260. How non-techies succeed in tech: lessons from Microsoft’s CTO

What does it really take to lead in tech without a technical degree?

In this episode, Jennifer Byrne, former CTO of Microsoft US, shares how she built a top-tier tech career starting with a psychology degree — and why understanding context, not code, is your key to success.

You’ll learn:

• How Jennifer transitioned from nonprofit work to tech leadership

• The difference between digital fluency and context (and why it matters)

• What cloud computing really is — minus the jargon

• How Microsoft handled global trust issues post-Snowden

• What CTOs actually do at big companies (hint: it’s not coding)

Whether you’re a founder, investor, or business leader, this episode will help you think more strategically about tech — and your role in it.

Chapters

00:00 – Why this episode still matters

02:30 – Jennifer’s path from psychology to tech

08:55 – Cybersecurity and the WikiLeaks era

14:40 – What cloud computing really is

25:25 – Digital context vs. fluency explained

35:45 – What a CTO actually does in big tech

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Transcript

Sophia Matveeva (00:00.14)
Let's learn from Jennifer Byrne how she ascended to the top of Microsoft and what she did when she got there. In this episode, you will learn some basic tech concepts. You will get an inside look at one of the world's largest companies. And also what I found really interesting is you'll hear how the Snowden and WikiLeaks era ended up helping Jennifer propel to the top of tech.

Sophia Matveeva (00:27.598)
Welcome to the Tech for an Turkey podcast. I'm your host, tech entrepreneur, executive coach at Chicago Booth MBA,Sophia Matveeva. My aim here is to help you have a great career in the digital age. In a time when even your coffee shop has an app, you simply have to speak tech. On this podcast, I share core technology concepts, help you relate them to business outcomes, and most importantly, share practical advice

on what you can do to become a digital leader today. If you want to a great career in the digital age, this podcast is for you. Hello smart people. How are you today? You know, it has been really hot in London in the last few days and most buildings here don't have air con. And so basically nobody knows what to do when it's hot. Anyway.

Today you are going to have a treat. You're going to learn from the former chief technology officer of Microsoft in the US, a super senior person in tech. Her name is Jennifer Byrne and she's fascinating. And this is actually a rerun of an episode that I released a couple of years ago, but concepts that Jennifer talks about in this interview keep coming up in my classes. They literally came up in a class that I taught on Monday. So I wanted to make sure that you didn't miss it.

And I suggest you pay particular attention to when Jennifer talks about what she does when she does not know a tech concept. And yes, that happens. Even the top technologist at Microsoft doesn't know everything about tech. So I hope you find this episode inspiring and useful. And if you do enjoy this episode, then I would really appreciate it if you leave the show a rating and a review. And now let's learn from Jennifer. Your first degree is in psychology.

and you ended up being the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft US, which is an interesting career path. But before we start talking about that, I'd like to know why did you choose to study psychology?

Jennifer Byrne (02:29.646)
Thank you for, no one asks that question. it was, you know, some of the biggest career decisions you make are the ones in the very beginning of your life, right? When you're trying to figure out who you are and who you want to be. I wanted to be a psychologist. I loved, and still do, I'm fascinated by people. You know, I'm just super curious about them and what makes them tick. I thought I could help people that way. So,

So I got a degree in psychology and I loved every minute of it. I knew that was what I wanted to study. It is what I studied. I didn't pursue an advanced degree after college, but mostly for financial reasons, it's tough to do that. And also because I just realized at 22, what do you actually know about life? So I ran a nonprofit and worked with mentally ill people in a social services setting for three years and thought I would use that as experience to understand more about the field and to grow up a little bit.

and then life took me in a lot of different directions. the story gets long after that, but I studied it because I loved it. And you know, I'll tell you, technology, because technology ultimately is a human expression, right? It's the thing that we created and imagined for ourselves. If you can understand the humanistic kind of inspiration behind it, it's actually quite helpful. So I do feel in a, maybe not a, you know,

really obvious way, but I do feel that my background has been super helpful in my technology career.

