Erwin Daria - Field CTO at Tintri

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Erwin, the Field CTO at Tintri, and we discuss what intelligent infrastructure is, creating a culture that fosters an appetite for calculated risk, and how they are building technology that facilitates work-life balance. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:34) There we go. Hey, buddy. How are you?

(Erwin at 00:00:36) Hey, I'm doing pretty good. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) Good. How do I pronounce your first name? Is it Erwin?

(Erwin at 00:00:40) Yeah, Erwin. Got it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) Boom. Nailed it. First try. That's how we know it's gonna be a good day.

(Erwin at 00:00:46) Yeah, no worries. No worries.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:48) Where are you located?

(Erwin at 00:00:49) I'm actually in the Bay Area, California.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:52) How is it there? Is it like a zombie apocalypse where everybody's leaving? Because that's kind of the feel I've been getting.

(Erwin at 00:00:59) Oh my god. I don't want to jinx it. So yeah, there's a bunch of different dynamics going on. Part of it is this mini exodus because of the way these tech companies are adjusting to mobile workforce. And then the other thing that's kind of added to it is the fires.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:17) And so on, going on.

(Erwin at 00:01:19) Yeah. Yeah. There was like 1,200 different fires in California. We've lost maybe, I don't know how many millions of acres. But yeah, and so the Bay Area and most of California was covered in smoke for a long time, so I didn't know if that's what you're talking about. But it really did physically look like kind of a mini apocalypse. Sky was red, all kinds of stuff, but it's cleared up in the last few days.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:39) Oh, I saw that news article. My producer had sent it to me where the title of it was like, San Francisco's like living on Mars, and it was like an orange haze.

(Erwin at 00:01:48) It looked just like that. It looked just like that. And so I think between the fires and this mini tech exodus and, you know, I think I was just talking to one of your producers about the storms that are kind of coming up in the Gulf Coast. I'm like, I'm wondering, we're like in the middle of a science fiction movie where the Earth is taking its revenge on us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) Too many iPhones.

(Erwin at 00:02:08) Exactly. Maybe the storms will put out the fires. You know, that'd be—

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:10) If they overlap, that would be great, but I don't think that they're overlapping, unfortunately.

(Erwin at 00:02:12) I heard there was a snowstorm in Colorado that put out some fires over there. So that was a good thing, but we're not getting very much rain here in California.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:23) Oh, man. Well, look, so I'm really excited to talk with you because I don't understand intelligent infrastructure, and it seems to be an emerging term. And as I was researching you and Tintri—is that how you say it, Tintri?

(Erwin at 00:02:36) Tintri, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:37) Yeah. As I was researching you and Tintri, you guys kept talking about this intelligent infrastructure. So I was like, you know what? I'm gonna talk to Erwin, and he's gonna help me understand it like I'm a two-year-old.

(Erwin at 00:02:48) Okay. Okay. You want me to start? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. Cool. So I guess I'll start by asking, how much of the infrastructure kind of world do you understand? I know that your background is in coding and that kind of stuff, software engineering.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:08) Well, as a two-year-old, I understand food time. No. So my background, software engineering, building applications, and then, you know, doing it myself as a full stack and then building teams and teams of teams and engineering organizations. So I'm familiar with the DevOps lifecycle, you know, CircleCI, deploying, like everything you would need to get a Fortune 500 or like commercial 100,000-plus user application up out the door.

(Erwin at 00:03:38) Perfect. Perfect. Okay. So let's talk about intelligent infrastructure. So we use that as kind of the launching point. So intelligent infrastructure, I think, in our view, kind of starts off as a subdomain of a much larger kind of conversation around AI in IT operations. So you might have heard of a term called AIOps. Generally, it stands for artificial intelligence in IT operations. And the gist of this big technology category is that we've been generating telemetry and data and log data, and you're well aware of where all the different layers are and how there are logging facilities in every single one of those things. We collect all those things, and then that ends up becoming like a giant big data pool. And AIOps is meant to look at that giant pool and be able to align that data and make inferences about how the various layers are related to one another. And eventually, you know, we believe in this space of AIOps that with enough repetition and with enough validation, the AI will be able to recognize predictably when there are going to be situations or issues that have to be remediated on the infrastructure or wherever else in the stack. So I guess to kind of revisit it, it's collecting telemetry, analyzing that telemetry, using that data to predict some kind of bad situation that would mean problems for either the application or for someone having to resolve some situation, and then, you know, either highlighting it or eventually autonomously fixing that problem. Intelligent infrastructure is just a kind of subgroup of the AIOps category. That's how we view it at Tintri. And the idea is if the infrastructure itself is able to collect its own telemetry and remediate these low-level issues—either performance, you know, in the world of Tintri is capacity management, all of the things that a human being would have to look at dashboards and gauges and click buttons and turn knobs—if all of those things can be taken care of by an AI, then that frees up a tremendous amount of bandwidth so that those people, those professionals that are taking care of that infrastructure, can move on and do much more innovative things, support the business, support software engineers, such as, you know, previous roles that you have previously held. And so that's really the gist of intelligent infrastructure. Now, obviously, infrastructure comes in a number of different flavors. And so when we talk about it at Tintri, we're talking specifically about storage. But we think that as the infrastructure gains intelligence, it will understand other parts of the ecosystem and be able to interact with other pieces of intelligent infrastructure such as the compute layer or the networking layer. Again, effectively creating a self-managing and autonomously running infrastructure for all those applications that are on top of it. That makes sense?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:29) Yeah. That sounds really cool. What's the problem that people have, and they look at you and they're like, you're the solution to that problem?

(Erwin at 00:06:36) Well, that's gonna be another kind of long description. Because—

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:40) As much time as you want, my friend. Hang out. You could bring your sleeping bag. You could sleep over. We got snacks.

