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Ecosystem Leaders

Episode 179

June 25, 2023

#179 Carlos Aragon: Powering the 5G Revolution - Enabling Partners for Success

In this Ecosystem Aces Podcast episode, Chip Rodgers, Chief Partner Officer, WorkSpan is joined by Carlos Aragon, Associate Vice President of Product and Partner Marketing, Mavenir.

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In this Ecosystem Aces Podcast episode, Chip Rodgers, Chief Partner Officer, WorkSpan is joined by Carlos Aragon, Associate Vice President of Product and Partner Marketing, Mavenir.

Carlos is an experienced multicultural marketing leader in telecom, software solutions, and enterprise applications. With 25 years of experience, he drives growth, revenue, and brand awareness through actionable go-to-market plans. Currently, as the head of messaging, branding, and go-to-market at Mavenir, Carlos promotes Mavenir's solutions and manages marketing activities with top partners like AWS, Google, Meta, Nvidia, Apple, and more.

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Topics covered include:

How to handle challenges of partnering and solution delivery - 3:53
Ensure effective communication and coordination among multiple partners? - 10:44
How has Mavenir implemented partner marketing capabilities for Mobile Congress - 15:49
Role marketing plays in providing tools for driving sales - 22:37
How to manage partner communications - 28:12
Carlos advice on professional success - 32:24

Chip Rodgers 00:07

Hey, welcome, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of ecosystem aces. Excited to be joined this morning, I'm Chip Rodgers, CMO at WorkSpan. And excited to be joined by Carlos Aragon. Carlos is Associate Vice President of partner Product Marketing at Mavenir. Welcome, Carlos. Glad to have you here. Carlos leads product and partner marketing at Mavenir. And Carlos is working with a lot of partners and helping partners get enabled and managing the large amount of federal MDF funds and helping partners to get the word out about Mavenir, and your products and your shared products. So why don't we start there, Carlos, maybe you can tell us a little bit about what you and your team are up at Mavenir.

Carlos Aragon 01:24

Thank you. So a couple of things. I'm gonna give you a quick story of where I come from. And because my experience in the partnership space comes actually in two in two routes. The first one is in my previous position within Maverin here when I was in charge of the enterprise, marketing and business unit activities.

On that front, we were involved in a channel partner program for enterprises. So basically, we enable channel partners to resell them on your products. And we have to handle all of the different assets and tools you need to provide the channel partners including training, assets, and market development funds, and other stuff.

And lately in this position, time handling of products is important in marketing. It's more focused on joining, going to market with partners that are in selling solutions together with NAveniror not directly reselling money, your products, in many situations, so we go to market together. And then each company sells their own independent activities. Sometimes when you're asked like the common aggregator solutions, or system integrator in reselling some of those partner solutions, sometimes it's the other way around.

So it's a little bit of a combination. But what we're doing lately, and what's kind of consuming most of my time these last few months, is a lot related to deployment of 5g networks. In both 5g networks, in particular, with a new kind of approach to deploying radio networks, which is called Open Run. It's all based on open API's that allow a multi vendor radio solutions, that requires a large ecosystem of partners, there are so many moving elements, a lot of companies provide value in their specific market segments.

So it's really a balancing act of figuring out which are the interests that both companies have, and be able to find a joint routes to market with those companies so that everybody can benefit and in the end, provide a much better value proposition to the end customers, which in this case, tend to be mobile network operators. So that's a little bit in a nutshell, what we're doing these days.

How to handle challenges of partnering and solution delivery

Chip Rodgers 03:32

So there's so much change and new technology that's been rolling out with 5g and those endpoints, bringing such speed and power right to the endpoint. I'm sure you guys have been pretty busy.

Carlos Aragon 03:53

Well, very much, and particularly on the partner front, because one of the main changes introduced by 5g is that the network standards that kind of developed their 5g networks focus a lot on allowing virtualization and lately containerization of the network functions, now as they call in cloud network functions, CNS. So what this means is that now you can build your network elements as 100% software, there are still some hardware dependencies, particularly in the radio part where in the end, you still need to radiate through a physical device. But the situation here is that everything is virtualized now and the flexibility is provided to the end customers, which are their customers for us,the carriers, the mobile network, operators or communication service providers to decide where and how they want to deploy these things.

And modern years' message is that we deliver one network of all software in any cloud. That means that we build everything with the flexibility so that we can decide okay, for certain elements, I want to do it in your private cloud or I want to do it on bare metal. For some other elements. I want to put it on a public cloud. What happens is that when you open all these possibilities, obviously a company cannot do everything themselves.

