Welcome!
Thank you.
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
Welcome to the second
annual Pluralsight Live.
Yeah!
You feel that energy,
being live together?
So incredible.
Welcome to our customers.
Welcome to our authors,
our partners,
our investors,
our press, and our analysts.
We're so glad you're all here,
and we hope you feel welcome
in the great Silicon Slopes.
Yeah.
Like that video just demonstrated,
being together for Pluralsight Live
creates a transformational experience
in which all of you
and all of us
and the Pluralsight platform
are energized, activated,
and changed for the better.
That's what Live's all about,
and I'm confident that's
the experience you'll have
with us this week,
so thanks again for coming and being here.
Our theme this week is
a lens into the future.
Our goal, as we peer
through that lens together,
is to amplify our collective vision
and see what's possible
when technology can be put to use for good
all over the world.
We have amazing sessions and
speakers lined up this week.
We've already heard from
Caitlin Kalinowski from Oculus,
Crystal Yan from the U.S. Digital Service,
and Deborah Kurata, one
of the many esteemed
Pluralsight authors here on our stage,
and I'm really proud to announce
that this year
over 41% of our speakers
are incredible women
from all over technology.
Give it up for them!
We have some incredible customers,
innovators, and partners
here with us this week,
like Google, Microsoft, Target,
Amazon, Starbucks, VMware,
and many, many more,
and we'll be covering topics
that are critical to
our collective future,
things like AI, blockchain, crypto,
data science and machine learning,
cloud, modern software
development techniques,
and, of course, the Pluralsight platform
and how we can help you.
And PS Live wouldn't be complete
without an incredible
global leader on our stage,
someone who can really
challenge our thinking.
You know, after last year,
many people said to me,
Aaron, I don't think you can top that,
but I think we did.
Tomorrow, I'll be proud to host
the world's youngest
Nobel Peace Prize winner,
a global symbol for human rights
and an international icon
for girls' education,
the one and only Malala.
It's going to be incredible.
It's going to be an incredible few days,
and I just can't wait to get started,
so let's dive in.
I want you to think for a minute
about why we're all here.
What would have you come
to Pluralsight Live?
The reason is because we're facing
a massive challenge and
opportunity as an industry.
When I was a kid,
there were only a couple
of programming languages,
and now today there are over 250
programming languages and frameworks,
many of which get updated as
many as 8 times per year.
Now, an average software developer
has to master nine skills
to be proficient in their role.
A React web developer
has an even higher bar.
They have to master 17 skills,
including things like HTML5, CSS, Redux,
Bootstrap, and many more.
The pace is daunting.
And in order to win,
we must embrace that challenge
and seize that opportunity
and create a new future.
So I want you to just
imagine for a moment
that you're standing in
front of a crossroads,
and what you may not
realize in that moment
is that one of these roads
leads to success and innovation
while the other road
leads to complacency and decline.
But you can't really
see it in that moment.
The key difference between
those two roads is simple.
It's your commitment to technology
and a future technology strategy.
You're either setting the pace
or trying to keep up.
You know, in my lifetime,
and just so you know,
I'm already a grandpa,
if you can believe that,
I have seen tremendous
transformational shifts that have happened
all over the place,
that have disrupted entire industries.
Do you guys remember the rotary phone?
See, I have clear memories of this
back in my little home
in southeast Portland,
and I was standing there in the kitchen
because the phone was actually attached
to the wall with a wire,
and I would get frustrated
when I had to dial numbers
that had nines in them
because I had to go all the way around.
You guys remember this?
And then because the handset
was attached to the wall,
I had to like hide in the broom closet
to have privacy when
talking to my girlfriends.
We've come so far
from rotary phones, to wireless,
to completely mobile experiences;
from taxis and car rentals
to carsharing on demand
just by pressing a button;
from retail stores to e-commerce
to instant delivery via drone;
from gas and electric cars to
incredible battery technology
that are changing the way we
think about moving around;
and from banks to PayPal
to Stripe, Venmo, and more.
Things are shifting.
Things are changing dramatically.
It's happening everywhere.
