Kit Colbert CTO at VMware

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, we are talking to Kit Colbert, the CTO of VMware's Cloud Platform, and we discuss the difference between invention and innovation, changing your mindset when you transition from engineer to leader, and when it's okay to take on technical debt. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast. So where are you calling in from?

(Kit Colbert at 00:00:36) From Palo Alto.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Oh, very cool.

(Kit Colbert at 00:00:38) So VMware headquarters here in Palo Alto.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) Have you been there a while?

(Kit Colbert at 00:00:42) Been at VMware for about fifteen years. Yeah. It's a long time, especially in Silicon Valley.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:47) Yeah. They tend to retain their people because I've seen in your history that you've kind of climbed up the ranks there.

(Kit Colbert at 00:00:55) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:55) Yeah. How'd you start?

(Kit Colbert at 00:00:57) Well, I started off as an intern, actually, when I was in college. That was back in the summer of 2002, and then came back full time September 2003. So, you know, three or more months, it'll be my fifteen year anniversary here. And, yeah, I've just done a bunch of different stuff across different parts of the company. So it's been a pretty fun ride.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:20) How did they raise you up and move you around there? Like, do they have some sort of system, or is it just they post jobs internally, you get to apply, move around? Like, how do they retain and pull up their people?

(Kit Colbert at 00:01:30) I mean, a bit of both. Like, my, for me personally, it's been just a lot of identifying opportunities that looked interesting and kind of jumping over. So I've helped to create—I mean, except for my first or maybe, yeah. Well, yeah. Pretty much all the roles I've had have been kind of created by me, just because, like, these are things we need to go do, and so kind of starting off efforts. So, like, doing some performance management software back in 2007, I think, or '08. And then driving a lot of our end user computing things and pushing the mobility, and then doing a bunch of cloud native stuff. So, yeah. So it's been kind of all over the place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:15) So you just get buy-in from people to do a specific project, and then you make that your role?

(Kit Colbert at 00:02:20) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:21) That's awesome. You're smart. That's smart. That's what people do. You identify something you'd like to do. You find the people that could make it happen. You get in a room with them, and you pitch your value, and they say, yeah, let's do it.

(Kit Colbert at 00:02:34) Yeah. Yeah. It's not—I mean, yeah. That's a good summary, although the reality is never quite that clean.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:41) We're preaching principles and, like, concepts.

(Kit Colbert at 00:02:44) Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:46) You get to struggle through the reality.

(Kit Colbert at 00:02:48) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:48) What were some of the struggles, like, that came up when doing that, like, that come to mind?

(Kit Colbert at 00:02:54) Um, so I think, and by the way, are we starting or how's this work?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:57) This is the podcast. Okay. We edit it. So, like—

(Kit Colbert at 00:03:02) Oh, you can keep going. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:03) We just kind of hang out and just talk about stuff and—

(Kit Colbert at 00:03:07) Yeah. Sure. Okay. Sure. So I wasn't sure if we were, like, bantering before the thing, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:13) I get that. I kind of like it. We've had so many—everyone's, I'd say one out of ten guests says you should really tell people before you start. And I'm like, I like watching them figure it out. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:31) Well, I've been on other podcasts and what they'll do is they'll banter with me, and then we'll have a call. And then, like, I'm twelve minutes into the banter, and they're like, alright, we're gonna get ready to start. I'm like, this was the best part. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:44) And then they do, alright, today we've got on the show, so and so and so and so. And, like, they build this big thing up, and then they're like, how do you do everything? And I'm like—

(Kit Colbert at 00:03:53) I don't know. Yeah. Well, to get back to your question. Yeah. So it's been an interesting learning experience for me, I think. So there's one technology that I'll give an example on. So there's this technology called Storage vMotion that VMware released probably back in 2009, 2010. It's been a little while, but maybe 2009. I don't know. It's all a blur.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:18) Well, we'll have the research team handle it.

(Kit Colbert at 00:04:20) Yeah. Someone will Google it or something. Anyways, point being that at the time, I worked on a technology called vMotion, which is a really core technology for VMware, and I was the tech lead for it. And what vMotion does is allows you to move a virtual machine between two physical hosts without any downtime or disruption. So it's really, really powerful because basically it disconnected a workload from the underlying physical host and allows you to move that workload away so you could do maintenance on the host or whatever. Right? So really powerful technology. But one of the problems was that even though you can change the computer, the server that the VM was running on, the VM was still tied to its storage. Right? It assumed kind of this common back-end storage between the two hosts.

(Kit Colbert at 00:05:04) And so if you wanted to change the storage that VM was running on, you had to power off the VM. And so that was obviously a pain for customers. And so, you know, we kind of came up with this idea of, hey, could we actually move the storage the VM's running on without needing the VM to take any downtime, disruption, or any of that sort of thing? So that's what the concept of Storage Motion. And interestingly, I noticed at the time that it was actually not that hard to do from a technical perspective. I could write most of the code and get some other people to chip in here and there. And then we just needed some folks to test it. So from a technical perspective, getting this new feature out was not that challenging. What ended up happening though was that in order to do all the testing we needed, we needed some dedicated resources. And, you know, anyone who's worked in software anywhere knows, like, it's challenging to get these resources. Right? So you had to convince someone to essentially give up on something else or stop doing something else to fund whatever your project is. And so as I was going about trying to get this done, it took me longer, I think, to get—it took me longer to get the funding for these resources than it did to actually write all the code for the project. And what I realized was that, you know, there is this element around, you know, how you kind of sell your vision, how you get buy-in from someone. It's, you know, selling an idea to someone internally to get funding for a project. It's not fundamentally different from, you know, selling the product itself to a customer. Right? You gotta get buy-in. You gotta get people on board. And then that process itself is as important or in some ways more important than the actual product. Right? Because it's like, if you're not able to get that buy-in, if you're not able to see your vision, then you're not gonna be successful because you can't get funding or you can't get it realized. I think that the lesson I took away from that is this kind of important distinction between invention and innovation. Like, we tend to think that invention and innovation are the same thing, that we use the terms interchangeably.

(Kit Colbert at 00:06:57) But what I realized is that invention is really all about creation. It's about something new or maybe a new use for an existing thing. Whereas innovation was really about impact. And so, like, I had invented this technology. Right? And the coding wasn't all that challenging. But in order to really innovate, I had to get it out to customers. And how can I do that? Well, I need to be able to test it. I need to be able to document it. I need to be able to support it. I need the sales guys to go sell it, marketers to market it, and all this sort of stuff. So this whole sort of sequence of events that—and that was kind of what the hard part was, is getting funding for all those things. Right? I had to go convince someone to do that. And so there's, like, the invention, which is the creation of this thing, but the innovation was actually getting the VMware pipelines spun up to support that invention going out. And eventually, I was able to, and we got it out to customers, you know, hundreds or thousands of people now. Tens of thousands of people are using it today. Oh, yeah. I know. So it's pretty cool. But I think that lesson for me was, like, really, really important. It's like, look, the technology's just at its core, only part of it. Right? There's this whole other aspect that gets you to innovation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:03) So when you saw this, obviously, something came up at some point in time. You're moving the VM between hosts, and that was fine. But then you needed to power it off for storage. So that was kind of like the hook. And then I'm assuming enough people mentioned they needed this so that you could stand behind it and believe it. You weren't just like, you know, it would be cool. You weren't, like, sitting around Friday night, like, you know, it would be cool if it would do this. And then you didn't talk to anybody and you tried to do it. Like, you went out and people validated it before you even tried to sell it.

