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Hello and welcome to the engineering leadership class test brought to you at ELC, the engineering leadership community. And I'm Gerry Lee, I'm honor BLC and I'm Patrick Gallagher. And we're your hosts, our share of shares and those beautiful first-time tips have its been examples of great software engineers. It's helped evolve leadership and technology.
Today's episode says we'll go to the ELC project archives with a best conversation, with the top-level development group, the M.A.s, the building over and C.J.L. at FF voices. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the difference between the technology and the previous deal and the inner time history and the effort are to the conference ELC. Coming up, and we have an incredible line of the features and tons of opportunities to build meaningful relationships with other growth
oriented engineering leaders. So if you love this podcast, you're going to absolutely love this conference. You want to be there. Melody will actually be joining us as one of our featured speakers at this year's conference. We actually just caught up to discuss possible topics. A few things that came up that were interesting that we might cover at the conference. When you have 100 plus years of content, how do you strategically invest
in technology or leverage AI in the right ways? And in a world where ideas are cheap and execution is everything, how do you invest in solving the right problems? So a couple really dynamic and interesting issues that Melody will likely bring up at the conference, but you got to be there to hear the stories. Today's conversation previews just a little bit of what you might expect at the conference. And so the conversation today covers what it's actually like to represent the technology
org during M&A negotiations. How to strategically structure your TSA or transfer service agreement to actually accelerate your tech roadmap. How to gain executive buy-in on engineering initiatives, especially when the approach may be non-intuitive and how this M&A event has continued to accelerate innovation and productivity at Fox today. Let me introduce you to Melody. Previously, she served as Fox's chief information security officer and as the president of its research and development
subsidiary, Blockchain Creative Labs. Melody leads the development design and implementation of emerging tech across the entire Fox Enterprise. We're talking Fox Sports, Fox News, Fox Entertainment, Fox Television stations and 2B Media Group. Her current focus is on future planning, including developments in AI and authenticating and monetizing premium content via blockchain technology. She also continues to oversee the cybersecurity posture of the business and leads technology
M&A efforts, identifying areas for investment and growth. Enjoy this episode from the podcast archives with Melody Hilda Brandt. Melody, first off, welcome to the show. We're so excited to have you here. How are you doing today? What's going on? You know it's good to be here. Glad it's Friday. Yeah, it's feeling good. Absolutely. Well, we are here to talk about how an M&A event can be used as an accelerating
force for your technology and your organization. You have so many interesting stories around this space. One of the stories we're going to talk about is 21st century in Fox and Disney and the deal there and how it spun out Fox Corporation. I think the big thing here that has Jerry and I most excited is most folks don't really get access or exposure to how those types of events work from a technology leader perspective, let alone like how to
actually leverage that in a way that accelerates your tech transformation. There was a blog post you released. One of the quotes was a transactional deal when structured well can pour jet fuel on your technology transformation plans. I was wondering maybe if we could start with the story behind this deal and so can you bring us in a little bit to what happened and how did that quote unquote pour Jeff fuel on your technology plans?
Yeah, so this was the 21st century Fox Disney deal was a mega deal, the biggest deal and entertainment history I think at the time, 72 billion dollar deal in 2017 and the big underlying context for it was I think something we're all observing right now in the streaming
wars and the different direct to consumer applications that you know all the major media companies are releasing and Fox leadership kind of looked at the space and I think it had a strong early view, there's going to be very few winners in this space and the winners
are going to be the organizations with the largest bulk. It's a game of having a massive content library that is compelling enough to get the average consumer to pay a monthly subscription to and want to maintain that subscription over time and Netflix will likely be a winner. Disney was very well positioned to be a winner and there might be one more between Paramount Plus, between Peacock which didn't even exist at the time and others.
So I think the leadership was a little early to see if there's a war happening and we are not particularly well set up to win this war. Like we could go after it and we had a play to be in the streaming wars but it really wasn't obvious that it played to our strengths. It wasn't clear that pouring billions and billions of dollars in content acquisition
was going to be a winning strategy and that's what it would have taken. The view was let's actually try to re-envision a new tech company, I should say entirely a new media company and take advantage of the opportunity that all of these organizations are looking to bulk up. It was just a massive opportunity to sell a huge number of assets and a massive
premium. So Disney purchased a large number of the Fox sales, particularly all the entertainment properties, those national geographic, the 20th century film studio, the television studio, and 10 other properties, all of our international properties and acquired that for 70 billion dollars. That allowed Fox to spin off a new company Fox Corporation which I chose to join
which you had a very different mission. It was very focused on live sports, live news, live entertainment and we saw that as a differentiated offering that would allow us to be nimble and like absolutely crush and be the leader in that space versus fighting for slot number
three in the other war. One of the other quotes in the blog post that really, to me, stood out as an extraordinary result was you'd mentioned we'd estimate that we completed at least five years of work within a two year time frame and that put you in this position to be nimble and to have a great future. Can you share a little bit more about what was that work that was accelerated because to me to fast forward a five year time horizon for your technology
roadmap to two plus years is crazy. Can you tell us a little more about what were some of those projects the things that got zoomed up? Yeah, I mean it's kind of amazing what can happen when you really actually have an immovable timeline right and there's a deadline that cannot be shifted.
