.png)
The IT Masters
An IT podcast unlike any other, where technology’s top leaders share their winning strategies.
The IT Masters
Startup to Enterprise: IT Leadership Lessons with John Muller
How do you scale from a shoestring startup to a global IT powerhouse?
Robert DeVita sits down with John Muller, whose career spans Hotels.com, Expedia, ATX Group, One Technologies and Intertek. Muller shares how he built a leading e‑commerce platform on a budget, navigated acquisitions, and now leads global infrastructure teams.
Together they explore cultural shifts in tech and what it takes to earn a seat at the executive table.
Stream the episode, then read our Start‑Up‑to‑Enterprise Scaling Guide. Share your biggest scaling challenge on LinkedIn.
Welcome to the IT Masters podcast, where technology leaders share their strategies shaping the future of IT. Hosted by Robert DeVita, CEO of Majetics, we bring you candid conversations with CIOs, CTOs, and enterprise architects who are driving digital information, from AI-driven security to cloud innovation and IT modernization. We cut through the noise to bring you real insights from the brightest minds in tech. No sales pitches, no fluff, just thought-provoking discussions with the masters of IT. Subscribe now and join the conversation. The IT Masters Podcast, where the best in IT share their journey.
UNKNOWN:All right, welcome, John Muller.
SPEAKER_03:John, you've held senior IT positions throughout your career and worked for some very well-known companies. tells.com, Expedia Group. Then we did some cool cutting edge stuff at ATX Group and One Technologies. Then to large corporate IT. So thank you for being here today. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_03:Let's sort of start in your career path, right? Tell us how you started in IT because people don't just go into it. So there had to be something that sort of triggered you to say, hey, I think this is cool.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's the proverbial how did you get here from there question. Me as a kid, we always interested in understanding how things worked, always tearing things apart, putting them back together, trying to figure out how to make them better. Very much an engineering mind, which, of course, wanted to continue that as I got older, went to college, engineering school. Ended up in computer science, which then launched me into the real world afterwards, into a sales engineer role. And that was in the industrial automation space, which was really cool experience. Interesting work where IT kind of met the mechanical world, if you will. Did some really cool things in the oil and gas space with some of the bigs, Chevron, Mobil, Shell. Worked in the semiconductor space, TI, Hitachi, some of those really cool areas. Very, very different, but still really neat. And then did some really neat machine control in factories and things of that sort. all before I was 30 years old. In that industry, again, it was pretty neat stuff, but before 30, I was considered one of the best engineers in the U.S. at what we did, and I was smart enough to understand that I was going to get bored. So the interesting problem started to run out, and I went to my network and had an opportunity to go to Hotels.com before it was Hotels.com and build essentially what we know today as a hotel club. hotels.com website. And the rest is kind of history. That was my foray into IT. So it really started as being curious and interesting and understanding that I wanted to do these kind of things going forward and just kind of manifesting it throughout my life.
SPEAKER_03:So let's talk about hotels.com, right? You know, a lot of bootstrapping there, right? You know, you had a lot of bubble gum, a lot of duct tape. and you built one of the biggest e-commerce sites around. Walk us through sort of the history of how Hotels.com started. How did you do essentially a lot with a little there?
SPEAKER_02:Sure. It was, so before it was Hotels.com, it was called Hotel Reservations Network. I mean, it was a call center business. It had a, you know, I'm dating myself here, but an AS400 at the back end, and people would call into an 800 number and book hotel rooms. And the then CEO of the company, David Lipman, got this crazy idea that, hey, you know, there's this.com thing out there. Maybe we should try to capitalize on it. And from my understanding, It took a little convincing for him to invest some money and some servers and some bandwidth and a few people to build the website. And he brought in two contractors to do that. Those contractors turned perm and they brought me in as kind of the infrastructure guy, did all the firewalls and the networks and things of that sort and help manage unique systems. But it was a bare bones business that was right towards the at the tail end of the dot-com, or as we all know, the dot-bomb. So there was a lot of hesitancy to spend some money there. So we had to prove the concept on a shoestring budget. And we did that through eBay purchases and going down to Home Depot and buying racks. And our first data center, I think, had a raised floor of maybe six inches in it. And it was something that was left over. And we were always fighting for bandwidth You know, this was back when we were bundling T1s and things of that sort. So it was challenging because it was on that shoestring budget, and we just figured it out. We were young, we were hungry, and we were looking for the challenge, and we found it.
