Cody Sanford CIO at T-Mobile

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, we are talking to Cody Sanford, the CIO of T-Mobile, and we discuss the future of 5G, how T-Mobile is using Alexa, and why it's all about the people when building a technology product. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. So what are you up to today?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:33) What's a normal day look like for you?

(Cody Sanford at 00:00:36) Well, I'm an early guy, so I get in the office between five and six. I'm in Seattle. Can you see out there?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:43) It looks like Seattle.

(Cody Sanford at 00:00:45) It sure does. It's a spring day in Seattle. So I get in early and I try to crank through as much of the work as I actually do before my meetings start. So you're catching me normally when I get dragged into my daily meetings.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:01) So you reserve the best time, the quiet time for you to get your work done?

(Cody Sanford at 00:01:06) My peace and quiet time. That's exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:08) That is exactly what I do as well. It works. It really does. So I find that people either will reserve the time in the morning or late at night, but they all tend to reserve time just for their own quiet progression.

(Cody Sanford at 00:01:23) Yeah, absolutely. My family helps to make that decision because no one's up early in my house. So if I chose to do it in the evening, my personal time would be interrupted anyway. So this is really the only choice I have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:35) So I did a lot of research on you.

(Cody Sanford at 00:01:38) Uh-oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:38) I had my whole team go.

(Cody Sanford at 00:01:40) I feel like I'm—

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:40) All sorts of amazing stuff. So I like that you are a fan of early STEM education.

(Cody Sanford at 00:01:46) Yeah, absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:47) You have some little ones, you said?

(Cody Sanford at 00:01:49) One not so little one. She's 14. And, you know, it's funny. She was into Minecraft as a kid and started to get into coding. And there were so few resources available for her.

(Cody Sanford at 00:02:03) I kind of got pulled into STEM more because of her than because of my career. So that's been a fun pursuit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:10) Oh, nice. I actually have a family foundation and we make children's STEM books.

(Cody Sanford at 00:02:15) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:16) We've got one called The Princess Physicist. Oh, cool.

(Cody Sanford at 00:02:21) And it's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:21) A princess who gets stuck in a tower. She finds a book on physics under the bed and uses physics to get herself out instead of a guy coming and saving her.

(Cody Sanford at 00:02:28) That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:29) And the other one's called Back to the Moon. So it's about two little brother and sister. It's to encourage space travel.

(Cody Sanford at 00:02:35) Oh, that's really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:37) Yeah. So we print them up every year and then we donate—like last year we did 10,000—we donate to homeless pregnant women shelters, foster families, stuff like that.

(Cody Sanford at 00:02:45) Yeah. I am on the—I don't know if you saw this—I'm on the board of the Washington Association for Better Schools out here. Which is 11 school districts in the Pacific Northwest in the Seattle area that are trying to engage students, teachers, and parents in building an ecosystem and curriculum to help kids get more into STEM and then be able to accelerate STEM into industry.

(Cody Sanford at 00:03:11) I mean, sorry, accelerate their education in the industry. And it's a very interesting space because frankly, the K through 12, the post-12, and industry have very different perspectives on the problem and what the opportunities are to make a difference. So it's been a great space to get in and find out what you can do to help.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:27) Yeah. Have you come across FIRST Robotics?

(Cody Sanford at 00:03:31) I've heard of them. I don't know much about them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) So I had Mike Anderson. He's one of the members of FIRST Robotics. And he builds embedded systems that, like, autonomous spacecraft that refuel satellites at mid-Earth orbit, stuff like that. So we had him on talking about building embedded Linux systems, and they basically bring these programs, like these Raspberry Pi-type programs and these robotics, into the K through 12. And I saw that you were tinkering around with the Raspberry Pi and Google Home.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:59) What did you do with that?

(Cody Sanford at 00:04:01) Well, we hosted an IoT hackathon. So we brought in kids and young adults from all over the Seattle area and hosted a pure IoT hackathon focused on smart building, smart campus solutions. So the Raspberry Pi was just one of the things we provided as an asset they could use in the hackathon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:18) That's awesome.

