Facemelting w/Chad Sakac Pt. 2 - The CTO Advisor Podcast

Machine-generated from the episode audio and not hand-corrected, so names and technical terms may be imperfect. The audio is authoritative.

Hey, how's it going? This is Keith Townsend and you're listening to episode 89 of the CTO Advisor podcast on the line. I have Mark May. Mark, how's it going? Doing well, Keith. How you been? You know, I've been good. It feels like we just talked to Chad like two minutes ago. I know, man, power of time. Yeah, the power of time. But in podcast land, it's been a whole week. Chad, how's it going? I'm doing great guys.

89, you should feel very proud. That's incredible. That's a good number. It took a little while to get up to it, but 89 episodes of this thing. And, uh, you know, we need to start planning a mega hundred. Yeah. We do need all the guests that we've ever had on at the same time. Guys, sign me up. That will be, that will actually be good. It'll be interesting to know who I'm working for. Come to a hundred podcasts and how that's changed the podcast.

That would be an interesting podcast. So speaking of a job changes, Chad, you've got this new thing going on for a while. Now you're in pivotal. Yeah, it was, uh, you know, when I was thinking about what I wanted to do next in my career, it's funny, you know, uh, it's only in those moments. We should talk, man. There's lots of opportunity. You know, the, I was thinking, not a job interview. Yeah, totally. That's later. Tell me about your greatest strengths and weaknesses.

There you go. Give me a code sample. No, but, um, I was thinking, what do I want to do next? And, and, uh, you know, I'd been inside a big company for a lot longer than I'd ever expected. So when I came into EMC, it was the, it was via an acquisition of a startup. And I thought I was just going to do startup after startup, you know, and I love working for smaller companies. And, uh, and I ended up working at Dell EMC for 13 years, uh, because I, I fell in love with the company and the people and all that stuff.

And so, and over that time I led, you know, the 4,000 SEs and, and, you know, roughly 2000 people in four and a half billion dollars CPSD business. And I'd learned about, you know, how to, hopefully, I hope people would say, be a good leader to large organizations, but I kind of was going, you know what? I'd like to do something small again, because small and big are very different. And so I was looking around what I wanted to do. And, and one thing that was, uh, you know, in my mind was I really believe that Dell tech is a great place and, and Michael's got a vision for what we're doing in the company.

So as I was weighing, look, I could continue to work in Dell EMC, or I could do something at VMware. I could do something at Pivotal. And it was great to have support from Michael and Pat and, and, and Bill Scannell and, and, and, uh, Rob at Pivotal. The, the one part of the company that gave me a chance to kind of learn a truckload of new stuff, you know, to stretch myself in new ways and challenge myself to work in something smaller again, although Pivotal's, you know, pretty big for something that small, right.

Um, was to join Pivotal. So the choice was kind of a no brainer for me because I got a chance to kind of do the startupy thing, um, and, and do it, uh, and explore new things in a place, uh, where I believe in Dell tech is a larger company. So let's, let's probe at that a little bit. I mean, you came out of the, one of the fastest parts of fastest growing parts of Dell EMC. Whatever initiated the change you have created for yourself are pretty impressive resume.

You know, as I look at the landscape, you have Hitachi. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks, dude. You're making me blush. But seriously, you mean you could, you look at Hitachi, NetApp, uh, Nutanix to a lesser extent in that market that what the, what you've learned, what you had, uh, uh, achieved, you could have pretty much looked outside of Dell EMC. I'm sure for what they could have made the finances work. What, what about Pivotal specifically made you say, you know what, above all the other opportunities, you know, I can get that smaller startup thing inside of another company.

Those things could happen. What about the Pivotal opportunity made you say, you know what, I can, I could, you got the new website. You're rebranded. You've rebranded yourself. Yeah. That's a big pivot. That's a big pivot, a big pivot. So you could have just played it safe. So I've been an infrastructure guy, my whole, uh, you know, I'm a, I'm an engineer, an electrical engineer and comp sci by schooling, but I've always been fascinated by the intersection of the tech and the customer.

But just, you know, everyone's career has components where, you know, you kind of like fall into it in a sense. Right. And so, you know, my first job was working for an engineering firm, but I was an IT dude, right? Like deploying Novell, uh, 311, uh, NDS. 0, for those of you, you remember it and, uh, you know, IPX networking and all that jazz. Right. Getting near server. Yeah. So you remember that, right? And so, um, yeah, we're getting old.

Like that's the moral of that story. But, you know, I kind of fell into being an infrastructure IT guy just by that first job that I was doing. And, um, and then, you know, I went to, you know, a series of startups and the startups were infrastructure domain. And then I, in Dell EMC have been in the infrastructure domain and infrastructure domain is fascinating, but I just, I realized whatever I do next, you know, you need some change in your life. So I was like, what is something that for me is a, is a bold new frontier.

