Redefining Software Development for the User with Jamie Thomas

Episode Overview

Our Guest: Jamie Thomas- Balancing Technology and Simplicity with Strategic Software User Experience

Jamie Thomas is a prominent figure in the field of technology and software development, particularly known for his significant contributions to improving software user experience. As the CEO and co-founder of Cognito Forms, a leader in online form building and data collection, Jamie has revolutionized how businesses and individuals interact with digital platforms. His background is as diverse as it is impressive, beginning with a degree in aerospace engineering—a field he chose for its challenges and complexities. Despite the rigorous demands of aerospace, Jamie’s passion for building led him to software development, where he spent years refining his skills in IT and cybersecurity before embarking on his entrepreneurial journey with Cognito Forms in 2012.

Under Jamie’s leadership, Cognito Forms has excelled at making complex processes simple and accessible, prioritizing the user experience above all. His philosophy centers on the power of simplicity in design and functionality, aiming to empower users by allowing them to easily create, automate, and manage digital forms. This approach has not only set Cognito Forms apart from its competitors but has also established the platform as a critical tool for thousands of users worldwide, looking to streamline their workflow and improve data management practices. Jamie’s insights into software user experience stem from a deep understanding of the needs of both developers and non-technical users, bridging the gap with innovative solutions that enhance productivity and usability.

Jamie’s expertise is not confined to just leading Cognito Forms; he is also a visionary thinker in the integration of new technologies such as AI and blockchain into everyday business processes, which could further enhance the security and efficiency of digital transactions and contracts. Despite the technical complexity of these technologies, Jamie emphasizes their practical application without overwhelming users with the technology itself. His forward-thinking approach ensures that Cognito Forms remains at the forefront of the digital form solutions market, continuously adapting to the evolving tech landscape while maintaining a strong focus on software user experience. His leadership style and dedication to innovation make him a respected voice in discussions about the future of fintech, digital security, and UX design, making him a sought-after speaker and thought leader in the industry.

Episode Transcript

Jamie Thomas: There’s this sort of lack of trust because it’s so obscure and nobody understands really what it means. So again, it’s going to come down to, I see it as a technology, I see it as a solution to making sure it is secure. But I don’t see that there’s a lot of value in screaming from the rooftops. We’re using blockchain or we’re using this advanced AI system. Just do it, do the things you’re supposed to do, and provide a great experience. But don’t say, because we’re using this technology, therefore it’s great.

Kevin Rosenquist: Hey, welcome to PayPod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for being here. For those of you who are regular listeners to PayPod, you’ll notice that I am not. Jacob. The longtime host of the show has moved on to other endeavors. I know I have some big shoes to fill, and I promise I will continue to bring you the enlightening discussions on the payments and fintech industries that you have come to expect. My guest today is Jamie Thomas, the visionary CEO and co-founder of Cognito Forms, with a passion for simplifying complex processes. Jamie has led Cognito Forms to become a leader in online form building and data collection, empowering users across the globe to create, automate, and manage digital forms with ease. Joining me from South Carolina, Jamie Thomas. You went from a degree in aerospace engineering to spending many years as a software developer, primarily in IT and cybersecurity, to founding Cognito Forms in 2012. Was there anything specific you saw in your experience that led you to the idea of creating a custom form builder?

Jamie Thomas: I don’t think I was mature enough to realize what I saw when I was young when I first graduated from college, but I love building things. That’s why I got a degree in aerospace to be able to build rockets one day. But I was also doing software development all through college. My dad told me it was too easy of a degree to focus on, so I did aerospace and he was right. But I loved building things. So even when I first graduated, I found I was trying to build software to make it easier for me to write software. So I’ve always viewed that as a passion project. And then as we were working with our customers and doing all these consulting projects and stuff, really saw the strong need to empower them to be more successful and be able to do some of the things I was doing, because it just didn’t make sense for them to pay tons and tons of money to build this custom software. That was going to be hard for them to maintain long-term.

Kevin Rosenquist: Did you always see yourself as an entrepreneur someday? Is that something that you had planned for or did just?

Jamie Thomas: Absolutely not on the radar? For me, my family comes first, so stable job. I may have had ideas, definitely, things that I wanted to accomplish, but really what it came down to was while we were doing the consulting, I had room within that to be able to do some experimentation, and when I pitched the idea internally to says, hey, let’s go ahead and start building a product to help our customers, I was given that opportunity. I wasn’t intending to create a company out of it necessarily, but definitely to create a product at the global scale that I would get to work on and be able to bring that vision to the world and then I became successful. They were like, you really should spin off and be CEO. Then I was like, okay, so definitely not seeking it out, I guess, entrepreneurial in my thinking, in terms of the ideas in being innovative but I wasn’t necessarily seeking this, the CEO title.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s not an easy leap going from just being an employee to launching your own thing. Were you nervous? Did it just feel right? Maybe a little bit of both?

