Eddie Satterly CEO of DataNexus

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today we are talking to Eddie Satterly, the CTO of DataNexus, and we discuss the importance of hiring developers who are genuinely interested in the technology you are creating, surrounding yourself with people who are always wanting to learn more, and the funny story of how we both ended up as accidental speakers. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Eddie, so where are you at physically?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) Like, where are you located?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:00:39) I am in Denver, Colorado.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:41) Oh, what's it like there right now?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:00:43) It's actually beautiful today. It's going to get up to 70 today. So it's been cold the last few days, it's been snowing, and it's going to snow again starting on Sunday through Tuesday next week. So we're having a little lull.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:54) So while it's not snowing, do you go outside and fly drones?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:00:58) Not in a while. I went over to Australia and I took all my drones out. And I'm actually selling my property and building a new place, so I don't have them currently flying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:09) Oh, I just got my first drone.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:01:11) Oh, I have two big drones.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:14) Oh, what type? Tell me about them.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:01:16) They're custom made. So a company out of Canada made them for me, but I use them to do analytics on my fence lines on my property for quite a long time because I had horses. But we got rid of the horses. Like I said, I went to Australia for 20 months, so we did that. We got rid of the horses, and so the drones have been retired for a while until we get the new property built.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:40) Oh, what type of horses did you have? I grew up with horses.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:01:43) Rescue horses. So my wife runs a horse rescue up in the mountains.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:48) Like mustangs or...

(Eddie Satterly at 00:01:50) No, it's taking in horses that are abused by other owners. So they're whatever.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:57) There's actually like a mustang ranch that's just like abused or refugee mustangs that one of my friends is familiar with and always talks about.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:02:06) Yeah, very cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:07) So you had these custom drones built by this company in Canada. What's their name?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:02:12) Yeah, that's a sensitive thing, so I'll just leave that one alone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:17) Oh, so they don't build them like commercially for people?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:02:21) They do not. They build military drones normally, but I had them build me a non-military drone that I could use.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:32) Oh man.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:02:33) They could stay in the air where I'm at because we get really heavy winds up on my ranches. So you have to have—they're hexafoils—so you have to have a very sturdy and very able to easily adapt drone in order to keep flying the lines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:51) Wow, that's awesome. So then you collect this data and you analyze the data yourself?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:02:57) Yeah, it was. Like I said, I haven't had to do it. It hasn't been running in a couple years. But yeah, when I was doing all the analysis myself, I actually talked at a conference about it and walked through what we were doing. But I used a bunch of algorithms created by a professor at Cambridge and all in Python, and did a bunch of the analysis myself just for me.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:03:18) But it alerted me when there's a break in my fence, so I never had to worry about the horses getting out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:22) Oh man, that's like right up my alley. That's so much fun. I love just crafting things from my imagination. I'm like, "Oh, this would be cool."