I mean in the case our deal you need a two year transition service agreement TSA this is common in every M&A transaction they're usually quite unstrategic they're basically let's give ourselves a little buffer so we can move the business over and generally it's like a lift and shift
you know project but then whoever's the acquiring company has to integrate the previous assets and whoever's the other company has to figure out how to like detangle all dependencies from those assets and so you know we had a two year TSA and we had the option once to extend by three months so that is a hard timeline and that really focuses effort in a very significant way.
So our strategy on this was that we looked at our technology assets and realized we had these projects in place we knew for example that you know we were running massive data center footprints. I mean we're in the media delivery business we're doing 4k encoding and distribution we're ready satellites all over the world you know we have satellite distribution facilities massive data centers massive broadcast facilities and you know these are like technologies are kind of
we're behind the say behind the times on cloud putting it nicely and so we knew we wanted to move to a cloud distribution facility but no one had done that before in broadcast no one had figured out how do you 4k distribution in the cloud for example this was kind of on the roadmap we knew we
wanted to get there but we didn't really didn't have one a site on how to get there that's one example you know we knew we were running for example we were running satellites out of Los Angeles our movie lot here which is where I'm high quarters and running satellites is LA is a pretty bad idea
actually satellite distribution there's a lot of earthquake risk there's a lot of interference from LAX so it's really not great to run huge antennas to deliver the super bowl at a LA where you have very little room for failure so we knew that we needed to have a different facility there were
certain things that we kind of knew we needed to do and then there's more like really unsexy things I really wanted to get like a zero trust architecture that is really hard to do if you have nine different email systems right and that was kind of the reality of what was like to be in
20th century Fox I mean we had huge brands that were all in this holding company so Fox News star India national geographic 20th century film some of these companies are 100 years old you know some of them are newer but all them had their own infrastructure and we were in this process and we
had actually made a lot of progress but like of integrating and moving the best in class stuff we had essentially done the easy stuff but there was just I mean a huge numbers of projects that we were just managing for ERP and finance and all this stuff it's really unsexy but if you're trying to
like do zero trust or you're trying to have you know a comprehensive cyber security view or you just want like efficiency and what you're delivering it's just a lot of overhead those were essentially all the things that were on the list and like I was like burning through this stuff with this view
to be a cloud native company and a view to be you know largely saster than and to kill our data centers but we thought that was going to take five years like optimistically because so often you know those kinds of transformations just get interrupted by well something the business wants
to stand up something and they detect team to spin up a new website and a new infrastructure a new platform and so things always get deprioritized and we essentially to the way we structure the deal made it so that they could not be deprioritized like we could not in two years have zero ERP system
we could not in two years like not have an email gateway solution for the company so that's what essentially allowed us to like focus and keep the team just laser focus on those priorities for two years so that we could actually run the business on the new infrastructure when the time came
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have that hard deadline it just makes me wonder if there's a way to introduce those types of timelines because I feel like oftentimes like timelines are so much so self assigned and so this was like such a forcing function to make that happen yeah I mean the easiest thing to do is like
you actually just say a contract's ending and that's essentially what this was it was to say actually all this technology is going over there they're going to provide a service back to us and that service agreements two years you know so you could do actually do something similar
recently on another project where we had a technology in place I'm like I am over this technology and every six months oh well we haven't quite gotten I'm like I'm changing the term of the contract I'm not signing another three-year deal renewal we're signing a one-year deal you got one year to make
it happen I think there is a way to kind of I don't think you do it the scale that we did it without you know some highly catalyzing event in two years if you do not figure this out like we will not be able to distribute the soup bowl it can be very core business function for us but I
think on the edges you can do it I think this is really good learning for all and your leaders to how you heard your team to get something massive or critical accomplished in effective manner because I experienced personal that by having a externally committed timeline that effectively boost the productivity of the team very obviously I think people are smart that having arbitrary downline and versus having a real downline that if you don't deliver then there's going to be
externally visible outcome psychologically that makes it huge difference. Jerry quick aside here it reminds me of when we were building the platform for our conference last year so we built our own platform to host our event host our community and the deadline was the event it was like this needs
to be live and it needs to be working yeah it's announced we're ready to design so we got to do it eventually it happened and the team just feel really proud but I don't think that's going to happen if we don't have that forcing function yeah I think there there is something but not having a
backup plan that actually aligns incentives and aligns effort it was just so galvanizing for the team too I mean again in this case it's like I forgot to work actually in the technologies they always wanted to work on right so the whole thing was very motivating because it wasn't like oh well
you have two years to like make this horrible thing not break again yeah these are these were teams that were maintaining systems that really should have been end of life to some cases I think some of the teams were so excited to be able to jettison all that and work on all the newest
technologies and what we did with Amazon for that was like you know we were partnering with Amazon it was the first time they had ever worked with a media company to really solve this distribution quality challenge at scale you know and so I think that there is something galvanizing too I think
