Tomorrow’s World Today® Podcast
It all starts with one idea. Visit the Worlds of Inspiration, Creation, Innovation, and Production as we explore the topics shaping tomorrow’s world. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.
Tomorrow’s World Today® Podcast
Digital by Design: How DigitalOcean Builds for the Cloud
What does it take to go from a curious nine-year-old tinkering with computers to leading product strategy at some of the world’s most powerful tech companies?
In this episode, Gabe Monroy reflects on his path through the tech world. Raised by a single mom who ran her own bookkeeping business, Gabe got his start helping set up computers for her clients. That hands-on experience sparked a lifelong passion for technology.
Over the years, Gabe would go on to sell two startups (including one to Microsoft), serve as a leader in cloud innovation, and hold the role of Chief Product Officer at DigitalOcean, where he helped shape tools built specifically for the world's small businesses. His experience at the company offered a powerful look at how product strategy and purpose can align.
The episode explores what made DigitalOcean different, including its commitment to small businesses underserved by larger cloud providers, and its remote-first team spanning nearly 1,000 employees across 185 countries.
One of the most compelling parts of the conversation is Gabe’s approach to creativity and focus. Living on a farm with goats and chickens, he shares how unplugging from technology helps him find clarity—and even his best ideas. His take on “flow state” and the Japanese concept of Ikigai offers a fresh way to think about success, especially in an industry where learning never stops.
Whether you're just getting started or rethinking your path, Gabe's story is full of insight and serves as a reminder that innovation can come from the most unexpected places.
For more information about the innovations that are shaping tomorrow's world, head to https://tomorrowsworldtoday.com/
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Welcome to the Tomorrow's World Today podcast. We sit down with experts, world-changing innovators, creators and makers to explore how they're taking action to make tomorrow's world a better place for technology, science, innovation, sustainability, the arts and more. Episode host George Davison, who is also the host of the TV series, tomorrow's World Today sits down with Gabe Monroy, the former chief product officer at DigitalOcean. Gabe discusses his journey from a young coder to a tech executive, highlighting his role in delivering cloud computing solutions for small businesses. He also talks about the value of learning, how to learn, achieving a flow state for productivity and happiness, and how a hardworking single mom led him on a path to success.
George Davison:Thanks for coming in and joining us today. Thanks for having me. Well, I hope you'll share some of your life experiences with us. You know real world stuff. I'm looking forward to it. All right, well good. I'm looking forward to it All right, well good. So we're going to chat a little bit about why don't we start with where you work and what you do there, so that our audience can get a little more?
Gabe Monroy:familiar with you, sure, so I'm the Chief Product Officer at DigitalOcean, and so I'm responsible for delivering the products, including design, engineering a lot of back-end systems to enable our customers to build digital products using cloud computing.
George Davison:Wow, how did that come to be? I mean, did you just wake up one morning and you were in this really awesome position?
Gabe Monroy:Yeah, I was straight on the chief product officer track from when I was in fifth grade. No, of course, I twisted and turned my way into the role. Lots of failure and interesting mistakes along the way. Really, I was a coder from a programmer from when I was extremely young. I got a picture of when I was nine years old, in front of an old AT&T 6300 writing code Wow, and didn't have a lot of friends, you know, when I was growing up, because I like to spend a lot of time just kind of banging away on the computer and focused on video games stuff like that. Over time I moved into doing startups and entrepreneurship and I was, over time, successful in that. It didn't always start that way, but you know, I was able to start and sell two companies. The last one I sold to Microsoft and I spent a lot of time at Microsoft and from there sort of moved into executive leadership and that's how I landed at DigitalOcean. That's fabulous.
George Davison:So we're going to learn a lot today. We're going to ask a lot of good questions and hopefully we can give some insight to these folks. So they probably want to know well what is. Let's talk a little bit about DigitalOcean so they understand what that world looks like and maybe what kind of job opportunities might exist in the future in that space.
Gabe Monroy:Sure, digitalocean exists to provide computing resources to developers and small businesses who are looking to build digital products, things like websites, mobile applications.