(Kit Colbert at 00:08:31) We did do some validation. Now, again, this is, you know, it's much younger, much more inexperienced. I was an engineer. I wasn't like a product guy. So I didn't really understand, you know, all the sort of steps you need to take to really validate a product idea and to get that sort of feedback. But, you know, once we had the idea, you know, I did want to, obviously, get feedback from customers. And so we have this conference called VMworld, which takes place in August, September most years. And so this is back in, again, 2007-ish time frame. So I remember, maybe in 2006 at this point, but I remember talking with many customers and, you know, getting overwhelmingly positive feedback. And so in my mind, it was like clear. Okay. Let's go do this. But, yeah, but, you know, having that data itself was useful, but then it's like the challenge is you gotta displace something else. And so how do you argue that this one new thing, which is still somewhat embryonic in the sense that we didn't have, you know, let's say, for instance, potential revenue numbers. So how would it help, you know, the company from a revenue standpoint? I don't know. Seems like a useful thing to do. I don't know how it's gonna help from a monetary—

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:40) That's a good question. Right?

(Kit Colbert at 00:09:41) Yeah. So it's like that sort of thing. So what actually what happened is I found a product management person who, you know, got it, totally believed in it, saw the value of it, kind of just the intrinsic value of the idea. And, again, you know, he had heard from customers as well, but he just saw kind of the bigger picture on it. So it was him that really helped to formalize some of that stuff and bring the case up to a VP at the time, who then was able to say, okay. We'll put this thing into a release. We'll deprioritize these other things to fund that. Right? So, yeah. So it took, you know, a couple steps to get there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:15) Did you come up with the name?

(Kit Colbert at 00:10:20) No. No. I'm not a name guy. I'm an engineer by trade. So that was a—we have a whole naming committee that focuses on this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:28) A committee?

(Kit Colbert at 00:10:29) Yeah. I know. It sounds very formal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:32) It does.

(Kit Colbert at 00:10:33) But they're very nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:34) Okay. So they're great people.

(Kit Colbert at 00:10:36) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:36) Yeah. We won't let the label hold back that they're just like, we'll call them a collection of awesome people.

(Kit Colbert at 00:10:41) Yeah. Yeah. If you want to know, so the name we can—so, you know, we had vMotion, which moves, you know, VMs compute. And so the original internal name was something around, like, disk motion, like you're moving the disks. Of the things, we called it dMotion. So we have dMotion and vMotion, but, obviously, dMotion has kind of a negative—

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:01) Yeah. You wanna sell demotion?

(Kit Colbert at 00:11:03) Yeah. Yeah. So guess why they don't let engineers name things because it's not a good situation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:09) They just have a bunch of scientific names. Hey, real quick. Could you—I love having Slack as a special guest.

(Kit Colbert at 00:11:16) Yeah. I know. We'll check it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:18) We'll just—can you snooze—is there, by the way, does Slack have a global snooze?

(Kit Colbert at 00:11:23) I don't know. Actually, you know what? Oh, yeah. I quit—I turned off Outlook too. So that's the other one. Outlook also, like, bongs and makes all sorts of noise. I think most of my other apps are dead. Anyway, well, I killed all my apps. Oh, that's cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:36) Well, this is a good topic of conversation. How do you feel about the rise of notifications?

(Kit Colbert at 00:11:44) I don't know. You know, I do have this more general thing of, like—because, like, yeah. I don't love all the notifications. It becomes—it makes it too interrupt-driven. You know what I mean?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:55) Yes.

(Kit Colbert at 00:11:55) One of the important things that I really try to do—so I do just a bunch of stuff day-to-day as in my role as a CTO. I kind of touch a lot of engineering, a lot of strategy, a lot of product management, some marketing stuff, some outbound customer stuff. So I'm kind of all over the place. But I think one of the biggest values of my role for the company is really around looking at, you know, what's coming down the pike in terms of industry trends, how's VMware positioned for those, what are we doing to capitalize on that to help our customers, and is there something that we're missing. Right? So a lot of what I try to do is just I actually get time away from the computer just to be, you know, just to think. And maybe still have the computer, like, researching, like, Googling stuff, but I don't want to be, you know, someone on Slack hitting me or emails hitting me. I want to turn—so I try—I actually turn that stuff off just because just having some quiet time is amazing. Just, like, let the mind percolate. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:49) We're like the frogs in the boiling water with notifications. We're all like, oh, that's cool. But then, like, over the past three years, now we're just, like, dead. Because we're in a state where we don't do what we want to do. We're constantly responding to notifications. So when I started the podcast, like last year, I had to learn how to use do not disturb so my phone doesn't go off during the calls. Yeah. And in the act of having to learn that, sometime, like, I accidentally left it on do not disturb. And I was like, this has been such a great day. Like, what is about that? Like, I haven't been—I've gotten, like, six things done. Like, this is—I've made more progress than ever. And then I look at my phone, it's like 30 missed calls. I'm like, oh, man. That's why. And but you know what? It sticks. I almost exclusively have my phone on do not disturb. And when I'm ready to handle with what the world's giving me, I go back and check it and respond. That way, I live life on my time.

(Kit Colbert at 00:13:47) That's a great idea. Maybe I should try that. I should practice that. Just turning things off. Because you're right. It's actually kind of stressful getting all those notifications. I was talking about that yesterday because I got an Apple Watch and so, you know, it, like, vibrates. And now it's trained me to, like, look at it, you know, whenever I feel the vibration.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:01) Yeah. So it's kind—

(Kit Colbert at 00:14:02) Of that's kind of an anti-pattern. It's what I'm thinking. In some limited cases, it's cool, but otherwise, it's just kind of annoying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:09) Yeah. You should get the Pavlov-like shock bracelet. Have you seen that? Exactly. And then you should API them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:14) So you get the buzz over here, and then it shocks you over here. So you start to hate notifications.

(Kit Colbert at 00:14:21) Serious psychosis that would happen pretty quickly, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:24) Then you could give a talk called "Hating Apple Watch."

(Kit Colbert at 00:14:29) I did this myself, but yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:33) Like, it's just not the same.

(Kit Colbert at 00:14:36) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:37) So how many direct reports do you have? Like, how many people do you directly engage with?

