Leon Kuperman | CTO @ Cast.AI | Ep 36 - Out of Play Area

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
John (00:00):
Us independence day, happy July 4th to my fellow Americans.
It's a bitter sweet holiday with whatwe've called out in my household.
considering a giant step back for thiscountry of freedom and opportunity with
the us Supreme court, overturning Roe vs.
Wade and making it illegal tochoose to abort their unborn fetus.

(00:22):
There's two sides to everything.
And this one topic in particular,there seems to be no middle ground.
It's either you protect life.
100%.
Or you give the a hundred percentfreedom of choice to the parent.
I'm damn near borderline Buddhistin how I value every single life.
But.
My personal views or not, when it comesto the cost of the parents' wellbeing.

(00:44):
I'm proud to say that both Amazon cats,employer, and epic games, my employer.
Pay full costs for traveling andtaking care of any medical needs to
any employee who has to travel outsideof their state From what I gather
pretty much the entire west coastand Nevada AK the home of since city.
Most of the Northeast withthe exception of Pennsylvania,

(01:08):
which was surprising to me.
Michigan, Indiana, New Mexicoand Colorado are all still.
As far as I know.
Legal and you have fullchoice on what you do.
This is what happens when there's akey balance piece, like the notorious
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and she passes.
Yeah, that was two years ago now.
And then 45 appointed AmyConey Barrett took her place.

(01:30):
It seems to me that that's how long ittakes to see the effects of change com.
You can't help.
What's a speculateahead at what's to come.
And you just know that same-sex marriagehas gotta be in their crosshairs.
I'm guilty.
I'm also watching Showtime seriesbillions of this definitely affecting
my thoughts, but while it's a fictionaldrama, It makes me wonder at the
nature of politics and The influencethat money has in addition to.

(01:54):
Paying for lobbyists thatinfluence policy and eventually.
that's what gets topics upon a ballot to vote for?
The same madness with gun lawsand how many mass shootings it has
taken to finally get a reform billout of Congress in front of Biden.
And that's going through, whichincreases background checks closes
some loopholes and incentivizesstates to individually pass their own.

(02:16):
Further harsher laws.
It's a small step, but that's thenature of policy and change in this
country that I've seen in my lifetime.
It's slow.
but tiny steps make a difference.
And also.
And as we've seen, they canbe overturned in the future.
That's precious.
I just want to call out to nevertake any of our freedoms for granted.

(02:36):
And know that.
We've got to keep pushing forchange and progress because
the second we are complacent.
Bam.
It's taken away.
Big shout out to our neighbors,to the north happy Canada day.
You know, that's always a possibility too.
I just straight up leaving the UnitedStates and going work for another country.
Who has more progressive laws.

(02:56):
And on a lighter note,July 4th is my father.
He has his birthday Philliescomplete on your Papi.
I love you.
Thank you for making it happen.
And when mom Dukes and doing yourpart to bring me into this world
and pass on your work ethic andhook me up with a solid education.
Perhaps this audience willget to hear from you someday.
No hit mom music.

(03:20):
On episode 36 of out of play area.
We fall out with LeonCooperman, the CTO of cast AI.
Who wrote his own Joerg text adventuresgot his start at IBM, founded a handful
of companies, one purchased by Oracle andwho is now working to look ahead and keep
the cloud a better place to do business.

(03:40):
We talk about his passion in tech, comingfrom Ukraine to a family of engineers.
Who's used on games and theways that his company at cast
AI is looking to make an impact.
Please welcome coming to us fromToronto, Canada by way of Ukraine.
Leon.
Cooper moon.
Let's fall the fuck out.

Catherine (04:02):
bienvenido Bienvenue Welcome to the out of play area podcast, a
show by video game devs for game devs,where the guests open up one-on-one
about their journey, their experiences,their views, and their ideas.
No ads, no bullshit.
Join us as we venture far outof the play area with your host
seasoned game designer, John Diaz

John (04:25):
The one thing I do not know about you, Leon, that I'm super
curious is do you play games?
If so, what were there, what wasthe first one that you played.

Leon K (04:36):
we won't have to edit much.
Let's go.
Oh man.
You're taking me back.
I think the first game that I ever played.
Was a textual adventure gamecalled Zork right where you
literally, there was no graphics.

John (04:42):
As soon as you said, text adventure, I was like, he's gonna say Zork

Leon K (04:46):
I was so fascinated by Zork.
I bought this like shitty, manual, howto build a text based adventure game.
I think when I was like 10 or 11and all I had was an apple to eat.
Like didn't have a lot of computing power.
And I spent, I think the whole summer,writing text based adventures, it
was like the most fun I've had,just coding for the fun of it.
and that's really what drew me intocomputer science was gaming to begin.

John (05:09):
It never tires me to hear that, right?
Like this wide realm of computerscience and most universities never,
ever take advantage of that curiosity.
Right.
They kind of throw you down into logicand binary bits and, and things like
this, well, I guess you start out withlike basic input and output, but tell
me more about some of the cases that youwrote yourself for your text adventure.

Leon K (05:32):
Oh, it was a classic nerdy DMD thing, you know, it was like, and then I
evolved it from, just plain text into agraphical interface of the dungeon itself.
And so you have a little characterthat walks through the Dunge.
I mean, gaming technology has evolved.
Centuries, you know, since, I wasplaying around with code and then
I continued to love that genre.
So there's kind of two genresof games that I really love.

(05:55):
I love a realtime strategy.
So I think the first realtime strategygame I played was do June like probably
in the nineties if I, if I had to guess.
And then when my kids were growing up,we played age of empires, like together.
That was kinda like aamazing bonding experience.
And then later I introduced him tosky and all of the kind, the prequels
and like that's kind of been Ireally love the world that Bethe, the

(06:18):
soft works has been able to create.
I know it took a lot of money, effortand talent, but that game for me
is something very special anyway.

John (06:25):
That's a great call out.
Yeah.
Now they're folded under theMicrosoft umbrella, right?
So I think they're,they're gonna be steady

Leon K (06:34):
I really dug into kind of gaming from a machine learning
perspective when the alpha starteam put together their machine
learning or artificial intelligencekind of version of their AlphaGo.
You guys probably saw thatdocumentary on Netflix which was
unbelievable where AlphaGo wasable to beat the world champion go,
which is an extremely complex game.

John (06:55):
Yes.

Leon K (06:56):
And then they stepped it up a level by playing StarCraft and training
the models in a very similar kind oftournament style winner takes all.
Game.
And I was recently interviewinga, a data scientist machine
learning prospect for, to hire.
And we went really deep into that kindof algorithm, how they trained it.
That for me is a fascinating fieldof machine learning because to be

(07:17):
fair, they had to hamper the computer.
In other words, they said, okay,well, like a human being can only
have a specific field of you.
They can't see the whole board.
So let's limit the computer's fieldof you let's limit the number of
actions per second to something, whatan average human can keep up with.
they created all theserestrictions and, like races.
they still can beat the world's bestindividual humans, which is very cool.

John (07:41):
Yeah, man.
The, the field of AI is amazing.
And, and I definitely look forwardto touching more about how you're
leveraging AI at your company cast AI.
the latest one I saw thisyear is called w Kong AI.
it's an evolution of, that Googlespace where, it just trains itself.
It plays against itself, howevermany ludicrous numbers of hours
to just figure out the strategy.

(08:03):
And, and yet it's from a gamedevelopment standpoint, we've always
been trained as game designers thatthe best AI ends up being the best,
second place, Like the best runner up.
It kind of just gives you enough of anopening where you can still triumphant
and feel like a champion, but.
And these competitive e-sportsenvironments, I can't imagine
a better way to train, right?

(08:23):
Like I'm, I'm sure a lot of the, thechess masters the best ones have
incorporated like a lot of strategy thatI'm sure a computer kind of showed them.
They thought was kind of not optimal.
And now they kind ofwhip these things out.

Leon K (08:35):
I think from a game development perspective, everyone
looks at AI kind of as a, how do weget NPCs that are more human likely?
So they're not just roaming on a veryspecific area in a, in a infinite loop,
but they actually have daily lives andthey, you know, they go to their jobs and
they, you

John (08:52):
Little like the Sims.
Yep.

Leon K (08:54):
Like the stems.
Yeah.
And, and I think the closer thatwe get to kind of general AI, and
we're still ways off, but I thinkthe more realistic the non-player
characters get in these game worlds.

John (09:05):
even the popular Hollywood takes one of my favorite ones, I don't know is
like a, I remember Scarlet Johansen didthe voice and it, you know, that was such
a great casting option and it was walkingPhoenix and yeah, it was just like, wow,
they learn how to cater to your ego.
Right.
And, and that's what we,as men tend to love, right.
Someone to cater to our ego.

Leon K (09:25):
John, have you heard of this, the touring test?

John (09:27):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Isn't that the gentleman was namedtouring and it's like, this is the
test at which you can no longer telllike, Hey, is this human or robot?
Like, is that, is that kind of close?

Leon K (09:37):
Yeah.
So the scientist name was Alan touring.
He was actually an heavy contributorinto cracking Nazi codes in world war II.
But he, he was a, a deep thinker inartificial intelligence before we
could actually physically manifestcomputers to do what they do now.
And yeah, he, he surmised this test whereif you could put someone behind the kind
of a wall and have a conversation, andyou don't know if that conversation is a

(10:00):
human or a robot or a computer, then thatAI has been deemed to pass the turn test.
And that's kind of the holy grail forperceived general artificial inte.
Yeah.
And these,

John (10:12):
Indeed.
The realm of AI.
Yeah.
I mean like that's the buzzword.
I think that's where all thefunding tends to go these days.
And I think that's whatseparates a lot of the.
The big companies, right.
Is how, how much they've had achance to train their AI what is
it using like captures now, right?
Like that's how we're kind of going inand telling computers what images or what,
and helping them categorize all that.

Leon K (10:33):
Most good.
Machine learning folks can write analgorithm that will train against those.
And, even to the point where,like, if you're asked to identify
all of the railroads, that's nota very difficult machine learning
problem to solve these days.
Right?
So captures are pretty weak.
the separation of humans and robots onthe internet is a very difficult problem.

(10:53):
It's something that I spent actuallyyears at my last company, trying to figure
out and we were somewhat successful.
But the problem is, is that when you'reusing robots as attackers in the cyber
world, you're gonna be heavily incentedto make those robots smarter and smarter
and behave more and more like humans.

