Building the Biggest Machine in History w/ Brian Janous, Former Microsoft VP of Energy

Today's guest, Brian Janous, is the former VP of Energy at Microsoft. In fact, he was their first ever energy hire back in 2011. Until his departure earlier this year, Brian oversaw energy strategy and sourcing for all of Microsoft’s cloud and AI infrastructure, including procuring renewable energy for the company to meet its carbon objectives.

Since the earliest days of his career, Brian has sought to answer the question, “How do we build markets around the complex machine of the electric grid to drive behaviors that shift the future?” As you’ll hear, Microsoft gave him the opportunity to do just that.

When Brian joined the company in 2011, Microsoft’s market cap was north of $218 billion. Today its market cap has skyrocketed to over $2.7 trillion, thanks in no small part to the company's ability to acquire energy, refine it into data, and use that data to fuel the creation of value in the cloud.

Brian is a natural-born storyteller, and you’re in for a treat.

In this episode, Brian and Chris talk about:

• The power of storytelling in building the world’s largest machine
• Why the future of energy innovation must be informed by the past and grounded in the present
• The breakthrough that converted Microsoft’s CEO at the time, Steve Ballmer, into a true believer in Brian’s and his team’s vision for the future of energy
• The importance of having an enduring narrative that drives your strategy forward

And much more!

Transcript

Brian Janous  0:00  
So we're walking through these aisles and he's marveling at the scale, like how big this is. And we walk through this whole giant room. And then we come to a door, and we open the door. And then there's a whole 'nother one. It's like, "Oh my gosh, there's another one of these. This is crazy. This is so big," and he stops. And he goes, "I feel like we're a real company now."

Chris Hare  0:16  
Welcome to The Storied Future Podcast, a show where I interview high performing CEOs, experts and innovators who have put new narratives out into the world and then used those narratives to shift the future. If you want to create a future where you're celebrated not only for what you've accomplished, but for how you've accomplished it, who you took with you and who you became in the process. You're in the right place. My guest today is Brian Janus, the former VP of energy at Microsoft and a longtime friend of mine. Brian was the very first energy hire at Microsoft back in 2011. Until his departure earlier this year, he oversaw energy strategy and sourcing for all of Microsoft's cloud and AI infrastructure, including procuring renewable energy, so that the company can meet their carbon objectives. Since the earliest days of his career, Brian has sought to answer the question, how do we build markets around the complex machine of the energy grid to drive behaviors that shift the future? As you'll hear, Microsoft gave him the opportunity to do just that. In 2011, when Brian joined the company, Microsoft's market cap was north of $218 billion. Today, it skyrocketed over 2.7 trillion, thanks in no small part to the company's ability to acquire energy, refine it into data, and use that data to fuel the creation of value in the cloud. And this episode, Brian and I talk about the power of storytelling and building the world's largest machine, why the future of energy innovation must be informed by the past and grounded in the constraints of the present. The breakthrough that converted Microsoft CEO at the time, Steve Ballmer into a true believer in Brian and his team's vision for the future of energy. And finally, the importance of having an enduring narrative that drives your strategy forward. Brian is a natural born storyteller, and you're in for a treat. Let's dive in.

Brian, welcome to the Storied Future Podcast. 

Brian Janous  2:14  
Thank you, Chris. Really happy to be here.

Chris Hare  2:15  
So first things first, I would love to hear a little bit about not just what you do, but who you are and your identity. 

Brian Janous  2:21  
Sure. So I'm a dad of five teenagers, I think is probably the thing that most distinguishes me. From most people's story. My wife, Kim, and I decided to adopt teenage twins during COVID. So that's how we ended up with five teenagers. So three biological two adopted, I have one who's heading off to college this year, and the other four are in high school. So one Junior, two sophomores, and a freshman. And it is as chaotic if not more than what people would imagine. Yes. Being a dad, most days is what defines my life. And we also have two wonderful dogs, too. So it's quite chaotic, around the jail's household most days. 

Chris Hare  3:02  
Well, thanks for sharing that. Several months back when I was prepping. And we're starting to have conversations about this, found this talk that you gave at wind power 2018 in Chicago. And when I heard it, I knew that this is the place that we had to start. 

Brian Janous  3:15  
Yeah, that was an interesting challenge. I think for me, I was asked to do a very short of this series of speakers that were going to come up and do a I think it had to be limited to four to five minutes, which makes it one of the hardest talks I've ever had to give because usually when I'm talking at a conference or any sort of event, I've got 20 or 30 minutes. And so you don't really have to think about it as much. Who was it Mark Twain? Mark Twain, thank you that, you know, I would have written you a shorter letter if I'd had more time, right. So I was challenged to come up with something that would be meaningful, in a very short period of time. And I just so happened to be staying at a hotel in downtown Chicago that overlooks the Fisk street power station, which was one of the first major power plants in the United States. It was basically designed or commissioned by a man named Sam Enzo who really is the father of the modern electric utility. And so much of what we think of today is how the power grid works and how utilities work came from Sam. And he was a protege of Thomas Edison's who often gets credit for obviously, the Pearl Street station in New York City and many things that he did. But really, it was Sam Menzel, who created the modern electric grid and the modern electric utility. And so he's always been someone that I was fascinated with. And so I'm sitting there thinking about what I want to talk about, and I'm looking down, I'm like, Oh, my gosh, that's the fiscal station. I'm looking at one of the first power plants in the country. And so I knew that's what I had to talk about, because that's we're going to be talking about storytelling, to me the history of anything, but in this case, I work inside the electric power industry, the history of that industry has always fascinated me because I think so much of what we have today, really only makes sense if you understand the history and so much of where we're trying to go and the right pathways to go The next steps we need to take are all rooted in why we have what we have already. What's the story? How did we get here. And if you don't have a connection to that history, it makes it a lot harder for you to think about the future. Because your assumptions going in are not really rooted in the reality of how things actually work. Right. And so, it's always been important for me to talk about the history of our industry, because I think it helps ground people to be more thoughtful about the future and where we need to go.

Chris Hare  5:30  
I think especially in big tech, there's this idea that you have to just invent from scratch, right? And it's all about who can be the most brilliant, forward looking person, right. But I love how for that story, you really rewind well over 100 years, right. And I think the lessons and the parallels are really powerful.

