As the racquet meets the ball, there's more at play than just a game of tennis; there's a world of strategy, resilience, and adaptability that mirrors the high-stakes realm of tech entrepreneurship. That's something Cole Crawford, the tech entrepreneur and former tennis pro, knows all too well. Join us on an exhilarating journey where we trace Cole's footsteps from the baseline of the court to the frontline of cutting-edge technology. We cover the inception of Vapor IO and how it's redefining the internet landscape, delve into the synergy between sportsmanship and business savvy, and discuss the potential of edge computing and AI to revolutionize industries from healthcare to sports betting.

Ever wondered how being an introvert shapes a leader? Get an intimate look at the intricacies of introversion as Cole and I unpack how this trait has played a pivotal role in the competitive worlds of both - tennis and business. From overcoming shyness to harnessing self-awareness as a strength, we unpack the unique challenges and advantages introverts face. We also celebrate the joy and challenges of past job roles—from Cole's days of embracing Linux to the thrill of building OpenStack—and the visionary steps that led to the foundation of Vapor IO. It's a tale of technological disruption, musical creativity, and the drive that blazes the trail in the startup landscape.

Prepare to have your perspectives challenged on everything from AI's role in our daily lives to the future of immersive technology. We explore the transformative potential of edge computing, the interplay with 5G networks, and how these advancements could change the way we communicate and experience the world. Cole shares his insights on AI fall detection in healthcare, the rise of micro-betting in sports, and the human side of technology—from VR for memory preservation to mental health and bridging the educational divide. This episode isn't just a podcast; it's an invitation to explore the profound impacts of our choices and the relentless pursuit to enrich the human experience through innovation.

Resources: https://www.vapor.io/ ︱ LinkedIn ︱Instagram

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Cole: 0:00

I got to kind of just shift my focus from me to them while still playing tennis and I think of myself as a really good coach. I thought of myself as a very good player but again, looking back hindsight, I'm probably a better coach than I was a player and, in terms of fulfillment, seeing one of those kids win a tournament probably meant more to me than me winning anything. So again, maybe I'm super lucky in the fact that the regret that I've got is very low, like very little regret on where I ended up, even though there's that moment that stings a little bit. But then there's what comes after the sting and I think that's where you grow and what you do with that sting is kind of character defining or redefining, altering, enhancing, whatever you want to use.

Cole: 0:54

The Florida move thing was probably an overreaction to the last thing that had happened, where I just quit. I was like I'm not going to quit, but the race is always ahead of you, it's never behind you, and just like a tennis match, the match is ahead of you, it's not behind you. Like the points that you should have won, what can you do about, should have absolutely nothing. That point is done and over and you've got to just move on to the next point. And so that's now how I think about starting companies, that's how I think about growing companies and just growing myself. You know I'm now 45. So I'm not like really young anymore, but there's a lot of road ahead if you prepare and you do kind of the right things.

Klara: 1:42

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Grand Slam Journey podcast, where we discuss various topics related to the Grand Slam Journey of our lives and our passions in sports, business and technology. Today's conversation is with Cole Crawford and we talk about just that his upbringing, growing up with the aspiration to be a professional tennis player and living the journey of a professional tennis player, and then transitioning to his next career in business and technology. Cole is the founder and CEO of Vapor IO, the creators of Kinetic Edge Platform, the world's true edge computing company. He's also the co-founder of the Open19 Foundation, founding executive director of the Open Compute Project, former chairman of the Open Data Center Alliance and co-founder of OpenStack. Cole was instrumental in creating of the US government's definition of cloud computing. He has over 20 years of leadership in the telecom and data center industry. Cole is a Forbes contributor. He has been named to data economist lists of the world's most influential data economy leaders and the world's first top 50 edge computing influencers. Cole states today's internet was built from the core out. Now we need to re-architect it from the edge in. Fixing that is Vapor's mission. They're engineers and business people passionate about re-architecting the internet at the edge for the good of humanity and the good of their customers. They do this by deploying the enabling infrastructure for the next generation of services provided by their customers and then supporting it with the business processes and ecosystems necessary to reach critical mass.

Klara: 3:53

During this conversation, we cover Cole's diverse upbringing. Cole was a competitive tennis player and grew up with passion to make tennis his professional career, and he lived this passion and dream until he decided to transition to the next chapter of his life. He's also a musician and technologist. He's always had deep passion in technology, from Linux to understanding how complex systems and architecture work and how you can recreate them with his contrarian view and make them better for the society. We cover the lessons Cole has learned from his sport and how we apply them in the next chapter of his life, his second career. Cole states that he used some of the key principles tennis had taught him in the entrepreneurial life to build new technology and companies. Vapor is one of his many startups.

Klara: 5:01

We discuss the reasons for starting Vapor, what was the main hypothesis behind it, as well as some of the changes that he had to navigate, including challenges they faced. Cole shares some interesting and unique use cases for edge computing and, last but not least, we envision what the future of technology, computing and connectivity may hold for us. Cole shares his perspective on Vapor's mission and his own personal passion for making the world a better place, helping to create new ways of collaborating, entertaining, interacting and new experiences that are being created and transformed by what he and the team at Vapor are creating. Of course, we touch on inferencing, large language model generative AI, xr or special computing, v2x, which means communication between vehicle and any entity that may affect or may be affected by the vehicle, and much more. In essence, this conversation covers all aspects of my personal passion as well sports, business and technology.

Klara: 6:23

One of the most challenging things about podcasting is trying to navigate, taking time off and disconnecting from publishing episodes on a regular basis. The 14 hour flight home has certainly helped me get some focused time to get this episode to you. I'm not planning on launching a new one next week, and so if you get bored, feel free to tune into this one again. From my perspective, it has a lot of wisdom on all of the key topics that I typically talk about sports, business and technology, and how to take the lessons we have learned through our athletic endeavors into the next chapter of our lives. For context, this conversation was recorded in the middle of January when the Australian Open was going on.

Klara: 7:19

If you enjoyed this episode, I want to ask you to please share with someone you believe may enjoy it as well. Consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. This is your host, clara Egochova. Thank you for tuning in, and now I bring you Cole Crawford. Hello Cole, Welcome to Grand Slam Journey Podcast. How are you?

Cole: 7:43

I'm really good. Thanks for having me. It's fun to be here.

Klara: 7:45

I'm super excited. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a few months and glad to have you here actually doing this in person, which is awesome.

Cole: 7:54

During the Australian Open, no less.

Klara: 7:56

Oh, that's true, but I'm very behind since I came back from Cozumel, so I've only seen Instagram snippets, so you'll probably more up to date.

Cole: 8:05

Maybe lots of work going on too.

Klara: 8:07

Anyone you're cheering for.

Cole: 8:09

Oh man, you got a route for the old guys. I'm rooting for Jo Kovic.

Klara: 8:14

He's making the history, so why not? And he's a fantastic dance player.

Cole: 8:19

Fantastic and if you train your body and your mind and eat right and it shows you what the art of the possible is. So love to see where he's at currently and it'll be good to see him. Potentially, this probably settles the score right. He'd be the best in the world of all time.

Klara: 8:35

Yes. Well, I think many argue he already is, with what he has achieved and actually just what you shared about him and what I know a little bit about you, I think the two of you very much aligned with trying to maximize your human potential, and you still do it in many ways, physically and obviously with your business and technology. And so being here it's super exciting for me because you have literally like the perfect three pillars for my podcast. You have athletic backgrounds that I'm excited to dive into and obviously passion with in technology and scaling technology and different business ventures. So I'm curious where this conversation takes us. I think we could be here for maybe half a day if we wanted to, so before we dive in, you are currently the CEO of Vaporio and you're much more than that. Especially, your background and experience is really interesting, and so when I give you an opportunity to introduce yourself to the listeners, Sure.

Cole: 9:35

So I've always tried to balance play with work. You know, my dad, like a number of dads and moms and grandparents around the world, always said if you're having fun, it's not work. Yeah, I try and take that to heart. I think you're going to live longer if you like what you do, and Vapor is certainly one of those journeys that has taken a long time. Vapor is, I think, my seventh startup, but it's certainly the longest startup I've ever been a part of.

Cole: 10:04

Yeah, I come from a tech background. My uncle was a Windows developer, like for Windows 3.1. Like I think that was Windows for workstations, if I'm not mistaken and so he taught me to code when I was like 12 years old and I just sort of grew up with tech. Never wanted to do tech as a career, I wanted to be a tennis player, as you know. But you know, looking back, I think that kind of the arc that I've had, I rely heavily on the mental aspect of what it takes to be an athlete and apply that in business across lots of different startups that span wireless wireline networking, telcos, clouds, hyperscale data centers, social networks.

Klara: 10:55

Yes, I think there's many of those. I love that you mentioned that you take the athletic mindset and apply it to the next ventures, and I strongly believe that our upbringing shapes a lot of who we are. So I'm curious if you could take us back even to your childhood. What was your upbringing like? What draw of you? You mentioned tennis specifically, or any other sports you have played and anything else that stood out, because, listening even to your other few podcasts, it seems like the tennis and technology really played a role early on and those were kind of the big two passions you have had.

Cole: 11:34

I think that's right. I mean, the only other thing I did as a kid, I mean tennis was really my sport. I didn't really deviate too much. I think you know, just like in business, you need a certain amount of focus. I was pretty dead set on, you know, having tennis be a big part of my life for as long as it could be a part of my life, and I think maybe I had the foresight I don't know, maybe the foresight was my parents or my coaches, but I'd like to think I had some foresight that you know, if you're going to be really successful at something, probably best to focus on that something and ensure that, you know, you're not distracted by like these other things.

Cole: 12:13

And I was a kid, you know I started playing tennis when I was four years old, so very early, and I come from a very long line of tennis players that you know we've chatted before. For those that listen to this podcast that are tennis fans, you might know, like the Linux Academy, my uncle taught at the Linux Academy in the 1980s and he's like currently, I think, number 10 or 11 in his age division. My aunt is, I think, number four or three in the world for her age division and in mixed doubles I think they're number two. So you know he was my coach for a long time and I just wanted to focus on tennis. I am a musician and I do love that part of my life as well. That, I think, brings in some of the creative parts of what it takes to run a company. But between tennis, music and just being brought up in a, you know, a tech oriented family, in a tech oriented world, I think the pillars you talk about probably were serendipitous for my own personal and career arc.

Klara: 13:13

Wow, I didn't know you were a musician. What instrument or what do you play?

Cole: 13:17

I can play saxophone. Wow, I can play guitar, I can play piano and I sing.

