Podcasts about loudcloud

In this episode, Ben, Peter, and Salim discuss recent tech, AI, robotics, and crypto news and what the new administration means for tech enthusiasts.   Recorded on Jan 23rd, 2024 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Ben Horowitz is a prominent businessman, investor, author, and technology entrepreneur who has played a pivotal role in shaping Silicon Valley. In 1999, he co-founded Loudcloud, which evolved into Opsware, an enterprise software company acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. In 2009, Horowitz co-founded Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a leading venture capital firm that has invested in groundbreaking companies like Airbnb and Coinbase. He is the author of two bestselling books, The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are, offering practical insights into building businesses and shaping culture. Known for his expertise in technology entrepreneurship, venture capital, and thought leadership, Horowitz also established the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund to connect cultural leaders with the tech industry and promote diversity.  Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO.  Learn more about a16z: https://a16z.com/  Join Salim's ExO Community: https://openexo.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/salimismail  ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at  https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today's and tomorrow's exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with entrepreneur and software pioneer, Marc Andreessen. They discuss the timeline of the woke institutional takeover, the ruinous effects it has had on Western ideology and business, the ways in which AI will shape society, and the immense responsibility we have to instill the future with an ethos and morality that serves human flourishing. Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marc serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Coinbase, Dialpad, Flow, Golden, Honor, OpenGov, Samsara, Simple Things, and TipTop Labs. He is also on the board of Meta. This episode was filmed on December 18th, 2024.  | Links | For Marc Andreessen: On X https://x.com/pmarca?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Substack https://pmarca.substack.com/ “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (Book) https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ 

In today's episode, THE MENTORS RADIO host Dan Hesse talks with Marc Andreessen, the outspoken technology visionary who believes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will save the world. In this episode, Marc shares his advice for entrepreneurs, talks about how new fields such as cryptocurrency and The Metaverse will impact our lives. After co-creating the influential Mosaic Internet browser and co-founding Netscape, Marc led a remarkable career building new companies. As co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreesen-Horowitz (also referred to as “a16z”), he continues to mentor many of today's most successful tech entrepreneurs. A lifelong innovator and creator, Marc is one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion (BILLION!) people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Andreessen co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which, as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Coinbase, Dialpad, Flow, Golden, Honor, OpenGov and Samsara. He is also on the board of Meta. Listen to this episode below or on ANY podcast platform (from Apple to Google to iTunes etc )— Just type in “THE Mentors RADIO” … even easier, Subscribe HERE & listen on any podcast platform!!! (click here).  And don't forget to give us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!! SHOW NOTES: MARC ANDREESSEN: BIO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen ARTICLES: Why AI will save the world, by Marc Andreessen Why Software Is Eating the World, by Marc Andreessen It's Time to Build, by Marc Andreessen VIDEOS/Other Interviews with Marc Andreessen: Marc Andressen on His Intellectual Journey the Last 10 Years An Interview with Marc Andreessen about AI and How You Change the World Woke Capital with Marc Andreessen

Vandaag bespreken we het boek The hard thing about hard things van Ben Horowitz. Ben is de medeoprichter en beherend vennoot van Andreessen Horowitz, een durfkapitaalfirma uit Silicon Valley die investeert in ondernemers die de volgende generatie toonaangevende bedrijven. Het bedrijf investeert onder andere in Airbnb, GitHub, Facebook, Pinterest en Twitter.  Daarvoor was hij medeoprichter en CEO van Opsware, voorheen Loudcloud, dat in 2007 werd overgenomen door Hewlett-Packard voor $1,6 miljard dollar in 2007.  Horowitz schrijft over zijn ervaringen en inzichten uit  zijn carrière als student computerwetenschappen, software-ingenieur, medeoprichter,  CEO en investeerder in een blog die door bijna tien miljoen mensen wordt gelezen. Ik weet niet zo goed wat ik van dit boek vind. Typisch Amerikaans. Focus op financieel succes. Het boek heeft een focus op de startup wereld die willen verkopen of naar de beurs. Anglo Amerikaanse wereld. Opschalen. Focus op oorlog in de markt, Winner takes all omgevingen. Hij noemt regelmatig bekende Amerikaanse succesvolle CEO's en sport coaches als voorbeeld. Alles geven als oprichter. Wat hij verder doet is niet alleen de rooskleurige kant beschrijven, maar ook alle lastige dingen die op je pad komen als CEO. 1 Van communist tot durfkapitalist 2 ‘I Will Survive' 3 Deze keer met gevoel  4 Wanneer alles instort  5 Zorg voor je mensen, je producten en je winst – in die volgorde  6 Over de zorgen van weggaan 7 Leidinggeven zelfs als je niet weet waar je naartoe gaat  8 De eerste regel van ondernemerschap: er zijn geen regels  9 Het eind van het begin  1 Van communist tot durfkapitalist 2 ‘I Will Survive' 3 Deze keer met gevoel  4 Wanneer alles instort  5 Zorg voor je mensen, je producten en je winst – in die volgorde  6 Over de zorgen van weggaan 7 Leidinggeven zelfs als je niet weet waar je naartoe gaat  8 De eerste regel van ondernemerschap: er zijn geen regels  9 Het eind van het begin Holacracy in times of crisis - Tom van der Lubbe (video) Peace time CEO - War time CEO A16z.com Disclaimer - heb je problemen neem contact met (zelfmoordlijn) Opvallende lessen uit het boek voor ons: 00:00 intro - korte indruk van het boek door Erno 03:25 korte indruk van Tom - het belangrijkste boek voor de ondernemer. 4:35 Vergelijk tussen een succesvol boek en dit boek - in dit boek staan de echt lastige situaties en keuzes voor ondernemers. 5:45 Ondernemen is heel eenzaam en dat je niet weet wat je de volgende week moet doen. Ondernemen is een nachtmerrie. 08:00 Je betaald privé een hele hoge prijs omdat je denkt dat je het beter weet en ondernemer wordt. 16:00 De meest gelezen management en ondernemersboeken zijn niet door echte ondernemers geschreven. 17:45 The war time CEO - niet leuk maar enorm belangrijk in tijden wanneer het niet goed gaat met het bedrijf. 26:25 Een CEO in oorlogstijd is niet uit op consensus, maar tolereert ook geen onenigheid. 27:20 Wees bij je mensen, vooral in een moeilijke tijd. 27:50 Leiding geven, zelfs als je niet weet waar je naar toe gaat. 28:45 De lastigste vaardigheid die hij als CEO moest leren. 29:50 Type 1 en type 2 CEO. 33:00 Praktische tips voor goede feedback naar medewerkers. 40:20 Sluit je aan bij een ondernemersnetwerk zoals EO, IDG Entrepreneurs network of werk met een coach. Bronnen die we genoemd hebben Mark Andreesen Ben Horowitz Andreessen Horowitz Blog Ben Horowitz Peter Thiel Reid Hoffman - Masters of Scale Only the paranoid survive - Andrew Grove Teal Around the World 2023: Tom van der Lubbe - 'Holacracy in Times of crisis' Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO - Ben Horowitz VanMoof en Lightyear Luister naar deze aflevering Beluister hier ons gesprek over het boek The hard things about hard things In een halfuur delen wij dit boek met jou.

In this episode, Purnima Padmanabhan, the general manager of Tanzu at Broadcom, talks with Coté about the evolution of DevOps and platform engineering. Purnima has worked at many interesting over the years LoudCloud, BMC Software, and VMware. That experience gives her a great perspective on the industry's ongoing journey to empower developers to deploy code into production quickly and reliably. The discussion follows the industry innovations and trends from early infrastructure automation to the rise of cloud computing and the emergence of platform engineering.   Purnima highlights the enduring challenge of bridging the gap between development and operations, emphasizing that the core objective remains consistent: accelerating the time it takes to move code into production. She underscores the importance of continuous improvement, noting that the industry is still striving for perfection. The conversation also delves into the nuances of platform engineering and DevOps, exploring the balance between standardization and flexibility, the role of automation in fostering trust, and the enduring need for both development and operations roles.   Purnima also discusses her experiences at various companies and the lessons she's learned throughout her career. Listen in to this 20+ year journey from LoudCloud's early foray into cloud computing to BMC's focus on process automation and VMware's cloud management solutions, all the way up the Tanzu's focus on cloud native development and platforms.   Find Purnima in LinkedIn. And check in on Tanzu.   Chapters:    00:00 Introduction 00:23 DevOps Evolution 01:30 Platform Engineering and Automation 02:24 LoudCloud and Early Cloud Innovations 03:10 BMC Software and Process Automation 04:30 Pivotal and Tanzu Division 09:06 The pull to on-premises 12:12 What ever happened to ITIL? 12:57 ITIL and Service Management 14:41 Remediation and Repaving 19:02 Moka5 21:03 Security Startups 21:40 VMware 22:49 Startup Experience in Large Organizations 26:51 Future of DevOps and Platform Engineering 30:15 Wrap up

In this episode, Purnima Padmanabhan, the general manager of Tanzu at Broadcom, talks with Coté about the evolution of DevOps and platform engineering. Purnima has worked at many interesting over the years LoudCloud, BMC Software, and VMware. That experience gives her a great perspective on the industry's ongoing journey to empower developers to deploy code into production quickly and reliably. The discussion follows the industry innovations and trends from early infrastructure automation to the rise of cloud computing and the emergence of platform engineering.   Purnima highlights the enduring challenge of bridging the gap between development and operations, emphasizing that the core objective remains consistent: accelerating the time it takes to move code into production. She underscores the importance of continuous improvement, noting that the industry is still striving for perfection. The conversation also delves into the nuances of platform engineering and DevOps, exploring the balance between standardization and flexibility, the role of automation in fostering trust, and the enduring need for both development and operations roles.   Purnima also discusses her experiences at various companies and the lessons she's learned throughout her career. Listen in to this 20+ year journey from LoudCloud's early foray into cloud computing to BMC's focus on process automation and VMware's cloud management solutions, all the way up the Tanzu's focus on cloud native development and platforms.   Find Purnima in LinkedIn. And check in on Tanzu.   Chapters:    00:00 Introduction 00:23 DevOps Evolution 01:30 Platform Engineering and Automation 02:24 LoudCloud and Early Cloud Innovations 03:10 BMC Software and Process Automation 04:30 Pivotal and Tanzu Division 09:06 The pull to on-premises 12:12 What ever happened to ITIL? 12:57 ITIL and Service Management 14:41 Remediation and Repaving 19:02 Moka5 21:03 Security Startups 21:40 VMware 22:49 Startup Experience in Large Organizations 26:51 Future of DevOps and Platform Engineering 30:15 Wrap up

In this Screaming in the Cloud Summer Replay, we revisit our conversation with Scott Johnston, CEO of (the church) of Docker. Docker's community and their fervor is well known, and Scott has much to say about it! Join the discussion as Scott goes into how he left Puppet after some exposure to Corey to become the CEO at Docker. Scott tells us what exactly Docker is, and where it starts, which is the community around it. Scott talks about the reset that Docker went through in November of 2019, where they decided to make the developer the focus of their mission. He also dives into Docker Desktop, which Scott goes into the details of. Check out this episode for more!Show Highlights:(0:00) Intro(1:15) Duckbill Group sponsor read(1:48) What is Docker?(4:03) Returning to being a developer tool(5:56) Docker's pricing changes and Docker Desktop(11:47) Community reaction to the pricing change(13:57) Building customer confidence(18:52) Duckbill Group sponsor read(19:36) Putting trust into user(22:04) Docker's monetization strategy(29:28) Embracing change(32:16) Where to learn more about Scott and Docker About Scott JohnstonScott first typed ‘docker run' in 2013 and hasn't looked back. He's been with Docker since 2014 in a variety of leadership roles and currently serves as CEO. His experience previous to Docker includes Sun Microsystems, Puppet, Netscape, Cisco, and Loudcloud (parent of Opsware). When not fussing with computers he spends time with his three kids fussing with computers.Links:Docker: https://www.docker.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/scottcjohnstonOriginal Episode:https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/heresy-in-the-church-of-docker-desktop-with-scott-johnston/Sponsor:The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

(0:00) Intro(1:20) The role of venture capitalists(5:52) Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs(12:00) commonalities in investments that you haven't done(14:05) The best CEOs(17:40) The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Business(21:16) The role of market trends in investment decisions(27:46) Reflecting on investment successes(39:41) Benefits as an investor vs board member(42:17) From Memphis to Stanford(44:29) The early days at LoudCloud(46:49) The Aspiration to be a Great CEO(49:33) The Journey to Joining Benchmark(53:20) Bringing new people to Benchmark(1:01:26) The Evolution of Early Stage Investing(1:14:07) What career advice would you give?(1:19:56) The value of Benchmark's Dinners Produced: Rashad Assir & Leah ClapperMixed and edited: Justin HrabovskyExecutive Producer: Josh Machiz 

In today's episode, The Mentors Radio host Dan Hesse talks with Marc Andreessen, the outspoken technology visionary who believes that Artificial Intelligence will save the world. In this episode, Marc shares his advice for entrepreneurs, talks about how new fields such as cryptocurrency and The Metaverse will impact our lives. After co-creating the influential Mosaic Internet browser and co-founding Netscape, Marc led a remarkable career building new companies. As co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreesen-Horowitz (also referred to as "a16z"), he continues to mentor many of today's most successful tech entrepreneurs. A lifelong innovator and creator, Marc is one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion (BILLION!) people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Andreessen co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which, as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Coinbase, Dialpad, Flow, Golden, Honor, OpenGov and Samsara. He is also on the board of Meta. Listen to this episode below or on ANY podcast platform (from Apple to Google to iTunes etc )— Just type in “THE Mentors RADIO” … even easier, Subscribe HERE & listen on any podcast platform!!! (click here).  And don't forget to give us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!! SHOW NOTES: MARC ANDREESSEN: BIO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen ARTICLES: Why AI will save the world, by Marc Andreessen Why Software Is Eating the World, by Marc Andreessen It's Time to Build, by Marc Andreessen VIDEOS/Other Interviews with Marc Andreessen: Marc Andressen on His Intellectual Journey the Last 10 Years An Interview with Marc Andreessen about AI and How You Change the World Woke Capital with Marc Andreessen

Sam Harris speaks with Marc Andreessen about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). They discuss the primary importance of intelligence, possible good outcomes for AI, the problem of alienation, the significance of evolution, the Alignment Problem, the current state of LLMs, AI and war, dangerous information, regulating AI, economic inequality, and other topics. Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marc serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Coinbase, Dialpad, Flow, Golden, Honor, OpenGov, and Samsara. He is also on the board of Meta. Twitter: @pmarca Website: https://a16z.com Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this episode, Sachin interviews Dave Asprey, a speaker, best-selling author, and biohacking entrepreneur, by video from Costa Rica. Dave shares some of his experiences, including the health challenges that enabled him to invent biohacking to improve his health. Dave discusses states of consciousness, tools for biohacking, tech entrepreneurship, the importance of mentors, how he deals with personal attacks from trolls, and how he has achieved greater equanimity in the face of stress and triggering events. Dave shares hacks he learned that he wrote into his books. Listen in for many more hacks you can use for better health.   Key Takeaways: [1:03] Sachin welcomes everyone and introduces the guest, Dave Asprey, who speaks on being an entrepreneur. Dave is a long-time entrepreneur and a best-selling author. His newest book is Smarter Not Harder. Sachin recommends you read it. Dave will talk about his experiences and how he can help your functional medicine or holistic health coaching practice.   [1:59] Dave joins the podcast from Costa Rica. Sachin thanks him for joining us. Dave is passionate about helping people feel and do their best. Dave is known as the Father of Biohacking. His definition of biohacking is the art and science of changing the environment around and inside you for full control of your biology.   [2:55] The definition is still basically the same but the domains of the environment around you that you can change are constantly expanding. Some of the biohacks that have the broadest impact are at the cellular level. When your cells start to work better, your capacity for consciousness starts to improve. You have more bandwidth to access hidden parts of reality.   [4:02] Dave speaks of the hidden parts of reality and non-ordinary states of consciousness reached through neurofeedback and breathwork and having science-based and consciousness-based techniques that allow us to access altered states of high performance, including healing, relationships, and feeling inner peace and compassion.   [4:54] The set of tools for biohacking is ever-expanding.   [5:40] Writing didn't come naturally to Dave. He is a computer coder by training so he knows how to group things logically. He held Google's first servers when Google was two guys with two computers. He co-founded the Professional Services Group there. He was part of building Salesforce's architecture when Salesforce had eight employees.   [6:09] Early-stage work requires structured thinking and the ability to teach new knowledge. For five years, Dave ran a program at the University of California starting each day in a tech startup and then teaching working engineers in Silicon Valley for two and a half hours how to build the internet and cloud computing. After dinner, he studied trade journals and wrote his next class.   [6:44] It was stressful, but Dave learned to assimilate information rapidly, translate it, and make it teachable. That made him one of the most powerful people in his company. Teaching is the best way to learn something. If you're not going to teach, write a book as if you were teaching. When Dave writes, he asks how he would teach it. That forces him to structure his thoughts.   [7:35] Dave is good at building the skeleton of a book and at putting the outer skin on it. The part of writing he doesn't enjoy is putting the muscles on the skeleton, so he works with a writing partner to flesh it out before putting on the finishing skin.   [8:37] Dave's first book, The Bulletproof Diet, had managed to break onto The New York Times list. He talks about the tech he used to achieve altered states of consciousness so he could write. The tech and coffee got him into a flow state quickly.   [10:04] Sachin advises opening Smarter Not Harder and finding something to quote on social media, giving Dave credit. Teaching knowledge is the best way to learn it. Dave's goal as an author is to say something that hasn't been said. He writes books to be launching points for things you haven't seen somewhere. Quote something from the book and add your nuance to it.   [11:48] Sachin adds, nuance it to your audience.   [12:34] Dave mentions WIFY, What's In it For You (your client)? Create content not for yourself but for your audience. Put yourself in your audience's mindset. What is the goal of your audience? How do you make what you have to share relevant and useful for them? Dave credits Joe Polish for WIFY.   [14:21] In Dave's early 20s, he was running a portion of the IT for a hospital. It was taking him a lot of time to manage their eight servers that did most of the work. He considered how to automate his job to free up time to learn more about tech. That was the thinking that led to the early days of cloud computing.   [15:00] Dave says with confidence that the first shipping modern cloud computing was his product. It shipped one day before Marc Andreessen shipped Loudcloud. There were probably 1,000 people in Silicon Valley all working on the same concept. It was driven by laziness. We all have a deep shame for being lazy. Dave explains how laziness is biologically built into us.   [17:27] Dave wants to have his cake and eat it, too, and says that's normal and healthy; just find a way to do it. That will motivate you more than the hope of being efficient. Dave wants “epic,” not efficient. He tells how to motivate yourself to exercise for eight minutes.   [20:21] Dave has set up the world's first biohacking facility, Upgrade Labs, in Santa Monica, California. Thousands of people have come through it. Dave is franchising it across the country with dozens of labs opening soon. You can go to ownanupgradelabs.com to get a franchise of a business that is profitable and makes a huge difference to the people who go there.   [21:06] Dave could write his book because after thousands of people have come through his biohacking facility, he had enough data on five big domains people are asking about.   [22:04] Dave is on 25 or 30 advisory boards and he has a portfolio of biohacking companies he has invested in. He does a lot of advising work for equity so he often has the conversation on where entrepreneurs waste their time. Many entrepreneurs are looking to prove they are good enough. There's a great deal of shame-based behavior. Many were bullied in school.   [23:12] Instead of running away from their past, what if entrepreneurs figured out what they are moving toward that's worthy? That is so much more motivating than running away. That's working smarter, not harder. Work hard when you need to, but there's no correlation between working hard and success. You're not here to be a better worker.   [25:10] When you read Smarter not Harder, figure out what you want. What matters to you? What problem are you going to solve? How do you want to be? This requires freedom of energy and freedom of time. If you're working hard, you have neither one. This book says, let's give you five to ten hours a week back, and let's double your energy and let's see what's possible.   [26:52] Dave's advice for people under 35: spend time with old people, your elders. These are people who've already had to solve all the problems you're trying to solve. You could try to do it all by yourself, but you could get help from others. Dave talks of the many health challenges he experienced in his early 20s that enabled him to create the biohacking movement.   [28:17] Dave ate salads and exercised 90 minutes a day, six days a week, but didn't lose weight. He still weighed 297 pounds. He realized it wasn't working even though he did everything he was supposed to do. Smarter Not Harder is his revenge for those lost 702 hours. He then listened to orthomolecular physicians, now known as functional medicine practitioners.   [31:26] Dave started working with the Silicon Valley Health Institute and became chairman and president of it when he was 30 and was the only guy under 50 in the room. He applied a strategy of finding mentors in business and following leaders who lived by different rules. In a tech company, a VP of Strategy taught Dave how to navigate the halls of power.   [33:16] Go to the elders and ask them how they dealt with marriage. Ask them what they learned. They all know and they want to tell you. He tells of mentoring he received from Ken Crittendon, who had in turn been mentored by Jack Welch. Joe Polish was another mentor. They want to help you and they're not transactional about it. Dave lists more mentors.   [35:22] When you are mentored, let the mentor know that you followed their advice and it helped you. They will be more inclined to continue to mentor you. As an advisor, Dave wants equity in the company as skin in the game. It gives the advice more weight when the company has paid something for it. Free advice, even when it's great, is not often followed.   [36:12] Sachin says, if you pay, you pay attention. Sachin gets excited when he gets feedback from someone who applied his advice successfully.   [38:00] Dave tells of a “wantrepreneur” who made a knock-off of the oil for Bulletproof Coffee that didn't work because it was the wrong formula. He says some narcissists and sociopaths want to steal your idea, make it cheaply, and claim credit for the original. Dave calls it the race to cheat instead of the race for results.   [41:08] Sachin wants you to know that Dave is the real deal and his recommendations are for things that he has done. Dave also endorses Sachin as one of the genuine helpers. There are helpful souls in the entrepreneurial health community. Dave cites Daniel Amen and David Perlmutter as people always willing to help. Some people will try to take advantage of helpers.   [42:48] David tells how good people help each other to win. People pretending to be good don't do good for others. They want you to lose if it benefits them. You need discernment to see when someone wants to take advantage of you to their benefit and your harm. The more successful you are, the more those people are attracted to you. Your discernment is visceral.   [46:57] Dave tells about appearing on the Joe Rogan show three times. At first, Joe Rogan was very complimentary and grateful for Dave's product that changed his life but when his friend was trying to steal the name Bulletproof, Rogan and his “death squad” became accusatory and defamatory in an 18-month-long online attack. It was very hard on Dave.   [48:45] Dave wondered why that was a trigger for him. On self-reflection, Dave saw that his trigger was around injustice. Most children experience it. Dave cleared the rage of injustice using the reset process in his book. He also saw that every time Joe Rogan attacked him, his coffee sales went up. When Joe Rogan moved to Spotify, he deleted the episodes with Dave.   [50:28] Dave thanks Joe because the concentrated attacks Dave endured on his media highlighted some important things. It takes a bully a minute or two to come up with an attack on you. It takes you half a second to click “delete.” You have a moral obligation to keep your environment clean for the people you serve. People who attack are kicked off. Dialog is fine.   [52:08] Dave and his clients are united in the goal to be healthy, have a better planet, and reduce animal cruelty. People who attack are blocked. Narcissists looking for attention and conflict are blocked. Sometimes Dave will use humor to defuse tyranny. He shares examples.   [56:21] Dave's newest coffee brand is called Danger Coffee. He explains how he is dangerous to trolls, but they pose no danger to him. They drive up his metrics.   [58:08] Dave got pulled over a while ago. He showed so much grounded love to the police officer that the officer asked if they could shake hands. Treat people as individuals trying to do their best.   [59:14] Dave reveals how he reacts to aggressive drivers without resorting to road rage. He tells that the other driver has a bowel emergency and has to get home. Don't be programmable by another person's behavior. What you are going to do is what you choose to do. When we have our full power, what we will choose to do is to support other humans and the planet.   [1:01:10] Rapid-fire round of questions from attendees: If you could choose one biohack to incorporate for the next 30 days, what would it be? Read Smarter Not Harder, because to answer that question you need to know your goal. Dave lists the Five Big Goals people want. Prioritize them. Dave and Sachin share supplement notes for health. Einstein said that the future of medicine is frequencies. What do you think about vibrational frequencies as modalities for healing? Don't look to Einstein for health advice. Dave recommends Nikola Tesla and Royal Rife. They were using frequencies for healing almost 100 years ago. Go to 40yearsof zen.com for Dave's brain upgrade program. Your body talks in frequencies of sound, light, and electromagnetics. More about light frequencies What is Brain Tap? BrainTap is a Biohacking Conference sponsor. It uses lights and sounds to lead a person quickly into a meditative state. Have you heard of Medbed? It is one of 30 or 40 brands of light beds that expose the body to light frequencies for healing. Dave talks about using lasers for healing. AI is helping to accelerate the world of biohacking. There is still much to study about light frequencies. What are the top free longevity hacks? What are the top longevity hacks to invest in? Read Superhuman, Dave's book on anti-aging. He goes through dozens of things shown in studies to extend the lifespan of mammals. The top thing is to learn how to get better (not more) sleep. Go to Sleepwithdave.com for a free sleep hack. Skip breakfast and don't eat after the sun goes down. Eat some animal protein.   [1:15:06] Dave has had many stem-cell treatments. That's a very expensive thing you can do. Use TrueDark sleep glasses. Wearing them puts your brain in a meditative state. Using them for an hour before bed, Dave does not get jet lag anywhere on the planet. He gets better sleep.   [1:16:13] Sachin thanks Dave for appearing from Costa Rica. Sachin recommends Dave's book Smarter Not Harder.   [1:17:15] Dave thanks Sachin as one of the people working for the betterment of the world and he genuinely appreciates that. People genuinely want to help you succeed. If you ask for help, you'll get it. Dave talks about his tech contemporary, Marc Andreessen, who sought a mentor's help and is a multi-billionaire. Dave wanted to do it himself and is not a multi-billionaire.   Mentioned in this episode Perfect Practice Live Dave Asprey Smarter Not Harder: The Biohacker's Guide to Getting the Body and Mind You Want The Bulletproof Diet: Lose Up to a Pound a Day, Reclaim Energy and Focus, Upgrade Your Life Upgrade Labs Ownanupgradelabs.com 40 Years of Zen Joe Polish Loudcloud (Now part of HP)Silicon Valley Health Institute The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene The Laws of Human Nature, by Robert Greene Genius Network Daniel Amen David Perlmutter Joe Rogan Danger Coffee VitaminDAKE.com Nikola Tesla Royal Rife BiohackingConference.com BrainTap Super Human: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever, by Dave Asprey Sleepwithdave.com TrueDark sleep glasses   More about your host Sachin Patel How to speak with Sachin Go one step further and Become The Living Proof Perfect Practice Live sachin@becomeproof.com To set up a practice clarity call and opportunity audit   Books by Sachin Patel: Perfect Practice: How to Build a Successful Functional Medical Business, Attract Your Ideal Patients, Serve Your Community, and Get Paid What You're Worth The Motivation Molecule: The Biological Secrets To Eliminate Procrastination, Skyrocket Productivity, and Get Sh!t Done  