So you have to rely on an ecosystem of partners. So for example, in the case of public cloud, we worked together with AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Platform, basically, the main hyperscalers in the market to make sure that if one of our customers wants to deploy, they are the ones who choose the platform they want to use. Sometimes it's for technical reasons. Sometimes it's for traditional relationships they have been using a certain hyper scaler. And they just want to continue with those runs to kind of build into those framework agreements they have.

On the other hand, for example, they may want to deploy on premise, they have their own data centers, they have their own infrastructure. And what they want to do is just have some kind of private network, a hyper scaler, that can go in there like VMware, or Red Hat, with whom we also work. And that means there's so many interests there. And so many kinds of integrations and value propositions that require a lot of close monitoring for marketing, because every time you do something, you need to kind of broadcast it out there, you need to deliver that message, amplify that message.

And make sure that when you do you provide value for both, actually, it's a three way you can provide value for both the partner companies that are going to market, but also amplify the value that's going to bring to the end customer, which is for us, the communication service provider, but also to their end customer, which is the end user.

So for things like for example, when you're trying to work with open run, and you're trying to provide, better performance, use artificial intelligence tools, to make the network make decisions on its own and be able to optimize the traffic based on the demands of the users at a certain point, the value chain goes on what you're going to help the customer with, and how both partners are going to deliver that with each partner doing their own responsibility area, and then how that's going to translate into a better user experience for the end customer, which is your customers customer, in this case, the person using their mobile phone, in the middle of a city or sometimes in a rural community where they are limited. So balancing those interests. It's super exciting, but it's quite complicated.

Chip Rodgers 07:14

That sounds like there are a lot of players. And you're right. I think especially in this when you're talking about going out all the way to the endpoints, and of IoT kinds of technology, there are always a lot of players involved. It's not just a simple solution. How do you guys manage all that as you're delivering solutions?

Carlos Aragon 07:40

Sometimes it's basically juggling a lot of things at the same time, because a number of customers keep growing. And the number of resources we have tends to remain the same most of the time. Sometimes you try to implement best practices so that you can reuse and recycle a lot of the activities or even sometimes like templates for collaterals that you put together.

I mean, after all, for example, when you sell private networks, doesn't matter who you partner with, most of those marketing collateral are going to be very similar just with minor modifications, maybe at the introduction, or reserving some space somewhere to be able to put the partners logo and some contact information for them.

In other situations, some of those activities are more specific, more tied to the customer. So just to give you a quick and dirty example here, with one of our partners with AWS, there were specific deployments that we're doing using their elastic Kubernetes system. So that requires us to start integrating all of our products there. So whatever we're doing there cannot be reused with other implementations, because they have their own specific tools. But you still have to do the marketing, you still have to figure out what is the value proposition, why it's important that we're doing it that way, what flexibilities it brings to the carriers, and what benefits it brings to the end users.

The kind of difficult part here is to interact with those foreigners, because all of them have their own interests, of course, but there they sometimes have different scales. Now we are a machinery company and we have around 5000 employees. When you compare that with AWS, it's in the 10s of 1000s. It's much, much bigger, and they have bigger goals with not just the telco space and just specifically open run and many other areas of business, their demand for joint activities and support tends to be much bigger.

And when you're a smaller company, you have to figure out a way that you can still entertain those needs and benefit from going together with them and drive that momentum. But on the other hand, come to terms with the realization that you don't have hundreds of people in product marketing or partner marketing, you have just a handful of professionals with you. And either you are very nimble, or you have to realize what things you have to say no to the partner even if you'd like to do it, because you just don't have the resources.

But in this particular case, the advice I would give to people in the same situation is, first of all, have an honest and truthful channel of communication with your partner, and make them understand from the beginning what your limitations are, so that both companies can or both partner marketing teams can optimize that go to market and figure out what are the better or most effective goals that we need to go for? Or sometimes what is the low hanging fruit that will kind of allow us to collect benefits or to collect results with kind of a minimal effort, and then build on that thing to put together a proper partnership strategy and then execute, of course.

Ensure effective communication and coordination among multiple partners

Chip Rodgers 10:44

How do you keep everyone informed? You've got marketing assets that your partner has marketing assets, you're trying to bring things together? You got multiple partners, multiple players involved. Tell me about a bill of materials? Do you have some guidelines that people need to follow? Are you getting webinars? And how are you keeping everybody up to speed on revenue and your capabilities and value props.

