A guy with a scarf

Julie Souza spent six years as Global Head of Sports at AWS, so if you worked in sports technology between 2020 and 2026 you probably met her in a pod at IBC or NAB, and she is now Executive in Residence at PwC. We crossed paths at many of those events and I always admired the energy, and that on stage she brought her whole self, humour and opinions included, which is rare for someone carrying a badge that size. I had her on A Guy With A Scarf this week, and I want to start with the test she ran on her own team.***"If we can't explain it in three big buckets, then there's not a story there."*** The buckets are the business problem, the solution deployed, and the outcome it drove with a number attached, and her warning for 2026 is that "we want an AI strategy" is landing on her desk in exactly the shape that "we want a locker room in the metaverse" landed four years ago.That metaverse brief came from a professional team, name withheld, and her first question was ***"why do you want to do that?"***, the answer was that it was the metaverse, so she asked about customer acquisition and the revenue stream, ***"and they sort of just blinked at me."*** Work backwards, she says, from what you are trying to do better, cheaper, faster or at greater scale, and the AI briefs she sees mostly arrive without any of those four words in them.I challenged her on the test, because the business lines I built that ran for a decade were built when nobody was measuring me. The horizon has to be long, she said: ***"If you're looking for quick wins, you might have a few of those, but I don't think then you're using it to its full power either."*** When the NFL changed its kickoff rule, the league and AWS ran the proposal through 10,000 simulated seasons to find a play that was less injurious and more exciting at once, and the AP reported in October 2025, using the NFL's own figures, that concussions fell 17% from 2023 to 2024. The proof on a programme like that arrives seasons in, so a quarterly review would have killed it in year one.On who should hold a multi-vendor solution together, her word is quarterback, ***"somebody you trust quarterbacking that"***, and on doing it all in-house: ***"If anybody's telling you they can do it all, that's probably not true."***On AI more widely she named two things: data centres becoming politically fraught in the US, and reports of frontier models jumping their guardrails, with no regulation in sight. To the argument that rules mean falling behind in the global race: ***"What are we racing toward? Like human extinction? Because I'm fine falling behind on that."*** On jobs, the usual line is that entry-level work goes and higher-judgement work remains, and her counter is that ***"how you know to make high judgment decisions is through experience."*** Stanford's "Canaries in the Coal Mine" paper, revised in August 2026 on ADP payroll data, finds 22 to 25 year olds in the most AI-exposed jobs 19% below where they would be against less-exposed peers, and no gap for experienced workers. I pushed back with the Google and Wikipedia panics, and with my laptop running a Claude Code project all day, and she replied that with Google you still wrote up your own analysis, while agentic AI does the writing up too, and for her the writing up is the thinking. Then she pointed out that I am building on decades of rigour and an eleven-year-old is not.She closed on live sport: ***"I don't think live sports can be disintermediated."*** Watch the video, and if you are working out what AI is for, write to me with the problem and the number you want to move, and I will tell you if it passes her test.Sources- AP via NBC Washington, 14 October 2025: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/sports/nfl/nfl-ai-predict-injuries-keep-players-healthier/4001576/- Stanford Digital Economy Lab, Canaries in the Coal Mine (rev. August 2026): https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publications/canaries-in-the-coal-mine

Paul Boustead, VP of Product Strategy at Dolby OptiView, walks through the Sports Intelligence demo on the stand at IBC 2026. What data the platform takes in and what it deliberately does not extract, exit risk as the first production use, why the obvious cliffs at halftime are the least interesting part, a cross-game recommendation engine, two personal-commentator prototypes, and the argument for lean-back personalisation over asking fans to configure their own experience.Recorded by Carlo De Marchis, A Guy With A Scarf. A Guy with a Scarf is collaborating with Dolby OptiView - Enabling live sports experiences that engage and captivate fans.

Dan Coffey, Director of Product at Dolby OptiView, recorded at 8am on the stand at IBC 2026 before the crowds arrived. The ads SDK that now works with any player, the Google Ad Manager certification, Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos with one-button up-conversion for SDR productions, configurable and synchronised latency, and the modular portfolio. Then the Sports Intelligence content intelligence demo: live transcription, event detection, excitement scores, mark in and out, auto-crop to vertical, rules-based automation to social, and plain-English search across a season's back catalogue.Recorded by Carlo De Marchis, A Guy With A Scarf. A Guy with a Scarf is collaborating with Dolby OptiView - Enabling live sports experiences that engage and captivate fans.

Giles Baker, SVP of Dolby Cloud Solutions, on the Dolby OptiView stand at IBC 2026 in Amsterdam. What changed in a year, why Dolby OptiView Ads is now certified with Google Ad Manager and separated from the player, the three stages of ad monetisation, sound as a personalisation layer, and where Dolby OptiView wants to be in three years.Recorded by Carlo De Marchis, A Guy With A Scarf. A Guy with a Scarf is collaborating with Dolby OptiView - Enabling live sports experiences that engage and captivate fans.

