Matt Baker: Serendipity, Volunteerism, Good Enough Wins | Turn the Lens Ep55

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Matt Baker: Serendipity, Volunteerism, Good Enough Wins | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick podcast Ep55
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(c) Copyright 2026 Menlo Creek Media, LLC, All Rights Reserved

Cold Open:
Okay, so I'll just count us down and we will go in three, two, one.

Jeff Frick:
Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here coming to you for another episode of 'Turn the Lens' and I'm excited for this next episode. This is somebody that I've known for a long time. Surprisingly, only interviewed him once in all that time. But we have some receipts because ironically, the last time I interviewed him was 11 years ago, at something called the 'Dell 1-5-10,' where we were trying to predict the future of what's going to happen in one years, five years and ten years. Good news, we made 11. So we'll see what the future portends. So welcoming in all the way from Maine. He is Matt Baker, builder of boats, founder of Broad Reach Partners and former SVP at Dell. Great to see you Matt.

Matt Baker:
It's great to be here. And I didn't realize that the 1-5-10 was the last thing we did. I thought it was a theCUBE interview.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, well, you did a lot of theCUBE interviews but for some reason, I was probably just not on camera with you. So, yeah. Full disclosure, Matt and I's careers have run these parallel lives with occasional overlaps. And congratulations too. He just came out with his new book "Unconventional Wisdom" and true confessions, I don't really do book reviews, but I love to support my friends that write books and Matt and I have so much going on that I ordered the book, and these are some of the people that we share connections with. So I'm excited to jump into this. But before we get into it, what motivated you to write the book?

Matt Baker:
Well. I don't know. I always wanted to write a book. In fact, I toyed with writing screenplays at one point just for fun. I had a really good idea, which sadly was basically Breaking Bad before Breaking Bad. But anyhow, I always wanted to write a book, and to be honest with you, you know, I ended up mentoring lots of people through my career and you know, you end up with a lot of high achieving really motivated people that I've, you know, that I've mentored. And that's great. But there's a lot of people out there who maybe weren't the high achievers and maybe came to the job there in through sort of happenstance to some degree, which

Jeff Frick:
Right

Matt Baker:
oddly enough, is how I ended up in the tech industry. And you know for somebody who in high school was kind of told, you know you're smart, but you just don't apply yourself and, you know sort of not really doing well, failing to sort of take off. I wanted to write something that gave people like that some advice. And, you know, in essence, you should never listen to that little voice in your head. And so it was part of that, you know, both of us lived through an incredibly exciting time in the tech industry, and I kind of wanted to sort of document my place in that. I was lucky to sort of have a front row seat to a lot of really important movements in the tech industry at the time. And, you know, I had some career advice that I wanted to give. So what I ended up with was sort of a part memoir, part industry history, part career advice. And I wanted it to be a little bit different. And I've always been a very open person. I've never tried to hide who I am or what I feel, and so I set about writing a book that was, I think, a little more raw and revealing than most career books. I mean, it's not exactly a career book. It's something for everybody, but it just was a challenge. And you know I ended up writing it in about four months, right after I retired from Dell. And I sat on it because I was like, I need to come back to this thing and make sure I'm happy with it. I had a friend who was a previous mentee of mine who reviewed it and provided some advice, and so I stepped back and came back and then I decided, heck, I better publish this thing at some point. I published it on my birthday, July 21st of this year, 2026. So yeah, that's sort of how I came to write it. Just something I wanted to do and I wanted to give back in some way. It was weird. Just one last thing before your next question is, you know, I got really nervous about publishing it because I'm like, is this, like, the ultimate narcissistic thing, you know, to write about yourself and publish it and expect people to read it and like it? But then I kind of got back past that and said, hey, there's a reason for this. If people read it, people read it. If they don't, they don't. You know and so far, I've gotten pretty good feedback especially you know, wonderful feedback from you. I really appreciated that, so yeah, that's what brought me to this point.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, well four months you clearly had it in you for you to be able to get it out that fast because, you know, I talked to like Bill Schmarzo, another former Dell guy who cranks out books. He's up to like book number six. But, you know, it takes him a while. So clearly, you know, it'd been stewing in your head for a while and you had, you know, put a lot of the, the kind of the process together because I think

Matt Baker:
Well

Jeff Frick:
it's interesting. It's a journey. But it also what I was so excited about is the validation of the future which is really super poignant as we go into this next wave as you've said time and time again.

Matt Baker:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was I had just retired after 30 years of running just you know, full sprint for that whole time. And, you know, I mention in the book, I, in fact I mentioned it right before we got on the air, you know, I had my mother had a medical event that really was difficult to manage for me, you know, remotely doing the job I had. I think I did a really good job but it kind of took it out of me. And then Covid hit and that changed sort of everything and I think it was just sort of super cathartic to work my way through that, because I'd been in a place that brought me back to those memories from childhood and memories from my early you know, career. And I was, to be honest with you, I was really excited also about acknowledging all the people that I had sort of come across through my career, and you know, how much help, you know, how much they helped me and how much I appreciated it and in fact, you said you should get David Vellante to read this. And I sent him a copy and he was just like, how do you remember all these details, all these people, all these names? And I was like, I don't know. It's just it was there.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Matt Baker:
So yeah, it was, it was a cathartic journey, let's put it that way.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, well the voice is great and it comes across with a really positive energy. So I think hopefully you accomplished, you know, what you're trying to do. And I certainly enjoyed it. And I do think, you know, just content strategy 101 these days. You got to do it for yourself. You know if you're if you're doing it for somebody else, you're doing it for the wrong reason. And don't look for that reinforcement. And if you feel the need to write or you feel the need to speak or you know, just do it for you and be happy with it, you know, for yourself, so.

