Author: hilary

Show Notes

Rajesh Raman (Twitter, LinkedIn) is the Chief Architect for SignalFx. What does that mean? In this episode, Rajesh and Ian dive into his role and how he focuses on not just the implementation of systems and processes at SignalFx, but also the best strategies and practices that will be needed months down the line. They also go into Rajesh’s history at Google and Facebook, and discuss cloud technology and the future of the industry.

Topics Discussed: Cloud platforms, app development, innovation, coding, monitoring, observability, microservices.

Introducing Rajesh — (1:15)

• Rajesh’s history with computers dates back to seventh grade and he taught himself programming on a computer that is now in the Computer Museum.
• Grew up in Bangalore, India, which is now considered the Silicon Valley of India.
• Has a Ph.D. in computer science and always had a sense that no knowledge was wasted.

What Rajesh is working on a SignalFx — (4:43)

• SignalFx’s CMO Tom Butta is also sitting in on the interview.
• In most other companies, the duties of the chief architect might be folded into the job of the CTO.
• The chief architect strategically looks at the technology roadmap to determine what the company should be working on six or 12 months down the line.

Rajesh’s role with customers — (8:12)

• Primarily the CTO is focused on the external-facing duties while the chief architect maintains a focus on internal functions.
• Tom: “The fact that we have someone whose sole focus is on the company’s architecture has enabled us to stay ahead.”

Why don’t more companies align the way SignalFx does? — (10:20)

• It’s kind of like making a movie and the role of a producer. Some producers are much more engaged in the way things get done, others sit back a little bit.
• Because SignalFx is focused so much on engineering, for them it makes sense to have engineers more involved in certain aspects of the business.

What SignalFx does — (12:25)

• SignalFx is a “cloud environment visibility platform.”
• Back in the day when cloud technology was relatively new, specific businesses had to build up the expertise to deploy applications at scale, to build them to operate them. Now, in the age of public clouds, any large application, system or company with a public strategy needs to do that, too.
• “People have been monitoring systems for as long as systems have been built. What has changed is that cloud environments make monitoring more complicated because they are larger in scale and scope.”
• What SignalFx has built is a platform that gives real-time insight into how your platforms are operating.

Who SignalFx works with —(15:35)

• The companies SignalFx works with spans the length and breadth of the industry.
• “It’s not so much the company itself or what industry they’re in, but rather their maturity in their digital transformation.”
• In larger organizations, there are observability groups deploying SignalFx to other engineers in the organization and SignalFx offers tools to manage usage.

How observability differs from monitoring — (19:50)

• Monitoring is a function that has always been around.
• “When you’re monitoring a system you always want to know is it up or is it down? Monitoring is just trying to answer that question. But that’s only the first step.”
• You also need to know why things are up or down and how to quickly fix a problem if one occurs.
• “We monitor SignalFx using SignalFx. We’re one of our biggest users.”

Trends to watch for — (23:30)

• Services you have to monitor are becoming much more numerous and the lifetime of components continues to shrink.
• “The universe of monitorables and observables is growing very large.”
• Collecting data used to be the problem, now it’s all about managing data.
• “The future of this space is going to be proactively telling you where a problem might be occurring.”
• Microservices are also going to be important to observe and understand.
  • You take a very large problem and break it into small problems and solutions you can deploy individually. This gives you flexibility, but it also creates a much harder architecture to monitor.
• Head-based sampling is a random sampling of data that many companies are using.
• SignalFx, on the other hand, traces every single data point.
• SignalFx has a series of Ebooks and papers.

How is real-time cloud monitoring evolving? — (31:50)

• SignalFx is currently the only real-time monitoring system available.
• “We look at our dashboards kind of like the instruments on an airplane. Real-time systems are critical because when you make a change to a system, you want to see what is happening and changing.”
• If you’re having a flash sale that lasts five minutes, and in that five minutes you make $2 million dollars, if something goes wrong and you can’t figure out what it is for two minutes, you lose out on a real amount of money. Real-time monitoring helps to prevent that kind of problem.
• “The real-time nature of monitoring is becoming a critical capability in operating large environments.”
• There is going to be a lot more automation that is needed in this kind of real-time monitoring.

Rajesh’s past at Google and Facebook — (33:15)

• Rajesh was at Google in 2002 and Facebook in 2009 and worked as a software engineer.
  • • He was “employee number 400-ish” at Google.
• “At Google, things were really buzzing. They were just taking off.”
• The number of machines was exploding day by day as Google built its infrastructure.
• “I got my hands dirty building real systems.”
• Even though Rajesh worked with a lot of big names in the tech industry, he was always impressed with how open and accessible they were. There was also a culture where you could debate ideas to find what works best.

Lightning Round — (49:10)

• Slack is the most fun app.
• Rajesh is learning to play the guitar
• Advice: “Your job is to make sure the right decisions get made, but you might not need to make those decisions. You have to create an environment where the best decisions can come to light.”
• Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin series
• Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History

Show Notes

Just because you work in the blue-collar world doesn’t mean you have no need for tech and artificial intelligence. In fact, Gabe Batstone (LinkedIn, Twitter), the CEO of contextere, believes that blue-collar workers can benefit from AI more than most.

In this episode, Gabe and Ian dive into the ways that contextere is delivering relevant information right into the hands of the men and women working on job sites around the world. They discuss how AI and AR will continue to grow and change, and the ways that both will continue to make job sites and the employees on them safer and more efficient than ever before.   

Topics Discussed: Blue-collar work, AI, AR, technology, innovation, mobile

Why start contextere? — (1:55)

• It started with asking a number of questions: Why did the technology revolution leave behind the workers who work the hardest? Why are people dying on the job? And why is there under- or unemployment?
• Gabe came from a blue-collar background and he thought there was an opportunity to combine AI and the blue-collar industry to answer those questions and come up with solutions.

