Patrick Kelley.

Simon J Dudley (00:00:01) Hello, everyone. This is Simon Dudley. This ⁓ is the Before It Was Obvious podcast. ⁓ Patrick Kelly from Zoom is my ⁓ incredible guest for our ⁓ episode today. ⁓ Patrick has one of the best titles I've ever heard. You're our chief technology evangelist for Zoom. Why don't you give us, before we get into the meat of the conversation, why don't we get into what do you actually do today? ⁓ What in the blazes is a C T E. It sounds like a Saab from the nineteen seventies. Patrick Kelley (00:00:35) Simon, this is this is the beauty of the internet and LinkedIn. You can make up any title you want for yourself. It doesn't even have to be the real title. And in fact, I am not a chief technical evangelist for Zoom. I just put that for because it's sounded really cool. My my official title, by the way, is just as cool at Zoom is Distinguished Architect. So I was just trying to spice it up a bit. Simon J Dudley (00:00:58) I think it's wonderful. And I had the title Evangelist ⁓ at some old employer of mine many years ago. And you definitely get some strange LinkedIn ⁓ requests if you have the word evangelist in your title. Patrick Kelley (00:01:10) Yeah, I just ⁓ I'm a ⁓ a technology evangelist. So I t ⁓ of course I work for Zoom and I do a lot of videos and a lot of posts about Zoom, but I do have other passions like A V and audio and video and lighting and sound. ⁓ And that ancillarily obviously works with Zoom, but sometimes I wanna dig deeper and I wanna go in deeper and talk about nerd things like ISO and shutter speed and and aperture and This allows me the ability to just have that evangelized throughout that whole process. Simon J Dudley (00:01:42) Sure, and and tattoos and Harley Davidson's and all this other stuff as well, which we're gonna get into today. So for those of you who haven't been on the podcast or haven't viewed the podcast before, ⁓ this ⁓ is really about how people got to where they are today and how they got into the A V industry and what they found out along the way. And many of us find that the Patrick Kelley (00:01:44) ⁓ Does as well. Simon J Dudley (00:02:06) If you look back in history, everything looks obvious, right? It's well, it's obvious that this happened and that happened. Well, it I can tell you now, having been there, and I think Patrick will agree with me, it wasn't obvious at the time. And we didn't know how things were going to turn out. ⁓ And I think that's one of the reasons why why the past always looks more safe than the future. The future is unknown. We don't know what's going to happen. It's very scary as as a result. The past, however, all looks really clean and sensible. Patrick Kelley (00:02:17) No. Simon J Dudley (00:02:35) And of course, it wasn't at the time. So, what we're gonna do today is we're gonna dig into Patrick's background. We're gonna go back, I don't actually know how many years. I'm gonna guess about 130. ⁓ to when the world was black and white, and we're going to talk about well, everything. So let's talk about origins. How did you ⁓ come into the world? Where did you come into the world? What was your education if you had one? What is that where did you actually kind of Patrick Kelley (00:02:45) ⁓ That's a good guess. Yeah. Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:03:06) Get started. Patrick Kelley (00:03:08) well, we're taking it back to dinosaur level era, Simon. ⁓ I grew up ⁓ as a farmer and a rancher in the southeastern corner of Colorado. And so ⁓ I grew up on a tractor ⁓ most of the summer, ⁓ combine most of the summer, and then on a horse most of the winter. ⁓ And when I was 18, ⁓ I I figured out I did I did a college campus tour. I was a I was a Boy Scout. And we did a campus tour of the University of Colorado. ⁓ And I remember looking at this ⁓ new world that I had never seen with people and ⁓ places and ⁓ partying and college and all. ⁓ I just remember going back home and telling my family, I love the farm, I love everything you do here. ⁓ I am not meant to be a farmer or a rancher. ⁓ I am meant for, I'm not gonna say bigger and better things. But different things. ⁓ And I can appreciate that. My family at the time didn't appreciate that decision. ⁓ I won't say I was ostracized by making the decision, but I knew college was my future. And so that's where that's kind of where I started ⁓ in in the real world, I guess you could say. Simon J Dudley (00:04:22) And what year are we talking about here, if you don't mind me asking? Patrick Kelley (00:04:25) Not at all. I graduated from Plainview High School ⁓ in 1989. And this is a Simon, this is gonna tell you how ⁓ small the area I grew up in. I grew up in a, as I said, a farm and a ranch was a very, very rural community. ⁓ and there were I went to a high school a high school that was K through twelve. It wasn't a separate high school. Kindergarten through twelfth grade was in the same building. because that's all the people we had in the entire district that could go to school. ⁓ And I graduated with four people in my my graduation class. Simon J Dudley (00:05:01) Wow, I bet your football team was terrible. ⁓ Patrick Kelley (00:05:03) ⁓ We were actually pretty good. We played we played six man football because we didn't have enough guys to play with 11 people because we that was just the population we had. And we played a bunch of other rural schools that same thing. We just played six-man football, but we were actually pretty good. Simon J Dudley (00:05:19) ⁓ very good. Okay. That was not the answer I was expecting. Okay. So clearly you went to college and you decided I'm going to do an A V degree. Patrick Kelley (00:05:26) That's exactly how it happened, 100%. No, of course I didn't go to college to do that. ⁓ I originally went to college because I thought I wanted to be an aerospace engineer. That was like my passion, flying and and stuff like that. ⁓ but then I figured out ⁓ I I wasn't nearly that smart, so I probably should not do the engineering thing. So ⁓ my real goal, ⁓ my real goal is to be a professional football player. And that was my passion. I wanted to go. And be a professional football player. ⁓ And ⁓ I was on the practice field for about 10 minutes with these alien beings that were twice my size and twice as fast as me. And my dream of being a professional football player died within 10 minutes of being on a practice field with Division One athletes when I figured out I am not nearly fast or big enough to play at at this level. So ⁓ I did continue to to ⁓ practice football. I didn't do a lot of playing. I did a lot of practicing. And I was a dummy for a lot for a lot of h hits. But ⁓ that's what that was my goal to be a professional football player. And again, died within ten minutes. Simon J Dudley (00:06:36) Now to confirm, we're talking American football, ha hand egg, right? Not not football. Patrick Kelley (00:06:38) American football. That is correct. Yeah. ⁓ That is one hundred percent with your accent. You I watch Ted Lasso a lot, so I've I've learned the ways of of real football, I guess you can you would call it that. Simon J Dudley (00:06:51) Yeah, well fair. And by the way, just for the record, I happen to live in Colorado these days as well, which is kind of weird because you're now in South Carolina, correct? Patrick Kelley (00:06:56) ⁓ there you go. That is correct. That is correct. Simon J Dudley (00:07:01) Strange parts. All right. Well, anyway, interview is not about me, it's about you. So, okay, so you did what at college, and then what happened when you left? Patrick Kelley (00:07:10) ⁓ after four years of practicing football, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. ⁓ Like zero idea. ⁓ and my scout team football coach asked me, He's like, What are you doing after college? I'm like, I honestly have no idea. Do you have any any ideas? He's like, Guess what? I'm gonna go be a coach ⁓ of this place called Adams State University, which is in Alamos, Colorado. You can look it up. Southeastern ⁓ South ⁓ side of Colorado in the mountains, very small division to ⁓ College football program. So he said, Hey, you know what? I'll get I'll let you get your master's degree. I'll pay for it if you coach coach college football for me. And I'm like, that sounds fantastic. Not because I get a stake in football, but two, ⁓ that gives me two more years. I don't have to decide what I want to do in life. Right. That was that was fantastic because I can delay the inevitable of ⁓ joining the real world. ⁓ While I was there. With my college ⁓ money, when I graduated from college, I got some money from my grandparents and my parents, you know, as a as a prize, I guess, for graduating, because everyone was a surprise to me. ⁓ I bought my first computer, which back in the day, you know, 486 with four mega RAM with a CD-ROM, I was kicking. I was I was like the technical wizard of everything. And that's when I started playing games like Doom and stuff like that. If you don't if you probably a lot of the people that are listening probably have never heard the word Doom. Simon J Dudley (00:08:33) Yeah, but we don't care about the people who don't know what Doom is. So ⁓ we'll move back and ⁓ if you don't know what Doom is, look it up, kids. Patrick Kelley (00:08:34) ⁓ Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Patrick Kelley (00:08:40) my God. It was the game of all games, right? It was the first, third ⁓ party. I mean, the first person shooter that was just ⁓ it was the most amazing game at the time. ⁓ But you needed a a really good graphics card to run it at its prime. So ⁓ I remember swapping out the graphics card. I swapped out memory and I started doing things with a computer that weren't probably intended to be done. And that's when I fell in love ⁓ with computers and my my college football coach at the time. was trying to convert all the plays that were written down to this new computer program that he had on this Mac. And he couldn't figure out how to do it. And he's like, hey, hey Patrick, you're good with computers. Why don't you figure out how to do it? And then I slowly started figuring out things about computers in the in the athletics office. And then other coaches like, hey, I'm having this problem with my printer or my monitor. And all of a sudden I