Big Compute - A Cloud Startup Story (Part 1)

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

Amazon started as a bookseller.  BloomNation was founded with money won in a Poker tournament.  The creator of Paul Mitchell hair products was homeless before starting the company with a friend for $700.  Each product or service we use on a daily basis has a unique startup story behind it.  In this episode, we hear from Joris Poort, founder and CEO of cloud high performance computing company, Rescale, about what led him to quit his job at Boeing to start a tech company.  From his birth in the Netherlands to finding himself surrounded by consultants at Harvard Business School – Joris’s story is proof that it takes a special kind of person with a special kind of vision to create a business that pushes innovation to the next level.

Wait, how many times have you eaten rattlesnake? Oh, when I was a little kid, all the time. Really? So if my grandfather happened to run across one when he was, you know, working out on the ranch, he would obviously like skin the snake, debone it. What? And then just fry it in butter with the cactus. And we would eat that in tacos. So that like.

You had rattlesnake tacos? Yeah, rattlesnake and cactus. Whoa. I can honestly say I've never had that. And we were little kids. So my sister and I, we thought this was normal. We didn't find out until much later that this is not normal for city folk, right? Because we grew up in the city.

I don't want to make it sound like we grew up in rural Texas. We just happen to have a- Well, you just said city folk. Yeah. That doesn't make you sound like you grew up in the city at all. Hi, everyone. I'm Jolie Hales. And I'm Ernest DeLeon. And welcome to the Big Compute Podcast.

Here we celebrate innovation in a world of virtually unlimited compute, and we do it one important story at a time. We talk about the stories behind scientists and engineers who are embracing the power of high-performance computing to better the lives of all of us. From the products we use every day to the technology of tomorrow, computational engineering plays a direct role in making it all happen, whether people know it or not. Ernest! Ernest, hello! Hello!

So it's obviously been a little while since we took what we'll call a little winter break. And I do have to ask, I mean, did you do anything eventful since we last recorded? Eventful? Probably not. I've been, unfortunately or fortunately, however you look at it, just incredibly busy. If I'm not working, I'm playing with my daughter, taking care of my daughter. And then by the time I'm done with that, I'm dead tired and ready to go to bed. So nothing eventful.

It's like sleep, daughter, work. Yeah. How about you? Yeah. I mean, it sounds like we live somewhat similar lives, though. I was able to take the family to visit like my siblings and my parents and my in-laws for the holidays, which was awesome. We also caught Omicron, which wasn't as awesome. But now we feel like antibody superheroes. So that's pretty cool. Though I got to say, I say antibody superheroes only when it comes to COVID, because since that time, my family's pretty much caught like back to back illnesses. So if you can hear a little bit of

congestion or whatever in my voice, you're not crazy. Apparently I've sounded like this since December. So. Well, that's kind of how it goes when people get sick. But one thing I can tell you, you know, obviously, you know, the COVID situation has been not a good one, but once it's behind us and we've kind of, you know, processed the trauma as a civilization, I look forward to like the next genre of B movies that come out. Oh no. About contagion and viruses and all kinds of stuff like that. Oh, I'm surprised they haven't come out already. It doesn't take a lot of time to make a B movie.

I mean, that's true. And furthermore, like nowadays you can shoot cinema quality film on an iPhone. Don't talk, oh my gosh. I knew you were gonna bring up a stupid iPhone. Stop. Or you could shoot it with a really nice DSLR camera. I mean, you could if you wanted to carry that thing around.

I would. Because, you know, we had Hollywood blockbusters about this kind of stuff. But I want to see the gritty, struggling filmmakers' B-movie interpretation of this entire thing. Especially since, I think, when the pandemic began, everybody went and watched Contagion again. So we have a virus with no treatment protocol and no vaccine at this time. Is there any way someone could weaponize the bird flu is how we're looking at it. Someone doesn't have to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that. It's figuring us out faster than we're figuring it out. It's mutating. And it was actually, I mean, kind of

terrifying to really think about, but it seems like it had a lot going for it in terms of accuracy, which surprised me. It did. As a matter of fact, one of the beautiful things is we've been able to see, you know, going back to the discussion about your family catching Omicron and whatnot and COVID, how technology has helped us in so many ways to just kind of lessen the damage. The number of deaths this time around, while incredibly high and tragic, is not on the level we saw in 1918 per capita. And so like all of these different entities who were using supercomputing or high-performance computing in the cloud were able to race to solutions and treatments and just advice to people, right? They weren't shooting in the

dark the entire time. It took a while to get all the relevant data, but once the scientists and engineers had that data, they were able to actually do things with it to help us. And that's kind of what this podcast, the stories we try to tell, which are people taking data and ideas and kind of running them through high-performance computing in the cloud and coming up with something that benefits humanity. And I think when we come out of this, we will have so many more excellent stories to tell about different people who worked on different things just to kind of help us get through this as a species. Yeah, I totally agree with you. It's been amazing. I mean, we've been, I think, so blessed to have

the technology that we've had because I think without it, I mean, I believe and I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest that things would have been so much worse. The speed at which we got vaccines to the therapeutic developments to I mean, there's a number of different ways, the communications, you know, there were still plenty of human errors, I think, in that regard. But as far as the technology goes, it was so helpful in trying to get through this pandemic. And it seems like things are actually opening up. Right. They're getting better.

But it's interesting how the world has kind of had to evolve, not necessarily against its will, but definitely not something that societies, I think, planned for. Right? Yep. Like anybody who's really educated knows that there's this looming possibility of a pandemic. But you don't really think about it as being the reality that might hit next month. Right. Right. Right. But then it did. Right. And when you when you have a looming possibility that isn't like an upfront reality, technology is still evolving to help in that situation. But it's not evolving so quickly because there's not this imminent threat. Right.