Who contextere works with — (3:50)

• Founded contextere 3.5 years ago and the idea was Ironman vs. Skynet and the fear that technology would mean the end of work. There was a transition that moved away from fear and more toward an awareness that humans and technology would need to come together to augment work.
• “The future of work does involve humans.”
• Most jobs involve 20-30 distinct tasks, some of which AI can help with. But AI cannot do all those tasks as well as a human.
• “We believe we can create ironmen and ironwomen by combining the best of technology with the best of humanity.”
• Computers are good at analysis, but humans understand judgment and bring curiosity to their work.
• “We’re going to create better jobs where people get paid for what’s between their ears versus what is in their hands.”

How the need for tech shapes different parts of the world — (7:50)

• For the foreseeable future, there will continue to be a need for “warm hands on cold steel” everywhere.
• There are three differences: Technical infrastructure, cultural interactions, and demographics.

Gabe’s time in Afghanistan — (10:00)

• Gabe spent time in Kabul and he had the chance to see the impact technology had on the residents there.
• “It was amazing to see the relationship that people had to technology.”
• Access isn’t limited just in places you would think. Even in rural Canada and other first-world countries, there are limits to access to technology, the internet and other IT.
• 3G, 4G, and 5G are not as ubiquitous as we may think and that affects people’s ability and access.  

Explaining the idea of “warm hands on cold steel” — (12:50)

• Gabe and his team spent a lot of time watching people on the job and asked the question, “How do we use AI to empower people?” To find the answer, Gabe and his co-founder spent time in the industry, on top of skyscrapers being built, at the factories where planes were being made, to find out how to augment the life and work of employees.
• There was always a checklist that is given to any person doing a job regardless of what their skill or knowledge was and they were expected to just do the work.
• What Gabe did with contextere was put the human first and find out what information they need, what relevant data would be helpful for them to do the job correctly and safely.

The idea of connected devices and the IoT — (17:17)

• It’s impossible to keep training and all the materials up to date because of the rate of change.
• There is an opportunity for technology to come in and bridge the gaps between needing to train people and having technology that can do certain tasks.

How far away are we from augmented reality? — (20:35)

• There are niche applications of AR, but there are a lot of technical challenges and cost factors that make widespread use of AR prohibitive.
• We could still be years before we have functional wearables, but the industry and the tech will grow and evolve every year.

Integration within blue-collar AI — (22:50)

• Access to the data is critical.
• Through APIs you can get access to data fairly simple.
• Trust can be a barrier to entry because companies need to grant access to outside entities like contextere to make their systems better.
• Sometimes when people see these kinds of solutions it becomes an academic exercise and they try to get every kind of data. It should be more about finding the minimum amount of information to get the outcome you want.

Mobile Integration —  (25:00)

• “We weren’t about the hardware, we’re about the data. It doesn’t matter what device the user has, the important thing is what you are trying to tell the person.”
• “Get focused on the outcome and making that outcome better every day, every month, every year. Eventually, the return on investment will pay for itself.”

Identifying the stakeholders involved in the implementation — (27:30)

• The value proposition is driven by operational impact. So the operational people have to care and be bought in.
• Gabe suggests starting small. Have a vision, but start in a safe, controlled environment so you can prove out your use case.
• You don’t just need buy-in, you need intelligence and knowledge the stakeholders bring as to where and how the product fits in.
• It starts with collaboration and engagement with the customer.

Lightning Round — (30:00)

• TripIt is Gabe’s favorite app
• Junk mail filtering is his favorite form of AI
• Toronto Maple Leafs
• Plays hockey and tennis
• Best advice: “Play in traffic. We underestimate how much value there is in just being engaged.”
• Borders matter when you have a company outside the U.S. and are trying to work within the U.S. Having subsidiaries on the ground in the U.S. makes it much easier.
  • In a B2B environment, the idea that you can satisfy a customer from far away is a big risk.

Show Notes

After a career in app development and with experience as a CTO, Josh Knell (LinkedIn, Twitter) joined Lambda School to help change the way students think about coding, school, and learning. As the director of instruction, Josh is constantly innovating and adjusting the Lambda curriculum in order to make sure that his students are as prepared as possible when they graduate from the program and enter the real world.

In this episode, Josh and Ian discuss the challenges associated with creating and maintaining an online coding boot camp designed to change the face of education. Plus they dive into what it means to have a community of well-trained graduates and how Josh’s past experience as a CTO helps him excel in his role today.

Topics Discussed: CSS, innovation, growth, development, education, technology, CTO, coding, HTML, app development.

Introducing Josh — (1:20)

• Josh started building computers at age 11 and he thought he could build a better, cheaper computer that the one he saw in a shop down the street, so that’s what he did.
• Warcraft was his game.

What Josh does at Lambda School — (3:00)

• Josh is the Head of Instruction, which is a new role that grew out of the rapid growth Lambda has been experiencing. He moved into the role after spending more than a year as a web instructor.
• “We needed a true north for how instruction at Lambda School should look.”
• Josh works with program managers who in turn work with instructors working with students.
• “We’re teaching them how to be better instructors.”
• Many of the teachers have an IT or tech background but no experience teaching, so finding someone who has the skills to both teach effectively and actually do all the technical things they are teaching has been like searching for a unicorn. So Josh is helping to train the instructors.

Why is it important to be building Lambda School? — (5:25)

• “We’re income accelerators more than we’re teaching students or creating technologists. We’re trying to change lives by changing income trajectory.”
• Technology is the lowest hanging fruit.
• “It’s not an easy thing to do to train people and give them confidence.”   
• Josh didn’t come from education, he taught on the side of his career in IT for fun.
• Lambda is trying to incentivize people to come to the school using income share agreements or a living stipend. That’s what draws people in, but what makes them stay is the curriculum.
• “People come into Lambda School thinking it’s a boot camp, it’s online and it’s ISA, but that’s only one-fourth of the story.”
• There is a community of students around the world who are trying to fill in the gaps that exist in the programming world.
• “We’re trying to create students who can help you immediately. We’re doing things that boot camps can’t cover and we can because of our ISAs and our structure.”

Why is the instruction at Lambda School different? — (9:35)

• It begins with the mental barrier of the financial barrier being removed.
• “The grit level in a Lambda School student is above and beyond the grit you see in others.”
• When you have a hunger to learn HTML and CSS, the lessons become 10-times more impactful.
• “We go to hiring partners and ask them what they wish they had in someone they needed to hire, and we teach that. …We are looking toward the hiring managers and what they need, not just what our instructors can teach.”

