083 Chris Dove Jr, Talent Specialist & Veteran Advocate

Chris Dove Jr (00:00)
So me, I would say I am a...

a poor kid that grew up in rural Ohio and I had the opportunity to build one of the premier tech companies of America from my basement in Ohio. I had a basement office, you know, doing all these calls and everything. And I was going to these conferences and rubbing elbows with people that, you know, I didn't really deserve to be in the same room with. And like, if it can do that for me, it can do that for you. Like if you get into the industry, you put your best

foot forward and you you give it your best effort and use all the tools that these companies give you because at the end of the day every company that hires you in this industry wants you to move up they don't want you to stay in whatever role they hired you for they want you to keep learning get better move up and like I think it's that kind of purpose that drives the human race forward

Mark Hinaman (01:56)
All right. Welcome to another episode of the Fire to Fission podcast, where we talk about energy dense fuels and how they can better human lives. I'm Mark Heindman and I'm joined today by my new friend, Chris Dove Jr. Chris, do people always include the junior when they say...

Chris Dove Jr (02:10)
I have always included the junior. ⁓

So obviously growing up a junior, my father ⁓ had the same name as me and it caused me so many issues with the government, ⁓ especially like with military records and VA records and stuff. Yeah, so actually one time he refinanced his home and we both had an account at the same bank and they deposited a lot of money into my account.

Mark Hinaman (02:36)
Hahaha

Chris Dove Jr (02:36)
I was

pretty young at the time, so I was like, my gosh, I gotta call somebody about this. And then it turned out they just deposited into the wrong account. I have always stuck with the junior. I think it might annoy some people, but ever since that day, I always point out to people, I'm Chris Stubb Jr.

Mark Hinaman (02:56)
That's really funny.

One of our engineers on the fire division team is also a junior, but he doesn't tell anyone that he's a junior. And then I actually showed up to his wedding.

And it was a very intimate family setting, kind pre-ceremony thing. And they were like, are you here for, we'll call him Jordan, Jordan's wedding. And I was like, who the hell is Jordan? I don't know who Jordan is. But it's his middle name. It's his whole family's middle name. And I was like, what? ⁓

Chris Dove Jr (03:26)
He went by his middle name? Yeah, there you go. So similar

problem, I grew up as CJ, Chris Jr., all the way until I went to the military and then I became Dove. And then when I was getting out, I was like, you know, this is a professional resume. I should put my full name. I'm Chris Dove Jr. And everybody started calling me Chris. And like, it's still weird to my wife out when people at work and stuff will call me Chris.

Mark Hinaman (03:37)
Yeah, there you go.

Chris Dove Jr (03:56)
⁓ You know because she has always known me as CJ and things like that. So Yeah, dude, just another reason that I use the the junior on the end, you

Mark Hinaman (04:04)
Nice. Cool. Chris, yeah, tell us a little bit about yourself. Give us a 30 second elevator pitch. You got a lot of stuff going on.

Chris Dove Jr (04:13)
Yeah, so definitely relevant to you and the podcast. I was in the nuclear Navy. I was an electrician's mate on a submarine. And, you know, while I'm 11 years removed from that now, I got out back in 2015. I always do give credit to the nuclear training and the nuclear network for where I am today. So essentially I got out of the military in 2015. I went into field service, very, you know, common transitionary role.

It's funny when you're going through the interview process, they're like, how do you feel if you're on site working and you have dinner plans later and now you know that you're not gonna be able to make them? Are you gonna be able to tell your wife? And being in the military, you're like, well, one time I was supposed to get home before Christmas and then I came back in February, so I think she'll be okay, right? So ⁓ it's a great transitionary role. So I did that for two years. I got actually headhunted.

Mark Hinaman (05:01)
Yeah. ⁓

Chris Dove Jr (05:11)
My first introduction to what a recruiter was really ⁓ and I got headhunted away from that company to go work for a small startup. ⁓ I did that for two years. So I went from like regional coverage to national coverage and from being a guy to the guy for that startup company. And you know, that's what kind of introduced me to recruiting. And then two years later, ⁓ the company wasn't doing that great.

I was looking kind of for my exit and I was spending a lot of time at the airport on LinkedIn and I saw people that I knew from the military that had star reenlisted for two years or they had extended for four years also getting out of the military. So I would hit them up and be like, Hey, you know, I'm searching for a job too. Like here's the do's and don'ts that I did during my transition. And then I referred so many of those people over to Orion talent, a recruiting agency.

that the recruiting manager one day called me back and he was like, hey Chris, you've now made more placements with us this month than some of the people that do this full time. Like have you ever thought about being a recruiter? And I was like, no, like, you know, what does that exactly mean? What's the pay like, you know, all those questions. And I took a leap of faith and I left, you know, 100K a year salary and, you know, being a, and commissioning. And I took like a 40 or 50,000.

Mark Hinaman (06:12)
I'm sorry.

Chris Dove Jr (06:31)
dollar salary with some commissions and got into recruiting. But I'll tell you, the first time I made a placement and legitimately helped someone, I felt way better than I ever did starting up a piece of equipment. So fixing equipment, starting equipment, not tons of job satisfaction.

Mark Hinaman (06:50)
Yeah, absolutely. That's ⁓ hilarious when you're...

Chris Dove Jr (06:52)
So that's kind of what happened.

The recruiting was just a ton of LinkedIn time and downtime. And I took that leap of faith. I moved across the country to become a recruiter. And that was actually, that month I started as a recruiter was when I found out about this little group on Facebook called the Navy Nuke Job Finder. And at the time it was like probably seven, 8,000 different people in the group that helped Nukes transition and find jobs. And ironically, I probably would have never became a recruiter if I would have known about this group.

because my problem was finding more technical roles in Ohio ⁓ to get back to Ohio to where my kids were. And all the jobs in Ohio paid way less than what I was making. ⁓ did the recruiting thing, loved every minute of that. Align Data Centers was actually one of my clients at Orion Talent. ⁓ And we found so much success together that one day ⁓ their head of HR called me and said, have you ever considered going internal?

