Why I Joined CIQ
Right place at the right time
Numerous people told me that CIQ and I are perfect fits for each other, yet joining the CIQ team is as much about being in the right place at the right time. I’ve spent a long time working in big silicon feeling like I was mostly swimming upstream against a tide of ‘just push sand’ mantras. I was lucky to work with extremely talented people all along the way, and this helped me create and cultivate a vision of expanding compute-intensive technologies to everyday use cases.
Along that journey, which included stints as Director of HPC Solutions for both AMD and Intel, I interacted with many people who were traveling along a similar path. We started to do more to compare our visions and ideas. We started to challenge each other and find ways to combine our individual views into a combined and stronger vision. Then a seemingly perfect storm of events occurs that launches CIQ as a company with an intriguing portfolio of technologies. At the same time, my routine soul-searching exercises led me to conclude that I needed to free myself from the safe zone of big silicon. Time to take that calculated risk that has been in my mind for years. Turns out, a few others in my circles had the same thing happen. We moved from contacts to colleagues at CIQ!
You can call it pure luck, and I’d agree to an extent. I’ve told many people through the years that luck is created through positioning. Like a really good hockey goalie, a high save percentage is a lot about good positioning. The puck just hits you, it may be luck, yet it’s a save! All the years and years of working through my individual vision, reaching out to others to poke holes in it (to help make it better), and continually looking to evolve and adapt to the bumps in the road, all seem to have led to this intersection. My positioning helped put me here, at the right place at the right time, to join CIQ and walk this path with my fellow travelers.
Drive to make the future a reality
A key motivation to be part of CIQ is the overarching vision and desire to elevate technical computing to a totally new plane of usability. We don’t just believe we can do this; we believe we are doing this. You can call it arrogance, overconfidence, or even wishful thinking. It may be any of those things. It may also be the desire to do something positive, something massive, and something that shapes the future. We have the drive here at CIQ to make a difference and to make the future a reality. That future will see far broader use of what we call High Performance Computing today.
Joining CIQ was the decision to lean into the future and be a key player in making the future a reality. I can’t tell you exactly what pushed me over the decision threshold leading me here. I do know that a major contributing factor was a string of webinars by an executive leadership coach, who talked about things like being comfortable with being uncomfortable. She talked about not settling and asking for what you want. It helped me conclude that CIQ is where I needed to be, and the timing was just right for it to happen. Guess I was lucky.
This blog will be focused on highlighting technologies used in technical computing, putting elements of the vision of the future out into the world, and will occasionally be a soap box. I never said I wasn’t opinionated! Putting ideas out there for the masses to vet and even knock down is uncomfortable, but I’m taking the leadership coach’s advice and getting comfortable with that.