Gabe Monroy:Folks want to create mobile apps of the future. They want to create new experiences, product experiences that are accessed over the internet, and they don't really want to have to manage the infrastructure and the servers and the cabling and the power and the cooling and all that annoying stuff that we had to do back when I was growing up. They just want to kind of rent that stuff and focus on the products that they want to build and the value that they want to create for customers. So that's what DigitalOcean is enabling, and we're doing that for small businesses really, and there's 100 million small businesses out there in the world and that's growing by 14 million every year, right, and so it's just a very underserved part of the market today. If you're a large enterprise, there's lots of places you can go to get your cloud computing needs met. If you're a smaller company, there's a lot less out there in terms of companies that are building solutions targeted at your needs, and that's really where DigitalOcean fits in.
George Davison:That's wonderful, your needs and that's really where DigitalOcean fits in. That's wonderful. So if I was working at DigitalOcean let's say there are probably a lot of different types of jobs how do you prepare? If I was to go onto the website and look at that, how would I prepare myself as a younger person right now If I set my sights on going to work there? Is there a certain way I should be thinking, a certain track that might make sense?
Gabe Monroy:digital ocean. Careers are extremely varied, right, so there are highly technical careers where you can work on, you know, as an engineer on operating systems or networking or storage, or really deep computer science fundamentals. There's also careers in marketing. There's also careers in program management. There's lots of different skills, and so for folks who want to work in the tech industry, I think it's important to remember that not everything in the tech industry has to be tech forward and related to computer science. That said, there is a lot of opportunity for folks who are interested in learning math, programming, classical STEM skill sets. That does provide a really interesting path forward in terms of careers at companies like DigitalOcean, which are growing very fast.
George Davison:Yes, Well, that's very helpful. So STEM, STEAM and pretty much storytelling, marketing, through all those gamuts. There are lots of different opportunities. That's right. Yeah, About how many people does DigitalOcean employ?
Gabe Monroy:We're just under 1,000 employees today and growing quickly. We have employees all over the world. In fact, we service customers in 185 different countries globally. It's important to us that we have an employee base that is reflective of the international nature of the business. We've got folks all over the world Definitely biased more towards North America. We have a lot of people in North America, but also lots of people in Western Europe, lots of folks in India, pakistan and really across the globe. Isn't it amazing?
George Davison:now we're working remotely in all these different locations. Does DigitalOcean have a specific headquarters where everybody goes to work, or is it all pretty much remote?
Gabe Monroy:It's an interesting story. The company was founded and headquartered in New York City, and one of the challenges that we found was New York City is expensive, right, it's an expensive place to live, and so we had some trouble recruiting the talent that we needed in New York City, right, and so we started being remote friendly, in that we would hire folks who were willing to work from any different part of the country, who were willing to work from any different part of the country, and we were doing that before the pandemic hit, before it was sort of required for folks to do that, and so we were about 60% remote prior to the pandemic and so, as a result, once everyone started working remotely, we already had it figured out more or less, and that was a really big accelerant for us.
Gabe Monroy:And so today we're extremely proud of our remote first culture, and I love it because it allows us to go tap folks in. You know parts of Idaho or parts of you know Canada. You know where people may not have access or may not have thought they had access to really great careers in the tech industry. You know we can now get access to that talent and get access to those ideas.
George Davison:That makes a lot of sense. Actually, there's an open innovation which you can put out there on the world and find people all over the world to help you solve problems on things that you're trying to work on. It's been around for a while. Quite a few big innovations came out of that space. I don't think it would have happened if it wasn't so global and having access to people with their special areas and traits that they know so well, that makes them tick. So tapping people all over the world makes sense to me.
Gabe Monroy:Yeah, and it is, at the end of the day, a pretty intense battle for talent for companies like DigitalOcean talent for companies like DigitalOcean right, and we want to make sure that our ability to deliver for customers is attached to our ability to get the best talent in the world, and by being remote friendly, we can do a better job at that.
