[00:00:00] Nick: I have a ceiling fan, but I prefer it off, but it's not always off 'cause I have a wife who definitely likes the ceiling fan

[00:00:07] Gary: That's weird.

[00:00:11] Gary: Hello and welcome to the Biz Dev Podcast. I'm your host today, Gary Voight, and I am joined by my co-host Kristi Pronto, who is the sales and marketing guru for both Tela and Big Pixel. David is not with us again today, thankfully, because show always better without him, but more important than that, we are joined by a guest today. special guest is Nick Miller. And Nick Miller is the founder and CEO of Lucid Network, and we're gonna find out more about what Lucid Network does in just a second. Hello Nick. How are you doing today?

[00:00:47] Nick: Hey, how's it going today? Nice to see you and Christie.

[00:00:50] Christie: You too.

[00:00:51] Gary: It nice to see you too. Now, before we get into any of the actual business stuff, we like to just goof around a little bit, break the ice with some questions that are. A little bit off the cuff, but it's like a this or that type thing.

[00:01:06] Nick: Sure, let's do it.

[00:01:08] Gary: for starters, one of my favorite questions is when you are heavy into work, do you typically work in silence or do you listen to some sort of music or have some background noise going on?

[00:01:19] Nick: Silence. It's it's, no, no music here, although I probably should try it, but generally it's just silence in the room.

[00:01:26] Gary: Just dead silence.

[00:01:28] Nick: Yeah.

[00:01:29] Christie: Do you sleep like that too? Do you sleep with a fan? That's a question we've never asked. Gary, do

[00:01:34] Gary: That's true. Any kinda white noise or any kind of

[00:01:37] Nick: I have a ceiling fan, but I prefer it off, but it's not always off 'cause I have a wife who definitely likes the ceiling fan

[00:01:44] Gary: That's weird.

[00:01:46] Christie: way. In a different way. Nick I don't know if we can do

[00:01:49] Nick: Oh man. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe there's the voices in my head. Does that make you feel A little

[00:01:53] Christie: yeah.

[00:01:53] Gary: Okay, you're at least you're not alone. Yeah. You got friends to support you there with those weird decisions. Okay. And then forms of entertainment lately, are you a movie guy, a streaming guy, or like an audio book guy or

[00:02:08] Nick: Oh man, I love me some LinkedIn. I love reading on LinkedIn. Lately we've watched a couple chess streaming shows on Netflix. Yeah, one, one was.

[00:02:17] Gary: shows.

[00:02:18] Nick: One was about the first woman who broke into the top 10 on chess, and the other was about a gentleman who just beat Magnus. And there was a whole controversy about whether he was cheating.

And then obviously before that the Queen's gambit.

[00:02:30] Gary: I was just gonna ask, you did see Queen's

[00:02:32] Christie: was such

a good show.

[00:02:33] Gary: Yeah, that was great. Awesome. All right. And then the last one, which is goofy, but when you do snack, do you prefer salty or sweet snacks?

[00:02:43] Christie: All right. All right. We can talk. We can talk. All right. Good. Good. You're redeem yourself from the silence.

[00:02:50] Nick: give me a potato chip or,

[00:02:52] Gary: and streaming chess. Okay.

[00:02:54] Christie: Yeah. He potato chips while sitting in utter silence, thinking about the chess documentary that

[00:03:00] Nick: it's silent to me, but nobody else in the room. All right.

[00:03:03] Christie: That's funny.

[00:03:05] Gary: all right, Nick, well back to the actual topic at hand. So you are the CEO and President or CEO and founder, I'm sorry, of Lucid Network. And from what I'm seeing here, it is the first buyer side marketplace and Agentic workflow platform for. The cloud AI and marketplace era. That's a lot to say and I'm sure you could probably sum it up for everybody a lot cleaner.

What? What does that actually mean?

[00:03:31] Nick: Yeah, what we see is fundamentally how software is getting brought into the enterprise is shifting, and it's shifting from these large system integrators or maybe direct contracting into kind of these platforms that have marketplaces designed to help accelerate spend. What, the way I like to frame it to somebody and I try to keep it simple for like my mom or somebody, but imagine you are the utility company and you are dependent on selling utility.