(Erwin at 00:06:46) You know, I started backpacking. I started investing in things like tents and backpacks, and that'd be really, really cool if we did like a little mini fort in my office here. Yes. So let's look at the problem specifically in the realm of storage, which is where Tintri lives and breathes. Right? So probably starting, I would say, early 20 years ago, when you built an application, that application was a piece of software that ran on a kernel, that ran on a piece of hardware computer, and then there was probably some storage attached to that computer. Either it was installed on the server itself or was attached to some kind of Fiber Channel network and there was a SAN. And that relationship—so the software and the operating system and the physical computer and the storage that it ran—was kind of a silo. And you could architect every single layer in that stack so that it met the needs of the application that was going to be using it. About 20 years ago, VMware came out and was like, you know, we're gonna squash all this. Right? So we're gonna be able to take a single physical computer. We're gonna put some software on it called a hypervisor, and we're gonna trick all these individual operating systems into thinking they have a slice of this hardware. Probably 10 years ago, we started seeing a lot more shared storage. So the idea is that virtualization is really powerful, but you have all these single points of failure everywhere. And so to be able to do something like high availability, we want shared storage. All that persistent, you know, stateful data is living in a shared space connected to all these different physical nodes, and then the virtual machines can basically migrate from node to node to node and provide this kind of high availability in the case that a physical computer dies because they never die, right? They never go out or they never crash. And so that shared storage issue is kind of at the crux of all of this operational friction on the infrastructure side. So what happens is the storage is shared. So that means that any number of virtual machines can live inside that storage, and it's really hard to architect it if you don't know what's gonna go inside of it. So commonly, what happens is you either architect it for like a high watermark, like, oh, I just need so much more, you know, performance capacity than I'll ever need. That's what we call overprovisioning. That makes it very expensive. Or you try to slice it up into little tiny slices so that when something breaks, it's not affecting a whole bunch of other things. And so that causes all kinds of overhead. So, you know, like, if you only have 10 things to manage, that's a lot easier than having to manage 100 things. And so that's really kind of at the core of this conundrum when it comes to shared storage and virtualization, and that's where Tintri was founded. That kind of the core of that problem is where we were founded to solve that. And so—

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:32) Did you want to spin out from like a VMware or a Pure Storage or some—did you, like, how did you identify that this was a problem and, like, join this? Did you—you're not a founder, are you? Or—

(Erwin at 00:09:43) So I'm not a founder, but I was around—I was employee, I think, around 100 when, after Tintri was founded.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:50) So why did you go there? Why were you like, that company's gonna win? Like, that company's gonna win. I want to go over there.

(Erwin at 00:09:58) So, here's my own personal story with Tintri. So my background is in IT infrastructure. So if you haven't gathered it, I kind of spent most of my career building the infrastructure that supported the applications that, you know, software developers would develop. Right? And in about 2011, from about 2008, 2007 to 2011, I actually relocated here to the Bay Area, and I worked mainly as a consultant for the venture capital community. And one of the things that I got a chance to do across many different kind of practices was see new technologies that were really trying to solve these really interesting problems. And in 2011, I heard about this company called Tintri that was coming out, and they presented their technology. I went ahead and went to their website. They'd just come out of stealth. They said, contact me. I'm one of the few people that probably ever would go to a website and say, contact me. And they did, and they did a demo, and it was so mind-blowing based on what I had known and what I'd known, what I described even earlier to you. What they were proposing was something that I thought was impossible. And so, you know, obviously, you know, we kind of have this mental threshold that I call like the BS threshold. So when something seems too good to be true, you have a tendency to say, you know what? That can't possibly be true. Right? And you either have a chance to like put it on the back burner or just kind of put it in a box in the back of your mind or challenge them and say, you know what? I think it's BS, but let's try it out. So fast forward about a year, I had actually transitioned from venture capital into the biotech space, and I was hired by a pharmaceutical in San Francisco called Medivation to lead their global infrastructure operations. And we knew that, you know, we were gonna have to do some really different things for Medivation. They were in the process of kind of transitioning from an R&D company to a commercial company. And so when you're doing a bunch of science and research and development, that's a different challenge than having to stand up a commercial company that was gonna be selling a drug across the globe. And so that means a lot of growth, et cetera, et cetera. And so I knew virtualization was going to be a big part of it. And I remember this company called Tintri that did this really interesting thing that I thought was BS for storage and virtualization. I brought them in, and we did a bake-off, and they wiped the floor with, like, everything that I brought in, everything that we had legacy, anybody that came in. And these are kind of the—you mentioned one of the brands, or one of the vendors, the kind of big ones that you have heard about. And I don't know if we're allowed to say other companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:21) Do whatever we want.

(Erwin at 00:12:24) So back then, it was like the NetApp and the EMCs of the world. Right? And, you know, my own personal claim to fame at Medivation is that I actually made one of those vendors quit. They actually didn't respond to an RFP because of the requirements that I had designed based on the capabilities of the system from Tintri. So we ended up implementing it. We spent a ton of money. I kind of hinged my career on it. My VP of IT at the time was like, this is a new vendor. We don't know about their finances. You know, they're gonna share with us as much as they possibly can, but we don't know if they're gonna be around. And I don't know if this technology is really gonna work. Is it too good to be true? And I kind of in no uncertain terms was like, we're gonna do this or, you know, I'll take the heat for it if it doesn't work out. And it turned out that it worked so great that we were able to kind of not only meet our goals within the two years that the executive team had set for us, but we were able to exceed those goals. We were able to scale an infrastructure. I think the numbers when I left were 900% from the day that I got there, and we were able to keep our operational expenses relatively low. So imagine having an infrastructure that had thousands of virtual machines across three different countries and only having three full-time employees managing the entire thing and no specialists. That's another thing that, you know, you're gonna hear from me talking about intelligent infrastructure is that if the infrastructure is intelligent, then you don't need certifications or specialization to learn how to use it. It actually knows how to use itself. And that's something that we were able to achieve in practice even as long as eight years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:56) Yeah. And it's progressive because you're taking knowledge and automating it, essentially. But that can get updates, and it can become smarter.

