Technological innovation has immensely helped turn the impossible possible. In this episode, Carrie Charles sits with Tony Grayson, the General Manager of Compass Datacenters, to have a future-forward chat on data infrastructures and technology and what they can offer on sustainability. The two discuss the factors slowing the expansion of 5G, the digital divide and the expansion of broadband network accessibility in rural areas, and the future of the edge for telecom. Finally, Tony shares his wisdom on strategies that leaders must take as the workforce continues to change. Tune in to this conversation to gain more insights about technology, sustainability, and leadership.
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A Future-Forward Chat with Tony Grayson of Compass Datacenters
I have somebody very special with me. His name is Tony Grayson. He is a technology executive, and I get this. He is a Former Submarine Commander for the US Navy. We are going to hear a little bit more about that in a minute. He’s the 2015 Vice Admiral Stockdale recipient for Inspirational Leadership, and we are going to learn his leadership secrets in a moment as well. He’s also a veteran advocate. He is the General Manager currently for Compass Datacenters. Tony, thank you for joining me. I’m so excited about this conversation.
I am too, Carrie. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Let’s hear about your history as a Submarine Commander. How did you get to where you are now? Tell us the story if you can. I know it could probably take hours over drinks but let’s try it.
No worries at all. It’s a super different path to tech. Twenty-one years in the US Navy in submarines. I chose submarines because it’s that last vestige of command where you could actually be alone and unafraid. If you can imagine, 38 years old CO. In an aircraft, you can talk to your boss. On a ship, you can talk to your boss. For anything else, you can talk to your boss. In a submarine, you can’t talk to your boss.
It’s just you and 150 people younger than you doing work out there where you have to make decisions. No one knows you are there. If you get caught, you are probably front pages of CNN. My lifelong goal was to command my own submarine. I did that. In 2013, I took command of the USS Providence (SSN-719) out of Groton, Connecticut. I had three and a half years of command. I absolutely loved it.
During that time, I probably spent about 80% of my time away from my family. You get to that point where you achieve your life goal and reassess where you are in your life. Over those 20 to 21 years, I missed a lot of my kids growing up in their life. I had left everything to my spouse to take care of. It’s like, “Go figure it out yourself. Here, I’m going to go out to do cool stuff on this submarine.”
I got out. Luckily enough, I was able to go work for Facebook at that time. Originally, I was going to take over the EMEA data center operations based out of Dublin. As we were going through this interview process, I talked to some of these hiring managers. I’m like, “I didn’t know how much about cloud I knew.” A submarine actually has 14 to 15 megawatts of IT load.
We have a substrate, an overlay, graphic user interfaces, storage, and HPC. I could actually speak cloud without knowing I could speak cloud. My job, instead of going to Dublin, which we have been trying to get to Europe forever and move out there, to more on the IT, the network, and construction side based out of Menlo Park.
I absolutely love Facebook. Coming out of 21 years in the military, they don’t pay you that much. I was by real estate with twenty-year-old kids with RSU. No offense to them but we couldn’t afford it. My choices are live in East Bay and take a two-hour bus ride or move. I moved up to Seattle, where I was stationed twice here, West of Seattle on Bainbridge Island, and I was flying the nerd bird down.
For those that don’t know what the nerd bird is, it’s a flight that’s usually Alaska for most of us. Going from Seattle to San Francisco. Leaves on. You fly down Monday morning first thing and fly back Thursday. It’s not assigned seats but you and your closest friends who normally base in Seattle and moved down there.
I did that for about six months but that’s why I left the military. I got a great job at AWS, where I was doing a lot more of the construction side and design side in the data centers. I had a great opportunity to go over to Oracle and do something new and different. Doing the network side, which turned into the data centers and more of the cloud strategy. I was there for about 4 or 4 and a half years.
About 2020, I was talking to a lot of my mentors and stuff. What I saw and had a passion for was to try to build something. I loved Oracle and loved doing it but essentially, I was a cost center. I was building to support their IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, which is awesome. I love that but I wanted to build something that I could brainstorm with, tweak, get out there, market, and sell.
