WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.080 - I don't like big companies 00:00:01.080 --> 00:00:03.360 because I use Google as an example. 00:00:03.360 --> 00:00:05.880 If I went in maliciously as an SRE there, 00:00:05.880 --> 00:00:09.400 I don't think I could take down google.com for one full hour. 00:00:09.400 --> 00:00:12.120 So if I can't do that maliciously and intentionally, 00:00:12.120 --> 00:00:15.000 how much upside good am I gonna be able to do 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:16.320 in a place like that? 00:00:16.320 --> 00:00:17.400 Or is it a small business like, 00:00:17.400 --> 00:00:18.560 oh, if I screw this up enough, 00:00:18.560 --> 00:00:19.680 we don't have a company anymore? 00:00:19.680 --> 00:00:22.000 Right, that's the level of impact I wanna have. 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:24.160 Not that I'm setting out to screw up, 00:00:24.160 --> 00:00:26.040 but I wanna be able to materially change 00:00:26.040 --> 00:00:28.560 the fortunes of places I work if I do it right. 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:32.600 - Hello, hello, hello. 00:00:32.600 --> 00:00:36.120 Welcome to episode 32 of the Metacast Podcast. 00:00:36.120 --> 00:00:40.120 So today we have a special guest with us, Corey Quinn. 00:00:40.120 --> 00:00:42.960 Corey is well known in the cloud computing circles. 00:00:42.960 --> 00:00:46.520 He writes the last week in AWS newsletter. 00:00:46.520 --> 00:00:51.280 He has a screaming in the cloud podcast and awesome Twitter. 00:00:51.280 --> 00:00:54.160 If you don't know, go check it out at Quinnipig. 00:00:54.160 --> 00:00:56.320 We'll also list it in the show notes. 00:00:56.320 --> 00:00:58.440 But Corey, before we hand it over to you 00:00:58.440 --> 00:01:01.920 for a better introduction, I wanted to tell you, 00:01:01.920 --> 00:01:07.000 so Ilya and I, we worked in AWS together for five years. 00:01:07.000 --> 00:01:10.320 And then I was there for about like 12 years overall, right? 00:01:10.320 --> 00:01:13.000 So you probably know already in Amazon, 00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:15.520 there's that culture of the empty chair, 00:01:15.520 --> 00:01:18.360 which is a symbol in every meeting, 00:01:18.360 --> 00:01:20.320 the customer not being in the room, 00:01:20.320 --> 00:01:22.800 but every decision you take 00:01:22.800 --> 00:01:25.320 is supposed to be considering the customer 00:01:25.320 --> 00:01:27.840 who is not there in the room, hence the empty chair. 00:01:27.840 --> 00:01:28.800 - Yes, and then they move the empty chair 00:01:28.800 --> 00:01:30.800 to the CMO's office for two years, 00:01:30.800 --> 00:01:31.880 but that's besides the point. 00:01:31.880 --> 00:01:33.880 - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 00:01:33.880 --> 00:01:37.360 But I think for a lot of us, when we were building services 00:01:37.360 --> 00:01:40.360 and thinking about like big customer facing decisions, 00:01:40.360 --> 00:01:42.440 that chair was personified by you. 00:01:42.440 --> 00:01:44.440 And I'm not joking, yeah. 00:01:44.440 --> 00:01:45.920 - I would hope so on some level, 00:01:45.920 --> 00:01:47.920 because I think that's something that gets missed, 00:01:47.920 --> 00:01:49.920 is that I'm not coming up with this stuff 00:01:49.920 --> 00:01:52.000 necessarily out of thin air. 00:01:52.000 --> 00:01:55.000 I'm also usually not the only person 00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:58.000 who experiences something and has a certain reaction to it. 00:01:58.000 --> 00:01:58.920 I just have no filter. 00:01:58.920 --> 00:02:00.440 That's really all it is. 00:02:00.440 --> 00:02:05.600 - Yeah, and before I forget, we have Ilya, my co-host here. 00:02:05.600 --> 00:02:07.560 We were supposed to record yesterday, 00:02:07.560 --> 00:02:08.960 but thankfully we didn't have to 00:02:08.960 --> 00:02:11.720 because he would have been recording from a car. 00:02:11.720 --> 00:02:14.000 That would not have been nice for anybody. 00:02:14.000 --> 00:02:15.520 - Well, I don't mind if he records from a car, 00:02:15.520 --> 00:02:17.840 but could he at least slow down on some of those turns? 00:02:17.840 --> 00:02:20.040 My God, I'm starting to worry. 00:02:20.040 --> 00:02:22.800 - Let's do an actual formal intro of yourself. 00:02:22.800 --> 00:02:26.120 Let's tell us who you are, what you like doing. 00:02:26.120 --> 00:02:26.960 Actually, before we go there, 00:02:26.960 --> 00:02:30.040 I think we have to say that we were looking for words 00:02:30.040 --> 00:02:30.960 for how to introduce you, 00:02:30.960 --> 00:02:33.000 because I guess a lot of listeners for this podcast 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:35.640 will come from you when you hopefully retweeted this. 00:02:35.640 --> 00:02:38.360 But our listeners who are native to our podcast, 00:02:38.360 --> 00:02:40.240 not all of them will be familiar with your work 00:02:40.240 --> 00:02:42.880 and what you do, or even AWS, 00:02:42.880 --> 00:02:45.960 because they might be Oracle customers or you know, 00:02:45.960 --> 00:02:47.680 and they may be on threads, 00:02:47.680 --> 00:02:51.000 so they may have been missing on your persona altogether. 00:02:51.000 --> 00:02:52.960 But yesterday we asked ChatGPT, 00:02:52.960 --> 00:02:55.160 do you know who Corey Quinn is? 00:02:55.160 --> 00:02:57.280 And surprisingly, actually, ChatGPT, 00:02:57.280 --> 00:02:58.480 well, maybe not surprisingly, 00:02:58.480 --> 00:03:00.440 ChatGPT knew who you were. 00:03:00.440 --> 00:03:02.960 And he gave us a very good answer, 00:03:02.960 --> 00:03:05.080 saying that Corey Quinn is a well-known figure 00:03:05.080 --> 00:03:07.160 in cloud computing community, 00:03:07.160 --> 00:03:08.960 particularly in AWS, yada, yada, yada. 00:03:08.960 --> 00:03:12.000 It was very on point, like exactly what you do. 00:03:12.000 --> 00:03:15.080 And then we asked him to introduce Corey 00:03:15.080 --> 00:03:19.080 in Corey Quinn's snarky voice and tone. 00:03:19.080 --> 00:03:20.440 And that's what came out of it. 00:03:20.440 --> 00:03:21.520 Arnab, you want to read it? 00:03:21.520 --> 00:03:22.480 - Sure, yeah. 00:03:22.480 --> 00:03:26.920 Ladies, gentlemen, and all you lovely misconfigured S3 buckets out there, 00:03:26.920 --> 00:03:30.160 get around for a dose of sarcastic wisdom 00:03:30.160 --> 00:03:33.000 that's more cutting than an IM policy gone wrong. 00:03:33.000 --> 00:03:35.600 And there's more, but we'll stop there. 00:03:35.600 --> 00:03:37.600 And I think it's very on point, yeah. 00:03:37.600 --> 00:03:39.720 It definitely makes an attempt. 00:03:39.720 --> 00:03:41.920 I don't know that it quite gets there most of the time. 00:03:41.920 --> 00:03:45.280 Believe me, you're not the first person to try to get it to say things in my voice. 00:03:45.280 --> 00:03:47.520 It misses some of the nuance. 00:03:47.520 --> 00:03:51.840 And you know, honestly, I think that's probably a fair failure mode. 00:03:51.840 --> 00:03:52.960 I am Corey Quinn. 00:03:52.960 --> 00:03:55.520 I am the chief cloud economist at the Duckbill Group. 00:03:55.520 --> 00:03:58.560 I fix horrifying AWS bills for a living. 00:03:58.560 --> 00:04:02.560 I write the last week in AWS, a newsletter and accompanying podcast. 00:04:02.560 --> 00:04:05.680 I host the Screaming in the Cloud podcast that goes along with it. 00:04:05.680 --> 00:04:10.000 And all this really stems down from history as an engineer who just 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:14.640 finally got tired of not saying what I really thought and getting fired for it and figured, 00:04:14.640 --> 00:04:18.080 all right, what if I lean into this and embrace all the things that everyone who's known me for 00:04:18.080 --> 00:04:22.240 longer than 30 seconds has said would be my ultimate downfall, my personality. 00:04:22.240 --> 00:04:27.840 And seven years in, I consistently surprise myself by failing to get it too wrong. 00:04:27.840 --> 00:04:29.280 But there's always tomorrow. 00:04:29.280 --> 00:04:29.840 Yeah. 00:04:29.840 --> 00:04:34.400 But I think your personality is actually, and the authentic personality that, like you said, 00:04:34.400 --> 00:04:37.680 comes out on Twitter, on these blog posts and everywhere. 00:04:37.680 --> 00:04:43.200 That's actually part of the main draw, I feel, on the contrary of like not losing your job. 00:04:43.200 --> 00:04:44.240 Partially that. 00:04:44.240 --> 00:04:48.320 It's also because my largest customer is a single digit percentage of revenue. 00:04:48.320 --> 00:04:52.480 I don't have any external investors and I'm not an AWS partner. 00:04:52.480 --> 00:04:54.240 So really, no one can fire me. 00:04:54.240 --> 00:04:55.120 It's kind of great. 00:04:55.120 --> 00:04:55.680 Right. 00:04:55.680 --> 00:04:55.920 Yeah. 00:04:55.920 --> 00:04:57.920 Maybe let's start with a bit of background. 00:04:57.920 --> 00:04:58.960 What do you do, Corey? 00:04:58.960 --> 00:04:59.200 Yeah. 00:04:59.200 --> 00:05:00.960 What's a chief cloud economist? 00:05:00.960 --> 00:05:01.280 Sure. 00:05:01.280 --> 00:05:05.680 I talk to large companies that have expensive AWS billing problems, 00:05:05.680 --> 00:05:10.160 either that the bill is too large or that the bill is inscrutable or that it's hard to predict. 00:05:10.160 --> 00:05:15.600 And I believe firmly that cost and architecture in the cloud are one and the same. 00:05:15.600 --> 00:05:20.960 So there are engineering optimizations that get made and for minimal amounts of work can cause 00:05:20.960 --> 00:05:23.040 significant levels of cost savings. 00:05:23.040 --> 00:05:26.800 There's also ways to do allocation between different internal initiatives and figure out 00:05:26.800 --> 00:05:28.320 what projections are going to look like. 00:05:28.320 --> 00:05:32.800 And this becomes key, not just for your own internal budget purposes, but also for negotiating 00:05:32.800 --> 00:05:35.360 with AWS on those long-term contracts. 00:05:35.360 --> 00:05:38.240 That negotiation takes up about half of my consulting day. 00:05:38.240 --> 00:05:39.200 It's kind of fun. 00:05:39.200 --> 00:05:43.040 So is the economist, I guess, a bit of a misnomer because you actually do a lot of 00:05:43.040 --> 00:05:47.360 technical investigation that results in cost savings, right? 00:05:47.360 --> 00:05:47.840 Right. 00:05:47.840 --> 00:05:50.880 When I started doing this, no one else was really in the space in the same way. 00:05:50.880 --> 00:05:56.240 So I combined two words that are often misunderstood, cloud, meaning a bunch of other people's computers, 00:05:56.240 --> 00:06:00.640 and economist, meaning someone who claims to know a lot about money, but also dresses like a flood 00:06:00.640 --> 00:06:01.200 victim. 00:06:01.200 --> 00:06:05.680 So you smash the two of them together and suddenly no one knows what the hell I do or how to categorize 00:06:05.680 --> 00:06:05.840 me. 00:06:05.840 --> 00:06:07.760 And that was convenient for a time. 00:06:07.760 --> 00:06:12.560 When people didn't know what to call you, it became much more difficult to bucket you and 00:06:12.560 --> 00:06:14.240 thus dismiss you in some ways. 00:06:14.240 --> 00:06:15.600 And early on, that was important. 00:06:15.600 --> 00:06:20.400 And now you've established cloud economists as your own thing, because for me, at least, 00:06:20.400 --> 00:06:24.880 a cloud economist is almost synonymous with Corey Quinn, because I don't know any other cloud 00:06:24.880 --> 00:06:25.680 economists. 00:06:25.680 --> 00:06:26.400 So well done. 00:06:26.400 --> 00:06:31.040 I have found multiple companies hiring for the role with that title. 00:06:31.040 --> 00:06:34.880 There's now an AWS cloud economics division, which is kind of fun. 00:06:34.880 --> 00:06:39.520 I also met someone who apparently had a PhD in very similar aspect from 2012. 00:06:39.520 --> 00:06:40.400 And he's like, there's another one. 00:06:40.400 --> 00:06:41.840 I thought I was the only one. 00:06:41.840 --> 00:06:44.960 And if I'd bluffed just a little bit more, I probably could have wound up with a book deal 00:06:44.960 --> 00:06:45.280 out of it. 00:06:45.280 --> 00:06:46.160 But you know, here we are. 00:06:46.160 --> 00:06:47.600 So take us back a little bit. 00:06:47.600 --> 00:06:49.920 Like you said, you started as an engineer. 00:06:49.920 --> 00:06:51.680 How did you land up in that space? 00:06:51.680 --> 00:06:52.880 What were you doing? 00:06:52.880 --> 00:06:55.520 This is, I'm assuming before there was a cloud. 00:06:55.520 --> 00:06:55.920 Oh, yeah. 00:06:55.920 --> 00:06:58.640 I started off as a grumpy Unix systems administrator. 00:06:58.640 --> 00:07:00.320 And the job never really changed. 00:07:00.320 --> 00:07:01.280 People argue with that. 00:07:01.280 --> 00:07:03.760 Like, no, I'm a DevOps engineer, or I'm an SRE, 00:07:03.760 --> 00:07:05.440 or I'm a platform engineer. 00:07:05.440 --> 00:07:06.960 It's all the same job. 00:07:06.960 --> 00:07:07.920 The tools change. 00:07:07.920 --> 00:07:09.200 The methodologies change. 00:07:09.200 --> 00:07:10.800 But the responsibility doesn't. 00:07:10.800 --> 00:07:15.280 It's keep the things that plug into the wall, whether it's your wall or someone else's, 00:07:15.280 --> 00:07:15.760 running. 00:07:15.760 --> 00:07:21.360 Keep the site up and ideally be able to predict the future and not get it wrong. 00:07:21.360 --> 00:07:23.440 If you get everything right, no one knows you're there. 00:07:23.440 --> 00:07:25.440 If you get it wrong, everyone blames you. 00:07:25.440 --> 00:07:27.520 It's really the definition of a no-win job. 00:07:27.520 --> 00:07:28.960 That's infrastructure. 00:07:28.960 --> 00:07:30.160 And one thing led to another. 00:07:30.160 --> 00:07:34.080 I focused in different areas at different times of my career and finally wound up dealing 00:07:34.080 --> 00:07:34.800 with cloud. 00:07:34.800 --> 00:07:39.520 In my last job, I had yet again to deal with a surprise AWS bill inflicted on me by other 00:07:39.520 --> 00:07:40.240 departments. 00:07:40.240 --> 00:07:44.320 And I wish there was someone I could pay to make that expensive problem go away. 00:07:44.320 --> 00:07:44.960 Couldn't find it. 00:07:44.960 --> 00:07:49.360 So when I decided to hang out my own shingle and figure out what I was doing, this seemed 00:07:49.360 --> 00:07:51.440 like a decent business problem to take a whack at. 00:07:51.440 --> 00:07:52.960 Oh, that's very interesting. 00:07:52.960 --> 00:07:55.680 So were you employed by somebody in that job? 00:07:55.680 --> 00:07:56.080 Oh, yes. 00:07:56.080 --> 00:07:57.600 My last job was at BlackRock. 00:07:57.600 --> 00:08:02.560 My personality did not fit in as well as you might think in a large regulated finance company. 00:08:02.560 --> 00:08:05.520 Why did you choose to work here in the first place? 00:08:05.520 --> 00:08:07.200 Like you bought the startup I worked for. 00:08:07.200 --> 00:08:08.720 I was not consulted on this. 00:08:08.720 --> 00:08:10.960 Is BlackRock Ray Dalio's company? 00:08:10.960 --> 00:08:11.840 Is that the company? 00:08:11.840 --> 00:08:15.760 They are a giant finance company with a bunch of different divisions. 