Gene:
I’m here today with Zach and Jacob Smith, both of whom are classically trained musicians. Jacob is a bassoon player, Zach is a double bass player -- but they're also tech entrepreneurs, and thus the intersection of arts and technology. So welcome guys.
Rather than my giving a whole long speech about your background, I thought perhaps you could explain what you did. You started a very successful company called Packet in 2014. And it is a hardware business for the Internet, but I don't think anybody really understands exactly what it is. Let's start our conversation with, you know, what do you guys do or what have you guys been up to for the last couple of years?
Zach:
Well, I guess I'll take that. All right. Just in case your audience was super curious, we are identical twins, but I'm the slightly older one. So, I get to go first sometimes. Jacob and I have been playing around in what we would broadly call the digital infrastructure space. These are the underlying things that make everything you do in your daily life related to the Internet or cloud computing or hosting or applications work.
I've been playing around with computers and data centers, which are basically big buildings attached to the Internet, for the last 20 or 25 years. Jacob's been helping people understand what that actually is via marketing and customer motions for just about as long.
And so in 2014, we leaned into the inevitable by starting a business together called Packet. And what we did there is we basically partnered with large scale real estate businesses - think data centers, telecoms, or, or other kinds of physical infrastructure companies. And we helped them automate the physical computers and networks that sat within their buildings so that they would be accessible to a developer user.
This was an experience that was kind of upgraded from IT users who would go and “rack and stack” and punch down cables and install like their operating systems. And we were upgrading that experience for somebody who sat on their MacBook, typed a few lines of code and expected computers all around the world to turn on. As I explained to my wife, we just turn computers on and off! So for the nerds around us, you know, we were providing the substrate of a digital infrastructure.
Gene
And so that business started in 2014, so you've been in the business a long time. And I wonder if you could kind of describe what you saw as the big transformations in tech - not the little things - but the things that really caused there to be a left turn or a right turn, in the way that technology has affected our lives.
Jacob
I'll take that. And first of all, just to be clear, we no longer run Packet. We sold Packet in 2020 to a big company called Equinix. Had a great time working there for a couple of years before charting a way out into the entrepreneurial world again. But you asked the question about what are the big trends?
I mean, there's a lot of big trends that we can talk about, but I think the biggest one that has influenced our career and allowed us in because we were not trained in any things spectacularly close to this: accessibility. The Internet has always been a sort of open community, but over the last 20 years it has moved from being something rather provincial and almost neighborly - like, “hey, I know a guy, he has a data center with a couple of racks and you can use them” to being something that's accessible to a really broad and almost, you could say, a ubiquitous population. So accessibility has been probably the biggest trend.
And infrastructure tooling, open source software, like a lot of things,j kind of lead into, well, “can I create something today that used to take weeks, months, years?” That's just hard to ignore as an entrepreneur.
Gene
I remember in the early, early days when Amazon was just building out AWS, their vision sounded similar to what you've said, which is “you don't need to build your own data center. We'll essentially rent you a piece of ours.” How did your business intersect with that evolution? Zach
I would say that the end result wasn't that much different for some customers, but we were really building for the folks that had much more opinion. So think specialized computing, things that are now you would call GPU hosting for telecoms who had unusual requirements. For example, there's really only four wireless carriers in the United States. Public cloud platforms like AWS are really built for the mass market. They're built for common use cases.
What we wanted to do was make sure that we could give that same cloud computing experience around automation and accessibility and developer control, but do so no matter what hardware you wanted to use, whether it was a kind of commodity computer or something very specialized, no matter where you wanted to put it - in a big data center in Ashburn, Virginia, or maybe at the edge of some tower sitting out in Des Moines, Iowa, where you had to process some wireless signals and no matter what software you wanted to run on top of it, we wanted to give access to people directly to the hardware.
And so we invested in the ARM ecosystem, which is the specialized processors that power things like your mobile phone, the accelerated computing market, like what's, what's become the GPU or AI and ML infrastructure and other types of specialized computers used for, I'll call “bell curve” use cases.
