Building Leaders to Build the Future: Kirk Offel on Data Centers, AI, and Purpose-Driven Teams

Wes

Today’s guest is Kirk Offel. Kirk is the CEO of Overwatch Mission Critical, a service-disabled veteran-owned small business that combines strategic consulting with full service owner representation for the data center and telecom industries. His mission is clear. Build a company that lasts by investing in people and culture and help customers unlock emerging technologies that improve lives everywhere. 

Kirk’s leadership journey began at the U.S. Navy aboard the fast attack submarine USS Memphis, setting the foundation for more than two decades of experience delivering some of the industry’s most demanding projects. He’s also the founder of DCAC, an anti-conference known for its South by Southwest style energy designed to shake up how our industry shares ideas. 

Kirk is a passionate advocate for veteran transition, industry education, and pushing our field to evolve. Kirk, welcome to the show.

Kirk Offel

Nice to be here, Wes. It’s a privilege to be here. Thank you for having me.

Wes

Yeah, so you have quite the background. I’d to dive in a little bit more. That way everybody understands a bit more about who it is that we’re talking with here. So with that, how did you get started? What prompted you to join the Navy? And just really tell me a bit more about your career and background.

Kirk Offel

Yeah, you got it. I appreciate that. So I am the youngest of a couple boys. My father was career military, turned 18, learned bombs on F-4s in Southeast Asia, came out of the military 24 years later with a bachelor’s in Boise State, a master’s from OU, and thousands of hours in the cockpit of multiple different platforms that he flew. And he was a big proponent in believing that Uncle Sam could help pay for our college too, right? So all of my brothers joined the military.

I myself stumbled in the only direction away from what they did and the only branch left was the Navy. And I watched a lot of movies about submarines, which inspired me. So I just thought it would be a really cool, I thought it was a special thing to do in the Navy was to be on a submarine. I still feel like it was. I feel like it had some of the most advanced training and I was exposed to some of the most advanced weapons, machinery and technology you can imagine. 

The schools that we had to go to were very, very challenging and the deployments that we did were very, complicated and challenging, but they were incredibly worth it. So I was a wrestler my whole life. And I believe that being a wrestler helped prepare me to be in a better sailor. Right. And it was critical that I was prepared to be a strong sailor because there was a, you know, another challenge in my life as I got out of the military. 

So I got out of the Navy in 2000, right around the end of the third industrial revolution or what’s also known as the dotcom bust, which was the bookmark between the end of the third industrial revolution, which began in 1969 and the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution, which ended right around the same time as COVID.

So in that time, I got out the military and put myself back through school as a UPS service engineer carrying a tool bag. And I ended up getting this job in Silicon Valley right around the same time that dot-com bust. And the beauty was, is I had a front row seat in emerging technologies. So if you remember what was happening during that time was, one industry was closing and then it was really the birth of web 2.0, which was the precursor to what’s known as the internet of things. 

So the worldwide web, which led to e-commerce and cloud technologies. And here we are today at AI. So I started my career in Silicon Valley after I got out of the military, sitting front row watching the development of this thing that’s now called the data center industry or the mission critical vertical. And back then it was very niche, very small.

It was emerging. I try to say that you know, today in 2025, now as we build AI and people are much more aware of what we’re building now with the announcement of programs that we’re, and we get to be involved with like Stargate and others that are like them of equal magnitude. We’re building the AI factories, we’re building the sky for the cloud and we get to build a home for AI. And, and, and everything that I got to do has been involved in an industry that is just now emerging into the mainstream.

So everything I did as a wrestler prepared me for my career in the military. My career in the military prepared me to get into a world of technology that really was reinventing itself on a monthly basis. So as a consumer, think about the way that we absorb and process and utilize technology and data today and how much different is that today than we did a year ago. And then try to imagine how much more different it’s going to be in a year from now.

So I get to be a part of this growing technology stack where we, the consumers that are demanding all the eyeball content and video cache, we’re also the same ones that get to deliver the product that allows that technology capability to exist.

Wes

Yeah, it does. And that’s awesome as well. You know, that grew up as a wrestler as well. So I would also say even beyond just preparing you for the military. Now, as a business leader and owner, I would say it’s great because it gives you a level of grit that most other really most of the sports don’t give you. But most other experiences don’t give you as well. Like, this, this internal, this mantra that I’m not necessarily relying on other folks, I’ll work as a team, but I can do this. I’m to face the difficult situation kind of head on and take in a strategic manner. Love it.

Kirk Offel

And I’m pretty proud of the fact that after World War II, 55 % of all new business that were started in the United States were started by a veteran. Today, that number’s less than 10 percentage points. When I started my company in 2019, that was about 5%. Now that number is trending closer to seven or eight. But if you look at the demographic, one in five members of the US workforce today are former military. So we are making an impact to industry and we’re making an impact to society in the way that we deliver our capabilities.

