Roll For Enterprise

Zack and Mike were joined by this week by David Cheriton, VMware & Google angel investor, as he talks Cloud, AI, and the Internet while weaving in stories from Stanford University, where he was a professor, and the beginnings of Google & VMware.  What he reveals may surprise you.

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

The gang is back together this week discussing the Windows 11 leak and their thoughts on MacOS versus Windows. Also the value, or not, of teaching coding in school. What code? What do we really want to teach our kids? Plus HBOs recent snafu and the hilarious intern responses. And finally what is happening that is leading to the increase in mental health startup funding?

Windows 11 leak reveals new UI, Start menu, and more

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/15/22535123/microsoft-windows-11-leak-screenshots-start-menu

Learn coding in school

https://twitter.com/hillelogram/status/1404197107964301320

The Hard Work Of Success

https://findthethread.postach.io/post/the-hard-work-of-success

Year 2038 problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

HBO blame the intern

https://twitter.com/hbomaxhelp/status/1405712235108917249

Venture Funding For Mental Health Startups Hits Record High As Anxiety, Depression Skyrocket

https://www.forbes.com/sites/katiejennings/2021/06/07/venture-funding-for-mental-health-startups-hits-record-high-as-anxiety-depression-skyrocket/

Recommendations

Dominic

Rectangle app https://rectangleapp.com

Mike

Divvy Window Management App https://mizage.com/divvy/

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

On this episode of Roll For Enterprise the gang is all together to discuss the recent Fastly outage which brought down a large part of the internet. Is this the same or different from on premise outages and just more noticeable with so many companies impacted?

Fastly outage and cloud resilience

Internet outage: which websites and services were hit by Fastly issue

Does the Fastly outage justify “Single Point of Failure” headlines?

What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages

Grindr Is Down So Users Are Hitting The Downdetector Comment Section To Pick Up

SRE and error budgets — need to review the concept

https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1402301316165160966

S2E10: SLOs and SREs a conversation with Brian Singer from Nobl9

https://anchor.fm/roll-for-enterprise/episodes/S2E10-SLOs-and-SREs-a-conversation-with-Brian-Singer-from-Nobl9-ersprg

WeWork follow-up — losses continue mounting up

https://robcampbell.co/2021/06/09/we-dont-work/

Steven Sinofsky on remote work

https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/1403112390032388096

Hardcore Software, Steven Sinofsky’s newsletter with the history of early Microsoft

https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

How to negotiate with ransomware hackers — turns out there are scammers who will negotiate between victims and criminals to try to arbitrage payments and pocket the difference

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/07/how-to-negotiate-with-ransomware-hackers

Recommendations

Dominic

Love Death + Robots volume 2 on Netflix

Lilac

Grace and Frankie - in part for the Mac tech support scene 

Mike

WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

Back to Work

(What do they think we’ve been doing all this time?)

People refusing to come back to the office

Lilac: "When I’m in the office I’m not also a mother and someone who has to do a load of laundry"

Dominic: Dangers of a hybrid office — people who are physically in the office get the inside track

“There is no return to normalcy,” says Mayer-Schönberger, whose research focuses on the role of information in a networked economy. “The environment people are reentering is fundamentally changed, so we need to reframe how we see our work and ourselves. If there is a reason why we go to a workplace, it needs to be a different reason than the one that we had: that this is the way we’ve always been doing it.”

Why the wild variation in plans for returning to offices is a good sign

Why Women Don't Want To Go Back To In-Person Work

News Roundup: Security and Ransomware

Hackers have new targets: people returning to the office.

Information About the Sale of Products Business to Symphony Technology Group | FireEye

Stack Overflow's value to job seekers is what makes it valuable — Quartz

Recommendations

Dominic

Defekt, by Nino Cipri (sequel to Finna, which was nominated for Best Novella in the Nebula Awards)

Lilac

Pink iPad Air!