Matt Baker:
Absolutely. And it's so, I mean, it's so easy now to publish, you know, self-publish something. You know, I was like, should I try to get an agent or at least an editor? And lo and behold, I found my edit GPT which turned out to be the only tool, only AI tool I used. I didn't use it for any of the manuscript but it came in incredibly handy for editing because reading your own writing and editing your own writing, man, that's hard. So yeah, yeah.

Jeff Frick:
Yes, yeah. Okay, so let's get into it. Because you just laid out that segue for me and what one of the things that I think is so important and also so difficult for people to understand is exponential curves. Looking forward is just really hard to understand that we have 8,000 Cray computers in our pocket running on a battery, but I think we can do it if I think it helps sometimes to look backwards at what has changed in something that we know, and then maybe it kind of anchors

Matt Baker:
Sure

Jeff Frick:
how fast things have changed now. Your first job at Intel. And just for everyone's clarification, you were, I think, a Philosophy English major, correct?

Matt Baker:
English, Political Science which is a philosophy minor.

Jeff Frick:
Political Science, okay.

Matt Baker:
Philosophy minor, so you got it right. But a

Jeff Frick:
All right

Matt Baker:
You know, English, Political Science.

Jeff Frick:
And you get pulled into networking at Intel through a series of events, really kind of through the IT department in supporting their executives so they could get online, remotely. You didn't have any experience in networking. You're there at Intel where you know the wonderful Moore's Law which is so, so famous from Gordon Moore. But I think that most important part of Gordon Moore's law is not the math behind the chips but the philosophy and the encouragement and kind of this drive. And I think what people miss is the technologies can change underneath whatever the underlying objective is. You lived that so directly in networking from the earliest of the earliest to 5G. I wonder if you can share some of the perspective in terms of, you know, a) how much stuff goes through those pipes and how those pipes have changed, but 2) then when you divide the output by the power required to deliver it, you get this another exponential bump, and then you divide that by the cost per unit. And you get this other exponential bump. And I mean to imagine what we are doing networking wise, I wonder if you can reflect on some of those early challenges in terms of bandwidth and really throughput.

Matt Baker:
I mean, it's sort of, you know, it's sort of like we're of the age where we lived from the day of no computers to pervasive computing everywhere around us. I mean, it's just everywhere. So I actually was lucky enough, my father was a stockbroker, and he was a really early enthusiast and we had a computer, I think it was 1979. And so I was lucky enough to sort of know something about it. And he was into, you know, CompuServe at the time was one of many, you know, sort of commercial bulletin board systems.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Matt Baker:
And so I knew about it. I ran, I helped my friend run his bulletin board system in Maryland. So I kind of had some computer experience. I took 'Basic' [programming] lessons when I was, I think when I was in first grade or something like that, so I had an unusual connection to computing even though I had really no practical experience with it by the time I got into, you know, into Intel. In fact, you know, I sort of left computing behind early. I just, something I didn't do in high school. There was really no, there's no precedent for it. I mean, it was like, you didn't, no one did their papers on a word processor or all of that stuff, so I say all of that because I think it's hard for people to grasp who are quite a bit younger than us that there was a time when, you know, the internet didn't exist. I mean, it did exist for academics and the government but it didn't exist for the general public. And if it did exist, it was insanely slow. I mean, I remember the first modem we had was a, I think, a Hayes 2400 baud. No one would even know what baud means anymore, so I won't even get into it but, by the time I got to Intel a decade later, things had not changed much. Not everybody had a computer on their desk at Intel, especially if you worked in a factory. But it was just then changing and so it was still dial up. I mean, that was the only thing available to most everybody. And that was, you know, 28.8 kbps. I mean, do that math compared to now, it's tiny. And then, you know, right as I started, there was this notion of a sort of higher download speed of 54.4 or whatever it was.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Matt Baker:
And that was like, everyone was crazed about that. But I was lucky enough, Intel had this notion that if they could get, I mean the internet had happened, had just started to happen, and they had the foresight to say, hey, if we could get higher speed internet into people's homes, it would kind of change the world. And Intel, you know, the thing that people forget about Intel, it's been beaten down over the last decade or so, but they were really the ones who were pacing the industry in terms of, 'Hey, how do we make computing ubiquitous?' Obviously they wanted to sell more chips. So part of that was driving, you know, high-speed internet and you sort of the ubiquity of home computing. And so the first job after my, I had this temporary job that was just sort of, by happenstance I got it, it's a really strange story. But anyhow, I got in and flipped over into networking very quickly and took care of all of the remote access systems, which is why in the book I cover, you know, having to support the CEO of the company at the time and sort of the fun of being desk-side support for these juggernauts of the industry, but right after that, Intel Labs and Les Vadasz, who founded Intel Capital, sort of got together and said, look, there's a lot of things changing. One of the big things that was changing was the Telecommunications Act, or we should call it the Deregulation Act of Telecommunications, which really opened the door for innovation on what was somewhat quasi public infrastructure, the copper that ran through, you know, all the poles in the country, and granted access to people to do that. And so the idea was, hey, let's sort of see what we can do with these new technologies that are emerging. At the time those technologies were things like digital subscriber line or DSL, which is what powers most of our internet access even today at home, unless you have fiber. But long story short, this was an experiment, and we started installing these relatively high speed internet lines into first the executives at the company. I was lucky enough to get one at home. So these went from, you know, a maximum of 56. You know, it was 56, sorry, 56.6 kbps. I got said 54. I'm doing my binary wrong

Jeff Frick:
And it never did 56.

Matt Baker:
No.

Jeff Frick:
Just the sticker on the box.

