Carrie Charles (00:01.122)
Welcome to Let's Get Digital. I'm Carrie Charles, your host, and super happy that you're here with me today. I have a guest with me, cannot wait to introduce him to you. I've known him for a little while now, and he is absolutely fantastic, really brilliant. Yes, I'm gonna brag about you, Sean. His name is Sean Shahini. He is the founder and CEO of Inorsa. Sean, thanks for being here.
Sean Shahini (00:29.593)
thanks for having me, Carrie. Super excited to be here.
Carrie Charles (00:32.864)
Yes, yes. So, Sean, five years ago, you were a lead engineer, right?
Sean Shahini (00:40.718)
That's correct.
Carrie Charles (00:42.158)
and you had an idea and you you created it you took action executed and now you have this amazing company five years later so tell me the story of the birth of a Inorsa
Sean Shahini (00:59.81)
So I started my career as a structural engineer in oil and gas. And then I was a structural manager in a in a utilities company, then telecom. And the idea behind North actually started when I was a junior engineer in oil and gas. Cause when I got into the kind of the oil and gas business, I realized everything we design pretty much looks the same as engineers, but all of these structures look the same. It's just like building Legos. You build the same thing over and over again.
And then when I got to telecom, the scale and repeatability of this was even way bigger. The problems the customers had were a lot larger because you have this high volume, low margin business. You have to deliver consistently the same type of projects over and over again. So that was the idea behind starting a company was automating everything an architecture engineering firm does because
It's a very repetitive business and I don't think anybody went to school to check RFDS tables all day and do the same thing over and over again. So that was the start of the company, but five years ago, so I had a very comfortable, great job. I worked at a great company. They became the first customer the day I quit. They really believed in the business and they were a big supporter of it, but it had its own challenges. moved and lived my brother's cash for two years and
then things kind of got picked up. I think the mission of the business really resonated with the customers. We realized if you want to automate the drawings, we have to automate some other stuff. We want to automate auto site acquisition and drawings, and I have to clean up the data. So it became this holistic end-to-end platform to solve a lot of the problems our infrastructure owner or service customers solve from.
&A because they buy and sell these assets all the time to site acquisition architecture engineering and some of the construction steps. So, yeah, it's been a great five years.
Carrie Charles (03:06.199)
love that story. tell me more about Inorsa, just go into detail about the platform and the problems that you solve.
Sean Shahini (03:09.058)
No, I didn't have to.
Sean Shahini (03:19.214)
So we divide all customer problems into four main categories. So we started from automating things that are like very technical documents like CAD drawings. We generate a document on the drawing side that's very CAD compatible. can obey another CAD, it looks like a drafter. It can automate everything 100%. So you can automate it 50 to 80%, 90%. But we started with architecture engineering, but we realized
There lot of data problems too, because all of these structures live forever. All of the telecom towers are going to be there for 40 years, 50 years. So there's a lot of data that have been touched by so many humans and all of these documents have issues and problems. So we kind of categorize everything into a document ingestion engine. So we have a, we self-forced our own large language model. are very, very call heavy AI solution. We create
kind of we get access to all the customers' we clean it up for them, everything is unique to the customers so we don't share data between customers. And now they can extract all sorts of information. They can organize the underlying utilities, they can ask questions from their tower or from their fiber asset, whereas financials or other customers use it for financials to figure out what are the least terms, what are the least kind of information in bulk about their towers or small cells or fiber.
So that's our data ingestion kind of product. Our customers can have now can have their own GPT kind of tower code, so on so GPT kind of products so can ask questions and interact with their assets. So that's one category of solutions. The next category is data validation engine. Basically, because all of these documents have a lot of problems, you see everything automatically. So some of the customers use this to que see their permit drawings.
