In this episode of Are You Human podcast I had a pleasure to speak with Camilo Sandoval, former The White House Senior Advisor, CISO of the United States, CIO of The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and Intelligence Analyst for the United States Air Force and the National Security Agency (NSA).
We talk how does innovation look like within government and corporate sector, how Japan perceives entrepreneurship vs. how it looks in the USA, cybersecurity, metaverse, how can professionals harness emerging tech like AI to stay competitive and relevant, and much much more. Enjoy this episode as I did and if you haven’t subscribed yet to ARH channel – please do 🙂
Feedback is more than welcome.
Transcript
The president of the United States once asked me a
question during one of these key meetings at the White
House, and he asked me, why is AI important?
Why should we investing more in AI?
You know, I’m in a room filled with very important people,
and so I had to think very quickly on my feet.
But it was a very natural
role and a very simple answer.
And the answer was that the reason, and in particularly
for me in healthcare, why you invest in AI and
modernization, is because it’s the difference in saving lives.
For example, you could have a scenario where you’re
in emergency room situation, and you could be relying
on artificial intelligence to help make a recommendation for
someone who is experiencing a medical situation.
And that recommendation could be the difference between
saving that person’s life, because the answer to
the question can be answered in seconds or
minutes, where in the past it could have
taken much longer, and therefore, either the wrong
decision or no decision or recommendation was made.
Hello, this is your host, Camila Hankivich.
And together with my guests, we discuss how tech
is changing the way we live and work.
Are you ready?
Camila, it’s a pleasure to have you here. Thank you.
It’s a pleasure to be here.
I love your name, by the way.
It’s almost like your name, but with a c.
It means perfect.
I didn’t know that.
I’ll have to add that to my LinkedIn profile.
Actually, it goes without saying, after I’ve seen your LinkedIn
profile and the number of roles and the types of
roles you held over the years, it’s an honor.
It’s an honor to speak with you.
And I’m really, really curious
about your experience you’ve held.
From what I see, you’ve been working in the United
States Air Force and the National Security Agency as an
intelligence analyst while living in Japan for five years.
And then you moved back to us and you wanted
to become an investment banker on Wall street, and then
you moved back to government, and you became chief information
officer at the Department of Veterans affairs, and then the
chief information security officer at the United States, at the
White House, and some more.
It’s just too many things to note.
I know that you are also advisor to many startups
in the US, based in the US and Japan.
What made you move away from corporate and
the government and switch tables to helping startups?
Well, thank you for that question.
And don’t let the long titles impress you,
because the government has a tendency of making
little small things into really big things.
And so the titles are always very long in all earnest.
I think it began with just a tremendous
amount of curiosity and thirst for knowledge that
I developed at a very young age.
And I was always very interested in the
intersection of technology, policy, healthcare, and national security,
and would find myself reading and following things
at a very early age, trying to understand,
trying to make sense of those things.
That led me to serve in the United States Air Force,
where in earnest I began that long journey to Japan.
And I served in the United States Air Force, but
also, as you mentioned, in the National Security Agency.
And my tenure in the military took me
to Japan in 1993, where I worked as
a signals intelligence analyst, listening to some very
interesting signals coming out of the Far east.
And I specialized especially on signals that
were transmitted from satellite systems to short
duration signals and including Morris code.
And that led me to then specializing
in cryptology and understanding russian cyrillic characters.
At the time, we didn’t call it cybersecurity or
big data or artificial intelligence, but essentially we were
at the cutting edge, at the forefront of what
we now know as such technologies.
And that experience then led me to, I
want to explore other types of problems.
I was always very fascinated and
interested in solving math problems.
And so the kind of problems that I gravitated towards,
I wanted to find a way of solving that algebraically.
And so I felt that after my career in the military,
that I wanted to explore a career in Wall street.
So after getting my.
Receiving my MBA, I landed in Wall street and
then pursued a career in healthcare, investment banking, and
another technology driven firms, which brought me full circle
back to Japan earlier this summer.
And so I kind of found this opportunity, if
you will, of culminating all those experiences in technology
and national security in Wall street and exploring possibilities
to bring that experience and invest in opportunities that
looked exciting to me in Japan.
And that’s how I spent the entire summer in Japan,
looking and exploring and meeting a lot of entrepreneurs.
I guess it puts you in a perfect position because you
see things which us is, in a way, leading, right.
And then in Japan, it’s starting to
become a thing to a certain extent.
I guess it’s also because of their aversion to risk.
What would you say?
Or there are some other factors.
Yeah, there are definitely a lot of factors.
But I think, first, I’ve had the tremendous
privilege to witness firsthand the rapid evolution of
technology and its implications, both from a domestic,
from a national security, and also from a
commercial point of view and the implications in
the global stage with Japan tech market.
Japan is very well known for its hardware innovation
and its amazing technology in robotics or even automobile,
but it’s lesser known, perhaps for its innovation in
AI, or cybersecurity, or software engineering.
And so this is both an
opportunity and a challenge for Japan.
And I think my experiences, especially during my time
based in Japan, for me, it was a natural
pivot to turn my attention to this market.
But moreover, I think we are
living in a more interconnected world.
And so, looking at these challenges, a belief that
Japan is further ahead or more advanced in certain
areas, and it’s actually five to ten years behind,
for example, in healthcare technology, for example, with their
electronic medical records or cybersecurity.
And would you say the AI biggest trends right
now, the emerging tech, is an opportunity for them
to maybe catch up with some areas? Absolutely.
So what brought me to Japan this summer originally
started with the G seven summit at Hiroshima.
And I met with many leaders, associations and other
entrepreneurs to talk about what is Japan’s future and
future role and responsibilities in the world of data,
data privacy, AI, as they are beginning to develop
their framework and their policies that will guide their
society, their entrepreneurs, their ceos, on what is socially
acceptable in Japan.
But like I mentioned, there
are many holes and opportunities.