Carlos Aragon 11:15

So when you're doing the outbound part, for example, in our enterprise portfolio, the plan we normally do is we have normally once a month, we have a webinar, where we bring up the latest kind of product developments, latest feature, latest kind of key sales aspect, any new incentive or any new offer or something that's, that's going to be interesting enough for the market, we bring it there.

We also publish a few email newsletters, our partners are subscribed to them. We have newsletters for customers, we have newsletters for partners, we tend to keep them different. And there's very specific information for them. One thing that is critical for companies that have a massive resale space is just doing new newsletters and doing outreach is normally not good enough, you have to be very well prepared for inbound requests. And automation helps a lot here. And when I mean automation is not artificial intelligence and those kinds of things, but providing ways that you can help those partners build their own stuff.

With this, for example, we implemented a partner portal. And what that allows basically, as you can create a set of assets, marketing, collateral, white label collateral that's ready to rebrand, put it in a centralized place, and then allow all the partners to get their own login to go in there, they can get information on the products they want, you can even filter the content, you offer them based on the products they're selling or, the segments that they're focusing on, sometimes based on the contract you have with them.

And then every time they need something, they can just go in there and get the latest version. If we do any updates, we don't even need to inform them, when they need the assets, they can go in there, it's always the latest content, it automatically applies for them, the logos are the contact information for them, and allows them to render a PDF, they can immediately sell to the customer. Most of these platforms, what they have are tools that allow you to even launch the emails directly from there.

So you can just type the information about your end customer, select the asset you want to send in the platform, we'll send that email on your behalf with your email address. But it will save you the effort of building that email and sending that asset and those templates of how to send these things we can also provide in the system so that they can just choose what they want to send in basically, it's very little effort, it takes a little bit of energy to put that together at the beginning. I'm not gonna lie to you, it's a lot of work.

But you do a lot of work at the beginning so that you can then grow and scale and save all of that effort individually, with every new partner that you are more so when the new partner gets imported, they just get their portal credentials. They go in there and find everything they need. If they have questions, yes, we tend to do with every new partner some kind of a little bit of one on one engagement with them. And answer questions for them. And then normally they pride themselves. Again, also depending on how you implement those portals and how many modules you activate, you can also activate the market development funds, you can activate opportunity registration through there that you can then feed into Salesforce, or other kinds of opportunity management tools. You can also implement marketing automation tools to connect, for example, to HubSpot, or to Marketo or other tools.

It depends on the vendor you use. I'm not going to bake some publicity here about which vendor we're using. Because we evaluated a lot and in the end, everybody has to decide one based on specific needs. It's not like one is better than the other. But it does help a lot. And then on the other front where we go together with the big players like AWS or Intel, or VMware or Red Hat, those guys. It's more of a one on one situation where we have periodic meetings. With some of them, it's weekly, some of them bi weekly, some of them where the activities are more like coasting.

Now, maybe we do once a month, when you get closer to a major event like the mobile world, Congress, that tends to be more periodic, because there are a lot of activities there this year, for example, we have seven different partners showing up in your demos at their booth. And that requires a lot of coordination. But again, the important part here is how you communicate when you are going to people who resell your solutions, there's maybe 60-70% part is outreach and letting them know the latest stuff, 30% of them finding their own staff through either a website or partner portal. But when you deal with people that you do join strategies together, that requires a lot of hand holding.

How has Mavenir implemented partner marketing capabilities for Mobile Congress

Chip Rodgers 15:49

Mobile Congress is huge. It's a must attend. event. You had seven partners that were actually demonstrating Mavenir as a part of their overall solution. So first of all, congrats on making that happen. Well done. But also it's a great example of the power of partnering and partner marketing. That you're, you're using in this case , but you're getting set in and multiplied by seven, for the region and impact that you're having. So talk a little bit about how you think about that, and how you've implemented some of those capabilities within it for Mavenir.

Carlos Aragon 16:57

Well, first of all, this starts in February, way ahead of time, we started activities around September, the previous year, whenever we do these things. The key important part here is very early in the game, both companies need to understand what is their outcome that they're trying to obtain from that Mobile World Congress participation.

Sometimes we'd run awareness. Sometimes the situation is that they want to put their brand out there, and they want to show that they're collaborating with one of the driving forces behind open run. So this year, a lot of those partnerships were related to or those joint activities or Mobile World Congress are related to open Run activities. The different thing like previous years, we've been doing a lot about RCS business messaging and pushing conversational commerce.

