A Cloud Startup Story (Part 1)

Jolie Hales:

Wait, how many times have you eaten rattlesnake?

Ernest de Leon:

When I was a little kid, all the time.

Jolie Hales:

Really?

Ernest de Leon:

So, if my grandfather happened to run across one when he was working out on the ranch, he would obviously skin the snake, debone it-

Jolie Hales:

What?

Ernest de Leon:

… and then just fry it in butter with the cactus. And we would eat that in tacos.

Jolie Hales:

What? You had rattlesnake tacos?

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah, rattlesnake and cactus.

Jolie Hales:

Whoa. I can honestly say I’ve never had that.

Ernest de Leon:

And we were little kids and so my sister and I, we thought this was normal. We didn’t find out till much later that this is not normal for city folk, because we grew up in the city. I don’t want to make it sound like we grew up in rural Texas. We just happen to have a-

Jolie Hales:

When you just said city folk, that doesn’t make you sound like you grew up in the city at all. Hi, everyone. I’m Jolie Hales.

Ernest de Leon:

And I’m Ernest de Leon.

Jolie Hales:

And welcome to the Big Compute Podcast. Here, we celebrate innovation in a world of virtually unlimited compute, and we do it one important story at a time. We talk about the stories behind scientists and engineers, who are embracing the power of high performance computing to better the lives of all of us.

Ernest de Leon:

From the products we use every day to the technology of tomorrow, computational engineering plays a direct role in making it all happen, whether people know it or not.

Jolie Hales:

Ernest, Ernest, hello.

Ernest de Leon:

Hello.

Jolie Hales:

So, it’s obviously been a little while since we took what we’ll call a little winter break. And I do have to ask, I mean, did you do anything eventful since we last recorded?

Ernest de Leon:

Eventful? Probably not. I’ve been unfortunately or fortunately, however you look at it, just incredibly busy. If I’m not working, I’m playing with my daughter, taking care of my daughter. And then, by the time I’m done with that, I’m dead tired and ready to go to bed. So, nothing eventful.

Jolie Hales:

It’s like sleep, daughter, work.

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah. How about you?

Jolie Hales:

Yeah. I mean, it sounds like we live somewhat similar lives. Though, I was able to take the family to visit my siblings, and my parents, and my in-laws for the holidays, which was awesome. We also caught Omicron, which wasn’t as awesome. But now, we feel like antibody superheroes. So, that’s pretty cool. Though, I got to say, I say antibody superheroes only when it comes to COVID because since that time, my family has pretty much caught back-to-back illnesses. So, if you can hear a little bit of congestion or whatever in my voice, you’re not crazy. Apparently, I’ve sounded like this since December.

Ernest de Leon:

Well, that’s how it goes when people get sick. But one thing I can tell you, obviously, the COVID situation has been not a good one. But once it’s behind us and we’ve processed the trauma as a civilization, I look forward to the next genre of B-movies that come out-

Jolie Hales:

Oh, no.

Ernest de Leon:

… about contagion and viruses and all kinds of stuff like that.

Jolie Hales:

Oh, I’m surprised they haven’t come out already. It doesn’t take a lot of time to make a B-movie.

Ernest de Leon:

I mean, that’s true. And furthermore, nowadays, you can shoot cinema quality film on an iPhone.

Jolie Hales:

Don’t talk. Oh, my gosh, I knew you’re going to bring up the stupid iPhone. Stop. Or you could shoot it with a really nice DSLR camera.

Ernest de Leon:

I mean, you could if you wanted to carry that thing around.

Jolie Hales:

I would.

Ernest de Leon:

Because we had Hollywood blockbusters about this kind of stuff. But I want to see the gritty, struggling filmmaker’s B-movie interpretation of this entire thing.

Jolie Hales:

Especially since I think when the pandemic began, everybody went and watched Contagion again.

Contagion Movie Trailer:

So, we have a virus. No treatment protocol, and no vaccine at this time? Is there any way someone could weaponize the bird flu? Is that what we’re looking at? Someone doesn’t have to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that. It’s figuring us out faster than we’re figuring it out. It’s mutated.

Jolie Hales:

And it was actually terrifying to really think about, but it seems like it had a lot going for in terms of accuracy, which surprised me.

Ernest de Leon:

It did. As a matter of fact, one of the beautiful things is we’ve been able to see, going back to the discussion about your family catching Omicron and whatnot and COVID, how technology has helped us in so many ways to just lessen the damage. The number of deaths this time around, while incredibly high and tragic, is not on the level we saw in 1918 per capita. And so, all of these different entities, who were using supercomputing or high-performance computing in the cloud, were able to race to solutions and treatments and just advice to people, right? They weren’t shooting in the dark the entire time. It took a while to get all the relevant data. But once the scientists and engineers had that data, they were able to actually do things with it to help us. And that’s what this podcast, the stories we try to tell which are people taking data and ideas and running them through high-performance computing in the cloud and coming up with something that benefits humanity. And I think when we come out of this, we will have so many more excellent stories to tell about different people who worked on different things just to help us get through this as a species.

Jolie Hales:

Yeah, I totally agree with you. It’s been amazing. I mean, we’ve been, I think, so blessed to have the technology that we’ve had because I think without it, I believe and I think there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that things would have been so much worse, the speed at which we got vaccines, to the therapeutic developments, I mean, there’s a number of different ways, the communications. There were still plenty of human errors, I think, in that regard. But as far as the technology goes, it was so helpful in trying to get through this pandemic. And it seems like things are actually opening up.

Ernest de Leon:

Right. They’re getting better.

Jolie Hales:

But it’s interesting how the world has had to evolve, not necessarily against its will, but definitely not something that societies, I think, planned for, right?

Ernest de Leon:

Yup.

Jolie Hales:

Anybody who’s really educated knows that there’s this looming possibility of a pandemic, but you don’t really think about it as being a reality that might hit next month, right?

Ernest de Leon:

Right, right.

Jolie Hales:

But then, it did. And when you have a looming possibility that isn’t like an upfront reality, technology is still evolving to help in that situation, but it’s not evolving so quickly because there’s not this imminent threat, right? Everybody had to pivot away from what they were doing. Researchers who were working on something totally different had to suddenly work on COVID and so forth. But that’s how society works, right? We evolve, and technology evolves based on what the needs are right in front of us. And I was actually thinking about this because I went back home for the holidays. And my hometown is like a totally different place.

News Clip:

For the 14th year in a row, Utah reigned supreme as the state with the best economic outlook.