If. The buyer had to build a market microwave. You probably wouldn't sell a lot of electricity if the buyer was trying to put together the microwave themself, right? And so what did the hyperscalers did? They said, Hey, we've got a bunch of microwaves in our store. Try them all out. Click to buy.

And that will help them sell more utility, right? And so in this age of utility consumption, most of the hyperscalers have launched a marketplace. And what that's done for procurement and for enterprise buyers is there's a whole bunch of workflow orchestration, enterprise governance, license management that fundamentally shifts how they've done business in the past to this new era where software's coming through cloud and AI marketplaces

[00:04:35] Gary: That makes sense. Yeah. David, the normal host I know one of his earlier jobs out of college was. In software, but it wasn't exactly software development as much as was software development and consulting. Meaning the company he worked for would send him out to the enterprise businesses that bought the software they were selling to help them integrate it.

And he'd be there for weeks at a time trying to teach 'em how to use it and get it all set up and everything. The services you're providing seems like it's. It's not going back to that job itself, but it is offering a little bit more of that personal one-on-one, I guess you could say.

Onboarding of a new software package for that

[00:05:15] Nick: Yeah, the in industry there's following a lot of the venture capital community, there's this term services as software, right? And this may be spun out of this like forward deployed engineer world that Palantir and others have. Built and now you see open AI and anthropic deploying forward deployed engineers.

But at the end of the day, what a forward deployed engineer is, in my mind is who is sitting on ground helping the enterprise with some change management that gets them to better outcomes with the software. And we as Pellucid are looking at this fundamental kind of convergence of. Innovation and innovation ecosystems inside of enterprises and procurement technology.

And we see those two things merging because at the end of the day, all roads lead to contracts. If you want to bring on new innovation, you have to be able to contract much faster. And direct contracting is not scalable. And this is why marketplaces were put in there at AWS and Salesforce was to help the buyers start initially as an end around traditional procurement.

More than that, it became this change management around how do we help the buyer change how they buy faster so they can start to plug in the microwaves faster.

But what happens in that world is like you end around procurement. At the same time, procurement and financial teams are going what about Sarbanes Oxley? What about risk management?

What about data sovereignty? What we, we can't like have another end on just because we have these agentic AI platforms inside of a hyperscaler. And so what Pellucid is trying to say is we should be able to do both. We should be able to innovate really fast and bring in the latest and greatest tools in technology and become better buyers of technology while also maintaining the foundational regulatory controls that make this nation great to be a part of.

Because the fact that we know companies are well-governed means we can put Grandma's Pension fund

[00:06:58] Christie: Yeah.

[00:06:59] Nick: market. And

[00:06:59] Christie: there's visibility across the board there, whereas it that can get lost without a third party coming in and making sure that stays front and center.

[00:07:06] Nick: And that's what the financial and the procurement teams do. And in enterprises they're that neutral auditor. And so what we wanna do in the fullness of time is first build the digital rails, but then once the digital rails are in place, you need this kind of agent that is set up by and operates on behalf of sourcing and finance internally to mediate these kind of agent to agent transactions.

Once you start involving contracts and once you start it involving money, you need to align to cost centers, you need to align to risk profiles, and all of that has to be done on the front end, not after the fact when there's an incident.

[00:07:39] Christie: Yeah, I saw healthcare being one of your biggest use cases and I can see how that could be just a mess if not handled with the care of someone like your, on your team.

[00:07:46] Nick: Yeah and

[00:07:47] Gary: data security.

[00:07:48] Christie: Yeah. Data security.

[00:07:50] Nick: And yet when you think about healthcare, there's a trillion dollars of overhead, right? So there's a trillion dollars of overhead in the healthcare administration. And often, they're using, for lack of a better example, yesterday's technology tomorrow at higher prices, right?

Like they, they're not on the bleeding edge of adoption. And part of that is, some of these startups aren't ready to work with health systems, but part of it is they just can't consume or adopt it fast enough because of the procurement regime that they've created their own kind of. Barriers to entry, if you will.

And so we're trying to like lower the barrier of the entry by making the way into these the networks or the bridges into these health systems more consistent across the board.

[00:08:30] Gary: Now you mentioned AWS and I saw that you used to work with AWS or work for AWS.

