Marcus East - Technical Director - Office of the CTO at Google

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Marcus East from Google, and we discuss amazing use cases in digital transformation, how to approach networking and growing relationships, and why it's important to develop a point of view early in your career. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) What's up?

(Marcus East at 00:00:32) Joel, how are you, sir?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) Dude, I'm amazing. How are you doing, buddy?

(Marcus East at 00:00:38) Yeah, I'm the same. Happy Friday.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) Are you out in San Francisco right now?

(Marcus East at 00:00:43) I am.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:44) How's the lockdown doing there?

(Marcus East at 00:00:46) You know, we were one of the first places to lock down, and I know a lot of people have found that quite hard, but it's kept the number of COVID cases here pretty low. So I'm very thankful for that, but looking forward to getting back to normal as soon as possible as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:02) Nice. How have you been getting your haircut?

(Marcus East at 00:01:06) I haven't. So trust me, I'm having a bad hair day today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:13) Dude, it looks amazing. I like the art you've got going on in the background too.

(Marcus East at 00:01:18) Thanks. Yeah, a little bit of my hometown of London.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:22) So you're from London?

(Marcus East at 00:01:24) I am originally, yes. So London born and bred. And I've been in the States for about six years. I first moved over here when I was working for Apple, and obviously, Silicon Valley is a great place to be for a technologist.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:37) And so what made you want to come over here?

(Marcus East at 00:01:41) I think one of the things that was really interesting for me in the UK is that so many of the decisions that impact enterprises today are driven by innovations coming out of the West Coast of the United States. And so being given that opportunity to be there in the heart of Silicon Valley was just something I couldn't turn down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:02) Yeah, of course. I mean, even I think about going out there. Well, I mean, I visit there a number of times a year. Every time I do, the energy is just so high when it comes to technology.

(Marcus East at 00:02:13) Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the energy attracts a certain talent. So there's some super talented people here doing some really interesting things. But what I love is taking all of that technology, all of those solutions, all of that thinking, and then applying it to help solve some of our customers' problems around the world. So I feel very privileged.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:35) And today you're at Google, office of the CTO?

(Marcus East at 00:02:39) That's right, yes. So in the office of the CTO at Google, which is for me a really exciting role, which I'm happy to tell you more about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:49) There looks like there's a lot of people in the office of the CTO. I was trying to wrap my mind around it.

(Marcus East at 00:02:54) Yeah, look, it's a very interesting team. There are about 40 of us across the globe in the office of the CTO. We're in, obviously, San Francisco, we're down in Sunnyvale where our Google Cloud headquarters is, but we have people in Singapore, in Japan, in the UK, all over the world. And that gives us a really strong international perspective. We're a group of, I guess you'd describe us as senior engineers and technologists, many of whom have been CTOs in big major brands. For example, I was CTO at National Geographic before joining Google. And we have three responsibilities really.

(Marcus East at 00:03:34) We're part of engineering, which gives us a unique perspective into what Google is developing for the future, but gives us an opportunity to help shape some of that. And we talk about that as our emerging themes, where we are trying to predict what we think our customers will need in three to five years' time so that we can help our engineering leadership to wrap their heads around it. So that's the first, what we call an OKR or objective and key results measurement. The second is that we are very heavily involved in market shaping, so many of us work very closely with people such as yourself. We do a lot of interviews, we do a lot of public engagement, and many of us have books out.

(Marcus East at 00:04:18) I have a book coming out in a few months about digital transformation, for example. So that's our second OKR. And then our third and most exciting OKR is working with Google's biggest customers, and we do that in the form of a trusted advisor. So we build stateful relationships with CIOs and CTOs in companies that either are existing Google customers or who are thinking about working with Google. And that's everything from big retailers through big insurance companies through to the government, and it's a lot of fun, I can tell you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:54) That's so cool. So what—first of all, I'm really excited. I'm going to ask you about your book too, because was the title Working with Dinosaurs?

(Marcus East at 00:05:02) Correct, yes. That's the title.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:04) Beautiful. It's perfect.

(Marcus East at 00:05:06) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:08) So I'm curious to know, if one of the OKRs was three to five years into the future, what does that look like? What does the future look like?

(Marcus East at 00:05:17) Yeah, look, predicting the future is always tricky, Joel. So I don't want to put my foot in it here, but one of the things that we're seeing—and a lot of that is driven by the current situation that we live in and the global pandemic—one of the situations that we're seeing is that there is an acceleration of the need for digital transformation. And one of the statistics that I'll share with you that really helps us to understand that is that last year when KPMG and Harvey Nash did a big study talking to many CIOs and CTOs, they asked how many of them saw budget increases versus decreases. And last year, about 60% of CIOs and CTOs saw an increase in their budget.

(Marcus East at 00:06:04) And of that 60%, 44% saw those increases because the board or their CEO had decided that digital transformation was a top corporate priority and needed more investment. So that is one of the things that's intriguing for us because it then shapes all of the activities that we see down the line. And many of the technologies that we're developing and many of the technologies that we have today are going to adapt to help our customers embrace that digital transformation opportunity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:37) Nice. So I saw on your profile, your bio, that you liked some games. What type of games do you play?

(Marcus East at 00:06:46) I love games. I have to say I was a beta tester for many MMORPGs back in the day. I built one of the largest guilds in Star Wars Galaxies when that was very popular. I think we had about 350 members around the world. So I do love those sorts of collaborative games where you get an opportunity to work with others.