everything is very jurisdiction specific. So for example, in fiber drawing, can see if things like the projects in this specific jurisdiction, it automatically checks every jurisdiction or requirements. And it could be other facets. They can clean up like cross check tens of documents and hundreds and hundreds of fields to figure out what are the mistakes. So they can clean up their documents, whether it's a lease or a drawing or anything like that. And the last category of the third category of products we offer are
Sean Shahini (05:43.946)
our generation services. So we generate all sorts of documents, leases, contracts, construction drawings, structural analysis. Again, these are very jurisdiction aware, very customer specific, so they can be tailored to the customer needs. And at the end, because all of our services are very data heavy, can, for example, if anybody knows about the tower business, have the RFDS documents, every single RF engineer fills up these documents differently. Our ability to extract is
documents or construction drawings are the same way, are very strong. They give access to our customers to kind of build their own tools on top of our platform. So we also integrate with a ton of tools that are already out there so we can give this holistic end-to-end solution for our customers. But that's how we solve the problem. We build this universal system of record and on top of it, the customers can kind of automate their needs or ask questions to kind of manage their day-to-day better.
Carrie Charles (06:41.569)
I can't imagine that anyone would ever say no to this. I mean, it just sounds like what we've been waiting for, for so long in this industry. What efficiencies, and I know you talked a little bit about this already, but go deeper into the efficiencies that this creates for the customer.
Sean Shahini (06:42.318)
I'm not just kidding.
Sean Shahini (06:46.616)
Yeah.
Sean Shahini (07:01.454)
I love this question because I have actual data. So we publish our top user data to most of our customers on a quarterly basis to give some perspective. For example, I was in, I managed a lot of the construction drawings. takes a person a day. That's how you budget normally. We did at least a drawing a day per person because a lot of red lines and issues that come up. The top user on one of the customer side generally 90, like 780 % on drawing. So.
it can be like another 100 % automated, but 90 drawings in three hours. So if I budget one drawing a day or two drawings a day, if it's like 80 % automated, that's the scale you're looking at. Cause for us to give the value to our customers, time is not a limit. So the higher the volume, the better we do versus if you do this manually, the higher the volume, the longer you have to wait. So our customers use us to really build their infrastructure a lot faster at scale, get
stuff installed on it. they're a tower company, get stuff installed at tower fast. If they're a service company, be able to serve their customer better like no one else can. We clean up a lot of the data so the accuracy of our product is pretty high depending on obviously the the step before that has been done. Also like for example on the M &A side, we have customers, have tower customers that use us to run due diligence on their projects. Last quarter, one of our customers ran it.
entire M &A process that normally takes them six plus weeks with eight to ten people with one person a day. So, the scale is really where we shine for our customers and also the quality of what they can get out of it. I was talking to CEO of one of the tower codes that's a customer last week and they were saying now they can put more people to serve their customers better and have a better experience for their customers, right? I'm doing this manual or repetitive work.
Carrie Charles (09:00.277)
You know, it's interesting, I was thinking people the whole time you were talking and, you know, thinking that, you know, obviously this is happening all over the world now where technology and AI is creating more efficiencies and therefore we don't necessarily need as many people in these particular roles and maybe they need to be up skilled and re skilled. But I'm just curious about, you know, let it must mean that less engineers are needed for that company. And if so, you know, how are
Sean Shahini (09:01.07)
So, was say I was standing tall, but I'm tall enough. So, yeah, so I'm So, I'm tall.
Carrie Charles (09:29.995)
the engineers reacting to this and what happens to those engineers? I'm just curious.
Sean Shahini (09:31.947)
music.
Sean Shahini (09:37.358)
I mean, there's no hiding it. When you automate stuff, need less headcount to do those tasks. I would say it's more, we really compete with the outsource firm because a lot of the, and we can talk about the problems with that too. A lot of the kind of these documents are done outside the U.S. because they're very time consuming, very repetitive. If you ask people what's the preferred part of their job, you're not going to hear a lot about these things, but
And it's not that the customers need less engineers, they need less drafters or net less kind of contractors. So, but I would say it's an opportunity because there's a gap for things to get automated. It's the same way as for example, an Apple App Store came up, you had all these kids basically writing apps and making millions of dollars. You have those small group of people that kind of jump in ahead of time, ahead of everybody else, learn how to use the tools. And I think they're going to have the opportunity to generate significant amount of revenue for their companies.
and kind of get ahead of the competition. I think those group of users or companies get way far ahead. And then we actually can focus on actual engineering because a lot of these things are repetitive. So they can get their customer experience. But at the end of the day, when you automate some of the tasks and you save a significant amount of money for the customers, they can invest on expanding their business. I think.
eventually we'll build more infrastructure. I think AI is going to give the opportunity to have one person, multi-million dollar companies for the first time, or hundreds of employee companies generate billions of revenue or hundreds of millions of revenue. So it's a shift, I think, in how things are done. But like every other change, you have to kind of get on track and catch up because...
