Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. Today, I have the pleasure of being joined by an actual tech veteran, literally when computers were invented.
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His name is William A. Adams. He is an award-winning D&I innovator. He's an engineering trailblazer and a philanthropist. He's here to talk to us about Techquity and his company, Adamation, which is here to not only teach us how to improve ourselves and how to invest in tech and create generational wealth, but how business and society can collaborate.
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to create a better world using tech. And before I go any further, please help me welcome William. Hi William. Hello, hello. That sounds like a great intro. It's like, you just nailed it. You have a lot of credentials behind your name. I'm even in the computer history museum. So I'm a relic. Wow. So you really are a veteran. Yeah, computer history museum in Silicon Valley. That is amazing. When did that happen?
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About two years ago, my brother and I did a seven hour long interview over two days to capture our verbal history up till the present, basically. Early history in Silicon Valley as black engineers and entrepreneurs. It's like the Silicon Valley version of Hollywood walk of fame. I suppose so. I mean, it's for geeks, but yeah, I suppose so. Awesome. Welcome to the show. I'm really excited. Thank you for having me. Mm-hmm.
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Because like I said, you literally started long before most of us were born with computers. I don't know about born, but certainly before the Apple II existed, which is pretty early on. So right at the dawn of personal computers, I was 10, 12 years old. And what got you started on that? Because obviously back then it wasn't as mainstream as it is today. No. So back then, yeah, a lot of things we did not have. We did not have cell phones.
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We did not have the internet. We didn't even have a bulletin board systems. That came later. But we did have, that was the earliest computer back then was the Atari game console playing Pong. Do you ever heard of that game? So that was the first experience that any consumers had towards computing. And I had an uncle who worked for the Navy. And he so happened to have this thing called a Commodore Pet.
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which is one of the very earliest personal computers before the Apple came along. And he said, well, how'd you like to have this? Because I'm getting this new thing at work. Who knows, he used to make missiles. So I'm getting this other thing. How would you like to have this? And I said, sure, right? I'm the only kid on my block, or probably my city that had a personal computer, which is a big deal for a little black kid, you know.
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But I grew up in Southern California in the heart of where we did aerospace, so Rockwell International, McDonald Douglas, and Hughes and all this. But I was the only kid in my block, and I got this computer, and here you go. Here's some books. And I just started coding. So just imagine this 12 year old William sitting in his room with this thing called a computer, typing up some code. You were coding back then at age 10? Well, I was 12, but yeah.
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Yeah, I was coding. I had no teachers telling me how to code or anything. I had a book and it's like I could read so I figured it out. No YouTube videos, no nothing, no groups, no hangouts, nothing like that. That is amazing. Were you always the type of child who wanted to know, who always had a curiosity? Oh yeah. So before computers came along, oh I had a little chemistry set that I bought with my lunch money, I had a physics set, I had an electronics kit.
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took my mom's car apart, you know, I fixed things in our house. So I was that kid that was just like, what if he does not blow up the house? It's considered a good day. It'll be a good day. So yeah, I was Mr. Curious. When you say you looked at books and you just started coding, it reminds me, you know the movie Hidden Figures? Yes. Octavia Spencer's character.
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when there was this computer, it wasn't her job. Remember, I don't know if you remember that scene. It wasn't her job, but they couldn't get the computer working and printing out those papers. And she went to the library to read up on it and she fixed it. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it was just like that. Now, probably the influence of my life, first this was my father was a typewriter repairman. That's the job he had. And so we had in our garage on his work bench, some...
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old typewriters and adding machines and stuff like this. So that was probably my first inclination that there's like this mechanical thing that you can do stuff with, right? And since I didn't know what computers, because we didn't have them at the time, it was at least this. And then when computers came along, it's like, oh, it's that, plus you can actually make this machine do stuff, right?