The community of graduates — (14:50)

• The Lambda School graduates are on fire out in the world and they naturally come together.
• “We started to realize the power of our own community.”

Making sure students are set up for success — (19:30)

• Lambda has a mastery-based progression built into the program called Flex.
  • • If you fail an aspect of the program, instead of having to wait to try again for an entire cycle, you can try again immediately. This opportunity is what sets Lambda apart in the way of preparedness.
• Sprint challenges, project-based work, being able to actually build minimum-viable products are all bars Lambda students have to reach in order to complete their education.
• Lambda offers a lot of resources to help students prepare for and learn from interviews, including doing play-by-play style interview analysis.
• Not everyone is ready to hire a Lambda School graduate, so there are still fit problems that need to be solved.
• “We don’t have a 100% hire rate, but that’s our goal.”
• When students don’t land a job, are not good at interviewing or there are some other problems that make it hard for the student to get hired, Lambda offers career coaches and helps to those students.
• If you lose your job, Lambda offers lifetime career support to its students.
• “As long as we’re in business, we’ll be supporting our students.”
• “We love university graduates because that’s kind of like a grit badge.”
• Lambda tells students that it is investing in them, and that is a confidence booster for students who want to go from the sandwich shop to a developer career.

Driving innovation at Lambda — (29:45)

• Innovation is top of mind especially when you are creating everything from scratch for your team.
• The risk of investing in your employees is scary because if they become smarter they’re going to ask for more money or go somewhere else.
• Lambda constantly reinvests in itself because they believe that their own people will be the drivers of innovation.
• “Educate your people and form them into what you want your company to look like.”
• Total mental buy-in from the executive board needs to happen to allow innovation to occur.

Looking back on Josh’s time as a CTO — (36:15)

• There was no empathy for technology among executives. Josh wished he was a better salesman in his approach to technology.

Lightning Round — (37:40)

• Josh built a funeral app in ActionScript3.
• He’s been involved in James Cameron’s 3-D Deep Dive, Pepsico.com, and Campbells Soup’s website.
• Did app development for Donny Osmond.
• Autosleep is the most fun app.
• Monday.com
• Kim Scott’s Radical Candor
• Park City is the best one-day getaway
• Josh is a banjo player
• Most excited about the future of CSS
• Advice: “It’s not the end of the world if the website goes down.”
  • “If you are coming from a software background, do not neglect deployment.”
• “If you don’t build, you fall behind.”

Mentions

• Education Trends
• Sapiens

Show Notes

Marene Allison (LinkedIn) has seen a lot in her career and her life. She was one of the first women to graduate from West Point and then went on to a role at the FBI bringing down some of the largest drug rings on the East Coast. Eventually, she moved on to the private sector to head up security for A&P Foods and today, she is the  Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer for Johnson & Johnson.

On this episode of IT Visionaries, Marene discusses her entire journey, as well as everything she’s learned, what it means to lead IT and security for a worldwide organization, what the future of AI and consumer privacy looks like, and much more.

Topics Discussed: Intelligence, security, AI, machine learning, data, West Point, military, women in tech, leadership, FBI, tech, digital threats, cybersecurity

Introducing Marene and her extensive background — (1:20)

• First FBI special agent on to be interviewed on IT Visionaries.
• As a special agent in the FBI, I was working on applicants in San Diego, CA. Also worked on the terrorism squad.
• “At the time terrorism was a very physical event and so the security was around the physical world.”
• There is still a physical threat, but today there is a greater online threat.
• It used to be you needed to go to another nation’s sovereign land to attack them, now those attacks can happen online. This changed how nations look at sovereignty, terrorism, and crime in general.

Threats in the digital world — (8:30)

• Digital threats were not as visible until the laws requiring the disclosure of attacks were changed.
• Probably the most important thing, even in the cyber world is know thy enemy.
• Signatures and other identifiers are available that will give you information into who is attacking or hacking you. By finding that it will also help inform your level of response.

What type of behavior or endgame are attackers looking for? — (10:50)

• A couple of things are happening. In some cases, you see that there has been exposure and hacking of data that has been linked back to China. But that data never makes it to the street or onto the dark web. So what is being done with that data because it’s not technically disruptive, at least not yet?
• On the other hand, certain viruses are designed and unleashed to cause mass destruction
• Investigators do see things in the environment that makes them question things and environmental clues can provide breaks in hacking cases.

What percentage of cyber attacks are for financial gain? — (15:15)

• Most of the criminal element of cyber is based on finding data for money, and not necessarily even for extortion. Data, in general, is just being monetized.
• 90% of email that comes into Johnson & Johnson is stripped off and filtered out because it’s mostly phishing and malware.
• “Today, sophisticated technologies are what makes me excited to be a CISO. We get to work with end users, design new systems, …and I have a huge cloud and machine learning infrastructure to look at data and find the needle in the haystack. So When the invisible man comes in to try to steal my data, I man never see him come in, but I can see the impressions on the carpet. We can identify them, surround them, and then prevent them from moving and taking any data.”
• Marene has been able to combine all the experience from the military, the FBI, electrical engineering and I’ve been able to find the perfect job.

What does information security look like at Johnson & Johnson? — (18:15)

• Johnson & Johnson is a global company with a high risk profile.
• “I enjoy making things simple and keeping things simple. …It’s about the diversity of thought and including everyone’s thoughts into the conversation.”
• The J&J credo is about coming up with solutions that are good for our customers, doctors, patients and all who use the products. The business of J&J is all about solving some of the most important and hardest medical problems in the world and to do that the systems have to be secure.

Growing responsibilities of CIOs and CTOs and what it means to blend information security and IT — (20:20)

• Information security has one foot in IT, one foot in the business and one foot in governance. It’s a three-legged operation.
• The reality is that the mission is to protect the company and the business data of customers. That could mean being at odds with IT or with the business. Ultimately it comes down to business risk.
• Everyone always wants perfect security, but perfect security may not be what’s needed. As long as the data is protected, even if it’s in an experiment, then you’re doing the right thing.

