Guy Harding – 2x founder & custom software developer

Recorded at Kiln Lehi in the Cottonwood Conference Room

Guy Harding on LinkedIn

Verisage Custom Software Development

V School – Learn to Code

Book Recommendations: The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty by Clayton M. Christensen; The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley; Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach by Mark Richards and Neal Ford; The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers’ Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy; Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

SUMMARY

This podcast features a conversation between Kyle Knowles and Guy Harding. The discussion revolves around the evolving landscape of tech education and the journey of becoming a programmer. Guy Harding shares insights from his involvement with V School, which offers tech courses. Unlike the traditional boot camp model, V School allows students to progress at their own pace, with dedicated support to ensure they don’t get stuck. Guy recalls a memorable experience with a blind student who completed the curriculum in a record two and a half months.

Guy’s passion for innovation and helping people achieve their dreams is evident. He shares his transition from working in a civil engineering firm to the tech world during the Y2K era. This shift was influenced by his desire to innovate and make a difference.

The conversation also touches on the importance of understanding the intricacies of businesses. Guy is working on a business operating system, aiming to make it available to small and medium enterprises. This system will be tailored to specific niches, allowing businesses to customize it according to their unique needs.

Kyle conducts a “lightning round” of questions in a lighter segment. Guy reveals his fondness for dark chocolate Toblerone, his appreciation for musical artists like Eric Clapton and U2, and even mentions enjoying some of Taylor Swift’s music.

In summary, the podcast delves into the world of tech education, the challenges and rewards of becoming a programmer, and the entrepreneurial spirit that drives innovation. Guy Harding’s experiences and insights offer a valuable perspective on the ever-evolving tech landscape.

Kyle Knowles:
Hello there. Welcome to the Maker Manager Money podcast, a podcast about entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, founders, business owners, and business partnerships from startups to stay ups, to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going and future entrepreneurs to just start. My name is Kyle Knowles and I’m just trying to make some cool content at Kiln Lehi on a Monday evening. Kiln provides working communities that are handcrafted and programmed to elevate lifestyle and performance. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Kiln is the lifetime fitness of co-working communities. And today, we’re recording in the Cottonwood conference room right behind the break room. So you might hear some people cleaning up some glasses because it’s in the evening right now.
But today’s guest is Guy Harding, founder, CEO, managing partner, and senior architect of Verisage, a software development firm that has delivered over 300 custom software development projects for clients, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies and large governments. Guy is also the co-founder of V School, which helps students build professional software skills through in-person and remote courses. Guy graduated from Brigham Young University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering. Guy, welcome to the Maker Manager Money podcast.

Guy Harding:
Thank you, Kyle.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. Where did you get the name Verisage from? What does it mean?

Guy Harding:
Yeah. So Verisage is two words put together, veritas and sage. So veritas meaning true, and then sage being wisdom. I think one of them is Latin and one of them is Greek. So I just mushed those together, looking for a name that could have some meaning, but also was available.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. So were you just going through the dictionary, or what were you doing to find that?

Guy Harding:
Well, this was 2002 when I did this and I had a process of, I kind of wanted something along those lines to tell people that we’ve got your back and we’re going to do right by you. But then my exposure to custom software and stuff at that point was fairly limited, but I knew that many of the projects had failed and we wanted to be different than that, so we wanted the name to reflect that difference.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of war stories or horror stories of working with different kinds of development companies and it’s very hard to find good ones.

Guy Harding:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
So tell me about how you got into custom software development and your career before that, working for someone else and then deciding, oh, I’m going to go out on my own.

Guy Harding:
Well, how long do we have? I’ve always wanted to be an innovator. I didn’t know exactly what form that was. When I was younger in grade school and middle school and high school, I thought I might want to be like at a think-tank. I used to read The Hardy Boys, if you remember that series of books about the young men who were scientists as well as good at everything else. And I thought, yeah, I could innovate, maybe go to be at the think-tank and stuff. Well, my life didn’t quite follow that path, but I found that I could innovate within companies. And when I started my own company, I really love helping other companies innovate and they’d come with ideas. So that journey from civil engineer when I did my master’s degree research in Guatemala and micro-hydroelectric power stations, and that was just a lot of fun to be out there innovating and taking the resources that they had. And we made a turbine and then we found locations where to install the turbine and things like that to generate water for out in the fields.
Those composts, they didn’t have electricity and stuff, so we would use the water to make electricity and then they could power their schools and health centers and also some of their equipment. So that was the beginning, then I graduated and I did civil engineering for five years. And during that time, I found myself up at nights writing software. And even there was so much opportunity within the company, I wrote software for doing stormwater and just water systems, pressurized water systems, distribution systems modeling with GIS.
And so that was like I’m staying up at night doing this and I wrote this software and we actually went out to Boston to try to sell it and the company didn’t take on it, but I kind of had the bug then that’s what I wanted to do. So in 1999 when the Y2K was happening and companies were just hiring anybody who learned how to code, and I had coded through school and I switched over to a company called Tenfold and helped them with their technology for a bit. And then 2002, I started my own company, kind of ran it on the side for a long time until about 2011 when I got a contract, a couple of contracts with Logitech and that formed a team and kind of took off from there.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. So how did you do that, running things on the side, just programming for different companies and just doing side work basically nights and weekends, just programming?

Guy Harding:
Yeah, nights and weekends. The reason I founded the company in the beginning was I had a friend who actually I’ve had a mix of different types of projects, especially when I was just me. So he wanted me to help him evaluate an oil project. And with my civil engineering background, especially in water resources, I looked at a lot of the technology they’re using there and see if it was viable and stuff like that. And then I’d have people help him with the website here and there. So I didn’t really advertise or didn’t push it, but when people asked, I could say, yeah, I can help you and you can pay me through my company.

