Sustainability and Disruption | EcoTech Insights

Hi everyone. I'm pleased to be joined by Jeda, who is a bestselling author of Disrupt or Die. com.

Jed, it's so great to have you on today. Thank Bonnie. Great to join you.

Well, I'd love to start a little bit about your background. You've had such a diverse career with all these different companies. Can you tell us how you got into, uh, the tech fields and maybe a little bit about what you're working on now?

Yeah, that's a pretty tough question because I, I really don't know exactly how I got into the tech field. I started out as an English major in college, and then I taught high school while I was in college. So I was a English teacher, high school teacher before I actually became a tech entrepreneur.

So it's very accidental for me. That is so interesting. I don't think I've ever heard a background like that.

So we, you got into these different companies and I know you recently had an acquisition for Delphix. Tell me a little bit about the area within these companies that you're, you kind of gravitated towards. For me, it all starts with product.

So when, when I was a high school teacher, you get one big benefit, you get your summers off. So I took an internship at a tech company in Southern California and as I learned about the technology they're building in the market that they were entering into, or I started to delve deeper, deeper into how software products worked. So I learned about architecture and design and at one point I came up with the product idea for my first software company in Avamar, and that helped transform the entire tape back, uh, came back up industry and we invented a concept called data deduplication, which helped pack data on day over day backups very efficiently onto disc That is original.

com. The Delphix started really based on some of the things that we did at Amar. So Amar, we packed data really well onto disk, but you had to restore it to multiple different locations to use that data.

And we had a lot of the world's biggest company using the product at the time, and some of them came to me and said, Hey judge, could you fix this problem where we have almost the same data in our development testing QIA staging all these application environments that we need to run our business? And I thought, yes, it could be fixed, but you have to build a completely different product with a completely different architecture. So I left EMC, which acquired Ammar and started in Delphix.

com? Yeah, absolutely. Wal, one of the interesting things that we've found at Delphix now at Delphix, we automate data for software development pipelines.

So we automate test data into many the world leading organizations. So we can see how fast companies are releasing software. And you have some companies that are releasing software on an annual, quarterly, or monthly basis.

Then you have tech giants who are releasing softwares at millions of times a month, literally millions of deploys per mile. And so there is this huge divide in the speed and rate of software development, and most companies don't know where they stand in that divide. They can't even tell where are the biggest areas of investment in their company and how are they comparing to each other.

Like if they have a center in India or in the US or in Europe, they can't tell you which one is more productive or has a better cost of productivity. com is to automate the top KPIs for these development organizations. So you can compare the big areas of investment and you can see the impact of things like gen AI on your software development In Disrupt or Die.

You talk about the importance of change to say competitive. Tell me a little bit more about that philosophy and also how it applies to sustainability in tech. Yeah, it's definitely at odds with sustainability in many ways.

If you think about sustainability, you have to think about sustainability of your business and then also what your business and what the people in your organization do to drive sustainability for the planet. And the challenge with disruption is that it disrupts what is sustainable in any given business. You have to stay ahead of all the innovation potential within your industry and by your competitors.

And so in order to be sustainable for your business and then be able to invest in sustainability of benon, you have to master disruption and innovation. org. How did that get started?

Yeah, So we started it when I was at Delphi and at Delphix, sustainability is very core to our platform. So at Delphix, anywhere we deploy us, we reduce the cost of data by 10 the planet. We wanted to help IT leaders take charge of sustainability for their organizations.

org came in. And what we try to do is encourage IT leaders to take responsibility for their sustainability initiative, not only for their companies, but for their industries. And in doing so, we can have one of the biggest potential impacts When people are trying to innovate their companies and lean into ai.

What do they need to be thinking about when it comes to sustainability and energy use? The n AI had an enormous cost to the planet. It is so expensive when it comes to compute and energy resources.

And today we're in a phase where there's vast experimentation with jet AI and different types of ai. All of that has really big implications to the planet. It's completely changed the curve on electricity consumption by technology, by the technology industry.

It's gone from growing over the next decade, a couple percentage points to more than 10% of the total for the planet. And you could really see how staggering the shift has been when you look at what the tech giants are doing with Microsoft, you know, restarting free Mile Island and restarting nuclear at the only way that they can really fuel the energy needs of their gen AI initiatives. So gen AI has incredible cost.

Now on the other side, it has incredible potential. It can really accelerate innovation and change the nature and the speed of innovation. So there's a very fine balance that we achieve we need to achieve when it comes to ai.

That makes sense. You mentioned Three Mile Island, and that was my next question. With these, uh, nuclear deals that are coming up for big tech and the, and the small modular nuclear reactors as well, where do you see this going?

Do you think that even though these reactors, some of them take five to 10 years to build, do, do you see nuclear coming forward as a, a major energy source for AI and and up being accepted? Yes, I, I think it's pretty interesting that Gen AI is actually creating the tipping point that is forcing us to master and to re-look at nuclear energy as a primary source of energy for the planet with the proper investment by these tech giants and the proper oversight, it should be possible to run ma in a state and sustainable lay. We talked about nuclear energy.

What are some of the other ways companies can manage energy use in, in the wake of gen AI's energy demands? I think one of the big things that need to happen is companies really have to master rationalizing what applications and AI programs they pursue. In today's world, so many programs are being started because there's a big imperative to show proof of gen AI in terms of strategy and execution and benefit for business.

But along these programs will not bear fruit, and yet they will cough the enormous amount for the planet. I always like to say that it, it really comes down to the discipline mind of the executive or the entrepreneur first, before you start your experimentations on starting a new product, starting a new initiative, starting a new startup, all of these things can be better served by first going through a discipline process of thinking and deciding what kinds of programs should be allowed to start in the first place. So how would somebody begin to even think about that?

