Status Go: Ep. 239 – Tech Trends from Around the World | Mehmet Gonullu

Summary

In this riveting episode of “Status Go,” host Jeff Ton welcomes the visionary Mehmet Gonullu to dive into the global tech trends that are reshaping industries far beyond the silicon valleys of the world. From the bustling startup landscape of Dubai to the widespread adoption of AI, cloud computing, and 5G, we explore how these innovations are fueling a tech revolution in 2024 and beyond. Gonullu, with a rich background in tech consulting and AI entrepreneurship, shares insider insights on the importance of embracing AI to stay competitive, the challenges of cybersecurity, and the transformative power of cloud agility. Whether you’re a tech enthusiast, a professional looking to stay ahead of the curve, or simply curious about the future of technology, this episode sheds light on the exciting advancements that are paving the way for a more connected and efficient tomorrow. Tune in to “Status Go” for a glimpse into a world where technology is the frontier of opportunity!

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About Mehmet Gonullu

With over 20 years of experience in technology and business consulting, I am the Founder and CEO of Yassi Ventures, a boutique tech and business consultancy firm that is revolutionizing how startups and scale-ups grow in the Middle East, Turkiye, and Africa region. We specialize in offering bespoke consultancy services for startups at every stage, from idea validation to mastering market entry.

As a dedicated startup partner, mentor, and advisor, I fully engage in the entrepreneurial journey of our clients. My role transcends just nurturing ideas and developing MVPs; it involves intricately designing business models, linking startups with potential investors, and steering them towards creating effective go-to-market strategies and fundraising endeavors. This holistic approach has consistently driven remarkable growth and revenue for the startups I collaborate with.

I apply my deep-seated expertise to aid tech startups in formulating strategic business development and market entry plans, laying a solid groundwork for their future achievements. Moreover, I am passionate about disseminating my knowledge and enthusiasm for technology and entrepreneurship, which I do as a public speaker and through my podcast, The CTO Show With Mehmet.

Episode Highlights

[00:00:00] – Embrace the future of AI in 2024 or risk missing the train to tech advancement!

[00:00:54] – Previewing 2023’s groundbreaking tech trends and what’s to come in 2024!

[00:02:12] – Celebrating the start of an exciting New Year on Status Go.

[00:03:19] – Discovering the world of tech through one expert’s journey from electrical to computer engineering.

[00:05:34] – The entrepreneurial spirit thrives with tech consultancies and groundbreaking startups.

[00:06:58] – Dubai’s forward-thinking approach makes it a high-tech hub akin to Silicon Valley.

[00:09:11] – Witness the rise of local tech startups in Dubai paving their way to global success!

[00:10:56] – Tech scene in Dubai heats up, mirroring global trends and behaviors.

[00:12:41] – Discussing cloud adoption, 5G rollouts, and IoT: Tech trends taking the world by storm.

[00:13:34] – The challenge of finding top tech talent and the initiatives to attract experts to the region.

[00:15:13] – Cybersecurity and AI skills in demand: Exploring the talent landscape in Dubai.

[00:16:51] – Remote work becomes mainstream, offering flexibility to local and international professionals.

[00:18:24] – Embracing the hybrid work model and the rise of digital nomads in Dubai.

[00:20:36] – Generative AI’s impact in 2023 and the initial shock it brought to the tech community.

[00:24:14] – Investing in AI understanding for businesses to secure a competitive edge in 2024.

[00:26:42] – The rise of industry-specific large language models and solving real business problems with AI.

[00:28:21] – Cybersecurity attacks expected to surge as AI becomes more pervasive.

[00:30:07] – Cloud adoption driven by a need for agility, not just cost savings.

[00:32:17] – 5G technology’s deployment enhancing IoT and application development.

[00:33:59] – Call to action: Embrace and understand AI to thrive in the tech industry.

[00:35:39] – Visit the CTO show for a treasure trove of tech insights and knowledge.

[00:38:16] – Wrapping up the show with an invitation to connect and learn more at intervision.com.

Transcript

Mehmet Gonullu [00:00:00]:

But I believe moving forward in 2024, we’re going to see people understand more and more about this AI thing. If you don’t give attention to the AI, you are in a dangerous place. Because now companies that they will adopt AI, they will be able to move forward from business perspective in a much faster pace. And if you miss the train, it will be very hard to catch the next one because the next one who knows when it’s going to come.

