Speaker 0 | 00:09.623
All right, welcome everyone back to Telecom Radio 1. We are continuing our series titled Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today we’re going off a little bit. We’ve definitely got a very popular nerd on here, Dipple Patel, who goes by
Speaker 1 | 00:29.231
Dip.
Speaker 0 | 00:29.888
Dip, welcome to the show, man.
Speaker 1 | 00:32.029
Hey, thanks, Phil. It’s nice to be here, man.
Speaker 0 | 00:33.951
Appreciate it. So, you know, we were talking today, you’ve got a really interesting, really interesting past. And I think what’s really cool is your history where you started out with Lockheed Martin, where really you became quite popular there by, you know, winning new business. And from like a business standpoint, I love the idea of… technology minded, engineering minded people and winning business going together all on the same sentence there. So maybe just let’s just start there, man. Or if you’ve got any other really crazy stories you want to tell me first, you can do that as well. Oh, no,
Speaker 1 | 01:12.663
plenty of stories. But I think that starting there makes sense. You know, like you mentioned, I kind of I was at Lockheed first job out of college. And I was kind of lucky because when I was in college, I went to Drexel in Philly. And I had a co-op. program there. So I got to actually work at a few companies before I went to Lockheed for six months at a time and really learn how to operate within a corporate environment. I think that you don’t really get a lot of training of that in undergrad. You learn a lot about how to actually be an engineer and things like that. But dealing with people, that’s a whole new thing. And so, especially in a corporate environment, right? You do it at school, like work in group projects. grades of the stakes. But I think with careers, it’s a whole new game, right?
Speaker 0 | 02:00.354
Totally different.
Speaker 1 | 02:01.215
Right. And so at Lockheed, I started as an engineer.
Speaker 0 | 02:05.858
Can I just ask you a question there? I think it came up the other day because a lot of times I have either friends or other colleagues online that ask me like, hey, Phil, what should I do? I’m trying to get this job in IT or I’m trying to do XYZ. Should I take this temporary temp job? And I’m always telling them like, yeah, man, you take whatever. What do you mean? like take whatever you got, you’re not doing anything right now. So absolutely take, you know, the job. And I don’t know if they were, you said they were like temporary, like six months or how long were they before?
Speaker 1 | 02:33.736
Oh yeah. So, and, and, uh, in undergrad, there was six months, uh, rotate, like basically co-ops and very short periods of time. And, um, I would agree with your counsel, you know, it’s like, uh, a lot of people are worried about the title of the job that they’ll get or the, uh, or whether or not. the job will look good on a resume, right? And that’s nice, you know, to think about, and it’s important to think about in terms of crafting your career. But what I always think about it as and the way that I, you know, try and when I’m lucky enough to actually like, you know, help some younger folks out, what I give them advice on is that, you know, you’re building a toolbox, right? And if you want to be a certain type of professional at some point, point, you need all kinds of tools in there, right? So if I want to be a home, like, let’s say I want to make gigantic skyscrapers, right? Then there’s 100,000 tools I need to build, right? So if I get a job just being a plumber, it might feel like this has nothing to do with my career track, or it might feel like this is, you know, pun not intended, but happy about crappy job. You know, I would say that But the way I would look at it is to say, look, go get a career and start building your toolbox, right? And take as much as you can out of these jobs. And the thing is, if you shine, people tend to find people who shine, right?
Speaker 0 | 04:06.614
That’s what I say, man. I say, get in there.
Speaker 1 | 04:08.496
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 04:09.456
Work your butt off and do really, really well. Do better than everyone else. And we’re just a little bit better. Sometimes you just need to do, you know, just 10% better or just, you know, but like you said, yeah.
Speaker 1 | 04:20.096
Yeah, if you shine, right, then people will recognize that and then they’ll know that they don’t want to lose you. And that, you know, if you’re shining as a, you know, as a contractor in a builder, let’s say I’m a home builder and I see this one contractor just constantly amazing, right? I don’t want that person to leave. So I’m going to go and say, hey, you know, what is it you want out of here? Because you’re kicking ass. And I might say, look, I want your job. It’s like, okay, well, let me teach you how to become me and I’ll mentor you, right? and maybe you get my job or maybe you get a job like mine somewhere else, right? But at Lockheed, I had people like that who kind of helped me. You know, piece of advice I got very early on from a BD guy. When I first got there as an engineer, I really wanted to get into business development. Three reasons. One, I saw it as a much more tip of the spear job, meaning your impact was much… much more tangible in a quicker way, right? Because you’re basically trying to make deals and sales. Whereas engineering, it might take years, right? Okay. And so that puzzle to me was more intriguing, dealing with people and sales than like…
Speaker 0 | 05:34.120
It’s so key. It’s so…
Speaker 1 | 05:35.461
Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 05:36.542
No, I mean, it is just because, you know, there’s a lot of this talk and it’s going to be… There’s a lot of this talk around. I’m going to do another podcast with Christoph out of… who’s a CISO and, you know, or, you know, talking about CISO burnout and stuff like that. And, and we were talking today about just how long some things can be and how I just, just, you know, where’s the burnout come from? And I don’t think, like you said, where you’ve got this, this tip of the spear kind of business development where you can, it’s either make or break. Like you either, you know, you either do it or you don’t do it. You either make a deal or you don’t make a deal, but it’s, it’s always kind of like on the seat of your pants, exciting.