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) I'll go sit down on the computer and just make it.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:03:36) Oh yeah. At the end of the day, our horses got out. A couple of the horses got out and were out running kind of close to—we live kind of next to a highway. Like, not a big highway, but a two-lane highway. And the horses got out and we had a hell of a time getting them back. So the plan was if the fence breaks again, to alert, because we have elk up here and the elk will run through the fence and just break it because they don't care.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:04:03) And so, you know, rather than have that happen and not be able to react, or have to worry about my neighbors calling me to tell me my horses are on the highway, that way if we had any breaks when they flew, we knew. And then even when I was not in town, my neighbors could come over, or the people who helped us with the rescue could come over and just fix the fence real quick or at least block it off so that the horses wouldn't get out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:27) Oh yeah. We've helped our neighbors with horses more than enough times to come home as they're in the back quarter of the property. "Oh, there they are again." And we used to live—what backed up to our property was a wild cat habitat. So there were lions, like probably about 10 lions and some tigers and bears, like, no joking.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:51) And so it was interesting because at night, at the different feeding times, you could just hear them, and it would scare the pizza delivery guy.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:04:59) Yeah, I bet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:01) Yeah. He's going to deliver a pizza and it's dark. It's like 8:00, 9:00 at night, and he hears lions roaring as he walks up to this house.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:05:10) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:11) Did you grow up on a ranch as a kid?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:05:13) Yeah, I grew up on a farm. My grandparents had a farm and I worked there in the summers when I was young, and I had my own horse from the time I was five. So yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:24) So how did you make the transition to and fall in love with technology?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:05:28) I've been doing tech forever. I actually had my first piece of open source software when I was 12 years old. It went out on the OWL CDs for the people old enough to remember what that was. But I wrote a device driver for US Robotics modems to run on my Apple IIe and then released it because there wasn't one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:50) And then you just continued going, like all the way through middle school and high school writing code?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:05:57) Oh yeah. I sold my first company in '91, which was a software company, and then another one that was a services company in '94, and then, or '95. And then moved out to—well, the first company that bought us moved me out to Fort Collins in Colorado, and so I fell in love with Colorado. And then in '98 I moved out permanently, and I've had a house in Colorado ever since.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:20) Nice. Do you really enjoy the weather, the seasons, everything about it?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:06:25) Well, I live outside, right? And Colorado is an incredible outdoor place. So, you know, I used to ski. I blew up my knee, I don't ski anymore. But now I have snowmobiles and a snow cat, and I can go play up in the mountains and, you know, still go play in the snow in the winter and play outside. We hike a ton. We have bikes. You know, you can do everything here. And all year round, it's fun to be outside.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:49) Yeah, I'm a big outdoors guy. I grew up with the horses and the dirt bikes because I'm in—grew up in Florida, right? So I'd dirt bike like year-round, right? And then my wife and I, you know, I found somebody similar to me. So all of our vacations consist of us hiking different places. Like we'll go out to Vegas, and rather than the casinos, we hike Red Rock, you know? And we go out into Georgia and hike in the mountains up there and the Carolinas and... yeah, we're big on the outdoors.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:07:19) Yeah. Well, hiking here is far more strenuous but far more fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:24) Well, you have the elevation difference because we're down in flat Florida, right? So it takes us some time to adjust when we go up in the mountain areas.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:07:32) Yeah, absolutely. You've got to be smart about it or you get hurt.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:37) Yeah, and you've got to be really careful with the pancakes, right? Because when you're making food, the recipes are all different. We found that out. Like, you see in Florida, your eyes just completely glaze over the directions for like what to do at higher altitudes. And then everything cooks differently.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:07:56) Yeah. Anything from pasta, like anything that essentially has, you know, the yeast or flour or any of that in it will cook very differently. I mean, you bake a cake and you bake it with a normal flatland recipe, it does not work here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:11) Yeah. What's elevation like in Australia? Is it lower or higher?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:08:16) It's—we were in Sydney, so it's much lower. I mean, Sydney is not much different than half of Florida. So you're at very low elevations. Their highest point in Australia, meaning the highest mountain in Australia, is not as high of altitude as my house in Colorado.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:35) Oh wow. But they have some really cool geographical structures because it's like, isn't Australia one of the oldest parts of the like, our land areas?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:08:45) Well, they have a whole lot of varying terrains. And, you know, you can go an hour in any direction and it'll be very different. Even from Sydney, if you go north and west, you've got what they call the Blue Mountains, which we would call hills. And then the other side of that, you've got the Outback, right? You're in the desert. So it's a couple hours to get from, you know, lush beach to very inhospitable desert.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:11) It's—the variety, though, is very intriguing. So you've got Colorado and then Australia. What initially attracted you to Australia? Like how did you get introduced there?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:09:23) I don't know. I did a talk down there, I don't know, eight, nine years ago, an early big data talk, and met a guy who founded a company back then and he'd been bought by IAG. And he just introduced me into that team maybe three and a half, four years ago. And I talked to him when I was down there on a trip for fun. And then, you know, they went through a big transformational project.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:09:48) And two years ago this coming April, they called me and said, "Hey, do you want to come down for originally four months," which turned into 20, you know, because it was "Come down and build us a plan and put together a roadmap and, you know, do a recommendation for us." And then it was, "Why don't you just stay and do it?" Right? So I brought my team down and we did it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:05) What was the sort of the theme of that, or is that private as well?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:10:08) No, no, it's public. There's a bunch of presentations on it. So they were doing a digital transformation project kind of across the board, and they put somebody new in charge of all that, who's the chief customer officer. And they needed a really heavy focus early on to get the data right so that they could do the rest of their transformation, both from their application layer, their legacy systems, and their digital experience. So they brought me in to build a data architecture and a two- to three-year roadmap of how they could get to where they needed to in order to enable all these other experiences. And, you know, that was what it was about: they had 23 different data warehouses because of organic growth, and all of them had different technologies. They use different models. You know, all their source systems were various versions of crazy transforms that needed to be cleaned up so that they could get the raw data and do a lot more work.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:10:56) Their analytics engine was, you know, outdated by about 15 years. So it was really updating everything across data and prepping data for analytics, and then implementing some of the new analytic systems as well as the big stuff. Yeah. I mean, they had a bunch of ETL. We went to EL so that we got all the raw loads and then did the T after. So we moved from a heavy ETL practice to an EL plus T.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:22) Yeah. So what is this company in Australia, what's their name and what's their primary function? Like what are they known for to the world?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:11:29) It's Insurance Australia Group, IAG, and they're the largest, oldest insurer and number of brands across Australia and New Zealand. And then they also have insurance partners in India and Indonesia and Malaysia where they offer significant product underwriting there as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:48) Nice. They were probably insuring like the Mayflower, right? Some of those old shows.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:12:00) Probably not quite that old, but yeah. It's about a 160-year-old company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:06) Wow, that's impressive. I love when companies can adapt and survive and thrive and grow for that length of time. They're doing something right, you know?

