Eric Schrock - CTO at Delphix

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. I'm curious to know how many of you have a leadership pipeline. We know that great leaders grow companies because we talk to them here on the show every day. But what are you doing to create great leaders within yours? If you're a CTO, it is 100% your responsibility to grow and improve your people beyond just their coding abilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) We've built a tool that improves your people in their craft and in leadership. Visit leaderbits.io to learn more. Today, we are talking to Eric Schrock, the CTO at Delphix, and we discuss challenging yourself by exploring new dimensions of a business, how managing people is much different than managing a system, and how Eric just might be the David Hasselhoff of technology writers. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:52) This is the Modern CTO podcast. And you know what I did for the first time ever this morning? So I'm so excited to share. I went to a data center. I was in a data center.

(Eric Schrock at 00:01:11) Oh, yeah? First time?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:14) First time being in a real data center. I've been in a data center before, like a server room type thing.

(Eric Schrock at 00:01:21) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:21) But this was like a data center data center. And it's for the county.

(Eric Schrock at 00:01:27) Oh, nice. So like a football field of servers or whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:31) Yeah. It was large. And then the floors have these removable tiles. You have this suction cup thing. You just go and it's like, yeah. That's where all the—you see all the gas lines under there. He's like, if there's a fire, the gas is pressurized. And then I got to go in the back and see the giant power systems that they have and the air conditioning that they're shoving the AC under. It's such a big, huge setup for these data centers. It's unbelievable.

(Eric Schrock at 00:01:56) Well, yeah. And, you know, engineers these days with the cloud are never going to experience that. Right? It's going to become rarer and rarer to go walk on the floor of a data center.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:07) It was smart though because they structured the data center. Like, these racks are for the school boards. Like, the kids' school lunches and everything are here. And this is for the hospital, so all the medical records and everything are here. And for me, I was just like, whoa. And it's in a building that you would never expect. I've driven by the building a million times, and I would never expect it to be the lifeblood of the county.

(Eric Schrock at 00:02:33) Yeah. Yeah. No. I find data center tech fascinating, like the machine learning predictions about weather patterns to adjust humidity and temperature ahead of time. It's like, you know, if you get it wrong, you'd be like, oh, that just cost us $200,000, you know, because we ran the coolers the wrong way or whatever for this weather pattern. So it's fascinating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) And so you do a lot with data. Tell me a little bit of what Delphix—am I saying that correctly, Delphix?

(Eric Schrock at 00:03:03) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:03) Yeah. What does Delphix do with data?

(Eric Schrock at 00:03:07) Yeah. So we build a data platform that makes it easy to capture and secure data and then deliver it to the people who need it. Right? So if you're an engineer, you're building an app, you're a tester, inevitably, you want realistic data to test against and validate against. And in a lot of these large enterprises that we serve, because we sell primarily to the global 2,000 large companies, that's really hard to get production data or production-like data. You know, when you talk about security constraints and privacy, when you talk about just the size of these data stores and the cost of moving it. And we eliminate all of that so that you can get full data environments in minutes. We can mask them. We can redact them and let you do your own work to refresh, reset, rollback, and manage that data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:59) That's pretty neat. So the customer, like a CTO would buy from you, so his team could or her team could have this real production data, but in sort of their development environment?

(Eric Schrock at 00:04:12) Yeah. I mean, what we're seeing is so much of today's economy is being driven by data. Right? If you think about companies that are competing out there, everybody's a data company. Like, whether you know it or not, you're a data company, and your ability to gather that data, leverage that data, and apply it to deliver services to your customers or derive new insights into your business is pretty critical. So the faster you can do that and the more effective you can be, the more of an edge you have in the market and, you know, the more money you can make. And that's really what's driving a lot of the issues around privacy and governance is you've got this explosion of data. And, you know, companies suck at managing data. And so bad things happen, like data breaches and, you know, massive regulatory fines and things like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:02) Now do you guys help companies with that type of stuff too or just the production data being accessible?

