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The Local Startup Ecosystem, Going Digital, and Microsoft for Startups

Are startups still viable today? Where are they in the digital ecosystem and what does Microsoft have to do with startups? We speak to Michael Smith Jr., the newly-appointed APAC GM of Microsoft Startups, to get his insights and opinions on the startup ecosystem in Singapore, and how Microsoft is positioned to facilitate the growth of startups.

Tune in to this episode of Ask A CISO to hear:

  • The startup ecosystem, then and now
  • Why startups are still necessary and will be here to stay
  • Why organizations need to adapt and go digital, now more than before
  • What is Microsoft for Startups, and what Microsoft offer startups
  • Opportunities in the future accoridng to Michael
  • Microsoft's roadmap for cloud services

About The Guest: Michael Smith Jr.

Michael Smith Jr. is the current Microsoft for Startups APAC GM leading a team to empower and service the Startups and Digital Native businesses primarily across ASEAN with the complete Microsoft Platform.

Prior to Microsoft, Michael led the Solutions Architecture team in APJ for AWS Startup segment.

Before joining AWS, Michael was a Partner at SeedPlus, a 20M USD fund that invested in many notable startups across ASEAN such as Homage, Qoala, Neuron Mobility, Appknox, CardUp, Engage Rocket, Kyklo, Lapasar, Moglix, Rukita, and Travelstop.

About The Host: Paul Hadjy

Paul Hadjy is co-founder and CEO of Horangi Cyber Security. 

Paul leads a team of cybersecurity specialists who create software to solve challenging cybersecurity problems. Horangi brings world-class solutions to provide clients in the Asian market with the right, actionable data to make critical cybersecurity decisions.

Prior to Horangi, Paul worked at Palantir Technologies, where he was instrumental in expanding Palantir’s footprint in the Asia Pacific. 

He worked across Singapore, Korea, and New Zealand to build Palantir's business in both the commercial and government space and grow its regional teams. 

He has over a decade of experience and expertise in Anti-Money Laundering, Insider Threats, Cyber Security, Government, and Commercial Banking. 

Transcript

Mark

Hello, and welcome again to another installment of Ask A CISO podcast from Horangi where we help your ship get to where it needs to go and navigate through the rough waters of cybersecurity.

Today I have a great guest with me. I have Michael Smith Jr. who's recently been appointed the APAC GM for startups and digital native businesses at Microsoft.

Before that, Michael was heading up the solutions architecture team in APJ for AWS startup segment. Two things I keep popping up here are startups. I think that's because Michael has a,

Michael

That's all there is. That's all there is.

Mark

That's right. You've been working here in APAC inside and just outside of startups since 1999. You were a partner at SeedPlus which was helping a lot of startups in their seed round, long list here. Homage, Qoala, Neuron Mobility.

Michael

Yeah, those are all the investments.

Mark

Yeah. Engage rocket. Oh, man. There's it keeps going. It keeps going.

We've got Moglix, Rukita, and Travelstop. So you've been doing that quite some time. You've been here since 1999 working in these startups. And my first question for you, Michael, is, even today, there's still this big debate about what impact are our startups having on the environment here in APAC I think startups are starting to win that argument but it's still a battle and I can imagine 1999, It was a super uphill battle so

Michael

There was nothing. There was nothing.

Mark

So it seems to me, if you were here in 1999, you must have seen something everyone else didn't. So why APAC? Why startups?

Michael

Yeah, so I got moved, I mean, just quick I got moved from or move. I chose to move from America to Hong Kong in 99 working for like a lot of pre-cloud stuff and that was this company called WebLogic which was one of the first J2EE application servers. I know I'm dating myself with this, cuz people are going what's J2EE but believe it or not, it was big back in the day.

Mark

It was a big one.

Michael

You know, Java is still around it hasn't gone anywhere. So BEA bought WebLogic and later Oracle ended up buying BEA. So that's kind of that. Thing, but what, even then I was trying to, I looked at the whole business, but I was also trying to figure out how to like engage the, a lot of times you would see people and focused on developer relations or just engage the development community. Maybe the label wasn't startup then as much, but, yeah.

Mark

Build things.

Michael

Yeah. It was just go build things and you wanted to help people do it, right?

Mark

Yeah.

Michael

So I've always been there and then Asia was new to me. Obviously, I was born and raised in the States. Uh, I had an opportunity to go to Europe or Asia. I picked Asia.

It was Hong Kong and been around Asia ever since. I haven't never moved back since I moved at that point. So I've lived in Hong Kong, China, Thailand, and Singapore. Yeah, it's always been startups. I think it got more, I guess, really focused on it in the 2000s, more like mid 2000s around it and yeah, when I first. I mean, some people may remember Singapore then.

I don't know, but like, remember Hackerspace a few of these things. I actually was roaming the streets with Meng Wong, looking for the Hackerspace location. Like go way back this is pre, like, JFDI, and pre any of these programs. Now I wasn't, I'm not gonna say people weren't doing startups or that there's somebody, I'm sure they're building one back then, but it's nothing like what you see today, right?

