Podcast appearances and mentions of BEA Systems

For episode 519, Brandon Zemp is joined by Peter Horadan CEO of Vouched to discuss identity verification. Vouched is an AI identity verification platform that’s transforming how leading Healthcare and Financial Services companies onboard and verify people—instantly and securely. Throughout his career, Peter has led the charge in replacing slow, manual workflows with scalable, automated systems that unlock efficiency, reduce costs, and create measurable impact. From digitizing expense reporting at Concur to streamlining sales tax compliance at Avalara, Peter has helped modernize core business processes across industries. His leadership reflects a deep understanding of how automation can drive growth, compliance, and customer experience at scale. Peter has also held leadership positions at Alavara, Scout Analytics, Microsoft, Corillian, and BEA Systems. ⏳ Timestamps: 0:00 | Introduction1:08 | Who is Peter Horadan?4:42 | What is Vouched?7:05 | Vouched solutions11:00 | AI for Identity Verification16:07 | Verified licenses and more18:34 | Regulations State-by-State19:56 | Data protection22:44| What industries can be improved with Identity Verification?24:18 | Vouched client examples & use-cases25:26 | Vouched roadmap26:39 | Events & Conferences27:36 | Vouched website & socials

In this episode of Digital Transformers, host Kevin L. Jackson sits down with Mark Rakhmilevich, Senior Director of Blockchain Product Management at Oracle, to explore the evolving landscape of blockchain, digital assets, and fintech.Mark shares insights from his career journey—from early days at IBM and BEA Systems to leading Oracle's initiatives in distributed technologies and blockchain. He discusses Oracle's commitment to blockchain innovation, including its enterprise-grade blockchain platform, Hyperledger-based solutions, and the newly launched Digital Assets Edition—designed to help businesses enter the digital asset space without extensive in-house expertise.The conversation covers critical topics such as the role of blockchain in financial services, central bank digital currencies, real-time interbank settlements, and how fintech innovations are driving efficiency and cost savings. Mark explains how Oracle's blockchain solutions offer high availability, security, and scalability—empowering banks, enterprises, and regulators to navigate the future of finance.Tune in to learn how blockchain is reshaping financial transactions, eliminating inefficiencies, and paving the way for a more connected, decentralized future.Additional Links and Information:Connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrakhmilevich/Oracle Blockchain: https://www.oracle.com/blockchain/Unveiling Oracle Blockchain Platform Digital Assets Edition - https://blogs.oracle.com/blockchain/post/unveiling-oracle-blockchain-platform-digital-assets-edition-accelerate-innovation-in-finance-and-other-industriesLearn more about Digital Transformers: https://supplychainnow.com/program/digital-transformers/Subscribe to Digital Transformers and other Supply Chain Now Programs: https://digital-transformers.captivate.fm/listenThis episode was hosted by Kevin L. Jackson. For additional information, please visit our dedicated show page at: https://supplychainnow.com/blockchain-critical-businesses-DT96

John Belizaire is the CEO of Soluna Computing, the world's first utility-scale company developing power plants and combining them with high-performance computing facilities. As a serial entrepreneur, John has successfully founded and scaled multiple industry-leading technology startups that have achieved market leadership and double-digit growth, including FirstBest, an insurance software company acquired by Guidewire, and The Theory Center, a software company acquired by BEA Systems. Before becoming an entrepreneur, John was the lead architect for Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. Soluna Computing builds modular, batchable computing centers for intensive applications like cryptocurrency mining, AI and machine learning. Soluna's scalable data centers provide a cost-effective alternative to battery storage or transmission lines. Soluna Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: SLNH) is the leading developer of green data centers that convert excess renewable energy into global computing resources. Soluna Holdings was formed when Mechanical Technology, Inc. (MTI) acquired Soluna Computing in 2021.https://www.solunacomputing.com/https://www.nexuspmg.com/

Join us on "Advantest Talks Semi" as we explore the transformative impact of the industrial metaverse with Don Ong and his guest, Sanjeev Kumar.Sanjeev Kumar is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and advisor specializing in enterprise AI, data management, tech-bio, and industrial automation. With over seven years of investment experience, he has worked closely with early and mid-stage startups through VC firms and accelerators. Previously, Sanjeev held leadership roles at Informatica, BEA Systems, EMC, and Oracle, focusing on machine learning, data engineering, and enterprise software platforms. He also served as Managing Director of India R&D and GM for multiple products at BEA Systems and Informatica. Sanjeev holds an MS in Computer Science from Rutgers University and a BS from BITS, Pilani, India.In this episode, we dive into how the industrial metaverse is reshaping semiconductor manufacturing, from digital twins optimizing production efficiency to real-time analytics driving smarter decision-making. Sanjeev shares insights on how AI, IoT, and advanced simulations are converging to revolutionize supply chains, predictive maintenance, and factory automation. We also discuss the role of edge computing and distributed security models in enabling seamless data exchange between physical and virtual environments.From early digital modeling techniques to today's persistent and immersive industrial metaverse, this conversation provides a comprehensive look at the evolution of these technologies and their future impact on semiconductor testing, design, and manufacturing.Thanks for tuning in to "Advantest Talks Semi"! If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear from you! Please take a moment to leave a rating on Apple Podcast. Your feedback helps us improve and reach new listeners. Don't forget to subscribe and share with your friends. We appreciate your support!

What's next for AI, and how does it compare to the transformative technology waves that have shaped our world? In today's episode of Tech Talks Daily, I'm joined by Chet Kapoor, CEO of DataStax and a veteran leader with over two decades of experience at tech giants like Google, IBM, and BEA Systems. Chet's career journey began as an intern working alongside Steve Jobs at NeXT, where he learned invaluable lessons about leadership, innovation, and an obsession with user experience. Chet walks us through the four major technology waves—client-server, web, mobile, and cloud—offering insights into how each wave optimized different aspects of technology and paved the way for the AI revolution. He explains why the AI wave is not only unique but also the most impactful yet, highlighting its shift from digitalization to “agentification,” where AI agents are designed to focus on effectiveness rather than just efficiency. We also dive into the practicalities and challenges of AI adoption, including its potential impact on jobs and the economy. Chet provides a balanced perspective, calming anxieties while emphasizing the importance of human-AI collaboration. He shares real-world examples of AI-powered innovation, from education to healthcare, demonstrating how AI is reshaping industries and enhancing productivity. Leadership in the AI era is another key focus of our discussion. Chet introduces his philosophy of “inspired execution,” encouraging leaders to move the human heart, believe in AI's potential, and inspire their teams to embrace it. He offers actionable advice for businesses looking to integrate AI, starting with mission-critical projects and iterating for effectiveness. Tune in to hear Chet's global perspective on AI, gleaned from his experiences presenting at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and learn about the opportunities and ethical challenges that lie ahead. What do you think is the most significant aspect of the AI wave, and how do you see it shaping the future? Join the conversation and share your thoughts!

Puneet Agarwal brings a strong mix of operational and investment experience to his partner role at True. He began his career as a product manager at CrossWorlds Software, an early startup focused on software integration, which was sold to IBM. He then spent time in technology investment banking at J.P. Morgan and later in venture capital at the Mayfield Fund, where he invested in early stage technology companies. Puneet spent four years at BEA Systems in various product management and marketing roles in which he initiated and ran BEA's RFID initiative. Following BEA, he joined Geodesic Information Systems, a mobile messaging company, where he filled the role of vice president of product management. As part of his work, he moved to India for several months. He joined the True team in 2008. Puneet holds a bachelor's degree and master's degree in industrial engineering from Stanford University, where he was a Mayfield Fellow.    You can learn more about: Trends and Opportunities in Early-Stage Investing 2. Due diligence on early-stage companies 3. Evaluating Founding Teams    ===================== YouTube: @GraceGongCEO Newsletter: @SmartVenture LinkedIn: @GraceGong TikTok: @GraceGongCEO IG: @GraceGongCEO Twitter: @GraceGongGG ===================== Join the SVP fam with your host Grace Gong. In each episode, we are going to have conversations with some of the top investors, superstar founders, as well as well-known tech executives in silicon valley. We will have a coffee chat with them to learn their ways of thinking and actionable tips on how to build or invest in a successful company.

