What is Technical Evangelism?

You might have heard the term technical evangelism or maybe technical evangelist thrown around in tech circles in recent years, maybe at conferences, maybe in social media, or maybe you've even seen job postings for a technical evangelist.

What does that exactly mean? What is technical evangelism? And what does a technical evangelist actually do?

In this episode, I'm joined by my friend William Collins, an actual director of technical evangelism, and we'll be defining what tech evangelism is, exploring the core responsibilities and activities of a tech evangelist, and, of course, discussing our own personal journeys into this role after years of turning a physical and a virtual wrench. My name is Philip Gervasi, and this is Telemetry Now.

Hey, William. Thanks so much for joining me today. I I am especially excited to talk to you. This is something that I've wanted it well, both of us because we've talked talked about it, like, at various conferences where we've met in meetups. But something that we wanted to do for a long time is to just just to get together and have a an impromptu, maybe not quite impromptu today, but a conversation, about what we're doing, in the space now and how our careers has have evolved. So so, again, thanks so much for joining me to the today, William. Really looking forward to our conversation.

Absolutely. Super pumped to be here and finally, you know, getting this, you know, getting to do this, getting to sit down and talk.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sure. We could talk about I mean, primarily, Telemetry Now is a is a technical podcast.

And, yes, we've had podcasts where we talked about specific algorithms and routing protocols and all that stuff. But this one is very, near and dear to my heart because this has been a career journey for me in the past three or four years. Basically, what is a a technology or a technical evangelist? What does that mean?

What who am I now as far as a professional and just kind of fleshing all that out? And I'm not done, by the way, and we'll get into that today. And I'm not done figuring that out. Maybe I never will be.

And, from our recent conversations, I know you're you've been on kind of a similar journey. So before we get into what you and I think technical evangelism is and and going into all of that, I'd like to know a little bit about your technical background. I note that right now, you are the director of technical evangelism at Alkira. And that's great.

But what about before that?

Yeah. Great question. I hope I don't ramble too long on this one because, you know, I'll tell you what. It, like, at this point, I almost feel like legacy software sometimes when I say that, you know, I'm talking to you know, I was just talking to someone yesterday, and they're like, how long have you been working in tech?

And and I'm doing the math, and I'm like, oh oh, dear. It's, like, twenty years at this point, you know, into my career. It's been a long time. I've seen a lot of changes.

Mhmm.

So, you know, I spent a lot of time a lot of time in in large enterprise. So, like, in the in the very beginning days, it was really I think, my first technical skill that I ever picked up and I ever got really deep into that was actually valuable to a large organization was knowing Linux. So I was kinda like science experiment sort of things when I was younger, building a computer, like, installing Slackware and doing all that stuff. And it turned out at that time, I I didn't know you could get paid for like, that Linux was actually, like, a skill you could get paid for.

Because somebody had given me a magazine at one point, like, how to install Slackware with the disk. I think they were actually floppies, a few different floppies. And I was just like, wow, this is really cool. Like, this is awesome.

And eventually, you know, I started I, I think at the time, it was right before the the world went through that big transition to virtualization, and I actually got in on that. So there was a local a gentleman locally where I lived that was doing, oh, physical to virtual migrations with VMware for, like, small to medium sized, businesses.

And I went and I did a lot of that. Like, I got exposure to a ton of that when I was so young. And then that's kinda when I found out, like, oh, this is a career path. Like, I don't have to, like, go to school to be an accountant or, you know, some of these other things that, just, like, no desire of doing.

So I got into, you know, a fairly big company, early on doing I I think my title was, like, sys something or I can't remember. Like, sysadmin something. But, basically, what it was was building and managing non human accounts for a large organization back when there wasn't software and stuff to do that. Like, you didn't buy a lot of big box software to handle those problems.

And that's when I got really into, like, bash scripting because I'm like, you know, we're doing the same thing, like, a thousand times. You know, how do we how do we speed this up a little bit? So I started getting into scripting at that point and eventually transitioned to PERL and then met the network engineering team there. And then I sort of pivoted over to network engineering and then got into data centers, started racking and stacking and building.

And, you know, eventually, you know, cloud came along and looked over that kitchen table. Yeah. And I I I bit hard on cloud. I I did a pretty hard pivot.

And, you know, it's been cloud networking and startup land, for the past few years. So Alkira just builds we build multi cloud network software on demand, on demand networking on top of the hyperscalers.

And other than that, I mean, I one of the things that, you know, going through this whole journey, because if you think about it, at the end of the day, like going from sysadmin type work to network engineering.

And then, you know, throwing in like automation, I was kind of I don't want to say I was lucky.

Or, you know, but I do believe I was kind of in the right place at the right time for for some of these pivots and transitions. And I also had a lot of, you know, leaders and, you know, stewards in my life that really helped and taught and mentors, I would say.

So then the, how long have you been in a role that you could, whether you had the title technical evangelist or not, how long have you been in that kind of a role?

So that's been like the past really about the past two to three years. So I started out, like, where I work at today, Alkira, like, I came in sort of as like an overlay role, where I was kind of, like, sitting with sales, like, in the field sometimes going to customers. And I I've never I've never done sales. So I just wanna, you know, just kind of throw that out there. So I've never been paid on commission.

I'm not a salesperson.

I'm just more of a nerd. I like to talk about the technologies and the beauty of the technologies and how they can be transformative.

You know, so about the last three years, I started doing like more events going to events.

And I've got a lot of I almost have a cheat code or kind of a leg up because I you know, grinding in the enterprise space for so long, a lot of of the big challenge in enterprise when you're a technical decision maker is, you know, sort of selling your ideas up to the top. And in order to do that, you have to make engaging presentations. You have to be you have to be a storyteller.

You have to be able to tell stories, and you have to be able you know, it's kind of a form of sales at the end of the day. So Mhmm. Having sort of having that, those presentation chops, the the public speaking chops, and then, you know, sort of setting up a full mesh to all the cool technical things I was working on, it kinda just it kinda just happened accidentally.

Mhmm.

Really.

Yeah. Yeah. I have a similar but different story. Does that make sense? Can you have a similar and different story?

I guess similar by default means it's not exactly the same. Otherwise, it'd be identical story. But I, I I don't wanna go too much into my history because my I think our audience has heard it about twenty seven times now. But for for our sake and your sake, I was, I was actually a high school English teacher before I got into tech.

And, you know, when I went to college, I didn't know what to do with an English degree. So all my friends were gonna go work in retail, or they were gonna become, you know, find finance bros in New York where where I am. And then, the third option was going into teaching. I so I went to grad school with the idea that I don't wanna be in finance, and I don't wanna go to law school, that kind of stuff.

Really no other reason. Like, well, I guess we'll do this. I did fall in love with it though. And so I got a teaching position in the middle of getting my master's in education.

And, that was gonna be my career. But what happened was, though I loved it, I, I was really disappointed with looking at the salary schedule. I was also very bored with, like, really, I'm teaching Julius Caesar again this year. Like, yeah, you can change your unit plans and lesson plans and the the dynamic of the classroom changes every single year.

Sure. But still, I'm like, I need to sink my teeth into some big project that's challenging. And I get it. There's the there's that, you know, metaphysical challenge of reaching the young minds of today so you can shape them for tomorrow, blah blah blah.

Wasn't wasn't my thing, though. So I I, my my father-in-law who works for New York state and in specifically ITS, information technology services, he was like, Philip, you gotta get into tech. You're gonna love it. I was twenty six at the time, and I did.

I got a help desk job.

And so my first title was similar. I was a systems analyst or systems engineer doing help desk work, learn group policy, you know, configuring a VLAN here and there and little things. And I I I don't know if you would agree with this, but I I really did feel like every single phone call into the help desk where I picked it up. Yeah. We had tickets coming in via email. But whenever I answered an email or or picked up the phone, I felt like it was partly a sales call because I was working for a little MSP in upstate New York.