John (11:09):
of course like the more they can spoof and fool people, the more
lucrative the back end I'm sure.
And, and, and on the other end,the black market and security kind
of goes step and step generally.
Mm-hmm

Leon K (11:19):
There's a lot of money to be made on the dark side.
Right.
So hence that's wherethe funding comes from.
Everything from state sponsoredall the way to, you know,
basically organized crime.
Yet the attackers are very wellcapitalized and run like efficient
businesses in many contexts.

John (11:36):
I heard you discuss how much you enjoy RTSs and as I, get to speak more,
you, Leon, I can have an appreciationfor your logical mind and, being able to,
control or direct or strategize an entireplay field to some victory condition.
I have to ask if you've everconsidered getting into development,
or has anyone ever approachedyou from the development side?

Leon K (12:00):
of course it's been like a deep, hidden fantasy that I would never vocalize
to anyone as they think I'm crazy.
But yeah, I would love to havethe free time to work on the
creative end of game development.
I think it's a young person'sgame for a lot of reasons.
You have to have the stamina and energy.
The coding hours are just insane.

(12:20):
And I'm probably kind of beyond that levelwhere I can do 16 hours a day of coding.
But maybe there's a future where I canparticipate on at least on the creative.
Game development side and maybe help withsome of the difficult computer science
problems that haven't yet been cracked.

John (12:34):
I definitely see an opportunity there, man, you're a company and, and
the things you work on, being able tobe a huge leverage point for a lot of
us on the other end building, you know,whatever you wanna call it, right?
Meta versus sharedworlds, things like this.
If I were to give you, thebest of the best, right?
The designers, artists, engineers, fullteam at your disposal, let's say two,

(13:00):
three year runway funding and all that.
What would you build?

Leon K (13:04):
This is gonna sound crazy Joan, but I would try to build an immersive
experience that breaks the player outof physically sitting in front of a
computer and maybe even wearing in Oculus.
Like, I think those constraintsare severe, I believe that there's
a gaming mechanism that puts youAs close to a reality as possible.
Let me give you an example.
Like we were just at universalstudios like maybe a month

(13:27):
and a half ago in Florida.
And I went on this Harry Potter experienceand so these rides now incorporate
a complete three dimensional screen.
Like you're completelyimmersed in the screen wear.
You are also on a physical ride.
So at some point it's just visuallytricking your mind into believing
that you're taking a physical drop.

(13:49):
They are incorporating heat.
So there's blast like, you know,when that dragon blows fire, you
feel it they're incorporating waterand all these tactile elements
into the writing experience.
And why can't that be donefor a gaming experience?
as an example, why can't you reallyget onto a space shuttle as if light
simulator and experience a star missionin the confines of like a stride Trek,

(14:13):
like, you know, Rover or whatever it's.
And, and I noticed that the rideexperiences are getting there.

John (14:19):
mm-hmm

Leon K (14:20):
I think the there's room for the, for gaming to move
in that physical direction as.
Yes.

\ John (14:25):
I love the ambition.
I love the, forward thinking, takingwhat we have on the horizon with AR
and VR and the confines of our livingrooms and, and moving in a step
towards these massive theme parks.
Right.
Just that, tactile stimulusthat we currently lack.
Even uh, the smells is alwaysa fun one to, to bring up.
I like it.

(14:45):
You got into computer science early.
Was that something that came from yourfamily or just the curiosity through
games can you tell me more abouthow you stumbled into the com sci.

Leon K (14:57):
I came from a, like a stem family, meaning my mom's electrical engineer by.
My dad is a mechanic.
My brother went intomechanical engineering.
I mean, computer science didn'texist when they were going
through their educations.
Or I still remember, mybrother was at Ryerson.
It was the school here in Toronto.
And he had a software class.
I think it was Pascal.

(15:18):
Was the programming

John (15:18):
Yeah.
That was like the first one.
Yeah.

Leon K (15:21):
Not exactly, but very, it was way early.
Right.
And I remember like he did his homeworkon punch cards and I had to do like help
him with his homework on the punch cards.
So that was fascinating to me.
And we had a computer at home.
We could write the code, like onour apple, but the, the school
needed it on these bunch cards.
so engineering and math wasalways a part of the family.

(15:41):
I think I got the entrepreneurshippiece from the family for sure.
And then I got the, the love andinterest of science from my family.
And then it just naturallyevolved into computer science.
When maybe when the first time I wentto radio shack, I don't like, I, the
first time I saw I saw a computer,I was like, just fascinated by it.
And then it becomes the 10,000 hour thing.

(16:03):
Like if you're 8, 9, 10, and thisnew tech appears and you just
dive into it for endless numberof hours, you just can't help.
But come out of it, being asubject matter expert, you know,
25 years later or whatever it's.

John (16:19):
yeah.
You were even well aheadof the game, right?
Like I'm sure everything that was thrownat you academically or in the curriculum
you were already well, well, in front of.

Leon K (16:27):
Yeah.
I don't think I really studied untilthird year computer science, I think
first and second year were part ofyears for me, cuz there was nothing
really, of interest to deal within the exams or in the assignments.
But third year in operating systems, itstarted to get a little bit interesting.
Started studying.

John (16:45):
okay.
What, what was it aboutoperating so simple?
Was it kind of like memory manipulationor registries and things like that?

Leon K (16:52):
it's a hands on course.
You build an operatingsystem through the semester.
So you build a file system.
You build a mini memory manager, youbuild a CPU slicer, and then it kind of
comes all together by the end of the year.

John (17:04):
man, I, have to ask Leon, cuz I find this paradigm super
interesting these days, right?
Like you have the people that comefrom traditional engineering comp
sci backgrounds, and then kindof this other wave of people that
come up more vocational tech, like.
Pure game development, right?
Where it's just like day one,it's like here's unity or unreal.
And then we're building a game.

(17:26):
And a lot of us came from pure traditionallogic and architecture and object oriented
programming, and then found an outletinto like, okay, this is how we can build
interactive experiences through here.
Right.
Curious what your thoughts are onhaving that deep, low level knowledge
as opposed to the other end of it.

(17:48):
Right?
Like, Hey, just tell me what I needto know to, to do the thing, right.
Or, Hey, I have an API that cando all the heavy lifting for me.
I just need to know how to hook in

Leon K (17:55):
When I interview people for even software engineering positions, as
an example, and I'm not gonna pick onthe.net community, but like, like the, the
Microsoft visual studio kind of.net, oreven before C sharp, it was visual basic.
And like, those are prepackageduniverses of their own.
You don't gotta know a lot, you know,to start and be productive and I always

(18:19):
try to figure out what is the motivationof the person not to dig deeper.
don't you wanna know how things work?
Like are you content being in a bubble?
How does unity do the things?
It does?
Where's the magic come.
You don't have to build thosealgorithms every time, but at least
understand the building blocks.
Right?
So how many of vocational, like gamedevelopers know what a transistor

(18:42):
is and know why a transistorchanged the world of computers?
Like why we couldn't do things beforewe discovered what a semiconductor
was, why couldn't we buildcomputing power that we have today?
And I bet you, if you ask a lotof folks that just don't know,

John (18:57):
Sure.

Leon K (18:57):
but that's lost tribal knowledge.

John (19:00):
Yeah.
Dangerous.

Leon K (19:01):
if you ask that question to like, even a non-technical person,
like if he has bill gates, who Idon't think is a super technical
guy, you know, he is a businessperson, how does the transistor work?
I think he would be able to tell you.
Right.

John (19:12):
Yeah, he was

Leon K (19:14):
yeah, so like, I think there's a whole bunch of travel knowledge
that we've lost and it's sad, right.
Because.
If you have the curiosity andthe background to dig into those
things, those are the foundation oflater ideas and the depth of your
knowledge really makes a differenceinto how you think about the future.

John (19:30):
1000000000%.
I love your frame of thinking there.
And I want to emphasize that right.
Is yeah.
There's ways to get off to theraces and get prototypes put
together and things like that.
But the underlyingtechnology hasn't changed.
Right.
It's just kind of gottenstronger, more powerful.
Right.
But knowing what a transistor does, whydoes that give you so much capabilities?

(19:53):
Another common one, I like to tell peopleis polygons and rendering triangles.
Right?
Why.
Is that the chosen way that we goabout drawing things to the screen?
Why does a computer really understandthree points in a space, right?
Or, or the limits of a plane.
And then being able to buildon that, like, this is how
lighting plays into that.
And this is how things look more natural.

(20:15):
And, and this is how you canoptimize these graphics, renderers
and GPUs to really pump outthat blurred reality, right?
Like now you see a lot ofthese simulations and you're
like, man, that looks amazing.
Is it just more powerful hardwareor is it a better understanding
at the lowest level that we cannow take better advantage of it?

Leon K (20:34):
I, I think a lot of the advances that we have now are
abstractions of APIs, right?
So from the hardware all the waythrough to the gaming API, but you
tend to lose resolution every timeyou go up a level in the stack, right?
And someone else has made a technicaldecision for you at that lower level.
Maybe those are great decisionsand those should be the right
decisions, but at least be aware.

(20:55):
Yeah.
I,

John (20:56):
absolutely 100%, right?
Like when it comes to these kind ofsecond to second or to the frame, right
games, we are bound to that frame, right?
If we get 60 of them in a secondyou gotta optimize these things.
And, and these worlds where now you'regetting into the hundreds of players
online anything that's off, you know,you can blame it on internet or,
or latency or something like that.

(21:17):
But if you can figure out the mostminimum amount of data that you're
transferring over the web, right.
To kind of get those dependenciesdown the higher you can go, right?
The farther you can push it as, as you.

Leon K (21:28):
I think when you start introducing multiplayer, it's a massively distributed
hard computing science problem.
Right?
You have action.
That's local and you have action.
That's in the real gamingworld, that's on the server.
And how do you reconcilethings as your connection legs?
What are the elements of the networkthat you need to use in order to make

(21:48):
sure that you can eventually do a fullreconciliation of all of the universes
that are playing simultaneously?
It's a super hardcomputer science problem.
It's a very difficult one to solve.

John (21:58):
yeah.
And then, you know, it's not asecret game, developers we're
expert, slight of hand manipulators.
Right.
We, we cheat as, as much as we can.
We could as many quarters as we can justto always cater to the player, right?
Like, Hey, what, what does itmatter at the end of the day?
What's the key thingplayers want to experience.
And so here we are.
We're talking about the web.
We can't talk about the webwithout talking about cloud.

(22:19):
tell me about your role where youare at today and your company.

