My first experience of the Lisa was my father bringing home a piece of paper printed on an early dot matrix printer that showed a series of overlapping geometric shapes, some filled with black, some hollow outlines, and some grey filled with an even grid of dots. Up until that point, I had only ever seen typewriter-like prints on what was called “Candy Stripe” paper -- words rudimentarily arranged on rolls of paper with perforations on the edges.

That day, everything changed. My father was an English and Art professor at Brown who was involved with a technology experiment that later, through a series of convolutions, turned into what is now known as The Victorian Web. That experiment made it possible for him to bring home a Lisa.

A Paradigm Shift in Pixels

If holding the printed page was surprising, interacting with the Graphical User Interface (GUI) was even more stunning. For the first time, there were objects on screen that could be grabbed and moved, such as windows, folders, and pull-down menus, using a strangely intuitive little device called a "mouse.” The Macintosh would successfully commercialize this formula roughly a year later, but the Lisa was the pioneer that proved the mouse and metaphoric interface worked outside of research labs like Xerox Parc.

Looking back at the physical artifacts of that era, like the box of Lisa software floppy disks, the first signs of efforts to bridge the gap between physical offices and digital spaces emerge. Susan Kare’s icon design work imbued the Macintosh with more personality, humor, and character; the contrast is striking between her warm welcoming designs and the stiff coarseness of these early Lisa icons.

The Artifacts of Innovation

Holding one of those disks today is a physical reminder of how massive that leap forward felt. The icon on the label was a simple line drawing of the computer itself, an interim design of what was to come. 

The Lisa did have a staggering initial price tag of nearly $10,000, leaving the lighter, cheaper Macintosh to claim the crown of history. But for a brief moment, thanks to a dumb twist of luck, the cutting edge of human-computer interaction sat in my father’s study, and changed the way I looked at computers, screens, and design forever.

The Coming Dawn of Desktop Publishing

In the years following my encountering the Lisa, I attended a summer camp (Buck's Rock) that had an exceedingly unusual workshop, the Print Shop, devoted to handset letterpress printing. I spent my days laboriously assembling tiny lead letters into lines, separated by slim strips of lead (technically leads and slugs).

I also devoted days to a neighboring shop (the Publications Shop) in which we cut long strips of text (galleys) and pasted them (with rubber cement) into gridded pages, imaged them onto printing plates (usually paper but occasionally metal), and ran them on offset presses.

But the Lisa was like a portal into the future, it offered a glimpse foreshadowed into the future, a future I did not encounter for years.

When I did encountered the Macintosh, it was a like an old friend, the other end of a magical portal through time, now mainstreamed and widely available. And with it I was able to use tools like PageMaker and laser printers, and later QuarkXPress, FreeHand, Photoshop, and more all to realize the possibilities at which the Lisa had hinted.

Epilogue

The Lisa computer itself sits in a strange, half forgotten place. Sharing the same name as Jobs’ poorly treated daughter, whose he devoted years to disavowing, the Lisa computer was ignored, while Jobs denied it was named after her — admitting the truth only late in life.

Before Macktez, I worked in theater, mostly sound and lighting production. There's an adage every sound guy knows: when things go wrong, it's rarely the $1,000 component. It's usually the $5 cable. Check the connections first, and carry spares, because those connections are where things usually fail.

Where Problems Live

Macktez has spent 30 years helping organizations through complicated change: new facilities, security incidents, big platform migrations. That work means coordinating vendors, infrastructure, power, cooling, security, and most importantly, people and their daily routines.

After enough of these projects, you notice the adage still holds. The problem lives in the gaps: between two systems, between a system and the person using it, between the software and the physical room it runs in. The hard but critical work is finding that missing connection.

Broader Definition

Here's the thing. I push back when people treat "technology" as a synonym for computers and electronics. Technology is something broader. It's the application of knowledge for practical purposes: tools, systems, and methods that solve real problems.

A well-placed sign is technology. So is a piece of paper, or a door that locks. Sometimes those are the most elegant solutions available. And adding computers, cables, or software only adds another gap.

The Takeaway

The best solution isn't always the most sophisticated one. Before reaching for software, look at what's already in front of you. Check those connections, literal and figurative, because that's where things usually break down.

Sometimes a sign on a door does more than a new app ever could. Elegance often lives in simplicity.

What's the lowest-tech fix you've ever seen solve a problem that started with everyone assuming software was needed?

I want to propose a different theory: Architecture education is actually the ultimate generalist degree, a modern, multidimensional SPATIAL LIBERAL ARTS.

Just as the classical liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium) aimed to cultivate free-thinking citizens through grammar, logic, rhetoric, geometry, and astronomy, an architectural education equips people to read, reason through, and shape the complex environments we inhabit. Whether those spaces are physical, digital, organizational, or social, studio culture teaches a core method of humanistic inquiry: how to synthesize competing forces into cohesive, spatial form.

Redefining the Liberal Arts for a Spatial World

The idea that the liberal arts must evolve beyond traditional text-based subjects is not new. Robin Sloan (and others at Snarkmarket) have written extensively on the topic; likewise Jason Kottke has ruminated about updating a definition attempting to stitch together technology & the liberal arts. In his proposed Liberal Arts 2.5, Tim Carmody posed the question: "How do the liberal arts need to change to reflect new technologies, media ecologies, and social and political transformations (and crises)? If you were teaching a youth today what they needed to know to be a free person in the world, what subjects would be on your curriculum?"

These conversations around an updated "Liberal Arts" expand curriculums beyond traditional literature and philosophy to include disciplines like Mapping, Iteration, Reality Engineering, and Design Thinking, but I argue that there is already an academic discipline that does this and does this well: Architecture education. It sits at the intersection of these and other similarly modern disciplines. It is critical to understand, however, that architecture as an education and architecture as a profession are two dramatically different things. 

The Deep Roots of Architectural Synthesis

Viewing architecture as a broad, humanistic discipline is arguably a return to its oldest roots. In De Architectura, the Roman writer Vitruvius argued architecture sits among the liberal arts because it requires a synthesis of nearly every branch of knowledge. As explored in studies of Vitruvius and the Education of the Architect, he insisted that the architect must be "a man of letters, a skilled draftsman, trained in geometry, informed in history, well read in philosophy, understanding music, not ignorant of medicine, well acquainted with the law and grounded in the practice and theory of astronomy."

