Build your business around a user obsession (and other sage advice)

Summary

In this podcast episode, Joe, Jeff and Antoine discuss JumpCloud, a platform that solves many problems for MSPs (Managed Service Providers) by centralizing identity access and device management capabilities.

Antoine shares his story of building MYKI, a decentralized password manager, and how it led him to JumpCloud’s focus on a passwordless world.

The episode also highlights the importance of MSPs becoming thought leaders in cybersecurity and partnering with the right vendors to provide the best services to their clients.

So listen in to hear what Antoine’s vision is for the future of MSPs and his advice for MSPs to build strong foundations for their business.

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Featuring

Antoine Jebara, Co-Founder & GM, MSP Products at JumpCloud

What is the problem you solve, and for whom?

In today’s fast-paced IT landscape, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face a rising number of challenges in managing their IT infrastructure. These challenges include managing users’ access to various cloud and on-premises services, handling multiple operating system vendors, as well as managing a geographically dispersed workforce.

JumpCloud offers an Open Directory Platform that helps overcome these limitations by providing a secure and frictionless way for users to access any application from any location and device.

Unlike legacy infrastructure built on Active Directory, which is limited to on-premises environments and Windows-based systems, JumpCloud supports all major operating systems and cloud-based applications.

With JumpCloud, organizations can manage their user identities, devices, and applications from a single cloud-based platform, eliminating the need for multiple disparate tools and reducing IT overhead.

By enabling SMEs to undergo an Identity Transformation, JumpCloud helps them to modernize their IT infrastructure, improve security, and increase productivity.

How do you help MSPs

JumpCloud helps MSPs by providing them with a unified platform to manage their clients’ IT infrastructure. With JumpCloud, MSPs can offer their clients a secure and modern cloud-based directory service that supports multiple operating systems, authentication protocols, and applications. MSPs can leverage JumpCloud’s multi-tenant architecture to manage multiple clients from a single console, simplifying their operations and reducing costs. JumpCloud also provides MSPs with a partner program that offers marketing support, sales support, technical certifications and special pricing.

JumpCloud’s Open Directory Platform enables MSPs to scale their business and offer new services such as identity management, access management, and device management. MSPs can also integrate JumpCloud with other tools and services in their portfolio, such as Professional Services Automation (PSA) tools, to streamline their operations and improve their clients’ experience. Overall, JumpCloud helps MSPs to differentiate themselves from their competitors, improve their clients’ security and productivity, and grow their business.

Your Company Website/URL

• https://cloud.jumpcloud.com/SGM-Podcast

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Transcript

Joe Rojas: Hello, everyone. I am Joe.

Jeff Loehr: And I’m Jeff, or was Jeff.

Antoine Jebara: I’m Antoine. Hi. How are you both doing?

Jeff Loehr: I’m doing great.

Before we go any further, I have a disclaimer. I’m actually not Jeff, I’m a deep fake powered by Chat GPT 5, or as we like to say, I’m not fake, just better.

Jeff started playing with the test version over the weekend, and he decided to let me take over his complete life because, frankly, I do everything better. And he also wants to stress that this was entirely his idea. There was no coercion involved whatsoever. And any pleas for help you hear in the background are him watching television now.

So this was an entirely voluntary takeover.

Joe Rojas: I’m so happy because you’re gonna work all the time now, and I don’t have to feed or pay you.

Jeff Loehr: We’re actually breaking into your system right now,

Joe Rojas: alright.

Jeff Loehr: Anyway, now that we’ve gone through the disclaimer, Do you want to introduce Antoine here?

Co-founder of JumpCloud. So co-founder GM of MSP Products at JumpCloud comes from MYKI, right? That’s the name of the company. You were the CEO of MYKI. And it was acquired by JumpCloud.

Antoine Jebara: It was.

Jeff Loehr: And now you’re doing cool stuff at JumpCloud. And tell us a little bit about yourself.

How did you get started with MYKI, and what happened with MYKI going into JumpCloud? Tell us a bit about your story.

