Dan Burcaw on Entrepreneurship, Using AI to Stop Customer Churn, and Deploying Code onto Nuclear Submarines

In this episode, Frank and Andy speak with Dan Burcaw on Entrepreneurship, Using AI to Stop Customer Churn, and Deploying Code onto Nuclear Submarines.

Show Notes

Transcript

The following transcript is AI generated.

00:00:00 BAILeY

Hello and welcome to data driven.

00:00:02 BAILeY

The podcast where we explore the emerging fields of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

00:00:09 BAILeY

In this episode, Frank and Andy speak with Dan Burke or Dan is a serial entrepreneur who has founded four companies each on the forefront of a major technology wave, open source software, the smartphone.

00:00:23 BAILeY

Cloud computing and now machine learning.

00:00:26 BAILeY

Currently he leads Nam Eml, a company focused on helping app developers start and grow mobile subscription businesses.

00:00:34 BAILeY

If you follow Frank and or Andy on social media, you certainly have heard them bang on about their secret project.

00:00:41 BAILeY

I will drop a one word hint here foreshadowing.

00:00:45 BAILeY

Now on with the show.

00:00:48 Frank

Hello and welcome back to data driven.

00:00:50 Frank

The podcast where we explore the emerging fields of data science machine learning, an artificial intelligence, and if you like to think of data as the new oil, then you could consider us Car Talk.

00:01:02 Frank

Because we focus on where the rubber hits the road.

00:01:05 Frank

So with that as my guest on this pandemic road trip, that hasn't happened.

00:01:13

Yeah.

00:01:13 Frank

By my copilot here is Andy Leonard.

00:01:16 Frank

How you doing Andy?

00:01:17 Andy

Hey, I'm doing pretty good Frank how are you?

00:01:20 Frank

I'm doing well, I'm doing well.

00:01:21 Frank

I had a kind of an architecture session this morning, so that went really well.

00:01:27 Frank

It was.

00:01:28 Frank

It was an interesting conversation and I love doing those.

00:01:31 Frank

Those are always fun.

00:01:32 Frank

How about?

00:01:32 Andy

Yeah.

00:01:33 Andy

Yeah, so I'm proofing the next book.

00:01:36 Andy

Proofing is the absolute last chance to remove all of the typos I've left in.

00:01:42 Andy

As I've gone through the last three full edit sessions and there's still some there.

00:01:47 Andy

Frank, I'm convinced that the next book is going to have, you know, have a fair share of those.

00:01:52 Andy

What I'm really concerned about.

00:01:54 Andy

Is making sure that the demos work an yeah that's you know it's it's tedious and it's the LastPass so you know it's like is this over yet? Yeah, I'm sick and tired of reading this guy's writing and it's me so.

00:02:10 Andy

Yeah no.

00:02:10 Andy

But yeah.

00:02:12 Frank

That was the hardest part.

00:02:13 Frank

People asking.

00:02:14 Frank

Like when I wrote a book on Silverlight an aside from it being about Silverlight, the hardest thing wasn't so much writing, it was having to go back and re edit my own stuff and like.

00:02:24 Frank

You know, and I would look at it and be like man like I'm a terrible or.

00:02:28 Andy

That's I have said over and over again to my computer monitor who wrote this crap.

00:02:33 Andy

By a friend if you live.

00:02:33 Andy

But Fortunately for this is a second edition, so an it's one of those second editions where I kept the first 10 or 11 chapters.

00:02:43 Andy

I I changed from my writing language.

00:02:46 Andy

I wrote it like three years ago.

00:02:48 Andy

And I really this grew out of a series of blog posts that I wrote back in 2012. It was all in VB back then, Visual Basic. And so I wrote it that way in 2017 and for the 2nd edition I went back and updated all of that. That's really the only thing I changed was I went to C sharp.

00:03:06 Andy

An I kind of needed to because the rest of the book was going to be in C sharp anyway.

00:03:12 Andy

And so yeah, that's that's kind of how it went.

00:03:15 Andy

And for anybody listen, it thinks wow, Andy is smart.

00:03:18 Andy

He's written a book about C sharp.

00:03:20 Andy

He must know C sharp really, really well.

00:03:22 Andy

I say throughout the book I am not a C sharp developer.

00:03:26 Andy

I feel like I'm working my way up to being a noob, but but.

00:03:29 Frank

Don't you work classes?

00:03:31 Andy

I do wear glasses.

00:03:33 Andy

Yes, yeah.

00:03:33 Frank

So you can see sharp.

00:03:36 Andy

I did.

00:03:36 Andy

They took me awhile.