And with each of these technology-driven
transformational shifts,
some companies won, and some didn't.
Just take a look at the
Fortune 500 list back in 1955.
If you take a snapshot of that list
and fast forward to today,
only 12% of those companies
are still on that list 62 years later.
Why?
The ones who stayed on the list
committed to technology,
and they learned how to
evolve and embrace it.
The ones who dropped off the list didn't.
But every company,
every company on that list
had the opportunity.
They had the choice to take
advantage of those technologies
to change their futures.
And the companies that
win in the next 60 years
will do the very same thing.
More companies will stay on,
and some companies will fall off.
Not that long ago,
I was sitting in New York City
with one of the world's largest banks.
I was sitting with their
C-level executives,
and I could tell these executives
looked a little bit different
than some of the others.
They were committed to
embracing technology
for the future of the bank.
And when I asked why,
I discovered that their CEO,
this is J.P. Morgan, by the way,
the CEO of J.P. Morgan, Jamie Dimon,
had recently declared
that J.P. Morgan is no longer a bank.
No.
J.P. Morgan is a tech company
disguised as a bank.
Think about that for a minute.
Think about that mindset
and what it means in terms of shifting
the way that entire organization operates.
That's what will keep J.P.
Morgan on the Fortune 500 list
60 years from now.
Here at Pluralsight,
we've experienced our own
version of this transformation.
You know, we weren't always
a cloud-based platform.
In the early days of Pluralsight,
back in 2004,
we started in the physical classroom
teaching people live, just like this,
and over time, over that next decade,
we moved from the physical classroom
to the virtual classroom
to a completely cloud-based experience.
And now we're using data science
and really advanced data-driven techniques
to create a personalized,
adaptive experience
for individuals all over the world
in over 150 different countries.
So when you hear that
statement from J.P. Morgan,
we think of ourselves that way too.
Pluralsight is no longer
just a learning company.
No.
Pluralsight is a tech company
disguised as a learning platform.
Thank you.
And I invite you
to think about your businesses that way.
Can you say the same thing?
Intentionally deciding
to become a tech company
requires you to first look
at the skills you need
to create that future.
That's at the start of all of it.
When you do that, you'll quickly realize
that the technology skills you need
are strategic to your future.
Let's just look at
another well-known example
in a company that I'm sure you all use, called Netflix.
How many of you use Netflix?
Okay, that looks like pretty
much every hand in the room.
Do you remember that
Netflix used to send DVDs to your house?
Do you remember that?
You'd have to manage your
queue online through a website,
and they would actually physically
mail you physical discs
that you would put into a DVD player.
Then they realized that
actually sending you
information, data, bits
through a wire would be
a lot less expensive,
and it would also be a lot better for you
in terms of the experience.
The early leaders at Netflix
saw this digital,
technology-driven opportunity,
and they saw it when they were small.
They saw it when it was early,
they were at that crossroads,
and they realized to win
they would need to get the right people
with the right skills
to embrace that technology future.
So what did they do?
They committed to a technology strategy,
and they started investing,
investing in technology skills development
across their organization,
investing in their people.
That was the new future for them.
And they knew even that
wouldn't be enough to move as fast
towards this future that they saw,
so Netflix went into the broader ecosystem
to tap into the advanced skills
that they knew existed in the market.
They announced this thing
called the
257
00:12:00,000 --> 00:11:57,007
.
Does anybody here remember that?
The Netflix Prize?
It was a bounty,
one million dollars
for the individual or team
who could come up with the very best
user recommendation algorithm
to drive their digital viewing experience
in the new digital Netflix.
Teams competed over 3 years
all over the world,
and in 2009, Netflix awarded a team
called BellKor's
Pragmatic Chaos the prize.
And that team consisted of
some of the smartest computer
scientists and researchers
from numerous companies,
sorry, countries across Europe.
The outcome of this contribution
really moved the needle for Netflix.
Over time, Netflix began to win
because of these data-driven experiences
and the data science they had
now built into their platform.
They knew it was the skills,
the tech skills, that
would make the difference.