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So that's how I probably got really interested in the first place. I was always into tinkering because we had this stuff in the garage and then that tinkering just turned into electronics, tinkering and software and computers. Right. So you were an advisor to the Microsoft CTO. That's running way, way into the future. Yeah. So in 2017, it was the year that Microsoft bought LinkedIn and with that came
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Kevin Scott, who was the VP of Engineering at LinkedIn. And as he came to Microsoft, they said, oh, Kevin, we want you to be our CTO. And at that time we didn't have a CTO. And just to back up a little bit, I joined Microsoft in 1998. Right. So it's been a minute. He's the CTO and I got this email from someone saying, hey, would you like to interview for this position of technical advisor to the CTO?
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And honestly, I thought it was one of those scam emails. Click here. You know, I was like, what is this? Yeah. It's not a job you apply for because at least at that time it was a, your name is in some hat because somebody recommended you and they pull your name out. And there it is. It's like, okay. And so I talked to Kevin and he hit it off and he said, okay, I want you to join. So I helped set up the office of the CTO in terms of like, well, what is the role of a technical advisor? And.
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What kinds of things should we focus on and how should this office run and stuff like that? So I helped do that for about two years. The role of technical advisor is similar to the role of a Supreme Court. The people that help the justices, you're the one who goes off and reads a bunch of stuff and synthesizes and says, here's an opinion. And then they do whatever they're going to do with that. But your job is to help synthesize the wealth of information that's out there and bring them something. It might be a specific area or it might.
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broad, like, oh, here's what we should do in AI. So yeah, I was the first technical advisor for Kevin Scott. And now the office has grown to be much bigger than that. And I'm no longer in that office, but I'm still that tech advisor kind of person. Right. It's kind of like, once you've been president, you're always president. Of course, we always call you that, don't we? Yeah. Yeah. The reason I jumped, which obviously we're going to get back to other parts and
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I'm looking at the 12 year old and his first computer. Is it the way you could have imagined how far this career was gonna take you? Is it something career guidance counselors knew at the time was a possible career path? No, and certainly not for a young black child. I mean, that's not something, I don't even think I talked to my career counselor in high school. It's like, what's the point? The jobs that we were being steered towards at that time, I was in high school in the eighties. If you go to college, maybe you're gonna
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You might be some sort of an engineer, maybe a civil engineer or something like that. Maybe electrical engineering and electrical engineering back then would mean working on power systems, like the grid, not designing computers. We did have a, at that time, a burgeoning MSIT. IT was up and coming, but it really meant like typing in code, feeding decks of cards into a machine, getting printouts, that sort of stuff. Software developer at that time.
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typically meant writing code to generate reports in COBOL, or maybe doing scientific computing and going to an engineering company like Rockwell International. But again, it's mostly mechanical engineering, drafting, design, computer aided design was just coming around. In terms of using the computer to actually do the drawings and stuff like that. Just starting to turn, so it wasn't quite a career yet. You are very tech and yet.
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You've been working in the diversity and inclusion space. Yeah. How did you not say, I'm a software engineer, this is all I'm gonna be and I'm passionate about. How did you then decide this is also gonna be my focus? It was a journey. So for all of my life up until 2005, I was very much the in my own space, blinders on, software, software, software, the code is all that matters kind of person.
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Oh, am I black? Who cares? You know, code, code, code, right? Complete blinders on. And it was only the algorithms that mattered to me and getting that next feature and whatnot. So I was completely oblivious to what was happening in the world. 2005, I'm now 40. And so it's beginning a midlife crisis, right? I'm going through the door. You're a sports car. Almost. So I'm getting divorced. I have the one child.
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I'm on the way to India to work for Microsoft to train our engineers, but I'm sitting on a beach in Hawaii. And I go, well, all right, it's midlife crisis time. I'm going to own my midlife crisis. I'm going to steer it the way I want it to be. So I go off to India. I did not get a sports car. I got a motorcycle. Oh, okay. Yes. I learned to ride a motorcycle in India. I lived there for three years. And this is my awakening. I went to India literally almost naked, just with a backpack.
