Enterprise hits and misses - gen AI spending meets ROI pressure, AI readiness is a thing, and AR/VR has a vision problem - “Enterprise hypothesis: AI can’t fix what ails you (e.g. legacy landscape and ‘messy’ data bottlenecks), but applied properly, it can accelerate what you do well."

How Much Revenue Must a Company Generate to IPO? - “Before 2018, only one company IPOed with more than $200m in revenue. In fact, the median revenue at IPO at $90m. Today, the median revenue at IPO is $189m (corrected for inflation), more than double."

YouTube dominates streaming, forces media companies to adapt - ’YouTube made up 9.7% of all viewership on connected and traditional TVs in the U.S. in May — the largest share of TV for a streaming platform ever reported by Nielsen’s monthly “The Gauge” report. Netflix ranked second, claiming 7.6% of viewership. Among streamers only, YouTube’s total viewership was close to 25% market share.'

I’ve hosted a lot of executive dinners for work - maybe 50 or 60 over the past several years…? These are commercial oriented. At my work, we’re trying to meet new people to sell our software to, or people who know people, etc. Getting to know “executives” is directly related to the sales process. The secondary goal is more brand and thought-leadership marketing: just making the attendee aware of us and what we do, and, hopefully, our “vibe.” And the priorities after those two are what you’d expect: networking, fun/useful conversation, and doing some overall “community management” and participation.

Here’s some behind the curtain stuff on doing them, especially targeted at people like me who don’t like group conversations. I’ll skip over the “sales” tactics I use1 and creating the “content strategy,” and just focus on getting a good conversation going and structuring the at-table event. “Surviving moderating an executive dinner,” so to speak :)

Here’s what I try to do, big picture:

1. Have some kind of five to ten minute “talk” that defines a topic. With me, this is usually discussing agile development, DevOps/platform engineering, etc. In the last one I did I threw out the topic: “you should centralize and standardize the platform your app developers use.” That was a good one!

2. Find a problem with that topic, especially the “it depends” kinds of implementation topics. One of the problems with the centralize platform thing was: the developers don’t like it, and won’t use it.

3. Ask people what they’ve encounter, done, or found.

4. Get them in a conversational fly-wheel, all talking and exchanging ideas with each other as peers.

To do this, you have to bootstrap the group into talking and then maneuver things to make sure they keep sharing, and asking each other questions: monitor and spin the fly-wheel when it starts to slow down.

This is all difficult for me because I don’t really like talking with/in groups, so I have to force myself to be involved rather than just sitting back and listening. I love just sitting back and listening.

My introverted self believe this is all impossible. But, it’s totally possible: they all want to talk, listen, and exchange ideas…to learn - that’s why they came!2 - but usually they need help getting going.

What is an executive dinner

If you don’t know what an executive dinner is it, here’s what it is. First, it’s hosted by someone who has a commercial interest in the attendees. In my case, we’re looking to sell Pivotal/Tanzu products and services that help companies build and run their software.

You find some decision makers (they have needs and budgets) at companies that you want to sell your stuff to. You invite them to a sit-down dinner in a private room of a fancy restaurant.3 Everyone sits at a big table so they can see and (mostly) hear each other. The dinner lasts for 2 hours or so. People talk during the dinner. That’s what it looks like from the outside.

It’s like really high-touch, really-expensive lead-gen. I’ll cover the goals inline below.

(And, hey, I’m being totally transactional and mercantile here. Cold-hearted, HA HA! BUSINESS. It’s also possible, encouraged, and necessary to just be chill and, like, human. But, let’s focus on the business part.)

Finding things to talk about

In the at-the-table conversation, it’s good to call on people who will have something interesting to say, and be on topic. But these people are strangers, so you don’t know who those people are per topic. Here’s a trick that. Often, you have a pre-sit-down “cocktail” party as you wait for people to show up (like a 30 minute windows). People stand around, get drinks, and eat tiny food.