00:03:37 Andy

Do you have your sound effects running from I?

00:03:39 Frank

Do were back in Zend Caster.

00:03:41 Frank

So for folks listening like I don't remember this being on the live stream.

00:03:45 Frank

If it's not, we're doing this the old fashioned way right then, and don't worry, Andy and I've been live streaming a lot, which you probably noticed, but today we have a very special guest, don't we, Andy?

00:03:48 Frank

Um?

00:03:56 Andy

Yeah yeah, Dan Burke all is awesome.

00:04:00 Andy

He's a co-founder and CEO and I hope I say this right, is it?

00:04:04 Andy

Is it nami? Nami ML Dan.

00:04:07 Dan Burcaw

Yeah nami. Like tsunami.

00:04:09 Andy

Ah OK, I got it right the first time NAMI AML and it's a really smart service for monetizing digital products with subscriptions.

00:04:09 Frank

Well.

00:04:19 Andy

And just he's had a whole ton of experience working in, you know, in marketing for the Oracle Marketing Cloud, working with the mobile product for that.

00:04:31 Andy

So pretty smart Guy joined joined Oracle back during the acquisition of Push IO and.

00:04:39 Andy

Push IO was a leading mobile messaging provider as well.

00:04:44 Andy

And he served there as a Co founder and CEO.

00:04:47 Andy

There's a bunch more in here about Nan, an it all kind of boils down to super smart, successful guy.

00:04:54 Andy

We've had a little bit of banner before we click the record button an I can attest to.

00:04:59 Andy

That is really enjoyable conversation.

00:05:01 Andy

I look forward to this show.

00:05:02 Andy

Thanks for being here, Dan.

00:05:05 Speaker 1

Really happy to be here.

00:05:05 Speaker 1

Really happy to be here.

00:05:06 Speaker 1

Thanks for having me.

00:05:07 Frank

Awesome, so you're a serial entrepreneur and you founded a bunch of companies.

00:05:13 Frank

Um, but my favorite part of the bio I read on you was that.

00:05:18 Frank

You wrote software that ended up on a nuclear submarine.

00:05:23 Speaker 1

Yeah, that's right.

00:05:26 Speaker 1

It's it's hard.

00:05:26 Frank

That that totally away I was like what?

00:05:29 Speaker 1

It it's it's hard to even tell that story sometimes because it's so unbelievable.

00:05:35 Speaker 1

I 17 years old at the time.

00:05:38 Speaker 1

The company that I cofounded was building a flavor of Linux.

00:05:46 Speaker 1

A flavor of Linux that was designed to run on Apple Macintosh hardware.

00:05:52 Speaker 1

And at the time.

00:05:52 Frank

Interesting.

00:05:54 Speaker 1

Then the the reason for that was that Apple was using the power PC chip power PC chip in that moment of time. You know, we're kind of talking in the late 90s. Early 2000s had fantastic price per performance per Watt, which is a metric that a lot of folks in the kind of high performance computing world look at when they're trying to figure out.

00:06:11 Andy

Me.

00:06:18 Speaker 1

How to build these kind of supercomputer clusters?

00:06:21 Speaker 1

And so it just happened at that moment in time, the Mac would had had the best price performance per Watt because of the chips that they.

00:06:29 Speaker 1

We're using and so we we ended up doing a deal with Lockheed Martin and the US Navy to build a cluster of Macs running Linux.

00:06:45 Speaker 1

That were deployed across the US Navy nuclear sub fleet for the purpose of doing sonar image processing, yeah.

00:06:53 Andy

Wow.

00:06:55 Speaker 1

The the the software that I wrote was related to.

00:07:00 Speaker 1

You know how folks on the boat would have to manage these units if there was issues, how would you know?

00:07:07 Speaker 1

Kind of the maintainability repair ability was a big issue when you're actually out at sea and trying to have this stuff run in kind of a mission critical fashion so.

00:07:17 Speaker 1

We ended up.

00:07:17 Speaker 1

I mean it was this was such a crazy project because the hardware was modified hardware.

00:07:22 Speaker 1

It wasn't off the shelf Apple hardware, it was Apple Hardware and then we did a bunch of things to it and then it was Linux and then it was some custom software that made the whole thing operate an.

00:07:35 Speaker 1

So it's it was.

00:07:37 Speaker 1

It was a nutty project, an I'm.

00:07:40 Speaker 1

Looking back on it now, I'm surprised that it had ever shipped quite frankly.

00:07:46 Frank

Spoken like a true engineer, right?

00:07:48 Frank

You're always you always...