Transcript

Jeetu Patel: You have to keep reminding them that you're running out of time because we're all against the race of time when it comes to this. You have to make sure intensity is always high when you're working in business because you're running against a time clock, and time is your enemy. And if you can't move fast, then you might as well not move at all because it doesn't really matter. Be slightly impatient and unsatisfied at all times.

Ted Blosser: Welcome to the LEARN podcast, where we interview top leaders in tech and learn about how they're building the world's most innovative companies. I'm Ted Blosser, CEO and Co-Founder of WorkRamp, the world's first learning cloud platform. Our mission is to help professionals reach their full potential through learning, and the LEARN podcast is where we can learn from the best leaders at the top of their game.

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Ted Blosser: Hey all, welcome back to the LEARN podcast. We have a special guest on today, actually from my alma mater, Cisco. We have Jeetu Patel, the EVP and GM of security and collaboration at Cisco. Welcome Jeetu, thanks for jumping on.

Jeetu Patel: How are you Ted? And it's good to see you again. Your alma mater was, uh, box, not Cisco, but I'm glad that you said Cisco.

Ted Blosser: Oh no, no. I actually worked at Cisco first job out of college. I didn't even tell you that.

Jeetu Patel: You, I worked for two of the same companies. That's amazing. Okay.

Ted Blosser: that's a good coincidence. And I didn't tell the audience that we overlapped as well at Box; although brief, I learned a ton from you. But that's going to be a perfect segue into Jeetu. Let's. Get kicked off with a little bit of background on yourself. Give us the elevator pitch on your career before we jump into the full conversation.Jeetu Patel: I think I'm very lucky to be lucky. In the sense that I have some great sense that I've been fortunate to be part of. I had the reverse trajectory in my career where I started in the startup and then ended up in a big company. Usually people go the other way around

And so I started in a company that I joined when I was in college as an intern and then eventually, was part of the buyout of the company and ran that business for 17 years and then came to Silicon Valley, and worked at EMC where I built their first SaaS product, Simplicity, which competed with Box and then joined Box after that and was a chief product officer and, strategy officer at Box for five years, I think.

And then from there joined Cisco. It's been a great ride so far. And, uh, you know, these days they'll just hire anyone for these things. It's, uh, it's amazing.

Ted Blosser: Would you say big differences and challenges? Those are such varied company sizes. Maybe before we jump in the main conversation, what have been your big learnings, big and small across the valley?

Jeetu Patel: The thing that I always found was people would say, can you think at scale at large companies? One of the big reasons that I moved to the Valley was I was fascinated. I grew up in India, and I came to America and I was fascinated with this concept of thinking about and building products at scale with a standardized fashion.

I always was amazed. I'm like, you know, you go anywhere in America. And you'd see these strip malls, and they would look the same wherever you go. You see expressways, and the signs look the same wherever you go in the entire country. I just thought it was fascinating that there was so much standardization, and that required someone to proactively think that we're going to go out and build out an infrastructure.

That's going to be consistent across the board so that people don't have to learn new things. Every single time they kind of switch from one place to the other. And so I always had this fascination for scale. I moved to the Valley to go to a big company to learn scale because in the small companies, felt like you weren't learning scale as well as in large companies.

What I found was this. I always thought that the absence of scale is harder than learning scale. You had a new product idea, and you're a company of five people, and you needed to go out and put five people on a new product idea.

That is a 100 percent pivot of your company. If you have a company with 5,000 people and need a new product idea that needs five people to go prosecute the idea or explore it at least, you would just go out and reprioritize work for 5 people and put it on this. I always thought the absence of scale is harder than actually operating at scale. But ironically, what I found is 100 percent of the hires that I made that did not work out like for me, the success rate of good hires, let's say I can hire 70 percent of them who happen to be great hires, but 30 percent still don't succeed because it's just hard sometimes to hire no matter how good your track record is. 100 percent of the hires that didn't work out were because they could not get into the mentality of an at-scale motion.

I found that very fascinating because an at-scale motion doesn't seem like it's that hard to do, except you have to be extremely deliberate about communicating the same message over and over again to a very large group of people in a very systematic way. If you can't do that, then scale is really hard.

