Burnout is a familiar concept in the tech field, with 40 percent of workers saying they want to quit due to stress, fatigue, and poor work-life balance. This can be especially true for startup companies, which face challenges and uncertainties that can place added stress on employees. But one company, Yerbo, is seeking to change that.  

On today’s episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center by Compass Datacenters, podcast host Raymond Hawkins, speaks with Francisco Vieira Mendes, Co-Founder and Head of Growth at Yerbo, about the origins of his company and what services they offer to tackle employee burnout in the tech world. 

Mendes explained the value Yerbo’s assessments can bring to the table to change an organization when leaders share their own results with the team. “It’s really important that those of you that are listening that are leaders of an organization or leaders within a team—even if it’s just a two-person team—it’s important that you show by example…If you show that we’re open to discuss those items, if you bring your results…that’s really important.” 

Mended went on to add “Because if you feel psychologically safe to be able to share that, that’s going to be very loud for your team, because your team is going to realize, ‘All right, I can share this because if you share this with me, maybe I can share this with him or her.’” 

Francisco Vieira Mendes is a marketing professional who has a passion for helping Latin American startups grow. He is Co-Founder and Head of Growth at Yerbo and has served in past roles such as a Class Lead for KURIOS, VP of Marketing at treble.ai, and Director of Product-Led Growth at CleverTap. Mendes earned a bachelor’s degree in Marketing from the Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto and a Master’s degree in Attendance and Computer Science from Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto. 

The phrase “energy crisis” has been tossed around frequently the past few years, and not without reason: as demand for fossil fuels skyrockets, climate change speeds up too. So while the U.S. puts legislation into place to help mitigate the climate crisis, there’s another problem in the process - our energy grid might not be able to keep up with these environmentally friendly power alternatives. What happens now? 

On the latest episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center Podcast, CRO and host Raymond Hawkins chats with the Vice President of Global Data Center Sales with Bloom Energy, Jeff Barber, about the energy crisis, ESG, and Bloom Energy.  

The two discuss: 

1. Why reducing your carbon footprint now adds time-value 

1. How Bloom Energy offers an alternative that lasts into the future 

1. What Bloom Energy is, how it generates power, and what their power-purchase agreement looks like 

“So, Bloom energy is solid-oxide fuel cells that are on-site, at your facility, in a micro-grid form. So this is power-generation at your facility, without the centralized grid, with the centralized grid…Bloom is intended to create energy for the facility, to be the primary energy to that facility, 24/7 365,” explained Barber, noting that these are not batteries. 

A California native, Barber has collected over 25 years of experience in the energy, sales, and data center industries. Though he first started working on network troubleshooting through the G-Tech Corporation as a Network Support and DEC VAX System Administrator, Barber has since held leadership positions at a number of globally recognized brands, including Hewlett-Packard, the EMC Corporation, and Oracle.  Prior to joining Bloom, Barber was a Partner & EVP Sales and Business Development leader for Prime Data Centers. He is a graduate of California State University at Sacramento, with a BS in Business Administration.  

In 2022, nearly 21% of persons with a disability were employed, but were much less likely to be employed than a person with no disability. For one company, however, people with disabilities are an untapped talent pool with lots of potential. Growing their data labeling and AI business, Enabled Intelligence looks to build an inclusive environment for those with neurodivergence, as they see what others might not be able to.

On this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center Podcast, CRO and host Raymond Hawkins, chats with Chief People Officer of Enabled Intelligence, Lauren Bacon Smith, about neurodiversity, data labeling, and AI.

The two discuss:

• How tapping into the talent pool of neurodivergent people led Enabled Intelligence to success

“Yeah, so we actually have a data science team in-house now where we are actually creating some of our own models, so we are kind of having that full life-cycle where we have also done data curation, so clients coming to us, a lot of times have their data already, but we have the ability…to actually go out, get the data, prepare it, annotate it, and then we also are able to create and test our own models,” explained Bacon Smith.

