The Macro AI Podcast
Welcome to "The Macro AI Podcast" - we are your guides through the transformative world of artificial intelligence.
In each episode - we'll explore how AI is reshaping the business landscape, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Whether you're a seasoned executive, an entrepreneur, or just curious about how AI can supercharge your business, you'll discover actionable insights, hear from industry pioneers, service providers, and learn practical strategies to stay ahead of the curve.
The Macro AI Podcast
Michael Reid – CEO of Megaport
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n this episode of The Macro AI Podcast, Gary and Scott sit down with Michael Reid, CEO of Megaport, to explore how network-as-a-service is reshaping the way enterprises connect to the cloud, scale their infrastructure, and prepare for an AI-driven future.
Michael shares his perspective on why agility and flexibility in connectivity are now strategic imperatives for CIOs, CTOs, and CFOs—and how Megaport is positioning itself at the heart of this transformation. We discuss the company’s recent global expansion, the impact of Project Centurion’s 400G backbone upgrade, and what enterprises need to think about as AI workloads demand more bandwidth, lower latency, and tighter integration across multiple clouds.
Listeners will hear insights on:
- How enterprises can simplify multicloud strategies while maintaining performance and security.
- The role of software-defined networking in accelerating digital transformation.
- Why infrastructure investments like Project Centurion are foundational to AI adoption.
- Practical advice for decision-makers navigating the convergence of networking, cloud, and AI.
Michael also highlights where Megaport is heading next, from enabling new AI-centric services to supporting the rapid evolution of edge computing. For executives thinking about how to future-proof their connectivity strategies, this episode delivers both strategic guidance and actionable insights.
Want more from Megaport? Don’t miss their own podcast, Uplink, where Michael and his team dive deeper into connectivity, cloud adoption, and the future of digital infrastructure. It’s the perfect complement to today’s conversation. You can listen here: https://www.megaport.com/uplink
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to The Macro AI Podcast, share it with colleagues, and stay tuned for more conversations at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, and business transformation.
Additional Information on Megaport:
https://macronetservices.com/best-megaport-options-2021/
AI Cloud On Ramp Interconnection options for AWS Direct Connect, Azure Express Route and OCI FastConnect
https://macronetservices.com/equinix-competitors-ai-cloud-interconnection/
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Gary Sloper
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gsloper/
Scott Bryan
https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottjbryan/
Macro AI Website:
https://www.macroaipodcast.com/
Macro AI LinkedIn Page:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/macro-ai-podcast/
Gary's Free AI Readiness Assessment:
https://macronetservices.com/events/the-comprehensive-guide-to-ai-readiness
Scott's Content & Blog
https://www.macronomics.ai/blog
I'm Gary joined as always by my cohost Scott. Today we have a really exciting guest, someone at the center of how global enterprises connect, scale and transform their digital infrastructure. We're joined by Michael Reed, the CEO of Megaport. Now, if you're not familiar with Megaport, they're a pioneer in the network as a service space.
01:25
help enterprises and cloud providers simplify and accelerate connectivity around the world. Michael has been leading the company through some major market shifts in cloud and the overall adoption, as well as enterprise networking and AI driven workloads. We're going to dive into all of this today. Yeah, Gary, this is a conversation I've been looking forward to for a while. uh we talk a lot.
01:51
on this podcast about how AI and uh digital transformation depend on infrastructure that's flexible, secure, fast, and global. And Megaport really sits right at the intersection of those, which is big implications for CIOs, CFOs, and really anybody who's thinking about how to future proof their business. Exactly. And we've lined up some great questions for Michael about where network as a service is headed, how enterprises can think about multi-cloud strategies.
02:20
And what all of this means to the AI workloads as they explode. So let's jump in. Michael, welcome to the uh Macro AI podcast. Hey, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. And hopefully I'm coming through clear. I'm in a hotel in San Francisco at the moment. So I think uh it looks good. This is not my house though. Well, you sound good and we really appreciate you jumping on. We know you're really busy. We've been following you around the world trying to get this lined up. So thanks again.