Matt Baker:
That was just the sticker on the box. But anyhow, this to 1 Mbps, 2 megabits per second, I mean like orders of magnitude faster. And it was exciting because it really you could see how it would change the world, because if anyone remembers bulletin board systems or the early internet, it was very text heavy obviously, because text is compressible and can go over these very skinny lines to, oh wow, we can now download, we can put pictures up there. We can, you know, we can put music, we can put... And that then started this revolution that has led today to, to today, which is you know, we can download music, Napster, we can share videos, you know, whatever. All those platforms that emerged in the late '90s were really unlocked by this effort by Intel and the carriers to create a new class of always-on internet access. And oh, by the way, there was another sort of thing lurking behind that which is, oh, consumer internet is really great, but what if we could get our employees to work another 30 minutes, another hour, another two hours, another four hours from home? I mean, obviously that's when you get into the, you know, the managerial class going, hey, wait a second. If we put this at home, people will get their work done, we'll get more out of them, and that was a whole other side of it. And so yeah, it was, it was just watching us go from, you know, really sort of caveman internet to things that people really couldn't quite believe. And, you know, back then, you know, everyone said, you know, there would be no brick and mortar stores anymore, of course that's not what happened. Everything always is overblown. We're seeing some of that over blow right now with AI, but long story short, it changed the world. And I was there to watch it, and it was, it was just fascinating. It was also fun, like, I remember getting phone calls from Andy Grove saying, you know, in his Hungarian accent, he'd be like, 'Matt, my internet's not working.' And, you know, I would call up Pacific Bell. And they had a truck sitting at the bottom of the hill in Los Altos Hills and they would just go up there, fix it. Everything would be, it was just, it was the ultimate tinkering. And we were tinkering on, at the time, the scale of the US. But then it went global. And yeah, it was just, it was really fascinating. And then of course, network back then, you know, was expensive. A T1 line, I think, was $15,000/month or something crazy like that, I mean.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, I looked it up. So a T1, it was 1.4 megs and it cost, if I recall, $1,500/month, so, we're, you know, and you compare that to a modern mobile phone plan just for the connectivity, right. You're getting tens of thousands of more bandwidth for fractions and fractions and fractions and fractions. I mean, the math is just so crazy. And of course, the real relevant topic right now for this is this whole data center conversation. Right?

Matt Baker:
Sure

Jeff Frick:
Because again, I just kind of built this whole little thing around the Cray [supercomputer]. You know, a Cray took a whole neighborhood [of electricity] to run it. And again, you got 8,000 of them now running in your pocket on a battery. So you know, to try to extrapolate, you know, kind of the current demand growth against these forecasted, you know, data center requirements. Well, the data set. I mean, you probably know better than me, you know, the density of those places and the amount of compute compared. And again, you first divide it by power and then you divide it by cost. And that's when you just see these banana numbers.

Matt Baker:
It's bananas to think about those exponential curves and just sort of the, you know, I obviously spent a lot of time around Michael [Dell] and he would always, you know, when the marginal cost approaches zero, I mean that's sort of that's when you, it's true, I mean

Jeff Frick:
Right

Matt Baker:
Computing has reached the sort of marginal zero cost, like you can do pretty much anything. Now we're in a place where we're compute starved again, which is interesting, it's, it's kind of very strange to think, are we witnessing right now in essence the very same thing, you know, are we witnessing something that is on another exponential curve?

Jeff Frick:
Yes

Matt Baker:
And I think the answer is yes

Jeff Frick:
Yes, yes

Matt Baker:
But also at the same time, we have to remember there was like, these things don't look, they're not, while there is an exponential curve, there is not a linear experience for everybody. Right. So

Jeff Frick:
Oh, for sure.

Matt Baker:
Everyone's like bubble, no bubble. It's like no, there is a bubble. But that doesn't matter. There's always a bubble. Like yeah, there's going to be some people that slough off. But then it's roar, you know, back at it. And that happened during the dot.com boom. I mean, by what was it, basically after Y2K everything just collapsed. But the crazy thing was, then everybody had an e-commerce presence. It wasn't e-commerce pure plays. It was everybody. Everybody ended up

Jeff Frick:
Oh come on, Pets, Pets.com, because pets can't drive. Webvan, come on, there was lots of good pure, I have the t-shirt. I'll go put it on. [laughter]

Matt Baker:
I mean.

Jeff Frick:
But to your point though, all the infrastructure was laid, right, all the new fiber was running up the right of ways along the train tracks. And, you know, people got used to suddenly putting their credit card, you know, in a computer, which didn't, I mean, anyway, we could

Matt Baker:
You could go on forever

Jeff Frick:
tell stories till the cows come home.

Matt Baker:
But there was a lot of, there was, the interesting thing is, as I just sort of, to today, it's sort of like there was a lot of carnage, like you mentioned, the railway lines, all of the, will, you know, all these gas pipeline companies got into the internet business and then realized, wait a second. Maybe we overbuilt a little bit. The funny thing is, is then that dark fiber got picked up later by other people, so it, like, everything's not just sort of a straight linear curve. There are these discontinuities and you kind of have to just hang on for dear life as those discontinuities happen, which is my advice I'd give to everybody right now with AI, it's like, look, just hold on for dear life and try to understand this as best you can.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Matt Baker:
Now you can apply it. Don't fight it. Don't, you know, don't you know? Obviously fight where it matters, you know, everyone should have access to this, you know, stuff. We shouldn't have biased models, which we do, you know? But, you know, hold on, because there's a new dawn coming. And if you're not on that train, you may be, you know, left behind. That's why all of these things that I'm talking about, we called them the xDSL trials with Intel Labs was, someone was like, hey, who wants to help Intel Labs? And you know, you still have your day job, but you want to help them? And I was like, you know, I put up my hand. Not everybody wanted to put up their hand, but that's sort of like, if there's something new, cool and exciting, you know, make the time to do it, even if it means, you know, sort of pushing yourself a lot harder than you thought you might. It's really important because

Jeff Frick:
Right

Matt Baker:
great things may happen.