(Kit Colbert at 00:14:42) Number of direct reports is pretty small. Just a small handful. But the way we're structured, so we kind of have the small CTO office that is directly under me. But then within our business unit, which I'm the CTO of, we have about, you know, 1,300 people, 1,400 people. And so there are, I don't know, like 10 or so, what we call our principal engineers, kind of the most senior level folks.

(Kit Colbert at 00:15:07) So I engage with them quite a bit, as well as the next level down are senior staff engineers. So there's, you know, a good number of people on the engineering side I work very closely with. But as I said, you know, a lot of our product managers, I work closely with some folks in marketing. So touching, you know, a lot of different people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:24) Do you have any—have you read this book?

(Kit Colbert at 00:15:27) The Pragmatic Programmer. I don't think so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:30) Oh, man. It is good. Is it good? Oh, yeah. Dave Thomas, Andrew Hunt.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:33) It is phenomenal.

(Kit Colbert at 00:15:38) That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:38) Yeah. I've been a big fan of it for a long time.

(Kit Colbert at 00:15:41) The subtitle kind of says "From Journeyman to Master." Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:47) Yeah. "From Journeyman to Master." And it's just, you know how some books are bloated, and it's just like you could read the summary paragraph...

(Kit Colbert at 00:15:55) And get the whole chapter.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:56) No. This is gold page by page.

(Kit Colbert at 00:15:59) Oh, that's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:00) Yeah. So it's rare when I found these types of books that got recommended through friends, but I prefer the books that are more condensed. I don't want fluff. I just, like, give me something good.

(Kit Colbert at 00:16:09) Yeah. I do. It's a—yeah. I do notice some of these books, they just tend to repeat themselves a lot.

(Kit Colbert at 00:16:14) You know, like, dude, you already made that point. Like, cut a whole hundred pages, and let's get done with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:20) Yeah. It's funny. So I have my book out, and it was the first book I've ever written. And so I—thank you. It did very well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:26) So I put it out there, and I tested it through putting some of the content as blog posts and then running ads against it to see what people would say in response to it. And then I improved it and edited it and then put it into a book and then moved it on. But it's interesting because the most successful people that engage with the book that reach out, they are like, I love it. Thank you so much. You condensed the information.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:50) And then they end up coming on the show and talking about it. And they really enjoyed how they could sit down and read it in two or three hours and really have some solid takeaways. We share experiences so on and so forth. But then the people who just constantly are consuming information in bulk—and maybe that's not even the right way to describe them. But then there's another set of people who are like, you didn't go deep into anything and you need more details.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:18) I need very specific steps to take. And so I'm learning that there are two very different worlds.

(Kit Colbert at 00:17:25) Yeah. Well, in some ways, you can have two different books for that as well. So, I mean, I agree. I think it's nice to have kind of the higher level overview that's concise, goes through it, doesn't have—it has enough detail, but, you know, it doesn't get lost in the detail versus other books where it's all about just going really deep on some specific topic and getting, you know, into the weeds.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:45) This book?

(Kit Colbert at 00:17:47) I've heard of it. Yeah. I've heard of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:49) Amazing. She's friends with Sheryl Sandberg.

(Kit Colbert at 00:17:51) Oh, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:52) And she ran teams of, like, thousand-plus people at Google. She did AdSense. She ran AdSense teams.

(Kit Colbert at 00:17:57) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:57) Yeah. And she's been bouncing around large internet companies for—

(Kit Colbert at 00:18:01) I think Silicon Valley had a spoof on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:04) Did they?

(Kit Colbert at 00:18:05) This season. Yeah. One guy they're trying to hire, I think, as COO or something. He was talking about radical candor, RadCan.

(Kit Colbert at 00:18:17) I don't know if you watch Silicon Valley, but that show is brilliant.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:20) You know, it's next up after Westworld.

(Kit Colbert at 00:18:24) Oh, dude. Yeah. Yeah. Westworld's amazing too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:27) Yeah. I'm—

(Kit Colbert at 00:18:28) I'm watching at the same time. Right? Because they both come on Sunday nights, you know. So it's a lot of TV to put down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:34) See, I don't watch a lot of TV. I think I watch, like, between—like an hour a month.

(Kit Colbert at 00:18:42) Hour a month?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:43) Wow. I want—I want more of—like, pretty much in this year, I have seen, like, four episodes of Westworld, and my wife dragged me to one movie. And it's, like, May. Yeah.

(Kit Colbert at 00:18:57) Also, I fly a lot, so that's what I put down. I just queue it up and then just put it down on the plane.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:02) There you go. That's—yeah. That's the way to do it. I haven't been flying a lot this year.

(Kit Colbert at 00:19:07) Yeah. Yeah. It's just, like, internet's kind of spotty, especially, like, over the Atlantic or Pacific.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:12) Always spotty.

(Kit Colbert at 00:19:14) Just, like, dialing down and—yeah. I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:16) You can't rely on Gogo. What is it? Gogo. Gogo. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:19) That's pretty unreliable.

(Kit Colbert at 00:19:21) Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It goes back and forth, but I don't know. It's a nice way to pass the time on the plane.

(Kit Colbert at 00:19:29) It is. And it has good content. So I don't know. I enjoy it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:32) I do. Well, it's relevant. I like Silicon Valley because they made a show that, like, we get their jokes. Yep. It's good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:40) So how do you—do you recommend books? Since—oh, but the reason why I held this up, I'm not just—it's not just show and tell day. It's because the point you were making is, after I read this book after I wrote my book. And she did what you were saying in the sense that basically the front half of it is, like, how I wrote my book, the style. And then the second half of it is actually, like, bullet point tactics. So you wouldn't sit down and breezily read.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:07) It's like reference, you know.

(Kit Colbert at 00:20:09) That makes sense. And I guess I get what you're saying there. Yeah. And I do think people do, you know, I've seen this just even within VMware, there's different folks and how they think differently. Right?

(Kit Colbert at 00:20:19) Some people I can talk to in these kind of bigger abstract ideas, they kind of get it. Right? So they can kind of, in their head, you know, draw that down to some specifics. Even if they don't have all the specifics right in front of them, they could go think through it and figure it out. Other people like to have it just much more cut and dry, like, boom, boom, boom.

(Kit Colbert at 00:20:36) Here's what we're going to go do. Not some sort of high-minded and wavy stuff. Right? And just, I think, different thinking styles.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:42) How has your thinking style changed from engineer to leader?

(Kit Colbert at 00:20:45) Yeah. I mean, I think a few different things have changed. So one of the challenges I think I definitely have is maximizing or really utilizing delegation. Right? I just kind of like to get stuff done.

(Kit Colbert at 00:20:59) So I just jump on something and just start doing it. And it's like one of those things where sometimes it just—my natural occurrence, if I see a problem, I was like, let's go—I'll go fix it. Let's go fix it. Right?

