Michael Reid: 0:02
If you rest on your laurels, if you stop listening the criticality of staying close to customers, keeping world-class talent and a focus around innovation. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter what sales team or finance team, nothing is possible Today.
Michael van Rooyen: 0:15
I have the pleasure in interviewing Michael Reid, also known in the industry as Chopper Reid. He’s been a long-term friend and has a very interesting career. Welcome to the show, michael. Before we kick things off, can you share a bit about your career in the tech industry and your many years at Cisco, as well as how you ended up being the CEO of Megaport?
Michael Reid: 0:33
Jeez, that’s a long story. It’s good to see you, mate. Thank you, yeah, and, by the way, congratulations on your journey. Thank you, yeah, it’s been amazing to watch as well, and Oro.
Michael van Rooyen: 0:43
Yes.
Michael Reid: 0:43
Yeah, world domination.
Michael van Rooyen: 0:45
Not as much as Megapop. We’re trying, that’s right, yeah.
Michael Reid: 0:48
So actually it’s good to be back from a fair bit of travel on the world domination front. But my story you know, I’ve shared a couple of these things. But I did aerospace engineering because I thought that would be the coolest job in the world. I thought I can go and literally build rockets for NASA, only to finish the degree to realize that you needed a secret clearance to work in any aerospace roles in the United States and it turned out that Australia didn’t have an industry at the time. So it was sort of that’s how you end up in tech. Now they have degrees for it, which is great. But back then that was how I got into tech and I started in Brisbane, actually in a cool company that actually went public on the Australian Stock Exchange whilst I was there and they needed a whole heap of Cisco certs to get there and I’d never heard of what Cisco was. And so the guy who owned the company literally stormed me through the office and he sort of says I’m looking for that rocket scientist, I need him to go and get a whole heap of Cisco certs so we can go public on the Australian Stock Exchange and we have a Cisco certification. And I said what’s Cisco? As he sort of rolled into his office and next minute by day I was sort of selling tech and then by night I was studying CCNA, CCDA, CCDP and all those sorts of pieces, and so that was my entrance into actually what then led to Cisco.
Michael Reid: 1:55
That company changed and I think went through lots of cultural changes and then I had an opportunity to go and work at Cisco in Sydney. So I moved to Sydney and over the years I had a number of different roles there but eventually ended up running banking and finance. So during my tenure I had a chance to run Westpac and Macquarie Bank and AMP and all these different things with banks in them, and that was a lot of fun. I got to go and see very large enterprises solving really, really complex problems and working out how to support them from a vendor side but also from a negotiation standpoint, and building out large business and contracts and so forth. And then I had the opportunity which is probably where you and I got connected I moved to Queensland to run the Northern region of Australia and that was a move for the family but an opportunity that was just too good to turn down. And that was cool because I got to run sort of 60 people in that branch. We got to really turn that company around. We cool, because I got to run sort of 60 people in that branch. We got to really turn that company around. We went from I think it was one female in the branch when I turned up and I think I was the youngest employee in the office we celebrated 21st birthdays and I think it was 33% female ratio and I started an SDR team on virtual sales and so a lot of the folks still, when I look back sort of seven years ago, are still there and thriving and lifted up through the career in the ranks. So it’s like an awesome thing to watch.
Michael Reid: 3:07
You and I met there and then, yeah, role massively pivoted to go to the US, and so that was probably the biggest change from a career standpoint, because I won’t spend the time on why or how I ended up there. I think that’s another story in itself but I ended up running acquisitions out of Silicon Valley. So, based down the road from San Jose, where Cisco was founded and or at least its head office lives, Cisco was founded in Stanford, just down the road. I lived down the road from that near San Francisco and ended up acquiring six different companies while I was there and I had a chance to run each of those companies and such a phenomenal experience A to understand how and why to acquire a business.
Michael Reid: 3:44
When you acquire a company, what happens when it comes into the business? How do you scale that? Things that work, things that don’t, how to scale inside a larger organization, how to protect companies, how to protect people, how to protect founders and the importance of a founder staying a company for a long enough period of time so that you can build it into its next culture, and so forth. So so much fun and I ended up the CRO, Chief Revenue Officer of Thousand Eyes in the end and I think prior to that I had a bunch of other different acquisitions IOT, which is very much in your space, and prior with, I think it was like three different acquisitions there, and then ended up running Thousand Eyes, and ThousEyes was this phenomenal company.