Mark

Right.

Michael

And I think, you know, I always joke when I hear somebody complaining or talking about they can't do this or they can't find that, or they can't find employees. I just go, do you know how good you have it now? Like, oh my gosh.

Mark

Yeah.

Michael

There's an ecosystem. Now you can't argue with it. Like there's absolutely an ecosystem. There's funding. I don't imagine what it was in 1999, you know, like it like nothing, there were

Mark

No tools for no tools to work with.

Michael

And none of the, none of the global players were investing that much in the region and stuff like that. So I've been around, it wasn't always startups, but it was like you said, building things, I think for the last decade plus. It's really only been startups starting back when I was working at Yahoo!, that was actually to like help people use the Yahoo! technology for their businesses.

But when you look what is happening now versus then, it's stunning. I'm sure everybody could say there's still things to work on. Like, do we see enough exits or is the biggest big enough, but I think the demographics, the amount of funding, and the amount of startups being created, there's just no question about it, right?

It's huge.

Mark

Right.

Michael

And I think it's also, you know, there's a slowdown kind of going on. People say there's a slowdown going on. I mean, we could argue that one, but I don't really see it in the ecosystem because what I see is that the demographics are still creating the kind of demand curve that is gonna be with us for a long, many more years to come and startups have a huge place in that, right?

There's just no doubt about it. So it's an exciting time, and I think, yeah, the world's rough right now. I won't argue that, but if you kind of put some of that aside inside, what, what am I doing in Southeast Asia? You would have to consider that there's still tons of opportunity and a lot of confidence around what's possible, right?

And that's, that's where I'm at today. Like let's kind of see it for what it is. It's amazing.

Mark

I guess I would even go further to say, even from like a meta, like macro level, right? The real question is, are there's still problems to be solved, right?

Michael

Yes.

Mark

And there's plenty, there's some, we live in a world of problems, right? So I think essentially when you talk about startups, like you said before, they were called startups, there was just people building things. And before it was people building things, it was people solving problems, right?

So I think at the end of the day, the conversation about is is startup gone or is it, you know, or I don't think it's ever gonna be gone because we're never gonna

Michael

Let's hope not.

Mark

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Michael

Yeah, and I think some of the big problems, like you said, are still yet to be maybe solved or maybe solved at scale. And I think as the world keeps evolving these problems that open up even more and I also think that, you know, you guys probably know this yourself as your own company, there's companies being born and bred here are now selling abroad, right?

Mark

Yes.

Michael

And that's another amazing thing that wasn't happening on a regular concurrence. Now you have companies that say, Hey, I'm born and bred in Singapore. I'm doing X but I have a market here, here and there. That's also the power of like, what's happening with the ecosystem and the connectivity of the world. You're having markets that are not even around here.

Mark

Do you think so that this increased connectivity, the world getting smaller, these are all factors that are helping APAC startups make global impact. Are there any other big factors that you would you'd throw into that mix that we see today that weren't there maybe 10, 20 years ago?

Michael

Well, I think just the whole function of online cross commerce and payments and logistics and fulfillment, you know, even putting the COVID nuttiness aside, how it kind of accelerated all that.

It's just amazing how what's kind of happening with like cross-region selling and what's happening with all the payment and logistical things, like that just wasn't really around before, right?

You were never really sitting online back then and saying, oh, I'm gonna order from here and order from here and it's gonna come in a couple days and the shipping's not that much. That's amazing and then it was also like, you know, maybe credit card was the only method for those things. And you know, now you see all these like cross-border payment things, you see all the kind of financial instruments that are coming around that.

I mean, I think who knows where it ends, right? I'm definitely not a futurist, but I think that you gotta imagine it's gonna keep moving, but at the same time, COVID's kind of taught us a lot about logistics and about maybe some resiliency and maybe even some, you better start doing some things locally, not just always buy things in.

So I don't know where it goes, but it just created this beast of a commerce engine that just didn't exist before and I think there's still lots to be done around there and I don't think that's really gonna stop.

Mark

Yeah. I totally agree.

I think we're just starting to get past the, we're just hitting the tip of the iceberg, as far as the lessons we learned from the COVID stuff and it's got implications, like you said, in so many different areas, so yeah, definitely it's crazy ...

Michael

But I think what's amazing. It's just kind of like, you don't hear why digital anymore.

At Microsoft, we'll hear Satya talk sometimes, and I like a couple of his comments, which is, say what you will about what's happening in the world, and depending on where you are, we're all experiencing different headwinds and COVID's kind of like, definitely not gone away. It's just we're managing, but he is like, please give me a scenario in any circumstance where doing more digital isn't going to help you run your business, whatever it may be like productivity, like, whatever it is, no matter what problem you experienced, there's a digital version of a solution that might help you move past it in some regard, not everything, but so this notion of like ...

