CTO Advisor Briefing - Matt Leib's Journey to being an Analyst
Transcript
hey how's it going it's keith towson principal of the cto advisor we're doing another where's who in the world last couple weeks ago we talked to bobby allen who is now vp of alliances over at cloud general focused on their aws i'm sorry vp of alliances alliances over at turbonomics coming from cloud genera he's focused on the aws relationship now we have a another industry analyst in a street influencer someone who's done some work for the cto advisor you know him uh with some of his
famous cto advisor hits which are vmware cloud solution options and uh upcoming uh white paper slash tech note on kubernetes you guys will uh i think appreciate that matt lee matt welcome to the program hi keith thank you so much well happy to be here so matt uh it's been a while since you know uh since you went on this independent route and you've decided to you know the cto advisor just wasn't giving you enough work and paying you enough money i can't blame you for
that buddy well we're paying tweets so you know you were getting paid well you know i was tweeting your name out like every other day so i don't know i don't know how i don't know how the exposure didn't wasn't enough for you uh so first off where did you end up well i'm working for idc uh my my specific role is called the research director um and uh and basically what i'm focusing on is um block and file uh and quite often object storage in
the unstructured data space at idc uh and uh that's a long way of saying yeah i'm another analyst over there so you you kept your analyst head on which is really interesting because when we talked a year ago when you made your last transition you you kind of had your eye out for analyst work you went the independent route at first you were doing some research for a gig home and some independent research for the cto advisor and idc came knocking what appealed to you about
the idc well you know for lack of a better uh and less pragmatic answer the real answer is i i needed something full-time uh salaried uh where the the workflow was going to keep me busy on a you know nine to five basis and uh not that i ever work nine to five it's always more than that but uh but ultimately um i don't have to to worry so much about uh about where the next gig is coming from and and that's uh you know i
know it's a journey you went on as well you know the first iteration of the the cto advisor um you had to evaluate whether the the many offers that were coming to you were going to be far more valuable to you than than keeping the um the main line of your of your business going and and obviously you kept it going outside of the full-time employment and uh you know thrillingly you came back to it because i think it's a great model yeah it is a
really tough coin um when i set out the first time i knew that consulting is kind of a feaster famine type of business so you really need to have a secondary source of income and the research and sponsored content was meant to be that secondary source of income i discovered in my case that the research and sponsored content became the primary source of income wasn't prepared for that type of business model i'm you know kind of a advisory management consultant at heart so you know we
we uh we pivoted and now we're back at it but you're absolutely right it is really tough to make a go at it time to time so let's let's kind of go on this thread and pull on this thread and maybe save some folk some angst or some aggravation what were some of the major lessons learned uh while you were out in the research market so let's preface one thing first idc is an amazing company i mean they they have some of the best research directors
in the industry some people that i really respect there and they do some uh important customer work so obviously you were good enough to be a research director at idc a year ago versus noun you're still the same guy what's like what was the challenge why was it so hard to find independent work well you know we to answer that truthfully we have to go back a little further obviously you and i both live in the chicago metro and um a lot of uh of the
considerations in in product marketing product management evangelism etc required you to be far more regularly in the bay area most typically and uh you know the travel expenses the potential time uh lag in uh in getting me out there has hindered me in in doing those kind of roles which really is what i've been doing as an avocation probably 12 years now oddly the the pandemic has made it clear to a lot of these companies that that providing those analyst type functions from a a remote
access kind of way just like we're doing this right now uh is is incredibly viable i don't think the tools wherever the the uh shortfall i think it was a perception of somebody wants to be able to tap me on the shoulder and say hey we've reached this hitch or this need or whatever it is and um that's really not requisite i think for for this so um so a year ago when when we talked uh i absolutely wanted to do this i wanted to do
this for a very long time it's just taken um sort of a confluence of events to come to this point where where you know i've seen it been seen as a more viable option in these spaces now let me be clear the the idc role i think it's a plum position i'm really excited about it but uh it was about six months in the making um so you know i remember when you when you first started interviewing for you were pretty excited for it six months
ago yeah i it almost felt like it was dead on the vine and and in truth i think it it may have been for a while uh it took until the right position at idc opened up and it took until i had a little bit more of a track record i believe as an independent analyst certainly the ocvs document that you and i created uh helped in that respect um you know most of the blogging that i've been doing been doing you know for the last
12 years has been far less long-term projects far far um less in terms of the the depth right which at which we went and it was a great project i you know and uh you know i i was appreciative of not only the work but the opportunity to sort of spread my wings in that direction um i was asked to do a presentation in the final interview process and uh so i created a document uh lining itself up towards the uh towards the market space that
they had asked me to be working in and uh it was received well and i got an offer from it but it did take a while yeah i went through the interview process with gartner which is uh similar and it's very long uh very intense and i think what our audience would be interested in many folks who watched this kind of look at what we do broadly and think man it would be wonderful to do uh what keith and what matt and steven and the group