(Eddie Satterly at 00:12:15) Oh yeah, absolutely. And I mean, their organic growth was kind of the key here, right? That's what kept them going. They bought other brands that were beneficial to their current brand, right? So they kept expanding their portfolio, getting into new spaces, getting into new markets. And then, like you said, they've done a lot of partnerships with, you know, like their India is with SBI, which is the State Bank of India. That's their insurance partner for India.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:12:37) Right? The biggest bank and most everyone in India has some tie to SBI, so that's where the insurance comes from there. And then they tied in with American General and Malaysia—AmGeneral, sorry, AmGeneral in Malaysia—and started that offering up there. So, you know, they've done a lot to expand and make new capabilities and get into new markets. And over the years they've made a lot of changes.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:13:01) This was just a big leap forward for them to catch up, you know, of a decade of lagging as all the new InsurTech stuff has come out. And, you know, they really spent the time doing it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:09) I like their mentality because what you can see from that, like as a step back, is you can see that the executives or the people that are running the company are keeping it interesting and exciting by moving around and doing these different things, right? They're keeping it fresh for them. They're not just waking up every day having the same business. They're always saying, "What's new? How can we advance over here? What can we—how can we, you know, not compete but totally dominate the market?" And I like those people because I'm one of those people. I like to look at things fresh and, you know, keep it interesting by expanding and growing.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:13:45) Oh yeah. I mean, if you're not learning, you're doing it wrong, right? Every single engagement I've done with a client over the years, or even the few times I've actually worked for companies over the years that didn't buy me, right, you know, it's been about learning, right? And I want to learn as much from them as they learn from me. When I got bought by—when my first company got bought, it turned into, you know, I was supposed to go and do some integration work, and I ended up being in the field a lot because we got done really quickly integrating the product. And I had two years to work there, so they put me in the field and taught me to be a consultant, right, and taught me how to interface with technology teams on the other end that were consuming the product.

