Kyle Moschetto: No email, no problem | Turn the Lens #08

>> So I'll just count down, and then we will start. Alright, three. Hey, welcome everybody. Jeff Frick here coming to you from the home studio. Happy, it's what got us February. The calendar is trucking right along. So, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, and I was on LinkedIn the other day looking at some posts and responding to some chat, and this crazy post came along and it said, wait, I do not check email with this big, bright red light. I was like, what in the heck is this? I've got to find out more. So I reached out to Kyle Moschetto. He is the Director, Managing Director Solutions Architecture for SADA, and I had to say, what is up with this Kyle are you really sending us out to people?  This is your out of the office. Reply that's on all the time. So I reached out to Kyle then and a small world. We met years ago at the Western Digital event at the Shark Tank when you're with CrossFit. So Kyle, great to see you.

>> Absolutely. Jeff, and thanks for having me on, man. I'm super stoked to talk about the controversy of no email.

>> I love it. So give us a little bit of the backstory. So again, for people that aren't seeing this, you know you put this up on LinkedIn and I reacted to it immediately. You know, it's great. You've got Tom Hanks on there and you got the big red. I do not check email. Give us a little bit of the background on the story.

>> Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to hedge myself a little bit at the beginning and say, before I get into this realize this will not work for everybody. And in fact, probably won't work for most people, but I'm in a unique position where it has worked well for me. And I'll also state that turning on an out of office reply and sending it to lots of people will get you some feedback. Some of it will be positive and some of it will be negative. And I will just let you know, it causes some waves. So, you know, maybe don't be as provocative as I was and full disclosure, I also posted this on LinkedIn cause I really wanted to get the conversation going about the value that people find in email. And so I set this up and I sent it only to people in my own company. So this was not going out to every single person who was emailing me. I do a lot of external communications with people and I didn't want this to be the messaging that went out to them. But for my internal teams, I kept having the same scenario play out which is I haven't checked email in about six months at my job. And I mean,

>> You have a free external though, people you said so you still get external people email or you don't look into that or have you train those people off it too?

>> Well, it's all about the training. And to your point, Jeff, it's all about the training. So what I've had to do with external people is whenever I meet with customers, whenever I meet with clients, whenever I meet with, you know, the company that I work for is a massive partner of Google Cloud and so I meet with just as many googlers per week cause I meet with people who are not with an@google.com email address. And when I introduce myself, I tell them who I am and what I do. And I say, and just a heads up, I don't check email. If you need me, you need to get me on chat. And everyone kind of like does this quick little, okay. But it's just I set the expectation very early.

>> Right.

>> And the biggest fear that I had at work since I've made this decision and we'll get to why I made this decision later is that some new employee would start at our company and send me an email because they really needed something. And then they just wait and I would just be, you know, I would be that guy who just never responded to their email and boy, what a bleep that person is. You know what I mean? And I just didn't want to do that. So I said, well, what's the best way that I can sort of de-escalate that situation, educate the people that I work with about the best way to get service from me. And so I kind of settled on what has worked for me a lot in the past, a funny GIF and a lighthearted message that just explains how to accomplish what it is that they want.

>> All right.

>> So it's worked so far pretty well.

>> Let's back up what you just went through First off, I think everyone would agree that email is the bane of our existence. And I don't know if it was yours or somebody else talked about, you know, just get off of your email, especially when you have work to do and just leave it alone. I still remember the first time I ever saw it, cause back in the day you had to type it up on a piece of paper and then you had to get the little yellow,

>> Oh yeah. If you wanted to send it to five people, you had to make five copies and do five envelopes. So there was a natural kind of gate to over copying, over replying, you know, kind of this thing in the past. I remember it like yesterday. First time I saw an email I'm like, that's how easy it is to add people and you can just keep writing people. This is not good. All that said, what you didn't talk about was kind of a company led initiative to try to reduce it. And I distinctly remember a buddy of mine went to go work at Atlassian years ago. And he said, we don't do email inside of Atlassian and everything is JIRA or Confluence at that point. And I'm like, okay, that's kind of cool. But again, they did it for external people. Obviously, Slack has really changed the world in terms of not only inter team communication but now external teams you know, people are bringing into Slack but you didn't talk about Slack as the alternative and you didn't talk about, you know JIRA tickets as the alternative.

