A Geek Leader Podcast - inspiring technical and creative leaders around the world

About Nicole Nicole is a passionate design leader who thrives on finding user-centered solutions to complex problems. Her leadership provides figurative (and sometimes actual) glue for creative collaboration. Working at Uplevel, her team creates product solutions to be simple, functional, and beautifully designed. With a BFA in Design from Cornish College of the Arts, she has 20 years of experience in digital advertising and marketing as well as product design. Nicole has led teams to create award-winning work for advertising agencies, in-house design departments, boutique design studios, and start-ups. She's based in Seattle with her partner and is kept very busy with her 2 sons and 2 Boston terriers. Today We Talked About Nicole's background UI/UX 4 Day Work Week Testing it out Separate home from work time Increase in productivity WIP Limits Context Switching Retro Connect with Nicole LinkedIn Website I hope you enjoyed this show, please head over to Apple Podcasts and subscribe and leave me a rating and review, even one sentence will help spread the word.  Thanks again! A2 Hosting I’ve been using A2 Hosting for several years.  They offer state of the art SSD hosting for all of their plans.  Their sites are super fast and easy to setup.  I rarely need support, but when I was migrating my sites to a larger plan I used their support services and they were phenomenal.  I highly recommend A2 hosting for all of your hosting needs.  And I also recommend everyone to have a personal website. If you’re in technology and looking for a job and don’t have your own website, I probably wouldn’t hire you.  Just sayin’. Please use my affiliate link when signing up. https://www.ageekleader.com/a2

About Katie Katie Burkhart puts a point on business. She’s the mastermind behind MatterLogic™, the simple system for running a purpose-driven business, and has quickly become one of the go-to experts in the space. She’s also a serial entrepreneur building the Matter ecosystem, including Matter 7 and MatterPulse. Defining matter as worth the time, these companies deliver critical focus, perspective, and alignment while distilling the big picture into pointed actions. Katie speaks worldwide as a keynote speaker, podcast guest, and workshop facilitator. She’s an Entrepreneur contributor, and her work has been published in The Startup, UX Collective, and Boston Content. She’s a thorough pragmatist intent on being useful, a language extractor eliminating jargon and empty labels, and an officially registered Jedi who also loves Star Trek and LOTR. Connect with her on LinkedIn, subscribe to her newsletter, and get her Weekly Brief. Today we Talked About About Katie Jargon Slayer Storytelling MatterLogic Starting with outcome first creativity Show me, don't tell me Paint the picture Retention through emotion Measurement / progress People Serve Story Team Story Progress Story Education / Knowledge Story outputs vs outcomes What's the point? So What? Big Thank You Connect with Katie LinkedIN Website Newsletter Twitter I hope you enjoyed this show, please head over to Apple Podcasts and subscribe and leave me a rating and review, even one sentence will help spread the word.  Thanks again! A2 Hosting I’ve been using A2 Hosting for several years.  They offer state of the art SSD hosting for all of their plans.  Their sites are super fast and easy to setup.  I rarely need support, but when I was migrating my sites to a larger plan I used their support services and they were phenomenal.  I highly recommend A2 hosting for all of your hosting needs.  And I also recommend everyone to have a personal website. If you’re in technology and looking for a job and don’t have your own website, I probably wouldn’t hire you.  Just sayin’. Please use my affiliate link when signing up. https://www.ageekleader.com/a2