Michael Reid: 4:24
It was this pure SaaS-based business out of San Francisco exploding with growth. It was early days. It was a 300 and something person organization when Cisco acquired that for allegedly sort of around a billion dollars and it was this awesome opportunity to go and scale something and build, whilst inside a bigger machine, and so I liken it to something like LinkedIn for Microsoft you know a separate brand inside a bigger machine, but you have the benefit of having the backing of that, and so that role was awesome. We got to build it. I think we had 150 people inside the CRO function when I started and by the end, literally in two years, we had nearly 400 people. The company went from, I think, 500 customers to like 2800. It was just like exploding through that growth. Annual recurring revenue was one of the most successful, if not the most successful, sas acquisition that ever run. So yeah, that was so much fun and then ended up at megaport.
Michael van Rooyen: 5:17
So just just as simple as simple as that, right yeah yeah, I mean, if you think about thousand eyes and even just looking at the and I know you were just there the cisco live in in vegas, yeah right, the global area network monitoring the whole thing, it’s a phenomenal story. Thousand Eyes on its own, and we’ve really moved from that infrastructure to viewing, you know, end user experience and that’s what everything’s become about right. So it’s a phenomenal story that on its own.
Michael Reid: 5:38
Yeah, the world’s changing between cloud and SaaS, and that has become the key interface for all customers to do something and all companies, and so what was different was there was no way of monitoring or understanding whether you had outages there. And so then ThousandEyes basically invented that space Mohit the founder and Ricardo the two of them literally did a university degree, did a PhD, and created this thing called called cyclops, which is monitoring the internet. 12 years later, they’re after they built that, built thousand eyes there. Yeah, they’re acquired for a billion dollars into cisco, so they’ve got a phenomenal story.
Michael van Rooyen: 6:12
yes, it was so cool working with them yes, and megaport, for there’s a lot of people in our industry that know what megaport is. For those who are listening that don’t understand a port, a really high level on what Megaport is in a summer.
Michael Reid: 6:24
Yeah, so Megaport is the original network as a service platform, the inventor, I suppose, of network as a service to become a cloud connectivity company, and so, in short, like all things tech, they’re always niche and funny and weird.
Michael Reid: 6:39
But if you think of us, we live inside 850 data centers globally. We’re in 26 different countries, we have 145 cities or something like that, so we’ve got all these different what we call pops. And so if you need to connect from a data center, so if you think of where your key infrastructure is and you need to connect to a cloud, megaport will do that at high speed with private connectivity, in less than 60 seconds. If you need to connect between those data centers, in less than 60 seconds, up to 100 gig will do that. And if you need to go between clouds and all of these are sort of evolving fairly rapidly, so if you need to go from Azure to GCP or GCP to Oracle or what have it, in 60 seconds, we can connect you at incredibly high speed between. And so space is constantly evolving, but the platform’s 11 years old and still innovative, still the largest network as a service platform on the planet for our space. So it’s yeah, it’s cool tech Very cool.
Michael van Rooyen: 7:34
It is very cool and you know the dashboard’s impressive, the platform’s impressive and being able to spin up services. I mean that’s unheard of, right from how it used to connect data centers together in our industry. It used to take months, if not weeks, to do it, and it’s very impressive.
Michael Reid: 7:46
We still have examples of when we procure telco infrastructure in the US and we’re still nine months to deliver some of the connections that we need just across the United States. And it just reminds you how valuable 60 seconds for insane speed is. I tell you one thing that’s fascinating, that you’ll love. We’ve probably got something like 3,000 or 4,000 network devices distributed in all those 850 locations. We’ve probably got 1,000 different fiber connections running into them, maybe more. We’ve got 30,000 customer connections across that, and do you know how many people run the network?
Michael van Rooyen: 8:23
We normally would expect that big team like hundreds of people running that Not a single human.