Leon K (22:23):
we started cast AI just a couple years ago.
so that's the company and it's solvinga specific, in one sense, it's solving
a very specific computer scienceproblem around cloud economics.
In another sense, it hasa much broader vision.
So let me explain the, the first stepwe took was in previous startups, we had
failed pretty badly in cost management.
Like everything else was great, butthe cost side of the equation when we

(22:46):
were deploying to AWS specifically,was a disaster and I could never get
the kind of cost, a good sold bottle,you know, my last startup organized
properly so that as we scaled customersinto the thousands, the, the cost
model would scale appropriately.

John (23:01):
was that a slow burn of like, you know, month over month
you're seeing these, these ticks?
Or was it like a, easyto miss kind of thing.
And then you're kind ofpaying before, you know it

Leon K (23:11):
from when we started the last company, it was like a few thousand.
We started a few thousand dollars amonth for the basic in this structure.
We're probably close to half a millionbucks by the time we'd sold the business.
So like multiple orders of magnitudesrising costs that was with, with reserved
instances and all kinds of savings plans.
Like we tried everything.

(23:31):
And what saved us is, is the,the company that acquired the
technology or the company was Oracle.
Oracle had its own infrastructure.
So cost of good sold.
Wasn't a problem.
We just moved everything into Oracle datacenters and cost went virtually to zero.
like we would've had tohave solved that problem.
Very quickly, because as your marketmomentum grows, your customers get bigger.
as your customers get bigger,the traffic increases and you're

(23:53):
paying dearly for that traffic.
If it's not well optimized, ifthe costs aren't well optimized.
So the continuation of thatthought process was cast.
And I'm like, okay, I can't be theonly guy who hasn't figured this out.
Sure enough.
I'm not because our customers allfeel this pain a hundred percent.
So we made a couple bets, John, wesaid, okay, number one, we think
that applications, and maybe you canchime in on this, on the gaming set.

(24:15):
I'm not sure this is a trend ingaming yet, but we believe that all
like business applications are gonnabe deployed in these things called
containers or containerized units.
Right.
So Docker containers and they'llbe made up a set of microservices.
So you'll have services thatrepresent different functional.
Parts of the system instead ofa single monolithic application.
And if that's true, then there needsto be an orchestration platform for

(24:38):
all of these containers and theirlife cycles and how they live.
And so we believe that system ofrecord will be Kubernetes, which I
can explain if, if listeners aren'tfamiliar with it or some cousin of
Kubernetes, but it will be that systemthat ends up being dominant in the
industry, especially for business apps.
And if those things are true andwe're so short on human beings, then

(25:01):
the logical conclusion was we needto have an autonomous system for
all of this life cycle management.
We can't have infrastructuremanaged by people anymore.
So we make way too many human decisions.
For infrastructure provisioning and thegoal of cast is to take all of that away
and to automate that through roboticprocess automation or through AI.

John (25:21):
give it to the machines.
Heck yeah.
That's what they do.
Best crunch numbers.
Tell me where I'm failing.

Leon K (25:26):
Absolutely.
so that's the premise for cast.
And so we have three pillars of platform.
And the first part of the platformthat we went to market with is
the cost optimization piece, whichis my most acute pain previously.
So the cost optimization piece basicallyallows our system as a SAS model software
as a service to plug into a customer'sKubernetes cluster in any one of the three

(25:48):
major clouds, Amazon, Google, or Azure,and first report on where the cost was,
is so where the resources are wasted.
And then given permission, it'll starttaking action to optimize the cluster.
And then within a few hours,you're running on a cluster
that's 40, 50, 60% cheaper.
Than where you were before you started.

John (26:08):
I've seen Kubernetes, right?
Like Docker came on the sceneand it was just like, that's
all you saw AWS prep pivoting toover the past handful of years.
Right.
And so the expectationsis Kubernetes, everything.
it seems like if you build itoff of Kubernetes, you can run a
report and then see your savings.
Okay.

Leon K (26:26):
and you may say later, Leon, why, why did you pick Kubernetes?
Why not just generally optimizecloud instances, bare metal.
And so it's too nebulous, John.
Like, if, if you say, Hey, we'll,we'll just tackle everything.
You're really tackling nothing.
So I love Kubernetes becauseit's like a game board.
it's like a StarCraft word.
Like you've got actors, you've gotactions that those actors can take.

(26:47):
And there are rules of engagement.
And if you follow those rules,you can teach a computer to follow
those rules and you can teach acomputer to optimize the outcome.
Kubernetes is the gameboard in this context.

John (26:57):
geez man.
You, you got me interested now, right?
Like I, at the time I waslike, okay not my cup.
I'll let some backend engineersworry about this and tell
me what I need to know.
But now you got me interested, Leon,I'm gonna go check out what applications
of Kubernetes may overlap with thetypes of things we do in games.
you provide a report service thatyou point it to your cluster, and

(27:21):
it'll tell you what you need to.

Leon K (27:23):
Yeah.
it's, it's a hundred percentfree and always be free.
And here's the reason why we do that.
John is because if someone's getting,let's say weekly value, they're getting
a weekly report, emailed to them aboutthe state of their cluster and all
their computers and how utilized theyare and which teams are sucking up.
All the resources.
Get a really nice in depth report,including some best practices.

(27:43):
I'm getting their data every 15 seconds.
our agent is streaming thedata, so it's not altruistic.
Yeah, we want to give value andwe want people to, to perceive
that value and get it for free.
But we're also getting somethingout of that equation, which is
we're getting their data and we'regetting it in the most unique
perspective, across three clouds.
I don't think anyone.
So like if we're in 10,000, a hundredthousand clusters, like, you know,

(28:07):
within a year from an entrepreneurperspective, you try to build
these moats mode around the castle.
And that's our moat like data is our moat.
It's gonna be hard to build those models.
Even if Google wakes up tomorrow says,Hey, that guy, Leon had a good idea.
Let's copy.
It's gonna be hard because you don'thave the data from the other clouds.
Like you're, you don'thave a holistic view.
The way we're positioning ourselves to.

John (28:29):
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
And I guess that's one bigadvantage as well, is that
because it's Kubernetes, right.
And all the clouds have hooked intohave Kubernetes on their, on their
infrastructure, your service kind ofjumps across the all three of them
and, and finds where the savingsare to be had independent of club.

Leon K (28:49):
independent of cloud that most customers aren't in a place
where they can leverage two,three clouds at the same time.
it is just too futuristicfor most customers of mine.

John (28:58):
Yeah.

Leon K (28:58):
But that will come.
Like we already have an offering thatallows you from a disaster recovery
perspective to create a cluster thatexists in two places simultaneously.
it is.
There's a couple of unnatural blockers.
And I'll tell you what, they'reone is the customer mindset.
Ah, I just can't get my head around beingin AWS and Google that's that's one.
The second one is this nasty thingcalled egress costs and everyone hundred

(29:22):
of your game developers feel thisand pay for what is an egres costs.
So clouds allow your data to stream into the cloud at zero cost, $0 stream.
As much as you want, as soon asdata leaves the cloud, like let's
say you're serving a video or animage or HTML or adjacent file.

(29:45):
You pay you the account owner,pay for that data to leave.
And you pay about 9 cents per gig,but now imagine you're running
a massively multiplayer game.
That's just got a little bit of datafrom every player streaming to the tunes
of a, maybe a couple gigabytes an hour.
All of a sudden your egrescosts are gonna be your number
one cost of running that game.

(30:06):
Especially if you have a freemium modelwhere your users may not be paying
anything, they may just be having a good.

John (30:12):
yeah.
Yeah.
That's something thatI wanted to touch on.
I'm glad you brought itup is a lot of developers.
I think if you're starting andyou're looking into the space,
Hey, you wanna be online?
You're not gonna worry about.
building your own little racks and,and, and maintaining the power and
backing those up and everything, right.
This is where the cloudcame in it makes sense.
Hey, go to the cloud, it's cheaper.

(30:33):
You don't have to worry about it.
But as you experience in your previouscompanies, when you get to that sweet
problem of having a ton of players,it can happen overnight, right?
Hits happen.
Something, a tweet orsome stream goes viral.
And then all of a sudden, your gamehas hundreds of thousands of not
millions of more players than youanticipated, because things are

(30:55):
in the cloud, they will scale up.
And like you said, so your costsavailable balloon and worse yet, if
you are operating on ad revenue andthe number of eyes that see your thing
or the few people that are paying for.
You could still very well get intoa place where you haven't adjusted

(31:15):
your numbers and your costs aremore than what you're making.
Right?

Leon K (31:20):
Yeah.
It's, I've seen horror stories of folksthat have like, used like function as a
service or some of the cloud databaseswhere either a developer makes a mistake
or there's just a balloon in traffic.
And then the bill comes like, Imean, those are extreme cases, but
like, And I don't wanna scare folks,like just put your safeguards in

(31:40):
place to make sure you don't scaleinfinitely, but you're right.
in my business cost of good sold isa for, for software as a service,
that is the number one driver.
So a gross margin, whatwe call gross margin.
It's what you collect versus what youhave to pay for those services, right?
So it should be around 80 to 90% for ahealthy software as a service business.

(32:01):
And then most of your moneygoes to acquiring new customers.
And that's how you scale.
That's how you grow.
I'm assuming the, the gameworld has a very similar kind of
macroeconomics where you want yourcost to good soul to be fairly low.
And you spend your ad revenueacquiring new gamers, right?
Acquiring

John (32:19):
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's what it is for sure, man.

Leon K (32:22):
and if you are not smart about cloud economics, AWS
Google or whatever can eat yourlunch literally eat your lunch.
And what's interesting is, and yourlisteners probably experience this when
they first start you can enter thesestartup programs in any one of the three
clouds and you'll get credits like wepersonally got a $300,000 credit, you
know, I don't even know if I'm supposedto say it, but Google's not listening.

(32:45):
Like we got a $300,000 credits,Google to start, guess what?
We blew through that in a year.
Right.
And then what, like, right.
And now what are you gonna do if you'renot ready for the cloud, you're gonna
get a very strong cloud economics lesson.

John (33:01):
indeed.
Yeah.
I mean, at, at the very minimum, right?
There's like alarms andwatches to set up right.
To auto notify and, you know,make sure you're getting those,
you you're paying someone, that'skeeping an eye on those things.
to avoid these surprises right.
To at the very least have somethingvery loud and in your face to let
you know, Hey, this is crossedover whatever threshold you

Leon K (33:21):
John, I'm gonna tell you a little bit of a unkept secret about those alarms.
they batch up overnight.
So your bill gets calculated nightly.
So if you start with a bad piece of codethat does a huge overrun at 2:00 PM, you
ain't gonna know about it until tomorrow.

John (33:39):
Oh my gosh.

