Watch or listen to this episode below.

Brief summary:

Our podcast guest for this episode is William A. Adams, Technical Advisor to CTO at Microsoft. William shared a story of the impact of being the only black person at Microsoft for at least 15 years, and the moment he realized there was something specific he was called to do and how that vision took conviction and perseverance to see it through.

Key insights from this episode:

• (04:07) William tells us who he is and what he cares about

• (06:13) William explains how he began to tackle the diversity pipeline and hiring issue at Microsoft

• (08:03) What is the Microsoft LEAD program, and how was it imagined and developed?

• (12:14) William explains a few of the challenges he faced while implementing an increase in diversity to Microsoft's workforce, and what he learned from these obstacles.

• (15:16) How he made sure  his diversity program get financial longevity.

• (17:55) William shares one of the primary factors at play that helped him influence others in his role as a change-agent at Microsoft.

• (18:56) William shares his process wrestling through the question, "why do I have to be the one to lead and pay the price for this big change project?", and how that drove his personal motivation to persevere, despite arrows in his back.

• (22:09) William shares more of his back story and why his 'fuel' is meaningful to him.

• (26:00) William crystalizes the impact he wants to make through his work.

• (28:24) William explains a term he coined, 'tequity.’

• (35:36) William shares his mindset in going into a big change and how it may reflect on him afterwards.

• (37:57) William shares the most rewarding part of the programs he's built and their impact in the world.

• (39:17) William shares where you can learn more about his work.

• (40:03) William shares how he likes to unwind after work.

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TRANSCRIPT
FUEL Podcast hosted by Leila Ansart
SEASON 2 Episode 13: Transforming How Underserved Communities Access Jobs in Tech— with William A. Adams, Technical Advisor to CTO at Microsoft

GUEST INTRO:
William A. Adams is an award-winning D&I innovator, engineering trailblazer, and philanthropist. From an early accomplishment of rolling out critical XML code to many of Microsoft's core products globally, he was later named the first Technical Advisor to the CTO of Microsoft, Kevin Scott.  

 William has founded and overseen global initiatives that revolutionize how underserved communities access jobs and build careers at the company. As co-founder of the Microsoft Leap program –  named Microsoft’s D&I Program of the Year in 2020 – he helped launch the training of more than 26 cohorts around the world. Today, a high percentage of Microsoft Leap participants obtain jobs within Microsoft or other high-tech companies. His most recent collaboration has been in the U.S. Virgin Islands, developing a strong tech ecosystem, training technical talent,  and evolving critical technical infrastructure.  

Early in his 35+ year software engineering career, William was one of the first Black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Through his company, Adamation, he developed mission-critical custom enterprise apps for Steve Jobs’ NeXT computers and pioneered a network instant messaging service purchased by the CIA. He holds two patents.  

Today, in addition to his role at Microsoft, William is the philanthropic founder of The EV3NT, a collaborative, community-based hackathon designed to solve real-world problems. When he’s not tinkering with bits and bytes, the husband and father of three builds kitchen cabinets, knits, and tries to recapture the exhilaration of riding a motorcycle in India.  I found so much value in this conversation. We talked about so many topics from how he architected diversity programs at Microsoft to have financial longevity so that funding for them couldn’t be cut off when some kind of money squeeze was happening; we talked about how certain phrases can perpetuate biases, and how a shift in perspective and terminology helps to bring more diversity of perspectives into the workplace. He shared a story of the impact of being the only black person at Microsoft for at least 15 years, and the moment he realized there was something specific he was called to do and how that vision took conviction and perseverance to see it through. If you enjoy this conversation half as much as I did, this may be your favorite podcast episode of the entire month.

Leila Ansart, Host
Welcome to the podcast, William. I am thrilled to have you on today. For those of you that are watching the video, you can see I'm doing a little cheer. William A. Adams is the technical advisor to Microsoft CTO and an absolutely phenomenal human. I've had the pleasure to speak to him prior today and learn about many of the initiatives and projects that he's not only created and spearheaded, but is extremely passionate about. I'm thrilled to have him on today to share with all of us some of his stories and his life experience. William, thank you so much for being here. 

