Meet The Disruptors: Vadim Vladimirskiy of Nerdio On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Most limitations are in our heads. We usually perform relative to what we think is possible to achieve. Feats that seem impossible are ones we never even attempt. Even if we do attempt these feats, we fail because we know they are not possible.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Vadim Vladimirskiy.
Vadim Vladimirskiy is a visionary expert in the creation and evolution of innovative cloud IT management platforms for the remote work era. He is CEO and co-founder of Nerdio and empowers companies of all sizes to deploy, manage and optimize virtual desktops in Microsoft Azure.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
My family emigrated from Ukraine to the U.S. in the early ’90s when I was 13. In my freshman year of high school, after learning the lay of the land (and the English language), I recognized my passion for technology and decided to make it my career. An entrepreneur from the get-go, I started my first “IT consulting company” my junior year and earned my first taste making “real” money at $25 per hour.
While I was pursuing my bachelor’s degree in computer engineering at Northwestern, I sought out new technologies and experiences, and even embarked on a startup endeavor called Level2 Storage, a data hosting company that provided secure online backup to SMB customers. All these experiences allowed me to gain valuable skills and expertise in areas like networking, backup, and managed services.
After a couple of years running Level2 Storage, our customers brought us to the realization that they wanted us to handle much more than backup. They wanted us to handle all their servers instead of having them sit in a closet in their office. This is how Adar IT was born in 2007 and why we engineered a novel approach to managed services at the time via the cloud.
By 2010, I completed my MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, and started building Adar full-time as a leading, cutting-edge managed service provider (MSP) with an unprecedented IT delivery model: a complete, virtual desktop-centric IT environment hosted in a private cloud. Building this company was one of the best professional experiences of my life. In the early days, the company needed my attention every second of every day. Eventually, little by little, I could take longer stretches of time to be away until we grew the entire organization to become entirely self-sufficient.
This allowed me to focus my attention on new opportunities in desktop virtualization and IT management presented by the evolution of public cloud technologies, and in 2016 I founded Nerdio, a SaaS company. With Nerdio, we were able to take the model and technology we had built at Adar and apply it more broadly to Microsoft’s public cloud Azure to deliver other MSPs effortless automation to better provision, manage and optimize their IT environments.
Starting out as an MSP owner myself with Adar, we had the right foundation and expertise and quickly gained traction with other MSPs who recognized the cost and time savings available with Nerdio. And they weren’t the only ones. In 2018, we were selected for a game changing opportunity to work directly with Microsoft ahead of their 2019 GA launch of Windows Virtual Desktop (now named Azure Virtual Desktop) to engineer support for the new service into our product.
This was a huge moment in our company’s trajectory and momentum — with the GA introduction of Windows Virtual Desktop, we evolved to support not only MSPs but also enterprises who were looking to simplify deploying and managing very large deployments while keeping costs low.
The pandemic only accelerated our adoption because VDI services like Azure Virtual Desktop emerged as ideal solutions for securely enabling remote work, and our Nerdio Manager products emerged ideal for any company looking at Azure Virtual Desktop. We also support Microsoft’s Windows 365 Cloud PC which was introduced this past July.
Today we help organizations of every size and vertical be successful and save money running virtual desktops in Microsoft Azure. Nerdio has employees all over the world, our products are used in over 37 countries, and we serve over one million users.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
At Nerdio, we believe strongly in the concept of every individual using a virtual desktop capable of providing them with their optimal work interface and online environment.
We are in the early days of mass desktop virtualization — with over one billion Windows devices operating in the world, only a small percentage of those are virtualized. With Microsoft’s significant investments in their virtual desktop offerings, Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365, the market is starting to realize something we have believed for years — that this technology is the real deal, making our vision possible at scale. To support this, I’ll share that in less than two years of product availability, our Nerdio Manager products have already reached one million users and we believe we are just scratching the surface.
Cheaper licensing costs, easier management, and up to 80% lower Azure compute and storage costs are the reasons why our business is booming and why we’ve seen tremendous interest — because we’re truly doing something different in the space. We built our Nerdio Manager solutions from the ground-up as true cloud solutions. Legacy virtual desktop technologies were created before the cloud and certainly not exclusively for the cloud, so they often must be retrofitted to try and afford a better user and management experience.