The best way to give everyone a seat at the table — (23:30)

• “ It gets down to diversity and inclusion and realizing who are the stakeholders needed to make the right decision. If you only have sales and marketing people, you’ll make a sales and marketing decision. If you only have IT people, you make an IT decision. You need a blend.”
• There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to the responsibilities of CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, etc.
• CIOs and CISOs can transfer skills and experience from one industry to the next.
• Marene learned from experience location security versus cybersecurity and more.
• How do you move a million dollars in cash? That was a problem Marene had to solve when she was working in a different industry. There are different tech and security needs depending on the business you’re in.
• You have to understand the business your in and the needs that go with it and it has to be part of the business strategy.

Integrating technology into the company — (27:00)

• Integrating technology has to be a big part of the business strategy.
• You have to look at what are you purchasing — technology, intellectual capital, molecule, etc — and then make sure you don’t lose sight of that. Then you need to strategize around those purchases.
• “When it comes down to the special sauce of what makes a company a company, it’s up to the business to realize what needs to happen.”
• There are many more options today and bringing acquisitions into a company can be easier. Using the cloud makes it 10 times easier than it ever was in the past.

Looking at innovation internally — (29:45)       

• “We do everything everywhere. J&J has innovation centers around the world.”
• The innovation centers help grow the industry itself, not just the company. There are smart R&D folks working on innovative technologies in-house. From the IT side, many of the technologies that are the latest and greatest can be used, but with things like an outside cloud, J&J would rather use a bigger, specific internal cloud.
• “AI might be out on the street, but it’s not where I want it to be yet for use in primetime.”
• “We can get lost in shiny objects in IT. But at the end of the day if you’re not doing IT 101 — if you’re not patching and fixing minor problems— those oversights end up being as much a vulnerability as not having the latest and greatest tech to utilize.”

How AI must mature before implementation can happen — (33:35)

• “ If you look at the maturity curve it’s at a 0.5 and we need it to be at a 6 on the maturity scale, especially depending on what you’re utilizing it for. In healthcare, we need to be sure. It has to be exact.”
• “AI sounds so good, it sounds sexy, but it’s a marketing term at this point. But when will we get real, true intelligence, and what intelligence are we going to use and trust?”
• Any time you do data science you have to do the curation of the data, you have to make sure you are curating the right data to you have to make sure it’s accurate.
• There can be unconscious bias when curating based on who is programming the curation.
• “I trust the data more than I trust the programmer.”
• Things like data ethics, which we haven’t even touched the surface of yet, eventually will be taught at universities in the future.

The emphasis on customer experience, is it good or bad? — (37:10)

• There are pros and cons to everything. Customer experience and customer intimacy are phrases that have been out there for a while. But you have to think about when is Amazon creepy and why does it keep following me when I go to other places or other sites? There have to be opt-outs, but then what happens to data sets when you opt out?
• It’ll be interesting to see what changes need to happen in terms of click data and private data.

Marene’s experience at West Point and as a woman in the armed forces — (42:15)

• Grew up in Massachusetts and was told women could not go to military academies. Her plan was to do ROTC at MIT when the academies opened up to women.
• Marene never applied for West Point, she applied for the Air Force Academy. But Margaret Heckler, who served in the United States House of Representatives, gave Marene her principal nomination to West Point and Marene accepted and went to West Point sight unseen.
• Took electrical engineering at West Point, graduated and got the very last position in her class for Military Police. The Military Police was the only branch in the army where Marene could do almost all the same jobs as a man so she was excited to be looked at as an equal.
• Got out and went to the FBI and eventually moved to the East coast and worked as an undercover drug agent.
• Was approached by A&P Foods, which was looking for a female in law enforcement with a security background and was a West Point grad to run their security.
• “If you’re locked into the idea that you are a thing and you’re not anything else, you will always be that thing. I always kept myself open to other options. I never would have thought of myself as fearless, but I am fearless.”
• Ran network security at the World Cup. Providing security on a world stage like that and having to deal with the South Korean government and other agencies and intercultural relationships allowed Marene to grow and move in the security space.
• “What I tell people is that if you have a sponsor, listen to them and follow their advice. There will be sponsors for you, recognize them and don’t discount their advice.”
• “If you believe you can do it, you have a chance of doing it. If you believe you can’t you’ll never get it done.”

Lightning Round — (49:55)

• Waze is her favorite app.
• She and her husband own a 182-acre organic blueberry farm in north Florida. “We’re the largest producer of organic blueberries in Madison County, FL.”
• Best advice: “Talk with your peers. Find a friend, someone you can chat with and talk with them at will.”   

Mentions:

• Future of Cities

Show Notes

At SparkCognition, Vijay Doradla (LinkedIn) is part of the team that is trying to solve the world’s most challenging problems by using artificial intelligence.

As the Chief Business Officer, Vijay brings his experience in engineering, technology, research and investing to catapulting SparkCognition to new and exciting industries and innovations. In this episode, Vijay and Ian discuss everything from how and why to invest, and the exciting projects SparkCognition is working on including autonomous everything from planes to power plants and more.

Topics Discussed: AI, investing, market strategy, autonomous vehicles, innovation

Introducing Vijay — (1:15)

• As the chief business officer, Vijay’s role focuses on business development, go-to-market strategies, and funding.
• Vijay does a lot of work helping the sales team and coming up with processes to make sure revenue is always coming in.

SparkCognition’s initiatives — (2:15)

• SparkCognition is working on solving some of the world’s hardest problems in many different sectors, including oil, power generation, air and space, healthcare and more.
• Offering predictive maintenance solutions and currently have a partnership with Boeing to build the future operating system for autonomous flying vehicles.
• “We believe that in the next decade we’ll have autonomous drones ferrying passengers, medicines, products and more.”
• How to manage the logistics and tech that goes into autonomous flight — getting from Point A to Point B without a pilot — is a huge technical challenge SparkCognition is working to solve.