In five years, I don't think anybody will do any of these tasks. Or even two years, in a year, most of these tasks will get automated.
Carrie Charles (11:40.026)
I could not agree with you more. I was in a meeting yesterday where there was actually a number of staffing leaders in that meeting. And they were talking about this one very, very large company that had a full offshore team of technical engineers, everything. And they needed to bring that back on here to America, to onshore. And so.
I again, this could potentially be a trend. Talk about that a little bit because I really liked what you said that, you know, companies are offshoring this now, many are, and this could be a way where they could become more efficient and automate it so they don't necessarily have to do that. So, but what are those risks of a company when they, the company's taking when they do offshore?
Sean Shahini (12:31.424)
So I think the first is US infrastructure data. are articles about how the breach of outsourcing to an outside vendor and their systems getting hacked has impacted US infrastructure. So I think most of our customers, everybody in this industry has an obligation to their carriers not to outsource the data. And this is a huge risk I think that every company is taking. I understand it's a large volume.
kind of low margin business, so you have to survive. There's a lot of pricing pressure. But on the other side of it, not only it's giving a better experience to the customer at the end of the day, so they can get their documents faster, higher quality, but because of AI, there's this opportunity for every company to invest and use this data to make their own process better. So like I mentioned, we don't share customer data, but every...
data point will make the customer's product, each customer's product and preferences better. instead of spending all of this money on outsourcing outside US and getting the same result over and over again, and when it's so people heavy, if someone leaves a company, you lose everything. You have to hire someone else, train them again. Here you have this knowledge source where your employees can get on board and kind of fast track the onboarding really fast.
preserve that knowledge for the company. a lot of our customers that are investing with us, they're not just investing to get their tasks done faster, they're investing on a product that gets better and better over time. And they avoid a lot of the risk and they give better customer experiences on the other side of it too.
Carrie Charles (14:16.253)
Let's talk a little bit more about automation because it's top of mind for every business leader, big, small, no matter the size. Everybody's thinking about how do I use AI? How do I automate? Where? And it's overwhelming. But what is, I guess this could be a simple question, but what is the risk if you do not automate? And you were talking about even within the next year.
Sean Shahini (14:16.887)
No.
you
you
Carrie Charles (14:44.915)
and maybe some common fears around automation right now, benefits, I mean, where do companies begin? Like, I know that's a lot in that question.
Sean Shahini (14:58.034)
I mean, it's all, think, hope and fear, right? I think a lot of the fears are right. If you don't jump in and you don't automate, you fall behind significantly. Because if a customer can deliver something that they have like a two weeks SLA in a day or two days or three days, significantly faster than others, they can grow their business a lot. It's just a rational. Here's the difference between a service business and a technology business. And a lot of these service businesses
because of AI are going to become technology businesses. For example, airlines are great examples. Most people will go buy the cheapest ticket. If the pricing are, prices are similar, they may go pay 20 bucks, 50 bucks more, go to a better airline they love. But most people go, it's a price competitive business when it's services business. People compete over price and a little bit of service. think telecom has been...
is becoming more and more because a lot of these tasks are repetitive. When there's a price cut where everybody loses, when you lose, you compete on pricing. but in tech, tech is not a, it's not a everybody takes different parts of the market business. It's not a price competitive business. It's a monopoly business. You only have one Google, you only have one Salesforce because they service a tech company.
after a while when they get more customers can offer their customers significantly better than any other service company. So is this going to become the same way for all of these service companies? So architecture engineering firm that can deliver drawings in two days and they're more accurate, so there are less red lines. Yes, in the beginning there are some pushback, it's digital transformation or AI transformation. You have to convince people, the customers have to get used to it. They redline things anyways in the beginning, but over time because they can
give significant amount of different quality experience and in a short time, that delta becomes bigger and bigger between a company that takes two weeks to deliver something, even if the quality is very different between a company that does deliver everything in 48 hours or 24 hours. So I think a lot of these service companies are becoming more tech enabled or AI enabled and because of that, they're going to have a competitive edge.