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Ben Jennings, Chief Revenue Officer, EmbrokerBen is a seasoned global technology executive with more than 25 years experience in sales, marketing, business development, customer success and alliances. He was previously the Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer for ServiceSource (Nasdaq: SERV) responsible for the company's global Sales, Solution Design and Business Development functions. Ben is a seasoned global technology executive, Ben brings more than 25 years experience in sales, marketing, business development, customer success and alliances to the role. Previously, Ben was Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer for ServiceSource responsible for the company's global Sales, Solution Design and Business Development functions. During his 15+ years at ServiceSource, Ben led the company's global expansion, founding and managing ServiceSource's EMEA and APJ operations, and also held a variety of customer success and operational leadership positions in the company. Prior to ServiceSource, Ben held leadership positions at Jamcracker, Loudcloud, and Transition Networks. Centered on revenue growth, Ben's career also includes marketing, go-to-market strategy, product management, networking, hardware, and managed service sales.https://www.embroker.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-jennings-8643b61/https://www.linkedin.com/company/embroker/

Meet Ben Horowitz:Ben Horowitz is Co-founder and General Partner Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a venture capital firm. He is the author of “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” and “What You Do Is Who You Are.” Prior to a16z, Ben was Co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud). When Opsware was acquired by Hewlett-Packard, he became their Vice President and General Manager of Business Technology Optimization for Software. Ben received a Bachelor's in Computer Science from Columbia University and a Masters in Computer Science from UCLA.Key Insights:Software is eating the world. It is a disruptive force in healthcare and other industries.The Power of Software. Software is disrupting all industries. From Amazon, to Netflix, to Uber, good software can increase efficiency, profitability, and customer satisfaction. To Ben, there is no business that wouldn't be improved with world-class software. Going Against Nature. As humans, we naturally want people to like us. However, telling people what they want to hear is a bad quality for leaders. As a founder of CEO, you may need to make tough calls that are necessary but will cause others to be upset.Follow Your Contribution. Passions can change, but talent tends to be more persistent. Ben recommends following your contributions, go where you think you can make the biggest impact with your unique skills and background. This episode is hosted by Gary Bisbee Ph.D. He is a member of the Advisory Council for Day Zero and is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Think Medium.Relevant Links:Learn more about a16zRead Ben's most recent article “a16z is Moving to the Cloud”Check out Ben's books

Meet Ben Horowitz:Ben Horowitz is Co-founder and General Partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). He is the author of “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” and “What You Do Is Who You Are.” Prior to a16z, Ben was Co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud). When Opsware was acquired by Hewlett-Packard, he became their Vice President and General Manager of Business Technology Optimization for Software. Ben received a Bachelor's in Computer Science from Columbia University and a Masters in Computer Science from UCLA.  Key Insights:The vision for Andreessen-Horowitz derives from Ben's own experience as a software founder. Lessons For CEOs. Ben has two main leadership lessons. One is to seek the truth: about the product, company, and everything you do. Two is to remember you are always talking to the whole company. Every brainstorming session, conversation, and raise can impact the politics and culture of your organization because you speak for and as the company.Are CEOs Made? Ben posits that CEOs are more made than born. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are so different from each other, yet are the CEO-founders of successful companies. Truth starts with being true to yourself and your own leadership style.What a16z Does Different. Andreessen Horowitz is a venture capital firm designed to help the founder become an effective CEO, rather than replacing them. This is done by providing founder-CEOs with a network of powerful industry experts, executives, and advisors. Additionally, a16z is transparent about their investing decisions by publishing articles on their website.  Relevant Links: Learn more about a16zRead Ben's most recent article “a16z is Moving to the Cloud”Check out Ben's books

Today, I am talking to Gagan Palrecha, the CEO of NFTSTAR, a new Bay Area startup in the NFT sports space. Palrecha is an engineer by training and has been fascinated by sports & music since his youth. We cover some of the stops across his career, the build-up to his current role, including time at Dapper Labs as VP of Operations. We go deep into the blockchain, crypto, NFTs, Web 2.5 to 3.0, the metaverse, digital stadium, play-to-earn, and many more current buzzwords and of course, his vision for NFTSTAR.    Key Highlights Palrecha grew up playing sports & had a passion for music. After studying computer engineering and science, he was attracted to the startup scene in San Francisco in the early 2000s. Palrecha joined Loudcloud, a startup backed by VC company Andreessen Horowitz, before moving to a few other startups. As his first entrepreneurial exploits, Palrecha started First Time Records. Palrecha helped develop a space for artists and creators at the following businesses: Zattoo -- live streaming, the first virtual cable operator Peekok -- a platform to help artists and labels create a direct retail relationship with fans, via social and interactive marketing (early days of NFTs) Chirply -- fundraising for design marketplace 2013: Blockchain and Bitcoin  The concept of a distributed ledger that governs ownership without government interference fascinated him. Palrecha's experience at Dapper Labs: Crypto Kitty was the first big project for Dapper, before it was called Dapper Labs. The NBA took a risk and jointly created NBA Top Shot in 2020. By the end of 2020 and early 2021, NFTs took off and NBA Top Shot lead the way. Over 1 billion worth of trading volume with NBA Top Shot. What worked and didn't work at the height of NBA Top Shot: Dealing with backlogs and regulatory issues. Blockchain challenges and issues with bots. Challenges of the virtual trading card model.  NFTSTAR: Palrecha's vision as CEO (website: https://m.nftstar.com/)  NFTSTAR is building the biggest sports stadium in the Web3 metaverse. The company is working with athletes to build a direct relationship with fans.  Current projects with: Neymar Jr, Luis Figo, Son Heung-Min (Soccer) Giannis Antetokounmpo (Basketball) Christian McCaffrey (American Football) NFTSTAR is currently in its startup stage, with its first collection coming out in the fall of 2022 Beyond the usual NFT headshots, NFTSTAR will include mobile gaming elements, as well an interactive and immersive fantasy world around its athlete partners. Prioritizing a meta stadium and virtual stadium vision, NFTSTAR rewards the fans and viewers with avatars and more. NFTSTAR is funded through private investors, not through a token raise. Play-to-Earn discussion: There are many current challenges early play-to-earn games are facing—taking a look at Axie Infinity for example. NFTSTAR is looking at the game and user experience first before focusing on play-to-earn business strategies.  NFTSTAR is not building a speculative platform. Instead, members are rewarded for participation with special privileges or items. NFTSTAR athlete engagement: Upcoming Neymar NFT drop, where Neymar and his team are heavily involved. NFTSTAR is all about the athlete and how they grew up, where they come from, and what shaped them.  The company helps build a community around the athletes by prioritizing experiences. If you'd like to reach Palrecha, contact him at nftstar@vsc.co.   About Gagan Palrecha joined NFTSTAR as COO in September 2021, and is responsible for business development and operations, strategic partnerships, and product strategy. As the former Vice President of Dapper Labs, creators of NBA Top Shot and the Flow blockchain, Palrecha brings extensive experience and expertise in the NFT startup space. He has held several leadership positions in business development, product and operations and has done extensive work in Europe and Asia. He is also an active angel investor through his investment fund, Palrecha Capital. Palrecha is a graduate of the University of Michigan, and currently resides in the Bay Area.    Follow us on our social sites for the latest updates Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sportsentrepreneurs/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marcusluerpodcast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sports-entrepreneurs Website: https://marcusluer.com Podcast: https://marcusluer.com/podcast To get in touch, please email us at podcast@marcusluer.com   Feel Good by MusicbyAden https://soundcloud.com/musicbyaden Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/_feel-good Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/bvgIqqRStcQ

Only the first 48 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the BLACK podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 1 hour and 53 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Marc Andreessen about the current state of Internet technology and culture. They discuss Marc's background in tech, the birth of the Internet, how advertising became the business model for digital media, the three stages of the Web, the blockchain, how successful technology reorders status and power in society, the Bitcoin white paper, the mystery surrounding the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the importance of distributed consensus, Bitcoin as digital gold, how society has performed during Covid, James Burnham and managerial capitalism, the principal-agent problem, negative externalities, risk and regulation, trust in institutions, WTF happened in 1971, regulatory capture, banning Trump and Alex Jones from social media, perverse incentives in philanthropy, and other topics. Marc Andreessen is a co-founder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marc serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Dialpad, Honor, OpenGov, and Samsara Networks. He is also on the board of Meta. Website: a16z.com Twitter: @pmarca Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this podcast episode, you will learn:According to Insik, what are the values, skillsets and dynamics of a great team? What should be the ideal size of a founding team?What are some things that the startup founders don't understand about VCs?When should startups think about forming a board, what is the role of the board and who should be a part of it?What is the role of a board member and an advisor?How does Insik assess a company that works with data; for example, a company working on data security for the cloud?What is an investment thesis and how do you come up with it? Do investors really need an investment thesis?What is the reason for the current VC funding winter and why a correction like this is needed for the startup ecosystem?AboutInsik is a General Partner at Vertex Ventures US and is a former founder of Loudcloud and Kiva Software, companies that helped shift enterprise technology categories. At Vertex US, he works with founders who are pursuing advancements in data science and machine learning, enterprise process automation, and real-time infrastructure.Prior to Vertex US, Insik served as General Partner at Rembrandt Venture Partners where he led investments in A Bit Lucky (acquired by Zynga), CloudOn (acquired by Dropbox), and Ooyala (acquired by Telstra). Before that, he was a Partner at Accel Partners, here investing and advising companies including Cloudera, Couchbase, Facebook, Mochi Media (acquired by Shanda), and Terracotta (acquired by Software AG).As the Co-founder and Chief Tactician of Loudcloud, which later was renamed Opsware, Insik helped create the cloud computing paradigm and the data center automation software category.Loudcloud IPO'ed and then was acquired by HP in 2007. His first company, Kiva Software created the Application Server Market market. Enterprises such as E*Trade, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo developed their first online sites using Kiva. Netscape acquired Kiva in 1997 for $180 million.He is currently on the boards of Testlio, Interana, Zepl, Cyberhaven, Evisort and Upsolver and holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and currently serves on the university's Executive Advisory Board for the College of Engineering. 

Scott Johnston is the CEO of Docker. Beginning his career in 1989 as an engineering intern, Scott has over 30 years of experience working in tech at places such as Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Loudcloud and Alloy Ventures. With such a track record comes wisdom, and we were very curious what advice Scott would have if he were to do it again. Today, we discuss how the Silicon Valley landscape has changed since the 90's, what to think about in your career development, and when it makes sense to start your own venture. Connect with Docker Website: https://www.docker.com/ Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/docker/ GitHub: https://github.com/docker Twitter: https://www.docker.com/ We talk to founders and entrepreneurs! We're in the business of learning and want to look at everything startup related. Our hope is to show just how significant this segment of business is to the world, and the things it can accomplish. For all inquiries, please email homeroomtalks@gmail.com.

In this episode from February 2017, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz and Jason Rosenthal, former Lytro CEO (now Vice President, Subscription Services, at Google) share stories and lessons learned from doing whatever they could to help their companies survive in hard times, including making and living through major pivots, selling new products before they were ready, figuring out financing with market and industry headwinds against them, and more. From their days together at LoudCloud to Jason's experience at Lytro, and beyond, a common theme emerges: a CEO's job is lonely in these moments and the hardest thing about a big pivot or change might be in finding the courage to make the decision in the first place.

Episode 223 features Mike Smerklo, an entrepreneur and professional investor in early-stage technology companies. He is the co-founder of a venture capital firm in Austin, Texas called Next Coast Ventures.Find Mike Online:Website: https://www.mikesmerklo.comLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikesmerklo/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikesmerklo/Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikesmerkloYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC61Mtr5kAat0Wu6RCFE_9iQFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/smerklo.mike/About Mike:Michael Smerklo is an entrepreneur and professional investor in early-stage technology companies. He is the co-founder of a venture capital firm in Austin, Texas called Next Coast Ventures. Prior to this, he bought a small technology services company, ServiceSource, and ran it for twelve years, taking it from a small startup to a public company with over 3,000 employees worldwide. Michael was also one of the first employees at a pioneer cloud services company called Opsware (then Loudcloud), which also went public. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he had (and thoroughly hated) jobs in investment banking and public accounting. Mike splits his time between Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area and is married with four children.........Thank you for listening! If you wanted to learn more about the host, Brian Ondrako, check out his “Now” Page - https://www.brianondrako.com/now or Sign up for his Weekly Newsletter and 3x a Week Blog - https://brianondrako.com/subscribe/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tim Howes is a software executive, entrepreneur, investor, and computer scientist who has been at the forefront of many of the most important waves in the technology industry since the 1990s. During his PhD work in computer science, Howes co-created the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which has become the industry standard means of managing directory information services. In the late 1990s he worked at Netscape on the server side of their business. After Netscape was acquired by AOL, he joined Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in founding Loudcloud, one of the first companies to sell cloud services, predating Amazon Web Services by nearly a decade. Loudcloud would transform into Opsware and be purchased by HP in a successful exit. Later in his career, Howes would co-found Rockmelt, the developer of an innovative web browser, which was later purchased by Yahoo. Howes has held engineering management and technology leadership positions at HP, Yahoo, AOL, and Facebook. He now does angel investing and advises early stage technology companies. In this episode, I interviewed Tim about his career and his advice for people just starting their journeys in the industry. The interview was recorded in-person on February 12, 2022 in my office at Champlain College. Champlain has a mask-mandate, so apologies about how my voice sounded a little muffled. Show Notes Tim Howes on Twitter Tim Howes on LinkedIn Tim Howes via Wikipedia Loudcloud/Opsware via Wikipedia Follow us on Twitter @KopecExplains. Theme “Place on Fire” Copyright 2019 Creo, CC BY 4.0 Find out more at http://kopec.live

In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz recounts lessons he learned about how to run a Silicon Valley startup, largely from his time as the CEO of Loudcloud, which later became Opsware. Horowitz provides specific advice about hiring, firing, managing emotions, handling growth, deciding whether or not to sell, and everything in-between. His thoughts are sometimes unconventional and often punctuated by relevant anecdotes from his experience as a CEO or venture capitalist. Show Notes The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz via Amazon Follow us on Twitter @BusinessBooksCo and join our Amazon book club. Edited by Giacomo Guatteri Find out more at http://businessbooksandco.com

Craig Foster not only has over 25 years of management experience in finance, he's also worked on 35 different IPOs over the course of his career. He brings that expertise and more to his role today as CFO at Picsart. Early in his career, Craig was working in an advisory role at a Big 4 public accounting firm when he was approached by one of their rapid-scale clients, LoudCloud, to come in house. The leaders of the company, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, were key players in the dot com boom and took a hands-on approach to leadership training. The “school” of LoudCloud was formative to how Craig would approach his management positions going forward. Being both a mentor and a mentee is important to Craig. Whether working in house or during his time as an adviser, he's built a network to help increase his learning. When Craig made the decision to transition to CFO for his first tenure at Ubiquiti Networks in 2013, that network helped him stay supported. And today at Picsart, Craig mentors his finance team with a forward-thinking approach and is always looking for ways to maximize their potential through technology.On this episode of The CFO Playbook, Craig Foster, CFO at Picsart, talks about coming up under Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz during the dot com boom, shares his philosophy on mentoring future CFOs, and outlines how he is always on the lookout for the right technology to execute finance goals.Take The CFO Playbook Listener Survey to help us improve the show. You'll also be entered to win your choice of the latest iPad Pro or a Samsung Galaxy S7.Connect with Craig on LinkedIn.Connect with our host Ross on LinkedIn.If you want a better way to track and control your team's spend, check out Soldo.com.