(Kit Colbert at 00:21:12) And then it's, like, hard to—like, well, instead of me fixing it directly, how about I get someone else to fix it for X, Y, Z reasons? Maybe because, you know, we want them to grow in that area or because I got other stuff to do that's more important or, you know, whatever reason. Right? It doesn't always occur to me.

(Kit Colbert at 00:21:27) Usually, it's just like, heads down. Let's get it done. And so I think, you know, as I've grown, especially outside of an individual contributor role, it is looking at bigger picture and thinking about the people and then kind of looking at those people in terms of, you know, their strengths and weaknesses and how they can play in each of these different areas. That's definitely a big thing for me that I'm still working on. I won't say that I'm great at it, but I think I'm—

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:49) We'll say you're perfect for the record.

(Kit Colbert at 00:21:52) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:54) So do you—you mentioned, you know, noticing people and their strengths and weaknesses. Yeah. How do you get feedback? Is it through one-on-ones or do you recommend content and you see what they think about it? Like, how do you sort of keep in touch with this person's growing in this area?

(Kit Colbert at 00:22:10) Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of one-on-ones. It's talking with other people that work with them. It's, you know, all the basic sort of data gathering type stuff.

(Kit Colbert at 00:22:20) You know, I try to—the other thing I try to do is just be really open and, I'm pretty generally speaking, even keel. I'm not someone that rips into people or overreacts to things. And so I think that I try to create that sort of space for people to bring up things even if they're, you know, not easy. Kind of, I guess, it kind of toward that radical candor type of—

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:42) That's exactly—we call it—it's called RadCan. Okay?

(Kit Colbert at 00:22:46) That's RadCan. All the cool people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:47) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Kit Colbert at 00:22:49) Too many syllables, otherwise, you got to cut those things out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:53) Does that sound like Elon Musk with the acronyms? No acronyms. Yeah. What are you really excited about right now that you're working on? Like, what's getting you out of bed in the morning?

(Kit Colbert at 00:23:03) Yeah. Ton of stuff. There's a lot of really good stuff. So if you look at my trajectory within the company, I started off in our sort of core area of ESX working on low level system stuff there. Expanded up into vMotion and Storage vMotion.

(Kit Colbert at 00:23:20) Went out to performance management. Kind of went higher up the stack, basically, is what I'm saying. Ended up with, you know, just—most basically doing some cloud native application container type focus areas. And now what I've done is actually gone back down to our core. So, you know, I'm the CTO for our cloud platform business unit, which is really the core of the company, core compute virtualization and so forth.

(Kit Colbert at 00:23:42) And so, you know, if you look at the history of VMware, we've done a lot of innovation down there. And so now I'm really looking at, you know, how do we take it to the next level. Right? We went out. We conquered virtualization.

(Kit Colbert at 00:23:53) We went and did that. So what's the next big thing? So—not I can't share anything publicly yet, but we've got a lot of really exciting things we're working on, you know, new sort of strategic directions that we're pursuing, a lot of fundamental rethinking of our products from an architectural standpoint. You know, we've got, again, a lot of these products that have been around now fifteen-plus years. So, obviously, we have a lot of, you know, sort of baggage from that.

(Kit Colbert at 00:24:15) So from a technical perspective, there's a lot of work to do to modernize that, to really get it where we want it to be for this next generation. And so it definitely feels to me like a bit of a renaissance here in the sense that we're really looking at kind of the second lap of the journey and some really, really exciting things. And I think the other thing I'll say is that I've also been really impressed with just the caliber of people that we have here. So we've brought in both hired from internally and brought in externally some really, really strong folks. And so, you know, just yesterday, actually, we presented to some of the executives on what the strategy is and where we're going and got really good feedback.

(Kit Colbert at 00:24:52) But, you know, we've kind of been working, you know, really consistently over the past few weeks on that to kind of finalize it. So—so yeah. So that's been really exciting and, kind of got high level alignment. And so now it's really getting into execution mode. So yeah.

(Kit Colbert at 00:25:06) A lot of really cool things are happening right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:09) Yeah. I was just out there a couple weeks ago for RSA.

(Kit Colbert at 00:25:12) Okay. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:13) And I noticed that there's a lot of these companies, I think one was called Bromium or something. There were two or three different companies, and they're using VM for security and containing individual browsers. What do you think? I don't—first of all, I don't know a whole lot about that. But what do you—I thought it was really interesting how they were saying they have these things called micro VMs and then they wrap the browser on a micro VM.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:34) And I was like, uh, how do you share data? It was interesting. But what do you think of VM as a whole for security?

(Kit Colbert at 00:25:41) Oh, yeah. Well, so—so first of all, yeah, I'm very familiar with a lot of companies such as Bromium. Bromium, one of the cofounders of that company was Simon Crosby, who was one of the creators of Xen, XenSource back in the day, which was another virtualization platform. So—so yeah. You know, it's kind of funny because virtualization, I think in the general industry mindset, it kind of has this bad rap as kind of old or kind of bloated technology.

(Kit Colbert at 00:26:09) Right? That, you know, especially compared to containers, which are kind of small and fast and lightweight. The reality is, you know, very far from that. You know, all virtualization is now done on the hardware. It's extremely efficient, extremely lightweight.

(Kit Colbert at 00:26:21) I think where a lot of the confusion stems is really the how VMs are managed today is in a very traditional sort of physical management sort of sense, whereas something like containers brings a lot more software automated type approaches. So, you know, as I was saying before, kind of hinting at before, we're really looking to fundamentally rethink a lot of that experience. And so part of it is taking on some of these micro VM type concepts that are out there. In fact, we've had, you know, stuff like that for a few years now in a few different cases. But in terms of security, that's another huge area of interest for us.

(Kit Colbert at 00:26:58) So we just put out—a product or some—in the last year or two, we put out a product called AppDefense, which is very focused on security, leveraging virtualization to do that, and getting, you know, those deeper insights. So, look, I think, you know, virtualization as a runtime technology, super, super interesting, and it provides a really strong, secure foundation. But by itself is not enough. And so what we're doing is, you know, deeply integrating with one of the container runtimes and doing really innovative things about how containers—you know, you can manage the container, but the runtime is still a super lightweight VM under the covers. We do that all very transparently.

(Kit Colbert at 00:27:35) And so it's like we're looking at how can we take this core VM construct but find new use cases and new consumption services for users.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:43) Yeah, there was this interesting one. I think they're called like Isolate, and they were in like the startup alley. It was like just a couple people. But did you see them?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:52) Did you go, by the way?

(Kit Colbert at 00:27:53) No, I think I can't remember where I was. I was traveling somewhere else, so I didn't get out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:59) So they did this thing where they had like you boot up three VMs and like one's a public VM and one's a private VM.

(Kit Colbert at 00:28:05) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:05) And like, have you seen that concept before?