About Robert Robert Cooke is the Founder and Principal Architect at 3Forge, a New York-based provider of data virtualization and visualization technology. Before starting 3Forge, Robert served in senior-level positions at Tier One banks JPMorgan Chase and Bear Stearns and the dark pool Liquidnet. Robert has an unmatched passion for all things computer science. With over 100,000 hours of software development, his mesmerizing array of accomplishments include the creation of the distributed columnar SQL live-view database, elastic messaging platform, low latency webserver, Cross-language Compiler, web-integrated IDE, remote-debugger, and real-time dashboarding/visualization suite.  These are all packaged under the 3Forge platform, a company he started in 2011. Today We Talked About Robert's background 3Forge Data Lake / Data Oceans Leave the Data Where it is Humans interacting with Data Ask a question Information Pushed in Real-time Enter Data into a computer Cascading Queries SQL Technology Connect with Robert Website LinkedIn Twitter 3Forge LinkedIn   I hope you enjoyed this show, please head over to Apple Podcasts and subscribe and leave me a rating and review, even one sentence will help spread the word.  Thanks again! Private Internet Access I’ve been a customer of Private Internet Access for over 3 years now and I love this service.  I was at a security conference a few years ago and I connected to the hotel wifi.  Immediately my endpoint protection software began to alert me of hacking attempts.  I launched my VPN from Private Internet Access and all of the attempts were stopped. My data and internet connection was secure.  Another great use of the VPN service is connect from different geo locations, which is very helpful when testing DNS and CDN caching. To get a your VPN account starting at $3.33 per month, please visit https://ageekleader.com/vpn

About Victoria Dr. Victoria M Grady is the Academic Director of the MSM Graduate Program and Associate Professor of Management/Organizational Behavior in the School of Business at George Mason University.   Victoria is also the Professor in Residence for the Healthcare People and Change Practice for FORVIS based out of Charlotte, NC.  Victoria’s research portfolio focuses on the behavioral implications of organizations introducing and implementing organizational change—her unique emphasis is the role of Attachment Behavior and Transitional Objects within the change process.  Victoria’s consulting practice includes work with United States Federal Government Agencies, Private and Public Healthcare Organizations in the United States and United Kingdom, Utility Organizations in Australia, K-12 and Higher Education Institutions, Nuclear Power Plants, and Non-Profit Associations. Recent research publications can be found in Harvard Business Review, CEO World, Washington Business Journal, Bloomberg News, GovExec.com, the Journal of Change Management, and The Public Manager.  She is co-author of Stuck: How to WIN in Business by Understanding LOSS, Productivity Press: Routledge Taylor Francis Group, 2022, The Pivot Point: Success in Organizational Change, Morgan-James Publishing, 2013, co-author of Family Capitalism: Best Practices in Ownership and Leadership, Routledge (Gower) Publishing, 2017 and Attachment in the Workplace: Managing Beneath the Surface, Routledge Taylor Francis Publishing, 2020. To learn more, please visit her website at www.pivotpnt.com or reach out via LinkedIN. Today We Talked About Victoria's background Organizational Changes The Custom Approach Tech Leadership Culture Post Pandemic Culture Memory, Emotion, and Learning Stuck Beneath the Surface Challenges Challenges with Remote work Is the grass greener? Great Resignation Engagement Burn-out Awareness Test Connect with Victoria LinkedIn Twitter Website Book I hope you enjoyed this show, please head over to Apple Podcasts and subscribe and leave me a rating and review, even one sentence will help spread the word.  Thanks again! A2 Hosting I’ve been using A2 Hosting for several years.  They offer state of the art SSD hosting for all of their plans.  Their sites are super fast and easy to setup.  I rarely need support, but when I was migrating my sites to a larger plan I used their support services and they were phenomenal.  I highly recommend A2 hosting for all of your hosting needs.  And I also recommend everyone to have a personal website. If you’re in technology and looking for a job and don’t have your own website, I probably wouldn’t hire you.  Just sayin’. Please use my affiliate link when signing up. https://www.ageekleader.com/a2