Sean Shahini (17:16.918)
And because more data makes the product better now, the sooner they start, the faster they get ahead. And then if it's five years from now and you've been doing it for five years versus someone who was just jumping on the bandwagon, it's going to be a big delta to catch up. So that's one area of it. Now how to start, it actually is easier now than how it was before to start with a product. If for example, you want to implement a project management tool, you want to implement an ERP tool, anything like that.
There is a lot of time you have to spend to onboard. You have to get your entire company on a platform. So unless you are a really good tool that everybody uses and you win the market, if you're a small company, it takes time to build a new software business or even have the customers get onboarded. With a lot of the automation tasks, because they're so task oriented, basically you can start very, very small. You can start
at a part of your company, automate a portion of everything you're doing. And as a result of it, most of these businesses are token-based model. Most of AI companies are token-based. So it's usage-based, consumption-based pricing. it's not necessary that if you're paying a monthly subscription fee, so you can start something with enough use cases, obviously, so there's enough budget for it, but they can start with one small part of the business and grow pretty fast.
If a company knows how to deliver a value, they should be able to deliver value pretty quickly too on certain kind of projects. So it's not like you have to implement something, wait six months to see where is my ROI. There are cases like that. So for example, in the automated construction drawings for our customers, that's a battle for them to go to permitting, go to approval from their customers, internally adjust things. But there are a lot of other things AI based that we offer other companies offer that you don't have to.
invest a ton, don't have, there are low hanging fruits where you can, the companies can win some good deal with their employees and show how things can get better and start from there and build on top of it. And build a roadmap that may take a year, may take six months depending on company or company is different to get them to that Nirvana where everything is hopefully more smooth and easier.
Carrie Charles (19:37.165)
Let's go into AI a little bit deeper. How does Inorsa use AI?
Sean Shahini (19:38.134)
I've got this awesome...
Sean Shahini (19:45.272)
So we use AI in several different ways. Not all of the solutions we offer are AI based for our customers. We are more focused on solving the customer problem, but about 40 % of what we do is all AI based, like fundamental. So for example, the same way Chad GPT or a lot of other companies use large language model, we self force our own large language models, which means we...
fine-tune and train the models based on telecom data and also we don't share data between customers. This helps us analyze customers contracts information give them access to their tools, but that's one part of it. Now our edge is really the custom solutions we build in house where you can't find anywhere else. So not everything is solved by large language. Most of it is like you can analyze a bunch of contracts documents.
Now, before, for example, you wanted to throw 10 different types of contracts in a machine, I wanted to see what they are, you had to kind of read the text and read the title and see, okay, this says a contract, so it must be a contract. Or this says a lease, it must be a lease. We read the entire context of the document. So even if the document doesn't say this is a lease, for example, it reads the entire document and tells you based on the context, I think this is a ground lease, or this is a tower lease, or fiber lease. So that's how we use language models, but.
More importantly, we have a lot of custom solutions that image-based or machine learning-based or AI-based for to understand these documents further, understand, for example, plumbing diagrams, understand construction, drawing, shapes, different things that are very telecom specific. So our ability, for example, to analyze all our FDS documents with
98 plus percent accuracy for our customers is a real competitive edge where the customer, cannot find that anywhere else. Our ability, for example, to generate context over CAD fuss, because we analyze jurisdiction requirements all the time, and we can kind of QC fiber drawings, for example, or we can generate CAD drawing, detailed CAD drawings for tower businesses. That automating AutoCAD in a way that when you open it, not only it looks like a drafter did it,
Sean Shahini (22:07.352)
but also it has instructions based on jurisdiction, based on specific towering formation. That's another way where we built an intelligent system to give value to our customers. it's just different ways in different places. We do a lot of custom solutions for our customers too. So.
Carrie Charles (22:28.765)
Yeah, no, I'm just listening, but I'm thinking, can you describe, let's say, a case study or a use case, I mean, without saying the company's name, and just take us through, like, you know, start to either, you know, maybe a custom solution.
