Hang10 Episode 1: Paddy Srinivasan, DigitalOcean CEO

We chat with Paddy Srinivasan, DigitalOcean CEO, about artificial intelligence, his secret talent, and the first website he checks every morning.

Transcript

00:00:08 Jeff Blankenburg

Hello everyone and welcome to Hang 10 brand new podcast from Digitalocean where we talk to people both inside and outside the world of technology and talk to them about how they’re using the cloud to power their applications.

00:00:19 Jeff Blankenburg

Today I have the opportunity to talk with Paddy, our CEO here at Digitalocean.

00:00:24 Jeff Blankenburg

My name is Jeff Blankenburg.

00:00:26 Jeff Blankenburg

I am our head of developer Relations.

00:00:28 Jeff Blankenburg

Thank you so much for.

00:00:29 Jeff Blankenburg

Being here.

00:00:30 Paddy Srinivasan

Jeff, it’s wonderful to be.

00:00:32 Paddy Srinivasan

Thank you for having me here in your episode 1.

00:00:35 Paddy Srinivasan

Truly honored and looking forward to what this.

00:00:37 Paddy Srinivasan

Bring to us.

00:00:38 Jeff Blankenburg

Well, I feel like you pilot the company a bit. And so being the pilot episode, that seemed like it made a lot of sense.

00:00:44 Jeff Blankenburg

I’m. I’m glad you could be here and I’m looking forward to this conversation.

00:00:47 Jeff Blankenburg

So we’ve talked briefly about this, but one of the cool kind of formats that I wanted to add to the show.

00:00:52 Jeff Blankenburg

So and to play into the Hang Ten name was to hang 10 questions on you.

00:00:57 Jeff Blankenburg

And so I’m going to go kind of rapid fire through a bunch of.

00:01:00 Jeff Blankenburg

Some of them are silly and fun, but it’ll give some people a feel for what your personality is like, how you think, the kinds of interests you have.

00:01:07 Jeff Blankenburg

So let’s dive right into it.

00:01:08 Jeff Blankenburg

You ready?

00:01:09 Paddy Srinivasan

Let’s do it.

00:01:10 Jeff Blankenburg

All right, if you could live in any fictional universe for a week, which one would you pick?

00:01:16 Paddy Srinivasan

I really would love Star Wars.

00:01:21 Jeff Blankenburg

I can see that Star Wars would align with me too.

00:01:23 Jeff Blankenburg

Think there’s a lot of?

00:01:24 Jeff Blankenburg

Things there, right?

00:01:26 Jeff Blankenburg

This is a tricky 1.

00:01:27 Jeff Blankenburg

Which app?

00:01:28 Jeff Blankenburg

You use on your phone the most.

00:01:29 Jeff Blankenburg

You would never admit to it.

00:01:34 Paddy Srinivasan

I would say.

00:01:36 Paddy Srinivasan

Instagram. Instagram.

00:01:36

Replay.

00:01:37 Jeff Blankenburg

All right.

00:01:38 Paddy Srinivasan

And you did.

00:01:38 Jeff Blankenburg

Just admit to.

00:01:39 Jeff Blankenburg

So I guess maybe that’s a trick question.

00:01:42 Jeff Blankenburg

What is your go to guilty pleasure snack?

00:01:47 Paddy Srinivasan

Is a bowl of cold cereal at my captain Crunch.

00:01:51 Jeff Blankenburg

Acting crunch crunch berries are just regular.

00:01:54

Regular.

00:01:55 Jeff Blankenburg

OK, OK.

00:01:57 Jeff Blankenburg

How about if you had a time machine? Would you visit the future or the past?

00:02:01 Paddy Srinivasan

Future.

00:02:02 Jeff Blankenburg

Future, I like future too.

00:02:04 Jeff Blankenburg

Uh, do you have a secret talent? Most people don’t know about?

00:02:07 Paddy Srinivasan

I can do a little bit of juggling like.

00:02:10 Paddy Srinivasan

Not juggling of tasks, but like literally juggling.

00:02:13 Paddy Srinivasan

Well, that’s good.

00:02:14 Jeff Blankenburg

I’m going to see you next.

00:02:15 Jeff Blankenburg

I might just have to see that happen.

00:02:17 Jeff Blankenburg

All right. What is the best pizza topping?

00:02:19 Paddy Srinivasan

I am a plain old cheese guy, but if I must have a topping, it’ll be basil.

00:02:26 Paddy Srinivasan

Right.

00:02:26 Jeff Blankenburg

Basil. All right, I’m a plain cheese guy too.

00:02:28 Jeff Blankenburg

Uh, that’s interesting.

00:02:30 Jeff Blankenburg

What’s your most unusual item on your desk right now?

00:02:34 Paddy Srinivasan

I have little globes or stress balls, but they have the World Atlas Princess Lab.

00:02:43

Printed on them.

00:02:43 Jeff Blankenburg

Oh, nice. OK.

00:02:45 Jeff Blankenburg

What was the first concert you ever attended?

00:02:49 Paddy Srinivasan

Aerosmith, 1991 No, 9095.

00:02:54 Jeff Blankenburg

That’s a.

00:02:55 Jeff Blankenburg

95 is a good.

00:02:56 Jeff Blankenburg

That’s like the the get a grip tour. Maybe that’s great.

00:02:58 Paddy Srinivasan

Yes. Yeah, they were.