This is really interesting and very rare because what I'm seeing in the discourse is that STEM is the way to go. that essentially, don't know, I'm seeing, I'm seeing a lot of people almost being pressured to go and study technology and science and maths. know, these are interesting and worthwhile subjects to study, but I also think psychology is interesting and worthwhile. And so is music and drama and, you know, the law.

Speaker 2 (04:30.088)
And so it's really interesting to see somebody who is, who rose to basically the top of the pyramid in big tech, who actually not only studied psychology, but actually says that it enhanced their career. Would you be able to expand on that a little bit? Why did studying psychology enhance your career?

Yeah, I think I could, what's the best way to tell this story? of chronologically, probably, I think that my initial move into tech was, mean, you what it is for most people, you start at the very bottom, right? When you make a career move, you start in an entry-level job that doesn't require a lot of tech skills and you're expected to grow them over time. The caveat for me, I will say, although I think it's still true now, is that

When I entered tech, it was the late 90s, and it was legitimately difficult to find people who had the skills for the kinds of jobs that were needed out in the world. I was living in Washington, D.C. at the time, in U.S. government, and all the agencies were trying to figure out what they ought to be doing from a security perspective, and they needed a lot of bodies, and there weren't a lot there. There weren't actually that many, you

full-blown computer science, four-year computer science programs across universities, least in the United States. I think that's true in Europe as well. So I got a little bit of a hall pass because employers more willing to accept nontraditional backgrounds or backgrounds where they could see more potential than proven capabilities. I had gone back to school for a year, night school, to...

get a couple of networking certifications. It was so big at the time to get a Nobel certification or a Microsoft certification. And that was the jumpstart. But because I had a degree in a social science, a liberal arts degree, I could show up with the kinds of broad competencies that employers really need. Like we hear this all the time. know, the first three bullets on a job description might be your tech, you know, sort of the tech skills that you need.

Speaker 1 (06:42.232)
But then the next 10 bullets are all about communication skills and writing skills and blah, blah. So that actually was very helpful for me to be able to say, I may have to learn how to configure a firewall and I'm not super proficient in Unix and I certainly don't know how to code. At that point, I could write a script, but I do know how to write. And I do know how to sit in a meeting with a bunch of senior government officials and...

and have a reasonable conversation. I do know how to think about things systematically. I understand process. By this time I'd run a nonprofit. So I knew a lot about business and I was able to have enough of that on my resume to get me into the door. And then once you get into an interview, you have an opportunity to demonstrate that you can string together a sentence and that you can understand the higher level concepts and the strategy and the long-term vision.

of the team that you're trying to join, even if you might be lacking in some of the skills. And of course, know, psychology. Psychology doesn't necessarily make you a great communicator for sure. You know, that's a little bit of a fallacy. It's a four-year degree. And by the way, my degree is really old. My kids have gone into college since me and are always fast to tell me that what I learned is fairly outdated. But it did give me some insight into

organizational dynamics and how people operate and, you know, basic human motivation. And I think I was able to use that to convince people in the early stages of my career that they ought to give me a chance.

So it sounds like it's the ultimate transferable skill, know, understanding how people work. And I can see that we've got some people who joined us. So if you have a question, then just press the raise hand button and then I'll unmute you. And then you can ask Jennifer your question, which I think is going to be a unique opportunity. I'm really, really enjoying asking you a question, Jennifer. So

Speaker 2 (08:37.326)
I know the story because you told me the fascinating story of how Samiridh Loh is working, leading a nonprofit, goes on to essentially being involved in cyber security during the WikiLeaks. That's a really, really good story. Would you mind telling it here?

See you,

Speaker 1 (08:55.348)
No, I love it. So the first jobs that I landed in the tech space were in the government arena, US government arena, and it was largely a function of where I happened to live when I made that career switch. And I quite literally stumbled upon a small consulting agency that was servicing mostly civilian agencies.

And they happened to have a cybersecurity wing. was the game out of the US Navy, the original sort of ideas behind firewalls and protection technologies. And so I just got that start. I think if I'd worked for another consultancy that was doing something else, networking or something else, I may have taken a slightly different path, but that's where I landed. So I built that competency fairly early in my career.