And that was my big learning is, they're just different games, and you have to make sure that if you're operating in a large company, You have to be able to communicate to large groups of people in a very consistent way over and over again so that the ship moves. When the ship does move, it's a force to reckon with, but it takes a little longer to move.

And what I found at Cisco is. We've been lucky in the sense that because of some of the ways that my peers and Chuck, who's our CEO, work, we're able to actually move really fast. And so the fastest I've ever moved in my career is that Cisco, which I would have never thought would be the case.

Ted Blosser: And you would think the smallest company would be the fastest to move that the fastest I've moved is at Cisco. And, of course, the largest scale is at Cisco. So that's an interesting dynamic that I didn't expect, you put your money where your mouth is. Think of how well and how fast you close Splunk as a company. Meanwhile, most other companies are taking years to close that, but that goes to the execution of even MNA, how fast you move, and how well you want to integrate that. So that's great to hear. Let's talk about the main topic for today, though.

I want to talk about your concept that you recently posted about on LinkedIn, which is mega trends. And so for today's conversation, we're going to talk about two mega trends. And if we have time we'll talk about leadership as well. But the two mega trends, obviously, we have to talk about AI, and then I want to talk about something that's maybe not as front and center for everybody, which is spatial computing.

I know you're a big fan of spatial computing with your Webex early application for Apple vision pro. So I want to talk about those two mega trends for today. But before we jump into it, give us your definition of a mega trend. And then also the ones you've personally experienced and where you feel like the mega trends are about to head as we talk about AI and spatial computing.

Jeetu Patel: The way I think of a mega trend, you can't stop something whose time has come. That's going to have a pretty widespread impact on all of humanity and all of society over time. If I just look back during my career on Megatrends, client-server computing was one of those moving from the mainframe to the PC era of client-server computing.

I think the Internet was one of them. And then the SaaS revolution that came out of the Internet. Mobile was another one. Now we have AI. I think those are some the big lessons, and I learned this from both of our previous bosses, Aaron Levy, who's one of my best friends. And, he and I would talk about this all the time that one of the big lessons.

To learn in this is never fight a mega trend. Always try to use it as a tailwind because chances are you will never win. Fighting a mega trend now the challenge is you have to be good enough at being able to tell a mega trend from just complete hype that might happen. So I'll give you an example.

Web3 was pure hype. AI is a true mega trend. We invested almost zero effort on Web3. In fact, anyone who would try to invest effort in Web3, I would judge them. There's no point investing anything on Web3. with AI, we pivoted our entire TFR, kind of resource base on AI and we've been actually investing in AI before generative AI is boom.

Two years prior to that, we had done a fair amount of work on AI in the WebEx space and then in security. And that's because, the use cases are so obvious that you don't need a PhD to understand what this mega trend is going to be able to do. It just becomes very obvious of what that is.

Whereas with everything else that might look like a hype cycle in the market that feels like a mega trend, but if you can't understand what this is going to do to change your lives. Chances are probably not as much of a mega trend. And so my rule has always been don't fight the mega trend, use it as a tailwind.

And definitely AI is one of them right now. And spatial computing be interesting for us to talk about both of them. I'm long on both of those. And I do feel like it's going to probably be, AI is probably going to be one of the most consequential trends we will have experienced in our lifetimes. It's going to have a long shelf life.

Ted Blosser: Well, you know, that's very prudent of you all because think about web three, you guys are the plumbing of the internet. And in theory, you could have benefited from that by investing more, but staying prudent and not betting on that was probably the best move, but let's talk about cause that's the first big mega trend.

I want to touch on with you. Where do you think we're currently at today? March 25th, 2024. Where do you feel like we're in the journey of AI? What inning are we in? And then, where do you see it going? Let's call it in the midterm one to three years out. How far do you think we'll get with AI?

Jeetu Patel: I would say if you look at a baseball analogy of nine innings, we're probably in the first or second inning. It's very early days right now when you start thinking about AI. We are just now getting to the point beyond, Oh, this thing is cool and it's fascinating. And by the way, what generally I did for society and enlarges it actually gave a very tangible use case. That's it. This makes complete sense, you know, and I know how to do this, and I can extrapolate from there on what this could be over the long term; any good mega trend the normal person can start to extrapolate pretty well on what this could be.

