Ep. #62 Emil Sayegh, Serial Tech and Data Center CEO at PGI | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast

Ep. #62 Emil Sayegh, Serial Tech and Data Center CEO at PGI | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast

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Emil Sayegh: We have a big education role, and then, you know, we got to simplify it. You can't just keep throwing speeds and feeds at people and expect them to make the the leap to understanding what the value prop. We can't just keep throwing features and and not talk about the benefits that they bring, right? Because people just get lost. There's a

lot of jargon, and we love to use it, but when it comes to communicating to the public and getting the public trust, as well as I think is going to be important also in gaining customers and filling these data centers with customers, you know, there's going to be another, another aspect to our communication plans, not just, you know, the power and the density and the cooling technologies and all that good stuff, but also the sustainability. Yeah, this is Emil sayeg from profit growth insights, and you are watching the data center go to market podcasts. Good morning Joshua Feinberg: for some of you, it's good afternoon. For some of you, it may even be Good evening. I'm Joshua Feinberg, host of the data center go to market podcast, and I am absolutely thrilled to have a very special guest joining me today. I'm welcoming Emil sayeg, who is the former CEO, President and Board member of entirety and host way and now currently, is the principal and CEO of profit growth insights based in Austin.

Emil, welcome to the podcast. Emil Sayegh: Thank you, Joshua, honored to be here. Joshua Feinberg: Honored to have you as well. I think what would

be a super helpful place to start is as a three time CEO in this space with a very, very deep background in managed services and infrastructure, curious how you ended up in this place in your journey. Was this something that you thought about as a teenager, back at the time when everyone was mapping out their career goals, or did it just kind of happen by accident? What was the spark that set you on this path to end up in the fantastic place that you've ended up in in your career? Yeah, Emil Sayegh: that's a great question. Joshua, so my, my career started as an engineer, right? I wanted to be an engineer. I'm a problem solver and and that's essentially how my career evolved. I kept solving problems and then

solving hard problems, and then people kind of brought me harder problems to solve, and then, and it kind of evolved. And one of the problems that was happening in the in the early 2000s was this problem of power, and California was having brown outs, and it was the emergence of the Internet and the emergence of data center space. So I joined a startup that specifically aimed to solve that problem with lower power power chips and and, and high density servers and and from there, essentially, I moved into services and and figured out a world of services, and then joined, joined rack space and helped launch the public cloud, and was instrumental in that, and then and continued my journey, and the data center cloud space and managed services space, frankly, Joshua Feinberg: it's really interesting, because for people that have only been in around, been around the space for the last five or 10 years, it's easy to take for granted that SaaS and public cloud have always been this mature, well established industry that's easy to navigate. But back to a time

in the early to mid 2000s where a lot of IT managers were really fearful of cloud. Some rightly so. Some were trying to protect their job security, but like, yeah, there was this real, real battle of the wills and philosophies about client server versus trusting your data in the cloud and SaaS and imagine, in the early days with this, it took a lot of time and energy to advance the value proposition and educate and build trust with different kinds of segments that needed to take this a lot more seriously to where we got to today. Yeah, Emil Sayegh: for sure. I mean, there's a the debate still rages on in some ways. You know, public cloud versus private cloud, and I think, I think people have resigned themselves that you need to use some kind of level of virtualization on your server so that you can maximize its use versus a server that's just dedicated to a single, single application. I

think virtualization has proven its metal over the last 20 years, but certainly the debate rages on between public cloud and private cloud, although undoubtedly, people are a lot more comfortable with public cloud. But I go back to go to market and messaging and focusing on the use case. This is where sometimes, as marketers Rico, we kind of gloss over it. We don't focus on the use case. We focus on the feed. Features. And you know, whether it's public cloud or private cloud, to me, that's a feature. You know, the real, the real value is going to be, is going to be, what is the use case that that is being used? And then you know that technology will will will find itself, and we'll be able to figure out what technology we use, whether it's private cloud, public cloud, and you know, it really depends on what your use case is and what you want out of the out of your application, Joshua Feinberg: yeah, for sure. And there's this always the you

don't know, what you don't know, and figuring out the segmentation, figuring out the product market fit and the go to market fit. I've watched some really, really well established companies in traditional software, and in SaaS, the 1.0 version, they were trying to sell the end users, the 2.0 version, channel partners were essential. They completely so,

like, you're always figuring this out, and like, without it, you just flounder around. So there's this constant need for iterations and cycles. And a lot of what I end up talking with people about is that not only the historical patterns on what's worked for sales and marketing and customer success and account management and product and channel partnerships, but where it's headed next, and kind of looking into the crystal ball. But I think a great place to go next is you're at the stage in your career where I imagine you get approached by a lot of young people that are looking for advice, career advice, on what they should do. And there's a really big debate that's going on, especially in the US right now, is rethinking higher education. So imagine from time to time that there's maybe it's nieces and nephews or cousins or teenage sons and daughters of neighbors or former co workers that approach you looking for advice. They may not be