00:03:01 Paddy Srinivasan

It was in a college campus.

00:03:03 Paddy Srinivasan

Was great.

00:03:04 Jeff Blankenburg

Wow are.

00:03:05 Jeff Blankenburg

We talked a little bit about Captain Crunch already.

00:03:07 Jeff Blankenburg

You said that’s a snack.

00:03:08 Jeff Blankenburg

What is your favorite breakfast food?

00:03:13

Oh.

00:03:14 Paddy Srinivasan

It’s usually cereal, but for health reasons and other reasons, it’s more oatmeal these days.

00:03:22 Paddy Srinivasan

Cereal. If I can have.

00:03:23 Jeff Blankenburg

One plain oatmeal.

00:03:24 Jeff Blankenburg

On it.

00:03:26

Just oatmeal.

00:03:27

All right.

00:03:28 Jeff Blankenburg

All right, last.

00:03:29 Jeff Blankenburg

And this is what I’m going to ask everybody.

00:03:31 Jeff Blankenburg

What’s the first website you check when you wake up?

00:03:35 Paddy Srinivasan

Wall Street Journal.

00:03:36 Paddy Srinivasan

Wall Street Journal.

00:03:38

All right. Thank you.

00:03:38 Jeff Blankenburg

That was a nice little insight into what’s going on in in patties brain.

00:03:43 Jeff Blankenburg

All right, so let’s get into the real meat of this though, because I think we can ask some more.

00:03:46 Jeff Blankenburg

Questions that.

00:03:47 Jeff Blankenburg

Might have just gone through there. So as we look at digital ocean as a whole.

00:03:52 Jeff Blankenburg

They’ve been a number of recent product releases around artificial intelligence lately.

00:03:57 Jeff Blankenburg

What is the future of AI look like?

00:04:00 Paddy Srinivasan

Yeah. So, Jeff, that is a great.

00:04:02 Paddy Srinivasan

This is so we had our earnings call last week. So I talked about all the great.

00:04:07 Paddy Srinivasan

We’re doing.

00:04:08 Paddy Srinivasan

And from an AI point of view, there’s a lot of cool stuff we are doing and.

00:04:15 Paddy Srinivasan

Our strategy is.

00:04:18 Paddy Srinivasan

A reflection of our fundamental belief in terms of how AI is going to evolve over the next three to five years.

00:04:26 Paddy Srinivasan

There’s a lot of focus on AI infrastructure, whether it is data centers, GPS.

00:04:32 Paddy Srinivasan

Power networking. All of that stuff.

00:04:35 Paddy Srinivasan

And I think they’re all super important.

00:04:38 Paddy Srinivasan

There are essential building blocks for for AI, but I believe that AI is going to have a very similar evolution to some of the previous.

00:04:51 Paddy Srinivasan

Technology shifts we have seen.

00:04:53 Paddy Srinivasan

Old enough.

00:04:54 Paddy Srinivasan

My first job at Microsoft was around Windows NT and Server operating system.

00:04:59 Paddy Srinivasan

So I saw the PC era or the end of the PC evolution of the PC era.

00:05:05 Paddy Srinivasan

Thensurelythe.com revolution.

00:05:08 Paddy Srinivasan

Then mobile and then.

00:05:11 Paddy Srinivasan

Cloud and now AI.

00:05:13 Paddy Srinivasan

They all go through a very similar pattern.

00:05:15 Paddy Srinivasan

So it all starts with infrastructure and then there are a bunch of tools or platforms that evolve about the infrastructure that essentially serve the creation of applications which.

00:05:30 Paddy Srinivasan

Deliver business value to customers or consumers, right?

00:05:33 Paddy Srinivasan

That’s the typical.

00:05:34 Paddy Srinivasan

So if you think about 1999, the company that was the most valuable in the market was Cisco.

00:05:41 Paddy Srinivasan

What did they?

00:05:42 Paddy Srinivasan

They built big infrastructure for the Internet, right?

00:05:44 Paddy Srinivasan

Everyone said.

00:05:46 Paddy Srinivasan

Yeah, Cisco’s the runaway winner for Internet, and they’re the ones who are doing all this massive infrastructure.

00:05:52 Paddy Srinivasan

Application needs.

00:05:53 Paddy Srinivasan

Hence the focus was pretty much squarely on either the cable companies that were pulling the fiber and the connectivity network or Cisco that was building all the.

00:06:05 Paddy Srinivasan

Raw metal infrastructure I feel today we’re seeing the same.

00:06:11 Paddy Srinivasan

Play or the same series of plays unfolding.

00:06:15 Paddy Srinivasan

Lot of action today on the silicon within media.

00:06:18 Paddy Srinivasan

With all the networking gear and things like that and the data center that these GPUs going to super important, very essential building block of the future and we also have some really compelling offerings where.

00:06:35 Paddy Srinivasan

True to our Genesis or our origin story, Jeff.

00:06:39 Paddy Srinivasan

We are trying to democratize the access of this GPU infrastructure for everyone, right?

00:06:44 Paddy Srinivasan

So we have two different.

00:06:46 Paddy Srinivasan

One is a bare metal GPU as a service offering, which is if you know what you’re doing and you just want us to provide you with GPU with the necessary.

00:06:57 Paddy Srinivasan

Network and storage and get out of the way so that you can do your thing better.

00:07:01 Paddy Srinivasan

Is your offering.