Valerie Singer, GM of Global Education at AWS, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the vast array of cloud computing education programs AWS offers to people of all skill levels and backgrounds. Valerie explains how she manages such a large undertaking, and also sheds light on what AWS is doing to ensure their programs are truly valuable both to learners and to the broader market. Corey and Valerie discuss how generative AI is applicable to education, and Valerie explains how AWS's education programs fit into a K-12 curriculum as well as job seekers looking to up-skill. About ValerieAs General Manager for AWS's Global Education team, Valerie is responsible forleading strategy and initiatives for higher education, K-12, EdTechs, and outcome-based education worldwide. Her Skills to Jobs team enables governments, educationsystems, and collaborating organizations to deliver skills-based pathways to meetthe acute needs of employers around the globe, match skilled job seekers to goodpaying jobs, and advance the adoption of cloud-based technology.In her ten-year tenure at AWS, Valerie has held numerous leadership positions,including driving strategic customer engagement within AWS's Worldwide PublicSector and Industries. Valerie established and led the AWS's public sector globalpartner team, AWS's North American commercial partner team, was the leader forteams managing AWS's largest worldwide partnerships, and incubated AWS'sAerospace & Satellite Business Group. Valerie established AWS's national systemsintegrator program and promoted partner competency development and practiceexpansion to migrate enterprise-class, large-scale workloads to AWS.Valerie currently serves on the board of AFCEA DC where, as the Vice President ofEducation, she oversees a yearly grant of $250,000 in annual STEM scholarships tohigh school students with acute financial need.Prior to joining AWS, Valerie held senior positions at Quest Software, AdobeSystems, Oracle Corporation, BEA Systems, and Cisco Systems. She holds a B.S. inMicrobiology from the University of Maryland and a Master in Public Administrationfrom the George Washington University.Links Referenced: AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/ GetIT: https://aws.amazon.com/education/aws-getit/ Spark: https://aws.amazon.com/education/aws-spark/ Future Engineers: https://www.amazonfutureengineer.com/ code.org: https://code.org Academy: https://aws.amazon.com/training/awsacademy/ Educate: https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/ Skill Builder: https://skillbuilder.aws/ Labs: https://aws.amazon.com/training/digital/aws-builder-labs/ re/Start: https://aws.amazon.com/training/restart/ AWS training and certification programs: https://www.aws.training/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A recurring theme of this show in the, what is it, 500 some-odd episodes since we started doing this many years ago, has been around where does the next generation come from. And ‘next generation' doesn't always mean young folks graduating school or whatnot. It's people transitioning in, it's career changers, it's folks whose existing jobs evolve into embracing the cloud industry a lot more readily than they have in previous years. My guest today arguably knows that better than most. Valerie Singer is the GM of Global Education at AWS. Valerie, thank you for agreeing to suffer my slings and arrows. I appreciate it.Valerie: And thank you for having me, Corey. I'm looking forward to the conversation.Corey: So, let's begin. GM, General Manager is generally a term of art which means you are, to my understanding, the buck-stops-here person for a particular division within AWS. And Global Education sounds like one of those, quite frankly, impossibly large-scoped type of organizations. What do you folks do? Where do you start? Where do you stop?Valerie: So, my organization actually focuses on five key areas, and it really does take a look at the global strategy for Amazon Web Services in higher education, research, our K through 12 community, our community of ed-tech providers, which are software providers that are specifically focused on the education sector, and the last plinth of the Global Education Team is around skills to jobs. And we care about that a lot because as we're talking to education providers about how they can innovate in the cloud, we also want to make sure that they're thinking about the outcomes of their students, and as their students become more digitally skilled, that there is placement for them and opportunities for them with employers so that they can continue to grow in their careers.Corey: Early on, when I was starting out my career, I had an absolutely massive chip on my shoulder when it came to formal education. I was never a great student for many of the same reasons I was never a great employee. And I always found that learning for me took the form of doing something and kicking the tires on it, and I had to care. And doing rote assignments in a ritualized way never really worked out. So, I never fit in in academia. On paper, I still have an eighth-grade education. One of these days, I might get the GED.But I really had problems with degree requirements in jobs. And it's humorous because my first tech job that was a breakthrough was as a network administrator at Chapman University. And that honestly didn't necessarily help improve my opinion of academia for a while, when you're basically the final tier escalation for support desk for a bunch of PhDs who are troubled with some of the things that they're working on because they're very smart in one particular area, but have challenges with broad tech. So, all of which is to say that I've had problems with the way that education historically maps to me personally, and it took a little bit of growth for me to realize that I might not be the common, typical case that represents everyone. So, I've really come around on that. What is the current state of how AWS views educating folks? You talk about working with higher ed; you also talk about K through 12. Where does this, I guess, pipeline start for you folks?Valerie: So, Amazon Web Services offers a host of education programs at the K-12 level where we can start to capture learners and capture their imagination for digital skills and cloud-based learning early on, programs like GetIT and Spark make sure that our learners have a trajectory forward and continue to stay engaged.Amazon Future Engineers also provides experiential learning and data center-based experiences for K through 12 learners, too, so that we can start to gravitate these learners towards skills that they can use later in life and that they'll be able to leverage. That said—and going back to what you said—we want to capture learners where they learn and how they learn. And so, that often happens not in a K through 12 environment and not in a higher education environment. It can happen organically, it can happen through online learning, it can happen through mentoring, and through other types of sponsorship.And so, we want to make sure that our learners have the opportunities to micro-badge, to credential, and to experience learning in the cloud particularly, and also develop digital skills wherever and however they learn, not just in a prescriptive environment like a higher education environment.Corey: During the Great Recession, I found that as a systems administrator—which is what we called ourselves in the style of the time—I was relatively weak when it came to networking. So, I took a class at the local community college where they built the entire curriculum around getting some Cisco certifications by the time that the year ended. And half of that class was awesome. It was effectively networking fundamentals in an approachable, constructive way, and that was great. The other half of the class—at least at the time—felt like it was extraordinarily beholden to, effectively—there's no nice way to say this—Cisco marketing.It envisioned a world where all networking equipment was Cisco-driven, using proprietary Cisco protocols, and it left a bad smell for a number of students in the class. Now, I've talked to an awful lot of folks who have gone through the various AWS educational programs in a variety of different ways and I've yet to hear significant volume of complaint around, “Oh, it's all vendor captured and it just feels like we're being indoctrinated into the cult of AWS.” Which honestly is to your credit. How did you avoid that?Valerie: It's a great question, and how we avoid it is by starting with the skills that are needed for jobs. And so, we actually went back to employers and said, “What are your, you know, biggest and most urgent needs to fill in early-career talent?” And we categorized 12 different job categories, the four that were most predominant were cloud support engineer, software development engineer, cyber analyst, and data analyst. And we took that mapping and developed the skills behind those four different job categories that we know are saleable and that our learners can get employed in, and then made modifications as our employers took a look at what the skills maps needed to be. We then took the skills maps—in one case—into City University of New York and into their computer science department, and mapped those skills back to the curriculum that the computer science teams have been providing to students.And so, what you have is, your half-awesome becomes full-awesome because we're providing them the materials through AWS Academy to be able to proffer the right set of curriculum and right set of training that gets provided to the students, and provides them with the opportunity to then become AWS Certified. But we do it in a way that isn't all marketecture; it's really pragmatic. It's how do I automate a sequence? How do I do things that are really saleable and marketable and really point towards the skills that our employers need? And so, when you have this book-end of employers telling the educational teams what they need in terms of skills, and you have the education teams willing to pull in that curriculum that we provide—that is, by the way, current and it maintains its currency—we have a better throughway for early-career talent to find the jobs that they need, and the guarantee that the employers are getting the skills that they've asked for. And so, you're not getting that half of the beholden that you had in your experience; you're getting a full-on awesome experience for a learner who can then go and excite himself and herself or theirself into a new position and career opportunity.Corey: One thing that caught me a little bit by surprise, and I think this is an industry-wide phenomenon is, whenever folks who are working with educational programs—as you are—talk about, effectively, public education and the grade school system, you refer to it as ‘K through 12.' Well, last year, my eldest daughter started kindergarten and it turns out that when you start asking questions about cloud computing curricula to a kindergarten teacher, they look at you like you are deranged and possibly unsafe. And yeah, it turns out that for almost any reasonable measure, exposing—in my case—a now six-year-old to cloud computing concepts feels like it's close cousins to child abuse. So—Valerie: [laugh].Corey: So far, I'm mostly keeping the kids away from that for now. When does that start? You mentioned middle school a few minutes ago. I'm curious as to—is that the real entry point or are there other ways that you find people starting to engage at earlier and earlier ages?Valerie: We are seeing people engage it earlier and earlier ages with programs like Spark, as I mentioned, which is more of a gamified approach to K through 12 learning around digital skills in the cloud. code.org also has a tremendous body of work that they offer K through 12 learners. That's more modularized and building block-based so that you're not asking a six-year-old to master the art of cloud computing, but you're providing young learners with the foundations to understand how the building blocks of technology sit on top of each other to actually do something meaningful.And so, gears and pulleys and all kinds of different artifacts that learners can play with to understand how the inner workings of a computer program come together, for instance, are really experientially important and foundationally important so that they understand the concepts on which that's built later. So, we can introduce these concepts very early, Corey, and kids really enjoy playing with those models because they can make things happen, right? They can make things turn and they can make things—they can actually, you know, modify behaviors of different programming elements and really have a great experience working in those different programs and environments like code.org and Spark.Corey: There are, of course, always exceptions to this. I remember the, I think, it's the 2019 public sector summit that you folks put on, you had a speaker, Karthick Arun, who at the time was ten years old and have the youngest person to pass the certification test to become a cloud practitioner. I mean, power to him. Obviously, that is the sort of thing that happens when a kid has passion and is excited about a particular direction. I have not inflicted that on my kids.I'm not trying to basically raise whatever the cloud computing sad version is of an Olympian by getting them into whatever it is that I want them to focus on before they have any agency in the matter. But I definitely remember when I was a kid, I was always frustrated by the fact that it felt like there were guardrails keeping me from working with any of these things that I found interesting and wanted to get exposure to. It feels like in many ways the barriers are coming down.Valerie: They are. In that particular example, actually, Andy Jassy interceded because we did have age requirements at that time for taking the exam.Corey: You still do, by the way. It's even to attend summits and whatnot. So, you have to be 18, but at some point, I will be looking into what exceptions have to happen for that because I'm not there to basically sign them up for the bar crawl or have them get exposure to, like, all the marketing stuff, but if they're interested in this, it seems like the sort of thing that should be made more accessible.Valerie: We do bring learners on, you know, into re:Invent and into our summits. We definitely invite our learners in. I mean I think you mentioned, there are a lot of other places our learners are not going to go, like bar crawls, but our learners under the age of 18 can definitely take advantage of the programs that we have on offer. AWS Academy is available to 16 and up.And again, you know, GetIT and Spark and Educate is all available to learners as well. We also have programs like Skill Builder, with an enormous free tier of learning modules that teams can take advantage of as well. And then Labs for subscription and fee-based access. But there's over 500 courses in that free tier currently, and so there's plenty of places for our, you know, early learners to play and to experiment and to learn.Corey: This is a great microcosm of some career advice I recently had caused to revisit, which is, make friends in different parts of the organization you work within and get to know people in other companies who do different things because you can't reason with policy; you can have conversations productively with human beings. And I was basing my entire, “You must be 18 or you're not allowed in, full stop,” based solely on a sign that I saw when I was attending a summit at the entrance: “You must be 18 to enter.” Ah. Clearly, there's no wiggle room here, and no—it's across the board, absolute hard-and-fast rule. Very few things are. This is a perfect example of that. So today, I learned. Thank you.Valerie: Yeah. You're very welcome. We want to make sure that we get the information, we get materials, we get experiences out to as many people as possible. One thing I would also note, and I had the opportunity to spend time in our skill centers, and these are really great places, too, for early learners to get experience and exposure to different models. And so earlier, when we were talking, you held up a DeepRacer car, which is a very, very cool, smaller-scale car that learners can use AI tools to help to drive.And learners can go into the skill centers in Seattle and in the DC area, now in Cape Town and in other places where they're going to be opening, and really have that, like, direct-line experience with AWS technology and see the value of it tangibly, and what happens when you for instance, model to move a car faster or in the right direction or not hitting the side of a wall. So, there's lots of ways that early learners can get exposure in just a few ways and those centers are actually a really great way for learners to just walk in and just have an experience.Corey: Switching gears a little bit, one of my personal favorite hobby horses is to go on Twitter—you know, back when that was more of a thing—and mock companies for saying things that I perceived to be patently ridiculous. I was gentle about it because I think it's a noble cause, but one of the more ridiculous things that I've heard from Amazon was in 2020, you folks announced a plan to help 29 million people around the world grow their tech skills by 2025. And the reason that I thought that was ridiculous is because it sounded like it was such an over-the-top, grandiose vision, I didn't see a way that you could possibly get anywhere even close. But again, I was gentle about this because even if you're half-wrong, it means that you're going to be putting significant energy, resourcing, et cetera, into educating people about how this stuff works to help lowering bar to entry, about lowering gates that get kept. I have to ask, though, now that we are, at the time of this recording, coming up in the second half of 2023, how closely are you tracking to that?Valerie: We're tracking. So, as of October, which is the last time I saw the tracking on this data, we had already provided skills-based learning to 13-and-a-half million learners worldwide and are very much on track to exceed the 2025 goal of 29 million. But I got to tell you, like, there's a couple of things in there that I'm sure you're going to ask as a follow-up, so I'll go ahead and talk about it practically, and that is, what are people doing with the learning? And then how are they using that learning and applying it to get jobs? And so, you know, 29 million is a big number, but what does it mean in terms of what they're doing with that information and what they're doing to apply it?So, we do have on my team an employer engagement team that actually goes out and works with local employers around the world, builds virtual job fairs and on-prem job fairs, sponsors things like DeepRacer League and Cloud Quests and Jam days so that early-career learners can come in and get hands-on and employers can look at what the potential employees are doing so that they can make sure that they have the experience that they actually say they have. And so, since the beginning of this year, we have already now recruited 323 what we call talent shapers, which are the employer community who are actually consuming the talent that we are proffering to them and that we're bringing into these job fairs. We have 35,000 learners who have come through our job fairs since the beginning of the year. And then we also rely—as you know, like, we're very security conscious, so we rely on self-reported data, but we have over 3500 employed early-career talent self-reported job hires. And so, for us, the 29 million is important, but how it then portrays itself into AWS-focused employment—that's not just to AWS; these are by the way those 3500 learners who are employed went to other companies outside of AWS—but we want to make sure that the 29 million actually results in something. It's not just, you know, kind of an academic exercise. And so, that's what we're doing on our site to make sure that employers are actually engaged in this process as well.Corey: I want to bring up a topic that has been top-of-mind in relation to this, where there has been an awful lot of hue and cry about generative AI lately, and to the point where I'm a believer in this. I think it is awesome, I think it is fantastic. And even for me, the hype is getting to be a little over the top. When everyone's talking about it transforming every business and that entire industries seem to be pivoting hard to rebrand themselves with the generative AI brush, it is of some concern. But I'm still excited by the magic inherent to aspects of what this is.It is, on some level—at least the way I see it—a way of solving the cloud education problem that I see, which is that, today if I want to start a company and maybe I just got out of business school, maybe I dropped out of high school, doesn't really matter. If it involves software, as most businesses seem to these days, I would have to do a whole lot of groundwork first. I have to go and take a boot camp class somewhere for six months and learn just enough code to build something horrible enough to get funding so that then I can hire actual professional engineers who will make fun of what I've written behind my back and then tear it all out and replace it. On some level, it really feels like the way to teach people cloud skills is to lower the bar for those cloud skills themselves, to help reduce the you must be at least this smart to ride this amusement park ride style of metering stick.And generative AI seems like it has strong potential for doing some of these things. I've used it that way myself, if we can get past some of the hallucination problems where it's very confident and also wrong—just like, you know, many of the white engineers I've worked with who are of course, men, in the course of my career—it will be even better. But I feel like this is the interface to an awful lot of cloud, if it's done right. How are you folks thinking about generative AI in the context of education, given the that field seems to be changing every day?Valerie: It's an interesting question and I see a lot of forward movement and positive movement in education. I'll give you an example. One company in the Bay Area, Khan Academy is using Khanmigo, which is one of their ChatGPT and generative AI-based products to be able to tutor students in a way that's directive without giving them the answers. And so, you know, when you look at the Bloom's sigma problem, which is if you have an intervention with a student who's kind of on the fence, you can move them one standard deviation to the right by giving them, sort of, community support. You can move them two standard deviations to the right if you give them one-to-one mentoring.And so, the idea is that these interventions through generative AI are actually moving that Bloom's sigma model for students to the right, right? So, you're getting students who might fall through the cracks not falling through the cracks anymore. Groups like Houston Community College are using generative AI to make sure that they are tracking their students in a way that they're going into the classes that they need to go into and they're using the prerequisites so that they can then benefit themselves through the community college system and have the most efficient path towards graduation. There's other models that we're using generative AI for to be able to do better data analysis in educational institutions, not just for outcomes, but also for, you know, funding mechanisms and for ways in which educational institutions [even operationalized 00:21:21]. And so, I think there's a huge power in generative AI that is being used at all levels within education.Now, there's a couple of other things, too, that I think that you touched on, and one is how do we train on generative AI, right? It goes so fast. And how are we doing? So, I'll tell you one thing that I think is super interesting, and that's that generative AI does hold the promise of actually offering us greater diversity, equity, and inclusion of the people who are studying generative AI. And what we're seeing early on is that the distribution in the mix of men and women is far better for studying of generative AI and AI-based learning modules for that particular outcome than we have seen in computer science in the past.And so, that's super encouraging, that we're going to have more people from more diverse backgrounds participating with skills for generative AI. And what that will also mean, of course, is that models will likely be less biased, we'll be able to have better fidelity in generative AI models, and more applicability in different areas when we have more diverse learners with that experience. So, the second piece is, what is AWS doing to make sure that these modules are being integrated into curriculum? And that's something that our training and certification team is launching as we speak, both through our AWS Academy modules, but also through Skill Builder so those can be accessed by people today. So, I'm with you. I think there's more promise than hue and cry and this is going to be a super interesting way that our early-career learners are going to be able to interact with new learning models and new ways of just thinking about how to apply it.Corey: My excitement is almost entirely on the user side of this as opposed to the machine-learning side of it. It feels like an implementation detail from the things that I care about. I asked the magic robot in a box how to do a thing and it tells me, or ideally does it for me. One of the moments in which I felt the dumbest in recent memory has been when I first started down the DeepRacer, “Oh, you just got one. Now, here's how to do it. Step one, open up this console. Good. Nice job. Step two”—and it was, basically get a PhD in machine learning concepts from Berkeley and then come back. Which is a slight exaggeration, but not by much.It feels it is, on some level—it's a daunting field, where there's an awful lot of terms of art being bandied around, there's a lot that needs to be explained in particular ways, and it's very different—at least from my perspective—on virtually any other cloud service offering. And that might very well be a result of my own background. But using the magic thing, like, CodeWhisperer that suggests code that I want to complete is great. Build something like CodeWhisperer, I'm tapping out by the end of that sentence.Valerie: Yeah. I mean, the question in there is, you know, how do we make sure that our learners know how to leverage CodeWhisperer, how to leverage Bedrock, how to leverage SageMaker, and how to leverage Greengrass, right, to build models that I think are going to be really experientially sound but also super innovative? And so, us getting that learning into education early and making sure that learners who are being educated, whether they are currently in jobs and are being re-skilled or they're coming up through traditional or non-traditional educational institutions, have access to all of these services that can help them do innovative things is something that we're really committed to doing. And we've been doing it for a long time. I may think you know that, right?So, Greengrass and SageMaker and all of the AI and ML tools have been around for a long period of time. Bedrock, CodeWhisperer, other services that AWS will continue to launch to support generative AI models, of course, are going to be completely available not just to users, but also for learners who want to re-skill, up-skill, and to skill on generative AI models.Corey: One last area I want to get into is a criticism, or at least an observation I've been making for a while about Kubernetes, but it could easily be extended to cloud in general, which is that, at least today, as things stand—this is starting to change, finally—running Kubernetes in production is challenging and fraught and requires a variety of skills and a fair bit of experience having done this previously. Before the last year or so of weird market behavior, if you had Kubernetes in production experience, you could relatively easily command a couple $100,000 a year in terms of salary. Now, as companies are embracing modern technologies and the rest, I'm wondering how they're approaching the problem of up-leveling their existing staff from two sides. The first is that no matter how much training and how much you wind up giving a lot of those folks, some of them either will not be capable or will not have the desire to learn the new thing. And secondly, once you get those people there, how do you keep them from effectively going down the street with that brand new shiny skill set for, effectively, three times what they were making previously, now that they have those skills that are in wild demand across the board?Because that's simply not sustainable for a huge swath of companies out there for whom they're not technology companies, they just use technology to do the thing that their business does. It feels like everything is becoming very expensive in a personnel perspective if you're not careful. You obviously talk to governments who are famously not known for paying absolute top-of-market figures for basically any sort of talent—for obvious reasons—but also companies for whom the bottom line matters incredibly. How do you square that circle?Valerie: There's a lot in that circle, so I'll talk about a specific, and then I'll talk about what we're also doing to help learners get that experience. So, you talked specifically about Kubernetes, but that could be extracted, as you said, to a lot of other different areas, including cyber, right? So, when we talk about somebody with an expertise in cybersecurity, it's very unlikely that a new learner coming out of university is going to be as appealing to an employer than somebody who has two to three years of experience. And so, how do we close that gap of experience—in either of those two examples—to make sure that learners have an on-ramp to new positions and new career opportunities? So, the first answer I'll give you is with some of our largest systems integrators, one of which is Tata Consulting Services, who is actually using AWS education programs to upskill its employees internally and has upskilled 19,000 of its employees using education programs including AWS Educate, to make sure that their group of consultants has absolutely the latest set of skills.And so, we're seeing that across the board; most of our, if not all of our customers, are looking at training to make sure that they can train not only their internal tech teams and their early-career talent coming in, but they can also train back office to understand what the next generation of technology is going to mean. And so, for instance, one of our largest customers, a telco provider, has asked us to provide modules for their HR teams because without understanding what AI and ML is, what it does, and what how to look for it, they might not be able to then, you know, extract the right sets of talent that they need to bring into the organization. So, we're seeing this training requirement across the business and not just in technical requirements. But you know, bridging that gap with early-career learners, I think is really important too. And so, we are experimenting, especially at places like Miami Dade College and City University of New York with virtual internships so that we can provide early-career learners with experiential learning that then they can bring to employers as proof that they have actually done the thing that they've said that they can demonstrate that they can do.And so, companies like Parker Dewey and Riipen and Forage and virtual internships are offering those experiences online so that our learners have the opportunity to then prove what they say that they can do. So, there's lots of ways that we can go about making sure learners have that broad base of learning and that they can apply it. And I'll tell you one more thing, and that's retention. And we find that when learners approach their employer with an internship or an apprenticeship, that their stickiness with that employer because they understand the culture, they understand the project work, they've been mentored, they've been sponsored, that they're stickiness within those employers it's actually far greater than if they came and went. And so, it's important and incumbent on employers, I think, to build that strong connective tissue with their early-skilled learners—and their upskilled learners—to make sure that the skills don't leave the house, right? And that is all about making sure that the culture aligns with the skills aligns, with the project work, and that it continues to be interesting, whether you're a new learner or you're a re-skilled learner, to stay in-house.Corey: My last question for you—and I understand that this might be fairly loaded—but I can't even come up with a partial list that does it any justice to encapsulate the sheer number of educational programs that you have in flight for a variety of different folks. The details and nuances of these are not something that I store in RAM, so I find that it's very easy to talk about one of these things and wind up bleeding into another. How do you folks keep it all straight? And how should people think about it? Not to say that you are not people. How should people who do not work for AWS? There we go. We are all humans here. Please, go [laugh] ahead.Valerie: It's a good question. So, the way that I break it down—and by the way, you know, AWS is also part of Amazon, so you know, I understand the question. And we have a lot of offerings across Amazon and AWS. AWS education programs specifically, are five. And those five programs, I've mentioned a few today: AWS Academy, AWS Educate, AWS re/Start, GetIT, and Spark are free, no-fee programs that we offer both the community and our education providers to build curriculum to offer digitally, and cloud-based skills curriculum to learners.We have another product that I'm a huge fan of called Skill Builder. And Skill Builder is, as I mentioned before, an online educational platform that anybody can take advantage of the over 500 classes in the free tier. There's learning plans for a lot of different things, and some I think you'd be interested in, like cost optimization and, you know, financial modeling for cloud, and all kinds of other more technically-oriented free courses. And then if learners want to get more experience in a lab environment, or more detailed learning that would lead to, for instance a, you know, certification in solutions architecture, they can use the subscription model, which is very affordable and provides learners an opportunity to work within that platform. So, if I'm breaking it down, it really is, am I being educated and in a way that is more formalized or am I going to go and take these courses when I want them and when I need them, both in the free tier and the subscription tier.So, that's basically the differences between education programs and Skill Builder. But I would say that if people are working with AWS teams, they can also ask teams where is the best place to be able to avail themselves of education curriculum. And we're all passionate about this topic and all of us can point users in the right direction as well.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to go through all the things that you folks are up to these days. If people want to learn more, where should they go?Valerie: So, the first destination, if they want cloud-based learning, is really to take a look at AWS training and certification programs, and so, easily to find on aws.com. I would also point our teams—if they're interested in the tech alliances and how we're formulating the tech alliances—towards a recent announcement between City University of New York, the New York Jobs CEO Council, and the New York Mayor's Office for more details about how we can help teams in the US and outside the US—we also have tech alliances underway in Egypt and Spain and other countries coming on board as well—to really, you know, earmark how government and educational institutions and employers can work together.And then lastly, if employers are listening to this, the one output to all of this is that you pointed out, and that's that our learners need hands-on learning and they need the on-ramp to internships, to apprenticeships, and jobs that really are promotional for, like, career talent. And so, it's incumbent, I think, on all of us to start looking at the next generation of learners, whether they come out of traditional or non-traditional means, and recognize that talent can live in a lot of different places. And we're very happy to help and happy to do that matchup. But I encourage employers to dig deeper there too.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to speak with me about all this. I really appreciate it.Valerie: Thank you, Corey. It's always fun to talk to you.Corey: [laugh]. Valerie Singer, GM of Global Education at AWS. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me exactly which AWS service I should make my six-year-old learn about as my next step in punishing her.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

In this episode, we're talking with Will Graylin about a few things: Love radio stations, a framework for navigating difficulty and conflict, and what to do when a founder (or maybe you) doesn't see the path forward. Will says purpose is the way to stay connected to yourself and that the faster you're going in your company, the farther down the path you need to see (he got that from his days on the motorcycle track). Listen in now for advice and perspective of this serial entrepreneur who is unafraid of embracing the challenge and taking the pain. Will Graylin is currently Founder and CEO of OV Loop, Inc., a Universal Wallet and Commerce Messaging platform for frictionless commerce experiences everywhere. He is also CEO of Indigo Technologies, an Electric Mobility company with breakthrough affordable EVs for fleets & drivers. Earlier in his career, Will was the Global Co-GM of Samsung Pay, and Founder of LoopPay (acquired by Samsung), ROAM Data (acquired by Ingenico), WAY Systems (acquired by Verifone), and EntitleNet (acquired by BEA Systems/later Oracle). Will holds two Masters from MIT and serves on the Board of Directors for Global Unites (a non-profit organization to help youths around the world become local leaders through conflict transformation) and previously, Synchrony Financials (the largest private label credit card issuer in the world) for seven years.See all his work here:LinkedInX (formerly known as Twitter)OV LoopIndigo Technologies Check out all things Dia Bondi here.