Mercury, Quicksilver Stream and a streaming platform you can change without rebuilding itSome months ago Tom Richardson of Mercury called me. He had read two of my articles, and one sentence in the second had caught the room's attention: "the stack is the product". We ended up doing strategy work together, so read what follows as coming from someone with a stake in the outcome.My guest on A Guy With A Scarf is Stephen Tallent, who founded Mercury in 1996 and carries the CEO and CTO roles together. He is an authentic product and technology person, and you can feel it in the interview: he attaches conditions to his own claims, names the tensions in Mercury's model openly, and makes no promise he cannot explain.Swapping a vendor without touching the appsA sports app on match night runs on Roku, Apple TV, connected TV, mobile and web, with authentication, video and analytics providers behind every client. Stephen puts the business logic in one set of APIs and lets the apps "focus on the pixels".His example is authentication. A provider will offer an SDK to drop into each app, which saves time at the start and ties you to that vendor. If it gets acquired, the change lands in every app at once. "The path of least resistance can very often be the worst decision for those client apps," he said.I pushed on whether this survives a real project. "In most cases, absolutely. Now it takes planning from the beginning."Where Quicksilver Stream came fromFor years big brands picked a video platform, hit its walls, and called Mercury to write the custom middleware around it. "That integration layer is basically everything," Stephen said. "That is the duct tape that's holding up these apps." Mercury waited until the same pain showed up at several customers, then built the common part into Quicksilver Stream. "We're developers and we're just trying to make our own life easier because we know the right way to do it."What intrigued me is that it is not yet-another-streaming-platform. It sits between the client apps and the vendors a customer chooses, so JW Player, Mux or an authentication provider can change underneath it.Lock-in, including to MercuryStephen prefers the word control to ownership. His claim of no lock-in, Mercury included, sounded bold from a vendor, so I challenged it. "If you provide a good product and you provide good service, they're gonna stay with you whether they have to or not." He then named the tension himself: "A customer needs control, but the platform vendor needs to be able to make money."When a client hires its own developers, Stephen says Mercury has supported that for a dozen customers and encourages it.A producer builds a page by typing a requestAt IBC in Amsterdam I built a database of what vendors said about AI. Mercury is my client, so I report only what I saw on screen. I described a feature I wanted, a producer trying a new page layout in plain language, and the team did it in front of me on the working platform. I had thought my idea was clever, and the feature already existed, so I felt a mix of embarrassment and surprise.Stephen's example is a scary movies page for October, built by an editor with no developer involved. The limit comes from him: "it may work when one person hits it." I have not load-tested anything, so his claim for game-time traffic stays his until a customer proves it at tip-off.Three questions for your own architectureWhich vendor swap would stall your roadmap today? What would your editors build if they could try five versions of a page, one per audience segment, without waiting for a developer? Who holds the keys to your endpoints on the day your current supplier is acquired?To see Quicksilver Stream, visit mercury.io and schedule a demo. If you want an introduction, write to me and tell me what you want to see.https://mercury.io/quicksilver