(Eric Schrock at 00:05:08) The two are really tied together in a way that it's hard to extricate. Right? You know, if you think about the risks carried within your data, right, that you've got people's personal information, obvious things like credit card numbers and stuff like that. But there's a lot of other stuff that could be considered personal or sensitive. And how do you then enable that data to flow into your analytics systems, to your app developers, to your third party providers who need to do testing? You have to integrate some level of risk mitigation, masking, obfuscation, techniques like that such that you can safely allow that data into these downstream environments because you ain't going to secure your third party offshore development center in the same way you manage your production data. Right? That's just not economically feasible. So you've got to be able to figure out how do I mitigate risk while I'm delivering data to these folks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:11) So I'm assuming you were just born, you came out of the womb, and you're just like data. How did your passion for technology come about?

(Eric Schrock at 00:06:22) So I've always loved creating things. At the end of the day, it's like two things in life that drive me. I love creating things, and I love having positive impact on the people around me. And those two things dictate so much of my life. You know, I do woodworking. I like to play jazz piano, I love cooking. I used to do art, you know, back in school, and yet I have this very analytical mind, and so I saw software engineering as like this perfect combination. It's like, it's this infinite canvas. Right? It's like I can paint with logic. Right? And I can create with math, and that just really drew me into computer science, you know, from a very young age. I took my first university programming course when I was, you know, like 12 or something, and just loved it. I've only had three jobs, and all of them have been programming. And so, but as I went to university and started trying to figure, okay. Well, where do I want to specialize? Like, computer science is a big field. What I really gravitated towards is kind of systems programming, you know, and obviously, that's things like operating systems and file systems. You're basically always learning new things. Right? You're always finding some new part of the system. You're already exploring some new constraint. And if you can figure out how to navigate those effectively, you can come up with some really amazing ideas. And so I ended up going into operating system development. And from there, kind of navigated into the ZFS storage team at Sun, and then that was the sort of start of my data focus. Right? So it was sort of like, I love CS. I love hard systems problems. You know, I like data, and that sort of carried my career into Delphix.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:17) So at what point were you like, I want to be a CTO?

(Eric Schrock at 00:08:24) So I joined Delphix as an individual engineer, and I was director of engineering, application engineering, VP of engineering for four years. And what happened to me was, you know, I started to think about, like, what is it I'm trying to create? Like, I love creating things. That's great. And for so much of my career, that was code, right, or product or, you know, physical manifestations of that. And it sort of got to the point of my career where, you know, I got high degree of confidence at kind of doing that, you know, and it's not that each new thing is not its own unique snowflake and interesting. But just, like, I want to go challenge myself in a new dimension. And so as I started to look at things like how do you create a positive engineering culture? How do you create a strong emphasis on mentorship? How do you build a strategy? And that's what really pulled me into management and leadership was the opportunity to create something, not just with code, but through indirectly through others. Right? And that is what drove me, you know, to kind of go down this path towards CTO was, like, how do I not just make things with my own two hands, but how do I mentor, empower, enable, you know, and lead other people to do much more than I could ever do myself. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:58) Yeah. Because that's how you accomplish more. You can only write so much code. You can only complete and deliver so many stories. But if you learn, if you decide to stretch yourself and learn the human side of things and, like you said, you know, grow yourself in that dimension, then you have the ability to collect amazing people and amplify your reach significantly.

(Eric Schrock at 00:10:21) Mhmm. Yeah. No. My most rewarding moments were when I would see people I had mentored mentoring others. Right? It's sort of like the how many degrees of separation—

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:32) Replicated leadership.

(Eric Schrock at 00:10:34) Yeah. The seed I planted, you know, three years ago is now really blooming, and this team over here, this person that I that I helped kind of grow up is just doing amazing things. And that was super, super rewarding for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:47) So how many people total in technology that you oversee across the globe?