Klara: 13:22

Wow, look at that. That's an interesting combination. I love that. So, diving into actually maybe all of those three, how did you discover some of these passions? Was there someone who influenced you? From tennis, it seems like you had your family members, so that seemed like a natural gravitation towards that sport. So about music, and it seems like technology you mentioned also, you had your family and technology. Was it kind of just that being exposed, or were there any other aspects you want to highlight?

Cole: 13:56

Man, you're actually giving me like a crisis of identity here a little bit because I you know you'd like to think you're kind of just your own person, and you always have been, but like thinking about those three things, you know my dad was a very successful song writer, also a tennis player, but very successful Like has written albums for Disney with my aunt and you know he's written music for famous Americana country artists. So brings into question for me a nature versus nurture question and it feels like maybe there's more nurture than nature for the passions that I have, cause yeah, I kind of do the things that and I'm passionate about the things that you know I saw my family members doing and, who knows, maybe I think part of tennis, part of the mental side of tennis, is pattern recognition and, geez, maybe I'm just good at pattern recognition.

Klara: 14:51

Or maybe you're talented and actually many things, because it's, I think, a very rare combination. So, speaking about those three, I think those three take a lot of time, and so doing all of that when you were a kid, what comes to mind is obviously time management, but also focus, and so obviously, being an athlete, I know how important focusing on the sport is, gradually more as you become better and better. So how did you balance those three, or what was your day like Even back then? I'm curious how you divided your attention to to those three things.

Cole: 15:27

Great question. I mean, we traveled a bunch and I was lucky enough to go to school in a year round school and so we chose sort of the seasons, like I grew up in Colorado and I didn't need to take the winter off, so I went to school three out of the four seasons, but then, as I was playing tennis in school, I was out so much traveling in kind of the late summer, fall, when tennis was that's when in your mountain place tennis so I took summers off, so I had summer and fall and half the year to basically travel and play tennis, and then we would like a lot of kids that were kind of homeschooled for some part of the year too. You know, we kind of took all of this with us. We traveled in a big conversion van with my family. My dad brought his guitar.

Cole: 16:18

I had an acoustic guitar that we played and I remember like now very vividly I don't know I haven't thought about this in forever, I think it was. This must have been 1994. Tim Currier was like on the front page of tennis magazine with a guitar and there was a whole feature about him taking his guitar around the tour and I was like, yeah, you know, I practice with my dad and at the time I probably paid, I don't know 20 or 30 minutes a day. But you know, I was just, I was never into kind of the normal things that kids were into, like video games and, you know, going and playing like flag football at the park or even like riding bicycles. I can't ride a bicycle, but I kind of wanted to be on the court or I wanted to be writing lyrics or playing guitar.

Klara: 17:03

So it seems like you were quite maybe between the three. What I'm sensing introverted and fine with being by yourself with your own thoughts and creating things on your own.

Cole: 17:14

Total social introvert. I don't mind. I mean, I actually like being on stage and I like playing in front of crowds. I like playing tennis in front of crowds. But I am by no means an extrovert, I'm a social introvert.

Klara: 17:27

And I think there's also power. Maybe we can talk about it even later when we transition to your role. What do you do in technology? But I do think there's power of being introverted and because you can sort of think things through, and then there's more and more people talking about the power of introvert and leadership positions. Anything you want to mention on that and how you maybe have evolved or did those things help you with that? Maybe even obviously playing tennis in front of people that helps a little bit. But music as well. There's something very unique in playing a song in front of audience.

Cole: 18:04

Well, I think there's good and bad to both. I think actually, as a kid I was probably more like a BNTJ and now I'm like an INTJ. But just because you're introverted doesn't mean you can have a hot head on the tennis court, which I did. But I also would think that sort of being introspective if you could get past like the self-criticality of what you could have done better, which is a big thing when you're a kid and it's a big thing when you're competitive.

Cole: 18:35

Once you get past that, I do think it allows for kind of the growth and what you're focused on to happen a little more organically than if you need to be taught those sort of lessons, and so I definitely think that there are pros and cons. At the same time, I probably had to struggle through some things by myself when I could have asked for help and gotten there quicker too. So I think it's a double-edged sword.

Klara: 19:02

I like the second one because I think that one I'm still struggling with myself as a tennis player. When things are tough, I have a tendency to lock in and refine my own game and skills and trying to figure out how do I get myself out of this. But there's situations and the older I grow, the more I realize, look, there is a big power in asking for help and talking to others about specific things.

Cole: 19:28

It's funny, right, because coaches are a real thing. You have a lot of blind spots that you just don't identify yourself, and if you try and solve these things on your own, it's going to take you a very long time. I was just reading an article the other day. I can't remember who it was, but there's some player that basically just reconstructed their serve, and to do that yourself, I think that would be incredibly tough, and I don't know that you'd actually end up with a better serve just by changing your serve. Like it's going to be far more qualitative than quantitative, and I myself was a coach. People came to me to get better, but oftentimes I would just want to power through something myself too. So, yeah, pros and cons, and what's the old saying? Half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at.

Klara: 20:20

Yes, I think there's definitely power in knowing what you're bad at. Actually, one of playing tennis that reminded me one of the most famous investor, mr Brody. I actually don't know his name, but I met him when I was playing some 10Ks in the US, in Maryland, and there was the advice when Sentence said know what you're bad at what you're not good at. And I thought about that sentence for a least since then. It was more than 20 years ago now and there's so much power in it. I'm still learning what that sentence means.

Cole: 20:55

And it's tough right, because you're fighting your own biases. I always thought that I had for tennis. I always thought that I had good footwork, I was fast, I had decent stamina throughout matches. But coaches, over and over and again, were like you have kind of lazy footwork and ultimately I switched from a two-handed backhand to a one-handed backhand to hit open stance, in part because my coaches thought that I had suboptimal footwork. But I had to fight that myself because I'm telling myself you don't have bad footwork, you're really fast, your coaches are wrong and so, like that mental battle, you have to also just accept and even if you don't initially accept it, you've got to try it and be open.

Cole: 21:39

And I think that that totally applies over to business as well. I've gotten a lot of advice in my career, on the technical side of my career, that it felt unnatural to do the things that they were suggesting. But I would find scenarios where I could attempt the suggestion and over time, what do they say? Water finds its balance and you learn as you go with these sort of things. But again, I think there's a double-edged sword and you weigh your biases against your results and then I think you end up where you. Well, I think I ended up where I was supposed to end up.

Klara: 22:25

And that's a great mindset. I think growing through that it taking me to my own journey, to realizing that there's also a lot of power in that. But going back to, maybe, your tennis and diving deeper, because you were a tremendous tennis player. Funny enough, when we met first, you told your tennis story and I could still sense how much passion you have for the sport and all it taught you. So maybe diving in a little bit deeper what was your upbringing like, maybe even specific to tennis, and is there a specific thing that you enjoyed about the sport? Because I feel like as I interview more people, there are some things that are still very personal, so it's interesting to hear other person's perspective on what attracted them to the sport.

Cole: 23:12

Well, again, I was sort of thrust into the sport. I remember as a junior you know this, this isn't like often talked about but in the early, early days I was sponsored by head as a little kid and then I wanted to switch to Wilson. But I ended up with a preferred relationship with Wilson. But that switch, for whatever reason, that was a big inflection point for me. I don't know why, because I really thought that you know, I was critiquing my game. I had other people critiquing my game. I was looking to optimize my strokes.

Cole: 23:47

At the time, I was starting to focus more on where do I want to be in a couple of years, and I think that that applies to what we're just talking about too. I think it's really important to like visualize your future and kind of plan towards what you want. It's big for Djokovic and how to stay healthy. It's big for anybody that thinks about longevity. You know, the question is not how do I live to 150? The question is, what do you want to be doing at 80? And like, I just like to walk my dog. You know what I mean. Like at 80 or 90, like if you've got the balance and the strength to get out and walk your dog, you know, as reasonably young people you know, we kind of take for granted the kind of frailty that comes with the 85 or 90 year old body generally. So that foresight I think of where you want to take your game and what you want to do that was me for the first time thinking I'm going to really invest in this. You know, when you're eight, it's just fun, right. You're just out there winning tournaments and getting trophies and your parents buy you a big celebration dinner. It's fun. But when you start thinking, okay, this is like something I might make a career out of or something I want to take very, very seriously, I think anybody with kind of a competitive mindset also wants to eliminate not just distractions but extracurricular things that could cause them to fail right.

Cole: 25:10

So that was also the same time that a lot of my school friends were starting to potentially experiment with recreational drugs and drinking and I never got into any of that and that was partly because I said you know, if I make a thing of this, if I really go for this like there's going to be no excuses on the other side, I'll have succeeded or failed on my own merits. It was really like the head to Wilson shift. That did that. So that was the first thing. And then, kind of a side note, like randomly, I actually for a year my junior year in high school I had gone from being top five in the nation to kind of top call it 50, what kind of distraction come in to my life.

Cole: 25:57

And I actually stopped showing up for tennis practice. There's a long story. I don't. I don't even know if it's interesting, but I was a better tennis player than the number one singles player we were about, even on matches, but he was the coach's son. But the reason I wasn't number one and the coach told me this and he told me flat out you're a better tennis player than my son, but you have a terrible work ethic for tennis.

Cole: 26:28

And in that year I did and it really just sort of put me off because I had spent, you know, my entire life thinking that tennis was going to make my career. And then here I am playing number two singles at a high school my junior year that I had gone to since I was a freshman, and played one singles. You know how it probably goes to school Like no freshman comes in and plays one singles, right Like they're seniors that are looking for their sort of college, you know, recruiting. So my sophomore year, my junior year, and then here comes this kid that you know kind of replaces you and I was like really mad, really angry about that and I actually told my parents. I went home and I was like you know what I'm done, very angsty. I just said I'm done, like this is my thing, and it was like a super kind of moment of self doubt and, I guess, general weakness, mental weakness. I kind of quit for a couple of weeks but it was enough for him to kick me off the tennis team, like my high school team. In the end, like you know, I came back, I played, I was already being recruited, so I kind of felt like you know, there was something on the back burner that I didn't really need my coach. In retrospect it was a really dumb thing. I should have stayed. I should have stayed and played. I hurt the team by leaving at state, but in a good way, but through kind of a bad event.

Cole: 27:47

That was another like really big learning opportunity that an analog to that would be. You know Thomas Edison's quote or he said I didn't fail a thousand times at making a light bulb. It took a thousand steps to create a light bulb. So I think it's only failure if you quit. But I had quit and so I make sure now that that's no longer. I've edited that out of my DNA, at least my mental DNA. So those, I think, were the two really big ones. And then, if there's a third, it was.

