Joe Kinsella - CTO at CloudHealth by VMware

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) It's difficult to be a technology leader. Here at the podcast, we spend our time making it easier for you, and we've gone even farther on this mission than just the podcast. Our goal this year is to help 100,000 technologists level up as leaders with Leaderbits. This could be as simple as you helping level someone else up on your team, you acting as the mentor, or maybe you're a team leader and you're looking to level up into a VP or director role. We are here for you at leaderbits.io to help you grow as a technology leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) Visit us and ask us all the questions that you have at leaderbits.io. Now get excited because today, we are talking to Joe Kinsella, the CTO of CloudHealth by VMware, and we discuss key takeaways from scaling a company, the entrepreneurial mindset of having the will to make it happen, and establishing a culture of goal setting to get everyone rowing in the same direction. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:01:01) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:02) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:01:14) Joe. Hey, Joe. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:17) Fantastic, man. Look at that. Let's see what you got going on. Looks like you're in Boston.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:01:21) I'm in Boston on a lousy rainy day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:25) Dude, you and me both. Well, I'm in Sarasota, Florida. But woke up this morning, and it's like hurricane winds.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:01:32) Yeah. You know what's funny? We are getting really high winds. I was just walking across the street. It is probably some of the highest winds I've seen in Boston in a couple years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:43) Definitely. So I pull out of my—first of all, so I opened my garage this morning, right? And I hear a bang, bang, bang, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:51) I'm like, what is going on? And we have an attic, right? It's got the cover. The wind is so strong, it's coming in the garage, and it's blowing the cover up into the attic, and it's coming back down. And I was like, oh my goodness. My wife's texting me. She's like, what are you doing in the garage? I'm trying to leave.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:11) So yeah. And then we go out. I'm excited right now. I don't know why, probably just because we're talking. But I go out and I have a jeep, right? So I back my jeep up, and there's like 60 birds in the sky. And that's normal, but something very wrong is happening with them because they're all stiff, and they're being flipped upside down. They got caught in some sort of wind thing, and they played dead or something, because I've never seen that before in my life. National Geographic, none of that. It was crazy.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:02:41) Well, that's wild. Yeah. Fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:44) Any bird tornadoes in Boston?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:02:46) No. No bird tornadoes. I haven't seen a bird in the sky in a while. So I think it's an odd day. It must be 60 degrees out and raining in Boston in December. That is just very strange.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:59) Same weather here, man. Alright. So I'm excited to start talking to you. So the show, this whole thing, we're already recording, we just clip out what we don't want, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:09) So we sound like rock stars and everybody loves it.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:03:12) That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:12) Yes. And so I want to hear a little bit about how you fell in love with technology.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:03:19) Oh, yeah. I can tell you that story. So my dad brought home an Apple II computer back when I was, I think, 11 years old. And I started hacking on it, and as usual, I think probably a pretty standard development from playing games to deciding that I wanted to write games. And to write games, I had to learn software. And I think my first big project was I wrote this baseball simulator. So I wanted to simulate what Babe Ruth would do against modern pitchers. And so I found myself challenged trying to write all this complex software that I'd never written before to try to answer the question. And that just got me—it kind of fused my two passions, which is I grew up really a big baseball fan and very quickly found my second passion from my first passion, which was writing software. And so, you know, fast forward all these years later, I feel like I've had one job my whole career, which is building software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:25) I love it. That's interesting. I was on this YouTube channel as a guest of somebody's show, and they asked me how could somebody get started in programming? And I just came up with some answer off top of my head, and I said, you know, find something that you love. I think I asked him in real time. He's like, I really like music, and he wanted to learn machine learning. And I was like, alright, well, find some excuse to apply machine learning to music, and then just do that for fun. And there's your intro to engineering. So that's exactly how you got started. That's awesome.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:04:53) It is. Yeah. I think it all derives from—I mean, you have to have a drive to actually push through learning the craft of software engineering. And having a problem you want to solve, I think, just makes it all that easier.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:05) So then what problems are you solving today?