GeneWell, you know, as, as you're both entrepreneurs and it sounds like, you didn't really have a background in business. So, if you had the opportunity to sit and talk with entrepreneurs today, give me two or three of your words of wisdom that you learned along the way about starting and building a company.
Zach:
Obviously hire as many bass bassoon and cello players as you possibly can!
Jacob:I'll give a few and I'll just make some connections to what I did learn how to do. I mean, I did go to school at Carnegie Mellon which was a techie school, but I was at the arts department. So I floated around and did things like business and computer science, mainly because I was interested. I grew up with the PC. It was kind of like the Oregon trail generation where you knew a little digital and you knew a little analog. And so it was very native to go and explore and try to figure out how to do something on the Internet.
But as a business person, I mean, first of all, you know, you kind of think back to your life lessons, obviously there's tons of failures that inform this. So these are only the ones that work, but the first thing is, is how hard it is to get the kind of alignment and clarity of leadership that we maybe take for granted.
As musicians, you know, playing in an orchestra or an opera, or even a chamber music ensemble, such an aligned group of people, experts at what they do - hopefully, are at least well prepared - doing a single thing at a single time, and you can hear the result, which is really not true in business.
And so there's been sort of an ongoing search for that, but I think it's a worthy search. It's not like the Philadelphia orchestra needs a conductor to help them know where one, two, three, and four is. And so it's less about dictating. And more about leading.
And I think that a business lesson that I took a little bit from the music world upon reflection, was from my first teacher on the bassoon. He was a Hollywood studio musician. And he said that the key to success in music (and life) was pretty simple, show up on time and don't play in the rests!
It's amazing how far that will take you in business as well. I think it goes right to probably the heart of the matter, which at least in the businesses we've run, which are B2B businesses, right? Trust, you have to earn trust. You have to show up, and deliver. If you, if you can't deliver, you have to honestly say why.
Zach:I'd add something else on there, which is maybe specific to being an entrepreneur. I think that people that I've worked with will tell you I've had to be very open about an annoying habit that I have, which is one, to be very intense, detail oriented, really try and work heavily on execution of a project or whatnot, and at the same time, be able to expand out, think very broadly, almost suspend disbelief into imagining the future.
And as an entrepreneur, you're constantly bouncing back and forth between those things. It's not like you're sitting at some research think tank, just wondering what the world's going to be like, but you do, you have to think forward because you don't really have a lot of paths to lean off on.
And so your advantage is to be able to envision a future that may exist, which may be five, 10, 15 years out, and exercise that kind of creative left brain. It doesn't matter how you would get there, the details seem hazy -- and at the same time, you jump right back into kind of getting down your licks, right, and practicing through and executing. And so I think that's a skill, but for entrepreneurs, particularly important to stretch yourself and not get stuck in the day-to-day minutiae too much, or at least all the time.
Gene
And as you're talking, I'm thinking all of those things ring true in my career. Well, as long as we're talking tech, it's kind of impossible to talk about tech today without talking about AI. And the interesting thing that I've observed (and I should say for full disclosure -- I'm an AI user. I'm on ChatGPT every day) And I find it to be a remarkable aid.
It is interesting to me, the number of people I run into who describe AI with fear. They ask the question, “ isn't AI going to take our jobs? Aren't you worried it's going to do X, Y, or Z?” Of course, as an entrepreneur, as you said, Zach, we’re thinking ahead.
So you talk about the future and sometimes you describe a future that's going to happen and people look at you and say, “really, that's going to be the way it's going to be?” But now it’s tinged with fear, more than I've observed in the past. And I wonder if you guys have a point of view about that and, and we can, let's expand on, let's start there and go from, go from there.
Zach:
Well, I do see what you're saying. you know, I do. There's no doubt that the technology is moving very rapidly. And so that can be just super scary to people because you don't understand the rate of change, or you're not sure what else is going to happen.
And so I think there's certainly that. I mean, clear paths, like, you know, “I'm going to learn how to be a computer programmer” seem less clear right now when you see the advancements that have happened with generative AI around software - my personal viewpoint, I don't have an answer about it.