Kyle Knowles:
And then so how did you transition from your engineering background? How did you learn to code basically? It was just on the job or…

Guy Harding:
Yeah, I had a couple of classes in college. Well, and even going back before then when I was young, you have to be old to know this stuff, but my dad bought a TI-99 computer. And if you remember, those are the hundred dollars from Texas Instruments and you could actually program it. They didn’t have any persistent memory. I would type in my program and I think it was basic and every time we turned it off, I’d have to type it in all again, and I turned it back on. But I played with that forever and we had the voice simulator, so I was making the computer talk. And then in school, we got the Apple IIes, I think they were, and Apple IIcs.
And anyway, I wrote a 3D Tic-Tac-Toe game on one of those in grade school. And so I kind of had that bug from way young. I just knew that technology was a crazy powerful thing and it spoke to me, so I just kept doing that. But every opportunity I could, of course, ’94 when the internet kind of became more available and was out and Mosaic, the browser came out and looking at those different things, I tried to stay current, and then when the opportunity came, I jumped in. But yeah, in college I had the courses that qualified me for the next step at the turn of the century.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice.

Guy Harding:
Kind of old same turn of the century.

Kyle Knowles:
Kind of the century. Not about our age, but about the century, right?

Guy Harding:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
So what’s the hardest part about being a business owner?

Guy Harding:
Oh, my goodness, that’s a good question. For me, I think it depends on your talents. If I was going to make it general, my hardest part has always been the sales and the marketing. I’m not super versed in that. I do really well if I can come and talk about a project and people can come in. I can whiteboard, I can help them realize their ideas. And generally in that sales environment, I have a pretty good close rate that it’s the generation of demand of leads and things like that. That’s really hard for me. I love the building part of it and I love the team. I love believing in young engineers and saying, yeah, go do it. And then seeing, helping them do it, those are the things that I thrive on. And the hard part, I mean, I love talking to people about their ideas. It’s just getting the demand and the leads in is probably the hardest part for me.

Kyle Knowles:
So it sounds like you’re a maker though. That’s what you like.

Guy Harding:
I think naturally, yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
As an architect and I guess as an engineer, you enjoy coming up with ideas and making things.

Guy Harding:
Absolutely.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Yeah. So how do you compensate for maybe what’s the hardest part of your business? Do you bring someone else in to do that, or what do you usually do?

Guy Harding:
Yeah, originally. In fact, in 2011, right after I finished the Logitech projects, I was like, well, we’ve got the profits. We can either kind of let the team go and go our separate ways or we can maybe partner with somebody and see what happens. And so I partnered with a sales guy, Michael Zaro, and he’s now the CEO of V School. But yeah, we partnered and we kind of tag teamed a lot of the sales and stuff, and he did a great job. That’s probably the easiest way to supplement your weaknesses is get somebody who’s strong, whose strengths complement you.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, I agree. So if you were looking back at 2011, I guess that’s when Verisage was really formed, was 2011, am I getting the timeline?

Guy Harding:
Yeah, founded in 2002 is really I went full-time on it. We had a team started going strong in 2011.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So looking back at Guy in 2011 from Guy in 2023, what are some of the things that you would tell Guy of 2011 now that you’ve been at this for well over a decade?

Guy Harding:
Wow. I’d probably say hang in there and you know more than you think you do, trust you get more. I’ve always come from, my personality, I’ve always come from a very logical, theoretical perspective, and it’s difficult for me to let go and just say, yeah, let’s go try that. And so if I were to looking back, probably trust my gut and then it would’ve been really helpful to have just some, I don’t even think it would’ve taken more than a couple of days of learning about business. I kind of did a bunch of research and learned what I could, but to have maybe a mentor in business, that would probably be the biggest thing. Find somebody who’s been there, done that, and get them to mentor you, yeah, I think that probably be the biggest one.

Kyle Knowles:
What would be some of the things that that mentor would teach you that you had to learn, I guess, the hard way?

Guy Harding:
The hard way, just how much it costs to do sales and marketing. So then you can really, you got to have that balanced perspective of your business. It’s not all about engineering. I mean, coming from an engineering perspective, I’m like, wow, this is everything. This is my life, but there’s more to it than that. And a mentor, especially one that has come from engineering, would be able to say, look, that’s good, but you also have to do this, and you have to build this infrastructure right for it to be sustainable and do good.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So if someone was going into tech, I guess, and becoming a programmer today, what are some of the pieces of advice you’d give them? For example, what kind of programming languages they should learn? How do they get into tech today?