William A Adams, Guest
Thank you for having me, Leila. 

Leila Ansart, Host
Absolutely. If you would take a moment to introduce yourself to the audience, let us know what you do both professionally and as a human. 

William A Adams, Gues
tAs a human. That's the best part, right? 

Leila Ansart, Host
It is. 

William A Adams, Guest
I'm a 57 year old black dude who's been in tech from the beginning of my life. I've been programming since I was twelve years old. I ran my own company for a number of years with my brother, my biological brother, and eventually I went off to Microsoft in 1998. I've been there for 24 years delivering tech. I'm a software guy, so I write code, manage teams, build teams, all that stuff. In 24 years of Microsoft, I've just done all sorts of other amazing things, some of which we'll talk about. As a human, I care about people. I care about intergenerational wealth development, I care about lifting people out of poverty, all sorts of things like that. 

Leila Ansart, Host
Absolutely. Well, it's such the silver thread that I can see through so much of the work that you've done, just looking you up and seeing some of your projects and what you do and where you stand in the world. Tell us about Microsoft's Lead program. I think that would be a great intro into helping people understand what you do on a practical level. 

William A Adams, Guest
Yeah, so the Microsoft Lead Program actually has a long history that began in India, but I'll start with 2015. I asked one of our corporate vice presidents, “What's a big challenge, I'm looking for a big challenge.”  He mentioned this need for better diversity in hiring. I thought, okay, let me just go and jump on that. More women and underrepresented minorities, essentially, in engineering and I thought, well, let's just break it down as an engineering problem. How hard could it be? 

It turns out it's quite a big challenge. I cast about and said, what are we doing? We were spending tons of money, literally millions of dollars on programs that I would call pipeline, but weren't spending a lot of effort on actually hiring people. And there were reasons for that. It roughly breaks down to we don't know how to evaluate people who don't come from the typical paths that we're looking on. 

That's the bottom line. If you didn't come through the top 15 CS programs in the colleges, or you didn't have ten years of experience already in tech, there was just no way for you to come in. For women and minorities, that kind of identifies them. They're not at the top 15 schools, necessarily, or they were like mom's returning to work and moms who have CS degrees, who stopped to raise the family, they have no way in because anyone who looks at the resume would say, you're out of date for by seven years, and that's the end of the conversation. Never mind that they already have a CS degree, and probably they're awesome because they raised a family for seven years. You just wouldn't get past that point. 

For minorities, women and minorities who are coming from different walks of life, like, how does the person who was a biotech engineer or biotech lab associate or assistant, how do they get into tech? They've decided to go to a coding academy. They're into it. They've learned Python. They're doing web development. They're as tech as anyone else. But again, people are going to look and say, well, you don't have a CS degree and you've been programming for a year. You're not a college hire. And that's the end of the conversation. 

LEAD comes in and says, hold on, let's look at those people and let's create an apprenticeship for them, because that's what's missing, right? The college hires have it easy because they just go through internships, right? That's the normal way that you get hired through college. Well, these people aren't going to go through an internship. They've already done all that college stuff. You need an apprenticeship sort of thing.  So we set that up. 

The other part of it was training our people how to look at people differently. It's one thing to have the apprentices available. It's another thing to go up to a hiring manager and say,  you know what, having them try to code a bee tree on a whiteboard in 15 minutes in a live interview is probably not the best way of evaluating people. 

You need to look better, deeper at their ability to collaborate, or how are they a team player or how can they problem solve in general? I bet that person who was a barista probably has great customer empathy, probably more so than your college hires from MIT. So isn't that a valued skill? And on and on like that. The program was really about training ourselves how to look at people different, right? 