00:07:03 Paddy Srinivasan

We also have something called as the GPU droplets, which are essential building blocks or a substrate over the GPUs.

00:07:12 Paddy Srinivasan

Giving you all the essential tooling that is required. Both the NVIDIA tooling, Pytorch and other developer tools.

00:07:21 Paddy Srinivasan

So that you’re not spending half a day building up the infrastructure required for you to run your first AI.

00:07:32 Paddy Srinivasan

Build on a target GPU and then GPU droplets do a lot more than that, but essentially it’s a layer on top of the bare metal GPU.

00:07:43 Paddy Srinivasan

The next layer on top of that is platforms and what are.

00:07:47 Paddy Srinivasan

Platforms are just a collection of tools that enable you to build an application.

00:07:51 Paddy Srinivasan

So last month, we announced a new project called Our Starfish Project.

00:07:58 Paddy Srinivasan

Which is or generative AI platform which we still have an officially named yet and it is available on early Early access mode for a limited number of customers. And what Starfish is a combination of different tools that enables companies to build applications for their customers so without?

00:08:20 Paddy Srinivasan

Having to manage RAW GPU infrastructure, they can just use our APIs to get access to LMS to pump in their unique data sources to build a knowledge base, to build guardrails so that the LLM stays within certain boundaries and so on and so forth. So.

00:08:36 Paddy Srinivasan

We have enabled a few different tools so that companies can consume all of this Gen. AI into their own application.

00:08:46 Paddy Srinivasan

So that’s the second layer.

00:08:48 Jeff Blankenburg

I like that. In fact, in the time that I’ve spent with that Geni platform, I’ve been really impressed by just how accessible and easy it is. I am a consumer of Geni.

00:08:57 Jeff Blankenburg

I I’m not somebody that’s in the business of building my own models or anything like that, but I do want to be able to use and leverage those models for the kinds of work that I do.

00:09:04 Jeff Blankenburg

And I thought just as a fun experiment, I would take a.

00:09:07 Jeff Blankenburg

I downloaded all of the transaction from my bank account over the last year and I pulled those into a knowledge base in our Gen. AI platform. And then I I built the model and got everything trained up and ready to go.

00:09:18 Jeff Blankenburg

And now I have a chat agent and I was able to ask it questions about my spending and how I how I’m using money.

00:09:25 Jeff Blankenburg

How my transactions look and are there any patterns?

00:09:28 Jeff Blankenburg

And its first instinct was to tell me that.

00:09:30 Jeff Blankenburg

I should spend less money dining.

00:09:33 Jeff Blankenburg

Which I thought was a good insight right as I’m moving fast and grabbing food when I can or going out with my family as we’re as we’re heading someplace on a weekend, we tend to go to some restaurants from time to time.

00:09:43 Jeff Blankenburg

So that was a that was a quick insight that I got in building something in 15 minutes, so.

00:09:48 Jeff Blankenburg

I think in each.

00:09:49 Jeff Blankenburg

Those 3 layers, there’s something for everybody, which?

00:09:52 Jeff Blankenburg

Kind of cool.

00:09:52 Paddy Srinivasan

So you built.

00:09:53 Paddy Srinivasan

Own application, that is, that’s.

00:09:54 Paddy Srinivasan

But.

00:09:56 Paddy Srinivasan

So we also built our own application, Jeff, which we released which we are using both internally as well as we release externally.

00:10:05 Paddy Srinivasan

Maybe I’ll just give you a quick.

00:10:07 Paddy Srinivasan

62nd overview of that application because I think our listeners will find it super helpful.

00:10:09

Lisa.

00:10:12 Paddy Srinivasan

So.

00:10:15 Paddy Srinivasan

We run a cloud platform, right?

00:10:16 Paddy Srinivasan

Things often.

00:10:19 Paddy Srinivasan

Or they slow down or there’s there?

00:10:21 Paddy Srinivasan

Are N number.

00:10:22 Paddy Srinivasan

Reasons to investigate what is going on in.

00:10:24 Paddy Srinivasan

Infrastructure and.

00:10:28 Paddy Srinivasan

Investigating software applications, let alone infrastructure, is not for the faint of.

00:10:32 Paddy Srinivasan

There’s we produce an enormous amount of exhaust, right? The log data security data, application performance logs, database performance Logs, operating system logs.

00:10:45 Paddy Srinivasan

We just throw out a tremendous amount of exhaust and to find exactly what is going on when something is not working well.

00:10:53 Paddy Srinivasan

Umm takes an enormous amount of manual labor to go and parse out these logs, find correlations, and get to the root cause.

00:11:01 Paddy Srinivasan

And we built an AI agent that can actually do this work.

00:11:07 Paddy Srinivasan

Mimicking the workflows of what we typically call a site reliability.

00:11:11 Paddy Srinivasan

So it’s taking a human workflow and automating it, and within seconds it.

00:11:16 Paddy Srinivasan

Give us.

00:11:17 Paddy Srinivasan

Exactly what is going on or a pinpoint?

00:11:21 Paddy Srinivasan

Which check in broke the system and things like.

00:11:26 Paddy Srinivasan

So we’ve been using it internally, dogfooding it. We find up to 35% reduction in the time it takes to troubleshoot tickets for us.

00:11:36 Paddy Srinivasan

And we are also releasing it externally to a limited set of customers so that they can do that with their applications running on the DO platform.