I became a systems engineer and, and, but because I had a liberal arts degree, I could also write. So I wrote a lot of security policy and I was able to be, a spokesperson, if you will, or a team lead because communication skills ultimately are what allow you, to express what you can do. So it's, it was a helpful thing. Lots of years with, companies like Symantec, McAfee, Intel, I hopped out at one point and ran sales and marketing for.

a small cybersecurity startup. But what I was really trying to do as my career progressed was trying to build a broader competency across the industry. At some point in my career, it occurred to me that there really was a fork in the road. I either had to get very, very good and very, very deep in a particular thing and be just the best InfoSec analyst, whatever, that I could be, or I could

you know, establish broader competencies, but stay within the industry. And that was always more interesting to me. I was always looking for the new adventure, but I knew if I stayed within that domain, I would have enough sort of a capability and skill and experience to continue to sort of a slow move up in my career, but also a broadening of my skills. And so I took sales roles, I took partner roles, I ended up in a corporate strategy team for a while, built some alliances, did biz dev, you know, just.

Speaker 1 (11:06.062)
exercised all that became an operator, ran a lot of internal teams. And, and ultimately in 2014, I got a call from a friend who worked at Microsoft and he said, well, we're looking for a chief security officer for our worldwide industry team. And I, that was an odd role for me because I typically think of a chief security officer as somebody who actually manages the internal security of an organization. And this was not that this was a, an external role.

And what it was really meant to do was to engage with governments outside of the US to have a conversation about the relative risks of adopting public cloud and specifically Microsoft's public cloud service. So public cloud, just the 32nd primer on why this is interesting is because what really it is, it's a bunch of data centers that are all around the world. When you have a public cloud service, what you're really tapping into

is whether it's AWS or Google or Microsoft, it's a bunch of data centers that are networked together so that wherever you are in the world, you can be provided with service. And what you're really doing is you're connecting to wherever your nearest data center is or what's most available to you. Ultimately, what that means is that if you are, let's say you are France, the country of France, and you're worried about Microsoft, you are, you're rightly worried because

Ultimately, your data is going to go into a data center owned by Microsoft. And because it's a US-based company, the US government might be able to ask for access to that data.

What kind of information were people mainly concerned about?

Speaker 1 (12:45.134)
Yeah, let's say you're a taxation agency in France. So you have tax information on all of the citizens of France. And you want to put that in a public cloud because it's much cheaper to put that in a cloud than into a local data center. That information could potentially be, could it potentially be accessed by the U.S. government? That was the concern. at the time, yeah, so at the time we had the Edward Snowden issues, we had WikiLeaks. And so there was this growing awareness

The public cloud was actually maybe not as good of an option if you weren't a US-based company.

the objective. Sorry, just for a second, just because I know that some people will be really cognizant of what cloud computing is. And I think a lot of people we've heard this term, but when you don't actually know what it is, so I'm going to give a very quick explanation. And Jennifer, if you have pearls of wisdom to add to that quick explanation, let me know. So essentially, a few years ago, maybe I don't know, about 20 years ago, if you wanted to store information, so say you're at the taxation agency, you would literally have

to store that data in essentially big boxes. Even if it is in bits and bytes, even if it's actually on a computer, your computer would, your computer still needs storage space for all of that data. And so you would have these, you would have server space and you would have these boxes, they're called servers, and you would have them in your office and you would have them somewhere. And they eat up a lot of electricity, so they're really expensive to maintain.

And also they get really hot. that means you need aircon so they get even more expensive to maintain. And then also they need security because somebody could steal them and then so somebody could break in, steal your box with all of your tax information or all of your salacious photos or whatever it is. Tax and salacious photos, if it's France probably. And run away. So essentially then companies like Microsoft and Amazon started creating an ability for

Speaker 2 (14:48.366)
companies and governments to rent space on their boxes. So it's a bit like that yellow storage company. So you basically take all of your stuff that you don't need at your house all the time and you rent space in somebody else's company to basically, so your house is cleaner and easier and that's cheaper for you. is that basically where...