Guy Harding:
Yeah. It depends on their background, but I’ve given this advice. Well, first off, it’s a great field to be in, and I’ve given this advice a thousand times. I was like, there’s so much demand and it won’t go away no matter where industry you end up with everything. What’s that famous quote, everything? “Software’s eating the world.” So everything is software. Everything is technology. And every time I’ve dipped my toe into another industry, I just see opportunities abound there for applying technology if you can speak the language, if you know what you’re doing. I know with AI now, it’s a whole nother revolution or going to see where people who know how to get the AI to do what they need to do are going to be pushing forward businesses and being super valuable. So right now at this, depending like, if somebody were to come to me and say, hey, I’ve got a family, I’ve got bills to pay, but I do want to do this.
I took my brother through this about 10 years ago, and he’s an engineer now, but he was a construction worker and he had a family and he wanted to do something different. And so we met every week for a year or so I think, and we’d talk about it, give him the next assignment type of thing. This was actually, this was privy school, so it was 14 or 15 years ago. And it was kind of gave me the idea that, hey, we could actually teach people to do this really quickly. He was super motivated and he did the work and paid the price, and he’s now a software engineer in Omaha. I mean there are ways to do it if you need to do it that way. If you have some capacity already, you could just go get a job doing it and jump in with both feet.
If you don’t or if you’re not super comfortable with that, there are really good bootcamps and V School. I would pitch V School as one of the premier and the preeminent ones that we’ve got. Well, a little pitch for V School. The unique thing about V School is that all the incentives are aligned, so you don’t graduate from V School until you have a job. And as long as you’re pushing forward towards that objective, you’re part of V School and you get the full support of everybody there, and there’s two stages. There’s a lot of detail in that I won’t go into, but just aligning that way really helps our outcomes be right. You get a certificate, but what people come to V School for isn’t a certificate, it’s for a career change to have a career in tech. And I just love what Michael’s done with V School in that regard.
And now it’s all online too, so you can do it in person, but it’s 99% of the people are online. They’re going with the tutorials and it’s competency based, and so you can go as fast as you can through it anyway. So there’s a lot there. And I think, I believe we’ve hit with V School on the most optimum formula for that. I know different people are in different situations. If you’re a young person who’s in school, I’d say finish school, get your degree in computer science or an engineering field, either engineering teaches how to think like a systems engineer, and that’s really valuable in any of these systems that we’re building. And you’ll get coding and stuff in there too. So I’d say finish your degree and get going, but everybody’s different and I would say just don’t stop. Just do it.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. So Verisage 2011, Michael joins at some point after 2011 or around 2011?

Guy Harding:
2012 I think when we formalized it.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So he is the sales marketing guy. You’re going down this road, you’re doing custom software development. What made you guys decide to open V School?

Guy Harding:
Oh, that’s funny because we were both very innovative in that way. We both wanted to start… So the initial, one of the things that we really bonded on was that we wanted to build something that would fund additional businesses, that we’d be able to have a group of businesses that we could then, like part of it was to build cool things and push industry, part of it was to provide employment for all these smart people that we knew and just have a way of that we could work together with everybody. So V School was the first one that it started really catching root or taking root and taking hold. But what we noticed in the couple of years that we were running both V School and Verisage is that our profits, whenever we focused on one, the profits would go up, the revenues would go up. And we focused on the other, that one would sag and the other would go. So we decided in 2016 to separate the two and that he would run V School and that I would run Verisage and so that’s what we did.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So tell people how to get to V School, I guess, and let’s just stay on that topic for a minute. What’s the cost? What’s the process? Those kinds of things.

Guy Harding:
Yeah. Okay. Well, a good pitch for V School. So Vschool.io is the website, and there’s a bunch of good information on there. The best way to really find out everything is just to reach out and talk to one of our sales guys. We don’t call them sales student success people.

Kyle Knowles:
So is it V-school or V School-

Guy Harding:
No, one word, Vschool.

Kyle Knowles:
Vschool, one word.

Guy Harding:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
V as in Victor.

Guy Harding:
Victor.

Kyle Knowles:
School.io.

Guy Harding:
School.io. Okay.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Guy Harding:
And the cost wise there, there are several like we do a lot of scholarships. We love the social impact, so there’s a lot of help for minorities or underprivileged people to get in. In fact, we just did, I think it’s a half a million dollar scholarship with Meta that they’re giving us to promote. I don’t remember which group, but there’s a specific group that they want to have more of. And I’ve even had some of the top technology leaders in the state. I was at a meeting once of CIOs and CTOs, and they were talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion. And I was just listening and taking notes and thinking about things. And then I heard the question was, “Where do you find diverse candidates?” And one of the other leaders said, “V School.” I was like, “Oh, I got to go talk to him.”
Because I hadn’t really talked to him about V School before, but it turns out that he was familiar with a lot of the social impact efforts that we’ve been doing there. But then cost wise, there’s several ways of addressing that. If you can qualify for a scholarship, that’s great. If you are a veteran, we can do the VA loan. We’re approved to do that. There’s even income sharing agreements that we can do. So if you qualify for that, then you don’t have to pay until you get your job, and then you pay a percentage and you end up paying more than if you just pay it upfront, but it’s kind of priced so that it’s good for everybody.

Kyle Knowles:
So there’s some kind of guarantee on the backend when you finish that you’re going to end up with a job.

Guy Harding:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
And you don’t have to pay until that happens.

Guy Harding:
Until you’re done, yeah, and you get that job.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. It sounds very fascinating. And are you seeing a lot of people, a lot of interest still in tech and becoming programmers? Those kind-

Guy Harding:
Oh, yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Guy Harding:
Yeah, and it’s changing. We don’t follow the bootcamp model anymore. We’re more, like I just talked about, you go at your own speed, but it’s not like lackadaisical. We have support people assigned to you. You’re moving forward and you get through it. We had one student. She was actually a blind student, and she got through it. She holds the record two and a half months of getting through all the curriculum, testing out of everything, and making sure that it’s right. And then she’s, oh, I don’t remember which companies she’s with. She’s one of the larger corporations that has transformed her life. Sorry, I don’t remember what your question was.

Kyle Knowles:
That was just about interest in becoming a programmer.