Jamie Thomas: Maybe a little bit of both. Being responsible for a larger division at my previous company, I had already had separate financials and been doing a lot of the things that were involved. I didn’t realize the extent to which I was already doing a lot of that work. But I think as a software developer, I had an easier time because anything that I did that was hard associated with that spin-off or things that were going to be tedious, like accounting, for example, I was putting my developer mindset on how can I make it so I don’t have to do that, how can I automate it or streamline it? So we spent a lot of time doing that and made it to where it’s a lot of that stuff that’s uncomfortable or tedious is pretty easy, so I get to still focus on software development and building a great product.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s awesome. So you developed software to be an entrepreneur.

Jamie Thomas: To some extent. Yes, our own software, but also just being able to recognize the right software that you can go ahead and purchase or subscribe to that meets your needs. That is good because we know what good software looks like. So we were able to do the same thing we were doing for our consulting customers and pulling in the right tools for the job.

Kevin Rosenquist: How many did you have? One co-founder?

Jamie Thomas: Yes, Jennifer. She worked with me and has been for the past couple of decades. Back to my previous company doing consulting and website design, and it was with her that we came up with this idea of really taking these problems customers were trying to solve, paying us lots of money on an hourly basis to solve them, and empowering them to build the solutions themselves. The reason that we felt we had to build Cognitive Forms was on the one side, you have these off-the-shelf products, our customers are trying to use them, but they just weren’t quite meeting their needs, they weren’t adaptable to their specific business needs. Then on the other side, you had us and they’re paying us hundreds of dollars an hour to build this thing that they’re not going to be able to customize down the road. We all know with agile processes and different strategies today, things change. So we felt, we had to make it accessible where anybody could build the custom solution for themselves, had to be affordable, and they needed to be able to maintain it long-term without having to hire people like us. So we literally used that experience consulting to realize this was the right product at the right time.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a good segue because one of the things that kept coming up as I dug into Cognito was the ease of use. User experience was and is important to you guys. It’s funny. I’m always amazed at how bad the user experience can be for apps and products from big brands and competitive markets. I never understood how they make it. Was going no code and making it a super user-friendly, part of the plan from the start was that like a focal point coming out the gate?

Jamie Thomas: We have three core tenants and the first one is “Ease of Use.” If our goal is for a non-developer to get in there and be able to do it, even if what they’re doing is complicated, hard, something that’s hard to think about, we had to make it easy. Because we can’t take away the fact that they’re still creating software. So the problems they’re solving are the same problems that the software developer was going to have to solve. The problems are hard, you can’t trivialize that. But we can make it super easy. So that’s the first thing with ease of use. The second component was it had to be powerful enough to let them do what they needed to do. That’s what was the problem with that off-the-shelf software or some of these sort of ad hoc type systems out there is they would get you like 80% of the way there, but they couldn’t get you that other 20% so that it had the support, that rich customization capability. That’s hard to do with a lot of these vertical solutions. Then the third tenet had to be value. It had to be cost-effective. A lot of these organizations, they can’t afford the super expensive enterprise platform with all these bells and whistles most of the time.

Kevin Rosenquist: Nor do they need it.

Jamie Thomas: Honestly, the enterprise customers don’t need it either. But their organizations have it and they have a consulting team that’s been trained on it, so that’s fine. But it had to be easy to use, powerful enough to where they could, not just initially, but long-term continue to use it. And it had to be at the right price point. So as they grew, it would grow with them and not be too big of a leap as they adapt.

Kevin Rosenquist: How hard is it to make things super user-friendly? I feel like the learning curve is so different from, say, my mom to me. It’s hard to make it for everybody. How do you do that?