And that had never really dawned on me. ⁓ I loved my job at the time. Working at Orion Talent was awesome. ⁓ Having so many different companies to work with and place veterans at was awesome. ⁓ But whenever you get a requisition in recruiting, you kind of grade it yourself. Is this an A, a B, or a C opportunity? And data centers were always an A opportunity. Good pay, good benefits, good career trajectory.

I never had a single person call me and be like, man, this place is terrible. You got to get me out of here. Nothing like that. ⁓ So like when I had the opportunity to recruit only for the data center industry, I kind of jumped at it. ⁓ Little did I know that I knew nothing about data centers at this point. So I knew a pretty good amount about data center operations, but like I didn't know anything about the construction side, the design side, the strategy and development side, like all the different pieces that actually go into making one of these.

know, buildings actually work. ⁓ But I got to learn a lot. I was employee number 97 over at Aligned. ⁓ I spent four years there. I started as a recruiter, eventually worked my way up to the head of talent acquisition. And I used to joke, you know, ⁓ if I was really bad at this job, I could have ruined this company, right? So I was like the first person. Was that? Right, exactly. So I mean, it could have went off the tracks.

Mark Hinaman (09:06)
Hired all the wrong people. Said hired all the wrong people. Yeah.

Chris Dove Jr (09:14)
real quick, right? Because I didn't have a ton of experience in setting up. At least 400. Yeah, myself personally. So like, I think the first year I did like 90-ish, and then the second year was like 150. And then the third year, I finally got to add a recruiter to the team. And by the time I left, you know, I had a team of probably four people underneath of me that were doing a lot of the day-to-day stuff.

Mark Hinaman (09:17)
How many people do you think you hired?

Yeah.

Chris Dove Jr (09:41)
⁓ but yeah, in those early stages, man, like it didn't matter what the requisition was. It came straight to me. I was the only like internal talent acquisition person. Don't get me wrong. I got help from the head of HR, but she was obviously busy being the head of HR. So, you know, she only had a limited bandwidth. and yeah, I just learned a ton in that, you know, short amount of time of, know, what internal talent acquisition actually looks like and internal mobility.

You know, it's not just about finding the right person to hire, but it's, you know, getting them onboarded, getting their preliminary training, and then making them feel valued to, ⁓ you know, retain them long-term. And ⁓ I think I brought like a lot of like blue collar kind of mentality to a very white collar role. And ⁓ Aligned was very much about like, hey, we're a team of high performers and as long as you're performing highly, like we're going to reward you. And that's kind of how I moved up within the company.

Mark Hinaman (10:39)
Nice. What kind of rolls were you hiring for?

Chris Dove Jr (10:41)
Literally everything, man. ⁓ I helped build out the design engineering team. I helped build out the engineering team, the construction management team, the customer success team. ⁓ One day I found out that people trade power for a living. You know, it makes sense when you think about it, right? Humans love to trade everything from Pokemon cards to oil and power, but to me, it never dawned on me when I got that requisition and I was like, ⁓ my God, people are literally sitting there.

trading power all day and all night long. This is crazy. So what I did in a lot of those instances was I would let the interviewees kind of teach me about their role and what they're looking for. And we would have like a really open, transparent conversation about, hey, this is what we're looking for for the role. This is kind of what you're going to be doing. And like people were very ⁓ kind to me and they'd be like, hey, I'm not the right person for this role. But if you look up this job title with this company,

that sounds like something you're looking for. like, you know, I would kind of go at it that way. But my number one thing in recruiting was like, don't be that guy that gets posted on the internet, you know, for ghosting someone or treating someone badly or whatever. like my philosophy was always, if you met with anyone after me, I would personally call you to let you know you weren't getting the job. So like even people that didn't end up getting hired at Aligned,

I still kept a pretty good rapport with and was able to build a network. then obviously, early days at Align, nobody knew who we were. So I would call people and I'd be like, hey, it's Chris Dove from Align Data Centers. And they'd be like, Align Data what? And I'd be like, Aligned Data Centers. And it didn't help me that there's another technology company called Align without the ED. But then by the time I left, man, you would call people and tell them you're from Align Data Centers. And they would say,

Mark Hinaman (12:24)
Yeah.

Kind of a big deal now.

So now Aligned is kind of a big deal now. Yeah.

Chris Dove Jr (12:39)
What's that?

Oh, huge deal now, right? Obviously

the news last August with the sale of the company, but just being like, think they're like top five in colocation capacity now and stuff like that. just like, no surprise to me, like everyone at that company is a high performer. Everyone carries, you know, a hundred to 150 % of their workload. Like you don't really have the opportunity in that environment to like get away with like.

30 hour work weeks or anything like that. Like it is definitely like you buy into the mission and you perform well or you're probably not going to last very long. But so many high performers love that because you know, they get rewarded for their hard work and their performance and you know, very quick to cut people that didn't quite cut it. Luckily we didn't have to do that very often, but you know, it was very much like a startup environment. And like that's how I got exposed to so many aspects of the data centers.

When I first started going to conferences, I was sitting at a table with the CEO of Oklo one day and I didn't even know it. And like how cool is that to be able to say now? And I had asked him some pretty good questions during like a nuclear panel and he started telling me about their business model at Oklo and I was like, well, that's genius. I'm going to buy some of that stock, you know. I don't know if that's insider trading, so don't get me in trouble, but.

Mark Hinaman (14:04)
Okay.

