Brad Schick - CEO at Skytap

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Brad, the CEO at Skytap, and we discuss how Skytap is helping companies transition to the cloud without rewriting their existing codebase, why the ability to learn quickly and adjust will help advance your career, and what the future looks like for organizations using a multi-cloud approach. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Brad Schick at 00:00:38) How are you feeling today?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) Is today a good day for you?

(Brad Schick at 00:00:41) Yeah, it is. Yeah, definitely. Good day. It's interesting just getting back into the swing of things after being off for the holidays. So, all comes rushing back.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:52) It's tough too, right? Because you have a day or two off. You know, you've got the Christmas or the Thanksgiving is when it all starts, and then you get the Christmas day or two off, and then you kind of have this awkward middle week that we're in, and we're half on, half off.

(Brad Schick at 00:01:06) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:07) It's a weird position.

(Brad Schick at 00:01:09) I actually found for many years, you know, before I had family and things like that, that that week between Christmas and New Year's was often one of my favorite. And what I used to do actually was work, and I would go into work. And everything is kind of relaxed and chill, and people are down. And then it was always one of my favorite weeks to be at work because you'd get things done, but people would sort of screw around and, you know, anyway, it was always a good relaxing week.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:35) Yeah. It's like when you have a substitute teacher, right? When you're in the office, it's a holiday.

(Brad Schick at 00:01:39) Yeah. It's like a play day. You're still going to work, but it's a play day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:44) In our meeting this morning, it was the last team meeting of the year, right? And so we realized that. So we kind of hijacked the meeting and went around and talked about all of our progress and everything that we've made throughout the year and goals. And I'm feeling pretty good about this past year. How are you feeling?

(Brad Schick at 00:02:03) Yeah. Actually, I feel good. Actually, very good considering how much uncertainty there was, you know, not only for our business, really, but the world. You know, in a small startup environment like Skytap, there's always uncertainty, and then you throw something like a global pandemic and, you know, your sort of economic and racial challenges. And, you know, it creates a lot of concern. And we ended up coming through it quite doing quite well. And so I'm very happy with the way the year went for us as a business. And, you know, looking forward to next year from a global perspective being a little more stable and a little more predictable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:44) Yeah. I got, usually I was pretty good about discipline about not watching the news, right? And then the pandemic happened and you kind of have to watch the news to see if the apocalypse is occurring or not.

(Brad Schick at 00:02:54) Right. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:54) Right? But then I kind of got into it for a couple weeks and I realized I was so not myself. And then I just realized, okay, I'll just hear it through my network. But for my own personal mental health, I just have to take it off. Like, I just have to stop it again.

(Brad Schick at 00:03:09) Yeah. It's true. And then, you know, running a business, you worry about it from your own health and your family's health and your friends' health, and then the impact on the business as well of what's it going to do. And there was just particularly going into it, there was so much uncertainty. You know, for us, it we ended up in a position that it was really neither a big boost nor was it a serious impediment. And so we had several, we had a bunch of customers that ended up using our service more than they would have because they're doing more remote work, and our service is conducive to that. So that helps. And then on the flip side, we saw a reduction in customers who are willing to make long-term commitments because on their side, they had uncertainty about the impact on them as well. So we had a shift that I think we were already headed down, but it accelerated, shift towards more, what I would say, uncommitted growth or uncommitted revenue where people will use the service and they'll pay for it on demand when they need it. And that increased significantly. But it's a little more uncertain when you're not sure. They're not signing a contract or a piece of paper that says, yes, we're going to spend X over this many years. So it's a much more cloud-friendly and cloud-like model as well. So that's headed in the right direction broadly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:22) Yeah. Can you give me the 10,000-foot overview of what Skytap does?

(Brad Schick at 00:04:26) Yeah. Absolutely. Essentially, we're an infrastructure-as-a-service provider much like EC2 or Azure Compute that, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with. But our infrastructure is focused on traditional on-prem, call it legacy applications that have been designed and built to run on premises over the last, you know, years or decades even. So think of, you know, older x86 systems that are often virtualized, but they're going to be running probably in VMware, Power systems from IBM that are running operating systems like IBM i that used to be called AS/400, and AIX, as well as sort of complex, traditional on-prem style networks. So we built an infrastructure-as-a-service offering that is designed to intake those older workloads unchanged and run them natively in the cloud and give you that full self-service infrastructure-as-a-service cloud experience without having to rewrite or change or modify or port your applications. And so you can do a lift and shift of a legacy app into the cloud and get all the benefits and semantics and value of the cloud without having to take all the risk and time and effort to go rewrite it to be a more modern application. And so for a business that has a lot of dependencies on traditional applications, it's a very valuable tool to start consuming the cloud without having to either jettison older workloads or rewrite them or refactor them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:51) Yeah. I had a conversation a couple times this year when I was really trying to understand why everyone hasn't gone to cloud. And I understood the market a lot better, and people, you know, helped share their experiences and it really gave me a well-rounded view. But one of the interesting things that I didn't see or didn't completely get at first was that there's two separate things happening. There's, you can either put your existing stuff in the cloud, like lift and shift, or you can rewrite the apps. But it sounds so easy, like, oh, you can rewrite the apps to be cloud native. But and so in my head, I think about that as a software development project, but in the way it plays out in a company, a medium-sized company or a large company, is that it has to change the culture of the engineering teams. It's the culture and the skill set. So it's not just as easy as saying, you know, oh, yeah, just, you know, rewrite it.

(Brad Schick at 00:06:45) Yeah. And even so you're completely right. There's a whole, there's a mindset change. Particularly if you want to get maximum value out of the cloud, there's a mindset change in the way you go about building and deploying your applications, which needs to be a little bit more modern. And that does, it increases the complexity, but also the return on that investment. I would say, though, that even just the simple technical rewrite of the application is a massive barrier for many businesses, particularly for applications that have been around or older. One of our marketing individuals once said that it's like the great pyramids. You know? They're out there, and everyone sees them, but no one really knows how, where they came from or how they were built or, you know? And businesses have all those applications, and they have all these great pyramids that they have. There's tons of value and interest in them, and they still use them. But the architects and builders and designers are long gone, and to replace them is impractical and expensive, and so you just need to keep them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:40) That's hilarious. I've never heard the Great Pyramid thing before.

(Brad Schick at 00:07:44) Which I think is, you know, is pretty apt. And what we see in big businesses is they tend to have a sort of a parallel path. If you have a big footprint of existing technology, some of the technology will be on a path for, say, upgrade or modernization or replacement. And that may be you're going to containerize it or rewrite it or start to use an off-the-shelf component to replace something that you hand-built in the past. You know, that happened, we've seen that happen a bunch with CRM. You know, businesses built CRM systems on top of IBM i years and years ago, or AS/400. And they're headed down a path where they want to replace it with Salesforce or something more modern or cloud-based. And for that part of our business and those customers, we're essentially accelerating their journey towards replacing or modernizing those components, and we're okay with that. You know, it's saying we're providing value for you in the short term, and eventually, you may not need our service, but, you know, we're happy to be part of that journey and then accelerate for you. But there's then a whole other part of most businesses that that technology is proven. It works. It's a sunk cost. It's delivering what it's supposed to deliver, and there's no reason to replace it. And so what they want is the ability to bring that forward, but into the modern era where they can run it in the cloud and pay on demand and scale elastically and have self-service and global reach and, you know, rich modern API on top of it and all the things you get out of the cloud. And those things are going to stick around because they're either, you know, too expensive or too risky to replace or they're offering a true business differentiation and replacing it gets them nothing. Right? It's there. It's doing what it's supposed to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:22) Yeah. It kind of reminds me a little bit of the data lake type issues, right? If you're rewriting it because it's going to bring you a business improvement and there's a very clear outcome to transition it there, like, you're going to get access to the data differently, you'll be able to generate money from that, not just have it because it's cool. I constantly struggle in my own business and in previous endeavors with, there's the entrepreneurial side of me and then there's the technologist side of me. And they don't always conflict because I want the latest and greatest. But sometimes it's like, if I do that, if I upgrade that, there's no financial benefit. It's not going to change anything. There's no improvement to the customer. There's no, like, anything. And so, then you just have to go focus your time and energy on the things that do create improvements.