or that helps to get to the goal to push the teams to all work in the technologies they've always wanted to work and to shed them from a lot of the like the craft that they've been you know wasting their time with I wanted to talk about your role as representing the technology organization
at the MNA conversation and how you strategically approached the TSA because to me that seems like an under leveraged tool to really accelerate your tech innovation can you just share a little bit more about you know what was your role as the tech executive and the representative of the tech
organization and how did that relate to the TSA structuring I think one thing at Fox at school is that you know our CTO my boss Paul cheesefro is very much in the top leadership team and the decision to sell to Disney like he was in that discussion right so we knew from the very beginning
when this deal was going to happen so we could be prepared to help structure the deal in a way that was strategic I think often technology orgs like they learn about something if make it happen and one thing that we intervened on very quickly because we were at the table for like how should
we structure the deal was to do something that was quite counterintuitive I think and very controversial which was to say let's essentially value all of our current technology assets at near zero and make them part of the deal you know so we weren't going to be able to change the deal price
like the price was I grew Murdoch right okay so that was kind of that was defined but what was in the deal you know was like what the teams then were kind of tasked with figuring out so we weren't going to be able to say oh we think our broadcast facility like you know we invested at least
$600 million in capital over the last three years it was probably about the right number we want you to pay for that like that wasn't going to be a thing right it was like no you can you take it so by default we said we were buying the business really you're about 70 percent of the business
so we're going to buy default put all the technology into that and then we're going to have the right to claw stuff back so you know we made the determination for example I got the time I was also running our streaming team engineering team we said actually we've been working for the last year
on a brand new from scratch platform rebuild of our entire streaming architecture that is actually exactly what we want to be in for the future so we're going to take that back so we can keep building on it right but you were going to take our core broadcast facility and then you're
going to provide that back to us as a service under the TSA this was hard and it means because like if you're a technology person who's been working at Fox for 20 years it's like I know it seems kind of a gut punch oh I've been working on this for 20 years and essentially this is now you're giving
all my work away for free like that was I think very hard for some people to internalize but it sounds like the the free part was more of just like how it all kind of added up and we're like that's that's like a little narrative you could tell yourself if you were thinking about it
unst strategically in my view you know it was like oh like I'm working on this forever and you've given it away but our view was if we buy default put stuff into the deal so we buy default we're giving it to you then we peel back the things that will actually accelerate our ability to deliver
the future state architecture then we essentially have the green field to go out and build that versus what is the reality in a large company like I was often which you're working in parallel and then you always have to have these integration points so it's like oh well let's cut over
this part of the capability something inevitably goes wrong there's an integration challenge it sets you back two months right and so we got basically got rid of all those integration challenges and because otherwise it'd be quite I've never seen a company just like actually
build a whole parallel infrastructure for two years and then flip a switch I mean that that really doesn't happen this affects what we were able to do so that was the like it was really my boss I think DCTO had the vision for this and then I was so excited I advocated for exactly
how to do it so much because it's so accelerated zero trust how's it going to be the network I mean they manage our network like on the lot for two years and so we could rebuild our entire new network we had a construction project to do into the 400,000 square foot ground up build of a building at
Phoenix and it had to hire 200 people from scratch because we had never had a presence at Phoenix before or Tumpy so that was the risky thing to do we really had to put our neck on the line and say we can do this right because of course the risk would be like we actually can't to do it and then
in two years the lights go off and there's no alternative I mean the stakes are pretty high that actually be able to deliver I think it was so cool to see how at the very beginning the technology organization was brought in is let's make this a huge strategic opportunity for us and
and set it up in the right way what are the questions that you asked at the beginning to identify the right strategy or how did you all kind of formulate the right approach here I mean some of it was actually just I think trying to ground the conversation a little bit which is some of it
well where do we want to this is a huge moment so like at a minimum it's going to force a ton of change the new company was made essentially 40% the size of the previous company so we can make personnel decisions right so the core question what's the team we want to have in the future again
by default we put everyone into Disney and then pulled people out that's also kind of hard to stomach right for some people oh my gosh some of these things oh there's two things I think these macro questions like what is the team who we want for the future what do we think and what are
the skills we think we're going to need do be able to continue to innovate the pace we want to through the future and there might be a different set of skill sets then we were looking for five years ago 10 years ago it's some employees within for 25 years at last so those are kind of the high
level strategic things and then it was like ground even it like well we have the super bowl next year the biggest moment in live television ever always it always sets records always breaks all previous television records so like how would we do this are we willing to take the risk of someone else
having such a large responsibility but of course the alternative is well if they buy national geographic we're never working on national geographic again national geographic is totally unstrategic to Fox but I'm spending my time as a technology leader helping national geographic
be successful for two years that means I'm not going to spend time on the future of Foxes that was like the galvanizing moment it's like what is the key leadership we're going to be spending its time doing and if we hold back our technology then we're going to have to service the businesses