And so all of our customers were using us kind of as a all you can eat buffet of of IT services. You know, we were we were an m MSP to to small and medium sized businesses, and we wanted to give them a reason to stick with us and not go to our competitor. So though we were fixing the issue, closing the ticket, we also wanted to make sure it was treated as a, let me remind you why you're coming to us.

And, you know, because I was teaching, I I or rather I I had been a teacher. I was still teaching at a local community college on the side because I made no money, very little. So I I got, I got that I continue that experience as a teacher. And I think, William, the same as you, once I got into a senior network engineer position in large enterprise and then working for VARs mostly, I actually got into presales because a lot of my a lot of leadership saw, hey.

You know, we see that you're a teacher on the side. You know, you'd be good at this. And it was. It was I was. It was a lot of fun, and you're right. I was basically the storyteller of the latest technology to our biggest customers.

And though I was not in sales, presales was I was salary.

But it was still just so so much fun. And I created demo videos for internal use for our customers. I was at the time, I just started the, you know, writing a blog and eventually started to do the network collective podcast.

Remember that from, like, seven years ago, something like that?

So you were you were saying that you were a teacher before, and you made that pivot. And I remember that story, and I was trying to remember where I remember hearing it from.

I was like, where did you That was a long time.

We have twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen.

And I was with a couple of other friends, and, I left after a year and moved on, and they continued. But, that was all of that stuff kinda converged together where I had opportunities to go beyond just turning a virtual and physical wrench, though I loved it. I loved racking and stacking and figuring out why this adjacency wasn't forming and, you know, like, oh, you you know, you can't you can't inspect real time traffic on your network, and that's why your voice calls are failing. And, like, figuring that out was just so so fun and satisfying.

Plus, it was much more lucrative than teaching. So all of that stuff, awesome. But I was doing that on the side, and people noticed. And little by little, here we are. So my foray was, also not not an accident, like you like like you were saying, William, little different.

I have a good friend from the community who is now at AWS, but at the time was with a competitor of my company. So he, he he he and I were just chatting on a private Slack. And he's like, yeah. I'm looking for a senior technical evangelist.

And I'm like, what does that mean? We chatted about it. I'm like, I wanna do that. That sounds fun.

So I get to be a nerd and have a lab and and then just, like, create lots of content, creative content, and be creative.

And that's that's how I did that, three or four years ago. So that's my transition into I said I wasn't gonna go in-depth, and here we are. Right?

Yeah. That's awesome. That's such a good story, though, because even, like, you mentioned having a lab, and that's some one of the still the fun things. Like, I still have a lab.

You know, honestly, to be I'm just gonna throw it out there. You know, the the lab that I have in my basement right now would probably cause some marriages to end. It's it's pretty intense. And my wife loves me.

She accepts me for who I am, and that means experimenting with a bunch of stuff.

And, you know, so I have all that on the side, but I also have my my work lab officially as well. You know, that's just kind of the curiosity and the passion sort of goes along with the role, you know, for sure.

That's a good segue into let's define what tech technical evangelism is and then what the role of a technical evangelist is because you just gave one of those those pull, bullets from our notes that I really wanna get into. And, yeah, I have a lab. You probably can't hear my old Dell PowerEdge servers to my right humming along, but they are there running a bunch of virtual machines and all these things. I had a full height rack up until recently of just various hardware, but I never turned it on. So that was pointless.

I had a full height rack, too. So I actually did get rid of my forty two u and all that. When I was studying for CCIE, like, long time ago, I still had so much gear left over from that.

Yeah.

I finally got rid of it and freed up a lot of space. And I have, like, a wire shelf in the basement now against the wall in a in a room that's got some soundproofing with all my stuff kinda just stacked on this metal wire.

And it's still there.

It's, yeah, still there. But a lot of the big forty two u Mhmm.

Is gone, and so is a lot of the old switches, old routers, old firewalls.

So Oh, yeah. Yeah. I remember same thing. Studying for the CCIE and had a full height rack of stuff of gear and, and just messing around with it. You know, most of it was either it was decon stuff from customers. Don't sell anybody. Some of it was eBay.

But, I never turned it on. You know, I run so much stuff that's just virtual or not pure networking, so I'm not not just not using it.

But, here here.

What everybody's missing out these days coming into network engineering. They just spin up some virtual things, and they're good. They they never had to deal with the eBay biz and getting stuff that didn't work and the no yeah.

And the mode buttons and things like that. Yeah. Sure. So let's let's get into what technology or rather technical evangelism is. I mean, I looked it up on Wikipedia just so we can have kind of kind of a basis, and I'll I'll just read the quote. A tech evangelist, technology evangelist, is a person who builds a critical mass of support for a given technology and then establishes it as a standard or a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects. It's a fancy definition.

I don't know what you think about that, if you agree or disagree. But, what are your thoughts there?

Yeah. I mean, I think the high level, that's a great definition. So in my mind, you know, to kinda like we've just sort of talked about, technical evangelism is the it's like the perfect blend of some technical acumen, passion, like, passion, nerdiness, and, you know, really, camp yeah. Campfire storytelling, I think. When you combine those three and then and then you combine some travel, you have some technical evangelism. And I think today, in the in the world of technology that we live in today, it isn't just enough to explain how your product works and, you know, beat folks over the head with your product and your features.

Mhmm.

You know, a lot of times, I know that I get a lot of direct reach outs on LinkedIn, on phone calls, and, you know, it's like the first sentence is, hey. We can do this, this, and this for you. We can solve all your problems. And that just I I just go straight from having a a married date to, you know, sort of being irritated.

And, you know, so you really have to in techno in technical evangelism, you have to paint a picture. You kinda have to be an artist of how you're you know, if you're talking about your product, how does that fit in the larger technical ecosystem? You know, and it has to be interesting, and you have to have value with it. It has to be valuable or you're gonna lose your audience.

So if you just you know, like, if you know, kinda like a lot of the events that we frequent. You don't go up and give a sales pitch. You're talking about, you know, industry standard technologies. You're really, you know, evangelizing technology in general.

And, you know, I think at the end of the day, tech evangelism is about love and passion, for the technology itself and having, you know, real conversations, engaging conversations with real people, you know, without expecting, you know, to schedule a meeting, without expecting to give a sales pitch. And to that point, you know, I think it's really necessary, you know, for companies, you know, these days that really they they need help, you know, differentiating their product, like, you know, the the apples of old. Like, when Apple came into the market, they were Mhmm. Kinda like the poster child for, you know, technical evangelism in a sense and marketing. Like, Apple came to the market with some amazing strategies. So I think that's sort of my my definition anyway. Mhmm.

Yeah. Yeah. I think I would agree with the concept of storyteller. And, though you didn't say it explicitly, you certainly implied that we're doing marketing without it looking, feeling, smelling like marketing, because it's not pure marketing in that sense. We're not just it's not product marketing.

I would argue that technical evangelism is not even technical marketing, that it does differ. Though in a small organization like yours and mine, I'm sure there's plenty of overlap, Whereas technical marketing is very product focused, and and perhaps you're writing a white paper on your particular platform or product or whatever feature. I don't do that. I don't write white papers. It's it is more there are certainly a lot of thought leader, writing blog posts, videos, discussions, speaking engagements involved.

But a lot of that thought leadership is around what what what technology my company is bringing, to the world. And that's where the idea of evangelism comes from. Right? It's like bringing the good news of your company and your product.

But more specifically, this idea, this technology, what benefit it can bring to the world.

So I think the idea of technical evangelism probably makes more sense for a company that is or an organization that's bringing forth some sort of new technology or some kind of very different technology.

I don't I don't know if my, like, local municipality water supply system company, whatever they are. You know what I mean?

