National Instruments Corporation

That's something Ev Concevoy knows all too well.

From his early days at National Instruments to founding Teleport, he's been focused on building tools for engineers like himself.

At Rackspace, he saw firsthand how hyperscalers innovate out of necessity and how those innovations trickle down to the rest of us.

And now with Teleport, he's tackling the unsolved problem of securing data in a world where access paths are multiplying at an alarming rate.

And there is also something to be said about being the kind of part of a global community of engineers, you know, like you have petroleum engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, software engineers, and like all these people essentially built the world that we're surrounded by.

So being the kind of servants to that community, I always enjoyed.

So started my career straight out of college at a company called National Instruments.

Like, as you could see in the name, I was building virtual instruments for all kinds of engineers.

What an interesting nuance.

And, uh, to, to just underscore that, so my previous life before starting this agency was I worked at a large corporation called National Instruments, which is now owned by Emerson.

And I was there during the same timeframe you were when e-commerce was coming about.

I, I started in '97, as context.

Okay.

Well then also, by the time this podcast released, we will have made public our keynote speaker, and his name is John Groff, and this is especially fun for me to talk about because John actually hired me at National Instruments back in my baby marketer days.

He was the CMO at NI for 30 years.

He has an engineering background, but really led the MarCom function and grew it from this $13 million company into be a $1.2 billion company.

They called the idea virtual instrumentation.

In 1976, they founded National Instruments to pursue it, starting with modest data acquisition boards that let computers talk to the physical world.

The real leap came a decade later.

In 1986, they released LabVIEW, short for Laboratory Virtual Instrumentation Engineering Workbench.

Instead, they built a language that spoke in the native notation of signals and systems.

That decision created a network effect among users who shared libraries of virtual instruments the way programmers later shared open source packages.

Truchard led National Instruments as chief executive and chairman for four decades until he retired in 2017.

And the company grew big enough that Emerson bought it for about $8.2 billion in 2023.

Hook 'em horns.

So the early start was, I was a software engineer, got into software management at this company in Texas called National Instruments.

It was publicly traded.

In fact, that era was interesting because it's all about learning on wireless standards, so horizontal technology space across many industries, education, wireless, government, anything where wireless would work.

How does the leadership mindset change depending on the company stage, the ownership, ownership structure, and the growth expectations? I, I imagine there were very different trajectories in each entity.

Yeah, yeah, and there were also very different philosophies.

So, uh, National Instruments, publicly traded, different mindset, right? It's all about yearly forecasting, but you then you have to meet your quarterly goals to keep up with what you've told the investors 'cause that's the thing you control.

Mm-hmm.

And how did you get started? Why did you choose to start an agency?

Yeah, I worked with a large manufacturer called National Instruments for the start of my career.

And while I was there, we noticed that the partners that we were working with, which were system integrators and these smaller engineering companies, They did not have a clue of how to do marketing.

Their websites were atrocious.

And really wanted to raise our kids and have that lifestyle.

And so it was a combination of professional and personal reasons that led me to want to start the agency.

And I did so with a colleague from National Instruments.

So we left more or less together within one year and started the journey together.

And his name is John Groff.

And this is especially fun for me to talk about because John actually hired me at National Instruments back in my baby marketer days.

He was the CMO at NI for 30 years.

He has an engineering background, but really led the Marcom function and grew it from this $13 million company into be a $1.2 billion company.