My role right now, I'm a director in the C2 office here at Google cloud. It's a dream job for a nerd like me. I started out when I was a kid. I wanted to be an astronaut, and I went to MIT because that's what I was told to how you get to be in the Marines and bein an ROTC program. And I failed down after 30 days and I thought my life was over, that's what you feel like when you're 16 and I walked across campus and there was a sign there for my future and the sign said, "Free beer" and so I walked up and I followed the sign and was at a top of 5-45 Text Square in Cambridge, and it was a meeting room of a lot of people walking around. One guy looked like Albert Einstein, I thought, another gentleman I thought looked like Jerry Garcia and he was one of the best minds in computer science, working on a list machine and I met the founders and creators of AI and fell in love with it and then I graduated and my parents were like 'Why'd you do that?' no one's hiring and what's AI" and so I did Web things for a long time, and then I was sort of retired in 2012. A fraternity brother of mine sent me a posting on Facebook and posting said WTF. My mom looked at me and said, Well, what does that mean? and I said, Wow, that's fantastic. And so what she meant and what it was, it was a posting about the deep mind and what's happening in deep learning and how they brought a computer program to play video games and the program, I downloaded it was four pages of math, and I couldn't even read the math, and I had to go back and find my MIT textbook and relearn everything. What that did is we figure out what's happening in deep learning AI came back in force because we had the cloud, we had enough computer and we find the algorithms have improved over time. And so I jumped into it with full force. So I went from a Web career where I had built on very large websites and what not at research IBM. Then I joined Google in 2016 and I joined Google because like a lot of other nerds like myself because the platform here is tuned to building AI. I built a career building in delivering services and in advising CEOs. And so that's where I am now. So it's a long story short, I started as the kid that always wanted to be an astronaut and got into AI and now I'm doing full time, and I guess the lesson learned is never to give up on your dream, it may be delayed, but they can still come true.

I hope that people watching this are students and can get lucky as I did in a sense that I've never worked a day in my life. I have always found what I enjoy doing. And I enjoyed so much that I people say, What's this work-life balance thing? I've always struggled with those parts and I get it if work is something that you don't really enjoy but if you're lucky you enjoy it to do and you'll find me on the beach reading research papers. You'll find me at the gym stopping the gym, at a coffee shop writing software, you'll find me at work at one o'clock in the afternoon, swimming in a pool. What happened to me is that work in life is continuous, and I'm content, I'm constantly working and constant loving. Work hours I put in is probably inordinate, it's probably a lot. I don't track it, what I do track are interesting things that happen in life. When deep learning hit in 2012, I started watching the papers and there are so many papers that get published, you can't keep track of it all. And so I find that every weekend I'm reading a couple of research papers, watching YouTube clips and I haven't cut the cord from a cable about eight years ago, I have never looked back, so that's sort of the lifestyle of someone who enjoys. I don't feel like I'm working now in terms of responsibilities, decisions in my role. We're a CTO function in Google and what CTO function at Google, we sort of created this, we have spent a lot of time with the research development teams to understand where products are going, and what they're curious about is how can they shape that product roadmap to deliver better value to people. How do you shape it over time? Now, if you talk to customers, they want to solve their hardest problems but they don't know where products are coming to help them solve their problems. And so we go between the two and we are sort of a matchmaker then we put together road maps and projects with large companies do amazing things, and so I'm very privileged that I wanted to be an astronaut and now I find myself working with NASA and we're working on the Mars Mission and the Moon Mission and working at Earth Mission, looking at from satellites down and we're doing a number of things, like trying to find planets, trying to map the moon using AI and those are all just basically using Google's at AI platform to do better science. I'm traveling all the time but again it's just life to me.

My role is like on a baseball team, all of the different roles. In my particular role, the crowd that hangs around, they tend to have a C in their title, right chief of this or that and so I spent a lot of time with CEOs. Chief investment officer, chief information officers, chief data officers. So that crowd and a lot of their direct reports, that's on the customer side. And on the engineering side, we don't really have chief engineers at Google, but you look at him as technology leaders, directors, and VP's of engineering and occasionally I talk to our CIO or CEO, it's really that matching between the leaders with business and it leaders at Google and how can we help bring those together to really sort of advanced state of the art. I think a lot of it is the softer side in the sense that what makes you uniquely human. You find that when you first start a career, it's a lot about bits and bytes and understand the mathematical algorithms, as you continue to progress it's more about having that as a ground ring, that's your deep root but then building relationships and how do you figure out how can you spend time serving others. As you're serving others if you're a manager, how do you serve your team and make them the best people they can be, if you are serving your customer, how do you help them to succeed? How did you get her next job of what she's working about for her family? If you're working with an engineer, how do you help her with her next rung at being at Google, how do you help her to have an impact so she can reward with her family and friends? And you're sort of this role of service and bring that into how you serve inside Google and serve that and also serve a community. I think a lot about stem and what can I do to help promote stem with diverse populations because AI diversity becomes paramount. We're now finding that you and I are humans and we use AI. We interact in a world, we make assumptions if we don't go crazy but because if you have a background that is different than mine then what happens is my assumption has to be different than yours. And so I find that we need more people to work together, to have the best solution. So diversity is a big passion of mine, and I try to serve the community to do more of that as well.