Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Tobi Knaup, CEO and Co-founder of D2iQ, which provides the leading independent Kubernetes platform, which simplifies and automates the really difficult tasks needed for enterprise grade production at scale, while reducing operational burden and reducing cost.

Tobi, as I mentioned before, I'm so excited to chat with you and learn more about your background. Experience the growth of Mesosphere to D2iQ and really you know, for the founders out there, how to navigate a transition, how to grow at scale and the different mechanics behind, you know, being successful and growing as a successful company.

But before we get into all that, what were you doing before you started? Well, Mesosphere, but now D2iQ.

Tobi: Yeah. So right before starting the company, I was an engineer at Airbnb. I was one of the first engineers there, actually joined the company when the founders were still running it out of the apartment in San Francisco

So it was very, it was quite the experience to see the company grow from, you know, less than 20 people to what it is today. And you know, did a lot of different things there As one of the first engineers wore many hats. I worked for another startup before Airbnb that was even smaller and you know, but my experience with cloud and infrastructure and machine learning software actually goes back to when I was a teenager, cuz I grew up in Germany. My best friend and I actually started a company when we were 15 years old and helped people Wow. You know, design websites and host servers and things like that.

Julian: Yeah. What do you think about the advent of all the new kind of like built ready, like no-code platforms and things like that. How much different would your company be at 15 now with all the recent tools and and platforms out there?  

Tobi: Oh, very different. I mean, we had to build everything from scratch back then. It was it was quite fascinating, but I think it gave me like a really broad view on, you know, what it takes to build an online. So we literally built our own servers. We would like order parts on the internet and assemble our own servers and then, you know, ask our parents to drive us to the data center so we could rack the server and connect it.

We figured out how to, you know, run Linux based servers, the Apache web server and other things like that. Learned php, we programmed their own e-commerce solution. Like everything was built from scratch, , and you know, today, I mean, you can build an, you know, an e-commerce site in probably a few hours by just clicking a few buttons basically.

So it's very different.  

Julian: What was the initial antithesis to, to go from Germany and come to the States. And was that your first engineering, like professional job? When and when you you know, jumped into was it ster at the time? Right. And then obviously moving to Airbnb. What was that transition like going from, you know, one location to a completely different one and then also being at the beginning of your professional.

Tobi: it was quite exciting. So, you know, growing up in Germany outside of Silicon Valley very far from Silicon Valley, right? You hear all these stories about startups and companies that are being founded there. And so I always thought like, I gotta check this place out. You know, I wanna see what it's like.

And so in college I I just tried to find an internship somewhere in the valley and you know, I applied. But all the big companies like Google and Apple and so forth never heard back . But that didn't discourage me, so I just tried, you know, other places. And then one day I saw an email on a Rubian Rails mailing list.

I was doing a lot of rails at the time, and I was from the startup called psta, and they were looking for interns. So I was like, oh, great. You know, I'll talk to those guys. And you know, they offered me an internship a college internship. So I worked with them for, you know, three or four. Back in 2008 and that was my first taste of you know, the startup world.

And yeah, it was super exciting. You know, I just loved the energy that everybody had and I, you know, went to a few meetups locally to meet some other, you know, engineers and people that were building companies. And I just, the energy was just so infectious. And then, you know, pink stu at startup you know, the founder and CEO.

Actually wanted to convince me to stay stay on and not finish my degree. I'm like, you know, I think I'll finish that first. It's a good idea, but I came back a year later to join them full-time in 2009.  

Julian: Yeah. Well, you know, being a part of the startup culture so early, what do you think, you know, what I guess benefited you now, well, not now, but when you started your own company that, that, you know, you carried on in terms of the lessons or the structure, was it the culture?

Was it the ethos? You know, I think a lot of people kind of tried to balance out. You know, do I go into this avenue of my career? You know, for, I guess for the non founders and the audiences, you know, do I go and work for a larger company, work for a startup? You know, I guess what were the benefits that you feel carried over to building your own company?

Tobi: Yeah. You know, many lessons and I learned some of those lessons, like I said, you know, early on as a teenager. Yeah. You know, it was always really fun for me to just create something outta nothing. I think that's probably, You know, just invigorating thing about building a company. Like you start with nothing and you're building something.