technical, they may not be thinking that engineering or software development is for them, but it's hard to miss the massive amount of attention that generative AI and digital infrastructure has been getting over the last year or two. So they're curious about these careers and like client facing roles. What would you tell to someone that's like late teens, early 20s is trying to figure out if this is a place for them? Emil Sayegh: That's funny, I was at family weekend with with two of my kids in college this past weekend, and I had a lot of these questions come up. So look, listen, there's certainly

the threat of AI replacing certain, certain, certain jobs, certain functions. You know, that's that's inevitable. I do think that AI will replace people that don't know how to use AI to their benefit so they can add value on top of it. But look, you know, this is topical. I would encourage a lot of

people to get into something that's going to be indispensable, indispensable on a go forward basis, when it comes to AI, which is data centers, that is the basic element by which AI functions and is able to deliver its value. Data centers is the foundation. So this is a market right now that is thirsty for talent, and in my humble opinion, it it doesn't always require a degree to get into it if, if being in engineering is not your calling, or being in development is not your calling, you know, the trades offer a great way to make a very comfortable living, to get into that space. You know, there's a need for for electricians, for builders, for plumbers, you know, so on and so forth that would come in and help build these data centers. And there's an insatiable appetite right now for data center space in the in the in the world, that is really fueled in part by this ai demand, although ai demand is still a small part, but that's what's attracting a lot of attention, and it's forecasted to grow. As a matter of fact, a data center space is is availability is an all time low. And JLL just published a report

a couple of weeks ago that is trending basically to zero availability. And then, so this is why we need more fresh talent to get into this business. You know, everywhere from folks in the trades to people in engineering to also people in go to market, right that understand how to explain the value prop of data centers. Data centers aren't just these big, boxy buildings that suck a lot of power. No data centers is where medical imaging gets done. Data centers, you know, we gotta

bring that value prop to the market so that we're not painted in the in the brush of these. The guys that are sucking all the energy and polluting and building these, these ugly buildings on the contrary, you know, if it wasn't for data centers, you know, we wouldn't have navigation, you know, we wouldn't have GPS navigation, we wouldn't have self driving cars. We wouldn't have medical imaging, you know, so on and so forth. So we gotta bring the value prop of what data centers bring to society, and the advancement, the rapid advancements that data centers have have brought to society. Joshua Feinberg: Yeah, it's interesting. And even this conversation that we're having and YouTube and podcasting like none of this would exist without having that kind of infrastructure to do this, it was a really novel concept 25 years ago when Mark Cuban made history for broadcasting a fashion show on the internet, back at a time when people could barely figure out how to add a photo to a file attachment, because there was no camera phones yet.

Emil Sayegh: Exactly, exactly, Yep, yeah, Joshua Feinberg: but yeah, it's wild. So when you look at this gap that needs to be filled with jobs, and the talent that's retired, talents that's retiring, and who's going to take these jobs next, and out of a couple 1000 higher education institutions throughout the US, there's maybe a handful that have some formal training, specifically around data centers. It's, yeah, when you think about the different parts, the operators, the technology, the facilities, companies, construction, there's a lot of great opportunities in the construction space. But that's not necessarily what people normally think with construction. They're probably first inclination is the stuff that's really visible working for a residential home builder or working for someone that's building retail. That's an interesting area, too, is how much retail space is really being built and how much office space is being built. But for sure, industrial is a hot area.

But you know, it's not an area that gets a lot Emil Sayegh: of attention. Correct, correct? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, now, I mean data centers. There was an article this morning. Well, it's your journal. You know that the data center designs are changing to go even more vertical, right? And and then the cat the design of the data centers is going to be the future design of data centers gonna have more windows and so on and so forth, to at least appear esthetic versus, you know, kind of like the the box and gray buildings that we're used to. So definitely, I mean, you know, and this is, I would say, where architects come in. I gave, I gave a piece of

advice to a a friend of mine, a civil engineer, architect working for construction company to focus his career, 10 years ago, on data centers and and this, this person will never, ever run out of work, you know, in his lifetime, at least. So that was sound advice. Then is still sound advice. Now the This is data centers, is what fuels, I would say the future, the future technology in our society. You know, that's the only way that that we can take advantage of these technologies.