Over the next 10 years,
Netflix went from 0
to more than 30%
of all home entertainment
revenue in the United States.
Incredible results.
And the single most
important decision they made
was this commitment to
a technology strategy
and building those skills they needed
to execute on it.
And I promise you
the same will be true for all
of you over the next 10 years.
Just look at what's coming right now.
We have things like
AI, blockchain, crypto,
augmented reality, virtual
reality, and so much more.
These are the skills that are
going to change our futures,
and you can't get them
fast enough to compete.
They must become a strategic priority.
Ten years from now
it will be your skills in these key areas
that determine which road you're taking,
so how are you going to
build that capability?
At this point in my presentation,
it may sound obvious,
but I can guarantee
you that most companies
simply don't see it this way.
Only 26% of leaders
said that their IT organizations,
skills and digital
experiences and technology,
are above average.
Fifty-two percent of leaders
say skill development
is either unstructured
or a direct response
to immediate needs.
Only 13% see these
technology skills as strategic.
There's good news and bad news in that.
The good news is that's a great
opportunity for all of you.
They don't see it.
The question is do you?
What are you willing to do
to make these technology skills
a strategic part of your company's future
and to create the skills you need to win?
I'm happy to say that
Pluralsight is here to help.
We're your partner in all of this.
Our SaaS platform enables you to win
in this new, digital age.
It's our rapid content development engine,
our innovative learning experiences
that enable you to keep up
with the fast pace of technology change
and make technology skills
strategic within your companies.
The Pluralsight platform will ultimately
allow you to create the
future you envision,
the future you can see.
We're not just content
and courses anymore.
No.
Pluralsight is the
technology learning platform
to enable and empower your future success.
Just like sales leaders
have salesforce.com
and HR leaders have workday.com,
technology leaders now
have pluralsight.com.
Thank you.
We're their go-to platform,
the platform they embrace
and engage with every day
to drive digital transformation
and ongoing innovation.
It's how we help Johnson Controls
eliminate cybersecurity risks
that could cost them and
their customers millions.
It's how we help O2 Telefonica
deliver award-winning web and
mobile apps all over Europe.
And while you're here this week at Live,
I invite you to listen to the many
Pluralsight customers who are here
sharing their stories of success
and how they've used
the Pluralsight platform
to create a new future for
themselves and their customers,
and I promise you we
can do the same for you.
Here at Pluralsight,
we're also constantly innovating
and disrupting ourselves
because we know that
everything I just said
is true for us too,
so we're innovating in
the realms of content
and product experiences.
One of our most recent innovations
that I want to tell you about
is something that we
released earlier this year
called the Pluralsight Technology Index.
And I'm really proud of this
innovation within our company.
This index ranks the
demand and growth rate
of over 300 popular technologies
across the industry,
and it's done in a
completely data-driven way
using data science.
We pull from nearly
eight billion data points
from across various developer
and IT-oriented sites
to calculate global popularity
and trending growth rates of
each of these technologies.
We then publish the technology list
into the Pluralsight Technology Index.
This equips our CIOs and CTO
customers and their teams
with valuable insights on
the growing and declining
technology trends to better
inform their strategies.
And guess what?
We use it too.
We use that same
data-driven technology index
to better inform our content strategy
to ensure that we're delivering
the right piece of content
at the right moment in time
for every individual on our platform.
Last year, we also introduced you
to a brand-new capability
within the Pluralsight
platform called Iris.
Yes!
Iris is the data science
behind our platform,
and isn't she beautiful?
Iris is learning and growing every year.
You know, we introduced Iris last year
and started collecting a
tremendous amount of data
across our customer base.
We also introduced you to one of the first
experiences built on top
of the Iris foundation,
which is the science.
The new experience is
called Pluralsight IQ.
The first member of that
family was Skill IQ.
Skill IQ measures the proficiency
in a specific technology skill.
Now, in the last year,
we've collected over one million Skill IQs
from across the industry
and benchmarked them.
With each data point we collect,
Iris becomes smarter,
and our learning becomes more personalized
for every individual.
