Harry Moseley - CIO at Zoom Video Communications

(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 Harry Moseley, the CIO at Zoom Communications, and we discuss the number one most important thing you can do as a leader, the advantages of having an entrepreneurial culture, and what you can gain by taking time to reflect at the end of each day. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) This is the Modern CTO podcast. So where are you calling in from?

(Harry Moseley at 00:01:03) I'm calling in from sunny Scarsdale, New York.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:07) How far is that from Westchester?

(Harry Moseley at 00:01:10) I'm in Westchester.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:11) Oh, I have lots of family in Westchester.

(Harry Moseley at 00:01:13) Where about?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:15) Well, there's a bunch of small towns. One of them we talk about is Armonk. I know they talk about Armonk a lot. Yeah, he's a musician. Owns a record label, works with Sony and stuff.

(Harry Moseley at 00:01:27) Cool. Cool. Armonk is about forty minutes north of me. I was riding up there on the weekend.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:33) Oh, very cool. Yeah, it's actually a really cool small town. There's a bunch of towns that are strung together, but everybody really knows each other. And it's a really cool population of people up there.

(Harry Moseley at 00:01:44) Yeah. I live in Scarsdale, which is more south, so we're twenty minutes north of Manhattan. Yeah. So it's very nice.

(Harry Moseley at 00:01:52) I like it. And where are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:55) We're down in Florida. It's nice and warm, but I'm actually in Manhattan Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. There's a couple companies up there, like Estée Lauder. Do you know them? Like, makeup company.

(Harry Moseley at 00:02:10) Yeah. I have heard of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:12) They do some amazing technology. You'd be really surprised if you looked at what they were building.

(Harry Moseley at 00:02:18) Oh, yeah? Like what?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:20) Well, for one, you know how the Snapchat filters make it look like you have makeup on you? Like, the girls—it makes their eyes bigger and rosy. Well, some of their luxury brands that they own, they're doing these smart mirrors. Right? And you can actually see what the makeup's going to look like on you before you purchase the makeup. And then you can actually pick a color and they'll customize the actual makeup to your exact color and all of these things.

(Harry Moseley at 00:02:44) That's very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:46) Yeah. From a machine learning or from an AI type—the problems that they're solving with the technology. I was like, this is actually—I didn't know—I didn't think makeup would be that interesting.

(Harry Moseley at 00:02:57) Yeah. Oh, it's kind of interesting, you know, sort of—it's one of the topics I love to talk about is the art of the possible. It's kind of like we thought about things years ago and we said, oh, if only we could do this, if only we could do that. And now we are doing this, and now we are doing that.

(Harry Moseley at 00:03:13) So the notion that, you know, you don't have to go to a store to try on the suit. You can just sort of upload your various different dimensions and then see how the suit looks on you—including your face. It's pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:29) Yeah. The volumetric stuff that they've done. And also, you don't even have to decide what you want to wear. You could take the whole Stitch Fix route and just tell a bunch of things that you previously liked, and it'll tell you what you should wear.

(Harry Moseley at 00:03:40) Yeah. Well, it's sort of like it's getting into all the predictive analytics. Right? So it's going to predict what you buy, predicting what you wear. It's kind of—you'll wake up in the morning, it will tell you the weather, it will tell you what your schedule is. Oh, and it'll tell you what you should wear today because of your inventory in your closet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:59) Perfect. Weather. Yeah.

(Harry Moseley at 00:04:01) Yeah. Personally, I think that's getting way too far, but it's the art of the possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:07) I love that. And so is that a core value as Zoomers that you talk about?

(Harry Moseley at 00:04:13) No. No. No. That's just my imagination running wild.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:17) I love it. So, yeah, I also saw when you switched the screen and it was the Star Trek. Right? I see a lot of the stuff—this backs up the art of the possible. They get the cell phones right now. Now you get the cell phones which are communicators. When do we get the teleportation?

(Harry Moseley at 00:04:36) Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Beam me up, Dr. Spock.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:39) Yeah. Yeah. You're kind of doing the teleportation right now. You're teleporting my photons, essentially.

(Harry Moseley at 00:04:46) Well, you know, it's not 3D, and we don't have touch and we don't have smell. But, you know, as I always say, well, we don't have those things yet. So not forecasting anything, but, you know, people in movie theaters have experimented with touch and smell and vibration, changing the temperature in the auditorium, changing it so that there's a mist if it's raining on the movie.

(Harry Moseley at 00:05:14) So you have a true, like, a real experience. So I think, you know, again, it goes back to what I just said a moment ago. It's the art of the possible. The art of the possible is here, and there's a lot more possibilities. Yeah.

(Harry Moseley at 00:05:29) I was talking to a group actually last week in California about the startups and, you know, when you think about doing a startup today, Joel, all you need is a credit card. You know, you need a credit card, a laptop, and off you go. You swipe it and you spin up a bunch of AWS servers or Azure servers or something in the Google Cloud, and you're off and running. I did a startup in 1981. Had to buy a mini computer for $100,000, which, you know—and that's, you know, notionally forty years ago.

(Harry Moseley at 00:06:03) Right? So in present value, quite a chunk of change. And then you had to buy terminals, and you had to wire it all up and so on and so forth. But today, credit card, laptop, off and running, and you can work out of Starbucks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:20) It's amazing all the benefits that technology has given to us. I like that you brought up your first startup. I want to go back and find out, like, when did you first interact with technology? Like, when did you first fall in love with tech? Was it video games? Was it a magazine? Like, how did you fall in love with technology?