And when we get into building, I found that wrestlers and veterans and people that come from the trades that just otherwise didn’t want to go to college to earn it. What is now almost a college degree is the equivalency of a taxi medallion in two to three years from now, considering the fact that one out of four kids will graduate from college in the next two years with a degree that’s already been made obsolete because of technology. Right?

So we’re really looking for as we build this guy for the cloud and the home for AI, where can we find a strong, robust labor force, the trades coming out of the military. And, vocationally, we still find people coming out the college that can contribute, but we’re really looking more for people that have craftsmen tendencies, the ability to deliver professional skills, and we could grow and mentor them to build data centers.

Wes

Yeah, no, that’s all excellent. Touching on the just I mean, obviously, for anybody listening, they can they can definitely glean that you have a passion for for getting folks into the industry. And I know that you have a lot like you touched on a focus around really pulling veterans into this this gigantic boom that we’re in now with data center construction. Can you tell me a little more about the outreach that you’re doing there and what you’re doing to help get folks ready to join this labor force and this massive opportunity that we have here?

Kirk Offel

Yeah, no, it’s a good question. And I’ll kind of zoom out a little bit before we talk about veterans, because there’s, mean, I have a company that’s a service disabled veteran owned business, but only 40 % of my workforce are former military. The other 60 % have a paramilitary type mindset. There are civilian counterparts and you have to remember less than one half of 1 % of the US population at any one time is in the uniform, meaning where there’s not a large population of those that go out and take the oath. 

So it’s a small pool to recruit from and what we look for in the military and what we can translate that into the civilian community or the civilian fleet would simply look like this. The reason why we like and we value military transitioning veterans is one, it does not matter what you did because this industry that we work in, the data center industry is technically considered what’s called the mission critical vertical. So all of you are listening that want to build, you know, there’s commercial and residential and there’s hospitals and semiconductor fabrication plants and high tech.

Things that are heavy in density on the MEP side are always fun to build, but there’s nothing more exciting than building a data center. That’s almost the punk rock version of construction because the way that we build data centers evolves every month. So why we like veterans isn’t because veterans are exposed to the most advanced weapons, machinery and technology, but the military as a whole is an incubator for leadership training. This industry that I work in is called data centers. We’re building AI.

It is not absent of genius or intelligence, but it is absent of leadership capabilities and the courage to be a strong leader. People in the military are in the left seat, right seat cockpit mentality from jump. As soon as they report to duty, their jobs to learn the job of the person above them while simultaneously teaching the job of the person below them. 

The entire military is predicated on an on the job training. It’s immersion training. It’s not unusual for people to just be thrown a list of things to go get done and go get accomplished with the minimum guidance and minimum resources with the only message was simply says, just go figure it out. And people that have the ability to learn at what I consider the most insane learning curve tend to have the most emotional range. People that come from the military are also mission critical, but they don’t measure it in downtime. They measure it in their own mortality. So mission critical as an industry on the commercial segment is relatively more like this.

For any business that could quantify the loss of revenue that they would create by $1 million per one second of downtime, that’s a mission critical company. So think about e-commerce businesses, companies that are just cloud businesses without brick and mortars. Those people cannot afford to go down. The other aspect of mission critical is life or death. Building FAA towers is an example, building hospitals that are capable of withstanding storm surges in the middle of open heart or open brain surgery.

Those are types of mission critical environments that we started from as an industry. And today we’re building AI isn’t even close to what we built when we were building cloud and building cloud isn’t even close to we were building to when we building the worldwide web or the internet of things. So the skills that are necessary to be successful in this industry are a large emotional range and the ability to learn at an insane learning curve. And if people have that ability, we could train them. 

We know that most people in the military have that because that’s the minimum standard, the stress inoculation, the pressure testing we go into having served in the military. We all know what the minimum standard is. There’s no institution on earth that could redefine the constitution of a human being better than the US military. We’ve all said people go off to boot camp or basic training and come back and they’re completely different people. And we know that that testing is that insane learning curve rate that they’re being introduced to and forced to. Like when you’re in the military, when you’re not in the military, you think that your potential is this. 

Once you get in the military, you realize that this is your potential because there’s someone there to guide you to pull it out of you. We actually don’t build data centers. When people ask us what we build, I’m like, we just build leaders. And if we could build strong leaders, those leaders will build teams. And if we have strong teams, those teams will build data centers. And those data centers are what service this guy for the cloud and the home for AI. 

So it doesn’t have to be a veteran. We know that there’s a minimum profile or category that you come from. The optics how we view you is very homogenous because all of us that have taken the oath know what that pressure testing looks like. In the civilian community, it’s harder to identify that, but those people definitely exist. Like I said, 60 % of my own workforce are not former military, but they thrive in this environment because they love things and they love a purpose.