Chris Dove Jr (14:08)
No, but like in all seriousness, like the number of startups and great minds and stuff that would be at conferences and just like going and learning and being a sponge, like I really feel like, ⁓ you know, those four years at Align were worth 20 years.

Mark Hinaman (14:24)
When did you leave? What drove you to go on to the next thing?

Chris Dove Jr (14:29)
So I left June of last year, ⁓ so not even a year ⁓ away from the departure. And I had just kind of, I burnt myself out if I'm being honest. I didn't have boundaries. I didn't have boundaries with candidates. I didn't have boundaries with work. I would work until 5 p.m. East Coast time and then I would switch over to start worrying about the mountain and Pacific time zones. And there was a lot of days where I was working 7 a.m. ⁓

talking to the guys in Eastern time all the way till eight, nine PM talking to the guys in Pacific time because, you know, with talent acquisition, that's not their full-time job. Typically they're thinking about that at the end of the day when they're wrapping up. I better give Chris that feedback or, hey, let me ask Chris where we're at with this, you know. ⁓ So I think I really just burnt myself out. Four years in like a high-paced startup environment, building one of the most elite technology companies in America, like.

It was not an easy task. It was a ton of fun. Yeah. And like, dude, I really don't have any other explanation for it than that. Then I just kind of waved the white flag and I was like, I don't have the passion that I did. I've built out a team that is incredibly capable. And like at some point, like I didn't love being a manager. Like I loved being, you know, more in the day to day and the hands-on stuff and talking to people.

Mark Hinaman (15:30)
I'm tired and now I have to do other things.

Chris Dove Jr (15:56)
and getting into strategy and data analytics ⁓ didn't really move the needle for me.

Mark Hinaman (16:03)
Yeah. Okay. Well, what are you working on now, Chris?

Chris Dove Jr (16:08)
So right now, ⁓ my full-time main job, I'm a regional sales manager at ABB. So now I'm actually selling UPS, STS, and PDU products to the data center industry. So sort of leveraging that network and all the contacts I built to find out about what projects are going on and help them find their critical power solution, which obviously with the bottleneck being power capacity in America right now.

You know, it's a great space to be in. It's fun, you know, seeing people's design changes. Because like, what, 2019 was my first time recruiting for data centers. And a 25 megawatt campus was huge back then. Now it's like, oh, 25 megawatts. Talk to me when you've done something, you know, big. And it's like, it's just wild the way the industry grows. And like, now you see like, you know, 72 to 100 megawatts is like a lot of the smallest campuses you'll see.

And then you see these mammoth gigawatt campuses. They're talking about a 9.6 gigawatt campus right here in my backyard in Ohio. The numbers are just crazy. ⁓ But along with that, also am the Vice President of Data Centers at BAL2 Technologies. ⁓ My whole goal when I got into recruiting was just to make sure no veteran had a hard time finding their place in the civilian world.

for seven years, I had a PDF study guide that we passed around in the nuclear community. Basically like a crash course on data centers, but if you've ever read a PDF, it's not very fun. Very much self-studying and monotonous. So my goal with joining VAL2 was to create a platform and a program that any veteran in the world could access and start learning about data centers. So we launched that ⁓ last month in April. ⁓

still kind of working out a couple things, but we've got interns with the Arizona Data Center Alliance and AFCOM out in Arizona that are using the program. We've got some people trialing it and going through it. like ⁓ I kind of put it out there and got a wait list and the people that were on the wait list are going through the program right now. And then hopefully by the end of this month, it'll be launched to the public and anyone veteran or not anywhere in the world can access and get data center operations training.

Like the training is so ⁓ immersive that hopefully it helps solve the talent shortage. Just because, you know, with every data center that's built, who do you hire, right? You can either A, go steal from your competitors and pay them a premium, or you can, you know, train and develop your own teams. you know, I think every company is kind of putting together ⁓ more of the training and workforce development now than ever before.

And then also, I just took a new role. haven't even put on my LinkedIn. I am the manager for virtual ⁓ events for veterans for the iMasons. So super excited about that. So when I took the job with ABB, I took a big step back from talent acquisition. It's been two, two and a half months now since I did that. So haven't been doing as many of the mentoring calls and things right, because life is busy.

but going to still be able to get back to the community through the EyeMason.

Mark Hinaman (19:32)
Nice. Let's talk about veterans and hiring veterans, because obviously you've got a lot of exposure to this. I'll preface the question with, first off, I love hiring veterans. I'm biased. My dad's a veteran, and I'll say he is quite crazy from Vietnam. He's got pretty severe PTSD, which was an-

Chris Dove Jr (19:55)
It's hard

to hear that.

Mark Hinaman (19:56)
zone experience growing up with, but it had a lot of positives too. mean, talk about a militant lieutenant, second lieutenant as a father, you can imagine the household growing up. Very fun, but also ⁓ strict, we'll say. but gives you like, I'm biased. think veterans have an extremely hard work ethic.

You know, but actually, we've got a lot of the early episodes for our podcast to thank from an ex marine. Yeah, that reached out to us, Drew Borenstein is a super badass guy. And ⁓ he helped like gather most of the early guests, especially the happy hitters that we had for this podcast. So, ⁓ so in your perspective, like what are some benefits and attributes that

Chris Dove Jr (20:36)
Okay.

Mark Hinaman (20:44)
veterans bring to companies ⁓ when they enter the workforce? And then what are some things that like skill sets, and I know it's tough to generalize like this, but that veterans might need to work on once they get into the workforce that, or if people are hiring veterans, you know, they may need to adapt in certain ways that may be unexpected.