[00:08:38] Nick: I work, I spent so yeah, about, a little bit about my background founder and CEO of Palita network. We started we're a pre-seed stage company as I mentioned I started in February for the six years prior to a WSI or six years prior to Palouse. I was at AWS and I led, about 60 to 70% of the AWS public sector.

Marketplace Business development team, which is a team of folks who are out there working with our field sales and with our solution architects and with different customers and clients and partners, helping them integrate AWS marketplace into their enterprise. I led the US federal government business, the US healthcare business, most of the public sector system integrators and partners and then all of our nonprofits and credit unions.

And what I saw at AWS was the customers love this marketplace model. It created a common language for developers to know how to engage with procurement to get things bought fast, and it actually created a common language for procurement to talk to developers, right? But what the procurement teams and some of the CTOs started to ask was, I see the rise of Microsoft Marketplace.

They've just doubled down on their marketplace. Salesforce just doubled down. Claw just launched a marketplace. Open Claw now has a skills marketplace. Nvidia has Neo Cloud, which has a marketplace. Stripes launching a marketplace. How the heck do I make sense of this? How do I integrate this at scale and just not have complete chaos, right?

And a lot of the things I wanted to do to add governance to AWS marketplace, it was like we gotta think of a world where we can do this for all of the marketplaces. At the same time, I'm not gonna build a marketplace because, the AWS marketplaces of the world have hundreds of engineers.

So does Azure and so does Salesforce. And so the idea that an enterprise is gonna build its own marketplace is a little bit foolhardy. 'cause that's a billion dollar plus effort, right? And so we said, how do we actually just orchestrate the marketplaces and make it simple and easy?

[00:10:28] Christie: Work smarter, not

harder.

[00:10:29] Nick: exactly.

Every procurement team is being asked to do more with less. And so how do we help them do more, less with automation?

[00:10:35] Christie: Oh, I love that.

[00:10:36] Nick: This is why I think marketplace models will win in the fullness of time, and we've frankly bet the company that's the future of software procurement.

How many times do you use credit cards today? Or how many times do you use cash Today? I barely ever have cash. And so like in the fifties and the forties when credit cards were starting, people probably fought that, this is crazy, why would we use this digital? But that's I think, where we're at in the marketplace era for B2B software.

[00:10:59] Christie: And now it's a virtual card that you don't have to pull out your credit card anymore. You can just show on your phone your virtual card, which is something completely new to me that I was looking at yesterday. I'm like, oh my gosh. But that sounds fascinating.

[00:11:10] Nick: great is the customer experience, right?

[00:11:11] Christie: Absolutely seamless.

There's a trust there. You do have to have the trust and you do have that friction there, but once you have that, it does make ease of use. Extremely easy to adopt.

[00:11:26] AD: We believe that business is built on transparency and trust. We believe that good software should be built the same way. Big Pixel is a 100% US-based fixed fee, custom software design and development agency built on transparency and passion. No offshore handoffs, no surprise invoices, just a team that treats your problem like it's our own.

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[00:12:21] Christie: So you're at AWS and you have this sense of, okay, this is where this is going. What then made you say. Is it that you didn't want it to be in the micro, you wanted to then create your own company and create this for the macro, and so that's what moved you because it takes a special person to say, I'm doing amazing work here.

We're taking billions to even more billions. This is great and it's working great. Let me stop all of that, risk everything and go this and create this. But still, then you're offering those services that you think are the future of what we're doing to multiple people. It takes a special person to do that.

So how did that shift happen?

[00:12:55] Nick: First let's the real special person must be my wife. 'cause we were walking one day after, after after some kind of, tough things at work and she said, I've never met anybody who works harder. Why don't you just go work for yourself? And that was where the light bulb came off and said, oh, that's like a real possibility.

And so we talked about that. She's look, I think, we've positioned ourselves as a family where we do have the flexibility. If that's something you wanna experiment with, let's go do it. So I think step one, that is the special person underpinning it. But two a lot of founder stories are, there was a pa a customer wanted to solve and I tried to get corporate to solve it and corporate said, not a priority or not right now, or, we're going left when you wanna go.