Needs a technical evangelist per se. They might need some sort of marketing, but even there, it's just like brand imaging. You know, there's not really much.

But I do I do differentiate it from sales and marketing like you like you have because I don't number one, I don't have any kind of quota or sales or anything.

Variable compensation, is not part of my overall.

But what I do have was, you wouldn't I don't think you could be a technical evangelist in good faith either.

Like, good faith evangelism.

And so, yeah, this is great conversation. But Yeah. Yeah. I don't think you could actually do the job the way that, you know, Phil Gervasi does today. If Phil Dravasi was only you know, if you're paid on commission, if you were just like another salesperson, I don't think it would work.

I mean, the way that I approach it is it's one engineer talking to another engineer about something that they should that I believe they should know. Right? Like, hey. You know, this is, like, my company's in network observability.

So a lot of folks are still trying to figure out what that means. I mean, in the past two, three years, it's become more common. But regardless, you know, what does that mean, and what does it mean to you? And it's one engineer talking to another engineer.

Sure. There's benefits. There's use cases. You could talk about case studies. All that stuff gets wrapped up into that.

But from a high level, that's what you're doing. And so I'm not trying to sell you on features or or anything like that when I have those conversations. It's, this is what this is all about. This is how the technology works too.

Now that that that might be a departure. I don't know if you agree with me there, but I do like to get deep into the technology.

I mean, the name suggests it. You're a technical evangelist or a technology evangelist. So when I'm speaking from an engineer's perspective to another engineer, my audience is, like I said, almost primarily engineers or engineering leadership.

From time to time, it's more, you know, VPC level. So I'll talk about the business use case and things like that and ROI. Sure. The cost benefit. Generally, it's from an engineering perspective.

And, and then in that, it requires me to really know what I'm talking about at great depth. Both my company's platform and then whatever new technologies out there that we wanna talk about, I gotta spend a week or more researching at great technical depth before I open my mouth.

Because I I really believe, and I've said this on other podcasts and in blog post, it's kinda like Missouri, the show me state. Right?

I remember being, you know, I'm just a network engineer working for a Var, and then such and such a vendor comes in, and they bring they bring bagels or whatever, and they have a presentation.

And, and I'm sitting there and they're talking about their they're going through their shtick and it's fine. And then finally, they're like, this is what we can do. And I'm like, I'm sitting there like, yeah. Alright.

Show me. Prove it. And so I really feel like that's what I'm doing. Like, we solve these problems.

Let me show you how we actually do that. And so that's how I've approached my my, my daily operations as a as a technical evangelist. No. I take that back.

That's that's the high level. And then all my daily ops kinda fit into that paradigm. That makes sense.

Right. Yeah. That's perfect. I love the sort of I think differentiating from, like, technical marketing.

Mhmm.

Because that's one thing is, like, okay. You okay. You're doing this thing. Well, isn't that just a technical marketer?

Isn't that just a product marketer? Like and the the answer is no. You know, categorically, no. These are very different roles with very very different responsibilities that do different things and have different focuses.

And you're right. There is overlap, of course. But there's overlap with a lot of roles and a lot of positions in a lot of areas.

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I mean, there's overlap because we're human beings and we're in small companies, so people wear many hats. But I would agree that a a TME or a technical marketing engineer and a technical evangelist in their purest sense, you can picture a Venn diagram, our separate roles with enough overlap.

And in the overlap is amazing technical marketing content. You know, it it is. I'm gonna put a a blog post out there or a demo video on how my company solves a problem. A TME might do the same thing. Thing. But I believe that your role and my role is significantly more public than a traditional TME. Most TMEs I'm aware at the big vendors especially are really behind the scenes doing very, technical writing or they're doing technical writing, things like that.

Perhaps they're doing internal sales enablement training and that kind of stuff. And that's all really important stuff. I don't do that. I don't do white papers. I do very, very little internal sales enablement.

Although, interestingly enough, a lot of my public facing content is used for sales enablement, but that wasn't my, you know, that wasn't the initiative. Rather, that wasn't my initial intent.

We we should dig into that more. If you don't mind, can we can I try to take a stab at what what if we tried to what if we tried to just define technical marketing, then product marketing, and then, tech evangelism, and kinda work our way out from, you know, the the product itself, the software, whatever it is that a company sells all the way to the customer?

Sure.

What about you wanna try that?

That sounds great. I mean, in your organization, does the technical evangelist, fall in the marketing organization?

Yes. It does.

Okay.

Yes. It does. But I I think it could I mean, honestly, that's something I think about a lot. Is it, like, the I think for younger companies, it doesn't matter as much, really.

Mhmm. Like, where it rolls up under. But I think the bigger you get, it probably does. You know?

So I think it's probably a it's probably based on the product that you sell, your your company, and then the size of your company, I'd imagine. So I think they're you know, you could land under you you could land tech evangelism on the org chart, maybe under marketing or sales. I guess a third option at the end of the day would be, like, product team. Like, you could probably roll up under product as well.

Mhmm.

Yeah. But, you know, there's there's gonna be different you know, when you when you are a part of marketing, you're gonna get pulled in other marketing things.

Oh, sure.

If you're part of sales, you're gonna get pulled in a more salesy direction sometimes.

Mhmm.

I think there is that gravitational field that you're gonna have to deal with depending on where you roll up to and how, you know, the company, the size that you're in.

Yeah. At my company, the tech evangelists, and there are three of us, we fall under content marketing. Now in content marketing, there are several several other people as well, including the three of us, the three tech evangelists. And that's because we generate most of the content, you know, from the company.

Not all, but most. But we do have a product marketing team. You know, we have a revenue team, and we have, kind of a match of people that go are part of the go to market team and, and and the various other, you know, subsets of the overall marketing team. Sounds like it's similar for you.

So what what would be then the difference between, like, product marketing, technical marketing, and, you know, now we have technical evangelism. Let's differentiate between those three.

Yes. I was just yeah. That's I I was just thinking about that and, you know, just sort of because it it can be confusing for those that have to interact with these different roles. They you know, honestly, like, if it was me and maybe I was on the outside looking in, I'd look in and say, hey. You really only need one of those folks to do this stuff.

It should be the same role.

And the more that I've learned and the more that I've been a part of different start you know, looking at our start up and then talking with other folks across other start ups. It really comes down to so if you picture you you picture your product.

And I would say technical marketing is the closest to the actual product, the nuts and bolts itself.

And I think it's usually, you know technical marketing, really, what it's can you know, that role is gonna be on the hook for is documenting, like, very technical concepts of a given product. So right out of the assembly line, okay, like, we do this really cool thing.

Mhmm.

We abstract this stuff.

Like, how do we translate the most technical aspects of our product into digestible bites for for folks that are less technical? You You know, and it also comes down to you know, you alluded to this a few times, just now, but creating specific types of collateral, like white papers, case studies. Case studies is another good one.

And they're they're usually, I think technical marketing is usually the keepers Mhmm.

Of the, like, the official product documentation.

So it's worked on internally, and it evolves with the product. And then that's maybe what's exposed to customers, as far as, like, quote, unquote, official product documentation.

So let's say that this technical marketing is is the closest to the the actual product itself. But then, hey. You you have this product. You you wanna sell this product.

You you see the customer. You see prospects. So you start moving towards those prospects. And that's where I think the next sort of, role is, product marketing.

So as you begin moving from the product towards the market and the customer, product marketing is really gonna focus on, positioning, you know, positioning the product and differentiating it amongst the the broad sea of all the competitions out there. So these these folks will really zoom in on customer needs, market trends, like competition, messaging, and, you know, maybe, like, doing stuff for, like, product launches.

So market fit, product launches, pulling together that the great collateral that the the technical marketing folks put together and really getting it ready for the masses.

You know? And then, again, you're moving you're moving towards the customer.