And I found that my experience was very much
valued to bring perspective, to not necessarily thinking about
how to develop better algorithms, but it was actually
more about opportunities of how to bring developing technologies
to the United States and what that takes.
One of the things that I was very impressed
and also surprised was the desire by these entrepreneurs
to want to be in America, to take their
technology, improve their technology in America.
And I met with entrepreneurs from the top
startups in Japan to day zero startups.
And the common denominator was this desire to
prove their abilities and their products in the
US market, which I was pleasantly surprised and
found myself wanting to help in many cases.
So these are the startups which have already achieved some
sort of success on the local market, or is it?
Yeah, not necessarily.
Some have.
I think some of the
startups that I’m currently advising.
For example, take one. Yap.
Yap is a day zero startup that was funded by antler.
And I jumped in because I was very
excited on the problem that they’re trying to
solve, and that is a supply chain problem
with respect to generic pharmaceuticals in Japan.
Japan’s population is getting older and living longer,
but that presents a very unique problem, as
Japan is a one payer system.
And what does it mean?
So basically, the insurance coverage that Japan receives,
the population basically is funded mostly by the.
And so that creates a tremendous financial burden
for a population that’s growing much older, it’s
increasing in size because they’re living longer.
And to compound the problem, you have the population
shrinking, which decreases revenues for the government to rely
on to pay for those older and sicker patients.
So Yap is on a mission to help support
Japan in changing how they interact with generic pharmaceuticals.
So they’re focusing in on looking at
DXP, which is the digital experience platform.
And these are three professionals that had
very successful careers in commercial Japan.
And they saw the opportunity.
And this is what I found very unusual, but
also inspiring, is that they changed their trajectory from
being corporate officers and career minded salary men to
being entrepreneurs and taking these ideas that they have
to solve the problem of generic pharmaceuticals and the
healthcare cost in Japan by developing solutions that are
technology driven, that are digital in nature.
These are use cases that have been looked at
and solved in the US many years ago.
But Japan is very unique in that
it’s still a very paper driven, very
process oriented, and also stamp driven culture.
So I found many of these startups like Yap,
but I particularly was fascinated with Yap because of
my background, where they’re going and the opportunity to
help them make a difference in the market and
also help Japan solve this problem.
Maybe like you said, it’s changing, but it’s incredible
to see sad alimen trying to break free from
what used to be the lifestyle, right?
Like when you were joining the company, the corporation
you were becoming, they were owing you, right?
And now more and more people, and I
know because I told you earlier, we were
also participating as our startup with 500 global
of international startups expanding to Japan.
And they were telling us in larger cities
like in Osaka or Tokyo, there are more
and more sarah men who are trying to
pursue career of entrepreneurship, which is amazing.
It really, you know, there are definitely
still a lot of growing pains.
And first of all, as an investor, that
hasn’t changed in terms of our perspective, or
at least my perspective, and that is that
you’re still looking for a return on investment.
And I think to add to that
is Japan traditionally operates through examples.
It’s a different culture compared to the US, where
it is almost celebrated or encouraged that it’s okay
to build a plane while still in flight.
In Japan, there’s a different
risk tolerance to that idea.
And so they prefer to have clear and
vivid examples before they make a decision.
And even then they’re going to have many meetings
about the decisions that are pending to be made.
And so having an appreciation for the japanese
way of doing things is tremendously important if
you’re going to be successful in that environment,
especially as an investor, because you can find
yourself being in a very uncomfortable environment and
it could be very frustrating.
And I think I rely upon those 30 years of
history that I have had in Japan to guide me
and understand and appreciate as well that with that frustration
that there’s also a ton of knowledge and opportunity to
learn from the way that they do things.
And it’s a mutually beneficial kind of relationship.
I learned from them, but they also learn from how in
the US, we tend to look at these problems differently.
But the use cases are definitely very clear.
What I find interesting is
that they’re exportable use cases.
These are use cases that if you can solve
the problem in one country, you can also solve
that problem, most likely in another country.
And that’s a fascinating kind of.
That’s a really interesting place to be in.
As you start, I start looking
more at the global markets.
Yeah.
And I guess it’s also very, like you
said, it’s a country full of opportunities because
even international startups stay away from Japan because
they don’t understand their culture. Right.
That there is tremendous need for innovation like AI.
And sometimes you are still wondering how come
some things are still run on paper.
Yeah, but I would say that’s true.
But I would also add that that’s changing.
And I was very pleasantly surprised.
Like, I spent a lot of time
meeting entrepreneurs, meeting corporate conglomerates and chief
information officers, and learning about how Japan
is shifting that perception.
Part of it was the challenges with the
visa programs in Japan and has made some
tremendous headway and policy changes in allowing entrepreneurs
to explore opportunities in Japan with innovative new
visas that allow entrepreneurs to enter the country
in a more friendly and supportive environment.
But it’s also out of necessity because you have
this decreasing population and Japan has communities that are
being decimated because they’re shrinking, communities that no one
wants to stay in these communities because they want
to live in the cities, they want to live
where the jobs are.
They don’t want to take over the mom and
pop shops that grandparents or their parents had.
So it is like a double edged thorn.
And so they’re relying on foreigners to come, in,
my understanding, to help augment some of that.
But there’s also an appetite to
bring more skilled workforce into Japan.
And it’s something that I want to help
advance as well, particularly in the cybersecurity space.
And how do you do that?
Well, I don’t want to give away too many
of my secrets, but one of the things that
I explored and had many conversations with university professors,
with government officials, with accelerators and incubators is the
idea of helping through education and partnership, and building
potentially twin city or sister city strategies that can
help Japan to solve some of these challenges.
And I believe it begins with education.
And, for example, some of the conversations that I
was having during the g seven summit evolved around
national security and the idea that Japan oftentimes has
to rely on its allies or other countries to
support its national security posture and apparatus, and they
could find themselves in a very uncomfortable position.