Brian Janous  5:49  
Yeah, and I think it is hard. And I do span both of these industries of energy and tech. And I do think it's hard for tech people, because in a sense, the tech world does allow you to create things from scratch that are completely disconnected from the history, because a lot of there was no history for a search engine, for instance. So so much of this stuff is new. But then when you get into a world, like the electricity industry, you can't apply the same logic, you can't just say like, well, we're just going to do it completely differently than we've always done. It's like, well, so we have this thing called the electric grid, and it's been around for about 120 years. And it actually matters. And you can't circumvent it, right, you can't really get around it, we put trillions of dollars into it. And so we need to figure out how to leverage it. And it's not just starting from scratch. And I have this conversation over and over again, with startups and other folks in the industry that want to come in and create drastic change. But you have to do that in the context of what exists today. And that's where that understanding that story, that history, and why we have what we have helps you then better understand of how do we move forward? Rather than, hey, let's just scrap this whole thing and start over. You can't do that, in that sort of industry. It just doesn't work.

Chris Hare  7:01  
Yeah, I love defining creativity around problem solving, ultimately, right. And so, and doing that, you're always doing that within constraints. And within your industry, there are very significant constraints. And so that innovation is probably that much more challenging.

Brian Janous  7:14  
It is and I call SMIL. As a writer who Bill Gates talks about a lot. He's written dozens and dozens of books on all sorts of different things. But he one of the things he's talked a lot about is energy systems. And for us, his sort of guiding philosophy is that energy transition is slow. It's a slow process to move from burning wood to burning whale oil to burning fossil fuels. And we look back over this history. And we think, Oh, wow, once we had access to crude oil, like we've moved really fast away from whale oil, that's not actually how it happened. There was entrenched industry of whalers that were really opposed to this idea of moving towards some other means of feeling things now, of course happens in the innovation happens. But the adoption of technology, when you have sort of an entrenched, industry already there protecting it, it takes a long time for industries to evolve. And again, that's why that understanding that history is really important, because then you have this sense of well, what we're trying to do right now, say, moving away from fossil fuels, to producing electricity with zero carbon resources. Seems like a no brainer. But it's actually still really hard. It's really difficult to reengineer the systems and build these massive power plants, whether it's wind farms, solar farms, new nuclear power plants, all the different things that we need. It just takes a long time. One of the things I've said to my team over the years and to to people outside of that is that there's two things you have to understand about building energy systems. One, it's hard to build big things. And two, it's really hard to build really big things. And I don't think people understand when we're talking about transforming something as a machine as big and complicated as electric grid, that that's a really, really hard problem. And it takes a long time. And it's a lot of capital. And it's a lot of creativity around how you navigate all the various constraints that exist inside that system, both physical and financial, and regulatory.

Chris Hare  9:11  
So when you go back to Sam Insull, he said, This is what we're going to do, what was the reality at that time? And then how did things kind of progress from there? Because I imagine there was some level of resistance.

Brian Janous  9:22  
I think what was interesting part about his story is what he saw in around 1900 Is that we had these bifurcated electric grids, right? So you would have a community or a neighborhood that would have a small power plant boiler symbol that produce electricity, and it would distribute on a street or a handful of streets. But you didn't have any sort of economies of scale because these systems were disconnected from one another. What Sam saw is, well, if I actually start to connect all these grids together, and he was doing this in Chicago, if I start connecting all these grids together, I can actually build much bigger power plants, and I can significantly reduce the cost of the electricity It was scale. And so that's what the Fifth Street Station was, it was the largest power plant in the world at the time, but significantly larger than anything anyone had built prior to that? Well, going back to that issue of sort of adoption, what was also happening during that time is major factories, anyone that was operating a big factory, they had their own steam boilers power plants inside of their systems, right. So they built factories around a central engine, which meant your things that needed more power had to be closer to that the heart of the plant, right. And so if you had some process that required a lot of energy, that was going to be on the first floor, and then it would go up from there. So the logic of how a factory was designed was built around proximity to that power source. Now, when Sam introduced lower cost electricity, suddenly, he was able to undercut the cost of power being produced by these manufacturers. But the process of manufacturers moving from making all their own power to relying on electric grid took about 25 or 30 years. And the reason is, the plant was designed a certain way. And so again, going back to that, there was inherent inertia and resistance to change. Because now when you design a plant, you're not designing it on proximity to power, because you can put electric motors all over the factory. And what you actually have is a much more efficient factory, because now the process flows Logically, if you're building a car, you're like, Yeah, I'm gonna start with a frame, and then I'm going to add the engine, and then I'm going to add all the other components. So that's how a car is built today. But you can only do that because you can spread that energy and that power over that system using electric motors. While Sam had a better solution, it took a long time for those factories to adopt it, because it meant retooling entire systems, right. And so that's where when you think about transition of energy industry of any industry, you have to understand the logic behind why things are done today, why they've been done that way in the past, to truly understand how you're going to transform the future. Because if you just go ahead and say, Hey, I have a better solution, I got a better mousetrap over here. It doesn't really matter if the entire industry is built around this other kind of mousetrap. That's where I think people have to really think creatively about how we change systems, and why understanding the history of said systems is so important.

Chris Hare  12:20  
So coming back to present day, you think about the journey to net zero. And let's just say everyone was completely bought into it at this moment. We know that's not the case, far from it. But what are the parallels that you see, not in terms of belief, so because we just want to assume that everyone believes it for the sake of this discussion? But in terms of the system, and systems? What does that look like? And what are the challenges there?

Brian Janous  12:42  
I think one of the biggest challenges is, especially if you're coming in from outside of industry, everyone wants to believe that markets are largely efficient, in other words, that the sort of the logical thing will happen, right. And I studied finance and undergrad and very much a believer in efficient markets, and that, hey, the markets are going to collect all the data that we collectively share. And then we're all going to kind of make the right decision the roughly the right decision about what actions to take in a society. The problem with the energy industry is it doesn't really follow that logic very well. It's not an efficient market is a market that is one very bifurcated by take the United States, when we have over 1000 electric utilities in the United States. There's these five items, and then you've got all these different regulatory layers around that. And then you've got federal regulatory layers around that. And so there's a bunch of inefficiencies along the way that get inserted into that, such that if you come in to the market and say, Hey, I have a solution. And it's better than the thing we're doing right now. It's like, okay, you might, but have you accounted for the fact that you've got all these other stakeholders, you've got all these other regulatory barriers, which may or may not make sense, but it doesn't matter is what they are, that creates the market, or the level of efficiency and speed at which we can adapt that industry. And so when we think about sort of moving towards a netzero system, it's true that the lowest cost source of electricity today comes from wind and solar power, by far. Nevertheless, you still have a significant amount of infrastructure that's already been built, for which the owner of those assets still would like to get a return on that invested capital. And so there's going to be resistance to necessarily just shutting off these existing power plants and transitioning to an entirely new system. And so that's where you have to really understand why do we have the things we have? How do we navigate that system in a way so that we can rapidly transfer over to lower carbon resources. But you've got to understand the existing systems too. And how do we work within those systems so that we can effectively navigate all of those stakeholders and all of those constraints.