was finding I'm actually really enjoying this and I'm actually pretty good at it. So that's That was my life into computers. So it started from there. Simon J Dudley (00:09:41) So what about first job? How did that where did you go from there? Patrick Kelley (00:09:45) Wow. First job. ⁓ Much like Doom, a lot of your viewers are probably gonna not gonna know what long distance calling is. ⁓ There was a there was a time and a place in this world where we actually had these things called telephones, Simon, and you actually had to pick them up and dial physical numbers without some directory of all the people that you knew. So you had to and then and during the day you can call locally. Like you can call the pizza place pretty for free, right? You had you had a phone bill. But if you wanted to call your mom, that was three hours away. You had to pay long distance, right? And and there was a long distance charge, and there was all these companies that made billions of dollars on long distance. So my very first job ⁓ was a company called MCI WorldCom. People some people are like, I've never heard of that, but there used to be a big gigantic telephone company called MCA WorldCom. And they ruled ⁓ they ruled the United States with with long distance. My first job, I was pulling cables, setting up monitors, setting up printers. At the MCI WorldCom headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Simon J Dudley (00:10:47) Wow. You know, a little aside, ⁓ I found out at some point that there were companies that did long distance calls. One of which was called it may have been the same company underneath, but one which was called You Decide. And the other one was called Whichever's Cheapest. And these companies, when people would ring up and say, Who do you want to use for your you'd ring the operator and say, Who do you want to use for your long distance call? They go, you decide or Patrick Kelley (00:11:01) Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:11:13) whoever's cheapest and they'd have to use them. And of course they were not they were not who they decided, nor were they the cheapest. but I thought that was a fun aside. Patrick Kelley (00:11:18) Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:11:22) That's that's that's how it worked back in the day, right? Is that and there was like family and friends discounts. So if you can call on the weekends it was cheaper and then you could have four or five of your family and friends, it was cheaper. There was always a way, you're always looking for a loophole to how the cheapest long distance goes. Simon J Dudley (00:11:25) All right. Simon J Dudley (00:11:36) Yes, yes, yes. At the same time I was living in Australia and dialing the UK, which was two dollars a minute. ⁓ And ⁓ the the conversation every month or however often I rang was either ⁓ why don't you ring more often and do you know how expensive this call is? And that and my mother weeping in the background. It was wonderful. What different world. Okay, so so you were doing this stuff with MCI. ⁓ then what happened? Patrick Kelley (00:11:41) ⁓ jeez. ⁓ Patrick Kelley (00:11:48) Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:11:54) Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:11:57) Yeah, that's ⁓ that was. Simon J Dudley (00:12:05) You got is there an A V in there somewhere, or did you do something else? Patrick Kelley (00:12:08) It took a while in that ⁓ after MCI WorldCom, I remember there was another thing called monster.com. I'm again most of your viewers are not gonna know what monster.com was. It was this giant thing before LinkedIn. This is how you found jobs. You uploaded your your resume to monster.com and then you submitted it electronically. It was it was a miracle. I was a big sports fan, ⁓ and I saw a job for ⁓ ESPN. ESPN is a Again, people don't know it's a sports channel that's on DV. It shows lots of sports. It was in Bristol, Connecticut, and I applied just jokingly for this job. ⁓ And somehow I got the job. I don't know. I I fought I fooled this guy named Jesse Myers, who was my boss at the time, into hiring me. ⁓ and he basically that was my indoctrination to corporate level IT. I was a network engineer. In charge of things like DNS and DHCP and WINS. People don't even know what Wins is, but Wins was a big thing back in the day. ⁓ And one of our jobs was to take care of the Exchange server, Exchange, Microsoft Exchange 4.0. And if you were to go back to 19, this is 1997, 98, this was our first taste of collaboration because now email is becoming a corporate way that we can collaborate and communicate. It wasn't A V yet, but that was my first indoctrination into collaboration and and that's where it all started too. Simon J Dudley (00:13:35) Hmm. Interesting. Okay. So ⁓ I always ask people this question. Can you tell me a really fun, interesting something that went really well, ⁓ or perhaps something that went really horribly wrong that you learned from during that era? Patrick Kelley (00:13:52) Wow, this was so ⁓ project a couple of years. I was still working for ESPN. And this was the night 1998, 1999. ⁓ And ⁓ this is gonna date me. ⁓ A lot of things was written in Fortran and COBOL. These were a lot, by the way, l languages that people used to use on a computer. ⁓ and back in the day, memory was highly, highly sought after. So you The shortest code one. ⁓ And if you think about it, nineteen ninety-nine is four digits, but ninety-nine is two. I've just saved two digits. I've really ⁓ shrunk my my my code by you know 50%. But now do times that by millions of millions of lines of code, those two digits saved a lot of time and money. But no one ever thought about in the 50s, 60s, and 70s and 80s, what happens in the year 2000. When the last two digits are zero, zero. And then everything resets. And in 1988, 1999, we all thought the world was gonna end in the year 2000 when every computer would stop working, right? And so I ⁓ I led this gigantic project to let's we had to recode everything and fig basically figure out what we were gonna do. And Simon, guess what? ⁓ Nothing happened. Like ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:15:18) ⁓ but nothing happened because you fixed it all, right? Patrick Kelley (00:15:20) ⁓ Yeah. ⁓ We'll we'll go with that story. We'll go with that story. Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:15:24) Which i for those of you who aren't aware of this, because I know it's ancient history now, to give you an idea of how afraid people were of this at the time, British Airways insisted that every senior executive in the organization was in the air on a BA flight at that moment to to give everyone the sense of nothing's gonna go wrong. And ⁓ and if it does, you're all going down with the plane. So ⁓ yeah, it was a big deal at the time. Patrick Kelley (00:15:30) Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:15:40) ⁓ Yeah. ⁓ Patrick Kelley (00:15:49) That was motivation to fix everything, that was for sure. Simon J Dudley (00:15:52) Yeah, yeah. All right. So what about A V? How did you ⁓ when when did A V fall into your world? Patrick Kelley (00:15:57) We we we started in A V, so two thousand, ⁓ a couple of I I w I got I worked for ESPN for a while, then I worked for a stent at Citrix, still doing email. ⁓ and I was I was kind of the email guy. Like I wanted to be the best email guy, ⁓ fix everything when it comes to exchange. And so I got a little brave and applied at Microsoft and said, Hey, I could be your your exchange guy. And I went through, you know, like five or six rounds of interviews and they finally ⁓ were dumb enough to offer me a job and they're like, you can start your exchange job. this was 2006. ⁓ And I show up at work. I was really to ro I was studying the whole time, ready to rock and roll ⁓ on exchange. And I remember walking in the door in Charlotte, North Carolina, ⁓ and they're like, hey, you remember that exchange job? I'm like, yeah, I'm really excited. They're like, yeah, we filled that. It's not available anymore. ⁓ but we have a networking engineer job. And I was like, I don't, I don't know anything about networking. Like they're like, Well, here's a book. study for a while, and in two weeks, you'll get on the phones and you'll answer help desk calls on networking for Microsoft. And I was like, this sounds like a horrible idea. But I did it anyway. I was just happy to work for Microsoft, happy to have a job. But ⁓ back then, the networking team was in charge of this software called Live Communication Server 2003. ⁓ LCS 2003. ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:17:22) L C S Patrick Kelley (00:17:25) This and there was a the networking team was a bunch of crotchy old gray-haired guys that look like me, but you know, 30 years ago they look ⁓ I didn't look like this. And they were like, I'm not doing any of this new fangled A V stuff. We'll let the new guy do it. And I was like, I'm happy to just be have a job. So I'll ⁓ I'll start learning LCS and live communication server. And this was like the first iteration ⁓ of of live chatting back and forth. And it was the first iteration ⁓ of of like live communication. And A V, and then that grew into LCS 2005 and L the LCS 2005 SP1, ⁓ which introduced for the first time in the Microsoft world ⁓ AV, a true camera on your desktop, and a true way to have a one-on-one conversation. And I was the person that was supposed to fix all these problems that companies were having when they were rolling it out. So that's my first AV job. Simon J Dudley (00:18:18) Now wasn't that about the same era that Microsoft went and bolted Skype? Patrick Kelley (00:18:23) No, that was several years later. LCS L LCS had a few iterations. LCS 2003, LCS 2005, and then they leaped into telephony with OCS or Office Communication Server. That was their first way to indoctrinate ⁓ true AV, but also telephony. That was the first big leap with the Nortel 1000 CS 1000s, like that's gonna take some people back too. Simon J Dudley (00:18:25) Right. Patrick Kelley (00:18:48) And then right after that, OC Microsoft bought Skype for I can't remember, was it five, six billion dollars? ⁓ Eight point five billion dollars, ⁓ which was Skype, Skype was consumer level A V, right? LCS, OCS was was ⁓ enterprise level A V. ⁓ And basically what Microsoft did was they just took the OCS label off of everything and they stamped Skype for business on top of that. That's all it really was. Simon J Dudley (00:18:55) Eight point five billion dollars. Simon J Dudley (00:19:15) I always got the impression because ⁓ for those of you don't know or remember, ⁓ Skype was it was a distributed, no centralized environment, wasn't it? Which was its major advantage is it allowed most of us at the time to do instant messenger with our friends at other companies without having to worry about some sort of corporate network. And then Microsoft went and bought it and then replaced over time all the things that made Skype good. And so they spent eight and a half billion dollars on a brand. Patrick Kelley (00:19:25) That's right. Patrick Kelley (00:19:44) That's exactly what happened, right? And they took away ⁓ all the loveliness of what Skype was and forced it into an enterprise model. And then you you probably remember there was a thing called public internet connectivity, a pick, which was another solution that Microsoft had, which connected Skype to things like Microsoft or MSN Messenger. That was another one. That was a competing product, Yahoo Messenger, ⁓ AOL Messenger. And all these had the ability to do audio video. But now we're forcing all these people to talk through PIC or public internet connectivity. Another thing that I supported at Microsoft. Simon J Dudley (00:20:20) Wow. Okay. So what happened next? Patrick Kelley (00:20:24) ⁓ Skype turned into Teams, my friend. That's what happened next, right? ⁓ well, you know what? A precursor to what happened to Teams is everyone was ⁓ A V was huge. ⁓ It took over the network, right? The networking engineers had to be A V experts because they're like, what are all these packets doing on my on my network now? Well, we need to We need to separate all these VLANs because now we need to have VLANs for the phone, VLANs for video, VLANs for just networking stuff. ⁓ And that's how my networking engineer background helped me really in that area where I can I could talk to the A V guys and the networking guys because they were two separate entities at the time. They would soon merge, right? And then ⁓ and then this thing came along called instant message mean meaning we all could instant message with Messenger and Yahoo Messenger and AOL. But we never did it at the corporate level. And we never did it at a level that really showcased how much more you can get done with sending in some messages back and forth instead of sending emails back and forth. Right. Emails had to be this corporate, you had to do that this this this formal way of you ask for a question, then you would wait an hour or two and get an answer back. And so messaging happened like that. And a company called Slack kind of figured out, hey, we can do this at the enterprise level. And Skype couldn't do that. We could instant message one-on-one, but we didn't have this thing theory like around meeting chats. We didn't have this theory around channels and then putting putting different projects in a channel, and all these like 10 people could instant message back and forth. And then Slack figured it out. Microsoft's like, Well, ⁓ this is actually working pretty good. ⁓ And so they built Teams to compete with Slack. Teams A V was secondary. Skype was still the king at A V back in the day on OCS and ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:21:49) Mm. Patrick Kelley (00:22:16) When Teams got invented, they just bolted on Skype right on top of Teams. Teams was tr primarily invented to compete with Slack. Simon J Dudley (00:22:25) Interesting. I wonder why they didn't buy them. I mean it would have been the obvious thing to do at the time. Patrick Kelley (00:22:27) ⁓ Okay. Patrick Kelley (00:22:32) Well, Microsoft does two things, right? They either buy you and assimilate you, or they just do it themselves. And they have enough horsepower and dev power and engineering power, they can just do it themselves. Simon J Dudley (00:22:42) Yeah, it's fair. And I I d don't want anyone to think that we're being anti Microsoft here. I I'm gonna go out a limb here and say, I think those guys are gonna be all right. Patrick Kelley (00:22:45) No, that's just a reality. Patrick Kelley (00:22:50) think they're I think they're gonna make it. Yeah, I think so. ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:22:53) I think they're gonna make it, at least for a while. Yeah. ⁓ I don't know how much they're worth this week, but ⁓ it's got a T at the front, so we'll leave it there. Patrick Kelley (00:22:59) I'm sure there's a four T something I can tell guarantee you. Simon J Dudley (00:23:03) Yeah, yeah. So did you see, you know, the the the podcast is is called Before It Was Obvious. Did you see these things coming? Patrick Kelley (00:23:12) ⁓ there was in the OCS days, this was one-on-one AV. ⁓ and so, you know, I could call you, Simon, on my my webcam and you can answer on your webcam and we could have this conversation. But what wasn't there yet was was meetings at the corporate conferencing room level, right? Those were still, ⁓ hey, we're gonna all go into a room, we're all gonna whiteboard this, somebody take notes. We hope something comes out of it. If you're virtual, you know what? You can call into a polycom trio that we have on top of the desk, right? And then we can hear you over the t the telephone. So we had audio conferencing. That was the big thing. People will get these big audio calls. And it was pretend there's 30 people on one phone call. Everyone's talking over each other. Nothing's getting done because you can't really hear anything. That was the first iteration of a software called Live Meeting. And this is where, hey, We can actually schedule a live meeting and have multiple people in one meeting from a video source. It wasn't even part of OCS. It was a completely separate application that Microsoft had just bought the company and then just renamed it, rebranded it, and put it in ⁓ in in in their portfolio. This is where I saw, you know what, there's something here. Wouldn't it be amazing to go into a competing room and not only hear that person, but then be able to see that person. Right. And that's when I'm like, there's something here and that's why s I stuck with A V for a while. Simon J Dudley (00:24:45) Yeah, it's interesting because I ⁓ again this is about you, not me. So I'm not gonna make this long. My my ⁓ my element is I'd been in the room part of meeting room video collab since the early 90s. And it was all ISDN and MUXs, and I remember once meeting a customer who said, We don't know why people aren't ringing our Japanese office. ⁓ they it was Hitachi and they had a UK office and a Japan office, and they said Patrick Kelley (00:24:50) Please do. Patrick Kelley (00:24:58) Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:25:10) Mm-hmm. Simon J Dudley (00:25:13) We don't know why people aren't using the video system. And I walked in the meeting room and there was a piece of paper on the wall saying, remember, this call costs 18 pounds sterling a minute. And I I just said, Well, take that down. And it it did help a little bit. ⁓ so you know, we came at this space. We ended up in a sort of similar world, but we came at it from a your stuff was all personal at the desk on a computer. Mine was all meeting room solutions. So Patrick Kelley (00:25:27) That would probably be it, yeah. ⁓ Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:25:39) Mm-hmm. Simon J Dudley (00:25:41) How did the meeting how did you fall into the meeting room element of it? Patrick Kelley (00:25:46) The the meeting rooms came a little bit later, right? Because as teams evolved, ⁓ Microsoft figured out we probably better incorporate these conferencing rooms into our solution. They didn't want disparate solutions spread all over the place. ⁓ And and so ⁓ live meeting got folded in, chat got folded in, instant messaging got folded in. ⁓ and then Microsoft Teams rooms came out ⁓ and and we started Trying to figure out how to deploy these Teams rooms, which were at the time very archaic and very simple, ⁓ right? There was no such thing as meeting bars. Hey, just throw up a meeting bar and we'll be good for a huddle room or something like that. No. These were incorporating like large, large conferencing rooms. And then all of a sudden, sound engineering has to be involved and audio engineering has to be involved because ⁓ most conferencing rooms have probably glass on one side so you can see in and then There's people on one side of the room compared to the other side of the room and the microphone phones in the middle were having this audio engineering problem. And that fascinated me. The the the the the architecture of a conference room really fascinated me. And so that's kind of how I dove deeper into A V and and rooms is Microsoft obviously were trying to evolve this product and I was I was part of that solution. Simon J Dudley (00:27:03) Right. And and you eventually left Microsoft. ⁓ then what happened? Patrick Kelley (00:27:06) I did. The ⁓ in in fantastic Microsoft ⁓ glory, ⁓ every first of all, my my job at Microsoft was voice technical solution professional. And so I dealt with everything A V, right? Everything telephony, ⁓ everything ⁓ audio, everything video, everything that touched the ⁓ a a web RTC kind of component. That was my baby. And I loved that job. And I was gonna my plan was to retire in that job. This was nineteen, no, sorry, this is 2019. 