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:05:08) So what I did is six years ago, I made the incredibly irrational decision to go off and quit my job and start a company. So exactly. I try to talk everybody else out of doing it. It is probably the single most irrational thing you can go do. And for the last six years, I've actually spent building CloudHealth Technology. So the thing that drove me was I saw this incredible complexity that was growing with cloud computing, which was, you know, the cloud opened up all this incredible opportunity for us around agility and innovation and consumption-based pricing and on-demand infrastructure. And it was just transformative in what its potential was, but at the same time, it came with a complexity. And that complexity was increasing every week, every month, every quarter. And so I just wanted to make it my mission to go solve that, not just for myself but for other customers. And so I got to a point I just realized that it was just such a—you know, I couldn't get it out of my brain and I really had to go just give it a try. So I quit my job, and then six years later, where we're at now is, we're dealing with kind of the next wave of cloud computing, which is we've collapsed a lot of this complexity for the 3,800 customers of CloudHealth. And the next challenge is the way we're using the cloud is actually moving into its next evolution. You know, I call it 2.0 where we're moving away from using the cloud as better virtualization, which is really just infrastructure as a service and moving to more towards composable applications and platform services and really what I think is the real innovation of cloud computing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:51) So your name leads me to believe I'm gonna store my Apple Watch health data in your cloud. But what is it that you guys really do?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:07:01) Cloud management. So it's the health of your cloud. So we—

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:06) Oh, you're like cloud doctors.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:07:08) We're like cloud doctors. Yes. It could be the health of the security of your cloud. It could be the health of your costs in the cloud. It could be the health of your performance in the cloud. Basically, every aspect of how you manage business services and applications, that's what CloudHealth is all about. It's just making it more streamlined, more effective for you to manage.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:31) Please tell me somewhere in your marketing, you have a sad cloud.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:07:36) No. There isn't. I really don't.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:38) Please. Yeah. You just do a little rainstorm. Be like, feeling under the weather.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:07:45) Well, you know, if you want to join our marketing team, just let me know. So clearly, we're missing that opportunity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:51) I love it. Yes. It's right there in front of us. We'll work on it. I'll send you some of my ideas. Look. If you actually look outside, Boston is showing you the sign right now.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:07:57) Exactly. It's correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:06) Okay. So you started this. Did you find a co-founder? How did you go about it?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:08:09) Yeah. So I started as a one-person business. I had the idea. I had worked in this space for a while. I actually had the luxury of, in addition to being a fairly reasonable expert in IT management, I also was an early adopter of Amazon and at a previous company had built it to pretty large scale. So for its time, it was 4,000 or 5,000 cores of compute before, 4 or 5 petabytes of storage, and this was 2010, 2011 time frame. And so I had a lot of deep expertise in this space. And so when I quit my job, I started on a path of experimentation. So I took this model of—I actually set up shop as an EIR at a venture firm, just so I had a phone, a desk, and just some structure around my life. And I ran effectively sprints. Every two weeks, I was running a new experiment trying to prove or disprove the concept around this idea I had in cloud management. And I just ran a series of successive experiments. Some were just putting up a web page and driving traffic to it. Some were surveys that I sent out. You know, and ultimately, it kind of culminated and I ran one experiment where I ended up closing a customer effectively by accident as part of the experiment. And all of a sudden, I was a business with one customer. And so at that point in time, I realized—a couple weeks later as I closed the second customer, I realized really something was happening here. I was really hitting the market at the right time with the right message. And so I went out and I found a CEO to come in. And in fact, I started a CEO search and ended up one of my advisors ended up being my CEO in the end, and that was end of 2012. In 2013, we went out and raised money, and we were off and running.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:03) So how many people do you have now?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:10:06) So as of a couple months ago, we were acquired by VMware. And at the time of acquisition, I think we were around 320 people. So over the course of that six years, we grew from one to 320.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:23) Woo. Congratulations, my friend.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:10:25) Yeah. Yeah. It was a wild ride.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:27) You're bringing some value to the market. That doesn't happen unless you're valuable.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:10:31) Yeah. It's, yeah. It was, and you know, we weren't looking to be acquired. It was kind of an interesting thing for me, which is we'd just raised a big round led by Kleiner Perkins. We were kind of headed down this path of building a big public company, and this came along and just the synergies felt right. And I felt pretty good about the vision and the people I was working with. And so we kind of took a different course and went down the path of an acquisition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:56) Yeah. We know Kit Colbert or Colbert. I always mess up that name. But he's one of the CTOs of, I think, IoT or cloud of VMware. Do you know Kit?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:11:07) I don't know him. I think we maybe shook hands at VMworld, either US or Barcelona, but I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:15) Oh, he was—we had him on the show. He was a really awesome guy.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:11:18) Yeah. Yeah. Excellent.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:20) And now I also see you're a member of the Forbes Technology Council.