They understand that we have a call to action as a business. are creating a movement to create a more sustainable and scalable labor force and people that believe in what we believe in want to come be a part of what we get to build. And that’s how we recruit and train. So military people are great. Wrestlers are fantastic. 

People that have been in challenging situations or stressful situations in their lives, they are the best from the civilian community at acclimating into a culture like this that has to build something that reinvents itself every month. This industry changes because of what you and I as consumers demand of our technology. The demand changes every month and the need for building the product that we have changes every month alongside of.

Wes

No, very well said. So, so you’re, what I’m hearing is you’re looking for people who are highly adaptable effectively. So whether that’s again, through that, that expedited learning curve, whether that’s the, the changing of specifications or requirements on a month to month basis, or even just the general idea of we’re going to be doing something new today as opposed to what we’re doing tomorrow. So let’s just focus on the new mission and execute going forward. And then having that element of the attributes of leadership to where it is, yes, can educate the people underneath me while also guiding them to follow the orders of the person above me. that generally the profile they’re looking for?

Kirk Offel

Not only are you a spot on and that’s what we’re looking for. Let me inspire them, I hope, with a statement that simply says, we don’t need experience. There will be people here that say you have to have some sort of experience, but there’s not. Experience here is only good for a year or two, three tops, because after that, it’s so obsolete. Like if you’re a kid going to college your freshman year being exposed to this technology, by the time you graduate from college or senior year, that technology is already obsolete.

So experience in the way that we, the means and methods and how we deliver this product, it doesn’t matter as much in this industry. We’re not a homogenous construct that’s been around for a hundred years and we’re not building hospitals the same way we have been for years and years and years. This is a completely different product. 

The fabric of this product changes every month. So people that have experience, the only experience that matters is the emotional range, having the ability to sit in a very volatile environment and being able to acclimate and pressure. Well, look, it makes diamonds or it makes the splat marks, right? And it ain’t for everybody, but it is for everybody. This data center industry as it emerges is going to create so many building opportunities for millennials and Gen Z that these are the jobs that will literally build back the middle class because you don’t need a college degree to be a builder in the data center industry. You just need to know how to reinvent yourself every month. 

And you have to, you have to immerse yourself in an environment where people believe in that method so they can teach you because this is such a kinetic environment that it gives you the ability to be limitless in what your capabilities and limitations are. A lot of the people that are building these major programs, they don’t have any formal training experience outside of what they learned on the job training by working their way up through the ranks of one line item within a CSI breakdown to the other and within the construction constructs of what we build within.

You have no limits and you can’t look at this industry as though the soup’s done cooking because this industry is so new that what 2025 is for AI is what 1925 was for the automobile industry. And to put that into perspective, we were still building Model Ts until 1927. And that’s because the boom began in 1925 where we didn’t have auto mechanics. We were building cars.

But we didn’t have people that were trained. There was no school to send people off to to learn how to repair cars, because cars were being reintroduced to the world every year, multiple times a year, by multiple other brands that were emerging in the industry. So there was no workforce behind the automobile industry. And look at how far the automobile industry has gone today.

Our industry is getting pulled into the mainstream because the demand of energy that’s being required is putting us on the collision course with the oil and gas vertical. But that being said is we’re sitting right now in the data center industry amongst the Henry Fords of our generation. This industry will be not only more mainstream than the automobile industry that we’re building, but it’ll have a greater impact on society since powered flight and the automobile industry. Better, the biggest impact on humanity since the automobile industry.

And if you think about the automobile industry, Henry Ford didn’t create a car. He created a 40 hour work week with an entire sub economy underneath that of companies that just make tires and just make seat belts and windshields and et cetera. So there’s a whole ‘nother group of things that are coming behind this AI demand. And a lot of people, think are scared of AI. They need to see it as an opportunity. we parents, I mean, you said you have a little one. I got three in college next year. 

And I just told you that college is a taxi medallion, but when there’s a lot of network that comes out of these colleges still, but there there’s still nine different job domains that represent 285 different jobs within the data center industry. And the ability to build with your hands will never go away. The jobs that we’re offering people and the jobs that kids could steer themselves for in college will be the types of jobs that you will never be. They will never be lost to AI. Hiring humans is the only way to build AI.

And these opportunities right here require people like you and I to just have conversations and open up the aperture to people that want to build, people that have an appetite to build, but they don’t know how to really get started. I’m here to introduce how they could find the breadcrumbs that hopefully lead them back to the data center industry. Cause I work for a company who’s only has one purpose and that is to build the strongest teams that could build the best data centers. 

And our purpose is we know that we started it with a veteran in mind. And I’ll tell you, it’s because when I started my company, 22 veterans were killing themselves every day. That number is down below 19 now, but it’s still 19 too many. We’ve learned that the only way to try to imagine the transition from going into the military where you’re driving a multi-billion dollar war machine to transitioning. And now you don’t have something that you get to contribute to that you feel is as significant as what you were doing when you were part of a much larger team.