SPEAKER_03:So, you know, that revenue started at zero for Hotels.com. And then finally, acquisition by IAC. I mean, what were revenues– What was the website doing then?
SPEAKER_02:We were about two billion. Crazy. We went from almost zero to two billion in I think it was our five years. And then the acquisition, to your point, IAC then turned into Expedia Inc. And I don't know where it went from there, but we were setting sales and revenue records all the time. It was catching lightning in a bottle for sure.
SPEAKER_03:It was an exciting time. We worked together then when I was over at AT&T trying to get you guys more for less. But yeah, it was exciting times. I remember we did the data center move. It's supposed to be done at You know, midnight, we're there at 5 o'clock in the morning trying to get the website up the next day.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, the snatch and grab. Again, that was, again, the shoestring budget of which we operated on.
SPEAKER_03:I don't think anyone today would be allowed to move a data center in the back of, you know, a box truck and pickup trucks.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah, it was exciting stuff for sure.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So a startup, essentially, into a big corporate dot-com conglomerate at ISE. Talk to me about... the culture changes, right? You had pretty much full autonomy at hotels.com. Then you've got the IAC umbrella, then you've got really them wrapping hotels under Expedia Group. How does that all change from a culture perspective?
SPEAKER_02:It's certainly a power shift, right? To your point, you go from all the autonomy that you want to going public. We were a private company when I started for about six months And then we went public. Of course, as a public company, you're beholden to the shareholders every quarter. So that was the first dynamic shift, shifted dynamics. And then, of course, I think it was USA.net at the time was the parent company that turned into IAC. Barry Diller's transition of that to IAC and then started purchasing other e-commerce companies. The whole concept or the whole idea was that You know, you... going to a city, you'd go to and you wanted to watch a Blackhawks game in Chicago. You'd buy a ticket on Ticketmaster. You wanted a jersey. You would go to CitySearch to get a jersey. And oh, you needed a hotel room with that as well. So you'd go to Hotels.com and get a hotel room. What
SPEAKER_03:if you needed a date?
SPEAKER_02:You'd go to Match.com. They had it all. So it never quite worked out that way, but that was kind of the intentions. And I think later on when that idea started to to fade a little bit. Then the Barry Diller approach of acquiring companies really kicked in and he acquired us wholly along with Expedia and started merging into Expedia Travel. And then, of course, we really lost a lot of our autonomy at that point because Expedia was the big kid on the block. And management and things like that starts going to the Northwest and And that's when things really started to change in the organization and a lot of people started doing other things.
SPEAKER_03:Got it. So big.com company grows up. You leave the organization. You head over to ATX Group to work on some really cool projects. Car stuff. Yeah. Talk us through that and how early of an adopter were they to where you see the industry now?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So this was 2006, 2007, I think, when I went over there. And this was really kind of the on-star days, right? Yeah. GM was really pushing their OnStar product for mostly safety stuff at the time, right? So you get in an accident, it would call back to a call center and they would pull your location and things of that sort and send emergency services. We were doing the same thing at ATX Group at the time for Mercedes-Benz and BMW. So we were more of a high-end product. It was not only the safety component of it, but it was a Thank you. standard stuff like opening your car door and things of that as well. But we're really turned into is what you see today in cars is everything connects to your mobile device now. So the whole phone home and stuff, it's still all there, but more, we called it infotainment is what we branded it. And I think somebody actually trademarked that sometime afterwards. But you look at all the things you can do in your car right now. We were doing those things for the car company companies back in the early 2000s and the really neat stuff about that was we reverse engineered the cars to do it.
