In this RedMonk Conversation, James Governor interviews Jamie Dobson, Co-Founder of Container Solutions, about his book Visionaries, Rebels and Machines, which traces the evolution of computing technology from 1799 through Edison’s workshops, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, to the modern cloud, creating what he describes as a “relay race of stories” that has not been comprehensively told. The discussion underscores the critical role of leadership in shaping technology’s impact on society. James and Jamie ultimately call for ensuring that technological progress translates into broader societal benefits rather than repeating the mistakes of previous industrial revolutions.

Transcript

James Governor (00:12)
Hey, it’s James Governor, founder of Redmonk, and I’m here with another founder, a co-founder, Jamie Dobson, co-founder of Container Solutions. Welcome, Jamie.

Jamie Dobson (00:21)
Thank you James, thanks for having me. You will notice my attire.

James Governor (00:25)
Not at all. I know that is amazing. There is a great conference called MonkiGras. And it will be on March 19th and 20th next year, 2026. The theme will be prepping craft. The idea is being prepared in software and in life. And so basically a bit of resilience and basically thinking about the things we need to do to be prepared. Cause it seems like…

Systems are just ready to give us a slap in the face at the moment. So But we don’t want to talk about that What we want to talk about today is Jamie Dobson’s work He has created a great book That well, I’ve read I’ve enjoyed it a lot. I think most people that have read this book have found it to be You know a bit of a bit of a cracker it’s been called a page-turner

It’s been called a murder mystery. Actually, maybe it wasn’t murder mystery, but it’s a good, a heist, a heist, not a murder mystery. Sorry, it’s a heist. And the book is called Visionaries, Rebels and Machines. And it’s got some lessons for us in tech. Ask some big questions, some tough questions. But yeah, Jamie, first question. What’s the book about?

Jamie Dobson (01:28)
I’m high. Well, the book, well, the title, Visionaries, Rebels and Machines, only gives a little bit away. The subtitle, How the World Went from Electrification to Cloudification, goes a little bit further. The idea was there are lessons in the past. Fornication, electrification, cloudification.

James Governor (02:03)
Did you say fornication?

Did you say-

sorry! Sorry, cloudification, sorry. I didn’t hear you there, Jamie. I thought it was the-

Jamie Dobson (02:11)
Well, no worries. The whole stupid project started when somebody said, what’s the cloud? And in trying to answer that question, I found myself going back further and further in time. then when you go back in time, so basically as any writer or historian ever sort of drew their bow back in 1799 and let loose an arrow that went all the way through Edison’s work benches, through Bell Labs, the invention of the PC at Xerox PARC.

to the cloud. It’s never been done. There’s a book about PARC and there’s a book about the cloud and there’s a book about Edison, but they’re all very much deep dives. So where is that long journey? It’s a relay race of

James Governor (02:50)
Mm-hmm.

Jamie Dobson (02:52)
stories. And the thing is I’m a cheeky, can I swear Jim? I don’t think I can swear on your…

James Governor (02:57)
Well, I mean, I just, I mean, I just totally derailed it by talking about fornication. So I think, I think we better. I mean, I, yeah. Right. Let’s, so let’s jump into some swears then. Yes, absolutely.

Jamie Dobson (03:02)
Californication. So I forgot what I was going to say now.

James Governor (03:12)
Well, the arrow had shot all the way to the beginning. You were saying that lots and lots of books about systems thinkers and yet there was not a systems view of the emergence of all of these systems.

Jamie Dobson (03:23)
So I was a cheeky bastard I’ve been trying to tell people for years computers are stupid They just do things very fast. You shouldn’t be scared of them But people don’t believe me to say you’re only saying that because you’re clever and I’m like I’m not that clever right if I was clever I’d have done physics at school right instead of computer science so the The point is I was a cheeky bastard because basically in chapter one I said this is a light bulb and then in chapter two I said well This is a this is a light bulb with a wire in it and it amplifies a signal

James Governor (03:39)
Mm-hmm.

Jamie Dobson (03:51)
And then a few chapters there I say, this very small thing does exactly what the vacuum tube does. It’s called a transistor. And then before you know it, you’ve got microchips, microprocessors, computers in the cloud. And the idea was to leave the reader feeling clever and engaged. Wow, now I know a f**k ton of concepts about computing that I would have never have learned if I had to start with the cloud or with a computer. built it up very cheekily. That was a point.

James Governor (04:16)
In that case then, so who is your reader Jamie? mean is it for nerds, it for fake nerds, real nerds, business people that might want to learn, you know, who is your reader? If you need to trick them into enjoying the technological explanations, who do reckon your reader is?

Jamie Dobson (04:28)
It wasn’t meant to It wasn’t meant to be the nerds. It wasn’t meant to be me or you or our friends in the community. But our friends in the community read it and liked it because I think they saw themselves in the story. The original plan, Complete Mea Culpa, was around content marketing from our work at Container Solutions. We have this great book, Cloud Native Transformation, Patterns of Change. All the middle managers and the team leads love it.

It’s technical, dense, it’s done well. People read it and they give us a call. But then from a business strategy, it’s like, if only I could speak directly to executives at the airport. So I need to write a more general purpose book. That was how it started. But then those crazy kids at the DevOps meet up in London asked me to do a talk when I was almost finished with the book, not quite, but almost. And there were lots of young people there. And they asked me at the end to, you know,

speak to them about the olden days so obviously I was feeling dead chucked I was there and there was a bunch of people and all excited and I was excited because I don’t get out much and these people said can we speak to you about the olden days so I started thinking yeah cool mainframes no problem and the microprocessor and they stopped me and they said no sorry we mean in the 90s just before we were born so that’s what they wanted to they wanted to talk about where does the cloud come from and I was like oh my god

James Governor (05:55)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jamie Dobson (06:01)
So there was another reader, the young recent graduate, know, a computer programmer or designers or people who were moving into tech and actually didn’t know how they got from there to here. So anyway, they became the next reader.