Jolie Hales:

I couldn’t even find the home I had grown up in because they had inserted some freeway. It was so confusing. I just didn’t even bother finding it eventually. But there’s just houses everywhere. There’s buildings where there didn’t use to be buildings. But you would see cows every now and then. But I didn’t grow up raising cows and livestock. I was in a suburb of Salt Lake City. I mean, have you experienced that with your hometown in Texas?

Ernest de Leon:

This has been happening for a long time. A lot of these cities have grown tremendously. There’s this little town north of where I grew up called San Marcos and it was a college town, very small. You could pass it in five minutes when I was young. And now, it’s just exploded, like there’s so many things. And this was a tiny, tiny town. It’s a full-on city now. So, I think this is normal, and it’s happening everywhere. But you’re right, that it’s one of those where just a number of people.

Jolie Hales:

Aside from just population, there’s just been a lot of relocation, especially because of the pandemic, so many people are suddenly able to work from home. And so, they move into areas that are maybe closer to family or a place that they’ve maybe always wanted to live in or whatever. But it’s interesting to see how society has evolved through the pandemic. And the same thing with technology, right? We’ve mentioned this, there’s this constant evolution with the times and demands. It makes me think about… do you remember when Amazon used to just sell books?

Ernest de Leon:

Yes, I do.

Jolie Hales:

Yeah. And now, it’s this massive behemoth of a company that, as one of its many features, it also offers cloud high-performance computing via AWS, which is quite a few steps away from just selling books online. And Google started only as a search engine, basically, developed in college dorms at Stanford. And now, they too offer cloud high-performance computing, along with a host of other services, like my beautiful Google Pixel phone and my five smart speakers that control the lights in my house because flipping light switches with your finger demands way too much effort. Though, I will say I have been quite frustrated with my home speakers not understanding me lately, or the wrong speaker responding, or I don’t know if the latest automatic updates just screwed it all up. But I can tell you one thing, it has definitely eased my fears about the singularity coming anytime soon because I’m like, “Nope, it’s not happening. They can’t even play the right song.”

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah, I don’t allow those kinds of things in my house. I do have one Apple HomePod thing, the little tiny HomePod.

Jolie Hales:

Really? I didn’t even know you had that.

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah, I have one little one and I use it for playing music or whatever while I’m working.

Jolie Hales:

Oh, yeah. And cooking-

Ernest de Leon:

And cooking.

Jolie Hales:

…timer.

Ernest de Leon:

It has a set timers on it. And it’s fine, but my wife laughs at me because she’ll be in the other room and I’m telling Siri to do something, and she clearly is not getting it. And it gets to the point where I start either cursing at her or whatever the case is. And then, sometimes I’m just like… and I realized it’s an AI. It’s not like a person. But I’m like, “Did you have an aneurysm or something? What is going on here?”

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah, I can imagine. A lot of these companies, they’re sprawling into areas that were not their forte, so to speak.

Jolie Hales:

Yeah. No, totally. We have an Amazon Alexa too because clearly, you got to have all the different kinds of speakers. I don’t know why. But we have an Alexa, and I forget completely that Amazon was basically, for me, a college textbook company.

Ernest de Leon:

A book seller.

Jolie Hales:

Right? It’s insane. And it’s so interesting to look back on the histories of these different companies and how they started and how they evolved. This got me down the rabbit hole. And I started looking up startup stories on the internet and there’s some really crazy ones. For instance, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the flower company called BloomNation.

Ernest de Leon:

No.

Jolie Hales:

Yeah. So, apparently, I’ve never ordered flowers from them. But I’m not a big flowers orderer.

Ernest de Leon:

Me either.

Jolie Hales:

But apparently, they’re a reasonably large flower company. And they were founded with money that was won at a poker tournament. The founder literally won a poker tournament and was like, “I’m going to start a flower company, right?” And then, there was another story about the billionaire who founded Paul Mitchell hair products. Do you know Paul Mitchell?

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah, I know who he is. Yeah.

Jolie Hales:

He was originally a homeless guy with a two-year-old son to care for, and he ended up starting the company with a friend for 700 bucks.

Ernest de Leon:

Yep. He originally came across my radar in an article I read that was talking about executives who do not use computers or-

Jolie Hales:

What?

Ernest de Leon:

… do not use email.

Jolie Hales:

Is he one of those?

Ernest de Leon:

So, he was one of them.

Jolie Hales:

How can you even do that today in 2022? How?

Ernest de Leon:

I believe in that article, he had said that he had his assistant print out emails, and he would dictate responses.

Jolie Hales:

Interesting.

Ernest de Leon:

And the assistant would go back and type the responses to the email. He’s a billionaire, right? He’s got this massive empire. It’s not like he’s suffering.

Jolie Hales:

He’s probably much more emotionally stable than the rest of-

Ernest de Leon:

He’s better off than the rest of us, let me tell you.

Jolie Hales:

Yeah, the rest of us that are on the grid constantly. I mean, I admire the guy.

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah, he doesn’t have to deal with all the garbage the rest of us do. But the thing that I always think of when I think of startups is, I’ve started in this industry shortly before dot-com bust that happened in 2000. And I remember, if you wanted to launch a company of any kind that required technology to operate, let alone a tech startup that needed an internet presence and all that, you had to invest hundreds of thousands, if not, millions of dollars into a hardware, servers, storage, electricity, HVAC, data centers. It was a fortune you had to outlay just to get yourself going. And then, now with the cloud, any person who wants to start a business, all they need is a credit card.

Jolie Hales:

I know. It’s so different.

Ernest de Leon:

It’s completely different. They can start up a business with 50 bucks, 100 bucks and just see where it goes. And scientists and engineers that want to run massive simulations don’t need to spend a million, 5 million, 10 million on hardware now. They can just run it in the cloud and pay whatever the fee is for borrowing those resources for that amount of time. It’s insane, the difference between just 20 years ago and now.

Jolie Hales:

I completely agree. That’s a great example, especially here on Big Compute. And it is actually very pertinent to what I want to talk about today. So, I wanted to tap into the heart of a startup story that is very relevant and it resonates well with us here. And our presenting sponsor, Rescale, was kind enough to lend me their founder who is also their CEO for a few hours to tell the story of not just how in the world he came up with this idea to create Rescale, but how he turned that idea into a reality and then grew it into a successful business that allowed companies to do, as you say, just pay with a credit card and suddenly be able to use high-performance computing to create amazing innovation.

Ernest de Leon:

It’s a beautiful thing.

