All right Well, we'll get started now. I see at least four TOC members as Brennan Burns or Brian Grant on The line on the phone potentially I will count that as no star six time you in case you're on the phone So, you know today's agenda, this is essentially Taylor. Can you go to the agenda? Cool, so, you know, this meeting is kind of our first kind of experiment in You know getting through the backlog of project presentations and proposals that we have and kind of presenting some of these projects to the TOC and wider community so we could Either, you know, accept them or give them feedback On on on the project. So we have three presentations today. We have Crio Brigade and Q-Bedge all applying for different levels We're going to start with the Crio team first And so I will go hand it off to VBATS, Rinal or whoever's essentially taken the lead on on this one We this is Vincent Bats and all those here as well. So we might tag team a bit but the Proposal for Crio. This has been I guess an exciting and Whatever journey up to this point for for for a Crio, to get out of the Kubernetes incubator is More of a formalized CNCF project We've opened the proposal finally a few months ago and So while crowd has been as the Kubernetes incubator for a long time now renamed or whatever the Kubernetes SIGs Along with CRI, CTO or the CRI tools and other stuff like that It's really The part of this proposal to get it in At the put it as the incubating level It's kind of confusing because it's really this should almost be a graduation from In an existing incubator, so I think this is kind of while there is a little bit of precedent of things coming out of the Kubernetes incubator It's kind of an odd transition because it's already been in a incubator for some time and used in production by not only companies, but also projects are around rallying around it It's been in it's it's been a 1.0 and stable and tracking with Kubernetes for quite a long So it As far as container runtimes go, this is a bit more of a pared down container runtime part of just intrinsic structure infrastructure underneath Kubernetes. It does not purport to make additional use cases and accommodate a variety of different Interfaces and otherwise it's really a very tailored infrastructure to Kubernetes itself And with that you'll see the releases March and Cadence along with Kubernetes But as far as an active and diverse as far as maintainers and Adopters and contributors. It's a very lively project so it in our in our eyes, it's largely needing to move more from the Kubernetes incubator piece into a sustained project itself to be seen Seen and used accordingly So I've got a link there to the COC TOC proposal it's got a little bit more information On some of the adopters and looking at the attendees list just now it looks like a few of the adopters are on the call So if there's questions more broadly that's possible And Yeah, it's this This piece lines up straight down the the mission stack of single purpose Almost Unix philosophy single purpose do it well But also support the cloud native infrastructure so that it can run The same seamless lendo stack and take away some of the headache of being able to run higher level concepts like Kubernetes and things on top of that So yeah What I'm not sure we're not all if you want to add something or Chris if there's more of a procedure to Say what would be next like questions? Yeah, I mean you could you're you're happy to talk in a little bit about architecture Yeah, if we move on to the next slide I have added an architecture diagram So this I can briefly talk to this This is a view of the node with cryo as a runtime you have the cubelet on the left talking gRPC CRI API to cry on the right and For implementing the two services We have these libraries called containers image and container storage now containers image is Something which is specialized in moving images across different registries and formats So we do a lot of innovation there like add different back ends like NFS and potentially also working on bit torrent and so on and We use it another tooling as well again like going with the UNIX philosophy So that library Innovates at its own pace and then as we get more features there We add those features bubble them up into cryo and right now It's the one that is implementing the image service and It's used to pull the images down onto the node and for the runtime service Like cryo the O in the name stands for OCI So any OCI compatible runtime can be plugged in over there So by default we use run C but we've been working with Inter from the beginning and we added support from Kata through annotations and eventually that led to adding support for a first-class support for runtime class and the In the cubelet API, I mean so we are kind of able to innovate At the lower level through annotations and adding new features and then push Prove them and get them added to Kubernetes And another thing is for networking we use CNI so any CNI Compatible plug-in can just be plugged in it should just work without any issues and at the bottom You see the container storage library. So that's where we have drivers for overlay Device mapper and recently we are working on a new LVM driver which takes away pain from device mapper And it's very important for the VM based container run times Sam do you want to add anything about the Kata integration? Sure, so I'm Sam and I'm from the Kata Continuous Projects and As Mano was saying we we started to work with with cryo from very early on before Even before a CRI continuity was was a project. So we I mean this having cryo Following the the communities release cadence and really making sure that the cryo works Nicely with the with all the communities version and nothing else really helped us Start playing with the with virtual machine as a nice relation layer for communities This was really our vehicle into into communities and that as as Mano was saying that really led to the current runtime class work that's being done at the signal And yeah, this this was a Really nice enabling vehicle for for Kata containers and in a more general way for really integrating virtual machine Into communities as a first-class citizen and Being able to to expand the the notion of front time to to a much more generic concept Thanks, Sam, and I think Dan was can talk more about like what we are doing in the containers libraries There's something I missed dance dance potentially muted, but okay. Okay. All right Yeah, you're happy to speak more like we could open up to questions you know, I linked the dev stats out there to essentially show some statistics about You know, Krio and in kind of real time But as I understand it you're requesting a proposal for essentially to see member to sponsor a vote for for incubation as I understand it, correct Yes, yeah, I mean so like like as Vincent said, right We've been used in production for a while and we got out of one incubator, but we had to follow the process and I think You'd want to get in as the highest level possible here Sounds sounds sounds good. Well, we'll open it up to to questions and make sure we have time for other other other projects I think there was a question from dims in the chat about Moving off some communities related dependencies. I'm not sure What Figure that out like Is the concern that we are importing any paths from Kubernetes itself Right. There's a hi. This is dims So the question is You mentioned that you're tied to the hip to the Kubernetes releases, right? So is there Is there a possibility to break that? Link or is it even feasible to break that link? So the one of the reasons for asking this question is We we are talking about in the signal. We were talking about how do we get off of the Depends dependency that we have on Docker in kubelet that's baked into kubelet. So this discussion here might help that also That's why I'm asking that question So Yeah, so I mean like we are using the CRI API and the issue of a docker Was like docker code has been Has been contributed. I mean the docker integration code has been contributed to the Kubernetes repo itself And it was the one that The project started with and so there might be some assumptions there and some tight coupling which makes it hard To decouple but in case of the new CRI based runtimes. We are just we are just talking over the socket So it's it's not tightly coupled to keep on it. I mean it Exists in its own repo from the beginning. So while so while it does import some of the paths It's really importing the GRPC Right apis and structures, but it's already talking through the decoupled abstraction Okay, then would it then would it make sense to Get those dependencies out into a staging repository in KK which will help you later What do you mean moving the GRPC stuff out to somewhere else? Yes, that's that's neither here nor there I mean it if it's moved into a Kubernetes PKG or you know, whatever Kubernetes CRI API that is a sub module that Kubernetes imports and cryo imports and container D imports. That's that's a after the after the fact That the important thing just is really it's not if they the attached at the hip that you reference is Part of why the CRI was invented in the CRI that Kubernetes exports is already the decoupled implementation of that So any further work to to fully purge any Docker assumptions from Kubernetes itself Should already be buffered up to the CRI layer that is where cryo imports from so where that lives is neither here nor there Okay, thank you. I think we have time for maybe one or one one more question otherwise, we'll Move on to the next presentation. All right. We'll send the email Afterwards, you know with this presentation and get some feedback from the community via the mailing list and see if there's any TOC Members members interested in pushing this for a vote. Okay So up next we have Brigade That is interested in the sandbox and have issued a think-of-proposal this morning and they're gonna present today So I think Michelle is on the line Hey Christy mine if I share my screen. Yeah, I think Taylor will have to stop so we'll We'll switch. Thank you. All right Is everyone good with this yeah, I see I see you Okay, thank you so much for giving us time here today to present Brigade I'm Michelle nerly and presenting with me is ready to tie If anybody has anything in chat, I'll check it at the end So Brigade is enables event-driven scripting for Kubernetes. It's a lightweight framework built with Kubernetes native objects Essentially, it's an in cluster runtime that interprets and executes scripts So that users can chain together containers to create high-level workflows using Kubernetes So every project in Brigade create it contains this Brigade.js file Which defines some JavaScript that ends up running So as you can see This is here We're defining like a job and that job contains exactly one task and so its task is to run the test on a github push event and This is a simple example But you can actually create multiple tests or tasks inside of a single job and you can define Multiple jobs inside of a single script and because this is Java script You can use promise objects to chain two jobs together to run one after another or you can run them in parallel And you can even use things like try catch blocks to deal with error handling So and just a few lines these scripts become incredibly powerful and robust We chose JavaScript because it already has a rich ecosystem of tools It's also the number one scripting language on the or was the number one scripting knowledge at the time on the red monk ranking and the Tyobi index and you can leverage any existing JavaScript package in the Brigade script