00:11:44 Paddy Srinivasan

It’s really, really cool.

00:11:46 Paddy Srinivasan

As we start building some of these applications to help really deliver business value to our customers.

00:11:53 Jeff Blankenburg

Yeah, I I you know, that’s something that I really take to heart because I think it’s important to dog food technology. And so I was.

00:11:59 Jeff Blankenburg

Actually aware of.

00:11:59 Jeff Blankenburg

That’s super cool that we’re actually using that to to diagnose a lot of the work that we’re trying to do to keep this platform rolling.

00:12:05 Jeff Blankenburg

Great.

00:12:05 Paddy Srinivasan

All right.

00:12:06 Jeff Blankenburg

So we we talked about announcements and as I said, you made a ton of announcements at the last shareholder meeting.

00:12:11 Jeff Blankenburg

But not all of them were around artificial.

00:12:14 Jeff Blankenburg

What were the big things that you’re excited about that?

00:12:17 Jeff Blankenburg

AI related.

00:12:18 Paddy Srinivasan

Yeah. So in last Mondays earnings call, I talked about us releasing 42 new features in Q3 and not all of them there were like four or five of them in AI, but the rest.

00:12:28 Paddy Srinivasan

Were in our core cloud computing platform and if you look at those features, they were advanced networking like virtual private cloud and many aspects of that.

00:12:40 Paddy Srinivasan

We announced a bunch of pre.

00:12:44 Paddy Srinivasan

Droplet configurations like more memory, more networking, more.

00:12:50 Paddy Srinivasan

CPU.

00:12:51 Paddy Srinivasan

We announced A48B CPU mode, A76B CPU mode and so.

00:12:56 Paddy Srinivasan

So a lot of these features have a common theme that runs across them, which is to be in service of running.

00:13:06 Paddy Srinivasan

Larger workloads on the core digital ocean platform, so as as you know, Jeff, we.

00:13:12 Paddy Srinivasan

00:13:13 Paddy Srinivasan

Customers that we call as scalers, and these scalers spend on an average $25,000 or more with us. So.

00:13:20 Paddy Srinivasan

These customers are typically multinationals.

00:13:23 Paddy Srinivasan

So they deploy more than one data center. They have applications that need low latency networks, they.

00:13:29 Paddy Srinivasan

They need larger footprint because they they they load up a lot of stuff in.

00:13:34 Paddy Srinivasan

So these are what I call like mission critical applications and a lot of our new innovation on the core cloud computing platform is aimed at this class of applications. In fact, I also.

00:13:50 Paddy Srinivasan

Talked about many examples of companies that are moving their workloads to digital ocean from other cloud platforms because they’ve been quite pleased with with some of our product innovation.

00:14:01

I.

00:14:02 Jeff Blankenburg

Very exciting.

00:14:03 Jeff Blankenburg

It’s nice to see that kind of diversity and the the scaling up of some of our offerings. I know that we we traditionally have been known as a company that has lots of hobbyists and experiments and and self starters and startups.

00:14:15 Jeff Blankenburg

But it’s it’s nice to know that, you know, we’re we’re offering things that companies of of.

00:14:19 Jeff Blankenburg

Sizes can handle.

00:14:20 Paddy Srinivasan

Yeah, absolutely. And and those hobbyists and learners of cloud computing.

00:14:27 Paddy Srinivasan

Are a bit are still a very big priority for.

00:14:31 Paddy Srinivasan

In fact, you and some of your colleagues hosted or 11th annual hackathon last month, right?

00:14:38 Paddy Srinivasan

Was the month of hackathon.

00:14:39 Paddy Srinivasan

We had more than 65,000 people participating in it, all from like 180 countries or something.

00:14:45 Paddy Srinivasan

They were crazy how much attention that got and how many open source projects where were contributed to as part of our October fest.

00:14:57 Paddy Srinivasan

It is.

00:14:57 Jeff Blankenburg

It is amazing.

00:14:58 Jeff Blankenburg

Oktoberfest is kind of like a a love letter to the open source community from digital.

00:15:03 Jeff Blankenburg

Motion and I think it’s nice that we can provide a mechanism for people to create all sorts of pull requests on hundreds if not thousands, if not thousands of open source projects all over the all over the web, even if it’s only for one month a year, all.

00:15:16 Jeff Blankenburg

Of the progress and work that is made on those is just remarkable.

00:15:20 Paddy Srinivasan

Absolutely.

00:15:20 Jeff Blankenburg

So yeah, that’s that’s a great shout out.

00:15:23 Jeff Blankenburg

All right. So the next question I want to ask you is specifically related to like being the CEO of a cloud platform.

00:15:30 Jeff Blankenburg

But before I get to that, one of the things that I really wanted to include in this and I was so excited to get into our first question, I skipped right over it is.

00:15:38 Jeff Blankenburg

Today you are the CEO of Digitalocean.

00:15:40 Jeff Blankenburg

But before this you were other things. You’ve had other roles, you’ve had other jobs. And so I generally like to ask people if you can just take a couple of minutes.

00:15:48 Jeff Blankenburg

Tell me where you went to school and kind of what the path looked like for you to get to where you are today?

00:15:55 Paddy Srinivasan

Great. So let me start from the beginning and I’ll keep it very short.

00:15:59 Paddy Srinivasan

So I’m an electrical engineer by training. I went to a school in India called BITS Pilani and for those who are familiar with India would have surely heard about it.