00:08:15.760 --> 00:08:17.920 So the answer to everything is it depends. 00:08:17.920 --> 00:08:21.200 One of the challenges I've always had with very large enterprises has been 00:08:21.200 --> 00:08:25.920 the lines of communication internally are challenging at the best of times. 00:08:25.920 --> 00:08:30.560 I'm not entirely kidding when I say that half my job these days is introducing Amazonians 00:08:30.560 --> 00:08:31.520 to one another. 00:08:31.520 --> 00:08:31.680 Yes. 00:08:31.680 --> 00:08:33.920 People are hard. 00:08:33.920 --> 00:08:35.840 They are always the hardest part of anything. 00:08:35.840 --> 00:08:38.160 Computers are at least deterministic, ideally. 00:08:38.160 --> 00:08:43.840 Yeah, we often talk about this ourselves now that we are outside that world. 00:08:43.840 --> 00:08:47.600 We can see where those shim lines are fractured. 00:08:47.600 --> 00:08:49.520 Let's say we're using something. 00:08:49.520 --> 00:08:51.200 I forget what it was, Ilya. 00:08:51.200 --> 00:08:53.520 Like something from Google the other day. 00:08:53.520 --> 00:08:58.880 And the sign up form was like completely unlike any other Google sign up form that I've ever seen. 00:08:58.880 --> 00:09:03.680 It was a Google Play Store form that could not recognize a phone without dashes. 00:09:03.680 --> 00:09:04.240 Yes. 00:09:04.240 --> 00:09:07.520 If I put the phone numbers with the dashes, it's like, no. 00:09:07.520 --> 00:09:09.280 And I'm like, this is Google? 00:09:09.280 --> 00:09:10.160 It was very strange. 00:09:10.160 --> 00:09:14.560 But it was immediately clear that these are like two different, completely different divisions. 00:09:14.560 --> 00:09:16.240 They don't know about each other and all that. 00:09:16.240 --> 00:09:16.480 Yeah. 00:09:16.480 --> 00:09:18.720 And this is normal in a big company. 00:09:18.720 --> 00:09:19.200 Oh, yeah. 00:09:19.200 --> 00:09:21.040 The forms drive me nuts on all these sites. 00:09:21.040 --> 00:09:24.960 One of the things that drives me nuts is AWS is on stage all the time talking about the value of 00:09:24.960 --> 00:09:28.560 data and personalization and understanding and knowing your customer. 00:09:28.560 --> 00:09:33.120 But I have to fill out the same giant pile of mandatory fields every time I want to attend 00:09:33.120 --> 00:09:34.480 an event or a webinar. 00:09:34.480 --> 00:09:35.680 And I've experimented with this. 00:09:35.680 --> 00:09:39.200 It does not matter at all what I fill out in those forms. 00:09:39.200 --> 00:09:42.400 I do not get any different outreach or treatment. 00:09:42.400 --> 00:09:47.600 Once I said I was a Swedish VC, I have gotten no startup pitches in Swedish. 00:09:47.600 --> 00:09:49.280 I don't know what to make of any of this. 00:09:49.280 --> 00:09:53.200 The problem that I have is not just the annoyance having to fill out the form, but it just feels 00:09:53.200 --> 00:09:58.320 disrespectful of if you're going to ask me a question, do me the service of listening to 00:09:58.320 --> 00:10:00.720 the answer, at least acting like it. 00:10:00.720 --> 00:10:01.840 But no, here we are. 00:10:01.840 --> 00:10:03.040 Marketing's hard. 00:10:03.040 --> 00:10:05.520 It's essentially like data gathering going on, right? 00:10:05.520 --> 00:10:09.360 And somebody has probably thought, okay, we'll end up using this data someday, somewhere, 00:10:09.360 --> 00:10:11.200 but nobody has used it yet. 00:10:11.200 --> 00:10:13.040 That seems to be a big push by the cloud providers. 00:10:13.040 --> 00:10:14.720 You need to collect all the data you can. 00:10:14.720 --> 00:10:15.120 Why? 00:10:15.120 --> 00:10:17.680 Because we charge you for gigabyte per month on that. 00:10:17.680 --> 00:10:19.440 So yeah, store all the data. 00:10:19.440 --> 00:10:22.800 That's probably not the actual reason, but it's hard to argue against it. 00:10:22.800 --> 00:10:23.760 Yeah. 00:10:23.760 --> 00:10:28.320 So Corey, one of the topics we like to talk about with our guests is because we recently 00:10:28.320 --> 00:10:32.320 jumped a big tech corporate ship to do our own thing. 00:10:32.320 --> 00:10:34.160 And you did the same thing seven years ago. 00:10:34.160 --> 00:10:37.120 You went from BlackRock into around your own consultancy. 00:10:37.120 --> 00:10:38.480 How did that shift happen? 00:10:38.480 --> 00:10:40.000 And yeah, we'd be curious to understand 00:10:40.000 --> 00:10:41.280 how the transition went. 00:10:41.280 --> 00:10:43.360 Oh, I got fired because of my personality. 00:10:43.360 --> 00:10:48.080 And at that point, I couldn't stomach the idea of doing the same thing yet again for different 00:10:48.080 --> 00:10:48.480 companies. 00:10:48.480 --> 00:10:53.040 Because let's face it, when you run the systems, it doesn't matter nearly as much as you might 00:10:53.040 --> 00:10:55.840 think what the company actually does. 00:10:55.840 --> 00:10:57.280 Are you selling boxes? 00:10:57.280 --> 00:10:58.640 Are you streaming bits? 00:10:58.640 --> 00:11:00.320 That's basically as far as it goes. 00:11:00.320 --> 00:11:02.560 What are the tolerances and constraints around things? 00:11:02.560 --> 00:11:07.120 And that problem just started to look the same again and again and again. 00:11:07.120 --> 00:11:11.600 What made me a good consultant was the same thing that made me an amazingly great employee 00:11:11.600 --> 00:11:15.040 for the first three months while I come in and everything's on fire. 00:11:15.040 --> 00:11:15.520 It's great. 00:11:15.520 --> 00:11:17.040 I know how to fix this. 00:11:17.040 --> 00:11:20.960 And sure enough, I would get to a point of a lot of these problems being fixed. 00:11:20.960 --> 00:11:24.000 And then, all right, now maintain it forever. 00:11:24.000 --> 00:11:25.280 That didn't work very well. 00:11:25.280 --> 00:11:29.760 So instead, I found myself in this unfortunate place of having to figure out just what the 00:11:29.760 --> 00:11:30.640 hell to do now. 00:11:30.640 --> 00:11:34.960 And then finding the fun problems involved me straying into other people's lanes. 00:11:34.960 --> 00:11:36.000 Not recommended. 00:11:36.000 --> 00:11:39.040 So did you find your, I think, co-founder, right? 00:11:39.040 --> 00:11:39.920 Business partner. 00:11:39.920 --> 00:11:40.160 Yes. 00:11:40.160 --> 00:11:40.560 Oh, yes. 00:11:40.560 --> 00:11:43.040 We've been friends for 15 years at this point. 00:11:43.040 --> 00:11:46.480 I think that people take the idea of business partners far too lightly. 00:11:46.480 --> 00:11:50.000 You see this with lightning dating for founders and whatnot. 00:11:50.000 --> 00:11:52.720 Realize it's like a marriage in a lot of different ways. 00:11:52.720 --> 00:11:55.120 You are forming a legal entity together. 00:11:55.120 --> 00:11:58.560 You are able to financially just ruin the other person. 00:11:58.560 --> 00:12:00.320 And you don't want them to be too much like you. 00:12:00.320 --> 00:12:02.640 Or you basically have two people doing the same thing. 00:12:02.640 --> 00:12:05.280 Mike and I are nothing alike in most ways. 00:12:05.280 --> 00:12:07.600 My first language spoken at home was sarcasm. 00:12:07.600 --> 00:12:10.160 Whereas Mike's love language is Microsoft Excel. 00:12:10.160 --> 00:12:14.240 But where we wind up aligning is that there's no daylight between us when it comes to our values. 00:12:14.240 --> 00:12:16.240 And that's one of those important things. 00:12:16.240 --> 00:12:20.240 Because if one of you believes in treating customers well and the other one believes in 00:12:20.240 --> 00:12:23.520 taking every penny you can get from customers this quarter, because who knows? 00:12:23.520 --> 00:12:24.800 Tomorrow may never come. 00:12:24.800 --> 00:12:26.480 You're going to have an awful lot of friction. 00:12:26.480 --> 00:12:30.960 It's important to be aligned on a lot of those baseline things before there's money on the table. 00:12:30.960 --> 00:12:32.720 So what was Mike doing at that time? 00:12:32.720 --> 00:12:35.760 How did you like convince to jump on and start this thing? 00:12:35.760 --> 00:12:40.240 He had just written a book on a practical monitoring was the title for O'Reilly. 00:12:40.240 --> 00:12:43.600 And he was an independent consultant focusing on the observability world. 00:12:43.600 --> 00:12:47.600 It turns out that if you really want to hate what you do for a living, write a book about it. 00:12:47.600 --> 00:12:50.320 That convinces you that you want to go find something else. 00:12:50.320 --> 00:12:52.320 So I convinced him to come run this place. 00:12:52.320 --> 00:12:54.400 And we wound up merging a new entity. 00:12:54.400 --> 00:12:55.600 And here we are. 00:12:55.600 --> 00:12:56.240 So hold on. 00:12:56.240 --> 00:12:59.120 What is it in writing a book that you hate what you do? 00:12:59.120 --> 00:13:00.640 Because I've just written a book, so... 00:13:00.640 --> 00:13:03.520 Common misconception is that people want to write a book. 00:13:03.520 --> 00:13:05.360 I don't think that's actually true. 00:13:05.360 --> 00:13:07.920 I think they want to have written a book. 00:13:07.920 --> 00:13:14.480 So I wound up figuring out one day that I want to do it, but I don't have that kind of attention span or that number of words in me. 00:13:14.480 --> 00:13:18.080 And I believed that for a long time until last December for the holidays. 00:13:18.080 --> 00:13:26.080 Mike and my wife wound up and a few friends wound up pitching in and buying me a series of books, leather bound, called The Complete Works of Corey Quinn. 00:13:26.080 --> 00:13:29.200 This is just a printout of my tweets from 2021. 00:13:29.200 --> 00:13:30.960 It's a multi-volume set. 00:13:30.960 --> 00:13:32.080 And it's psychotic. 00:13:32.080 --> 00:13:33.840 It's a list of all the stuff I put out there. 00:13:33.840 --> 00:13:35.200 It's over a million words. 00:13:35.200 --> 00:13:36.560 I guess I did write a book. 00:13:36.560 --> 00:13:39.520 Can you open the random page from the book on your desk and read it? 00:13:39.520 --> 00:13:41.040 Oh, we could absolutely do that. 00:13:41.040 --> 00:13:41.920 It doesn't matter. 00:13:41.920 --> 00:13:45.440 There are times I wind up putting all kinds of weird pictures up there. 00:13:45.440 --> 00:13:47.600 They turned out the retweets, all the rest. 00:13:47.600 --> 00:13:51.440 Everything I put out there, like pick any random day and look at me on Twitter. 00:13:51.440 --> 00:13:52.800 No, we're not going to call it X. 00:13:52.800 --> 00:13:53.920 And that's what it turned into. 00:13:53.920 --> 00:13:54.640 Weird stuff. 00:13:54.640 --> 00:13:59.280 Do you know that book, "Shit My Dad Says" or "Shit My Dad Tweets" or something like that? 00:13:59.280 --> 00:13:59.840 Oh yeah, it's funny. 00:13:59.840 --> 00:14:03.120 In fact, the picture I just pulled up there was a picture that I captioned that someone had. 00:14:03.120 --> 00:14:05.280 This is back in the early days of the pandemic. 00:14:05.280 --> 00:14:06.960 It was a Rorschach plot on a mask. 00:14:06.960 --> 00:14:11.120 And my caption was, "Ooh, I can buy a mask with an awesome image of my parents fighting on it." 00:14:11.120 --> 00:14:12.400 Yeah, you know, fun stuff. 00:14:12.400 --> 00:14:16.240 Just the psychotic stuff that pops into my head I never had an outlet for before. 00:14:16.240 --> 00:14:17.600 Well, I do now. 00:14:17.600 --> 00:14:19.760 At least I did until a jackass bought it. 00:14:19.760 --> 00:14:21.120 I love this idea of the book. 00:14:21.120 --> 00:14:22.400 Is there a great essence? 00:14:22.400 --> 00:14:26.640 Are there like likes and retweet counts and all that on there? 00:14:26.640 --> 00:14:29.600 No, I pay almost no attention to that because my jokes are for me. 00:14:29.600 --> 00:14:33.440 I care a lot more about, is this humorous to me? 00:14:33.440 --> 00:14:34.400 Does it work? 00:14:34.400 --> 00:14:35.440 It's not for everyone. 00:14:35.440 --> 00:14:38.560 And I think that's something that a lot of people miss when they're trying to find their voices. 00:14:38.560 --> 00:14:40.080 They try to appeal to everyone. 00:14:40.080 --> 00:14:42.400 In doing that, you're going to appeal to no one. 00:14:42.400 --> 00:14:45.680 Also, no matter what you do, some people are going to just flat out not like you. 00:14:45.680 --> 00:14:49.600 And if you're a people pleaser, that gets unfortunate, but you also can't avoid it. 00:14:49.600 --> 00:14:53.760 So you have to figure at that point, do you want people to dislike you for who you actually are, 00:14:53.760 --> 00:14:54.880 for who you pretend to be? 00:14:54.880 --> 00:14:56.400 For me, it wasn't much of a choice. 00:14:56.400 --> 00:15:00.240 So do you have a setup like Greatest Hits there for yourself? 00:15:00.240 --> 00:15:01.280 Not particularly. 00:15:01.280 --> 00:15:05.920 I'm not one of those who sits alone at night chortling at my own jokes and how clever I've been. 00:15:05.920 --> 00:15:08.000 So I'm curious when you set out to write a joke. 00:15:08.000 --> 00:15:12.960 So first of all, is there a routine or do you just like randomly do it whenever an inspiration 00:15:12.960 --> 00:15:16.480 comes or you have like a specific time and day or something? 00:15:16.480 --> 00:15:22.400 I tend to take the perspective of just like whenever I wind up working on some particular 00:15:22.400 --> 00:15:26.880 area of sitting down to write a blog post or whatnot, or coming up with anything. 00:15:26.880 --> 00:15:28.240 A blank page is scary. 00:15:28.240 --> 00:15:29.680 It doesn't give you a whole lot. 00:15:29.680 --> 00:15:32.240 Most of my best humor comes from riffing off of other people. 00:15:32.240 --> 00:15:34.720 My humor, I think, took a bit of a dive during the pandemic, 00:15:34.720 --> 00:15:39.120 just because I wasn't in social settings with people for a while where things come up. 00:15:39.120 --> 00:15:41.840 And like you say something and someone misunderstands like, 00:15:41.840 --> 00:15:44.400 "Sorry, I thought you said that Route 53 was a database." 00:15:44.400 --> 00:15:46.560 It's like, "That's good. It is now." 00:15:46.560 --> 00:15:53.120 It's the weird one-off conversations that hit and you just jot the idea down and investigate it later. 00:15:53.120 --> 00:15:58.160 That might have been actually one of the first few things where I knew your name before because 00:15:58.160 --> 00:16:03.680 I was already working at AWS, but that the Route 53, like use it as a database post, 00:16:03.680 --> 00:16:08.720 that got me hooked into the whole like the podcast and all the newsletter and all that. 00:16:08.720 --> 00:16:09.520 That was awesome. 00:16:09.520 --> 00:16:13.840 I mean, at some level, I realized that anything can become a database if you hold it wrong and 00:16:13.840 --> 00:16:16.960 take a sufficiently liberal view of what a database is. 00:16:16.960 --> 00:16:21.440 I mean, hell, you have information I can ask you about. Congratulations, you're a database. 00:16:21.440 --> 00:16:24.960 Yeah, we should link to that episode from our show notes because I remember that was the very 00:16:24.960 --> 00:16:29.920 first episode I listened to because you just kept talking about Route 53 as a database on Twitter. 