You're, you know, you're moving towards the prospect. So, you know, we get closer to that direction.

Communities are Communities are big and events Okay. Which is where we find our I think our modern day tech evangelist, as in you know, this is someone that's gonna advocate for, you know, that specific technology vertical and then the product itself within the the tech community. You know? So they they build that excitement. They speak at conferences. They write blogs, you know, kinda like you you just gave the perfect example. And, you know, they help build that brand and that trust that underpins that brand.

Mhmm.

You know, they, you know, their role is more I think, you know, our role is more focused on relationships, you know, fostering community and bolstering brand, you know, rather than direct sales and doing bits, you know, click on this and this feature and that feature. You know, because technical marketing and product marketing, they they actually do a lot for internal folks as well. You know, kinda like you alluded to earlier, it's not really a public facing role so much. You know, to summarize, I guess, you know, technical marketing is like translating technical concepts to folks that aren't as technical along with documentation and such.

Product marketing is, positioning in your market and and tech evangelism. You know, that's your your champions, I guess.

Yeah. Yeah. Certainly very public facing. I agree with that.

We are we are balancing, where I work now, the efficacy of certain, speaking engagements versus online content, versus, kind of thought leadership content versus in the weeds content, what's the most effective. And, you know, we're finding that it's all effective in its own way, and so we're looking at all those as methods.

But you mentioned the word advocacy. Now it's much farther on our show notes than where we are right now, but I wanna bring it up now.

I know some organizations use the term DevRel developer relations. Some say developer advocate, and then we use the term technical evangelist, you and I.

Do you think there's a difference between those terms, or is is there, are they synonymous?

That's that's a really good question. And I think it it this adds to the confusion that I think a lot of the the population experiences when they start looking at all these different things, or even when you're applying to jobs or you wanna get into one of these roles, you know, it can be it can be confusing.

I think, like, as an industry, both of these things, they have they have their distinct focuses, and I would say maybe different approaches, but they're kind of, like, spun from the same tree. Mhmm. You know, I think, this developer relations, this DevRel's a fairly new thing. I think tech tech, you know, quote, unquote, technical evangelism is a principle and is a, a concept for a role has been around for for longer. But I I think the primary focus of DevRel is really, you you know, your your focus it's developer focused. So nurturing communities of developers, Philip facilitating and and building communication between because, I mean, at the end of the day, if you're selling a software product and your your audience is developers, what you really wanna do is you wanna be involved in the community and you wanna set up some sort of link, you know, facilitate some sort of communication between developers and, you know, and the company you work for.

Mhmm.

You know, you wanna ensure that, you know, all the resources and support they need to succeed with the company's products are out there, but you wanna do it in, like, good faith.

Again, not a salesperson, but if you're in that role, chances are you love the product that you are advocating for. Like, maybe you see the the big value for it, and you're you're excited about it, and you wanna get the word out. So in a sense, it's like a tech evangelist, but just focusing on, maybe a a very specific subset of the the tech ecosystem, which is usually developer and coding focused.

Mhmm.

I think that's sort of the big at least in my mind as I think about it, sort of the big difference.

Yeah. I I tend to agree.

In fact, I just saw a short video from a very well known, influencer in the tech community. I forgot who it was. It's I I just saw it. Very well known, yet I forgot who it was.

But he was saying how he did not care for the term technical evangelist and preferred developer advocate because, you know, an evangelist is going out trying to, like, show and convince how, you know, this is, this is a good thing, and you should, you know, you should consider adopting the same idea. And he didn't like that. And I'm like, that's exactly what what we do. So I I I disagree with him in the sense that, number one, we're not talking to developers.

Maybe that's semantics. Maybe it's just a generic term to refer to anyone who's in technology. I don't think so. So that's why I don't think it's semantics, but maybe.

So we don't we're not focused on developers per se, And, it's not the relations or advocacy component where I'm focused solely on building community, maybe a part of it. And And there may be somebody on the tech evangelist team who is focused on that, maybe takes on a different title. Who knows?

I I feel like the technical evangelist is much more public facing in that they are going out into the world and and talking about the technology, not necessarily focused solely on building community among developers or network engineers or whatever technologist that you wanna insert there. Though that could be part of it, as I said, but it it really is much more about evangelizing the technology. Hey. This is the tech.

This is what we're doing. This is how it's different and why it's useful and and why you should agree that it's good. So there's the evangelism component. So I I have no problem with the term, which I like like you said, it's been around for a long time.

I have in the notes here that it was, first started, in the, what, the eighties, from, I don't know, somebody in marketing at at Apple who used the term software evangelist.

And, and then it was adopted by Guy Kawasaki who said it's, it means using a fervor, and zeal even, but never money to convince software developers to create products for a computer with no installed base and etcetera, etcetera.

So I I think that it is different from those things, and and therefore the podcast today to really explore what that means is title that you see from time to time. And, I know when getting into the career journey aspect now, I didn't quite know what it meant. For me, it was a transition to get away from doing cutovers at two AM, you know, and I wanted to get into creating more content. It was also a pay increase, and I'm like, okay. That's good. Let's go do that.

And I I have to admit, William, this is weird to say. I I almost felt like it was a higher pay, but kind of a demotion. Like, I'm no longer an engineer.

My worth as a technologist is now decreasing.

And the conversations I've had over the past three or four years, others around me think the opposite.

They're like, wow. You've you've gone all the way. And I have the same title as you, by the way. I'm the director of tech evangelism here at Kentik.

I don't I don't feel that or or sense that. And so my one of my jobs that I've assigned to myself other than creating the content and being public facing is this constant mad dash to learn new technology correctly at a deep level so that everything that comes out of my mouth or onto the keyboard in form of a blog post or a video is one hundred percent correct because I never wanna be called out for being wrong, for misrepresenting the company, or anything like that. The amount of technical review I go through before I hit publish is is crazy. It's a it's a week of just technical review.

And, and so I see that's how I see it as kind of my career journey in the past few years. Really, this this strange new imposter syndrome. See, it used to be imposter syndrome. Like, I wasn't good a good enough engineer.

I, you know, I might have these certifications, but I don't have these. And, wow, this person has, like, all this other knowledge. And look at at the conference room table. This person's a genius, and I'm a jerk.

And then, you know, now it shifted to, I'm no longer an engineer. I have nothing to offer. So I'm gonna create really I'm gonna write blogs and do podcasts and do videos and demo videos when, even all all the way up to our CEO has a completely different perspective. I just have to internalize that, William.

I don't know.

How about you?

That's such a, you know, I feel exactly the same the same. I've actually had this sort of conversation with someone, one of our mutual connections recently.

Pretty, you know you know, Yvonne Yvonne Sharp. We sort of had a conversation around this a little bit. Just your your your career shifts.

And when you're when you're early on, like, especially with with us both, like, we were really in the weeds, you know, policy based routing, BGP, you know, connect you know, partner connectivity to different vendors, like going into data centers, cutovers, and all this stuff.

And this is such a skill set that we worked so hard for so long to build and refine so we could be better, so we could move, you know, progress in the in the field of engineering.

And then you start like my you know, it's almost a fear that I have. It's like deep within my it's, like, in my heart. Mhmm. Like, this fear that the longer that I'm not the one in the weeds doing the things, Like, another week that I'm not in that role is another week that I'm becoming, like, less valuable sometimes.

Mhmm. It's just, you know, like like you said, it's a a new it's like a secret imposter syndrome that, like, creeps up. But yeah. I mean, it's and and I think that almost, I mean, I hate you know, I try to see the silver lining with everything.

It's, like, one of my principles that it's it's always glass half full. Like, I've gotta take a positive and and move on, adapt and overcome, and just find a way to make my circumstances better for me and those around me. Yeah. So I try not to dwell on the negative.