does to be able to just basically go to shows and write about this stuff create content around it and the dirty secret is that you have to make money so there's basically only before you know the rise of the independent influence or the independent analyst there was basically only two routes you could go to do this type of thing for a living you can become an evangelist at a software hardware or services company a technology company or you could go the gartner idc route there's only
so many gardner idc positions and there's only so many uh evangelist roles within large software companies and on top of that you're kind of stuck talking about that one talk track and it's not really an independent analyst if you want to be independent if you want to go from blogging to if you want to go from blogging to key for matt the the the you have to figure out a business model today like i i i ca i in my business can support some people from
throwing them independent work you know the ovc uh the ocvs the oracle cloud vmware solutions paper was a great opportunity like you said you got an opportunity to spread your rings show your your analyst muscles and and and capabilities to the folks at like idc time green did the back end work of that spent hundreds of hours of engineering work getting in the lab those projects have to be sold so you have to have the one you have to have opportunity fortunately for me uh i
entered the cto advisor at the right time at the right moment i was at shows for the past few years i was meeting people so this aspect that you're talking about being around the valley absolutely has to be true i spent my own money to go into the valley and have sales meetings to talk to vendors talk to customers curate the business of the cto advisor even before i became the some of those deals have a really really long tail yeah some of them have a
really long tell you know intel is a sponsor of the cto advisor uh data center it took from or the cto advisor hybrid infrastructure it took from i reached out to intel september of 2019 and the contract for that service wasn't signed until july 2020 so almost a full year to cultivate the sale and then let's not talk about the first time you actually receive a paycheck from that so it's uh it's it's a scary scary thing so lessons learned what what were some of the
lessons learned from your previous year of of of search um you know i it's crazy to say this but in most cases it was almost exactly what i anticipated you know it was uh and and i'm not talking about the job search itself but but acting as an analyst for you guys and and for ben over at uh eight gigahome uh required me talking to vendors required me seeing solutions evaluating those solutions um you know taking copious notes and uh and trying to pile those notes
together into a document that not only reads well and and is understandable to the audience we're seeking but uh you know makes sense it's organized it's it even looks in in your case like a cto advisor white paper that's really important um and a lot of that work quite frankly uh particularly in the document processing the the the aesthetic aspect of it was done on your end um but but the writing for me you know i was a lit major in college writing has always been
something i've done and you know i think that i consistently get better at it i think i've developed a voice over the years that you know where my audience understands what i'm saying with a uh with a note of uh sort of maybe some understanding that i tend to use too many words um which believe me you and i talked about more than once um but i don't have to you know write the entirely complex sentences and uh and i just need to be organized and
plain spoken in the documentation i create and hope that it you know hits the the points i needed to hit and that the audience receives it well yeah this this stuff is hard i think one of the biggest challenges with my business is finding matlibs and uh alistair cooks and the likes when there's opportunities to create this great research these these research efforts takes take i don't think people realize it to do a proper research document is tens of thousands of dollars of work like each
paper each research piece of research is tens of thousands of dollars of investment from uh idc gardner et cetera it's not just the analysts as you hand it to there's copy editors there's uh layout there's revisions we have to get the stuff technically reviewed so not only do you know you give me the document you're a smarter engineer and architect than i am but uh just me peer reviewing the document is not enough i have to hire someone else we hire a third person to peer
review our work just so you know it could stand to the muster when we're when it's released it is much much bigger than writing a blog post like writing a blog post i can write a blog post and i can be wrong and i can publish it and i can do an addendum at the end and say hey you know what i was wrong about x y z i don't mind taking the heat when i'm wrong no i don't mind taking this analyst firm you you
can't afford that no you you you can't afford that so i really uh appreciate the rigor you put into the document i'm really excited to see the work that you're going to produce at idc i know it takes a while to get your first piece of documentation or first piece of research published i know it's in the works but it takes a while it is a idc and gardner and all the likes are a machine they'll probably do a little bit better than me i'm looking
forward to hearing the lessons learned uh from you i'm looking forward to that piece first piece of work uh you know let's let's ask the question when should we expect the first uh matt lee byline from garden i have uh i have a couple of docs on my uh on my agenda right now there might be a quick hit that that hits probably [Music] mid-march or so but i think that the first real research project uh is probably due in the beginning of second quarter so
matt i really appreciate you jumping on i appreciate all of the work that you've done for the cto advisor over the past year you have helped make us better uh you've helped give us a voice other than mine which i really appreciate and i think the audience appreciates too for those that want to follow you on the twitters or web how can they find you uh so on twitter it's at m b l e i b and remember i spell my last name wrong it's a
e before i which is weird yes exactly that's an ellis island name yeah um and uh you know the blog po the blog is uh virtually tied to mydesktop.com which is of course way too long uh though i'm likely gonna be spending less time on on the blog because most of my writing is going to go to my friends over at idc well as well as i should i appreciate the folks at idc picking up one of my favorite analysts in the industry if you want
to learn more about the cto advisor you can find us on the web ah matt has my new cto visor cup the ctoadvisor.com is the website at ctoadvisor is my twitter handle and talk to you next cto does thank you