(Eric Schrock at 00:10:53) Well, now it's great. It's three. Right? So, you know, at Delphix, I like to say there's as many CTO roles as there are CTOs. It tends to be a highly personalized thing for each company. Right? And so there are CTOs with huge spans of operational control. Right? All of product and R&D report up to them. There's CTOs that are primarily market facing. Right? They're on the road. They're talking to customers all the time. They're, you know, doing media interviews. And there's CTOs that are much more research focused. And, you know, we do research. And so as I took on this role, you know, I'm remote, as I just said, from the main team. And as we moved to Atlanta, I was like, well, you know, the team's reaching a level of scale. At that point, it was like 100, 110 people. And so that team was reaching a level of scale. It was clear I'm not going back to the Bay Area anytime soon. And so I transitioned much more into sort of a strategy role. And so, you know, I manage a pretty small team, but we really sort of explore the edges of our technology, kind of looking at the future edges of the roadmap, but also sort of how do we integrate into the ecosystem of today. So the whole R&D at Delphix is probably close to 200 people now, but, you know, the part that I actively manage is actually quite small.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:19) Yeah. So it's like the office of the CTO, or are the three of them actually working on direct projects, or are they three people that are running massive parts of the organization?

(Eric Schrock at 00:12:29) Oh, no. They are three individual contributors. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:33) So you're running an office of the CTO then?

(Eric Schrock at 00:12:36) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:36) I like that model. I make notes when I meet with the CTOs of the different ways they operate. And I actually had just met with a CTO in Boston who sold his company. I think his name is Joe Kinsella. Sold his company to VMware, and he operates an office of the CTO because he just likes it. Some people just, that's their style, and I love it when I see it. Because then we can publicize it and make it so that people don't have to hate what they're doing, and they know that being a CTO, that's an option.

(Eric Schrock at 00:13:09) Yeah. Well, and the challenge is not to have the office of roads to nowhere. That's what I like to call them. You know, it's very easy to create R&D divisions that don't produce value for the company. Right? Either, you know, they get really divorced from the business. Like, hey. Here's this awesome idea. I built this first person shooter for the iPhone or whatever, and you're like, what does that have to do with our business? Right? But there's also places that try to do the early stage incubation. Right? Oh, we'll build version 0.1 of the product, and then we will hand it off to engineering. And that's just really hard to do. I mean, you've got all of the planning alignment and staffing alignment. You've got to have all the knowledge transfer. You've got cultural issues of, like, the cool kids build the new stuff. And so, you know, as I looked at how I wanted to shape the office of the CTO, it's much more, you know, how do we help the product to work? Right? If you think about things that are on the edges of the product management roadmap, you know, six months out, nine months out. There's huge questions about those, and there's huge questions rooted in technology. Right? Like, what is possible? How do these things work? You know, how do customers actually use this technology? And that's where we can go and do much more bounded investigations and say, hey. Here's what we learned about X, or here's a prototype we built. And that way, they're not designed to be roads to anywhere. They're kind of well-contained research items that then support the rest of the business. And then we combine that with, you know, leading kind of field technologists, you know, sort of how do we elevate the maturity of our field and our customers in these technology domains. So it's part research, part kind of field technology leadership. But so far, it's been working pretty well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:11) I like it. I think it's unique. We build these little—we started building these little guides because just we have experts on so many different things. And I think I'm going to find some of the people like you who do this R&D and make a few bullet points on, yeah, R&D CTO. Because you don't want to build it where it's like roads to nowhere. You want it to bring value to the business. So—

(Eric Schrock at 00:15:34) Yeah. I talked to a lot of—as I was taking on this role, I reached out to folks in my network and through, you know, my CEO's network who had done similar things, trying to find the right balance. It's tricky.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:48) Yes. It's always tricky. The balance is the work. It's like you first identify the spectrum. Right? Where could I be? And then you figure out where your positioning within that is. I read some of your writing on Medium. I really enjoy it. How often do you write?

(Eric Schrock at 00:16:05) You know, I'm publishing probably once a week, but a lot of that is through—I don't do as much on Medium. So I try to publish through Forbes if I can. That's usually—you know, part of their technology council.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:22) Yeah. Me too, buddy.

(Eric Schrock at 00:16:23) There you go. I love it. You know, more and more of my writing is kind of geared towards supporting the business, and I don't do as much—you know, I love to write about diversity, inclusion, and things like that. I want to get back to that more. But yeah, probably somewhere an article is being published around once a week.

(Eric Schrock at 00:16:46) Apparently, I have a lot of German articles. I just get these notifications because our teams will rework content and translate it into German. I'm like, oh, you're in your seventeenth German trade mag. And I'm like, okay. Hopefully, I'm not like some crazy celebrity there.