(Cody Sanford at 00:04:19) Yeah. It was cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:20) So you are the CIO of T-Mobile. You've been there for a long time. I want to hear your story about how you got involved and how you became the CIO.

(Cody Sanford at 00:04:30) Alright. Well, I'll try to make this 19-year journey story palatable for a 45-minute podcast. So I've actually been in the wireless industry since I graduated from University of Washington. And I joined the predecessor to T-Mobile, which was VoiceStream, in 1999, June '99. And I entered on the engineering side of the house, network engineering operation side of the house.

(Cody Sanford at 00:04:57) And my experience to that point in that field was mostly on the outside plant infrastructure. So I was building towers and helping the network, which was in a massive expansion mode. I know you're too young to remember this, but there was very little coverage nationally at the time. So we were in full buildout mode on towers. So that's how I got into T-Mobile.

(Cody Sanford at 00:05:16) And I spent seven years in engineering and operations and switching and outside plant and RF engineering. And then I got a chance to come and build our 3G network and lead the 3G build, which coincided with the release of the G1, which for anyone who's listening, remember that was the first Android phone that was released. So we coincided our launch with the G1. So I got into the product side then. I spent some years in product and operations, did some transformation programs, and then had a wonderful boss who was the former president for Starbucks who came in with our chief operating officer.

(Cody Sanford at 00:05:51) And he asked me if I wanted to go try sales out for a while. And for a company that was heavily retail-focused, that was an awesome opportunity. So I actually spent a few years leading our retail sales and direct sales organization on the West Coast, which was fantastic. And then moved back into technology transformation and led a large-scale stack transformation endeavor and then got into my current role. So it's a very circuitous route to my role.

(Cody Sanford at 00:06:19) It definitely didn't start as a coder on a desktop. But my experience across the business and my grounding in both the network side and our software made this job a pretty natural fit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:33) That's amazing. So I know that you also have a CTO.

(Cody Sanford at 00:06:37) Yes, we do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:38) Alright. So I imagine that the way you handle your differences is through lightsaber battles.

(Cody Sanford at 00:06:44) That's right. Full-on battle. Actually, it helps because I report to him. So there's very little fighting that occurs. But you can imagine that our product for the most part is our network.

(Cody Sanford at 00:06:55) And so our infrastructure, both from a core and radio access, is a huge focus and where most of our capital goes. My side is the software side of the house, which is evolving into the way we relate to customers and whether we generate revenue. And actually, it's a pretty interesting journey. If you read the rags on our industry, we're moving from utility companies into technology companies. And that existential evolution has been incredible to be a part of because utility operates in a very IT-is-a-back-office-function mode, moving into a tech company where software is your asset.

(Cody Sanford at 00:07:35) And evolving your organization to get there, it's been a great journey. It's been awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:42) So a couple of things that I really like recently is the branding transformation you guys had a few years ago. I think maybe about two years ago. I'm just going with my gut here. But I just started noticing the lights in all the stores. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:55) All of a sudden you got the pink lights. I noticed the CEO is out there on my feeds and is just, like, super personable and in a T-shirt and stuff like that. So I want to give you guys a bunch of credit for the transformation from, like, not awesome to awesome, in the nicest way possible.

(Cody Sanford at 00:08:17) You worked at that "not awesome." Yeah, look, we call it the Un-carrier journey. So it actually started five years ago. We exited—I don't know if you remember this—but AT&T tried to buy us. And in 2012, the deal fell apart. And as you can imagine, being a part of that process wasn't an awesome experience for the employees at T-Mobile.

(Cody Sanford at 00:08:43) But we exited that period. We had $3 billion in cash from the breakup fee. We launched—we got low-band spectrum, which we used to build out our LTE network. We got the iPhone, which we hadn't had up until that point. And we also merged with MetroPCS, which was a scrapper brand out of Dallas. So we had all these amazing assets.

(Cody Sanford at 00:09:03) And then what John brought in was the will and the guts to go be a risk-at-challenger in the marketplace. And the Un-carrier evolution started with a manifesto, and the manifesto was really simple. It was, you know, we're in a broken, stupid industry, and the only way we're going to fix it is to shut up and listen to our customers. And that was really the kernel of the Un-carrier revolution, and the brand has been really John's baby—John Legere, our CEO. And you see him all over.

