Bob Worrall CIO of Juniper Networks

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. As you progress in your career, communication becomes one of the most important skills that you can have. We use communication to set context and sell our vision. We use it to create buy-in or resolve tension within our teams. It's communication skills that allows me to bring you this podcast week in and week out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:20) And I didn't always have the best communication skills. They were learned bit by bit over time, and I'm still working every day on improving them. If you're interested in improving your communication skills, head over to leaderbits.io and sign up for the free trial to experience it for yourself. Now, get ready for an absolutely fantastic podcast because today we are talking to Bob Worrall, the CIO of Juniper Networks, and we discuss articulating the bare essentials to sell your vision, being energized by hard problems, and embracing the unknown to grow as a leader. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Bob Worrall at 00:00:59) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:00) This is the Modern CTO podcast. That was so much fun. It's amazing. Every day, it's like CTO of Microsoft, CTO of Verizon, and we always have something going on with a microphone.

(Bob Worrall at 00:01:22) Yeah. Mankind can put people on the moon, but we can't make an audio call. It's a little crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:30) How's your day going?

(Bob Worrall at 00:01:33) Yeah, really good, actually. How about you? I hear you're in Florida, so you're probably a little hotter and steamier than we are, but things are good here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:40) Yeah. I love it. In the morning, I go for my 5:30, 6:00 a.m. run, and so it's nice and cool. And it's not until that sun comes out really that—it's beautiful before when it's humid and cool, but when it's humid and hot, it's not fun. So I get on top of the day early.

(Bob Worrall at 00:01:56) Good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:57) You must too. I mean, I'm looking and reading all about you, and I was just blown away by your experience and the companies that you've gotten to work with. It's amazing. How did you get started in technology?

(Bob Worrall at 00:02:12) Yeah. So that's maybe a weird story. So I don't come from a technical background. I was working on my MBA in quantitative methods and supply chain management of all things. And at the time, I had a job doing planning for a large manufacturing firm here in the Bay Area. And life was good. But about the same time, I got married and had our first child, and I was the single breadwinner for the family. And so money was really critical. And a buddy of mine called who was working for a small tech startup here in the Bay Area. He said, you know, we need someone who can kind of figure out what those programmers are saying and explain it to the business. And I've known you for a long time, and you're good at marriage counseling and those kinds of things. So we need someone to perform that activity between the programmers and the business. What do you think?

(Bob Worrall at 00:03:04) And I only asked him one question, honestly. I said, what's it pay? And he said—I'll never forget this—he said, I'll give you $5,000 more than you're making now. And I said, sold. When do I start? Because my sole focus, as selfish as that sounds, my sole focus was I've got a new baby at home. My wife just quit work. I've got a house payment to make. And so I went home and I explained my decision to my wife. And after she kind of picked herself up off the floor, I started at this small startup, which was in the toy industry of all things, but it was high-tech toys. And the company was Worlds of Wonder. We had one smash hit, which was our animated talking teddy bear, Teddy Ruxpin. And so there's a few nodding heads here in the room. That was—we were the coolest thing on the planet for a while until we went bankrupt.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:13) That's what they based the movie Ted off of, right?

(Bob Worrall at 00:04:15) Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it was a great job and having then two young kids at home. We were product testing everything, and it was a really cool thing. But I was finishing my master's degree in supply chain management, and I thought, well, I got a decision to make. One was, do I stick with this IT thing that I was just introduced to or go back to sort of my roots? And, again, for financial reasons, I thought, well, the IT guys seem to get paid more than the supply chain guys, so I stuck with it. And then the same friend who dragged me into IT in the nineties knew of this other relatively small startup called Sun Microsystems and recommended that I sort of parlay my experience in doing business analysis into a bigger role at Sun Microsystems. And so I joined them in 1990.

(Bob Worrall at 00:05:05) And over a 20-year career—by the way, that was a fabulous company for the record. Over a 20-year career, Sun had a really proactive kind of HR approach to taking what they classified as high-potential employees and almost forcibly rotating them across functions to gain lots of experience. And I was no different. I had a great mentor who, for whatever reason, saw some potential in me and kind of put me on the fast track of every two to three years moving from one function within IT to another. And so I started out doing business analysis and then into infrastructure and then applications and compliance and security.