During this time, you move around the room and just get to know people.4 The good thing is, they all came for a topic and will want to talk about. You can just dive right into that topic, it’s not like fishing for topics at a playdate with mixed normals.

I usually ask people “what do you do [at work/in subject matter area]?” They’ll give a long answers! “Well, I’m the director of application development, so oversee three teams that work on our customer facing loan app.”

Next, I either ask them to:

1. Clarify things I don’t understand5 - “whoa - what does ‘generative cyber-analytical responsiveness’ mean?”

2. I ask for some more detail - “what kind of methodology do you use?” “Oh, why do you run on public cloud?” “Is Google Cloud good? Why not Azure”)

3. Or, I just say “is that fun?”

The last question usually throws people for a loop, and they have to stop and do some original thinking, breaking out of the usual small talk pattern. And from there, you just ask questions about why it’s fun or not. This usually evokes problems and challenges, or victories and success they have. And, the “is it fun” question also downshifts the conversation from professional to more whimsical.

So, you walk around and talk with three or five people in this pre-event. Now, you know three or five people who can talk about some topics. During the dinner conversation, you call on those people when the topics come up (or when cold-start bring the topic up), and you know that they have something (interesting) to say. “On that topic, Geraldine: we were talking about the challenges of managing 50 plus SKUs in the salty snacks industry earlier. What have y’all been doing to make that better…and does it work?”

Keep “intros” very short

Everyone is sitting, and you have to start. The main thing I’ve learned to avoid is having each person do an open-ended introduction. You need to know who each person is, but you have to really make people keep it short. Some people’s introductions include their “life story,”, and can extend to 5, even 10 minutes if you don’t manage it. Asking “what brought you here?” usually evokes a lengthy response. And these lengthy intros snow-ball: once one person gives an extensive into, the next people start modeling them and giving long intros. So, if you have 8 to ten people to go through, you’ve blown 10, even 15 minutes of time.

You can avoid this by not asking people to say what their interest in the topic is, this usually results in two or three people telling you everything about their involvement and experience in the topics, which can be 5+ minutes which ads up. It’s risky to ask them what they’re interested in hearing, but worth it to get topics on the table that you can refer to when boot-strapping.

I try to be blunt: “let’s go around and introduce ourselves, but keep it really short so we can get to talking: tell us who you are, where you work, and just briefly what you’re interested in hearing from the group [maybe even just one thing].”

Now, there’s a trade off you’re making here. Your sales people would love to hear an extended list of wants, needs, and problems that each person has. A huge point of these events is to do a lot of sales intelligence gather all at once, and knowing people’s background and examples of what they do is very useful for qualification and structuring “customer journeys,” etc.

Moderating - keeping things conversational

About ten or 15 minutes in, you have to watch for things turning into a series of lectures from individuals. People will just give “readouts” about a topic. You might also get people who are the “let me solve this problem once and for all,” dead-ending into a conclusion rather than people doing structured shooting-the-shit. In general, you just have to let that person sort of run, and then immediately call on someone else to share their experience, or change the topic. Another tactic for the readout people is to be like: “that sounds great, but how do you get people to decide to actually do it?”

Sometimes, only a few people talk. You want “most everyone” talking. So, you have to call on people who aren’t talking. Like, just specifically on a topic: “what do you think?” - “has that been your experience?” - etc. Or, you can try to bring the conversation back to the table by saying things like “what are the rest of you experiencing/doing?”

Sometimes the conversation stalls out, and then you have to do talking. Have some 2-3 minute monologs ready. I don’t have first hand experience most of the topics at these dinners, so I go over what other people have told me, things I’ve read, etc. When you’re re-starting the conversation, you have to do the “say something that can be objected to” thing, and then ask people what their experience is.

Another trick for managing the conversation flow, is timing the meal courses. We try to have the main conversation before the food (appetizers) is brought out. Group talking while you’re eating is hard.

Having the serving staff bring in food 15 minutes after you sit down gives you a natural hard stop: you can time box the focused, group conversation, and when the food shows up, transition to side conversations.