Antoine Jebara: I was always interested in cybersecurity from a very young age, and I learned a lot in high school, and I carried that over during my university year and then after university, and I started consulting in the cybersecurity space.

And one of the big areas that was usually a pain point and found to be an entry point for different types of attacks was humans, which is still the case, specifically, Users’ interactions with passwords.

Jeff Loehr: You mean when people call you up, and they say, what’s your password?

And then the person gives them the password?

Antoine Jebara: Gives them their four passwords, right? Because it could be this or this. Try all four. They’ll work everywhere.

Jeff Loehr: If it doesn’t work at this bank, go to that bank, and one of the other three will definitely work.

Antoine Jebara: I mean, we joke, but it’s always a version of this that ends up happening, and it used to be worse in the past when MFA was not as enforced as it is to it today and when cyber awareness was not as mature as it is today. Definitely still a work in progress, but passwords have always been an issue because, as humans, we’re not designed to create strong alphanumeric unique combinations of strings.

Jeff Loehr: And I certainly am not. No, I can’t remember them either. My daughter keeps joking that, like all of her friends, their parents ask them for their phone passwords, and then they keep their phone passwords, and then she says, you’ve asked me for my password. All the time. And she said, what’s my password?

I said I have no idea.

Antoine Jebara: And most people are the same, and I built a product at MYKI to address this problem, not only for others but for myself as well. So we’ve always had a love-hate relationship with passwords in general.

Jeff Loehr: Yeah, it’s an excellent way to put it.

Yeah. Nobody likes it.

Antoine Jebara: No, not at all.

So passwords were a big issue. They’ve always been a big issue. And there were some products out there, enterprise solutions that were password vaults. Still, from an architecture and usability perspective, they felt more like an Excel sheet with a master password.

And we still solve problems and sometimes amplified problems because of that. You know, you get phished, the scenario we discussed before, and now instead of the hacker just having these four passwords, I just gave them. They have access to the hundreds of passwords in our enterprise vault.

So that was a problem. And specifically the user’s interactions around passwords. I don’t think that a password manager should rely on a master password that’s created, managed, and remembered by an end user to operate because you’re creating a single point of failure. You’re making it easier in some ways and harder in some ways, but like the trade-offs aren’t. Everyone should use a password manager.

I don’t think that anyone would deny that, but I believe they were, and there was room to improve. Yeah. And that’s what we did at MYKI. So we built a decentralized password manager, and by that, I mean the passwords are stored locally on the devices of the different users as opposed to being stored on our servers.

And users can unlock their vaults with biometrics or a local pin. Still, we built a layer of convenience on top of that by automatically having password sync in an end-to-end encrypted way between multiple devices you have. So you get some of the security benefits of an offline password manager and many of the convenience benefits of a cloud-based solution into one platform.

Jeff Loehr: And then you sold that to JumpCloud.

Antoine Jebara: 100%. So we focused on the MSP market because we identified that this was one of the markets that were most in need, not only for internal use but also for reselling. Because MSPs were starting to think about the deploying password management to their customers and thinking about how they will incorporate it into their stack without adding layers of complexity and increasing the number of tickets they receive for forgotten master passwords.

Jeff Loehr: Yeah.

Antoine Jebara: Which usually cannot be easily reset or at the time weren’t easily reset. So we built that specifically for MSPs. We also had a free consumer offering that focused on the MSP space and then grew that to about over 800 MSPs that had it deployed to tens of thousands of organizations. And then, I met the JumpCloud team,

Jeff Loehr: and it all changed.

Antoine Jebara: And it all changed shockingly, so I met Greg, one of the original co-founders, who’s our Chief Strategy Officer now, and Greg said, Hey, listen, we do identity access device management in one platform. That makes a lot of sense for IT admins and specifically for MSPs, and single sign-on is part of our identity and access management components.

We also have MFA and conventional access policies for Zero Trust. We have all that good things, but we’re missing a piece. And the missing piece is a password manager. We want everyone to move to a passwordless world today.

Jeff Loehr: Yeah.

Antoine Jebara: Still vendor locked sometimes by having specific vendors’ paywall SSO or just not supported.