If you’re experiencing, imagine you’re the leader
of a superpower and you have to
rely on other countries to learn more
about your cybersecurity posture or defense mechanisms.
And I think those opportunities to solve that
needs to begin with reskilling the workforce.
That doesn’t happen overnight.
I think that happens through partnership.
And I believe that through my network and my
knowledge and just my relationship, my 30 year relationship
with Japan, that I find that is a very
passionate problem that I think I can help solve.
And it’s going to take a community.
It’s not just me helping Japan reskill
and retrain and build more of that
cybersecurity awareness with AI in mind.
It’s really interesting because at the same time, as
you said, the population is decreasing, but there is
more need to tackle challenges, external, internal, and then
become more efficient with what you have.
From what I read about, Japan is one of the oldest
in the world as a population, but it’s estimated by 2040,
Japan is expected to have people aged over 65.
It will be one third of the whole population.
Right now, it’s already one in ten
japanese people is over 80 years old.
I guess it’s a big opportunity for
you because you have experience in healthcare.
So healthcare and AI and combining this, there
is just so many use cases, so many
areas where you can bring value. That’s right.
Absolutely.
And that was how I spent a lot of my time,
was understanding exactly what those use cases would look like.
And particularly I look and
very interested in healthcare. Japan.
There are a lot of similarities in the challenges
that Japan is facing and the type of challenges
that I saw at the Department of Veteran affairs,
where I had a tremendous opportunity to look at
our national healthcare system, both from a public standpoint
and a private standpoint.
More specifically, these opportunities could be in something like
home care, where it tends to be very difficult
environment today to find the skilled labor workforce, because
it is kind of like a revolving door.
And when you have a shrinking population like Japan
has, and you have an aging and increasing aging
population, it becomes very difficult for Japan to service
the needs of those that are sick at home,
that need just simple home care.
It’s not even looking at nursing care.
And when I start diving into those use
cases, I find a lot of similarities.
Disparate systems, fragmented workforce, tremendous opportunity to
leverage SaaS platforms, bring integrated solutions into
the marketplace, both in Japan, but also
in the United States.
And I apologize.
There’s some sirens.
I live in New York City, where there are always lots
of sirens, but I promise they’re not coming for me.
That’s what I was suggesting.
Just a moment.
But, yeah, just to finish my thought.
Yes, healthcare is a tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurs
and even just organizations that want to invest
in Japan and bring their innovative solutions.
And so, again, I find myself in a very
pivotal position to help advocate both ways, both importing
and exporting not just solutions, but ideas and conversations.
And I’m finding myself engaging more and
more in those types of conversations and
also looking for investment opportunities.
So let’s focus now on the american side.
When you were serving as a CIO for
the Department of Veterans affairs, what were the
biggest challenges you faced and what kind of.
I know lots of them, but what
kind of technology, emerging technology you had
a chance to use and implement, or.
It was still very much traditional.
So it was an honor to serve, and it was, as
a veteran myself, it was a privilege to serve other veterans.
And one of the things that I share with
people that ask me about my experience, and it
was my second opportunity to serve this country.
And as a political appointee, you take
that responsibility very seriously, and you transcend
political, and you focus on the mission.
And the mission of the VA is very humbling.
It’s based on serving veterans who have
tremendous needs and everything from trying to
prevent veteran suicide to homelessness.
And you realize that the decisions that you’re making
doesn’t impact decisions I’m making today, may impact a
founder or an investor, but the decisions I was
making at that level, at that scale, are impacting
millions and millions of people and their families.
So you take those responsibilities very seriously.
And many of the challenges that I saw
at the VA were also challenges that you
experience in the commercial sector, like ideas such
as interoperability of healthcare data, which is a
tremendous challenge and a tremendous opportunity.
And in no scenario should our
healthcare, our medical records, be held
hostage to the inefficiencies of technology.
At the same time, we made a lot
of headway in trying to solve those problems
and those use cases through modernization of systems
and working with the Department of Energy and
the supercomputer capabilities at Oak Ridge, leveraging frontier
to solve problems like inefficiencies in healthcare records.
The president of the United States once
asked me a question during one of
these key meetings at the White House.
And he asked me, why is AI important?
Why should we investing more in know?
I’m in a room filled with very important people.
And so I had to think very quickly on my feet.
But it was a very natural and a very simple answer.
And the answer was that the reason,
and in particularly for me in healthcare,
why you invest in AI and modernization?
It’s because it’s the difference in saving lives.
For example, you could have a scenario where you’re
in emergency room situation and you could be relying
on artificial intelligence to help make a recommendation for
someone who is experiencing a medical situation.
And that recommendation could be the
difference between saving that person’s life.
Because the answer to the question can be answered
in seconds or minutes, where in the past it
could have taken much longer and therefore, either the
wrong decision or no decision or recommendation was made.
And you learn very quickly that in
Washington you don’t sell the technology.
What you sell is the solution in terms of
how does it make a difference in people’s lives?
And ultimately, that is the point, I
think, of government is to benefit society.
And so it was a privilege to be able to
look at those types of problems at the VA as
the CIO, to be able to not only tell those
stories, but also to make decisions around the type of
investments that we were making to help improve the lives,
the quality of lives that veterans were living.
And there irons again, don’t worry about that.
Hopefully I answered your question.
Yes, very big.
And I have a follow up question.
Actually, it’s a follow up question suggested by my friend
who was also serving in the US Army, Jonathan.
And he was asking if I can ask
you, what difference do you see between integration
of emerging tech, like AI in the government
space, versus commercial applications, which you work around?
So if I understand the know, I believe one
example that I can provide you is during my
time at the VA, I help bring the concept
of developing open APIs in healthcare.
And that’s because of the strong belief
that even though government plays a foundational
role in leading the way and encouraging
both public and private investment, the government
also has unique responsibilities to encourage innovation.
But the government is limited sometimes in
the innovation that it can produce itself.