(Marcus East at 00:07:07) And when I'm playing by myself, I love turn-based games. So games like XCOM or Phoenix Point—and if you've come across Phoenix Point, which was recently released by the founders of XCOM. And yep, I love the intellectual challenge as well as the twitchiness of some of the games that I play.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:28) I was reading up a little bit. So I had taken a break for several years from playing games. And then with the whole pandemic, I said, all right, let's see what's going on in the gaming world. And I found that a lot of the platforms are moving to online, digital.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:46) I know that Google has the one—I think it's called Stadia?

(Marcus East at 00:07:50) Correct. Stadia, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:51) Stadia, yes. But there's definitely this new trend with cross-playing. Like, I can be on my Xbox but also playing with people who are on their PC. And it's just the way that the games are evolving.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:04) One of the articles I was reading was saying, you know, the companies that are going to win this are the companies with the most amount of server power, right? Because in the future, the games are going to be played like that. And so I was pretty excited to try out the Google stuff. So that's my next adventure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:22) Have you gotten to try it all?

(Marcus East at 00:08:23) Excellent. I have, yeah. I think you'll really enjoy it. I mean, one of the beauties of Stadia is that people don't need to have expensive console equipment or, like I have for example, a dedicated gaming rig that I built from the ground up at extensive cost. It's helping us to democratize gaming, and I think that it's a really good example of where the cloud is very powerful, in that increasingly customers are saying to us, we need more capacity to support the growth in our customer usage, and the cloud's a brilliant way for them to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:58) So do you get to—I guess if you get to travel a lot, then you could just bring the controller with you and play wherever you go?

(Marcus East at 00:09:06) Correct, yeah. Most important thing is make sure you've got a good internet connection.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:11) Man, and I'm excited too. I've been trying to find the Starlink, you know, Elon Musk's Starlink thing that they put up, and I haven't been able to see it yet. But a couple of my friends—our producer Jake, he's even texted me. He's like, go outside, you can see it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:25) And I missed it by 10 minutes. But have you gotten to see the Starlink in the sky yet?

(Marcus East at 00:09:29) I haven't yet, no. That's something that I'm definitely planning on doing soon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:34) Me too. I was looking for an app that would notify me. It would say, oh, they're coming around. Because there's one that'll do that for the space station. But I couldn't find an app for that.

(Marcus East at 00:09:43) But maybe—I'm sure somebody's working on it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:47) I know. I'm going to get a hundred emails after this about the app that will track it. No, but I think that's going to be a huge player in getting high-speed internet even more accessible as you get to travel around the world.

(Marcus East at 00:09:58) Yeah. And another thing that I think is really interesting is how the pandemic has impacted educational organizations. For example, we've seen many, many schools that are now suddenly having to adapt to working online. And one of the challenges is pupils don't always have internet access around the world. And so in Kenya, for example, we were able to help through our Loon, which is a sister company of Google, using high-altitude balloons to deliver internet connectivity to remote places. And that's been transformative to the education system there, and something that we're very proud of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:36) That's L-O-O-N, Loon?

(Marcus East at 00:10:38) L-O-O-N, yeah. Check it out. It sounds crazy, but basically it is balloons at high altitude that are carrying technology that allows them to receive and transmit internet signals. And it is amazing.

(Marcus East at 00:10:52) Providing access. Yeah, it's one of the things that Google does very well where we say, you know, let's forget how people are tackling this problem today. How could we tackle this problem if we had the ability to build any technology in the world? So I think you'll find that pretty exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:09) It's an amazing explanation too to the kids. I could imagine growing up, you know, going through middle school and high school and asking where does the internet come from, and my teacher telling me balloons in the sky.

(Marcus East at 00:11:21) That's right. That's the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:24) I love it. Yeah, there's a—and then Facebook, they did a drone one or they tried to. I think it exploded on one of Musk's rockets. I don't know if they actually got the program up, but it seems like a lot of companies were exploring this aerial way of internet versus running lines.

(Marcus East at 00:11:41) Yeah, I think that's right. And look, we can take for granted having great internet connectivity. And if you live in North America in a major city, and if you have a great job, then having access to the internet is almost a given. But increasingly, that is not necessarily the case. And so thinking about ways to tackle that problem and helping to deliver internet connectivity, I think, is a really important way in which tech companies can help society.

(Marcus East at 00:12:09) And I think that as we look at the way in which education has adapted to the pandemic, the rapid speed with which schools and teachers have been able to adapt to teaching remotely has been enabled by ubiquitous internet access. And I think things like 5G will help as well in the future too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:28) Oh, I'm really excited. The different applications that I've seen, the use cases of the 5G—it's just a whole—we got so used to 3G, 4G. There wasn't much of a difference. The 5G is a meaningful difference.

(Marcus East at 00:12:45) Correct, yeah. I mean, for many people, it means that when they're out and about on their Android devices, for example, they're going to get better internet connectivity and more bandwidth than they've been getting at home on their WiFi. And that is going to really transform the relationship between many of the big enterprise customers that we work with and their customers. I mean, just as an example, we work with several entertainment companies, and entertainment companies have always dreamt of people being able to access content anytime, any place. And the reality is the cost of 4G bandwidth has been one of the constraints there, as well as the performance.

(Marcus East at 00:13:22) I would say that in three years' time, we're going to see that completely turned on its head, where organizations are going to be able to deliver enriched content out to consumers, fully personalized, using a combination of 5G technologies for the distribution, but also edge computing, which will allow them to process some of the workloads for things like personalization much closer to their customers at much higher performance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:48) I love the future.

(Marcus East at 00:13:51) Me too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:52) Now we just need the Neuralink going.