Criss Cross being, one of my mentors, said, “Why don’t you come over?” He bought two businesses in 2018. One was focused on software, and the other one was focused on this monster business. I came over here to Compass to take over this business. I’m a total technology and ops person. I wanted to try to run the business, and this is the greatest way to do it because I have training wheels. I don’t have to go raise money. I just go to my parent company and ask for money. They help me with my hiring. If I need learning or helping, then I have this great board and execs around me from Compass to teach me the ways. That’s how I got to where I am.
Tell me more about Compass.
Compass is a data center company servicing all the cloud and platform providers. US, Canada, and Europe, and expanding more. What they bring is more of a modular construction. What I love about them are their partners. We are working with my previous companies, too. They see customers. It’s not necessarily a supplier-customer relationship. It’s more of a partner relationship. “Let’s figure out how we can both be successful.”
They are probably one of the only companies that are out there that I know that have this R&D budget that is looking at more sustainability, looking at new ways to do business. They are building around the world. I love the Compass. What I also got from Compass is that they do put culture first. I have always been at companies with culture but culture has been a thing that you read off the slide that you might do.
At Compass, they put that culture first. I finally get that quote, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” What they are saying is that if you follow the culture, you know exactly where to go. You don’t have to ask a lot of questions because you know what the team is going to say around you. That’s what I’m learning at Compass, hear and do.
What I’m specifically focused on is that we have this centralization of everyone going from enterprise to the cloud because it is easier and cheaper. Now, we are starting to see regulations, latency, bandwidth, and financials start to decentralize what the cloud is doing. I’m not saying hyper-scale data centers are going to go away. I think we are going to have this, what we are terming the fourth internet, when we start to have all these networks.
When we have true 5G, we can actually get a lot of data from these endpoints. It’s not going to have to go to Ashburn, Virginia, Phoenix or Chicago. You are going to have to have a lot of these local nodes. What I am focused on building are these facilities, the house of these local nodes but not as a CapEx, more as a turnkey OpEx kind of business. At the leading edge, we can debate what edge is all you want but that’s what we are focused on.
Somebody reached out to me and said, “You have to interview Tony on your show.” The more I learned about you, read about you, and watched some interviews. I’m fascinated because you see the ecosystem from different perspectives, with your experience with Facebook and AWS. I want to ask you some questions. We are going to jump around a bit. I want to get your perspective. This will be fun.
That sounds great.
Let’s talk about 5G. 5G promised to change everything. Why hasn’t it happened yet?
To be honest, it has been too expensive. 5G, from my perspective, you are going to have to gut your existing infrastructure system and rebuild a new infrastructure system. There’s a toll transport layer that’s going to be required to take care of this bandwidth. You can’t rely on these old towers with these old telco huts in the bottom of them. Everyone has been choking on the bill.
If I’m talking just states, the US government is investing a lot of money in networks, so middle mile, last mile transit. This is all the BEAD funding, and it’s like the Broadband Infrastructure Bill, which is 44 billion, which will help fund all this transport. You are also starting to get companies to start developing this 5G private network. You are getting private investment into this. Hopefully, we will finally get this whole millimeter wave and all those frequencies worked out, so we can actually have 5G.
Once we have that true transport network, it’s going to explode because everything is generating so much data. Now, when you have a transport network that can take all the data, people will write the platforms that will do this. Instead of machine-to-people, you will have machine-to-machine-to-machine, and you will have more of this network that’s going to be needed, and it’s going to explode.
We are not talking like a linear. We are talking exponential. We are going to go from the third internet. If I’m messing this up, I apologize to the analysts out there. We are going to go from 1 billion nodes. By nodes being like a bone to 27 trillion nodes in the space a couple of years, then that requires is going to be there. We are going to have all these platforms that are going to do it.
They are going to turn to have this concept of data gravity. Data gravity is you bring the compute to where the data is being stored because it’s too cost-prohibitive to transport data anywhere else. That will make this decentralized environment that we are having. Let’s be honest. If you are driving a Tesla and you hit a pothole, do you want that data to go to Ashburn to let all the other Teslas know that you hit a pothole? No, it’s going to have to have some edge architectural local infrastructure that’s going to have to support it.