02:50
appreciate it. It's really just to open it up. uh Listeners are always curious to hear from our guests about their journey. You know, how, how did you go? We know you have a background in aerospace engineering and a lot of other interesting things to becoming CEO of Megaport. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about your background. Yeah, so I think it's a bit of a start to end up where you were where I've ended up. So you know, aerospace engineering at university.
03:19
in Brisbane, Australia. At the time I thought, you know, maybe I'm going to go work for NASA or something along those lines. actually during university, the Twin Towers attack occurred. since that time, aerospace was a, I think, secret clearance from the US requirement. And so actually there really isn't much of an aerospace industry globally other than in the United States. So that sort of created fairly limited job opportunities at the end of the role.
03:47
It was a, it's an engineering degree. So I think a lot of it's around a lot of it was coding, a lot of it's development, all different pieces. So it was a natural lead to pivot into technology. And at the time it was more of a technology sales background that I ended up in. Uh, and then I ended up sort of bouncing through different tech sales roles, ended up at Cisco, which you guys are probably familiar with. I was there for 15 years doing a whole range of different things around banking and finance for a period of time.
04:16
And then I moved to Bay Area in the U S so just, just down the road from San Francisco, actually where I spent five years and I was acquiring companies during that time and then scaling them and running them and had a chance to sort of run and lead a whole range of different, uh, interesting and fascinating companies got to constantly explore, uh, new SAS companies and, and, and look at why we would acquire them, why we wouldn't acquire them. And then the great, great opportunity was to then once acquire them, I had a chance to scale them inside Cisco, which was just this.
04:46
phenomenal experience for me personally and such a great opportunity given that I'd never acquired a company before I sort of stepped into that role and had this great opportunity. I think it was six different companies required and scaled. And then the opportunity to step into Megaport, I've known Megaport for a long time. It was this incredible disruptor in the, particularly disrupting the telco space, but using network as a service. sort of invented this concept of network as a service, i.e.
05:14
a network that is totally autonomous, totally delivered via code and delivered at scale globally. And so there's a really great opportunity two and a half years ago to step into the CEO role of that company. We're a publicly traded company. We sit on the Australian Stock Exchange. But the interesting thing about us, but whilst we were founded in this small town in Brisbane, Australia, the company has scaled and sort of dominated the global market.
05:42
the vast majority of our revenue, 60 % of our revenue sits in the United States. The vast majority of our go-to-market sits there. So we have this really interesting company where a lot of the tech developers and finance HR and so forth sit in the Brisbane head office. And all of our go-to-market sort of is dispersed between 26 countries with the vast majority in the US. just means for me a hell of a lot of travel, put it that way. a lot of travel. That's for sure. Yeah, now we can...
06:11
We can appreciate that. We've been there before in our careers. ah You know what, I think to your point, it's really interesting and I work quite extensively with Megaport today and a variety of different topologies. And it's always nice to hear a CEO with a deep Cisco background. uh Both Scott and I spent a lot of time getting certified in our younger days. And I think that probably really helps you within this NAS pioneer of an organization.
06:41
you know, which is Megaport. Can you talk a little bit more about, you know, the Megaport network and explain to the users and listeners here ah what makes you unique? Because I think you're up to about a thousand locations uh worldwide, which really allows you to play Switzerland. And I think that's really a nice niche of being able to connect various locations together and just kind of be that layer one through three.
07:07
architecture. So maybe you could just go in a little bit about the NAS solution and what really makes Megaport unique in that aspect. For sure. So one of the hardest things to do in networks, and I think anyone in the network space will be familiar with this, is automating networks is incredibly difficult, particularly automating networks at mass scale. And particularly when you're crossing multiple data centers, countries, and what have you. And so what
07:33
We were very lucky in that the vision for the company was set up from the get-go to be 100 % automated. And kind of over the last 12 years, what we've realized is it's actually impossible to build Megaport or A, something like Megaport unless you start with automation first. Retrofitting an existing network with automation, like from what we can tell is impossible, IE we've never seen another company deliver upon that even though they've tried.