(Bob Worrall at 00:05:52) And I got to the end of a 15-year journey doing that, and the CIO at the time was leaving to do a different role. And the CFO came to me and said, well, you've done everything else. The only other job we've got free to do is the CIO role. And I said, you know, I've seen what CIOs do. Why in the hell would I want to do that? You know, it's a very stressful job. There's a lot of travel and so on. I said, yeah, thanks, but no thanks. Not interested. I was just happy doing the things I was doing. And a couple weeks went by. He came back and he said, no, seriously. Let's have this conversation again.

(Bob Worrall at 00:06:32) And so after some back and forth and, you know, him being a great salesperson and convincing me that the CIO job would not require 90% travel, I decided, yeah, what the heck? I've kind of made a career out of being willing to do anything that they asked me to do, so I'll give it a try. And so for the final five years at Sun, I was the CIO and we dealt with the whole transition and acquisition by Oracle. And then, you know, I guess as the story goes, my network had been significantly built by that time and had some acquaintances who had left Sun and went to NVIDIA, the chip manufacturers down the street.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:14) Gamers.

(Bob Worrall at 00:07:14) And so the same story kind of pursued. They called me and said, hey, we've got this gig. What do you think? And I thought, well, why not? Did that for four or five years. And then the third and final installment is some former friends from Sun who had went to this startup 20 years ago called Juniper Networks called and said, hey, we got a deal going on at Juniper that's really cool, and it's a chance to sort of work with all, you know, former friends. And we've been here about three years, and it's fabulous. I can't say enough positive things. Probably the biggest draw for me was that opportunity to work in a culture which was very similar to Sun, work with people that I was familiar with, and have some fun doing some really important work. So I've enjoyed it ever since. Sorry for the long—

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:15) Oh, no worries. Yeah. I actually got connected or I became aware of Juniper through one of the speakers that talks, writes, and speaks about Juniper. I think he's one of the original ambassadors. They're called ambassadors, right? I'm pulling from a couple months ago. And his name is Stefan, and he mentioned the story of the CEO, which was a really cool genuine founding story. And then through our people and their people, we got connected with the CEO, and he said, actually, you know, this is the person you want to speak to. Bob's awesome. And I said, oh, this is absolutely fantastic. I like NVIDIA. They do so much more than gaming. They are huge. They've got these huge farms that they'll license for massive computations, and so I get geeky with that stuff. And so, yeah, I really—I haven't gotten the luxury to do the gaming stuff in about a decade, but—

(Bob Worrall at 00:09:11) It's changed over the last 10 years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:14) Yes. But I really resonate with your story given the fact that I have an 11-year-old daughter and a second one on the way. So that motivation, that drive—there's no way to explain it until you have the living breathing thing and you're holding it in your hands, but I just had this—every day, I get up, I get my giggles, you know, because I get the giggles early in the morning, and I'm just like, I'm going to own the world for you. That's why I'm walking out that front door right now. And that makes so much more of a difference than when I was in my twenties and I was focused on object-related things. But this fuel, this fire just keeps growing.

(Bob Worrall at 00:09:55) It's a strong motivator.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:58) Hungry mouths are strong motivators. Yes. So for those of us who don't know what Juniper Networks is, can you give us the high-level overview?

(Bob Worrall at 00:10:07) Sure. It's pretty easy. So we've been in business about almost 21 years. We are what's called a network provider. We make network infrastructure for the largest companies on the planet. We literally power the Internet with some equipment that was designed back in the nineties. Our claim to fame, I guess, is we solve some of the most complex network challenges known to man. So today, we are used by some of the largest cloud providers, service providers, telecommunications companies to handle the most complex routing and performance challenges around. And we have since extended some of that innovation and technology into life sciences and other adjacencies where they can take advantage of some of that innovation. So, again, our claim to fame is powering the network with the most innovative solutions on the planet, and we are passionate about solving network problems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:12) So you're a great leader, right? You've gotten—I've read your recommendations. Obviously, for you to progress to where you are today in your career, you've had to obtain these amazing leadership skills. So I'm curious to know what your first experience was getting to lead your first team.