Jamie Thomas: It’s almost like one meeting at a time, one decision at a time. Having these core tenants of ease of use. One of our core values in Cognitive Forms is simplifying, and that means that we have to simplify everything we do so that it feels easy. Even if it’s not, it has to feel easy. So it’s just one decision at a time, and putting yourself in the shoes of your end customer and asking the question “Will they understand this?” “Does it look simple?” It’s not just is it simple, but it has to even feel simple. Otherwise, you get intimidated and you don’t even try. So I wish I could tell you that it was like one thing. It’s not one thing. It’s a series of small decisions. Also, cohesion is important. I think a lot of things you see with products today are like they have all these bells and whistles, but they don’t work together harmoniously so they don’t make sense. So for us, a lot of it is making sure that everything we build interacts and integrates with everything else that we have. That’s been a labor of love. Probably our hardest thing is we’re marrying power and ease of use. Those are just they’re loggerheads with each other. They don’t want to play.

Kevin Rosenquist: I think you hit on the nail on the head too with the intimidation part. Because I do think that it’s very easy, especially for people who aren’t super knowledgeable about various software to try something new, especially with the functionality of something like Cognito. Well, since we’re a payments podcast, I want to talk about that functionality. Was that part of the initial iteration of Cognito?

Jamie Thomas: Absolutely. It’s funny because we launched it as a beta product or an alpha product in December of 2013, and we were free. Anybody could use this. We had no way to charge our customers for anything anyway. So in 2014, instead of launching paid plans because we didn’t quite feel we were ready to do that, we were still incubating the product. We decided to launch payment so that people could create a form that could collect payments because there were things that our product did already at that point, in terms of customizations for calculations and repeating data that was not available on the market. So you could create a complicated order form that could do some pretty complicated things. We decided to go ahead and launch payment on strike so our customers could create a payment form. All we did in terms of getting a fee for that is we charge 1% of the transactions as our sort of commission on that sale, and we still have that today. So on our free tier, you can build forms to your heart’s content and collect payments for free, and you can pass that fee on to your end customer.

Jamie Thomas: You can use Cognitive Forms free of charge to collect money from your customers, which is cool. So that was integral. But I think the bigger question is why is it integral. Since our goal was to help people build workflow productivity applications to connect both with their internal employees, but also their end customers, since that was our goal, was to facilitate creating applications like that, it doesn’t make sense if the process you’re automating doesn’t have value. So what value could be assigned contract? It could be saving somebody’s time. It could be an approval process to make sure things are done the right way. It could be making sure that a room is reserved properly because it’s a scarce resource. But it could also be payment so anything that adds value to the organization is important. So we started with payment because it’s a very clear connection between the value of automating the process and the value to the organization. No doubt they’re able to collect that money, and that money is a form of a contract.

Kevin Rosenquist: I noticed you offered a lot of different I think you have PayPal and Stripe and and a bunch of other ones. Is it hard to get those integrated within your system or is it pretty seamless?

Jamie Thomas: For us, it’s hard. We only have three providers. And the reason for that is because if you look at other products in the market, they may have 12, they may have 24, or maybe a kitchen sink sort of mentality but a lot of those platforms, it’s like you can collect payment. When the user clicks submit, they can collect payment and then that’s it. That’s the point where the product is like, we’re done, we did our job. Our job was to facilitate that one-time transaction. But in our view, people are trying to automate the entire process of engaging with their customers over time. So that can’t be the end of the story. It may be that they need to initially, the customer sends an inquiry in, and then the organization of the business may need to provide back a quote to that customer. They may negotiate around that quote. They may then make a payment. Maybe it’s just an installment payment, maybe the organization later has to see what the running balance is or maybe they need to refund that payment, and they ideally want to do that all through the same system. They don’t want to have to go and log in to whoever their payment processor is to do these other transactions. So that’s one of the reasons why we only have those three, is we want our customers to have a great experience with a high-quality provider, and we want it to be tightly integrated so that they can see in our platform how much it’s been paid and initiate that refund to our platform if they need to.

Kevin Rosenquist: Back to user experience, you’re all about the user experience.

Jamie Thomas: Absolutely. It’s got to be great.

Kevin Rosenquist: I need you to go work for ESPN and fix their app for me.

Jamie Thomas: It’s funny, we were switching banks relatively recently and it was like, “Okay, why are we switching banks?” Well, because the banking software we’re using is terrible, absolutely terrible.

Kevin Rosenquist: How is that possible?

Jamie Thomas: The irony is we still even in switching, we were like, well, it’s better. It’s still not great, it’s just better. Same thing with our human resources platform. It’s like it’s not great, but the alternatives aren’t great either.