that you write We often refer to Brigade as Unix shell scripting but for Kubernetes and So a Unix shell script to find the workflow around executing one or more lower level system executables similarly a brigade script to find a workflow for executing multiple containers within a cluster I Mean handed off to my colleague ready to explain the high-level architecture ready to take it away Yeah, thanks. First of all, can you hear me? Yeah So Brigade has a couple of components. First of all, it has gateways Which are components that translate events from either inside or outside the cluster into Brigade events Which are caught by a Kubernetes controller Which listens for these events and creates worker pods and then a worker body scheduled as a result of an event The JavaScript defined in your project and schedules the job that you define there together with any error handling and other Kubernetes related operations such as volume mounting caches and other things Optionally, you can also have an API that you can use it to interact with Brigade from web dashboard or CLI components or terminals Awesome. Um Next slide ready Yes God, okay So there are several different use cases for Brigade CICD is like the first an easiest use case that like comes to mind But we've been really pleased to see lots of different Brigade being used in lots of different ways For example, one company uses Brigade to do a bunch of meta testing on various code bases at regular intervals So they'll run language specific winters Do code quality assessments and some security scanning and then they'll notify automatically the right teams if they like find something that needs to be looked at Another company uses Brigade to build weekly roll-up reports by aggregating and analyzing data from lots of different data sources another company uses Brigade to process image data and The last one that I have listed here is something that like the whole team has been so excited to see There's one group of people who are using Brigade to spin up preview environments for every pull request or on-demand Giving developers this like up-to-date environment to do Experts and experimentation and testing on there's a blog post that I linked in the proposal. That's like really interesting This this use case. So if you want to learn more about it, feel free to check out the pull request We've also seen several different projects being Built around Brigade. So we have a related project section in the repo and it lists a bunch of a bunch of projects There is someone from Charter for example who built the gateways for Bitbucket and GitLab Kashdi is a dashboard that was built alongside Brigade core To view your Brigade pipelines and there's just several others that you can check out Ready, do you want to talk to us a little bit about the roadmap and progress? Sure. So we're very close to releasing a 1.0. We hope that someone around this week will be able to tag 1.0 Together with the 1.0 working towards 1.0. We've been having regular weekly community meetings That and we just regularly discuss with the community in the Brigade Kubernetes Slack channel We have a project for that's up to date and we're tracking work items and as well We have the entire CI4 Brigade built with Brigade and we're dog footing the latest release every time As for the roadmap from now till summer on May We plan for a stability period for non and non breaking changes for the Brigade core at the same time We want to split out the rep repo and have separate repos and release cycles for the gateways and other projects that are in the repo at the same time We want to migrate all the projects to Brigade core GitHub organization Together with multiple community projects Awesome. Thank you. Um And do you want to talk to us a little bit about what we're doing and within the cloud native community sure So we've been really happy to see lots of integrations coming from the community. So for example, we have Magic Explorer for communities coming from the community. We have gateways for Kubernetes in cluster events We also have integrations with cloud events, which is a CNCF project for defining event schemas And we actually ship a cloud events gateway with Brigade that that can handle cloud events schemas and also with virtual to get which is also a CNCF project that allows us to Schedule Brigade jobs on top of virtual nodes so that you don't have the provision infrastructure for your builds as you can imagine this can this can spin up and This scenario is where you can have serverless Pipelines built on top of Brigade and virtual keyboard Thank You very So our last slide is about why CNCF. Um, we think that this is going to be a really great home for us In terms of having a vendor neutral IP space to foster collaboration We've seen a number of end user companies Become interested in Brigade and we really hope to get time with the end user community in the CNCF At large to get some feedback And just present what we have and see if they have any any Editions or anything for us to to look at we're already leveraging existing cloud native projects like ready mentioned with the integrations with Cloud events and virtual cooblet it's kubernetes native it runs in kubernetes. It uses home charts for packaging and deployment So we have Kind of we're already really set up with the cloud native space and we want to continue To talk about interoperability with other cloud native projects and integrations and getting that feedback from this community So I'll hand it back over to Taylor at this time and I'm happy to take questions Yeah, let's let's do some questions. There's a Proposal that I linked On on github with bread and burns and Quintin as the TSC sponsors for for the sandbox But we'd love to kind of hear any questions from the community now Have no questions. I think this looks like a great project to have in the CNCF Thanks so much, Alexis A question from Matt Spencer would Brigade help with cross-platform CI I think I can take this one So if I'm are you specifically referring to windows and Linux and other operating systems? If that's the case then I'm not talking about cross-os. This is cross architecture. So, I mean, I'm representing on here on this call We're trying to work out how we get different architectures represented in the CNCF CI process So specifically we've been working with the community for the last month or so in adding arm support for Brigade Which essentially means that as long as you're able to join an arm node to your Kubernetes cluster Then yes, you can run jobs. You can run Brigade jobs on top of that node And there's there's options when running the Brigade script where you can pinpoint to a specific subset of nodes or taints when running when defining the job So yes, it could it could help with that Awesome. Thank you. Hello. Hi Hello. Hi. So the question about the event model. So are you folks supporting complex event models such as you know one too many and you know, or is that like pretty simplistic, you know stringing Running, you know job sequentially you do you have plans to support that as well? So at this point One Brigade project can respond to one event that being said when when when the event is handled You can spin off multiple jobs and you can chain them however you want you can run them sequentially you can run them in parallel You can get him essentially the JavaScript API is flexible enough to allow you to spin up jobs in any way you like Well, I think my question was can I do like in typical, you know, the flow, you know Process management. I remember we used to have people stuff So you can do folks and join then those kind of thing. Do you have plans to do those kind of thing complex? You know event patterns Right now we don't have support for that, but I'd be extremely excited to hear the your use case and then work with that Great. Okay. Thanks Hello My name is Vlad from 3Dop have one question Do you plan to extend the features of the DSL itself, I mean that currently in one job you can create only one container For example in Jenkins, you can create multiple in interact with different containers within the same job Will you plan to extend? Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. We actually have a proposal for allowing sidecars in reggae jobs in in the pod We decided to leave this out of 1.0 mainly because of the life cycle and pod lifetime implication that would have and We're actively working with the community to understand what would be the best default for the lifetime of the pod in that scenario But yes, we were definitely want to support sidecars and multiple containers in pods. Okay. Thank you All right, any other one more question Otherwise, we will move on to the next one. There's a proposal. I linked that has two TSE sponsors already I think we'll leave it open probably for Another day or two to get a little bit more feedback from the community before otherwise. It's already met the really minimum requirements we have for for the sandbox so I Will now close it off and hand it off to the next speaker So thank you Michelle and Radu for for your time. All right. Now we have I think it's a Q-Bedge folks. So Believe it is Who is here from Q-Bedge? Yes, Indy and Sunil should be here. Oh star six if you have to unmute, but we'll go for it. Hello This is Cindy Xin Today, Sunil Kumar and I are going to present Q-Bedge project Currently Q-Bedge has contributors from industry Academy and etc They are very excited to have Brandon and Quinton to be our TLC sponsors They can move to the next slide Q-Bedge is a Kubernetes extended infrastructure for IoT and edge computing this the Control plan at cloud worker nodes at edge Q-Bedge Enables orchestration of native container applications from cloud to edge It has been proven to be valuable to real customers The uniqueness of Q-Bedge lies in the following first of all The edge and cloud are loosely coupled where the edge side can autonomously working and then in sync with the cloud Q-Bedge supports bidirectional multiplexed network communication between cloud and edge The agent running on the edge side consumes about 10 megabyte memory at runtime The architecture is based on Kubernetes is highly extensible and plug-able One basically run a Kubernetes cluster cluster from the cloud Without knowing where the edge node is located Next slide, please Before we drill down to the Q-Bedge architecture I'd like to like us to walk through some of the edge computing use use cases On this page you can see two pictures, which are very relevant to our daily lives Think about often times we have to when they go into a parking lot You don't have to manually gain something or you have to wait longer enough time to find a Lot available in the gas station Imagine using AI at edge a lot of things can be more efficient and automatic so through Image recognition and AI model at edge everything can be done easily Next slide This use case is about a water tank system as you can see there are three water tanks Geo located at different locations on each water tank there are sensors valves controllers and Through the communication between among all the controllers The water level in each tank and the pipeline can be stabilized and balanced So it is that decentralized the architecture without the edge node talking to the cloud So we can move to the next slide as you can see and similar edge computing Use cases here is our view of edge computing The resources and devices are located on edge, but they are managed from the cloud Applications or serverless functions. They run at edge, but we want to deploy or orchestrate from the cloud As you can see essentially edges are extension of a cloud We