Voice Over – Ben Miller [00:00:37]:

Technology is transforming how we think, how we lead, and how we win. From InterVision, this is Status Go, the show, helping IT leaders move beyond the status quo, master their craft, and propel their IT vision.

Jeff Ton [00:00:54]:

Welcome to the first episode of 2024 here on Status Go. We are entering our 6th year of bringing you outstanding tech leader content. Today, we are going international. Last fall, I had the honor of appearing on The CTO Podcast with Memet. In this episode, Memet returns the favor.

2023 was an amazing year in tech. Of course, the news was dominated by chat, GPT, and the other generative AI platforms, but there was so much more. Cloud adoption hit all-time highs, 5g rollouts. We’re not quite ubiquitous yet, but we’re closing in on that. And of course, the Internet of Things. Everything is connected. Absolutely everything. All of these things made impacts and Mehmet and I will talk about not only those trends and the impact they had in 2023, but more importantly, looking ahead to 24. What do you as a tech leader need to be thinking about when it comes to those trends and maybe some additional ones that pop into our heads as we’re talking today?

With that Mehmet, welcome to Status go.

Mehmet Gonullu [00:02:12]:

Well, thank you very much, Jeff, for this opportunity and Happy New Year, by the way, to the audience wish it will be a very successful 2024 for everyone. And thank you for inviting me to your show.

Jeff Ton [00:02:28]:

I was really excited to be on your program. Several months ago Mehmet, and in preparation for that, I started listening to some of your episodes and I became a fan. So I listen to almost every one of your episodes. I can’t say I catch them all, but for our listeners, it is a great program and it’s available on all the major podcast distribution channels. So check it out. It’s The CTO show with Mehmet.

So Mehmet, before we get into these trends, I’d love for you to share a little bit about your background, because in addition to doing podcasting, you are doing a myriad of other things in the tech space. So tell us a little bit about your background and the things that you’re up to these days.

Mehmet Gonullu [00:03:19]:

Sure. Thank you again, Jeff, for this introduction and yeah, a little bit about myself. So podcasting, it was not my main thing until the beginning of last year, 2023. So I started in Jan 2023. So now one year exactly in this podcasting adventure, I would say myself, I’m based in Dubai, outside of the United Arab Emirates. I’m originally from Turkey, shifted here back in 2005. So now almost 19 years and counting. Been a techie guy all my career.

So since I was kid, was fascinating. First by electronics and then later on. If someone is same as our generation, the age of Internet, when it started in the, everyone started to have computer in his home or her home. And this is why I was fascinated. And I saw the future actually in technology. And actually when I went to college, I started my studies as electrical engineering. And then after just two semesters, I figured out, no, I need to be in the computer space. So shifted to computer engineering because I was always fascinated by technology.

I mean it, computers, programming languages and so on, by any means, I’m not a programmer, so I was always kind of the infrastructure networking security guy. So that’s how I started my career during college. So I was living in a country called Lebanon. It also is in the Middle east, so where I started my own network management company. So I was just taking care of people’s computers, network switches and so on. And then in 2005, when I shifted to United Arab Emirates, I worked for a university, started a little bit back, I would say took a step back, start as a system analyst all the way to managing the infrastructure, including servers, storage, networking and so on. And then I shifted gears very quickly and I started to work with American tech companies, being their first solution consultant, their solution engineer, sales engineer. And then I took the role of a sales rep.

Actually, it was a nice experience because when you are a techie guy at the same time you do sales, it becomes fun. So people cannot say, hey, is this sales rep right? So he knows what he’s saying? Yeah. And last year I decided to be on kind of an entrepreneurship journey. So the podcast was the first step. And then from there I started to do many things. So it’s kind of like trying every single thing that I wish to do it before. Some of that is still doing consultancy, mainly tech consultancy around all the things we just mentioned. I’m a fan by the way of following trends.

