In this episode of Making Markets, former Splunk CEO Doug Merritt joins the show to talk about what is going on with tech, growth, the economy, and how the shifting policy may or may not affect the long-term growth of tech.
We also dive into this week’s earnings including IBM, Intel, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Apple. Finally, we explore how Merritt is looking at Web 3.0, Crypto, and the Metaverse for future investments and impact on tech and the world.
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: As suspected, tech earnings were largely outstanding, and the market’s negativity towards tech shows a disconnect from reality. Tech is deflationary. However, it is actually a growth engine in all economic conditions.
This week, Doug Merritt, former CEO of Splunk, joins the show to talk about earnings, tech, growth, and even a little bit of Web3 and crypto. So strap in for another dive into the tech deep end right here on Making Markets.
Announcer: This is the Making Markets podcast, brought to you by Futurum Research. We bring you top executives from the world’s most exciting technology companies, bridging the gap between strategy, markets, innovation, and the companies featured on the show.
The Making Markets podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Please do not take anything reflected in this show as investment advice.
Now, your host, principal analyst and founding partner of Futurum Research, Daniel Newman.
Daniel Newman: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another edition of Making Markets. Excited to be joined here today by my friend, former CEO of Splunk, Mr. Doug Merritt.
Doug, welcome aboard.
Doug Merritt: Thank you. Nice to see you. Thanks for having me.
Daniel Newman: It is nice to see. I meant to have you on when you were running the show over at Splunk. You and I have done a bunch of these kinds of one-on-ones, but different platforms, different show, different topics. You keynoted our Six Five Summit a couple times. Super grateful for that.
The world’s looking a little bit different for you right now. What’s going on?
Doug Merritt: Definitely, definitely looking different. Eight years of driving Splunk. As the board and I were talking about me moving on, my immediate response was, “Not a bad idea, because I cannot think of a single day in eight years where I woke up and thought, ‘What am I doing today? Let me just relax and kick back, and not worry about something.'”
It’s actually nice to not have that wake up at 2:00 AM every single night with some worry. When you’re a senior exec or CEO of a company, any company, and certainly a company like Splunk, there is not a day that goes by where you don’t have an HR issue, a product issue, a customer issue, a opportunity. That keeps you up at night. So it’s just nice to get a little bit of downtime.
I’m really back into heavy, heavy learning mode, which I’m super excited about. Another thing that a lot of people don’t realize is, given the operational intensity of running any company, and then going through a transformation like Splunk was going through, I was myopically focused on how to transform this company and operate this company. I know a lot about the data space and the cyber space, since those were two of the key areas they were focused on, but I have not had that much time to actually sit back and reflect.
The things that I used to do all time, just meet with interesting people just to have a coffee and learn, get onto a website and play, download a product and play with it, listen to your podcast, and other awesome people’s, as they’re talking about interesting trends in the market. So it’s been great.
Actually beginning to get thoughtful about maybe I should step on a couple boards and advise a couple of CEOs. It’s been a really interesting and refreshing five, six, seven weeks since mid-November, the first month and a half or so, helping with the transition, and spending a ton of time at Splunk. Now, it’s moderate time. So I get some Doug time for a while, which has been good.
Daniel Newman: All I could think about as you were saying that is the luxury of choice. And then I thought about what doesn’t keep a CEO up at night. As someone who runs a growing private company, not nearly at the same scale is what you were doing at Splunk, I can think of a thousand things that keep me up at night.
The luxury of choice of being able to pick a few boards, pick a few projects. Having had a lot of success, hopefully accumulating a little bit of … I’ll call it flexibility rather than wealth. You’ve accumulated choice of what you might do next.
You’re absolutely right, though. You definitely get into this lane where you’re thinking about what you have to think about.
If you look across the sphere of tech because I’ve been lucky enough to be one of those people. We’ve had lunch, we’re going to do that again next week, and just talking about things. You talk about what’s going on in DeFi, what’s going on in crypto, what’s going on in growth.
I’ll put it this way. A lot of people probably look at an announcement and what happened in your exit at Splunk, and they might try to find the negative in it. But I look at it as something to celebrate. You had a great eight-year run. The market is in a very interesting spot right now. It might not be the worst time to not have to swim and navigate those waters. You’ve got people you know that are carrying the ship forward, and of course, you’re going to root for. You probably have some financial benefit if they keep crushing it for you. But overall, I love the fact that you’re going to have a moment here to pivot and do something different.