But also, you know, when we started this first company as teenagers, we learned some hard lessons too, right? We had customers who didn't pay the bills, and so you're like, oh, what do we do now? And things like that. So, you know, just and then just also realized how much work it is, right?

You know, I think if you have if you're an employee, you have your job, you work a certain amount of hours. But you know, for us, even back then, you know, we were in school of course, so there was school and then, you know, on the afternoons and evenings we would, you know, write code and design websites.

Yeah. And then on weekends we would send invoices to our clients. Right. So there's, you're just got an early idea of how much work it is and then Yeah. You know, just joining Airbnb in the early days too, and Pinta was an early stage startup. A lot of things go wrong. It's not a straight line to the top, even for some, a successful, hugely successful company like Airbnb. So, you know, just a lot of experiences there too. You know, it's a rollercoaster.  

Julian: Yeah. You know, back, if you were to think back in, you know, I guess in 2013 when you first started Mesosphere at the time, which I'm, if I remember that's what it was first called, what was the inspiration behind leaving Airbnb and really taking on you know, Mesosphere in this own project?

Was it. You know, did you, was the problem so compelling that you had to follow it? Or was it, you know, the inkling of having this continued entrepreneurial mindset that you were like, I see the problem and I have to go, which one was it? Was it problem guided where it's a little bit of mixture in terms of yourself or yeah. In, in, for other founders that are maybe in a similar experience.

Tobi: Yeah, totally. So it was a little bit of both. So I'm you know, moved to Silicon Valley, actually around the same time as my best friend. So the guy I founded the company with when we were 15, we grew up in the same town in Germany. But we both moved to the States and ended up in San Francisco around the same time.

He was working for Twitter at the time and and he ended up being my co-founder at Mesosphere too. And as a third guy too, Ben, who you know, so Flo is my bestfriend.. Ben is the third founder and Flo and Ben met during a student exchange in high school. So, and Ben also came to the Bay Area around the same time.

He was, you know, doing some research work in Berkeley basically working on his PhD on you know, container orchestration software. He created Apache Mesos, one of the, you know, first open source Yeah. Container softwares and. You know, Flo and Ben worked at a, at Twitter, I worked at Airbnb and you know, these companies were growing super fast and had scaling challenges and between the three of us, right, we solved a lot of these scaling challenges using containers.

So both Twitter and Airbnb were early adopters of Linux containers. And Apache, right, which Ben had created. And so, you know, the it is sort of twofold. So the selfish reason I say for starting this company was, I used to be the guy with the pager, and sometimes the pager, you know, goes off at three in the morning and then you spend five hours fixing broken computers.

Right. Nobody likes to do that. And then, you know, and then we automated a lot of the operations, right? We implemented containers, container orchestration, so a lot of these problems went away. And basically the system could just fix itself a lot of the time, right? Yeah. When something randomly crashed, ran out of memory, whatever it.

So selfishly, my page didn't go off as much anymore, so I'm like, well this is great. This is like the mythical 10 x technology, right? That solves all my problems. But on a more serious note you know, we were doing a lots of open source meetups at the time around Mesos and talking about how we solved these scaling challenges at Twitter and Airbnb.

And a lot of interesting companies started showing up to the meetups and said, you know, we have similar problems and that we knew how to solve in a much better way. And. That's where we saw a big opportunity to really say like, okay, you know, eventually every company's gonna run into scaling challenges like this.

You know, this was around a time where mark Andreessen's article in the Wall Street Journal had just landed which he called softwares eating the world. You know, Netflix was just starting their streaming business a few years earlier and, you know, eating in the Blockbuster. And so we thought, You know, eventually every company is gonna have to run online services and keep them available and scalable and, you know, we know how to help them.

So that's why we created the company. I think the other aspect was just, You know, Flo and I had started a company before in Germany and it was a lot of fun overall. Yeah. And so, you know, at some point over drinks, you know, in San Francisco we realized like, you know, hey, we're in Silicon Valley now.

Everyone's starting companies. We gotta start a company too, one day . And so we were basically just waiting for the right idea. And and you know, me sphere and container orchestration was it.  