Sean Shahini (22:29.506)
Yeah, I'm just listening but I think I just need you.
Sean Shahini (22:47.48)
can take you in two different pieces basically from &A when a customer buys and sells towers to actual operations and how we are helping. It would be pretty much two different cases, same companies, but basically there's a lot of &A activity going on in the industry. It doesn't have to be &A specific. Sometimes there are existing assets our customers on a tower side own and they want to know what's under tower and they want to know financial information.
So when it comes to &A case, usually the window of time is very, very short. I think on a day-to-day operation, it should be short too, because you want to your operation smooth and you want to make sure you're not losing revenue. But when a customer wants to put a of a letter of intent to participate in a bid on a &A activity, they get access to all the data for those towers, basically the seller is selling. So they have a very short amount of time to analyze the information.
And normally it's done by the outsource basically to some contractors, we label the files, we name them based on their naming conventions. they go document by document, try to extract information, put it in a spreadsheet. Then some other group, they're usually consultants from Deloitte or PwC or whoever comes in and they analyze these documents and they say, this tower portfolio is worth $2 billion. The way we help our customers, for example, one of our customers wanted to buy
couple thousand towers, I can't exactly say the volume because it's their data, but in a short time, when they got the information from the seller, they were able to upload the documents on our platform, rename all the files automatically. We have a concept called AI lab, so you can go train the model, write prompts the same way you write for chat GPT, and kind of fine tune things.
deal by deal, so this specific deal has a set of requirements that we have another feature called intelligent fields where they can ask questions. So they ask tens of questions from these documents that can export the financial information. All of it can be done in a couple of days. Really you're limited by how much it takes for the person to upload the files. So once they do that, now after a couple of months, if the deal goes through, they buy the towers, now they have to do integration, they have to bring everything to their project management tools.
Sean Shahini (25:10.808)
we extract the information, fill up the project management tools fields, and then when it comes to day-to-day operations, we also help them to generate construction drawings or applications, for example. One of the core documents for every infrastructure owner is the application. So we generate the applications or we QC everything automatically. And if they want a CAD file, they can generate a CAD file. Every time the customer comes in, they get the order form, they get everything, they get the CAD file. And then...
things get done significantly faster and more accurately. we have customers on a small, this is a smaller scale customer, but we have customers on the large scale that use us too for different pieces of this.
Carrie Charles (25:56.072)
I want to ask you a question, I guess, coming from, you know, about you as an entrepreneur, Sean. Because, you know, I've talked to a lot of people in telecom. There's actually quite a few tech companies popping up that specialize in telecom. There's telecom leaders that are starting tech companies. And I think it's great, right? I mean, just everything that you've said over the past, you know, 25 minutes or so. I mean, this is all lending itself to we need this and
Sean Shahini (25:56.558)
I don't know how to...
It was an awesome.
Thank
Carrie Charles (26:24.833)
you know, we're moving in the right direction. So, but what are the challenges that you've experienced in launching and scaling a tech company, you know, in the telecom world? And, you know, maybe what has helped you succeed?
Sean Shahini (26:39.734)
So I think the personal challenges and the professional challenges, everything becomes easier if there is one thing in mind and that's customer obsession. the customer, like, but you have to mean it. Like everything we do is so focused on the customers and making sure they're successful. And because the value prop is big, sales, sales could be better, but sales is one of the smallest, has been since day one.
So, but building a business, I think from scratch, especially something that nobody has done before is an impossible task. It's like if you totally get on a plane and there's 90 % chance you're gonna fail, nobody will get on a plane, but people do start companies and in the beginning there's 90 % chance you fail. So we've had periods where we're a short on payroll for like a couple thousand dollars and there were times that we were completely like,
Carrie Charles (27:24.909)
Alright.