Luckily we were in this kind of world where everything keeps changing. I like to look at the positive side of it. I'm usually an optimist in one way. I think it's going to make accessing this world of technology much more accessible. You know, I think maybe it was you or a friend, a mutual friend of ours who introduced us to making instruments easier to play.
By allowing more people to be musicians -- without having 10 years of figuring out the technique of how to use the violin. I think that's going to be a somewhat similar analogy for software and technology, which is, you can envision a lot more people being able to participate and create software or work with it because the tools make it more accessible.
So I think that's an expansionist view on how and where people can participate. And then, and then I think like the optimistic end as well is that there's just so much progress that can occur, areas that would not have been able to do 15 years ago. For instance, I couldn't work remotely and run a business. Now I can! Look how much that's added.
That hasn't removed things from our lives, it’s created it. So, my optimistic view is that more people will be able to leverage technology, and participate in it. And that we'll be able to do more -- that’s hopefully towards a good thing. But that's certainly not guaranteed.
Jacob
And I think to Zach's point about rate of change, like overall net, net technology has always come around and humans have always adopted it. Doesn't matter what it is, you figure out how to use it. The question is, who benefits and who, you know, how do you help people transition if their particular area of expertise or their economic mode goes outdated.
The other thing I would say is, I originally decided to study music. I was wrestling with this exact question. I was like, should I go study music? Because I was really worried about how to make a living. A friend had lent me a book that was about the future of technology and culture.
But basically, the thesis was, as technology became more ubiquitous, people would do more of this kind of stuff, communicating and interacting in tech driven ways, and that the experiences that brought us together and made us feel more human would become more valuable, because they would be more rare. And I believe that that is true.
We've gone through 20, or 25 years of sort of learning what it means to be distracted and not in touch. And when do we come out the other side of that? But I was probably wrong on my timing. But I was like,” people are definitely going to want to go to music concerts.” I don't know how to predict the outcome, but I think that is a reasonable thesis.
Gene
Well, it's funny that we're having this discussion today, which we're recording this on the 20th of January in 2025, just yesterday, the Surgeon General, the outgoing Surgeon General under Biden, issued a report, basically following up on, on something that he put out in 2023, telling the Us that there's an epidemic of loneliness in the country.
And his parting document basically said that the recipe for what ails us is -- community -- bringing people together, is bringing people together in unstructured environments where we are physically in the same room experiencing something together. That could be sports, that could be arts, that could be a book club. But that, that basically reinforces what you just said.
I want to turn for, for a second now to the thing that of course I'm. particularly interested in, which is this intersection between technology, entrepreneurship and, and the arts. The first place I think about is, well, how can we use tech and by extension, AI to run a symphony orchestra better or to run a theater company better.
And I can come up with a bunch of ways. My general thesis is that if someone has a menial task. Let’s say they're working at a theater company and they have a menial task that takes them 20 minutes. If AI can help them do that in four minutes - and you multiply that times all of the theater companies in the country times all the people doing that particular menial job, it's a fundraising multiplier because you've now multiplied people's time.
And so I wonder, you know, how you guys think about how the arts could be affected in a positive way by entrepreneurs creating, creating technical solutions that can help the arts broadly speaking.
Jacob:
First of all, I think like the arts broadly speaking, then there's classical music and things we all have a direct relationship with. Because certainly the world of entertainment and arts and creators has already been transformed. There are a lot of solo entrepreneurs or businesses making quite an impact by doing what they do with technology. And it's pretty impressive. I think you were talking when we got on, you said “Hey, this podcast,video editing software has gotten way better with AI.”
And I, and so I think you're right. That there's an ultimate efficiency effect. What I've seen so far in the business world, and I expect will happen also in the arts, two things. One is that it won't be like “well, you're fired.” It's more like, and you get to do new and higher level things. And that's a really important thing. It's like, okay, now we put people to higher purposes. And I think that's, because talent's still hard. It's still hard to hire great people, you know? And there's a lot of need for them.