But I think this negative, sort of what we're talking about, is almost kinda like you said. It's caused you to really dive down deeper in some of these areas because you want to be accurate.

You're you're on a more of a public facing platform, and you wanna be accurate. You wanna be concise. You you you're going in. You're doing the research.

You're putting together the content. There's a a bigger peer review process, and it's like more pressure on you to make sure that everything you're saying, everything you're writing, the videos that you're putting together, and then most importantly, the conversations you're having. So Yeah. You know, going at, like, a lot of these events, like like you and I go to, you can't go I mean, if you go to those events and you really don't know what you're talking about, guess what?

That that audience is gonna know very quickly, And that's not a place that you wanna be in. Mhmm. Because then you wouldn't you wouldn't be a technical evangelist. You don't wanna just go around parroting, you know, a few different scenarios and, you know, having a few different talk tracks and not being able to go deep and have good intelligent conversations with other engineers because that's a lot of the value comes from those one on one conversations at some of these events or just you you know, I had a talk track.

Yeah. You were I think you were at that one. It was I've done so many of these nugs, but it was the one where I was talking about segmentation and AWS. Yeah.

I think so. That one. Dallas. Yeah. But I I had yeah. Oh, yeah. Dallas. That's right.

Ugh. Shazam in my head. I just the travel. Like, once you travel a lot, you you forget, like, faces, names, and places. Oh, yeah. You can't, like, tie those together as easy. But, yeah, like, I had someone that reached out after that, on LinkedIn.

And, you know, we we it's just like, yeah, this is exactly what we're going through.

You know? And so we we actually ended up setting up a subsequent Zoom call, and we had a really good conversation. I was actually able to get some feedback from him, you know, indirect feedback on what, you know, sort of the the challenges of, you know, what he sees in the market and where the the current products aren't fitting.

And so it's kinda like a, you know, a really a really useful feedback loop at the end of the day.

So if I can be technical enough to talk about some of these things with some of these engineers, you know, and that's another thing with tech evangelism. There's some feedback loop stuff here. Like, hey. If we're we're going in the wrong direction with a feature, like, hey, product team. I just talked to, like, a bunch of folks, and they said x, y, and z. Do we need to sort of pivot just a little bit in this one area? So that feedback from the community is just infinitely useful.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I would agree. And those those one on one conversations are great. The speaking engagements are great.

I've had feedback from demo videos and blog posts where somebody pinged me about a technology that I had just finished researching. You know, it was relatively new to me, and yet they saw it as, like, oh, he knows what he's talking about. It's just because of the painstaking effort of preparing because, like like you said, there's a trust relationship, between you and your audience, and I and I and I guard that with my my life, my professional life. I guard that with my life.

It's so important from a personal perspective, and then, of course, as a representative of my company. Now, we've been flirting with what the role of a technical evangelist is. We've been talking about what the concept is quite a bit, but let's focus on the role now. We've already started talking about it, but more explicitly, the this it's I I'm assuming by what you're saying that you presuppose a technical evangelist, it it that person going into that role needs a strong technical background, whether it's in a specific niche of technology or as a generalist, but they need to have a strong understanding of at least the fundamentals, the foundations, perhaps for you and I, the very basic knowledge of networking, so that way we can move forward with new technology.

I don't know. What are your thoughts there? Is that really a requirement?

I I think, like, this can sort of, I guess, come into, you know, what type of company so I'll say this. Like, going back to the technical engineering, marketing, product marketing, and tech evangelism, these roles become increasingly important with your product. And do you have a complicated product? It's maybe a little harder to sell.

It's more technical. It's very technical. Mhmm. You know, it solves a lot of problems. You know?

And I think is a, you know, as a technical evangelist, yeah, I don't wanna get myself in trouble here. But I would say that it will definitely help and benefit if you're a technical company, an engineering focused company, having some deep technical acumen, you know, in the technical vertical that your product lives in, you know, and then knowing the mechanics of how your product works, how it fits, being able to do intelligent demos, how it enables outcomes within that technical vertical, it's gonna make your job much smoother.

Mhmm.

It's gonna it's also gonna I think one thing I've seen so I actually talked to I talked to someone maybe about a year ago that was trying to, he he was trying to make a career pivot, I I I think, if I remember correctly. And and he was looking at technical evangelism and DevRel because they're just so big and so popular right now. But I I remember very distinctly one of the things he talked to me about. He's like, you know, the company I work at right now, he's like, I just don't know the mechanics of this stuff anymore.

I've been so far removed from the technology because he had been in a people leader position. And he's like, you know, if I went and I was a technical evangelist and this was his conclusion after, you know, I think after a few months of deciding whether he wanted to pivot. You know. But he he said that he would just have to have such a heavy reliance on other resources within the organization constantly, asking questions, asking how things work, asking the you know, all the different things, you know, just because he lost so much of that technical chops over the years.

And he's like, yeah. I just wouldn't be comfortable.

You know, he's like, if I can't explain this to you, William, right now in an intelligent way, how am I gonna explain it to an audience? You know? So that sort of forced him to pivot in another direction somewhere, in a role that he's actually very happy with right now. He's definitely found his fit.

So, yeah, I think the the technical acumen, the technical background, I think it's probably a good logical evolution to at least have some sort of engineering chops Yeah. Under the hood and having done a lot of this stuff. You know, it's like this. I mean, you don't wanna you don't wanna go in and, you know, listen to a lecture from a doctor that, you know, maybe hasn't practiced before.

Like, it's probably gonna be more valuable for you to hear someone that's actually gone through some Right. Tough surgeries, gone through, you know, some some tough situations.

And, you know, that's maybe the type of, resource that you'd wanna learn from instead of just dry textbook. Okay. This is what the textbook says on and on and on and on. Yeah. So that's just Yeah. My perspective.

Oh, I agree. I agree. I I do think that a, that someone going into technical evangelism, especially in a b to b or a business to business role and especially, a technical evangelist for a tech company, so so not necessarily like some tech solution, like a business solution, does need a technical background. I I really believe that that is extremely important. Now to what extent you need that background, you know, it depends. And, certainly, it doesn't need you don't need to have three CCIEs and and a JNCIE to do technical evangelism, but you need to have the foundations there. You need to understand the basics of networking.

I don't want to assign a level to that, but I think it's fair to say, in my opinion, that you need to know the the foundational, components of of network devices and what things do and protocols and stuff like the basics.

Furthermore, I really believe that a good technical evangelist has a desire and a capacity to learn.

You have to. My company releases a new product, and it's let me give you an example, William. I, I got interested in intent based networking about twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen when I first heard the term. Got really, really eyeball deep into it.

That, caused me to also start looking into, you know, the various algorithms that are used, you know, like, you know, college level statistical analysis algorithms, algorithms, and then then eventually machine learning and how those things are used in in tech and networking specifically.

And, you know, this was twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. I'm sitting there learning, time series models and how they're embedded into, you know, Python and things like that very different than what I had done for a career. But I was learning that stuff. Because it was interesting to me. I was generating content on it, and I realized not a lot of other people were.

And so I really and and here I am in twenty twenty four. My company, recently released, you know, what, you know, whatever kind of a generative AI component to the platform.

It's not something that we talk about a lot. We don't use the term AIops, but it is that underlying component, and and I'm able to go and talk about it. And and, you know, to an extent, speak intelligently about what a large language model is and and how I don't know. Why we don't use engram models anymore and what a transformer is as opposed to an engram and things like that and how that works.

And then lo and behold, folks are like, hey, Phil. Can you come on this podcast and talk about how your company is doing that thing, you know, with with AI? And I'll go in there and speak about it and say, hey, by the way, you know, let's make a distinction here that it you know, it's not like superintelligence. And people are like, what?

No. This is how a large language model works. And so, I really believe that having a foundation of of technology and also a desire and capacity to learn new technologies is absolutely critical. I mean, maybe you can get away with it.