want to have the bidirectional network communication between edge and cloud But the come the network Connection between edge and cloud can may not be reliable and then the cloud side network family that can be limited Think about the edge nodes can be large-scale as well Based on that we want the edge node can have some autonomy So business can run on the edge side local quick and reliable and then Plus the edge nodes can be decentralized as so that they can aware of each other Communicate with each other. The other thing is about the he told genius Uniqueness of the edge nodes from hardware perspective It can be a Raspberry Pi or a server machine and then It also like from the IoT device to the edge side the protocols in between can be very diversified And the scale of the IoT devices can be quite different as well Next slide please So here's the architecture It has two parts. One part is the control plane, which is deployed on the cloud The second part is the edge agent, which is a single prep process run on the one run on each edge node So there are some main components. Let's talk about the edge edge node side As I mentioned, there is a single process The HD is basically a very lightweight of cobalt for the IoT edge computing And then the edge hub and cloud hub They use WebSocket to build the bi-directional Network communication through the same the single long connection The data all kinds of data can be communicated And then the edge controller basically is a Kubernetes extended controller It converts all the pods All the relevant pod node information And convert it so that only The targeted metadata will be communicated to a specific edge node And then you can see there are two data storage ETCD on the cloud for the control plane We also have another data store at the edge side Each side maintains the metadata, but on the cloud is for the whole cluster On the edge side is only the metadata targeted for this edge node Currently we use SQLite for the data store on the On the edge side to fit the Raspberry Pi resource constraint But if people feel free, they can pick any other SQL Any other data storage they would like to have One thing I want to call out in the edge side We use the infrastructure framework so that the components are Plugable for example, if you're not doing IOT scenarios Then at runtime when we launch the single process You can configure without loading the device to MQTP broker Etc So this is the high level architecture And then we can move on to the next Up till now we have two minor version released Currently Kube Edge is having an end-to-end solution for IOT and edge computing It builds a fundamental infrastructure based on Kubernetes In a major release on top of all the current capabilities We plan to build some data plane service mesh Security guard by integrating with beefy and spare We also building the device management API using Kubernetes CRD We also plan to evaluate the performance and scalability And later on we have plans to enable monitoring and some other features Next please From a CNCF and community perspective, we really Agree with the CNCF vision and would like to contribute to the community As you can see kube edge is based on Kubernetes. The architecture is very Open and Extensible it supports native container application We presented the kube edge Three times deep session through deep sessions in kube come Well, I was presenting. I heard a lot of interest From companies academy and folks and So There are a lot of needs People are working on IOT edge computing which kube edge architecture can help people in the world And also kube edge can help people to integrate with a lot of other projects, for example, you still speak the product promise views and etc We like to welcome and engage more people to make more innovations Another thing I want to mention is kube edge architecture is called out as an example in the Kubernetes IOT edge working group web paper So in summary, we think kube edge align with the community Community there is the needs The architecture is open Extensible and we can include more people in the community and build some innovation for the edge computing And that's what I have any question comments Cindy could you perhaps talk a little more about the How how the connectivity between the edge and the cloud is handled Particularly that connectivity is is often very poor Which is something that kubernetes does not handle. Could you just explain a little more detail about how that is dealt with? Sure. So can we go to the architecture chart? so From the edge node to the cloud There is a long connection, which is a single connection We use web socket so that the the the connection can be built But it's initiated from the client from the edge node Because when they configure or provision The edge node it knows where the kubernetes control plane API server is located Once the connection is initiated this web socket is a bi-directional connection And then the data can be flowed from and to between the edge and cloud and one specialty Of kube edge as I mentioned We handle the network disconnection and reconnection scenarios In case the network disconnected Because on the edge side we have a copy of the metadata For the edge node then things can continue continue And autonomously working without Even without this connection But once the network connection is Rebuilt then all the data from the edge side can flow back to the to the cloud or vice versa I think you might wonder like you know in the current kubernetes architecture Every 10 seconds the kubernetes has to report the habit to control plane about its liveness But we how we address this is We use the taint mechanism So in case The network is disconnected the edge node will be tainted accordingly So that new deployment won't be Scheduled to that edge node But once it's connected it can remove the taint and things can continue working That's what I mean by the edge node and cloud are loosely coupled So that edge side can autonomous Autonomously working and also when the network is reconnected it just Everything just work like you run a kubernetes cluster But the location of the edge node is transparent to the user Thank you Any other questions Cindy Yeah Imagine the edge the agent Currently is running only 10 megabytes As you can see I think I did mentioned we're removing the dependency of Docker I believe currently kubernetes is more than 100 meg Or something So this is a great improvement to be done cool There's no other questions We'll look forward to a proposal and maybe get some feedback via there Thank you All right I'm pretty much wraps it up for Today so this is a bit of an experiment for us and we're going to continue Doing project presentations Once a month on the second Tuesday of the month at 80m pacific So hopefully this was kind of useful folks Helping us kind of get through the backlog and You know learn about some of these projects that are interested in joining CNCF so Other than that, you know look forward to the discussion. There's some proposals already out there Feel free to give them some comments and then we'll do this again Next month. So thank you very much Go take care all Yes, goodbye Thanks, Chris. Yep


Welcome to my analysis for hedgehogs. Let's talk about viruses and I mean specifically the malware type virus, the malware that self-replicates by infecting other files on the system. But let's take a look at a simple virus. So a simple virus has the so-called virus body that's the main code of the virus. It does the infection searches for files that it wants to infect and then there are also encrypted viruses. So at some point virus writers discovered that it makes sense to encrypt them. So antivirus products have a harder time to detect them. But still there needs to be some code that decrypts the encrypted virus body, which is a so-called decrypto code. That's a bit smaller usually. So the AV, the antivirus, will usually put pattern on the virus body if it's not encrypted, right? But the encrypted virus, the antivirus product can still use a pattern but put that on the decryptor. We take as a given that the decryptor is long enough and unique enough so they would usually be able to find some kind of pattern for the decryptor in that case and they can also detect this kind of virus and they would have to change the decryptor to make it undetected again. So that's why at some point virus writers made their decryptors polygomorphic, which means they had several decryptors in the virus body. So if the virus creates a new generation of itself, so if it replicates, it would choose one of ant decryptors to apply. And so there are several of them. There could be three but there could also be a few hundreds but it's not so much that some of them might also just modify some proportions of the decryptor so it's just slightly different. That's also possible but in any case the number of decryptors that's possible is not that high. Antiviruses could still use n-signature patterns to detect all of them. It's tedious but it's possible and some antiviruses started at this point to apply dynamic decryption meaning they for instance emulate the code to get the decrypted portion of the virus. So the next more advanced stage is the polymorphic virus and with the polymorphic virus you also have an encrypted virus body but the decryptor, the possibilities for the decryptor are so high you cannot apply pattern signatures anymore. So it would be millions of possible decryptors and they achieve this by modifying the decryptor. Some viruses will actually look for compilers on the system they infect and then have the source code carrying in the virus body and then change the source code then recompile the source code for the decryptor so it looks very different every time they create a new generation. So in this case no pattern detection is possible but they can apply dynamic decryption like by emulation for instance. Yeah and metamorphic viruses are an entirely different breed so to speak. In any case with oligomorphic or polymorphic viruses the decrypted virus body just looks the same in this case visualized by a rectangle with some dots in it so it's always the same decrypted virus body. The metamorphic virus changes its own body shape all the time so every time it creates a new generation and so we have different shapes for this and it achieves that by changing the execution flow by adding junk instructions and so on so there are different possibilities to do that and yeah you can apply the pattern detection here. The only thing you can do is use algorithmic detections and heuristic detection so it's quite hard to detect them but it's also very hard to write those kind of viruses. If you want to know more about this topic I suggest you read the book the art of computer virus research and defense by Peter Zaw. It's pretty old but it's still valid up to this day and also the contents of this video are based on the theoretical stuff in the book so read it and well have fun see you next time.


You've got radiant heat fluxes high enough to essentially vaporize vegetation. Flame temperatures are 1,100 degrees or more. So this is a turbulent diffusion flame. One thing you notice about it is it's very hot and that's what you feel is radiant heat from a bushfire flame. In the vicinity of a fire, the temperatures can be a couple of hundred degrees. Survival basically depends on maintaining your core temperature. If your core temperature rises by two degrees or more, you run the risk of suffering from heat stroke and losing consciousness. There's no questioning the facts. Learn more at emergency.vic.gov.au Authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.


