Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to Uplink, where we explore the world of digital infrastructure, uncovering the technology, fueling AI and cloud innovation, with the leaders making it happen. I'm your host, michael Reid, and in this episode we get to know Matt Simpson, evp of Business Development and Global Channel here at Megaport. Matt tells his story about pivoting from hospitality to tech and the massive impact it's had on his life. Let's dive in. Yeah, matty, hey.

Speaker 2: 0:33

What's up?

Speaker 1: 0:36

So, Matty, 11 years Megaport. You've always been in tech. You always wanted to be in tech. Your background's pretty cool man. You're basically adding it into land curating the world's best experience for anyone coming into those facilities. I think that was. Was that screws wife, or something you built, though?

Speaker 2: 0:56

yeah, jude turner, yeah, graham turner, and flight center. So you're like five years old and you're running the whole thing pretty much yeah, like 29, I think it was, and I was out there building retreats, yeah, so it was really fun. Um out on 10 000 acre properties. You know, I think it was 5 000 head of cattle. I had no idea about cattle, but I knew how to guess.

Speaker 1: 1:22

Yeah, here's the cattle look after the guest. Yeah, build a retreat, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:26

Yeah, that's pretty cool but it was very tolling um great industry. My hobbies are like wine and food, yes, but I kind of was like oh, I want my weekends back yeah, yeah, it's never ending but also just watching tech and where it was going and my brother is in it, yeah, and he was sort of getting me sort of primed and ready for it.

Speaker 1: 1:44

Yeah so.

Speaker 2: 1:45

I had this conversation with this guy called Bevan Slattery. How did she come across that guy?

Speaker 1: 1:52

Through my brother actually. Oh, wow, Okay.

Speaker 2: 1:54

Yeah, so my brother was hosting he's in data center Was he Hosting, service Hosting yeah, yeah, and he was like a pretty big customer of Bevan's one of his other companies, next DC, yes, and so he was like you should go and have coffee with this guy called Bevan. I was like I have no idea, that's so funny. We just caught up and we, like Bevan was telling me about this vision of this company that he was trying to build, yeah, and it was like, okay, I'm sold, like I need to get into this. At the time he was like, look, matty, I don't really have anything for you, but look, maybe we can start you in sales. So I was like, of course, yeah, I'm in.

Speaker 1: 2:36

I'm in, which is funny, because Megaport was just getting formed. Yeah, we hadn't figured out. I don't think we'd figured out the value.

Speaker 2: 2:50

A lot of stuff doing all these pieces. I know you were selling stuff that probably wasn't even built yet. Um well, I always remember my first week it was. I walked in, uh, people were sort of scrambling around a typical startup. Yeah, it was really exciting because all the desks were bunnings, bunnings, plastic tables yeah, but we had awesome like macbooks, that was pretty exciting so the tech was awesome, yes, the furniture maybe not so much.

Speaker 2: 3:11

But I remember the first week it was like, okay, you're going to this event called aws reinvent and I had no idea what that was. And then I was going down with libby trickett I mean some people, you know, uh yeah, yeah and we're out there, like just out on the floor, selling this dream and so libby's a like, a world um champion, swimmer, swimmer, pitching megaport.

Speaker 1: 3:34

With you coming, you've been running cattle and building resorts.

Speaker 2: 3:39

Yeah, uh, you're at aws right in the deep end. Um, but it was the fun.

Speaker 1: 3:44

And it was 11 years ago. So the company's what one or less than Probably no, like maybe six months in, six months in? Yeah, yeah, we had a couple of customers.

Speaker 2: 3:54

Aws was also pretty new then, yeah, so I remember those events were tiny. But, just being on this booth and just interacting with all these potential customers.

Speaker 1: 4:05

Who were new to the cloud. I mean, you rewind, it's normal now, but back then that was like leading edge. I remember people trying to explain the pitching, that people there's this cool thing called the cloud and it was like we'll never go away from that. You know on-premise blah, blah, blah. And then it's exploded. Obviously now what 70,000 people are at those events, but you were there at the start with this company that was still building, trying to figure out where its home was yeah, I mean like a typical startup, like you jump in even though you have a sales title.