Julian: Yeah. Describe a little bit about, you said a lot of companies face scaling problems and without this container service, they're not able to mitigate these problems either quickly or they, you know, they're not able to overcome them, you know, almost entirely it seems like.

If they don't have some sort of solution built in long term. So what does that trickle down in, in terms of other problems that companies start seeing? Obviously there's this one, you know, kind of a lesion, right? But then I'm assuming it kind of leads into other things.  

Tobi: Yeah, so I think, you know, what it comes down to is just. You know, being able for companies being able to offer online services that are resilient, that are secure and that they can operate effectively. So, you know, again, when we were teenagers and we were running this company there wasn't much automation, right? If we wanted automation, we had to build it ourselves and we would write a bunch of batch scripts to do things.

And, you know, even early Twitter and Airbnb days, it was kind of still like that, right? A lot of home-built. You know, and you know, just a lot of manual effort. And if you, those of you who remember who were maybe Twitter uses back in 2009 2010, you would see the Fail Whale a lot. So the Fail Whale, this cartoon whale, you know, when Twitter was over capacity?

Well, the reason was that the, the, how the infrastructure was originally built wasn't very scalable. And so, you know, as Twitter became more popular you know, the infrastructure just couldn't keep up. And. One thing that changed at the time too, is, well, in the early days of the internet, you know, the internet was kind of like a playground.

You know, people hung out there, whatever, but slowly over time you know, online services became a bigger part of people's lives. Yeah. And they became bigger, more important revenue streams for companies. Right. In the early days of Twitter, They weren't selling ads, they weren't making money. It was just, you know, people just hung out.

And maybe the fail whale was like funny and fine sometimes, but they were developing into more serious business, right? Yeah. And so the service had to be resilient. It had, couldn't go down and of course it had to be secure to people try to like break into it. And similar at Airbnb, right? In the early days.

Small scale, but the thing took off. And so, you know, if the site was down for a minute, that meant, you know, a big loss for the business and unhappy customers. So, so like that's sort of the realm of of problems we were attacking is like, how do we make this thing more resilient for users? How do we make it secure as people can't break in?

And then also, how do we operate it efficiently? Right? Like, because obviously as you scale as you know, especially as a venture funded company, at some point efficiency becomes a real challenge too.  

Julian: Yeah. If you don't mind describing briefly what is, what are the mechanics behind this container service that allows companies to, you know, run very large applications and have a lot of users at scale without having to deal with, you know, crashes and things that would be, you know, detrimental to a continued say quality service to their customers?

Tobi: Yeah. So, so there's a couple of different technologies at play here and. You know, it starts with containers. So I mentioned containers a bunch. You know, a Linux container is what we're talking about specifically Linux containers. It's essentially a set of technologies and Linux that allow you to, you know, package applications and then run multiple different applications on shared infrastructure.

So on the same machines running multiple different applications in parallel next to each other, sharing the. Right. So that's just containers. So you package an application, you manage the resource sharing between them and then you layer on top of that, you layer container orchestration.

Kubernetes is the technology that most people use there. Our products that we sell as a company data queue based on Kubernetes. So that's essentially a system which then you know, orchestrates manages these containers across a lot of different machines and. What that allows you to do then is just automate many of the aspects of running an a large online service or even a small online service, frankly, right?

So if you're a developer and you're building an application, you wanna ship it now, all you have to do is you put it in a container and you write a manifest that describes how to run this thing. And then the system will take care of everything else. It can automatically scale it up and scale it down, restart it if it crashes and so forth. And those are all things we had to do manually in the old days.  

Julian: That must have been such a ti I can just waking up at 3M and then working on something for five hours to fix and then having that, oh yeah. Time back to you. I couldn't imagine how much. How much freedom you probably felt in, in that moment, right?

Tobi: Especially if you just had a night out with your friends and then you come home and your pager goes off. That's not fun.  

Julian: I guess, you know, thinking about not even just early days, but you know, you. You know, going through pretty much this user discovery process with these meetups that you were having and then figuring out the validity to your idea and then kind of expanding on that, starting the company you know, is in terms of things that you had to learn new in terms of like fundraising and you've gone through a few fundraising now and congrats on the success with that.