Guy Harding:
Oh, that’s right. And so the products, the curriculum, the courses we were expanding. So we’ve got full stack dev. We’ve got UX design, UX UI design, and we have now cybersecurity, is our newest one. And we’re looking, there’s a lot of buzz right now around the AI, and so we’re looking at that. Generally, Michael wants to be very careful about. He doesn’t want to just jump on the latest fad. He wants to build something that we know we can have a pipeline and that it’s going to go. So I personally think we should have an AI course, but I’m not the CEO anymore, so we’ll see. But I think AI is going to revolutionize the world, and we’ll have an AI course in short order so people can learn to be prompt engineers and kind of get the whole sense of what that is and be productive in it.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, I agree with you. I just was watching a presentation today about trends in tech and mobile and GPS just had so much going, especially in the academic side, so many papers and things. And apparently AI has that same trend for academic research, and a lot of those trends are the ones that-

Guy Harding:
They’re leading.

Kyle Knowles:
… they’re leading and they’re going to be around for a long time. So I agree with you that AI is going to revolutionize so many different things we are not even thinking about right now. So it’s really exciting time to be in tech. Is there any fear from, because I’ve seen programs written by AI, basically seeing people put prompts in and then it spits out like a webcam that follows human faces, and you’re just like, whoa. So I mean, is there any fear from you or other technologists that AI is going to just eliminate all these programming jobs?

Guy Harding:
I’m not seeing that yet. I’m not fearful for that. I think it will increase our productivity. And so for so long, there’s just been so much to do in tech and the promise of so many technologies still hasn’t really been fulfilled. I mean, it’s kind of a classic maturity curve and it’s like, oh yeah, now we’re saturated this market, but even our mobile revolution hasn’t saturated yet. There’s still a ton of mobile functionality that needs to be done. So to me, the idea that we’ll suddenly have AIs that do all that, I think we’re generations away before an AI can actually, before we could have a business leader talk to an AI and have it spit out an app that actually works, does everything.
I think the next step will be programmers saying, write me a function to do this and make sure it’s tested. I think that would be a huge step, and then it might progress on beyond that. We’re getting into some really complex scenarios where even the generative AI don’t know that they could do it, and I don’t know how much it will take to get to where they can do it. So I’m not super worried about that. I think the worst case, our job titles might change to AI prompt engineer or something like that. That’s the one that I’ve heard quite a bit. And maybe we end up all the boring stuff gets automated in short order. That would be lovely.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, just even learning or testing and things like that, I think AI is going to be a huge help there, save people a lot of time. I also saw that, I mean, I can’t remember the percentages I saw, but the idea of cloud computing, there’s so many companies that still have nothing in the cloud or very little in the cloud, so there’s still all that work to be done to move things as well. So yeah, I don’t see it happening in my lifetime where, and the thing is you have to tell AI what to do. It’s not like AI’s just running around writing all these programs, eliminating companies and eliminating jobs on its own. And so yeah, I think there’s still a lot of work to be done, but that’s exciting that you’re doing so much good in the world with V School and creating opportunities for people. So back to the student who did it in two months, were they just really crazy smart or was it just of crazy amount of work? They were just doing it 12 hours a day?

Guy Harding:
Yeah, I didn’t talk to her myself. I’ve talked to Michael about her and the core things that we’ve learned is that she was hyperfocused and her blindness was part of that focus. She could just shut everything else out, because she had to get the computer prompts and to read things to her, and she had to be able to communicate that way to it. So I think that allowed her to be hyperfocused. I think she was naturally gifted as well with this. It kind of came natural to her. I’ve seen other students struggle with, I mean perfectly bright students, but for some reason, they struggle with a certain concept. Think about the first time you saw somebody try to understand a spreadsheet. That’s when a lot of people are familiar with and it’s like, oh yeah, I get it now. I could just go do it. But when you first are presented with that grid of cells and do something on it, you’re like, I got to create a new paradigm.
So I think she just didn’t have those blockers. And I think she just kind of smoothed right through a lot of those things where I’ve seen perfectly great developers get stuck on a certain concept for days until they get somebody off. Well, that’s one of the things we look for at V School like, are you stuck? Let’s get you off of that. It can take a five-minute discussion and it saves you hours now. And that’s what I look for when I’m mentoring a young engineer as well, is are they stuck on things that really should be a five-minute conversation and not a bang your head against the wall type of an experience.

Kyle Knowles:
And that’s how you get them unstuck is just explain it to them in five minutes.

Guy Harding:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Guy Harding:
We had a really telling experience with that. Back in 2017, we went out to Ghana to teach. In the past, we’ve taken V School to different countries. We’ve gone to Kuwait. We’ve gone to Lebanon, Baghdad, not Baghdad, sorry, Lebanon, not Baghdad. And then we went to Cape Coast in Ghana and we taught nine students how to code. And I hired three of them at Verisage when I got back, and then I hired three grads, U.S. side. And the dynamic was I could just sit there next to on the projects and they five minute conversation or a two-minute, Guy, what’s going on here? And they’re done. They’re moving forward, whereas I know I was trying to communicate with the engineers in Ghana. I mean, there’s a lot of factors in this, so it’s really anecdotal, but they would take three or four times as long. They couldn’t reach out to me in five minutes. They’d have to Slack and then I’d have to see it, and then we get back to them.
So they might lose a day on something that was really a five-minute conversation. So it’s that type of support that we strive to provide at V School. And I think it’s really critical. I think a lot of people who want to get into tech and think they can’t just simply because they run into roadblock after roadblock after roadblock like that. When I was first installing Linux and doing that, there wasn’t a whole lot of support out on the BBSs and things like that. So that’s what I did. I just banged my head against the wall for weeks and then I got it to run and I told my wife and she goes, “Huh, cool,” but it was so gratifying to me. But that’s the process that a lot of people, they could get into that and they’re like, “I just don’t want to do it.” But when really if they just would have somebody take them cross that next threshold, they’d be a great developer, a great programmer.

Kyle Knowles:
I think out of fear or something. I never crossed that line. Always worked with developers, but never really thought that I had it in me to be able to do it.