(Marcus East at 00:13:56) Absolutely. And it's funny you mentioned that, because one of the things that I did recently was a presentation for one of the United Nations groups that looks at the social impact of technology, and I talked about biohacking, which is, you know, obviously a very wild and very wide field. But they were so intrigued to hear about how people are looking at using technology to enhance what it means to be human. So maybe we can talk about that in another podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:26) Right. We need notes. We need prep on that. One of the things that I did notice—I was, you know, reading all about you, and I get to read a lot of different profiles and biographies. But you seem to be really good at networking with people, at building relationships.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:46) You seem to be really smart about the different associations that you belong to, professional groups. And it just stood out to me. And I was curious, how do you approach that? How did you get involved with some of them originally? Did someone suggest that you do that? Like, where did you get your first experience into being a part of those types of groups?

(Marcus East at 00:15:07) Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for noticing that. For me, it starts at the beginning of my career. I was very fortunate that 26 years ago, when I was starting out after leaving college, I joined IBM. And one of the things that was very important there was that people in IBM and the executives that I worked with in IBM really believed in investing in their people and building a network that would support them.

(Marcus East at 00:15:33) And one of the things that happened very early in my IBM career is that some of the senior execs took me under their wing, and there was a group of about 14 of them who then spent over the next couple of years a lot of time with me, teaching me about what it means to be a technologist, what it means to be helping customers with their technology. And why that's important to me is that I understood that having a network of people that you can learn from and a network of people that you can provide value to is critically important as a technologist. And I think that it's one of the things that helps to identify the sort of most impactful CTOs and CIOs versus those who aren't. You need to be able to build relationships with non-technologists, with other technologists deep into your engineering function. And I think that I was very fortunate to have had that experience early in my career.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:30) Yeah. So if people were wondering about how to get started, you know, maybe somebody's saying, I haven't been a part of the groups, but I've heard of groups. You know, what sort of insight do you have for them? How could they get started?

(Marcus East at 00:16:42) Yeah. Many of these groups have some quite interesting opportunities to engage with them. They have, for example, open nights where there might be some key speakers coming in and you can get to see how the group operates. But we all know that personal introductions can be very important as well. And one of the things that I think has been interesting for me is watching how some people at the start of their career are really good at reaching out and asking for advice and building connections and asking to be introduced into those sorts of groups. And I think you've got to, if you're at the start of your career, have the confidence to reach out to people who may be a few years ahead of you and to ask them for support.

(Marcus East at 00:17:26) Just this week, I was contacted by a technologist and architect over in the UK who is super interested in continuing his career. And he said, look, I've seen some really interesting things in your background. Would you be willing to talk to me and tell me about groups and organizations that I can connect with? And I was, of course, happy to do so because it's the sort of thing that helped me in my career early on as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:52) Yeah. I found that when I was in that position, I was shy. When I was newer, I was more shy. But then once I learned how to ask, it became easy because, yeah, 80% of the people say no. But if you ask 100 people, you get 20 people who are willing to help you, 10 that it actually comes down to, and you build three or four meaningful relationships.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:14) And it takes a week to kick that off. So learning through that process, and then owning a business and understanding how sales works, you need a lot of at bats. But going through that process really builds confidence. And also, for me, and obviously for you based off of that story, when people who are newer in the game are asking up for help, it's really pretty easy to help. And I'm often really open to it if they ask politely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:48) You know? And so I would say for younger people listening, don't be shy. Just do it.

(Marcus East at 00:18:55) Couldn't agree more, Joel. And I think one of the other things that's important is it's good to develop a point of view even early in your career. So one of the things that was interesting for me was that back in 1996, I took it upon myself to write a white paper about the impact of the Internet on technology. Now, some of the senior execs at IBM said that's not your job, but actually the paper was pretty well received. And so I then became known as someone who was really interested in what was described at the time as e-business.

(Marcus East at 00:19:26) And much of my career since then has been focused on e-commerce. It's been focused on building large-scale systems. As an example, when I was back in the UK, I was the CIO for one of the largest not-for-profits over there called Comic Relief, and it's famous for having these big telethons. And the problem was that back in 2009, 2010, people were increasingly wanting to interact with the charity online rather than through the telephone. And so I worked with my team to build what at the time was one of the most scalable and one of the first cloud-based architectures that allowed us to handle a huge volume of transactions in a very short period of time.

(Marcus East at 00:20:11) We were doing about 55 transactions a minute in terms of overall technology throughput. And then on a credit card basis, we were doing about 500 transactions per second, which was remarkable. And what was interesting about that for me is that I really didn't think about that as a new thing. We were just looking for a solution to our business problem. But then I was approached by some people from the British Computer Society who said, look, the cloud is something that people are starting to get interested in.

(Marcus East at 00:20:44) We'd love you to come and share some of your thoughts and your thinking with us. And that ultimately led to me becoming a fellow of the British Computer Society. So that was a really interesting experience for me, and I think that people should always try to develop some sort of deep expertise in one area to help move their careers forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:03) Yes. And then share their insights and opinions even though it might not be exactly 100% right, open that up for discussion so people can at least join the conversation.

(Marcus East at 00:21:17) I couldn't agree more. And just to give you another example, this week, I was invited to join a group of senior tech leaders from around the world in a sort of Chatham House rules discussion about challenges that they face. And one of the things that was interesting for me was that I found myself being a little bit contrarian in that conversation in that many people were just talking about how great it is to be a CIO or a CTO. But I made the point that to be really effective, CIOs and CTOs also have to be great partners to the business stakeholders that they work with. And I think the skills that you need to be a CTO to be successful are more than just those technical skills that may have got us started at the beginning of our careers.

(Marcus East at 00:22:03) You've really got to understand how to solve business problems and how to deliver business value. And the pushback in the meeting was some of the people saying, look, as a CIO, you're defending your technology from other business executives who don't understand it. And I think for me, that's a slightly old-fashioned approach. And what's interesting in my role in the office of the CTO is I get to work with many forward-thinking tech leaders. And because we're positioned as that trusted advisor, they're very open to talking to us about some of their biggest challenges.