Chris Hare  14:53  
So from a narrative standpoint, then people are trying all kinds of different ways on both sides to convince folks But what do you feel is the most compelling narrative around? Here's what the future holds. And here's how we get there.

Brian Janous  15:06  
Yeah, this is an interesting problem, because when you look at the benefits of a net zero power system, or even a net zero economy, there are ample benefits that are not debatable. It's not debatable that having less pollution in the air is a good thing. And it's good for everyone. It's not debatable that putting carbon in the atmosphere increases temperatures, and there's negative consequences as a result of that. Not to say people don't debate it. I'm just saying it's not debatable. What's frustrating is that that conversation often gets deemed as a political conversation, when the comments that I just made have absolutely nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with science. Where it gets to be political is when you get to the question of what we do about it. And I wish that when we had these debates, we were really talking about politics, which is, how should we make decisions then as a society as it relates to how we're going to regulate these things? Or how we're going to incentivize the building of new things? Those are political discussions, right. But what often happens is we stop at the scientific debate, because we deem it political and not polite conversation over the dinner table with thanksgiving, when in fact, that is simply a scientific discussion. And it has nothing to do with politics. And it's a shame that so often, it's not just on the issue of climate change. So the issue of a whole lot of things. So often we get stopped from having intelligent discussion, because we deem something political, that really isn't. Right. And you can say that about any number of issues that get treated as not polite conversation. It's frustrating, because we should, as a society be able to really talk about politics of what should we be doing in response to these things, rather than pretending like, we're still debating whether there's a problem or not?

Chris Hare  17:12  
Yep, I have a friend who is anti regulation, but he just invented this technology. And now he's working with the government to get them to pass regulations to make his innovation required by law. Whatever, whatever makes you more money.

Brian Janous  17:31  
Everyone hates regulations until they don't. I mean, regulations are pretty important. And then they're particularly important in a monopoly industry like the electric utility. I mean, the whole thing is regulated, it has to be. You have to regulate, please, there's no other way to do it. But that that is frustrating.

Chris Hare  17:47  
Well, Brian, I'd love to shift over to your story now projecting into the future, and kind of your first day of retirement, how do you want to be remembered? And what do you want to be proud of at the end of your career?

Brian Janous  17:58  
My hope is that the people that I've interacted with over my career feel like they're better as a result that I would have left in my wake history of having helped people in organizations get better and get stronger. That's really what I'm passionate about, obviously, in the context of having a meaningful impact on climate. I mean, that's sort of why I do the work I do. But you only do that through people, or the only do that through making other people more successful, and then leaving behind a legacy of impact that hopefully will outlive me. But I think that's kind of what we all want, whether that's with our children, or the people we interact with, in our work lives. It's all about how are we ultimately making people better? Yep.

Chris Hare  18:46  
So going back, rewinding to when you were a kid, where did you grow up? What do you like as a kid? And how did you think about the future back then?

Brian Janous  18:53  
So I grew up, from Mississippi originally, but grew up in Houston, Texas, most of my childhood, I had a great experience growing up, I lived in a neighborhood with a bunch of kids my age, and we spent all day every day outside, my house backed up to this deep woods that went, we never found the end of it. We spent a lot a lot of days trying, and created a lot of frustration for our parents, sometimes when we would come home very, very late. But we always knew where we were, they just didn't make them a little nervous. But that was a great experience for me. I mean, it gave me a love for the outdoors and being outside. Gave me a love for sports and play. And we were always creating games and making things up. And I still do that with my own kids. I mean, I think that growing up really create a love of those things for me, and I still love the outdoors and love being outside. And my kids joke a lot. They're like, and I wish we I wish we grew up in the 80s Because I tell the stories all the time about all the things that we did and I wonder. It's not like the world is necessarily any different in terms of those opportunities. It's just we've obviously unfold gently, our kids have become constrained by screens and other things sort of their time that we didn't really have. And we had a Nintendo and things like that, but certainly wasn't to the degree we have today. And it's sad for me because I do feel like my childhood, in a lot of ways was more interesting than theirs. In terms of the stuff that we did. So anyways, that's why I like sharing those stories with them to hopefully inspire them just to go outside sometimes go kick around in the woods.

Chris Hare  20:25  
Yeah, I remember we lived on about 120 acres for a little while. And I was terrified. I think I was eight when we moved there. And I was terrified of the cows, because that always seemed charging down the hill. And I always thought they're gonna come for me, you know. So one day I decided I'm going to face my fears. And I went, and my dad had these two bone handled knives in this sheath. So I strapped those on, put on a red cowboy hat, which isn't good when there's bulls around supposedly reds, but color. And I went out there and I stared down a, I think it was a bullet had horns, it might have been a cow. Because I know they do sometimes. And I looked at it, and I'm like, Okay, I knew what irony was, I didn't know the word, but I'm like, I'm gonna make this cow wear this cowboy hat. And so I took it and threw it between its horns, and then it ran off. So face down the fears. But as you're talking, I remember those just, it is odd, right? You just go play for eight hours. Sometimes when I like I would do it with friends. But sometimes I just do it by myself just go out and run around in the woods.

Brian Janous  21:17  
Yeah, it's pretty wonderful experience to get to have it's good. 

Chris Hare  21:21  
So do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up? Or kind of what you thought about the future? And then kind of what was the path to power?

Brian Janous  21:27  
Yeah, I mean, well, like most kids, my age and are our age, I wanted to be a fighter pilot, because I saw Top Gun. I mean, who didn't want to be that? So anyway, after I determined that, maybe I'm not going to become a fighter pilot. I didn't actually really have much of a plan. I went away to college, I got a degree in finance and philosophy. The reason I pursued both of those degrees is that I was always interested in system, financial system is always fascinated me understanding economics about why people make decisions, why consumers make decisions they do. And philosophy was fascinating to me, because it's also about systems, right? It's about how we formulate ideas, how does our brain connect to the world and come up with concepts like the color blue and things we would sit around and talk about forever, and esoteric questions, which are actually quite important. And so those are the two things that I studied in undergrad. And then right when I got out, I was looking at different opportunities. And I had this opportunity to join this energy consulting firm. And I never really thought about that industry too much. But I jumped into that, and immediately just fell in love with this idea of how do we build markets around this complex machine that we built, which was the electric grid, drive behaviors? How do people make decisions around investments in the space and this was very early on, and really thinking about the adoption of renewable energy. And we're still dealing with a lot of turmoil from the fallout of Enron, which happened sort of early in my career, just fascinating. But yeah, I just immediately fell in love with it, and knew that this is what I wanted to do with my life. And so I had the good fortune of sort of falling into this space. But it was something that was an immediate fit for me, because it sort of scratched an itch that I had around the things that really think are fascinating. And so yeah, that's kind of how I got in. And I've loved every minute of it than excited to continue to be part of this industry, regardless of what hat I'm wearing going forward.