And so people have to revert to using passwords; in that case, we had a JumpCloud. When I say we. At JumpCloud, we had to build relationships with third-party password managers. And that broke the experience because you had that tremendous unified platform that we’ll talk about in a bit.

But, then, for passwords, you had to go somewhere else. So he said, that makes a lot of sense. Can we do a deep integration? And that evolved over time. And then we were raising a Series B around the funding, and the JumpCloud team said, Hey, we’d like to acquire MYKI instead of just deeply integrating with MYKI.

And that ended up happening.

Jeff Loehr: That’s a great story. I love that.

Joe Rojas: That’s an awesome story.

Jeff Loehr: So now you’re with JumpCloud, and one of the things that we talk a lot about is understanding and getting really clear about the problem that you solve for others, right? Really understanding the problem for that market.

And as you said, you guys focus on MSPs. JumpCloud?

Antoine Jebara: We focus on SMBs, which are the end users, but we recognize that the MSP space is one of the fastest-growing spaces, and more and more SMBs are outsourcing IT capabilities to MSPs.

Jeff Loehr: Yeah.

Antoine Jebara: For us to gain some market share in the space, become the dominant player, and continue to grow quickly, we need to have a strong MSP game.

And today, our MSP channel is one of our fastest-growing channels that’s receiving tremendous investment from our end.

Jeff Loehr: And we’ve heard good things from MSPs, which is one of the reasons why we reached out to you. Several MSPs are using your platform, and everybody raves about it.

So you must be doing something right. Put it that way. What would you say the problem is that you solve? So if you’re an MSP, what was life like before working with you?

Antoine Jebara: So I’ll give you a bit of history and, again, then go back to where we are today, right?

Over in the mid-90s, late 90s, and early 2000s, you had your perimeter, which was your on-prem infrastructure. And this housed identities and identities, digital identities specifically, are one of the most important things we have today and have to treasure because it’s the representation of yourself in the digital world.

When an IT admin gives you access to something, they’re giving access to your digital identity, allowing you to access the resources you need to access. And in this perimeter, there was a house for identities called Active Directory, and you had all your identities that sat there.

Admins could give you access to different types of devices, different types of on-prem services, et cetera. It was all good. But over the last 15 years, we’ve moved to the cloud, which came with amazing things. Cloud applications, cloud infrastructures, authentication protocols to connect into an on-prem setup through VPN, you connect to wifi now to connect to the internet. So it’s become increasingly more complex and amazing at the same time.

Active Directory was never designed to give you access to that world, right? So many companies started building point solutions on top of Active Directory to give you access to different stuff like Single Sign On, MFA, VPN Radius authentication through cloud servers, et cetera.

And everyone absorbed these new technologies because they wanted to give their users access to this sort of new world that made them more productive, reduced their costs, made them more secure in some ways but less secure in other ways, et cetera. And now, as an IT admin and MSP, you must have an infrastructure to enable your customers to use everything available.

And what we’re saying at JumpCloud is that the same way we went through a cloud transformation, we now need to do an identity transformation to move from this old legacy way of doing things where you’re layering vendors on top of each other and trying to connect things into each other and to a cloud-native way that’s open in a way that gives access to users to any resource device, authentication mechanism, application, whether it’s on-prem or in the cloud, without the users having to worry about anything and without MSPs having to worry about the overhead of having that infrastructure built. And that’s what we do at JumpCloud. So we’re an open directory platform.

And I’ll explain the open term in a bit that allows IT admins to centralize identity access and device management capability in one unified platform that gives users frictionless access to any type of device, regardless of the operating system or any type of app application or resource, regardless of the authentication mechanism that’s underlying.

Jeff Loehr: So when you guys talk about identity transformation, you’re not talking about my takeover of Jeff’s life.

Joe Rojas: I forgot we were talking to ChatGPT 5.

Jeff Loehr: I know. Cause I’m so much better than Jeff at this, but what you’re talking about are the tokens and my IT identity.

Right.

Antoine Jebara: 100% every single attribute that makes up your digital identity. It’s a collection of things, even passwords that you use or attributes that represent your identity, right? So all of these things we’re saying you don’t have to worry about, like figuring out the stuff, connecting dots together, and enabling your users with different use cases.