Speaker 1 | 06:16.165
Yeah. And you know what’s funny? So that’s what I thought, right? The second thing I thought was I would get to travel a lot, which is cool. And the third thing I thought was this would propel my career, right? Turns out I was right about two of those three things, which is you can get your career propelled in sales jobs and in BD jobs, and you certainly get to travel a lot. But I would say that the feeling that you make more of an impact or that you… get an immediate kind of satisfaction is true in certain jobs, but in a lot of jobs in the DOD or especially hard, big buildings, uh, big, uh, big kind of, um, projects, it could take years to close the deal. Right. And yeah. And I learned that, uh, what really drove me to it, I didn’t know this at the time. I was an engineer at Lockheed for about, uh, let me see here from 2004 is when I got in there and I went into the program management group in about. 2008. So for four years, I was an actual, like, you know, uh, in the lab, you know, engineer, right. Nerd, super nerd type. And it was awesome. Um, and, but the thing is what I noticed was the people around me were significantly more talented than me and they loved it a lot more than me. Okay. Um, like they would read books on filtering, uh, for fun, you know, they would like, they would learn about like new math formulas for filters. And I’m like, this is fun. And this is cool, like fascinating to me, but I’m not this passionate about this. And I was like, shit, I need to find a different job. And, uh, so I started working my way towards trying to get into BD. And that’s when I met a mentor, um, who told me dip when you’re here with your skills and the way you are, he’s like, don’t worry yet about the grot, like the, the reputation of a program. Right. Like He’s like, worry more about how difficult it is and whether it’s the most advanced tech. He’s like, you know, try and attach yourself to the most advanced technology you can, even though typically the most advanced technology isn’t where you get promoted the most or isn’t where you get the most money, right?
Speaker 0 | 08:27.816
That’s pretty intimidating.
Speaker 1 | 08:29.257
It is, it is. And I was like, all right, man, I’m in. And so I worked my way into missile defense and from there into… this group called Advanced Programs for Radar. And a lot of people would call that, you know, if you’ve heard of Skunk Works, which is a group within Lockheed Martin for aircraft, it’s where the most advanced kind of aeronautics research is. There’s similar groups for other platforms, right? And there was one for radar, and that’s where I ended up, right? I was working on… In our, you know, the most advanced radar concepts and technologies. And I would look, and this is where I kind of shifted from being a program, like an engineer into a program manager. Okay. The program manager means you manage programs rather than actually do the, like the engineering work. You’re managing groups of engineers. And they’re like, look, go get your hands dirty and get your feet wet on this, on this program called electronic warfare and electronic warfare at the time. uh, was very kind of niche within Lockheed. It was small. Um, the stakes weren’t super big. And as a result, that meant I could go in and kind of screw things up and learn in this, you know, I wouldn’t like get people fired or anything. Right. And so they’re like, go learn this for a year and then we’ll get you more involved. And so, you know, I was like, look, uh, I’ll do this for a year, but I, uh, I’m not going to just sit around. So I made friends with this guy named Will. He’s a mentor of mine. And, uh, I’m like, what do we do? And he’s like, all right, we’re going to go and watch threat briefings. Basically go to the labs, you know, Naval Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Research Laboratory, and other like within the DOD, right? It’s broken into the armed forces. And then within the armed forces, there’s different offices. focused on different things. And so we went to the most advanced of these offices for each of the branches. And we just started watching these things called threat briefings. And that’s when actual operators like captains, you know, sergeants, lieutenants, things like that, come out and actually talk about what they’re seeing and what’s scaring them.
Speaker 0 | 10:40.884
Okay. What’s scaring them? What was the scariest thing you heard just out of curiosity?
Speaker 1 | 10:45.006
The scariest thing I heard was about this concept called MKV. And And basically, in missile defense that I came from, when you shoot down, when you intercept a missile, it happens in like the low Earth atmosphere, like it’s outer space, basically. Yeah. And you’re basically intercepting the missile at about 20,000 miles an hour, right? And so it’s a kinetic impact. You’re hitting, you’re getting in the way of the trajectory of the missile. And just the missile hitting something at that velocity causes it to explode, right? Yep. And… What happens is a missile is huge when it leaves, just like a rocket taking stuff to space. And as it gets up into space, it starts dropping off pieces, right? And then when it starts to re-enter the atmosphere, that’s called a kill vehicle, KV, right? And in the case of a nuclear warhead, that’s where the warhead would be along with the explosive and some avionics to help guide it back. And then that’s it. And so it’s basically like throwing a baseball. They call that a ballistic trajectory, which means once it kind of… takes off and sets its target. It doesn’t readjust like 90 degree turns or anything. It follows a ballistic trajectory, like a bullet, but it has semi-corrections. So it’s got some corrections, right? And you would hit this thing. Now, the missile defense that we were building at the time was focused on very specific threats from overseas. And those were all shifting from single kill vehicle to multiple kill vehicle, right? And… the MKV, as they called it, and you can watch YouTube videos of what these things look like. Basically, when the missile goes out into outer space, as it starts to reenter the atmosphere, it would break off into multiple pieces, right? And the most jarring, I swear, slide was this one where, and I actually had fallen asleep, to be honest with you. Because the person speaking before the captain was like this really, really peaceful talking, like Morgan Freeman type guy speaking about process. Right. And I was just like, I was having way trouble staying awake. But then the captain came and I woke up and he showed this slide and the slide showed a very specific asset. Right. And it showed how the MKV would would effectively destroy this thing. And I started like panicking. I was like, what the f***? Oh, sorry about that, man. Sorry about the curse.
Speaker 0 | 13:20.762
We can beep anything out if we have to. I don’t know what the legal is around this.
Speaker 1 | 13:24.865
Whatever. Ask forgiveness, not permission. But the Janet Jackson theory. Anyway, basically, I started freaking out, getting worried. And I talked to Will, who, again, I was learning from. And he’s like, look, there’s new technologies that can defeat this stuff. But it’s all focused on electronic warfare. Right. Meaning disabling the missiles without actually hitting them with something physical, but rather confusing them with with electrical energy. Right. Like frying the circuits, for example. And so that’s a very layman’s term, obviously. But so he’s like, look, man, let’s just go start attacking technologies that that focus on that. And. I worked with him for a couple of proposals and, uh, basically what we’d have to do is identify kind of new technology, go see who in the government’s looking for it, wait for a proposal or a request for proposal. And at that point, hopefully we knew the customer, um, and had helped shape that thing. And when it came out, we would, we would bid it. And because this was such a niche thing at Lockheed, we had to like scramble, right. For not only like the money to bid it, but also the team. And that’s where I learned. kind of where my superpower was. And that was, I learned that when Will would identify good people, I could kind of see what he saw in them very quickly. Like it came natural to me. So under his tutelage, I could kind of, I kind of became a very good judge of talent, I think, at least in a technical engineering perspective. And then the second one that I really thought I did well is actually I did better than Will. and this is where I think he started giving me my own lead, is I was very good at making people work together, helping people work together.