Doug Merritt: Yeah. The timing does seem very opportune right now, honestly. You’re right. If I go back to when I entered, we were $300 million in perpetual license revenue, which is roughly the equivalent of $100 million of annual recurring revenue, if we had that component when I joined. I exited at almost 3 billion. We were 2.92 billion at the Q3 of ARR, of annual recurring revenue.
To be with a company just under eight years, and take it from a hundred million to three billion, unbelievable opportunity. I could not be more grateful and more honored to have been part of that journey. I think there’s still a ton of growth in front of Splunk. Yes, I do have financial interest, I love the company and am rooting for the company.
But I do think we all knew that the valuations and the multiples that we were looking at were not long term sustainable. It had nothing … I’m not going to call it a bubble. We’ve just seen cycles where 5X is the norm on a high growth company. Up to, what, 120, 140 was what we were dealing with. It always is somewhere in between those two. Never as conservative as down markets. Never as euphoric as the up markets. So we knew that compression was going to come. It’s always hard to go through that change.
But the good part about this cycle that I can see is there’s a ton of unbelievably awesome companies out there. They are real businesses. Now, they’re hundred million plus in ARR, $500 million in ARR, in annual current revenue, and they’re growing at 30, 50, 80, 100%. So those are real businesses with cashflow positivity. The valuations just becoming more normal.
I think that’s a great opportunity for the teams that are there. And when you look at the private markets, that eventually will follow. Public markets. There’s going to be a ton of opportunity to be thoughtful about acquisitions and about combinations.
We’ve all seen that there are probably a lot of companies that exist as independent that probably are features, which always happens in markets. Now, they get to be part of a actual product portfolio that’s not just a set of features.
I’m excited to get some free time, personally, but then also given what’s going on with the industry right now. Because I view the next five years, irrespective of valuations, as unbelievably exciting. I still think we’re in the first, second, maybe third inning of a nine inning or more, if we go into overtime, game here. Tech has got so much more run in front of it.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. It’s a really exciting time to be in tech. I love what you said about the private public. Cathie Wood is pretty unpopular right now, especially for anybody who invested in her ETFs. Pretty amazing to watch funds that are diversified fall 50%, but that’s been the recent trend with growth.
The fact of the matter is, is the weighted indices are a complete misrepresentation of what the market dynamics actually look like right now. I heard rumor somewhere between 40 and 50% of the NASDAQ are now down over 50% off their highs. Now, there’s a lot of things that can be at fault for that.
When I called you up to come on the show, besides the fact that I know you had a little more time now than you had when you were at Splunk, when I was trying to get you on the show, also one of the things that I like is that right now you have a little bit more of the ability to have an unfiltered view. I get a CEO, a former CEO at the moment, to give a little more of that unfiltered view.
Because my recent guests, some really, really sharp guys … I had Honeywell’s Darius Adamczyk. I had Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon. I had Antonio Lucio from HP. These are brilliant guys, but they’re running companies, and they have to … There’s always a framework. They can only say so much about things like this.
Doug Merritt: For sure.
Daniel Newman: Right now, we’re in this really interesting market dynamic. We are in a situation where growth has been slaughtered, effectively. Big tech is starting to see some legitimate pullbacks, Doug. I wrote an article today in MarketWatch, and I wrote it because, partially, you could say it was therapy. The header was, Technology companies are outperforming expectation as the Fed lowers the boom.
I was just looking at this week. Okay. I’ll just start off here, because I’m framing the question. Netflix is not really a growth company. It was a convenient N in a word that would’ve not worked very well if you took it out.
But the companies were starting to see report this week are real tech companies, real enterprise and somewhat in consumer. Now, Apple’s actually reporting as we speak. I might see if I can pull that up. We could talk about it later.
We had IBM go Monday. IBM has been a monolith that has a hard time growing throughout the growth boom. Guess what. They shedded off some big overhead in their managed business, the Kyndryl GTS. Now, they’re growing. It only took a quarter. They’re growing, and they’re growing in cloud, hybrid cloud, data automation.