Jeff Frick:
Right. I love it. So let's talk about another megatrend that was really demonstrated at Intel for both of us. And it's kind of Clayton Christensen 101, Innovator's Dilemma, and that's when good enough is good enough, right, so you know, the classic juggernaut at Intel, x86, destroyed everything. And as good enough was good enough, it came up and knocked out SPARC and all these high end architectures and computers. And for those that don't know, those were just specialty machines that did really high end jobs. But as we see over and over and over, right, the competition always comes from below. And x86 came and ate that up.

Matt Baker:
Now ironically, I was working on IA-64 at Intel, which was their next step, and even we at Intel couldn't stay ahead of the IA-32 guys because they were just lapping us, and the IA-64, it was a whole debacle.

Jeff Frick:
You're talking the 'iTanic' as it became known.

Matt Baker:
Yes, yes, yes, a lot of, a lot of dead bodies. [figuratively, not literally] That's where I learned about operational efficiency. Comparing the six person team at HP working on McKinley compared to the 400 people at Intel that were working on Merced, and which one moved a little bit faster, but then Intel, you know, falls victim to the very same thing when, you know, the ARM architecture comes from underneath to basically, you know, take the mobile, that Intel completely missed the boat, so, you know, it's just interesting when you think of good enough is good enough.

Jeff Frick:
And I want to take it back to our last chapter together, which was kind of big data. And the first conversations of citizen developers and citizen data scientists. Well, now, and you know, BI [Business Intelligence] and but ultimately it's about making better decisions faster.

Matt Baker:
Yeah.

Jeff Frick:
You know, with LLMs now and this access to the machine that you didn't have before, if you didn't know how to do a C prompt, you know, have we finally kind of entered the age that you and I were touting about in terms of helping people make better decisions faster with these massive computes at the end of your telephone.

Matt Baker:
I well, I certainly think that I don't know about better decisions. Faster and more is certainly what we're seeing now. And a decision made is better than a decision not made, right.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Matt Baker:
So quality, let's sort of set quality aside, because I still think what hurt us back then with big data continues to hurt us now, which is that the data sphere, the private data sphere for most companies is still a giant mess. And that messed up big data, along with other things. Big data, they put the technology first and not the business process first, which I give, I think I probably give Dell and to some degree myself some credit, which was, look, the technology's interesting. But without addressing the core business process the technology is meaningless. That was a lesson I learned out of big data when we were talking on that.

Jeff Frick:
How could they still not have their data cleaned up? Every AI discussion I get into, it's like, okay, you had the big data, you had the big data chapter to kind of get your data stuff organized. Hopefully you got it organized.

Matt Baker:
We'll sort of, we'll sort of date ourselves. But I sort of think of it like, remember the end of Indiana Jones when they put the Ark of the Covenant in a box and then they store that box in a warehouse that never ends.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Matt Baker:
That's what most people's data environments look like, because they just, you know, you create more data in a day than you can, you know, sift through and analyze in a year. And so that hasn't changed. And so I, you know, I think everyone keeps talking about who's going to make the big money is the model, where the money is. I don't think so. It's the harnessing and sort of the stuff that surrounds the model. Yeah, probably. But anyone who figures out how to finally wrestle control of data, and, and by the way, the LLM can do that, like we just, you need to point the thing at the right problem and tell it what to do and organize your data. But that's also somewhat dangerous, so I mean, at the end of the day, we're still fighting the same problems. We still have the same challenges with data. The consumer side not so much because they're not dealing with the same. That's why the consumer use cases for LLMs and GenAI in general have been so, have outpaced the, the sort of the commercial use of it. And that's because of the data environments, they're, you know, if you want to be successful with generative AI in a, in a business context, then you have to wrestle with the data problem, which means you have to say, we're okay, we're going to solve a finite problem, and we're going to clean up a finite amount of data.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Matt Baker:
Whereas the big data thing was trying to, you know, fix everything all at once, which is a fool's errand. And the technology was, it was middling. It was nowhere near what we see with AI today. So, yeah, I mean it's an interesting, it's just sort of, there's so many parallels between the sort of rise of the internet and the industry that surrounded the internet and the rise of AI, that you could go on for days saying, oh, it was like this then, and it's like this now. The problem is, is that, you know, history is sort of echoes, but it never repeats itself exactly. So

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Matt Baker:
A lot of nuance in there. But yeah, you're right. It's, you know, it's sort of, same challenges, different tools. We make incremental, we make really incremental movement forward. And it feels like we're making a lot of incremental. Things moved very fast from, say, '97 to 2002. And then they kind of slowed. Things are moving really fast when ChatGPT till about now, but on the sort of corporate or commercial side of AI, things are still moving relatively slow. And I'm not discouraged by that. In fact, I think that's an indication that things are moving as they should, which is, this is complicated stuff and if you want it to change the world, you're going to have to work your way through it. And the world changed from '97 to the mid 2000s to the point that, you know, if you woke up from a, you know, a coma in, I'd say like, you know, the, like 2010, and, you know, you went to sleep in '95, you'd just be like, holy mackerel, what happened? It's like

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Matt Baker:
Like the world has changed. I, you mean I can order everything online, and you know, and then you get to Covid. It's like, I don't have to go to the grocery store anymore. I just get someone to deliver everything. That's what Webvan was trying to do way back when

