Guy Holmes: A maverick, serial entrepreneur and innovator.
I was once told that there are two types of people in this world, house dogs, who wait to be fed and get a pat on the head, and street dogs who hunt for their food and go where they please. Guy is a street dog and if he were put in a house, he’d probably bite off your arm. This metaphor is incongruent with the man because he’s an incredibly considered and thoughtful bloke. Nevertheless, when you listen to his stories of tackling problems that people thought impossible, you get a real appreciation of his intensity and commitment to breaking the mould. In fact, when you meet him, you think “how can I be more like that guy?”.
Guy has built and sold five businesses from the ground up and has a tenacity to solve problems that others run from. Guy doesn’t like to be told ‘no’ and has a litany of stories where he’s been told “that can’t happen”, then he makes it happen.
Guy’s latest business, Tape Ark is all things cloud. To the naive consumer, you’re probably wondering what the big deal is, you’ve got a google-drive it’s not that complicated. To any technologist I may have piqued your interest. Before I proceed (like me) you probably need to get your head around the nomenclature of data that Tape Ark deal with. Berkely’s 2013 infographic (summarised below) gives you an appreciation of the scale of data that Guy works with. He talks in Petabytes and beyond…
1 Byte = 1 digit
8 Bytes = one character
1 Kilobyte (1000 Bytes) = paragraph / low-res image
1 Megabyte (1,000 Kilobytes) = complete works of Shakespeare / 2 high-res images
Gigabyte (1,000 Megabytes) = 7 min video / DVD all Beethoven’s works
Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) = 50,000 trees made into paper and printed, 200,000 5-minute songs
Petabyte (1,000 Terabyte) = al photos on Facebook meta (10 Billion)
Exabyte (1,000 Petabytes) = all of Netflix streamed 3,000 times
Zettabyte (1,000 Exabytes) = 250 Billion DVDs
Yottabyte (1,000 Zettabytes) = All of the internet in 2013 (which would take 11 trillion years to download using a high-power broadband).
Here’s a 30 second down-load on Guy’s passion. Tape Ark work with massive amounts of data and help organisations convert it from traditional storage units (tapes) into the cloud (amazon, azure, etc.).Consider this, every business and organisation stores their records on large tapes. Now, with the advent of the cloud and AI, they want a better way to access that data to search for insights, grant users better access or simply move into the 21st century. In fact our retail experience of data access (thanks to Netflix) has radically expanded our expectations of access to information. Tape Ark, exists to solve data transfer and cleansing challenges at the scale of petabyte and beyond.
For instance, a film business wanted to transfer their historical animation movies onto the cloud. Think, 60 high resolution images for every one second. Now consider a whole library of these films… Currently all of that content is stored on a device that has to be decoded, cleaned, categorised and loaded into a cloud environment. The work would otherwise take 18+ months to complete – a hugely manual task. His team innovated the current methods and completed the task in a matter of weeks. Now, consider every hospital, government agency, university, private enterprise … any organisation older than 10 years and the volume of email, process, documents, reports, system data, R&D, etc.! They all need to move to the cloud and this means shifting massive swathes of data into more accessible and searchable locations.
Guy shared another story where he was delivering a keynote at a conference in the states. He had made prior arrangements with an offshore vessel and global internet provider to demonstrate an incredible feat. As he was describing the scenario to the audience, members of the crowd started to walk out in disbelief. While he recounts the story to me, I could see the zeal in his eyes since he knew he was about to prove that something which was believed to be impossible, was actually possible. The crew for an onshore seismic acquisition project completed seismic scans of the subsurface (massive photo) and the data was sent direct to the cloud. It passed through a processing centre in Australia and then a few moments later, as Guy refreshed his browser, the file displayed on his webpage, all while he was standing next to a podium in Dallas. I’m not talking about taking a photo on your camera and saving it to google drive. I’m talking a scenario where the data needs to be physically shipped via a vehicle to a processing centre, and then manipulated before loading it to the cloud on a very big USB drive. This would usually take months to complete. Guy did it in minutes with a live audience. I’m sure there are elements of ego present in this exercise but damn … you’d obviously need to back yourself to the hilt if you were likely going to piss off possible clients and industry colleagues.
He’s the cut-out of an entrepreneur with all of the insights and battle scars to prove it. I’ve spent the majority of my career in the corporate world where the term ‘intrepreneurship’ is seen as an antidote to organisational autocracy and the allure of entrepreneurship. Guy has some pretty hard-hitting insights from his journey and we in the corporates could learn a thing or two about innovation, challenging limiting beliefs and being the person to keep knocking on the next door despite rejection:
Listen to your customer. When you build enough trust with a customer they will share their real pains. This is where the GOLD is for a service provider. People enjoy a shoulder to cry on or an open ear to bend but they really cherish someone who comes back to them with a solution for their problem. Be that person that targets the perceived unsolvable.
Invite your people in to solve the problem with you. In the corporate world we call this an innovation lab or a co-design workshops. I’ve run a stack of them and they are great fun but at the end of the day, no one is going to go hungry if we can’t solve the problem. Guy infects his team with his curiosity and tenacity to improve the world and from here they get about the work of active problem solving and innovation. This generates real excitement and it’s where people go the extra mile because they are actually making a difference.
Accountability and allocation of work. Everyone hates a micro manager and Guy is the antithesis of this. He actively looks for ways to segment the body of work so he can tackle a portion independently and expects you to do these same in your area. He doesn’t have the time to worry about whether you’re looking into it with the same level of detail or focus, he trusts that you’ve been infected by the same quota of curiosity and that you will deliver quality work.
80:20 principle for delivery and improvement. The team need to have 20% focus on improvement and innovation. Typically, this is reserved for the innovation or Continuous Improvement team and although every executive would love their teams to generate improvements, the complexity of navigating organisations for approvals ultimately restricts improvements. We’re also creatures of habit so if you build a culture that necessitates innovation for survival, you’ll breed people that step into improvement and not fear getting it wrong in the journey to improve.
There is never a better time to upskill in AI, cloud and cyber. Take an Azure/AWS course or familiarise yourself with Open-AI. We are in the next wave of transformation and these tools are the foundation skills that will get organisations there, think what excel did to the abacus. This advice is applicable to student who are graduating or professionals wondering about their next move. There is a global talent shortage and these skills are in HOT demand. If you were on the fence, get of and start to teach yourself!
Guy’s a busy guy and I wondered how such a busy guy keeps up with the evolving aspects of technology? Here’s a short list of Guys’ go-to podcasts:
A16Z –Tech trends from a Silicon Valley VC firm.
Masters of Scale – Business advice from Silicon Valley and beyond.
Creative Elements – Get behind the scenes of top creators.
Here’s the thing – Alec Baldwin side steps the predictable and takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and performers.
How I build this with Guy Raz – interviews the entrepreneurs to learn how they build their iconic brands.
I think everyone has a street dog inside of them but either their education, desire for security or limiting beliefs have caged their inner-animal. Listening to Guy explain how he upskills his team and engrains an innovative spirit in his culture is truly inspiring. It shows me that we can all unleash our street dog. The trick is to have both the bravery to continue to swim against the current as well as intentionally surrounding yourself with other street-dogs who are emblazoned by those who say “that can’t be done”.