About a year and a half before this conversation, Mark Davis took over Translube Lubricants, the 50 year old family business his parents founded in 1975. One of his first moves was a rebrand. People on sales calls had started giggling at the name. The company is now Steelglide. That decision is one chapter in a career Mark describes as reinventing yourself every few years, from programmer on the software that delivered video for the Seoul Olympics to startup founder to family business operator.
What You'll Hear
- Why Translube Lubricants had to become Steelglide after 50 years
- How Mark checks in with his dad's memory before making big calls on the family business
- The four week gap between contracts he calls skydiving in the dark
- How a Friday morning men's Bible study conversation turned into a real estate appraisal software startup
- The Monday Zoom call where he had to fire a team of 15 after COVID burned the strategic partner
- The inside out upside down interview method he used to hire people one good break short of awesome
- Why he no longer advises young people to get a computer science degree
- The gas station moment that reminded him why he gives with no expectation of getting
Taking over a 50 year old family business and rebranding it
Mark's parents founded Translube Lubricants in 1975 after his dad bought the rights off his employer. For decades Mark did what his dad told him to do in the business without really running it. When his mom passed, and then his dad about a year and a half before this conversation, he and his sister had to decide what came next. Mark took it on.
The first major change was the name. On sales calls, prospects would giggle at Translube and ask what he was selling. The Google results were rough too. Mark had been talking to his dad about rebranding before he passed, but his dad did not like change and did not understand marketing, so it never happened. Now the company is Steelglide, and the rebrand has gone well, though Mark notes that updating the name across every government and private entity is a paperwork marathon that never quite ends.
The weight of changing a 50 year old company is not just administrative. Mark talks about checking himself before substantial decisions, trying to put himself back into the mindset his parents had when they made the original calls. He does not want to walk in as the new guard and assume he knows better. His parents ran the business successfully for five decades. He is circumspect in a way he was not with the companies he founded himself, because those were his vision and the only person he had to check with was himself. Running down his parents' handwriting on an old note still chokes him up. He is carrying something forward that they spent most of their working lives on, and he intends to pass it to his kids.
A 40 year software career built on reinventing yourself every few years
Mark was supposed to be a writer. He went to an art school, auditioned in with a portfolio of poetry, fiction, and opinion articles, and grew up obsessed with Southern Gothic authors like Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. Then his dad bought him a computer. The obsession flipped, and software became the career instead of a side interest. His dad, he says, would drop things in your life just to see if you would take the bait.
He became a Christian at 21 or 22, and that is when his sense of purpose crystallized. He wanted to write software and nothing else. Out of a roughly 40 year career post degree, he has only been a W2 employee for three years total. The first job out of engineering school was at Hughes Aircraft, where he worked on the software that delivered the video for the Seoul Olympics. After that he has been a contractor or a founder, running what he calls an Army of One consulting practice where word of mouth fed the next gig. In all that time he has only had four weeks without a contract. He calls that stretch skydiving in the dark. You do not know where the bottom is, you do not know if you should pull the rip cord, you just fall in the dark.
The arc since has followed the pattern his dad taught him: reinvent yourself every several years, and never finish playing the same game you started. Programmer, user experience designer before that title existed, application architect, small business owner, startup founder, and now family business operator. Planning can only get you so far. His dad modeled that range at a much bigger scale, bouncing from sharecropping in North Alabama to NASA to the US Army Missile Command to the Department of Energy at a nuclear plant, plus a chain link fence maker, a conveyor belt maker, house building, real estate, and heavy equipment restoration. His grandfather got out of subsistence farming by going to what was then Alabama Polytechnic, the school that eventually became Auburn University, and trained as a master electrician. Every man in the Davis family has gone to Auburn since.
The software startup, the strategic partner, and the day COVID cut the funding
The next company came out of a Friday morning men's Bible study. A commercial real estate appraiser in the group kept complaining about how bad the software was in his space, especially after a competitor bought the vendor they relied on. Mark told him to flip the script and get in the software business. The appraiser thought it was a terrible idea. His partners loved it. Mark ended up as the majority owner of a software company building for commercial real estate appraisal.
They shipped version one without outside money by running cheap, picking a cutting edge architecture that was almost free to build and run, and leaning on the pocket change of the founding team. Around year three they raised friends and family money, some KC area angel money, and then landed a large strategic partner who both invested and paid to add features. Feature count nearly doubled in 18 months. At peak they had 15 engineers running in two agile teams.