Like everybody had to pivot away from what they were doing. Researchers who were working on something totally different had to suddenly work on COVID and so forth. But but that's kind of how society works. Right. We evolve and technology evolves based on what the needs are right in front of us. And and I was actually thinking about this because I went back home for the holidays and my hometown is like a totally different place. For the 14th year in a row, Utah reigns supreme as the state with the best economic outlook. I couldn't even find the home I had grown up in because they had inserted some freeway. It was so confusing. I just didn't even bother finding it eventually. But there's just houses everywhere. There's buildings where there didn't used to be buildings. But, you know, you would see cows every now and then. But like I didn't grow up raising cows and livestock like I was in a suburb of Salt Lake City. I mean, have you experienced that with your hometown in Texas? This has been happening for a long time. A lot of these cities

have grown tremendously. There's this little town north of where I grew up called San Marcos, and it was a college town, very small. You could pass it in five minutes when I was young. And now it's just exploded. Like there's so many things. This was a tiny, tiny town. It's a full on city now. So I think this is normal and it's happening everywhere. But you're right that it's kind of one of those where just the number of people. Aside from just population, there's just been a lot of relocation, especially because of the pandemic. So many people are suddenly able to work from home. And so they move into areas that are maybe closer to family or a place that they've maybe always wanted to live in or whatever. But it's interesting to see how society has evolved through the pandemic.

And the same thing with technology, right? We've mentioned this. There's this constant evolution with the times and demands. Like, it makes me think about, do you remember when Amazon used to just sell books? Yes, I do. Yeah. And now it's this massive behemoth of a company that, as one of its many features, it also offers cloud high-performance computing

via AWS, which is quite a few steps away from just selling books online. And Google, right, started only as a search engine, basically, developed in college dorms at Stanford. And now they too offer cloud high-performance computing, along with a host of other services like my beautiful Google Pixel phone and my five smart speakers that control the lights in my house because, you know, flipping light switches with your finger demands way too much effort. Though I will say I have been quite frustrated with my home speakers, like not understanding me lately or the wrong speaker responding. Or I don't know if like the latest automatic updates just screwed it all up. But I can tell you one thing.

It has definitely eased my fears about the singularity coming anytime soon. Because I'm like, no, it's not happening. They can't even play the right song. Yeah, I don't allow those kind of things in my house. I do have one Apple HomePod thing, the little tiny HomePod. Really? I didn't even know you had that. Yeah, I have one little one, and I use it for playing music or whatever while I'm working. Oh, yeah, and cooking.

And cooking. It's a set of timers on it. And, you know, it's fine, but my wife laughs at me because she'll be in the other room, and I'm telling Siri to do something, and she clearly is not getting it. And it gets to the point where I, like, start either cursing at her or whatever the case is. And then like sometimes I'm just like, you know, I realize it's an AI. It's not like a person. But I'm like, did you have an aneurysm or something? What is going on here?

Yeah, I can imagine a lot of these companies, they're kind of sprawling into areas that were not their forte, so to speak. No, totally. Like we have an Amazon Alexa, too, because, you know, clearly you got to have all the different kinds of speakers. I don't know why. But we have an Alexa. And I forget completely that, you know, Amazon was basically for me a college textbook company. Right? It's insane.

And it's so interesting to look back on the histories of these different companies and how they started and how they evolved. You know, like this got me down the rabbit hole and I started looking up startup stories on the Internet. And there's some like really crazy ones like, for instance, I don't know if you've heard of the flower company called Bloom Nation. No. Yeah. So apparently I've never ordered flowers from them, but I'm not a big flowers orderer. Me either. But apparently they're like a reasonably large flower company and they were founded with money that was won at a poker tournament. Like the founder, like literally won a poker tournament. It was like, I'm going to start a flower company. Right. And then there was another story about the billionaire who founded Paul Mitchell Hair Products. Do you know Paul Mitchell?

Yeah, I know he is. He was originally a homeless guy with a two-year-old son to care for, and he ended up starting the company with a friend for 700 bucks. Yep. He originally came across my radar in an article I read that was talking about executives who do not use computers or do not use email. Is he one of those? So he was one of them. How can you even do that today? Like in 2022, how?

I believe in that article, he had said that he had his assistant print out emails and he would dictate responses. Interesting. And the assistant would go back and type the responses to the email. So it's like, you know, he's a billionaire, right? He's got this massive empire.

It's not like he's suffering. He's probably much more emotionally stable than the rest of us. Yeah, the rest of us that are on the grid constantly. I mean, I admire the guy. Yeah, he doesn't have to deal with all the garbage the rest of us do. So but the thing that I always think of when I think of startups is, you know, I started in this industry shortly before the dot-com bust that happened in 2000. And I remember if you wanted to launch a company of any kind that required technology to operate, let alone a tech startup that needed like an internet presence and all that, you had to invest hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars into hardware, you know, servers, storage,

electricity, HVAC, data centers. Like it was a fortune you had to outlay just to get yourself going. And then now with the cloud, any person who wants to start a business, all they need is a credit card. I know it's so different. It's completely different. They can start up a business with 50 bucks, a hundred bucks, and just see where it goes. And scientists and engineers that want to run massive simulations don't need to spend a million, 5 million, 10 million on hardware now. They can just run it in the cloud and pay whatever the fee is for borrowing those resources for that amount of time.