Kevin Rosenquist: Switching is a pain. So it’s like, oh gosh, I could talk about that all day. Electronic signatures I wanted to talk a little bit about that because they’re getting more and more prevalent all the time. But there’s still resistance at least. I know my wife is a realtor and some people still aren’t comfortable signing documents with like, DocuSign and things like that. What would you say to those people who, for the listeners, you guys offer electronic signatures, Obviously, in Cognito? What would you say to the people who are still uncomfortable with the idea of signing?

Jamie Thomas: I think that uncomfortableness with it is probably more that they’re concerned about the people who are signing being comfortable. So that I can understand that. But not everybody can read the United States Esign law and realize that it’s all fine. It’s all kosher. We know who these people are, we have their signature. It’s legal. So the legality of it’s not a question. It’s more about this person who’s never done it before. Familiarity with them going, oh this is okay. So it’s going to be something that everybody expects. And it’s just going to take time for the market to adapt. I don’t think there’s anything that an individual product can do to make it better. We just have to keep doing it because nobody wants to sign the paper in person.

Kevin Rosenquist: Nobody wants to go anywhere.

Jamie Thomas: I think that one of the things that COVID helped with was realizing that we need this stuff to be online, it needs to be electronic. So I think that’s helped to jump-start the adoption in the market.

Kevin Rosenquist: You are seeing it a lot more since COVID for sure.

Jamie Thomas: Absolutely. That’s another of those high-value outcomes. It’s one of the reasons we do and have had early on document generation. So be able to support custom documents specific to the needs of the organization. So they could do things like collect signatures on those and be able to have something that’s like, okay, here’s my paper. Because everybody, eventually, they wants this. They want a document. Even if it’s not printed out. They want a document that’s like got the signature on it and stuff. So there’s still that familiarity, even though nobody needs to sign anything. Clicking a checkbox is fine.

Kevin Rosenquist: Absolutely. Just have like a script font as your signature. It’s not even your real signature.

Jamie Thomas: Part of that’s just knowing who your customer is and realizing that part of the user experience is them being satisfied. Even if you don’t think what they want is necessary, you still need to make them happy.

Kevin Rosenquist: How do you feel about Web3 and the blockchain as far as smart contracts go? Do you see that helping or hurting the average person’s trust in the idea of digital contracts?

Jamie Thomas: I think that 99% of the population wouldn’t have any trust in it, even though they should. I think it falls into the category of something with AI, there’s this sort of lack of trust because it’s so obscure that nobody understands really what it means. Again, it’s going to come down to, I see it as a technology, I see it as a solution to making sure it is secure. But I don’t see that there’s a lot of value in screaming from the rooftops. We’re using blockchain or we’re using this advanced AI system. Just do it, do the things you’re supposed to do, and provide a great experience. But don’t say, because we’re using this technology, therefore it’s great. I just say it’s great. Then they see it and they say, yeah, you’re right, this is good, and don’t have a breach where your contracts are get voided because you’re doing it the right way. Then everybody is like, yeah, I’m good with that. But I don’t see that by itself being this panacea because there’s going to be distrust by the vast majority that’s stolen. They don’t get it.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s not an easily digestible concept, I think, for most. So I think it makes sense. Do you see Cognito exploring or integrating anything as far as blockchain or smart contracts?

Jamie Thomas: In terms of smart contracts, probably, right now, the only thing we’re going to be doing is adopting the Adobe signing methodology for digital signing. So it’s not really 100% in the blockchain scenario, but it’s in that same vein of being able to have a chain of trust, not specifically with blockchain. We’ll probably explore it, but it’s not like for us right now, it’s not top of mind.

Kevin Rosenquist: You brought up this newfound AI thing everybody’s talking about. What about that is, as far as Cognito is, specifically, what are you exploring in AI technology and large language models at all?

Jamie Thomas: We are exploring it for benefiting our customers, as I said, like, how can we leverage some of these capabilities to make it easy for our customers to do what they need to do? Do we eventually want to make it to where they can make it easy for their end Customer? Yes, 100%. But again, it comes down to how you make that more complicated technology available to where it actually provides value, is easy to use, and is cost-effective, and all of those planets haven’t quite aligned yet. We’re getting there. But one of the things we’ve already done is made it to where people can build forms by just describing the form they want in English, and automatically generating the form as a starting point for them. That’s one of the beauties of these large language models, is you’re like, I want a contract to help let people become to rent my condo for the next six months. Here are the terms, and I want the form to support the five signers being able to describe that in English, and then being able to create a form that meets those requirements. That’s pretty powerful. It simplifies things. It helps that jump-start. So that’s an example where we’re already using AI. We’ll be also using it to help our customers in terms of answering some of their questions and stuff and continuing to explore where it makes sense, where it’s a good fit, and where we can look at the outcome and go, that’s better. It’s not just the buzz, it is a better solution.