I would say that we are in the very early innings. I think there's going to be a tremendous amount of upside with AI. And so on balance, I am actually pro AI all the way, but I do think it would be naive of us to not think that there's going to be some pretty meaningful areas where there'll be displacement of jobs that happen over time, there'll be adverse effects of AI that can be there from a cybersecurity landscape standpoint or in general, what can happen around the world, where AI gets in the wrong hands of people, as robotics gets to be much more prominent in AI, that'll actually have other risks that actually also emerge. So, I do feel like we are in the early innings. The reason this wave is different from the rest is, I think there's going to have to be some regulatory oversight.

You cannot just go out and let it run free for all on this one. And I think the public sector and private sector are going to have to work very closely on this. The risks associated with AI are non trivial and should be factored in the way in which we design AI systems. Responsible AI should be front and center in the way we think about it.

The ethical use of AI and how you train models in the right way—are all important dimensions of it, but in any of these trends, what ends up happening is that, in the short term, things get grossly overestimated. On the impact of it, and in the long term, it's massively underestimated.

I think in the short term with AI, it's pretty evident that your and my life didn't change that materially in the past 12 months as a result of AI. Like, it's not like we have an entirely different way of living because of it. But in the next 10 years, you can guarantee that it's going to be meaningfully different.

And I think that's the difference in the short term. It might not feel like there's that much change. And so what ends up happening is people get hyped up, then they get disillusioned about it, but then it actually starts to really get consistent delivery. And AI has had a few of these cycles when it'd be Kasparov and chess.

That was one of those cycles, but I do feel like this is a pivotal moment for society, where now most companies in the world, there's only going to be 2 kinds of companies in the world, AI-forward companies and irrelevant companies. I don't think there will be a middle ground over there.

If you're not really thinking about AI and a core part of what you do is value, then don't think you'll be a company that's sustainable with a durable advantage over time.

Ted Blosser: You know, you brought up a really great point on public policy. I was reading the Splunk blog posts that you all put out. I think Chuck put it out, but when it officially closed, I didn't really realize how much of a bet that was from a security posture standpoint, helping companies regulate how they work with AI. Do you have any strong opinions on public policy around AI, whether it's at a country-by-country level, or are we too early innings to really decide? I'm curious if Cisco proper or you as a whole have some general leanings there that you mentioned public policy.

Jeetu Patel: I think there will have to be some degree of healthy regulation around AI. What that is, I just don't think we've figured out a society yet. We still have a lot of work to do in collaborating with the public sector and figuring that out. I do feel though, that the absence of any regulation will not be progressive for humankind; you're going to need to have some guardrails with which you operate here, and the way that I think the government entities and private sector are working right now in most countries and most geographies, the rhetoric that's there in the market, which is like, both of them pointing fingers at the other saying, you know, there's one person that doesn't want to do the right thing or the other person that's not smart enough to do it or whatever it might be.

But in my opinion, I think the collaboration that's happening between governments and the private sector in this particular domain is actually pretty good. Now, if you think about what are some big problems that will have to be solved in society? These are hard problems to solve, which don't have easy answers, and think about something as basic as copyright.

How do you solve copyright issues? And is it okay for someone to go index the public domain or whatever content is there and then be able to make sure that they give you is AI-ified so that if you ask for a question, it'll give you an answer, which could be an excerpt from a couple of pieces of content that someone had written that they were monetizing. I think these are hard questions to get solved. And they don't have easy answers, which is why you see so much tension in society right now. But those debates have to be had. I think the next few years are going to be very instructive and how the world is going to evolve with AI and what kind of guardrails we're going to put on it that don't become so restrictive because, remember over regulation and making it too restrictive only gives the adversary and the bad actors an advantage because they then can go out. They don't have any restrictions on them for how they use this. On the other hand, being too permissive can actually create unintended consequences that people have to think through. And so I just don't think there are any easy answers in this one. But, if every developer works with the assumption that I know my technology is going to have a lot of good, but I also acknowledge that it could have some bad adverse effects. I am going to think about those proactively at the time of building them rather than thinking about figuring it out.