(Erwin at 00:14:04) That's right. That's exactly right. You do get better over time. And that's a really important thing for folks to understand the capabilities of the technologies that are available to them as they're, you know, transitioning. We talk about kind of the apocalypse or, like, you know, coming out of this pandemic, and you'll—I'm sure you've heard all kinds of things from CTOs and CIOs around what's the new normal.

(Erwin at 00:14:25) And the new normal has to be these types of technologies so that we can empower whatever that vision is for workplace mobility or agility or whatever that might be. So anyway, I ended up deciding that my time in IT was up in 2014. I came over to Tintri, became a principal sales engineer for four years, and then recently came back as Field CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:51) That's amazing. I wanna dive a little deeper. You brought up this interesting topic that I really wanna know more about. You were talking about how you bet your career on this or that you were interested. The topic of conversation that I want is about risk. So you—I get asked about that a lot. When people have me come speak at their companies, one of their recurring objectives is empower my people or put the sentiment out there that they can take risk. We wanna get people to take more risk because that's something that some companies have trouble with. And so because you just shared the story of, like, you had this thing, the company was a little bit new, you were a little bit—so I want you to actually kinda walk me through the best you can. Like, what was it that gave you the confidence in taking that risk?

(Erwin at 00:15:45) Yeah. I wish I could take credit 100% for taking the risk. I think what we had at Medivation and I think what we have at Tintri and many of the successful organizations I've ever been a part of is a culture of acceptable risk. Right? You can't change the world if you're sitting behind this wall of comfort, you know? And I always say, in the tech industry, especially in IT, you'll always hear somebody say no one gets fired for buying Cisco or, you know, one of these brand names that's kind of well-known. But I always say no one remembers you when you buy Cisco. Right? And that's not to say that their technology is not good. It's excellent, obviously. But if you're trying to do something different, it's really difficult to do something different by doing a whole bunch of what other people have already done. And so David Hung was the CEO of Medivation at the time, and I consider him just kind of a huge inspiration in my career. Obviously, it's been eight years, and I still talk about him. But he obviously put together a foundation of a culture that was willing to take acceptable risk to make big differences. And that culture just permeated all the way down the organization. And so when I had my VP of IT kind of extending that culture into the IT department, you know, we knew that we were doing something risky, but we were willing to go ahead and do it if it meant that we were gonna be able to achieve all these really different or differentiated capabilities versus what we had done before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:13) Yeah. No. That's good. That's what we want. Right? So the root of it is a culture that makes it known that taking intelligent risk is accepted, that you're not gonna get burned or fired for something not working perfectly. How do you—did they train you on how to analyze risk? Is that just something that you kinda went with your gut on?

(Erwin at 00:17:37) Yeah. I mean, maybe this is, in this particular instance, a virtue, but maybe in other instances is not necessarily that great of a virtue. Throughout my career, I've been kind of a shoot-from-the-hip kind of—I don't know if you watch football, but a Brett Favre kind of IT guy. And, you know, I've always believed that it's really difficult, like I said, to do something different if you're just repeating what other people have already done. Now, with regard to our decision to invest in Tintri early on, we had to do a lot of analysis. We had to figure out, okay, what are we looking to gain out of implementing such a new technology? And then what is the calculated risk for if that doesn't work? Right? And so for us, it was like, okay, look. If it doesn't work, we'll just go back and buy the thing that everybody buys. Right? Whether that's NetApp or Pure or EMC or whatever that might be. But if it does work, this is what it means. And we had to go and do a lot of exercises to almost stretch the imagination of our business partners in IT and say, hey, if we could develop or if we could implement an infrastructure environment for you—this is before infrastructure as a service—but if we could basically do infrastructure as a service for you, the various lines of business, whether that is the statistical analysis group or the clinical trials group or the finance group or whatever, if we could take something that you're accustomed to waiting six weeks for and turn it into six minutes, is that valuable to you? And that was kind of the core of the calculus that we had to decide on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:11) I like that. I like that. Yeah. So you have a little bit of a design background. Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

(Erwin at 00:19:18) In terms of infrastructure architecture and design?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:21) No. Like, digital illustration design. I'm a big design geek. So—

(Erwin at 00:19:26) Oh, digital illustration. Um, so, yes, I went to the Academy of Art college. I actually dropped out in order to get into IT as weird as that sounds. But, yeah, from as early as I can remember, I drew a lot. I think for probably the first eighteen years of my life, I wanted to be a comic book artist. And so wanted to be working for Marvel or DC or any one of those companies. And, yeah, that was a big part of my life. It's still kind of a part of my life. I do it as kind of a hobby. It's really interesting to be able to kind of step away from this very analytical, very business-related world and then just kind of escape and exercise the creative legs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:12) Do you keep an Instagram or some sort of portfolio online where you post your stuff?