It's insane. The difference between just 20 years ago and now. I completely agree. That's a great example, just 20 years ago and now. I completely agree. That's a great example, especially here on Big Compute. And it is actually very pertinent to what I want to talk about today. So I wanted to tap into the heart of a startup story that is very relevant and it resonates well with us here. Our presenting sponsor, Rescale, was kind enough to lend me their founder, who is also their CEO, for a few hours to tell the story of not just how in the world he came up with this idea to create Rescale, but how he turned that idea into a reality and then grew it

into a successful business that allowed companies to do, as you say, just pay with a credit card and suddenly be able to use high performance computing to create amazing innovation. It's a beautiful thing. Yeah, it is. And his story includes everything from not being allowed to watch TV, to having to fight for HPC resources, to being completely broke. And then ultimately, obviously, the formation of Rescale. And it's pretty interesting. And so we wanted to bring it to our listeners today. It's also really affirming to me that creating a tech company is not something that I want to put on my bucket list, but I'm very glad that others have it on theirs so that I may ultimately benefit from their genius by being

able to use cooler products. Yeah, that's definitely agreed. And we all benefit from other individuals starting businesses or building new products so that we don't have to do everything ourselves. Right. And yours is one of those people who was willing to take on the stress of building a business with the hopes of changing how the world operates and making things better for people. And my hat goes off to him and to people like him for doing that for people like us, with rather benefit from other people's stress, right? Because I don't know. The nice thing about not being a CEO is that when I'm done for the day, I don't have to think about work for a few hours. And I feel like they just never get that break,

you know, that mental, emotional break. I mean, there's probably higher highs, you know, at work, like bigger reasons to celebrate when you lead a company. But I imagine that the hard times are much harder, right? You can't just go get another job somewhere. Like this is your baby, you know? Yep. It's a difficult path to take. I mean, it was really cool to actually talk to Joris. And Joris is a really personable guy,

which is awesome because not all CEOs are as personable as he is. And by the way, his name is spelled J-O-R-I-S, but it's not pronounced Joris. So he tells me that it's actually very common for people to call him Joris. But for everyone here, you now know it's Joris, right? It's actually not a name that originates from the United States, as we'll get into for a little bit. But I should, before I go into his story and introduce him, I should take a minute to explain Rescale a bit better in case some of our listeners are not super familiar. But Rescale is basically, it's an online platform that engineers and scientists who are looking to run a simulation, they can log on to this platform. And then basically by using drag and drop with the

mouse, they can pick the software they need to use, pick the hardware they want to run it on. And that includes high performance computers from, you computers from all the major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and so forth. And then they can click run and basically the simulation runs. What we actually do is help engineers and scientists run all the different types of experiments they'd like to run in software faster, better, cheaper. And that allows us to build much better products. And we do this across many different categories of companies from cars and rockets and airplanes to medical devices and many other interesting challenges. Coming straight from someone who knows a bit about Rescale, the CEO himself.

One thing I want to point out here is that Rescale is a little bit different than a lot of other products that you hear the word cloud tossed around. There's a difference between taking a product that was designed for the old data center world, right? We would typically term as either homogenous, vertical, silo. We use a lot of these words, but they were apps meant to run wholly contained, often within the same either server or group of servers, whatever the case is. It's a different thing to take one of those and try to put it in the cloud than to design a product to run natively in the cloud. And I think that's where the big difference is here is that Rescale was initially thought

up as high performance computing designed for the cloud as opposed for let's take old HPC and try to cram it into the cloud. Yeah. And that's a great way to put it. The way I think about it, too, is like when shared drives first existed, right? They were in the cloud. But like if you wanted to edit a document, you could still only access that document one person at a time and you were still editing it the old way before the cloud even existed. So it was in the cloud. But who cares?

Because the only thing it saved you was printing something out and running it to somebody physically. It wasn't designed for the cloud. And then Google Docs and Office 365 came along where they're designed to be in the cloud where people can simultaneously work on them. Teams can see them at the same time. You can make suggestions. You can make edits. I mean, something like that is engineered. It's created for the cloud and it changes the entire way that people do work. Right. Yep. And that's what Rescale has made their goal from the very beginning. so in a way that is so specifically optimized and built for the cloud, which puts the user first. And Rescale believes that in order to put the user first, it means offering like an easy to use interface with intelligent automation, software, deployment models, geographical regions, the whole lot, all updated and fine-tuned for workloads on the cloud so that it's not just running in a cloud space, but it's made for a cloud space. So any advantage that you can think of for high-performance computing to be in the cloud is implemented into the Rescale product, and that's been their entire

goal, and that's what sets them apart. So I'm glad you brought that up. Basically, Rescale eliminates the need for a company to purchase and maintain on-prem hardware, which is a bit of a disruptor. But because of the lack of resource restraints, its technology has contributed to some pretty incredible and quick innovations across multiple industries. And you can basically innovate as fast as you want, right? Right. Like our previous interviewee on the podcast, Vertical, discussed. Right. And many Fortune 500 companies actually use Rescale. We just don't have permission

to tell you who they are, which is lame, but that's the way the world works, I guess. So use your imagination. Think of really cool aerospace automotive, life science, energy, consumer product companies, all of those that anyone who uses engineering in some way, and there's a solid chance that they actually dabble in the Rescale platform. That's right. And it's actually far more than people would imagine. If you can think of any company that's doing engineering and design, they are probably using Rescale. And if they're not, their competitors are going to squash them. A very definitive statement from Ernest, ladies and gentlemen. It's all about time to market. Time is money.