Otherwise, I don't know. But, if you're gonna succeed, I really believe you need those two components there.

Obviously, the ability to public speak is nice. The ability to string some sentences together on paper or virtual paper on your monitor is is good. Although we have editors now. The ability to do that without relying on cheap chat GPT to do it for you is good. So that way it's your voice, and you're not creating a trust deficit with your audience. That's very dangerous.

All that kind of stuff is is really important. Another thing that I think is important for the role is the ability to see kind of a bigger picture. So here's the platform. Here's this release. Here's this particular feature technology. I would never go out and just talk about features about, you know, my company's platform.

But you might talk about it in use cases, and everybody likes to talk about use cases. Well, what does that even mean? Right. For me, it's like, here's a specific problem.

Hey. Look. We have this, you know, we have this data exfiltration that occurred because somebody was able to piggyback on UDP port fifty three, some kind of a sneaky DNS attack. Right?

And they were able to get some tunneling protocol going. That's actually kinda common. So let's see how we figured out what was going on and how we solve the problem. I mean, that's a that's a specific use case.

In that storytelling, yeah, you talk about this feature and that feature and, you know, you go through your whole story, and it works. I think those are kind of the foundational components or the foundational skills, soft skills and hard skills of what I believe makes a good technical evangelist.

So A hundred percent.

You said so you said a lot of good things there. Look.

First of all, like Thank you.

Kudos to Kentik and the the marketing for not coming out of the market and saying, yeah. We've got the first ever, you know, AI ML, you know, built categorically across our whole product. Yeah. Yeah. It's the best.

We specifically do not use the term AIops. Like, that's an explicit like, we don't use that term. But the funny thing is we'll talk about the specific models that we use and algorithms. Sure. Why not? I mean, it's those are tools in in our toolbox.

That's, you know, that's a beautiful thing that you don't see a lot on the market today. I'll just throw that out there. That's a really awesome And you said one more thing. So I I know we're probably coming up on time, but you, you were talking about, you know, how some the context of, b to b for, you know, some of the cases you were talking about. And I I have a question for you. Like, is a technical evangelism both B2B and b two c? Because a lot of times, we're talking to or engaging individual consumers or having, you know, more many more hallway conversations than you'd have normally.

Yeah. I would say so because those folks are decision makers for their business. They they may not be the the decision maker outright, but they're the technical resource that the VP of engineering is using before they sign a PO. So, yes, I look at it as very much a b to b in that sense. Although, you know, in a in practical, application, it is very much a one on one person to person, endeavor.

Now I do think that there is a b to c technical evangelist. It's just not me. So b to c technical evangelists are geared more toward that consumer. So that original software evangelist from Apple I mean, they're talking to developers.

They're talking to folks like that, but they're also talking to you know, you have those technical evangelists back in those days that were talking about, you know, Apple computers. Right? And just kind of building the brand, putting a a persona around it, and it was for a specific consumer, not necessarily for, the business. Although, you know, Apple sold computers to entire school districts and companies, so there's that as well.

But I do approach it as as more of a b to b endeavor. Now I could be wrong. William, you asked me a question that I have never really thought of before. So, that's an off the cuff answer for me.

I just thought of that just now. Because I know I know at the end of the day, like, we're selling of course, like, you know, we're not gonna sell Kentik or Alkira to a single person, obviously, that doesn't have a business and a business case and business problems Yeah. That these products solve for. But I think in my mind, anyway, some sometimes I'm approaching conversations, like, okay, this vertical or health care x, y, and z or fin services x, y, and z.

But sometimes it's individual people with individual, you know, you know, problems that they've had to focus on. And and I'm definitely in my mind, I'm looking at it as a b to c type of conversation in a sense.

But yeah.

I mean, I think it on the surface, though, it's b to you know, we're again, our products solve larger business problems usually at the end of the day.

It's not a home network issue that we're they're focusing on.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. So then, maybe we could talk about some of the daily activities of a tech evangelist.

Right? I know what I do every day, and I don't know if you do the same. I'm assuming you do from our conversations. But what are what are some of the typical daily activities, or maybe not daily, but overall, activities, deliverables that you have as the director of technical evangelism?

Yeah. So the first thing is when you when you look at kinda like the the premise of of getting the word out, you know, getting the good news out about, you know, okay.

I I, of course, want to do that. Like, if if I worked so I'll start here. If I worked for a company that maybe we had a product that I didn't really care for, It's not okay. Like, I work here for my job, and I get a paycheck.

I I couldn't be a technical evangelist. I wouldn't be able to do it because it it would be missing the passion aspect, which is the main goal, or the one of the main drivers. But as far as what my role does, I see myself a lot of times, like, as far as responsibilities is like an overlay. And I'm an overlay over product marketing, technical marketing, a little bit of sales, and and maybe the product team a little bit more broadly in certain circumstances.

But Yeah. If you look at if you look at, like, a, product marketer, they're gonna have very specific tasks that they do. They have a schedule, a routine, maybe throw an ARPR and some of the other marketing things. But as far as what I see myself as is, like, if you look at all the the tasks that, like, a product marketer has or that even, like, lead generation under the marketing engine or or sales, like, all there's a lot of connectivity tissue that needs to be inserted in a lot of these areas, especially with the game of field marketing.

So field marketing is a you know, I would say that when you're a start up and you're you're a younger start up, a lot of the places that you're gonna have engaging conversations, because nobody nobody knows who you are, is is gonna be at events.

So one of my big responsibilities is traveling, going to events, having conversations. Now you can you can sort of split that into two different areas.

And just for the sake of simplicity in this conversation, I'm gonna say, okay. We're gonna split events into, unsponsored and sponsored.

So on the sponsored side, like, yeah, we may sponsor an event. I'm going to that event. I'm not coming with a direct sales pitch, but I am at the booth. I'm having conversations. I'm doing demos. And, you know, I'm giving, technical demonstration and talking about technical things, but I'm also soaking in a lot of what is around me, The the conversations that I'm having with different technologists, different folks, but different businesses across different verticals, and I'm taking notes. Mhmm.

You know, a lot of times, honestly, like, I have my laptop available, and I'll have a really engaging conversation with someone about the problems they're having within their business and, you know, some of the things they're trying to solve with some of this new technology.

And I'm going and I'm taking notes. Like, okay. This is a problem, you know, that organization, b is having with, you know, technology c. And this is what they've tried, and and this is why they're still having this problem.

And, you know, so I do I wouldn't call that competitive intelligence. I would just maybe call it marketing intelligence. But I think part of, my job day to day is is taking notes and learning what is happening in adjacent areas around our company, adjacent technologies and documenting and crafting things for our product team. Because our, you know, our product team isn't gonna be able to go and travel to every event in the world.

They're they're doing amazing work with, you know, like we talked about earlier.

They have their focus Mhmm.

That they're focused on. And and you need that outside influence. You need that outside intelligence, and you need to bring it back in. So events are a huge thing for me.

I'm I'm in a lot of events. You know, we're both at a lot of events and having those conversations. But I think, kinda like you talked about, like, I have, you know, partnering with other parts of, you know, Alkira, to understand, like, okay. We have an editorial calendar.

Like, these are the events that we have lined up. These are the features that we have that are that are gonna be coming out in q four. So, again, like you said about yourself and going deep in some of those areas, like, we may have so let me just use an example. Like, I'm just gonna be very vague here.

Oh, let me think of some. So ZTNA. Let's just say ZTNA. Let's say for some reason, like, we're gonna roll out as ZTNA solution in twenty twenty five or something.

Now okay. As a technical evangelist, yeah, I wanna learn how my company does z t and a. I wanna know how we do it and why we do it better. But what I really need to learn also is what are the options on the open market? Like, if a customer was gonna build this themselves, what would they be doing?