Speaker 0 | 15:15.769
So one, just a couple things. I’m very curious. What do you think? it is that makes someone good? And I don’t know if there is even an answer to that question, because it might be multiple things all kind of working together. But what do you think it is that makes someone a good team member? Or what is it? What do you think just makes someone good? Like you said, you have a good eye for it. So what is it?
Speaker 1 | 15:43.206
One is they take their work very seriously. Even if it’s crappy work, like busy work, they They don’t complain about it and they take pride in it, right? So that’s a very good characteristic of recognizing when somebody sees the mission or the team is more important than what they’re specifically working on, right? And that’s very in high-functioning engineering organizations, right, you get a lot of engineers who could do the job, right? You don’t get a lot of engineers who can do the shitty job, like the boring job, right? Like debugging for software, like, you know, routing, routing, ethernet cables or checking wave guides for radar. Right. Um, and, but when you found people that could, you recognize that, okay, when, when push comes to shove, when dirty work needs to get done, um, they’re not going to complain about it. And that, to me, that’s a characteristic of a good team player beyond just everybody says they’re a good team player. Right. Right. Every single person on the planet says they’re a good team player. So of course, this is a good way of seeing whether they truly know.
Speaker 0 | 16:49.923
Not many people come out and just are like, I’m a bad person. I’m an evil person.
Speaker 1 | 16:55.128
You are a pain in the ass to work with, but there’s no good team players. Right. So understand them. Yeah. There was a little more. There was a little more too. And then what I would say is, so that’s one. And then the other is like, you want people that are comfortable or okay with. being open and honest and being transparent. For a lot of folks, that’s against their nature to be transparent, but they value it. And so you can recognize that they understand it and they value it, but it’s against their nature and they’re working on it. And for others, it comes naturally. And for some, they don’t like it at all. And when you’re dealing with very high stakes and very fast-turned things, you need people who either value, super value transparency to the point where they… are working on it, actively trying to become more transparent, or they have exhibited the fact that they are already very transparent.
Speaker 0 | 17:51.110
And give me an example of someone that’s very transparent, because I just think of someone that just wears everything on. It’s not necessarily someone that just wears all their emotions on their sleeves or anything like that. No,
Speaker 1 | 18:00.014
you want them to be in control of their emotion. In fact, that’s where one of the things that I needed to get a lot better at is learning to control my emotions. And I learned a lot of that from running my own startup, from working at Lockheed. And even my current job, John’s the CEO. He’s like Yoda with his emotions. And I’m learning a lot. Because the problem is with emotion is it clouds your judgment, right? And so when I say-It can be very crippling too. It can be extremely crippling, right? And I think that the trick is with transparency is- So you want somebody who’s willing to point out zits before they become infections. See what I’m saying?
Speaker 0 | 18:45.546
I love your metaphors.
Speaker 1 | 18:46.866
Thanks, man. If they could point something out and do it in such a way that isn’t threatening, and it comes from a place of just wanting to help each other, that’s a great talent. And one of the main things I’ve noticed, characteristics of somebody that’s very transparent is they… will be transparent about themselves first and foremost. You know, they’ll, they’ll tell you what their career paths are. They’ll tell you why they’re here. They’ll, they’ll be more honest about what they want to do with a job or, you know, when they’re like, when you’re like, Hey, how’s it going? There’ll be, there’ll be like one of the few people to be like, I’m having trouble with this. Right.
Speaker 0 | 19:24.712
Here’s the interesting, here’s an interesting piece because, you know, there’s a lot of different personality types and, and then you deal with a lot of engineers and I find engineers. typically, and you tell me if I’m wrong, don’t like the question, how are you doing? Like just the general, Hey, how you doing? Um, I don’t think they, I don’t think typically they would like a answer that or necessarily know how to answer it outside of the context of what we’re focusing on at the moment.
Speaker 1 | 19:52.644
And you’re right. You’re absolutely right. Right. Um, and that’s the behavior and for most engineers, if we’re going to bucket all of them, right. Like into like the persona almost like. Yeah, you’re right. Like you have to help them become comfortable in, in, in, in kind of talking about that stuff. Right. Whereas the, on the other side of the coin, when you get, um, people that are like. come from very introspective type backgrounds, right? And are comfortable talking about that stuff. You need, I almost need to coach them in, hey, listen, when you talk about this stuff, you should have a little more evidence or objectiveness to what you’re trying to communicate because that’ll resonate better with the engineers who like to see evidence, right?
Speaker 0 | 20:33.807
Numbers, facts, figures.