That shift usually happens when the entree is brought out. In the appetizer phase, you’re slowing down the single thread group talk, and people are starting to talk in pairs and small tuples. This transition kind of takes over the table, and then you have lots of little conversations going on, which is my goal for the rest of the dinner.

Ending it

Closing out depends on what you want. Eventually you need to announce the formal end of the event, and throw out a “what’s next”/call-to-action. In our sales focused dinners that means saying “hey, this was great! We’re here to talk about how we solve these problems, so feel free to talk with us more.”

I don’t like the retro/summing up/what’s your take away thing like you might do at work. That’s just extra work you’re asking people to do, and also it’s usually lame, and no one’s going to do anything with it (probably).

At the end, do your CTA, just thank people, and close out. Also, people are both tired, full, and maybe booze-buzzed - not the best time for “read outs.” I used to hang out after as people moved to the bar. But, following the Ann Richards Evening Activities Principle (roughly quoted: “well, y’all, I’m leaving now, because nothing interesting/useful/good happens after 9pm”), I usually leave. Sales people sometimes stick around.

Also, sometimes it just doesn’t work. This especially true if you have free-loaders, cynics, and too heterogenous of topic areas/SME’s. When that happens, wherever: you usually met 1 or 2 people that are interesting.

Oh, and the organizing it part is a whole other thing that I don’t have a lot of experience with. We use agencies for that. They have big lists of people, and the other thing they do is gently encourage people to show up. They’ll call them the day before, and sometimes they call them if they haven’t shown up to see why. This will get some people who dropped out to decide to come! The organizers also move around in the background to time things like the food delivery above and to welcome stragglers, shuffle them into the room.

Cultures

I’ve done these events in several European countries, and, of course, America. If you’re not acculturated to different cultures, it’s good to go in with some sense-making tools. Apply these tools with care: they’re stereotypes, generalizations, etc. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Americans are pretty good at organically getting a conversations going. You have to be careful with them when it comes to individuals dominating the conversation, and the “readout” person above. American business culture is surprisingly hierarchical: HiPPO, and all that.

UK people and the Dutch have the relaxed, gregarious American stereotype, but much less HiPPO: they tend to speak as equals.

Despite stereotypes, most (other) continental Europeans are like this too: but (if you’re American) you have to get ready for continental European bluntness: where they tell you you’re wrong and that’s considered polite and helpful - I think of it as “free advice.”

Also, there can be language frictions. I only speak English, so there can be barriers with the French, Italians, Spanish, and Belgians. Germans are usually confident in their English (and, of course, the Dutch are bilingual, so English is no problem). But, in the world of IT, everyone speaks English very well, they just may feel like they don’t. In those cases, I try to make fun of myself for being a dumb-and-lazy American, linguistically, and that usually opens things up a little.

Motivating myself

Have I said, yet, that I don’t like talking in groups? This means that if I don’t catch myself, in a dinner like this I’m just maneuvering to run out the clock. That’s not commercially good! How do I motivate myself to do this thing that comes very unnaturally to me and also feels…not fun?

First, it’s my job. It’s amazing how “get over yourself” effective that is for me.

Second, I’m want to hear what have people to say, if it’s interesting. I was talking with Sasha Czarkowski yesterday, and I realized that one of the main reasons I don’t like group conversations is that I fear being stuck in a boring conversation.6 So, a lot of my tactics in dinners are about keeping things interesting to me. This risks going off commercial-topic, sure. But I have the job I do because I’m interesting in what my work does and what people do with our ideas and products. So, driving conversations to what I’m interested in is rarely off topic.

Presentations

I haven’t mentioned presentations because those are a bad idea for in-person dinners. Contrary to that, if you’re doing an online event, I think presentations are excellent, maybe even required. I wrote up more on that in my previous how to do executive dinners article.