(Erwin at 00:20:18) I mean, a little bit. I don't really do stuff—on Instagram, I've got an Instagram. It's got a bunch of food photos. So I picked up cooking probably fifteen or twenty years ago. And so I got into molecular gastronomy, and I can do all kinds of things with regards to some of those techniques. And I think I just kinda nerd out on a bunch of different subjects. And my Instagram is kind of an accurate reflection of what I'm going through at whatever time or whatever day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:48) I burned some stuff this afternoon for lunch. So I make turkey toast for lunch. And so what it is, it's like a piece of bread, and then you toast the bread, and then you put, you know, some sort of meat on there and some cheese and some oregano and then you put it in the oven and you broil it, you know, for three minutes, four minutes, and it comes out like all the cheese is crispy and it's like this turkey toast stuff. Right? And it's amazing. It's my favorite. I even bought that domain a few years ago, just in case if I ever wanted to turn it into—

(Erwin at 00:21:21) Turkey toast. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:25) Yeah. There was wax paper and I didn't think about it. I was like, oh, let's just try the wax paper. And because we're out of tinfoil, and there's a open flame from the broil with a gas stove, and it started a little fire in there. So I had smoked turkey toast.

(Erwin at 00:21:41) Yeah. And it probably tasted like a crayon a little bit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:44) A little bit. I caught it quick enough to where, right when it started its initial smoking, I was able to save it a little bit, but, yeah, it was a little experience with using wax paper on broil with an open flame. Not good.

(Erwin at 00:22:00) That's a common thing. You know, it actually happens more than you think. The confusion between parchment paper and wax paper happens all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:07) Oh, I don't even know the difference. Can you give me a breakdown?

(Erwin at 00:22:10) Yeah. So wax paper is exactly that. It's paper that's coated in wax. It's really meant to kinda separate things that are in the refrigerator or, you know, something that's room temperature or cooler. And then parchment paper is actually impregnated with silicone. And so it's non-stick, but it's also safe to 500 degrees or something like that. So next time you're out of foil, but you have parchment paper, then I think you'll be okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:33) I did have it too. We cook all of our meals. We're big into cooking. So it was just a fun mistake. But, yeah, I saw it in there, and I just grabbed the wax paper instead, and I learned—so I made a mistake, but I learned something new, and it wasn't a catastrophe.

(Erwin at 00:22:48) And you were willing to take the risk. Yeah. It didn't work out, but it didn't destroy your entire home. So that's exactly the kind of mentality I think that we were talking about earlier for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:58) If anything, it's created a net positive. Right? Because now we get to have this conversation about food.

(Erwin at 00:23:05) We can have a broad-ranging conversation, I'm sure. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:08) So what are you drawing? What do you like to draw?

(Erwin at 00:23:11) So most of my education was in traditional illustration. So pencil, dry media, charcoal, not pencils, pastels, that kind of thing. I've recently, or probably over the last three or four years, kind of transitioned to digital illustration, which is basically on my iPad using Procreate and an Apple Pencil. And then the subject matter I tend to draw is, you know, probably not too far from what I focused on in college, which is human form. So I wanted to draw comic books. Right? And I was horrible at drawing cars and buildings and that kind of thing, which is probably why I'm not drawing comic books. But drawing the people themselves was something that I really wanted to get good at. And so that's kind of what I focus on most of the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:55) That's pretty cool. So you must have some really good whiteboarding skills.

(Erwin at 00:23:59) I don't know if that translates to whiteboarding, but I will say illustration does provide—or anything artistic or creative. I think, especially when it's related to storytelling, it does help you, as corny as it sounds, in making decent PowerPoint presentations. So when you wanna—when you're trying to convey an idea, and I think a lot of my career even in IT was about convincing people to spend millions of dollars that they don't really wanna spend. So, you know, pictures do help. And I wish it wasn't so simple, but sometimes it does really help a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:34) Yeah. Sounds like you have a pretty diverse background. You had some sales experience. You had technology experience. You had some illustration and art. Sounds like it really helps you, all those abilities.

(Erwin at 00:24:45) Well, I don't know if I would call them abilities. And I would say, you know, kind of reverting back to what we discussed earlier, you know, my personality is to take risk. And that also means even if I change careers or if I take on some other endeavor to learn skills or do something different for work. And so, and then that also kind of informs my level of comfort with that risk. Right? So so far, you know, I'm 42 now. Nothing's really bitten me in the butt. So I feel like I'm empowered now as I get into the middle part of my life to just take whatever risks I think are appropriate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:26) And so when we talk about culture and a culture of accepting risk, how does that actually play out? So you run your team. Right? You have this team there. Is the act of it just bringing it up every now and then as a topic? Or how do you embed that into the culture?

(Erwin at 00:25:47) So I don't know. I'm not gonna be able to share some formulaic way that your listeners are gonna be able to step-by-step implement something that's similar. This is my particular approach. So when I work with people, I really do invest a lot of my time in kind of the mentorship aspect of it. And mentorship is a lot more than just someone asking you a question and then you giving them an answer. To me, it's really—again, my background is in art, and maybe this is just an artifact of my education in that space. But, you know, I really—for people that work for me, work with me, I really want them to exercise or stretch those creative fibers. And so even in infrastructure engineering and operations, you know, somebody might say, hey, we're trying to solve this problem. And they might look at a Wiki or they might look at a white paper for how to do it, and I'll challenge them and say, look, is this the best way that you think? Or is this the most elegant way? Or is this the most efficient way of doing what you're trying to accomplish? And they may say yes or they may say no, but that's a conversation, and that's a discussion where we get to explore whether or not there are better ways to do it. And, you know, again, for people that work with me, if there's risk associated with doing it differently than what's been documented or whatever that might be, let's look at that risk. And if I'm the leader, so for instance, you work for me, then my job is to make sure that I support you. If you wanna do this thing that's really different, but you think it's gonna really make a difference, then I've got your back. Right? I've got your back, not just to my management level, not just to your peers. I've got your back up and down the organization, and you have to be willing to do that to kind of foster that kind of culture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:24) Do you ever get over into the design and marketing side of Tintri?