James Governor (06:09)
Thank Okay, yeah, I mean, think that that just comes through so strongly is, I mean, you talk about that sort of that arrow shooting through time is there are just lots of different points at which you can stop and enjoy the sort of the innovation journey that we’ve been on. How did you, I think from my perspective.

I mean, he had to do a really good job of like saying no to ideas, right? So to write this book and like, so for me, Apple barely gets a mention, right? Apple is sort of, yeah, we’ve done the Xerox PARC and then we’re like, well, surely now, surely now we’re going to find out how Apple became this dominant company and changed the world. And Jamie’s like, now we’re not going to talk about that.

Jamie Dobson (06:54)
F**k them. Yeah. It was difficult, James. It was difficult. And I upset a lot of people on the way. for example, back at ARPA in the late seventies, when, when Steve Jobs was running off with the PC, Vint Cerf came up with the TCP/IP protocols. He only gets a one sentence mention. my friend, Adrian Moa read a few drafts and was saying, where’s this person? Where’s that person? And he wasn’t, he wasn’t wrong. And unbelievably, Claude Shannon doesn’t get a mention. Does not get a

Claude Shannon who it was to software what the transistor was to the hardware element so it 50 % was just making very difficult decisions and I’ve actually got chapters about Shannon and about other people that just are not in the book So there was a there was definitely a taking away element that was hard However, I helped myself by doing the following the three ways you can look at an electrical circuit. There’s the there’s the way

the physicists, there’s one there’s one view of the circuit. It’s the physicists view electrons and currents moving around. Number one. Number two, there’s the gadget view of a circuit. You put something on it, a light bulb, a receiver, and it becomes a thing. But the third way of looking at electrical circuit is informational that when you close a circuit, a signal can be sent.

James Governor (08:06)
yeah, yeah, yeah. Well that’s, yeah.

Jamie Dobson (08:28)
all of the things I talk about to do with information processing. So I don’t talk about the radio because that’s more on the gadget end of the spectrum. I don’t mention that in the book, but the main point is we go in from Edison’s workbench and the arrow is the arrow of the informational sciences. That’s where we go from Edison’s effects through to cloud computing. That allowed me to frame it. So that meant that Marconi is not in. It means that John Logie Baird television is not in.

But so that was easy. However, choosing which of the visionary rebels and machines to keep in around computing was definitely challenging. And I think if there’s going to be a version two, so to make up for the Claude Shannon issue, I am going to dedicate a full two part episode to Shannon on the podcast, which comes along as a complimentary sort of set of content to go along with the book.

James Governor (09:22)
Okay, and so partly, so Amazon works, they claim to work backward from the customer. Because you were working backward from Amazon, you had to say, no, you’re not allowed in. I’m not gonna, but there is gonna be second book, is there? Is that, that’s a thing.

Jamie Dobson (09:39)
Well no, so what I’m doing right now, I’m having a lot of fun. hope my my listener and my readers having a lot of fun. I’m now on substack and every time there’s a podcast, a supporting podcast, welcome to Visionary, Rebels and Machines, my name is Jamie That type of thing. And the first chapter, the first…

James Governor (09:51)
Mm-hmm.

I think you should always speak like that Jamie,

I want you do the rest of the podcast like that.

Jamie Dobson (10:02)
So the first episode was about Volta and his frog’s legs and that’s absolutely brilliant because basically people say, well he invented the battery so what? And I’m like what the fuck? He invented the battery for the very first time humanity had a continuous current. It never been done before and at the same time people were thinking if that electricity can move a frog’s leg maybe we don’t have a soul and maybe there’s not a god so everything changed with the battery. I didn’t have time to put that into the book. So episode one is an exploration of Volta, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, it’s all connected. And then the idea is that…

James Governor (10:39)
Yeah. Have you seen the new film yet? Have you engaged? I mean, it’s out now. I mean, you know, you’ve got to, maybe we should arrange a viewing together, Jamie, because I really want to see it.

Jamie Dobson (10:44)
I can’t wait for that to… When is it out? When is it out? I saw it was coming out on Netflix and I thought I’ve got to see Frankenstein and anyway, so I don’t know if there’s gonna be a book too, but there’s definitely short articles on substack the philosophy of the battery the machine itself a little exposé of Volta it links back to the podcast and the idea is that we’re going on a rampage from 1799 right the way back to the future and it’s all gonna end on my 50th birthday next August that’s the idea and

If the episodes are any good, if the sort of what we record is any good, that will form the basis for either an ebook or a sequel. But the most important thing is to finish the podcast and finish the substack. And I’m desperate, James, to fight against the enshitification of the internet. All of the content is coming from me. It’s all curated. There’ll be links to books, to papers and bread, bread trails. I’m going to do a little bread trail and say, okay, you’re a leader. This is where you can go to learn about psychological safety.

James Governor (11:26)
Okay.

Jamie Dobson (11:55)
you’re a techie this is how you can learn about that so it’s my gift slash bit of fun between now and when I become 50 next August

James Governor (12:05)
Okay, so psychological safety. When I was reading your book, it was quite interesting because I, in fact, my book was published yesterday. Thank you very much. So it’s a book about what we call progressive delivery. It was written with Kimberley Harrison, Heidi Waterhouse.

Jamie Dobson (12:17)
Congratulations.

James Governor (12:34)
and Adam Zimman. And it’s really about, we just felt that there was some missing aspects. When you think about CI/CD and where we’ve come on this long journey through agile, there were some things that you could do that are based on sort of cloud and cloud abundance and cloud automation that you couldn’t frankly do.

Or it was very expensive and hard to do when, you know, the, the, the, the, the giants that put, you know, what sort of, you, if you think about the kind of work, the people like Martin Fowler or Jez Humble were doing, I mean, it it was, if you were going to have two instances, if you were going to do a blue green deployment, you know, Fowler talking about a blue green deployment, right? It was literally two.