(Kit Colbert at 00:28:08) I mean, broadly, yeah. I've seen different models. But yeah, I'm not surprised. Right? Again and again, I think VMs—the VM is a very versatile technology. And, you know, historically, it was all about, you know, the VM for the VM's sake. It was all about, you know, the—it was the end as well as the means. And now I think what we're seeing is that the VM is becoming the means but having different ends. Right? Security or, you know, containers, cloud-native applications.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:36) For me, it was like my experience—I got into a lot of the business logic of applications. So that's where my focus has been in the past 15 years. But when I was, you know, between the ages of eight and like 13, 14, before I got really heavily into business logic, I was hanging around just poking around all the different corners of the technology. And in my need for running multiple operating systems, I found that's how VMs were to me. Like, it's usually whatever—like, if you hear a new term, your first experience with that term, it typically will stick with you. Right? So when I needed to run Mac and Windows together and it was like, oh, you need a VM. Or if you wanted to run other instances of Windows, you could boot something up and like run some code in there. You would use it for that. It's like I think it was like VirtualBox or something. That's an old one, right?

(Kit Colbert at 00:29:25) Yeah. VirtualBox is still out there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:27) Yeah. Yeah. So that, to me, that was my extent. And then when I go to the security conference, it's like containers, VMs, containers, VMs. And I was like, everywhere. And it's like micro VMs. I'm like, ah, you got marketing people.

(Kit Colbert at 00:29:40) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:41) You got a committee.

(Kit Colbert at 00:29:43) Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, I think what we've seen—so certainly, you know, VMware started on the personal desktop side with that same sort of run Windows on Linux or whatever type of use case.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:54) Oh, that's how it got started?

(Kit Colbert at 00:29:55) Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, VMware Workstation was our first product. And, but, you know, I think the founders of VMware always knew they wanted to go to the data center to enterprise customers. They proved out the technology on, you know, PCs first and then went out there. But what we've seen and what VMware's been able to do in the data center is really drive a standardization around virtualization just because there's so many benefits in terms of management and all those other things. Right? So that's why now I think a lot of the folks in the industry and a lot of folks there in the RSA are looking, okay, how do you take this kind of primitive out there and actually build on that, add even more value into it. So there's still a lot of interest and, yeah, people evolving the technology, the micro VM or nano VM or whatever type of adjective you want to use.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:40) Yeah. So does VMware have like—I'm not fully immersed in the culture, but do they have like open technology in the sense that like you can build stuff with it and you can build upon it? Like, oh, do you have any open projects that people play with?

(Kit Colbert at 00:30:56) Yeah. So it's definitely over the past few years has been a much bigger area of interest for us. So, you know, we are putting—especially in terms of containers and cloud-native—putting some stuff out in the open source. Some of our products now, these are integrated containers, for instance. That's all open source. We've done a lot better job recently in terms of APIs as well. So if folks want to use APIs, it's much easier to consume them now with like REST-based and so forth or language bindings than we've had traditionally. So yeah. So this is definitely an area I would say a few years ago, we were behind, but we put a lot of effort into getting more relevance there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:36) So one of the questions from—so we—I tell people when we have guests and we have 70,000 active listeners and many of them are CTOs. And if they're not CTOs, they want to become technology leaders in some capacity. And one of the questions I got for you was, what is the difference between a virtual machine and a container?

(Kit Colbert at 00:31:56) Sure. So there's a number of different ways of answering that. And so a virtual machine is basically an abstraction of physical machine hardware. Right? So we're extracting the CPU, memory, disk, network, et cetera. So we have virtual devices and so forth that we go and create. A container, on the other hand, is really an abstraction within an operating system. And so when you think about a container, it's like—so what does an operating system have? Processes, users, file system, you know, these sorts of things. And a container basically abstracts those. So you can have—so like with a virtual machine, you can have many VMs on one physical host. Conceptually, it's similar with a container. You can have multiple containers on one operating system. Right? Now so both of them are conceptually similar that they're both kind of ways of abstracting, you know, either physical hardware or an operating system, and then, you know, having multiple instances on, you know, sharing that on top of that system. So that's the basic difference. There's so much detail when you go into it, but I think that—

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:54) That's what smart companies do that last in the market. They see what's going on with the market and then they support the up-and-coming technologies and find a way to exist with them and help them and support. You can't say no to the market.

(Kit Colbert at 00:34:08) Yeah. I know. I mean, look, we're not—I mean, we're not dogmatic. We think that, you know, there's all these different technologies out there, and we need to help customers manage across those. Like, you don't just have containers. You don't just have VMs. You have both. And so how do you, you know, manage across both those things? And so yeah. So it's—and I think it's one of those things where I actually like—I love all the innovation that's happening in the container space. It's a lot of really, really good stuff. And so I want to take advantage of that and help our customers to embrace that, not just for container workloads, but even for their virtualized workloads as well. So a lot of, again, a lot of really interesting stuff we're working on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:43) No, I really respect you as a leader, the way you describe that and how you're working. I didn't even know that that was like a thing that people thought, what you mentioned. But I love what—

(Kit Colbert at 00:34:53) There's that undercurrent out there. I hear it coming from time to time. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:56) Well, it's good to address it and talk about it.

(Kit Colbert at 00:34:58) Yeah. I agree. I mean, look, I think it makes sense. I mean, there's—and plus a lot of the container companies use that as competitive positioning. So, like, oh, you know, VMware's against containers, but they can just make that stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:08) Sales and marketing.

(Kit Colbert at 00:35:09) Sounds good to say, you know? Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:11) So is this your office that you're in right now?

(Kit Colbert at 00:35:14) I am. Yeah. It's kind of bright outside to close the shade.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:19) No, it's beautiful. Is it—so you've got some children?

(Kit Colbert at 00:35:23) I do. I don't know where you can see that here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:25) I don't see your children. I see their drawings.

(Kit Colbert at 00:35:29) Yeah. That's good. The kids aren't here today at the office. So yeah. Now I got two kids, ages seven and four. Oh, actually, almost five now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:37) Boys, girls?

(Kit Colbert at 00:35:38) Yeah. Girl, boy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:39) Girl, boy? Who's older?

(Kit Colbert at 00:35:41) The girl.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:42) The girl's older? My first child's a girl. She's eight months old.

(Kit Colbert at 00:35:46) Oh, congratulations. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:47) I'm like—I'm in that stage where I'm counting giggles.