(Erwin at 00:27:30) I do. I do. So in the Office of the CTO where I work, we do have a lot of hats that we wear. And so some of it is customer-facing, so representing the company at large to external organizations such as yourself or analysts or even customers. But it also means that we have to take what we learn from the field and come back and inform our marketing and design approaches as well. So we have a really strong marketing team, but they've been really awesome in terms of wanting our input and really seeking kind of that creative conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:06) Nice. Yeah. Because, I mean, it'd be hard to not give some insights or feedback when you have such a background in it. Right? Because you want the company to be the best it can be.

(Erwin at 00:28:18) Well, I think so. But you also kinda have to walk that fine line. Not everyone is seeking your opinion. So sometimes you gotta be judicious in where you offer it. But, you know, I think, at least for myself and for our team here at Tintri, we've got such a strong culture of really just wanting to be helpful. And it doesn't—you know, we have very few egos in the organization. I think we have egos where it's good because, you know, you kinda have to have one to do something so different. But we're also strongly committed to having a culture where, you know, we share ideas openly. There's not such thing as a bad idea. And I think I don't remember where I heard this, but, you know, we challenge ideas. We don't challenge people. So, you know, we don't make it a personal thing. We wanna make sure that we get the best out of everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:06) That seems to be the trend in the newer companies. I would imagine that there aren't a whole lot of startups who don't share those type of values. But at the same time, there's all the legacy companies that are trying to move from the popular command and control of the eighties to nineties into this more empowered organization. And so I always try to look out and forecast the future. And when I see the companies getting started having these values and wanting to improve and grow and have a part of—your employees can have a life, too—all of these things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:49) And then accountability to even some of the harder things like the discipline and accountability. I like that those things are being talked about. I feel pretty hopeful and bright about the future and the growth of technology.

(Erwin at 00:30:05) I think so. I also agree with you. I think it's incumbent on us, you know, I think generationally. There's responsibility as a generation as a whole to kind of facilitate some of those things that you just described, and then building technology, obviously, that facilitates those things.

(Erwin at 00:30:23) Right? So you mentioned work-life balance, making sure that, you know, we're not perpetuating this culture where everyone's working ninety hours a week and wearing that as a badge of honor, you know. To us, or at least to me and to us at Tintri, because we built such differentiated technology that's AI embedded in the infrastructure itself, we don't want our end users and our customers spending hours and hours and hours touching the technology. And I think that's maybe a little different than maybe the legacy technologies. You know, you want that engagement.

(Erwin at 00:30:53) And even social media platforms, you want that engagement. And, quite frankly, we don't. Because it means if you're not engaged with our technology, one, it means it's doing the right thing. It's doing a good job. And two, it means that you have more bandwidth to do more important things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:05) That's exactly it. The goal should be to spend as little time as possible inside of your interfaces so that you're out there doing the things that you love. You know?

(Erwin at 00:31:15) That's right. That's right. And so, you know, I do a lot of secondary analysis in terms of human behavior and neurological development and those kinds of things. And so, you know, one of the threads that I've been studying is this idea that human beings are very poor at repetitive tasks. That's why we continue to automate.

(Erwin at 00:31:33) Right? Repetitive tasks for human beings offer a lot of windows for errors. Right? And that's why, you know, if you look at, you know, from the industrial revolution in the late eighteen hundreds all the way to today, our whole technological direction has been to automate away all those repetitive tasks. Now one of the areas where there are a ton of repetitive tasks is in IT management.

(Erwin at 00:31:59) And, again, so, you know, if there's an ethos buried underneath our vision for what our technology is supposed to provide, it's really to kind of take care of those things, automate those really complicated things that do end up essentially being repetitive tasks, and then freeing up our end user customers to do those things that human beings are actually better evolved to do, like more creative problem solving, that kind of stuff. Yeah. So I'll get off my soapbox. I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:29) Soapbox it up. Your repetitive task we're very poor at. You know, it's interesting because there's two things swirling around in my mind. The first one is I know that to be true. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:40) Yeah. It's just—I believe that persistence is one of the most difficult things in the world, whether it's persistence of an idea or, you know, seeing something through to the end or just organic matter when you start discussing the basis of the universe and entropy. Right? Persistence is a difficult thing universally. At the same time, it's very difficult to get people to change behaviors and patterns of behaviors.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:10) So it's almost like we have to draw this finer line between behaviors and how people are spending blocks of time versus the specific repetitive tasks. It's almost like you have to have some nuance there so that the ideas can kind of fit together.

(Erwin at 00:33:30) Yeah. I mean, I think my thoughts on it, not that I've spent a ton of time on it, but just kind of responding to what you just said. When you say that human beings—I'm just gonna speak in broad terms. Right? Human beings are resistant to change.

(Erwin at 00:33:43) I wonder—and I don't have an answer for this—but I wonder how much of that, especially in the IT field, is that resistance to change tied to, you know, our value system. Like, oh, my value to the organization is I know how to do this one thing. Right? And I'm the best at doing that one thing. And all of a sudden, we build kind of this—you know, our egos center around our ability to do those things, even if they're not really good for us.

(Erwin at 00:34:08) Right? Like, if our—you know, I work ninety hours a week, and I get all my projects done on time. That's not a badge of honor. Right? The fact that you get your job done is amazing.

(Erwin at 00:34:18) Right? But we, you know, as leaders and as technologists, we have to help these people so that they can still find value in themselves without having to be tied to these things that are so detrimental to our development. Right? And, you know, one thought that I've had, and not to kind of digress in a different direction, is that we're beginning to see that technological innovation is happening at a pace that we've never seen before. And I think you could say that almost every era.