(Brad Schick at 00:10:12) Exactly. And that's a beauty to what we're offering here as well is it frees you up to go spend time on things that will move your business forward that are perhaps more modern or innovative. And instead of having to spend your time on modernizing something that's not going to give you any net value, bring that forward, keep getting the value you're getting today in a cloud setting, and then spend your time on those more modern things. So it doesn't come at the exclusion of modernization and innovative technology. It actually accelerates that. Just put that effort where it's delivering the best value, which probably isn't optimizing your, you know, 20-year-old, you know, inventory system that's doing what it's supposed to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:55) Do you have referral partners for when people do want to do cloud rewrites, or do you do them if they want to?

(Brad Schick at 00:11:01) Yeah. So another, the big part of our business that I probably should have mentioned upfront is that it's been an evolution of our company. Skytap's been around for over 10 years, and we started focusing on Skytap as kind of the end destination for these applications, as a really as a standalone cloud and a standalone business. That was, you know, over a decade ago. And the pivot to the company or the evolution has been that we're now, most of our business is coming through big cloud partners. So our two premium partnerships are with Azure and IBM Cloud. And so in the end of the day, the destination for most of these companies and their workloads is actually Azure or IBM Cloud. And we're, you know, we'll expand to others at some point. So then in terms of who does the work and where are they going, Skytap is essentially an enabler or a component of your journey to, say, Azure. And we may help do the work. We have a small professional services team, or we may be partnered with a Wipro or an Accenture or a smaller, you know, regional systems integrator like a Meridian or whatnot who will help the company with that sort of migration and modernization path. And the but the real key to that is those partnerships we have with the third-party clouds that says your ultimate destination is going to be a big public cloud that has all the components you want. And so instead of Skytap providing the data lake service or the AI service or the Kubernetes service, what we're doing is making the connectivity to the native cloud services provided by one of those public clouds simple and easy while letting you preserve and get sort of a modern consumption approach or option for your legacy, traditional components. We, I tend, we tend to try to avoid the word legacy because it has a negative connotation to it. But it, you know, it makes the point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:55) So people are looking at their P&L. They see that they're going to, you know, the equipment, maybe they're locally hosted, right, on-prem. They're going to have to make the reinvestment in the new equipment, and they start getting quotes. They see that timeline coming up. They're like, maybe we just shift this workload to the cloud and not have to manage all of this ourselves. And then there's a cost benefit there. I'm assuming they're lifting and shifting because of a cost benefit.

(Brad Schick at 00:13:20) Yeah. There's usually a cost benefit. It, you know, I think one of the, perhaps, over the exaggerated expectations of the cloud was that it was going to be a dramatic cost savings on the IT side or R&D side. And I think it, you know, it depends. It can be an improvement, and it depends which numbers you look at and whether you're looking at TCO or just, you know, or just the infrastructure costs. I think in the end of the day, it's the value is more on accelerated innovation and consistency and performance and, you know, the results you get more than it is, I'm just going to spend less dollars on IT. That was a big focus in the early days of cloud, and it can happen. But we often see that when people move to the cloud, they take advantage of increased efficiency and innovation to do more things, and they end up spending more money. So their efficiency is better, but not necessarily their absolute dollars.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:14) So there's more, like, in my head, I guess, I had it wrong. I thought it was just like a direct costing. So there are additional benefits. Like, let's say, walk me through a customer. It's like I lift and shift, and then what benefits do I get from that, shifting and putting it into the cloud versus having it on-prem?

(Brad Schick at 00:14:31) Yeah. Well, first, let me say that it's not the, I didn't mean to say there's never cost savings. There can be. And in particular, if, you know, you're closing an old expensive data center and moving to the cloud and, you know, you're avoiding hardware refresh and things like that, there absolutely can be. What I was trying to articulate is that often the bigger value and the long-term value is increased innovation and access to infrastructure that you get from a cloud consumption model.

(Brad Schick at 00:15:00) So, for example, let's say you have a new customer opportunity, a new customer that's showing up that you want to provide capacity to. Well, let me back up one step and say a lot of our customers are still selling software in a traditional model where it's a single-tenant kind of on-prem software. That's the way it was built. So if you're an ISV and you're selling software, you may have a traditional selling model where it's not provided yet entirely as a service. So for a customer like that, being able to get infrastructure in the cloud lets them provision infrastructure per customer on demand to create, you know, what I've jokingly called fake SaaS.

(Brad Schick at 00:15:39) So, you know, this is often how people did it on-prem if their software wasn't written to be multi-tenant. They would just create a new instance or stamp of that software and provide it to the customer. Doing that in the cloud with Skytap, say, in Azure, you can easily provision those resources that are ready to go, preconfigured, and just hand it over to the customer and do that on demand and create and destroy it almost instantly. And so you don't have to have that fixed inventory to grow customers. So that would be an example of a new selling motion and a new way to deliver software to customers if you have more traditional software, if you're reselling that software. If you're working on an internal, say, line of business application, often a focus of productivity is on, say, development and testing teams who face constraints in access to resources to do their jobs.

(Brad Schick at 00:16:32) If all you have is the data center that you own, then when you need to do a big upcoming release or you need to run tests or you need to validate something, you're often constrained by not having access. It's one of the big benefits of the cloud, is that you can just spin up the capacity you need for a particular job or task, use it, complete it, and then spin it down, throw it away, and don't pay for it. So that accelerates innovation. And so you get all those benefits even for these twenty-year-old applications that are running on an AS/400 by using Skytap in the cloud.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:06) Oh, that's amazing. You know, the first time I really wrapped my head around what you were discussing, the single-tenant, multiple installation concept, was when I was helping my parents with their business and I had to go get their QuickBooks file. Right? Now I use QuickBooks Online.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:23) Right? So it's wherever my username and password is. Right? And they have a network that's local that is not accessible publicly at their office, and then the QuickBooks is installed on the network so you can use it from any of the computers internally. And I was like, well, how do you check your stuff when you're gone?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:41) He's like, well, you really can't. Sometimes I'll set it up where I can remote into one computer and then check it. And I was like, that's so crazy. And so I was blown away because for me, just my personal path of experience is the first things I built, like one of the first offers I built, I didn't make it multi-tenant when I started, and then I had to go through that whole process of converting it to be multi-tenant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:07) And then from there on out, I just make everything I build multi-tenant because I understand the scheme of how to do it.

(Brad Schick at 00:18:12) Right. Well, and imagine that you are—I'm not going to name names—but imagine you are a very large financial services company selling banking software that for decades has run on-prem on banks on an AS/400. And now you are looking at how do we sell this as a service? Well, one way you can do it, which many are pursuing, is rewrite it from scratch in the cloud and take that decades of experience and knowledge and transition it to something new. And, you know, I assume you read blogs.