Joshua Feinberg: I see also, too a lot of the big operators and developers having to invest a lot more resources in nurturing, I don't want to say gatekeepers, but they used to have to spend significant resources convincing planners to green light this thing. Now it's planners plus utility companies, plus other regulators, plus the general public that would vote on on these referendums, because it's it's complex. It's not the traditional measures that a governor would be really excited about with job creation. It's different. The resources are

different. Selling someone that there needs to be small modular nuclear reactors to power these data centers is, for sure, a different kind of conversation that needs to be had. So yeah, there's going to be a need for a different kind of education beyond just what we have now exactly. And Emil Sayegh: then this is kind of like where the role of the role of the the marketers comes in, and the whole go to market organizations, you know, you gotta also focus on community and building trust within the community, building those relationships within these communities. So it can't be all speeds and feeds. We gotta talk about sustainability. We gotta talk about how we are creating opportunities, you know, maybe, you know, like we understand data center jobs don't create a lot of jobs on a permanent basis. They do create a lot of

construction jobs, but on an ongoing basis. It's not a, you know, it's not a factory. But we got to focus on the benefits and talk about what's important to that community where those data centers are being built? It's like, hey, look, you know, we're going to have a medical imaging company here. You know, we're going to have a autonomous car, if it's a rural community, potentially, you know, look, we're going to have the brains behind the. These self driving combines that are, you know,

come in and, you know, help you guys plow your fields, right? So that you can, you can sit in your in your porch, or your your bedroom, and then, you know, watch the Combine kind of doing the work for you when it's when it's below freezing, right? So anyway, we're going to be able to sell the value that data centers bring to that local community and to society in general, so that we can overcome some of these hurdles. Joshua Feinberg: Yeah, like from a technology standpoint, we know that there's certain applications that for sure, need edge, but a lot of people can't articulate why edge is a priority. And then you start talking through like, well, for EV infrastructure to scale, for smart cities to become a reality, for all of this stuff with with llms and AI, for sure, needs better latency. But like, yeah, these are all things that

there's if I think about on a national level, every time Congress brings alphabet, brings Facebook, whatever to talk about these issues, you see such a glaring lack of understanding of social media technology that's been around 10 years. How do we even begin to advance this on a national level, of getting people up to speed about the kind of infrastructure and even basic right infrastructure investments that are necessary to do this. So, yeah, yeah, Emil Sayegh: staggering. It's staggering that the politicians

don't understand this better, right? But this is also a reflection of of the the population at large. So, you know, we have a big education role, and then, you know, we gotta simplify it. We We can't just keep throwing speeds and feeds at people and expect them to make the the leap to understanding what the value prop we can't just keep throwing features and and not talk about the benefits that they bring, right? Because people just get lost. There's a lot of jargon, and we love to use it, but when it comes to communicating to the public and getting the public trust as well as I think, is going to be important also in gaining customers and filling these data centers with customers. You know, there's

going to be another, another aspect to our communication plans, not just, you know, the the power and the density and the cooling technologies and all that good stuff, but also the sustainability, you know, what you know, the, you know, some of the, some of those elements that come with making sure that we're a good steward or the environment right, that are going to be essential to a lot of companies, you know, deciding to go in a certain data center. I Joshua Feinberg: think the challenge with all of this, too, is a lot of companies are struggling on the go to market. That got them there to where we are today versus what they need going forward. And I think there's so much saturation of messaging and so much competing for people's attention that the idea of a sales person needs to needing to show up as a true consultant and an expert and a thought leader and a trusted advisor is very real, but it's nearly impossible to do that across several verticals simultaneously. So this is

another case where the small versus the mid size versus the enterprise at the enterprise level, they can afford to have a whole team of domain experts that immerses themselves in healthcare communities or financial services communities or manufacturing communities, to really, truly show up as a domain expert for the smaller that has 1020, different kinds of businesses that they work with. I don't know. How do they avoid commoditization? Emil Sayegh: Yeah, yeah. Very true. Very true. Yeah, that's the challenge with all of us. Yep. New World. New World. Yep. Joshua Feinberg: We talked about what advice resonates, what will potentially work well for someone in their late teens, early 20s that's trying to figure out what their first job could potentially look like in this space? What about someone that you may have worked with 10 years ago in the early days of hosting and managed services becoming more mature. You bump into them at a conference, and you sense that they're a little bit burned out. They're thinking about their next opportunity. They want to do something related to digital infrastructure, and they're looking for some insight over lunch or cup of coffee on how to get back on track. What would

you advise someone in that situation? Yeah, Emil Sayegh: I mean, don't be afraid to go to an adjacent field, adjacent technology. There's a lot of advancements right now and then, you know, I guess my first advice is to do away with, you know, can't do that, or this can't be done just because, you know, maybe over the last 10 years, you know, technology wasn't there to get something done. Technology is advancing very quickly. You know, you got, you know, we just touched on nuclear, you know, there's a, there's a resurgence in, in gas, actually, you know, gas is. And, and, you know, we got to figure out how to locate data centers next to the natural gas sources. There is a, you know, there's this whole world of AI. There's a, you know, World of liquid cooling that is,

that is coming on very strongly, right? I would say, don't be afraid to go to one of those lateral areas, adjacent areas to where you've been playing. I know there's a lot of pressure, as an example, in the IT space. So there's been a bunch of layoffs and and people reductions. I, you know, I wouldn't be concerned if I was, you know, one of those people to say, Okay, well, I'm going to go and focus on the data and data data center industry, not just data centers, but but OEMs that supply the data center industry. There's so much advancement in technology that goes into data centers. It is as much as the advancement that you see in software, right? We saw all the rapid advancements in virtualization technology over the last decade. Now there's, you know, equivalent