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:11:23) Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:25) So am I. I think it's one of those things that you think about doing, and you're like, uh, then you're like, okay. Cool. But you know what? I get no spam from there, which is what I really like.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:11:39) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a good lightweight way to engage in the community and just stay connected with topics that are, you know, keep certain topics front of mind that people are talking about in the industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:52) Yeah. Plus it's super cool when you contribute to Forbes and you have a Forbes article. That's amazing, right? I think that's one of the coolest things in the world. It's like a childhood dream, cross off. It's not the cover, but it's close. I'm still working on it. I have a Photoshop now. I'm just—

(Joe Kinsella at 00:12:15) I know. I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:15) So from your experience growing zero to over 300 in a couple years, just five, six years, you know, what are your big takeaways from that?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:12:27) It is really, really hard, I have to tell you. So I think there's, you know, you look and it's one of those things where you see when you look at the graphs of our revenue over time, it's like the classic VC revenue graphs of up into the right. Everything looks great. Everything is getting better every month than the previous month, and it all looks fantastic. And, but the inside of going through that type of growth is just it's really hard. It's, it never feels like those graphs make it appear. In fact, I used to tell this story all the time where every—as we were going through these phases, people would look at our growth and they would say, you know, wow. Congratulations. What a fantastic success you're having. And I adopted this story of, like, you know what that feels to me is like what it feels like is I'm driving around in this hot red sports car all day, and everyone's looking at it saying, wow, that is a beautiful hot red sports car. And then I drive it into my garage at night and then work on it all night so that I can drive it out again. That's really what it felt like throughout that period of time is you never feel like you're as successful as the outside perceives you and as the numbers suggest you are because there's so many things to fix. And I think that's just the nature of building a company is something is always broken, something can always be improved, and the key is to pay attention to the right ones at the right time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:57) Yeah. And with the chaos of the scaling, right, you got customers that are going to want it to do different things, and so now you have to make sure you're keeping the product aligned with the business. You know, did you have a lot of struggle with that?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:14:08) Oh, we did without a doubt. So in the early days when you're building—you look at what we did is we built a product for a market that really didn't exist. No one was really doing cloud management. No one really understood the space of building a platform that can drive your cloud center of excellence back in 2012. And so we built the product and it's so much easier in those early days because there's no expectations around it.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:14:33) You have very few customers, and so the amount of requests that you get and the feedback you get is limited. You know, as you start to grow, as you go from a handful of customers to dozens to hundreds to thousands, that fundamentally changes. And the key is you need to figure out ways to get the signal-to-noise ratio correct so that you're paying attention to the right issues at the right time. You also need to figure out how to scale the DNA of your organization, which is when you're one team—like when marketing or sales or engineering is just a single flat team reporting into a single individual—that's pretty easy to manage. As you start to break into teams, being able to scale that DNA to make sure that people maintain the innovation, maintain the connection to the customer, maintain the depth of technical context that's required to move quickly.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:15:29) These are things that you have to constantly figure out how to scale them in the new environment. And so to me, I always look at it as you're really trying to keep the DNA of the organization the same or roughly the same, but figure out ways to adapt how you go execute it. And at every level of scale, I found that there were just new plays you had to run in your playbook to go make that happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:55) Yeah. Was it a lot of you keeping the people running the teams, like, really close to you so you could, culture-wise, understand who they were as people, the new people coming on, and that they came in and understood how the culture was there?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:16:08) It was. Yeah. I mean, the first set of people you bring in, you work closely with. So what you do is, as a company scales quickly, you get this original core—like a founding team, like the first few, less than 10 people in. They're all tightly bonded.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:16:24) They all know exactly what the mission of the company is. They all represent the DNA of the company. And what happens is as you scale, newer individuals get less and less time from that core team that were there at the company. And the less time they get, it becomes harder to impart through just working together the DNA of the organization and what the expectations are and the vision and the focus. And so you've gotta find ways to get it so that even as the distance grows—because had we continued, we would have gone to hundreds of thousands of people over time.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:16:59) And we still will. We'll just do it inside of VMware. And so you just have to figure out a way to actually make that scale so that people do feel connected to the mission. They do know what they need to do. They do have an instinctive sense of where to focus and where not to focus.