(Harry Moseley at 00:06:39) That's a short question. It's got a relatively long answer to it, but I'll try to keep it to the short version. So I studied Trinity College Dublin, math, computer science, and engineering. And math and engineering were together, and computer science just came along for the ride, and I thought it was rather interesting. Graduated '77, spent the first year as an engineer, and at the end—the middle of 1978, I realized that, you know, engineering wasn't going to take me where I wanted to go.

(Harry Moseley at 00:07:18) And I spent the prior six months programming a microcomputer to do various different engineering artifacts, if you will, to sort of get away from the manual elements. Probably should've stayed doing that, in hindsight because that was kind of ahead of the curve. And started my first job in 1978 with a tech company in London City. I started as a computer clerk, going around maintaining software and doing all the upgrades. It was all very manual, so I replaced the whole lot with automation.

(Harry Moseley at 00:07:49) I literally built it all from scratch. Again, a mistake. I should have built that into a company, but I didn't. So lots of mistakes along the way, but, you know, here I am today and very satisfied with the career I've had, to be honest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:04) But when's the first spark? Like, when's the first time you turned something on? You're like, oh, I love this. Or like, when's that first moment that you fell in love with technology?

(Harry Moseley at 00:08:14) I think it was when I was programming that—well, what, you know—I mean, my first love goes back to when I was in college. It's like, you know, programming—although it was programming a mainframe with punch cards. You could punch out the punch card—you create the punch card deck, you submit it in the evening, get your results in the morning. If one of the cards was wrong, it all ended up in the bit bucket and had to start again. But I just love—I was just fascinated by it because the automation level was just amazing. For my thesis in college, I designed a concrete tower.

(Harry Moseley at 00:08:51) It's called universal strength where the stresses and strains are equal and has an elliptical skin on the outside and an elliptical skin on the inside, and the curves are completely different. So doing that manually, mathematically, was virtually impossible—not quite, but would have taken you a very long time. And so getting the mainframe to do that overnight was trivial by comparison and popping it all out was very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:17) I love it. See, I like those first moments. Because, like, the first time I wrote code, I felt like a caveman that had just created fire.

(Harry Moseley at 00:09:24) I ran around. But I also remember when I did my startup in 1981 and got my MicroVAX and was programming in the—at a very low level in the MicroVAX using the system services. That was very, very cool. Because I was very fortunate. My education in computer science took me in at a very low level.

(Harry Moseley at 00:09:47) We actually wrote machine code. I don't know if you've ever experienced that, but that is particularly hard where you're actually controlling the registers, which is a very low level of programming. And I remember the professor explaining why we were doing this. He said that I want you to understand the fundamentals of computing, that it's all binary, that it's all registers. And if you can understand that, then whatever you ever do in your future will be based upon the same principles.

(Harry Moseley at 00:10:14) Of course, now we've got quantum computing, which is different, but the underlying principles are very similar.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:22) Yeah. So my father was an engineer, and so he taught me how to write code, get into computers and registries, and essentially how bits work and how they get stored and retrieved. You know, you're smiling because you know what I'm talking about. It's very similar to where you were in the conversation with the registries. But and then it gave me this visual understanding of how an operating system actually boots up and how memory gets stored on the physical disk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:47) And when you see it like that, your—I remember that day. Like, my mind just unlocked about how the computer is actually working, and it's just fascinating.

(Harry Moseley at 00:11:00) Yeah. It is fascinating. And, I mean, there's many fascinating pieces of my journey. You know, I remember when I automated the software maintenance of the software company that I was at, I remember writing my first program that went into the banking system that we were working on. I remember so many things, but there's so many—this one was fun. So it was around about 1980, probably about 1980. And there was for this bank, there was two systems.

(Harry Moseley at 00:11:39) There was the banking system, and there was the money transfer system. And one of the ladies in this bank had two terminals on her desk, and I was coming back one day, and I said to her—I remember her name, Gloria. I said, Gloria, why do you have two terminals on your desk? One banking and one money transfer. So she says, some of the—frequently, I will get a request to transfer money for a client.

(Harry Moseley at 00:12:07) And so before I transfer it on the banking system, I go to check that the funds are—before I transfer on the payment system, I go to check on the banking system that the funds are available. And if they are, then I will debit his account on the banking system for the transaction, and then I'll wire the funds out. And I thought, very interesting. And I went back into the computer area, and I said to Steven what I just experienced with Gloria. And he said, okay.

(Harry Moseley at 00:12:37) So what? And I said, well, why don't we automate that? And he said, what do you mean automated? And I said, look, there's two wires coming back out of each of these two terminals that transmit the receive wire. They all go through the matrix panel.

(Harry Moseley at 00:12:49) Why don't we just cross the wires? He said, well, what's that going to do? I said, and then we can write a little piece of software on the banking system and on the payment system to communicate like terminals. And then we'll create a new program for Gloria that, basically, she wants to transfer funds for this account. It would check the funds that are available.

(Harry Moseley at 00:13:07) And if they are available, wire it out. And when it gets the confirmation back that the wire was successful, debit the account with all of the transaction details. And he said to me, one of these things that I've used a lot since in my career, which is, he said, will it work? And I said, well, I don't know. But if we don't try it, it certainly won't work.