(Brad Schick at 00:18:43) And one of my favorites out there, I think Joel Spolsky wrote, was never rewrite software. Like, never start from scratch. Right? And, you know, it's not always the case, but it's a very expensive, long proposition because a lot of knowledge is codified within the application. It's not documented.

(Brad Schick at 00:18:59) It's just through hard-won experience that's baked into the systems. So one way is to start over and hope all that works out. Another way is to take that banking application and deploy it in essentially a virtual data center in the cloud that has the same capabilities. And when a new bank shows up that wants your software, you just spin up a new instance and say, there you go. And so, you know, that's why I call it fake SaaS because it's not SaaS in the true multi-tenant, one system that everyone is using in a multi-tenant fashion. But it gives the end customer the same agility and speed.

(Brad Schick at 00:19:34) And by using a cloud service, a lot of the same efficiency that you would get from converting to multi-tenancy. So for some customers, it may be an end state. For others, it's a stepping stone to someday having a true multi-tenant service. But, you know, one of the things I've learned just through my career is that the transition to new technologies is always much harder and more time-consuming than you expect, particularly for big businesses that have a lot invested and a lot riding on these systems. And so the crux of Skytap is really making that transition easier and faster and more efficient.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:10) Yeah. I do read blogs. I like that Joel guy. When I first saw some of his content, I said, oh, this is great. He's giving the Joel name a good reputation.

(Brad Schick at 00:20:18) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:20) But I read some of your blogs. I read one, I think it was on your LinkedIn, but you were talking about Microsoft and their history and I think it was their culture of only building stuff for themselves versus being able to interact with other companies. And I noticed that shift too, right? Because...

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:35) Windows is one of the first computers I was ever on and, you know, that geeky Bill Gates face is still in my head, like the first time I saw him. And I was like, oh, this is so cool. So I followed it and I remember when one thing turned me off once, I saw Steve Ballmer give a talk. I was like, I don't, you know, he just didn't match my personality. And but when I saw Satya talking, I think that's how you say his name, he was just like, it was like night and day between the two leaders. And I don't know because I never worked for Microsoft.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:10) But I was just curious, do you think the leadership culture had that impact on it?

(Brad Schick at 00:21:16) Yeah. I think that, so I don't know, I always say his name is Satya, so I'm not sure how to pronounce it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:23) One of us is getting it right.

(Brad Schick at 00:21:24) Right. Right. Exactly. I would say that, you know, it's certainly, I have always assumed that he led the charge for Microsoft changing, because it would be awfully coincidental that when he took the helm, the company really pivoted.

(Brad Schick at 00:21:42) But, I mean, it's been a phenomenal transition, an amazing transition. I worked there in the late nineties and up through 2000, and the company was very internally focused on its own products and its own walled garden. And, you know, that probably made sense in the day, but the whole company has made an amazing shift towards being what I would say the world's compute service, rather than a run Microsoft software service or company. And, you know, everything from really, you know, I'm sure they wouldn't put it this way, but deprioritizing Windows to, you know, the cloud investment and purchasing of GitHub and embracing open source software and not calling, you know, the GPL a cancer or whatever, you know, in the past was happening when I was there. You know, it's been a phenomenal shift, and I actually think it's saved Microsoft.

(Brad Schick at 00:22:30) It's made Microsoft relevant. Not only relevant, but one of the leading tech companies in the world again. And I think that has to be largely thanks to leadership and the change in focus. You know, I'll say that I'm actually working on a blog post talking about the cloud in general. It's, uh, it's not, I'm not very good at writing, and so I have these ideas and things like, I should write this down.

(Brad Schick at 00:22:52) And then two years later, I'm still working on it, and it becomes less relevant. But one of the shifts that I have thought about for a while that is aligned with what Skytap is doing is that the cloud in general, so this includes Microsoft and other cloud providers, started off focusing on, you know, modern software that's built and designed to run in the cloud. It's a new way to build and operate things. But that doesn't address all the large footprint of technology that's already out there unless you believe, which I don't, that it could all just be easily rewritten. So what I think is going to happen, and I think we already see happening, is that these big clouds will end up building specialized enclaves of technology designed to embrace and run these older systems.

(Brad Schick at 00:23:38) And so, you know, I've called them cloud enclaves or nested clouds or embedded clouds, but I think of them as specialized capabilities designed to run certain very big, strategic, well-established workloads in the cloud. And you already see this happening with, every cloud provider now has a VMware offering. Right? That's a good example of that. Microsoft now has a Cray offering.

(Brad Schick at 00:23:59) They have an SAP specialized offering. They have Skytap, which sits on top of several of those things, including the Power systems that I've mentioned. And so I think that you'll see that proliferation of public clouds having an increasing number of these enclaves designed to run these legacy applications and/or existing designs. Because if they don't, then businesses will choose another cloud that does have that because you won't be able to meet their needs, and they're not going to be able to rewrite it all. And so I think that cloud providers will be encouraged to go down that path.

(Brad Schick at 00:24:33) But I also think it's an amazing opportunity, and this is how it ties back to Microsoft, is that historically, Microsoft, their only business was to sell software that they created. So they write it and they sell it. And when it comes to technology they didn't build, it was actually somewhat of a burden for them because they had to interoperate with it. They didn't get a lot of money from it, but if they release a new version of Windows, you know, it's going to have to communicate with UNIX systems. If they build a new software design platform, it's going to have to account for databases that they didn't write.

(Brad Schick at 00:25:07) And, you know, it's going to have to read ODBC connectors for, you know, for Oracle or whatnot. And, you know, there's a limited benefit from them in doing that. It's more of a burden. With the cloud, and if they go this direction that I think is already happening and I'm talking about, where they actually create these specialized capabilities in their clouds, now they can actually profit from these things. You can run VMware in Azure.

(Brad Schick at 00:25:30) You can run an Oracle database in Azure. And so now there's actually a benefit to them, you know, a business profit, business growth by embracing and running these, not foreign technologies that they didn't create. So instead of just interoperating with them, they're now integrating them and running them and hosting them, which is a complete sea change for a company like Microsoft. And I think they realized that, and that's the direction they're heading. It's why they are working with a company like Skytap.

(Brad Schick at 00:25:58) I mean, ten years ago, if a company like Skytap said, hey, we could run AIX in Azure or in Microsoft, they would have rolled their eyes. And now I think they realized this is a very material opportunity. And I should say, sorry, I'm going on here a bit, but I should say it's not just to run those older systems.

(Brad Schick at 00:26:17) It's everything that will be connected to them and built around them. So it's not typical, you wouldn't typically bring an older system in and just have it be this isolated island. You bring it in, and then you may modernize it, or you may build things around it. You know, you add a new mobile front end. You add a new data collection and analysis service around it.

(Brad Schick at 00:26:36) So you tie in all these great modern cloud services to improve and augment these traditional systems that you've been using for years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:45) So you've been at Skytap for ten years. Right? It looks like Skytap's about ten years old. Were you the first employee there?

(Brad Schick at 00:26:54) No. No. So the company is, I think it's actually more like thirteen years. I lose track. I have been there for just a little over ten years.

(Brad Schick at 00:27:03) And, no, I'm not the first employee. Not by a long shot. I think there were thirty, twenty, maybe twenty-five people when I got there. And so I joined as the VP of Engineering and then, years later, became the CTO, which the change there was to go from just running the engineering team to engineering and product.