Mike Smerklo is an experienced entrepreneur, investor and business leader driven by the desire to turn ideas into reality. Having bought and scaled a small business into a publicly traded company worth nearly a billion dollars in value, he has a deep understanding of the hard work, dedication and grit that truly powers successful entrepreneurship. Today, as the co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures, Mike is a champion for a new generation of entrepreneurs building disruptive companies in big markets. His new book, Mr. Monkey and Me, is a “real talk” guide for entrepreneurs who want to cut through the noise to cultivate a mindset that supports greatness. Mike grew up in a blue-collar family in Ohio with dreams of achieving something more with his life. After working his way through college to earn an accounting degree and moving to Chicago to launch his CPA career, he eventually talked his way into a junior analyst gig with the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers. He went on to earn an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and experienced the Silicon Valley dot-com boom as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. Mike was recruited by legendary entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz as one of the first employees of their new startup, Loudcloud. Here, he learned from the very best about what it takes to grow a company from an idea through an initial public offering. He began his own entrepreneurship journey in 2003, purchasing ServiceSource, a 30-person technology services startup in San Francisco. As CEO over the next 12 years, he grew the business into a successful 3,000-person publicly-traded company with close to $300M in revenue. He has developed a new perspective on entrepreneurship at the helm of the Austin-based firm Next Coast Ventures, which has backed more than 40 companies across two funds to help startup founders achieve their goals.

Starting Greatness with Mike Maples Podcast Notes Key Takeaways Ben Horowitz gives a detailed timeline on Loudcloud's“IPO from Hell” and how it went from $0.35/share to being acquired for $1.65 Billion at $14.25/shareIn a near-death experience as a founder, it takes a lot of humility and resiliency to make the best choice out of all the horrible choices“If you have the will and the idea, [being a founder] is the best thing you can do with your life” – Ben HorowitzRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgStartups are romanticized AFTER they win. But it takes extraordinary grit to have what it TAKES to win. Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreessen-Horowitz, is the perfect guest to tell it like it is, as he has for many years in his books "the Hard Thing About Hard Things" and "What You Do Is Who You Are." Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE interviews Ben to discuss the ups and downs of dealing with "the struggle," and why the best startup leaders are often the ones who simply refused to quit.

Starting Greatness with Mike Maples Podcast Notes Key Takeaways Ben Horowitz gives a detailed timeline on Loudcloud's“IPO from Hell” and how it went from $0.35/share to being acquired for $1.65 Billion at $14.25/shareIn a near-death experience as a founder, it takes a lot of humility and resiliency to make the best choice out of all the horrible choices“If you have the will and the idea, [being a founder] is the best thing you can do with your life” – Ben HorowitzRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgStartups are romanticized AFTER they win. But it takes extraordinary grit to have what it TAKES to win. Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreessen-Horowitz, is the perfect guest to tell it like it is, as he has for many years in his books "the Hard Thing About Hard Things" and "What You Do Is Who You Are." Mike Maples, Jr of FLOODGATE interviews Ben to discuss the ups and downs of dealing with "the struggle," and why the best startup leaders are often the ones who simply refused to quit.

About ScottScott first typed ‘docker run' in 2013 and hasn't looked back. He's been with Docker since 2014 in a variety of leadership roles and currently serves as CEO. His experience previous to Docker includes Sun Microsystems, Puppet, Netscape, Cisco, and Loudcloud (parent of Opsware). When not fussing with computers he spends time with his three kids fussing with computers.Links: Docker: https://www.docker.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottcjohnston 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 Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Once upon a time, I started my public speaking career as a traveling contract trainer for Puppet; I've talked about this before. And during that time, I encountered someone who worked there as an exec, Scott Johnston, who sat down, talked to me about how I viewed things, and then almost immediately went to go work at Docker instead. Today's promoted episode brings Scott on to the show. Scott, you fled to get away from me, became the CEO of Docker over the past, oh what is it, seven years now. You're still standing there, and I'm not making fun of Docker quite the way that I used to. First, thanks for joining me.Scott: Great to be here, Corey. Thanks for the invitation. I'm not sure I was fleeing you, but we can recover that one at another time.Corey: Oh, absolutely. In that era, one of my first talks that I started giving that anyone really paid any attention to was called, “Heresy in the Church of Docker,” where I listed about 10 to 13 different things that Docker didn't seem to have answers for, like network separation, security, audit logging, et cetera, et cetera. And it was a fun talk that I used to basically learn how to speak publicly without crying before and after the talk. And in time, it wound up aging out as these problems got addressed, but what surprised me at the time was how receptive the Docker community was to the idea of a talk that wound up effectively criticizing something that for, well, a number of them it felt a lot of the time like it wasn't that far from a religion; it was very hype-driven: “Docker, Docker, Docker” was a recurring joke. Docker has changed a lot. The burning question that I think I want to start this off with is that it's 2021; what is Docker? Is it a technology? Is it a company? Is it a religion? Is it a community? What is Docker?Scott: Yes. I mean that sincerely. Often, the first awareness or the first introduction that newcomers have is in fact the community, before they get their hands on the product, before they learn that there's a company behind the product is they have a colleague who is, either through a Zoom or sitting next to them in some places, or in a coffee shop, and says, “Hey, you got to try this thing called Docker.” And they lean over—either virtually or physically—and look at the laptop of their friend who's promoting Docker, and they see a magical experience. And that is the introduction of so many of our community members, having spoken with them and heard their own kind of journeys.And so that leads to like, “Okay, so why the excitement? Why did the friend lean over to the other friend and introduce?” It's because the tools that Docker provides just helps devs get their app built and shipping faster, more securely, with choice, without being tied into any particular runtime, any particular infrastructure. And that combination has proven to be a breakthrough dopamine hit to developers since the very beginning, since 2013, when Docker is open-source.Corey: It feels like originally, the breakthrough of Docker, that people will say, “Oh, containers aren't new. We've had that going back to LPARs on mainframes.” Yes, I'm aware, but suddenly, it became easy to work with and didn't take tremendous effort to get unified environments. It was cynically observed at the time by lots of folks smarter than I am, that the big breakthrough Docker had was how to make my MacBook look a lot more like a Linux server in production. And we talk about breaking down silos between ops and dev, but in many ways, this just meant that the silo became increasingly irrelevant because, “Works on my machine” was no longer a problem.“Well, you better back up your email because your laptop's about to go into production in that case.” Containers made it easier and that was a big deal. It seems, on some level, like there was a foray where Docker the company was moving into the world of, “Okay, now we're going to run a lot of these containers in production for you, et cetera.” It really feels like recently, the company as a whole and the strategy has turned towards getting back to its roots of solving developer problems and positioning itself as a developer tool. Is that a fair characterization?Scott: A hundred percent. That's very intentional, as well. We certainly had good products, and great customers, and we're solving problems for customers on the ops side, I'll call it, but when we stood back—this is around 2019—and said, “Where's the real… joy?” For lack of a better word, “Where's the real joy from a community standpoint, from a product experience standpoint, from a what do we do different and better and more capable than anyone else in the ecosystem?” It was that developer experience. And so the reset that you're referring to in November 2019, was to give us the freedom to go back and just focus the entire company's efforts on the needs of developers without any other distractions from a revenue, customer, channel, so on and so forth.Corey: So, we knew this was going to come up in the conversation, but as of a couple of weeks ago—as of the time of this recording—you announced a somewhat, well, let's say controversial change in how the pricing and licensing works. Now, as of—taking effect at the end of this year—the end of January, rather, of next year—Docker Desktop is free for folks to use for individual use, and that's fine, and for corporate use, Docker Desktop also remains free until you are a large company defined by ten million in revenue a year and/or 250 employees or more. And that was interesting and I don't think I'd seen that type of requirement placed before on what was largely an open-source project that's now a developer tool. I believe there are closed-source aspects of it as well for the desktop experience, but please don't quote me on that; I'm not here to play internet lawyer engineer. But at that point, the internet was predictably upset about this because it is easy to yell about any change that is coming, regardless.I was less interested in that than I am in what the reception has been from your corporate customers because, let's be clear, users are important, community is important, but goodwill will not put food on the table past a certain point. There has to be a way to make a company sustainable, there has to be a recurring revenue model. I realize that you know this, but I'm sure there are people listening to this who are working in development somewhere who are, “Wait, you mean I need to add more value than I cost?” It was a hard revelation for [laugh] me back when I had been in the industry a few years—Scott: [laugh]. Sure.Corey: —and I'm still struggling with that—Scott: Sure.Corey: Some days.Scott: You and me both. [laugh].Corey: So, what has the reaction been from folks who have better channels of communicating with you folks than angry Twitter threads?Scott: Yeah. Create surface area for a discussion, Corey. Let's back up and talk on a couple points that you hit along the way there. One is, “What is Docker Desktop?” Docker Desktop is not just Docker Engine.Docker Desktop is a way in which we take Docker Engine, Compose, Kubernetes, all important tools for developers building modern apps—Docker Build, so on and so forth—and we provide an integrated engineered product that is engineered for the native environments of Mac and Windows, and soon Linux. And so we make it super easy to get the container runtime, Kubernetes stack, the networking, the CLI, Compose, we make it super easy just to get that up and running and configured with smart defaults, secured, hardened, and importantly updated. So, any vulnerabilities patched and so on and so forth. The point is, it's a product that is based on—to your comments—upstream open-source technologies, but it is an engineered commercial product—Docker Desktop is.Corey: Docker Desktop is a fantastic tool; I use it myself. I could make a bunch of snide comments that on Mac, it's basically there to make sure the fans are still working on the laptop, but again, computers are hard. I get that. It's incredibly handy to have a graphical control panel. It turns out that I don't pretend to understand those people, but some folks apparently believe that there are better user interfaces than text and an 80-character-wide terminal window. I don't pretend to get those people, but not everyone has the joy of being a Linux admin for far too long. So, I get it, making it more accessible, making it easy, is absolutely worth using.Scott: That's right.Corey: It's not a hard requirement to run it on a laptop-style environment or developer workstation, but it makes it really convenient.Scott: Before Docker desktop, one had to install a hypervisor, install a Linux VM, install Docker Engine on that Linux VM, bridge between the VM and the local CLI on the native desktop—like, lots of setup and maintenance and tricky stuff that can go wrong. Trust me how many times I stubbed my own toes on putting that together. And so Docker Desktop is designed to take all of that setup nonsense overhead away and just let the developer focus on the app. That's what the product is, and just talking about where it came from, and how it uses these other upstream technologies. Yes, and so we made a move on August 31, as you noted, and the motivation was the following: one is, we started seeing large organizations using Docker Desktop at scale.When I say ‘at scale,' not one or two or ten developers; like, hundreds and thousands of developers. And they were clamoring for capabilities to help them manage those developer environments at scale. Second is, we saw them getting a lot of benefit in terms of productivity, and choice, and security from using Docker Desktop, and so we stood back and said, “Look, for us to scale our business, we're at 10-plus million monthly active developers today. We know there's 45 million developers coming in this decade; how do we keep scaling while giving a free experience, but still making sure we can fund our engineers and deliver features and additional value?” We looked at other projects, Corey.The first thing we did is we looked outside our four walls, said, “How have other projects with free and open-source components navigated these waters?” And so the thresholds that you just mentioned, the 250 employees and the ten million revenue, were actually thresholds that we saw others put in place to draw lines between what is available completely for free and what is available for those users that now need to purchase subscription if they're using it to create value for their organizations. And we're very explicit about that. You could be using Docker for training, you could be using Docker for eval in those large organizations; we're not going to chase you or be looking to you to step up to a subscription. However, if you're using Docker Desktop in those environments, to build applications that run your business or that are creating value for your customers, then purchasing a subscription is a way for us to continue to invest in a product that the ecosystem clearly loves and is getting a lot of value out of. And so, that was again, the premise of this change. So, now to the root of your question is, so what's the reaction? We're very, very pleased. First off, yes, there were some angry voices out there.Corey: Yeah. And I want to be clear, I'm not trivializing people who feel upset.Scott: No.Corey: When you're suddenly using a thing that is free and discovering that, well, now you have to pay money for it, people are not generally going to be happy about that.Scott: No.Corey: When people are viewed themselves as part of the community, of contributing to what they saw as a technical revolution or a scrappy underdog and suddenly they find themselves not being included in some way, shape or form, it's natural to be upset, I don't want to trivialize—Scott: Not at all.Corey: People's warm feelings toward Docker. It was a big part of a lot of folks' personality, for better or worse, [laugh] for a few years in there. But the company needs to be sustainable, so what I'm really interested in is what has that reaction been from folks who are, for better or worse, “Yes, yes, we love Docker, but I don't get to sign $100,000 deals because I just really like the company I'm paying the money to. There has to be business value attached to that.”Scott: That's right. That's right. And to your point, we're not trivializing either the reaction by the community, it was encouraging to see many community members got right away what we're doing, they saw that still, a majority of them can continue using Docker for free under the Docker Personal subscription, and that was also intentional. And you saw on the internet and on Twitter and other social media, you saw them come and support the company's moves. And despite some angry voices in there, there was overwhelmingly positive.So, to your question, though, since August 31, we've been overwhelmed, actually, by the positive response from businesses that use Docker Desktop to build applications and run their businesses. And when I say overwhelmed, we were tracking—because Docker Desktop has a phone-home capability—we had a rough idea of what the baseline usage of Docker Desktops were out there. Well, it turns out, in some cases, there are ten times as many Docker Desktops inside organizations. And the average seems to be settling in around three times to four times as many. And we are already closing business, Corey.In 12 business days, we have companies come through, say, “Yes, our developers use this product. Yes, it's a valuable product. We're happy to talk to a salesperson and give you over to procurement, and here we go.” So, you and I both been around long enough to know, like 12 working days to have a signed agreement with an enterprise agreement is unheard of.Corey: Yeah, but let's be very clear here, on The Duckbill Group's side of things where I do consulting projects, I sell projects to companies that are, “Great, this project will take, I don't know, four to six weeks, whatever it happens to be, and, yeah, you're going to turn a profit on this project in about the first four hours of the engagement.” It is basically push button and you will receive more money in your budget than you had when you started, and that is probably the easiest possible enterprise sale, and it still takes 60 to 90 days most of the time to close deals.Scott: That's right.Corey: Trying to get a procurement deal for software through enterprise procurement processes is one of those things when people say, “Okay, we're going to have a signature in Q3,” you have to clarify what year they're talking about. So, 12 days is unheard of.Scott: [laugh]. Yep. So, we've been very encouraged by that. And I'll just give you a rough numbers: the overall response is ten times our baseline expectations, which is why—maybe unanticipated question, or you going to ask it soon—we came back within two weeks—because we could see this curve hit right away on the 31st of August—we came back and said, “Great.” Now, that we have the confidence that the community and businesses are willing to support us and invest in our sustainability, invest in the sustainable, scalable Docker, we came and we accelerated—pulled forward—items in our roadmap for developers using Docker Desktop, both for Docker Personal, for free in the community, as well as the subscribers.So, things like Docker Desktop for Linux, right? Docker Desktop for Mac, Docker Desktop for Windows has been out there about five years, as I said. We have heard Docker Desktop for Linux rise in demand over those years because if you're managing a large number of developers, you want a consistent environment across all the developers, whether they're using Linux, Mac, or Windows desktops. So, Docker Desktop for Linux will give them that consistency across their entire development environment. That was the number two most requested feature on our public roadmap in the last year, and again, with the positive response, we're now able to confidently invest in that. We're hiring more engineers than planned, we're pulling that forward in the roadmap to show that yes, we are about growing and growing sustainably, and now that the environment and businesses are supporting us, we're happy to double down and create more value.Corey: My big fear when the change was announced was the uncertainty inherent to it. Because if there's one thing that big companies don't like, it's uncertainty because uncertainty equates to risk in their mind. And a lot of other software out there—and yes, Oracle Databases I am looking at you—have a historical track record of, “Okay, great. We have audit rights to inspect your environment, and then when we wind up coming in, we always find that there have been licensing shortfalls,” because people don't know how far things spread internally, as well as, honestly, it's accounting for this stuff in large, complex organizations is a difficult thing. And then there are massive fines at stake, and then there's this whole debate back and forth.Companies view contracts as if every company behaves like that when it comes down to per-seat licensing and the rest. My fear was that that risk avoidance in large companies would have potentially made installing Docker Desktop in their environment suddenly a non-starter across the board, almost to the point of being something that you would discipline employees for, which is not great. And it seems from your response, that has not been a widespread reaction. Yes of course, there's always going to be some weird company somewhere that does draconian things that we don't see, but the fact that you're not sitting here, telling me that you've been taking a beating from this from your enterprise buyers, tells me you're onto something.Scott: I think that's right, Corey. And as you might expect, the folks that don't reach out are silent, and so we don't see folks who don't reach out to us. But because so many have reached out to us so positively, and basically quickly gone right to a conversation with procurement versus any sort of back-and-forth or questions and such, tells us we are on the right track. The other thing, just to be really clear is, we did work on this before the August 31 announcement as well—this being how do we approach licensing and compliance and such—and we found that 80% of organizations, 80% of businesses want to be in compliance, they have a—not just want to be in compliance, but they have a history of being in compliance, regardless of the enforcement mechanism and whatnot. And so that gave us confidence to say, “Hey, we're going to trust our users. We're going to say, ‘grace period ends on January 31.'”But we're not shutting down functionality, we're not sending in legal [laugh] activity, we're not putting any sort of strictures on the product functionality because we have found most people love the product, love what it does for them, and want to see the company continue to innovate and deliver great features. And so okay, you might say, “Well, doesn't that 20% represent opportunity?” Yeah. You know, it does, but it's a big ecosystem. The 80% is giving us a great boost and we're already starting to plow that into new investment. And let's just start there; let's start there and grow from there.This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: I also have a hard time imagining that you and your leadership team would be short-sighted enough to say, “Okay, that”—even 20% of companies that are willing to act dishonestly around stuff like that seems awfully high to me, but assuming it's accurate, would tracking down that missing 20% be worth setting fire to the tremendous amount of goodwill that Docker still very much enjoys? I have a hard time picturing any analysis where that's even a question other than something you set up to make fun of.Scott: [laugh]. No, that's exactly right Corey, it wouldn't be worth it which is why again, we came out of the gate with like, we're going to trust our users. They love the community, they love the product, they want to support us—most of them want to support us—and, you know, when you have most, you're never going to get a hundred percent. So, we got most and we're off to a good start, by all accounts. And look, a lot of folks too sometimes will be right in that gray middle where you let them know that they're getting away with something they're like, “All right, you caught me.”We've seen that behavior before. And so, we can see all this activity out there and we can see if folks have a license or compliance or not, and sometimes just a little tap on the shoulder said, “Hey, did you know that you might be paying for that?” We've seen most folks at the time say, “Ah, okay. You caught me. Happy to talk to procurement.”So, this does not have to be heavy-handed as you said, it does not have to put at risk the goodwill of the 80%. And we don't have to get a hundred percent to have a great successful business and continuing successful community.Corey: Yeah. I'll also point out that, by my reading of your terms and conditions and how you've specified this—I mean, this is not something I've asked you about, so this could turn into a really awkward conversation but I'm going to roll with it anyway, it explicitly states that it is and will remain free for personal development.Scott: That is correct.Corey: When you're looking at employees who work at giant companies and have sloppy ‘bring your own device' controls around these things, all right, they have it installed on their work machine because in their spare time, they're building an app somewhere, they're not going to get a nasty gram, and they're not exposing their company to liability by doing that?Scott: That is exactly correct. And moreover, just keep looking at those use cases, if the company is using it for internal training or if the company is using it to evaluate someone else's technology, someone else's software, all those cases are outside the pay-for subscription. And so we believe it's quite generous in allowing of trials and tests and use cases that make it accessible and easy to try, easy to use, and it's just in the case where if you're a large organization and your developers are using it to build applications for your business and for your customers, thus you're getting a lot of value using the product, we're asking you to share that value with us so we can continue to invest in the product.Corey: And I think that's a reasonable expectation. The challenge that Docker seems to have had for a while has been that the interesting breakthrough, revelatory stuff that you folks did was all open-source. It was a technology that was incredibly inspired in a bunch of different ways. I am, I guess, mature enough to admit that my take that, “Oh, Docker is terrible”—which was never actually my take—was a little short-sighted. I'm very good at getting things wrong across the board, and that is no exception.I also said virtualization was a flash in the pan and look how that worked out. I was very anti-cloud, et cetera, et cetera. Times change, people change, and doubling down on being wrong gains you nothing. But the question that was always afterwards what is the monetization strategy? Because it's not something you can give away for free and make it up in volume?Even VC money doesn't quite work like that forever, so there's a—the question is, what is the monetization strategy that doesn't leave people either resenting you because, “Remember that thing that used to be free isn't anymore? Doesn't it suck to be you?” And is still accessible as broadly as you are, given the sheer breadth and diversity of your community? Like I can make bones about the fact that ten million in revenue and 250 employees are either worlds apart, or the wrong numbers, or whatever it is, but it's not going to be some student somewhere sitting someplace where their ramen budget is at risk because they have to spend $5 a month or whatever it is to have this thing. It doesn't apply to them.And this feels like, unorthodox though it certainly is, it's not something to be upset about in any meaningful sense. The people that I think would actually be upset and have standing to be upset about this are the enterprise buyers, and you're hearing from them in what is certainly—because I will hear it if not—that this is something they're happy about. They are thrilled to work with you going forward. And I think it makes sense. Even when I was doing stuff as an independent consultant, before I formalized the creation of The Duckbill Group and started hiring people, my policy was always to not use the free tier of things, even if I fit into them because I would much rather personally be a paying customer, which elevates the, I guess, how well my complaints are received.Because I'm a free user, I'm just another voice on Twitter; albeit a loud one and incredibly sarcastic one at times. But if I'm a paying customer, suddenly the entire tenor of that conversation changes, and I think there's value to that. I've always had the philosophy of you pay for the things you use to make money. And that—again, that is something that's easy for me to say now. Back when I was in crippling debt in my 20s, I assure you, it was not, but I still made the effort for things that I use to make a living.Scott: Yeah.Corey: And I think that philosophy is directionally correct.Scott: No, I appreciate that. There's a lot of good threads in there. Maybe just going way back, Docker stands on the shoulders of giants. There was a lot of work with container tech in the Linux kernel, and you and I were talking before about it goes back to LPAR on IBMs, and you know, BS—Berkeley's—Corey: BSD jails and chroots on Linux. Yeah.Scott: Chroot, right? I mean, Bill Joy, putting chroot in—Corey: And Tupperware parties, I'm sure. Yeah.Scott: Right. And all credit to Solomon Hykes, Docker's founder, who took a lot of good up and coming tech—largely on the ops side and in Linux kernel—took the primitives from Git and combined that with immutable copy-on-write file system and put those three together into a really magical combination that simplified all this complexity of dependency management and portability of images across different systems. And so in some sense, that was the magic of standing on these giant shoulders but seeing how these three different waves of innovation or three different flows of innovation could come together to a great user experience. So, also then moving forward, I wouldn't say they're happy, just to make sure you don't get inbound, angry emails—the enterprise buyers—but they do recognize the value of the product, they think the economics are fair and straight ahead, and to your point about having a commercial relationship versus free or non-existing relationship, they're seeing that, “Oh, okay, now I have insight into the roadmap. Now, I can prioritize my requirements that my devs have been asking for. Now, I can double-down on the secure supply chain issues, which I've been trying to get in front of for years.”So, it gives them an avenue that now, much different than a free user as you observed, it's a commercial relationship where it's two way street versus, “Okay, we're just going to use this free stuff and we don't have much of a say because it's free, and so on and so forth.” So, I think it's been an eye-opener for both the company but also for the businesses. There is a lot of value in a commercial relationship beyond just okay, we're going to invest in new features and new value for developers.Corey: The challenge has always been how do you turn something that is widely beloved, that is effectively an open-source company, into money? There have been a whole bunch of questions about this, and it seems that the consensus that has emerged is that a number of people for a long time mistook open-source for a business model instead of a strategy, and it's very much not. And a lot of companies are attempting to rectify that with weird license changes where, “Oh, you're not allowed to take our code and build a service out of it if you're a cloud provider.” Amazon's product strategy is, of course, “Yes,” so of course, there's always going to be something coming out of AWS that is poorly documented, has a ridiculous name, and purports to do the same thing for way less money, except magically you pay them by the hour. I digress.Scott: No, it's a great surface area, and you're right I completely didn't answer that question. [laugh]. So—Corey: No, it's fair. It's—Scott: Glad you brought it back up.Corey: —a hard problem. It's easy to sit here and say, “Well, what I think they should do”—but all of those solutions fall apart under ten seconds of scrutiny.Scott: Super, super hard problem which, to be fair, we as a team and a community wrestled with for years. But here's where we landed, Corey. The short version is that you can still have lots of great upstream open-source technologies, and you'll have an early adopter community that loves those, use those, gets a lot of progress running fast and far with those, but we've found that the vast majority of the market doesn't want to spend its time cobbling together bits and bytes of open-source tech, and maintaining it, and patching it, and, and, and. And so what we're offering is an engineered product that takes the upstream but then adds a lot of value—we would say—to make it an engineered, easy to use, easy to configure, upgraded, secure, so on and so forth. And the convenience of that versus having to cobble together your own environment from upstream has proved to be what folks are willing to pay for. So, it's the classic kind of paying for time and convenience versus not.And so that is one dimension. And the other dimension, which you already referenced a little bit with AWS is that we have SaaS; we have a SaaS product in Docker Hub, which is providing a hosted registry with quality content that users know is updated not less than every 30 days, that is patched and maintained by us. And so those are examples of, in some sense, consumption [unintelligible 00:27:53]. So, we're using open-source to build this SaaS service, but the service that users receive, they're willing to pay for because they're not having to patch the Mongo upstream, they're not having to roll the image themselves, they're not having to watch the CVEs and scramble when everything comes out. When there's a CVE out in our upstream, our official images are patched no less than 24 hours later and typically within hours.That's an example of a service, but all based on upstream open-source tech that for the vast majority of uses are free. If you're consuming a lot of that, then there's a subscription that kicks in there as well. But we're giving you value in exchange for you having to spend your time, your engineers, managing all that that I just walked through. So, those are the two avenues that we found that are working well, that seem to be a fair trade and fair balance with the community and the rest of the ecosystem.Corey: I think the hardest part for a lot of folks is embracing change. And I have encountered this my entire career where I started off doing large-scale email systems administration, and hey, turns out that's not really a thing anymore. And I used to be deep in the bowels of Postfix, for example. I'm referenced in the SVN history of Postfix, once upon a time, just for helping with documentation and finding weird corner cases because I'm really good at breaking things by accident. And I viewed it as part of my identity.And times have changed and moved on; I don't run Postfix myself for anything anymore. I haven't touched it in years. Docker is still there and it's still something that people are actively using basically everywhere. And there's a sense of ownership and identity for especially early adopters who glom on to it because it is such a better way of doing some things that it is almost incomprehensible that we used to do it any other way. That's transformation.That's something awesome. But people want to pretend that we're still living in that era where technology has not advanced. The miraculous breakthrough in 2013 is today's de rigueur type of environment where this is just, “Oh, yeah. Of course you're using Docker.” If you're not, people look at you somewhat strangely.It's like, “Oh, I'm using serverless.” “Okay, but you can still build that in Docker containers. Why aren't you doing that?” It's like, “Oh, I don't believe in running anything that doesn't make me pay AWS by the second.” So okay, great. People are going to have opinions on this stuff. But time marches on and whatever we wish the industry would do, it's going to make its own decisions and march forward. There's very little any of us can do to change that.Scott: That's right. Look, it was a single container back in 2013, 2014, right? And now what we're seeing—and you kind of went there—is we're separating the implementation of service from the service. So, the service could be implemented with a container, could be a serverless function, could be a hosted XYZ as a service on some cloud, but what developers want to do is—what they're moving towards is, assemble your application based on services regardless of the how. You know, is that how a local container? To your point, you can roll a local serverless function now in an OCI image, and push it to Amazon.Corey: Oh, yeah. It's one of that now 34 ways I found to run containers on AWS.Scott: [laugh]. You can also, in Compose, abstract all that complexity away. Compose could have three services in it. One of those services is a local container, one of those services might be a local serverless function that you're running to test, and one of those services could be a mock to a Database as a Service on a cloud. And so that's where we are.We've gone beyond the single-container Docker run, which is still incredibly powerful but now we're starting to uplevel to applications that consist of multiple services. And where do those services run? Increasingly, developers do not need to care. And we see that as our mission is continue to give that type of power to developers to abstract out the how, extract out the infrastructure so they can just focus on building their app.Corey: Scott, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more—and that could mean finding out your opinions on things, potentially yelling at you about pricing changes, more interestingly, buying licenses for their large companies to run this stuff, and even theoretically, since you alluded to it a few minutes ago, look into working at Docker—where can they find you?Scott: No, thanks, Corey. And thank you for the time to discuss and look back over both years, but also zoom in on the present day. So, www.docker.com; you can find any and all what we just walked through. They're more than happy to yell at me on Twitters at @scottcjohnston, and we have a public roadmap that is in GitHub. I'm not going to put the URL here, but you can find it very easily. So, we love hearing from our community, we love engaging with them, we love going back and forth. And it's a big community; jump in, the waters warm, very welcoming, love to have you.Corey: And we'll of course, but links to that in the [show notes. 00:32:28] Thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it.Scott: Thank you, Corey. Right back at you.Corey: Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker. 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 that Docker isn't interested in at all because here's how to do exactly what Docker does in LPARs on your mainframe until the AWS/400 comes to [unintelligible 00:33:02].Scott: [laugh].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.