Leon K (33:41):
So you have to calculate, you have to alarm on your usage
metrics, not on your dollars.
So what I mean by that is if, like, forexample, you're in AWS and you're using
CloudWatch set alarms and triggers.
On your traffic, thetraffic itself, right?
Because you're gonna get built for thatset alarms and triggers on the computers
that you're using the, the servers,because those are the things that will

(34:03):
ultimately yield to the lead to the build.
But the curve, the what's called costreport usage and reporting module.
It does a, it does a, acrappy batch thing overnight.

John (34:14):
Oh man.
That's a pro tip.
That's well worth the priceof admission right here.
Do you set up your alarms on the usage?
Not on the dollar amount andthat you'll catch it much
sooner than when it's too late.
That's awesome.

Leon K (34:28):
like our customers, like we, we emit something called
Promeus scrapable metrics.
These are just time series data that we weupdate in our platform every 15 seconds.
So what our customers do is they connecttheir monitoring systems to our metrics
and they, they continuously scrape them.
And then within a minute or two you'llknow exactly where the costs have gone.

(34:49):
And then they use that to pina team down and say, Hey guys,
you had a bad deployment.
You just balloon thiscost 20 X or whatever.
Let's roll it back.

John (34:57):
I'd like to talk a little bit about opportunities
that you helped to point out.
the very little cloud education I have.
Right.
my time over at Amazon was theearly opportunities to be had
regarding on demand instances tothen reserve instances, right?
Kind of you're paying in advance sothey can sell that to you cheaper.

(35:20):
And then at the very low end of thespectrum, Spot instances, right?
Like the things that are likeexcess and too volatile for anyone
to really take advantage of.
That's why you kinda geta great deal on them.
But the big secret isthey were great for games.
Right.
Great.
For these less than 10 minutesessions, 15 minute sessions, right.
Where hosts are constantlymigrating, right.

(35:42):
If you have a 50 on 50 thing,someone gets killed, the host
jumps over to someone else.
Right.
Those what do you call it?
Like, I don't know what some of them havelike two minute warnings where it's like,
Hey, this, this thing is going down.
Right.
Someone needs it now.
So we're gonna take it from you.
It was perfectly suitedto game developers, right?
Like spot instances.
Mm-hmm and, and, and that's what, theyhave a service called game lift that helps

(36:05):
kind of, you know, as a service around it.
Gives you an opportunity toget versed in that again, it'll
always pale in comparison to youspinning it up for yourself, right.
Again, empowering people to learn whatthey're doing so they could write it
for themselves as opposed to kind ofrely on AWS's service to, to tell you.
Right.
But what, what, what opportunities doescast leverage for, for people mm-hmm

Leon K (36:29):
So I think game lift is a great bundled service.
Obviously there's a pricing model andyou pay for the extra features like,
and it's got a whole bunch of stuffthat's really tailored towards the
gaming communities, kudos to thoseguys for packaging it, seeing the,
the need and packaging it that way.
And they do use like spotinstances under the covers.
So I, we have to, it would be interesting.

(36:51):
Like I have to do some researchto see how effective would it
be to deploy a real time game.
Inside of Kubernetes becauseKubernetes does it's, it's
pretty low latency network.
Like, I mean, you basically get thebare network of the machines but there,
you know, but there's some containerruntime overhead, and you, you are
run, you're not running on bare metal.
You are running in acontainer image in a pod.

(37:12):
So it would be interesting tosee if someone has successfully.
I, I suspect the answer is yes, becauseKubernetes or K eights is the acronym
has this really nice feature calledHPA or horizontal pod auto skilling.
What that means is, is as you getmore players in the door, for example,
like, as they're queuing up, the systemwill automatically spin instances
of the game services that you need.

(37:34):
And then as the Q empties,it'll automatically shut
them down under the cover.
the infrastructure that'srunning on can be elastic.
It can scale up and scale down.
Now.
The, the AWS gaming service, thegame lift service has that kind of
auto scaling capability and theykind of tie that into spot instances.
So I would say it's a specializedversion for the gaming community.

(37:55):
So what we do with spot instances,it's, it's a very interesting
kind of Freakonomics problem.
Let, let me explain what I mean, John.
when we look for, to add a node into acluster in Kubernetes, if the workload
itself is tolerant of being interruptedand what I mean by that is like, if
the process can get a signal that says,Hey, I need to kill you, but you're

(38:17):
gonna get spun up somewhere else.
So that's your kind of analog ofmoving like the, the, the game
node from server a to server B.
So if those workloads are, are Itolerant, we handle the life cycle
of the instance for our customers.
You mentioned a coupleof other business models.
So maybe before I go into deep intothe spot instances, let me give you my

(38:37):
2 cents on like, kind of where I thinkthose pricing models are and where a
customer like, like a developer shouldbe thinking about those pricing models
on demand on demand was the first andprobably the most transparent model.
It pays you go, I need acomputer for a couple hours.
I rented $2 an hour.
Cool.
I paid four bucks.
I'm done.

(38:57):
And then customers starting to cometo the cloud and saying, well, these
things are getting really expensive.
What do we do?
So what did the cloud say?
Very smart.
Cuz it's a, it's a,it's a lock in protocol.
Like I want these customers locked in.
Right?
So exactly John.
So they say, all right, wellcommit to us for two years, a year,
three years, and we'll give youa 50% discount or 40% discount.

(39:19):
But in early days of AWS, you werecommitting to a specific processor family.
You were saying like I'm committingto the M four family, which is a
specific Zion chip set under the covers.
What, what happens in threeyears of your commitment?
Well, according to Moore's law, wedouble our processing power of 18 months.
Therefore we have ourcosts every 18 months.

(39:40):
So you're committing to a pricing model.
That's gonna be obsolete 18 months.
So, so I look at reserved instancesas an evil, it's a necessary
evil, but it's an evil we, wewant to try to eliminate and then.
So the last kind of like what Iconsider the most market driven discount
available to users is the spot instance.
And if you can learn to deal with thechaos, if your application can handle the

(40:02):
interruption, which we help with, thenyou're in the best position to to, to
take advantage of the highest discounts.
And so what are theproblems with SW instance?
The first one you mentioned already,John, which is two minutes, notice get
off the machine, we're killing it, right?
So that's a hard problem to deal with.
That's where Kubernetes helps us,frankly, help the customer, cuz we've

(40:23):
got some elegant ways of draining theworkloads off the machine and getting
them replaced into a different placewithin two minutes, by the way, only 7%
of AWS users take advantage of bodies.
This is for,

John (40:35):
Wow.

Leon K (40:35):
for, for that exact reason, we play this other interesting parlor trick.
When we were going to reserve capacity.
So we, we have a copy of AWS's.
We scrape all of the inventory andpricing every couple of minutes.
And so we know when prices fluctuatebecause they do it's a marketplace when
demand is high prices go up when demandis low prices go down, but they're

(40:57):
different for different instance types.
So you may have this really weirdcomputer shape that no one ever uses.
I'll give you an example.
Inf one, these are calledinferential processors.
No one's ever heard of them.
Fairly few people use them, but they'resuper cheap because no one ever uses them.

John (41:13):
Are they
like for like computerlearning or something?

Leon K (41:16):
they're used for inference.
Right?
So this, the, the second part of machinelearning, like once you have a model
built and you want to infer, you know,the hot dog, not hot dog problem on . So
when you wanna infer hot dog, not hotdog, you use an inference process.
So you could use that processor tospeed things up and make it cheaper.
The problem is no one uses them.
It's an SDK, no one installs thisSDK, etcetera, et cetera, but they're

(41:37):
super cheap machines right now.
So we see those spot instances are often alot cheaper than the regular CFI family or
an MFI family and AWS, most people order.
So we have this Freakonomics nature,we'll get a computer with SSDs,
the super fast network card, extraprocessors, we pay less money.
And then when that processor goesaway, or that that family goes away,

(41:58):
we just replace it with something else.
And we're continuously doing that.
So I guess the bottom line is youhave to be pretty sophisticated about
your kind of inventory management ofwhat's available in the marketplace
in order to make the best possibleuse of spot instances in the market.
A

John (42:14):
Gotcha.
Gotcha.
This makes total sense.
Now, Leon, when
What 10, you know, what's the patternsand what machines are not used and
when, and, and how, and, and being ableto kind of spot that well in advance
of other people and, and being able tokind of give that, that savings right.

(42:36):
To the, to the end customer.

Leon K (42:37):
hundred percent.
That's the goal right.
Is, is to get people's cloud costs down.
And frankly, I think all the clouds willbenefit from this is why I think they're
pretty appreciative of our service.
Then we can get everyone's cloudcosts down that leaves more
resources for our next generationto migrate more departments than
every company start migrating.
And we don't get this backlash of, Hey,this costing is too hard to figure out.

(42:58):
Let's just go back toour own data centers.
That was easy.

John (43:01):
cast AI two years young, already making pretty good strides and then
getting people's cloud build down.
You mentioned that you have a few pillars.
You have your eyes on as you move forward.
Can you talk to us about thenext the next venture in cast AI?

Leon K (43:19):
Yeah, the, the, absolutely.
I'll tell you about all three of them.
I, I, I don't believe inlike a secretive development.
I mean,
I'll tell, you know, like the bestmartial artist can, like, there's this
guy in jujitsu, his name's Gordon, Ryan,he's the, you know, probably the number
one grappler in the world right now.
And he'll come to like thesebig tournaments against high

(43:40):
level professional fighters.
And he'll tell them, I'mgonna submit you this way.
Once he gave the ref, like a little pieceof paper said, open it after the match,
it'll have the, the submission on it.
So like, you know, say he's justsuper, so I, I'm not gonna, like,

John (43:56):
Do you

Leon K (43:57):
people.

John (43:57):
Do you roll?

Leon K (43:58):
Oh, I roll.

John (44:00):
Ooh, fantastic, man.
And, and so again, you know,is that a family thing?
I, I your family hails from,

Leon K (44:08):
the Ukraine.

John (44:08):
from Ukraine.
Okay.
Okay.
things are still terrible over there.
If there's any way that you know of thatlisteners can help, please let us know.