(Kit Colbert at 00:35:52) No. Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:53) And it's just—oh, it's a—it's like the—you know, here's a good question for you. When you were watching your child develop, like, did you feel that they're just like this little organic machine learning algorithm learning? Because they just have this like brute force way of learning. And they're—

(Kit Colbert at 00:36:09) It is. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty incredible how much—so I've noticed a few things. So first of all, you're right. I mean, they're absolute sponges in terms of just picking up information. And they pick up even more than you realize you're giving off. You know what I mean? So, like, all these little mannerisms, how you react to things, how you respond, the exact words and phrases you use. And it's just like, you hear it coming back, you're like, woah. I said that? Yeah. And stuff like, that's interesting. So it's that—you know, the thing I found is that they're really very insightful mirrors, you know, into yourself, into like, you know, who you are and how you behave in the world. And, um, and so, yeah, it caused me to think like, maybe I should, you know, try to work on how I react in these situations because it kind of, you know, they kind of react similarly. So it's been great. I've, you know, it's been awesome. Being a parent's an awesome experience. I've learned a lot about myself during the whole process. Right? Just kind of, you know, how you react to things and seeing that in the kids.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:12) And so you get to bring them to work. So my youngest memories are like the smell of solder because my father is an electrical engineer. Like, he would make program microchips and he actually—it was in the early or mid-'90s and they developed these screens that went inside golf carts. Right? And back then you had like manuals and you ordered chips from manufacturers. They're like the Internet was not like a great resource. So it was just like they would be constantly soldering. It's like that smell and that whole thing was like my childhood. He'd bring me to work with him. Yeah. That's how I got into programming because I would sit in the cubicles on the weekend. So I have siblings and my mom would say, I can only deal with two kids. You take the nerd one to the office with you. And he would sit me in a cubicle with stacks of books and he would say, you know, do something. And then he would give me like a little task and I was writing these little programs and it was a lot of fun. Yeah. And then I just didn't stop there. Like, I just—it was—you get it. You, like, you write some code and you're like, what? What else can I do? And then it's like 30 years later and you're like, wow. Look what I did.

(Kit Colbert at 00:38:18) Yeah. I know. I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:19) Yeah. So so you bring your kids to the office and they get to be around what you're doing?

(Kit Colbert at 00:38:24) Yeah. Occasionally. I mean, not too often because I actually live up in San Francisco, so it's a bit of a hike to get down here to Palo Alto. But—

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:31) How far is it? Like, 40 an hour?

(Kit Colbert at 00:38:34) Yeah. I mean, it's like 35, 40 miles, something like that. I mean, the time it takes depends highly on when you go just because like traffic can be insane during the commute. But most days, I actually try to take the—so there's a train called the Caltrain that runs up and down the peninsula. So that's nice. You can bring your bike on it. I could work on it. Oh, you—

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:53) See, you ride your bike to the train. Yeah. That's very Einstein of you. Like, he would ride his bike to the college.

(Kit Colbert at 00:39:00) Now I will say one of the like—one of the things that I do do—so I'm pretty rigorous about scheduling. Right? So, and like, maintaining my schedule. So every day, I block off. I try to get like 30 minutes, but more like an hour a day. Some days when it's like my calendar is not that busy, which is very rare, I'll get like an hour and a half to go to the gym and just like go for runs, work out. I feel like I—I just found especially for running, it's just my mind goes blank. I kind of, you know, think all sorts of random process events of the day. And I've had a lot of good insights while doing that. You know? So, like, for me, like, exercise is super important to the overall, you know, balance of work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:41) It is a requirement for me. I used to be 300 pounds. Yeah. I used to be really big. Yeah. Yeah. I used to be really big. Yeah. I'm like—I'm like pretty strong now.

(Kit Colbert at 00:39:52) Yeah. That's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:53) Yeah. And so I've—when I started working out, it's like a superpower. Like, your body releases—the thought—my thoughts are better. I solve problems by accident. Like, I get better ideas. And it's just—it's really—there's so many benefits to getting your blood, like, just pumping. And doing that even for 15 minutes a day just to do it, just to get that up is like—it's just incredibly beneficial.

(Kit Colbert at 00:40:23) Yeah. I agree. Yeah. So that's what's nice about, you know, the biking. It's like not that far. It's maybe like two or three miles on each side of the train, both in the city and then down here. So it's like maybe like 10-ish miles a day round trip. So it's not that much biking, but, you know, it's like little 10 or 15 minute spurts. To your point, I mean, it really helps just to get the blood flowing and get the mind going a bit. Yeah. So I find it to be hugely useful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:48) So do you hang out? I'm respecting your time because now it's 2:45. We're gonna stick to that schedule.

(Kit Colbert at 00:40:53) Yeah. No worries. We can go a few minutes over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:55) I always get lost like with the time because it's just so awesome to talk to other technologists.

(Kit Colbert at 00:41:01) Yeah. Totally. Now I get it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:03) So advice you would give yourself 10 years ago. But you only get like, you only get like one small piece of advice. Like, that's a good, condensed piece of advice.

(Kit Colbert at 00:41:13) That's a good question. What would I tell myself 10 years ago? Let me throw out a couple of things. We'll see which one is the best one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:20) Which one sounds the best? Yeah.

(Kit Colbert at 00:41:21) Yeah. We'll choose one that's—see, my watch thing. I looked at it. All the notifications—

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:26) Get that Pavlov one, dude.

(Kit Colbert at 00:41:28) I know. So interestingly—interestingly, I think one of the things that I would tell myself is that, you know, I—so I guess, yeah. Well, the thing I'd tell myself is that, you know, take your time with new markets. I think oftentimes—yeah. I'll give you the example of the cloud-native space, the container space. As I said, you know, I've been involved in that for a while. When it first came out, I was really worried that, you know, VMware was gonna be able to adapt quickly enough to embrace all these container technologies and that there might be some, you know, threats of workload moving off our platform. And so I was like really dropping the hammer down trying to get stuff done and ended up, you know, we moved really fast. We were kind of sloppy in some ways. Didn't make great decisions.

(Kit Colbert at 00:42:15) You know, didn't give things enough time, thinking through them from an execution standpoint sometimes. But when I look back, you know, and looking where we are today, I'm like, wow, we actually had more time than I thought. And so I think there is that. You want to go fast, at the same time, you want to go at a cadence that's sustainable and that you're able to really make the right decision. Making rushed decisions too often, you're just going to make the wrong decisions too often, right? And you're going to burn out and other sorts of things. So I think, you know, there's that kind of take your time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:46) Patience.

(Kit Colbert at 00:42:47) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:48) That's one that I'm always learning.

(Kit Colbert at 00:42:50) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:50) Like, every time I've made progress with patience, there's more progress to be made.

(Kit Colbert at 00:42:55) So true. Yeah. It's kind of like a less is more thing, almost.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:58) It really is.

(Kit Colbert at 00:43:00) Yeah. I think you can get in these frenetic modes where you're just kind of go, go, go, go, go, and then you stop thinking is the problem. And then you create—there's a lot of things that happen, right? You take shortcuts, you create technical debt, there's a lot of that stuff. And then sometimes, look, I mean, I'm not against hacking things out when necessary. But if there's a good—if you had thought through that trade-off and said, yeah, the time to market really is worth creating this debt. I look at something like technical debt, for instance, if you go into that one. It's an interesting term, debt. Usually people think about debt as something to pay off, right? Like, oh, I took this shortcut and now I've got to pay it off. But what they're forgetting about oftentimes is that, you know, if you're looking to think about debt from a financial standpoint, sometimes it makes sense to go into debt because it allows you to accelerate your plans, right? You get more money now, and you actually have to pay it off later, but it's an informed risk. In a sense, you say, okay, actually, it's worthwhile for me to take on this debt because I'll get somewhere far faster.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:00) And it's worth the interest.