Today, the rise of design thinking popularized by IBM, IDEO, SYP, and peer studios has encouraged forward-thinking institutions to re-center architecture as a foundation for generalist critical thinking. The Harvard Undergraduate Architecture Studies program explicitly frames its curriculum around "teaching design thinking through making within the liberal arts context." Similarly, the liberal arts program at the SCI-Arc Liberal Arts curriculum treats spatial education as an independent cultural exploration designed to "disrupt conventional ways of thinking about architecture, space, and urbanism."

For the After Architecture: Education, Profession Tête-à-Tech on Thursday, October 16, 2025 in NYC, Nicholas de Monchaux, Professor and Head of Architecture at MIT, and I gathered with a number of architects for a discussion on the evolving nature of careers, the diversity of thinking that architecture can engage, and how the changing nature of careers for architectural graduates can help us understand the shifting role of education in our society and economy.  

Those present had studied architecture but chose to explore real estate development, technology, education, literature, industrial design, building cultural institutions, and numerous other fields. Together, we explored this idea of a broader definition of architecture: not as buildings, but as spatial, technical, designed for human experience. ​Many of us embraced architectural education, but escaped the traditional grasp of the profession to build novel, interdisciplinary careers. 

The prompts we sent ahead of the evening were deliberately personal: "How did architecture form part of your education? How do you rely on that education today? And how does it provide any of your superpowers — or your Achilles' heel?"

De Monchaux entered college to study astronomy, figured out quickly that it was not right for him, and chose architecture “because [he] knew it would let [him] do all the different things [he] wanted to do.” And decades later, running the architecture department at MIT, he more sharply expressed the same idea: “Architecture is the thing that I could have done that allows you not to figure out what you want to do.” (De Monchaux is about to move back to UC Berkeley, drawn by the unique opportunity to lead the College of Environmental Design [CED], the area’s premier institution for studio learning and critique embedded within a world-leading technological hub.)

This same desire, to leverage the malleability of the study of architecture to explore my own wide range of interests, was what brought me to the AA School of Architecture in London, which at the time exhibited an exceptionally quirky and flexible definition of what could be considered architecture (as well as having the word in the school’s name twice). And it also brought me to Kent Bloomer, the Yale Director of Undergraduate Studies, jazz musician, sculptor, and advocate for meaningful ornament whose multifaceted expertise paved the way for signing off on my time studying in the UK.

What Does "Spatial Liberal Arts" Actually Teach?

If traditional liberal arts teach us how to process language, logic, and quantitative data, what are the core habits of mind cultivated by a spatial liberal arts education?

1. Spatial Literacy

We live in a world defined by boundaries, flows, adjacency, and scale. Yet, basic spatial literacy is rarely taught in primary education. As highlighted in Kottke’s The geometric zen of solving Rubik's Cubes, the National Academies of Sciences notes that: "To think spatially entails knowing about space, representation, and reasoning. This is the kind of knowledge we tap into every day, when timing our commutes or taking detours, reading maps, and solving problems."

Architecture as a study elevates spatial literacy into a cognitive tool, teaching how spatial organization dictates human movement, social dynamics, and power structures.

2. Iterative Epistemology ("Thinking Through Making")

In studio culture, ideas are not evaluated purely as abstract text; they are tested through physical artifacts, drawings, models, and spatial simulations. Knowledge is gained through the iterative process of drafting, tearing down, and rebuilding. This requires a comfort with ambiguity and rapid prototyping that can apply equally to software design, policy making, and organizational strategy.

In our conversation, De Monchaux described this habit from the outside in. His Bay Area studio once shared space with a firm that had spun out of Google. After watching a table of architects work a problem, i.e.: “That’s not right, that needs to change, how could we reimagine this," the founder of that firm turned to him and asked, “How do you do that? How do you teach that?” What the tech founder was noticing, de Monchaux explained, was a trained reflex: “There’s a real depersonalization of problem-solving that’s taught, and a real focus on iteration. We did this, [now] how can we do it better?“

3. The Studio Critique as Rhetorical Arena

The architecture desk critique and formal review ("desk crits" and "juries") function as a modern dialectic. Students must present an idea, defend spatial decisions against multi-layered constraints, and adapt to critique in real time. It is rhetoric made spatial.

One of my most formative experiences in school was staying up all night before a presentation, building what I thought was a great model and generating pretty drawings. But when it came time to present, I muddled my way through the presentation, confusing the critics and failing to direct their attention to the parts of the design I most wanted their input on. A senior critic focused on an aspect of the design I hadn’t drawn or modeled, and our debate quickly grew heated, with my responses more defensive and aroused, culminating in them throwing up their hands and storming off to the next presentation. I was frustrated, angry, and confused, and spent the night and following day ruminating on how and why things had gone so quickly and drastically off the rails. 

I eventually grew to understand that it was my responsibility when making drawings, models, and choosing what to say to direct the attention of the critics to focus on points of my choosing. A failure to do that, or doing it too passively, resulted in confusion on everyone’s part. Initially it felt rude to assert where they should look and to what they ought to pay attention, but I learned in time that not doing so was far ruder and akin to showing up to an important presentation and just saying, “What do you think?” without any intro, guiding framework, or expression of vision and purpose.

4. Systems Thinking & Creative Synthesis

An architect cannot isolate structural integrity from environmental impact, historical context, human psychology, or material costs. Architecture is one of the remaining disciplines that forces students to practice broad synthesis rather than narrow specialization.

Why This Matters for the Future

We live in an age increasingly dominated by hyper-specialization and automated execution. Technical skills alone age rapidly, but the ability to structure messy, complex problems spatially and humanistically remains rare and valuable.

De Monchaux’s response is not to defend architecture as a profession, but to spread its pedagogy. At MIT, he is working through interdisciplinary design majors and minors to bring design education into every undergraduate major, on the conviction that it is “very useful no matter what you end up doing in the world, particularly in a world defined increasingly by other kinds of intelligence — some of them non-human — with which we also have to learn how to interact and collaborate.”