Jolie Hales:

Yeah, it is. And his story includes everything from not being allowed to watch TV, to having to fight for HPC resources, to being completely broke, and then ultimately, obviously, the formation of Rescale. And it’s pretty interesting and so we wanted to bring it to our listeners today. It’s also really affirming to me that creating a tech company is not something that I want to put on my bucket list, but I’m very glad that others have it on theirs so that I may ultimately benefit from their genius by being able to use cooler products.

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah. That’s definitely agreed. And we all benefit from other individuals starting businesses or building new products so that we don’t have to do everything ourselves.

Jolie Hales:

Right. And Joris is one of those people who was willing to take on the stress of building a business with the hopes of changing how the world operates and making things better for people. And my hat goes off to him and to people like him for doing that for people like us, who would rather benefit from other people’s stress, right? Because I don’t know, the nice thing about not being a CEO is that when I’m done for the day, I don’t have to think about work for a few hours. And I feel like they just never get that break, that mental, emotional break. I mean, there’s probably higher highs at work, like bigger reasons to celebrate when you lead a company. But I imagine that the hard times are much harder, right? You can’t just go get another job somewhere. This is your baby.

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah, it’s a difficult path to take.

Jolie Hales:

I mean, it was really cool to actually talk to Joris. And Joris is a really personable guy, which is awesome, because not all CEOs are as personable as he is. And by the way, his name is spelled J-O-R-I-S, but it’s not pronounced Joris. So, he tells me that it’s actually very common for people to call him Joris. But for everyone here, you now know it’s Joris, right? It’s actually not a name that originates from the United States, as we’ll get into for a little bit. Before I go into his story and introduce him, I should take a minute to explain Rescale a bit better in case some of our listeners are not super familiar. But Rescale is, basically, it’s an online platform that engineers and scientists who are looking to run a simulation, they can log on to this platform. And then, basically, by using drag and drop with the mouse, they can pick the software they need to use, pick the hardware they want to run it on. And that includes high-performance computers from all the major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and so forth. And then, they can click “Run” and basically, the simulation runs.

Joris Poort:

What we actually do is help engineers and scientists run all the different types of experiments they’d like to run in software faster, better, cheaper. And that allows us to build much better products. And we do this across many different categories of companies, from cars, and rockets, and airplanes, to medical devices and many other interesting challenges.

Jolie Hales:

Coming straight from someone who knows a bit about Rescale, the CEO himself.

Ernest de Leon:

One thing I want to point out here is that Rescale is a little bit different than a lot of other products that you hear the word cloud tossed around. There’s a difference between taking a product that was designed for the old data center world, what we would typically term as either homogeneous vertical siloed. We use a lot of these words, but they were apps meant to run wholly contained often within the same either server or a group of servers, whatever the case is. It’s a different thing to take one of those and try to put it in the cloud than to design a product to run natively in the cloud.

Jolie Hales:

Exactly.

Ernest de Leon:

And I think that’s where the big differences here is that Rescale was initially thought of as high-performance computing designed for the cloud as opposed for let’s take old HPC and try to cram it into the cloud.

Jolie Hales:

Yeah, and that’s a great way to put it. The way I think about it, too, is like when shared drives first existed, right? They were in the cloud. But if you wanted to edit a document, you could still only access that document one person at a time. And you were still editing it the old way before the cloud even existed. So, it was in the cloud, but who cares because the only thing that saved you was printing something out and running it to somebody physically. It wasn’t designed for the cloud. And then, Google Docs and Office 365 came along, where they’re designed to be in the cloud where people can simultaneously work on them, teams can see them at the same time. You can make suggestions. You can make edits. I mean, something like that is engineered, it’s created for the cloud. And it changes the entire way that people do work, right? And that’s what Rescale has made their goal from the very beginning. In fact, they’re known as high-performance computing built for the cloud, which means that it not only allows the power of cloud computing to innovate, but it does so in a way that is so specifically optimized and built for the cloud, which puts the user first. And Rescale believes that in order to put the user first, it means offering an easy to use interface with intelligent automation, control, analytics, and it opens up this world of options, like different architecture, software, deployment models, geographical regions, the whole lot, all updated and fine-tuned for workloads on the cloud so that it’s not just running in a cloud space, but it’s made for a cloud space. So, any advantage that you can think of, for high-performance computing to be in the cloud is implemented into the Rescale product. And that’s been their entire goal and that’s what sets them apart. So, I’m glad you brought that up. Basically, Rescale eliminates the need for a company to purchase and maintain on-prem hardware, which is a bit of a disruptor. But because of the lack of resource restraints, its technology has contributed to some pretty incredible and quick innovations across multiple industries. And you can basically innovate as fast as you want, right?

Ernest de Leon:

Right, like our previous interviewee on the podcast, Vertical discussed.

Jolie Hales:

Right. And many Fortune 500 companies actually use Rescale. We just don’t have permission to tell you who they are, which is lame, but that’s the way the world works I guess. So, use your imagination to think of really cool aerospace, automotive, life science, energy, consumer product companies, all of those, anyone who uses engineering in some way, and there’s a solid chance that they actually dabble in the Rescale platform.

Ernest de Leon:

That’s right. And it’s actually far more than people would imagine. If you can think of any company that’s doing engineering and design, they are probably using Rescale. And if they’re not, their competitors are going to squash them.

Jolie Hales:

A very definitive statement from Ernest, ladies and gentlemen.

Ernest de Leon:

It’s all about time to market. Time is money.

Jolie Hales:

But anyway, that is Rescale. Hopefully, that didn’t sound like too markety.

Ernest de Leon:

That was super markety, but it’s okay. That’s what you do for a job.

Jolie Hales:

I know, but I don’t know what else. It’s so funny because I’m legitimately… we talked about so many Rescale cases here that I’ve just really come to appreciate Rescale’s technology and what they’re doing. And so, it’s really hard to talk about it without sounding like I’ve tried to sell something. And so, I’m so sorry if I came across that, but I like the product.

Ernest de Leon:

I’ll give it from my end and I know you’re going to be upset. But anyway, Rescale, to me, is like my iPhone. It is simple and it gets out of the way. And I realized, for people who use Android, they want to tinker. They want to do these custom configurations. They want all of this flexibility and adjustability. And hey, that’s awesome. For people who want to do all that and that’s their interest and their passion, knock yourselves out. But for me, a phone is a device to get things done, whether that’s communicating with my family, whether that’s running an operating, a security organization, whatever it is, I need the phone to get out of my way. I need it to be simple, I needed to be fast, and I needed to get out of the way. And that is what Rescale is for engineers who need to run high-performance computing jobs in the cloud.