(Cody Sanford at 00:09:31) So he's up to like 6 million followers now. But he is the brand. He manifests the brand every day. I mean, it's not an act. Everywhere he goes, he is interacting with customers, either through social or directly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:45) It's too much work to be somebody you're not. It's way easier just to be yourself and let a camera roll.

(Cody Sanford at 00:09:49) Right. Amen. You do it every day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:52) Yeah. So I see that you enjoy running. You a big runner?

(Cody Sanford at 00:09:57) I am. I'm not a competitive runner. I mean, I do races for fun, but I'm not competitive. But it's the only way I stay sane. So I try to get out, you know, 25 to 40 miles a week depending on how much time I have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:10) Whoa, 25. Alright. So I'm like 15 to 20 minutes three times a week in the morning. I just like to change my state. Like, when I'm feeling a little not energetic, if I go for the run when I'm feeling a little tired, then I get pumped up.

(Cody Sanford at 00:10:28) Yeah. I get my flow state when I run. So I do a lot of problem solving and, you know, I work through issues I need to work through and get my head squared away. So without it, I notice that my frustration level, my patience level, everything's in a worse state unless I'm out there pounding the pavement.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:44) What's going on with the audio situation? Are you listening to a specific style of music? Like, where are you at when you're thinking and processing?

(Cody Sanford at 00:10:54) Oh, interesting. So I'm a mood runner, so it depends. I will tell you, I mostly run to old-school hip-hop. Oh, yes.

(Cody Sanford at 00:11:02) Yeah. So that's really my thing. But it doesn't really interfere with my thinking. It just keeps the other side of my brain active.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:11) That's awesome. Yeah. I'll go through moods. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:15) And you know what's interesting? Pandora hasn't really figured out the mood thing yet.

(Cody Sanford at 00:11:19) Not at all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:20) And I was having this conversation with—I can't remember who—but it was another CTO that was familiar with the whole thing. But Pandora came out and they were killing it, man. They were just innovating their face off, doing all sorts of great things. And then it's like somebody just said stop. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:36) Because people want to listen to music, and we have moods. And we want to listen to successive music in the mood that we're in to stay in that mood. But their systems don't do that. And then you notice that, who's the competitor? Spotify.

(Cody Sanford at 00:11:51) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:51) Went through playlists.

(Cody Sanford at 00:11:53) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:54) Because they—people—humans curated the playlists to reflect the moods, and then people swarmed over there. So have—I know that at one point, I saw some ad where the different cell phone companies were announcing that they wouldn't charge for data on certain streams. Was that still a thing or was that just like a marketing thing? How did that go?

(Cody Sanford at 00:12:15) Well, today, no one charges for anything because we're all unlimited. But we actually—I don't remember what Un-carrier move—so we call them Un-carrier moves. There have been, I think, 14 to date. But one of them was called Music Freedom.

(Cody Sanford at 00:12:27) And it really, that was the initiation of the idea of we're not going to decrement your data. We're not going to charge you for data if you're streaming music. And then we partnered with all the key music streaming services, and if you were using those streams, we effectively whitelisted them. So if you were a customer of T-Mobile and you were playing Pandora, it wouldn't go against your data bucket. Now that we offer unlimited, it doesn't really matter anymore.

(Cody Sanford at 00:12:49) But that was the beginning. And then, as with every success of an Un-carrier move, all the competitors followed suit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:56) Nice. Yeah. I just have to ask. Like, this is just—it's more personal for me.

(Cody Sanford at 00:13:00) Like, I'm just— I love it. I will tell you though, I had the same issue. I actually find—I moved over to Apple Music more now. I have Napster and Apple Music and Amazon. They're my music services, and I can't find good curated stations or good curated playlists.

(Cody Sanford at 00:13:19) I end up having to do it myself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:21) Yeah. It's tough. I actually found a niche for my running. There was this whole three-month season I went through with like '70s, like, high-energy music from the '70s.

(Cody Sanford at 00:13:33) Disco, you mean?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:34) Yeah. I guess. I don't know. But it was just awesome. And yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:39) I think it was disco, but they had some really catchy stuff. There's this one—those like, "The earth moves under my feet." And like that song, I want to start every run with that song.