It's a perfect example. think demystifying what cloud computing is, is incredibly important. Like we, in the tech industry, we invented the term. And I don't think we realized how confusing it was going to be for the rest of the world because it's not actually a cloud. It's actually just, yeah, Microsoft can have, we have, you know, you get the leverage of, you know, the economy of scale, right? We can buy millions of servers and put them into data centers and make that service.

really fast, really efficient, really cheap, really available, all the things that everybody wants for themselves. You know, if you're, if you have an e-commerce platform, you're trying to sell goods online, you don't want your users to click and then wait for 10 seconds. You want that service to be super fast and you want to have lots and lots of features and video and streaming. And the only way to do that really well is to use a cloud service because the cloud providers have that kind of infrastructure they can offer. Also,

because they are leveraging the economy of scale, they can insert or overlay the kinds of security processes. They're actually really, really difficult for a single company to do for themselves because Microsoft can hire 4,000 security experts. And if you're a company, you can probably hire 14. So one of those is gonna be more secure ultimately than the other. Nevertheless, Microsoft is a US-based company and therefore,

subject to US laws. So if the US government by court order said to Microsoft, we demand you give us access to data in your cloud service, what's Microsoft to do? They're governed by the US government, right? By US laws. And that was a very, very good question that governments all around the world were asking Microsoft to say,

Speaker 1 (17:07.564)
You are a global company and we understand that that's how you'd like to operate. And we do think we need all of the speed and the efficiency and the features of cloud, but we're just not really sure that we're comfortable putting our data into your service. And so there was this really complex conversation to have with them that was part technology. It was part policy, law. It was part just the

practical reality, like what is the relative risk of security, you know, in the public cloud versus what you're doing in your data center. You just got hacked by a group of hackers that are also not in your country. Maybe they're from Eastern Europe, maybe they're from Asia, they're somewhere, and you have no recourse. And the reason why that happened is because you don't have the kind of business model that allows you to invest in security. Microsoft does. And so,

You've got some level of risk that the US government could access your data. You've got a much bigger risk that somebody could hack you if your data is in your own data center. So there are all these complicated conversations that needed to be had because from a business model perspective, we really needed the world to develop public cloud. So my role was to go and spend a couple of years traveling around the world, having this conversation with governments and, you know, kind of to take this full circle, it was

precisely the kinds of skills that I had built early in my career. So it's communication, it's process, business process, know, systematic thinking, all of that, that allowed me to have a conversation that was, although it was grounded in technology, it was really far bigger than technology.

So that's so interesting because you started your career as a non-techie, then you got into tech, but then when you were at the highest echelons, actually you weren't dealing with engineers. You weren't looking at source code. You were speaking to people who are non-techies, but are very important, like, you know, the leaders of governments. so what could you, could you talk us through literally some of the professions and the backgrounds, the educational backgrounds of the people that you're working with? Because.

Speaker 2 (19:20.696)
What I really want to understand is what is it that CTOs do? Because I've worked with CTOs at a startup level and I mean, no government cared about what we did. we didn't have that issue, but at a startup level, a CTO is either they're actually coding or they are setting tasks for the developers. So it's a different role, but it is definitely much more strategic than just what a backend developer does.

But at a big company, obviously you're not going to be checking source code. But yeah, so if you could just tell us about the team and their backgrounds, then we can take it from there.

Sure, and are you talking about my internal team at Microsoft or are you talking about the teams of the people who I was in the customer environment?

So let's start with the teams at Microsoft. And the reason I'm asking, I can tell you why, because I think in terms of the people who come to Tech for Non-Techies and who listen, a lot of them know they want to transition into tech. And some of them might have an idea for a startup, but they're also thinking, well, if this doesn't work, maybe I'll be a product manager or maybe I will just get a job in a tech company. But essentially, if you don't have a technical background, you just know that tech is there.

And it seems to me where everybody's making money and using all these words like cloud computing that I don't understand. And a lot of people assume that in order for me to even to get a job in a tech company, I have to completely retrain and do something completely alien. So I'm curious because I'm assuming around you, there were some people who were cyber security specialists and you know, that would be some sort of long-term training. But I would also assume that there were people with other backgrounds.

Speaker 1 (20:51.534)
Mmm.