Whether or not a graduate goes on to design physical skyscrapers, an architectural education instills a way of seeing the world. It teaches that every system, be it an app interface, a transit network, a community garden, or a corporate hierarchy, have spatial design components.

Architecture education is no longer a professional training for builders. It is a foundational general education for the 21st century: a spatial liberal arts that prepares us to understand, critique, and construct the world around us.

An additional N.B. by De Monchaux: “As well as arguing that architecture provides a great vector to bring the liberal arts into technology, one could also accept a related argument made by Bruno Latour in his book Science in Action that engineering/technology and the creative arts actually involve nearly identical modes of creativity, but it is particularly in the cultural interest of engineers and scientists to not acknowledge this, and indeed to suppress it in their larger claims to technical authority. When, in our contemporary moment, the culture of science and technology is the leading driver of change, this is particularly essential to acknowledge and examine.”

If you appreciate the attention to detail lavished on the Vitsoe 606 System by Dieter Rams, love to find clever and elegant ways to enhance, augment, and take advantage of the opportunities it offers, and have been mulling over how to illuminate a wall of it with a magical, seamless glow, you are going to love this essay.

I don’t like glare or seeing bare light sources. I do like Vitsoe. And I so enjoy elegantly concealed lighting. It transforms a room from where I “pile my hoards of bric-à-brac” to one where I can “display a gallery of thoughtfully collected, cherished objet d’art.”

I couldn’t find the lighting solution I wanted out there on the market so have spent the last two years exploring, trying out parts, testing combinations, and refining what I feel works best. 

And I have some good news. 

Vitsoe shelves happen to be engineered with a beautifully sized flat channel along the front edge, under the lip that is just perfect for tucking away an LED strip. Unfortunately, I did not find any commercially available under cabinet lights that fit; nor is there a clean hidden path to route cables from the shelf to the back, so some effort and planning is required. 

But, I do have solutions to share, and the best part? No messy adhesives, no permanent damage, and zero sticky residue. With a little bit of ingenuity, thanks to the magic of magnets, you can readily and cleanly attach, reposition, and move these lights around however suits your fancy and the contents of your shelves.

The front lip of the wide bay is inset from sides, and so allowing for cables, connectors, and material thickness, it is perfectly sized to completely hide a 34-inch light strip. With a strip that size or smaller, you get all of the gorgeous, warm glow without any visible fixture or hardware.

Keeping in mind that all of my 606 components are white wide bay (90cm), all of these parts and measurements are for that size and material. If you have narrow bays or different finishes, you’ll need to make some adjustments.

Depending on your comfort level with a little DIY electrical wiring, I’ve put together two distinct paths: The Custom Pro Build (maximum elegance, ultra-sleek, totally hidden) and The Lightly Hacked IKEA Route (plug-and-play, no wire-stripping required).

Let’s break down what's required for each!

Best Route: The Custom Pro Build (For the Perfectionists)

If you want great light quality, totally hidden lights, and have the patience for sourcing from multiple vendors and connecting some bare wiring, then this route is for you.

A. The LEDs (Don't Skimp Here!)

I love a bargain, but have not had good success with no-name LED strips from Amazon or other sources. They tend to have poor, inconsistent color. I want colors to look good (meaning a 90+ CRI) and strongly prefer a warm color temperature (like 2700K). Many inexpensive LEDs drift green at warmer color temps. So, unless you want your shelves taking on a sickly tint, I encourage you to spend a bit extra on good stuff. I have used and can recommend aspectled.com or environmentallights.com. They both have responsive customer service if you have questions or need anything special.

• Option A: aspectLED Linear Dotless 90+ Strip
• Option B: Environmental Lights 2700K 2216MR

What is COB? You’ll see the term "COB," literally Chip on Board. Functionally, it means that the LEDs look like one continuous, glowing orange/yellow strip instead of a bunch of tiny, pixelated chips. If you use COB strips, then you don’t need a diffuser. If you choose non-COB, get a diffuser to smooth out the bright hot spots of the individual LED chips.

Example Order Spec: When ordering, I suggest you ask for as many custom “34in long COB light strips with extra-long, 72in 2-wire white leads in a white jacket, soldered on one end” as you have shelves to light. 

B. Driver

You'll need a way to power and control the LEDs. I use Lutron Caseta wall dimmers everywhere I am plugging in these shelf lights, I just need a compatible driver to power them. If you don’t already have a dimmer, however, you can get a driver with a remote control, or just get a lamp cord with an on/off switch.

• If you’re reading this, you probably don’t already have a suitable case to put this in, so I suggest you get a driver with a metal junction box enclosure. This is a 96W version, which supports up to four of the strips above. (They’re a little under roughly 20W each.)
• If you do already have a case, then there are many bare driver options. I’d suggest starting with a common model like this Magnitude Dimmable LED Driver; it is compact, well labeled, and the manufacturer has been surprisingly responsive when I have reached out.

C. Connecting The Wires

• Wago Lever-Nuts I like Wago. They’re elegant, classic, clean, and easy to use. If you’re a lover of Vitsoe, and don’t already have another wire nut/connector preference, then I suggest you start with the WAGO 221 series. This link is for a 20-piece assorted set, but a smaller 12-piece set, or even single couplers, will work fine for smaller setups. You’ll need one for each cable, meaning you’ll use three direct couplers (221-2401 in Wago terms) for the input side and something like the five port (221-415) to connect up to four LED strips.
• If you go with the metal junction box enclosure, you'll want something to grip and protect the cable as it passes through the holes in the enclosure. These 1/2in NPT Black Nylon Cable Gland are meant for waterproof environments, but look and work nicely here; they work especially well with round power cables like this 18 Gauge 3 Prong Replacement Cable. (But almost any bare lead power cord will do. You can even cut the end off of an extension cord if you know what you’re doing; this Lamp Cord is a simple, basic easy option in white to help it blend with the Vitsoe system.)

Before you start connecting it all together, make sure the equipment is disconnected from power. (That means unplug it from the wall.)