Michael Reid: 8:28
What 100% code? Wow, and that is the magic. And that’s the reason. We are only 275 people as a company, but not a single human runs the network. It’s all code and you can’t actually get a human involved in it. It’s impossible because the code will always overwrite. So it’s fascinating involved in it.
Michael van Rooyen: 8:44
It’s impossible because the code will always overwrite, so it’s fascinating. Yeah, that is fascinating and obviously Megaport’s known for its innovative approach, you know, to delivering cloud connectivity and NAS. You know what are the most significant trends you’ve seen in your time at Megaport, you know, around cloud connectivity and kind of how are you addressing these trends?
Michael Reid: 9:00
So the cloud, you know it’s funny, the cloud journey, if you think 12 years ago or whatever, it was people I mean Amazon was out there convincing people that cloud was a good idea, if you remember.
Michael van Rooyen: 9:10
And people.
Michael Reid: 9:11
You know it was a really interesting space. Maybe it was longer, but it certainly wasn’t that long ago and so Megaport became the connector to clouds. We were very much tied together with Amazon Web Services. In fact, it was AWS that dragged us to the United States and actually, as I was mentioning before, megaport’s 60-something percent of our revenue is the United States. So we are one of those very rare Australian stories where the majority of our business is sort of not from ANZ, but it was actually Amazon that dragged us there in the first place. So we’ve been the connector to the clouds, or the enabler to the clouds, for the last 11 years.
Michael Reid: 9:42
But what’s happened, as you know, is it hasn’t become one cloud to rule them all, so to speak. You know one ring to rule them all. So what happened is Azure really came up quickly, as you would have seen, and Azure’s, microsoft’s so dominant, if you think from an enterprise perspective, they’re so strong, and so it’s been a fast follower, and I think probably, from what our data suggests, they’re probably at equal market share today in Australia, as an example. But then Google jumped into the space as well, and then so they’re starting to innovate, and so what would happen is we would have customers that said we’ve got a cloud first policy and we’re all going all in with AWS, and then all of a sudden, the IT team would sign an enterprise agreement with Microsoft and then they’d realize that all half of them, like Office 365, is in their cloud, and then they’d start to win services and loads. So now you’ve got two clouds and then someone in the office comes up and decides that AI is a great thing and we’re going to run that in Google. And then the next one comes up and says congratulations, your Oracle database has been running for the last 15 years, but you’re now migrated to the Oracle cloud. That’s a great result and, by the way, oracle’s then trying to jump into this space.
Michael Reid: 10:41
But what’s happened over the most recent time? So, firstly, you end up in this multi-cloud environment, even if your strategy was one, and so you’re moving between. You’re seeing, actually the next phase which I suspect you’re probably seeing as well, where certain loads probably don’t make sense to be in the cloud from a cost perspective. So you’re seeing, like this, repatriatization of like compute and data, and so you’re seeing data centers sort of grow, but it’s not all of it, so it’s a mix. So you end up in this state of you’ve got it a little bit everywhere and you need to connect them together, which is where Megaport’s value proposition comes into play, which is why we’re becoming more and more important than beyond just getting to the cloud, which, between the clouds and through the clouds and across the clouds and on the premises and between the data centers, and you name it. But the one that’s blowing it all up is AI. Every single person will talk about AI and sprinkle AI on top of everything, but we’re in this really interesting space.
Michael Reid: 11:30
We live in the data centers, and I can tell you, globally, the data centers are exploding. You know there’s more data centers being built now than ever before. There’s more capital being pumped into these things. They can’t actually find enough it’s not space, but power to build enough data centers to house the compute that they need to, and the compute they’re trying to put in them is like using four to thousand times the power, whatever it may be, and so they can’t get access to the power. So this thing’s exploding and it’s actually not the traditional cloud players that are just in this space. You saw core. We’ve raised I don’t know whatever it was billions and billions of dollars just recently, and then they raised billions more not long after that, like almost a week later, and then they’re building out, so they’re like an example of a GPU as a service platform or a GPU cloud. The new clouds are coming, yes, so it’s just a really interesting space at the moment.