You put JumpCloud in your stack, and it connects to whatever you have in place, hence the open part. So if you have an existing directory in place, whether it’s on-prem or in the cloud, we connect to it. If you have different sources of identity and HR systems, whatever you have in place, even a PSA for MSPs, we connect to that, and then we become the glue that connects all of the different things together.

Jeff Loehr: So I do wanna come back a little bit to the problem. What is a day in the life like for an MSP before they have you versus when they don’t have you?

What are the business problems that are coming their way all the time where now they say, oh, now I need someone like JumpCloud.

How do they know they’re in that space that you fix?

Antoine Jebara: So we solve many different problems by now because we’re touching on many different topics.

As you know, MSPs vary in degree of sophistication and integration, et cetera.

An average MSP usually has multiple directories of identities. One in every application that they’re supporting for their customers. They have their RMM, which is an identity of devices, but doesn’t tie back to the identity of users. They have cloud applications with their own directories of users that need to be manually updated, right and left.

Then you have documentation systems that help you track what exists across the board and a series of integrations that enable different use cases. If you want to allow users to log into a VPN, you need a protocol and a service that enables you to use that to log into a VPN. If you wanna do radius authentication, you need that as well.

So you have all these tools and systems allow you to do what you do, but they’re expensive. Because you need to have multiple vendors to be able to get there. They’re complex, very complex.

Jeff Loehr: Just so I understand, all of these vendors are tying everything together, is what you’re saying. So there’s all of this, like Zapier-type connecting stuff that requires a lot of manual labor.

Antoine Jebara: So you have that, right? And then human processes, which tend to be the most common ways for people to do things like take an easy use case, right?

You have an employee that’s leaving one of your clients’ organizations.

Yeah. This employee has access to stuff. Stuff that you know about and sometimes don’t know about through shadow IT. Hence, the way you do things is you go to your documentation platform very frequently and figure out, okay, this user has access to these seven different applications. Plus, they have these three devices in their RMM.

And then, you go and manually start deactivating that user’s access across the board. Now sometimes you have some sophistication built in. You can turn off some of the cloud applications in one go if you have an existing directory. If you’re using a password manager, you can also stop all access to passwords in one go.

If you have an RMM that’s well set up, you can deactivate the devices quickly if you need to. But it’s manual work, and it’s error-prone.

Yeah, it’s expensive because you do it all day long, and there’s a disconnect between where we are today and everything happening around us. We’re talking about Chat GPT, like this level of sophistication and how manual some of these actions are.

Jeff Loehr: And I just wanna pause ’cause I think that’s true. We put these manual processes in place, and I think we often don’t really understand the cost of these manual processes, right? Like you might not be writing a check for it, but that opportunity cost of having to spend your entire day going through and changing all these things, managing these identities.

And managing manual processes. And then, of course, manual processes are always prone to error, right? Like one thing we know about manual processes is someone’s gonna mess up, right? So you’re always going to have to go back and redo the rework

Joe Rojas: Cause you are gonna be halfway through the deactivation of that user. You’re gonna get an emergency ticket. You’re gonna have to stop doing what you’re doing. You’re gonna have to run over. Take care of that, especially if you’re a small MSP, you’re a small MSP with four or five people. It’s just coming at you.

It’s coming at you at a thousand miles an hour, right? And then you are trying to go through all these manual processes and must stop what you’re doing. Go figure that out. And then you need to remember cause now your a thousand mile an hour day doesn’t slow down.

Antoine Jebara: You have to do this between password reset tickets. Yeah. 50 a day sometimes for different types of services, some of which you don’t even remember how to log into because you haven’t used them in a while, or they were supported by someone on your team that left the business. So you have to go back and study. But what it comes down to in the end, it’s freedom of choice because if you wanna lock a company into a hundred percent Microsoft ecosystem, where you only use Microsoft Tools, Microsoft teams office suite, windows, devices, et cetera.