Chris Dove Jr (21:07)
So I think the biggest hurdle for every veteran getting out, if you want to lump them all together, is the professional communication, right?

the even writing an email in a corporate environment versus the military environment that you came from. ⁓ So just professional communication. But then also, you know, there's something nice about being in the military and having a plan of the day, a uniform of the day. You know what you're wearing, where you're going, what you're doing pretty much, you know, before you wake up because they put that plan of the day out.

and you really got to get used to, no one is going to make you do anything, right? They're going to give you the tools and the opportunity to do everything, but no one's going to come and say, hey, if you don't get this qualification done, we're going to take half of your pay for two months and knock you down in rank, right? That doesn't happen. ⁓ So, you know, a lot of people that joined the military.

Mark Hinaman (22:03)
You look at fire, but yeah,

we're not dead.

Chris Dove Jr (22:05)
Yeah, you'll

get fired, right? ⁓ And that's something like that's definitely a gap you have to bridge. And that's why I love the SkillBridge program, which I'm sure you're familiar with. But for anybody that's not, the DOD SkillBridge program basically lets you ⁓ get a veteran intern that you're not allowed to pay because the DOD still pays them.

but they get a temporary assignment of duty to your company for anywhere from 60 to 180 days, depending on the person and what they get approved. Typically, I would say it's about 90 days. And in that 90 days, you can train them and get to know them so much better than three to five hours of interviewing. I can pretend to be whatever you want for three to five hours, but getting to actually see them. So the duty skill bridge program really changed the game. ⁓

for like that veteran acclamation period. But because not everyone's gonna get to do the skill bridge, I think that's something that I've done really well in my career is just the like one-on-one calls like this, prepping them for corporate America, prepping them for, know, hey, this is the downsides of the job. This is the upsides of the job. Like I never painted a rainbow and butterfly picture for them. ⁓ And you know.

as long as they know what they're getting themselves into, they can pretty much adapt and overcome to any situation. And like that was my kind of goal with being so active in the nuclear community was like, actually interviewed for a data center in 2015, but I didn't know what a data center was, even though I was doing the interviews. Like I didn't really understand it. And then, you know, here I was five, six years later, hiring for data centers.

and realizing almost everyone that I talked to thought it was IT jobs. Like 90 % of the people back in 2021 getting out of the military thought data centers were all IT jobs. They didn't know that you could be an electrician or an HVAC or a mechanic or anything like that and find a career path here. So I think the education piece was huge. Common pitfalls that I've seen is

you know, ⁓ fewer and farther between. We had a lot of success at Aligned and ⁓ there was a point at Aligned where we were like over 40 % veterans as a company and over 70 % of operations was veterans. So like we were very veteran friendly, very veteran heavy. We started a veteran employee resource group. We had a guy up in Chicago that was helping people with their VA disability claims. We had, you know, another guy.

in another area that was ⁓ helping them with their initial mentorship and getting acclimated to corporate America. there was just so many veterans that wanted to give back to the new people that it really made my job easy.

Mark Hinaman (25:01)
That's awesome. I mean, something that I heard was having a plan of attack. ⁓ It sounds like veterans don't mind, I mean, the structure, right? Like just embedded into ⁓ their being. But like being a self-starter and proactive and generating that structure internally and like by yourself could be a tough transition. So.

Chris Dove Jr (25:02)
Yeah.

Exactly. And so like when you go to a new command of the military, you usually get a mentor at the new command, you know, in the Navy we call it a C-dad. Like when you go to your first, ⁓ you know, boat or ship, you get a C-dad to kind of show you the ropes and stuff. And I think that that mentorship is really underutilized and undervalued in corporate America. You know, not all mentorships are created equally. So it's gotta be like, ⁓ you know, a well thought out ⁓ event. can't just be, Hey, let's get

on this call and talk about military stories for 30 minutes every two weeks or whatever. But ⁓ yeah, so I think that was huge in the success of veteran hiring. And then I think the Facebook groups were huge. I kind of keep alluding to these, but we have two groups on Facebook, the Navey Duke Job Finder. It's up to like 20,000 members. And then people got so sick of me talking about data centers.

that we started a data center nuke group for just the data center jobs because they were gaining so much traction. So many nuclear Navy members were going into the industry and come to find out in the year 2000.

maybe nukes were getting into the industry. like, you'll see like even at some of the hyperscalers, the imprints of the training that's still very similar to the nuclear Navy today. So you're talking about trillion dollar companies whose training program basically mimics the program set up by Admiral Rickover back in like 1940 or whatever, right? So.

Mark Hinaman (27:03)
This is a cult. It is propagating. ⁓

Chris Dove Jr (27:07)
Yes,

100%. I will say sometimes people are, nukes can be a little too nuki and a little bit too, what's that?

Mark Hinaman (27:15)
Man, I was at a corporate offsite event and like,

so I was at a corporate offsite event and went through like a full bottle of scotch with a couple of Navy nukes and had some excellent stories, excellent stories. I don't recount any on the air cause you know, but they were really hilarious. So great culture.

Chris Dove Jr (27:34)
I can't believe that you remember him after a full bottle of scotch, but maybe guys will do that.

Mark Hinaman (27:37)
I didn't drink the entire bottle.

There was more than just me drinking it. Let's shift gears a little bit. Data centers, right? I think that's big reason why we reached out and wanted to have you on the show. Industry is booming. It's all people talk about. This growth has been extreme, we'll call it. Just talk to me broadly, Chris, about how you see

the roles available in data centers. mean, you alluded to electricians, HVAC guys. I mean, there's people building these things. There's people citing them. There's the IT crews, who else? And then how does the Venn diagram of nuclear energy overlap with the data center space? And I mean, you already alluded to Navy nukes and the culture. So some of the procedures like.

feeding these companies, which is fascinating. But do have other examples? And how do you see that evolving?

