One Last Time
On January 1, 2019, I took over as the President of the VMware User Group, an organization that I have been deeply passionate about in my previous roles as a Leader, Board Director, and most importantly – a member. Now, I find myself a few days away from the end of my third term as President, a role by which per our community bylaws I am not allowed to serve more than three successive terms. While the end of this incredible thrill ride is bittersweet, I am truly delighted that on January 1, 2022, I’ll be handing off the role of President to Adrian Woodward who has previously served as our Secretary/Treasurer. I am confident that the VMUG community is in the best possible care with our Board and President-Elect; I certainly wouldn’t have settled for any less.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you all so much for giving me this opportunity. I sincerely hope I made you proud.
Still, this transition is hitting me a little harder than I thought it would. It turns out that a huge piece of my life – both in terms of chronology and raw hours dedicated – has been spent with VMUG. On top of that, having served in this role has been a large piece of my public identity; ‘VMUG President’ is currently the first line on my LinkedIn and Twitter bios. I have been a VMUG member for about a third of my life, and a Leader in some capacity for about a quarter. I’ve never been particularly good at “endings,” and the more I’ve enjoyed something the harder the ending is to swallow. And make no mistake - I have enjoyed serving our members immensely these past three years.
As a result, I’ve been having a lot of “final thoughts” as I’ve wrapped up various scheduled meetings and “last times” that I do things. I thought it might be cathartic to wrap them all together. So if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to take this post as an opportunity to provide my perspective on some of the highlights, lessons learned, and best moments of my time serving in this role. While I recognize the risk of this entire post appearing to be self-serving, I thought it may be interesting for those who have an interest in VMUG, technology communities, or leading volunteers during a worldwide pandemic (which is apparently a less esoteric skill than I would have thought a few years ago).
I’m acutely aware that most people don’t reach the end of blog posts, so I wanted to start with the things that I am most proud of over the duration of my term as president. Taking the reins of a global organization right before the entire planet is plunged into chaos isn’t the canvas I thought I’d have to paint on, but we did some incredible things over the past three years. That VMUG is healthy heading into 2022 represents the near-herculean efforts by our Board and staff teams. In April of 2020, it was unclear if we’d been dealt a mortal body blow because events were being shuttered globally, but we were able to continue to thrive and serve our community with virtual offerings that kept us all connected.
I started keeping a separate notebook in those early days of March 2020 with “VMUG / Covid” scrawled on the front. Reviewing it now almost two years later, a few notes stick out to me from the first page that are clear reminders of how deep my concern was. Among them were “What’s our current financial reserve balance,” “What is our run-rate,” and the one I underlined: “How long will we be solvent with no UserCons?” Early on, social distancing could easily have been an existential threat to VMUG.I didn’t sleep much.
My actual notebook from March 2020.
I can safely answer myself that the likelihood that it blows over in 3 months is 0%. Sorry, 2020 Steve.
Yet just one page later – literally on other side of the same sheet of paper - I wrote “How do we engage and connect members remotely? Our mission is this.” And that’s precisely what we did as an organization, keeping the central tenet that above all else “VMUG is a community” as our guide. I am deeply proud of how our Board and staff teams rallied virtually overnight to keep VMUG offerings stable and our members connected to each other throughout the Covid pandemic. From modifying UserCons to be virtual events, to coming up with new and exciting offerings we could all do remotely like Peers & Pints and Odyssey competitions, we reinvented what VMUG was without losing the soul of what it always has been.
In some ways we had our best years ever in 2020 and 2021. By my observations and assessment, our Board of Directors is the strongest and healthiest it has ever been since my first meeting in 2016. While I cannot take credit for the metamorphosis on my own, I am convinced that this group is the most seasoned, diverse, and thoughtful group of people we’ve had as we craft, evaluate, and adjust the strategy that guides VMUG’s operations around the world.
While he’s moved on, Pat Gelsinger’s commitment to listening to customers is still very much alive at VMware.
Something that I am particularly proud of is that I diligently worked to represent our member needs and interests to VMware at every level of the company. Throughout my term, I was able to have many conversations with VMware executives which allowed me to discuss and present my perspective on what I was hearing (often in near real-time) from our members. I can tell you for sure that every time I was connected with a VMware executive, they truly cared about that customer feedback, and I am so happy I was able to channel the thoughts of our 150,000 members for three years.