AI and how it will become part of daily life — (5:00)

• “I’m predicting in the next five to ten years we won’t even be talking about AI. It will just be a part of our daily lives.”
• You don’t look at Siri or Amazon Alexa as having AI in your home, but that is already the world we live in and it will only get more complex.
• “We believe artificial intelligence has come to a tipping point in terms of adoption.”
• AI is in the early stages of scaling on the enterprise side of business.
• SparkCognition is working on autonomous power plants. That doesn’t mean that plants will run on their own. Rather, AI is going to augment human power and efficiency and create a new workplace.

How SparkCognition is innovating — (8:30)

• SparkCognition has quite a few patents and is working on the cutting edge of technology in a number of areas.
• AI and machine learning technologies are going through huge amounts of data and helping to implement predictive maintenance and AI algorithms to take work to the next level.
• The trick is packaging technology into a usable format that brings ROI to industries.

Why companies are excited about investing in AI — (12:00)

• Vijay has been on both sides of raising money as both an investor and a founder.
• Companies that invest and partner see opportunities to disrupt, or be on the cutting edge of innovation or to augment what they are doing to make things easier or be able to grow faster.
• “When I was on the other side of cutting checks … I was constantly looking to push the envelope of innovation.”

Working with John Chambers — (14:35)

• John has been an investor and supporter of SparkCognition from the Series B round and he spends time with the team.
• “He’s an amazing leader who has been there, done that and seen everything you can think of in the enterprise market.”
• He helps the team understand if they are on the right track, as well as discuss culture in the fabric of the company so that they can grow the company to the next level. 

What it means to look for innovation — (17:40)

• There are many vehicles for innovation and a lot of companies have arms and have roles like Chief Digital Officer or Chief Innovation Officer, dedicated to leading innovative work.
• You invest with the idea to grow and scale in the long term, and you have to be looking at which companies are working in new and exciting ways to make that possible.
• The best companies are companies that don’t always listen to the product teams.

Best practices for bringing in other companies — (23:25)

• John Chambers had good advice after executing on 181 acquisitions and he shared his strategy with Vijay and SparkCognition: Figure out the formula that works for you. 
• Acquire companies that are a good fit in terms of team, product market, culture and all other areas. This takes a lot of due diligence.

Comparing all of Vijay’s roles — (25:55)

• Being an entrepreneur is the toughest thing on planet earth.
• Every role could be easy or hard depending on your own psychology.

Lightning Round — (28:50)

• Big fan of Google Maps
• Bad Blood
• Advice: When you enter into the role, the stakes are at a different level. You are the leader, everyone looks up to you, so it’s important to understand stress and responsibilities come with the territory. Take a deep breath, go one day at a time, and keep a positive attitude because positivity trickles down in a company.

Show Notes

Michael Machado (LinkedIn), Senior Director of Product for Einstein Deep Learning Solutions, Ceverly Strand (LinkedIn), Product Marketer for Einstein, and Julien Sauvage (LinkedIn), Head of Tech and Product Marketing for Einstein, all stopped by Mission HQ for this special episode of IT Visionaries!

This Salesforce crew is part of the team that is bringing Einstein and voice technology to customers everywhere. They took some time away from the lab to discuss with Ian all the ways Salesforce is doing innovative work in this exciting field. They also talk about what is going on in the AI marketplace, explain what deep learning technology actually is, and take a look into the future of tech.

Topics Discussed: Voice technology, deep learning, AI, IT, unstructured data.

Introducing the roundtable — (1:30)

• Michael came to Salesforce three years ago from a company called MetaMind, which was focused on deep learning technology. Now he is bringing unstructured data into Salesforce and launching voice technology.
• Ceverly works on marketing the unstructured data, as well as vision and voice software.
• Julien does marketing for all of the Einstein products Salesforce offers.

What’s going on in the AI marketplace? — (3:05)

• Michael: More and more companies are interested in bringing unstructured data into the enterprise.
• Unstructured data — video, texts, messages over the phone and voice itself (aka streaming audio) — used to be very difficult to analyze. But deep learning and AI have provided a way to analyze the data and make it structured in a new way.
• “In certain ways, there are vast amounts of data being collected for no reason at all, but some people are looking at that as a potential strategic advantage for the future. I think in the future we’ll be leveraging that data in a more trusted way and in a way to deliver new experiences for users.” –Michael

Defining “unstructured data” and using it to make a change — (5:10)

• Images, blocks of copy on surveys, and more inputs that are not specifically defined for analysis are considered “unstructured data.”
• Using tools like keyword extraction help aggregate unstructured data, and the tools are becoming more advanced to work at a much larger scale.
• Julien: There are four main benefit statements when it comes to AI and use cases around AI — discover, recommend, predict and automate.  
  • Discover means to discover hidden patterns in data.
  • Predict is at the core of deep learning and AI and helps to focus on leads or accounts that might convert to sales.
  • Recommend is used to recommend the next best action or engagement to use.
  • Automate allows for the automation of workflows with AI.

How Einstein works within the four benefit statements — (7:55)

• Einstein helps sales reps know what opportunities to go after and recommends which leads to pursue. It can also be used to create a customized experience and predict when to reach out or make the next move in business or sales.  
• “The jury is still out on AI. We believe people don’t buy AI just for the sake of having AI. People buy AI for their CRM because they want their CRM to be smart, to be automated, to be intelligent and to be AI-powered.” –Julien
• “Einstein is everywhere in our narrative and in our customer success stories.” –Julien

A crash course on deep learning — (13:30)

• Many of Salesforce’s products are built directly into the platform already.
• Think about your business process and what data you have. What do you want to achieve? How will you use the data to achieve what you want?
• You are not looking to make employees or processes one percent more efficient. You are looking to create an environment or a system that will yield the absolute best possible results every time. Sometimes that will mean taking tasks off of their plate that can be automated or analyzing how they succeed in some areas and fail elsewhere, which is what deep learning helps with.
• Identifying small, incremental solutions by using deep learning and then implementing those solutions can have monumental effects on productivity.