Wes

No sense of purpose.

Kirk Offel

Purpose is everything. It has to be about purpose. And here’s the beauty about what I’m talking about. The demand, the adoption rate of emerging technology, specifically driven because of the demand for AI, has made our ability, like right now, we’re building more capacity for data centers right now than we’ve done in the previous 20 years prior to that. 90 % of what we’ve already built or was under construction today is already occupied or pre-leased. We can’t keep up with demand because we can’t put labor forces together fast enough.

So right now there’s people that have a purpose and we’re trying to figure out how to give purpose to people because we’ve learned that in a human performance perspective, they have a higher level of output and productivity, which pencils out as a business. They bring more value to your clients when they have purpose behind what they’re doing. So we knew if we give someone purpose as they transition out the military, they’re less likely to hurt themselves. 

And the jobs that we’re offering them are the most significant jobs the middle class could ask for today because there is no greater man for build construction models at the volume that we’re building at than what we’re seeing in AI and the programs like Stargate that we’re building today. That’s the fifth, that’s the Manhattan project of the fifth industrial revolution. And that’s just the first part of it. Right? 

So there’s other programs that are going to come. The opportunity to build is going to be massive. We’re going to need leaders like with your background, your skill set that are amplifying and using your megaphone to reach more people so we can recruit people to bring back into this industry. to help build the sky for the cloud and the home for AI.

Wes

No, very well said. There are people that are out there that might think, is it all hyperbole? Is this just all something that we’re doing so that we can generate pictures of cats in space or something like that? But truly, as more of these technologies are coming out, the words that you’re saying as far as really that point in history likened to 1925 of where we are today, very well stated. 

At the time, the utilization of the car, the adoption or the commercialization are was nothing compared to this like it is today. And we’re at a very similar point where, you it was the early adopters the last couple of years who have been using things like AI, but it’s pervasive these days. So  everybody’s getting on board with it. 

It’s democratizing information to where we’re able to do more and more and more and make people much more capable. In that way, so absolutely, this is not just a farce. This is growing and with a significant purpose. 

And in that way, I’m curious, know, there are a couple of different things that are coming to mind, directions that we can go with the conversation. But one of the things you were saying is, we don’t need people with a lot of experience. We need people with the right attitude, the right personality, the right intent behind their actions. 

How is it that if you’re able to attract these people to you, you screen them, yes, these are the candidates that we are looking for. What do you do with them then? Can you tell me a bit about how it is that you’re getting people ready for this ever-changing environment and how it is that you can help them to succeed once you have them.

Kirk Offel

I’m glad you asked and I’m going to speak about Overwatch University in just a second. But before I did, just for the people that are listening to understand because you’re talking about data and you’re talking about, you know, how we’re using technology. People need to realize like every time you chat GPT one question, try to imagine the demand of energy that’s required to make an answer is the equivalency of charging your cell phone from zero to a hundred sixty times. And as people know, when you generate an exchange of electrons like that, you create heat.

The only way to reject that heat is typically with some sort of water. One Chat GPT question is the frequency of charge in your phone, zero to 160 times, and it requires about a 16 ounce bottle of water to reject that heat. That’s one Chad GPT question. So think about it at scale. We create more data on this planet every nine months than the history of the data before that. So data is now the most valuable commodity on earth.  

So when I talk about your question is, is how do we recruit, grow, train, and most importantly, retain this talent? And it’s, it’s through a program that we’ve launched one piece at a time. So I get to work for the one of the most sophisticated technology incubators for labor ever created. We’re a staff augmentation company for anybody that wants to go build data centers. They just come to us and they pull talent off the shelf. So how do they know what a transparent, predictable and reliable model looks like? Any different than you and I as a consumer at home? 

The fastest way to becoming a millionaire today is hands down through the trades, not through college. And the beauty about the industry that we’re in is you can’t go create curriculum and put it in a university today and teach people on this. Cause by the time you’re done writing the curriculum, it’s already outdated. By the time you’re teaching them, it’s already outdated. So the only way to train people is almost through a journeyman or an apprenticeship journeyman master program. 

So what we’ve created is last year, Overwatch Mission Critical acquired a company called the Talent War Group. Not sure if you heard of the Talent War Group, it was led by a very famous Navy SEAL who’s currently ranked number 9th in the world right now for leadership gurus. His name is Mike Cirelli and Mike Cirelli is a retired Navy SEAL King Commander. But he also wrote a book called The Everyday Warrior, which he hosts his podcast, The Men’s Journal and Sports Illustrated. But he also wrote a book called The Talent War, which is about what we’re talking about is

There’s this massive pent up demand for talent and we can’t get talent fast enough into this industry to build distributed natural gas generation plants, the four walls and the roof that house the data center infrastructure as well as all the technology that rolls in. And we have to figure out how to recruit for that. So when we started, we started with leaders. So we bought the talent word group last year and absorbed them and began implementing them into our business.