But anyway, that is Rescale. Hopefully that didn't sound too markety. That was super markety. But it's okay. That's what you do for a job. I know, but I don't know what else. It's so funny because I'm legitimately, you know, we talk about so many Rescale cases here that I've just really come to appreciate Rescale's technology and what they're doing. And so it's really hard to talk about it without sounding like I'm trying to sell something. And so I'm so sorry if I came across that way. I like the product. I'll kind of give it for my, and I know you're going to be upset, but anyway, Rescale to me is like my iPhone. It is simple and it gets out of the way. And I realized like for people

who use Android, right, they want to tinker. They want to do, you know, these custom configurations and all that. They want all of this flexibility and, you know, adjustability. And hey, that's awesome. Like for people who want to do all that and that's kind of their interest and their passion, knock yourselves out. But for me, a phone is a device to get things done, whether that's communicating with my family, whether that's running and operating a security organization, whatever it is, I need the phone to get out of my way. I need it to be simple. I need it to be fast and I need it to get out of the way. And that is what Rescale is for engineers who need to run high-performance computing jobs in the cloud.

Yeah, see, why does that sound so much better than anything that comes out of my mouth? It's just one of those things where like the products that exist in the world that are the simplest to use and get out of your way are the ones that people are most attached to. When a product does that, I'm completely appreciative of it and I'm more than happy to. When a product does that, I'm completely appreciative

of it. And I'm more than happy to pay whatever the cost is to, I'm essentially buying time. That's what I'm doing. I'm buying time. But hopefully that at least, you know, gives our listeners a better perspective of what Rescale is. And I imagine all of this makes its founder and CEO, Yoris Port, a very busy man. I'm firefighting all day long trying to run a high growth startup. You might even say he's running a high growth startup at home, too. I do have a two year old and a four year old. So I really enjoy spending a lot of time with them, especially on the weekend.

And they have a ton of energy and they're always a lot of fun to see every day. So I try to make sure that I spend enough time with them every day. Yeah, I think every parent in some way is running a high growth startup, right? I'm in the same boat. I have a toddler and one on the way. So I would think that there's a lot of correlation between trying to run a house with very, very young children and a high-growth startup. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And Joris' story actually began outside of the United States.

I'm an immigrant. He was born in... Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Which I'll never be able to pronounce. It's on the east side of Holland, close to Germany. This is apparently Dutch music, by the way. being very i guess you could say undercultured when it comes to the netherlands i just instantly pictured windmills tulips uh those wooden shoes that you see in the pictures i did do gardening in wooden shoes so not just the tourist thing

yeah are the wooden shoes just to prevent your feet from getting wet because it's like really like moist soil or something? I don't even know. It's a good question. I actually don't know. So I looked it up afterwards and apparently they were designed to protect the feet of farmers, fishermen and factory workers. Probably other people with a title starting with F apparently.

And it was designed to protect them from sharp objects. And actually, these wooden shoes have been declared by the European Union to be an official safety shoe. So now you know. I mean, that makes sense. It's going to be hard for something to puncture wood. Right. So I was in the Netherlands until I was seven. Both my parents were academics. And so I was definitely the nerdy kid in school, by the way. So of course, he started a tech company because isn't that what nerds do?

I mean, surely. I think every tech person starts a tech company at some point, even if it's only in their mind. They start. What does that even mean to start a tech company in your mind? Well, that's often where it has to start. A lot of plans don't make it out of the mind. That's where they die. Oh, yes, this is true. But yes, I think it's hard to look at a tech company that has been successful and not claim its founder to be a nerd. I think nerds kind of run the world at this point. For the most part.

And because Yoris' mom taught at a bunch of different universities, the family ended up moving around quite a bit while Yoris was growing up. And when he turned seven years old, the family flew across the ocean and they landed in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Where his mom was a Fulbright scholar. That was an interesting experience, which I very much remember because I didn't speak a word of English. And we just kind of, you know, dropped into school. He had an English as a second language class once a week, which, you know, I mean, that's all you really need when you've never spoken a native word of English in your life. Yeah, once a week is more than enough, of course. And then after a year,

the family moved back to Holland for a short period, and then they flew across more oceans to settle in Adelaide, Australia, where they lived for five years. Back when we were in Australia, I would say one of the formative experiences was my father's huge Steve Jobs fan. And at that time was kind of the time he left Apple and started this new company called Next Computers. And because my dad was such a big fan, he ended up buying it somehow convincing my mom that it would be smart to invest in a computer that was really built for universities. And so we had this Next Computer at home, the Next Cube, which is an amazing feat of engineering, probably the most overpriced computer ever marketed.

Hi, I'm Steve Jobs, and I make computers. The board emerges ready to power the most advanced, most sophisticated, most efficiently produced computer workstation of all time. Next. I wasn't familiar with Next computers. I think I've actually maybe heard of them, but I have a feeling that you, Ernest, probably know a lot more about them than I did growing up. Oh man, I can tell you an entire episode worth of a story about Next Computers, but there's only two things that are important

to come out of that story. One is that it involves Steve Jobs. The second is that the kernel for Next Computers lives on today in modern macOS and iOS products. Oh, that's right. That's how it all ties together. Interesting. Yeah, I looked it up and I kind of got a light sense of what you're talking about there. But for those who are not Apple users and don't follow their story as closely like myself, the Next Cube was sold in the it was basically just sold in the early 1990s for $8,000 and it sported a 25 megahertz CPU, eight megabytes of RAM, expandable up to 64 megabytes.