You just said, I'm not doing email. So when you say the alternative is to reach me via an instant message even then that's not necessarily clean. Cause is it a LinkedIn instant message, how we communicated? Is it a phone instant message? Is it a Twitter instant message? So give us a little bit more kind of on your strategy and how have you kind of channeled people into an effective communication method.

>> So we all live in this world where we have a bunch of different communication methods. Like I'm going to take the example you just used right? Between JIRA and Confluence and Slack and email. There's four right there, where I work I have eight I think if I had to add them all up and you count LinkedIn and Twitter and all these other ways that people kind of communicating with.

>> Salesforce and there's tons of email.

>> Oh, exactly. Yeah. Your CRM, right. So we use both Google Chat, like Google Hangouts Chat and Slack internally. So we have two real time synchronous communication systems. I have those up on my screen all day long. And for me, I run a team of ultra nerds who help solve computer problems and cloud-based problems for customers. Like the hardest problems that can be solved, we come in to help solve them for customers. It's the best team I've ever run, it's the best team I've ever worked with in my life. But I don't have that customer facing role meaning no one's going to cold email me and no one is going to reach out to me cold and if they do, they're going to be a Google representative in which case Google uses Google Chat 100% of the time. So that's my sort of calm method with all of the googlers. And then all my engineering teams that I execute with, they live and breathe in Slack. And so I have Slack as sort of my channeled way to communicate with my engineering teams and then the sales team's kind of float between both of those things.

But I have a very weird, unique position where I can avoid this email thing so then I just kind of stacked ranked every communication method that I have in my professional life and said, which of these are adding the most value to me? And at the very bottom was email. And I said, all right, I'm going to try this out and mind you, Jeff, I have been a lifelong, like getting things done by Dr. David Allen and like inbox zero guy. I have done like all the inbox hacking things. And I worked at Google for two years, they have the formula for how to like get your inbox management under control. And I would get to inbox zero three times a day. That has been what I've done for the last over five years before trying this out. And it just got to a point where I said, this provides me the least amount of value to my productivity within this company, to the team that I lead, to the customers that I'm helping.

And I just said fine, I'm just not going to do it. So I didn't tell anybody at first because it was sort of my internal experiment. And let me tell you all if you want to just start by announcing that you're going to stop checking email, things will not end well for you. So I needed a track record, I needed the data to be data-driven in this aspect to say, actually, no I haven't checked email in six months, give or take. And you know, every now and then someone will message me in chat and say, hey I sent you this email that I need you to respond to, which is perfect. Cause then I just open email, search for the subject line go respond to the email, close the email tab again and I don't go back. I have something like 60,000 unread messages right now. I have my email open because I forwarded you the out of office responder earlier today and like, I have no stress about that number. If you would have talked to me seven months ago, I would have lost my mind about that number. And now, I'm totally cool because I have validated for myself that email is the least effective communication method and the least productive way for me to use my time.

And you know this, if I had to check every email that came in just to the next 24 hours, that would take me hours to do. We're just all inundated. And I can set up all the filters in the world but it still sort of like ticks at your mind. You're constantly looking over at the edge of your screen like, where's that alert going to come through about an email that's come through and I just try to lower the number of distractions. I unfortunately can't escape real-time chat so therefore, I'm just doubling down on it. If you chat me, I'll respond quickly. And people do hundreds of times a day and I try to keep on top of that and make sure that I'm doing it. But even then, there are times where I have to block out work zones to say, all right, closing the chat window, closing all the things so that I don't have the distractions. And this is just one way to do that. And I also love the fact Jeff that I got so many responses to this on LinkedIn.

So many people direct messaged me and sent me private messages on LinkedIn, basically saying how did you do this? What is the system? So first off, selfishly, I love that you invited me on here to talk about this. Cause I get to kill a little bit of two birds with one stone but it's also just a really interesting thing for everyone to take a look at what are the communication methods that you have and which ones actually provide you value?

>> Right. Right. So let's kind of look at at the outcome, right? The results. So within your own personal, you know, work flow, what was the result? I mean, did it free up how much time ? You know, kind of secondarily, what's the impact of this, you know, increased amount of chat or you just, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul? Or has the tone and or, you know, need to respond quickly changed?

>> I think a couple of things that happened there, I mean, the the impact to my life is I have about two hours of my life back every day, because two, well, I get somewhere in the realm of like 100 to 300 emails a day.