(Marcus East at 00:22:37) And that for me is key because for us to be successful CTOs and tech leaders, we always have to be learning and developing ourselves too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:46) Yeah. I can tell. I'm a little biased doing the podcast because I intentionally seek out forward-thinking, you know, modern CTO, CIO people. And when I hear—I do hear when guests come on, they talk about the people who aren't forward-thinking, but I'm so not around them. I just don't have much exposure to them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:06) So it's always whenever I hear stories, I'm like, oh, that's right. There are entire groups of people that still have that defensive posture that was popular a decade ago, but that's not how you get farther ahead culturally. If I were looking for a new place to work, if a company started saying, you know, about protecting developers or doing these words or phrases, those are typically red flags for me. Because I'm like, alright, then they just don't have everyone on the same page in the culture.

(Marcus East at 00:23:37) Yeah. I head for the hills when I hear people saying that. But joking aside, one of the things that's key is that increasingly CIOs and CTOs are talking to us about the help that they need to drive, not the technology transformation that's going to support the business, but the cultural transformation that really underpins that. And it might surprise you to hear that one of the things we do a lot of in the office of the CTO is help organizations with that cultural transformation. To give you a couple of examples, I've done a lot of work with big insurance companies recently, both here in the US and over in the UK. And one of the things they're trying to get to grips with is how do they balance the desire to maintain their systems and keep the lights on with the need to also innovate.

(Marcus East at 00:24:25) And for us in the office of the CTO, one of the things that's key is that, yes, the technology is critical in being successful, but you also have to build a culture that embraces principles like innovation, real extreme collaboration, experimentation. And ultimately, I think the most important thing is a real strong focus on the end customer. And if you have those things, if you build a culture in your tech function that embraces those things, then you can really be successful in delivering business value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:59) Yes. Preach. I love it. There's actually a guy I think you would like. So his name is Rob. He was from Hexagon Mining.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:08) They're not digital mining, like, actually mining out of the earth, ore. And he was on a couple months ago, but we were talking about the autonomous construction vehicles and all of this cool technology that's happening in the mining space. And, you know how sometimes you meet a couple different people and you're like, oh, I think they would probably like each other. Like, that would be a good intro. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:35) I think you would—I'll link you after the show. Right? So we don't—

(Marcus East at 00:25:39) No, I'd appreciate that. And I find it super interesting to get out there and to connect with people. I think you picked up on that from my profile. Yeah. One of the other things that I like to do is scan the horizon and look at startups that are doing interesting things and find out how the things that they are doing might help me to become better at my job, but also might be solutions for some of the problems that our customers are facing.

(Marcus East at 00:26:02) And I think that's another indicator of a sort of modern forward-thinking CTO, someone who doesn't want to rely on what they already know, but really wants to extend their knowledge and always stay abreast of developments in the field.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:16) Yeah. Rob is that guy. He's a cool guy. Entrepreneurial too. And I think his company was a mining technology company, then they got acquired by a much larger enterprise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:28) And then he heads that division. I'm pretty sure that's how the story went. But no shortage of cool things to talk about because I had no exposure to that industry, and it's so important for everything that we get—or a lot of things we get start out being mined. And then to see how they are—I just get nerdy with optimizations, like, the supply chains. I haven't personally worked in supply chains before, but getting exposure to that and how they optimize within is just—it's super nerdy, but also fun.

(Marcus East at 00:26:59) Yeah. And important. And one of the things that I'm really excited about right now is how AI and machine learning can help more traditional organizations change their businesses. So I mentioned earlier insurance, and many people think of insurance companies as being very risk-averse, very low when it comes to innovation. But recently, we worked with one of the big insurance brokers in the UK to build their first AI-based syndicate.

(Marcus East at 00:27:27) It's called Kai. And the discussions that we had with the CEO over the last few months have been super interesting because on the one hand, his organization is around 600 years old and has been working in the field for that time, and the Lloyd's of London market that they operate in has been around for 600 years. And so they have incredible respect for the traditions that have allowed them to be successful. But at the same time, as a forward-thinking CEO, he could see that in 50 years' time, the way in which they operated their business couldn't be sustained. And he actually sought a relationship with Google, not because we were an existing provider of technology to them, but because they loved our bias towards innovation.

(Marcus East at 00:28:12) And I remember looking at him in this first meeting that we had and he said, look, I don't really understand technology. I'm not a technologist, but I do know that Google has leadership in this space. And what I want is not just Google technology. I want Google thinking. I want to know how Google would approach tackling the problems that we're facing.

(Marcus East at 00:28:32) One of the principles that I shared in that meeting was 10x thinking. And in Google, that's the belief that if you're trying to tackle a problem, don't just think about making it 10% better. Think about how you could make it 10 times better and that requires you to really step away from what you know today to get out of your comfort zone and to think about the technologies that could really shape what you're trying to deliver. And in the case of this insurance company, that led to us helping them build their first AI-based and AI-driven service, which is going to transform the industry. And we really have a strong passion to help drive positive disruption in existing enterprises and existing industries that haven't necessarily embraced technology before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:22) Okay. So let me wrap my mind around this because I'm getting pretty excited here. So this 600-year-old industry leader, you get to meet with them and brainstorm technology products and outside-the-box thinking, and then help take that, deliver that to them and help them take that to market. That's something you get to do. You get to be a part of that process.

(Marcus East at 00:29:41) And not everybody gets to do it. That is one of the primary reasons that the office of the CTO exists. If you were to speak to some of my colleagues, they would say the reason that they wake up in the morning is because they feel empowered to help Google's customers find solutions to their most difficult business problems. And that doesn't mean that they have to use Google technology.

