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Jeffrey Allen, a respected energy healer and Mindvalley author, is known for his teachings on personal transformation and spiritual awakening. His ‘Duality' training with Mindvalley and ‘Spirit Mind' training with his wife Hisami assist people worldwide in transforming their lives and reconnecting with their true essence. Prior to entering the world of spirituality, Jeffrey had a 15 year career as software engineer with the US Department of Energy and Sun Microsystems. Since then he has spent over 15 years teaching clairvoyance, healing, and mediumship studies around the world. Jeffrey has studied with world renowned teachers Michael Tamura, Mary Bell Nyman, Jim Self, John Fulton, and Nassim Haramein of the Resonance Project. We discuss: The Spirit Body Why men don't feel energy like women Types of energy healing Insight on the current energy right now How to recognize your natural gifts Follow Jeffrey Allen on Instagram @iamjeffreyallen Explore Jeffrey's Duality or Unlocking Transcendence classes with Mindvalley https://www.mindvalley.com Learn more about Jeffrey Allen www.IAMJeffreyAllen.com www.SpiritMind.com Follow Chef Whitney Aronoff on Instagram at @whitneyaronoff and @starseedkitchen Learn more about High Vibration Living with Chef Whitney Aronoff on www.StarseedKitchen.com Get 10% off your order of Chef Whitney's organic spices with code STARSEED on www.starseedkitchen.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode of The Segment, host Raghu Nandakumara sits down with one of the most influential technology leaders of our time: Tony Scott, President & CEO of Intrusion and former U.S. Federal CIO under President Obama. With CIO roles at Microsoft, VMware, Disney, General Motors, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Sun Microsystems, Tony brings a rare, decades-wide perspective on how enterprise technology evolves—and where it's heading next.Tony shares his journey through some of the world's most complex organizations, offering a candid look at the forces that drive digital transformation, why organizational silos still shape most architectures, and how AI may finally help dissolve them. He breaks down how cybersecurity models must shift in an era of ubiquitous AI, legacy infrastructure, and escalating regulatory complexity—and explains why continuous monitoring and long-term institutional memory are now essential.We also dive into Tony's leadership philosophy, how he balances transformation with cyber risk, and what he's learned transitioning from CIO to CEO of a cybersecurity company tackling some of today's hardest problems. Key themes discussed:The evolution of the CIO role across decades of transformation Managing cyber risk amid AI proliferation, legacy systems, and modern architectures The importance of “useful life” frameworks for tech modernization Leadership lessons from navigating both public and private sector tech at scale A must-listen for CIOs, CISOs, tech leaders, and anyone preparing their organization for what's next in AI-driven transformation and cybersecurity.
It began in the 1970s, with rumors rumbling from the outskirts of the American technology giant, IBM. A new chip architecture capable of revolutionary processing speeds. It was called RISC. The RISC Wars were fought over nearly 20 years, with the most intensive battles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At its peak, it involved a mix of young chip upstarts and old giants across the world throwing around benchmark results. Sun Microsystems. MIPS Computer. PA-RISC. IBM. PowerPC. DEC Alpha. Fujitsu and NEC in Japan. Siemens and Philips in Europe. And of course, looming over them all: Intel and the burgeoning Wintel Death Machine. It was a time of shifting alliances, leaps of inspiration, wild technical claims, and the Iron Fist of Intel. Today, we delve into legends of the RISC Wars.
What if the real key to exploding your business isn't just innovation—but mastering the art of pivoting through change? In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene interviews Blair LaCorte, CEO at LaCorte Ventures. Blair is a leader who has guided multiple companies from startup to IPO and through major industry disruptions. Blair's career includes C-level roles at ExoJet Vista, TPG, Autodesk, Sun Microsystems, and the world's largest live entertainment production company. He's currently training as an astronaut for Virgin Galactic, serves as Vice Chairman of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, and has collaborated with icons like Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Bill Clinton. In this candid conversation, Blair shares how to recognize when to pivot versus double down, why change is the ultimate business opportunity, and how to build lasting connections that fuel personal and professional growth. Key Takeaways: → The two essential skills every entrepreneur needs: fact-finding and quick-start decision-making. → How to tell if you're pivoting too much—or not enough. → Why change should be viewed as a profit opportunity, not a threat. → The biggest mistakes leaders make when reacting to disruption—and how to avoid them. → Why restructuring and scaling have more in common than most think. Blair LaCorte is a dynamic business executive with a diverse career spanning entertainment, aviation, AI, technology, aerospace, consulting, investing, and military logistics. Raised by entrepreneurs, he has held CEO and C-level roles at major companies like PRG, XOJET/Vista, TPG, Autodesk, and Sun Microsystems/Oracle. Blair has helped lead multiple startups to successful IPOs, including AEye Technologies and VerticalNet. Currently, he is an astronaut-in-training for Virgin Galactic and serves as Vice Chairman of the Buck Institute, a leader in longevity research. He also co-founded and facilitates a Mastermind group of 40 global CEOs. Known for his engaging leadership and strategic vision, Blair has served on nonprofit boards alongside luminaries like Steve Kerr, Phil Jackson, Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Bill Clinton. Connect With Blair LaCorte: Website: https://mastermindinnovate.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blair-lacorte-68084/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
BONUS: The Evolution of Agile - From Project Management to Adaptive Intelligence, With Mario Aiello In this BONUS episode, we explore the remarkable journey of Mario Aiello, a veteran agility thinker who has witnessed and shaped the evolution of Agile from its earliest days. Now freshly retired, Mario shares decades of hard-won insights about what works, what doesn't, and where Agile is headed next. This conversation challenges conventional thinking about methodologies, certifications, and what it truly means to be an Agile coach in complex environments. The Early Days: Agilizing Before Agile Had a Name "I came from project management and project management was, for me, was not working. I used to be a wishful liar, basically, because I used to manipulate reports in such a way that would please the listener. I knew it was bullshit." Mario's journey into Agile began around 2001 at Sun Microsystems, where he was already experimenting with iterative approaches while the rest of the world was still firmly planted in traditional project management. Working in Palo Alto, he encountered early adopters discussing Extreme Programming and had an "aha moment" - realizing that concepts like short iterations, feedback loops, and learning could rescue him from the unsustainable madness of traditional project management. He began incorporating these ideas into his work with PRINCE2, calling stages "iterations" and making them as short as possible. His simple agile approach focused on: work on the most important thing first, finish it, then move to the next one, cooperate with each other, and continuously improve. The Trajectory of Agile: From Values to Mechanisms "When the craze of methodologies came about, I started questioning the commercialization and monetization of methodologies. That's where things started to get a little bit complicated because the general focus drifted from values and principles to mechanisms and metrics." Mario describes witnessing three distinct phases in Agile's evolution. The early days were authentic - software developers speaking from the heart about genuine needs for new ways of working. The Agile Manifesto put important truths in front of everyone. However, as methodologies became commercialized, the focus shifted dangerously away from the core values and principles toward prescriptive mechanisms, metrics, and ceremonies. Mario emphasizes that when you focus on values and principles, you discover the purpose behind changing your ways of working. When you focus only on mechanics, you end up just doing things without real purpose - and that's when Agile became a noun, with people trying to "be agile" instead of achieving agility. He's clear that he's not against methodologies like Scrum, XP, SAFe, or LeSS - but rather against their mindless application without understanding the essence behind them. Making Sense Before Methodology: The Four-Fit Framework "Agile for me has to be fit for purpose, fit for context, fit for practice, and I even include a fourth dimension - fit for improvement." Rather than jumping straight to methodology selection, Mario advocates for a sense-making approach. First, understand your purpose - why do you want Agile? Then examine your context - where do you live, how does your company work? Only after making sense of the gap between your current state and where the values and principles suggest you should be, should you choose a methodology. This might mean Scrum for complex environments, or perhaps a flow-based approach for more predictable work, or creating your own hybrid. The key insight is that anyone who understands Agile's principles and values is free to create their own approach - it's fundamentally about plan, do, inspect, and adapt. Learning Through Failure: Context is Paramount "I failed more often than I won. That teaches you - being brave enough to say I failed, I learned, I move on because I'm going to use it better next time." Mario shares pivotal learning moments from his career, including an early attempt to "agilize PRINCE2" in a command-and-control startup environment. While not an ultimate success, this battle taught him that context is paramount and cannot be ignored. You must start by understanding how things are done today - identifying what's good (keep doing it), what's bad (try to improve it), and what's ugly (eradicate it to the extent possible). This lesson shaped his next engagement at a 300-person organization, where he spent nearly five months preparing the organizational context before even introducing Scrum. He started with "simple agile" practices, then took a systems approach to the entire delivery system. A Systems Approach: From Idea to Cash "From the moment sales and marketing people get brilliant ideas they want built, until the team delivers them into production and supports them - all that is a system. You cannot have different parts finger-pointing." Mario challenges the common narrow view of software development systems. Rather than focusing only on prioritization, development, and testing, he advocates for considering everything that influences delivery - from conception through to cash. His approach involved reorganizing an entire office floor, moving away from functional silos (sales here, marketing there, development over there) to value stream-based organization around products. Everyone involved in making work happen, including security, sales, product design, and client understanding, is part of the system. In one transformation, he shifted security from being gatekeepers at the end of the line to strategic partners from day one, embedding security throughout the entire value stream. This comprehensive systems thinking happened before formal Scrum training began. Beyond the Job Description: What Can an Agile Coach Really Do? "I said to some people, I'm not a coach. I'm just somebody that happens to have experience. How can I give something that can help and maybe influence the system?" Mario admits he doesn't qualify as a coach by traditional standards - he has no formal coaching qualifications. His coaching approach comes from decades of Rugby experience and focuses on establishing relationships with teams, understanding where they're going, and helping them make sense of their path forward. He emphasizes adaptive intelligence - the probe, sense, respond cycle. Rather than trying to change everything at once and capsizing the boat, he advocates for challenging one behavior at a time, starting with the most important, encouraging adaptation, and probing quickly to check for impact of specific changes. His role became inviting people to think outside the box, beyond the rigidity of their training and certifications, helping individuals and teams who could then influence the broader system even when organizational change seemed impossible. The Future: Adaptive Intelligence and Making Room for Agile "I'm using a lot of adaptive intelligence these days - probe, sense, respond, learn and adapt. That sequence will take people places." Looking ahead, Mario believes the valuable core of Agile - its values and principles - will remain, but the way we apply them must evolve. He advocates for adaptive intelligence approaches that emphasize sense-making and continuous learning rather than rigid adherence to frameworks. As he enters retirement, Mario is determined to make room for Agile in his new life, seeking ways to give back to the community through his blog, his new Substack "Adaptive Ways," and by inviting others to think differently. He's exploring a "pay as you wish" approach to sharing his experience, recognizing that while he may not be a traditional coach or social media expert, his decades of real-world experience - with its failures and successes - holds value for those still navigating the complexity of organizational change. About Mario Aiello Retired from full-time work, Mario is an agility thinker shaped by real-world complexity, not dogma. With decades in VUCA environments, he blends strategic clarity, emotional intelligence, and creative resilience. He designs context-driven agility, guiding teams and leaders beyond frameworks toward genuine value, adaptive systems, and meaningful transformation. You can link with Mario Aiello on LinkedIn, visit his website at Agile Ways.
In this episode, we sit down with Peter Schein, co-founder and CEO of the Organizational Culture and Leadership Institute, to explore the power of asking the right questions and building open, trusting relationships. Peter, who contributed to the second and third editions of Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling (originally written by his father, Edgar), discusses how curiosity in leadership is more important than ever in today's fast-paced, innovation-driven world. Join us to discover: · How to effectively ask open-ended questions to foster trust and curiosity. · The key differences between inquiry and interrogation, and why they matter. · The transformative power of asking instead of telling. · How to navigate and overcome challenges in the modern workplace with humble inquiry. With over 30 years of leadership experience in the technology sector, including roles at Apple, SGI, and Sun Microsystems, Peter brings invaluable insights into organizational culture, leadership development, and communication. His work offers a fresh perspective on leadership, emphasizing trust and inquiry over command and control. Learn more about Peter and his work by visiting his website today! Episode also available on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/38oMlMr Keep up with Peter Schein socials here: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pschein/ X: https://x.com/scheinocli
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 10, 2025 is: obviate AHB-vee-ayt verb To obviate something (usually a need for something, or a necessity) is to anticipate and prevent it. A formal word, obviate can also mean "to make an action unnecessary." // The new medical treatment obviates the need for surgery. // Allowing workers flexibility should obviate any objections to the change. See the entry > Examples: "In 1987, a new kind of computer workstation debuted from Sun Microsystems. These workstations, as well as increasingly powerful desktop computers from IBM and Apple, obviated the need for specialized LISP machines. Within a year, the market for LISP machines evaporated." — Jeremy Kahn, Fortune, 3 Sept. 2025 Did you know? It's most often needs that get obviated. And a need that's obviated is a need that's been anticipated and prevented. That sentence may obviate your need to consult the definition again, for example. Obviate comes ultimately from the Latin adjective obviam, meaning "in the way," and obviating does often involve figuratively putting something in the way, as when an explanatory sentence placed just so blocks a need to consult a definition. (Obviam is also an ancestor of our adjective obvious.) Obviate has a number of synonyms in English, including prevent, preclude, and avert, which all can mean "to hinder or stop something." Preclude often implies that a degree of chance was involved in stopping an event, while avert always implies that a bad situation has been anticipated and prevented or deflected by the application of immediate and effective means. Obviate generally suggests the use of intelligence or forethought to ward off trouble.
Blair LaCorte is the Vice Chair of the Board of Directors at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging—the world's first biomedical research institution dedicated solely to understanding aging and age-related diseases, and the largest independent scientific institute in the Bay Area. A seasoned leader and strategist, Blair has a track record of transforming companies across five industries, leveraging his expertise in change management to drive operational alignment, scale, and market leadership. Most recently, he led AEye's $1.5B IPO, advancing the company's mission to enable safe, reliable vehicle autonomy. Prior to that, Blair served as Global President of PRG, the world's largest live event technology and services company; CEO of XOJET, one of the fastest-growing aviation companies in history; and Senior Advisor and Operating Partner at TPG, a leading private equity firm managing over $97 billion in global investments. His earlier career includes executive roles at technology innovators such as VerticalNet, Savi Technologies, Autodesk, and Sun Microsystems. Blair is an active board member and advisor to organizations spanning science, business, and education, including the Positive Coaching Alliance, the Kairos Society, the Graduate Business Foundation, and alma maters Dartmouth College and the University of Maine. His leadership has been recognized by Fast Company, Ad Age, NASA, and the ITAS “100 Most Influential Leaders in Transportation” list. His insights have been featured in Forbes, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and on major networks including ABC, Bloomberg, CNN, and CNBC. Holding multiple patents across hardware, software, communications, security, and defense, Blair is also an astronaut-in-training and is scheduled to fly with Virgin Galactic. Outside of his professional pursuits, he is a dedicated father to three sons and the owner of a slightly anxious Weimaraner named Bella. Work With Us: Arétē by RAPID Health Optimization Links: Blair LaCorte on LinkedIn Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram
On "A Brush With Death: 5 Minutes On...," we spend 5 minutes providing listeners with quick insights into various funeral trends, products, events, organizations, and goings-on. In this episode, host, Gabe Schauf, sits down with Welton Hong, founder and CEO of Ring Ring Marketing. Welton and Gabe discuss AI's effect on search engines as well as a few things you can do to keep your website SEO working for you. Ring Ring Marketing specializes in helping funeral homes grow by making their phones ring. With a focus on generating quality leads, improving online presence, and building stronger connections with families in need, Ring Ring Marketing provides proven strategies tailored to the funeral profession. Their goal is simple: bring more at-need and pre-need families to your funeral home so you can focus on what matters most—serving them with care and compassion. Welton is a leading expert in helping funeral homes convert leads from online directly to the phone line. He's the author of the book Making Your Phone Ring with Internet Marketing for Funeral Homes and a regular contributor to NFDA's The Director magazine and several other publications. Welton has a graduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to starting Ring Ring Marketing, he was a senior technologist at R&D facilities for Intel, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle. He regularly speaks at conferences and other events for people in the death care industry. Click here to learn more about Ring Ring Marketing.