1. The driver has an input and an output. The lamp cord will be connected to the input with Wago couplers, using one for the hot (black), one for the neutral (white), and one for the ground (green) wire.
2. If you have multiple strips (up to four), use a Wago five way connector, and place the output from the driver in one slot, along with one wire from each LED strip. In the other Wago, place the other wire, and the other half of each of the LED strips.
3. Polarity (meaning which cord goes on which side) does matter, especially so on the LED side; if a specific strip doesn’t work, just reverse the polarity of the wires.

D. Mount it with Magnets 

Now it's time to connect the light strip itself to the shelf. Take advantage of the inherent magnetic material of the Vitsoe 606 by using a magnetic strip. Many kinds of magnets will do. I suggest a roll of this inexpensive, easy to use, readily available soft, flexible, magnetic strip.

Cut it down to a bit longer than 34 inches long, roll it flat, and adhere it to the LED strip. I suggest starting at the wire or lead end. Lay the magnetic strip adhesive up, peel back the paper strip, and likewise peel back the paper on the LED strip adhesive, aligning them carefully, and then pull off both paper strips as you slowly work down the length until the end. I like to burnish the strips down tight on a firm flat surface (careful not to damage the LEDs or connectors), and when done, I trim off any extra magnetic strip with a sharp knife or pair of scissors. I also leave some weights on top over night to help the two parts adhere. (I use a few nice books as weights.)

Now pop your magnetic lights beautifully into the inside shelf lip, pointing the LED Strips back towards the wall. Since they are magnetic, you can slide it around to experiment with its effects. I prefer to pull it as far down into the lower edge of the lip as possible, but you might prefer otherwise. 

E. Hide the Cord

There are a few ways to discretely route the lead or wire.

• Option A: Keep it loose. For high shelves, I route the wire over the top and down the inside corner of the shelf. For the rest of the shelves, I keep it on the underside and tuck it up tight to the side. Once it reaches the back of the shelf, you can follow Vitsoe’s advice and run it down inside the E track channel itself. (I like to put a standard aluminum stud in the next topmost hold to keep the wire up and hanging neatly down.)
• Option B: Use magnetic clips. If loose is too messy for you, then I’ve tried a few different magnetic cable clips and settled on two viable options: 
• • Magnetic Cable Clip: These run a little too big to be fully hidden, but they are the best I’ve found in white. I use them for lights and shelves I move around often. White seems to fall out of stock more often than black, so you may need to keep checking back until they are available in white.
  • I really like these metal magnetic cord holders, but they are a rougher, more industrial look. (They look especially good in other contexts, mounted on galvanized or unfinished metal.) They are a bit smaller than the clips above too. 
• Option C: Tape it. For the extra particular among us who are up for a little adhesive on their shelves, Avotaper attaches a very thin strip of adhesive to cables so it can be perfectly, neatly stuck to the edge of the shelf. The results are amazing. Note that they sometimes won't ship to the US due to customs issues. If you fall in love with this option, check back in periodically for updates, or contact them for current options.

Disclaimer: I really hope it goes without saying electricity can cause shock, fire, or death. Any work described here, you do at your own risk.

Good Route: The IKEA Hack (The "I Prefer a Pre-wired System" Option)

If the words "driver" or "Wago" make your eyes cross, you can still build a similar version using off-the-shelf IKEA under-cabinet lights. It's a little less bright, a bit cheaper, and slightly less elegant, but still works very nicely. 

The IKEA Shopping List

Luckily, Ikea’s MITTLED under cabinet lights favor my favorite light temperature: a cozy, warm white 2700 Kelvin. And they come in a modular kit of parts that works nicely too, with some clever configuration and caveats.

• 18in MITTLED LED Countertop Strips (504.554.27)
• 15in MITTLED LED Countertop Strips (104.554.34)
• ANSLUTA Power Supply Cord (301.214.11) Connects the power supply to the wall.
• VÅGDAL Connection Cord (704.636.00) Connects the LED strips to the power supply.
• TRÅDFRI Driver for Wireless Control (103.561.89) Power supply, or driver. This one is 10W, and a 15in and 18in together require 9.3 W so it can handle one shelf. To light more than one shelf, get the bigger 30W one which supports up to three.
• DIRIGERA Smart Hub (505.034.14) If you want smart home control and don’t already have a Matter Hub, this is simple and easy to set up.

One 15in and one 18in strip joined together are just a bit smaller than the front of the shelf and stay nicely hidden.

The Secret Sauce for the IKEA Build: Because the MITTLED strips aren't magnetic, you’ll still need something to keep them firmly stuck inside the shelf channel. Grab a pack of these 16 Feet Magnetic Strips with Adhesive Backing. 

The Installation Trick: Take these magnetic strips and stack two of them on top of each other right inside the groove/channel on the back of the MITTLED light bar, offset by about an eighth of an inch. Once you've got your double-stacked magnets in place, the top of the magnet is flush with the edges of the LED case. Place the magnetic side directly underneath the shelf, and slide the MITTLED forward until the edge corner catches right under the Vitsoe shelf lip. It should just tuck in. The combination of the magnet in the groove and the physical lip of the shelf keeps your lights locked tightly in position, even if the adhesive of the magnet unsticks.

One key note: These lights will be pointing down not back, so they are more visible. You’ll see them from the side and down below, and the light bleed will wash much more forward and front. For most uses, though, both the custom build and the Ikea hack solutions work nicely.

Which route are you going to try?

Contact me if you have any questions about the wiring or options. And if you do end up building one of these, tag me so I can see that glorious glow.

We covered everything from how I accidentally stumbled into technology consulting to the three core security practices that even small organizations should implement from day one.

This article includes the key themes we discussed, links to watch the full conversation, and the complete transcript below.

Topics Covered

• The unexpected path: How a favor to set up servers turned into 29 years building an IT consulting firm, and why my architecture background actually shaped how I approach technology problems.
• Security foundations that matter: The three non-negotiable practices every organization should implement early—password managers, multi-factor authentication, and secure domain registration—regardless of size.
• Trust as the competitive advantage: Why the real success of Macktez comes down to building and maintaining trust with clients, and how that shapes everything we do operationally.
• Scaling intelligently: The metrics we track, the challenge of growing a professional services firm, and how we think about the role of automation and AI in our work.

Watch Now

Watch the full conversation below, or watch on YouTube.