(Brad Schick at 00:27:25) And then just about a year ago, became the CEO. So it's been a long, exciting journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:33) How did that happen? How did you go, well, yeah, walk me through both. How did you go from VP to CTO? And then what were the big milestones there or the big reasons? And then how did you go from CTO to CEO?

(Brad Schick at 00:27:46) So, you know, the first transition, you know, there's always a confluence of factors that cause a change like that. So, you know, part of it is the job that I'm doing at the time. So, you know, when I was the VP of Engineering, I was taking on more and more responsibility of talking to customers and helping with product planning and doing things that are just beyond the scope of what you'd necessarily have to do as a VP of Engineering. I actually think that's the, you know, for anyone out there who's thinking about their next career step and being promoted or taking on more responsibility, my number one advice is just go do it. You know?

(Brad Schick at 00:28:24) Don't say to someone, I want to be promoted. Please make me a director or VP or whatever. Just go do it and succeed, and then someone's going to look and say, well, that's pretty obvious. You should be doing this job because you're doing a great job already. So, you know, I...

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:40) Yes. Yeah. I think we need to take a breath there because we can't gloss over this because I'm sitting here, you know, people on YouTube are like, they see me excited, but people listening, they need to understand, with entrepreneur eyes, I see this and it's like, how do you translate it to your team? Right? How do you let them know that, exactly what you said?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:01) If you say, I want the promotion, like I just want the increase in money. I want the title. And I know that there's some responsibilities there and I want to do those. And you're waiting for permission. And then there's the person that will just go start doing them. They'll see the gap and say, oh, that's necessary.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:15) And then there's people that understand, I'll just keep making myself so valuable. And if you keep doing that, they will pay you out of fear.

(Brad Schick at 00:29:24) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:25) They will say, look, we need to give you a new title now and we need to give you some more money because you're just doing so much. And that so much isn't just busy work, it's directly impacting the business. So some people I see will make the mistake if they just do a lot to stay busy. But if you can connect what you're doing back to the customer or revenue or however you do it, make sure it's impactful and important to the business and just go do it. If the gap's there, then people recognize that. The right people see it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:56) They're not unskilled. You know?

(Brad Schick at 00:29:58) Yeah. And I think that applies to really any size company. I think it's easier to have visibility in a small company when you do that, but I worked at Microsoft and Accenture—it was called Andersen Consulting at the time—and it's the same thing. You just over-perform, do more than is expected of you, and that's what leads to better outcomes and promotions. And, you know, I have, we occasionally have people asking things like, you know, I'd like to see how do I get promoted? Can I have a checklist for getting promoted? And, you know, my snarky answer to that always wants to be, well, step number one is don't ask for a checklist to how you get promoted. Like, you know, just go—you know, I mean, that's a little unfair because it's saying there's no rules, but it, the implication is that, can I have a list of 10 things where if I can check the boxes, then it's a done deal? And it's not, it's never like that. The situation is typically too dynamic.

(Brad Schick at 00:30:55) And also, it's your own initiative. It's not waiting to be given a checklist. It's finding what needs to be done. It's creating your own checklist that aligns with the business's needs and getting it done. And then it just sort of becomes a fait accompli or whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:13) And communication. Right? Like, people being able to communicate their value and articulate it versus doing it in the dark. And if no one knows what's really going on, but it happens to be really important to the company, then you're doing yourself a disservice.

(Brad Schick at 00:31:26) Yeah. Absolutely. You know, and I would also say there's positive and negative ways to go about that. I will say at bigger companies, you end up with people who are succeeding and growing through sort of a negative approach to delivering more and taking things away from others and competing or backstabbing or whatnot. And, you know, in the end of the day, it is over-delivering that gets you growth and promotion.

(Brad Schick at 00:31:54) But I have seen in bigger companies that sometimes that goes down a bit of a negative path where it ends up being sort of competitive and antagonistic towards your peers. So, you know, my other advice in coaching would be don't go that path, do it in a positive way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:09) I know. Sometimes we have to pad the advice here.

(Brad Schick at 00:32:11) Yeah. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:12) Like, there's little warning signs. It's like, okay, let's do a prerequisite that you're a great person. You work on yourself constantly. You're mentally stable and fit and organized. Like, you're, you're, you're—yeah. And then take this. Because the great people, well, some of them will make the mistake and learn and others just will figure it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:31) But that's why, you know, trying is so important and not being scared of failure and just getting up and doing it and just keep going back out. I mean, you've been there 10 plus years. You've got stories. There were times when it was incredibly difficult and you just, you don't quit in the dip. Right? Like, when things are down, that's when you push harder.

(Brad Schick at 00:32:53) Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Um, you know, I'd also say that just looking at my own background in the transitions, my first job out of school was actually, I mentioned, in consulting, now called Accenture, was Andersen Consulting at the time. And I actually had this idea that early in people's career, everyone should go into consulting at some point. I mean, I know that's a bit of a probably impossibility, but there was so much value that I got from sort of the nature of those jobs that I've applied throughout my career. And the biggest one is that when you're an inexperienced sort of young professional in consulting, what happens to you is you get plopped into these engagements, these jobs to be an expert or a delivery person at something you probably don't know much about because you just graduated from school, whether it's undergrad or grad, and you've just been put on a project on an insurance company, and you have to do something. Right? And are you an expert in insurance at that point? Probably not.

(Brad Schick at 00:33:51) And so what you learn is to, you learn to get comfortable in situations where you don't have all the information and all the knowledge, but you have to gain it quickly and make good decisions and execute. And that just happens to you over and over and over again on these different projects. And at least for me, it started off with a huge amount of fear and uncertainty every time I would go to another project. Just like, man, how am I gonna understand how to build a billing system for a cable company? I mean, I know there's consistency in billing systems, but I don't know anything about the cable business. And you build that sort of ability to quickly learn and to quickly adjust and adapt and perform in those situations where you don't have all the facts and all the knowledge. And as you get into leadership positions at companies, you realize that's how it always goes. Right? Even if it's your own business and you've been there for 10 years, it's full of uncertainty and incomplete information. And the ability to sort of make good decisions in that context is incredibly important.

(Brad Schick at 00:34:50) So that's, anyway, that's why I've always thought consulting is actually a great way to, you know, kick off any kind of career, even if you want to be a software engineer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:58) I fully agree. I got the same experience slightly different. I did app development, like software development. And I just went from project to project to project, you know, building teams and companies. And I just got, you know, real estate, fitness, finance, like—

(Brad Schick at 00:35:15) All of—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:16) these different industries that you would have to wrap your entire mind around, like understanding how every financial product works and modeling it to perform analysis on it to understanding fitness and, like, all of these different things. And what I found is that for me, that's just the match for me. Like, that's why the podcast works well because I get to talk to such a variety of people.