(Cody Sanford at 00:13:50) Right? That's awesome. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:51) So 5G is what everybody's talking about on the LinkedIn right before AI and AR consume the world.

(Cody Sanford at 00:14:00) And blockchain.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:01) Oh, yeah. Blockchain. Can't forget about it. What's going on with 5G? Like, I saw some really cool lab stuff where they basically said it's going to be real-time, it's going to be insane fast. And I want to know what your take is on it.

(Cody Sanford at 00:14:14) Yeah. Well, I'll give you my take on 5G. 5G is both a radio access evolution, so like antennas and radios in the network, and also on the core. And from a customer benefit standpoint, it's really—well, it's threefold. So one is it does bring incredible speeds, like 15x speed.

(Cody Sanford at 00:14:36) So think 450 as like an average download speed on a device or in your home. I mean, your average broadband connection is what? 5 by 30? So think, you know, 10x that is a huge advance in speed. Now, we don't have a lot of use cases that demand that right now because your 1080 is only 1080.

(Cody Sanford at 00:14:59) But it does allow for use cases like VR, like AR, and doing it wirelessly without being wired into your desktop or a gaming computer. So that's one evolution. The other one is incredibly low latency. So the standard allows or kind of requires us to be able to support latency that is as low as ten milliseconds. So think the ability to get real-time information in autonomous vehicles or in things that would require response time that we can't possibly support today with our wireless infrastructure.

(Cody Sanford at 00:15:33) And the last, which is probably the most cited use case, is IoT. So billions and billions of connected devices provisioned instantly across our environment. So smart buildings, smart cities, asset tracking, all those things that the IoT solution space is going to produce for us as consumers all get unlocked with 5G. That make sense?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:54) Oh yeah, it makes total sense. I had an awesome individual on my show, the CTO of this company called hologram.io. But they essentially make—they're like for the maker community and the enterprise IoT community, and they make these little chips, and you can build on top of them. And basically, if you want to IoT-enable your homemade hacking project or some device you're building, hardware device, you would buy this kit from them and then they would offer some sort of analytics.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:23) I'm curious, has T-Mobile ever played, or have you ever in your mind played, with the idea of offering some sort of part of the company that makes it more accessible for the data? Because I'm curious as to why I see a lot of these third-party companies like Hologram and stuff pop up and why I don't see a lot of the carriers themselves offering this as something.

(Cody Sanford at 00:16:44) It's funny. I saw our first 5G dev kit yesterday. It's tiny, but it will allow people to do exactly what you're saying, which is use our access to our ecosystem and our ecosystem more broadly to build IoT devices and solutions. So that's exactly where we're at. I think you hear that from our competitors as well.

(Cody Sanford at 00:17:04) But I think you're going to see more and more of that. The data front's an interesting one, though, because data is really the big unlock for IoT. So if I have billions of asset trackers out there, that's kind of useless unless I have the ability to capture location of that data, what they're doing with that device, and then being able to use that to make the consumer's life better. So that's another thing that the carriers are really the only companies that can provide that because we're the only ones who have access to where that device is in space and time. So there's a bunch of really cool opportunities for the carriers to play more in supporting developers, supporting small companies, or enabling other application platforms to support them.

(Cody Sanford at 00:17:49) So companies out that are more able to deal with a garage, five guys in a garage—that's not really our thing, but we can enable them to support them. So we can have intermediaries that can get your Silicon Valley companies off the ground.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:04) That's really smart. So I had a need to pull cell phone records for myself, and I happen to be on Verizon. And so I never really interact with them. I just pay the bill. I don't interact with them professionally how I work with other companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:21) And then what they did was they limited the download inside to like thirty days. And then if I went the developer route, because I looked up in their docs real quick, but everything was really old. And I was like, it occurred to me after having that conversation with Hologram and them that at least—I didn't even look into T-Mobile, but at least Verizon, they had like no good developer support.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:45) Like it was old, and I'm thinking they must have, like T-Mobile, you guys make the impossible happen with all these devices connected and transferred to—we take it so for granted, right?