2019. ⁓ and around June 30th, every year, Microsoft ends their fiscal, right? And July 1st, brand new, ⁓ brand new things come out and brand new targets are met. And every salesperson has brand new commission numbers that they gotta hit. I lost my job basically. ⁓ I I I didn't lose my job in the sense that I got laid off. I lost my job in the sense that, hey Patrick, you know that lovely voice TSP job you have. And I was like, Yeah, love it. They're like, it doesn't exist anymore. ⁓ That's that's not the priority we're going down. Voice and telephony ⁓ and and video and instant messaging and chat, that's not where we're going. We're going with security this year, and that's our big focus. And you don't have security, so you don't you don't get to be your voice T S P anymore. Which really upset me because that was my whole world, right? I loved everything about it. ⁓ And I'd ⁓ ha I had had a couple of friends that had left Microsoft and went to this small company called Zoom. And and no one had heard of this company in 2019. ⁓ and and they knew I wasn't happy at Microsoft and they and they basically said, Patrick, what you want to do with your life? I'm like, I want to do everything A V. I want to do video and audio and rooms and telephony. And they're like, Simon J Dudley (00:28:34) Mm. Patrick Kelley (00:29:00) Do you know we do here at Zoom? I'm like, I have no idea. I've never heard of the company. They're like, We do audio and video and cameras and telephony. That's all we do. Why don't you come talk to us? I'm like, That's worth a conversation. Right. Well, I'll I'll go I'll talk to Nothing's hurt by talking to somebody about something. Simon J Dudley (00:29:18) Hindsight is an exact science, ⁓ right? But could your timing have been better? You 'cause you obviously saw a global pandemic coming, right? Patrick Kelley (00:29:20) ⁓ Yeah, exactly. Patrick Kelley (00:29:25) ⁓ no. We we didn't we all didn't we all prepared for that. Yeah. ⁓ so ⁓ around December, they around December, January, you know, ⁓ we've heard we kinda heard about the pandemic, right? It was on the news, but no one was really paying attention. ⁓ I thought I and it didn't factor in the consideration of, you know what, I'm gonna leave Microsoft ⁓ and and I'm gonna go to this small company and do what I love. ⁓ and that I finally made the decision. Simon J Dudley (00:29:32) Sure. Patrick Kelley (00:29:58) Around February of 2019. ⁓ And as soon as I made that decision, gave my two weeks to Microsoft, which by the way they didn't take, ⁓ but that's fine. ⁓ they're like, Who are you going to work for? I'm like, Zoom. They're they're a competitor, right? I'm like, Well, sort of. ⁓ well, you can have your two weeks and just just you could go on your merry way immediately. So ⁓ I got I got two weeks just to sit at home and watch the world implode in front of me ⁓ as ⁓ twenty yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:30:18) Well, well. Simon J Dudley (00:30:25) So that was that 2020, wasn't it? Tony Chang. Patrick Kelley (00:30:28) February of twenty twenty, right when the world's like, we're just gonna shut down right now and just kind of just stabilize on everything. And I just I just quit my job. ⁓ and ⁓ I remember like a week into my before I started at Zoom thinking, this was the worst decision I've ever made in my entire life. That they're gonna fold, they're gonna stop doing everything. And remember calling the boss that I was gonna start working for. I'm like, Simon J Dudley (00:30:38) Yep, I remember. Patrick Kelley (00:30:56) Hey, I just wanted to check in, see if everything's good. Do we still have a job lined up? He's like, dude, ⁓ everything's blown up. We we can't answer the phones fast enough. Like, do you want to start now? Because we're shorthanded. Little did I know, I started in March of 2020 ⁓ and ⁓ I was thrown into the fire very quickly. Simon J Dudley (00:31:16) Yeah, that was quite a time. ⁓ I was at Logitech at the time and ⁓ and I had been at ⁓ ISE in Amsterdam ⁓ and about ⁓ 90 reset ⁓ vendors who were meant to be there from China didn't come. ⁓ my wife and I got extremely sick on the way home. I'm not saying I am the super spreader for Texas, but we could well have been the super spreader for Texas. Who knew? There was no tests at that time. Patrick Kelley (00:31:20) Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:31:24) A Patrick Kelley (00:31:30) Yeah. Sure. Patrick Kelley (00:31:39) ⁓ You're ⁓ Yeah. ⁓ Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:31:46) And and our world blew up as well. I mean we it was like, will that work as a webcam? Yes, right. I'm buying it. Do you know what it is? No, but I'm buying it. ⁓ We couldn't sell any we could sell anything at the time. It was a remarkable era. So what were you doing for Zoom other than being wildly lucky? I assume people rubbed your top of your head for luck, did they, at that point? Patrick Kelley (00:31:53) Doesn't matter. ⁓ Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:32:07) Yeah, that's ⁓ I didn't feel very lucky because I was ⁓ those were twelve, fifteen hour days. And I'm like, what did I get myself into ⁓ with the with this? ⁓ but I was I was hired as a distinguished architect ⁓ for Zoom. Basically, ⁓ there's like three levels of of engineering architects at at Zoom. There's the SC level, right? You're doing pre-sales with the AE's and you're doing maybe a little bit of post-sales troubleshooting, doing a lot of POCs, things like that. And then there's the architects or the the architects above them that are designing, you know, solutions and answering maybe ⁓ higher level technical problems. And then there's the distinguished architects above that that are talking to the architects or things that are wrong, talking to the product group about things that we need to build, ⁓ ideas that we need to to make, ⁓ talking to the marketing team, talking to PMs, how to market this new product and how it works with a competitive stance, like. What does Microsoft have? What does Cisco have? What does Google have? And that's kind of where I started is that they're like, hey Patrick, I was a little Microsoft guy. First of all, there was only two distinguished architects on the whole team when I joined in 2020. ⁓ and then Microsoft, Zoom started competing with Microsoft Teams, right? And Microsoft hadn't put a lot of effort into competing with Zoom just yet, right? They were a they were a small fry. They were looking at the Cisco's of the world and the and the Googles of the world. Zoom wasn't even on their radar. And then all of a sudden, 300 million users later, and knock, you know, a a few months later, Zoom's a big, big competitor competitor of Microsoft Teams. ⁓ And and so my my basically my my job was to convince customers that we're on Teams, hey, guess what? There's a better product. There's a a ⁓ a product with higher quality ⁓ that meets your demands better. So I was brought in more of a competitive architect than anything. Simon J Dudley (00:34:02) Right, right. And it and it obviously was a gangbusters, what two, three years, I suppose. It's fun it's funny. It wasn't that long ago, but even I'm forgetting how long it took. Patrick Kelley (00:34:12) It took about a year and a half ⁓ of just pure just balls to the wall ⁓ Zoom ⁓ the Zoom world. ⁓ when it started to go maybe publicly because everyone's like, I need Zoom. They're like, you know you have Teams and Skype and everything. Like, yeah, but everyone else is using Zoom. I have to use Zoom. So it it it became Zoom started out as an enterprise product. Simon J Dudley (00:34:33) Yeah, yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:34:38) It was designed for enterprises, right? It was not designed for consumer level. It was designed for for educations and large enterprises. But the thing was, it was just so darn easy to use. You know, grandma could use it without this big help desk coming on and figuring out, hey, how do we have set this up in your office? And there wasn't some training manual that you had to do. You just literally hit join and you were in a video meeting. Like there was nothing to do, it was it was just so, so simple that it went To a consumer model, right? But Zoom ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:35:10) Yeah, I completely, completely agree. I mean, I I I was on the hardware side but saw the the scenario and it was the I think the first product in the vide video space that was that had a network effect. ⁓ Nothing else really had a network effect. And the network effect is the old Metcalf's law ⁓ rule, right? Of the utility of a network goes up at the square of the number of nodes in it. In other words, the more people who have it, the more useful it is, right? It's But the problem with that is, of course, is it's always advantageous to be the last person to join it. Because then you've got millions of people to call. If you're the first person to get it, then you spent all this money and you haven't got anyone to ring with it. It's all a bit pointless. So that was the breakthrough that Zoom had. ⁓ and of course it makes sense that Zoom would be, I think a lot of people think of Zoom now as Patrick Kelley (00:35:46) That's true. Patrick Kelley (00:35:56) Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:36:03) at least in that era as a consumer brand, because every yoga teacher on the planet suddenly started doing calls over Zoom. ⁓ but of course Eric and his team, engineering team, had all come out of ⁓ Cisco WebEx, hadn't they? Patrick Kelley (00:36:07) Sure. ⁓ Patrick Kelley (00:36:15) Yep, that's exactly right. It was designed as an enterprise level with ⁓ with data centers all over the world and and backup data centers and MMRs and this architecture was built to be ⁓ to evolve quickly, right? The design model could evolve quickly. So you didn't s have to necessarily build up a whole bunch of data centers all over the world to make this all mesh work. No, you could literally just build upon build. You can create servers that could literally stay in the same data center and you could exponentially build these because they're all VMs too, right? You could you just you're just ripping off servers like this because you went from 10 million people to 300 million people. You scaled that because your design was so perfect at the small part that it could exponentially handle 300 million people in a matter of months. And that was the beauty of it. Simon J Dudley (00:37:07) So I think no one who knows anything about this space wouldn't know that Zoom was a wildly successful play at the time. And I'm not suggesting they're not now, and they clearly are a wildly successful company. But what did you get wrong there? You as Zoom rather than you individually. What do you think? You went, ⁓ we should have, you know, tacked left when we actually tacked right. Is there an example? Patrick Kelley (00:37:31) That's a great question. I ⁓ I think we were such a young company at the time and and ⁓ we weren't built for growth, right? We were