And I realized like, there's so much interesting stuff that's happening above the infra domain and the, and the binding areas between the infrastructure domain and the, and the application domain. So if you look at above the infra domain, what's happening inside application services, what's happening in functions, lambdas, event streams, what's happening in how people write software, um, what's happening in all of those domains. And then you have interesting stuff that is change in the mating surfaces. So the places where infra and apps meet, namely inside the Kubernetes and container ecosystem.

And I'm like, that is interesting. Like, it's just, I don't know about you guys, but a big factor for me in what I do, you know, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm thankful. And I, I've got a roof over my head and I can put food on the table for my family and my kids. But once you pass a certain point, a big factor for most people, certainly for me is you jump out of bed when you're learning something, you're growing, you're challenging yourself and you're just curious.

So like, I'm curious about the domain. And so then if you think about it and said, okay, forget about Dell tech, just forget about Dell tech completely. And you said, what are the interesting companies that are out there that are focused on how people build new apps in new ways, changing the way that people write software? Who would you, who would you list? There's a whole bunch of companies that I can't think of the name of. Yeah. Like, so, so I'll give you a bunch, right?

So there's a whole bunch of like Kubernetes startups that are, yeah, exactly. A ton of those. There's a bunch of companies that are working on projects like Istio that are interesting. There's a bunch of companies that are doing stuff around something called low code or no code. Mendix is a really neat one where you use like, you know, GUI driven programming models, right? Didn't they do that in that movie, Hackers? That's always how they, they joke about hacking, right?

It's like, I'll grab this code snippet here and I'll write, but, um, but Pivotal would be on that list. Pivotal would be on that list. I've, I've, uh, whenever I focus on kind of like the infrastructure portions of what it takes to run Pivotal, people remind me, you know what? You're focusing on the wrong thing because Pivotal is one of the, one of those technologies. When you're talking about cloud foundry and all of the supporting parts of it, that really changes how applications are written.

And really when you, when you talk about, I did an ebook for Normada and we talked about using Kubernetes versus a full path layer. And, you know, Pivotal is that quick on-ramp to being able to write cloud native applications, like right out the box. I always call it like a training wheels, right? You do it this way. It'll keep you focused. In the end, if you do what you're supposed to do, you'll end up with success, which is I think what a lot of people need when they're starting that journey, right?

You could go a billion different ways and having a clear path to walk is one of the reasons for success. So it's fascinating because if you look at it, Pivotal's history, you know, started with cloud foundry and now that's just a part of it, right? So it's this application service that represents the curated training wheels that you described, Mark, right? Which means a PaaS, a platform says, give me your code and I'll take it from there. I'll not just compile it, I'll build all the dependencies.

I'll figure out how load balancing and routers work. I'll figure out how to containerize it. I'll figure out how to deploy it onto the IaaS. You just give me your source code. Yeah, I call it the original serverless. When I first, uh, yeah, I had that, me and Mark had this argument that I say, you know what, Pivotal is serverless and Mark at the time didn't agree with me. It's, it's, it's, it's frustrating because again, I said this on the last call, I'll keep saying it, people struggle with the word and it's not for, right?

So we think that you're going to have container as a service abstractions. You'll have PaaS, platform application services as an abstraction and you'll have functions and event, uh, so PaaS, right? So serverless, and it was interesting because people get religion about one or the other and it's invariably, you're going to use some Kubernetes, you're going to use some PaaS, you're going to use some functions. And, and the, the one thing that is true, however, is that the more, the higher up the abstraction stack you can go, even all the way to SaaS, right?

The, the faster you go and the most, more focused you are on the things that matter the most. And that doesn't mean you should put everything up in the, in a, in serverless or, or, or PaaS, lots of things that belong in containers and Kubernetes. That's why I actually, you know, I'm, I'm really excited about what we're doing on PKS, what we're doing around PaaS, what we're doing around PFS. It's not going to be one or the other. It's going to be an, and it's, I'll give you an interesting thing that I've just been watching another human beings journey.

So you guys know Kelsey Hightower at Google. I mean, you've got to know at least of him, right? Yeah, we've had him on the podcast before you joined, we just need to get Kelsey on again. It's been, he's, he's, he's, he's legendary. Like I admire that guy out of the yin yang. I can't wait to get to know him better and meet him, but I follow him on Twitter, right? He wrote a tweet once that was interesting because he said, because, you know, he was one of the primary evangelists for, for Kubernetes.

He basically said, Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms. And people were like, whoa, you're blowing my mind. And he's, he's right. Which is that the container layer is a sub layer, like a Russian doll. But if you're going to build, you know, function to venting or platform, uh, platform service on top of it. But then the other thing that was interesting is he then went through his own journey where he's exploring functions and, and serverless. And he started to go, you know, alt, if you look at his Twitter stream, he started to make comments like, man, ultimately the dream platform is one where you just give it your code and it runs it.

Yep. And, and, you know, it's interesting for someone who's been focused for so long on Kubernetes, what he just realized in that tweet was the power of the next abstraction up. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the further you move up that stack, the harder it is to think about it, but that's, that's always. So Mark, we had the CTO of, uh, New York times on. He talked about that pivot, Nick Rockwell. Yeah. Nick Rockwell.