(Cody Sanford at 00:18:56) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:56) And so the talent that you have within your organization is tremendous, and you clearly can build and scale enterprise systems. So, you know, open up, show the developer community a little love.

(Cody Sanford at 00:19:08) Why do we suck at that space? You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:11) I didn't—those are your words.

(Cody Sanford at 00:19:13) I bet we do. I mean, you know, if you compare us to any other tech company out there, and especially ones that are kind of born digital, we have definitely not unlocked the power of the community from a dev perspective. We're getting there. And so a lot of what I'm pushing in is the open source space to start to figure out ways to leverage the development community in areas that we care about.

(Cody Sanford at 00:19:39) So we've got blockchain open source initiatives, and we've got some partnership with Lambda and Amazon to start—

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:47) Oh, that's awesome.

(Cody Sanford at 00:19:48) Yeah. So we're really starting to push in that space. It is hard for us for only one reason, though. It's not a talent problem. It is a priority problem.

(Cody Sanford at 00:19:55) So you can imagine, I have a lot of people working with me, our employees, awesome partners all over the world. But if I had twice the resources and twice the money, I still couldn't get everything done that I'm supposed to get done. So it's really the ability to focus on it. And one area that we're trying really hard to do is find how to use our developer community within the organization to start creating those ecosystems on their own, like through the open source programs, and giving them incentives to do that, to participate in those, to create SDKs for developers.

(Cody Sanford at 00:20:31) So that's where most of our traction is coming from, but it definitely won't be through the website, right? Like finding the SDK on the website's probably not going to be there. You'll have to be a Linux dude, or you'll need to be super—probably on GitHub.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:45) Probably on GitHub.

(Cody Sanford at 00:20:46) Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But it's happening. It's happening every day, which is—and I would say it's very recent for T-Mobile anyway. It's probably been in the last year and a half where my team's, the dev community has really gotten engaged in participating in outside forums.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:01) There's a company called Stripe, and they do payment processing. You know them?

(Cody Sanford at 00:21:06) Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:07) Okay. So I've been following them since essentially like day one because I was—I've been writing enterprise applications and needed payment solutions. And so right when I saw them come out, I was like, this is great. They built it entirely for the developer community. They completely disrupted a payments industry, and they're a billion-dollar-plus company just because they focused on developers and making it easy for them to build their tools.

(Cody Sanford at 00:21:28) Yeah, it's really cool. You know, I was sharing with you that evolution from utility to tech company. And for us, development was a means to an end as opposed to what we do, right? And it really, in the last two years, our digital transformation has been pushing decisions and capability out as close to the customer as we possibly can through our developers. And that is an incredibly new paradigm for us. Before it was, you know, I have a website and I have a network and I have an app, and the rest is just back office. So SAP and finance and payment and billing. And to move into a relationship with the development community is a massive transformation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:15) So are you speaking publicly a lot as the CIO of T-Mobile?

(Cody Sanford at 00:22:22) I do. I try to stay off the circuit, but primarily because there's a lot of work to do. And I'm a believer in do something first and talk about it later. I'm in a place right now where my team is an amazing group of people, and we've actually put some wins in the ground that I think are worth talking about. And I believe we have earned the right to start talking about it. So it's starting to become more of a priority. And I would share with you the reason that we're doing it is really twofold.

(Cody Sanford at 00:22:51) One is I want to make sure that my team feels rewarded and appreciated for the great work they're doing. And second is telecoms aren't generally a recruiting hot spot for great dev talent. So, you know, talking about what we're doing in that community is an important part of creating gravity for developers who are thinking about getting started in their careers or later in their careers. So those are really the reasons I'm doing it. Up until this point, I just haven't felt like we earned the right to be there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:17) The head of evangelism, like developer evangelism for Alexa, is David Isbitski, and he's a friend of mine. And he goes around and does a lot of talking and stuff like that. Now and then, have you thought about Alexa at all in the context of T-Mobile?