Hey, GovCon Giants family, your host, Eric Coffey here today bringing you another exciting episode of the GovCon Giants podcast. Today's guest, Mr. Mike Mello, co-founder actually with his wife and organization ITA International back in 2003. Mike, it's really, really exciting story to tell you, to bring you how they got into cyber intelligence and data analytics in this upcoming episode. The organization named ITA stands for in the arena, which was a passage taken from a famous speech by Teddy Roosevelt in 1910 that Mike's father gave to him back in 1968 before going off to Vietnam. So today, we're going to talk with Mike about his latest acquisition that he made with the organization, how he grew the business alongside his wife, how he built it up to more than 300 employees in over 20 countries. Such exciting stuff today.  This is the episode to listen to, to pay attention, take notes. Mike is a super humble guy and I know personally from people in the DMV Beltway who had nothing but great things to say about them. They are an amazing company and they have a guiding principle and philosophy that they live by. We're going to discuss all that and more into today's episode. Welcome, our next giant, Mr. Mike Mello. I'm Mike Mello. I'm the CEO of IT International, we're a defense contracting company down in Newport News, Virginia. I'd like to describe ourselves as we do data-enabled services for Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security and we have subject matter expertise in a variety of fields, mainly analysis, planning, training, exercises, but we've added maintenance logistics, acquisition management and cybersecurity recently. We have a very diverse group of people supporting the government across many different customers. And I did, just so you know, I did do my homework and I've read about your story. And so what I'd like to do is I don't want to repeat what people already know about you. Okay.  I think it's very important to share, I guess, an entrepreneurial's journey, okay? Because I had a lot of people when I first started, a lot of people helped me out and I had a couple of companies I'd go and I talked to them about being in business and they would chuckle at me and say, you know, Mike, this is what we did, it might not work for you, but so we did and so that experience, and I think entrepreneurs have a kinship to start a business, okay? Right. And I think we're all in there to help. There's plenty of work out there, we can all help each other and I'm a big veteran supporter here in Virginia and a lot of people come to me, Mike, I want to start a business. I'll share with them in my experience. I think that's what it is about sharing the entrepreneurial story because I think it's so critical. No, and I agree and that's why I created the podcast to share those stories. That's the purpose, that's the intent and I wanted something that was specifically focused on government contracting, not just a round of world entrepreneur story, just because I felt like there's enough entrepreneur podcasts, I wanted something specific to government contract and even more specific to the federal arena for that matter. And so that's our focus. No, that's great. Now, in 2005, we decided to go off on your own, retired naval officer and you left, which was written in an article, a good state job. What was that good state job that you had that you gave up Mike so so vehemently to come out there and start ITA? Yeah, people think I'm crazy, but I was actually, I retired from the Navy and I was working at Old Division University, run a program called troops of teachers and recruit military personnel to go in and be teachers in high need schools across the Commonwealth. So it's a great program, but I always wanted to start my own business. And I actually, ITA is my second business. The first business fell miserably. OK, it was a marine maintenance business that we did maintenance on small boats. We'd go to their place and do it. It fell at my wife said, the only thing I got out of that was an air compressor that I still have for my bikes. OK, that's the only thing we still have left. I decided to go into government contract because I understood the government, I understood what their problems were. And so I converted from being a marine maintenance into analysis and planning company for DoD. So I made that transition. I got a contract for one person for one year and I'll never forget. I walk out, we're down next year to walk out and tell my wife, I say, hey, I've got a deal for you. I'm going to leave a state job, you know, I get seven weeks off a year. I run my own schedule and I'm going to go start a company that I can guarantee I'll have work for one year. And she's actually my partner in business, as she said, go ahead. And so we jumped in both feet and we haven't looked back. That's amazing. That's amazing. That's that's the story. And as I understand, the funds that you use to start with. Got my daughter's college fund. That's right. That's right. She didn't hear this story until she'd actually graduated from college. But no, we we leveraged my daughter. She was a senior in high school at the time, actually. Oh, wow. And I retired from Navy. I got a good job and my wife is a school teacher. She stayed a school teacher. I took a minimal salary. We used that to try to launch the company because I knew we'd be successful. It wasn't a doubt in my mind. And I end up it didn't come back and hurt her. She went to college, graduated. And she is actually we just promoted her from being the chief people officer to the chief of growth for the company. She actually works in the company now. So that's great. But we used her. We used her. I don't like to borrow money. I can tell you that right now. And so we use that money that we had to start the company. With that said, did you take any other any other outside money when you were growing the business? Or is it just grew organically? We grew organically. And I always tell people I learned early cash flow because I had one contract for one person within a month. I got a contract for eight more people. So I went to my mind that was a president of a bank. And I said, hey, Bob, I need to. I had a line of credit for $25,000. I said, I need $225,000. And so he said, OK, Mike, he says, you know, government contractors fail. And I says, yeah, I know, I know. But I said, he gave me the money. We took off my prime. I was a sub to another company. And my prime was paying me at 95. OK. And I did 200. It was terrible to her. That's hard, Mike. That's hard. And I had $10,000 left. And I called her up and I said, hey, you know, I just want to know when I'm going to get paid. And she says, well, Mike, running a company is not for the faint of heart. That's OK. So she fed us me a check. I made my payroll. But then what you learn is cash flow because you had a service to debt. You still had to make payroll. And it took us 10 months to pay that off. And from then on, my wife, Kath, and I, we tried not to borrow money. We just borrowed money actually for the first time this year when we made an acquisition. We bought a company. And we did a leverage buyout of the company. We made an acquisition. But we don't borrow money unless we have to. I tell people that. And to me, that was borrow money for growth as opposed to operations. If you borrow money for operations, it's going to be, it's not going to end well. Right, right, that's bad, right, right. No, that's bad. No, no, no, that's really bad. That's bad, I agree. Now, you mentioned understanding cash flow. What did you learn that? That experience right there.  Everything is going to be good. But it didn't work that way. Because I thought, oh, I'm going to get this money in. And I'll pay off that debt. I was, oh, wait a minute, I got that money in. But that was only for the first month. And I've got, you know, when you think net 95, that's 125 days. Right, because you have to do the work first. And then build. Yeah, right. Exactly right. And I said, OK, so I mapped that out. And Kathy, my wife and I, we said, OK, we'll pay this much each month.  You got to pay this much money and so we did that. And we have grown this company from one person to 397 today with organic cash, except for that acquisition thing. So that's interesting. And it's going back to an interview that you did seven years ago, you were talking about making acquisitions of companies back then. I was. And we we looked at acquisitions and a couple of opportunities we looked at buying and we did buy. And we finally, this year, we found the perfect company for us. It was a great match culturally. It was very complimentary to our skill sets. It gave us that data to enable services that we're talking about because we're migrating from simply a just, you know, a direct services company to a company that uses data to better enable us to provide our service to the government. I actually use Netflix as an example because you think about Netflix, you know, they're a video streaming company, right? But they use data to help provide that video streaming better. We want to use data to help provide those government services better and so that it's a very similar model. You can make the model for CarMax or Capital One or any of those companies. They use data to help provide their service. And that's what we're trying to do at I.T.A. I guess for me, the first thing comes to mind is insurance companies. Oh, yes. Yeah. Right. Hey, Mike, they're using some. Measurement my driving record. I probably can't save it all today. That's OK. Yeah. No, this is like, well, they. Well, remember, I had progressive name with that thing in your car to. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know what, Mike? I didn't save any money. That thing, I took it up. I think it was hurting me more than was helping me. I took that. I could see, oh, here's Eric again. You got the report. Red flag up at the office. Think about that. I imagine they have that in, you know, tens of thousands of cars. And I think it's.  Yeah, I actually, I just I just bought a Tesla. OK, next. And it's just a computer on wheels and they're connected to all the other computers on wheels and they're talking to each other all the time. And so they have this tremendous amount of that in my iPhone. Heck, you drive. I drive down the road from here home. This can tell me where the Starbucks is that I stop off every day. It sure does. That's right. OK, I don't even have to think anymore. So no, my phone is the same thing when I get in my car. It'll tell me how far is the gym, even though I go there.  OK, thank you. How did you know I was going to the gym at? Well, I guess you go to gym this time every morning. So it knows probably going to. I was just Alexa the other day. I said, Alexa, what's the weather in Yorktown today?  No, no, seriously, she did. She did your low on car. You look carry. I said, oh, Alexa's been watching me. Wow, that's. Yeah, I don't give Alexa that much power. I don't know. You know, between Alexa and Siri, we've got. Yeah, I know you bet that anybody. That's right. So let me ask you this.  