(Harry Moseley at 00:13:26) But so we had a prototype running at 3 a.m. in the morning. Literally, a prototype where—and it worked, and it was absolutely amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:38) And then it rolled into production?

(Harry Moseley at 00:13:40) We didn't—well, we enrolled into production shortly after that. In those days, you didn't have release plans, release controls, and separation of duties and release managers and stuff. We had controls, but not like the rigid controls we have today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:00) So you're innovating and automating in that space. And ultimately, today, you end up at Zoom. How far along did you—and, like, how far along was Zoom before you joined?

(Harry Moseley at 00:14:10) They were very well established. I mean, Eric Yuan, our CEO and founder, has created an amazing company, an amazing culture, an amazing product. And so when I joined—I joined fifteen months ago approximately. It was very well established, obviously. We've grown a lot since then and changed a lot, and we will continue to grow and change, just by the nature of the fact that, you know, of the company.

(Harry Moseley at 00:14:40) And yeah. So it's been a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:43) Yeah. I mean, you guys just went public recently. Right?

(Harry Moseley at 00:14:47) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:48) Yeah. That was exciting. I'm just a fan of Zoom. We've been—we started the podcast with some other type of tool. And then we slowly explored different options, and ultimately, we ended up with Zoom because of all the different features and capabilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:04) And then we just became fans of Zoom.

(Harry Moseley at 00:15:07) Well, it's like I said to Jake, your colleague, a few moments ago, you know, he gets on and he goes, can you hear me? And I say, yes. I can. And, you know, we're so used to making that statement, but when it's Zoom, you really don't need to make that statement.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:21) Right? Well, it works.

(Harry Moseley at 00:15:23) I'll tell you what.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:24) It just works. You could look at my account too. Like, we—the amount of calls we do on Zoom is ridiculous. We do a lot. And then we're always doing video, and then our podcast is heavily dependent on the video working correctly because we make these little micro content clips and all of these things that we do with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:41)
And it's something we don't have to think about. We don't have to worry about if things are going to be corrupt, if recordings aren't going to happen properly. Everything just works, and that's why people love it so much.

(Harry Mosley at 00:15:54)
So is your podcast audio or audio and video?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:58)
Yes. So the podcast in the podcast app only supports audio. So people listen to us mostly on their commutes and things like that. But the way we get a lot of interaction views is we take clips of the podcast from the video, and we chop them up into these what we call micro content clips. And we post them on LinkedIn and YouTube, and then people interact with them because they like to be visual when they're on their screen, and they like to be audible when they're mobile.

(Harry Mosley at 00:16:26)
Got it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:26)
Yeah. So we love it.

(Harry Mosley at 00:16:30)
Great. Yeah, no, it's a terrific platform.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:33)
So what is the thing right now that you're extremely excited about? Is it the background replacement? Is it the growth of the company? Is there something else that's secret and you can't talk about?

(Harry Mosley at 00:16:44)
Well, definitely that. Definitely we're working on new things, new capabilities. But, you know, we introduced Zoom Phone earlier this year. So that came about as a consequence of two things. One was strategically, as a company, we wanted to complete the circle of unified communications and collaboration. And our clients came to us and said, you know, you created this amazing meetings platform where the quality of the product and the stability of the product and the audio on the product is superior. So much so that, actually, the audio on Zoom, many of our clients have said it's better than a traditional phone call, principally because you got a higher frequency range so you don't have the clips. Right? So they asked us about Zoom Phone, and we wanted to do Zoom Phone. The notion that now we have Zoom Phone, it's available in production, and that you can actually just make a phone call and then elevate that phone call into audio or video—it's really cool. So I actually did this one day last week. I was driving home, and I joined a call using Zoom Phone. And then when I got home, I was actually able to elevate the call into video without having to disconnect and redial.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:15)
Think about that.

(Harry Mosley at 00:18:16)
Yeah, so think about that. It's like, man, how many times do you get called on your cell phone and then ask you to join a meeting, but now you have to disconnect and dial back in? So we don't need to do that anymore.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:30)
That's amazing.

(Harry Mosley at 00:18:31)
Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:31)
Just listening to your customer over and over and over.

(Harry Mosley at 00:18:35)
Yeah. So, you know, the voice of the customer has always been super important. Michael Dell, I think, coined that phrase, the voice of the customer, very early on. And we do that a lot. We listen to our clients, listen to their needs, and typically take their requests in and put them into the road map. But Zoom—so going back, though, Zoom Phone is very exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00)
I actually saw—I've been thinking about it a little bit over here because we're growing our sales team, we're growing our company, and we were looking for a phone solution. And right around the same time we got the emails about Zoom Phone, I was like, oh, I wonder how that's going to work for us. Maybe as a team, maybe we use it. We already use the Zoom products to connect us with our customers already. So it's like, you know, maybe we use the Zoom Phone one too. So now we're going to explore that.

(Harry Mosley at 00:19:27)
Yeah, natural extension. Well, if I can help you in that regard, please feel free.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:32)
Just keep making amazing products, please.

