This fascinating #NomadFuturist podcast provides insights into the thinking of Yuval Bachar, a visionary technologist whose career has been driven by curiosity, a fearless engagement with current challenges and possibilities, and a relentless quest to push the barrier of existing conditions to address the needs of the future. Many companies including Juniper Networks, Cisco, Facebook, LinkedIn and Microsoft have benefited from the strategic thinking and infrastructure technology innovations resulting from Bachar’s approach of challenging the status quo.

Bachar discusses his initial training as an Electrical Engineer and his good fortune in being present for significant developments in the IT world including the inception of the Internet and the birth of the cloud.

He credits his Israeli heritage as a major influence in his life. The cultural diversity, the intensity of daily life as well as the shared military service were all factors that promoted the ability to make decisions, live with stress, accept responsibility and leadership.

He talks about the Israeli tech mindset: “We solve problems right now. It might not be perfect, but we’ll solve it now. Then we’ll make it better.”

Bachar reveals a tremendous generosity of spirit and a mind open to engaging with the new generation of technologists who may be more oriented to creating software than dealing with the underlying enabling technology. 

“How young people look at the world, how they solve problems with software gives me the power to develop the infrastructure they will need, the power and efficiency for the newest generation of data centers.”

Bachar predicts the cloud will be with us for some time but ultimately envisions a bubble of connectivity and democratized access that will serve everyone, everywhere.

He is excited by the potential of AI to accelerate the pace of development. 

“AI will give us the power to do things a hundred thousand times faster, but it will be necessary to monitor it on a worldwide basis.”

In terms of this COVID moment, he observes a new appreciation for interpersonal relationships that used to be taken for granted and believes this could lead to a higher, better way of relating.

Bachar offers the following advice to young technologists:

“ Do things that are much more than what is expected from you. If you don’t dare and sometimes fail, you will never succeed.”

“Always be happy in your work. If you’re not happy, don’t stay.”

“Look at your career as a mission to change the world.”

“That’s exactly what we did in the late 80s and 90s when we built the Internet. When we built the core routers for the Internet…when we created enormous bandwidth…no one knew what was going to happen. You can see what has happened…it’s a totally different world!”

Yuval Bachar is the Principal Architect for the Microsoft Azure Platform focusing on driving data center self-healing and predictive maintenance at extreme scale leveraging machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) engines. Prior to that he held senior technical leadership positions at a range of leading tech companies driving next generation innovation in the data center and networking space. Bachar is one of the founders and the President of the Open19 project. He has also contributed to the PCI standard and several IEEE standards. He holds seven approved US patents in the networking and system design areas. He has garnered extensive global industry recognition as a top Data Center and Edge influencer and leader.