It also had a floppy disk drive and an ethernet connection, which actually the Ethernet connection surprised me. That was not commonplace for the early 1990s. I'm pretty sure that at my house, we were just starting to get AOL on a dial-up modem right at this point. Yeah, as a matter of fact, Ethernet connections were not actually common even all the way up into the early 2000s. It's a well-known fact that when Microsoft was getting ready to launch the original Xbox, which launched in 2001. For the first time, let me now unveil Xbox. One of the heated

arguments that was had was whether or not they should put an ethernet port on it or a modem port. And the argument was around, are we building for now or are we building for the future? Interesting. Anyone who owned an original Xbox knows what the end choice was there. And it's the reason that that console became the first one to have, you know, Xbox Live Arcade and any kind of online interaction between players was because of that Ethernet port. That's fascinating. And that was 2001, right? So it was like. Right. And this next cube is like early 1990s. Like I think it was 90 to 93 or something. Right, so this is an era of dial-up. And, you know, your point is taken well here that this was a forward-thinking machine,

even though the price was... $8,000! Oh my gosh, in the 1990s. Oh, I can't even imagine. But it was something really made as like a really high end computer for universities to buy, competing with Sun Microsystems. And we had that next cube at home. And so two older brothers, we had like very early, we had the internet. And I basically learned object oriented programming from my older brothers on this next computer when I was not very old.

And young Yoris, with the brain that he inherited from two academics, loved the computer. And he also loved math because, you know, smart kids often love math. Next computer came with this software called Mathematica. Something familiar to many who work in high-performance computing. Mathematica is sort of this math package for, you know, math PhDs to do like very esoteric research in math, but because it was free. And if you don't know anything about Dutch people, Dutch people are usually very frugal, but it came with a computer.

So might as well use it. So learn how to use Mathematica. And that was, you know, object-oriented programming. It really changes how you think. And so that was probably a pretty formative experience before I hit high school. And I love this because while young Yoris was learning how to use the technical computation software system Mathematica on a Nextcube, I was pretty much sitting on the couch watching reruns of Lois and Clark. When a small town guy... Welcome to the Daily Planet.

...meets a big city girl... Lois and Clark. When a small town guy, welcome to the daily planet, meets a big city girl, Lois Lane, Clark Kent, what happens is out of this world. Lois and Clark, the new adventures of Superman. I mean, do you remember that show, Ernest? I remember that show. You watched every episode right when it came out, didn't you? I don't know if I watched it like that much, but what I remember. But you did watch it. Yay. I did watch it. And what I remember most about it was laughing because, you know, at some point in school, we had talked about the Lewis and Clark expedition. Right.

And I remember the show mainly because of the play on words from the actual historical event. Oh, that's so nerdy of you. You're supposed to remember the show because of, you know, Dean Cain playing Clark Kent. And what was it terry terry hatcher i don't remember i wasn't into the you know the fine cinema that i am now yeah the fine cinema like lava lanchula things like rubber oh yeah rubber that was the trailer you sent me over the weekend i was like what is earnest sending me and i look at him i'm like oh no i still haven't had a chance to watch it. Another terrible movie I can never make myself watch.

You know it's going to be good. What is it about like a tire that like attacks people? Yeah. A tire. The description on IMDb is a homicidal car tire. How can you even continue? Hold on. Yeah.

No, it gets better. Like you would think that you would think like, okay, that's it. You've let the cat out of the bag about the story. But no, it's a homicidal car tire discovering it has destructive psionic power, sets its sights on a desert town once a mysterious woman becomes its obsession. Wow. wow so there's a love story of obsession between a tire and a woman and the tire discovers it has psionic powers and thus becomes homicidal like who i don't know how someone came up with this idea everybody this is what our killer looks like tire okay i'm looking up lois and clark's tagline on IMDb right now.

It says, in addition to fighting evil, Superman has a burning romance with Lois Lane in both of his identities. That's maybe a little bit better than the homicidal tire tagline, but not much. That's marginally better than the homicidal tire. Only marginally. We also grew up with no TV. So he sadly missed out on Lois and Clark. And I imagine he probably hasn't seen Rubber either, unfortunately.

Very unfortunately, yeah. That was interesting, too, because we basically, you know, you'd show up to school and all the kids would be talking about some TV show thing. And you just have no idea what they're talking about. They were probably talking about Lois and Clark. My mom taught dentistry at the University of Australia. And after five years of living in Australia, when Yoris was around 14 years old, he and his computer loving family, they all packed up and they moved their household

back to the united states this time to the state of michigan go blue where yoris finished up high school and attended college which i'm gonna be honest i don't know how he doesn't have some dutch australian like minnesotan accent or something because he doesn't yeah that's definitely odd it's weird how some people have them and some just don't yeah and he's one because he doesn't. Yeah, that's definitely odd. It's weird how some people have them and some just don't. Yeah. And he's one that just doesn't, despite like growing up in the Netherlands, speaking Dutch. I mean, I grew up in Texas, but in Australia. Yeah. You're not like saying y'all all the time. No. See, that's the thing. I grew up in Texas and I, you know, there

are certain phrases or words I use. What's the most Texan thing you can think of to say that you would say? I'm going to go fix me a plate. Oh, yeah. Which is imagine a non-native English speaker say he's going to fix a plate. Like, what does that mean? There is a broken plate and he's going to go fix it. Right. But that's all it is normal for us.

It's unfortunate because sometimes, you know, as I got into college, it would have been nice to have an Australian accent. But as for Dutch, I still speak it. We have a bilingual household, but my wife is half Korean, half Chinese, and she grew up speaking Mandarin. And so we decided to be more useful for the kids to speak Mandarin than Dutch. But we sing a lot of Dutch songs. So that's my contribution. So his children are clearly destined to create their own global enterprises. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Yoris isn't married with kids at this point in the story yet. He's a college student at the University of Michigan. I really enjoyed my time at Michigan. Amazing experience there. I studied mechanical engineering on the advice of my father that computers are just

a tool to get a job done. You should go study a real subject. That is amazing advice. I really enjoyed, you know, the physics of building things, but also did a minor in applied math and then spend a lot of time on the sort of software side. So a lot of the projects I did were still leveraging a lot of the sort of computer science background side. So a lot of the projects I did were still leveraging a lot of the sort of computer science background, things like that. And that was a lot of fun. He also got to go to a couple Rose Bowls because... I did also participate in marching band. A well-rounded nerd.

