Hear Chris discuss how his winding path went from restaurants and management to Security and Innovation. Join us as Chris Moore, VP of Solutions Architecture for Thrive lays out the key problems facing customers in the midst of this massive tech talent shortage. Thrive has tons of tools, but more importantly, the talent to manage just about any customer environment while modernizing and augmenting whatever technology they might run up against.
Transcript of episode can be found below.
Josh Lupresto (00:01):
Welcome to the podcast that is designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering, Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech. Hi everybody, welcome back. I'm your host, Josh Lupresto, and today we are joined by a good man, Chris Moore, VP of Solution Architecture for Thrive. Chris, thanks for jumping on with me, man.
Chris Moore (00:28):
Josh, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it.
Josh Lupresto (00:31):
So, title today we're talking about, you know, in this managed services world, but more importantly we're laying a claim. We're saying it's really hard and it's real, the talent shortage in technology, you know, in security in cloud, all of these things, right? So, so we're gonna get to that. I'm excited to kind of hear, obviously you guys have a lot of incredible solutions around that, and we'll get into that as we go. And we're gonna try to answer this. Now, more importantly, though, I wanna hear about your background. You know, if, look, if you've had a, you've had a great linear path and you knew exactly what you wanted to be your entire life, kudos to you. But if you took some weird, windy path and you, you know, you used to train goldfish or whatever, that's okay too. So, first of all, tell me about your background, Chris, let everybody know kind of how you got here.
Chris Moore (01:18):
Absolutely. Thanks Josh. So, as a kid my dad brought home this lovely IBM computer, and I turned on the monitor. I was like, What the heck is this? I'm looking at, And there was a five and a quarter inch floppy sitting next to it, and I plugged it in the 28 discs or whatever it was to get it Lotus 1, 2, 3 loaded up. Then the next evolution came. I was like, Oh, we can put this modem in it and I can get Prodigy loaded up and everything's good. And then as I progressed through my childhood I didn't honestly really play that much for the computers. I got sucked into working at restaurants and washing dishes and helping the bartenders and all that good stuff. And then I realized when I went to college, I wanted to go get my restaurant resort management degree.
Chris Moore (02:07):
So that's what I started off down that path. And then right around that time is right when the the CD writers came out where you could burn your own music onto, yeah, CDs. And they were all running by a parallel port, and you expect hundreds and thousands of dollars on CDs that never burnt correctly, and you threw 'em out. And it was right around that point in time where I decided actually, I want to go do something with computers for a career. So I went down and saw my counselor, said, Hey, I wanna change majors. And she looked at me and she goes, Well, if you wanna be here for three more years, and I had about 18 months left, right? So she goes, If you wanna be here for three more years, then you can change majors. And I looked at her and said, Nope, I'll get my degree, and then I'll go do what I want to do. So I did, and ironically, my first job out of college was working at a national restaurant chain on their help desk.
Josh Lupresto (03:05):
Ah.
Chris Moore (03:06):
So from there, I did help desk support. I went out to restaurants, pulled CAT5 cable, redid their POS systems, and kind of terminated everything you know, at two o'clock in the morning after the restaurant had closed, and then came back in the next morning and trained the...