built to obviously grow. Simon J Dudley (00:37:44) From a from a people perspective rather than from a technology perspective, right? Patrick Kelley (00:37:48) We were we were a thousand people big, right? And we were essentially a startup in the eyes of enterprises, right? We now Eric had been around for, you know, the he had started that company six, eight years before the pandemic hit. So of course they had some some horsepower, but not enterprise level horsepower, where ⁓ we have to s make decisions based on not a million users, but now 300 million users. And we didn't make those decisions based on, hey, how does this one thing affect 300 million people? Because we were making decisions based on, hey, how's that affect the million people? Things like I'll give you an example. Microsoft obviously has billions of users. So when they make a change in their software code and they update something, there's a rigorous QA process that has to go through months and months and months of iterations, months of trials, months of betas. before they released the real thing to right to enterprises, because you can't just break one thing. You're gonna break a lot of things. I I I think we didn't have that level of mentality early on because we weren't used to that thinking. We were thinking, Hey, let's just push this update. I think this fixes it, because four to five people had this problem and you're like, well, we didn't really truly test it as much as we probably should have. Right. So Simon J Dudley (00:39:12) Yeah, it's a fair question. I mean, you can say, well, it's ninety nine point nine nine percent reliable, and then you've got a billion users and you've got a hundred thousand support calls. It's like, hang on, this has all gone horribly wrong. Yeah, yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:39:16) That's true. Yeah. Yeah that are gone. Yeah. That's exactly right. Yeah. We so we weren't ⁓ staffed to handle that level of of of growth. ⁓ so I if and that's not a that's not a bad thing, right? Because we were just we were we were kind of learning a day ahead. It's one of those things ⁓ there there's a saying clause, sometimes you don't want to know how the sausage is made, right? You're set when you go to a butcher. ⁓ That's a little scary. It's a little scary behind the scenes. Yeah, yeah. So ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:39:45) You never know wanna know how the sausage is made. That's ⁓ it's ground up earlobes and arseholes mainly. Patrick Kelley (00:39:53) We grew as fast as we could and we had to become a r a enterprise level company in the blink of an eye. And those are those are some tough growing pains. Simon J Dudley (00:40:02) Yeah. ⁓ And I wanna point out for those of you who aren't aware of this, Zoom is still a wildly successful company. I mean, you I mean, it's not as if you can ⁓ but but no company is perfect and no scenario is perfect. You can it it's swan like though, isn't it? You can look very serene on the surface and everyone's going crazy underneath, right? Patrick Kelley (00:40:09) One hundred percent. Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:40:20) ⁓ We weren't the only ones, I'm sure. Simon J Dudley (00:40:23) No, no, no. Far from it. Okay, so you've bit Zoom, I think Zoom has actually changed a lot more over the last three or four years than most people understand. ⁓ I think that most people think, well, Zoom is just a video calling app, right? But but you're moving into a different world. So ⁓ I've for those of you who haven't seen it, I've written quite a lot about and I'd be interested, Patrick, in your opinion on this. I ⁓ Patrick Kelley (00:40:36) That's probably true. Simon J Dudley (00:40:53) perceived technology have basically four stages, right? There's stage one where it's effectively a science experiment. So, you know, it kind of works in a lab if the if the incense has been burnt in the right way. Then there's the technology works, sorry, the user works around the technology. So in Video Collab, ISDN would be the science experiment. ⁓ calling on via ⁓ via Patrick Kelley (00:41:00) Mm. Patrick Kelley (00:41:17) Sure. Simon J Dudley (00:41:22) IP networks or IP addresses on early internet video calls would be the user works around the technology. You actually needed to know about what audio algorithm you're using, right? ⁓ you changed that, Zoom changed that because you just said here's a call, and now the technology worked around the user. And then the fourth stage is the technology dissolves into a larger workflow. Patrick Kelley (00:41:35) Anyway. Simon J Dudley (00:41:51) And you know, you could argue that ⁓ word processing is like that. How many of us actually open a word processor to write a document these days? Most of the time we just open an email client and just type or talk to it from there as an example. But almost all technology seems to go through those four stages. And Zoom seems to be right in the mu middle of changing from a the best individual ⁓ app in the market to something greater. So Patrick Kelley (00:41:57) Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:42:02) Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:42:20) Where is well how have you got how far have you got on that project? 'Cause I I even I don't keep up with all the things you're up to and I use your stuff every day. Patrick Kelley (00:42:27) Yeah, yeah, that's ⁓ that's a great question. Is that like when I used to wear my Zoom shirt, like I would have like a Zoom t shirt and I'd go to the grocery store, they're like, my god, I love your videos. I'm like, Yeah, I get it, but there's a lot more stuff that we do. ⁓ and and they were so far ahead in the video world because Eric had obviously Brought that up through through WebEx, he understood how video architecture needed to be designed. And that's one of the reasons he started Zoom, is because he's like, This this WebEx thing needs to be completely re-architected. And Cisco's like, nah, we're good. And he's like, Okay, well then I'll I'll start my own company with a way better idea. And it was a better idea. And they were exponentially better in quality and the ability to scale and the ability of a reliability for poor networking. It was completely designed from the ground up for that video reason alone. But then the customers love video so much, they're like, hey, can you we would love the same thing with telephony, right? ⁓ because we still gotta make phone calls. People still make phone calls. It's shocking that I know, but people still so he built a a phone architecture based on the same video architecture to scale with reliability and scalability and survivability. And then ⁓ Zoom phone came into place. And then people are like, hey. We really love it if you had a chat solution like Slack. Guess what? They built one. ⁓ And then they would like a room solution. So Zoom Rooms came along. And then every single iteration of the collaboration communication world started happening under one client instead of four or five or six different clients. And now Zoom has got an individual. There obviously every company in the world is an AI company now, right? So you have to stack AI on top of everything. ⁓ Now they got into contact center and and and ⁓ customer engagement. ⁓ Now they've got into productivity. They've got into email and calendaring. And so now this one small app became this huge productivity, collaboration, communication, and AI ecosystem, not just an application anymore that did one thing good. Patrick Kelley (00:44:39) Now it can do a whole bunch of things good. And I guess that's probably one of the things that I struggle with the most is ⁓ informing and enabling customers like, hey, ⁓ we do that too. Like they're like, yeah. ⁓ For example, Zoom Rooms comes with digital signage. There's a whole bunch of digital signage companies out there, right? You go to the airport, all everything you see on the terminals, that's a digital sign. Zoom does that. And a lot of customers are like, hey, we have Zoom rooms, we'd love to do Zoom rooms, but we can't afford it because we have to pay for this digital signage solution. I'm like, you know, Zoom can just do the digital signage too. You don't need a separate application, a separate software, a separate ⁓ contract, a separate support structure. They can do it all. And that that's probably one of the biggest hindrances is people don't understand the true power of what Zoom can do. Simon J Dudley (00:45:29) But it's interesting, isn't it, that you've effectively you've turned yourself into Zoom has turned itself into a stage four, into a workflow with video as an element within it rather than as a standalone product. And and I think that that's a very sensible thing to do. ⁓ it's it's interesting to me how many companies, not just in the video space, in all of technology, they're all running into each other. ⁓ I I used to use a product called D script for Patrick Kelley (00:45:54) Yeah. Sure. ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:45:57) ⁓ for editing video because you edit by words not by waveform then it's fantastic and then i used ⁓ a product we're using right now called riverside that records video calls on both ends and says shows that you don't have any internet issues when you're ⁓ uploading the files right fantastic well now ⁓ i opened riverside for the first time in a while yesterday went ⁓ hang on i've opened d script by mistake i mean it looks like d script and then i opened d script and went Patrick Kelley (00:46:01) Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:46:26) ⁓ that also now does what so I have to pick one and everything kind of turns into everything else. I think that's a very interesting position as to what happens next. ⁓ the barrier to entry, I guess, for so many things is dropping with AI. ⁓ Patrick Kelley (00:46:32) Yeah the Patrick Kelley (00:46:41) ⁓ The yep. ⁓ Right. ⁓ Is that let's be honest, every software maker in the world wants you to stay in their software as long as absolutely possible. We don't want to do context switching where, hey, for you get I'll use your Word document example. In order to make a Word document, I gotta open Word. I gotta leave email and go to Word. Nope, I'll just do it in an email. It just saves me a step right there. Right. I gotta leave I gotta leave email and I gotta go to Excel. I gotta go to PowerPoint. Every single hop is called a context switch. And every time you hop, you're losing productivity. So the Simon J Dudley (00:47:23) Cut paste is perhaps in the era of AI, perhaps the I spend forty percent of my entire working life doing cut and paste from one app to another. We need to organize that. So so at Zoom now you've been there ⁓ six years, seven, six and a half years. What's exciting you about what Zoom's up to at the moment? Patrick Kelley (00:47:26) Greatest thing. Patrick Kelley (00:47:32) Bueno. Patrick Kelley (00:47:37) Yeah, six and a half years. Yeah. Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:47:44) I think I'm gonna circle back to what we were just talking about. It's that conversation piece ⁓ of of how we do our jobs. ⁓ Because think about this meeting that we're having this this this podcast that we're having right now, right? We didn't just start talking, right? You sent a message to me, I said yes. Then we escalated that to an email and then we talked about email. And then we had to set a calendar item, right? That's a whole conversation that happened before the meeting even started. Right. That was that was what we call in the meeting life cycle. That's that's before pre-meeting. There's a lot of work that has to happen before the meeting even starts. Right. And so a lot of people have to do have to do a lot of research. You have to maybe set up a PowerPoint slide for a presentation, ⁓ maybe do some Excel d documents ⁓ because you're maybe doing a proposal. You did a s a ton of of work before the meeting even started. Then during the meeting, this podcast, we're having a conversation for an hour or two. ⁓ And then that's where the other work starts because after the meeting, you gotta put all this together, whether it's editing, you gotta ⁓ then upload this to YouTube or LinkedIn. There's a whole meeting lifecycle, and you've had to use 10, 15 tools to get all of that stuff done throughout the whole meeting. What if you can do all of that stuff in one application? Right. And they'll well i in a fictitious world, ⁓ in a unicorn world, what if I could literally Simon J Dudley (00:49:02) Yes. Patrick Kelley (00:49:13) Look at all the stuff that we did before the meeting in one application. Maybe all the meetings we had before the meeting even started, all the emails, all the chats. Put a document together of, hey, give me an idea of what we can talk about. Create an agenda for this meeting. Have the meeting while we're going on. ⁓ As there's a meeting coming in right now, I'll have to decline that one. ⁓ Then during the meeting, something's taking notes because I don't want to furiously be taking notes. I want to be paying attention to the meeting, right? So what if there's something AI is taking taking some notes? And then after the meeting, I get a glorious document of everything that Simon and Patrick talked about, the tasks that were going to be taken away, who's assigned those tasks and dates where those tasks are going to be done. And then after the meeting, I can look at all that stuff and come up with next steps in order to continue this meeting in a sales cycle, for example. I could do all that in one. Simon J Dudley (00:50:02) I think now I know this is a podcast, not a not a sort of traditional meet video meeting room environment, but just to give the viewers an under or the listeners a an understanding of this, I probably spent two hours doing the prep for this. I probably should have spent more time. ⁓ but whatever. I spent two hours. We spent perhaps two hours on the call. I certainly booked out two hours for the call. And the editing process will probably take me Patrick Kelley (00:50:07) Sure. Patrick Kelley (00:50:17) Yeah. ⁓ Simon J Dudley (00:50:30) six to ten hours. Now I'm not a very good editor as you will see during the edit. ⁓ and I'll probably lose interest halfway through. ⁓ not because you're not fantastic, but because my d ADHD has made me go off and look at another shiny item, right? ⁓ it's a lot of work. You know, it's it's probably a full day at least of a business day for me to have a one and a half to two hour meeting with you. If I could make that if I could halve that time. Patrick Kelley (00:50:31) Mm-hmm. Patrick Kelley (00:50:44) Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:50:59) it would be enormously more productive. So no, I think it's a very interesting idea. ⁓ and are you gonna continue to be the CTE or whatever the old title is that you like to call yourself this week? Patrick Kelley (00:51:06) Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:51:14) As as long as Zoom can can stand me ⁓ doing it, I'll I'll keep doing it, that's for sure. I I ⁓ it's a labor of love. It's not it's one of those things where ⁓ I I have the ⁓ hopefully I guess I have the respect from my boss where he just lets me do things that are impactful. Like there's not a list of, hey Patrick, here's the five things you need to be do to be successful today. It is Patrick. Come up with ideas for the five things you need to be successful. And that's listening. I'm in a lot of customer calls. I work a lot with the AEs, I like work a lot with the SEs. ⁓ I try to find friction in their day and then alleviate that somehow with whether it's an enablement exercise, it's a video, an internal video, where I solve a problem for them, maybe come up with a talk track. ⁓ how do we beat Microsoft at a certain thing? And then give ideas to the all the field because I don't scale well. I can't be in every single meeting with every single customer, right? So I need to arm everyone that's in the field to have these discussions. ⁓ then it's the whole next part of that's keeping up with what we're coming out with. That's the other problem with ⁓ this is a first world problem to have is we are we grow so quickly here at Zoom. We innovate so fast that you have to keep pace with what we're doing, not in the market today, but What's on the roadmap for tomorrow? And then ⁓ how to strategize and present that into a customer idea of how this is gonna solve a problem that they probably don't even know they're gonna have. So ⁓ it's a lot and it takes a lot of evangelizing to have all that stuff come together. Simon J Dudley (00:52:52) Yeah, and and clearly, I mean, you've said it yourself. One of the problems that you have is that most of your client don't even know that you do all these other things, right? So the storytelling element seems to me a pretty important one. Is that something? Do you get involved in the working out what the story should be, or are you more in the somebody else works out what the story should be and you present that story? Or is it collaborative? Patrick Kelley (00:52:58) ⁓ That's true. ⁓ Patrick Kelley (00:53:13) No. It's a collaborative I mean, it's not just me in a you know a silo doing it. I certainly ⁓ I work a lot with our marketing team. I work a lot with the PMs of what they're developing, what they're coming out with. I work a lot with sales and revenue of hey, w does this story work? Does this story not work? So yes, as a team, we have to come up with not only all the data to create the story, but then somebody's gotta figure out how to tell the story. ⁓ Right. And that's the whether that's a sales deck. Whether that's an enablement video, ⁓ scenarios that you're gonna see, ⁓ discovery questions that you're gonna have to discover what the customer needs, you know, ⁓ things that the customer c questions you, you better have an answer for. That the whole story takes a a whole team. And yes, I'm thankfully I'm part of that team. Simon J Dudley (00:54:02) Yeah. All right. So let's switch gears. ⁓ Tell me about a couple of people in your career who influenced it in a positive way and and how did they influence it? Patrick Kelley (00:54:16) I actually mentioned one of them earlier. His name was Jesse Myers, was ⁓ my first boss that gave me my real my real IT job. He was at ESPN at at the time. I remember interviewing for him with for him, ⁓ and he asked me, this is because I was I was pretty green, he asked me what DHCP was and what DNS was. And I had no idea what they were. I had ⁓ I had zero I didn't work at that level. ⁓ and I remember walking out of that interview. Really disappointed that I didn't get that job, knowing full well there was no way they would ever hire me. He was the first guy that saw something in me that I didn't see in myself. And that was hunger and passion and the ability to want to learn. ⁓ and so Jesse Myers was that first person that literally took a shot when he probably shouldn't have taken a shot on me. ⁓ but thankfully, I would like to tell I would like to for him to say, I I think it worked. ⁓ he was the first person. Second person, ⁓ Brent Wichell is his name, was a voice. He was a TSP, a technical solution professional ⁓ at Microsoft. ⁓ And I was coming from the Microsoft world where I was super nerdy, ⁓ super technical, and I was getting into pre-sales, and I wanted to overpower you with all the knowledge of protocols and Wireshark and network traces that I had and how I could solve. When you're selling something, no one gives a shit about that stuff, Simon. They don't care about that stuff. They want to know how you're going to solve a problem. And you do that by telling a story of how this one solution can impact you and solve a business problem that you're having. I couldn't tell that story. I didn't have the ability to tell a story that was directed, that resonated with people that weren't nerds. I needed to tell stories that resonated with people that had the checkbook, right? That's where you need to tell a story. I didn't have that skill, but Brent Wichell had that skill. And I would be in meetings with him. Simon J Dudley (00:56:05) Yeah. Yes, yes. Patrick Kelley (00:56:13) And we technically had the same job. He was way better at it than I was. And I was humble enough to say, you know what? I need to learn from that guy. And I learned how to tell a story. I learned how to be in front of an audience. And I learned how to take technical, nerdy stuff and make it so the checkbook holders could understand and why they needed that to solve a problem. They probably