And this is know, Jeff, like we talked even on the show with me, AI and all, you know, last year I experimented a lot of ideas using AI, and currently I’m consulting again, for a tech company in the US, here in my region, where we are trying know push their product and tell their stories to the local customers here. So this is in a nutshell, more about me. I call myself the tech guy who knows how to sell.

Jeff Ton [00:06:46]:

I like that, the tech guy who knows how to sell. Well, one of the things that strikes me, or at least my impression of Dubai, is it’s pretty high-tech.

Mehmet Gonullu [00:06:58]:

Yes.

Jeff Ton [00:06:59]:

Right. Is that a correct perception that the tech scene in Dubai is kind of on fire? Right. People are really into technology and what it can do.

Mehmet Gonullu [00:07:11]:

Yeah. So, actually, you’re very right, Jeff. And one of the main reasons, because I remember when I had my interview before actually moving to the country here. So they invited me for a couple of days to spend some time and then I did my interview back in 2005. And at that time, I was fascinated because I saw that they built a city called the Internet City, where you have buildings with the logos of Microsoft, HP, Canon, and all these tech giants. And I said, oh, wow, I didn’t visit the Silicon Valley by that time, by the way, but it’s like you have a mini–Silicon Valley in the city and actually the country in general and Dubai specifically as one of the major emirates in the country. So they were really forward-thinking, and they saw that the future is with technology. So they were the first ones to launch e-government services.

They were the first one to offer any type of every single service need to be digitized. So digitization started very early. Now, what started to happen actually specifically in the past, I would say mainly ten years, we started to see even local tech startups starting from here. So I know your audience are in the US mainly, but just to give some context, so some of the successful business models in tech that were very successful in the US. So some people here, they started to see this as a success and they said, hey, wait a second, we have the infrastructure, we have everything ready. I mean, from legal perspective, economical perspective, there is stability as well. Why we don’t start by imitating these business models back here? And the first one actually was in the e-commerce space with a company called Soup, which is actually Amazon. They came back, and they bought them.

So they acquired this company, and now it’s Amazon UAE. It was actually the legacy of Soup. And another success story was a company called Kareem, which is basically in the ride hailing business and basically Uber. They came and they became the first unicorn to become like first billion dollar company. And then they were acquired by Uber in the States. Basically this was like I would say the ignite to something bigger. And what happened during the past ten years when these two companies succeeded? We started to see a lot of development and more entrepreneurs start to come out. And of course, everyone wanted to contribute, whether like big enterprises, governments and so on.

Now I cover in my newsletter, part of The CTO Show Podcast. At the end of each week, I like to just document the number of startups that they are getting funded. If you ask me the question, five years back, we barely heard about any big acquisitions, any big money raising series or something like this. Now it’s the norm. And what started to happen, because the infrastructure, everything is new in the city, here in Dubai, mainly. So the rest of the region, the rest of the countries surrounding here, they started to implement the same thing, because everyone started to figure out, hey, actually this will be the future. Because these countries, traditionally they were living on oil, right? So it’s oil and the oil products. So when they start to see how the technology can actually become revenue generating, so we start to see a lot of investment in this space.

And now the tech scene is very booming. Now, just finally on that is also the behavior of people who work in tech also change, because back in the days, I remember if, for example, I bring in new technology and tell someone about it, right? So they say, you know what? Okay, it’s a cool technology. I’m not a first adopter. I’m not an early adopter. So what started to become with time is these same folks, they start to see, oh, no, actually, we are trying to get every single new technology here to the region. So they became more approachable when positioning to them new technologies. This is why, and I think maybe we’ll talk about translator on but whether it’s Iot five G, the things that you were chatting about before we start. So all these technology, actually, we became the first ones to implement them here.

And it’s booming because again, all the entrepreneurs, they start to see kind of a gold rush, I would say. So it’s not a replacement to any tech spot in the world, but this is the new spot where there are a lot of opportunities.

Jeff Ton [00:12:10]:

And that’s incredible. And one of the things that I found fascinating as you and I were exchanging some emails to prep for today’s conversation is I sent you a list of tech trends and was not sure if they were the same trends that you observed from Dubai, and you confirmed that they’re kind of worldwide.

Mehmet Gonullu [00:12:40]:

Absolutely right.