SPEAKER_03:Because I would have to think that You know, the designing of a car and the technology happens years before it gets to market, right? Yes. Like, hey, here's what you have to work with. You know, give us what services can you deliver?
SPEAKER_02:Well, yeah, and it was really out-of-the-box thinking because we would, to this day, a lot of cars or most cars have a network in them called CAN bus, car area network. And we would sniff that network, reverse engineer the calls, so somebody would hit a button to unlock the door and we'd see the message go across the network. And we built a device that would link into that. And then we could send those commands across that network and we did it through the mobile networks. So it was really neat. We had to convince car companies that these were good things. And if you've ever worked with a car company, they are You know, I say the smartest people in the room all the time, and they don't always take your advice. These are the same
SPEAKER_03:people that you have to print out 700 documents to buy a car.
SPEAKER_02:That's correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it was a really, really cool job. We had some really cool technology that we got to work with. And I'm a car guy, so I absolutely loved going out to BMW in New Jersey and sitting down with their engineers and talking to them about how this stuff worked and how we could help.
SPEAKER_03:Nice. Yeah. Talking about One Technologies. So that was next.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. So from e-commerce to the automotive industry and back to kind of the internet world and online marketing. So One Technologies was a, they really were an online marketing company, but they had a product and credit monitoring. And in terms of understanding how the users really interacted with your website, they were the best. They absolutely tracked everything. They had statistical models behind it. So the brainchilds of the technology were all mathematicians and statistical analysis people. And so the technology that we built was really capturing all of the data how a user would interface with a website. And it was all bespoke technology. And now there's a lot of people out there that do that today. We built it all from scratch, and it was interesting. You'd walk through the office, and we had glass offices, and you'd see all these equations and integrals and derivatives and all this stuff written on the walls, and you just thought you were in some space camp or something like that, right? But it was really neat, and we... measured every click. We measured every movement across the website. We really knew how people interacted with our technology.
SPEAKER_03:Are the infrastructure needs for those three companies are different, right? I'm assuming heavy infrastructure on the dot-com side, probably medium infrastructure on the ATX side, and probably light on the one technology side?
SPEAKER_02:It really depended upon the project that we were working on. The way that we did it back in 2004, 2005, and hotels.com is completely different than the way you do it today, right? We were a Unix shop, AS400 on the back end. We built our own data centers, managed all all of our own stuff. Today, that would all be in the cloud, right? And of course, we had very deterministic traffic patterns. So the cloud would have been perfect for it because we would automatically spin up services and turn services down. And as our traffic spiked happened, which as I mentioned, were very deterministic. So that was, again, a neat challenge, but we overbuilt. And again, doing it on a shoestring budget that always made things interesting. And then, you know, in the automotive world, again, those are very deterministic loads. The technology was all over the board though. We had some really old technology because it was modem technology at that time. We were, you know, 56K modems into cars, right? The car would answer the call over like you would in the 90s. Whereas today, of course, internet-based and things of that sort, you know, data-driven. So we had a lot of gear around that, which made our footprint a little bit bigger. One technologies, tons of data, right? So yeah, your web front ends were much smaller.
SPEAKER_03:Your storage.
SPEAKER_02:But your back ends and your computational power of that data was enormous. So it just, it shifted, you know, the workloads shifted from maybe database back ends to front ends and vice versa.
SPEAKER_03:Got it. Then you go to large corporate IT, right? Totally different world.
SPEAKER_02:Totally different world. Totally different world
SPEAKER_03:from an infrastructure perspective, from a... from a culture perspective, from a process perspective. It almost seems like you're doing some really cool stuff and you just wanted to get handcuffs put on you.