(Eddie Satterly at 00:14:23) And then, you know, that turned into building a services company. And then from that I learned a lot of things not to do and, you know, helped build a couple other people's companies for a while and, you know, even built one and ran it out of business because we got too heavily embedded with a single client, right? So you learn from that. So everything is a learning experience. And if it's not, you're not doing a good job for yourself or anyone else.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:46) Yes. We think very similarly, Eddie. I really like you. It's rare. You know this. People don't say this all the time. This isn't the 80%. This isn't the common thing people say. People are always seeking comfort and to be still or go backwards. People aren't seeking growth actively.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:04) You have to work to find these people and then surround yourself with them.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:15:07) Well, that's the thing, right? I mean, every company that I've built or helped build or been a part of has always been looking for people, even if it's a small number of people at the company. You know, I went to work for Splunk right after they went public, and that's because of Eric Swan, right? I mean, he's the exact same kind of guy. He's always pushing the envelope. He's always learning. He's always pushing people around him to learn. So I went to work with Eric, right? That was the whole reason I went there, and I took a full-time job, which is something I rarely ever do. But it was because I had the chance to work with someone like him, right? So, you know, you take the opportunities that present themselves and then rule out 90% of them and find the 10% that might be a fit. So people wonder why I don't just take any client that wants to work with me, and that's because I don't want to work with them. If I don't think it's a growth experience, I'm uninterested.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:58) I was talking with a computer science student about that last week. They messaged me and said, "Hey, I need to know about how to get this job. I want to make this much money and do this in programming." And they're very focused on this number and role and position. And I said, "Well, you know, where do you want to end up?" And they told me where they wanted to end up. And I said, "Look, you being so hyper-focused on that number and that position and that being the end result is probably the quickest way to not go where you ultimately want to be. I would actually take the coffee-running job in the office of a CTO just so I could be around the CTO and monkey see, monkey do—watch what they do and then go to two or three and intern at two or three companies in the office of the CTO and constantly watch the CTO and ask them for information and build a relationship, rather than just trying to go get a certain dollar amount job in a role somewhere because I feel like I want to make that amount of money today. Because I'm continuously investing in myself, and you've got to get creative to do so and not care about the label of the fact that you would be an assistant or running coffee or helping out. Instead, focus on the value of the actual situation you're in."

(Eddie Satterley at 00:17:12) Oh, absolutely. I mean, I've had a number of people over the years that I've brought into the companies that I left behind when I left, right, where I built out teams. And, you know, a number of the people come in to interview the first time, they're like, "Well, I need to be a senior engineer, and I need to make this much money," and I never hire them. It doesn't matter how good they are. I won't hire them, right? But you have a guy who comes in and says, "Oh, hey, I'm really interested in working with you and learning what you're doing," or "I'm interested in this new technology you're working with or this new approach or whatever." Those are the guys you hire, right? I mean, the guy who wants to have a certain title or make a certain amount of money—yeah, that's great, but keep it to yourself. Nobody cares, right? That's your personal view of things. You should be engaging in why you are wanting to work at this particular company or this particular role, or why this technology matters to you. Or, you know, I had a guy that I hired at IAG down there that, you know, is there today, and he came in and said, "I know I'm not greatly qualified for a lot of the things in this job rec, but I've been learning a lot, right? I'm taking these online classes. Here's what I've done. Here's some samples of my work. This is what I'm working on becoming an expert at." And I hired the guy right there, right? I literally made him an offer that day, right? Because he's clearly investing in himself, investing in learning new things, wants to try new things, came prepared with, "Here's some samples of the code. I know it's not great, but I'm learning." I will hire that guy any day. He's the guy you want.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:48) Yeah, the person who's trying, because you can't pay people to try. They're either already trying in life or they're not.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:18:55) Yeah. And, you know, I honestly believe you have in technology 85 to 90% of the people who are just trying to get by, right? They don't ever want to do anything extra. They don't want to stretch. You know, they will if you make them, but it's not their goal. They don't, you know, they want to be at a certain level, and they want to do a certain thing and nothing else. And, yeah, those aren't the interesting people to me. It's the 5% of people that want to learn something new and want to do something different. Even if they fail, they want to try something different, learn it, and maybe six months in go, "Yeah, you know, I didn't really want to do that," which I've done, you know, 10 times in my career, where I want to try this new thing, and you go and try it. You go, "Yeah, that sucked. I don't want to do that anymore. Let's go do something else next."

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:39) Right. And the worst thing is when the other people in their life go, "Told you you shouldn't have done that." I'm like, be quiet. You encourage people to try. Go out there and try 10 things and see what works best and don't care what other people think, because, you know, at the end of the day, you have one person to answer to in life, and that's yourself. You're with yourself, and you have to own up to those mistakes. That's the one guarantee, Eddie, in life, is that you will always be with yourself.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:20:10) Well, if not, it's a very interesting life you lead.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:13) We might want to see a doctor.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:20:15) Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think they're medicated.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:18) Show. Yeah, there's a pill for that. Yeah. So at what point in your career were you like, "You know what? I'm going to stand on a stage and tell people about things." How did you get into speaking?