Powerful automation in the forms of auto-scaling and image management are some of the most easily recognizable differentiators for us in terms of disrupting desktop virtualization. Because Azure is priced on a consumption-based model, it can be difficult for IT professionals with little Azure experience or short-staffed IT teams to understand and manage consumption and as a result cloud costs can be unpredictable.
With Nerdio, onboarding existing Azure environments or building completely new ones are easy and don’t require specific or deep knowledge of scripting languages or even the Azure platform. We are making deploying and managing virtual desktops accessible for all companies and lowering the technical complexity and acumen it typically takes to see substantial ROI when implementing this technology across a workforce or organization.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
One story that sticks out in my mind happened when I was working as an IT consultant in the early 2000’s. A client’s hard drive needed to be upgraded to a larger size and I was using a program called Ghost that could be used to clone the old (smaller) hard drive to the new (larger) one. As I set up the cloning process and pressed ENTER to start, I instantly realized that the new, empty hard drive was selected as the source and the old one that contained all data was selected as the destination. I immediately tried to cancel the process, but it was too late. Within a split second all data from the original hard drive was gone and overwritten with the new blank one.
The feeling of making such a stupid mistake and causing an executive to lose his work data was terrible. And I never forgot it. Since then, I’ve been extremely careful (some would say obsessively so) whenever there is even the slightest chance of irreversible data loss. I always triple check the settings and even get a second pair of eyes before hitting the “go” button on any process that could be disruptive. This incident was also one of the reasons I started Level2 Storage, which was a company that helped organizations protect their data from loss or corruption. I wanted to make sure that the mistake that I accidentally made would not be catastrophic to others if it ever occurred.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
There have been so many people on my entrepreneurial journey who have inspired and supported me and continue to do so. My parents have always instilled in me the attitude that there is nothing that’s out of bounds. All it takes is setting a high bar, creating a plan to achieve it by working backwards and breaking it down into small steps, and then relentlessly executing your plans without being overly impacted by setbacks.
Teachers and professors in my academic career encouraged me to believe in myself and take risks. One specific example I always remember occurred when I was 13 or 14 in 9th grade algebra class. It was my first school year since emigrating to the US and I was struggling with learning English. Math was the one subject where I felt confident because lack of English wasn’t impeding me from getting good grades. However, at some point during the year we got to a section with “word problems.” I received a C on the very first test on this unit. I’d never had a C before in any class, only As, let alone in math. I was very discouraged. The math teacher (Dr. Cohn) pulled me aside after class and said that he knew how good I was at math and that the C on the test was only the result of me misunderstanding the word problems because of my still-improving English. He said, “I guarantee you, in six months you’ll be the best student in the class, and everyone else will be coming to you for help.” This gave me a great boost of confidence and the high bar of being “best student in the class.” I was fortunate to achieve this status not only in 9th grade, but pretty much through the rest of my high school, college, and graduate academic career. A bad grade that could have broken my resolve turned out to be a source of inspiration for me due to a kind word from a good teacher.
Throughout my career I was surrounded by people who were supportive of me and who challenged me to think bigger. There are too many to enumerate, but without them I would certainly not have achieved what I’ve been able to so far.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Disrupting an industry with innovation that improves the customer’s experience, reduces costs, or increases efficiency is general viewed as positive. These disruptions often come as a result of technologies or novel ways of thinking about systems and figuring out ways to drastically simplify or otherwise improve them. Disruption for the sake of improvement is good.
On the other hand, disrupting anything, including an industry, for the sake of disruption itself is likely to be counterproductive. It’s not enough to do things differently. Doing things differently is only good if it is somehow beneficial to the participants of the industry (e.g., customer, suppliers) not just beneficial to the disruptor. For example, disrupting a supply chain causing limited supply of something that has high demand will generally increase prices and benefit the disruptor if they have supply of the good or service, but it hurts the rest of the industry.
Can you share 3 of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
1 . As an entrepreneur, seek others’ input, BUT don’t base decisions on what others think is possible or not possible. The best inventions are those that everyone thought were impossible.
When starting my previous company in the early 2000s, I solicited feedback from a well-known industry expert about a specific technical implementation of server virtualization that I wanted to use. He told me that it was absolutely impossible to make it work at scale and still make a profit. I was young and stubborn, and happy that I was. Because this was the foundation of the business that worked very well technically, without any of the issues that he was concerned about.