The excitement surrounding voice technology — (20:45)

• Ceverly: This is about getting better data into the system.
  • • Agents in the field will take notes by hand and then never get that data into the system for others to use or get insights from. Or, if the data is input, it is not always complete.
• “Voice is helping change things by allowing you to put great data into the system at the moment.”
• Michael: Different companies have different thought processes about how to leverage voice data.
• Privacy and trust will play a huge part in finding the best use for voice technology.
• “We’re going to start seeing voice as a primary input in devices you’ve never even thought of.” –Michael
• Analyzing past data is great, but there’s more to it than that with Einstein — voice is going to be the new UI.

What everyone is most excited about for the future (31:45)

• Ceverly: Expanding the voice use cases.
• “People have a misconception that it’s a simple technology but there’s a lot under the hood and there’s so much you can do with it.” –Ceverly
• Michael: Autonomous Assistants and the relationship individuals build with them.
• Julien: More data and the possibilities of improving technology with it. It’s a virtuous circle of data collection and improvement.

Customer success stories with Einstein Voice — (36:20)

• A workers comp organization has been using Einstein Voice to connect customers with providers, improve customer experience, streamline the process and get workers back to work faster.
• Ian: “If you’re not creating frictionless experiences, your customers are not going to get the services they need.”

Lightning Round — (39:00)

• Favorite apps: Twitter and Flipboard are helping the panel stay connected.
• Hidden Brain, sports podcasts, Joe Rogan and French fiction novels and Riad Sattouf books are the top content the panel is consuming.
• Favorite vacation spots: Charleston, Northern California and anywhere in the Mediterranean.

Show Notes

Eric Tan (LinkedIn) has been on both sides of the IT coin as a consultant and now in an operations role as the VP of Business Services and IT at Coupa.

In this episode of IT Visionaries, Eric discusses how he grew up destined to be in IT, even though he started his career as a CPA. He also details what it means to join and lead a company that has doubled in size twice since he joined the organization. Eric reveals the challenges growth presents, but also the excitement that comes when innovation happens in every part of the organization.

Topics Discussed: Cloud technology, AI, machine learning, UI, CIO, growth, innovation.

Introducing Eric — (1:15)

• Eric helps build the IT architecture and infrastructure for a rapidly-growing organization.
• He is also responsible for bringing innovation into the company and into the hands of the customers.

Eric’s background in IT — (2:35)

• Eric’s father was an IT professional  — he worked his way up from meteorologist to CIO at a bank — so Eric grew up with the latest technology all around him.
• Even still, Eric’s father will try to help Eric solve some of the IT problems he’s currently facing.

Eric’s past experience in tech — (4:50)

• Spent two decades helping companies build internal IT architecture.
• At PwC, Eric was helping companies work in the cloud when they were just trying to figure out how and why they would use cloud technology.
• There were some struggles in moving from a consulting position to an operations roles.
• “I thought had it. I had been very successful in implementing IT strategies and ERPs. When I got to Coupa, what I didn’t realize was how hard it was because Coupa was growing fast.”
• In the span of a couple of years, Eric’s employee base doubled, Coupa acquired four other companies and an entirely new leadership team was brought in.
• “Imagine coming into a company having the expectation to build the architecture for a growing company then having all these changes happen and guess what, you don’t have the backing of 200,000 people like do you did at your previous company. You have this IT budget and have to make things work.”
• Eric has a background in finance and accounting and is a certified CPA.

How to look at UI and adoption rates — (10:55)

• Coupa has one of the highest adoption rates in the industry.
• “We believe no UI is the best UI.”
• Customers who use the Coupa platform enjoy the experience because a lot of the thinking has already been done for them.
• Anything you want to buy or spend, you can do all of that on the Coupa platform.
  • In the background, the Coupa infrastructure and tech is doing risk assessments and comparisons on whether what you are purchasing is a “good buy” or not.

The amount of time spent with customers vs. in-house — (13:25)

• Eric does 70% in-house work and 30% with customers.
• There are many internal processes that need to be automated and/or fixed, so there is a lot of technical debt that needs to be addressed.

IT culture at Coupa — (14:30)

• IT was aggregated and the function of IT was spread across all the employees at the company but there was no governance, strict policies or processes. And it is similar today because that allows a bit more room for innovation, however there are more safeguards in place.
• “Every employee at Coupa is, in fact, an IT person. We still encourage innovation across our 1,300 employees. Innovation should come from your team.”
• Coupa just recently hosted its fourth hack-a-thon to promote problem-solving and innovation throughout the company.
  • During the hack-a-thon, a 20-year-old with no coding experience and by using Apex in Salesforce, he created 36 lines of code that has helped the company reduce customer service tickets by 130 per year.

Forming a community among IT leaders — (20:50)

• There is a community of CIOs, especially young CIOs in Silicon Valley, who help each other and discuss common problems.
• When he wants to implement a new technology or idea, the No. 1 question Eric gets from the CEO or CFO is, “Where has it been done before?” Having a network of IT leaders to tap into and learn from helps him answer that question.

Becoming an IT Leader — (23:45)

• “I’ve always had the mindset where I can solve anything and everything. I think that all changed when I was in the driver’s seat and realizing that resources are not unlimited and a company’s priorities change. Being able to be nimble enough to change and make quick decisions was eye-opening.”
• 50% of IT projects are not about IT, it’s about change-management, navigating people to rally toward a specific mission and adoption.
• The five-year roadmap isn’t helpful when innovation and change happens in a matter of days, weeks or months.

Coupa Pay — (31:30)

• Launched in 2018 to solve two problems: 1) Payments in the B2B space. 2) Supply and Finance
• Coupa has a supplier network of four million suppliers.

Working with AI and machine learning — (33:40)

• “I still think AI and machine learning are in their infancy. Without data, AI and machine learning are not going to work.”
• “Over the last 10 years, data has evolved so much. We have such a wealth of data that deploying technologies such as AI and machine learning makes predictive capabilities so much more powerful.”
• All the data being collected can be used to tell stories about how and why people are buying and make the experience better.

Lightning Round — (37:45)

• Eric is a big fan of Waze, Slack and Google AI
• Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
• Half Moon Bay is a great one-day getaway

Show Notes

There is no question the IT security is becoming one of the most important areas of focus for companies large and small. More data than ever before is being collected and shared, and the security measures to protect that data constantly need to be upgraded. At ForeScout, Julie Cullivan (Twitter, LinkedIn) serves as the Chief People and Technology Officer and works to make sure that businesses around the world are equipped with the most advanced tech possible to keep them safe.

