Well, this is one of the questions that I think that most people cannot really answer honestly, because people don't really understand how they wind up where they are. In my case, I can say with more certainty than most people that I do not know because my path to worry has been clearly a random walk. In some cases, um, an opportunity appeared and I grabbed it. And I'm quite aware that being in the right place at the right time was only to a small degree my own doing. Now, having the ability to grab those opportunities, I think, was partly my doing. But more than I think most people realize these things could happen a different way and could easily have done so. Specifically what I did, what little part I had in this, was to follow passions. And I've always had a passion for computing and a passion for understanding things. Intereset in mathematics, in the structure of things and in a huge variety of topics, from genomics to text, understanding to machine learning to big data systems to computer design, all of these things. Such things have been fascinating for me. Yeah, I've always worked on computing from the age of 11 on, which was very unusual when I was young because computers were young as well, and so that put me in a position ahead of most people when I was young. But it also gives me a perspective now that I think that young people and old people. Young people, because they didn't live in a world of computers so small and older people because they have been slow to adapt to a world where computers are so large. I mean both extremes literally, my first computer had just barely more bits than I have fingers, 12 bits, not bytes. And as you know, we come to now where a typical processor has 40 billion transistors on the processor chip itself. It's just amazing and fabulous. And if we look at things well, the same principles apply from the early phase to the later phase. All that changes is the number of zeros we put in our equations. And so that's what's got me here is that curiosity in very broad things. There are a few incidents that I think stand out. One is just simply where I went to high school. It was in Los Alamos. Now, I think my path was largely set before I moved to Los Alamos for the last two years of high school. But being there really was a fabulous experience, and especially in that moment in time, because when I was in high school was kind of the last moment you could meet the famous people from the Manhattan Project and that golden age of physics. So I got to meet Linus Pauling, Marvin Minsky, Hans Bethe, and people like that, as well as many of the lesser figures that you don't hear about who contributed in very substantial ways. Every Tuesday I got to run away from school and go to the colloquium at the laboratory where these people would come to talk and give lectures. That was an extraordinary opportunity and it was fantastic fun to be able to be there. Then, later, in college, there was another similar experience where I was wandering through the halls not exactly focused on school work (which has always been a weakness of mine). But I saw a name tag, a very small little tag, hand-written, that said S Ulam, which was remarkably similar to the name Stanislaw Ulam. But it seemed impossible that one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century would be right there in the hallways in the University of Colorado. So I knocked on the door. How bad could it be? And the guy said, "come in". So I did and asked if he was Stanislaw Ulam. And he was. He said that he had to finish a phone call and there was a puzzle I could work on. As it turns out, he gave me a fixed point that he had solved when he was 19 and I made some small progress in the 20 minutes he was on the phone. When he finished I showed my approach how it went and how it went wrong. And after that we had some great talks. And that, to me, was one of the more important things. Not necessarily because of what I learned from him since I didn't have enough contact to really see him as a huge mentor. But the lesson that I really I think I internalized and didn't realize until many years later is that you should go ahead knock on doors. I realized that the worst that could really happen is they say they are busy. Well, the worst that could happen is somebody else entirely and, in fact, one of the janitors had the same name or something, but there was nothing bad that could really happen by knocking on the door and asking. People who are so famous that you can't even believe that they actually exist still are usually happy to talk to people. And then I used that lesson later. Some years later, I was working on some of the early UNIX machines. Not even Linux and I had a problem with a system called AWK. So I knew that that stood for Aho, Weinberger and Kernighan, three famous people in computing. So I called Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill and asked for Dr Aho. And he just answered my question. So, knocking on the door makes all the difference in the world. You could do it but you should be ready to ask a good question that has some value to you. And I think that the knocking on doors that other people would not has led me to places that other people didn't get to go.