Jeff Frick:
Exactly

Matt Baker:
So anyhow, yeah, it's just, I find it, I find it really fascinating and, and you're right about the sort of coming up from the bottom. I mean my second company after Intel, Dell, that is, Dell was Dell's M.O., I mean the entire PC business. I'd say the PC business changed the game relative to IBM and the other clone makers at the time with an entirely different business model, which was that built-to-order model. But in terms of disruption of incumbents, I think the one that's probably the most important and seminal moment in terms of what Dell had done was, you know, what Jeff Clarke, who's now the COO and has been for a bit, you know, his job back then was basically to go figure out how to get into the workstation business. People nowadays won't even know what a workstation business is. But way back when, you know, people bought these incredibly expensive $50,000 Sun workstations to do things like computer aided design, CAD and other modeling. And Dell came in with a good enough strategy with the right ecosystem. They knew that the ecosystem was around graphics and, you know, and app developers. And they went and said, hey, look, there's going to be more money in it for you. What if we take the cost of a workstation from $50,000 to $5,000? And that was the end of the Sun workstation. And then the same thing happened during the dot.com boom. And I write about it in my book. You know, everyone was running their websites on these very expensive, you know, at the beginning, where these [Sun] E10Ks, these big scale-up SPARC systems, SPARC got, I mean sorry, Sun got the message and finally created a pizza box. You know, two socket, one socket. They called them Netra boxes but everyone still was running their websites on SPARC. And these were very expensive systems and then all of a sudden, I remember the day I was testing x86 systems and turning on SSL, the encryption, when you see 'https,' the encryption, because everyone before that was putting their credit cards over clear text on the internet. Luckily there weren't as many people watching. And then they said, we can't do this. We need to enable this, well, the SPARC systems went from processing say, 100 transactions per second down to like 2 or 3, and the x86 system went from like 100 to 90, and you're like, wait, what? What just happened? And it was like, well, this good enough x86 chip running on a, running a Dell server at the time can do now the work of, you know, 10 to 20 SPARC boxes. It was the end. I mean, at that point everyone 'student body left' moved over to x86 to host their websites and Sun faded slowly into oblivion.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, yeah. Well, the other thing too, right, that just was the pricing model based on user moving to an internet model. Like people don't think of these things. These things were not priced. They were priced by user because they were business licenses. They weren't, never designed to be pointed to the outside. So I remember the whole, like, changing the licensing, it was CPU and then it was [CPU] Core and blah blah blah.

Matt Baker:
Just all over the place.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah but let's jump back into the hot tub time machine because I have notes from our conversation.

Matt Baker:
That's fair.

Jeff Frick:
It was February 13th, 2015, for those paying attention at home.

Matt Baker:
Whoa! Way back.

Jeff Frick:
So it was you. It was Jai [Menon], John Thompson and Susan Etlinger

Matt Baker:
Oh

Jeff Frick:
were the cast of characters. So let's check some of the forecast. One of the ones that you brought up and you said that there was an 80% failure rate at big data projects at that time. Ironically, I think a year ago, MIT had a 95% failure rate on AI projects. So you are, in fact, right. And it goes back to the same thing. It's about transforming business process and everything else, not the technology, whether you call it big data, AI, BI.

Matt Baker:
The same. It's the same thing. It's the same.

Jeff Frick:
It's the same thing. One of the interesting things that Susan thought is at that point in time she saw no technology on the horizon that could read text off a picture. And if you remember back in the day, right, that's how you could save your own little pass codes. You could take a picture of a post-it note, and the computer couldn't read it, so she did not, she did not get that, get that one right on LLMs.

Matt Baker:
Well, it took, to her credit, it took a long while to get there.

Jeff Frick:
Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. No for sure, but it just makes me think what's going to happen in the next ten.

Matt Baker:
I agree, I agree

Jeff Frick:
Right on these crazy curves. Jai had an interesting comment that said there's no such thing as anonymous, that anything that can be known will be known. And this was before the Facebook, first big Cambridge Analytica nightmare with them, which I thought was pretty interesting. So I do think, you know, it's still ultimately, as we just said, it's about trying to get to better decisions, whether they're better or not. At least they're faster and more of them.

Matt Baker:
You know what's interesting about Jai's comment that I think a lot about, which is, is he's absolutely right. There are no secrets, you know, like what can be known will be known. But the interesting thing is, is that the world has recognized that, and the challenges we're dealing with right now, which is, there's too much we know, and a lot of it's manufactured and fake, and therefore discerning. Like so it, now Jai's thing is, yes, everything is known. But what can be believed, and that, like, you know, sort of, sort of the death of, of reality, if you will, like, you can, you basically can, you can hack people with, you can hack people's brain with misinformation very easily. So flood the zone with all sorts of gobbledygook and you can make people like, you don't need a secret anymore. What you need is to blast non-secrets, to blast misinformation. So you know, to me it's sort of like, he's absolutely right. But there's like a dark side to that which is

Jeff Frick:
Very dark.

Matt Baker:
Very dark.

Jeff Frick:
You were in PolySci [Political Science]. I was in rat lab, and you know, they basically behave pretty, B.F. Skinner had it pretty much nailed. It's not that complicated

Matt Baker:
Yep

Jeff Frick:
Another funny thing that John Thompson said, and you were just talking about it in your projects, is kind of a different thought process around the data. You know, back then in Hadoop, right, the vision was just throw it all in Hadoop and maybe some magical value will come out. But to your point, you know, what's the business case. And then, by, you know, a lot of people I've talked to more recently, you know, by tightening that down, you know, now you tighten down your data requirements, now you tighten down your data requirements complexity and, you know, opens up a lot more kind of opportunities. But even you then talked about Dell being a democratization provider, and as is everyone else, so again, kind of back to the citizen developer. I wrote an app at dinner to tell me when an airplane shadow was going to go over my house. I mean, it's pretty amazing now, you know? Have we finally got there? Are we close?