(Erwin at 00:34:45) But, you know, we're starting to see changes in the way that we implement and use technology in the span of even months, not just years or decades or half decades or whatever that might be. Right? And, you know, over the course of the next decade or so, I think we're gonna see an interesting shift in that the way that we implement technology is gonna require this agile kind of skill base. Right? So the people that are managing and developing and building our technologies in the future aren't gonna have the time to become—to spend three years learning Python or some programming language.

(Erwin at 00:35:25) You're gonna have to be able to be super agile because the technology that we build, all those applications or services or whatever, is gonna change much more quickly. So this idea that, again, I'll go back to storage, which is where we live—Tintri lives. This idea that you're gonna have some guy in your organization that's been working on storage for twenty-five years and they're the storage expert, like, that's just gonna go away. One, we're not making storage experts anymore. Nobody graduates college and says, hey.

(Erwin at 00:35:51) I wanna be a storage administrator or a storage architect. Right? And so—dream, Arlene. So you might be the one. Right?

(Erwin at 00:35:59) But, you know, I'm sure you've seen, you know, prior to this pandemic, we had record unemployment in the tech space. Right? We actually had negative unemployment. We had more job roles or job positions open than we had, you know, what they say is qualified people. And so our view of that world is, well, what if they don't have to be so qualified?

(Erwin at 00:36:20) Can you fill those roles if the technology assumes some of those job responsibilities? Right? So, again, I think over the course of the next decade, we're gonna start to see that a lot more and more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:29) Yeah. I saw a job posting the other day, and it was ten years experience in that, seven years experience. I was just like, come on. And I love sometimes when I see the job roles, I'm like—my favorite thing, which is probably weird, but my favorite thing is when I see the job roles and I can rip it apart in my head to where I can see what they actually need based off of some of the words.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:51) And I'm like, that's not what you need to solve the problem you're trying to solve.

(Erwin at 00:36:55) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:55) And I then I just move on. Like, nope. Back to not giving your opinions to people that don't ask. I heard this person once explain that—I'm probably saying it wrong, like telephone game, but saying something along these lines. The sentiment was, you have to ask a monk three times or something like that, or you have to ask a wise person three times for help before they're going to help you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:23) And I heard that story a while ago. And then as I've gotten older, it's just become more and more true. So the people that you will try to help that don't ask for your help, that's usually a massive waste of time. Right? And then the people that will ask once, they're usually half a foot into it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:41) But the people that'll ask a couple times and keep bothering you about it because they really, really want to, and then they're asking smart questions on top of that that are more than things they could Google in two seconds and find the answer to. You know? I find those people tend to be the ones to spend time helping.

(Erwin at 00:38:02) Yeah. Well, I think it's almost like a self-qualifying effort. Right? Like, they're gonna spend all that time asking you those questions. You're gonna engage with them as long as you're open to engaging with them.

(Erwin at 00:38:11) And like you said, the ones that are not really all the way in it, they'll fall off the vine eventually.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:17) It's like 80% of the people.

(Erwin at 00:38:20) It is. It is. I don't know what the answer to that is. I think, you know, we live in really interesting times. Right?

(Erwin at 00:38:27) Like, I think, you know, again, philosophically speaking, and I don't know if, you know, you wanna go there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:32) Let's do that. Yeah. That's where I wanna go. That's why you keep finding us there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:37) Yeah.

(Erwin at 00:38:37) Yeah. Well, so, like, technologically, we're evolving faster than human beings can evolve right now. Right? So, you know, the way our brains develop, the world is changing faster than we can recognize and then set it as a recognizable thing in our brains. Right?

(Erwin at 00:38:53) And so it's gonna be a really interesting thing. Right? I think there's all kinds of compounding. And when we talk about AI, obviously, AI is gonna color every aspect of our lives. But it's gonna be really interesting to see how it changes how we essentially educate, not just, you know, our young, but everybody else that has to continue to participate in the society when it changes so fast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:17) Yeah. What you said, if we look back, you know, a hundred years ago. Right? There were very few people to listen to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:29) Right? Very few people to listen to. Whoever controlled the print or some radio. And they would have a series of thoughts and people—those would come out on a topic and everyone was kind of orbiting around these national things. Right? And then you would have a thought on them and then that would be discussed and then you would have what you were saying, like, you would have this landscape of, like, okay, here's the current landscape and this is what's socially popular.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:55) It's like things that our brains do because we're social animals in the background anyways. Right? So you have an idea. You got this blueprint, this ability to navigate that landscape. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:05) But today, the information iterates so rapidly that it's difficult for us to get a grasp on a landscape to navigate it, but it still works.

(Erwin at 00:40:18) Barely, I think, in some ways. Right? I think to your point, right? I think a hundred years ago, we don't necessarily have to go a hundred years ago, but even thirty years ago. When you describe that landscape, that landscape was agreed upon by society at large. Right? We knew, hey.

(Erwin at 00:40:33) There's a mountain there. I know. I don't have to have seen it. Somebody that I trust has seen it and mapped it, and that's there. And now we're almost kind of entitled to our own. Each individual person has an entitlement to their own kind of view of what that landscape is.

(Erwin at 00:40:48) And so it's very hard to find common ground. That's another kind of discussion that we can have about the kind of social fabric of what that means and what, you know, everybody living by truth means and how everyone has a perspective on facts. That kind of changes things as well. But from a technological perspective, I think you're exactly right. It's hard to have a common understanding of something when the thing that we're trying to understand is continuously changing, and each individual person that's trying to understand it has a different capability of being able to understand it.