Cole: 28:22

This was before you could legally take money as a college tennis player. But the transition from summer to college actually lost a tennis scholarship altogether and I knew my parents went from a very young age, said, like your tennis lessons are your college fund, like that's how you're going to go to college, and so like that ended up being another, like probably ultimately bigger challenge for me in life. But I didn't quit. I actually relocated to Florida. I always had tech to fall back on, so I was actually working for America online. I was working nights for America online but I was teaching at Harbour Island Athletic Club during the day and in the evenings and that, like I was right between St Augustine and Jacksonville, where the ATP is based, and I was trying to play satellites. It was a much harder path because now I'm kind of like self funding a lot of this and you know how incredibly hard that is.

Cole: 29:20

The travel schedule is not fun, you know, when you're poor it's like less fun because, you're staying at like Motel six and we chatted about this, but you know I was eating like Taco Bell, like food. Nutrition was not what it is today.

Cole: 29:33

Like the food science of all of this is not what it was today. But on the other side of kind of my tennis story, like I've been able to build so much of that and I mean even in pitches for companies, I've started I often say like don't bet against an athlete, Never, never bet against an athlete, because they don't want to say no and they're going to plow through whatever it is right. They're almost singularly focused on an outcome and if they're dynamic enough, they're going to get to the right answer. They'll get to where they want to get. So those were kind of the big three inflection points in tennis. The rest, I think, was a lot of noise.

Cole: 30:16

Since the Australian Open is going on, these are the shows that people watch and get excited for, but the training happens elsewhere. This is not where Al Kirezz or Djokovic or whoever like golf or whoever. This is not where you get better. It's where you get mentally better playing in front of a big audience, but your right to be there happens somewhere else. But if you can take those lessons, I think it's totally possible to build that into your everyday life.

Klara: 30:48

I want to ask especially about the last lesson that you mentioned, because I lived it in a little bit similar, a little bit different way. But losing a tennis scholarship or not being able to compete for a tennis team when you already admitted and you're kind of committed, your playing is a big deal. I had to sit out for one and a half years of my eligibility and it's actually still a thing in some ways that still bugs me today. And so the fact that you actually somewhat I would say accidentally accepted a few money that by no means covers all the expenses and hard work that you put in right, there's not even winning a satellite tournament. That covers maybe the expense for that tournament itself, and that's all right 10K for sure.

Klara: 31:37

Yeah, how have you dealt with that? Going even a little bit deeper, how hard was it at that point? And now, looking at it from retrospect, Incredibly hard.

Cole: 31:48

Like it really incredibly hard, because you've built this idea of what you want for yourself and then, like, it just disappears. And I mean that was an incredibly challenging situation to be in, and I do remember almost making a I wouldn't say it was a snap decision, but it was a very fast follow because my parents were in Colorado, you know Western slope, and I was like, well, I don't want to live at home anymore. I think I was I don't know like two months from turning 18. And I really wanted to be more independent. And so I just woke up and I told my parents like I'm gonna go try and be a pro in Florida and I'll figure it out.

Cole: 32:37

And I moved to Florida. I actually had a girlfriend at the time who was also a tennis player, lived in Florida, and so I went and I'd applied for some tech jobs. I did get a job at an ISP, like an internet service provider, like a dial-up company. They didn't pay well and I actually think they went under pretty quickly after I got to Jacksonville and I was applying around to bigger companies but they didn't have like I didn't have a job immediately in the tech industry. And again, I could code, I could system architecture was kind of already a thing, but I ended up getting a job at a restaurant. You know, for a little bit and humbling for sure. I actually think everybody should take a job at a restaurant.

Klara: 33:23

You know, I've always felt like I wanted to be a waiter, at least just to experience what it is. I couldn't because if you're immigrant you can't work outside of school, so there's very limited options. But I actually feel understanding customer experience and kind of what it takes.

Cole: 33:39

You must learn quite a bit from that job 100% and at the time I was very bitter, I was very mad and very bitter. But again, I think the introspective view of okay, what can you learn from the situation you are in? That taught me a lot about humility. That taught me a lot about you know, I don't love the term, but some of the philosophies resonate with me. I actually think the very definition of a server in a restaurant is servant leader. You know you are responsible for, like, the experience that that table is going to have.

Cole: 34:14

They're at your mercy but, you're there to serve them, and so it taught me a lot about that, like listening to what people you know need and want from you and how to deliver that. But I didn't learn that lesson in the moment. That took some time but I ended up going to night school in Florida at Flagler, while I was playing tennis during the day. So I found my path and in retrospect I can 1,000% say if I were as successful on the men's side of tennis as you were on the women's side of tennis, I would be 100x less successful playing tennis than I am in tech. So you know, I think on both sides and for the audience, tournament-wise men and women get paid the same. But I look back now at kind of what I've accomplished in the tech field and I'd have to be a top 20 player probably to make the same amount of money.

Cole: 35:15

And it's not money. It's not about the money. I want to be clear. It's not about the money. I think money follows success. That's how business works. But if there's a comparison, you know I'd have to have been a really, really damn good tennis player. I would say you're an incredible tennis player. I'm like a mediocre tennis player now.

Klara: 35:37

Thank you, you're too kind. I look at myself differently as well, but I think it's interesting because the last time we met we a little bit chatted about the gratitude we have for failing in the sport. Mine literally didn't come until, you know, just recently I was still living. Probably a lot of tennis has been a failure and I think there's a good side of failure. When I tell someone I have failed in tennis, they're like, oh no, you haven't.

Klara: 36:03

I was like, yes, I have, like it's a real thing. I don't mean in a bad way. I mean I have learned a lot from that failure because the sport was so much for me. So it's literally like living your own dream and creating, I think, a lot of what athletic journey is like. It's probably same what you have lived through entrepreneurship and so I wonder how all of these things you've mentioned a little bit the aspects that translate to being an entrepreneur and having your own companies. But going back to that time that you decided you told your parents I'm moving to Florida, I'm going to try to be a tennis player, which is incredibly hard and courageous thing to do and probably very.

Klara: 36:47

I must admit, very stubborn too, I'm just going to do this Like I'm going to commit, and trying to do that while having a job I mean dead alone, like those two things. It's impossible because you train so much and you have to recover and so sort of all that.

Cole: 37:02

And I was working nights right Like Anna was working.

Klara: 37:04

I mean that's almost impossible because you don't get enough sleep. I mean I can imagine that experience was extremely difficult. And so when and how did you realize, look, this is not sustainable. I need to quit this tennis dream and this identity of trying to live up to be a professional tennis player, and that alone is really hard realization. When did you realize it and how did you go through that next path of you know, I just need to lean on to technology.

Cole: 37:34

Actually that never happened. I think I mean certainly the giving up on touring and playing professionally. I gave up on that, but and it doesn't even. I mean I'm going to use the word compromise but it's not, it wasn't really even a compromise. I've always had a passion, I think partly because of my own upbringing and all the coaches and how much respect I had for my coaches and I always did outside of my high school coach.

Cole: 37:59

I always respected my personal coaches like just massively and I had some incredible coaches, like Kenny DeConning, who is Surinam's like Davis Cup coach, like I've had really good coaches. I love teaching and I've always loved kids. So at Harbor Island athletic club I got to teach what was called Future Stars and these were kind of the upper echelon of the Florida. You know, harbor Island's a pretty nice club and the kids I got to teach were really good and so I got to kind of just shift my focus from me to them while still playing tennis. And that again I use the word compromise, but it wasn't really right. It was just an evolution of playing tennis and like where my strengths were and I think of myself as a really good coach, thought of myself as a very good player, but again, looking back hindsight, I'm probably a better coach than I was a player and in terms of fulfillment, seeing one of those kids win a tournament probably meant more to me than me winning anything.

Cole: 39:11

So again, like maybe I'm super lucky in the fact that the regret that I've got is very low, like very little regret on you know where I ended up, even though in those specific moments there's a sting to the realization that you know I'm gonna accept that I'm probably working 40 to 50 hours a week now as a career in tech, versus because I certainly didn't want to be a full-time tennis coach like that. You know that doesn't pay well but you want to live like a tennis player when you're a full-time coach. It was really funny because you know, I taught with a bunch of full-time coaches. But there's that moment that stings a little bit. But then there's what comes after the sting and I think that's where you grow and what you do with that sting is kind of character defining or redefining, altering, enhancing, whatever you want to use.

Cole: 40:11

You know the Florida move thing was probably an over tilt, you know, over reaction to the last thing that had happened, where I just quit. I was like I'm not gonna quit. But I think the race is always ahead of you, it's never behind you. And just like a tennis match, right, like the match is ahead of you, it's not behind you. Like the points that you should have won, like what can you do about, should have Absolutely nothing, that point is done and over and you've got to just move on to the next point, and so that's now how I think about starting companies, that's how I think about growing companies, that's and just growing myself. Like you know, I'm now 45. So I'm not like really young anymore, but there's a lot of road ahead if you prepare and you do kind of the right things.

Klara: 41:09

So, on that note, preparing, doing the right things you've kind of described your tennis journey, the learnings that you had, and then you mentioned your first sort of tech job was at an ISP, not very well paid, and reflecting and kind of hearing. If I can summarize what you've taken from your tennis career, it seems like a lot of the lessons you've applied to entrepreneurship and building business with technology, obviously technology being at the center. So what was that career like? Let's transition, because I think we could talk about tennis forever and you have achieved so much more. You know talking about the tennis, but you have achieved so much more in technology leadership specifically. So how would you reminisce on even your beginnings there, in the start of that journey that led you to then having seven startups and even now vapor IO edge, and there's so much we can talk about what you're creating and building now?

Cole: 42:10

So I'll start by saying this you know, I think going into something eyes wide open and prepared it's, you can't just, you know, thumb in the wind, say this is my next startup, you know, with no plan on how to get there. Those are typically pipe dreams that investors are going to shy away from. So when I went into tech, I went into it very deliberately with a plan on kind of what I thought I was good at, where I thought I could apply some of the knowledge that I had, but ultimately with a goal of like where I wanted to be. You know, because you look at a Silicon Valley investor and those guys are also good pattern matchers, right, and I wasn't Stanford, I wasn't Berkeley, I, like you know, I didn't live in the Valley. So, like raising money out of Silicon Valley for me was not an option and I knew that. So I looked at kind of the next, call it 10 years in my early 20s about what data points should be added to my you know knowledge set and ultimately, cv or resume that will get me to where I want to go. So, you know, I took jobs that I could learn new things in and I built a you know, a well-rounded knowledge, set of skills that would later serve me, and I knew there'd be no immediate benefit, right. In fact, sometimes it was a sacrifice, but I went into it prepared and I mean even so far as to, you know, working for a while.

