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Tyler Smith

Economics writer at the American Economic Association and host of the AEA Research Highlights podcast.

Aug 12, 2026

2:16
And your time starts now.
2:19
Awesome.
2:20
So TechAlign was born from an internal, non-existent tool at my MSP.
2:29
We needed to create business reviews and deliver SaaS reports monthly for our customers.
2:37
So we went ahead and built TechAlign.
2:40
And TechAlign today turns every review into project revenue and also reports on the past reporting period.
2:49
So existingly, reviews prior to TechAlign looked like hours of manual reporting, pulling data from other systems like your PSA and RMM and compiling that into spreadsheets.

16 MINS LATER

18:52
As we start to wrap up here, what is, you know, one or two things that I didn't ask about that you want to make sure that listeners know about Tecla? Mm-hmm.
13:06
Tyler, can you tell us how you've structured the show schedule, and do you think that has actually encouraged people to enter more and show more?
13:15
For sure.
13:15
Like I said, when we're going through our show bill, every year we reevaluate our show bill.
13:19
We have our end-of-the-year banquet, and we put a survey out saying, "Hey, you know, what did everybody like this year? What didn't you like? Is there a class that you'd like to see? Is there a class that you think maybe we don't have enough participation in?" Literally every single year we'll go through and evaluate, hey, what was people's problems with the schedule? What worked? What didn't work? Do we need more time here for a break, or do we need less time for a break? The input from everybody is the biggest thing that helps us design the show bill.
13:47
If you sat down and looked at it, you're like, man, this is jumping around a little bit, but at the same token, it has worked like that by we'll have a member call saying, "Hey, I have a youth that it happens to be they show all their classes after the third break on Saturday.
14:00
Can we move classes around a little bit?" And we'll go back and reevaluate and say, "Hey, yeah, we see that now.
14:05
Let's go ahead and move a class here, move a class there." It really works when you just get everybody's input.

11 MINS LATER

24:54
Why do you think that? Why do you think that EMA's held at the same location that many Class A shows are, but you're growing and many of them are struggling? What do you think that difference is?
6:37
Major Tyler Smith, Cyber Operations Attorney with the sixteenth Air Force, told me a bit more about his experience.
6:44
As we've been planning this, we try to think of, of questions, legal questions to, to go along with the, the cyber play, uh, how can we make this relevant to the different legal audiences? And, and information sharing is one of the key things that we focus on, right? And we're, we're putting out questions that are requiring our legal audience to look at their nation and look at their national laws and, and look at their domestic policy on, hey, how do we share? How-- if this happened and we knew a partner was gonna have or was having a similar thing, how do we do that?
7:17
Yeah.
7:18
And so there's not an overriding international law basis to share that information.
7:22
That's domestic policy, domestic law, and so this is a, it's a good opportunity to, to kinda blend that international flavor of what we're doing, but then have them also hone down and look at, "Hey, well, how would we do this-

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