(Erwin at 00:41:20) That's a really interesting challenge, but I don't know what the answer is yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:26) I love it. No. And I think it's cool because it's—I like to play that game. What are the humans building? Like, if we were aliens, you and I, we're aliens from Alpha Centauri or something, and we are here. We just pop over here, and we're up in the atmosphere in our radar-covered craft. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:53) And we're looking at these humans buzz about and work towards something, and it's like, what are they doing? Like, what's the end result? You know? Like, what are they producing? What's the byproduct? You've got Teslas shooting out of—rockets coming out of Earth. Like, is that what they're trying to do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:01) They're trying to deploy Teslas to seed the universe with Teslas? You've got all these different things happening. So I'm curious for you. If you had to answer the question—this is just for fun. Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:14) What are the humans building? What is the answer to that?

(Erwin at 00:42:19) I don't know. I—you know, sometimes, I've done this kind of thought experiment a number of times in the past, and it's hard for me not to kind of have this, not pessimistic view, but kind of just a dim view of what human beings at large are doing on this planet. So, again, if I'm an alien sitting in the atmosphere looking down at what the world is like right now, you know, I think that the biggest thing that I think is kind of sad is that our species. Right? So I often take lessons from—I don't know if you know Yuval Harari.

(Erwin at 00:42:52) He's an author, historian, wrote a book called Sapiens, a number of books.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:57) Oh, yeah.

(Erwin at 00:42:57) Sapiens is one that—and so, human beings are, as far as we know, we're the first species to have something called collective intelligence. Right? It's the idea that as our species matures, we don't have to continually learn the same things over and over again. So for instance, if you were born today, you don't have to learn, you know, how to make fire or, you know, how to get water to come out of your faucet or, you know, obviously, there's technological answers for all those things. But our collective intelligence allows us to iterate at a much faster pace and make bigger jumps, technologically speaking, every generation. And what I can't help but think about is that we've gotten to this place where technologically speaking, we can solve almost every problem that faces our own species: collective hunger, energy creation, storage, all those things.

(Erwin at 00:43:48) But we're also the only species that chooses not to for other reasons. Right? We're also the only species that doesn't find equilibrium with its environment. So there's all these things that, again, if I'm an alien looking at a planet as a kind of a holistic ecosystem where everything has to kind of live in balance, we're the one species that, generally, doesn't like to live harmoniously within that sphere.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:15) Yeah. I think there's a little pushback there.

(Erwin at 00:44:18) I think so. I think so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:19) Fun because if you consider us, like, citizens of the universe and scope it out to that, then the resources are far more vast. If we pull the context down to Earth, a hundred percent agree. Right? But just the thing I like to go with, stream of consciousness stuff, you know, just hanging out. But so I fully agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:39) I'm a hundred percent on the team with, if we just scope it to Earth. Right? But if we scope it to the universe, it's a different story. We could be living harmoniously within our universal environment.

(Erwin at 00:44:53) We could eventually. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:54) But the—

(Erwin at 00:44:55) The thing is we don't have to. Right? We could solve it right now within our scope of—

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:01) I know. First of all, I love it. And as you were describing that, my brain was just running through why we haven't. And the first thing that popped in, whether it's right or wrong or people like it or they don't, is that I think this technology has been so fast that when it wasn't possible, maybe thirty years ago, when you were at the point where in order to provide this resource, you have to require another human's time. Right? So now you're going to either imprison or you have to somehow either pay them or there has to be an economy to support that. But it's changed. If we looked at it—if we came into the game today, we would be able to orchestrate and architect a different system. Right? So I think what needs to happen is just for the, you know, time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:55) Time to—that's more politically correct to say time rather than the old people to die. But the people who are there in their prime of their career, in their fifties, thirty years ago, this stuff was not possible. And now it is. And so I think if we just—enough time, enough generations—I mean, we're already hearing talks about universal basic income and different strategies around how to handle this mass automation that's going to occur. And, honestly, I love the idea of benefiting from technology, however that looks.

(Erwin at 00:46:32) Well, obviously, you're not going to find me arguing against the benefit, you know, of living in that space where technology is taking care. Obviously, you're talking to the Field CTO of a company that essentially runs self-optimizing storage infrastructure. Right? But yeah, you're right. I mean, this is a much larger conversation. But with regard to the tactile, everyday feeling of the benefit of these technologies, you're exactly right. I mean, we should benefit from these technologies. And we just gotta figure out—and like you said, over time, as our perception of the world changes collectively, then hopefully we react and we change and we shift and we evolve in ways that allow us to fit and meet that equilibrium that I was talking about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:20) Yeah. And I love the way you talked about information and skills and abilities sort of layering on top of each other, like not needing to know how to make fire. And the reason is because I was searching for purpose and meaning in life, you know, for the past decade, really getting into that. And one of the things I found along my journey was how DNA works, and DNA copies information down to the next generation of DNA. And I also see that happening in life. People hand down information to the next generation. And so for me, it was like, that is something that is objectively true, and that was one of the reasons we're starting the podcast. Let's have people on and hand their information down to the next generation. But then I saw something cool in the storage world where they're actually using DNA for data storage. Have you come across this?

(Erwin at 00:48:07) I have not.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:08) Oh, it's going to blow your mind. Alright. So after you take a look at this company called Catalog, I believe is their name, but they store information, and they just took a senior executive for twenty years at some Fortune 500 company, like, big technology name over to take their product to market because they put the entire Wikipedia collection into DNA.

(Erwin at 00:48:38) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:39) Yeah. It's mainly for longer term storage. From what I was reading on their business side of their site, they were going to target part of the market that was still storing data on tapes, long term stuff that they would—when the tape is going to degrade, they copy it over to new tapes because this has a longer shelf life. I mean, you can go back ten million years and find DNA dinosaur stuff. Right?

(Erwin at 00:49:03) Sure. Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:04) Yeah. So I've been following this company for two or three years, and they finally got funding, I think a month ago and then recruited some really bright people to take it to market. But because you're in the storage space and it's DNA—I just think it's fascinating that they're storing stuff in DNA.