Simon Ritter has been in the IT industry for 40 years. He went from university to work on Unix in the early days, employed by AT&T and programming in the C language. In 1996, he switched gears to join Sun Microsystems, programming in Java. Years later, after the Oracle transition, he started to dig into what might be next. Outside of tech, he is married with an older son. He is a complete petro-head - meaning, he is really into cars. In fact, in the last few years, he and his son re-built a classic mini from the ground up.While Simon was at Oracle, he started to crave a different opportunity, but still in the Java space. He stumbled upon a company digging into powering the Java platform, to make it the most secure, efficient and trusted platform on the planet - and he, and the company, found a great fit.This is Simon's creation story at Azul.SponsorsFull ScalePaddle.comSema SoftwarePropelAuthPostmanMeilisearchLinkshttps://www.azul.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/siritter/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/code-story-insights-from-startup-tech-leaders/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Join us in this episode as we dive into the art of building open and trusting relationships with Peter Schein. In 2013, Peter's father, Edgar wrote Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. Since then, Peter has contributed to the second and third edition of the book to bring a fresh perspective on how to see human conversational dynamics and relationships, presented in a compact, personal, and eminently practical way. Why do we need Humble Inquiry more than ever? Peter sits down to explain… Join in to discover: How to curiously ask people what's going on in their world. The key differences between inquiry and interrogation. The power of asking instead of telling. How to confidently navigate challenges inherent in today's workplace. Peter is the co-founder and CEO of the Organizational Culture and Leadership Institute in Menlo Park, California. He contributed to the 5th edition of Organizational Culture and Leadership (2017) and brings more than 30 years of experience in the technology sector. His career spans leadership roles in marketing, corporate development, and strategy at both emerging startups and global IT leaders such as Apple, SGI, and Sun Microsystems. In driving new strategies and integrating smaller ventures into larger enterprises, Peter developed a deep expertise in the organizational and cultural challenges that innovation-driven companies face. Want to learn more about Peter and his work? Click here now!
Alles außer Politik: Peter Filzmaier und Ali Mahlodji reden über Integration. „Wir sollten jedem Menschen in dieser Welt endlich mal das Gefühl geben, so wie du bist, bist du gut genug“, sagt der Unternehmens- und Politikberater. Ein Podcast vom Pragmaticus. Das Thema:Beide sind in einem Gemeindebau aufgewachsen, jetzt stehen sie gemeinsam im Tonstudio: Ali Mahlodji und Peter Filzmaier. Er fragt ihn: „Was ist Integration?“ Mahlodji antwortet: „Der Raum, in dem jeder das Gefühl hat, ich werde gesehen und ich werde gehört und es ist okay so.“Diese 8. Episode von Alles außer Politik, der Podcastreihe mit Peter Filzmaier, ist die bisher persönlichste Folge. Während der Unternehmens- und Politikberater und der Politikwissenschaftler die Kriminalität von Ausländern besprechen, an den Fragen des Staatsbürgerschaftstests scheitern, die Anzahl der Ausländer in Österreich erraten und schließlich die österreichische Nationalhymne singen, ist die Frage, wofür es sich zu leben lohnt, das eigentliche Thema. Unser Gast in dieser Folge: Ali Mahlodji stammt aus dem Iran. Er war zwei Jahre alt, als er mit seinen Eltern über die Türkei nach Österreich flüchtete. Im Flüchtlingslager Traiskirchen aufgewachsen, habe er seine Karriere als „stotternder Schulabbrecher“ begonnen, schreibt er auf seiner Website über sich selbst. Er hatte über 40 verschiedene Jobs und verdankte seine erste Anstellung bei Sun Microsystems seiner Hartnäckigkeit. Doch die, sagt er, ist (anders als der Ort der Geburt) kein Zufall: „Ich hatte Glück, weil ich in meiner Jugend viel Liebe erfahren habe.“Er wurde berühmt durch seine Erfindung von whatchado.com, einer Video-Platform, wo berufstätige Menschen aller Sparten und jeder Hierarchie-Stufe erzählen, wie sie zu ihren Berufen gekommen sind. Heute hilft Mahlodji einzelnen Menschen, Organisationen, Institutionen und Unternehmen, sich weiterzuentwickeln. Vom Radiosender Ö1 als „Philosoph der Arbeitswelt“ bezeichnet, ist seine Hilfe sehr konkret: „Ich habe noch niemals eine Lebensgeschichte oder einen Menschen erlebt, der nicht das Potenzial hat, das eigene Leben zu leben.“ Der Podcast Alles außer Politik mit Peter FilzmaierIn „Alles außer Politik“ vollzieht der Politikwissenschaftler und Polit-Analyst Peter Filzmaier den Drahtseilakt im Gespräch mit Wissenschaftlern und Experten alles zu bereden und doch nicht bei der Politik anzustreifen. Gar nicht so leicht. Und doch ein weites Feld: Jeden 3. Donnerstag im Monat also Gespräche über Alltag, Leben, Philosophie, Kultur und neue Ideen abseits des Politzirkus.Was bisher besprochen wurde: Das Geld mit Gabriel FelbermayrDie Gesundheit mit Katharina Reich Der Marathon mit Julia Mayer Das Land mit Lisz Hirn Die Demokratie mit Oliver RathkolbDie Sicherheit mit Bruno HofbauerDie Durchsetzungsstärke mit Helga Rabl-StadlerDer Host, Peter FilzmaierPeter Filzmaier stammt aus Wien und ist der Politanalyst des Landes. Die Frequenz seiner Auftritte in den Nachrichtensendungen des ORF kann als Indikator für die Intensität einer politischen Krise dienen. Filzmaier formuliert dann im berühmten Schnellsprech präzise Einschätzungen zur Lage der Parteien und zum Urteil der Wähler. Der Politikwissenschaftler forscht und lehrt ansonsten an den Universitäten Graz und Krems, wo er Professuren für Politische Kommunikation sowie Politikforschung innehat. Und er ist Leiter des Instituts für Strategieanalysen (ISA) in Wien. Alles außer Politik ist der einzige Podcast, in dem er nicht über Politik spricht.Dies ist ein Podcast von Der Pragmaticus. Sie finden uns auch auf Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn und X (Twitter).
In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with one of the channel's most seasoned transformation leaders Alan Butler, VP Global Channels & Alliances at OpenText, to explore what “good” really looks like in channel strategy. With a career that's spanned Sun Microsystems, Dell, Adobe, and now OpenText, our guest shares a rare perspective on what it takes to build, scale, and integrate partner ecosystems that last.We dive into the foundational elements of partner success - from startup grit to enterprise orchestration, including:- How Dell flipped its revenue model from direct to 50% indirect in just five years- Why internal alignment and executive education are non-negotiables in channel growth- How to handle M&A without losing the DNA of the acquired partner ecosystem- The make-or-break role of finance in proving partner value from day one- Why most partner advisory councils fail and how to build one that truly drives change- How to balance short-term targets with long-term investment in emerging partnersWhether you're building a channel from scratch or trying to realign a legacy motion, this episode delivers field-tested insights from someone who's been at the helm through it all.Connect with Alan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ab530/_________________________Learn more about Channext
Kohsuke Kawaguchi is a prominent software engineer, best known as the creator of Jenkins, an open-source automation server that is widely used for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). He is currently the Co-Head of AI at leading DevOps provider, CloudBees and the former Co-CEO of Launchable, an AI platform that speeds up testing to help teams expedite their continuous integration (CI) and delivery pipelines, which was acquired by CloudBees in 2024.Kawaguchi developed Jenkins as a side project when working at Sun Microsystems in 2011. Since then, it has become an essential tool for developers and DevOps professionals around the world helping teams automate parts of software development, testing, and deployment.In addition to his work on Jenkins, Kawaguchi has contributed to the broader open-source community and has worked with various technologies related to software development, automation, and cloud computing. He is also known for his contributions to the world of Java and DevOps.You can find Kohsuke on the following sites:WebsiteXLinkedInGitHubHere are some links provided by Kohsuke:CloudBeesPLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCASTSpotifyApple PodcastsYouTube MusicAmazon MusicRSS FeedYou can check out more episodes of Coffee and Open Source on https://www.coffeeandopensource.comCoffee and Open Source is hosted by Isaac Levin
Andrew Casey remembers a moment when colleagues truly looked to him for leadership. At ServiceNow, a then‑$400 million company with little go‑to‑market infrastructure, the team faced a long list of missing elements: no functioning comp plan, no partner ecosystem, and no clear strategy for scaling sales. “Whenever people said they didn't know how,” Casey recalls, “I started raising my hand and said, I don't know either, but I know what we're going to go do… and then we're going to adjust as we go.” That willingness to lead through uncertainty became a turning point in his career.ServiceNow would grow from $400 million to $4.5 billion during his tenure, and colleagues still use the pricing and deal frameworks he created, he tells us. The experience cemented his approach: chase experiences, not titles, and transform finance into a partner that drives business outcomes.That mindset carried into his first CFO role at WalkMe in 2020, where, just two weeks in, COVID forced an immediate office shutdown. “We didn't even have a work‑from‑home policy,” he tells us. The sudden disruption forced him to navigate crisis management, team alignment, and IPO preparation simultaneously.His journey through Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Oracle, HP, ServiceNow, and Lacework sharpened his ability to guide transformation and scale. Today, as CFO of Amplitude, Casey draws on those lessons to help a smaller public company grow with discipline. Each chapter—from orchestrating 37 acquisitions at Oracle to steering turnarounds—reflects a career built on stepping into complexity, listening first, and leading change with confidence.
About 22% of adults age 65 and older reported volunteering in 2021, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, Volunteering and Civic Life Supplement. Around 22% of people in their 70s and 80s volunteer on a weekly basis, which is higher than the rate among older adults in their 50s. This week on the Swimming Upstream Radio Show, we'll meet two people repelling for a cause and one who says public speaking is a path into lending a hand to people Repelling for a Cause Meet Jon Hubble, age 84, and Diane Malone, both members of a senior residential community, They're choosing to raise money for an important project by repelling (that's dropping down with a rope). Anyway, they'll be coming down the front of a four story building. They'll be back next month to tell us how it went. Bil Lewis, Toastmasters Bil Lewis is a Computer Scientist and has worked in research and taught most of his life, most recently doing Genetics Research at MIT. He has taught at Stanford and Tufts Universities and worked for FMC, Sun Microsystems, and Nokia Data. Bil is a Past District Governor for Toastmasters (Eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island), an Eagle Scout, a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, and a Patriotic Citizen of the United States. Bil joined Toastmasters when his mother dragged him by the ear to a meeting after he graduated college. Bil discovered that being able to speak well in public was a very useful skill, which he was weak in. He has improved. Using his speaking skills, Bil ran his own company for a decade, teaching and consulting in Computer Science. In 2015, Bil took on the persona of James Madison and began performing for schools, libraries, and conferences. As a District Governor, Bil got to practice his leadership skills. He had 50 direct reports and 3,000 members, with a budget of $50,000. He ran two major conferences and organized 100 contests and trainings. He learned a lot. All because of Toastmasters. Links: Bil Lewis on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/bil-lewis-4986314/ Toastmasters International - https://www.toastmasters.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Despite being the son of a pharmacist turned wine professional, I did not know the purpose of an Entheogen. Ross Halleck set me straight,so much so, that after defining an entheogen, the value of the consumption of wine became clearer. Ross Halleck doesn't just make wine—he might just ask you to close your eyes and seek the divine within a single glass. In this episode of Wine Talks, you'll be swept past the typical vineyard tales and deep into the spiritual and mystical roots of wine itself. You'll learn how Ross stumbled into the wine trade not through family legacy or grand ambition, but with the curiosity of a seeker and a penchant for unearthing life's mysteries. Paul and Ross unravel why, for some, wine is more than a social lubricant or status symbol; it's an “entheogen”—a conduit to something sacred. Discover how the trappings of wine culture, from magazine scores to over-intellectualization, can miss the magic entirely, and why Ross is on a mission to return wine to its ancient role: bringing people together, not driving them apart. You'll step inside his West Sebastopol vineyard and hear why he believes winning top awards means little if you can't connect with people's hearts. The conversation flows from digital reviews and the democratization of taste, to the pitfalls of marketing wine as pure commerce, to modern-day plant medicine ceremonies designed to foster self-discovery, belonging, and reverence. As the layers peel back, you'll come away with a fresh perspective on wine—not just as a beverage, but as a timeless link to the sacred, the mysterious, and the collective human story. And if you've ever wondered why a certain glass makes you feel something inexplicable, or why wine alone among drinks is revered across cultures and epochs, this episode offers more than an explanation—it offers an invitation to experience the “vine intervention” for yourself. Halleck Vineyard Website: halleckvineyard.com (Ross Halleck's winery, mentioned as halleckvineyard.com under events for wine ceremonies.) Starbucks Website: starbucks.com Hewlett-Packard (HP) Website: hp.com Apple Website: apple.com Sun Microsystems (company no longer independent; acquired, but for historical reference): Website: oracle.com (redirects to Oracle) Wine Spectator Website: winespectator.com Robert Parker/Wine Advocate Website: robertparker.com Wine of the Month Club Website: wineofthemonthclub.com Michelin (Michelin Guide for restaurants) Website: guide.michelin.com Yelp Website: yelp.com Foursquare Website: foursquare.com Kosta Brown Website: kostabrowne.com Kendall-Jackson Website: kj.com Rombauer Vineyards Website: rombauer.com Cheval Blanc Website: chateau-cheval-blanc.com #wine #winetalks #paulkalemkiarian #rosshalleck #halleckvineyard #winepodcast #wineindustry #pinotnoir #sonomacounty #wineandspirit #wineculture #enthiogen #wineexperience #winelover #winecommunity #wineclub #winemarketing #winepassion #spiritualwine #wineceremony
Peter A. Schein is the co-founder and CEO of OCLI.org in Menlo Park, California. He is a contributing author to the 5th edition of Organizational Culture and Leadership (2017). With Edgar H. Schein he is co-author of Humble Leadership (2018, 2nd ed. 2023), The Corporate Culture Survival Guide, 3rd ed. (2019), Humble Inquiry, (2nd ed. 2021 and 3rd ed. 2025), and Career Anchors Reimagined (2023). Peter's work brings 30 years of technology industry experience in marketing, corporate development, and strategy, at large and small IT companies including Apple, Sun Microsystems and numerous start-ups. While forging new strategies and merging smaller entities into a larger company, Peter developed a keen focus on the organizational development challenges faced by innovation-driven enterprises. Peter was educated at Stanford University (BA in social anthropology with honors and distinction), Northwestern University (Kellogg MBA), and the USC Marshall School of Business (HCEO Certificate).Link to claim CME credit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3DXCFW3CME credit is available for up to 3 years after the stated release dateContact CEOD@bmhcc.org if you have any questions about claiming credit.