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a couple of laptops and nothing else from my past life. So it was really an opportunity to go, who am I? What are my values? I can't lean on, hey, I have this car, I have this house. It's like none of that defined me. These people don't know any of that. Right. Who are you? What do you stand for? What are your ethics? What are your morals? India is a great place to go through that sort of a transformation because you see everything, right? Poor people, rich people, injustices, big hearts.
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all religions, you see it all. So it's really a place to crack you open emotionally and figure out what's inside. So this is what happened to me. And then I trained a bunch of engineers how to be better engineers over the next three years that I lived there. And then I came back to the US. And then in 2015, I had this, not epiphany, but it was just a, okay, I've shipped code a million times now, what next? And I actually asked one of our VPs,
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you know, what's a big business challenge? And he said, well, you know, there's this whole diversity thing. I was like, oh, I'm gonna go check that out. Now keep your mind. So my mind is a little bit open because I had the whole India experience and I'm mid-lifing it. This is 10 years later, it's 2015. We're not hiring women and minorities and we haven't been for decades. And so this whole thing about it's a pipeline problem.
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qualified, blah, blah, blah, it's just a bunch of red herrings. The problem is we just don't know how to hire them and we don't want to hire them. That's the problem. So I just set about creating a program that says, well, let's forget that. We're going to hire these people. We spent millions of dollars on pipeline program, but nothing on actually hiring people, right? And so I changed it and I said, we're going to do this apprenticeship because that's what's missing. That's the missing piece. And really what I was doing was making it possible for my peers
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to find an acceptable path. There was nothing wrong with the talent. The talent was always good. It was always out there. We just ignoring it. So I was setting us up and I could do this because I was in a position of high credibility at that point. Right. I delivered software, I'm proving myself as an engineer. I didn't stand up and say, hey everybody, I'm a black engineer and look how good I'm doing. That had nothing to do with it. I was just good, incredible.
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I had a Rolodex that I could tap into and say, hey, white leader in a position of power who can make decisions, why don't you hire five of these people? And they go, well, we trust you. So, okay, we'll try this out. That's how it started. We started with a cohort. Then they said, okay, well, that's pretty good. Keep going. We only hired two ladies out of eight in the very first cohort, but that was enough, 25%. They weren't expecting it to get any better than that. And they were okay with that.
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These days we hire probably 80, 90% of the people that go through the program. So it says good, if not better than college hiring. All you had to do is name the number of people you want and you'll get that number of people hiring and they're good. So started with just saying, we need a cohort model. We need to go to coding academies. We need to look at moms who are returning from work. We need to just think differently. We need to change the interviewing process.
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And we need to give them this apprenticeship because then they'll be on the equal footing with the college hires who always have an internship first. That's how to get hired. Right. So we did all that. And then it just turned into cohort after cohort after cohort to the point where now it's like, it's a federally recognized apprenticeship program. My co-founder is off to the white house, meeting up with Joe Biden. So it's like, okay, we've changed the way that our industry looks at hiring in these pipelines. And.
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So goes Microsoft, so goes the rest of the industry, right? Cause we have lots of customers and they look at us and they say, well, how do you do it? And then we say, well, we got this thing. And they say, okay, how about we just pay you for that? That's how it got started. After the first cohort, it was still an engineering challenge to me because it was like, oh, how do you crack this? Well, you know, you got to find the people and you have this cohort thing. You know, it's just mechanical. But after the second cohort, I was like, huh, this is serious. This affects people's lives.
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And this is where I truly understood the intergenerational transformation that it has on families and communities. Because you take the single black woman as a child, she goes through the program, she gets the $150,000 job, she's now on a track, whereas her child is now gonna go to a better school, have a different outcome than her, have better outcomes for herself, and probably get into the same high tech path herself.
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And that formula was repeated over and over and over again. And I had so many emails of people saying, you have changed my life. And that's different from what you see from your typical college hire. The college hire expects this life. Their parents had this life, their cousins have this life. They're gonna get this life and they're gonna be like, yeah, of course. These people didn't have a chance. So there was an intervention that said, wait a minute, here's the path. Let me let you in on the secret.