Jeff Ton [00:12:41]:

Absolutely. So we had a group of chief information officers that met last week for breakfast. And these were the trends that we talked about: cloud and infrastructure, 5g, Internet of things. Of course, you cannot have a technology conversation without talking about cyber risk, artificial intelligence, and then talent attraction and development. And I’d kind of like to start with that last one, with this explosion of tech that you’re describing there in Dubai and throughout UAE. What’s that done to the talent pool? Is it easy to find talent? Is it hard to find talent? What are you seeing in 23 that will carry over into 24?

Mehmet Gonullu [00:13:34]:

Yeah. So, honestly speaking, finding talent is a hard task. We know this. This is why I told you all the topics you mentioned, Jeff. They are kind of a global ones now. The thing that we started to see is that there was some ease from the government to allow these talents to come to the country, kind of a short visit visa to find jobs. So this at least because back in the days, the company, if they wanted to hire someone, let’s say, in any of these fields that we talked about, really someone who does the job well, they used to be living in the hot areas, whether in the US mainly at some stage, the country used to attract a lot of people from Europe and from Southeast Asia. So actually, what changed the landscape, honestly, is the pandemic.

So with the pandemic, what started to happen? The country kind of, we stayed open. We didn’t close much, so we didn’t have these long lockdowns. So it was just like a couple of weeks of real lockdown. And then things started to ease. And actually, people, they say, hey, okay, if I can live here on a freelance visa, they call it, right, and try to find jobs. So this is added kind of attraction to the pool over here now. But there are some, to be honest with you, maybe this is easy across some sectors, not across the others. What I mean by this, for example, I still hear from people that they are finding difficulties.

And I think this is even on my show, we discussed several times in finding great, for example, talents in cybersecurity, for example, AI, machine learning is the new thing, right? So people are still trying even to figure out what it is, what kind of talents we want. So this is kind of a gray area. But in the rest of the things, yeah, we have like a great pool of talents, I would say, over here in the country and in the region in general. And what they are trying to do actually through the ease of regulations and legalizations of all this, to attract more of these talents to be available for everyone ton hire from. But of course, one of the things also as well, and to be honest with you, it’s kind of an attractive market because the pay scale here is good. Of course, the lifestyle is high as well, but they pay good salary. So this is why they try to attract the best of the best. But in some areas, as I said, cybersecurity, AI, it’s still the new thing and the challenge at the same time.

Jeff Ton [00:16:19]:

Yeah. The universities and alternative schools just can’t crank out people overnight. Right. It does take time. One of the things that we saw with talent during the pandemic, and it has kind of carried over, and that is, I live in Indiana, which is Midwest, so we’re right kind of in the middle of the country here. And what started to happen with the pandemic is everybody went home. Everybody can work remotely.

So, the companies in Silicon Valley and the companies on the East Coast started coming in and offering much higher wages to those here. And you can still live in Indiana. You don’t even have to move. So can people work remotely in Dubai or do they have to physically move and come in on a visa?

Mehmet Gonullu [00:17:17]:

So, very good question, actually. So part of the attractiveness they wanted to create, they said, you don’t have to work for a local company. You can come have a kind of a residence as a remote worker for a company that is not here now on the local scale. Of course, the pandemic changed a lot of things. So majority of the companies today, they have applied the hybrid model. And what started during the pandemic, due to the restrictions, because, as I said, although we opened back very early, but still there was these measures, and you don’t have to have more than 50% of the staff in the office and so on. And they figured out, hey, guess what? We don’t really need all these people in the office all the time, especially the ones who are in the back end functions like mainly it, as you know, the HR people, the finance people and so on. So anything which is not like customer facing functionality, so you can have them work from home.

And today, some of the banks, for example, I think majority of them, they allow on Fridays or maybe sometimes Thursdays for part of the staff to work from home. So this becomes a norm. The other thing we started to see regarding this is they also figured out one thing very important is, hey, guess what, actually, let’s try this four days work week model as well. And now you see that there are more flexibility. And they figured out, okay, we don’t really, the people to be working five days a week, we don’t need them to come to the office but some people, by nature, they love to go to the office because maybe they are living in a small apartment, they have kids at home. So when you do the Zoom call, you have the noise coming from the dog, from the cat and so on. But nevertheless, the flexibility is there. And work from home, whether you are full employed or whether you are a freelancer working for a local company, or even you are a remote worker for another company, so they give you all these flexibility, which is, again, back to the talent thing.