I often share memories of wise old men who gave me good advice.I have a grandchild turning 17 today, so I will play the part of the old man.The person I am advising is you.Always deliver the negative truth while the sale hangs in the balance. If you smile and make the sale and keep quiet until that predictable moment of crisis arrives, the truth will no longer ring true. It will just sound like you are making excuses.Tell your customer what they deserve to know while they still have the chance to walk away. Look them in the eye and warn them. Make it a moment they will never forget.Fools are attracted to slick and shiny liars who will tell them what they want to hear. But when you tell the negative truth while the sale hangs in the balance, you filter out the fools.When a fool hears your warning and walks away, dance and sing. Rejoice! You don't want to live your life surrounded by anxious, nervous, finger-pointing fools.Tell the truth when it is not in your best interest. Smart people will trust you. Your relationships will last for decades.When everything is upside and there is no downside, you can be certain that someone is lying.The downside of the advice I gave you today is that you will definitely lose sales you could have made.The upside is that you really didn't want to make them. Not only would you have lost that client within a few months, you would have eroded your integrity and lost your self-respect in the process.And if you keep eroding your integrity, you will soon become slick and shiny.Roy H. WilliamsI have a weirdly excellent rabbit hole for you to explore today. Do you know the way in? – Indy BeagleKen Paskins witnessed his grandfather and his father struggle to run a successful business. He was determined to find a better way. So Ken went to work for giant companies like Oracle and BEA Systems. Today Ken is the co-founder of a CEO coaching and peer advisory community that shows owners and CEOs of companies with 100 or fewer employees how to achieve their goals. Rather than rely on a single guru for sage advice, Paskins tells roving reporter Rotbart, his clients learn from experts and peers

Ken Paskins, a third-generation entrepreneur, witnessed his father and grandfather struggle to run a successful business. He was determined to find a better way. So Ken went to work for giant companies, including Oracle and BEA Systems, until he could deconstruct the leadership, HR, sales, and finance formulas for success. Today, Ken is the co-founder of The Shift Spot, a CEO coaching and peer advisory community that shows owners and CEOs of companies with 100 or fewer employees how to achieve their goals. Rather than rely on a single guru for sage advice, Paskins tells host and award-winning author Dean Rotbart, his clients learn from experts and peers. Photo: Ken Paskins, The Shift SpotPosted: August 7, 2023Monday Morning Run Time: 43:45Episode: 12.08 RECENT EPISODES: What Are You Waiting For? Selling to Uncle Sam Can Be Very Lucrative Why You Should Prepare to Sell Your Business Long Before You're Ready To Walk Away No Matter the Circumstances, Resilience is a Muscle Anyone Can Develop

Nelumbo nucifera, or the sacred lotus, is a plant that grows in flood plains, rivers, and deltas. Their seeds can remain dormant for years and when floods come along, blossom into a colony of plants and flowers. Some of the oldest seeds can be found in China, where they're known to represent longevity. No surprise, given their level of nitrition and connection to the waters that irrigated crops by then. They also grow in far away lands, all the way to India and out to Australia. The flower is sacred in Hinduism and Buddhism, and further back in ancient Egypt. Padmasana is a Sanskrit term meaning lotus, or Padma, and Asana, or posture. The Pashupati seal from the Indus Valley civilization shows a diety in what's widely considered the first documented yoga pose, from around 2,500 BCE. 2,700 years later (give or take a century), the Hindu author and mystic Patanjali wrote a work referred to as the Yoga Sutras. Here he outlined the original asanas, or sitting yoga poses. The Rig Veda, from around 1,500 BCE, is the oldest currently known Vedic text. It is also the first to use the word “yoga”. It describes songs, rituals, and mantras the Brahmans of the day used - as well as the Padma. Further Vedic texts explore how the lotus grew out of Lord Vishnu with Brahma in the center. He created the Universe out of lotus petals. Lakshmi went on to grow out of a lotus from Vishnu as well. It was only natural that humans would attempt to align their own meditation practices with the beautiful meditatios of the lotus. By the 300s, art and coins showed people in the lotus position. It was described in texts that survive from the 8th century. Over the centuries contradictions in texts were clarified in a period known as Classical Yoga, then Tantra and and Hatha Yoga were developed and codified in the Post-Classical Yoga age, and as empires grew and India became a part of the British empire, Yoga began to travel to the west in the late 1800s. By 1893, Swami Vivekananda gave lectures at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago.  More practicioners meant more systems of yoga. Yogendra brought asanas to the United States in 1919, as more Indians migrated to the United States. Babaji's kriya yoga arrived in Boston in 1920. Then, as we've discussed in previous episodes, the United States tightened immigration in the 1920s and people had to go to India to get more training. Theos Bernard's Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience brought some of that knowledge home when he came back in 1947. Indra Devi opened a yoga studio in Hollywood and wrote books for housewives. She brought a whole system, or branch home. Walt and Magana Baptiste opened a studio in San Francisco. Swamis began to come to the US and more schools were opened. Richard Hittleman began to teach yoga in New York and began to teach on television in 1961. He was one of the first to seperate the religious aspect from the health benefits. By 1965, the immigration quotas were removed and a wave of teachers came to the US to teach yoga. The Beatles went to India in 1966 and 1968, and for many Transcendental Meditation took root, which has now grown to over a thousand training centers and over 40,000 teachers. Swamis opened meditation centers, institutes, started magazines, and even magazines. Yoga became so big that Rupert Holmes even poked fun of it in his song “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” in 1979. Yoga had become part of the counter-culture, and the generation that followed represented a backlash of sorts. A common theme of the rise of personal computers is that the early pioneers were a part of that counter-culture. Mitch Kapor graduated high school in 1967, just in time to be one of the best examples of that. Kapor built his own calculator in as a kid before going to camp to get his first exposure to programming on a Bendix. His high school got one of the 1620 IBM minicomputers and he got the bug. He went off to Yale at 16 and learned to program in APL and then found Computer Lib by Ted Nelson and learned BASIC. Then he discovered the Apple II.  Kapor did some programming for $5 per hour as a consultant, started the first east coast Apple User Group, and did some work around town. There are generations of people who did and do this kind of consulting, although now the rates are far higher. He met a grad student through the user group named Eric Rosenfeld who was working on his dissertation and needed some help programming, so Kapor wrote a little tool that took the idea of statistical analysis from the Time Shared Reactive Online Library, or TROLL, and ported it to the microcomputer, which he called Tiny Troll.  Then he enrolled in the MBA program at MIT. He got a chance to see VisiCalc and meet Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, who introduced him to the team at Personal Software. Personal Software was founded by Dan Fylstra and Peter Jennings when they published Microchips for the KIM-1 computer. That led to ports for the 1977 Trinity of the Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80 and by then they had taken Bricklin and Franston's VisiCalc to market. VisiCalc was the killer app for those early PCs and helped make the Apple II successful. Personal Software brought Kapor on, as well as Bill Coleman of BEA Systems and Electronic Arts cofounder Rich Mellon. Today, software developers get around 70 percent royalties to publish software on app stores but at the time, fees were closer to 8 percent, a model pulled from book royalties. Much of the rest went to production of the box and disks, the sales and marketing, and support. Kapor was to write a product that could work with VisiCalc. By then Rosenfeld was off to the world of corporate finance so Kapor moved to Silicon Valley, learned how to run a startup, moved back east in 1979, and released VisiPlot and VisiTrend in 1981. He made over half a million dollars in the first six months in royalties.  By then, he bought out Rosenfeld's shares in what he was doing, hired Jonathan Sachs, who had been at MIT earlier, where he wrote the STOIC programming language, and then went to work at Data General. Sachs worked on spreadsheet ideas at Data General with a manager there, John Henderson, but after they left Data General, and the partnership fell apart, he worked with Kapor instead. They knew that for software to be fast, it needed to be written in a lower level language, so they picked the Intel 8088 assembly language given that C wasn't fast enough yet. The IBM PC came in 1981 and everything changed. Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs started Lotus in 1982. Sachs got to work on what would become Lotus 1-2-3. Kapor turned out to be a great marketer and product manager. He listened to what customers said in focus groups. He pushed to make things simpler and use less jargon. They released a new spreadsheet tool in 1983 and it worked flawlessly on the IBM PC and while Microsoft had Multiplan and VisCalc was the incumbent spreadsheet program, Lotus quickly took market share from then and SuperCalc. Conceptually it looked similar to VisiCalc. They used the letter A for the first column, B for the second, etc. That has now become a standard in spreadsheets. They used the number 1 for the first row, the number 2 for the second. That too is now a standard. They added a split screen, also now a standard. They added macros, with branching if-then logic. They added different video modes, which could give color and bitmapping. They added an underlined letter so users could pull up a menu and quickly select the item they wanted once they had those orders memorized, now a standard in most menuing systems. They added the ability to add bar charts, pie charts, and line charts. One could even spread their sheet across multiple monitors like in a magazine. They refined how fields are calculated and took advantage of the larger amounts of memory to make Lotus far faster than anything else on the market. They went to Comdex towards the end of the year and introduced Lotus 1-2-3 to the world. The software could be used as a spreadsheet, but the 2 and 3 referred to graphics and database management. They did $900,000 in orders there before they went home. They couldn't even keep up with the duplication of disks. Comdex was still invitation only. It became so popular that it was used to test for IBM compatibility by clone makers and where VisiCalc became the app that helped propel the Apple II to success, Lotus 1-2-3 became the app that helped propel the IBM PC to success. Lotus was rewarded with $53 million in sales for 1983 and $156 million in 1984. Mitch Kapor found himself. They quickly scaled from less than 20 to 750 employees. They brought in Freada Klein who got her PhD to be the Head of Employee Relations and charged her with making them the most progressive employer around. After her success at Lotus, she left to start her own company and later married. Sachs left the company in 1985 and moved on to focus solely on graphics software. He still responds to requests on the phpBB forum at dl-c.com. They ran TV commercials. They released a suite of Mac apps they called Lotus Jazz. More television commercials. Jazz didn't go anywhere and only sold 20,000 copies. Meanwhile, Microsoft released Excel for the Mac, which sold ten times as many. Some blamed the lack os sales on the stringent copy protection. Others blamed the lack of memory to do cool stuff. Others blamed the high price. It was the first major setback for the young company.  After a meteoric rise, Kapor left the company in 1986, at about the height of their success. He  replaced himself with Jim Manzi. Manzi pushed the company into network applications. These would become the center of the market but were just catching on and didn't prove to be a profitable venture just yet. A defensive posture rather than expanding into an adjacent market would have made sense, at least if anyone knew how aggressive Microsoft was about to get it would have.  Manzi was far more concerned about the millions of illegal copies of the software in the market than innovation though. As we turned the page to the 1990s, Lotus had moved to a product built in C and introduced the ability to use graphical components in the software but not wouldn't be ported to the new Windows operating system until 1991 for Windows 3. By then there were plenty of competitors, including Quattro Pro and while Microsoft Excel began on the Mac, it had been a showcase of cool new features a windowing operating system could provide an application since released for Windows in 1987. Especially what they called 3d charts and tabbed spreadsheets. There was no catching up to Microsoft by then and sales steadily declined. By then, Lotus released Lotus Agenda, an information manager that could be used for time management, project management, and as a database. Kapor was a great product manager so it stands to reason he would build a great product to manage products. Agenda never found commercial success though, so was later open sourced under a GPL license. Bill Gross wrote Magellan there before he left to found GoTo.com, which was renamed to Overture and pioneered the idea of paid search advertising, which was acquired by Yahoo!. Magellan cataloged the internal drive and so became a search engine for that. It sold half a million copies and should have been profitable but was cancelled in 1990. They also released a word processor called Manuscript in 1986, which never gained traction and that was cancelled in 1989, just when a suite of office automation apps needed to be more cohesive.  Ray Ozzie had been hired at Software Arts to work on VisiCalc and then helped Lotus get Symphony out the door. Symphony shipped in 1984 and expanded from a spreadsheet to add on text with the DOC word processor, and charts with the GRAPH graphics program, FORM for a table management solution, and COM for communications. Ozzie dutifully shipped what he was hired to work on but had a deal that he could build a company when they were done that would design software that Lotus would then sell. A match made in heaven as Ozzie worked on PLATO and borrowed the ideas of PLATO Notes, a collaboration tool developed at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana  to build what he called Lotus Notes.  PLATO was more more than productivity. It was a community that spanned decades and Control Data Corporation had failed to take it to the mass corporate market. Ozzie took the best parts for a company and built it in isolation from the rest of Lotus. They finally released it as Lotus Notes in 1989. It was a huge success and Lotus bought Iris in 1994. Yet they never found commercial success with other socket-based client server programs and IBM acquired Lotus in 1995. That product is now known as Domino, the name of the Notes 4 server, released in 1996. Ozzie went on to build a company called Groove Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft, who appointed him one of their Chief Technology Officers. When Bill Gates left Microsoft, Ozzie took the position of Chief Software Architect he vacated. He and Dave Cutler went on to work on a project called Red Dog, which evolved into what we now know as Microsoft Azure.  Few would have guessed that Ozzie and Kapor's handshake agreement on Notes could have become a real product. Not only could people not understand the concept of collaboration and productivity on a network in the late 1980s but the type of deal hadn't been done. But Kapor by then realized that larger companies had a hard time shipping net-new software properly. Sometimes those projects are best done in isolation. And all the better if the parties involved are financially motivated with shares like Kapor wanted in Personal Software in the 1970s before he wrote Lotus 1-2-3. VisiCalc had sold about a million copies but that would cease production the same year Excel was released. Lotus hung on longer than most who competed with Microsoft on any beachhead they blitzkrieged. Microsoft released Exchange Server in 1996 and Notes had a few good years before Exchange moved in to become the standard in that market. Excel began on the Mac but took the market from Lotus eventually, after Charles Simonyi stepped in to help make the product great.  Along the way, the Lotus ecosystem created other companies, just as they were born in the Visi ecosystem. Symantec became what we now call a “portfolio” company in 1985 when they introduced NoteIt, a natural language processing tool used to annotate docs in Lotus 1-2-3. But Bill Gates mentioned Lotus by name multiple times as a competitor in his Internet Tidal Wave memo in 1995. He mentioned specific features, like how they could do secure internet browsing and that they had a web publisher tool - Microsoft's own FrontPage was released in 1995 as well. He mentioned an internet directory project with Novell and AT&T. Active Directory was released a few years later in 1999, after Jim Allchin had come in to help shepherd LAN Manager. Notes itself survived into the modern era, but by 2004 Blackberry released their Exchange connector before they released the Lotus Domino connector. That's never a good sign. Some of the history of Lotus is covered in Scott Rosenberg's 2008 book, Dreaming in Code. Others are documented here and there in other places. Still others are lost to time. Kapor went on to invest in UUNET, which became a huge early internet service provider. He invested in Real Networks, who launched the first streaming media service on the Internet. He invested in the creators of Second Life. He never seemed vindictive with Microsoft but after AOL acquired Netscape and Microsoft won the first browser war, he became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation and so helped bring Firefox to market. By 2006, Firefox took 10 percent of the market and went on to be a dominant force in browsers. Kapor has also sat on boards and acted as an angel investor for startups ever since leaving the company he founded. He also flew to Wyoming in 1990 after he read a post on The WELL from John Perry Barlow. Barlow was one of the great thinkers of the early Internet. They worked with Sun Microsystems and GNU Debugging Cypherpunk John Gilmore to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF. The EFF has since been the nonprofit who leads the fight for “digital privacy, free speech, and innovation.” So not everything is about business.    