Chris Hare  23:27  
So I'd love to hear how you made the jump to Microsoft was, I think the recruiter first reached out to you in 2010, 2011, somewhere around there, but about a role on the Data Center team. And I know you thought it was gonna be a dead end job. Can you tell that story?

Brian Janous  23:41  
Yeah. So I actually started consulting for Microsoft in about 2008, when they were just starting to build out at that time, very small data center portfolio. And then 2011, someone came to me, Christian Gulati, who's has also been at Microsoft for a long time and done a lot of things in this industry. It's been very influential. E approached me and said, Hey, I think you should come over and start this energy team. And I said, Look, Christian, I, I'm an energy guy, right? A lot of tech guy. I don't understand why a company like Microsoft would even need a full time position. I can just keep consulting for you. And I said, I just think this sounds like a dead end job. I don't know why this is even that important. He said, Look, I really think there's something to this whole cloud thing. And I, I think energy is going to be essential to this company going forward. He goes nobody realizes it yet. In fact, he had to convince his boss that this job was even necessary. So he had the foresight that this was going to be critically important to the company. And he had a particular passion about this that frankly, I just like, it'd be at least fun to work for this guy for a couple years because he was seemed like a lot of fun and really innovative guy and he and I are still great friends and I'm thankful every day for him convincing me to do this because over that Due to time, I did come to realize how critical energy was for a company like Microsoft. And I got to observe the evolution of the organization from energy and sustainability, as a result, being something that no one was really thinking about, to suddenly something that everyone's thinking about a lot. And they realize, well, this is absolutely it's existential for the company. In fact, Satya said that a few years ago, that energy is an existential issue for Microsoft. So yeah, we went from nobody caring, or understanding why was important, myself included to now this is an existential issue for the company. And I got to ride that wave the whole time, which, in and of itself is full of lots of interesting stories about how we moved from point A to point B. But I'm thankful, as I said, Every day that I got to be part of that journey,

Chris Hare  25:54  
I love that idea of, someone else had the vision. And they kind of saw that in you that you could connect to that right, even when you didn't see it, pulled you into it. And then ultimately, you're in charge of owning that vision eventually, right? But it almost kind of propels you along, even though you didn't quite see it.

Brian Janous  26:09  
Yeah, yeah. And I looked at a lot of my career that way, and so much of like, being in the right place at the right time. And sure, of course, I made decisions to do things. But I think there's a lot of people in this space that are a lot smarter than me, and I just kind of happened to be there at this right moment where all this stuff was coming together. And I'm very fortunate. As a result, I think that I got to sort of be where I got to be, and be part of this story. That's going to go on without me as I've now stepped down from that role, but very fortunate.

Chris Hare  26:49  
And earlier this year, you left your role as VP of energy at Microsoft, and are taking time to explore what's next. Can you talk a little bit about and we'll talk about how you made the leap there. But first, I'd love to understand what your scope was when you left and kind of what you're most proud of during your time there.

Brian Janous  27:04  
Yeah, so my role at Microsoft was respond, I oversaw the energy strategies, sourcing for all of our cloud and AI infrastructure. So the vast majority of Microsoft's energy footprint is in our data centers, and 90, probably 98%. And so my responsibilities, were managing the acquisition of that energy, managing the ongoing sort of cost in exposures that we have there. And then also the carbon piece of it. So procuring the renewable energy for the company to meet all of our carbon objectives that we set. So that was the overall scope. 

Chris Hare  27:48  
And what are you most proud of during that time?

Brian Janous  27:48  
I think I'm most proud of all the things that we didn't do, when you have the sort of scale that we had. And we are one of the largest consumers of electricity on the planet at this point. There's a lot of opportunities that get presented, there's a lot of investment decisions, technologies, I mean, obviously get pitched anything and everything because everyone sees Microsoft and thinks, wow, you can buy this new widget, whatever. And so I think one of the disciplines that I had to have is the most valuable resource that we had was our people's time. Right? That was the thing that was most critical to ensuring that we were getting the most out of it. And if we spend our people's time on things that ultimately aren't the most important things, we're squandering company's most important asset. And so there's a lot of things that came across my desk over the years that we could have chosen to spend time on that ultimately, would have been a waste of that time and would have been, you know, not the right decision. It's not that we always made the right decisions. But there's a lot of things I look back on and go. I'm glad we didn't do that. Like, I'm glad we didn't spend time on that, because that ultimately wasn't going to work or it wasn't really a good idea. And so being able to make decisions sort of early on in the process like that, that's what I look back on and go Well, that's the thing I'm most proud of, which maybe is a little counterintuitive. I mean, there's things that we did, I'm proud of to, but we were only been able to do those things. Because of all the things we chose not to do. 

Chris Hare  29:15  
Is there a story that comes to mind, and you talked earlier about how important it is for you to bring other people along or help other empower other people to succeed? Is there a specific one that comes to mind? Yeah,

Brian Janous  29:25  
I mean, there's, there's a lot, and a lot of it was navigating the importance of this issue to the company, with a lot of people, a lot of stakeholders that don't really understand the issue, right? I mean, we were running an energy team inside of a tech company. There's a lot of brilliant people at Microsoft that don't know anything about energy systems. But that doesn't mean people don't have ideas or they don't have opinions about it. Right as energy became more and more important to the company. We would get more ideas coming in about what we ought to do. You. And one of the things that I had to impress upon the team and we were having this conversation, actually, before I left for someone was asking me what's going to be the biggest challenge for this team going forward. And so the biggest challenge is all of the bad ideas that people are going to have, that they try to get you to adopt. And you are going to have to hold the line. Because there's a lot of really smart people, and maybe even very powerful people inside the company, they're going to have opinions. But fact of the matter is, they don't know how to do your job better than you do. And I was actually reading a article in The Atlantic right before that about high end wedding planning. And this woman was writing the article has a mentor, and she's like the wedding planner, for all the rich and famous people in the country, she said, the challenge you're going to have is that you're gonna have these super powerful clients that are super successful, and they're gonna intimidate you. But the reality is, Bill Gates doesn't know the first thing about table setting and lighting for a wedding. And I do. And so it's the sense of, you can't be intimidated by whether it's your leaders or anyone inside of an organization, you have to have that confidence that you are the expert on the stuff that you are the ones who've actually thought about it. I think that can be hard for people with me, especially early career people to come into a situation where they feel like, Oh, I'm gonna be intimidated by these smart, powerful people. But just because you're really smart at doing X doesn't mean you know anything about why. And I think oftentimes, we allow ourselves to sort of be intimidated by people who are successful, and let them apply and on all sorts of things that they actually know nothing about. Which I mean, we see that over and over again, it's a logical fallacy, I forget which one it is like, it's been a long time to my logic classes, but we tend to ascribe certain benefits and knowledge to people from one area to another. And there's not really any rationale behind that. So

Chris Hare  32:02  
I'm seeing you come into this company, or essentially speak a completely different language, right? And coming in, and started as a one man team, and talk a little bit about how you use storytelling in that journey to really bring people along on the vision.

