Sunil Singh CTO of Global Logic

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(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) Speaking of great technology leaders, today we are talking to Suneel, the CTO of GlobalLogic, and we discuss digital transformation and what it means for companies around the world, surrounding yourself with people who will challenge you, and why it's important to be open and transparent to gain the trust of your team. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Suneel at 00:01:11) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:12) This is the Modern CTO podcast. I like your leadership poster back there.

(Suneel at 00:01:26) It's only one of them. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:29) I love them. So you're a big fan of, what is that? A specific quote? I can't read it.

(Suneel at 00:01:34) Well, I'll read it for you. What it says: leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. And if ever there was an engineering quote, that's what it said.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:48) Right? I got a little goosebumps here on that.

(Suneel at 00:01:50) Because I'm sure you build products and launch them. The PowerPoint and the vision is the easiest part of the job, done in one afternoon. And then you have the grind and the slog work to get it out there, and that's where leadership comes in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:06) Yes. With that action mixed with the focus, that's the tough human part, to continue that and to literally will your imagination into reality. There's a little pain there.

(Suneel at 00:02:20) Not a little. A lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:21) A lot. So I'm curious to know about the structure of your day. If it were a pie chart and there were three big slices, how would that look?

(Suneel at 00:02:32) Okay. Three. Maybe closer to four. I was just going through it in my mind. But let me tell you, the biggest part of my pie chart by far is hanging out with customers. And by that I mean literally meeting them. I break up my customers into sort of two segments: those who we want to become our customers, and there it's all about understanding what they're doing, understanding the problems they have, and figuring out what's the best technology that'll solve their problems. That's one side.

(Suneel at 00:03:12) And then there are existing customers where we are working for them. And there it's all about, you know, what we're doing today, where is their business going, how will we expand the current road map, fit it into their business. So that, I'd say, is the biggest piece of the pie. The second part, and that's just the nature of my role, is really inward focused—meeting with a lot of the technology leaders within the company, ranging from architects who are working on projects, project managers who are driving the technology development, and just sitting and understanding: okay, how is each project going? Where are the technology challenges? What are we doing? Where do we need to do resets?

(Suneel at 00:03:58) And by the way, it sounds boring, but that's actually one of the most fun parts of the job. And I'd say the third part is really my role as a CTO in the company. We are organized by practices, which are core competencies. You know, DevOps is a core competency. Analytics and machine learning is a core competency.

(Suneel at 00:04:22) So one of the things that I end up doing a lot is figuring out what is the innovation agenda, because we always have to be one step ahead in terms of—so, you know, I act like an internal VC, if you want to call it. You know, it's a company budget, but it's saying, where do we put some bets on? Let's develop this. Let's build a proof of concept. Let's do some innovative stuff, and the administrative structure that underlies that whole thing. I think those are, I would say, the three big pieces of the pie.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:54) That's amazing. And so now I'm curious a little bit more about GlobalLogic and what the business type is. It sounds like you're a large company. Correct?

(Suneel at 00:05:04) Well, depends on what you define as large.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:08) You have more than three people. I'm just kidding.

(Suneel at 00:05:10) Well, let's put it this way. We're closer to almost 12,000.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:14) Right.

(Suneel at 00:05:15) We are large-ish.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:16) You're large-ish. Yeah. And then the style of business that you do—you mentioned you have clients. Right? So right now, a lot of the technology companies that, just by nature of life, come on the show, they happen to do one product really big, like maybe Asana. Right? Prashant, and he's out in the Bay Area too. And so they'll focus on Asana, and obviously there's lots of complexity within it. But do you have one product, or do you work with multiple companies to build products? Can you explain that?

(Suneel at 00:05:45) So I think the latter that you said is close, but let me explain it in a little more detail. We really work with our clients to build out products, platforms, digital systems that will impact their business outcomes. And so if you think about what we're really doing, think of us as a product company, except we're the builders of products for other people. And that includes companies who themselves may be building products for end users, and they are our customers. So we'll often be the behind-the-scenes people building it out for them.

(Suneel at 00:06:27) But I think the most exciting part of it is it also includes a lot of these, you know, what you would consider traditional businesses, you know, retailers or automotive companies. I mean, software and technology is everywhere. And so we build their platforms or products that'll drive their businesses. So we are fairly well established in a few verticals. Retail is big for us. Automotive is big for us. Medical devices is big for us. Telecom is big for us. And in each of those segments, we have different products and platforms we're building for different people, which is why we have so many people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:09) And arguably, I've been making product—I know product—my whole life. Right? So I came in right when everyone was building stuff. I'm in my early thirties. My father was an engineer, embedded systems designer, and so he taught me when I was eight to write code, and then I've just been writing and doing all that since. I got into the founding status and then leadership and advisory.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:31) And you're one of the hardest lines of business there is. When you're a client business to be the size you are, I mean, that's tremendously hard. You typically will see the companies that are at several thousands of people and then the companies that are under a hundred, because if you're able to make that transition and you have those skills, you can usually do really well in the market, but so few are able to do it. I think the only ones that come to top of my mind that are that size are you and maybe a CA Technologies. Right?

(Suneel at 00:07:59) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are a few that specialize. And, again, that's the important part. IT services is a different beast altogether, and product engineering and platform engineering is completely different.