00:16:29.920 --> 00:16:31.680 I'm like, "What is he talking about?" 00:16:31.680 --> 00:16:34.960 Yeah, because you were not explaining what it was, you were just using it as a side thing, right? 00:16:34.960 --> 00:16:38.960 This was a common problem, by the way, early on because when I started independent consulting 00:16:38.960 --> 00:16:43.360 seven years ago, I had something like 1500 Twitter followers and it had taken me seven 00:16:43.360 --> 00:16:46.800 years to get there. These were mostly people who had seen me talk at conferences and who I knew. 00:16:46.800 --> 00:16:51.200 They had the pre-existing context where I could say something and have the implicit 00:16:51.200 --> 00:16:56.000 assumption that everyone reading this already knew who I was, my shtick and the rest. 00:16:56.000 --> 00:17:01.200 And at some point you grow beyond your own sphere when your audience gets big enough and no one 00:17:01.200 --> 00:17:06.640 has the context. People look at it now and think, "This guy's a fool if he thinks that's going to 00:17:06.640 --> 00:17:11.680 work as a database." Well, no kidding. I found that out when I had to break character when I saw a 00:17:11.680 --> 00:17:15.600 Reddit post once upon a time and someone saying, "Yeah, I get he's kidding, but this actually doesn't 00:17:15.600 --> 00:17:20.880 sound like a terrible idea." It's like, "Hi, let me explain to you exactly why it is." Because we did 00:17:20.880 --> 00:17:27.760 this in 2009 in production to figure out which rack servers lived on and which server a VM lived on. 00:17:27.760 --> 00:17:32.080 There are better tools for this job. What is the problem you're attempting to solve for? 00:17:32.080 --> 00:17:36.880 Yeah, I guess basically what happens here is that your early followers who have been with you for 00:17:36.880 --> 00:17:41.680 years, they know all the context and they know what's joke, what's not, and they also kind of get the 00:17:41.680 --> 00:17:46.960 jokes, I guess, at the deeper level. But then some of the newer people, they actually might come to you 00:17:46.960 --> 00:17:51.760 almost like a TikTok consumer, right? You just like, saw it, tweet, laughed at it, swiped, go next. 00:17:51.760 --> 00:17:56.880 Do you think this changed what kind of engagement you have? I don't want to use the term engagement in 00:17:56.880 --> 00:18:01.440 that kind of TikTok, Instagram way, but more like, just to give you an example, podcast usually gives 00:18:01.440 --> 00:18:06.080 a lot deeper engagement with people because they would write you like a very long email. They get 00:18:06.080 --> 00:18:11.600 very intimately connected with you, whereas tweets might be more kind of ephemeral. I'm curious if you 00:18:11.600 --> 00:18:17.600 see a different level of that kind of connectedness with your early fans versus people who came after 00:18:17.600 --> 00:18:22.240 the first 1500s. Oh, yeah. I've had my DMs open for almost the entire time. And because it's, if 00:18:22.240 --> 00:18:27.040 people are actually curious about something, I am thrilled to wind up entertaining anything. It still 00:18:27.040 --> 00:18:31.360 surprises me. Even talking to Amazonians from time to time, like, I really didn't like that thing 00:18:31.360 --> 00:18:35.440 you wrote, but I didn't want to say it because I didn't want you to drag me in public. It's like, 00:18:35.440 --> 00:18:41.840 you've got how many years of history now to look back on and never see me doing that unless you're Larry 00:18:41.840 --> 00:18:49.680 Ellison. What exactly? Like, yeah, that's it. Some random software engineer for some service in AWS. 00:18:49.680 --> 00:18:53.840 Yeah, that's what I'm going to cash all this in for just to make you look like an idiot. Yeah, that's 00:18:53.840 --> 00:18:59.360 going to go well. No. And the biggest problem I run into with most of the stuff I put out is silence. 00:18:59.360 --> 00:19:03.840 I don't get a whole lot of feedback on certain things. If you hit reply to my email newsletter that 00:19:03.840 --> 00:19:08.320 goes to something like 32,000 people now, it goes straight to my inbox because less than a dozen 00:19:08.320 --> 00:19:13.200 people do it on any given week. That's easy to work with. The podcast, for the first six months 00:19:13.200 --> 00:19:18.000 that I ran that thing, I was half convinced I'd forgotten to turn on the microphone or something. 00:19:18.000 --> 00:19:22.480 Then I went to a conference and a lot of people talked about it. And it was, okay, that's interesting. 00:19:22.480 --> 00:19:27.040 My theory is that anyone can send an email. So at least it's easier to hit reply. And I send emails 00:19:27.040 --> 00:19:31.280 too. I'll give them a piece of my mind. But writing to someone about a podcast feels different. It feels 00:19:31.280 --> 00:19:36.880 like you're calling into a radio show. And who does that? Well, lunatics. And most people who 00:19:36.880 --> 00:19:40.720 aren't on Twitter don't self-identify as lunatics. So it wasn't the way to go. 00:19:40.720 --> 00:19:42.080 Why do you think they're lunatics? 00:19:42.080 --> 00:19:46.560 Have you listened to AM radio shows? My God, the people who call in sound deranged. Like, 00:19:46.560 --> 00:19:50.320 I don't want to sound like that. I'm not going to call in. I'm just going to roll my eyes and keep 00:19:50.320 --> 00:19:56.160 on driving down the road. What I think we've seen with our show, but also with some of our previous 00:19:56.160 --> 00:20:00.960 guests, is people who actually do write an email for a podcast host, it's almost like a letter. 00:20:00.960 --> 00:20:04.080 So it's almost like you read a book, especially if you listen to multiple episodes, 00:20:04.080 --> 00:20:08.560 and then you finally decide, well, I have something to say to this author and I'm going to write a 00:20:08.560 --> 00:20:14.160 letter. And it ends up being like two pages long email full of praise or like some questions and all 00:20:14.160 --> 00:20:18.880 of that. And it feels super weird. Like you're taking a risk to do that as well. Yes. And because 00:20:18.880 --> 00:20:22.240 no one does it. And there's also the question having, before I started this stuff, I used to do 00:20:22.240 --> 00:20:26.960 that myself from time to time. And the vast majority of the time I got no answer to it. And it was, 00:20:26.960 --> 00:20:31.280 well, okay, at least I got it off my chest. I'd said what I needed to say. Always polite. I've 00:20:31.280 --> 00:20:34.960 never felt the need to reach out to someone and tell them I hate what they're doing. That just, 00:20:34.960 --> 00:20:39.440 what am I possibly going to achieve by doing that? I'm just going to be a jerk and make someone's day 00:20:39.440 --> 00:20:45.520 a little bit worse. But I find that it's an effort investment. And do you wind up getting a response? 00:20:45.520 --> 00:20:50.320 Oh God, do I sound like a lunatic, some sort of parasocial creeper or something if I wind up sending 00:20:50.320 --> 00:20:55.840 this? And the answer for most people is absolutely not. One thing I feel like to frame it in terms of 00:20:55.840 --> 00:21:01.280 engagement that I have noticed as well is the way that I engage with large brands, with the internet, 00:21:01.280 --> 00:21:06.480 et cetera, is not something I would recommend because I got it wrong a lot when I was starting 00:21:06.480 --> 00:21:11.360 out down this path. The failure mode of clever is asshole, as John Scalzi is famous for saying. 00:21:11.360 --> 00:21:16.800 And if you get it wrong in this direction, you're just being mean. I've had a number of times 00:21:16.800 --> 00:21:21.280 I've had to jump in to DM someone like, "Hey, heads up. I just want you to be aware of how this might 00:21:21.280 --> 00:21:24.960 be coming across and you probably don't see it because I didn't. The first time I made a joke 00:21:24.960 --> 00:21:29.920 very similar. Let me learn from my experience so you don't have to make these mistakes on your own." 00:21:29.920 --> 00:21:33.040 And people usually respond to that pretty well. If you call them out in public, 00:21:33.040 --> 00:21:36.640 they feel the need to double down and get defensive, which is never the right move. 00:21:36.640 --> 00:21:41.680 Now, we had a few questions like this later on, but let's just like get started here. 00:21:41.680 --> 00:21:45.360 Did any company or any HR or somebody get back to you saying like, 00:21:45.360 --> 00:21:50.480 take this down or edit it or something like that? If so, like how did you handle that? 00:21:50.480 --> 00:21:55.040 No, I don't work for them. If anything, like the HR only is focused internally on employees. 00:21:55.040 --> 00:21:57.920 You'll have people who mean well, who will reach out and say, "I don't know if that landed the way 00:21:57.920 --> 00:22:02.800 you think it will." But I've never gotten a letter from someone's legal department threatening me for 00:22:02.800 --> 00:22:09.760 anything that I've said. I have a pretty good sense of where the line is in that respect. And it stops 00:22:09.760 --> 00:22:14.960 well before we get into the defamation territory. So instead, it's much more about people reaching 00:22:14.960 --> 00:22:19.920 out as individuals. I did have, for example, Forrester DM me once when I was talking about 00:22:19.920 --> 00:22:24.000 some stuff that they put in one of their reports that someone had posted. And they said, "Well, 00:22:24.000 --> 00:22:28.960 posting screenshots of this is a violation of the agreement that we have for publishing these. It's 00:22:28.960 --> 00:22:34.240 great. One of your customers with whom you have an agreement published this. And I certainly didn't 00:22:34.240 --> 00:22:39.040 agree to anything you say. It's on the internet. Screenshots are generally fair view for this. 00:22:39.040 --> 00:22:42.320 So have a nice day." And they didn't bug me again. 00:22:42.320 --> 00:22:47.520 Right. Did you ever have to consult legal when you were about to post something? Like, 00:22:47.520 --> 00:22:50.640 how do you know where that line is? Because legal is very complicated. 00:22:50.640 --> 00:22:58.320 I've noticed that. So I have been, for the last 15 years, my wife, as I've known her, 00:22:58.320 --> 00:23:03.120 she's been an attorney the entire time. She used to be a litigator. She's now in corporate litigation, 00:23:03.120 --> 00:23:08.000 as well as a lot of contract work. She's one of those high powered lawyers, like much of one of those 00:23:08.000 --> 00:23:12.720 schools that people aspire to go to. Obama was one of her law professors. I'm just some schlub with 00:23:12.720 --> 00:23:17.440 an eighth grade education, but she's actually impressive. So you pick up a lot of this stuff 00:23:17.440 --> 00:23:22.480 osmotically. You have a lot of conversations over dinner about a lot of germane topics, 00:23:22.480 --> 00:23:27.280 assuming you're both interested in that sort of thing. And it helps identify at least a framework 00:23:27.280 --> 00:23:33.040 to think about these things. For actual questions I've got on these things, we do have attorneys that 00:23:33.040 --> 00:23:37.040 we wind up paying for this sort of thing, but I almost never need them at this stage. 00:23:37.040 --> 00:23:40.720 Because if it's close enough to the edge that I need to get a legal opinion, 00:23:40.720 --> 00:23:44.400 don't go with it. The joke is almost certainly not worth it. Find a better one. 00:23:44.400 --> 00:23:48.400 Right. Let's go back a little bit. You were talking about how, before we got here, 00:23:48.400 --> 00:23:52.800 like how you knew Mike already and he jumped on, you decided to. 00:23:52.800 --> 00:23:55.920 I'm really curious about the name Duck Bill. So what's that from? 00:23:55.920 --> 00:24:01.200 The Duck Bill Platypus is the mascot, Billy the Platypus for the newsletter and the rest. 00:24:01.200 --> 00:24:04.880 And I came up with that before I came up with the name for the company, 00:24:04.880 --> 00:24:10.560 because it amused me. I wanted a cartoon animal I could have fun with and not get yelled at for. 00:24:10.560 --> 00:24:15.920 And the Platypus is an inherently ridiculous animal. So why not? And it's as good as any other when it 00:24:15.920 --> 00:24:20.560 comes to these things. And then when Mike and I decided the future might be us joining the company, 00:24:20.560 --> 00:24:24.720 it's like, well, what do we call it? Like where that kitchen just looks up is the Duck Bill Group. 00:24:24.720 --> 00:24:26.080 Sold. Works for me. 00:24:26.080 --> 00:24:31.200 Awesome. And where are you at today? Like how many employees do you have? What do various people do? 00:24:31.200 --> 00:24:38.080 Number seven, just signed an agreement. More to come on that in the near future. We've been as large as 12 or 13. 00:24:38.080 --> 00:24:42.080 But we're in that fun place where we're completely bootstrapped, which means we have this ancient, 00:24:42.080 --> 00:24:45.920 old timey business model where we make more money than we spend every month. 00:24:45.920 --> 00:24:50.240 And that means that we have to be able to grow organically. And if you build out a services team 00:24:50.240 --> 00:24:54.880 in the wrong ways, you start having serious concerns. It comes down to utilization. We never 00:24:54.880 --> 00:25:00.240 bill our clients by the hour, for example, but there's a certain cycle of time where every month 00:25:00.240 --> 00:25:06.080 certain things have to be paid, like payroll and our AWS bill and whatnot. And at some point, 00:25:06.080 --> 00:25:09.360 you need to be able to project these things. And people sitting around idle for too long 00:25:09.360 --> 00:25:12.960 becomes a problem for the business. But that also means if you don't have the capacity, 00:25:12.960 --> 00:25:17.200 you can't take work that suddenly comes thundering in. It's a constant balancing act. I think this is 00:25:17.200 --> 00:25:22.160 part of the reason that people love SaaS so much. Scale is trivial and easy to solve for, 00:25:22.160 --> 00:25:25.920 right? Until it's very much not. But at least there, there are clear cut solutions. 00:25:25.920 --> 00:25:29.760 I would like to ask you the question that you asked Andreas Wittig on your podcast. 00:25:29.760 --> 00:25:33.680 Did you ever consider going into product space, maybe like automating what you do 00:25:33.680 --> 00:25:37.120 and making a product out of it, or venture into the product area that scales 00:25:37.120 --> 00:25:40.000 nonlinearly compared to services business? 00:25:40.000 --> 00:25:42.960 I considered doing that at the beginning. I thought that's the direction I was going in. 00:25:42.960 --> 00:25:46.160 But the problem that I've discovered across the board, when it comes to 00:25:46.160 --> 00:25:54.560 at least AWS billing optimization, is that it is not something that is nearly as math and API driven 00:25:54.560 --> 00:26:02.880 as you would think. It is overwhelmingly dictated by psychology. It's a people problem. And there is no API 00:26:02.880 --> 00:26:07.920 legally that you can install in people that makes them all behave a certain way, or you can address them 00:26:07.920 --> 00:26:13.440 programmatically. It's things that make logical mathematical sense. Like, okay, this is less of a 00:26:13.440 --> 00:26:18.640 problem these days, but earlier on, we talked to a customer. Great. You should buy $18 million of 00:26:18.640 --> 00:26:23.200 reserve instances this month. Go. But they'll sit there and they'll hesitate because it's more money than 00:26:23.200 --> 00:26:28.640 they'll likely see in their career. And if they screw it up, that feels like a dangerous thing. 