Chris Dove Jr (28:41)
So I was at the DFW Data Center Summit just this past February, I think, ⁓ and I met a Navy nuke really doing every aspect of data centers, right? I was in sales, there was another guy in workforce development, there was another guy in project management, another guy in strategy and development, know, some more on the corporate real estate side. ⁓ But the typical transition for an enlisted person.

is going into one of those technician roles, right? Whether they were an Air Force avionics technician or a Navy electrician's mate, it doesn't matter, right? They have the technical training to be re-skilled in a data center environment. ⁓ But that's kind of the fun of dealing with so many veterans was it didn't matter what they wanted to do. They have the GI Bill. They have all these benefits available to them that I always recommended. Just get your foot in the door.

spend a couple years in a data center environment and then figure out where you want to go. ⁓ But yeah, definitely the top three are operations, commissioning and construction. So a lot of the people at like the holders and the, you know, big construction groups, a lot of the MEP engineers, the construction project managers, they're also former military. ⁓ You know, they can command a crew, they can stay on track and on schedule.

you know, all of those ⁓ things that come from military training directly translate over, you know, and then for the people that don't want to just keep doing what they've done in the military, every data center company I've ever recruited for has an internal development program, whether it's, you know, a yearly scholarship fund or, you know, continuous training or, you know, whatever that, you know, people have taken different paths and branched out. ⁓ But if you wanted to see like a Venn diagram of the overlap,

Hard chargers, adaptable to any situation, and very trainable. Even training, qualifying in Navy Nuclear Power School and at prototype, then you go immediately to either an aircraft carrier or a submarine, and you have to start over. So you're literally learning it all over again, qualifying even more in depth and things like that. And it's the same thing when you see them go to a data center.

They're just sponges that are trainable to the data center environment. And the way I always explained it when talking to veterans was like, instead of keeping ⁓ power and propulsion and cooling for your life, you're keeping it for someone else's servers, right? So mission critical environment, but definitely a step down from having your life at risk. ⁓ Whereas if you're coming from a civilian ⁓ aspect, mission critical work is probably a step up in intensity.

in operational tempo and in the repercussions of mistakes, right? And I think that's where the military members are super valuable because they're not gonna flip that breaker if they're not 100 % confident in it. They're not gonna order you to do something without 100 % confidence in it. ⁓ So just knowing the catastrophic outcomes of an outage in a data center environment.

⁓ you know kind of change it's like a whole mentality thing.

Mark Hinaman (32:05)
Yeah. Awesome. How, how have you seen the industry change and evolve? you know, I mean, you start working for a line in what, 2019 and then, ⁓ 2021. Okay. Yeah. And then, I mean, think explosive growth since then, but, know, it's, it's all over the news now. Everyone, everyone, I'll put this in air quotes, knows that data centers need tons of power. and, know, the chip size are.

Chris Dove Jr (32:17)
2021.

Mark Hinaman (32:35)
evolving and the rack space or rack power density is getting more dense, ⁓ more megawatts per rack or kilowatts, I suppose, but up to megawatts per rack now. ⁓ Yeah, just talk to me kind of as a generalist or holistically as how you've seen the space evolve.

Chris Dove Jr (32:56)
So it's definitely a fun time to be in the industry. ⁓ I'd say two years ago was a little more fun because there wasn't ⁓ as much of the negative aspects ⁓ with the public sentiment and things to go along with it. But just the collaboration between companies, the amount of money that's going into it, all the research and development. And everybody likes to talk about Nvidia's 1 megawatt rack. ⁓

they just did like a news article for the new Microsoft campus that actually has the highest density. I think it was at like 264 kilowatts per rack. like we're still far away from where we could be if we had the power available. But I think, know, I'm a little spoiled because I was going to the data center conferences and I was talking to people and like I knew the power problem was coming before it was really a problem. I knew the workforce problem was coming before it was really a problem.

but you've seen like this transition in the last like 24 months of people finally admitting like, wow. Okay. This is a real problem and it is now the bottleneck, right? Because you either have, ⁓

electrical power problems or people power problems. And as data centers hired more and more people away from manufacturing or from the skilled trades or from construction, right now you have more junior people working on every site. And it's amazing that we're keeping up with the pace of these builds because, you know, a lot of the best people moved up, they moved off the job site into management or strategy roles and just, you know,

keeping refilling that talent pipeline. ⁓ Now it's empty, right? Everyone's realizing it's empty. You're seeing announcements like every month from some company or some initiative. You've got Mike Rowe and Home Depot now involved in trying to get more people trained in the skilled trades. You've got Metta rolling out a program. Microsoft has great programs with their data center academy. Google has military pathway programs. Like everyone is rolling out these programs.

⁓ But I really think that we were the early ones to do it. So we saw the problem coming. We knew as a co-location provider, we couldn't offer the exact same package that a Google or a Meta could offer. But we could offer people a pretty good package and a great environment with the ability to move up. ⁓

So as far as like the industry changing, know, I kind of talked about it earlier, just the size and the scale, right? We went from 25 megawatts being a good project. I think when, when Stream Data Centers got purchased last year by Apollo, they had delivered like,

I don't know, 50 megawatts or something like that in 25 years. And like now they have like a one gigawatt pipeline. Don't quote me on any of those numbers, but like it's astronomical. was, there was very successful companies that had been in the industry for 10, 20 years that had never delivered, you know, one of these campus sizes now. So like people really underestimate like what a 72 megawatt data center actually entails and like all the people that come together to, to make that happen.

and now you've got multiple one gigawatt campuses spinning up. So like the scale, the speed, ⁓ I can't believe that people aren't out of equipment already. ⁓ That was like something that I thought would be like the third problem, would be like, okay, hey, you can't buy anything for three years now. Like, what are you gonna do? luckily,

Mark Hinaman (36:40)
Well, yeah, what's your perspective

on that? mean, for ABB, like you guys are still making sales and have...