(Suneel at 00:08:14) And we're the latter. And I think you've hit the nail on the head because the kind of thinking and discipline that it requires to build and launch a product and a platform—and that starts right from the specifications. You know, understanding what—it's not just a case of, hey, somebody wrote to you, do this. Good product management requires really understanding what is the business, where will it lead to, what is the road map, because you're not building something just for today.

(Suneel at 00:08:47) You're building something that'll scale, that'll be deployed, will last a few years, yet you have the adaptability built in that you can add new features, functions, pivot as the business is changing. And I think that requires a certain discipline, which once you learn it, you can apply it again and again. But to learn it is the hard part.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:12) I was speaking about this the other day, which was coming up through my head while you were talking: working backwards from the outcome. And that's just what you were hinting around. It seemed like it was, you know, just because it's like, tell me to do something, and then you have to understand a little bit more about the why to bring them the value. And then on top of that, I loved how the first part of the conversation was I spend a lot of time with the customers, because I don't think you would actually be surprised though to find out that when I talk to a lot of the companies that have between 50 to a hundred employees that are struggling, I'm always asking them about how they engage with the customers and how they're engaging with their C-level counterparts of their clients. And they're like, we don't talk to them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:58) And I'm like, change orders come through, we do the—or requests come through, we discuss the price of the request. You don't sit down and talk with them about what they're experiencing, how it's going with their customer, what value you bring them so they can bring value to their customer better? And they're like, why would I do that? That's for my CEO. That's someone else's job. And I'm like, nope. You're the CTO, and they have a CTO over there, and the two CTOs need to get together and collaborate around the customer.

(Suneel at 00:10:24) Yeah. And I would go a step further that, you know, of course, not to undervalue the role of the CEO—they have their own thing. But in the type of business that we are in, which is really technology building platforms or products that'll drive your business, the CTO, that's my view, has a more pivotal role because, yeah, the finance guys will work out the financial arrangements, and the CEOs, of course, will drive the company. But in the end, it's CTO to CTO or CIO to CTO who have to look at each other and say, well, on their side, the customer side, they are being entrusted—and sometimes with very large budgets—to take their business to the next level.

(Suneel at 00:11:13) And they are now relying on you as a partner to help them get there. So that conversation is where rubber really hits the road, and I don't think there's any other way you can look at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:29) I'm enjoying you, my friend. So how did you end up—how did you get to GlobalLogic? What is your path there look like?

(Suneel at 00:11:38) Yeah. That's interesting. I'm not sure that you would consider it, you know—I was listening to you when you were saying, you know, you were a kid and you were coding and you always knew you would go there. You know, I've sort of come at it from a slightly different angle, you know. And I think the most important piece I would say is curiosity drove me.

(Suneel at 00:11:58) So, you know, I did engineering, and then I went to grad school. I was actually at Cornell, where I studied robotics and flying artificial intelligence and all that, a long time ago. And for a short time, I was even an assistant professor at Dartmouth, one of those small schools down in New England. What I think brought me into technology and products was realizing, even as, you know, when I was a professor—I love teaching, by the way, and that's still a passion. But what I really enjoyed was seeing how you could apply technology.

(Suneel at 00:12:38) We were working on these research projects from DARPA where we were building virtual reality platforms. We were designing languages where you could express how virtual actors would behave, applying robotics. And what we started to see was there was such a pull from the industry even then. You know, Intel was building its new chips, which included all those 3D primitives. QuickDraw 3D was coming out at Apple.

(Suneel at 00:13:07) And, you know, so you sort of realize all the excitement is happening there. And so I left academia and started with a bunch of friends. You know, we started building a certain product, did very well, exited. And from that point on, I really have been a—I became a technologist entrepreneur, if you would like, doing different kinds of products. I moved to Silicon Valley from the East Coast, did products in supply and demand chain, real-time analytics, had a few exits. The Internet became hot. Consumer internet was hot. Worked with a couple of companies as an investor, board member in consumer internet space. They did very well. So it's been sort of the startup products journey. And I think I reached a stage where I realized, you know, now I've got all this experience behind me, and maybe what would be fun would be applying that to bring it to other customers.

(Suneel at 00:14:16) And GlobalLogic seemed to be ideal. It's about products. It's about platforms. At the same time, you're applying that to multiple customers. So that's sort of the journey that got me into GlobalLogic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:28) Oh, I like it. So when I was younger and my father taught me, I did it because I thought it was a lot of fun. Right? So I thought it was really cool to see the screen that I saw in the movies, you know, the hacker screens. Right? That's what an eight-year-old would call them, which is just the command prompt terminal. And I thought it was so cool to get it to say stuff, and then he taught me some basic commands. And then I ended up writing a little program that made it so I could press one button and it would run the command. Right? And then I just had a lot of fun with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:00) And actually—and I don't think I've ever even shared this on the show at all—but in high school, I was planning on a police officer or pilot. Right?