But thank you. Describe learning that skill and if for other founders out. What was strategically successful for you, and what are some things that weren't as successful going through the fundraising process if you were to give a few, you know, I guess pieces of advice for other funders out there.

Looking to continue the, their funding rounds and and what are the different, I guess, steps, you know, when you're going into growing each round. .  

Tobi: Yeah. So, there's a lot to talk about there. We could probably do like a few podcast episodes on just that, just fundraising. You know, I think we were super happy with how our fundraisings went.

You know, I think, you know, one quote that I remember, one piece of advice I got from people is if this is your first time you're raising money the quote was like, you're, you know, you're playing a game. It's their game. You don't know the rules to the game. Right. . So I think get all the advice you can get.

Yeah. There's just, it's complex, right? There's a lot of things. Yeah. And people will throw all these terms at you that you don't understand. So get a good advisor in our case. What what really helped is well, a few things. So the former VP of engineering at Twitter at the time you know, he had left Twitter.

To become a VC at Kline of Perkins. And so, you know, Flo and Ben, since they worked at Twitter, it was their former boss, basically. And you know, he was one of the first people we talked to to pitch the idea. And of course he was familiar with, you know, the success that the technology had at Twitter.

So that really helped. And then and, you know, he was a good advisor to like really help us with a pitch and Yeah. You know, tell the. And the other thing that really helped us too, actually navigate more the mechanics of fundraising. Like, you know, what's a good term sheet? What's a bad term?

Sheet is we just had a good lawyer that was also recommended to us, you know, get a good law firm, a lawyer you trust . And I think, you know, for us it was I think when you're fundraising you're selling, you're essentially, you're a salesperson and you're selling your idea to investors, right?

Keep that in mind. And, you know, the way to sell something really well is to tell a good story, right? Like humans, we respond to stories. So, yeah. You know, even if you're doing something like super sophisticated technically and, you know, and you get excited about that as a technical founder, you know, I'm a technical founder, I get it.

VC will get a little less excited about, you know, the technical details. But but if you tell a good story that resonates with anybody and So I think in our case that was that was really important is to hone in that story. And and then it's also, you know, VC is also, or raising capital is also about networking, so, just try to find people who can help you, who can make introductions for you to investors. Yeah. Who can coach you. You know, in our case we ended up raising money from Andre and Horowitz for a seed round in our Series A. They're a big investor in Airbnb. . So having that connection, you know, they, they did reference calls with people at Airbnb who said good things about us, I imagine

So, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, tho those things help. you,  

Julian: Do you have any favorite, just I guess a little piece of selfish advice, but do you have any favorite templates that you use to like gather those reference calls or get introductions? For those reference calls? Is there anything that that you saw success that you saw that was successful that you were using in terms of wording or phrasing or

or where to navigate those network. I think a lot of us struggle like, all right, I have a friend that knows somebody and then that person knows somebody, but how do I make the connection and I guess not elegantly, but enough to where it's extremely authentic. And genuinely get the response that you want.

Tobi: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think it, it comes down to the story too, right? Yeah. It's so getting that right, I mean, in terms of, you know, a template or like, how do you ask? I think, I mean, generally, I. Keep emails as short as possible. And I prefer phone calls a lot of time. Just, you know, just talk to people and tell your story.

And and yeah, it's gotta be something, you know, if you have an exciting story to tell, then you know, people will be excited to bring that story to like break the news, so to speak to an investor they might know or someone else they might know. Right. Yeah, because so yeah, I think that's what it comes down.

Julian: Yeah. Amazing. Describe, you know, Mesosphere or Mesos, I heard you call it short. Mesos describe the transition to adding more features and adding more products and then creating going through a rebrand and creating. , you know, a D2iQ, which I learned stands for day two. is some DevOps term which I'd love to hear the description from that. But describe, I think a lot of companies, you know, we work on one really good product and then we're starting to build momentum and traction. Then at some point we're getting requests for other things, or we see other things in the market that we can impact positively with a solution or piece of technology.