This episode's guest is Shelly Stoneman, who has worked everywhere from Capitol Hill, the Balkans, the White House, and the Pentagon. She is a leader in the national security community and leads Government Relations for BEA Systems, where she is also on the Board of Directors.  Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also appointed Shelly to chair the Department of Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service, and in her “spare time,” Shelly also serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Leadership Council for Women in National Security. Listen now.Find more episodes of STAFFER on our website https://www.staffershow.com

Tarang Gupta hosts Alfred Chuang, Founder and General Partner at Race Capital, a venture capital firm that invests, builds, and partners with exceptional founders building the future. In this episode you will hear about: - What Alfred loves about a venture's journey from zero to one - Web3 and its influence on the future of fintech - Achieving repeated success as an entrepreneur - Economic downturns and its hidden opportunities for VCs And much more! About Alfred Chuang Alfred is the Founder and General Partner at Race Capital. Recognized by Andreessen Horowitz as “Silicon Valley CEO's CEO”, Alfred is an accomplished entrepreneur, having co-founded and taken BEA Systems public. Prior to BEA, Alfred spent eight years and a half years at Sun Microsystems where he led product development and network infrastructure. Alfred received a B.S. in computer science from the University of San Francisco and a Master's degree in computer science from the University of California, Davis. About Race Capital Based in San Francisco, Race Capital invests in seed, pre-seed, and few idea stage companies and is generally focused on all things B2B/Enterprise on the infrastructure layers of the tech stack. For more FinTech insights, follow us on WFT Medium: medium.com/wharton-fintech WFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech WFT Instagram: instagram.com/whartonfintech Tarang's Twitter: twitter.com/tg_tarang Tarang's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/taranggupta100

On this episode of Product Chats we dive into building AI-driven products with Gagan Gulati, Chief Product Officer at Behavox. He's built a wealth of product knowledge during his decades-long career that features product leadership roles at Microsoft, BEA Systems, and Oracle. Gagan shares his deep knowledge of AI-driven and AI-infused products in this episode, so be sure to check it out. Time Stamped Show NotesThe importance of storytelling in your career [02:33]Advice for transitioning from engineering to product management [04:15]Ensuring you understand users' challenges [05:49]Avoiding “what” and focusing on “why [06:41]Building AI-driven products [09:00]AI-Driven products vs AI-infused products [10:54]Researching to build an AI-driven product [13:55]Difference being a PM in a large vs small company [15:15]How wide a span PMs at startups have [19:36]Importance of aligning with company goals [22:21]  Product Chats is brought to you by Canny. Over 1,000 teams trust Canny to help them build better products. Capture, organize, and analyze product feedback in one place to inform your product decisions.Get your free Canny account today. Stay Connected!TwitterFacebookLinkedIn

Kent talks about Smart Home products transitioning to aid businesses, particularly in home rentals. He analyzes the current tech and how it impacted the short-term rental experience. Ryan and Kent then discuss the current landscape of the Smart Space industry, with Kent sharing insights on trends and challenges he's witnessed. The podcast is wrapped up with what to look out for from Yonomi and the Smart Space industry.Kent Dickson is an experienced technology leader who enjoys building great teams and disruptive products. He is VP and GM of IoT Platforms & Services for Allegion, a global pioneer in seamless access, with leading brands like CISA®, Interflex®, LCN®, Schlage®, SimonsVoss®, and Von Duprin®. Before Allegion, Kent was co-founder and CEO of Yonomi, the simple connected home integration platform, which joined the Allegion family of brands in January 2021. Kent's background includes serving as General Manager of GridMachine, a massive scale Grid Computing-as-a-Service operated as a business unit of Sentient AI. Kent spent nine years at BEA Systems, leading the teams for several market-defining products in the WebLogic and AquaLogic lines. Kent has spent ten years working on the Smart Home frontier, partnering with leading device makers, voice assistants, AI innovators, and service providers. Kent holds a BS in Aerospace Engineering and an MBA from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Scott Dietzen is Vice Chairman of the Board of Pure Storage and served as the Company's CEO from 2010 to 2017. Under his leadership, Pure grew to thousands of employees and completed an IPO in 2015. Dietzen is a four-time successful entrepreneur with WebLogic, Zimbra, and Transarc. Before Pure, he was President and CTO of Zimbra (now part of VMware), but originally acquired by Yahoo!, where Dietzen served as interim SVP of Communications and Communities. Prior to Zimbra, Dietzen was CTO of BEA Systems, where he helped craft the technology and business strategy for WebLogic that drove BEA from $61m in annual revenues prior to the WebLogic acquisition to over $1B. In Today's Episode with Scott Dietzen You Will Learn: 1.) The Journey to Pure Storage CEO: How did Scott make his way into the world of tech and startups? What was the hardest element of making the transition from CTO to CEO? What advice would Scott give to more technical leaders looking to make the move to CEO? Where do so many make mistakes? 2.) How To Build Trust in a Team: What are the most important ways that leaders can build trust with their teams? How can leaders be honest and share the hard truths without damaging role? What is the right tone to communicate both the big wins and big losses? Why does Scott always believe the losses teach more? How does Scott approach post-mortems? 3.) The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make: What are the single biggest hiring mistakes that founders make? What are the single biggest firing mistakes executives make? Why should founders sometimes say no to customers? How should founders approach investor selection and valuation for rounds? 4.) How to Optimise a Board: What specifically can founders do to optimise their board? What are the biggest errors founders make when communicating with their board? What is the value per word framework? How does it tell which board member is the best? Item's Mentioned In Today's Episode with Scott Dietzen Scott's Favourite Book: The 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing

John Belizaire is the CEO of Soluna Computing, the world's first utility-scale company developing power plants and combining them with high-performance computing facilities. As a serial entrepreneur, John has successfully founded and scaled multiple industry-leading technology startups that have achieved market leadership and double-digit growth, including FirstBest, an insurance software company acquired by Guidewire, and The Theory Center, a software company acquired by BEA Systems. Before becoming an entrepreneur, John was the lead architect for Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. About Soluna Soluna Computing builds modular, batchable computing centers for intensive applications like cryptocurrency mining, AI and machine learning. Soluna's scalable data centers provide a cost-effective alternative to battery storage or transmission lines. Soluna Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: SLNH) is the leading developer of green data centers that convert excess renewable energy into global computing resources. Soluna Holdings was formed when Mechanical Technology, Inc. (MTI) acquired Soluna Computing in 2021. https://www.solunacomputing.com/ https://nexuspmg.com/

Content creation is the name of the game when it comes to marketing in 2022. In this episode of Digital Marketing Swipe File, Eric welcomes Daniel Burstein, Senior Director of Content & Marketing at MECLABS Institute and host of the podcast How I Made It In Marketing (https://marketingsherpa.com/podcast) from Marketing Sherpa. Daniel breaks down what marketers should know about content marketing in 2022, especially for B2B SaaS companies. Tune in to gain insight into the shifts MECLABS made in their content marketing after the covid-19 pandemic hit, the reasoning behind media company consolidation within B2B SaaS companies, the importance of understanding your target audience before creating content, and the relationship between content production and low-quality MQLs.You'll learn Eric and Daniel's candid thoughts on the importance of research in copywriting, storytelling as an approach to content creation, and much more! This is a juicy episode you won't want to miss! “What we're doing with content marketing is we're ripping the doors off that factory, we're ripping to doors off the coders and we're showing them, hey, here's what we're creating, here's how we're creating value for you, and all we have to decide is what value can we create and give for free and what value… especially for a B2B SaaS company, do we need to start charging for?”        - Daniel BursteinResources mentioned:Story Engineering by Larry Brooks: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9... Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4...About Daniel Burstein, Senior Director of Content & Marketing, MECLABS Institute: Daniel oversees all content and marketing coming from the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa brands while helping to shape the editorial direction for MECLABS – digging for actionable information while serving as an advocate for the audience. Daniel is also a speaker and moderator at live events and on webinars. Previously, he was the main writer powering MarketingExperiments publishing engine – from Web clinics to Research Journals to the blog. Prior to joining the team, Daniel was Vice President of MindPulse Communications – a boutique communications consultancy specializing in IT clients such as IBM, VMware, and BEA Systems. Daniel has 18 years of experience in copywriting, editing, internal communications, sales enablement and field marketing communications.Connect with Daniel: www.linkedin.com/in/danielburstein Visit MEC Labs: www.meclabs.com 

Today's guest is John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna.Soluna is the leading developer of green data centers for batchable computing, powered by wasted renewable energy. Soluna's scalable, on-demand data centers buy every excess megawatt from renewable energy projects, increasing project revenue while eliminating wasted energy. Implementing Soluna data centers is a low-risk, low-friction process due to the company's four pillars of expertise: Project development, energy markets, project finance, and computing technology. Soluna has molded this unique expertise into a proven project finance structure and revenue-generating solution.John is a versatile CEO and serial entrepreneur who has successfully founded and scaled multiple technology companies over a 20-year career. Before Soluna, John was the founder and CEO of FirstBest, a transformative insurance software company acquired by Guidewire Software, and Theory Center, an e-commerce software company acquired by BEA Systems. In this episode, John explains Soluna's mission, approach, and the problem the startup is setting out to solve. He outlines why renewable energy can be inaccessible and the future of a connected energy grid in the clean future. We also dive into Soluna's competitors, customer base, and recent acquisition. It was great to sit down with John and learn more about Soluna. Enjoy the show!You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.Episode recorded November 30th, 2021To learn more about Soluna, visit: https://www.solunacomputing.com/To learn more about this episode, visit: https://myclimatejourney.co/ctss-episodes/soluna