>> And even if we just take that at face value and say, it's going to take me 20 seconds, 30 seconds to check all of those it really starts to add up. And that's not even counting the actual things you have to do. Like, if you have to actually respond to those emails and or to create an action or find a document to share, there's 100 different examples we could go through here. It's just time that starts to bleed away. And again, I analyze my situation, I found this to be the least valuable. So I previously had booked out an hour in my morning and an hour in my afternoon is like check email inbox, zero, check, email inbox, zero and I just floated that away. So now I don't have that anymore. I have replaced that with check my chats in the morning and check my chats at the afternoon so I get to chat zero, if you will. But the interesting thing about switching that gear is that I loved the point that you brought up earlier in that the barrier of effort needed to involve so many people in the conversation is almost zero on email, right?

Especially if you have like a distribution list or a group that you're sending messages to, you can trigger a lot of work for other people by simply typing a few words into email and clicking send. You know, think about the last one line email that your boss sent to you and how much work that caused you and then just multiply that by number of people. But have found that chat is very different. Chat, it's difficult to involve a lot of people and things and when you do it's for very specific, targeted reasons. So I love the fact that when someone reaches out to me on chat, it's almost always that hey Kyle, this is what I need, can you help me with X? Because that's easy for me to be like, yes I can or no, go talk to so-and-so.

>> Right. Right.

>> And also, so at Google this is a very famous thing that I've tried to evangelize also, which is the no hello, no hi. If someone sends me like, hi, Kyle enter and it just sits there, I will literally send them a link to an article that says like, please don't ever just say hi to me, ask me what you want. Because the odds of me getting back to you with the answer is really high if I don't have to context switch four times to do it. And that echoes through my activity. So now if I'm interacting with somebody on chat, I'm almost always productive while I'm doing it. Meaning I'm responding directly to their question because it's chat and they had to like clickety-clack it into their keyboard and into their system. They usually just focus on what they need. There's not this formality of like, dear Kyle, kindest regards, hope you're doing well. How has COVID treating you? None of that is in play, right? Like get to the point in chat.

And everyone natively has that and natively follows that rule so it's been really cool to see. And when I spend 30 minutes responding to chats when I get done, I'm always like, all right, I've done this. As opposed to spending 30 minutes in email and realizing that I spent 20 of those minutes responding to things I didn't need to know about or like calendar requests and all this other kind of junk that goes into it. But, right, I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from a lot of my peers. And I've gotten a lot of really critical feedback from a lot of my peers too about like how in the world do you do this? This is a little bit unfair, And full disclosure, it absolutely is. Right? Like, I empathize so deeply with like the salespeople that we have in our organization. This would never work for them. Right?

>> Right.

>> But I bet that there's at least one other communication method that they could ignore and it probably wouldn't impact their performance in selling. And so just, I want to be clear. This is not a way to make friends with everybody around you is to set that of office responder. It's just a way to sort of take a stand and say, I know you need something. If you emailed me, I know you need something and because you need something, I want you to know that this is not the most efficient way to get ahold of me. And the most efficient way to get ahold of me is the following.

>> Right.

>> And I mean, blue links that they can click on. So the barrier of effort for them to switch gears is ultra low. And in that original email that I sent out to my coworkers, my personal cell phone number is in that email. It's like, no matter what, if this is an emergency, you have the direct line to me wherever I am, because of course I'm never more than six inches from my phone right? None of us are these days. So you have every possible escalation path to get ahold of me and to use me and to make sure that I'm providing you value. I just want to be gentle and say, the one that you're choosing to use right now is the worst.

>> Yeah. I think that the quote in your note is if it's an emergency and you want me to pick up the phone, call me like a cave person and just call me. I love it.

>> Yeah. It's an actual emergency, I want you to pick up the phone like a cave person and call me right now. I will answer it or I'll call you back.

>> All right. So that's cool. Now, I want to explore a little bit and you touched on it briefly, but more directly, you know, kind of the impacts within your team and then kind of the conversations that this has a spawn and just for clarity, when did you start this?

>> I think I posted this, it was like the second week of the year is when I actually this on.

>> Second week of 2021 or 2020?