(Eddie Satterley at 00:20:29) Well, that was a really interesting thing because I didn't really mean to. I was working with HP, and I put together a bunch of technical presentation material for an executive who was going to be presenting at HP OpenView Forum years ago. And he missed his flight, and I was the only one there who knew the content because I put most of the content together. So I got put on stage at the OpenView Forum for a little sub-keynote with, you know, 10,000 people or so in the audience. And, you know, I was miserable going out there and doing it. I'd never done it before. I'd never presented to more than five or six people in a room, and I was literally presenting at a massive stadium. And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:07) Wow.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:21:07) You know, I was miserable. I got through it. People clapped, so it didn't totally suck. And then I literally walked off stage, went backstage, took my undershirt off, and wrung it out from the sweat because I was so nervous, right? And then after that, I just really got to where I enjoyed it. And every chance I got since then, I've—I've probably presented—well, if you Google me, you can probably find 30 or 40, but I've probably presented at several hundred events over the years. Anytime I get a chance to talk about something that I'm interested in, I'll go and do it. Matter of fact, I'm flying to Australia again to present at a conference down there in a couple weeks, spend a couple days down there and do a presentation, and turn around and fly back because it's an interesting audience and a great topic. And I've been invited to do one in China later this year. I'm probably going to fly over and do that too. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:58) You know what's interesting is while you were telling that story—because I didn't have that story on my notes. I didn't read about it or anything. But my producer, Jake, he's on the other side of the table here. His eyes got so big because my story that I've told on the podcast before, the way I got my first speaking gig, was in New York City. Missed flight. The guy—I was in the group, and the individual missed his flight, and they're like, "Hey, Joel, you know about user experience, user design," which is not my specialty. It's just something that I am a little geeky about. So, you know how it works, right? It doesn't have to be your specialty, the one thing everyone knows you for, for you to know a lot about it, right?

(Eddie Satterley at 00:22:36) Right. Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:36) Yeah. I mean, I'll get up. It wasn't 10,000 people. It was like 800 people. But for my first one, I was pretty excited about it.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:22:45) When you get thrown into the fire early, everything else gets easier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:48) Yeah. I had no time to think about it. Yeah. They're like, "You can just go up there and talk, make some bullet points, and talk about user experience, user design." And I was like, "All right." So I just went up there, and I sat there on my notepad. I said, "All right, three things. Here's what not to do." And then I go out onto the stage, right, to read my three things, and I had a real quick slide thing put together too, a real quick Keynote thing of just my name, the three bullet points, what not to do, right? And I go to use the clicker, and the clicker doesn't work, right? It's not synced. It's not working. And then the first thing out of my mouth was, "This is a technology conference. Does anyone know how to work this?" And everybody laughed. I didn't even mean for that to happen, and that just broke the ice. And then it was just—dude, it just flowed. It was so easy. Yeah. And it felt so good afterwards.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:23:42) Oh, yeah. Well, me too. Like you said, it was not intentional, but when it happened, it inspired me to do it any chance I get now. So, you know, someone wants me to come talk. I just went and did a tech talk for a financial company here in the Denver area last week where they just said, "Hey, we've got a tech talk slot. Do you want to come talk? It's just all of our architects in a room." Like, "Sure, I'll come talk." So any chance you get now, it's something I really enjoy, like this, for instance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:10) Yeah, yeah, exactly. You build up such a library, and it creates this confidence, and it's like, "Yeah, which talk do you want me to give? I got a bunch."

(Eddie Satterley at 00:24:20) Yeah, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:20) So was that a cool company that—it was a financial company you spoke to their architects? Were they, like, programmers or just the designers or just the architects of the system?

(Eddie Satterley at 00:24:30) Yeah. Several of them previously were in programming roles, right? But they moved into design architecture work on systems and application side and then the infrastructure guys. So, yeah, we just—they're starting a similar journey, right? They're modernizing. They're looking at new technologies, new data systems, new ways to approach problems, new ways to do the IaaS and PaaS solutions. So, you know, it was a good—kind of a little bit of the DevSecOps stuff and a little bit of data and a little bit of, you know, how do you take the right approach and design patterns for kind of modern systems and modern ways of doing things. So, yeah, it was good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:09) Did you ever get into any of the making of the physical chipsets or boards or anything like that?