And the second thing is that new businesses, whether they're arts related or any other kind, will start with those tools from the beginning. And we'll be just inherently well positioned to take advantage of them. And that's not fair.
Like. 20 years ago, it was really expensive to use, you know, Patron style software. And so you helped make it easier. And so did a lot of other people. And now it's just not that hard, right? It's going to get way easier to do that kind of stuff.
I would always suggest that it's the mirror image of cheaper is better. And you still have to create value. You can't just kind of squeeze costs out, especially in the arts where it's not about. necessarily, how cheap are you? It's really about, can you make an impact?
Jacob:Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to agree wholeheartedly. It's just way easier to run a business and reach your end user customers, offer experiences. I mean, these things are becoming a lot more powerful and a lot more accessible , and I think it applies to the arts as well. So I'm excited for those because, let's be honest, a lot of the arts experiences are not nearly up to par with some of the other experiences in our life that we've come to expect.
I'm a huge fan of Apple Classical. Thank goodness somebody brought high quality recordings in the way I want to listen to them so that I can really enjoy significantly more classical music in my cool AirPods, right. I don't have to carry around my record player or my CDs.
So I think these types of upgrades to people's experiences would be so powerful. I still think we have a long way to go and luckily, like I've been thinking about this as it relates to sports these days, which is another form of live entertainment that, you know, seems to be pretty well understood by the general population.m You know, we’re kind of going through a revolution right now in terms of -- you can watch the NFL finally on streaming, you can watch a live game all over the world, which is creating this massive market expansion for sports.
Well, we still really don't have that for a lot of the arts. We still don't have great archives and accessibility and follow this artist and understand them better. So there's like, there's so much to do. So I'm excited by that. And the access to technology and services platforms that can create new experiences. My hope is that there'll be artists who focus on those and, and, and do great things with them versus just kind of like taking more of your money. So I'm looking forward to that. I think it's an awesome time to be building any type of organization in the world right now.
Jacob:
Can I just add one thing? It's like a couple of years ago, we took our kids who were in their early teens on a trip to Europe as the pandemic started to loosen its grip. And it was the first time they or we had traveled when ApplePay is everywhere and you can basically find a map to anything on your phone. And if you can't understand it, you just translate it, you know, in instant real time.
And there's downsides to that, the mystery and the lure of landing in Madrid without any idea how you're going to find your hotel is no longer there in the same way. Although some people do it for fun, the accessibility of like -- I can go engage in another culture and talk to someone. So it's really what you make of it.
And this is something I found transitioning from pure arts to a different part of the world that was bigger, frankly, economically, is that the things that are so omnipresent in the arts world are undervalued in the arts world, and yet they are so rare and so needed in other parts of the world, and that would mean like creativity, imagining new experiences, impacting people, you know, all that kind of stuff is, it's art.
And it's also valuable, but I think there's a real imposter syndrome that I find many people have when they grow up and do something amazing in the arts. And then they're like, ” but I'm not qualified to do anything else anywhere else.” Like what? It's so overwhelming to do most things, but it really is a leap in a translation layer that I think we all need to help with.
GeneWell, this conversation in a way went in a direction that I was hoping because I share with you the optimism and the enthusiasm and the energy around what tech can do to help the arts. And I'm hopeful that this interview and all of the rest of the posts on this website and others that we do are going to imbue a sense of optimism and a sense of wonder and a sense of excitement and creativity to help make the arts better than they are, and more accessible.
Jacob:Finally, if any one of your audience members listens And works at Apple and makes Apple intelligence, have them hire any one of your other audience members to help make Apple intelligence more personal and human, because it's so obvious, right?
We're building generative AI, which is of the moment. It is a powerful and amazing technology, but it also creates opportunities. And in this sense, I think it will not be mass marketing for everyone, but for those who are creative and know how to, you know, compel that to happen and touch people -- boom, game on.
Gene
Thanks, guys. This has been great to talk to you. I really appreciate it.
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