>> 2021. So this is very recently that I turned this out of office responder on. But I've been doing the I'm not checking emails since about August of 2020

>> So what kind of conversations besides the damn it that's not fair, Kyle, you can't do this. (Kyle laughs)

>> There's been a few things, right. I've had more than a few people kind of question and say how can you actually do this? Aren't there things that fall through the cracks? And I think the answer is of course, but I feel very strongly that there are no more things that are falling through the cracks because I've chosen not to check email than there would be if I had simply spent two hours a day checking that email. Because now I've got two hours less to actually respond to my peers, to help lead my team, to help engage with customers and add value to their organization. And I think that there's a great book by Greg McKeown called Essentialism, where it talks about like what are the things that matter most in your world and focus all your time on that because that's really what matters. So, and no one likes to talk about this because everyone likes to think they can do it all. I know I can't do it all. Like full disclosure, Kyle is not perfect in any way, shape or form and I will drop the ball no matter what.

So I've just realized that as long as I make sure I'm focusing on the very few things that are absolutely critical to the success of me, my team and my company, then I'm doing the right thing by way of our customers. I'm doing the right thing by way of our organization. So the first real criticism was sort of like, you have to be dropping the ball on things. And the answer is, you're absolutely right. However, what I'm not dropping the ball on are the most important things. And therefore I'm okay with it.

>> Right, right. It's wild. (Kyle laughs)

>> So, you know, my mind's going so many places because for me, it's funny, you talk about what your least efficient communication forum which one can you cut off. And I've kind of done it informally, I guess I should put a no to my voicemail, with your voicemail.

>> Oh, yes.

>> 'Cause nobody leaves me voicemails anymore so I don't check voicemail anymore. So if you're the two people, you know, once a month that leaves me a voicemail, you know probably not going to get to it, you know, send me a text, I'll get back to you faster. But what are the big themes? And we talk for, we turn the cameras on is my conversations with Darren Murph, all right, at GitLab. And Darren Murph's Head of Remote. And for people watching this interview if you haven't watched some interviews with him, watch Darren's interview everybody. The guy's a phenomenal person on remote work. And the key piece to successful remote work is asynchronous communications on the assumption that people aren't necessarily in the same time zone, they're not necessarily awake and you have to make it super efficient for people to find the stuff that can help them solve their own problem, or manage the expectations on the timeliness in which you're going to get back to them. And then the other part that they've taken to the next level is even to have real specificity about what types of communications should go onto what channel, so that everybody's reading off the same hymnal and you know, that expectations are properly set. You still kind of have this asynchronous issue though maybe even exacerbated with instant messaging, but that hasn't been a problem for you.

>> I don't think that it hasn't, and it hasn't been any more or less of a problem than it was before. And I think that's the critical element here is that I haven't made anything worse by not checking email and focusing more on the real-time communication and asynchronous real-time communication. And my hope is that because like chat systems are asynchronous by design and by nature that they tend to lend more emphasis on efficient communication and on me being able to provide the information to users. I think that what GitLab has done around asynchronous communication is phenomenal. They are sort of like hashtag life goals for me and how I like to work. But it's tough to get there, it's a long road and you've got a lot of untraining to do with people. I think that, especially since we're all sort of worked from home forever now, it's going to be hard for us to turn off any communication pathway, right?

Like, LinkedIn messages is how we got in communication. I probably can't turn off LinkedIn right now 'cause I use it as a major outlet for the messaging that we're giving in our customer outreach and recruiting efforts. And I'm very active on Co-host to Podcast with a few US Marines in the cybersecurity space and other things that it's critical that people have a method to reach out to me. And I don't want to just have my email address out there. So a LinkedIn message is like, wonderful, but I can't turn that one off. And then where does Twitter fall in? Where does Facebook fall in? Like all these things start adding up and I want to have a system that works.

>> And so what Darren has done there is really remarkable.

>> Excuse me. We got to read Darren's documentation. That's a for sure. But it is interesting as you're saying that I find that there are certain individuals and it doesn't have to do with role or relationship or anything but they're just certain individuals where you kind of fall into a pattern of a particular channel. And for that particular person, like I have that some people is just always a Twitter, I am.

>> Yep.

>> It's never a text or an email. It's just the Twitter I am. No difference in the actual communications that I would have with you or anybody else but it just, is kind of like how we got started or maybe how we first touched base. And it's really interesting. Well, what's the boss say, have you had the conversation with the big Gs?