08:03
And there's a million reasons you could go into as to why. But when you build from an automation mindset upfront, you actually can never log into a device. So one of the really unique things about Megaport is, and I think if you look at all the network engineers across the planet, most of them are uh trained, CCIEs and so forth, to log into the CLI code of the actual devices themselves and stitch them together. uh
08:29
When you join Megaport as a network engineer, the first thing you want to do is open a laptop and log on to a device. And the funny thing is it's impossible to do. So you can't actually log into a single one of our devices. What you have to do is actually drive the code which delivers the entire scale network. Like literally, we've got 3,000 Cisco network devices across the platform. They're in 1,000 data centers in 26 countries and each one of them is stitched together with about 6,000 pieces of fiber.
09:00
And then we have about 30,000 plus customer connections. Those customer connections change every second. They either change where they're to Z per second or their speed per second or what they're delivering across that or between the clouds, all these different pieces. Each one of them is happening per second. the network, because it was built with code and automation, enables you to deliver upon that. So what you have is this in...
09:28
incredible speed to deliver anything because it's totally automated and then what we've done that the other piece to the puzzle which is very hard for traditional telcos is resiliency and redundancy and and kind of the Switzerland statement you had before is we're actually massive customers of telcos and so we don't build fiber but if you're a customer today and you needed to connect from data center a to data center B
09:55
You would need to go and talk to telco a and you would need to get a physical fiber path. And then you need to go and talk to telco B to get a separate, fully resilient, different path out of that data center, outside of a different side of the data center and then down at different streets from a KMZ perspective. like if you looked on Google maps, they, the paths never cross. So have to do that. If you're trying to do that as a customer and you have eight data centers, you're doing that.
10:24
for every connection between them at scale. And if you do that in different countries, you now end up in a situation where you've got multiple carriers in every country. So you could foreseeably have a 40 different carrier contracts to deliver this service. The beauty of Megaport is we've actually built this incredibly resilient backbone with multiple carriers. And if you look even subsea, up to five different paths when you look at that component. So like...
10:53
um US to Europe or Asia Pacific or Europe, wherever it is that you're going, there's all these subsea cables that we have access to. And so when you take a single connection with Megaport, we give you access to every single one of those paths so that we have this philosophy that everything inside Megaport is built to fail, but the customer won't experience an outage. And so we expect someone to dig a hole in the street and drill through a fiber.
11:23
Because we've built for expected failure, there is a constantly always other paths, guaranteed other paths. And we sort of had this joke that if you dragged an anchor through the middle of the United States and you couldn't get from the East Coast to the West or no one could, Megaport would instantly route you around the other side of the world. So the only thing that you would have is a latency increase. this sort of this platform got built
11:50
And it's stood the test of time and the scalability piece is just unbelievable. And so the team, we only have like 350 people delivering what is the largest global network on the planet, the largest NAS platform on the planet, with the largest connected to AWS, Azure and GCP on the planet. uh We're in more data centers than anyone else. And so just been this unbelievable automation and scale story of how to make a network work for you in those regions. yeah, so that's...
12:18
uh The last piece of that puzzle is because it's automated, it's all delivered via a portal. So instead of talking to us, you could literally log on to the platform. You can either put a credit card in or just put your payment details and you can click and deploy and 60 seconds later it is deployed. As opposed to an experience you would have with most traditional telcos, particularly when you're doing multiple in multiple countries, you've got a long process of engaging with each one, going through the procurement documents.