(Harry Mosley at 00:19:36)
Yeah. Yeah. And then you got, you know, and then we had the partnerships that we announced late last year with Atlassian and Dropbox.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:43)
Oh, you know Atlassian? Have you hung out with their CTOs over there? There's CTO or CIO? Oh, they're awesome people, man. I just had them both on the show. We did a CTO, CIO one, and we had their CTO on one week, their CIO on the next week. And we talked about the differences in their roles and responsibilities and where they're focused. They have an amazing company culture similar to Zoom, but their first culture item is "Open company, no bullshit." That's their first—that's what they publish everywhere, and I was like, that's interesting. I love that.

(Harry Mosley at 00:20:18)
That's a good corporate—I think being transparent, being open, creates a fantastic culture. It could create—you know, because it's all about trust. So if you trust me and I trust you, then off we go. If there's a doubt about that trust relationship, then, you know, you're a little bit more reserved. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:40)
Yeah. And when it's open and transparent, you can get more smart people involved with the problem.

(Harry Mosley at 00:20:44)
Yeah. And you just go faster. I mean, it's, you know, sort of like the no BS comment. You just go much faster. You know, when you feel like you're walking on glass, it's really hard. Or if you're pushing on rope, that's really hard. But when you don't have to deal with those sorts of issues, you can just go dramatically faster.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:07)
No, that's one of my favorite leadership things to talk about. I do have some questions that we get. It's like we push out to our mailing list, and we ask questions to all the different CTOs, CIOs, and VPs of engineering type people that listen to the show. And then they send back some questions, and I look through them. And so I have a couple of those if that's okay with you.

(Harry Mosley at 00:21:28)
One of the phrases I say is you can ask me anything and I'll choose if I want to answer it, and if I do, how I answer it. So feel free.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:38)
Yeah. So one of the questions that's been coming up a lot is, as a leader, how are you accountable to your team? And, you know, how do you deal with accountability in general with that relationship between you and your team?

(Harry Mosley at 00:21:52)
Yeah. So I have always believed that as a leader, the number one thing that you're responsible for is the success of the people on your team. So every day I wake up and I think about what challenges they have, what opportunities they have, and what can I do as a leader to help them achieve their objectives? That, by and large, is the most important. Spending time, effort on that, trying to figure out ways—whether if it's a colleague in enterprise sales that's trying to figure out a way into an organization, how can I help them? If there's a colleague with a technical challenge, how can I help them? If there's a colleague that's having a challenge at work, even from a mentoring perspective on their career and aspirations, how can I help them? I think that as a leader, your number one responsibility is to the people you work with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:55)
I agree. Your microphone is scratching a little bit against your collar. There we go.

(Harry Mosley at 00:23:03)
Absolutely. Well, so everybody should know that scratchy was caused by my microphone physically scratching off my shirt, so it wasn't going to do with the quality of the Zoom audio platform.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:15)
I can verify that. So how do you go about developing your team? Obviously, you have some sort of team that you work directly with, direct reports. How do you go about developing them? Do you spend a lot of time, a little time? How do you balance that?

(Harry Mosley at 00:23:33)
I think it goes in fits and starts. I mean, you know, typically you do one-on-one meetings once a week. So you have the one-on-one dialogues which are between you and the individual, and then weekly meetings with the team, and then quarterly meetings with the entire group. So you want to make sure that everybody's on the same page. And not everybody needs to be on every conversation because sometimes, you know, if I'm working with one of the people on the team and we have a difference of opinion, it's not that he or she is right and wrong or I am right or wrong. It's like we have a difference of opinion. So you've got to work that out, right, and then figure out, well, how are we going to go forward? Not everybody needs to participate in that conversation. And, you know, when you have the leadership team conversation, that's to make sure that everybody understands all the moving parts that we've got. And then getting together with the entire group is so that everybody understands where we've come from and where we're going.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:44)
How do you connect with your peers? Do you give a lot of talks? Do you go to the local New York Technology Association type meetings, conferences? How do you stay in touch with your peers?

(Harry Mosley at 00:24:58)
Yeah. So I probably attend one to two events a week these days, given that I work for a tech company as opposed to working for KPMG or Blackstone or Credit Suisse UBS in my past. And so that's a way of staying in touch with my peers. I've got a pretty significant network, and so I know a lot of people. A lot of people know me. And in any given week, I don't know, I must connect with 20 plus of my peers. It's rather staggering, and one could argue that's not possible, mostly, you know, it's not realistic, but it's—you know, I do track who I connect with on a week to week basis just because I think it's important. You know, one of the important things I believe that everybody should do is at the end of the day, take a reflect on the day and reflect on what would not have happened had you not gone to work today. Now, you know, some days nothing changed. But most days you will find that, you know, there's three, four, five things that would not have happened had you not gone to work today. And I think that's important to track because it's important for you to recognize the contribution you're making.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:30)
Yeah. Bring awareness to it.

(Harry Mosley at 00:26:32)
Yeah. And not from a peer perspective within the organization, but just for your own self-edification, if you will.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:42)
I'm a big fan of growing myself. I always look at, like, how can I make one small improvement and how can I leverage the compounding nature of time in order to move myself forward?

(Harry Mosley at 00:26:54)
Yeah. Absolutely. My English teacher when I was in school, I was probably about 12 years old, and I remember Mr. Blackburn saying that every day you wake up, you need to learn something new. It doesn't matter how small it is or how big it is or what it is. It could be—you know, when you grow up and you're, you know, sort of—I was 12 at the time, as I said. When you grow up and you're a professional in your career, whatever that's chosen to be, it could be something from a professional perspective. It could be something from a personal perspective. But learning something new every day is super important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:33)
It's that sense for me. It's the sense of progress. Right? The fact that I move myself forward. I find that all the bad things in life happen to me when I feel like I'm standing still.

