Erik Riedel, PhD is a regular speaker on both technical, leadership, and cultural topics. He has worked for over twenty years as an engineer and engineering leader. He is currently founder and Chief Engineering Officer at Flax Computing - working to measure and reduce the worldwide carbon footprint of data center servers and systems. Erik was most recently Senior Vice President of Engineering at ITRenew - acquired by Iron Mountain - building the Sesame line of compute & storage solutions. Before joining ITRenew, he was Senior Director of Engineering at Dell and EMC where he and his team built two generations of market-leading scalable storage products with 1000s of worldwide customers in all industry verticals. Over the past ten years (twenty years) he has watched new technologies create cultural and organization change with many of these customers, and he has watched and guided similar changes within the organizations that he has built and led. He has built teams and he has monitored, managed, and mentored teams. He has built alliances and partnerships within the corporate structure and across the industry in open source and standards activities. He splits his time between technical and non-technical contributions, feeling comfortable with both the propeller-heads and the pointy-hairs.