12:47
then getting orders and then waiting three to six months, depending upon when they get delivered. Everything for us is just like literally 60 seconds. It's kind of mind blowing. Yeah. That's so it's amazing. Customers that haven't experienced it just don't really fully understand it and can't believe it. And then when they see the demo, they're just mind blown at the ease of use and what it can do for their business. They always think that it's, there's gotta be a catch or there's some magic. That's it's so funny because if you either
13:15
We have two types of customers that companies out there. have companies that know of Megaport and they're usually a customer. And there are companies that just don't know we exist. uh And we're a small company. We love that we've got your support to help get the brand out there. yeah, it's great for us consultants because the customers just love it when we bring something like that to them. And we've had similar conversations with the customer.
13:42
you a network engineer, maybe even a CCIE level. And we say, listen, you do not have to get on the CLI. Like we're going to make this extremely easy for you. they're blown. But, but I think it does reduce the amount of potential errors. You know, we're all very skilled at the CLI, but you know, if it's two o'clock in the morning, we may make a mistake and push something out that doesn't need to be. so I think to Scott's point as well, you know, they are just blown away when we say we'll have a fully
14:10
Functional network up and running 10 gigs between cloud a and cloud B within 15 minutes once BGP propagates correct Yeah, yeah Yeah, I think I think a lot of our listeners obviously are focused on AI and it's always amazed me how ahead of the curve and forward-looking Megaport has always been with the technology and the ideas and I Gary and I were talking about projects in Turian. It's something that you guys launched to prepare the network for
14:40
AI and compute intensive workloads. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about that and the future where you see things going from that perspective. Yeah, we look at sort of an addressable market or total addressable market in a few different lenses. One lens is the types of products you offer. Let's say you only connected between data centers, for example. Once you add a cloud connection product, that is a new product and a new market that you can go after.
15:10
Well, we've been in those spaces for a while and you can expand TAM two ways. You can either add new products and I think we'll talk about some of those further on, but you can also expand the existing products that you have. And so that is very much a build phase that we're constantly going through. And to do that, you do two things. You either land in more data centers, more countries, more locations, and we've been scaling, I think we added 112 data centers in the last financial year that we just reported on.
15:40
And we doubled what we did the previous year. We doubled what we did the previous year and, you know, ah not giving forward-looking guidance. I'm not allowed to do that, but that is the trajectory we want to continue going on. So that, what that does is allow you to get from more locations, more spaces, more things to connect to. It allows you to get more customers to connect to also more on the ecosystem, more internet exchanges, SaaS providers, and a whole range of things. It means we get more cloud on ramps. But the last piece, which was Project Centurion,
16:10
was the Centurions, the 100. So we basically upgraded all of the backbone of Megaport to 400 gig backbones across huge, think about the distances we've got, rings and rings across the United States, across to Europe, across to Asia and all these different pieces throughout Europe, et cetera, so that you can in 60 seconds get 100 gig from Megaport from any point to any point.
16:35
And this has become really important for AI. It's important for every company actually, regardless. I if you're moving data from one location to another, no one's ever going to tell you what they want it slower. They want it faster. The faster they do it, the faster the project. Data is just increasing. If you think of just a really simple use case, not even AI related, but we've got a lot of customers that are in the healthcare space or that are in... um
17:03
providing records of data for US citizens around their health as an example. And they are regulated to have, they're in the cloud, but they're also regulated to have off-cloud backups. And then what they do is they have a backup off-cloud, and then then back that up from one data center to the other data center on the other side of the planet. So Iron Mountain, they literally stick this thing in the bottom of them under a mountain. And so they've got to move that from one side to the other. What's cool with Megaport is,
17:31
You can take a one gig link between the East Coast to the US to the West Coast for most of your time. But on Friday afternoon, when they do the big backup East Coast to West Coast, it spins automatically up to 100 gig and runs until the backup finishes and then it winds itself back down, totally delivered via code on the customer's side. And then it's actually automated on the code on Megaport. So there's actually no one logging into the portal.