(Eric Schrock at 00:17:05) But who knows?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:06) That'd be—you're like David Hasselhoff, man.

(Eric Schrock at 00:17:08) Yeah, man. Secretly, I'll pretend. If I ever go to Germany, I'll walk off the plane. It'll be like The Beatles just mobbing me. Like, oh, you wrote that article in the IT tech forum, whatever issue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:21) I believe it.

(Eric Schrock at 00:17:22) Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. I'm not gonna hold my breath. Let's put it that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:29) So you're writing a lot about diversity inclusion. What's your favorite? What's the recurring topic that happens in that writing?

(Eric Schrock at 00:17:37) You know, for me, obviously, I'm a white straight guy. I'm not someone who's really had to experience a lot of what folks in underrepresented groups have had to face. But, again, if you go back to the two things in my life that really motivate me—creating things and having a positive impact on others—I've always looked to ways to be like, how can I leverage my privilege and my opportunity and my position to try and do more for those around us? And so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out, like, how do you create corporate momentum around diversity inclusion, right?

(Eric Schrock at 00:18:21) And how do you do that in an environment where there's always 10,000 other priorities? You know, unless you're a rocket ship to the sky where you're flush with cash and you're gonna go direct listing because everybody knows your name—for most companies, this has to be weighed against a lot of other things that very clearly tied to revenue.

(Eric Schrock at 00:18:46) And so a lot of it is just, you know, how do we focus? How do we do the right things? And so for me, it's a lot about how do you have an inclusive environment. All the diversity in the world is for naught if you're not actually listening to those diverse voices. It's like, well, we brought all these diverse voices to the table, and by the way, the same group of six old white dudes makes all the decisions. Well, all that diversity is not really helping you anymore. So, you know, how do you create an inclusive culture? And then what are some of the methods to drive diversity through hiring, through better retention, things of that nature?

(Eric Schrock at 00:19:26) So I try to look at it through that lens as kind of a leader in the company. What are the things I could be doing or others could be doing to build a better environment?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:40) So I'm a big fan of Alexa. I love the voice. I love having her play the music and just everything that the technology does. Are you using voice technologies there? Are you playing with that in the office of the CTO?

(Eric Schrock at 00:19:58) Not explicitly. You know, it's on our sort of horizon as you think about how data is changing. Today, so much of data is—it's sitting in a database or it's sitting in a JSON document somewhere. It's this structured or semi-structured data. But, you know, voice computing is really interesting, especially as you start to get into what is sensitive or not. If I have audio recordings of your voice in the call center, what is sensitive? Obviously, you could literally say a credit card number, but there's a lot of other unique attributes that I could tie that voice back to you. Or video data—what happens when someone says to YouTube, like, my right to be forgotten. I want me out of every video that you have. It's like, good luck, right?

(Eric Schrock at 00:20:47) Or even things like genetic information. When the human genome was published and Henrietta Lacks' grandkids raised their hand and said, hey, that's private. There's a bit of me in that information, and it's not okay for you to just put it out there to the world. And so I'm really—we, Delphix, don't actively manage voice data or provide voice interfaces. But from a thought leadership perspective and trying to understand what our customers are doing, I'm super interested in kind of these new edges of data and what does that mean?

(Eric Schrock at 00:21:33) Even streaming data, which is not as far on the edge, but you think about what we do where it's like, hey, here's a copy of your database. What does it mean to deliver a copy of a data stream? Data in motion is just really different. And so what do developers need to develop applications based on streaming data technologies?

(Eric Schrock at 00:21:55) So I spend a lot of time thinking about that and talking to customers about it, even if we're not actively prototyping. As much as I would love to build some skills to control Delphix from Alexa, which folks have done in hackathons, I don't do much there today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:14) So as you made your transition from individual contributor to first-time leader, what are some of the struggles that you faced? What's your big takeaway from those moments?

(Eric Schrock at 00:22:25) Oh, I only can pick one? Only one. So let's see. My biggest takeaway was, you know, I'm naturally sort of a kind of a system thinker. I mean, I said that—navigating systems. And so my default reaction when I'm faced with some unknown thing is to try to articulate it in the concept of a system. Like, oh, recruiting—let's break that down into some system, and there's some steps, and there's some tools and management decisions. Let's build some framework for that and things like that. And it's a useful skill, but so much of management is, number one, just people and conversations.

