Well, thank you so much for tuning in to our first podcast. We are so excited about what we're going to bring you this season. I am so honored to welcome our first guest on our podcast, the founder, CEO, and chairman of Voyager Technologies, Dylan Taylor. Dylan, thanks for being here.
Slick, I'm thrilled to talk to you. It's always a pleasure.
It's incredible, you know, you're one of these guys who've literally done more in a decade than an entire country, right? I mean...
I don't know about that, but
Well, I tell you, you are so humble, and I know that's kind of what we're going to talk about is your humility, but success as well. And I want to take it back to the beginning. The origin story of Dylan Taylor. You're a guy who grew up in Idaho. Your dad is an engineer. He was a professor of engineering. You grew up playing baseball, football, fly fishing, riding horses. Tell me what it was like growing up, and I can only imagine the stories that were around the Taylor dinner table.
Right. Yeah, well, first of all, there was a prequel to that, right? My parents got married super young. I think my dad was 20, my mom was 19. So, when I was born, he was actually serving in Vietnam.
And my mom and I were kind of, you know, think of almost like a young single mom situation. So, I think early years were a little bit scarce, and of course, I think that forms a little bit of the way you see the world. But, fast forward, my dad finishes his PhD at Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. That's the tying back to Denver, and gets this professorship at the University of Idaho. And actually, I really commend my dad, because he got job offers at other places like NYU and Columbia, but he's like, 'No, I'm not doing that. I'm prioritizing my family.' And so, he ended up moving to Moscow, Idaho. You know, think of Mayberry, right? It's kind of this idyllic place.
And it was a great childhood. Truly. To your point, lots of outdoor stuff, fly fishing, riding horses, playing baseball. When you grow up in a small town, and probably many of the listeners have, it's really a different experience, right? It's about the relationships, it's about conversations. There's not a lot to do, right? You're up on the mountain having a kegger, right? That's your entertainment, basically, which is great. But it's not like there's a professional sports team or an amusement park or different things that bigger cities have. Yeah, so it was great. It was a great upbringing. And I would say my passion at that time was seeing the world. My dad was a professor, as you mentioned. Lots of his students were international students. So, one of my favorite memories is we have a Fourth of July party. We had people from 10 different countries blowing stuff up. And of course, they're like, 'Oh, this is an interesting holiday.' Or Thanksgiving, because they didn't have family, so they would come with our family. And so, that was a great passion of mine. And then, of course, always super competitive with sports and outdoor stuff and baseball, football, and all that.
Well, you know, I have to say thank you. The unsung heroes for us military members that get to serve are the families that support them. I know that there's many, many folks that serve and were dependents of active duty or guardsmen or reservists. So, thank you. And of course, your mother being that single mom, if you will, for lack of a better way of saying it, while dad was off serving. So, thank you for that. I'm sure that shaped what your outlook was looking forward and for others that have served as well.
Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure. And I think, well, thanks for saying that. I'll pass that sentiment along to her. She'll appreciate that.
Yeah, I appreciate it. It is the toughest job in the military family.
Especially when you're 19.
Yeah, especially when you're young, for sure, for sure. And of course the worry and all the things that we could have an entire separate podcast talking about that. But at any rate, thanks to you and your family for supporting the military. And then of course now, I don't want to fast forward, but we have to obviously mention the connection with Matt Cuda and his military service, your co-founder, and we're going to get into that here shortly. But before we jump all the way to getting to Voyager, so you grow up in a household with a materials engineer,
right? And then you go off and become an engineer yourself going through school.
Yeah, well, I wouldn't call myself an engineer per se, but I did study engineering undergrad. I did quite well in my education, but for me, I really need to interact with people and I was fearful that as an engineer you're stuck in a lab, working on a project and not necessarily being tied to the grand vision. So, I would say about two years in, because I studied in the same field as my dad, I knew I didn't want to be necessarily a traditional engineer, but I knew I wanted to be a technologist.
And I had some really good mentors at the time and they said, 'Look, engineering is probably the best foundational degree you can get.' This is really kind of pre, you know, now maybe people would say computer science or something like that, but I still think engineering. And why is that? It teaches you how to solve problems, critical thinking skills, and I also think it trains you to utilize technology in a way that actually has impact. Traditional science is discovery, which is great, but the practicality and tying it into something that actually is going to work or that's affordable or that has an impact, that's really the engineering solution.
Of course. Yeah, the critical thinking angles that you attack a problem is probably different than a traditional, you know, finance major going into business. So, you then get into business, electronics, right?