Guy Harding:
And there are a few that I’ve met that really, I just think that’s not so far outside of their nature that they just shouldn’t. But the vast majority even, I’ve had two experience, I’ll tell another story.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Guy Harding:
When we were first starting V School, what was she before? I don’t remember. I think she was a stay-at-home mom, but she came into my office just in tears like, “I can’t do this, Guy. This is so hard. I’m stuck. Everybody else is moving on.” And this is back when we were doing cohort based stuff and everybody’s moving on, and I just said, “Look, you’re smart. You can do this. Give it another week. You’ll do it.” And then the week later, she came back into my office, she was crying. She says, “I did it. I did it.” So I was like, that’s happened over and over again. People can do it.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. It sounded like you exhibited programming tendencies or engineering tendencies from your childhood. Did you exhibit any entrepreneurial aspirations?

Guy Harding:
What would that look like?

Kyle Knowles:
A lemonade stand, I don’t know.

Guy Harding:
I like playing Lemonade Stand on all the Apple IIes and Oregon Trail and Star Trek. I don’t know. Like I said, I always wanted to be an innovator. I’ve always wanted to help people achieve dreams and build things. And I think there’s a natural extension to that of being an entrepreneur that drive. I didn’t ever have a great affinity for studying the books of financials and things like that, but it was very intriguing to me to understand how companies worked. And so I studied financials and I studied how to do accounting and why that’s important. And so that was more in my mind, a means to the end of being able to responsibly run businesses and responsibly consult with clients on things and kind of understand where they’re coming from when they come in with a certain problem or if I have a problem with my business. But yeah, the entrepreneurial part of it, I think, is there because that’s the place where you get to innovate.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. So you were working for someone else, and then what was the tipping point? What was it that drove you to make the decision to at least start Verisage?

Guy Harding:
Yeah. So I was working at a civil engineering firm and I had just gotten my professional engineer’s license. And so if you know what that PE means, it’s a big thing. I can stamp plants now for civil projects that says I’ve looked at it and it’s my name on the line and everything. And I’ve only ever stamped two plans now since, because I stamped one plan, those two plans, right when I got my PE license or projects I was working on. And then it was Y2K, and my friend called me up and said, “Hey, do you want to come interview for a job programming with us?” He and I had worked together at the engineering computer graphics lab at BYU. And so I said, “Sure, I’ll come take a look at it.” Well, long story short, they made a good offer and I got in there. I got to work on the universal application part of the Tenfold company there, and that opened my eyes to a lot of good things.
There’s good architecture, a good processes, and it was fascinating to me. And that was about 2002 when I started Verisage. My friend said,” Hey, can you look at this?” Like I said, and that was kind of the tipping point of saying, yeah, I’ll start my business. It was a safe. I dipped my toes into it. I didn’t have to provide for my family yet and things from the business. And then I did startups and well, let’s see. I went from Tenfold to Allstate. Allstate was one of Tenfold’s largest customers. I helped them go from, let’s say, 88% uptime to 99.9% uptime in a year, a couple of years that we did a special project there and then went from Allstate to… I had the bug. So I was looking at startups and Allstate.
I went from Allstate to a financial, let’s see, no, I left Allstate and went to i.TV, I think it was. I’d have to look at my LinkedIn. I don’t remember the sequence, but i.TV was an iPhone startup. We did the first TV and movie guide on the brand new iPhone. I don’t remember which one it was, but it was when the App Store came out. We were one of the first apps in the App Store. We went from 0 to 3 million users plus in a matter of months, and that was just fascinating to see. We would sit there and watch and we had all our server clusters and everything managed so we could support the traffic and everything.

Kyle Knowles:
Wow. So when you look back at your days of just starting to be an entrepreneur and running your business, what are some key things, some key learnings that you had during that formulation of a company and things like that? What were some of the learnings if you look back on those days?

Guy Harding:
Lessons that I will carry in my grave?

Kyle Knowles:
Yes.

Guy Harding:
So initially, I mean it’s wise to have a good partner. And when my partner and I separated, we separated in really good terms. I still own a chunk of V School and we have meetings regularly and stuff, but I credit Michael a lot with that. I mean, separating a partnership is not easy, and usually it’s on the heels of a challenge. And we did have that challenge in 2016. We had $3 million clients lined up and I hired up. We saw the sales projections. We hired up. We had a great team of about 26 people ready to rock on this, and they all went away in the first quarter, the next year. So at the same time, we were trying to split out to let V School run with that. And so that was a really difficult, difficult time. And I think it’s hard to know beforehand, but who you are partnered with makes a huge difference in times like that. We just didn’t.
We rolled up our sleeves and did what we need to do, and we didn’t point fingers or blame each other. And we’re still great friends now, and I think if you have deficiencies, and we all do, you need to find people who compliment those deficiencies, and you don’t always get to pick who you’re going to partner with. But I would say establishing that partnership right in a good way, establishing those relationships. And that’s probably something I would’ve done differently. I don’t know if Michael would’ve still partnered with me, but at that time, I probably would’ve brought him in on a slightly different structure so that we could have had a stronger sales performance reward and incentive system instead of, we kind of just came together as partners and said, we’re just going to do this. And I didn’t know how much it took to run a sales team and to be successful at sales.
And if we could have done that, that would’ve been a lot, I think a lot more effective for our sales as it is basically we have done no, as I’ve mentioned to you before, we don’t do advertising. It’s all word of mouth, and I still struggle with that. I still struggle with the sales part of it to get it right.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. What are you excited about now in tech and the future of tech?