Speaker 2: 4:32

You were sort of product. You were marketing everything, you know everything and that's what I loved about it, yeah. And then, 11 years later, you probably still a little bit of that like. It is yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:42

You're inventing new tech. I mean, you keep coming back with more ideas. One thing I love about Megaport is the closer you are to the customers, they'll tell you the feedback and they'll tell you what challenges or problems that they'd love us to solve. And we are still so disruptive. Even that sort of vision from 11 years ago is super disruptive today. But you're always coming back. You're like hey, I think we should build this. Internet's a great example, and we've rolled that platform out. That thing has exploded. In hindsight, it's so. That was such a simple thought to add to the product set. But uh, it doesn't. It comes from our customers asking for more, and I know you're trying to build out all these other cool things. You just launched brazil. We're in 26 countries and I know we pulled you from australia to the us to kick that thing off way back when, and yeah, so I moved.

Speaker 2: 5:30

I moved to the us six years ago and that was mainly because all of the hyperscalers, their offices were on the west coast. Yes, of course you have to be very near, yeah, and near like silicon valley so it was like it made sense to make that move.

Speaker 2: 5:44

But I feel, feel like during my whole time at Megaport we've always come up with these crazy ideas and you think, oh, maybe they may not stick. And sometimes you know, the board or even the exec were like, yeah, let's do it. And then all of a sudden we're sprinting to sort of the finish line yeah, hustle, yeah, Launching, delivering, yeah.

Speaker 1: 6:04

And it's not easy with network because you've actually got to roll out, you've got to connect to the fiber, connect to the locations, build all the resiliency, get the hardware rolled out, installed, delivered. There's lead times. So it always is astounding how fast the team move. I know you're pushing the team. I mean there's smoke coming off these guys' keyboards and they're like what are you? 80 data centers a year or something that you're pushing. I know you turned up to Brazil. You're like we'll start with a couple, and I think you came back up. We came back after that session. We're like no, it's 13. 13 data centers, different regions, all the connectivity, yeah, what?

Speaker 2: 6:39

next, what are we doing? Well, I mean just to talk about that sort of expansion. It was pretty incredible, like when I started we thought 10 data centers in australia connecting to this little thing called aws was pretty cool and it was, it was game changing?

Speaker 2: 6:54

yes, because everyone was like, oh, I've got to get a fiber or a circuit from an incumbent carrier, um, and now it's just mind-boggling like 26 different countries. There's a lot of flights Like I have pretty good status, you know, with United, but Brazil, I think, was the most interesting project for us. I think.

Speaker 1: 7:17

Well, yes, your 930 data centers. You had 25 countries, the 26 with Brazil, Probably one of the harder or more challenging ones to land in the more challenging ones, I mean we had a little bit of change at Megaport, but it was just.

Speaker 2: 7:31

There was a lot of times where we were like, okay, this is probably going to be too hard for us, but we pushed through and we were able to get through. You know some of those importation hurdles yes, licenses. You know some of those importation hurdles yes, licenses.

Speaker 1: 7:43

So costly Local entities, yeah, all the government regulations and there's the costs that come in on top of it. I know there's a lot of tariff discussion, but Brazil, I think you know, almost double whatever you're bringing in, and so you've got to build the business case on that. That's one of the things that's cool, for where you're at, you're always, and I think that you know you're landing, you're a builder and you're placing bets and the company is supporting the bets, or the company, in effect, is placing bets based on what you're thinking. But that's what's cool is you're like it's a new market, we don't know. You don't know anything until you land, like you can place all the thesis and all the strategy that you like, but until you land and actually execute a game so that you don't know how it's going to play out, that's right, and that's where you're like first feet on the ground. I think this makes a lot of sense. We're getting the data, we're getting feedback from the market. Our customers and partners want us to be there.

Speaker 2: 8:35

They want us to get there.

Speaker 1: 8:36

So there's a few pieces that are sort of pushing. It Still got a land puddle. I mean Brazil's massive as well, actually.