Mark

It's quite overwhelming though, right?

Michael

Yeah, it is.

It's just not gonna stop. And I, yeah, I think sometimes it's hard to wrap your head around it and I don't mean like the whole just sitting there and using your phone and being social, but just the fact that there's business problems, there's communication problems. There's dealing with your remote employees. There's dealing with, you know, people in hybrid mode, There's dealing with, you know ...

Mark

Logistics problems,

Michael

Logistics problem. How do you make sure people are happy when they work that way?

None of this stuff is gonna get simpler, but digital is a way through it, regardless of maybe how you factor it.

Mark

That's true. That's true. And you're right.

We did use to have that argument all the time. Why digital, right?

Michael

Yeah.

Mark

And we pretty much blew that out of the water.

That actually brings another thing to mind. By no means I've only been out here in this region operating maybe the last five years and one thing I've been learning as I keep working in this region is there's still a lot of entrenched traditional enterprises that haven't really started their digital transformation journeys and they still have a lot of market share and so we're still in the middle of this digital natives versus people who haven't gone digital yet.

Where do you see that battle right now? Where are we in that battle?

Michael

Right.

I think it's like, it's, I think it's a foregone conclusion that digital is happening. I think that each, let's say, enterprise or entity has to wrap their own head around where to go with it so I'll give you an example of. I had met with a group of kind of entrepreneurs and people involved in the Indonesian banking industry and they were on a trip to Singapore looking at the different government programs, the startup, and they're from the large and trans-Indonesian banks. They're just trying to learn. And it was a very open, candid discussion.

And someone said that, like, you know, why do you think things get created even when like we have banks and we have the ability and I've said like, well, because they're still solving problems. So if you look at a very real example of this, there's a startup in Indonesia called Flip, and it's just a easy send money to each other, right? It's the basic use, but then you can also have businesses.

Now, in Singapore, we all have PayNow, some basic stuff that the government and the banks together have, you know, I don't even know how it got created to be honest with you, but I know I kind of can't live without it and I've assumed that it

Mark

Right.

Michael

probably always been there but in Indonesia that didn't exist and even the banks and the government haven't created, so Flip comes along and just says, shouldn't this be simpler to send money to each other? And then they've done and it's growing like a weed.

So these people were asking me why did that happen? I'm like, well, if you didn't build the function as the bank, then somebody's gonna go build it.

Mark

Someone's going to ...

Michael

as a thing.

It doesn't mean like the bank shouldn't have done it or that the bank couldn't do it. I mean, the question is they didn't do it, right? So, right. So I think this ... that's always gonna happen.

The question is, do you wanna tackle it yourself or do you let someone come in and do it for you, which is a competitor, right>?

Mark

And this is what I run into. I run into a lot of like this organization you were talking about. The question, even the question itself, baffles people like you and me, right? Like it baffles us that someone would say, well, why would they build that?

Michael

Yeah. What, who needs it?

Mark

It's the problem.

Michael

We didn't offer it.

Mark

Yeah. Right.

Who needs it?

But you, then you look, I mean, even as a bank, you look at Indonesia, you look at Vietnam or Philippines. These are largely unbanked populations. So as a bank, you would look at the problem and say, yeah, there's a large part of our population that doesn't use our services and it would be easier if we made it digital because they all use cell phones and they all use laptops.

Why didn't they think of that?

Michael

Yeah.

Mark

So at the end of the day, I mean, like for me, and you. adapt or die is quite, it's quite an obvious statement.

Michael

Yeah.

You wake up every day, almost always thinking about it, right?

Mark

Exactly digital is coming. You gotta make that move. What percentage of these enterprises, these old school enterprises do you think will end up dying instead of adapting?

Michael

I don't know.

Cuz I don't think unless I keep track of it incorrectly. I don't think what you see is a lot of deaths. I think what you see is relevancy, maybe the relevancy moves past them, but in some regards it's funny, you see this in Singapore with, I'm pretty sure a couple years ago, it's, Comfort's dead and they're gonna get destroyed.

And, you know, and I'm sure we were all using Grab and GoJek and whatever the other things that were. And I always remember that Comfort has this SMS booking. I don't know if everybody knows about it but you can basically ... You know, the Comfort number and you say book and your ZIP code. And as long as your payment thing and everything's set up, it just comes to you. And it was really funny, even in the boon of like, I was still using that 'cause I'm like, it's so convenient. I just book my ZIP code, it comes and I think Comfort's doing pretty well.

So in some sense they've responded to it and other ways and other places haven't I think everybody has to do that.

Mark

Yeah.

Michael

I think that none of us probably do a good job of tracking the irrelevancy chart plus death, to be honest until you, maybe you read about, Hey, do I even go there anymore?

So I myself don't know how I keep tabs on it, but I do know that it's probably happening all around us every day. I think the question is how do these people actually compete with it if they do wanna stay relevant? 'cause that was one of the questions that came up. How do you do innovation if you're this old company? Because it's not as simple as build an app, cuz that's not really what it's about.