Cole: 43:48

As you know. You know, I built open compute for Facebook and that was a 501c6 nonprofit. There's no stock in a nonprofit, right. It's like like there's no liquidity event at the end of that job. But I went into that job knowing that on the other side of that my Rolodex was gonna be a lot bigger. I'll have worked with really high profile hyperscale executives across the industry and for a couple of years I'll be doing these guys, all of them massive.

Cole: 44:21

I won't say favors because that you know, my job wasn't to do favors, but my job was to put the puzzle pieces together to help them. That's, corporations join 501c6s to move the needle but also sort of compete and like even the nonprofit work that I did. And let me be clear there's a very big difference between a 501c6 nonprofit, which there's a lot of like corporate money behind in a 501c3. And a 501c3 charitable nonprofit and I do a lot of those too. You know, up until last year I was the executive chairman of the Leaders with Heart Committee for the American Heart Association and have a lot of passion for charity work as well.

Cole: 45:00

But I was very deliberate in kind of a 10 year arc that would allow me to start being recognized and ultimately, you know, even before the Facebook open compute stuff, I was the youngest or at least I was told I was the youngest D1 strategist for Dell that they ever hired and you know that felt good. I ended up working in well for, I should say, the Department of Defense, where you know I had major contributions to building FedRAMP, in fact built the very first FedRAMP compliant cloud offering the government ever could use, and that meant spending time with the Vatcundra and then East Chopra under, you know, the Obama administration. And like I just got some very I got to do some very cool things in my career by being deliberate about what I wanted.

Klara: 45:53

Mm-hmm, I love that you actually mentioned you were really deliberate and almost planned your next journey. It seems like really being a tennis player, because in tennis you have everything mapped out. You know how your day's gonna look like. You create your tournament calendar obviously shifts a little bit based on wins and losses, but you have kind of given four seasons and you know they're each gonna look a little bit different depending what tournaments you plan, how you're preparing. So it seems you've kind of taken that approach and applied it. Well, this was my athletic journey how do I create my technology journey and who do I wanna be and then worked from sort of that backward 100%.

Klara: 46:37

And you did it pretty much first thing at the beginning when you were starting your career. That's impressive.

Cole: 46:44

Yeah, I think so.

Cole: 46:45

I mean again, though I had family members that had been in this industry for a very long time and I had sort of outside coaches that were also guiding me. But so much of like the Western but probably more accurately said US culture is instant gratification and I really had to deny on several occasions a higher salary for a job that would not have been as impactful as a lesser paying offer that I thought ultimately would be a better foundation to go build companies off of, and that takes. You know that everything in your life that you will treasure for a long time probably takes some sacrifice.

Klara: 47:40

Yeah, 100%. There's trade-offs and so, knowing what you're trading, opportunity costs right there it is it's real.

Klara: 47:49

I mean, you have so many interesting parts of your journey in technology that obviously led you here to vapor IO that I want to talk a little bit more about as well. But before we dive there, reflecting on some of the roles you've now shared and things you have done, which ones were some of the most fun roles that, if you look back, oh man, I would go back and do this again. This was really fun and you know your definition of fun. I'm sure it requires a lot of work and effort and skill and probably learning, but anything you want to reminisce on that, you really enjoyed perhaps even the struggle that came with it.

Cole: 48:28

Sure, like the first really fun I think really fun job that I had, because working over nights at America Online was not fun, it helped kind of pay the bills in the early days. But the first real fun job that I had for a considerable amount of time was working for US West, the telco which was a spin out of Mountain Bell so which like totally dates me. But I was an architect for US West worked in a pretty interesting environment. We had some networking responsibilities around building some of the network, but we also had all of the shared infrastructure. So any application that didn't warrant its own you know multi-million dollar budget came to us because we operated our own multi-million dollar budget and then we offered infrastructure out to the rest of the company. But, man, we had a lot of fun and it was, you know this was at the time so like shifting purely into tech. Linux was brand new and I had kind of grown up when I wasn't playing tennis, like very weirdly, using Linux.

Cole: 49:38

That's a whole different story how I got into that, but being very young and being invited by the CTO of US West to go present to like Joe Nacho, and it was all hands for the entire company and we got to talk about what we were doing and, like it was the first time I'd ever bought a suit I'd never owned a suit before that and it was kind of fun to go out and like pick a suit and know that I was gonna go you know, start brushing shoulders with big corporate executives. At the time, like you know, those guys became the ultra stars, but we just had a lot of fun in that job Working in the DoD also, like you know, I worked for a federal contractor. We were an 8A. So an 8A is a socioeconomically, you know, disadvantaged company. When we were building OpenStack I'm not sure how much of your audience won't even know what that is, but it's an open source cloud computing platform and this was spinning up. At the same time, amazon was spinning up right, like this was just like a year or two, and the US government in 2010, 2011, 2012, in fact, like it wasn't probably until 13 or 14 that any cloud company had a FedRAMP compliant data center and, again, like I had a big hand in creating that.

Cole: 50:57

So in the early days, like building OpenStack and like creating the license, you know, helping to create kind of the license of that which was Apache too. We didn't create the license, but we applied the license to a government funded in some ways, cause NASA was. You know, the NASA was the leading government entity that was funding the development. That was just incredible, like really a fun time to take a company like NASA and a company like Rackspace and then bring in you know, at the time it was AT&T and Citrix was there and Cisco is there and like kind of building this big ecosystem around this open source movement. It was just so fun.

Cole: 51:43

And those are probably my top two outside of like vapor was well, let me say it differently Vapor by far, vapor IO by far is the biggest startup I'll ever be a part of. I don't think I'll ever be a part of a startup that will be as big as vapor is. I think back maybe two months ago there was an interview with Jensen from Nvidia. He's being interviewed about looking back, what would you do different? I think it was a question. He's like I wouldn't have even started the company. It is really hard to start a company. You know as hard it is to start a company. It's harder to scale a company.

Cole: 52:26

And it's a different skill set completely, but I knew, going into this again, the forethought of going in, and so I'll just kind of touch on it because I'm sure it's like your next question Like how did you come?

Klara: 52:38

up with the idea for vapor, see the foresight you know again.

Cole: 52:45

actually I think a little bit was part of what I wanted to do, but also pattern matching against like where the industry was headed. And I just finished up building open compute and you know that 501c6 nonprofit does afford you kind of the internal roadmap knowledge of a lot of big companies because they're planning silicon and system architecture and like other things.

Cole: 53:11

I mean, the Facebook wasn't shy about this back in 2011, 2012 at all, like Mark Zuckerberg had launched a Facebook phone. That was a thing. But there was a bigger plan. At the same time, twitter was coming out and the whole world was kind of moving to this wireless first strategy, and it just seemed like super obvious to me that, well geez, if you're going to have anything more than just packets shipped to you, you're going to need kind of a different network for that. And we don't have that network, and I know because, at US West.

Cole: 53:45

you know we built those networks like Phil Anschutz, the guy that started Quest, like he had the fiber rights along I 70 and that's how May East and May West got built and you know that carried all of the traffic westbound and eastbound across the United States. And I started looking at all of these experiences. Now, this was, you know, still 2015. So, geez, almost a decade ago now.

Cole: 54:11

But Facebook there was already internal conversations happening around Oculus and spatial computing, or immersive computing, or you know, whatever mixed reality, xr, and it just seems super obvious to me that, like we didn't have the internet architecture that we needed in order to go build what does that book call it? Spatial computing? Yes, and so I went off and again, part stubbornness, I think, was the part stubbornness, part boldness, part naivety. One of the board members on open compute was a partner at Goldman Sachs, and so I flew to New York and I said, hey, I need like hundreds of millions of dollars to go compete. And they're like no, but we'll give you like seven. You can like start writing the software and like let's see where things go. And so, again, it's like being in a match where you expect your opponent to play a certain way and they're not playing that way, so you have to also adjust your game. You know, I thought again kind of naively, that you know, I've known this Goldman Sachs partner for a while he's on my board.

Cole: 55:18

I can raise whatever money I need to, but I raised a different amount of money but we made it work in that round. We made it work and we started building things and this has been a really fun journey in terms of like art, of the possible in terms of the footprint you know we might have as a company and look, it's still entirely possible that it all falls down Like that can happen to anybody. One of the board members open compute was Andy Petterschein, the founder of Sun Microsystems that people often don't know. Do you know what Sun stands? For no.

Cole: 55:52

Stanford University Networks. Like people don't realize. You know that's like that's a fun fact, but you know Andy also, the very first investor in Google right. Like wrote the check to Larry and Sergey. There's a fun story about that that maybe I'll tell you offline. Not relevant here, but interesting story nonetheless. Sun, I think at its peak, was valued, you know, somewhere around a billion.

Cole: 56:15

So it, like you know, adjusted for inflation and everything else Like that, would have been probably three or four billion today. I mean nothing to sneeze at all. I think Oracle ended up buying them for maybe $400 million.

Cole: 56:31

So, even like the biggest companies are subject to disruptors. Yeah, and I've always viewed myself as a disruptor and a contrarian. Like, how do you look at something you know outside of the box and then how do you go? How do you go penetrate that? So finding the attack surface area and the threat vectors that exists to an industry. I think I've been always pretty gifted at finding those things. And then the rest is, you know, telling a compelling story that gets people to believe in what you're doing. And I think I've always had that gift, that presentation of like being on stage and I am motivated to do those things. But telling the vapor story has been really incredibly fun. But the journey came out of part open stack, part open compute. Telco is doing this thing, Cloud is doing this thing. Like, what do they all need?

Klara: 57:25

Yes.

Cole: 57:25

And I thought Verizon, at&t, t-mobile I worked for one of those they were going to be slow moving. I can move faster and I can pivot with the requirements of hyperscale because Facebook at the time was as big as any of those guys, right? I mean, I think at the time Facebook had a higher market cap when they went public than a lot of those cloud guys that were in the game. So that's how we ever got started and it's also been incredibly fun and who knows, we'll see we're still building stuff, so it's still fun. And probably just bringing some tennis back into this, I don't think people realize. Let's look at Alka as an example When's Wimbledon right and then, like Cincinnati doesn't look like himself at all.

Cole: 58:16

I don't think like the general population knows how much pressure you feel for the expectation that you know you are now one of the greats, right, like I remember seeing all the news, he's got all of the strengths of Nadal and all of the strengths of Fedditor and none of the weaknesses Like in all the strengths of Djokovic, none of the weaknesses that puts a punch of pressure on you and that exists for us too.