It attracted a lot of people, especially also like this trend that started in part of Southeast Asia and in Europe, the nomad life and all this. So we start to see more of these nomads coming to the country. They enjoy the lifestyle, the sun, it’s a hot weather majority of time of the year. So people, they sit on the beach with their laptop and you see them working. So this became kind of a norm.

Jeff Ton [00:20:04]:

Now that sounds excellent right now. Right now, where I’m sitting, it’s 19 degrees Fahrenheit, so it’s pretty chilly outside. It is, yeah.

Well, so another trend that I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about, we’ve got to talk about AI, generative AI. What are some of the impacts that you saw Gen AI have in 2023?

Mehmet Gonullu [00:20:36]:

Okay, that’s, again a very good question. So my answer might not be appealing to a lot of people. I know this. So AI came so fast, in my opinion, when Chat GPT just to clarify things, AI is not a new thing, but what made it float to the surface is Chat GPT when they released at the end of November 2022. So what happened at the beginning is people were living a shock and they were not sure what is this thing? And if you remember, I think it was end of Q1 beginning of second quarter of 2023, when the tech giants like Microsoft, Google and the other, they started to say, hey, we’re going to have copilot, we’re going to have this in our products. And people started to think, oh, we really need to look at this. The funny thing that happened is people thought that AI is just the chat bots, that you write something into it and then you get some answers. So the idea of AI and what AI can do, it kept, in my opinion, little bit limited to what generative AI actually came for at the beginning is just to copywriting and such things.

By the end of the year, I started to see people understand more, but I think still there’s work to be done there about generative AI and its use, in my opinion. And I’m talking again, and some of my guests, they said the US is the same. But I mean, at least in what I’ve seen in my region, in my area, people still didn’t understand completely the power of AI and what it can do because sometimes when I was telling, hey, it’s AI. But look, you can automate things. You can plug it into the API and automate things with it, or for example, with the latest announcement that came in December, beginning of December or end of November by OpenAI with the new set of tools that they have come up with, like the vision and all these things and the whisper API. So people still are trying to digest what AI can do. But I believe moving forward in 2024, we’re going to see people understand more and more about this AI thing. Because don’t forget, Jeff, like, what happened is people, they were scared at the beginning.

There was a lot of talks, hey, people going to lose jobs. But no one, actually, one of my guests said it very perfectly. He said they told people they’re going to lose jobs, but they didn’t tell them that there will be a bunch new set of jobs. Actually, this is my guest, Kai Peterson, who mentioned this on one of the podcasts, and I agreed with him. I said, yeah, because they just scare people of AI. And people were shocked. Okay, what is this AI thing? But moving forward in 2024, I’m very bullish actually, on adoption of AI across the enterprise and even for small medium businesses, because I think even in our episode, we mentioned this, Jeff, last fall, if you don’t give attention to the AI, you are in a dangerous place, because now companies that they will adopt AI, they will be able to move forward from business perspective in a much faster pace. And if you miss the train, it will be very hard to catch the next one because the next one, who knows when it’s going to come?

Jeff Ton [00:24:14]:

Well, and I think one of the things that is holding people back perhaps, is that it is changing so fast. You mentioned the new tools that OpenAI released at the end of November. We’re just a year removed from Chat GPT being released, and now all these other new tools. Is there a tool that you see from your perspective that is going to gain popularity with the enterprise, with the masses? Not specifically Gen AI, but a use case for Gen AI?

Mehmet Gonullu [00:24:54]:

Yeah, that’s a very good question. And I was lucky enough to talk to founders last year and what we are seeing, of course, people, again, AI, they think Chat GPT and OpenAI only what I’m starting to see is that more companies now, I mean, in the startup, because I focus a lot on startups, as you know, Jeff. So they are building their own large language models, and they are trying to go more specific on some use cases, right? So for example, they go and they develop themselves a large language model for healthcare, or they develop a large language model for financial services, or they have another one. I had one of my guests, for example, they are into the supply chain, right? And they build these models based on the customer data. So because security is key here and privacy and all these things and enterprises, they started to understand the idea that having a large language model and interacting with this large language model, it’s like this next moment, similar to what I would say when we had the data analytics first came out. You have this tool that can clean your data, it can show it to you in a very nice way and present it to you in something that everyone can understand. And now with large language models and AI tools and machine learning, they took this more a step forward, whereas even the normal user can interact with these models, which add a lot of value to the companies. And I think in 2024, we’re going to see a more focus on that area.