(Cody Sanford at 00:23:36) Alexa's a big part of kind of a lot of what we do internally. I mean, I have my telemetry all integrated into Alexa, so my dev teams can literally—they can look at every instance I've got in my AWS environment and get data from—so we've integrated internally, and we've also integrated into our relationships through our asynchronous messaging with our customers. And you're going to see a lot more Alexa integration. So that is a healthy, evolving relationship. It's actually pretty cool to see what we're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:08) Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, it was really like I got one in December.

(Cody Sanford at 00:24:13) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:13) Changed my life.

(Cody Sanford at 00:24:15) Really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:15) Yeah. I'm having a conversation with my wife, and she's like, what do you want for Christmas or whatever? And I'm like, you know what? We need an Alexa around the office. It keeps coming up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:23) My hairdresser brought it up that her daughter's into it, and you always got to watch the future, the children, what they're excited about. And so I said I want it. And she goes, okay, well, it's on the counter. She's like, that Amazon package is your first one. Because I pull out my phone to order it, I'm like, oh, I think it's going to be like two days before I'll be able to bring it up on the show and like play with it. She's like, you can just have the one on the counter. And I'm like—because it was all packaged up, it was my surprise. I was like, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:47) It was like instant. Bezos was like in my head.

(Cody Sanford at 00:24:50) Very cool. So, two questions. Have you started to automate the house and office yet?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:55) Yeah. We have a Christmas tree that we voice turn on and off.

(Cody Sanford at 00:25:00) That's a start. It's a start.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:01) It's a start.

(Cody Sanford at 00:25:02) Yeah. You know, I think for me, I have two reasons why I don't have it in my home. One is my wife hates the idea of another device in the home.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:12) I'm sorry, you're going to say woman.

(Cody Sanford at 00:25:14) No, no.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:15) I was like, you can call it a computer.

(Cody Sanford at 00:25:17) That would be funny. No. And the second thing is I actually want to be thoughtful about how I start using it with automation of the rest of the home. So I need some time to get the rest of the home on it. I have—my house is Sonos, for example, and there's still no really healthy integration between Alexa and Sonos. So I'm kind of waiting for it to start so I can actually use it to be functional other than a source of entertainment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:49) So you want—what do you want? Because I'm just going to message it to Dave later. You want Sonos?

(Cody Sanford at 00:25:54) I do. So that would be—like for me, I would have it in my home in a heartbeat if I could fully integrate Sonos and Alexa. It'd be done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:02) Oh, fantastic. Well, I'll push the message along.

(Cody Sanford at 00:26:06) Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:07) So what right now—what's getting you up out of bed and like really exciting you about the future of T-Mobile? Like what's really, like, what are you pumped up about?

(Cody Sanford at 00:26:18) Well, first I have to say that, you know, the company, the Sprint combination we announced a few weeks ago is by far the most exciting opportunity that we have to transform the 5G landscape. So I'm really excited about that, the potential for that coming true. But if I'm just being selfish for a second, we are in the heart of our digital transformation. And we are, I'd say, probably twelve to eighteen months from being in a place where we can unlock innovation at a speed and a frequency that we've never been able to before. And that all the way down to the customer, whether that's how they're interacting with us or how they're purchasing services or how they're interacting with television, because we're—I don't know if you know this, but we purchased a company called Layer3, which is an over-the-top content provider.

(Cody Sanford at 00:27:12) So we are on the precipice of such amazing innovation, and my team is really at, you know, kind of the vital organs for it. And so I'd say the next eighteen months, the last key and the last lock and the last door gets open, and we get to push it out. So that's what I'm most excited about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:33) That's awesome. Yeah, I just learned about the Layer3 thing. Will you do me a favor and just take mental notes of the experience you get in the transition or the mergers so that like in a year or two, we can have you back on the show? Because, you know, that's always—there's very rare situations where you get to go through that experience because it's such a large situation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:52) And I would love to hear about like what you learned, because, you know, our audience is primarily CTOs. And everyone's getting acquired. Like Adobe just did a big acquisition with Magento.

(Cody Sanford at 00:28:03) They did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:04) And they also acquired my friend Bruno's company, which is—they do like real-time video AI like replacement. So if you're like—if I'm watching a video and you're watching a video and there's a billboard in the video, you'll see like a T-Mobile ad and I'll see like a Nextel ad, right? Because it replaces the objects real-time in video. That's pretty neat, right?