So we started that program and we used a cohort model so that we could bring people in batches, because I knew that having a social fabric was necessary, so they would come in in groups of initially it was like 20 to 30, and now we have mega cohorts, but that's how we started and we just kept at it. There's plenty of stories of woe and despair in the development of the LEAP program, but we just kept at it. Now it's in its 7th year, about to celebrate eight years. Now it's just a thing that we do at Microsoft. It's federally accredited and all that stuff. 

Leila Ansart, Host
That's really wonderful. And where did this brainchild come from? 

William A Adams, Guest
From my thick noggin. I have a partner in crime. Her name is Chun, and she was on the HR side. We initially talked to this executive who set us down the path, he said, talk to Chun. From there on, it was completely our own creation. Now, there's a little bit of history. 

I mentioned India. I was India from 2006 to 2009 working for Microsoft, and one of the challenges we had was an influx of about 300 college hires every year, every summer. The office only had 1000 people in it. You're increasing your office size by 30%. You don't have an ability to train all those people. I created a program to onboard them where they would come to me for the first five weeks of their life at the company, and I would train them how to be software engineers. That program was called LEAP:  Engineering, acceleration program. 

So I was accelerating their learning, right? I had that in the back of my head. I knew how to train engineers, and I knew that having them coming in cohorts was important for them to stick around. I knew that because I had that experience. 

Move forward to 2015, and I leaned on that experience and said, well, it's the same thing here. They're not college hires, but it's the same dynamics. It's a minority group coming into a majority culture, and they need to link arms so that they find affinity so that they can stick around and find support and all that stuff. The five weeks training was the same as well. It's like, well, you got to train them how to be a software engineer. That's where it came from, really. Some experience and just some like, I bet we can try this.

Leila Ansart, Host
I'm sure there were plenty of setbacks along the way. Tell us about one or two of those, if you would. 

William A Adams, Guest
A lot of the setbacks have to do with the ingrained culture of where we are trying to enact this. Microsoft is no different in this way than any other tech company, or any company for that matter. Everybody is trying to deal with increasing diversity of their workforce. The things that hinder you are institutional sorts of things the institution doesn't realize it's even doing it. There's certain biases and key phrases that you hear, like, we don't want to lower the bar, for example. That's got to be a common phrase across every industry. Like, if you try to nail people on that, what do you mean, the bar? 

We would have to turn those phrases to say, it's not about lowering any bar, it's about casting a wider net. It's like you're not playing limbo here, where it's like people are trying to get under the bar or over the bar. Forget that. You're trying to cast a wide net because you need inclusion, you need more voices, you need diversity of perspectives, or your product development is going to ossify because you're all the same. You're going to lose your market if you can't diversify your thought processes. So certainly the lowering the bar thing. Now, granted in tech, all those people who were hired from Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, these are all people who's like, well, I've worked my whole life. I got a master's degree in CS, and you're going to bring this barista in here and they're going to get paid the same as I am? No way. There's some resistance there where the people who are in the culture like, you can't be the same as me because I worked really hard to get where I got. So there's that sort of thing. We just flat out had people tell us we're not going to hire anyone who doesn't have a CS degree. We're only doing this because were told to do it. It's like, okay, you're off the island.

Now the program is housed within HR Human Resources, as was our goal from the beginning, but in the very beginning it was not. We had, I wouldn’t say passive, resistance to us existing. Plenty of people whose job it was to hire diverse talent looked at us like, well, what are you going to do? There are plenty of people who either actively or passively just wished we would fail because we’re kind of showing a different thing that wasn't,  I mean, we're kind of in their wheelhouse, so it's threatening. So there's things like that. How we did the financing for the thing was critical because these sorts of programs are always the first to get killed when there's any sort of a squeeze on money. It's like, I'll get rid of that diversity thing. We're done with that. So I had to fund it in such a way that couldn't happen. 

It was funded directly by the recipients. So the people who were sponsoring these apprentices, if you will, they pay for it directly. I did not have a central budget that could be choked off. 

So It actually had financial longevity because of the way we got it funded. It turns out to be pretty important as well. So all of that, all those challenges. 