And in those fronts, it was all about the awareness, not specifically about Mavenir, it was showing there that we were a leader in RCS business messaging at the time. But for other partners there is to show that they are in a new wave of technology, to present themselves as a key player there, and then on the other side to leverage their technologies and their solutions to be able to sell to those carriers. One important aspect in there is that when you go to these joint events, it has to be very clear. Who owns the responsibility for what?

Sometimes there's also funding involved when you're doing a joint demo, sometimes there is equipment that needs to be purchased. Normally, whoever manufactures a certain thing provides the equipment. But when it comes to your trolley station Well, the thing is, we need software, even if you're a hyper scaler, buying a specific hardware, if you're going to be doing something on premises, it's not very clear who owns that part. So in those cases, we normally also play with another partner in there who wants to provide the equipment and also be part of the picture.

So just to give you an example, one of the things we did at Mobile World Congress is we did a joint demo together with Vodafone, it was at the Vodafone booth with radio units in there. And the demonstration was showing theMavenir radio access network elements in this region and centralized unit. And we were in partnership there also with HPE. And with Qualcomm, HPE was providing the servers for the demo, basically Intel powered servers, of which Intel is another one of our partners. And then Qualcomm was providing an accelerator card to do that kind of the level one acceleration for the radio interfaces.

And they were all running a Mavenir software on top and then they were connected using modern years radio to deliver a full open Run solution for Vodafone. We had to join blogs posted together. We had the assets in the booth at Vodafone. All of us were sending. We put together some posters to put on our booth to show the different partners that we had so that we could send traffic over there and we also coordinated with them like if they wanted to carry customers for visits, provide some hours.

In addition to that, our CTO and a couple other experts from Mavenir, we work with them to record interviews for those partners so that we can respond in our social networks. So with VMware, for example, we recorded an interview over there, Intel came over to our booth to record a couple of pieces with our CTO. So all of those things highlight that we're driving the ecosystem forward in the case of Open Run, that we're keeping it open. And both the different players in the monitor side and the partner side, are providing their own distinctive value.

A critical aspect here is having complementary portfolios where overlap is minimized, because in the past, we've seen situations where we've been partnering with some companies, we've been going jointly to market, but then the other partner had some product portfolio that conflicted with ours. And even though the agreement was we were going to go to market together with a certain set of products where Mavenir would provide A and the partner would provide B, in some situations where the partners, salespeople had the opportunity to also sell components of a, they basically went rogue and still trying to sell them, that part of the partnership, and that drove into some friction, some problems, some of those partnerships, eventually, we ended up breaking, because we saw that it wasn't going in the right direction.

So I'm trying to minimize the overlap that is important. But if there is overlap, then you have to set certain rules, and like very specific rules. And you have to define accountability for both companies, maybe not to the point, setting up penalties and things like that. But at least make sure that the accountability comes from the company's training their salespeople, where the monitors are going to be where the joint opportunities are going to go. And make sure that they can stay within the rails.

Chip Rodgers 21:59

I love this example, Carlos, because it's just a classic of so many companies, each company coming together, each providing their own specific value proposition and like you said, you can't, you can't build everything, no company can build everything all the time. So you had a solution being delivered by Vodafone. So you got Vodafone involved there. You have Mavenir, of course HPE, Qualcomm, Intel and I think was VMware part of that as well or was that a separate?

Carlos Aragon 22:32

No, VMware was going to separate.

Role marketing plays in providing tools for driving sales

Chip Rodgers 22:37

Vodafone, HP, Qualcomm, Intel Mavenir, all coming together to put this whole solution together for customers. It's fantastic. That's amazing. Also a lot of coordination on building the marketing capabilities and marketing assets, the message, the rules of engagement, Co-selling, talk a little bit about Co-selling like once you hit the market, and you get sales teams out there trying to close business together. How does that work?

Carlos Aragón 23:14

So that's fine, I'm not going to be able to give you a lot because we do have a separate team for that we have our own business development team that works together with a partner. So when we reach a point that we're going to sell, they normally take over and they handle the day to day activities. So they deal with conflict and deal with those kinds of rules.