If you have the same tools and you’ve
kind of exhausted the many different ways that
you can maximize or leverage those tools.
You have to find ways to leverage new
tools to solve old problems, if you will.
And oftentimes you have to step out
of Washington, DC, to do that.
So we started was this
open API program called Lighthouse.
And the lighthouse program was designed specifically to allow
the private sector, if you will, to leverage the
data sets that the VA has tremendous data sets.
Its corporate data warehouse is renowned for
its longitudinal records of its veterans.
We have the healthcare records from
when you serve in the military.
We say from birth, from cradle to death in the VA,
because we literally do have the records of service members from
when they joined the military at a very early age to
the day that they no longer need the VA.
And so finding opportunities to encourage innovation required
us to share and open certain data sets,
but with a very specific ask.
It needed to improve customer service.
And so the whole notion of driving more digital
experience in the VA was something that was a
very top priority of our time and my time
there and building those partnerships and answering the question
that I think that we need to continue to
look at how this public private intersection of government
and the private sector can help bring more innovation,
not just innovation from the government.
Lastly, I would say that the regulatory environment
also is very critical, and the policies that
get created, oftentimes we lean towards our legislators
to try to solve some of the challenges.
But there are times that the rules in the
legislation become so draconian that they suppress innovation.
Especially, I believe, and I led with this in
mind, is that you definitely want to protect those
that could be disenfranchised by automation or AI systems,
but you also need to have room to allow
for exploration and innovation to happen.
And so I encourage legislators that even though we are trying
to protect our most vulnerable in society, we also need to
encourage some more risk taking, because from that, we wouldn’t have
had the first man in the moon, or we wouldn’t have
had NASA, wouldn’t have been able to do the things that
they have done in the past.
And even they had to realize that they
had to evolve and rely more on the
private sector to continue that public private collaboration.
So that’s how I think the VA brings that to
the table, and that’s what we tried to do during
my time to help drive more public private innovation.
Yeah, I guess it’s a very delicate balance, right,
between protecting privacy, protecting data, and being open and
allowing for failure in a way or experimentation.
And this brings back the notion of the differences
in the culture between Japan and the US.
I think we do have more of an acceptance
towards failure, but we want to fail quickly.
And I think from my experience,
they have a different take.
They don’t necessarily embrace failure the same way.
And it’s more about what do you
do to mitigate that failure up front?
And you kind of see that with the manuals
that the Japanese are famous for producing or developing.
They’re very thick manuals.
They love their manuals in
Japan and their documentation.
And that’s not to or belittle the importance of
it, but failure is an important concept to innovation.
And in are, it tends to be a
little bit more like Japan in some ways.
There are political risks, if you will,
that also are taken into account.
People who are ruling always look short
term, protecting what they are influencing rather
than what’s good for long term. Yeah.
Thankfully, I think at the Department of Veteran
affairs, everyone was more focused on what benefits
the veterans, as it should be.
You mentioned about the aspect of
education, and I couldn’t agree more.
It’s very important also on the level
of challenges and opportunities and risks.
And I’m working in AI, and what I’ve heard,
like the conversation I had the other day with
one person who works in UN, it shocked me,
but at the same time, it didn’t.
Some countries, some officials downplay the role and the threats
of not really the AI per se, but of not
utilizing it and letting other countries surpass you.
So it will create bigger and
bigger gap between different countries.
And I guess my question to you, how can you
encourage government officials to take a note and to be
more aware what’s happening and treat it more seriously?
No, that’s a great question, and it
is a challenge, particularly when you’re working
with different governments and different government agencies.
Their starting points are different in terms
of their knowledge and their use cases.
But I think the common denominator, and you kind of
touched that in your question, is that the leap to
AI is not as big as what people think it
is because people know their industry, people know their use
cases, there’s subject matter expertise that they can bring to
the table that enhances the world of AI.
It’s not just necessarily focusing on the math,
but I encourage those that I have similar
conversations with that leaning towards that curiosity.
For example, if you look at today, the
trend, what are some of the prerequisites, for
example, for somebody that wants to take a
deep dive or specialization into deep learning, high
school math background is sufficient in multiple ways.
For example, there are many different roles in
the world for engineering, including beyond engineering, for
example, product managers, business development, legal and finance
and marketing, and pr and customer service.
All of them are going to require some level of expertise
and knowledge that are going to be technical in know.
We’re kind of seeing that today here in
the US with the strike at the giant
automobile manufacturers across the country and in Michigan,
the UAE or UAW, where there are concerns
about, we’re advocating for EV electrical vehicles, but
those vehicles require a different kind of workforce.
But that workforce doesn’t mean that
there aren’t other opportunities there.
But, so, yeah, there’s a lot of concern.
There’s a lot of interest as well.
But I think building more awareness, I think
it’s key for governments and for institutions.
Again, this is one of the things that
I saw as an overarching opportunity in Japan.
For me, is that nexus between how do
you build a future workforce in Japan or
America or in Europe or anywhere else?
You have to have this public
private collaboration that supports centers of
excellence and institutional knowledge.
So we are better prepared to transition to what?
The commercial sector and even the government sector, the type
of skills that will be required in the future.
I’m less discouraged by that trend.
I see more opportunities.
At the end of the day, this is just going
to require just more knowledge and some more experience.
But the world is not as scary as
some people may make it sound to be.
Of course, don’t trust media.
It feeds on fear.
But then at the same time, you
see that tech is more accessible. Right.
Of course it helps to understand the logic
and everything, but you don’t really need to
code in some ways to build things.
There are no code platforms.
There are tools which allow you to, I
don’t know, build a website, build a shop
without having any knowledge, technical knowledge.
So it’s encouraging for people who are hoping
to get an extra income and they can
do lots of things by themselves.
Yes, that is an evolving.
It is more accessible, and I
think that’s a great thing.
But we have to be more comfortable with kind
of rethinking what a career might look like.