And that's when those confluences of customer pain. Nick, I see what you're doing at AWS marketplace. We don't have Microsoft at the table right now, but how does this work when they come to the table and when Oracle comes to the table, how do I stitch this all together and start to pay people right?

And optimize and do transformation without procurement kind of being that drag on digital transformation. And so this is what I was positioning and wasn't able to get it off the line in WS and then two, my wife was like. Maybe you should just go do it. And I had a fortuitous conversation in the winter of last year with who is now my co-founder, Dr.

Hj Gim. He was reaching out, what's going on? And I said funny enough, I'm thinking about doing so the next, he said, me too. And one thing led to the next and we said, okay,

yeah, stars aligned, right? And super excited. And the reception has been great from industry and yeah. It's been but we're early and excited.

[00:14:27] Christie: It is exciting.

So someone, you said your client came to you and said I am having this pain point and you can probably help me. What does that client look like? What is that pain point that they're vocalizing? Is it just that this is so chaotic that they don't know how to patchwork it together?

Is it the friction of the procurement dragging things down? Is it that they wanna scale and just don't know how? Is it all of those things?

[00:14:47] Nick: Yeah, I'll give you two or three pain points that like, really make it real for me. The first one is hey, I'm an AWS client, but we've acquired two or three different enterprises that have their own AWS footprint, right? The way AWS is architected, those look like independent companies. With the payer family.

And but from a procurement perspective, you don't have to log, you don't have to log into three different AWS accounts and do your work. You want that to be unified, right? Large enterprise might have, 35 payer families. And so that just creates a complexity for procurement, right?

And so that, that's the really good use case is a company has more than one AWS account. They want to unify the marketplace operations. A second use case is hey, I've built my workflow for security review and purchase review in Jira, or in ServiceNow or in Appian, and I love marketplace and I wanna get the financial incentives of marketplace, but like I need it to follow my process. How do I get it into their process? We do that out of the box, right? We make that integration easy and we're also keeping track with the API changes so that you as an enterprise don't have to devote 1, 2, 3 FTEs to keep that integration fluid and fast.

[00:15:58] Christie: So is that the length of what is your length of engagement with a particular client as you come on and you orchestrate and then you step out? Or is it where you're that service provider ongoing for them to make sure everything is seamless

[00:16:09] Nick: Yeah, so we're not yet doing full suite outsource procurement. What we would do is more kind of initial setup, initial training, and then ongoing kinda customer support activities both on different use cases. We don't support from a product feature roadmap perspective.

Different marketplaces, they want different systems. They want integrated. Because just as much as like you want something to be set at, forget it. These enterprises are changing. They're moving from, maybe an Oracle implementation to a Coupa implementation or from a, great Plains implementation to a Workday implementation.

And they're gonna have these hybrid estates for a period of time, if not indefinitely. And things are coming in and things are coming out. And so we wanna make sure that we always are supporting that client as they're thinking about that. If they're also executing new transitions, they may be buying Snowflake today and tomorrow they buy Databricks, right?

How do we make sure they, they bring on new people, they train 'em up, and so we wanna be partners with them as they think about fundamentally rethinking how they do procurement in the age of ai.

So what we wanna do is make that balance easier and I think this is really relevant in the age of vibe coding because. You could vibe code yourself a new MongoDB or a new Salesforce or a new CRM or, but should you, if you're the sales guy, should you be main

[00:17:21] Christie: we believe no, but yeah, we strongly believe, no. Yeah.

[00:17:25] Nick: Yeah, I do too, by the way. I firmly believe unless it's really core to what you do and super niche that you're, like, there's probably somebody who's got a team of PhDs and really smart engineers building that as a product. The OM tail is not yours anymore. They own the OM tail. And so yeah. But how do you make your agent aware of what's in the enterprise that they can leverage, that they have terms that they can use quickly, that they can spin up on.

And so these are some of the use cases we're thinking about that not only are we gonna help with the workflow, but we're gonna help with the enterprise architecture back out to these agents around what's in the enterprise, where can we use things, how does costing work around that?

What is on the approved catalog because that matters. And then now that the agent wants to use it, like whose cost center does it go against? Because that also matters, right?

[00:18:14] Christie: yeah. Absolutely right. I didn't even think of that.