they bought because you can't just flip it over they want someone has to operate that technology through they were operating it or you're operating it and it was seen as very unstrategic for the people we were saying are these are the people we want to build the future of Fox but for two years
they're going to be entirely distracted running businesses for Disney that was a bad place to be so it was like well those were our options either our leadership team and our core team is we focused running other people's business we get paid for it but like our goal is not to be like
a service provider yeah we want to create our own business or we take the risk they service us I mean they're a real company of this is like a huge company so it was risky but it's not like an unknown quantity right we knew the technical team over there was extraordinarily competent
they were going to have service level agreements with us that were very strict that we had to design when we thought about it that way that I think was not kind of the aha moment there seems to be like this big conversation happening between you and Disney this whole time about who owns what during
this two-year period of time and I was wondering if there were any lessons from those conversations that you learned that might be relevant for engineering leaders like in coming up with the structure between the new entity and the assets being transferred were there any lessons from
that conversation or particular moments that went really well that would be a good thing to call out for any engineering leader who maybe is entering into those types of negotiations things that went well interesting off the off it was more contentious but you know I think there was a mutual respect between the teams right we were as I think approaching it from that perspective okay we're both like technologists we both want to be able to deliver the best technology for our respective companies
let's have an honest conversation about really what the current capabilities are I think we were extremely honest both sides I wasn't trying to like sell them a bunch of junk and say that it's something that it's not I think it's important to be honest in these conversations this is the size
the team that currently maintains this technology it's probably going to be what's required in the future right so I think one thing that works is like the comfort position of mutual respect we had these working sessions who are very detailed I think very honest about what the current state was
but then to have a few of your like bright lines I mean for us it was extremely clarifying to say by default the technology is with you right at any time they'd say well actually it seems like we don't really know enough about that technology maybe you guys should keep it on I'm like by default
the technology is with you right and I could always like come back to that and that came from the highest levels so I think that was one thing can you have these guiding principles you're going to approach the conversation honestly you're going to come from a position of mutual respect but there's
going to be moments where like each of you kind of want a different outcome around a specific decision and it's really useful to have these agreed upon principles that by default we're going to adhere to and that's what we're able to get through the right advocacy I think with the you know top three
people at Fox who had our back on all those conversations and occasionally we had to call them up and say you need to tell them this was the deal we're not going to take on this responsibility by default it's with them the learning committee is out from a few different angles of our new
erroneous of course but also for those that are sort of driving decision like this as exact a word as a CEO story wise I think this is the people going to remember and I think the dividends from this conversation the learning will be teased out over time and when they came
across the situation like oh this is something that happened and I can refer back to that for first meeting insights I'm definitely taking as many notes as possible because this is one of those moments where I feel like as an engineering leader like you don't get that many shots on goal to do this the right way and so the learning curves seem really steep high pressure and high intensity so I wanted to ask you one more question about the deal structuring and negotiation for somebody who's
never been in that room and who's never never had a conversation like that is there any recommendations you would give to help somebody prepare for their first M&A type conversation or strategically defining a TSA yeah I think for engineering leadership I think really being able to paint a
picture of the future and what that can enable is what gets I think the business excited to be willing to go to bat for you I think it's fair to say the executive team was not initially on board with this approach or like initially was risky right and so you have to say like well what is the
reward to taking this risk because it would have worked the other way right and it would have been safer and I think that's often the challenge for engineering leadership they're often abstracted away if you paint right technical pain and so initially you kind of have to paint the picture of
it in two years Christopher we could be you know if we took this approach and that is quite compelling I think and part of that then actually I think probably the slide that won the battle here was here's our two-year projection of what percent of our technology budget which is over billion dollars
what percentage of our technology budget is going to running the business versus growing the business and it was something like 60 40 60 percent running 40 percent growing then we said we think it's going to be inverted in two years and it is and so I think that's the slide that kind
of sealed the deal we really partnered with finance we'd a partner with all the business units to like make these projections real I mean it's a nice thing to say we're going to flip 60 40 right but it had to be like actually grounded in real data like what are teams spending time on
you know we have a team over a thousand technologists what are they spending their time on today how many people are like literally running the data centers versus coding our software for streaming that I think is it's painting the future and then speaking then in the language that the
business can care about because they don't really care about honestly like oh like we have five engineers who have a really brutal job like having to maintain this like old ERP system you know I think that I don't really care so we've to paint in business terms so I guess probably my that
probably the biggest thing is like what is the future and then how do you translate that to actual business results yeah another study inside I gave from that is that think about those plans before your impetus to do how to think about it right you mentioned it the team is running fine right you
can sustain the load in and can continue to grow the business but that's probably the better time or best time to think about future plans versus your you better tradition the house on fire that's too late right yeah it wasn't like we had to come up with this vision out of nowhere it wasn't like oh