Full Transcript

Noah Landow: I think it's the kind of area that many organizations are fine, but just like insurance, if you sort of take a little extra time and spend a little bit of extra money early on, you're protecting yourself. It's the kind of thing that most organizations don't have that problem twice because it's so horrifying when it happens. But many have it once because they don't realize until after something happens that it isn't that hard to protect yourself, but it does require a certain kind of diligence and a certain kind of organizational consistency.

Pam Jordan: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Pivot to Profit. We have the amazing Noah Landow here. He has extensive IT knowledge, cybersecurity—but this is going to be a fun conversation. We're going to learn all about his journey. Noah, how are you?

Noah Landow: I am good. It is a beautiful day in the autumn today. I'm just—I am loving the weather, so doing very well.

Pam Jordan: And Noah is chilling in New York City, like New York, New York proper. So, super jealous, I love the city. So let me officially introduce you. Noah is the founder and CEO of Macktez, an IT consulting firm that has partnered with innovative organizations to solve complex technology challenges for more than 25 years. Noah also serves as board president of UnionDocs, a center for documentary art, and sits on the board for the Victorian Web, a pioneering digital resource for Victorian art and culture. He's a long-time advocate for creative communities and education with a career that bridges technology, design, and cultural engagement. Noah divides his time between Providence and New York City, continuing to bring thoughtful insight and creativity to everything he does. Amazing, Noah! I'm so excited. We've watched other conversations that you've had, so I'm just going to dive right in. Are you ready?

Noah Landow: Absolutely.

Pam Jordan: What did Noah want to be when he grew up?

Noah Landow: Well, depending on what age, I definitely wanted to be a fireman for a very long time. There was a long period there where I decided I drove around in a little tiny fire truck. And then I switched at some point to wanting to be a knight. And I have vivid memories of probably in middle school where I decided I was going to be a vampire knight. So, good indication that these desires change as you grow and, you know, being aware of the ever-evolving complexities of the world affects your ambitions for the future.

Pam Jordan: Well, I'm sorry to hear you did not turn into a vampire knight when you grew up.

Noah Landow: I'm happier, I think, with life than I would be if I was a vampire knight. So, thank goodness.

Pam Jordan: So what was little Noah, who wanted to be a firefighter and a vampire knight, taught about money? What was family taught, society, school? Money good? Money bad? Should you have it? Should you not? All of those things.

Noah Landow: My parents were academics. And interestingly, I mentioned at one point that the company that I run, Macktez, was my mother's maiden name. Part of the story behind that is my father's side was more academic—his father was a doctor—and my mother's side, her father and brother had started a company named after their grandfather. And so as children, it felt a little bit like the business side was on my mother's side and the academic was on my father's side. That wasn't quite black and white because my mother was also an academic. As a child, I felt like we had modest means. Academia certainly didn't equip us with wild, decadent lives. I certainly grew up comfortable and in Providence, Rhode Island—a wonderful town to grow up in.

And over the years, I think I've been fortunate enough to not have a shortage of money being a driving challenge in my life. I've been very lucky, and I think luck is an important thing to highlight in that. Some of it is family, some of it is circumstance, some of it is just the dumb luck of buying a bunch of Apple stock a long time ago back when it was very cheap and holding onto it for a very long time. So that did make a huge difference, and frankly, it's a substantial portion of our portfolio now. And so yeah, as a child, I think finance and business and all those were things that were kind of like a little bit secondary. I was most drawn to and excited about these ideas of creativity and explorations and design. My aspiration in college was to become an architect, which I did pivot out of relatively quickly. But I think in a lot of ways that love of what are the practical constraints… but over time, I think one of the great journeys of Macktez has been kind of realizing early on that I needed to learn how to balance books, I needed to learn basic operational things, I needed to run a board meeting. So there are evolving necessities of learning and knowledge to gain as you progress. Somebody once told me recently in the last 10 years that the primary job of a CEO, particularly an organization that's trying to grow, is to basically learn something new and then hand it off to somebody else continuously. I don't think I do that perfectly, but I certainly aspire to that and I try to maintain that as sort of, at least in broad strokes, a part of my job.

Pam Jordan: I love it. So let's talk early career. You did go to Yale for architecture, and then now that's not at all where you're at. So what was the driving force of that? Like where were you like, "Yes, this is what I want"?

Noah Landow: The pre-driving force to even before that is before I went to college, I did a bunch of arts and creative projects. I actually worked as a silversmithing counselor at an amazing summer camp called Buck’s Rock that is part of my resume. I ran a, or was part of a non-profit for about 25 years that did essentially scholarships to the camp. The camp has now become a non-profit in a wonderful journey of its own and I'm still tangentially involved there. But those early days as a silversmith for about 10 years, culminating in this summer camp, were sort of my pre-college years. And then architecture, I think as a field, was something I was drawn to. I did a lot of theater, a lot of theatrical design, and a lot of sort of like trying to shape the human environment. And so architecture for me was an opportunity to kind of learn about volume and space and construction and materiality and lighting and sound. Architecture as a career and architecture as an education are very, very different. I actually had a tech talk in our office just a few weeks ago specifically on this called "After Architecture," in which everybody in the room was somebody who had done an architecture undergraduate or graduate or some sort of degree and then did something else as their job. So it was 20 people filling the room specifically on this topic. But I think architecture is an amazing educational experience, but it's very different as a profession. As a profession, it is much more constrained by regulation and by contracts and by construction schedules, and I did not find that anywhere near as exciting. So after a couple of internships, I kind of veered off in a different direction and started working for a graphic designer and then a funny experience working as a graphic designer for a German design firm called MetaDesign in San Francisco in the mid-1990s resulted in me switching gears. And instead of doing design work for Hewlett-Packard, which is what I'd spent a couple of months doing, I was like, "I'd much rather have my clients be the creatives and do the technical work." It meant that I spent all of my time working with designers as opposed to all of my time working with Hewlett-Packard engineers. So I kind of jumped to the other side of the fence there a little bit, and then one thing led to another.

Pam Jordan: I love it. So when one thing led to another and you were like, "I'm going to start my own business," did you have in your mind that "I'm going to be an entrepreneur" or "I just want to be my own boss"? What was the motivation there for you?