(Eric Schrock at 00:23:17) There's a lot of times where, hey, the answer is not some Jira system to hand bug 47 off to this person in this—it's like, those two people just need to talk to each other. And you need to figure out how to get them to talk to each other and collaborate effectively, and you can't solve that with some process or system.

(Eric Schrock at 00:23:38) So I think one of the things I learned is, you know, how do I fight that natural inclination? And as you scale, changing systems becomes harder and harder. When you're a team of 10 people, you're like, hey, let's try this new scrum model. Three weeks later, you're like, oh, that was a dumb idea. Let's try a different one. And, oh, this one's much better. When you have a hundred people, that's a big ship. And it can take three months or six months to really get everyone on the same page about doing something in a new way.

(Eric Schrock at 00:24:12) And if that's not the right way, you can't just change it again. And so it's the combination of those two things. Everything can't be solved with a better system design. By the way, if you steer this ship kind of in the wrong direction, oh my god, is it expensive to recover? Those two things are really challenging to me. And I had to spend a lot more time talking to people and listening and having conversations than kind of sitting—not in code, but thinking through process and structure and that sort of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:50) I like that you say that because I tend to be a systems thinker too.

(Eric Schrock at 00:24:54) Yeah. I look back on something and I was like, did I really think this would solve our recruiting problem to have these 17 spreadsheets linked in this crazy way with this tooling? And I'm like, no. We just—hiring managers didn't have a sense of ownership over the process. They didn't feel empowered to work with recruiters in kind of a positive way, and that's ultimately what was broken, not how we schedule interviews in a spreadsheet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:22) So what are you most excited about today? What's happening within the company that you're just really pumped up about?

(Eric Schrock at 00:25:29) So, you know, about—I guess it was a year and a half ago—we really shifted the company from sort of a tool that was really targeting a set of infrastructure users to a platform that was really targeting developers and users of data. And it's that transition to a platform, which we're still going through, that's super exciting to me because a platform is not just something you build. You build it for others to build on it, and they're gonna invest in it. They're gonna build on it. And the opportunity to build partnerships and community and really seeing people take your platform and use it in new and interesting ways is thrilling to me.

(Eric Schrock at 00:26:17) And so a lot of what we're focused on from a product strategy perspective is how do we give people better building blocks? How do we—we're not always gonna build the turnkey solution to solve every single use case of every—because data's only getting more complex. And so, but how do we give people really great building blocks and see what they create? And I love watching what your users create because they're way more creative than you are. Or there's way more of them, and certainly the sum total of them is way more creative than you are. So you're just always being like, I love going to customers. We'll go to a customer and be like, you're doing what? That's really cool. I never thought of doing that or I never thought of doing it in this way.

(Eric Schrock at 00:27:00) And so that growth of the platform is really empowering and exciting, and I love communities of users. It's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:11) It's like one computer versus Amazon Web Services, like when you have thousands of processing capabilities.

(Eric Schrock at 00:27:19) Amazon's great at this, right? They build great building blocks, almost to a fault. Andy Jassy stood on stage, and he's like, look at all the names of our services. And it's like 384 names, only half of which are recognizable. Like, these are great building blocks. I have no idea how to put them together, but they're really great, right?

(Eric Schrock at 00:27:45) But Amazon, I think, really embodies that. It's like, how do we give people the right components and let them build them together? I think they're—you know, there's—they're reaching a scale where just the number of building blocks starts to be daunting. But, you know, you have ecosystems and other folks who are helping to stitch them together. So, you know, we're no AWS, but certainly that idea of the platform is still pretty durable for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:04) Yeah. And if they're always building the base layer, then it can only be helpful to their business model.

(Eric Schrock at 00:28:12) Yeah. Then it's great. And I love, you know, platform also is—we earn money if you ingest data into our platform. I'll simplify it to that. But let's say we get paid when you ingest data into the platform.

(Eric Schrock at 00:28:28) I don't care how you get data into it. I don't care if a partner built that connector or the community did or we did, or if you're using it for DevOps or you're using it for analytics. We don't have to monetize those pieces. I think some of the things you get into when you have this sort of closed ecosystem, everything has to be monetized.