(Eddie Satterley at 00:25:16) Not in a long time. I used to do a lot. Matter of fact, in the '90s, I spent a lot of time restoring the '80s arcade games on the side where I had spare time. So, you know, I used to program the ROMs and redo all the chips and change out and do all the cap kits and all that, just for fun, right? And I've still got five of the games that I fixed. I kept them. They're in my house. But, you know, the rest of them, I just fixed them up and traded them off or sold them off to people to get something I wanted. You know, my coveted thing was a Tron game, and I finally got three games that somebody really wanted that had a Tron, and he traded me for it. And then I fixed it up, and that's still sitting in my basement today. I play it every once in a while just because I can. But, you know, I got the Spy Hunter and the Tron and Rally-X and Gauntlet, because those are the games—the Rally-X one is the very first game I ever played in my life when I was a young kid. So I had to have that. And then the others were games that I loved over the years, and so I've just collected them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:15) Oh, that's fantastic. Growing up, my dad was an engineer, electronics engineer. So growing up, the smell of solder and burnt electronics were, like, that's my childhood smell. You know?

(Eddie Satterley at 00:26:28) Yeah. And that's how I got computers, is my dad, because he was an engineer for AT&T, so they always got to bring home computers because they didn't keep them very long, like two years, and they'd bring the new ones home. So, I mean, I got—my early computers were all compliments of my father's job at AT&T. And that's how I got into the Apple, because he had a Lisa, and they brought it home. So I still have the Lisa. It still boots up, believe it or not. But, yeah, that was my dad's work computer that he got to bring home, and that was, you know, my next computer. And then I went from one to the other, and yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:03) My dad did freelancing. So he would have different types of jobs. So some days, he'd be writing software. Some days, he'd be building chips and building all sorts of different embedded systems. And so he had different things that he did for several years, and he would take me to work with him at the different job sites, which, you know, I call them job sites, but they're different offices. You know?

(Eddie Satterley at 00:27:24) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:24) And he even did some radio designs, like some antenna designs and stuff like that. That was really cool. So I remember when he brought home—he was so excited, biggest smile on his face. I don't know, I'm probably like seven or eight years old. He's like, "Look, it's a portable computer." And this thing's like three and a half feet wide by a foot thick. And you had this case on it, and you open the case and it had this five and a half inch green screen on it. And he was like, "It's a portable computer." I'm like—it was so funny to think about that. He was excited that that was the portable computer.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:28:00) Yeah. My dad had those originally too, with the fold-down keyboards in the front that was part of the case. Yep. Yeah. He went through those, and we had one of the early Tandem machines and, you know, a whole lot of various machines over the years. But, you know, the Apple one is the one that always stuck with me, so I still use a Mac today. And I've been that oddball that used a Mac all along.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:22) Yeah. I didn't get introduced to Mac until about the age of 18. I'm in my early 30s now. So I was well into programming for, you know, at least a decade by the time I got introduced to a Mac. And I was flying with a friend to San Francisco, buddy Caleb, and my luggage got lost, which had my laptop in it. And I was working, doing some freelance code writing. So I needed to grab a computer. So I used his computer, and it was very exciting. Oh, yeah. There was just something about it. I'd never even touched a Mac. I didn't have a preference. I didn't care. I just had never had a need to experience one. And when that situation arose, I came back from that trip, purchased my first MacBook, and then I've never touched another computer since.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:29:10) Yeah. I've had a few PCs over the years, but always for my LAN gaming, never for anything else. My work computer has always been a Mac since I started. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:20) Oh, nice. What are you playing?

(Eddie Satterley at 00:29:22) Not nothing anymore, but I got young kids now, so I don't get any time to do anything. But, you know, my gaming time is over now. I get to play Civ every once in a while when I'm flying. I keep it on my Mac so I can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:36) So you're playing Civ? What else were you excited about back when you were gaming?