SPEAKER_02:I wouldn't call it handcuffs. The technology is more, I'll call it traditional. Maybe dated a little bit, but at a huge scale. And that's what really interested me there was just the scale of which we operated. We went from small organizations. When I was with Hotels.com, I had some presence in Europe and some responsibility in Europe, a little bit in South Asia, but not much, and then on to big box stuff. We were in 100 different countries. Try to put an internet circuit in Guam. I've tried for you. Yes. You know some of those challenges. Again, more traditional technology, but just how to deliver these services in these different locations all over the world from first world to third world countries was a big challenge and really interesting.
SPEAKER_03:When you worked at Intertech, a big global company, you mentioned 35,000 employees, 100 countries, 700, 800 offices. And then Intertec, you can tell the story about how old the company is. So how did Intertec become? It's about as old as
SPEAKER_02:it gets. So Intertec, for those that the name isn't familiar, Intertec is a testing certification company. And most of us here in the U.S. have heard the term UL or Underwriters Laboratory. And what Underwriters Laboratory does here in the U.S. is mostly electrical testing. And if you flip over your toaster or something like that, you'll see a a mark that says UL on it. And that's a certified saying that it meets industry standards for the components. They'll test the paint that's on it. They'll test the electrical components that are in it to make sure that it doesn't cause a fire and things of that sort. Well, Intertech does all of those same things, but they do a thousand more things as well, right? So they expand out much, much further into the market than just electrical testing. So Intertech has a product or a certification mark, if you will. It's called ETL. And what I tell people is ETL stands for Edison Testing Labs. And that is the Edison that everybody thinks about when you hear the name. That's how far back the company goes, the roots of the
SPEAKER_03:company. company goes that far back, really built through acquisition and domestically, internationally, different business lines, that's a lot of technology debt that's out there from an acquisition perspective. And when you're in charge of the infrastructure team and setting standards for a company of this size, walk us through some of the challenges of really old stuff, really new stuff, you You know, competing business units, competing objectives by different business units, you know, P&Ls that are separate. How do you, as someone who's tried to set a corporate standard from an IT perspective, navigate all of these different things?
SPEAKER_02:Sure. So... Lesson number one, when the acquisition happens and there's budget to merge technology, do it as fast as you can. The longer you wait, the more reason it gives people to use that money somewhere else, and then it doesn't happen. So, for example, we did an acquisition of a company. It was about 200 offices, I think, maybe 3,000 or 4,000 people. And we had a plan. We had an acquisition plan. And we went through the acquisition. The company continued to run on its own. We had other priorities that we looked at. You know, six, eight months later, oh, this company's running fine by itself. Leave it alone, right? So we lost the opportunity. So speed makes a difference. So do it quickly. Do it while you have the opportunity. The other way that you do things is, you know, you've got to justify it. You've got to justify that there's a reason to pull out other technology and put in your technology. And you do that through cost savings initiatives. You do it through cybersecurity. security initiatives, operational standards. You build it through the argument of why you want to standardize operationally on things. So there are a lot of different components or different pieces of that puzzle, but number one is do it quick.
SPEAKER_03:Yep. One of your favorite sayings that I use, you can't see it, you can't manage it, you can't report on
SPEAKER_02:it. Yeah. Close. Close? Close. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. That came to me from a consulting firm that I worked with years ago, actually when I was in the car company business. The meaning behind that is that if you can measure something, you can control it. Otherwise, it becomes emotional. How do you control things on emotion? When you it and you try to convince somebody to do something and they're emotional about it, in my opinion, the only way to convince them is through data. And so data is the measurement that drives us, helps us understand where we are, and then measure how close we are down the road where we want to get to.
SPEAKER_03:So opinions versus facts. I'm sorry? It's opinions versus facts.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. Yep.
SPEAKER_03:Yep. So Now let's go to one of the largest law firms in the world. What's the culture like there compared to Intertech compared to smaller or different industry-type companies, right? It's got to be a whole different beast.