(Eric Schrock at 00:28:50) And we're like, nope. We're a platform. Anything that gets more data onto our platform or more data getting masked gets us money, so we support all of it. We love our partners. We love our community. Go do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:03) We have a question from the audience if that's okay.

(Eric Schrock at 00:29:05) Sure thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:06) What metric do you find useful to track?

(Eric Schrock at 00:29:12) Oh, that is a good question. So for someone like me in my role, I spend a lot of time thinking about our community and the ecosystem around us and trying to figure out how do you measure a vibrant community? How do you measure interactions? It's challenging because the easiest thing to measure is sort of like, I don't know, how many integrations are there, or how many connection points do you have, but that doesn't really count how many people are using it.

(Eric Schrock at 00:29:52) And so to me, the metric that I most love is something that tracks how your customers are using your product or using your integrations. And when you're building a SaaS service, that's really simple. You're just flush with metrics about every click and every interaction and everything like that.

(Eric Schrock at 00:30:13) As you get into on-premise products or things like a community ecosystem, it gets to be more challenging. So, you know, my favorite metric is definitely customer use of a feature—how customers are actually using it—and then trying to think really creatively about some of these other domains that are hard to track. You don't have click data for how many people are interacting with Delphix through Jenkins, for example. You gotta figure out other ways to get that information.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:51) And what tech trend that's happening right now do you believe will impact your team in the near term?

(Eric Schrock at 00:31:02) Well, so we sell to big enterprises, which means our customer is always five years behind the latest trends. So the things that are impacting our business are things like, you know, the shift to public cloud, which from a tech trend is pretty old at this point. It's like, oh yeah, dude, startups have been building in the cloud for a decade, and you're telling me that's the trend that's impacting you. And it's like these big companies, they move slowly. And so the things that are nearest to us is, you know, how does public cloud adoption, how do new types of data affect us? For example, like streaming data, evented transports.

(Eric Schrock at 00:31:42) You know, if you build an app based on Kafka, a lot of the way we do things today doesn't make sense. And so those are not things that are gonna be relevant to our customers at a reasonable size in the next five years. But, you know, there are things that I'm very interested in because as data gets into these different types of environments—I'm building with microservices.

(Eric Schrock at 00:32:11) It's like, well, the way you use data is really different. You're not all on one giant database, you know, just sharing a schema. So I think the trend that's impacting us the most is probably just the shift to cloud, but, again, that's a pretty old trend. If I think the next trend that's gonna impact us the most, I would just call it sort of, I don't know, modern data stores for lack of a—not big data because that's also old, but things like Kafka, Kinesis, Amazon RDS, you know, basically these very different types of data stores that you don't interact with in the same way that you do traditional data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:52) That's super interesting. And it really is. I found too after, you know, it's one thing doing the podcast. And before this, primarily, I was just building technology for people who knew me already. And so I didn't have much—I had virtually no experience selling into companies, like selling into companies. I just had relationships, and I sold them on my relationships. But selling into companies, it's amazing how the larger companies, how slowly they actually move.

(Eric Schrock at 00:33:24) Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We were—I was just at a large financial institution that I won't name. But they have a process where in order to deploy a package of software in their centralized IT systems, you have to have the special ID.

(Eric Schrock at 00:33:42) It's, you know, X ID. I won't say what it really is because then you could figure it out. But it's like getting that X ID is this massive process, and it took them six months just to get that ID so that they could deploy software into their centralized system.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:58) Their internal resistance is I?

(Eric Schrock at 00:34:00) Yeah, their internal system. Their internal processes and structures, which, you know, someone built to solve a problem ten years ago, and nobody wants to change anymore. But yeah, it could take six months. Our biggest impediment to deployments is acquiring infrastructure, like literally a VM. It's like, can we have a VM with these specs? They're like, I'll get back to you in nine months. What? Yeah. We sold to a hardware manufacturer. And again, I won't name them.