(Suneel at 00:15:11) Out of common, I might say. Odd? Out of common aspiration.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:17) Yeah. So my father was in the Air Force. That's how he learned electronics design. They put the GPS systems into the B-52 bombers. And I thought it was very cool. The pilot's just cool. His—one of his business partners had a plane, so I got to go up in it, and I was like, oh, pilot or—and the cool people I knew were firefighters and police officers. They were the cool people. And so I said, you know, I'm gonna go that. And then after, at the end of high school, I saw how much money they made. And I go, well, how much money am I making, you know, in high school doing freelance online? And I was making more money doing freelance in high school than you make in that career.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:00) And so I said, well, that's really cool. But you know, in high school, you think about the cars you want to buy. Right? And you think about—you're heavily object focused. And then I looked at the objects that I wanted, and I was like, well, I need to go into this. I need to just take the thing I love and just parlay that into a career. So it wasn't clear growing up until the end of high school when I had to make financial decisions. Right? And then I went into a real estate office because my stepdad had a real estate office. And I sat around there and I looked and I paid attention to what people's problems were.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:38) And I was talking to them, and so then I built little tools to help them. And ultimately, an agent left that office, went up north because they split their time where they live, told that company about it. They happen to be one of the largest real estate companies in the world. And they flew down and ended up licensing my IP and deploying it to thousands and thousands of real estate agents.

(Suneel at 00:17:00) Great. That's a great story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:02) Yeah. And so that was one of my first ways that I found out, oh, this is how the world works. And then, of course, round two, I didn't do that because I thought it was really cool that I could just build product. And then I realized the most important part is actually being there with the customer so that you're building it to solve their problem because your technology being cool or being designed in a cool way isn't cool unless it solves someone's problem, because that's the only reason why they exchange money.

(Suneel at 00:17:29) Yes. That's exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:31) Sorry. I usually don't tell a longer story.

(Suneel at 00:17:34) No. That's great. I love hearing about it. I'm glad to hear that you found your calling through a certain way, so that's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:43) So tell me a little bit about the first time you had the opportunity to go from individual contributor to being a leader.

(Suneel at 00:17:51) Yeah. I think it actually started right away. I mean, you know, I used to be a professor, and you're sort of a leader there. But let's put that aside because it's a very different kind of role. The first time I founded a company, I was also the CTO then, and also driving the entire—you know, it's a longer conversation at some point about CTO versus VP engineering, but when you're small, it's all the same. You're responsible for the product, and you're responsible for building it. You're responsible for getting it to the customer. So I think the biggest difference from being an individual contributor—you can sit and do your own stuff—is you suddenly realize, okay, I've got to manage these people. And the kind of role a CTO has, the people you're managing are not necessarily yes men or people you just order. They're people who challenge you. They're people who will say, no, I don't agree with this design. Why is it? And so one of the biggest things I learned right away was that you have to sort of lead by example because the easiest way to convince people to do something that you want them to do is to make them believe you really know what you're doing, because then they'll follow you. And so I think it's really important, and that's something I believe very strongly in engineering-centric companies. The leadership has to be people who lead by example. They cannot be just pure managers who just come in and say, well, I don't know what you guys have to do, but here's your schedule to do it. So step one, you learn, okay, be ready to be challenged, show them how it needs to be done, and then you'll get things done. There are a whole lot of other lessons, but I'll tell you that that, I think, was the single biggest learning, and it stayed with me throughout my life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:52) Now I noticed in my research, it looks like—I may be wrong—but it looks like you have two CTOs.

(Suneel at 00:19:58) That is right. Actually, we could have even more than two just because of the size we have. And very often, there's a vertical focus. So one of my colleagues, he works much closer with just the sales side. He's a business CTO working on the business side, and we have a lot of overlap. You know, we both work with customers in there, but our responsibilities within the organizations are slightly different. And then there's actually more than one. You may or may not see all of them. And one of them is focused very vertically in a telecom domain in there. And, you know, one of the things we see is if the amount of work expands too much and one domain is consuming too much time, we're going to put another one there. And so it's sort of a shared responsibility, but very targeted with individual roles and responsibility that happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:58) I love it. That was the first time I noticed that. And I was like, I hope this is right. Because I like how you get to that size, and I like how you bifurcated, split the responsibilities. It looks very intelligent.

(Suneel at 00:21:13) And I think that also has to do with, you know, it is a little bit unusual. If it's a single product company, you will have usually just one CTO. And the reason is very simple. There is a complete sort of end-to-end focus on a single product, and you need decision-making, you know, that is, for lack of a better word, centralized in one thing so that it elevates. The kind of business we are in, we're servicing multiple clients and multiple domains. So while we may share, you know, technology vision, in effect, each individual client is the equivalent of his or her own product. So you're essentially managing the products. And so there, the bifurcated shared responsibility becomes easier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:04) You know, I had a friend of mine send me an article about two weeks ago, and somebody had performed a study. I'm just trying to remember. They performed a study about how technology companies invest in their own proprietary technology. Like, we all know about Google Cloud, Amazon's services, but this study was focused specifically on how they spend on developing their own internal tools to help them serve the market better. And that was really great because in this whole world of us developing products for other people and then leveraging the whole SaaS market in order to serve the customers, it's rare that I find companies building tools at the level of around a hundred people for themselves. Instead, they're just trying to leverage and pull everything together. And myself, I've always been a fan of building tools, something that can help me today, something small that can help me today do better. So that's a culture, you know, in the companies I'm a part of is let's build some tools that help us serve the market better. We don't necessarily need to patch everything in the world together. So I like that you mentioned that that's part of your core business model, that your clients are leveraging you. Like, I may be a big brand and have a fantastic product, and all we do is build our product, and to keep the focus on that rather than booting up another division, I go pick up a contract with GlobalLogic. Now they're solely focused on their pods on developing technology that's going to help me. And to know—I guess for me to raise awareness of that ecosystem is something that I'm enjoying doing because it doesn't get talked about a lot and only recently has it come into the field of my view a handful of times.