Elisabeth Brinton is Executive Vice President of Shell’s Renewables & Energy Solutions (formerly New Energies) business, steering the company’s work in power, renewables and lower-carbon technology. This role covers Shell’s work in wind and solar, new mobility options such as electric vehicle charging, Nature Based Solutions and laying the foundation for an integrated lower-carbon power business. In 2021, Elisabeth joined the Anglo American Board as an ESG focused non-executive director where she is a member of the board's sustainability committee. Elisabeth is a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur and utility industry veteran that is passionate about the role electricity and technology can play in moving the world towards a lower carbon energy system. Throughout her career Elisabeth has grown energy and technology businesses in some of the world’s largest markets including the USA and Australia. Elisabeth joined Shell in 2018 from AGL Energy, Australia’s largest integrated energy company, where she was Executive Vice President, New Energy. There she helped to increase adoption of renewable energy, build the world’s first residential virtual power plant and grow and sell a profitable smart metering business. Previously, Elisabeth was the Corporate Strategy Officer for PG&E Corporation, the US utility company that specialises in renewables, customer solar, energy efficiency and electric mobility. From 2008 to 2013, Elisabeth was Chief Customer Officer of Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and held founding and management roles in four successful Silicon Valley start-ups including, Loudcloud, a web infrastructure company that went public in May 2001. Useful links: MORE INFO ​Elisabeth Brinton World Economic Forum​ ​Elisabeth Brinton LinkedIn Elisabeth Brinton ShellSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Follow me on Linkedin for podcast updates, new episodes and highlight clips.Highlights: - How much mindset matters in running your business- What to look for in a good mentor- How Mike met Bill Campbell - Self-awareness - fundamental block for your successAbout MikeMike Smerklo has worked 100 hour weeks at Lehman Brothers, a job that he hated. Got hired by legendary entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz as one of the first employees of their new startup, Loudcloud. Started his own company after acquiring a San Francisco startup and grew it into a successful 3,000-person publicly-traded business. He now heads Austin-based firm Next Coast Ventures. 

    In this episode of the Road to Growth podcast, we are pleased to introduce you to Mike Smerklo. Mike is an experienced entrepreneur, investor and business leader driven by the desire to turn ideas into reality. Having bought and scaled a small business into a publicly traded company worth nearly a billion dollars in value, he has a deep understanding of the hard work, dedication and grit that truly powers successful entrepreneurship. Today, as the co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures, Smerklo is a champion for a new generation of entrepreneurs building disruptive companies in big markets. His new book, Mr. Monkey and Me (Scribe Media, Nov. 17, 2020), is a “real talk” guide for entrepreneurs who want to cut through the noise to cultivate a mindset that supports greatness.      Mike grew up in a blue-collar family outside of Toledo, Ohio, with dreams of achieving something more with his life. After working his way through college to earn an accounting degree and moving to Chicago to launch his CPA career, he eventually talked his way into a junior analyst gig with the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers. While he hated the job, surviving two years of hellish 100-hour workweeks and countless spreadsheets (so many spreadsheets) gave Mike a solid understanding of finance and company building. He went on to earn an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and experienced the Silicon Valley dot-com boom as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.    Mike was recruited by legendary entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz as one of the first employees of their new startup, Loudcloud. Here, he learned from the very best about what it takes to grow a company from an idea through an initial public offering. Mike began his own entrepreneurship journey in 2003, purchasing ServiceSource, a 30-person technology services startup in San Francisco. As CEO over the next 12 years, he grew the business into a successful 3,000-person publicly traded company with close to $300M in revenue.      In Mr. Monkey and Me, Mike draws on his broad range of experiences and mistakes as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Using lessons he learned from renowned entrepreneurs, he developed the SHAPE formula -- Self, Help, Authenticity, Persistence and Expectations -- which gives readers an actionable approach to mental toughness that will help any entrepreneur start, grow and run a successful business. An anti-memoir, Mr. Monkey and Me features practical tools and the “other stuff” you don't normally learn in classrooms or business books, such as the mental hurdles you have to overcome, the risks you have to take and the sacrifices and mistakes you'll make to become a successful entrepreneur.     He has developed a new perspective on entrepreneurship at the helm of the Austin-based firm Next Coast Ventures, which has backed more than 40 companies across two funds to help startup founders achieve their goals. Mike and his wife spend the bulk of their free time chasing their four children.  Learn more and connect with Mike Smerklo by visiting him on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikesmerklo/ Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC61Mtr5kAat0Wu6RCFE_9iQ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikesmerklo/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikesmerklo   Be sure to follow us on Twitter: Twitter.com/to_growth on Facebook: facebook.com/Road2Growth   Subscribe to our podcast across the web: https://www.theenriquezgroup.com/blog Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2Cdmacc iTunes: https://apple.co/2F4zAcn Castbox: http://bit.ly/2F4NfQq Google Play: http://bit.ly/2TxUYQ2 Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKnzMRkl-PurAb32mCLCMeA?view_as=subscriber  

Todd Zipper, President of Wiley Education Services, welcomes Manoj Kutty, CEO and Founder of GreenLight Credentials. Todd and Manoj discuss how GreenLight is putting the student first and setting them up for future success through the secure storage and sharing of lifelong verified credentials. Topics Discussed: • The growing need for verifiable digital records of lifelong learning • How blockchain technology can secure student records • The appetite for a common language when evaluating credentials versus degrees • An employer's role in the accelerating trend of verified digital credentials • COVID-19's impact on the adoption of this technology Guest Bio Manoj Kutty is the Founder/CEO of GreenLight Credentials and a leader in ed tech for the past 28 years. He founded LoudCloud Systems in 2010, a competency-based learning platform with clients in North America, Australia, and India. In 2016, LoudCloud was sold to Barnes and Noble Education. Kutty then served on the leadership team to transition and integrate LoudCloud into the digital business. From 1993-2010 he was the President of Tata Interactive Systems, one of the world's largest developers of custom e-learning products and services. He serves on several Boards, including the Dallas Education Foundation and the Center of Brain Health at UT Dallas.

In episode 648 of "Making Waves at C-Level" Thom chats with a repeat guest on the show, Mike Smerklo. Together they discuss trends before and after the pandemic and how business leaders can "Make Waves" in the new environment. They also talk about Mike's new book, "Mr. Monkey and Me".  About Mike SmerkloMike Smerklo is an experienced entrepreneur, investor and business leader driven by the desire to turn ideas into reality.  Having bought and scaled a small business into a publicly traded company worth nearly a billion dollars in value, he has a deep understanding of the hard work, dedication and grit that truly powers successful entrepreneurship.Today, as the co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures, Smerklo is a champion for a new generation of entrepreneurs building disruptive companies in big markets. His new book, Mr. Monkey and Me (Scribe Media, Nov. 17, 2020), is a “real talk” guide for entrepreneurs who want to cut through the noise to  cultivate a mindset that supports greatness. Smerklo grew up in a blue-collar family outside of Toledo, Ohio, with dreams of achieving something more with his life. After working his way through college to earn an accounting degree and moving to Chicago to launch his CPA career, he eventually talked his way into a junior analyst gig with the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers. While he hated the job, surviving two years of hellish 100-hour workweeks and countless spreadsheets (so many spreadsheets) gave Smerklo a solid understanding of finance and company building. He went on to earn an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and experienced the Silicon Valley dot-com boom as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley. Smerklo was recruited by legendary entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz as one of the first employees of their new startup, Loudcloud. Here, he learned from the very best about what it takes to grow a company from an idea through an initial public offering. Smerklo began his own entrepreneurship journey in 2003, purchasing ServiceSource, a 30-person technology services startup in San Francisco. As CEO over the next 12 years, he grew the business into a successful 3,000-person publicly traded company with close to $300M in revenue.  In Mr. Monkey and Me, Smerklo draws on his broad range of experiences and mistakes as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Using lessons he learned from renowned entrepreneurs, he developed the SHAPE formula -- Self, Help, Authenticity, Persistence and Expectations -- which gives readers an actionable approach to mental toughness that will help any entrepreneur start, grow and run a successful business. An anti-memoir, Mr. Monkey and Me features practical tools and the “other stuff” you don’t normally learn in classrooms or business books, such as the mental hurdles you have to overcome, the risks you have to take and the sacrifices and mistakes you’ll make to become a successful entrepreneur.  He has developed a new perspective on entrepreneurship at the helm of the Austin-based firm Next Coast Ventures, which has backed more than 40 companies across two funds to help startup founders achieve their goals. Mike and his wife spend the bulk of their free time chasing their four children. Visit https://www.mikesmerklo.com to read his blog and learn more.https://thomsinger.com/podcast/Mr-Monkey-and-Me************ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike Smerklo of Next Coast Ventures joins Nick to discuss The Sustainable & Temporary Trends of COVID, The Self-Aware Founder, and Writing the Survival Guide for the Mental Aspect of Entrepreneurship. In this episode, we cover: Walk us through your background and path to VC. What's the thesis at Next Coast Ventures? What are 'Next Coast' markets? How do you come up with the themes that drive investment focus at NCV? What are some of the trends emerging now that you are following that may have the most impact on new business creation over the next five years? Which are sustainable and which are temporary? Especially in the post covid world.  The biggest difference in the founder journey from the LoudCloud and ServiceSource days vs. today? What qualities do you look for in founders when investing in the early-stage vs. growth stage? How do you help founders? What led you to write the book Mr. Monkey and Me? Why are you giving all the proceeds for the book to charity? I would love to hear your thoughts on self-awareness w/ entrepreneurs and your approach to it. This question is called three data points. I'm going to give you a hypothetical situation w/ a startup, and you can ask three questions for three specific data points. Let's say you're approached to invest in a Series A Marketplace startup... The company is based in Houston The sector is oil/gas. They launched 24 months ago. and they currently have $500k/month GMV and a 25% take rate ($125k monthly revenue run rate) Again, the catch is, you can only ask 3 questions for 3 specific data points, in order to make your decision. What three questions do you ask?