(Erwin at 00:49:21) Yeah. I mean, obviously, I don't know enough about that—about specifically DNA and how data gets encoded and, obviously, how do you take those proteins and then eventually make a bit that you can read or write or whatever. It might be a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:34) Printer.

(Erwin at 00:49:35) I know. A DNA printer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:37) Yeah. It's like they—so you gotta watch the videos. They show you the videos. They show you everything.

(Erwin at 00:49:43) That's cool. On their website. Take a look at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:45) Yeah. That's a totally good thing you can geek out about this weekend.

(Erwin at 00:49:50) And then does that mean at some point you might inadvertently create a DNA data monster that then kind of mutates?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:59) A little gremlin? Like, little DNA?

(Erwin at 00:50:00) Yeah. Well, eventually, DNA replicates and then it has a—as it copies itself. Right? We know that it has a tendency to mutate, and then that's how—you do that enough times and have enough iterations of that and that's how life begins and all that kind of stuff. Really interesting.

(Erwin at 00:50:16) But one of my—

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:17) One of my thoughts, and I think you'll like it because it's kind of out there, but so when, I think it's elephants or deer are born, they just come out walking and they can walk and they can—

(Erwin at 00:50:29) Both. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:29) Run and yeah. They have—this information's in their DNA. It's in there. It's pre-programmed in them. And so then I was thinking, okay. Well so you've got that as something that's real, that's out there, that's objectively true. You have this DNA storage. We're finding that DNA is a really great way. The visualization was like a football stadium full of servers compressed down to my pinky finger. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:55) So that was the compression. I think that was the compression ratio. You'll see in the video on their site, but so if you take that—so we can actually write information to DNA now, and then we pass DNA down. It's like—and then we have the genome editing or the CRISPR editing. Right? CRISPR editing. At what point—I'm curious now, is Neuralink—am I going to download a package from Neuralink and that's how I'm going to learn a new skill? Or am I going to splice my DNA and that's how I'm going to learn a new skill? Or are we going to start putting information into DNA so that humans will pass it on so my kid comes out and he's already a storage expert?

(Erwin at 00:51:37) You know, that'd be really interesting to dive into that. I think when it comes to DNA, I think there are ways to—I mean, we still don't know yet. Or maybe somebody does, but I don't know, and maybe I haven't figured it out or I haven't seen anybody talk about this. But I know that you can—there are genetic predispositions to certain things. Right? And some of those things are related to learning methodologies and that kind of thing. Do I think that you could splice somebody's DNA and all of a sudden they know kung fu? I'm just thinking back to that scene from The Matrix where they plug them into the machine and then Keanu Reeves is like, "I know kung fu." I don't know. But a predisposition to athletic agility and absorbing information at a fast rate, maybe potentially. Right? And that's where I think it's really interesting to even kind of compare that to Neuralink. Right? Elon Musk's idea where we're going to eventually just all be tethered to the central AI, and we'll just be able to Google things by thinking about it and not be able to comprehend that there's a difference between organic recollection and just getting siphoned from a machine. Yeah. I mean, interesting conversation.

(Erwin at 00:52:47) It's a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:48) It is. That's why we have to have you back on. Right?

(Erwin at 00:52:51) Oh, I'd love to come back on. This has been an amazing conversation. And it's—I love the fact that it's relatively wide breadth, and we can talk about a number of different subjects over the course of the time that we have together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:03) Yeah. So as we start to wrap up, because I want to be aware of the hard stop here in four minutes, what's the reason why people would go to Tintri? What do your customers look like? What's the elevator pitch for Tintri so we can drive some traffic there?

(Erwin at 00:53:20) Yeah. So Tintri, we have an entire portfolio of storage solutions. Our flagship is a product called VMstore, which is this AI-embedded storage array that basically self-analyzes and self-optimizes so that it basically runs itself. It can ensure that even in the most high-performance, most demanding kind of high-churn environments, like these enterprise private clouds, virtual desktop infrastructure, these types of things, that regardless of the end user behaviors, the people that are logging into the virtual servers and clicking on things, regardless of how busy that is, the system can automatically make sure that every single one of those people has high performance. And then we have all kinds of layered technologies on top of that that dramatically reduce operational overhead. So our data shows that if you implement Tintri VMstore and all of those technologies in the most demanding orchestrated and automated environments, that you can still reduce operational overhead by more than 95%. So that 95% allows our customers to go and do way more innovative work. That's why people come to Tintri. And we have a rabid, almost cult-like following with our customers. And it is kind of a double-edged sword because some of our largest customers are the kinds of customers that won't let you share their logo or share that they're using them. But it's been something that, you know, we've been at it for almost a decade now, and we're really proud of what we've been able to accomplish. And I think if anybody is looking at implementing these things and, again, to our earlier point, if this new now means more agility, more work-life balance, more technologies that allow your teams to spend more time with their families, then Tintri has to be a big part of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:07) Look at that tie in. What a pro. Yes.

(Erwin at 00:55:11) I do your sales and marketing background as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:13) You're awesome. This is good. This is good. Alright. So what we'll do is we'll put you on the list. We'll have you back on. I love that there was—there's ten topics we didn't even get to. So that's good. So we'll have you back on again next year, and we'll catch up and see how Tintri's going and have fun talking about everything from philosophy to technology, the whole nine yards. And then we'll make sure to put notes in the show notes with links to Tintri and all the information and about you and all that good stuff. And if there's anything else that I can help you with, you just let me know.

(Erwin at 00:55:47) Awesome. I'm looking forward to it, man. Thanks so much, Joel. Yeah. Really pleasure talking to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:52) Absolutely. Talk soon, buddy.

(Erwin at 00:55:53) Yep. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:54) For sure. Bye. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or a colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.