And then you see these it's about But how do you do it? Like how do you go to those steps? And that's where some people are looking at like they have an accelerator inside their company or they have an innovation studio or they bring someone in to do design thinking. But I do think that like one of the things that, like you just said with the whole adapt or die. If you're building a startup, like with you and Paul (Hadjy), it's make it or die, right?

Like there isn't a gray area, right? Like you guys either have revenue, raise funds, grow, and if you don't, it will be over, and it'll be a swifter experience that I think what happens with all these big companies is that whatever they're doing in innovation, it doesn't necessarily get that same adapt or die within it.

Sure, the whole company feels it. They don't feel, but they don't ... Yeah.

Mark

They don't feel that urgency.

Michael

And I don't know how you fix that problem, cuz I've never been put in charge of something big and old and you know, that someone could say, maybe that's what I'm doing at Microsoft, but it's, you know what I'm saying?

Like you live with that notion every day, it forces a certain behavior but if you're over here at like, let's just say X bank and X old bank is doing just fine. They say, we really want you guys to go innovate. Well, but if you're still kind of getting your paycheck and getting fed and maybe the project dies and no harm, no foul, they're not actually feeling what you feel and I don't know how you solve that problem.

Mark

I think, well, the reason why I think about it all the time, I mean, like you said we're kind of smaller. We're a little bit more nimble. We feel, we feel these changes in the environment more, we're more sensitive to these changes in the environment than, than a C-suite at the top of a thousand 10,000 person in enterprise.

But it seems to me when I watch, because, you know, I do a lot of consulting to these larger organizations. It seems to me that the term you use is relevancy, right? Relevance like the way it is, is you're relevant until you're not, yeah.

Michael

This suddenly happens.

Mark

Right, Right, It just happens, and actually there were indicators and there were red flags, but you weren't watching them. You weren't measuring them. One day, you just see that your price drops X amount, and you're like, whoa, whoa, why did that happen?

Oh, because we failed to catch this wave or whatever. And you're right. Nobody really knows what the solution is, but I think that larger organizations have to start thinking in those terms, because digital is here.

It's here to stay. It's coming. It's the future. It would be funny if like 10 years from now, we both get pretty wrong but I feel like it's here to stay all the indicators and ...

Michael

It definitely is, but I think sometimes people go so far to describe businesses that have no, uh physical things to them. And I think that's where there's a lot of amazing businesses that are physical, and digital augments them, that like it's more of the innovation around solving problems and creating markets and doing things than purely like a digital-only thing.

I mean, I'm always marvel at some physical businesses and what they do. And I have a friend who's left the industry. He's a tech guy like us, and he's left the industry and we keep tabs with each other and I was like, what are you doing next?

He goes, oh, dude, this is crazy. I'm going into manufacturing for lifestyle things that I find that are white spaces in Southeast Asia, and he's building his manufacturing line and I'm, and I'm fascinated. I'm like, dude, it's real stuff. I'm like, ain't that cool? And I don't even know what ... I don't even know what the technical stuff he's gonna put around it.

Maybe not so much yet to begin with, but I do know one thing: from day one, he is trying to figure out the digital selling, like, where is he gonna use Amazon? Is he gonna use this? And how is he gonna deal? Without a fact

Mark

And logistics,

Michael

it's digital all the way in some regard, even though it's this physical thing and it's a green space forum, but if you think about the complexity for someone that's already been going and having to merge those worlds, it's not easy.

It's quite fascinating like how you solve some of those problems when you have both worlds to deal with.

Mark

Most definitely.

I think that's where the excitement is, right? Because like I said, in my opinion, everything is just about solving problems and there are some unique problems in that space that no one ever even thinks about until it has to get done.

And so I think that's what makes that stuff exciting. I don't profess to know your friend or anything about your friend, but I'm sure that's what drives you.

Michael

Yeah, I think he's kind of like, Hey, I get to bring the best of both worlds. Maybe some of my, you know, a hobby that I like plus manufacturing, plus my digital brain and build a business from day one which is also quite fascinating.

Mark

That's pretty cool. That's really cool actually, which I guess I'll use that as my segue then, I'll use that as my segue into. So your current role you're over at Microsoft and you're dealing with startups and digital native businesses.

Tell us a little bit about that role. Tell us a little bit about the types of things that Microsoft is doing for these digital natives

Michael

Yeah.

I think that most startups probably have somewhere in their journey the, oh, I need to put my business on one of the clouds. I think that's a common ... Now, if you come from when I was building them, it actually used to be, we gotta rack up some servers, which I do have that in my past, and that's all gone but today, you know, you wake up and I guess some people, it could be anything from, Hey, I could just use Airtable and that's my business, right?

Other people get a little more in the weeds and, you know, I know people that build webpages using the GitHub pages and that's their website so let's assume everybody has the, I need to put my stuff somewhere and I guess more traditionally, a startup says I could be using AWS, Google, or Azure, or even like those Heroku and Digital Ocean and CloudFlare and I'm not here to pitch one over the other, but it's more of this. That happens. right?