(Brad Schick at 00:35:37) Yeah. I also think it's in the end what makes a great leader and, you know, not everyone needs to be destined to lead teams of people. You know, we absolutely can build a phenomenal career being a specialist, deeper and deeper specialist in a certain area. In fact, in our company, we try to make sure that there are career paths in both directions because you want there to be growth and increased responsibility for people who want to be a specialist in a certain area. But to truly lead, I think, teams of people or companies, well, you have to get to that place that you just described where you're happy thinking about lots of different things and changing your focus on a daily or sometimes it feels like hourly basis. And then being comfortable learning things that you don't know quickly. I mean, I still remember taking the, when I took on the CEO role, my entire career was in product and engineering, and so I felt very comfortable in that space. But as soon as you step into a role where you're responsible for a company, you're thinking about things like finance and legal and, you know, go-to-market, which includes business development and marketing and sales. And, you know, I understood these things, but didn't directly have responsibility for them. And, man, like, I loved it because it was this opportunity to learn, but, you know, I didn't know what FP&A meant when I took the job and had to quickly figure it out. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:06) But that's the type of person you are though. You were up for the challenge. And the team, I'm assuming there's a board or something. They trusted you and they knew you knew the business and they knew your—like, I like evaluating people based on their ability to learn. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:20) I love—yeah. If they can go, like when I was an engineering leader, I would keep diving deep until I found the area where they didn't understand, like where they had a gray area, a lack of knowledge. And then if they wouldn't admit to a gray area, I would just address that in the interview because that was like a problem with, I don't know, a third of the people. It's like, look, just when you don't know something or you're not an expert, just say I don't know or, you know, discuss it. But I would find their gray area, something they don't know, and then I would give them some, find a concept there and I'd say, okay, go learn this concept and explain it to me, you know, tomorrow. And then we'll do another interview tomorrow, go home, learn this concept and then teach it to me tomorrow. And I specifically remember I did it once with this guy Chris and it was like polymorphism. He was a newer engineer and he didn't understand the concept of polymorphism.

(Brad Schick at 00:38:11) So I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:11) was like, alright, go research this and come back. And he came back the next day and I hired him. He explained polymorphism to me the best and he was like, I don't, you know, I don't have, like, hands-on experience. I did a couple little things with the code, and I can't—I get it. Like, I understand it. But, you know, I was like, he did a great job, and so we hired him. And yeah.

(Brad Schick at 00:38:30) Yeah. I actually very much like that, and I agree with you. An interviewing approach that I've used for a long time is very similar to that. But instead of spilling it over two days, I try to go deep on something that I don't expect the person to know a lot about. And actually, I even caveat it with them and say that upfront. This is intentional. We're going down a path that I don't expect you to have a lot of knowledge on. And the reason I do that is, do they get flustered? Do they get resistant? Do they say, it's not fair. I don't have any experience here. Or do they, are they reasonable and articulate and come up with good potential? You know, I don't do things that are impossible, like, come up with some physics theory that no one understands. It's just gonna be if you're a product manager, I might go deep on some technical area. If you're a technologist, I might go deep on how do you make product decisions or something that's a little bit tangential to what they would do on their daily job to see how good they navigate something they're unfamiliar or uncomfortable with. So I very much agree with you. I like that approach. It's a good interviewing tactic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:37) You were talking about multiple tracks. Right? I just want to, I want to check a concept I have in my head or an idea or something out there in the ethos. Okay. So I hear a lot of people say, okay, we got the technical track and the management track. And I, you know, got to go to all these conferences last year and meet all these different types of people in person after doing the show. And what I found is that there's a certain group of engineering-type people who use that argument as, like, a crutch almost for developing their communication skills. And it's almost like the—for me, I see the leaders that accelerate, like as people leaders, maybe go from engineering leader to people leader or just people leaders and they accelerate down that track. And then I see the engineers that accelerate down the, you know, subject matter expertise track. The thing is the people that go the farthest, like let's extend it all the way out to like complete career maturity. You cannot get around the communication skill. But some people will be like, oh, you know, I don't like repeating myself. Right? I noticed a lot of their objections to the people stuff is communication-related.

(Brad Schick at 00:40:50) Yeah. I agree with you. And I think you're right is that even if you're gonna go down an individual contributor path, that ends up, at least for us, and I think a lot of big tech companies in kind of, like, an architect role or distinguished engineer role or something like that. And actually then at that level, communication actually becomes one of the primary requirements. You're not running a team, but what you're supposed to be doing is influencing and helping others make good decisions, and that's all about communication. And so if you don't have that, it's gonna be a limit to your growth there. I completely agree with you. The delta, the difference between the manager track and the individual architect path is just whether you are directly responsible for the set of people doing the work or the schedules or, you know, even a budget and things like that. And so, yeah. I completely agree with you. It's not about do you need to have good communication skills or not. And, I mean, I think there can be, there's certainly a place for people that are gonna be extremely specialized in a certain area and may own something themselves and not need to be communicated as much, but those are pretty rare. I mean, that's not a common, you know, where you're an expert at some algorithm or some database or some system, and you're just gonna do the work yourself, and you just need to produce results. Particularly at more senior levels, that's not very common.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:19) Yeah. Well, they're just not gonna reach their full potential.

(Brad Schick at 00:42:23) It kinda puts a cap, I think, on how far you can go with that, I think. Yeah. Exactly. And it is, you know, I think that for people in the tech world, you run into a lot of people who are very smart and very articulate. And I think that a challenge for many people is not only communication, but it's ensuring you're treating other people with respect and empathy and helping them grow. You know, there's a tendency in the tech world, I think, to be dismissive of other people and people who don't have as much knowledge or experience as you being sort of short with them or quick-tempered or impatient or whatnot. And I think that's another thing that, you know, it comes somewhat maybe from competitiveness or lack of self-confidence, but it's something else I think people need to get over and get through to get to their maximum potential. If you're really gonna succeed as a leader, whether it's as an individual architect or as a manager, you have to be treating your team with respect and empathy and helping them grow and helping them succeed. You can't be sort of domineering, and your goal in life can't be to prove you're smarter, which I will say when I worked at Microsoft, I don't know if it's like that anymore. There was a lot of that at Microsoft of, like, people whose whole goal was to basically prove they're smarter than you. And, you know, that just in the end doesn't go very far and doesn't work in my opinion.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:43) Yeah. But the people who could see that, step back, and corral those people having their competition to achieve some outcome, they're the ones that became the leaders.

(Brad Schick at 00:43:53) That's right. I completely agree. I mean, it also comes, you know, a little bit from the sort of style or the culture of the company. You know, in the nineties, Microsoft was a pretty, it was a fairly combative place, and, you know, I think there's been plenty written about that, so I'm certainly not the first one to say that. And I think a little bit of that kinda comes from the top. I mean, you know, sort of famous Bill Gates reviews and things like that. I mean, you know, anyway, it's like it's what's tolerated within the company or it's the model or the example that's set by leadership as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:29) Yeah. Another topic you just reminded me of, something that people don't talk about much, personal maturity. Like we always try to keep everything professional in the professional box and you just can't because that's not how life works. Who you are at your core just spills over in everything you do, right? All your thoughts and actions. But we don't really evaluate—we don't have a scale. At least, I don't have the words to talk about it. Like, how do you evaluate personal maturity in an interview? I think it's just like an unsaid thing that we kinda pick up on.

(Brad Schick at 00:45:02) Yeah. I mean, it's difficult. And I mean, interviewing in general is difficult. I've long said it's like going on a date or two and deciding if you're going to get married. You just don't have the full information, and everyone's sort of on their best behavior.

(Brad Schick at 00:45:16) And it can be difficult. Particularly things that are more subtle like that are really hard to extract. I mean, I would say that one of the things that we do is we put a lot of weight on previous knowledge. So someone who's worked with a person in the past before or, you know, a solid reference that we can trace back because that's an easier way to get information of how did this person behave in the past versus, you know, a couple hour interview. I mean, there's a whole theories about behavioral focused interviews and things like that.

(Brad Schick at 00:45:47) But, you know, I've never personally found the silver bullet for how do you get through an interview with high predictable, you know, high with high predictive outcomes on things like personality. That's difficult.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:01) It is. I mean, because and it's because people are so dynamic.