(Suneel at 00:23:47) I would add a little bit further to it that even, you know, we also—because we have these horizontal practices that I was telling you, there's DevOps and there's analytics and machine learning, the big data, there's UI, UX—part of what, you know, we do internally because we are working with so many different platforms and products is we sort of learn to connect the dots and say, oh, you know, here is a certain utility or here's a certain tool or here's a certain product or platform or a framework which we think is going to be used again and again because people are using very similar technology stacks. So we build those internally that one of the duties that I was telling you about is I often act as an internal VC and say, let's make some investments. We will build those out because then we can leverage that and get people quicker to market. And that's one of the fun parts of what we do at GlobalLogic, which is, you know, that's kind of also becomes our specialization in ways that we help our customer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:54) Now have you gotten—and I'm just curious because this was on my mind about a year ago. When I first saw Intercom—you're familiar with Intercom?

(Suneel at 00:25:06) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:08) When I first saw them, I just said, oh, wow. This is the future. And I was actually working on a large project, right? And that was a component that we were building as just out of necessity to make that business model more accessible, to make it work easier. And I said, guys, I know we're building this and this small chat thing that we've built, only 20% of the market or 20% of our whole concept. And it's just this little add-on thing that we have to do. But I just saw this company come out called Intercom. And then I looked up and there was, like, another small company out there too, and they maybe had, like, 10—they were small, right? And this—I'm wrong on my timeline. This must have been three years ago. I looked at it and said, what we need to do is we need to break this off and attack the market as quickly as possible with it. Because this other thing that we're trying to do, it's just a little bit better, and we don't—it's just a—we're just building phase right now. We don't actually have any customers or relationships in that area. And I was just advising on the project. I was like, look, this is going to be a huge thing. I went on Crunchbase. I saw two more companies got funded for it. It's like, guys, chat is the future. Like, no, no, no. We're not doing it. I'm like, all right. And then boom. I get an email, like, about six months ago. Like, we should have listened to you. So that was a long-winded way of me asking. Have you guys built any of the chat stuff and made investments into that?

(Suneel at 00:26:18) So the most important thing is, of course, that we build—if we build, we are building for our clients.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:26) Right.

(Suneel at 00:26:26) So, of course, we are building that they've taken to market. Our business isn't really launching our own product. We don't compete with our own customers in that. So whatever we build—we call them more like frameworks and scaffolds, you know, help build things quicker that we can reuse again and again. And we built a lot of those technology that we built for others.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:48) Right. I love it. I'd be amazed. Walking through your building would be like me in the Willy Wonka chocolate factory. It'd just be so cool.

(Suneel at 00:26:59) We joke about it that, you know, what we do, we're like, you know, bringing kids to a candy store. You know, if you start your day at one end, you're dealing with devices that are, you know, medical devices that are saving lives. And you go elsewhere, and it's all about autonomous learning and, you know, autonomous cars, and they're being tested. And you go to a different part, and there's a new retail, you know, mobile app that is being developed. And it's, yeah, it's like being a kid in a candy store.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:39) That's amazing. You mentioned robots. You have a background when robotics wasn't as sexy. It's obviously getting a whole lot more attention now. And I'm curious, have you seen the Boston Dynamics robots?

(Suneel at 00:27:53) Oh, of course I have. And, actually, Marc Raibert was there when I was a grad student in robotics, and he was at Carnegie Mellon. And we used to see his—I don't know what it was called, the jumping dog or the hopping robots. And, yes, I've seen them since that time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:09) Those things are amazing, aren't they?

(Suneel at 00:28:12) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:13) So, like, when you see those things, is your mind just processing all your old school information about how they're operating and...?

(Suneel at 00:28:21) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, robotics is sort of one of the most fun technologies, but it's also one of the hardest. And, essentially, you know, even though it looks very nice and it looks great, what you realize is it's doing something very specific. You know, a hopping robot that is not the same as a walking human being. So it's doing something very specific, and even that requires enormous, you know, control systems and computing power and sensors that are everywhere that are sensing, you know, the tilt and the speed at which it's moving and the orientation and, you know, calculating all that and powering the servos to take the next jump. So, yeah, they're very complex systems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:09) So I'm curious about the future of robotics. And, specifically, I'm curious to know—I was trying to imagine, you know, the future because that's always a fun thing to do. And I thought, all right, what would be a cool point to figure out how long it would take until we get there to ask you? And what I came up with was if we had solar-powered robots, right, that could maintenance their own factory to build them and maintenance their own solar power panel factory that produces those and provides their own power, basically, they're in this immortal cycle of being able to manufacture, repair, and power themselves. How long till we get there?

