Leadership in Technology: David Goeckeler of Western Digital

Thanks, Ravi. Great to be here. I look forward to a fantastic discussion.

Kind of an interesting start, maybe serendipitous. I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and went to a public school. When I was a senior, the school got its first computer for students. Nobody knew what to do with it. It sat in a room. I figured out how to write software and help the instructors and teachers figure out how to use it. That got me started. When I went to university, I started off in industrial engineering, lasted one semester, then transitioned to computer science full time. It was something really enjoyable to me and something that came naturally, quite frankly. Writing software led to a tremendous career.

Yeah, I'll tell you what I look for in people that I hire in almost any discipline. It starts with you have to be outstanding in what your field is. As a computer scientist, you have to be an outstanding computer scientist. You have to be good in your domain. That is the table stakes for contributing at a professional level. Then I look for two other characteristics that I've found are incredibly important for how you manage your career and be successful as a professional. The first one is grit, or perseverance. You have to be able to persevere when things get tough. Things aren't always easy. You don't always have great information depending on where you work. You have to stay focused and be successful when other people get distracted. That is a hugely important skill. The other skill I find in people that is really important, but it is quite rare and seems easy, is you have to be able to change your mind when you are given new information. This sounds simple, but it is not easy because people tend to dig in on their point of view. What you have to learn is that we live in a dynamic world. Every day I get up to a new world and new data. You have to evaluate and decide what is the best direction forward. It doesn't mean you make a new decision every day, but you keep an open mind and realize you don't know everything. You have to factor that into what you are doing. If you can be excellent at your craft, that is the table stakes. Then add other skills, and you are going to be very successful. As for organizations, how to build organizations that are successful and want to retain people, this is what I've spent the last 20 years of my career doing, all the way up to a point where, as Ravi said, I had a team of thousands of engineers. I often get this question in times of stress on organizations, when they are going through big leadership transitions or big shocks. I have been a person who has come into organizations, and that is a bit of my specialty. People ask me, 'How are you going to make this a place where you retain all the engineers?' The very simple answer is I am going to make this a place where people want to work. It is just that simple. You have to create an environment people want to be a part of. I have a core belief that people want to be part of something larger than themselves. As a leader, if you can create this environment, obviously you have to have a mission on what you are building. You have to have passion. It has to be important work. You have to put a team of people together that support each other. One of the things I learned in professional software development is that you are working on big systems, and you don't do anything by yourself. It's about how do I bring a team together that supports each other, a team that is going to be successful, a team that has that grit I talked about. If you can create that environment, then I think it is what attracts people to want to be a part of it. You can pay people more, but that has its limits. It seems like a lot early in your career, but it is not what works over the long term. What works over the long term is being part of a team. As a leader, how you create that is a really important thing, something I spend an enormous amount of time thinking about. If you can do it, you are going to attract all the talent in the world.

