Exploring Leadership and Open Source with Maria Bracho

Alexis:

Welcome to another episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. I'm your host, Alexis Monville, and today I'm thrilled to welcome Maria Bracho, Chief Technology Officer at Red Hat LATAM. Maria brings over two decades of experience in steering multinational technology initiatives and mastering the art of leveraging cutting-edge technology to drive business growth. Maria, it's wonderful to have you here. Could you start by sharing how you typically introduce yourself in professional settings?

Maria:

Hi, Alexis. It's a pleasure to be in your podcast. I am Maria Bracho. My role at Red Hat is as Chief Technology Officer for Latin America. And I partner with our customers, communities, and our teams to create better experiences and shape the vision of Red Hat — both with our technology and with communities — to move the world forward, hopefully with open source technologies.

Alexis:

Maria, for many, Red Hat is synonymous with open source, but there are also many in our audience who may not be familiar with either open source or Red Hat. Could you explain what open source is and perhaps share a bit about Red Hat?

Maria:

Sure. Absolutely. In the context of software, open source not only means having your code available for others, but it means sharing it in a way that others can also use and modify, depending on the open source license, but also create with open source communities — for open collaboration and the definition of the goals that you want to pursue together, and also being able to listen to multiple ideas that move the technology forward.

Alexis:

Would you have something to explain that in a more tangible way for our audience?

Maria:

Yes, absolutely. So I have a few examples from personal experience. As you know, I have lived in different places, and I've also worked in these different countries. More recently I lived in Japan for the last four years. It's fascinating to me going to a new place, but also living, working, sharing the customs — especially the food.

I came across this example by going to the Cup of Noodles Museum in Yokohama. That's the city I lived in. This was one of the highest-rated places to go for newcomers and visitors. Of course we never went, because we just thought it was a tourist trap and we didn't feel like tourists, but we had family come visit. And we went there. As I was listening to the story of ramen, it really felt very familiar to the way we talk about open source software. Have you ever had ramen, Alexis?

Alexis:

I had some, yeah, of course. And I'm very curious about how some sort of noodles would speak about open source, the way you spoke about open source just before. So yeah — enlighten me, please.

Maria:

So I'm not talking about the ramen you go sit at a fancy restaurant for, where they come in hot and ready for you. I'm talking about the workhorse of ramen — the ramen that are hard, the essential staple for university students, anybody with an end-of-the-day or after-party snack, middle-of-the-night hunger pangs. These are the flash-fried ramen noodles that you can then rehydrate using hot water. So it's the simplest form of cooking a super delicious and satisfying meal.

The story starts with Momofuku Ando who, like many in post-war Japan, was sitting and looking at lines and lines of people trying to get a hot cup of ramen. Inside the country, it was hard to get access to food. Wheat had become one of the new crops to come into Japan. So noodles was a new thing. He didn't want people to stand in line for hours to get food. He wanted to devise a method to preserve the noodles, to make them more accessible.

And here's the part where the invention may have come from him or may have come from someone else: he was sharing this problem with his wife as she was cooking tempura shrimp. She was flash-frying the battered shrimp. She told him that what happens when you flash-fry shrimp is that it takes out all the moisture from the batter, and then it makes it a little bit more shelf-stable. So she was able to get the shrimp ready and then have them last for hours, if not days. And then if you put a flash-fried noodle back into a soup, it will reabsorb some of the water and rehydrate, and made it delicious to eat. The whole point was this flash-frying method.

Momofuku Ando tried this particular method and was very effective with it. He noticed it allowed the noodles to remain shelf-stable for months. Access to hot water was a lot easier than having an entire kitchen to prepare meals. So this game-changing technique made him very famous, his business started to grow. And then he was looking at his competitors, seeing them stumble into problem after problem trying to get to the perfect way of preserving the noodles. He had this thought that it wasn't just about him or his business, but more about Japan and helping feed the country.

So what he did next was sort of an odd move, even for a collective-thought society like Japan. He met with all his competitors and started sharing the recipe. He said: hey, this is how you should preserve the noodles. Japan is huge on food regulation and sanitary procedures, so they were eager to get this new method going. They would still compete on the flavor that you add to the soup, but sharing how to preserve the noodle was something that helped them all move forward.