(Bob Worrall at 00:11:28) You know, I honestly, I was scared to death. My first team was a really crusty group of old guys who were 20 years my senior and had gone through technical school and got all the credentials and everything else that I didn't have. Honest to God, I never forget when I was given the opportunity to go lead this group, kind of stepping out of the business analysis role into my first infrastructure job where I was going to lead this team. I knew nothing about what these guys do and probably lost more sleep that weekend than I can ever recall after that worrying about it. And I guess I used a trick that has served me well since, which is I went in that morning and gathered everyone around the table and I said, let me get one thing perfectly straight. I'm the stupidest guy in the room. You all know more than I will ever know and I will never profess to know everything that you know. And I said, here's what I think I can lend to the group, right? I can lend some organizational skills. I'm a pretty good communicator. So don't think of me as the superior or the boss, but think of me as a team member who's got a different set of skills. And I kept at that theme for a while. And you know, over time as we encountered lots of crises as you do in IT and I was able to kind of lend those skill sets, I began to build a rapport and some credibility with them. But through my entire career, I was kind of taking that. So as I've moved into each of these functions, I've been the guy in the room who's had the least knowledge about that subject. And though I work really hard to gain a functional knowledge of the topics, I don't profess ever to be the smartest person in the room, but only to have maybe a different or a unique skill set that hopefully helps the team at large.

(Bob Worrall at 00:13:33) So, you know, that was a scary moment. And, you know, I guess the other takeaway—if I, sorry to prolong this—but the other takeaway from that experience and a series of other experiences in my life is the best thing that my manager did for me in that experience was not help me at all. What I mean by that is, you know, the guy I was working with was a good friend of mine. He could have stepped in and said to the team, here's Bob and you're going to listen to everything he has to say and he's going to come to me if you're screwing up, all those kinds of things. He basically said, you're going to manage these guys. I'm not going to help you at all. You're going to live or die by everything that happens in the next 72 hours. And so that crisis of conscience that you have, you know, whether it be mouths to feed or this new function that you're leading, you've either got to deal with it or you're going to crash and burn. And so there's that crisis of self-reliance and self-confidence and everything else. And you come out of that when it's successful. You come out of that with kind of a renewed confidence, right? And you kind of take that to the next gig. So it was a small team. Yeah. I think we had six or eight guys at the time, but the experience and the lessons were invaluable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:38) No. That's—I love it because usually it's the first team is when you get to make all the mistakes.

(Bob Worrall at 00:14:44) Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And I made mistakes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:47) Oh, yeah. So it's always—I usually ask the question, what was the first team and then how did you screw up? So if you were to make a pie chart—I'm really curious, right? You make a pie chart of your day and you had to identify the three biggest slices, what does that look like for you?

(Bob Worrall at 00:15:07) Of my workday? It would be—I guess—three biggest slices. So the first slice would be, I guess, I would label all the normal stuff that IT people do, which is, you know, looking after all the projects we've got going on, looking after budgets, looking after escalations. There's always escalations. Somebody's laptop's not working or those kinds of things. That would be a big portion of it. The next third, I guess, would be—here at Juniper, the IT function plays a specific role, which we refer to as customer one. And that means deploying early versions of Juniper products and helping the engineering community to understand product features or gaps or bugs or those kinds of things. So we have a focused team who looks after all of that, and that kind of takes some unique time. And then the third element, which has grown in the last couple of years, is just a focus and time and attention spent to the security topic. We have a pretty significant investment in people and technologies at Juniper to look after security of all types, right? Individual privacy, customer privacy, all of those kinds of things. And because Juniper is used by national infrastructure providers, governments, intelligence agencies, banks, all of those kinds of people, they have very significant expectations of privacy and security, and so that consumes a lot of time. So those are the three big sections, right? Kind of the day-in and day-out IT stuff, our Juniper on Juniper program, and then security.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:51) I really liked how you mentioned briefly—you called it customer one, right? Because that's so smart because those are the people who implement your products ultimately, right? Was that the reference?

(Bob Worrall at 00:17:01) Yeah. It's exactly that. It's, you know, ideally, my team who's sitting on the other side of this wall, the network team, they should be the first people who deploy a new switch, router, firewall, whatever it might be. And if it fails here in our campus, that's actually a good thing, right?

(Bob Worrall at 00:17:21) Our employees might not like it, but the engineers are excited because they run over and they say, "What happened? It shouldn't have happened, so let's diagnose it."