Leila Ansart, Host
In the work that I do, when you have someone trying to spearhead such a big change initiative and as you mentioned, there's so much that goes into it, so much internal bias and conversation and defensiveness and feeling intimidated by someone coming in supposedly doing something similar to you. And we're all human at our core. We're all trying to take one step forward at a time and do what we need to do. It all comes down to some of those same fears that we all deal with. 

William A Adams, Guest
On the plus side there's a lot of challenges, but how do you get past that? Well, first and foremost is that we have a company mission written on my employment badge that says,  “Empower every person on the planet to achieve more”. 

William A Adams, Guest
It's like, okay, well, I can drive a truck through that. How can we empower everyone on the planet if we can't even empower our own employment practices? 

So that was critical. Having support from the top and the side, I mean, I mentioned some people who are resistant, but really from the top, the head of HR, Kathleen Hogan from the beginning, like our second or third cohort. She was like, I'm with you. I can't give you a ton of money, but I can tell everybody that this is a thing. We had several layers of pretty senior VP’s who were like, this is happening. 

Really it's the middle layer that you're really dealing with. But from the top, we had support. And that was critical. 

Leila Ansart, Host
I’m curious, in terms of your role in leading that program, what did you find were some of your most surprising leadership lessons that came about to help you to sway the resistant people? 

William A Adams, Guest
I would say that it came in two different phases. The first phase was we literally went through my rolodex of people I knew at the company, and they became our first customers. And these are friendlies, right? Some of them are, at least. It was important that I was in a position that I've been at the company long enough, that I had enough people that knew me and knew of my good works outside of this.  Because most of the time that I'd been doing engineering there are enough people who had an attitude towards me which was, “oh, William is doing something, okay, we trust him, and let's try it out”. First and foremost, that was super important. 

When the various other challenges came along or things that surprised me and we had to work through was just about the resistance and us looking back on ourselves and saying, “why do we have to be the ones to pay for this?”

What I mean by pay for it is, you're paying for it with your career. Your career is on the line here. You're doing something oddball, right? You're paying for it and perhaps you're not getting that promotion that the people who just kept the head down and wrote code and you kept to these points where you're meeting resistance and you just think, I thought the company wanted this. Why do I have to deal with all this resistance?   

What I learned was that my personal convictions were super important.  I had to say I'm not doing this because I'm getting a giant paycheck at the end of it. To the contrary, almost the opposite happened as far as financial rewards. I had to really dig in after a few cohorts and say why am I doing this? Develop or let emerge the true vision that I had and the true convictions.

It's like, look William, you can just stop this nonsense. Why are you taking all this pain and suffering? Because intergenerational development is important.  If I'm not doing it, specifically me, the next person down who could do it is probably quite a few years out, if ever.  Now is  the time, now is the place. I'm the person, this must happen. 

This is something I discovered about myself, is that at times you are called to do something and you get to decide whether you answer that call or not. This was my moment. I was called to do something and I rose to the call and took the arrows in the back and said no, this is happening. I am not going to give up. So the conviction is that. It's like you believe in it strongly enough and have perseverance to say this is going to be a multi year thing. This is not like one and done. It's like, no, this is a ten year journey. If you're not into it, if you don't have passion about it, just stop. 

I learned that your own personal conviction and having a personal vision of where this is going was super important. More so than I've ever had on a piece of software. Because it's cultural transformation, not just “ship this program”. 

Leila Ansart, Host
You're heavily invested in it. It’s you. It's your career, your energy and even the emotional toll, as you said, of taking the arrows in the back. Even though you did have great support from many, I'm sure, you had plenty of pushback. 

William A Adams, Guest
The arrows still came. Even with support. It's support. It's not a shield. 

Leila Ansart, Host
Yes, good point. You said there that your personal conviction was that intergenerational development is necessary. 

William A Adams, Guest
Yes. 

Leila Ansart, Host
Tell me more about why that's personal to you. 