And I think now you have over 100 veterans working for a company or so. Is that a coincidence or was that part of your strategy? Well, can I say both? No, sure. Yeah. No, I think, you know, in our business, hiring veterans gives us a leg up because most of the work we would do is for the government and in support of a variety of fields that I talked about. But also I tell people it's a common bond that we have already. So it's easier, more integration into the company. You know, we at IT, I tell people we're trying to build a different kind of company that would take care of our employees, we take care of our customers, you know, do the good stewardship revolved in our community because I believe business can't do good, you know, and business should do good. And so at IT, we're trying to do that here. So hiring veterans is it's a no brainer for me. I actually ran the Virginia Chamber of Commerce Military Veterans Affairs Council and I was on that group, had CVS, I had JP Morgan, I had Capital One, I had Dominion Energy, all these very large companies looking at hiring veterans because they knew what veterans are provided to their industry. So they were actively recruiting them, not because it was feel good. It was because they come with a highly high set of skills that they can use to help grow their business. And so that's what it is doing. By the way, tell us the name and the meaning behind ITA. OK, that's a great story. I love the story, but no, I love it as well. I actually it's worth mentioning. Well, in 1968, we were stationed in Victorville, California. My dad was a fighter pilot in the Air Force and he was learning to fly the F4 going to Vietnam. And so in fact, that that summer we sanded down a desk. It's a old wood desk and I am sitting at that desk right now. OK, my dad gave me this quote. It's a Teddy Roosevelt quote called in the arena and it's about not being the critic. It's about getting into the arena and if you strive and if you fail, you fail well, dairy. To me, that's what entrepreneurship is all about. So when I started this company, it's been 16 years now. I named the company after that quote, ITA stands for in the arena and I tell people our mission as a company is to serve those in the arena. So we do a D and DHS. But at the 10 year anniversary and my dad passed away about two years ago and he had a great life. But at the 10 year anniversary, my dad came to our ceremony and I got a picture of him sitting at that desk with me standing next to him in a company that was named after a quote. He gave me in 1968 and I was 12 years old. I usually thought my Navy career, I've used it to run this business. And to me, it's just serving those in the arena. It's just customer focus. That's good business. If your customer focus and you do the right thing and you take care of your customer, you can grow a company. That's what I believe. So but that's the quote my dad gave it to me. He was never proud or sitting at that desk, you know, thinking about what we'd accomplished at that particular point in time. And it was just I was glad he was able to see it. So yeah, no, that's good. Yeah, at least you got a chance to see. Yeah, they can take off. Yeah, Zach, I still can't. Yes, it's a podcast, but you can't see it. But yeah, we were at the video running. We can see it. There's the quote right there. Hold on, let me let me zoom in one second. Sorry, that's the wrong one. That's OK. There it is. There's the quote that my dad gave me 1968. So I still have it in my little notebook. Now, he actually wrote that out to you. No, no, that's a tiny rose. That's it's a little copy of a little thing. It's a tiny rose. He took a copy of it and gave it to you the copy. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, so when I retired from the Navy, he gave me a copy that I have hanging on my wall in here, too. So but I keep that in my notebook just to remind me where we came from. So it's a good story. No, I like that. And you said that and also you said that you are American Dream. And my father came over to tell us. Yeah, my grandfather immigrated from the Asia Islands back in the early part of the islands. The A's or it's in Portugal. OK, OK. They're off of Portugal. He immigrated back at the turn of the last century, 1900s, like 1918 or so, and settled in close to California. I was a dairy farmer there. And my grandfather spoke four languages. He's very smart and he loves America. He came to America and it was a dream to come to America. And he used to get mad at the other Portuguese that wouldn't learn English. He said, Hey, you're an American, I'll learn English. And so. But so then my dad graduated from high school in 1946. And so he, because all the veterans were coming back from World War Two, we couldn't go to college. And so he joined the Marine Corps and he listed in the Marine Corps in 46. He served two years in the Marine Corps and then they started the Air Force. So he did lateral transfer to the Air Force. And then he flew for 25 years. And my dad was the smartest man I ever met. But he got his bachelor's degree and then his master's degree in the Air Force. And so here I am. I'm a second generation American. I'm living the American dream. You know, we built a company from scratch. We started from scratch. We risked everything. And now we have something that we're very proud of. And our employees are proud of this company. They're they're proud to be part of it. And we actually call them ITAers.  You become an ITA or ITA or that's what we call ourselves. OK, and so to me, that is the American dream, you know, absolutely, absolutely. Have you reached outside of the federal arena, like into the private sector and commercial work? I have. OK. OK. But I think if you're a government contractor, you build an organization for government contracting because you have a different accounting systems, the different DCA, DCMA, the government contract, all those kinds and understanding them by and cycle of the government is different than a commercial. Actually, in 2010, OK, I went chasing after oil and gas because a lot of the skill sets we use in the military with analysis and planning and so forth, we could use in the oil and gas industry because they're operated on a global scale across and just like the military doesn't. So finally, in 2014, I got a contract with Shell Oil Company to do an analysis and planning for some training exercises for them. This was after deep water rise and spill down the Gulf Coast. They were trying to do some emergency plan, emergency exercise and kind of stuff. And so we got hired to do that. Well, so it took me four year buying to get there. We bought it. They finally awarded in November of 2014. And in the summer of 14, the oil price started shrinking as Shell Oil laid off 6,000 people in January.  We cannot hire you company to do that. So, you know, and then the oil finally came back three layers with the contract was expired. So I spent seven years trying to get that contract and letting anything out of it. So I said, hey, we're going to focus on the government space. And I mean, we were the sequestration. The sequestration was pretty tough for us as a company. I mean, we were about 120 people. Sequestration came along. We got down to 67 people. And then we won the Oasis contract and we've grown from then. So now what is sequestration? Sequestration back in third with Congress couldn't agree on a budget. OK, so they they agree that, hey, if we don't agree on a budget, then we're going to make these automatic cuts. OK, and so it was across the board cuts from the DOD perspective. And so, you know, instead of everybody coming to a table and making up a budget and working on it, they just let somebody, oh, I can't. It's not my fault that got sequestration. So they did that and they did a bunch of cuts and then they overrode the next couple of years. But so we had an organization that we were sporting probably nine years and we got a word of the contract in August. And then the first part of September, they called me up and said, hey, Mike, we decided to just establish that command because of sequestration. So I had 18 people on that contract. They had let them go. You know, and so that was probably the toughest part. I tell people, talking about cashflow, 2013, you know, I think we had a $300,000 loss by June of that year. But by the end of that year, we managed our cash, we made some changes. We and this is all part of business, I think. It's just the cycle. We were down to only a negative 30 K. And so we recovered and that was the only year. And my CFO says, Mike, that's not really only negative 30 K. That's not losing money.  That's OK. Right. That's fair. I would agree with that. I mean, it's almost balanced. They're almost there. That's the only year. Well, again, again, at that level, the level you're at, right? If you're, you know, your one man business losing 30 K. That is tough. That's it. That's a death blow. Right.  I said, OK, open your wallet and give me $1,000. And you put it in perspective. Oh, Mike, I'm lucky. Well, that's the point.  It's real interesting. Have you finished no rules yet? No, I'm not finished. OK, I'll tell you this way. OK, it's a good story.   OK, I said, that makes sense. And I've used that here in our company.  Right. And so when they spend it like their own, if they're extravagant, they're going to spend that way. If they're frugal, they're going to spend that way. And so he said, now he tells them to spend your money in the best interest of Netflix. Right. So it puts it in the company's perspective, as opposed to spend your money like it's. Right, right, right, right. Which that doesn't make sense. There was like my mom wouldn't spend a dollar.  She's not ordering no steak. She's not ordering the lobster. She's ordering a salad and some chicken.  You said, mom, we can afford steak. No, no, I'm not spending all that money on steak. They won't, you know, right. Yes, no, I laugh. My mom, I actually lost both my parents in the last couple of years. But my mom one day and, and, you know, she's at this retirement community and she had had a stroke. And so when I come over one day, you know, the company, you know, we're 200 people, we're doing pretty well. She goes, you know, Mike, do you need any money? No, no, I'm good. I think I'm okay, but I'm okay.  Yeah, no matter what, I'll be her little boy. No matter what, you know, it doesn't matter. Isn't that, isn't that great though? Isn't that great? She could chuckle about that. I think that's great. Same thing to my daughter. No, that's great. That's great. How many, how many kids? We have two daughters, two girls. Like I told you, one's the chief of growth and one actually just joined us. Both of the, they're not girls, they're women, but they're both of them are in the company now. And one is chief of growth and the other one just joined us six months ago. And she is the manager of our innovator solutions contracts. So she's on board. It's a family run business. No, that's great. That's great. Now tell me one thing that was hard when you started in business, that's still hard today. This is a tough one. Oh, that is a tough one.  No, my wife will say that is not true. Okay. All right. No, just to say. You got to have a drive and I tell people, I think the hardest thing is you grow a business and ITA is trying to grow a company. I mean, we're trying to grow our goals to get to $200 million by next five years. And so I think the hardest thing is that people that you started with, you know, cause I had a lot of friends that came to work with me and you know, I knew them from the military. But as we got bigger and be more sophisticated, you have to have some pretty tough conversations with some friends of yours. Right. Because you got to do what's in the best interest of the company. And we're very, I mean, my people tell you that we're very sensitive to how we treat people. We do not treat people like commodities at ITA. There are employees, there are friends, they're trying to grow it. And so those conversations were probably the toughest thing. I think the other tough thing is growing a company because the first year of business, we had 20 people, you know, once a month we'd go out for lunch and we'd talk to everybody. I knew all the people personally. I knew all of it now because we have 397 people. I don't know them personally. And so I know you probably find it the hardest to believe but like I like people, I like talking to people. I like enjoying engaging with people. So it's tougher the bigger you get. So those are the two things. Having those tough conversations and growing the people and trying not to lose that personal touch. My wife and I can't, we didn't do it last year but we do, we call it the Christmas trip. Okay. So, you know, we visit our customers throughout the year but started in Thanksgiving. Kathy and I, every week and go to our customer sites, we take our employees out for Christmas party. And not 2020 but 2019, we actually ran out of time and we had to go and it was actually 2020 but we had to go in January to finish up the schedule just to go out and see everybody. And but it helps you as good as close to building a personal relationship with your employees as you can because, you know, the ones we go visit us, they tell us their story. We had one guy, we delayed our Christmas vacation because we wanted to go to the Christmas dinner with Mike and Kathy. Wow. And so it's just, and so you do things. I miss that personal connection we have with our employees but Kathy and I worked very hard to try to maintain that as best we can as we keep getting bigger. And our goal is to try to keep doing it. Kathy actually sends a birthday card to every employee, handwritten birthday card to every