advancements in technology that's going inside of data centers, you know, and then you can, you can look at the revolution that the GPU chip from Nvidia has created, right? There's a whole sector of of industries and technologies that are around that that are going to be needing to change and adapt to provide the amount of power, the amount of cooling that these GPUs require now and in the future, right? Joshua Feinberg: Yeah, I've seen a lot of that first hand. Over the last 10 years or so. I've seen a couple dozen people in sales and marketing roles that were working for data center operators that left and went to adjacent spaces, in a lot of cases, SaaS companies or managed services companies or something related to telecom. And I'm sure they're just finding better opportunity there. But to wonder, at the end of the day, with the data center operators, the digital infrastructure companies that are constantly complaining about talent shortages and not able to fill these jobs, what they're thinking letting talent go to adjacent industries? Are they really thinking this through, and is there a more creative approach to saying, okay, this person hit a wall in their particular job. What could three months make a huge difference in cross training them into an area of higher growth? It's you wonder at some point if retention becomes should be a bigger goal than it currently is, as opposed to just on the recruitment side. Yeah, that's

Emil Sayegh: very true. I Joshua Feinberg: mean, within companies, Emil Sayegh: yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's just like customers, yeah, of course. You know, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta generate the leads, you gotta win them, and then you gotta retain them. You know, that's the cycle. It's a three part cycle. Same thing with employees. And then the way that retain employees is, if their job, let's say, is getting is is getting obsolete. You gotta cross train them. If they have a

good attitude, man, you know, just train them. You know, I would say, I always say, whenever hiring new talent is, you know, hire, hire for attitude, and then train for skills. You know, Train for for for experience. And same thing with existing employees, you know, they gotta take the initiative as well. The employee has to go to their employer and say, here's what I'd like to do. Here's sort of training that I

that the company may not offer, that I'd like support in. And then this is kind of where I see myself, right? So it's a two, two part, two part role here the employer, the manager needs to, needs to kind of keep an eye for that and challenge the employee and say, well, here's some opportunities. They're going to require some training. We'll help support you. The employee also has to be willing and also take the initiative to come to their employer, to come to their manager and say, here's a set of things that I want to do. You know which ones, which ones is the company interested in? I mean, again, for us to perform our best, I will say we have to perform in our magic zone. And the magic magic zone is basically a Venn diagram that is composed of three circles, right? The first one is, you're doing something you love, you gotta do something you love, right? But that's not enough, because you may love building sand castles. The second question that you have to that

you have to ask yourself, is that you gotta also be doing something that you're good at. So again, just doing something you love and something that you're good at may not be good enough to make a make a meaningful living. You may be good at building sand castles, and you may love building sand castles, but people aren't willing to pay more than five bucks for building sand castle for them. That's not going to support your lifestyle, unless you want to live as a bum on the beach, right? So, so then the third one is the third part of the vin diagram. Am is you know that someone, a company, society, is willing to pay you for enough to sustain your lifestyle. So it's the intersection of these three areas, something that you love to do, that you can get up in the morning love to do. The second thing is something that

you're really good at, and the third thing is something that society, or someone is willing to pay you for enough to sustain the lifestyle that you choose for yourself and and then once you were in that magic zone, this is when we shine. This is when we do our best. This is when, you know, we feel appreciated because we're paid well, we're doing something we're passionate about and something that we're good at. You Joshua Feinberg: know, because there's for sure, there's these well trodden paths of like, you see people being promoted from like SDRs into AES. You see some people that are really good at

retaining existing clients, but not so good at hunting for news. They move into like, account manager, Customer Success kind of roles, but like, yeah, just moving from go to market. Let's say somebody wants to move into more of an IT career. They want to move into operations or cyber security or something like that.

Yeah. So it's a matter of figuring out. A lot of companies are pay referral bonuses for bringing in new so there's a lot of experimenting that I think companies are going to be doing in the coming years to figure out all of the different angles on talent. I think most of the cycles are being spent right now on technology roles, because that seems to be the biggest shortage. But yeah, there's, there's, there's for sure, some leaks in the bucket on the go to market side. Also, the data

center go to market podcast is sponsored by DCSMI, elevating the role of sales, marketing and go to market GTM professionals in the growth of the data center industry. To stay informed about upcoming episodes, make sure that you subscribe to the data center sales and marketing newsletter on the DCSMI website that can be found at www DC smi.com Again, that URL is www DC smi.com Emil Sayegh: I mean, on the technology side, you know, all the vendors are willing to a lot of the vendors are willing to pay for the training as well, you know, so and, and, you know, we got to take it. I mean, I we got to take advantage of that as employees, as employers as well, tap into that. And I tell you

we, you know, the hardest part at the many companies that I've been at, you know, we would have budget for training is spending that budget. It wasn't getting the budget for training is spending it getting people willing to take the training and advance their careers. It's, it's, it's kind of crazy. So I think it takes two to tango, and my advice is, don't get caught into this nonsensical loop. Is like, well, if I'm going to take