Skill IQ has made it possible
for us to now identify
the strengths and the
gaps at the skill level
for every individual and every
organization on our platform.
We've made a lot of progress
with Iris and Pluralsight IQ,
but there's so much more we can do
to measure proficiency,
not just at the skill level,
but for a role or a job.
The way most companies do this today
are insufficient at best.
They tend to use a lot of HR consultants,
vendor certifications,
you know, manual, in-person
onboarding techniques,
but those types of things
only get you so far.
As a result, most technology leaders
don't understand their existing talent,
and they don't know where
their strengths and gaps exist.
We know we need a better way.
So today, I'm excited to introduce you
to the newest member of
the Pluralsight IQ family, Role IQ.
SO exciting what's possible with this.
With Role IQ, you now have
a groundbreaking new way
to measure proficiency in a role.
And the best part?
It's free for everyone
anywhere in the world.
Let's see how it works.
When you build a great product,
you do it with precision.
You don't just wing it.
You have a plan.
Why don't you approach teams the same way?
Because you can't.
Oftentimes, putting the right
people on the right projects
feels like a guessing game.
You're in the dark.
Let's say you need to build
a new enterprise web app
to replace some aging legacy software.
How do you know you have the
right people to pull it off?
You could walk into a room and ask
who here is a web developer?
You might get a fair share of takers.
Great, but I need people who know Angular.
Yeah?
Okay, but who's really experienced?
Let me show you what Pluralsight
Role IQ can do for you.
With Role IQ, people will finally know
which skills really matter for their jobs.
They can prove how good they are
or see if they're falling behind.
They'll know what it takes
to become the best.
It's the way to quantify roles
across your technology teams,
and you can customize roles
and build teams to tackle
your biggest objectives.
Whether that's moving
critical apps to the cloud,
eliminating cybersecurity threats,
or building your next
great customer experience,
it's time to move from chaos to clarity.
With Role IQ, you can
now quantify the talent
across all your teams
so you can make the right calls,
deliver faster, and nail your goals.
Stop the guesswork.
Go rock your role.
What do you think?
Really excited about this one.
Role IQ gives you the ability to measure
a collection of skills
that make up a role.
First time this has ever been possible.
Now you can get a Role IQ
for a specific role like
a Node web developer,
a security analyst,
or a systems administrator.
And once someone enlists in
a role to get their Role IQ,
those individual technologists
will get greater clarity
on the skills required
for success in that role
and a clear path to mastery
as they continue their learning journey.
Role IQ further adapts
the learning experience
for those individuals,
speeds it up, and makes
it even more effective.
Eighty-eight percent of our beta users said that
Role IQ helped them better
understand their job proficiency
and move faster.
Role IQ also enables technology leaders
who are trying to make sense
of all of it from up here.
It allows them to standardize roles
as a collection of skills,
and then they can identify
the skills gaps that exist
across the organization
and in the people in those roles.
And because the last mile
for every customer is always different,
we give leaders the
capability to customize roles,
to create new ones,
to define them as a collection of skills
from across our library
allowing you to better
align your organization's
unique needs to your future strategy.
Then you can clearly quantify
the talent on your teams,
expose those skills gaps,
and close them once and for all.
Role IQ, in the end,
allows you to move from chaos to clarity.
You know, even the biggest
software companies in the world
need this capability.
It's not just all of you.
Microsoft has shown tremendous leadership
over the last few years in working with us
to cultivate an ecosystem
of Microsoft Azure skills
relying on our content and Skill IQ,
and now, today, they're
building on Role IQ.
We're proud to have Microsoft
here with us this week
as our official Role IQ launch partner.
So now, please welcome to the stage
Jeff Sandquist, GM of Cloud +
AI Developer Relations at Microsoft
to talk to us about this partnership.
Jeff, come on out.
Buddy!
Come up here.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
Really great to see you.
So good to have Jeff here.
Here, Jeff, have a seat.
Hey, great!
So, Jeff, your title is interesting.