About Perry PERRY CARPENTER, C|CISO, MSIA, currently serves as chief evangelist and strategy officer for KnowBe4, the world’s most popular security awareness and simulated phishing platform. A recognized thought leader on security awareness and the human factors of security, he’s provided security consulting and advisory services for the world’s best-known brands. His previous book, Transformational Security Awareness: What Neuroscientists, Storytellers, and Marketers Can Teach Us About Driving Secure Behaviors, quickly gained a reputation as the go-to guide for security awareness professionals worldwide, and, in 2021, he was inducted into the Cybersecurity Canon Hall of Fame. He’s the creator and host of the popular 8th Layer Insights podcast and co-author of the new book The Security Culture Playbook: An Executive Guide to Reducing Risk and Developing Your Human Defense Layer (Wiley; April 19, 2022). Learn more at SecurityCultureBook.com. We talked about The human sign security awareness flaws Knowledge / Intention behavior gap Just because I'm aware doesn't mean I care Working against human nature will fail What my employees do is more important than what they know Password Manager Make Security Easier Connect with Perry Twitter LinkedIn Website Podcast - 8th Layer Insights Podcast Book I hope you enjoyed this show, please head over to Apple Podcasts and subscribe and leave me a rating and review, even one sentence will help spread the word.  Thanks again! A2 Hosting I’ve been using A2 Hosting for several years.  They offer state of the art SSD hosting for all of their plans.  Their sites are super fast and easy to setup.  I rarely need support, but when I was migrating my sites to a larger plan I used their support services and they were phenomenal.  I highly recommend A2 hosting for all of your hosting needs.  And I also recommend everyone to have a personal website. If you’re in technology and looking for a job and don’t have your own website, I probably wouldn’t hire you.  Just sayin’. Please use my affiliate link when signing up. https://www.ageekleader.com/a2

About Douwe Douwe Maan is the Founder and CEO of Meltano, an open source platform for the complete DataOps lifecycle. Spun out of GitLab In early 2021, Douwe took charge at Meltano and went on to raise $4.2M in Seed funding led by GV. Douwe became a successful developer at a young age, Co-Founding his first company at age 18. He would be happy to speak about DevOps, DataOps, open source data and just about anything else he has experienced along the way to success in such a booming industry. Born and raised in the Netherlands, Douwe was introduced to computers early by his father, and picked up programming at the age of nine. Throughout high school, Douwe worked as a freelance software developer, building many websites, an iPhone jailbreak tweak with 300k downloads, the #1 (closed) most downloaded watchface for the original Pebble smartwatch, and two iPhone apps that got featured on the App Store. While studying at Utrecht University, Douwe co-founded a SaaS startup that grew to $150k in ARR, which led to him joining GitLab in 2015 as employee number 10 after landing the parents of its co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij as customers. Soon after, he hired and trained GitLab's next 10 engineers and became its first development lead and engineering manager. After graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Douwe spent six months traveling the world, visiting and working with 49 colleagues in 14 countries on 5 continents. In late 2019, Douwe joined the internal Meltano project at GitLab as Engineering Lead to bring his experience building open source developer tools to the data space. Soon after, he was asked to take over as General Manager, and quickly pivoted to focus on open source data integration, which led to Meltano picking up significant traction during 2020. Douwe currently lives in Mexico City with his delightful wife, who he met on the aforementioned trip around the world, and their two cats. Today We Talked About Douwe's background Programming at 9 years old GitLab Building Apps Reading your own code Meltano's start DataOps vs. DevOps Version Control Connect With Douwe LinkedIn Twitter Website Meltano I hope you enjoyed this show, please head over to Apple Podcasts and subscribe and leave me a rating and review, even one sentence will help spread the word.  Thanks again! A2 Hosting   I’ve been using A2 Hosting for several years.  They offer state of the art SSD hosting for all of their plans.  Their sites are super fast and easy to setup.  I rarely need support, but when I was migrating my sites to a larger plan I used their support services and they were phenomenal.  I highly recommend A2 hosting for all of your hosting needs.  And I also recommend everyone to have a personal website. If you’re in technology and looking for a job and don’t have your own website, I probably wouldn’t hire you.  Just sayin’. Please use my affiliate link when signing up. https://www.ageekleader.com/a2