Massive systems that you needed to have next to each other, each with expensive Oracle database licenses, expensive networking gear, yeah, just Cisco stuff. Probably, I don’t know, whatever it was, the customer was using EMC storage and yet to two of them. That you would deploy the application to in order to see how this, you know, obviously some sophisticated.

sort of, you know, routing there, but you had to have two entire infrastructures if you wanted to do a blue green deployment. That’s really expensive and really hard. So without virtualization, super hard, virtualization change things a bit, but the cloud and cloud abundance meant that suddenly it’s like, why would you only have two of things? You, you could have, you can have a bunch of things and see which one works best. That’s not really thinking about the user and

the, how the user feels about the application that you’re rolling out. And we’re seeing that in AI now, actually. I mean, we’re seeing people, they’ll have eight different agents spin up a different version of the application that you might deploy. It’s abundance thinking. It’s a very different way of thinking about the world. And so we’ve just tried to capture all of that. Now, what I was actually going to say is that one of the, in the book, we had to talk about the notion of psychological safety and what we’re trying to.

developers and organization in order that we can experiment and in order that we can roll out applications confidently and safely on a Friday afternoon and the sort of culture you need to get there. And so I was really, well, a couple of things happened. A, your book is annoyingly good, Jamie. was, I was really fell in love with the author, authorial voice. I thought it was excellent. And I, I, I had to beat myself up a lot.

and just feel like here are some things that I and my co-authors could have done but psychological safety, what’s that and why is that so important?

Jamie Dobson (15:34)
Psychological safety, feels like a modern term. It is important, but in a nutshell, it’s about having a tolerance for failure. many companies come to me and ask, we want cloud, we want multiple experimentations, but they’re terrified of failure. Failure is something that other people do. So psychological safety, as we know it today, the Amy Edmondson version of psychological safety is that it’s a group level phenomena.

where people feel safe to fail. They feel that if they try something and it goes wrong, they won’t be criticised or humiliated or punished in any other way. It’s a group condition. That’s what Edmondson figured out. So if we were working in a team together, James, and I wanted to try something a little bit mad and a bit random, there would be no fear in the back of my mind that later in the pub or at the end of the week in retrospective, I would be told off or punished or told that was a mistake.

It’s such a difficult thing to build. It’s easy to lose once you’ve got it, but to build that, leader, the person in charge needs to model that behavior. They need to own up to mistakes. They need to control the urge when something goes wrong to move into that punitive mode. Everybody does that. If you spend 50 grand on an experiment, it’s blown up. And if you’re a reasonably small company, of course your first reaction is to go, well, could we’ve done anything different? That’s actually not a bad question, but you know,

or what have you done there? Yada, yada, yada. So without psychological safety, it becomes impossible to experiment. And all of your work into progressive delivery and experimenting our way forward or growing through failure into the future requires that psychological safety to be there. So you cannot, and this happens to me all the time, it appears in the book, you cannot say, I want to do experiments and I want to be cloud native and I want to be like Netflix and…

I’m not going to do the psychological safety thing. I mean, just kidding yourself. This is the foundation of that and not the other way around.

James Governor (17:36)
Right. And I think that comes through really strongly in the book. And interestingly, because it’s a book about technology, but because it’s a book about innovation, it is a book about culture. yeah, particularly this organizations that succeed in delivering sort of breakthrough, I’ll call them digital,

products and services today, but certainly these breakthroughs, that’s what comes through. You’ve got to be able to fail. That’s fundamental.

Jamie Dobson (18:13)
You’ve got So the great thing about psychological safety and the culture of teens is it proves a really important point. Human nature doesn’t change, technologies do. So the exact same environment that gave rise to the incandescent light bulb at Menlo PARC, which was Edison’s little research laboratory, the same culture that produced those artifacts is exactly the same culture that they have at Netflix. Of course, the technologies in between have changed. How do you get that? There’s two very simple rules to create an environment where…

psychological safety is there and that will produce innovations and breakthroughs. Low bureaucracy, just get rid of it, it completely kills the flow of information and of course lots of information. Thomas Edison, people think of him as an inventor, he was primarily a fantastic manager. He knew how to deal with people, all these German snobs who came to Menlo PARC, he used to haze them, he’s tried to bring them down to the American pragmatist level, not because he was a sadist.

James Governor (18:52)
Thank

Jamie Dobson (19:14)
because you know they were building stuff there we couldn’t we didn’t care about people’s history we cared about people’s future Robert Oppenheimer my absolute I love I call him Robert it’s weird that I know I call him Oppie that was a nickname he picked up when he was at university in Leiden I didn’t mean to become an expert on Oppenheimer

James Governor (19:32)
So you must have loved it when the film came out because you were already, or you might hate the book, but you were deep in your love of Oppenheimer and then this sort of amazing view of it comes out as a film. That must have been wild for you.

Jamie Dobson (19:36)
The problem is… No, no, I the film. I love the film. Go. The thing is, I’ve got it on my desk, I’ve got it in every… I’ve got multiple copies of this book. So this is Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s American Prometheus. The film adapts it so well, and I know this book so well that actually nothing appeared in the film that I didn’t understand. Some of the lines I’d memorised. It’s a fantastic film, but I didn’t appreciate it like others did because I knew the story back to front. Oppie was a clever man, really clever, charming…

James Governor (20:15)
Right.

Jamie Dobson (20:18)
But he was a brilliant manager. What does he do in Los Alamos? What does he do? Brings people in, smashes the hierarchy, has a fight with General Groves who wants to compartmentalize exactly like we do in big businesses. And Oppenheimer’s like, we need to break down bureaucracy. Information must flow. He said security might cost us the race, but a lack of information definitely will. So Oppenheimer, more than anything, was cast in the role of manager, which of course,

feel like you know a bit beneath him and I’m like why don’t am I mad am I the only person who sees Oppie as a fantastic manager and Edison as a fantastic manager that’s what they were and my book is meant to inspire other managers that hey there’s nothing wrong with management it’s a noble profession and you can do a lot of good work with it

James Governor (21:08)
I mean, that’s a huge question on our industry, isn’t it? Are you an IC? Are you a manager? You know, the work of people like Charity Majors that talks about this a lot.