From my perspective, our industry is not ready for that. We are very good at building 500-acre campuses that are massive. We are not good at saying 1,000 distributed locations around the US, all of the certain latency and the certain requirements. That’s what we are trying to focus on. It is the future, and it’s what’s going to end up happening. That’s going to be the smart cities, the smart roads, all that stuff.
You talked a bit about broadband. What do you think is the outlook for 2023 for rural broadband? You mentioned programs. There are various programs. One is BEAD. Can you tell us what BEAD is?
BEAD is going after the digital divide. We are putting $42 billion to $44 billion in Federal governments in the state hands based on FCMaps, which is going to be an argument at broadband maps as it is. What we are trying to do is use government capital to build a private enterprise to build cheap broadband out to the rural areas. Everyone thinks that the US has this massive broadband and that people have easy access.
If we actually had that, then Starlink or LEO satellites would not be needed. It doesn’t exist. There are people in rural areas that are paying dollars per megabit. We in the Metro areas don’t understand that. It creates this huge digital divide. That’s what it’s at. The COVID Act, I’m getting these numbers of $10 billion, and that was to start this. We had a middle mile, which was $1 billion, and then the BEAD was $44 billion. Roughly, it’s $77 billion the US is spending.
By 2025 to 2026, they are going to have $77 billion spent in improving aggregation points of this broadband network, which the 5G can build off of. That’s why when I say, “The edge is coming,” we have been talking about the edge forever, knowing the edge is coming. Now, you are going to have the transport layer to develop these cool apps and platforms that everyone wants.
The edge is coming because now you’re going to have the transport layer to develop these cool apps and platforms that everyone wants.
Tony, there are so many acronyms in telecom technology. It’s unbelievable. The fact that you cannot remember all of them. It’s literally hundreds of thousands. That’s so interesting.
It’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment. No one knows about this program. It is a huge investment by the US government to go after this digital divide and bring broadband to areas. We are in areas where people don’t even have the ASNs. College campuses don’t even have their own ASN, and they backhaul another way to get on. It’s mind-blowing. If you go over to Europe, they are not like that. EMEA seems to be much farther ahead on how they built their network. We can discuss that at a future time. I don’t know how we got there but it’s interesting.
Let’s talk about sustainability. Where is sustainability on telecom’s agenda?
This is probably not what people want to know. I have a view of sustainability. We need to take baby steps. We have set 2050 goals but some companies feel like 2050 goals are someone else’s problem. Like, “That’s my successor’s problem.” We have to say 2050 because that’s what the market expects. For me, sustainability is never going to change until it hurts their pocketbooks, affects their business or there are regulations that come out of it.
Europe is the greatest example of that stuff. They have a thing called green financing. If your company is green-financed, you get a different interest rate than a company that’s not in green finance. You have a push towards sustainability on how you want to do that. Plus, there are great companies that are out there that are funding infrastructure.
They are going to force the company that’s trying to get money from them to meet certain sustainability. In the end, it’s this whole balance of, “I got to rub my business and be profitable.” I hate to say that sustainability is more expensive. How do you balance that profitability with sustainability? To me, we have an opportunity here. We are building out this edge and what we talked about because the edge is smaller and cheaper.
You can try these things like PEM fuel cells, solid oxide fuel cells, PV, photoelectric generation with battery backups at low cost and less risk. People are afraid to try these big sustainability projects because they don’t know what’s going to work. They don’t know what’s going to have a less carbon footprint. Instead of trying to solve world hunger, let’s use the phrase, “Go slow to go fast.”
Let’s take these small incremental steps. Let’s try something, see if that works, and build on that. We have to look beyond the greenwash and the carbon credits because that’s allowing you to bypass the problem. Let’s put the regulations in place that actually force us to do stuff instead of hoping and praying that our fingers do the right thing.
To me, the ESG is interesting because we tend to focus on the E as Environmental and Sustainability. We have the S and the G. That’s also super important. On the East side, let’s start putting our money where our mouth is. Let’s start taking these baby steps. A lot of people have thrown goals out there that they are not quite sure how to meet yet and are trying to figure out.