00:26:28.640 --> 00:26:33.760 So they don't. But they should, because they're going to be spending that money one way or the other. 00:26:33.760 --> 00:26:39.280 You might as well do it at a discount. But the psychology of it is fascinating. One of my personal 00:26:39.280 --> 00:26:45.360 favorite areas is the sense people have around loss aversion. People would much rather have 95% 00:26:45.360 --> 00:26:51.440 coverage of their spend than 102%. Now, 102% is mathematically going to be better for them 00:26:51.440 --> 00:26:56.000 regardless, but they are going to freak out about the overspend. Far more than they will about not 00:26:56.000 --> 00:26:57.920 having spent enough. It's kind of weird. 00:26:57.920 --> 00:27:02.240 Is it the prospect theory that Daniel Kahneman was talking about? I think he got the Nobel Prize for 00:27:02.240 --> 00:27:07.680 this where it's like people are, I forgot the number, but almost like 10x more prone to be 00:27:07.680 --> 00:27:12.960 risk averse. I guess the risk affects them 10 times more. Yeah, loss aversion specifically. Yes, 00:27:12.960 --> 00:27:17.760 it's partially that. It also flips in its head in some ways for corporate entities. If I told you right 00:27:17.760 --> 00:27:22.240 now that you need to come up with $1,000 for something and you can either make it additionally, 00:27:22.240 --> 00:27:28.320 or you can cut your cost to come up with it, people will by and large bias very heavily as individuals 00:27:28.320 --> 00:27:33.040 toward cutting costs. It's easier to cut Netflix and stop eating out than it is to wind up getting 00:27:33.040 --> 00:27:38.640 another job or negotiating with your boss for a raise or coming up with a side hustle. Companies, 00:27:38.640 --> 00:27:43.040 on the other hand, are optimized inherently towards growing revenue, entering new markets, 00:27:43.040 --> 00:27:47.760 building things and boosting their returns. Cost optimization is one of those things you feel 00:27:47.760 --> 00:27:50.880 like you should do on some level, especially when the market turns and people suddenly care 00:27:50.880 --> 00:27:56.160 about it a lot. But you can spend all your time optimizing costs or working on security or buying 00:27:56.160 --> 00:28:01.120 fire insurance for your building, but it's not going to move you one inch toward your next actual 00:28:01.120 --> 00:28:05.840 business milestone. It might keep you afloat long enough to do those things and you need to do those 00:28:05.840 --> 00:28:10.800 things, but it doesn't generate value directly on its own. So do I understand correctly that businesses 00:28:10.800 --> 00:28:16.240 are inherently optimized for maximizing revenue and growth, whereas people who work in those businesses, 00:28:16.240 --> 00:28:20.800 they are wired to be loss averse and that creates kind of that problem? 00:28:20.800 --> 00:28:27.520 As individuals, yes. For example, there are two reactions and it's differentiated entirely between 00:28:27.520 --> 00:28:34.960 is this corporate money or is this personal money? $50 for a hamburger, go screw yourself. $50 for a 00:28:34.960 --> 00:28:40.240 hamburger, I'm going to need a receipt. People treat company money differently, as they should. One of the 00:28:40.240 --> 00:28:44.480 most toxic pieces of advice I've ever heard people give around expense reporting and all right, 00:28:44.480 --> 00:28:49.920 you have a corporate card. How do I decide what to spend this? Treat it like it's your personal money. 00:28:49.920 --> 00:28:54.000 You understand not everyone comes from the same background, right? There are people on food stamps 00:28:54.000 --> 00:28:57.360 and there are people with trust funds that you're telling this to, and they're going to have very 00:28:57.360 --> 00:29:01.600 different approaches to how this stuff works. In my case, it is my money. It's just a question 00:29:01.600 --> 00:29:05.680 of what pocket it comes out of, but you wind up building mental frameworks to think about these 00:29:05.680 --> 00:29:11.680 things and reason about them. So you said that you are fully bootstrapped and we admire that we are fully 00:29:11.680 --> 00:29:17.040 bootstrapped. All of our previous guests were fully bootstrapped. Well, we are more like socked up right 00:29:17.040 --> 00:29:20.960 now. We're not bootstrapped yet, but we're hoping to be bootstrapped, yes. 00:29:20.960 --> 00:29:26.960 Yeah. Have you ever had in your seven years of running Doug Bill, being with Doug Bill, 00:29:26.960 --> 00:29:32.240 cases where you were like, we're not going to make it, but then you still kind of somehow made it? 00:29:32.240 --> 00:29:37.440 The hardest part of running a company, bar none, is managing your own psychology. A lot of people say 00:29:37.440 --> 00:29:41.920 they want their executives to be very transparent about everything that's going on. They'd be terrified by 00:29:41.920 --> 00:29:46.160 the end of week one and an awful lot of shops if that happened. When I was independent just by myself 00:29:46.160 --> 00:29:50.880 and have other mouths to feed, it was in the morning, I'd be flipping through benefit services 00:29:50.880 --> 00:29:54.400 available just in case. And then something would happen in the afternoon, I'd be flipping through 00:29:54.400 --> 00:30:00.080 a page in the yacht dealerships just in case. And it's the constant peaks and lows. One of the things 00:30:00.080 --> 00:30:03.920 I learned is you can't treat every situation like life or death because you're going to die lots of 00:30:03.920 --> 00:30:08.560 times if you do. Very few things are as critical long-term as they feel like they are in the 00:30:08.560 --> 00:30:13.360 moment. There's an immediacy tied to it. And companies are disturbingly resilient in some ways. 00:30:13.360 --> 00:30:19.280 Like if I quit, this company is screwed is never true in almost any case. The only one I'm actually 00:30:19.280 --> 00:30:22.880 honest of an open question right now is like, since so much of our media side of the business is tied up 00:30:22.880 --> 00:30:27.760 in me, if I quit the company that I own, the company is going to have some problems on that. 00:30:27.760 --> 00:30:32.160 But that's also always been a bit of a way that I would select roles. I don't like big companies 00:30:32.160 --> 00:30:37.600 because I use Google as an example. If I went in maliciously as an SRE there, I don't think I could 00:30:37.600 --> 00:30:43.200 take down google.com for one full hour. So if I can't do that maliciously and intentionally, 00:30:43.200 --> 00:30:48.320 how much upside good am I going to be able to do in a place like that? Or is it a small business 00:30:48.320 --> 00:30:51.680 like, oh, if I screw this up enough, we don't have a company anymore? Right. That's the level 00:30:51.680 --> 00:30:56.800 of impact I want to have. Not that I'm setting out to screw up, but I want to be able to materially 00:30:56.800 --> 00:31:00.880 change the fortunes of places I work if I do it right. Which meant that long-term infrastructure 00:31:00.880 --> 00:31:04.640 is probably not for me. I think it's a very good framework because the company protects 00:31:04.640 --> 00:31:09.840 you from downside, but you also don't get any of the upside, pretty much, unless you're an exec. 00:31:09.840 --> 00:31:15.040 Even then, the world of difference between how much founders make in exits and employee number one, 00:31:15.040 --> 00:31:21.040 it's a universe apart. Take a look at founders versus, look at the compensation publicly stated, 00:31:21.040 --> 00:31:25.760 clearly, between Andy Jassy, who's making hundreds of millions of dollars spread over a 10-year span, 00:31:25.760 --> 00:31:31.600 and Jeff Bezos, who was, for time, the wealthiest man alive. And it's orders of magnitude difference. 00:31:31.600 --> 00:31:37.280 So talking about that, you said you focus a lot on the media side. What are the other people there? 00:31:37.280 --> 00:31:41.440 Who's doing, yeah? Not many people ask that question. I think there's an implicit assumption 00:31:41.440 --> 00:31:45.520 that despite all the faces on our team's page and whatnot, everyone else's job is to sit there and 00:31:45.520 --> 00:31:51.520 clap as I do all the work. That is not true. We also make extensive use of external contractors. 00:31:51.520 --> 00:31:56.400 And I want to be clear when I say that, that is not, we just find people and then miscategorize 00:31:56.400 --> 00:32:01.520 the shit out of them because we don't like laws. No. I'm talking companies that do things, 00:32:01.520 --> 00:32:06.560 for example, HumblePod does all of our podcast production work, start to finish. They do a lot 00:32:06.560 --> 00:32:11.120 of the production of producing work on the video work that I get involved in from time to time. 00:32:11.120 --> 00:32:16.000 And as a result, I can finish a recording and then not think about it again because they take 00:32:16.000 --> 00:32:21.280 everything there and move on with it. So for me, at least, the goal has been on media to 00:32:21.280 --> 00:32:26.320 anything that doesn't need to be me personally doing a thing probably shouldn't have me doing it. 00:32:26.320 --> 00:32:30.000 I should not be updating copy on the website. I need to write the newsletter, 00:32:30.000 --> 00:32:34.640 but I shouldn't be the one putting in the email system and scheduling the send for 7:30 Pacific on 00:32:34.640 --> 00:32:38.960 Monday. There are a bunch of different things that I've learned to let go of as a result. 00:32:38.960 --> 00:32:44.160 Yeah. So actually, I want to dig a bit into how you produce your podcast. So when you first started, 00:32:44.160 --> 00:32:47.120 did you do everything yourself or did you hire someone right away? 00:32:47.120 --> 00:32:51.040 Never. I started off hiring someone right away because I knew going in that I have no background 00:32:51.040 --> 00:32:56.800 in audio editing. And if I was going to learn this for a period of time, I was not going to be as good 00:32:56.800 --> 00:33:01.280 as someone who actually loved to do this. Same with graphic design. I didn't ever design our own logo 00:33:01.280 --> 00:33:05.840 either for any of the previous iterations of logos I had for the stuff I was doing. It's stuff that you can 00:33:05.840 --> 00:33:11.120 outsource relatively inexpensively and then get back to doing the thing that makes you special. 00:33:11.120 --> 00:33:14.960 Your audio engineering is never going to be it as someone who's producing the content. 00:33:14.960 --> 00:33:20.400 So in the very beginning, once you decided, okay, we're going to start this thing, right? How did 00:33:20.400 --> 00:33:25.600 you get the first customers and what were you doing? Did the podcast already start? How were you paying 00:33:25.600 --> 00:33:31.360 for all these things? No, it started off with, I had a bit of seed money from severance from being 00:33:31.360 --> 00:33:35.600 let go. Great. I don't have to work for four months. What do I want to do instead? And the 00:33:35.600 --> 00:33:40.720 first 18 months in business, your customers all come from your network word of mouth. People screw 00:33:40.720 --> 00:33:45.360 that up at their peril where they have this idea that I'm going to, I have this amazing thing. 00:33:45.360 --> 00:33:49.040 I'm just going to go post on Hacker News and people come flooding into my website and convert, 00:33:49.040 --> 00:33:54.960 or I'll buy a bunch of Google ads and then people will come torrenting in. That's incremental stuff. 00:33:54.960 --> 00:33:59.520 You need to make sure that this is something that resonates with people who already are predisposed to 00:33:59.520 --> 00:34:04.640 like you. You'll do business with friends first and foremost. And in time, we still find one of 00:34:04.640 --> 00:34:09.280 our primary generators of business is both recurring customers, some of whom have transferred to other 00:34:09.280 --> 00:34:14.080 companies or word of mouth. People who have said, yeah, I was wondering how to fix this. And everyone 00:34:14.080 --> 00:34:19.520 tells me to talk to you. It works out well. So it's hard for me to draw a direct line between the 00:34:19.520 --> 00:34:25.760 newsletter that's out there and people coming in who care about AWS billing. But people have heard 00:34:25.760 --> 00:34:30.880 of me as a result. There aren't a lot of large personalities in the cloud space, let alone the 00:34:30.880 --> 00:34:35.520 cloud billing space. And people don't talk publicly about problems they have with AWS bills unless they 00:34:35.520 --> 00:34:41.120 want to get fired if they're a significant portion of billing. We've negotiated over $4 billion of AWS 00:34:41.120 --> 00:34:47.600 contracts so far and growing all the time. That's something that people with that scale of problems 00:34:47.600 --> 00:34:52.560 aren't public about it. So I need to be loud enough that I pop to the top of the mental SEO stack 00:34:52.560 --> 00:34:57.680 for that very specific, very expensive problem. What's the average percentage, if you track that, 00:34:57.680 --> 00:35:03.360 of the money that you spend to save for your customers? It depends because it also assumes a 00:35:03.360 --> 00:35:09.520 few things that aren't necessarily true. In many cases, companies aren't looking to actually save money 00:35:09.520 --> 00:35:14.240 by these optimization projects. They're looking to understand what is going on in their environment. 00:35:14.240 --> 00:35:17.840 They're looking for ways to think about it. And there's a reason I talk about optimization, 00:35:17.840 --> 00:35:22.000 not cost cutting. There have been times I've advised companies to spend more. Okay, 00:35:22.000 --> 00:35:28.000 you say that that S3 bucket is the one true source of all the company's data, but it's not being backed 00:35:28.000 --> 00:35:31.600 up anywhere. It doesn't have multi-factor delete turned on. And you say, if it's gone, 00:35:31.600 --> 00:35:37.680 then there isn't a company anymore. Spend more. And this is also why I only ever do it on a fixed fee 00:35:37.680 --> 00:35:42.720 basis. Otherwise, it's backups. What are you, some kind of coward? Delete those. And I add that 00:35:42.720 --> 00:35:47.920 up to the tally of what I'm saving them. I want to give the advice that I would want someone to give 00:35:47.920 --> 00:35:51.360 me or what I would do in their situation. And that's not really all it is. 00:35:51.360 --> 00:35:56.800 So as part of your problem solving, you also do all sorts of configuration auditing 00:35:56.800 --> 00:35:58.400 of their AWS, it sounds like. 00:35:58.400 --> 00:36:03.040 In some ways, yes. Usually with an eye toward cost. I've got the hell out of the security space just 00:36:03.040 --> 00:36:07.200 because it seems that tends to derail things, though I still periodically discover problems in 00:36:07.200 --> 00:36:12.240 the security realm as a part of the bill analysis. It's a weird party trick, but I can take the PDF 00:36:12.240 --> 00:36:17.600 exploded bill of someone's month on AWS and then describe their architecture to them. It's a sad party 00:36:17.600 --> 00:36:21.920 and it's winding down at that point. But still, it can be done. Architecture and cost are the same 00:36:21.920 --> 00:36:26.480 thing. We also have no partners in the space, which is intentional and by design, which also means if I 00:36:26.480 --> 00:36:30.560 recommend a product or a service to a company, they listen because they understand that, oh, this is 00:36:30.560 --> 00:36:34.720 something that I believe in and not just something I'm recommending because I get money if I do it. 00:36:34.720 --> 00:36:41.200 So what are some of these huge architecture, like anti-patterns, if you will, that you very often see 00:36:41.200 --> 00:36:46.160 people come in and like, okay, that's the one thing. Go change that and you'll save like X percent immediately. 