But there is something that marketing needs to provide there. And that is the tools they need to be able to drive that sale to the end. And that's where we work together with putting together so for example, this few last few couple of weeks, I've been working together with VMware, on a couple of blog posts out there that included a video of the demo we put together for mobile Congress to drive awareness in the space that in some situations, you may want to go with a hybrid cloud or in the case of radio, for example, open round.

Normally the sell side is deployed locally, it has to be at the edge latency and performance is really important. So you're going to run that on a specific server running at the sell side. Now you can run that on bare metal just put into software on top of it. But if you want to be able to scale and manage it normally, like easily, let's say you're going to do hyper scaler there so that you can deploy the software as containers and kind of mix and match and change whatever you need. In those cases we use either VMware as a partner, we use Red Hat as a partner, we also have my own hybrid platform called Lavinia webscale.

But in the case of VMware, for example, we did that kind of joint go to market together. We agreed on the blog post, they wrote a blog post, I wrote another one that goes in the same direction and we cross link to each other. We put the video in there and we coordinated and published it at the same time. And then we also work on putting together some joint solution briefs that explain how mob and your solution is integrating into their VMware telco cloud, for example, or we do the same thing with other partners right red hot.

And we put together joint press releases about new solutions that are there in the market. So it will stall, we required a lot of follow up and tracking with those partners to put together a joint content calendar. And then both sales support content, which is like presentation solution briefs, sometimes we do join white papers, we do a lot of them with Intel.

And sometimes it's also outreach in awareness, doing joint email campaigns, sometimes it's doing blog posts. Besides doing press releases, sometimes it's doing webinars together, doing videos together, where the both companies work together, sometimes it's talking about a success story. And we go and interview one of our customers where we deployed successfully. And we basically provide the pitch together. Just to give an example. Another recent activity we've done is with worldwide technology. We also work with VMware, and with HP with Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

In this case, we work with HP and other other activities, we work with Dell, because they are at the same level in the same game of providing the servers. But in this case, with worldwide technology, the partnership combines Mavenir HPE, VMware and World War technology as the systems integrator to provide a single handshake, single neck to toe whatever you want to call it, for Open Run. So basically, when you deploy something that has such a big ecosystem of partners, one thing that the carriers have been used to in the past is to just buy everything from a single vendor.

In fact, I mean, since the early 2000s, a lot of the carriers have outsourced their network planning and network management functions to big vendors out there. So now when they buy a new radio solution, they just buy everything from a single vendor, just because it's easier for them to have one hand to shake. And then when something goes wrong, one neck to choke.

And we have an open ecosystem. Think open Run thing, Wi Fi many other solutions where there is multiple vendors, it's good to have one system integrator that deals with those partners that coordinates the roadmap for that when Mavenir introduces new feature that has a certain dependency on something that needs to be supported by the hyper scaler like VMware, or something in the hyper scaler has something that needs to be supported by the servers, like implement them, for example, the latest in fourth generation Intel Xeon, or Shiota, scalable processors, they all work together so that everything aligns at the same time, and it's ready for the customer.

And when we did this together, we did a press release to announce it in a blog post. And then we did an interview at Mobile World Congress where we sat people from each company together, and we did a live broadcast and interviewed somebody on everybody's website to see. But all of those activities highlight that even in a multi partner where you have, in this case, four players. Each player has their own areas of responsibility and its own value that can be brought together and then there is worldwide technology that coordinates with us to make sure the roadmap provides a solution that behaves like if it was a single vendor, even though each party is doing their own part.

How to manage partner communications

Chip Rodgers 28:12

So they're providing the glue that makes sure that all the pieces fit together. I had a question on LinkedIn that came up from Gagan Deepa Saini, considering the examples of multi company co innovation examples you just provided How do you manage partner communications? It's a multi company collaborative partner engagement today, do you think there's a scope to make it better?

Carlos Aragón 28:38

Of course, there is always a scope to make it better. There are things that work that are things that don't work, particularly in this case that I've been talking about recently, where we go together jointly, I haven't figured out a way that we can make it better with automation. This requires a lot of hand holding, and most of the activities are unique. So the only way you can scale that and make it better is by having people who are experts who understand that technology who understand the needs of the partners and the needs of the customers being part of your team.

So hiring the right people is important here. On the other front, when you're basically working with your resellers. It's less of having people in your team, it's more of having people in the partners team. So you need to make sure that the people they have in roles like sales engineering, are properly trained and understand what your solutions provide best. Not showing them your solution is better than the other is about to show them how your solution is different. So that they are the ones that have the knowledge to identify the opportunities.