Back in 1994, Peter Deutsch and his colleagues at Sun Microsystems identified what they described as the "eight fallacies of distributed computing" — flawed assumptions that often get made when teams move from monolithic to distributed software architectures. In recent years, software architecture experts and regular writing partners Neal Ford and Mark Richards have identified a further three new fallacies of distributed computing: versioning is easy; compensating updates always work; and observability is optional. In this episode of the Technology Podcast, Neal and Mark join host Prem Chandrasekaran to talk through these three new fallacies, before digging deeper into other important issues in software architecture, including modular monoliths and governing architectural characteristics. Listen for a fresh perspective on software architecture and to explore key ideas shaping the discipline in 2025. Learn more about the second edition of Neal and Mark's Fundamentals of Software Architecture: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/fundamentals-of-software/9781098175504/
Sun Microsystems เติบโตอย่างต่อเนื่อง ทุกๆ 6 เดือนตั้งแต่ปี 1982 ถึง 1987 ยอดจัดส่งเวิร์กสเตชันเพิ่มขึ้นเป็นสองเท่า ในปี 1985 บริษัทเปิดตัว Sun 3 ที่ใช้โพรเซสเซอร์ Motorola MC68020 รุ่นใหม่ พร้อมแนะนำมาตรฐาน Network File System (NFS) ที่ได้รับการยอมรับอย่างกว้างขวาง จนในที่สุด Sun สามารถแซงหน้า Apollo Computer คู่แข่งรายใหญ่ได้ในปี 1987 Sun เข้าตลาดหลักทรัพย์ (IPO) ในเดือนมีนาคม 1986 ด้วยรายได้ 210 ล้านดอลลาร์ ระดมทุนได้ 45 ล้านดอลลาร์ ซึ่งเป็น IPO ด้านเทคโนโลยีที่ใหญ่ที่สุดในรอบสามปี รายได้ของบริษัทเพิ่มขึ้นห้าเท่าจาก 210 ล้านดอลลาร์ในปี 1986 เป็น 1.1 พันล้านดอลลาร์ในปี 1988 เลือกฟังกันได้เลยนะครับ อย่าลืมกด Follow ติดตาม PodCast ช่อง Geek Forever's Podcast ของผมกันด้วยนะครับ #SunMicrosystems #SiliconValley #StartupThailand #ธุรกิจเทคโนโลยี #บทเรียนธุรกิจ #TechStartup #CaseStudy #กรณีศึกษาธุรกิจ #HistoryOfTechnology #TechHistory #JavaProgramming #BusinessLesson #DigitalTransformation #TechCompany #DigitalDisruption #ความล้มเหลวธุรกิจ #HistoryOfComputing #BusinessFailure #Innovation #StanfordUniversity #geekstory #geekforeverpodcast
In this episode, Avanish and Andrew discuss:Andrew's journey as an "operational CFO" from Sun Microsystems through ServiceNow, WalkMe, Lacework, and now Amplitude, being part of the team that built ServiceNow from $400M to $4.5B ARRWhy CFOs must "play chess, not checkers" - thinking several moves ahead about decision implications and making strategic investment pivots for anticipated future growthThe critical difference between multi-product and platform strategies: true platforms have definite customer adoption journeys where products aren't sold independentlyRecognizing platform readiness signals: when customers organically create their own workflows and use cases you never conceived, like hospitals using Amplitude for emergency room optimizationBuilding effective teams by mixing "veterans with rookies" to solve problems rather than just "admire problems," and driving focused execution around single key investmentsThe "fair exchange of value" approach to pricing and partnerships that emphasizes customer adoption, transparency, and simplicity over complexityAbout Avanish Sahai:Avanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and served as a Board Member of Hubspot from 2018 to 2023; he currently serves on the boards of Birdie.ai, Flywl.com and Meta.com.br as well as a few non-profits end educational boards. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow. From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase. Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.About Andrew Casey: Andrew Casey is Chief Financial Officer at Amplitude, where he leads Amplitude's General & Administrative organization, which includes finance, accounting, and legal. With more than 25 years of enterprise software experience, Casey brings deep financial expertise combined with extensive go-to-market strategy and business operations experience.Casey joined Amplitude from Lacework, where he served as CFO and oversaw its successful acquisition by Fortinet. Prior to that, he was the CFO of WalkMe, where he led its Initial Public Offering (IPO) and transformed its enterprise sales motion. Casey's career also includes senior finance roles with ServiceNow, Hewlett-Packard, NortonLifeLock Inc. (formerly Symantec), Oracle, and Sun Microsystems.About TidemarkTidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale. Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years. Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.LinksFollow our guest, Andrew CaseyFollow our host, Avanish SahaiLearn more about Tidemark
Deepak Bhootra is the CEO of Jabulani Consulting, with over 19 years of experience in the tech industry, including significant roles at Hewlett Packard and Sun Microsystems. Deepak has a deep understanding of pricing strategies and their impact on sales performance. He is passionate about helping organizations navigate the complexities of pricing and sales operations. In this episode, Deepak shares his journey into pricing and sales, discussing the cultural nuances of negotiation in India and how they influence pricing strategies. Together, they explore the challenges salespeople face with pricing, the importance of understanding value from the customer's perspective, and how AI can play a role in pricing strategies. Why you have to check out today's podcast: Discover the common pitfalls salespeople face when discussing pricing. Explore the importance of aligning pricing with customer value and the psychological aspects of pricing. Learn how AI can enhance pricing strategies and sales effectiveness. “Pricing is something that companies use to control sales behavior. Salespeople don't like to be controlled.” – Deepak Bhootra Topics Covered: 01:46 – Deepak introduces himself and shares his background in pricing. 03:10 – The cultural significance of negotiation in India and its impact on pricing. 07:44 – The relationship between sales and pricing and the challenges salespeople face. 14:21 – Discussion on the emotional aspects of pricing and how they affect sales decisions. 17:12 – Insights into the importance of understanding value from the customer's perspective. 23:09 – The role of AI in enhancing pricing strategies and sales effectiveness. 30:35 – Deepak's pricing advice. 33:18 – Connect with Deepak. Key Takeaways: “Salespeople need to understand the value of pricing and how it relates to customer perception.” – Deepak Bhootra “Value is in the eye of the beholder. Understand what the customer values before discussing pricing.” – Deepak Bhootra “When you ask a budget question right up front, you're actually setting yourself up for a pricing discussion.” – Deepak Bhootra “Pricing is one of those conversations where you have complete control of your CRM updates, you have complete control over your forecast, your relationship, but you do not have control over the price because someone else dictates the price.” – Deepak Bhootra “When you are looking at price, giving a discount is the easiest lever to pull right up front. And typically (salespeople) they do it because they can also bamboozle you with a lot of stuff.” – Deepak Bhootra People/Resources Mentioned: Jabulani Consulting: https://jabulaniconsulting.com Amartya Sen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen Connect with Deepak Bhootra: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deepakbhootra/ Email: deepak@jabulaniconsulting.com Connect with Mark Stiving: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/ Email: mark@impactpricing.com
An airhacks.fm conversation with Colt McNealy (@coltmcnealy) about: first computing experience with Sun workstations and network computing, background in hockey and other sports, using system76 Linux laptops for development, starting programming in high school with Java and later learning C, fortran, assembly, C++ and python, working at a real estate company with kubernetes and Kafka, the genesis of LittleHorse from experiencing challenges with distributed microservices and workflow management, LittleHorse as an open source workflow orchestration engine using Kafka as a commit log rather than a message queue, building a custom distributed database optimized for workflow orchestration, the recent move to fully open source licensing, comparison with AWS Step Functions but with more capabilities and open source benefits, using RocksDB and Kafka Streams for the underlying implementation, performance metrics of 12-40ms latency between tasks and hundreds of tasks per second, the multi-tenant architecture allowing for serverless offerings, integration with Kafka for event-driven architectures, the distinction between orchestration and choreography in distributed systems, using Java 21 with benefits from virtual threads and generational garbage collection, plans for Java 25 adoption, the naming story behind "Little Horse" and its competition with MuleSoft, the Sun Microsystems legacy and innovation culture, recent adoption of Quarkus for some components, the "Know Your Customer" flow as the Hello World example for Little Horse, the importance of observability and durability in workflow management, plans for serverless offerings and multi-tenant architecture, the balance between open source core and commercial offerings Colt McNealy on twitter: @coltmcnealy
Johnson Yan, a trailblazer in real-time 3D graphics, joins the podcast to recount his remarkable journey from the earliest days of computer graphics and flight simulation. Starting in the late 1970s, Johnson tackled fundamental challenges like texture mapping, anti-aliasing, translucency, and scalability, long before today's GPU technology emerged. He shares insights into his pioneering work at Singer-Link, where he developed flight simulators utilizing vector graphics and early raster technology, laying the groundwork for both military training and future advancements in real-time visualization. In this episode, Johnson also discusses his transition into the commercial sector, detailing his impactful roles at companies like Sun Microsystems and Oak Technology. He explores his efforts to develop affordable 3D graphics chips, significantly enhancing consumer PCs' capabilities. Reflecting on industry milestones such as the rise of NVIDIA, the evolution from rasterization to ray tracing, and the integration of AI into modern graphics, Johnson provides unique historical context and personal anecdotes. His firsthand perspective offers a rare glimpse into the technological evolution of real-time graphics spanning nearly half a century.
Dr. Frederick G. Elias is committed to improving organizational leadership styles through the use of communication and motivation. Dr. Elias has attained national recognition as an educator and consultant in organizational development, organizational behavior, industrial psychology, and human resource management. He is a dynamic speaker and author in the areas of motivation, communication mastery, team building, self esteem enhancement, personal goal setting, and empowerment. Values, Beliefs & Clients Leadership training Dr. Frederick G. Elias designs, implements and conducts leadership training, staff development, productivity improvement, team building, and peak performance programs for the private and public sectors. He works with individuals to create resources that will transform their lives both personally and professionally. Top Clients Clients include Xerox, Sun Microsystems, General Motors, Cox Cable, Automated Test Engineering, Inc., the State of California Department of Personnel Administration, Los Angeles Community Colleges, Santa Barbara County, and the San Diego Community College District. Reputation & Resume Dr. Frederick G. Elias is author of the acclaimed I CAN I WILL, Dynamics for Personal Success (ODC Publishing, 1992) and Maximum Impact: Strategies for Life Fitness, in which he encourages readers and listeners to increase self-confidence, manage emotions, and overcome barriers to success. He brings these concepts to the corporate environment through hands-on workshops that provide participants with the necessary tools to make personal changes for lifelong success. The results are vast improvements in the Quality of Work Life (QWL) and enhanced cooperation and compatibility in working relationships.
Welcome to episode 276 of the Grow Your Law Firm podcast, hosted by Ken Hardison. In this episode, Ken sits down with Hamid Kohan, founder of Law Practice AI. Hamid is an experienced entrepreneur with a diverse background in technology and law. He earned his engineering degree at 17 from Chico State University and was quickly recruited to Silicon Valley, working for prominent companies. By 21, he completed an MBA in business marketing, propelling his career in business and technology. Hamid was integral in developing the world's first laptop at Grid Systems and later worked at SUN Microsystems, helping the company grow from 200 to 13,000 employees. He also held senior positions at Hitachi and Tandem Computers, directing business and technology development. In 1999, Hamid became Division President of Emblazed Technology, where he led the company to a 300% growth and a $1 billion valuation in just one year. In 2004, he co-founded CAPLUCK Inc., launching Cap60, a data management system provider recognized as the largest service provider for nonprofits in the U.S. In 2016, Hamid entered the legal field by founding Law Practice AI (formerly Legal Soft Inc.) offering practice management solutions for law firms. Under his leadership, Law Practice AI grew rapidly, helping firms expand across the U.S. Hamid's expertise in law firm management has made him a sought-after speaker and author of three books, including How to Scale Your Stupid Law Firm. His practical approach has made him a respected figure in legal practice management. What you'll learn about in this episode: 1. Client Follow-up and Communication: - Law Practice AI streamlines client follow-up processes through automated calls, texts, and emails, allowing for personalized sequences and efficient communication. - The AI technology collects and analyzes documents in real-time, providing immediate feedback and facilitating document collection during client interactions. 2. Document Summarization and Organization: - Law Practice AI offers document summarization and analysis, enabling the rapid processing of large volumes of documents, such as medical records, in under five minutes. - The platform allows for easy organization and filing of documents, enhancing client file management and workflow efficiency. 3. Centralized AI Solutions for Legal Operations: - Centralized AI solutions like Law Practice AI aim to simplify legal operations by integrating with CRMs to automate data management, calendaring, and client interactions. - Virtual staff integration alongside AI tools presents a strategic approach to scaling law firms efficiently and cost-effectively. 4. Simplified Tech Environment: - Law firms benefit from a centralized tech environment provided by platforms like Law Practice AI, avoiding the need to navigate multiple systems for different tasks. - Future versions of Law Practice AI feature API integrations with CRMs to automate matter opening, data storage, calendaring, and flag-setting processes. 5. Intake AI and Client Communication: - Intake AI technology addresses challenges in client communication by providing a seamless experience, including quick escalation to live agents for high-value cases. - Law Practice AI differentiates itself by offering personalized and efficient intake processes tailored to the legal industry's unique needs and complexities. Resources: Website http://www.mylawfirm.ai/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/people/Law-Practice-AI/61556510846445/ Twitter https://x.com/LawPracticeAI LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/law-practice-ai/ Additional Resources: https://www.pilmma.org/aiworkshop https://www.pilmma.org/the-mastermind-effect https://www.pilmma.org/resources https://www.pilmma.org/mastermind
Sponsored By AdCirrus ERP, your trusted partner for cloud ERP solutions. Learn more at adcirruserp.com.Meet Vivek JoshiVivek is the founder and CEO of Entytle, a provider of Installed Base Intelligence solutions to Original Equipment Manufacturers. He has extensive leadership experience in various industries, spanning diversified industrial manufacturing, healthcare, high technology and private equity. He previously was founder and CEO of LumaSense Technologies Inc., an Operating Partner at Shah Capital Partners, and Senior Vice President of Marketing for Sun Services, a $3.6 billion division of Sun Microsystems. He also served at Webvan as Vice-President of Program Operation; at GE Transportation as General Manager, Off Highway/Transit Systems; at GE Corporate as Manager of Corporate Initiatives; at Booz Allen & Hamilton as a Management Consultant; and at Johnson & Johnson in an operations role. Vivek has an M.S. in Chemical Engineering and an M.B.A. from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville and a B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from IIT, Mumbai.Connect with Vivek!Entytlevivek.joshi@entytle.com LinkedInAftermarket Champions PodcastLinksKirin Holdings will begin online sales of "Electric Salt Spoon", a spoon that uses electricity to enhance salty and umami tasteHighlights00:00 Fun Team Question: What's Your Career Theme Song?01:55 Introducing Our Guest: Vivek Joshi04:58 Vivek's Journey in Manufacturing08:50 The Impact of Key Mentors11:10 Why Entrepreneurship?13:03 The Importance of Aftermarket Services16:28 I Just Learned That: Fascinating Insights21:31 Addressing the Labor Crisis in Manufacturing24:49 Conclusion and Contact InformationConnect with the Broads!Connect with Lori on LinkedIn and visit www.keystoneclick.com for your strategic digital marketing needs! Connect with Kris on LinkedIn and visit www.genalpha.com for OEM and aftermarket digital solutions!Connect with Erin on LinkedIn!