About W. Curtis W. Curtis Preston (AKA Mr. Backup) has specialized in designing data protection systems since 1993, and has designed such systems for some of the largest organizations in the world. His lively prose and wry, real-world approach has made him a popular author and speaker. He has written four O’Reilly books, the latest of which is Modern Data Protection, published in 2021. He is also the host of BackupCentral.com and it's Restore it All podcast. He is now the Chief Technical Evangelist for Druva, the only at-scale SaaS provider of data protection. Today We Talked About Curtis's background Why Backups are important. Modern Backups SaaS Service backups Container Backups Cloud Backups Protecting Code Spaces MFA as a requirement M365 Backups Immutable Backups Ransomware LTO backups Archiving vs. Backups GDPR and backups Forget me Yes? Retention Policies RTO and RPO - What are the? Connect with Curtis Podcast LinkedIn Website Twitter I hope you enjoyed this show, please head over to Apple Podcasts and subscribe and leave me a rating and review, even one sentence will help spread the word.  Thanks again! Private Internet Access I’ve been a customer of Private Internet Access for over 3 years now and I love this service.  I was at a security conference a few years ago and I connected to the hotel wifi.  Immediately my endpoint protection software began to alert me of hacking attempts.  I launched my VPN from Private Internet Access and all of the attempts were stopped. My data and internet connection was secure.  Another great use of the VPN service is connect from different geo locations, which is very helpful when testing DNS and CDN caching. To get a your VPN account starting at $3.33 per month, please visit https://ageekleader.com/vpn

About Raghu Raghu Bala is CEO, NetObjex Inc based in California USA.  He is an experienced technology entrepreneur and is an alumnus of Yahoo, Infospace, PwC, and has had 4 successful startup exits.  Focused on Web3/NFT/Defi/Metaverse/IOT/AI. Four exits. Wharton/MIT/Columbia/Stanford. Now the CTO of Kresus Labs. Mr. Bala possesses an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania), an MS in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a BA/BS in Math and Computer Science from the State University of New York at Buffalo.  He is Ex-Columbia University Adjunct Lecturer, currently tutoring MIT courses in AI and Blockchain on the GetSmarter platform.  He is a published author of books on technical topics and is a frequent contributor online. He is a contributing author in an upcoming book titled “Handbook on Blockchain” for Springer-Verlag publications.  He is also a Contributing Editor to a new book called “Step into the Metaverse”.   Mr Bala was also instrumental in the development of the Metaverse strategy for NetObjex including its purchase of land and construction of a Metaverse building (see https://youtu.be/yV3YfZQpAGo).  He is Board Advisor to several Metaverse and Crypto initiatives – 3DMeet – a Metaverse Education company , Dreamium Labs – a Layer 0 Protocol for the Metaverse, OpenFabric.ai – a decentralized AI platform, and, TrinityDEX – a state of the art DEX built on Algorand. Mr Bala has spoken at several major conferences worldwide including Asian Financial Forum in Hong Kong, Global Foreign Direct Investment Conference in Sydney, Blockchain Malaysia, IoT India Congress, Google IO, and several more.  He is also an elected board member of AIM - The global industry association that connects, standardizes and advances automatic identification technologies. His current areas of focus include Product Development, Engineering and Strategy in the businesses or SaaS offerings related to Decentralized computing, Distributed Ledgers, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and the Metaverse.  His domain knowledge is vast including Automotive, Retail, Supply Chain & Logistics, Healthcare, Insurance, Mobile & Wireless, and more. Today We Talked About Raghu's background Metaverse Education Training Field Trips Blockchain What is Web3 IoT AR Car Windshield AR Lanes on your Winshield Locations ahead Blockchain contracts NFT Tokenization Commercial Papers Connect with Raghu LinkedIn Website Twitter I hope you enjoyed this show, please head over to Apple Podcasts and subscribe and leave me a rating and review, even one sentence will help spread the word.  Thanks again! Private Internet Access I’ve been a customer of Private Internet Access for over 3 years now and I love this service.  I was at a security conference a few years ago and I connected to the hotel wifi.  Immediately my endpoint protection software began to alert me of hacking attempts.  I launched my VPN from Private Internet Access and all of the attempts were stopped. My data and internet connection was secure.  Another great use of the VPN service is connect from different geo locations, which is very helpful when testing DNS and CDN caching. To get a your VPN account starting at $3.33 per month, please visit https://ageekleader.com/vpn