employee in the company and she goes to the list, she gets them and sends it out and I get thank you notes from everybody. Say thanks for the birthday card, I'll thank you. I get the credit for this, get it all at work. Get it all at work, I get the credit for it. But and so that's the hardest thing is that personal touch and you just got to keep working it, I believe so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, wow. Let me ask you, okay, we were talking about your wife about maintaining a sense of calm, a sense of peace. Right? How do you handle the stressors? How do you alleviate the stressors? Exercise? Well actually, my wife and I, COVID has actually been good for us because we work out every morning now. And my wife works out every day and she's got me now. We go for a walk every morning and I think exercises. The other two things is my hobbies are Virginia Tech football, okay? Cause I love Virginia Tech football. So I got Okie Bird right back here and Boatie. I love to go Boatie. So in the summertime I'm on the water all the time and any day on the water is a good day. So those are my two hobbies. And I think you need to take those times off. And so, but I run in a company as a 365 day a year job. I saw I'd never stopped thinking about ITA but I do take breaks and get away from things and enjoy myself. And my wife and I, we take vacations and we do things together and we'll be married for 39 years in June. And so you think about that. She spent with me 23 years in the Navy and now we've been in business for 16 years together. If anything can try your patience, those two events can try your patience but we're going strong. No, that's great. That's great. That's great. What do you think? I noticed that you read a lot. And so what are some of the other books or quotes that you live by or that you operate by? Some of the better known maybe books that you give to your employees. Are there any other things like that? Like when employees come on, do you have something to say? Hey, this is like one of my guests actually says that his business development team, they watched the Michael Jordan special. Oh, yes. That's a good one. And so that how Michael Jordan turns, you know, on. Right. And so he actually, he has a sales guys watch that to get the idea of how Michael Jordan operated. Oh, yes. That's a guy I like that. Can I make a note about? Yeah, you can take it. You never stop learning. I actually, my chief people officer gave me a book a couple of years ago. She's my new chief people officer. She used to be the VP of town here, but Simon Sinek. OK, yeah, OK, infinite game. And I heard that one, the infinite game. Yeah, it's start with why I went back and start with life. OK, start. I know that one. Right. I started with the infinite game. OK. And so because to be honest with you, about I guess probably four years ago, Kathy and I were going through that decision process of we knew we were coming out of being small business in the government space and there's either small businesses or large businesses and very few mid-sized companies as actually out of 110,000. There's only 1512 if you were wondering. So it's large businesses. No, but mid-sized companies. Oh, mid-sized. Yeah. And so those are companies over twenty five million dollars a annual revenue of twenty five. Yeah, five. It's it's between twenty five million and five hundred million. There's fifteen hundred and twelve of those companies. And so we happen to be one of those companies. But and so Kathy, I went through this process of should we sell the company because we probably had about two hundred and fifty million dollars in backlog. We probably could have exited.  And we were trying to build a company that's going to make a legacy. And so and that's when Amber gave me this book, The Infinite Game. And it talked about businesses. It's it's not you in this one contract you won the game. It's not that you get this sort of revenue you've won the game. Business is it's a continual game. The goal line keeps moving. The bigger you get the goal. I just keep moving now. So you got a flat like it's an infinite game. And in order to do that, you have to have a just cause. Okay. And that just causes sort of like your vision statement. But it is, you know, what are you trying to do as a company? And so after some full search and Kathy and I decided that our just cause for a company is we're working to have a secure, stable and sustainable world. Okay. And I always say, because we're in the global security space, that's why I tell we have two business units, global security and data analytics. And the global security is man-saving equipped DoD DHS forces as we move forward. But I think if you're going to have a sustainable world, first, you got to have security. And when you look at the human human experience, the human ecosystem, you know, you can have this insecure role and I always use Somalia as an example. Here to the United States, you got to, you know, first world country, and there's this whole human experience in the middle of it. And so, so we as a company want to work toward that secure, stable, sustainable role. That's our just cause. Okay. And I got that out of one of the books I read. And to me, it made a lot of sense. And so, Kathy decided, Kathy and I decided not to sell the company that we wanted to build something that's going to have a legacy in the last and we can turn over to my daughters or get professional. Whatever we do from an exit strategy, but it's a company that we're going to, it's going to be a different kind of company. It's going to be a company that people are proud to be called ITAers. It's going to be a company that's doing something positive for not only the community, the business, but we are a business and we're here to make money. Okay. And so, bounce those things up, but you can do both of those things. Okay. And so, you know, so I'm going back to book the infinite game and the just and start with why the other one I really like is team of teams by Stan McChrystal. He talks about he was the JSOC commander over in Afghanistan 2004 2005.  They go process, prosecute a target and they'd be very efficient at it. But they were always one step behind. And so he said in this modern time that we live in with this information age, that hierarchical structure does not work as well. And you really have all these informal teams that develop long lines of communication basically. And so if you're going to function in this new world and flow information to your entire organization, you got to function more like a team of teams than a chain of command. Okay. And that's unusual for a military guy to think like that because I'm used to a chain of command hierarchical structure go down. Yeah, absolutely. But in reality, in reality, I can think of thousands of time I've worked in an organization and you know, in an organization, there are certain people get things done, there are certain people you know, if I go talk to this person over here, they can do this for me and this person over here. And so that's the team of teams concepts. You figure out who can do that. And you flow information across the organization as quickly as possible. And you make decisions quickly and you move out. And so those are the books that I would recommend. I don't know if you got them all, but those are the ones. Yeah, well, I mean, I have the infinite game. Start with Y and team of team of teams. Now, what's the author and team of teams? Stan McChrystal. Stan McChrystal. So you know, it's interesting that you're taking notes there. And then I'm taking notes. And that's, well, I find that what other when you were originally studying entrepreneurs and successful people, what other traits and habits that you pick up from them that you've carried along the way? I think you got to read a lot. Okay, I like to read. Okay, I like to talk to people because I get best ideas and talk to people. I tell people all the time, I am not the smartest guy in the room. There's a lot of smart people than I am. And if you just go talk to people, you'll find out good ideas. And I think an entrepreneur, if you read a lot, you talked a lot of people, the thing that I think sets entrepreneurs apart from everybody is the ability to listen to all these different sources and connect the dots. Okay. And I tell people all the time entrepreneurs don't think literally.  And to me, that's, that's the important thing is being able to connect the dots and so if you read a lot, you talked a lot of people, you go out, experience things, go out, talk to your customers. I mean, it's all good business. I don't have an MBA. Okay. And I learned everything for the last 16 years of their own business. Okay. And so I just, I love being in business. I love what I do every day. Okay. I just can't imagine. I tell people, I make a terrible employee from that.  What's there? Did you ever have like back in high school, a job that a some odd job that you worked? Oh, I tell people, I started my first business when I was 11, because I was a paper boy.  And my mom used to give me grief because I used to even learn customer service because you lived in Victorville, California when I got that quote 1968. And I'm riding up this hill, and I just let this old lady live at the top of the hill. So I'd always ride up the top of the hill, drop off a newspaper on her front doorstep. The old paper boy used to throw in this lady had trouble down getting this paper. But you know, she used to come out every day when I dropped that newspaper off, she bring me a cookie, you know. And to me, that's customers. That is, that is customer service right there. You go, you give something that the customer really appreciates what you're doing above and beyond. And it didn't take it took me an extra 15 seconds to go up that hill, drop that newspaper off. But it meant the world to that lady. And so then I just tell you, I did that. I have, I've been a carpenters helper. I unloaded box cars up at the Wazeburg pottery factory. I've been a lifeguards. That was an easy job. Okay, so I've had a lot of different jobs. And those all make you better. Everything makes you better.  Such a positive attitude. I think that also that same attitude carries over to this. I'm sure people see it. Well, I'm going to tell you, we have a I can't speak enough about the people on it. This is just a great group of people. I think they like what the least of they tell me I like what they're doing. You know, not every day is perfect. It's business. Okay, we have ups and downs and you know, you win some contracts, lose some contracts. But you just got to keep your eye on the ball and keep moving forward. Okay. And I think our people at it, our it is believe in our just cause and they believe in what we're trying to do. They believe in the way we run the organization. I got excellent interviews and some of it leaves and I see this coming all the time that Mike and Kathy really care about the employees. And so they people people at it feel they have a sense of connection to Mike and Kathy mellow and it's because COVID came when we were actually on a trip. We came back to 13th March the 16th of March. We shut down the office. We did teleworking for the next couple of months.  