Evan Kirstel - The B2B Influencer Interview Keith Townsend @CTOAdvisor
Transcript
[Music] hey i'm here with keith the cto advisor so i'm going to start it out controversial because every cto advisor we have to be have a little controversy please let's do it and you've credited me three times already even or evan because it's a twitter handle we only know each other by twitter handles we do cto advisor is pretty good and even is i want to say even even though it's not spell even if it's evan and cursed out we we've been following each other for
years probably yes and yet have never been introduced really never met so that welcome to the world of social media right yeah welcome to the world of social media i've seen you at like commvault goal etc but we've never actually sat down had a conversation this is very very civilized i just love your setup for the people on audio who are listening i guess we have 18 22 followers now tell us where i am exactly describe our setup so we're inside a 20 20 28 foot
in length 27 uh flying cloud 27 front bed which means that uh we're in an airstream it is about uh a hundred and eighty square feet gorgeous it's stunning it's beautiful it is a machine the if the people want to see pictures of it you can check out my twitter feed i have uh plenty of pictures but we're located uh in the campsite in uh well we're just south of boston right we are we're at wet southwest it's a gorgeous day you are in the uh
the uh king and queen of campsites here this is an amazing place normandy farms yeah and tell us how has the first two weeks of your journey been what what's been the highlights low lights all right so low light low low point was last week when we figured out that you cannot cool off a 180 foot airstream with one air conditioner when the temperature hits 80 degrees you have to start out the day cold in the day cold now do 120 in texas right that is
going to be entry july in texas is going to be interesting for us uh high point is actually uh uh with exchange goddess uh puma smith we had lobster her mom and her dad are literally heroes literally heroes but now liv will live with her and uh her mom cooked us whole lobsters that's awesome that was amazing so so how many more weeks do you have left on this magnificent uh road trip 11 weeks 11 weeks so is this what you envisioned with the the idea
you came up with last year to go on the road with a in the you know in the middle of a pandemic with an rv and and meet people like where did this amazing idea come from so it was my wife's idea uh we she had become part of my we call it the v community we had dinner last night with uh luigi danakos and his lovely wife mara and the concept was basically hey let's get back out and talk to people right uh uh meet
people we haven't met before reconnect get sponsors to sponsor all of this and just have a great time again because we can't do what the conference is living the dream this is fantastic so it's like no man land in in real life um and what about the tech setup here like we're on the camera here you've got obviously wi-fi at the campsite you got all kinds of 4g 5g has it been tough to take the show on the road it has there is has not been
without challenges the biggest challenges is that we do video so we're we're shooting this in 4k right now right and consistently i've had to download downgrade the video to 1080p so that i can upload it over lte to my editors because uh you're not gonna upload 16 gig of data over any lte i have a uh grandfather at t count account so at t has been fairly kind to me i have about uh we've been on the road for two weeks and i have uh used
about 300 gigs of data amazing lte amazing now you're you're sponsored for this trip tell us about your sponsor and and uh that relationship with the kind of content you're creating we're still looking for a named sponsor so if anybody out there want to become the name sponsor of this year but we all we do have two we have three different sponsorship levels uh similar to our conference we have gold uh which faction inc is one of the gold sponsors they're a storage uh a cloud
storage vendor very uh good uh supporters of the cto advisor and netapp our platinum sponsors netapp we did a video in the tesla i think we saw that right great great greg nearman uh we did a video in a tesla talking about ai and cloud so you really blended your your personal and professional life congratulations do you think this is the next normal for a lot of people kind of taking their professional life and and just maybe hitting the road being more connected to other people
not necessarily just at big events but in in small more intimate settings yeah i think this is the future of of work and i know you talk about the future work a lot yeah and i think this is the future of work i've we've run into a a plethora of full-time rvers who have become full-time rvers over the past year and they're working we today is laundry day and we ran into a woman who said oh i have to run and get my laptop because i'm
technically at work and she's doing laundry that's fantastic now what about as a creator you're a writer you're a blogger you know a videographer do you find you're more creative on the road like what kind of of content are you sort of creating on this journey so i don't have enough time to create all the different types of content i would like to create one of the things that i thought would happen was that uh i just grabbed the camera we do a bunch of video
content and then publish that content but there's so much missing from that when i uh talked to i talked to uh two entrepreneurs in akron ohio uh manufacturers competing against china super interesting story and we captured a 15-minute conversation but there's probably a good two or three blog posts right of of just perspective that i've learned from them so it's a combination primarily blog post in video fantastic now what about uh social media we met on social media you know years before we were actually formally
introduced um what value do you find in social both in documenting this journey and connecting with people like what's been your experience as kind of a social creature in particular on this trip well you can't beat real-time feedback yeah yeah even twitter twitter etc and i you i cannot thank the twitter followers as much enough when they were helping guide me through this rv purchase i've never i've never remembered you almost crowdsourced your uh yeah the election selection of all the gear and the setup and
i remember reading it like oh this is going to be really fun to watch for for better or worse but obviously things worked out well yeah and uh you know at first i had in mind a specific type of rig and set up and people were like you're crazy you know twitter so people have opinions you're crazy why would you ever do that and then there's a huge audio video community there as well and they've helped out a lot that's awesome and so um you know
you have another few weeks kind of then what like are you is this going to be a semi-permanent feature where you're just sort of on the road and traveling around to events or what do you think so we've talked about that a lot and melissa again is the brainchild of this and she challenged me even on this and she said why don't we make a data center or why don't we make this a data center on wheels oh now it gets interesting and uh you know
me the technologies i'm like whoa slow your roll we can't even figure out air conditioning and you want to have maybe it'll be a small salon yeah you'll get a 5g sponsor to put something on your roof and that's the idea the guy from 18t just connected with me the other day but the uh her concept was is that we basically go from city to city gradually build the data center on wheels and then end up at a big conference say vmworld and then we're on
the show floor vmworld showing the thing like we've done the road show and now we're at vmworld we plug in the next piece and light up the the it's really comfortable in this airstream i mean i hope airstream is sponsoring because they're getting so much free pr but you know people can come in chat have a coffee it's really spacious i'm here on the couch you can't see it but it's really comfortable what a great workspace in terms of you know uh your your uh your
remote office yeah and it's pretty uh uh jeremiah owen we should have attacked uh tagged him gave me the he said keith you have to do an airstream right but a lot of people are using this as their remote office in their backyards right and it is it's a fixed as a fixed thing and i see why it's it's a a wonderful place to be creative like right the beautiful light uh the aesthetic just lends itself to being creative well i love it well i'm gonna
turn off my audio in a minute but thanks so much we'll do a a quick video shoot as well so people can get a feel for the airstream and and uh and meet keith in the setup but uh great to see you and we'll continue chatting in person all right for those on video even what where can folks find you uh i'm mr twitter so you can always find me on twitter at evan kurstel and i you know just retweet or tweet it at keith and
he'll be sure to to hook you up and um really just congratulations on on such an amazing project now i don't know if i just said even or evan just a second it's evan but i don't know which one i said but it's evan and we started out uh uh i i have a i have problem spelling e-v-a-n right is throughout many literally evan keith is a little a little more simple yeah and you're gonna see you're gonna go out to boston check check out the
sites the history and i can't wait to see your tweets so all right check you guys uh next video