You can’t be in a role like this without having some awesome memories. I’ve been tweeting recently about #vMemories from my entire time involved with VMUG, and while that’s been fun, distilling some of the highlights into 280 characters seems like a disservice to how impactful they were for me.
I was able to grow as a person during my term. One simple way is that the world shrunk for me, which really started with my trip to visit Australia in 2019. That trip was my first time being outside North America. For some perspective, I grew up in rural New Hampshire in a family without many financial resources. I don’t think many folks from my old hometown left the state. To find myself in the landmass closest to the antipode of my home was thrilling. Even more amazing to me was being so far away from home and seeing firsthand that people all around the world really are incredibly similar. I had this surreal experience of conversing with folks who had incredibly different life experiences than I did, and we were all brought together by talking about how to solve some challenges we were having using VMware Horizon VDI.
This was an inflection point for me and really crystalized my hope that for many of our members, the scale of VMUG’s global reach enables them to build connections and relationships around the world. The ability to interact with people you’d never run into in your local area may be the single most powerful aspect of our global community. I don’t think it’s too much to say that many come for the tech and stay for the relationships.
I couldn’t count all of the friends and relationships I’ve made over my time in this role. Being able to visit so many of our UserCons and spend time connecting with VMUG members and hearing about what they’re working on has been an absolute thrill. I’ve learned so much just chatting with people while I line up to get coffee or striking up a conversation on the exhibit floor. Many of these have turned into longstanding friendships that I count among the most important to me and they all happened organically. Never underestimate how interesting what you’re working on is to someone else – and where that conversation can go and what it can blossom into. I have legitimate friendships on six continents that I simply would not have were it not for this organization.
Leader Summit is a powerful event, and being able to emcee it was a huge highlight for me.
I truly enjoyed meeting up with many of those friends during our annual Leader Summit held in Palo Alto, California at VMware’s campus. Getting 140 VMUG Leaders from around the world together at “the Mothership” just creates an energy that carried me for a long time after we had all gone home. While there are lots of specific little stories, my favorite moment of all time may have been in 2020 when I decided to welcome every one of them to breakfast and thank them for coming with a handshake in the morning with another VMUG Director. Here was a group that was various stages of jetlagged just looking for some coffee and with all the energy of an audience for The Price Is Right. VMUG Leaders remain the most passionate technologists I know. On a personal note, taking the stage in front of a raucous group of people you respect so much can be daunting, but I found it to be an addictive rush. Emceeing Leader Summits is something I’ll miss forever.
Of course, given the disruption in the world over the past two years, not every moment can be sheer joy. While on balance I have truly loved serving this community I can’t help but feel at least a little upset at everything the pandemic has taken away. We’ve been trying to get back to in-person events for almost the entirety of 2021, and it just hasn’t really been possible. As I write this, yet another wave of Covid – this time the Omicron variant – is rolling through the entire world, potentially stymieing yet another round of planning for events for VMUG and other groups.
There were also so many people I wanted to meet and connect with face-to-face that I never got the chance to. In fact, I was booked on a flight to Amsterdam to see the Netherlands VMUG UserCon on March 17, 2020. Clearly, that didn’t happen, and I am disappointed I never got to see the biggest event we have globally. The same can be said for Japan, Paris, Germany, and others I had planned to visit to meet with our members there. While we did the best we could with Zoom, it lacked the fidelity of being able to connect and have random encounters with members walking through the event space.
I also had a major disruption in my day job this past summer that sidelined me for a few months. While we have an incredible team and Board, I felt awful that I wasn’t able to commit as much time as I wanted to into my volunteer commitment. I don’t think anyone noticed outside of the VMUG team and our Board, but I am still frustrated at those lost opportunities because I truly enjoy feeling connected to our community members.
Still, I believe that VMUG is well positioned for the future. There are incredible changes happening in digital infrastructure and application architecture, and we have prioritized getting content to our members that can help them navigate the changing landscape and improve their skills and thereby their relevance to their current (or future) employers. I know of no other user group so focused on making sure that members have opportunities to grow their portfolio of skills, and I’m incredibly proud to have been a part of that. I still think VMUG’s best days are in front of us all.