Speaker 1 | 20:35.148
Exactly. And the thing is, when it comes to a team, like you’ve got super rational engineers and you’ve got super irrational market dynamics and customers, right? And you’ve got product marketing and sales that sit in the middle and try and bridge the gap, user experience. A rational engineer would be like, what does it matter what color the button is? That’s the button. Just click the right. I’m a robot. right like i’ll give you a great story you wanted a story right um i was working on a submarine program and uh we were working on a new uh user interface for uh like the the the combat system and you know the reason this is relevant to this talk is like a lot of this stuff is it systems it’s just different computers right um and you’re and you’ve got people interfacing with with complicated computers and stuff and so we’ve got these soldiers and these sonar men um interfacing with these computers. And the computers are designed by engineers who probably grew up playing video games, right? And know interfaces and understand complex computers. And then you’ve got 18, 19-year-old sonar men who might have been very, very limited in terms of their computer. They might have never had a computer growing up, right? Or if they did, it was only in school. Like you have no idea what their background is, right? They might not even be a techno weenie. Like they’re just very good at sonar or whatever. They got this job, right? And so trying to understand what they want became a really complicated thing with lots of reviews and stuff. Then I met this guy and he was actually a former sonar man himself. And he’s like, yo, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to take these people and we’re going to let them draw what they want to see. So we went down to the base, we grabbed some soldiers, right? Got them food. And then we had a stack of paper and a bunch of colored pencils and crayons, right? We’re like, guys, draw what you want to see. And then we shut up and we let them start arguing with each other. They’re like, this button should be here and it should be big because when I’m in trouble, I need to see that button and I need to click it. And they’re like, yeah, you’re right. But you only get into this trouble because this button. And so they started debating. And at the end of it, we had like a really good idea of what they wanted. And the trick to get them to open up, right? Because they were soldiers. They knew each other. They had the camaraderie, right? They just didn’t trust us. So by taking them into a place, feeding them, showing them that we were just regular guys trying to help them out, right? It helped them open up to us. So I think that the key with any high functioning team and evaluating talent for that team is to understand the different styles of everybody on the team and celebrating that as diversity, right? And… By being a leader, you have to almost be a chameleon and be able to adapt to all the different motivational styles, communication styles, and you have to become the translator, right? Between organizations that have very different cultural foundations. And the thing is, you don’t want to break those cultural foundations, right? Because the diversity in those cultures and how these teams operate, like marketing versus sales and sales versus product and product. versus IT and IT versus security and security versus engineering, right? All of these different, if you start trying to make them operate the same way, then you lose the magic that makes them good at what they do, right? And the best leaders can let these people operate in very, very unique cultures and operating kind of systems like OSs within the teams, but they can then, they can tie together. together in a, in like a master plan. That’s amazing.
Speaker 0 | 24:31.605
So they can focus on their strengths and not be kind of straight jacketed.
Speaker 1 | 24:34.746
Yeah. And you get away and you got to get away from insecurity. And that’s why transparency is so hard in a large company because you’re asking people to be vulnerable in an environment where vulnerabilities can be used as leverage. In a war team, that’s a little different, right? And in a startup that’s a little different because you’re all in the same group. Like, you know, But when you’re in a large company, you have no idea sometimes who you’re working with. And you have no idea what their career aspirations are and how they might use some information like, yeah, guys, I’m really sorry I was not performing well the last few months. I’ve been dealing with alcoholism. Like having the cojones and the environment to share that could be so powerful for a team because then everybody can get behind that person and be empathetic, right? Instead of being like, yo, why is Dip always out? What’s wrong with him, right? Is he a flake? No, he’s dealing with a disease, right? But at the same time, if you’ve got some bad apples in your team or the team isn’t truly a safe place to be transparent and vulnerable. then that information can leak and cause a lot of problems, right? So creating that environment, I think, is something that I did fairly well. And the reason was I was very young. I was much younger than most of the team I was leading. And as a result, they would wonder, why are you leading me? And then I would wonder, holy shit, why am I leading these people? And then I would understand that my job is not to be better at their jobs than they are. It’s to tie it all together, right? really, really good teams and contributors might not be the best at tying it together because that’s what they’re focused on. And so the way I became kind of trustworthy with them is I would say, look, my job is different than yours. My job enables your job. And I’m here to keep all the BS process out of your way. I want to make you spend 99% of your time engineering and 1% of your time doing overhead. And I’ll do 99% overhead and 1% engineering. Right. Yeah. And, and I think that that gained respect. So part of it, like, I think that what, what makes an effective team is like, you have to find a way to get rid of the insecurities and egos and transparency and trust is the two, like most to me, it was like the, the, the, the best ways to do that, you know?
Speaker 0 | 27:06.859
And to just to kind of take it back now, because now you’re, I mean, you’re, your CTO now, even just taking it back to, you know, for, for anyone else, anyone else, wherever they’re at, you know, IT director or not working with a small team or a large team transparency and vulnerability being some of the biggest pieces, allowing people to do their job the way that a, they’re comfortable doing it, but then also feel comfortable on the team.
Speaker 1 | 27:35.368
Exactly. You know, and, and, and, and, and, you know, you got to lead by example there, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, uh,
Speaker 0 | 27:45.712
so we were also talking about, you know, mission driven, you know, amazing people. I think we’re hitting, I think we’re hitting on the amazing people, mission driven. Why don’t you just tell, you know, just tell us a little bit about where you’re at right now, how you ended up where you’re at right now. Yeah. And what should you know, because if we really haven’t talked about mission driven, you know, one thing that you’re never taught in school growing up is you’re never taught, you know, goal setting. And now we’re way beyond, you know, you’re never taught, you know, what, what, how to have a vision or. you know, what should my purpose be? And I think a lot of people kind of just wander through those years. So maybe let’s just touch on that a little bit, because obviously now, you know, through your entire career, you’ve kind of had a goal of where you want to be, or at least a feeling, I don’t know, you know, whatever it is. So what is that?
Speaker 1 | 28:26.373
You know, it’s funny, when I was younger, right? People would say, what do you want to do when you’re growing up? And I would say, I want to own and run an engineering firm, right? And I had no idea what that meant. Like, but I just knew that like I wanted to lead people and I wanted to build awesome stuff. Right. And so as I as I got older and I got to actually be an engineer and start leading these teams, my answers became more nuanced. Right. And when I was at Lockheed, I would say, look, I want to get up to the upper echelons. Right. I want to I want to make huge impacts within this company. I feel I have a lot to add. I want to shape the way I would say things like I want to shape the way this company grows. Right. Things like that. And, you know, again, those felt like the right answers. But again, I think that I was just very young and I left Lockheed in 2012 and I was 31 years old. Right. And I went to MIT to Sloan School, the business school. the place changed my life and not for the reasons I thought. Like I went there to learn how to start a new business, but what I learned was I needed to learn about myself a lot. You know, I needed to be kind of introspective and understand my goals and my trajectories a lot better to become kind of mission driven and to become the most effective person. And then when I… When I was there, I also started my last company, which is called EcoVent. And it was a hardware and software product. It was an HVAC product. HVAC is heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. It was basically a zoning system for forced air. So I could, if you have most homes in this country and buildings have one thermostat for a large area, and then they have air that comes out of these ducts, and then the air just kind of goes where it goes. I made air vents that open and closed and could adjust that airflow real time. And I started working with a lot of contractors, like HVAC contractors. And these guys blew my mind. Like, I couldn’t believe it. They were A lot of them didn’t go to college. Some did. A lot of them were very happy with their lives. Like they were just, I met them and I just felt like, wow, these people are just really just in good moods. They have a good time. They have good friends.
