Tell me about your vision.
Okay, so my vision, I'm in technology
and my vision is really about technology.
So technology is on an exponential growth path
and that's what I really believe it's going.
We see all these developments,
but that's a development that's been going on
since the 1940s, 50s of last century
and it's going faster and faster developments.
And I think AI is our next step.
And what we will probably see is that
that development is gonna go faster.
And I think there's gonna be a bigger divide.
So we have the number of people
that actually understand that technology
is probably decreasing.
I mean, a lot of people can use AI,
but the people that truly understand how it works
is decreasing.
And the impact that technology has
on people's lives is increasing, right?
So almost everybody these days uses AI.
There's not a big difference between age groups.
So even boomers use a lot of AI
all the way down to the gen Z's, they all use AI.
And I think that's a gap that we need to bridge.
And I think technology and especially technology leaders
play a really big role in that.
I do think that that requires a step.
So for people in technology,
they're often really good at the tech side of it.
Their social skills and their leadership skills
often require development or growth.
And I think this is the challenge.
We need technical leaders in this society
and in our businesses that have a very deep understanding
of AI and technology on one side.
And on the other hand,
also have a very deep understanding of business,
of people, of stakeholder management,
of convincing people, of talking to people
and solving business problems and even business finances.
And I think that's the challenge that I see.
And that's also why I do what I do.
I coach tech leaders and I really coach them on this growth
that they take the technical knowledge that they have
and actually learn how to apply that in businesses,
manage a team, manage stakeholders
and help their businesses grow.
Tell me more about the side when you mentioned
that they need to know both the technological side
and deep knowledge of technology
and what do you mean exactly by that?
And then the other side, the leadership side of it.
Yes, so in technology, and I mean, we all know about AI,
but there is so much more.
And I can give you some examples.
So I do a lot of, I'd say more simple technical work.
So we do a lot of software development as well,
like website development, app development.
And sometimes I ask the question to a developer,
can you explain to me how that all works?
Like how a request goes from someone's phone
all the way to a backend server
and just tell me all the little steps in between.
And a lot of developers understand
how they build a web application,
but they don't understand the underlying technology,
how the internet works, how the routing works,
how the app on the phone works,
how JavaScript is executed.
There's a lot of technical details there
that even web developers often don't understand
and can't explain.
So I think it's really important for people in technology
to not just understand the one part that they're working on,
like the one AI model or the one web technology
or the one application development model,
but to really have a very deep understanding
of the underlying layers as well.
So that's for me the technology side.
And people need to invest time and energy to learn that.
That's one.
And on the other side, people like that,
especially the people that love technology,
spend a lot of time behind the keyboards
and not necessarily talking to people.
At some point they will become a team lead
or a senior developer or even a CTO or a CIO,
and they suddenly require a very different skillset.
They need to manage a team, they need to hire a team,
they need to figure out how to make that team work together.
That's on the internal side and on the other side,
they need to, they have stakeholders.
They suddenly have a head of sales
that they need to speak to or head of products
or a head of customer support.
And they need to be able to manage all the stakeholders,
to talk to them, to explain to them what technology can do,
what it's capable of, and together,
actually work together with them to solve business problems.
So AI is a very nice set of tools,
but it doesn't do anything on its own.
You need to apply it to a business problem.
So the technology person needs to understand
those two sides, the technology,
what kind of technology do, the business side of things.
So what are the problems that sales is having
and wants to solve or customer support or finance,
and have a discussion, have a useful discussion
with those sales leaders, the finance leaders,
and the customer support leaders in that organization.
And I think those are two very different skillsets
and you need to grow both.
I understand the second one very easily,
but I'm having a hard time understanding
what do you mean by the first one.
So according to, I mean, I'm a software developer,
by the way, if you didn't know that,
I can develop websites and I'm on my path
to becoming, learning more and more leadership skills.
But if a software developer or a marketing guy
or a website developer is really good at website,
for him to get to know how the internet work,
like how the networking part work,
how will your data would transfer from packets
to go to this router to that and that and that,
and then go in the air and then go that way.
For them to be expert in that field
or even have consistent amount of knowledge in that,
that will take years of experience.