(Kit Colbert at 00:44:01) I can reap the rewards and pay back that debt. And so it's similar from a technology perspective. You know, it's a debt that you consciously take on because you know you want to go faster, and it's a conscious decision. So I'm not against technical debt when it's a conscious, thought-through, balanced decision. I'm against it if you're just going crazy and just doing it because you think you have to, not because you really have thought through it, or you're unaware of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:24) Yeah.

(Kit Colbert at 00:44:24) Yeah. Or you're unaware of it. Yeah, I mean, that's the other way. So a similar thing is this concept of throwaway code. People always complain about throwaway—especially engineers—like, oh, I don't want to do that because it's throwaway code. And I'm like, well, if you take a long enough time horizon, all the code is throwaway code, right? It's all going to stop being used at some point in the future. The question is how long? And so when you start looking at that from that time frame, you're like, okay, what is the code buying me and for how long? You know, again, going back to the financial metaphor. And so maybe the case that, look, you know, the code won't be around for very long, but you get a whole lot of value out of it or something that does something very important to you. You know, the other thing I think about is when the construction crews are working on roads, you know, very often—or it's not very often—they will completely dismantle the road. Usually, they create a new road around the place where they're working, right? So it's this kind of side-off part that goes off of the road. They kind of pave that. Now you can kind of, you know, cars—

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:22) They'll actually build a temporary road to rip up a road and replace it.

(Kit Colbert at 00:45:26) Exactly. And so that's what I think about throwaway code. It's like, you want the cars to keep flowing or not. And maybe it's okay for the cars to stop flowing, but there's probably some big cost to that that you're not really thinking through. And then throwaway code actually allows things to keep moving. And yes, it is extra work, but there's a lot of benefits to it. So, again, it's like you really got to think through those sorts of trade-offs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:48) Yeah. I sometimes look at life like a game. I have these abilities. I have a menu of options available to me, and I'm in a situation. I've got different levels of experience with each option, right? It's like which one am I going to apply? Sometimes acquiring technical debt is an option that you leverage, that you use.

(Kit Colbert at 00:46:08) Yeah. You can look at it as pure negativeness, right? Like, it can be a very useful thing when deployed properly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:16) Yeah. I like that. I like that. That was a well—that was a good perspective of technical debt, because that is one where you get the diehards of the technical debt that really take it, like, concrete, like zero technical debt, and it's just unacceptable. And then it's like, whenever I feel myself with that rigidity creeping in, especially as I get through my thirties, I say to myself, I don't want old man syndrome. I don't want yelling at the front yard. What am I not seeing here if I feel that pull towards rigidity? So—

(Kit Colbert at 00:46:45) Yeah. I think it's just being able to handle a little bit of that messiness. I mean, I think the other thing you've got to be able to do, though, is on the back side of that, after you've incurred the debt, is to be able to put up the resources to get rid of it, right, to fix it. And a lot of times we don't do that. We don't follow through. So that's the other challenge, because then some people are afraid of getting into technical debt because people never fix it or rarely fix it. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:09) Now do you think sometimes the people with the throwaway code—that the root is, like, what if they—there's the way you see something in the plan you're putting together—

(Kit Colbert at 00:47:17) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:17) And your ability to communicate that is critical as a leader. So if they see it as throwaway code, it might not be for the concept of the fact that it's throwaway code, but more like the feeling that what they're doing is useless. Yeah. And so then addressing that human need, like, you do that?

(Kit Colbert at 00:47:34) Yeah. So no. I've heard—I hear a lot of those concerns as well. So I think what I try to do is paint a bigger picture. Yes. So what we try to do, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:45) Yeah. Do you—you've got to do the Simon Sinek why. You've got to explain why you're doing it so that they feel like what they're doing is useful.

(Kit Colbert at 00:47:53) Well, it's also showing a progression. It's like, look, I think people are okay with that sort of throwaway work if they understand how it fits in the bigger picture and they see how the ball is being moved forward by virtue of the work that they're doing. It's, you know, it's a lot of this also transition from, like, waterfall-style thinking to more agile-style thinking, or lean, if you will. And so in a waterfall model—yeah, a waterfall model, if you're building a car, you know, you build the frame and eventually put on some wheels and, you know, paint it, put on glass, and make a door, and all that sort of stuff. But it's very like, you know, kind of you have this whole complete car you want to do and then kind of just, you know, fill all the pieces, and eventually the thing works. And it's nice because there's no throwaway code. Like, everything you do will be used for that longer-term purpose. The challenge is that the car is not actually usable until the very end, right? Unlike a lean or agile type of model where you're not building a car, you're building transportation. That's the value you're delivering. And so maybe it's like a skateboard that you deliver first, or a scooter or something. It's not very useful. It's human-powered. And eventually, you put a motor on it. Eventually, it becomes a bicycle with a bigger motor. Each time you're throwing away a lot of stuff, but, you know, you're throwing away code, maybe you're reusing ideas or some of these things. And so, but if you can paint that picture and say, look, we're getting to a car, but we're not doing a waterfall model. We're doing this much different model. We have to prove out each of these steps. And, yes, some stuff will be thrown away, some stuff may not be. But this is the reason we're doing it, because we can get to market much quicker with a kind of MVP, and then we can potentially, you know, scale up to something better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:26) No, I like—I like that you mentioned that we, you know, we've been having the show and everybody on and that's a reoccurring theme, right? The MVP, Eric Ries, like, get something out that brings the value, because everyone has a different MVP in their head. Yeah. And, right? So you've got to really be specific about what you're talking about. But what we did was about sixteen, seventeen days ago, we had these recurring episodes where all the CTOs were going from, like, 30 to 100 people. They were experiencing some growth. And so they all kept saying, oh, we had this problem with figuring out leaders and growing our leaders as we're scaling rapidly. And so because those came up successively, I said, well, you know, why don't we, as the show, try to solve it and we'll use all the methods that all of our guests talk about and that we all, you know, say are the best method. So we do a daily video blog. We started it and then yesterday was the first—we came up with this whole concept, this whole plan, everything. Yesterday was the first day we took it to the market within, on day like 16, to ask the market if it's valuable. But not just valuable. Valuable enough for them to become customers today, right? Like when all we have is this basic MVP. And we got to—we got—our first two meetings we had, we got the two customers. Nice. So we're like, I don't care about the money. I care about the fact that—

(Kit Colbert at 00:50:37) Of course.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:38) We did something that, we did it the right way, the way we've been talking about, right? And then we also documented it daily. So—

(Kit Colbert at 00:50:48) That's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:48) Yeah. And now we have, like, 16 meetings set up over the next two weeks. So we might have accidentally brought value to the market.