Sean Shahini (27:38.722)
running out of money, that was a consistent problem early on. I think there are two things in building a business, like what we do, I think if it's a service company, it's still very difficult, but it's different types of challenges. Whereas a product company, especially your auto, you're doing something that everybody has done differently for tens of years. So there's a lot of pushback, which is rational, because people are protective of.
what they've been working so hard on and there's a new thing coming up. So it has to be like a movement. There are early adopter customers that to me, they're the real heroes. They have to really believe in it to kind of jump in and believe in the company. So it's really critical to understand the difference between getting customers that are early adopters and the customers that are, they don't want to be the first ones. So those early adopters customers really, they helped us build the company because they're very patient with.
the product, it's every product company will have a lot of issues in the beginning. So that's pretty normal. But also I think individually, like you're under constant pressure all the time. So, and you're running out of money and it's like 24 seven. I don't think I took a vacation for the first four years. I lived my brother's cash for two years, even when we were making a ton of money, I still lived on his couch. So, cause at the end of the day, the business survival is key.
I don't think building a business is possible without, and I really mean it, heroic effort of its early employees that go out of their way, work 24-7. There were times when my employees came to me and they were putting their savings down. That's how much they believed in the business. So it has to feel like a movement for their employee and the customers, because the customers put up with it too when things were not good. So that's the early, think.
phase of every tech company where you try to really nail down the product and it's really impossible. And then once you figure that out, then you have other problems, growth problems, hiring the right people. think that talent is really fundamental to everything. yeah, it's kind of a consistent roller coaster, so you have to get used to it and you have to understand it. I think it changes you as a person. You become a different person.
Sean Shahini (29:59.032)
But everybody that joins the company becomes a different person too. So especially the early 50 or 100 people. And depends on the ambition, because I think the goal is for the payoff to weigh down the road. So it takes a lot to convince a lot of people that you have to come here, have to pay cuts, you're paying yourself almost nothing. And then one day it's going to work out.
it takes some level of, I think, craziness and really persistence. think for our company, grit is everything. Like when it was just me or when every single new person that joined in, just, it was just not giving up no matter what. every, they say every, there is this quote that every happy family is the same. Every unhappy family, every unhappy family, every happy family is
the same, every unhappy family is different. It's the opposite for businesses. Every unhappy business is the same. Every happy business, every happy company is different. So you have to do everything your own way, which is a lot of freedom, because you get to write something from scratch and build that culture. So it's just a lot of, think, just not giving up. Bottom line is just if you do this for five years or 10 years and just at some point has to work like it's not. But I think on the other behind all of this is
Yes, you have to be crazy, but financially things have to make sense. So we had really good financial models from early on. We knew if you get this many customers, this is our margin, this is how the business is gonna work. That financial really helped us to get early investors. When it was just me, we had a couple of really great early investors that didn't even invest in super early stage startups, which is basically a one person company, but all the numbers made sense.
And there were a lot of early adopter customers that really believed in, if this works, it's going to change everything. So that's the other part, because this is my second company. My first company didn't work out because the financials didn't make sense. The financial model wasn't there.
Carrie Charles (32:03.989)
Sean, thank you for sharing that. I know that so many founders are listening to this, just nodding their heads and saying, wow, I've been there or I am there and I get it. And I know I've been there and everything you said just really resonated with me as well. I just hear your passion and what drives you? What is inside of you just lit up?
Mission, what is it?
Sean Shahini (32:37.422)
Again, I think everything is per son outside, but thank you for saying that. think every entrepreneur have to go through similar but all of different journeys. I think there has to be something, I think on the bigger picture, there has to be a bigger mission. think engineering, especially on the infrastructure side. In America also, all over the world has not advanced for the past 20 years. We still use AutoCAD. When I went to college,
20 years ago, AutoCAD was the same way, still is the same way. So there has to be some gap and really believing that we're gonna build a better engineering kind of, better engineering for not only the country but the world. if like there has to be a bigger purpose that feeds into it. But I think individually there has to be something, I would say something wrong with you. So, but I think it's a mix of insecurity and pride at the end of the day. Cause you have to be able to believe in yourself that you can deliver.
You have to be the almost the only person in the world that you can do this to deliver, but it has to come from a lot of insecurity that if I don't do this on the flip side, whether it's living a normal life or whatever there is that I think it drives from childhood or some experiences that pushes you to do something to kind of feel like you deserve or you not deserve is not the right word, but.
you think you're capable of it. I don't think anybody gets anything they deserve in life, but you think you're capable of it and you're insecure at what happens if I don't do this. yeah, and there is some greater good behind it because I think you can start all sorts of different type of businesses, but it has to have a kind of a good culture for the company. It could be for the employees. It could be for something else that kind of went.