Talk about the leadership one first. I tell people who work for me, this is the life you chose. If you chose to be a leader, you have to lead. There was a point where I had a choice to make. An individual contributor builds technology hands-on, and that is a fantastic career. All the analytical skills to build software, I could use to build up people. I have a simple model. One is if you are a leader, you need to be in charge. Take it seriously. You have people, you have an organization that looks to you for leadership. If you don't tell people what you want, if you don't express the value system of the organization, everybody is confused. That doesn't help. You have to set a strategy of where you want to go. Then the fun starts. How do you put all the pieces together so it works? A simple model: needs of the business, needs of the organization, and needs of the individual. You have to figure both of these out. Then you have to figure out how to put it all together. It is like a big puzzle. Every person is different—what drives them, their capabilities, skills, lots of things, what they want to do, what they are capable of doing. Everybody is like their individual puzzle piece. Then you have what are we trying to create as an organization. How do I get those two things in line? I am going to put the right person in the right role at the right time to get the right outcome. Ideally, you are going to get the needs of the individual and organization perfectly matched. Everybody is doing exactly what they want, and the business is going to get exactly what it needs. The more of that you can create, the better. Sometimes it tilts to either side. As a leader, that is a dynamic thing. That is why it is always changing. A lot of times in organizations, people get caught up on why do we reorganize all the time? We are in a dynamic world. We are trying to get this equation just right. I think if you are a leader, you are responsible for helping make people successful. You have to understand what do they need, what do they want, how do I put them in a position of success? What I have found is that almost exclusively, when organizations or people are not performing, it is a structural issue. I have a core belief that 99 percent of people get up and want to be successful. If not, something structurally is wrong. The organization is not put together correctly. To me, that is what being a leader is about. It is a dynamic. Organizations are like organisms; they evolve. Being the person to help guide that in the right direction, I find that to be enormously satisfying and really fun to think about. As for the pandemic, you are right. I was at Cisco for 20 years. I had a great job. The team there is fantastic, Chuck Robbins is a close friend, and the company is doing great things. I had the opportunity to go off and be CEO of a large company. I took the opportunity to do that. Sure enough, my first day was March 16th. I think March 16th was when the WHO declared a global pandemic. My first week in the job, the very first decision was to send everybody to work from home, all the professional employees. We are a fully integrated company. We have manufacturing facilities in the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, China, and an enormous great company venture in Japan. Keeping all of those running and getting people into work was amazing to watch. We were in China in January, so obviously it was going on there. Just to live through that and see from a front row seat the impact on the world, at the same time everybody needed more technology. All of a sudden, the need for technology exploded. On the other side, the ability to produce was somewhat compromised. There are not many times when you have a supply side shock and a demand side shock simultaneously. Trying to keep everything in balance, the team did a tremendous job.

I would say in a couple of ways. First of all, as a computer scientist, if I think back on formative portions, I remember when I went to Illinois for a graduate program. You might have the same thing. They tell grad students, 'Okay, folks, you need to take this seriously. More people didn't make it than did. Take it seriously.' I remember in my first or second semester at Illinois, everything clicked together on how systems work, all the way from the language all the way through. It really prepared me with a deep fundamental education, not just how to write software, but how systems work, the underlying algorithms, all the things you are trying to achieve. That prepared me really well for the first phase of my career. After that, I went off to Bell Labs, which was a great start to my career. I joke that it was the greatest place to ever start a career. Then I made the transition to leading organizations, as I have talked about. When I was at Berkeley, I took classes in leadership and power dynamics on how to think about how do you get stuff done. The whole idea that if you are going to get anything seriously done, you have to get a lot done. Big things are done for a reason. You have to have an organizing principle. How do you think about that? How do you drive to get what you need done? How do you accumulate power and drive an organization? Most people think about power in very negative ways, like the politics that goes on in the office. I think you have to reframe your point of view. That is not what it is about. It is about how are you going to get people to follow you. The best in the world are people who think they should show up and because they say something, that is what everybody should do. It doesn't work that way. How do you influence others to get things done? It is about having the right answer at the right time, building consensus, all these kinds of things. How do you make things happen? There is a lot of research on it. Finally, understanding the theory behind cognitive biases. I think really for me, it was the mixture of these two topics. If you can't do that, nothing else matters. You have to be able to say that doesn't make sense. You have to have enough confidence to understand what makes sense and what doesn't. You have to have a good filter. On top of that, you have to be able to mix in how do I then drive an organization and drive a group of people to achieve something? What is the science behind that? If you can do that, you can get organizations to do great things.