It also helped them standardize on other partners and vendors. They would partner with a company that made the size of the cup. So regardless of the noodle that you were selling, everybody had the same cup. So the cups became cheaper to acquire and to resell. And then it also made it possible for vendors to serve other packet flavorings — MSG, dried shrimp, dried corn, other toppings. All of that lowered the price and increased accessibility, to the point that you can find this type of ramen anywhere in the world. Even though his ambitions were for the collective of Japan, it ended up influencing things globally. You can have the same noodles today, and they are curry flavored, or have specific flavors for different regions. If you go to Thailand, you'll find them with lemongrass and other things. The idea was: starting small, thinking about the good and the collective, and moving a whole industry forward.

Momofuku Ando didn't even think that he was going to be able to influence so widely. His influence lasted even to NASA, because the space program also has these noodles in space. So that made me think about our influence and the work that Red Hat has done with Linux. It was a little bit about not just improving or moving one company or one technology, but more about being the right way to share and think about the collective, and the power of what we can all accomplish together. We have RHEL now in space as well, right alongside the noodles. So that's what made me think about parallels with open source and the places that I've traveled.

Alexis:

That's a very beautiful way to explain open source and the benefits of it. And to explain why competitors can collaborate on something that even becomes a standard like Linux, that can run everywhere — even at Microsoft. I hope it will help people understand the role of open source in an ecosystem and why competitors can absolutely cooperate on building the community and the future standard, but still compete on the toppings.

Maria, you have an impressive background, with leadership roles in different geographies — Japan, the U.S., and now Latin America. How have these experiences shaped your leadership style, and what unique challenges and insights could you share with us?

Maria:

I also spent time in France. Some of these things were unintentional — my career has sort of been that way. I have found that not only being in different geos, but actually living there, understanding the language, the culture, the way of work, has influenced myself. So I also think they have left a mark on me.

Alexis:

Wait, wait, wait. You lived four years in Japan and you're telling us that you speak Japanese?

Maria:

I am not by any approach of the imagination fluent in Japanese — no way — even though I have given it my best efforts. But there's a lot more of the culture that is the language. Coming from Latin America, where it's a different way of communicating or sharing information — collaboration in itself is very direct and open and exciting and somewhat loud. In Japan it is much more quiet, subtle. It is a lot more thinking about the collective rather than the individual. That has been a great compare-and-contrast — two different forms of the spectrum.

And then in North America, that's really where the bulk of my career has been. So corporate America has been the staple of how I have moved. Working at Red Hat has been the space where we think more globally in terms of community and collaboration and the power of open source. That's how I feel much more at home at Red Hat with open source communities, because it does think about the power and the good of the collective, but also being very direct in proposing ideas and challenging each other and the status quo. That may be very French.

I find that it has been a great space to use all of what I have learned in different places. And yeah, I'm very, very happy to be back in Latin America, where I started my career and my preparation, in a region that is growing year after year — not just for Red Hat, but for many other companies. A region that can benefit very much from open source and the innovation that happens elsewhere, but also that happens in LATAM. A geo that has many challenges, both political and economical, but has a lot of people willing and able to try. A lot of the spirit of the underdog and a lot of the spirit of trying new things and not being afraid — sort of a there's-nothing-to-lose kind of way. I love being in that space. If you think about it, Latin America is sort of the startup of the rest of the geos, where North America and Europe would be like the most established, and then APAC comes in with very niche offerings. LATAM is very much the startup or incubator where many ideas happen.

Alexis:

It's very interesting. I've observed you working on topics that probably nobody wanted to take. Nobody wanted to take those challenges. And it seems that after some time, people were realizing that you were doing really great. Can you explain how it works? Can you explain how you are doing those things?

Maria:

Well, I have for a long time had an attitude of both being naive to the challenge, but also being just happy to be here. I started my career in Venezuela, very much a third-world country, where it was really hard to get into a very competitive university and have access to collaboration with research institutes all over the world. So I was very lucky to be in one of those. Anytime that I look back to where I was — and the place where I'm from no longer exists as I knew it — I think anything extra is gain.