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So this is the transformation that I went through is like, oh, it's not just that I can do this, I must do this. As I like to say, this was my civil rights moment. And now I'm trying to go on and say, well, there's still more to do because I'm not dead yet. Transforming lives, yeah. Yeah. I had a guest, he is pushing the alternative to college, which is blue collar jobs and all the possibilities there because he's been in construction, I think 35 years.
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At first I thought, oh, it's either that or college. He said, no, there are six other options. I can believe that. Yes, because everybody thinks, you know, it's just college, college, college. The fact that you have this apprenticeship program, it can lead someone to making $150,000 a year without having had to acquire student loan debt and all that time. And sometimes, you know what I mean, especially with tech, because there's always a new software program being developed coming up.
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Sometimes you literally get left behind because you're learning things from four years ago. You know, Microsoft, they're like, oh no, we don't do that anymore. We don't do that anymore. Did you learn this latest thing that we came up with six months ago? Oh, yesterday. Yesterday. Yeah, exactly right. We don't have time to wait for people to go through four years of college to learn the basic skills. The world moves faster than that now. Right.
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What would you say are the benefits of a company embracing diversity? Well, this goes straight to the bottom line. So companies talk about total addressable market. How many customers are possibly available to you? And you see this with cell phones. The total addressable market is everyone on the planet. So let's try to get cell phones into everyone. So you try to tailor it to.
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all sorts of different segments, young people, older people, security people, you know, whatever. This culture, that culture, and you'll do all the right things for each one of those segments, right? African kids in the widow are gonna do some hip-hop something or others to sell it to the Nigerians and they go, yeah, that's made for me because my favorite artist is typing it and it's got the skins on it and you know, it's all this for me.
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So diversity is about, well, how do you know that the kid in Soweto doesn't want this cell phone if you don't even have anyone on staff that can spell South Africa or Soweto or has even been there or even knows that it's not that Africa isn't a single country? Right? Thank you for saying that. I've got my education. It's like at least 54 countries over there. If you want a wider addressable market,
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you need to get educated. If you're gonna sell the farmers, you need someone on staff that came from an urban environment. Yes. Right? So that they're bringing their perspective. And I'm not saying anything about skin color. No. I'm not talking about DNA. Lock and segmentation, like you said. Yeah. Right. It's about perspectives and experiences and all that sort of stuff. And the companies who are going to benefit the most are the companies that know how to absorb those perspectives and incorporate it.
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into their business processes and their sales processes and all the rest. The companies that are going to fail are the ones who are like, we've got a bunch of smart dudes from MIT. How hard can it be to understand the kids in South Africa? We'll just figure it out. Yeah. Good luck with that. It's a total addressable market. And the world is so fast and changing so quickly that you can't lean on your big brains anymore. In the past, we could. We as Microsoft or IBM. Just say.
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Well, you're just going to do it this way because this is the way it is. And how many options do you have? So it's critical. It's not even a benefit. It's a business requirement that you have to be more inclusive of diverse perspectives, where you're just not going to survive in the future world or even the current world. Right. That teamed up with the fact that talent is everywhere and doesn't want to move to your own and doesn't have to.
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You know, these things are at the confluence of this change where it's like diversity inclusion. It's not an option. It's a requirement. If you work in isolation, you're just going to lose. That's all there is to it. Exactly. Because business is about people. Yeah. You're selling to people. People are making your devices, making your software, making your business run. So if you're not addressing the people and you're just mechanically turning the crank and you just think.
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it doesn't matter who's there. It's just anyone who's got a brain. It's like, oh, okay. Good luck with that. Yeah. Because as we talk about communication on this podcast, you wouldn't know how to communicate, like you said, with the kid in Soweto. You know absolutely nothing about them. And therefore, how are you going to market your product or tailor make it for them? Yeah. And I'll give you another example. I went to Nigeria in Kenya a few years ago.
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And we were talking about Xbox, there's no Xbox sales there. And we're like, oh, you guys don't like Xbox. And they're like, look, every time you turn on the Xbox, it wants to update itself. It wants to do like a 500 megabyte download. Well, the amount that I'd have to pay for those data charges is more than my monthly salary. Data access, even though they had 4G networks everywhere, it's still expensive.