The Hard thing about hard things A valuable book for tech entrepreneurs, The Hard thing about hard things helps throw light at the challenges a CEO goes through. Ben Horowitz launched Loudcloud in 1999, just before the dotcom bubble. Their company offers enterprise SaaS to tech clients. Then the trouble began * Because of the dotcom bubble, many of their customers went out of business * Had to IPO to survive, during hard times * After going public, they pivoted to become OPSware, a radically different business * They got threatened to delist from NASDAQ * They had mass employee revolts In the end, he sold OPSware for 1,6B to HP

A lot of people talk about how great it is to start a business, but only Ben Horowitz is brutally honest about how hard it is to run one. In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, draws on his own story of founding, running, selling, buying, managing, and investing in technology companies to offer essential advice and practical wisdom for navigating the toughest problems business schools don't cover. His blog has garnered a devoted following of millions of readers who have come to rely on him to help them run their businesses. A lifelong rap fan, Horowitz amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs and tells it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, from cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in. His advice is grounded in anecdotes from his own hard-earned rise—from cofounding the early cloud service provider Loudcloud to building the phenomenally successful Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, both with fellow tech superstar Marc Andreessen (inventor of Mosaic, the Internet's first popular Web browser). This is no polished victory lap; he analyzes issues with no easy answers through his trials, including demoting (or firing) a loyal friend; whether you should incorporate titles and promotions, and how to handle them; if it's OK to hire people from your friend's company; how to manage your own psychology, while the whole company is relying on you; what to do when smart people are bad employees; why Andreessen Horowitz prefers founder CEOs, and how to become one; whether you should sell your company, and how to do it. Filled with Horowitz's trademark humor and straight talk, and drawing from his personal and often humbling experiences, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/pbliving/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/pbliving/support

See my notes here on DX Circle!Audio Source: https://a16z-live.simplecast.com/episodes/a16z-infra-1-2iEyBTf5a16z on InfraIntroductions and Backgrounds [00:00:00]Martin Casado: [00:00:00] So this is the a16z infrastructure show. This is actually the very first one.  Where are we going to be talking about infrastructure companies investing in them, building them products? It just turns out that we're three GPS at a16z, and we all have a lot of experience in info.Like all of our companies were infrastructure companies. We do a lot of infra investing. So the way that we're going to structure this session is first, we're going to introduce, our backgrounds in context of that. Many of you know, us, many of you have worked with us. But we do want to give you a sense our relationship with infrastructure and how we went through it.So we'll and we each go through our own kind of bios that way and I'll orchestrate that. Okay. Th then we're going to talk about why infrastructure is different. This isn't B2B, this is an enterprise, this isn't vertical SAS. It's specifically infrastructure. And it's my it's my favorite topic and my favorite area.So we'll go through that. We've got a lot of great questions on Twitter, and so we're going to try and get through those. And then if we still have time, then we'll open up to questions. Uh, for everybody else. So that's rough, we plan to have this every two weeks and we want to cover everything as things go, we want to cover category creation and we want to cover open-source and we want to cover the shifts and go to market and the cloud and investing and everything else.So we're going to go ahead and start with our intros and just, yeah, very quickly. So for the, if you don't know, so I'm Martine I'm a GPN Andreessen Horowitz, and. I actually want to start by introducing Ben actually having him introduce himself, but I want to let you know how I met Ben. So I was doing my PhD at Stanford in the networking space, and we spun out and we started a company called this Sera.This is the software defined networking space. And we started it right before. Like the great recession, the nuclear winter had set in and we were struggling. And one of our investors who was also on our board was Andy Rachleff, who was actually a professor at Stanford at the time, but he's this super famous investor from benchmark.And we were at the, we were at the bottom of the recession and we're like, we had a professor as a CEO and he needed a new CEO and we were talking with Andy Rachleff and we're like, who would be the best person on earth? It's well, there's this guy that just sold the company to HP.And his name is Ben. And I had never heard of him at the time. And and we should talk to him. So this I, this was in 2008, so I got introduced in the band and he came in, of course, Ben's you have so insightful and he'd just done it. Like he just built a company at the same thing. And uh, so I asked Ben if he would be our CEO, actually.Ben, do you remember what you said in response to that? I don't. I don't. I said, no, you said I'm too rich.You're like to be CEO of a company like this. You gotta be piped in. And so instead, however, Ben and Mark invested Ben ended up joining the board. And so much of what I've learned has been with Ben. And so I thought it'd be great if Ben, most of you know him, but it'd be great if he just gave you a quick rundown of kind of his background with respect to infrastructure that we'll move on to David.So Ben, if you wouldn't mind. Ben Horowitz: [00:02:36] Yeah. Sure. And that, that did bring that a, man's got to know his limitations. If you know how hard a job is if you're going to give somebody a really, really hard, nearly impossible job, it's it really helps if they're not rich, I have to say, yeah, that's a good hiring tip as well.At some point, rich people are just like, this is too hard. I'm going to the Martin Casado: [00:02:54] beach. Things we learned multiple times, I think, in, in our Ben Horowitz: [00:02:57] careers. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah kinda my career, actually, my, probably my career in infrastructure, I started way back when I was an engineer at Silicon graphics and kind of the first.I was working on, we were, we had to put, we had an operating system called IRX or truss Unix-based and we were the first we had built the, the original multiprocessor machines. And so there was this task of having to. Put semaphores on all the Colonel processes and so forth so that they went collide and you wouldn't have all these weird race conditions, which was I would say probably the most complicated engineering job I ever had, but.Eventually then eventually went to a company called Netscape where I was in charge of kind of the web servers and then we needed a directory kind of project. And so we that's where we. I got the idea to  popularize LDAP and kind of make up the directory standard.And that was like my big infrastructure thing there. And then Mark and I founded a company called LoudCloud, which was one of the first or the original kind of cloud computing company started much too early. Ironically, because there wasn't enough infrastructure like principally, there was no virtualization, for example.And so you couldn't really do cloud computing in that way, but the tools that we had so we transformed that company into a company called Opsware and that's the one that I sell to HP, which made me to to rich, to take Martine stock. Martin Casado: [00:04:21] And since joining Andreesen, you've done a lot of infra investing actually so comfortable.It'd be great to just go through that a bit. Ben Horowitz: [00:04:28] Yeah, sure. Made a bunch of introduced structure investments. The first  investment I've made is on a company called Okta, which was very familiar to me from my directory days. And more recently I've invested in a company called Databricks.And then, most recently one called any scale and Databricks is infrastructure for AI and big data. And any scale is a new way to, how do you get the kind of processing power that you need, at the growth rate that you need. Now that Moore's law is definitely not going fast enough to support the hunger of AI and it can turn it can basically Make the cloud look like your laptop and make it very easy to program in parallel.Martin Casado: [00:05:10] Awesome. All right. Cool. So I was one of Ben's investments. He joined, we were definitely for a journalist Sarah networks. I was gonna say there was another one, sorry about that. Yeah we so very honestly I learned so much of what I know by having been on my board.We ended up selling the company to VMware where I ran that business. And when I left, there was about a $600 million business and end to end, that was about an 11 year journey. And then I joined Andreessen Horowitz where I also focus on core infrastructure. And as part of that, I'd always heard of DaveBut I met him and I don't know if you ever have these moments where you're like, I dunno, you meet someone new and it's like talking to a long lost brother, but I feel like he's lived this parallel life to me as far as the company he's built and what he's done. And so super happy he was able to join as well.And do you, if you're cool with it, it'd be great to get your personal journey through infra just to set the stage before we actually dive in. Sure, sure. David Ulevitch: [00:06:03] And this is great. This is a favorite topic. So. I was one of those people probably like you Martina and who fell into infrastructure early in my computing career.And I had an internship at a mom and pop ISP in Sydney, Diego because I had demanded to our family that we get real internet. Not like AOL or prodigy much to the dismay. I think of my sister because all her friends were, her prints were on like AOL, but when I wanted internet, so we got that. And then I was able to get an internship in eighth grade at this company and learned all about this.This is a company that's run on Sonos and later on a Solaris, which are just a slightly marginally better than IRX that Ben was talking about. But only marginally and So I learned all about routing and networking and Unix, and started my career as a mediocre or programmer there. It was great to understand how appearing works and how the internet worked.And I really, at that point fell in love with the internet and how it cross borders and how, you had this asymmetric opportunity to either write code or do something that could reach a whole bunch of people. And then there was sort of one technology in particular that I fell in love with, which was the DNS or the domain name system.And I started buying domain names. I would eventually went off to to college and built a domain name management sort of service because I started to own a bunch of domain names and all these other tech people started to use my free service. And we had the founder of Rackspace using my service.We had distinguished engineers at sun and chief scientist at Microsoft. And at that point we became big enough that we needed to build a network. And so I started to learn about things like any CAS networking and how the internet really started to come together from a commercial standpoint. And we got Rackspace that data centers, things you don't have to do any more.Cause we have AWS and GCP and Azure, but we started to build out a global network. We got IP addresses allocated to us, and I really had an incredible experience learning how to scale up and infrastructure. And that eventually paved the way to building a company called open DNS, which was a cybersecurity company that started out.As a consumer company to give people a faster and safer and better internet experience. Many, many millions of people wanted that none of those people wanted to pay for it. They'd rather go buy a cup of Starbucks once a month, instead of paying me three or four bucks a month for a better internet and safer internet.But it turned out a lot of businesses were using our product and the timing, this was We started the company at the end of 2005. And so by the 2007, 2008, the iPhone was out. People were bringing all kinds of wireless devices into the office devices, you couldn't install traditional end point security onto.And so a lot of it administrators were using open DNS to provide better protection as a network service, without having to install endpoint software, because we were delivering all of our security as a service using the DNS. And that was a novel innovation that we had. We'd come up with.And so all these businesses were using it. None of them were paying us and we needed to make money. And so in 2009, we went through a major transition to becoming an enterprise cyber security company and starting with all those millions of free users, eventually figuring out what two ones are businesses.And we'll talk about some of that today, but it started to go down that sort for enterprise, go to market and. That's what ended up becoming a decent sized enterprise cybersecurity company. We sold to Cisco. And like you said, we were you and I have a very mirrored career path. And in some ways I went on to run the security business at Cisco, which was a great experience working with really great people.We had about 240,000 customers. It was really an exciting opportunity to both operate and lead at scale, we did a bunch of acquisitions and I was very happy after three and a half years in Cisco to to get a call from someone that people that know a16z well know, Jeff stump is on our team here and talk to him and Ben and you, and a whole bunch of folks.And they've been here ever since now. It's two and a half years, and I invest in enterprise software, but a little bit of, a little bit of the infrastructure stuff. I think the one investment that we've announced in this space is is census, which sort of operated the, at the data layer. We can talk about that later.What is Infra? [00:09:51]Martin Casado: [00:09:51] So I think maybe for starters, especially since we've got a very varied audience, it's probably good to cover, like what infrastructure actually is. So what do we mean by infra? Why is it exciting? Why does it make sense to actually have a separate, talk around in for us?It for traditionally has meant that the stuff that apps are dealt on. And so it, traditionally has been compute network storage. These days is everything from dev tools to security, to API APIs. But think about it is the underlying layers that we use to, to build modern compute apps.And, it actually is quite different. Like companies and infra are, tend to be quite different than other, and that, they tend to be like quite technical. They tend to be horizontal. They they tend to have, complex insertions. They tend to be the product of. Real tactical work.They tend to be a little disconnected from business users. And so if you look at an infrastructure company, they often look quite different than, a typical app company. But they've really had a moment in the last couple of years. If you heard names like Okta and snowflake and GitHub and Databricks and do on MuleSoft and Datadog, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, these are all core infrastructure companies.Will Infra Ever Be Over? [00:10:56]And so I think, actually, it'd be interesting to hear your thoughts. Ben and David, which is, it's always been these underlying. The underlying technology, but you always have to wonder is is the day of infra ever over like steel? Are we ever done, like building like the concrete and like the rebar and whatever, and it's just about apps or is it going to continue to be a growth area?Because this year, last year just been phenomenal for infra. And if you have any opinions on that, it would be fun to talk through it. Ben Horowitz: [00:11:20] I think we're very far away from Infrastructure being over and it being done. And what happens is the needs of the applications change.And then the infrastructure has to change. The kind of, one of the first big shifts in our careers in infrastructure was the shift to cloud computing, which completely changed the requirement. As one of the brilliant things about Nycira networks is that networking got completely, just got devastated in terms of all of its architectural flaws. Once you move into the cloud environment. And, we used to talk about, okay, East West traffic versus North South traffic and. You know what Cisco could do and what kind of and so forth. And then, but that happened at every layer in the stack, storage was broken, the operating systems were broken every kind of piece of infrastructure wasn't built for that kind of an architecture.And so it has to be completely rebuilt and, and then as, things have scaled, then things have to be upgraded, on, on the other side, as we move from just procedural programming so AI, and now we're, the data is the program. There needs to be a whole tool chain to support that.And then, a lot of people are going, Oh, wow. Like this NFT thing is an amazing craze and it seems like it popped up overnight. But the, those of us who are infrastructure, people know that this thing has been, decentralized computing. And, trustless state, across machines is something that's been worked on since 2009.And and the first kind of cut at NFTs for things like crypto kitties blew up the infrastructure, so the infrastructure needed to be revamped. And so anytime there's a new important application need, I think, it ends up causing an evolution of the infrastructure. And that evolution of the infrastructure is, maybe the best thing to look at.If you're trying to understand. Stan what's going to happen in the future because, like I say, a lot of people are like shocked and amazed by NFTs and they just think it's some wackadoo thing. But, for those of us who have been like an infrastructure where Oh yeah, this is coming and we're surprised it took this long.And now that it's here, we know exactly what it is. So it's a a great way to fortune tell what's going to happen in apps world as well. Martin Casado: [00:13:32] Yeah. Yeah. I was, I always find it interesting to walk through like the major trends that we track and infra, particularly with respect to this, because it just drags on so much behind it, an early, I think an early lesson that I learned building an infra company as.It just seems like lower layers of the stack never go away, but there's always something that you build on top of them. And so it's almost like we're just gaining in complexity over time. And so I want to talk to a few of the trends that we track at a 16 Z and then, and then David, as I end up, it'd be great.Trends - Data [00:13:59]If you want to add any of them, but it'll just give you a sense of the disruptive power of infrastructure, how big the markets are, and how it, it opens up future potentials for say what's companies or investment. One of them, this is going to sound like a cliche.But but it, I, there is a lot deep there and that is that as data. And what do we mean by data? Data is just so central to how we build businesses, right? And again, like this is one of these cliches, which everybody has been saying. It we've been saying it for 20 years, but like we have these massive proof points recently of, large companies, large startups, snowflake Databricks, for example that are centered around data, but then applications and.And all of in front of is really to empower applications of using data for differentiation. In fact, actually, if you look at the application space, you're like okay, like what differs like three different SAS? Those let's look at three different, like whatever, three different SAS apps say that they're consumer apps.And you're like, okay, to build one of those things, Yeah, you have to understand distributed systems, but we know that yeah, you have to build a big cloud service. You have to know that, like these things are hard things to do. But they're pretty well understood, but to actually do good personalization and actually to do good prediction, to actually use data in a way that's differentiated, that's almost where a lot of the battle has moved to.And as a result, we're seeing this kind of explosion  of companies and tooling around data. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to enable those that are building SAS apps, the ability to to do, whatever on the business side they're wanting to do with kind of higher accuracy, whether this is wait time prediction, whether this is personalization, but this is pricing, whether this is fraud detection.And so from an investor standpoint, there's probably too many companies to track and you always have seems an infrastructure. You've got these kinds of explosions and then these contractions, right? Like you see an explosion of apps. Companies, and then they consolidate, we're seeing an explosion of data companies and they're going to consolidate.So if you look at data as as a market segment, it's growing about twice as fast, the cagar is the rest of infrastructure. So it's a major area, it's a major area of focus and investment. And again, you've got dozens of companies that underlie it. So that's one trend that we're very focused on.Trend - SaaS [00:15:59] Another trend that's quite interesting is, when David Ben and I got into the game decades ago, like software companies were actually software companies. Like they shipped software that's where I cut my teeth. There's you'd write code and you'd ship it. And you built companies around that.Like you built companies around having releases and getting them out and being able to debug remotely and supporting, complex HCLs Hardware compatibility lists. It's in different environments. And that was really what the companies looked like. These days it's very tough actually to find Harbor company or sorry, shipping software companies, almost every company is becoming basically a SAS company or an operations company.And it's just a very. Different type of company, right? The way that you write software, the way that you support the software. It all is becoming operations and there's huge impacts to infrastructure because rather than having something that I can give to somebody else, that's easy to debug and run.The question is how can I have high up times internally? And listen, we've seen massive increase in, or like changes in personnel. Like for example, SREs now are very much in demand. There's change in the programming style to do this change in development methodology, changing in the tool set and so forth.So this is also another kind of cross vertical area. That's very interesting. Do you mean be, want to talk a little bit about the pro-sumer ization of infrastructure or bottom up, because that's an area that you focus on quite a bit.Trends - Security Analytics, Billing, Metering [00:17:14]David Ulevitch: [00:17:14] Yeah, actually I was thinking, as I'm listening to you talk about these things, I was thinking that, all of these trends are talking about have the.These massive derivative sort of downstream effects, right? So when people talk about the massive amounts of data, that creates opportunities, not just for the storage companies and the database companies, but then it creates new opportunities for the analytics companies. It creates a new surface area for security companies to focus on data privacy and data governance and all this regulatory controls around data.And that all of those standalone, all of those derivatives, sorry. Sort of our categories of their own. When you talk about every company is becoming a SAS company and we don't ship perpetual license software anymore. One of the things I think you and I have heard over and over again, especially when we talk to infrastructure companies and I'm sure Ben sees this as well, is that all these companies are now dealing with major issues around billing and metering of their customers.And, AWS may have a major metering solution for being able to do billing and metering. But all of the SAS companies building on top of these platforms have almost nothing, right? There's, they're older tools around subscription billing, but not a lot around usage based billing. I'm sure companies like Twilio have had to build their own.Then, you mentioned the SREs and all this operational sophistication that companies need that creates whole new opportunities around management tools. Around, across cloud and private cloud sort of management tools that people need. And so all these major trends end up coming up with all these derivatives categories that ended up getting created that are brand new surface areas for new companies to be made.And many of them are just very large, even on their own. That's what I was thinking about as you were. Martin Casado: [00:18:46] I do think it's worth it. And just a moment, we'll get more in kind of the weeds and questions that are, I know, on, on many folks minds, things like, open source and so forth.Trends - Prosumerization of Tech [00:18:55]But I do think it's worth talking through what makes it infrastructure companies. Different like how we look at it on David Ulevitch: [00:19:02] the, on the bottom, on the bottoms up point, you were asking about, developers have way more power and control than they've ever had before in terms of the buying decisions of technology, especially for technology companies.And that has changed. I think the entire go to market for infrastructure companies. You're no longer a sales person reaching out to a CIO to arrange a golf game, to talk about. While your database is better or why your data center is better. Like all those days are gone. Now you're basically doing content marketing to get somebody excited about the technology that you've created.The developer is just going to download it. Maybe it's open source at the heart of it. They're going to download it and play with it. Or they're going to set up an account and start using it right away. They have to have time to value that's measured in minutes or hours. And then eventually you're going to start tracking all the analytics and data of how people use it.And that then eventually feeds over to a sales person who tries to go create a much larger opportunity, but that transformation has been, I think a, not a major shift in how every infrastructure company has ever gone to market before compared to how they're going to market today.And it's been a major re-imagining of even the stack and how sales teams and marketing teams come together inside of infrastructure companies. Martin Casado: [00:20:12] One thing that's super, I think maybe unique to infrastructure, which is you almost have this weird barbell construction with the team, which is most infrastructure companies require a kind of a deep understanding of the market or technology, right?Like you had to understand DNS, Ben had to understand the cloud. I had to understand the networking. And so the people that do it tend to be the, tend to be, technical founders, very focused on that. But at the same time at the same time, there's like actually tends to be a much more difficult go to market as well.Just because, often you're selling something that's low level, that's relatively technical. Normally you're actually somewhat removed from the business, value. You're like, yes, I get the case of software defined networking, yeah. makes things operationally more flexible or like whatever it is.It's very difficult to actually tie that to our revenue. And so I think one of the things that's tough about being a founder for an infrastructure and even an investor is you do need someone that, both has to be very good at go to market and has to be very good at tech and product.And and we see this in a lot of the founders and then everybody up here, and I don't know, Ben, I don't want to put you too much on the spot, but you saw, like my evidence. So I just, I just look how naive I was early on. I was just so tech focused and later I just had to learn, go to market and it took about 10 years and this and that.And I'm just wondering do you have any thoughts about how you bridge that gap either as a founder or as a board, or, how do you think through that? Because I think it is probably the broadest gap between technology and go to market in the industry. Ben Horowitz: [00:21:37] Yeah, that's a great lead up. I would say, one, it varies a little, so it depends where in the infrastructure stack you are. So in a Sarah was, I would say the worst case scenario in terms of go to market challenge, because it was infrastructure that.Was basically at the bottom of the stack. So if something went wrong with Nicera, then you basically get fired as the customer. And that's always a tough place to start with a new company. You really have to be. Comprehensively good at product marketing sales, lead generation story.Every everything's gotta be exactly perfect to get that off. These days, just no matter how compelling your value proposition or how great your technology is that ends up being a thing. But it is always. I would say challenging because you are going, you're the underpinning and if your stuff doesn't work and if your company doesn't last and all the things that people have to trust about, you have to be in place and, Oh, by the way, if you ever, God forbid have some kind of breach, you'd just die right there.A lot of the things that I look at are, most of what I do with the infrastructure companies that I'm on the board on are focused on and, helping the founders, CEO get the right kind of partners, I would say on the kind of sales and marketing side To do that product.And I always assume that the founder doesn't quite know what they're doing. And like really one of my favorite stories on this was, Okta has got off to a very rough start because of this go to market problem. And what happened was, they had come from salesforce.com and salesforce.com had a very kind of specific go-to market idea, which worked for an app, which was, Hey, we have.One 10th, the features of CBO, the on-premise product. So we're not going to go sell to those guys. We'll sell the guys. They can't get to because it's too heavyweight. And so they start at the bottom of the market and they work their way up. So Octa tried that, but it turns out. Little companies don't care that much about their security infrastructure.So it was a terrible place to start. And so just, me, a lot of the things we worked on is, okay, not only are we selling to the wrong customer, but because we're selling to the wrong customer, we have the wrong channel. We have the wrong pricing. We have the wrong marketing, like everything is wrong and we have to make that shift.And of course, once they made the shift, they went from being a company that looked like it. Wasn't going to make it to a very successful company, just highlight how important, go to market ends up being usually what makes an infrastructure company succeed or fail. Yeah. It's Martin Casado: [00:24:08] it's just so you would hope that this is the challenge for those that have spent, whatever their schooling to learn business.So they understand all the challenges, but in France almost, primarily product and tech founders, right? Like David  like DNS, and it's interesting when you see I remember when I first met David I'm like, listen, this guy is like a head of sales, right? All he thinks about as good a marketer you've talked with Ali or any of.Any of these founders for these companies is just, such a big focus. And even like D David, th just to pull you in really quickly, I remember you're like the last three years I've been like a student of go to market. Like, how did I. Did you know, and now as you take board seats, for example and you work with, infrastructure founders do you feel tempted to drag them into, go to market or focus on product or, David Ulevitch: [00:24:51] yeah, I think I look, I think there's different phases of the company journey.And I think, that when I think about my own experience and then. The companies that we work with, and then we spend time with people. Basically you have the technical founder hat, which is you need to have a technology that works. That's really good. It's differentiated at solving a real problem.And it really, 10 X way to what the world looks like in me, to Ben's point about Salesforce. I may not do everything that the incumbent solution does, but it does something else just in a dramatically better fashion that, so you wear that technical hat and product hat and you build that, but then eventually.Every founder sort realized. I was like, just because you build it does not mean that the customers will come. And so I found that out in multiple painful ways, because every time you solve that problem, then you want to Uplevel your company. Then you have to resolve that problem. And so figuring out and spending time with customers and really putting on that sort of sales CEO, hat, I think is one of the best ways to actually become a great CEO.Because it means that you're listening to your customers. It means you're understanding exactly what the market is telling you. People always ask questions, like how should I price my product? What, how should I package it up? A lot of those questions actually get answered just by being in the market.And you, as a CEO of, I think of an infrastructure company, you can't outsource that. Like you can get help from your product team, from your product marketing team, but you actually can't outsource it. You have to be out there with your customers, especially if you're aspirational and who you want your customers to be.You can spend time with your current customers. That's great. But if you want bigger customers or you want a different segment of the customer base or a different vertical to go after, you have to get out of there. So I was spending, this is like the period of my life, where, and I think, Ben and Martina and lots of people that are listening can relate to this.You ended up getting the, United global services and you realize that's actually a status you'd never want to get, because it means just spending too much time Martin Casado: [00:26:34] on the road, seven years, seven years of golden services, man. David Ulevitch: [00:26:37] It feels really good when you first get it for cancer.Yeah. Ben Horowitz: [00:26:41] Yeah. That's a. It's very bad for your health. It turns out. David Ulevitch: [00:26:44] Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Ultimate Pyrrhic victory and, and but, so I really enjoyed the experience of getting out in front of customers and recognizing that the software and the services we had built in the infrastructure we had built to deliver that service.Was powering some of the biggest companies out there are some of the companies I respected the most. And so that, and then we're actually one of the most interesting things about that journey is you actually find out your whole company really loves that experience too. Like engineers that are working on really hard engineering problems, love finding out that, you went from having your biggest deal, be like a hundred thousand dollar.Annual deal to closing a customer, that's paying you now a million dollars a year. And like the satisfaction of knowing that, the code that you write and the services you've stood up are now I'm getting paid for in that way, because people are finding that value. Like I found that really satisfying and exhilarating, but the only way to go through that journey is I think to be as close to the customers as possible then brought up like, 500 really important threads.You talking, he mentioned channels. He mentioned pricing. Like all of these things are things that you just have to spend a lot of time on. And the worst part about all of them is that once you actually get one working and get it right, it's only going to work for a while and you create more Slack somewhere else in the system where you dedicate your attention, but then once you then go, tighten up the Slack somewhere else, you have to come back to pricing.You have to come back to packaging. We have to come back to your channels and distribution strategy. And that, that for the, the right kind of founders, I think is really an exciting part of the company building process. Deplatforming and Decentralization [00:28:13]Martin Casado: [00:28:13] Awesome. Okay. Let's I'm going to, so I think we should get a little bit into the nuts and bolts now.There's one topic I want to go too into David. I actually, so this, we've had an amazing few years in infrastructure. Like many of the top enterprise companies are like core and for companies, it's data it's, whatever, but Going forward. There's also a lot of opportunity, both in frontier tech.Like whether it's satellites, but we're also just seeing like the traditional players being blown up. And I know one that you've been focused on is listen. There's a lot that's going on with kind of regulation and compliance. And when you see companies taking political stands and you and I hit this and I helped run a CDN, many years ago.And. You ran a DNS server and this has always been an issue. But often when you try and deep platform, infrastructure is what reshapes to provide hosting. And so love your thoughts on the current environment and what that might mean to infrastructure.And those in this audience that are thinking about building infrastructure companies. Oh, yeah. We'll call David Ulevitch: [00:29:10] this a leading question, but I know, my views on this, so I'll share them widely, which is that, I think companies have a right to operate. They want the way they want to operate.But when I looked at what was happening, around the election, when AWS kicked parlor off their services, like I, and I say this about actually any opinion about parlor or, and, I guess I've only seen AWS do it. They want what it really is to me signaled, it was like, this is a great.Infrastructure opportunity because for a long time, I think people felt like the lower layers of the stack were fully baked. There's no room for innovation, Azure GCP, and AWS have cornered the market on standing up hosting and infrastructure and services at those low layers. But, if you're running a service like parlor and you can just get thrown off by one of those services that, you just get thrown off by the other two as well.Then all of a sudden. There's going to be people that are now like fully invigorated and have been now catalyzed in action to go re-imagine. How do you build truly like Bulletproof globally, distributed, decentralized hosting and infrastructure solutions. And we know that in the crypto world we're seeing this across a number of of the crypto initiatives to create file hosting, file distribution content distribution, and all of these things now are going to, I think, start to get a ton of R and D effort because one of the great things about the internet has been that it's been decentralized and, as these Cod platforms of urgent and offered a lot of flexibility, they've also now centralized a lot of that control that the internet used to de-centralized.And so I, I get excited about the idea that, maybe parlor, which, good writtens are not good writtens, but it may end up being the greatest catalyst to re-imagining infrastructure that we thought was done fully baked in that no room left for innovation. And I'm sure someone's going to start to tie together new pieces of new ways.And I'm excited for that. Ben Horowitz: [00:30:56] Yeah, and really interesting on that, parlor, there's a lot of things that would be very hard to run on a decentralized service right now. Like Netflix kind of comes to mind as something you would rather not try, but parlor could definitely work. So that is a, like a really interesting idea.Like parlor is something that you could probably decentralize right now Martin Casado: [00:31:16] for sure. I just love the info when this whole thing went down or just funny to see the different personas and yours is definitely like the, I think the infrastructure founder view, which is, this goes down and some people like, this is good, parlor's a bad thing.Others are like, Oh, this is council culture. This is terrible. This shouldn't happen at central ship. But my reaction was yours, which is this is totally a failure and infrastructure. That's right. David Ulevitch: [00:31:38] Yeah. And we know it can be done the pirate failures than online the parent days, like two decades now.And this is a site that has been legally shut down so many times. It's it's still on there. Totally. And we know what can be done, but it can be done better in a more scalable way. And in a more general purpose Martin Casado: [00:31:52] way. So my sensibilities were totally offended just because I'm like, how is it possible that you can actually shut something like this down?Whether it's politically the right or the wrong thing to do, I was less concerned with, it's just, when we ran a set CDN back in the early two thousands, there were these sites that like, Interpol would show up, every couple of months asking to take it down and whatever, and they would just pop up somewhere else going for, and so in this day and age, especially with crypto, the fact that you actually could cancel something means that like it's time to rethink.The stack not by the way, because of any political agenda, positive or negative. It's just like infrastructure is meant to be ubiquitous in everywhere. And this is just, I think either a failure of imagination on the case of partner, or maybe we've gotten to a place where infrastructure, isn't what it used to be.And that's David Ulevitch: [00:32:35] exactly right. That's exactly right. There's still room for innovation Open Source is becoming Irrelevant [00:32:38]Martin Casado: [00:32:38] Let's talk opensource. I actually, so I have a bit of a, I think I'm a contrarian position on opensource. Ben, it'd be great. If you could backstop me on this one or contradicting or contradictory. Sorry.Here's the thing. For those that are listening, what is open source? So open source has been around for quite a while. It's the idea that, if you're writing code, the code should be, visible for. For everybody so they can look whether it's, to modify it, to build a community around it, to make sure that, it's correct to to address bugs, et cetera. This is a massive movement and, there's just been a lot of, focus on open source as the way to build these businesses. Yeah I can't help, but think that actually opensource. Is actually becoming a little bit irrelevant and not for the reasons, people say meaning it's fine to build an open-source company and it's fine to have open source, but in the era of SAS, Whether it's infrastructure satisfied in the era of you're actually running a SAS service, it's not super clear the role that open-source plays.Certainly not as clear as it did say 10 years ago. So if I'm shipping you software, if that's my business model, I'm shipping you software open source is something that people can get and like download and run. And it's a great kind of go-to-market channel. You get, the actual users of the open source become your customers.But if I'm building a SAS service, even if I open source the actual functionality of it, there's so much of the operations, which is actually really hard about this stuff, that is an open source, right? If you think about AWS as an open source, there's nothing open source about it. Get hub, isn't open source snowflake, isn't open source, but these are these kind of developer focused companies that are all very huge, that, and we had this question on Twitter and I think it's a great question. Like where does the source fit? It yeah. Going forward. I actually think, listen it's still like what it used to be. However I do think it's it's diminishing and relevance because the consumption model is becoming a service and listen, David, I know you've got an opinion on this.Would love to hear that. And Ben would love to hear yours as well. David Ulevitch: [00:34:28] I'll just say mine really quickly. Cause I, my view that people are conflating multiple things here, which is, I always view SaaS as basically a way of outsourcing IT. And so when you sign up for a SaaS service, you're effectively saying, I don't want to pay somebody inside my IT organization to run something, on-prem manage it, install patches and updates.And so it's a little bit orthogonal and I agree with you that. People are paying for SaaS, whether it's open-source underneath the hood or not, they're not paying for open-source, they're paying for it basically to not have to pay to manage something themselves. And in fact, they often pay a premium for that.I think the open source angle is often I'd go to marketing. What's a marketing way to get to build awareness to give people competence in your product. But I don't think that open source. Component isn't important at all. Like I'm agreeing with you, but it's really because of the framing to me is about outsourcing it.Not about whether they're paying for software or not paying Martin Casado: [00:35:22] for something. It's just, I've just felt like there's so much industry focused on open source. And this, I have a long personal history with open source, I've funded it, I've worked on it. I think it's fantastic. It's transformed the industry.It will continue, but if you look at a new company in the infrastructure space, It's most likely they're going to monetize with a SAS service. Not all the case and if that's the case, it's just not super clear how relevant open-source it's like you can have it and it's great. And yeah, it's great from maybe a marketing community standpoint, but it's not clear to me that going forward, like this is the thing to rotate on.Ben, did you have a comment?  Ben Horowitz: [00:35:51] it's funny when you think about the history of it, right? Because the thing that made open source destroy. Closed source were these big internet services because if you were running Facebook or Google, there's no way you can take a closed source piece of infrastructure and build Facebook on it.Because if there is a bug it's way, way, not okay to be dependent on some software company to patch it and ship it to you. That's just too long, a low. And so that moved everything to the thing that made everything open source was running these big services. But when the open source became services, Themselves then the kind of value of the open source went away.And I agree with David, it became a marketing tool. It actually is. Weirdly analogy is like an industry where, but when it went to streaming, then, the song is almost more of a marketing thing for building the brand of the artist than a way to make money. And. In a way open source is more, just a branding thing for the company and not how they make money.They make money on the service. Martin Casado: [00:36:54] Yeah. I mean it just, for everybody listening, we love open source. We're huge fans of it. I'm on the board of maybe seven open-source companies and they're all great. It's just, we used to hand ring as founders and investors so much about, Oh, can you do open source and still monetize it?And we just don't worry about that anymore. If you have an open-source company, great. Don't worry about monetizing it because we know you're going to most likely monetize as a, a SAS offering. And that just doesn't count isn't cannibalized because nobody wants to operate their own infrastructure.Infra Company Margins [00:37:22]So I actually want to take this moment to dovetail a little bit into another question on Twitter. Which is another thing that we actually obsess about a lot, which is the margin question. So yeah, I feel like so many of the, so many of the the way to think about software companies, the unit economics came from the days of like shippable software, right?You're like, Oh, 80% margins. Cause you ship it and people run it. But more and more in particularly for infrastructure, like we've mentioned. Like the companies are monetized as services. I think AWS, or whatever platform, any scale Databricks. And the thing about, a service, especially in infra is, the Mo the margin structure actually can start to matter.We've been doing this internal study, hopefully it'll turn into a blog post soon, but it's interesting if you take a an average. SAS company that's built on top of the cloud. The amount of contribution that cloud has to margin to the actual cogs is significant, right? It can be like double points of margin.And as long as the company is growing, that doesn't really matter. Especially in this macro economic time or debts, basically free, like these companies that get these great valuations cause they're growing very well. But while they're doing that, whether they're taking on VC funding or. Or whatever, they're writing all of this unoptimized code, that's running on these clouds.And then let's assume that at some point in time, the growth slows down then margin really starts to matter. And if you've got multiple points of margin, Like the impact to the market cap of the company is significant. So let's say you've got a $20 billion company that's doing this.The difference in 10 points of margin could be, billions of dollars in market cap. And when, and then, so you hit these very interesting situations where it totally made sense to use the public cloud early on hundred percent because you're growing very quickly. Then let's say, you saturate your market and you go public or whatever, then you slow down.Then all of a sudden, like it's hard to pay that margin tax. And then when you have actually pretty good arguments for repatriating like Dropbox, did you basically say, listen, it will never make sense from a cashflow perspective to build a data center, but this is probably 10 billion of dollars of market cap that we can save.Oh, sorry. I'm just, David wants to do a question. Oh yeah. So maybe, yeah. Yeah. So let me explain a little better. What I mean by this, which is if you're offering a SAS service. And let's say you're running it on AWS or you're running on the cloud. And let's assume that you're doing some level of compute while you're doing it.Like you're paying AWS. So you actually have a co like a cogs cost, like a cost of goods. So to bring on a new customer, it's expensive. On your AWS bill, for example, that hits your balance sheet as margins. And when you're a growth company, when you're invested like, by David or Ben or myself and your invest, when you're being investigated by a VC, you don't really worry about that as much because you're growing very fast and you're mostly valued on growth, but as soon as growth slows.It really matters and there's probably, tens of billions of dollars right now, trapped in kind of cloud margins. It's something that we're very focused on. And so I don't think that we fully rationalized how much margins are going to play a role going forward, but you have to believe with all these SAS companies, IPO, knowing that there's going to be a reckoning and Ben, I know, you've been watching the data space as well.There's been a lot of discussions around margin. I'm wondering if you think is there a big reckoning coming where this has to be reconciled? Can we just grow forever? Is this like a non-issue. Ben Horowitz: [00:40:34] I think that, it's funny, the data space is a little bit special with regards to your ability to get out of the monster clouds because of the data gravity problem in that let's say you're an analytics company, you have to be proximate to the data because the thing that's more expensive than the regular, storage and compute is bandwidth.And specifically been with. Out of the cloud. So if you are an analytics tool and you have your own data center and you're talking to say Databricks or snowflake or Redshift and another cloud that's going to be a very expensive proposition for your customers to move that data across. Whereas moving data within a cloud of course is nothing.So I think that's a special case, but I do think that. On the other hand for things that don't necessarily interact with a lot of other kind of components in the cloud yeah, like it's real, it is a gigantic amount of money at scale. So I do think that's going to. FIA thing for certain companies.Here's Martin Casado: [00:41:30] this thing I'm just kidding, just from an industry standpoint. And here's what I'm curious on. We're in this very special macro economic time where debt is very cheap, right? And the public markets are valuing. Companies based on growth. And then of course, on the private markets, we value companies a lot on growth because it's so hard to even calculate margin.It's just so early, and they're just mature. And so let's assume that there's this whole cohort of companies in the last five years that are funded by VCs. They get to scale, they go public, they all have great growth and then they start to slow down and then you find that.There's you know, 10 points of margin plus captured, by the cloud, this could be hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap, I just wonder if there's going to be a reckoning here. And does that mean that we're going to see a layer that optimizes that? Are we going to see repatriation or, it's a very open question in my mind.Ben Horowitz: [00:42:21] And so what is the thing that causes debt not to be cheapest? Also, that's a macroeconomic question. These countries are printing money, like crazy good. It would basically destroy the country to raise interest rates now. It's a very. Dangerous given how much money we owe, but Martin Casado: [00:42:39] I feel so much, it's an odd thing to say, but I feel so much of the current state of infrastructure is being dictated by exactly this, which is, it's a weird thing.It's basically yeah. We're printing money. And a lot of it's going to AWS because we don't care about margins. That's basically the collection of it because we're just focused on growth. Uh, but if the growth slows and or infrastructure interest rates go up, I do feel we're going to have Like a significant portion of the economy is going to be trapped in this layer.And I think it's very interesting to see whether, we can dig our way out of it. Are we going to see optimization companies? Are we going to see repatriation? This is going to blow up infrastructure yet again. I don't really know the answer. David Ulevitch: [00:43:14] I don't know the answer either, Martin. One thing I think people underestimate is that there is a level of competition in the infrastructure space and people forget that pretty, but it's easy. It's easy to actually remember it when you need to. So I think most of us who are on boards have gotten an email at one point or another from a company that we've invested in.It says, Hey, great news. We found out about these things called reserved instances. And all of a sudden we've lowered our Amazon bill by 25%. We're saving millions of dollars a month. And you're like, great. You figured this out now. It's fine. It's good. But the same thing happens when they say, wait a minute, we just got an incentive to move to Azure and we can save 30% on our bill.'cause like to use the Bezos quote, " your margin is my opportunity" that will eventually get used against all the major cloud players. And even the old school providers, like the Equinixes of the world are now starting to offer more and more sort of dynamic like services elastic like services.And I think that the margin issues and tends to solve as there's contraction in the market. And that people find ways, whether it's an overlay tools, the pride optimization, and as the virtualization to us continue to get better and better. You're just going to see more and more people be able to move more nimbly and that'll push pricing down.Martin Casado: [00:44:26] I think. I'm going to take the, I'm going to take the counterpoint on that, which I think is totally reasonable. A reasonable thing to say is it's not an issue right now. And once it becomes an issue, like we can move workloads around or optimize here's okay. Listen, you're all you all are hearing it now.Here's my prediction, which is there's so much money at stake. I think fractions of, a trillion dollars, right? So much money. If the macro economic environment changes that we're going to see a thermonuclear detonation on the cloud, it's just going to be like, Holy shit. We've got just, so much money in market cap trapped on this layer.And yes, we could do these 20% optimizations, but Oh, by the way, if I have a. Focused. If I built my own data center, for example, I can drop it by a factor of 10 and we're going to see just like the cloud kind of decimated PCs. I think there's a chance that we see it moving back. Who knows, but I do think we're talking of numbers of that size, right?David Ulevitch: [00:45:15] Yeah, but I'm okay with people building their own data centers. We, when you and I were having that discussion about parlor and infrastructure, I think that the more structure we have out there and the more choices, the better Martin Casado: [00:45:25] that was good, every section stays relevant.David Ulevitch: [00:45:27] There's a related point, Martine that in the discussion of sort of margin, which is that. Usually the cost of the company is incurring to run. Their service is not at all related to the way they price their offering. In fact, usually in the in fact, the best companies don't connect those things at all, because usually the customer has some axes of pricing that might be users or storage, but the actual cost of the service might be based on compute cycles or processes or something else.And th that's actually, I think where companies need to be a little bit more in tune with what their actual costs are and what the incremental cost of a customer is, and that they can certainly do independent of the macro environment. Martin Casado: [00:46:05] I dunno. I just think everybody talks about technical debt and we're like, Oh, it's bad  but like it's all fun and games until it's a $200 billion problem. And somebody looks like, literally somebody looks at the, like the U S economy. And it was like, Oh my God. Again, like some percentage of market cap is being owned by AWS or whatever.And then I think that people get very motivated to make big dramatic changes. And we'll just see. 