Noah Landow: That's a great question. I actually started as a favor. One of my thesis advisors in undergraduate architecture was a partner in a design firm—a great design firm called 212 Associates that was based in lower Manhattan. And I had thought I was going to do design work for them and ended up in a sort of like weird series of coincidences. They had a member of the team who had bought a bunch of server physical stuff and had never gotten around to setting it up. This thesis advisor of mine was like, "Hey, would you mind basically doing us a favor for a couple of months and like taking on this project?" And I was like, "I don't actually know that I'm the right person for that, but if you'll pay me, I'll do it." And I did, and I turned out I was okay at it. And also, probably equally importantly, I identified other people who I could bring in for help, including my current business partner now. And over the years, I have found some wonderful people to collaborate with. So the long arc of that was I sort of almost fell accidentally into technology in New York City thinking I was only doing it for a few months, and then one thing led to another, of course. So I didn't intend to start off as an entrepreneur, although I did in my very early days of Macktez remember talking to a friend and saying, "Okay, so the one thing I don't want to be is bored, and I don't want to be doing the same thing over and over again. So I think what I want to do is like pick some new area to explore for the business every six months or every 18 months." And so the first year it was like, "What's an LLC? and what's an S Corp? and what's taxes?" So I spent a bunch of time learning some very basic things, and then over the years, that window has shifted obviously. After 29 years—which is what we're up to now, crazy—that is a very different set of topics that I focus on than I did 27 years ago.

Pam Jordan: You stumbled into entrepreneurship as a favor to help somebody and then all of a sudden, now we have a business. So in those early years, I'm sure there were good times and bad times, but tell me about one of the bigger financial wins that you remember where you were like, "Hey, wait, I can do this and maybe pay bills and still enjoy what I'm doing." What was one of those early financial wins for you?

Noah Landow: I think one of the early moments, probably in the first decade, was realizing that we had reached a point where we needed to hire a staff person. The early years were kind of a collective of three to five freelance consultants who were all collaborating on projects. And we reached a point where it occurred to myself and a few others that it would really make a big difference if we had somebody sitting at a desk who was actually like answering the phone and able to accept deliveries and to sort of coordinate. And I think that was a convoluted process—I think we, looking back, I would have handled that differently now than I handled it then—but we hired somebody who worked out fine for a while, and it was a very interesting kind of moment. It felt like, "Oh, we suddenly have an employee." And then of course that creates a significant number of ramifications as a business in terms of like you need to put them somewhere and you need to understand how payroll and all that other stuff works. So that was a 10-year process of education and exploration for sure.

Pam Jordan: I love it. Yeah, growing a team is a new stage in scaling. Because if it's just you and some contractors or some buddies making things happen, once you admit that there's enough going on that I can't do it by myself and I need help, it really makes you feel that "Oh, this is a business now. Like, I'm not playing." So it makes total sense that that first hire was like, "This is real, this is how we're going to go."

Noah Landow: I think it's also fascinating now, a quarter century later, because the line of what kind of work we would hire a full-time person to do versus hire a company to do, particularly an outsourced company or a SaaS offering, is very, very different. Obviously, the role of AI is a factor here, but also international factors, telecommunications—there are so many variables now that are quite different from 25 years ago. In some ways, I don't know that we would have hired a person if I was encountering the problems we encountered then today. I don't think hiring a staff person would have been the way I solved the problem. And I think that's interesting—it's sort of like as the landscape has shifted over those years, the kinds of tools available to solve problems have also changed dramatically.

Pam Jordan: Because the reach and access to talented team members, they don't have to be W-2s coming into an office in New York. They could be sitting in Central America, Europe, wherever. I love it.

Noah Landow: I mean, our last—probably half of our last five hires were not in New York, even though we're New York-based.

Pam Jordan: Yeah, well, and also New York labor laws are not fun and taxes are not funny either. So, I have a team member in New York and it was not a nice awakening to realize all the crap that came with that. So let's talk about Macktez. What is it doing now? How do you describe—like, what's the elevator pitch for it?

Noah Landow: The elevator pitch for Macktez is we are a combination of two things in the technology world. There are essentially two very similar kinds of things that happen when companies want to manage technology. There's something called a Managed Service Provider, or typically an MSP, and there's something called a technology consultant. A technology consultant typically comes in and tries to understand all the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of your organization and then helps you design, find, figure out solutions that sort of fit within your mixture of needs and capabilities. Those are typically much larger companies—management consulting is often a big part of that, so Deloittes and Accentures do a lot of this kind of work, but there's also groups like ours that are at the smaller end of the scale. Managed Service Providers tend to be organizations that take responsibility for managing the technology in a number of different ways. Typically that's managing the computers and the networks and the identities and the credentials—all these different pieces that sort of in the modern world allow companies to function, to share information, and to do business. Most organizations have some element of that, but most tend to be strongly in one area or the other. And we're a little unusual in that the way that we approach both of these are kind of multivariate and exploratory. In other words, most of the times we get involved with a client, it's because things are not working the way that they want them to. And so a big part of us coming in is sort of like untangling a mess or kind of figuring out some sort of beastly, terrible tech debt—something or other that doesn't kind of work the way people wanted it to. We actually have a book coming out, hopefully in the next month or so, called Tame the Tech Beast, which talks more granularly about this process. But we essentially come into organizations and then try to understand, in a co-managed collaborative way, what their in-house IT departments are doing, what their operations in HR and other groups are doing, and try to solve the problems that they're actually having. What that means varies significantly from client to client. We deal with clients that are 1,000 people and clients that are 20 people. Most of our clients, of course, are at the larger end of the spectrum—probably in the 50 to 150 range is most common—but we do have clients at both sides of that range. And a big part of what we do in that space, I think, is ultimately trying to help these organizations navigate where the world is now technologically, which is often very different from where they were when some component of their infrastructure was designed or bought or implemented.

Pam Jordan: This leads great into my next question because as a small business owner, we've got hundreds of clients that we work with—at what point does someone need to raise their hand and be like, "I need a managed service provider"? Because is it headcount? Is it revenue? Is it tech stack? Because there's so many stuck points within technology, and cybersecurity is a whole another beast. But like, at what point does someone need to raise their hand and be like, "Noah, I need help"?