Jolie Hales:

Yeah. See, why does that sound so much better than anything that comes out of my mouth?

Ernest de Leon:

It’s just one of those things where the products that exist in the world that are the simplest to use and get out of your way are the ones that people are most attached to. When a product does that, I’m completely appreciative of it and I’m more than happy to pay whatever the cost is, too. I’m essentially buying time. That’s what I’m doing. I’m buying time.

Jolie Hales:

But hopefully, that at least gives our listeners a better perspective of what Rescale is. And I imagine, all of this makes its founder and CEO, Joris Poort, a very busy man.

Joris Poort:

I’m firefighting all day long, trying to run a high-growth startup.

Jolie Hales:

You might even say he’s running a high-growth startup at home, too.

Joris Poort:

I do have a two-year-old and a four-year-old. So, I really enjoy spending a lot of time with them, especially on the weekend. And they have a ton of energy, and they’re always a lot of fun to see every day. So, I tried to make sure that I spend enough time with them every day.

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah, I think every parent in some way is running a high-growth startup, right? I’m in the same boat. I have a toddler and one on the way. So, I would think that there’s a lot of correlation between trying to run a house with very young children and a high-growth startup.

Jolie Hales:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And Joris’s story actually began outside of the United States.

Joris Poort:

I’m an immigrant.

Jolie Hales:

He was born in-

Joris Poort:

Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Jolie Hales:

Which I’ll never be able to pronounce.

Joris Poort:

It’s on the east side of Holland, west of Germany.

Jolie Hales:

This is apparently Dutch music, by the way. And being very, I guess, you could say under-cultured when it comes to the Netherlands, I just instantly pictured windmills, tulips, those wooden shoes that you see in the pictures.

Joris Poort:

I did do gardening in wooden shoes.

Jolie Hales:

What?

Joris Poort:

So, not just a tourist thing. Yeah.

Jolie Hales:

Are the wooden shoes just to prevent your feet from getting wet because it’s really moist soil or something? I don’t even know.

Joris Poort:

That’s a good question. I actually don’t know.

Jolie Hales:

So, I looked it up afterwards and apparently, they were designed to protect the feet of farmers, fishermen and factory workers, probably other people with the titles started with F apparently. And it was designed to protect them from sharp objects. And actually, these wooden shoes had been declared by the European Union to be an official safety shoe. So, now you know.

Ernest de Leon:

I mean, that makes sense. It’s going to be hard for something to puncture wood.

Jolie Hales:

Right.

Joris Poort:

So, I was in the Netherlands until I was seven. Both my parents are academics and so I was definitely the nerdy kid in school, by the way.

Jolie Hales:

So, of course, he started a tech company because isn’t that what nerds do?

Ernest de Leon:

I mean, surely. I think every tech person starts a tech company at some point, even if it’s only in their mind.

Jolie Hales:

What does that even mean? Start a tech company in your mind?

Ernest de Leon:

Well, that’s often where it has to start. A lot of plans don’t make it out of the mind. That’s where they die.

Jolie Hales:

Oh, yes, this is true. But yes, I think it’s hard to look at a tech company that has been successful and not claim its founder to be a nerd. I think nerds run the world at this point.

Ernest de Leon:

For the most part.

Jolie Hales:

And because Joris’ mom taught at a bunch of different universities, the family ended up moving around quite a bit while Joris was growing up. And when he turned seven years old, the family flew across the ocean and they landed in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where his mom was a Fulbright Scholar.

Joris Poort:

That was an interesting experience, which I very much remember because we didn’t speak a word of English and we’re just dropped into school.

Jolie Hales:

He had an English as a second language class once a week, which I mean, that’s all you really need when you’ve never spoken a native word of English in your life.

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah, once a week is more than enough, of course.

Jolie Hales:

And then, after a year, the family moved back to Holland for a short period. And then, they flew across more oceans to settle in Adelaide, Australia, where they lived for five years.

Joris Poort:

Back when we are in Australia, I would say one of the formative experiences was my father is a huge Steve Jobs fan. And at that time was the time he left Apple and started this new company called NeXT Computers. And because my dad was such a big fan, he ended up buying and somehow convincing my mom that it would be smart to invest in a computer that was really built for universities. And so, we had this NeXT Computer at home, the NeXTcube, which is an amazing feat of engineering, probably the most overpriced computer ever marketed.

Steve Jobs:

Hi, I’m Steve Jobs, and I make computers.

NeXT Computers Commercial:

The board emerges, ready to power the most advanced, most sophisticated, most efficiently produced computer workstation of all time. NeXT.

Jolie Hales:

I wasn’t familiar with NeXT Computers. I think I’ve actually maybe heard of them. But I have a feeling that you, Ernest, probably know a lot more about them than I did growing up.

Ernest de Leon:

Oh, man. I can tell you an entire episode worth of a story about NeXT Computers. But there’s only two things that are important to come out of that story. One is that it involves Steve Jobs. The second is that the kernel for NeXT Computers lives on today in modern macOS and iOS products.

Jolie Hales:

Oh, that’s right.

Ernest de Leon:

That’s how it all ties together.

Jolie Hales:

Interesting. Yeah, I looked it up and I got a light sense of what you’re talking about there. But for those who are not Apple users and don’t follow their story as closely like myself, the NeXTcube was sold in the… it was basically just sold in the early 1990s for $8,000. And it’s sported a 25-megahertz CPU, eight megabytes of RAM, expandable up to 64 megabytes, whoo. It also had a floppy disk drive and an Ethernet connection, which actually, the Ethernet connection surprised me. That was not commonplace for the early 1990s. I’m pretty sure that at my house, we were just starting to get AOL on a dial-up modem right at this point.

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah. As a matter of fact, Ethernet connections were not actually common even all the way up into the early 2000s. It’s a well-known fact that when Microsoft was getting ready to launch the original Xbox, which launched in 2001-

Bill Gates:

For the first time, let me now unveil Xbox.

Ernest de Leon:

… one of the heated arguments that it was had was whether or not they should put an Ethernet port on it or a modem port. And the argument was around, are we building for now or are we building for the future?

Jolie Hales:

Interesting.

Ernest de Leon:

Anyone who owned an original Xbox knows what the end choice was there. And it’s the reason that that console became the first one to have Xbox Live Arcade and any kind of online interaction between players was because of that Ethernet port.

Jolie Hales:

That’s fascinating.