Of course, I sincerely hope we get back to seeing other in person soon. While our virtual offerings are second to none - and in many ways are more mature than some of the larger, more extravagantly funded events that trillion-dollar companies put on - they are simply not the same experience that I relish. Chance meetings don’t happen as easily in virtual events – which is no knock on the virtual platforms, they are amazing in comparison to what we had to work with years ago - but I miss hanging out in a session and chatting with the presenter afterwards, and I especially miss being that presenter afterwards.
This blog post probably isn’t this moment, but it feels like it a little bit in my head.
I hope, as I said before, that people use VMUG’s global reach to make connections and friendships around the world. The more connected we are, the better chance we have to leave the world a better place – and not just in our industry. We are the people who are shaping the future of business; the importance of digital infrastructure will only grow over the next decades, and we wield incredible influence in our organizations. What better way to use it than to promote the idea we prototyped: a world as a connected community looking to further each other?
As I close, I would be remiss to not thank a few people who have supported me in ways that often go well above and beyond the call of duty over the past three years.
Chiefly among those with my sincere appreciation are my wife Danielle and my kids. Serving as VMUG President takes a lot of time – more time than I actually thought it would when I accepted the role. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with some of my newly freed time, but spending more of it with these three people is high on the list. I’m deeply grateful for their patience and forgiveness with many nights and missed dinners spent on Zoom, recording a video, or working on “VMUG stuff.” An extra thank you to Danielle for being a soundboard, blog post reviewer, occasional camera operator, and deliverer of tea and seltzer.
The incredible VMUG team deserves so much more praise than they get. They are truly passionate about this organization and the whole community.
The incredible staff that run VMUG’s operations are second-to-none, and have true passion for the community they serve. We should all be proud of them and what they enable us to do every time an event goes on. I know I am. For me personally, they have become friends that I will miss seeing so often, and they have often gone much above the call of duty to make this role easier for me – working around my often arduous schedule to make sure we accomplish what needs to get done. That I have ever presented as polished is because of their tireless efforts.
I also am deeply grateful for the folks in VMUG and larger vCommunity for embracing me. From my very first VMworld in 2009 and local VMUG events even earlier, I have always felt welcomed. It’s this openness that I hope we always embody regardless of where the technology heads, because somewhere there’s another young IT professional at their first event – and we all have the ability to shape the direction of their career. I hope we always welcome them in with open arms, and give them the same opportunities that we’ve had to connect in the community and further our careers.
In this same vein, I’m truly grateful to our over 150,000 VMUG members and hundreds of VMUG Leaders around the world. That you all have trusted me with this role for three years is humbling. I hope I’ve been able to serve you all well, despite the fact that I have gained so much more from you than I could ever repay.
And so, what’s next? Well, I’ll still be around and with the VMUG Board in an ex-officio capacity as the Past President. Primarily, my role will be to serve our new President, Adrian, in any capacity that he needs so that he is successful. Truthfully, he’s such an intelligent and strong leader that in many ways, I suspect I will mostly just be cheering him on, but he knows that I’m ready to support him and the whole team in any way imaginable. Otherwise, I will mostly continue to serve as the Associate Chief Information Officer for my university. The pandemic has created new challenges and opportunities in IT as it relates to delivering academic and instructional excellence. However, I’m generally not the kind of person to be satisfied with working and then going home, so I’m sure I’ll find some sort of new volunteer gig to keep me busy – though for a while, I’m setting my sights on “less busy.”
It’s hard to believe the last in-person VMworld was more than two years ago. It doesn’t feel that long - but it also feels like a decade.
Above all, I believe I always kept it clear in my mind that VMUG is a community – a community of passionate technologists growing together. As I’ve been fond of doing for some time when I have the opportunity to talk to a group of VMUG Leaders, I’d like to leave a final challenge to our entire community, which is this: never stop growing. Commit yourselves to learning something new – something outside your current role or comfort zone - in 2022. Our industry is one not marked by change – but defined by it; you can never stop learning and growing if you want to be great in technology. So go out to the bleeding edge. Break some stuff, figure out how to fix it, and then tell us all about it. This is the essence of a user group, and so long as we all keep doing that – we’ll just keep getting better.
I can’t wait to see what we all learn together in 2022, back in the role that started it all for me: VMUG member.