Speaker 2 (21:05.752)
who are supporting you in your role and who are also really, really important.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I had a great opportunity to understand people's backgrounds because I hired a lot of them. And I would say no more than half the time did I hire anyone and probably more like a third of the time did I hire somebody who had a four year degree in computer science. Because they, I mean, well, there two reasons. Number one, if you are hiring at a certain level, there just actually aren't that many people with that degree. That's a hard degree to get.

voice

Speaker 1 (21:39.532)
It's a hard degree to want to get when you're 18 or 19 or 20 years old. And so, you know, there aren't all that many people coming out of universities worldwide who have that degree. There are far more job openings. You can do some quick math or research on this. There's far more job openings in tech than there are graduates out of four-year degrees. And so, you know, as a hiring person, you have to look.

more broadly than that. You cannot have that as an absolute requirement. You'll never find enough people. So, you you hire people who learned it on the job or went back to school or took a year coding boot camp or some kind of internship within their company. Very, very common to find people who with a degree in music or a degree in English or no degree, in fact, and learned something about tech. Maybe they were in the military. Maybe they, you know, sort of

got a sysadmin job and they moved from HR into a tech role in their company, maybe they went back and got a certification like I did that was very common. you hire, if you look at competencies, how do I say this? You weigh the value of competencies that people acquire across the entire span of their career rather than being really focused on what they may have done 10 or 20 years ago.

And that's actually very prevalent for anyone listening. This is the good news because computing and technology in general, but computing specifically, moves so fast that what you learn, and they say this actually for now, what you learn as a freshman in college or your first year university, some portions of that are completely defunct.

they're out of date by the time you finish four years later. Coding languages change, frameworks change, there's all sorts of the technical details that change. And so these really specific skills that you may learn don't last. People who have computer science degrees that are over 10 or 15 years old may know how to code in C sharp. They may know a few things, but there's a lot of stuff. Like Python wasn't even invented back then. So you're looking really more for broad skills.

Speaker 1 (23:55.448)
You're looking for critical thinking skills. You're looking for problem solving. You absolutely want to see some computer science and math, for sure, but not nearly to the degree that people think.

Interesting. Well, so a lot of the people who listen to Tech with Techies, they don't intend to learn to code. They want to be part of the tech boom. Understanding technology, but maybe as investors or maybe if they're working in a tech company, say in a product marketing role, or even in a product manager role. And so we always talk about the concept that people need to know, because essentially it's about co-creating, right?

So as a CTO, you're also working with that chief marketing officer. And you you have other people who are doing other very important things for, for a company to function, right? Like somebody, somebody has to count the money that will be the CFO, make sure that people get paid. Um, and all of those people have had to learn about technology. So a Microsoft CFO is going to know much more about technology than say a CFO at

Also, I was going to say equally successful company and then I there aren't any. Very few, but you know, I don't know, at LVMH, you know, which they're very important, but something completely different. So what do you find that in order to succeed in a tech business, but in a non-technical role, what do people need to learn about technology? Because they do need to learn something.

I was...

Speaker 1 (25:28.406)
Yeah, totally. I have a term for this that's a pretty broad term, but I find it to be accurate. You have to understand the difference between acquiring digital context versus digital fluency.

interesting. Please tell us more.

So context to me means that you can see the bigger picture of how things connect together, but you might not understand the details of it. And we actually had a little bit of this conversation just now because you explained context around cloud computing. And so as soon as that picture clicks, you think about it, think about doing a jigsaw puzzle. You know, you get the border, right? And then you can see, well, I've got some blue pieces and there's a sky up there and

These little red pieces are a house and this is a tree. And you start to kind of group little pieces together and you place them into the puzzle, you know, where you think they are. And as you fill it in, a picture emerges. And there's this moment when you don't have all the pieces there, but you have enough that you can kind of see what this puzzle is going to look like. That's context and technology. How you describe cloud computing and the way you demystified it by just explaining, look.

