't know, it's an exciting ride to be on. It's a true, what you're just saying, the biological perception evolution. Now we have a robotic perception evolution happening. This is, this is nuts. It's in COFA's brain trust is one of the most fascinating yet. I really highly recommend checking out COFA's links below. Last question, Pete, what would be a really important skill for kids and adults to learn in the 21st century? Communication, you know, technology is great. But where I've seen, you know, the most successful enterprises is really, you know, having, you know, that technology savvy, but being able to communicate, you know, and, and, and being human beings, you know, at the end of the day, you know, I'm drawing to technology as much as anyone, you know, you're, you know, pushing the buttons all the time. But, but don't forget we're human beings and that interaction that, like COFA's is a perfect example when you get people together and the conversations happen. Not that you can't communicate in other vehicles, but I certainly hope we never lose that face to face, you know, human being interaction that, that I think really does help us break through barriers and become more innovative and solve bigger problems. Yeah. Yeah, well said. Thank you so much for coming on to the show and teaching us. Well, thank you for doing what you do. Thank you. Yeah, we have so many brilliant people to continue highlighting. We really appreciate everyone for tuning in. Thank you so much. Check out Pete's links below. Check out the links to COFA's as well. Support the artists and entrepreneurs that you believe in support COFA's, support simulation. Our links are below. Also, go and build the future everyone. Share this type of content with more people. Get inspired, manifest your dreams into the world. Huge thank you for tuning in and we will see you soon. Peace.