Ep. 192 Craig McKesson, Chief Commercial Officer at Takanock | Data Center Go-to-Market Podcast

Likewise.

So you mentioned when we were planning this interview that one of your biggest challenges is overcoming community misconceptions about data center developments.

Can you give us a little bit of context, especially given your background coming from the data center operator and real estate side?

Sure thing.

I think, you know, anybody, as anybody in the industry knows, um, There's been a lot of misperception around data centers.

We've had a tremendous amount of growth.

And quite frankly, with that growth has come a few problems.

And so we found that in order to effectively engage with communities in an open and transparent manner, we've been able to overcome a lot of the fears, help educate people and ultimately try to align.

I think as an industry, one of our biggest challenges is really taking a step back and aligning on you know all of the good things that we're doing for communities all the good things we're doing to enable both the

you know

the us and the global economies you know all of those things the digital infrastructure has really become the fabric of the global economy and so i think as The more we can educate people that we have aligned with different technologies, different cooling technologies like closed-loop cooling to eliminate water use, doing things to mitigate air and noise and things like that, the more successful we'll ultimately be and be able to actually continue this absolutely incredible once-in-a-lifetime growth pattern.

It seems like, too, that some of these community development problems have gotten most pronounced in the last couple of years.

Early on in the life of this podcast, a little over two years ago, I remember I was speaking to a marketing leader from Cyrus One, and at the time she was describing how in addition to the normal buyer personas that people think about when they're selling hyperscale and selling colocation, she was talking about the idea of building a team or a dedicated position on community stakeholders.

And it wasn't just The community stakeholders that show up at the events with a lot of tough questions, it was like educating and building trust with elected officials, regulators, utility companies.

I know you come from a similar kind of background in a leadership role at T5 for a number of years.

Is that something that caught you off guard a little bit of how to systematically approach this? And I'm just curious how...

what kind of thinking you've brought to figuring out the whole go-to-market strategy with now, in addition to the traditional stakeholders, all of these additional voices that want to weigh in.

Well, you know, honestly, Joshua, I think it's, you know, it's part and parcel to the incredible evolution of our growth.

You know, when I started in this business, we would do a 250 KW deal and high five each other.

It was a, it was a big deal, right? I think the first data center we built at T5 was six megawatts and it took us a couple of years to actually lease it.

Right.

as you know things evolved from enterprise wholesale co-location into even you know the emergence of call it cloud 1.0 the sites really weren't that large right they could kind of hide in plain sight you know the community didn't really notice what was going on um now i think especially with the rise of ai you know you're starting to look at you know kind of campuses where 300 to 500 megawatts is kind of table stakes and some growing over to a gigawatt those types of developments you know need a lot of coordination with the local communities to make it work on so many levels and so i think those data center operators who started to really kind of be at the forefront of those larger scale developments saw the need to partner with educate and just kind of be present with local elected officials understanding kind of the pulse of what's happening in the different communities and and make sure that they were aligned in terms of how they were progressing their developments and so i think we've all learned that that's incredibly necessary now.

And, you know, like at Tecanic, we're taking a pretty unique approach and looking at what are some of those problems that are, you know, out there now, especially around power, and then how can we come in and start solving those problems, bringing our own natural gas, co-located generation capabilities that ultimately end up solving some of those some of those needs and so when we lead with a solution like that that matches what you know a lot of the different communities are pushing back against it helps the local elected officials you know the planning and zoning boards the city councils it helps them actually show that they're listening to their constituents and pushing and working with the developers to create a win-win situation.

Have you seen any really good examples so far regionally or nationally where associations and groups of local elected officials are systematically getting up to speed to what they need to know to be better stewards and better asking questions? I know for a long, long time, the general public has looked nationally at Congress and often wondered how it's possible, how elected officials in the Senate And the House, when they bring in like Mark Zuckerberg or they bring in Sasha Nadella, like the levels of literacy versus being completely off the reservation seems like there's a big missing part of that.

Is any better at the local level or is it largely what we see nationally?