17:58
So that's a really simple example of why a hundred gig has become really important, just speed. But what's, what's exploded with AI is people are moving workloads to train their AI models. And you'll be familiar with all these different random companies that are appearing with what they would call AI factories or GPU as a service. In short, they bought a hell of a lot of Nvidia chips and they've stuck them in a data center wherever they could get a data center space. And the problem with that is
18:26
They got data center space in some random data center because that's the only one they could get it. And the next thing they turn up and tell all their customers like, hey, bring us all of your data. And the customer's like, sure, how do I get it there? And then that becomes the Megaport story. It's actually the same story that we offer for instantaneous connectivity to the cloud. But this is just a Neo cloud or a new version of that to these GPU as a service. So we launched the, what we call the IX exchange. It's basically
18:54
almost like a peering platform for AI factories to get to any enterprise. So if you're in any one of the thousand data centers we serve, which is the vast majority of sort of enterprise data centers that you would probably find yourself in, a cross connect to Megaport and 60 seconds and you get a hundred gig to any one of those AI factories. Now, the interesting thing that we're seeing is the GPU cost is...
19:21
dynamically changing and everyone is offering a different price depending upon what you need access to, know, the amount of chips, how long you want to train for. And so what you've got is you've got choice to make a decision to say, okay, it's, it's, you know, 30 % cheaper or 70 % cheaper to train here for the next month. But maybe next month, you might want to change and train that elsewhere or make those changes or, or, or inferences become the thing. So
19:49
Like the Switzerland story you had before, Gary, is like that we are this constant connector to everything and allowing anyone to make choice. So the goal for us is just to give our customers constant choice. And you know that there's no choice. If you choose to move your data from this data, this GPU service company today, and you said, oh geez, tomorrow I need it over here. If you need to wait 30 to 60 days to 90 days to get a fiber connection. At least.
20:18
We've had examples where we've been trying to be particularly for you when you try to buy um high speed, say, again, it's a year and a half to get some some links, uh access to these things. So, you know, it's quite astounding how difficult it is to get uh high speed connectivity to the locations you need. So that's sort of one example of how AI is playing out for us. There's some other interesting ones I can give you, but I'll pause there because I feel like I'm talking a lot at you.
20:45
No, no, no, and you're spot on. I almost feel like we led the witness here because your use case that you just mentioned, I just had that same topology with working with your team. A client uh is trying to figure out, I go back into the data center because some of the GPUs might be more static. Some of those workloads may be more static. that way my CFO likes that because it's more predictable. But I need to test this out. So before I go and invest in
21:13
you know, physical hardware, I need to use a cloud provider. So we literally stood up a Megaport connection to connect two clouds together. And, know, you were talking about the flexibility earlier. Um, you know, it's not just spinning an environment up, but your pricing model and your contract model does afford a customer the ability to go month to month. Granted, it might be a slightly higher premium, maybe 10, 20 % more, but the flexibility of being able to turn something on for 30 days to prove out a project.
21:44
And then to come back, which is what happened here, we proved it out for 30 days with the customer. They came back and said, okay, we know we can get with, get by with a 10 gig circuit. Now we would like to install a 36 month term and need to connect to these entrance points. And they couldn't believe that Megaport was able to do that because I think for so many years, we've been indoctrinated with the telco world of you need a 36 month contract. It's 90, 120 day install and it's, it's static.
22:13
And, and I think where you're playing in that space and a lot of organizations have started to start and stop their AI journey, they need a partner like a Megaport to be able to go along with them to test this out. so I think where you, you know, where you, you, you've built this infrastructure and kind of the.