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If your thing requires a 500 megabyte download every time I turn it on. And we wouldn't know that unless we went there and talked to them. So yeah, you have to be there. You have to listen. You have to have those people on your team so that they would tell you. And speaking of business, being about people, talk to us about your philanthropy work and how you merge that with your business expertise, how business and society can collaborate and make things work. Okay, there's probably...
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Two kinds of philanthropies that I do. One I would just say is just gifting because I'm a human. And I'll give you an example of that. My kid's school, last year I gave them $15,000 and this is public school. The first year we're back to school post COVID and they just needed stuff, you know, like microphones for the teachers in the classrooms and this and that. And the other thing.
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And I was like, okay, I'm not paying for private school, so I'm saving $50,000 a year. I can give you 15,000. And so should all these other people that are driving up in Teslas and BMWs and Mercedes, right? You're public school, but that doesn't mean you have to be poor. You know when you hear those stories of teachers don't even get crayons and pencils for their kids? Yeah, it's ridiculous, right? Yes, parents can contribute a little there when they go to Walmart, just buy a pack of pencils.
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Yeah, exactly. I talked to the principal a couple years before that and she said each teacher spends probably $500 a year on school supplies. And they don't get paid a lot. They don't get paid much. So I created gift certificates for each of the teachers in my son's kindergarten grade at that time. I gave them $500 gift cards because it's like, why are you paying for my kid's education? So that's gifting. And I've done stuff with my family in India and other people. Like my sister-in-law said, hey, brother.
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A friend of mine whose mother has cancer, she needs an operation, needs this many thousands of dollars. Here you go. Right. This is just humanity. So I can share. And then the other kind of philanthropy is more business focused. So this past summer, I gave a talk in Detroit, black men in leadership. I offered a grant to people that came to this talk that I gave. One guy who won this grant, his name was Rodney, and he has this virtual library of VR experience that is trying to work on his company.
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So I thought, well, that's great. And that could tie in with other stuff that I want to promote business-wise. So here's a grant. I'm not doing it as a investment. I'm not like, now give me 10% equity or anything like that. It's like, you just need a grant, here you go. So I'm doing targeted things like that where I'm trying to just foster and promote certain kinds of things that are headed towards this tech-quity vision that I have. That's my philanthropic efforts. It's either just pure
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humanitarian gifting or some focus towards drawing people towards tech with. And speaking of tech with the that's where you talk about how you can create generational wealth using the tech industry. You want to talk a little bit more about that? It's just this observation that I have. And of course, I've been in tech my whole life. So of course, I think everything is about tech. But if you just look at the top Forbes list of top billionaires in the world.
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six out of 10 are through tech one way or another. So it's like, all right, just like in the early 1900s, that list would have included a bunch of industrialists and robber barons and whatnot, because back then it was about industrial revolution. Right now, and for the last decade and probably for the next decade, it's about tech titans. But there's Elon Musk and there's Jeff Bezos that's still up there and Mark Zuckerberg has kind of dropped down, but Steve Ballmer's still up there. You know.
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There's a bunch of tech dudes and you say, okay, that's the tide and that tide is still rising. All the wealth that the world is generating is coming through tech. There's a few exceptions, but mostly it's about tech. So like, all right, that's the rising tide. If you want your tribe to rise with that tide, they need to be in boats that are built on technology. Right? You need to either have ownership in the stock of those companies.
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or have stock in your own company that has a tech focus to it or leverages tech in some way. And if you don't have a boat built on tech, you're just going to drown by the tide. You'll get further and further away because the water is rising and you're like, ah, you're a tech consumer. You're not going to get rich off of owning this. You're going to get rich off owning Apple stock. Right? Because the stock is still going to be there once your salary is gone because you're retired or laid off or whatever.