(Brad Schick at 00:46:05) Yeah. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:05) Exactly. Because they're byproducts of their existing environment that they're in and they're going to go into a new environment. And so you can't really calculate that change. You can try to sync them up. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:14) That's why I see a lot of people go from one company to another, like they'll transition. I noticed a lot of great leaders come out of Walmart. For some reason, I just had picked up on that trend. And so I started asking them about it, and they're like, well, the culture there, it's a technology company masquerading as a retailer. I was like, oh, oh, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:30) Cool.

(Brad Schick at 00:46:31) Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I would say also you can, you know, you build an environment, like you said, a culture that encourages people to behave a certain way and function a certain way. And that's not so much about, like, you know, writing down all your principles. I mean, that's a good thing to do, and we try to do that.

(Brad Schick at 00:46:48) But I think it's the example that people set and your actions that actually end up driving the culture and the behavior that's expected and tolerated and who gets promoted. Right? And just like we were talking about earlier is what leads to success in the company is and ends up being more of, like, what drives the culture than what you, you know, say, write down. It's too easy to be, you know, have a bit of hypocrisy by writing down, we value integrity, and then do something completely different.

(Brad Schick at 00:47:15) You know? So I think it's more like what you do that ends up defining the people that grow and succeed in the company. It's actually, and it's a bit of a tangent, but, you know, as I've talked to people on our team about how to be a manager or a leader, I sort of like to jokingly say, well, my management philosophy is to not have a management philosophy. And the reason I say that is that different people and different circumstances require different actions. And so you may have someone who needs to be who who prefers to be given very specific information about the tasks that need to be accomplished and then followed up and checklisted with them, and then they'll be very productive.

(Brad Schick at 00:47:55) You may have another person that just wants to be pointed in a direction and, you know, asked to go, you know, go succeed and call them back in a year when it's done. And the goal of a leader is to understand what's going to lead to the most success. How do you optimize the output of your team and your people based on the context and their needs at any given time? And if you approach it with, well, this is my approach. Like, I'm a hard ass or I'm a task master or I'm very laissez faire.

(Brad Schick at 00:48:22) Like, that it's going to fail eventually with some set of people or teams or, you know, probably even a company. I would say even companies themselves have stage appropriate leadership that changes throughout its life cycle, and you need to be adapting to that all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:38) Yeah. I guess looking for if someone's asking or looking for a management style or or something. For me, I started reading different books by different leaders to understand who they were and how they made decisions. Yeah. And to try to figure out, because that's something that everybody goes through is to figure out who are you going to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:58) I mean, if you haven't chosen who you're going to be, then you're just who you are by accident, right? By happenstance. Yeah. That's true.

(Brad Schick at 00:49:05) Yeah. That's true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:06) I like a lot of different I really like Ray Dalio's Principles. I think principles have become more important. So we've called them like culturatum principles but ways of thinking on how to make decisions that allow you to abstract the emotions from the moment and just think like, does this, it's like a, it's like a loose framework because it's not a to do list. But it is like an ability to make sure that your core values are aligned. Like with, with money or how you're you can use it for anything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:32) Money, cash flow, hiring, and then it's about finding like those principles and how they spread across different areas and just awareness of them. But for me, I know it's a little bit more abstract but it's been very useful.

(Brad Schick at 00:49:46) Yeah. I agree with you. It's having a set of principles or outcomes you're looking for and being consistent and transparent about that and not hiding from situations when they're not going the way you want as well. I mean, it's, I know we're kind of talking about a bunch of different things, but one of those principles that we talk about at Skytap is having an RCA mindset, which, you know, comes from an engineering world of root cause analysis. So things aren't always going to go as you expect.

(Brad Schick at 00:50:18) The response to that that we'd like to have is to is to think about how did we get here, what occurred, and how do we change it in the future. So getting to the root cause of why things didn't go the way you want is much more important than, you know, assigning blame or, you know, or just putting a patch in place to get things to work. You want to understand, like, how did we get here? Like, how did we end up in this situation and then try to fix that? That's, you know, going back to the root cause.

(Brad Schick at 00:50:43) So, like, that that's an example of a principle that I, you know, I think is very important that we talk about at Skytap. It's one of the things I love about Amazon, actually. They have these 12 leadership principles, and, you know, I tend to only remember two or three of them. But I they're very practical. They're more like operationally focused, you know, principles or leadership guidelines, which I think are very, very good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:06) And they're even better when the people own them and act them out. And so it becomes the cool thing to do, like, within the organization culturally. Right.

(Brad Schick at 00:51:15) Right. They're reinforced and they're sort of lived. It's back to that point that was making earlier. You can write them down. There's some there's value in that because everyone sees them, but in the end of the day, it's whether you act them out and you reinforce them and, you know, leadership values them actually values them and focuses on them is what what gets them to occur, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:34) Yeah. I I quest I thought a lot about, like, writing them down. We've written them down. And what we found was the most useful part of writing them down was we could, like, call people out, like, in a positive way. Like, oh, look.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:46) This person's executing on this principle, you know, like, crab hands. That's how we do like our clapping on video calls. We'll be like, oh, crab hands, Jake or whatever. And, and then also for new hires because it's like a it's a quick index. I mean, it's like 10 points.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:00) It's like or eight points or whatever it is. But they instantly know, like, this is what it's like here. You know, this is what we value here and they can, they self select too. Yeah. They'll yeah.

(Brad Schick at 00:52:13) Right. Right. Agreed. Yeah. I absolutely.

(Brad Schick at 00:52:16) I think that it's, you know, writing them down is is definitely critical because as you said, it sets that it sets the introductory expectation. It gives you something to point to so that it's well, you know, well documented and understood. The key is then, I think, that leadership has to really embody them and embrace them and live them for them to become, you know, effective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:36) Oh, we all know that story. We all know the big company that just puts them down and just puts them down because it's an exercise that they did in a workshop, and they don't live them out, and it's not who they are at all.

(Brad Schick at 00:52:45) Right. Yeah. Did did you ever watch the sitcom, I think it was Silicon Valley. It was on HBO. Yeah.

(Brad Schick at 00:52:52) I always I loved the conjoined triangles of success or whatever they were called. It was, like, the classic example of, like, words on walls that are just like, what is this talking about? Like, I have no idea. It was I love that show. That was hilarious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:07) It was such a funny show. You know, I resisted watching it until it had been completely aired because I don't watch a lot of TV, but people kept asking me. They're like, oh, you're the tech guy. What do you think of the Silicon Valley show? Is that what it's like?

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:19) And after four or five years of people saying that, I just sat down and I was like, alright. Now I'm going to watch this and see what it's all about. And I laughed pretty hard. They got they had some great it was a good show.

(Brad Schick at 00:53:31) It was they did a great job on the humor. And if you're in the in the space, there were so many things in there that just rang true. I mean, they did such great research on on what it's like. Everything from raising money to running the business to, you know, sales versus engineering culture. Like, they just they poked at it all, and all of it is you know, like, all the like, probably all the best humor out there, there was, like, a significant kind of truth to everything they were poking at.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:57) Yeah. They did a great job. Now when when you were, like, very young, were were you interested in, like, rockets? I'm I'm recently watching this, like, I think it's, National Geographic. They dramatized, like, the first space launch or something, that whole process of, like, selecting the pilots.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:14) And so I was thinking about that. And I was just curious, like, when you were young, were you, like, you know, watching the space shuttles launch and getting excited about that? Like, what were you doing?