And it's gonna be, to me, more like,
it's like jack of all trades and master of none
kind of situation.
So help me explain what do you mean by that and why.
So if you're, and if you're a software developer,
I think it's still okay that you know the one scale,
the one trade, right, to be able to front end developer,
to have all the knowledge on Reactor Next or whatever,
or to be a backend developer and be a Python developer
or a JavaScript developer.
I think it's fine if you're still at that point.
Although even there, you get to discussions like,
how do I make sure that my app performs?
You get to things like CDNs and do you understand
what a CDN, like a content delivery network,
what that is and how that works.
So you already start to get into like,
how does the internet work?
What is a CDN and how do I optimize my delivery?
So that is actually fast.
And that's, I mean, that's the first scale.
If you're working as a CTO and you're trying to address
business problems, you need to have an understanding
of what's available out there.
So what are the tools that are out there?
What are the available options that we have out there?
I mean, you're going to talk to a sales person
and that sales person doesn't understand technology.
All that they understand is their sales process,
their customers, and those customers may be all
across the world and they have a sales problem,
perhaps that they wanna solve.
I think it's then up to the CTO to say,
that's interesting.
There are different solutions that we can talk about.
We can talk about a Salesforce or another CRM solution
and we can talk about a front end and a backend
and we can do a custom build or we can do off the shelf
that we can customize it.
There are so many different options
that that business has to choose from.
It's the role of the CTO to help the business
make those decisions.
To be able to do that, you need quite a broad set
of knowledge because that sales, the next person is financed
or customer supports or the supply chain or the delivery.
So a CTO needs to have those discussions
and bridge that gap.
And I think that's why he also needs that other side,
that deep understanding of what's available out there.
And of course he can reach out.
I mean, no CTO can know everything,
but still let's say we talk about sales,
he needs to have a basic understanding of what's out there.
He also needs to have a network
with somebody that may understand Salesforce
or HubSpot or some of the other CRMs out there.
And I think that that's the role of the CTO.
So your program is designed for CTOs
to develop in their leadership skills
and their knowledge and technological skills.
So they're able to perform their CTO duties well.
Yes, absolutely.
My program focuses more on the leadership skills
because I think most of the CTOs that I've seen
and that I've worked with really have already
five, 10, 15 years of experience
and I have broadened their technical knowledge already.
I do always, I mean, everybody that I work with,
I try to motivate and inspire to just continue
to tinker with new stuff, to try new stuff out
and just continue to play with the technology.
And I really focus on that other part,
the leadership skills.
Yeah, so developing a vision.
And I think that's why I also love this podcast.
I mean, CTOs need to have a vision
how technology can help their business
and help the business grow and solve business problems.
Being bold, being bold in their business.
So not just waiting for somebody to come over to them
and ask a question, but actually being bold
and approaching other people in the business
and together working on solving those problems,
those business problems.
And really being that technology vision for the company.
Thank you for sharing that.
I'm now more intrigued.
This is not a common niche to be in, Mark.
It's a very unique and a very different
but I've heard before.
So where did this come from?
Like, how did you end up in this field
and how did the process of training CTOs?
So I'm a techie by heart.
So I started, I've been in technology for 30 years
and I started my career in infrastructure.
I'm not a software developer.
I'm an infrastructure engineer by trade.
And that's how I started my career.
Unix, Windows, DBA, accrued into architecture,
project management and into senior leadership roles.
So I've grown from being that hardcore techie
that spends like 40 hours, 50 hours, 60 hours a week
behind their PC and then even on the weekends
tinkering with stuff into a senior leadership role
where I led large teams, global international teams.
And over the years, I've learned so much
about the leadership skill.
And I've had coaches myself, I've had coaches over the year
that were either given to me by my employer
and even now I still pay for my own coach
because I think it's incredibly valuable
to have somebody that helps you,
that coaches you along the way.
I've had my own coaching training
and that actually came from the fact
that I was in a leadership role
and always people would come up to me and say,
Mark, I've had this feedback from my manager.
What should I do about that?
Or Mark, I'm thinking about changing jobs.
Can you help me?
Can you advise me?
And what should I do next?
And out of my job, those are actually the discussions
that I really loved having.