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you still have the stock and that's what's going to carry through generation to generation. That's how wealth is developed. So yeah, Techquity is about saying, all right, if that's the way it is, technology is the main driver. Let's get more of our tribe into tech positions. Whether you are working in tech, owning tech stock, building tech companies, owning patents in technology, all of those things that are equity.
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in technology. That's what tech-quity is about. Mm-hmm. And with the kids starting with Code Academy. So they can start at 12 like you did. Yeah. Okay, you start, you create a game. Don't just sell it off for peanuts. You know, be smart about what you do with that. Licensing is better than selling. The money's different because it's like, okay, if you license something, you're going to get smaller money, but for longer.
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Whereas if you sell it, you get... Even after you retired, like you said, yes. Yeah. Whereas if you just sold it, it's like, oh, you're going to give me 50,000 for my game? Here you go, kid. Thanks. I'm going to buy a car. And it makes 50 million dollars. And your car depreciates immediately. Hold on. Just have a little bit of foresight for gratification and you'll have a better outcome. Delayed gratification.
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You remind me of the story, I forgot the name of the boy, but he was in the original Lion King. He was apparently offered by Disney $2 million or 200,000 plus a percentage of what the movie was gonna make, royalties or something. I'll take that percentage. I forgot the name of the kid, but against his wishes, he still went with his mom's advice. He was a minor, so the mom signed everything.
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But he really wanted the $200, because he thought...
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So he got the 250 and the royalties. He got the lesser money with the royalties. Guess what? Didn't the right king come back? Now he loves his mom more than anyone else. I mean, obviously he always did, but now that's where the wealth is. Yeah. He had blown up the money in two years. I think it's important, and this is why I do a lot of podcasts and on stage and all the rest and talk about tech-witty, is because our community, we haven't had the hundreds of years of economic,
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understanding and growth and development that people around us have. So we oftentimes just think, oh, just get a good paying job. If you got a 60 to a hundred thousand dollar job, you're set. It's like, you're only thinking about bills. We only think about bills and feed my kids. That's it. Right. It's like, let me tell you what we could do that's even better, that will put us in an even better, that will put your kids in an even better position.
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You don't want to just get enough so that you can pay to send them to college and then wash your hands you're done and retire because your pension doesn't exist anymore, the one. So here's what you have to do so that you're okay, you're okay in retirement and your kids have a little something after you're gone and then they can build on that. This is why I talk about it all the time. It's like let's talk about money. Relay the gratification. So Mr. Adams, any last words of wisdom before we let you go?
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Oh my gosh, words of wisdom. Well, one thing people ask me is how to get started in tech. And I'll tell you the, it's all about passion. And this is true for anything. And I'm saying, oh, you should start a business. Like, well, even before that, because starting businesses is hard. Be mindful, purposeful, work with a purpose, be intentional. That's the starting point. So if there's any words of wisdom is find and define your purpose. Plot a course for your life.
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And this is of course hard to say to someone who's in their 20s, but plot a course for your life. And that's the way your life is gonna go. If you don't plot a course at all, you'll just go wherever the wind blows and it's probably not gonna be that great. But if you plot a course, and the sooner you can do that the better, you're probably gonna have a better outcome than if you don't. Words of wisdom from William A. Adams, the tech trailblazer and CEO of automation. Plot and chart your course.
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Be intentional and mindful. Thank you so much for being here today. This has been a wonderful conversation. Yeah, thank you for having me. It was fun. I know you retired. So if you don't want me to share your social media handles and wanna be left in peace, we will respect. Oh no, I do wanna share. Oh, okay. So yes, please share all your social media. William-A-Adams.com. That's my website.
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All the sponsors are there, all the podcast thingies, all the speaking engagements, all the papers, all my code. I'm still writing code every day. You'll find it all there. Serious passion indeed if you're retired and you're still writing code. There's no retirement from code. I've been doing it since I was a lad, right? I'm going to stop this until my fingers don't work and then I'll use voice. Whatever it takes.
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Thank you so much. William-A-Adams.com is the website to find William A. Adams, who has been such a wonderful inspiration to us today. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.