You're gonna find some place to do it. I think under Satya Nadella, which is, if you externally look at Microsoft and some of us have been around Microsoft as a person for what, the majority of their life. I mean, I started on Windows, and Visual Basic and all this kind of stuff.

Mark

Yeah, same, same.

I was using those Windows 3.1

Michael

It's historically with a lot of us like it or not. And then even in the gaming spheres.

Mark

Yeah, yeah.

Michael

I think under Satya, Microsoft has done an amazing job of acquiring assets, LinkedIn, GitHub, some others and there's also, Jim's been culturally remaking the company right around what we see for, Hey, equipping everybody to build what they need for whatever they do is Microsoft's mantra.

I know that's not the exact marketing slogan, but it's that, and that's in every kind of like vertical segment. I would say Microsoft has done some fantastic jobs in a bunch of segments and I think it has realized over the last couple years that we could be doing a better job in startups and digital natives and I was at AWS and was doing the same kind of function, but purely technical.

And to be honest, I think all of us look for growth, you know, and when someone said, Hey, Would you be willing to do this, but for Microsoft, but it's the whole thing. It's the business, it's the tech. And I'm like, I've never rolled a GM hat of my life. I've done some startups and obviously you guys are all senior leaders, you do everything but at these big companies, you're kind of put in these boxes, but for someone to say, Hey, your box is the top box, looking at the whole problem. Hey, I'm like, that's quite interesting.

And then I have mad respect for the Microsoft brand. I think it's, like I said, I've grown up around it. I see it. And I've seen the change. You know, it was really funny. I was standing behind somebody getting their, I was with my kid yesterday and then the smoothie boost juice, right? The smoothie thing out at the thing.

And a whole group of, I think they were like high schoolers or college people sitting in front of me. And of course they're whipping through their phones with WhatsApp, Snapchat and all this. And what's funny is I saw two or three of 'em using Microsoft Outlook for email, which I thought was interesting, cuz they were not of age that they had jobs, I don't think. And I was like, they just see it as a good email client, which frankly I think that, well, mobile Outlook is pretty decent cross-platform email client.

So just this whole notion of like building things for helping people to do their, their stuff and I think Azure is something that's just amazing capability. But if also, if you look at GitHub, you look at Visual Studio, you look at all the pieces that you might need to run a startup. People use LinkedIn to find jobs. This whole thing is something that we have not articulated well into the startup community to say, Hey, if you're a startup and you're two guys and you're gonna go build out. You're gonna need all these pieces. You're gonna need a comms tool. You're gonna need a place to store your code. You're gonna need some developer tools.

Granted, I won't argue, you could get all these pieces from different people. Got it. I'm not, it's true, right? Best of breed but you could also decide to say, I don't mind getting them all from Microsoft. By the way, we have a credits kind of a freebies program for it. So that's the startup hub microsoft.com. We call it Founders Hub, and what I'm doing is just kind of looking at the totality of APAC and saying, can we do better than what we're doing when it comes to working with startups and that's of all shapes and sizes.

So I've only been here about four months. I'm hiring out a team and the idea here is to create a competitive ecosystem for all startups, which I think all startups should be appreciative of. Like you want us and Google and AWS competing hard for your business so that you get the best of everything to, and I think it's good for the community. And at the end of the day, that's kind of what I move on, which is, you know, turning Microsoft into a competitor in the digital native startup space is good for the community and that's my vantage point and I'm just a few months into it.

And that's still where I sit.

Mark

Would you say it's an oversimplification to call yourself a Microsoft ...

Michael

It's not, it's basically because you have startups of all shapes and sizes. It can get complicated because you could have a person that, like, I just had coffee with someone. It's literally one founder and their CTO is joining and they have decks and they have an angel round and they're going, and nothing's even been coded yet, and my pitch to him was, you know, you're gonna need email, right?

You're gonna need documents and you're gonna need video conferencing. Plus you're gonna need a place to store your code. Oh, and you're gonna have to put your code somewhere to run it. Okay, Microsoft has all those things. So for that person, it's kind of like your tech stack in a box. right?

That's great. And I think for those people, that's a simple conversation, but if you're over here and you're like been running for four years and you're on AWS or GCP or Heroku or Digital Ocean, that's a different conversation, cuz you're like, do you wanna move this thing that's more complicated? And then if you're a giant startup, that's even more complicated. I'm looking at all of it.

So I think these conversations change, but at the end of the day, it's we think Microsoft can be a good partner for startups of all shapes and sizes across different parts of our technology. Some of it could be the Azure stuff. Some of it could be power apps, which is the whole low code, no code thing, which is actually growing like weed. Some of it could be just the things you wanna say, Hey, I wanna use GitHub and the developer tools.