sure I did not found map are, by the way. I was early there, but I was not. A founders want to make that clear at the beginning? Uh, open source is a much older thing than people thank. The word was coined in 1999 but the movement existed a long time before that. And so in the mid seventies, I was involved a lot with micro computing. And there was a group that would meet every Tuesday evening at the Colorado School of Mines called the 65 02 interest group. And, uh so I would go down there, these people would get together and we would share code. Now back then, that map handing floppy it's actually at that point. It was even before flawed because we typed our own programs in to the computers separately because we didn't have interchangeable mass media. And of course, there was no Internet. But the idea and the core of the idea was sharing. One of the guys worked at the university, and his idea was that because the government the public paid a salary, he should give back everything he did to the public. It was a simple exchange to him. He just viewed it as honest exchange. The only honest exchange you could have is the way he put it. And I felt like sharing this because everybody was giving me so much more than I gave them anything I could get. Pack was too little. Some people with occasionally charge, like $50 for the floppy disk in the manual said that there was a replication cost, really, that that was paying and we shared hardware designs and that that was the time of the West Coast computer faire and the homebrew computer movement. I had one of the first apple ones. It was, ah, a magical moment in time. But it was very lunch of around sharing. And that is the Silicon Valley ethos is to compete fiercely but to share fairly openly and the original HP mentality. That son mentality has always been that you talk to people and you worked with them, even if their competitors there was ah, thing called the wagon Will Cafe uh, in Silicon Valley, and people would go there at lunch from different companies, and there would write down problems on napkins and pass them around and people would write down answers. Yeah, this was the unofficial side of the baby area that was so important to how this place became. What it iss. Yeah, it was very natural for open source to be heavily adopted here. Uh, it just it made total sense. Now there was another center of that that's on the East Coast at M I. T. Where Richard Stallman worked. And he's one who framed the thoughts that a lot of people had in the best ways with the free software movement and the new license. But it predated that that both there and here and across the country, you know, I was in Denver and that's in the middle of the country or Boulder, and it was very much alive there. So the roots are very, very deep, and it seemed natural. When I was working at a university to share everything, I thought at first I would put limits on it like you would have to If it was commercial, you would have to get back to me. But later I just put everything I did in the public domain, and that came back to me huge value. I realized that especially at the university. There were many things I would definitely not fight to maintain an ownership in. I was busy and therefore it was better to give them because if somebody else became famous for my work, there was a very good chance that they would be friendly and I would learn, earn something out of it anyway. Not necessarily that they would write me a check or something, but that it would go back around and make the world a better place, perhaps for myself. And so yeah, seem totally natural. I became involved in a patchy foundation much later in 2007 but I have been involved in open source by for decades. By that point, really, and Apache has served a function of defining a form of business friendly, open source. So the Free Software Foundation was designed in many ways to subvert proprietary licenses to destroy them, and many companies saw that as a threat, and so they forbade the use of free software. They opened that the good new license software as much as they could, and they still do. They won't allow any dependencies on that because of the worry of legal ramifications and surprises. And even if people agree with the license, they often can't agree officially with the license because of possible misinterpretations of it. So there's a Jason dot award license that takes ordinary free and open source licensing the Berkeley license and adds one line that says the software will not be used to do evil, and all the people I know agree with that. But many of them cannot use that software in a company because the definitions are not clear. Somebody could easily climb that. Just building a car is evil or turning on electric light is evil. Who knows? You could have all kinds of interpretations. So company can't use that on Apache friend, a license that can be used by businesses. And so it's an open source license that allows this spreading to go through companies, and that's a big, big deal. There's also a big focus on community building, and I think that the community building that's happening now with Kubernetes and things like that does not have Apache is it? Centre eventually does have a very, very important role, but the Club Native Computing Foundation Ah, is lately where a lot of the excitement is, but that's partly because companies can participate there with Apache. It's just individuals, and I think that that's a very good place for students to get started because they don't have a company that could be influential in Communities world. They could make contributions, but it's much more difficult for an individual to become known there on the Apache side, it's still very much possible for an individual to make a difference and a student to establish a portfolio of good work. So I think there's a lot of interesting alternatives. Now back to the question of how a came to map are two alerts decree that had to do with my work at Apache. I was a very adorable early adopter of Big Data and Hadoop in the company's I Worked in, And uh, that led to me being somewhat prominent in the Hadoop community. Probably just I talk too much, but I answered a lot of questions, and some people saw me as somebody and I tried to communicate publicly with blog's about some of the work I've done in machine learning and some of the big gate of stuff. And so the vampire people who founded the company, came to me and and asked me to join. Eventually I did, and that was 15 months after the founding of the company, but well before the product had been made public.Well, there's this one big change map. Ours assets were acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Hve and, um, the next day, the change waas that that the largest company I had ever worked for previously had about 600 employees. That was Matt Bahr at its largest or agency software in the nineties. Yeah. Now that starting day October 1st I had 60,000 people in the company's. It was almost exactly 100 times larger. And I expected that to be, um, a huge transition. And it has been huge in some respects, but it has also been mm, almost like no change at all in other respects, which is a very strange thought. Uh, the reason that it isn't a change. I mean, there is the reason that it is a change is