Michael van Rooyen: 12:17
Wow yeah. So off the back of that, so much happening, and we see this bell curve of just new adoption, new services, and in fact Amy Webb was talking about. You know the speed and acceleration of this and things like adaptability moving it so far. So, considering that you really are the stitching glue between a lot of these clouds and then there’s other services that are just part of the Megaport fabric, how do you stay ahead in the curve for yourself? Like, what are you doing to canoe? That I mean what’s for yourself? Like what are you doing to to canoe that I mean what’s your strategy? How are you keeping ahead of this? Because it’s just such pace right.
Michael Reid: 12:49
Yes, we’re in tech, that’s cool, so that means we get to. You know, constantly be challenged and changed. And if you look at a company, if you boil back a tech business at the end of the day, well, there are different styles of tech business. But if you take a product company, which is what megaport is, most vendors, so to speak, would be, rather than a managed service provider actually executing. But if you look at the product that we create without having a world-class product, that’s differentiated, that’s priced right, that is solving customer problems, that’s unique in their market, that is at least number one or number two in that space, without having all of those factors, you no longer have a company.
Michael Reid: 13:25
So the priority is to constantly innovate on the product that you bring to market, constantly and never stop, ever. But if you actually boil that down so you go back to the strategy piece unlike what people will have, you believe, chatgpt doesn’t yet build products, or maybe it does, but it certainly doesn’t build most products and it’s humans that build products. And so, getting an amalgamation of world-class talent aligned in the right direction, with a passion towards innovation on technology and then staying extremely close to your customers, your customers will tell you where you need to be innovating and if you listen and constantly solve their challenges and problems in line with what you can solve, you will always be at the innovative edge and providing what needs to be done. If you rest on your laurels, if you stop listening, if you allow the IT world to sort of pass you by, you will fall out of product market fit rapidly and you no longer have a company.
Michael Reid: 14:23
So like the priority of the criticality of staying close to customers, keeping world-class talent and a focus around innovation. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter what sales team or finance team, nothing is possible. So it starts there and then it sort of flows through. But don’t underestimate the criticality of the humans is the key. Get the humans to create the product, have the vision around that, and so on and so forth.
Michael van Rooyen: 14:45
So that’s a great angle, because most people think of innovation always being tech led and there’s lots of tech to do it right. But you really touched on a good point there, which is around the humans and the team and listening to customers, right, I think sometimes people forget that or they don’t pivot quick enough to change. It’s interesting you say that AI doesn’t build anything. I don’t know if you ever saw it online, but there was a building being built somewhere overseas and they had the screen print on it and they actually had a chat TPT when it said hey, I build this building for us because they know that can’t do it Right. So the human element is absolutely part of it. So, considering the future of cloud networking because everyone’s in cloud and hyper connectivity is happening and growing, as you said, I was just going to continue to accelerate that.
Michael Reid: 15:32
Where do you envisage the future of cloud networking going, and what are you doing at Megaport in preparation for that? For us, we’re just seeing a huge increase in the speed. I think what will happen and we’re seeing this play out already with this sort of GPU as a service. I’d say there’s almost more fragmentation in this space, where what the answer becomes is, let’s say, you’ve got a huge amount of data and it’s sitting in Oracle.
Michael Reid: 15:46
You need to train a model, and so to train a model, you’re going to have to pick a location to run that model on some NVIDIA chips somewhere. Well, you don’t want to buy the chips, you’re going to stick them in some other cloud. That might be in any cloud, it could even be in Oracle, but let’s say it’s not. You then need to pull it as fast as possible. You don’t want to spend like three, five weeks waiting for data. You want it now and then you want to move it somewhere and you want to train, and you want to move it back, and you’re going to move it back and forward, and what’s probably going to happen is these are so expensive, these models to run. We’re talking like you could be a million dollars a month just to run one model, and so if you can save a quarter of that, you will make a decision to move it.
Michael Reid: 16:22
And that’s sort of what we’re seeing is sort of this arbitrage between, like, where do you end up rolling cloud? Well, the only way to do that is to have high-speed, instantaneous network connectivity. Well, guess what that’s us. But what do we need? To be Higher speed, we need to increase the speed that we provide. We need to increase the locations that we’re on ramp to. So all of the different AI providers will have to be added to the platform, and you’ll see, in our portal we’re adding more and more AI space.