In this episode, recorded at the 2025 Abundance Summit, Vinod, Brett, & Peter dive into a Q&A on the future of humanoid robots, transport, and more. Recorded on March 11th, 2025 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, serving as its first chairman and CEO. In 2004, he founded Khosla Ventures, focusing on technology and social impact investments. As of January 2025, his net worth is estimated at $9.2 billion. He is known for his bold bets on transformative innovations in fields like AI, robotics, healthcare, and clean energy. With a deep belief in abundance and the power of technology to solve global challenges, Khosla continues to shape the future through visionary investing. Brett Adcock is an American technology entrepreneur and the founder of Figure, an AI robotics company developing general-purpose humanoid robots designed to perform human-like tasks in both industrial and home settings. In 2023, he also founded Cover, an AI security company focused on building weapon detection systems for schools. Previously, Brett founded Archer Aviation, an urban air mobility company that went public at a valuation of $2.7 billion, and Vettery, a machine learning-based talent marketplace acquired for $110 million. Learn about Figure: https://www.figure.ai/ Learn more about Vinod: https://www.khoslaventures.com/ Learn more about Abundance360: https://bit.ly/ABUNDANCE360 For free access to the Abundance Summit Summary click: diamandis.com/breakthroughs ____________ 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: Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots
In this episode, recorded at the 2025 Abundance Summit, Vinod Khosla explores how AI will make expertise essentially free, why robots could surpass the auto industry, and how technologies like geothermal and fusion will reshape our energy landscape. Recorded on March 11th, 2025 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, serving as its first chairman and CEO. In 2004, he founded Khosla Ventures, focusing on technology and social impact investments. As of January 2025, his net worth is estimated at $9.2 billion. He is known for his bold bets on transformative innovations in fields like AI, robotics, healthcare, and clean energy. With a deep belief in abundance and the power of technology to solve global challenges, Khosla continues to shape the future through visionary investing. Learn more about Vinod: https://www.khoslaventures.com/ Learn more about Abundance360: https://bit.ly/ABUNDANCE360 For free access to the Abundance Summit Summary click: diamandis.com/breakthroughs ____________ 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: Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots
In this episode of The Eric Ries Show, I sit down with Marten Mickos, a serial tech CEO who has been at the forefront of some of the most transformative moments in open-source technology. From leading MySQL through its groundbreaking journey to guiding HackerOne as a pioneering bug bounty platform, Marten's career is a masterclass in building innovative, trust-driven organizations.Our wide-ranging conversation explores Marten's remarkable journey through tech leadership, touching on his experiences building game-changing companies and, more recently, his work coaching emerging CEOs. We dive deep into the world of open source, company culture, and the nuanced art of leadership.In our conversation today, we talk about the following topics: • How MySQL revolutionized open-source databases and became Facebook's database• The strategic decision to make MySQL open source and leverage Linux distributions• The art of building a beloved open-source project while creating a profitable business model• How a lawsuit solidified MySQL's position in the open-source database market• The role of transparency and direct feedback in building organizational trust• Why Marten was drawn to HackerOne's disruptive approach to cybersecurity• Marten's transition to coaching new CEOs • Marten's unique "contrast framework" for making complex decisions• And much more!—Brought to you by:• Wilson Sonsini – Wilson Sonsini is the innovation economy's law firm. Learn more.• Gusto – Gusto is an easy payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. Get 3 months free.—Where to find Marten Mickos: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martenmickos/• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/martenmickos.bsky.social—Where to find Eric:• Newsletter:https://ericries.carrd.co/ • Podcast:https://ericriesshow.com/ • YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@theericriesshow —In This Episode We Cover:(00:00) Intro(03:15) The first time Eric used MySQL(07:10) The origins of MySQL and how Marten got involved (13:22) Why MySQL pivoted to open source to leverage the power of Linux distros(17:03) Open source vs. closed (18:56) Building profitable open-source companies (24:52) The fearless company culture at MySQL and the Progress lawsuit(29:30) The value of not cutting any corners (33:35) How a dolphin became part of the MySQL logo (35:55) What it was like to build a company of true believers(38:47) Marten's management approach emphasizes kindness and direct feedback (42:12) Marten's hiring philosophy(45:14) Why MySQL sold to Sun Microsystems and tried to avoid Oracle (50:24) How Oracle has made MySQL even better(52:22) Why Marten decided to lead at HackerOne(55:41) An overview of HackerOne(59:31) How HackerOne got started and landed the Department of Defense contract(1:03:19) The trust-building power of transparency(1:08:30) Marten's successor and the state of HackerOne now(1:09:23) Marten's work coaching CEOs(1:14:20) Common issues CEOs struggle with (1:16:45) Marten's contrast framework (1:26:12) The book of Finnish poetry that inspired Marten's love of polarities—You can find the transcript and references at https://www.ericriesshow.com/—Production and marketing byhttps://penname.co/.Eric may be an investor in the companies discussed.
An airhacks.fm conversation with Volker Simonis (@volker_simonis) about: early computing experiences with Schneider CPC (Amstrad in UK) with Z80 CPU, CP/M operating system as an add-on that provided a real file system, programming in Basic and Turbo Pascal on early computers, discussion about gaming versus programming interests, using a 9-pin needle printer for school work, programming on pocket computers with BASIC in school, memories of Digital Research's CP/M and DR-DOS competing with MS-DOS, HiMEM memory management in early operating systems, programming in Logo language with turtle graphics and fractals, fascination with Lindenmayer systems (L-systems) for simulating biological growth patterns, interest in biology and carnivorous plants, transition to PCs with floppy disk drives, using SGI Iris workstations at university with IRIX operating system, early experiences with Linux installed from floppy disks, challenges of configuring X Window System, programming graphics on interlaced monitors, early work with HP using Tickle/Tk and python around 1993, first experiences with Java around version 0.8/0.9, attraction to Java's platform-independent networking and graphics capabilities, using Blackdown Java for Linux created by Johan Vos, freelance work creating Java applets for accessing databases of technical standards, PhD work creating software for analyzing parallel text corpora in multiple languages, developing internationalization and XML capabilities in Java Swing applications, career at Sun Microsystems porting MaxDB to Solaris, transition to SAP to work on JVM development, Adabas and MaxDB, reflections on ABAP programming language at SAP and its database-centric nature Volker Simonis on twitter: @volker_simonis
What to say when Steve Jobs threatens to sue you. Original text by Jonathan Schwartz. More about Lighthouse Design's Concurrence courtesy of the Apple Wikia instance. Sun famously sued Microsoft over their incompatible Java implenentation variant in 1997. Microsoft settled by paying Sun a bunch of money. Please enjoy this Flash animation shown at JavaOne 2004 retelling the story. Steve Jobs quotes from Triumph of the Nerds, WWDC 1997 Q&A, and Macworld San Francisco 2003. In the mid-1990s, Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision and its StarOffice product, which Sun open sourced and renamed OpenOffice. After some entirely predictable grief from Oracle, the community forked the project and delivered what we know today as LibreOffice. Apple adopted Sun's dynamic system-wide tracing and performance profiling framework DTrace, known as Instruments in Xcode's collection of tools. Apple announced Snow Leopard Server would ship with Sun's ZFS but that ultimately never happened for licensing and patent reasons. Whether Sun's soon-to-be-acquisition by Oracle and the Steve Jobs/Larry Ellison relationship would have helped or hindered this, we'll never know. Either way, Apple, I know you're reading this and I'd like APFS to checksum my data blocks too, not just the metadata. Thank you. Jonathan Schwartz and Scott McNealy quotes from Sun's NC03-Q3 (2003) keynote and JavaOne 2004. See Project Looking Glass in action.
In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Alper Yegin, President and CEO of the LoRa Alliance, joins Ryan Chacon to discuss the state of LoRaWAN in 2025. The conversation covers LoRaWAN adoption, LoRaWAN use cases, the role of satellite IoT, edge, and AI, LoRaWAN certification and interoperability, misconceptions about LoRaWAN, and the future of LoRaWAN.Alper Yegin is the President and CEO of the LoRa Alliance. He oversees the organization's strategic direction and supports the development and global adoption of LoRaWAN, a key standard for low-power wide-area networks (LPWAN) in the Internet of Things (IoT). Before becoming CEO, he chaired the LoRa Alliance Technical Committee for eight years and served as Vice-Chair of the board for seven years.With over 25 years of experience in the IoT, mobile, and wireless communication industries, Yegin has held senior roles, including CTO at Actility, and various positions at Samsung Electronics, DoCoMo, and Sun Microsystems. He has contributed to global standards development in organizations such as IETF, 3GPP, ETSI, Zigbee Alliance, WiMAX Forum, and IPv6 Forum. Yegin holds 16 patents and has authored numerous technical standards and papers.The LoRa Alliance is an open, non-profit association that has grown into one of the largest and fastest-growing alliances in the technology industry since its inception in 2015. Its members work closely together and share knowledge to develop and disseminate the LoRaWAN standard, the de facto global standard for secure, quality IoT LPWAN bearer connectivity.Discover more about IoT at https://www.iotforall.comFind IoT solutions: https://marketplace.iotforall.comMore about LoRa Alliance: https://lora-alliance.orgConnect with Alper: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alperyegin/(00:00) Intro(00:18) Alper Yegin and LoRa Alliance(02:58) Current state of LoRaWAN adoption(04:17) The role of LoRaWan in the IoT ecosystem(07:19) Certification and interoperability(09:48) LoRaWAN use cases(15:03) Impact of AI and edge computing(18:09) Misconceptions about LoRaWAN(21:14) Future of LoRaWAN and challenges(24:14) Upcoming initiatives and eventsSubscribe to the Channel: https://bit.ly/2NlcEwmJoin Our Newsletter: https://newsletter.iotforall.comFollow Us on Social: https://linktr.ee/iot4all
Sun Microsystems ก้าวขึ้นมาในวงการ Silicon Valley ด้วยโมเดลธุรกิจที่น่าทึ่งและการเติบโตที่รวดเร็ว จนกลายเป็นหนึ่งในบริษัทที่สำคัญและเป็นสัญลักษณ์ที่สุดของ Valley โดยมีมูลค่าสูงถึง 140 พันล้านดอลลาร์ในช่วงที่รุ่งเรืองที่สุด แต่เมื่อเวลาผ่านไป แสงอาทิตย์ที่เคยสว่างไสวก็ค่อยๆ มอดลง การตกต่ำของบริษัทเป็นไปอย่างยาวนานและเจ็บปวด และในทุกวันนี้เราแทบจะไม่ได้ยินชื่อบริษัทพวกเขาอีกต่อไป เลือกฟังกันได้เลยนะครับ อย่าลืมกด Follow ติดตาม PodCast ช่อง Geek Forever's Podcast ของผมกันด้วยนะครับ #SunMicrosystems #SiliconValley #StartupThailand #ธุรกิจเทคโนโลยี #บทเรียนธุรกิจ #TechStartup #CaseStudy #กรณีศึกษาธุรกิจ #HistoryOfTechnology #TechHistory #JavaProgramming #BusinessLesson #DigitalTransformation #TechCompany #DigitalDisruption #ความล้มเหลวธุรกิจ #HistoryOfComputing #BusinessFailure #Innovation #StanfordUniversity #geekmonday #geekforeverpodcast
From assembling elite teams at Ford Motor Company and Sun Microsystems to navigating the high standards of Bridgewater Associates, Steve Fitzgerald has honed the craft of leadership—yet every other day, you'll find him carving through fresh powder in the Rocky Mountains. As a seasoned HR leader, startup advisor, and board member, Steve has spent three decades weaving together people and profits, championing both efficient business outcomes and more fulfilling personal lives. In this episode, Ryan and Steve dive into the principles that have shaped Steve's unconventional career path, such as strategic leaps of faith and walking away from corporate safety in pursuit of authentic balance. They explore Ray Dalio's “pain plus reflection equals progress” outlook, offering tangible takeaways on how to welcome tough feedback, develop a growth mindset, and build teams that thrive on continuous practice.