(Kit Colbert at 00:50:57) Well, accidentally brought value. Yeah, we accidentally did it, though. And look, I mean, I think that's great, you know. And that's how you prove it out. And you're right. Like, you don't care about the money, but the money is a useful forcing function to separate interest from really wanting something. Because the customers can be interested in any—interest is kind of one of the worst things you want because people are interested, but they don't really care. So how do you actually separate out the people who are just interested and kind of window shopping, if you will, from people who are actually like, okay, I need help here. I need to do something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:27) Yeah. Well, I figured it's like when you give a talk, you have the audience to see if there's a thousand people. There's going to be, like, a hundred people that believe, like, what you're talking about. That really are like, I believe in this. I believe in what this individual is saying. Then there's going to be everyone else, right? And whatever their thing may be. So my goal was, you know, let's find people that believe. And if there's enough people that believe early enough, then that's what the trend will be as we enter the market. Because if you can't get someone to believe early, then you build the whole product—no one's going to believe it then.

(Kit Colbert at 00:51:57) Yeah. Yeah. No. So I think the lean ideas are amazing. I think it's—yeah. I've read, you know, the Lean Startup. I have not read his most recent book yet, but definitely on the to-do list there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:09) Yeah. I'll send you some—so what the thing is is we actually take little, like, so, like, there's 12 lessons in here or whatever, maybe 15. So we'll just take one and make, like, a three-minute video about it. And then you—they deploy it out to their team and then their team can actually—like, it has a little lesson in it so they reflect real quick. It's a ten-minute experience and then the CTOs can see what their people—like, who's hungry to be a leader, because the people that don't want it won't touch it, right? It'll just be like ignore it. But the people who want more, they'll be like, oh, this is cool. And they'll, like, learn and watch the video and then, like, share their experience and reflection, and then they can see that they're, like, working towards it. And so that was the idea. The shortest value was to identify leaders in their organization, and because they all kept saying they had that problem. And then we did it and then people are like, yeah. So that was a cool—it's a cool week for me.

(Kit Colbert at 00:52:58) Yeah. That's awesome. Congratulations. Yeah. And then—

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:01) We're going hiking in the mountains this week, too. We're going up to North Carolina.

(Kit Colbert at 00:53:04) Oh, nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:05) Yeah. Where—

(Kit Colbert at 00:53:06) Where abouts are you based?

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:07) We are in Florida.

(Kit Colbert at 00:53:09) Oh, wow. Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:10) Yeah. So we're doing a ten-hour drive. See, it doesn't make enough sense because, like, if we tried to fly, you can only fly into Atlanta, and then it's like a six-hour drive into the mountains. Yeah. Then I'm like, it's the same amount of time, travel time.

(Kit Colbert at 00:53:26) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:26) And so we have the little babies, so I just figured it'd be way easier if we just drive. Yeah. We're going to go hiking. And I got a drone, so I'm going to get, like, some mountain shots.

(Kit Colbert at 00:53:36) Nice, dude.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:37) You like hiking?

(Kit Colbert at 00:53:39) Yeah, I do. I do. And—

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:41) I'm going to send you some mountain shots.

(Kit Colbert at 00:53:42) Dude, San Francisco, like, the whole Bay Area is just beautiful for—I do a lot of trail running as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:51) Oh, you do? Yeah.

(Kit Colbert at 00:53:51) Nice. Love running around the Bay Area. Even here down in SoCal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:54) There we go. Oh, there you go. I wear, like, a nice, you know, shirt and jean—like, nice jeans and fun socks, and then I wear my running shoes—

(Kit Colbert at 00:54:00) There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:00) Because they're, like, the most comfortable things ever.

(Kit Colbert at 00:54:03) Yeah. Yeah. You're always ready to go for a run.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:07) Always ready. Yeah. I think I've got to find some of the shoes that are, like, look really sharp, but then they're also comfortable. When you find sharp-looking shoes, like professional, that are also comfortable, that aren't $12,000, let me know.

(Kit Colbert at 00:54:21) It's a tough find. I agree. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:24) Well, thank you so much, Kit, man. This has been a fan—I really like you. When I'm out there, I'm going to stop by and get a high five and say hello.

(Kit Colbert at 00:54:31) Sure. That'd be great, dude. Yeah. Let's keep in touch. For sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:33) Because I'm going to be out—I think I'm going to be out there in, like, three months. Because this, you know, this month we're having you, Microsoft, Intel, and who's the other one, Jackie? There's one more. I think, like, Google or Snapchat? T-Mobile.

(Kit Colbert at 00:54:50) T-Mobile. They just got bought by somebody. Sprint, or they merged?

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:50) T-Mobile. They merged while they're trying to merge with Sprint. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:53) Okay. Well, we'll get the insight from their CTO next week.

(Kit Colbert at 00:54:56) Oh, cool. I don't know what they can say since it's an ongoing thing, but it's pretty good. I mean, do you read this blog called Stratechery?

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:05) You're the second person.

(Kit Colbert at 00:55:07) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:07) You're the second person to recommend this to me.

(Kit Colbert at 00:55:09) It's Ben Thompson. He's really good. He's really good. So he's got a whole rundown of that and the implications of it. It's worth it. It's like $100 a year, but it's really good content.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:19) Sure. Stratechery. Yeah. Now I will check it out. When things come up enough, I check them out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:23) He's an author too, right?

(Kit Colbert at 00:55:26) I don't know what else he's done. I don't know much about the guy, actually. I've just heard a bunch of friends mention that it's really good, so I signed up for it. And I've really enjoyed it. Yeah.

(Kit Colbert at 00:55:34) It's like a daily thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:36) Oh, it's a daily thing?

(Kit Colbert at 00:55:37) He's got like a short one, or shorter one, daily. Still pretty meaty. And then he's got like a longer one once a week as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:45) Do you follow that CB Insights dude?

(Kit Colbert at 00:55:47) What's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:48) There's a guy named Nod or something. He's got a company called CB Insights. But the way the tone of his emails are, like, really fun and playful. But they track like how money flows between organizations, like what sectors got the most money, and they track a lot of information—who's investing in what and why.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:09) And he rates it in like a fun style.

(Kit Colbert at 00:56:13) Yeah. I haven't heard of it. But yeah, that sounds interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:15) Yeah. Very cool. Thank you so much, man. I really appreciate all the time.

(Kit Colbert at 00:56:18) Thanks, Joel. Let me know whenever you're in town.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:21) Yeah. I will. I'm gonna send you some drone video like next week after we get—because, I mean, that the mountain—it's gonna be cinematic. You know it.

(Kit Colbert at 00:56:27) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:29) Oh, I'm so excited. All right. Have a great day, man.

(Kit Colbert at 00:56:31) Cool, man. Take care. See you. Bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:39) 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.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:45) I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.