Even for me, the idea, after serving in government and
in commercial sector for the past 30 years, after leaving
the White House, I had to reevaluate how I wanted
to spend the next 3510 years and understanding that I’m
constantly looking for ways to evolve my skill sets.
I’m either reading new books, I’m
watching a lot of YouTube videos.
There’s just so much out there.
But there is a point where you do want to specialize.
But I think it begins with something as
simple as building, having a whiteboard and writing
down an equation one piece at a time.
And there is an art and a
science to that that I think helps
students understand the slowness of the whiteboard.
And writing down those equations kind of forces
you to minimalize your ideas that I think
lead to stepping to building blocks.
And so my recommendation is don’t start with
the most complicated problem if it discourages you
from trying to solve that problem.
Start with something as simple as just
writing down the problems piece by piece.
And then if you can develop a solution on paper,
then you start figuring out how do you develop those
solutions digitally, even in the low code, no code environment,
having those basic building blocks are going to be invaluable
when you get into more advanced use cases.
And I know that you are advising and you
are coaching on personal development and career progression.
So what would be your advice for people who
are in very traditional type of industries, and they
understand that focusing more or like implementing some part
of technical or technological tools would be beneficial for
transition, but they don’t know where to start.
I don’t want to answer it
by giving you examples of tools.
I want to answer it by giving you kind
of like what I learned in the commercial sector.
I once had a senior executive at a very
prominent and apologies for the sirens again, no worries.
It’s a great city that never sleeps.
But as I was saying, what I would encourage your
listeners and others to think about is, yes, you can
learn about more about math and about supervised or unsupervised
data and training and machine learning and use cases.
But I think you begin with a vision for me.
I remember once a senior executive that I
worked with, once shared with me, you have
to be the CEO of your own career.
And so I internalized that.
And what that meant for me was that developing a
vision is key, and having that thirst and ambition and
hunger helps you to develop and make that transition.
And I think for me, that was something that kind
of was born with a sense of curiosity, driven by
my fascination with math problems and science, but then trying
to find real world application and how to solve that.
At the time, I wasn’t thinking about machine
learning at my earliest years, but there was
just something about developing that internal passion.
And so the idea of being the CEO of your
own career means that you do have to take a
level of ownership of where you imagine or where you
vision yourself going and then giving yourself permission to experiment
and take risk for me, at the time, I was
working full time and I started a little startup that
was based on near field communication.
I’d never developed any mobile app before.
I’d never done anything with near field communications.
But I saw a trend and I wanted to prove
kind of like, could I put together a team and
an idea and then develop kind of like that?
Entrepreneurial juices.
I see my camera just stopped.
Mine or yours? Both.
You disappeared.
I see my. Wait.
Yeah.
At least I will be looking more
closer to the camera right now.
So where were we in the commercial sector?
I always vision myself doing where I want to
be before I actually head in that direction.
And there’s just something about the creative
process and trying to kind of reverse
engineer and back into that vision.
At the time when I received that advice, I had just
started my first startup and I was working full time.
I wasn’t ready to leave my Wall street job.
But the advice he gave me helped give me the encouragement
that it was okay and that it was okay for me
to take chances and that I didn’t need to wait for
the next promotion, that it wasn’t going to be something that
was going to be handed down to me.
But given how democratized the technology is today, that
there was enough tools and I had developed enough
business acumen that I could just figure it out
and become an entrepreneur or a CEO of my
own startup and my own vision.
And I think the challenges that I see today
is that I see too many in corporate America
and in Japan with the salary man mindset, that
the expectation is that if you work hard and
you wait your turn, then eventually you will become
the CEO of your career or of that organization.
And I think what we’re seeing today is we’re seeing
that pivot, especially coming out of post pandemic, that people
are leveraging the awesome power of AI and data and
innovation to become the ceos of their own careers.
And those that are still hesitant
or on the sidelines start small.
That’s what I did.
I didn’t give up my day job,
but I was pulling very long hours.
But there was a burning passion that
was driving that notion for me.
And I think that’s a good first step.
That’s how I would approach it.
I completely agree with you.
You always have to start with the vision and
then also all the nice things you get.
The promotions in a way, like when you are having
your own company, the glory, the business deals, it’s all
the result of giving value, creating the value. Right.
This is how I would even extend and share this,
that this is also a very helpful tactic for those
that are interviewing in careers that I have been in
interviews in the past where there was absolutely no structure
or no agenda to the interview.
But I walked into the interview with a vision in
mind and internalizing how I would imagine one day if
I were a product manager or if I were a
senior person in that organization, what products would I develop
or what vision would I share.
And oftentimes I find that I’m sharing things that
are very much appreciated with the interviewers because it
shows that you’re thinking and you are proactive. Yeah.
The practice that you’ve thought about
it, I think it’s important.
And these can be very technical interviews, but just
bringing a vision to the table, we can always
figure out how to do the technical part.
The vision and the creative is extremely important.
And I think that is something that people all
over the world look upon America as being very
much a leader in, and that is that creative,
innovative spirit, as well as being able to deliver
the more technical and complicated side of things.
But I think it’s a balance. Yeah.
Like you said, reverse engineering.
Like first you want to have a vision, you want to
know what you are trying to achieve and then worry.
Even if you don’t have the
skills, you don’t have the experience.
Try to find the people who do and who
can help you to get where you are heading. That’s right.
Yeah.
You’ve mentioned, you said something really interesting
there about the structure of organizations.
And with your focus on AI, do
you see any difference right now, like
the ways corporations and larger organizations function?
Clearly there’s going to be differences, but
from, let’s say, government, for example, it
tends to be more structured.
And there’s reasons for that.
There’s lines of accountability.
There is a tendency that there is a
certain way for, there’s a certain process of
where ideas have to come from.
And at times it can be frustrating because
in the world that I come from before,
after the military, but prior to my government
services, ideas in commercial can come from anywhere.