Chris Dove Jr (36:46)
yeah, I mean, you know.

It's a beautiful spot to be in, right? Having the equipment that everyone needs. ⁓ And then I recently posted on LinkedIn, like ABB is so well positioned with their partnerships. Like there's a partnership going on with Nvidia. We've got the HyperGuard medium voltage UPS that is like accidentally made for AI data center applications. It was actually made for like industrial power plant applications. And then data centers just kept growing and getting bigger and you know,

Now that gives people the flexibility to build in a 25 megawatt block. ⁓ Do you see lead times get longer? Absolutely, right? There's no getting around that. Even as people are opening new manufacturing facilities or adding a shift to their current facility or whatever they're doing to try to up their capacity, people just buy it faster. And like when people learn like, hey, there's only a three month lead time with this company versus the nine or 12 month lead time with another company.

the business blows in and out and ⁓ yeah, I couldn't imagine a better spot to be in during the data center boom than selling the critical power equipment that everyone needs.

Mark Hinaman (38:01)
Yeah, fascinating. ⁓

You know, it's been in the news a lot. SMR is cited as the solution to power the data centers. And I know that several advanced nuclear companies have made announcements about how we're going to, these are prospective customers. ⁓ Do you see that? What's your perspective here on nuclear and nuclear powering data centers?

Chris Dove Jr (38:25)
So I'm kind of smiling because it has been a hot topic in the new groups. I've always been pro like we're finally going to have that nuclear Renaissance that everyone has been talking about. Right. And we, we joke in the nuclear community, more nuclear, more, more fission is only five years away. And fusion is always 10 years away. Right. So like, don't worry guys, five years from now, we're going to have more of it. 10 years from now, we're going to have fusion, but people have been saying that for, you know, 20 years now. but.

So I was very pro on the side of getting this done. ⁓ And then I was actually at that data center summit in Dallas and ⁓ the CEO of Compass, ⁓ forgive me for not remembering it, Crosby, Chris Crosby, very respected, ⁓ like that guy is a genius. Like I see why he's the CEO of a company. And when he talked about SMRs and the way that NRC is currently written,

That really kind of spun me the other way to where I'm now more in the middle. I don't know if we're going to get there. I don't know if we're going to get there fast enough. You see now a lot more, you know, combined cycle plants going in, you know, the power to 9.6 gigawatt campus here in Ohio. They're starting out with a gas plant with the hopes of eventually adding SMRs because it's already a nuclear cleared site, things like that. But

Oklo was kind of like the darling of that, right? And I do still love their business model. They're taking ⁓ spit fuel that didn't get used hardly enough ⁓ and repurposing it into those HALU fuel cells to...

you know, then uses new reactor fuel. But the NRC and like this stuff with me, don't quote me on it because I'm paraphrasing, but the NRC was written for light water reactors.

Nothing that anyone's doing today and trying to get built is a light water reactor. There's better technology, there's more efficient ways of doing it. And for a couple years at every conference, I would talk about the Navy Nuclear Program and how they've operated light water reactors at sea without an event for, what, 70 years now?

So like, why not start there? Because you already have all those data points. You already have those approved designs. We could have started there and I think you would have already seen some more reactor development rolled out. But people really took a big bite and you know, there's all kinds of other technologies outside of light water reactors that are being developed. But to get those actually built and online and generating power outside of like a test facility like Idaho National Labs, I'm not seeing it.

It was supposed to start happening. We're supposed to be generating by this time next year. And I just don't see it coming to fruition quite at the pace that I would have liked to have seen it. Will we get there? Maybe five years from now.

Mark Hinaman (41:30)
Five years from now, yeah. I'm bullish. I've got a lot of inside information, so I can't say. know, NDAs are annoying, but I'm bullish.

Chris Dove Jr (41:31)
about five years from now.

Good. That's great news.

Because the cool thing about being in critical power, all these power plants also need a lot of the same equipment, right? So I would love to see ⁓ a big rollout of small modular reactors. And I'm an early investor in Oklo. ⁓ I've invested in some other companies, but I just really love the Oklo business model. I love the partners that they've made. I love the...

the collaborations they've had with the NRC, with the back and forth and things. So I am still partially bullish, but man does it feel like it's taking forever.

Mark Hinaman (42:22)
So in your view, Chris, what does a healthy ⁓ nuclear and data center workforce look like?

Chris Dove Jr (42:33)
think, dude, right now we have a huge education problem. that's like, if you took a poll of people that wanted a nuclear power plant or people that wanted a data center in their community, I think the nuclear power plant wins right now. So like, we've got to educate.

Mark Hinaman (42:48)
Yeah. You know,

that's fascinating. Sorry to cut you off, but like, I was personally surprised to see that people were pushing back on data centers. I was like, why guys? These are warehouses. Yeah. They're like a little noisy, but so what?

Chris Dove Jr (43:02)
Right, and.

Like ⁓ now we're in this defensive posture as an industry, feel like, you know, where like every thing is like trying to dispel misinformation. What I would like to see is just people talk all like about the positive aspects, right? Like there's so many examples of people that I hired that have an exponentially better life now because they started their data center career. And like most of them still aren't being hands on, you know, now seven years later, right? They've moved into.

Mark Hinaman (43:07)
Yeah.

Chris Dove Jr (43:33)
management roles, project management roles, all these things that no other industry really would have given them the opportunity to. But when you had this rapid propagation of data centers nationwide, everyone either had to move out or move up. Right. So like so many people were given these opportunities and so many careers were made and like that's not even, you know, talking about the millionaires that were made by working at Nvidia and having stock at Nvidia. Like their entire company became millionaires and like how many other companies

companies are like that right now. Like how many companies have seen 300 to 1500 % growth and like how much does that help those families and those employees and like ⁓ one of the biggest detractors for data centers that people like to harp on is, well it's only gonna have like 20 permanent jobs once it's built.