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:31) No, that's amazing. Yeah, they can't even Google the answer for it because they're the ones creating it.

(Bob Worrall at 00:17:35) Exactly. Yeah, we make a note as we go on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:39) What is the project that you're most excited about today? Like, what's getting you out of bed? What are you jumping out of bed for?

(Bob Worrall at 00:17:47) Oh boy. I guess the one that's got us the most excited right now is we're at the tail end of a significant project that's been going on for a couple of years, which, I guess if I had to put a label on it, it's really Juniper's move to the cloud. And if I take a step back and describe that briefly, about four or five years ago there was a discussion with our board of directors about the fact that our customer base was changing. If you go back in history for Juniper, Juniper largely sold to the likes of AT&T and Verizon and others, provided them the infrastructure. Over time, as our solutions and technologies have evolved, cloud providers and other very innovative companies have begun to adopt our technologies.

(Bob Worrall at 00:18:34) And what we learned from that new customer set was there's a new way of doing business, and that way of doing business is moving things to the cloud. So today that sounds kind of silly, but five, six, seven years ago it was still fairly new. And so, credit to the board and our founder, the board set aside a significant amount of money and said, "We want Juniper to take full advantage of all these new technologies and features just like all the big guys—the Amazons, Googles, Facebooks, and everybody else. So go make it happen." And so we set out on this multiyear journey.

(Bob Worrall at 00:19:09) And in the last couple of years, we have successfully now closed all of our data centers. We had 18 data centers at that time. We're down to one small little colocation facility. We've moved all of our business applications to some flavor of the cloud, either up to Amazon or to a software provider or something of that sort. And so, if all goes well—I'm going to go out on a limb here—but if all goes well, by about November we will close the final colocation we have, and we'll be able to say with great pride that we have no data centers whatsoever. And that's, you know, again, for the likes of a Google or Facebook or something, that's not that astounding. But I challenge you to look at any large enterprise in the US and see how many data centers they have left and the complexity that goes with that. It's an amazing feat of energy and performance and technology that the team has put in the last couple of years. But I think also it showcases to people who are stuck in that journey that it can be done.

(Bob Worrall at 00:20:14) Right? We're no different. At one layer, Juniper's no different than any other large company. Right? We have the same challenges that everyone else does, but somehow we've overcome it.

(Bob Worrall at 00:20:24) So I think we can showcase the art of the possible for other large companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:30) You had me thinking back. So about ten, twelve years ago, I had a pretty successful real estate software. And one of the things that made it so popular was the fact that we piped in massive amounts of multiple listing data from hundreds of different agencies that were all updating multiple times a day. And I was the CTO and the cofounder, and so we had to make the decision of which data center to put into. I think I ended up going with Rackspace.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:58) But I remember the bill we'd get from them to actually put in a ticket, let someone build the machine, set up our slave cloning and everything like that. Those were custom scripts—it wasn't a feature. I had to go in there and manually set up or pay managed services to do my backups, and then just go there and move physical machines around. It was just crazy. And then now it's like I just spin up an instance that expands infinitely, and I don't even worry about it. It's pennies.

(Bob Worrall at 00:21:28) You don't have to worry about backups or failover or redundancy at all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:31) They're real-time diffing my Postgres database, so I can go back—there's just a million forks. I can go to any point in time and just be like, "I want to restore that." It's just unbelievable in what a short period of time. But what you mentioned, the way you were able to get the whole company—or the way the whole company was able to transition—says a lot about the culture. I'm curious, could you give me an insight of what it's like to be on the Juniper team?

(Bob Worrall at 00:22:00) Sure. I think you're right in that for most companies, if the CEO said, "I want you to move everything to the cloud," typically a lot of antibodies would come out. Right? There'd be lots of reasons why it couldn't get done or whatever. At Juniper, there always has been—this is a credit to Pradeep Singh, our founder—he set a culture of, you know, don't think of what's impossible. Right? Just break down the barriers. And so there's a strong—I don't know how to describe it otherwise—but there's a strong sense of teamwork at Juniper when there's a really gnarly problem facing the company. Everyone, because of their thirst to solve hard problems, just jumps on it with a lot of ambition and thirst and vigor. And so this was no different. I think the board set this really gnarly goal for everyone.