(Eddie Satterley at 00:29:41) Oh, back in the day with the LAN. Like, we literally started off with Warcraft and Diablo and StarCraft. Yeah. Total Annihilation was my favorite when we used to play. The Cave Dog game that kind of came and went really quickly. But that game was just tons of fun to play on the LAN, and we'd get four of us playing and just, you know, you'd lose a weekend really quickly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:04) Oh, yeah. Before Xbox Live, I was doing—there's a thing called Xbox Connect where you could LAN over the internet, and that was amazing because Xbox Live and that sort of console gaming live was just not a thing. But Xbox Connect allowed you to LAN, but like, over the internet, and we loved it.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:30:22) That was one of my most fun projects ever. Xbox Live was my baby. So I actually did all the security architecture and all the connectivity for Xbox Live when it was built with Microsoft. So I was up there on that consulting gig for getting everything live so that we hit our August date and then the Halloween date for initial stuff. So I still have my Live account, and I still use it every once in a while.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:45) Oh, that's awesome. You were on that project? That's so cool.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:30:50) Yeah, I worked for Eric Neustetter, who is probably the most famous person, fan of Xbox Live. But yeah, I worked for him and came up and did the design architecture work and then implemented all the security controls around the original go live. Of course, none of that exists anymore. They've changed that network up several times since then. But yeah, the original go live for that—that was our baby. I was there from May till November.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:12) Oh, man. That's so cool. I'm talking to someone who's famous. Like, everything else you do, nah nah nah nah nah. Not the drones, not the cool projects. Like, you got the Xbox Live security on the original go live. Like, alright. Now Eddie's, like, high five status.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:31:28) Yeah. It's interesting because that's all my nephew ever told anybody is that I worked on Xbox Live. He didn't care about anything else I've ever done in my life. He wanted to tell all his friends that I worked on Xbox Live.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:40) It's so cool, though. It's just weird that we're just—that's just a human thing, Eddie. Like, you know, IAG, multibillion dollar insurance company doing the crazy things over there, you know, with their data center transformations. But like, Xbox Live. Come on.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:31:54) I love it. Still, the only thing my nephew tells his friends, and he's in his mid-twenties now. Anytime he introduces me, he's like, "My uncle, he's the guy who built the Xbox Live." I'm like, well, that's not entirely true, but I had a part in it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:08) It's like the telephone game. Yeah. Oh, it's so good. So what are you really excited about that you're working on now? If you can talk about it.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:32:18) Yeah, sure. I mean, so we started the DataNexus company that I have now. We started it really to build an open source-based data routing platform, and, you know, we kind of perfected that with IAG and got the version one of the product out. And we've been working with a number of companies to adopt on the open source side. But more recently, we've been working on a research project with a couple of large corporates around doing a data trust, data identity platform, you know, leveraging the Hyperledger project to track the interactions between individuals and businesses and between businesses to exchange data, which, obviously, with Mark Zuckerberg's time this week is probably super important even more than it was before. But, you know, there's a lot of really merit in kind of the research we've been doing and the prototypes we've been building and, you know, hoping to engage with a couple of entities in the next, ideally, few months to kind of prove out the prototype in a larger scale environment and make sure we can make it work. But it gives people the opportunity to have a little more control and an idea of the security and be able to grant and revoke and share their data between multiple business entities. And, you know, it even helps with a lot of the stuff coming up with GDPR and the stuff that's coming in May and a lot of the other national things. Australia put some new requirements in in February this year, and they've got some more coming in next year around this that I think it's really a super interesting space for me. Obviously, not sure it's gonna work. It's a big, hairy, audacious goal to kind of get this out there and get it going and, you know, partnering with another company that's looking at the human identity side of it. You know? And it's just—I think it's a very interesting space and an actual viable use of ledger and blockchain that's not cryptocurrency related, that gives you an opportunity to go out and use the technology and what's been built to give people some more safety and security as well as to make sure that companies have a data trust between them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:17) Yeah. Well, it's big. It's a huge project, and that's what makes it worth doing. Like, that's why you spring out of bed in the morning.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:34:23) Yeah. I love it. Yeah. That's what gets me excited, right, is taking new angles on a technology and trying to do something a little different with it. And, obviously, I've been involved in open source for ages. So, you know, the fact that we can leverage some open technologies and make all this possible and, you know, if we can prove it out with a small set of entities, then it's something that, you know, we can both open source a core part of it and, you know, also build a business around it to get people enabled in the capability. So, you know, neither one of those is a bad thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:55) Right. And my brother and my stepmom are both doctors, and we were actually talking about the personalization of data and being able to, you know, give and retract personalized data to and from the different physicians as you meet them. I don't know, like, if that would even come close to anything that you're imagining with it, but it's a conversation that's come up a couple times.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:35:17) Yeah. It's interesting. The platform we're building—I just had a conversation with a health care company earlier this week. I had lunch with an executive from a health care company, and we were talking about exactly that. So if you build this, can you take that and, you know, tie it into EHR stuff? And even he was talking about an ambulance, you know, picked up a friend of his, and they didn't have his details. And because of it, he almost died because they couldn't give him blood because they didn't know his blood type until they got it typed. And they didn't know any of his medical information. And, you know, they were afraid to give him anything that he might be allergic to. So, I mean, he literally almost died by the time they got his blood typing back and figured it out, you know, and hey, if we made this available where a trusted entity could use your data to save you, wouldn't that be interesting? And, like, that would be great. Not what we started building it for, but that's another use case of the exact same technology that we're already down the path of, you know, building a prototype on. So it would be great to tie it into, you know, EHR, eventually, electronic health records and, you know, be able to make an individual able to give it to a trusted entity. So, you know, I'm a paramedic in an ambulance. I'm trusted once you're in my ambulance. So you should be able to share your data with me on everything health care related. And if you had control of it and had it in a—you know, connect it to your smartwatch or whatever else—someone could, you know, connect to it and get it if they're authorized to do so. That would be a pretty compelling, you know, save the world kind of use case.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:40) Right. And you can give the user the checkbox. Like, do you want to share this data with them? And if so, how much? And you can select, you know, in an emergency situation, share this data. How much? You don't have to give them everything like your dental records from eight years old. You know?