Noah Landow: That is an incredible question. The answer is a little complicated. We actually finally, grudgingly realized we had to write a book because that answer had so many different variables. The book is an attempt to answer that comprehensively, but to answer that in a little bit of a flippant way, I think it depends on the culture. The culture of the organization determines often who within the organization wants to deal with what aspects of growth and preparation. If, for example, you have a CTO in a five-person organization, a co-founder, they might be extremely happy to just deal with this stuff on the side. But there are also CTOs that are like, "I'm not going to deal with that stuff. I want to stay focused on product." So obviously for like a SaaS or more technical organization. For a company in a more regulated industry, you'll often find yourself in finance or fintech or in health, you'll often find yourself with a founder who is sort of adjacent and having done some of these before says, "Hey, we really need to bring somebody in to handle this piece so we don't screw it up at the beginning and use a bunch of incorrect data storage models." So different industries, different businesses, of course, have different variables. But the more useful, less wishy-washy answer would be that by a time an organization hits about 50 people, in the current technology landscape, you probably want to have fixed a bunch of things that you didn't necessarily need to care that much about when you were five. And there's a few very simple things most organizations can do at the very, very beginning when they're only one or two people that make a big difference for scale. The two or three things that we talk a lot about are one: recognizing—and hopefully this isn't too specific, but to be super specific—number one would be taking a little bit of time to establish a safe and secure place to store credentials. The classic example of this is some sort of password manager. Something like 1Password or another company is great—doesn't really matter what company it is—but to have a product that allows you to store in an encrypted way, properly manage a set of shared credentials. That's number one. Number two would be whatever your organization is doing for email, web, collaborative service—typically it's Google Workspace or Office 365, but it could be others—to ensure that you've set that up by taking a little bit of time to read some of the best practices, watch some videos. Google and Microsoft are both quite good at pushing you to make a lot of good decisions now. Google is frankly probably a little bit easier for a beginner who's non-technical, but both have strengths and weaknesses. But in both cases, we would really encourage people to turn on multi-factor and to make sure that is correctly and properly stored for everybody in your organization. And then the third, something that comes up relatively infrequently but I think is sort of the Achilles' heel of a lot of security approaches, is to make sure that you have registered the domain names that you're using for your business in a way that the business owns them and that are securely protected—usually with credentials that live in one of these password managers. So that's sort of like the core foundation that even an organization of two or three people can do. You don't require an outside organization to do that. If you've done that, then that's sort of a good base foundation layer. As organizations grow, one of the great challenges often becomes procuring new hardware, not losing track of the hardware that you already procured, also kind of like maintaining and managing access to the correct bodies of information and beginning to bind the different pools of information that you have together. Often the point in a conversation where we get involved is either an organization has already implemented or intends to implement something called an identity platform. And an identity platform in the bigger Microsoft enterprise world is often called Azure or Azure AD or Active Directory, and a lot of our clients use different mixed—but JumpCloud is also a common competitor there. If you're somebody who's hearing those terms in your boardroom, then I would encourage you to reach out to a company like us because those are the kind of things where if they're implemented poorly, it can be extremely frustrating down the road. But if you're implementing them at the smaller end of the scale, the cost is reasonable. Those do, on the business side, incur some significant additional monthly recurring expenditure requirements, so there is a sort of an OpEx problem there. So one of the balancing acts is how to delay some of these investments until you actually need to spend the money. But this is one of those areas that's usually the first moment when somebody is like, "Hey, we really want to make sure that our Slack and our Google and our Microsoft and our Harvest and our Zero—that all these things are sort of connected to each other." And that's usually beyond most non—unless you're a very technical founder in the organization—it's usually beyond most people. So that's an area if you find that that's being talked about, that's a good like, "Hold on a second." The other is if you're looking around and you're like, "My team just doesn't have time to deal with this stuff," that I think is also a great opportunity. Sometimes that's five people and sometimes that's 50. It depends a little bit on your expectations of complexity and also how complicated your industry and business are.

Pam Jordan: I love the call out about passwords. Because we deal with people's financial information, right? And every now and then we'll get a client that'll want to give us their login to their bank. And I'm like, "Oh, please stop. Like, please, please stop. No, don't do it!" It's like, "Pause the recording right now! Don't say it! Don't—" you know, like, oh my gosh. And it seems silly, but there's so many nightmare stories, I'm sure that you could tell, of people just not having a tight lid on that and just being taken advantage of. Especially when employees leave—I've seen it get really ugly for some of our clients when key employees leave and they had access to things that people didn't know they had access to, and it just gets messy. So I love that that was your first call out, because as an entrepreneur, it does come—like, as the founder, it comes back to you even if someone on your team screws up like that.

Noah Landow: I think it's the kind of area that many organizations are fine, but just like insurance, if you sort of take a little extra time and spend a little bit of extra money early on, you're protecting yourself. It's the kind of thing that most organizations don't have that problem twice because it's so horrifying when it happens. But many have it once because they don't realize until after something happens that it isn't that hard to protect yourself, but it does require a certain kind of diligence and a certain kind of organizational consistency.

Pam Jordan: I love it, I love it. All right, so in the past you've talked about how Macktez success isn't about a secret recipe, but about relationships. Help us understand what that philosophy means and what does it mean on a day-to-day basis for you and your clients?