>> Oh, of course, of course. They're cautious which I think is very fair, like 100% if someone on my team had did this it would give me heartburn too. I wish I could say that it wouldn't but I know that it would because I have those same reactions, which is, well you've got to be dropping the ball and things, and man we've got to be getting back to people via email and things like that. I definitely see it from their point of view and I think that I have since turned off this autoresponder and gone to a more subtle system of reaching out to people every day in that aspect. But it's still important that the most important piece to me is making sure that my peers know how to communicate effectively with me and get the response that they want. And I think that the team that I'm running has spoken for itself and its performance and the way that I've led that team has spoken for itself and performance too.

And I'm super lucky in that I have an amazing leadership team at SADA. I mean, every single person in my leadership chain is phenomenal at their job, has ultra high IQ. And really, it was just a conversation like, hey, talk to me about this. I totally understand. Like as soon as I posted this, I knew the conversation would happen and as well it should happen. But it's allowed me an opportunity to also just say, hey, I think that there are less valuable forms of communication that we are using that we should explore. Now, you know, do I still check email? Nope, I don't, but I'm still helping, you know two dozen customers every single day through my team and making sure that we are maturing our processes and hitting all of my goal targets and stuff. And our company is amazing.

>> I'm just curious,

>> Anyone who's LinkedIn us, we're hiring, but either way.

>> In your client engagements, cause you're in engagements, right? You're working on customer engagements,

>> Oh yeah very customer facing.

>> What is the typical channel that you guys use in engagements?

>> Well, so for your weekly updates and you know, your planning and all that kind of stuff. So there's a couple luxuries that I have here which is if it's a sales motion, we have dedicated sales teams that manage those relationships. So those people have to respond to customer emails. when it's an actual engagement where we're providing professional services, we approach the management of services.

>> You know, you got weeks and weeks, and you got a team and you're distributed so where are those communications usually happening?

>> I would say 99% of the time they're happening either in chat if it's teamwork with Google representatives or internal teams, or it's in Slack if it's with our engineers or other team representatives. We tend to find that a lot of customers are using that sort of luxury SAS chat platform, like Slack where you're paying extra. We prefer Google Hangouts and Google Chat because it comes with the workspace. And obviously we're a full Google shop so we're obviously noticeably biased. But we tend to find that asynchronous communication works really well with customers too. We have emerging practices that we're developing where I will reach out to a customer in real time on chat and say, hey, just a heads up we're running into this issue. Can you provide some support? And I think that we've had really good track records with getting rapid response much faster than we would with email and what I love these group chat rooms that we have inside of these chat applications is that everyone has, contexted a single pane of glass.

So if I send an email to you, it's just communication between the two of us. If I post in a chat room and tag you, then everybody in that chat room gets to share in the context. Now, I acknowledged that there's an additional burden of having to scroll through all your chats every day but the beauty is that it's there if anyone wants it, there's a record of it. I can scroll back up and I don't have to like search by subject line or keyword and email. I'm always in context in my pane of glass of what I need to communicate with.

>> No, I mean, Slack and those types of tools are way better than, I mean, email is the absolute worst. And you know, God only thing worse is when you have, you know, Excel documents, Word documents with version control and you're trying to keep track of which version. I mean, it's a freaking nightmare, no doubt about it. Well, really interesting, Kyle, and, you know, I'd love that we'll keep in touch and kind of see, you know, kind of how it evolves but you know what you didn't say again to the boss is I got two hours back on my calendar and yeah some of that's eaten up in my increased chat time but I got two hours that I had dedicated to this task that I can now dedicate to other things which is significant. And you know, I think everyone, everyone wants to get off email except whoever the person was that invented it back in the day. But, you know, it's just not an effective communication tool. That's even before you get into subtleties and nuances of language and miscommunication and all the other nasty stuff that comes.

>> Yeah. Tone is always one of those things that is sort of lost in email and it's also lost in chat. But I think the barrier of going from, I sent you an email, now let's jump on a video chat or pick up the phone and call each other digitally or otherwise right on Zoom, Hangout, RingCentral Teams world now, I just don't think that email is as valuable to business as it once was. And I think that that's the key element and the takeaway that I have sort of settled on through reading a lot of other things that people have written up. I'm really standing on the shoulders of many others in this choice. But no matter what, we all have different ways that we communicate and they have value in their own way. Right? If I have a legal document that I'm going to share with a customer, I'm emailing a legal document I'm not sending them a PDF in chat, right? Like that way I have a record of it and that it went and that I have it stored in some long-term archive.