Guy Harding:
Yeah, I guess there’s so much going on, and of course the huge opportunity. There’s a huge opportunity in AI and just nobody really knows what that looks like. I think some of these established businesses have very clear roadmaps that they can optimize their workflows with AI. You can Google that and there’s a lot of articles on how to do that in sales and in different aspects of the business, but I don’t think the winners are going to be the people that just do that. There’s a revolution waiting to happen there, and whoever figures that out is going to be the next Facebook, the next Google, whatever. That’s going to be a big deal, so I’m excited by that. I have some ideas on that and I’m excited by we’re trying to transition Verisage. So one of the challenges that I’ve had with Verisage is that we really like startups and small businesses, but startups and small businesses have trouble paying for our services.
And so it’s just expensive and relative to their budgets. So I want to create a product for businesses similar to what the Tenfold application was or the universal application was for Tenfold. The idea with that is that about 90% of the functionality that a business needs and the universal application was targeted towards large enterprises, but 90% of that you can build beforehand, and then you just put the pieces together. And it worked really well until it didn’t, but it was really good for replacing those enterprise ERP type applications. And I feel like there’s an opportunity now for small businesses, somebody to do something similar with the range of open source that is out there and the cloud and the hosting and stuff. I feel like I’m about 70, 80% through development on this because I’m leveraging all these open source things and I can provide a, well, it’s not even an ERP, I call it a business operating system to specific industries that they will be able to afford.
In fact, I think we can do it for free for small businesses. You can start, and if you stay under a usage threshold, you can rent it for free. And, of course, if you go over that usage threshold, that means that you’re making money, and so you should start paying some money for the system. But if you think about an operating system for a computer, this is what I’m building for our business. So everything that you need and then a couple of key things is that since businesses are unique, we’re not going to make every business fit a mold. So it’s super customizable, super configurable. And I think there’s a whole, if you think of Clayton Christensen’s disruptive curve, there’s a whole market of non-consumers right now, or if they are consumers, they’re consuming 16, 20 different apps to manage their business, and really it takes an exceptional individual at that business, at that small business to be able to really manage that.
And oftentimes it just can’t. I mean, they’re throwing stuff together, cobbling things together. They’re making decisions on bad information or just half information and complete information. So that’s something I’m really excited about. I’m really excited. I was a CTO of the ERC Specialists until April was it was or March, I think, I finished. I helped them with their conversion from, they were all a no-code system and they reached the limits of their no-code, so they needed to get more and more into a architected system, so I helped them do that. And since then, that’s in terms of helping small businesses, that’s probably the best offer out there for a business who’s eligible.
So if you’re listening to this and you haven’t applied for ERC, reach out to me. We do it. I’m an affiliate of ERC Specialists and I know their technology fairly deeply, and it’s good. And we can do an eligibility assessment for free, and if you’re eligible and choose to file, then I can help you get it filed. So in terms of just adding, I mean, that’s probably the best offer I’ve ever been able to give anybody for custom software because it’s expensive. But for just in the business in general, it’s helping you get your payroll tax money back.

Kyle Knowles:
So explain ERC a little bit what that is.

Guy Harding:
Yeah, so the employee retention credit, it’s part of the same act that was the paycheck protection plan, PPP and the EIDL. A lot of businesses has taken advantage of those. The ERC has been a little lesser known because it’s a payroll on the payroll side of it. And so the accountants and the people who generally do the income tax side of things weren’t nearly as familiar with it. In fact, when I did it for Verisage, I had to do it myself. I asked my accountant, I asked my payroll provider, and they’re like, “Oh, we can’t help you.” So I just did it and it took a couple of days of actual work just working through everything. And Verisage is a small business.
If you have any amount of complexity in your business, you probably should get help. And ERC Specialists is great with that, so yeah. And so the amounts are entering into, you can get up to $26,000 per employee, per W-2 employee that you’ve kept during COVID. And the calculation of that number is what’s complicated is you have to go through and you have to be eligible under certain, there’s three ways you can be eligible. And then as you get into that, there’s just an analysis that has to be done to determine how much you’d be eligible for.

Kyle Knowles:
So you can help small medium businesses fill out the paperwork, get it all submitted. And what are the numbers looking like the average companies or what are some of the dollar amounts that are coming back?

Guy Harding:
Yeah, the average when I last checked was $270,000 for the company’s getting back. So if you have 10 employees and they qualify for the full 26,000, that’s 260,000. So it is significant, and I can’t tell you the number of businesses that have, I mean, the testimonials of this has made a huge difference for us. It’s saved our bacon. It’s let us go to the next level. I know for Verisage, it saved my bacon. I was like, it’s that much money and I need to just do it. So that’s what, yeah, and we did it for V School and it was also very meaningful for V School and then the other businesses that you can see the testimonials out there, but it’s a game maker or game changer for a lot of small businesses in this climate.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. And we’ll put links to your affiliate program and contact information so that people can reach to you so you can help them get those forms submitted.

Guy Harding:
Yeah. And you can just go out to verisagecustomsoftware.com/erc and it gets you in the right place.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Guy, were either of your parents entrepreneurs?