We’re going to see a lot of startups focusing on this area because it’s not because it’s the hot topic, but because people started to see, I mean, decision-makers power. Yeah, they started to see that it’s not just like the toy that I write a text and then it generates for me a story or paragraph that will stay right, of course. But we are solving real business problems and coming from a consultant background, Jeff. So always I tell people, let’s see if this solution or this technology can either increase our revenue, it can reduce the time we do things with, it can increase the productivity of our employees, or it can reduce some risks. So based on that, definitely machine learning, AI, large language models, they come into.

Jeff Ton [00:27:32]:

This category well, and I think, as you said, these large language models, I think the power that will be unleashed is training it on your own data or industry-specific data, where it’s not this general use, let’s call it Chat GPT. But it’s specific to your organization. I think that will change the way businesses look at the data that they have in their organization.

Well, we have time for one more trend, so I’m going to let you pick a trend. The ones we have left from the list I sent you were cloud, 5G, Internet of things, and cyber risk. So which one of those do you want to talk about, Mehmet?

Mehmet Gonullu [00:28:21]:

That’s a tough one. Very quickly, cybersecurity, I just can’t do it in one phrase. Of course, cybersecurity trends, the attacks will increase due to the AI coming into the picture. So this is what I would say, keep your data safe, keep your data well preserved. I would say now when it comes, if we want to cover, I can cover if you want the cloud and infrastructure, right?

Jeff Ton [00:28:47]:

Yeah, let’s do that.

Mehmet Gonullu [00:28:48]:

Yeah. So cloud and infrastructure, we started to see. It’s an interesting cycle actually, because I can talk on local level here in my region. So the adoption was slow previously now, but what the hyperscalers, without mentioning the names, actually we can. So all the hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, so they have invested in local data centers across multiple countries within the Middle East. So here in the UAE, we have three data centers for AWS, two data centers for Microsoft, which is big same in the neighboring countries also as well. Now, in addition to that, what we started to see people now they understand, in my opinion, that the cloud adoption is not about saving cost, because I think there was this, and I follow some of the trends even in the US. And now there is this debate, hey, we shifted to the cloud, but the bills increased instead of now, in my opinion, unfortunately, this is due to the false promises.

I’m not blaming the hyperscalers. Some people, they said you’re going to shut the data center, you don’t have to pay this, that and so on. But actually, the point that they have missed, and people didn’t get, is the agility of the cloud. Now, I think there will be some correction in this direction. I believe that the hyperscalers, due also to the high competition that is there, they might need to reduce their prices and their margins also a little bit. But of course, the cloud is, in my opinion, here to stay for a reason, because the agility that the cloud can provide today to businesses, especially if you have, I would say a mandate to develop your own software internally, you’re going to need the cloud. Now, if you have shifted to the cloud as a shift and lift, as we say, you know what, you should didn’t really maybe go to the cloud. If you just have a couple of servers and you use the same architecture in the cloud, probably you are not seeing any benefit, right? But on that point, cloud is here to stay.

Now there are some debates here and there. I started to see is regarding again the pricing model, the data, how we can make sure that the data which is in the cloud. If we decide one day we might need to go back to on prem or maybe for any, because in some part of the world there’s this instability and so on. So, okay, if one of these SaaS providers decides to cut the line off and stop the access from my country, let’s say how I can access my data. So these are debatable topics, but for sure it’s not in any mean slowing down the cloud adoption. Because I would say the benefits are very clear, especially if you are into DevOps, if you are in in house development and so on. So this is very quickly on the cloud, five g. I can tell you it’s already deployed here, Jeff.

Like all the telcos, we have it. So my phone has a 5g since three years, honestly. But it will help, of course, in getting the Iot more adapted. It will help to get more, I would say, applications regarding this. So these are my quickly, if I want to do a quick turn on.