Lauren Bacon Smith holds over a decade of experience in program management, human resources, and recruitment. Starting her career in the hospitality and service industry, Bacon Smith spent eight years with Hilton Worldwide as the Senior Manager for Military Programs before joining Enabled Intelligence as the Chief People Officer to help continue fostering a culture of inclusion.

By providing the infrastructure required to store, process, and transport enormous amounts of data, supporting a wide range of applications and services, data centers in general play a crucial role in the digital economy. The "Data Center Capital of the World" title sometimes makes reference to Loudoun County in Virginia, which is a popular location for data centers. The county has become a desirable location for data center development due to its close proximity to Washington, D.C., its dependable power system, strong fiber-optic network, and its advantageous tax incentives.

The Executive Director of Loudoun County, Virginia Economic Development, Buddy Rizer, was the guest on this edition of the "Not Your Father's Center Data Podcast," hosted by Raymond Hawkins, CEO of Compass Datacenters.

According to Buddy, “Data centers allowed us to cut our tax rate to 89 cents last year, which means less pressure on homeowners to pay their loans. Additionally, we were able to construct a variety of schools, invest up to a billion dollars in road infrastructure, and extend the Washington D.C. Metro to Loudoun which in turn provides great jobs and services.”

Buddy Rizer is the Executive Director for the Department of Economic Development in Loudoun County, Virginia, which was named the 2021 Economic Development Organization of the Year by the International Economic Development Council. He leads the agency responsible for encouraging growth and developing relationships with Loudoun’s business community in both the commercial and agricultural-based business sectors.  During his tenure, Rizer and his team have attracted more than $40 billion in new commercial investment and more than 50 thousand new jobs.

Jonathan Friedmann knew the semiconductor business would find its way into his life someday. Friedmann, CEO & Founder of Speedata, spoke to Raymond Hawkins about his career and his latest venture, Speedata, which provides a state-of-the-art Analytics Processing Unit to optimize big data and analytics workloads.

While data growth is expanding at an exponential rate, processing speeds are lagging behind. Multiple cores on a single chip were a first-step industry solution, data centers were the next. Many data companies utilize clusters of hundreds and thousands of nodes to solve their complex processing needs. Friedmann’s Speedata solution offers a different approach.

“Speedata is looking at a workload that is arguably the biggest workload in the data center today, databases and analytics,” Friedmann said, “Essentially, you have a database, and multiple industries hold their information in databases, and then they want to extract information from them. And you look at the public clouds; they are giving multiple managed services to handle that. The biggest and most important managed services in the world you find are all databases and analytics.”

With the knowledge that big data is a large part of the processing need, Friedmann and Speedata designed a chip to target this specific workload, “Today, 99% of big data is processed by the CPU,” Friedmann said. That’s a large slice of the pie for Speedata to tap into and lessen the burden, “You look at what’s happening in the analytics and databases; the first revolution did not happen yet.”

Data isn’t just coming from the outside. Computers are generating synthetic data, creating even more need for processing solutions. Friedmann equates what Speedata is doing as acting as plumbers. They’re building the tools and making the pipes wider so companies can better extract their data.

Born, raised, and educated in Germany, Carsten Baumann, Solution Architect and Director of Strategic Initiatives at Schneider Electric, calls the United States his home these days. Baumann’s travels took many different routes, from a town outside of Frankfurt to the glitz of Los Angeles and now a quiet, more rural ZIP code in Colorado. But one constant remained: engineering. Baumann spoke with Raymond Hawkins about his journey and career in systems engineering.

Schneider Electric does some exciting work with Compass Datacenters utilizing microgrids, something Baumann knows inside and out. As recent as five years ago, Baumann said many people in the data center world had no idea what microgrids were. A lot’s changed since then. “The definition of a microgrid has evolved, but as we understand it now, it’s something where we have a combination of distributed energy resources, like local energy generation assets we can use in case a grid goes down,” Baumann said.

Baumann said microgrids solve three critical issues in the data center world. “One is greater resiliency, which we all want in a data center. Number two, which is a huge factor as well and becoming more and more prevalent and important, is sustainability,” Baumann said. “And the third one is overall, of course, cost and cost benefits. Ideally, we want to have everything. We want to be more sustainable; we have greater resiliency, and it ought to be cheaper.”