[00:18:17] Gary: That, that actually leads into one of my questions that came up while you were talking about ai. We're seeing tons and tons of hype around AI and all the promises of what it can do, and, everything's, flowers and sunshine until you actually start using some of these products or.

Testing 'em out in a way that you would need them to work and see that they're either not everything they're cracked up to be either failing or whatever. Which goes into what you were saying, should you buy a product that does or create your own? And as you were saying, yeah the product that you would buy also has the same amount of people, if not more working on it to make it better than what you could build at that time, unless your niche.

So when you're in the process of looking at what's in the marketplace. And what the company needs. I know you said you don't really guide them in the right direction yet, but are you finding failures in the connection between new features and new AI type agents on both sides?

[00:19:15] Nick: Yeah, so I, coming outta the marketplace world, I see a lot of what the hyperscaler marketplaces are doing. And they absolutely want to kill the RFI, the death of the RFI. Why? There's so much undifferentiated work that goes into producing an RFI for a document that's barely read or maybe read with AI now.

And so they, they have. These features that kind of do comparison as a service, right? And I think that's gonna come out in these hyperscalers. I think that's gonna be part of what they build, right? We're gonna build the things that the enterprise needs to use to manage. What, if you use a comparison as a service feature of a hyperscaler, how do you compare and contrast it against another one?

Should you believe it, right? Where I kind of land on AI is, I was around, in the early internet era with, the Internet's gonna transform work and if you did word processing in the early two thousands, you were like, man, really? 'Cause it's still hard to do stuff, right?

And then like I was around in the mobile era and mobile was gonna transform work. And I tell you in the 2013 to 17 era, like mobile was something that wasn't like adopted, but now. Like mobile's been figured out, right? And so like in these early innings of any of these trends, like it is a little messy and categories are made by people who lean into 'em.

And competitive advantages made by people who lean into it. And so like I do think you've gotta lean into it and you've just gotta expect some friction. And when you find what works, you gotta figure out how to scale it. And that's exactly like the innovation thing is place 1920 bets, 19 of them will fail.

One of them will work. Scale that one up, put some more fuel in it and I think that's how enterprises are gonna have to think about their own corporate product delivery because they're gonna have to allow for small failures and scale the ones that work as products. What I've seen in enterprises is the cost of entry to start a failure is so high.

You create a lot of people who sit against the wall who say. Hey, welcome. What's the innovation we're gonna use today? And that's actually at odds at what a enterprise and a competitive world wants, and enterprise and competitive world wants. All of the people who are smart to and close to problems to dive in and start to figure out solutions. Right?

What we saw was, cost of new customer acquisition is high no matter where, no matter what industry you're in.

[00:21:33] Christie: I.

[00:21:34] Nick: this is why people pay 10, 20, 30 points to a reseller or a distributor to allow them to get their mark. The hyperscalers are only charging 1.5 to three points and they're really intimate with their customers. And so it became this new way to co-sell. And so I would tell any product company that if you're not leaned into at least one hyperscaler partner network, you're leaving a lot of money on the table

they are,

they are very invested in helping you sell microwaves.

Because they make money. They make money when you when the customer that you mutually have plugs that thing in. Right. And

[00:22:09] Gary: Yeah,

[00:22:11] Christie: That's a, I wrote that one down. That was good. Thank.

[00:22:14] Gary: Seeing that you are fairly new, you said you guys just started but you did hit the ground running. What would you say in five years if everything went as smoothly as possible, like it's going out, where do you see your company in five years?

[00:22:29] Nick: Yeah. We hope to be building a new class of products. And, that's hard to say. But look we are based in Raleigh. We believe that one of the things this area has is great talent, great mission alignment just a great community and we want to build a world class company here in the Raleigh area.

And how big that is, how fast we get there. I don't know, but

[00:22:49] Christie: right.

[00:22:50] Nick: I want, I want

a world class company here in Raleigh that really helps bring the ecosystem together and maybe helps unlock some of the capital velocity that is needed to create the innovation cycle that Raleigh could need to be a next great tech hub.

[00:23:02] Gary: Awesome. So Nick, we've come to the time in the show where you're going to make everyone who listens here smarter, you're gonna bestow

[00:23:12] Nick: That's really scary.