SPEAKER_02:It absolutely is. Number one is you're working with lawyers, right? You're working with highly compensated individuals that, in our case, we have 4,000 lawyers globally, and they're all their own business, really. So the types of personalities that you work with are just... different and the expectations are different. What makes sense to somebody in an e-commerce world, they don't care about, right? They care about making sure systems, their systems are available when they need them so that they can build. And change is very, very difficult in that type of environment. Again, they're very proceduralized and they're members muscle memory. And if you change those things, it means money to them because now they've got to learn something else. They've got to spend the time to learn something else.
SPEAKER_03:Got it. Talk to me how you go into these organizations or you build these organizations. What are you looking for in team members? How do you build a highly productive, efficient IT team?
SPEAKER_02:First, you've got to look at the culture, right? And
SPEAKER_03:you've got a bunch of different cultures that you've worked in.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. As a leader, number one is you have to understand the culture of the company. You have a little bit of control over the culture of your team, but that cannot drift too far from the culture of the company because the C-levels and the accounting teams and things of that sort, that's all the culture of the company. And if you can't mesh with that, you can't really service them. So you really have to understand what the culture of the company is and how you interface with that. But you do have the ability to drive the culture to a certain extent within your own team. And when I look for players, I look for, number one is, will people get along with them? I've said this a hundred times. You can have the smartest person in the room, but if nobody likes that person, they won't work with them. And there's not an organization that I worked in that one person is the key to success. It's teamwork.
SPEAKER_03:Good stuff. And again, a bunch of different types of organizational cultures. How do you navigate the power structure within organizations? Because you don't ever generate revenue except at hotels.com, right? You enable generation. You're a cost...
SPEAKER_02:at a lot of these companies. We're a cost center most of the times, yeah. And it really depends on the company, right? So what is the... What is IT to the company? Is IT a contributing factor to the strategy of the company? Or is IT kind of the necessary evil that sits behind the expense of people that sit behind the scenes that we have to have them because we need email and we need file servers and we need those kinds of things, right? The dynamics in the way you maneuver within those companies are very, very different. When you're more of the strategic part of the company of course, you get a lot of leeway in terms of helping drive the strategy of the organization. You're more of a partner at the table. And so when you want to do things, you're listened to in a different way. Where on the flip side of that, if you're more of a commodity to the company, then your value is doing more with less, right? You're driving to the bottom line by costing less, but providing more. And so your seat at the table is different if you have a seat. So then when you look at the dynamics of the organization, where IT sits in the organization, then you need to start understanding how the organizations themselves work together. The legal industry, the organization I'm in right now is a Swedish Rhein structure, which means it's very loosely tied together at the at the top of the organization and each region runs very independent. So the politics in working in an organization like that is very, very different. And people have asked me, well, how do you do it? And the answer is real simple, is you have to sit and watch, right? You have to be patient. You have to understand how decisions are made. And a lot of times you're gonna scratch your head and say, I can't believe anything works like this, right? But if you sit there long enough and learn it well enough and plug into it versus fight it, you've got a fighting chance.
SPEAKER_03:Yep. How has your leadership style changed in different types of organizations? Because when I look at the bullpen at Hotels.com and the way that we all interacted together, probably... 180 degree difference between what you would do at NRF.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. So there's a lot of dynamics there that would make that change. Number one is the organization, the Hotels.com organization was here on fire 24-7. And that was from the top of the organization down from the CEO and the president all the way down. And the expectations of excellence with very little resources was always Do you think today
SPEAKER_03:that people would work as hard as those guys worked in the hours that they worked knowing that we're just in a different type of environment now?
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's generational. That's a generational discussion, right? There
SPEAKER_03:were dudes doing 18-hour days. They had 30 empty monster cans at their desk.