00:16:09 Paddy Srinivasan

I did electrical engineering, hated electrical engineering for my day one, and I couldn’t change it.

00:16:14 Paddy Srinivasan

Was just stuck with electric elect.

00:16:16 Paddy Srinivasan

So I did that and I knew that I really wanted to pivot to software in my second year of college.

00:16:26 Paddy Srinivasan

Started picking up a part time development jobs here and there.

00:16:31 Paddy Srinivasan

Ended up at Microsoft as my first real enterprise software job.

00:16:36 Paddy Srinivasan

Built a lot of different things at Microsoft, including some parts of Windows NT was in the original one of the original peopleinthe.net teamevenbeforeitwascalled.net.

00:16:51 Paddy Srinivasan

And eventually my last five years at Microsoft, I did parts of the SharePoint operating platform.

00:16:58 Paddy Srinivasan

So that was my last job at Microsoft, and then I spent a couple.

00:17:01 Paddy Srinivasan

Years at Oracle.

00:17:03 Paddy Srinivasan

In mobile embedded databases and then I.

00:17:07 Paddy Srinivasan

I did my I did a startup for five years in.

00:17:11 Paddy Srinivasan

It was the early days of cloud in 2000. Between 2008 and 2013.

00:17:16 Paddy Srinivasan

And we built an application performance management monitoring platform which basically monitors other cloud and hybrid applications and helps fine tune the performance of these applications so.

00:17:31 Paddy Srinivasan

Lot of raw bare metal knowledge came from those experiences and then I spent a good portion of the last 10 years at a company called LogMeIn, which is a remote access remote support company.

00:17:44 Paddy Srinivasan

I.

00:17:44 Paddy Srinivasan

We were bought $100 million.

00:17:46 Paddy Srinivasan

Company over the 10 years we scaled it to about one point, three $1.4 billion did a lot.

00:17:53 Paddy Srinivasan

Cool stuff.

00:17:55 Paddy Srinivasan

As part of scaling the company up played a lot of different roles.

00:18:00 Paddy Srinivasan

I was also in between a couple of stints at LogMeIn.

00:18:04 Paddy Srinivasan

I was also at Amazon for.

00:18:07 Paddy Srinivasan

A brief amount of time.

00:18:09 Paddy Srinivasan

And then I joined Digitalocean in February of this year.

00:18:13 Paddy Srinivasan

That’s a readers digest version of my background.

00:18:16 Jeff Blankenburg

I like.

00:18:17 Jeff Blankenburg

That’s a good journey and I’m sure everybody can track you down on LinkedIn if they want to see the specifics, but that’s that’s a cool journey.

00:18:23 Jeff Blankenburg

What’s interesting is that being at a company like Digital Ocean, you bring a little experience from what Amazon has been doing.

00:18:30 Jeff Blankenburg

What Microsoft has been doing?

00:18:32 Jeff Blankenburg

And certainly some of the cloud monitoring stuff you were talking about plays nicely.

00:18:35 Jeff Blankenburg

The things that we’re doing here so well, congratulations on that.

00:18:38 Jeff Blankenburg

Now that’s a that’s quite a path you’ve taken all the way from electrical engineering.

00:18:43 Paddy Srinivasan

Yeah, it’s, it’s it’s been. I’m very grateful for the opportunities I got. And as you can see from my background.

00:18:50 Paddy Srinivasan

I’ve always been a developer at heart and most of the time I have built system.

00:18:55 Paddy Srinivasan

Other developers. So Digitalocean fits right then from that glide path perspective.

00:19:01 Jeff Blankenburg

I love it.

00:19:01 Jeff Blankenburg

All.

00:19:02 Jeff Blankenburg

So now we’ll get.

00:19:03 Jeff Blankenburg

My second big question here, which is.

00:19:05 Jeff Blankenburg

As the CEO of a cloud platform company, what is the thing you’re most excited about?

00:19:10 Paddy Srinivasan

Yeah. So.

00:19:12 Paddy Srinivasan

I’m most excited about, so there are two things I’m excited about.

00:19:15 Paddy Srinivasan

The current.

00:19:16 Paddy Srinivasan

The current is we have 640,000.

00:19:19 Paddy Srinivasan

So, Jeff, how many times can you wake up and say that we serve more than half a million paying customers, right?

00:19:26 Paddy Srinivasan

Just an incredible honor and an opportunity for us to make.

00:19:30 Paddy Srinivasan

The lives of our customers better and I take a lot of pride both before digital ocean, but certainly in digital ocean.

00:19:37 Paddy Srinivasan

To say that my mission is to make the complex simple and the simple affordable, and we do both of that really, really well at Digitalocean and that’s why we have 640,000 paying customers, many of them small individual customers or.

00:19:55 Paddy Srinivasan

People that are running their passion projects on do like I was and we do also have.

00:20:04 Paddy Srinivasan

More than 100,000 real paying customers who are proper businesses and most of them are independent.

00:20:10 Paddy Srinivasan

Software vendors, in the sense that they sell software.

00:20:14 Paddy Srinivasan

As their primary monetization mechanism, so it is a great opportunity to be in service to them and realizing the fact that we are actually running a platform, which means it is a utility, which means if we go down, our customers go down and it is a very serious.

00:20:32 Paddy Srinivasan

Responsibility that we have and something that we don’t take very lightly and as I said, the first principles of what we do is to make the complex.