Today, the education around microgrids is growing, and Baumann said potential data center customers want specifics around how microgrids can help them and the best approach they should take. “I believe site selection for data centers will expand the criteria to meet sustainability aspects,” he said. “Being able to do onsite power generation when the electricity is expensive, we may be able to produce it cheaper ourselves and more sustainable, so the carbon intensity of our own electricity is less than the carbon intensity of the electricity we buy from the utility company.”

The world is in an energy crisis caused by many events affecting billions. Yet, while others are focusing on how this might affect oil & gas prices, the critical piece missing from the news is how this will involve a business that helps lift the entire market: data centers. So, what impact will the crisis have on data centers, and what is the forecast for the industry heading into 2023?

On the newest episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center podcast, host Raymond Hawkins engages with returning guest Andrew Jay, Executive Director of Data Centre Solutions, Advisory, & Transaction Services EMEA CBRE. The two review…

• What is affecting the data center market, including the investment market, geopolitics, and the energy crisis

“...What we’re trying to do is very much bring the end users to the table with the public authorities and say, ‘Look, how do we sort this out together?’...,” said Jay.

Jay is the Head of Data Centre Solutions with EMEA Advisory at CBRE and has been with CBRE for over 23 years. CBRE is a London-based worldwide commercial real estate services and investment company.

Like most people involved with Data Centers, Andy Lawrence, Executive Director of Research at Uptime Institute, didn’t start his career that way; Lawrence’s beginning was IT. As a journalist covering all things IT, Lawrence gravitated to the economic and ecological impacts, which led to his interest in data centers. He joined ‘the Hawk’, Raymond Hawkins, to talk about his career and discuss some of the power challenges faced in the DC industry.

As the head of research at Uptime, Lawrence said there’s a lot of client interest in the efficiency and efficiency of data storage facilities. “There’s obviously a lot of energy being consumed in the IT side, so I feel now there’s starting to be an awareness of how we actually start to tackle that.”

With an awareness that things need to change, executive management in the IT industry is signaling to its investors a move towards carbon-neutral policies. The problem? Saying it ‘net zero’ and getting there are two different things. So, when the decree to go carbon neutral comes down from the top to the data centers, the data centers turn to Lawrence and his team at Uptime for help.

If the goal is to get to carbon neutral without significant reliance on offsets, how should data centers be thought of as stewards of the energy they use? Lawrence felt there was no easy answer, but the data storage industry should work harder to promote its value to the overall IT sector. There is a misconception that data storage centers account for a much more significant percentage of overall global energy usage than they do. But there are various regions and countries where the average is much higher, and there is work to be done to reduce those numbers.

Who doesn’t love a sequel? Raymond Hawkins sure does, and back by popular demand for another episode of fantastic industry insights, Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings, joined the Hawk to talk about all sorts of things. Top of mind was how current events are shaping the crypto community and how crypto could impact the events unfolding in Europe.  

The current state of affairs could provide a new test for digital currency. Thiel pointed out in past wars; displaced citizens did not have many options for moving their money. “Crypto provides a unique thing in this world where sanctions have become essentially a weapon and weaponized,” Thiel said. In the matter of the war in Ukraine, the United States and its allies have used sanctions to shut off Russian access to banks. The only other bearer asset available for many people and businesses in this scenario is Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

One might ask if Crypto is a solution to transferring assets, could Russia use crypto to avoid sanctions? Thiel said that the daily trading of cryptocurrency and the total market cap prevents this idea from being scalable. “As a tool for sanction evasion, Bitcoin is not a good option,” Thiel stated.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, one trend is the decoupling of the correlation between bitcoin and equities. “All of a sudden, now there was a real use case for bitcoin that was very actual and urgent, and so you started seeing bitcoin move in the opposite direction of equities. Even bitcoin-related stocks which track the price of bitcoin started moving separately. So, there were days when the Dow and the Nasdaq would go down, yet bitcoin would go up, and you saw the Nasdaq-traded, bitcoin-related stocks, Like Marathon, for example, move in lockstep with bitcoin.”