SPEAKER_02:Does that still exist today? Yeah, you could go back and Google images of the dot-com era back in the 2000s or the late 90s, and that's what you saw, right? You saw the Code Red, Mountain Dew Code Red towers and things like that. Would you see that today? Boy, I don't know. Probably illegal. Well, yeah. I mean, most of those guys that did that are probably not in perfect health now either. So a lot of challenges with that. But, you know, we look at what we did back then and how do we change in our management style. Culture, again, absolutely drives some of it. Age certainly drives in the knowledge that comes along with that age. So, yeah, we were very you got to do it my way. We're the smartest people. people in the room. If you're not doing it my way, you can't be successful kind of people where now we understand that there's just a lot of different ways to skin that cat. And our hair doesn't need to be on fire to get these things done. Work smarter. Yeah, we just work smarter.
SPEAKER_03:So sometimes we talk about what should a company be doing? Should it be managing infrastructure or should it be managing its applications? Or do they want to do both? Where do you sit on on
SPEAKER_02:this? again, with so many things in IT, the answer always is it depends, right? I'm going to say that there are very few reasons out there to manage your own infrastructure anymore. There are some, right? But listen, my companies, we're not putting people on the moon. We're not working in areas where life safety is of importance. So in those areas where people really feel like they need to have that control, most of the time you just don't. And I'm an engineer, so for me to say that, it's hard. I had to go through that transition of saying, I want my hands on this. I want to be able to control it. The only way I can guarantee it is if I'm doing that, right? And your journey to the cloud, if you will, was painful for a lot of us because we couldn't touch it, right? Everything was done remotely. We remoted into everything, and And if something was broke, we couldn't see it. We had to look at the things that we had at our disposal and pick up the phone and call people if things were broken. That was very foreign to us. But now that we've gone down that road, we've got some experience with it, I would never go back. I look at it from the perspective of the business executive. How many times have I had to sit in a room and say, hey, I need a million bucks for a storage array, and they look at me like I've got two heads. They're like, what the hell is that, and why do you need one? What they care about, really, is they don't care about the hardware. They care about their assets. Their asset is the data on that. How can I drive value, a competitive advantage out of that? When I start talking about those things, then ears perk up. Is it the application? It's the infrastructure. It's the application. It's what we do with the data 100% of the time.
SPEAKER_03:You talked about going and trying to get a storage right. How have the conversations shifted from talking to a CFO about I need a giant CapEx infrastructure to now giving him death by a thousand paper cuts with everything sort of as a service?
SPEAKER_02:We don't present it as death by a thousand paper cuts. We present it as a service. Here is the cost of the service. If you want the service to change, these are the things that we have to do and the investments we have to do and change. So if we want the service to transact 100 transactions a minute versus 10,000 transactions a minute, here's the price tag, right? You determine, Mr. CFO, what the value to the business of that is.
SPEAKER_03:Got it. So something that we struggle with every single day is how do we get in front of more IT leaders to tell the story of what we're trying to do. You've got to get bombarded by LinkedIn messages, emails, phone calls to your office phone, phone calls to your cell phone. What makes you reply to a message?
SPEAKER_02:It's... It's interesting because you're right, I do, I get bombarded by sales calls and things and there's only a fraction of a percent that make it through. And quite frankly, the ones that make it through are the people that have done their legwork. They understand who I am, who the company I work for is, what are some of the possible challenges of the industry, do we have these, right? You know, public company, go look at their earnings statement. Understand, you can learn a lot about a company by looking at their earnings statement and what their goals are. Align it to some of these things. I used to tell the story about years ago when I got married when I was much younger, we built a house. We weren't in that house three days and I had a door-to-door salesman walk up and try to sell me windows. I'm like, this is a brand new home. You just wasted my time and yours. I'm not putting new windows in my brain. So just make it relevant, I guess, is the point.
