The challenge for a startup is professional services versus product.

Professional services pays cash right away, and it's nice cash.

My one partner refers to it as crack.

You can easily get yourself hooked, and we kept fighting that.

And we built some really cool things on top of our platforms for some very well-known companies.

But that wasn't going to scale.

What we kept pushing on the product and ourselves was to keep getting the box smaller and smaller

so that we could focus on one thing and sell at scale.

My name is Ron Rock, the co-founder and CEO of MicroShare.

This is Code Story, a podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries who share in the critical moments of what it takes to change in industry and build and lead a team that has your back.

I'm your host, Noah Laphart, and today how Ron Rock took an everyday sensor from the IoT world and created sensing as a service. All this and more on

Code Story. Born and raised in Philly, Ron Rock put himself through college, working at Denny's as a

midnight chef and started his first business when he was in his

20s. He spent a lot of time restoring old furniture and cars. In fact, when he was a kid, he was the guy all

his friends brought their 10-speed bikes to, which of course changed to cars as they got older.

Post his other successful startups, one of which he sold to Accenture, he was intrigued by the

space at the intersection of cloud and mobile. He set out to combine disparate data sources,

and when he started to pursue this, he noticed that IoT sensors were going to put his

core mission on steroids. Four years ago, his company pivoted to be solely focused on IoT and commercial real estate,

to create smart and connected facilities.

This is the creation story of MicroShare.

MicroShare was something that the two co-founders, Tim Pinaugus and Charles Amal, along with myself,

...