(Suneel at 00:29:51) Yeah. You know, that's a very difficult question. And, unfortunately, I don't have the most optimistic answer in that. And maybe that's one of the things of the legacy of having come from a time when, you know, robotics wasn't easy. It's taken a long time to even get to where we are. So the way I would say is if you took some very specific functions, you know, Raibert's, you know, hopping robot or—I don't know if you remember long ago when I was a grad student, Rodney Brooks at MIT used to build these what he called these small insects.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:33) Oh, yeah.

(Suneel at 00:30:34) One called Attila and one called Genghis. And, you know, he was trying to prove a point around the subsumption architecture where, you know, each individual, how it stands up and then how it walks. All of these, what they demonstrated was you can do some very specific set of tasks, and maybe you can get them to do it well. I think the big challenge becomes when you start saying, can you build these general-purpose machines that can do tasks the way human beings can do? And I suspect that's where you're leading to, that they're building their own factory and they're doing that. And I think that is really a long ways away, and I know that sounds sort of pessimistic. The optimistic side of it is for specific tasks. Yes. You can build those. The technology is getting there, and we will see that happening. So, you know, as long as you're confining it to a very limited set of tasks, yes, I think those are not that far away. But if you want to build a general-purpose machine, you know, the same thing that AI is trying to do, you know, the strong AI versus the weak AI. Strong AI is general-purpose intelligence, and that's going to be tough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:54) For your official answer, I'll say four to five years.

(Suneel at 00:31:58) Maybe add a zero to that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:01) No. You know, I find the hard thing about thinking about future things is that the future comes at us almost in this exponential way and we think in this linear way. So, like, we always think forward. If I'm going to think about ten years forward, what I'm going to do is I'm going to think ten years ago and then I'm going to equate that to going forward. Right? But that's not how it happens. Right? Because it's always going faster. So that's a disadvantage and the way I always humble myself and ground myself before thinking about the future is realizing that a hundred and ten years ago, electricity was not widespread and available. I mean, I'm living in Florida, so I wouldn't have had AC. You know? And now what we are able to do with data and rockets landing themselves back on their launch pads and just the unbelievable amount of things that have happened and coming from virtually no electricity widespread a hundred and ten years ago to where we are today and the fact that every area on Earth is coming online, like, that's another perspective that we don't always have directly in our vision because we're always surrounded by these electronics. But, you know, Africa is coming online in a huge way right now. They're getting incredible amounts of devices and they're also able to avoid a lot of the mistakes that we made infrastructure-wise because it's more advanced—it's coming to them in a more advanced way. So when I see these other countries coming online, it makes me very optimistic. I'm a fan of documentaries, so when I do watch stuff, I'll watch some interesting nature stuff. And I saw this one on a rainforest, and it talks about one of the ways the rainforest is able to survive and live so well is because of its diversity. Right? It protects itself. And so I love the fact that we have the whole world coming together through the Internet because that means the amount of diversity that we have in our ecosystem for developing products and for making the world a better place for the next generation is only becoming more resilient and not becoming less resilient. Right?

(Suneel at 00:34:07) I agree with you 100%.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:09) I don't know where that came from. I just got excited.

(Suneel at 00:34:12) No, I think, I mean, we see that. Look, GlobalLogic, if you think about it—and not only GlobalLogic, even, you know, my startups and others that we've always had—you know, engineering teams all over the world: Central Europe, Latin America, India, China. So, I mean, that's just the nature. The Internet has brought the whole thing together, and that's what we're seeing now everywhere.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:39) It's so great. Last night I did a late call, a 7 p.m. call with the CTO of Lenovo who splits his time—his name is Art—he splits his time between San Francisco and China. And it was just unbelievable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:53) We're bouncing light, you know, fiber around the world in seconds, and we're talking to each other right now. Like, that's just—it makes me so proud. So from a leadership standpoint, you work with a lot of great people, right? And there's always people around you, whether they're on your direct team or they're just around you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:11) What stands out to you as high-potential future leader actions? Like, when—what's the last time, I guess, you could think in the past—somebody did something and you're like, I'm gonna keep an eye on them for leadership. What was that?

(Suneel at 00:35:24) Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I split leadership, I guess, again along two dimensions, and more based on, you know, the kind of role I have, but also the kind of focus that the company has. So one is around the technology and technical leadership, and the other would be probably the dimension of human leadership, if you want to call it that. So one of the things I always look for amongst young engineers, people who are coming up, you know, architect types, is on the technical side: how good are they at problem-solving?

(Suneel at 00:36:04) You know, and problem-solving doesn't mean you always know what the answer is. It's the approach that you take. I mean, it reminds me of when I—at Cornell, when you're doing your PhD—you have to go in for what is called your defense, where you propose a hypothesis and your advisors and thesis advisors sit there and ask you questions, and they're really testing how good are you. Will you actually be able to complete your dissertation in the original area?

(Suneel at 00:36:38) And I remember there were, you know, one of my professors had asked me a particular problem, very mathematical, you know, manifolds and surfaces and n-dimensions—that's math. And, you know, I tried to answer it, and they said, "This is how?" And I was struggling and sweating and saying, "Oh my God, I don't know how to do this." And at the end of it, I thought, oh, I didn't do that well. And they said, "Oh, you did really well." And I said, "But I didn't get the answer." And his response was, "I don't think there is an answer. We don't know the answer either. We just wanted to see how you approach it."