(Marcus East at 00:30:03) The reality is that most of us are pretty open-minded in terms of the technology, but we just have this willingness to help them. And in this particular instance, what I thought was really interesting was that the company that we worked with had previously done lots of big pieces of consultancy work with big consulting firms, and none of those had actually translated into a tangible thing that customers could touch. And our bias in Google is towards action, and so we said, yeah, we can definitely have a conversation about all of the principles, but we want to build something with you. We want to build a proof of concept that shows what this could do and helps to inform the rest of the industry. And that's increasingly, I think, why many enterprise customers who didn't work with Google before are coming to work with Google because they understand that we have a slightly different approach, and they can tap into the years of experience that we have building products like YouTube, like Google search, like Android that are used by millions of people. And that's incredibly exciting, and the best way for me to describe how I feel about it is probably what my wife says.

(Marcus East at 00:31:13) My wife often says to me, the problem I have with your job is that you would do it for free. You would absolutely do your job for free. And I just keep saying to her, please don't tell my boss.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:26) Dude, that's amazing though because—I get what you're saying. I get to talk to you for my job. I am so excited that I get to do this. And I had to do it for free for a long time. When we—I think we all do starting out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:43) But, yeah, I think that, you know, we hear that sentence about, okay, we help Google's top customers find their—you know, that's a polished sentence, and I get that. And that wouldn't ever raise an eyebrow to me having read it. But hearing a story about how you get to do this with this older company and that just creates such a different mental image, it makes it so much more exciting. It also kind of is helping me understand about this concept of the office of the CTO, because now you have a group of these CTOs. So when someone comes into the office, they can get a specific area of expertise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:19) Is that the thinking?

(Marcus East at 00:32:21) Yeah. So we're an interesting collection of different skill sets and experiences. Some of us are super technical and have been software engineers for, you know, 25 or 30 years. Some like me have come from more of a consulting background and have really spent a lot of time thinking about the business implications of technology. And the beauty of the team is that we get together on a regular basis and using the tools that Google has made available, we can collaborate together even though we're in different parts of the world.

(Marcus East at 00:32:52) And so if I, for example, have a business problem that a customer has discussed with me, and if I don't feel that I have the right level of expertise in that particular field, I can just bring it back to the team, and we will what we call swarm on it together in order to make sure that we come up with a really compelling proposition which will then help our customers to move their business forward. So the swarming of the team and the way in which we come together to collaborate with each other is as important as the collaboration that we do with our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:25) Is that a methodology that's common out there, this concept of the team swarming, like how to execute on it?

(Marcus East at 00:33:33) Yeah. I think it's something that is gaining traction. Many of the customers that we work with are asking us more about that. And just to give you a couple of principles that I think are really important there. In Google, the company tends to be fairly open by default.

(Marcus East at 00:33:49) And what I mean by that is if you are working on something, as long as it is not confidential and protected by an NDA, there is an expectation that you will openly discuss it with other people and share your learning and your thinking with them even if they're in a different team. So one of the things that was most interesting for me when I joined Google was that people in different parts of the company who had nothing to do with me would often reach out and say, I've heard you're working on project X. Sounds interesting to me. I'd like to learn about it. Can we put half an hour in the calendar?

(Marcus East at 00:34:24) And that openness, I think, leads to some really great outcomes. And some of the meetings that I've been in, just having the perspective of someone who has been thinking about a completely different field of technology for a few years is really powerful. The other thing that's important for us is that the tools that we use allow us to easily collaborate together on documents. And one of the things you might have seen is I've done a few articles for the Forbes Brand Voice portal talking about the cloud primarily. And the first example of that that I did, I had about 42 other people in Google who all came into that document to make contributions, to make comments, to make edits because they're so passionate about the topic.

(Marcus East at 00:35:14) And also because in Google, we want to help each other, and tools like G Suite really help us to do that. And the ability to operate on a Google Doc completely enables that swarming mentality.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:27) Okay. So I am a huge fan of G Suite. We use it every single day at the business. Your show notes, everything that's in front of me right now is a G Suite, or a Google Doc. I mean, this has just become the word now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:41) Like, it's just like it's the Google Doc. It's the spreadsheets with my accountants and my finances and all of that. Like, it doesn't even compare to any—I don't know. I'm just like a native on the Google Docs and I'm a huge fan.

(Marcus East at 00:35:57) That's good to hear. I think that I've always been torn because I have worked in a world where there were mainframes and there were very old school applications. And I absolutely love the freedom and the flexibility that tools like G Suite gives, but I also appreciate that you've got to make some cultural change to really embrace them. In that if your culture in an organization is closed, you probably are not going to want to embrace a tool that provides that sort of open collaboration. And that for me is another good example of where the technology and the cultural change sort of go hand in hand.

(Marcus East at 00:36:36) To get the best out of using a tool like G Suite, you have to be prepared to adapt your processes and your culture. I'll throw out one customer example that I think is a really good one, and that would be PwC, the global consulting firm. They have around 275,000 people who are now using G Suite. And in fact, we just released a video about that, and it has completely transformed the way that they work. And I'll share one data point with you that I think is interesting.

(Marcus East at 00:37:05) Prior to them using G Suite, most of their customer interactions were done in a sort of formal structured way where somebody would send a calendar invite, someone would then turn up and they would sort of work together on that. Since they've adopted G Suite, the majority of their interactions with customers are now ad hoc, where they say, hey, let's just jump on Meet and let's talk about this right now. And as you can imagine during the pandemic, it's been critical to them because they've been able to continue interacting with their customers and running their businesses. So for them, yes, the technology solution that we provided was very critical to success, but actually their willingness to change and to adapt their culture was the key driver.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:52) So when earlier we were talking about the top questions people ask you and a little bit about other CIOs asking you about culture. Do you recommend books? Do you have conversations? Like, how do you approach when someone's asking, like, how do I change my culture?