So I usually do take on the hard, difficult assignments, because I have found so much reward in getting something done that was very hard or complicated. There's nothing like it. So I'm usually chasing that same feeling of: wow, we moved the needle. We really made an imprint here and we changed it for the better. And I selfishly learn a lot — I learn a lot, and I learn that I could do it. So I'm more emboldened the next time. I'm still naive to the next challenges that I take. But I know that persistence and hard work and collaboration and the spirit of learning from others really moves me forward.

Alexis:

Yeah, but there's something with that idea of being naive that I have trouble understanding. Can you tell me more? What happens to people that they start really working with each other, collaborating really well — that's not, I have trouble connecting that with being naive. So tell me more about that.

Maria:

Well, maybe the exact word is not just naive, but it's not letting the big challenge stop you. And not letting not seeing the full picture stop you either. Understanding that — and this is very true with open source — if you influence and collaborate with a collective and you continue to move forward, you can help shape the innovation. You can help shape the future. And that is very consistent, even if at the beginning you don't know exactly how hard it's going to be, or how long it's going to take, or how difficult the external challenges are going to be. Through being open and persistent, open to learning and growing and changing direction — pivoting as well — hard work pays off.

Alexis:

It's very interesting, because I've heard over the years a lot of product managers in tech having trouble interacting with engineering teams and getting what they wanted. Now you work in open source, and of course you cannot tell open source or the open source communities to do what you want. So it sounds like a no-problem for you. Tell me more about that — maybe other product managers can use that.

Maria:

No, that was a lesson hard-learned. I think that in my first few months at Red Hat — I joined over nine years ago as a product manager — I was a product manager at another company where I just created PRDs and MRDs (basically a document that says the system shall do X, Y, Z). That's really what I focused on: understanding the market, talking to customers, and then I would give that to my engineering team and wait until they told me they needed clarifications, and just give me a timeline of when it would be done based on a timeline that I gave them. So the ego was quite big, Alexis.

And then landing in an open source company, where it was: well, this is a nice-looking document. Yeah, we're not doing that right now. You need to go talk to the communities, et cetera. So I was like — I need to influence outside my own company. These are not really walls; these are more like lines in the sand that I can cross at any time, embed myself into other customer problems, really work with them, co-engineer, figure out exactly their use case. And then also collaborate with competitors and coopetitors to, again, together understand the problem and come up with a solution and then iterate on it.

That was new for me. It felt like an enormous amount of work. It felt like nothing I had done before. It felt like my ego was nowhere to be seen, and I was just in the mud wrestling to get going. However, the outcome after that is that the piece of code, the design, the documentation, whatever outcome that we had created and co-engineered together, went to market kind of right away. It made it to production in that moment. A new sense of wow, this is the way kind of came upon me, and I don't think I can go back.

I'm not interested in the ego of thinking that whatever I said goes — I had a lot of situations where whatever I said, and then I had to pay a third party to try my product and tell me the feedback. And then even with that feedback that I had to pay to get, it didn't actually resonate with customers the way I wanted. I'm not ready to have that feeling ever again. That was a huge waste of time. So if I have to work hard, iterate with communities, wrestle with competitors, partners, customers, to really move technology forward and move entire industries forward — that's a hard work that I am grateful to have. The outcome and the feeling of accomplishment is unlike anything I had ever experienced before.

Alexis:

I love it. And I can see how it led you to become a Chief Technology Officer for that geography you are in — because you're able to be very comfortable with the technology, talking directly with engineers inside your company and outside of it, and really wrestling with different customers or competitors to finally agree on the size of the cup, the noodle cup. That's pretty cool. Could you share a little bit about your approach to recruitment, and what strategy you find most effective for assembling a team?

Maria:

This is great, because I just recently had two recent hires that I'm extremely proud of finding. I take recruiting with: this is my job — not just outsourcing it to the HR team or the talent acquisition team or another recruiting firm. Understanding where I would like a team to be and to fit, and to see if those folks are also going to be a great fit for the current and existing team, and whether they're also going to come and catalyze the team and bring new perspectives based on where we want to go, is also very important.