Cole: 58:43

In business, you raise more money, you start growing, you bring on bigger names as partners and customers and there's an increased amount of pressure that gets put on you to turn that into revenue, and those are the things that I find myself. You know me, so you know I'm super passionate about the things that I do and I'm 100% passionate about vapor. As I think about, though, like you know, your sweet spot because, like in tennis, there's certain followers, there's baselineers, there's all sorts of players. You need to kind of know what you're good at. Like, my kind of power gift is being that contrarian that identifies the market opportunity. I can be an operational leader. You know I actually started at Open Compute, which we started at Facebook, as the chief operating officer, but I think I like changing the world more than growing the world.

Klara: 59:44

It's more fun, I think. I think so. Yeah, I mean because I get to be vocally disruptive.

Cole: 59:52

Part of the reason I've not been on many podcasts is in the early days of vapor, we just had this like crazy contrarian view of the industry. Now our view of the industry is generally well accepted.

Cole: 1:00:02

Right Distributed architecture yes, Like when we started that was not something that people were thinking a lot about and people were telling me we were crazy for it. I loved that, but now that that's come to pass and people agree with us and people are also building capabilities that look like that, there's less opportunity for me to be super contrarian Now. The fact that AI is now here. It's not just about the fact that AI is now here and the entire conversation for that is around generative AI.

Cole: 1:00:31

We get to be contrarian once again. I actually don't think, just like I don't think that the telco networks of days past were the right networks for spatial computing and kind of what we're going to experience over the next few years In AI. I really don't think the total adjustable market is in large language models, inferencing the kids attached to those models, and they may not even be language at all. It might be. It might be an LVM like a large vision model and you look at, the number one producer of data across the globe in any 24 hour period are cameras, far and away. I heard a statistic. This is now a couple of years old but I'm sure it's still probably true and in fact it might be more true today than it was even then. But China alone, through CCTV and cameras, generates more data than Facebook does globally in a day. Just close circuit cameras in China.

Klara: 1:01:28

That's scary and that's a very different country, cause there's also this privacy in. China of being communist, I guess you guys have a lot of cameras. Yeah, you can't. Yeah, what are they called the circle?

Cole: 1:01:40

I forget. But the rings I forget what the London calls that, but I mean cameras by far are like from an IoT perspective, they're the biggest data generating and also capture some of the most sensitive things that are relevant to humans. You look at the value of a of a camera at an intersection versus, you know, like a, a particulate sensor in a factory for like you know paint. There's like those are different things in terms of data, in terms of impact on human life and whatever.

Cole: 1:02:15

So cameras are super interesting and I think things like computer vision and intent based computer vision specifically, and spatial computing and like building models around these inference engines with standard deviation built around like the autonomy of what should be happening. I just think that over the next five years the level of automation in our daily lives in an urban environment is going to look very different than it does today. It's interesting to have like that view of of it, Cause I think the world in general is still like you know, I can get a meal plan out of chat GPT. Yeah, I don't think that's what the money is longterm.

Klara: 1:02:58

And you want to go back a little bit more, even to your decision of vapor, io and starting and you know, drawing back on my memory, at the end of my Ericsson days, it was probably a little bit after you decided to start vapor that 2018, 19, 20, I mean edge computing was the hit right. Everybody talked about it, anybody who knew the definition back then or could string sort of this 5g edge computing. Sometimes you didn't even have to know what they mean, but you spoke the language. It was fantastic the industry would write about, but that triggered a lot of competition. Even mobile edge eggs yeah, ericsson had their own.

Klara: 1:03:36

I actually forgot how their edge computing startup was named. They did end up shutting it down. Yeah, obviously all the big cloud players at their own edge and edge offering continue to build those and so throughout if you look at the decade, I guess maybe that's a good way to put it, cause you were kind of early with that hypothesis there's been difference in opinions and perhaps space of how to perceive the edge and the value of the edge, what it delivers and even scaling of it, as you mentioned. So when you look at your original hypothesis behind vapor aisle, how accurate is the list now or how much have you needed to tweak it as you have been building vapor and what are maybe some of the big learnings that you you know could be positive or negative, that fueled or maybe stalled or just kind of changed the way you thought about that reality?

Cole: 1:04:36

Great question. First and foremost, one thing that I knew we were not going to have to change was the architecture, like I flat out knew in 2015,. You know, before the podcast, you and I were chatting a little bit about Tesla and Elon Musk and I remember an interview with him. This must have been 2008. This was a long time ago. He was so convinced that Tesla was going to be a multi-billion dollar car company and they were on the verge of bankruptcy back in 2008. They almost shut the door, like, I think, on Christmas Eve. They were like, you know, about to shut the door, but he later in interview, like this, was so self-evident to me and I had the conviction to just keep going, keep funding, keep fighting and not to put myself in the same field stadium, city, galaxy as Elon Musk. I did feel like I knew what the architecture needed to look like and that was a huge open question by everybody not us in the industry back in 2015. I'm sure I hope you were part of Ericsson meetings where they're like what's this vapor IO company?

Klara: 1:05:44

Yes, Because everybody had those meetings. Yeah, we're actually doing. I was part of the fan member strategic team that we're advising to North America leaders in Ericsson and we took a project on edge computing, like what's the definition, what's the market? Should Ericsson go build it? Should we partner? Like what should we build? And obviously, yeah, vapor.

Klara: 1:06:03

I remember from those days, like what is this kind of new company trying to create an edge? Cause there's been a lot of established players and everybody's been throwing kind of millions and billions of dollars to trying to stretch into the edge and build the edge. That's right.

Cole: 1:06:21

So and everybody had those conversations in retrospect, having kind of the outside of work conversations with a lot of the industry leaders. It's been fun to know. You know how much competitive analysis has been done on kind of. You know we did and I think, look, in the early days we we were able, and I think we're still, punching way above our, our weight class at vapor because of who we partner with at the time.

Cole: 1:06:44

You know, we could not have found a better partner than Crown Castle. I mean just a massive tower, I don't think.

Klara: 1:06:50

I remember when the deal was announced that shook the industry a little bit. I was like, oh my God, even Crown is getting into this edge business, like there was very stretchy, huge yes.

Cole: 1:06:59

Huge. So you know again that deliberate. I needed names like Goldman Sachs. I needed names like Crown Castle. You know names like Berkshire. You know all of who have ended up investing in vapor. I needed that optically. So I don't want to say look bigger than we were, but to to be relevant to a cloud player that you want us to put millions of dollars in what where, like you know, and you're like this at the time, like 20 person startup. But you know again, like hindsight 2020, a lot of people don't realize today that did your realty trust was a giant. You know, multi-billion dollar data center. Read today they went public with 11 people. So it's possible to kind of do these things. But anyway, back to your question. We knew unequivocally the architecture for the edge had to look different. By the way, always hated the term edge. We live on a sphere and I don't know where the edge of the internet is, and all I wanted to do is build more internet Right, so the edge became this kind of catchphrase that I think got overused.

Cole: 1:08:08

Yes, and even vapor sort of felt. I think we were part of the dilution of the concept of edge, even though you know what a Verizon would call the edge and what we kind of thought about the edge were very different. And that became hard to talk about publicly because when we talked about it, the things we were trying to eliminate and people still don't know this today. So I'll give kind of a one on wireless to wireline architecture. I won't tell you what carrier I'm on, but I will tell you that I don't actually get an IP address until I get fiber backhauled to like St Louis, missouri, from Austin, texas, from St Louis, because, again, like we're peering and interconnection and network handoff happened there. There's no peering point in St Louis, so I actually get further backhauled to Atlanta, georgia, and then, depending on, like, where I'm going on the internet, the request that I'm going for. So let's say, like I want to find you on LinkedIn.

Cole: 1:09:10

Well, linkedin, the news last month was they were going to migrate to Azure front door on Microsoft. That didn't happen. So what will remain true for the foreseeable future is if, say, the CDN that they use I won't say the name, but you can find it the CDN they use is working like maybe 40% of my feed comes back from that CDN in Atlanta, but the other 60% of the data I'm looking for like literally goes from Austin to Atlanta, atlanta to like San Jose, california, and then back to Austin and that's a ton of money. So, the speed of light being the speed of light, there's latency involved with that. So you're certainly not going to get to like spatial computing or you know anything that comes after that which we all think you know.

Cole: 1:09:58

I don't want to use the term layman, but kind of like what people think of, or at least what they thought was going to make the edge very successful, or things like Robotic surgeries and autonomous cars and drones and sure, like some of that stuff will materialize over, you know, the next decade. But forget the use case for a second, because I don't think if you're an infrastructure company, you're trying to build the use case, which we certainly weren't. I wasn't trying to come up with a killer app for edge.

Cole: 1:10:25

I was trying to come up with the right architecture for the killer app. I think, like a lot of people, we thought that that would be the convergence of telco and cloud. We really did and that turned out to look more competitive than complimentary. I mean, look today kind of the big deals that have gotten done. A lot of it's being unwound.

Cole: 1:10:49

There's a lot of it being unwound today. Certainly some things are going forward, but we also thought that we would be in a great position to capitalize on that neutral host share, the tower model. Because you go to a crown castle or an American tower Macrosel site and you've got all the telcos living on there and you know crowns kind of initial bet on vapor was hey, like the next generation tower might look like a data center at the bottom of our tower and so. But you might now have clouds in there and you might have content delivery network companies in there. Like that's a slightly more sophisticated like a tower. Such an incredible business model because you know, with the escalators built into the leases on those towers, you could build the thing and then not pay any attention to it for probably 10 years and as long as the weeds didn't grow and prevent access to the site, that tower will make more money for 30 years every year than it did the previous year. Just an incredible business model because it's just a tower. Yes.

Cole: 1:11:48

Whereas data centers are, ups is and servers and top of rack switches and optical gear and like. There's a lot more that goes in into that. And so that original thesis which we also thought turned out not to be what originally, was viewed as our killer app, which was really economics and easy button. So it wasn't the use case. It wasn't autonomous driving or robotic surgery. The killer app for infrastructure, for any infrastructure, has always been economics and easy button, 100%.

Cole: 1:12:22

Amazon makes no qualms about the fact that for probably 95% of every company out there, outsourcing your data center requirements to AWS is more expensive from a CapEx perspective. But on the flip side is, with all of the tooling they have, shifting that CapEx to OpEx, are you doing more with your resources internally so you don't have to go operationally have that data center and no different on our side, like if you want to build a lateral fiber, like dig up city sidewalks, that's a tough ask for an enterprise Like you worked at Apple. I don't think Apple knows how to zone and permit for fiber in downtown Los Angeles, and not because they can't figure it out. Clearly they can. Do they want to figure that out, though I don't think they want to figure it out. It's really hard too, and it's not months, it's years of zoning and permitting, like LA. I'm not picking on California or a specific city.