Michael Reid: 16:52
We’re actually building an AI exchange, basically to say, well, if you need to get to these locations in 60 seconds, you need high speed connectivity. Here is Megaport, we can deliver that. So if you’ve got a port with Megaport, take your pick of where you want to run this. So we offer your choice. So that’s sort of one component to the strategy. The other piece is around the innovation, the product itself, and so you’re constantly adding network services and functions and different components to it. There’s a never ending list that you could sort of go down there, but speed, location, countries, innovation from a product standpoint all of these become critical to the business, and there’s so many ways you can go about that.
Michael van Rooyen: 17:22
So, as a leader coming out of Cisco and leading a team, and then Thousand Eyes and now obviously CEO of Megaport, and with that innovation angle, how are you fostering a culture of innovation and agility within the organization, within your group?
Michael Reid: 17:36
Again great humans and again focus on the customer. So if you can get back to understanding what your customers need, want, challenges of it, and constantly listen to that, and then figure out what products that you can evolve that makes sense, that you can innovate on and then push back into that space, now the trick becomes fast innovation is like a prototype, a producer prototype. Don’t spend two years developing this beautiful thing only to get to the end to realize it actually doesn’t solve any problems of a customer, but deliver it incredibly quickly. Have your customers check and see that that is going to make sense to them, how it’s actually exposed, how it’s shown, and then innovate rapidly, constantly. That is very, very helpful.
Michael Reid: 18:19
But then you’ve got to also set this expectation that perfection is never going to be achieved Like. You have to accept that you will fail, you’ll get it wrong and you need to be able to pivot quickly. One of my favorite sayings that I share with the team is it’s like Bezos’ quote it’s the is it a door that you can walk back through or is it a door that you can never walk through? So if it’s a door, that you can never walk through.
Michael Reid: 18:38
So if it’s a door that you can just walk in and out of, if it’s a decision that you can change constantly and quickly and move back and forward, make it incredibly quickly and pivot when it doesn’t make sense. But if it’s something that, when you walk through this door, you have an opportunity to walk back and change it, it’s like you have to move forward, take the time, spend the time to get it perfect, test it and get that right. There’s so many examples of those decisions, but the reality is 99% of them are two-way doors.
Michael van Rooyen: 19:04
Yes. So, considering that Megaport is really this fabric, that is, this mass connectivity. You talked about the consumption of speed. People want more speed. The drivers of IoT are just continuing to be massive inputs mobility, connectivity. So, with that in mind, and this continuous trajectory of more connectivity, more capacity, your network continuing to grow and more footprint everywhere, cyber is always a big concern and that’s something about most people think of cyber at the ends, device to device or device to cloud. Considering the fabric underneath, what’s your thinking or your team’s thinking around? How do we make sure cyber is really front and center for everything?
Michael Reid: 19:38
you do. I mean our customers. We have 2,600 plus customers and most of them are the largest banking financial institutions on the planet. There’s a lot of healthcare, there’s a lot of critical information, basically running across. We’ve got every single customer you could possibly think of. So the importance of protecting that A, our network, their network, but also the data that runs across it, is paramount, and there’s so much we put in place with the ISO certifications that we go through in a whole range of pieces. For a small company, we do a huge amount there. But then you look at what customers can do across the network.
Michael Reid: 20:08
One of the interesting things about a private network versus public is that when you run on Megaport, it’s not available publicly and so your attack surface is gone. If you’re running a VPN across a public internet, maybe your VPN can’t get penetrated, but they can take out the path that you’re on. If they work that out, they could literally take down a provider. So there’s so many different. They could DDoS attack a particular area. Once you’re in Megaport, you’re gone. It’s invisible. So there’s a huge amount of our customers use us purely from a security perspective to be invisible.
Michael Reid: 20:40
The other piece is most of the time that traffic’s encrypted. And then we’re seeing customers use things like MaxSec and actually encrypting right down at the layer two and encrypting all the way through. So we’re seeing customers encrypt across us, us ensuring that we’re protected, and then the fact that we are invisible. You can’t access us publicly all of those pieces. The last piece of the puzzle is our virtual edge platform. You can spin up Palo Alto Cisco Firewalls. Just recently, meraki about to be announced, if not announced, probably a little bit of a spoiler there we’re partnering very closely with Aviatrix around what they’re doing and Fortinet. All of these platforms can be spun up on our network. And so when you look at building up SD-WAN and security platforms, we’re seeing customers build that inside our network for their own network sake. So there’s sort of a multiple angles to it for us.