Once we get to them, I think we'll build for a better framework in society, and I do feel like we are getting there. And so the companies that don't think about responsible AI, privacy of data, security of data in the right way. I just think that they're going to be left behind in this because I think customers will reject that note because they'll be too afraid of what the downside consequences would be.

Ted Blosser: speaking of bad actors, let's talk about two things, security and collaboration as it pertains to AI. A lot of people obviously know Cisco as the premier networking company in the world, but it's truly a security and collaboration company which you run the divisions of what's the future look like when AI gets infused. Into the security landscape and the collaboration landscape, like AI. Does this mean Cisco is now one of the most important people at the company? Do they have less influence? All the way to how does collaboration transform as well? With AI, you're seeing some early; you see all the hundreds of YC companies coming through trying to transform collaboration. Well, how are you looking at this from running two of the biggest security and collaboration orgs, literally in the entire world?

[Jeetu Patel: I actually think on the security side, if you think about what's happening right now, both the sophistication of attacks that are happening today and the surface area within which the attacks are happening is expanding exponentially. You know, so sophistication is increasing. It used to be that there were college students who used to go out and conduct attacks for pure purposes of vanity so that they could prove to someone that they were smart or for some kind of financial gain.

Now, what you see is nation states going out and doing this for purposes of espionage. And so, the cost and the impact of this is far greater to humanity than what could have been a few years ago. and we have to just keep that in mind and go. All right. If security is critical infrastructure that can actually stop other critical infrastructure, imagine if you have a cyber security breach of the hospital, people won't get dialysis. Imagine you have a cyber security breach of the power plant. You wouldn't get your power. Imagine if you have a cyber security breach of the financial services institution, you can't move money around. These are like critically debilitating activities that happen within society if you don't do this right.

So there's a tremendous amount of pressure around making sure that you get this right. But historically, if you think about cybersecurity, the advantage has always been with the adversary, the person who's the bad actor. Because they have to be right once, you as a defender, have to be right every single time. And so there's this kind of known asymmetry advantage being the side of the adversary. I think this is the first time, at least in my career of 30 years that you will start to see that shift is starting to happen where you can see a light at the end of the tunnel that scale might tip in favor of the defender because of a data advantage.

And what I mean by a data advantage of security is purely going to be dealt with a machine scale, not a human scale. And as you think about dealing with a machine scale, the way that you get to better security outcomes is by making sure that you can correlate data more effectively to predict and prevent a threat. And in real time, detect and respond to a threat that's occurring.

If that doesn't happen at the right clock speed, you've kind of lost the window, and that clock speed of response is shrinking. You have less time today than you did five years ago to go out and respond to something. And I think AI is actually going to play a pretty consequential role in both the defender side of the house and being weaponized on the other side. But I do believe that the defender, for the first time, could actually accumulate a data advantage. We're not there yet, but we could get there. But we have a lot of work to do between now and then.

But it is exciting to see that. There's more that can be taught proactively as you start doing this, and it's all because of the sophisticated use of data and AI models put together.

Splunk acquisition makes it extremely, uh, Because what that does is the way I think about this is you cannot be a credible security company if you're not an AI-first company. And you cannot be an AI-first company if you're not a data-first company and Splunk will just make us better on the dimension of data because of how much data at scale they have that they can add to the list of telemetry we already have.

One of the reasons why I'm so optimistic about Cisco is that we have the largest amount of telemetry of anyone across multiple domains, every packet that flows through a network, every email that gets forwarded, and every website request that gets made, every endpoint that is compromised because the process got kick started.

We actually have telemetry that we can correlate across and say, Oh, this says Ted's not doing what Ted should be doing. And that might not be Ted. So let's go out and monitor what Ted's doing, finding that needle in the haystack has been very hard to do where low level alert and multiple different areas would be ignored.

Now that can graduate to high-level alert. So it's exciting times in security.