Cole: 1:13:24

I mean, they have pretty tough requirements, it is tough, right, like LA just happens to be an incredibly tough town to zone and permit, for we started that city, I think, in 2017 and we just finished. We just finished. So it's kind of know your strength, know what you're good at. So that's the easy button part. And then you know again on the connectivity side, like the backhaul of this billions of dollars of backhaul going to this per year from each of the carriers, right, so AT&T, t-mobile, verizon, they all offer backhaul for enterprises and it's expensive when, in reality, I think again for the next generation of applications, so for kind of an internet 2.0 right now, and we're kind of building the third act of the internet, which will be more mixed reality, more spatial, most of that data is going to stay local anyway, right, like there's no need for you to traverse half the United States for what needs to be sovereign to that city, that county, that zip code, like whatever the constraints are. But I think data sovereignty and data velocity are kind of the next things that make up the backhaul elimination and part of the value that we're going to bring to the industry.

Cole: 1:14:38

And I really believe that the killer app is AI. Ai has this adoption curve that Telco's never had. What was the statistic? The chat GPT like it had. Was it double the amount of people in?

Klara: 1:14:51

24 hours versus Twitter, it may have been even more.

Cole: 1:14:54

It's incredible, and we've already seen the trough of disillusionment happen for AI. I just think that that's really the killer app. So we're kind of betting now the farm on being the right architecture for, again, not generative AI, but how generative AI needs asynchronous training, how asynchronous training is benefited from, like real time inferencing. Like if you want to inference an intersection, you can't be 20 milliseconds away, like that's too far away. So that's our bet that's vapor. We still have the same thesis on the architecture the go to market.

Cole: 1:15:34

Now the other thing that we found was people want something that Apple knows really well, a lot of companies know really well is the ecosystem really needs to look end to end, and we always wanted to kind of shy away from offering everything because we never wanted to compete directly with our customers. If you have a cloud company, we wanted you to put your stuff in our environments. Now we've been kind of forced through customer conversations to kind of build up this inferencing capability. But it's also so different where I feel like we're kind of back in 2015. We're really the only ones talking about this publicly and I want to just call out that that's not the reason why I wanted to come on your podcast and the early days. I would only do podcasts if I could be concharian about what vapor was building. That's not what I'm here, but serendipitous maybe, but that's where vapor sits today.

Klara: 1:16:22

Yeah, it's fantastic and I was listening to one of my favorite pots I don't know if you'll listen to the all in podcast and sort of.

Klara: 1:16:29

They talk about, obviously, this inferencing and the large language model, and the more and more you start doing these inferencing that requires huge amounts of data as you mentioned even just the cameras that's a great use case the more you need actually the existence of the edge right? There's been hypothesis that 5G will also create that. I think the problem's been we don't have the killer app for 5G and it's becoming to a point where people are tired of talking about 5G and the killer app because they've been trying to figure out what that is and what is coming up with. Anything, including the new business economics that carriers could monetize their investments that they have put into all the 5G. But I really think it's kind of I see it similarly as you like the AI and all of this. You know beautiful convergence in this swirl of activity and innovation about AI. It seems like that only would benefit Vapor and your position and what you have built and the effort you have put up until now. Is that accurate, I think?

Cole: 1:17:33

so yeah, but why so like? Let's go back to, I think, the technical limitations that have been forced onto the telcos, because even the telcos you know, coincidentally, and you know this they all backhaul themselves to their own central offices and then those central offices have to further backhaul to like these internet exchange, like peering points that are sometimes 100, 200 miles away. That architecture, just it just doesn't work. For, I think, these lower latency inferencing use cases Hindsight being 2020, I feel like they should have never been called data centers, we should have called them centers of data, and I think that center of data is like moving from, interestingly, what I would call the edge of the network the other way right Because.

Cole: 1:18:23

I think the center of data is actually the urban core. Technically, the reason you would choose like a vapor is because you need that kind of sub 10 millisecond roundtrip capability and that's part of the reason why we've launched this relationship with Comcast and we've said things about the work we're doing with Dish and, you know, other telcos. If you can run your packet core and your inferencing engine on the exact same hardware, now you've got a sub 10 millisecond capable solution and 5G. The promise of 5G, if you remember, it got booted out of the spec. There was actually a spec for it in Etsy Mech and then there was another spec in like the open ran 7 to standard called ultra reliable, low latency.

Cole: 1:19:17

That's not in 5G anymore. That was pushed out. It might come in like a later version of open ran, but only vapor after the modem handshake right, which in 4G was like 30 ish milliseconds, so already too far. You know, just the modem handshake alone was too long. In 5G you can still do a modem handshake in about one and a half milliseconds and then if the inferencing engine is running like right there in the packet core, is running right there on the vapor network, like you could get to the cloud computing resource and back to the of the receiving modem, then the phone or, in the IoT sensor, the Wi-Fi network, in optimally under three or four milliseconds around trip, and I don't think really anybody else in the US can offer that.

Klara: 1:20:07

I think in.

Cole: 1:20:07

Germany and you know, smaller countries. It's possible, because of the distance that you need to travel, that the US is just so incredibly large and our telco footprint and our cloud footprint is just so disaggregated. I don't think there's another company that can do what we can do, you know, with regard to like having all that infrastructure, live in one place and truly keep that data local across a vast number of markets. So my vapor has 36 markets. I mean, technically, we operate not by square footage but by, you know, number of locations per market. We probably operate more data center infrastructure at scale than you know the biggest data center companies in the world and just in the US.

Klara: 1:20:58

Which is impressive that you have been able to achieve that, built in relatively small period of time, considering the amount of effort that it takes to build this out right. I do know a bit about just real estate zoning, obviously from telco, and just how difficult it is to even construct the soul side, which from your perspective is probably even more difficult from what you're trying to create than the amount of space and backhaul that you may need, and digging and trenching. It's a real hard work.

Cole: 1:21:29

People think you're so right. People think of vapor as a and we are a technology company, I mean at the end of the day, we're a technology company that delivers our solution via a SaaS like a software as a service model.

Cole: 1:21:40

But last I checked we had about 210 algorithmic data points that went into site selection and where we go, and a lot of it's automated. So there's a massive GIS system on the back end of this and everything from power availability to rev share to water planes and easements. It's like 100 and something almost 200 data points that go into just the beginning, like just scrubbing markets to figure out where to go. That in itself is a differentiator for us and it truly in the early days of our journey. I don't think we would have gotten there without Crown Castle Like that's what crown does day in, day out, it's all they do zone permit, build towers and the fact that they've got land at the bottom of those towers that we can lease from them wholesale. We would not have been able to build vapor without them, the vapor that we know industry knows today.

Klara: 1:22:38

Yeah, just to summarize a little bit, you mentioned some of the smartest decision where understanding the architecture that you can build and what is the right one from the start which is really impressive, considering you started building it almost a decade ago knowing the right partnerships. The third one comes to mind is really the execution, in that you were able to really materialize on the vision that you have had. Looking at that and all of the challenges, you've kind of described a little bit the shifting of the reality. What were some of the things you haven't anticipated perhaps that you had to deal with? Anything you want to call out maybe top two or three.

Cole: 1:23:22

Inflation.

Klara: 1:23:23

Yeah.

Cole: 1:23:23

The geopolitical situation, the climate that we're in right now geopolitically, and just from a vapor. We are a technology company but we're not funded like your typical software company or capital intensive. We build physical infrastructure. We certainly didn't predict a pandemic, which slowed down a number. If you think about on the consumer side, one of the biggest money making footprints you can own is a stadium.

Cole: 1:23:54

There's a ton of revenue that goes through a stadium from the retail alcohol sales, food sales, concert tickets, football games, basketball games, hockey games, like whatever, baseball, whatever it is. There was no venue activity for three years almost, and there were a lot of things we were doing with cloud companies and other SIs and MSPs in the venue space. That just got shut down during the pandemic One thing that a lot of folks don't know about the experience that the retail companies have, and because that's all contracted, they have to basically share the same Wi-Fi network as every person who is Instagramming or tick-talking or whatever you do now at these events, and that makes for a challenging retail scenario, and we were working on solutions there too. So I think, of all of the things that we've had to sort of prepare for, despite not knowing the pandemic was the biggest the geopolitical sort of wars and what's happening now in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Cole: 1:25:05

That was kind of second. And then, because we're in some respects powered by giant real estate investment trusts, inflation and interest rates have a more. Interest rates have a lot to do with the cost of capital there, and so those things have been challenging. But again, at the same time we're figuring out what levers we can pull to pivot on our go-to-market and how we control our own costs and ensure that we can pass as much savings as we can find on to our customers.

Klara: 1:25:41

Makes sense, kind of the big, I guess, macro challenges that you're dealing with. I have maybe a few more questions about Vapor and then I want to transition to a few more macro questions as we wrap up here, or maybe some fun questions to throw there as well. Okay, but I'm curious. I know you said you're building the edge and you're not necessarily thinking about building the applications because that's what your partners come up and buy the edge infrastructure or through that model that you have, which actually went on your website. I really like the simplicity that you created, that people can even see the pricing spot on on your website. I think just the way that you're thinking about it and you mentioned the economics and easy button to make it simple is really important for you and the team when you have been building Vapor. But anything you want to share with listeners I'm curious even some interesting applications that you wouldn't have foreseen that are coming up on edge. Just something to spike the enthusiasm and for people to think about differently.

Cole: 1:26:41

Yeah, I'll tell you a fun one that was very recent. I was at a conference recently and someone was like oh, cole, the father of the edge, or something. I was like, yeah, I'm not old enough to be the father of a four-year-old and a three-year-old.

Klara: 1:26:54

I'm not the founder.

Cole: 1:26:57

I look up in my career, I've been fortunate enough to spend times with some Titans, right Like VentSurf, arguably is the father of the internet. Guys like Paul Machupertis, the inventor of DNS, who is right up there as an industry Titan. Our chairman of the board is literally, a couple years ago, indoctrinated into the wireless hall of fame. And these are the fathers of things. I am not just my two daughters, I thought.

Cole: 1:27:24

Starting vapor in 2015, I'd pretty much heard every sort of iteration of a killer app for edge, you know, from practical to totally impractical. One of the more recent ones which again I think emphasizes why AI is here and now and required was a use case that was brought to us by a partner around a hospital use case, and I had not heard of this. I had no idea, because I'm actually pretty into health and, to the extent that that trickles into like disease prevention and what you can die from, I've done some of that research, as macabre as it is. So we were sitting around talking with this partner and they said we've got to, we're like compelled to try and build this, this solution, around the number one killer of human beings in a hospital. I'm like, internally, I'm thinking to myself like what AI solution is going to be used for, like MRSA?