They may be dealing with some customer and they're going to be recommending to the customer the best solution for the customer. Sometimes they'll go with us and sometimes they will go with another vendor. But they're the ones making that choice. You need to enable them with those training materials with supporting assets so that when they make that decision, they have the information they need. That requires having easy access to those tools.

And for that I always recommend implementing the partner portal, spend a little bit of an effort there, building it up with collateral, do periodic sales training, record the assets, and then make them available in those partner portals, create some kind of curriculum or training. One example that I can use here is when we acquired Telestax a couple years ago, it's a CPaaS provider that we acquired and integrated into our solutions. One thing that Telestax used to do quite well, is they had this CPaaS certification program, like the CPaaS Academy.

And they've had something called the CPaaS playbook. So they had a specific website, where they would send their customers and they had all of the marketing assets that they needed there. They were similar to a partner portal, because in the end for Telestax, they were enabling carriers to sell CPaaS solutions.

So their end customers were not the enterprises using the API's where they taught us of the world that you call him AT & T, those guys are, that are trying to implement API's to be able to compete against Twilio, or other people that are taking their enterprise business away. And the problem they found many of the times is that the people that were in those carriers trying to sell this new API model were people that had been selling subscriptions their entire life, but subscriptions to mobile phones, landlines, internet connections, not really how to sell API.

So a lot of the effort was on delivering the training mechanisms, making them not just watch the training, but join a virtual session or a live session, most of the time it was virtual, and this one we acquired was during the pandemic. So we had to do everything virtually. But you have them join the presenter from the company that kind of delivers the entire training, or it can be also pre recorded. And then at the end, you have to make them run through an exam and get certified. If they do get a diploma and diploma, they can put it on social images they can put on their LinkedIn profile and stuff.

But putting together those kinds of programs helps a lot. Because it makes sure that your partner has people who understand that technology, they understand how it brings value to them, not just to their customer, but also to what's going to enable them. What are kind of the new things, they can upsell that allows them to make more business. And they can be better prepared when the customer comes with questions so that they don't have to delay and they can answer immediately.

Carlos advice on professional success

Chip Rodgers 32:24

That's fantastic. Carlos, this has been terrific . We've covered a lot of ground and you're done with a small but mighty team, as you said, a handful of folks and you've got a lot of ground to cover. As we wrap here, any piece of advice that you would have for anyone watching for that's helped you be successful throughout your career.

Carlos Aragón 32:57

There's a few I mean, you've seen me already, I can talk for hours, I have multiple pieces of advice I already gave, one was like if you can be the partner portal. It's a lot of effort, but it really pays off. It's the biggest advice I would give here. When dealing with partners. People buy from people, there is no level of automation that can replace personal relationships. So you have to help those partners nurture those personal relationships with their customers. But also you have to nurture your own personal relationship with those partners.

Because at the end of the day, when when things become stressful, when there are deliverables and deadlines coming, it's that personal relationship, the one that's going to help those people drive that extra mile, do the extra effort, work that 11th hour to make sure that both companies are successful in the end. That's kind of one critical aspect. And then of course, to be able to nurture that personal relationship, what I mentioned before, honesty and truth. Of course, every company has their own confidential information.

And there are certain barriers of how much you can share with the other partner. But you need to figure out a way that you can share as much as you can and not withhold things that you don't have to withhold. Be transparent and honest. When problems arise, be proactive. Don't wait to see if the problem solves itself. Even if you think you can solve the problem. Let your partner know in advance, hey, we have this. We have this roadblock. We're working to solve it so that they can be prepared with a plan B if something happens and they need to react. That's what I would recommend honesty and truth and then of course nurture those personal relations.

Chip Rodgers 34:35

And communication, right. Keeping people well, keeping everybody informed on exactly. It's the good, the bad and the challenges.

Carlos Aragon 34:45

Yeah. If there is no magic book, I mean, I wish we had otherwise.We would be super rich. You and I could just go through it together. There's no magic recipe here. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of the things you just eat no matter how much You've been in the industry. A lot of things you keep learning every day. So always keep an open mind and keep learning.

Chip Rodgers 35:06

Awesome. Carlos, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and expertise. This has been fantastic. And I really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us today.

Carlos Aragon 35:17

Thank you for having me. And it's been a pleasure.

Chip Rodgers 35:20

Awesome. Carlos, thank you for joining and thank you all for joining and we will see you next time on the next ecosystem. Aces Podcast. Thanks, everybody.