Brian Janous  32:19  
Yeah, so I spent the prior almost 12 years in the consulting space. And that's a great education, because consulting is about, obviously, people are hiring you because you have some matter of expertise. And what makes one successful in that space, is being able to convince your clients that when you have something of value to bring to the table, but you're doing it in an arena where clearly they don't understand what you're talking about to the same degree that you do. Otherwise, they wouldn't be hiring, right. So you're just naturally in an environment where you're forced to be a good storyteller if you're going to be successful. And let's face because you've got to talk to a wide range of your clients, all that have varying degrees of understanding of things we're talking about, but mostly don't understand it as well as you do. But you got to be able to convince them that tell them enough of a story to where they understand your value. But obviously, you can't bring them all the way to where you are either. And this is what I had to transfer. When I got came into Microsoft, it was the same sort of thing is like, Okay, well, how does energy guy now slowly, people started to realize, oh, wow, we're going to build these more data centers, and we're going to start spending more money. And that was the first thing people started thinking about as well, this could get kind of expensive as we're building those data centers. And we have to plug all these servers in, and we're gonna run it for 20 years. And that was actually sort of my first bit of storytelling was sort of connecting the dots for people to say, look, if we do this, and you run this data center, 20 years, you can spend a billion dollars on electricity, right, which is kind of a big deal, even for a company like Microsoft. And that spent a lot more than that today. But that was a way to sort of connect with that to say, hey, there's some pretty important decisions that we need to make. Going into this situation, if we're going to be committing to spend billion dollars over a 1520 year period, it's really important that we do it right, right out of the gate. Because once you make certain decisions, you can't really undo go out of this. So that was sort of my first thing, and just getting people to get a sense of like, wow, these are some pretty significant obligations we're taking. And then over time, doing the same thing around carbon, and you're like, hey, we're actually going to create a pretty big carbon footprint. As a result of this. There's a lot of energy that's going to be generated to support these data centers. What does that mean? And how do we invest that? So just slowly getting people to understand the implications of the decisions we're making, which was challenging for a company that at that time, you know, Microsoft, was a kind of a box software company, right? And that's what they distributed, they sold software and that is a very different sort of animal than building massive infrastructure, and building, owning and operating some of the largest machines in the world. That's a whole different world than what the company had done since its existence in 1975. So there was a lot of education that had to happen with not just how much power we consuming, but how much land and how much labor, you know, how many servers and so there was this sort of constant evolution of getting deeper and deeper understanding to our leadership of what are we really doing when we're talking about building a cloud business, because you're building, the only thing that even comes close is the electric grid itself. And that's one of the things that I think was critical for me, sort of in this storytelling element was being able to connect the dots between these two things. It's like we're building what may become the world's largest machine, which is interconnected network of data centers. And again, the only thing that rivals it is electric. That's the biggest thing that humanity has ever built, is your biggest machine. Right. And I think data centers are beginning to approach that and May, at some point exceed that in terms of the overall scale, in terms of however you want to measure it, capital, deployment, physical stuff. But it's massive. It's a really amazing thing that Microsoft and some of the other big cloud players have done over the last decade. 

Chris Hare  36:15  
Plus, you just named our episode: building the world's largest machine. I like it. I love the story about your meeting with Steve Ballmer. And we'll talk a little bit in a little bit about kind of the scale of Microsoft when it comes to data center space and energy. But I know it was your job to forecast how much data center space to build out and then make it happen. So can you talk about that?

Brian Janous  36:37  
Yeah. So when I started, the cloud business was very, very small. Satya, I believe was actually running it at that time, or building the business case as to why we should even do it. But I don't even know if he was making a billion dollars. Maybe in a company like Microsoft, that's not a very big business. For a company whose revenue today is 140 billion or something for like, I think. So. It's very small business. And certainly whatever money it was making, it was losing money at that time. So build out a data center infrastructure was kind of an afterthought, I think, for our leadership. But over the first few years, I was there was getting towards the end of Steve's tenure, we did have an opportunity to take the leadership team on a tour of one of our bigger data center campuses at the time out in Quincy, Washington. And so they were having retreat out in the mountains. And so we took a bus out there and picked them up and then drove out to the data center. And got a chance to talk to Steve along the way, which is fascinating. And this would be the first time he's actually stepped foot in, in Microsoft data center. So walking around, it was impressive. I mean, they're even more impressive today, because they're even much bigger than than that one. But walking through the server halls, and if you've ever been in a data center, I mean, imagine just a sort of a Walmart Supercenter size building, that instead of aisles of clothes, and knickknacks, and whatever, and you just have aisles of servers. That's it. That's what a data center is. So we're walking through these aisles and sees marveling at the scale, like how big this is. And we walk through this whole giant room. And then we come to a door and we open the door. And then there's a whole nother one. He's like, Oh my gosh, there's another one of these, this is crazy. This is so big. And he stops and he looks around he goes, I feel like we're a real company. That's already been one of those valuable companies in the world for a decade plus, or two, I do decades at that point. And here's these feeling like we're finally a company now because we're building stuff. And it's funny his background is I believe his dad was executive at Ford. And so building something physical, manufacturing world, right, and building big things. And so I think in his mind, it was like, Wow, I'm finally doing that. To me, it was a fascinating moment in the story of the company. Because was where that sort of light went off, I think, for the first time for a lot of our leaders of like, well, we're a different sort of company. We're not just a company that writes code, and then ships it. But rather, we're a company that builds massive infrastructure to support our business in the future. And that what it's going to take for us to be successful in the future is not the same thing as what has made accessible in the past. And yes, we still have to write good code, but the way we deliver that is going to be a lot different. And the mechanism by which we do that is going to be a lot different. So the things that we have to care about now start to change. And I think that was one of those first steps along that journey of Microsoft's shift from, you know, a software company to an infrastructure company. And I think one of our first steps to being a leader in climate, because that was one of the implications of that sort of slippery slope of going down, building those infrastructure. Suddenly our carbon footprint starts to become one much larger the to way more important to the company for our success.