SPEAKER_03:Future of IT. Let's talk about AI, right? We can't get out of here without talking about AI. I would think that there are so many applications in a law firm to utilize AI. But there's also, I've got to think, an equal list as long of why not to use AI. And this is really from an end user lawyer type experience. So let's go there first and then we'll talk about end user AI versus business adoption process AI.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. This is interesting because I'm living this right now. AI get introduced, ChatGPT specifically, right? It's going to change the world. And it really has in many ways. I mentioned earlier change is bad in legal firms, right? You ask them to do something different, it's very difficult to get them to accept and understand the value. So the original reaction to it was, We don't know where the data is coming from. They would ask ChatGPT a question. It would come back with made-up data. So immediately it was shut down, right? You cannot trust it. And there was several law cases where somebody used ChatGPT that it made up case study.
SPEAKER_03:It cited a wrong, yeah,
SPEAKER_02:get disbarred. Yeah, the person got disbarred. So, of course, when you start seeing those stories, people get really, really scared. with it. So we started with AI in a different place in the organization, which then immediately became data privacy, right? How do the engines get access to our data? Where is that data stored? So there was a tremendous amount of due diligence done in just how does it work and where's the data? How does it get access to the data? How do we protect, especially in the law firm, because we've got what we call is legal walls, right? Where we're a firm that we might be representing the plaintiff and the defendant at the same time. So we've got to have these walls in between so that they can't get access to our information. So how does AI represent that? How does AI treat that? So there's a ton of work that we had to do just to get in and say, can you read my email? Tell me what this email chain does, right? So we started small like that. And the more comfortable that we got with it, the more acceptance it got through the, well, I'll call it the operational door. And once we got a year or so into it through the operational door, people then started saying, okay, it's come a long way. We can start looking at it from the legal perspective. And we have partnered with a couple of companies now that we are starting to head down that path, but it is very slow. And it's very detailed, the path that we walk down to ensure that privacy is held, data privacy is maintained and number one is it's a cultural shift again where people really have to verify the data that they're seeing.
SPEAKER_03:I was up in New York and I was at an IBM conference and they were talking about Watson, their engine, and they're up there with J.P. Morgan or Morgan Stanley, somebody like that, and the guy's like, listen, we're a financial firm, 100 years old, we don't adopt anything quickly. He's like, this is going to be one of the you know, we're going to be one of the last adopters of this. He goes, but where we have adopted it is in like for our analysts, right? You know, I need you to go research, you know, 50, 10 Ks of these 20 companies and give me a summary of them. He's like, that's where we've adopted it. Like not the full power of AI, but that's the only powers we can use right now from a cultural perspective, a legal perspective, and scared perspective.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. So it's... The big brains that created this created a solution in search of a problem in most cases. We haven't fully understood how to monetize it in our day-to-day lives yet, but let's not kid ourselves. It is absolutely going to change the world, and it's going to change the face of IT as we know it today. Jensen Hong of NVIDIA, for instance, predicted that your programmers, as you know them today, your coders, they won't exist in 10 years, right? You won't need them. You'll ask an AI engine to go write a program for you and do it in whatever language you want, whatever flavor of the day language, and it will do it. And it will do it probably better than most humans would do it. Satya Nadella, he's taken it one step further. He said the application's gone. His opinion is these AI agents, we will interact with AI agents and they will be writing the application on the fly in real time based upon the problem we ask it to solve. And then Bill McDermott from the CEO of ServiceNow, From a service perspective, he said, if you're a service provider and you haven't started down the AI route yet, you're never gonna catch up. So it's here. And we as consumers of that, we're gonna have to figure it out or we'll get left behind for sure.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, here's my sort of point of view on it, like right now from an end user sort of adoption of AI, right? It's not replacing people right now, right? It's making your B player, your A player, your C player, your B player, your A person, you know, exceptional, where I think it will replace, it's not going to replace jobs, you're just not going to have one if you don't know how to use it.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03:You're at a disadvantage.
SPEAKER_02:It's always the technology adage, it's going to take people's jobs away. Technology doesn't take people's jobs away, it redistributes them.
SPEAKER_03:Technology's undefeated.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you're not going to win.