We teach leaders first. So when they come in, we try to introduce them to some homogenous constructs of leaderships, what the rules and engagement look like to be a leader, what the responsibilities and expectations are. And then when we’re done with that, we partnered with the most accredited global data center certification program in the world. 

And they’re referred to as EPI. They’ve been around since 1983. Microsoft and Amazon, two of the largest, Goliaths, when it comes to AI and cloud, only standardized on those certification programs. We as a business have signed a partnership with EPI to where once every employee has worked for us for at least six months, we will get them certified in data centers within the following six months. 

Typically, it comes in two different opportunities. DCF, Data Center Fundamentals or CDCP, which is a certified data center professional. So when people come to work for Overwatch, if they could stay here for six months and show what their value is, we invest into getting them certified. In that first six months, we’re definitely exposing the leadership training. In the second six months, we’re getting them certified through EPI, one of the most accredited global platforms in the world for data centers, and all of our workforce will be certified at data centers. 

So that way when people call and they’re like, I need this talent, could call us like they call the plumber or like they call the electrician. They’re not asking for the resume of that person. How long has that person been doing it? Where’d they get trained at? Where’d they come from? They just know they have a transparent, predictable and reliable resource that’s going to come up on scene and they’re certified at data centers and they can answer your questions and help solve your problems. So we are creating this incubator that we did just for our own business. We created it just for our own talent. We hire 20 people a month as we grow right now.

And I have to have a standardization before we optimize and scale this business. And training is where we optimize. We’re a former military group. We’re a paramilitary type culture. We love to train. So we’re going to train, train, then we’re going to train some again. And we’re going to give people the opportunity to do that. If they do that after one year, we’ll even go get them PMP or all the EIEIOs they want behind their name. But getting them certified in data centers is going to give them the confidence to walk into any construction site and not only know what they have to do for construction background, but they understand the components that they’re putting in the building.

What each thing is doing is it’s connected to the other. So this platform that we started just for us is something that we begin to offer our clients and our clients are beginning to send members of their team to us to get standardization training on leadership and then certifications and data centers. 

We just actually less than one hour ago, I just signed a lease for 14,000 square foot of class and office space to serve as Overwatch University and Overwatch University gets launched in about the next 60 days where we will officially have our classrooms up. Because right now we just do mobile training. And I think that that helps us – if we take care of training them, it takes care of retaining them. So we’re just really focused on investing everything we can into the people that we hire.

Wes

First off, congratulations on signing the lease.

Kirk Offel

Thank you.

Wes

That is a huge step for you for Overwatch and really for the industry, really for you guys, awesome. Congratulations.

Kirk Offel

Appreciate that, thank you.

Wes

So with that, interesting thing that I think that I heard is that you don’t start off necessarily getting overly industry specific whenever you start off with your training. I think I heard that you say that you focus on really leadership training to begin with and the core fundamentals of how it is that we’re going to work in a team network and then you focus on really specializing in kind of the bits and pieces of what it is that we’re building. Is that right?

Kirk Offel

Yeah, you have to look at it like this. There used to be a time where there were so many people lined up for the same opportunity that a company can afford to just rip out and replace him being like they would a bad spark plug on a car. Hey, this isn’t performing. They’re underperforming. Just rip out and replace it with another one. The problem is the data center industry today has 3.2 million people around the globe. We are 500,000 people short in this industry as of right now.

And ironically enough, since this industry, in many respects, people believe that the data center industry gave birth in 1994 when amazon.com went live. But imagine if that was true. It’s not, it started before that. But imagine that was true. That’s more than 30 years ago. So to put a few things into perspective, do you know how long it took before one in four Americans adopted electricity from the time that it was discovered in the second industrial revolution? One in four Americans putting in their home from the time that it was introduced to society as an option. It took 40, 46 years.

Wes

I would say 30 years. How long was it?

Kirk Offel

Forty-six years before one for Americans adopted electricity in their home from the time that it was introduced as an option. Connectivity which was the third utility it took 27 years before one for Americans put a copper wire in their homes So they could communicate with other people what I’m telling you is the adoption of emerging technology Can be very slow at first right televisions picked up faster. That was 13 years. You know radio was nine years. You could go to Facebook, which was five years you go to… You could probably go to TikTok, which is nine months and you go to chat GPT, which was five days. So we adopt technologies as they arrived to us faster than we used to, but it took a long time.

So we’re watching this polar shift take place in the way that people are functioning with their technology. We are in the fifth industrial revolution, which is designed for us as consumers and as humans to have a healthier and more harmonious relationship with machines and technology, which means that there’s going to be repatriation of cloud and regression of some capacities of technology demand, but it is going to trigger a shift in our global economy from an energy basis, because it’s untenable. 