George Davison:Well, all right, so they scooped you up, so you're considered really great talent and did somebody help you along the way, like you didn't just become who you are. Were there mentors when you were in middle school or high school who were some of the influential people in your life, in your life when you were growing up?
Gabe Monroy:I had a really different story when I was growing up. I think one of the the things that was unique for me is my first bosses when I started working professionally were all female bosses in the technology industry, which, if you go back to when I was coming up in the late 90s and early 2000s, it's actually kind of rare to have female technologists in positions of leadership, and so, you know, those were my mentors growing up and they taught me a lot about. You know just you know humility in the workplace, how to communicate, how to deliver impact and sell your impact.
Gabe Monroy:I think one of the things that, yeah, I recall learning very much was it wasn't good enough to just do good work and then expect that the world would recognize your good work. You have to be able to evangelize why the work is important and sort of sell yourself. And some people think that that's chest thumping and maybe a little bit untoward in terms of how that shows up, but it's really important to be able to talk about the impact you're delivering and how you're innovating on behalf of customers, and that was one big takeaway from my mentors.
George Davison:You know, there's an old poem that goes hand in hand with what you just said he who has a thing to sell and goes and whispers in a well is not so apt to get the dollars as he who climbs a tree and hollers.
Gabe Monroy:I love that. That's a good one, all right.
George Davison:So that's great. You had some gals who were out there empowering you when you were beginning your life in the, let's say, the computer software space. But let's, can we go back a little further, sure?
Gabe Monroy:how about, let's?
George Davison:go back to like maybe when you're younger uh, let's say middle school or high school do you have parents who were married and they worked together to help you? Were they separated, can you?
Gabe Monroy:would you be willing to share some of that? Yeah, so. So my, my family story is, you know, a little abnormal, I would would say. Both of my parents are from the Caribbean. Actually, my father was born in Cuba, my mother was born on an island off the coast of Venezuela called Curacao, and so first generation Americans yes, and that's an interesting dynamic. My parents also were divorced when I was five and my father wasn't really around all that much, and so it was myself and my mother and my two sisters growing up, and so that definitely created an interesting dynamic for me personally.
Gabe Monroy:One of the things my mother did was she was starting small businesses as a bookkeeper, helping folks just get their bookkeeping system set up and do basic accounting for folks, get their bookkeeping system set up and do basic accounting for folks and you know, this is maybe in the mid-90s or early 90s. And it was through that experience of helping my mother get off the ground with some of that bookkeeping that I actually got access to computers right, because she needed the computers in order to build her bookkeeping business. Computers right, because she needed the computers in order to build her bookkeeping business, and so I ended up helping her set up the computers at the different you know clients that she was servicing and that's sort of how I got into that. Wow, yeah, that's a great story.
George Davison:I love that story. You know, yeah, divorce can be tough, but moms are tough, aren't they, boy? I tell you, they are driven people and when they, when they're, when they're alone with kids, it's amazing what they'll pull off. I came from a similar background single mother, driven, and I give her all all the reasons why I've become who I am because of my mom, really. I mean, there were lots of mentors, but started with mom absolutely so.
Gabe Monroy:you know, same thing for me and and you you know, as the the son, I was inspired by that drive that you're describing and definitely wanted to help out, and it allowed me to have a sense of empowerment and a feeling like I could do anything and sort of conquer anything after a few wins in terms of helping her. That helped me get the confidence I needed to branch out into doing things on my own. So before long I was setting up bulletin board systems with dial-in modems where I had my own business that I was running when I was 13, 14 years old. It was all because I had that confidence from helping my mother out and seeing the fruits of that.
George Davison:That's great. I'm sure she was complimentary of you along the way.
Gabe Monroy:I, I, yeah, I. I remember all the compliments vividly, as you can probably imagine.
Steven Ruffing:That's great Well thanks for sharing that yeah that's wonderful.
George Davison:So let if we were to go back to high school, if you could just try to trigger your mind on just something that wasn't so perfect. Did you have any trip ups? Did you have a failing grade? Did you have something that you had to work through in order to get to where you wanted to go?