(Harry Mosley at 00:27:47)
My father used to say if you're standing still, you're really going backwards because the rest of the world is moving forwards.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:52)
Of course. Yes. Oh, man, I like the way he thinks. Now while you're in New York, are you in San Francisco a lot? Is that where the headquarters is?

(Harry Mosley at 00:28:05)
Headquarters in San Jose.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:08)
In San Jose.

(Harry Mosley at 00:28:09)
Yeah. So I get there probably once a month.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:14)
Once a month?

(Harry Mosley at 00:28:15)
Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:16)
I was out there. I ran into this company called Pulse QA, which was pretty interesting. Have you heard of them?

(Harry Mosley at 00:28:22)
No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:23)
Oh, so they're essentially like—we have the podcast on, we have guests on, and we talk. Right? And we share the advice and the audience listens. But they took it a step farther. They focused on creating community of technology decision makers that just share between themselves. And so I saw them online and then I was out in San Francisco the next, you know, week after that. And I ran into them and I saw what they were doing. But it was pretty interesting because I know you meet a lot with your peers. Right? Because I get to meet a lot with people, and they're usually way ahead of me, so I'm getting tons of value out of it. But some of the peers like to give back to the next generation, do things like coming on podcasts. And Pulse QA is really cool technology. So if you're getting a lot of the peer-to-peer stuff and you want to, you know, see what's coming up in the next generation, Pulse QA is pretty cool, pretty cool for that.

(Harry Mosley at 00:29:20)
I'll check it out. Yeah. But it's absolutely—it's a known fact. I mean, you know, if a friend of yours, Joel, if a friend of yours calls you and basically says, Joel, here's a piece of technology that I think is really good and that you should take a look at it, what will you do? You will probably take a look at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:40)
Yeah. And if it's going to—

(Harry Mosley at 00:29:41)
If it's someone you know and you trust. If it's someone you don't know and you don't trust, you might just listen and be like, okay, next.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:52)
Yeah. That's why when I see cool stuff like this, I like to tell people about it because it's, I don't know, it's kind of how life works. Right? You see cool stuff, you pass it along. That's how Zoom grew. Right?

(Harry Mosley at 00:30:03)
Yeah. Absolutely. And it's like, you know, if you just look back over the last—I mean, looking back into 2018, there were over 200 features we added to the platform, believe it or not. Yeah. So it's pretty significant. Right? And, you know, you look over the first 90 days of this calendar year when we added over 50 features, plus the introduction of Zoom Phone, you know, so that you can do things like multi-content sharing in a room, which is pretty fascinating. Right? You know, we announced that we're going to be doing real-time transcription later this year, which is pretty cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:40)
That is really neat.

(Harry Mosley at 00:30:42)
Yeah. So, which, you know, augments the transcription we already had. I don't know if you've ever used that, where you're doing the recording and you create the cloud recording and use the digital transcription that goes along with the audio and the video and the content sharing. That's really cool. The nice thing about real-time transcription is that if you, you know, arrive five minutes late for a meeting, which, of course, would never happen to the likes of you and me because we're just never.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:10)
Never.

(Harry Mosley at 00:31:11)
But if you did arrive five minutes late, you could actually go to the real-time transcription and look and see what did you actually miss without having to interrupt the meeting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:20)
That's super useful.

(Harry Mosley at 00:31:22)
Yeah. Very useful. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:23)
Now I've got an actual product question here. So the transcription is only available when you do cloud recordings. Right?

(Harry Mosley at 00:31:32)
Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:32) Okay. So we record a lot locally to our computer, but I did do the cloud one once, and it was really cool because I believe this is correct. I searched for the transcription, and it would take me to a different point in the call.

(Harry Mosley at 00:31:45) Yeah. Exactly right. Yeah. You search for the word or the phrase, and it highlights on the audio and video stream with little yellow spots where it finds the word or the phrase, and you can just click the spot and it'll take you right there. Or you can click the transcript and it takes you right there. So very cool. But yeah. So recording to the cloud provides that for you. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:10) So I'm a big geek. We talked a little bit about Logic 17 and built like a lot of apps, a lot of different companies and technologies. And so I'm curious to, like, what's the structure like at Zoom? Do you guys have hundreds of engineers, thousands of engineers? I don't know.

(Harry Mosley at 00:32:24) We don't disclose how many engineers we have. So sorry. No. Yeah. That's okay. That's, you know, it goes to what I said a moment ago. Feel free to ask anything you like, and I'll choose to answer it or not. So we don't disclose how many engineers we have. But it's a, you know, we're a fairly entrepreneurial culture. And so we get a lot of different sort of inputs, if you will, into the product from, you know, from our clients primarily, but also internally from industry, from our, you know, we have a client advisory board. So we get sort of multiple different, we have multiple different ways of getting those inputs into the product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:07) Very cool.

(Harry Mosley at 00:33:08) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:09) And then you...

(Harry Mosley at 00:33:10) And then we have great partnerships like I talked about before, like, you know, with the Atlassian and Dropbox and Okta and Splunk, etcetera. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:20) And those are some great companies too.