(Cody Sanford at 00:28:24) That is cool. Yeah, yeah. And that is the future.

(Cody Sanford at 00:28:27) If you imagine advertising, so the Layer3 tech, TV that we bought—if you imagine the ability to multicast, so in a home I can have a personal relationship with all five people in the home regardless of the TV. So if I turn the TV on, think the Netflix home screen as opposed to your normal TV where it just brings up the guide and the last channel you were on. And it knows who you are, knows your preferences, it curates the entire experience.

(Cody Sanford at 00:28:55) And I can also personalize—in the future I can personalize what we advertise to you. So if I know that you've been at a BMW store, I can personalize the advertising to make them more relevant too. The ability to do, like, hyper-personalized integrated with your mobile device, over-the-top TV is a huge area of opportunity for us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:18) That's amazing. Especially when we get into the more of the voice control and we get more comfortable with vision. Then I won't even have to pick from the home screen. It'll just know it's me and automatically personalize it to me.

(Cody Sanford at 00:29:28) And you'll—all you have to do is talk to your girlfriend Alexa, and you can do everything from your couch.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:36) I'm gonna rename her computer now. Oh man, this has been a fantastic conversation. And no wonder you've been able to have such a long, amazing climb at T-Mobile. You're extraordinarily personable, and I would love to hang out with you all the time.

(Cody Sanford at 00:29:53) Come on. When are you gonna be in Seattle?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:55) You know, the show is really doing well. This month we have T-Mobile, Microsoft, VMware, and they're all in Seattle.

(Cody Sanford at 00:30:06) Yeah, come out. Your microphone travels.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:08) Yeah, no, we did the Alexa show from RSA, my hotel room at RSA.

(Cody Sanford at 00:30:15) You know, you talked to VMware. That's really cool. Have you spent any time with the Pivotal crew?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:20) Oh, well, I know one of their chief developers from college.

(Cody Sanford at 00:30:25) They're an awesome partner of ours. In fact, if I look at the partners that have probably been most integral to our accelerated digital transformation, they have been just an awesome partner. So I love what they're working on. And where they're headed in the Kubernetes space is also really exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:39) Oh yeah. That's been the containers just exploded. Yeah.

(Cody Sanford at 00:30:44) That's us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:45) That was what I was talking about with VMware. And he was explaining to me the differences with containers and how some of the market or some of the community thought that they were disruptive to VMware, but actually VMware supporting containers to run efficiently in VMware systems, and it's not a negative thing, it's a positive thing. So that was a good conversation too. I learned a lot.

(Cody Sanford at 00:31:05) Yeah. Yeah. Well, they have to hedge their bets with Pivotal because Dell bought them both, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:11) Yeah. Everybody's acquiring everybody. Yeah, it's feeling really good. So, Elon Musk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:17) Are you a fan of Elon Musk?

(Cody Sanford at 00:31:19) I love Elon Musk. I love anyone who asks why not. That's an awesome skill.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:24) And so, let's say that Elon Musk invites you over to his house, right? And he's got a time machine, and you're gonna get to go into the time machine and visit yourself ten years ago and give yourself one piece of quick advice. What would it be?

(Cody Sanford at 00:31:39) It's all about the people. I will tell you that I've spent most of my life in technology, all of my career in technology. And I fooled myself for a very long time that it was actually about the tech. And the longer I've worked in my career, the more and more I understand it has absolutely nothing to do with the tech. It's cool.

(Cody Sanford at 00:31:59) It's almost a passion and a hobby. But the real lesson in life is it has nothing to do with the tech and everything to do with the people who work on it. And the more time I can spend there personally now, the more satisfied I am, and the more we're able to return to our shareholders, to our customers, and to our employees. So that would be my one piece of advice to my ten-year-old self.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:21) Both work. Either your ten-year-old self or ten years ago.

(Cody Sanford at 00:32:24) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:25) Yeah. More about the people. Yeah. I found that out early on in my career. My father is an engineer, so I wrote my first code at eight and I'm in my early thirties now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:34) So for the first, you know, up until my early twenties, so, you know, fifteen plus years, I was just crazy about product and I had that story, if you build it, they will come sort of thing. And then I realized, no, no, no, no. If you bring value to the market, the market responds.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:50) Yeah. That's how it works.

