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 NotesTranscriptThe following transcript is AI generated.00:00:00 BAILeYHello and welcome to data driven.00:00:02 BAILeYThe podcast where we explore the emerging fields of data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.00:00:09 BAILeYIn 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 BAILeYCloud computing and now machine learning.00:00:26 BAILeYCurrently he leads Nam Eml, a company focused on helping app developers start and grow mobile subscription businesses.00:00:34 BAILeYIf you follow Frank and or Andy on social media, you certainly have heard them bang on about their secret project.00:00:41 BAILeYI will drop a one word hint here foreshadowing.00:00:45 BAILeYNow on with the show.00:00:48 FrankHello and welcome back to data driven.00:00:50 FrankThe 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 FrankBecause we focus on where the rubber hits the road.00:01:05 FrankSo with that as my guest on this pandemic road trip, that hasn't happened.00:01:13Yeah.00:01:13 FrankBy my copilot here is Andy Leonard.00:01:16 FrankHow you doing Andy?00:01:17 AndyHey, I'm doing pretty good Frank how are you?00:01:20 FrankI'm doing well, I'm doing well.00:01:21 FrankI had a kind of an architecture session this morning, so that went really well.00:01:27 FrankIt was.00:01:28 FrankIt was an interesting conversation and I love doing those.00:01:31 FrankThose are always fun.00:01:32 FrankHow about?00:01:32 AndyYeah.00:01:33 AndyYeah, so I'm proofing the next book.00:01:36 AndyProofing is the absolute last chance to remove all of the typos I've left in.00:01:42 AndyAs I've gone through the last three full edit sessions and there's still some there.00:01:47 AndyFrank, I'm convinced that the next book is going to have, you know, have a fair share of those.00:01:52 AndyWhat I'm really concerned about.00:01:54 AndyIs 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 AndyYeah no.00:02:10 AndyBut yeah.00:02:12 FrankThat was the hardest part.00:02:13 FrankPeople asking.00:02:14 FrankLike 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 FrankYou know, and I would look at it and be like man like I'm a terrible or.00:02:28 AndyThat's I have said over and over again to my computer monitor who wrote this crap.00:02:33 AndyBy a friend if you live.00:02:33 AndyBut 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 AndyI I changed from my writing language.00:02:46 AndyI wrote it like three years ago.00:02:48 AndyAnd 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 AndyAn I kind of needed to because the rest of the book was going to be in C sharp anyway.00:03:12 AndyAnd so yeah, that's that's kind of how it went.00:03:15 AndyAnd for anybody listen, it thinks wow, Andy is smart.00:03:18 AndyHe's written a book about C sharp.00:03:20 AndyHe must know C sharp really, really well.00:03:22 AndyI say throughout the book I am not a C sharp developer.00:03:26 AndyI feel like I'm working my way up to being a noob, but but.00:03:29 FrankDon't you work classes?00:03:31 AndyI do wear glasses.00:03:33 AndyYes, yeah.00:03:33 FrankSo you can see sharp.00:03:36 AndyI did.00:03:36 AndyThey took me awhile.00:03:37 AndyDo you have your sound effects running from I?00:03:39 FrankDo were back in Zend Caster.00:03:41 FrankSo for folks listening like I don't remember this being on the live stream.00:03:45 FrankIf 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 FrankUm?00:03:56 AndyYeah yeah, Dan Burke all is awesome.00:04:00 AndyHe's a co-founder and CEO and I hope I say this right, is it?00:04:04 AndyIs it nami? Nami ML Dan.00:04:07 Dan BurcawYeah nami. Like tsunami.00:04:09 AndyAh 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 FrankWell.00:04:19 AndyAnd 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 AndySo pretty smart Guy joined joined Oracle back during the acquisition of Push IO and.00:04:39 AndyPush IO was a leading mobile messaging provider as well.00:04:44 AndyAnd he served there as a Co founder and CEO.00:04:47 AndyThere's a bunch more in here about Nan, an it all kind of boils down to super smart, successful guy.00:04:54 AndyWe've had a little bit of banner before we click the record button an I can attest to.00:04:59 AndyThat is really enjoyable conversation.00:05:01 AndyI look forward to this show.00:05:02 AndyThanks for being here, Dan.00:05:05 Speaker 1Really happy to be here.00:05:05 Speaker 1Really happy to be here.00:05:06 Speaker 1Thanks for having me.00:05:07 FrankAwesome, so you're a serial entrepreneur and you founded a bunch of companies.00:05:13 FrankUm, but my favorite part of the bio I read on you was that.00:05:18 FrankYou wrote software that ended up on a nuclear submarine.00:05:23 Speaker 1Yeah, that's right.00:05:26 Speaker 1It's it's hard.00:05:26 FrankThat that totally away I was like what?00:05:29 Speaker 1It it's it's hard to even tell that story sometimes because it's so unbelievable.00:05:35 Speaker 1I 17 years old at the time.00:05:38 Speaker 1The company that I cofounded was building a flavor of Linux.00:05:46 Speaker 1A flavor of Linux that was designed to run on Apple Macintosh hardware.00:05:52 Speaker 1And at the time.00:05:52 FrankInteresting.00:05:54 Speaker 1Then 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 AndyMe.00:06:18 Speaker 1How to build these kind of supercomputer clusters?00:06:21 Speaker 1And 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 1We'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 1That were deployed across the US Navy nuclear sub fleet for the purpose of doing sonar image processing, yeah.00:06:53 AndyWow.00:06:55 Speaker 1The the the software that I wrote was related to.00:07:00 Speaker 1You know how folks on the boat would have to manage these units if there was issues, how would you know?00:07:07 Speaker 1Kind 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 1We ended up.00:07:17 Speaker 1I mean it was this was such a crazy project because the hardware was modified hardware.00:07:22 Speaker 1It 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 1So it's it was.00:07:37 Speaker 1It was a nutty project, an I'm.00:07:40 Speaker 1Looking back on it now, I'm surprised that it had ever shipped quite frankly.00:07:46 FrankSpoken like a true engineer, right?00:07:48 FrankYou're always you always...