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

The team passionately debates the impact of GPT-3 converting speech to code on the business and software developers. Microsoft introduces this as a low code feature at their Build Conference.

@Mike points out that IT must provide the business with guard rails. “The biz knows how to read and use the data, more so than someone in a technology role. This is the democratization of software development, and data is the next step. It’s going to continue and has to continue.”

@Mike reminds us that Bubble & SquareSpace are empowering users to create the next Amazon or Shopify with no-code.

@Lilac is looking for a low code version of Atlassian. “A CICD type cycle that allows people to manage these type assets, to cycle them and collaborate against them, relate them, fork them, etc.”

A16z pens an article about cloud and repatriation cost but quickly loses credibility with the classic and worn-out Dropbox example. The team debates the report and future of the cloud.

Speed round:

Apple iPad Pro and the Center Stage feature is impressive. @Dominic shares his feedback on the wide camera angle that focuses on the active speaker and zooms out if someone else enters the frame. “Impressive. The iPad camera has been poor UNTIL NOW.“

Rapid7 has a software supply chain breach that has not hit the news like SolarWinds. People are in shock. Companies are going back and reanalyzing.

In-person events…AWS is leading with re:Inforce in Houston this August.

Basecamp has learned nothing and doubled down.

SFDC threw a lone engineer under the bus for an outage…Really Salesforce!? One employee is the reason for everything that has gone wrong, and they should feel bad?

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

Show Links:

From conversation to code: Microsoft introduces its first product features powered by GPT-3

https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/from-conversation-to-code-microsoft-introduces-its-first-product-features-powered-by-gpt-3/

Microsoft uses GPT-3 to let you code in natural language

https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/25/microsoft-uses-gpt-3-to-let-you-code-in-natural-language/

Bubble is the most powerful no-code platform, empowering entrepreneurs to build production-ready web apps.

https://bubble.io

https://twitter.com/dwellington/status/1397842550153793536

The State of The Cloud

https://app.livestorm.co/p/b445fedf-e2a9-432e-8935-7321c43e29d0

Over 90% of respondents reported growth in on-prem sales over the past 5 years.

Over 50% of respondents’ revenue can be attributed to on-prem software sales.

86% of respondents are using Kubernetes for their on-prem software

The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox — a16z

https://a16z.com/2021/05/27/cost-of-cloud-paradox-market-cap-cloud-lifecycle-scale-growth-repatriation-optimization/

In this episode Roll for Enterprise welcomes Aneel Lakhani as a guest. Aneel is a Marketing Exec, Startup Advisor, Growth Therapist, and Investor. After 25-plus years in technology, with stints in engineering, product, and marketing in big companies and startups--Aneel now serves as an advisor to mostly b2b enterprise software startups and VCs.

Aneel shares his insights with Dominic, Lilac and Mike on the difference in marketing between startups and more established enterprises, getting your first enterprise clients as a startup and why it’s particularly hard on both sides and failure modes of tech marketing.

References:

Dominic on getting your first customer reference as a startup: https://findthethread.postach.io/post/reference-this

You can find Aneel as @aneel on Twitter.

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

Dominic, Mike and Zack are together again this week to discuss the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack and all that we’ve learned since. People are still the weakest link in social engineering of attacks. Could China has prevented something like this thanks to their great firewall when compared to American or European companies? They also discussed various news items including: IBM surprise 2nm chip rollout which took everyone by surprise; Elon Musk’s Crypto announcements; and Apple’s hire and fire of Antonio García Martínez. Whom coincidentally is an ad tech person and signifies Apples move into ads, or some ads.

https://twitter.com/dwellington/status/1392864211630530563

A Closer Look at the DarkSide Ransomware Gang

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/a-closer-look-at-the-darkside-ransomware-gang/

Tech audit of Colonial Pipeline found ‘glaring’ problems

https://apnews.com/article/va-state-wire-technology-business-1f06c091c492c1630471d29a9cf6529d 