(Cody Sanford at 00:32:52) And, you know, I mentioned this earlier, but when you define value is by asking the question about what is it that you want, and how are you feeling about that experience. And then you're actually able to satisfy what a customer or an employee is asking for. That is the most rewarding technology experience when you can actually give someone something they need and want.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:15) Yeah. And when you pass the spectrum of needing money and you get up at a higher level in the career, you quickly realize that, you know, going from $1 million to $2 million doesn't bring you happiness, but bringing someone value is instantly rewarding and makes you feel good. And we need to do it all the time. It's not like I bring value to someone and I feel good for a week. I have to be doing it every day, all the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:40) Yeah. It's extraordinarily rewarding. Thank you so much for your time. Do you hang out on LinkedIn, Twitter? Where would we—

(Cody Sanford at 00:33:47) Both. Yeah. Yeah. LinkedIn and Twitter. I try to do both. I'm, frankly, I'm pretty shitty at it because it's just about my time. But I do do both, and that's where I spend most of my time. Internally, I'll spend most of my time on Slack, but externally LinkedIn and Twitter are both where you can find me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:03) And does your dev culture, are they excited? And if I see John on, you know, my feed, and then I go work in technology at T-Mobile. Let's say I'm an engineer listening to this, senior engineer, and I wanna go over and experience what T-Mobile's like. Is the culture in your technology section of your business, are they, is it real positive? Does that go through the whole company?

(Cody Sanford at 00:34:26) Well, it's gonna sound incredibly self-serving if I say yes. But it is. Yes.

(Cody Sanford at 00:34:32) No. No. Two things. One is, yes, it is in our environment. Now granted, if you go into a call center or into a retail store, you will be awash in a sea of magenta and screaming, clapping, passionately enthusiastic employees like you've never seen. It really is amazing. The culture in those environments are like nothing you've ever seen. If you go into our dev community, you'll get some of that, but typically, we're a little bit more introverted. So you'll see it's a little bit more muted, but the culture is a very cool spot to work, and I love T-Mobile. What we've become in the last five years is something even better than when I started nineteen years ago. It's been really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:18) And that should be the title of your memoirs of your journey at T-Mobile: Awash in a Sea of Magenta.

(Cody Sanford at 00:35:25) That's good. I'll write that down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:28) It sounded so poetic when I heard it. I was like, oh man. That's such a great line.

(Cody Sanford at 00:35:33) We have these, when we go visit call centers, we have these things called clap-ins. When John shows up, without any exaggeration, when he shows up the entire call center, so I think five to 800 screaming, you know, 20-somethings out there, it will take him an hour to enter the building because he'll stop and talk and take a selfie and clap, and they'll clap the entire time. They will—I mean, and this is, it is, it really comes from a place of appreciation and respect, but it is a part of the culture. I can't explain it. You have to go see it. It's really cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:07) And then when he does it to the dev team, you just hear those Slack notifications just going crazy. Alexa, is—

(Cody Sanford at 00:36:17) That's right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:17) Welcome, John. Oh man. So, yeah, I'm definitely gonna when I'm out in Seattle meeting everybody, I'm gonna stop by, see the office, see what it's like, maybe light saber battle with you and the CTO.

(Cody Sanford at 00:36:30) Yeah. Well, our building is, but if you come at night, because all our entire building and our campus is lit up magenta. So, oh. Yeah. We'd love to have you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:40) Such a simple change. Such a simple way to stand out. You guys really, the Un-carrier Movement. Just write a little memo of that individual and say, hey, do that for our developer stuff, and then just watch T-Mobile explode. Thank you so much for your time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:58) This has been, this is fantastic. This is the best interview. I love it.

(Cody Sanford at 00:37:02) Well, it's been awesome. I really, really need to meet you, and I'll hold you to get in touch with me. I'd love to see you out here in Seattle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:08) Absolutely. Talk soon, my friend.

(Cody Sanford at 00:37:09) Bye. Adios.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:16) 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 00:37:22) I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.