00:20:42 Paddy Srinivasan

So that our customers can get started and scale in a very.

00:20:49 Paddy Srinivasan

Easy manner and make the simple affordable.

00:20:52 Paddy Srinivasan

So today the cloud is a very complex space and making sense of that is super, super hard. And the more we can make.

00:21:04 Paddy Srinivasan

The ROI more predictable and transparent in terms of our pricing. The more our customers will appreciate that.

00:21:12 Paddy Srinivasan

Those are the the core tenets of what makes me excited in today’s world.

00:21:17 Paddy Srinivasan

But then when you look at tomorrow’s.

00:21:21 Paddy Srinivasan

The world is unmistakably becoming more and more automated, with more advancements in AI and moves slow getting replaced by.

00:21:31 Paddy Srinivasan

The laws of AI, which are accelerating, compute significantly faster. Instead of 18 months. Now we are moving six months at a time in terms of the capability of these models, so I feel.

00:21:46 Paddy Srinivasan

Our core tenet of making the complex simple and the simple affordable or even more important in the world of AI. Because AI if not anything, is super complex, you need.

00:21:57 Paddy Srinivasan

Multiple PhDs to make sense of what is going on South. Most companies don’t have that luxury, so we can absolutely democratize the access of AI by making it simple like we have tried to do with our Gen. AI platform. And then AI is super, super expensive. So how?

00:22:14 Paddy Srinivasan

We take that and make it bite sized so.

00:22:18 Paddy Srinivasan

Need a full 8 GPU cluster.

00:22:20 Paddy Srinivasan

Can get one.

00:22:21 Paddy Srinivasan

You can also take it at a fractional level.

00:22:24 Paddy Srinivasan

Can do it on demand.

00:22:26 Paddy Srinivasan

So we’re doing our best to democratize the access to AI and do it.

00:22:32 Paddy Srinivasan

A simple affordable.

00:22:33 Jeff Blankenburg

Yeah, I. So I don’t know if you and I have talked about this, but in my recent previous life, I spent seven years on the Alexa team at Amazon. And Alexa is a very early look at what like an autonomous agent could be for you, right? You can.

00:22:47 Jeff Blankenburg

It to do things and it’ll retrieve information for you.

00:22:50 Jeff Blankenburg

Play.

00:22:50 Jeff Blankenburg

It’ll tell you what your To Do List is.

00:22:53 Jeff Blankenburg

But I think as you point to that future, I think that’s one of the.

00:22:55 Jeff Blankenburg

Exciting things for me anyway.

00:22:57 Jeff Blankenburg

Is that when I think about what?

00:22:59 Jeff Blankenburg

Real, functional. Capable. Autonomous.

00:23:03 Jeff Blankenburg

AI agent looks like for me.

00:23:06 Jeff Blankenburg

I start to get really excited.

00:23:07 Jeff Blankenburg

You’ve probably seen the memes online about how I thought AI was going to do all the hard work for me so that I could spend time writing music and writing poetry, and like creating art, and instead what people are finding is that AI is really good at doing.

00:23:21 Jeff Blankenburg

Of those things, and it’s not taking away the doing the dishes and taking out the trash and all that kind of stuff, but I think.

00:23:27 Jeff Blankenburg

As we start to look towards the future, right, it’s going to start taking away a lot of the things that we don’t want to do. A lot of the things that eat a lot of our time.

00:23:36 Jeff Blankenburg

And I’m that’s the stuff that really gets me excited. I have a whole talk I’ve put together called the future of people and what people’s lives look like when you have AI just looking over your shoulder, taking care of things, getting things out of the way for you.

00:23:49 Jeff Blankenburg

The one example I used that I you know, the sooner we can make this happen, the better.

00:23:54 Jeff Blankenburg

I was at home and I was planning out dinner.

00:23:56 Jeff Blankenburg

We were going to make like a homemade Mac and cheese.

00:23:58 Jeff Blankenburg

You need milk and cheese and noodles and all the things butter to pull that stuff together.

00:24:02 Jeff Blankenburg

And so I.

00:24:03 Jeff Blankenburg

I knew I had everything I needed and I had to take my daughter.

00:24:05 Jeff Blankenburg

Ice skating practice so.

00:24:08 Jeff Blankenburg

Left for an hour and a half when we went to ice skating practice and I knew when I came home I’d start.

00:24:11 Jeff Blankenburg

Making all of that Mac and cheese? Well, while I was gone, my 7 year old son discovered there were Oreos in the pantry.

00:24:18 Jeff Blankenburg

And so he went and he grabbed the Oreos and he grabbed the thing of milk, and he poured himself a big glass of milk.

00:24:22 Jeff Blankenburg

As he was doing it, he spilled the rest of it all down into the sink and so no longer did.

00:24:27 Jeff Blankenburg

Have any milk?

00:24:28 Jeff Blankenburg

And so I was thinking about the sensors that we start seeing in devices like refrigerators.

00:24:32 Jeff Blankenburg

Countries that can recognize what’s there and what you’re out of and what you might be low on.

00:24:36 Jeff Blankenburg

On and combine that with an agent that recognizes what our families menu might have been, or where all of this food is going to.

00:24:44 Jeff Blankenburg

Right. We start to pile a bunch of these things together and all of a sudden I get a text message while I’m at the skating practice that says, hey, you’re out of milk and I can stop on my way home. But the worst possible feeling and we do.