And that requires me to actually go out and maybe prototype it and try to build some stuff or even use some I mean, one thing I do a ton is the all the products out there that have, like, a free tier or, like, a free thirty day trial. I I've I've tried so many products out there. It's not even I've I've a burner email, Phil. I have a burner email that I use to sign up for these things just so I don't get obliterated by sales teams.

And I think that email account probably has, like, thousands of emails in it. But yeah. Like, going out and learning and actually building the stuff that your product would compete with. So you're doing all these little things, you know, but then on the surface, like, what what all this stuff sort of translates to is, yes, I'm writing technical blogs, not only about our product, but about the industry, about how you would, you know, do this if you were gonna build it yourself.

Or, you know, the different, you know, maybe the different scenarios that some of our competitors might do loosely, like, just kinda understanding that and finding a way to articulate it in a good faith manner to where I'm educating, not, you know, beating anybody over the head.

So and then creating content. So I create a lot of content, a lot of videos.

And when I'm not actually the one building the content, I'm helping support other folks within our company that are trying to build something. Like, maybe somebody has an idea, and they wanna make a video with it. They wanna have a maybe a back and forth about a a feature. Well, not everybody's used these video editing softwares out there or knows how to record or knows that you know, one one thing that's funny to me and I remember being in this spot too is, like, sometimes somebody will just throw on some AirPods and say, hey.

Let's record a professional thing. And they're using some, a very blurry video. And I'm like, oh, okay. Hold on.

We we gotta go back and, you know, we we want this to actually look and sound good, just so people can understand and people can see. And you you don't want it to be you wanna put your best foot forward.

So, you know, a lot of it is organizing all this stuff and aligning it also to where, you know, what your company is doing, the features, you know, product updates, events, and kinda timing is a big thing too. So working out the timing, with a lot of this. Yeah. Yeah.

So yeah. It's a it's kind of a spread. You know, again, it's like an it's almost like an overlay role across a few different areas. It's it's not something like, oh, you're a tech evangelist.

You write x amount of blogs a month. You need to create this many pieces of content a month. Good job. Mhmm.

It's it's much more than that.

Yeah. Yeah. I I do think that content is just the mechanism that we use to get the word out. And so content might be a speaking engagement or a blog post or a demo video or a podcast, all of these things that are public facing. So that's that's, I think, a main component there, that it is public facing and that it is generally technical nature even if it is kind of a thought leadership piece.

And, you know, I've gone through periods where it was we had a bunch of ideas kind of brewing within the team, and they mostly lent themselves to blog posts and not a podcast. And so so the the nature of the content can change over time and ebb and flow.

I tried to decrease my public speaking engagements this summer because, you know, family vacations and things like that. I'm trying to get my family camping every once in a while, and and, I can't travel quite as much. Things like that. There's someone else on the team who's a principal tech evangelist who's really working, on on developing community. I don't know where that's gonna go, but it's a thought, and it's something that we're discussing.

But what about, things like, how you represent yourself? I mean, there's there's two things here that I'm I'm thinking about, William. One is is a technical evangelist and, like, a a brand ambassador in that classic sense of what that means? And then, also, what is your relationship with social media these days?

Those are two great and funny questions, especially the social media one Sure. Yeah. For me right now.

Some so somebody wise once told me so, actually, let's start with the brand ambassador.

I I like so I see a lot of brand ambassadors out there. And to me and I'm not, again, not an expert in this area. But to me, a lot of times, what a brand ambassador is and I think what I'd say more, like, what the the population thinks it is is here, I'll give an example. So you have AWS. AWS, big cloud provider, you know, the biggest.

And they have, of course, they have their internal tech evangelists. They have their internal, you know, Jeff Bars of the world. But then they have these programs. As they as they go out and they reach out and build community, they have the community builders, but then they have the AWS heroes.

Now the the community builders and the AWS heroes are strictly community. They don't they you can't work for AWS and be either one of those. And I don't believe that with the hero program, you can work for a partner. I'm I'm not a hundred percent sure on that, but they also have an AWS I don't even I don't know what the program's called, but it's basically partners that do a lot of business with AWS at the end of the day. You can become, like, a brand ambassador for AWS. Like, you're using so much of their stuff. Maybe you're creating content around it and how it integrates with your product, and you are sort of a brand ambassador.

And and because I think the the important distinction that some companies wanna make there is like, okay, this brand ambassador doesn't work for us. They're using us.

So you can go out and say that. And I think folks are likely more likely to take that at face value.

So I think brand ambassador, I think there's definitely as far as, like, what you're doing day to day, the type of content you're creating, and maybe the speaking engagements, a lot of it probably overlaps really closely. But I think it's the scope of okay. Like, some of the optics, you know, the bigger a company gets, you wanna really refine and focus on those optics because they're important. Like, if AWS had an ambassador that's working for them that rolls up under sales and is going out and doing the same thing, it's not gonna have the same impact. It's just not, versus having that external, sort of brand ambassador. But thinking of, like, what ambassador means and that part of technical evangelism is you do wanna build your brand. In a sense, you are a brand ambassador.

So, yeah, it's, I don't know if I can I have the best answer for that, but that's just the way that I I see it anyhow?

Yeah. Yeah.

That's fair.

And social media, I have the biggest love hate relationship with social media. So someone someone wise once told me, like, this is a a long time ago. I wasn't out on social media a ton, and I had spoken at an event. And the this person reached out to me and was like, why aren't why aren't you, like, plastering this all over the socials?

And I'm like, I don't know. I I just never thought I would do that. Like, I just kinda it it wasn't my I I didn't think about it in that way. Like, I thought LinkedIn at that point was, hey.

I'm just posting a job update. You know, I I switched, you know, like, I got promoted or, you know, oh, so and so got promoted. But the content marketing, the influencer marketing, like, so much of this stuff has shifted the industry so much. And, like, one of the ways that you can get the word out is a technical evangelist.

Like, yeah, you can pay for ads. You can pay for Google, you know, analytics, LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, Facebook's metas, or you can make content in good faith.

You can share it on social media, stuff that's actually valuable. And I think there's a big benefit to that to where you're growing organically. Like, you're not it's not a pay to play, pay for this, pay for that sort of thing. But you're slow.

It's it's the it's the long game that you're you're bolstering not only the your own, you know, really a lot of your own self worth and that you are a, you know, an expert in your your craft, but also you're helping build the company's brand indirectly as well. So using social media to that end, I think, is critical. And since everybody wants video these days and, just there's different things where the stuff you're sharing is definitely shifted. It's much different now than it was, like, five, ten years ago.

Yeah. Right. On the LinkedIns.

So yeah. I mean, social media is huge. And then even, like, I was reluctant to go on Instagram and TikTok for the longest time. I was like, oh, you know, you gotta keep it a hundred percent professional.

It's gotta be LinkedIn only. And I've shifted my, you know, shifted gears there as well, with with especially with, Instagram and TikTok. So, like, my own podcast, I post on there, and that's been huge for me. When I started going to TikTok, I like, I'll I had one video that went viral, Phil.

Like, one video, it just went nuts, like, over millions of views. And, like, all my other views don't get as much. And I don't even really care about the views. But, like, one day, I was working at home, and my phone was just continuously buzzing for, like, six hours.

And I look, and I have, like, thousands of notifications.

Like, what in the world happened?

Yeah.

And that one video went viral. And I noticed at the same time, like, my my podcast downloads were just going up. And I'm like, oh, wow. Yeah.

Who who'd imagine? Like, you you have reached this bigger audience, and you actually used the social media algorithm for that reach. You didn't have to pay for it. Like, how beautiful is that that if you could find a few pieces of content that are so valuable to the the population that you can, you know, really maximize your reach, increase your brand.