In this episode of IT Visionaries, Julie sits down with Ian to discuss how she found her way into the world of IT and the role of CIO, what it means to be responsible for the IT security of a company, and what the future holds for the industry as a whole.

Topics Discussed: Security, cybersecurity, technology, IT, OT, diversity, inclusion, women in tech, AI, machine learning, big data.

Introducing Julie — (1:30)

• Julie joined ForeScout 18 months ago as CIO and to help with business operations. She also recently took on the role of Chief People Officer. These two positions allow her to keep her finger on the pulse of the organization in two very different ways.
• “I’ve always been passionate about developing teams and about culture and values, but always more as a consumer. Now I get to play a role in developing and influencing what we do at the company for the people.”

Joining ForeScout five months before the IPO — (3:30)

• As opposed to start-up mode, when a company is going public they need to focus on IT and operations. ForeScout was looking to bring in someone to focus on compliance and security, so Julie started out with her sights set on leading the business transformation that happens when a company goes public.
• “The real work starts after you go public.”
• After going public, there is a shift toward hitting quarterly goals and a pressure to make sure the company probably prioritizes these goals.

How Julie developed into a CIO — (5:55)

• CIO is not an easy role to take on and Julie — who came from a business and team-building background — had never done the job before, so she was nervous to accept the offer.

Cyber risks and the challenges in security IT — (11:20)

• “The ultimate challenge is that the threats out there are real.”
• The biggest breaches happen when you’re not able to wrap your head around the foundational aspects of the security problems you are looking to solve.
• Attacks aren’t always necessarily hyper-sophisticated. They often happen when attackers find the one window a company leaves open that can be taken advantage of.
• “In order to do the fundamental things well, there is a combination of technology, orchestration, automation and looking at ways to leverage the investments in security.”

Do security best practices exist? — (13:50)

• According to Julie, best practices are dependent on the size and maturity of a company, as well as what industry and market a company is involved in.
• There are many variables to consider and those variables tend to change over time.
• No one person or department “owns” the security of the company — the responsibility of keeping the company and its assets secure falls on everyone, not just the CSO.
• There is an assumption that CIO’s don’t understand security or think it is important, but as companies grow and compliance becomes more important, that assumption and the practices that lead to them will change as well.
• “No matter what, in the end, there is going to be some sort of connection back to your IT officers and the operational side of security. So regardless of the reporting structure, all those parties have to be aligned and on the same page or it’s not going to work.”  

The difference between IT and OT — (16:15)

• IT is built around traditional corporate systems and the operations you have to run the business — the internal systems that you own to leverage the business.
• OT are critical business services — anything from IOT, printers, cameras, HVAC systems and more critical operational systems such as those running a nuclear power plant. Many are proprietary and cannot be taken down for patching.
• OT technologies were not traditionally connected to the internet but that is changing today.
• Who is responsible for each system is less black and white or separated than it was before.

What governance will look like going forward — (21:20)

• “Before you even worry about governance you have to make sure you have the visibility you need. Do you really understand everything that’s going on in your environment? That’s where I think a lot of companies struggle because they think they’re okay but how do you know if you don’t have complete visibility?”
• You have to have consistent processes in place to understand all aspects of your systems and resources.
• It starts with visibility and once you have that you need to add policy and governance on top of it.

How innovation happens at ForeScout — (22:00)

• “I think innovation has to be done in the context of problems. Innovation for the sake of innovation is difficult to do in a company of my size. But if I can identify where there’s real need and a problem, then I can come up with an innovative way to solve that.”
• CIOs always want to talk about their technology, whereas Julie tends to want to talk about the problems she is facing and figuring out if the technology being offered can help solve those problems.

The growth of AI and machine learning — (25:00)

• If you leverage the technology in the right way AI and machine learning can be valuable in how your products interact with customers.

The ForeScout Women’s Network — (28:00)

• Julie and a group of others wanted to build a community and have an impact on diversity and gender balance within the company.
• “It’s as much about bringing diverse talent into the organization as it is about keeping diverse talent in the organization.”
• The network provides a sense of community and an opportunity for women to see that there are others like them who maybe have endured similar struggles.
• Men are also welcome in the network!
• A lot of attention is paid to job descriptions and ensuring that women and diverse candidates are being brought in for every interview, especially at the executive levels.
• Creating measurements to track progress is important so that you can see whether or not progress is being made in terms of diversity.
• “I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about, ‘Well, I’m a woman, am I getting a fair shot?’ because things were going well for me. It was not until I worked for a company that was not a West Coast headquartered company, went to my first meeting and there were two women in the room and everyone else was a man. That wasn’t abnormal to me until someone assumed that I was somebody’s administrative assistant. That’s when I noticed it and thought, ‘Wow, this is real.’ And it woke me up to what I could be doing.”

The Lightning Round — (37:00)

• You Are A Badass
• Educated
• “I am excited about mixing AI and machine learning with crowd sourcing. I think that’s where companies can really solve problems.”
• Advice: “Understand the business inside and out. Know more about the end-to-end business than the business partners themselves.”

Show Notes

Ali Bouhouch (LinkedIn) has more than 20 years of experience in the tech industry and he currently serves as the CTO & VP of Enterprise Architecture at SEPHORA. It may seem odd that a makeup company has such an intense focus on tech, but when you dig a little deeper, it’s clear that technology is a key driver in the retail industry and a large part of how Sephora will grow in the future.

In this episode, Ali and Ian discuss applications that allow customers to virtually try on Sephora products, how the company is using AI and big data and so much more.

Topics Discussed: Innovation, AI, retail, VR, technology, customer experience, machine learning, applications.

Introducing Ali — (1:15)

• Curiosity is baked into Ali’s personality dating back to when his parents would give him toys and he would take them apart to see how they function.
• When he was younger, Ali wanted to build rocket ships to “create adventure and push the envelope of where humans could go.”