00:36:46.160 --> 00:36:52.240 There are remarkably few that I can say that about definitively. There's a reason that we classify these things as 00:36:52.240 --> 00:36:58.720 curiosities. It's a lot of tooling and approaches tend to assume, oh, you have duplicate cloud trail 00:36:58.720 --> 00:37:04.540 management trails in place. That's a bug. Fix it. Yeah, 95% of the time, you're right. It is. But there's also that 00:37:04.540 --> 00:37:10.680 edge case where security as an organization wants to have its own unadulterated trail that has not been touched by 00:37:10.680 --> 00:37:16.140 anything else and then they won't share that onward. So, okay, that is a position to take. Here is the 00:37:16.140 --> 00:37:22.460 actual cost of that decision. Now you have context to figure out how you want to make that decision going 00:37:22.460 --> 00:37:27.500 forward. What we do is purely advisory. We make no changes to customer accounts for a variety of 00:37:27.500 --> 00:37:31.820 excellent reasons, but it's almost always a mistake when you see it. Data transfer is often rife with 00:37:31.820 --> 00:37:37.740 misunderstanding. The generalized advice is, oh, the AWS comes up with is buy some savings plans or 00:37:37.740 --> 00:37:42.620 reserved instances. Go ahead and right-size your instances. Usually in that order too is the way they 00:37:42.620 --> 00:37:47.260 recommend it, which is not how you want to do it. And third, we are completely out of ideas. Oh, 00:37:47.260 --> 00:37:52.160 wait, switch to Graviton and or serverless. And the reason they love giving that advice is because 00:37:52.160 --> 00:37:56.900 those three are really the only three things that can apply almost universally. Everything else is 00:37:56.900 --> 00:38:05.540 contextual and it's nuanced and it's not something that is going to lend itself to just blindly run this 00:38:05.540 --> 00:38:10.060 script and it'll be fine. Like our internal tool suite, we consider to be sort of power tools in that 00:38:10.060 --> 00:38:15.160 these are the tools a professional would use with context, but that doesn't mean you necessarily want 00:38:15.160 --> 00:38:18.360 to give it to someone who has no idea what they're looking at because they're going to take whatever 00:38:18.360 --> 00:38:23.140 the tool says as gospel and get themselves in trouble. Ilya, do you want to move on to like the 00:38:23.140 --> 00:38:29.840 media side of it? We had a lot of questions about that. Yeah. I'm really interested in tracing how your 00:38:29.840 --> 00:38:35.460 media and content evolved. So I guess let's take a step back. So today you have Twitter slash X. 00:38:35.460 --> 00:38:39.480 I don't know which one you use. Anyway, so you're on Elon Musk's ground. 00:38:39.480 --> 00:38:43.900 That's just plain fun. That's not actually revenue driving. I've never monetized Twitter. 00:38:43.900 --> 00:38:47.800 Right. So, but still it's like, it helps a lot. That's how probably many people discover you. 00:38:47.800 --> 00:38:53.180 Then you have two podcasts, Last Week in AWS and also Screaming in the Cloud. We have a newsletter, 00:38:53.180 --> 00:38:54.140 maybe two. 00:38:54.560 --> 00:39:00.380 One newsletter comes out three times a week. Monday is the roundup of AWS news. Thursday is the same thing 00:39:00.380 --> 00:39:06.100 with a security focus, different releases. And Wednesday is usually long form thoughts. It's also 00:39:06.100 --> 00:39:10.760 a blog post. The AWS Morning Brief podcast is just the spoken word version of those because not everyone 00:39:10.760 --> 00:39:15.420 wants to read. Some people want to listen. I'm not like that, but I'm there for other people in the way 00:39:15.420 --> 00:39:20.060 they want to consume content, not the way I would want to consume content. And the Screaming in the Cloud 00:39:20.060 --> 00:39:24.060 show is different. That's something else. And we'll get to that in a bit. But this all started off 00:39:24.060 --> 00:39:27.780 as just the newsletter by itself because I was already having to pay attention to everything 00:39:27.780 --> 00:39:34.020 AWS put out. Notice that there was a tremendous amount of nonsense when it came to the sheer number 00:39:34.020 --> 00:39:40.480 of things that they cared about versus what customers needed to think about. And I wanted 00:39:40.480 --> 00:39:44.020 someone to distill it down to the interesting things. And they didn't really have anything 00:39:44.020 --> 00:39:48.380 out there like that. So I figured I was already having to look through this stuff. They got me 80% 00:39:48.380 --> 00:39:52.460 of the way there to catch it all. And then I figured I'd just write some stuff and send it out. 00:39:52.560 --> 00:39:57.800 I would give it a few weeks. And at some point, if I didn't have at least 50 people reading it, 00:39:57.800 --> 00:40:02.320 who I didn't know, then I would go ahead and shut it down because that would just be sad. 00:40:02.320 --> 00:40:05.760 Then Charity Majors tweeted about it when I pre-announced it by two weeks. 00:40:05.760 --> 00:40:09.900 And the first issue went to 550 people, but it's been growing ever since. 00:40:09.900 --> 00:40:11.720 Oh, wow. So what year was it? 00:40:11.720 --> 00:40:12.880 That was 2017. 00:40:12.880 --> 00:40:16.900 So Charity Majors was that popular even back then. Wow. 00:40:17.200 --> 00:40:22.760 Oh, Charity's been great. She, in the space that I operate in, yes, very much so. We knew who she was 00:40:22.760 --> 00:40:29.420 long ago. And that historically was the space that I wound up focusing myself on because it's the 00:40:29.420 --> 00:40:32.800 field I come from. Those are my people, for lack of a better term. 00:40:32.800 --> 00:40:38.320 Yeah. For those listeners who don't know who she is, I think we should link one of her InfoQ talks 00:40:38.320 --> 00:40:42.540 about testing code in production. I think that's what it's called. That's an amazing talk about 00:40:42.540 --> 00:40:43.060 observability. 00:40:43.600 --> 00:40:48.000 So today, like, do you do all of the, you write the newsletter, the weekly one you said, 00:40:48.000 --> 00:40:53.100 right? The in-depth one. What else? What else are you doing for the media side? Or is it all you? 00:40:53.100 --> 00:40:58.000 All the content is me. I don't have anyone else writing any of this. I do have an editor who helps 00:40:58.000 --> 00:41:01.780 once I put out the rough draft, who then winds up helping with structure. And then I go back and 00:41:01.780 --> 00:41:06.440 incorporate those changes. But that's writing. Everyone else is operation side or sales side, 00:41:06.440 --> 00:41:10.200 for example. That's what sort of happened next is a company, Datadog, as it turned out, 00:41:10.440 --> 00:41:14.580 reached out after, I've been doing this for about six weeks, and said, can we sponsor your 00:41:14.580 --> 00:41:19.180 newsletter? And it's like, can you give me money to talk about you? Of course you can give me money. 00:41:19.180 --> 00:41:25.920 How much money? It sort of grew from there. And it was surprising given to me the relatively small 00:41:25.920 --> 00:41:29.840 scale of the audience versus the revenue it commanded. But it makes sense when you realize 00:41:29.840 --> 00:41:34.400 that this is a specialized audience that has tremendous influence over purchasing decisions. 00:41:34.400 --> 00:41:40.260 And if one prospect becomes a customer, it sponsors everything I do for a decade and change, 00:41:40.340 --> 00:41:44.860 just because the dollar figures are so ridiculous. And it was a surprising source of 00:41:44.860 --> 00:41:50.900 revenue. I treated it like its own P&L. So I was able to then take that and basically self-finance 00:41:50.900 --> 00:41:54.880 investment in the media side of the business. My total upfront investment for the newsletter, 00:41:54.880 --> 00:41:59.440 I decided I'd give it 2,500 bucks because that's what it cost back then to join the AWS Partner 00:41:59.440 --> 00:42:04.000 Network. And is that the best way to grow my business? I don't know. If I had that money, 00:42:04.000 --> 00:42:07.860 what would I do with it instead? Well, I do have that money. Let's see. I have a theory. 00:42:08.440 --> 00:42:12.360 And here we are. The podcast came a few months later, Screaming in the Cloud specifically. 00:42:12.360 --> 00:42:17.780 I just recorded the 500th episode of that. So it's been going reasonably well. But it started 00:42:17.780 --> 00:42:22.260 off as basically an excuse to talk to people I had no business speaking with. And because if you 00:42:22.260 --> 00:42:25.140 historically, at least to my mind, wanted to talk to someone, their response would be, 00:42:25.140 --> 00:42:29.320 how'd you get into my office? But if you invite them on your podcast, they'll clear an hour off their 00:42:29.320 --> 00:42:34.180 schedule to make that happen. And at least that was my opinion at that point. It gave me an excuse to 00:42:34.180 --> 00:42:37.680 reach out rather than just, I find what you're doing interesting. Can we talk about it? 00:42:37.680 --> 00:42:42.320 And those authentic conversations with people about things they're excited about, whatever that 00:42:42.320 --> 00:42:48.860 happens to be, every episode's different. I enjoy the ebb and flow of them all. And you get to see 00:42:48.860 --> 00:42:54.060 an awful lot of the industry in a very short period of time just by talking to people who are innovating 00:42:54.060 --> 00:42:55.140 in various corners of it. 00:42:55.640 --> 00:42:59.360 Yeah. You know, I listened to multiple of your episodes. I think they tend to be pretty short, 00:42:59.360 --> 00:43:03.120 kind of intense, and focused on one or two topics max. 00:43:03.120 --> 00:43:08.440 Roughly half an hour. We expect an hour and do a half hour recording on it because it depends on the 00:43:08.440 --> 00:43:14.520 topics and where we're going with it. But a lot of people can be interested in engaging on almost 00:43:14.520 --> 00:43:19.860 anything for that period of time. But if you do a two-hour, three-hour long podcast, well, that's a big 00:43:19.860 --> 00:43:24.340 time investment you're asking for people to listen to it. And two, people start running out of 00:43:24.340 --> 00:43:28.620 steam and the things they're really passionate about right around that point as well. There are 00:43:28.620 --> 00:43:32.740 times I've done episodes that crossed into an hour and a half or so, but it's atypical. 00:43:32.740 --> 00:43:37.440 How do you think about sourcing the guests? Are you the person reaching out? How do you go about? 00:43:37.440 --> 00:43:41.820 I am. It turns out that it's not that hard to see someone doing something interesting, 00:43:41.820 --> 00:43:45.080 or they make a great point you hadn't considered to just drop them a line and say, 00:43:45.080 --> 00:43:51.540 hey, would you like to chat about that on the podcast? And if the answer is yes, great. Here's a link to 00:43:51.540 --> 00:43:55.120 the booking page. It asks the stuff I need to care about, and I don't think about it again. 00:43:55.120 --> 00:44:00.260 The time rolls around. I wind up, oh, in 10 minutes, I have to go do a recording about this 00:44:00.260 --> 00:44:05.100 person? Cool. And I suck at preparing for things. I'm ADHD personified. And when that's your failure 00:44:05.100 --> 00:44:10.960 mode, you've got to be good at improv. So great. We spend about 10 to 15 minutes beforehand talking 00:44:10.960 --> 00:44:15.000 about what it is that we're going to cover. Anything I should avoid talking about if there's 00:44:15.000 --> 00:44:21.120 sensitive about it, great. Let's dive in. And for the rest of that, we have to do about 40 to 45 00:44:21.120 --> 00:44:25.640 minutes most times on the recording side of it. And then we wind up cutting that down as a result. 00:44:25.640 --> 00:44:29.520 So before you start the recording, you talk to them right away, but before you hit the record 00:44:29.520 --> 00:44:30.980 button, that's how it works? Yes. 00:44:30.980 --> 00:44:32.320 Like warm up. Yeah. 00:44:32.320 --> 00:44:36.240 Because otherwise, we have a pre-meeting a week in advance. Great. I'm not going to remember what the 00:44:36.240 --> 00:44:40.300 hell we talked about in that level of context and depth. And once you get people there, 00:44:40.580 --> 00:44:44.940 it's good to at least figure out the direction. Even if they say there's nothing in particular I 00:44:44.940 --> 00:44:49.520 need to talk about, great. I'll take it from there. And then you throw it over the wall for 00:44:49.520 --> 00:44:53.820 the editing and all that. You said you outsource all that. I wind up closing the browser tab. I 00:44:53.820 --> 00:44:58.060 don't think about it again because we've automated an awful lot of this. Even the publishing and 00:44:58.060 --> 00:45:02.560 scheduling and all of that. Well, some of the people, some of it is automated systems behind 00:45:02.560 --> 00:45:06.580 the scenes. The line is sort of blurry. And these days, I'm not sure where it starts and stops 00:45:06.580 --> 00:45:10.540 because I'm not building those systems anymore. I did originally. Because one of my failure modes 00:45:10.540 --> 00:45:14.320 before that was I would do a recording. And then it would just sit there for months before I 00:45:14.320 --> 00:45:17.640 remember to copy it over to the editing folks and get to work on that. 00:45:17.640 --> 00:45:19.480 What tools do you use to record? 00:45:19.480 --> 00:45:25.660 A microphone and a keyboard, generally speaking. There's not a lot of magic that goes into it. 00:45:25.660 --> 00:45:31.720 I'll use remotely.fm as the browser platform that I've been using now. I was using Zencaster for a 00:45:31.720 --> 00:45:36.840 bit, but they got kind of weird and I had some audio artifacting issues. And there's nothing perfect, 00:45:36.840 --> 00:45:41.420 but they all tend to use larger the same APIs. Most of them are as good as any other. I'm not a big 00:45:41.420 --> 00:45:44.540 fan of doing it over Zoom. The compression gets weird, but it works out. 00:45:44.540 --> 00:45:50.100 Yeah. Just when you said that you can forget to copy things, I just wanted to insert a plug 00:45:50.100 --> 00:45:53.400 for the squad cast that we're using right now for recording. We're not sponsored by them, 00:45:53.400 --> 00:45:57.300 but we had their founders on the show. It was episode eight. Really nice guys, bootstrapped company. 