00:24:56 Jeff Blankenburg

This as humans all the time is we go all the way home.

00:24:59 Jeff Blankenburg

Only to discover that we don’t have the.

00:25:00 Jeff Blankenburg

And now we have to go back out or order something or solve the problem manually.

00:25:04 Jeff Blankenburg

And I think that as we start to think about where AI is headed, yes, it’s going to help us create chat bots for our businesses and it’s going to help our.

00:25:11 Jeff Blankenburg

And there’s a lot of obvious customer service kind of things that can be done here. But I think when we start thinking about on the individual level how this effects our individual lives.

00:25:22 Jeff Blankenburg

I think we’re going to.

00:25:23 Jeff Blankenburg

People are going to start to really embrace the idea of having someone helping you out. Just sitting on your shoulders saying, hey, I can take care of that for you. I’ll. I’ll schedule that meeting.

00:25:32 Jeff Blankenburg

I think it’s going to be a remarkable future.

00:25:35 Paddy Srinivasan

Absolutely yes. I think the consumer use cases, I visited a customer of ours, which is a human robotics startup in Silicon Valley. And I was actually blown away by some of the prototypes they have and they’re running.

00:25:52 Paddy Srinivasan

These robots on individual LMS, so each robot has a version of the LLM because think about it right. It’s a personal use robot.

00:26:02 Paddy Srinivasan

I’m sure even in my house, the way I like my clothes to be folded is very different from how my wife prefers.

00:26:09

Sir.

00:26:09 Paddy Srinivasan

Of course, her preference is more important.

00:26:13 Paddy Srinivasan

So if we get a personal robot, it has to be trained.

00:26:17 Paddy Srinivasan

The way she likes certain things to be.

00:26:19 Paddy Srinivasan

Around the house, right.

00:26:20 Paddy Srinivasan

It’s very.

00:26:21 Paddy Srinivasan

Like yes, it needs to have some.

00:26:23 Paddy Srinivasan

Basic motor skills to be able to do this, but then the last 10%, the last mile of of making that robot personalized to our use, there’s a lot of value there and I think these things are going to happen.

00:26:38 Paddy Srinivasan

Software, but also more importantly, software plus hardware.

00:26:42 Paddy Srinivasan

It’s going to be super, super critical for us to have that.

00:26:46 Paddy Srinivasan

Level of personalization and I think.

00:26:49 Paddy Srinivasan

Not very far from that.

00:26:50 Paddy Srinivasan

It you.

00:26:51 Paddy Srinivasan

Sounds scary, but I think in the next 5 years we’re going to look back and say remember that the time when.

00:26:56 Paddy Srinivasan

Didn’t have a personal robot.

00:26:58

Yeah.

00:26:59 Jeff Blankenburg

Yeah, I think in tandem with all of this AI revolution robotics revolution that we’re going through, there needs to also be, and this is for every developer that’s listening. There needs to be an API revolution as well and and the reason I say this.

00:27:12 Jeff Blankenburg

Is because think about every time you’ve had to schedule a doctor’s appointment.

00:27:17 Jeff Blankenburg

You you have to call and then you have to kind of manually sync your personal calendar with what the doctor’s calendar is, and you’re doing this over the phone and bouncing back and forth.

00:27:26 Jeff Blankenburg

I want a future where.

00:27:28 Jeff Blankenburg

I just get told. Hey, you have a dentist appointment next Tuesday and you did nothing to make that happen.

00:27:33 Jeff Blankenburg

Your calendars were able to sync. APIs were able to.

00:27:36 Jeff Blankenburg

Recognize that there was availability on both.

00:27:38 Jeff Blankenburg

Insurance companies were talked to all of these API endpoints were all talked to at once.

00:27:43 Jeff Blankenburg

And magically I haven’t done this appointment at the right time at the right, in a schedule that works for me.

00:27:49 Jeff Blankenburg

The APIs have to keep up with the rest of this because there is so much data out there that we need to make good informed decisions.

00:27:55 Jeff Blankenburg

A lot of it is.

00:27:57 Jeff Blankenburg

They’re sitting behind a wall or in some unstructured manner.

00:27:59 Jeff Blankenburg

Difficult to get to.

00:28:01 Jeff Blankenburg

And I think APIs are going to keep up with the rest of this revolution.

00:28:04 Paddy Srinivasan

Absolutely, yeah.

00:28:06 Paddy Srinivasan

And I think the incentives also have to be aligned right. Everyone needs to have the same incentives to make these things work seamlessly.

00:28:16 Jeff Blankenburg

Very much agree. Alright, I.

00:28:19 Jeff Blankenburg

I have one more big question for you and I’m happy to continue this conversation as long as you’d.

00:28:23 Jeff Blankenburg

But this is one that is is good for me as somebody that has been at the company for only a few months and I’m really trying to get a.

00:28:29 Jeff Blankenburg

For what makes digital oceans heartbeat?

00:28:34 Jeff Blankenburg

What is your favorite part of your job?

00:28:38 Paddy Srinivasan

So my favorite part of the favorite part of my job is getting to work with 12150 very, very talented digital ocean employees that we call sharks across.

00:28:53 Paddy Srinivasan

Hello. And it’s just an incredible group of people from different parts of the world we have.

00:29:02 Paddy Srinivasan

Half of our employees are outside of North America, so we have sharks in Pakistan. We have sharks in India, we have sharks in Europe.