training, is it on paid time or not? Man, do it on your own time. This is for your own benefit. I mean, you know, this is, this is stuff that's between you know, in your in your brain, that you're going to keep forever, right? And if that's the point of contention, then you're solving for the for the wrong problem. You know you're being, you know, too narrow minded. Just go ahead, take advantage of it, and and and

grow as a professional so and Joshua Feinberg: even the like the On Demand training, I been saying for years, like anyone that spends time at the gym or goes out running or biking, I listen to 45 minutes of a LinkedIn learning course while I was out walking this morning, like people that commute, people that travel a lot, there's so much downtime where you can squeeze this stuff in, if you just have the willingness to do all of this. And I think, I think that's part of the reason why AWS and the Google career certificates, all this stuff, has been wildly popular and continue to be increasingly popular, because it takes away a huge barrier and the cost and the time, Emil Sayegh: yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I You're absolutely right. And you this is kind of what I said is, if you hire for attitude, you know, you're trained for skills. You know you and part of the attitude is that curiosity, that desire to learn, that desire to advance, that ambition, right? I mean, you got to look for these things in people you hire. And then if you have those employees in your ranks, man, fuel that fire, you know, fuel that fire, encourage them to learn more, encourage them to develop their skills and and, you know, one of the worst things that we can do as managers and CEOs and whatnot is not allow mobility within our companies as well. You touched on it a little bit, because what's the choice for somebody who's been in sales, who's been in sales, let's say they have, you know, strong technical skills. They want to move into

solution architecture, or they want to move into product management, right? And then we say, no, no, you're a good sales person. You're the only one that can hit the quota here in this group, at this level, you get a. As a sales person, this person is going to go somewhere else, where they're going to, they're going to do something they love, you know, maybe they're good at selling, but they really love, you know, doing more technical stuff, right, you know? And then somebody else is willing to pay them that, and then they're going to be in their magic zone.

So let's create magic zones within our own companies, right, so that people can move laterally or be promoted into into roles inside of the company and other functions, and not trap people into into one function just because they're good. You know, they may not love what they're doing, right? They they may be good at it, but not love it. Let's put them in a role that they're good at, that they that they love to do, and then you know that they're going to get paid what they deserve, right? Joshua Feinberg: Yeah, they the Ae to the product manager, the sales to the product manager is super interesting too, because they, as someone who's maybe marginally hitting quote or consistent a little bit over quote or something, they're having a seven figure impact on the company, but in a product role, they could have an eight maybe nine figure impact on the company, because everything that they're doing now is not just what they're doing with their own prospects and their own book of business. They're creating leverage, and the unique insight

of hanging around for with the ideal prospects and clients for a couple of years gives them super powers to understand, hey, everyone keeps asking for this. Why did we never build Emil Sayegh: it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, for sure. And then you see a sales person that's, you know, very good technically. You know, maybe solution architecture another path for them, right? You see, you see a technical account manager that wants to move into the solution architecture side. That's it.

That's another path as well. You know, people that are heavily, heavily technical and focused on a single customer. And then you take that and you say, Okay, well, I'm going to put you in solution architect where you can, you know, my bottleneck all of a sudden is new leads. Is new new logos coming in that need to

be architected properly. Just move them over there, you know. And then, you know, maybe, maybe they, you know, as a tam, as a technical account manager, you know, they kind of suffered from the monotony of just kind of dealing with two or three big customers. You go over there, you got that cycle. They gotta, you know, they got a new pep in their steps. They, they, they get, you know, they get energized, you know, with the activity and the with the new customers and new logos that they're bringing in, and they use new use cases that they're having to look at an architect, right? So, yeah, Joshua Feinberg: when you look at what's going on across all the different parts of the digital infrastructure, data center, critical facilities ecosystem, what do you think is the single biggest challenge, the single biggest problem that everyone is dealing with right now. Emil Sayegh: Look, certainly I'm going to state the obvious, the scarcity of power. This case, scarcity of data center assets. You know, this is something that is, is very top of mind.

However, I want to talk about something a little bit more strategic, if you will, if you would allow me, is making sure that we don't chase the latest, latest shiny object and go and over build. I want to remind everybody that we need to build data centers with purpose in mind, with the use cases in mind that we want to serve. And you know, I just point you back to the to the crypto euphoria from a few years ago, where we thought that crypto is going to go in every data center. But then what it turned out is that we need to build data center specifically targeted for crypto and a certain area of the country with certain power, power profile, and so on and so forth. So, you know, a data center is not a data center is not a data center. They need to be built with purpose. They need

to be built with the end user in mind, with that use case in mind, so that, you know, they don't get obsolete in five years. And we keep chasing our tail and trying to retrofit data centers, because we we built them with the wrong power assumptions and and whatnot. And then, you know, and I'll just go back to a point we made earlier, is that we get to build things that last, that are friendly to the environment. Data Centers have a 5050, year life cycle. You know, we got to build them so that we're not harming the environment. We got to build them in a sustainable way. We got to build them in a way that