SPEAKER_03:It's like the cheerleaders, I tell my daughter, if the football team loses, you're still and defeated. Like, you've
SPEAKER_02:never lost. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So let's talk about some of your advice and your vision, right? What, you know, you've got directors and VPs and people that have reported you over the years. What advice do you give them of trying to make it to sort of the C-suite?
SPEAKER_02:Sure. It's, number one is, You gotta build relationships in the organization that you work in. I mentioned it before, you can be the smartest guy in the room and if nobody wants to work with you, there's no value to the organization. And people want to work with people they like. So once you kind of build that relationship and you kind of break down some of the barriers that might be there prior to that relationship being built, then the door is open for you to go and show what you can do, right? So... Get in, understand the culture of the organization, build some relationships with people, understand what's valuable to the organization, and especially in the leadership position, you've got to think strategically and not tactically. If you're thinking tactically, then there's a lot of people that can do that. And if you're in a position, a CIO position or VP position or something like that, the expectation is that you can look at the organization, where it is today, where it wants to be, and you can build a plan around how to help to get it there. And so then you execute it. Measure. Measure what you're doing and then manage it. And then what comes out the back of that is the execution of hopefully something good.
SPEAKER_03:Is the biggest jump from director, manager, VP to C-level, is it that finance part?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Again, I'll say it depends on the organization, but most of the organizations that I'm in, IT is expensive, right? I haven't been in an organization where somebody says, oh, I would have thought it would have been more.
SPEAKER_03:Now, I don't mean a cost perspective, just understanding finance and how does the company look at, like all companies look at finances differently, right? And how things are accounted for, just understanding those types of financial terms and how they relate to the business.
SPEAKER_02:Exactly. So where I was going with the was the more you can speak the speak, the easier it is to get your funding, right? If I sit in front of a CFO and I can talk the CFO language, I am miles ahead than if I sit in front of them with the greatest idea that they can't understand.
SPEAKER_03:Got it. And just from, again, from a vendor perspective, how does someone get a seat at the table, right?
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:From a vendor perspective? Yeah, like
SPEAKER_03:if I'm coming in and I want, you know, you've got a project and I think I've got a solution, right? You know, what are the things that make you want to trust me? That I'm not just in here, you know, and sort of fly by night. I want to sell you my widget.
SPEAKER_02:So this actually goes back to my first job out of college as a sales engineer. We had a salesman that worked for us that was incredible. And the sales engineer or this salesperson never walked into a customer and tried to sell them anything. Right. Never tried to sell them anything. The first thing he did was he sat down, tried to understand the company, what the company's goals were and what did he have in his toolbox, his services, his bag of goodies that can help them do that. And that's where the conversation started. So it starts from a trust perspective is show me that you really understand my problem and you've got something that actually will help me with that problem. Once that trust is built, then again, the door is wide open. You can come in and then you can start the real sell. But you can't sell me something if I don't trust you.
SPEAKER_03:I would think that you've got to be extremely lazy now with AI if you come in and you don't have any idea what a company does. You've got to have a different level of lazy.
SPEAKER_02:You know, some people are better utilizing AI than others, right? You know, I've got two kids, and they're in their 20s, and I asked them, you know, how to use ChatGPT, and they're like, well, I use it to write my college papers. I'm like, well, now you're in finance. How do you use it? I haven't. I'm like, okay, let's expand on that a little bit. Let's understand what it means to you now that you're not in college anymore.
SPEAKER_03:Imagine having two girls and you'll spend three hours learning a TikTok dance, but you can't figure out how to use Snapchat. Something you're going to have for the rest of your life. If you're 30 seconds of fame for 100 hearts. Well, good stuff, John. I appreciate you coming in today. This was a lot of fun. You are our second guest here, so we'll see who gets more views.
SPEAKER_02:Perfect. Great. Thanks for having
SPEAKER_01:me. Thanks for tuning in to the IT Masters podcast, where technology's top leaders share their winning strategies. Subscribe now and stay ahead in the ever-evolving world of IT. Until next time, keep innovating and leading the way.