That's crazy to me. My job doesn't exist. The people in the factories manufacturing the equipment doesn't exist. The customer service reps, like there's so many other jobs that come from this ecosystem that people don't give it credit for because it's at the macro economic scale versus their local community, right? ⁓

But that was another thing that I felt like we did right when building Align Data Center is like we were talking to these communities well before we were breaking ground on a facility or, know. ⁓

and then actually talking to the communities about what it takes to get a career in data centers, helping local residents actually start getting the training, offering internships to the local community, to local college students, things like that, and just being an overall good neighbor, right? Like the things that, when you say them out loud, they seem so straightforward and logical, but like so many companies aren't doing it that way, right? There's three shell companies that are buying up different properties

and then combining them and then trying to get them rezoned without telling the community that this rezoning is happening and not educating the community on what a data center is. And then what do they do? They get on ChatGPT and they say, how much water does a data center consume?

ChatGPT doesn't know about the newest designs being used, right? It's still pulling the same stuff from Reddit or from a news article that's saying, ⁓ data centers are going to bankrupt you on water and power and all these negative things. ⁓ so again, now I find us in a very defensive posture. And here locally, just because I've always lived near an atomic site, no one here could care less about the SMRs that are potentially going in. They care way more about the data centers that

going in.

Mark Hinaman (46:15)
Fascinating. How?

Chris Dove Jr (46:16)
Yeah, so what does

the healthy future look like, I think was your question. More education on the opportunities that are available that most data centers use less water than your local golf course. And just talking about the positive impacts that data centers have had. And a lot of people don't talk about this, but Loudoun County, Virginia has two or three of the top five school districts in the nation in that county because of all the money and people that moved in there because of the data.

industry and like there's so many other positive but you know the the general public grabs on to ⁓ a negative thing that is maybe not even true and then they run with that and they all talk to each other and it spirals out of control because there's a huge education problem both on what a data center is what it's going to do for you how much water does it actually consume and what are the career opportunities

Mark Hinaman (47:12)
How...

How does the bubble burst?

Chris Dove Jr (47:16)
How does the bubble burst? So I would say I'm very bullish on the fact that there's not a bubble. There's no bubble. The dot com bubble was tied to.

Mark Hinaman (47:18)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Chris Dove Jr (47:29)
⁓ fictional valuations, whereas like let's say Google stops doing all the Google stuff tomorrow, that is still a bunch of critical infrastructure that somebody else is gonna buy and move into, right? Like this isn't going anywhere. This is all tied to real tangible assets that are being deployed in the real world. ⁓ So I don't think there's a bubble, ⁓ but if the, will the bubble burst for some companies? Absolutely. ⁓

to about who I think is going to be the big winners and big losers. ⁓ But there can't be all winners in this industry and it is a very dog-eat-dog world. If you get a partnership or a contract with a company and you fail to deliver for them, you're probably not going to get a second chance.

Mark Hinaman (48:19)
Yeah, I guess the way that I think about it is I question if the feedback loop is closing fast enough. So hyper scalers, everyone knows that hyper scalers are building fast and deploying tons of capital and. ⁓

building new AI models and trying to make money off AI. But I still don't know if the amount of value generated from AI will be able to pay back and how fast it will pay back the capital investments for this. And maybe.

Chris Dove Jr (48:54)
in that.

That's where the

losers are going to come in for sure. The people that fail to actually monetize the assets that they've deployed. But I think we're finally seeing that ROI within Profic, right? With Claude Code and Claude Cowork and Blackstone just announced, I think yesterday or the day before, that like every company that's under their ownership is going to start ⁓ integrating Claude into everyday life. You've got Meta that just put out the memo

to

its employees that every click, every keystroke, everything they do is now being recorded to help train AI, right? So like, I used to joke about this with Uber, that never before in history were drivers, you know.

working themselves out of a job, right? Because the whole point of Uber was to get to autonomous, ⁓ robo taxi type travel, right? And the drivers were making them money so that they could put them out of work faster. And like that sort of like the double edged sword of AI now is like, we've built all this, we've deployed it, it's been trained, it's getting better every single day, new models are being released every quarter. And at some point it's going to

displace a lot of people. Like if I had a job that was easily replaceable by AI at a Blackstone company, I would be, you know, re-skilling myself into either A, an AI guru, right? There's tons of free training available. There's no reason anybody should be completely unaware or unable to use AI. ⁓

But if you can become ⁓ an expert on that with the free trainings that are available and literally leveraging the AI that you pay for to help train you, then I think you'll be all right. So everyone thinks like, doomsday is coming, we're gonna go into a recession. I think you're gonna see more people able to start their own businesses and we're actually gonna take a little chunk out of the control of corporate America. ⁓

you know, because let's say I got this place to have an AI agent now that can spec all the equipment, deal with the customer service, yada, yada, yada.

I'm going to have to find a way to make income. So whatever new venture I go on or new skills that I get, like that's making everyone better. And I think the rising tide will raise all ships. Will there be some growing pains in the middle? Absolutely. Right. Nobody likes to see a headline, ⁓ 30,000 people being laid off so that we can invest more money in AI infrastructure or, Hey, we're cutting 18 % of our workforce this year because we're so much more efficient due to our AI, know, automations and you know, things like that.

Nobody likes that, but it's part of the growing pains, right? But I view it very much as email. If you were one of the people that said, email's just a fad, the internet's just a fad, like it's gonna go away, you can't do that. You're gonna fall behind. The world moves at an incredible pace now.