(Eddie Satterley at 00:36:55) Yeah. Absolutely. But, you know, if you've got a health watch, right, that's monitoring your health, and you're in an ambulance with someone and it sees your heart rate is erratic or, you know, because you're in trauma or because your heart rate's slowing down, like, any of those things could be a trigger to say, let anyone with a scanning device pull the minimum set of data they need, like my allergies, my blood type, you know, any other conditions I have. Let them pull that just during this period of time, and, you know, that would be super compelling. Right? And it would be an easy integration to the technology we're starting to prototype to do this, you know, expansion of the capability.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:31) I like what you're experiencing right now because this is something I always work on—to keep the main thing the main thing. Right? So as you go around and you tell your idea to everybody, the way that they understand it to themselves is by seeing how they could apply it to whatever they know about. So, like, you go and tell this guy you're talking about what you're doing and they instantly apply it to the medical field or something that they're aware of and know about. And then you have to keep the main thing the main thing and be like, yes, applicable use. Now back to the main thing.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:38:00) Yeah. Yeah. Like, I've—yeah. And like we said, you know, how we started this earlier. Right? It's about learning. So you talk to somebody about what you're doing and all of a sudden they say, "Hey. This is a whole different use case for what you talked about." Well, that's great, and I'm glad I've learned that new use case. And I'll definitely put it in my next slide deck. But, you know, it's building the core underlying piece to make all this possible because that's the, you know, the hard part—is getting the original prototype out and getting a set of use cases you can deliver. And then piling 20 more use cases on it, well, that's just, you know, icing on the cake or free money or whatever you want to call it. Right? I mean, it's another way to monetize and grow and make the capability more ubiquitous. But yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:42) Oh, we have so much—Eddie, I like talking to you, man, because, like, we have such similar—we've never met. Right? And we've both lived like totally far away from each other, but yet we have so much in common from these core principles of building these systems for—both for me my whole life or you your whole life too. Right?

(Eddie Satterley at 00:39:02) Yeah. Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:03) Oh, thank you so much for everything, the conversation, your time today. Look, our dads were both in technology. Come on. We both got our first speaking opportunity because of a canceled flight. Mine was for snow. I don't know what yours was for.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:39:15) Mine was snow too. That's coming from Vancouver, so snow related.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:19) Yeah. Oh, yeah. Mine was—we were in New York City and they were coming from California and they got snowed out. So, oh, dude, this is—we couldn't script this.

(Eddie Satterley at 00:39:27) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:34) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.