So Kathy and I started doing weekly town hall meetings, everybody and say, Hey, this is the status of IT. All the people are employed. You know, we've had two people infected, but they're doing fine. And just that sense of communication because now we used to be all together and we could talk and communicate. And now we have this isolation because we're operating teleworking. And you only see people on a camera like this and that town hall meeting really made a connection for people. And so in June last year, we said, we said, so, hey, you know, that we're Virginia is coming out of it and and they relax some of the standards and so forth. And so we said, Hey, should we cancel the town hall meetings and 80% of the people said, No, we should keep doing town hall. Okay. And so now we do them on a monthly basis. But it's a sense just to build connection, you know, and even our people, we have some people in Guam, Arsena, excuse me, and guitar and UAE, Kathy and I do a 730 town hall meeting with him once a month. And just to stay connected and they truly appreciate that connection piece. And when you say town hall meeting, what does that mean? What does that can can he describe it? So we can visualize it? Yeah, what we do is, we're on a call like this. Okay. So we're connected to everybody. And we're actually in 24 states and five foreign countries, we operate it. Okay. So across the United States and overseas. And so we'll do a town hall meeting on teams. Kathy and I will give an update of the company status, you know, what's happened in the company over the last couple of last month. Then we'll have the various departments, you know, like the people group might have some HR issues that they want to talk about, you know, the finance groups have some stuff about contracts are ISO, we have a director of quality, we're ISO qualified companies. So they'll talk about some different issues that we talk about instead of just putting out, they'll put it out over this town hall meeting. But then we started doing Bravo Zulus. And that's a Navy, I'm not sure it's a Navy expression, Bravo Zulus means job well done. Okay. And so then we first, we started, I would just roll down this list of people that the customer, hey, this person did a great job and this person did a great job. And then we had this idea, I forget who had the idea, but we said, hey, let's, let's, because we all have company photos. Let's start putting the slide deck together and put the individuals picture on the photo and run through the slide deck and say, hey, this is, this is Joe and he did a great job. This is Erica, she did a great job. And so we could, they could actually see themselves on the screen and in that recognition. But the other thing is talk about learning organization from a company perspective is everybody across the company got to see, I got somebody in Colorado Springs doing training. I've got somebody in Guam doing investigations. I got somebody in Baltimore doing maintenance. I got somebody in San Diego doing training. And so they started to see the depth and breath of the company. And you did it. It's not like you're getting a lecture. You're just getting to talk to, hey, you know, Joe did a great job. And Eric's doing a great job. And so we just recognize themselves. All right, talking my hand. So I can't help that. That's okay. I didn't say the same thing. I didn't say, listen, I, I promise you, I have to like sit on my hands sometimes. In real life, I talk about hands on the podcast interview. I, you know, I try to maintain some sense of control. I just learned after doing a couple, you know, it all goes back to that thing of connecting with people, you know, that's what it goes back to. And the town hall was just another way for us to do that. No, thank you for explaining that. So again, for me, when we're sharing with entrepreneurs and they're, they're trying to figure out how to grow their small teams and connect with folks. I mean, any idea helps, right? Any other, you know, the birthday cards that your wife does. I mean, those are great ideas that anyone, right, it doesn't cost anything to do it. Or very, very, very, very little. And you'll score a lot of points with that. So I think so. No, I agree. My mom still writes out birthday cards and Christmas cards and she sends them out to people and she's, and it's true. It's nothing like getting a handwritten card. Oh, exactly. No, I'm with you.   It took me a while to write something else. So you know, just so we know it meant a lot of micro. Yeah, exactly right. And who was it? George H. W. Bush used to send notes out to everybody. I mean, he had a set and he was sent out 20 notes a day. He would just sit down there and write out a note. So somebody did something. Hey, thanks for doing a great job. Send it to him. And it's just, and then we get this personal letter from the president of the United States. That's pretty cool. And it just made all the difference in the world people's lives. So Oh, sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Speaking of that, what's a recent purchase that you made on Amazon that brought you joy? Oh, sheesh. That's right. I'm giving you all the tough ones, you know? Okay, you can find this is silly, but that's okay. That's why we asked that. That's why I've learned to ask that question, because it tells me more about the person. It tells me like something deeper about the person. Well, see, we just bought a house in Nag's head. So North Carolina, so we bought a lot of stuff for that. But the thing that I like most I bought, it was a monocular, you know, monocular, monoculars, right? So monoculars, just one of them. Okay. And so we're at the beach house, I can sit up there and I see a ship come by and pull it out like and wash the ship guys. It's actually pretty cool. And it's how you sit out there. Look at ships. So now why monocular versus binocular?  And binoculars remind me when I was in the Navy, and I used to have to stand for four hours around the ship. And I have this we call it a brick and you have this binoculars around your back. So now I have this little monocular, I just pick up and I can look out and see the ship. So it's much easier to do. Okay. All right. Okay. That's probably a strange you say what the heck? No, no, listen, it always, it always, it always tells me something about the person. That's unexpected. I don't know. I found that question. Yeah, it does. I mean, I've had people, believe it or not, I had someone who they would send their sister in the hospital like treats because right every week from Amazon her chemo treatment. Oh, very cool. How would you know that? No, we wouldn't even how would you know the ask anything of that nature? So yeah. Are you a morning person or a night person? I'm a morning person.  After about, well, I actually tell people I work from about four to midnight. Okay, so you can call anytime you think midnight or four. Don't call me. Okay. But I'm a morning person and actually my whole family's morning people would get up early in the morning. I like to get up and get the day going. As John Wayne said, I don't want to be burning daylight. No, I agree. Yeah, no, I agree. I'm a morning person as well. Yeah, I do. Just some people, you know, I don't I mean, I some people do better. It's it's there. I can't hear rhythms, whatever that thing. Right. Yeah, they found work for them. Exactly. I'd work better in the morning. So if you weren't doing this, what else would you be doing? I have no idea. You know, I probably still be an ODU, run the troops, the teachers program. I probably still because I enjoyed it was a good job. I enjoyed it. I had the freedom to do what I want to do. And it wasn't my ambition. It wasn't what I was trying to do. But it was a good job. So I'd have a job to do something like that. So until I retire and I don't plan to retire anytime soon. I'll be 65 this year. I don't plan to retire. No plans of retiring. I got I'm still young. I got plenty left. Absolutely.  I mean, yeah, maybe maybe if the zoom in some more on the camera. No, we're good. I tell those wrinkles are only where my smiles have been. Okay. So I got a lot of smile. You look good. You look good. I'm sure during your time in that area that you've worked and I think your other guests mentioned that in the banker mentioned it, that government contractors fail. What has been or that you've seen them that you know of some of the reasons why people have not experienced such success in the government contracting arena? Do you see any patterns trade that we heard?  Just, you know, if you could share a couple of insights with us, that'd be great. I tell you the thing I've noticed, I have a lot of friends that have similar businesses like I do and they get past, you know, they probably get to the, you know, 12, 15, 20 million dollar range. And where they fail is they think they're the smartest guy in the world. They take their eye off the ball. Okay. And they're not hungry anymore. They start to get, you know, the benefits of being a successful entrepreneur and you start, you believe that, hey, I'm the smartest guy in the room and I can do anything and they take their eye off running their company and that's when the company goes.  I don't make those decisions anymore. My people will tell you that I'm a hands-on CEO. Okay. And I can't tell people and let them run their people, their group, but you got to stay focused. I think the CO is responsible for providing the vision and the culture. Okay. The vision is where we're going. Vision and culture. Okay. Those are the things. So the culture, the organization and the vision. So the vision takes you down the path. The culture is really going to how you do that. So how do you proceed down that path, you know, with the right kind of people doing the right, you know, taking care of people going after the right contracts, you know, making sure you do things the right way. We had it. I remember I'm not the smartest guy in the room. Okay. So I can only remember things in three. And so I have to use an example of a three-legged stool. Okay. And so we as a company, in order to have a stable stool, we got to maintain all three of the legs. And those three legs consist of our employees, our customers and our partners. Because if we at the headquarters take care of our employees and they can focus on taking care of the customers. You know, if we at the headquarters focus on our partners, then they'll take care of our customer too. And so, you know, at the headquarters, you know, the HR people, their customer is the internal customer out that's facing the external customer. You know, if they're worried about their pay, if they're worried about healthcare, if they're worried about PTO, they can't take care of the customer. So it's our responsibility to make sure we take care of the customer. And so that's the thing I would say. Three-legged stool. Mike, I'm telling you, you could teach an MBA class. I know you didn't go to an MBA school, but you could definitely teach an MBA course. These are just years of experience. And I'll tell you, I couldn't have a better partner than my wife, okay, because she is, you know, it's real funny. People first came into the company and they think they underestimate the company. And she, she is probably one of the smartest people in the company too, because she knows she's very detailed. She knows what's happening. She's got great people skills. And together, I think we work well together. And I tell my guys, I don't, I don't have an accounting degree. Okay.  I'll account it. I said, okay, whatever that means, that's what I'm doing. Okay. You got to manage the money. You got to manage the money. So I tell people, you know, business is really simple. More money comes in that goes out. If you do those two things, you'll be good. Simple. Look at all that other stuff. That's it. Right. Everything we talked about for the last hour. All right. So we're gonna, we're gonna take about everything we talked about for the last hour. And this is the final point, right? Yes, that's it. I'm gonna make this your intro right there. That's gonna be your quote for the intro. That's gonna be your intro quote. I like that. That's gonna be your intro quote. No, I do. And I appreciate you sharing that about people taking an after ball. Like, I guess it does go along with the the same lines of the blockbuster, right? Netflix star. Yes. No, you're exactly right. Right. Because again, Netflix originally went to blockbuster and they turned them down. Yeah, they did. Now they're thinking, oh, man, the blockbuster's out of business and Netflix is is taking over the world. Right. Right. Right. And they're and again, you talked about being customer focused. They, you know, again, they took their eye off and in that regard as well, because they thought people want the experience of going inside. Having to rewind data, paying people to rewind to pay late fees. Because remember, late fees was a part of their business model. Yes, exactly. Right. Yes. That's not that's total opposite of customer centric. Yes. Well, you can even make the case for Amazon and Barnes and Noble or the bookstores, you know, I mean, it's just like, okay, you know, Jeff Bezos is not perfect in the world, but he does some great things in business. You got to get a lot of credit for his business savvy. I mean, he really has done some pretty cool stuff. So and we want to do cool stuff too. I think you're already doing it.  