William A Adams, Guest
Well, being a black child of the 60’s i did not grow up in a place where I was called bad names and all that stuff, but I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s so I certainly was aware of the place of black folks in the United States at least, and this generalizes to any minority group in any situation. I'll talk about Africa, perhaps, but being in that situation, you get a sense and it's told to you as a child, you must work twice as hard to get half as much. 

This is a common phrase that if you grew up black in America, most people my age grew up with that phrase in their head because all of our parents told us that. That's the sense of like, dang, what a bad hand. That's not fair, but it is what it is. It's not a cliche, but all the things like, oh, I'm the ‘only’. 

I've always been the ‘only’ in tech. I've told other people at Microsoft until about five years ago, the number of black people I ever saw in any given meeting was exactly zero for at least 15 years. It's like maybe one other person here and there, but most of the time it was just me, the only black guy in a meeting. Now, you could say, so what it's like?   Yeah, it is kind of a (inaudible) for the most part, but it wears on you.  When younger people are growing up and they're looking towards what can they do, and they look at black people and say, what are black people doing or allowed to do or succeeding at? 

Back in the 60s, there's a lot of civil rights leaders and lots of activity going on, lots of people and lots of different professions. In modern times, most the black folks see is either sports figures, entertainers. You don't see a lot of black scientists who are out there and well known people in tech. They don't know necessarily that those salaries are good, that you can get an equity share in a company. Those examples aren't out there. So when you go to Oakland, who are they going to look up to? They're going to look up to Steph Curry and they're going to try to become a basketball player. Well, one in a million, right? What are the rest of you going to do? 

It's true for blacks and it's true for girls, and looking up to female leaders now, I think we've done a lot more work in this country for women specifically. There are I'll say some, I won't say there's a ton, but there's more examples. I think of things like that, where it's like, well, you need to give examples so that black child or that girl or that whatever minority can look to something and go, I could do that. 

That's good because then they have an option other than picking oranges, which is what I grew up around, picking oranges, picking strawberries, working multiple jobs, not quite really making it, just being able to pay rent. And that's it. 

So I want people to have options. That's why it's useful to say, hey, here's an option. Here's how you can get in the tech path. That's an option. Look what I've done. Look at this program. This is your entree, this is your way in, and look what it can result in. 

Once they do that, they have better income. They can now send their kids to better schools, they can live in better neighborhoods. The outcomes intergenerationally are going get better. That's why I think it's important, because when you look at something like, I heard some statistics about a neighborhood in Atlanta where the graduation rate for black young black men was like 30% or less. It's worse than that. It's a really low number. It was abysmal. 

And I just thought, we're wasting our talent intergenerationally because all those guys who didn't graduate from high school, they're going to become early dads or whatever, and it just perpetuates.  You can look at a problem like that and go, what can I do? Do I give money? Do I get a tutor? Boys and Girls Club. What? They need jobs. 

You need to create opportunities where people like that can go into jobs that are going to get them out of that [their current limitations]. 

That's why it's super important to me, because it's what I can do. 

Leila Ansart, Host
Yeah. It's right in your area of influence, your area of authority, and so many examples if were to go down your bio of how you've taken that position and said, let me create the path for others to come behind me. I think it's incredibly inspiring and gives all of us something to really shoot for when we do have the, if you want to call it privilege, if you want to call it the results of your labor. Whatever it is, for each individual in their own story. I think all of us have a responsibility to look back and say, how can we make a difference for someone else? And I just love that. That's such a big part of who you are and what you do.

Leila Ansart, Host
Talk to me about this term techquity that you coined. 

William A Adams, Guest
Yeah. I was just casting about for something to describe what I care about and what I want to do very succinctly. So I eventually came up with techquity. Techquity means leveraging technology, an equity stake in technology to rise up. So technology and equity. What that means specifically is there's a difference between having an iPhone and owning the patents that created the iPhone, or at least having stock in the company that created the iPhone. 

And that's true across all tech. You can be a consumer of tech and we're all consumers of tech. That doesn't make any of us rich. The person who gets rich is the person who owns the technology, has an equity share in the technology, right? 