About SamA 25-year veteran of the Silicon Valley and Seattle technology scenes, Sam Ramji led Kubernetes and DevOps product management for Google Cloud, founded the Cloud Foundry foundation, has helped build two multi-billion dollar markets (API Management at Apigee and Enterprise Service Bus at BEA Systems) and redefined Microsoft's open source and Linux strategy from “extinguish” to “embrace”.He is nerdy about open source, platform economics, middleware, and cloud computing with emphasis on developer experience and enterprise software. He is an advisor to multiple companies including Dell Technologies, Accenture, Observable, Fletch, Orbit, OSS Capital, and the Linux Foundation.Sam received his B.S. in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego, the home of transdisciplinary innovation, in 1994 and is still excited about artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology.Links: DataStax: https://www.datastax.com Sam Ramji Twitter: https://twitter.com/sramji Open||Source||Data: https://www.datastax.com/resources/podcast/open-source-data Screaming in the Cloud Episode 243 with Craig McLuckie: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/innovating-in-the-cloud-with-craig-mcluckie/ Screaming in the Cloud Episode 261 with Jason Warner: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/what-github-can-give-to-microsoft-with-jason-warner/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. Set up a meeting with a Redis expert during re:Invent, and you'll not only learn how you can become a Redis hero, but also have a chance to win some fun and exciting prizes. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: Are you building cloud applications with a distributed team? Check out Teleport, an open source identity-aware access proxy for cloud resources. Teleport provides secure access to anything running somewhere behind NAT: SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, internal web apps and databases. Teleport gives engineers superpowers! Get access to everything via single sign-on with multi-factor. List and see all SSH servers, kubernetes clusters or databases available to you. Get instant access to them all using tools you already have. Teleport ensures best security practices like role-based access, preventing data exfiltration, providing visibility and ensuring compliance. And best of all, Teleport is open source and a pleasure to use.Download Teleport at https://goteleport.com. That's goteleport.com.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and recurring effort that this show goes to is to showcase people in their best light. Today's guest has done an awful lot: he led Kubernetes and DevOps Product Management for Google Cloud; he founded the Cloud Foundry Foundation; he set open-source strategy for Microsoft in the naughts; he advises companies including Dell, Accenture, the Linux Foundation; and tying all of that together, it's hard to present a lot of that in a great light because given my own proclivities, that sounds an awful lot like a personal attack. Sam Ramji is the Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax. Sam, thank you for joining me, and it's weird when your resume starts to read like, “Oh, I hate all of these things.”Sam: [laugh]. It's weird, but it's true. And it's the only life I could have lived apparently because here I am. Corey, it's a thrill to meet you. I've been an admirer of your public speaking, and public tweeting, and your writing for a long time.Corey: Well, thank you. The hard part is getting over the voice saying don't do it because it turns out that there's no real other side of public shutting up, which is something that I was never good at anyway, so I figured I'd lean into it. And again, I mean, that the sense of where you have been historically in terms of your career not, “Look what you've done,” which is a subtext that I could be accused of throwing in sometimes.Sam: I used to hear that a lot from my parents, actually.Corey: Oh, yeah. That was my name growing up. But you've done a lot of things, and you've transitioned from notable company making significant impact on the industry, to the next one, to the next one. And you've been in high-flying roles, doing lots of really interesting stuff. What's the common thread between all those things?Sam: I'm an intensely curious person, and the thing that I'm most curious about is distributed cognition. And that might not be obvious from what you see is kind of the… Lego blocks of my career, but I studied cognitive science in college when that was not really something that was super well known. So, I graduated from UC San Diego in '94 doing neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and psychology. And because I just couldn't stop thinking about thinking; I was just fascinated with how it worked.So, then I wanted to build software systems that would help people learn. And then I wanted to build distributed software systems. And then I wanted to learn how to work with people who were thinking about building the distributed software systems. So, you end up kind of going up this curve of, like, complexity about how do we think? How do we think alone? How do we learn to think? How do we think together?And that's the directed path through my software engineering career, into management, into middleware at BEA, into open-source at Microsoft because that's an amazing demonstration of distributed cognition, how, you know, at the time in 2007, I think, Sourceforge had 100,000 open-source projects, which was, like, mind boggling. Some of them even worked together, but all of them represented these groups of people, flung around the world, collaborating on something that was just fundamentally useful, that they were curious about. Kind of did the same thing into APIs because APIs are an even better way to reuse for some cases than having the source code—at Apigee. And kept growing up through that into, how are we building larger-scale thinking systems like Cloud Foundry, which took me into Google and Kubernetes, and then some applications of that in Autodesk and now DataStax. So, I love building companies. I love helping people build companies because I think business is distributed cognition. So, those businesses that build distributed systems, for me, are the most fascinating.Corey: You were basically handed a heck of a challenge as far as, “Well, help set open-source strategy,” back at Microsoft, in the days where that was a punchline. And credit where due, I have to look at Microsoft of today, and it's not a joke, you can have your arguments about them, but again in those days, a lot of us built our entire personality on hating Microsoft. Some folks never quite evolved beyond that, but it's a new ballgame and it's very clear that the Microsoft of yesteryear and the Microsoft of today are not completely congruent. What was it like at that point understanding that as you're working with open-source communities, you're doing that from a place of employment with a company that was widely reviled in the space.Sam: It was not lost on me. The irony, of course, was that—Corey: Well, thank God because otherwise the question where you would have been, “What do you mean they didn't like us?”Sam: [laugh].Corey: Which, on some levels, like, yeah, that's about the level of awareness I would have expected in that era, but contrary to popular opinion, execs at these companies are not generally oblivious.Sam: Yeah, well, if I'd been clever as a creative humorist, I would have given you that answer instead of my serious answer, but for some reason, my role in life is always to be the straight guy. I used to have Slashdot as my homepage, right? I love when I'd see some conspiracy theory about, you know, Bill Gates dressed up as the Borg, taking over the world. My first startup, actually in '97, was crushed by Microsoft. They copied our product, copied the marketing, and bundled it into Office, so I had lots of reasons to dislike Microsoft.But in 2004, I was recruited into their venture capital team, which I couldn't believe. It was really a place that they were like, “Hey, we could do better at helping startups succeed, so we're going to evangelize their success—if they're building with Microsoft technologies—to VCs, to enterprises, we'll help you get your first big enterprise deal.” I was like, “Man, if I had this a few years ago, I might not be working.” So, let's go try to pay it forward.I ended up in open-source by accident. I started going to these conferences on Software as a Service. This is back in 2005 when people were just starting to light up, like, Silicon Valley Forum with, you know, the CEO of Demandware would talk, right? We'd hear all these different ways of building a new business, and they all kept talking about their tech stack was Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. I went to one eight-hour conference, and Microsoft technologies were mentioned for about 12 seconds in two separate chunks. So, six seconds, he was like, “Oh, and also we really like Microsoft SQL Server for our data layer.”Corey: Oh, Microsoft SQL Server was fantastic. And I know that's a weird thing for people to hear me say, just because I've been renowned recently for using Route 53 as the primary data store for everything that I can. But there was nothing quite like that as far as having multiple write nodes, being able to handle sharding effectively. It was expensive, and you would take a bath on the price come audit time, but people were not rolling it out unaware of those things. This was a trade off that they were making.Oracle has a similar story with databases. It's yeah, people love to talk smack about Oracle and its business practices for a variety of excellent reasons, at least in the database space that hasn't quite made it to cloud yet—knock on wood—but people weren't deploying it because they thought Oracle was warm and cuddly as a vendor; they did it because they can tolerate the rest of it because their stuff works.Sam: That's so well said, and people don't give them the credit that's due. Like, when they built hypergrowth in their business, like… they had a great product; it really worked. They made it expensive, and they made a lot of money on it, and I think that was why you saw MySQL so successful and why, if you were looking for a spec that worked, that you could talk through through an open driver like ODBC or JDBC or whatever, you could swap to Microsoft SQL Server. But I walked out of that and came back to the VC team and said, “Microsoft has a huge problem. This is a massive market wave that's coming. We're not doing anything in it. They use a little bit of SQL Server, but there's nothing else in your tech stack that they want, or like, or can afford because they don't know if their businesses are going to succeed or not. And they're going to go out of business trying to figure out how much licensing costs they would pay to you in order to consider using your software. They can't even start there. They have to start with open-source. So, if you're going to deal with SaaS, you're going to have to have open-source, and get it right.”So, I worked with some folks in the industry, wrote a ten-page paper, sent it up to Bill Gates for Think Week. Didn't hear much back. Bought a new strategy to the head of developer platform evangelism, Sanjay Parthasarathy who suggested that the idea of discounting software to zero for startups, with the hope that they would end up doing really well with it in the future as a Software as a Service company; it was dead on arrival. Dumb idea; bring it back; that actually became BizSpark, the most popular program in Microsoft partner history.And then about three months later, I got a call from this guy, Bill Hilf. And he said, “Hey, this is Bill Hilf. I do open-source at Microsoft. I work with Bill Gates. He sent me your paper. I really like it. Would you consider coming up and having conversation with me because I want you to think about running open-source technology strategy for the company.” And at this time I'm, like, 33 or 34. And I'm like, “Who me? You've got to be joking.” And he goes, “Oh, and also, you'll be responsible for doing quarterly deep technical briefings with Bill… Gates.” I was like, “You must be kidding.” And so of course I had to check it out. One thing led to another and all of a sudden, with not a lot of history in the open-source community but coming in it with a strategist's eye and with a technologist's eye, saying, “This is a problem we got to solve. How do we get after this pragmatically?” And the rest is history, as they say.Corey: I have to say that you are the Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax, and I pull up your website quickly here and a lot of what I tell earlier stage companies is effectively more or less what you have already done. You haven't named yourself after the open-source project that underlies the bones of what you have built so you're not going to wind up in the same glorious challenges that, for example, Elastic or MongoDB have in some ways. You have a pricing page that speaks both to the reality of, “It's two in the morning. I'm trying to get something up and running and I want you the hell out of my way. Just give me something that I can work with a reasonable free tier and don't make me talk to a salesperson.” But also, your enterprise tier is, “Click here to talk to a human being,” which is speaking enterprise slash procurement slash, oh, there will be contract negotiation on these things.It's being able to serve different ends of your market depending upon who it is that encounters you without being off-putting to any of those. And it's deceptively challenging for companies to pull off or get right. So clearly, you've learned lessons by doing this. That was the big problem with Microsoft for the longest time. It's, if I want to use some Microsoft stuff, once you were able to download things from the internet, it changed slightly, but even then it was one of those, “What exactly am I committing to here as far as signing up for this? And am I giving them audit rights into my environment? Is the BSA about to come out of nowhere and hit me with a surprise audit and find out that various folks throughout the company have installed this somewhere and now I owe more than the company's worth?” That was always the haunting fear that companies had back then.These days, I like the approach that companies are taking with the SaaS offering: you pay for usage. On some level, I'd prefer it slightly differently in a pay-per-seat model because at least then you can predict the pricing, but no one is getting surprise submarined with this type of thing on an audit basis, and then they owe damages and payment in arrears and someone has them over a barrel. It's just, “Oh. The bill this month was higher than we expected.” I like that model I think the industry does, too.Sam: I think that's super well said. As I used to joke at BEA Systems, nothing says ‘I love you' to a customer like an audit, right? That's kind of a one-time use strategy. If you're going to go audit licenses to get your revenue in place, you might be inducing some churn there. It's a huge fix for the structural problem in pricing that I think package software had, right?When we looked at Microsoft software versus open-source software, and particularly Windows versus Linux, you would have a structure where sales reps were really compensated to sell as much as possible upfront so they could get the best possible commission on what might be used perpetually. But then if you think about it, like, the boxes in a curve, right, if you do that calculus approximation of a smooth curve, a perpetual software license is a huge box and there's an enormous amount of waste in there. And customers figured out so as soon as you can go to a pay-per-use or pay-as-you-go, you start to smooth that curve, and now what you get is what you deserve, right, as opposed to getting filled with way more cost than you expect. So, I think this model is really super well understood now. Kind of the long run the high point of open-source meets, cloud, meets Software as a Service, you look at what companies like MongoDB, and Confluent, and Elastic, and Databricks are doing. And they've really established a very good path through the jungle of how to succeed as a software company. So, it's still difficult to implement, but there are really world-class guides right now.Corey: Moving beyond where Microsoft was back in the naughts, you were then hired as a VP over at Google. And in that era, the fact that you were hired as a VP at Google is fascinating. They preferred to grow those internally, generally from engineering. So, first question, when you were being hired as a VP in the product org, did they make you solve algorithms on a whiteboard to get there?Sam: [laugh]. They did not. I did have somewhat of an advantage [because they 00:13:36] could see me working pretty closely as the CEO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. I'd worked closely with Craig McLuckie who notably brought Kubernetes to the world along with Joe Beda, and with Eric Brewer, and a number of others.And he was my champion at Google. He was like, “Look, you know, we need him doing Kubernetes. Let's bring Sam in to do that.” So, that was helpful. I also wrote a [laugh] 2000-word strategy document, just to get some thoughts out of my head. And I said, “Hey, if you like this, great. If you don't throw it away.” So, the interviews were actually very much not solving problems in a whiteboard. There were super collaborative, really excellent conversations. It was slow—Corey: Let's be clear, Craig McLuckie's most notable achievement was being a guest on this podcast back in Episode 243. But I'll say that this is a close second.Sam: [laugh]. You're not wrong. And of course now with Heptio and their acquisition by VMware.Corey: Ehh, they're making money beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, that's all well and good, but an invite to this podcast, that's where it's at.Sam: Well, he should really come on again, he can double down and beat everybody. That can be his landmark achievement, a two-timer on Screaming in [the] Cloud.Corey: You were at Google; you were at Microsoft. These are the big titans of their era, in some respect—not to imply that there has beens; they're bigger than ever—but it's also a more crowded field in some ways. I guess completing the trifecta would be Amazon, but you've had the good judgment never to work there, directly of course. Now they're clearly in your market. You're at DataStax, which is among other things, built on Apache Cassandra, and they launched their own Cassandra service named Keyspaces because no one really knows why or how they name things.And of course, looking under the hood at the pricing model, it's pretty clear that it really is just DynamoDB wearing some Groucho Marx classes with a slight upcharge for API level compatibility. Great. So, I don't see it a lot in the real world and that's fine, but I'm curious as to your take on looking at all three of those companies at different eras. There was always the threat in the open-source world that they are going to come in and crush you. You said earlier that Microsoft crushed your first startup.Google is an interesting competitor in some respects; people don't really have that concern about them. And your job as a Chief Strategy Officer at Amazon is taken over by a Post-it Note that simply says ‘yes' on it because there's nothing they're not going to do, or try, and experiment with. So, from your perspective, if you look at the titans, who is it that you see as the largest competitive threat these days, if that's even a thing?Sam: If you think about Sun Tzu and the Art of War, right—a lot of strategy comes from what we've learned from military environments—fighting a symmetric war, right, using the same weapons and the same army against a symmetric opponent, but having 1/100th of the personnel and 1/100th of the money is not a good plan.Corey: “We're going to lose money, going to be outcompeted; we'll make it up in volume. Oh, by the way, we're also slower than they are.”Sam: [laugh]. So, you know, trying to come after AWS, or Microsoft, or Google as an independent software company, pound-for-pound, face-to-face, right, full-frontal assault is psychotic. What you have to do, I think, at this point is to understand that these are each companies that are much like we thought about Linux, and you know, Macintosh, and Windows as operating systems. They're now the operating systems of the planet. So, that creates some economies of scale, some efficiencies for them. And for us. Look at how cheap object storage is now, right? So, there's never been a better time in human history to create a database company because we can take the storage out of the database and hand it over to Amazon, or Google, or Microsoft to handle it with 13 nines of durability on a constantly falling cost basis.So, that's super interesting. So, you have to prosecute the structure of the world as it is, based on where the giants are and where they'll be in the future. Then you have to turn around and say, like, “What can they never sell?”So, Amazon can never sell something that is standalone, right? They're a parts factory and if you buy into the Amazon-first strategy of cloud computing—which we did at Autodesk when I was VP of cloud platform there—everything is a primitive that works inside Amazon, but they're not going to build things that don't work outside of the Amazon primitives. So, your company has to be built on the idea that there's a set of people who value something that is purpose-built for a particular use case that you can start to broaden out, it's really helpful if they would like it to be something that can help them escape a really valuable asset away from the center of gravity that is a cloud. And that's why data is super interesting. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Boy, I had such a great conversation with Oracle over the last 20 years beating me up on licensing. Let me go find a cloud vendor and dump all of my data in that so they can beat me up for the next 20 years.” Nobody says that.Corey: It's the idea of data portability that drives decision-making, which makes people, of course, feel better about not actually moving in anywhere. But the fact that they're not locked in strategically, in a way that requires a full software re-architecture and data model rewrite is compelling. I'm a big believer in convincing people to make decisions that look a lot like that.Sam: Right. And so that's the key, right? So, when I was at Autodesk, we went from our 100 million dollar, you know, committed spend with 19% discount on the big three services to, like—we started realize when we're going to burn through that, we were spending $60 million or so a year on 20% annual growth as the cloud part of the business grew. Thought, “Okay, let's renegotiate. Let's go and do a $250 million deal. I'm sure they'll give us a much better discount than 19%.” Short story is they came back and said, “You know, we're going to take you from an already generous 19% to an outstanding 22%.” We thought, “Wait a minute, we already talked to Intuit. They're getting a 40% discount on a $400 million spend.”So, you know, math is hard, but, like, 40% minus 22% is 18% times $250 million is a lot of money. So, we thought, “What is going on here?” And we realized we just had no credible threat of leaving, and Intuit did because they had built a cross-cloud capable architecture. And we had not. So, now stepping back into the kind of the world that we're living in 2021, if you're an independent software company, especially if you have the unreasonable advantage of being an open-source software company, you have got to be doing your customers good by giving them cross-cloud capability. It could be simply like the Amdahl coffee cup that Amdahl reps used to put as landmines for the IBM reps, later—I can tell you that story if you want—even if it's only a way to save money for your customer by using your software, when it gets up to tens and hundreds of million dollars, that's a really big deal.But they also know that data is super important, so the option value of being able to move if they have to, that they have to be able to pull that stick, instead of saying, “Nice doggy,” we have to be on their side, right? So, there's almost a detente that we have to create now, as cloud vendors, working in a world that's invented and operated by the giants.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: When we look across the, I guess, the ecosystem as it's currently unfolding, a recurring challenge that I have to the existing incumbent cloud providers is they're great at offering the bricks that you can use to build things, but if I'm starting a company today, I'm not going to look at building it myself out of, “Ooh, I'm going to take a bunch of EC2 instances, or Lambda functions, or popsicles and string and turn it into this thing.” I'm going to want to tie together things that are way higher level. In my own case, now I wind up paying for Retool, which is, effectively, yeah, it runs on some containers somewhere, presumably, I think in Azure, but don't quote me on that. And that's great. Could I build my own thing like that?Absolutely not. I would rather pay someone to tie it together. Same story. Instead of building my own CRM by running some open-source software on an EC2 instance, I wind up paying for Salesforce or Pipedrive or something in that space. And so on, and so forth.And a lot of these companies that I'm doing business with aren't themselves running on top of AWS. But for web hosting, for example; if I look at the reference architecture for a WordPress site, AWS's diagram looks like a punchline. It is incredibly overcomplicated. And I say this as someone who ran large WordPress installations at Media Temple many years ago. Now, I have the good sense to pay WP Engine. And on a monthly basis, I give them money and they make the website work.Sure, under the hood, it's running on top of GCP or AWS somewhere. But I don't have to think about it; I don't have to build this stuff together and think about the backups and the failover strategy and the rest. The website just works. And that is increasingly the direction that business is going; things commoditize over time. And AWS in particular has done a terrible job, in my experience, of differentiating what it is they're doing in the language that their customers speak.They're great at selling things to existing infrastructure engineers, but folks who are building something from scratch aren't usually in that cohort. It's a longer story with time and, “Well, we're great at being able to sell EC2 instances by the gallon.” Great. Are you capable of going to a small doctor's office somewhere in the American Midwest and offering them an end-to-end solution for managing patient data? Of course not. You can offer them a bunch of things they can tie together to something that will suffice if they all happen to be software engineers, but that's not the opportunity.So instead, other companies are building those solutions on top of AWS, capturing the margin. And if there's one thing guaranteed to keep Amazon execs awake at night, it's the idea of someone who isn't them making money somehow somewhere, so I know that's got to rankle them, but they do not speak that language. At all. Longer-term, I only see that as a more and more significant crutch. A long enough timeframe here, we're talking about them becoming the Centurylinks of the world, the tier one backbone provider that everyone uses, but no one really thinks about because they're not a household name.Sam: That is a really thoughtful perspective. I think the diseconomies of scale that you're pointing to start to creep in, right? Because when you have to sell compute units by the gallon, right, you can't care if it's a gallon of milk, [laugh] or a gallon of oil, or you know, a gallon of poison. You just have to keep moving it through. So, the shift that I think they're going to end up having to make pragmatically, and you start to see some signs of it, like, you know, they hired but could not retain Matt [Acey 00:23:48]. He did an amazing job of bringing them to some pragmatic realization that they need to partner with open-source, but more broadly, when I think about Microsoft in the 2000s as they were starting to learn their open-source lessons, we were also being able to pull on Microsoft's deep competency and partners. So, most people didn't do the math on this. I was part of the field governance council so I understood exactly how the Microsoft business worked to the level that I was capable. When they had $65 billion in revenue, they produced $24 billion in profit through an ecosystem that generated $450 billion in revenue. So, for every dollar Microsoft made, it was $8 to partners. It was a fundamentally platform-shaped business, and that was how they're able to get into doctors offices in the Midwest, and kind of fit the curve that you're describing of all of those longtail opportunities that require so much care and that are complex to prosecute. These solved for their diseconomies of scale by having 1.2 million partner companies. So, will Amazon figure that out and will they hire, right, enough people who've done this before from Microsoft to become world-class in partnering, that's kind of an exercise left to the [laugh] reader, right? Where will that go over time? But I don't see another better mathematical model for dealing with the diseconomies of scale you have when you're one of the very largest providers on the planet.Corey: The hardest problem as I look at this is, at some point, you hit a point of scale where smaller things look a lot less interesting. I get that all the time when people say, “Oh, you fix AWS bills, aren't you missing out by not targeting Google bills and Azure bills as well?” And it's, yeah. I'm not VC-backed. It turns out that if I limit the customer base that I can effectively service to only AWS customers, yeah turns out, I'm not going to starve anytime soon. Who knew? I don't need to conquer the world and that feels increasingly antiquated, at least going by the stories everyone loves to tell.Sam: Yeah, it's interesting to see how cloud makes strange bedfellows, right? We started seeing this in, like, 2014, 2015, weird partnerships that you're like, “There's no way this would happen.” But the cloud economics which go back to utilization, rather than what it used to be, which was software lock-in, just changed who people were willing to hang out with. And now you see companies like Databricks going, you know, we do an amazing amount of business, effectively competing with Amazon, selling Spark services on top of predominantly Amazon infrastructure, and everybody seems happy with it. So, there's some hint of a new sensibility of what the future of partnering will be. We used to call it coopetition a long time ago, which is kind of a terrible word, but at least it shows that there's some nuance in you can't compete with everybody because it's just too hard.Corey: I wish there were better ways of articulating these things because it seems from the all the outside world, you have companies like Amazon and Microsoft and Google who go and build out partner networks because they need that external accessibility into various customer profiles that they can't speak to super well themselves, but they're also coming out with things that wind up competing directly or indirectly, with all of those partners at the same time. And I don't get it. I wish that there were smarter ways to do it.Sam: It is hard to even talk about it, right? One of the things that I think we've learned from philosophy is if we don't have a word for it, we can't be intelligent about it. So, there's a missing semantics here for being able to describe the complexity of where are you partnering? Where are you competing? Where are you differentiating? In an ecosystem, which is moving and changing.I tend to look at the tools of game theory for this, which is to look at things as either, you know, nonzero-sum games or zero-sum games. And if it's a nonzero-sum game, which I think are the most interesting ones, can you make it a positive sum game? And who can you play positive-sum games with? An organization as big as Amazon, or as big as Microsoft, or even as big as Google isn't ever completely coherent with itself. So, thinking about this as an independent software company, it doesn't matter if part of one of these hyperscalers has a part of their business that competes with your entire business because your business probably drives utilization of a completely different resource in their company that you can partner within them against them, effectively. Right?For example, Cassandra is an amazingly powerful but demanding workload on Kubernetes. So, there's a lot of Cassandra on EKS. You grow a lot of workload, and EKS business does super well. Does that prevent us from working with Amazon because they have Dynamo or because they have Keyspaces? Absolutely not, right?So, this is when those companies get so big that they are almost their own forest, right, of complexity, you can kind of get in, hang out, do well, and pretty much never see the competitive product, unless you're explicitly looking for it, which I think is a huge danger for us as independent software companies. And I would say this to anybody doing strategy for an organization like this, which is, don't obsess over the tiny part of their business that competes with yours, and do not pay attention to any of the marketing that they put out that looks competitive with what you have. Because if you can't figure out how to make a better product and sell it better to your customers as a single purpose corporation, you have bigger problems.Corey: I want to change gears slightly to something that's probably a fair bit more insulting, but that's okay. We're going to roll with it. That seems to be the theme of this episode. You have been, in effect, a CIO a number of times at different companies. And if we take a look at the typical CIO tenure, industry-wide, it's not long; it approaches the territory from an executive perspective of, “Be sure not to buy green bananas. You might not be here by the time they ripen.” And I'm wondering what it is that drives that and how you make a mark in a relatively short time frame when you're providing inputs and deciding on strategy, and those decisions may not bear fruit for years.Sam: CIO used to—we used say it stood for ‘Career Is Over' because the tenure is so short. I think there's a couple of reasons why it's so short. And I think there's a way I believe you can have impact in a short amount of time. I think the reason that it's been short is because people aren't sure what they want the CIO role to be.Do they want it to be a glorified finance person who's got a lot of data processing experience, but now really has got, you know, maybe even an MBA in finance, but is not focusing on value creation? Do they want it to be somebody who's all-singing, all-dancing Chief Data Officer with a CTO background who did something amazing and solved a really hard problem? The definition of success is difficult. Often CIOs now also have security under them, which is literally a job I would never ever want to have. Do security for a public corporation? Good Lord, that's a way to lose most of your life. You're the only executive other than the CEO that the board wants to hear from. Every sing—Corey: You don't sleep; you wait, in those scenarios. And oh, yeah, people joke about ablative CSOs in those scenarios. Yeah, after SolarWinds, you try and get an ablative intern instead, but those don't work as well. It's a matter of waiting for an inevitability. One of the things I think is misunderstood about management broadly, is that you are delegating work, but not the responsibility. The responsibility rests with you.So, when companies have these statements blaming some third-party contractor, it's no, no, no. I'm dealing with you. You were the one that gave my data to some sketchy randos. It is your responsibility that data has now been compromised. And people don't want to hear that, but it's true.Sam: I think that's absolutely right. So, you have this high risk, medium reward, very fungible job definition, right? If you ask all of the CIO's peers what their job is, they'll probably all tell you something different that represents their wish list. The thing that I learned at Autodesk, I was only there for 15 months, but we established a fundamental transformation of the work of how cloud platform is done at the company that's still in place a couple years later.You have to realize that you're a change agent, right? You're actually being hired to bring in the bulk of all the different biases and experiences you have to solve a problem that is not working, right? So, when I got to Autodesk, they didn't even know what their uptime was. It took three months to teach the team how to measure the uptime. Turned out the uptime was 97.7% for the cloud, for the world's largest engineering software company.That is 200 hours a year of unplanned downtime, right? That is not good. So, a complete overhaul [laugh] was needed. Understanding that as a change agent, your half-life is 12 to 18 months, you have to measure success not on tenure, but on your ability to take good care of the patient, right? It's going to be a lot of pain, you're going to work super hard, you're going to have to build trust with everyone, and then people are still going to hate you at the end. That is something you just have to kind of take on.As a friend of mine, Jason Warner joined Redpoint Ventures recently, he said this when he was the CTO of GitHub: “No one is a villain in their own story.” So, you realize, going into a big organization, people are going to make you a villain, but you still have to do incredibly thoughtful, careful work, that's going to take care of them for a long time to come. And those are the kinds of CIOs that I can relate to very well.Corey: Jason is great. You're name-dropping all the guests we've had. My God, keep going. It's a hard thing to rationalize and wrap heads around. It's one of those areas where you will not be measured during your tenure in the role, in some respects. And, of course, that leads to the cynical perspective as well, where well, someone's not going to be here long and if they say, “Yeah, we're just going to keep being stewards of the change that's already underway,” well, that doesn't look great, so quick, time to do a cloud migration, or a cloud repatriation, or time to roll something else out. A bit of a different story.Sam: One of the biggest challenges is how do you get the hearts and the minds of the people who are in the organization when they are no fools, and their expectation is like, “Hey, this company's been around for decades, and we go through cloud leaders or CIOs, like Wendy's goes through hamburgers.” They could just cloud-wash, right, or change-wash all their language. They could use the new language to describe the old thing because all they have to do is get through the performance review and outwait you. So, there's always going to be a level of defection because it's hard to change; it's hard to think about new things.So, the most important thing is how do you get into people's hearts and minds and enable them to believe that the best thing they could do for their career is to come along with the change? And I think that was what we ended up getting right in the Autodesk cloud transformation. And that requires endless optimism, and there's no room for cynicism because the cynicism is going to creep in around the edges. So, what I found on the job is, you just have to get up every morning and believe everything is possible and transmit that belief to everybody.So, if it seems naive or ingenuous, I think that doesn't matter as long as you can move people's hearts in each conversation towards, like, “Oh, this person cares about me. They care about a good outcome from me. I should listen a little bit more and maybe make a 1% change in what I'm doing.” Because 1% compounded daily for a year, you can actually get something done in the lifetime of a CIO.Corey: And I think that's probably a great place to leave it. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, how you think about these things, how you view the world, where can they find you?Sam: You can find me on Twitter, I'm @sramji, S-R-A-M-J-I, and I have a podcast that I host called Open||Source||Datawhere I invite innovators, data nerds, computational networking nerds to hang out and explain to me, a software programmer, what is the big world of open-source data all about, what's happening with machine learning, and what would it be like if you could put data in a container, just like you could put code in a container, and how might the world change? So, that's Open||Source||Data podcast.Corey: And we'll of course include links to that in the [show notes 00:35:58]. Thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it.Sam: Corey, it's been a privilege. Thank you so much for having me.Corey: Likewise. Sam Ramji, Chief Strategy Officer at DataStax. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me exactly which item in Sam's background that I made fun of is the place that you work at.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Chet Kapoor is the Chairman and CEO of DataStax. He is a proven leader and innovator in the tech industry with more than 20 years in leadership at innovative software and cloud companies, including Apigee, Google, IBM, BEA Systems, NeXT and others. As Chairman and CEO of Apigee, he led company-wide initiatives to build Apigee into a leading technology provider for digital business. Chet successfully took Apigee public before the company was acquired by Google in 2016. If you're an entrepreneur and technologist who wants to understand how a second time CEO is helping connect developers to the power and scale of open source software and cloud database-as-a-service, you don't want to miss this episode. 