Managing director of Next Coast Ventures Show notes: https://www.markgraban.com/mistake47 My guest for Episode #47 is Mike Smerklo. He is an entrepreneur, an investor, he's the co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures. He was one of the first employees at Loudcloud, recruited there by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. in 2003, he purchased ServiceSource, a 30-person technology services startup in San Francisco. As CEO over the next 12 years, he grew the business into a successful 3,000-person publicly traded company with close to $300M in revenue. Mike now shares his lessons in his book Mr. Monkey and Me: A Real Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs. In today's episode, Mike shares favorite mistakes about giving into “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” and how he made the mistake of trying to be a blend of two very different leaders who were both role models to him. We also talk about why he wrote the book and the “SHAPE” formula — Self Awareness, Help, Authenticity, Persistence and Expectations. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/favorite-mistake/support

In this podcast episode, I had the pleasure of interviewing the author of the book, "Mr. Monkey and Me," Mike Smerklo. Mike shares the inner critic we all face and has done an amazing job of titling it, "The Monkey in my head." I have always believed if you can make light of the inner critic within you, it takes less power over you and you can be more resilient to the words, emotions, and things it will say to you. Check out the episode and learn more about the monkeys we all have within our heads! Who is Mike Smerklo? Mike Smerklo is an experienced entrepreneur, investor and business leader driven by the desire to turn ideas into reality. Having bought and scaled a small business into a publicly-traded company worth nearly a billion dollars in value, he has a deep understanding of the hard work, dedication, and grit that truly powers successful entrepreneurship. Today, as the co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures, Smerklo is a champion for a new generation of entrepreneurs building disruptive companies in big markets. His new book, Mr. Monkey and Me (Scribe Media, Nov. 17 2020), is a “real talk” guide for entrepreneurs who want to cut through the noise to cultivate a mindset that supports greatness.   Smerklo grew up in a blue-collar family outside of Toledo, Ohio, with dreams of achieving something more with his life. After working his way through college to earn an accounting degree and moving to Chicago to launch his CPA career, he eventually talked his way into a junior analyst gig with the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers. While he hated the job, surviving two years of hellish 100-hour workweeks and countless spreadsheets (so many spreadsheets) gave Smerklo a solid understanding of finance and company building. He went on to earn an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and experienced the Silicon Valley dot-com boom as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.   Smerklo was recruited by legendary entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz as one of the first employees of their new startup, Loudcloud. Here, he learned from the very best about what it takes to grow a company from an idea through an initial public offering.   Smerklo began his own entrepreneurship journey in 2003, purchasing ServiceSource, a 30-person technology services startup in San Francisco. As CEO over the next 12 years, he grew the business into a successful 3,000-person publicly-traded company with close to $300M in revenue.   He has developed a new perspective on entrepreneurship at the helm of the Austin-based firm Next Coast Ventures, which has backed more than 40 companies across two funds to help startup founders achieve their goals. Mike and his wife spend the bulk of their free time chasing their four children.   How to Connect Website: https://www.mikesmerklo.com/about/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/smerklo.mike/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikesmerklo/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikesmerklo Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikesmerklo/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC61Mtr5kAat0Wu6RCFE_9iQ --------------------------------------------------------- Get Connected with Dr. Vic Facebook: www.facebook.com/DrVicManzo Instagram: www.Instagram.com/DrVicManzo LinkedIn: www.LinkedIn.com/in/DrManzo Parler: www.parler.com/profile/DrVicManzo YouTube: Bit.Ly/38QULv91   Free Virtual Workshop on Life Mastery https://empower-your-reality.mykajabi.com/pl/229795   Download the first 3 Chapters to Dr. Vic's New Book for FREE https://empower-your-reality.mykajabi.com/3-chapters-lead-generation-awitd   Looking for Coaching? https://www.empoweryourreality.com/one-on-one-coaching   Email DrVic@EmpowerYourReality.com

