487. A 20-Year Journey from the Garage to Nine-Figure ARR, Reinventing with Every Platform Shift, Avoiding the Innovator's Dilemma, and Future-Proofing for Generative AI (Dave Link)

This episode of TFR is brought to you by Ramp, the spend management platform we use here at TFR. They're offering listeners a $150 just to take a demo. We've never had an offer quite like this. Claim your $150 before this offer is gone at our partner link, ramp.com/partner/tfr. And this episode of TFR is brought to you by the American Arbitration Association, where smart startups and investors turn to for fast, efficient, and cost effective dispute resolution. Visit adr.org/tfr to learn more. Welcome to the podcast about venture capital, where investors and founders alike can learn how VCs make decisions and reach conviction. Your host is Nick Moran, and this is the full ratchet. Dave Link joins us today today from Reston, Virginia. He's the founder and CEO of ScienceLogic, a leading AI ops and IT observability company. Before founding ScienceLogic, Dave was an SVP at Interlient and held leadership roles at IBM. He launched ScienceLogic in his garage in 2003 and bootstrapped it for seven years. And after growing beyond unicorn status into a global company, they now have over 9 figures of ARR. Dave, welcome to the show. Great to be with you, Nick. Yeah. Such a pleasure to chat again. Why don't we start out just with a quick backstory to becoming an entrepreneur? You know, I've had that in my bones since an early age. I had probably four or five businesses as a young teenager. I had a lawn cutting business. I grew the biggest paper route in in our town, selling one paper at a time, door to door. And and then I started, on the side, another business with my my parents repairing old engines and reselling things and trading things. So that mindset was always core to who I was. And at the same time, I had a w two job working on a golf course. So I just love work. I loved accomplishing things and learning, tackling a new task, figuring it out, and getting to the other side. Awesome. And so, you know, you left IBM. You started ScienceLogic. What was the initial insight there? I've been looking at this problem for much of my professional career, managing networks, managing infrastructure, delivering that great service quality to a user through an application that was delivered in the early days of kind of the Internet before the Internet CompuServe, which is where my first career started. I got to really understand networks and systems and applications through that job. I was there about nine years, almost ten. Then I went to IBM and led some product teams where we were taking really the best technologies out of the globally renowned labs and getting them to market in Internet speed. And that was an era where the the marketplace was evolving so quickly, but you really had to formulate something that would have a quick time to value. Very different than a prototypical IBM software product of the day. And …