(Eric Schrock at 00:34:31) They literally make hardware. And the requisition process within their own company for a department to purchase their own hardware, which is literally shipping off of it, was three to six months. So like, a company that's building the servers, like literally, you could walk to the factory floor and just reach over and be like, I want that one. And they'd be like, nope. Six months. Six months process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:55) Have such demand and they were behind on their production, or was it just a—

(Eric Schrock at 00:35:00) It's all their, you know, processes and the approvals and you've got to be in this queue and, you know, how do we count for budget. I mean, it's just bureaucratic overhead.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:09) Some startups are going to take that out, because I'll tell you this. I was working with a big company, which I won't name either. And they came to me, and they wanted to try our leadership product. Right? And I was like, well, you know, everybody are household names, so maybe. Right? And eight months later, we're still working through legal just to give them a demo. And at—we eventually just had to shake hands and not do the deal because the amount of—first of all, the amount of cost I incurred at their organization with meetings and stuff, it was ridiculous.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:52) And I asked them too. I said, how do you guys buy Slack? Like, how do you do that? Because if every tool you want to get, you have to do this type of dance. And they're like, yeah. Yeah. I was like, that's hurting your advantage to move fast in the market.

(Eric Schrock at 00:36:10) Yeah. It's—I mean, I can't imagine a startup being like, hey, I want a new VM in Amazon. Like, sure. Talk to me in six months.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:18) Yeah.

(Eric Schrock at 00:36:18) Like, I'll get it for you. Don't you worry. I mean, it's just brutal. But yeah. I mean, they're trying to figure out ways to kind of work within these processes and, you know, dip their toe into public clouds. You know, some of them are successful. Most of them are not. You know, public cloud is mostly a science experiment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:43) Why would they not be successful in the transition?

(Eric Schrock at 00:36:47) You know, it's a couple reasons. One is you have basically all your processes and structures that you put in place to manage your on-prem data centers are not really a good fit for the public cloud. Right? I mean, just—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:03) Doing tape backups and mailing them off. Yeah.

(Eric Schrock at 00:37:05) And you know, oh, you've got to allocate this ID before you can provision a VM. Right? And it's like, you can't really take advantage of it. You know, security and infosec, everybody gets much more concerned when the publicly accessible checkbox gets clicked, and now we have a data breach. Right now, we're on the front page of the Times. And so security is really concerning. Like, we deal with customers where there's only a certain set of AMIs that anyone in the company can ever provision. They're like the blessed security ones. And if any instance ever gets created that's not one of those, it gets killed within five seconds. So they have all these monitoring things.

(Eric Schrock at 00:37:43) And so one of them—the same financial customer—I asked them. I'm like, where are you with public cloud? And they're like, not really anywhere notable. And the way he described it is they put so many restrictions on it that it kind of lost its usefulness.

(Eric Schrock at 00:38:03) Right? Like, the speed and agility and, you know, the services would be like, oh, you can't use any services. You only use EC2. You can only use these AMIs. You have to go through this requisition process. You have to do this secure—and it's like, at that point, it's not much better than on-prem. And so the companies that I've seen—now that company has started to take the guardrails off, and so there are some groups that are moving quickly. But I think the ones that are successful have to basically redesign their processes for the cloud. The ones that try to translate their processes and their approvals and their infosec and just make them work for the cloud, they're not really successful because they basically destroy the value of the public cloud once you put all of that bureaucracy around it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:52) So let's end on a positive note.

(Eric Schrock at 00:38:53) Yeah. Yeah. Not that, you know, every company sucks and they're all going to die. Yeah. Okay. Something more positive than that. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:02) Now the only thing in my head is the statistic I heard the other day about the Fortune 500 companies, like how fast they go out of business. Because it's amazing to me. It's like, you know, they get really big. The bigger they get, the slower they move, and then they all go out of business. And I'm like, that's unbelievable because the small people can move really fast and do services and stuff. And it's—I guess it's just a lot of learning experience I'm having right now, you know, being in my early thirties coming into this world and this market.

(Eric Schrock at 00:39:30) Yeah. No. I love learning about scaling challenges. Right, and what breaks and what doesn't break as you get bigger. And yeah, moving fast and innovating, it gets really challenging as you get big.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:49) Do you have any favorite leadership authors, like Jim Rohn or John Maxwell or Tony Robbins-type people?