And which instrument did he play? The trumpet, which if you'll remember back to our COVID musical instruments episode, do you remember that? It was like over a year ago now. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Do you remember how the trumpet spreads aerosol particles like COVID germs at like, I believe it was a whopping 10 times the rate of normal talking? But I mean, at the point that Joris was playing the trumpet, you know, COVID was still a couple decades away. So he's good. He was just helping to spread colds and stuff, probably. Yeah, it's not surprising for anyone who was in marching band.

The most problematic instrument in terms of overpowering everybody else was the trumpet. So loud. But I also remember which was the instrument that had the least spread of aerosol particles. Yes, the tuba, which if I remember correctly, you are a tuba player, are you not? Yes, but ironically, I started out as a trumpet player. Oh, I love that both you and yours are total band nerds. That's amazing. I suspect that in the tech world, in the nerd world, there's probably a lot of people.

I would say the majority of people I run into play some sort of instrument. It's pretty cool, actually. And for Joris, in his final couple years at Michigan, he took on a couple internships, and one of which was particularly formative in shaping his future plans, which was an internship with Boeing. It was my junior year at Boeing, and they gave me the opportunity to work on the Dreamliner. A pretty cool internship for a young engineer. It was slated to be the first kind of fully carbon fiber airplane. And so that was a really interesting project.

Yeah, I got very lucky, I would say, to have that opportunity. Although luck hid itself for a time when he was accidentally given the wrong relocation city to move to, a two hour drive away from his internship. But at that point, I mean, he was already paid up on his new apartment. Yoris ended up driving four hours round trip each day to this Boeing internship, which would admittedly be pretty rough in the days, especially before podcasts. You know, I have to say, absolutely. That was horrendous. But consider that anyone in like LA or the Bay Area, that's our normal commute every day, or at least before the pandemic, that was a normal commute. But you're right. At least there are podcasts and other things now that you can do while you're still paying attention to your driving. So yeah, that was probably pretty rough back then. I'm curious, what did he do to entertain himself while he was driving? Ended up signing up for a van pool where you left like 4.5, like before your kids get up. Trust me, that was pretty rough. But very, very amazing opportunity, of course, to work in that

program. So amazing, in fact, that once he graduated, he ended up going back to Boeing to work full time, this time living a bit closer, I'd imagine. And Boeing had a continuing education program where they would pay for employees to get additional degrees or certifications. I did a certification in material science for carbon fiber, building carbon fiber airplanes. And that was a lot of fun because it was able to kind of learn new things still while I was working and then decided to do a full-time master's while I was working as well. So Joris got his master's in aeronautics and astronautics from the University of Washington while he worked at Boeing. The topic I studied was multidisciplinary optimization. And so the topic that I was

both doing at Boeing and studying sort of academically was using self-tuning optimization algorithms to design carbon fiber aircraft. And what that really was is essentially trying to use software to sort of press a button and design the perfect airplane. And that was a transformative experience for Joris because it led to the realization that in the way that things were set up, there weren't enough computing resources to solve the problems that he was looking to solve. At this time, I mean, cloud high-performance computing didn't exist. At that time, most companies like Boeing would build these data centers with a variety of hardware from places like Cray, SGI, HP, Dell, etc., and sort of build an on-premise computing

system that you'd need lots of special permission to get access to because these systems are so expensive and only the sort of top aerodynamicists on the most important program sort of get access to run like a large fluid dynamics model or something like that on these systems. And when yours first arrived at Boeing, his first real job was to optimize the design of a metal rib inside a 787 Dreamliner, which was considered a less significant design element of the aircraft comparatively. There was no way I was getting access to that HVC or supercomputing system. But over time, Yorce moved around to different

teams at Boeing until he eventually landed on the team that was tasked with designing the wing. And I don't know if you know this, Ernest, but the wing is, you know, generally considered an important part of an airplane. Yeah, that would seem logical. And then 787 was falling a little bit behind schedule, as most good aerospace programs do. And so eventually, when I was working on these like sort of bigger programs, then through lots of lobbying and politics and management, eventually you'd get access to these larger systems.

Cue the music. And through those larger systems, when I was working on the wing, you could go run these like larger scale computations for anything from the material science of the carbon fiber to the how the wing actually bends to the sort of the finite element analysis or the physics of the wing and then the air elasticity. So also the aerodynamics and the fluid dynamics problems. At the time, it was really easy for different engineering teams to stay in silos.

Some engineers were experts in carbon fiber or aerodynamics or some other element. Having to sort of do all the aerodynamics and only think about aerodynamics, making it exactly right, then handing it over to another engineering silo to of do all the aerodynamics and only think about aerodynamics, making it exactly right, then handing it over to another engineering silo to go do all their design work on, say, the structures and making that right, and then handing it back and then checking the aerodynamics again. You've got to go through these feedback loops that can take a long time. But since Yoris was simultaneously studying multidisciplinary optimization while he worked at Boeing, he was very interested in breaking down those silos.