If you're in SF, join us tomorrow for a fun meetup at CodeGen Night!If you're in NYC, join us for AI Engineer Summit! The Agent Engineering track is now sold out, but 25 tickets remain for AI Leadership and 5 tickets for the workshops. You can see the full schedule of speakers and workshops at https://ai.engineer!It's exceedingly hard to introduce someone like Bret Taylor. We could recite his Wikipedia page, or his extensive work history through Silicon Valley's greatest companies, but everyone else already does that.As a podcast by AI engineers for AI engineers, we had the opportunity to do something a little different. We wanted to dig into what Bret sees from his vantage point at the top of our industry for the last 2 decades, and how that explains the rise of the AI Architect at Sierra, the leading conversational AI/CX platform.“Across our customer base, we are seeing a new role emerge - the role of the AI architect. These leaders are responsible for helping define, manage and evolve their company's AI agent over time. They come from a variety of both technical and business backgrounds, and we think that every company will have one or many AI architects managing their AI agent and related experience.”In our conversation, Bret Taylor confirms the Paul Buchheit legend that he rewrote Google Maps in a weekend, armed with only the help of a then-nascent Google Closure Compiler and no other modern tooling. But what we find remarkable is that he was the PM of Maps, not an engineer, though of course he still identifies as one. We find this theme recurring throughout Bret's career and worldview. We think it is plain as day that AI leadership will have to be hands-on and technical, especially when the ground is shifting as quickly as it is today:“There's a lot of power in combining product and engineering into as few people as possible… few great things have been created by committee.”“If engineering is an order taking organization for product you can sometimes make meaningful things, but rarely will you create extremely well crafted breakthrough products. Those tend to be small teams who deeply understand the customer need that they're solving, who have a maniacal focus on outcomes.”“And I think the reason why is if you look at like software as a service five years ago, maybe you can have a separation of product and engineering because most software as a service created five years ago. I wouldn't say there's like a lot of technological breakthroughs required for most business applications. And if you're making expense reporting software or whatever, it's useful… You kind of know how databases work, how to build auto scaling with your AWS cluster, whatever, you know, it's just, you're just applying best practices to yet another problem. "When you have areas like the early days of mobile development or the early days of interactive web applications, which I think Google Maps and Gmail represent, or now AI agents, you're in this constant conversation with what the requirements of your customers and stakeholders are and all the different people interacting with it and the capabilities of the technology. And it's almost impossible to specify the requirements of a product when you're not sure of the limitations of the technology itself.”This is the first time the difference between technical leadership for “normal” software and for “AI” software was articulated this clearly for us, and we'll be thinking a lot about this going forward. We left a lot of nuggets in the conversation, so we hope you'll just dive in with us (and thank Bret for joining the pod!)Timestamps* 00:00:02 Introductions and Bret Taylor's background* 00:01:23 Bret's experience at Stanford and the dot-com era* 00:04:04 The story of rewriting Google Maps backend* 00:11:06 Early days of interactive web applications at Google* 00:15:26 Discussion on product management and engineering roles* 00:21:00 AI and the future of software development* 00:26:42 Bret's approach to identifying customer needs and building AI companies* 00:32:09 The evolution of business models in the AI era* 00:41:00 The future of programming languages and software development* 00:49:38 Challenges in precisely communicating human intent to machines* 00:56:44 Discussion on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and its impact* 01:08:51 The future of agent-to-agent communication* 01:14:03 Bret's involvement in the OpenAI leadership crisis* 01:22:11 OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft* 01:23:23 OpenAI's mission and priorities* 01:27:40 Bret's guiding principles for career choices* 01:29:12 Brief discussion on pasta-making* 01:30:47 How Bret keeps up with AI developments* 01:32:15 Exciting research directions in AI* 01:35:19 Closing remarks and hiring at Sierra Transcript[00:02:05] Introduction and Guest Welcome[00:02:05] Alessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co host swyx, founder of smol.ai.[00:02:17] swyx: Hey, and today we're super excited to have Bret Taylor join us. Welcome. Thanks for having me. It's a little unreal to have you in the studio.[00:02:25] swyx: I've read about you so much over the years, like even before. Open AI effectively. I mean, I use Google Maps to get here. So like, thank you for everything that you've done. Like, like your story history, like, you know, I think people can find out what your greatest hits have been.[00:02:40] Bret Taylor's Early Career and Education[00:02:40] swyx: How do you usually like to introduce yourself when, you know, you talk about, you summarize your career, like, how do you look at yourself?[00:02:47] Bret: Yeah, it's a great question. You know, we, before we went on the mics here, we're talking about the audience for this podcast being more engineering. And I do think depending on the audience, I'll introduce myself differently because I've had a lot of [00:03:00] corporate and board roles. I probably self identify as an engineer more than anything else though.[00:03:04] Bret: So even when I was. Salesforce, I was coding on the weekends. So I think of myself as an engineer and then all the roles that I do in my career sort of start with that just because I do feel like engineering is sort of a mindset and how I approach most of my life. So I'm an engineer first and that's how I describe myself.[00:03:24] Bret: You majored in computer[00:03:25] swyx: science, like 1998. And, and I was high[00:03:28] Bret: school, actually my, my college degree was Oh, two undergrad. Oh, three masters. Right. That old.[00:03:33] swyx: Yeah. I mean, no, I was going, I was going like 1998 to 2003, but like engineering wasn't as, wasn't a thing back then. Like we didn't have the title of senior engineer, you know, kind of like, it was just.[00:03:44] swyx: You were a programmer, you were a developer, maybe. What was it like in Stanford? Like, what was that feeling like? You know, was it, were you feeling like on the cusp of a great computer revolution? Or was it just like a niche, you know, interest at the time?[00:03:57] Stanford and the Dot-Com Bubble[00:03:57] Bret: Well, I was at Stanford, as you said, from 1998 to [00:04:00] 2002.[00:04:02] Bret: 1998 was near the peak of the dot com bubble. So. This is back in the day where most people that they're coding in the computer lab, just because there was these sun microsystems, Unix boxes there that most of us had to do our assignments on. And every single day there was a. com like buying pizza for everybody.[00:04:20] Bret: I didn't have to like, I got. Free food, like my first two years of university and then the dot com bubble burst in the middle of my college career. And so by the end there was like tumbleweed going to the job fair, you know, it was like, cause it was hard to describe unless you were there at the time, the like level of hype and being a computer science major at Stanford was like, A thousand opportunities.[00:04:45] Bret: And then, and then when I left, it was like Microsoft, IBM.[00:04:49] Joining Google and Early Projects[00:04:49] Bret: And then the two startups that I applied to were VMware and Google. And I ended up going to Google in large part because a woman named Marissa Meyer, who had been a teaching [00:05:00] assistant when I was, what was called a section leader, which was like a junior teaching assistant kind of for one of the big interest.[00:05:05] Bret: Yes. Classes. She had gone there. And she was recruiting me and I knew her and it was sort of felt safe, you know, like, I don't know. I thought about it much, but it turned out to be a real blessing. I realized like, you know, you always want to think you'd pick Google if given the option, but no one knew at the time.[00:05:20] Bret: And I wonder if I'd graduated in like 1999 where I've been like, mom, I just got a job at pets. com. It's good. But you know, at the end I just didn't have any options. So I was like, do I want to go like make kernel software at VMware? Do I want to go build search at Google? And I chose Google. 50, 50 ball.[00:05:36] Bret: I'm not really a 50, 50 ball. So I feel very fortunate in retrospect that the economy collapsed because in some ways it forced me into like one of the greatest companies of all time, but I kind of lucked into it, I think.[00:05:47] The Google Maps Rewrite Story[00:05:47] Alessio: So the famous story about Google is that you rewrote the Google maps back in, in one week after the map quest quest maps acquisition, what was the story there?[00:05:57] Alessio: Is it. Actually true. Is it [00:06:00] being glorified? Like how, how did that come to be? And is there any detail that maybe Paul hasn't shared before?[00:06:06] Bret: It's largely true, but I'll give the color commentary. So it was actually the front end, not the back end, but it turns out for Google maps, the front end was sort of the hard part just because Google maps was.[00:06:17] Bret: Largely the first ish kind of really interactive web application, say first ish. I think Gmail certainly was though Gmail, probably a lot of people then who weren't engineers probably didn't appreciate its level of interactivity. It was just fast, but. Google maps, because you could drag the map and it was sort of graphical.[00:06:38] Bret: My, it really in the mainstream, I think, was it a map[00:06:41] swyx: quest back then that was, you had the arrows up and down, it[00:06:44] Bret: was up and down arrows. Each map was a single image and you just click left and then wait for a few seconds to the new map to let it was really small too, because generating a big image was kind of expensive on computers that day.[00:06:57] Bret: So Google maps was truly innovative in that [00:07:00] regard. The story on it. There was a small company called where two technologies started by two Danish brothers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who are two of my closest friends now. They had made a windows app called expedition, which had beautiful maps. Even in 2000.[00:07:18] Bret: For whenever we acquired or sort of acquired their company, Windows software was not particularly fashionable, but they were really passionate about mapping and we had made a local search product that was kind of middling in terms of popularity, sort of like a yellow page of search product. So we wanted to really go into mapping.[00:07:36] Bret: We'd started working on it. Their small team seemed passionate about it. So we're like, come join us. We can build this together.[00:07:42] Technical Challenges and Innovations[00:07:42] Bret: It turned out to be a great blessing that they had built a windows app because you're less technically constrained when you're doing native code than you are building a web browser, particularly back then when there weren't really interactive web apps and it ended up.[00:07:56] Bret: Changing the level of quality that we [00:08:00] wanted to hit with the app because we were shooting for something that felt like a native windows application. So it was a really good fortune that we sort of, you know, their unusual technical choices turned out to be the greatest blessing. So we spent a lot of time basically saying, how can you make a interactive draggable map in a web browser?[00:08:18] Bret: How do you progressively load, you know, new map tiles, you know, as you're dragging even things like down in the weeds of the browser at the time, most browsers like Internet Explorer, which was dominant at the time would only load two images at a time from the same domain. So we ended up making our map tile servers have like.[00:08:37] Bret: Forty different subdomains so we could load maps and parallels like lots of hacks. I'm happy to go into as much as like[00:08:44] swyx: HTTP connections and stuff.[00:08:46] Bret: They just like, there was just maximum parallelism of two. And so if you had a map, set of map tiles, like eight of them, so So we just, we were down in the weeds of the browser anyway.[00:08:56] Bret: So it was lots of plumbing. I can, I know a lot more about browsers than [00:09:00] most people, but then by the end of it, it was fairly, it was a lot of duct tape on that code. If you've ever done an engineering project where you're not really sure the path from point A to point B, it's almost like. Building a house by building one room at a time.[00:09:14] Bret: The, there's not a lot of architectural cohesion at the end. And then we acquired a company called Keyhole, which became Google earth, which was like that three, it was a native windows app as well, separate app, great app, but with that, we got licenses to all this satellite imagery. And so in August of 2005, we added.[00:09:33] Bret: Satellite imagery to Google Maps, which added even more complexity in the code base. And then we decided we wanted to support Safari. There was no mobile phones yet. So Safari was this like nascent browser on, on the Mac. And it turns out there's like a lot of decisions behind the scenes, sort of inspired by this windows app, like heavy use of XML and XSLT and all these like.[00:09:54] Bret: Technologies that were like briefly fashionable in the early two thousands and everyone hates now for good [00:10:00] reason. And it turns out that all of the XML functionality and Internet Explorer wasn't supporting Safari. So people are like re implementing like XML parsers. And it was just like this like pile of s**t.[00:10:11] Bret: And I had to say a s**t on your part. Yeah, of[00:10:12] Alessio: course.[00:10:13] Bret: So. It went from this like beautifully elegant application that everyone was proud of to something that probably had hundreds of K of JavaScript, which sounds like nothing. Now we're talking like people have modems, you know, not all modems, but it was a big deal.[00:10:29] Bret: So it was like slow. It took a while to load and just, it wasn't like a great code base. Like everything was fragile. So I just got. Super frustrated by it. And then one weekend I did rewrite all of it. And at the time the word JSON hadn't been coined yet too, just to give you a sense. So it's all XML.[00:10:47] swyx: Yeah.[00:10:47] Bret: So we used what is now you would call JSON, but I just said like, let's use eval so that we can parse the data fast. And, and again, that's, it would literally as JSON, but at the time there was no name for it. So we [00:11:00] just said, let's. Pass on JavaScript from the server and eval it. And then somebody just refactored the whole thing.[00:11:05] Bret: And, and it wasn't like I was some genius. It was just like, you know, if you knew everything you wished you had known at the beginning and I knew all the functionality, cause I was the primary, one of the primary authors of the JavaScript. And I just like, I just drank a lot of coffee and just stayed up all weekend.[00:11:22] Bret: And then I, I guess I developed a bit of reputation and no one knew about this for a long time. And then Paul who created Gmail and I ended up starting a company with him too, after all of this told this on a podcast and now it's large, but it's largely true. I did rewrite it and it, my proudest thing.[00:11:38] Bret: And I think JavaScript people appreciate this. Like the un G zipped bundle size for all of Google maps. When I rewrote, it was 20 K G zipped. It was like much smaller for the entire application. It went down by like 10 X. So. What happened on Google? Google is a pretty mainstream company. And so like our usage is shot up because it turns out like it's faster.[00:11:57] Bret: Just being faster is worth a lot of [00:12:00] percentage points of growth at a scale of Google. So how[00:12:03] swyx: much modern tooling did you have? Like test suites no compilers.[00:12:07] Bret: Actually, that's not true. We did it one thing. So I actually think Google, I, you can. Download it. There's a, Google has a closure compiler, a closure compiler.[00:12:15] Bret: I don't know if anyone still uses it. It's gone. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of gone out of favor. Yeah. Well, even until recently it was better than most JavaScript minifiers because it was more like it did a lot more renaming of variables and things. Most people use ES build now just cause it's fast and closure compilers built on Java and super slow and stuff like that.[00:12:37] Bret: But, so we did have that, that was it. Okay.[00:12:39] The Evolution of Web Applications[00:12:39] Bret: So and that was treated internally, you know, it was a really interesting time at Google at the time because there's a lot of teams working on fairly advanced JavaScript when no one was. So Google suggest, which Kevin Gibbs was the tech lead for, was the first kind of type ahead, autocomplete, I believe in a web browser, and now it's just pervasive in search boxes that you sort of [00:13:00] see a type ahead there.[00:13:01] Bret: I mean, chat, dbt[00:13:01] swyx: just added it. It's kind of like a round trip.[00:13:03] Bret: Totally. No, it's now pervasive as a UI affordance, but that was like Kevin's 20 percent project. And then Gmail, Paul you know, he tells the story better than anyone, but he's like, you know, basically was scratching his own itch, but what was really neat about it is email, because it's such a productivity tool, just needed to be faster.[00:13:21] Bret: So, you know, he was scratching his own itch of just making more stuff work on the client side. And then we, because of Lars and Yen sort of like setting the bar of this windows app or like we need our maps to be draggable. So we ended up. Not only innovate in terms of having a big sync, what would be called a single page application today, but also all the graphical stuff you know, we were crashing Firefox, like it was going out of style because, you know, when you make a document object model with the idea that it's a document and then you layer on some JavaScript and then we're essentially abusing all of this, it just was running into code paths that were not.[00:13:56] Bret: Well, it's rotten, you know, at this time. And so it was [00:14:00] super fun. And, and, you know, in the building you had, so you had compilers, people helping minify JavaScript just practically, but there is a great engineering team. So they were like, that's why Closure Compiler is so good. It was like a. Person who actually knew about programming languages doing it, not just, you know, writing regular expressions.[00:14:17] Bret: And then the team that is now the Chrome team believe, and I, I don't know this for a fact, but I'm pretty sure Google is the main contributor to Firefox for a long time in terms of code. And a lot of browser people were there. So every time we would crash Firefox, we'd like walk up two floors and say like, what the hell is going on here?[00:14:35] Bret: And they would load their browser, like in a debugger. And we could like figure out exactly what was breaking. And you can't change the code, right? Cause it's the browser. It's like slow, right? I mean, slow to update. So, but we could figure out exactly where the bug was and then work around it in our JavaScript.[00:14:52] Bret: So it was just like new territory. Like so super, super fun time, just like a lot of, a lot of great engineers figuring out [00:15:00] new things. And And now, you know, the word, this term is no longer in fashion, but the word Ajax, which was asynchronous JavaScript and XML cause I'm telling you XML, but see the word XML there, to be fair, the way you made HTTP requests from a client to server was this.[00:15:18] Bret: Object called XML HTTP request because Microsoft and making Outlook web access back in the day made this and it turns out to have nothing to do with XML. It's just a way of making HTTP requests because XML was like the fashionable thing. It was like that was the way you, you know, you did it. But the JSON came out of that, you know, and then a lot of the best practices around building JavaScript applications is pre React.[00:15:44] Bret: I think React was probably the big conceptual step forward that we needed. Even my first social network after Google, we used a lot of like HTML injection and. Making real time updates was still very hand coded and it's really neat when you [00:16:00] see conceptual breakthroughs like react because it's, I just love those things where it's like obvious once you see it, but it's so not obvious until you do.[00:16:07] Bret: And actually, well, I'm sure we'll get into AI, but I, I sort of feel like we'll go through that evolution with AI agents as well that I feel like we're missing a lot of the core abstractions that I think in 10 years we'll be like, gosh, how'd you make agents? Before that, you know, but it was kind of that early days of web applications.[00:16:22] swyx: There's a lot of contenders for the reactive jobs of of AI, but no clear winner yet. I would say one thing I was there for, I mean, there's so much we can go into there. You just covered so much.[00:16:32] Product Management and Engineering Synergy[00:16:32] swyx: One thing I just, I just observe is that I think the early Google days had this interesting mix of PM and engineer, which I think you are, you didn't, you didn't wait for PM to tell you these are my, this is my PRD.