So I think everybody has a different viewpoint of what they might see in us. I'm representing all of it. And I think different startups of different cohorts are gonna see it differently.

I hope that's not too complicated, but that's how it all, that's the big,

Mark

Not at all, not at all. I think from our perspective as well, like you said, different shapes and sizes, different phase in their journey and that means different requirements, different things that they need and you're just trying to be there to provide all.

Michael

Yeah, I think it's just enable them to build.

And I think if you're a gaming company, like we just launched a bunch of amazing things that basically puts a lot of the gaming platform in and for gaming people that might be super useful. Other people say, no, I'm gonna go build all that stuff. Like, you know, everybody has a different viewpoint, but one of the things I always tell people, and you know, this from building the startup is like at the end of the day guys it's what do you build that a customer wants to pay you for?

And most of the time the customer doesn't ask you how it was built. Maybe they want, they're curious about it. They're generally like, are you delivering me a product that I'll be willing to pay for?

If Microsoft can help that startup in any form or fashion on that journey, I love to talk to you and I'm just a very open door policy kind of person. I keep a Calendarly going for coffee meetings and virtual meetings. And I tell anybody if you want to talk to us so we can learn more about you and you wanna learn about more about us, that's great, 'cause I think that's where we're at with wanting to work with people.

And again, it's just to provide a competitive ecosystem and that's, and that I think everybody can benefit it from.

Mark

Yeah, most definitely. You were talking about these 1, 2-men shops, and then you moved on and you said there are these other companies that are, they're already in the middle of their journey 5, 6 years in, maybe a little under 10, and let's just say that, this is a problem that I run into a lot.

I'll run into a lot of people who are like, you know, let's just say 90% already on the cloud, they're using all Azure or all AWS or all GCP. I've never had to do this, but let's say that I'm and I would assume, you might have to run into this problem in your current role. You might have to get someone who's 90 to a hundred percent on AWS and persuade them to come over.

Michael

Yeah.

So it's, it's, it's not easy, right?

And I think all of the, you know, I mean, I guess I've worked also at AWS and I was doing the other things. So it really depends what people's situations are. Like one of the things that we notice as companies march on and get bigger, for some people it's really a simple, like I'm all in on this, I don't want to talk to anybody, have a nice day and that's fine. Like those people it's like, hi, it's nice to meet you. Like it ever help you great.

But as you talk to people, you'll find that there's these anomalies or various buckets and what we see more and more is kind of this core workload phenomenon of when you press the button on the app, it's calling that and it's doing its thing, but behind it is a data lake that is actually fairly disconnected from the push of that button and is actually different. And then you might even see that that's being run on Snowflake or being run on somebody else.

So data is largely in the bigger shop. You remember, we're speaking to the big shop, not. The data's largely starting to take a life of its own and becoming almost a separate system. The AIML stuff is starting to look the same way and then even, maybe you bundle this with data, maybe you don't, the whole what am I using to look at it and write reports on it and share with people is another thing.

Mark

Yes.

Michael

So in some of the big shops, we actually already see where they're, Hey, my core workload is this, but my BI stuff is that. And my ML stuff is this. And in some of those cases, I've already seen two or three vendor shops with that. Now, maybe it's not GCP user, but it's whatever name for that thing. That's starting to happen. And then I think you're actually gonna see a whole thing grow up around low code, no code because you know, all of us, and I'm sure you know this, like how do you have enough cybersecurity experts? Do enough of them exist? I don't even know.

It's funny. Cuz my son's looking at trying to figure out what he's gonna do and he's 14 and he's, you know, I could do this like that. And then one of the things was cybersecurity for like an IT program. I said, and he, and I it's a three-year program. I said, look, I'll bet you a thousand Sing and it'll be cash money that you will have job offers during or right after that program.

Like, because yeah, and, and I don't even think you need to say, I'm going on to Poly(technic). I'm going, if you just know how to do things and I go, and I guarantee you'll find a place to intern and the place you intern probably wants to hire you because they can't get enough of cybersecurity people.

Mark

Tell him to gimme a call, tell him to gimme a call, tell only gimme a call.

Michael

I think the same things happen.

Mark

I won't take that back, right?

Michael

Like if you look at how amazing APAC is, I'm sure you're saying I can't get enough skilled individuals in the door, in our various countries that we're working at.

Mark

Yes.

Michael

And I think you see, like there's a startup I like here in Singapore, called Locofy, which is taking, it takes your Figma, I think it takes your Figma drawings for apps and it does the React stuff behind the scenes for you so it's from drawing like low code, and then Microsoft also has our power app stuff, which is growing like a weed.

I think some of your bigger shops are saying, Hey, we have this hard stuff over here. This is gonna need engineers. We built this data model that everybody can use our BI steps here. Oh, and by the way, for these basic, you know, you need an app inside your shop that has a form that does this. You don't need an engineer for that. You're gonna go and use this stuff and point into that.