obvious. It's huge. And, uh, the reason it is not a change is that, for one thing, the traditions of computing that I was formed by are to a large degree, still resident in Hillary Pattern, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the merger of HP, the traditional computing side of it and deck digital equipment and compact, which introduced sucked in a bunch of things and Silicon Graphics. And there are still some of these people around, but that whether or not the exact people are still there, the people who started those companies have a large cultural impact on Hewlett Packard Enterprise as it ISS. And those companies were the ones that embody the philosophy of computing that I had adopted. And so it's almost like coming home philosophically and the engineering style and wigger of the company in the fact that it's engineering driven. It makes it feel like coming home more than coming to a new place. So that's one thing. Secondly, the number of people we were selling Teoh I had a very external position in that bar, and I was out in front of people in front of customers in front of non customers all the time, and I estimate that there were about 20 to 50,000 people that we needed to talk to maybe as many as 100,000. And so the number of people I was talking to them is about the same as the number of people I'm talking to inside the company now, and I have two rules, internal and extra, like my job is part of the CTO office to evangelize and help the company adopt data fabric, which is the key technology that Matt Bahr developed. Yeah, so I'm dealing with the same number of people, people on average, for smarter. They're more engineering oriented, but they're also less educated in software than in hardware. And so there's still the same level of communication description demonstration as before, and so it doesn't feel like a big, big change. I still have a lot of people I know and a lot of people I don't. And the external community beyond that is just all of computing. Because HP is the largest producer servers in the world has essentially every big company as a customer and a lot, a lot, a lot of small companies as well. So it's just the entire world is what you were talking to outside. And that doesn't seem all that different, cause I was always happy talking to everybody anyway. So, um, my roles and responsibilities now are too communicate now to invent, Yeah, to understand, you got to learn, you know, But the key thing is for me to communicate what I've learned and invented and understand and to communicate that to different audiences, to the field engineers who talked to customers and are very big part of our sales process to the sales people who manage the relationships and help guide the conversation with customers, UH, two other engineers who are designing the next generation of computing that HB will offer. And the generation beyond that and the generation beyond that, the son of the stuff that happens here is just astonishing. Yeah, there are things that we've learned at Matt Bahr that have a huge relevance toe how those next generations of computing will happen and somebody needs to bring that word to them and in terms of weekly work hours, you know, it's very, very hard to say I work a lot, but I also play a lot. But my play looks a lot like my work, and so it's very, very hard to draw the line exactly, probably to my detriment. But so, for instance, one of the fundings of doing lately is one of the kids in the neighborhood said he wanted to learn about computing and what he said that it was clear that what he wanted to learn is really weren't about computing from the electron ICS all the way up, and that sounded like fun to me. So I've been talking to him a couple times a week talking first about Here's how electron ICS work from the quantum mechanics upward. Here's how the components work and now we're at the gate level and we're using simulators and beginning to design components of a modern computer. That was that work, or is that play? It's very, very similar to the work I do, but it's play. It's absolutely for play. Ah, but it's also educational for me because I get to go back in and review how it is that modern computers work. And one of the key challenges now is that we're needing to change that, that modern processors need to live a bit more in a bubble because we're using them to run compute loads that could be adversarial. And it is now clear that very, very subtle timing attacks and things like that can leak information between tenants in a single computer core. And so we now have what a concept of what we call Air Gap security, where the compute operations, the jobs that were running in those compute systems cannot be allowed to affect the Iot. Systems cannot be allowed to reconfigure. The networking devices cannot be allowed to do anything that would compromise the integrity of the hardware itself. And it really, really helps to have a modern view of how computers were designed in order to understand what the implications are for that huge revolution that's happening right now.

There's exactly one challenge as I see it in any job, and that's to define what you really should be doing and then some hell to make yourself do that. And it is not the same thing as listening to the person who supervises you in doing what they say. It's very common that there's more that you could do. It's very common that what they say literally is not what they mean. It's very common that what they say is incomplete, and it's very common that what they say is simply wrong and that there's something that after you do it, they would be much happier that you did it or that the entire group that you're working with would do better if you did that. So that problem of definition applies even when you're in a low level, heavily supervised position or in a rolling mine. Literally. When I talked to uh, the head of the CDO strategy office that I work in Robert Christians in the first meeting I had with him, I said, What would you like me to do? And you said Ted, that's ridiculous. You know what you're good at? You can figure out the best way to contribute. You don't want to do all right. Oh, great. That's really not a very big hint, but it was really much more honest about that and much more aware about that than most people would be. Most people would assigned tasks literally. And for a person like me, who is, I find it very difficult to be managed. I tend to see things that need to happen and go do them. Ah, and so it really is better to work with me in a very loose way. Now other people really need that structure and help in defining that. But I think that their challenge is exactly the same as mine, really. They just working on it on a different level or a different motives. They need to define what really needs to be done and how their talents match without, and then they need to figure out some way that they can make themselves or allowed themselves or convince other people to allow them To do this, they need to knock on those doors that lead to interesting situations. And it's really hard because if you admit that you don't know how the world works in some sense, and you don't you don't Eido. Nobody really does, because it's too big to understand. Then that problem of defining where you should go is scary.