What must change when your team becomes too large to know everyone by name. Gabriella Vacca and I studied computer engineering together in Turin, where she was the more dedicated student, and she built an international career: Olivetti, Omnitel, Bouygues Telecom, Cingular and AT&T, ESPN Mobile, Gogo, ten years at Comcast and five years as CTO of Sky Italia until last July 2025. She left Italy with two suitcases and a plan to be home within a year and, thirty years later, she is based in Philadelphia leading a strategic advisory portfolio.The spine of the episode is that leading 200 people and leading 2,000 are two very different jobs, and the second one only works if you design the organization intentionally, with clear purpose. Values become infrastructure. When your organization has fewer than roughly 300 people, you know everyone, and the why can travel through you. As she put it, "it is easier to inspire your team with the why, rather than only the what and the how." Above that size, the why must be built into the organization. She uses the Gartner pyramid, adding a foundational values layer underneath and KPIs that serve both the tech org and the business.Transparency, defined properly, does not mean handing the business every report you produce. . That level of detail is too specific to be meaningful outside the organization. Her analogy is a visit to the doctor: do you need someone simply to read your lab scores; you need interpretation, empathy and a clear explanation of what the scores mean. Are you fine? Can you improve? Is there something serious to worry about? She put that value to the test in a meeting with lawyers present, when her own team admitted that it had chosen not to disclose a data point. She stopped the meeting and told the business stakeholders: "Please forgive for failing to uphold our commitment to transparency." A value becomes real the first time defending it publicly costs you something.Crossing the forest. Intended change is like crossing a forest you have never entered before, without survival training. You keep the destination in sight, bring the right equipment, surround yourself with people who have skills you do not have, act with humility, and clearly say what you know and what you do not. Knowing your own limits becomes part of the operation you lead. She needs seven hours of sleep, and during COVID at Comcast, while moving call centres and thousands of people to remote work, that fact shaped the plan: work shifts from day one and a designated backup for every team member, including herself, to keep operations running 24/7 if anyone became unavailable.“Live operations” (or ON SCREEN?) changes the discipline. In media, "the damage is already done. It's real time. You are on screen." At Sky that meant tracking near-miss KPIs, because once a failure has occurred, it can’t be undone; the near misses help prevent the next one. The 92% conversation. Growing up near Turin meant being measured against the best of the best, and learning that risk is personal, so failure feels personal too. Moving to the States rewrote that mindset into four words: "Movement is life. Movement is learning." Take calculated risk, and learn to be satisfied with 90% or 92%, because investing 100% of your energy on a single destination leaves every other opportunity unexplored.A swimmer, not a diver. She can dive deep when needed but doing so costs her the broader view. The role of a senior job is to make sense of complexity so other leaders can make sound decisions, including recognizing when the right technology decision is the wrong decision for the company.The reality of women at work. Gabriella hosts a nine-episode series of that name on the EveCareers Podcast Network. She defines luck as readiness plus opportunity plus the ability to say yes. Her view on where women stand in the workplace is shaped by two factors: the company culture and what each individual is willing to do within it. .

The Ex-LinkedIn now Shake Content CCO on the platform's credibility shift, why athletes are finally moving in, and why the person now carries the brandFor episode 58 of A Guy With A Scarf, summer edition, I spoke with Dani Markovits. Dani joined LinkedIn in 2021 as one of its first creator managers and stayed four years. Now he is CCO at Shake Content, a LinkedIn agency. Few people have watched the platform change from the inside and the outside the way he has.His headline point lands fast. LinkedIn stopped being the place you open only when you want a job. Ten years ago almost everyone logged in to hire or to be hired. Today people scroll it on the bus like TikTok. It became a mix of social feed, job market, and the room where professional conversations happen.The word Dani kept using was intention. People arrive ready to connect and talk business, which is why direct messages work there and fall flat on Instagram. Trust sits underneath all of it.On personality, his take is that you earn the right to go off-topic. Keep your expertise as the anchor, then let the human side show. "If you only share memes, if you only talk about music or about food, I don't think that's a recipe for success."Sport is arriving late, and that is the opportunity. When Dani pushed sport at LinkedIn, colleagues doubted the fit and athletes said the platform was "for boring people." That has flipped. Athletes want to invest, sit on boards, back causes. LinkedIn is where the audience wants to hear about the life beyond the pitch. They "don't wanna be known only as the tennis guy or as the football lady." And here they read their own comments, because they are speaking straight to decision-makers.I saw this in a bar in Torino. Alex Del Piero sat in front of me, talking for hours about family, business, investments, and cinema. Close to zero football. That is the version athletes bring to LinkedIn.Reach is not the metric. "You don't need a huge audience," Dani said. What matters is who you get in front of. He has seen athletes with small followings do very well.The biggest recent change is that LinkedIn now measures who is posting, alongside what they post. It judges whether the author has the credibility to speak on a topic. One football post, word for word, should travel further from me than from him. "It matters the credentials, it matters the earned experience." Reach can drop while engagement holds or improves, which means the matching is working.LinkedIn is finally serving creators too. A native creator marketplace, video monetization, a call-out feature. Brands now see that creators and experts drive the decisions, and in B2B they all live on LinkedIn.Shake Content puts the person ahead of the company page. The share of people who actually post on LinkedIn is in the low single digits, so the room to stand out is wide open. Dani works with founders, executives, and athletes on credibility and visibility, with the person first and the company page second.On the corporate side, the old fear that employees build their own brand at the company's expense is the wrong lens. Companies gain from association. Four years ago firms blocked employees from posting. Now they push them and hire on the strength of their LinkedIn activity. "The best people suited to speak about your company is your own employees." Cheaper, and more impactful. His caveat: anybody can do this. Not everybody should. There is no shortcut.Dani also launched his newsletter, "LinkedIn/actually," after years of telling everyone else to do the same.My position is clear. LinkedIn rewarding credibility over raw reach is the healthiest move it has made in years. It favors people who know their subject and show up as themselves.