2. Innovation is a process and can be consistent and predictable. Many think that it’s just a “flash of inspiration,” but it can be much more deliberate.
The process that works for me is as follows:
1. I identify a problem that I want to solve. It should be the biggest possible problem for the largest possible audience.
2. I spend a lot of time loading my brain with information about the related subject matter. It doesn’t have to be structured learning. I just read and absorb as much information as I can about this subject matter. I usually spend a couple of weeks just learning as much as I can about it. With today’s access to information on the internet it is a fairly easy thing to do but requires lots of time and effort.
3. I rest my brain and force myself to step away from the problem for a few days. This usually involves getting a good amount of sleep on the weekend or a vacation. All the unstructured learning is processed subconsciously and after a few days a novel solution usually pops up by itself in my head. Most of the innovative ideas I’ve had over the years happened when I was doing something relaxing, not when I was working.
3. Setting the bar is the most important step in achieving amazing results.
Most limitations are in our heads. We usually perform relative to what we think is possible to achieve. Feats that seem impossible are ones we never even attempt. Even if we do attempt these feats, we fail because we know they are not possible.
In my career I discovered that people manage their activities relative to what’s expected of them. If the expectations are modest, some will meet them, some will fall short, and others will modestly exceed expectations. But as the goal posts are moved to achieve more and more, the ability to execute and deliver follows. This is why, in my opinion, some companies can achieve so much in such a short amount of time. Team members come into an environment where everyone is working toward a goal, and they never question if it’s realistic. They simply start moving along with everyone else and achieve amazing things. This is the incredible power of the human mind.
In my personal life, I took up running several years ago. As a result of working from home during the pandemic I was able to run more consistently because of a more predictable work schedule. At the end of the year, I looked at my running app and saw that I logged over 1000 miles. I was amazed, as I would have never imagined being able to run that many miles in a year. This year, I decided to go for 1500 miles, and I have already achieved this goal and will beat it for the full year. Next year, I’ll aim for 1750 or 2000 miles. These numbers would have seemed completely out of the realm of possibility to me just a year or two ago, but now I have full confidence in achieving the goal.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Because we are an agile startup focused on delivering the most value and cost savings possible when it comes to VDI and DaaS in Azure, we are hyper focused on new product innovation — bringing 15–20 new features every month to each Nerdio Manager product.
We have an amazing network of IT and Azure enthusiasts from all over the world that we are proud to call our customers and partners. We source new feature and functionality requests working directly with them and have developed the right feedback loops and engineering processes to sustain market innovation and disruption.
We see the world of personal computing moving toward the cloud and strive to be the company that makes this process of transformation easier and more efficient for hundreds of millions of devices and the people operating or managing them.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
“Peak” by Anders Ericsson is one of my favorite books that has had a deep impact on my thinking. Ericsson’s research shows just how elastic our brains are and how with enough Deliberate Practice we can make ourselves experts in literally any endeavor. It will take a lot of time, persistence, and dedication but nothing is off the table.
I’ve put these theories into practice in my own life and have seen them actually work. It is very energizing to know that I can do anything with proper planning and relentless execution. I try to instill these principles in my own children.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Excellence demands effort and planned, deliberate practice of increasing difficulty.” — K. Anders Ericsson, author of “Peak.”
I found this insight to be true in almost every aspect of my personal and professional life. Setting a clear goal, figuring out the right type of practice to achieve it and relentlessly executing the steps to reach it is an amazing capability of the human mind.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Entrepreneurship levels the playing field for everyone. Societies that encourage and embrace entrepreneurship and innovation prosper and I have experienced this firsthand in the U.S. coming from another country.
Even so, entrepreneurship can often feel like a game of trial-and-error. And a lot of it is certainly because it is so unpredictable and requires testing and adjusting. However, there are basics of innovation, sales, marketing, finance/accounting, and an overall approach to problems. For the most part, it feels like these basics are missing from our education system and it’s only a select few who have the guts to go on their own and take the risks that get to experience entrepreneurship.
It would be great to see entrepreneurship be taught as its own discipline as early as high school. This could accelerate innovation and improve the lot of so many.
How can our readers follow you online?
You can find/follow me on LinkedIn or catch me writing frequently for Nerdio’s Enterprise Academy and MSP Academy.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Vadim Vladimirskiy of Nerdio On The Three Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