Gabe Monroy:I yeah, I was not the best student, let's just put it that way which was really weird because I was in sort of a gifted and talented program where I was doing stuff in that space, but in my normal Spanish class and stuff like that, I was sleeping in class and I was just not great.
Gabe Monroy:And in retrospect I think it was because I was kind of bored. And what I took away from that experience was I really needed to focus on learning how to learn different things, and so that's kind of where I ended up going. But I think probably the biggest mistake I would say is the way that I went out of high school straight into college. I was not ready for that, and so I think I would have probably done a lot better had I taken a little bit more time between high school and college to figure out what I really wanted to do, because once I got into college, I only lasted a couple years before I went back into the workforce. I never graduated and I would have loved to have completed that journey, but I didn't know what I wanted. I didn't know what I really needed at the time and and and I felt pressure to kind of just go on the train straight into college, as people do, and even even today folks do, and I think perspective would have probably benefited me and being more patient.
George Davison:Yeah, that's helpful. The learning how to learn other things. You said yeah, so how did you teach yourself how to do that? Would you share that?
Gabe Monroy:please Sure, when I was really young I had access to computers and really young is, you know, it's it 10, 11 years old and the computers were the key to video games and I really wanted to play some video games right, and so the video games were the lure for me.
Gabe Monroy:And, as you can imagine, you know, back in these days it was kind of hard to get this stuff working right. It was always kind of broken and there was always some challenges. It was kind of hard to get this stuff working right. It was always kind of broken and there was always some challenges. But the idea of being able to play this video game was motivating to me, and so that took me through. It taught me perseverance, it taught me how to learn in order to go get the video game working so I could go play it on the weekend right. And so, you know, having that goal and figuring out what are the things I need to learn in order to achieve that goal was something, it was a pattern that I started to develop, and it started with those video games.
George Davison:So it sounds like when you engaged yourself to do your own self-learning right, I think we talked about something called flow, yes, called flow, yes, and maybe you could talk a little bit about what flow means to you and how you achieve flow when you're doing self-learning.
Gabe Monroy:Yeah, there's a book out there called flow and I read it and it really resonated with me. It's this idea that you know, sometimes we work on stuff and we really get lost in it. And if you think about the attributes of the kind of work that allows you to get lost in it, there's a few things that pop. The first is the activity has got to be the right amount of challenging Not too challenging, that it's frustrating, but challenging enough to keep you engaged. It also has to provide some rapid feedback. You've got to understand how well you're doing, because otherwise, if the feedback cycle is too long, again you'll get disinterested in it. And and also it has to enable you to feel a sense of accomplishment after you've done it.
Gabe Monroy:And when you get these things right, you will find that whatever you're doing maybe it's music, maybe it's art, maybe it's coding, maybe it's music, maybe it's art, maybe it's coding, maybe it's designing consumer products, could be lots of different things you'll start working on it and 12 hours will pass and it'll feel like five minutes right, right, like time travel. It's like time travel right. And and I and you know the book argues that there's a real strong correlation between that flow state that you know I'm describing and happiness, and so, for me, I'm always trying to figure out how can I create flow state for myself and how can I enable the creation of flow state for the teams that work at DigitalOcean and elsewhere, because I think it's really important to folks doing great work and to being happy in the work that they're doing.
George Davison:So anytime you start to feel that loss of time, that flow state, right. That's when, for example, when we're designing and creating new things, flow state. It happens a lot here and we do. We have a great time. You get a sense of euphoria and happiness when you're doing it, but before you know it you're late for dinner. Right, but you had a great day.
Gabe Monroy:I do want to point out it's harder today than it's ever been, right you think about the advent of TikTok and the advent of sort of the short form video and things like that. Attention spans have gone really short, right, and part of this idea of achieving flow state is focus for longer periods of time, and the world has sort of moved away from that in a lot of ways. So being attentive and focused on where are you finding the desire to stay tuned into something for a long period of time? It's a really important skill to develop now and it's gotten harder in the world.
George Davison:I agree with you. Do you have any hobbies?