Jamie Dobson (21:18)
I love Charity Majors’ work by the way. I love her stuff on leadership. I love Charity Majors, brilliant stuff.

James Governor (21:22)
amazing. Yeah, absolutely. You can learn so much from every blog post she writes. Yeah, Charity is just amazing. I mean, it was funny, again, thinking about your work on what it means to have effective management in tech. I’ve just started reading Sarah Drasner’s book on engineering management. yeah, questions about trust.

how you get a team to work together, the importance of values, the fact that different people may have different values, you need a way of navigating that so they can collaborate together. This stuff is super hard. But I want to ask actually a question about Edison. Did you feel any, I mean, did you feel some sort of responsibility to reclaim Edison? I think these days everyone wants to be like, no, Edison was the bad guy.

know, Edison just was, he was just out there like, you know, killing elephants and stuff like that. And, you know, we should not admire Edison. know, there’s an alternative history in which, you know, Tesla, who had not been screwed over by Edison is able to make a better and brighter future for us all. I mean, was there an aspect of reclaiming Edison?

Jamie Dobson (22:26)
Yeah. 100 % and and and a lot of that I started to fight for Edison after the first drafts came out because people Said to me you you’ve committed a crime one of my friends. He said you really Committed a crime because he was a bastard right and and you know, you’ve not you should have be said he one sentence would have done it I just want to And I’m like, well, okay, but I didn’t just make it up. I’m surrounded by papers and books about Edison and

This bastard view of Edison is not shared by historians and biographers who are way more talented than I am. And so the question is, where does this come from? Was it jealousy? That seems like a sensible place to start. He was very, very successful, both in terms of his output and in terms of his wealth creation. He became very rich. Is it jealousy? Is this what people said about him? If you succeed long enough, because there’s lots of people out in the world that don’t like me either.

and that’s because for 10 years I was a leader and I wasn’t afraid to lead, I made decisions. Some of my decisions benefited the group but not universally. Some people did not benefit from my decisions so it’s easy to say, Jamie’s a bastard. Well, you reverse that and put them in my shoes what decisions would they have made. So if you lead

James Governor (24:01)
very effective operators are bastards, Jeremy. mean, if we’re, you know, we’ve got a rather rich chap in the world at large right now who clearly is capable of getting some stuff done. But also, I mean, it’ll be quite interesting to see how our history looks back on Elon Musk, right?

Jamie Dobson (24:04)
That was it. and He will not be in the book of visionaries rebels and machines part two. He won’t make it. He won’t make the cut. He won’t.

James Governor (24:27)
Right, he’s not… I don’t think he does much on psychological safety, Jamie.

Jamie Dobson (24:33)
No, but I don’t like Elon Musk. The comparison between him and Edison is really unfair. Edison, so this is the rough way this goes. Elon Musk, he’s not really, invents anything, he’s a cuckoo. He goes in there, pushes the founders out, and he claims Tesla for himself. It didn’t actually do any work. And therefore he’s like Edison, because Edison did that. What? Really? Did Edison really do that? I thought Edison invented the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph.

Andy spent 10 years trying to do some mining that didn’t work and he invented the film industry as we know it today. He did all of that. He didn’t steal that. At one point he was so famous if you were an inventor and it’s very hard to be an inventor and an innovator and a businessman, would say to people, listen, I’ll be able to reverse engineer that and come up with something better in a pretty short amount of time. Why don’t you sell me the patents, we’ll stick the Edison brand on it.

and we’ll both get rich. That was a tactic of his, towards the end of his life when he was very, very famous. He gave people a choice. This is where the comparison between Edison and Musk comes up is that tiny thing. But that was only one part of Edison’s work. So was he a bastard? I don’t think he was. The Nikola Tesla thing, the current wars came after he invented the incandescent light bulb. So don’t forget, I said this was an arrow shot in the spirit of computation.

James Governor (25:36)
Right.

Jamie Dobson (25:58)
all of the conflict with Tesla came later. Now, the next thing where it went wrong, where Edison gets cast as being a bastard is because of what he did with the film industry. He invented the camera, I can’t remember what it was called, Edison’s CineMotion, it had a strange name. And he had this idea that you could only license this stuff from him. This was a mistake. So people were like, no, we’re gonna make an alternate version.

And actually Edison controlled a lot of the places you could film in New York and in any case, the light was bad. So people ran away from Edison because they didn’t want to pay the subscription fees and to use this patented stuff. And that’s how Hollywood began. So Hollywood began because it had great light and Thomas Edison wasn’t there. So yes, he annoyed a lot of people when the birth of the film industry arrived. But I think people knee-jerk that he’s an awful person without really thinking about it.

James Governor (26:38)
Okay.

Jamie Dobson (26:53)
I don’t see any evidence in there to suggest he was particularly evil. He wasn’t a very good first husband. So Mary Stilwell eventually died, officially of complications because of an illness, but she was heavily self-medicating on drugs. So it could be suicide in small increments, but either way she died a neglected and lonely woman looking after two children that Thomas Edison barely saw.

James Governor (27:21)
That needs to be on the account. And it’s, again, it’s not ideal if you’re doing psychological safety at work and you’re not giving your family psychological safety. That is not a trade off that I think either of us would be willing to make

Jamie Dobson (27:41)
me earlier about the people I left out the book. I have a genuine sadness that I couldn’t find the space to mention the women behind the men I talk about. And I also genuinely regret not being able to unearth the women, visionaries and rebels in the stories of visionaries, rebels and machines. It’s not that they didn’t exist. They’ve been airbrushed out of history.

So there’s a mental note somewhere in there that I’m going to go dig in and try to reclaim some of the lost figures of our history.

James Governor (28:15)
So I don’t need to bash you for that. Cause that was one of the things that sort of struck me in the book. was, you know, I was definitely waiting.

