Matt's Journey from Hospitality to Tech

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

Early Days of Megaport Startup

Speaker 2 3:30

, 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

Global Expansion and Brazil Challenges

Speaker 1 6:34

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

Internet Exchange Growth Strategy

Speaker 1 10:12

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

Discovering New Market Opportunities

Speaker 1 12:56

. 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 ,

Channel Business and Future Direction

Speaker 2 16:35

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 .