The Microshifter's Guide to Fragmented WorkWelcome to our discussion on Microshifting: the new rhythm of work that aims to make your professional life "shorter, sharper, and more human". This practice is gaining traction, especially among solo professionals and Gen Z, and has been called the next evolution of flexible work.What is Microshifting?Microshifting is defined as the art and occasional struggle of working in shorter, intentional blocks of time, typically under six hours, instead of continuous stretches. It involves breaking the day into fragments, creating a "mosaic" rather than the linear 9-to-5 schedule of the past.For independent workers—creators, advisors, and thinkers—microshifting is often necessary for survival. It allows professionals to build around peaks of inspiration and align their work with personal rhythms, energy levels, and creativity, rather than against real life. This approach is seen by some as liberation, though others view it as fragmentation.The concept fits neatly into the new modular economy and the creator economy, where work involves short cycles, quick releases, and frequent recalibration. It signifies a cultural shift toward customizing work to fit the human, instead of forcing the human to fit the clock.The Choreography of FragmentationMicroshifting is not chaos; it is choreography. The author of the accompanying guide realized they were a Microshifter when they began working in bursts—a few hours of intense focus, a pause, another window of deep work, and sometimes a late block of writing.In this model, days are designed like a musical score with movements and pauses. Each block of time has its own specific start, end, and purpose, such as a creative block in the morning or a communication block in the early afternoon.The Freedom Trap and the Need for EdgesWhile the freedom is seductive, it presents a danger: flexibility, when unmanaged, becomes erosion. Without fixed corporate schedules, there is a risk of stretching time infinitely, leading to 15-hour days spent across five different tasks and four different moods.The key insight is that flexibility is not the opposite of structure; it needs structure to survive. Microshifting must involve "framed fragments," meaning that you must fiercely defend the edges where each work block begins and ends.A core challenge is the Cost of Fragmentation. Splitting the day requires extra effort to reconnect the dots, potentially fracturing the sense of flow and making the Microshifter feel perpetually "halfway through" everything. This risk means one might become incredibly responsive but slowly lose the ability to go deep, which requires time, boredom, and friction. To mature as a Microshifter, one must move from being merely flexible to being intentional.What the Science SaysThe principles underpinning Microshifting are supported by research on focus and recovery.• Productivity Peaks are Short: Behavioral data suggests that most people sustain true high-focus work for only about 2 to 3 hours per day, supporting the use of short, high-intensity blocks.• Breaks Improve Well-being: Studies indicate that micro-breaks (typically under 10 minutes) significantly reduce fatigue and increase vigor. Active micro-breaks, such as stretching or walking, can improve mental well-being and reduce musculoskeletal pain.• Autonomy is Key: The ability to take breaks and have control over one's time and rhythms is vital for sustainable performance.However, the science also presents warnings about excessive fragmentation:• Cognitive Load: Switching tasks frequently, even within short blocks, incurs a measurable switching cost, potentially consuming 10–20% of working time as the brain reorients.• Overwork Risk: When individuals have high control but low boundaries (like working flexible hours from home), they tend to work longer overall and struggle to detach, potentially leading to higher fatigue.

This week, I asked my ex-colleague Jim Irving about one of the biggest frustrations in streaming — finding what to watch. His new app, Recce, takes a surprisingly human approach to solving it.🎙️ Q: What is Recce?💬 Jim’s take:Finding what to watch has become one of the biggest pain points in media — and Recce wants to fix that by bringing trust back into recommendations.➡️ Recce is a movie and TV review app built around trusted recommendations — not algorithms, but real people you actually know.➡️ It digitizes the most natural discovery habit we all have: word of mouth. That moment in a café or pub when someone says, “You’ve got to see this.”➡️ Users can share, rate, and discuss shows within their communities while building their own curated watchlists.➡️ Through Recce Rewards, engagement is rewarded — since people create value on the platform, they also share in it through access to exclusive content and prizes.As Jim puts it: “We’re trying to digitize the most trusted way of finding great content — word of mouth.”📱 Recce goes on pre-order this week — a small but meaningful step towards a more personal way to discover what’s worth watching.

🎙️ Q: What are the traits and skills to get hired in our industry in 2026?💬 Chris’s take:The game of hiring has changed — and not always for the better.AI and automation aren’t necessarily improving recruitment; they’re exposing how broken and outdated many processes already were.➡️ Recognize that job hunting today can be demoralizing — applications often disappear into a black hole.➡️ Stop “job hunting” and start “job farming”: use your LinkedIn network as fertile ground. Those connections are your community, not random numbers.➡️ Productise yourself: craft your narrative — where you’ve been, where you are, where you want to go — and anchor it around what you truly love.➡️ And finally, don’t underestimate likability. Skills matter, but positivity and energy are what make people want to work with you.Chris puts it perfectly: “If you go in with years of experience but speak in a polluted way about where the industry is going, that’s going to put people off.”🎧 Watch the full 3-minute video on A Guy with a Scarf asks a question to… Chris Redmond.