Michael van Rooyen: 21:31
Wow, wow. I really thought that’s a very good point, right, because you’re a private network, you’re backbone connectivity, people think of it as not sitting on the internet, right, and that’s one of the benefits. You can’t get to it. So that’s a very good clarification. You talked about the power consumption and, as you build out your network, tell me about your sustainability thoughts. Obviously, everyone’s driving green, everyone’s driving sustainability. We had a green world and I mean, as you build your network, you need more gear, you need more power. Yes, how?
Michael Reid: 21:53
are you doing that? There’s a lot going on in the sustainability space and that’s important. From our side, we are pretty light. Firstly, we’re about 275 people globally. We have one office actually, which is here, actually two, I think. We’ve got one in London, which is actually a nice office, but we’ve really got two physical locations.
Michael Reid: 22:14
Where we live is in 875 data centers, but inside those data centers, because of what we run, run, it’s only a very small amount of space. We take up a quarter of a rack and we take up about the usage of a hairdryer. If not, yeah, on each one, not totally, but but so, and because switching doesn’t take much. A lot of it’s switching and routing some compute, but it takes up almost no power. So we can’t really reduce our power globally on that front. We’re very, very, very limited in terms of that. So the focus is around what we can contribute as humans, and then you end up thinking that’s why the lights went off. When you walk in here, what impact are you making in every area? And the majority of folks work from home, so we should ask them to work in the dark or something like that.
Michael van Rooyen: 22:56
That’s right. It’s a good way to report on it. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Recently, megaport celebrated its 10th anniversary. Whilst you’ve been here for a while, what are the milestones that you’re most proud of during its journey that you’ve seen, and what’s on the horizon for the next decade?
Michael Reid: 23:11
Most of that journey I wasn’t there, so I’ve only been in the role just clocked over a year and a little bit. I think the most impressive thing about Megaport is that it’s so rare to find a company is that on the Australian Stock Exchange, launched and founded in Australia and in our case, brisbane of all places Fortitude Valley right here that actually went and took the world by storm from a tech perspective or even any perspective, frankly. So I think what’s amazing is this tiny company that came from here that has exploded globally. The majority of its revenue sits in the United States. I think what’s amazing is this tiny company that came from here that has exploded globally. The majority of its revenue sits in the United States. It’s really so innovative. It’s still the leader in its market and still on the ASX, and that’s very rare.
Michael Reid: 23:52
I don’t even know what other companies really fall into that category. There’s only a few that have really made a global piece. So I think that’s an incredible achievement from this small company. And the other piece is like the amount of passion that customers have for the for us is sort of funny, like it’s nice. They’re passionate mega porters and you see them turn up in t-shirts all over the place and the next 10 years is the world domination story.
Michael van Rooyen: 24:15
Yeah, and lots more t-shirts, more t-shirts. I do like the annual t-shirts.
Michael Reid: 24:19
You’ll probably be able to measure our revenue growth in the t-shirt suppliers that we have. They’ve also got the same revenue charts. I bet they do. That’s a good point.
Michael van Rooyen: 24:26
That’s a good point. So pivoting a little bit away from Megaport specifically, and again you know aspiring tech leaders that are looking to make an impact in the industry.
Michael Reid: 24:44
Stay curious. The amount of change in tech is the reason we probably choose tech. It’s the thing that keeps it interesting, because every day there is something literally disrupting itself, ai being the most recent, the internet itself, iphones, you name it, whatever. Embrace the tech, embrace the tech, embrace the learning. Don’t get stale. You know like constantly think of the. You know like disrupting yourself and then find humans. I think there’s a much better way to do that today than before, and that is follow podcasts, follow the humans you like. Follow them on LinkedIn, follow them on whatever it is, or tiktok. There’s a lot of influences out there now, but follow those journeys and stay connected. You have an ability to learn more from fascinating people than ever before because the information’s there. You can just literally jump on youtube and watch a all-in podcast and be up to date with what’s going on from a tech perspective with some fascinating people you would never have had a chance to communicate with, and you get that weekly. It’s free, yes yeah, it’s.