Gabe Monroy:I do, I'm a technologist executive.
Gabe Monroy:I also live on a farm and I'm new at this right and again for me, I know nothing about farming. I know nothing about, or knew nothing I should say about, goats, chickens, livestock, guardian dogs, things like that. But I've got all that stuff today and it really keeps me engaged and I find that I can achieve that flow state that we were describing by cleaning a goat shed or a chicken coop, and during those periods I'll often get some of my best ideas related to work. Right, it's almost like disconnecting from the work and focusing on manual labor, including manual labor that smells really bad. I will get some really great ideas that I can, you know, sort of bring into my workday. And if I didn't have that hard disconnect from work and I stayed too plugged in for too long into my computer screen and type it in the keyboard, I wouldn't have that perspective, and so that's important for me.
George Davison:Yeah, we've learned to manage that here. It's that process of we have it represented with the open hand, meaning the mind is free and you're in flow state, but then when you grind and grind and grind, your hand gets tight or your mind gets tight to the point where your knuckles are white and you can't get an idea, you can't get into the rhythm and before you know it, you better let go. And when you let go and if you're trained in it, you go to nature. So I'm not surprised you have a farm. That's beautiful.
George Davison:You've figured all this out, because we're actually talking about that in the world in which we create for our staff, which is nature, is a very critical piece to unleashing yourself. Nature has been around with us for thousands of years and we can learn a lot from nature. Let's just say you have gifts inside you. That, and so do all human beings that are observational analysis, for example. Right, how do you learn to use your observational analysis when they don't teach it in school, but somehow another? We already have this gift. And when we're younger and we wander through nature, it's just that we feel very healthy and happy and we're always in a good mood, and then we get pulled into this other world, which is a little tighter all the time. Learning how to manage that pump turn it on and off is a process, and so it's great. It sounds like, hey, you're on the farm, lose yourself, you go into flow and then, subconsciously though, your mind's probably working on problems and then bang in comes the idea, or whatever the idea might. Does that sound?
Gabe Monroy:a little familiar, precisely, and I like to call it vitamin n and for nature, right, and we all need our dose of vitamin n, oh and, and you know if, if you don't get it, it's hard to find that perspective. But you're right, subconsciously that's really what it feels like. Right Is you're working on something else and subconsciously there's a background task that's in your head about your processing, your workday, and ideas will pop out of that in the back of your brain and will come to the front of your mind and insights. Innovation. That's a recipe for it, exactly I love hearing it.
George Davison:That's right on, all right, so sounds perfect. Your hobbies are wonderful. Knowing what you know today, what advice would you give a person interested in entering into that industry that you're in?
Gabe Monroy:I mentioned this a bit before but probably worth elaborating on. Learning how to learn is really important. There is the pace of innovation happening in the digital world today is incredibly fast. World today is incredibly fast. I feel really bad for the teachers who have to develop curriculum that can track how fast the world of technology is moving today, because it's like every six months there's some new disruptive innovation that comes out and it's like wait, here we go.
Gabe Monroy:We got to update the textbooks again, we got to update the curriculum again, and so, as a student, it's really important that you figure out a way to track that innovation as it's coming and figure out how to learn about it so that you can stay on top of your game faster than the more formal curriculums can develop, and so that's a skill that learning how to learn is something I'd really encourage folks to prioritize, and there's, fortunately, lots of resources online online learning programs things like Coursera or Khan Academy and different coding schools like that, where you can get access to tools that can help you learn. But this idea that you can't rely on a system to sort of feed you information in a push model, right, pushing the knowledge to you you have to figure out how to pull the knowledge that you're going to need, and that's an important shift in terms of, I think, how folks need to think about the future.
George Davison:And you can pull easier today than you ever were able to do before right. Correct. Yeah, Get in that internet, focus on what you want to learn and pull it out of there.
Gabe Monroy:Yeah, and you know, even things like learning how to do an effective Google search Right, like that's a, it's a thing that we might take for granted, but you know, if you talk to someone who has studied how to ask a question in a search engine and get the right answer from a trusted source, right, that's a very concrete skill that will take you real far, and it's not that hard to learn how to do it. If you put your mind to it. Well, that's good to know.