It seems like at that point you might not know the answers to those questions. I, I think a lot of people think there's incredible amounts of luck when it comes to innovation and startups and applications that go big and build billions in revenue strains. But if you look at Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley is filled with repeat successes that prove that it is not an outlier to continue to innovate over and over again with high certainty.

And so my book Disruptor Die is filled with frameworks that I have put of practice or that I've learned at put of practice from other entrepreneurs who've built much bigger company than the mind mine. And so those are the frameworks that entrepreneurs use to ensure that the things they work on have high probability and high return. com and the fact that M had already been invented in the data center business mode into the clan, all of the new app platforms that followed those were sure bet those were applications that already were successful in the data center and as they transferred into the cloud, were sure to service markets that would grow and sustain many customers for decades.

And so that is an example of the platform transference where there was high probability and FI certainty of success. I wanna understand data transparency, why it's important and where it fits into leadership and, and tech companies. Our audience is filled with people that work in the DevOps space, uh, and cybersecurity.

So I'd like to hear your take on that. Yeah, there's a lot of different angles when it comes to data. You have data governance as well and data privacy.

So data privacy, data transparency are two things that you really need to balance well for company at Delphix, we provide a lot of data governance for companies, which is part of sustainability by protecting social security card numbers, credit card numbers for millions of consumers around the world. When it comes to transparency, you also really need to be transparent about how you handle data, the business decisions that you make that could impact different facets of individuals. You really want to be transparent when it comes to the data that you are using in order to manage teams and manage programs.

All of the elements are part of mastering data in the modern world and with gen AI become even more important. Let's talk about leadership for sustainability first, just generally, do you have any overall advice for tech leaders and maybe the ones that aren't a part of sustainable IT that that this is something new to them they know they have to focus on? What's your overall advice for leadership and sustainability?

It's a great question and I think for too long, sustainability has been somebody else's problem to solve maybe the CEO or chief sustainability officers problem to go and solve and creative solution. But I think IT leaders are in the perfect place to take charge of their sustainability efforts. So in IT, they can not only look at the IT consumption of environmental resources, they can also look at the broader footprint of their entire company and then perhaps their entire industry.

So when it comes to technology leaders taking charge or they should not only think about what's what they can do in it, but what they can do with and by IT, with technology to transform the footprint that their citizens have on the world and then their industries have on the world. If you think about the only way we can really get through the sustainability crisis for the planet, it's through electrifying everything and running everything on software and just being more efficient with our resources and all of that routes through technology leadership. Well, I'm talking about the c-suite maybe that aren't the tech savvy ones.

How would they convey that to their IT team? org. You look at IT standards that we've set.

org, no one had set standards for sustainability or it, we set a standard so you could take a look at what you can do in it. I think the second part is really making sustainability a big part of the purpose of your organization, which will help you retain and to attract the best talented people in the world because people really deserve to work in a place with our B and then it's the thing, what can we do? And this is where disruption and sustainability go hand in hand.

What can we do to change the nature of our business using technology today that is more environmentally friendly, uh, for the planet and operationally efficient and strategically places our business in the future relative to our competitors? So I think you, you're looking for the places where disruption and sustainability go hand in hand. For instance, if you look at technologies like Delphix, which drives efficiency over where we're deployed, it's both disrupted and sustainable of the zania.

We're coming to the end of 2024, hard to believe. But going into next year and beyond, where, where do you see the trends going with sustainability in it? And then we have new regulations with ESG coming into 2025, but overall, what is your vision for where you see it going because you've really been there at the forefront and now we're coming into a very exciting time, I think in this space.

I think sustainability was really starting again, rate, mind share and rise in importance until this last wave of gene ai, when gene AI has really taken the frontrunner seat. And unfortunately gene AI is such an enormous cost to the planet that I think the focus around it also is dinning the focus around sustainability leadership. So I think it's very important for leaders that we call around the world to reprioritize sustainability and to look very carefully at what they're doing with gene ai.

The challenge with gene AI is that it has a massive accelerant, it's a massive accelerant on innovation. So it not only changes the nature of what you can build in applications because you can incorporate gene AI and AI ml and other types of AI into your applications and programs. It also changes the rate of innovation.

com, which measures the impact of gene AI tools on developers, uh, we're seeing that the average developer using gene AI tools like GitHub, co-pilot are shipping new features, 38% faster, 38% more features in terms of time to market than in the baseline. 4 x developer with a $19 a month solution. And so it radically accelerates potential for innovation at a very low cost, low dollar cost, but it does have a very big cost to planning because these LMS are hugely expensive on planetary resources.

What do you think about other solutions within ai, um, using smaller models and also using AI to become more efficient, like teaching it to be more efficient itself in, in light of all the innovation that people are excited to, to work on? Yeah, all alarms are really expensive, but these mini language models as well, the new logic and reasoning model, they, they are diverging from how alums have operated in the class. There will be smaller, more efficient models, but the factor that is overweight, that range at which AI is changing and adopting and adapting and the range of things it can do, keeps growing and then moves into video and voice direct, um, direct management of data against video and voice.

All of these things will create more and more demand for cq, not less. So there are areas where it'll become more efficient in areas where it'll become even more voracious in its appetite for energy and planetary resources. Thank you so much.

com and you're just an innovator. You've done so much already and I'm sure you have a lot more that you're working on. Although when I last talked to you, you said you were taking a break, but I don't think you take that any breaks, right?

I I take a break every now and then. I'm currently not fully employed, so it's uh, it's been pretty good. Okay, great.

That sounds good. org, which is a great organization to learn more. If you have uh, more interest in learning about how to be sustainable in it, check it out.

Alright, thanks so much Jed. Thank you very much. Wanni.