Leon K (44:18):
John, you bring up a really good point.
So, so I was born in Odessa,which is the Southern city and
the Ukraine it's on the black sea.
That's where the, kind of the Southernamphibious assault is, is kind of
occurring.
year, my business partneralso born in Odessa.
I don't have the accent cuz I was young.
He does.
So we talk about it all the time.
But we are doing a program right nowfor engineers that currently living

(44:41):
in the Ukraine that want to leaveand are looking for a way to get out.
And we are both kind of refugeesfrom that former Soviet union system.
So we understand how difficult it is toget out and get your feet on the ground.
So we're offering folks we'll takeyou through a remote loop, meaning
we'll interview you remotely.
We'll, you know, we'll do the codingexercise with you and if we offer

(45:02):
you a job we'll offer you relocationto ness, which is in Lithuania.
It's we have a development center there.
We're gonna pay forthree months of housing.
for the developer and the family,and we're gonna help take care of
all the paperwork to the immigration,the visas, the lawyers, all of
that is daunting and overwhelming.
So we're gonna try to make itas easy as possible for folks

(45:23):
and start their lives elsewhere.
We're try to help there.

John (45:27):
fantastically on way to give back to the to the roots, man.
Heck yeah.

Leon K (45:31):
Yeah.
It's, it's not a hundredpercent altruistic.
I mean, there, there's an element of that.
I mean, I am gonna, I am gonna benefitdirectly, but I'm hoping that those,
those folks will be, you know, we willbe super loyal to them and hopefully
they'll be super loyal to us, right?

John (45:45):
Awesome.
Awesome.
Thanks for sharing for that.
And, and I'll definitely link in the shownotes to the hiring page where people
can click on and learn more about that.

Leon K (45:55):
Yeah.
Like if you guys can spread theword, that that would be huge,
but I wanna get back to your, Iwanna get back to your question,
You asked me if I roll, I have a,a brown belt in Brazilian jujitsu.
I've been rolling since 2009.
I started in jujitsu by the way,a lot of tech folks in like in
Seattle is a huge like community.
Like when I was, when I was shadowingup the Seattle every week even like

(46:19):
pre COVID, obviously, but there weresome great little clubs out there.
You guys have a 10th planet outthere across the lake in Bellevue.
There's some really good

John (46:26):
Okay.

Leon K (46:27):
to roll.
But going back to the three pillars,the second pillar is cybersecurity.
So we are going to provide a set ofAutonomous services to help secure
customer clusters, make sure they'refollowing all the best practices,
make sure that their containerimages don't have vulnerabilities.
And there's a whole suite ofpeople do just a bad job of
cybersecurity in the cloud in general.

(46:47):
And I have my own theories asto why that is, but we're gonna
try to help customers there.
And the third pillar is disasterrecovery and high availability.
So how can you make sure thatyour application stays up?
I'll give you an example.
If you have your entire game hostedin AWS and that in a specific
region, and that region goesdown, your game's offline could be
offline for two hours, three hours.

(47:08):
What does that mean?
How long does it take forplayers to get back to you?
That could be a two, three dayramp back time, depending like,
cuz it's a chicken and egg, right?
Like if you have no one to play with,
you're gonna

John (47:19):
Yeah.
yeah, you can, I don't know.
You can jump servers somewheresuper far that kills your latency.
Right.
Which again is gonna ultimatelymake people drop off as well.
Mm-hmm

Leon K (47:28):
hundred percent.
So there's three pillars.
The first one we're starting withis autonomous cost management.
The second one is autonomouscybersecurity and the third one is
disaster recovery, high availability.

John (47:38):
great spaces that are gonna be, you know, there's no
signs of slowdown anytime soon.
Right?
The more companies that comeonline and pretty much, I can't
imagine the space that isn't right.
Like they, they, these are thingsthat they should be worrying
about or should have a plan for.
I don't care who you are really.
Right?
Like keeping costs, slow, keepingyour information and data secure and

(48:00):
then having backup recovery plans.
If, and when things do go bad.

Leon K (48:06):
Yeah.
People ask me sometimes, Hey Leon,what's your Tam, which stands
for total addressable market.
It's kind of a.
Measurement people use to decide whetheryour opportunity is worth investing
in is the opportunity big enough.
Right?
And, and so my, you know, my answeris my, my total addressable market
is the entire cloud, like layers.
Literally everyone is gonnabe deploying with containers.

(48:30):
Everyone is gonna be using Kubernetes.
So

John (48:32):
Yeah.

Leon K (48:33):
we have a lot of people to help in the future.

John (48:35):
I know your role, right?
You founded the company.
I would love to know what atypical day looks like for you as
do you go by founder, CTO, CEO.
What do you go?

Leon K (48:45):
My title on slack, I kid you not is chief plumber and sandwich maker.

John (48:54):
I haven't heard that one.
Leon chief plumber and sandwich maker.
I get the

Leon K (48:59):
Well, like, look, you're in a startup and someone clogs the toilet,
someone's gonna unclog the toilet.
And as often it's gonna beone of the founders is not.
So you wear all hats in a startup.
Right.
And that's the cool partabout being in a startup.
You get to do everything sometimesit's distracting, but it's so immensely
fulfilling, it's hard and most peoplefail and every venture is bound to fail.

(49:22):
Like, so, like it's not somethingthat, that same people usually try
to do, but, but when you're there andyou can get some inkling of success,
it's like the greatest feeling.
And John, yes.
What my day is, most of my day is.
Talking to customers, that's 80%of my day getting their feedback,
helping them everybody is insupport in our organization.

(49:43):
And that's the way I believe it has to be.
So, customer connection is themost important thing for me.
And then very rarely tellingour teams what to do because
I hired really smart people.
Like they know what they gotta do, right?
So it's basically walking the, makingsure that the vision is, is being
properly represented in our shortterm, medium term, long term roadmap.

(50:05):
And then sometimes they'll bring meinto a technical conversation where
they could use some gray hair opinion.
And I'm happy to chimein when that's the case.
Like makes me feel.

John (50:14):
I haven't heard the term gray hair opinion.
I, I got, I have the image rightaway, but what does that mean to you?

Leon K (50:21):
It means a dude who's over I'm almost 50.
Right?
So like in software engineeringcommunity, that's, that's dinosaur status.
Right?
look, they don't let me code anymore,and these guys are way better than me
anyway, but it's nice when we can havea good technical conversation and then
I can bring up a learning from my pastthat is helpful to them in a go forward

John (50:41):
Which IM sure happens.
Happens regularly.

Leon K (50:44):
situation, probably more than I'm admitting, but yes.

John (50:46):
There you go.
Fantastic.
You know, development,engineering, problem solving.
You've seen your share.
You've been in on many of those roles.
You hire a bunch.
What separates a great engineerfrom an average engineer.
When you're looking at candidates,what helps I'm in there

Leon K (51:09):
It's a really simple, I mean, it's a great profound question.
My answer is gonna be tri simple.
It's the reason that they're doing it.
Right.
So I start the conversation with don't.
Tell me about your background.
Tell me what draws youto computer science.
What draws you to this field?
Right.
And if the answer was, well, I had awhole bunch of choices in university.
I could have been a doctor or a lawyer,and I talked to my and said, oh, well,

(51:32):
software engineering is super lucrative.
That's the wrong reason.
Yeah, it is lucrative.
That's the worst reason.
Cause last thing you wanna do.
Is be sitting in front of thescreen, super bored for a paycheck.
why would anyone do that in a worldof so much opportunity where you can
just follow your passion or I don'tunderstand why people do boring jobs.

John (51:53):
Agreed.
I don't know what you've seen overthe past couple of years, but I.
This pandemic thing was abig wake up call, right?
Where people, I don'tknow what happened, right.
Were either forced to leave jobs orcouldn't go into an office and therefore
had the chance to finally take a step backand reassess and be like, wait a second.
You know, like I can do other thingsor, or look at how much more happier I

(52:15):
am now that I'm not going to an office.
Right.
Like, gee, you know, let me reassessmy priorities and, and spending time
with the family and things like that.
So I'm with you, you know, if, ifit hasn't hit you yet after this
pandemic, why would you spend timedoing something that doesn't bring
you absolute satisfaction and joy?

Leon K (52:34):
with this gig economy, you can literally like, be anywhere
it's like the, have you everread the four hour work week?

John (52:40):
Yes.
Yeah.
Tim.

Leon K (52:42):
Tim.
Ferris way before his time wrote thatthing, but he is like, absolutely true.
Like, you know, earn in us dollarsand, and spend them in yen or where
wherever he was at the time in Brazil.
I don't remember where hewas, but like that dude had.
The right idea.
I remember this really interesting story.
It was this eCommerce company at thetime, and I read the four hour work week
and I sent it to my whole team and thechief operating officer, she was really

(53:05):
like, Hmm, very skeptical older lady.
And, and she, and she sent the CEO like,look what Leon is sending his team.
They, he only wants himto work four hours a week.
who was the best.
I'm like, you completelymissed the point of that,

John (53:22):
Yeah, because there's so many great takeaways in there right.
Of like learning to scale and, andautomate and not be a bottleneck.
Right.
and hire people to do things.
So that freeze up your time tomake bigger impact elsewhere.
Right.
Like a lot.
Those are the ones thatI still remember anyway.

Leon K (53:40):
Yeah, like super, that was a super impactful book.
But, back to your question,like what, what do you try?
I try to figure out wherethat person's passion.
Lies.
Like I know when I open a ID,integrated development environment for
you guys, it might be unity for me.
It's visual studio code,like, and I, and I create code
that's that's artwork for me.

(54:00):
And I don't want my artwork to be rushed.
I hate it when I have tocode against the deadline.
Like sometimes the colors on have totake the time getting on the canvas.
My wife super laughs at mewhen I talk about coding like
art, but I truly believe it.
It's like my it's my artistic expression.
When I produce an algorithmthat works sufficiently, it's
like, no, no better feeling.

(54:22):
And I need to see that in a candidate.
I need to see some similar spark ofpassion and they'll U it'll usually
come out when they tell me about ahard algorithmic problem that they've
solved or a hard distributed computingproblem that they solve, or a hard
machine learning problem that they solvetheir eyes light up, that spark shows.
And then I understand thatthere's a culture fit.

John (54:43):
a good portion of this show is spent educating and preparing other people
to enter development, and things tobe prepared for things to keep in mind.
And, and that's a great one to call out isKnow why this role, while you're applying
to this company, why you do this thing beprepared to talk about either the hardest

(55:03):
thing you had to solve or the thingyou're most proud of having to solve.
Right.
I think those are common ones.

Leon K (55:09):
Yeah, and those are standard interviewing questions.
And I used to think that it was likehaving a formal computer science education
was a big deal for me because like,you get to like the nuts and bolts and
you go through all of that, the grindof learning, the lower level, like
we talked about it early on, right.
I interviewed a guy maybetwo weeks ago, great guy.
And we hit it off on all thetechnical side and on the culture fit.

(55:29):
And I looked at his resume and I'm likeyou know, is, I don't, I'm not gonna say
his name, but like, I'll just use John.
Hey John, where did you getyour computer science education?
He's like, no, and I'm self taught.
I never went to college.
I'm like, fantastic.
Like I could carry a supertechnical conversation with you.
And we really geeked out on abunch of these cloud concept.