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:17:13) And they feel like they really understand all the cultural tenets of the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:21) We're working on that right now. We just hired our tenth person yesterday.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:17:26) Excellent. So that's exciting. So how many people were you a year ago?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:32) We didn't exist a year ago.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:17:34) Okay. Alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:35) We started a leadership training company out of the podcast people. Basically, people came on and were asking for it, and we're like, alright. Well, people knock on your front door and ask for lemonade, you should open up a lemonade stand. And so we're like, alright.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:48) Cool. And, you know, what I did was I just created a PowerPoint and went around to a couple people who had mentioned it, and I was like, hey, you guys mentioned you want something. Do you wanna purchase this and actually pay for it? And they're like, yeah. And so we got some customers, built a product in like ten days, and that was like seven months ago, and now we have 10 people.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:18:08) That is absolutely incredible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:11) Yeah. And we did a—we did a small—after we got our first 100,000 in revenue, like, that was just me calling people on Zoom calls. Then we did a round with this company called Florida Funders, just a VC-type company that's in Tampa. And because, you know, we're in Florida. And they invested, and then now we're just like scaling sales.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:18:36) That's incredible. It's highly irrational, so I'm glad to know I'm talking to somebody else who's also equally irrational to go off and start something on your own. But it's nice when you start—those early days where you're really grinding it out through the early problems and bringing people on. I look back at that as some of the most exciting times in the business, even though at the time, they sometimes feel like some of the hardest times in the business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:02) Yeah. And we were talking about the culture thing today, and so we started this thing today called Fun Friday. So it's basically we'll answer a fun question. Like, if you could have two superpowers, what would they be and why? Like, different questions every week, but we answer them as a team, and we can all see each other's responses.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:19:19) Right? That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:20) We just built like a little internal tool. And so now I gotta ask you, because this is like our sort of team building thing that we did at the office today. If you had two superpowers, what would they be and why?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:19:30) Well, I think I'd probably have to go with—I'd probably go with flying. You know, that's a no-brainer because I think every human wants to fly. And, you know, you look at the commute here in Boston, this would really cut down my commute and let me spend more time building my business. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:51) Yeah.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:19:52) I think my second might be—

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:57) Uh—

(Joe Kinsella at 00:19:57) I don't know. I always like Spiderman, so I wouldn't mind being able to shoot webs out at people. So I'm sure that could come in handy in certain discussions that occur building products.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:09) Alright. There we go. You can—it gives whiteboard a whole new meaning. Right?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:20:15) And what were yours?

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:17) Oh, time traveler and shapeshifter, so I could go anywhere and be anything.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:20:23) Alright. That sounds great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:26) I was like, I don't know. Because I'd be like, if you could travel through time and you can change shape, like, I could go be a kangaroo in the 1800s. I don't know why—I don't know—

(Joe Kinsella at 00:20:36) Why you'd wanna do that, but—

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:39) I don't know why either. I don't really question the thoughts that come through my head. I just like let them come. I'm sorry. It's Friday, and it's like the day before our break, so everybody at the office is just like really in a good mood.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:55) Is that how it is over there?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:20:57) It is. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, a lot of people are working still next week, but I think everyone's kind of shifting gears and realizing that they can actually—you know, they're gonna have a week where they can actually get some heads-down work done because there's gonna be fewer people in the office and less interruptions. So I'm looking forward to that personally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:18) Yeah. That's what we're excited about too. Like, I write in the morning.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:21:22) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:22) And so usually, I have to stop my writing session because my team gets here. Because I get into work early. I'm a crazy person. I'm up at 5 a.m. doing running and working out, and then I'm in the office by like 7:30.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:39) And then I like to do my writing and everything until about nine. But, yeah, it's cool because now I'll be able to persist that all the way probably until lunch. So I'm looking forward to that. Alright. Back to you. The acquisition, right, you had this cache, but then VMware came in and convinced you to do this acquisition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:56) What has it been like? I'm assuming it's going to be a positive thing, but anything interesting that happened in there? Like, did it change everything? Did you guys all get like VMware emails now? Like, what's changed?