Things get really, really tough, gets other people bought in, but also kind of keeps you going too. So. you.
Carrie Charles (34:36.957)
this is this is my jam. I love talking about this. Thank you, Sean. It's it's so, true. I think it was Damon John that said, I mean, you always have to stay hungry and that insecure feeling once you get really comfortable, you know, things could change. And I truly, truly believe that you talked about culture. What describe the culture at a Inorsa and, you know, what is it like to work there?
Sean Shahini (35:01.486)
Thank
Sean Shahini (35:07.308)
So we're still a relatively small size company. We put a lot of effort into hiring everybody at the company and that's an absolute killer. But our culture is very dependent on the people because everybody is very bought in the mission. So there's a lot of dependency on making sure everybody is really depending on the other person delivering. So there's a huge amount of trust. But also we run the company in our own different way.
from how we run meetings, from how we do hiring, how we onboard employees, from little things we do to make things more meaningful. This is a 24-7 job. Anybody that comes in, usually, I do two interviews, but one of the last interviews I tell them, after you join in, there is no other, like this is 24-7. You wake up, you think about this, you go to bed, think about it. So people have to have some level of drive, like you mentioned.
to want this, because sometimes it just doesn't work. Some people have other obligations, they prefer to work nine to five. That's not the case here. So we put a lot of effort to make sure that everybody's not only bought in, but they have the type of drive and mentality to come in and really jump in to solve customers' problems. I try to focus on one area of the company every week or two weeks. So my job is mostly jumping in.
one area or two areas. Everything has proper documentation. We run meetings very much like a lot of tech companies like Amazon, but by memo. So we spend a lot of time on writing narratives and stories in terms of why are we doing this and what are the KPIs and stuff like that. But most of the things we do, nobody has ever done before. So there are some challenges we've already solved in our business as usual for the customers, but I would say most things we do are very R &D heavy.
Since the early on, one of the core principles of our product is we are not going to focus on anything that is not technical. So one day we may, but everything we do is heavily technical. Most of them, nobody has done it before. There's a lot of trial and error. When you do a project, there is an end date on a project. You deliver the project to the customer and you try to plan upfront to make sure everything is perfect. then you iterate, that's not the case here. It's more strategy and principles.
Sean Shahini (37:31.17)
the iteration is pretty fast because you build something, you put it out there, you get feedback, you build it again, you fix it again, you go over and over again. So I think the newness is the most exciting part. like I mentioned, employees are the real heroes because they're here 24-7. I mean, it has to be reasonable. So we don't work on weekends unless it's needed. But most of the time it's pretty intense and
people start loving it because the reward is pretty big too. You fix one thing on one construction drawing, gets, there are hundreds of drawings getting generated everywhere. the impact is a big part of the reward. Every milestone we hit, our investors, our shareholders, all the employees are shareholders by the way, which is kind of, so I have a duty to them and everybody has duty to each other to make sure that.
they deliver the best experience to the customer so the company can survive. So there's a lot of skin in the game too. And at the end of the day, everything comes from customer obsession. Like that's one of the core values and we really mean it. We try to deliver to the customer above and beyond, which means even the software engineers are pretty involved in the day-to-day customer stuff. So everybody has to do customer service at some point or.
look at customer tickets or join the demos or customer meetings. Everybody at the company is responsible for one thing and one thing only. I refuse to talk to them about other things. So they have memos and documents for that. Obviously people need help with different areas. So there may be one area that one person is in charge. so we have junior engineers that graduate two years ago and they're in charge of like some really big piece of content. That's very rewarding to them. It's at the end of the day.
when you sometimes your job is sales and that job is convincing people, that's not the case here. Again, we really focused on figuring out what's the truth and what's the answer. I'm focusing on that KPI and making it better. So there's not a lot of fluff. There's not a lot of filter. People give me feedback all the time. Sometimes I run an all hands meeting and I have an idea in mind and someone says, I don't think this is true. You should have, this is what we should do. And that changed it changes the trajectory of how we do things. So
Sean Shahini (39:55.31)
It's a very no filter culture. Not much politics. There's no room for that. But also, think naturally, because everybody's very driven and they care about the mission of the company, they really try to deliver on that. So I can talk about this all the time, because it's all day.