One of my mentors said, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
It’s almost like we are getting this analysis paralysis. Take a step. It’s probably going to be wrong. You debate about it for ten years. You are probably going to be wrong. Take one small step and then go. See what regulation and what works. If that doesn’t, then change the regulation. You have to start somewhere. Look at California. California has pretty much said, “No more Tier 2 types of diesel.” Everyone was like, “How are you going to do that?” They are like, “Not my problem. You figure it out.” What a way to drive innovation and sustainability by saying, “Can’t do it.” It’s the permitting that’s going to drive the innovation, which will make companies do something different.
Speaking of something different. What do you see on the horizon with cleaner energy? Anything exciting.
I hate to say this because my background is nuclear. I have to say SMRs are fascinating to me because the nuclear industry has always been highly regulated, as it should be. We have been focused on these massive power plants that are hidden in the middle of nowhere because no one wants it near them. We have to get all these counties and states in countries to agree on the regulations that surround that but now we have these smaller modular reactors.
We are going from gigawatts of power down to 70 or 60 megawatts of power that are built in a factory to the same spec. As opposed to these spoke units which are peppered around that allow you to drive costs down, and you have the same quality standard. You can transfer your operational lessons learned from unit to unit as you do it.
If I speak here in the states, they’ve actually recognized these reactors as something different. Your planning starts at your fence line. What that allows you to do is you can bring these reactors closer and put them in more areas where they are needed. We are not talking fantasy. There are great designs that are out there that are probably will be in 2035, and these are the sodium-based reactors that don’t have a lot of data to use them. You have data that are essentially submarine reactors that are based on those designs that we have a lot of data for that are in the states that are already approved. We are talking 4 to 5 years, and you can have 400 to 500 megawatts of relatively cheaper power.
There’s also stuff into using actual fuel in what we are calling fast vision reactors to use that fuel, so you don’t have to make new fuel. There’s also some of these reactors like nuclear batteries that we put in these satellites and spaceships to look at that and take it those to areas. By making energy cheap, you provide innovation.
Once again, here in the West, we don’t realize it that a lot of the energy doesn’t have access to cheap power. Once they get access to cheap power, then they can start working on things. They can innovate. I’m most excited about these small modular reactors because the costs are low, and the designs are good. They are based on passive designs.
A lot of the energy doesn’t have access to cheap power. But once they access cheap power, they can start working on things they can innovate.
We can talk true noble through a mile and focusing what happened there. The design, a lot of passives line, a lot of safety features that are in here and are cheap enough that we can put them out in different locations in the world. That, to me, is the most exciting thing. That generates green hydrogen, which can go into fuel cells. The sky is the limit with nuclear from my perspective.
You talked earlier about technology changing things exponentially in moving so fast. We cannot stop this interview until we talk about the workforce because it has changed so much over the past two years. What do you see as some strategies for hiring with nowadays workforce? Where are we now?
Our generations are super naive in the way we think. We think everyone thinks like us. I’m at the tail end of that where people want to go to a company for twenty years. They want a pension. That’s how they work. That’s how they think. That’s not how the current generation works. They want to be challenged and included, and I don’t think we recognize that.
We are still trying to put our values of a system into that new culture. Kids nowadays are raised on social media. They think differently than us. They take in information differently than us. They learn differently but we are still trying to jam them into this old mentality of, you come to work and work 40-hour work weeks. You stay at your desk. You don’t walk around.
It’s so different in the way they are thinking. I also think that we are putting too much emphasis on performance or experience too. We are going at such an exponential rate. We don’t have people who have this background. People who have this background are the great hero or are retiring. You got to figure out how to bring these people in.
We need to focus on will, which is that they want to get in there, do a good job, and learn. Loyalty means that, once they learn, they want to stay for the company and set up this performance. You are going to have to teach them. You are going to have to make them learn. You can’t sit there and say, “You shall have an MBA from Harvard.” That stuff doesn’t exist anymore.
You have to bring them in. We have a new term called quiet quitting. They are never going to tell you they are going to quit. They just don’t show up to stuff or they get another job. People stay for pay but more people are going to stay if they believe in the mission, their job or the environment they are doing. Focus on that. I don’t think we do that enough. We treat everyone as a disposable asset.
People stay for pay, but more people are going to stay if they believe in the mission that they’re doing.