That's right. Yeah, my first job out of school was working for a Swiss electronics company. That was a brilliant role. They created this role. Think of it almost as technical support where you're interacting with customers, you're understanding what they're trying to design for, and then you're taking the catalog of solutions for the company and you're trying to help them co-create a solution to that problem. So it's one part customer service, one part design engineering, one part sales. So I really, really enjoyed it. Yeah, I was with that company around six and a half years. Caught that at the right time. They were just expanding from Switzerland to North America. And so ended up having a lot of success there, getting promoted to go back to the world headquarters in Switzerland. So I did two years over there. And then promoted to run North America, which I later did and moved back to the US.
Incredible. So yeah, that international piece that you had growing up translates directly into living overseas, and then growing your personal experience in business to then leading a company. And that was your first, I mean, you talk about a rocket trajectory from a leadership perspective. Really incredible. And then
Yeah, and just on that point, I just want to emphasize. I mean, I was ambitious and hard working, but I was super lucky. Right? I caught that at the right time.
Again, your humility comes through, Dylan, because better to be lucky than good, but we know that you're good, and then also, you make your own luck. Had those doors and that luck wouldn't have been there had you not had the resume and the work ethic and I'm sure the reputation that you grew quickly to take on that next challenge.
Yeah. I think that's one key thing that Kuda and I bonded over. I think Matt's got this mentality of no one's going to outwork me. And I certainly had that mentality certainly at that time. I mean, now I would say I've got a more balanced perspective.
But that's youth, right? And that's what we should be doing in our 20s when we're trying to build our futures. Well said. Yeah, exactly. Amazing. So then you're back in the US and you go on a bit of a pivot, right? Out of this kind of rooted in engineering with this electronics company and running that company and then
Yeah. So what was interesting there? So I went to business school at the University of Chicago. That's where I met my wife, Gabrielle. We were study buddies. And that was transformational. University of Chicago, I mean you have top-flight students from all over the world. Super, super smart people. And that really opened my mind to, you know, typically when you're studying engineering, you kind of look at business, you're like, 'Ah, well that's the easy part of academia.' And what it taught me is there's a whole rigor to business that I didn't fully appreciate. And certainly at the University of Chicago, that's the standard. So I met my wife there. So about that time, when I got sent over to Switzerland in that promotion, promoted to run North America, they moved the headquarters from Chicago, which is where I had left from, to Michigan. And they did that because so much of our business was automotive related. And so as an expat, and I know you've done your expat assignments, the logic is I'm here, you move me here, you move me back to where I started.
And so I was like, 'Wait a second. I don't want to live in Troy, Michigan. I want to go back to Chicago.' And so that's when I was like, 'Okay, well maybe I need to make a job change.' And at that time, there was a newly minted public company that was in the real estate services group called LaSalle Partners, publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. They were just merging with another company called Jones Lang Wootton, London-based, to create a global real estate services firm. And they were looking for people who had global business experience with top-flight MBAs. They only hired from four schools. They were kind of particular about that. And I'm like, well, this is kind of cool. I don't know much about this industry, but I ended up interviewing there, was super impressed with the leadership, and then I ended up essentially switching industries.
Incredible. And so, how many folks did you oversee in that role? So, publicly traded and you're leading huge teams.
Yeah, well, I mean, initially not. So, initially I was their global account manager for several accounts. By the way, there's a whole set of stories on that.
I backed into JP Morgan and my first meeting with Jamie and all this stuff, but we'll cover that in another episode. But yeah, so I think initially think of it as more global account work, and then later, of course, I got promoted into more leadership roles and then ultimately moved from Chicago to Denver for lifestyle reasons. My wife and I, that's where we wanted to raise our family. It's great. Then, one of the senior executives at Jones Lang LaSalle went to another company, brought me along. So, it just ascended. That's really where I cut my teeth. I should have mentioned, we took the Swiss electronics company public on the Swiss stock exchange. It was the first IPO that I was involved in, and then there were several others. So, the claim to fame was really running large public companies or divisions of public companies. And in some cases, they were private companies that wanted to be public, and that's really kind of the expertise I had developed.
Amazing. And then, you're running Colliers. That's right. You know, the ultimate as a CEO. And another publicly traded company. So, now, you know, we're building this track record of your experience in the finance side of, you know, I mean, because running a company is hard enough. Talk about running a public company and why that is so different. So, the responsibilities that you have with shareholders.
I love it. I mean, a lot of people are like, well, you know, why do it? I like the degree of difficulty, because I think it's a standard that a lot of people don't fully appreciate. It's difficult to perform at that level. There's a scoreboard every day. It's not always fair, just like sports and life, right? But at least you know where you are. So I really like that. I also like the ability to access capital because if you're running a growth company, which is really the companies I'm used to running, availability of capital is really your secret weapon. Whoever has the lowest cost of capital and the ability to deploy capital accretively over time, that compounds and over time you will win.