We can’t scale the adapt rate of technology based on the limited capacity of energy that exists. And we can’t give up our dominance of AI because we can’t put energy online fast enough so that China could outflank us. So there’s going to be this massive shift that takes place in the next four to five years in this industry. And we’re building a schoolhouse around that to where people could come in and whatever evolutionary shifts are taking place in the field will be reintroduced into the classroom, both from a leadership perspective and a technology subject matter expertise perspective, because it all begins with leadership. 

Ninety percent of all the problems that exist within a team come down to communication because there’s no bad teams, there’s only bad leaders. And we train people. We in this technology industry, in this build industry, in the construct industry, we’re teaching everyone how to be professional subject matter experts. We’re not teach them not only one how to lead and grow and maintain teams, but we’re not teaching them how to lead them. And there’s a difference between managing them. Managing people is like managing a processor or protocol. Leading people requires a difference, and that word is called inspiration. 

If you can’t inspire, you can’t lead. If you can’t lead yourself, you definitely can’t lead others. So you have to, we have to teach people how to lead themselves first. Because there isn’t today 1,000 people standing in line for the same job. 

There are 500,000 people in this industry globally that we’re short on. And here’s the beauty. This industry started, let’s say 31 years ago then. If that’s the case, then more than half of our industry has been in this industry for more than 20 years. Meaning we’re facing what’s called the silver tsunami. Half of our industry that went through the growing apprenticeship or the birth of this industry together, that no world of bodies are buried and how we got here. They’re poised to retire. The only thing stopping them is maybe the de-escalation of a couple of wars between Israel or Ukraine, maybe some tension with China de-escalating or a global economy becoming more stabilized. 

But the minute that those things take place, we’ll see a massive wave of the silver tsunami of people that are going to be retiring. And we are already 500,000 people short in this industry right now. 

So everybody listening that wants to build, we’re building campuses of thousands of acres at a time. For every time we build a hundred megawatts, that’s on 40 acres, it takes 1400 people to build that. leave at least 100, we leave one person back per megawatt when we’re done building it, just to operate it when we’re done. There are so many jobs and these campuses aren’t a project like a Stargate type of program doesn’t last for one year or two years or three years. It lasts for five years, it lasts for seven years. Those are campuses that we’re building urban cities around. There’s so much change coming that if we don’t build stronger leaders, we won’t have a workforce.

We can’t recruit them and keep them in this industry long enough because we’ll burn them out because of the pace we grow at. So we need to find leaders who could build and grow strong, healthy teams and build and protect bulletproof cultures that we could build and talk subject matter experts around. And that’s how you scale an industry.

Wes

I think it’s the absolute right approach. There’s the age old, how to influence people. Dale Carnegie says it in there. Is it the best engineer that ends up becoming the engineering manager? No, it’s the engineer that works best with people. And really, why is that? Just like in engineering, just like in construction, it’s not like we have a bunch of robots that are going around out there and we get programmed the systems. It’s not like the dirt or the piping or the cable is going to move itself. Who does it?

People does it. not managing, like you’re saying, the operation. You’re leading and guiding and managing people. people are at the center of all of it. If you don’t know how to work with people and lead people, then you’re not going to be successful as a leader fundamentally.

Kirk Offel

Yeah, I’m really big on like, host this technology summit once a year in Austin, Texas called DCAC, it means data center anti-conference. And it’s just we’re David poking holes at Goliath. There’s four Goliaths in the world that run most data center conferences. They’re all about the same. They offer about the same. We, we focus not only on the energy and the technology of building data centers, but we focus one third of the conference on human performance. 

We’re getting to an age where we have never pushed our teams harder. I’m sure with all the teams and all the programs that you built, I don’t know how it works in your industry, but in our industry, there are three KPI, safety’s first, schedule’s second, cost is third. You can never compromise one thing for the other, but we build big programs and mega scales and they are dangerous. So getting ready go home at the end of the day, that’s the number one focus in this entire industry. 

But scaling this industry by training people how to maintain schedules is and the integrity of a budget, is the next hardest part. And we’re putting so much pressure on humans right now because the adoption rate of the consumer of technology that we just simply can’t deliver fast enough.

There is so much pressure on this industry right now that we can’t get more cowbell out of these people until we start really focusing, not just training them better as subject matter experts, but we have to equip them emotionally to be able to endure the challenges that come with an evolving industry that’s reaching the mainstream. Again, try to imagine living in the automobile industry before it became mainstream. There was no ethics, there were no regulations, just like our industry, it’s all self-imposed.