Jeff Ton [00:32:36]:

Quick hits, I love that. I love that. And I agree with you on your perspective on the cloud, that you can save money on the cloud, maybe, but it’s really more about the agility and the elasticity, the ability to scale up and scale down as the demands of your industry hit. And here in the US, we’re still in the midst of our 5g rollout.

My phone’s had 5g on it for a while, but not really. It’s kind of fake, 5G, at least.

Mehmet Gonullu [00:33:15]:

No, here is real. When I do the speed test, it gives me what 5g should give.

Jeff Ton [00:33:22]:

That is awesome. And that does, that ultra connectivity that it brings is really going to change the way we work and live.

Well, Mehmet, we’re reaching the end of our half hour. And as I warned you, we are all about action here on status. Go. I’d love to leave our listeners with a very specific call to action, something that they should go out and do tomorrow because they listen to our conversation today. So putting you on the spot, what are one or two actions our listeners should go do?

Mehmet Gonullu [00:33:59]:

Yeah. Thank you, Jeff. So, first one, don’t listen to the noise out. When it comes to new technology, especially in the AI thing, go and try it. You will not lose anything. Ignore the voices that will say, hey, you will lose your job. I believe you should go and embrace this new technology. And I’m mentioning AI because as we mentioned, it’s the hot thing here, so don’t be scared to test it.

If you are a decision maker and listening to us today highly, I advise you start a program to educate everyone in your company about AI and explain to them what AI and what it can do. So this is something I see very necessarily today because we need to move the unknown things in the head of people, right? So some people, what is this AI thing? So we need to be, all of us on the same page. You don’t need to go deep technical maybe, but explain it on a high level so even someone with not technical background can go and understand what this AI is capable to.

My second call to action would be I would love you to come and visit The CTO Show and have a listen. As Jeff mentioned two weeks back in 2023, in December I was doing daily, so I figured out that it’s too much for the listeners to keep up. But now we are doing twice a week or maybe maximum three. It depends on how much backlogs we have. So highly, I advise you to go and even go to previous episodes.

I’m sure that you will find a lot of informative episodes for you over there. And finally, Jeff, I really thank you very much for inviting me on your show. I enjoyed really the conversation with you.

Jeff Ton [00:35:52]:

Well, as I said, I really enjoyed being on your show and I will echo that call to action. The CTO Podcast and the back episodes is a wealth of information on the tech space. Mehmet does a wonderful job in working with his guests and bringing the best and the brightest to his show, and so I encourage you to check it out. I added it to my playlist when I discovered it and I try to catch all the shows.

So Mehmet, thank you for carving out time. I really appreciate it. I know the time zones can be a little tricky to figure out.

When I look back on 2023, one of the things that I count at the top of my list, quite candidly and honestly and sincerely, is having the ability to meet you through podcasting. We were able to meet and had a great conversation for your show, and I follow you and I follow your newsletter and I love reading the newsletter every week, so appreciate that. I feel like I’m more up-to-date on tech because I met you, so I appreciate it.

Mehmet Gonullu [00:37:13]:

Thank you very much, Jeff. It’s an honor to hear that from you. And again, what I’m trying to do, finally, it’s not only about tech, so it’s also to empower people who are considering tech as their career path or even like founders, early stage startup founders to go, because you will find in the show not only tech specific topics. So sometimes you will see even something related to marketing, to sales, but it’s all somehow I try to relate it to tech. So again, thank you very much, Jeff, for all the kind words and for inviting me today.

Jeff Ton [00:37:46]:

Here it is. My pleasure. Hey, to our listeners. If you want to learn more, if you have a question, want to learn more, visit intervision.com. The show notes will provide links, and we’ll be sure and link to The CTO Podcast there, as well as Mehmet’s LinkedIn profile so you can connect with him if you’d like to.

This is Jeff Ton for Mehmet Gonullu, Thank you very much for listening.

Voice Over – Ben Miller [00:38:16]:

You’ve been listening to the Status Go podcast. You can subscribe on iTunes or get more information at intervision.com. If you’d like to contribute to the conversation, find InterVision on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Thank you for listening. Until next time.