What it takes to be an industry-leading CTO — (3:35)

• Excellence and trying to understand and utilize technology to try to solve human problems are the two key factors to starting your journey toward being a CTO.
• You have to have a breadth of knowledge rather than focusing on a niche area.

The opportunity for IT and technology in the retail space — (4:55)

• Through his work in consulting, Ali became involved with retailers and that was when it became a focus for the next part of his career.
• “What got me interested in retail was the intersection of two intellectual curiosities. One is about technology and how to use it to solve human problems. The second one is understanding human psychology and understanding how that influences how we make decisions.”
• In retail, the goal is to understand human behavior and psychology. Ali then uses the latest cutting edge technology to make sure that the company can meet human needs.
• “Retail is an industry that is always changing. Therefore innovation is not a luxury, it’s necessary in order to remain relevant.”

How much does technology drive the retail industry? — (6:53)

• When most people think about retail they think of brick and mortar traditional retail experiences. Traditional retailers, though, still run much of their IT on mainframes and have very little technology in the stores.
• “Advanced retailers have blurred the delineation between physical and digital. Therefore, there is a lot of technology that enables the experience of blurring the line between the digital and physical.”
• Because of the way tech has permeated every aspect of daily life, consumers have become more tech-savvy and retailers need to catch up.

Building the Sephora app — (10:12)

• “You have to understand consumers more intimately. You have to anticipate their needs and wants and then create the experience that will meet those needs and wants. And you have to meet the customer where they are both physically and digitally.”
• The customer is at the center of every question Sephora asks. And when they look at creating something, they first ask, what is missing from the experience?
• When dealing with humans, people can feel judged. But technology can create a sense of personal private space between you and a machine.
• It’s not about duplicating successful experiences that happen in the physical stores, rather it’s to enhance the physical experience by inputting valuable things the physical experience is lacking.
• The virtual try-on experience was born after finding out that applying different makeups in stores was difficult and time-consuming.

Using AI to enhance the customer experience — (19:35)

• One of the biggest challenges is overcoming all the hype: “The majority of what you see and hear about AI is marketing hype.”
• There is tremendous potential: “You are starting to bring higher degrees of intelligence to human decisions thanks to the the capabilities of machines.”
• The machine learning recommendations are not generic or based on what’s trending, they are personal.
• “My skin is as unique as I am. I don’t want some generic recommendation. I want a recommendation that has a high level of succeeding for me. When that happens and that sweet spot is hit, the residual experience is nothing short of magical.”

What will be the standard moving forward? — (26:50)

• Consumers are choosing to live in a digital world so that will be the way forward.
• Voice is a natural way to interface and that is one of the areas Ali and his team are working on for Sephora.
• You can’t use voice as a gimmick. Just as with the other technologies, you have to put the customer at the center and solve the challenges she is facing in the most appropriate way, whether it’s AR, machine learning, voice or any other technology.
• “To me, technology is just an enabler that allows us to solve a human need.”
• You have to have trust between brand and customer, and your technology cannot infringe on that trust. There is a fine line between useful and creepy technology, so you have to walk that tightrope.
• Fundamental confidence is the core of what Sephora does.

Balancing the needs of customers versus employees — (36:10)

• The interaction between IT and business has come a long way.

Getting buy-in from the top — (39:45)

• It’s a three-step process:
  • 1) Do your job and do it well
  • 2) Understand the business you’re in
  • 3) Have the courage to take the initiative

Lightning Round — (43:45)

• Dare to Lead by Brene Brown
• San Diego and Santa Cruz are worth a visit
• Advice: “Get a mentor. I would not be where I’m at today without the invaluable advice and time my mentors have invested in me.”

Show Notes

On this special episode IT Visionaries producers Aaron Gerlitz and Hilary Giorgi interview Louise Charles who heads up communications for Climeworks (Twitter, LinkedIn), a carbon-capturing company based in Switzerland.

Louise discusses the origins of Climeworks, how they are using technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere and some of the biggest technical challenges facing their company, and the environmental IT industry as a whole.

Topics Discussed: Carbon capture, innovation, scaling, renewable energy,

Introducing Louise and Climeworks —(1:30)

• Louise has been with Climeworks for a year and a half
• Climeworks was founded in 2009 by Jan Wurzbacher and Christoph Gebald
  • Based in Zurich and have been scaling in a large way over the last 10 years.
• Direct capture plants are capturing many thousands of tons of CO2 from the air

What Climeworks does in laymen’s terms — (3:35)

• Climeworks builds big machines similar to oversized washing machines. Modules are called CO2 collectors and they have filter materials that selectively capture CO2 like a sponge captures water. Once collected, the CO2 can be resold as a raw material for uses in things like fertilizers, carbonation in drinks such as Coca-Cola, and renewable fuels.
• CO2 can also be mixed with water, pumped underground and there it mineralizes and turns into stone.
• “When companies choose to use Climeworks, they are furthering the development of air-capture technology.”

Scaling up and dealing with challenges — (8:15)

• “We’ve been able to scale at a factor of about a billion in the last decade if you think of going from capturing milligrams to capturing tons of carbon every day.”
• Challenges include dealing with short innovation cycles, figuring out how to focus your technology and when to shift focus, and looking for a strong network of partners to work with 
• Companies and organizations have paid Climeworks to reverse their carbon footprint and help them become carbon neutral.

Finding the right talent — (10:50)

• Without the team, the Climeworks technology would not be where it is today.
• Currently, there are 60 employees throughout the company made up of many engineers, research and development professionals, marketing and sales people

How do you keep innovating? — (13:00)

• Work on short innovation cycles to keep bringing out new generations of technology.
• Design sprints and strategy workshops are put on throughout the year

Making sure the plants are running — (14:45)

• Plants are built in a way so that they can be accessed remotely.
• Engineers are on site and off-site the engineers check in to make sure that everything is running smoothly
• There is a lot of technology working behind the scenes to make sure that the carbon is being captured and treated in the appropriate ways

The future of Climeworks — (18:00)

• The ultimate goal is to be able to halt or reverse climate change.

Lightning Round — (19:05)

• Uses Whatsapp to stay in touch with friends and family
• Homo Deus