Speaker 0 | 30:54.332
What is it with HVAC guys? All my HVAC guys are like that. I’ll be completely honest with you, man. Like I go to jujitsu in the morning and like this guy is like, you know, he just lost, by the way, his total side subject. but I mean HVAC guy came to jujitsu he’s been with us for like I don’t know six months now lost 50 pounds and he was already in pretty good shape to begin with but now he’s like 55 like super ripped wow yeah always fun always outgoing real talkative I mean it’s just like and then every other HVAC guy I can think of has been like that as well now I’m gonna now now probably the next HVAC next guy I run into is gonna be miserable yeah but yeah but I hear you man you
Speaker 1 | 31:34.858
I think the reason is because it’s a career that if you are like into it and you enjoy it and you work hard, you’re going to do well. And, uh,
Speaker 0 | 31:44.003
I think it’s because they make good money and then have free time once they build their business up.
Speaker 1 | 31:48.805
That’s right. That’s right. But the thing is, the thing is the ones that, that don’t love it, that don’t work hard, they don’t ever, you never end up actually meeting them.
Speaker 0 | 31:57.150
Yeah. They’re just rolling a truck or something.
Speaker 1 | 31:58.591
They’re just, well, exactly. Right. And they’re not the ones that interface with the customer when they come to your house. But when I met, these guys, what I realized was like, some of them make a lot of money, man. I’m talking like, one guy I met took home, he took home more than $10 million a year. Right. And I was just like, wow.
Speaker 0 | 32:17.377
He was doing the chillers on the roof in DC or something.
Speaker 1 | 32:20.358
It wasn’t DC, but yeah, it was in Florida. And I asked him, I said, Hey man, like what, what could I do to double the size of your business? And he said, find me better. He said, find me more HVAC technicians. He’s like, I have all the business I need. I need better people. I need more people. Right. And the reason I brought up HVAC was because it is not a glamorous career, you see, and it is not one that requires a four year degree or a PhD. Yet, if you like it and your mission and you want to help people get more comfortable and you understand that it is a critical part of our society, you’re going to be very successful. Right. And. That’s what I learned. It clicked when I was at my MBA program and I started my own company. It was like, I have to be the person who maximizes everybody’s output, right? Like everybody’s LeBron at something, you know? Everybody’s Jimi Hendrix at something.
Speaker 0 | 33:19.993
Are they really though? I believe so, man. You do?
Speaker 1 | 33:22.976
I really believe it, man. I just don’t think everybody has the training in the thing that they’re good at, you know? Like somebody might be a nun. a phenomenal souffle maker, you know, but like they’ve never made a souffle. So they just end up being like the best omelet maker at like a decent, you know, diner. See what I’m saying? Like, it’s just some, some, some specialties are hard to suss out, but I believe in the genius of people, you know, in general.
Speaker 0 | 33:48.797
I do too. I’m just playing advocate here.
Speaker 1 | 33:50.778
Yeah. No, I’m glad you are. I’m glad you are because then, cause I could sit here and just talk smack. Right. But if you, if you, at least I, if you challenge me a little, I have to back up what I’m saying. And I like that. First of all,
Speaker 0 | 34:01.754
I find anything that you make a lot of money at to be somewhat quite exciting, just so you know.
Speaker 1 | 34:05.976
You ain’t kidding, man.
Speaker 0 | 34:07.417
You’re making a lot of money.
Speaker 1 | 34:08.217
I tried to convince my nephew to go be an HVAC person for like four years before he went to college. He graduated high school near the top of his class, got into a bunch of colleges. And he’s like, I don’t really know what I want to do. I’m like, what’s the rush, man? I was like, go make some money, be an electrician, right? Learn how to… learn how to do some work get some work ethic in you you know uh learn how business works that’s super important you know and you’re just gonna be yeah you’ll be older than this kids at school but who cares like that’ll make you more interesting like you know i
Speaker 0 | 34:42.733
remember the year my career took off i got into a training class um this is like 18 years ago and i looked around the room and every single one of them was younger than me and i was like okay I can do better than you, you, you, you, you, you. I was like, I need to worry about you and I need to worry about you. And at the end of like, you know, 18 months, like no one was standing, no one was left.
Speaker 1 | 35:02.055
That was my boy. See? Yeah, man.
Speaker 0 | 35:03.718
I was just like, and I remember that. And I remember this one lady tell me before, she had a similar story to that. And she’s like, look, she’s like, when I started here, I went in, I was like, all these kids are younger than me. And here I am. Like, I need to, like, I have really no choice. I’ve got to make it. You know what I mean? And like, for what reason? Yeah.
Speaker 1 | 35:22.559
What kind of training class was it?
Speaker 0 | 35:24.380
It was a sales class. So most people don’t know my story. Like I was working at, I was working at Start. When I got out of college, I was like married, like my junior year of college. So. When I first got out of college, it was like, I got to the first job I got. I took this restaurant job. Then I was working at Starbucks. And then I was a store manager at Starbucks with managing all these employees. And that’s kind of where I got my like MBA really, because they’re, that organization is so, they were throwing so much money at their store managers back then. So they’re sending us to all kinds of business classes, how to read PNLs, understand gross margin, flow through profit, you know, like all these different things they’re sending us through. Like they. like advanced behavioral interviewing classes. I mean, I know how to interview people just from Starbucks. That’s so cool. Like really, like it was at the heyday where they were trading really high, um, before they’re kind of like stock market crash piece. They’re at like $42 at the time there, everyone was getting stock up. Anyways, it was just, it was a really good education. Um, but they’re just, it was, it was a grind, you know what I mean? There just wasn’t, the money wasn’t there. So, and I, At the time, I saw these people walking through the door, these young guys, I’m like, what do you do? Like, how are you driving that car? Like, why do you make this money? And, you know, they’re like, I’m a, you know, mortgage broker before the, you know, before the housing crash and everything where everyone was like, you know, signing all different kinds of different mortgage deals all the time. Everyone could, you know, make money there. This was in Colorado. Anyways, so I threw my resume up on Monster. Some company called Cisco called me and they’re like, have you heard of Voice Over IP? I’m like, I have no clue at all. Like what you’re talking about. Cisco delivers my paper products. They’re like, no, Cisco with a C.