George Davison:See, there's hope out there, everybody All right. So let's see here Based upon where you are in your life and what you've brought with you, do you think anybody can be successful today?
Gabe Monroy:And that's a broad word meaning successful with your work, family, however you want to describe it. I absolutely do. I think that you know success is in the hands of individuals, right? But it's also important that you define what success means specifically, right? There's a Japanese concept called Ikagai which really resonates with me and something I use when I'm coaching different folks who I mentor, and Ikagai has sort of four concepts, and the first is what you're good at right. The second is what you enjoy doing, the third is what you can make money doing, and the fourth is what benefits the world right. And so when you talk about success right, really for me success is can you get the sweet spot in the middle of doing all those things at once what you're good at, what you enjoy, what makes you money and what the world needs right? And so the goal for me and for anyone that I'm involved in mentoring, is how do we find the sweet spot right in the middle where you can hit all those things? Because to me, that's what success is.
Gabe Monroy:Some people would define success is just the money part. Some people would define it as just you know doing work that you enjoy potentially, but ultimately, fulfillment is going to be striking that balance between all those things and over time, time it will change, right, because as we grow up, we change, we evolve, and so maybe we're a little bit out of balance Today. For me, just as a concrete example, one of the reasons I love DigitalOcean is we're serving small to medium-sized businesses, and I think they're wildly underserved, and so that's a what the world needs component.
Gabe Monroy:And so for me, success is can I contribute to what I think the world needs? And I think everyone has to wrestle with their own version of, uh of those questions well, that's perfect.
George Davison:We, as human beings I don't know about everybody else in the world, but most everybody I know we like to. I think the saying was put a dent in the universe, or you know, to make a contribution for your, you know, your fellow people. It just that's another feel good, that's a success. Like I made this impact. It took me a long time to figure all this out, but look at how many people benefit from it. Right, it's wonderful. It's a wonderful feeling.
Gabe Monroy:Yeah, and it's also very personal, right from it, right, it's wonderful, it's a wonderful feeling. Yeah, and it's also very personal, right. What success means is going to vary greatly individual to individual, and that's okay, right? That's part of the goal, and so I think the first step is just understanding what success means for you as an individual, understanding that that will change over time, and just start chipping away at it, right?
George Davison:That's great stuff, all right. So what one project that you think your industry has struggled with but you think would elevate humankind the most?
Gabe Monroy:That's a great question. Part of the world, you know, 16 million new developers are projected to enter the market by the end of 2023. So coming up pretty soon here, right, and you think about where those folks are. Right, they're not coming up in the, you know, western Europe or the Silicon Valley area, right, these are going to be in India, china, southeast Asia, africa, lots of different parts of the world.
Gabe Monroy:And so what do those folks need? What do we need as society to deliver to those individuals, to get their ideas and their innovations into our socioeconomic fabric? And that's a really important question for me. And so, when I think about what are the innovations that could enable that, that could democratize technology for those folks, there is this concept of low-code and no-code tools, this idea that you can build digital products without actually having to write classical computer code. So you can think of it as, like, I'm going to draw out a mobile app using sort of a move my mouse and put the box here and collect input here and feed that into some other tool, and you don't have to be a professional coder to build that application. Right, there exists those sort of tools today. They're not as good as they should be to empower those 16 million new developers that are entering the market, and so I would love to see that kind of tool get better in the interest of empowering that set of folks.
George Davison:That makes a lot of sense. So simplification to empower others who are coming up in the field. I remember back in the day when the mouse was invented at the research center for Xerox, I think, is where that came from and then Jobs got a hold of it and it changed the world. Simplification of complex ideas is a lot of opportunity in that space.
Gabe Monroy:Absolutely, and large companies don't have a monopoly on wisdom, but they do have a monopoly on the tools and technology required to deliver innovation in parts of the tech field today, and so we've got to break through that. We've got to figure out how to democratize that technology, and there's lots of ways we could do that, but to me that's the thing that would be the most helpful.