I have the easy job

The other thing to keep in mind is that I just show up and talk. There is a lot more that goes into these events. You’ll need a professional field marketing person to lead and own the event: actually planning, arranging, running everything, and making sure it has tracked ROI. You’ll need people (probably an outside agency) to recruit people and call them, even day of, to remind them to show-up. Most importantly, you’ll need someone who makes sure all the post-event activities happen. These are not your sales people, it’s that field marketing person.

Anyhow. There you go: now go do some executive dinners :)

Also, here’s an older write up (from 2022) of some more of my tactics and general strategies for these kinds of event. It covers much of the above, but has a lot more on my experience doing them online (during COVID), and more detail managing the event (pre- and post-), which is the hard part.

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That was long! I’ll save the strange finds and links for next time.

If you like this kind of thing and you’re not reading it in your email, you should subscribe to my newsletter. It’s all I have after the social media fragmentation we now swim in like a bunch of pirates clinging to a cracked strip of wood.

I setup a page with most all of my Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam pictures: “most all” that I could find at the moment.

There’s just over 200 of them. Here’s a sample:

During New Year’s:

There’s a lot of chairs!

Have you tried having less?

Standardized. Centralized. Consistent. Those words I use over and over when talking about platforms. In large organizations, you’ve got hundreds, even thousands, of applications. There are likely tens of “platforms”: the stacks of runtime and middleware goo that all those apps run on. Maybe even hundreds if the company is large enough, old enough, and has gone through enough acquisitions (most all global banks).

The more of those platforms your have, the more time you’ll spend managing them, governing them, securing them, and figuring out how to trouble-shoot problems. This is just, like, intuitively the case: instead of knowing how one thing works, you need to know how five (ten, 20, etc.) things work.

Here’s a chart on all this from our recent State of Cloud Native Platforms survey:

This used to be called the “State of Kubernetes Survey,” but it’s been slightly generalized with the rename. Still, I’d mostly think of these finds as Kubernetes-centric.

These are large enterprise challenges, and you see that in some other questions.

First, “management” is much more concerned with governance at scale and strategic risk management. They’re worried about more than just one app, or just one platform, but about the long-term health of the organization. You see that they care more about these types of concerns when compared to individuals:

And, when you look at things these larger organizations worry about, it’s back to governance, control, and consistency:

There’s all sorts of reasons that large organizations run a lot of different platforms. But, clearly, they work towards running less.

There’s more fun findings in the survey, check it out for free! I’ll probably pull some more charts out of in another newsletter episode.

Also, on that “consistency” thing, here’s more from Whitney and Oren about the benefits of having less platforms:

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. SREday London 2024, September 19th to 20th. VMware Explore Barcelona, Nov 4th to 7th.

Discounts. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.

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What does it mean when you’ve been carrying the same overdue things in your to do list manager (OmniFocus) for months? It doesn’t mean they’re not actually due. I think it might mean that they’re thing you wish you would do, but don’t need to do: false urgency? They’re things you don’t want to lose track of…that could be due…or not? Managing these items is challenging.

AnythingLLM - Could this really be an easy to use, desktop ChatAI thing? Will check.

Delivering Great Developer Experiences with Platform Engineering - A whole lot of first hand accounts of building and running developer platforms. (1) the platform should include CI/CD tooling, and I presume how to package and configure apps for production, (2) use developer surveys to track usage and needs, (3) product manage the platform, with a variation being to run it like an open source project to get the benefits of transparency (and inherent product management), (4) lots of training and workshops, (5) use chat instead of tickets.

Once again, I am bringing you only links and funny pieces of text.

Relative to your interests

• Measuring Engineering Productivity, at Google, circa 2020 - “If the decider doesn’t believe the form of the result in principle, there is again no point in measuring the process.” // Some great advice in here about improvement programs. Come up with metrics and needs from the (economic/strategic) stakeholder who has the power to make changes. Ask them what metrics they care about and study those. Otherwise they won’t care about the results. // Also, this is why you should seek out pre-meetings with The Bosses when they ask you for reports. You want to find out what numbers they actually care about, and what actions they can take afterwards.