But there's probably very few opportunities that we all have throughout the day to fit into that nuance to category. Whereas the water cooler conversations are now 100% in chat for all of us and in video and invoice, they're not happening in email. No one is replacing that aspect of the social life of your office with email. And I think we're just moving farther and farther away from what email was intended for at the time it was invented to provide and we're moving to just many unique, new ways of communicating with each other, whether that's everything from Slack and instant messaging systems to, you know TikTok and WeChat and all these other systems that are really interesting unique ways of communication. And right now, we're doing a podcast and a video cast between two people who are thousands of miles apart and we're doing it in real time. And this is yet another way that we are going to communicate with the people that we know and love on the social media.

>> Right, right. Well, the other thing I think that just, I mean, we all know it. I don't know that it gets called out so much. It's just the signal to noise ratio, right? The noise, the email noise is so high that it's the wave of noise that completely washes the value out to see. Cause you can't hardly find it.

>> Right.

>> And you're a Google. I know. I mean, Oh my gosh, you can take a Google thread that's been going on for two weeks with 15 people and try to find what the latest entry is.

>> That's right.

>> You know, good luck to that so.

>> I Would say that the chat applications provide a certain barrier to the riff-raff meaning no one can message me on Google chat, for example, unless they're part of my organization or part of the Google organization. Otherwise it filters them out and puts them into sort of like special spammy area that makes it super easy for me to just ignore and the same with our Slack messaging system, unless we invite you in, the only people are people within my organization. So it's almost a self curated group that has immediate access to me. And so I know without a doubt that if I go into those applications there's value to be had in every message that's been sent. But to your point, the signal to noise of email is the exact opposite. I mean my personal Gmail account, for example, Oh my gosh. Like I probably see four or 500 messages a day. I've just stopped, I've just given up on filters in my personal Gmail because at this point I'm just filtering by username that sent me messages or Amazon purchases or whatever, but it's bad. Right? There's very few things of value in my email but there's lots of content, just lots of waste to suck minutes my life away.

>> There's nothing like if you switch, right? If you switch from like, you know, Yahoo mail to Gmail to Hotmail and then you get off your old and then, you know, so you you eventually move all your people that batter onto your new, and then you ever go back and look at the old, there's full of crap and all crap.

>> That's right.

>> I want to shift gears a little bit and take advantage of your, you know your professional life beyond not doing email. You were at a CrossFit, the exercise and then you had a little journey in your Google for a while, and now you're at SADA. So SADA for people that aren't familiar, give us a quick overview. You guys are one of the bigger Google Cloud partners, is that right?

>> That's right. Yeah. Largest in North America. And we provide pretty much services, support, managed service, resale professional services for customers across the entire suite of alphabet services. So we do Google Maps, we do a Google Workspace, which is the artist formerly known as G suite, all of the business productivity apps under the Gmail and Google banner. And we also do Google Cloud. And that's where I focus all of my time as running professional services for our Google Cloud organization. I run the Solutions Architect team. And generally we help customers figure out how they are going to adopt this cool Google thing. And I say in that very specific set of language because it kind of encompasses anything and every customer comes to us at a different spot in their journey and so we adapt to sort of meet them. You have some customers who are just totally legacy and doing things very old school, and they just want to be more like Google to some aspects, whatever version that means to them.

And we help them do that. And then we have some customers who are just really tip of the spear and just need help on a particular product suite or a particular solution category. And we have expertise across a huge array of those things. Yeah.

>> The specific question I wanted to ask you is COVID as a digital transformation accelerant. And you know, I already know the answer to the question is yes. Right. Whether it's work from home or work from anywhere or bursting capacity or securing remote workers, I mean, there's so many things that this has pushed along but I wonder if you can share some of your insights from the front line, you know, seeing it with customers and what happened, you know, in March of 2020 when this lights switch moment occurred and oh my goodness, I hope you're not having to run a procurement order through your billing department to try to get some new servers that you can install for the new app that you hope to get up and live and running at some point in time or anticipating you're doing a super bowl commercial for the first time ever. Oh my goodness.

>> Yeah.

>> So I wonder if you can share kind of what happened mid-March with your customers and specifically their adoption or kind of the acceleration of their projects in Google Cloud specifically which you guys work on.