(Suneel at 00:37:13) So, you know, the combination of how you approach, are you a problem solver? Do you have curiosity about, you know, how you're doing things? Do you bring in innovation? Those are on the technical dimension. On the side of what you are as a person, I think as a leader, these things are really important. You know, how fair are you with people around you? You know, if you're always looking to take credit for work that has been done, that's a red flag. How transparent and open are you? Do you worry about, "Oh, this information shouldn't go out. This thing didn't work well." As long as you see that, you know, the person is transparent, open, is fair—I think those are the things I really look for and say, this person shows potential. So, you know, I'm sure there are many more dimensions people look at, but really, those are the ones that stand out for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:15) Oh, I love it. Yeah. That's the stuff that comes out in real time that's just off, you know, your consciousness. Those are the items that really make you unique. We could iterate through a list of an infinite database, right? But yeah, that's—that was some incredible advice. Thank you for that. So I'm curious to know about digital transformation. We get a lot of people talking about it, and a lot of individuals that listen to the show, engineers, they'll reach out and say, "What's the digital transformation? Everything's already digital." And so—said it well. I will ask for you.

(Suneel at 00:38:54) Yeah. No, no. That's a great—you know, this word is, of course, being used everywhere. And, you know, I'm certainly one of the people who are answering that for my customers.

(Suneel at 00:39:07) So I'll try and give a quick answer to that. See, there was a seminal blog or something that I think, you know, Marc Andreessen wrote some time ago, which was entitled "Software Is Eating the World." And I think if you look at the thesis that was in that write-up, what it really said is any industry that you look at today—it doesn't matter what you're doing. You can be in education. You can be in farming. You can be in automotive. You can be in retail. Every industry is going to be completely transformed by software and digital systems that are coming along. What that really means is what they're doing today—a traditional retailer had stores, and people would come and they would buy, and they understood it well. Well, Amazon has shown the business has changed completely. Why? Because they have a platform through which they essentially recapped the nature of retail. And now you take that to almost any business. You know, automotive is being transformed not just by the battery technology, but by autonomous learning. That's gonna change the entire—Uber has already changed the taxi business. So digital transformation at its most fundamental is about: think how technology and a platform built on technology is gonna change your business. And that's what really digital transformation is about. We go to companies and organizations that have been doing business for 80 years, 100 years, and they're all asking that question: how will my business be changed by a new technology? And that's what we help them do.

(Suneel at 00:40:57) We say, "This is the approach." You know, they all have strong IT departments. They know how to do technology to support the current business. The question is, you have to change your entire mindset now, and it isn't about supporting your current business. It's about building technology that'll drive your new business. It'll bring in new partners. And that, I think, is what digital transformation is all about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:25) Yeah. That's why I like it. I loved that it wasn't a "go to the cloud" answer. No, that's really, really insightful. It actually reminds me—you know, Juniper, right? They do all the switches and the routing. I was speaking with Bob over there, and he's had an amazing career and has been around the Bay Area for a long time as well. And he was telling me that they actually have a—I guess, for lack of a better term—like a think tank there that's always kind of thinking really big thoughts and imagining what's coming down the pipeline next and then working with the chief product officers to see: is this something that we're gonna—this is a great thought, but is this something that's coming now that we can actually do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:08) And when you mentioned digital transformation, you must have some sort of team or infrastructure that allows to think those big thoughts for these companies to ensure their ability to own their marketplace, right, on their vertical. So is that a dedicated job? Like, is that dedicated positions, or do you just get some of the bright top people and pull them in?

(Suneel at 00:42:29) No, we definitely have—I mean, so, again, if you look at a digital transformation as its own sort of vertical, it has, you know, functions that go all the way from rethinking how the business will use the technology, figuring out what the platform will be, what the ecosystem is going to be, how you're gonna drive partnerships. So there is a business angle to it. And then there is the technology angle which says, how are you gonna build what you have and how will you get there?

(Suneel at 00:43:04) And so we do have dedicated people who form that entire team. It goes from one end to the other. And once you have that, you have to help build the thing out for them, and different companies are at, you know, different stages. I mean, they may have tech people, but they have legacy systems that are in there. So, you know, there's a massive amount of transformation that we have to help them get through just to take their legacy systems and rebuild it, you know, on the new modern stack, you know, one that leverages the cloud, while you asked for that, right? You wanted to hear—

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:44) Yeah.

(Suneel at 00:43:44) Well, that is part of actually digital transformation, so we shouldn't underplay that because you're rebuilding it. You're leveraging the cloud infrastructure. But they're also—you know, even the back ends are all—I, you know, if you're a technologist, you know everything is now containers and microservices, and relational databases have gone into polyglot with NoSQL. And even the front end, there's a massive change happening with, you know, presentation layers are shifting with React and—

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:16) DesignOps, that's something I learned that was new. That is true. Yeah, just pushing it real hard through their shared libraries. Basically, you know, reusable code components, but for graphics and branding, and I'm like, woah.

(Suneel at 00:44:30) I mean, but it's all over the thing. And so helping companies think through from end to end, including the building—that is what you would call the full digital transformation. And yes, there are dedicated teams that do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:43) Oh, that's like—I didn't know that that world existed, but if I didn't do this as a job, right, that is, like, right up my alley because you get to leverage the business side of things. I'm a business geek, right? You have to leverage product because it's not enough to know where things are going. You gotta tell me how to get there, right? Like, it's like, yeah, all right, we wanna go north, but we need to know how to get there, how to convert what we have so we can, and then we have to have plans to onboard transfusion systems, you know, data massaging on the in-between ETLs. Like, just all that stuff is—oh, it just—I'm getting too excited from an individual contributor standpoint.