Matt Baker:
Well, I think, I think we're awfully close, this, you know, this notion of like vibe coding and citizen developer, anyone can develop, you know, an application of their liking, right. Now the question is, is like, can that same citizen developer build something that, you know, at Dell, you know, 90,000 to 100,000 people can rely on every day? That's where I think that's, we're not at the point where a nonprofessional can create a broad based multi-user application that is flawless, right. And in fact, to some degree, you, with this notion of citizen coding, you end up with code that is probably not optimal. But that being said, I mean that doesn't matter. If you're talking about individual productivity, like, the doors have blown open in terms of your ability as an individual to create your own productivity tools. I mean, like that to me is a massive unlock of potential. And I sit here saying this, I don't do any of this, you know, like, I watch from afar. I'm, you know, I love the technology and I stay close to it. But at the same time, I haven't, I haven't done any, you know, vibe coding. I used to code

Jeff Frick:
Right

Matt Baker:
So I sort of like

Jeff Frick:
You're a real coder.

Matt Baker:
It's not that exciting. Well no, no, I was not a real coder. I was an amateur. I was an IT coder. They call us 'script kiddies'

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Matt Baker:
I was more of a script kiddie. But you're right. I think the thing is, is that the citizen developer is, I think, at, is still at a very, very early stage. And I think where it's most successful is in truly personal productivity, right, like, you have a niche, a want, a need. And you say, hey, build me something that does this, this, and this within a limited scope. And I mean, it pops out the other side fully functional

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Matt Baker:
I mean it, but, but.

Jeff Frick:
Two other big things though, I think, you know, one is, I think it just increases the surface area of the people that will eventually write the next class of enterprise apps

Matt Baker:
I agree

Jeff Frick:
because right, now everyone has access to it. And again, if you didn't know C prompt, you didn't have access to those machines before.

Matt Baker:
You didn't.

[SPEAKER UNCERTAIN -- verify against audio, ~00:39:40]
And you know, again.

Jeff Frick:
Fast forward, you know, 5, 10 years from now, where, you know, kind of the automation and say the infrastructure to security risks, all the things that you know, that separate a good app from just a regular app, below the functionality, you know, more and more get automated. It's just going to be, curious to see, it's just, I think the voice to supercomputer is the most underreported piece of this whole thing. And even in the short period since ChatGPT has come out, you know, things like, like memory and adding my own data and all these kind of things have been addressed over the course of, I don't know, what's it been now, three years? Is that a short time or a long time? So it's just, I think the democratization, for, because the other, oh, the other piece I was going to talk about is this whole concept of lost Einsteins, which I'm sure you've probably heard of, right. Which is, some girl in sub-Saharan Africa has the cure for cancer in her head, you know, if she had nutrition, if she had education, if she had, you know, access to the right tools. So, you know, the fact that all this stuff is delivered on your phone is just really exciting.

Matt Baker:
I, well, I think it is really exciting. And I think that there's, you know, there's a lot of negativity floating around right now about AI, which I think is warranted because, man, I mean, these companies have done a crap job of presenting themselves and their case for why what they're doing is a net positive to society. I mean, it started with, you know, a lot of the lab leaders saying there's going to be mass unemployment. It's like, guys, what, like, stop for a second, you know, step away and find some professionals who can help you articulate what this thing is capable of doing on the good side. It's just that, to me, you know, I was just listening, my wife always is listening to our local NPR station back in Austin, and when I first got up here to Maine, everyone was so excited about that Maine had passed this No Data Center act. And I was like, I said to my, my aunts, who are both very, you know, sort of liberally minded people, and, you know, power and water, and I'm like, first of all, those things are all pretty overblown. You know, there's a lot of disinformation going on out there. Second, do you want the state, Maine, which has fewer people in it than Austin proper, and very few surviving industries, do you want to just sort of basically like sideline yourself, especially given that Maine touches Quebec, which has more hydropower than they know what to do with. It's like, this is an ideal state to build data centers in and you're trying to ban them. It's like, so I sort of confuse matters to some degree, which is, look, there's a lot of negativity and some of it warranted. I, you know, like, this notion of regulatory capture that people are trying to pull off, especially, I won't even name the companies but it's quite obvious who, sort of like, this is dangerous, we need to do this, we need to do that. It's like, guys, like, it's not, this is going to unlock human potential. Just let's pragmatically talk about the puts and takes here and bring some rationality to this discussion. But unfortunately, we're in a place where the industry is reactionary at the moment, which is, it's like, I don't, you know, I don't care what people say, we're going to just go do stuff. And sort of like this, what the Valley has turned into over the last three, 4, 5 years. It's like, no, you actually have to sell people on this. You're going to hit a wall.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah.

Matt Baker:
And, anyhow, to me it's like, yes, there are so many hidden Einsteins. But, you know, let's stop tripping over our own feet and say, how are we going to unlock human potential? Like, to me, it's like, that's the message. It's not how to unlock limitless computer intelligence that is going to take over the world. That's a dystopian notion. It's like, oh no, how are we going to unlock this? To unlock human potential, which I see is what's happening, but there's just too much noise around the political. It's getting politicized. As soon as that happens, we saw it with Covid, things go sideways. You know, and nothing's right, so I worry, you know, I worry that we're going to face a degree of backlash that we didn't have to face back in the internet era because the internet era had a very positive message, even though it ended up yielding some negative results, right. All information wants to be free, blah blah blah blah blah.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, but the

Matt Baker:
in come the ills of social media.