(Harry Mosley at 00:33:22) Yeah. And also, it's like, you know, I don't know if you've seen this, but if you click on your participant button of the Zoom screen and you see the names over on the right, if you hover over the names, you see the little LinkedIn profile? You see the LinkedIn icon showing up?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:49) I might have an older version. I hover over participants, I hover over Harry. I got mute, more, and then your photo and your name.

(Harry Mosley at 00:33:58) Yeah. Well, maybe after the recording is over, we should figure out why you can't see that. So, yeah. So as an example, I'm hovering over your name. I see the LinkedIn icon, so I can click on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:11) That's awesome.

(Harry Mosley at 00:34:13) And if I have a connection, which I do with you, it brings up your profile for me. Looking at you and looking at your profile. It's a little along the lines of, I'm sure you saw the TED Talk on the sixth sense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:28) Oh, no. But I love TED Talks. I haven't seen that one yet.

(Harry Mosley at 00:34:31) Oh my god. You haven't seen that one?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:34) No. Sixth Sense? Like, not like the movie. Right? Like...

(Harry Mosley at 00:34:37) I'll send you the YouTube clip. Please. It's awesome. It's actually awesome. And it's the sixth sense, I think, was done around about 2011. So it's about eight years old, nine years old now. But when you see it, you're going to look at it and say, wow. It's kind of like, yep. Some of these things were almost there. I mean, it's a, you know, so that today, it's like, you know, the notion I was reading in JFK now at a couple of gates, they have facial recognition where you can actually board a plane without having to see a gate agent. They actually, it's the facial recognition that's allowing you on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:20) Good topic. So I actually saw on Twitter, like, this weekend, this other guy, Scott Hanselman. He has a podcast for developers about writing better code, things like that. And I saw his Twitter, and he said he was boarding an international flight, and they didn't give him an option to opt out. They just physically put him in front of the sensor and said, here you go and then move on. And he posted on Twitter and then a bunch of people responded with, like, that's so messed up that you didn't get a chance to opt out. Me personally, I don't care, man. Like, let's just go live life. Like, this technology is moving us forward. People ask me all the time about my Alexa and everything. I'm like, dude, just it makes your life easier. Who cares? Like, signal versus noise.

(Harry Mosley at 00:36:02) I absolutely. I love the automated gate controls at the passport, you know, sort of slide my passport in, look at the camera. Sometimes I forget to take off my glasses, which is a pain. I love, you know, I love using things like Clear. I love using, you know, sort of all of these services, you know, global entry, etcetera. Yeah. It's I've got nothing to hide. And so, please feel free to sort of look at my entire profile.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:34) Yeah. I look, I spent my entire life in technology. Right? You have too. It's like we're constantly building to make things easier to use with good intention.

(Harry Mosley at 00:36:44) I remember when E-ZPass first came out. E-ZPass. Like, it's like I'm never going to have an E-ZPass on my car. Why not? Because I don't want people knowing where I went, what day, and what time. It's like, what are you worried about? What are you trying, what are you hiding from? And now it's like, you know, now they got rid of the toll booths in the tri-state area and it's like, if you don't have E-ZPass, they're looking at your license plate. Now they're, you know, they're emailing you the bill to your home. So, yeah, I love things like that. Just makes life flow, it just makes life easier, moves things faster, and then we can, you know, it's kind of, you know, it's like getting into the whole topic of sort of AI, NLP, ML, etcetera. Just making life easier for all of us humans so we can, you know, sort of not become lazy, but we can be, you know, so that we can apply ourselves to, you know, to better making the world a better place in different ways. Something I'm thinking and talking a lot about recently is the notion of machine thinking. I don't know if you've spent any time thinking about that or talking about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:54) Yeah. Keep going.

(Harry Mosley at 00:37:54) But it's a, it's a little, you know, my mind is a little different from AI and ML because, you know, we're humans. Right? And as humans, we get a lot of input. And what do we do with that input? We think about it. And we act on it. But then we still, even though we've acted on it, we continue to think about it. And then when more inputs come in, we still think and then we may act, we may sort of reverse actions that we've done before and now take new actions or augment those actions that we did before. And I think it's a very different piece in my mind that sort of strikes me that it might be a little different to the ML or the AI. I don't know. You do a lot of talking to a lot of different industry experts. I'd be interested in your perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:47) Yeah. I've actually thought a lot about this because there's the general perspective of we're trying to build artificial general intelligence and, like, 99% people aren't. We're trying to just build something specifically to automate. And then what you brought up, thinking and being able to describe it and articulate it, I believe, is step one. Like, I almost thought about writing an entire book because I find that the hardest things, the nerds get it nerdier. Right? They get really down deep in the details of the algorithms. And there's almost like a lack. It's, I guess, taking like that Star Trek approach of, like, having the vision of how it could work and better than layman's terms, but not too difficult and deep down. So when you're talking about machine thinking, like, I really like that concept. I look a lot at how I make decisions. Like, I try to look at myself objectively as much as possible. And to build some sort of assistive technology to help you with that would be so cool. Right?

(Harry Mosley at 00:39:48) Yeah. That's kind of what I'm thinking too. But it's like, but it's, you know? So here we are. Machine thinking. I'm thinking. It's like, you know, it's you think about things and you don't act on them because you want to keep, so I don't know yet if that's different to AI or ML, but I think it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:08) It, I think it is. I do. My gut says it is. I'll figure out how to articulate it later.