So people that want to take
or are thinking about those kinds of decisions
or those kinds of challenges with their career
don't know where to go next
and are really looking for some outside support,
somebody to brainstorm with, somebody to bounce ideas off
and to have that discussion like, what can I do next
and how do I get there?
And that's the part that I started loving more and more
and that's why I started my training as a coach.
And that's how I rolled into this.
Thank you for sharing that.
And what would you say, Mark, is the why of what you do?
The why of what I do, if I boil it down to one thing,
I think technology is amazing, but with technology,
we often forget about the human being side of it.
So we, and I see this all the time, right?
We use AI because we can then deflect customer inquiries.
So we don't actually have to talk to our customers anymore.
We can use AI to talk to our customers
or, and those kinds of things.
And that's really where I, what I want to stand for
is that we put the human at the center of everything,
even in technology, even in big companies
like OpenAI and Google.
I mean, it's all about the people
and the people that work there
and the people that work on these amazing models.
The same on the people that use it.
It really is about the people that use the technology.
And that's the most important part to me.
What would you say is,
with AI coming into the technological space
and growing so fast, is a concern using that?
I think there's a lot of concerns,
and especially when we started hitting an AGI model.
I don't know if you've ever read the book,
Singularity by Ray Kurzweil.
It's a very interesting book,
and it talks about what happens when AI gets
to the point where AI can actually improve itself
and develop itself.
And it's a very interesting thing,
if and when that happens,
but I think that's still quite a bit out.
I think for now, the concern is that it's moving so fast
that people are really struggling to keep up.
So the number of people that are keeping up
with what happens every day,
the new models that come out,
the advancements in the models, all the changes,
that number of people is shrinking.
And I think that that's the biggest concern that I have,
is that we're leaving a lot of people behind in this,
because technology is going so fast
that people can't keep up.
And I think that really is my biggest concern.
And what would you say that if someone wants to combat that,
what would they do?
How do they keep up with it?
Yeah, so, and that's an interesting question.
So first of all, I think that there's,
and this is not a nice thing to say,
but in my experience,
there are two types of people that I've worked with.
There's people that really just love working from nine to five
and at five, they go home
and they're basically ready for the weekend
and they start to do other stuff.
They don't spend time in technology tinkering
with what happens and what comes out.
They don't read the news, they don't stay up to date,
they don't listen to tech podcasts,
they don't do any of that.
They just are okay with their job
and doing the job as well as they can.
And that's okay,
but technology is really going faster and faster.
And I think the other set of people
is the people that really love tinkering
and playing with their stuff
and that have their hobby projects
and they just download a new AI model from hugging face,
deploy it and see if they can get it to work.
And I think really we need to get more people
to that second space.
People that really tinker with stuff,
people that try stuff out
and people that keep themselves up to date.
I think that's one.
And I think the other one is
how do we get everyone else along on the journey?
And I think that that's a really hard and challenging one.
I think, I hope that over time AI becomes simpler,
but the technology is so incredibly complex
that it's really difficult to use correctly right now.
And I think we see all these trainings online
and we see all these courses online,
but still I think we're leaving a lot of people behind.
I don't have a perfect answer for that one.
No, that's fine.
It was just, I came up with that question.
I went off the script.
But if, do you believe that if more people are not trained
and they don't take time to use AI to their advantage
or learn these technologies to their best,
that for some way or the other,
they would be replaced by the same AI?
I think maybe replaced by AI is not the same word,
but at some point their skills,
their knowledge become obsolete.
And I think that's the bigger risk if you're in technology
and you can already see how fast all the,
you're a software developer,
how fast all the coding models go.
So how fast a year ago we had hardly any models
that could properly code software.
And we've come to right now
where we have a lot of different tools like Cursor,
that are really very good at developing software.
And that's been a year.
So you can't imagine what can happen
in another two or three or four years
and where these models get to.
If you're a front end developer,
I would really spend time making sure
that I stay up to date with all these models.
So I know what's going on and I have a skillset
that is still usable in 26, 27, 28.
If I just focus right now on my front end skills
and getting better at it,
I'm not sure that that's how long
you're gonna be able to do that.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show
and thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.
Thank you.