Ted Blosser: Hey, everyone. I want to take a quick commercial break and tell you about the company that produces this podcast. I co-founded WorkRamp back in 2015, and our mission has always been the same, to help professionals reach their full potential through learning. As part of that mission, we built the world's first learning cloud, an all-in-one platform for your employee, partner, and customer learning needs. If your company is looking for a learning management system, also known in the industry as an LMS, we'd love to talk to you. You can reach us at our website, workramp.com, or you can even email me directly at Ted@workramp.com and I'll get you in touch with our team. Hope you're enjoying the episode and back to the show.

Ted Blosser: Let's shift gears to AI in collaboration, and then we'll end with spatial computing to AI in collaboration. You have the secure enterprise now, but now you want a collaborative, and you want to add the AI mega trend on top of it. What's your vision of the world when AI gets layered into the collaboration landscape?

Jeetu Patel: So it's a great question because the way that we see the future of work is going to be hybrid. People are going to work in a hyper-distributive fashion, ideally from anywhere. I think if we think about we're in the third major phase, we started out with everyone working in the office. Then everyone started working at home during COVID. And while the first few months were, like, okay, this seems like it's productive. I could be at home. People started longing for the behavior of human contact. And so now you're kind of in this 3rd phase where people want to work sometimes in the office, sometimes at home, sometimes somewhere else. As you think about these, one of the fascinating statistics is that 98 percent of the meetings that will happen in the world will have at least one person in that meeting who's not in the same physical location as everyone else. 98 percent of the meetings, but only about 20 percent or 25% Of the world's conference rooms are actually video enabled.

So there's this massive discrepancy where people want to work remote, but you don't have the infrastructure to work remote. And that's a huge opportunity for the world to go out and make sure that we can kind of solve that problem. And if you do solve that problem in the right way, think of what it does, Ted.

It means that a person in a village in Bangladesh would be able to participate in the global economy, just like someone in the heart of Silicon Valley, but geography does not become a thing that's disproportionately valued. I think that's important because, if you want to kind of strive for an equal world of equality, the most bizarre concept that we've all been living with is.

If you don't happen to have access to the same geography that I have access to, where I happen to be in privileged geography, then you will not be able to succeed as much lighting. I think that's so unfair, we should actually allow for global participation. Of anyone in any place into a economy, that's a global economy and that's what I think these collaboration technologies can do, is they can reduce the distance between people.

We have this concept called distance 0. We just take away the distance between 2 people. So it doesn't feel like you're not together. And we have gotten probably about 20 percent of the way there. I don't think we are 100 percent of the way there at all. And I think there's a lot of longing for people being together, which I think is great, but there's also a lot of work to be done. And when people are not together that they don't feel the presence of distance, that presence of distance can actually create more latency and how you actually respond and activate.

But the reality is if you try to just stay within your own geography. At some point in time, the model breaks down because talent is pretty evenly distributed throughout the world. But right now, the opportunity is not. And so we should make sure that opportunity gets evenly distributed throughout the world to match the talent that happens to be there, because the opposite view is you bring everyone into one concentrated area.

Ted Blosser: And that's going to be very hard to have everyone live in that area because the real estate prices go up, and it's hard for everyone to live there because it's too crowded. At some point in time, 8 billion people can't live in the city of San Francisco. It just doesn't work. You feel like AI-infused collaboration? So with this concept, you're sharing where you're essentially reducing barriers, getting more people on hybrid meetings, virtual meetings, You infuse AI on top of that, actually improves the quality of meetings. So for example, if you're canonical examples, if you're in sales, you can be coached exactly what to say in the correct timing. Do you actually think AI can make virtual meetings even more productive than in-person meetings? Is that the future you see as well?

Jeetu Patel: I believe that in some instances, virtual meetings will be a better medium than in-person, and in other instances, there's no replacing an in-person meeting. I'll give you two examples. If I'm presenting to a group of people in a distributed location, it actually makes a lot of sense to do a virtual meeting because I have all the data in front of me.

I can be more prepared. I can be more effective in my delivery of message. That is an example of how a virtual meeting will be more effective. Where it would be, less effective is the way that these video conferencing tools work is it's not actually a deficiency of the tool, but it is the human programming of the mind and what these tools are good at.