No, we are not. We are not. You know, what happened in 2003, you know, I told you my my book, if you can tell you've probably seen a common thing or I love boats. Okay. Yes, I see that. I think I figure my I thought that would be your answer. If you weren't doing this, you'd be out like teaching boating or something. Oh no. I thought yeah, I actually taught seamanship navigation at the Naval Academy. Okay, I was close. I guess I could run a marina. That'd be a pretty good job. Yeah, run a marina. Maybe that should be your next acquisition. Yes, I could be. I told that to Kathy. She said no. They don't make money. I said, OK, I got it. OK. Well, I forgot the question. What was I asking you? I forgot the question myself. What was I asking you? That's OK. We'll come back to it. Oh, I asked you about the diving and you were. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, going back to two thousand thirteen. Here's a lesson I learned on that is I started that dive company in 2010 in Hampton Roads, Virginia. OK, because I thought offshore oil and gas and offshore wind was going to come to Virginia. The the requirement for diving was going to expand exponentially. And so we'd be well positioned to jump into that marketplace. And Hampton Roads are four dive companies that have been servicing the ships in Hampton Roads for 40 years. OK. And so I was projecting this significant increase in work for diving company. We're already going to be here. We'll be ready to go. Well, it didn't happen. OK. I lost probably about two and a half, three million dollars on that endeavor. Wow. And then sequestration hit. And so I had to shut down my diving team. OK. And that was a lesson I learned. Here's an example. I thought I was the smartest guy in the room and I had this vision for the future. And I went off down that path and I didn't do my market research. I didn't understand the market. And so then it cost me money. But here's a story I always like to tell. We were in business for about four years and we made the 500 at number 19. OK. We had a fifty eight hundred percent growth over those four years. OK. And so I tell people if we had kept that growth up, we'd be a 17 billion dollar company. Well, we are not. OK. So. But we had the pleasure of having lunch with Jim Collins. You know, a good degree. Thriving on. So the top 20 companies got to have lunch with Jim. And so we're all sitting around chatting. It was a great conversation. Kathy and I are sitting there and then somebody asked the question. It says, Jim, how do you know if it's too much risk? And the answer gave me a lot of sense to me from the Navy perspective. He says, if you're risk and you're taking it fails miserably, if it sinks the ship, there's too much risk. But if you get hit and it's above the waterline and you just live and keep going forward, you've learned something you didn't sink the ship. And I always use my diving company as an example. I mean, that was an above the waterline hit. It failed miserably, but it did not sink the ship. And we learned lessons from that. And so our next acquisition, we did a lot of research on the marketplace and specifically in data analytics is the company that we bought and we bought the right company for where we want to take the company to. And it's sort of the markets going to we're getting some tremendous traction on it. But I did that market research. And so you can take risk as long as it doesn't sink the ship. But how would you have known it would have sank the ship? You wouldn't know that. You know, you don't know. But like I could look at my cash flow, going back to cash flow, okay. Right. And I know that if this wasn't making money that I had sufficient cash to still fund this organization. And if I got to a certain point where I couldn't, I could cut it off and I didn't lose anything. And that's exactly what happened. And so it wasn't one of those ones that, you know, I best 20 million dollars in this thing and it fails miserably. And then I would not have the cash to support that operation. And that's what I'm that. So OK, cash is king.  Yeah. Yeah. No, that's great. No. OK. OK. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense there. But that's a great. I didn't know that about the top 20. It got a chance to oh, yeah, number 19. So that's pretty cool. So that's really cool. We've actually been on the 500 or five, five thousand. We've been on it eight times. And and so sequestration, we fell off it and we came back. We clawed our way back up. We got back on it. So my goals be on it 10 times. That's what that's. There's very few companies that have been on it 10 times. Our goals to get on it 10 times. So that's the plan. So as there you've mentioned, Jeff Bezos, you've mentioned some other. Are there any companies again, taking the good to great model or any companies that you I say model after or that you you think they're they're doing a good job? Well, I like to be similar to not similar to the terms of business, but not in terms of the business, but itself, the company, right, because that's what good to great talked about is great companies. Well, and it's interesting that when you talk about the infinite game, it talks about worthy rivals. OK, companies that you may be not even competition with them, but you look up to them to build your model after. OK, and so now I'm going to say Netflix. I really like the Netflix model. OK, I actually like the Amazon model. I think they did a great job of building something out. There's a couple of private companies that I, you know, I talk about Secure, Stable and Sustainable, Tetra Tech and Bechtel are two companies that are they're building dollar companies. OK, I know Bechtel. Yeah, they're great companies and they're they're in the same space that we're talking about being in, but they have a tremendous amount of capability. They do things right. Bechtel is actually a privately held company and I'd love to remain as a privately held company and I'd love to be a billion dollar privately held company. That's what I would love to be. OK, that's a great goal. And it's because, you know, I think one of the challenges of a publicly traded company is you have a lot of stakeholders that influence your business business decisions. OK, and they drive you to make short term decisions for, you know, dividends. And the only two people that make those decisions at I.T.A. or Mike and Cathy Mill, OK, and so we can make decisions that may not make the best since they're not bad fiscal decisions, but their decisions that you would not make if you were focused on dividends. OK, and so it gives us the flexibility and the freedom to make long term decisions that have a lasting impact on the company. And that's what Bechtel does. And the long term decisions, that's what they're going. They know where they want to head to. And that's what they're trying to do. So. So we're going to try to stay owned by Mike and Cathy as long as we can. All right. No, I think that's great. I think that's great. Just for the small business guy out there and the other tips, wisdom, insights that you'd like to share. I got so many scars the shade. I think you have to. I really believe you got to you find your niche or your niche and market and focus on that. OK, build your customer intimacy and, you know, even in the government contracting space, if you build that customer intimacy, when you go through tough times, the customers are going to help you. And we found during COVID, we had a lot of customers that work with us and able to make sure we take care of our people, but also they accomplish their mission. So I think you got to build your customer intimacy, focus on something that you get to be known for that. Hey, I always know that these guys do that. Always watch your cash. OK, don't overspend, because that's that's what a lot of people do is they overspend, I think. And then when you get into troubles like with the COVID and people they don't have the cash resources to survive it, they fail. And that's, you know, I can't do that. So and always hire people smarter than you. Don't just because you're the owner of the company.  I won't say one thing I do about hiring people is for senior leadership people. Kath and I take them out to dinner. Are we taking out to lunch? OK, two reasons. One is I want to see their table matters. OK, because they have bad table matters. I mean, that's going to be they're going to be representing you in some form or fashion. And, you know, I've had even senior military officers. I've taken out to lunch and I was appalled by their table matters. OK, but the other thing I think is even more important is how they treat the way staff. OK, because how they treat the way staff if they're dismissive or they're just that's how they're going to treat people. OK, and we can't have that in the company.  She had great experience. We flew her in. We took her out to dinner. We took her to our favorite restaurant. We knew the way staff intimately there, you know, and she was just dismissive of the way staff. So Kath and I said we're not hired because that's how she's going to treat people. We're not going to have that right to you. That's that's appalling. It is. It is appalling. And that's a great little hack. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's it's efficient. It's effective. It's yes, inexpensive to eat. We're going to eat there. We love this place. We go there and it was. That's a. Yeah, so those are my stories. I have notes to make sure I told you everything I wanted to tell you. Oh, wow. Look at that. I'm I'll tell you, Lord, prepping me up really well. Lord, Lord's great. I thank you Lord for reaching out to me. Yes. And and wanting to be on the show. That's great. I have to chuckle.  So I took the credit for it. And then I said, oh, no, it's Lord. No, that's great. Lord did a good job of reaching out and letting us know. Here's the opportunity. This one thing I was I said, don't take off the ball. But the other thing I tell people all the time is I think I'm probably I'm not the smartest kind of room. But I'll tell you one thing. I'm a hard worker. And I think if you're going to run your business, hard work and persistent, don't just somebody's going to tell you, no, don't just take that answer. Keep plugging forward. And nobody outwork you. Nobody else will see you because there's a lot of smart people that don't work hard. Right. That's what I've learned. I've learned that. That would be my two cents. So I learned as well. Mike, how could people reach you or you want them to reach Lauren? What would you like? Sell us the website. I'll tell you one thing. I'll give you my email address and I'm on LinkedIn. I'm a big LinkedIn user. OK. OK. So you can find me as simple so Mike Mellow and my K.E. M.E.L.O. at LinkedIn or Mike Mellow at I.T.A. dash I.N.T.L. Dot com. All right. And I'll be glad to help anybody. What kind of things to people when they're reaching out to you? What kind of things that you like to talk about or that you people like to ask you or that you're, you know, yeah, things that some people hey, Mike, you know, this what kind of people? What kind of situations? Different things. Well, I think it's anything. Virginia Tech football. I'll be glad to talk about Virginia Tech football. We're talking about Virginia Tech football. We're talking about this football, Mike. I'm a Florida Gator. OK. Oh, I got to talk to the Lord now. I'm going to talk to my Gator. Listen, hold on, Mike.  Oh, there it is. OK. OK. They beat us in the first round of the NCAA basketball term. I don't want to say anything. That's OK. I'm actually I'm actually on the Virginia Tech Athletic Fund Board of Directors. So OK, you got me off track again. I forgot. So you have a question to answer. Yeah, a question of stuff. People are asking.  What's your advice for business?  I'm I'm actually I'm on. I don't feel you ever heard of the the CEO project out of Ink Magazine. No. It's it's a pretty interesting group. But I'm on a peer group of eight CEOs. We meet once a month and we talk about different issues. And it's really interesting of the eight CEOs. Two of us are owner CEOs and six of them are professional CEOs.  Guys, there's a lady there, Maria, too. But they're hired to professionally be CEOs. And as far as we have, I'll have a different perspective. We all in different market sectors. But and you would think these guys are smart people in the world, but they're always looking for help.  And I think most people want to help other people. And so I don't mind answering people questions and people ask me for recommendations. And I'll be glad to answer.