1:06- Getting a degree in music
2:57- Childhood and growing up in Southern California
3:50- Being an entrepreneurial child
5:15- Fist computer and getting into tinkering
6:20- First job and buying his own computer
9:08- Having a workshop and growing up with an amazing collection of tools
10:28- Fixing broken things vs. creating something new all together
11:27- “I am, by nature, an ops person and I work at creativity”
12:10- Being excitable, enthusiastic, and optimistic
12:50- Dropping out of high school
14:32- Being in a hurry to grow up
17:32- Applying to Juilliard
19:17- Moving to New York
21:09- Helping a lady send an email to her grandkids for $30
23:09- Planning for post-graduation and not wanting to be a starving artist
25:49- Going to a temp agency
27:15- Spare time and access to theinternet
28:27- “If you choose to get in business, do something that’s recurring revenue”
29:36- Renting servers and selling hundreds of websites
31:00- A “sketchy” situation
32:47- Being one of the biggest customers of a Linux hosting company
34:00- Stumbling into the cloud hosting thing
34:55- Selling Voxel to Internap (2011)
37:11- The importance of showing value of the business
39:07- Not being fully prepared for what it meant to be acquired
40:24- Learning how to work within a public company
42:28- The New York reunion of internet infrastructure people
43:35- Figuring out a better model
44:23- Re-doing Linux to make it portable for software
45:12- Requirement for un-opinionated infrastructure for developers
46:20- A millennial-friendly, developer-friendly approach to hardware
46:39- Idea for Packet
48:30- Unique challenges around creating an infrastructure product that has a lot of hardware vs. creating a SaaS company
49:15- “How can we take this hard thing and create this new category called hardware as a service?”
51:07- Having faith that what we were doing wasn’t completely stupid
51:50- Pushing through doubts
53:25- Realize what your strengths and weaknesses are
54:02- Reacting faster to what customers want and listening to what they were saying
54:56- The next year for Packet
56:25- Giving back to the community that’s helped them so much- open source infrastructure support
Where to find Zac: @packethost, @zsmithnyc, Slack, The Packet Blog
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