Martina Lauchengco is a Partner at venture capital firm Costanoa Ventures, and also a Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, where she leads on product marketing — a critical function for any high growth SaaS business which she discusses here with Stephen Millard and Paul Papadimitriou.Highlights:- Product marketing is all about strategy, delivering what the company needs to connect their product with their market.- 2021 is the year to double down on positioning.- Listen to your customers and how they talk about you. Learn from what they say and keep your messaging simple using plain languageProduct marketing is a critical function for any high growth SaaS business and not only is this one of the hardest jobs to recruit for, it's also one of the hardest jobs to do really well. Product marketing is central to translating customer insight into messaging that resonates with customers, accelerates the sales cycle and lays the foundation for evangelism. Martina Lauchengco is a Partner at venture capital firm Costanoa Ventures, and also a Partner at Silicon Valley Product Group, where she leads on product marketing. She has spent over 25 years as a marketing executive building, branding and launching market-defining software at Microsoft, Netscape, Loudcloud and more. She has served on 12 startup boards and also lectures on marketing and product management at UC Berkeley.Read more: https://notion.vc/resources/good-to-great-product-marketing/ 

As products and companies develop more name-brand recognition, expansion is inevitable. Prashant Pandey has experience working at companies large and small and in his current role as Head of Engineering at Asana, he knows what it’s like to navigate the growing pains of managing expanded teams.On today’s episode, Prashant talks to Peter about what to take into consideration when judging a team member’s contribution, why failure is the single best learning tool, and how to manage expanding teams across time zones. Tune in for Prashant’s thoughts. [00:11] - Velocity by Code Climate  [00:49] - Internship at Loudcloud  [03:25] - Research at IBM [05:11] - Managing teams at Vdopia [06:53] - Learning through failure [09:27] - Getting up to speed with Amazon's best practices [10:54] - Viewing metrics [13:47] - Measuring impact [16:21] - Joining Asana [19:51] - Bifurcation challenges [24:28] - Remote vs distributed teams [26:28] - Collaboration tools [28:13] - Managing a successful rewrite [36:32] - Velocity by Code Climate Velocity by Code Climate is an engineering analytics tool that takes commit and Git insights and turns it into actionable metrics and dashboards for engineering leaders. Use concrete data to help you answer questions like:- How fast are we moving?- Did a recent change in our process have a positive or negative impact on efficiency?- Who are my top-performing teams and why?Sign up at https://codeclimate.com/ctoconnection/ and mention CTO connection to get a free month of the product.CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Conneciton podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to CTO Connection in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.This podcast episode produced by Dante32.

Photo credit: Elisabeth Fall Ben Horowitz started Loudcloud with Marc Andreessen in 1999. He ran the company for eight years and chronicled his experience in his first book The Hard Thing About Hard Things. In his time running Loudcloud, the dotcom bubble burst, but Loudcloud needed cash so badly that he took the company public The post Leadership with Ben Horowitz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Episode #4 Newton Series Classic episode featuring renowned Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist Ben Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz Co-Founder Ben Horowitz gave this Newton Lecture Series talk on campus at Berkeley on November 3rd, 2009, just four months after starting his new venture firm. In this episode, he shares his entrepreneurial journey, along with what his new firm was looking for in terms of entrepreneurs and companies in which to invest. 00:30 - Episode Introduction 01:30 - Ben Horowitz introduction 02:40 - How to play Quarterback in the NFL 04:10 - Controversial Computer Science degree 05:35 - Are you studying the right thing? 06:07 - The hilarious Warren Buffett 07:03 - Words of wisdom from the King of Pop, Michael Jackson 09:05 - What you need to build a new technology company 10:45 - Apple's Steve Jobs 14:17 - Story of Bernard Hopkins 15:10 - The second thing you need to build a new technology company 16:39 - How I became a CEO 20:30 - Story of America Online (AOL) to Loudcloud to Opsware 27:49 - Bill Clinton & Lesson from Colin Powell 29:10 - Is it too late to start a tech company? 33:12 - How can someone from Harvard write something so stupid? 35:12 - Would you like to know why smart people are so stupid? 39:34 - All the value in tech companies & who VCs want to invest in 41:48 - Quality of the team 42:40 - Megalomaniacs 43:59 - Great opportunities 45:31 - The biggest challenge for entrepreneurs 46:43 - Even William from Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook 48:02 - The biggest thing to building a company

In episode #1184, we share with you our hit-list of 7 must-read books for leveling up in your business! The books we recommend will help anyone who is interested in learning more about startups, team management, simplicity, and making it happen in an engineering organization. Tune in to hear which outstanding authors and business moguls have made our ranking!  TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today’s topic: Seven Evergreen Books Guaranteed to Help You Grow.   [00:32] Suffering through startup world and the woes of being a founder in Ben Horowitz’s book. [01:16] More great advice about startups and how to win in Peter Thiel’s Zero to One.  [02:56] Why The Ideal Team Player should be required reading!  [03:22] Learn the value of being simplistic with Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. [04:22] The Phoenix Project: a resource for effectively managing an engineering organization.  [05:05] How multibillionaire Ray Dalio’s book Principles will help you grow in business.  [06:35] Multipliers as a must-read for anyone who is about to start working with other people.  [07:25] To stay updated with events and learn more about our mastermind, go to the Marketing School site for more information. Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Marketing School The Hard Thing About Hard Things Ben Horowitz on Twitter Netscape LoudCloud  Zero to One  Peter Thiel   The Ideal Team Player Patrick Lencioni  Don’t Make Me Think Steve Krug  Basecamp The Goal  Jeff Bezos on Twitter The Phoenix Project  Gene Kim Principles Ray Dalio on Twitter Multipliers Leave Some Feedback:   What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.   Connect with Us:  Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

In episode #1184, we share with you our hit-list of 7 must-read books for leveling up in your business! The books we recommend will help anyone who is interested in learning more about startups, team management, simplicity, and making it happen in an engineering organization. Tune in to hear which outstanding authors and business moguls have made our ranking!  TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:25] Today's topic: Seven Evergreen Books Guaranteed to Help You Grow.   [00:32] Suffering through startup world and the woes of being a founder in Ben Horowitz's book. [01:16] More great advice about startups and how to win in Peter Thiel's Zero to One.  [02:56] Why The Ideal Team Player should be required reading!  [03:22] Learn the value of being simplistic with Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. [04:22] The Phoenix Project: a resource for effectively managing an engineering organization.  [05:05] How multibillionaire Ray Dalio's book Principles will help you grow in business.  [06:35] Multipliers as a must-read for anyone who is about to start working with other people.  [07:25] To stay updated with events and learn more about our mastermind, go to the Marketing School site for more information. Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Marketing School The Hard Thing About Hard Things Ben Horowitz on Twitter Netscape LoudCloud  Zero to One  Peter Thiel   The Ideal Team Player Patrick Lencioni  Don't Make Me Think Steve Krug  Basecamp The Goal  Jeff Bezos on Twitter The Phoenix Project  Gene Kim Principles Ray Dalio on Twitter Multipliers Leave Some Feedback:   What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review.   Connect with Us:  Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout  Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel  Twitter @ericosiu

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways  “To be a good CEO, and to be liked in the long run, you must do things that upset people in the short run” – Ben Horowitz“If you make decisions that everybody likes all the time, then those are the decisions they would have made without you. You’re not actually adding any value.”As an entrepreneur, avoid thinking in terms of probabilitiesInstead, think in terms of: “How do I do this?”You have to have the mindset: “Okay, I’ve got one bullet in the gun. I’ve got to hit the target. I’m going to do whatever I can to get as close as possible… If somehow we don’t make it, we don’t make it. But we’re going to die trying.”Sharpen your contradictions“In an organization, you’ll often see little disagreements between people, and a lot of your inclination is to smooth things over, but the right answer is to sharpen the contradictions” – Ben HorowitzWhat you DO is who you are – not your values, not what you tweet, but what you DOA company culture isn’t a shared set of beliefs, it’s a shared set of actions/behaviorsRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.org"One of the key insights from Bushido is that a culture is not a set of beliefs, it's a set of actions." — Ben HorowitzBen Horowitz (@bhorowitz) is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and the upcoming Harper Business book, What You Do Is Who You Are, available October 29th. He also created the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund to connect cultural leaders to the best new technology companies, and enable more young African Americans to enter the technology industry.Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications, including the widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line.Ben has an MS and BA in Computer Science from UCLA and Columbia University, respectively.This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so.As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you'll get a free 20-count travel pack (valued at $79) with your first order at athleticgreens.com/tim.This episode is also brought to you by Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel, LinkedIn's podcast now in its second season, and it is full of advice you can start using today.Each week, Jessi sits down with featured guests to investigate the role work plays in our lives, and how to make it work for us. This season, one of the first episodes I recommend checking out is with Jerry Colonna. I've worked with Jerry in the past, and he is one of the start-up world's most in-demand executive coaches. In the episode, Jerry shares his approach to meetings, explains how to ask good open-ended questions, and he also goes through his approach to daily journaling.Whether you're starting your first job or gearing up for retirement, Hello Monday helps you tackle Monday — and the rest of the workweek — with tactics and strategies you can use. Find Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss

"One of the key insights from Bushido is that a culture is not a set of beliefs, it's a set of actions." — Ben HorowitzBen Horowitz (@bhorowitz) is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and the upcoming Harper Business book, What You Do Is Who You Are, available October 29th. He also created the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund to connect cultural leaders to the best new technology companies, and enable more young African Americans to enter the technology industry.Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications, including the widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line.Ben has an MS and BA in Computer Science from UCLA and Columbia University, respectively.This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so.As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you'll get a free 20-count travel pack (valued at $79) with your first order at athleticgreens.com/tim.This episode is also brought to you by Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel, LinkedIn's podcast now in its second season, and it is full of advice you can start using today.Each week, Jessi sits down with featured guests to investigate the role work plays in our lives, and how to make it work for us. This season, one of the first episodes I recommend checking out is with Jerry Colonna. I've worked with Jerry in the past, and he is one of the start-up world's most in-demand executive coaches. In the episode, Jerry shares his approach to meetings, explains how to ask good open-ended questions, and he also goes through his approach to daily journaling.Whether you're starting your first job or gearing up for retirement, Hello Monday helps you tackle Monday — and the rest of the workweek — with tactics and strategies you can use. Find Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways  “To be a good CEO, and to be liked in the long run, you must do things that upset people in the short run” – Ben Horowitz“If you make decisions that everybody likes all the time, then those are the decisions they would have made without you. You’re not actually adding any value.”As an entrepreneur, avoid thinking in terms of probabilitiesInstead, think in terms of: “How do I do this?”You have to have the mindset: “Okay, I’ve got one bullet in the gun. I’ve got to hit the target. I’m going to do whatever I can to get as close as possible… If somehow we don’t make it, we don’t make it. But we’re going to die trying.”Sharpen your contradictions“In an organization, you’ll often see little disagreements between people, and a lot of your inclination is to smooth things over, but the right answer is to sharpen the contradictions” – Ben HorowitzWhat you DO is who you are – not your values, not what you tweet, but what you DOA company culture isn’t a shared set of beliefs, it’s a shared set of actions/behaviorsRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.org"One of the key insights from Bushido is that a culture is not a set of beliefs, it's a set of actions." — Ben HorowitzBen Horowitz (@bhorowitz) is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and the upcoming Harper Business book, What You Do Is Who You Are, available October 29th. He also created the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund to connect cultural leaders to the best new technology companies, and enable more young African Americans to enter the technology industry.Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications, including the widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line.Ben has an MS and BA in Computer Science from UCLA and Columbia University, respectively.This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so.As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you'll get a free 20-count travel pack (valued at $79) with your first order at athleticgreens.com/tim.This episode is also brought to you by Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel, LinkedIn's podcast now in its second season, and it is full of advice you can start using today.Each week, Jessi sits down with featured guests to investigate the role work plays in our lives, and how to make it work for us. This season, one of the first episodes I recommend checking out is with Jerry Colonna. I've worked with Jerry in the past, and he is one of the start-up world's most in-demand executive coaches. In the episode, Jerry shares his approach to meetings, explains how to ask good open-ended questions, and he also goes through his approach to daily journaling.Whether you're starting your first job or gearing up for retirement, Hello Monday helps you tackle Monday — and the rest of the workweek — with tactics and strategies you can use. Find Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss

In this episode we discuss Kubernetes and Docker with Ben Newton. Ben Newton is a veteran of the IT Operations market, with a two decade career across large and small companies like Loudcloud, BladeLogic, Northrop Grumman, EDS, and BMC. Ben got to do DevOps before DevOps was cool, working with government agencies and major commercial brands to be more agile and move faster. More recently, Ben spent 5 years in product management at Sumo Logic, and is now running product marketing for Operations Analytics at Sumo Logic. His latest project, Masters of Data, has let him combine his love of podcasts and music with his love of good conversations.   Contact Ben Neton: Podcast: Twitter: LinkedIn:   Other Links: Kubernetes: Docker: Docker Swarm:

Michael Smerklo is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Austin-based venture capital firm Next Coast Ventures. NCV provides early-stage capital to high-growth startups in ‘Next Coast’ markets, using macro trends and themes to guide their investment strategy.     Michael has been in the technology industry for almost 20 years as an operator, investor and board member/advisor. Michael currently sits on the board of NCV portfolio companies Tenfold, Navegate, LeanDNA and AlertMedia. He serves as a board observer for NCV portfolio companies EverlyWell, Stoplight and Cloverpop. Previously, he served on the board of OnRamp (acquired in July 2018) as well as SPS Commerce (NASDAQ: SPSC).       Prior to founding NCV, Michael was an investor and advisor to emerging growth companies in Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas from 2014-2015 via his personal entity, True North Ventures LLC. From 2003 to 2014, Michael served as CEO (and Chairman from 2008-­2015) of ServiceSource International, a company he acquired via a search fund, at a time when the company had one office, 35 employees and a few million dollars in revenue. Under Michael’s direction, ServiceSource grew from a groundbreaking idea into a publicly-traded company that is the market leader in Recurring Revenue Management (NASDAQ: SREV). Michael was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year® Award Finalist in Northern California in 2010. Michael retired as CEO in 2014 and from the Chairman role in 2015 as part of his planned relocation to Austin. Prior to ServiceSource, Michael was an early employee at Loudcloud (renamed Opsware), working closely with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in Business Development. He previously worked at Morgan Stanley (Silicon Valley Technology Investment Banking), Lehman Brothers (M&A) and Ernst & Young (Audit, CPA).    Michael received his MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern (with distinction) and a BS in Accounting from the Miami University (Ohio). Michael is an active member of Young President Organization (YPO) in Silicon Valley. He is also an active blogger, focused on the Entrepreneur’s Journey, on his personal site www.mikesmerklo.com.

Frank Chen is a Partner @ Andreessen Horowitz, one of the world's most prestigious venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Airbnb, Coinbase, Github, Lyft, Slack and many more incredible companies. As for Frank, prior to joining the world of venture, he was a VP of Products & UI Design at HP Software and before that held the same title at Opsware. Before that, even cooler, Frank was Director of Product Management @ Netscape where he led a cross-functional team that defined, shipped, and marketed Netscape's award-winning LDAP directory and security products.  In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Frank made the move from the world of operations with Opsware and HP to being a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz? 2.) How does Frank view the current state of play for AI and machine learning? How does the rise of automation shift the economy as we know it? What does it do to class distinctions? How does Frank view it's impact on the labour market? How does Frank think about the value of truly large datasets? Where is the asymptotic moment where the utility value of data is realised? 3.) With the rise of self-driving, how does Frank perceive the future of car ownership? Who will fundamentally own and operate the vehicles? Will it be a horizontal play or a vertical play? In terms of adoption, why is Frank negative towards a driver assisted transition phase and believe in a more binary transition? 4.) How does Frank perceive the rise of automation and self-driving cars impacting public infrastructure? How will the layout of our cities change over time? How does Frank believe urban real estate could be optimised in a more efficient manner? Which nations does Frank believe will be the first to innovate here? 5.) What is the most challenging element of Frank's position as Partner @ a16z? How does Frank think about the right way to say not to an entrepreneur? How does Frank look to scale the learning curve rapidly when investigating new industries? What are the challenges here? What advice would Frank give to someone looking to scale learning curves? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Frank’s Fave Book: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of The Rings Frank’s Most Recent Investment: Branch As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Frank on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Hall is joined by Michael Smerklo, co founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures. Hall and Michael kickoff this episode learning about Michaels background before investing in early stage companies. Michaels background includes being a CPA and investment banker before attending business school. Once he completed school, Michael move to SIlicon Valley where he first worked with Morgan Stanley followed by Loudcloud for two years. Michael then decided to buy a company. He worked as CEO for 13 years before retiring. At that point he decided that he really wanted to give back to the entrepreneurial community since he enjoyed working with early stage companies and became a VC as the next logical step in his career. Michael also shares his advice to new investors in the startup world as well as how he sees the industry evolving. In this episode, you'll learn Michaels own personal investment thesis and he came to it. Hall and Michael touch on challenges, risks and opportunities to pursue in this sector.    