Speaker 2: 8:43

What was really interesting, I think, is that, whilst it was the most challenging market to get into, most of our expansion has been sort of, you see, sort of a little bit of slow adoption in the early days, like the first 12 months. But Brazil is really unique Like we've exploded. Like we've gone from just two data centers and now we're rolling out to 13 yeah, within a space of six months. Like all those 25 other countries. Like never been that you land first and then you see, work out where the demand is. But we've had the sort of opposite, yes, with brazil. What I would say the biggest learning from this is you got to find the right people.

Speaker 2: 9:21

Yeah, you got to find the best talent, yeah, and we have an incredible builder as well down in in sao paulo, and I think that that has been really integral for our expansions.

Speaker 1: 9:31

Finding those people and you know what's funny with adriano is like when I first met him, he was always very. He had such an entrepreneurial mindset yes, uh, and that like that belief that we're just going to build and zero fear around it actually.

Speaker 1: 9:47

Maybe he had more fear, but he certainly showed up pretty good and then. So our job is just to support him and sort of put wood behind that arrow. You're doing that everywhere. I know you run the IXs globally and I think we've rolled out more IXs in the last year than ever before and we're going bigger again.

Speaker 1: 10:04

Ix is an interesting space, particularly with the new platform that we've rolled out from a compute stack. What's really cool is that before to build an IX was actually pretty costly. You had all these compute servers. You had to figure out a location, kind of where we've landed is that the compute stack. There's almost no cost for us to build out an IX with the infrastructure we have. Obviously there's the infrastructure and we're building that anyway, and so then with the new compute stack, you can run the route service on that at no additional cost from a hardware perspective, and so from a community perspective, the IEX is always bending back, giving back to the community in terms of, you know, keeping routes, local peering easily not sending traffic everywhere, saving the internet, so to speak. So I know you've got some plans around that.

Speaker 2: 10:53

We're like like let's leverage it yeah, I mean that one also is expanding pretty quickly. We thought that from an internet exchange perspective, that it was maybe sort of a saturated market and where sort of the cost of transit sort of coming down. But as we've been building up all of these ixs, we've seen these, these different types of peers, like cdns and eyeballs, actually joining. Yes, because I think you know my 11 years of megaport, the foundation really hasn't changed. It's about enriching that ecosystem, yeah, and the ixs bring that community together. Yes, so we've always, to your point, it's always been sort of that value add. So they're like okay, well, I've already got a port that I'm connecting to cloud actually makes sense to peer with megaport instead. Um, again the brazil market. We thought, well, there's ixbr, they're a great ix, they've got all the cdns and eyeballs, we'll, we'll partner with them. But then what we found was customers wanted like a redundant solution.

Speaker 1: 11:53

Yeah, and it makes it easy for us to go and build an SLA. They want that. You mentioned something before that I think a lot of people miss in terms of the value that Megaport brings, and that is when we build the network. We, if you and this is kind of what I've realized over time is that you go into a data center and you end up needing all these services like you need internet, you need data center interconnect, you need cloud connectivity uh, you need all these sort of different pieces of the puzzle. Ix, internet exchange connectivity. Oh, I need a connection to someone in the ecosystem. Cloudflare for us is huge. Hey, I'm in this data center, but I want a private connection to cloud or salesforce or whoever and whatever.

Speaker 1: 12:33

And what happens is you end up then you need that redundant. So you end up with like multiple paths. The cool thing about Megaport was, instead of talking to five different or six different companies or 10 different companies to go and get those connections together. Particularly when you add all the cloud providers in there, one piece of infrastructure being the port that you connect to, the Megaport would give you all of that access. That's kind of the cool story. So, instead of having to run multiple cross-connects to every single connection that you need. You build out network on your side to connect to every single provider each time and then trying to manage that For resiliency, you take two ports, one blue, one red, and then you've got all this sort of connectivity, all these other pieces all the other service providers, and it doesn't necessarily need to be in that same data center.