About Jim James G. Wetrich, LFACHE is the CEO of The Wetrich Group of Companies and the author of Stifled: Where Good Leaders Go Wrong. His writing has also appeared in the 2021 anthology series Quitless: The Power of Persistence in Business and Life, a USA Today and WSJ best seller. Having led teams in three continents over more than 40 years and consulted with over 100 companies, Jim has seen great leaders who have thrived and ones that have failed. A noted expert in leadership, Jim’s leadership lessons are as highly sought after by today’s business students as they are Baby Boomers. From 2006 to 2014, Jim built a team at Molnlycke Health Care that grew the revenue over 7 times and the EBITDA over 20 times creating over $1BN growth in enterprise value and taking the US business from number 5 to number 1 in the served market with an employee satisfaction index over 95%. Jim is passionate about diversity and inclusion and hosted a two-day meeting for all women in the organization (not just high potentials) to discuss their unique challenges. As the founder and CEO of The Wetrich Group of Companies, Jim focuses now on coaching and mentorship and spreading his leadership lessons to help individuals become better leaders and organizations create great leaders and managers. Today We Talked About Jim's background Leadership issues that we face Where Leaders go wrong Letting go Ego Training Demotivating your team Not all interactions should be transactional "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care" - John Maxwell Celebrate our Successes Work-life Balance Expectations Self-awareness 360 Reviews Remote Work Retrospective Being Vulnerable Connect with Jim Books Website LinkedIn I hope you enjoyed this show, please head over to Apple Podcasts and subscribe and leave me a rating and review, even one sentence will help spread the word.  Thanks again! Private Internet Access I’ve been a customer of Private Internet Access for over 3 years now and I love this service.  I was at a security conference a few years ago and I connected to the hotel wifi.  Immediately my endpoint protection software began to alert me of hacking attempts.  I launched my VPN from Private Internet Access and all of the attempts were stopped. My data and internet connection was secure.  Another great use of the VPN service is connect from different geo locations, which is very helpful when testing DNS and CDN caching. To get a your VPN account starting at $3.33 per month, please visit https://ageekleader.com/vpn

About David David Kakish is the founder and President of RIA WorkSpace. It’s his belief that small and midsize Registered Investment Advisors and Financial Advisors are different than other businesses. He likes to think of these RIAs as the Small Giants in the financial services industry. David is committed to higher standards and easier access to enterprise level IT and cyber security for small and midsize RIAs. He believes that an off-the-shelf IT setup doesn’t meet the unique needs of the industry and encourages RIAs to seek out better, enterprise-level solutions to protect their business and their clients. Under his leadership, the RIA WorkSpace team developed cloud and managed IT platforms specifically for RIA and Financial Service firms. They’re keenly focused on creating leading edge security and headache-free environments for their clients. While not at the office, David is an active reader and enjoys playing soccer and basketball. He loves traveling, learning, and spending time with his family. On the weekends, you’ll typically find him coaching one of his kid’s sports teams. Today We Talked About David's background IT Security Microsoft 365 Security Features Not using features of M365 Ransomware Cyber Security DLP - Data Loss Prevention MFA - Multi-Factor Authentication Power in simplicity RoN - Return on Negligence Leadership Enterprise Single Sign-on Microsoft Security Score Who is auditing your IT group? Connect with David Website LinkedIn RIA Podcast I’ve been using A2 Hosting for several years.  They offer state of the art SSD hosting for all of their plans.  Their sites are super fast and easy to setup.  I rarely need support, but when I was migrating my sites to a larger plan I used their support services and they were phenomenal.  I highly recommend A2 hosting for all of your hosting needs.  And I also recommend everyone to have a personal website. If you’re in technology and looking for a job and don’t have your own website, I probably wouldn’t hire you.  Just sayin’. Please use my affiliate link when signing up. https://www.ageekleader.com/a2