You want to kind of bring all these engineering disciplines together and ultimately design the best possible design, given all the physics and the engineering that goes into each of these different disciplines. So the theory was, if you connected all the computational models and simulations together, from structural design to material design to aerodynamics and so forth, you'd be able to make overall better design decisions and you'd end up with a much better product, be it faster or lighter or more performant or more valuable or all of the above. So for a few years, Yorce pushed to make that practice a reality at Boeing. But having all

the engineering teams work in tandem meant running a lot of simulations simultaneously. That requires an enormous amount of computation. So the challenge that we ran into trying to reduce these cycles at a place like Boeing is really around ultimately there's not enough compute even in these like specialized data centers to be able to run it that fast. And so Yoris tried to find ways

to access that kind of compute. I definitely experienced all the pain and frustration of trying to get access to more compute power. Especially given what he was learning at the university. If you think of kind of the dissertation I was writing at University of Washington on the academic side, the actual work I was doing on the 787 program, they all sort of led to this thing of like, look, you just need a lot more compute power. And if you provided that access to that kind of compute power to engineers, you would solve these problems in a much smarter, faster,

better way, right? And it kind of blew my mind that in an organization like Boeing at the time, and a lot of things have changed since this time, right? We're talking 15 years ago. But you know, it was really hard to get access, you know, just even getting an upgrade on your laptop would be hard to do. Like you can imagine how hard it is to get access to like a data center of 1000 servers or something. But Joris knew that having access to the necessary compute could make a big difference for the project and for the company. Now, I was a young, bright eyed, bushy-tailed engineer willing to break a little glass. And eventually we got access to a lot of different internal resources to run these

sort of large-scale problems. Even if it was like pulling teeth sometimes. At a new company starting today, you obviously have the power of cloud computing. So you never need to build a single data center. Just building the data center take like over a year for a new compute capacity from the day you write the check to having it installed and up and running. Whereas with cloud computing, you can literally press a button and have access to the largest, best data centers in the world, both in that kind of timescale, right? You can instantly kind of spin these things up and you can also pay for it on a consumption basis, which really changes, I think, the economics as well. But at Boeing, data center capacity and access were limited,

at least when it came to data centers they originally had access to. However, yours and his boss, Adam McKenzie, who will actually come back into play a little later in the story, both of them knew that Boeing was this big company, right? I mean, today it employs more than 140,000 people at locations around the world. But that also meant that there had to be data centers with compute that was currently being unused somewhere. So we kind of bootstrapped together and we actually used some software to essentially build some distributed computing software to take advantage of these different idle systems. And, you know, you can kind of very generously call that a private cloud. But yeah, it was really just a hack together. So a lot of a lot of Python scripting and but

kind of internal within Boeing, we would programmatically try to find access to the resources that weren't being used. And most of that would be happening on the weekends. So most of the work we did, the big runs would always happen on the weekend because from Friday afternoon, when everybody clocks out at Boeing, to Monday morning, there would be a lot of idle capacity. And so that would be the time that we could really run the big jobs that we were doing. And through their hard work, brains, and creativity, they used multidisciplinary optimization to make a difference.

We eventually, we did get to using that technique to sort of get a much lighter weight wing design and save many hundreds of millions of dollars. Not only did they save the company millions of dollars, but it changed the way that things were designed at Boeing, which moving forward now led with this multidisciplinary optimization mindset. You're generally always kind of using the best practice processes from the previous airplane program. And so to what I understand, yes, that same process has been carried forward. And I think it made a huge impact on the way engineers think about designing and building

airplanes. And for more than four years, Yoris continued to forward a multidisciplinary mindset at Boeing. And while he had found ways to access idle data center resources, I mean, Boeing, as we've established, is a very large company. And with any large company, you would expect there's a lot of pushing through red tape in the battle for resources. They had a lot of focus on delivering the 787 airplane program. And it was an amazing experience. And I'm still very, very thankful for having to be able to participate that sort of from start to finish. But at a certain point, I was really interested in trying something new.

So Yoris left Boeing. And when he left, he didn't actually know what he wanted to do. He was on a path to do a PhD in aeronautics, astronautics, multidisciplinary optimization, and he was also looking at some manufacturing combined with business sort of programs because he had been so fascinated by how large companies like the one he had just been working at operated. I ended up actually at Harvard Business School. You know, as one does. It was actually a pretty tough decision because I wouldn't say that I had a lot of support around me. Joris' social circle was basically filled with PhDs and he didn't even know a single person who

had an MBA. In addition, I mean, his parents were both academics from a very frugal Dutch culture and they couldn't understand the thought of Joris taking out a bunch of student loans to go to business school. The Dutch culture would say, you know, debt is a bad thing always, which business school would teach you different. Joris' parents were originally thinking, yes, we've got all four kids out of the house, graduated from college and in stable jobs. I mean, Joris was working at Boeing, where he would obviously work for the rest of his life.

But then all of a sudden, Yoris quits his stable job in order to take out a bunch of debt and then go to business school. They did not appreciate that that may be kind of a direction that I'd like to take my educational career or my work career into. But at that time, I was old enough that I kind of

stopped listening to my parents to a certain extent and decided, and this is a framework I think that is helpful in life in general, which is, I think it's actually Jeff Bezos who coined this, which is the minimum regret framework. And so if you kind of look at, you know, I do like either a PhD program or go do this hybrid sort of manufacturing business thing, or I do like the MBA at Harvard. Across those choices, you know, fast forward a couple of years, which one would you kind of regret the least, right? And I like audited this class where you get to do these visits and sit in on these business school classes.

It was totally jarring, right? Like completely different than engineering. People get cold called. This is like high pressure environment. There's all these finance people, consultants. I never interacted with any of those folks. And I was like, wow, this is a whole different world. And I thought I would learn the most and regret it the least. And so that's how I ended up there. And I would have thought that the dramatic change in scenery would have been intimidating or, you know, maybe even scary for an engineer raised by academics where, you know, A plus B equals C. End of story.