Then that’s, that might not be very hard actually. You have tools that allow you to do that that are offered by Microsoft, making it easy in many cases. But you cannot easily give your clients the freedom of choice, the freedom to choose any type of service they want to use.

Zoom versus Google Meet versus Microsoft Teams. Different operating systems, Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android, are always a headache. And we hear it all the time. We don’t do Mac, we don’t do iOS, and we don’t do mobile in general. Why don’t you do that? I know because the tools that you have today are very limiting.

Yeah. And it’s not easy for you to expand your horizons and add new things. It has a cost to it. And if it gets you a thousand dollars of new recurring revenue, it will cost you $5,000 to implement, train, and certify everyone on your team.

Joe Rojas: It’s not worth it.

Antoine Jebara: And it’s not a good business decision.

Jeff Loehr: No, that’s definitely true. So what is your program for MSPs?

Antoine Jebara: So we have the JumpCloud Open Directory platform. Yeah. And then we have a product specifically designed for MSPs

Jeff Loehr: called JumpCloud. Oh. We like products specifically designed for MSPs. Now you’re talking our language.

Antoine Jebara: And I can tell you how we built it. So we noticed that many of our users were actually MSPs and were using our single tenants to sign up for different organizations.

Over time we started talking to these MSPs because our persona is an IT admin, and who’s a better definition of an IT admin than an MSP?

MSPs expect certain things. They expect multi-tenancy, so a single pane of glass gives them full visibility and control over different types of organizations and templatization of things so you don’t have to repeat things over and over again.

That’s one thing they expect a partner program that’s gonna support them in selling marketing, training their teams, and just like being successful in positioning their business to new customers, not just the existing ones, and improving their existing operations for existing partners. And they expect to be built a certain way as well because it’s a partnership. It’s not a sales transaction.

So we’re both invested. We’re gonna provide the expertise, the solution, the support in general, and they’re going to provide the on-the-ground expertise, the thought leadership within their customer base. It will allow them to broaden their horizons, grow their businesses, and continue being more and more efficient.

And that’s exactly what we launched. So JumpCloud for MSPs is a multi-tenant platform that gives you access to the full JumpCloud suite of tools, the Open Directory platform. And it comes with a partner program with marketing support, training, support, certification, and education and preferential pricing for MSP Partners.

Jeff Loehr: That is awesome. So we’ll have to make sure that all of our people have some access to that.

So, you gave us a link back to the program. Is that for them to sign up for the program?

Antoine Jebara: Yeah, it should. And they can try it for free. They get 10 free users for life that turn into NFR licenses after,

If they become JumpCloud partners, that’s how we build the company. We’ve always had 10 free users. You just go in, use all of JumpCloud, and try it. Figure out if it works for you. And if you think that it will help you continue growing your business, like increasing your revenues, reducing your costs, and improving security, then let’s have a conversation.

We value great partners. We think that if you surround yourselves with the right people, there’s nothing to stop you. And if you do the opposite, it’s the best way to ruin multiple keys. People’s businesses, not just ours, are partners, so we thoroughly vet new partners.

We wanna make sure that every single person that we talk to really sees the value in what we have to offer.

Jeff Loehr: I think it’s recognizing that everybody’s putting their business on the line. And when we talk partnership, there’s really that element of you that can destroy my business.

I can destroy yours. We can make our brands look terrible. And it’s definitely good to stay on the right side of that equation.

Antoine Jebara: And we sometimes forget that because MSP sales motions within SaaS vendors often turn into straight-up sales conversations.

Like, let me try to close this deal. I wanna get this partner in, and they’re in, and then we’re good afterward. That’s not it. If you do that, just sell direct. Why would you sell at a discount for someone who will abstract the end customer layer one layer down? It doesn’t make sense. The opportunity is huge.

Just embrace it. That’s something that I think about all the time, and I feel like we tend to forget and really have to refocus on this all the time.

Jeff Loehr: Yeah. I think we do forget how big the opportunity is, right? So we’re always, we call this operating from a perspective of abundance rather than scarcity.