When customers have great experiences, they want to buy more and are more likely to remain loyal. A positive customer experience often results in positive word-of-mouth referrals. 73% of customers say a good buying experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties (Source: PwC).  Daniel Burstein is the senior director of content and marketing at MECLABS Institute. He oversees all content marketing coming from the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa brands, while helping to shape the marketing directions for MECLABS Institute, digging for actionable discoveries while serving as an advocate for the audience. Before joining MECLABS Institute, Daniel was Vice President of MindPulse Communications—a boutique communications consultancy specializing in IT clients such as IBM, VMware, and BEA Systems. Daniel has 21 years of experience in copywriting, editing, internal communications, sales enablement, and field marketing communications.  In today's episode, we're going to discuss customer-first marketing and how we can help our customers see the value of our products and services Customer-First Marketing Daniel is passionate about what he calls “customer-first marketing”. This is an area where MECLABS Institute has done a lot of research. Daniel said there are many different ways to succeed as a marketer. However, from different studies and research, they've done, they've found one of the most successful things we can do is put the customer first. As marketers, it's part of the job to ask for a conversion. Daniel believes the best thing we can do is go back to our team and ask, “What can we do to put our customer first?” MECLABS conducted a research study on 2,400 consumers to determine how they perceive companies. The research found that the customers who could perceive that their needs were being put first were more loyal to the company, more satisfied, and more likely to be repeat customers.  Daniel said the most important question we need to ask whenever we need to make difficult decisions, is the question of how we can put the customers' needs first, while also achieving our business goals. “Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design.” - Clare Muscutt, Founder of CMXperience Actual Value Vs. Perceived Value It's important to understand the difference between the actual value and perceived value. Marketers have to communicate to customers the perceived value of the products a company is creating. This is the reason why we have content marketing and marketing in general. That's why marketing plays a vital role in value perception. If marketers don't do a good job and show the customer the value of what they're offering them, they will likely choose another company.  Though the difference may seem subtle, it's really important that our customers can see the value we're providing. I see this happening all the time when companies provide so much value to the customer but they fail to communicate this value to the customer effectively. As a result, this makes it much harder to make the sale.  We can't just provide value to our customers. Our customers have to perceive the value we are providing.  What is Your Sign Out Front? Just as luxury real-estate companies invest a lot of money in the sign in front of the development, we as entrepreneurs must ask ourselves, “What is our sign out front, and what does it say about our products?” Our “sign” can be our website or a free version of a premium course we're offering. This sign has to indicate to our customers that what we offer is what they're looking for. It has to help them perceive the value of our products.  Trust Through Transparency  Daniel mentioned the research from Michael Norton, at Harvard Business School, who spoke earlier at their event. In his research, he talked about what he calls “trust through transparency”. Once again, it comes down to value perception. A lot of times people don't understand what went into making the product or service they're buying. This includes the many years of experience we've accumulated to be that good at what we do.  If we're trying to monetize our content, we need to show all the work that went into creating the content in order to help customers and potential customers perceive the value of what we're offering. The Conversion Sequence Heuristic  MECLABS Institute has patented methodologies based on research done to understand the factors that go into customer decisions. The MECLABS Conversion Sequence Heuristic is a framework of five factors on which marketers need to focus their optimization energy.  Daniel focuses on the “D factor” which represents the force of the value proposition. There are four elements that affect the force of the value proposition. Daniel believes these elements are critical when we consider monetization. Because then we have to build a value proposition for our product. It's even more difficult when it's a digital product when customers can't just walk into a store, pick up a book, flip it around, and perceive its value. That's why, with digital products, we need to make sure we're communicating the value proposition right.  The four factors that form the force of the value proposition are appeal, credibility, exclusivity, and clarity. When we're trying to create the value proposition for a product, we have to ask ourselves how we rank on these four different factors to a customer.   1. Appeal    First, we need to ask if our product has appeal. After we've created something that has appeal in the marketplace, our customers will want to know why and how our claims will work.    2. Credibility   We need to look for ways to add credibility to our product. This can be achieved through some third-party certifications, customer reviews, or testimonials. This is also where content marketing can come in.      3. Exclusivity    After we've created an appealing product that people believe in, we need to think about exclusivity. If everyone else is selling our product, it'll be a commodity that we won't be able to sell at a higher margin. This takes us back to building the value proposition for our product. We must ask, “What is the exclusivity that we bring to this niche that no one else does?” It's about finding out what differentiates our product.    4. Clarity    The fourth element is clarity. We can have the most appealing, credible, and exclusive product but without clearly communicating these values, the customer won't care. We won't be able to get their attention and convert it into interest. Daniel's advice is to look for the exclusive value we offer in the marketplace and make it the headline.   Key Takeaways Thank you so much Daniel for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode: If we don't put customers first, they won't put us first. If there's one question we have to ask, it is, “How can we put the customers' needs first, while also achieving our business goals?” It's important to show our customers all the work and experience that went into creating our content so they can perceive the value we're offering. To make sure our products have exclusivity we need to ask, “What is the exclusivity that we bring to this niche that no one else does?” What is exclusive and appealing to one customer is not going to be to another customer. That's why it's important to identify and target our ideal customer. Connect with Daniel Burstein If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Daniel or connect with him, you can find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielburstein/ or visit MECLABS website, meclabs.com Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer? Did you like today's episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content: Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.  Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter. Share Your Story  How do you help your customers perceive the value of your products and services? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers. Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/92-customer-first-marketing-and-how-to-help-customers-perceive-the-value-of-our-products-and-services/ 

Company Name: OV Loop Company url: https://www.ovloop.com/ Company Linkedin Profile URL https://www.linkedin.com/company/ovloop/ What does your company do in 5 words or less? Faster and safer contactless payments Your 50 Word Bio Will Graylin is Founder and CEO of OV Loop, a Universal Wallet and Commerce Messaging platform for frictionless commerce. Prior to OV Loop, Will was the founder of LoopPay (acquired by Samsung), ROAM Data (acquired by Ingenico), WAY Systems (acquired by Verifone), and EntitleNet (acquired by BEA Systems/later Oracle).

Alfred Chuang of Race Capital joins Nick to discuss The Next Generation of Tech & Venture Capital from the Perspective of a Unicorn Founder Turned GP. In this episode, we cover: Walk us through your background and path to VC What's the thesis at Race Capital? Why did you name your fund Race Capital? I want to talk a bit about open source... there seem to be wildly differing takes on this but what is your opinion of for profit tech companies building products on open source architecture and, in some cases, just reskinning open source tech w/ a UI and selling for profit? As we evolve to an increasingly cloud-first technology environment, what does it mean as we transition from a hybrid (onprem, cloud) approach to cloud only? How does edge computing reconcile with this future cloud-only environment? On the data side... Do you think we move to a Unified Data Infrastructure Architecture in the future? Transition a bit to talk more about your journey... I want to talk a bit about BEA Systems... sounds like an amazing journey and a great outcome. What is your biggest regret looking back (if any)? Ultimately, why do you think entrepreneurs choose you over other firms? What's your opinion on valuation and, as things have gotten more competitive, firms bidding price up and founders really optimizing for valuation at the early stages? Is Silicon Valley's exodus real? Will these SPAC deals blow up?

The 2020 Kessler Foundation Virtual Grantee Symposium taught how employers use artificial intelligence (AI) in the employment process for streamlining resume screening, interviewing candidates, and onboarding new hires. Increasingly, this machine learning process is reshaping the world of work. It is important for disability professionals working in job search, placement, and support to understand how disability is defined and understood in the context of AI, and the perils of bias in these systems. View the symposium video at https://youtu.be/PF7bVQtKoY4 View the slides at https://kesslerfoundation.org/sites/default/files/2020-12/2020%20Grantee%20Symposium%20Slides-WEB.pdf Read the transcript at https://kesslerfoundation.org/sites/default/files/2020-12/Implications-of-AI-for-employment-of-individuals-with-disabilities-TRANSCRIPT.pdf Moderator: Elaine Katz, MS, CCC-SLP is Senior Vice President of Grants and Communications. Elaine Katz oversees Kessler Foundation’s comprehensive grant making program and its communications department. During her tenure, the Foundation has awarded more than $49 million in grant support for national and community-based employment programs. For more than 25 years, Katz has worked with non-profit organizations in the areas of board development, fundraising, marketing, and business development. Katz often speaks about innovative practices for employing people with disabilities, and is the author/co-author of articles and papers on related topics. Guests: Betsy Beaumon, CEO, Benetech Betsy Beaumon is the CEO of Benetech, a nonprofit that empowers communities with software for social good in education, poverty alleviation, and human rights. Betsy has been advocating for ethical and inclusive technology for over a decade and is focused on innovating around the immense potential of technology to drive inclusion, equity, and justice to positively impact marginalized communities across the globe. She defined the concept of “Born Accessible,” a vision where all digital content is made accessible to everyone when created. Betsy is a social entrepreneur and engineer and has co-founded two software companies, including the first web-based information and referral service for human services. She has developed products across software, semiconductor, and information sectors and held senior positions with BEA Systems and Cisco Systems. Betsy holds a degree in electrical engineering from Northwestern University. Jonathan J. Kaufman, President, J. Kaufman Consulting Jonathan Kaufman is an innovative thought leader, business educator and strategist who recognizes the impact of personal development on organizational growth. Born with Cerebral Palsy, Kaufman’s disability has been a profound part of his personal, academic and professional life. Building on his past experience as a former policy advisor to the White House on diversity and disability, Professor Kaufman has grown his work even further. Currently, he is a Forbes contributor, writing a regular column "Mindset Matters” that focuses on the intersection of disability, business and leadership strategy. In addition, he is an executive coach, licensed psychotherapist, and strategist working with C-Level Executives, Fortune 500 and 1000 companies, and nonprofits through his company J Kaufman Consulting. He develops new strategies and initiatives by combining ideas from management theories and applications to entrepreneurial thinking with the knowledge of human capital through increasing motivation and skills to achieve greater success both personally and professionally. For more information contact: Kfgrantprogram@kesslerfoundation.org

Today's podcast episode features John Belizaire, CEO of Soluna, the world’s first utility-scale blockchain infrastructure company developing power plants and combining them with high-performance computing facilities, currently developing its Harmattan Project in Morocco. As a serial entrepreneur, John has successfully founded and scaled multiple industry-leading technology startups that have achieved market leadership and double-digit growth, including FirstBest, an insurance software company acquired by Guidewire, and The Theory Center, a software company acquired by BEA Systems. Before becoming an entrepreneur, John was the lead architect for Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group. https://blog.cryptomining.tools/2020/09/039-john-belizaire-crypto-mining-tools-podcast/

Bill Roth is the Director of Cloud Economics at VMware and has over 30 years of experience in the enterprise software industry. He has also worked as a technical evangelist, operating executive, and journalist in addition to running product management organizations and holding CMO positions for startups. During his career, Bill has worked for several startups and bigger companies alike, including BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems, and Morgan Stanley.  In this episode… A leader’s main focus is to help the people around them become better individuals. Bill Roth, the Director of Cloud Economics at VMware, believes that a leader has to be transparent, vulnerable, and humble to inspire a culture of growth. In this episode of the Next Wave Leadership Podcast, Bill discusses how your personal values can empower your team and create products that improve other people’s lives. You’ll hear about Bill’s experience with community organizing and how this process is similar to the ways leaders build their teams. Additionally, you’ll discover how to establish a work environment where both individuals and leaders can give and receive constructive feedback. Bill also shares the impact that his faith has on his personal and professional life. Join Dov Pollack in this episode of the Next Wave Leadership Podcast as he talks to Bill Roth from VMware about his knowledge of product marketing and cloud economics. Bill also provides his insights into putting your ego aside to build honest relationships, welcoming the positive opportunities that come from negative situations, and employing your personal values to create good within your organization. Learn more about Bill and his experience in the resources section below.