Michael van Rooyen: 25:42
It’s amazing that the availability of information and learning and people just don’t don’t adopt it right and and you know, maybe that’s the trick.
Michael Reid: 25:49
the problem is, there’s too much information, there’s too many pockets, too many but and then? So how do you disseminate the signal through noise? And that’s where you’ve just, I think, you’ve just got to find what you like and follow, I, I suppose, and learn from that. Yes, yeah.
Michael van Rooyen: 26:04
And you know, diversity and inclusion is talked a lot about, particularly in our tech industry. We have come from a very male-orientated industry. I know that’s changing a lot, which is great. As a leader, how are you thinking about creating a more inclusive environment? I know you’ve always been very pro that. At the time, I’ve known you and how are you?
Michael Reid: 26:23
handling that? How are your employees feeling about that? I’d say you’ve got to constantly have this openness to a wide aperture, to respect every walk of life and also not to, I think, people everyone needs to have an exception that not everyone’s going to get it right, but as long as you’ve got the aperture to accept and understand, then you’ll be in a good place. And then there’s a whole range of discussion you could have. It’s funny that right now, after this session, the women in digital was having a board meeting here. They’re about making an impact for women in the industry and that’s super important.
Michael Reid: 26:54
But we’ve also got so many other challenges from race, religion and gender, and it gets complex. So the point is you’ll never get it all right. So just be open to as much of it as you can and embrace and support it. The other piece is communication. I think is really, really key. So just constantly have the door open for communication and allow people to feel that there’s a place for them to share and communicate without being judged, and you’ll get the feedback to what you need.
Michael van Rooyen: 27:18
That’s great, and just off the back of that, I know we’re coming to the end of the session, but a couple of more quick questions. With increasing influence on tech in society, ethical considerations what do you believe tech leaders need to keep in mind when dealing with that?
Michael Reid: 27:32
I think there’s a huge debate at the moment and I think everyone’s got a different view. But AI is really interesting and I think it’s probably polarizing. But I do feel that Elon’s probably got it right to an extent in that he is searching for truth and I think the models from an AI perspective being trained to search and find truth as best to their ability rather than being skewed by a political view or whether it would defend someone, et cetera I think is really important and I think that and we’ve seen that play out really interestingly with Google and a few other pieces so I think right now the world’s in a really interesting space from an AI perspective.
Michael van Rooyen: 28:14
And look to wrap up, because I know you’ve got your events on is one of the questions I like to ask guests on the show is a very generic and general question Can you tell me about the most significant technology change or shift that you’ve personally been involved with during your career, and how has this changed your thinking on things?
Michael Reid: 28:31
I think it’s every innovation. The thing with tech is it’s constant. I can tell you what I remember. I remember when email came out on BlackBerry and I thought this has changed everything. And then the iphone came along. Like this has changed. I mean before that it was the internet. This has changed everything. And then I think it keeps evolving. Ai, this has changed everything. I think there’s just so many pieces to the puzzle. Things are getting. You know. I find funny. It feels like things are getting meant to be getting easier. Actually, doesn’t it feel more complex, more complicated, harder to figure out, like which app, which ai, app, which thing, which this, which you know? To some extent, the more innovation we have, it should be getting simple, everything should be done, but it actually feels more and more complex, which is why companies like yours exist to solve all these problems. You know.
Michael van Rooyen: 29:18
Yes, yes, it’s funny. You say that because one of my previous guests talked talked about. You know we used to have to solve complex problems simply. Now it’s solving complex problems complexly. Right, it’s kind of the same thing. There’s just so much, so much, you know, data out there. So many options, too many.
Michael Reid: 29:32
Yes, yes, yes, it’s the signal to the noise.
Michael van Rooyen: 29:35
That’s exactly exactly right, exactly right, chopper. I really appreciate the time today having a chat always, always great to catch up. I appreciate the insights. Thanks, mbr.
Michael Reid: 29:44
Cheers mate.