Ernest de Leon:

And that was 2001, right? So, it’s like-

Jolie Hales:

Right. And this NeXTcube is like early 1990s, like I think it was ’90 to ’93 or something.

Ernest de Leon:

Right. So, this is an era of dial-up. And your point is taken well here that this was a forward-thinking machine, even though the price was-

Jolie Hales:

$8,000, oh, my gosh, in the 1990s. Oh, I can’t even imagine.

Joris Poort:

But it was something really made as like a really high-end computer for universities to buy competing with Sun Microsystems. And we have the NeXTcube at home. And so, two older brothers, we have very early, we have the internet. And I basically learned object-oriented programming from my older brothers on this NeXT Computer when I was not very old.

Jolie Hales:

And young Joris, with the brain that he inherited from two academics, loved the computer. And he also loved math because smart kids often love math.

Joris Poort:

NeXT Computer came with this software called Mathematica.

Jolie Hales:

Is something familiar to many who work in high-performance computing.

Joris Poort:

Mathematica is this math package for math PhDs to do very esoteric research in math. But because it was free, and if you don’t know anything about Dutch people, Dutch people are usually very frugal, but it came with a computer, so we might as well use it. So, I learned how to use Mathematica, and that was object-oriented programming. It really changes how you think. And so, that was probably a pretty formative experience before I hit high school.

Jolie Hales:

And I love this because while young Joris was learning how to use the technical computation software system, Mathematica, on a NeXTcube, I was pretty much sitting on the couch watching reruns of Lois and Clark.

“Lois & Clark” Promo:

When a small town guy- Welcome to the Daily Planet. …meets a big city girl- Lois Lane, Clark Kent. …what happens is out of this world. Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.

Jolie Hales:

I mean, do you remember that show, Ernest?

Ernest de Leon:

I remember that show.

Jolie Hales:

You watched every episode right when it came out, didn’t you?

Ernest de Leon:

I don’t know if I watched it like that much, but what I remember-

Jolie Hales:

But you did watch it, yay!

Ernest de Leon:

I did watch it. And what I remember most about it was laughing because at some point in school, we had talked about the Lewis and Clark Expedition, right? And I remember the show mainly because of the play on words from the actual historical event.

Jolie Hales:

Oh, that’s so nerdy of you. You’re supposed to remember the show because of Dean Cain playing Clark Kent, and what was it, Teri Hatcher?

Ernest de Leon:

I don’t remember. I wasn’t into the fine cinema than I am now.

Jolie Hales:

Yeah, the fine cinema like Lavalanchula.

Ernest de Leon:

Things like Rubber.

Jolie Hales:

Oh, yeah, Rubber. That was the trailer you sent me over the weekend. I was like, “What is Ernest sending me?” And I look at it and I’m like, “Oh, no.”

Ernest de Leon:

I still haven’t had a chance to watch it.

Jolie Hales:

Another terrible movie I can never make myself watch.

Ernest de Leon:

You know it’s going to be good.

Jolie Hales:

What is it about? Like a tire that attacks people?

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah, it’s a-

Jolie Hales:

A tire?

Ernest de Leon:

The description on IMDb is a homicidal car tire discovering it has-

Jolie Hales:

I can’t even continue.

Ernest de Leon:

Hold on. Yeah, no, no, it gets better. You would think like, “Okay, that’s it.” You’ve let the cat out of the bag about the story. But no, it’s a homicidal car tire discovering it has destructive psionic power, sets its sights on a desert town once a mysterious woman becomes its obsession.

Jolie Hales:

Wow.

Ernest de Leon:

So, there’s a love story of obsession between a tire and a woman, and the tire discovers it has psionic powers and thus, becomes homicidal. I don’t know how someone came up with this idea.

“Rubber” movie trailer:

Everybody, this is what our killer looks like, a tire.

Jolie Hales:

Okay. I’m looking up Lois and Clark’s tagline on IMDb right now. It says, “In addition to fighting evil, Superman has a burning romance with Lois Lane in both of his identities.” That’s maybe a little bit better than the homicidal tire tagline, but not much.

Ernest de Leon:

That’s marginally better than the homicidal tire.

Jolie Hales:

Only marginally.

Joris Poort:

We also grew up with no TV.

Jolie Hales:

So, he sadly missed out on Lois and Clark. And I imagine, he probably hasn’t seen Rubber either, unfortunately.

Ernest de Leon:

Very unfortunately. Yeah.

Joris Poort:

That was interesting, too, because we basically… you’d show up to school and all the kids would be talking about some TV show thing, and you just have no idea what they’re talking about.

Jolie Hales:

They were probably talking about Lois and Clark.

Joris Poort:

My mom taught dentistry at the University of Australia.

Jolie Hales:

And after five years of living in Australia, when Joris was around 14 years old, he and his computer loving family, they all packed up and they moved their household back to the United States, this time to the state of Michigan-

Joris Poort:

Go Blue.

Jolie Hales:

… where Joris finished up high school and attended college, which I’m going to be honest, I don’t know how he doesn’t have some Dutch Australian, Minnesotan accent or something because he doesn’t.

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah, that’s definitely odd. It’s weird how some people have them and some just don’t.

Jolie Hales:

Yeah, and he’s one that just doesn’t despite growing up in the Netherlands speaking Dutch-

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah. I mean, I grew up in Texas, but I-

Jolie Hales:

… and Australia. Yeah, you’re not saying, “Y’all”, all the time.

Ernest de Leon:

No. See, that’s the thing. I grew up in Texas, and there are certain phrases or words I use.

Jolie Hales:

What’s the most Texan thing you can think of to say that you would say?

Ernest de Leon:

I’m going to go fix me a plate.

Jolie Hales:

Oh, yeah.

Ernest de Leon:

Which is imagine a non-native English speaker say, “He’s going to fix a plate? What does that mean?”

Jolie Hales:

There is a broken plate and he’s going to go fix it.

Ernest de Leon:

Right. But that’s-

Jolie Hales:

That’s all it is.

Ernest de Leon:

… normal for us.

Joris Poort:

It’s unfortunate because sometimes, as I got into college, it would have been nice to have an Australian accent.

Jolie Hales:

But as for Dutch-

Joris Poort:

I still speak it. We have a bilingual household, but my wife is half-Korean, half-Chinese, and she grew up speaking Mandarin. And so, we decided that it’d be more useful for the kids to speak Mandarin than Dutch, but we sing a lot of Dutch songs, so that’s my contribution.

Jolie Hales:

So, his children are clearly destined to create their own global enterprises, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Joris isn’t married with kids at this point in the story yet. He’s a college student at the University of Michigan.