Chris Hare  40:01  
I think what's so powerful is you may never have gotten that result in a PowerPoint, right? The fact that he was there, and it connected with his own story and hit him emotionally. Right? That shift that happened after that is really remarkable. Yeah,

Brian Janous  40:14  
I think you're exactly right, I think it was critical to just actually see some of this stuff, to get a sense of what it actually takes to build it.

Chris Hare  40:22  
So then I know you had to come back to him and give him projections around what things were going to look like 10 years out.

Brian Janous  40:29  
Yeah, that's been an interesting journey as well, because again, when Microsoft, when the primary business is just distributing software, the cycles for that are very short to develop, the next iteration of office is a very sharp, let's say, I mean, it's hard work. And it takes time. But you're talking about months, sometimes a year or two, of coding, etc. When you talk about building physical infrastructure, that's a completely different animal, we can be talking about years, and in some cases in excess of a decade, to build out, say, the electrical infrastructure to support a datacenter at the scale that we build them today. And so that shift and thinking, we had to get that understanding of you can't make decisions on an 18 month planning horizon, right, you've got to make decisions on a five year or 10 year planning horizon, which is very unnatural for a company that has never had to do that before. Right. So that was one of the things that I spent a lot of time on over the years, is pushing our planning teams, to think much, much more long term about what it is that we want to build, because you're in this industry that's growing incredibly fast. And the demand was hard to predict on how fast cloud adoption was going to be. And of course, now in the world of AI, it's even more complicated. But you really have to have a lot of foresight into how far out you plan into the future. Because you can't just pivot on a dime, you can't just stand up a datacenter. Overnight, you can't get hundreds of megawatts of power overnight. These are things that take a long time. And so that planning process became super important in terms of our overall success of the company of are we going to have the right vision for where this business is going.

Chris Hare  42:17  
So how did he respond when you first presented? I know you had a bunch of reams of data and all your projections and everything and brought it to him in terms of...

Brian Janous  42:25  
So, one of the things I remember Steve saying when we were talking about projections for where the business was going to go. And again, this is early in the adoption of the cloud. And so there was a lot of uncertainty about what the demand was going to be and what the uptake was going to be in the market. And we obviously had a lot of people working on these demand projections. And he turned to our VP and one of these meetings and said, Where are you getting these projections? And he said, Well, we're we talked all the business groups and and Steve says stop, he goes, don't listen to the business groups. Because the only thing you need to do to do forecasting is open an Excel spreadsheet, look at what happened in the past, and then draw a straight line from there. That's the best forecast you're ever gonna get in a market like this. And I laugh at that, in part because he was so right. Because when you go back and look at the history and go, because I built forecasts off of that said, Alright, let's just take that and run with it and run it out to 2020. And I remember pulling one of those forecasts out several years later. And I was off by like 5%, in our forecast. And in the intervening years, I mean, we've had demand forecasts just go all over the place, and they change all the time, and people would freak out. And I always always kind of like, you know, I'm just gonna kind of go with Steve's approach and not freak out about this and just assume that we're probably going to grow at a relatively constant pace. And that's sort of what happened. So I love that. I mean, one of the things that good leaders do is they find a way to take really, really complex things and just simplified it down to the barest bones. And that was one of those moments where I'm like, Okay, that's a great way to think about forecasting, we don't actually know what's going to happen in the future. And so we spent a whole bunch of time trying to figure it out. But at some point, we got to take a step, and we got to do something. And so we got to find ways to sort of eliminate the complexity of these issues, and particularly the people that actually have to go do the work, because I think that's where people in organizations really get frustrated is when there's a lack of clarity about what am I supposed to do today. That's what our people want. When you're running a team. There's no way that everyone on your team, by the time I left Microsoft, I had 100 person team, there was no way that every person on that team was going to understand every single thing about what we were doing. But they needed to know what do I need to do today? When I show up in the office on Monday, do I feel like I have clear guidance about what is it that I'm supposed to be doing? How am I supposed to be contributed contributing and how is it meaningful? And that's a critical part of storytelling is being able to tell that story to our people, so that they feel valued. They feel like the work they're doing is valuable, that it's meaningful, and it's actually going to help them have career success.

Chris Hare  45:05  
So when we met up a few months back, you talked about your personal view that Microsoft is an energy company masquerading as a tech company. I know that might throw some people for a loop. So, talk to me a little bit about that.

Brian Janous  45:16  
Yeah, as we talked about earlier, Microsoft's historic business has always been selling software, and you buy software, download software, and put it on your computer. And so the engine of growth for the company, what company was really delivering was the code, right, the code that the software engineers wrote and then distributed. But as the business model has shifted to a cloud, first business, and AI first business, the means of which we deliver that service has changed. And what it's become now is the acquisition of energy. And then the translation of that energy into data, and then distributing that across a network. And so energy really has become the raw material of the business, you still have to have the coders and the software, I mean that, but the means by which that code gets delivered has changed. And so energy has now become the primary input into the product that Microsoft sells. And it's a refinement business, right. And if you think about the nature of the electricity system, itself, that is a business of energy reformation, right you're taking, whether it's fossil fuel, or wind blowing across the field, or sunlight, or water flowing over a dam, which, to most of us is completely meaningless. If you had to go try to live off grid, and live the same way you do today, you're gonna have a hard time figuring out and in our forefathers, and mothers could have done it, we're probably a whole lot less adept at figuring out how to survive without electricity these days. And so what the whole electricity industry has done is taking these things that are mostly not useful to most of us. And they've refined them in such a way that we have this commodity, this utility, that is actually extraordinarily useful, because it can do all sorts of different things. What we do then with data is we take that commodity electricity, and then we further refine it into light, and then distributed across the network, and then create all the tools and things that we have today as a result of that. So there's a business really has become a business of energy acquisition and refinement.

Chris Hare  47:19  
Can you talk about the scale then? So Microsoft, when you first started there, it was kind of, you've talked about as much electricity as a small state, that's what it consumed? And then what does that look like now?