An easy way to point this out is if you look at the Forbes top ten billionaires in the world today or something like that, the top six, or at least six of the ten, are tech people, specifically tech guys, right? Bill Gates is still on the list for the last 20 years and he's still hanging in there and he's rapidly going to give away all his money, but he's still there. You got Mark Zuckerberg and Bezos and Musk and a few other guys. And it's like, okay, clearly that is where the equity share takes you. That's where tech takes you -- to the top. Now, that doesn't mean that every one of us has to strive to be a multi billionaire and try to get on the top ten list, but it does tell you where the focus of the world's attention is. When the focus is like that's usually where the power dynamics exist as well. 

That's how laws get written, that's how regulations get written. That's how your neighborhood is going to get a school and that other one, isn't. It's going to be based on people allocating money, and that money is going to be coming from tech, probably, for the most part. It behooves you to have an equity share in technology because as the rising tide of tech lifts up, you have an equity boat, if you will. So you'll rise up as well. If you don't, you just get drowned by it, right? 

Rising tides lift boats, and everyone else drowns. So you better have a boat. Techquity is about building those boats so that as tech rises, and tech is everything. It's not just Microsoft, Google, Facebook. Everything is tech. As technology rises, you have an equity share in that rise. Therefore, your wealth, your family, your influence, your ability to vote, your ability to have outcomes that you like rises as well.

So that's equity. Little tiny word, big meaning.

Leila Ansart, Host
I love it.  I think it needs to become more said. William, when you talk about this personal conviction, you have to develop people to have that intergenerational rising of the boats, as you say. 

Tell us the story of another time that drove you past the hiccups, the obstacles, and we all get to point where we feel like we just don't have anything left to give. Have you been through some of those times? Has that motivation continue to drive you? 

William A Adams, Guest
Yeah, I probably reached back a little bit  but it's kind of leap related, kind of not. So in 2018 or 19, I had a young engineer at the company say, hey, we need to be in Africa. We need a development center in Africa --engineering. I was introduced to him by another African, and they had been working on this for ten years prior, trying to get the company to create a development center in Africa. They're just kind of running into a brick wall. It's like lots of nodding of the heads, lots of ‘atta boys” and “go talk to so and so”. It would always just keep sizzling. 

I had the conversation, I talked to the various people who are working on it. I thought, wait a minute, okay, you're going about it wrong. You keep going to the top.  That's not how things work in the company. The way things work at Microsoft is you go and do something, and then you can short up with support, but you have to actually do it. I went back and hired people in Kenya to get the ball rolling, to say, look, let's just hire them. Let's have them work on whatever. It doesn't matter. We set the salaries, we worked out all the details of finance and HR and all this other stuff. Within a year, the rest of the company comes with a support of Windows. “We've got it from here, thank you very much.” Now we've got 650 people there in Kenya and Nigeria. But the conviction thing there was being able to look at Africa and come up with like, why bother? Who cares? Why do you have to stick your neck out for this? You're not going to get rewarded for doing this, and people are just going to think you're crazy. 

It's like because my badge says, empower every person on the planet to achieve more. The African continent is 1.2 billion people. How can you ignore that, right? We had zero engineering there. How can you ignore that? I'm convicted, I believe what it says on the badge, even though it may be marketing. Who cares? It says, and I take it literally, empower every person on the planet to achieve more. You can't do that by normal huge swath of the physical planet as well as the human bodies on the planet, right? 1.2 billion is not a small number. That took some conviction, it took some cojolling, it took creating a video and hiring people and just being out there. That one wasn't an arrows in the back. That was more of, okay, thank you, we've got it from here. We just had to push to get to the tipping point.And then it's essentially hands off, and now I get to just tell it as a story of something that I help catalyze, help push. Yeah, but there's plenty of other leaders now. It's like “I'm the leader of Africa.” It's like, yeah, good on you. You know, it's because I push. 

Leila Ansart, Host
Absolutely. 