Joris Poort:

I really enjoyed my time at Michigan. Amazing experience there. I studied mechanical engineering on the advice of my father that computers are just a tool to get a job done. You should go study a real subject.

Jolie Hales:

That is amazing advice.

Joris Poort:

I really enjoyed the physics of building things, but also did a minor in applied math and then spent a lot of time on the software side. So, a lot of the projects I did were still leveraging a lot of the computer science background, things like that. And that was a lot of fun.

Jolie Hales:

He also got to go to a couple Rose Bowls because-

Joris Poort:

I did also participate in marching band.

Jolie Hales:

A well-rounded nerd.

Ernest de Leon:

And which instrument did he play?

Jolie Hales:

The trumpet, which if you remember back to our COVID musical instruments episode, do you remember that? It was like over a year ago now.

Ernest de Leon:

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Jolie Hales:

Do you remember how the trumpet spreads aerosol particles like COVID germs at like, I believe, it was a whopping 10 times the rate of normal talking. But I mean, at the point that Joris was playing the trumpet, COVID was still a couple decades away, so he’s good. He was just helping to spread colds and stuff probably.

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah. It’s not surprising for anyone who was in marching band, the most problematic instrument in terms of overpowering everybody else was the trumpet.

Jolie Hales:

So loud.

Ernest de Leon:

But I also remember which was the instrument that had the least spread of aerosol particles.

Jolie Hales:

Yes, the tuba which, if I remember correctly, you are a tuba player, are you not?

Ernest de Leon:

Yes. But ironically, I started out as a trumpet player.

Jolie Hales:

Oh, I love that both you and Joris are total band nerds. That’s amazing.

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah. I suspect that in the tech world, in the nerd world, there’s probably a lot of people, I would say the majority of people I run into play some sort of instrument.

Jolie Hales:

It’s pretty cool, actually. And for Joris in his final couple years at Michigan, he took on a couple internships and one of which was particularly formative in shaping his future plans, which was an internship with Boeing.

Joris Poort:

And so, it was my junior year at Boeing, and they gave me the opportunity to work on the Dreamliner.

Jolie Hales:

A pretty cool internship for a young engineer.

Joris Poort:

It was slated to be the first fully carbon fiber airplane. And so, that was a really interesting project. Yeah, I got very lucky, I would think, to have that opportunity.

Jolie Hales:

Although luck hid itself for a time when he was accidently given the wrong relocation city to move to, a two-hour drive away from his internship. But at that point, I mean, he was already paid up on his new apartment. So, for an entire summer, Joris ended up driving four hours round trip each day to this Boeing internship, which would admittedly be pretty rough in the days, especially before podcasts.

Ernest de Leon:

I have to say, absolutely, that was horrendous. But consider that anyone in LA-

Jolie Hales:

Anyone who lives in California, that’s their commute-

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah, LA or the Bay Area.

Jolie Hales:

… for 10 miles.

Ernest de Leon:

That’s our normal commute every day, or at least before the pandemic, that was a normal commute. But you’re right, at least there are podcasts and other things now that you can do while you’re still paying attention to your driving. So, yeah, that was probably pretty rough back then. I’m curious, what did he do to entertain himself while he was driving?

Joris Poort:

I ended up signing up for a vanpool, where if you’ll ask, that’s something like 4:45, before your kids get up. Trust me, that was pretty rough but very, very amazing opportunity, of course, to work in that program.

Jolie Hales:

So amazing, in fact, that once he graduated, he ended up going back to Boeing to work full-time, this time living a bit closer, I’d imagine. And Boeing had a continuing education program where they would pay for employees to get additional degrees or certifications.

Joris Poort:

I did a certification in material science for carbon fiber, building carbon fiber airplanes. And that was a lot of fun because I was able to learn new things still while I was working, and then decided to do a full-time masters while I was working as well.

Jolie Hales:

So, Joris got his masters in aeronautics and astronautics from the University of Washington while he worked at Boeing.

Joris Poort:

The topic I studied was multidisciplinary optimization. And so, the topic that I was both doing at Boeing and studying academically was using self-tuning optimization algorithms to design carbon fiber aircraft. And what that really was is essentially trying to use software to press a button and design the perfect airplane.

Jolie Hales:

And that was a transformative experience for Joris because it led to the realization that in the way that things were set up, there weren’t enough computing resources to solve the problems that he was looking to solve. At this time, I mean, cloud high-performance computing didn’t exist.

Joris Poort:

At that time, most companies like Boeing would build these data centers with a variety of hardware from places like Cray, SGI, HPE, Dell, et cetera, and build an on-premise computing system that you’d need lots of special permission to get access to because these systems are so expensive. And only the top aerodynamicists on the most important program get access to run a large fluid dynamics model or something like that on these systems.

Jolie Hales:

And when Joris first arrived at Boeing, his first real job was to optimize the design of a metal rib inside a 787 Dreamliner, which was considered a less significant design element of the aircraft comparatively.

Joris Poort:

There’s no way I was getting access to that HPC or supercomputing system.

Jolie Hales:

But over time, Joris moved around to different teams at Boeing, until he eventually landed on the team that was tasked with designing the wing. And I don’t know if you know this, Ernest, but the wing is generally considered an important part of an airplane.

Ernest de Leon:

Yeah, that would seem logical.

Joris Poort:

And then, 787 was falling a little bit behind schedule, as most good aerospace programs do. And so, eventually, when I was working on these bigger programs, then through lots of lobbying and politics and management eventually get access to these larger systems.

Jolie Hales:

Cue the music.

Joris Poort:

And through those larger systems, when I was working on the wing, you could go run these larger scale computations for anything from the material science of the carbon fiber to the how the wing actually bends, to the finite element analysis or the physics of the wing, and then the air elasticity, so also the aerodynamics and the fluid dynamics problems.

Jolie Hales:

At the time, it was really easy for different engineering teams to stay in silos. Some engineers were experts in carbon fiber, or aerodynamics, or some other element.

Joris Poort:

Having to do all the aerodynamics and only think about aerodynamics, making it exactly right, then handing it over to another engineering silo to go do all their design work on, say, the structures and making that right. And then, handing it back and then checking the aerodynamics again. You got to go through these type of feedback loops that can take a long time.

Jolie Hales:

But since Joris was simultaneously studying multidisciplinary optimization while he worked at Boeing, he was very interested in breaking down those silos.

Joris Poort:

You want to bring all these engineering disciplines together and ultimately design the best possible design, given all the physics of the engineering that goes into each of these different disciplines.