like we've never thought about where we're going to be in five years I think Paul and I myself like Paul particular or I boss like we really had a set of where we want to be like we we had that vision you know technically and then it was like suddenly the scramble to be like okay let's make it real let's ground it in the business outcome today but it wasn't like coming up with the strategy as you think say Jerry like from scratch nothing you should always be preparing for an M&A event but
I think being able to you know fall back on like you know a future vision that is already kind of like an orienting goal for the team and then saying we're going to dramatically shorten our delivery time versus we're going to pitch you on a future we've never told you about before that we promise we
can deliver you in two years that we just came up with yesterday that's harder I think that'd be a harder sell but a lot of things we had talked about like in terms of what we think we can deliver to switch the business our concept state is that can team it already heard so it's always
an acceleration this is not like magic this is also a part of an angle for how and you're at certain level that you got to find opportunity to to make an impact yourself you're not tow to do something you're too senior to do that and this is a good example that no even though it seemed
very good but you can make massive impact by being proactive by exercise strategic thinking and then come up with ideas that what dramatically accelerates the technology transformation you know with it probably nobody anticipated I totally agree just even like selfishly it actually allows the
tech team to be thinking about the next thing not thinking about the best right so like from the moment that you know we basically had the plan in place we were always thinking to the future even as having your brain space to be able to think about well what's the next big thing like that
that faces like what I'm working on now I'm working on very different than I was at the time of the transaction that I didn't even anticipate then but because I wasn't forced to be running all this like stuff over here it gave me the brain space to be able to even see that future and I think it's
meaningful for the business and it's meaningful to be able to have your tech leadership being able to think about the future of the business not just as you say to like kind of like do it marching orders or like taking commands or something about how to just make a thing happen I have personal
process questions communicating in a visionary way about the strategic future of a technology organization to me is like an amazing skill that not everybody knows how to do well do you have any recommended recommended ways to learn how to communicate about the technology organization
to the business in an effective way like is there a book to read people to follow what where do you go to acquire the language skill there I'm playing with this is an underrated engineering leadership skill that is I think easy to dismiss this kind of like soft skills or like oh no good at
that like I think you really put a ceiling under so you say like oh I'm so technical like I don't need to have those soft skills for something I think it's absolutely key to my ability to get things done totally but the thing is here is this is a great story of showing the difference that
that made because you could be stuck with legacy technology that's impeding the progress of your organization and this is like a huge macro example of what that would look like sorry continue I just was like this is a big deal I mean honestly I think a lot of it is like actually caring about
what the business is about I mean understanding what the future of the business what are the business leaders want the future of the business to be and where do they see the future of the business and it really internalizing that and realizing it's your job to actually really understand
that and then being able I think in some ways of talking language that is the way that these decisions are actually made I mean the decisions are made at executive levels like backed by real data and it obviously did a lot of research to figure out like well how much money does it take to win
the streaming worst you know these are grounded in facts right and he's like is it worth us to suspend five billion dollars a year on content to maybe win that's the decision point right so similarly I think as I mentioned run the business grow the business we actually kind of came
up with that framework it's not like oh that was a slide that we pulled out of another deck but it is the way that the team thinks about the world a little bit and so I get a lot of benefits from just being in and I always ask to stick around the meetings that I'm not really
supposed to be and I get a lot of benefit from being in those meetings and seeing other people brief and seeing other people like executives how does the CEO Fox Sports brief their business right and what resonates and so I learned a lot from seeing how business leaders communicate you know
about what their business is and how it runs not only to understand myself but also to see what really resonates so for me it's like a lot of listening and like outside of my lane and internalizing that and I think it's very different company by company different leaders obviously respond to
different approaches but I think that's been like the first step for me and then I always I don't know I'm like very prepared when I talk to leadership which is extremely prepared and then I always I look at it and I'm like what is all the jargon in here and I remove all the jargon and I always
look for passes for jargon every time to make sure that I don't use jargon and is this engineering jargon yeah it's like engineering jargon and I'm we're gonna like blockchains stuff now and like that's very hard to avoid jargon okay I was like because you know to pull out the business lane go
to and lots of jargon. It's totally cool drop that in there you know all day but engineering jargon I do like for passes to remove it for and your leaders that are not in those meetings yet but it's want to what are the approaches to to do it in a way that's come across in positive way
the way I started to do that was literally because I was in a meeting and I was briefly in like technical thing to a group and there was a group after me that was basically gonna brief to the next group and I was like you know can I stick around this meeting I'll send the back and they're like
yeah sure I said in the room I mean this is a block with Murdoch meetings so it's like it showed like a little bit of a hoodspot to like just ask to stick around and I did and like literally that has led to me like co-writing this business right like oh why were you there again and we started
talking and like go to some pretty smart and like next thing you know like even if like initially you might not have as much to contribute and I'm very comfortable asking to stay in the room I've done that a lot and just I said I could learn if I could just be in the room I won't be disruptive or whatever and then maybe I should just say something because I think generally don't want to be totally silent in a room because people like why are you here?