Brian Janous  47:30  
Yeah, the growth and you know, it's not just Microsoft, obviously, it's the entire cloud industry, but the growth of data centers has been enormous. And you see that in pockets in places where you have high concentrations of these things like Northern Virginia and Ireland, back, I think, in Ireland today, data centers consume, like close to 20%, maybe approaching 25% of the country's total electricity, which is remarkable. And that's probably one of the highest percentages, I think, anywhere in the world, for any single country, because there is such a concentration there. But you see that in pockets, other places, and that growth is just continuing. And so data centers will continue to consume more electricity. I think the introduction of AI will only add to that. But then the real question that I always wrestled with is, what is the return on that investment from a societal standpoint, if you say, I think today, data centers consume about 2% of the world's electricity, that's probably a pretty good return on investment. When we think about all of the things that we can do today, and all the innovations that cloud and no AI technologies have delivered over the last decade plus, there's a lot of societal benefit that comes along with that. And so, yeah, it's a lot of energy, but it's a pretty good return on that investment. And then the other thing to think about too, is, is big tech companies have been the leaders in decarbonizing their own operations. And they've really led the way in terms of renewable energy acquisition and helping to drive down the cost of wind solar over the last decade, we saw 90 plus percent reduction in costs over about a 10 year period of those technologies. And that was in large part because tech companies as well as a lot of other corporations, were so active in procuring renewable energy scaling those markets helping to get down those learning curves. And so everything is going to have an environmental costs and I think when we put sort of blinders on and go, Oh, we shouldn't do XYZ we shouldn't you shouldn't drive an electric car because you're gonna have to mine certain minerals to do it. It's like well, okay, there's an environmental costs to walking out the front door. Everything has an environmental costs, what we have to do is evaluated of all the potential things we could do, what is the best possible investment we can make and what's the most efficient thing that we can do that minimizes our overall in marginal impact. And I think that's something that we're continuing to wrestle with as a society. But I've made a ton of progress over the last decade.

Chris Hare  50:08  
And so I know sustainability is a core value at Microsoft now. But that wasn't always the case. How did it go from becoming an afterthought to being a core value?

Brian Janous  50:16  
I was very fortunate to have a front row seat to how this unfolded at Microsoft, but also to work very closely with peers across a lot of other companies during that period, as well. So that I got to sort of see what was happening broadly across a number of different industries and a number of corporations, and what was happening during that time. And it's not just about sustainability. But there was really a shift over the last decade in companies definition of what is the purpose of a corporation. And having been a finance guy and having studied finance, economics, my understanding, at least at the time, was that the purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value. That's the whole sort of Keynesian idea of like, why a corporation exists, it's to maximize the value to the shareholder. But there was really a shift that happened kind of in late 2010s, of companies starting to ask the question, like, Are there more things we should be thinking about beyond shareholder value? What are the obligations that we have, to our employees, to our customers to society as a whole. And it's really what sort of spun up the whole ESG investment movement. And I think back to things like Larry Fink's letter to CEOs in 2019, and the Business Roundtable, and companies like Microsoft, and others, starting to make significant climate commitments, that was all driven during this era, where companies were starting to reassess, what are we really about as a company. And again, I got to have a front row seat at those deliberations, Microsoft, which was fascinating, but it was happening all over the world. And now granted, there are some companies and the tech companies are among those that were really leaders in a lot of these spaces. And there's a lot of different reasons probably why that happened, some of it was competitive is that we were all just sort of looking at each other going, well, what are they going to do? It's like, well, they're going to do that. And we're going to do that plus something else. And so there was a good bit of positive peer pressure, in terms of commitments to being 100%, renewable energy, or zero waste, or, in the case of Microsoft carbon negative. All of those were, in some parts, spurred on by that desire to say, hey, we're gonna be the one company that's not doing this, like we're gonna make sure that we're leading. And the other thing I think, is important in that, because I think that commerce question a lot, which was like, this is all just greenwashing, right? Is this all just for marketing? And actually, just yesterday was talking to a guy who is the head of the startup and carbon removal space. And he said, You know, I'm really impressed by the fact that Microsoft is in so many things. And so few people know about all the things that you've done over the years. He goes, it's clear to me that you're doing this because this was important, not because we were looking for a press release. And it was true, I think back of all the things that we've done, and the conversations that I've had, and it's always been about what's the right thing for us to do as a company? What is our obligation to society, not like, Oh, if we do this, we can have this great press release about it or whatever. That was never really a driver for us. It was really just a question of, what should we do given the responsibility we have, as one of the largest companies in the world? What's the right thing to do? What's the right way to build out this infrastructure. And that's the right way for our communities the right way for the environment. Those were the animating forces for us. And I, for one, just feel very fortunate, again, to have gotten to work at a company for a set of leaders who were so deeply committed to doing it the right way. 

Chris Hare  53:50  
And it really speaks to, I won't name any energy companies right now. But plenty in the news lately, right, have have done the more surface even near things, right, versus the things that are driven from values that to your point happened quietly behind the scenes. That, and really just doing it because it's right, but that also accrues to the value of the business ultimately. 

Brian Janous  54:14  
It absolutely does. Yeah. And I think that this whole like ESG thing has gotten, as we were talking about earlier, gotten politicized, but it's all kind of nonsense, because companies, I think that recognize that they do have a responsibility to society are going to be more successful. In the long run, they will ultimately return more to their shareholders, will it cost them something in the short run, of course, I mean, all these things are gonna have a cost. I mean, having health care for your employees, it has a cost, but that's something that you brought up the word value. What I saw in my time there when I saw that shift of sustainability being a nice to have for the company, which is sort of what it was, early on in my tenure to being a value it really changes the narrative inside the company because You're no longer debating, should we do something, the only thing we're talking about is how we're going to do it. This is so important to the company, that we're not going to have a discussion about, oh, this is gonna cost us X, Y, and Z this year. And the analogy I was used inside of Microsoft was like, things like customer data, privacy, keeping customer data, private is a value for a company like Microsoft, like, you're not going to ever have a year where you go, you know what, it's just too expensive this year to do that. That's existential to the existence of the company, you can't not do that. Right? So you're not debating how much is it going to cost? Or what is it going to take? It's like, No, we're going to do this. And then everything else has to take a backseat to that. And I saw during my tenure, sustainability sort of rise to that level to say, No, this is a non negotiable for us, we're going to do it the right way. Now, just go figure it out, go figure out how to do it. And it's not like a blank check to go do all these things, you start to bring a lot of creativity and innovation into solving that problem. But you're not having to go back year after year, and ask for resources or ask for support or ask for commitment. It's like no, you've heard what they said, This is what we're gonna do. Now let's just go figured out how to do it. And that's the difference between a priority and a value.

Chris Hare  56:19  
So when you think about execution within your team, we've talked about how critical it is for a business to have a simple, enduring narrative that everyone can get an execute on, versus, oftentimes there's a, let's do the next thing and have a retreat and come up with the new narrative. And our new pillars talk about that.

