Fortune's Path Podcast

JJ Rosen on Being In The Right Market at the Right Time

Episode Summary

JJ Rosen is the founder of Atiba, an end to end technology services company with a thirty year history of serving clients of all shapes and sizes. A dying breed, JJ is a native Nashvillian. He talks about his childhood summers as a roadie with his Dad, how his obsession with computers began, and how being in the right market at the right time can mean you don't have to advertise your business.

Episode Notes

• JJ: "My my dad was in the music business. He did this thing called mobile recording, where he had this 18 Wheeler truck, in the back of it was a recording studio. And so he would go around the country recording, you know, all kinds of live concerts and albums. And so by the time I got to maybe, I guess, seventh grade, my summers, I was a roadie. So I did that for my summers. And that was really fun for maybe like a week or so. And then I quickly saw that oh, this is pretty hard."
• JJ: "To be like a techie it was all about you had to be real good at math or something. And so you had to be kind of a math nerd. And I just pictured. "Okay, I'm not that.".. But as it turned out a lot of tech is about at least I've found is more about creativity."
• JJ: "We've gotten deep into AI. The attitude internally we had at our company was, okay, this is both a threat and an opportunity kind of thing."
• "Tom: I don't think large language models are going to be with us as, like, a permanent thing. I think eventually they may turn into just like a parlor game. Sort of an amusement. It's just statistically predicting what might come next. That feels like a fatal flaw.  There's a structure problem that is fatal. "
• JJ: "We went years with  no formal marketing. We were working and lucky to be in a field where there's been some demand.  So just trying to do a good job and live off of referrals. Over time, as we  grew, you  want to shift from being reactive to being proactive. That's what I felt would be good to do. That's when we started investing in  marketing internally. "