So, right now, these tools look like they're very transactive in nature. So you and I are talking, we've got a 30-minute window, and at the end of 30 minutes, if there's a 7-second lull in between the 30, a minute 22, what's going to happen is immediately one of us is going to say, well, do you have any other questions?

I can give you back 8 minutes. Because it's a very transactive medium, right? People have an agenda. They've got a certain amount of rhythm. That they expect. And if that rhythm is broken, then you kind of just say, okay, it's the end of the meeting now. Consider this, you and I go out to dinner and the appetizers are served. And there's a 15-second long immediately. You would ask me that. Hey, what are you doing for fun lately? How old are your kids? Do you have kids? Have you been traveling a lot lately? All of those things add additional texture to me and my personality for you to get familiarity with. Right. So you can get more familiar with me that establishes trust and that trust then establishes the ability for us to engage in conflict without it being adversarial and conflict.

If you assume is a necessary condition of business where you have to make sure you debate on ideas, then you have to establish trust at fast speeds, and you cannot establish trust at fast speeds if you're only in a transactive mode of communication. So we have to do one of two things. Either we have to get better at not using the online mediums.

As purely transactive and allow people to wander or until people society gets trained on that, you have to make sure that you augment online meetings with some kind of in-person interaction. Where you can just have serendipity take over, and you can wander a little bit and be able to engage with each other in ways that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do in what's thought of as a transactive medium.

So actually feel like that's the X factor is not one or the other. There'll be some that the virtual meeting will be a better format for, and there'll be others where you will still need to meet in person. Just recently went to India you know, I knew all about the development of India and how fast it's growing and all that, statistically, but I didn't really feel it. It had been five years since I've gone there. I went there last time, like right before COVID, it's an entirely different country. Right. In four and five years, you would never think that India has made that much progress in that short amount of time. And I would have never picked that up had I not physically been there because there was a vibe that you were able to feel that I just don't think we're good enough yet in translating through digital means. And so I do think it's a combination of both.

Ted Blosser: Cool. I'm going to switch to spatial computing, and then we'll do a quick rapid-fire round. Thanks for covering your thoughts on AI security collaboration, but let's talk spatial computing. I'm going to ask one major question around this, which is that Cisco, you know, invested heavily in being one of the first apps in the Apple Vision Pro.

I bought my own Apple Vision Pro. I've loved it. We use that at a recent conference called HR transform. Got a lot of customers and prospects through it. So. I'm a big believer, but the question I want to ask you is not to opine on if it's here to stay, or if it truly indeed is a mega trend, maybe the thing I want to ask you is where does spatial computing need to go next, where would you say it needs to go next? They confirmed it's launching internationally this morning. I think Apple confirmed that. So they're doing more. So where does it need to go next as a technology to maybe classify as a mega trend? What do you think?

Jeetu Patel: Let's first analyze what's working and what's not working in spatial computing. So in spatial computing, the thing that's completely revolutionary is other than smell and touch, I think it's very hard to decipher the difference between being physically in a location versus being immersed in a location through your spatial computing vision provides it.

And by the way, I think Apple is probably the only company right now that has that level of kind of immersiveness that I've seen. Phenomenal what they're doing. Right. I'd say that from that perspective, there's a massively immersive experience that can be delivered that otherwise was not even thought of as possible.

And it's hard to explain it. You have to experience it. And then you're like, Oh my goodness, this is unlike anything I've ever experienced. That in my mind is the upside. And by the way, what needs to be done for that is applications need to be built natively for that platform rather than porting applications from other platforms.

Like, you know, you can't have a skeuomorphic design in this. You can't say, here's what worked in the iPad. Just with a bigger screen, I'm going to make it work over there. No, you have to fundamentally reimagine the application experience for the platform. Otherwise, it doesn't work, That's the thing that I think is important for the ecosystem to do, to go out and take advantage of the platform.

What I think The providers will have to do for spatial computing is the form factor, while beautiful in the way that it's built, needs to eventually get to the size of this, and you have to have your glasses. Any burden that's beyond that, 8 billion people might not use it.

Of course, the cost curve has to go down, but I actually find it pretty plausible that the cost curve will go down over time. So I'm not worried about the cost curve being at 3,500 right now. That's going to not go down. I think it'll go down. But what has to happen is the size and scale dimensions have to actually compress, they have to get lighter.