didn't even know they had. Simon J Dudley (00:56:38) Know the anatomy I completely agree with that mindset. My ⁓ way of thinking of this is a bit like knowing kung fu, right? You walk into a rough bar and you want the confidence to walk to the bar and order a drink. What you don't want to do is use the kung fu, right? Because the everything gets smashed, you don't get a drink, right? ⁓ and everyone turns out with what's a bits of wood sticking out of places, right? So Patrick Kelley (00:56:45) Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:56:52) Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:56:56) What's the point? Yeah. Yeah. Patrick Kelley (00:57:05) Yeah. Simon J Dudley (00:57:07) I think it's very important. I think technical knowledge, too many salespeople in my experience, and SEs for that matter, think that knowing all the answers is what matters. And actually it's knowing what questions to ask is what matters. The questions are far more important than the answers. But having the confidence ⁓ to ⁓ know that you know the answers, ⁓ I think is part of the part of the scenario. Patrick Kelley (00:57:21) That's exactly right. Patrick Kelley (00:57:32) Yeah, the the one of the greatest salespeace per people I ever met was this woman at Microsoft. ⁓ And she and you ⁓ in your mind, my in my mind, when I think of salespeople, I think of like closers that are just talking, that own the room, that are telling stories. And she was the exact opposite. She was kind of an introvert, but she she kind of already knew the answer. So she would literally ask questions and discovery questions and make the customer come up with their own solution, knowing full well where she wanted to guide them. She would just guide them with the questions. So by the end of the close, they've closed themselves. She didn't have to do anything. All because she didn't talk a lot and ask great pertinent questions. Simon J Dudley (00:58:18) Okay. ⁓ What happens next? What what's the next five years look like for you? Patrick Kelley (00:58:24) Wow. ⁓ I was just on I was on a game show, kind of like this technical game show earlier ⁓ today. And they asked kind of what's what's the next five years ⁓ look like in IT, you know? 'Cause that tells you where your job's gonna be. ⁓ 'Cause a twenty year the knowledge I had twenty years ago is not really pertinent to the to what job I do today, right? Maybe the experiences and the ability to have have the knowledgeable educational Simon J Dudley (00:58:40) Yeah, fair. Patrick Kelley (00:58:53) Conversations is ⁓ but those technical things aren't really pertinent what to what I do today. Even five years ago, no one was talking about AI in the workplace, but today they are. That's true. Yeah, everyone, no one will shut up about AI at this point, right? Sam, yeah, that's ⁓ that's a good point. Is that ⁓ how is AI, because it's going to, how is it going to change the landscape of what we do? Simon J Dudley (00:59:04) No one isn't talking about AI in the workplace, whether it's pertinent or not, my experience. Patrick Kelley (00:59:20) As individuals, right? We can all be more productive in three to five years because AI can do a lot of the mundane tasks that we took care of today. But what does that mean for us as people that are in front of the customer, that are talking to the customer, that are understanding what the customer needs and wants and solves? I am hoping, Simon, that my job doesn't change too much. I'm not talking about the technology. We all know that's going to change in five years. I'm talking about what I do for the customer today, what I do at Zoom today, what I do on LinkedIn and YouTube today. ⁓ I really ⁓ my one of my favorite things, I told I was a college football coach, is teaching people and coaching people. I don't think AI can do that at the level that I do it. And maybe I'm in five years I might be completely wrong, but I'm still gonna think that a customer is gonna want to talk to a human being about their problems and then solve them person to person. So I hope my dog doesn't go away, honestly. Simon J Dudley (01:00:17) I think you've got a fair point there because I mean, how can you have a human connection if there's not a human in the loop? Right? It it's not it doesn't se I mean, maybe again, maybe we're both wrong and we'll all be living on the moon by then, but but probably not. Patrick Kelley (01:00:22) ⁓ It's very tough. Yeah, it's very tough. Patrick Kelley (01:00:28) Sure, yeah. Yeah, I'm guessing not. Simon J Dudley (01:00:32) All right, another couple of questions. If you were if you had an eighteen year old in your life and they were sitting there going, I grew up in whatever it is, southeast Colorado and I'm thinking of going to college. But I don't know if I should or not, what would your advice be? Patrick Kelley (01:00:44) Yeah. ⁓ Patrick Kelley (01:00:49) Yeah. Ha ha ⁓ this might be a little bit controversial, ⁓ Simon. ⁓ Simon J Dudley (01:00:57) I hope so. That's the whole point in this. Patrick Kelley (01:01:01) ⁓ and this is not to degrade going to college. That's what you want do, fine. ⁓ I don't think that I would have ⁓ if I was today, if I was 18, I would not have gone to college. ⁓ I think growing up on a farm and a ranch taught me how to do things with my hands that I typically, if I grew up in the city, I wouldn't know how to do. I wouldn't know how to weld, I wouldn't know how to plumb, I wouldn't know how to run electricity, I wouldn't know how to do the staple of things that people still need in this world. And I think everyone was coaxed and motivated to go to college. And then we lost a lot of trades and craftsmanship on how to do the the tangible things that make our world run today. So if I were gonna talk to my 18-year-old, and I kind of had this conversation with my 24-year-old, I would tell them to go into crafts and tradesmanship. I would tell them to be an HVAC guy because guess what? We all need air conditioning and heating. No matter how rich or poor you are, no matter what technology does, you're gonna want to be hot or want to be cold. You want a solution. You're gonna need running water. You're gonna need electricity. You're gonna need ⁓ infrastructure and welding. ⁓ I think those things are gonna grow exponentially. Just think of a data center getting built today. Data centers aren't built by nerds, Simon. They're built by craftsmen and tradesmen that know how to do those things that are essential to just the infrastructure of the world. That's where I would tell somebody to go. Simon J Dudley (01:02:24) Okay. And what about the thirty five year old who's already in our world? Patrick Kelley (01:02:29) That is a tougher that's a tougher one. ⁓ even the 55 year olds that doesn't know what to do sometimes. The 35 year old What's not going to go away, I guess I'll circle back to what I said earlier. Technology is going to take those mundane white-collar jobs away. That's just how AI works, right? Is I I give this example of like, hey, is AI going to take jobs? 1000%, it's going to take jobs. ⁓ When when they when Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, guess what? A lot of candle makers went out of business. That's just how it worked. When when Henry Ford invented the car, a lot of people that ran horse carriages are out of work. That's just how technology works. You better come up not not come up with you better work in a field that doesn't rely solely on technology. ⁓ this is probably another controversial topic. ⁓ If I was a graphic designer at 35 today, right? If I gr design graphics, I'd I'd be pretty scared about my job because I can literally go to ChatGPT right now. It's like, hey, this is on a cool animated graphic and I can get an answer in 30 seconds. I don't have to wait three weeks for somebody to design it. That that would be scary to me. I would I would say, yeah, thirty-five is probably a little bit old to start a trade craftsmanship and electric electrical engine an apprenticeship, but it's not gonna fail. Simon J Dudley (01:03:50) But it's it's also to be fair, it's also the the old Chinese thing, you know, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time to plant a tree is right now. you know, if you're 35 and your industry's dying, then then you can't say, well, I'll just eke it out, what, for another 30 years? I mean, that's not realistic. You have to find a reinvention, I think is important. My personal thoughts are that Patrick Kelley (01:03:57) ⁓ Right, that's true. ⁓ That's a good point. Patrick Kelley (01:04:09) Yeah. ⁓ Simon J Dudley (01:04:17) There's a lot of interesting things to do between spaces. So if you're if you're technical and you can talk to clients, plainly you're an example of that. There's something in there. If you're only really good at talking to people, or only really good at the technical side, you're easier to replace. If you're a multifaceted person, you could probably do something more interesting. Patrick Kelley (01:04:24) Sure. Yeah. Patrick Kelley (01:04:34) Yeah. Agreed. Patrick Kelley (01:04:39) Yeah, yeah. There's no it's not a zero or one, right? There are there is a gray area in between that there was ⁓ we were we're getting a new door installed in our house. ⁓ And they were measuring the door and they're like, we can tell you what and we picked out the door from this catalog, and the guy's like, I can tell you what it's gonna look like. And he went and took a picture. He's like, We got this great software that can re-impose the door on your door and tell you exactly what it looks like. And he showed the picture to me. And it was basically like a cut and paste of their their stock door, like stapled over our our house. And I'm like, this is your solution. ⁓ It was about that bad. ⁓ you're a door salesman. My wife literally took a picture. She's like, this is what it's gonna look like. Within a minute, she had surpassed his software, and she's not a technical nerd at all, but she knows that how to use those tools. That's what you gotta do. Simon J Dudley (01:05:18) Did he cut it out with a piece of paper? Simon J Dudley (01:05:33) Yeah. I I think the questions are becoming more important than the answers. The answers are easy, but if you don't know what questions to ask, then you're in trouble. Patrick