Tuesday, Microsoft reported, and to nobody’s surprise, had a killer quarter. Strong guidance.
That was one of the things I said, Doug. I said revenues and earnings probably will be good, because a lot of this shift happened about Thanksgiving forward, in terms of sentiment starting to shift. I said, but the guidance, everyone’s going to be like, “Well, are these companies going to start becoming a little bit more cautious?” Not Microsoft.
Yesterday, Intel … Nobody thought Intel was going to do well. Intel did extremely well, record revenues, slight margin compression with their new process.
I guess my point is big companies doing really well. Have we gotten out over our skis? Is growth going to be this bad, or are we just normalizing? What do you think the outlook is for big tech and growth?
Doug Merritt: First of all, Cathie and her team, super thoughtful, intelligent people. I have loved interacting with them. They’ve got a very defined position. That position is unpopular with sentiment right now. So of course, they’re going to see that, the outcome.
But as you were leading into, I think the fundamentals are legitimate. Warren Buffet, I think, is at least credited with saying, “In the short term, the market is a voting machine. In the long term, it’s a weighing machine. We’ve all got to focus on the weighing.” When I look out over the next three to five years, it’s not even remotely surprising that Microsoft, Intel, curious to see Apple, but that-
Daniel Newman: Hey. Hold on. I’ll give it to you. I’ll give it to you, because I just found it. You want it?
Doug Merritt: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: All right. Earnings were $2.10 cents versus 1.89 estimated. So pretty significantly on the bottom line. Revenue came in at 123.9 versus 118. I would say that’s a near blowout for Apple, which is very closely tracked. It’s not easy for them to blow them out.
Doug Merritt: It’s not.
Daniel Newman: But go ahead. Sorry. There you go. You got them all.
Doug Merritt: That makes sense to me, because the underlying fundamentals that we all get tired of hearing about, that the world is still going through and at the very beginning, sadly, interestingly, a digital transformation, it’s real.
There is significant productivity and agility that comes to an organization as they digitize more business processes. To digitize business processes, you need to buy a bunch of tooling. You need to buy a bunch of apps. You need to consume a bunch of infrastructure. That infrastructure means you’re consuming a bunch of silicon, compute, a bunch of networking products, bunch of storage.
Are interest rates going up more? Yeah, I think so. I think we’ll agree on that. Inflation real? Probably. It seems like it. Through that, do companies still have to find a way to grow? Yes. Are consumers going to still have some purchasing? Absolutely. Are every one of those organizations need to find efficiencies and effectiveness increases? Yes, they will. I think the tech industry will continue to be the driver, as it has for the past couple decades, of those trends.
What has changed is the over-optimism, and potentially, mostly it happens with capital, but potentially the overbidding on the promise of some of these companies. But again, as we started with, so many of these organizations that have recently gone public, and have seen these astronomical market caps, are fundamentally good companies. They are cashflow positive. They are real revenues. Now, once you get above 100, 2, $300 million in annual recurring revenue, that’s real. That’s a legitimate company. Much less these mega companies like Microsofts, Intels and Apples we just talked about.
I am and remain a super strong bull on the tech industry and how much more potential it has, because I still think the reach is pretty limited versus what is possible. In many ways, I’m actually happy that there’s a little bit more of a realistic perspective on how these companies should be valued, so that they don’t have five years to grow into their valuation, which is what I think we were seeing with some of the multiples that, at least for now, are behind us. We’ll see what-
Daniel Newman: Yeah. Some of the rev multiples were off the charts big. You had some companies that you certainly saw, they pulled a lot of growth forward. Companies like Zoom, where … Eric Yuan, a great CEO.
Doug Merritt: He is.
Daniel Newman: He’s proven. That company is going to be fine, no matter what the exit is, whether it’s they build a platform and grow, or they get acquired by AWS and become the Teams competitor. I don’t know. But the point is, is whatever happens there, it’s a good company. The fact that it was at 550 or so, and now is at 150 is almost unbelievable. But what you’re saying is it probably never should have gotten to 550. 150 is probably a really fair price. Because you’re still talking about something like 40 times forward earning.
Doug Merritt: Yeah, yeah.