(Suneel at 00:45:30) Well, there's always a role for that. You're welcome to come in and have fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:36) Oh, man. It's just—it's so much fun because you just—I think for anything, there's people out there who have that experience. And just to be able to peek inside your company through this conversation and know that you guys are doing something like that is tremendously valuable. And I'm sure you do a good amount of public speaking.

(Suneel at 00:45:58) Fair enough. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. You know, I would love to do it more if I could find the time, but it's—it's hard to find the time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:05) That's why the podcasts are so convenient.

(Suneel at 00:46:07) Yeah, that is indeed. You can do it right from my office.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:11) But I've found that the individuals who are out there talking about things that are really unique about their business, or at least having, you know, team leads and other people talking about the organization, that attracts the talent of like-minded people.

(Suneel at 00:46:28) That is correct. I fully agree. And I think—I know we didn't talk about this when you mentioned the leadership—but that does bring me to another important one that I do look for when I'm grooming or looking, and that's communication. You know, being able to communicate your ideas, your opinions, and very often, you know, something that is not commonly accepted—and being able to communicate that is supremely critical for a good leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:00) I'm always working on the communication. Writing a book was a good way for me to work on that and expand that. Before I was just saying, "Well, I tried to write and I tried to write a book and it didn't work very well." So then I said, "Well, I don't give up. That's not who I am." I just surrounded myself with people who had done it before and people who could help me on the journey, and then I put out the first book. And that new skill—now I don't have to hire writers. I can just—I can write now. And that ability to communicate through multiple mediums, through video, through voice, and through text—usually people only get comfortable in one, and they only want to exist in that one. But if you have the ability to spread the message in all three, then that just gives you more of an edge in the market. And this is a competitive marketplace.

(Suneel at 00:47:50) It is. It is indeed. But yes, the value of good communication cannot be underestimated.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:57) I actually—I'll share one story that happened today. So I put a job posting out for video editors because I've been editing my videos, and we have multiple types of videos and we have about seven people at the company. But this one type of video I have been editing myself. And I wanted, as a leader—it's always important to know where you're spending your time, allocating your time, and then what items are able to be delegated to other people once they've been process-sized enough and you've had enough experience with them. So I put out this job for video editor. I get this reply from this guy named Alex, and he's up in Connecticut. And he says to me, he says, "Look, I wanna come move down to Florida and work for you. I saw the podcast. I saw the job posting. I love what you're doing. It's unbelievable how you're talking to these great people." He's like, "I wanna come work for you." And I said, "Oh, tell me a little bit about yourself." He's from Russia. He was doing very well in a nice film production company over there—great portfolio, all the stuff. Him and his wife accidentally won the lottery for a green card. Boom. Got a green card in the United States overnight. They have five-year-old kids, so they said, "Well, we don't speak English," and, "This is a major opportunity." They never thought that they would get it. It's not even like a visa. It's just straight green card lottery that happens—

(Suneel at 00:49:19) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:19) —which was news to me, right? Because I knew you could apply for, like, high-performing visas and things like that. So then they're over here for six months. They learn enough English to do a job interview, and his wife has to speak for him because she learned it faster. He gets a job interview, and now he's like, "It's very cold, and I just came from Russia, and one of the bonuses of coming to America was that we'd live in a warmer climate." We happen to be in Florida. So he's like, "I wanna move—finish up my project here and then move down and come work for you." I'm like, "You would actually do that. You would just pick up and bring your family down here just to work and for the opportunity?" And I go, "There's no guarantee. You gotta work hard. You gotta produce." And, like, "I'm not guaranteeing anything." He's like, "Yeah." And so he's on his way down, and he's in his early thirties like I am, and he's just hungry, and he's driven, and he has incredible work ethic based on—you can't fake a large portfolio like that, right? And I was just blown away. I said, "I've never done that before. I've never hired someone off of a video call." But when I saw his work, he could perform the work, and he had that drive, and they found out they were scared to do it, but they did it. And he speaks virtually perfect English in one year. He's been here for, like, you know, a year, and he speaks virtually perfect English, and he's just trying so hard. When you see that happening and they have quality of work, I said, "Yeah, you're hired. Come down to Florida."

(Suneel at 00:50:42) Well, that's an inspirational story because it also shows you the value of dedication and hard work. And I say that, and this is really true in engineering. Yes, you want tremendously bright people, or you want innovative thinkers. But if you don't have the tenacity and the hard work to back it up, it just won't cut it because I don't care how many—I mean, I've built and launched I don't know how many products, some that I founded, some for clients.

(Suneel at 00:51:17) But you know, there is a period of getting it built and stuff which is just will feel like a grind. And if you don't have it in your DNA, engineering is gonna be tough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:31) That persistence and that drive. I've got two more questions for you, and then we'll begin to wrap it up. First one is, what are you most excited about at GlobalLogic? Like, what's getting you jumping out of the bed in the morning?