Kelley (01:05:40) That's easier. Yeah. ⁓ Yeah. You you ⁓ if it prompt engineering is gonna be the the newest way we can make a make an impression fast. Simon J Dudley (01:05:51) Yeah. All right. So ⁓ controversial topic from me. And and if you don't want to talk about this one, I perfectly understand. You have talked a bit publicly about this. You had a very significant life-changing event happen to you in the last 12 months, which a lot of us were very appalled and sad to hear about. I don't know you've talked about you've written about it, but I don't know you've talked about it. Do you want to talk about that or w is this just too Patrick Kelley (01:06:05) Mm-hmm. It's true. Simon J Dudley (01:06:19) painful a subject and I would understand if it is. Patrick Kelley (01:06:21) No, I you're right. I have written a lot about it. ⁓ I don't think I've I've never talked to anybody about it. ⁓ November 24th, last year. ⁓ I don't know how or how know why, because I have zero memory of it. ⁓ I apparently fell down the stairs to my basement. ⁓ to this day, I have no idea ⁓ what happened. ⁓ because I fell down the stairs ⁓ and ⁓ the next day I woke up. in intensive care in the hospital. And what happened when I fell down the stairs, I I broke my neck in in two places. ⁓ I fractured my face ⁓ in seven different bones in my face were broken. And part of the swelling ⁓ of ⁓ of ⁓ the the facial fractures created so much pressure that it it killed the optic nerve ⁓ in my right eye. So ⁓ I'm now permanently blind in my right eye. Thankfully ⁓ the the bones have healed ⁓ And thankfully, I'm thankful I don't actually have a memory ⁓ of of what happened. So ⁓ it was a grueling ⁓ it's been a it's been a few months since then, but it was a grueling process of getting back to what is now normal, which is zero death perception ⁓ and and ⁓ going through life, ⁓ seeing things with just ⁓ one eye. But I'm laser focused with that one eye, Simon. I'm laser focused. Simon J Dudley (01:07:25) Yeah. Simon J Dudley (01:07:46) I bet you are. And I'm sorry to hear it. I know many of us were. ⁓ it's one of those random accidents that just luck or bad luck, isn't it? One slip and you can do something really serious. Patrick Kelley (01:07:57) It certainly puts into perspective taking one day at a time. And ⁓ and it's given me no pun intended, give me a different ⁓ look on life ⁓ to a degree. ⁓ and things that I would probably have been hesitant to do or try, I'm like, you know what? Why wait? Why why not take advantage of of today and ⁓ and try to be I know this is kind of weird to say, but everyone says it. Try to be grateful for what you have today, because you honestly, you have 100% ⁓ don't know if you got tomorrow. Simon J Dudley (01:08:31) Yeah, fair. My friend, this has been just a joy, and I really hope that our audience has stayed with us for as long as they have. ⁓ or as long as we have. ⁓ I guess we couldn't really check out of this. No, but it was this has been a wonderful conversation and I really appreciate it. What questions should I have asked you about that I didn't? Patrick Kelley (01:08:43) Yeah, yeah, yeah. We we didn't have a choice, assignment. Thank you. Patrick Kelley (01:08:55) my gosh, that's a qu that's a that's the hardest question you ask all day. ⁓ Simon J Dudley (01:08:59) That's there you go, that's why it's at the end. Patrick Kelley (01:09:03) Huh, I I don't know if there is a question that you you could you could have asked. ⁓ I like for the viewers that don't know, ⁓ or if you probably have you probably guessed already, we did not we did not play on this conversation, right? There was no agenda on this conversation. There was no written script. Like when you watch ⁓ jo well, probably didn't watch Johnny Carson, but some of you there's a pla guy John Johnny Carson, and when he would have guests out to his to his ⁓ show. They already knew the questions that he was gonna ask, right? They were green screen prepared questions, and everyone had to be able to study and have the ability to answer those questions appropriately because they probably had some PR guy that wrote the answer to their question. I love the ability because I I've been on a lot of podcasts, and a lot of podcasts are there's 20 or 30 prepared questions. ⁓ I ⁓ to anybody that's gonna ask me on a podcast and you do that, that's fine. I'm probably not going to answer it the way you want me to answer it. I don't like a scripted version of how life goes because this is not what would happen if we were at a party, Simon, talking. Like, okay, Simon, it's your turn to ask a question. And then and then here's the ⁓ that's not how life works. Life works spontaneously like this. This is how people are truly authentic. You're just, ⁓ I hope I didn't say anything that was too controversial. I look back, I'm like, ⁓ okay, well, they're good. All right. ⁓ That's just how that the ⁓ this is how I think podcasts work. Simon J Dudley (01:10:19) Yeah, yeah. Simon J Dudley (01:10:25) I do. Patrick Kelley (01:10:31) Like this. Simon J Dudley (01:10:33) I mean, f ⁓ for the audience, for those of you who are with us on this one, I will say for the record, the primary reason I didn't ask Patrick a ton of questions in advance ⁓ is that my ADHD just stopped me being able to do that. And I just cannot cope with that. And secondly, the reason I've done the podcast in the first place is I spent the last thirty years meeting some fascinating people. And having some really interesting conversations and learning amazing things about people's lives. And then I've got no one to share it with. And I thought, this seems like a bunch of people whose ⁓ story could be interesting to others. And and you know, modern podcasting and YouTube allow us to do these sort of long form stuff, which even 10 years ago you couldn't have done. So I think it's been great. And ⁓ it's funny for for some of my Patrick Kelley (01:11:02) Yeah. Patrick Kelley (01:11:06) Yeah. Patrick Kelley (01:11:19) Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Simon J Dudley (01:11:26) Some of my upcoming guests, I have considered writing questions and I think I'm gonna not do that because this has been a fantastic put you on the spot, ask you an awkward question and see what happens. Patrick Kelley (01:11:35) ⁓ Yeah. I guess that depends on your guests, right? If they they can think on their feet. I've been in front of a lot of customers that asked me a lot of questions. I'm like, whoa, I don't know how to answer that one. You know, the the silence in the room will fill a void. So good luck with that time. Simon J Dudley (01:11:52) Yeah, but you know, what's the worst thing that can happen? I mean, I think people are terrified of silence. It it I can take the silence out in the edit. So ⁓ it's absolutely fine. I mean, there was one point during this ⁓ conversation where Patrick stared blankly into the screen for 15 minutes and I'm will edit that out. ⁓ so on that note, this has been an absolute joy, Mr. Kelly. Thank you very much for being involved. ⁓ And Patrick Kelley (01:11:57) I agree with you. ⁓ It's straight true. Patrick Kelley (01:12:11) ⁓ Yeah, yeah. Patrick Kelley (01:12:20) We'll stop. Thank you. Simon J Dudley (01:12:21) I really hope that everyone ⁓ everyone who's got this far in the video ⁓ enjoyed it ⁓ and we'd love, you know, a thumbs up and a like and you know, all the things that people say at the end of the YouTube videos. Yeah, yeah, all that. And then ⁓ give us a comment because ⁓ I think Patrick's an absolute gem of this industry and he deserves a bit of ⁓ a bit of recognition. So thank you, Mr. Patrick Kelley (01:12:32) All the subs subscribe, yeah, do all that stuff. Yeah. Patrick Kelley (01:12:43) Jeez. Simon J Dudley (01:12:50) Patrick Kelly, I really appreciate it. Everyone, thank you for being involved in the show. Simon J Dudley (01:12:59) Patrick Kelly, that was unbelievably brilliant. Patrick Kelley (01:13:04) Well, I hope you think so. Thank you very much. Simon J Dudley (01:13:06) I mean, did you enjoy it? Patrick Kelley (01:13:07) I did. I've been on a lot of podcasts who are like, ⁓ this is thirty minutes so long. ⁓ well one I g Simon is my favorite topic. I could talk about myself. That's of course I enjoyed it. ⁓ Simon J Dudley (01:13:18) Sure. I think people will get something out of this. ⁓ I'll be doing an edit in the next. ⁓ I've got another recording actually. I was only meant to do one a day because you know, it's quite a lot of cerebral work. ⁓ not cerebral energy, perhaps not work. ⁓ so I got another one this afternoon with Dan Freeman of Video 360, the camera manufacturers. ⁓ so he I'm sure that'll be very different with Dan, which will be interesting in itself. Patrick Kelley (01:13:28) It takes a lot, yeah. Yeah, it does. Patrick Kelley (01:13:35) I agree. Yeah. Patrick Kelley (01:13:40) Sure. Yeah. Patrick Kelley (01:13:47) Yeah. Simon J Dudley (01:13:47) So I hope to have an edit ⁓ realistically ready to go within a week. ⁓ I'm planning to record probably four or five ⁓ to start with so that I've got a bit of a buffer. ⁓ and then I'll launch the show. ⁓ And if you're able to help me out with a bit of ⁓ you know, promotion, look at me, I'm on the telly type stuff, ⁓ that would be ⁓ unbelievably awesome. Patrick Kelley (01:13:55) Yeah, no pr no rush. Patrick Kelley (01:14:02) Yeah, yeah. Okay. Patrick Kelley (01:14:15) I would more than happy to do that. Simon J Dudley (01:14:17) Cool. All right, my friend. And I will get you a ⁓ I mean I y you didn't say anything that I could imagine that you would be you you've decided you don't want to say. ⁓ but I will get you a link so you can have a look at it before it goes out. And what I'll also do is cut this into pieces so that we can do some promotion ⁓ on on elements as well as the full because you know, asking someone to give them an hour and twenty minutes is is quite a thing. But they might they might take five minutes here and there. And ⁓ Patrick Kelley (01:14:31) Okay. Patrick Kelley (01:14:35) Yeah. Yeah. Patrick Kelley (01:14:42) Myths luck. Yeah. Yeah. That's ⁓ that's why they invented chapters in YouTube. You just watch watch the chapters. Simon J Dudley (01:14:47) We shall we shall go from there. ⁓ Yes, absolutely. All right, well I'll stop recording.