But it's hard to define when the right time is to incorporate that and how that might take away from. Original vision. . So oftentimes, you know, you see companies do a rebrand to incorporate all the solutions that they have. What was the process like? What were the thoughts that went into making a critical rebrand in the decision and incorporating all that, and how did you maintain the core value of the product that you originally created?

Tobi: Yeah, so I think our story is a bit unique there. We, our company used to be called Meso Sphere because the core open source technology that our product, our original product was built around is called Apache Meso. So it's an Apache project which my co-founder Ben created at Berkeley. Originally as a research project, but then it became the basis for Twitter production.

And so, you know, open source container orchestration software, we created the company around it and basically productized this open source software to. Usable for, you know, any mainstream enterprise. And you know what, what happened? And we had a great story there, right? Like this is the stuff that powers Twitter and Airbnb.

But then a few years later Google came out with their own, you know, similar software called Kubernetes, and they told the world, this is like how we run Google internally, right? It's based on our best ideas for how we operate Google. And you know, now it's open source and you can use it too. And and so basically what happened what's really critical in open source is to build a strong and healthy community, right?

Where ideally there are actually many different companies and perspectives represented in the community. It's never good if it's just owned by a single company. Even, you know, if it's your company, you created the thing. You know, you can make the pie a lot bigger by creating a bigger community.

And so, you know what happened? Over the years is that they're just a really big community formed around Kubernetes. A lot of people went there, including people from our community, from the Mesos community, you know, just went there and you know, it was just sort of had this really galvanizing effect.

And so, you know, basically that's where the action was. And so, you know, for us as a company you know, in our sales conversations, talking to prospect, You know, for a very long time, cuz it took, takes time for this kind of software to mature. It's measured in the years, you know, for a long time we could point out, you know, clear technical advantages, right?

MES is more scalable, it's more robust, it's more proven. But there just came a point where prospects said like, well, I get it, but this is where the action is. Right? Yeah. That's the community I want to join. That, you know, I want to be able to recruit people from that community or whatever the region was.

Became obvious to us at some point that we're gonna have to reorient the business around it. We actually got involved in Kubernetes right from the beginning. We partnered with Google. We co-founded the Cloud Native Computing Foundation with Google and others because we knew it was gonna be big.

And so, you know, at some point we tried to like, offer two product lines in parallel for some time. , but you know, it very quickly became obvious. We need to focus. And so we decided to go all in. We built a completely new product line from scratch built on Kubernetes. And in that process also renamed the company because, you know, we had Mesos, the name of the technology in our company name.

And, you know, we just wanted to make sure there's no confusion. Yeah. That we're doing something else now. So, you know, little word of advice for other founders out there. Don't put the technology name in your company name.  

Julian: Yeah. That's that's a good piece of advice. What was it like in terms of the educational part with kind of, obviously new name new, pretty much platform based on new te.

Did you have any drop off from customers that you had and or how did you kind of mitigate that with education or was it active conversations, you know, for founders going through maybe a similar transition, how can they, you know, de-risk themselves from either losing any traction that they have?

Tobi: Yeah, lots of conversations at the bottom line. Yeah. We stayed you know, really close to our customers. , there was a group of customers, so we always do, you know, customer advisory boards yeah. On a regular basis where we get feedback from customers. So this was one of those things too, where we told a, you know, group of almost trusted customers that were planning to do this and sort of got their feedback and advice.

And so, yeah. You know, I think with a big transition like this and, you know, for our customers, this was a lot of work, right? It was obviously a big transition for us as a company, but for our customers too, they. , you know, relearn everything and rebuild the infrastructure. So, massive migration. And so basically we just tried to make it as easy as possible for customers to say yes to migrating to the new product.

Yeah. So we built migration tools, you know, we did favorable pricing. You know, we did free or discounted professional services where our, you know, our team, our field engineering team would. Partner with the customers to to help them migrate. So, so yeah, basically try to make it as easy as possible for people to say yes.

Yeah. Even though it's something they really don't want to do. And then, you know what always happens with something like this is some people will say yes, and some people will say no and they'll do something else. So we actually have people. Opted to still use the old product. We don't provide any support for it anymore, but you know, they, they're still using it and supporting themselves.