I think, more and more, the big shops will largely start to look maybe even like what enterprises look like, where due to the complexity plus cost, plus maybe disseminating these features around your global centers, you're gonna actually have to carve these up different ways.

So for those people, we start talking to them about, you know, what does this look like? What is that like? Can we help you with that? Maybe it's not always the core workload thing.

Other people, you know, if you're running a shop, you know this, and I'll make this very simple. Your entirety of your spend is probably people, marketing and cloud. Those are the three big buckets and every startup's gonna have them.

Mark

Those are the big buckets. Yep.

Michael

If you're having a downturn or maybe the market didn't work for you, or you're gonna have to cut back, it's gonna come out of those three, right?

And it's like, what are you gonna do? Lay off people? Maybe.

You're probably gonna ratchet it down. That's why Google and a few people said, if there's a downturn, they see it in their stuff. I think Facebook's already seeing this. The third is reduce your tech spend. I don't even have to call it cloud, reduce your tech spend.

How do you want to do that?

Maybe you start looking for places to sign deals or come up with a cheaper, better, faster way of doing something. I think your big shops that are like your series A, B, C, D kind of shops, if they're looking at any of these inflection points, I guarantee you, the investors and CFOs say, we're gonna have to go after these three buckets somehow.

It doesn't mean shut things off. We know that you need to run a business, but it might be becoming smarter about it.

And I think some people know, and the other thing you see is acquisitions and mergers where, like if you guys were gonna buy a company and you know, you run on this and they run on that, you're not just gonna shut it down. You're gonna have to figure out. So we see these hybrid thing as a very real thing.

So you would say, I think it's legit. I don't think you wake up and actually build a multi-cloud system from day one. We all know that. That probably doesn't make a lot of sense, but I think via acquisition or you like say happenstance and the whole thing. And I want the ML thing to sit over here, cuz I really like the product better. That happens as well.

So those conversations, going back to your initial question, they're complicated, but we definitely like to help people understand where we might fit into that puzzle piece. May not be everything, that's okay. I don't think the world works that way. It could be a piece of it. I just think it's a relationship. We just wanna help people out, and we see it around the development stuff. I mean, how many people don't use GitHub or, you know, there's a, there's sure people use other things.

I'm not saying there's not another product, but it's a huge successful product. Now you take the whole Copilot stuff, which is growing like weed, kind of command line completion for code. It's pretty intense, right? So I see lots of opportunity for Microsoft, but I would say each company's journey might see a different version of Microsoft, right?

Mark

Actually command line completion for code, right?

That's interesting to me, if it works anything my autocorrect. I don't know if I'm down for that

Michael

You should check it out. It's called GitHub Copilot. They have about, I think, a million users on it after launch and it's just learning from everybody's stuff. It uses your stuff and their stuff. It's a machine learning portal but people are saying it's pretty amazing. You can go see some videos online that people are sharing. People are like, yeah, how do I live without this?

But you know, I think the whole machine learning, there's so many different aspects. One is like, what? And I'm sure you guys use it with your stuff. Like, what do you learn about your data and, you know, for threat detection and stuff like that but I also feel like machine learning's gonna eventually get poured into all the day-to-day stuff that'll just make your day-to-day a little bit more intelligent.

Mark

I think that's because, and of course, that's the first stop because that's the most data that we have, right?

That's the thing that we have the most data about.

Michael

Yeah.

Mark

So definitely that's the first stop. Most definitely,

I think as well. I agree there. Actually a little bit about, a step back into that which cloud, multi-cloud, all that stuff. We were looking at the numbers and towards the end of last year, Q4 of 2021, Microsoft has 21% of the cloud infrastructure market. And it's reportedly starting to take chomps out of AWS' share year over year.

Are there anything now, I mean, you haven't been there long, but since you have been there in Microsoft, is there any particular factors that you think play a big role in that?

Michael

I think it's when you're the number one, which AWS is, it's kind of like everybody's taken a chomp, right?

Hats off AWS for this amazing, like they just had an amazing quarter, and how they keep having this repeatable growth on AWS. It's phenomenal, right? I think people say it's an $80 billion business now, or something just AWS or it's a runway to 78 billion or something.

But at the same time, I think that choice is really good in the ecosystem. And I think what Microsoft has done a phenomenal job over the last couple of years is this focus on where can we meet you in the cloud? And one of the things you can see us putting a lot of emphasis on is this thing called industry cloud.

And what we mean by that is most people kind of rock up. to a cloud, a bunch of services and I go and build everything I need on top of it. But I think the world, as the world keeps getting more and more complex, you don't wanna necessarily go and build from scratch every little thing you need for everything, so Microsoft has this notion of an industry cloud, where we're taking Azure plus pieces by industry. So maybe it's finance or manufacturing or metaverse and saying, what can we build into it that will meet a particular need for somebody so they can move faster to their end business rather than kind of build everything up.