Speaker 1 | 37:06.526
Yeah. Not Ketra. Hilarious.
Speaker 0 | 37:10.487
And I’m like, don’t worry. Put a suit and tie on and like, come in. You’re going to speak with this like sales manager. You’re going to do this ride along, you know, like typical recruiter guy. Tell him, feeding me like all the answers. Like you’re going to come sit down with this big player. Make sure that you close for the interview at the end. You know, this is like, you know, whatever. Like it ended up being a business sales job where we’re 50 doors a day. Like. literally business to business cold calling 50 to 50 55 doors a day trying to switch them to voip yeah yeah like we were selling t1s we were selling integrated t1s and um uh you know dynamic allocate you know wow man that’s a hustle man yeah so i got into this class you know it was like all kids that got out of college that like just took whatever job they had and then i’m here me with like you know a wife and two kids i’m like what the hell did i get myself into And I’m like, I don’t know, but like, I have to succeed like no matter what. So I had this like deep hunger inside, you know, like there just, there was just no going back. I had sunk the ship. I had literally sunk the ship from the retail world, management world. And like, I’m successful in this world. What happened was I learned to A, manage my emotions and overcome a lot of adversity. And I went, I tripled my salary in six months. I mean, I went from. you know, what I was making at Starbucks, which was like, you know, 40,000 a year at the time, plus benefits, which was like handcuffs kind of like, Oh, I’m going to give up benefits and give up salary to this, like, you know, to like $19,000 a year salary and everything else is commissioned. You know, it was just, you know, but I had all that business acumen with me. So every, every door that I walked into, I could relate to the business managers. I could relate to the people. I understood what, what they were struggling with, how they were trying to make money. I understood. you know, controllable costs. I understood all, I understood all this stuff that I had from Starbucks that none of these college kids had. Right. So when I went in, I wasn’t just like some guy trying to like pitch some product or try to, you know, sell them something. I was actually someone that could actually deliver a solution that helped them.
Speaker 1 | 39:09.420
Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 0 | 39:10.601
So it was kind of crazy. So to go from, you know, 40,000 a year to like over a hundred thousand a year. And it’s kind of funny because my, my like market director at the time, I think I made more money than him. It was such a glory position. You start climbing these ranks and there’s all these fake promotions to make everyone… I don’t know how we got off on this subject. It has something to do with mission-driven and amazing people.
Speaker 1 | 39:40.260
That’s it. I think it was a transition of how I ended up at Saluna.
Speaker 0 | 39:45.904
Somehow.
Speaker 1 | 39:46.445
You know what I mean? I’m fascinated. Keep going, man.
Speaker 0 | 39:50.888
So, you know, for whatever, I mean, that was it, man. I couldn’t believe it at that point. I was like, I cannot believe that people make money. you know, like doing something that’s kind of like, you know, like when business development, that’s exciting, helping people solve problems and talk to people. I was like, this is kind of ridiculous. I thought you had to work, just work like a crazy person, you know, in the trenches forever. And then maybe you’d get lucky someday and get promoted to like a district manager role. But that’s not the case.
Speaker 1 | 40:16.931
You can actually, you’ve got the hustle, man.
Speaker 0 | 40:20.173
Anyways,
Speaker 1 | 40:21.634
you learn, man, you train yourself, you know, and that’s, I mean, at Ecovent is where I learned like… this is crazy because at Lockheed, I didn’t need to do marketing and sales, right? These type of things kind of, yes, there was business development and writing a proposal, but it wasn’t like I was making a pamphlet and hoping somebody was going to buy a helicopter. You know what I’m saying? It’s a much different kind of thing than what my company was here. And, you know, I learned a lot from the contractors about wanting to be happy. And by being happy and being a badass at your job, you can make a lot of money, like a lot of money. That’s where we’re at. Yeah. And I stopped chasing the money. Right. And I started chasing the happiness and I, you know, got EcoVent and that went really well. And I had to sell it after running into some issues. And, you know, I took about six to eight months to go back to school to be an EIR, entrepreneur in residence, and try and lick my wounds a little, advise some people and then, you know, figure out what was next for me. And I got a… call from this guy named John. And John and I, he sold his company around the same time I sold mine. And for the five years I was running EcoVent, John was running his company too called First Best. And we were in the same CEO forum together. So we had gotten to know each other a lot. And we got to know each other a lot more because he was like one of my principal advisors when I was going through the sale of my company. And he would give me such good advice, you know? And… I would open up to him and I realized like, this guy is awesome. And so when he, uh, founded or when he found this opportunity, well, he was recruited to, when he was recruited to this opportunity for Saluna, um, his, you know, he wrote me an email saying, Hey, the subject line is so funny. And it was, who do you know that knows about crypto, right? Which at the time meant blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies. And, uh, you know, I know a little bit about it because I used to mine it back in the day. And I, paid attention to it because I believe in it. And I was like, look, I don’t care what you’re doing. I’m not going to introduce you to anybody until I hear what you’re doing. And if I don’t want the job, right? He’s like, I need a CTO. And I’m like, great. I’m your guy. I don’t care what the job is.
Speaker 0 | 42:41.056
Who do you know that wants to make like $2 million? Do you know anyone?
Speaker 1 | 42:43.718
Yeah. And it’s not even that million dollars,
Speaker 0 | 42:45.338
like a month.