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:22:10) Yeah. Yeah. So we do have VMware email. I'll tell you, it's—I've been doing this a couple other times in terms of acquisitions.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:22:18) Okay. And acquisitions are really, really hard to get right. And I would say the thing that I think has gone really well with the VMware acquisition is, first, I think there was a good alignment of culture. Like, if you look at the people that we met at VMware, they're very similar to the people that we would hire at CloudHealth. So I think that, first and foremost, I think helps make it easier to integrate a company, especially when you're looking at a 24,000-person company acquiring a 300-some-person company. But I think they got the big things right.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:22:50) Like, there's, you know, the big things in terms of just how you treat the employees, how you invest in the business, how you keep it kind of incubated, isolated so that it can continue to execute its business without a lot of distractions and interruptions. I think they got a lot of these things done really well. And as a founder, you deeply appreciate that because, you know, it's easy to believe all of that as you're going through the process of due diligence and deciding to go do this acquisition, but it's another thing to see it executed on the other side. So, you know, and then there's frictions that come with working in a larger company, but they're the frictions that come with working in any larger company because, you know, when you have a bigger brand and you're public, you just have to do a few things differently. To me, that's just noise in the system.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:23:41) I just feel like that we've managed to get the really big things right, which is what really counts.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:46) When I was reading your bio, you're talking about interdepartmental relationships, relationships between people in different departments. How do you encourage that?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:23:55) Yeah. I think it's one of the things that you have to scale. So pay attention to this one, which is, you know, in the early days, marketing talking to engineering, talking to finance was just shout across the room and you're having a conversation. And as you scale, you know, like today, we take up two floors of downtown Boston of a large footprint office building in downtown Boston. It becomes harder to go do that.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:24:23) And we have offices in seven locations around the globe now. So as you start to do that, it becomes harder to actually communicate. So I think scaling communication, scaling collaboration is something to pay attention to. You have to encourage it. You have to—you know, I think it starts with good goal alignment, which is if you can—you know, it's one of those things where it's easy to not pay attention to this early, but there's a phase in your growth where you really have to put in place a good system of goal setting.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:24:54) And the reason why that becomes important is as you start to scale, you need all the departments and the organization as a whole to kind of row in the same direction. And whatever the goal mechanism is, I think one that really caught my eye was just objectives and key results, OKRs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:15) Yeah. Jim—John Doerr?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:25:17) Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So he brought it to Google and a variety of other places. And so you just need some mechanism to get that goal alignment so that everyone rows in the same direction, everyone knows how they interconnect with everyone else.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:25:29) And I think once you do that, you know, I think people start to see how to collaborate with their peers because they have shared goals that make it so that they actually have to be jointly successful. And it's a much more scalable way, as you go beyond a hundred people, I think, to drive that cross-departmental communication.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:51) Yeah. Right now, we've got like a spreadsheet, really high-tech. But we got a spreadsheet, and it tracks output. So we track content produced. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:59) And we just—we have goals. We show like our last month, and then our goal is to keep the output consistent. Right? And but you can see—you can see, okay, well, video outputs this, audio outputs this. Those are two different departments, two different people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:16) And then we see what is happening over in sales, right, with meetings booked and things like that. Yeah. We have a spreadsheet. We just track it month over month, and it's working for right now, but if you have any tips, please.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:26:29) I'll say this is right now, I'm tracking this all via a spreadsheet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:36) Alright. So you can get to 320 people tracking it on spreadsheet.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:26:40) You got it. So, and no, I think the key is you're building the muscle memory in the organization for metrics, for goals, for having transparency and kind of shared ways to measure your success or lack of success. And I think that building that muscle memory in the organization early is exactly what you should be doing, and it'll become—you'll scale it and change how you do it over time, but people will expect it right from the very beginning of an organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:11) So with your exit now, are you going to buy the Red Sox?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:27:19) You think John Henry would sell them?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:24) I don't know. I just—just thrown it out there.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:27:28) My youngest son is—his whole mission in life is, I think, to manage baseball teams, to like run baseball teams. And so I think his dream job would actually be to be Dave Dombrowski and run the Red Sox. So maybe that'll come true. Maybe I should go today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:49) Maybe. Or maybe you'll like live vicariously through him doing it.