(Suneel at 00:51:44) Well, that's a broad question. I know. I'm gonna come in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:50) I didn't say it was easy.

(Suneel at 00:51:53) Because, you know, there are many things. There are things we're doing and, you know, if you look at our website, we're welcoming a very powerful and big set of investors. There's all those things. But I'll answer the CTO of what's getting excited is, you know, it's really the new technologies. But even within that, if I had to pick the single area that's just—I feel is gonna change the world—it's the AI machine learning.

(Suneel at 00:52:25) And I'm sure you're hearing it from everybody, so it's more of the same. But I'm telling you, we are working across sectors from, as I said, retail, education, automotive, telecom. And if I was to say the single unifying thread that is just coming up is that everywhere there's this embedding of the new AI and machine learning to drive more and more functionality. You know, the retailers are predicting customer behavior. They're predicting inventory levels. They're doing in autonomous driving, you're looking at machine recognition of obstacles. And this AI and machine learning is ubiquitous. You know? My sort of new way of thinking is, we used to be—mobile was hot, whatever, fifteen years ago, and everything was becoming mobile first.

(Suneel at 00:53:23) Then it became cloud and it's cloud native. Well, now is the era of AI native. Every product is gonna have elements of AI embedded. That's getting me really excited.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:37) I see it when I look at the market. I'm a big fan of studying, like, what happened in the past, especially a few years ago. I went on a big history kick, and I saw what was happening in, like, the forties through the eighties, nineties with computers. Right? How they started out giant rooms and then they slowly shrunk down and you saw—but in that process, while you see the technology transition, in the marketplace, what was happening is these companies were focused and they were coming out and becoming in business just for building the one piece of the pie. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:11) And then you if you look at the, I guess, the lighthouse, the milestone being the personal computer maybe in the, you know, early two thousands. Right? Where it's all just one thing. You can just get it and it's all there and you scrub that timeline back to the forties where everything's giant and huge and then the sixties. That's how I see right now with everyone building their basic AI functions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:35) Like I see the essentially the conscious style, at least the fakeably conscious, right, style AI. And then I see everybody building the little pieces. Like this person's working on the visualization piece. This person's working on the thought piece. There's some emotional cortex concepts going on with emotional recognition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:55) That's really cool. And so as I see the market, I said, alright. Well, I see it going there, and I see everybody building their pieces. Again, I just don't know what the timeline is.

(Suneel at 00:55:04) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you'll see the impact of what I call this very specific problem solving using AI and machine learning in all of products. I think already out there, and you're gonna see them all over.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:22) And we get all the benefits too. Like, I spoke to Canon and Verizon, and they were telling me about how they're using—one of the big things that they have going on today is the predictive analytics across their IoT networks of knowing when a piece of equipment is going to fail and shipping you out new pieces of equipment prior to its failure. Like, I love it.

(Suneel at 00:55:41) Yeah. And that's just one part. I mean, you can just go across anything. As I said, autonomous learning, you know, they're learning how to recognize obstacles, becoming better. If you go into education, it's all about learning how students are picking up and deciding what path so it becomes personalized.

(Suneel at 00:56:01) I mean, it's just every product that's gonna come out is going to have AI embedded in it, which is why I said it's the AI native products that are the next big thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:13) I love it. I love the AI native. So Elon Musk, are you a fan of Elon Musk?

(Suneel at 00:56:20) I know him. Yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:21) Yeah. How could you not—oh, you actually know Elon Musk?

(Suneel at 00:56:24) No. No. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:26) Oh, okay. I was like, shut up. Come on. It's like a school girl over here. Like, what? No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:32) So, so let's say that he calls you up. Right? Or let's say you're driving down the road, and he pulls up in his Tesla, and he says, hey, I got a time machine. Come on over to my house. And you get to go on the time machine and go back in time and give yourself advice ten years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:48) What advice would you give your past self?

(Suneel at 00:56:52) Ten years. Ten years ago, before COVID. So I mean, what I would say at every instant I would give myself the advice probably about, you know, trusting your instincts much more. And I think this is especially true for those of us who are engineering analytic guys. If I look back, not just ten years, but twenty years or whatever, you know, twenty, twenty-five years, I always get the thing that there's a lot of things that you've seen coming or have—you know, and you could almost say, I think this could happen. So the advice I would probably give is trust your instincts and maybe put your money where your mouth is because a lot of us are able to see into the future again, especially those of us who have strong analytics, the knowledge, the foundation, to trust your instincts more and maybe bet on it a lot more.

(Suneel at 00:57:53) You know, I've done some of it, but I now look back and say, you know, I could have done a lot more and trusted my instincts and guided myself in that manner. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:03) Trust yourself. I love it. That's some great advice.

(Suneel at 00:58:08) Yeah. That's the key. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:10) We did it, my friend. We made a podcast, and it was unbelievable. Like, it was really good. You just deployed an incredible amount of value and knowledge. I can't thank you enough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:22) Is there anything else that we didn't cover that you would like to cover?

(Suneel at 00:58:25) No. I mean, we could talk for twenty-four hours and not cover technology—such a vast field.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:32) Oh, yes.

(Suneel at 00:58:32) And I enjoyed it. So yes. Alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:35) Have a fantastic day.

(Suneel at 00:58:37) Okay. Take care.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:38) Bye. Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:49) I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.