Speaker 1 | 42:48.019
It could have been like, who wants to make seven cents over the next five years, but we could change the world. I’m like, dude, with you, I’ll do it. And so, yeah, so exactly. And so, uh, you know, I said, all right, let’s do it. This is going to be great. And, uh, you know, basically, um, at the time this company was very raw and what it’s become is magic. And basically the way it started was there’s a private equity shop in New York and they, um have a west african power development company okay so that they they know the markets uh in africa uh and they understand how to build green energy out there and this about you know this company’s been around for a while and years ago they found this site right uh in morocco that creates more wind than uh just about almost any other site in on the planet and uh a german company had gone and done quite a bit of engineering back in 2008, 2009, 2010, up to 2012, 2013, with just engineering on this site to prove how windy it was, you know, putting up wind masks, measuring every 10 minutes for years, wind speeds, things like that. And what happened was, when you make green energy, you have to sell the power, typically, before you even build the plant. And they call that a power purchase agreement. and in order to do that we’ve got windmills in my town that there you go yeah so i understand this and we have a really really really weird political thing going on with the energy and the kilowatt hours but i get it you got to sell it back to the grid exactly and if there’s no grid you can’t sell it and if you can’t sell it it never gets built right yeah this site that dormant waiting for morocco to connect the grid because the this site is very far from the current grid right and so uh it took years about eight years and In that period of time, the company that owned the site and did all that work was acquired. And the new acquiring company said, divest everything outside of Germany that isn’t beyond a certain stage, right? So they wanted to get rid of this site. And this… private equity shop in New York, got wind of it because they had this company out there and they made a play to buy it. They bought it and they bought all the engineering studies, the lease as it stood, the rights, all of that. And basically, they decided to spin out a new company, which is what’s now called Saluna, and hired John as the CEO. And the concept was, once the grid shows up, the Moroccan grid shows up, sure, we could sell the energy to the grid. But in the meantime, we’re going to actually… vertically integrate an off-grid computing center, right? High density off-grid computing that does at the time blockchain computing, right? Bitcoin mining, right? Because Bitcoin mines, you can turn them on and off so it can handle variable power, which is what green energy is, very variable. And it also doesn’t require a lot of internet bandwidth. So it was perfect. And that was the mindset. And, you know, as we started building Saluna, we realized There’s a whole new kind of data center market growing out there, and that’s of high-density compute, not just high performance, but high density, and asynchronous computing. So the idea being a lot of hyperscalers and data centers now are optimized to deliver content fast, whether it’s gaming or video for streaming or Netflix or video conferencing or any other type of real-time data like avionics data, stuff like that, right? Um, but there’s this other market growing and it’s growing at a rapid rate as well. It’s very small relative to the hyperscaler market, but it’s still big and it’s growing very fast. And that is of asynchronous computing, right? Things like video rendering, deep data models and deep data mining, you know, like oil rigs that, you know, mine exabytes of data to try and figure out what’s going on and look for correlations. That stuff doesn’t happen in real time, right? Like you ship the data somewhere and then they work on it for a long period of time and then give you the results, right? And right now, the only options are you build your own data center or you lease somebody else’s. And the problem is the data centers that are optimized for content delivery are not optimized for asynchronous tasks, right? And if you start building a data center from scratch, throw away all assumptions that you know about data centers. and you say, look, I’m going to build a data center purely for protein folding, purely for video rendering, purely for deep data research and genome research, or blockchain mining, all of a sudden, you can get rid of a lot of the requirements that you need for a traditional data center, such as millions of gallons of water, perfect clean energy, 100% uptime. You need light. PhDs to run it and you need a very clean internet, right? And lots of it. But with this kind of model, you can create distributed clusters all over the place. And that’s our model to create these shipping containers filled with basically ASIC chips that are super specific, right? Like this container is for video rendering. This container is for protein folding. This container is for Fourier transformers, right? This container is for blockchain or SHA-256. And- And when you do that, you can actually take a data center. Like the analogy I give when I talk about this at school is that data centers right now are designed like F1 cars, right? They need clean energy, clean power, clean fuel, which is like the clean internet. And they need clean roads. I’m sorry, the roads are like the internet. So they need a track, which is like clean internet. They need very specific fuel, which is like clean energy. And they need very specific operators, which is like… you know, the operators of data centers. Now I’m going to build like, uh, you know, like a, like a Land Rover defender 90, you know, or like these, these trucks you see in East Asia where like you could fix just about anything in them with a wrench, you know? Okay. Uh, you know, the reason I think we can do this is the radars that I built for Lockheed, uh, the teams that I personally built them, obviously. Um, they, uh, were extremely advanced computing data centers, in fact, right? And they were operated in very rough conditions, desert, shipboard, things like that. And they were designed so that an 18-year-old marine under mortar fire can operate them and maintain them. And if there’s a failure, fix them, right? So if we can apply the same principles to these new types of chips that are coming out, hyperspecific chips that are coming out, all of a sudden you can build a data center that like, that’s like an F one 50 truck, right? It’s designed to be fixed by anybody driven by anybody run on any kind of road and fuel. And, um, can do the work more efficiently, right? And what we’ll be able to do is basically say, hey, look, Jamaica, take a look at this. You know, you can make two gigawatts of green energy, but your consumption’s only, you know, instantaneously one-fifth of that. So, no one will ever build the site. Well, all of a sudden, we can throw, you know, 90 shipping containers on there, have them do work that’s very necessary for the growing world. And Jamaica as a The country benefits because now the Jamaican people are running essentially a green energy plant, right? And they’re enjoying very sustainable, very cheap power in abundance.
Speaker 0 | 50:37.105
So explain these shipping containers because I’m just, I’m trying to imagine this. Are you saying, are we literally shipping anything or are these shipping containers becoming like pods on like a data center type thing?
