Bryan Schielke 0:00

Thanks again for joining me, Jerry. I really appreciate it. Let's jump in here and get to some questions and uh love to hear and learn more about you and your background in your business. So, first question here. You've reinvented yourself multiple times from jazz composition to Wall Street Tech to Microsoft to Healthcare Cloud. How do you know when it's time to pivot versus push through the messy middle?

Gerry Miller 0:20

It's a great question. I don't know, is really the answer. Just about everything that I've done in my life has been the result of a happy accident. I like to say I'm probably the luckiest guy alive. So life lets me know when it's time, and it often is not clear at the time what the right thing to do is. Pushing through the messy middle, though, is one of the more important things at cloutity. We have a number of attributes that make a successful cloutan. Tenacity is one of them. And so we're very much focused on getting through some of the more difficult challenges that life tends to bring. As to when it will be time for me to wrap up this chapter and move on to the next, I just can't say.

Bryan Schielke 1:00

Gotcha. That makes sense. Well, glad it's worked out. And obviously it's worked out really well. So fantastic. Thank you. Okay. Next question. At Microsoft, you helped grow a business from 20 million to 100 million fast. What leadership habits did you build there that still show up in how you run Cloud Ticity today?

Gerry Miller 1:18

It was really a team effort. At Microsoft, I was fortunate to work with about a hundred uh virtual team members around the world. And everybody was super focused on understanding exactly where we needed to take the business. And my job was primarily to get out in front and just clear the way. So I like to say I'm a good bulldozer to clear the way so that the folks that I'm fortunate enough to work with can get their jobs done effectively. I was blessed with a phenomenal team there. We had a very clear mission, and the team clearly succeeded in what we set out to do. Awesome.

Bryan Schielke 1:54

Great to hear. You've built several firsts in healthcare cloud, including a patient portal and a health information exchange on AWS. What did you get wrong early? And what did that mistake teach you about scaling in regulated industries?

Gerry Miller 2:08

That's a great question. Um I like to say that I'm a uh PhD from the School of Hard Knocks. So if it could go wrong, it did. And if there's a mistake to be made, I probably made it. We took on a lot of firsts, and we continue to do that at Cloud Tisson. And so we're gonna get things wrong. I would say that the thing that we generally get right is graceful failure. So we like to say that on any given day, if we haven't failed at something, we haven't tried hard enough. And so we continue to do that. So we continue to take on the hardest challenges in healthcare, the hardest challenges in technology, and we continue to focus on the end goal, to really understand that the industry that we're privileged to serve is here to help people. And so if at the end of the day we can help our clients better serve their patients, then we've done our job. And if it gets a little bit messy along the way, we're okay with that.

Bryan Schielke 3:06

Love it. Stick to the mission. That's fantastic. All right. When New York State needed a compliant COVID data lake in March 2020, you delivered in six days. We did. What did you prioritize? What did you ignore? And how did you keep the team aligned under extreme pressure?

Gerry Miller 3:22

That's a another very good question. What we prioritized was the fact that thousands of people were dying a day. At the time that we took on that mission, New York State was the hardest hit state with COVID, with more deaths per capita than any other state in the U.S. And so our primary focus was moving as fast as we could to get the information in the hands of the people that could start to fix that problem. And so we eliminated all noise. For six days, we eliminated all sleep. But that was what was necessary to get the job done. And it was a challenging project because not only was it technically challenging, but I remember on the first call that we had with the entire team, there were over 200 people on the call. So there were about a dozen state agencies involved. There were, you know, many folks from our partners at Amazon Web Services, there were our team. So we had to collaborate with a very large and geographically dispersed team, every one of whom was focused exclusively on what we had to get done. The next thing was the technical challenge. Health data tends to be pretty messy. And so we had to collect from a wide variety of disparate sources some very challenging data at tremendous scale and put it into a state that was usable so that the epidemiologists and the government folks and the hospital folks and the clinicians could all derive meaningful sense from the data. And we enabled some pretty interesting use cases. So we built a contact tracing program on top of this. And so there were thousands of people that were would get phone calls that they had been in contact potentially unknownly with somebody who had had COVID. We were able to do analytics to determine comorbidities, so things that go along with COVID that tend to produce worse outcomes like diabetes or obesity. We were able to do geographic analytics to predict when a hospital might run out of an ICU bed or out of a ventilator and dynamically shuffle inventory. And so all of these use cases fell out of this fantastic project that we were able to participate in.

Bryan Schielke 5:45

That is amazing. Unbelievable. Yeah. Well, congrats on that. Very cool. Okay. Thank you. Next question here. You have a track record of improving growth and retention by making employees actually want to stay. What are the specific cultural rules you set when a company is scaling fast and burnout is looming?

Gerry Miller 6:02

That's a good one. Well, it generally starts with the hiring process, right? So we want to attract the right kind of first. We have a very diverse workforce, which is absolutely critical to our ability to succeed. But everybody shares certain common traits. And so everybody is tenacious and has a high degree of integrity and is but the factor that I look for the most is curiosity. So all cloutitians have this innate, almost insatiable curiosity. And the work that we do is not rote. Every day brings something new and exciting and unexpected and potentially a little bit frightening. But because we have such a curious workforce, every problem that crops up is an opportunity to dig into that exploratory sense that we all share as cloutitians. And we're on an important mission together. Our vision has been from day one to help every human on earth get healthier through the work that we do. And that might sound like a large vision, and we don't expect that we're going to save the world, but if we can make it just a little bit better, then that's the reason that all of our team gets out of bed every morning. And so that shared sense of purpose and that drive toward curiosity and towards solving problems that are meaningful to humanity is, I think, what keeps clouditians engaged, even though day by day the work can be really hard.

Bryan Schielke 7:35

That's amazing. Very cool. Okay. Uh last question here. Summit sessions is about relationship-driven success across startups, turnarounds, and enterprise deals. What's the most underrated relationship you invest in and how has it changed outcomes for your business?

Gerry Miller 7:51

I think we across our whole team, we invest in every relationship. When I gauge the how a person is going to show up, both to work or even at life, I look at how they treat everybody around them. I look at how they might treat the waiter that brings them a cup of coffee in the morning. And that should be no less of a relationship than your spouse or the people that you work with. There are a certain category of people that just value other people. And they wouldn't think to pass a stranger by in the street without saying hello or some sort of acknowledgement. And across the board, those are the relationships that I think both me personally as well as the team that I'm privileged to work with, we invest there. And in doing so, we try to brighten the room a little bit because that's the value of what we do at CloudCity. You know, again, our vision of helping every human on earth get healthy through the work that we do is an important one. And if we as a team of people are unwilling to invest in even what feels like the most trivial of relationships, then we'll never be able to achieve that higher purpose.

Bryan Schielke 9:10

Absolutely. Wow, that is amazing.