Mark Hinaman (51:56)
Yeah.

I like that abundance mindset. ⁓ Easier for entrepreneurs to build newer, better tools. So let's go use the tools.

Chris Dove Jr (52:07)
So like even

me, ⁓ getting the legal stuff, starting my own business, doing the graphic design for the Uptime Talent logo, like all of these things I was able to do with.

I think I spend $125 on the Clawed Pro subscription and $20 on ChatGPT and that's it. And then I get Gemini for free with my Google Suite for Business. And that gave me the capability to do a lot of things. And then I have a personal laptop that I've made into a Clawed bot and it will respond to all the email inquiries that I get, automatically schedule people.

I feel like it takes like a basic human like me and like gives me superpowers because like I'm not artistic but I can type out what I want the art to look like and have somebody else create it for me. So like it's closing some doors, but I think it'll open twice as many.

Mark Hinaman (53:06)
Okay Chris, we're coming up on our time man, but if there's one thing that you want someone listening to this to take away, they're a veteran thinking about what comes next or maybe somebody in the nuclear industry wondering where to go find good people or good companies, ⁓ what do want them to take away?

Chris Dove Jr (53:24)
The number one thing I want people to take away. ⁓

Mark Hinaman (53:28)
other than this abundance mindset that you just really like, hey, can humor about it or it's the end of the world, or you can say, look at all these awesome tools, let's go use.

Chris Dove Jr (53:32)
Bye.

Bingo, right? So me, I would say I am a...

a poor kid that grew up in rural Ohio and I had the opportunity to build one of the premier tech companies of America from my basement in Ohio. I had a basement office, you know, ⁓ doing all these calls and everything. And I was going to these conferences and rubbing elbows with people that, you know, ⁓ I didn't really deserve to be in the same room with. ⁓ And like, if it can do that for me, it can do that for you. Like if you get into the industry, you put your best

foot forward and you you give it your best effort and use all the tools that these companies give you because at the end of the day every company that hires you in this industry wants you to move up they don't want you to stay in whatever role they hired you for they want you to keep learning get better move up and like I think it's that kind of purpose that drives the human race forward and I think this industry gives it to you tenfold compared to other industries like if you are good at your job and like

If you don't believe me, look at people's LinkedIn. Go look at senior VPs at data center companies and look at how fast a lot of them moved up. Traditionally in corporate America, you're waiting 20, 30 years to move into those roles. Some people are moving into them in five or seven years.

Mark Hinaman (55:02)
Nice. I love that.

Chris Dove Jr (55:04)
So I would say the one thing that is not talked about enough is that the Department of Defense has powered the data center industry for 25 years. There are military members in the C-suite at a bunch of companies. You've got enlisted Navy nukes that are now the CTO at Menlo Digital, ⁓ the Chief Facility Operations Officer at Aligned. You've got Tony Grayson that was an officer that already had a successful exit from a company.

But every single year, there's 200,000 military members that transition from the military back to the civilian world. And to me, those are the best people to hire. They're not looking for a job because they got fired. They're not looking for a job because they're unreliable. They're looking for a job because their contract was up. They usually fulfilled it successfully, right? And now they've got all these benefits and training that you can help them become whoever they wanna be. ⁓

And I just feel like it's really not talked about enough that like the training programs, the processes, the procedures from construction and commissioning to operations in the data center industry have a very military flavor to them. Right. And like, I think that makes it even easier for the veterans that are getting out to immediately transition into those roles. The qualification and training programs are very similar to something they saw in the military, no matter what branch they came from. And like the DOD,

has been providing the number one, or has been the number one provider of skilled trades for 25 years now, because we made this mistake as a society where we said, Mark, if you or your kids didn't go to college, they're less than, right? Don't go to trade school, don't go to vocational school, you wanna get an English degree or a communications degree, right? And we had this 25 year period where people didn't necessarily learn marketable skills.

They just got a piece of paper that said, hey, you're college educated, right? ⁓ And now you're kind of seeing the inverse polarity of that where, hey, I can make $200,000 a year as an electrician and it only took me four years to become a journeyman. Why would I not do that, right? What jobs is AI gonna replace first? The white collar people, the English majors and the comms majors and things, right? If you don't have some skillset that AI can't replicate easily,

then you are very much at risk versus, hey, I'm a hands-on person running electrical wire, doing terminations. I'm starting up a million dollar piece of equipment today. Like, that's not something that's gonna easily transition over to AI. But like at the end of the day, for 25 years, know, people going into the military that received the skilled trades training, they got out after four, six, 20 years, and they've been powering all of these technical jobs.

Mark Hinaman (57:56)
That's awesome, What else?

Chris Dove Jr (57:59)
That's it. That was

the one talking point I felt like I missed. I'm just like, ⁓ you know, something I've never said publicly, but my dad did 22 years in the Navy. He got out, he was an aviation ordinance man, and there was nothing for him in 1991 or 92 when he got out. Like he went and got some entry level construction job as like a 30 something year old to provide for his family, because there was no DoD skill bridge.

you know, technically you had the Montgomery GI Bill, you know, who has time to go back to college when you have a family and all that? So like the success that veterans have had in data centers and like I try to emphasize that with every new person I talk to is that for 25 years, somebody came before you and made you marketable. Don't mess it up. Just be the best version of yourself. Put your best foot forward, be trainable, be adaptable and good things are going to come your way.

don't do the opposite or it could sour opportunities for the people that are going to come after you.

Mark Hinaman (59:01)
How about that? That's awesome.

Mark Hinaman (59:03)
Chris Dove Jr. It's been great to chat with you, Thanks so much for taking time.

Chris Dove Jr (59:06)
Hey, thank you, Mark.

I'll see you next time.

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