Colonial Pipeline paid hackers nearly $5 million ransom in cryptocurrency to restore network

https://fortune.com/2021/05/13/colonial-pipeline-paid-hackers-5-million-ransom-cryptocurrency-ransomware-attack/ 

News roundup

IBM Creates First 2nm Chip

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16656/ibm-creates-first-2nm-chip

Musk Sends Bitcoin Tumbling With Shock U-Turn on Payments

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-12/musk-says-tesla-suspending-bitcoin-purchases-citing-energy-use

Musk Renews Critique of Bitcoin as Environmentally Unsustainable

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-13/musk-renews-critique-of-bitcoin-as-environmentally-unsustainable

Spectacular failure of vetting by Apple HR, rapidly corrected

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22433437/apple-hire-antonio-garcia-martinez-out-petition-investigation

https://twitter.com/gassee/status/1392665221014032385

Recommendations

Dominic

Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir — but don’t start it at bedtime, because you will be up late reading “just one more page”

Mike

Crypto mining! Seriously!

Zack

Follow Dominic and Mike recommendation.

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

Our guest on the podcast this week is Priya Doty. Priya is the Global VP Product Marketing for IBM’s iconic IBM Z brand and it’s all-Linux sister brand, LinuxONE. Unlike a lot of marketers, Priya has also been a developer, which means she enjoys deconstructing marketing messages by reading technical manuals. Based in Brooklyn, she is a mom, wife, and author of an upcoming fiction novel. 

Aside from majoring on the topic of Confidential Computing (and Cloud Security in general), Priya is all about the IBM Z platform, Product Marketing (Top 100 Influencer in PMM 2-Years Running!), and outside of work, writing.

Confidential computing is a cloud computing technology that isolates sensitive data in a protected CPU enclave during processing. The contents of the enclave - the data being processed, and the techniques used to process it - are accessible only to authorized programming code, and invisible and unknowable to anything or anyone else, including the cloud provider.

Gartner has called confidential computing a top trend for 2021, naming it and Fully Homomorphic Encryption as part of a trend for “Privacy Enhanced Computation”.

Why IBM believes confidential computing is the future of cloud security

Fully Homomorphic Encryption

The Instagram ads Facebook won't show you

The Changing Value Of Mistakes 

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Our theme music is by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

With the recent controversy surrounding Basecamp and David Hansson (https://twitter.com/dhh?s=20) Dominic, Lilac and Mike spent some time discussion their thoughts on the topic. Not an easy topic with a lot of different opinion and many consequences to be considered.

Background:

https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basecamp

https://qz.com/work/2002100/why-basecamps-culture-memo-is-so-controversial/

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1387343362013995009?s=21

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1387044958377447424?s=21

https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1386773744484552715?s=21

https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1388237962991652865?s=21 

Yes, a bunch of people took that severance package

https://twitter.com/caseynewton/status/1388212468510380034?s=21

https://twitter.com/lizthegrey/status/1388300929506582530?s=21

https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of-hate.pdf

Reference to Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

https://amzn.to/3vDWbE6

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!

The guest on this episode is Rachel Chalmers of Alchemist Accelerator. Rachel joined Alchemist from Autodesk, where she was Director, Transformation Growth Boards and Product Excellence. Prior to Autodesk, Rachel was a VC with Ignition Partners and Merian Ventures, leading investments in Docker, Wit.ai (acquired by Facebook), Unikernel (acquired by Docker) and Honeycomb.io. She began her career as employee number 10 with 451 Research (acquired by Standard & Poor), where she was the first analyst to cover VMware, Cloudera and Splunk.

Find Rachel on Twitter and on LinkedIn. Alchemist Accelerator is at https://www.alchemistaccelerator.com

Among many other things, our conversation touched on:

Links mentioned by Dominic:

Follow the show on Twitter @Roll4Enterprise or on our LinkedIn page. Theme music by Renato Podestà. Please send us suggestions for topics and/or guests for future episodes!