[00:23:14] Christie: No. Hey, you've made me smarter. I've taken notes. So that's, you've definitely done that.

[00:23:19] Gary: Yeah. I come from the design side of things, so a lot of what you were saying, I understand, but I'm not. Equipped to ask intelligent questions about, so I just you go. That's why, again, you are gonna bestow upon us some knowledge. Out of what you've learned, not just from your company, but what you've learned and seen in other companies that you've worked for, what would you say are your top three pieces of advice for a new entrepreneur or a founder?

Okay.

[00:23:42] Nick: Yeah, it's a great question and one of the questions you asked early on is like, how did you get here? What? This has always been a dream. And, I didn't wanna look back when I was 70 and say, man, I never put the ball on the tee, right? And I would just say you have to be deliberate about understanding what you want to go after and get something that you're passionate about.

Step one I had some ideas in the past. One was pizza as a service, like Green Apron for pizza, homemade pizza. And. I thought I, but it's not something I would've done for a career, right? And so I would encourage you to find something that you feel like you want to become the world expert on.

You. You want to wake up every day. 'cause if you're successful, that's probably what you're gonna end up doing. Number two is you do this for a purpose. I've got a family, many have a family. And so you've, you gotta have really good alignment with your family if you're gonna do this as a.

As a married or, family unit. 'cause they're your first co-founders in many respect. And then number three, like I, I believe in, mission-driven innovation. Why I think we have the best nation in the world. Our healthcare system has a lot of problems, our education system has a lot of problems.

And I think if you look at the way technology has lifted people out, and frankly, technology plus democracy have lifted people out of poverty. For the last 250 years, I think we have another 250 years to go, but it's gonna take us leading in that way with those kind of core values that we as a nation believe in.

And so why not try to roll my sleeves up and, lean into that.

[00:25:04] Christie: Yeah, that's very much aligned with David's mission and with Big Pixel over the past 13 years, as well as he was a developer who was at a company develop, doing his developing thing, and he was like, this can be done differently. We can treat people differently. I wanna create a company in a. In North Carolina, I wanna instill the values that I think are really important for the business ecosystem and create that.

And after 13 years, he's still doing that with very similar core values. So I am excited that you guys are, I think you guys are meeting soon and chatting, but that'll, yeah, and I love when two people who are super aligned, a lot of what you said and your core values are very aligned with him.

So I think you guys will have a really great conversation.

[00:25:44] Gary: And yeah, actually, the reason he's not here with us today is because he is participating in an event that's trying to help develop the tech industry here in Raleigh.

[00:25:54] Christie: Yeah.

[00:25:54] Gary: He's at

one of the partner, yeah, the founder events related to the startup week and stuff.

[00:26:00] Nick: Yeah. No. The Raleigh Startup Week is this week, and I happen to be missing it only because we, yeah, we did a we did a Veterans Pitch competition early on. We were one of six veteran companies that got pitched to go into what's called Emerge America. They were trying to do basically south by Southwest.

In Miami, Florida, and by being one of six, we got a free booth, a free expo hall. So a lot of, you know,

What would be typically, tens of thousands of dollars

[00:26:23] Gary: yeah, you can't pass that up.

[00:26:25] Nick: can't pass that up. And yeah, super excited.

[00:26:27] Gary: Speaking of marketing, so Nick, if anybody wants to learn more about you or about Lucid, where's the best place to find you?

[00:26:34] Nick: I'd say our website's the best place to find us, pulin network.com. Super easy. But if you are not using the website just follow me on LinkedIn. I don't have a a really memorable handle. But Nick Miller CEO of Pulin network. You'll see me, I post quite a bit. Sometimes it's nonsense.

Sometimes it's thought leadership, sometimes it's about the company. But I try to be very active and again, I think it's all about how do we make companies become more competitive, make procurement a value creation function of the enterprise, but do so in a way that helps the enterprise become more digitally savvy.

'cause the world is becoming much more high-paced and technology is how we're gonna keep up.

[00:27:11] Christie: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:27:12] Gary: Awesome. Nick, thank you again for your time and thank you again for sharing your story with us. You

[00:27:18] Nick: Oh, thanks for the opportunity. This is awesome.

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