doesn't impact the community that they're in in a negative way, right, whether it's power or water consumption or or pollution or whatnot. So I think these are the big challenges we're going to be facing. And these changes challenges are evolving quickly, evolving quickly because now we're running at the same pace as as chip design, and as we know from Moore's law, chip design doesn't move in a linear fashion. And. Uh, but moves at an exponential rate of growth and and we got to adapt as a data center industry that is, you know, somewhat, you know, a little bit used to be, used to be little bit more glacial in its space to something a lot more fast pace. I Joshua Feinberg: think the purpose built is super interesting as well, because over the last couple of years, what's come into focus is the traditional repurposing doesn't work as well as it used to. For sure, the big hyper scalers, when they decommission a facility, there'll be an operator for the right price, who wants to take that over? But the idea of some of these really older facilities being turned into office buildings, office buildings for who it was like, the same way with the office buildings being turned into retail and what to do, like all, there's so much that's being shaken up in commercial real estate now, and they've said for probably a good year or two that industrial is the healthiest part of that everyone else is kind of scrambling for what to do as both traditional office space and retail has really been rethought with so many of the hybrid and remote and just different needs.

Emil Sayegh: Spot on, yep, exactly, yep. Joshua Feinberg: You don't really hear of decommissioning a shopping mall yet in our own geographic area, there's one that's being sunsetted in the next probably six to 12 months, and there's another one that's probably five years behind. It also behind. It also that's run its full life cycle, and they'll be redeveloped in the area where we live in. There's a huge need

for more housing. But yeah, there's definitely these shifts that are going on. The interesting one too is the Sears headquarters in Chicago, years ago that said, Oh, wow, that's got amazing utility power, great for redeveloping into data center campuses. But yeah, a lot of these second chances aren't quite the slam dunk that they were before, especially when utility powers is the limiting constraint Emil Sayegh: across Exactly, yeah. I mean, maybe, maybe 10 years ago, they had enough power, but now it's just not enough, right? So yeah, Joshua Feinberg: when you think about what you do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. Emil. How do you envision that either staying the same or changing? When you think 234, years out, do you envision a very different set of engagements or leadership in in a technology company? Or do you think it's going to be somewhat of the same? What's what's going to change? What's going to stay the same? Look? Emil Sayegh: I think this whole debate of Office versus in person, you know, so on and so forth, is going to get settled.

There's there's value in both. There's value in both. And I think, I think employees that and especially younger generation employees, you know, that came into the office during the COVID crisis or right around that and you know, we're able to function at home. You need to understand also that there is a lot of value for the for being in the office, for being seen, for for collaborating with others, for water cooler talks, right? It doesn't mean that you have to be in the office five days a week, but you know, both sides of the argument need to have some flexibility and some pragmatism into into the situation, because I'm going to tell you this that, you know, seeing somebody on Zoom or teams or, you know, whatnot, and talking to them in Slack is not the same thing as working with them face to face. And you get, you get completely different

impressions when you're working with people face to face, good or bad, you get vibes. You see them, how they operate. Plus, you know, when you're working in the same office, you know, you get to overhear what marketing is worrying about, what product is worrying about, what operations is worrying about, what the latest CSM is talking to their customer. So even as a as a salesperson, you can benefit instead of, kind of like being siloed, sitting by yourself at home. So excuse me,

my advice is, is, frankly, for for people to kind of get more flexible and figure out how to make hybrid work. I do believe that there's, you know, a need for people to be together, is it, you know, two days, three days together a week. That's up to the company and to the group, and you know the culture of the company, but there's a minimum of two or three days where people, in my humble opinion, need to be side by side, working together if they're in the same location. Now, if your company has, you know, been built on a on a remote concept, then that's part of the culture of your company and and that would work if you're development oriented company and whatnot. But I do think that companies that were traditional before COVID, and there's still this, this, this debate going. And on. I think both sides need to kind of compromise, and then, you know, figure out something that works with in agreement that, hey, look, everybody's going to be in the office, you know, these two days. And then you know this, you know, these other days are

going to be optional, or flexible or whatnot. So that would be my humble opinion of how things are going to evolve. You know, that's not really, you know, potentially, hey, commercial real estate is coming back and as everybody's coming back to the office. But it is, it is kind of somewhere,

somewhere in between. Joshua Feinberg: Yeah, great. It's so much of digital infrastructure is tied to real estate that it's hard to get away from the idea that the physical presence is you look at one of the five biggest players in the world has Realty in its name, and you go down to the next tier, or two dozens of companies with real estate, or Realty in this overall approach. So it does make sense that that's going to be super important, and even from someone that's in an a role, how do you do tours if you're not physically there? That's right. Client wants to come visit the facility. They're touring your data center, and three or four others, they've flown in for a day or two. And if you're not physically there to give them