(Bob Worrall at 00:22:52) And they said, "Look, this is not an IT project. Let's make that perfectly clear. This is a Juniper project." Right? It's going to require engineering, marketing, finance, IT, legal, HR, everybody.

(Bob Worrall at 00:23:05) And so, you know, pulling together that sort of cross-organizational team, which was largely driven by IT but included all those team members, and establishing it as a company goal, not an IT goal, I think was the fundamental difference for us. But we, as I say, relied heavily on what we refer to as the Juniper Way, which is kind of that set of values that makes Juniper's culture an important differentiator.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:32) No, that's my tribe, man. That's my people. It's like, let's do something hard. Let's solve something hard. Let's have some fun. And then—I wake up with such a zeal, like a zest for life. I just want to go out and do things. And so for me, a lot of my development over the past decade has been the focus of that energy. Right? And once I got that down, I went from being the sun lighting everything up to being like a dangerous ray—wherever I put my energy is getting done.

(Bob Worrall at 00:24:06) No, it's—you know, I joined about a year after that board decision was made. And when I arrived, people were in the course of doing technical designs and project plans and all that. And I can tell you, in the last three years that I've been here, countless times where someone got hit with some roadblock of some sort, right? And kind of scratched their head and they go away for the weekend and they come back and they're like, "I figured it out." You know? So I think people in companies like Juniper are energized by those hard problems, and this one is certainly good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:40) Oh, and those weekends away are good. I remember when I was writing code in my sleep quite a bit. There were many years when I would dream I'd be writing the code, and then I'd wake up and I'd write the code, and I'd be like, "All right, that dream was a little bit too real-time."

(Bob Worrall at 00:24:56) Like, I've worked a little bit too much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:57) But it's interesting when you solve—I'm sure you solve problems in your sleep. It's just something that, you know, I think happens from time to time. Now, you have a CTO and a CIO, and I was talking with Cody. He's the CIO over at T-Mobile. They also have a CIO and a CTO, and they handle their disputes with lightsaber battle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:12) Okay. What is the relationship like? How are the responsibilities? I know the answer on a broad spectrum. Everyone's like, "What's the difference?" I'm like, "It depends on what company you're at."

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:29) Yeah, very different at every company. So I would like some insight on what the CIO, CTO looks like at your company.

(Bob Worrall at 00:25:43) Sure. I like the lightsaber idea. I might take that one. Yeah. So, let me explain it, maybe from a lifecycle perspective.

(Bob Worrall at 00:25:55) So our CTO is a fabulous guy who just joined the company named Bikash Koley. He came over from Google where he ran all of Google's network. So his basic job is to be the big thinker, right? To think five, ten, fifteen years downstream and where Juniper's got to be from a products perspective. He's got a bunch of really smart people who sit in dark rooms and think big thoughts. He then hands those ideas over to our Chief Product Officer, who takes those kind of raw ideas and notions and market analysis and squirrels away and does some real market analysis and says, "Yeah, that idea is smart because we can make money off of it, and here's the specific products that we need to take to market to accomplish that." The Chief Product Officer then takes it to our Chief Engineering Officer and says, "Great, you guys have told me what to make. I'll go make it."

(Bob Worrall at 00:26:53) Right? So he turns ideas into boxes and software. And then Chief Engineering Officer gives his products to me, and I go deploy it. So that's a long-winded way to get to your question, but there's this lifecycle that evolves from CTO to CPO to Chief Engineering Officer to CIO. All four of us report to the CEO, and it's very, very clear in all of our staff conversations that each of us has those distinct roles.

(Bob Worrall at 00:27:25) Right? But, again, sort of pulling it back to the culture piece, what I can also tell you is that though each of us has those specific domains, there's an immense amount of collaboration. So if Bikash says, "Here's what I see happening in the hyperscaler data centers," because of my background as CIO, he'll pull me in and say, "What do you guys think?" Or he'll pull in the product and marketing guys and say, "What do you think?"