We hear MSPs talk about their concern about competition, and we’re like, guys, you’re really not in competition. The market is growing. There’s plenty out there. It’s not about competing. It’s really about putting together the best program for the customers so that they’re getting the desired results, right?

Joe Rojas: Our view is that agnostic is where MSPs die. So the more narrow and focused you get right, the faster you’re gonna grow and the more you’re gonna put yourself in a category of one. So you’re really not competing with anybody else. You are providing something nobody else can, which is why we’re having this conversation. Right, because what are the things that you can tell us, Antoine, that help those MSPs get into that category of one?

Antoine Jebara: You have to obsess about the end client. This is very important, right? Ultimately, you’re providing services and if people are delighted with what you’re offering, you’re gonna continue growing.

There’s zero doubt about that. You’re recession-proof, you’re everything-proof. And then more contextually, I would say cybersecurity is not something you do on the side anymore. It’s not a Oh, and yes, we have a package for that. Cybersecurity is core to your business because people come to you because of the increasingly complex nature of IT, but specifically the increasingly complex nature of cybersecurity.

So they expect product leadership. They expect you to be able to show them the way, and there are ways to do it because a set of vendors that you deploy will do a lot. But it’s not enough because security is like a contract you need to have with your customer where you say, I’m gonna provide you with the thought leadership, with the know how, with the tools.

But you have to embrace it. You have to accept that you have a role to play in this.

Jeff Loehr: You mean you, the client?

Antoine Jebara: Yes. 100%. And I think that an MSP doing that if they’re able to Hyperfocus about the end client. They’re able to hyperfocus on cyber security in general and make sure that they’re very like knowledgeable about what’s happening in the space and where they should be if they’re setting the expectations straight with their customers when it comes to how they’re gonna actually partner together to improve their IT and security posture.

And if they surround themselves with the right vendors that will enable them to provide the service they offer.

Jeff Loehr: So is that how you see MSP evolving in this cybersecurity context?

Antoine Jebara: For sure. It has to be because if you think about it. The space now is nebulous.

You have so many different things going on, right? If you’re an SME, a dental clinic, a small legal firm, or a print shop somewhere, then you might be doing your job amazingly well. But your job description as any team member is not IT, not cybersecurity.

You’ve been outgunned for the past 15 years at this point in time. It’s just absurd. You shouldn’t even try to do it. So if you’re not gonna have an IT team in place and just invest in this and know how to hire these people and just be able to build that IT strategy in-house, then your best bet is to either fully outsource to an MSP.

Or do a co-manage setup if you have a person in place that you think is good on the ground, et cetera. So yes, I absolutely think that this is how things are gonna continue to evolve more and more. In my opinion, SMEs are gonna outsource outsourcing to MSPs.

Jeff Loehr: And one of the things I like about what you’ve said is just this idea of MSPs becoming thought leaders, and I think.

Regarding cybersecurity, it’s gotta be more than just the IT solution. I think JumpCloud sounds great, but there’s also the education around don’t use the same four passwords for everything you do. When somebody calls up,

I remember we had this phishing problem at a company I was with, and all the password managers in the world wouldn’t have helped because she got this email and transferred money on the instructions from the email. And the email was fake, right? And so I think that MSPs have to step into that space of thought leadership and helping their customers, their clients, and their users, understand how to navigate this nebulous world of cybersecurity and how it all works.

So I think that’s a very interesting observation.

Joe Rojas: Yeah. I also like what you said about co-management.

Many MSPs are a little leery of co-management, and I think you really have to start stepping into and creating offerings for that space, right? Because that co-managed space is popping up more and more because even people that have 500, a thousand seats, they’re seeing.

We have a full internal team of eight people, but we’re not enough. It’s coming at us, and it’s coming from every direction. We need more wagons.

Antoine Jebara: Many times, I hear some of our partners say, yeah, this is a co-managed type of deal we’re trying to get into. Like our goal, let’s just get in, and we’ll get the local guys out once we are in.

That’s not the right mindset. No. The best way to grow your business is by having other people do your job, and what better job than to have someone literally paid by the client to do a big chunk of what’s expected of you.