George Davison:Yeah, some of these new innovations that are coming out, they don't have the financing power that the big corporation has. That's another limiting factor at getting your innovation forward. All right, so last question what do you think the next big innovation will be in your industry?
Gabe Monroy:be in your industry. There's a lot. I talked before about this idea of serverless and locationless compute, and I do think that's an important one, but I'm taking a different pivot on that. I really think that artificial intelligence and machine learning is going to transform the technology landscape over the next decade. I think if we're sitting here 10 years from now and we're looking back on this period and we say, well, what really moved the needle for the industry as a whole, it's things like the OpenAI, gpt-3 language model or DALI 2.
Gabe Monroy:I don't know if you've seen the ability to create art images by asking an AI a prompt hey, give me a picture of a Colorado farmer wearing overalls with some goats behind them, and you get this beautiful picture of exactly what you described, and it's mind-blowing what that technology is able to do. And so when you think about applied artificial intelligence where, in this case, artificial intelligence applied to generating imagery, right, that kind of stuff is going to be radically transformative to the industry, and I think some people are very afraid of this, right? They think about well, oh gosh, is this going to disrupt my ability? As you know, I don't know a coder, right? Am I going to be replaced by artificial intelligence, and we've got to figure out how we can allow these to be tools that enable folks to be more productive, while accepting the disruptive innovation component, and so striking that balance is, I think, going to be interesting, but I do expect that to be transformative.
George Davison:I think you're right and it's really controversial in some ways right now. I was just reading about an article where these artists I think it was in California this big art competition and the person who won it was an AI art creation and the entire art community was like they, they went ballistic over. Hey, what's going to happen to us? And that transition when technology moves into traditional, let's say, industries, it can be kind of scary. In the beginning there was an just another little side story, but back. This is why innovation kind of throws people off for a while.
George Davison:But an example would be there's a little island right and you've got all these little Islanders there and and back ages ago and all the men would push their little boats out into the water and they fish right and then one day, you know, they bring back to catch in. One day this guy guy invents a net and he goes out and he catches enough fish for the entire village in a couple hours and the entire village goes crazy saying what are our people going to do? That's what we're supposed to do. But then shortly thereafter we had running water and better roofs and roads were built, and so that transition is kind of scary when innovation does move in. I hope you're right. I'm sure AI will rattle a lot of cages for a while, and then we'll figure out how that, as well as the telephone, the electric light bulb and everything else that transitioned and disrupted everything along the way. We'll figure it out.
Gabe Monroy:Yeah, and you know it's. The cloud computing industry is a pretty similar story, it's right. It's like there used to be a set of folks who were managing servers in a data center and racking and stacking gear and cabling the gear and dealing with power and cooling. And now, with the cloud, they don't have to do that anymore. Right, because they can go to DigitalOcean and they can purchase cloud resources right. And so there was a set of folks who were displaced. Right, because they were the ones who were working in the data center.
Gabe Monroy:It's like, oh, what happens to me now? What happens to my career? Well, guess what? It turns out that they were pretty easily retrained into writing software or helping manage the servers that were running in the cloud, or helping manage the servers that were running in the cloud. And so it's really about being adaptable to change more than anything and accepting sometimes that disruptive innovation will come. So, using your example of the fishing net, it's like, well, now that we've got a net, why don't you figure out how to attach that thing to a boat? Because once you do that, you can start collecting even more fish. And so I think it's that growth mindset that I think is really important for folks to keep in mind.
George Davison:Well, Gabe, I can't thank you enough for your time today and you sharing some of your life's wisdom with us so far so thank you for coming in.
Gabe Monroy:Thanks for having me.
George Davison:Bye everybody.
Steven Ruffing:Thank you for listening to this episode of Tomorrow's World Today podcast. Join us next time as we continue to explore the worlds of inspiration, creation, innovation and production. Discover more at tomorrowsworldtodaycom. Connect with us on social media at TWT. Explore and find us wherever podcasts are available.