“As an entrepreneur, tech CEO and venture capitalist who is also a woman of color, I am well aware of the challenges most entrepreneurs face when it comes to raising capital.”  So Promise Phelon summarizes with typical grace what she has learned in an amazing career.  Her book, “The Way of the Growth Warrior” – well you can’t get it yet.  You can pre-order it in the link below.  In the meantime, you can hear her story in this episode. Promise Phelon started that career at BEA Systems, where she became Head of Product Marketing.  While a Black woman running marketing at BEA in the 1990s might be its own story, it was just her beginning... The Growth Warrior https://thegrowthwarrior.com Something Ventured https://somethingventured.us

An airhacks.fm conversation with Tomas Langer (@langer_tomas) about: The first line of code was in Basic on Atari 800 XE in 1989, computer club for kids in Prague, the programming accident in Java, studying and working for 16h a day, early interests in application servers, joining BEA Systems in 2003 and starting with version 6, the weblogic.jar and the weblogic "thin client" jar, the only BEA consultant in eastern Europe, Oracle's acquisition was a big change, leaving Oracle and moving to AVG for building custom application servers, starting at HomeCredit to develop with WebLogic, service buses and Co., joining a JavaONE conference session with Josh Long about SpringBoot, what is the purpose of FatJARs, one application per server, WebLogic became bigger over time, hollow JARs are explainable, about the costs of running application servers in the cloud, the deconstruction of the application server, how clustering became obsolete, application servers and docker layers, separation of business logic and infrastructure, the superfluous deployment machinery, the idea of a single application, the complicated application server's classloading, helidon only relies on the system ClassLoader, cloud features without clouds, starting at Oracle again, Airport, Prime, J4C and Helidon, helidon was fully opensourced in February, 2019, the origin Helidon idea was to be a cloud platform, Helidon's security is similar to WebLogic 8-9 security model, helidon separates between the user and service accounts, helidon's outbound security is automated, helidon was designed with docker in mind, helidon supports hollow jars and so directly the Docker layering, FatJARs are not worth the trouble, bare metal is the killer use case for FatJARs, hardcore classloaders are problematic with GraalVM, Helidon supports MicroProfile 3.0 all parts of it, merging all infrastructural modules in a single JAR is dangerous - beans.xml and class clashes are possible, helidon comes with JWT support fo outbound communication, in helidon you can provide you own main method, helidon comes with two modes: MicroProfile and Java SE, helidon is just a set of libraries, one library happens to be the server -- but is optional, helidon started as a Java SE platform only - microprofile came later, helidon was inspired by expressjs, trying to replicate the express experience, helidon ported the Java 9 flow API to Java 8 (by renaming the package) to backport the user experience, helidon uses the event loop of netty - never block the thread, most of Jakarta EE and Java SE libraries are not reactive, Java SE and MicroProfile modes can be used at the same time, helidon Java SE application is directly compilable with GraalVM to native image, Helidon 2.0 will come with native compilation support of MicroProfile, commercial support for Helidon will be probably possible, Helidon team answers questions on slack channel, no-one is interested in providing support of outdated software, MicroProfile is volatile - backward compatibility can be a challenge, Tomas Langer on twitter: @langer_tomas and on github: https://github.com/tomas-langer

Episode 41: Kent Dickson – Yonomi Kent Dickson is the co-founder and CEO of Yonomi, the IoT company creating a more connected smart home. Yonomi builds smart home solutions for people and companies to connect devices, integrate multiple platforms, and Bring the Home to Life(TM). Kent’s background includes serving as General Manager of GridMachine, a massive scale Grid Computing-as-a-Service operated as a business unit of Sentient AI. Prior to that Kent was CTO at Tendril where he led product development and strategy for a first of its kind Cloud platform for the Internet of Things with a focus on residential energy management use cases. Kent also spent 9 years at BEA Systems leading the teams for several market defining products in the WebLogic and AquaLogic lines. Kent has spent 10 years working on the Smart Home frontier, partnering with leading device makers, voice assistants, AI innovators, and service providers. Kent holds a BS in Aerospace Engineering and an MBA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Links to things we talk about: Kent Dickson on LinkedIn Yonomi Website Yonomi on Instagram Click to Review and Rate Colorado TechCast on iTunes! We value every review we receive and often read them out on the show. If you take the time to leave one, THANK YOU – You rock! IF YOU LIKE WHAT YOU HEAR, PLEASE: Subscribe to our list Connect with us on Twitter Email us and tell us what you think!        

Jay is responsible for all revenue-generating activities of Atlassian, including customer success and retention, operations and marketing. Jay joined Atlassian in 2008 as vice president of sales and marketing to lead Atlassian’s pioneering efforts to develop a high-velocity, low-touch sales model. He’s overseen the company’s global expansion, introduction of its Starter License program (a disruptive approach to “freemium” where the company donates all proceeds to a charitable cause), and its growing worldwide customer community and programs. In 2011 Atlassian introduced its cloud-based offering Atlassian On-Demand, an evolution of its fast-growing SaaS platform. Jay has more than 18 years of experience in the software industry. He began his career at Plumtree Software where he held a variety of senior marketing and sales roles. Significantly, Jay oversaw the company’s expansion throughout Europe and Asia Pacific. When Plumtree was acquired by BEA Systems in 2005, Jay became vice president of marketing for BEA Systems, which was later acquired by Oracle in 2008. Jay holds a bachelor’s degree in political and environmental science from the University of Washington.

Meet Lissa Daniels, VP of demand generation, marketing operations, and analytics at Looker. Looker is a unified Platform for Data that delivers actionable business insights to every employee at the point of decision. Prior to Looker, Lissa spent her entire marketing career manically driving leads to the sales team. Over the years, she has worked at companies of all sizes and stages of growth, including, BEA Systems, VMWare, and Medallia. In this episode, you'll hear about the initial steps you need to do when joining an early stage company as the first marketer and how to handle having multiple customer personas - how to manage each one of them and how to look at them from a marketing perspective. You'll also learn the one phrase every marketer must make their mantra, key testing methodologies, how to make budget-driven decisions like Lissa does and finally, what needs to shift for marketers in 2019. Enjoy! Show Notes 02:37 A Platform For Data: A Single Source of Truth for All 04:57 First Full Time Marketing Person 05:33 Putting On Blinders: Finding New Customers and New Business 06:41 Competition and Differentiation 07:49 Finding The Right Customer Personas 11:28 Channels and Optimization 14:39 Using Guesstimations When Starting Out 18:05 The Testing Process 20:26 Testing Metric Guidelines 21:14 Tracking By Channel 21:47 Prioritization In Testing 22:46 Valuable Metrics For Marketers 24:12 Lessons Learned From Roadblocks 27:20 For 2019: Growing Traction and Key Partnerships 30:14 Lightning Questions

One of FinancialForce CFO Gordy Brooks’ most valuable early career-building experiences began by butting heads with his CEO. The chief executive insisted on issuing sales commissions on a weekly basis – an ask that would have most finance chiefs pulling their hair out.  After the CEO stuck to his guns in the face of counterarguments, Brooks spent two weeks carefully unpacking the problem behind his CEO’s requested outcome. He discovered that the root cause of the request involved ineffective operational processes (sales territory assignments and compensation plan design) and inefficient comp and payroll processes. When Brooks presented those findings with a significant process improvement proposal, the CEO embraced his systemic solution. “The CFO role is not only about metrics and business models,” Brooks notes. “It’s also about the human touch.”  Brooks – who possesses two decades of finance executive experience with VMWare, BEA Systems, Citrix, Microsoft and other notables – shares his takes on current comp challenges, the importance of early  public-company experience, and the high career returns on international assignments.

話したこと アギレルゴコンサルティング @kawaguti さんとともに、M-1、Regional Scrum Gathering® Tokyo>、Certified Agile Leadership などについてお話ししました。 Podcast へのフィードバックをぜひ #omoiyarifm までお願いします！ M-1グランプリ ジャルジャル ホットワード ゼンチン / ドネシア #33 Agile2018 in San Diego に来ています 上戸彩が可愛い REGIONAL SCRUM GATHERING® TOKYO 2019 12/11 12:00から REGIONAL SCRUM GATHERING® TOKYO チケット販売 REGIONAL SCRUM GATHERING TOKYOボランティア募集中 OST Scrum Fest Osaka 2019 DevOps Days Tokyo 2019 Certified Agile Leadership Program Michael K Sahota BEA Systems AGILITRIX CSC Roger Brown Scrum Alliance® Certified Agile Leadership (CAL) Program 詳細PDF StructureとCultureの両方がないとうまくいかない How To Change Your Organizational Culture 文化はバブル CSMよりも社内での推進者にはCALの方が良いのでは？ CALのマネジメントスタイルを理解するマネージャーがいると良さそう

John Belizaire is the CEO of Soluna, the world’s first vertically-integrated blockchain computing company with the core mission of powering the blockchain economy with self-produced renewable energy. The company will generate the lowest cost of green power in the world by combining a 900-megawatt wind farm with a utility-scale blockchain computing facility that will support the next wave of innovations from cryptocurrency mining to other high-density computations such as distributed graphics rendering, file storage, machine learning, and AI-related computations. Prior to being the CEO of Soluna, John founded FirstBest Systems in 2006. First Best was sold about 10 years later to Guidewire, the leader in P&C Enterprise Software Solutions for over $40 Million dollars. Before cofounding FirstBest, John was the Senior Director of Business Development and Strategic Planning for E-commerce applications division at BEA Systems, Inc. He drove international expansion into EMEA and AsiaPac and grew annual revenue to over $100 million in 3 years with a global list of customers. This podcast is brought to by....… Coin Gamma. If you are looking for help with your blockchain strategy, need blockchain engineering help to create a dapp, or want help growth hacking your blockchain related business (STO or ICO included), get in touch: fritz@coingamma.com Show notes 02:27 - Moving from the more traditional technology background into the blockchain space. 04:02 - Becoming a serial entrepreneur. 04:57 - Joining Soluna as CEO. 07:41 - Projected evolution of blockchain. 09:29 - The fast paced maturity of blockchain infrastructure. 10:51 - Bringing more green power (wind power) to the network. 14:12 - Developing a farm of computing facilities designed to power blockchain applications. 17:03 - Offering a cloud-based mining service. 19:04 - Expanding into other locations after Morocco. 25:09 - The disputed territory. 29:14 - Investing in the local economy of the current location. 31:31 - Doing a Security Token Offering (STO): Creating a utility around their platform and offering the utility to private investors. 35:10 - The domination of Bitcoin mining computing power by Bitmain 37:40 - The energy efficiency of cryptocurrency mining compared to traditional data centers. Connect with John Belizaire and Soluna Soluna Twitter -@SolunaPower Soluna Website - soluna.io Soluna YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtWkmPR6NAlU4drrsgtPc3Q  Jonn Belizaire LinkedIn - John Belizaire LinkedIn Profile Connect with Coin Gamma Website: Coingamma.com Market Data: Market Data Page Twitter:  @coingamma Download our app: Click to Download

Panel Brendan Eich Joe Eames Aaron Frost AJ ONeal Jamison Dance Tim Caswell Charles Max Wood Discussion 01:57 – Brendan Eich Introduction JavaScript [Wiki] Brendan Eich [Wiki] 02:14 – Origin of JavaScript Java Netscape Jim Clark Marc Andreesen NCSA Mosaic NCSA HTTPd Lynx (Web Browser) Lou Montulli Silicon Graphics Kernel Tom Paquin Kipp Hickman MicroUnity Sun Microsystems Andreas Bechtolsheim Bill Joy Sun-1 Scheme Programming Language Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – 2nd Edition (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman & Julie Sussman Guy Steele Gerald Sussman SPDY Rob McCool Mike McCool Apache Mocha Peninsula Creamery, Palo Alto, CA Main () and Other Methods (C# vs Java) Static in Java, Static Variables, Static Methods, Static Classes 10:38 – Other Languages for Programmers Visual Basic Chrome Blacklist Firefox 12:38 – Naming JavaScript and Writing VMs Canvas Andrew Myers 16:14 – Envisioning JavaScript’s Platform Web 2.0 AJAX Hidaho Design Opera Mozilla Logo Smalltalk Self HyperTalk Bill Atkinson HyperCard Star Wars Trench Run 2.0 David Ungar Craig Chambers Lars Bak Strongtalk TypeScript HotSpot V8 Dart Jamie Zawinski 24:42 – Working with ECMA Bill Gates Blackbird Spyglass Carl Cargill Jan van den Beld Philips Mike Cowlishaw Borland David M. Gay ECMAScript Lisp Richard Gabriel 31:26 – Naming Mozilla Jamie Zawinski Godzilla 31:57 – Time-Outs 32:53 – Functions Clojure John Rose Oracle Scala Async.io 38:37 – XHR and Microsoft Flash Hadoop Ricardo Jenez Ken Smith Brent Noorda Ray Noorda .NET Shon Katzenberger Anders Hejlsberg NCSA File Formats 45:54 – SpiderMonkey Chris Houck Brendan Eich and Douglas Crockford – TXJS 2010 Douglas Crockford JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford TXJS.com ActionScript Flex Adobe E4X BEA Systems John Schneider Rhino JScript roku Waldemar Horwat Harvard Putnam Math Competition Chris Wilson Silverlight Allen Wirfs-Brock NDC Oslo 2014 JSConf Brendan JSConf Talks 59:58 – JavaScript and Mozilla GIP SSLeay Eric A. Young Tim Hudson Digital Styles Raptor Gecko ICQ and AIM PowerPlant CodeWarrior Camino David Hyatt Lotus Mitch Kapor Ted Leonsis Mitchell Baker David Baren Phoenix Tinderbox Harmony 1:14:37 – Surprises with Evolution of JavaScript Ryan Dahl node.js Haskell Elm Swift Unity Games Angular Ember.js Dojo jQuery react ClojureScript JavaScript Jabber Episode #107: ClojureScript & Om with David Nolen MVC 01:19:43 – Angular’s HTML Customization Sweet.js JavaScript Jabber Episode #039: Sweet.js with Tim Disney TC39 Rick Waldron 01:22:27 – Applications with JavaScript SPA’s Shumway Project IronRuby 01:25:45 – Future of Web and Frameworks LLVM Chris Lattner Blog Epic Games Emscripten Autodesk PortableApps WebGL 01:29:39 – ASM.js Dart.js John McCutchen Monster Madness Anders Hejlsberg, Steve Lucco, Luke Hoban: TypeScript 0.9 – Generics and More (Channel 9, 2013) Legacy 01:32:58 – Brendan’s Future with JavaScript Picks hapi.js (Aaron) JavaScript Disabled: Should I Care? (Aaron) Aaron’s Frontend Masters Course on ES6 (Aaron) Brendan’s “Cool Story Bro” (AJ) [YouTube] Queen – Don't Stop Me Now (AJ) Trending.fm (AJ) WE ARE DOOMED soundtrack EP by Robby Duguay (Jamison) Hohokum Soundtrack (Jamison) Nashville Outlaws: A Tribute to Mötley Crüe (Joe) Audible (Joe) Stripe (Chuck) Guardians of the Galaxy (Brendan)

Panel Brendan Eich Joe Eames Aaron Frost AJ ONeal Jamison Dance Tim Caswell Charles Max Wood Discussion 01:57 – Brendan Eich Introduction JavaScript [Wiki] Brendan Eich [Wiki] 02:14 – Origin of JavaScript Java Netscape Jim Clark Marc Andreesen NCSA Mosaic NCSA HTTPd Lynx (Web Browser) Lou Montulli Silicon Graphics Kernel Tom Paquin Kipp Hickman MicroUnity Sun Microsystems Andreas Bechtolsheim Bill Joy Sun-1 Scheme Programming Language Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – 2nd Edition (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman & Julie Sussman Guy Steele Gerald Sussman SPDY Rob McCool Mike McCool Apache Mocha Peninsula Creamery, Palo Alto, CA Main () and Other Methods (C# vs Java) Static in Java, Static Variables, Static Methods, Static Classes 10:38 – Other Languages for Programmers Visual Basic Chrome Blacklist Firefox 12:38 – Naming JavaScript and Writing VMs Canvas Andrew Myers 16:14 – Envisioning JavaScript’s Platform Web 2.0 AJAX Hidaho Design Opera Mozilla Logo Smalltalk Self HyperTalk Bill Atkinson HyperCard Star Wars Trench Run 2.0 David Ungar Craig Chambers Lars Bak Strongtalk TypeScript HotSpot V8 Dart Jamie Zawinski 24:42 – Working with ECMA Bill Gates Blackbird Spyglass Carl Cargill Jan van den Beld Philips Mike Cowlishaw Borland David M. Gay ECMAScript Lisp Richard Gabriel 31:26 – Naming Mozilla Jamie Zawinski Godzilla 31:57 – Time-Outs 32:53 – Functions Clojure John Rose Oracle Scala Async.io 38:37 – XHR and Microsoft Flash Hadoop Ricardo Jenez Ken Smith Brent Noorda Ray Noorda .NET Shon Katzenberger Anders Hejlsberg NCSA File Formats 45:54 – SpiderMonkey Chris Houck Brendan Eich and Douglas Crockford – TXJS 2010 Douglas Crockford JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford TXJS.com ActionScript Flex Adobe E4X BEA Systems John Schneider Rhino JScript roku Waldemar Horwat Harvard Putnam Math Competition Chris Wilson Silverlight Allen Wirfs-Brock NDC Oslo 2014 JSConf Brendan JSConf Talks 59:58 – JavaScript and Mozilla GIP SSLeay Eric A. Young Tim Hudson Digital Styles Raptor Gecko ICQ and AIM PowerPlant CodeWarrior Camino David Hyatt Lotus Mitch Kapor Ted Leonsis Mitchell Baker David Baren Phoenix Tinderbox Harmony 1:14:37 – Surprises with Evolution of JavaScript Ryan Dahl node.js Haskell Elm Swift Unity Games Angular Ember.js Dojo jQuery react ClojureScript JavaScript Jabber Episode #107: ClojureScript & Om with David Nolen MVC 01:19:43 – Angular’s HTML Customization Sweet.js JavaScript Jabber Episode #039: Sweet.js with Tim Disney TC39 Rick Waldron 01:22:27 – Applications with JavaScript SPA’s Shumway Project IronRuby 01:25:45 – Future of Web and Frameworks LLVM Chris Lattner Blog Epic Games Emscripten Autodesk PortableApps WebGL 01:29:39 – ASM.js Dart.js John McCutchen Monster Madness Anders Hejlsberg, Steve Lucco, Luke Hoban: TypeScript 0.9 – Generics and More (Channel 9, 2013) Legacy 01:32:58 – Brendan’s Future with JavaScript Picks hapi.js (Aaron) JavaScript Disabled: Should I Care? (Aaron) Aaron’s Frontend Masters Course on ES6 (Aaron) Brendan’s “Cool Story Bro” (AJ) [YouTube] Queen – Don't Stop Me Now (AJ) Trending.fm (AJ) WE ARE DOOMED soundtrack EP by Robby Duguay (Jamison) Hohokum Soundtrack (Jamison) Nashville Outlaws: A Tribute to Mötley Crüe (Joe) Audible (Joe) Stripe (Chuck) Guardians of the Galaxy (Brendan)