(Marcus East at 00:38:11) Yeah. This is the $64 million question, Joel. I would say in the last year, I have probably talked with over 100 different CTOs or CIOs of big enterprises to get to grips with this. I was down in Texas, for example, with one of the U.S.'s largest insurance companies, and I had a breakfast with the CIO, the CTO, and several of the tech leaders there. And they said, look, we've made this commitment to go to the cloud. We've got budget, but we're not—we just don't seem to be making the sort of progress that we want to make.

(Marcus East at 00:38:47) And one of the things that we agreed at the end of this breakfast was that we sometimes forget to think about the skills that our people have and you've got to think about enhancing and developing those skills as well. And what I mean by that is that if you were to go back 20 years, many people were actually proud of being very focused on defining a technology architecture, building out an environment, implementing a solution, and then lovingly protecting and looking after that. But in the modern cloud-based world, you need people who don't think just about building things, but who can think about orchestrating solutions based on the best capabilities that are out there in the cloud. So for example, when I was CTO at National Geographic, we had a big challenge around the image collection, which is Nat Geo's 2 million most iconic photographic images. And they were running on a 20-year-old application that was housed on a server in the offices of National Geographic three blocks from the White House.

(Marcus East at 00:39:56) And obviously, that's a suboptimal setup. And what we decided to do was find a way to take that capability and to move it into the cloud, and in fact, we chose Google Cloud as our provider of choice. But what was most interesting for me was that in order to get there, I had to embark on quite an extensive training program for my team. And I had at that time around 250 people in my organization and many of them had no real experience of working with the cloud. So we had to develop new training programs for our architects so that they could understand cloud architecture.

(Marcus East at 00:40:34) We had to develop new training for our application developers so they could understand what it meant to—what it means to develop natively in the cloud. And we also had to look at things like serverless computing, which we also embraced at National Geographic. And I think that you've got to invest the time to get your people to go on this journey as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:57) So how did you create those training programs?

(Marcus East at 00:41:01) Yeah. I think there are two components to it. One is we spent a lot of time looking out in the industry to identify what are other people doing to get certified, for example, and to build the skills needed in this field. And, you know, that led to me personally deciding that I was going to make sure I was fully certified when it came to some of these things. So I'm an Associate Cloud Engineer, Google Cloud Engineer, and also a Professional Certified Google Cloud Architect.

(Marcus East at 00:41:30) And so understanding the training materials that are out there and actually putting our people through those tests was pretty important. But the other thing that we noticed off the back of that was that we needed to really develop some very specific in-house training programs that would allow our people to understand the impact of the cloud, but in the context of our business. And that's an area that Google is helping many enterprises with right now. A big financial services organization in the U.K., for example, recently worked with us to take about 5,000 of their employees through a cloud-based learning program that was all about the principles of using the cloud, both from a business perspective and the technology perspective. And they understood that that was important to help them unlock the potential of the cloud further down the line.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:24) Okay. So I get it. It's like you're teaching them how to use the tool. It's like this is the class on how to use the tool, and then this is the class on how to apply the tool in the context of the business.

(Marcus East at 00:42:33) That's right. But also the principles. I mean, some of the principles that are really key here would be moving from a configuration sort of type model to a consumption model where instead of defining capacity, you're simply creating a solution that has big impacts on budgets and finance, which is a top topic for many CIOs and CTOs. Helping them to get to grips with the budget changes is as important as the technology. But security is another important thing.

(Marcus East at 00:43:05) I mean, one of the things that many companies look to Google for is leadership when it comes to protecting our network and our data and that's another thing that people are having to wrap their heads around in the cloud because it's a different paradigm. If you have all of your data and all of your applications running in your own physical data center, then you have a very clearly understood approach to security. When you then start to orchestrate solutions based on native cloud-based technologies, you have to think slightly differently about security and so we do spend a lot of time as well helping our customers get up to speed with best practice in security. And then finally, one of the other areas that's really key here would be just general tech ops in that many organizations have extensive teams that have been running data centers for years and running networks for years. In a cloud-first world, they don't have to do that and many of those people are now freed up to actually focus on building products that are impacting customers or building services that help to drive revenue.

(Marcus East at 00:44:12) So I think that this period that we're in right now is incredibly exciting and I do think that the cloud helps to drive digital transformation by providing flexibility and giving organizations an opportunity to really start again when it comes to building out their digital experiences.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:31) Yeah. And you would have a plan for how you transition those people and upskill them. Does Google do any—I know you guys have some certifications on your products, but do you have like a Google Educate? Like, is there like a place to go to see all the Google education?

(Marcus East at 00:44:49) Yeah. In fact, if you were to run a search for Google education or Google training, you'd probably find very quickly that we embrace environments like Coursera. So I know this because I recently was an instructor for one of our courses on Coursera about the cloud, which is really designed in this case for non-technical people who wanted to understand the cloud. And what's interesting about those courses is that people really love them, and I think that sometimes we underestimate how much people want to learn themselves before they make a decision to move forward. And you'd also be surprised, you know, not all CTOs are modern CTOs.

(Marcus East at 00:45:31) I've met a number of CIOs and CTOs who have said to me, Marcus, I'm actually pretty scared about this cloud stuff. I don't really understand it. It's not the world that I've come from. What can you do to help me wrap my head around it? And so many of our training resources are targeted towards that.