(Bob Worrall at 00:27:51) So at the end of the day, he's responsible, but in fact, today's a great example. We're having a meeting after this with the CTO office, and we're just brainstorming some big problems that his team sees five years from now. He's trying to get some real-world input on it from my team. So yeah, it's a great cross-organizational collaboration.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:13) I love it. I feel like I owe you a consulting fee. No, it's—I like hearing, you know, how different companies are structured and what they do, because at the end of the day, we're all working together towards enhancing technology and making the world better for the next generation, right? So I really love hearing about that. I like the flow of how that's handled, and to be completely honest, that's the first time I've ever heard that. So that was original for me to hear.

(Bob Worrall at 00:28:45) Cool. Juniper is very original, so I'm glad that it worked out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:49) So as a leader, and you work with other individuals and other teams, when you see an emerging leader—right, amongst your crew of available people you interact with, so that's not necessarily directly on your team—when you see an emerging leader, first of all, what is happening that makes them stand out? What have you noticed? Like, what will catch your attention as, "Oh man, that person's just doing things that stand out as they're going to be fantastic leaders in the future"? Like, what catches your eye about that?

(Bob Worrall at 00:29:22) Yeah, it's a good question. I've done a lot of mentoring over my career, but in terms of the one thing that stands out, this might sound kind of silly, but above everything else, if somebody walks into a room and can articulate their thoughts and ideas in a very succinct manner, I'll listen to that person all day long. On the contrary, if somebody walks in and they can't effectively communicate and they sort of ramble on and they're literally reading the slides and so on and so forth, I will mentally tune them out instantly. And so that's just my personal thing, right? That's my personal pet peeve. So that distinguishes the makings of potentially a good leader, because I think a good leader needs to be able to get to the point quickly, make the sell, and get out. Right? And I'm not claiming I'm really, really good at this, but I think one of the things that has helped me in my career is that if I need to go into an executive session to make a pitch for something, I will strip down the messaging to the absolute bare essentials.

(Bob Worrall at 00:30:26) Right? And always be conscious of the audience, the lack of patience that they're going to have, and so on and so forth. And so to this day, in fact, last night I had to go to our audit committee of the board of directors with an update, and I was in and out of that presentation in about ten minutes, answered all their questions, and got out. And I think back to the thing that I cherish so much—this ability to be succinct and articulate.

(Bob Worrall at 00:30:52) I try and be a living example of that. And I hope in the course of that, show people that if you're in this for the long run, you've got to attend to both your technical skills, your leadership skills, and your communication skills. Right? It's got to be a whole package. Can't be one or the other.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:09) I love it. And here's why. I get the question all the time: "How do I level up?" Right? How do I go from individual contributor to team leader, or just to the next level? And they're like, "I've been reading all the books on my craft and improving, learning all the programming, learning all the advanced techniques." And I said, "Well, you need to spend time learning the skills that you'll have to have at the next level. And you have to begin learning and understanding and practicing those today, because becoming better at writing your code won't necessarily be the skills you'll need to lead the group of people writing the code." And so it's like a video game, right? So pay attention to what the players are doing that are in the levels higher than you and go ask them for help, or go ask them what materials they learned from, or just go ask them about their transition. And that's how, for me, I capped out. Right? So I got to leader, team leader, founder of company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:05) And so one of the reasons why I started the show was so I could have access to people who are so far up there and have done it for so many years and are running these massive companies, that I could then see how they think and what they do and what they focus on. And I've always been good about going after something, but just in my own way. I was curious what wealthy people read, so I went and walked through a couple open houses of some million-dollar houses and took pictures of their bookshelves. I was like, "What got these people this house?" Like, I get having some money, but these are mansions. Let's see what they're reading.

(Bob Worrall at 00:32:47) I'm just thinking if somebody walked through my house, what impression they would get of me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:53) As long as they don't go in the dungeon. No. Oh man. Where are you located, by the way?

(Bob Worrall at 00:33:01) So we're in the Silicon Valley Bay Area. I live in the East Bay, just over the hill. A nice little bedroom community. But lived here all my life. I had a two-year assignment—I don't know if you saw in the bio—I was over in Amsterdam for a couple of years. Other than that, fortunate to live here in the Bay Area a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:19) I thought that's where you were going to go. I knew about the Netherlands, so I thought that's where you were going to go when you said, "They promised me there wasn't any travel, then they sent me to the Netherlands."