Then COVID hit. It did not damage Mark's team directly. Their whole company was already remote and virtual because it was cheaper and productivity did not suffer. The damage was indirect. COVID hammered real estate, which hammered the strategic partner, and the partner went through its books looking for things to cut. Mark's team was one of them. The partner left seven figures of receivables on the table and walked. Mark had to fire the whole team on a Monday morning Zoom call, something he had never done in his career. He was 58 or 59 at the time. They extended payroll about two more weeks than they could afford and pushed everyone into a job market that was not great. He watched LinkedIn for months, refreshing to see which of his people landed somewhere and which were still searching. He eventually pulled the ripcord on the company last year and handed it to a new leadership team.
Hiring one good break short of awesome, and leading from a Christian frame
Mark's interview style is so different from a standard process that candidates regularly told him it was the weirdest interview they had ever had. He calls it inside out upside down. Most employers walk into a hiring moment looking to buy a set of skills. That, in his view, produces a poor experience because the skills do not make a good teammate or a good career. The person does.
He looked for people he described as one good break short of awesome. People who had everything except the opportunity. Those people, he found, recognize when they have been given a real chance and they perform. To find them, he stayed away from questions like how many years of C plus plus or Unix. He asked things like what was the first piece of software you ever wrote, what was the last, what are you most proud of creating, and what do you do in your spare time. The spare time question is loaded on purpose. A candidate who mentions a home lab is most of the way to hired. Some of his interviews started with let's go grab a beer, and the candidate did not know it was an interview until he made the offer. His first hire at the startup turned out to be on food stamps. He did not know that at the time. That person stayed for years and went on to a HubSpot career. He terminated exactly one person for cause in his entire career.
The philosophy underneath all of this is Christian, and Mark is upfront about it. Leadership, to him, is helping people achieve their own goals on their own terms. He paraphrases Paul on withholding help being a sin and flips it into a personal rule: give with no expectation of getting. He credits Gary Vaynerchuk for saying the same thing with more profanity. That same posture shows up in an interview he shares with a transitioning candidate who asked whether his Christianity made the conversation awkward. Mark's response was that she did not really know who Jesus was, that Jesus was the one having dinner with tax collectors. He hired her and wrote into the employee handbook that the team is better when they work together and better when they are different from each other. The same rule shows up outside work. Mark tells a story about pulling into a gas station late, running behind to get to his daughter's house, getting hit with the familiar ask for help, and initially saying no. Then he looked at the woman's face, realized she was not trying to trick him, pumped her car full of gas, and sent her off. As she drove away he noticed she was wearing hospital socks.
LLMs, the widening chasm, and why he stopped recommending CS degrees
Mark describes the arrival of large language models as the spark that started the current fire. He had built small neural networks in Python with libraries like TensorFlow. Three billion input LLMs are on a different planet. He treats the last few years less as a new invention and more as the industry reapplying and extending LLM technology into everything it touches.
His read on the impact is not catastrophic but it is sober. Every major technological leap, from agriculture to industry to electricity to personal computers to air conditioning, creates culture change and a new gap between people who can leverage the technology and people who cannot. For the people who understand LLMs and can use them, the upside is large. For a lot of others it is going to be hard. He names marketing graduates, journalism graduates, and people who chose software only for the paycheck as groups he worries about. Software, in his view, has always been a cruel mistress. It only rewards people who are continually educating themselves, because the stack you used five years ago is not the stack you use today. If you are not obsessed, you fall off the back.
Mark explicitly says he no longer advises young people to get a degree in software engineering or computer science. Sam pushes him on the pace of change, comparing it to buying a new iPhone every day instead of every two years, and Mark does not flinch. He expects only a niche of people to make LLM technology particularly effective, and he expects many veterans of the last technology wave to get left behind the way mainframe experts did in the 80s and 90s when distributed computing took over. He has seen people take an early retirement package thinking they would reland quickly and burn through it 14 months later with no offer.
About Mark Davis
Mark Davis is the owner of Steelglide, the family lubricants business his parents founded in 1975 as Translube Lubricants, which he took over and rebranded about a year and a half before this recording. A longtime software contractor and engineer with roughly 40 years in the industry, Mark started his career at Hughes Aircraft working on the software that delivered video for the Seoul Olympics. He later founded a commercial real estate appraisal software startup that grew to a 15 person engineering team before COVID collapsed its strategic partner.