(Brad Schick at 00:54:25) Yeah. I've I've always been,

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:27) I would

(Brad Schick at 00:54:28) say, excited about creating things. And so, yeah, whether it's, like, watching other people create them, like, what NASA's doing, absolutely, I love that and remember watching the space shuttle launches in grade school and, you know, and that was a thrill. But then I also have always been, I guess, what I would say, a tinkerer or creator, like, just building things whether it was physical things that I wanted to build. And I still remember these things I wanted to create that, you know, when I was nine that I think back, and I'm like, that would be cool, and it was impossible. I never could have built it, but, you know, it seemed exciting when I was young.

(Brad Schick at 00:55:01) To, like, software projects, I mean, I still do that. I still when one of the ways I use my free time is I build, you know, electronic gadgets around my house. I have, like, five Raspberry Pis and then ESP8266 or whatever controlling our heating systems. And, you know, I still really love creating things. That's why I like being in a small company as you're building and creating things, and now it's expanded from not just product to marketing and sales and finance and partnerships, but it's all creative.

(Brad Schick at 00:55:29) It's like growth and building. And, you know, I've had fun doing that throughout my career. Built games and startups and,

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:37) you

(Brad Schick at 00:55:37) know, it's I find that's what keeps me excited is creating something. And it's one of the reasons I went into software is that it it's a fairly new field, and you're often starting with a blank slate and you get to build things up and create them from nothing. And I just I've always loved that. And, you know, I think if I hadn't gotten into software, I'd probably be in, you know, architecture or, you know, construction or some place I get to build things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:03) Yeah. Building is great. Like, I say the analogy for me is the first time I wrote code, I felt like a caveman that had just created fire. Like, it was just unbelievable. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:14) And and then I've gotten, like, I figured out that, like you said, there's different there's different parts of you. Right? So there's like the tinkerer part, and you kind of have to make sure that you're watching the different versions of yourself. Because if it's all work all the time, then you get burnt out. If it's all play all the time, then you feel unproductive and that it's equally bad to overplay as it is to overwork.

(Brad Schick at 00:56:37) Yeah. I I agree. I agree. And and it's and it's hard you know, we started this conversation talking about the, you know, the holiday break, and I've one of the things I've found is that I'm pretty good at that it helps me, stay, I don't know, stay stay calm or stay sane is that when I'm not working, I'm actually pretty good at turning it off. And so, like, over the Christmas break, I didn't work, and I didn't think about it, and I didn't read email.

(Brad Schick at 00:57:03) If I got a text, I responded to it. But, you know, I kind of turned it off, and I forgot about the, you know, everything going on and the problems. And, you know, it's a great relief, and I felt, you know, calm through that period. But then Monday comes, and you're like, oh my it all rushes back because you have to get back into it. You know?

(Brad Schick at 00:57:20) So those transitions can be really hard for me. But, you know, but being able to switch your brain off, I think switch it on and off actually is really it's actually really important. This will seem like a bit of a tangent, but it's actually interesting. I think that the ability to kind of switch gears like that and go go from different context, whether it's work or not work, or even within work from, like, a very big strategic decision to a micro decision, being able to switch gears is actually a pretty important attribute. And I was talking to a person on our team who's, you know, down this path of being an architect and a distinguished engineer, and and we were actually discussing that exact point in how to make that transition, which is how do you be productive as an architect when your goal is kind of be operating at the higher level and kind of guiding people in various directions.

(Brad Schick at 00:58:15) But if you stay there all the time, you lose contact with the specific problems and the specific decisions. And so we were actually discussing kind of, like, on the fly saying, well, I think the right model is actually you know, on Monday, you go super deep in one area and you maybe write code and you're decide you know, making, like, concrete tactical decisions on a specific project or implementation, perhaps even building it, and you might do that for a few weeks. But then the key is you need to pop back up and then look over the whole organization at what decisions are being made. And I think that for being a successful architect, that ability to go up and down kind of the stack over time is actually really critical and, you know, probably important in many roles as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:59) Yeah. Yeah. Definitely in the like, in all the roles. You have to go up. I think we talked about this before, but I don't have, like, a good a good story or anything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:08) But I know what you mean. Like, you know, you hear things and you just know that they're true. Right? And yeah. The ability to to switch gears like that and come in and out, incredibly important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:18) I've seen some companies, they all have different ways that they accomplish it. One thing I saw that was interesting is when they'll have, like, the lunch and learns. Right? Yeah. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:27) The engineers will, like, teach something, like, a problem they solved at work, and that'll keep the management team that has, you know, engineering experience, like, more detailed seeing code on the screen, understanding the problems. Companies that can teach internally are are just really fantastic.

(Brad Schick at 00:59:43) Yeah. And I think that is particularly for a senior role. I go back to that architect role. I think, you know, what we were discussing was that if you get stuck at kind of one level, either the high level or the low level, you're probably not going to succeed in your job as well. Because if you're stuck at the high level, you lose touch with the details and the specific problems that are occurring.

(Brad Schick at 01:00:06) If you're stuck at the low level, you know, you're just building something and you're not keeping an eye out for the whole project and the bigger decisions. And so being able to kind of switch back and forth is—you're trying to cover both the territory of both in a way.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:22) Are you telling me, just to be clear, are you telling me it's hard work to grow?

(Brad Schick at 01:00:30) Yeah. It's, you know, maybe there's some general principle here, but it's some discussion—like, because it started off talking about holiday breaks, right? It's some discussion of being able to switch contexts frequently is actually valuable, right? Whether it's an architect being high or low level or a leader being able to take a weekend off.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:53) So let's do some switching right now. So let's give a shout out to Skytap, like who the customers are, what the website is, why they should go there. That way, the people who are listening, who want to learn more, maybe somebody has a lift and shift project that they're actually considering and they're like, "Oh, I like Brad. Maybe I'll reach out to them and see if Skytap can help."

(Brad Schick at 01:01:15) Yeah, excellent. So our website is skytap.com or www.skytap.com. And you can reach out to us through the website, or you can sign up for our service in a self-service manner through Azure's marketplace or the IBM Cloud portal. You can just get going on your own. You don't even have to talk to us if you don't want to. And our customers are those that have traditional systems that have been built on-prem over many years, and they're looking to move those systems into the cloud. And so, you know, you can find our reference customers and our testimonials online and understand how other customers have succeeded through using Skytap and kind of where we're headed from there. And yeah, people can reach out to me as well, and I'm always happy to chat.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:04) Yeah. We'll put the links in the show notes so that people have quick access to them. Was there anything that we needed to get out that we didn't hit on?

(Brad Schick at 01:02:13) You know, I do realize that one of the—at least I was expecting us to talk about multi-cloud and the sort of history or trajectory of multi-cloud, and that's actually not something we did. So I don't know if, you know, you ever want to follow up on that. But there was a—you know, I thought part of the context—I'm just remembering this actually—was to talk about how businesses are going to consume, this isn't really even Skytap specific. This is how businesses are going to consume the public cloud through multiple providers, like why they would do that and how they're going to go about it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:45) Yeah. Let's talk. Tell me.

(Brad Schick at 01:02:47) Okay, sure. Well, yeah. I mean, I guess I would say that the lead into multi-cloud is why, and why are companies going to do that. And I think in the early days of the cloud, there was this notion that multi-cloud was going to be a company sort of optimizing their spend by having multiple providers and a workload would potentially move, you know, from one cloud to the next, or you'd use, you know, cloud brokerage firms to use the cheapest resources of the day. And from the get-go, I thought that was ridiculous, and that would never happen. I mean, in a lot of ways, it's sort of reminiscent of the Java "write once, run everywhere," right? Like, it's maybe a good language, but people weren't actually using Java to run it on, you know, run a server on Windows on Monday and Unix on Tuesday. And I don't think that'll ever happen in the cloud either. I mean, for maybe really specialized workloads that are batch oriented or bursty, maybe you might move them between locations, you know, Bitcoin mining or something—just run it somewhere one day and the next. I guess that doesn't work so well in the cloud, but whatever, that idea. I don't think that's going to happen broadly.