Noah Landow: So organizations like ours—and I mean that in a very broad sense—only really work if there's a trusting relationship between us and the stakeholders and the clients that we're working with. Almost by definition, the work we're doing requires us to trust them and them to trust us. That's sort of a complicated, intimate, kind of intertwined element to technology. And examples of that are somebody generally needs to have the ability to lock out people from accessing key resources. Typically that's the IT department, but of course, if it's like a junior IT person, you want to make sure that junior IT person isn't either accidentally or intentionally locking out the CEO or the ED. So there are some complicated things that—particularly for a non-technical founder—it might not be obvious how complicated some of those can quickly become. So I think recognizing that on some level actually trusting each other is sort of a fundamental requirement. You need to trust that the people who have been tasked with managing this stuff are actually trustworthy and capable of being trusted. So I think if there's a special sauce, it's something we talk about every time we have a leadership briefing—it's just this idea of trust. You know, you have to earn it, you maintain it. It's something that consistency helps build, but it's also easy to lose it. Little small things can happen that can undermine trust even sometimes things that seem silly at the time. That's, I think, special sauce is—there's nothing terribly magic about wanting to build trust, but I think that is an area that we do put no small amount of time and attention. The other thing is that, you know, we are a little unusual in that we sit in this sort of space where we're not exactly kind of a hardcore MSP. There are lots of organizations that are like, "We're an MSP for finance" or "We're an MSP for architecture," and there are lots of great, very effective, successful organizations that do that. I think a big part of us has been recognizing that our strength is not in these industry verticals or in a particular unit size, but it tends to be cultural. We're really looking for organizations that are dynamic, that are changing a lot. And changing doesn't necessarily mean growing in headcount; changing could mean the industry they're in is sort of going topsy-turvy underneath them. It could be an organization that's actually shrinking, it could be an organization that's building a new facility—but these organizations that are sort of navigating some sort of significant change are the ones where our team is particularly well-optimized to sort of help them navigate that path and kind of come out the other side. The other thing is that we often think about these relationships not in terms of like "Hire us and then we'll take care of it forever," but we often think of these as co-managed relationships where what we do and what the people inside the organization do ebbs and flows over time. Maybe we'll take on a bunch of responsibility during a very dynamic period, and then as things get calmer, maybe more of that responsibility and frankly expenditure shifts back to the client. Other times we'll bring in somebody at a higher level who will do a bunch of complicated conversations, and then that will also drop back down again and then raise even higher. So I think that variability is something we take a lot of pride in.

Pam Jordan: So as the CEO-founder of your business for 29 years, obviously you can't ignore your numbers and still be in business that long. So what are some key metrics that you and your leadership are tracking on a weekly or monthly basis—financial numbers, conversion rates, whatever—that really let you know "Are we good or are we not?" Like, what are some metrics that you yourself are putting eyeballs on?

Noah Landow: It's tricky. I think we're probably closer to a professional services business than probably any other super-oversimplified vision. I heard a COO at a professional services design firm many years ago make a comment of like, "You can have like seven great quarters and then one terrible quarter and suddenly like the projections are sort of all skewed." And I think we have a mixture of recurring revenue—our MSP work is typically recurring—and some of the technology consulting we do kind of falls under recurring infrastructure development project. But we also just do a lot of projects, and the projects of course are very difficult to predict; the pipeline is filled with a lot of uncertainty. So I think ultimately the numbers we look at are basically what we're billing, and what do we think we're going to be billing over the next quarter, and what is the size of the opportunities that are in front of us. Are any of them large enough? Many of our client relationships, many of our new opportunities are quite large. We don't tend to have many small clients. When we were much younger—when we were in our first 10 or 15 years—you know, a client might have been $10,000 or $20,000 a year, but that's probably below where most of our clients are now. I mean, we have a legacy of clients of course and we have some that ebb and flow, but typically I think the kind of relationships that we're often engaging are larger than that. That having been said, we will take a smaller client and a smaller project if it's really compelling and exciting, and particularly for an organization that has some sort of really compelling quality to them. But typically the numbers we look at are projecting what our plausible revenue, what our invoicing will be. We kind of want to keep an eye on what our workload is. I think we're lucky to have a really amazing team. One of the very interesting things to kind of struggle with in this moment in time is sort of what the interplay is between various forms of AI and staffing. So that's an area where automation—which is maybe what I would use as the more unambiguously positive side of AI—is a little more complicated, but using automation to sort of say, "Hey, we're doing this process a lot. Can we do this process in a way that it doesn't require quite so much time or labor from individual members of our technology services team? Can we find a way to streamline it? Can we find a way to help the client to do some of these tasks themselves when they want to do them, not to submit a ticket?" That's one of our big kind of goals for this year is sort of getting our head around those possibilities. It's difficult to quantify some of those; some of the KPIs are misleading in the sort of help desk and other areas. But there is sort of an anecdotal quality to like, "Hey, this is something that people keep being frustrated by, maybe that's something we should take a closer look at."

Pam Jordan: Maybe we should focus on that. I love it. And you have a book coming out, so what's the name of it again?

Noah Landow: Called Tame the Tech Beast.

Pam Jordan: Love it. And so who is the book for? Who's going to get benefits from it?

Noah Landow: Great question. It is intended primarily for sort of COO, CFO, maybe CEO, and then perhaps a CTO that is more product-facing, meaning a CTO that doesn't want to talk about the internal technology operations too much. And our hope is that people will read this kind of before there is a situation they want to fix or in the early stages of figuring out how to approach solving kind of a tangled messy situation. I think it's also relevant for an organization that's on the smaller side as well, an organization more like some of your viewership. And I think it's helpful to think a little bit about "What are the things I'm going to have to think about down the road?" One of the things we talk about a lot in our prospective client conversations is "This is a thing that you should think about, but not something you probably should do now, but you should think about reserving funds or time or attention to do this in 18 months or in 24 months. Where you are right now, this isn't a priority, but this will become a priority in some time frame." We also work with a lot of nonprofits where you sometimes need a couple of years of lead time to get a large expenditure into a budget. And so in those cases, it can be helpful to be like, "Hey, this piece of equipment is going to be nearing its end of life in two years, so next year is your last chance to do another project before that project comes due."

Pam Jordan: Got you, I love it. Well, amazing, I can't wait to see the book because it's definitely—IT and managed services is something that as you grow, you're not even—in my mind, it's not even on my horizon that it's something I'm going to deal with, and it's coming a lot faster than I realize. So I appreciate that. Noah, thank you so much for sharing your profit story with us. Where can people connect with you?

Noah Landow: Simplest place is just our website, Macktez.com—M-A-C-K-T-E-Z dot com. My email address is on there; you can also find me on LinkedIn. That works for people, happy to take communication either way.

Pam Jordan: Awesome, Noah, this has been amazing. Thank you so much. And that's all for today's episode of Pivot to Profit. If you need help understanding your numbers and knowing "Are you profitable? Can I make payroll?", just go to PamJordan.com and schedule a call with my team. Remember, it's not what you make that matters; it's what you keep. Thank you, Noah!

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