Daniel Newman: It is a very high price considering, what, Microsoft trades around 30. Intel trades at 10. I think Amazon’s one of the ones that is still pretty high at 50. But other than the AMDs and Nvidia, that have been out closer to 100, which is just crazy, at some point, it had to normalize.
But now, when you get this compression, there’s runway for growth again, which …
Doug Merritt: Right.
Daniel Newman: Growth in the value. These companies get out from underneath that pressure to be able to deliver numbers that warrant these prices. But I think for a lot of investors, it’s just really hard to [palate], “Good Lord. What happened to these valuations?”
Doug Merritt: Yeah. I think both you and I are investors in companies.
Daniel Newman: We are.
Doug Merritt: We get to experience this. But again, my fundamentals on these companies, I like the companies I’ve invested in. I believe in them. I usually use their products, either on the corporate side or on the personal side. I don’t think there’s anything wrong.
I own a number of Peloton devices. It’s a great company. You’re right. They pulled growth forward, but probably by four or five years, which was awesome. But I don’t see their subscriber count falling off. My usage is not lower. Will it be lower as we all go back to gyms? Maybe a little bit, but not much. I’m not canceling my subscription.
I just think we all need to take a deep breath, try and focus on the weighing machine aspects. The hard part is for any people that need cash immediately. That’s always a problem, which is why we all get that sage advice of only invest in high risk assets that which you don’t need access to and you can afford to lose.
Daniel Newman: Yeah.
Doug Merritt: Almost always is a patience game.
Daniel Newman: It is. And over time. I cited this in my MarketWatch piece. I’m sure I’ll get ripped a lot by people who are mad right now. But I said the so-called tech wreck makes for good headlines, but perhaps this is the moment to remind investors that tech will be okay. The NASDAQ has had 66 corrections since 1971, but is still up nearly 7400% over the last 40 years.
Doug Merritt: Wow.
Daniel Newman: If you can be patient, if you can wait … I say this to all the people. You might have been the one that bought Amazon at 100, sold it at 10, and then said, “God, what would your life be like if you’d just held on.”
Now, that creates a lot of jokes about the diamond hands and all the people. I’ve seen some funny memes lately about the, “Hey, diamond hands. Welcome back.” It’s a picture of some people going back to work at Wendy’s. Look. These are a little bit meager times.
I said last week … I recorded my show. I was wearing a black shirt and a black vest. I said, “I’m dressed in all black, because it feels like a funeral.” I said, “but the fact is, is we will be okay.”
You said something earlier, for our last topic … I want to go into crypto and Web3 with you just a little bit. But before I say that, you said something I think is worth reiterating. Tech is deflationary. I think that’s actually what you were saying.
And that, by the way, is Cathie’s thesis too, is that the fact is, is whether you’re in the growth phase in the economy, where tech booms because everything’s booming. But actually, when the economy slows, companies look at whether it’s your old company at Splunk …
I wrote a really positive earnings beat on ServiceNow yesterday. Talk about workflow automation. Companies are going to say, “How do I become more streamlined? How do we reduce costs? How do become more efficient?” It could be from anything from meeting customer experience goals to meeting your ESG goals, technology is going to enable you to do it faster. It’s going to enable you to do it for less money. You can do most of it operational expense wise, not CapEx now, which is very convenient for most companies from a cashflow standpoint. It’s deflationary.
So while everybody’s got this thesis that tech’s going to get this big growth compression on a half point or a 1% interest rate hike, I would argue that the growth will accelerate exponentially more than whatever the discount rate impacts in terms of costs.
Doug Merritt: Yeah. Ultimately, we sell to companies, and they need to have available budget, which almost always is percentage of the revenue. Tech always follows the health of the global economy to an extent.
However, as you just said, even in a more challenged revenue scenario, almost every organization, especially if we still face skills challenges, cross border crossing challenges, and labor shortages of any type, tech becomes instrumental, non-negotiable to drive our organizations forward. We’re going to continue to have to serve customers better. We’re going to continue to have to innovate our portfolios. And we have to continue to find ways to streamline our operations. You can’t do that without technology and the applications and tools that surround it.