(Eric Schrock at 00:40:00) You know, I used to read like a management book a month in my early days. Not so much anymore.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:08) Got your Audible.

(Eric Schrock at 00:40:10) I do. That's your convenience. But I listen to your podcast. That's all I ever listen—

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:14) Right? That's it. 24/7.

(Eric Schrock at 00:40:18) I don't have time for anything else. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:19) You got date night with the wife. You got some wine and candles and the Modern CTO podcast.

(Eric Schrock at 00:40:24) Exactly. She's like, we watched this latest series on Netflix. I was like, nope. Nope. Priorities.

(Eric Schrock at 00:40:31) No. But the books that do appeal to me are the ones that are more evidence-based, like, you know, a lot of the earlier Jim Collins books.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:40) Yeah.

(Eric Schrock at 00:40:40) Like, Good to Great, Built to Last. Because what drives me nuts is when someone publishes a book and they're like, here's the five factors to success—yeah—because I said so. And you're like, all right. I don't buy it. Like, you know, what led you to those five factors? And what failed and what worked? And so I prefer leadership books that sort of show a bit more of the process. And the books, you know, like Collins' books are much more—I mean, he's a researcher. Right? So he's like, here's the parameters of the research and, you know, here's what we set out to. And his conclusions are not fundamentally different than a lot of those, you know, I bequeath to the world my vision for five successful companies or whatever. But I just enjoy reading them more and I trust them more because I can see more of the thought process and what failed. So that's usually what I look for in a leadership book is, like, do you talk about how you got to this vision for leadership, and do you explain your failures along the way? If you do, I'm going to trust your conclusions way more than if you're just like, I'm a CEO for forty years, and I know business better than anyone. So here you go. Like, here's my strategy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:56) I wrote my first book, and it is very much like a first version of most products that people make. Right?

(Eric Schrock at 00:42:03) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:04) But my take on it was I'm not an expert, but here is my story of the mistakes I made in transition from developer to CTO. Yeah. And I get the most amazing feedback from 80% of the people. And then there's the 20% of the people who are like, this is not a detailed guide on how to become a CTO. It's not a step-by-step career development guide. I'm like, no. No. No. No. It says my story is like going from developer to CTO. Like, this is a book that's like a collection of mistakes. And then they'd be like, it's too short. And then other people are like, I like it. It's a feature that it was short. Like, it was the best thing. I could read this on a flight. And I—

(Eric Schrock at 00:42:45) To the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:45) —to the people that said it was too short, I was like, I'll go make more mistakes.

(Eric Schrock at 00:42:50) Yes. I'm not done making mistakes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:52) I'm not done. Just wait for—

(Eric Schrock at 00:42:54) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:54) But the good news was it's very similar to putting out an actual product because I learned what people expect from a book. And there's no blog post I could have read. There's nothing you could actually do without putting an actual print book together, selling it to thousands of people, and hearing the things that they love and the things that they hate. Like, that's just real to me. So now, on the second book that we're working on, I figured out the different elements different people are looking for in order to make them happy. Like, for you, you probably would enjoy like a Malcolm Gladwell-type book because he does a nice story-data mix. You know?

(Eric Schrock at 00:43:30) Yeah. Yeah. I do like Gladwell books. Yeah. But, yeah, I like—I like someone who's—yeah, I think the story-data mix is a good way to describe what I like. I like to understand the why. Yeah. And not just get the story, but, you know, understand—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:47) How we got there. You want the journey. You want the journey. You want the road trip. You don't want to just see a picture of them, you know, on the island. Right? You want to see the road trip.

(Eric Schrock at 00:43:57) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:58) Exactly. So—well, this has been absolutely fantastic, my friend. I really enjoyed our conversation. I think it's going to make for an unbelievable podcast. What do you think?

(Eric Schrock at 00:44:07) Great. Of course, it is. I mean, was there ever any doubt?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:11) There was no doubt.

(Eric Schrock at 00:44:13) There was no doubt.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:13) No doubt. We have the unicorn on our side. So—

(Eric Schrock at 00:44:16) All right. There we go. There we go. Awesome. Well, I appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:26) Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast and then CC me, [email protected]. If you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout-out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.