[00:16:42] swyx: This is my requirements.[00:16:44] mix: Oh,[00:16:44] Bret: okay.[00:16:45] swyx: I wasn't technically a software engineer. I mean,[00:16:48] Bret: by title, obviously. Right, right, right.[00:16:51] swyx: It's like a blend. And I feel like these days, product is its own discipline and its own lore and own industry and engineering is its own thing. And there's this process [00:17:00] that happens and they're kind of separated, but you don't produce as good of a product as if they were the same person.[00:17:06] swyx: And I'm curious, you know, if, if that, if that sort of resonates in, in, in terms of like comparing early Google versus modern startups that you see out there,[00:17:16] Bret: I certainly like wear a lot of hats. So, you know, sort of biased in this, but I really agree that there's a lot of power and combining product design engineering into as few people as possible because, you know few great things have been created by committee, you know, and so.[00:17:33] Bret: If engineering is an order taking organization for product you can sometimes make meaningful things, but rarely will you create extremely well crafted breakthrough products. Those tend to be small teams who deeply understand the customer need that they're solving, who have a. Maniacal focus on outcomes.[00:17:53] Bret: And I think the reason why it's, I think for some areas, if you look at like software as a service five years ago, maybe you can have a [00:18:00] separation of product and engineering because most software as a service created five years ago. I wouldn't say there's like a lot of like. Technological breakthroughs required for most, you know, business applications.[00:18:11] Bret: And if you're making expense reporting software or whatever, it's useful. I don't mean to be dismissive of expense reporting software, but you probably just want to understand like, what are the requirements of the finance department? What are the requirements of an individual file expense report? Okay.[00:18:25] Bret: Go implement that. And you kind of know how web applications are implemented. You kind of know how to. How databases work, how to build auto scaling with your AWS cluster, whatever, you know, it's just, you're just applying best practices to yet another problem when you have areas like the early days of mobile development or the early days of interactive web applications, which I think Google Maps and Gmail represent, or now AI agents, you're in this constant conversation with what the requirements of your customers and stakeholders are and all the different people interacting with it.[00:18:58] Bret: And the capabilities of the [00:19:00] technology. And it's almost impossible to specify the requirements of a product when you're not sure of the limitations of the technology itself. And that's why I use the word conversation. It's not literal. That's sort of funny to use that word in the age of conversational AI.[00:19:15] Bret: You're constantly sort of saying, like, ideally, you could sprinkle some magic AI pixie dust and solve all the world's problems, but it's not the way it works. And it turns out that actually, I'll just give an interesting example.[00:19:26] AI Agents and Modern Tooling[00:19:26] Bret: I think most people listening probably use co pilots to code like Cursor or Devon or Microsoft Copilot or whatever.[00:19:34] Bret: Most of those tools are, they're remarkable. I'm, I couldn't, you know, imagine development without them now, but they're not autonomous yet. Like I wouldn't let it just write most code without my interactively inspecting it. We just are somewhere between it's an amazing co pilot and it's an autonomous software engineer.[00:19:53] Bret: As a product manager, like your aspirations for what the product is are like kind of meaningful. But [00:20:00] if you're a product person, yeah, of course you'd say it should be autonomous. You should click a button and program should come out the other side. The requirements meaningless. Like what matters is like, what is based on the like very nuanced limitations of the technology.[00:20:14] Bret: What is it capable of? And then how do you maximize the leverage? It gives a software engineering team, given those very nuanced trade offs. Coupled with the fact that those nuanced trade offs are changing more rapidly than any technology in my memory, meaning every few months you'll have new models with new capabilities.[00:20:34] Bret: So how do you construct a product that can absorb those new capabilities as rapidly as possible as well? That requires such a combination of technical depth and understanding the customer that you really need more integration. Of product design and engineering. And so I think it's why with these big technology waves, I think startups have a bit of a leg up relative to incumbents because they [00:21:00] tend to be sort of more self actualized in terms of just like bringing those disciplines closer together.[00:21:06] Bret: And in particular, I think entrepreneurs, the proverbial full stack engineers, you know, have a leg up as well because. I think most breakthroughs happen when you have someone who can understand those extremely nuanced technical trade offs, have a vision for a product. And then in the process of building it, have that, as I said, like metaphorical conversation with the technology, right?[00:21:30] Bret: Gosh, I ran into a technical limit that I didn't expect. It's not just like changing that feature. You might need to refactor the whole product based on that. And I think that's, that it's particularly important right now. So I don't, you know, if you, if you're building a big ERP system, probably there's a great reason to have product and engineering.[00:21:51] Bret: I think in general, the disciplines are there for a reason. I think when you're dealing with something as nuanced as the like technologies, like large language models today, there's a ton of [00:22:00] advantage of having. Individuals or organizations that integrate the disciplines more formally.[00:22:05] Alessio: That makes a lot of sense.[00:22:06] Alessio: I've run a lot of engineering teams in the past, and I think the product versus engineering tension has always been more about effort than like whether or not the feature is buildable. But I think, yeah, today you see a lot more of like. Models actually cannot do that. And I think the most interesting thing is on the startup side, people don't yet know where a lot of the AI value is going to accrue.[00:22:26] Alessio: So you have this rush of people building frameworks, building infrastructure, layered things, but we don't really know the shape of the compute. I'm curious that Sierra, like how you thought about building an house, a lot of the tooling for evals or like just, you know, building the agents and all of that.[00:22:41] Alessio: Versus how you see some of the startup opportunities that is maybe still out there.[00:22:46] Bret: We build most of our tooling in house at Sierra, not all. It's, we don't, it's not like not invented here syndrome necessarily, though, maybe slightly guilty of that in some ways, but because we're trying to build a platform [00:23:00] that's in Dorian, you know, we really want to have control over our own destiny.[00:23:03] Bret: And you had made a comment earlier that like. We're still trying to figure out who like the reactive agents are and the jury is still out. I would argue it hasn't been created yet. I don't think the jury is still out to go use that metaphor. We're sort of in the jQuery era of agents, not the react era.[00:23:19] Bret: And, and that's like a throwback for people listening,[00:23:22] swyx: we shouldn't rush it. You know?[00:23:23] Bret: No, yeah, that's my point is. And so. Because we're trying to create an enduring company at Sierra that outlives us, you know, I'm not sure we want to like attach our cart to some like to a horse where it's not clear that like we've figured out and I actually want as a company, we're trying to enable just at a high level and I'll, I'll quickly go back to tech at Sierra, we help consumer brands build customer facing AI agents.[00:23:48] Bret: So. Everyone from Sonos to ADT home security to Sirius XM, you know, if you call them on the phone and AI will pick up with you, you know, chat with them on the Sirius XM homepage. It's an AI agent called Harmony [00:24:00] that they've built on our platform. We're what are the contours of what it means for someone to build an end to end complete customer experience with AI with conversational AI.[00:24:09] Bret: You know, we really want to dive into the deep end of, of all the trade offs to do it. You know, where do you use fine tuning? Where do you string models together? You know, where do you use reasoning? Where do you use generation? How do you use reasoning? How do you express the guardrails of an agentic process?[00:24:25] Bret: How do you impose determinism on a fundamentally non deterministic technology? There's just a lot of really like as an important design space. And I could sit here and tell you, we have the best approach. Every entrepreneur will, you know. But I hope that in two years, we look back at our platform and laugh at how naive we were, because that's the pace of change broadly.[00:24:45] Bret: If you talk about like the startup opportunities, I'm not wholly skeptical of tools companies, but I'm fairly skeptical. There's always an exception for every role, but I believe that certainly there's a big market for [00:25:00] frontier models, but largely for companies with huge CapEx budgets. So. Open AI and Microsoft's Anthropic and Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud XAI, which is very well capitalized now, but I think the, the idea that a company can make money sort of pre training a foundation model is probably not true.[00:25:20] Bret: It's hard to, you're competing with just, you know, unreasonably large CapEx budgets. And I just like the cloud infrastructure market, I think will be largely there. I also really believe in the applications of AI. And I define that not as like building agents or things like that. I define it much more as like, you're actually solving a problem for a business.[00:25:40] Bret: So it's what Harvey is doing in legal profession or what cursor is doing for software engineering or what we're doing for customer experience and customer service. The reason I believe in that is I do think that in the age of AI, what's really interesting about software is it can actually complete a task.[00:25:56] Bret: It can actually do a job, which is very different than the value proposition of [00:26:00] software was to ancient history two years ago. And as a consequence, I think the way you build a solution and For a domain is very different than you would have before, which means that it's not obvious, like the incumbent incumbents have like a leg up, you know, necessarily, they certainly have some advantages, but there's just such a different form factor, you know, for providing a solution and it's just really valuable.[00:26:23] Bret: You know, it's. Like just think of how much money cursor is saving software engineering teams or the alternative, how much revenue it can produce tool making is really challenging. If you look at the cloud market, just as a analog, there are a lot of like interesting tools, companies, you know, Confluent, Monetized Kafka, Snowflake, Hortonworks, you know, there's a, there's a bunch of them.[00:26:48] Bret: A lot of them, you know, have that mix of sort of like like confluence or have the open source or open core or whatever you call it. I, I, I'm not an expert in this area. You know, I do think [00:27:00] that developers are fickle. I think that in the tool space, I probably like. Default towards open source being like the area that will win.[00:27:09] Bret: It's hard to build a company around this and then you end up with companies sort of built around open source to that can work. Don't get me wrong, but I just think that it's nowadays the tools are changing so rapidly that I'm like, not totally skeptical of tool makers, but I just think that open source will broadly win, but I think that the CapEx required for building frontier models is such that it will go to a handful of big companies.[00:27:33] Bret: And then I really believe in agents for specific domains which I think will, it's sort of the analog to software as a service in this new era. You know, it's like, if you just think of the cloud. You can lease a server. It's just a low level primitive, or you can buy an app like you know, Shopify or whatever.[00:27:51] Bret: And most people building a storefront would prefer Shopify over hand rolling their e commerce storefront. I think the same thing will be true of AI. So [00:28:00] I've. I tend to like, if I have a, like an entrepreneur asked me for advice, I'm like, you know, move up the stack as far as you can towards a customer need.[00:28:09] Bret: Broadly, but I, but it doesn't reduce my excitement about what is the reactive building agents kind of thing, just because it is, it is the right question to ask, but I think we'll probably play out probably an open source space more than anything else.[00:28:21] swyx: Yeah, and it's not a priority for you. There's a lot in there.[00:28:24] swyx: I'm kind of curious about your idea maze towards, there are many customer needs. You happen to identify customer experience as yours, but it could equally have been coding assistance or whatever. I think for some, I'm just kind of curious at the top down, how do you look at the world in terms of the potential problem space?[00:28:44] swyx: Because there are many people out there who are very smart and pick the wrong problem.[00:28:47] Bret: Yeah, that's a great question.[00:28:48] Future of Software Development[00:28:48] Bret: By the way, I would love to talk about the future of software, too, because despite the fact it didn't pick coding, I have a lot of that, but I can talk to I can answer your question, though, you know I think when a technology is as [00:29:00] cool as large language models.[00:29:02] Bret: You just see a lot of people starting from the technology and searching for a problem to solve. And I think it's why you see a lot of tools companies, because as a software engineer, you start building an app or a demo and you, you encounter some pain points. You're like,[00:29:17] swyx: a lot of[00:29:17] Bret: people are experiencing the same pain point.[00:29:19] Bret: What if I make it? That it's just very incremental. And you know, I always like to use the metaphor, like you can sell coffee beans, roasted coffee beans. You can add some value. You took coffee beans and you roasted them and roasted coffee beans largely, you know, are priced relative to the cost of the beans.[00:29:39] Bret: Or you can sell a latte and a latte. Is rarely priced directly like as a percentage of coffee bean prices. In fact, if you buy a latte at the airport, it's a captive audience. So it's a really expensive latte. And there's just a lot that goes into like. How much does a latte cost? And I bring it up because there's a supply chain from growing [00:30:00] coffee beans to roasting coffee beans to like, you know, you could make one at home or you could be in the airport and buy one and the margins of the company selling lattes in the airport is a lot higher than the, you know, people roasting the coffee beans and it's because you've actually solved a much more acute human problem in the airport.[00:30:19] Bret: And, and it's just worth a lot more to that person in that moment. It's kind of the way I think about technology too. It sounds funny to liken it to coffee beans, but you're selling tools on top of a large language model yet in some ways your market is big, but you're probably going to like be price compressed just because you're sort of a piece of infrastructure and then you have open source and all these other things competing with you naturally.[00:30:43] Bret: If you go and solve a really big business problem for somebody, that's actually like a meaningful business problem that AI facilitates, they will value it according to the value of that business problem. And so I actually feel like people should just stop. You're like, no, that's, that's [00:31:00] unfair. If you're searching for an idea of people, I, I love people trying things, even if, I mean, most of the, a lot of the greatest ideas have been things no one believed in.[00:31:07] Bret: So I like, if you're passionate about something, go do it. Like who am I to say, yeah, a hundred percent. Or Gmail, like Paul as far, I mean I, some of it's Laura at this point, but like Gmail is Paul's own email for a long time. , and then I amusingly and Paul can't correct me, I'm pretty sure he sent her in a link and like the first comment was like, this is really neat.[00:31:26] Bret: It would be great. It was not your email, but my own . I don't know if it's a true story. I'm pretty sure it's, yeah, I've read that before. So scratch your own niche. Fine. Like it depends on what your goal is. If you wanna do like a venture backed company, if its a. Passion project, f*****g passion, do it like don't listen to anybody.[00:31:41] Bret: In fact, but if you're trying to start, you know an enduring company, solve an important business problem. And I, and I do think that in the world of agents, the software industries has shifted where you're not just helping people more. People be more productive, but you're actually accomplishing tasks autonomously.[00:31:58] Bret: And as a consequence, I think the [00:32:00] addressable market has just greatly expanded just because software can actually do things now and actually accomplish tasks and how much is coding autocomplete worth. A fair amount. How much is the eventual, I'm certain we'll have it, the software agent that actually writes the code and delivers it to you, that's worth a lot.[00:32:20] Bret: And so, you know, I would just maybe look up from the large language models and start thinking about the economy and, you know, think from first principles. I don't wanna get too far afield, but just think about which parts of the economy. We'll benefit most from this intelligence and which parts can absorb it most easily.[00:32:38] Bret: And what would an agent in this space look like? Who's the customer of it is the technology feasible. And I would just start with these business problems more. And I think, you know, the best companies tend to have great engineers who happen to have great insight into a market. And it's that last part that I think some people.[00:32:56] Bret: Whether or not they have, it's like people start so much in the technology, they [00:33:00] lose the forest for the trees a little bit.[00:33:02] Alessio: How do you think about the model of still selling some sort of software versus selling more package labor? I feel like when people are selling the package labor, it's almost more stateless, you know, like it's easier to swap out if you're just putting an input and getting an output.[00:33:16] Alessio: If you think about coding, if there's no ID, you're just putting a prompt and getting back an app. It doesn't really matter. Who generates the app, you know, you have less of a buy in versus the platform you're building, I'm sure on the backend customers have to like put on their documentation and they have, you know, different workflows that they can tie in what's kind of like the line to draw there versus like going full where you're managed customer support team as a service outsource versus.[00:33:40] Alessio: This is the Sierra platform that you can build on. What was that decision? I'll sort of[00:33:44] Bret: like decouple the question in some ways, which is when you have something that's an agent, who is the person using it and what do they want to do with it? So let's just take your coding agent for a second. I will talk about Sierra as well.[00:33:59] Bret: Who's the [00:34:00] customer of a, an agent that actually produces software? Is it a software engineering manager? Is it a software engineer? And it's there, you know, intern so to speak. I don't know. I mean, we'll figure this out over the next few years. Like what is that? And is it generating code that you then review?[00:34:16] Bret: Is it generating code with a set of unit tests that pass, what is the actual. For lack of a better word contract, like, how do you know that it did what you wanted it to do? And then I would say like the product and the pricing, the packaging model sort of emerged from that. And I don't think the world's figured out.[00:34:33] Bret: I think it'll be different for every agent. You know, in our customer base, we do what's called outcome based pricing. So essentially every time the AI agent. Solves the problem or saves a customer or whatever it might be. There's a pre negotiated rate for that. We do that. Cause it's, we think that that's sort of the correct way agents, you know, should be packaged.[00:34:53] Bret: I look back at the history of like cloud software and notably the introduction of the browser, which led to [00:35:00] software being delivered in a browser, like Salesforce to. Famously invented sort of software as a service, which is both a technical delivery model through the browser, but also a business model, which is you subscribe to it rather than pay for a perpetual license.[00:35:13] Bret: Those two things are somewhat orthogonal, but not really. If you think about the idea of software running in a browser, that's hosted. Data center that you don't own, you sort of needed to change the business model because you don't, you can't really buy a perpetual license or something otherwise like, how do you afford making changes to it?