That’s why I’m so big into veterans because veterans want to get out there. They want to work and have been, I hate to use the word condition but they see the bigger mission. If we are working together, Carrie, they want to work to help you and the company succeed. They are not out there to punch the clock and that overall mission and company thing. That focus is what gets them.
That’s why I want to help vets. Most people don’t know this but vets, some of them, are on food stamps. Some of them are going to food banks raising 5 or 6 kids. They get paid next to nothing. We need to help them across that river sticks into this civilian. Give them the tools they need to be successful because they are going to crush it. They may not know as much as other people who come out of this industry but they typically switch jobs every two years. Their ability to ramp pick up these jobs is great. They are also great team workers. That’s how we need to solve this workforce instead of looking to people that don’t exist anymore.
Tony, how do we hire more veterans? Where are the programs? Where do we look?
There are a lot of programs out there. They are all disparate programs. They are all well-intentioned, working for the same thing but working in silos. We have a group called Infrastructure Masons. It was put together by Nelson and me. It was to get all these large technology sectors. It’s like OCP under one room to standardize how we are doing our business.
Under that, we have a veterans’ association, which we are trying to get the word out. We are not trying to preference any company over another company. We are trying to get into these veterans’ organizations globally. When we talk about vets, unfortunately, US vets but there are vets in every part of the world. They all think the same way. We are all taught the same way and equally can do this job.
We should be looking at, “Globally, how do we approach these vets?” We don’t want to rob them of the military because they need them but we want to be the first person at the door to help them to be successful. It’s two totally different things. We all need to come together under one banner to help them and teach them to fish.
They can go find their own fish and what job they want but we should show them what program managers, project managers, sales, computer science, networking, infrastructure or construction do. All this stuff they can do. They just don’t know it. There’s a ready-based talent that we are not utilizing. Instead, they are going to factories or truck driving.
We also have this over-emphasis too on officers. You don’t need a degree to be successful. It’s all experience. What college tries to do is to give you that experience in four years. Some of these people learned from this experience for twenty years and probably did a better job than a college who gets a degree. We must lean on these programs, help them, and teach them to fish. We will be pleasantly surprised at how well they can help our business.
I couldn’t agree more. I’m a veteran and was enlisted. I don’t have a college degree. I’m one of those people that you talked about.
It’s stupid. Once you get to that point, who cares? In fact, I would rather hire an E-9 than I would rather hire an ‘06 and ‘07. I know there are some people who don’t understand that but they get the work done. “As a sub-commander, this is what I did. COB, make it happen.” The COB made it happen with my senior enlisted. They can do this stuff. We don’t put an emphasis on understanding what that senior NCO can bring. Instead, we focus on the JOs. I’m not saying anything against JOs, mid-level officers or senior officers but you get something different with that senior NCO who gets stuff done while we sit and drink my coffee.
We need to look at the whole picture when it comes to talent, especially when we don’t have enough of it. I get a lot of comments after the interviews that people love leadership advice and leadership principles. I would like to ask you. What leadership lessons did you learn from being a Submarine Commander?
From a Submarine Commander, it’s this weird progression. Early on, you have your senior enlist to help you out but you associate how everyone is dealing with your own success. Unfortunately, you are in micromanagement mode. You get to a point where you can’t micromanage anymore and have to delegate but you can’t delegate and use fear to do that. To be honest, I was like that.
I’m not embarrassed to say that I had this micromanagement aspect when I would keep continually ping people to get stuff done because I thought that I had to be in control of everything. If I’m doing a movie, I have to be in charge of the set, the lighting, the actors, the makeup, and everything. It’s never going to work like that. I learned during my CO tour when I went into Stockdale.
You have to empower them, let them fail, and be able to pick them up there and teach them. You must let go of this ego and this fear of being wrong. You have to instill that into them. You want them to take charge. You want them to make decisions. If they mess up, you don’t want to be throwing stuff at them. You want to take them and say, “What could you have done better? Learn from that lesson. Get out there and do it again.”
That goes into the civilian world too, where we put so much pressure on ourselves that our team is our success. In reality, what we should be doing is empowering a team to be successful. I’m not one to spend the best at this, and I’m the first person to say it but you need to empower your team to be successful and stop having this fear of things out of your control to work.