22:35
culture and autonomy that a customer can have uh is really leading versus what I'm seeing with a lot of the other NAS providers. So kudos to you and the Megaport team. Well, the original vision was to build it like a cloud. And so it's like cloud compensation for network. And so if you think about it, a cloud is just a bunch of compute and they're selling that compute to whoever. When someone's finished using with it, they just sell that to someone else. And so we're kind of the same. So the reason it's so instant. So why that's important is
23:05
It means we can do per second billing. uh In the portal, it bills per month, but it's actually pro-ridered. So it's actually per minute, per second, actually. So if you only use it for a minute, we're only going to charge you for the minute of usage. So if you spin up to a high speed for a period of time, only a very short period of time, that's fine. We'll only build that way. But it goes back to that automation story that I was telling you at the
23:28
the start, the reason other telcos can't do that is because of the physical cost to go and install and spin up a circuit. So if someone said, I want a month, a hundred gig connection, they've got to physically send someone to site, plug things in, connect it, make sure it's all terminated, do it on the other side, and they're only getting a month of revenue. So they can't do it because of the cost to actually physically install. So again, I go back to how
23:55
critical it is to build automation from the ground up to remove humans from the process. And that's why we can actually offer customers incredible value from a pricing perspective and a timeframe perspective. What's interesting is most of our customers, once they use us, they actually end up with us for about, we've got a 10 year life cycle, lifetime with our customers. So they usually stay for a long time, but they can pick and move all the different stuff during that time, if that makes sense. Yeah.
24:22
It sure does. Yeah, well, kind of on that note, what about layering in things like security, security being a concern for AI workloads and distributed workloads? Anything you can touch on there? Yeah, we there's a lot of elements. Being a network provider, in effect, you are inherently secure. were a private network. So in effect, you can't you can't hack us because you got you can't get to us. We're not publicly facing.
24:51
If you want to get to something, you've got to somehow be able to connect to it physically, or you go via the internet. In our case, we're a private backbone, so you can't get there. So inherently, we have a security layer built in because you physically have to plug in. The second piece is everything that we can do can be encrypted. So customers, when they land on the platform, often encrypt all of their traffic across those pieces. And we look at MacSec as examples into into clouds and backbones and all sorts of things. um
25:21
One of the things that we released very recently was an IPsec where we can actually terminate IPsec tunnels on our edge. We have a really interesting platform which we call our Edge Play, is Megaport's cloud router and virtual edge sits on our compute stacks globally, which is quite a fascinating um platform. You could spin up all sorts of vendors. So take Cisco, Fortinet, Palo Alto's, you could spin up a firewall.
25:50
in 60 seconds on our platform. It looks, it's a virtual firewall that looks no different to what a big physical firewall. These things have up to 400 gig connectivity running into them. So they kind of like splitting the atom in terms of like what's networked, what capability there is. And then you can take out a whole bunch of cores on that and literally deploy whatever firewalls. So you can actually run full blown firewall functionality, you know, of all those vendors inside the platform.
26:19
And then on top of that, we can also terminate IPsec. So we've got lots of customers with branch sites that have internet access only, and they want to connect into Megaport. they actually use Megaport for their backbones, but they use internet for their sort of last mile. And so you're going to IPsec tunnel terminate, you're in our private backbone. Once you're the private backbone, you can then go and connect securely everywhere. So...
26:43
There's a is one of those sort of cans of worms. Um, but yes, there's lots and lots of pieces of that puzzle that we, we deliver today. Yeah. I attest to that. We actually worked on a, uh, genomics research company here in the States that, that is using, uh, your, uh, Megaport virtual edge on their Fortinet platform. And they were just completely blown away. So they're able to get down and dirty, you know, DIA circuits, but, overlay that with the Megaport, uh,
27:12
virtual edge environment on their Fortinet. It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's such a unique platform. It's probably one of the hardest things to explain because no one's ever thought about it. And so then by the time you explain it, it's hard enough to get their head around just the transition from a traditional telco to Megaport, which I find weird because it's just an automated telco, guess, if you think about it. Take them to the next step and then...
27:35
Once they finally get there, the sophistication that you can build inside the network is quite astounding. And so when you get some more of our sophisticated customers, what they're doing is phenomenal. And they do that and sort of build it globally. So there's huge cost savings that we can bring into that space. And I'll give you a really good example of, so once you build this thing, there's all these other pieces that you can build into it. We launched a thing called NAT Gateway just sort of six months ago.