Unless a series of global EMP strikes takes out the entire backbone of technology, and we go back to the Dark Ages, companies are on this wheel that they can’t jump off of continuous improvement, and I believe technology is the backbone of that.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. You and I are on the same page. Again, some of these opinions may be unpopular right now with people who’ve been margin called and liquidated, and feel like doom is here. But I think that is really what’s going on is that tech will continue to be the fundamental and foundational element of what will actually carry us forward into the next wave of significant growth.
Doug Merritt: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: By the way, that next wave, to me, is interesting. Let’s just, at a very high level … I know you’re not a Web3 expert. In fact, when you and I sat down and chatted, that’s one of the things we said is we’re both really digging in here. We’re learning. We’re interested.
But whether that’s crypto, whether that’s some of the projects built on blockchain, and some of the different coins and all coins, whether that’s the metaverse, what are your initial impressions in this space? Are you going to be investing some serious time? What are you looking at around Web3 and the metaverse?
Doug Merritt: Yeah. In my newly found freer time, that’s definitely [inaudible] big chunk of my focus right now is trying to get much more deeply current, not superficially current, on Web3 and blockchain. Any of us in the tech industry have been reading about it the past five, six, seven years, but that’s different than, again, having your own wallet, and transacting a couple NFTs, and holding a broad portfolio of different well known and not well known cryptocurrencies, and just listening to, again, a serious podcast, following the investments at Andreessen Horowitz, whose done an incredible job in the crypto space. That’s where I’ve been spending most my time.
I am very enthusiastic about what the promise of Web3.0 brings. Everyone wants to believe that every one of these shifts are brand new. What older folks like you and I have found is every one of these shifts just builds off of the past. We’ve been dealing with distributed data structures since the ’60s. It’s not a new concept. We’ve been dealing with tele everything since the ’70s. That’s not a new concept. Virtual worlds have been around for close to 30 years.
Is the quality better? Yeah. But Neal Stephenson did a great job, in the early 1990s, with Snow Crash, painting what this metaverse world might look like. A lot like what happened with the pandemic, we’re getting a lot of interesting acceleration around some of these concepts, but the laws of physics still apply.
As you and I were talking about at lunch here today, I’m still thrashing, still trying to figure out, “Okay. I get the promise of Web3 is fantastic.” Constantly available, fully distributed, and replicated data in a transparent and immutable basis. Who does not want that? That is what we’ve been working on, again, for 60, 70, 80 years of [inaudible] tech industry.
Daniel Newman: I’d love all those dark pool trades somewhere.
Doug Merritt: Transparency is good, but there’s a cost for that. We can see the cost. If you want a true peer-based network, then there’s got to be different mechanisms to create that transparency and that security and that immutability. Which use cases justify that cost? Who’s willing to pay for it? I think we’re way back at that early stage of …
We’ve all been hearing title, property title, and inefficiencies in insurance industry, and governmental services. Key for blockchain. Yep. It is. Where are the replicable services and repeatable companies that are providing this? Well, they’re not quite there yet.
But Web1 and Web2 companies in the late-90s and early 2000s weren’t there either. That doesn’t mean the Internet didn’t become what it is now, that we’re leveraging. It just means there’s time to build out … both, let the technology grow up, let the costs become less onerous, because they always do with Moore’s law and all the derivatives, and let the vendors, the proponents, catch up to be able to provide the services.
But definitely an area that I am super fascinated by. As you get closer to it, I think most of us that have been in the tech world … I get more and more intrigued. I can see why they call it the rabbit hole, because you definitely … As you begin to play, you just want to go deeper and deeper. I’m excited.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. You make a lot of great points. The speed of change keeps getting faster. Makes me think about, for a lot of people that are trying to figure out how to invest or what their strategy is around crypto, there’s a quote in The Big Short that’s something along the lines of, “I might be early, but I’m not wrong.” Then the guy goes, “It’s the same thing.” It’s the same thing.
The fact is is the first dot bomb, the bubble was all about the fact that it wasn’t dot bomb wasn’t real. It was all going to be real. It was too soon.
Doug Merritt: Timing.
Daniel Newman: We all got way out in front of ourselves. There’s a little bit … You could see a little bit of that with … You can call it, like you said, maybe it’s a bubble, maybe it’s just inflated valuations, but with crypto, especially some of these alt projects.