Joe Rojas: Yeah. And it’s great because that’s MRR, which requires the tools, training, and thought leadership, but not brute force.

I love what you said, Antoine, and let somebody else pay for the brute force work. There’s an opportunity to monetize, make some real revenue, and grow as you expand into this co-managed space because it will happen more and more as maintaining your cybersecurity posture gets more complex. People are going to be reaching out to experts. And if you say, look, I only work with that dental clinic, right? And I’m an expert in all the different kinds of attacks for dental clinics, then you become a category of one. Whether that’s for dental clinics or veterinarians, it doesn’t matter.

It’s what are you amazing at and obsessing about the client.

Jeff Loehr: Obsession of the client. I think we’re gonna have to quote you on that one, Antoine. Cause I think that’s also our focus on this obsession with the client and delivering that amazing client experience, making sure that they are delighted in getting tons of value.

And you’re right. That’s just what makes you recession-proof. Make sure that you have that MRR coming in regularly. And I think, really, to do it, you need to have the right partners and tools in place to delight the customers.

And to go back to what we discussed before, I don’t think you can do it with a series of manual processes. I think if you’re spending all of your time using manual processes to do things that are otherwise better done with an algorithm, it’s going to be really hard to blow your customers away.

Antoine Jebara: 100%. And that’s just like business sense, you know? But it’s just that in the MSP space and IT space in general, automating things is so much more complex. It’s been in the past, right? And that all started because of a mismatch between different technologies and a rift that happened without a shift having happened at some point.

And I think many of our IT partners are still suffering from that. Still, like very transparently, I think that today, partners that use an open directory platform like JumpCloud, for example, have a clear advantage over other types of MSPs because you can get this automation. After all, you can reduce the number of vendors if you choose to because you can connect us to different types of systems and answer every customer request with Yes. I think that might be possible.

Let me check. And then you can get back to them 30 minutes later saying, I just enabled that because I’m just equipped to do that. Yeah. And I think, yes, that’s from a tooling perspective and positioning yourself for technical success, I think that’s very important.

Jeff Loehr: I have one more question for you, Antoine. I noticed you were on the Forbes 30 under 30 List. That’s pretty impressive. I’m only five months old, so you know I’m much better at that. So what I did wanna ask you about though was the 30 under 30 and just the short story there, so was that for MYKI?

And what happened there? Cause that’s actually pretty cool.

Antoine Jebara: It was unexpected. And it was for MYKI as well. We never optimized for these awards, but we got a few along the way. If you’re doing the right thing, have strong convictions, and think you’re like helping people improve in general, you get noticed.

Yeah. And then, depending on how noticed you get and chance involved. You end up on lists like this one. So I’m very glad to have been like it’s something I would’ve never expected. And I’m very glad that I was on the list,

Jeff Loehr: That’s brilliant. So for anybody out there, any MSP who’s starting to grow their business, do you have any advice, like business advice, anything that you would say you wish you knew when you were starting your business or a perspective you can offer?

Antoine Jebara: Hyperfocus on the end client. That works everywhere, not just in the MSP space but especially well on the MSP space. I would say don’t over-invest in building complex technical setups before you get product market fit like understanding the pain points of your prospects and customers and building a strong business with strong foundations.

Don’t tie yourself up to different types of technical people, et cetera. Limitations. Remain very agile, and iterate. Don’t be afraid to test things that don’t feel comfortable. And if you keep pushing and really keep thinking positive thoughts and like constructively in general, then your chance of failure, whatever that means, decrease more and more over time. And that’s what you want at the end of the day.

Jeff Loehr: I couldn’t put it better myself. I love that.

Focus on the customer, understand their pain, and develop solutions around that. I love it.

Well, Antoine, it has been a pleasure chatting with you.

Thank you for coming to our podcast. We will have links to their amazing product in the show notes. And we will also be adding JumpCloud to the SGM directory. So if you’re one of our MSPs, you can find more information about JumpCloud there. And that’s it. Thank you very much, Antoine.

Great again to chat with you. Joe, have anything to say to end the podcast?

Joe Rojas: Absolutely. As usual, Remember that You Are Loved.