Cole: 1:28:24

like something you know bacterial infection that kills someone. So that's why I thought the number one thing was and so they come out with the statistics. I'll ask you really quick. Maybe I'll ask you this, I don't know, but do you know what it is? Do you know what the number one cause of death in a hospital is?

Klara: 1:28:39

I have a hand, but I think you told me too it's false, false.

Cole: 1:28:43

Falling out of bed, breaking hips In talking with your friends around, like you know their grandparents, et cetera it's like oh, they broke their hip. It's not looking good.

Klara: 1:28:53

Yeah, fine enough. Just my aunt, 85 year old aunt, is in a hospital. My mom brought her there today because she broke a hip and she needs an emergency surgery. So actually falls in general.

Cole: 1:29:05

Falls in general.

Klara: 1:29:06

I think we're one, and I think in hospital it's perhaps more so because you're under narcosis People don't think about it. That's right, even though nurses and doctors tell them don't get up, you need help. They sort of oh, I can do this and yeah.

Cole: 1:29:21

So this partner, who is highly opinionated about GPUs, said we want to build a computer vision platform to prevent fall detection and that what a low latency application. Right, like your microseconds, milliseconds maximum. You need to have a lot of stuff local, and that was a really fun one, because I hadn't heard it. I think I probably have heard more use cases around this Others that are like really fastening to me.

Cole: 1:29:48

So I sit on the board of a of an AI company out of Tel Aviv company called Nexar, and they're doing some really incredible things from a generally call it X to X, but, like to break that up, it's a vehicle to infrastructure, vehicle to vehicle and infrastructure to vehicle. Now, when I say autonomous driving, I don't mean like putting on a breaking function or like turning the system or like turning the steering wheel from like a level for you know autonomous capability, but just like humans are augmented through our connectivity to things that are happening in the Ukraine, like you know, we're sitting here, in Austin, texas, but we use augmented data to like build our like you know internal and external narrative.

Cole: 1:30:31

I mean our phones. It's so funny, it's super anecdote. I swear if, like, you're an alien and you landed on earth and you walked through an airport like you would for sure believe that all of these humans were like getting their instructions from, like something that they're like glued to, because and I don't know if you- go the next time you travel, just look at how many people are sitting in their chair at the airport on their phone. It's pretty incredible. So augmented data, but you own an EV. I you know.

Cole: 1:31:03

I own an EV and, for whatever reason, autonomous functions seem to exist more in the electrical vehicle space than the ice space. But they're also monoliths and localized, so all of the sensors that they can see, there's proximity to those sensors. So if you're going to actually build like a decent experience from point A to point B, where point A to point B is longer than a football field with entropy- you know, with people running into the middle of the street and fire hydrants, whatever.

Cole: 1:31:37

I think you kind of need more data, the car needs more network based data, and so those are some really fun use cases, because there are very large companies thinking through hey, if we did have access to all this extra data, we could do X, y and Z, and so to see, like giant corporations like you know, building theses around X to X communication I think is cool. And then, like the other ones that I'm just really excited about because I think that are practical and I think there's a lot of money to be made, is again kind of in the stadium experience. But from like a gaming perspective, like micro betting, I think that's going to be massive, like I think we spend a lot of time in Vegas.

Klara: 1:32:24

I think it is quite. I mean, it's been rising a lot in the past several years, right Even just the poker, the pandemic, people playing so much more poker online everywhere. So I think just that trend and betting on sports.

Cole: 1:32:39

I don't know that I can fully envision like how this would happen, but there's a call it multiple seconds, sometimes upwards of like 15 seconds delay, you know between your feed and like what happened. But if you're in Vegas or if you do have a lower latency connection to the game, you know distributed through relationships, you know that vapor has right. So Comcast, as an example, has a lot of cable head ends with a lot of connectivity into stadiums and also into thousands of homes in a market. Just as an example like imagine being able to put a dollar on the next free throw for basketball or the next ace.

Klara: 1:33:17

You know what's the over under on Djokovic hitting his next serve and being an ace, like being able to bet on that would be. I love betting double folds. I don't know if you still have that Like when I'm watching the game somehow before they bounce and toast the ball, I was like double fold and I was always right. I don't know how I spot them, but that'd be kind of fun example.

Cole: 1:33:37

I bet you can test it, because I think we're going to go play tennis after this. You can test it on me. What I found and I was a serve specialist when I taught tennis, like serves were kind of my specialty If you see their shoulder drop before the ball is at its apex, there's a statistically very high chance that that serve is going to go into the net. So that's why your coach always said keep your arm up If your shoulder drops everything else is going to drop, but yeah, I still play that game too.

Cole: 1:34:05

Also, I don't know if you know the story about, like you know, boris Becker and like he'd stick his tongue out left to right. Do you know about this?

Klara: 1:34:10

I've heard about it. Somebody told me to depending where he's going to serve and so people could guess. Yeah, I can see, we guessed, and Becker, like never knew.

Cole: 1:34:19

I like forecasting, like are they going to serve out wide or down the middle, et cetera. Anyway, those are like two kind of fun use cases that I think are three. I guess that are super interesting. And then, consumer wise, my wife wants to go see the heiress tour from Taylor Swift. I was like wouldn't it be better if, like, you could send your friends the heiress tour and you just like, paid you?

Klara: 1:34:41

know a virtual ticket.

Cole: 1:34:41

but then you're there, right, you put on your Apple Vision Pro, your MetaQuest 3 or whatever it happens to be, and you're there and you're like it's immersive, and you're not like dancing Nexus, like a bunch of sweaty people and I actually agree, I don't enjoy going to concerts anymore, Although I'm considering Ellen is more said.

Klara: 1:34:58

it was one of my first concerts I've been to as a kid and she's back in Austin this summer, so I would go see her actually.

Cole: 1:35:04

I would see a lot of more, say I full disclosure. I own jagged little pill.

Klara: 1:35:09

I love that album. And I've listened to it many times.

Cole: 1:35:14

So anyway could that virtual, you know, even shot on goal, or being able to, like sit virtually next to you know some famous person at the Lakers game, or whatever. I just think those sort of immersive experiences, those are pretty cool, and these are near term.

Cole: 1:35:30

These are not far term. There's a lot of money to be made. I mean, I train sometimes in this app called Supernatural, so it's boxing yeah, it's in VR, and I was like putting like I was spinning it down yesterday and it was like Travis Scott is like live in this, like you know, metahorizons, whatever thing and I like literally wandered in there and I was watching 500 foot Travis Scott. It was cool, like you know. I don't know that I would like want to spend an hour in there, but it was neat to walk around and if it wasn't, artists that I like really love, like yeah, I probably even pay for it.

Klara: 1:36:06

Yeah, I do enjoy the mixed reality. I mean, I've tried the meta Oculus, it was all right. I'm really curious what the Apple vision for, obviously, will be like. I haven't tried it personally, even though I worked at Apple. We don't always get to do that, but it changes the perception of how we see things and even thinking. My grandma, for example, is paralyzed. You know that the Apple vision pro is available in check right away, but I guess I could buy it and bring it to her, and so it changes the perception. Even for communication, right, we've been used to FaceTime with my family because I always traveled I know you did too but I think this makes a little bit different difference when it comes to you like, especially for someone who cannot move.

Cole: 1:36:52

Right.

Klara: 1:36:52

And now you actually put them in like a different environment, right?

Cole: 1:36:55

So I'm curious how they could change, let's say, my career, mass communication with me, it's all going to change right, like this is going to be kind of a TMI as we kind of wind down here. But a few years ago luckily my dad's still with us and I'm actually going to see him in a couple of days down in Costa Rica, they've retired there A couple of years ago my mom called and said hey, dad's a certain level that could be an indicator of cancer like really high? And I was like geez, you know, like I could not talk to my dad soon, ever again, and that that really hit me hard. It was actually one of the catalysts for me like just, you know, really focusing because both my daughters are adopted, which we don't actually say often. I don't know why, I just volunteered that, but we did that for me a little later in life.

Cole: 1:37:39

You know I was kind of in my mid 40s taking home a brand new baby from the hospital and I wanted to make sure that I'm around later in life for them.

Cole: 1:37:49

It would be tragic to the extent I was aware of it being tragic if I wasn't there when they walked on the aisle of, like, whoever they want to marry, if they want to do that, you know, being there for some of the big milestones in their lives.

Cole: 1:38:02

I just I really want to make sure that I'm there for that, because my parents were there for me during those things and so this experience, like my dad, I would love to capture such an incredible songwriter and such a like just a superhuman, you know, good soul, super gentle. He was like a Navy SEAL, but before the SEALs, because that wasn't a thing when he was in the Navy. But if what I think is going to happen over the next couple of years, I'll be able to take every email hero, every song hero and all of the things that have been documented, that his communication and the recordings, and, you know, my kids, who are probably going to be too young to really remember him, are going to be able to spend time with him in VR or you know, and a lot of people think that that's perverted, but I do not.

Cole: 1:38:52

I think part of the process of healing is being able to do this. Why do humans ultimately? I mean, I can tell you I lost my grandmother a couple of years ago and it was less painful than losing my dog, and not because I mean I love my grandmother more than I love my dog, but I got to say goodbye to my grandmother and I got to kind of deal with that on the terms that you know I had and we could talk about things, whereas, like you, can't do that.

Cole: 1:39:20

So I think, the real time staying of like not knowing, not being able to communicate with the person or the thing that you love. I just think that we're going to grow as humans. I often say we're 21st century software, our brains running on like zero century hardware, just like our you know our DNA. But I actually think we're going to be soon on like the next iteration of the operating system and I think, ai and mixed reality. I think this is going to bring about and my hope is that we can build a lot of good into those experiences, therapeutically for people, for people's mental wellness. I mean, I was, as an introvert and as a germaphobe, I spent a lot of time alone during COVID and it really did mess with me in some ways, but I think a lot of people went through something like what I went through during.

Cole: 1:40:14

COVID and it certainly called out to me the need for us to think through our mental wellness and I think this is just like education there's a digital divide between education. I think there's a massive divide between the resources that can help you work through something mentally and your ability to reach those resources.

Klara: 1:40:38

And I think ARVR, mixed reality.

Cole: 1:40:41

I think this is going to change drastically and I think that's going to have a positive effect on the world.

Klara: 1:40:45

You actually maybe answer one of the questions I was going to ask on the macro level, which is you have such a fantastic and broad view of technology and, obviously, the journey and what do you have achieved and done. What are you most excited about? Is that pretty much what you painted? Now, when you look at what's coming ahead from technology perspective, I really am not.