Jolie Hales:

So, the theory was, if you connected all the computational models and simulations together, from structural design, to material design, to aerodynamics, and so forth, you’d be able to make overall better design decisions. And you’d end up with a much better product, be it faster, or lighter, or more performant, or more valuable, or all of the above. So, for a few years, Joris pushed to make that practice a reality at Boeing. But having all the engineering teams work in tandem meant running a lot of simulations simultaneously.

Joris Poort:

That requires an enormous amount of computation. So, the challenge that we ran into trying to reduce these cycles at a place like Boeing is really around, ultimately, there’s not enough compute even in these specialized data centers to be able to run it that fast.

Jolie Hales:

And so, Joris tried to find ways to access that kind of compute.

Joris Poort:

I definitely experienced all the pain and frustration of trying to get access to more compute power.

Jolie Hales:

Especially given what he was learning at the university.

Joris Poort:

If you think of the dissertation I was writing at University of Washington on the academic side, the actual work I was doing on the 787 program, they all led to this thing of like, look, you just need a lot more compute power. And if you provided that access through that compute power to engineers, you would solve these problems in a much smarter, faster, better way, right? And it blew my mind that in an organization like Boeing at the time, and a lot of things have changed since this time, right? We’re talking 15 years ago. But it’s really hard to get access, just even getting an upgrade on your laptop would be hard to do. You can imagine how hard it is to get access to a data center of a thousand servers or something.

Jolie Hales:

But Joris knew that having access to the necessary compute could make a big difference for the project and for the company.

Joris Poort:

Now, I was a young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed engineer willing to break a little glass. And eventually, we got access to a lot of different internal resources to run these large-scale problems.

Jolie Hales:

Even if it was like pulling teeth sometimes.

Joris Poort:

At a new company starting today, you obviously have the power of cloud computing, so you never need to build a single data center. Just building the data center take like over a year where you have compute capacity from the day you write the tech to having it installed and up and running.

Jolie Hales:

Whereas with cloud computing-

Joris Poort:

You can literally press a button and have access to the largest, the best data centers in the world, both in that to timescale, right? You can instantly spin these things up and you can also pay for it on a consumption basis, which really changes, I think, the economics as well.

Jolie Hales:

But at Boeing, data center capacity and access were limited, at least when it came to data centers, they originally had access to. However, Joris and his boss, Adam McKenzie, who will actually come back into play a little later in the story, both of them knew that Boeing was this big company, right? I mean, today, it employs more than 140,000 people at locations around the world. But that also meant that there had to be data centers with compute that was currently being unused somewhere.

Joris Poort:

So, we’ve bootstrap together and we actually use some software to essentially build some distributed computing-

Jolie Hales:

Wow.

Joris Poort:

… software to take advantage of these different idle systems. And we can very generously call that a private cloud, but it was really just a hack together. So, a lot of Python scripting. But internal within Boeing, we would programmatically try to find the access to the resources that weren’t being used, and most of that would be happening on the weekend. So, most of the work we did, the big runs would always happen on the weekend because from Friday afternoon, when everybody clocks out at Boeing, to Monday morning, there’d be a lot of idle capacity. And so, that would be the time that we could really run the big jobs that we were doing.

Jolie Hales:

And through their hard work, brains and creativity, they used multidisciplinary optimization to make a difference.

Joris Poort:

We eventually, we did get to using that technique to get a much lighter weight wing design and save many hundreds of millions of dollars.

Jolie Hales:

Not only did they save the company millions of dollars, but it changed the way that things were designed at Boeing, which moving forward now lead with this multidisciplinary optimization mindset.

Joris Poort:

You’re generally always using the best practice processes from the previous airplane program. And so, to what I understand, yes, that same process has been carried forward. And I think it made a huge impact on the way engineers think about designing and building airplanes.

Jolie Hales:

And for more than four years, Joris continued to forward a multidisciplinary mindset at Boeing. And while he had found ways to access idle data center resources, I mean, Boeing, as we’ve established, is a very large company. And with any large company, you would expect there’s a lot of pushing through red tape in the battle for resources.

Joris Poort:

They had a lot of focus on delivering the 787 airplane program, and it was an amazing experience. And I’m still very, very thankful for having been able to participate that from start to finish. But at a certain point, I was really interested in trying something new.

Jolie Hales:

So, Joris left Boeing. And when he left, he didn’t actually know what he wanted to do. He was on a path to do a PhD in aeronautics, astronautics multidisciplinary optimization. And he was also looking at some manufacturing combined with business programs because he had been so fascinated by how large companies, like the one he had just been working at, operated.

Joris Poort:

I ended up actually at Harvard Business School.

Jolie Hales:

As one does.

Joris Poort:

It was actually a pretty tough decision because I wouldn’t say that I had a lot of support around me.

Jolie Hales:

Joris’s social circle was basically filled with PhDs. And he didn’t even know a single person who had an MBA. In addition, I mean, his parents were both academics from a very frugal Dutch culture. And they couldn’t understand the thought of Joris taking out a bunch of student loans to go to business school.

Joris Poort:

The Dutch culture would say, “Debt is a bad thing, always.” At which business school teach you different.

Jolie Hales:

Joris’ parents were originally thinking, “Yes, we’ve got all four kids out of the house, graduated from college, and in stable jobs.” I mean, Joris was working at Boeing where he would obviously work for the rest of his life. But then, all of a sudden, Joris quits his stable job in order to take out a bunch of debt and then go to business school.

Joris Poort:

They did not appreciate that, that may be a direction I’d like to take my educational career or my work career into. But at that time, I was old enough that I stopped listening to my parents to a certain extent and decided, and this is a framework I think that is helpful in life in general, which is I think it’s actually Jeff Bezos who coined this, which is the minimum regret framework. And so, if you look at, I do either a PC program, or go do this hybrid manufacturing business thing, or I do the MBA at Harvard. Across those choices, fast forward a couple of years, which one would you regret the least, right? And I audited this class or get to do these visits and sit in on these business school classes, and it’s totally jarring, right? Completely different than engineering. People get cold calls, which is high pressure environment. There’s all these finance people and consultants. I never interacted with any of those folks. And I was like, “Wow, this is a whole different world.” And I thought I would learn the most and regret it the least, and so that’s how I ended up there.

Jolie Hales:

And I would have thought that the dramatic change in scenery would have been intimidating or maybe even scary for an engineer raised by academics, where A plus B equals C, end of story. But when I asked Joris if he was freaked out by leaving his engineering atmosphere for one of the fastest paced business schools in the United States, he actually said, “No.”