Brian Janous  56:36  
Yeah. One of the things that frustrated me and this is true about every big organization or corporation is there's always this desire, if you get a new leader to sort of put your mark on the role or the organization. And so you know, you want to have a retreat, and you want to go talk about a mission statement, and you want to create a vision. And you want to have core pillars and all this stuff. And so I lived through a lot of leaders over my tenure there. And I saw a lot of mission statements and vision statements and pillars and all this stuff. And one of the things that I really tried to practice is really keeping things super simple. For my team. And very early on, I established a three priorities for us. And I never wavered from that I never changed them. And I told my team all the time. It's like, Look, if someone can come up with something that you think is more important, or does not even covered in these three things, you let me know. But in the entire time I was there, no one was ever able to suggest anything. Because it was simple enough that it covered all the things that we were supposed to like, what are the things that are absolutely necessary for us to be successful as a team, these are the three things and if we do these three things will be successful. And we don't need to add anything to it, we don't need to change the wording or do language, like make it simple. So that day in day out, people can come to work and okay, as long as I'm working towards one of these three things, it really made it obvious that we would be successful as a team. And then every time I got a new leader, you know, Mike, people always get nervous, it's like, Oh, you got a new boss. Now what's gonna happen, what's gonna change? Every time I said the same thing, nothing's gonna change. The only thing that's gonna change is our rhythm of business. That meeting we used to have on Tuesday. Now, what's going to happen on Wednesday, that PowerPoint that used to prepare that have this format is now going to have a different format. But the things that are going to ultimately make us successful as a team, I promise you will not change. 

Chris Hare  58:24  
And what were those three things? 

Brian Janous  58:26  
For us, it was one, we got to deliver electrons, right, we got to have capacity. Because if you can't turn on the data center, then nothing else matters, right? Again, the whole business is turning electricity into light, you got to have electricity. So that was number one, we got to deliver capacity on time, when and where it's needed to, we got to manage the costs effectively. Because if we don't do that, we're gonna have poor margins, and we won't have a cloud business, we won't have anything to deliver to our customers. So we got to focus on cost. The third thing is we got to focus on sustainability, we got to make sure that those electrons that are coming into that data center are zero carbon, because that's our commitment to our customers. That's our licence to operate. Those are the three things that we have to do. And then everything else falls in under that umbrella. So but I always impressed upon my leaders, your team needs to understand which of those three things it's contributing to. And sometimes it's all of them. Sometimes you're doing something and touches all of them. Sometimes you're focused on one. But they have to understand how does my work translate to one of those three things, because then they can find meaning and purpose in their work. Or they can find like, Okay, I understand how if I get this contract on, it's going to help us deliver capacity for this new data center in XYZ country. And that's going to be meaningful for the business to help business continue to grow. So they needed to be able to have a very simple rubric, so that they can translate and find meaning in their day to day because it gets really frustrating when you come to work. And it's like, oh, I'm doing tasks XYZ, but I don't know why. I don't know why I'm being asked to do this. And especially if you're operating in an environment that is inherently chaotic, which ours was, because very fast paced. It was very rapid growth, the demands of the business were always changing where that power needed to be. And when was changing, obviously, the business climate was changing very rapidly. But if people could understand like, Okay, I gotta come in this day, and I just got to deliver X, then they can find meaning in that and not get distracted by all the chaos that's around them, which is inevitable, you know, high growth, environment,

Chris Hare  1:00:24  
Stepping out of that chaos recently, and in this time of transition, what's been kind of the highlight of this this season for you? And what are your learning about yourself, as you process that and think about what's next?

Brian Janous  1:00:35  
One thing that's been great for me is just having time to reflect on one of the things that I've done over the last 20 plus years in this industry, and then what can I extract from that in terms of value that I can deliver going forward? So that's been fun for me to just have the headspace to stop and go, Okay, here's where I think I can add value. Here's the things that I've learned, being able to sit in my unique position, and translate that into other industries, or at least across my industry into a bunch of different verticals. I've actually spent a lot of time talking to founders talking to startups about new markets, new technologies, helping them start to think through. Okay, how does it actually work in the real world? How do you actually commercialize some of these technologies? How do you sell this to a company like Microsoft? How do you sell this utility? How do you sell this to a regulator? Because those are the things that are the hardest parts of energy transition is not, hey, you built a better mousetrap. It's like cool. But there's a whole bunch of these other mouse traps that are sitting out there right now. And everyone's still using those mouse traps and are comfortable those mousetraps and so how do you create that narrative that shows why this thing really is better? Why the market should start to adopt this new technology, this new approach. So that's what I've been spending a lot of my time doing, it's been a lot of fun. For me, it's been educational, because I've got to talk a lot of different companies and all over the map, I mean, nuclear companies, and hydrogen and geothermal and carbon removal and all these different spaces, it's really been a blast for me, and then talking to a lot of investors in this space as well, that are looking at different technologies and different business strategies. And so that's what I've been doing. I'm still taking my time to figure out where I really want to spend my time going forward. But I'm thankful to have the luxury right now to just go slow and take the time to figure out what do I want to do with my life when I grew up? Awesome.

Chris Hare  1:02:36  
Well, my final question for you, Brian, is, as you look to the future, what are you most excited about?

Brian Janous  1:02:41  
Yeah, I am optimistic that there's so much energy, no pun intended, focus right now on decarbonisation? And how do we build pathways that really makes sense and can be successful, there's so many brilliant people in the space. And I have the good fortune to talk to college students through various programs and connections with some universities. And that's actually one of my favorite things to do. Because I get to sort of tap into that next wave of passionate professionals, they're going to come in and really get to carry the mantle for a lot of work that me and my peers have done over the last decade plus, as we've really been focusing on energy transformation. And so I'm excited about the opportunities that the next decade holds. There's some real unique challenges. And they're different. I mean, I look at some of the successes we've had over the last decade. And we do need to keep building on those. But there's a whole lot of stuff that we also need to keep learning, because it's not just taking the same playbook over and over again, because every stage of this evolution is a new set of challenges. And we run into new barriers and roadblocks. And so being able to really foresee what some of those are, and then help companies and organizations navigate that so that we can look back over the next 10 years, and hopefully see a similar amount of success that we've had, because it's a huge challenge we have in front of us, but I'm excited to continue to be part of it through this network of super talented people.

Chris Hare  1:04:13  
Awesome. Well, thanks, Brian. I really appreciate your time.

Brian Janous  1:04:16  
Thank you, Chris. Really enjoyed it.

Chris Hare  1:04:19  
Thanks for joining me on another episode of The Storied Future. What part of Brian's story did you find most impactful? Did anything shift and how you're thinking about your future? And how you're thinking about your narrative about how you want to tell your story? Find someone today and tell them your story, and ask them about their story. Because when we tell our stories, it can change us, it can change others, and it has the power to change the future. And that's it. Please subscribe, leave us a review, and be sure to visit TSFpod.com for information about Brian Janous, for show notes, and to check out our other episodes. 

The Storied Future Podcast is a production of The Storied Future LLC. Produced and edited by Ray Sylvester. Audio engineering by Ali Ozbay. Theme music by The Brewz. Your host is me, Chris Hare. Learn more about how I help leaders use the power of narrative to transform themselves their companies and their industries at www.thestoriedfuture.com.