00:45:57.680 --> 00:46:01.520 So there you can actually add people to your organization. And then once you record, 00:46:01.520 --> 00:46:05.800 they can just go and download the files themselves. So which makes things easier 00:46:05.800 --> 00:46:08.180 if you outsource and you don't have to pay for extra users. 00:46:08.180 --> 00:46:13.640 They don't have much of an RBAC story going on over at remotely. We evaluated squad cast back and we 00:46:13.640 --> 00:46:17.520 periodically review all of our vendors. And as our needs change, because we're still using this thing 00:46:17.520 --> 00:46:21.760 because it solves a problem that we had four years ago. We haven't thought about since as a bad 00:46:21.760 --> 00:46:26.760 reason to keep doing something. And we wound up passing on squad cast, but I don't for the life of me 00:46:26.760 --> 00:46:31.960 recall exactly why. Some of it has to do with the reason we pick these things is mostly not me. 00:46:31.960 --> 00:46:38.100 I'm not an audiophile. I do not have the ear for that sort of thing. So when someone says, 00:46:38.100 --> 00:46:43.600 oh, the audio quality is terrible. Can't you tell? No, I can't. I also believe people over index on tools 00:46:43.600 --> 00:46:48.920 where they want to make sure that their production value is stratospheric. That's secondary. It takes 00:46:48.920 --> 00:46:53.660 a backseat because it has to to content. People will suffer through an awful lot of crappy production 00:46:53.660 --> 00:46:59.260 value if the content is compelling. And if it's not, it doesn't matter if your production value is Oscar 00:46:59.260 --> 00:47:05.960 winning. No one is going to care. And I think you said that right. There is a minimum bar. It's easy to 00:47:05.960 --> 00:47:11.420 like get over that minimum bar for the quality, the audio quality of it. Beyond that, yeah, you could 00:47:11.420 --> 00:47:15.660 make it like a movie, but most people wouldn't care or know the difference between those two. 00:47:15.660 --> 00:47:20.240 Depends on what I'm doing too. If I were to have a chat with someone at a sidebar in a reInvent, 00:47:20.240 --> 00:47:24.640 for example, I want to have something portable on my person that I can flip up and say, go, and we start 00:47:24.640 --> 00:47:29.780 recording. And on some level, if you have certain production quality requirements, well, now you 00:47:29.780 --> 00:47:34.620 have to convince it to go back to a studio and schedule time for that. And a lot of opportunities 00:47:34.620 --> 00:47:40.340 get lost as a direct result. So tell us like how all of this, the newsletter and all that, 00:47:40.340 --> 00:47:45.540 you said you have a separate like P&L line for that. How does it feed into the business? How do you 00:47:45.540 --> 00:47:49.640 tell that attribution? Effectively, it's one of those rarities in the world, a marketing department 00:47:49.640 --> 00:47:54.020 that turns a profit. Right. But how do you attribute like, is there a customer acquisition 00:47:54.020 --> 00:48:00.280 or something like that sort of thing that you can attribute to a podcast episode or a newsletter? 00:48:00.280 --> 00:48:06.240 No, not directly. It's almost impossible to pull that off because people don't reach out to us 00:48:06.240 --> 00:48:09.300 because they hear an ad for us somewhere. It's something that has to sit with them for a while. 00:48:09.300 --> 00:48:13.900 There needs to be a recurring, acknowledged, painful problem. It's also a very fixed point in time. 00:48:13.900 --> 00:48:16.940 Today, you might not care. Tomorrow you will. And in three days, you won't care again. 00:48:17.340 --> 00:48:22.340 People put in the, where do you hear about us? The overwhelming answer is the nonsense that I do. 00:48:22.340 --> 00:48:25.660 Very often be like, I don't know. I've just always sort of known that Corey was there. 00:48:25.660 --> 00:48:29.660 That's kind of the point. I also don't trust podcast download statistics for crap, 00:48:29.660 --> 00:48:35.320 but I do know that for no other reason than I've had some guests who absolutely have huge 00:48:35.320 --> 00:48:39.660 platforms of their own and the numbers don't really move even when they promote it themselves 00:48:39.660 --> 00:48:45.100 versus what I see as a standard baseline. So, okay, whatever on that front. A lot of these 00:48:45.100 --> 00:48:50.900 sponsors definitely want to do attribution. And that podcasting in particular, and also to some 00:48:50.900 --> 00:48:55.100 extent newsletters are not the way to get there. The only way to get there reliably is to have an 00:48:55.100 --> 00:48:59.040 in-depth conversation with the person who reached out and that's hard to do. There are some things 00:48:59.040 --> 00:49:05.260 that you can never do attributive value to. It's what is the ROI on having your company's advertisement 00:49:05.260 --> 00:49:10.960 for 20 minutes on the New York Times, on the Times Square billboard in New York. And the answer is, 00:49:10.960 --> 00:49:14.960 I don't know, but it's cool. So you should do it anyway. People love to be able to measure these 00:49:14.960 --> 00:49:19.080 things about what's working and what's not. But an old saw in marketing is half of your marketing 00:49:19.080 --> 00:49:22.020 budget is wasted. You'll go broke trying to figure out which half. 00:49:22.060 --> 00:49:28.100 Right. And I think you made a very important point on one of your episodes that your advertisers, 00:49:28.100 --> 00:49:34.980 so big companies who provide enterprise services. So the customer lifetime value there is huge and 00:49:34.980 --> 00:49:41.180 their clients are mostly companies. So the person who heard your podcast, they're out on your podcast 00:49:41.180 --> 00:49:44.200 and made the decision might not actually be the person who is buying. 00:49:44.640 --> 00:49:48.880 Right. It comes into meetings. It gets discussed internally. And then someone decides to reach out 00:49:48.880 --> 00:49:53.380 for a trial. I had one sponsor that decided after a couple months that they weren't going to continue 00:49:53.380 --> 00:49:57.220 because they weren't seeing value. Okay, cool. Two months later, they came back and bought everything 00:49:57.220 --> 00:50:00.860 I'd sell them. And it turned out that they sat down and interviewed their largest customers. And I think 00:50:00.860 --> 00:50:04.560 two of the top five or three of the top five where I've heard about them on the podcast, like, 00:50:04.560 --> 00:50:08.960 oh, it works. But I'm honestly surprised they were able to figure out that those companies came 00:50:08.960 --> 00:50:13.480 through the podcast. Most people just don't know where it came. Like, oh, someone in a meeting brought you up. 00:50:13.900 --> 00:50:17.440 So by the time you launched your podcast, you already had the platform of the newsletter. 00:50:17.440 --> 00:50:21.700 So your podcast essentially didn't have to be bootstrapped from zero in terms of the audience. 00:50:21.700 --> 00:50:24.540 Sort of. I mean, just because you're getting an email newsletter doesn't mean you're automatically 00:50:24.540 --> 00:50:28.660 going to download a podcast. A lot of that doesn't convey. But it gave me a platform from which to 00:50:28.660 --> 00:50:33.320 talk about the launch of it. So on the actual, like, the billing side of your business, right? 00:50:33.320 --> 00:50:37.840 Is that like a recurring model? Or do I come to you when I have a problem and I know that, 00:50:37.840 --> 00:50:41.500 oh, there's Corey? Fixed point in time, depending on what it is you're looking to do, 00:50:41.560 --> 00:50:45.100 which is a little bit challenging. It feels like it's a bit of a treadmill story. We have to run 00:50:45.100 --> 00:50:49.120 to keep up all the time. But there's something reassuring about recurring models. But the way 00:50:49.120 --> 00:50:53.940 that we approach it at the moment, we have not yet found a way to serve our customers well. 00:50:54.140 --> 00:50:57.920 That doesn't turn into just rent extraction. And that doesn't sit well with me. 00:50:57.920 --> 00:51:02.620 We actually had a couple of episodes ago on subscription pandemic. That's what we call it. 00:51:02.620 --> 00:51:07.640 So it's a global phenomenon that everybody wants to charge you a subscription. On personal level, 00:51:07.640 --> 00:51:12.780 you know, enterprise, I guess, retainers for companies also come to that space. So I'm curious, 00:51:12.780 --> 00:51:17.440 what do you think about usage-based pricing versus subscription pricing for cloud services? 00:51:17.520 --> 00:51:23.800 People like to do consumption or usage-based pricing because they believe that it is transparent and 00:51:23.800 --> 00:51:28.540 that it's fair and that it's predictable. And in truth, it is none of those three things. 00:51:28.540 --> 00:51:34.760 It is not at all clear. If I'm going to charge you for every second that something runs at, 00:51:34.760 --> 00:51:37.840 that works out to this monthly fee and what you need is going to scale up and down, 00:51:37.840 --> 00:51:41.920 you run your application for a month and then figure out what it costs. It's an after effect thing. 00:51:42.120 --> 00:51:46.280 The fact that it's transparent doesn't mean it's easy to predict. And predict is the hard part on this. 00:51:46.280 --> 00:51:50.820 And as far as it being fair, I don't know what's fair. I don't think that necessarily means much 00:51:50.820 --> 00:51:55.200 in a business context. I do know that most of my customers would pay 10 to 20% more than they're 00:51:55.200 --> 00:52:00.220 paying now for AWS in a heartbeat if there was some magic way to be able to predict to the penny 00:52:00.220 --> 00:52:02.040 what it was going to cost them for the next three years. 00:52:02.040 --> 00:52:03.580 To flatten the spikes. 00:52:03.580 --> 00:52:09.060 Make it predictable. Spikes are fine, even seasonal, but they want to be able to predict and then 00:52:09.060 --> 00:52:15.200 reason around it. And as a result, then inform the rest of their business decision-making process. 00:52:15.200 --> 00:52:20.280 So for your own business, because it's not like a recurring revenue kind of story, right? 00:52:20.280 --> 00:52:25.700 In the beginning, when did you decide that, okay, we're ready to like hire one more person we need 00:52:25.700 --> 00:52:31.000 for this role. And because it's not a recurring revenue, it's a bit harder to kind of reason about 00:52:31.000 --> 00:52:31.220 that. 00:52:31.220 --> 00:52:35.240 It became a bit easier at start because at the start, we hired someone to do sales for media. 00:52:35.820 --> 00:52:41.500 And it made sense because I didn't want to spend all my time wooing sponsors. And that's wound up 00:52:41.500 --> 00:52:47.120 justifying itself super easily. The next problem was, okay, now that that's done, what do we figure 00:52:47.120 --> 00:52:51.700 out with? What do we figure out as far as having other people come in and service these things? And 00:52:51.700 --> 00:52:56.420 if so, what does that mean for our ability to focus on the business as well? There's no easy 00:52:56.420 --> 00:53:01.940 answers in any of this. It comes down to what makes sense, what doesn't make sense. Hiring is always 00:53:01.940 --> 00:53:06.640 harder than people give it credit for being managing people is incredibly challenging. I no longer manage 00:53:06.640 --> 00:53:11.100 people for that exact reason. I let my business partner handle that. In fact, the only person I 00:53:11.100 --> 00:53:15.260 can actually fire at this company is my business partner, who's also the CEO. So it's kind of fun. 00:53:15.260 --> 00:53:20.060 And so are there like other technical people in the company of the seven that you said? 00:53:20.060 --> 00:53:20.580 Oh, yes. 00:53:20.580 --> 00:53:21.680 And what are they doing? 00:53:21.680 --> 00:53:25.100 Consulting delivery has always been fun. I'd also say everyone on some level is technical, 00:53:25.240 --> 00:53:31.820 it's hard to wind up viewing technical through a narrow lens of, oh, they write code. They are very 00:53:31.820 --> 00:53:36.960 technically proficient at the areas that they focus on. One of the challenges as well is when you hire 00:53:36.960 --> 00:53:42.240 for someone to do the kind of consulting we do as we do it, it's basically unicorn hunting. You need 00:53:42.240 --> 00:53:47.460 someone with the background of a senior SRE because there's no way to teach scale for someone who doesn't 00:53:47.460 --> 00:53:51.560 have that. You need them to have the consulting skills, which look like a lot of varied things. 00:53:51.560 --> 00:53:55.940 They need to be comfortable presenting to clients at basically every level of the org up to and 00:53:55.940 --> 00:54:00.520 including the board. And then when you get all that done, a lot of the work starts to look 00:54:00.520 --> 00:54:04.840 repetitive from certain points of view. And these people are often bored and then they decide what 00:54:04.840 --> 00:54:09.120 do they want to be doing instead? So there are challenges in this space. We don't believe that 00:54:09.120 --> 00:54:11.700 we've managed to solve them all yet. We're getting closer. 00:54:11.700 --> 00:54:17.160 So as a founder and the business owner, you're probably more tolerant to doing repetitive things 00:54:17.160 --> 00:54:18.620 because it brings you money. 00:54:18.620 --> 00:54:21.120 Oh, personally, I can't stand when too many days look alike. 00:54:21.520 --> 00:54:26.000 But there's a reason that the type of engagements that I work on look very different than the type that other 00:54:26.000 --> 00:54:31.740 folks work on here. The long term deep dive into every aspect doing cost analysis doesn't interest me. 00:54:31.740 --> 00:54:36.200 My attention span trips out. But let's sit down for two days and tear through one side of your bill 00:54:36.200 --> 00:54:41.180 and then down the other and find the optimization opportunities there in a quick first pass. 00:54:41.180 --> 00:54:42.300 That's always fun. 00:54:42.300 --> 00:54:48.420 I want to get back to that point you made about your first 18 months of customers being from your network 00:54:48.420 --> 00:54:51.960 and all that. I want to ask a selfish question because, you know, we are a bootstrap business. 00:54:51.960 --> 00:54:58.160 So we will launch our product maybe two, three months, I would say, in the very best case scenario because it takes time to build it. 00:54:58.160 --> 00:54:59.360 Publicly launch, yes. 00:54:59.640 --> 00:55:06.140 Publicly launch. We may run out of money in terms of our own savings, right? And we don't necessarily want to take VC funding unless we really have to. 00:55:06.140 --> 00:55:14.140 So we were thinking about doing consulting, maybe some product consulting, maybe consulting people like on the process, like product development because of our experience. 