• Docker Launches 2024 State of Application Development Report - Survey for future newsletter analysis.

• PDF to Podcast - Could be super cool.

• How CIOs can ease the generative AI transition for developers - “AI-powered coding tools are expected to become fairly ubiquitous within enterprises in the next four years, according to Gartner research. The analyst firm predicts around three-quarters of software engineers will add AI coding assistants to their workflows by 2028, a considerable jump from the 1 in 10 enterprise developers leveraging the tools early last year [2023].” And: “why would I hire junior developers who can write crummy code when I can have a generic AI do it for me.”

• The breath of the gods - Video influencer technique: have the video format/style match the medium. // “I have uploaded a different version to the great algo­rithmic mills, where the breath of the gods upon a scrap of video can propel it” And: “The smile, with the wince: that’s the overall expression of the 2020s internet.”

Original Content

In this week’s Software Defined Talk podcast: “we discuss the AI Hype Cycle, Apple Intelligence and other announcements from WWDC. Plus, Coté concludes the episode by using as many phrases as possible from Taylor’s Urgent/Optimistic Meeting Matrix.” Also, why having a picnic with ChatGPT is like talking about concrete.

Watch the unedited video recording, or listen to it as a podcast.

Wastebook

• “It’s fun to talk about failure when you’re no longer a failure.” ROtL #539

• “young folks that bring some of that drama” are not invited in dine, but the “grown and sexy” are welcomed. Here.

• “If you can’t create photorealistic images, you can’t generate deepfakes or offensive photos of people.” Here. // As we develop in this week’s Software Defined Talk, Apple’s AI stuff feels non-threatening (to humans). In contrast, most other AI things seem threatening to people’s jobs and abilities.

• “There is a big difference between tech as augmentation versus automation. Augmentation (think Excel and accountants) benefits workers while automation (think traffic lights versus traffic wardens) benefits capital. LLMs are controversial because the tech is best at augmentation but is being sold by lots of vendors as automation.” Dare Obasanjo, via.

• “I’m searching for something. That email from someone that will sweep me off my feet. The job offer. The opportunity that gift wrapped from the universe just for me.” Here.

• “sharing the enormous cuts of beef bonded our group.” Good steak in Nuremberg.

• Monte Cristo: what if a grilled cheese sandwich, but unhealthy.

• “The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.” Evelyn Waugh, via.

• “My neighbor’s dog barks in my RAM.” Borg chatter.

• “with 1970s sausage fonts thrown in.” Moron font.

• “There’s nothing worse than selling things to people.” Noah.

• If you have no sleeves, there’s no danger of people seeing your heart.

• Automating a series causal dependent activities that previously required a meatware-buffer.

• “Think before you act, and then you will be forgiven.” TJ Watson, the IBM fella.

• You create, we computer.

• “The undisputed leader in workforce agility”

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

DevOpsDays Amsterdam, June 20th, speaking. SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29, 2024. SREday London 2024, September 19th to 20th.

Discounts. SREDay London (Sep 19th to 20th) when you 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. And, if you register for SpringOne/VMware Explore before June 11th, you’ll get $400 off.

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I gave a new talk this week, at NDC Oslo: my round up of developer productivity metrics and fixes. Here’s the live streamed version (if that link messes up, it’s at timecode 7:30:20), I’ll put a link here when the stand-alone cut comes out. Also, here’s the slides.

I build up a case that focusing on “inner loop” developer productivity is fine, but you’ll get much better gains focusing on putting CI/CD in place and using a centralized platform. Hey! Who guess it’d be aligned with my commercial interests. Also, I believe it, which is handy for my ethical wellbeing. I’m giving this talk at DevOpsDays Amsterdam next week, and I’d like to think I’ll evolve it a lot. Maybe I will.

Docker Launches 2024 State of Application Development Report - Survey for future newsletter analysis.