Definitely encourage them to stick with it. This is an interesting topic. Obviously, I am a software developer by training. I have run all different kinds of businesses. Right now, I work in a company that builds fundamental stuff—all kinds of semiconductor processes. It is massively impressive. There is a famous phrase that software is eating the whole world. But you have to reach a level of scale. You have to take the software and implement it in a different way. You build some piece of hardware. The real trick is being able to innovate all the way down to the devices and build the right system. What has been fascinating to me working in Silicon Valley over the last 20 years is all this talk of software eating the world. It changed in the last three or four years. If I go back 10 years ago, conversations with Ravi and customers were that the whole world is software running on processors. I don't know how long ago that was, about 10 years ago. It is a great direction, but it has limits. I can't run everything on a general-purpose processor. I would need a whole truckload to do straightforward things. You saw the most advanced software companies building custom silicon teams as quickly as they could. In my previous life, we built purpose-built networking. People said networking is going to run on general-purpose processors, it will never happen. It is too slow and not energy efficient. Behind the scenes, a lot of technology is moving in that direction. It is very healthy. If you are going to do anything at scale, you are going to have to do device development. I would encourage people to do what you are good at. If you are good at it, it is easy. If it is easy, you keep doing it. I love to play golf, but I would make a terrible living if I tried to do that. Writing software was straightforward. Keep doing what you are good at. There is a market for you in technology. We can talk more about my view, but we are just getting started in my book. We have a long way to go.

As you know, Ravi, I led the largest cybersecurity company. There was an unbelievable team there, the Talos team, some of the best cybersecurity folks I have ever seen. I would recommend their website. This is a very, very difficult problem, as you know. I kind of see it through the eyes of a software developer. The software industry has a difficult problem. The way software was built with so much open source, you have an asymmetric problem. The people you are facing are massively sophisticated. One of the things about cybersecurity getting pervasive is I talk about software talent. Early in my career, it is interesting. I had older siblings that didn't have the opportunity because it wasn't available. They were only three or four years older. The discipline has been around much longer. The idea of commercial software as something you build your career on happened over the last several decades. Used to be that getting access to world-class software talent was really difficult. People who could do it found lots of stuff to do. Right now, it has changed. Anybody can hire world-class software development. Our adversaries have access to just as good talent as the rest of us, just as good capabilities. Now you have this asymmetric problem that is very lucrative. My threat intel guys pointed me to a Bitcoin wallet. How do you protect yourself when you have all these adversaries? I don't mean to sound fatalistic. It takes a lot of dedication. Building products, as we have seen recently in the world, you have to be really disciplined in your software development methodology. You have to have a secure lifecycle of how you are making sure you are not leaving vulnerabilities in your products. Constantly red teaming to better find vulnerabilities before other people do. It is a very, very difficult environment. There is a lot of innovation on both sides. I am optimistic it will get better, but it is something you have to stay on top of. I think the software industry has to think hard about this issue. If you are in professional software development, you ship a lot of software. In other roles, I would ship thousands and thousands of releases of software a month. Customers expected fixes within a certain number of days and weeks. It is unclear you can get your tool chain in place to do that or understand what software is in your product. This is an area ripe for innovation in how it works and how it is run given the security environment we are all in.

I think it is not an incentive. I think if you think about this in an enlightened way, we are building software and systems that the whole world relies on. At Western Digital, 50 percent of the world's data is stored on one of our devices. You have to think about that. When I was at Cisco, it was the backbone of an important franchise in the world. You have to, if you consider yourself a professional, there is a difference between you being a professional and someone who writes code. If you are a professional software developer, you think about security. You think about maintainability. You think about reliability and availability. These are all very difficult problems. This is what it means to be a professional. If you are not willing to do those things, then you are not a professional. I don't need people working for me who aren't professionals. Write professional software. Don't write something hacking something together. There is a time and place for that, but that is not what professional software development is all about. You have to think about these issues from the beginning—coding standards, you have to have peer review. A very simple way I think about it is that everybody here who has written code may have a similar experience. I can tell you when I was at Bell Labs, you can be working on a piece of software, you think you have it perfect, and somebody else finds a bug that was right in front of you the whole time, so obvious. You didn't see it because it is difficult. If that happens to you, it should happen to you. In that instant, if you don't realize that there needs to be a professional process for how we do this, and that it shouldn't be in the field, then you are not a professional. You shouldn't collect money to do this. If you are a professional, you have to follow a disciplined process. That is why I am doing these things. If you cut corners, it is not a good situation. There is a whole other aspect around quality. Again, this is about being a professional software developer. This is what you do. This is how it works.