I think this focus and really the focus on what's been happening on for developers and the tooling is just really starting to see, like it's kind of coming into its own, but it's been a multi-year push. So I think that like Microsoft's made some amazing strides with Azure and I think this industry cloud focus you'll see is another step in what we're doing to kind of make life easier for certain sectors and yeah, these are amazing, huge competitive industries, and you know, this, the overall market keeps growing and I think the numbers still show like, I'm terrible at every little fact and figure.

The majority of the world is still on prem. People forget that. So if you think about the opportunity ahead for someone like Microsoft, given that the world is still moving into the cloud, it's just phenomenal.

Mark

Most definitely.

From what I'm hearing then it really strikes a chord with me because here at Horangi, we tell people, Hey, let us worry about your cybersecurity because cybersecurity is not your business. We'll worry about the cybersecurity part so you can focus on what you guys do, right?

Whereas you guys are saying, Hey, it's really, like you said, we're one's paying you to build these things.

Michael

Yeah.

They're only gonna pay for the thing there, that feature, right? Value customer.

Mark

Right. So let us build that stuff so you don't have to worry about it so you can in turn, push that value on that other end, where you really need to be focusing anyway.

Michael

I think there's also lots of opportunity for like where the world's heading. Hybrid is like a reality. I do three days a week in the office and two days a week home and I just take my laptop with me from place to place. At work I plug it into the monitor; at home I don't.

But everything kind of functions, like Microsoft building a lot of stuff, even around this, for where we're going with Teams and presence and it knows when you're in the meeting room, it knows when you're not in the meeting room. You know, these type of things all have like a cloud permutation to them cuz you can build around them with Teams and stuff.

So I think it's really powerful to kind of have the fact that yeah, there is a cloud, but there's an ecosystem with Teams and Office that says it knows presence., and you even see teams where people are just building their app to live inside a Teams, not actually live as a normal app because Teams has such a massive installed base.

So I think there's lots of interesting things. I think, you know, my journey is I'm four months in, I'm trying to wrap my head around what pieces of this will be useful to startups and digital natives. Because it's not everything and, and they have a different problem sometimes with what they're building.

Mark

Yeah.

Michael

But it's super exciting. And I think, you know, I just go back to ... there's lot, like you said, the problems keep coming. So what's fun is to kind of keep saying yep, and that gives us lots of opportunities for people that we can work with. Take the overall market, take the demographics. I tell people over and over, there's no better place I want to be than ASEAN, right, or at this stage of the game, with some intersections of the cloud, because it's just, you know, it's not done yet.

Is it another five years? 10 years? I have no idea, but it's, it's the demographics kind of show us that there's a lot more to do. And, you know, the problems keep getting harder, especially in cybersecurity, especially in all the connectivity, people working from home, that's kind of exasperated these systems which means there's more things to fix.

Mark

Yeah. Most definitely, I mean the attack surface hasn't just increased; it's evolving.

Michael

It's almost like exponential increases. Cause it's like, like you said, more devices coming, more complexity. The surface area changing, like, you know numbers better. It's not just a little bit harder. It's X harder, you know, and we saw it during, COVID just the amount

Mark

X times harder

Michael

things that were happening because people moved from being in their secure office network environments to like working from coffee shops. It made it even harder to keep everything kind of locked down. There's no end in sight really to the problems. I think that the question is what are the solutions that map to business opportunity?

Mark

A hundred percent. I think that's been the big theme here that we've been talking about. And I think it's a big theme of just generally what we do, what you and I do. Where other people see problems, we see opportunity so yeah, it's definitely exciting.

Super, very exciting.

We're just reaching the top of our time here. So, Michael, for all of our viewers and listeners out there, one thought that you, one little takeaway that you wanted to ...

Michael

Yeah.

So I think it's like ... it's not a sales speech. It's just more like Microsoft would love to hear from you and I think that we can do a better job than what we've done in the past to listening and reaching out to startups. So I'm on LinkedIn, it's just Michael Smith Junior. Friend me, send me a message. I'll book time with you. I'm in listening mode, but I also love meeting people and hearing about startups. And that's kind of what's fun about being in this business.

So if there's anything we can do to help, if there's anything that you're curious about, what Microsoft does that I can help, you can just feel free to ping me. LinkedIn's probably the easiest place to find me, but that's my only speech.

Mark

Yeah yeah, if any of you guys listen to this episode, I think it's pretty sure now that's what gets this guy excited?

So yeah. Reach out to Michael Smith on LinkedIn.

Michael, thank you so much for coming along. Dropping the knowledge, was pretty cool. It was a great convo. Really enjoyed it.

Michael

Awesome.

Mark

We'd be happy to have you

Michael

Thanks for you

Mark

another time. That would be great.

Michael

See you.

Mark Anthony Fuentes

Mark Fuentes has over a decade of experience in the cyber security field highlighted by roles in organizations such as Verizon, The International Monetary Fund, and The United States Department of Homeland Security. Mark is an avid consumer of technology trends and threat intelligence and seeks out new applications of tech and research to combat cyber crime.

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