(55:50):
And you never went to schoolfor it, like congrats for
saving four years of your life.
Cuz I couldn't do it.
Right.
So, you know, hats off to thoseguys who can teach themselves.
Cause it's a super impressive skill.

John (56:00):
I love it too.
And, and, kudos to you for not catchingthat on the resume and instantly
kind of throwing it aside, right?
Oh, university's not even in here.
I don't recognize it.
Okay.
Pass or next.
Yeah.

Leon K (56:10):
And then at the same token, I've yesterday I interviewed a PhD student and
like 15 minutes of this is a conversation.
I'm like, dude, this is not goingwell, this is not gonna be a, like a
call like super smart academically,but didn't have the drive.
Didn't have the passion.
Yeah,

John (56:24):
the few graduate students I know, depending on where they are, right.
Are either ready to be done orsome people just fit better in
the academic world, I guess.

Leon K (56:34):
that you nailed it.
Just, just a better fit.

John (56:36):
I have yet to have direct reports.
I'm in the IC route, I think one dayand the not too distant future, I
can see myself going into management.
You had this amazing insightand I want you to share it here.
It's like, how do yougauge your team, right?
Or the people that you report to BecauseI think a lot of people fall into the trap
or managers fall into the trap of keepingthe status quo, keeping everybody happy.

(57:00):
And I don't think that's the best way toapproach the team for long term success.
And, few other places have builtin to kind of constantly keep
people sharp and making sure theyhave, stat ranking or whatever.

Leon K (57:14):
Yeah.
performing.
Yeah.
It's like throughperformance reviews, right?
And like, I think the extreme exampleof some old school thinking is Jack
Welsh is the CEO of G he had a, a rule.
every year, the bottom 10%of the sales team gets fired.
matter how well they.

John (57:29):
that's it.
That's it.

Leon K (57:31):
and I don't believe in that, but that is an extreme
case of performance manager.
But I think the reference you were talkingto is if you are unsure about a team
member, if you're unsure about someoneon your team, whether they're performing
or not, there's a instant litmus test.
You can ask yourself toget it's a gut check.
And the gut check is if that guyor girl walked into your office

(57:51):
tomorrow and said, I quit, what wouldyour instant emotional reaction be?
Would it be one of relief orwould it be one of anxiety?
And then the answer is one of relief.
It means you probably haveto work that person into a
performance improvement plan.
And then if that performance doesn'timprove, then you gotta let, 'em go.
Cause it's not fair.
The rest of the team, if youdon't have people equally pulling
their weight and putting in thesame sweat, equity and labor.

(58:14):
labor of love, then you're gonnahave other team members that get
disgruntled and say, ah, fuck it.
Like if Leon doesn't care,why am I trying so hard?
And then everyone's performance suffersand that's a rotten apple in a barrel.

John (58:28):
Mm-hmm

Leon K (58:28):
If you're gonna manage performance, you gotta do it proactively.
I have a policy of doing performancereviews often and quickly.
Meaning every six months we do a reviewof everybody's performance on the team.
And we don't only do that, reviewto give people a pat on the back,
we do that to compensate them.
So bonus stock options, pay, bump,whatever that is, is like the

(58:51):
recognition of good performancehas to come with a reward.
And then the opposite is true.
Like if you're not doing well,we're gonna figure out what
the plan is to get you perform.
And many people turn aroundand do really well after that.
But some people don't and you're actuallycontinuously improving your team that way.
And then just another, like my tidbit onperformance, I don't believe in spreading

(59:14):
like if you had like 10,000 bucks inbudget to give, pay raises this quarter.
Right.
I think the worst thing you can do isjust kind of spread that around equally
across the team that's kind of the worstversion of communism for me, like the,
the people who work the hardest andhave shown results deserve the game.
That doesn't mean next six months orthe next quarter, other folks don't

(59:36):
step up and, and, and get rewarded.
it's like the term peanutbutter spreading peanut butter.
It's just the worst approach.
Right.
And I, I often red flagmanagers that do that.

John (59:49):
Yeah, let that be a, a strong takeaway it's a great conversation piece
as well, it's the same problem of you havethat you could call it an underperformer,
but really it's like not performing tothe same degree as everyone else on the
team and kind of dragging the team downis the same way of saying like, Hey, as
a team, we'll all bask in the gain orthe excess of the rewards, but it can be

(01:00:12):
much more inspirational motivating thatyou do recognize the standout performers.
Right.
Cause then everybody has a barto reach towards to be like,
oh, you know, look at so.
And so they did this, I saw.
Their contributions.
I saw them putting in the timeor fixing these really big
problems when they didn't have to.
And I see them get recognized.

(01:00:34):
Good for them.
I wanna see what that feels like.
I want to get there.
I wanna be in the, and theshould come next performance.
Right.
And I bet you, that's gonna prompta one-on-one and be like, Hey man,
you know, if, if it hasn't already,if, if for whatever reason, right.
They haven't realized thatto, to come at your door and
be like, how can I get there?
Right.
Like, or, or, Hey, I see thesethings that I'm working on.

(01:00:56):
Will this move the needle?
Right?
Is this the best way tospend my time or elsewhere?
Right.
Like, I think it's just allpositive conversations to be
had after something like that.

Leon K (01:01:04):
you nailed it.
And at least it's out in the open.
Like everyone knows exactly what

John (01:01:09):
mm-hmm yeah.
It's not invisible that kills me.
I, I know there's a popularconversation out there in the
world of like pay transparency.
But more than that, right.
Is, is transparency of like companyvalues and what do we reward
and what are we looking for?
Right.
Like, Hey, we hired you becauseyou fit the culture and, we believe
you can deliver these things.

(01:01:29):
Right.
And it's, so if, if everybody's kindof on, at the same benchmark, right.
And then there's people that can stilloverachieve and, and, and jump across
the room of everybody's a genius,I think that just makes everybody
sharper and keeps everybody pushing.
you've been in tech for a while and,and I've been in it for a bit and.
There's no end there's shortage ofnew opportunities and new things

(01:01:51):
to conquer or to learn about.
And it's exciting, man.
It always surprises me to run into someonethat tells me, oh, I've I've done it all.
Or I'm not interested in something,you know, I don't just, it loses
that, that zest or that spark to keeplearning or keep trying new things.

Leon K (01:02:08):
Yeah.
It's actually during interviews whenI'm kind of interviewing for culture
fit, you know, I like to ask why like,Hey, you designed the system this way.
Why?
Right.
Sometimes the answer will be,I don't know the decision was
made before me, or I don't know.
My manager made that decision or thesenior engineer made the position.
I'm like, Does this soundlike a good idea to you?

(01:02:30):
Doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
So why wouldn't you ask the questionand if that individual didn't ask
the question that tells me somethingabout their character, I don't need.
Yes, man.
I want people to be passionateabout their positions.
If they think something iswrong, I want 'em to speak up.

John (01:02:43):
Yeah,

Leon K (01:02:44):
they haven't spoken up in the past.
The chances have them speaking up onthe, you know, the probability that
we have a good culture fit is lower.

John (01:02:50):
totally.
This is something that I've comeacross over the past month or so.
That was kind of surprising to me.
I think I fall into the quadrantof agreeable, you know, agreeable
as opposed to disagreeable.
And there's a metric there thatsays that the people that tend to
rise up the ladder or in positionsof power or management or whatever.
Are those disagreeable people.

(01:03:12):
Right.
And you know, there's definitelylevels of tact in how you voice your,
disagreements something that, thatI realize I definitely have room to
ask why or challenge when somethingdoesn't make sense to me, as opposed
to, like you said, yes, agree.
Okay, this is the decision.
Cool.
I'll rock with it.

Leon K (01:03:32):
I'm the opposite, John.
I'm a total shit disturb.
Like, I, I, I rattled the cage.
Like if something doesn't make senseto me, so we have this pretty good
cultural core value I didn't invent it.
It kind of came from Amazon and AWS,but it's like the basic essences
disagree and commit like you and Ican have like a vehement disagreement

(01:03:53):
about a tech decision, right?
Like, we'll hear each other out.
Someone's gotta break that tie either.
We agree.
Like we pick a direction somehowwe pick a direction and we go,
and then there's no backstabbing.
We both go a hundred percent in.
And I, I just had this with my CEO.
Like I, we, we had a nice blowoutyelled at each other for an hour.
And then at the end of that, satdown, had a nice glass of wine.

(01:04:16):
I said, all right, Erie, here are allthe reasons why I disagree with this
decision, but if you're gonna makeit, you're the CEO of the company.
I'm a hundred percent behind you andI'm gonna make that decision successful.
That's the only way to roll in my opinion.
Like you can't bottle it all up, but youalso can't have sabotage in the company.
You, gotta stand behind adecision a hundred percent.

John (01:04:35):
I appreciate that.
I appreciate you reminding me ofthose Amazon leadership principles.
They are, there was 14 when I was thereand I think they added two after I left

Leon K (01:04:46):
year were you there

John (01:04:47):
2018 to 2020.
yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so that was I think sincethen they've added two along the
lines of like good citizen, right?
Like, I think like long termsustainability or like green
energy or something like that.
I, I I'd have to look them up.
Ooh,

Leon K (01:05:01):
so there are way too many of them, like I have four core principles
and those are the only things thatwe kind of guide our decisions.
Customer obsession, cust you
know, figure out the customer journey.
All else we'll follow.
The second one is taking ownershipand leading by example, the third one
is developing yourself, your team andhiring the best people around you.

(01:05:22):
And the fourth is embracing change.
Understanding that change is constantlyoccurring, have respectful discord,
respectful conversations, but once youget to a point, disagree and commit.
Yeah.

John (01:05:37):
Those are solid custom obsession, ownership, hire and develop
the best and disagree and commit.
That's one that I cando some more reps on.
I'm good at committing.
I gotta be better about voicingmy disagreements when I have them.
Right.
Like I think everybody can identifywhen they get the little knots
in their guts something thatmakes them kind of bat an eye.

(01:05:58):
Of like not quite aligned.
And that could be fora few reasons, right.
There could be, you may notbe understanding something.
There could be a disconnect but theworst thing you could do and I'm guilty
of it is not raising the question.
Right.
Hey, Hey, hold on.
Can we step back?
What do you mean by that?
Or, you know, what does that entail?
Things like that.