Important topic for lots of reasons. I think about it in two ways. You have to think of the pipeline of hiring diverse talent. Just as or more important is keeping people. The question we started with: how do you build an environment people want to be a part of? You need to build an environment where everybody feels like they are part of it. Every individual is different, and you have to think about what they want to get out of coming to work every day or being a part of your organization. Not everybody is the same. You have to customize the approach for individuals and what is best for the organization. Making sure people stay is making sure people feel they belong and are working with others who share similar values and backgrounds. They are not the only person. They can't be the only one. People need to feel they are part of a larger community and can progress in their careers without biases in the system. All of this is really, really important. You have to keep the people you have and make sure you are building the right environment. There are lots of techniques: blind hiring, diverse interviewing slates and panels. Nobody wants to interview for a role where they are the only one. Making sure you are engaging in the pipeline. One thing I have had success with is talking to people who have gone before you. Some of the things you think will work, research shows they won't work. We all need to keep focused on it until we make more progress.

I don't know. I don't know if it can be recaptured. There are things about Bell Labs that are a bit unique. Lots of resources were available, and a lot of things they could work on. I will say one thing, just to bridge these two topics. I worked at Bell Labs in the late 1990s. We spent a lot of time on diversity training. I feel like that served me well my entire career. They were way ahead of the curve. I don't want to make that statement lightly, but they were behind it. I think it served me really well. The Labs was an interesting place with a lot of really, really smart people, really consequential. To create organizations, people feel like they have the ability to innovate and drive and do what they need to do, and they are going to accomplish something big. When I was there, I was working on telephony software, old school systems. It was a massive project with thousands of people working on it. We had the best quality system in the world. We did it, and it was a lot of fun. It was a cool place to work.

Yeah, I'll go up one level, Ravi. I have a simple view of the technology world that I developed when I was at Cisco. I had the world's networking franchise. I got to travel all over the world seeing how it was adopted. Everybody in the world was my customer. I came to Western Digital. I think the world is evolving. We have this technology architecture being built. We are kind of early. It has been going on a long time, but relatively early. You have a very powerful cloud computing architecture. I think, Ravi, you have heard me talk about this. You have the most powerful companies driving forward a technology architecture that the rest of the world can leverage. That has never happened before. If you wanted to build world-class technology or world-class software, you had to hire folks like the ones on this call. They are expensive, sometimes temperamental, and hard to manage. Now you have these huge companies driving cloud through API calls. If you want the most advanced AI software, it is available to you. You don't have to home-grow it yourself. This hasn't happened before. On the other side of this, you have very, very intelligent devices. Those devices are driven by the intersection of a number of technologies: miniaturized storage technologies, which is a big part of Western Digital's franchise—your phone has lots and lots of storage in it—obviously processing technology, and user interface technology. You have these incredible sets of devices being driven across the world. It is like an evergreen market. More and more all the time. I used to tell people, one of my favorite commercials is people sitting on the corner of a city street with virtual reality headsets on. While I pray for humanity, if that happens, it is great. The amount of bandwidth being consumed and stored is incredible. Two worlds: one at the center of this incredibly powerful cloud, getting more and more powerful at a rate almost unprecedented in size and scale and growth rate, and then all these devices that continue to innovate, new devices all the time, tied together by high-speed networks. I used to sit and talk about 5G for a while. Also, Wi-Fi is getting faster. You have this technology platform the world is creating: a very powerful cloud and devices and networks that tie them together in a virtuous cycle. Each is evolving. Networks get faster. We are innovating at an incredible rate. We are building a platform that the rest of the world builds on top of. Nobody built high-speed networks 20 years ago. You are going to walk on the corner and a stranger will drive up in their personal car and give you a ride somewhere. This platform was created, and everybody else innovates and disrupts industries. Everything changes through this relentless application of software and more and more powerful memory, storage, and processors. I think one of the reasons I came to Western Digital is I had a huge conviction in this architecture. When you sit in the middle of technology, you realize the world is a big place. There are a lot of people in the world and a lot of cities. What it takes for technology to penetrate into every government and every utility is a decades-long transition. I think we are relatively early. I think it is going to go on for a very long time, and innovation will be driven in ways we can't even imagine. Whether it is AI or robotics, it continues to get stronger and stronger, and people are going to build new things that change everything about our life. It is a really exciting place to be. It always fascinates me what people come up with and what they are able to innovate. It is pretty incredible.