Speaker 1 | 50:47.151
We actually use the word pods. Yeah. The idea is like, it’s a, it’s a… It’s not fully integrated because during shipping, things will jostle around, but it’s like a box of Legos, right? You ship them out to a site and you assemble them very simply, like red goes to red, blue goes to blue, that type of thing. And you turn it on and you plug it into power and it will return X amount of dollars per kilowatt hour. That’s it. You see, you don’t have to worry about running water to it. And the maintenance is very simple. And the idea is when the wind turbines or the solar panels turn off. the shipping container is smart enough to adjust its processing to turn off as well, right? And then eventually there’ll be a higher layer on the internet that distributes the workload, right? So if Disney says, all right, I need you to render Toy Story 5 and we need this scene done in a month, we’ll be able to distribute that amongst the different sites to beat any other render farm because again, we’ll have more energy at a cheaper price, right? So even if we’re only operating 40% of the time or 50% of the time, we’ll be operating 30,000 times more efficiently. Not that much, but 10 or 20 times more efficiently or eventually 30,000 times more efficiently when very specific chips come out. And so the idea is very general hyperscaler data centers still have their place and they’re growing like crazy, which is why there’s no innovation, as much innovation on the shipping container side yet. But the shipping container side is coming. And what it’s going to do is cater to the asynchronous computing tasks that are going to exponentially grow, right? As we collect exponentially more data, that data is going to need to be crunched. And a hyperscaler that is designed for video delivery is the wrong data center to do that work, right? And the way John and I see it and Saluna sees it is that we can use the… the properties of these new types of processors that are coming out to actually catalyze green energy power plants. You see? So when it comes time to build a new green energy plant, instead of saying, okay, I need a PPA with the grid, you can just say, no, we’re going to put a thousand containers on site. And that’s going to be our return until the grid gets there. And what it’s going to do is create a new financing method. methodology for green energy, which we believe can actually help put oil out of business. And that’s really our mission, right? It’s to-Again,
Speaker 0 | 53:24.056
where’s your bodyguard?
Speaker 1 | 53:27.057
We’re going to get them. Don’t worry. My brother-in-law, I joked about this before, but my brother-in-law protected Condoleezza Rice when she was in the sex state.
Speaker 0 | 53:36.620
Someone can get to him. Someone can get to him too.
Speaker 1 | 53:40.761
Right. But can they get to the guy protecting him? you see we need 12 layers right oh man like inception but uh hey you know what if you open source the tech then there’s no reason to kill me it’s out there right it’s too late yeah that baby you get it you make it you put it out there and you uh you get you you rid the world of a massive disease right uh and that is uh oil and i love oil don’t get me wrong it’s great you can store it you can ship it it makes plastic it’s amazing material but In terms of using it to fuel us as a species, we need to come up with a new way immediately. And the biggest holdup with green energy is that it’s intermittent and it can’t be stored and it can’t be shipped, except with the grid, right? So if we can monetize that intermittency, then there’s no reason to keep oil around anymore. Because green energy, you can make energy at a penny a kilowatt hour, two pennies a kilowatt hour. You’re just never going to get there with oil in terms of price.
Speaker 0 | 54:43.963
I just wrote down no more oil.
Speaker 1 | 54:46.465
I love it. Except for plastic. I love plastic, man. Maybe not for shopping bags, but like, you know, medical use and things like that.
Speaker 0 | 54:56.797
Gotcha. So, hey, I mean. you’re, you’re, you’re so off in the stratosphere of amazingness right now. I mean, what we’re talking about, it’s, it’s really kind of far up there and we’ve come a long ways. We’re probably going to, this show is probably going to be broken up into two parts, but the, for everyone else out there, for everyone else out there listening, right. For everyone else out there listening that, you know, you have any advice or any, I mean, if there was one, if there was one message you had to send out to anyone listening and technology or anything, what would that be?
Speaker 1 | 55:29.268
I would say find a real problem and then apply your strengths solving it. A lot of people say look at your weaknesses and find a way to solve them. To me, the best way to solve your weaknesses is to find a team member who is strong at those things. So what I would do is, yeah, find a problem that you are like hyper-passionate about and then… Figure out what you’re LeBron at and then make them work together and you will be successful. It may not manifest itself in a way that makes the most sense to you right now, but it will manifest itself and I promise it’ll be most effective at making you a highly successful person.
Speaker 0 | 56:15.821
Dip, we’re ending on that, man. We just can’t go any higher than that.
Speaker 1 | 56:21.263
Appreciate you. Thanks for your time, man. Yeah. Thanks to the listeners too. Hopefully this was cool. You know, I always like the break and being able to talk for a while. It energizes me. So thank you.
Speaker 0 | 56:32.271
Yeah, man. Anyone that wants to, anyone that wants to reach out to, to dip as well, you can find them on, on LinkedIn. And Dipple Patel, D-I-P-U-L-P-A-T-E-L. I’m surprised you’re not in hotels, man. What’s the deal? Every, every hotel guy I work with is, is Patel.
Speaker 1 | 56:50.684
Hey, believe it or not, when we came here from Kenya, I had a motel and my parents and my uncles and I cleaned it growing up. And my uncles are still in the motel hotel business.
Speaker 0 | 57:00.788
So pretty much every hotel you walk into, if you ask for like, hey, where’s the owner? And his last name is going to be Patel. Well,
Speaker 1 | 57:06.810
real quick. The reason is the last name. The last names in Indian culture typically refer to the caste and the profession. And Patel’s were hospitality and innkeepers for the most part.
Speaker 0 | 57:18.635
Yeah, man.
Speaker 1 | 57:19.576
You can see how restaurants, convenience stores, gas stations, and places of lodging are mostly held true by Patel because it’s in our passion. It’s in our blood.
Speaker 0 | 57:30.600
That’s good, man. Every time I walk into a Best Western, I’m like, look, where’s Patel? I need to talk to him now.
Speaker 1 | 57:34.782
Best Western is such a Patel brand. That’s hilarious. That’s so true. That’s like the brand two or three of my aunts and uncles own. That’s hilarious. Look,
Speaker 0 | 57:41.805
don’t forget, man. I started off cold calling 55 businesses a day. You know how many doors I had to hit? How many people? Hey.
Speaker 1 | 57:49.108
I’ve done door-to-door sales myself my friend I’m with you it’s crazy I know thanks again for your time Phil yeah have a great weekend you too pal take care