So you say one smart thing and that's it shut your mouth the rest of the time and that's my advice is like ask to stay in meetings that you're not actually invited to I think this is harder actually to work from home a lot harder to actually make that kind of thing happen yeah I was really
lucky in that as well as you were mentioning that that was an incredible deep path I didn't expect us to go that far as amazing the other personal process question melody do you have a particular process that helps you ideate the future strategic direction of the technology organization
how do you approach that are you creating like a specific regimented space you're doing like journal prompts what's your process there I write so many Google docs I mean I got Google docs come to Fox just so I could use Google docs I mean we were like a Microsoft shop I was like we
need Google docs this is how I work I find it so helpful to write I just write so much all the time and I'm always writing docs and then I'm always just put a comment in my docs and we're finally I just I think writing is so clarifying so I really like to write and then just in terms of how I spend
my time I'm a big believer in like high low time where I think it's important to be thinking strategically in my role like I need to be you know putting together frameworks for the team can like filter information like my example earlier of like by default technologies out these are
like the kinds of filters that I think really can be clarifying for teams to execute against and then I'm really in the weeds on certain projects where I'm actually seeing like how does this framework actually work for this project in practice I think middle management is like absolute death
it might be a weakness of mine but I just really hate superficially touching lots of things in the quest to make them each life one percent better I think that's like a total waste of time so personally I write a lot and I'm either writing like strategic like here's what this company should be all
about here's what I think the technical architecture should be I'm doing this right now blockchain stack right now so such a big question right what chain are we working on well while it's what this what are the futures right so I'm writing a ton about what is the feature technical
architecture for us that like meets what we need to do and then I'm like literally writing technical specs basically for one project I just do this a high low thing that works really well for me I really like to be grounded in like actual application and then I basically get comfortable that I don't know a ton of stuff like in the middle I don't know exactly how like these seven projects are going but you know there's like some ways to check in occasionally they go off the rails and that's
like a weakness of this approach but I still think it's it works for me for the low time can you give a little bit of commentary about what that looks like like when you're getting really in the weeds with
the team seeing how your framework is being implemented to get some feedback there is a shadowing a meeting or what does that look like oh no it means like I'm producing all the work products for it okay so I mean like right now for example you know where I'm working on this you know new business
within Fox around web 3 and I am personally developing the entire tokenomics strategy for one of our the export sleep partners we're working with and every piece of utility we're going to offer I was put together yesterday our entire drop schedule for the next year I'm like every time like here's
the exact price we're going to release it at here's like the utility is going to be offered here's the mechanic we're going to drew it for I literally wrote all that you know for feedback you know but I did the first draft that's what I mean by being low it's like you do the first draft you're not
just comments you know what other people are doing you're not getting briefed and you know contributing early to a project is like you are actually creating the work product for some project through the first time about what it's all about what's the the benefit of doing that
comparing to being brave and how out of field to take the lead in and you put your feedback you know and I was like I was for every project obviously that would be completely impossible I mean some of it is like my passion I really am excited about this project like I think it can be like one of
the most transformational about three projects out there I have a vision for it and I just wanted to like see this vision through I love the fact that I feel that way like it's super energizing to me that I can have this vision that I can actually make it real that I'm going to meet this chairman
of the lead the CEO of the business and when I talk about it it's like I wrote it all so like I know it really well so I find that personally quite energizing there are other projects we're working on why I just don't even feel that close connection to the for whatever reason I'm still this
project still need to be successful and we also think very talented people running it and so I'm super psyched that those projects are running I'm like I totally trust that person to run that project come to me if you need help but like by default I totally I support you and so I think the some of
the advantages like I personally find it energizing you know and it gets me like this is what we're all about this is why we're here that's one one piece of it but it's also it it's causing me like checks certain assumptions that seemed like right in the abstract but in practice I'm like actually
have no idea how I'm going to do this this would be really dumb in practice so some of it just like got checks and the final thing I'll say is I think back to my time at Palantir and I spent eight years at Palantir and did a ton of roles but there was one period of Palantir where I was basically in
this clear middle management role right where there were a bunch of individual contributors who were running I was essentially overseeing 12th projects and my job was basically like those 12 people it was too many projects for me to be involved with any of them those 15 projects maybe
huge projects you know would report up to me and then I would basically report up to the next part like to the CEO and I hated that job at when it was that way I love my time at Palantir but half the time in these meetings I'm like okay sounds good I'm like I just wasted their time
briefing me I guess you know some of my management style there's a lot of weaknesses to this approach you really it's like it's kind of risky but I think it's kind of like high risk kind of reward the amount of the goals of our conversations of umpuh guys is to offer different approach different