(Brad Schick at 01:03:55) I think that the way that multi-clouds will be used is it will be using the right tool for the right job, meaning different clouds have different strengths, and businesses will use the cloud and the services that that cloud provider has for its specific capabilities that are optimized for their needs. And so that could be, you know, features of their platforms. It could be support for different types of hardware operating systems. It could just be locality. Who has a data center closest to where I need it to be? And then the workloads that are designed for those systems will be built and designed to run on those systems, and they will stay there for long periods of time. But they will, because they're big companies, they will choose multiple cloud providers and run the systems that are best fit for each provider in those providers. And then in the end of the day, what spans all those clouds are a couple big, important, call it policies and procedures that need to be used to guide consumption of the public cloud. So it wouldn't be the technology that's multi-cloud, but what will span clouds are things like your security requirements or your cost controls, your SLAs. There are things that are important for the whole business that will span multiple cloud providers. And those things might be actually extracted from individual cloud providers and built as a common layer on top. I actually think there's business opportunities there. But I don't believe that it's going to be, you know, like I said earlier, a workload running on Cloud A on Monday that, you know, shifts over to Cloud B on Tuesday.

(Joel Beasley at 01:05:35) That's an interesting progression because, yeah, I had on my topic list, I was like, I want to know what the future looks like in ten years, and that abstraction feels kind of natural, right?

(Brad Schick at 01:05:45) Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think particularly for a big business, it's almost unavoidable that they're going to have multiple cloud providers. And so, you know, like, another reason to think about this is just through sort of natural, call it evolution. I mean, there's this idea called vicariance in, I think, evolution where it's, you know, where like a physical separation causes a species to, like, split in two. Like, I actually think that applies to technology and big businesses. So, you know, call it technology or technical vicariance where, you know, big company has divisions that are in different countries or different product lines and whatnot. And they're, of course, separated, and they're going to go their own ways. And one of them is going to prefer using Azure, and another is going to prefer using AWS. And trying to force that to not happen is not worthwhile. But what is worthwhile is to say that both of those situations need to comply to the company's security requirements or their SLAs or their cost controls. And so that's the layer that you want to, I think, extract from an individual cloud and build as a sort of, call it a control layer above cloud providers.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:00) Oh, so rather than me having a cost control center inside of Amazon, Azure, and all these different things with all these different preferences because they're quite extensive, you would have an extracted billing system that would connect with all the clouds.

(Brad Schick at 01:07:16) Yeah, exactly. And all the clouds—

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:17) They don't have that yet?

(Brad Schick at 01:07:19) It, you know, I'm sure it exists. There are places—

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:22) Is this Skytap's new—we have, like, some unannounced news?

(Brad Schick at 01:07:27) No. We're not headed in that direction. But I think it's, there's, you know, there's a business opportunity there, you know, and there are many startups, I'm sure, that are going down this path. I'm actually aware of a few that are doing it from a security compliance standpoint as well. I mean, just look at, like, PCI compliance, right? There are lots of companies out there that focus on PCI compliance, and they do that across clouds. Most of them wouldn't be focused on a single cloud. So that's a good example. I think, you know, like I said, billing or SLA requirements, things like that also are not cloud specific. But a technology decision like whose database you're going to use is cloud specific, and trying to say, "We're going to build an abstraction layer so that we can, you know, switch database providers on the fly for all of our systems," that's a decision better left to individual projects and teams, and you don't get a lot of value from centralizing a decision like that, in my opinion.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:23) Have you heard of SecurityScorecard?

(Brad Schick at 01:08:27) No. They are—familiar with that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:29) Yeah. They are—I talked with them a little bit ago and fascinating. They're taking, like, I think they're one of the companies that you're kind of alluding to with your security requirements. But essentially you have to go through all these security processes as you know, right, with the different customers. And they had taken, like, all the questionnaires and basically created a central area where you can become, like, a member of SecurityScorecard. You can get your security, like, scorecard done, but then you can share it. So if we're both in network, like we're both inside SecurityScorecard and understand the concepts and everything, we can just see our information and understand you. And they give you like a—I'm probably not describing it great—but the memorable part of it was your business would have a score like a credit score, but for your security. And then you could share that credit report, you know, that security report with other people when doing integrations and things like that. And I was like, "Oh, that would be so great," because I just did, like, an eight-month integration with a company, and the security aspect of it is what drew it out, and it was so hard.

(Brad Schick at 01:09:34) Yeah, right. For sure. Yeah. Makes sense. And they, I assume, they're going to have some standards and do an audit or something like that. And, you know, it's actually an interesting challenge. There are so many security standards out there. You know, different industries have their own compliance regimes and different countries have their own. It's something as a small company we face all the time. Customers asking us if we have various certifications, you know, from, you know, BSI—and I think that's a German standard—to, you know, FedRAMP in the US, to PCI, and various ISO standards. And, you know, there's just this never-ending list. I mean, it's impressive. Like, go to Azure or AWS and look at their list of compliance, and it's just huge. It's a big field. But yeah, the point I was trying to make is that, I guess if I take a step back, I think that when you talk about multi-cloud, it's inevitable that—in my opinion, it's inevitable that big businesses will use multiple cloud providers because they're providing different capabilities for those customers. And then you have to decide, if you have multiple cloud providers, what decisions and technology is centralized versus decentralized. And my general belief is that you want most of the decisions to actually be decentralized, meaning you want to be optimizing your services and your deployments and your teams to be experts at the tool that fits their needs best. So that might be one specific cloud provider, and they're going to be different across different contexts. So that's decentralized. But then there are other things that are important to the business that either are significant business risks that, you know, require extensive coordination across teams or are very expensive to duplicate, and those things you want them to be centralized. And so that's where I put, like, you know, budgeting and billing. Like, that's a significant business risk and requires coordination. And same with security and infosec. If you get that wrong, there's a serious consequence for a business, and so you need that to be a centralized decision or controlled centrally. But then the technology implementation decisions of what database should I use, what message bus should I use, et cetera—like, those are far better off left to be decentralized and to not require them to be coordinated across teams or divisions or groups or products or whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:13) You should write an article about this.

(Brad Schick at 01:12:15) I, you know, I actually am working on it. It's another—I mentioned earlier that it's, like, all these things I want to write up, and then, you know, it takes me years to get there. That's another thing. I've got half-written, half-baked. I've got a PowerPoint deck. I just have to convert it to something more substantial.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:29) Well, we'll take a clip of this multi-cloud concept and post it, and then it's like a video blog.

(Brad Schick at 01:12:38) Yeah, perfect. There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:39) Boom. We nailed it.

(Brad Schick at 01:12:40) Write the actual blog, and then we'll tie them all together.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:43) We'll have it transcribed and then call it a day.

(Brad Schick at 01:12:45) We'll be—

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:45) Like, hey. Success.

(Brad Schick at 01:12:46) There you go. There you go. Perfect. Alright. Alright. I appreciate it. Thank you. It's good conversation. Thanks.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:53) Talk soon, bud.

(Brad Schick at 01:12:54) Bye-bye.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:57) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd 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.