You know, other people went, somebody else and other people migrated. So that's pretty typical.  

Julian: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about the traction that you're seeing now. Obviously, you've gone through a few rounds of funding, you've gone through a transition in the platform of software, and I'm assuming you, you continued your growth.

What does the growth look like now? What are you excited about in the coming year in terms of the projections that you're expecting and team and size and things like that. Where is D2i Q headed? .  

Tobi: Yeah. So we're very excited about you know, this continuing transition to the cloud and to, you know, more digital services being created. So, you know, as for the folks out there who have been, you know, running stuff on the cloud or maybe have their own, you know, cloud related startups or have been using Kubernetes or other technologies, it may seem like, you know, this is all old stuff at this point, you know? Came out in 2015. We started our company in 2013.

Right. Stuff's been around for a while, but for the industry as a whole, like it as a whole, it's such early days still. Yeah. So there's a number, I think it was actually an executive from AWS who mentioned it, that only about 10% or so of overall IT spending is on the cloud Today. 90% is still off the cloud.

So gives you a sense for how early it is still. Right. At the same time, you look at surveys around Kubernetes specifically and you know, basically it's an industry standard, right? Everybody is going to move the vast majority of their workloads to Kubernetes over time. And, you know, I think there's some really strong tailwinds that, you know, are helping us and really anybody that's working in cloud or DevOps which is that eventually, you know, every company, it doesn't matter what you're.

You know, you're gonna be building and operating some kind of cloud service, right? Whether you're selling home appliances, dishwashers, or whatever, like those things are already connected to the internet and there's a cloud app, right? Cars are connected. It's gonna be I heard recently about a company that sells power tools.

So those things are getting, you know, some iot thing and app with it now too. So, so a lot of these things are still early and obviously there's a lot of excitement around AI right now too. , I. There's a lot of things happening in that field, and I think eventually the, all the industry leading products of tomorrow are gonna have AI built in.

Yeah. And AI needs a lot of resources, right? It needs a lot of compute. It needs a lot of data. And, you know, for us as a company that provides a platform on which to run mission critical software production. Including ai. That's really exciting, right? We want to be the platform that our customers choose to build whatever is next for them, right?

Whatever their new products are. And so, so yeah, super excited about what's ahead there.  

Julian: Yeah. What are some of the biggest risks that D2iQ faces today?  

Tobi: Yeah, well, like every other company out there, we look at the overall economy, right? And we wonder what's going on and you know, how that's gonna affect things.

. So yeah. You know, we don't know how how the market's gonna evolve over the next year. There's the, you know, different people have different opinions on it. So, you know, for us what that means is just be able to weather the storm, right. Be able to run the business in a way where we. See things through through and and yeah, manage the business in, in, in really a challenging environment.

And, but there's also good, you know, every crisis, or I don't wanna call it a crisis, every, you know, challenging economic environment also has offers opportunity and for us. Yeah. What we're seeing with a lot of folks is that, They're actually often accelerating digital projects because it helps them find new revenue streams or, you know, be more efficient in manufacturing, for example.

. And so, you know, so there's a lot of tailwinds for our business too, in this environment.  

Julian: Amazing. What if everything goes well what's the long-term vision for D2iQ?  

Tobi: Yeah, so I mean, our Launchment vision is we want to be the provider of intelligent infrastructure that helps customers unleash in.

Yeah. That helps them build their next generation products that helps them, you know, put AI into whatever products they are selling. And, you know, a lot of our customer stories fall into this bucket. You know, it's people that are building you know, better medical devices where they can update the software faster than ever before and use things like ai.

We help companies, you know, develop electric cars. We you know, there's a long list of these things. So, so yeah, I think especially too because Kubernetes and related cloud native technologies are, you know, there's such a big lever. They really help people innovate faster and build infrastructure that's more resilient and secure and efficient.

But it's also pretty complicated technology, right? Yeah. So if you're new to it there's a lot to learn and it's, you know, it's not just Kubernetes. Kubernetes is kind of the star here, but there's a, you know, over a dozen other things you need to put together. You know, we really think that we, you know, we're excited about what we bring to the table in terms of automating and simplifying Yeah.