Jamie Dobson (28:21)
Do you know what? Do you know what it came to me really late? I worked really hard on the research I really really did it came to me late in the in the day so there were two Women that spring to mind there Lynn Conway. Who invented I think a process for designing Microchips and then of course a woman a famous woman from England. You maybe have to help me

James Governor (28:45)
By the way, you’ve got to see some comics that my friend Jim Bolton makes. Jim makes comics of figures in tech history. You’ve got to meet Jim. He’s an amazing storyteller. He’s brilliant. You two will get along. But also, these comics are amazing and he’s got a comic of Lynn Conway that is really nicely done.

Jamie Dobson (28:49)
Yeah.

Cool.

James Governor (29:13)
So yeah, so he, luckily enough, I think, you know, sort of, or at least in that, so he speaks to the people, like, let’s make sure that we capture some of this in their own words and their lovely comics. Brilliant history. And I think the two of you, maybe that’s, I don’t know, maybe that’s another podcast, but we’ll all have a pint together first.

Jamie Dobson (29:25)
Yeah. I’d love to speak to him. So Lynn Conway was a trans woman who left a remarkable footprint on the world that we live in. She started work at Xerox PARC and then went on to develop this chip design process, the Mead Conway design revolution it’s called. But it all came to me at the last moment. And if you think that this was easy for me, I spent one day looking pale and I said to my editor,

I’ve committed a crime, I’ve contributed to the airbrush and I’ve contributed to a great historical crime. then of course, Steve Sherley was on my radar. Steve Sherley is actually Stephanie Sherley, but she told everybody and it was Steve because nobody wanted to deal with a woman. And, you know, there’s loads of these stories and it came to me late and I was close to exhaustion at the end of the book. And my editor Beth said, you’re gonna have to do it in the next edition. You’ve got a ship.

James Governor (30:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, amazing.

Jamie Dobson (30:35)
and in the end that’s just what did.

James Governor (30:39)
When I read it, it was noticeable. I don’t think it’s unforgivable. You’re aware of it. You’re going to do the work, as they say, with later editions. And it is harder because if we think about invisible figures, if you’re reading history, it is hard to know, actually. There is a layer of history that we’re lacking because that airbrushing has been a thing, unfortunately.

Jamie Dobson (31:07)
Well, because they’re invisible, you don’t stumble across them. So it was only at the end of the book when my digging was so deep, did I actually come to these women. So I’m not using that as an excuse. And then even the Lovelace thing, Ada Lovelace is a powerful figure in her own right. And recently she has become recognized as such. But for most of the last century, she was Charles Babbage’s muse.

Now when you start reading about Lovelace, this is utter nonsense, she was the powerhouse in that relationship, he was another devil for an idiot. And then you get to that weird Victorian period where women don’t contribute as much because it was such a break of gender roles, you get Alexander Graham Bell, another bumbling idiot, I mean I really can’t stand him. And you get his poor wife, who basically propped him up, her job was to manage his emotions and then motivate this unmotivated and unmovable Scott.

James Governor (31:37)
Absolutely.

Jamie Dobson (32:02)
She’s the real hero in that story. So in a way I’ve contributed to it, have, and that’s on me and now I need to do something about that.

James Governor (32:14)
Well, I mean, you know, first episode, I you’ve to own it. It’s better than saying it’s not a thing. So, but yeah, we don’t, I’m not, well, let’s, think we had a slight slight gear change. But, but yeah, I think that that’s something I look forward to seeing in your future works.

Some again, and I didn’t know actually when we, mean, obviously I’m an arch and inveterate planner. I plan everything down to the very last detail. So I knew exactly how this conversation would go before we started. I was interested in this notion of sort of innovation and how it works. And in

described some of the characteristics. So first of all ask, what are the characteristics of successful innovation engines, successful organizations that innovate? So I’ll ask you that first and then I’m gonna ask a second question. yeah, what are the, you looked at archetypes in the book. Like what do you see as the archetypes of successful. organizations that can innovate and create new and breakthrough digital products and services.

Jamie Dobson (33:24)
Okay so innovation is a bit like pornography it’s a bit hard to describe but you know it when you see it. Most people don’t understand innovation is quite mysterious nobody you know there’s books about this does it come from flashes of inspiration however there are patterns there are broad brushstrokes of patterns the first thing is that so so innovation is slow it tends to bubble up after Volta discovered

The battery, and I say discovered because it was waiting to be discovered, he unearthed it like an archaeologist. For 30 years it took for somebody to take the battery and put it into the telegraph. So the process of doing something sensible with battery took a very long time. That was number one. Number two, all innovation is recombinations of existing things. So if you look at the battery, the disks and the wires coming out, and then look at the telegraph.

Physically, it’s almost identical where the wires keep coming and then at the end of the wires There’s a there’s a there’s a hammer to tap out my dots and dashes on a piece of paper So you think well, why was the telegraph earth-shattering it went viral it changed the world It changed how we speak to each other It changed everything the Associated Press came out of the telegraph the Western Union did why why did the battery not have such an effect? Well, that’s because the telegraph was the hardware. I just described we combined with

very ancient technology, language. The dots and dashes and the small communication channel between you and I that is bound by words. So it was two ideas melted in the telegraph, the hardware and then the notion of language. So innovation is quite mysterious, but it’s always recombatant. Is that even right? It sounds like something from Mortal Kombat.

James Governor (35:12)
recombinant, recombinant, recombinant, recombinant. I mean, I think we’re in the right ballpark, Jamie. I mean, you know, I think people know what you mean.

Jamie Dobson (35:15)
What type of right am I? I don’t claim to have the best vocabulary in the world. So, so anyways, so those environments that have done well allow these ideas for want of a better word to meet each other, marry, have sex and the consummation of those marriages and new ideas. So Edison’s light bulb is just that battery again, but instead of having a sound on the end, like in the telephone, he stuck a light bulb on the end. So these ideas have got to swirl around. Ideas have sex in between the ears of, you know, human beings.