(Harry Mosley at 00:40:14) Exactly. I haven't done that part yet, but I think it is too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:18) But I like to watch my memory stack. So, like, we're actually very, like, we're very poor at, like, storing memory in context for real time processing. Like, we can only store a handful of items in real time, like, in our head to make decisions. And I thought, like, how could I, if we're always using technology to augment ourselves, right, like, and scale ourselves, how can we take the way we process decisions or our unique algorithm of how we think about things and have a machine allow us to bypass our limitations of holding objects in real time for decision making processing, right? Like, how could I scale Joel's decision and thinking abilities to be able to think about this problem while keeping these 400 things in sight at the same time while choosing the best option?

(Harry Mosley at 00:41:09) Yeah. And I think, you know, as humans, we've struggled with that for years, centuries probably, which is, like, you know, sort of you got all these balls in the air. How do you make sure that you're keeping all these balls in the air and you're doing everything possible to sort of maintain them. I think it's really hard, and I don't think any of us do it very well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:31) No. The moment I went on the road of discipline, like, trying to figure out how to be disciplined and grow and improve myself, I realized how quickly two things, how quickly you can get to the top through discipline and setting yourself apart. And the second thing is our universe, like, base principles, it's entropic. Right? Like, it's always deteriorating. And so the hardest thing to do is to persist. Right? So the moment you have, like, ask the people 200 years ago, right, like, the hardest thing to do is to keep going towards one singular focus. It's ridiculously difficult. And then it gets frustrating. You try it, and then you have to improve yourself in all these different areas to go after this goal. And we really admire the people who do that, specifically, like, athletes do it pretty well. Right? The highly successful business people do it very well.

(Harry Mosley at 00:42:22) Look at Eric. I mean, like, you know, he was on a, he was on a mission, and he's still on a mission. And the mission isn't over. Yes. You know, you look at Benioff from Salesforce. It's like, you know, it's very, very clear laser focus of where they want to go. But I think, you know, so when you look at a lot of the tech companies today, I think that's the case. They, you know, it's, I fundamentally believe in the technology world today. It's a, it's all about the ecosystem, and it's about an ecosystem of systems. And we are now in a world where it is easier to switch out of one system into another system because they have a superior product, which means that we need to keep innovating and keep moving that game forward. Because if we don't, then someone's going to come up, meet us, and exceed us, and pass us by. The cost of change is dramatically less than whatever it used to be before. And, you know, there are, you know, we are all trying to figure out ways to make our product stickier. But, you know, you look at Salesforce, you look at Splunk, you look at ServiceNow, you look at Workday. These are all great products, and that's the ecosystem that we're living in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:46) Now have you gotten the chance to meet, um, Parker Harris over at Salesforce? No. So you would really like him personality-wise. I know you would get along with him, but he's one of the three co-founders. It was him, Benioff, and the third person. But he just became...

(Harry Mosley at 00:44:03) Is Parker Harris the guy that Benioff met on the plane?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:09) I don't know. But he's definitely the guy who, like, it was the three of them in an apartment. And then Parker and this other guy were working at this other company, like, doing these other type of technologies, and Benioff convinced them to start Salesforce. I don't know if they met on a plane, though.

(Harry Mosley at 00:44:24) It's because there was a story, and I can't believe I'm making this up. But when I send you the YouTube video, I'll send you the story if I can find it. But I believe Benioff, when he was on a flight, around about the time that he was starting Salesforce, met this data scientist on a plane, and they were sitting next to each other, had this whole flight. And on the flight, Benioff hired him and joined Salesforce. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:53) He's on the episode, he shared a cool story about Benioff, but he seems like the type of person that super cares about the individual themselves and wants what's right for that person over the company, which is something that I admire a lot.

(Harry Mosley at 00:45:09) Well, look. At the end of the day, Joel, we're just humans, and we're only here for a short period of time, relatively speaking. And, you know, I think that it's important to help our fellow citizens be, you know, better at what they do or have a happy life, enjoy what they do, be successful, etcetera. And if people don't like what they're doing, then help them figure out, well, what is it that you would like to do and then help them do that. I think that, why wouldn't you want to do that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:43) I don't know. I don't have an answer for that. I heard from things like Jim Rohn. I like the motivational people a lot and the people that think about life a lot. And he said, help enough people get what they want, you'll get what you want. And I was like, well, that's actually really interesting because then it puts you in the perspective that in order to get what I want in life, the only thing I can really do is go around and help people get what they want.

(Harry Mosley at 00:46:10) That's cheap.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:11) It works for me. Right?

(Harry Mosley at 00:46:14) Yeah. No. I got it. It works for me too. Yeah. Yeah. I've, you know, sort of people have asked me in a sort of, clearly, you've had a successful career. What is it that you've done to make this happen? Nothing. No. I, it's like, you know, did I sit down, you know, sort of five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago and say, here's the map of my career? No. I fundamentally always, you know, put my head down, do the best job I can for the organization I worked with. I had great teams around me, great supporters around me, and was just sort of immensely lucky, to be honest. And, well, they say people can make your own luck, and I don't know if that, you know, I didn't make anything happen. I just did the best I possibly could and supported the people as best I could. And everything else is, then, you know, sort of let the cards fall where they fall. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:14) But that's the most rare and important thing, though, the thing that you're doing. Like, you're running a large organization. You see inside of lots of teams. You get to meet lots of different people at other companies. Like, it is the rare thing to be like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:28) And so what I do is whenever I find cultures like that, I get near them. I decide that I want to put myself in environments where those types of people exist. And that conscious choice is something that I find a lot of people, like at the beginning of their career, they don't know it's okay to do that. It's like you need to make sure that you're in an environment where healthy things grow so that that's who you become. Those are the habits you pick up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:51) That's, you know, you become the people you're around.