Joris Poort:

If I look back at younger versions of myself, what has never scared me is something new. I’ve always been, I would say, relentlessly curious and always eager to learn new things.

Jolie Hales:

And so, relentlessly curious, Joris went to Harvard Business School where he found himself suddenly surrounded by business consultants, when he didn’t even know what business consulting was.

Joris Poort:

What’s very unique about Harvard Business School specifically is they use this thing called the case method. And so, everything that you study is in the context of usually a real-world example, where whatever you’re studying, you’re going through the narrative of a company going through that challenge or whatever it might be, right?

Jolie Hales:

And over the first year, students would end up learning hundreds of cases, where every day, they would need to read 15 or 20 pages or so about a case where they’d learn the history and background about a real-life company, what their specific challenge was, and so forth.

Joris Poort:

And then, if you get cold call, which is a fun experience, where the way they ensure compliance that you read the case is through public shaming. And if you didn’t, which means a random person is usually class of like 90 folks, you get called and you’re asked to what’s called opening up the case. So, you’re supposed to recite from memory this case that, theoretically, you read the day before.

Jolie Hales:

The professor asks some questions, various students in the class chime in different perspectives.

Joris Poort:

Every class has essentially a new case. So, by the end, we have hundreds of these, you’ve seen how hundreds of companies have solved hundreds of different business challenges. And what’s very different from engineering, which is where all my background comes from, on the technical side of things, we always have a very crisp and clear answer. So, everything has just got a map and has clear answers. I would say the business school and the case method, it teaches you… a lot of these things don’t even really have answers, right? It’s just like, this is what the company did. This one worked well. This is what didn’t work well. And you start learning these patterns. And the theory, I think, is that that teaches you how to make better decisions in the future.

Jolie Hales:

And Joris was thrilled by the new perspective he was getting.

Joris Poort:

I would say a year and a half into business school, I was pretty… I had done a lot of school at that point in my life, and I couldn’t really let go. I will say I left Boeing with this feeling of, man, this technology has so much potential, right? There’s so much more to be done. And I’d spent so much of my career at that point, probably already 10 years in both combination of Boeing and academia, studying this field of running these computations more efficiently. And I was still in my free time just reading books and researching this stuff. And at that time, that was really when cloud computing was becoming a little bit more mainstream.

Jolie Hales:

Things like AWS and the concept of big data were just starting to emerge. And Joris was still really interested in all of this stuff, especially considering recent years where he fought tooth and nail for on-prem compute resources. And after a year at Harvard Business School, Joris had been bitten by the consulting bug and he ended up taking a summer job as a consultant for McKinsey & Company, where he actually got to go back and live in his homeland of the Netherlands.

Joris Poort:

Most of this work always happens… the business world operates primarily in English. But once that team found out that I also speak Dutch, everything switched over to Dutch. And I can tell you, that was quite the interesting experience because-

Jolie Hales:

What about all the tech jargon? Did you know-

Joris Poort:

Exactly. No, nothing. Just imagine, I have like seven to 10-year-old’s Dutch language skills. And all of a sudden, I’m supposed to work at a team for this CEO of this company producing these results, yeah, in a language where I have 10-year-old’s language skills.

Jolie Hales:

But this wasn’t the first time Joris had to quickly adapt to a less familiar language. And he picked up the Dutch tech jargon quickly. And there was a lot of tech jargon in Dutch because at this time, he was a consultant for a company called ASML, which is a semiconductor company that has a large amount of market share, making lithography machines or machines that build computer chips.

Joris Poort:

What was really interesting to me and sparked my imagination at the time was that these more customized chips that are getting built, they have obviously commodity cloud computing. But if you can build more efficient chips, that’s another way to solve this large computing problem, right? And most of the computer chips or CPUs, central processing units, are built for general purpose computing, right? But at that time, you already have NVIDIA building GPUs and things like that. And what was really interesting to me was like, why aren’t there custom chips being built like, for example, aerodynamics, right? So, why are we solving aerodynamics problems on computer chips? They’re really not built to solve necessarily that specific type of problem.

Jolie Hales:

And between the ideas of increasing access to compute resources and using chips customized for certain types of jobs, Joris was convinced that there just had to be a better way for engineers in general to get their work done.

Joris Poort:

And so, those are the areas and the topics I combined to study in second year business school, which means maybe a little bit different than what most other MBAs were doing at that time.

Jolie Hales:

Probably just a little bit.

Ernest de Leon:

That’s probably true, not that I wouldn’t know.

Jolie Hales:

And while his three months working as a McKinsey consultant in the Netherlands was incredibly interesting and rewarding, Joris wasn’t convinced that he wanted to stick to consulting as a career.

Joris Poort:

And I realized at the time, if I went down the path of a next five, 10 years career in consulting, I’d probably get paid more than I ever thought I would get paid. I’d probably work with the most powerful people in business that I would never otherwise get to work with on really interesting projects, but I would not really get to implement and really work on the actual technology and taking it to market, the customers for that technology, and the products we would be building.

Jolie Hales:

And for Joris, it was the hands-on, impact-driven side of technology that really drove him.

Joris Poort:

It gave me a lot of additional inspiration and motivation to do something in the field of computing.

Jolie Hales:

And with that, Rescale was born. The end. Okay, just kidding. If you’ve been watching the clock, you can see that this story is going to need to be a two-part episode. So, stay tuned to the next release of the Big Compute Podcast to hear more about Joris disappointing his parents, moving to Silicon Valley, being rejected by numerous investors, and then finally landing a small first check that got the ball really rolling toward his dreams of accelerating innovation.

Ernest de Leon:

To see photos, links and videos associated with this episode, including I’m hoping a trailer link for the movie Rubber, head over to bigcompute.org.

Jolie Hales:

Yes, you can also go to Rescale.com/PCpodcast to learn more about the Rescale platform. Sign up for a demo and then that lets them know that we sent you.

Ernest de Leon:

And to support the Big Compute Podcast, you can leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. And as a matter of fact, if you tweet us, we’re prolific tweeters, and we’ll respond to you.

Jolie Hales:

Well, I love the “we” there.

Ernest de Leon:

It’s the royal we.

Jolie Hales:

Yeah, it’s more of the Ernest. It’s not even the we like I spend five seconds on Twitter per month. So, tweet at Ernest. Thanks for joining us today.

Ernest de Leon:

And always use MFA and 3-2-1 backup.

Jolie Hales:

Stay safe out there. Bye.