James Governor (35:51)
We’re obsessed with it today by the way Jamie. started I shouldn’t have said fornication at the beginning I mean, I’ve got you know, I’ve really I’ve really set you off. I Blimey

Jamie Dobson (35:56)
You started this. started this. And so then if you look at Container Solutions, just to use as an example, we always, we designed the company to be flat, to be open. We didn’t have any Google 50 % rule, but we’re always looking for ways to create space. And so if you look at the external secrets operator, it’s a tiny, tiny example. We didn’t start it, but in the mode, when we first got our hands on it, we were component builders.

And ESO, it’s a secret operator for Kubernetes, whatever. So we were building on existing technology, but then the next thing was to be like, well, how do we find use cases for this? All of this requires space and time. In my role back then as the chief executive, I’d have said, what is the return on investment? is, when are we going to see a payoff from this? In other words, I’d have paralysed the whole operation by bringing bureaucracy into it. ESO would have never gone off the ground and then later nabbed with the CCS.

So Xerox PARC, Container Solutions, Netflix, they create space for ideas to bubble up, to meet, and then to become the next thing. Of course, all of that requires psychological safety, which we spoke about earlier. And it’s challenging because many managers, it all starts with the manager. How tolerant are you for failure? I’ve got a high tolerance for failure. And I trust people. I’ve built a lot of big computer systems. And if one of my engineers says, I’ve got this hunch, I just say, follow it.

I don’t care about the 20, 30, 40 grand that you know we’re going to spend in terms of salaries and licenses just just go for it and let’s talk again in four months. Not many managers can do that and in fact when I explain this

James Governor (37:35)
No, can this only happen at the beginning of the process? Because to me, you know, I look at, so if we think about the names you’re mentioning, and right now, you know, if you you talk to or listen to people that have are working at or have worked at OpenAI right now, for example, there is an incredible freedom to just fix problems and build things.

These organizations, at least within their engineering staffs, are finding ways to enable great innovation or new stuff. mean, we both would agree that AI is moving pretty fast. There’s a lot of new cool stuff happening. Google’s had a good year. 2025 has been amazing for Gemini. They’ve had some breakthrough consumer products, Nano Banana crossed over, Notebook LM continues to gain plaudits Gemini is

Jamie Dobson (38:22)
Saw that. They had their first billion dollar quarter.

James Governor (38:32)
So the very good year for Gemini. But you know, some of the, I think my question was when I, it’s pretty hard to have psychological safety if everyone’s afraid that they’re gonna get laid off. And to me, so many of the big firms at the moment, how are they, how can they possibly be sort of inculcating a feeling that you can fail when the management decisions are so predicated on we’re firing people, show me the money right now.

Jamie Dobson (39:09)
Well, there is something called creative desperation. When you think, when your back’s against the wall, you come up with creative ideas, it’s not very sustainable. My feeling is, I don’t know what goes on inside these big companies. Your question is, can this only happen in the beginning? Not necessarily, but obviously, look at the telephone company, they’ve got a product, and then once it’s working, it’s about scaling, driving down costs, and then broadening reach. Once you’re in that cost-cutting operational mode, then of course you’re not gonna

If your absolute goal is to drive profit margins up by 1%, you’re not going to sanction a 50 grand spend on innovation. A lot of companies, it’s very sad. A lot of companies’ innovation strategy to buy smaller companies and not because it’s a, it’s a bad system. It’s just because they know that trying to get a company that is so used to driving down costs, increasing revenues, turning the handle and existing machinery, getting the type of people who run such a machine.

to them all of a sudden innovate over there. It’s just impossible. Psychologically, the people drawn to a large organization have a certain set of character traits. They don’t like risk-seeking, they don’t like novelty, and they have no tolerance for failure whatsoever. That’s why they work there and they do a fantastic job. The challenge for big businesses is they come to me and say, we want to be GenAI and we want to do a bit of cloud computing with the same staff. And that’s not possible. Now, it’s impossible to innovate in a dangerous environment, I think.

James Governor (40:41)
Yeah, and I look around and I think orgs, some of them are gonna struggle because there’s just too much fear. It’s really hard to do your best work if you’re, and I mean, guess that’s, I mean, is that something, does innovation, maybe there is a bit of a, like when the economy is growing, it’s easier or I wonder what the correlation sort of there is, but at the moment, yeah, it’s challenging, not much safety around. So.

Jamie Dobson (41:08)
But it’s not to say that large organizations can’t innovate. So Bell innovated remarkably well in the last century through Bell Labs, but under immense pressure from the Department of Justice, it has to be said, they innovated because their profits went above a certain threshold. It would trigger anti-monopolistic court cases. So they had an incentive to burn their money through Bell Labs, which benefited all of us. And then of course you get this weird situation.

James Governor (41:17)
Mm-hmm.

Jamie Dobson (41:38)
Xerox could innovate as well. Xerox was a remarkable company. And then they came up with the Palo Alto Research Center that invented the personal computer. So you can’t say that they couldn’t innovate, but then what they failed to do with the PC was to monetize it, capitalize on the investment.

James Governor (41:55)
Right. See, I would say the innovation is partly the money. think of the invention, at least this is my definition, the innovation is actually the scaling and the making money from it. The invention, they did the invention, but they didn’t take it to market. At least that’s my…

Jamie Dobson (42:10)
Yeah, that’s a Some people do agree with that. I think it’s a spectrum. when does an invention become an innovation? So yes, indeed, an invention is like you imagine a penitent tinkering, they come up with a component, but it takes somebody else who can drive all the inefficiencies in that component, then scale it for wider societal use, driving down the cost so you can stick it in the hands of tons of people.

Xerox definitely failed to do that. So the moment has to be right and then thereafter you have to succeed in the scaling. So maybe they did some invention and then they did the first bit of the innovation cycle but then unfortunately the last bit of the innovation cycle was Microsoft’s and Apple’s in that case. They were the big winners.