These are a bunches of servers that are in data centers that are not owned by you. They're owned by these big companies and you're basically renting the service because their service, the way they provide it, is way faster and better and cheaper than what you would do for yourself. It's like the electrical grid. A long time ago, in the turn of the century, every big factory generated their own coal-fired power and then all of a sudden,

Speaker 1 (27:08.556)
you know, we were able to create a grid where electricity could run across the grid and people could just rent electricity instead of having to make themselves. That's cloud computing. That understanding that big picture is context. Understanding how things get built is fluency and there are many levels in between. But when you're thinking about a tech role, the most important thing to do is to understand the broadest possible context.

And a lot of times it's actually not nearly as difficult as you think it is. It's actually pretty intuitive because it's in fact just a system. If you think of a car, a car is a system. It has a bunch of different required components that have to work together in order for a car to go, right? So you've got something that's a carburetor, right? That's, you know, sort of, it's feeding gas. You're feeding gas into a carburetor. It's creating a spark.

That spark is creating electricity, which is making pistons go up and down. The pistons can turn gears and then the tires move. You don't need to know how to open a hood and point any of that out to understand the basics of how a car works. The same with technology. That allows you to sit in a conversation and you might not know all the details, but you have that broader view. In the application space, my example would be you have some idea of how a mobile app is computing,

communicating with the backend, that would be understanding kind of the broad terms. You don't need to know how to write a mobile app to kind of hang with that concept. So I always like it when people start there. And then you pick off pieces that you want to learn a little bit more. Like people talk about data all the time. Well, what's the big deal with data? It all starts with a database, and then databases get more complicated. And then there are ways that we've made data, we've evolved databases, and so they can handle more data.

It can be easier to search, faster to search. can distribute the database across a bunch of different areas. Like you can go as deep as you want in a certain area. As long as you have the context, you never get lost. A lot of times we go so deep in technology first, it's like you've just gotten dropped into the middle of a forest. So you might've learned one tree really well, but you have no idea where you are. So stay up a little bit.

Speaker 1 (29:28.394)
never forget your context and then just take these short dives down and you'll eventually acquire a lot of contextual knowledge about technology.

You know, so this is exactly what we actually cover. So I teach two courses. One is tech fun on technical founders. And the other one is how to speak tech, which is basically the same thing, but without the founder aspect because founders have their own, you know, there has to be things about investors and all of that. And actually just this week I've been teaching at London Business School and at Oxford University. And, know, these are smart people who go to these universities. And, and also they are.

very willing to learn and they're very willing to do hard things that they don't like. so, sometimes it almost feels like what I, what I say to them kind of, because the broad picture it is once you understand it, it's very intuitive because it's, it's a, process. once, once you've seen the process, you can't unsee it. And, and, know, I often get asked, well, okay, well,

I don't really want to learn to code, but I kind of think I probably have to, if I am going to, I don't know, go and work at Amazon or if I'm going to have an app in my company. And then which coding language, and that's it. Which coding language should I choose? And this is literally what I say to them is if you do choose one coding language, you could, and it would definitely enhance your knowledge. But unless you understand how it fits into the whole, unless you understand how that fits into the work of what a designer does.

It's you're going to be a person who just does Python, which is if that is what you want to do, that is fantastic. But if you're going to be in a more strategic role, then which is what a founder has to be or what a digital strategist, you know, a lot of them want to go and work in McKinsey, a digital strategy. And like just learning Python is not going to help you.

Speaker 1 (31:23.246)
No, not at all. I mean, it can give you a level of confidence. I think sometimes learning a little, getting a little bit of depth in a skill, and this was true in my career for sure, was very helpful. So I did not enter into technology with a lot of depth. I was not a coder, I was not a programmer for a long time. The CTO role, as you've mentioned, and I know you know, is oftentimes a very deep technologist, right, who actually themselves

created a patentable thing. They coded a patentable thing. And so, you know, I, when I found myself in the company of people who were far more technical, it was very helpful for me to say, I'm going to take a three-day crash course in some level of technology. Because I had context, I could take a deep dive and understand the relative importance or application of the thing I wanted to learn. But it just helped me, you know, hang with the conversations. And so I do

really think that that continuous learning process that every single one of us, regardless of our career, if we want to grow as individuals, needs to be on that journey. And you design your own journey. There is no paint by numbers. There's no path. You have to design it yourself. But in that journey, occasionally, even if it's once or twice a year, taking a deep dive,