He talked about the difficulty of that pivot. You know, they, they built their crossword app completely serverless. And one of the challenges he said he had to get with organizationally is to get his developers, not, not the, not the infrastructure folks, but his developers to get them out of the weeds and getting them thinking at that higher level of abstraction. So, you know, whether it's Kubernetes or pass, try to take, you know, when you take away the, our toys of all the knobs, we, we get kind of upset and it's hard for us to make that mental transition.

But I love my nerd knobs. I mean, they're the best. Yeah. You know, it goes back to the last episode with Chad, when we talked about the early days of VMware. No, it's going to fail. No, it's going to fail. That type of reaction, I think is just human nature. Whenever there's a shift in how you do things or how you're going to do things, people, a lot of people, not everybody just, you know, they kind of say, ah, and they pucker up a little bit and don't know how to handle that.

Yeah, it, uh, it's another thing that I think is fascinating for me as I joined the new company, right? The culture originates out of an interesting idea. So one thing that is fascinating is Pivotal is built off of open source software and companies, companies that are built off of open source software, they're ridiculously hard business models, right? Because, you know, it's not like, um, it's not like your IP is closed here. You go here, here's where you get it. The IP is inherently open, right?

So you've got companies that have built around open source software that are like, we'd run a service on it. So that's like Google and Facebook and their business model works great because their business isn't the software. It's what they do with the software, right? Then you've got other companies that say we license support. So that's, you know, you know, Red Hat and other examples, right? Um, Portworx is an example, um, Pivotal is different. So we sell like the, here's our enterprise distribution of Cloud Foundry.

Here's our enterprise distribution of Kubernetes and PKS, right? But the thing that's fascinating is the company was born where one of the things that we do is teach people how to write software in new ways. So in other words, a core part of what we do is technology, but a core part is methodology. And one thing that is so fun about showing up to a Pivotal office, every office, every day is filled, not with Pivotal employees, but with customers who are there learning how to write software in new ways.

So I have a question about that. When they leave, when they leave, does it stick? Yeah, so in fact, it's awesome as many of them when they leave, they actually build their own labs, Pivotal labs like thing, wherever they go. So so like when you go to visit Ford, Ford has got a place called Ford labs, right? When you go and you visit, you know, Vanguard, they've got like a labs environment, because they learned that basically that the approaches of paired programming of the agile methodology that we use, the way that we have kind of customer intent driven design, all of those things are like stick with them pretty permanently.

What does happen is that periodically, those people come back to like recharge mark, because everything's continuously evolving, right? So like there's new tools, new techniques. It's, it's, it's really, really fascinating. By the way, if you get a chance, anyone, this is an open invite, and you look up, like a Pivotal office in your neighborhood near you, go and come for a visit, say hello, say Chad Sackett said to come visit, you'll, you'll something really cool, which is, you'll go in and you'll go like, Oh, my God, who are all these people?

And you'll, you know, you shouldn't interrupt them while they're working, but to tell you like what they're working on, I'm working for HSBC, and I'm working on a new mobile app, I'm at Boeing, and I'm designing, you know, new airplane, you know, control systems. Road trip to Chicago. Yeah, I have a I have a meeting this Thursday down in Chicago, I should, I should schedule some time that it's not it's only a few blocks away from the lab here in Chicago is in a merchandise mart, and my meeting is only a few blocks away, I should just come in a little early and visit.

And there's a Garrett's popcorn right there. You know, there's a Gary's. I'm close enough to Chicago. There's a Garret's popcorn everywhere. Yeah. Their standups are really interesting. If you can make it down for their morning stand up and their breakfast. That's, that's, that's part of that's part of it. That's part of the technique, right. So a stand up basically starts at like 905. And they're very time limited, because like one thing that everyone hates is meetings, right.

So, but basically having everybody do a morning stand up that's part of a team that's working on something before they break apart and go and do their work. And basically say, here are the problems that I'm going to solve today. Here's what we're going to go off and do as a pair. And you see the technique on how they do it like a speed round. It's pretty cool. Alright, so we're a little bit over and want to respect your time for the second episode chat.

For those who didn't listen to last week's episode, where can people find you? So yeah, guys, thank you for having me, first of all. So and I will hopefully be on much sooner than a year from now. And I want to be on that hundredth episode. So sign me up. But if people want to stalk me, they can find me on Twitter at s a k a c c. io. And then Mark, where can people stalk you? You can stalk me on the Twitters is at Sensi storage.

And you can find all my other various links around there too. So in the show notes of this episode, you'll find the RSS feed and as well as the iTunes feed, text that to your mom or your dad, maybe your sister or brother. What about Google? Why are you hating on Google? Oh, you do you could Google it either way. Share the podcast. That's all I care that they don't have to be technologists to enjoy the soothing sounds of Mark May and the CTO.

If you have a newborn baby, they love the sound of her voice. The dulcet tones of your Yes, it puts them to sleep all the time. Yes. Until then, we'll talk to you next CTO advisor podcast. Thanks.