I reach out — like anybody else does — to my network, within the company and outside. And then I usually try to find a diverse group of folks to help me with a strong panel that can not only challenge the applicants, but also challenge me in what they expect my team to be. I try to bring them in during the recruiting phase. If we're going to be collaborating in the future, we want them to feel valued, but also add value and help them grow. I invite the rest of the team and I'm happy to say I also tasked them with the opportunity to recruit and to help shape the positions we're in. So I take more time than I would want recruiting, but it usually pays off. I'm very happy about the team I'm putting together.

Alexis:

I hope they will listen to the episode and hear that you're saying it out loud to the world. That's pretty cool. Looking ahead, what are some of the key areas of focus for you and your team at Red Hat?

Maria:

I'm in the field. As a CTO I'm still part of the engineering organization. So what we are looking for are moments to co-engineer with customers. Beyond just the products that we have today and the open source communities we engage with today, we look to find and understand use cases of where the industry is going — telco, FSI, financial services, health and sciences, insurance companies, et cetera.

We try to come together and be a trusted partner, where customers can understand these new technologies and how they can affect or move the needle for their business. And then we create spaces — sometimes with competitors, sometimes not — for customers in the same vertical to come together and see how they're using our technologies, and other technologies in addition to that. They don't feel so lonely or alone following their own technical trajectories — they can build a roadmap that aligns not just with their business, but with adjacent businesses. We help create that community between customers as well, because sharing ideas this way is the way to move things forward. And selfishly, that also helps us validate where Red Hat is going, where we should be investing, where we see spaces where it makes sense for us to invest more, or ways in which we can be effective for other businesses.

Alexis:

And you are a CTO — will you say anything about AI? We are in the midst of the hype of AI, so is there something you are doing about it?

Maria:

I have been planting seeds about that since the very beginning. Even with the ramen story, I planted the seed and made allusions to: this is pretty much how Linux started. We made recent announcements just last week — we had Red Hat Summit in Denver. Some of those presentations are up on YouTube, releasing some new cool products and others in tech preview. One of the big announcements was RHEL AI.

Naming a product as a product manager is one of the hardest things to do. For us to call it Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and attach AI to that known and trusted brand means that we're very serious about moving into the AI space. And I think we're doing it in the most Red Hat way — in a way that is very authentic to the mission and vision of the company: of being a catalyst in communities of customers, partners, collaborators, to move it forward using open source.

We also made an announcement around a new invention called InstructLab, which helps modify large language models. That is really a novelty, because any other technique to train a model has been done at the inference stage — RAG, for example. But having the ability to influence a model itself, to change the actual model, is something that was not accessible to regular humans. You needed a data scientist to be able to do that. I really love that we're democratizing access to models. We're influencing — in this case, IBM — to open-source the Granite family of large language models. That's huge.

And then having a way for anyone to modify a model from their computer — like, you have a laptop, you can do this — is something that, if we see the current models available, even if they have 'open' in the name, you don't really know what's in there. Having models where the code is available openly cited with the data they were trained on, so you know exactly what they were trained on, and the ability for you to use it, modify it, train it with your data, and keep all of that private, is very compelling. So we're really hoping to catalyze this industry and excited about what's to come. Kind of the same as the beginning, like Momofuku Ando just trying to preserve a noodle — we're starting small and we are eager to see where this can go, being a little naive to how far it can go. All we have going for us is the experience that we've had with Linux. So that's really exciting, Alexis. I think we're at an inflection point here, and I'm happy to be part of it.

Alexis:

I love it, Maria. And that will be my last question. What advice would you give your younger self?

Maria:

Wow. I have a 16-year-old daughter that I give advice to. She looks just like me and likes things just like me, and sometimes I wish she wasn't so like me. But the advice that I tell her is sort of the same thing that I did: just work hard, continue to be authentic to who you are and what you believe. And then be open to feedback, open to learning. You will find places where you can continue to shine and places where you can continue to learn. And hopefully that will lead you to a fulfilling and happy life.

Alexis:

I love that. I continue to explore. That's beautiful. Thank you, Maria, for having joined the podcast today.

Maria:

Thank you. It's a pleasure.