(Harry Mosley at 00:47:55) But I also think, Joel, you know, in addition to all of that, it's also a lot of hard work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:00) Oh, yeah.

(Harry Mosley at 00:48:01) Yeah. I mean, you know, it's never been a nine to five. Work starts and stops when it starts and when it stops. So it's not, you know, work isn't on a clock.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:17) I'm not gonna let a clock tell me when I can do what I love.

(Harry Mosley at 00:48:20) What's that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:21) I'm not gonna let a clock tell me when I can do what I love.

(Harry Mosley at 00:48:24) No. Absolutely not. Yeah. It's like, you know, I remember a funny story. I remember when I was working for a particular organization, they had this upward feedback process. Right? And so I was there, I don't know, maybe four months. I got my first upward feedback report, and I was devastated. It said, you know, a lot of nice things about me, but then it said, you know, Harry doesn't know anything about work-life balance. Harry believes in work all the time. You know, the weekends are miserable because I get email from Harry all weekend and so on and so forth. I get emails from him at 3:00 in the morning. Something has to be done about Harry's work-life balance. So, you know, it's like you don't like people telling you they don't like you, right? They don't like your work habits. So I decided that I would, at 6:00 on Friday, sort of download all my email to my laptop, work offline over the weekend on my mobile device when I'm sitting outside waiting for my younger son to come out of swim practice. I would draft emails on my iPhone. And then at Monday morning at 6 a.m., I would open up, connect my laptop, and send all the drafts off, you know, real emails. And then I got my next upward feedback report, which was devastating. I hate Monday mornings. It's like, it's the worst day of the week. What's wrong with this guy, Mosley? Why can't he just send email when he sends it? Why does he have to wait till 6:00 on Monday morning? You know, Monday mornings are awful because it's like email. Harry Mosley. Harry Mosley. Harry Mosley. Harry Mosley. Yeah. If he just emailed me over the weekend, that would be so much better so I could read it, think about it, digest it, and come up with a plan for next week. So that's when I realized, Joel, that, you know, you can't change the spots on the dog. I am who I am. This is my DNA. And so, you know, life just goes on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:32) And better yet, if you embrace it and you start to look for it, then you can be around people who want to run like you want to run.

(Harry Mosley at 00:50:39) Yeah. But it's like, you know, but I think it's important. If you have an idea or have a suggestion or you have a question, you should feel free to just ask it. You know, if it's off hours, I'm not expecting people to, you know, if I'm on a flight to Europe and it's, you know, 11:00 at night, I'm not expecting people to respond back to me unless it's a crisis or a production issue or something of that nature. But, typically, nothing is ever that urgent that it needs an instantaneous response.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:08) Well, and I like, for me, I noticed myself doing this too. Like, I'll write the Slack messages in the Slack but not want to push them all the time because I sometimes feel a little bit bad about it. But at the same time, it's like, you know, if I don't do it, I risk losing getting it out there. And I like to take action, and I like to get stuff done. I like to feel that sense of accomplishment. It's like, it's on my mind right now. I can either take action and let it out, or I have to, like, take an action to remind myself to take action at a later time. It just seems so inefficient.

(Harry Mosley at 00:51:41) Yeah. Which goes back to what we were talking about a moment ago, thinking. You're thinking about stuff and, like, oh, the light bulb goes off. Now you either take action on what you thought about, and now the thought, or you're gonna have to, like, store it and retrieve it later. And it's like, you know? So yeah. So absolutely. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:00) Very cool. As we wrap up here, let's say you go back to that version of you that was writing that payment integration wire transfers script. You could go back and give that individual one piece of advice to last him the rest of his career, only one. What would that be?

(Harry Mosley at 00:52:20) I think the one piece of advice I would offer to my compadres, so to speak, is whenever you encounter a problem, always try to figure out a solution for it. Doesn't matter how crazy it is. There was a time in my career when I encountered a problem and I didn't try to figure out a solution, and that cost the project about six months. And I recognized it was a problem, and I just left it for somebody else to figure it out, which was, I was very junior at the time, but I think that, fundamentally, if you see a problem, you should do something about it. Raise it, put a solution in place. If you, you know, if you can't think of a solution, get some people around the table who can help come up with a solution. Just don't leave it fester.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:19) I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on, sharing the advice, connecting with us. People want to learn more about you, connect with you, probably LinkedIn or Twitter?

(Harry Mosley at 00:53:29) All the above.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:30) All right. Either one's fine.

(Harry Mosley at 00:53:32) Yeah. Any one. And let's circle, if you could do the intro for Logic 17 or whatever its new name is, and I will send you The Sixth Sense and see if I can find that Benny Haas story for you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:45) Oh, that'd be very, very cool. Fantastic. Thank you, man. I really like you. Like, you're very cool.

(Harry Mosley at 00:53:52) All right. Very good. Enjoy the rest of your day and the week. All right, man. Thank you very much. Cheers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:56) Talk soon. Cheers. 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.