[00:35:31] Bret: So it only worked when you were buying like a new version every year or whatever. So to some degree, but then the business model shift actually changed business as we know it, because now like. Things like Adobe Photoshop. Now you subscribe to rather than purchase. So it ended up where you had a technical shift and a business model shift that were very logically intertwined that actually the business model shift was turned out to be as significant as the technical as the shift.[00:35:59] Bret: And I think with [00:36:00] agents, because they actually accomplish a job, I do think that it doesn't make sense to me that you'd pay for the privilege of like. Using the software like that coding agent, like if it writes really bad code, like fire it, you know, I don't know what the right metaphor is like you should pay for a job.[00:36:17] Bret: Well done in my opinion. I mean, that's how you pay your software engineers, right? And[00:36:20] swyx: and well, not really. We paid to put them on salary and give them options and they vest over time. That's fair.[00:36:26] Bret: But my point is that you don't pay them for how many characters they write, which is sort of the token based, you know, whatever, like, There's a, that famous Apple story where we're like asking for a report of how many lines of code you wrote.[00:36:40] Bret: And one of the engineers showed up with like a negative number cause he had just like done a big refactoring. There was like a big F you to management who didn't understand how software is written. You know, my sense is like the traditional usage based or seat based thing. It's just going to look really antiquated.[00:36:55] Bret: Cause it's like asking your software engineer, how many lines of code did you write today? Like who cares? Like, cause [00:37:00] absolutely no correlation. So my old view is I don't think it's be different in every category, but I do think that that is the, if an agent is doing a job, you should, I think it properly incentivizes the maker of that agent and the customer of, of your pain for the job well done.[00:37:16] Bret: It's not always perfect to measure. It's hard to measure engineering productivity, but you can, you should do something other than how many keys you typed, you know Talk about perverse incentives for AI, right? Like I can write really long functions to do the same thing, right? So broadly speaking, you know, I do think that we're going to see a change in business models of software towards outcomes.[00:37:36] Bret: And I think you'll see a change in delivery models too. And, and, you know, in our customer base you know, we empower our customers to really have their hands on the steering wheel of what the agent does they, they want and need that. But the role is different. You know, at a lot of our customers, the customer experience operations folks have renamed themselves the AI architects, which I think is really cool.[00:37:55] Bret: And, you know, it's like in the early days of the Internet, there's the role of the webmaster. [00:38:00] And I don't know whether your webmaster is not a fashionable, you know, Term, nor is it a job anymore? I just, I don't know. Will they, our tech stand the test of time? Maybe, maybe not. But I do think that again, I like, you know, because everyone listening right now is a software engineer.[00:38:14] Bret: Like what is the form factor of a coding agent? And actually I'll, I'll take a breath. Cause actually I have a bunch of pins on them. Like I wrote a blog post right before Christmas, just on the future of software development. And one of the things that's interesting is like, if you look at the way I use cursor today, as an example, it's inside of.[00:38:31] Bret: A repackaged visual studio code environment. I sometimes use the sort of agentic parts of it, but it's largely, you know, I've sort of gotten a good routine of making it auto complete code in the way I want through tuning it properly when it actually can write. I do wonder what like the future of development environments will look like.[00:38:55] Bret: And to your point on what is a software product, I think it's going to change a lot in [00:39:00] ways that will surprise us. But I always use, I use the metaphor in my blog post of, have you all driven around in a way, Mo around here? Yeah, everyone has. And there are these Jaguars, the really nice cars, but it's funny because it still has a steering wheel, even though there's no one sitting there and the steering wheels like turning and stuff clearly in the future.[00:39:16] Bret: If once we get to that, be more ubiquitous, like why have the steering wheel and also why have all the seats facing forward? Maybe just for car sickness. I don't know, but you could totally rearrange the car. I mean, so much of the car is oriented around the driver, so. It stands to reason to me that like, well, autonomous agents for software engineering run through visual studio code.[00:39:37] Bret: That seems a little bit silly because having a single source code file open one at a time is kind of a goofy form factor for when like the code isn't being written primarily by you, but it begs the question of what's your relationship with that agent. And I think the same is true in our industry of customer experience, which is like.[00:39:55] Bret: Who are the people managing this agent? What are the tools do they need? And they definitely need [00:40:00] tools, but it's probably pretty different than the tools we had before. It's certainly different than training a contact center team. And as software engineers, I think that I would like to see particularly like on the passion project side or research side.[00:40:14] Bret: More innovation in programming languages. I think that we're bringing the cost of writing code down to zero. So the fact that we're still writing Python with AI cracks me up just cause it's like literally was designed to be ergonomic to write, not safe to run or fast to run. I would love to see more innovation and how we verify program correctness.[00:40:37] Bret: I studied for formal verification in college a little bit and. It's not very fashionable because it's really like tedious and slow and doesn't work very well. If a lot of code is being written by a machine, you know, one of the primary values we can provide is verifying that it actually does what we intend that it does.[00:40:56] Bret: I think there should be lots of interesting things in the software development life cycle, like how [00:41:00] we think of testing and everything else, because. If you think about if we have to manually read every line of code that's coming out as machines, it will just rate limit how much the machines can do. The alternative is totally unsafe.[00:41:13] Bret: So I wouldn't want to put code in production that didn't go through proper code review and inspection. So my whole view is like, I actually think there's like an AI native I don't think the coding agents don't work well enough to do this yet, but once they do, what is sort of an AI native software development life cycle and how do you actually.[00:41:31] Bret: Enable the creators of software to produce the highest quality, most robust, fastest software and know that it's correct. And I think that's an incredible opportunity. I mean, how much C code can we rewrite and rust and make it safe so that there's fewer security vulnerabilities. Can we like have more efficient, safer code than ever before?[00:41:53] Bret: And can you have someone who's like that guy in the matrix, you know, like staring at the little green things, like where could you have an operator [00:42:00] of a code generating machine be like superhuman? I think that's a cool vision. And I think too many people are focused on like. Autocomplete, you know, right now, I'm not, I'm not even, I'm guilty as charged.[00:42:10] Bret: I guess in some ways, but I just like, I'd like to see some bolder ideas. And that's why when you were joking, you know, talking about what's the react of whatever, I think we're clearly in a local maximum, you know, metaphor, like sort of conceptual local maximum, obviously it's moving really fast. I think we're moving out of it.[00:42:26] Alessio: Yeah. At the end of 23, I've read this blog post from syntax to semantics. Like if you think about Python. It's taking C and making it more semantic and LLMs are like the ultimate semantic program, right? You can just talk to them and they can generate any type of syntax from your language. But again, the languages that they have to use were made for us, not for them.[00:42:46] Alessio: But the problem is like, as long as you will ever need a human to intervene, you cannot change the language under it. You know what I mean? So I'm curious at what point of automation we'll need to get, we're going to be okay making changes. To the underlying languages, [00:43:00] like the programming languages versus just saying, Hey, you just got to write Python because I understand Python and I'm more important at the end of the day than the model.[00:43:08] Alessio: But I think that will change, but I don't know if it's like two years or five years. I think it's more nuanced actually.[00:43:13] Bret: So I think there's a, some of the more interesting programming languages bring semantics into syntax. So let me, that's a little reductive, but like Rust as an example, Rust is memory safe.[00:43:25] Bret: Statically, and that was a really interesting conceptual, but it's why it's hard to write rust. It's why most people write python instead of rust. I think rust programs are safer and faster than python, probably slower to compile. But like broadly speaking, like given the option, if you didn't have to care about the labor that went into it.[00:43:45] Bret: You should prefer a program written in Rust over a program written in Python, just because it will run more efficiently. It's almost certainly safer, et cetera, et cetera, depending on how you define safe, but most people don't write Rust because it's kind of a pain in the ass. And [00:44:00] the audience of people who can is smaller, but it's sort of better in most, most ways.[00:44:05] Bret: And again, let's say you're making a web service and you didn't have to care about how hard it was to write. If you just got the output of the web service, the rest one would be cheaper to operate. It's certainly cheaper and probably more correct just because there's so much in the static analysis implied by the rest programming language that it probably will have fewer runtime errors and things like that as well.[00:44:25] Bret: So I just give that as an example, because so rust, at least my understanding that came out of the Mozilla team, because. There's lots of security vulnerabilities in the browser and it needs to be really fast. They said, okay, we want to put more of a burden at the authorship time to have fewer issues at runtime.[00:44:43] Bret: And we need the constraint that it has to be done statically because browsers need to be really fast. My sense is if you just think about like the, the needs of a programming language today, where the role of a software engineer is [00:45:00] to use an AI to generate functionality and audit that it does in fact work as intended, maybe functionally, maybe from like a correctness standpoint, some combination thereof, how would you create a programming system that facilitated that?[00:45:15] Bret: And, you know, I bring up Rust is because I think it's a good example of like, I think given a choice of writing in C or Rust, you should choose Rust today. I think most people would say that, even C aficionados, just because. C is largely less safe for very similar, you know, trade offs, you know, for the, the system and now with AI, it's like, okay, well, that just changes the game on writing these things.[00:45:36] Bret: And so like, I just wonder if a combination of programming languages that are more structurally oriented towards the values that we need from an AI generated program, verifiable correctness and all of that. If it's tedious to produce for a person, that maybe doesn't matter. But one thing, like if I asked you, is this rest program memory safe?[00:45:58] Bret: You wouldn't have to read it, you just have [00:46:00] to compile it. So that's interesting. I mean, that's like an, that's one example of a very modest form of formal verification. So I bring that up because I do think you have AI inspect AI, you can have AI reviewed. Do AI code reviews. It would disappoint me if the best we could get was AI reviewing Python and having scaled a few very large.[00:46:21] Bret: Websites that were written on Python. It's just like, you know, expensive and it's like every, trust me, every team who's written a big web service in Python has experimented with like Pi Pi and all these things just to make it slightly more efficient than it naturally is. You don't really have true multi threading anyway.[00:46:36] Bret: It's just like clearly that you do it just because it's convenient to write. And I just feel like we're, I don't want to say it's insane. I just mean. I do think we're at a local maximum. And I would hope that we create a programming system, a combination of programming languages, formal verification, testing, automated code reviews, where you can use AI to generate software in a high scale way and trust it.[00:46:59] Bret: And you're [00:47:00] not limited by your ability to read it necessarily. I don't know exactly what form that would take, but I feel like that would be a pretty cool world to live in.[00:47:08] Alessio: Yeah. We had Chris Lanner on the podcast. He's doing great work with modular. I mean, I love. LVM. Yeah. Basically merging rust in and Python.[00:47:15] Alessio: That's kind of the idea. Should be, but I'm curious is like, for them a big use case was like making it compatible with Python, same APIs so that Python developers could use it. Yeah. And so I, I wonder at what point, well, yeah.[00:47:26] Bret: At least my understanding is they're targeting the data science Yeah. Machine learning crowd, which is all written in Python, so still feels like a local maximum.[00:47:34] Bret: Yeah.[00:47:34] swyx: Yeah, exactly. I'll force you to make a prediction. You know, Python's roughly 30 years old. In 30 years from now, is Rust going to be bigger than Python?[00:47:42] Bret: I don't know this, but just, I don't even know this is a prediction. I just am sort of like saying stuff I hope is true. I would like to see an AI native programming language and programming system, and I use language because I'm not sure language is even the right thing, but I hope in 30 years, there's an AI native way we make [00:48:00] software that is wholly uncorrelated with the current set of programming languages.[00:48:04] Bret: or not uncorrelated, but I think most programming languages today were designed to be efficiently authored by people and some have different trade offs.[00:48:15] Evolution of Programming Languages[00:48:15] Bret: You know, you have Haskell and others that were designed for abstractions for parallelism and things like that. You have programming languages like Python, which are designed to be very easily written, sort of like Perl and Python lineage, which is why data scientists use it.[00:48:31] Bret: It's it can, it has a. Interactive mode, things like that. And I love, I'm a huge Python fan. So despite all my Python trash talk, a huge Python fan wrote at least two of my three companies were exclusively written in Python and then C came out of the birth of Unix and it wasn't the first, but certainly the most prominent first step after assembly language, right?[00:48:54] Bret: Where you had higher level abstractions rather than and going beyond go to, to like abstractions, [00:49:00] like the for loop and the while loop.[00:49:01] The Future of Software Engineering[00:49:01] Bret: So I just think that if the act of writing code is no longer a meaningful human exercise, maybe it will be, I don't know. I'm just saying it sort of feels like maybe it's one of those parts of history that just will sort of like go away, but there's still the role of this offer engineer, like the person actually building the system.[00:49:20] Bret: Right. And. What does a programming system for that form factor look like?[00:49:25] React and Front-End Development[00:49:25] Bret: And I, I just have a, I hope to be just like I mentioned, I remember I was at Facebook in the very early days when, when, what is now react was being created. And I remember when the, it was like released open source I had left by that time and I was just like, this is so f*****g cool.[00:49:42] Bret: Like, you know, to basically model your app independent of the data flowing through it, just made everything easier. And then now. You know, I can create, like there's a lot of the front end software gym play is like a little chaotic for me, to be honest with you. It is like, it's sort of like [00:50:00] abstraction soup right now for me, but like some of those core ideas felt really ergonomic.[00:50:04] Bret: I just wanna, I'm just looking forward to the day when someone comes up with a programming system that feels both really like an aha moment, but completely foreign to me at the same time. Because they created it with sort of like from first principles recognizing that like. Authoring code in an editor is maybe not like the primary like reason why a programming system exists anymore.[00:50:26] Bret: And I think that's like, that would be a very exciting day for me.[00:50:28] The Role of AI in Programming[00:50:28] swyx: Yeah, I would say like the various versions of this discussion have happened at the end of the day, you still need to precisely communicate what you want. As a manager of people, as someone who has done many, many legal contracts, you know how hard that is.[00:50:42] swyx: And then now we have to talk to machines doing that and AIs interpreting what we mean and reading our minds effectively. I don't know how to get across that barrier of translating human intent to instructions. And yes, it can be more declarative, but I don't know if it'll ever Crossover from being [00:51:00] a programming language to something more than that.[00:51:02] Bret: I agree with you. And I actually do think if you look at like a legal contract, you know, the imprecision of the English language, it's like a flaw in the system. How many[00:51:12] swyx: holes there are.[00:51:13] Bret: And I do think that when you're making a mission critical software system, I don't think it should be English language prompts.[00:51:19] Bret: I think that is silly because you want the precision of a a programming language. My point was less about that and more about if the actual act of authoring it, like if you.[00:51:32] Formal Verification in Software[00:51:32] Bret: I'll think of some embedded systems do use formal verification. I know it's very common in like security protocols now so that you can, because the importance of correctness is so great.[00:51:41] Bret: My intellectual exercise is like, why not do that for all software? I mean, probably that's silly just literally to do what we literally do for. These low level security protocols, but the only reason we don't is because it's hard and tedious and hard and tedious are no longer factors. So, like, if I could, I mean, [00:52:00] just think of, like, the silliest app on your phone right now, the idea that that app should be, like, formally verified for its correctness feels laughable right now because, like, God, why would you spend the time on it?[00:52:10] Bret: But if it's zero costs, like, yeah, I guess so. I mean, it never crashed. That's probably good. You know, why not? I just want to, like, set our bars really high. Like. We should make, software has been amazing. Like there's a Mark Andreessen blog post, software is eating the world. And you know, our whole life is, is mediated digitally.[00:52:26] Bret: And that's just increasing with AI. And now we'll have our personal agents talking to the agents on the CRO platform and it's agents all the way down, you know, our core infrastructure is running on these digital systems. We now have like, and we've had a shortage of software developers for my entire life.[00:52:45] Bret: And as a consequence, you know if you look, remember like health care, got healthcare. gov that fiasco security vulnerabilities leading to state actors getting access to critical infrastructure. I'm like. We now have like created this like amazing system that can [00:53:00] like, we can fix this, you know, and I, I just want to, I'm both excited about the productivity gains in the economy, but I just think as software engineers, we should be bolder.[00:53:08] Bret: Like we should have aspirations to fix these systems so that like in general, as you said, as precise as we want to be in the specification of the system. We can make it work correctly now, and I'm being a little bit hand wavy, and I think we need some systems. I think that's where we should set the bar, especially when so much of our life depends on this critical digital infrastructure.[00:53:28] Bret: So I'm I'm just like super optimistic about it. But actually, let's go to w
The recent Azul State of Java 2025 survey offers a timely window into the use of Java and why it is still so popular. To find out more about the survey and its findings Ronan spoke to Simon Ritter, Deputy. CTO, Azul.Simon talks about what Azul does, the benefits of Java, the Azul State of Java Report, security and more.More about Simon Ritter:Simon Ritter is the Deputy CTO of Azul. Simon joined Sun Microsystems in 1996 and spent time working in both Java development and consultancy. He has been presenting Java technologies to developers since 1999, focusing on the core Java platform as well as client and embedded applications.At Azul, he continues to help people understand Java and Azul's JVM products. Simon is a Java Champion and two-time recipient of the JavaOne Rockstar award. In addition, he represents Azul on the JCP Executive Committee, the OpenJDK Vulnerability Group, and the JSR Expert Group since Java SE 9.