00:55:14.140 --> 00:55:18.680 Actually, what would you recommend to folks like us? Like, how do you find your first customer in your network? 00:55:19.120 --> 00:55:23.280 People do consulting in a lot of ways, and I think a lot of them are misguided at best. 00:55:23.280 --> 00:55:29.180 Never charge by the hour. You're going to spend at least 70% of your time on client development and finding new clients. 00:55:29.180 --> 00:55:33.680 So unless you want to work 120 hours a week, I don't recommend that. 00:55:33.680 --> 00:55:42.720 There's also the idea of being very narrow and very focused because it's much easier when you can speak directly to someone who hears himself in the description of what you do 00:55:42.720 --> 00:55:46.260 and address the expensive problem with which they wrestle. 00:55:46.260 --> 00:55:50.560 Effectively, I started off with the SRE skill set. What I started off with was great. 00:55:50.560 --> 00:55:58.060 I am a great solutions architect. Cool. Swing a dead cat. You're going to hit 15 people in a room who look like that. 00:55:58.060 --> 00:56:04.580 And when you're trying to be all things to all people and going broad, you're now competing against Accenture, who has a bigger marketing budget than you do. 00:56:04.580 --> 00:56:09.340 Instead, become more and more narrowly niched because that's marketing. 00:56:09.960 --> 00:56:16.000 Positioning is marketing. And ideally, you should be able to trigger Rolodex moments where people at a party ask what you do. 00:56:16.000 --> 00:56:20.040 You tell them like, oh, my God, I know someone you need to talk to. That happened a lot. 00:56:20.040 --> 00:56:28.500 Specificity and being the leading expert in a very narrow space is the way to be able to charge top dollar for a lot of these things. 00:56:28.500 --> 00:56:34.300 So basically, you were in the niche of your own for a while. You established the niche when you first started. 00:56:34.300 --> 00:56:35.080 Oh, yes. 00:56:35.080 --> 00:56:40.540 So I listened to an episode of your podcast, which was probably six years ago or so. 00:56:40.540 --> 00:56:43.320 I probably don't remember the specifics, but I'll take it at face value. 00:56:43.320 --> 00:56:49.400 Yeah, I can't find it. Unfortunately, it was with some VCs who invest in enterprise software or cloud software. 00:56:50.220 --> 00:56:59.540 And you made the point that GCP has the best tech of all of the cloud providers, but they have kind of the worst enterprise sales, the worst customer service. 00:56:59.540 --> 00:57:02.220 And that triggers a lot of people away from that. 00:57:02.220 --> 00:57:07.240 So I spent time in AWS, I spent time in GCP. I kind of have seen some of that internal stuff going on. 00:57:07.240 --> 00:57:10.960 What you said there really resonated with me in terms of how these companies operate. 00:57:10.960 --> 00:57:16.960 I'm curious, have you seen much change, I guess, in Google specifically, in GCP specifically over the years? 00:57:16.960 --> 00:57:20.020 Google's gotten much more proficient at speaking enterprise. 00:57:20.020 --> 00:57:23.660 I think that is Thomas Kurian's influence, and it's done tremendous things. 00:57:23.660 --> 00:57:28.940 You no longer have the same trope of the salesperson from GCP who shows up at your office and insults you. 00:57:28.940 --> 00:57:32.760 That happened in several occasions I can remember personally. 00:57:32.760 --> 00:57:35.540 It's a, they don't do that anymore. 00:57:35.540 --> 00:57:40.660 They realize that the decision makers are not always engineers, but a lot of the people driving the decision are. 00:57:40.660 --> 00:57:42.800 That's a natural evolution that works. 00:57:42.800 --> 00:57:45.620 I also think that Google continues to be technically excellent. 00:57:45.620 --> 00:57:54.300 I think where they completely miss the ball is understanding just how much damage product cancellations do to them in the conversations to which they are not a party. 00:57:54.300 --> 00:58:03.440 And at this point, after they killed Google Cloud domains, how do I recommend a Google product and not look like a clown in the process if it's something that a cancellation is going to cause a problem with? 00:58:03.440 --> 00:58:04.940 There's no database anymore, right? 00:58:05.380 --> 00:58:06.140 No genus. 00:58:06.140 --> 00:58:07.100 Exactly. 00:58:07.100 --> 00:58:09.300 Now they sold the domains to Squarespace. 00:58:09.300 --> 00:58:10.320 Next, what are they going to do? 00:58:10.320 --> 00:58:11.500 Sell the databases to Oracle? 00:58:11.500 --> 00:58:12.140 Yeah. 00:58:12.140 --> 00:58:15.980 I mean, we ourselves, we use Firebase right now. 00:58:15.980 --> 00:58:17.360 We have Google domains. 00:58:17.360 --> 00:58:18.780 How's those dynamic links worth treating you? 00:58:18.780 --> 00:58:22.940 See, by the time we got to Firebase, it was already deprecated. 00:58:22.940 --> 00:58:25.100 So we did use that, yeah. 00:58:25.100 --> 00:58:25.780 Oh, good. 00:58:25.780 --> 00:58:27.140 So you're safe for this one. 00:58:27.140 --> 00:58:28.480 It's just the next cycle that'll catch you. 00:58:28.480 --> 00:58:29.560 Yes, exactly. 00:58:29.560 --> 00:58:30.100 Yeah. 00:58:30.100 --> 00:58:31.840 But it is a hard thing, yeah. 00:58:32.080 --> 00:58:38.680 With Google domains too, I think all the emails and all that Ilya and I have set up, we don't know what's going to happen and there's no clarity. 00:58:38.680 --> 00:58:42.380 We don't know exactly when what is going to get deprecated. 00:58:42.380 --> 00:58:44.640 Is there an alternative to it or not? 00:58:44.640 --> 00:58:45.360 What's your take on this? 00:58:45.360 --> 00:58:48.520 Because this was a big decision, I suppose. 00:58:48.520 --> 00:58:53.760 In terms of like the repercussions of that is pretty big because there are, I think, 10 million domains registered through Google domains. 00:58:53.760 --> 00:59:02.100 It's both people like small, like individual people just doing domain squatting to like large enterprises who registered domains through Google domains. 00:59:02.100 --> 00:59:04.400 And especially some features go away. 00:59:04.400 --> 00:59:08.240 Like let's say if email forwarding goes away and stuff like that, people will be really pissed at Google. 00:59:08.660 --> 00:59:10.140 I'm curious because I cannot explain it. 00:59:10.140 --> 00:59:13.880 Like I've not been there long enough to like really understand how do they make a decision? 00:59:13.880 --> 00:59:14.780 Like what's your take on this? 00:59:14.780 --> 00:59:24.820 Every single Googler that I've spoken to about this, and many of these people are remarkably senior, has expressed that they found out about it the same time the rest of us did. 00:59:24.820 --> 00:59:25.580 Wow. 00:59:25.580 --> 00:59:28.300 Corporate communication chains are hard. 00:59:28.620 --> 00:59:29.340 That's crazy. 00:59:29.340 --> 00:59:29.820 Yeah. 00:59:29.820 --> 00:59:40.600 I think coming back to the other side, Amazon as a company and AWS, one part of it, big part of it, one of the best things about it is the customer service. 00:59:40.600 --> 00:59:47.360 Google, we haven't had the opportunity or the misfortune to like talk to their customer support yet. 00:59:47.360 --> 00:59:53.560 What's your take on like, is that a typical, because Google, the company doesn't have a good name for customer service. 00:59:53.560 --> 00:59:55.560 Is GCP similar or? 00:59:56.120 --> 01:00:00.520 I have to defer to what other people have to say about this. 01:00:00.520 --> 01:00:09.960 One of the side effects of being known in the space is that when my name comes in attached to a question I have, it tends to get actioned very effectively. 01:00:09.960 --> 01:00:16.180 It is almost unheard of these days for me to have a poor customer service experience with a cloud provider. 01:00:16.700 --> 01:00:21.420 And I'm not asking for special treatment, but it also is the natural evolution of these things. 01:00:21.420 --> 01:00:27.840 I'm also at a point technically where when I start having problems, it is invariably not something that I've gotten wrong on my side. 01:00:27.840 --> 01:00:41.240 I've solved more problems in the course of my career than I care to name by starting off trying to draft an email to a newsletter, to a mailing list on this, or to write a ticket where I distill the problem down into a skeleton reproduction case. 01:00:41.440 --> 01:00:42.740 And then I find the problem. 01:00:42.740 --> 01:00:44.300 Rubber duck debugging is great. 01:00:44.300 --> 01:00:46.520 So at least my issues are complicated. 01:00:46.520 --> 01:00:50.200 Can you attribute any product changes directly to your feedback? 01:00:50.200 --> 01:00:51.140 Oh, absolutely. 01:00:51.140 --> 01:00:54.480 I've been talking in terms of AWS, Google, or both. 01:00:54.480 --> 01:00:56.820 AWS, like we know, I think, ourselves. 01:00:58.020 --> 01:01:00.300 So we'll just talk about Google, yeah. 01:01:00.300 --> 01:01:08.320 My personal favorite, and I'm not going to name the service, but the GM was super excited to meet me and brief me on the service a week before reInvent. 01:01:08.320 --> 01:01:10.460 And they asked if I had heard of it yet. 01:01:10.460 --> 01:01:13.160 And I said, well, I did write the original PR FAQ. 01:01:13.160 --> 01:01:16.740 And their response was, no, you didn't. 01:01:16.740 --> 01:01:18.080 Ding, it's in your inbox. 01:01:18.080 --> 01:01:21.060 Let's see how far it's fallen from my original vision four years ago. 01:01:21.060 --> 01:01:23.100 And they just had no idea. 01:01:23.100 --> 01:01:25.500 And again, they weren't true to life on all of this. 01:01:25.500 --> 01:01:26.200 I'm an outsider. 01:01:26.300 --> 01:01:26.860 What does it matter? 01:01:26.860 --> 01:01:36.100 But yeah, there's a bunch of stuff that I've seen that I've caused to get fixed, that I've been noisy about, that I have asked for on Twitter and then get granted later. 01:01:36.100 --> 01:01:39.620 And there are also very good reasons why some of the things I ask for don't get done. 01:01:39.620 --> 01:01:44.400 No one shows up at work hoping to do a crappy job today unless apparently they work on Microsoft security. 01:01:44.400 --> 01:01:47.980 So it's one of those areas where it's just, there are constraints. 01:01:47.980 --> 01:01:49.920 The scale of what they do is monstrous. 01:01:49.920 --> 01:01:53.140 And it has to work for every customer the service has. 01:01:53.360 --> 01:01:56.460 And that means that corner cases become common cases at that scale. 01:01:56.460 --> 01:02:05.280 So looking at these three organizations, AWS, Azure, and GCP internally, where would you say they're doing a great job, each one? 01:02:05.280 --> 01:02:07.740 Microsoft has the ecosystem stuff working for it. 01:02:07.760 --> 01:02:19.160 But I think that they're having serious problems right now with their lack of attention to security on that to the point where I think that we're going to start seeing a lot of brand name customer references are going to ask to not be references anymore as a result. 01:02:19.320 --> 01:02:23.640 Because if you see your bank as an Azure reference customer, what does that really say about you? 01:02:23.640 --> 01:02:26.200 And that is reaching a fever pitch. 01:02:26.200 --> 01:02:37.400 Google is doing surprisingly well in a lot of these things where I don't necessarily see that there is a whole lot holding the back except Google themselves. 01:02:38.080 --> 01:02:46.140 And AWS has focused on some level toward revenue protection and honestly just being crappy to customers in ways that I would not have expected years ago. 01:02:46.140 --> 01:02:49.740 I don't know what the pressures are that are driving it, but it's unfortunate. 01:02:50.200 --> 01:02:56.740 And I'm nowhere given the same benefit of the doubt or assuming the same good intent that I would have three years ago. 01:02:56.740 --> 01:03:07.220 I wonder if AWS, because I left AWS when Andy Jassy was still the CEO of AWS, and he was the founder of AWS, even though he was an employee of Amazon, but he was the founding figure, right? 01:03:07.220 --> 01:03:09.420 And Bezos was still the CEO of the company. 01:03:09.420 --> 01:03:14.800 And I think, what, in 2021, basically AWS CEO has changed. 01:03:14.800 --> 01:03:18.380 So it was no longer led by the founder, by hired executive. 01:03:18.980 --> 01:03:26.600 I wonder, I mean, I can only speculate, of course, if that might have played a role, because a founder figure might think a bit differently about certain issues. 01:03:26.600 --> 01:03:28.340 It's entirely possible. 01:03:28.340 --> 01:03:30.800 I don't know at some level what that is. 01:03:30.800 --> 01:03:33.280 And I think that a lot of these factors are incredibly complex. 01:03:33.280 --> 01:03:39.660 And trying to distill it down into simple talking points from the outside is a fool's errand. 01:03:39.660 --> 01:03:41.660 It's, oh, what they're doing is easy. 01:03:41.660 --> 01:03:45.320 All they have to do is just, no, no, no, no, no, none of this is easy. 01:03:45.320 --> 01:03:48.460 But I do know that historically, customer obsession was their guiding star. 01:03:48.560 --> 01:03:51.060 And it feels like that has been lost as a customer. 01:03:51.060 --> 01:03:52.600 That is what I am feeling. 01:03:52.600 --> 01:03:56.940 And that was the thing that made AWS special. 01:03:56.940 --> 01:04:03.560 And if you take that away, there's not that much difference between them and Oracle, if we're being perfectly direct. 01:04:03.560 --> 01:04:06.700 And I know a lot of Oracle customers, but I don't know anyone who likes Oracle. 01:04:07.180 --> 01:04:12.600 What has taken that space, the customer obsession piece of it that's missing now? 01:04:12.600 --> 01:04:13.820 I don't know that anyone has yet. 01:04:13.820 --> 01:04:22.100 I mean, at least in small companies, it's easy to do because, you know, you're a small, scrappy startup and you want to obviously be great and get a lot of attention to your early adopters and the rest. 01:04:22.100 --> 01:04:26.860 But somewhere between that and a trillion-dollar publicly traded company, a lot happens. 01:04:26.860 --> 01:04:27.620 Right, right. 01:04:27.700 --> 01:04:33.180 No, I mean, like in AWS, you said, the North Star, the focus used to be customer obsession. 01:04:33.180 --> 01:04:34.380 Now it's no longer that. 01:04:34.380 --> 01:04:38.040 So what is it that's taking that space inside AWS? 01:04:38.680 --> 01:04:42.660 Well, lately, it seems like it's generative AI because the market's excited about it. 01:04:42.660 --> 01:04:45.080 So we need to spill that all over everything we've got. 01:04:45.080 --> 01:04:46.740 And we're an AI company. 01:04:46.740 --> 01:04:48.580 We're totally not behind. 01:04:48.580 --> 01:04:55.300 It's like, me think the lady doth protest too much because you're awfully insecure sounding about that. 01:04:55.300 --> 01:04:58.420 And you haven't shipped anything really significant in that space. 01:04:58.420 --> 01:05:02.460 And you're rebranding a bunch of stuff that's been around for a while as generative AI. 01:05:02.460 --> 01:05:07.500 And I don't want the underlying platform behind all of my infrastructure to be hype chasing. 