Leon K (01:06:18):
In, my tech discussions with my team, like if we're
getting to kind of a critical.
I think they're being too quiet.
I pick the scab, like what's wrong withyou guys is you don't have your coffee.
Like if I'm right, we'redefinitely in the wrong path.
You know, like I needyou guys to speak up.
I pick the scab and I often getthe reaction I need out of that.
Like, you know, maybe there's a casewhere everything is logically laid

(01:06:39):
out and there's no reason to havethat debate, but often I know what
the other side of the argument is.
Right.
it's not that I wanted argument.
I want these guys to learn to, like, if Iget hit by a bus, They need to be critical
thinkers each and every one of them.
And like, that's the legacy, right?
The making sure that, that if I gethit by a bus or if I go, if I get
ship wrecked, as for our work week,the litmus test is you come back and

(01:07:03):
your company's running, but thriving,
you know, that you've done the rightthing in terms of your organization.

John (01:07:09):
Heck yeah.
I, I forget what I read.
It was some book that was referredto me about leadership or whatever,
and, and it's kind of like, you cango down the history of companies
that were built to succeed aftertheir founder or CEO stepped down or
companies that crash and burn, right.
As soon as the one person, wasn'tthere to keep the ship together,
it all crashed and burned.

(01:07:29):
So that's it right?
Like.
Build the culture that can sustainitself after you're gone or not
available, or whatever, work

Leon K (01:07:37):
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I got this great piece of careeradvice early on in my life.
A good friend of mine, rip Simpson.
He, bestowed on me.
He runs a great little companycalled snow commerce right now.
They're just killing it.
But he said to me work towork yourself out of a job,
and you'll never be out of a.

John (01:07:55):
to work yourself off, out of a job.
And you will never be out of a job.
Yeah.

Leon K (01:08:00):
Which is basically constantly get yourself out of the path of execution.
But as that happens, the scopeof responsibility increases, your
company grows customer side, youknow, everything is kind of ballooning
around you and you have to plan forthat next level of scale as a leader,

John (01:08:16):
that's a great blueprint to start out, right.
If you're kind of wonderinglike, Hey, where can I go?
How do I grow?
Or, Hey, I have to write athree year plan five year plan.
That's a great starting point.
If you're not already thinking thatway to help you kind of flesh that,
pR FAQ of your life for something,

Leon K (01:08:32):
Anyone that chose me a three year plan and I'll call bullshit
before I read it, nobody knows whatthree years looks like in the future.

John (01:08:39):
Tell me about it.
Yeah.
I struggle.
I was asked at my last job at EA.
Hey, write a three year plan.
And I was pretty good about writingkind of a one year plan, right.
Of like, Hey, a year from now, thisis what I hope to have contributed
to, or be working on the, thethree year, the five year was, I
don't know why it was daunting.
Right.
Like even even think aboutit, like working backwards.

(01:08:59):
Right.
If we're here, some hit game onthis technology using these systems
and then working backwards, eventhat was like too daunting, right.
Or unrealistic, right.
It just becomes fluff.
Like the whole middle part ofthat sandwich just becomes fluff
that it's not gonna happen.

Leon K (01:09:13):
What was your favorite gaming environment to work in?
Like as a company?

John (01:09:19):
you're gonna put me on the spot, but in the spirit of.
that's been an easy one.
I've only been what, six places,epic being the current one.
And, and I'm too young at epic, right?
I've only been there what, like threemonths, if that, and I'm still trying to
get my feet and foundation underneath me.
Awesome culture, supersmart people learning a lot.
Fortnight's a, an insane tankergoing at like Lamborghini speeds.

(01:09:43):
But prior to epic, I was at EAand EA is one of the oldest game
developers in the business, right.
Still going today andthey're public and all that.
And if you were on the outside listening,
there's nothing but terror stories oflike EA being this conglomerate and
corporate behemoth and like no souland, no creativity, blah, blah, blah.
But on the inside, I had a blast.

(01:10:05):
I had a blast.
I, I, I, I really benefited in a waythat they've learned where all these
other brand new startups and, andgame developers are still trying to
figure out how to get to this likesustainable place of game development.

Leon K (01:10:20):
believe it, I, I had a similar experience at Oracle.
Like when I joined Oracle throughthe acquisition, you were like,
oh, they're gonna suck your soul.
It's gonna be the death of you creatively.
And I was like worried.
And like, I, I got there and itwas a little weird at first cause
never been at a big company.
And I'm sure a lot of people didn'tlike the fact that I was asking,
why do we do things this way?

(01:10:40):
So many times.
Hey, this sounds ridiculous.
Why are we doing this?
and then some of those things Ichanged I was like privileged, right.
I had like a vice president position.
So like, I, had a little bit oflike say, and then I got a chance
to like really work through thesystem and build some new products.
I got the chance to meet Larry Ethat dude is like super sharp or I

(01:11:02):
was blown away and I was riffing onsome, some next level ideas with him.
And we were like talking about howAmazon would react and so forth.
And I, I had like, nothing,but like an amazing, like all
of politics and garbage aside.
Sure.
That that's there in every big company.
I'm sure.
I mean, I haven't been to a lot ofbig companies, but I can imagine
it's like that everywhere, butthe experience was like, cool.

(01:11:24):
Like I wouldn't trade that experiencefor anything because it like gave
me a whole new dimension to, whata corporate life actually looks.
Being able to exercise your creativity,even inside of a big company and
not being that cog in the wheel.

John (01:11:38):
IBM was kind of that first big business role that you had.
And then from then on youwent full entrepreneur.

Leon K (01:11:45):
Yeah.
I, I was recruited to IBM.
Like there were two positionsthat, of like 300 applicants.
I have no idea how I made itbut I got recruited to IBM
like to Toronto laboratory in ahardcore engineering position.
As an intern and I spent 18 monthsthere, it's kind of boring it sometimes.
But like, I, steered my way into ateam that was building like this.

John (01:12:07):
yeah.

Leon K (01:12:07):
ECommerce platform before eCommerce existed.
And like, I was like, I was one ofthe, like six engineers on that team.
And it was like destinedto fail, but it succeeded.
And we launched like this companyLL B, which is like a big cataloger
in the us online before anybody.
Like, it was very few people doingtransactions online and all of a
sudden that whole division blew up.

(01:12:28):
It got funding from inside.
I remember ner.
So like, it was also a very unusualexperience in that I was 19 years old
and I got a chance to experience likea startup within a massive company.
Right.
And the entrepreneurial spirit took over.
As soon as I got it started gettingguardrails like, oh, you can't
do this or you can't do that.
I'm like, yeah, I'm outta here.

(01:12:49):
I'll just do my own thing.

John (01:12:50):
that's usually the nail and the coffin or the sign, right.
Of like, I don't know.
What do you call it?
Bureaucracy bureaucracy forthe sake of bureaucracy, right?
Like, Hey, this is the process.
And you have to go through these checksand balances to make a big change, as
opposed to, Hey, this could really help.
And I'm interested in passionate about it.
I'm gonna take ownership, youknow, let me, let me do this.

(01:13:11):
Right.
I'm I'm making the same money anyway.
I'm just gonna bring you more money.
And people just stop that becauseit's not by the book or something.

Leon K (01:13:18):
Yeah.
I remember like I had a mentor at IBM.
Like the guys like stillkeep in touch with him.
Like he, he was the lab directorand big executive at IBM.
And like, he, when I wanted to leave, hewas like, oh, you're leaving too early.
Just hang out.
I'll introduce you to all the right BCSin the I'm like, dude, I already got the
fun thing I'm out, but it was interesting.
I was more of a shit disturber than Ithink I realized, like, for example, I had

(01:13:41):
like a fish tank in the office that was,there was no pet policy in the office.
Like I just brought afish tank one uh, weekend.
Like my wife bought itfor me as a present.
And, and then like, on the exitinterview, the HR person was like,
you don't not have any idea howmuch trouble that fish tank caught.
Like we have meetings about like,whether we could let you keep your

(01:14:01):
fish tank or not like you see, well,you're just validating my, my move here.
Well,

John (01:14:07):
Yeah.
Yeah.
We had meetings about somethingthat doesn't affect anybody, but
you and you didn't know about it.
Yeah.
so good exposure at IBM and enough of a,of a motivator to go do your own thing.
So a vital part in the path.
Yeah.

Leon K (01:14:21):
John, have you ever read dad poor.

John (01:14:23):
I think I read that in my like mid twenties.

Leon K (01:14:26):
Yeah, me too.
But there was, there wasone lesson that stuck.
Like, I, I don't know if I agreewith everything that, that guy says,
like Robert, Robert KAK his name, butthe book is a must read for like, if
you're just getting outta college,you don't know anything about Marty,

John (01:14:39):
That's the.

Leon K (01:14:40):
go read the book, it's gonna save you a lot of credit card pain.
Right.
But one thing he said, like, youknow, when you come outta school, you
don't know what problems to solve.
Right?
Like you have no idea what theissues in the industry are.
So go work for someone, go work for zero.
So it doesn't matter.
Go work for someone, not because fora paycheck, go work for someone to
understand the industry that you're,that you're interested and passionate

(01:15:02):
about, where the actual friction andproblems are and that's what I did at IBM.
I discovered eCommerce.
I'm like.
This is bad the wayeCommerce is being delivered.
And the shrimp wrap software is terrible.
It needs to be in the cloud on demand, youknow, and I went and did that, but like,
I didn't have any idea of how to solveit until I felt an actual friction point.

John (01:15:21):
I like to put it as like, go get your real world education
on someone else's dime, right?
Like go into, see how.
Companies can be better by do,going to someone else's company.
Right.
And okay.
If I build my own company, thisis how I would do it differently.

Leon K (01:15:35):
That's basically it.
Right.
And it may not be that you build whenI build my own company, but it's like,
if I built a product to solve thisproblem, I would do it differently.
Start at the product levelor the feature level.

John (01:15:45):
Leon, I look up at the time and the time has flown the F by, but if you
are ready to get into what I like tocall the final round, you know, I'm a
big fighting game player and the finalround consists of short questions.
Whatever comes to mindand we blow through them.

Leon K (01:16:00):
Perfect.
Let's do it.

John (01:16:01):
Can you tell me the last game that you or your children
finished saw the credits role?

Leon K (01:16:08):
Planet coaster with my nine year old daughter.
It's a SIM, it's a SIM fortheme parks, amusement parks.

John (01:16:13):
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Rollercoaster tycoon type thing.

Leon K (01:16:16):
Yeah.
But more real.

John (01:16:18):
What is the last book you read?

Leon K (01:16:20):
Oh, I'm constantly reading.
So I'm currently readingthe wheel of time series.
it's a massive epic.
I think I'm on book six butit's called crown of swords.