28:02
Network address translation, it's a really simple thing. It's where if you go to AWS, Azure or GCP and you're externally connecting to them, it means you have an external IP or a public IP address that then hits the cloud. Well, once you hit the cloud, that IP address gets translated into an internal IP address. The cost to do that is astronomical. We've got customers that are getting charged sort of up to $50 million US per annum.
28:28
just to do the NAT translation. Now, they're customers that have huge amounts of uh individuals hitting their sites for a million different reasons. But there's lots of different providers that have this. But Megaport, because of what we've got, we've got such high powered, high speed routing capability right next to the clouds with massive internet pipes and massive cloud pipes. So when you stitch those two to three things together, what you have is this incredible NAT gateway platform.
28:56
We can save customers up to 70 % of their net cost just by being clever around how they've designed it. sort of a, you know, what we've found is over time, this massive network and all these sort of Lego blocks that we've built, you sort of connect them together and sort of form a Hogwarts castle or whatever it is, know? So it's like a Millennium Falcon. That's what we're building at home at the moment. Anyway, so yeah, there's lots of cool stuff you can do with the platform. I was going to ask you, Michael, so.
29:24
You know, if you think about the audience that listens to the show, watches the show, have everybody from business leaders, tech enthusiasts, and there's a lot of younger folks coming right out of university going into the workforce. So, you you've gone through this, we've gone through this, you know, what would be one piece of advice you'd give to them to prepare for this AI driven future and more specifically enterprise connectivity?
29:51
I think you took two factors that will always be helpful for you. And maybe you're either born with this or not, but if you're curious and you've got some drive, you sort of couple the two of those things together and you'll follow your path. You'll figure it out. The great news about today versus sort of, I think when I grew up and, ah you know, that our kids are now experiencing is that these sorts of podcasts that you're doing now, you can access incredibly talented people right at the coalface delivering
30:21
right now and then sharing their experiences. Now there's a sea of data, you've to sort sift through it, but by being able to access that content and learn, you're just going to be exponentially better off than whatever it was you were reading from a textbook when I was a kid that was written sort of 30 years earlier. So that, the world is changing super fast, but the way you can consume and access it is incredibly fast. And so I think the bit is it's important not to spend your time flicking through TikTok, but actually
30:50
Be intentional about the stuff that you're listening to. And if you do, you'll learn and sort of develop a perspective of it. And then the last piece, if you're trying to get into the industry or even change the industry, just have a go. Turn up and actually try a role. Any role, just try and then sort of learn your way through and just don't give up until you get an opportunity. It doesn't matter where you start, but you can accelerate very rapidly, particularly in tech. And as you see with my background, there is no right background for tech.
31:20
You can really come from any path. think the two pieces that will be helpful is if you're curious and you actually go and put the effort into to sort of either sort of feeding that curiosity and having to go probably probably applies for most things in life. I suspect nothing new. No, we love it. That's, that's great advice, Michael. And it's been a really incredible conversation, really insightful for our listeners right on target with what our
31:50
clients and all the guests like to hear. So thank you. Thank you very much. Well, let any of your clients know we've got a big team of folks just willing to help and get you playing with the platform. You can jump on, you can leverage it, have a go. You don't have to pay it. You can just do a trial, test it out. And then it's yeah, per month or you can start to take on longer contracts, if it makes sense. So we're all here willing to help. You can find me on LinkedIn. If you add me on LinkedIn and ping me, I'll usually respond. yeah, easy to easy to get in touch with us.
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Yeah, appreciate it. And for our listeners, if you'd like to hear more from Michael, he just mentioned, you know, find him on LinkedIn and we'll also put some additional links in the show notes to talk about uh other things that Megaport's doing and dive deeper into what they're helping enable within AI and cloud and innovation. ah It's a great compliment for what we've talked about today. Love it. Thanks gentlemen. Really appreciate it. you. All right. Thank you. Safe travels.