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:27:52) I might be a billion shy to be able—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:57) You and me both, my friend. We're getting there. Yeah. I listen to audio like books and stories, like autobiographies and things of different billionaires. And I just started collecting all of their habits.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:10) Right? Like, they get up really early. They write down what they want every day. And so I was like, everything I do is like what a billionaire does, just minus the bank account. But I believe that, like, you have to turn the faucet on before the water will flow type deal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:23) So I believe if I maintain those habits and stick with them consistently and continue to bring value to people, that that is a valid possibility on my timeline.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:28:33) Yeah. Yeah. I think it's—I certainly—it's, you know, one way or another, I think if you work hard, usually good outcomes happen. You know, and so I think people are willing to take chances and work hard, certainly have an advantage over everybody else. Doesn't mean they're gonna become a billionaire now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:53) No. But I did find, though, that the amount of value that you can—like, if you bring an overwhelming amount of value, the market will respond with capital. So, like, I used to think of all billionaires as greedy people. They like own this out of—and I started looking at like the people who like actually get wealthy and like how they got wealthy. They're all doing things that are extremely valuable to a large number of humans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:15) Like, the only way you can get money is by someone giving it to you for you doing something useful. Right? And so then it's just a question—

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:23) If I see someone with a Lamborghini or one of the brand new Teslas or something, I used to be bitter about it like, "Rich person." But now I'm like, I want to know—I'm over 30, so I'm sick of—I just want to have the success. I want to know what they are doing that's so useful that the world has handed them that much money. And then by studying them, I can figure out how to bring more value to other people.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:29:50) Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. I think for me, the financial side always was just a byproduct. It was always a mystery to me, but I think you hit the nail on the head, which is it's about figuring out how do you bring value and how much value can you bring. And if you can just focus on that, especially as an entrepreneur—if you can wake up every day and add more value for your customers than you did the day before and then do that tomorrow and do that the next day—there's a decent chance that good things will happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:25) I like that. You're positive. I like it. There we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:30) You got a motivational speaker in your future, my friend?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:30:32) I don't think so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:34) We'll get Russ on it for you.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:30:37) Okay, sounds good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:40) Oh man, that's exciting. Okay, so what are you really excited about? The acquisition's happened, you've grown to 320, but what is the thing that's happening today that you're pumped up about?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:30:50) I feel like on a technical side, what has me really excited right now is I feel like we're on the cusp of transforming IT management in a way that hasn't happened before. For the better part of 20, 30 years, basically we've used technology to bring business services to our internal and external customers. And the way we've done that is we've purchased hardware, we put hardware in data centers, we've deployed applications on that hardware, we've hired people to actually go manage that hardware, we bought tools to support management of that hardware. It's just this very labor-intense, non-scalable way to deliver business value to our internal and external customers. And I think the future—fast forward 15 years from now—and it'll be more declarative. It'll be, "You know what? I need this SAP deployed to my customers. I want to tell you here's the budget I need to have, here's the data durability I need to have, here's the data sovereignty I need to have, here's the SLA performance characteristics I need to maintain. Go make it happen." And smart software will go make that happen on your behalf in the future. And for the first time, I think I'm seeing a set of trends come together around ML, around AI, around platform services, just around the freedom of choice that's offered from the expressibility that's in the cloud today. And they're all coming together in a way where I think you could see that future starting to take shape, and that will be transformative. Fifteen years from now, it'll let businesses focus on the value that they deliver and spend less time in technology. And I think there's been a slow incremental improvement over two decades, but I think we're going to see a hockey stick over the next two decades. And I think that'll be transformative from a value we can bring to customers and just a productivity of all of us in the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:52) Have you seen the Lex by Amazon?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:32:56) I have, yes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:57) Oh yeah, that's exciting. Man, I was looking at what they're doing with their business intelligence dashboards. You can take all the processing power of Alexa, right? And then you can just do whatever you want with the technology, and it's like a beautiful code interface. Well, it's its own programming language, but it was very simple and beautiful and easy to use. And they had both an interface or you could write raw code, and you could essentially just hook it up to say, you know, "Alexa, what is the sales compared to last month?" And she'll be like, "Sales are up 13% over last month." And it had all of these functions pre-done into it, so it could do comparisons month over month. And all you have to do is just hook the data up.