The recent Azul State of Java 2025 survey offers a timely window into the use of Java and why it is still so popular. To find out more about the survey and its findings Ronan spoke to Simon Ritter, deputy. CTO, Azul. Simon talks about what Azul does, the benefits of Java, the Azul State of Java Report, security and more. More about Simon Ritter: Simon Ritter is the Deputy CTO of Azul. Simon joined Sun Microsystems in 1996 and spent time working in both Java development and consultancy. He has been presenting Java technologies to developers since 1999, focusing on the core Java platform as well as client and embedded applications. At Azul, he continues to help people understand Java and Azul's JVM products. Simon is a Java Champion and two-time recipient of the JavaOne Rockstar award. In addition, he represents Azul on the JCP Executive Committee, the OpenJDK Vulnerability Group, and the JSR Expert Group since Java SE 9. See more stories here.
An airhacks.fm conversation with Richard Bair (@RichardBair) about: early programming experiences with Basic and building computers, his first production app at 17 for his father's auto repair shop, starting computer science degree at 16 and completing it at 43, joining Sun Microsystems' Swing team, working on JavaFX from its inception as F3 through its evolution, becoming lead of JavaFX team and chief architect for client Java, moving to Oracle's IoT team, current role as VP of Engineering at Hedera blockchain company, explanation of Hedera's Hashgraph algorithm solving the Byzantine Generals Problem, implementation of Hedera's technology in Java, open-source nature of Hedera's codebase, resources for learning about and developing with Hedera including documentation, Hedera Improvement Proposals - hips, and developer hedera playground, discussion of blockchain technology and its potential impact on open protocols and decentralized networks, comparison of blockchain to distributed databases, explanation of consensus mechanisms in distributed ledgers, tokenization of real-world assets Richard Bair on twitter: @RichardBair
In this episode, we celebrate Free and Open Source Software Month this February by chatting with some of Intel's own open source software and community enthusiasts, Arun Gupta and Shirley Bailes, about open source, its business value, and how to unlock innovation through openness. Arun discusses his book, 'Fostering Open Source Culture,' detailing his journey from past experiences at major tech companies to the process and inspiration behind writing the book. The conversation covers the importance of fostering an open source culture, including the roles of various companies and foundations. Shirley shares her first-time author experience, emphasizing the role of foundations in maintaining a sustainable open source ecosystem. The discussion touches on the benefits of corporate engagement in open source, the challenges of proving ROI, and the critical need for a new generation of contributors. Arun and Shirley highlight real-world case studies and provide practical advice for companies looking to embrace and invest in open source culture. 00:00 Introduction 00:33 Arun Gupta's Journey in Open Source 03:23 Shirley Bailes on First-time Authorship 04:42 The Role of Foundations in Open Source 07:17 Leadership in Open Source Foundations 11:27 The Business Case for Open Source 15:40 The Importance of Community and Collaboration 25:18 Conclusion and Book Information Guests: Shirley Bailes has been involved in developer communities and building open source programs for over 15 years. She is the Director of Software Ecosystem Strategy in Intel's Office of the CTO, where she leads thought leadership and strategic initiatives to accelerate startup innovation and developer ecosystem growth. She previously led open source programs at AWS and served as Co-President of the Women at Amazon Global Board. Arun Gupta is Vice President and General Manager of Developer Programs at Intel Corporation. He is an open source strategist, advocate, and practitioner for over two decades. He has taken companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Sun Microsystems through systemic changes to embrace open source principles. He is the elected chair of the CNCF GB and elected Chair of the OpenSSF GB. He has delivered technical talks in 45+ countries and authored multiple books. He is a fitness and kindness enthusiast.
Jeffrey Allen, a respected energy healer and Mindvalley author, is known for his teachings on personal transformation and spiritual awakening. His ‘Duality' training with Mindvalley and ‘Spirit Mind' training with his wife Hisami assist people worldwide in transforming their lives and reconnecting with their true essence. Prior to entering the world of spirituality, Jeffrey had a 15 year career as software engineer with US Department of Energy and Sun Microsystems. Since then he has spent over 15 years teaching clairvoyance, healing, and mediumship studies around the world. Jeffrey has studied with world renowned teachers Michael Tamura, Mary Bell Nyman, Jim Self, John Fulton, and Nassim Haramein of the Resonance Project. We discuss: The Spirit Body Why men don't feel energy like women Types of energy healing Insight on the current energy right now How to recognize your natural gifts Follow Jeffrey Allen on Instagram @iamjeffreyallen Explore Jeffrey's Duality or Unlocking Transcendence classes with Mindvalley https://www.mindvalley.com Learn more about Jeffrey Allen www.IAMJeffreyAllen.com www.SpiritMind.com Learn more about High Vibration Living with Chef Whitney Aronoff on www.StarseedKitchen.com Get 10% off your order of Chef Whitney's organic spices with code STARSEED on www.starseedkitchen.com Follow Chef Whitney Aronoff on Instagram at @whitneyaronoff and @starseedkitchen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
EpisodeTopic In this episode, we delve into the world of cybersecurity with Anand Naik, founder of Sequretek Tech. Anand shares his extensive experience working with major companies like IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Symantec, and how he transitioned into founding Sequretek in 2013 to provide cutting-edge solutions to protect businesses from evolving cyber threats. His company's focus on using AI and machine learning to combat security risks in real-time is transforming the way cybersecurity is approached. From large enterprises to smaller organizations, the need for robust protection against cyberattacks has never been more critical. Lessons You'll Learn Listeners will gain valuable insights into the cybersecurity landscape, particularly how new technologies like AI, machine learning, and cloud-based solutions are redefining threat detection and mitigation. Anand explains the importance of simplifying security, offering businesses the flexibility to maintain visibility over their operations without overhauling existing systems. You'll also learn about the growing risks from IoT devices and quantum computing, and how companies can stay ahead by adopting advanced security solutions like Sequretek's percept XDR and percept IGA. About Our Guest Anand Naik is the founder and CEO of Sequretek Tech, a company dedicated to providing innovative cybersecurity solutions powered by AI and machine learning. With over two decades of experience working with global giants like IBM, Symantec, and Sun Microsystems, Anand brings a wealth of knowledge in cybersecurity. His company focuses on making security simple, providing businesses with seamless integration of advanced protection while reducing the complexity of managing multiple security systems. Anand's work is helping to shape the future of enterprise security, ensuring organizations stay protected in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. Topics Covered In this episode, Anand shares his journey from corporate giant to startup entrepreneur, offering insights into the technological shifts he witnessed and how they shaped his approach to cybersecurity. He discusses Sequretek's unique approach to providing real-time, AI-driven threat detection and security management. Anand also talks about the importance of flexible, modular systems that integrate with existing infrastructures and the future of cybersecurity, touching on emerging threats such as IoT breaches and quantum computing. Additionally, he explains how Sequretek is helping businesses navigate these challenges with minimal disruption and maximum protection.
In this episode of TECHtonic, TSIA's Executive Director Thomas Lah sits down with longtime tech leader turned executive coach, Mary Cay Kosten, to explore the challenges and opportunities awaiting professionals in today's AI-driven landscape. From maintaining a positive “energy” mindset to knowing when it's time to pivot your role—or your entire career—Mary Cay draws on her breadth of experiences at Sun Microsystems, EMC, and Dell to guide you toward intentional, strategic decision-making. Tune in for practical tips on managing the rapid pace of change, prioritizing what matters to your leadership, and harnessing AI's potential without losing sight of your own personal growth. If you're ready to chart a resilient career path in the ever-evolving tech world, this is the conversation you won't want to miss!
In the latest episode of Fixing Healthcare, hosts Dr. Robert Pearl and Jeremy Corr welcome back Vinod Khosla, legendary investor and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, to discuss the transformative impact ... The post FHC #153: Vinod Khosla on AI, disruption & the future of medicine appeared first on Fixing Healthcare.
We've curated a special 10-minute version of the podcast for those in a hurry. Here you can listen to the full episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/vinod-khosla-future-trends-and-the-power-of-the-improbable/id1614211565?i=1000674090066Why is the improbable so important? Will robots replace human labor? And how will AI change the science of medicine? In this episode of In Good Company, Nicolai sits down with one of the most successful entrepreneurs and venture capital investors of all time, Vinod Khosla. Co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures, Vinod shares his thoughts on investing in transformative technologies, the importance of taking bold risks, and the power of focusing on what seems improbable. Tune in to hear Vinod's philosophy on the future of robotics, clean energy artificial intelligence and more.In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday.Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Why is the improbable so important? Will robots replace human labor? And how will AI change the science of medicine? In this episode of In Good Company, Nicolai sits down with one of the most successful entrepreneurs and venture capital investors of all time, Vinod Khosla. Co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures, Vinod shares his thoughts on investing in transformative technologies, the importance of taking bold risks, and the power of focusing on what seems improbable. Tune in to hear Vinod's philosophy on the future of robotics, clean energy artificial intelligence and more.In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New episode out every Wednesday.The production team for this episode includes PLAN-B's Pål Huuse and Niklas Figenschau Johansen. Background research was conducted by Une Solheim.Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode of Tech Sales Insights, Randy Seidl is joined by Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, unfolds his vast career insights and personal anecdotes. The discussion, primarily focusing on sales tips, touches on various topics such as McNealy's parenting philosophy, experiences as a sales leader, and humorous personal stories from his life. The script highlights McNealy's sales strategies, the importance of leadership involvement in sales, and maintaining ethics in business. Also included are McNealy's ventures post-Sun, his involvement with his sons' careers, and the personal values that have guided his life and work.KEY TAKEAWAYSSales Tips: Emphasis on the importance of building strong relationships and being present.Leadership: McNealy's focus on ethical leadership and employee fulfillment.Parenting Wisdom: McNealy discusses his strict but loving approach to parenting.Company Culture: Sun Microsystems' culture fostered numerous future leaders.Innovation and Persistence: Notable stories of overcoming business challenges with creativity and resilience.Personal Growth: Transition from being shy to becoming an effective public speaker and leader.QUOTES- 'Sales is a contact sport. You've got to be there. You can't zoom your way to B2B success.' — Scott McNealy- 'No deals ever lost. It's only postponed.' — Scott McNealy- 'You're not your kid's friend. You're their parent and too many parents want to, have sleepovers, go water skiing with their kid and do all of these other things.' — Scott McNealy- 'If you're going to bring a child into the world…you ought to take full responsibility until they're out of the nest.' — Scott McNealy- 'It's your responsibility to keep skills current, not the company's.' — Scott McNealy- 'Everything will be fine. Don't you dare cheat.' — Scott McNealyFind out more about Scott McNealy through the links below:https://www.linkedin.com/in/smcnealy/This episode is sponsored by Sandler. Sandler is a world leader in innovative sales, leadership, and management training. For more than 50 years, Sandler has taught its distinctive, non-traditional selling system and highly effective sales training methodology, which has helped salespeople and sales managers take charge of the process.
Vegasnearme.com Discover Vegas with the Ultimate All-in-One App: VegasNearMe About the Guest(s): George Meyer is the CEO and Co-founder of Near Me Entertainment, a company focused on creating advanced location-based apps that provide comprehensive and interactive discovery of local events and venues. George boasts a lifelong career in technology, with past roles at industry giants like Hewlett Packard and Sun Microsystems. His unique aptitude for developing user-friendly, efficient applications shines through in his latest venture, Vegas Near Me, which aims to revolutionize how visitors and locals find entertainment and dining options in Las Vegas. Episode Summary: In this episode of The Chris Voss Show, host Chris Voss engages in a lively discussion with George Meyer, the CEO, and Co-founder of Near Me Entertainment. George returns to the show to detail the extensive features of their innovative app, Vegas Near Me. This application is designed to streamline the process of finding entertainment, dining, and activities in the vibrant city of Las Vegas. Promising a one-stop solution for tourists and locals alike, the app consolidates everything from concerts and events to dining options and insider experiences—all within a user-friendly interface. Throughout the episode, George explains the inspiration behind the app, the technological intricacies, and the anticipatory plans for expansion beyond Las Vegas. He shares various unique aspects of Vegas Near Me, such as its internal maps of major resorts, curated YouTube and podcast clips, the ability to set specific preferences, and access to exclusive deals. This app addresses the common challenges visitors face, like discovering events, navigating massive resorts, and finding late-night dining options. Highlighted through real-time app demonstrations, George showcases how the application not only offers convenience but also enhances the overall Las Vegas experience by putting all necessary and exciting information at users' fingertips. Key Takeaways: Comprehensive Discovery Tool: Vegas Near Me consolidates all possible entertainment options, from shows and restaurants to unique activities, making it a superior alternative to other review and discovery platforms. User-Friendly Interface: The app features internal maps of resorts and a curated list of YouTube and podcast clips, providing an immersive and easy-to-navigate user experience. Personalized Searches: Users can set preferences and filter searches based on specific criteria like age appropriateness, type of activity, proximity, and open status. Exclusive Deals and Offers: The app provides access to special prices and deals, often offering discounts on major shows and activities. Expansion Plans: After establishing robust functionality in Las Vegas, Near Me Entertainment plans to roll out similar apps in other major cities globally. Notable Quotes: George Meyer: "What we've done is we've put all of this into one app. It's better than Yelp or Google for Vegas. It embarrasses Yelp and Google for Vegas." George Meyer: "This app, no matter how much I talk to you about it, you have to see it to believe it. It makes it fun and easy to find anything near anywhere." George Meyer: "Missing this journey concert got me kind of upset and drove me to find out that people are struggling to find anything in a city like Vegas." George Meyer: "Plans are underway to take this app to cities all over the world, making it easy to find anything near anywhere you go." Chris Voss: "The problem with Vegas when you go there is entertainment overload. This app solves that by providing a structured, comprehensive guide."
"The Ben & Marc Show," featuring a16z co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. In this special episode, Marc and Ben dive deep into the REAL story behind the creation of Netscape—a web browser co-created by Marc that revolutionized the internet and changed the world. As Ben notes at the top, until today, this story has never been fully told either in its entirety or accurately. In this one-on-one conversation, Marc and Ben discuss Marc's early life and how it shaped his journey into technology, the pivotal moments at the University of Illinois that led to the development of Mosaic (a renegade browser that Marc developed as an undergrad), and the fierce competition and legal battles that ensued as Netscape rose to prominence. Ben and Marc also reflect on the broader implications of Netscape's success, the importance of an open internet, and the lessons learned that still resonate in today's tech landscape (especially with AI). That and much more. Enjoy!Watch the FULL Episode on YouTune: https://youtu.be/8aTjA_bGZO4 Resources: Marc on X: https://twitter.com/pmarca Marc's Substack: https://pmarca.substack.com/ Ben on X: https://twitter.com/bhorowitz Book mentioned on this episode: - “Expert Political Judgment” by Philip E. Tetlock https://bit.ly/45KzP6M TV Series mentioned on this episode: - “The Mandalorian” (Disney+) https://bit.ly/3W0Zyoq Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.