John (01:16:32):
What's the setting.

Leon K (01:16:33):
So have you ever heard of the wheel of time?
It's Robert Jordan he's passed awaynow, but he's like this epic author.
This is Amazon has hasreleased it as as a series now.
On Amazon prime.

John (01:16:44):
Ah, okay.

Leon K (01:16:46):
So it's based on this kind of Eastern belief.
That time is a circle and that agescome and go, but basically history
repeats itself and it takes you throughkind of this epic good versus evil.
it's very similar to kind of the genre ofLord of the rings or even game of Thrones.
it is.
And that's my kind of numberone, non fiction genres.

(01:17:09):
I love reading fantasy.

John (01:17:10):
Yeah.
something that's not the day today, which you see around you.

Leon K (01:17:13):
Yeah.
So I have, I, I always in parallelone book, either audio or reading,
one book that's nonfictionin one book that's fiction.
And I kind of read two in parallel.

John (01:17:21):
I was going to ask what's your format of choice
or what, device do you read on.

Leon K (01:17:27):
I listen on audible and I read on Kindle.

John (01:17:31):
Yeah, that ePaper, that's my, my go to as well.

Leon K (01:17:34):
I did want give a shout out to the non-fiction book that I'm reading.
So there's Ray Dalio is a famouskind of investor, hedge fund manager.
He recently published the book andan accompanying kind of YouTube.
Educational video that takes youthrough the whole book in about
an hour, it's called the changingworld order is the name of the book.
Great nonfiction read.

(01:17:56):
And it's basically about the rise andfall of empires default currencies, where
he thinks we are in terms of where theus empire is as its status quo, like
leader in the world in terms of it, itbeing the, the peg currency of choice.

John (01:18:12):
Thank you for that call out.
I had no idea.
There was a new Ray Dahlia out there,and this topic has been at my forefront.
Anyway, as I'm just digging into currencyworld bank crypto, the fact that we're not
backed by gold things like this, right?
So this is really on brand forwhere my thinking is these days.

(01:18:32):
So thank you for that call.
Hmm done

Leon K (01:18:33):
You know, who does a really good job of explaining like the philosophy of
money, how it was created is Sapiens.
A short history of mankind.
And I always mispronouncethe author's name.
His name is Yuval if you haven't readsapiens, it's like a must read classic

John (01:18:53):
If you could have three dinner guests that are alive, would they.
Yeah.

Leon K (01:18:58):
there's so many people that I would love to talk to.
I think Hawkings would be onethat I, that I would love to speak
to Albert Einstein would be onethat I would love to speak to.
And then from Russian historythere's a character named Ross Putin.
It was like a priest.
And I would love to understand what wasgoing through that crazy dude's mind.

(01:19:21):
I would love to speak to iron Rand.
it,

John (01:19:24):
name?

Leon K (01:19:25):
she wrote the fountain head and Atlas shrugged.
She's.

John (01:19:28):
Alice shrug.
There we

Leon K (01:19:30):
Yeah.
She like her philosophies.
These very kind of libertarianphilosophies are a lot cornerstone,
a lot of beliefs of the teaparty and the Republican party.
But regardless, I think they've all beenwarp, but like if you have ever read Atlas
shrugged, it is quite an interesting pieceof perspective on, on world and Liberty.

John (01:19:48):
another good one.
Boom.
I give, I'll give you that.
Fourth one.

Leon K (01:19:52):
you, man.
I know I
broke the rules.

John (01:19:54):
All good.
I love it, man.
Shit disturbing andpushing the boundaries.
That's what we're about on herefrom what you see of the industry.
What is one of the things thatyou think we can do better?

Leon K (01:20:05):
Gaining industry or tech in general.

John (01:20:07):
The one that you're most familiar with?

Leon K (01:20:09):
Yeah.
So I'm most familiar with cloud and Ithink that we can do a lot better in
letting customers of the cloud move theirdata around without being locked in.
So everyone is busy trying tolock everybody out of and gain a
competitive advantage instead ofhaving open interoperability and
just, letting customers move freely.

(01:20:31):
And guys, there's plenty of business,like stop it with this nonsense and let
people consume these cloud resourcesnaturally without artificial vendor lock.

John (01:20:41):
I like that one.
Right?
It's our data.
We should have free unrestrictedaccess to it and it should not be
hard for me to do what I want with it.
I, if that is to migrateit somewhere else, right?

Leon K (01:20:55):
Yeah.
And look, I charge a fee charge,a reasonable fee, but don't charge
30 times the cost to move data.
That's just ridiculous.
And that's the numberit's, I've done the math.
It's 30 X.

John (01:21:05):
30 X, geez.
And that's so arbitrary.
Right.
That's like, so made up to belike, Hey, this is how we're gonna.

Leon K (01:21:10):
I, I don't think it's arbitrary.
I think it's deliberate.
It's like we, you know, it's hotel,California, check in anytime you
like, but yeah, you're never leav.

John (01:21:18):
All right, Leon.
We are at the final question.
and that is if you had a good timefalling out of the play area, is there
anyone that you would nominate tofall out of the play area behind you?
That could be a mentor colleague, someoneyou think has an interesting, compelling
story for anyone of the art listeners?

Leon K (01:21:38):
that's a great question.
I have a great, I, I don't knowif she, she would do it, but
there's a someone that, that I took upas a mentor while I was at Oracle, I was
introduced to her name is Patty Azzarello.
I can make an introductionto you on LinkedIn,

John (01:21:51):
That'd be fantastic.
Yeah,

Leon K (01:21:53):
Yeah,
she, she is a corporate coach.
She was like a former marketingexecutive at HP, and she's done a
whole bunch of, she's got, she'swritten two books one's called move.
And the other's called rise on howto deal with all of the pressing
priorities of, of kind of deliveringand how to juggle those priorities and
ensure that you're like moving forwardas opposed to spinning your wheels.

(01:22:15):
So to speak.
She was a fantastic mentor for me.
I would love if you can, if you cangrab her, she would be a great guest.

John (01:22:21):
I appreciate an introduction and all we can do is try

Leon K (01:22:25):
Absolutely.

John (01:22:26):
Leon, we made it, made it to the end.
Thank you immensely.
I learned a lot.
I can't wait for my listeners to get aload of this and learn about the things,
cast their eyes up to learn about thedifferent ways that cloud is doing things.
And some of the things they shouldconsider for, their business, right.
It could be just the way thatthey handle their infrastructure

(01:22:48):
internally or for their players.
And on top of that, there's justa lot of cool ideas around the
space of development in general.
And most importantly, some ofthe things cast AI is doing for
employment for the people in Ukraine.

Leon K (01:23:03):
Hundred percent and we'll, get those links over to you,
John, so you can link 'em up.

John (01:23:07):
absolutely.
Do you have any last words before we.

Leon K (01:23:10):
Yeah.
John, great questions.
And I love exploring thegaming space with you.
And thank you for your insight.

John (01:23:16):
Fantastic Leon.
Hey man, I'll stay in touch for sure.
Seeing what you guys do as youmove forward in making the cloud
a more affordable, safer, and

Leon K (01:23:28):
place to do business.

John (01:23:29):
better place to, there we go.
There we go.
Awesome.
We will stay in touch.
Take care.

Leon K (01:23:36):
Thank you, judge.

John (01:23:38):
Talk about falling out of the play area.
Technically Leon has never shippeda game, which is the key criteria of
all the guests that come on the show.
But he has developed games and hasshipped products that game devs can use.
Developers or developers.
A few parts of resonated with me.
Six month performance reviews, keepingthat conversation more frequent.

(01:24:01):
And transparent and rewarding,outstanding contributions to the business.
Before Amazon, I witnessed whathappens all too often as studios
who are fighting to finish andship a game and drop everything
that doesn't contribute to that.
And are super quick to sacrificeemployee development and investment.
You've all heard me preach about bymonthly, if not weekly, one-on-ones
both with your manager, yourreports, and also your skip level.

(01:24:25):
Another key piece of that equationis the biannual, if not quarterly
performance review conversation.
These naturally extended to oneanother where you're constantly
having that conversation.
Of the impact you either making, notmaking or should be making to get you to
the next level of where you can bettercontribute to the business and the team.
How many of y'all are up onyour cloud spending and keeping

(01:24:47):
a close, careful eye on that.
I don't know about you, but I've neverbeen a fan of not keeping my spin in check
and making sure if there are any savingsto be had that I take advantage of them.
I think my partner in life,Catherine, where, yeah, I'm
much healthier financially.
And I know it was 10 yearsago, living in California.
And a huge part of that is keepingtabs on interest I'm paying, taking

(01:25:08):
advantage of all bundles, subscriptions,bulk or wholesale purchasing that
I can make the save a dollar.
So with that, there's a promo link for outof play area listeners in the show notes
To claim a cast AI offer specificallyfor out of play area listeners.
I also decided to look into like,Hey, do any people in games actually

(01:25:29):
use Kubernetes for their backend?
And I found an interesting articlethat specifically talks about unity
game backends built on Kubernetes.
So curious if, uh, that helps you atall, any mileage you get out of that,
please let me know super interested.
As far as I know, when I was working atAmazon and I never really knew of anybody.
Strictly deploying through Kubernetes.

(01:25:49):
On episode 37 of the gamedevelopers podcast out of play area.
And we'll sit down with Chris Cole,a dear friend, and a senior technical
artists currently working for Amazongame studios and whom first started
alongside me back in 2007, a full yearbefore the Dawn of the Marvel cinematic
universe and Chris Nolan's dark Knight.

(01:26:11):
A time where you may berecall everybody singing or
listening to Rhianna's umbrella.
Chris Cole and I bothstarted at mid way, Austin.
That episode is set to debut in a coupleof weeks on a Monday, July the 18th.
make sure to follow us so that youdon't miss out on that episode.
Thank you for listening, Deb.
If you found this episode informative,I ask that you pay a link forward to

(01:26:33):
a developer to help grow our listener.
If you're a game developer with astory you think could help a fellow dev
out, please go to out of play area.comand click on the Calendly link at
the top to meet up, please make sureyou get approval from your manager
or studios, PR HR team beforehand.
Out of play area, the game developers,podcasts releases, new episodes every

(01:26:55):
other Monday on all the major players,including Spotify, apple, and Google.
Please make sure to follow us, to seewhat developer falls out of the play area.
Next time.
I'm your host John Diaz untilnext time devs stay strong.
Stay true.
Stay dangerous

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Leon Kuperman | CTO @ Cast.AI | Ep 36

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Leon Kuperman | CTO @ Cast.AI | Ep 36