Cole: 1:41:05

A lot of people say this, but I try and live this and, at the end of the day, really, yes, I want to provide a good return on investing capital for my investors and I want to make money. I think it's clear, like businesses need to make money, but my motivation we build technology to serve humanity. When I think about serving humanity, I want to think about like, to the extent I'll have a legacy. I want that legacy to be building solutions that help humans be better humans, and that's everything from not having to run red lights because you're just sitting in a stupid red light with no traffic coming the other way and the light's still red and you just, you know, I'd love to run that red light, but how annoying that feeling is, but also to the healthcare and, like you know, everything like digital divide is such a big thing for me.

Cole: 1:41:58

Part of the deal we did with the city of Las Vegas is we provide free Wi-Fi for underprivileged zip codes there. That makes me feel really good. So as we build more of you know what we call today. It's called kinetic grid.

Klara: 1:42:12

That's what we've built because we don't like the term edge as we build AI into this offering.

Cole: 1:42:17

I'll just tell you, you'll be the first. I don't know when this gets published. I sure as hell hope it gets published after we've announced it. But what this wall turned into when AI is embedded into this offering is called zero gap, and that has a multitude of reasons of why we call it zero gap. But it has everything to do with the sort of end to end experiences that humans ultimately have to endure through the human to mechanical or human to electrical or just generally human to machine communication spectrum. But I don't think we don't operate at machine speed. I think, by affecting humans, we have to automate machine to machine for our benefit, and I'm just I'm super excited about art of the possible here and I'm really driven to build better experiences that bring families closer together and will allow you and I select legally get that light green faster.

Klara: 1:43:15

That's fantastic. On the opposite side, even we talked a little bit about AI, generative AI. I know it's a great use case for edge some of the inferencing that you had mentioned. What do you think we need to keep an eye on? There's also a lot of talks about this could potentially create extension. It could destroy us. What is your view, or are there any other things you think we need to really focus on and think about creating this positive future? Because I think, as humans, technology can be used for good or bad, and it depends on, I think, a little bit of human who's creating it and the human who's using it and how they decide to use it.

Cole: 1:43:55

Man, such a good question and like. Two things immediately come to mind. One is like so the body mechanics of any sport, your body goes where your head goes, right. So I think I think that is true for your brain as well. If you want to focus on the positive implications of something that you're doing, then I think generally the results are going to be positive.

Cole: 1:44:17

Conversely, if everything's wrong and you find ways to poke holes, like our cognitive biases can, whether they're positive or negative, have everything to do with, like you know what you can personally achieve and then what influence you put on the people that you work with and spend time with. So I just try and choose to continue to be the optimist and maybe with some naivete. But I also think, like anybody that starts up any company ever has some naivete about, like, starting that company. So the again that self awareness of, hey, we're going to go and attempt to do something and hopefully it works. We think it's going to work. Part of why any startup or any business is successful is because you can influence the people that you're trying to, you know, to influence successfully, like look what an incredible job Steve Jobs did with Apple.

Cole: 1:45:11

Like he got people to in a day, got people to switch from five different large cell phone manufacturers to the iPhone because of an app store. Right, and like I cannot tell you how many startup pitches I've been in as an angel investor, whereas, like we're going to be the iPhone of the X industry.

Cole: 1:45:35

But I also know the people at Verizon who turned the Apple deal down and then regretted it and they said you know, we're Verizon and we can, we can call the shots. And so I do think you need to go into these things with the intent that you want to have long term. And I mean, there's some really scary things that you can do with AI, like the deep fake stuff is pretty scary. Yes.

Cole: 1:46:04

But my circle of influence and the sphere that I care about, I can do what I think is right and I can sort of affect change there. And I came out of the DoD, so I'll let politicians be politicians and you know, do I think there should be some government oversight on AI, probably, like there probably should be and there probably should be more than just the US right, like there should be some UN policy on how AI will affect warfare, because I think it has a massive potential to affect warfare. I was watching a video yesterday. It's a really funny like parody of like the pitch meeting that went into every Marvel movie everywhere.

Cole: 1:46:46

And if you actually think about how many humans actually get killed, it's very little, right, but lots of CGI characters get killed and that's, you know, in part to make the audience like, hey, we can kill bunch of CGI aliens, like that doesn't really affect us. But I don't know. I just think that I want to focus on education and mental wellness and connectivity and digital divide and you know, also money saving, backhaul, eliminating things that a retail store or a venue are going to also benefit from, and if you're an optimist for humanity, you have to believe that we will always find our balance. Humans are pretty good at finding his balance, finding their balance, and it's not smooth water, sometimes right, but it usually levels out to some form of you know, acceptable outcome. It has for thousands and thousands of years, so let's bet on that.

Klara: 1:47:45

I agree that's a great answer. All right. Last, maybe a few rounds, I've heard you on another podcast. Somebody asked you a question If you could play with tennis with anyone, you picked Christopher Walken. But if you could play tennis against any tennis player, who would that be?

Cole: 1:48:05

Oh, man, you'd think I'd have a good answer for this, like immediately. Probably it would be Pete Sampras, probably just because when I was growing up he was the best. But, man, I'd want to play someone that I would absolutely get destroyed by, because I wouldn't want to play someone that it was competitive and there was a chance of me winning and then losing. Maybe Pete Sampras, but man, there'd be so many people like I'd love to play Boris Becker, I'd love to play Yvonne Lindel, there's like a lot Jim Courier. I'd love to play so many tennis players, and I mean there's a lot of female players I'd love to play too. That's such a good question. I'll go with Pete Sampras.

Klara: 1:48:57

All right, so similar. But on the technical side, if you could have a technical conversation with anyone you want in the world, who would that be Sort of related to? Could be, you know, vaporized, or what are you building?

Cole: 1:49:16

Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think like is this someone that I could like influence for vapor? But where my mind immediately goes is like what good could I influence by connecting to someone who thinks about connectivity? You know who it probably would be Honestly sitting here now thinking about it it's probably Sam Altman.

Klara: 1:49:34

That's fun.

Cole: 1:49:35

Probably because I think that I don't know that he knows how much power he's got. Yeah. I mean, maybe he does. But I also think, look, you can't be good at everything. I couldn't go build open AI the way he did, even though he started as a nonprofit, and I'm good at doing those. There's some things around the connectivity side of what he wants to achieve and, yeah, I think it'd be Sam Altman.

Cole: 1:50:01

just for the amount of good, I think, hopefully he knows he can do with this, but also some of the pitfalls that could be waiting for him specifically around, like how well AI is going to be integrated into a human experience when you have the speed of light to deal with, because I just don't think they think about that often Sometimes very doable and achievable and I wish to be like a flounder wall when you and Sam talk.

Klara: 1:50:28

hopefully it happens sometime soon.

Cole: 1:50:30

I think we're in different leagues.

Klara: 1:50:32

You know, it's just any message, or I'll try doing it for you. I think maybe I'll share with him this conversation and see what he says.

Cole: 1:50:40

Okay.

Klara: 1:50:41

All right. Last but not least, you know you have a house full of women, obviously your wife and two daughters. What are you teaching them? Or they're still kind of very young, but when you think about their upbringing and sort of our technology is heading. Obviously we talked about your athletic and music background. How do you see their upbringing and any kind of major things? How do you look at that?

Cole: 1:51:10

Let me tackle the first part of that. First, having daughters. The one thing that I want to instill in them is they can do anything they want Like they should grow up accepting the world that we live in, but they should also grow up knowing that they can change the world we live in. If there's like a philosophical baseline that I would like to instill in them is that they can be as powerful as they want to be and they are as strong as you know anybody on earth. So I think that's one more like, pragmatically, around my hopes for them.

Cole: 1:51:52

I want to make sure I mean again, tennis was. I just went out on the tennis court when I was four and just kept on playing every day. It became a passion of mine because I was introduced to it and it was a passion of people that I loved and respected. And would I have played tennis and been passionate about tennis if my parents were tennis players? Who knows? You know what I mean. I don't know. I want to make sure that I introduce my girls to as many things as I can. I mean, my daughter's been snowboarding, my oldest has been snowboarding, she's been on a surfboard, she's been on a wakeboard. I want to introduce them to a bunch of things and then let them figure out their passion, and then I'm going to just support the heck out of that passion. And that doesn't have to be a sport, that could be anything. And I just want to make sure that I'm there to support that and nurture that.

Klara: 1:52:43

That sounds like a great parenting. Thank you for leading by example, cole, and many of those areas, and I appreciate your time. I know you have lots going on right now so I really do treasure this. I think we could go for hours, so maybe at some point we can get to podcast episode number two between the two of us. It's been a pleasure having you. Anyone who wants to reach out? I know again, you're very busy. Is there a way, best way, to reach you or follow you?

Cole: 1:53:11

Geez, I mean I'm on LinkedIn, so that's the only social network I'm on. I mean, otherwise, maybe I'll give you my email address and then if someone says, hey, that's someone I want to connect with, you can give them my email address. Okay.

Klara: 1:53:29

I'll test you before I'll be your filter. I like that, that level of trust we've established during this past two hours.

Cole: 1:53:35

Thank you, Geez. Maybe that was a terrible answer to you.

Klara: 1:53:39

I appreciate it. That's a big compliment for me. I got to make sure I'll schedule a call with them and ask the right questions, so I don't send this. I feel so bad.

Cole: 1:53:51

I don't want to just give up my email address on here, but I am reachable on LinkedIn. That's probably the best way.

Cole: 1:53:58

And if you care about skydiving, which is something we've not talked about, which I do. I guess I kind of fit there a little bit at the end. I do have an Instagram account but that's like largely my adventures in skydiving, which I actually kind of keep very private and very personal outside of like all the other work, but I find it to be. It puts me in the present like no other thing can put me in the presence. So fun, like PHUN jumpers, the Instagram account, but it's all skydiving. But you can reach me there professionally LinkedIn.

Klara: 1:54:33

Great, I'm going to check out your Instagram profile because you didn't mention it before when we talked. I love skydiving. I only did it once and I wanted to get certified to actually be able to do it by myself.

Cole: 1:54:43

I'm a coach, you are.

Klara: 1:54:45

Oh my gosh. Well, maybe here I found my next skydiving adventure. I love this. Well, thank you so much, and I look forward to hitting some tennis balls with you now.

Cole: 1:54:57

Let's go do it If you enjoyed this episode.

Klara: 1:54:59

I want to ask you to please do two things that would help me greatly. One, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, spotify or any other podcasting platform that you use to listen to this episode. Two, please share this podcast with a friend who you believe might enjoy it as well. It is a great way to remind someone you care about them by sharing a conversation they might be interested in. Thank you for listening.

Grand Slam Journey

66. Cole Crawford: Founder and CEO of Vapor on Breaking Boundaries in Tech with a Tennis Mindset

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