In reality, let the person hit the ditch. That’s how smart people learn. You never learn if you are successful. You don’t know if you are successful because you did it or you were lucky, or maybe what your team did. You learn by hitting that ditch, going, “I can do that again.” You need to give that experience. What you would do as a leader is provide that experience to people.
It’s this incremental feedback. Instead of saying, “Carrie, go find me rockets. What are you thinking, Carrie? Is that what you want to do? What about this and this?” This is the whole “Go slow to go fast.” We talk of all this stuff about servant leadership. I get it but I don’t think people follow that. In the end, fear leads us and we need to let go of that and drop that ego.
Once you drop that fear and ego, you will be a hundred times better leader because you are empowering your team, and that’s what it comes down to. Sorry, you are a big ramble on there. I have some scars, let’s say, on this stuff. I’ve come to a place where I feel super comfortable with it now, and it comes down to, “Your success is your team’s success. If they get promoted, that’s your success. If they do this stuff, that’s your success.” You should be the silent partner that’s orchestrating things in the background. That’s all you should want.
I was talking to my team in a meeting about fear and how to turn fear into power. There’s a lot of pressure on a leader nowadays. The workforce has changed with everything the generations involved. Where are we going to work? How are we going to work? The mental health, the flexibility that the workforce is demanding. The Great Resignation, retaining people, paying them enough, and keeping them engaged. There’s a lot of pressure. I honor your authenticity to say, “I haven’t done all this perfectly.” None of us really have. We are figuring all this out together, so I honor you.
You got to be able to stand up to your boss and say, “You are wrong.” You should be able to stand up to the chairman and say, “You are wrong.” They should give you the freedom to do that. If they don’t, then is that the place you want to work at? That’s what it comes down to. Everyone’s opinion is valued, and there is a lot of pressure and force to do this.
This comes to this generation. You can’t use fear with this generation that’s coming in. They are going to leave. It’s not the job coming. They are going to probably do 3 or 4 jobs. I figure out what the statistic is trying to find out what my son is now. He’s doing it when he’s doing good business. He’s doing cybersecurity. He might switch around jobs 3 or 4 times in his first couple of years to figure out what he’s doing, and I think that’s great.
That’s what we should be encouraging. I have never always gotten it right and won’t get it right in the future too but I’m at least trying. If you think you know everything, you are not who you think you are. Every day we can learn something from someone, and you should be focused on trying to learn something every single day.
Tony, this has been insightful, and I’ve learned a lot. I want to thank you so much for coming to the show. Where can we reach you? Where can we connect with you?
Either the Compass Datacenter site, that’s White Space as a Service or Quantum data. The best way probably is on LinkedIn. I’m very active on LinkedIn. I’m trying to do YouTube too but I stink at it. My kids laugh at me all the time. LinkedIn seems to be the best way. Just DM me. I try to respond to all those DMs. Respond to my posts out there, too. I love to have conversations. I know I’m not right. LinkedIn oftentimes is rainbows and unicorns, and not a lot of challenging. Challenge me. I want to be challenged. That’s the only way we are going to have better thinking.
Tony, thank you so much. I can’t wait to get to know you better. I’m glad this is recorded because I’m going to take a bunch of notes after this.
Thank you, Carrie. My pleasure.
Important Links
- Compass Datacenters
- Infrastructure Masons
- LinkedIn – Tony Grayson
- YouTube – Talking Tech, Cars, and Veterans
- Chall@CompassDataCenters.com
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About Tony Grayson
Tony Grayson is the General Manager of Compass Quantum and is known as a cloud and datacenter leader throughout the industry. Mr. Grayson regularly speaks and writes on topics ranging from sustainability to energy to datacenters to edge. Before joining Compass, Tony was an SVP at Oracle, where he was responsible for their physical infrastructure and cloud regions. Before Oracle, Mr. Grayson held senior positions with AWS and Facebook. Before embarking on his datacenter career, Tony served for 20 years in the United States Navy in multiple places, including Commanding Officer of USS PROVIDENCE (SSN-719). Mr. Grayson is a winner of the prestigious VADM James Bond Stockdale Award for inspirational leadership.