Kevin Rosenquist: That was my next question because a lot of times you get some of those products. I was just looking at a website platform where you just type in what you want and it spits out a website. I’ve used some that are okay, and the one I use today was just horrific. It looked, I was like, what is this website from 1999? It was terrible. How has your output been thus far with using the AI?

Jamie Thomas: It’s been pretty good. Part of that is the forms especially and are structured by their nature. So there’s a lot of data and correlations, and aesthetics is not as much of a factor because the styling of our forms you can do is independent of the data that’s being collected. So in that sense, being able to leverage the global repository of all types of data collection that anybody has ever done and summarize that, and to be able to translate these English requirements to create a form leveraging both what the customer is asking for, but also this wide breadth of knowledge on the internet about what that looks like. It’s adding value, but again, it’s like putting it in its box and saying this is a good use for it.

Kevin Rosenquist: I think that’s the key. There’s a lot of questionable like where you do the head tilt like “I don’t know if that needs AI.” But just from your own perspective, do you embrace AI? Are scared of it? Are you both?

Jamie Thomas: I embrace it, but my daughter doesn’t embrace it. She’s so irritated by students using it to cheat in school while she’s, like, laboriously writing out all of her essays.

Kevin Rosenquist: I can’t relate to that side. I’m not in school.

Jamie Thomas: That’s right. I see it’s going to be transformative. It’s just going to require people to get past the hype and focus on practical applications and making sure the right governance is in place. We talked about potentially, for example, making it to where some of the generative AI concepts could be within our product. But then the first thing we would have to do is how do we prevent people from abusing it if that’s out there? If we make it to where our customers can provide it on their forms and stuff, then people could use it in an abusive way if we don’t put safeguards in place. That’s one of the problems today. It’s really hard to do that even with our own forms. For example, when we were using AI, we told it not to do anything that was illegal. We told it not to do things like collect credit card information, but then we had to go back after it was generating these results and go, well, you didn’t get it right. This is still not good enough and we had to put the kibosh on it. So you have to be diligent and you have to anticipate abuse and make sure that it’s being used the right way.

Kevin Rosenquist: We’re doing good with Segways today. That’s a good Segue. My next question, and that’s about data security and privacy. Most of us aren’t very diligent about keeping our data safe. I fully admit that if I’m signing up for a new streaming service or something, I just want to watch the hockey game, I’m just skipping through. I’m like, yeah, I agree, and that’s not very smart. But I better hope people like me, better hope people like you are doing good things for data security. But is it getting harder to secure data or is it easier with newer technology?

Jamie Thomas: I would say, in some respects, it’s almost getting easier because it’s very clear what you’re supposed to be doing and look at it from what we’re trying to provide with our product. Our goal is that it’s supposed to be easy. We even say easy peasy and it should just work. That’s one of our other tenants. So if you’re signing up to use our platform, you’re probably not thinking about security. Some of our customers do but most of them are just like they’re assuming that it is. I think that’s probably the good thing is that there are now a lot more products on the market that are secure, that are taking care of things, but wonder how many times we sit through and do our SoC audits and all the other scrutinizing and stuff. It comes down to you have to want to do it, and then you have to use the right tools. You asked, is it easier? I would say, yes, the tools are easier now than they were. It’s easier to encrypt the data and make sure that it’s being processed securely through all the different channels. All those things are built in. You just have to choose to use them. Then authentication is probably another big thing, like being able to know that you’re securely logging in to a system on a device that’s secure, that’s been locked down. Those tools are getting a lot easier, and the expectations are getting a lot better. So I think in that sense, it’s good, it’s getting better. But the flip side of that, you do every service you use, you really should still ask the question, what are they doing or are they doing the right thing? Have they had data breaches? What are they doing to guarantee security?

Kevin Rosenquist: It seems like, for us, personally, we don’t want to spend the time making sure that everything’s fine and a lot with companies. It seems they don’t want a lot of time and don’t want to spend the money. It’s more of a reactive, reactive approach instead of a proactive approach. You come from the cybersecurity world. So I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but would you say that most of us, individuals and companies alike, are pretty woefully unprepared for incidents or data breaches?