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:33:41) Isn't that mind-blowing? I mean, you think of 10 years ago, the effort that you would have had to put in to have something that was a crude version of that was immense. Five years ago, it was immense. And today, you and I can spend an afternoon and pull something pretty sophisticated together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:00) It's beautiful. Yeah. Oh man, I love the future. I'm so—because it's exponential growth, so I'm really pumped about, you know, 10 years. I was talking with my wife. I was like, our daughter is 16, and we've got a little boy on the way in April. And I was like, I don't know if we will buy them cars. We'll probably just get a subscription to some comp brand that the car just comes picks them up.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:34:24) Yeah. Cars are so 2020, right? We still don't have a car in the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:28) I got a jetpack, bro. I got a Tesla jetpack. That'd be cool. Or if we go too far in the future, we just beam our consciousness to another organic unit. Yeah. Elon Musk with his neural net. Right? So if you go back to the day that you started this company, right, that day you got that first accidental sale—you could just go spend maybe 30 seconds with yourself and give yourself just a little bit of advice—what would it be?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:35:02) I think when I locked into my first customer, it was just a series of fortunate circumstances. But when I peel it back, what I would have told myself is you need to go find a customer who really is what Stephen Blank calls the early evangelist. Right? It's someone who has a problem, knows they have a problem, knows how to solve that problem, has invested in solving that problem because it's so deeply important to them, and they have a budget. And when you get all these components aligned, you have somebody who is willing to make a leap on a very early idea and invest in it because they care so deeply about it and it will save them so much time that they're willing to commit money to it. Now, turns out I happened to find two customers—my very first two customers who lined up perfectly with that—but it was pure accidental luck that brought me there. But there's a very simple formula. It's like a five-point formula. Go look for it when you're building a new market, and when you get rejected, don't try to—you know, actually, failure is part of the process and admitting that maybe what you have isn't as valuable as what you thought. It's really important to actually keep a little bit of emotional distance from your idea so that you can iterate it and learn from it. Because ultimately, success comes from just a series of failures, and you've got to be willing to embrace and experience those failures to be able to get to that success.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:44) These five points of approaching a market, is this an article you've written? Is this something we can find online?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:36:50) Yeah. So if you search—I have to confess, I probably haven't read it in over a decade—but if you search for the phrase "early evangelist" on Google, you'll probably find something.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:05) Joel Osteen just came up. I'm just kidding. I'm joking. I didn't even Google it.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:37:09) It should be Steve Blank.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:12) Okay.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:37:13) And I think you should see kind of his breakdown of the definition, and I think it comes from this book that was really pivotal in my life, which was called "The Four Steps to the Epiphany." So Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He was on the board of Eric Ries, who ended up going off and writing the book "Lean Startup," which I like to think is the marketing version of "Four Steps to the Epiphany." And "Four Steps" was like his distillation of his class notes from Stanford. And it's just really a great read. I mean, it's dated now, but it really shows how, as an entrepreneur, you can manage risk, which is really, you know, at the end of the day in early ventures, all about managing risk. And he shows you techniques to manage risk, and one of the techniques was, here's how you find your early customers. There's actually a formula for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:06) How to find your early customers. Done. I'm going to look that up. We're doing all right. I'm excited. It's weird because—so you started something, so you get it. You're a founder. You start out, you get a bunch of meetings, and then sales start closing, and then you make some money, and then it's always a question of, there's going to be more customers next month, right? How—we know the market's bigger, but people will respond. It's just the uncertainty. But then you put the work in and no matter what, something comes out of it. It's just this weird journey.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:38:44) I would agree. It's—part of being an entrepreneur is you have to will it to happen, which means you have to believe that next month you're actually, you know, have a chance of making that target number that you set out for yourself. And even when you look at it, you have no idea how you're going to go do it. And I think it's the act of willing yourself to believe that and then convincing the people around you that you can achieve that. That is—that's how things get created. You know, and I think—so you have to kind of be that person who—I remember I used to sometimes wake up in the middle of the night just unable to sleep because of just the weight of knowing I have all these people who have joined this company that are dependent upon this idea that I had created and expecting that it's going to be something important in the industry. And just that sense of—I don't know, just the weight of just feeling that obligation to all of them. And I feel like the counter to it, though, is what you do is you wake up and you go to work, and you just have to convince yourself that what you believe is true. And in many cases, it will become true. So it's, you know, something I think as an entrepreneur that—this is why most people don't do it—is it's an unnatural act to believe something that you can't prove to be true.