Jeff Frick:
The, I think the X factor was social media, right? Because the social media

Matt Baker:
It was

Jeff Frick:
if you look at social media as the interim app between the launch of e-commerce and web 101 or whatever. And unfortunately, you know, the technology is way ahead of the regulators. I would hate to know how many politicians still have their emails printed and hand it to them by somebody in a manila envelope, and I bet it's surprisingly high. So

Matt Baker:
That's funny given the news, some very particular person typing your Truth Social posts for you.

Jeff Frick:
Yes, yes.

Matt Baker:
So anyway, and I'm equally as scared and terrified as I am excited because, like any technology tool, right, it can be used for good and it can be used for bad, and, and to your point, I think we should slow down, I think this, you know, innovation at, as high, hyper speed as we can go, it does not necessarily yield good results. And you don't have to look at tech, go back to 'The Jungle' [by Upton Sinclair, 1906] and look what happened in Chicago when people aren't really taking care of people, so

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, well I'm, and we've reached a point where, I guess what I was saying is, is that the tech industry of the mid to late '90s, early 2000s, was a very idealistic, positive, you know, and maybe Pollyanna, as we get to the ills of social media, I feel like we're in the opposite space right now, which is, the industry is pretty nihilistic in some ways. And it's like sort of, we're going to just go do this.

Matt Baker:
Right, right.

Jeff Frick:
And that, that probably will yield, as you mentioned, sort of, it will yield the opposite, which is the ills will come faster and they'll be addressed probably more swiftly. That actually might be a good thing. I don't know, but, like you, I'm equally, I'm not terrified. I'm far more excited than I am pessimistic, but I still, I'm a little disheartened by where the industry is today. And, you know, its relationship to its customers. I think, you know, that's sort of the thing that I remember, you know, that I prided myself, and my career at Dell as being very customer focused, with big ears to listen to customers. And I just feel like, especially the AI industry today, is not really listening to many, you know, anyone, right? It's more of a

Matt Baker:
Yeah, just stop. You could, not listening, you could put the period right there.

Jeff Frick:
All right, well now we're getting towards the end of our time. I want to end up kind of on your philosophy and career and your career progress. And there was a couple of things that jumped out

Matt Baker:
Sure

Jeff Frick:
to me in the book. And the first one really was serendipity. You know, you went to the cities where you got employed because your wife at the time was on her education journey and was getting accepted into programs in universities in those cities. And lo and behold, here you end up in the Phoenix area at Intel. And then you have, I don't know, were you at Intel, 15 years? A long time.

Matt Baker:
Ten years.

Jeff Frick:
Ten years. And then she applies to UT (University of Texas, Austin) and you go to Austin and then you've got this, this great thing at Dell. And then, you know, as we talked about, you had a little bit of computer nerdiness, but, you know, you got thrown into this networking thing. And to your point, you just kept volunteering for new things. So I want to talk about that. The other thing that jumped out to me, which is kind of tangential, is your international travel early as a professional.

Matt Baker:
Sure

Jeff Frick:
and to your point, to the shitty locations, because all the guys with status went to the nicer places?

Matt Baker:
Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Frick:
But I really am curious of how that early global experience, and you continue to travel a lot throughout your career, but more as a young, as a young person, you know, kind of impacted your ability to be more empathetic, to see more points of view, to not get

Matt Baker:
Yeah

Jeff Frick:
locked into maybe the most popular view or the loudest view in the room because you'd seen so much more

Matt Baker:
Yeah, well I think the serendipity thing at, like, serendipity was sort of, you know, seems to be my middle name when it came to my career. I mean, I, I mentioned it in the book, you know, I was supposed to be an elections official in Maricopa County of all places, and my father died in a scuba diving accident, and I couldn't take the job. And when I got back, I had a phone call from someone at Intel and said, hey, we've got a temporary position, are you interested? And I was like, yeah, of course I'm very interested. I'd just lost this opportunity because of policy, and that got my foot in the door. And again, I had no, like, I had this experience early on, but that just gave me a little bit of core understanding. I wasn't prepared to be in the industry as it was because everything had changed. So yeah, I mean, and that's the, the sort of the opposite side of serendipity, and maybe, the sort of, what can look like serendipity is actually volunteerism, which is, there are always opportunities sitting in front of your face. You just have to open your eyes and ears to listen and see them, and then jump on them, and sort of be like, absolutely, I want to do that, even if you have no idea how to do it. That was what I did. It was like, this stuff is actually fairly simple, it took, for whatever reason, technology came easy to me relative to almost everything else in life. And so it was sort of like, all right, yeah, I'll do that. That sounds fun. That sounds cool. You know, I'll do this, I'll do that. I mean, all the way through my career, I would, like, I remember sitting about to walk into the FTC.

Matt Baker:
FTC? Yeah, the FTC, during the EMC deal, and, you know, I was like, like, who normally does this testimony at this? And they're like, it's almost always the CEO. And I was like, yeah, I'm not Michael Dell. And the lawyers like, well, he must really trust you. And I was like.

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Matt Baker:
Well, I guess so. So again, it's sort of like, I found myself in an environment that I thought was very rich with opportunities. But at the same time, you know, I was sitting alongside many other, frankly, probably as capable or more capable on paper than me, but they just weren't stepping forward to take, you know, take, you know, benefit from what was, to some degree, serendipity. It was like, yeah.

Jeff Frick:
Well, I like that framing, because I do strongly believe that you can kind of increase your surface area of luck, right? Preparation and putting yourselves around it.