Carrie Charles (40:15.693)
You know, Sean, we partner on staffing as well with you and Inorsa. And I will say, you are absolutely right. Every single person that we have placed with you loves Inorsa, loves the culture, loves the mission. And they're super happy. And so, I mean, I can attest to that, that everything you say is true. And I wanted you
to express it because it is so unique and special and I think that companies can learn a lot from that, what you've created. So thank you, thank you for sharing. And what's...
Sean Shahini (40:54.014)
Thank you so much and you guys have been great partner to us too. It's been a great experience working with you.
Carrie Charles (40:58.102)
Thank you.
Thank you, thank you, no, it's awesome. What's your big vision? Let's talk about the future, take me, speed up the movie. What are you creating?
Sean Shahini (41:12.782)
So every three years I actually write a document, employees love it. So I did one year and they asked me to write it every year, three years ahead. our kind of mission is not starting, stopping with telecom. We want to be kind of the end-to-end platform for our customers to build, maintain and upgrade infrastructure on our platform. So we are starting with telecom. There are a lot of other verticals for us to get into or we are doing R &D on to get into next.
So we want at the end of the day to give our customers or infrastructure owners or engineering companies to be able to kind of get access to all of this valuable data over tens of years of working in every jurisdiction, everywhere, all over the world, and kind of automate their services so they can build their infrastructure, focus on more complicated tasks for engineering and become that core platform for them.
to be able to maintain and build their infrastructure. I think every part of the world has different challenges. I think in America, we really have been stuck in this phase of not creative engineering. So we are not building cool new things. We're just building the same things over and over again. Everything is done manually. giving the customers ability to be more creative, to build more complicated infrastructure.
is one of the core values we bring to our customers here. But if you go to other side of the world, if you're in Africa, or if you're in Middle East or other side of the world where you don't have access to engineering, with us, you're able to kind of bring that knowledge base. So you can go build your infrastructure better too, where you don't have access to, whether it's the data, the tools, you don't necessarily follow building codes and stuff like that. So I think it's pretty divided enough.
shrinking that gap of knowledge to like basic knowledge everywhere else is a big part of kind of our drive to when it comes to expanding all over the world. But still, clearly the company is young. So we are pretty fast growing. We are investors fastest growing investment ever. We have the same investors as Salesforce Dropbox, those large enterprise applications. So it's been very rewarding so far, but
Sean Shahini (43:41.23)
Still, it's a long way to go.
Carrie Charles (43:43.405)
I absolutely believe that you're going to accomplish all that and I cannot wait to see the rest of your journey. Sean, where can we reach a Inorsa? Give us your website.
Sean Shahini (43:47.246)
Thank you.
Sean Shahini (43:51.854)
So obviously our website is inorsa.com. Very simple. If you reach out on our website, it gets passed to our marketing team or me or sales team, but my email is also shawn at inorsa.com. pretty responsive. Anybody can reach out to me anytime. And our team is pretty accessible on LinkedIn, our platforms. We go to a lot of telecom conferences. We invest heavily to show up.
You can probably find our boot or somebody wearing a Northside shirt somewhere. So that's the other way to reach out to us.
Carrie Charles (44:29.293)
Sean, I really appreciate you coming on the show and also being authentic and you know, I feel your heart, I feel your passion and it matters. You know, that's what matters to people and customers. And so I really appreciate it. Can't wait to see you next. think we're probably, there's a show coming up where we're gonna see each other again. So I truly appreciate you coming on.
Sean Shahini (44:51.476)
Same here, Carrie. I appreciate you doing the shot too and all the work you're doing for Inorsa as well. And yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing you soon too.
Carrie Charles (44:58.763)
Alrighty, take care.
Sean Shahini (45:00.29)
You too. Thank you.
Carrie Charles (45:04.0)
Alright, that was awesome. my god, that was so good.
Sean Shahini (45:05.356)
Thank you.