William A Adams, Guest
These sorts of things, you have to know that you may not get all the accolades afterwards. You have to be okay with that. Iin that particular situation, my thought process was I want to increase the number of melanin enhanced people in the company over the next ten years. Now, that means Africa, it means the Caribbean, it means Mexico and South America in general. How are we going to do that? Well, I have the history of India, and what we did in India is we have a steady state of a couple of thousand engineers there, which feeds a few hundred to redmond every year -10%. Well, if we can do the same thing in Africa, the same thing is going to happen. If I get up to a couple of thousand engineers in Africa, at least a couple of hundred are going to drift over to the US every year. That's going to change the melanin count for the company. 

So this is a strategy. That's a ten year out strategy. You're saying, well, we have to hire these people now, and if this evolves the way we want, in ten years, not only are we going to have awesome development center on the continent, but we're also going to have this diaspora where a lot of Microsoft people of color are going to be all over the place, because that's just what happens. 

You have to have a vision like that, a conviction. It doesn't have to be as grand as that. This is Microsoft, it's a world sized company, but at whatever level you're at, you have to have some sort of a vision and you have to be convicted about it enough to say when the naysayers come, and start saying, I don't know, why do we have to do that? Why don't we focus on Romania instead? You have to be able to say, no, this is worthwhile, we're going to keep at this. That's what's required. That's another time where I've really had to have that conviction. 

Leila Ansart, Host
What have you found has been the biggest reward for you personally in all of these struggles? 

William A Adams, Guest
Oh, easy. The emails from people saying, you've changed my life for the better. 

I mean, forget about any software I've written. There's some software I've written that existed for the last 20 years. That's nice, but none of that software has had the impact of a single person saying, you've changed my life for the better. 

That's worth it. I get goosebumps just thinking about it. Just think about it. How many times in your life do you get to have someone tell you've changed my life, and it's happened tens of times because we've touched thousands of lives. Several people now have different life choices because of some convictions I had. It's like, okay, what more do you want out of life? It doesn't get any better than that, really. 

Leila Ansart, Host
I totally agree with you. I mean, it all comes down to people. It comes down to people and the meaningful changes that we can help create. 

William A Adams, Guest
Yeah. 

Leila Ansart, Host
So, William, thank you for sharing all this. Where can people learn more about you both what you're doing with Microsoft and also some of your personal projects. 

William A Adams, Guest
William-a-adams.com

It's a website. It's got some stuff on it. It's got links to LinkedIn, Twitter, maybe even Instagram. Yeah. I'm just doing stuff, and if I do, it shows up there. 

Leila Ansart, Host
Wonderful. As we close today, William, you're making a difference in so many areas. You tapped into that personal juice. I call it the good juice of personal motivation around something that's meaningful to you. How do you unwind as you finish the end of a long week or a long month? What's your secret sauce for kind of decompressing and unwinding? 

William A Adams, Guest
I have young kids, so they both keep you on your toes and always introduce you to wonderful new things. So it might be a bike ride. It might be cleaning the garage. We added a slack blind to their place set in the backyard a few weeks back, inflating the pool for the 90 degree weather. I would say it's a mix between family, writing code, filling about in my garage, anything that's perhaps less cerebral, because programming is very cerebral. You're always in your head, so anything that gets out of my head is physical. Like riding a bike with my son, that kind of stuff. Just being human. 

Leila Ansart, Host
People always like to hear those things. They're like, oh, I do that too. 

William A Adams, Guest
It's just normal stuff. Buying some pop and fresh dough and making cinnamon rolls with the kids. Yeah, that's pretty fun. Watching my daughter draw some art and going, yeah, that's very nice, for the thousandth time. 

Leila Ansart, Host
All the dad's stuff. I'm with you there. I've got two little ones of my own. Well, again, William, thank you for your time. It was such a pleasure getting to know you better and hearing about what makes you tick on the inside. So thank you. 

William A Adams, Guest
Thank you, Leila. 

Leila Ansart, Host
All right, talk to you soon.