But one of the ways I’ve thought about it, Doug, because I’ve tried to simplify this too, because I can be a little bit linear in thinking at times. I’m like you’ve got a little bit of kind of an IaaS/PaaS/SaaS thing going on with crypto. You’ve got your projects that are infrastructure. You’ve got the ETHs. You’ve got the Solanas. Then you’ve got your platforms, the projects that are specific for IoT or for 5G or for social media networks in the blockchain. Then you’ve got your actual applications, people building games on the blockchain, and they’re selling these projects.
But it’s basically, they’re like projects. You made that comment. They’re like features in a lot of cases. They’re not really companies yet.
Unfortunately, for most of us, we got to read all these white papers. Because that’s still … You got the coolest emerging future technology, but the way we decide about investing is you read a 20 page long white paper. How backwards is that process?
But what I will say is that you are right that this is very real. It’s tangible. It’s coming. This level of visibility and transparency, I believe most of society wants, but it’s a little bit like privacy, where there’s always trade offs, meaning that in order to get it, you’re going to have a certain amount of trade off in order to get it. So we’re all still navigating how much we’re willing to trade off, how much transparency we’re willing to give, how much risk we’re willing to put in moving our currency, or moving the way money flows into an unknown, unregulated, soon to possibly be regulated, set of digital asset stores of value. So there’s a lot going on there.
Now, one quick question to wrap this up. You can give me one or two or three. But when it comes to Web3 or metaverse, are there any companies, well known or projects, that are really interesting to you right now?
Doug Merritt: Most of my time has been down at that 1.5 and 2 level, starting with Bitcoin and the proof of work basis, but then jumping into Ethereum and Solana. The way that I tend to learn is I’ve got to understand at a reasonably detailed level. I’m an experiential learner, and I’m a competency based leader. If I don’t understand something, it’s really hard for me to be excited about it. So I am way down at that level 1, 1.5, and a little bit of 2, on the way that, at least, the descriptions of the different blockchain layers exist.
The fascinating thing is, as you were saying, it’s so early. It is so early. It reminds me of the early ’90s when I was getting started in tech, and all the early Internet companies that we forgot 99% of the names, the companies that were once hot beyond belief.
Daniel Newman: Lycos and Excite and Jeeves, I don’t know, all these cool companies. Even AOL’s been forgotten at this point.
Doug Merritt: Especially by today’s generation. But they were absolutely foundational to get us there. And for a moment in time, they were worth a lot. It’s just this stair step of experimentation/build, experimentation/build, until there enough repeatability and understandability and gravitas and users and makes something as prolific as it needs to be.
Cryptocurrencies certainly, the major cryptos, are at that point of gravitas. But I think the bulk of the rest of the promise of blockchain and Web3 is still at an earlier stage, which for people who like to experiment with that startup world …
I know I just got done with a big $3 billion company leadership role, but I was a founder twice. A huge chunk of my early life was in zero revenue to under $10 million revenue companies. So it’s a really exciting … It’s an exciting area of the landscape. You just have to be willing to go through to understand the pains of startup and the stops and starts that come with that.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. You’ve experienced a whole gulf.
One thing I’ll say here, Doug, but is I do think some of the big mega tech companies are going to lead in this Web3. This year, I did a MarketWatch OpEd on the tech trends and the companies that are going to be worth watching. In metaverse, for instance, it’s going to be Microsoft. It’s going to be Nvidia. It’s going to be Roblox. It’s going to be Meta maybe.
I’m least bullish about them, but I just think it’s because I don’t particularly like the company. So it’s probably not to do with … They’ll probably be fine. I just don’t particularly care for some of the decision making they do.
But those are going to be the companies that, for the average person that wants exposure, that they’re going to be able to get exposed to it through some very, very safe, robust, well led companies like those that I just named.
Now of course, I say this in the beginning, I say it at the end, and I’ll just remind everyone now, this isn’t investment advice. It’s just two guys having a conversation, just sharing what we’re thinking about.
Doug Merritt, it’s been a pleasure working with you at your time at Splunk. It’s going to be a pleasure continuing talking. Thank you so much for joining me here on Making Markets.
Doug Merritt: Vice versa, Daniel. Thanks having me on. I’ll see you in a few days.
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Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.