opinions like you got to know it and then you can choose yeah I don't recommend it for everyone I think for a lot of people it might not be right at all but it works for me so this massive thing happened that was incredibly shifting for the new organization that came out of this and it
opened up a whole new set of capabilities in a whole new pace of innovation for your organization and the way you look and operate it sounds entirely different than what it was pre this event with all of this that happened can you share a little bit more about like the end state what
that's now enabled with the stuff that you're working on now and the room that's opened up and now all the exciting things that you could now do because of leveraging this type of event can you give us a little more insight into what the impact has been around this sure immediately after
the event I think it was like all right we really had to focus on building the right capability into years be able to do all the things we knew we wanted to do so I personally for example and I spoke with this at your conference last year pivoted to streaming the Super Bowl in 4k
first time I did ever done by anyone and because we weren't worried about all these other things we could put this very audacious bowl in place which was actually in one year not even a laser the TSA we decided we were good just independently ahead of schedule let's stream on our own brand new infrastructure at this new quality level and that was a super audacious goal you know to move from you know zero concurrence basically to you know as I talked about last year about 3 million
concurrence you know on high quality definition so that was a kind of year one it was like all right let's really start accelerating our deliveries capabilities then you know we visited these projects kind of at that point we're on pace right like we basically said at what our goals were we were all
like smooth and real fast to execute against them I was one very burnt out which is very much the nights and weekends job you know for all sports events everything Jerry and I are casually in the live streaming business and we know how the impact that it can have people so exactly and
you know all sports games happen on Saturdays and Sundays and Thursday nights and Monday nights and it's just personally it was super fun but also very burnt out and you know anytime a screen would flicker I would get texted by like five second and we began to think about the future and it
basically when you when you choose not to fight one war it really gives you the resources to fight another war right so by not going after the streaming wars we'd essentially masked a 70 billion dollar war chest to do something different right and part of what we kind of came to the hypothesis
last year was like we think web 3 is the future of media distribution and so we founded this whole business we immediately got a hundred million dollars so we could start this new business and we could essentially what I think my hypothesis you know we'll see it's early days it's like this leap
frogs what media distribution should be you know so now we still stream we do live streaming that's still core competency for us it's very different than on demand streaming technically and so I'm still super proud and excited about everything it's having my old team on live streaming like they
said new quality capability is every day that people adore but we're not playing this on demand you know subscription business so instead if we're looking at web 3 it's like what's the few how does the next simpsons get financed by the fans we've a huge animation studio on partnered
up with our head of our animation studio and running this business we have this huge creative team to be able to go after this and it allows us like really look into the future and play make very big bets like in crypto that I think other media companies it's harder to do if you have not just
like see technology but also associated with that is legacy content rights and distribution rights oh well I can't sell this piece of content directly to the fan because I enter into this carriage deal with this cable company and they have the rights in this country for four years
right all that is gone so we have a lot more freedom yeah we're just looking at blockchain media distribution and what that's going to be and what that can enable and I think that's entirely facilitated I mean it's not just me personally my time and my boss's time and you know the team's
time but it's also like the budget and the headspace and the the vision and like the fact that you know the executive team trusted us right and we delivered on then the whole replat for me in two years thing and so they're likely to like now also be like oh this one's kind of crazy
and it might blow up all of our previous models for monetization but like we're willing to take like a bat and they've kind of we've kind of built up some trust because of our execution so it's super fun I'm like I'm learning new technical stuff every single day yeah I can tell you're
really excited and happy it blows my mind again is the speed and also the timing like the cutting edge the forefront that that you're at with this because you know at the time of us recording this you know the mass singer NFT marketplace and the WWE NFT marketplace launched like three four
months ago in October November and only all of a sudden now with the time of the recording this in January like everybody's talking about NFTs and everyone's launching a marketplace and yeah but you did this four months ago so it's to me it's the speed and the timing too and the way you've
been able to get into these new innovative spaces and such powerful ways that they get so extraordinary awesome thanks Patrick rapid fire questions what are you reading or listening to right now I'm listening to conversations with Tyler which I think is the best podcast by far out there I always
love it and I'm reading Project Hail Mary which is a new book by Andy Weir who wrote the Martian you know kind of a typical kind of near future event you know I kind of descriptive in the title pretty good you know that's my current media diet I love Eddie Weir I read Artemis and I
thought it was a ton of fun I was like man I really want to go visit the moon now so that's great what tool or methodology has had a big impact on you you know maybe I'll think about Tyler actually podcast I how to ask good questions and you guys are obviously experts at this I think it's like a