I worked on a micro-masters for design thinking because I really wanted to understand, know, I get a little more depth on that. I've taken data analytics courses and I did quantum computing for a little bit because we were doing it and I could not remember physics from high school. So, you you get there.

when you were working already at Microsoft and you're already at the CTO level. apart from the cyber security aspect, you involved in other aspects of Microsoft technology? Because it's such a big title for such a big company. I do wonder how it's possible to do such a... Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:24.43)
Yeah, good question. So the Chief Security Officer role was, it was my success in that role that got me to the next level. I was working for the CTO on an industry team and we built this program, when we're talking to government, we built a program and the way we measured our success was the adoption of Office 365. So if you could get a country like Australia or Czechoslovakia or Singapore or whatever to

say, yeah, we actually will create a policy that will allow our government and the countries within our country, or the companies within our country to adopt public cloud. Then they would go to Office 365 because everyone was using Office on their computer, right? But they knew they needed cloud-based service of it. So that the program that we built, we were able to convince enough governments that it was okay to adopt Microsoft Public Cloud. Office 365 is a service.

within the Microsoft public cloud offering just for everyone to understand why that the connection there. And that generated a lot of revenue for Microsoft. So my team did a really good job. And it was that largely because I could put together a technically based strategy to drive business. That was the reason why I was I was eventually picked to become the CTO of that industry team. And then my portfolio expanded. I have to tell you, I made the boss I worked for.

I remember saying to her, I don't know if I can do this job. I mean, I know cybersecurity technology really well. And I've had to learn a lot about networking and I've had to learn a few other things, but Microsoft has this huge portfolio of applications and windows and operating systems. that's not, mean, I know. And she said, do you honestly think, and there's anyone in this company who knows all of that? And I thought, this is really interesting. Technology has actually gotten so broad that there's no one, it's impossible.

for any one person to say they're technically proficient in everything. everyone, it don't care who you are, the most technical CTOs, everyone has an area where they're really smart and they've got depth and then everything else, they just have context. So that was really helpful for me. That didn't mean I didn't need to spend a lot of time learning. I really did. But what I realized a CTO does more than anything else is think strategically.

Speaker 1 (35:50.624)
about what is a problem that we're trying to solve? You know, you're a company that sells windmills, you know, you're a company that sells, you know, t-shirts, whatever, you have a problem, a business problem you're trying to solve. How can technology be applied to that problem? So it's this intersection of technology to real world problems that is the key to

an effective CTO. So you have to have a lot of broad technical context because you need to know what is technically possible. But you also have to have the ability to really look deeply into a problem and then figure out a strategy. A strategy in the simplest terms is just a creative, clever plan. So you have to be able to get both of those things and get a plan. Like what we've done in this conversation around Adoption Public Cloud was I understood what was technically possible.

I learned what the real problems were through the eyes of these governments I was working with, and we created this clever plan, and we executed it. And that was effectively the same methodology for CTOs. And so I eventually moved into the CTO of Microsoft US, and that was a much, much, much bigger role. I had a lot of technical people who worked for me. I had a lot of existing infrastructure that I ran. And so there was a lot of just leadership components and

but I was there really to figure out how we could transform our internal sort of conversations so that when we went out to talk to our big customers, think of the biggest companies in the world, we were able to help them understand like, you know, how do you digitally transform your business? You're the biggest oil and gas company in the world and you need to transition to your renewable resources and you're pretty sure technology could be part of that solution, but you don't know how.

how do you have that conversation? And it's that competency of understanding the intersection of technology in business that was really the key to that role. And I think I don't really care how technical you are as a CTO, some are very technical. If you can't do that, you really can't be a CTO.

Speaker 2 (38:02.348)
Wasn't that awesome? If you're still listening, you do think it was awesome. Anyway, have you left this episode or this show a rating and a review? If not, what can I do to guilt you into it? It would really help me if you did that. Anyway, thanks for listening and I'll be back with you next week. Ciao.