James Governor (43:00)
So… On that, I the other thing, and I guess we have to get to this, and some of it’s AI being blamed, but I think, well, mean, given the subject of the book and the subject of the conversation, lightbulb moments is probably a transition here, and…

AI is very real. Another book I’ve been reading, Gene Kim and Steve Yegge’s, I don’t know if it’s Yegg or Yeggie, I need to find out. Their book on vibe coding. And it’s interesting because…

I mean, Yegge is certainly, like he’s not someone that reflexively jumps on new technology. As they say in the book, like he was, you know, handwriting, refused to use an IDE, handwriting Java code for the longest time, refused to learn Git. And yet 20 years of his life was building systems at Amazon and Google that probably many of us use on a daily basis, but skeptical.

a conservative in terms of technology adoption. But that moment when AI, we realized bloody hell, this is very real. I I think that’s interesting to me because in your book, it’s that gear change where we go to, bloody hell. We’ve come through cloud, we’ve got the compute that has enabled us to do these things with transformers. We’re into AI now and shit, what have we done? You’ve got this.

ear change in the book where, yeah, sort of the horrific downer later in the book where you just start to ask questions about will anyone have jobs? Will we use AI to sort of create viruses that kill us all? You turn into a doomer at the end. And I mean, I’ve got a bit to say about, but yeah, tell me how you felt sort of, the book is quite an optimistic book until

Suddenly you’re like, no, no, I’m not optimistic anymore. And I mean, you don’t, and it’s funny, because one of the things you talk about is not cars, not being able to drive properly. Wait till you go to San Francisco and get in a Waymo, because, or when they come to London, Waymo is, they feel safer than normal drivers. That’s, that’s any cab driver I’ve ever had, a Waymo feels safer. So tell me about that sort of gear change where you’re like, actually things could get bad here, folks.

Jamie Dobson (45:32)
I think things can get bad. History’s arrow makes you think that the way things happen is how they had to happen. So the reason I can be optimistic and joyous about what’s been in the past is because I’ve got the benefit of hindsight. There’s a few things that mark my thinking. Some of them are personal. Some of them are practical. think people get excited about killer robots. I wouldn’t worry about that. They’re going to come. Not right now. The real thing to look at, and if you were depressed after reading section five of the book, you’re to be even worse when I start talking now. The original quote that said one percent of all the wealth is held by 99 percent of all the people within this country. What year do you think that quote’s from?

James Governor (46:14)
Yep.

It’s got worse, hasn’t it?

Jamie Dobson (46:17)
Well it has got worse, in the last five years it’s got much worse. But what year do you think that quote was made?

James Governor (46:21)
Much worse.

Not sure.

Jamie Dobson (46:23)
1906, 1906 in a book called Poverty. as the last century as the last century turned

James Governor (46:28)
Bloody hell. Okay. Did we fix it a bit and then it’s gone bad again?

Jamie Dobson (46:33)
Well, yes, but we required a first world war and then the Holocaust for it to be fixed. And it was only a temporary fix. So if you really want to get upset about all of this stuff, at the turn of the last century, the big trust, the big monopolies, AT &T, Rockefeller and all of these people were hoovering up so much vast wealth that the seeds for social discord were sown. We could not stop that train once it was in motion. Starting with the great crash of 1908.

James Governor (46:59)
Mm-hmm.

Jamie Dobson (47:03)
First World War, all of that building up to the big big crash in 28, which inevitably gave Hitler that platform in the 30s. All of the markers that came before the Second World War are now presently within our societies. The financial crash of 2008 was the equivalent to the stock market crash of the Great Depression of the 1930s. That’s the most terrifying bit of this whole story. And it’s systematic because a computer system or a business based on a computer system

James Governor (47:18)
Mm-hmm.

Jamie Dobson (47:33)
consolidates gains and hoovers them up into a very tiny percentage of the population. So it’s history that is making me think what comes next might be difficult challenges. But I do say in the book, we’ve been here before and there’s great hope in that. We have seen this before. We understand what happens when you impoverish billions of people and what they do at the polling station. So we know this. So I think there’s a fight back. So this was part of my look.

James Governor (48:03)
Yeah, we had a weird, I mean, you know, and obviously, I mean, podcasts shouldn’t be necessarily time specific, but, you know, talk about the news. We had a, the Democrats had a pretty good day yesterday. You know, New York’s gonna have a new mayor. London and New York are gonna have Muslim mayors. There were all sorts of interesting wins by Democrats, actually across the country.

Jamie Dobson (48:15)
Yeah,

Yeah.

James Governor (48:31)
So to your point about optimism, yeah, occasionally humans do take a step. At Colorado, passed a bill, hire people on higher incomes in order to do free meals in public schools. So sometimes we do the right thing.

Jamie Dobson (48:52)
Exactly and the right thing so back in the turn of the last century the Paris underground and the municipal transport systems were put together not by left-wing do-gooders but by politicians who were terrified that if working people didn’t see some of the gains of the know increases in wealth there would be social unrest. So we know this history teaches this common sense teaches this as well so there is some hope we have been through these scenarios before we may not fall into them again.

but I don’t think we should be complacent. And this is very difficult for me because if you ever read a book about really deep dark material, whether it’s type of abuse or anything like that, you can only put so much darkness on the reader for so long before they just completely switch off. And I think that’s normal, that’s human nature. But I’m here trying to say, I’d like us to talk about these dark things. I think we’ve all done well in technology. It’s been brilliant for me. I’ve had a great career. I basically…

James Governor (49:38)
Mm-hmm.

Jamie Dobson (49:49)
fuck around for a living these days, it’s great, right? I read, I talk, I help people, I play with computers. I used to do that for fun before I got a job and then the day after I got a job I got paid for it. I think we need to not shy away from these conversations and chapter five or section five is about trying to hold the industry to account, hold myself to account and start to say, listen, if we can’t predict the future, we won’t be able to shape it. And those who can’t construct the past cannot predict the future.