(Bob Worrall at 00:33:28) Yeah. Yeah, that was an interesting household conversation too, talking about, you know, feeding mouths and so on and so forth. I had been doing a lot of travel, and my boss at the time said, "Well, you know, you can cut down on travel if you move to Amsterdam where we're building a new data center and so forth." So I didn't tell my wife for weeks because I was terrified when she was listening.

(Bob Warrall at 00:33:52) And I brought it up one weekend, kind of indirectly, and she said, "Look, are you asking me to move?" And I said, "Yeah, I guess so." And she said, "Look."

(Bob Warrall at 00:34:01) The kids were 10 and 12 at the time. I have two boys. And she said, "If we're gonna do it, this is the perfect time as long as we're packed by the time they get into high school." And so, yeah, with her approval, we made the switch, but it was a great experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:18) See, I would have found some movies that were filmed in the Netherlands and put them on, like, "Wouldn't it be great to go there?"

(Bob Warrall at 00:34:27) There you go. Yeah, I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:29) So your kids, did they follow in the technology?

(Bob Warrall at 00:34:33) One of them sort of has. My oldest son works for a large electronic auto manufacturer that starts with a T here in the Bay Area. And he's doing security systems work for them. So he's kind of in technology.

(Bob Warrall at 00:34:53) My other son, my younger son, years and years and years ago, he was probably, I don't know, 10 or 12 years old. My dad asked him, "So what do you wanna be when you grow up? Do you wanna do what your dad does?" And he looked at him and said, "Why the heck would I wanna read email for a living?" Because that's his perception of what I did, right? And so God love him. He went a different direction. He got a marketing degree and works in the golf industry, spends most of his days outdoors, and he's a very social kid and loves his life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:27) Really? He's in the golf industry?

(Bob Warrall at 00:35:30) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:31) So let him know, when you talk to him next, my father in our town, he was the third engineer. He was the third hire at this company in the late eighties. They invented the digital screens that go inside golf carts at the high-end golf courses.

(Bob Warrall at 00:35:49) Oh, nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:49) Yeah. So my childhood is those being baked in ovens in our garage for heat testing because they were shipping them out to the desert in Arizona, and the units were literally melting off the golf carts.

(Bob Warrall at 00:36:04) Oh, that's funny. Small world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:06) Yeah. Most people.

(Bob Warrall at 00:36:07) I've used a lot of those over my time. We've played a lot of golf together out in the desert sometimes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:14) Oh, nice. Yeah, it was called ParView and then ProLink. They got bought and they went public.

(Bob Warrall at 00:36:19) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:20) Seeing the whole thing happen was really cool because I walked in there, you know, I remember because I was probably about eight. So I remember they had these, it was one of those small office suites, you know, it's two rooms, probably 700, 800 square feet, and just boxes stacked to the top. And then they got a bigger office, and then the next year a bigger. And then I ended up walking, my dad had this warehouse with 30 people that he was leading. And I was like, "What is going on? This thing just keeps multiplying." And instead of cookies and grandma's baked goods, my smell for childhood is solder and baked electronics.

(Bob Warrall at 00:36:59) That's a good story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:02) So I'm sure I'd fit in over there because, I mean, when you go into those server rooms, it smells very similar.

(Bob Warrall at 00:37:08) Yeah. It's also very cold. Yeah, cold. You don't want to be in there if there's a fire because then all the air gets sucked out and no fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:12) No fun.

(Bob Warrall at 00:37:17) I have not experienced, well, it's been 20 years now. But back in the days when data centers had fire suppression systems in them, they had halon systems. I was in a data center when someone accidentally pushed the fire alarm button.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:30) Are those the foam systems?

(Bob Warrall at 00:37:33) This was compressed gas, halon gas. And I assume it was a little frightening, but anyway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:40) Walk outside like you inhaled helium. "Oh my god, there's a problem."

(Bob Warrall at 00:37:46) Yeah, that was crazy. Oh, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:49) This is awesome. You are so much fun to hang out with. And next time I'm out in San Francisco, I'm gonna stop by and say hello or whatever works. I know you guys have probably crazy security, but I'm a big fan of the Bay Area.

(Bob Warrall at 00:38:05) That's alright. We'll let you in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:08) What is the, and I'll begin to wrap it up, the advice that you give yourself 10 years ago, what would it be?