Infrastructure, software and, you know, eventually, so I talked about ai a lot. You know, AI and infrastructure have sort of been the two things I've been excited about for a very long time. So what we're actually gonna do is you know, put AI into our own products to, to automate more. And you know, help customers, help more customers have that experience that I had when my pager didn't go off it three in the morning anymore.

Julian: I love that. I love that. This next question, I'd love to ask for my audience and myself for research purposes, but whether it was early in your career or now, what books or people have influenced you the most?  

Tobi: Yeah. That's a long list. I mean, I, we'll start with the most recent one I recently read the book called Trillion Dollar Coach.

Yeah. It's about Bill Campbell, one of the most famous executive coaches he coached the Google founders coached Eric Schmidt, coached Steve Jobs many successful executive teams across the valley. He passed away a few years ago, and so, some of the Coach Cheese wrote a book about him and about his techniques including Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and a few others.

And it's a fantastic book. It talks a lot about the human side of running a company and managing teams and culture, which, you know, I think is the most important thing. It's probably the best piece of a device I got when I started the. Including from Brian Chesky, the Airbnb founder. , which is, you know, when you start a company that you're gonna make a lot of mistakes.

Everybody does, but there's one mistake you should avoid at all costs, and that is don't mess up your culture. Yeah. So that's always been really important to me. And you know, that book helps with it. So, so yeah, that's trillion Dollar Coach great book, highly recommended. Start with why Simon Sinek. Great book. I really like that too. High output management is another classic. But yeah there's a long list.  

Julian: Well, I I love the I definitely will tap into the trillion dollar coach. That sounds exciting. A anytime someone writes or a group of people write something about an influential figure.

It's always fascinating to see the perspective change. You know, they had one about Michael Jordan and a book written on him from a different perspective of someone who followed him. And it was really it was. Really in tune to what people probably extract from the lessons versus, you know, the mechanics of what somebody does strategically.

But it's super impactful. I've been troubleshooting this question and I'm pretty excited about it, but I'll troubleshoot on you as well. If you weren't working on this, what industry, or what product or what project would you be working on if, you know, you didn't have to, not, didn't have to, but if you weren't working on D2iQ?.

Tobi: Oh yeah, that's a good question. So, if I was working on something else, it would probably be some combination of AI and music, I think. Yeah. Cuz those are my other two passions. I love music. Used to play in bands and I DJ on the side. So, and I think ai, well music has always been very technology driven, like every time, you know, I mean the electric guitar, that was a technological invention and Yeah.

You know, all of a sudden you had rock music and and then, you know, synthesizers and I think AI is just going to do so much for music and yeah, I'd love to explore that.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. It's in incredible what open AI did with with, I think with chat tp t when they came out. You can put in oh yeah.

Commands for making songs and writing lyrics and things like that. So it's gonna be interesting to see. That's wild. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Tobi, I so much appreciate your time and I know we're at the top of the episode. We went over a little bit, but we could talk, I'm sure for hours on different subjects, but such a pleasure chatting with.

Last little bit is I'd like to give my guests a chance to give us your plugs. Where can we find D2iQ? Where can we find you? Where can we be part of the mission and support the overall technology? Or if we're a customer, where can we find you and get involved?  

Tobi: Yeah, so you can find us d2iq.com. So that's d the number two iq.com. And by the way, I didn't talk about this earlier, but day two you asked about day two, the DevOps concept. So day two, operations. There's day zero, which is essentially your planning phase. Day one is installation, day two is the ongoing maintenance. So, you know, we help people operate mission critical environment.

So that's where the day two comes from. And then the iq, we, you know, help people become smart about the technology. And we're also putting smarts, automation, and, you know, AI into our own products. So, D number two, IQ dot. You can request a demo on there to check out our software. We also have a bunch of videos on YouTube if you want to find out more about what we do. So just search for D2iQ on YouTube. And we're also pretty active on Twitter. That's also D2iQ.  

Julian: Incredible. Well, I hope you enjoyed yourself, Tobi, and thank you so much again for joining the show.  

Tobi: Thanks so much for having me on the show.