And if we zone out now, the future will belong to the Elon Musk’s of the world. And we can’t let that happen. So this is part of the fight back. And then I think the second part is that I came from a deindustrialized city and I witnessed the mining strike on TV. This wasn’t abstract. This was happening in my community. Government policy, when it goes wrong, leads to the childhood I had and the city I was raised in. So technology change will always come. There will be winners and losers.

but policy choices by governments will dictate what happens to most of us thereafter. So as a part of section five is advice, policy advice. Well, this is happening. The potential for people to become very rich is happening. What can we do to make sure we all get to use these technologies and we all get to be paid fairly and to benefit? It’s never going to be 100 % equal, but how can we all win right now? Because if we all win, we might intercept social unrest that potentially could follow up if we don’t solve that equation.

James Governor (51:23)
through AI. And I was at a conference yesterday. No, no, I mean, I think people have to read the book. It’s a great book, Section 5, Nightmare. But you’ve got to read it. We’ve got to be clear sighted. For me, at least. I care about people. So, yep, this is stuff you need to think about. I have a family.

Jamie Dobson (51:23)
I didn’t mean to depress you and set you free.

James Governor (51:47)
Um, you know, we want them to be safe. Um, you know, if you think about, talk about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in the book and self-actualization. mean, you have to start with safety, know, psychological safety is one thing in an organization, but if you don’t have a roof over your head, uh, food on the table, um, you know, that stuff is super important. And obviously I want, you know, me, you, uh, our kids, our families, everyone on this podcast and the wider world to have, uh, those, those base levels.

And yeah, I think we do have to fight for them. But I did yesterday, was at an AI conference and you know, I’m very used to it. And there were loads of amazing people there, like building amazing stuff. there’s like vision models and voice models and there’s all sorts of startups building this cool stuff. And it’s like, this is amazing. at this thing they built. Robots and all sorts of amazing things that may or may not take jobs. And you know, they’re basically, they’re pretty clear goal to make money.

and I, I, I got, I went to have lunch and I just started talking to this chap. His name is Bruno Suarez. And he, I asked him what he did. He said, I’m an oncologist. And I was like, what’s an oncologist like doing at an AI conference in Lisbon? And he said, well, I am an oncologist. And, one of the really important things is how,

Jamie Dobson (52:57)
Right.

James Governor (53:12)
like people report on their symptoms, particularly not the symptoms of the cancer, but the side effects of the medicines we give them. Because the medicines we use are tremendously invasive. They really hurt people. And if you, if they take too much of them, it can shorten their life and it can certainly ruin their quality of life in any life that they have. And we’re really not very good at this stuff. There are global standards to lay out reporting for symptoms.

He kept on using the example of diarrhea and I was trying to my lunch and I’m like, dude, but he’s an oncologist and he just came, he didn’t even think about that as a thing, but you know, the sort of seven levels of, and what does it mean? And how do we, how do we have a consistent way of reporting on our symptoms? And there is a French healthcare company, they’ve got one which is quite rigid in classification. And he was actually just pushing back and saying that his organization and the patients that they were dealing with,

They should build their own system using, and he was building a proof of concept. He had built a proof of concept. It was LLM based. Immediately someone else came, you should use an SLM, use small language models. But basically he built it so that people, the patients could use WhatsApp. They could talk to the machine and it would turn that into standard reporting. And he obviously was quite worried about making sure there weren’t hallucinations. into standard reporting on

the effects of the drugs on their lives. And for me, you know, as I say, it’s, it’s, I mean, there’s people out there that say AI doesn’t work. There are people out there that say it’s all bad. I was really taken with the possibilities and the potential with this wonderful, wonderful guy, Bruno. And I’m gonna…

Jamie Dobson (54:42)
Yeah.

James Governor (55:08)
try and get involved, help him where I can. Because if you can help one person to live a better life, one cancer patient, then that’s amazing. And he was absolutely, could not, there was no way he could have done it without AI.

Jamie Dobson (55:23)
Bruno may or may not succeed, but somebody like Bruno will. One of the huge lessons of Visionaries, Rebels and Machines in the history of tech is that the destiny of a general purpose technology does not lie in the hands of its inventors. It lies in the hands of users. That’s what Bruno is. after the hype, yeah, so after the hype, practitioners, people who don’t give a shit about social media will get busy and they will find brilliant use cases. There’s loads exist already.

James Governor (55:38)
He is exactly-

Jamie Dobson (55:49)
a generative AI stethoscope, you put it on your heart, it does what a stethoscope does, sends a bunch of data back to a cloud and then says, you might have this, this and this. Way more accurate than a human being. I’m not worried about that. think finding use cases for generative AI is already massively in progress and in 10 years time, we’ll see some great use cases. Will it be the end of work? I think some jobs will vanish. I think some basic jobs will vanish. I don’t think LLMs can do what humans can do, but I use… Claude to do all kinds of things mainly around planning I Know what I’m asking Claude to do so now I can do in five hours what I used to do in 15 hours Great. It’s a production boost so things

James Governor (56:30)
my goodness, as an author, I’ve just started using Wispr Flow Wispr Flow is really good. I don’t know if you’ve used it, Jamie. You might use it when you do your vibe coding too, because Wispr Flow, you just open the text area, you know, press the button and it’s really good at transcripts. So anyway, what do want to go too much on? I wanted to stop End on a high note. We’ve got some positives. I think for today.

Jamie Dobson (56:49)
Bye.

James Governor (56:53)
We’re gonna, we’re gonna cap it now, Jamie. But I want to say thanks so much for joining me. It’s been a super conversation. And yeah, once again, you know, I’d say to people watching, Visionaries, Rebels and Machines, absolutely an enjoyable book that helps you understand the world that we’re living in today by that time’s arrow looking back and was a cracking read. And so you should buy it, you should read it. And Jamie, thanks so much for joining us.

Jamie Dobson (57:29)
Thank you, James.

From Light Bulbs to Large Language Models: Jamie Dobson on Technology’s Relay Race Through History

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