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:07) Yeah. Elon Musk, I like to listen to one of his interviews, and he described it as staring into the abyss and eating glass. I was like, some days, I'm like, yep, this is one of those eating glass days. Because—and it's mostly myself. It is mostly an internal thing where I'm beating myself up. It's like, am I working enough? Or I'm doing 10 hours, 12 hours a day, taking care of my health still and family, and it's just—it's so interesting how it goes. But I noticed it's like this ebb and flow. I noticed when it starts to get almost overbearing, I'm just like, all right, I'm going to let it all go, and I'm just going to go, you know, execute 10 things, take a whole lot of action, and just really have a great day today. And then life all of a sudden opens up. It'll give you something. Like, it knows when you're pushed to the breaking point, and then it backs you off, and then it gives you a little, and then you go right back into that cycle of being pushed to your breaking point. And it reminds me—I guess what I'm in hindsight right now, what I'm describing is just growth. I mean, you can't grow a muscle without tearing it.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:41:12) No. I mean, I completely appreciate that. I feel like the piece that most people don't talk about about starting companies is just the emotional side of it, which is it is emotionally a grind to actually start a company. I used to tell people that in the early phase of being an entrepreneur, it's like you have a little person on your shoulder who every day tells you you suck because something will go wrong every day. You know, a customer will be unhappy with something, you won't close that sale, you'll release a defect in your product and it'll cause a problem with your customer base. It's just—you just have to have emotional fortitude to kind of push through it because it's not easy. And the unfortunate thing is, even though you have a lot of people around you supporting you, not everyone feels that same level, the weight of that obligation for the business that you feel. And so you just have to find a way to manage it. And it sounds like for you, it might be your health outlet might actually be a cathartic release for all the pent-up angst that comes with starting a company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:22) Oh yeah, definitely. The runs in the morning are—I block out work as much as I can and just say, all right, this hour in the morning where I run and have some breakfast with my family, that's my private time. So no matter what happens in my life, whether I'm doing really well or doing not really well, that time is just—I focus on that. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:43) This is so much—you brought a whole lot of value today. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:42:47) Yeah. This has been a fun conversation. I really enjoyed it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:50) Yeah. You're a fantastic personality. Super enjoy you. Love what you're doing. Look forward to getting a copy of your marketing material that does have the sad cloud of the rainstorm on it. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah. So that wraps it up. I mean, we made a podcast. And if people want to find you or learn more, do you hang out on LinkedIn or Twitter?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:43:15) Yeah. So I'm Joe Kinsella on Twitter. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Again, Joe Kinsella. I'm the CTO and VP at VMware now, formerly CTO and founder of CloudHealth Technologies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:28) Woo-hoo. Congratulations on all of your success. How old are your kids real quick?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:43:32) My oldest is a freshman in college, and my youngest is a senior in high school.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:39) You have a freshman in college?

(Joe Kinsella at 00:43:41) I have a freshman in college.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:43) Dude, you and me, we both have the gift of good genes. Because people tell me all the time, like, I look young. They're like, "You know, what are you, in high school?" I'm like, no, man, I'm 30.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:43:59) Hey. And you know, not only that, I'm a freshman in college, and he's a computer science major, which is—I was a computer science major. I like to say that all computer science majors have an obligation to produce one more computer science major.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:09) All right. Well, you fulfilled.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:44:12) Exactly. Got to stay at least population neutral.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:15) Population neutral. Oh man, this is great. All right. Well, I was actually in Boston two weeks ago, but I'll probably be in Boston again in March, meeting with—doing a little talk there with Harvard. But when I'm out there, I'm going to look you up and maybe stop by and say hello because you're a fantastic person to know.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:44:35) Yeah, fantastic. I'd love to have you stop by. I'll show you the digs here, and it'll be fun to keep the connection going. And if there's ever another opportunity you want to catch up and talk on the podcast, let me know.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:44:45) Perfect.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:46) Thank you so much, Joe. You have a fantastic holiday.

(Joe Kinsella at 00:44:48) Thanks, you too. See you, Joe. Bye.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:56) Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to help, please take a moment right now to open up the iTunes app and leave a review of the podcast. If you take a screenshot of the review and text it or email it to a friend who needs to listen to the podcast, and then CC me, [email protected]. If you CC me on the email, I'll send you a copy of the Modern CTO book or give you a shout out on the podcast, whichever you prefer. We're trying to get listed on the top 100 for iTunes, and I need your help in order to do this.