Speaker 2: 13:19

And as we grow more and more data centers, there's more and more service providers. What's really, I think, kind of cool is we've, we've got this marketplace and sometimes we we know like, yeah, aws, microsoft, that's a no-brainer, but then we sort of we kind of trip over these new players in the market Totally who are really disrupting in their space. Like the Wasabi story is really cool Totally, the latitudes, yeah, and you start digging.

Speaker 1: 13:45

They're not as a service crew, they're storage folks who are actually doing something different. Yeah, and adding even like when we came like the, and adding Even like when we came back. The NAT Gateway product is another example just coming along. All these things were sort of stumbling across, yeah, yeah, and then all of it. I love it because we get to see how people are connecting and we say we'll see it, we'll see the reality of it. Ai was a great example. You build the AI exchanges out. We went really, really quickly in that space.

Speaker 2: 14:15

And quickly in that space and bringing that community of interest together. And then, when we looked at it, 35 providers okay, we thought it was just a couple.

Speaker 1: 14:21

Yeah, and they're growing. Um, and this is the other piece we all see. One thing I also love is when we've brought them on. It takes a while and then all of a sudden we see traffic like one whole thing is the proof is in the traffic, yep, and when you see the traffic explode, for certain it.

Speaker 1: 14:38

When we saw wasabi take off as a really good example. What is this thing and what and that? And it's proof that someone's using it. You can't send like 100 giga traffic to anything unless you're doing something really interesting. And then we saw wasabi take off. We've seen different AI providers inside those exchanges take off. We're seeing the new providers of AI inference take off, so it is changing.

Speaker 2: 15:05

And how do we on-ramp them? And then they're trying to work out where do they need to be, wherever sort of Megaport is, which is really cool.

Speaker 1: 15:12

That was cool. I mean, some of them are literally looking at the data centers that Megaport are in and choosing their space to build their own clouds, because they've realized that the slowest thing is actually the network and so, again, that value prop around 60 seconds to connect. And now, given that you've 10x the network to 100 gig, it's like 100 gig connection in 60 seconds at all these different locations and the global piece was a really interesting one. It's like, um, my favorite one is your demo.

Speaker 1: 15:38

when we first came, we came on the connection from, uh, london to sydney or whatever it was, and we realized that price is wrong. So, you know, we had to reshape the pricing, which was a big deal, and you are welcome by the way I'm so glad that I did.

Speaker 2: 15:52

You found it yeah, I think it was. It was Manchester to Sydney and I was like I don't know, a customer probably wants Manchester to Sydney at 10 gig. I think it was some ridiculously crazy price.

Speaker 1: 16:05

Well, and we solved all that, but now we're seeing customers take it up. So, yeah, there's lots of cool stuff. I mean you're continuing to build. You also run the channel business, which is different in each country, in each region. The US has got a really interesting channel program that we're doubling down on. I think a huge portion of our revenue is pushed from that team. It's just so different actually, the channel business in the US versus anywhere else in the world.

Speaker 2: 16:32

In the world. Yeah, it's an incredible business. I mean, these types of agents are out there selling co-location, all types of technology, and you just don't. You can't sort of grasp how they're understanding all the different types of tech, but, yes, somehow, like, they're getting us into the some of the largest customers in the world. So it's just, it's amazing yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:55

Well, maddie, keep building, keep doing all the amazing stuff that you're doing, the all the ideas, all the innovation, not only from a product, but the locations, the data centers, the countries, the, the speed our push into ip transit, more, more, more more, more, more, faster, faster, faster, more everywhere.

Speaker 2: 17:14

And now, yeah, I mean, it's been a great journey and a ride for the last 11 years. I'm I think, uh, we're only just getting started. Yeah, where are you gonna live? Who?

Speaker 1: 17:23

knows who knows where do we send you? Oh my gosh, there's a lot of requests from other crazy countries. Do you want to go there?

Speaker 2: 17:29

I think san francisco's got you, yeah I think the bay area is is where I'll stay for a little while. Yeah, that's cool.

Speaker 1: 17:36

I appreciate all the hustle, all the travel, everything you've built. It's amazing.

Speaker 2: 17:39

Love it. Thanks, man, thanks Chuck Cheers mate.