It can come from the bottom or
it can come from the top.
And they’re encouraged because innovation is so important
in the more government structured environments, I think
you tend to have the ideas have to
come more from the top.
I’ll bet that’s changing.
I think that becomes a challenge.
And in Japan, that’s also, I think, sometimes a
challenge as well, especially in the much larger organizations
where it’s kind of like a top down approach
as opposed to bottom up approach.
But I think technology, the way that it’s
evolving, has democratized, if you will, where ideas
can come from, where you can have someone
working in a contact center, developing in the
front lines with customers, and leveraging artificial intelligence,
but also experiencing firsthand opportunities to improve customer
workflows or improve the digital experience platform.
So I think it’s important to have an integrated
community, an integrated organization, where as we move to
more remote work and more digital work, that we
don’t lose our channels of communication with our employees
and our customers to derive those signals that help
us improve how we deliver customer service or even
the quality of our products.
I guess utilizing AI to experiment more at scale.
And that in turn, can put you in a spotlight
in an organization so you can bring more value faster.
Don’t you think?
You can?
And I think we see that happening today.
Just look at LinkedIn and how many the posts that
I read, people are talking about or bragging about the
kind of changes that are happening in their workplace.
The difference is that in a commercial, the
main objective might be to increase efficiency and
reduce cost and enhance customer experience through AI,
ultimately to achieve that competitive advantage.
But in government looking kind of like how they’re leveraging
AI, there seems to be more of a tendency to
focus on using AI, to use an AI for transparency,
because there’s such a strong demand for transparency in government
operations, as they’re accountable to the public.
And if an AI system makes
the wrong prediction or recommendation, it
could have broad implications for society.
Hence, there’s a push for explaining AI more.
We’re seeing that as well in the commercial space.
While transparency is still important in the commercial
space, enterprises might prioritize proprietary algorithms or methods
that give them a competitive advantage.
However, as you get increased regulations, businesses
are also focusing on explainable AI.
And we see that from example X, formerly
Twitter, releasing publicly their algorithms so it can
be publicly scrutinized and improved on.
And whether you agree or disagree, these
are trends that we’re seeing more of.
But I haven’t seen that on LinkedIn yet.
And that would be an interesting topic matter,
maybe for the future to explore more.
And that is, what are the algorithms, for example, that
are being leveraged in a platform like LinkedIn, and what
is their responsibility to us as the consumers?
But I think these are different ways that AI
is being leveraged by people that are in the
front lines, both in the commercial and public sectors,
and I guess in the government.
The transparency is very crucial, but then should
all treat it as an assistive tool, not
something which makes decisions for humans, but something
which can help us to grasp, to bring
all the information which we need to know.
Otherwise, we would not have time to find
in various systems and just help us, help
us to focus on the right thing.
There is definitely some concerns with automation and how AI
can ultimately be used or where AI could be bad.
But I think that I see more
good coming out of it than bad.
I’ll give you an example.
For example, at the Department of Veteran
affairs, one of the most important things
that responsibilities that the department has is
adjudicating and making decisions that benefit veterans.
And in the past, the process of making those
decisions has been encumbered by the number of systems
on top of systems on top of systems and
the disconnected workflows and the lack of appreciation for
the digital experience that consumers have.
And although this also exists in the commercial
sector, the government has a fiduciary responsibility to
its citizens to deliver those services, public services,
as quickly and efficiently as possible.
And so leveraging AI to help make
decisions that could improve that efficiency.
Can I make decisions faster?
Can I lead to more benefits that
were not being delivered in the past?
These would be considered very good things and other
challenges that there are many jobs that go unfilled
because there are so many mundane roles.
There are roles that really should be.
We should be looking at technology and
machine learning to automate the low skill,
kind of mind numbing process.
You made it sound.
But yes, there are definitely some very.
I witnessed at some of these very large call centers
where decisions are made on behalf of veterans, and why
would I not leverage technology that would shrink the backlog
of decisions that need to be made?
Oftentimes, this is a key frustration to veterans, is having
to wait so long for a decision to be made.
Well, if I can improve that and cut it
by 90% or even 50%, and the decisions are
more favorable than they were the manual way, then
I would say, then that’s a tremendous value add
to the taxpayer and to the veteran that’s relying
on that government employee to make that decision.
And so I see more positives than negatives.
But I also do take very seriously
the concerns that are out there.
And it’s not perfect, but again, it’s that
concept of building a plane while in flight.
We can admire the problem, but the longer
we wait, at some point you also have
the responsibility of making decisions, informed decisions.
And I believe that is what it’s important
here, is to make those informed decisions.
But to lead with that in mind, that you’re
trying to improve services to our taxpayers and the
benefits can be on many different layers.
Like you said, it gives the person the right answer.
But then also there are many situations where solution or
the answer has been already done or given same situation
to somebody else, so it can just be reused.
Right now we don’t experience that.
I think, again, it depends on the use case.
And I do see examples of where we
are learning from those experiences and developing more
sophisticated, better models, decision making capabilities.
And I think there is more that can be done.
Of course, we’re still early in this journey,
but once we’ll eventually, I think, reach a
point where we’ll be having less conversations about
the concerns and more, hopefully conversations about what
other problems can we be solving with the
technologies that are available to us today.
But we have to practice good cybersecurity awareness
at the same time, because with all this
great technology, there are also new opportunities to
take advantage of other weaknesses that we have.
As I mentioned earlier, cybersecurity is an area of
great concern and vast opportunities as an investor to
explore how AI in cybersecurity can help improve and
mitigate the concerns that we’re seeing.
Just yesterday I read about Sony
has been hacked in Japan.
And this is a pretty sophisticated
organization, but yet we’re seeing examples.
Japan possibly could be one of the most ransomware
countries in the world right now because it’s going
through that inflection point of becoming more digital and
taking advantage of all these tools.