the tour, how does the deal progress? That's Emil Sayegh: right. And I'm gonna tell you something also from me, as CEO of, you know, multiple data center companies. There's an unfairness, there's there's a fairness issue or unfairness issue, whichever way you want to but you know, I have data center technicians that have to be there. 24/7, they had to come in during the they had to come in during the pandemic. They had to be there in person, you know, certainly they had to wear gloves and masks, but they had to, you know, they had to be there physically. And for me, at this point, when there's no

pandemic, to be able to say, well, you know, there's haves and have nots in my company, where, you know, certain people can, you know, have to be there 24 by seven at the facility, keeping the facility going, where some people, well Can, can work from whatever they are, if they're within driving range of my offices, right? I think there's a fairness issue as well, and, and, you know, as CEO, I have to make sure that the culture is uniform across my company. I can't have a culture for the marketing team and a culture for the sales team and a different culture for the development team and a different culture for my for the backbone of my company. Which are my data center operators, you know, which are, you know, the guys that are bracking and stacking the servers, the guys that are maintaining the generators and making sure that the that all the electrical, sophisticated electrical machinery is functioning and so on and so forth, right? So, so I think there's a fairness issue, you know, aside from look customer, want to see it, want to feel it, want to witness it, right? And it is. It is just awesome for you to be able to kind of walk a customer through a facility and then look at the expression in their faces when their jaws drop, and see the amount of amount of technology that is running in those data centers. You know, everything is high tech from, I mean, from the generators to the controls to to the cabling to the wiring. I mean, everything is engineered with, with precision and sophistication. It is, it is, it's, it's awe inspiring. And

then, you know, I think it's beneficial. So yeah, yeah, Joshua Feinberg: even pre pandemic, there was this palpable of, how do you avoid an us versus them with remote first? Because even leading into the pandemic, there was a lot of talent wars going on in the late 2010 so yeah, these aren't new issues. Yeah, was I would say, Emil Sayegh: I would say, we just got to keep an open mind and be willing to compromise. It's not my way or the highway

on both sides and and we got to come to a happy medium. And I think that's what's going to happen in next two or three years, because everybody's seeing the benefits. And, yeah, so, I mean, I know Amazon just issued a mandate of five days a week. We'll see, we'll see where that goes. That'll be bellwether for the industry, but we'll see, but, but that's kind of like the way that I like to run things is in a pragmatic way, where we come to a happy medium, where the needs of the company are met, the culture stays intact, but also the needs of the employees are also met. Joshua Feinberg: Zooming in a little more to your daily routine, I'm curious to get your thoughts on any favorite tools or apps or how AI has impacted your daily routine.

Emil Sayegh: You know, something I love, LinkedIn, you know we were talking I used. It's the, it's the ever going everlasting, you know, kind of trade show. You know, to me, it is a low touch way for me to stay in touch with my tribe, my community, you know, see what's going on. Sometimes I get ideas.

I like the AI feature that is within LinkedIn, where it kind of rewrites your post. I don't always take it. I always kind of like let it edit my post and then read it, because it doesn't always get it right. It'll get it right with time. It'll learn. But it's not there quite there yet. So it also helped me, you know, kind of like, grammatically edit my posts, frankly, on LinkedIn. I like it a lot. So that would be my, one

of the ways that you know that AI has changed one of my favorite apps here. Joshua Feinberg: Yeah, I see for sure, too, that there's like this period of my career, pre LinkedIn and post LinkedIn. And the people that I work with and former clients from like 2010 on, it's really easy to stay in touch with them in low friction ways over time. And then the people that I work with in the 1990s and early, 2000s pre LinkedIn, it's a lot more difficult. Yeah, Emil Sayegh: yeah, for sure, it's a lot more difficult. And, yeah, I mean, I hardly spend, I mean, just in complete transparency anytime on Facebook or x or any of these platforms.

It's just, you know, I'll keep in touch with my friends and family on Facebook, but and x, I just don't know what to make of it yet. There's, there's something you know to be done from a B to B on X, I just, I just don't know what it is yet. It's just, you know, it's unfortunate, but it's a lot of, it's a lot of political and, yeah, it's a lot of political noise out there. So and, and personally, you know, my appeal to my LinkedIn tribe is, please keep politics out of LinkedIn. I

mean, that would be, that would be my plea, keep your political beliefs on the side, just don't bring them to LinkedIn, because, you know, nobody ends up as good friends whenever you do that. And just keep them away. You know, we have enough to talk about, keep and there's enough places to talk about politics other than LinkedIn. I mean, yeah, other than LinkedIn, go talk about it anywhere else, on Facebook and Twitter and all that good stuff. But just keep LinkedIn for the purpose that it

was built, which is a place, you know, for business, business people to talk to each other, connect, and yeah, that would be my play. Joshua Feinberg: Yeah. I think for me, LinkedIn has become like the second CRM. I think for anyone in a go to market role,