When industries become mainstream is when we start adopting ethics and more regulation and because AI is the forefront of everybody’s optics You’re gonna see this industry getting pulled into the mainstream faster. So it’s still blue sky. Experience isn’t really a factor that should anybody consider to hold them back from getting into this industry People should be looking at how they could bring their professional skills their craftman skills or trade skills to this industry to help advance it moving forward because it has the most volume and velocity of construction that you’re ever going to build.

Wes

Right. And then even just the infrastructure that you have to build around it to get ready to build the infrastructure to get ready to build the infrastructure is immense. Like it is, it is a huge undertaking. for anybody who’s ever built a LNG facility in North Dakota or something, it’s the same kind of thing.

Kirk Offel

There’s never been a better time to be a builder. There’s never been a better time to build, be a builder.

Wes

I couldn’t agree more. Taking out of all of these inputs that we’ve been talking about here and bringing them all together really back in, I think into Overwatch University, I’m curious, you’ve been in the industry around data centers for a couple of decades now.

Kirk Offel

Since 2000.

Wes

Yeah, that’s awesome. So you’ve seen change after change after change in design. So the full build out of it in the way that they’re getting executed. And now you’re in the middle of this gigantic boom that we’re behind on labor, but we need to accelerate schedule fundamentally. we’re, we’re needing to do more with likely fewer people. And one of the, one of the elements of that is it’s kind of augmenting technology. I think you touched on it earlier when you’re beginning of the conversation of even the tools that we’re using on a monthly basis or bi-monthly basis are changing. 

So I know with, believe anyway, with the work that you’re going to be doing with Overwatch University, that’s an element of it as well, is getting folks up to speed on some of the resources and tools that are out there to augment the labor experience. What are you seeing in that space? I guess, what sort of changes have you seen? What are you seeing maybe some solutions for now and where are still the big problems for people to tackle for, again, just making the industry better and expediting our schedules while maintaining safety.

Kirk Offel

Yeah, good. A lot of great questions. How at the end, well said, how do you never compromise the integrity of the safety element? All right. So Overwatch University is a static, I mean, a dynamic environment, not a static one. Well, there’ll always be components that our ecosystem will donate to the schoolhouse that people want to look at a UPS or a PDU or like those things will be there. But you have to think about the evolution of a labor force. Right. So we, we up until now, we didn’t have enough transparency and visibility into what was working. And when I say working, I say with a very broad stroke, because if you’re a leader of a team, you invest so much money into a team. If you’re not retaining that team, it’s hurting your bottom line.

So you’re going to be dealing with human nature.

So my thing is, we had to start with not just focusing on building a labor force with more subject matter expertise, we almost had to pause, collect our breath, and then focus on the human, the human aspect of our labor force. And that’s where we focused on the leadership side, teaching people how to lead themselves so that they can go lead others and they could go solve problems on teams and those teams could go deliver and have a higher level of output productivity. But we started with the leadership side. 

Then once they understood and had the strong leadership capability, the emotional range, capable of being on a project that’s highly kinetic, then we could teach them the subject matter expertise on how to function and be comfortable and operate on that campus or within this industry. 

Once that’s done, then we have to equip them with advanced AI resources. There are multiple companies that we’re talking with right now. Some have GoPros that will put on their helmets that can walk through a construction site. And I could, the barrier to entry or the introductory requirements to get into the market are lowered because I don’t need someone that has experience. I need someone that could follow a map and walk an entire construction site. And when they’re done, they hook that camera up to a SharePoint repository that feeds that information into another machine.

That is gonna build the entire construction project on a model and it’s gonna evaluate whether you’re on track or not. But those types of technologies we’re gonna be adopting and installing on our teams. There’s other technologies that start at the supply chain level where we will teach our teams, we will invite groups like Kaya AI, which are writing some of the most advanced procurement software platforms in the world. 

And what they’re able to do is aggregate the inputs of every contributor from an ecosystem supply chain, any vendor management inventory program, any OFCI schedule, and it could pull it all in. And then when there’s one disruption to the entire supply chain, it’s automated through AI. It’ll inform everybody. It’ll tell you what the impact is, what’s the critical path, what’s the long pole in the tent, and it’ll give you remediation plans if necessary. What I’m telling you is we start with leadership, then we make stronger, such matter experts.

We have to start with the human, okay? So we’re gonna have to focus heavy, heavy on the human side. That’s the leadership side, teaching people how to lead themselves so they can lead others. Building subject matter expertise.

We’ll never change. We will never not have an evolving level of curriculum that’s fed through based on what’s relevant in the field at that time. But then teaching them advanced techniques and advanced technologies is the third phase of the four phases. That third phase is getting them used to using AI, getting more things done to where we have clash coordination studies that are coming to us faster to make sure we’re not running trades into each other in the field. 