(Marcus East at 00:45:48) We also though try to share some of our thought leadership. So the financial implications of using the cloud, this move from a CapEx-heavy, CapEx-intensive approach to an OpEx-intensive approach is one that many organizations really struggle to wrap their heads around. So we produced a white paper about financial implications of using the cloud. Things like that are also important alongside the training.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:14) Yeah. Because, I mean, as an executive, you're going to have to completely understand it and then teach it to the CFO and the CEO so that they understand the transition. And do all of that knowing that your previous budgets and everything were very forward looking, and so you might be equipment heavy and that's, you know, over several years, and then you have to put in a plan to transition it. And it's moving a pretty big ship, so you have to feel really, really solid and really comfortable with it. And I don't know about you, but for myself personally, I can never tell you how long it's going to take me to reach a level of comfort.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:53) I just have to do research and follow these ends and keep filling up these gaps, and then I get to this process where I have a structure in my mind, and I know what I don't know. I know where these different roads lead, but I have like a highway, and I've—and then I feel content. I'm like, okay, I've wrapped my mind around this enough to where we need to make a decision now.

(Marcus East at 00:47:16) Yeah. I think I probably follow a similar approach to you in that it really is a process that you're going through, and ultimately you'll wake up one day and you'll be comfortable. You can't just tick a set of boxes to get there. You have to embrace what I said earlier, continuous learning. You also have to get out there and talk to different companies.

(Marcus East at 00:47:37) I mentioned earlier that previously at National Geographic, I'd built a serverless application with my team. That was an application that allowed National Geographic to create personalized app experiences for consumers. It was really well received by consumers, but my team had insisted that we do this using serverless technologies. And at the time, I wasn't super comfortable with that. And I said, why can't we do this the sort of traditional web application app, application way?

(Marcus East at 00:48:06) And they said, no, no, we think serverless is the way to go. And I had to literally every day spend some time really understanding, okay, how does a Lambda function work versus some of the more traditional techniques that I would have used in the past. And the beauty of it was by the time we launched the application, I became a huge fan of serverless computing and serverless solutions.

(Marcus East at 00:48:29) And one of the other things that I think is interesting for Google customers is that many of the more forward-thinking CTOs are no longer interested in defining architectures and spending a lot of time just doing technical operations. They want that to happen, and they've got great teams in place for that. They want to have the time and the freedom to start thinking about some of these future improved and more forward-thinking technologies. And things like serverless give them an advantage in that many of the customers that I work with have spent a long time trying to build data warehouses or data lakes, for example. And one of the things that's beautiful in the cloud-based world is that they don't have to do that.

(Marcus East at 00:49:12) We have many big enterprise customers who are using a Google tool called BigQuery and updating the datasets to that and using BigQuery as their data warehouse rather than building some sort of complicated technology stack. And what's nice about that is it works. Google obviously built BigQuery to have managed multi-petabyte datasets, to process them and to store them. But the other thing that's interesting is that it's entirely serverless. There's no configuration.

(Marcus East at 00:49:44) You only pay for what you use. And many customers who haven't thought about using the cloud before have been drawn to it by solutions and technologies like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:54) I have seen so many posts on both LinkedIn and Instagram of people taking screenshots and saying, oh, look what I did with BigQuery, or I did this huge thing that would take me forever in this other system. And then I did it in BigQuery, and it was like a tenth of a second or—it's always interesting. That's—I haven't talked about that before, but I've seen a lot of that in my past on LinkedIn and Instagram.

(Marcus East at 00:50:18) Yeah. We see a lot of that, and we are excited about that because what it really means is that organizations are able to unlock the value in their data much more quickly than they were able to do before and much more cost effectively as well. So rather than spending 80% of the budget building the data warehouse and 20% on driving insight, they can spend 20% of the budget on the technology and 80% of their budget on driving insights, which is, as you know, where they get the real value.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:47) Yeah. Time too. I mean, to say we're gonna have to boot up this whole infrastructure and these teams just to have the base layer to be able to do this stuff versus being able to jump right into finding those important business insights.

(Marcus East at 00:51:02) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:02) Yeah. Like, right now, I'm working on this project with my parents. They own a wellness center, like a health and wellness center. And they've been operating for, I think, seven to ten years, and they've grown pretty big. They've got, like, a couple warehouses up there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:19) And I was talking with them about their financial data, like, what products are the most profitable, things like that. And they're like, well, we don't really know. We don't have a whole lot of insights on our data. We just do our thing. And so I went up there this past weekend and got backups of their point of sales for the past seven years, and I'm gonna be running some experiments to see, like, which sales they have, which products had the most profit, you know, what worked, and just see if I can derive any sort of interesting insights out of their, you know, seven years of operational data.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:54) And so that's what I do on a Saturday night.

(Marcus East at 00:51:58) That's super interesting. And I'd say your parents are very lucky that they have a CTO son who can help them with those sorts of things. And, ultimately though, many CEOs that I talk to, that's what they want. They want the equivalent of you. They want somebody who's gonna come along and just help them deliver some insight or help them deliver some business functionality.

(Marcus East at 00:52:20) They don't wanna talk about the technology, and I think that provides an interesting conundrum for technologists. On the one hand, I said that we have to always be learning about the new technologies and making sure that our skills are up to date. But then on the other, I also said that I believe that CTOs have to really understand business drivers, business implications, and have that ability to build relationships with other executives in the company. And so I do think that the role of the CIO or the CTO in some respects has become more complex. You know, we all have heard the expression shadow IT where non-technology executives are increasingly purchasing or specifying solutions and using their own budget to buy it.