it is phenomenal what you can do with it, but you be willing to play the long game as well and use it in a way that educates and builds trust as a way, as opposed to just a way to think transaction of trying to push people into meetings. I think there's still, it's crazy that in the we're in the mid 2020s and you still have to remind people of that from time to time. But yeah, there's a lot of people that just think it's another version of zoom info, and they can just send out 1000s of messages, and people are going to magically want to book time with them on their calendar. Emil Sayegh: Yes, if on Calendly on calendar, they send you their calendar invite. That's my favorite. Oh yeah, Joshua Feinberg: yeah, yeah, for sure, the world has changed. I would remember too, with keeping the conversations professional on there, I remember going to a train the trainer workshop very early on in my career. I think it was for something PC

Troubleshooting, and the advice from the veteran instructor at the time is it will serve you well in your classes, in your workshop, something you do to stay away from religion, sex and politics, because, Emil Sayegh: by the way, that's good advice for LinkedIn users. That's very good advice because this is a professional environment, and you don't know, you don't know who you're going to offend, and why, right? And, and, and you don't know, an offhand comment can cost you a deal. Can cost you a career opportunity, you know? So anyway, yeah, agreed. Joshua Feinberg: I think there's a lot of people too that are trying to build a personal, professional brand on LinkedIn.

And I think in a lot of ways, too many enterprise employers are still figuring out the level of autonomy that they're comfortable with their employees actually having a strong what I typically see by default in larger companies, especially in the space, is there's a ton of people that are taking the same video. On the same post that's being slack to all the employees and sharing the exact same content. It seems a lot more unusual in larger in place for people to be putting out unique text posts and unique videos and unique image content. Part of it is time. Part of it's probably risk aversion and creating a culture where people can feel comfortable sharing their hot take on a session that they were at or a recent news announcement or something like that, yeah, Emil Sayegh: yeah, yeah. I mean, not working for a company like in this, in this sabbatical period that I'm in, you know, kind of doing this consulting, and then just, you know, I feel like I have a lot more freedom, you know, to kind of comment on things. But certainly, I mean, yes, you have

to be beholden to the company that you're working at. But, you know, there's a there's some degrees of freedom. Companies want you to be a thought leader. And you can be a thought leader within, within, you know that margin, you know, you know, you certainly can't go and say, Oh, well, I'm so impressed by by this competitor's product. And, you know, my product sucks as an

example. You know, you can't say those things, but because you're still an employee the company, represent the company, but there's a margin by which you can operate and show your thought leadership and present your personal brand. And I see a lot of people doing that successfully, but there's definitely some constraints, and you have to, you know, you have to, if you're going to work for someone, if you're not going to be working for yourself, you got to live within those concerns. So yeah, Joshua Feinberg: this has all been terrific. Emil, I really

appreciate you sharing so generously about your expertise and your thoughts on career development, and your thoughts on teams working together in career progression. And what this all means on a very practical level for data center development and utility and grid constraints is fantastic. I have tons of people, both within the US and globally, are going to get an enormous amount of value from watching and listening to this interview. If someone wants to follow what you're working on or connect with you, is LinkedIn the best place to send someone? LinkedIn, Emil Sayegh: absolutely. Emil, say, yep, on LinkedIn and or you

can shoot me an email for sure. Emil.sa, y, E, G, h@gmail.com, I live in Austin and happy, happy to connect and help out in any way I can Joshua Feinberg: cool for profit growth insights. Where's the best place that you'd send someone to? The website or LinkedIn, yeah, Emil Sayegh: profit Yeah. It's profit growth insights.com and then there's a link for more information. And you know,

profit growth Insights is really a consultancy where we help both operators, you know, people that were see that are CEOs like me, you know, kind of, essentially, you know, solve some of the most critical problems, whether they go to market problems or operational problems, or if they're looking at M and A, as well as help investors on the on the M and a front, you know, Essentially, with diligence, freding out good companies, you know, for adding out integration, so on and so forth. So I've been, I've been blessed to be engaged with multiple parties on both sides of the equation, both on the operator side and the on the investor side. And it's been it's been a it's been an absolute joy to to help people out. Yeah, Joshua Feinberg: that's terrific. I've been speaking

with Emil, say, who's a three time CEO, best known for leading entirety and host way also now consulting through profit growth, insights, meals, based out of Austin, Texas and Emil. I really appreciate you joining me on the data center go to market podcast. Emil Sayegh: It's been awesome anytime. Thank you to you and to your listeners, and we will, we will talk soon Joshua Feinberg: the data center. Go to Market podcast is

sponsored by DCSMI, elevating the role of sales marketing and go to market GTM professionals in the growth of the data center industry to stay informed about upcoming episodes. Make sure that you subscribe to the data center sales and marketing newsletter on the DCSMI website. That can be found at www dcsmi.com Again, that URL is w, w, w, D, C, S M, i.com you.

2025-01-19 18:26

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