>> Yeah. I think it's coming a few different waves. I think the first pain that everyone felt was the sort of national lockdown and the echos and the ripples in the pond that happened with that where you had so many organizations that were just so unprepared to send all their people home and still get work done. And it sort of came to a point where people were just paralyzed by the indecision of what to do. I had somebody that I know locally here, I live in Colorado, reach out to me from a local city. They worked at IT at a local city and they were like, hey, we literally just told everybody to pick up their desktops and take them home. I don't know what to do now. And you know forethought into that decision that was just like, well, they'll have their computers so we can figure it out later kind of thing.

>> This happened everywhere across every industry and some companies were prepared and some weren't but we've really seen a massive shift early in how people thought about supporting people who work from home. And I think that was the first wave of it. And then as everyone realized, you know, a month or two in that, oh, this might be here to stay. I think businesses started really looking at like, CAPEX, OPEX spend and how they were going to position themselves for digital transformation. And that led to a lot of companies trying to figure out how do we start to adopt more and more cloud technology. And I think that as more people started jumping onto that wave first off, you know, companies like ours were massively overloaded and we just had floods of customers. And, you know, the cloud has exploded the earning statements for Amazon Azure and GCP all came out last week and they're phenomenal because everyone's flocking there because it's very difficult to support on-prem workloads anymore.

And no one really knows what the future of work is going to look like at a practical level. And then I think now we're reaching this sort of third wave as we're approaching a year into, you know COVID and lockdowns and all of these things where companies are now realizing that, okay, now that we've sort of dipped our toe into this cloud space or even gone Whole Hog, now we have the ability to take advantage of two very critical things. The first is what the future of remote work looks like. And I think that Google and again, shameless self plug here, I am a massive Google guy. I do Google all day. I really believe in the product and technology I used to work there, blah, blah, blah. Google's work from home long-term scenario is awesome. You know, standardizing on Chromebooks, pushing all of your applications and your productivity stuff into the the Google workspace and then using their specific lessons learned and their implementation guides on beyond Corp.

And the sort of put all your applications in the cloud and control them with identity where proxies and all this other super nerdy stuff is awesome. And I hope everyone is prepared to say, yeah, I'm going to get a laptop that costs a couple hundred dollars that I can run over with my car drive to best buy buy a new one, or have Amazon prime overnight new one do my local locker or whatever, and then log back in and have access to all the same stuff that I needed. And IT organizations don't need to worry about how many agents you have installed for any virus and how many agents you have installed for your patches and all these things are going to fade quickly. So from everyday worker perspective that's going to be the biggest shift. Is all of a sudden having, you know, 5G or home internet connectivity is the only barrier to entry for you to work anywhere and do any thing.

This is going to be massively disruptive to what we think obvious like Centers of Industry in Silicon Valley and you know, TechHubs and things like that. And then the next piece of this is everyone's starting to realize that machine learning and artificial intelligence is possible. And this has been a massive shift for just about every company to come in and talk to anybody in this space. There are so few people who really understand this at a functional level and who know how to apply this for businesses and for technology and for the data and the democratization of that data within your own organization. That we're going to see some equally amazing and equally terrifying things come out of the next few years of development in this space. Like I am fascinated by all of it no matter what but it's going to be some interesting times.

>> Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It is. Cause the same coins got two sides, right?

>> Yes it does.

>> It's all about context. (Both chuckles) Well, this is really interesting. I'm sure a lot of people are going to be saying, Kyle, you know, what are the secrets? So I think your follow-up posts has got to be you know, here's the 10 do's and the 10 do nots to try to execute this in your own world and probably hold back on the Tom Hanks, the Tom Hanks email until you got it worked out before you rub anybody's nose in it.

>> Yeah. Jeff, I'm going to blatantly steal that post title. It's click Baity enough and valuable enough but I think it's going to be magical for my SEO. So yeah. 10 things to do and don't when you turn off email permanently.

>> I love it. It's great to connect and see you after all these years. And congratulations on what's going on with SADA. It sounds like he jumped on to a to a rocket ride and making cool Ironman suits on the side. It's an awesome gig.

>> Well, thanks, Jeff. I appreciate you inviting me on. And yeah. I got super lucky with this company and I can't wait to see where it goes.

>> Awesome. All right. Well, thanks everybody for joining, Kyle, great to see you. I'm Jeff Frick, he's Kyle. You're watching Jeff Frick from Turn the Lens from my home studio. See you next time.

>> Cheers everyone.

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