very underrated skill and I don't know if you've listened to Tyler but he had this end of year review and he's a very distinct and true style it's totally unlike anyone it's super direct there are no warm-ups right and he was reflecting on that in his end of year and he had this great line this
is something like I don't ask open-ended questions because like they invite bladry responses and this to me was like almost like a little counterintuitive because in interviews with candidates and stuff I often open with like how would you describe like your career how do you describe kind
of what you work on what gets you open yeah in the day and he's a super opposed to all this questions like he opens every interview with like like I listened to an interview yesterday with him on a classical guitarist he's like why is Bach so difficult for classical guitarists to learn
that literally the first words on the book okay like we're right into it right and I actually I'm kind of into that so I'm experimenting with this I don't know if it's a tool or methodology but it's kind of like a I think it's a tool like asking good questions and asking very pointed questions
versus open-ended ones I'm intrigued by and I'm I my people have been interviewing recently I've been subject to this style for better or worse I'm a big fan of that my thesis right now on the podcasting landscape are some of the best ones are the ones that drop you right into the conversation
as fast as possible so those direct questions I'm like I'm gonna listen I'm gonna I'm gonna learn I think that's that sounds like a really great what you got Tyler Cowan because he's the absolute master I love it what is a trend that you're seeing or following that's interesting or hasn't
hit the mainstream yet well I mentioned web 3 even though it's obviously not unknown but I do think there's a mainstream application that's totally under appreciated right now and it's so much more than JPEG collecting it's so much more than like speculative asset you know collection
and appreciation so I'm just really excited about kind of community activation as we were talking about earlier in this space and like what tokenization can unlock for you know connecting IP holders or creators directly with their fans and I'm just thinking about that in more authentic ways I
still think web 3 is a little underrated in actual projects out there the community activation piece I think is it's such a powerful phenomenon I mean we were talking about WWE fans are so passionate about that particular entertainment form and to create like a fan first environment for folks I
think is so cool so I'm really excited to see like the things that you all continue to do in experiment with meldy okay so you talked about you love asking good questions or the art of how to ask a good question what's your favorite or most powerful question that you like to ask or be
asked gosh I don't know well I think in the spirit of pointed questions like there is no single generic question every question is like actually based upon what that person is about a detailed thing about what they're doing so I think maybe I'll reject the premise of the question and say
that there are the best kind of question actually is not generic but respects kind of what that person knows and thus is like actually attuned to whatever they're about and it's thoughtful and wouldn't be appropriate to ask another person I so love the overarching point there rejecting
the premise but it's about really specific but I think that's so true do you have a quote or a mantra that you want to leave us with that's really resonating with you right now I mean you know maybe I'll harken back to our conversation about modes of working I don't know like good out of
it's a mantra but I always tell myself like be high low the middle is deaf is kind of a like a succinct way that I remind myself of you know and my focusing on like the right things and or learning the right things high low not the middle fantastic meldy this was so much fun thank you so
much again for joining us and for sharing your story to speak for Jerry a little bit like this is just so exciting to be a part of this conversation with you again and I've learned so much from you well I appreciate everything you guys do to free it at home for engineering leaders to come
together it's kind of a unique space and appreciate what you guys are up to we can do that means that I'll just apart like from people like you here are a couple takeaways from our conversation with Melody Hildbrand most mergers and acquisitions commonly include a two-year transfer of service
agreement or TSA and are usually quite unstrategic the unique opportunity of a time-bound TSA is that they can create a forcing function to turn your long-term tech wish list into an accelerated list of must-do initiatives Fox accelerated their tech transformation from five to two years how did
they do that they set a default decision in the agreement that all assets were disney's and then they have the right to claw back those assets as they aligned with their future vision of the technology organization this allowed them to selectively choose the things that will accelerate
their ability to deliver a future state architecture and then create team space to actually build the key priorities for their tech future to create the basis of your technology organization's merger strategy ask yourself questions like what kind of team do we want for the future what skills
do we think will need to deliver and innovate at the pace we want what are the key areas we want our leadership to be focusing on and can we offload the work not aligned with that when entering into an M&A negotiation come from a position of mutual respect be honest with your current
capabilities and what it will take to maintain them and determine agreed upon guiding principles like Fox's default here's how you can prepare for an early M&A or TSA strategy conversation with your team remember non technical executives are abstracted away from technical pain prepare to
communicate the future vision of the technology organization and what your solution can enable for the company you need to illustrate to them what is the reward for taking this risk especially if the approach is non-intuitive the opportunity for Fox that Melody highlighted was how Fox could
invest more in resources that grow the business versus running it to present a compelling strategy like that you need to ground your insights in real data so work with finance understand where are the investments going and know what your teams are spending their time on finally learn how the business leaders you're presenting to communicate remove jargon and speak using language that they resonate with if you like this episode make sure you subscribe to our new podcast girls