Matt Baker:
Totally

Jeff Frick:
But you're putting a really nice verb on it, which is just 'volunteer.'

Matt Baker:
Totally

Jeff Frick:
Just, just, just put your hand up and go.

Matt Baker:
Yeah, and if it doesn't work out, it fizzles out. It's no skin off your chin. And you know, if it does take off, then it's, you know, I remember leaving college, you know, English, political science. You know, the market wasn't great then. You know, it.

Jeff Frick:
It never seems to be for college kids

Matt Baker:
And I was like, yeah, I'm going to do all right. And you know, I remember saying to myself, if I make over $n, $n thousands of dollars, I will have, you know, I will have made it. At least I will have. And then, you know, the fact that I ended up an SVP at a Fortune 50 company, like, I never, never would have predicted that. But the way I got there was just, kept putting my hand up and proving that I was, you know, at least good, halfway decent at it, and maybe even good at it.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Matt Baker:
And that's the sort of message of the book, which is, look, don't let your past, don't let your conception of yourself, don't let the conception of others of you, you know, don't let any of that get in your way, because that's just garbage, like, you really

Jeff Frick:
Right, right

Matt Baker:
You don't need to have self-confidence. You have to shut the noise, you need to shut the voice off that's saying, man, can you really do that? Are you prepared? Like, do you know what you're doing? It's like, no, I'm going to figure it out because I'm, I can figure things out. We can all figure things out. If there's anything that, you know, humans excel at, it's at figuring things out. How to use a stick to get ants out of a hole. You know, like, all the way to, how do you use an LLM to automate, you know, whatever you want, like, we're, ingenuity is what we do. And if you put yourself in a position to be creative and ingenious, and, you know, you're, as you say, your surface area of luck, you can increase it massively.

Jeff Frick:
And I love the way you put that, which is, you know, the more you contain yourself, the smaller you make yourself in your mind, that surface area contracts. And you know, if you end up sort of opening that aperture, opening up that, if you will, that giant net of opportunities, then tons of opportunities will come at you.

[SPEAKER UNCERTAIN -- verify against audio, ~00:53:59, possible return to Matt Baker]
It's like, every day, here's like, I don't have enough people to do, let me help. I'm, you know, if you put your hand up and help, most of the time people are willing to accept your help, right? Even if you might not be the expert. So I just, to me, it's sort of volunteerism, looking for opportunities, always listening for opportunities. That's the way you get ahead in life. It's not, you know, more degrees, more proof that you're worthy, work, you'll figure it out. You know, you'll figure this. Change tomorrow, right? That's the other thing. I mean, I think that critical thinking, continuous learning, curiosity, because the technology keeps changing. You know, what we used to do, what we're trying to do keeps changing. And, you know, you learn it today. I think that's really the hardest thing because it's kind of like, you know, some sunk cost fallacy. It's like, oh, you know, I just learned all this stuff and now I got to throw it out. It's like, I just wrote all this code and I got to throw it out. But that's kind of what, that's kind of what it is now.

Jeff Frick:
Well, but I mean, the thing is, is that you're not really throwing it out.

Matt Baker:
Yeah. Sunk cost. But there was value, accrues from that sunk cost. Even if, even if what you wrote doesn't actually end up being run, you still benefited from that journey. So that's why I say, you know, like, I could not imagine a day without learning something, like, to me, it's, it's like the world is such an amazing, beautiful, complicated, sometimes disheartening place. But, you know, like, if you don't, I want to learn everything I can learn while I'm here, because it's fascinating, good, bad or indifferent. I mean, it's like, like it's lifelong. Learning is the only gift we're given, right? If your blinders are on, then everything becomes the same, the same, the same. You don't grow as an individual. And frankly, you're not helping the world and the people around you in the world grow as well. So lifelong learning and being curious and exercising your curiosity and creativity, to me, that's the most important thing you can do in life.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. That's great. Well, I think we'll leave it there. We've been, I've been taking you all day, so I appreciate the time. We're going to get into woodworking and boats, but maybe we'll save all that for the next episode.

Matt Baker:
Yeah.

Jeff Frick:
Well, that, that will have to wait. I've got my boat. It's sitting right there. I'm going to go put it in the water and go sail it here in a second. So

[SPEAKER UNCERTAIN -- cross-talk, verify against audio, ~00:56:36-00:56:54, boat-building video exchange]
The one that he couldn't have, though it hurt me though it was. But it goes. It goes back together. I know, but. I know you think. Yeah. The video, you're cutting the thing in half after you put it all together and sanded it and this. And I was like, oh my. God, creative destruction. That's another core concept, right?

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Matt Baker:
And I appreciate your time. And I, to be honest, like, I really appreciate you taking the interest in my book and providing me with great feedback. It's been, you know, really super valuable. And I'm glad you, you know, enjoyed it to some degree and got something out of it, you know. So again, appreciate your time, and frankly, appreciate everything about all the stuff I learned from you about electric bikes and, you know, like, again, lifelong learning. I saw you doing all sorts of cool stuff with these electric skateboards, one wheels, bikes, etc. You sent me on a journey. I've got two of those. Surron's still there. They're super fun.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. Now everybody's got them finally. Right.

Matt Baker:
It's true. That's true.

Jeff Frick:
All right, Matt. Well, thanks again. It's been, it's been a real treat.

Matt Baker:
Yeah, it's been a real treat. Thank you.

Jeff Frick:
All right. He's Matt. I'm Jeff. You're watching. Turn the Lens. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening on the podcast. We'll catch you next time. Take care. Bye bye.

[Cold Close]

Boom!
All right.
Oh, great.
That was awesome.

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