Guy Harding:
No. So my dad worked for the U.S. Postal Service and then for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And I grew up in, let’s see, I was born in Salt Lake, grew up in Pennsylvania, and then in Berlin, and then we moved to Omaha, Nebraska for most of my schooling for third grade on. But yeah, I’m not sure where I got that bug to be an entrepreneur, but they weren’t. Well, even a lot of my friends and my mentors growing up, some good friends of mine is their dad was a VP of Peter Kiewit. And so that’s a huge civil engineering construction firm. I think he gave me a piece of advice that stuck with me, and I think I’m remembering it right anyway, but the advice was, “Guy, you can do a lot more good for the world in business by trading with other countries than you can by being in the government or by making laws or rules.”
And that’s always stuck with me. I want to make a difference in this world. That’s part of the reason why we’ve been to Ghana and to Lebanon and to Kuwait is that being in technology is one of those things you can do anywhere. You can get and become a part of the world economy even if your local government isn’t helpful that way. Sometimes, I’m not saying break any laws, but sometimes the local governments just they’re not helpful and they don’t have the infrastructure and the ability to help you with your business. I think I served a mission for the LDS church in Bolivia, and I did my master’s research in Guatemala. And so I’ve seen in several different places where you don’t have the infrastructure and you need to start somewhere.
My personal opinion, I agree with my mentor is that if you start change with an economic reason, with a commercial like Clayton Christensen’s book, The Prosperity Paradox is a really good one on this. He’s done the analysis and the research on how to succeed in a developing country. It’s not giving them resources. To make a real change, you start to trade, you start to exchange something of value for another, and then they start to change their countries and their societies and their communities. I’m pretty firm believer in that. I’ve seen a lot of projects fail that I’ve tried to be imposed from the outside. And some impossible things happen when people on the inside are empowered to do and to solve their own problems.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah, I like that. I like the advice that your mentor gave you. What was the name of the book again?

Guy Harding:
The…

Kyle Knowles:
Prosperity Paradox?

Guy Harding:
The Prosperity Paradox. Yeah. So if you follow Clayton Christensen and his whole disruption and everything, he’s looking at it through the lens of consumers and non-consumers, which is pretty parallels pretty closely. The idea that disruption curve where you start with non-consumers like the disc drives is one he uses in the Innovators Dilemma. And it just shows generation after generation of disc drives getting disrupted because the people who can’t afford the 700 or $2,000 disc drive still want a disc drive so they’re non-consumers, and then somebody invents something and sells it to them at $200 and then that goes, and that’s down to $50. That’s a similar process to injuring entering into a developing economy with a product that serves that economy. And I’m just be citing examples from his book. In my experience, like going to Guatemala and teaching a local machine shop how to build a cross-flow turbine was a similar thing.
I’ve given him the power and then the idea was, I didn’t have enough time to finish this, but all the different coffee growers that were part of the group who were down there with were going to pay him to build this. So he was going to have to hire people and he was going to have to refine the technology and the techniques and everything to build these cross-flow turbines because they were going to get electricity on their farms, their fincas through these cross-flow turbines. So that’s the progression of progress, I think. You empower people locally to give them the knowledge, give them the power and the economic reason, which that has to kind of grow organically. You have to see that opportunity. And he does a pretty compelling job of, well, my experience with in Guatemala, these people could buy these. It wasn’t outside of their price range and it was going to be built locally and maintained and supported.
So it could be an industry there. And that’s kind of the Clayton Christensen’s and The Paradox talks about that, how people spot when you can look at non-consumers, it’s scary because as an established consumer economy, you can run metrics on it, you know how big it is. And when you do a sustaining innovation, you can say, oh yeah, if we add rear seat heaters to this automobile, then we’re going to be just competing. We’re going to be just as good as a BMW or those types of things. You have a lot, you can analyze and look at, we’re non consuming. You don’t know when the guy took cell phones into Africa, everybody told him he was crazy, but he did a whole bunch of work there and now it’s a multi-billion dollar business, and I think he sold it in 2005, but there’s a whole economy, a whole, what’s the word? But yeah, the whole group of industry built up around.
There’s dozens of companies and that’s all because he had the vision to go and make a product that fit those people, that economy, the need, at least according to Christensen. The need was as simple as an African villager wants to talk to his mother, and that’s either a three-week journey or nothing. So how valuable is it for that person to talk to their mother? And I mean, he based his whole value proposition on that. And then he had to work out different supply chains and there’s pricing models and stuff because it wasn’t our way of thinking about it, but he did it and it took a lot of time and effort, but the payoff was actually higher. And there’s some statistics you can see when you create a new market, you actually earn a lot more, and the benefits to society are huge. So anyway, there’s a lot of theory there.

Kyle Knowles:
I like that. I like that example. So you mentioned the Clayton Christensen, are there any other books that you recommend?

Guy Harding:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
What’s the book that you recommend the most to people?

Guy Harding:
It just depends on what I’m reading though. But I’ve got my library here on Audible. So many people, I listen while I drive and do things like that. The ones that I’ve been really keen on lately, The Prosperity Paradox, I just love anything that I find he so well-reasoned in his approach. The Rational Optimist, and that’s he talks about how exchange is kind of the core. And as long as we can exchange, then we will continue to progress as a human society and why it’s rational to be an optimist, and that’s what caught me with the title. One of my friends recommended it and I was like, “Oh, I want to read that.”
And then to me, when you have a little pearl, a little diamond there of core value and then, like in this case, the value of exchange, you can build a whole society rationally from the idea that you can exchange. Like I can be better at harvesting coconut, then you can be better at weaving mats and we can exchange and both of us be better off. It doesn’t matter what the price point is, it’s just the principle of exchange. And he goes through and kind of lays out a wonderfully complex society from that viewpoint of that lens. And I just found that fascinating and it resonated really well with me.

Kyle Knowles:
What’s the author name?

Guy Harding:
Matt Ridley.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay, Matt Ridley.