Panel Brendan Eich Joe Eames Aaron Frost AJ ONeal Jamison Dance Tim Caswell Charles Max Wood Discussion 01:57 – Brendan Eich Introduction JavaScript [Wiki] Brendan Eich [Wiki] 02:14 – Origin of JavaScript Java Netscape Jim Clark Marc Andreesen NCSA Mosaic NCSA HTTPd Lynx (Web Browser) Lou Montulli Silicon Graphics Kernel Tom Paquin Kipp Hickman MicroUnity Sun Microsystems Andreas Bechtolsheim Bill Joy Sun-1 Scheme Programming Language Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – 2nd Edition (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman & Julie Sussman Guy Steele Gerald Sussman SPDY Rob McCool Mike McCool Apache Mocha Peninsula Creamery, Palo Alto, CA Main () and Other Methods (C# vs Java) Static in Java, Static Variables, Static Methods, Static Classes 10:38 – Other Languages for Programmers Visual Basic Chrome Blacklist Firefox 12:38 – Naming JavaScript and Writing VMs Canvas Andrew Myers 16:14 – Envisioning JavaScript’s Platform Web 2.0 AJAX Hidaho Design Opera Mozilla Logo Smalltalk Self HyperTalk Bill Atkinson HyperCard Star Wars Trench Run 2.0 David Ungar Craig Chambers Lars Bak Strongtalk TypeScript HotSpot V8 Dart Jamie Zawinski 24:42 – Working with ECMA Bill Gates Blackbird Spyglass Carl Cargill Jan van den Beld Philips Mike Cowlishaw Borland David M. Gay ECMAScript Lisp Richard Gabriel 31:26 – Naming Mozilla Jamie Zawinski Godzilla 31:57 – Time-Outs 32:53 – Functions Clojure John Rose Oracle Scala Async.io 38:37 – XHR and Microsoft Flash Hadoop Ricardo Jenez Ken Smith Brent Noorda Ray Noorda .NET Shon Katzenberger Anders Hejlsberg NCSA File Formats 45:54 – SpiderMonkey Chris Houck Brendan Eich and Douglas Crockford – TXJS 2010 Douglas Crockford JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford TXJS.com ActionScript Flex Adobe E4X BEA Systems John Schneider Rhino JScript roku Waldemar Horwat Harvard Putnam Math Competition Chris Wilson Silverlight Allen Wirfs-Brock NDC Oslo 2014 JSConf Brendan JSConf Talks 59:58 – JavaScript and Mozilla GIP SSLeay Eric A. Young Tim Hudson Digital Styles Raptor Gecko ICQ and AIM PowerPlant CodeWarrior Camino David Hyatt Lotus Mitch Kapor Ted Leonsis Mitchell Baker David Baren Phoenix Tinderbox Harmony 1:14:37 – Surprises with Evolution of JavaScript Ryan Dahl node.js Haskell Elm Swift Unity Games Angular Ember.js Dojo jQuery react ClojureScript JavaScript Jabber Episode #107: ClojureScript & Om with David Nolen MVC 01:19:43 – Angular’s HTML Customization Sweet.js JavaScript Jabber Episode #039: Sweet.js with Tim Disney TC39 Rick Waldron 01:22:27 – Applications with JavaScript SPA’s Shumway Project IronRuby 01:25:45 – Future of Web and Frameworks LLVM Chris Lattner Blog Epic Games Emscripten Autodesk PortableApps WebGL 01:29:39 – ASM.js Dart.js John McCutchen Monster Madness Anders Hejlsberg, Steve Lucco, Luke Hoban: TypeScript 0.9 – Generics and More (Channel 9, 2013) Legacy 01:32:58 – Brendan’s Future with JavaScript Picks hapi.js (Aaron) JavaScript Disabled: Should I Care? (Aaron) Aaron’s Frontend Masters Course on ES6 (Aaron) Brendan’s “Cool Story Bro” (AJ) [YouTube] Queen – Don't Stop Me Now (AJ) Trending.fm (AJ) WE ARE DOOMED soundtrack EP by Robby Duguay (Jamison) Hohokum Soundtrack (Jamison) Nashville Outlaws: A Tribute to Mötley Crüe (Joe) Audible (Joe) Stripe (Chuck) Guardians of the Galaxy (Brendan)

Mikey Butler is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at New Relic. He's responsible for Product Engineering, Platform Engineering, and Site Engineering Operations. He brings more than 30 years of experience in the software industry. The first half focused on system coding at Digital Equipment, Bank of America, Data General, Rolm and Sun. The latter half on engineering management for Cisco Systems, Sybase, BEA Systems, Intuit and, most recently, Seagate. And named one of the 50 Most Important African Americans in Technology at the 2009 Soul of Technology Innovation and Equity Symposium. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikey-butler-25602a1/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikeybutler  

Tim Eades is the CEO @ at vArmour, the industry's first distributed security system that provides application-aware micro-segmentation. Tim joined vArmour as CEO in October, 2013. Prior to that, he was the CEO at Silver Tail Systems until the company was acquired by RSA, the security division of EMC in late 2012. Prior to leading Silver Tail Systems, Tim was CEO of Everyone.net, an SMB focused SaaS company that was acquired by Proofpoint. Tim has also held sales and marketing executive leadership positions at BEA Systems, Sana Security, Phoenix Technologies and IBM. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Tim make his way from punk rock fan in the UK to leading Silicon Valley CEO? Why does Tim believe Incremental Account Opportunity (IAO) is one of the most important metrics for a growing startup? Why does Tim believe that most founders are far too late to ship their second product? How can they identify adjacent markets? When exactly is the right time to know when to ship your second product? What does it take in terms of sales team structure to successfully orchestrate the 7 figure deals that Tim does? What does that look like in terms of sales team compensation? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Tim Eades

Join Dr. Krister Lowe and today’s featured guest and leading organizational coach Bob Costello—a Senior Agile Coach with the Eliassen Group—for this week’s episode of The Team Coaching Zone Podcast! Bob offers over 20 years experience in the software industry and has held leadership positions in both software startups and large organizations. He has a background in software development, product management, and engineering. For the last 8 years Bob has been helping organizations, both at the team and leadership levels, to make the transition to agile. Bob excels at helping organizations achieve both their business and organizational goals of an agile change program, with leadership coaching, team coaching and change management. He has a rich background of experience with IBM Design Studio, BlueCollar Objects, Akkolade Consulting, Valtech, ACS, CGI-AMS, BEA Systems, Deloitte, Next Software and more. In this episode Bob shares his journey over the last 20 years rising up through the ranks in the software development industry to becoming an agile leadership and team coach. Themes covered in the podcast include: working at NEXT Software with Steve Jobs; The Agile Manifesto; the changing operating context that catalyzed the agile movement; agile principles and practices; coaching agile mindsets vs. process; “being” vs. “doing” agile; using situational leadership for coaching agile leaders and teams; shared leadership in agile teams; the 4 SCRUM ceremonies; managing your role as an agile team coach; team maturity and development; agile teams as learning teams and more. Bob also shares some great stories coaching agile teams as well as recommendations on books and team coach training programs that focus on agile. All team coaches including both generalist practitioners as well as specialists in coaching agile teams will find Bob’s insights and lessons learned well worth the listen. This is an episode that you will surely not want to miss!

Geschäftsführer Guerrilla Marketing Group Anthony-James Owen führt zusammen mit seinem Team Marketingberatung und Vertriebstrainings für Kunden durch. Er ist besonders im Bereich der Neukundengewinnung aktiv. Außerdem ist er der Moderator der wöchentlichen Internetradiosendung zu Marketing und Vertrieb GuerrillaFM. Berufshintergrund Anthony-James Owen Erlernte das Vertriebshandwerk bei Hewlett-Packard (HP) in den Vertrieb. Zugute kam ihm dort auch seine reichhaltige Erfahrung, denn bereits während seiner Ausbildung betrieb er eine EDV-Beratung. Seit 1992 ebenfalls in leitenden Positionen tätig u.a. als Geschäftsstellenleiter und Vertriebsleiter Deutschland für öffentliche Auftraggeber (Umsatzverantwortung 100 Mio. DM), danach Marketingleiter bei Silicon Graphics (SGI) und später Verkaufsleiter bei Sun Microsystems für die Fertigungsindustrie. Trainings Seit 1985 ist Anthony-James Owen als Trainer tätig. Zusammenarbeit Seine Suche nach bewährten und einfach anwendbaren Konzepten führte ihn zur Guerrilla Marketing Group und deren erfolgreichen Trainingsmethoden, wie in den Büchern Guerrilla Marketing oder Guerrilla Verkauf beschrieben. Diese unkonventionellen Methoden hat Anthony-James Owen an die europäischen Verhältnisse angepasst und hält diese Trainings in deutscher und englischer Sprache. In Deutschland arbeitet er seit vielen Jahren mit verschiedenen Partnern zusammen, die Unternehmer unterstützen. Darunter finden sich so etablierte Einrichtungen wie der Business-Plan-Wettbewerb in Berlin / Brandenburg (BPW) als Referent seit 2004, das TCC (Technologie Coaching Center) als Berater, die KfW (als Gründungscoach), das RKW als Marketingberater und Trainer. Kunden Er trainierte u.a. Management wie Außendienst von Unternehmen wie: RWE, Nomadic Display, BEA Systems., AOK, Inneo, Deutsche Telekom, ABC-Privatkundenbank, WIngas und diverse Einzelhändler. In der Marketingberatung unterstützt er besonders Gründer und Jungunternehmer beim Start und dem Aufbau eines konstanten Neukundengewinnungssystems. Dazu zählen u.a. Berater, Trainer und Coaches. Aber auch Hersteller von Investitionsgütern und Software. Persönliches Anthony-James Owen ist im Oktober 1963 geboren und lebt in Berlin. guerrilla.de Dein Pitch:  Mein Name ist Anthony-James Owen ich bin Teil der Guerrilla Marketing Group. Wir helfen Unternehmen mit wenig Budget das Optimale im Marketing und Vertrieb rauszuholen. Wie bekomme ich mehr qualifizierte Interessenten für wenig Geld. Dein schlimmster Moment als Unternehmer?  Mein allerschlimmster Moment, war: Ich habe mich schon sehr früh selbstständig gemacht und habe schon während meinem Studium meine erste Firma gegründet. Das Business lief sehr gut, wir waren rasch 15 Mitarbeiter und konten und vor Aufträgen nicht retten. Als dann eines Tagen am Morgen mein Business-Partner nicht da war, die Bank anrieft, der Vermieter anrieft und kein Geld auf dem Konto war. Mein Partner hat in einer Nacht- und Nebel-Aktion die Konten leer geräumt und ist mit mehreren hunderttausend Mark untergetaucht. Wie hast Du es geschafft, Deine Leidenschaft zu finden?  Ich hab mit 16Jahren ein Buch über Unternehmensberater gelesen und wusste danach, ich werde Unternehmensberater. Ich habe das ja dann lange auch nicht gemacht, heute allerdings bin ich Unternehmensberater. Es spielt keine Rolle was du machst, du musst es nur sehr intensiv machen. Ich hab Bücher gelesen, Hörbücher gehört und mich stundenlang damit beschäftig. Wenn dich was interessiert musst du dich stark damit beschäftigen, dieser starke Fokus bringt die Leidenschaft mit sich. Was war der wichtigste Schritt, der Dich zum großen Erfolg gebracht hat?  Ein Verkaufstraining von Tom Hopkens 1990 - das hat mein Leben verändert Deine Lieblings-Internet-Ressource?  Copyblogger Link zur Ressource:  http://www.copyblogger.com/ Buchtitelempfehlung:  Einfach verkaufen , Tom Hopkins   Kontaktdaten des Interviewpartners:  www.guerrilla.de Podcast: www.guerrilla.fm +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++   Mehr Freiheit, mehr Geld und mehr Spaß mit DEINEM eigenen Podcast. Erfahre jetzt, warum es auch für Dich Sinn macht, Deinen eigenen Podcast zu starten. Jetzt hier zum kostenlosen Podcast-Workshop anmelden: Podcastkurs.com   +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

There’s an old expression, that there are only 2 hard problems in computing: naming, cache invalidation and off-​​by-​​one errors. Building offline web apps is all about those hard problems. There are some different ways of storing stuff - such as html5 caching, html5 storage, sqllite, and even native stores such as contacts and calendars - and we’ll sing their praises. But the really hard problems are knowing what to store, whether the stuff is still good or needs refreshing, how much to store, how to resolve conflicts between the client and server, how to integrate with data-​​specific stores, all in a bewildering cacophony of network and storage limited devices. We’ll spend the bulk of our time on these hard problems, which is probably more useful than api description and sample code. Dave Orchard is Mobile Architect at Salesforce​.com and located in Vancouver, Canada. This means being involved in many mobile platforms, architectures, tools, technologies and APIs. Prior to that, he was a co-​​founder of Ayogo Games and focused on iPhone and ruby/​merb/​mysql based casual social games. Back further in the mists of time, he was the Web standards lead for BEA Systems for 7 years, including being elected three times to 2 year terms on the W3C Technical Architecture Group chaired by Sir Tim Berners-​​Lee. Follow Dave on Twitter: @DaveO Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Over time, Web developers have feared, hated and loved Web caching, at times trying to kill it, at others professing undying love. Mark Nottingham (chair of the IETF HTTPbis Working Group and author of its revised Web Caching specification) will examine how browsers (mis)-treat your content today, as well as where your relationship with browser caching might go in the future. Mark Nottingham is a Principal Technical Yahoo!, putting together Web-based infrastructure for sites like Yahoo! Finance, Sports, Tech, TV and Movies. He has spent the last fifteen years designing, debugging, serving and caching Web content, with past stints at Merrill Lynch, Akamai and BEA Systems, along with scars from writing specifications like the Atom Syndication Format, WS-Policy and the WS-I Basic Profile, and chairing both IETF and W3C Working Groups. Right now, his focus is on using HTTP for what the rest of the industry calls Web Services. Past occupations have included being a photojournalist, Volkswagen mechanic, graphic designer, Webmaster, developer, systems administrator, research scientist, standards expert and all-around Web technology guy. He’s married to Anitra, with two sons, Charlie and Bennet. They currently live in Melbourne, Australia. Follow Mark on Twitter: @mnot Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

Our region is on the cusp of an explosion of funding sources for technology businesses. Sources of angel capital, early stage funding and VC money have been locating here and finding great companies and ideas in which to invest. But unlocking the treasure chest requires more than a bright idea and a pretty business plan. Join us for a lively session featuring three local investors that focus on tech businesses for early stage or later stage investments. Our panelists include: Mike Stubler, Managing Director of the Cleveland office of Draper Triangle Ventures, an affiliate of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a midwest leader in seed and early stage venture Capital. Mike's experience not only includes professional investing but leadership positions in a variety of early stage tech businesses. Charles Stack, CEO of Flashline Partners; Charles is former founder and CEO of Flashline which was sold to BEA Systems; Charles has formed Flashline Partners to invest in promising, technology-based, early stage businesses in northeast Ohio. Becca Braun, COO of JumpStart; who co-founded and was the initial CEO of Supplier Insight, a company that offers supplier management services and software to corporations and government agencies and that was ultimately acquired by Ariba (Nasdaq: ARBA); Becca was also formerly VP of Kirtland Capital Partners. These entrepreneurs turned investors will share their insight into the changing environment for investing, positioning a company for investment, and working with investors.

Our region is on the cusp of an explosion of funding sources for technology businesses. Sources of angel capital, early stage funding and VC money have been locating here and finding great companies and ideas in which to invest. But unlocking the treasure chest requires more than a bright idea and a pretty business plan. Join us for a lively session featuring three local investors that focus on tech businesses for early stage or later stage investments. Our panelists include: Mike Stubler, Managing Director of the Cleveland office of Draper Triangle Ventures, an affiliate of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a midwest leader in seed and early stage venture Capital. Mike's experience not only includes professional investing but leadership positions in a variety of early stage tech businesses. Charles Stack, CEO of Flashline Partners; Charles is former founder and CEO of Flashline which was sold to BEA Systems; Charles has formed Flashline Partners to invest in promising, technology-based, early stage businesses in northeast Ohio. Becca Braun, COO of JumpStart; who co-founded and was the initial CEO of Supplier Insight, a company that offers supplier management services and software to corporations and government agencies and that was ultimately acquired by Ariba (Nasdaq: ARBA); Becca was also formerly VP of Kirtland Capital Partners. These entrepreneurs turned investors will share their insight into the changing environment for investing, positioning a company for investment, and working with investors.