But if you don’t have the cybersecurity awareness, or
you’re not using your tools effectively or at all,
or you’re not building that infrastructure of awareness and
workforce, then this will become more the norm than
the exception, unfortunately, and more could be done and
needs to be done globally.
But particularly right now, Japan is
experiencing some very concerning trends.
So they are trying to catch up, they
are trying to build this plane, but they
forgot to build the most important bits.
Yeah, there are a lot of things there that I
could point to, but I think, again, it’s worth repeating.
I think it begins with training and reskilling the
workforce with the tools, with the latest tools, with
the latest technology to help them strengthen their national
security threats when it refers to attacks, and we
still see that here in the US, but it’s
alarming the level that I’m seeing and that Japan
is experiencing right now.
And the threat isn’t going away.
It’s getting worse.
Yeah, it’s more intensified, especially when
you consider how many applications there
are around deepfakes the synthetic voice.
I have a long list of
things that nation state actors, ransomware. Yes.
Even the supply chain attacks.
The supply chain is a huge problem.
Who is your supply chain? Supply chain.
Supply chain.
And how much vetting have you done?
And this is a national security concern that I had
to deal with and face firsthand wearing the hat of
the chief information security officer in the White House.
Critical infrastructure.
I have a friend who I worked with in the White House.
He was the director of cybersecurity
for the National Security Council.
And he recently started his own startup
and working on critical infrastructure and the
essential services and looking at the problems
there that concerns nations and concerns states
that have significant real world consequences.
So what would you say are the
biggest trends right now companies and governments
should focus on when thinking about cybersecurity?
Well, during my time at the White House, one
of the things that I was very much in
favor of was the job descriptions that were being
used to hire people, needed to be modernized.
I think there’s a tendency to overcomplicate
the job titles and the requirements.
And I think the epiphany that many of
us had was the realization that many of
these roles, critical roles that needed to be
filled in government, were going to remain vacant.
If we didn’t kind of think and reimagine what
these traditional job descriptions, how are we going to
attract the next generation of cybersecurity experts?
We started with looking at the job descriptions and
rewriting those to be more in line with what
industry was looking at, not just government.
I think the other idea was, again, I’ve
touched on this before, and that is reskilling.
And that is using your existing workforce,
who already understands your business model, that
already understands your use cases, that already
understands your customers, that you don’t necessarily
need to hire from outside.
There’s a lot of talent within, and it just
requires investing in the right tools and the right
mindset, a growth mindset, to give permission, if you
will, to your workforce that new opportunities, it’s okay
to come, that it requires reskilling, but that the
skills that you’ve learned in the past could actually
help not hinder your new kind of experiences or
entering in the cybersecurity workforce, that your background is
actually an opportunity to enhance the awareness, but also
to mitigate the threats that we’re facing.
So I think my advice would be
double down your investment in education and
workforce reskilling, because that will pay dividends
both internally and externally in the workforce.
And we started to see the benefit of
that in the government as we started taking
that same approach, relying on our large workforce
to help us to fill those vacant jobs.
Also, I know that you are
working around web three and metaverse.
Do you see any interesting friends there?
I know there are lots of them again,
but is there something which you particularly looking
to maybe as an investment opportunity?
Yeah, there’s a tremendous amount of opportunities
there, as web three promotes the idea
of decentralized ownership and control.
And so the idea that users in the future
or now might have more ownership over their data
in digital assets and online identities presents an opportunity.
I’m very interested in the virtual economies
like digital real estate goods and services
that might become more significant economic drivers.
And the decentralized kind of sandbox is
already allowing us as a buyer developer
to sell virtual land using cryptocurrency.
You mean like virtual land like the
second life or ready player one?
Or it’s like real land.
Real land being maybe registered as on blockchain.
Like how does it work?
Yeah, I mean, look, I can give you examples
in telemedicine, for example, how blockchain can help with
pricing transparency or in the pharmaceutical space, but I
like use cases like that that have a real
impact in the real world, but it’s not unfamiliar.
I’m sure to many in your audience that virtual
lands and virtual worlds like zynga for example, and
Farmville, where back many years ago when I was
at a particular financial institution, we experimented and explored
use cases where planting a particular tree would monetize
the value of your virtual land in exchange for
signing up for a particular product or currency.
In this case, it was a prepaid card.
And so we were bringing the nexus of real world
and virtual world and digital marketing and digital currency.
Although in this case the currency was increasing
the value of your farmville land by planting
this particular tree that was designed for us.
That looked really nice.
But yeah, I mean, the digital disparity, digital divide
that we’ve seen on the Internet, in the metaverse
or web three, you can’t escape it.
It’s just going to grow more prevalent.
And I look forward to discovering opportunities, if you
will, especially in Japan, of how they are going
to take these technologies to explore new startups.
I guess it makes me a boomer because I’m
not that old, I’m 35, but I remember playing
the sims and building the words and word of
Warcraft where you had this concept, right, like you
could buy weapons for real money virtually.
And I guess it’s very much the same concept.
And I know that big brands like
Gucci and other retailers are investing and
building virtual shops on the virtual lands.
But somehow, I don’t know, it’s
not so attractive as an idea.
I prefer the reality.
Well, there’s definitely more, I
think, out there to explore.
I’m very encouraged by some of
the startups that I’ve invested in.
One of them in particular, ex mayor out of
Japan, is focused on solving the challenges with dementia.
And this founder in particularly impressed me with how
he’s using virtual reality, but without having to wear
the glasses to help encourage the patients that are
suffering with dementia to stimulate their minds through the
use of virtual reality and his unique technology.
And so use cases like that really impress me.
And I’m very excited to see where Xmere goes with
that as they’ve identified many opportunities to use their technology
in the corporate space, as Japan is also looking to
encourage their workforce to do more exercising.
And so he started with this one problem
which was driven out of his own personal
experience with his family and watching his parents
go through these challenges and mental health challenges
and leveraging this technology to solve those problems.