(Marcus East at 00:53:04) That's a challenge for many CIOs and CTOs because on the one hand, they want to support the business, but on the other, they want to make sure that things are done in a secure, scalable way that is highly cost effective and efficient. And I think that's one of the other areas that has been really helpful for me in Google. It's this understanding that we don't think about just building a solution and running away. We think about developing deep partnerships with our customers. And those partnerships can encompass everything from the culture that we've talked about through to the skills development, through to actually then defining and building some solutions. So it's a really exciting time to be a CTO, but it is challenging because of the range of skills that we have to have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:50) And I like it too. I mean, you've obviously, you know, you go through that process developing as a professional, and you get to that point where you've achieved mastery of something and it takes years. But then after you do that, you realize, oh, I now know what it takes to achieve mastery at something, and then you go for a second thing. And then as you begin to achieve mastery in more than one subject, it actually becomes easier because you can draw off of these abstracted principles. And, yeah, I think it's, I don't know exactly where I was going with that, but I think it's exciting to be at that stage where you're continuing to achieve mastery in multiple areas.

(Marcus East at 00:54:31) Yeah. I couldn't agree more and I think that that desire to always be learning is just critical to be successful in this space and it's one of the things I do tell people who ask me about their careers and I say, well, it's great that you're thinking about your career, but in parallel to that, you've got to think about your skills and always think about developing levels of expertise that can help you out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:56) Yeah. That actually makes me so one of the reasons I was helping with my parents was they were talking about opening a second location because my brother's a physician and we live, like, an hour apart from each other. And so they're like, oh, we should open up a second location down in Sarasota and your brother could be the doctor there. And we could boot up that location and grow it to be the size of the one in Tampa. And when they were exploring that, they said, we've offered so many products. We don't know which ones to offer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:23) And then I have a lot of business experience from the entrepreneur side of building companies, but they were all tech companies. And so I thought, okay. Well, what if I get in there and show them I'm useful by helping them figure out which products to offer and what it would take to ramp financially a second location? And that'll help me in two ways. The first way it'll help me is it'll expand my knowledge in this retail business world that I don't have experience in. But it'll also allow me to come up with a model, a multi-location model for scaling their businesses in which I would earn a percent off. So I was like, once I do the work, I could say, hey, if you open up locations like this, then I could, you know, assist you with that process and then be involved in the family business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:12) So I think that goes with, like, one of my principles of, like, being able to do the work for free upfront. But it also at the same time, it also is expanding my business knowledge of learning how this physical goods retail in-person location business works.

(Marcus East at 00:56:29) Which makes you a better technologist, and I think one of the, for me, one of the key principles that you've touched upon there is this idea that you're partnering with your parents to find that, find the way for them to be able to take advantage of the technologies. They weren't able to specify what they needed. They didn't say to you, we need a data analytics tool. They just talked to you about their business problem. And I think that increasingly, many of our enterprise customers are saying that they're needing to be a lot more deliberate about their choice of tech partner and that you don't just want a technology partner who is gonna build great technology and make that available to you.

(Marcus East at 00:57:05) You want a technology partner that's gonna get involved in the sort of conversation that you're having with your parents, really understanding what the business drivers are, really understanding where the problems might be, and then going away and identifying how the technology can help. And I think that that's one of the key differentiators in the cloud space as well. In that it's wonderful that there are all these cloud tools out there, but I would encourage organizations to look for those organizations that can help them, not only in terms of providing the tech, but also by providing input, guidance, and acting as a trusted advisor in the way that I described earlier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:43) So let's say people are listening and they're interested, let's say medium sized business, 10 to $100,000,000, and they're interested in learning more about Google being a partner or how they can, you know, get some of that Google thinking on their side. How do they, such a big company, how do they go about interfacing with Google?

(Marcus East at 00:58:05) Yeah. It won't surprise you to hear me say that there are many great resources that we've made available on the web in order to start that journey. So I always encourage people to, whatever field they're interested in, go and start on google.com, do a search, and that will often very quickly direct you to the right team and the right part of the organization. The other thing that's key though is that we recently have put a huge amount of investment into becoming what we describe as enterprise ready.

(Marcus East at 00:58:34) Everybody understands that Google has come from this heritage of building incredible consumer technology, but, you know, a few years ago, people were not as comfortable with Google as a provider of enterprise solutions. And so one of the things that we've had to do is we've had to build out our infrastructure for supporting customers. That means we have more sales professionals, more customer success professionals, more technical account managers available. So that where there is an organization that wants to tackle a problem, they're not expected to go and just do self-service. We're now making sure that we have resources available to help them.

(Marcus East at 00:59:12) So in most cases, there will be a local Google Cloud sales team, for example, that they can get in touch with that can help them. And the other thing that I'll mention is that we also have an incredible ecosystem of partners. So for those organizations that perhaps don't have the sort of budget that would really command the interest of, say, a big consulting firm, we have some smaller consulting and services partners who love helping in those medium to small business spaces as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:46) Nice. I love it. It's so cool. I haven't, I don't think I've ever talked to anybody from Google on the podcast before, but it's such a cool thing to be able to say, oh, you just go to google.com and type in. That's like the answer for, like, most things. It's what we're, that's, it's so cool. Alright. Now you guys are an amazing company, and obviously, the culture there has attracted some amazing people like you. Man, this is so exciting. I'm so glad you came on and hung out with me and talked today.

(Marcus East at 01:00:14) Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's been a great conversation. And, yeah, I think there's a few things we touched upon that we can talk about again in the future perhaps.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:22) Yeah. We'll have you on again in the future, man, because I really like you, and you're super smart. You're bright. You're a good example for young and old professionals alike. And, yeah, it's just a really good conversation. Thank you so much, man.

(Marcus East at 01:00:37) Wonderful. That was a really great conversation. Yeah. Loved your impression, your questions. So thanks a lot, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:42) Talk soon, Marcus. Alright. Take care. Bye bye. Bye.