We are very far away. First of all, HDDs. Hard disk drives—I had one in my laptop, but now I have a solid state drive. 99 percent of the world does. Hard drives are the foundation of the cloud. 99 percent of the storage in the cloud is on hard drives. What they have become is very high-speed, high-capacity storage for the cloud. The technology structure of the cloud is not going away. What is going to happen is devices are going to get stronger. The camera on my device, I can take 4K video. Just a few years ago, you needed professional equipment. Networks are getting faster, more stuff is being stored in the cloud. The amount of data stored is almost like the bottom of a cup of coffee. Big cloud providers want to store way more data. They have lots of data they can't store. What do you do with data? If you are a company, you need to figure out your data set. How do I optimize my data set? I can monetize it. The world's leading companies have figured out how to do just that. NAND flash memory cost per bit is declining 30 percent per year. Hard drives cost per bit is declining. There is about 10 times more cost per bit advantage for hard drives. When you click on that video, the ad comes from a solid state drive. I expect hard drives to be core of the cloud for any useful planning horizon in the technology space. I think all the big players will tell you the same thing. That doesn't mean solid state drives aren't important. They are both going to grow. That is why I love being at Western Digital. They are growing because of this technology architecture and because you are generating content. We are generating content recording this. There is a 99 percent chance it is being stored on something my company created. I don't see this equation changing for a very, very long time.

Yes. People are scaling up. It is the technology architecture. I had huge conviction that this technology architecture is the underpinning of all of our future. That is why I came to Western Digital. It plays in the cloud and the device. It is a very unique perspective on all of this. Then a global pandemic came along. This technology architecture was already in place, and we just had this massive acceleration. I would probably be in Ann Arbor right now. The good news is the technology architecture is there. Can you imagine if we had a global pandemic 20 years ago? Life was able to go on. Everybody realized that their future is going to be dependent on their ability to leverage technology. If you are going to go to school, you will need technology. You are going to need more technology. The whole world became more technology enabled. It massively accelerated. The supply chain was optimized for a set of scenarios of how growth was going to happen in the future. All of a sudden, it shifted up dramatically. Giant facilities are quite expensive, costing billions of dollars, and they take time. You have to train people. You have to build the tools. The ability to bring new capacity can take months, if not years. The quickest is nine months. You are talking years. I think the whole industry is figuring out what the new normal is. What is it going to look like? I don't think we know yet. I think we know the world is more technology enabled. The industry will respond to that and add the capacity to match supply and demand. Right now, there is a huge demand side surge. You haven't had time for a supply side surge. Hence, you see the issues. One more note: most of the investment in semiconductor processes is at the leading edge node. You are going to invest in seven nanometer, always pushing the envelope forward. But there is a lot of demand on the trailing nodes. You have the capacity, but people still use it. Getting all of that sorted out is also a complication. The industry will adapt. We will get there.

Thank you very much. It was a great joy for me. I look forward to sitting in on your classrooms and enjoying the environment with all of you. Thank you very much.