And now he’s looking at that same technology to
potentially help encourage the workforce to exercise more.
And what’s particularly interesting on how they’re doing
this is they’re incentivizing their workforce that by
downloading these apps and going through the exercise
routine, that by taking these steps, they potentially
are lowering their own cost of health care.
And so it’s a whole new way of kind
of looking at things and leveraging this technology.
And I’m really excited to see where this goes
and bringing such innovations here to America and beyond.
No, I get such innovations. I get.
I understand the application and I see why
it’s so convincing, why it’s so beneficial, the
augmented reality, but the investment in virtual worlds.
Yeah, that’s maybe not my thing.
I hear you.
I think it’s important just to kind
of keep up with the trends.
Yes, you’re right.
You have to be open today may be
actually an innovative new piece of technology that
could have some more real world applications, but
yeah, it’s definitely not the 80s or 90s.
When I was growing up and for me, it
was fascinated with cell phones and beepers, and that
was then and here we are now.
And you don’t see that anymore.
Yes, on that.
My last question, because I know that you have to go.
I have to go.
Do you have any favorite memories?
Pre mobile, pre Internet.
Because it feels like you are immersed in technology.
Do you remember how it was before I remember, I was,
I think, 14 when I had a connection to the Internet.
You know, this dial in, like
it was making sounds like e.
I don’t know if you had it, maybe.
I remember those days, yes, lots of memories.
I was very curious at a young age,
and I would spend a tremendous amount of
time at the library reading science books and
encyclopedias and anything that just caught my attention.
But my fascination at a very early age was learning how
to create my own BBS board with a 2400 bod modem.
So I’m very familiar with that sound and kind
of like, imagine, if you will, the early onset
of a LinkedIn back then where you would join
these BBS boards, and it was different.
I remember my monitor would occupy my entire desk.
I was using Lotus one two.
And so those memories, although they were very fond,
I much prefer kind of like the technologies that
we have today, because you can do so much
more quicker, and the barriers to entry and the
learning curve is much faster, I believe.
But I started just basically by taking
things apart and learning how to put
them back together like just computers.
Even though today those opportunities
don’t exist as often.
I can’t open up my MacBook and
put it back if you force it.
I do miss those days, but I also appreciate
the rapidness of technology and how interconnected we are.
We wouldn’t be able to have this interaction
today we’re having right now with you or
your audience if it wasn’t for the advancements
that we’ve made in technology and in Internet.
There are pros and cons.
But I hope you agree that in person, it’s always best.
It is always best.
Sometimes it’s not so
efficient and environmentally friendly.
That’s right.
But look, I hope that one day you and your
audience and others have an opportunity to visit Japan.
I highly recommend.
I’ve been this year, one and a half months already.
Very nice.
I’m learning Japanese as well.
That’s right.
Well done.
I’ll add this last thought, that
for many years I have struggled.
It’s usually because it’s about prioritization of my time,
but I’ve always been fascinated with learning Japanese and
trying to build and find time to practice.
Just something as simple as my
kanji is always a challenge.
But I found that in this recent trip that I
relied more on AI to help me overcome those challenges.
So you became noisy, I’ll tell you that.
I gave a presentation in Japanese to a company that was focused
on AI, and they asked me, how did you do that?
And I said, well, I used AI to help me
present in Japanese, but how did you do it?
Did you record yourself and then translate it?
Did you use synthetic voice or it was
just, you learned how to read it?
I did both.
I first translated the presentation, which was text
based, and I used multiple tools just to
make sure that I had it right.
So I would use one tool and then use another tool
to verify it actually said what I wanted to say.
But it goes back to building those math equations.
It really forces you and focuses you to
use minimal language to get strong points across.
But again, this is another beautiful thing
about the technology we have today.
And so with that in mind for those japanese entrepreneurs,
I also have, because I was able to do that,
I have an expectation that they can also use the
same technology to overcome language barriers and challenges.
And it’s mindful to anticipate the need.
So if you’re presenting to an audience that’s a foreign
audience, that you should be able to at least anticipate
the need and attempt to translate in the language of
the country that you’re pitching or presenting to.
Almost to me, unexcusable that you wouldn’t at least attempt to
do that, or at least show the curiosity or almost a
respect to be able to not only speak in your native
tongue, but also be able to translate that.
And I think it goes to build
that relationship, which is so important. Japan.
And you always connect better, even.
I guess you see this as well.
When you travel and you try to speak, say few
words in the local language, it’s always best, better received.
You always get better treatment. Absolutely.
The disadvantage, though, is that I’m not practicing my
Japanese as much because I’m relying on these tools
to get my thoughts and my thoughts across.
Okay, I have an idea for you.
So I’m on Duolingo.
So let’s become friends, and I’ll be cheering on you.
But Duolingo is great for learning words, but
it doesn’t really help you to speak.
And what I found is you can
google it, another application called Michel Thomas.
And you don’t write anything, you just listen.
It’s like the teacher who is saying something
and you have to repeat it, and then
another student who is with the teacher is
repeating, and it works surprisingly well.
Whenever I go to Japan, I always refresh what I have
to know, and I remember lots of things right after.
But for now, let’s do duolingo.
I will find you.
You are difficult to find on LinkedIn, and I
saw that the aggregated data it’s not so easily.
You cannot link it on. Yes.
You did it on purpose.
I think I know.
No, I think it’s just the spelling of the word data.
I spelt it uniquely japanese.
That’s why the e gets confused for the a. Right.
Smart.
All your work and experience around crypto.
Well, it’s been a pleasure and an honor,
and I hope your audience finds this informative.
And I hope to, if they look for you,
I will send them the direct link or email.
Please do.
Okay, perfect.
So enjoy your day.
I think you still have a sun there.
It’s darker in Europe, but.
Yeah, I’m looking forward to keeping touch with you.
And I guess see you soon.
You got it.
See ya. Thanks. Bye.