Join the Acquired Limited Partner program! https://kimberlite.fm/acquired/ (works best on mobile)   Acquired dives into the legendary acquisition of Ben Horowitz & Marc Andreessen’s “second act” software company Opsware, from a perspective never before heard—HP’s side of the story! Our heroes are joined by Michel Feaster, who led both the acquisition for HP and then the Opsware product as part of the integrated company afterward under Ben Horowitz. Today the tables have turned: Michel is the Co-Founder and CEO of Seattle-based startup Usermind, and Ben Horowitz sits on her board on behalf of A16Z. This episode is not one to miss!   Topics covered include: Opsware’s early history and origins as Loudcloud, the “second act” of internet wunderkind Marc Andreessen and Netscape product manager Ben Horowitz Ben’s first person telling of the Loudcloud/Opsware history in The Hard Thing about Hard Things, as well as the great Wired "period piece” covering Loudcloud’s launch in August 2000 The importance of timing, and Loudcloud’s too-early vision of—essentially—AWS before AWS (including eerie parallels between the metaphor Andreessen used to describe Loudcloud during the company’s first press briefing, and Jeff Bezos’s description of AWS at YC nearly a decade later) Creation of the “Opsware” tool inside of Loudcloud to automate deploying and configuring servers within Loudcloud’s data centers Loudcloud's meteoric rise, crash following the burst of the internet bubble, and hard pivot as a public company into Opsware—now an enterprise software company selling datacenter tools  Michel’s role in HP’s evaluation of the company as an acquisition target, and process leading to its $1.6B acquisition in July 2007 Integration of the company into HP’s culture and sales channel The creation of Ben & Marc’s “third act”, the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and what it’s like for Michel now having Ben as an investor on her board at Usermind    The Carve Out: Ben: StarStaX star trail photography software David: Jimmy Iovine on the Bill Simmons Podcast

Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) is a legendary figure in Silicon Valley -- and worldwide. Even in the epicenter of tech, it's hard to find a more fascinating icon. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic Internet browser, the first widely used graphical web browser. He also co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. Then he co-founded Loudcloud, which sold as Opsware to Hewlett Packard for $1.6 billion. He's considered one of the founding fathers of the modern Internet, right alongside pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee, who launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and early HTML standards. This all makes him one of the few humans ever to create software categories used by more than a billion people. He's also one of the few who's established multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc is now co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, where he's quickly become one of the most influential and dominant tech investors in the world. In this interview, we dig into some fun things Marc has not discussed in many places, including: His epic debate vs. Peter Thiel Rules for investing The future of bitcoin Artificial intelligence Favorite books, documentaries, and movies And much, much more We had an extremely detailed and rich conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. Please do say hi to Marc -- he's very active on Twitter at @pmarca. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Audible. I have used Audible for years and I love audio books. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose between more than 180,000 audio programs. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim and get started today. Enjoy This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you're happy with or your money back. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Shellye Archambeau CEO, MetricStream Date: September 5, 2008 NCWIT Interview with Shellye Archambeau BIO: As the CEO of MetricStream, Shellye Archambeau is responsible for running all facets of the business. Ms. Archambeau has a proven executive management track record and over 20 years of experience driving sales growth in the technology industry. Prior to joining MetricStream, Ms. Archambeau was Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of Sales for Loudcloud, Inc. [renamed Opsware], responsible for all global sales and marketing activities. At Loudcloud she led the transformation into an enterprise-focused company while growing sales 50 percent year over year. Previously, she served as Chief Marketing Officer of NorthPoint Communications, where she led the design and implementation of all sales and marketing strategies. Ms. Archambeau also served as president of Blockbuster, Inc.'s e-commerce division and was recognized by Internet World as one of the Top 25 "Click and Mortar" executives in the country in June of 2000. Ms. Archambeau spent the prior 15 years at IBM, holding several domestic and international executive positions. Ms. Archambeau is an author and sought-after speaker on the topics of compliance, marketing, and leadership. She has been featured or quoted in numerous business publications including BusinessWeek, InformationWeek and the San Jose Business Journal. She is co-author of Marketing That Works and she guest lectures at The Wharton School West and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Ms. Archambeau currently serves on the board of directors for Arbitron, Inc.[NYSE: ARB] and The Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives. She is also a member of the Trustees Council of Penn Women at the University of Pennsylvania and the Information Technology Senior Management Forum. She earned a B.S. degree at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business. Larry Nelson: This is Larry Nelson with w3w3.com. And we are fortunate to be right here in the headquarters of the National Center for Women in Information Technology. We are so excited about this particular series, because it is really targeting young people and trying to get them more interested in getting involved with IT and how exciting it is. But most of all, on the entrepreneurial side. So Lucy Sanders, who is the CEO and founder of NCWIT, as we call it, for all of our friends. Lucy... Lucy Sanders: Well thanks Larry. We are excited about this series, as well. With me is NCWIT Board Director, Lee Kennedy from Tricalyx. She is a serial entrepreneur. And we are speaking today with Shelley Archambeau, who is the CEO of MetricStream, which is an incredibly cool company. Very timely in today's regulatory and quality environment. Shelley, welcome. Shellye Archambeau: Thank you. Glad to be here. Lucy: Why don't you tell us a little bit about MetricStream? You do a lot. You have software, you have services, and you have training. Tell us a bit about what you do. Shellye: Absolutely. What we do is to provide solutions to companies to help them ensure they can comply effectively with rules, regulations, and mandates that are out there in the marketplace. So whether that is Sarbanes‑Oxley or that are FDA regulations or ISO 9000 processes, any time they basically need a solution to ensure that they comply with the regulations so they can reduce their corporate risk, as well as get the visibility to be able to manage that risk and apply appropriate resources as needed. That is where MetricStream comes in. So we have customers in the FDA space, everything from Subways, which I'm sure a lot of people have eaten at, to pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer. We also run a high technology space, with companies like Fairchild Semiconductor, Hitachi America, and etcetera. So, we work with companies of all sizes to help them comply by providing the full software services total solution. Lucy: Well, we are excited. I must make a plug about Pfizer. Pfizer is an investment partner for NCWIT. Larry: Oh, right. Shellye: All right. Lucy: They help us by funding our K‑12 Alliance. We love Pfizer. Shellye: Excellent. Well, we do too. Lucy: We can have a Pfizer love fest. Larry: There we go. Lucy: Yeah, I love them. One of the things that I noticed too, while I'm looking at your website, was that MetricStream just won an award, the Stevie Award. Shellye: Yes. Lucy: And that is, I think, is that focused on your portal that uses an innovative use of open source? Shellye: Yes, absolutely. We won first place for Compliance Online. Compliance Online is a web portal where we bring together all of the different information about compliance: rules, regulations, best practices, training, and etcetera. To make it easy for compliance professionals to find out and learn what's new, where the areas of focus, where the areas of risk, get updates on how companies are best handling the management of different issues and regulations, etcetera. And we're pleased that in just a very short time, and we just launched this basically the beginning of last year, we have become the number one compliance portal. Lucy: Wow. Shellye: We are leveraging a unique model, where we basically have experts from around the world that provide training to those that need it. And we create an environment in which professionals can come and ask each other questions, interact, etcetera. As well as do vertical search, meaning when they want to find information on FDA CFR part 11, they can do a search on that and just get that, versus getting something that may have the same part number, like a widget on a car if you do a broader search. So all of those things are actually bringing a significant value. And we were recognized, as you said, as a Stevie Award, which is basically an international business award. Larry: Fantastic. Shelleye: As the number one player in that particular category. Lucy: Well, I'm sure you use a lot of technology with that. And certainly you're Compliance Online Portal is one such. And by the way, congratulations. I read you got to go to a great gala to get the award. Lucy: I was hoping I could come carry your bags. Our first question for you really does, in fact, relate to technology and how you first got interested in technology and also, as you look out onto the horizon, which technologies you see as being very important in the future. Shellye: Certainly. So first, interest. It was really college. And now I'm going to date myself, because I went to school in the early '80s. That was around the time frame that Apple Computers and all those things were starting to come out, and really seeing just the changing horizon out there. So, I went to Wharton and focused on business marketing. But where I really put my focus was doing all that in the area of technology. I thought this was really how we could change the world. Again, you're 18, 19, 20 years old and you believe you could do all that, so I did. But I wanted to get into this space. It was hot. It was new. It really looked like there was a lot of leverage that could happen by getting involved. And it hasn't let me down. I've spent over 20 years now in the technology space, and it's just amazing how fast technology continues to change. Harnessing the power is just an exciting, exciting area to be in. Lucy: So Shelley, when you think about the series we're doing, it's all about different, fabulous entrepreneurs and what they've done. So we love to find out, why did you decide to be an entrepreneur? And what is it about it that really makes you tick? Shellye: You know, it's interesting because I actually started my career not as an entrepreneur, per se. I joined IBM. You can't get much bigger than that in terms of a conglomerate to join. [laughs] But I joined IBM with the objective of wanting to run a company, so I might as well try to run IBM. I spent a good number of years doing that, running different divisions and operations both domestic as well as overseas. But the piece that I was missing in all of that was that the higher I got in the company, the farther removed I felt from the market and what was really happening. You spend more focus trying to get things done within the company. With that, I said let me take what I've learned ‑ all the technology focus, I had lots of opportunities to go and fix divisions, build new divisions, get them growing, et cetera ‑ let me take that and apply that to smaller companies. Because now I want to have more of an impact, if you will, on a business. So becoming an entrepreneur to me was really taking a set of skills and trying to get out there and just have an impact. When you think about all that we're learning in our careers and all the skill sets that we're building, that's really what we're trying to do. Whether you're trying to do that against a company or against a technology or against a social issue, et cetera, we're all just trying to make an impact with what it is that we're doing. I don't think there's any better way to make an impact than to be an entrepreneur. You're bringing a new idea, a new concept, a new way to approach technology. All of those things you can do as an entrepreneur and really have an impact on the market space that you're targeting. Lucy: Along the way you have a fascinating career path coming through a large corporation like IBM and then starting your own company. Who influenced you along this path? Do you have role models or mentors that you remember? What kinds of influences shaped you? Shellye: It's interesting. I think one of the things that shaped me in the beginning is that I've always been a planner. I knew, as I said, that I wanted to run a business. I didn't have, really, a view of being an entrepreneur when I first came out of school. Going to Wharton, everything was pretty much focused on big companies, et cetera, and that's what I did. But as I started to progress and see what kind of changes people could make by being an entrepreneur, and then getting connected with people in this space. You talk about mentors. One of my mentors and advisers is Mark Leslie. Mark Leslie built Veritas, which was just acquired about a year and a half ago by Symantec. He took a company from start to four billion dollars in market cap. Seeing what can be done is just amazing. I'm a big believer in mentors and advisers in general. You didn't quite ask me this question, but let me just frame it a little bit. One of the tidbits that I like to offer people is that as you're moving forward in your career, try to adopt mentors. And I say adopt, meaning look for people who are doing things you want to do, or things you think you might be interested in, and just spend some time. Try to reach out, talk to them, ask them for advice, etcetera. There is so much to be learned. And it was really in doing that kind of thing that enabled me to develop a set of really strong relationships that helped me shape what I wanted to do with my career. I still reach out and grasp for mentors and advisors and ideas, because there is so much going on in the world. There is no way you can experience it all yourself. So the best way to try to get broader perspectives is try to leverage other people's experiences, which is really what mentoring is all about. Larry: I haven't had this type of corporate experience, like being with IBM. So, going from IBM to now being a real, full‑fledged entrepreneur, along the way I am sure there's been a bit of course correction and other challenges. If you were to pull something out, what would be the biggest challenge that you had to either try to overcome, or maybe you didn't overcome it, you just had to learn to live with it? Shellye: Gosh, probably the biggest challenge I'd almost put as two things, and I'll answer two ways. In the corporate world, it was all about rightsizing, downsizing, whatever word you want to use. It doesn't matter how many times you do it, that is just a hard thing to do. You are obviously trying to get the business models right, but you're also impacting individuals very specifically. So that is something that is hard to do. Have I done it? Absolutely. Can I do it? Yes. But that doesn't mean that that is something I enjoy. What we've tried to do, when taking that experience and coming to build MetricStream, is try to ensure that we're growing at the right pace and path with the business growth and momentum. So to try to avoid having to go through that kind of activity as you grow. On the entrepreneur side, as to what has been the toughest, it's really...Gosh, we've put two companies together. Part of MetricStream's growth, we actually merged with another company three years back. And that was probably one of the toughest things. Because now you're trying to a business that you've got, investors that you've got, match it and marry it with another company that has its own set of investors, their own original business plan. And make it work both from a financial standpoint, from a structural standpoint, as well as from a market standpoint. So, I would say merging MetricStream three years ago was probably one of the hardest things that I've done, because it touched on every aspect of running and operating a business. Lucy: So Shelley, you had some great advice earlier about role models and mentors. If you were sitting here today with a young person, what advice would you have to them about entrepreneurship? And what advice would you give them? Shellye: Well, first would be only do what you're really passionate about. I mean, this is hard work. Being an entrepreneur is not showing up at nine o'clock in the morning and leaving at five, and being able to put all of the stuff behind you. Being an entrepreneur is totally encompassing, because nothing happens unless you make it happen. If you work for a big company, if you don't show up for work, there is already an engine. There are people doing other pieces, people pitch in, things will still happen and still work. When you're an entrepreneur, if you don't show up, things don't happen. Because you don't have all of that infrastructure and things in place. So if you're going to work hard, make sure you are doing something that you are really passionate about. So that when you have the good times, which you will, you can celebrate and enjoy. But when you have the bad times and the struggles, you still want to persevere. And you do because you are really passionate about what it is that you are doing. As an entrepreneur, the ups can be almost euphoric. But the downs can have you second guessing everything that you are doing. It's important to do something that you love, so you can power through all those cycles that you go through. So that's number one. Do something that you are passionate about. Second would be, create an informal network of advisers. I touched on this, in terms of mentors and things. There are a million people out there who have done what you are getting ready to do. Maybe not in the same industry, maybe not with the exact same model, but in terms of creating a business, finding customers, creating a business model that works, getting investors and funding, etcetera. All those things have been done by others, so create a network of advisers to help support you in that overall process. And then lastly, test your ideas before you just launch into it. You know, make sure that there is a good niche that you're targeting. So testing ideas, either with others like these advisers I talked about or just with people on the streets, to see what kind of feedback you get about your concept and what you're doing. And then get launched into it. Do something that you're passionate about, number one. Two, make sure you create this informal network of advisers. And three, make sure you test your ideas before you jump into it. Lucy: That's all really great advice. I'm really resonating to the testing of the ideas, because it's only then that you test it with your advisers and they love you, they're going to give you the hard news. It's great.. Larry: Now we have to listen. Lucy: Well, you know, they're giving you all the input that you need. Shellye: You know it's true. And it's interesting, because a lot of people come up with great ideas for the product, whether that product is software or it is hardware, or it's a cool widget, whatever it might be. The hard part is, how do you get that product to market? Hundreds and thousands of new businesses and new ideas are created every day. The ones, however, that make it, are not always the ones that actually have the best product. This will be the ones that end up with the best business plan and marketing strategy to get it to market. So, and I'll put a little plug, I hope you don't mind, but I'll put a little plug in there for a minute because I actually co‑authored a book on Marketing That Works. That is all about how to use different techniques and capabilities and structure and discipline to make all that work. Really, that is where to spend the time to make sure that you can be successful. Lucy: Well Larry, I think just as a side note, that's another interview for you. Larry: There we go. Lucy: You need to go look at the book. Larry is an author, as well. Larry: We'll put that up on the blog. Lucy: Yeah. Shellye: Oh, Okay. Great. Lucy: You have great insight and advice. What other personal characteristics have given you an advantage as an entrepreneur? Shellye: You know it's interesting, in terms of reflecting on that. A couple things. One is, I'm a pretty good leader. And when I say a good leader, I think of leader as people who operate in a way that people want to follow them. Making sure you provide the vision, the strategy, the direction, and just stay two inches ahead of everybody. So that you are pushing out the boulders and blockades, etcetera, so that everyone else can be successful in what it is they are getting ready to do. I think leadership is an important characteristic, and one that has definitely helped me. The other is being a listener. And this one's a little different, because people don't always think about this. But it's really being a listener. To make sure that as you come out with your product or your set of solutions, that you don't fall so much in love with your product. When I say in love, it's very much like falling in love with a person. When you fall in love with someone initially, you are almost blinded to everything else. All you see is all of their positives, all their best traits, etcetera. You tend to diminish and not focus on maybe some of the negative traits, etcetera. Well it's easy to fall in love with your product. So that you're not really listening to what the market is telling you so that you can make that product better in what you are doing. So listening has been another key piece to all of this. I mentioned earlier that I'm a planner, and I think that has helped. I absolutely have been able to bring both to my own personal career. A game plan for what I want to do, so what do I need to be able to get there? And making sure I put those things into place. And frankly, once I've gotten here, the other thing that's an advantage is being a woman. There are so few female entrepreneurs running companies in different places, as a percentage. When people do meet you, they tend to remember you, which actually helps your company because they then can associate it with what it is that you do, etcetera. So I actually think that's an advantage. The last would be, I like to win. I like to set objectives. I like to work with teams to go make it happen and win. That's what this is all about. As you build a company, an organization, it is how do you make sure your product fits the market needs? It's making sure that you're building a team and leading it to be able to deliver on those overall needs. And putting a plan in place that will be successful and then making sure you win if you're getting out there and competing. Speaker: Wonderful. Lucy: That's great advice. So Shelley you've had such a wonderful career. You're running a company now. How do you bring balance to your personal and professional life? Shellye: That's interesting. I think about balance and I tell people I think balance is a misnomer. Balance to me means you spend equal energy, time, hours, whatever it is in one area as well as another area at all times, right? That's balance. I don't have balance. What I have is integration. So I think of this more work‑life integration. I've got a fabulous husband. We celebrate 23 years in August. Lucy: Wow. Shellye: And two kids, which, however knock on wood, are turning out really well. But I've been able to do that because number one I work in partnership with my husband so we view each other as a team in terms of how we execute. But number two I've been able to leverage. I'm going to use technology to actually make it all work. My son, as an example, my son played in a basketball championship when he was in high school, which was last year. And they actually made it to the States. When I was in home and in town I didn't miss a game. Now how did I do that? I did that because of the Blackberry and a cell phone. It doesn't mean I was in the stands... I couldn't focus every second on every game. There were times when I was actually plugging away on email, there were times I had to step out and take a call but you know what? I was there. Without technology I couldn't have been there all those times and making sure that things are happening the way they need to happen. So I think integrating the two in a way where you can physically be where you want to be and yet insure that things are getting done that need to get done really makes a difference. It's very hard I think to actually shut out and say, "Okay, from this time to this time I do X. And from this time to this time I do Y. And never the two shall meet." That doesn't work for me. It works for me to integrate the two and to be available. For part of my career I actually commuted. So for three years I left home Monday mornings and I came home Thursday night if I was lucky but usually it was Friday night. And my kids were at school at the time. So the deal I had with them was, "Listen, when you want to talk to me or reach out to me you just call me. Just call my cell." And folks that I worked with knew that when my cell phone rang if it was my kids I was going to answer it. Now it didn't mean I stayed on the phone. I'd answer it and say, "I'm doing this do you need me to step out or can I call you back?" And you know what? 95% of the time I could call them back. But that just knowing that they could reach me meant that I was still there, right? There was no difference if I was at work three miles away versus being three thousand miles away in terms of what was happening. And me taking those phone calls? That didn't impact my ability to execute on the overall job. So when I say integration if it's both kinds of things, figure out how you can make it work together so that you can be available in both sides of your life. Lucy: Well, and we asked this question. I won't say it's a trick question but we all agree with you. We are a fan of integration and blending. I personally think this word 'balance' does us a disservice. And one reason why we really wanted to ask the question is because we want young people to know that there are ways to blend these types of very aggressive and time consuming jobs with having a rewarding personal life. So... Shellye: That's right. Now listen, can I add a couple more things to that? Lucy: Absolutely. Shellye: Because what happens to a lot of young people especially is they put themselves in a trap. And when I say "they put themselves in a trap" meaning my biggest advice to people, which has helped my husband and I, is you need to get help. And I don't mean a psychiatrist. Shellye: When I say, "You need to get help" meaning those things that really aren't as important to you whether it's cutting the grass, whether its' cleaning your house whatever it happens to be for you and your husband, get somebody else to do that. So the people say to me, "Damn it, how can you afford all that?" Especially when you get started, and the whole bit. My answer is to plan it in. When my husband and I got married, I knew that I wanted to have kids right away and so did he. I'm right out of college just starting and the whole bit. Well, we bought a house that was a small, little house that was a fairly decent commute in terms of overall distance. But we did that because I spent more on childcare and help than we did on our mortgage. And we did that so that it would work and we wouldn't be pulling our hair out to be able to get it done. Now, that takes discipline. Everybody else you want to take and say, "OK, let me get the best and biggest house I can get for what I'm spending." We looked at it and said, "Oh no. I want to consider childcare and support and mortgage as one big hunk." Now, what can that be? And now we've got to divide it up between the two. But plan for it. What tends to happen is we come out of school, we work for awhile, we get married, we get the house, we get the cars. Next thing we know, our fixed expense is so high that we don't have the tangible or flexible dollars to be able to go get the help that we need to enable us to better balance. Because I will tell you, it is impossible to do it all without any help and still retain your sanity and your health and all those things. You've got to figure it out. Start financially with, "OK, what can I do". Then work from there. It makes a huge difference. Lucy: Well, I know you can't retain your rotator cuffs either if you try to do it all. That's great advice. One last question for you. You've achieved a lot in your career. I want to also tell listeners that, although you didn't mention it, we know from reading your bio that you also have a big heart. You're involved with a lot of non‑profits ‑ the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives, you're also involved at Penn. What's next for you? You've done so much and you have so much time ahead of you. What's next for you and your company? Shellye: Well, the immediate next is to build a great company and metric strength, and to indeed have an impact on the whole marketplace of how large and small companies comply with the rules and regulations and mandates. So first, next, is absolutely to build a great company. The follow on to that is that I want to continue to do things that have an impact. Whether it is an impact in business, in terms of driving and building and growing another company, or it's on the social entrepreneurial side in terms of looking at ways to have an impact and take some of the skills and capabilities that I've built to go do that. I'm not sure yet which that will be. What I can tell you is that if you flash forward five or ten years, I still absolutely expect to be out there and creating an impact in both the business world as well as in the non‑profit space. Because you're right, that is an important thing to me. I know that I have not achieved everything that I've achieved because of me, because of Shelley Archambeau. I've been able to do it as a result of a lot of good support, advice, and path paving that was done in front of me. And I want to make sure that I'm helping to do that for others.. Larry: Well Shelley, based on the experience and the lessons you learned going from IBM to trying to figure out how to apply these lessons you were learning at IBM to a smaller company, you've done a magnificent job. Of course, a couple of words that really pop out in my mind is being a good leader, a good planner, a good listener, and really liking to win. Shellye: Right. Lucy: Yeah, go! Larry: With a team. With a team, of course. Lucy: And she's an author. Larry: And she's an author. "Marketing That Works". Lucy: Yes. Larry: What a title. I like that. Lucy: We'd love to help you advertise your book. Shellye: Well thank you. I definitely appreciate the help. Larry: We'll do that for sure. This is Larry Nelson here at NCWIT. I'll tell you, this is another exciting interview. I don't know how you and the board line up all of these wonderful people, but I'm just happy to be a part of it. You'll be able to hear this and other interviews at ncwit.org, that's after the www of course. Lucy: Yes, of course. Larry: I just don't like to say it with ours. We have the podcast, and so.... Lucy: Yeah, too many w's. Larry: Yeah, www.w3w3.com. All right, thank you for joining us Shelley. Lucy: Thank you Shelley. Shellye: You're quite welcome. Thank you all. Lucy: We appreciate it. Shellye: Okay. Bye bye. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Shellye Archambeau Interview Summary: Shellye Archambeau offers three great pieces of advice for entrepreneurs: only do what you're passionate about, create an informal network of advisers, and test your ideas before you launch. Release Date: September 5, 2008Interview Subject: Shelley ArchambeauInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry Nelson