(Bob Warrall at 00:38:20) You know, I guess 10 years ago, as we spoke earlier, I'd grown accustomed to this idea of rotating from job to job. And I guess if I spoke to my younger self, it would have been, "Don't be afraid of it or hesitant, just embrace it." Right? Embrace the unknown, so to speak. That's kind of a pompous way to put it. But that fear of stepping into a new job, every time you do it, it just makes you a better leader, a better person, better executive. And 10 years ago, 20 years ago, I was, you know, like all of us, maybe struggling with some of those transitions. And I'd say, you know, I'd say, "Don't worry about it. It's gonna work out okay." Right? It's actually gonna help in the long run. But just don't stress as much. And maybe that's the other commentary I would have. You know, our jobs are really stressful. My job is a 24 hour, seven days a week job.

(Bob Warrall at 00:39:17) There's always gonna be a crisis. There's always gonna be some network problem or a PC problem or something. And, you know, I've probably looked over and managed teams that have closed millions and millions of tickets over the years. Life will be okay. The sun's gonna come up tomorrow no matter how bad the problem is. Just get the right team of people focused on it. Give them the resources they need. Give them the support they need. Communicate to the stakeholders about what you're doing, and it'll be okay. So, you know, don't lose sleep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:50) So a little hard work, a little patience.

(Bob Warrall at 00:39:53) Yep. Yeah. Hard work, patience. Yeah. I think whether it's my job or your job or anyone else's, my advice generally to people is show up early. I was here early. Right? I was here early. Show up early.

(Bob Warrall at 00:40:07) Work hard. Be willing to do whatever they ask you to do. Don't complain unless it's appropriate, and help the next guy. Right? So all of those, you know, that advice, I guess, is kind of transferable to almost any job, but just work hard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:27) It's really the basics, right? Just, you know, not sexy. Nobody likes to hear them. No one likes to hear discipline. No one likes to hear showing up. But in reality, that's what it is. You don't need to just execute the basics. You know, my father, the way he got into the electronics design was actually courtesy of the U.S. Air Force. So he got his electronics design education there, putting the GPS systems into the B-2 stealth bombers.

(Bob Warrall at 00:40:55) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:56) Right? Because they had a very stealthy plane. What's better than a stealthy plane? A stealthy plane that knows where it is.

(Bob Warrall at 00:41:02) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:03) Even better. Even better. So they were, you know, in airplane hangars all day just figuring out how to get this GPS thing into the bomber. And he taught me about discipline, and I hated it when I was younger. Right? Everyone, I was like, "Oh, you're not fun." And I actually talked to him. I called him to tell him this weekend that we have our second child on the way.

(Bob Warrall at 00:41:24) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:24) I said, you know, "I just wanna say to you again, I've been working on discipline a lot with my early morning runs and things like that. And I just, you know, wanna say thank you for, even though when I was a kid, my mom and us, we would kind of all say, 'Oh, he's the boring one because he's, you know, the work hard discipline one.'" You would just keep grinding. He would just ignore it, keep grinding. And then as an adult in my thirties, I'm looking back with a tremendous amount of respect. And he taught me also that, you know, on time is late.

(Bob Warrall at 00:41:54) You know? Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:54) You know, show up early.

(Bob Warrall at 00:41:56) Absolutely. Yep. If I'm on time, I'm five minutes early.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:00) Yeah. It's amazing what that'll do too. I did due diligence for a little bit for technology, code reviews and stuff for invest people. They want your investment money, and so they would have me look at the code. Amazing how many of these entrepreneur, founder individuals would be late to investment meetings where they want money from someone else. It blew my mind. So anytime I'm going for help, I'm not 10 minutes early. I'm 15, 17 minutes early. And I'm sitting there preparing, doing my notes. Luckily, we have these computers in our hands. We can just do some work. Just be sitting there and do some work and be early. It's so easy.

(Bob Warrall at 00:42:40) Yeah. I don't think the recipe is that hard and, you know, people have written thousands and thousands of books on how to be great leaders and everything else, but you can put it on a Post-it note. It comes down.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:49) Hard work works. Yep. Disciplined consistency, trust. Yeah. Bob, I love getting to speak with you and getting to know you. This has been tremendously valuable for myself, so I wanna say thank you so much for your time.

(Bob Warrall at 00:43:05) Happy to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:12) Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.