Like, it does so many there's so many positive benefits, for that. So I'm in the camp now of, okay. I I I've had to up my social media game. It's important at this point.

So Yeah.

Yeah. I have two things. The brand ambassador thing, I'm a technology ambassador for sure. Right? That's what I'm talking about. So in in this podcast, I've mentioned my company's name way more times than in other podcasts from Telemetry Now podcast.

And that's just because of the nature of our conversation. But generally speaking, I'm evangelizing the technology, and, absolutely, I represent the company. I'm in a video wearing the logo on my shirt, or I'm speaking on behalf of the company. So, of course, I I represent the company.

But you do it in a in such a way that, like you just said, you're you're not, you know, peddling your wares per se. You are offering something of value to your audience, perhaps to the larger community, and it's asynchronous and not at a small speaking engagement. And when I say value, I mean something meaningful, something that they can use. And that doesn't mean that it's just like a how to do this thing, how to configure this thing.

Although that that does count, and that is important. But it's also like, have you ever figured out why in the world this thing works the way it does out there? Like, we all talk about or how about this? Just humor.

Like, I'm lightening your day with this stupid meme, which apparently I do now for a living, William. I don't know where that came from.

That stuff's hilarious.

I don't know.

Your your meme game is top.

It just literally started one day on my own personal social media. Got a bunch of likes. I got one meme with, like, I don't know, several thousand likes on on it. And then my boss is like, hey.

Can we retweet that? Do you mind? And I'm like, I guess so. And now I'm like, I'm not required, but every once in a while, he's like, you got any memes this week?

So but that but that's the same thing. It's it's, yes, it's humor, but it is still something of value because the the memes or a funny video or I have song parodies coming out soon, They are Oh. Yeah. Yeah.

They are, from my own experience. And so I think going down to the social media conversation, I mean, I have the job I have now because of my my, use of social media over the past over over a decade, or quite maybe a decade.

So my my own blog, my own podcast stuff apart from work, my own, Twitter and LinkedIn and, you know, to extend some other things. Like, I use Facebook a little bit for, you know, like, personal things. And, I have an Instagram, which is just memes. If you wanna look at it, it's network engineer memes. It's just the memes.

So so things like that. And, yeah, I think that it's changing, in the sense that there are far there's a different crowd on Twitter, for example. I I I do disagree with everyone that says, like, Twitter's dead and nobody uses it. I'm like, no.

I I have a ton of engagement on it. It's just the people that got pissed off left, and then there's still a bunch of people there that I interact with. And they're a different crowd, but they're there. And, you know, I I I do experiment with others like Mastodon and Blue Sky now.

My engagement on LinkedIn is by far the best, which is a surprise the past year, but who knows? But the folks are using these as tools to get information.

As as you know, you you know, you can't keep up with textbooks being written on the very latest technology. By the time it gets published, even if it's an e EPUB, it can be a little out of date, and so people rely on blogs, social media, podcasts for the very, very most up to date information. So I think that's a mechanism for that. And and and you need to be flexible as a technical evangelist. Maybe, you know, yesterday, it was Twitter. Today, it's LinkedIn.

You said TikTok. I was using TikTok for a little while until I did a podcast with a friend of mine who told me about the security implications, and I basically just stopped.

Yeah.

I should do it again. He said it was safe if you're using, like, a VM to do it and all these other things. So whatever. Anyway, yeah. Yeah.

And I and I they they it's just spyware.

It's just malware on your phone. So if you That's all. If you if you set up another machine at your house that's completely disconnected from your network and it's, you know, on a VPN out of Switzerland, you should be good.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, and and so I think that the social media component is a part of it because in the the society and culture in which we live, you know, if we're going to, quote, unquote, bring the good news of our technology to the world, well, I mean, that's how you do it. Sure. The speaking engagements in person, but also, you know, those webinars and the social media posts. And, you know, maybe instead of writing a blog post, it's a blog post that you write natively on LinkedIn just because people are scrolling while they're, you know, waiting for a train or something. It's just reaching people with your your content, your idea, your your good news, I I hope. Right? And so that's how I've I've looked at both the whole brand ambassador thing and also the, the the the social media community engagement aspect.

Right. I think one danger these are the only danger I'll say and I I had this conversation with somebody that I was mentoring, like, a year like, maybe a year ago. But this is a younger person out of college, and they were it was like they were just like, every conversation we had, it's like, well, how do I how do I do that to get more followers? Or how do I do this to get more this or that on social?

I'm like, look. Just forget about the social media. You wanna learn the concept. Like, you need to you know, one one thing you could do is, like, you could blog or, you know, make content about your journey as you're learning.

Like, that's awesome. Sure. But you I I think the gauge of success, like, us as an industry, we need to be careful with social to say, look, you're not your goal isn't just to get more followers and views. Like, you need to have something deeper than that that you're tied to within the technology, or you're gonna fizzle pretty quick.

Yep. And you're not gonna have anything to fall back on. Like, it's gotta be more than that. And because I think a lot of folks see the just the big, big successes on the Twitters and the, LinkedIns and all these places.

And they're like, that's what I wanna be. And, you know, so yeah. You wanna be careful to be grounded in whatever your trait or your your craft is first and then use social media to augment, enhance and, you know, get the word out in a sense. And you're so right about Twitter.

It's so funny because I remember when Twitter got acquired, like, everybody was like, okay. First of all, it's not gonna work after a week. There's gonna be nobody on here doing anything anymore. It was just like this perpetual thing of, oh, there's no value.

But I still I mean, some of my you know, some of the you know, when news hits and everything, I still use Twitter, like, I know, pretty extensively. Mhmm. And I have so much good engagement on there that it's just I don't think it's died, myself.

Yeah. Yeah. You know what? That's part of our our I think that's part of our role is not necessarily being contrarian by going out there with our opinion substantiated with evidence and and, you know, if you could think about it in the context of technology.

And maybe that's contrary to a lot of public opinion, but there but that's the value proposition. Right? I really believe that what we do is offering something meaningful and valuable and worth something to another engineer or to the community. Again, whether it's a technical, how to do something, how something works, you know, not just being a shield for the company, but what what can I offer that's meaningful for you today that you walk away having grown as an engineer in your own in your own right?

And and, of course, a result of that, I do work for Kentik. A result of that is that, hopefully, you know, you you have a greater respect for the company I work for. I'm also talking predominantly about the technologies that my company works with and sells. So all of that is part and parcel of of the role, I think.

Yeah. One hundred percent.

So, William, we went really long in this podcast, but, great conversation. So I have no problem with that. In fact, I think we could have gone for another hour and ten minutes without without issue.

So For sure. Yeah. So rather than do that, maybe we can I can have you on as a as a part two or maybe go into one aspect of technical evangelism or something else for that matter? But I would love to talk to you again.

Yeah. We'll have to do something else. I'll have you on mine as well. Yeah. Keep Keep the keep the convert the good conversations going.

Great. Great. So, if folks wanna reach out to you online, question, comment, and, of course, check out your podcast, where can they do that?

So, you can find me on LinkedIn, William hyphen Collins.

On the Twitters, it's, William five zero two.

Five zero two is actually the area code of where I live. That's the reason. I always get a lot of questions about that one. And then everywhere else so I'm really, I've I have the Cloud Gambit podcast, an homage to the Queen's Gambit chess play, which turned into a TV show, which was really awesome.

So talking about, you know, all the things surrounding cloud tech usually focused on infrastructure. So I'm on all the major podcast catchers, YouTube, and, in those places. And I think LinkedIn is probably the place I'm most active. So if you wanna reach out, yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn.

I'd love to connect.

Great. Thanks. And you can still find me on Twitter, network_phil, my blog networkphil.com, and, of course, also on LinkedIn. Now if you have an idea for a show, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out to us at telemtrynow@kentik.com. And, for now, thanks so much for listening. Bye bye.