Jamie Thomas: For the most part, yes. As much as we have to deal with just understanding the complexities of it, yeah, I think most people it’s the last thing in their minds 100%. For us, it’s a huge business risk. So we take it super seriously and we know that all of our customers’ data has to be protected 100% of the time. We have to talk about it in company meetings, don’t ever let customer data leave the production environment, and never look at it in an unsecured way. We have to do all this stuff, whether it be the technology or the training to protect, to protect our customers’ data. For most of our customers, that’s literally the last thing on their minds.

Kevin Rosenquist: Totally. Again, back to the payments. You’re taking credit card information. So obviously security is an important thing. What do we need to do better in your mind as a former cybersecurity guy Someone who has to make sure that keep that in mind with your Cognito.

Jamie Thomas: I think, adopting two-factor type authentication across the board or device-specific authentication and realizing that that’s the necessity. It’s not “Oh, I really should do that.” No, it should be like you have to do it.

Kevin Rosenquist: But it’s annoying, Jamie. It’s annoying.

Jamie Thomas: It can be. But like if you do device type authentication where you’re like, as long as I’ve logged into a device I use on a regular basis, I don’t have to do this other thing. It’s not that bad. I think that’s where a lot of applications are going to where this understanding that, yeah, this is a new device, I’m gonna have to do some additional verification because I want to keep my data protected. But if somebody in China is logging in, they’re not going to be able to get in. If they try, I’ll know what’s happening. You want that. If you’re doing that properly, then you’re probably going to be able to keep your information safe as long as you’re working with a provider that does this well, that’s one of the reasons we started upfront. We said, let’s go with Microsoft. They seem to know what they’re doing. They have to deal with it for much larger customers than we do. That’s one of the reasons we’ve been able to offer HIPAA security for our enterprise customers is all the pieces, and parts that need to be there to do it properly are in place.

Kevin Rosenquist: I was going to ask you that. I did notice the HIPAA message on your website, and I was going to ask you what you guys do so Microsoft is what you feel is the best way for your business to stay secure and keep your customers secure.

Jamie Thomas: They provide the HIPAA-compliant hosting. Then we do all of the auditing and stuff that we have to do on our end to make sure we’re additionally compliant. But even then, we still have to educate our customers because they may integrate our platform with some other system, you know, not HIPAA compliant. So we’re like, okay. When you do this, just be mindful. These are some constraints, you can’t just email anybody in the world this data, you have to ask for consent first. There are a lot of rules, but I think at least in the world of medicine, the healthcare providers are a lot more knowledgeable because there is the law. The law doesn’t tell you a lot. It doesn’t prescribe a lot. It’s not that restrictive, honestly, but at least they’re thinking about it and they’re doing some of those pieces whereas in most other lines of business, people just aren’t thinking about it that much until there’s a breach.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, that’s just like the reactive thing. All right. Well, let’s let’s finish off with a personal note. I saw you’re a big fan of the outdoors and camping. Have you been out? I’m in Colorado. We talked about that. Have you been out here camping?

Jamie Thomas: I’ve not been out in Colorado. New Mexico probably is the closest. I spent about ten days out in the mountains part of New Mexico, beautiful. It was really enjoyable.

Kevin Rosenquist: Are you a camper? Do you have a tray a tow behind? What do you guys do?

Jamie Thomas: Tent, backpacking, so.

Kevin Rosenquist: Oh my gosh.

Jamie Thomas: There’s a beautiful foothills trail here in South Carolina. One of the few temperate rainforests in North America does that twice a year right now, some friends of mine. It’s been a great experience, but love getting outside and working in a corporate environment, this isn’t that corporate actually. But working for this is fun. It’s a lot of new challenges every day, but it sometimes is just nice to completely reset.

Kevin Rosenquist: Just turn it off.

Jamie Thomas: Absolutely.

Kevin Rosenquist: What’s the coolest place you’ve ever backpacked?

Jamie Thomas: Probably in New Mexico. That was probably the most profound because we were so isolated. There was nobody for hundreds of miles in some cases. So that was pretty profound. That was a long trip for me for ten days.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s long.

Jamie Thomas: We had one of our coworkers do the Appalachian Trail last year. I’m not going to do that. That’s way too much commitment.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a lot of commitment. We went to Peru a few years ago and they have like you can hike up to Machu Picchu. There’s like a huge backpacking trail. It’s like five days. We didn’t do it. We were too lazy. But I give people credit who are willing to do that.

Jamie Thomas: Awesome.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, Jamie, thank you very much for being here. The website is cognitoforms.com, so definitely check them out. It was great talking with you.

Jamie Thomas: Great talking to you too, Kevin.