But when I asked Joris if he was freaked out by leaving his engineering atmosphere for one of the fastest paced business schools in the United States, he actually said no. If I look back at like sort of younger versions of myself, what has never scared me is like something new. I've always been sort of like, I would say, relentlessly curious and always eager to learn new things. And so relentlessly curious, Yoris went to Harvard Business School, where he found himself suddenly surrounded by business consultants when he didn't even know what business consulting was. What's very unique about Harvard Business School specifically is that they use this thing called the case method. And so everything that you study is in the context of usually a real world example,

where whatever you're studying, you're sort of going through the narrative of a company going through that challenge or whatever it might be, right? And over the first year, students would end up learning hundreds of cases where every day they would need to read 15 or 20 pages or so about a case, where they'd learn the history and background about a real life company, what their specific challenge was and so forth. And then you get cold called, right, which is a fun experience, where the way they sort of ensure compliance that you read the case is through public shaming, and if you didn't, which means a random person, it's usually a class of like 90 folks,

you get called and, you know, you're asked to sort of what's called opening up the case. So you're supposed to recite sort of from memory this case that theoretically you read the day before. The professor asks some questions. Various students in the class chime in different perspectives. Every class is essentially a new case. So by the end, when you do hundreds of these, you've seen how like, you know, hundreds of companies have solved, you know, hundreds of different business challenges. And what's very different from engineering, which is where, you know, all my background comes from, you know, on the technical side of things, we always have a very crisp and clear answer.

So everybody's just got a math and has clear answers. I would say the business school and case method, it teaches you a lot of these things don't really have answers, right? It's just like, this is what the company did. This is what worked well. This is what didn't work well. And you kind of start learning these patterns. And the theory I think is that that teaches you how to make better decisions in the future. And yours was thrilled by the new perspective he was getting. I would say a year and a half into business school, I was pretty, you know, I've done a lot of school at that point in my life, right? And I couldn't really let go. I will say I left Boeing with this kind of feeling of, man, this technology has so much potential,

right? There's so much more to be done. And I'd spent so much of my career at that point, probably already 10 years in both combination of Boeing and academia, kind of studying this field of running these computations more efficiently. And I was still in my free time, kind of just reading books and researching this stuff. And at that time, that was really when cloud computing was kind of becoming a little bit more mainstream. Things like AWS and the concept of big data were just starting to emerge. And Yoris was still really interested in all of this stuff, especially considering recent years where he fought tooth and nail for on-prem compute resources. And after a year at Harvard Business School, Joris had been bitten by the consulting bug and he ended up taking a summer job as a consultant for McKinsey & Company, where he actually got to go back and live in his homeland of the Netherlands.

Most of this work always happens, you know, the business world kind of operates primarily in English. But once that team found out that I also speak Dutch, everything switched over to Dutch. And I can tell you that was quite the interesting experience. Yeah, what about all the tech jargon? Did you know? Exactly.

No, nothing. Like, I have, like, just imagine, I have, like, sort of 7 to 10-year-old Dutch language skills, and all of a sudden I'm supposed to work with a team for this, like, CEO of this company producing, like, these results, yeah, in a language where I have, like, you know, 10-year-old language skills.

But this wasn't the first time Joris had to quickly adapt to a less familiar language. And he picked up the Dutch tech jargon quickly. And there was a lot of tech jargon in Dutch because at this time he was a consultant for a company called ASML, which is a semiconductor company that has a large amount of market share making lithography machines or machines that build computer chips. What was really interesting to me and sort of sparked my imagination at the time was that these more customized chips that are getting built. So you have obviously commodity sort of cloud computing. But, you know, if you build more efficient chips, that's another way to solve this large computing problem, right? And most of the computer chips or the CPUs, central processing units, are built for general purpose computing, right? But at that time, you already had NVIDIA building GPUs and things like

that. And what was really interesting to me was like, why aren't there custom chips being built, like for example, aerodynamics, right? So why are we solving aerodynamics problems on computer chips that are really not built to solve necessarily that specific type of problem? And between the ideas of increasing access to compute resources and using chips customized for certain types of jobs, Yorce was convinced that there just had to be a better way for engineers in general to get their work done. And so those are kind of the areas and these sort of topics I combined to study in Secular Business School, which was maybe a little bit different than what most other MBAs were doing

at that time. Probably just a little bit. That's probably true. Not that I would know. And while his three months working as a McKinsey consultant in the Netherlands was incredibly interesting and rewarding, Joris wasn't convinced that he wanted to stick to consulting as a career. I realized at the time, if I went down the path of a, you know, next five, 10 years sort of career in consulting, I'd probably get paid more than I ever thought I would get paid. I'd probably work with the most powerful people in business that I would never otherwise get to work with and on really interesting projects. But I would not really get to implement and really work on the actual technology and taking it to market and the customers for that technology and the products we would be building.

And for Joris, it was the hands-on, impact-driven side of technology that really drove him. It gave me a lot of additional sort of inspiration and motivation to do something in the field of computing. And with that, Rescale was born. The end. Okay, just kidding. If you've been watching the clock, you can see that this story is going to need to be a two-part episode.

So stay tuned to the next release of the Big Compute Podcast to hear more about Yoris disappointing his parents, moving to Silicon Valley, being rejected by numerous investors, and then finally landing a small first check that got the ball really rolling toward his dreams of accelerating innovation. To see photos, links, and videos associated with this episode, including, I'm hoping, a trailer link for the movie Rubber, head over to bigcompute.org. Yes. You can also go to rescale.com slash bcpodcast to learn more about the Rescale

platform, sign up for a demo, and then that lets them know that we sent you. And to support the Big Compute podcast, you can leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. And as a matter of fact, if you tweet us, we're prolific tweeters and we'll respond to you. I love the we there.

It's the royal we. Yeah, it's more of the earnest. It's not even the we. Like I spend five seconds on Twitter per month. So tweet at earnest. Thanks for joining us today. And always use MFA and 321 backup. Stay safe out there.

Bye. Thank you.