There’s so many ways that we’re going to adopt these technologies. And once we’re done, it turns out this week I also had conversations with Wade Vincent, who’s the chief data center architect for all of Nvidia. Nvidia is one of the largest contributors to robotics in the world right now. So groups like us are going to be talking to companies like Nvidia and other robotics companies to figure out how we can implement some robotics into our labor force. There will be things that weigh 2,000 pounds that don’t require human beings to move it. Maybe that’s the perfect job for a robot to pick up and move that thing around.

It could be a solar panel. It could be a load bank. Who knows? But there will be things. what we build, first of all, building and having the ability to be a builder at any trade level, at any general level, is the greatest job that you can have to secure a career throughout the birth and proliferation of AI. Everything that AI is doing that’s wiping out those white collar jobs will never replace what we will do on the blue collar side.

Emerging industry means the soup’s not done cooking. The way we do things today won’t be the same way we do them next month, next quarter or next year. And as long as there are people that like to go learn and grow,

This is blue sky country for those people, right?

But we’re going to start with leaders teaching humans how to take care of humans, teaching humans how to teach humans how to be better subject matter experts, teaching humans how to use advanced technologies, then teaching humans how to work alongside robots. They’re going to take away roles that were of the greatest risk to safety or the greatest risk to a human in general in terms of how they could injure themselves. Does that make sense?

Wes

Yeah, no, excellent. So those are your four phases. Focus on leadership, integrate technical understanding, then advanced technical understanding along with some of the resources that are available to them, the tools that you’ll deploy. And then the fourth phase is that integration and that kind of, you know, human robotic element and how you’re going to work alongside not just the digital AI or digital resources that are out there, but really the physical resources, the manifestation of that on project.

Kirk Offel

I would say 95% of all the work that’s required to build a data center will never be able to be solved by a robot. It has to use a human. And we won’t build anything in this country at a larger volume of velocity than what we’re doing right now, other than data centers. And to put it into perspective, there are let’s say 8,000 data centers on earth right now, depending on which AI robot you ask. 

Let’s say 5,426 of them are in the United States. That means if you add up every aid, every other data center outside of the United States, it’s still not even close to how many we have here. Because if you look at the largest drivers of cloud, which would be Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle, and SoftLayer, those seven groups represent 80% of the world internet traffic probably. 

So between them, we are the home of the most advanced technologies because we are deploying more of it. And we’re the only thing that we need to stay ahead of it on a national security basis as a stronger labor force. A bigger labor force that’ll allow us to build more power plants, distribute natural gas generation plants, renewable energy plants, more power plants to support the need for AI because AI is the most advanced weapon machine and tech ever built and we can’t let anybody else outflank us on.

Wes

No, you’re absolutely right there. And clearly this, you know, just getting effectively, you know, the workforce readied for this between the craft workers and the leaders, not that the craft workers aren’t individual leaders and contributors themselves, but is clearly a passion for you. I couldn’t agree with you more on the importance of it, the significance of it on a personal level for how it is that it can really revolutionize your life and entirely shift the paradigm and structure for how it is that you’re operating yourself and just the opportunities that are coming with it.

Totally right, now is the best time. If you’ve never done it before, built something, now’s the best time to start. Totally agree.

Kirk Offel

I agree, man. You know, I really respect what you’ve done with this podcast and I share your desire to help people. I share your desire to reach more people. I think that this is the greatest thing that we get to do. Building is the greatest job career you could ever have. If you look back deep enough, we’re all builders. just, the biggest project that we’re always building is ourselves. 

We’re just simply trying to get people like building themselves enough so we could their talent and their passion to help us build data centers. Because the jobs they may have if they came into this industry, two years from now those jobs don’t even exist yet, right? So there’s so much blue sky opportunity for anybody that wants to be a builder. And those building opportunities are the jobs that build back the middle class.

Wes

Absolutely. Couldn’t agree with you more. So Kirk, I do appreciate it. Thank you very much, sir. Can you tell us a little bit more? When is when is DCAC this year in Austin? How can people find it?

Kirk Offel

Yeah, thanks for asking. you could find information about about DCAC and just Googling DCAC live. DCAC live will come up and it’ll take you to our conference that has a landing page that talks about what we’re doing here on September 16th to the 18th. But we we rent out Austin city limits in downtown Austin for two days and we bring in some of the greatest rock stars around the world of data centers. Everybody’s been on that stage from Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Tesla.

So I invite anybody that wants to shift or look into a career in data centers to visit us at dcaclive.com. then for the Overwatch side of what we do, our website’s simple. Weareoverwatch.com.

Again, we are Overwatch.com. And if you go to that, you’ll find trails and information that leads you to perhaps Overwatch University. if worse comes to worst, find me on LinkedIn. And I’ll put you in touch with the right people if someone’s interested in getting into the career field of the data center side.

Wes

Excellent, absolutely. Kirk, I do appreciate everything that you’re doing. Thanks for coming on this show and hope to talk again soon.

Kirk Offel

Thanks for having me, man. It’s an honor to be here. Thanks so much, I mean it.