You're the GM of AI +
Cloud Developer Relations,
and I saw a tagline,
a description of that,
that you're basically,
your intention, your goal,
is to reinvent Microsoft's relationship
with developers around the world?
Is that?
Every company's transforming,
and we're no different than that.
We're not your mother
and father's Microsoft.
We're building a great team across,
around the world that is
connected with developers,
people that are committers
to the Linux kernel,
Node developers, .NET developers,
all folks that are looking to go help you
get connected to the cloud.
And through that transformation,
partnerships like that with Pluralsight
are so important for us
to be able to reach folks.
Awesome.
And has anyone noticed a
difference in Microsoft
over the last few years?
Yeah?
Yeah, I think that's crystal clear.
Such great work,
and thank you for your
contributions to the industry,
to the community.
It's so important, you know,
with the changes that are going on.
You talked about the number of languages
from a Node developer
and how hard it is to learn,
and how do you remove that friction?
And being able to go online,
and being able to connect,
that's where a lot of my folks that live,
they go connect on Twitter,
they go use online training,
they use those to help developers.
And much like you're not
going to go tell somebody
you need to speak French to do business,
you're not going to tell a developer
that they need to do C#.
They're going to bring the
language that they want.
So whether they're a Node
developer, a C# developer,
HTML5, any type of developers,
we want to be the cloud for that.
Awesome, awesome.
So, Jeff, talk to the
audience a little bit about
why Microsoft decided to
partner with Pluralsight
on Role IQ.
Role IQ is such a great way
to assess your skills, right?
And if you look at the different roles
that are available for it,
how can you make it easy
to assess an organization?
Now, here's what we know.
We know that content, online materials,
any type of form of learning and training
drives growth of our business.
That's how we drive growth of Azure,
that's how we pay the bills every month
and keep the lights on,
and one of the best ways of doing that
to get more developers,
is to partner so people
can assess their skills.
It's 2 in the morning,
inspiration strikes.
Developer gets out on Google,
they search, they look for that answer.
We want to be on the other side of that,
and by being online with you all,
that allows us to reach any developer.
The don't have to come
to our sites to do it.
They can go where they're comfortable.
Pluralsight's a great place for that.
And do you see,
before I go to the next question,
do you see a connection between these
Azure skills and what it means
to your business in the end?
A hundred percent.
First and foremost, like using a cloud,
people have choice, right?
They can go to Amazon,
they can go to Azure,
they can go to Google, right?
There's three major cloud providers.
The only way we're going
to win people's business
is by earning them,
by delivering a great product
and ensuring they have the skills.
When people learn how to do things online,
get that technical training,
there's a direct correlation
to growth of our products.
We see it every day.
We see double digits.
We just have to get people
able to consume content
and understand where their skills are.
You and your organizations though,
you have a bigger challenge.
How do you get your people trained?
How do you do it consistently?
How do you assess that?
What's the easiest way to do that?
There's probably not a lot
of easy ways to do that.
You need something consistent.
That's why this is important.
Because what we're trying
to do as a business
is help companies transform.
You know, a company that
was not in the cloud,
everybody now is a developer company.
Every company is building
these infrastructures,
and this is a really
great way for us to help
an organization get ready for the cloud.
Yeah, that's great.
You know, look, in the end,
I see it very clearly.
Like one of the reasons why
Microsoft is doing so well
in the cloud is because
you and your leadership sees
that these skills are strategic,
and there is a direct
correlation to billions,
and it's incredible to like
just see you executing on that
and seeing the results play out.
So next, talk to me about
what Microsoft is wanting
to solve with Role IQ.
You look at different
roles to start, right?
You look at this whether
you're a developer,
a solution architect, or an administrator.
How do you go and build
those skills, right?
Where do you get started?
What are the building blocks?
And so what we're trying to do
is make it so that we can be
the cloud for all, as we say.
You can go down and see our booth.
It's a great tagline.
What it really means is that
whatever developer you are,
whatever you need to be able
to go build with your business,
how do we go enable you to get trained?
And when we do this work with
great partners with this,
here's what I know about Pluralsight.