01:05:07.940 --> 01:05:08.840 Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. 01:05:08.840 --> 01:05:10.280 They don't need to do everything. 01:05:10.280 --> 01:05:11.660 And I think that they've lost that. 01:05:11.660 --> 01:05:13.640 So with that, we actually have a question. 01:05:13.640 --> 01:05:20.780 What's your opinion on producing content with ChatGPT, which a lot of people seem to be experts 01:05:20.780 --> 01:05:23.860 in these days, at least if you trust your LinkedIn feed? 01:05:23.860 --> 01:05:26.160 Oh, I've been doing it for a while now. 01:05:26.160 --> 01:05:30.000 Part of what I'll do is I'll tell it to write a blog post about a particular topic with talking 01:05:30.000 --> 01:05:32.160 points I provided in the style of Corey Quinn. 01:05:32.160 --> 01:05:34.140 And then it'll spit something out. 01:05:34.540 --> 01:05:38.120 And I usually despise everything that it wrote. 01:05:38.120 --> 01:05:40.420 So I copy that into a text editor. 01:05:40.420 --> 01:05:44.440 And then I spent 20 minutes mansplain correcting the robot on these things. 01:05:44.440 --> 01:05:47.380 And at the end of it, I've got a serviceable first draft. 01:05:47.380 --> 01:05:49.680 And it's easier than staring at the blank page. 01:05:49.680 --> 01:05:51.220 And it comes with a structure. 01:05:51.220 --> 01:05:53.660 It comes with misunderstandings around points. 01:05:53.660 --> 01:05:56.900 In some cases, it wouldn't have occurred to me that someone would believe that to be true. 01:05:56.900 --> 01:05:58.200 We'd better make sure they don't. 01:05:58.820 --> 01:06:02.880 And at the end of it, I maybe have like three words in a row that were originally in the 01:06:02.880 --> 01:06:03.120 thing. 01:06:03.120 --> 01:06:04.720 And I can live with that for one. 01:06:04.720 --> 01:06:09.100 And two, I'm perfectly fine with plagiarizing from the thing that's plagiarizing from me. 01:06:09.100 --> 01:06:11.160 It feels certain poetic justice to it. 01:06:11.160 --> 01:06:11.580 Okay. 01:06:11.580 --> 01:06:14.840 By the way, but you wouldn't publish whatever it output as is. 01:06:14.840 --> 01:06:15.960 My God, no. 01:06:15.960 --> 01:06:19.120 Without review and looking at these things, hell no. 01:06:19.120 --> 01:06:23.920 I do have a colleague who has what I affectionately refer to as the asshole in email problem, 01:06:23.920 --> 01:06:30.480 who will take a message that normally they would have sent and put it through ChatGyppity 01:06:30.480 --> 01:06:32.740 and say, great, turn this into a business email. 01:06:32.740 --> 01:06:34.460 And that works super well. 01:06:34.460 --> 01:06:37.020 And I'm sure some of the other side is like, this is a five paragraph email. 01:06:37.020 --> 01:06:39.480 Hey, ChatGyppity, tell me what this person wants me to do. 01:06:39.480 --> 01:06:42.420 Yeah, it's like basically it's an API for human interaction. 01:06:42.420 --> 01:06:47.360 There are certain niceties and etiquette that a business email has to convey that a Slack 01:06:47.360 --> 01:06:48.000 message doesn't. 01:06:48.400 --> 01:06:53.600 So I accidentally did this yesterday where I asked ChatGyppity to like, give me how to 01:06:53.600 --> 01:06:54.180 make a Mai Tai. 01:06:54.180 --> 01:07:00.200 There were some friends over, but I had my system prompts and everything set up to always say, 01:07:00.200 --> 01:07:06.080 you're a software developer, always respond in like technical and precise instructions. 01:07:06.080 --> 01:07:08.280 And what came out was hilarious. 01:07:08.280 --> 01:07:10.400 I mean, it was awesome, but hilarious. 01:07:10.400 --> 01:07:15.920 I had that too when I was trying to get it to explain, I forget the exact concept to a six 01:07:15.920 --> 01:07:21.420 year old because she was curious, but being snide and sarcastic as a default tone does not work well 01:07:21.420 --> 01:07:23.620 with six year olds in case you weren't aware of that. 01:07:23.620 --> 01:07:26.460 So like, Ooh, let me fix that right down. 01:07:26.460 --> 01:07:30.420 On Twitter, I've done a bit of content with ChatGyppity just in terms of here's its response 01:07:30.420 --> 01:07:31.740 to the prompts I've given it. 01:07:31.740 --> 01:07:34.340 Cyber bullying it into ranking the U.S. 01:07:34.440 --> 01:07:36.480 presidents by absorbency was a good one. 01:07:36.480 --> 01:07:40.540 It's like, that's not a respectful way to, or effective way to rank U.S. presidents. 01:07:40.540 --> 01:07:43.080 It is if I have a spill and need to select a U.S. 01:07:43.080 --> 01:07:45.620 president to mop it up with like, Oh, here you go. 01:07:45.620 --> 01:07:47.160 All kinds of fun stuff. 01:07:47.160 --> 01:07:47.900 You can ask it. 01:07:47.900 --> 01:07:51.280 Like if the purpose companies are doing a terrible job of marketing this stuff in fun 01:07:51.280 --> 01:07:55.700 ways, here's a transcript of a meeting, pick out the action items for everyone. 01:07:56.160 --> 01:07:58.000 No, here's a transcript of a meeting. 01:07:58.000 --> 01:08:01.740 Find the most unpleasant son of a gun to work with because we're trying to build a layoff 01:08:01.740 --> 01:08:02.020 list. 01:08:02.020 --> 01:08:04.920 Cool. 01:08:04.920 --> 01:08:08.180 So on this funny note, you just have a couple of parting questions. 01:08:08.180 --> 01:08:11.480 So Corey, do you listen to podcasts or do you read books? 01:08:11.480 --> 01:08:14.300 Can you recommend something that you, content that you consume? 01:08:14.300 --> 01:08:16.160 This is a weird confession. 01:08:16.160 --> 01:08:18.380 I don't listen to podcasts and I don't watch videos. 01:08:18.380 --> 01:08:21.640 The way that I ingest, that I learn things are twofold. 01:08:21.640 --> 01:08:24.220 One, I can read astonishingly quickly. 01:08:24.220 --> 01:08:28.400 So I absorb and retain information through reading very well. 01:08:28.400 --> 01:08:32.020 But if I want to learn something technical, the best way I found is to build something with 01:08:32.020 --> 01:08:32.140 it. 01:08:32.140 --> 01:08:34.300 That is what really sears it into me. 01:08:34.300 --> 01:08:37.320 So it's weird that I produce podcasts, but don't listen to them. 01:08:37.320 --> 01:08:38.520 But it's absolutely true. 01:08:38.520 --> 01:08:42.020 There's a reason that all of mine have transcripts so that you can just, you can get the written 01:08:42.020 --> 01:08:43.260 version if that's what you're into. 01:08:43.260 --> 01:08:45.900 I can absorb things a lot more quickly there. 01:08:45.900 --> 01:08:52.500 There are a wide variety of different things that you can read that put you in different ways. 01:08:52.500 --> 01:08:54.300 And there's trash reading you do for fun. 01:08:54.300 --> 01:08:56.280 There's technical stuff that comes out. 01:08:56.280 --> 01:09:00.540 And then there's the occasional book that changes the way you think about things. 01:09:00.540 --> 01:09:05.120 Never Eat Alone was one of them by, I think it was Ken or Keith Ferrazzi. 01:09:05.120 --> 01:09:09.160 It talks about the value of how to build connections and network effectively. 01:09:09.160 --> 01:09:12.400 I mean, some of it's obvious, like just go to lunch and people will do you a favor. 01:09:12.400 --> 01:09:13.480 No, no, no, no, no. 01:09:13.480 --> 01:09:14.860 Do favors for people. 01:09:14.860 --> 01:09:17.660 It comes back around again in weird ways. 01:09:17.860 --> 01:09:22.280 And the way that you do this is you always make it a point to go out and be social with 01:09:22.280 --> 01:09:22.660 people. 01:09:22.660 --> 01:09:27.220 Like some of the best money I ever invested in my entire life was at various jobs that 01:09:27.220 --> 01:09:33.000 I had when I would take anyone who wanted to at any time out for coffee and buy coffee and 01:09:33.000 --> 01:09:34.580 just have a talk about what they were working on. 01:09:34.580 --> 01:09:39.520 I must have spent thousands of dollars on coffee a year and it was worth every penny because 01:09:39.520 --> 01:09:44.360 sometimes it turns into weird stuff, weird ways of seeing the world, weird opportunities. 01:09:44.360 --> 01:09:48.400 They talk about the problems that they have and that gives you an idea or, hey, I know 01:09:48.400 --> 01:09:49.560 someone who's focusing on that. 01:09:49.560 --> 01:09:50.520 Have you two met? 01:09:50.520 --> 01:09:53.980 It's a small thing for you, but in some cases it can change everything for them. 01:09:53.980 --> 01:09:59.480 And that's indicated every time that I wind up getting a rando DMing me, which still happens 01:09:59.480 --> 01:10:04.320 from time to time, about something I said years ago about job interviewing or having ADHD or 01:10:04.320 --> 01:10:08.020 any of the other stuff that I rant about sometimes really changed their perspective. 01:10:08.020 --> 01:10:11.220 And then they credit that with changing how they approach something. 01:10:11.220 --> 01:10:12.560 I don't think I did much. 01:10:12.560 --> 01:10:14.180 All I did was just made an observation. 01:10:14.180 --> 01:10:18.180 They did the rest of the work, but it's gratifying to know that hearing the right thing at the 01:10:18.180 --> 01:10:19.980 right time can affect people's lives. 01:10:19.980 --> 01:10:21.860 It's been years since I read it. 01:10:21.860 --> 01:10:22.760 I should definitely read it again. 01:10:22.760 --> 01:10:23.340 Cool. 01:10:23.340 --> 01:10:23.540 Yeah. 01:10:23.540 --> 01:10:24.680 We will link the show notes. 01:10:24.680 --> 01:10:28.640 Now, before we close, I had a side question from what you said. 01:10:28.640 --> 01:10:33.360 You mentioned that basically the mode that you learn things is ingest things is to try 01:10:33.360 --> 01:10:33.960 them out, right? 01:10:33.960 --> 01:10:40.000 How do you keep up with the insane volume of stuff that's coming out from AWS, Azure, GCP, 01:10:40.000 --> 01:10:40.960 like all the time? 01:10:40.960 --> 01:10:44.600 Because AWS putting out something does not mean that it is for you. 01:10:44.600 --> 01:10:45.260 Okay. 01:10:45.260 --> 01:10:45.960 That's interesting. 01:10:45.960 --> 01:10:47.600 Maybe I'll use it for something. 01:10:47.600 --> 01:10:48.780 Maybe I won't. 01:10:48.780 --> 01:10:53.220 I don't try the majority of things that come out, but there are things that I go very deep 01:10:53.220 --> 01:10:53.460 on. 01:10:53.460 --> 01:10:57.360 But if I have a spare afternoon to kill and I build slack into my schedule for this sort 01:10:57.360 --> 01:11:01.480 of thing, all right, let's try spinning up something with Amplify and let's see what 01:11:01.480 --> 01:11:02.180 I'm going to learn. 01:11:02.180 --> 01:11:02.920 What did I learn? 01:11:03.020 --> 01:11:06.300 I learned I'm not a front-end developer and that was fine. 01:11:06.300 --> 01:11:10.480 But even just kicking the tires on those gives you an exposure to it. 01:11:10.480 --> 01:11:14.360 But for a lot of the in-depth stuff, talking to people, this is the value of talking to 01:11:14.360 --> 01:11:14.640 people. 01:11:14.640 --> 01:11:20.620 I might think that Aurora serverless is crappy for a use case or great for a use case, but 01:11:20.620 --> 01:11:23.760 I'd rather talk to people who've been building production applications on top of it. 01:11:23.760 --> 01:11:24.980 What do you think? 01:11:24.980 --> 01:11:28.840 Because if you love it or hate it, that's going to tell me something. 01:11:28.840 --> 01:11:32.720 And there's also a circle of people I trust on a lot of those things who are working in 01:11:32.720 --> 01:11:33.360 certain areas. 01:11:33.360 --> 01:11:35.900 I don't necessarily trust randos. 01:11:35.900 --> 01:11:37.920 Like, let me as well trust Amazon reviews. 01:11:37.920 --> 01:11:38.700 I don't care. 01:11:38.700 --> 01:11:43.620 But people that I know in certain spaces who have opinions that are considered and worth 01:11:43.620 --> 01:11:45.920 hearing, I listen twice to those people. 01:11:46.280 --> 01:11:48.320 Yeah, so Corey, where can people find you? 01:11:48.320 --> 01:11:51.160 Last week in AWS.com. 01:11:51.160 --> 01:11:53.280 There's a newsletter, subscribe here thing. 01:11:53.280 --> 01:11:55.700 Put your email address in and send and hit that. 01:11:55.700 --> 01:12:00.700 You will likely enjoy what comes out over the next few weeks once you do that. 01:12:00.700 --> 01:12:04.160 We have like a fun onboarding drip campaign that explains some of what we do. 01:12:04.160 --> 01:12:09.640 But honestly, it's my thoughts every week on what is going on in the industry delivered 01:12:09.640 --> 01:12:11.520 in my native language of sarcasm. 01:12:11.520 --> 01:12:15.060 And that is probably the best exposure to what I do these days. 01:12:15.720 --> 01:12:16.320 How about Twitter? 01:12:16.320 --> 01:12:17.240 What's your Twitter handle? 01:12:17.240 --> 01:12:20.360 I try to avoid driving people to Twitter unnecessarily. 01:12:20.360 --> 01:12:21.860 But if you're there, it's Quinny Pig. 01:12:21.860 --> 01:12:23.700 Q-U-I-N-N-Y. 01:12:23.700 --> 01:12:24.320 Pig. 01:12:24.320 --> 01:12:26.360 What is Pig a reference to? 01:12:26.360 --> 01:12:32.060 Oh, because when I changed my name to Corey Quinn in 2010, all of the usual domain stuff 01:12:32.060 --> 01:12:32.540 were taken. 01:12:32.540 --> 01:12:35.860 And Quinn is a great last name to pun with. 01:12:35.860 --> 01:12:39.140 My wife and I, for example, don't engage in hanky-panky. 01:12:39.140 --> 01:12:40.240 We have Quintimacy. 01:12:40.240 --> 01:12:42.040 So, you know, keep rolling with it. 01:12:42.260 --> 01:12:43.660 And it was an experiment. 01:12:43.660 --> 01:12:46.340 So instead of being a guinea pig, I'll be a Quinny Pig. 01:12:46.340 --> 01:12:48.100 And it just sort of stuck. 01:12:48.100 --> 01:12:48.980 That's very cool. 01:12:48.980 --> 01:12:50.200 All right, Corey. 01:12:50.200 --> 01:12:50.800 Thanks. 01:12:50.800 --> 01:12:52.940 It was a pleasure to have you on the podcast. 01:12:52.940 --> 01:12:58.860 And I think I need to close this with, if you like this episode, give us a five-star review. 01:12:58.860 --> 01:13:02.200 If you hated this episode, give us a five-star review. 01:13:02.640 --> 01:13:04.660 That's how you end your podcast every time, right? 01:13:04.660 --> 01:13:05.240 I do. 01:13:05.240 --> 01:13:07.260 And then also leave an insulting comment. 01:13:07.260 --> 01:13:10.860 And then I throw it back to something that was said during the episode. 01:13:10.860 --> 01:13:13.360 Again, this is how I keep it fun and engaging. 01:13:13.360 --> 01:13:18.500 And I generally don't know what I'm going to say until about halfway through the sentence 01:13:18.500 --> 01:13:19.400 introducing it. 01:13:19.400 --> 01:13:20.500 It's great. 01:13:20.500 --> 01:13:21.920 Like, you better have something. 01:13:21.920 --> 01:13:22.580 It goes well. 01:13:22.580 --> 01:13:24.900 It's games I play with myself to keep myself engaged. 01:13:24.900 --> 01:13:25.980 All right. 01:13:25.980 --> 01:13:26.380 Yeah. 01:13:26.380 --> 01:13:27.280 Thank you so much. 01:13:27.280 --> 01:13:27.880 It was awesome. 01:13:27.880 --> 01:13:28.120 Yeah. 01:13:28.120 --> 01:13:29.120 Thank you for having me. 01:13:29.120 --> 01:13:29.960 I appreciate it. 01:13:29.960 --> 01:13:30.540 Thank you. 01:13:30.540 --> 01:13:31.540 Thank you.