Guy Harding:
The other one, the Fundamentals of Software Architecture is a little bit more geeky, but that’s a good one. The Gap and The Gain, these are ones that I’ve read twice. And so there’s the ones, I’m going back to that one. Antifragile, I found to be quite interesting. The concept is by Nassim Taleb. The guy that did The Black Swan. And just that the idea that we need to be building systems that are not just robust, but actually antifragile that thrive under change and under stress. And it’s just a fun word in the front concept. We think about how we train our muscles, we tear them down, but then they get stronger, and we need systems, from my perspective, particularly technology systems, but also social systems that are antifragile. We know things are going to happen, things are going to break, and yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
I like it. I like those recommendations. And speaking of systems, and you want robust systems, when is your operating systems for business going to be available to small and medium businesses?

Guy Harding:
Yeah, no, this is a public forum. I have been telling, I’m hopeful that in the spring, I’ll have a product. There are a couple of paths this could take. And I’ve talked to one person who’s like, we could just go sell this to a $400 million business and they would buy it. And I am hesitant to do that for all the dangers that involves when you have a fledgling product and no product survives first touch with people, right? And so if I do that with a 400 million business and we have real meaningful struggles, that could be really difficult. And because the idea with this is to service small businesses to give them an opportunity. So my approach right now is going to pick a niche and I’ve got a couple in mind, and then I’m going to, it’s going to be configured for that niche. So we will get 80% there with just the generic, you need accounting, you need marketing, you need this and that.
Those functions will be there. And then we pick that niche and we customize it for that niche that get us like 90, 95% there, and then a client can come. And a big part of the piece that I still need to write is the no-code customization part of it. That’s key because we need to have these brilliant entrepreneurial business owners be able to go in and say, well, actually in my business we do marketing this way. So I’m going to change this series of drip emails or drip communications or whatever, and we’re going to do it a little different, or we always use HubSpot or whatever. So if we need that integration there and how do we build that integration very quickly and without having to code it in a customized way. So that’s a big piece of what’s left to build.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So sometime next year.

Guy Harding:
Sometime next year.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Thanks for that. And it’s been so fun talking to you.

Guy Harding:
I know.

Kyle Knowles:
I can talk about a geek out on all this stuff all the time with you. And thank you for your time today. I’ve got a lightning round of questions I want to get to. These are just fun ones, but what’s your favorite candy bar?

Guy Harding:
Oh, boy. They used to have a dark chocolate Toblerone that I love. I love dark chocolate.

Kyle Knowles:
Never seen it before.

Guy Harding:
Yeah, I’ve had that. I am sure they have. Maybe it was just a dream. I haven’t been able to find it recently, but I remember loving that dark chocolate Toblerone.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. Who’s your favorite musical artist?

Guy Harding:
Let’s see. I’ve got a lot of Eric Clapton and I like U2 a lot, so kind of shows my age. And I’ve been listening to a bit of Taylor Swift lately, which is-

Kyle Knowles:
Okay, jumping on the bandwagon.

Guy Harding:
A little bit, yeah. Everybody’s saying she’s so awesome, and so I’m listening to her a little bit and it’s fun.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s great. What’s your favorite cereal?

Guy Harding:
Grape-Nuts.

Kyle Knowles:
Mac or PC?

Guy Harding:
Linux. So I ran Mac for 10 years and I love the macOS, but I just love being able to tinker with everything that I get with, and I run Ubuntu. And now that I do redo React Native, I don’t have to have a Mac in order to publish iOS apps so.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. Google or Microsoft? And that would be Google Workspace, Google Documents or Microsoft-

Guy Harding:
365?

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah.

Guy Harding:
We are a Google shop.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Dogs or cats?

Guy Harding:
We actually just got a cat, so we got a dog and a cat. I don’t know how to choose. Maybe the dog because he goes running with me.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Phantom or Les Mis?

Guy Harding:
Les Mis by far.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. What’s something that most people don’t know about you?

Guy Harding:
Something frivolous. So my brother and sister-in-law and their family lived in Beijing. He was a diplomat, and we went and visited them and I said we went down the street of gross things. I know they had a name for it, but it was a street where they fried anything. And I said, “Okay, my nieces challenged me.” I said, “Okay, I’ll eat one of anything that you pick as long as it’s cooked and it won’t kill me.” So they picked scorpions. And so I’ve eaten fried scorpions off a street vendor in China.

Kyle Knowles:
Wow, that’s very daring. It’s like Fear Factor level right there.

Guy Harding:
It wasn’t too bad. It’s crunchy.

Kyle Knowles:
So where can people find Verisage? And we talked about V School, it’s Vschool.com, and then you mentioned Verisage-

Guy Harding:
Vschool.io

Kyle Knowles:
Oh, sorry, Vschool.io. Verisagecustomsoftware, all one word. So three words into one.

Guy Harding:
Yeah, .com.

Kyle Knowles:
.com. And then any other socials or anything where they can reach out to LinkedIn or…

Guy Harding:
Yeah, LinkedIn. I’m Guy Harding, LinkedIn. And if you search for Guy Harding, there’s two of us. Well, there’s two of us on Google that I don’t know how many that are on LinkedIn, but I’m the one here in Provo.

Kyle Knowles:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Guy for being on the podcast, this episode on a Monday evening. It’s been so fun talking to you. Have I not asked you anything that you want to talk about?

Guy Harding:
You’ve done pretty good. I think if we go to the next level, we’re going to be here for five hours, so I really appreciate it.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, thanks so much for being generous with your time, and I’ve had a really good time talking with you tonight and look forward to seeing this operating system coming out of Verisage Custom Software.

Guy Harding:
Thank you. My pleasure.

Kyle Knowles:
Thanks, Guy. Yep. And then would you mind putting that Topo Chico out front? Yeah, and if you need to take a drink anytime, that’s fine. It’s good. Someone was joking that it’s good ASMR to open that up. Let’s see what it sounds like. That’s nice.

Guy Harding:
That’s good.

Kyle Knowles:
Put mine there.