How many Pluralsight
authors, presenters out here,
you guys are amazing, and gals.
You're absolutely some
of the best of the best.
So we know we're going to
have great quality presenters.
We care about our customers.
We know when they come
and visit Pluralsight
they're going to have
great quality content.
We know that they're going to be helped
by a community of individuals
of fellow learners.
And when all of that comes together,
magic happens, right?
People learn.  People change their lives.
You've talked about changes
in industry, right?
I've been lucky too.
We're both grandparents,
believe it or not,
and we both have grandkids
and things like that.
I've seen shifts of technology
change happen, right?
Whether it was the early days of Windows
and things like that or .NET and Java,
those things brought,
they brought opportunity.
Right now, the world, with
the move to the cloud,
it's the single largest shift
in computing in the history,
the history of computing.
No time has ever been greater.
And sometimes, us nerds,
we got to go participate
that, and others didn't.
Now, what's going to happen is
every company's becoming
a developer company,
and that shift, if you're into finances,
there's about a trillion
dollars up for grabs
in business to go get.
Great, go after that.
You want to change your life?
Great, you can build new skills.
You want to change the world?
The cloud is going to empower anybody
regardless of where they live.
Whether it's a small town in
Saskatchewan, where I grew up,
San Francisco, Salt Lake City,
or wherever you come from,
the cloud will change and empower you.
Together with Pluralsight, Role IQ,
the work that we do,
you can transform your organizations,
and you can transform yourself.
I'm very excited about it.
So who will ultimately,
one more question, you're
not getting off that easily,
who will benefit from these
roles that we're shipping?
Look, I lead a large team
in a company that's what, 600 plus folks
that work in my org,
and every day you're trying to decide
how do you get ready for the next wave?
How do you get ready and prepare yourself?
So one, leaders of companies
are going to be benefiting.
Two, and this might be
more, your customers, right?
At the end of the day,
your training teams,
those here that are
responsible for that,
your customers are trying
to use your products
and transform with your company.
They're going to benefit.
Your company's going to grow.
Your shareholders are going to grow.
And finally, you as individuals.
What is the skill?
What is the skill that you
want to go learn this day?
Even those that are here that aren't a developer
that are learning how
to help your company,
what skill do you want to pick up?
I find that when you reduce the friction,
you make something free,
you make sure people are aware
and you drive that quality,
that is what's
going to really matter for folks,
and that is what's going to change.
And our industry is always changing.
We don't celebrate history.
We don't necessarily celebrate tenure.
Microsoft had a lot of tenure,
and we weren't really,
you know, unless we were changing.
We celebrate progress and innovation,
and we celebrate the ability to change,
and so all of those things
will help us benefit.
On that note, Jeff,
thank you so much for being here
and sharing your story.
Great work at Microsoft.
I really appreciate the partnership.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Bye.
So as part of this incredible partnership,
we've shipped three new
Microsoft Azure roles
that you can go check out in the Exchange
and get started with.
We're also thrilled to
announce that Google
has also committed to
partnering with us on Role IQ,
and we're working with many
other large software companies
on how we can do the same for them.
With features like Iris,
Skill IQ, and now Role IQ,
no one can help you better lead
through digital
transformation and innovation
better than Pluralsight.
We're your platform.
So go check it out at the Exchange,
and rock your role.
We have some cool hats that
you can get once you do that,
these trucker hats with
one of many different
Pluralsight badges on the front.
So now,
imagine you're back at that
crossroads we started with,
and you're facing that decision.
Do you see now the connection
between the road that leads
to success and innovation
and this commitment to a
future technology strategy?
Do you now see the technology skills
as strategic to your future and success?
This means your tech strategy
is now becoming your company strategy.
Do you now see yourselves
as tech companies described,
disguised as whatever it is that you do?
We certainly see you that
way here at Pluralsight.
And as the resident tech
leaders in your organizations,
we know that you have the power
to choose the path forward.
You have a tremendous amount of influence,
and it's time to take charge.
Build the capabilities
you need to win tomorrow
by starting today with us.
Thank you, thank you for being here.
Thank you.