00:29:14 Paddy Srinivasan

So just seeing.

00:29:16 Paddy Srinivasan

Them come together virtually and leave their magic is the absolutely most rewarding part.

00:29:23 Paddy Srinivasan

My job.

00:29:26 Paddy Srinivasan

As a start, converts as I have started conversing with our customers both.

00:29:32 Paddy Srinivasan

As well as.

00:29:33 Paddy Srinivasan

Physically, on the phone, talking to them or meeting.

00:29:36 Paddy Srinivasan

In person.

00:29:38 Paddy Srinivasan

It’s just a very gratifying to learn how much they know.

00:29:43 Paddy Srinivasan

Digital ocean, or how much they love digital ocean and.

00:29:48 Paddy Srinivasan

You won’t believe how many people have told me.

00:29:50 Paddy Srinivasan

Hey I learn how to program in Python on digital ocean documents or my first job was figuring out how to use digital ocean in this company XY and Z.

00:30:04 Paddy Srinivasan

It is just.

00:30:06 Paddy Srinivasan

So cool to see how immediate or impact is.

00:30:11 Paddy Srinivasan

Yes, you can get that in a in a different scale. Working in a big company like Amazon or Oracle or Microsoft like I did.

00:30:19 Paddy Srinivasan

But in a smaller company like Digitalocean, it’s lot more immediate and lot more palpable.

00:30:28 Paddy Srinivasan

That impact comes full circle pretty quickly and we’re very small compared to these large, big tech providers, but.

00:30:36 Paddy Srinivasan

The impact we have is is almost as big, if not bigger, than those big tech companies.

00:30:43 Paddy Srinivasan

That’s the the best part of my job.

00:30:46 Jeff Blankenburg

I.

00:30:47 Jeff Blankenburg

I will tell you, as I’ve been in our discord and I’ve talked with people on Reddit and Twitter and everywhere else.

00:30:52 Jeff Blankenburg

It’s always surprising to me how many people have engaged with Digitalocean or it was part of their learning journey as they became a developer.

00:30:59 Jeff Blankenburg

They use something simple like app platform to get their first thing running and up on the web.

00:31:06 Jeff Blankenburg

It’s delightful to see, and as far as the internal side of things go, I mean you mentioned it’s only, you know 12150 people globally located. I will tell you that you know, I’ve worked at those big companies and you live in this little silo and.

00:31:19 Jeff Blankenburg

In this little silo and very rarely do you venture out.

00:31:23 Jeff Blankenburg

And in the few months that I’ve been here at digital ocean, it is.

00:31:25 Jeff Blankenburg

Been so refreshing to be able to reach across the entire organization and work with people and get the information that I need and collaborate in ways that I’ve never had opportunities to before.

00:31:37 Jeff Blankenburg

It’s we’re we’re doing some good things here. I like it.

00:31:41 Paddy Srinivasan

Wonderful, Jeff.

00:31:43 Paddy Srinivasan

All right.

00:31:44 Paddy Srinivasan

As I guess.

00:31:45 Paddy Srinivasan

Thank.

00:31:46 Paddy Srinivasan

Thank you for having me as a guest.

00:31:47 Jeff Blankenburg

Oh.

00:31:48 Jeff Blankenburg

Well, thank you for being.

00:31:49 Jeff Blankenburg

It’s nice to be able to kick off a new podcast.

00:31:52 Jeff Blankenburg

And have somebody with your insights and your vision about what’s happening at Digitalocean, in the cloud and the industry.

00:31:58 Jeff Blankenburg

I think it’s good is.

00:32:00 Jeff Blankenburg

Is there anything you want to leave people?

00:32:01 Jeff Blankenburg

Is there anything interesting you’d like people to maybe go check out or or visit before we wrap up here?

00:32:07 Paddy Srinivasan

So I think maybe the one call to action I have from my side is if you’re a developer and you want to kick some tires and learn AI, we have some phenomenal resources.

00:32:19 Paddy Srinivasan

In the usual digital Ocean blog.

00:32:22 Paddy Srinivasan

And also we have almost all of our services that I mentioned in the beginning part of this podcast is all available for developers to try.

00:32:32 Paddy Srinivasan

So please give it a shot.

00:32:35 Paddy Srinivasan

Kick the tires.

00:32:36 Paddy Srinivasan

Give it a spin and see.

00:32:38 Paddy Srinivasan

And I’ll be super thrilled to see what magic you can build up. And as our mission statement goes, we want to simplify cloud and AI so that developers can create software that changes the world.

00:32:49 Paddy Srinivasan

And that will be very, very rewarding to watch.

00:32:52 Jeff Blankenburg

And as you get started, if you have any questions, if you have any feedback, I’m here to listen. So as I didn’t mention at the top of the show, my name is Jeff Blankenburg.

00:33:01 Jeff Blankenburg

The head of developer Relations here at Digitalocean and we’re here listening.

00:33:05 Jeff Blankenburg

We’re here and we’re open and we want your.

00:33:07 Jeff Blankenburg

We want to know how we can make your experience building for the club better. So with that, Patty, thank you so much.

00:33:13 Jeff Blankenburg

Being here.

00:33:13 Jeff Blankenburg

Thank you to everyone that’s listening to our very first episode and we expect there to be many, many more.

00:33:19 Jeff Blankenburg

Thank you all for tuning in and we will talk to you all again soon.