It has to be something that's natural to wear for 8 hours a day. And, you know, once you start to get there, you'll actually see much more broad-based adoption. But I already think it's a mega trend. And I would say that. My guidance to my team is don't just double down, don't just triple down, quadruple down, quintuple down on this piece of it, because the combination of AI and spatial computing just makes magic happen in ways that like you know, that is the only demo in my life.

That I had viewed where I actually cried after the demo, and I'll tell you why, my mother had just passed away, and I saw the demo a few months after she passed away. We were kind of building our app and I saw the demo a few months after she passed away. And my first reaction was, darn it, if she had lived for another five to seven years, I would have been able to show the world without her having to travel.

She always was afraid of traveling because it was going to affect her health, and she's like, I'm just going to stay where I am. She would have been able to see the whole world with this. I think, you know, sports is going to get completely reimagined. Travel is going to get completely reimagined as an industry.

I travel in different parts of the world and if I have my laptop with me when I travel, I am always annoyed when I'm traveling because right now at home, I have multiple screens. At my office, I have multiple screens. When I'm traveling in New York City with a small little laptop, I'm hovering over a little screen.

I won't have to do that anymore because now I have my spatial computing headset. So I do think that there's a tremendous amount of benefit and upside, and I think the innovation that's going to happen in the next, you know, three to five to seven years is going to be phenomenal. There'll be a cost curve drop, there'll be a form factor reduction, and then there'll be an application sophistication rise. And the three of those together will create magic in my mind.

Ted Blosser: Thank you for sharing that story. I thought you were going to say how photo realistic you're hoping to take photos and videos. Cause when you take those immersive photos and videos, feels like you're there with your family. Your deceased family members ever. My mom passed away also about five years ago, but I wish I had that at the time. So you could be in the room with them and have them literally next to you. Like, I know you cared a lot for your mom and you've poste a lot about her, but imagine if she was in that room with you and you had those videos, but beautiful story. All right.

Jeetu Patel: I will say one last thing on this one: A lot of credit goes to that team that built Apple Vision Pro. There's a gentleman named Mike Rockwell who leads the effort at Apple. Probably one of the brightest people that I know of. And he has thought so deeply about this problem for so long. And he's been at this problem for so long. But that's what's magical about Apple, is when they build something, they take so much care about building something and thinking about it long term that, I really admire the company and what they've done in this one. It's one of the best products they've built.

Ted Blosser: Shout out to Mike Rockwell. And especially, this is not an easy product to get to market. So great job, Mike. I have not met Mike, but good job to Mike. Um, okay. I'm gonna give you one question. One quick response for the LEARN rapid-fire round. Your number one leadership tip. I've always admired you as one of the best leaders in all of Silicon Valley. What's your one tip for other leaders? That you would give.

Jeetu Patel: Oh, that's high praise coming from you, man. I would say that I have three jobs. And you have to be very clear that you as a leader have these three jobs. Number one, you have to make sure you hire the best people. They don't have to be as good as you at doing a job. They have to be 10x better than you at doing the job that you've hired them for.

So that's number one. Number two, Number three, you have to create a very clear strategy that everyone can be aligned to, that you're going to be able to achieve, and the associated level of execution that needs to show up with that. But number three, you have to keep reminding them that you're running out of time because we're all against the race of time when it comes to this.

And if I were to say my leadership team, it's kind of summed up with, you know, it's a book that was also written recently by Frank Slootman, called AMP It Up. It actually is a really good reminder of, you got to make sure intensity is always high when you're working in business because you're running against a time clock and time is your enemy.

And if you can't move fast, then you might as well not move at all because it doesn't really matter. Be slightly impatient and unsatisfied at all times.

Ted Blosser: All right. Well, Jeetu, this was a great conversation. We went even longer than we expected, but thanks for sharing all your words of wisdom and background as well, too. We'll get you off to your next meeting, but appreciate you coming on the pod. And, uh, let's catch up personally soon.Jeetu Patel: I'd love to do that, man. And congratulations to you for all the success you've had, my friend.

Ted Blosser: Appreciate it. Appreciate it.