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Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud.

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I'm Cory Quinn, and today my guest is something

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of a member of the Pantheon of finops royalty.

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If I can abuse two metaphors and smash them together, JR Storm is the executive

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director of the finops Foundation, but also one of the OG folks in the space.

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You were a co-founder of Cloudability.

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Uh, thank you for.

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Taking the time to speak with me and avoiding strangling me.

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Thank you, Corey.

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I gotta say it's like.

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It's super surreal to be here because, uh, you know, as some of the audience

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may not know, you and I were kind of on like opposite ends of this spectrum

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in terms of what we thought about the space in the early days, and it's like

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really great that you've invited me to be here because it's like getting to

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know you and, and your process has been an amazing part of the last few years.

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We, we've.

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Passing like ships in the night for a very long

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time, even before the Enos Foundation existed.

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I had a bit of insecurity around it where, uh, I go and I talk

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to these companies as an independent consultant, pred Duck

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Bill, and like, oh, so you do what, what Cloudability does?

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It's like, yeah, but I'm.

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Better looking and it, it, it, it doesn't work.

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But I do remember that you were very kind and sat down with

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me for half an hour or so at reinvent at a bar years ago.

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Mm. And it was so validating because we were talking shop and so

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many of the things that I had a strong suspicion on at one point

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you, like I, my comment was, oh yeah, it feels like a strong majority

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of the spend, despite all the stuff they talk about is just EC2.

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Maybe that's just the small number of customers I talk to.

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And you've busted out your phone with data on it.

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Like, ha, there's a reason you think this, it, it was so validating

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and it was, I appreciate you're taking the time to talk to someone

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That, frankly, was more a little annoying in a bunch of different ways.

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Your, your, your brand of snark though is one that I've

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also actually been, uh, not annoyed by, but intimidated by.

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I'll say, because you, I'll say at the start of this, you have always

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been a lot funnier than I am, and you've been much better on the,

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on the camera and on the podcast, and so I've actually, for the

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long time, and I'll, I'm being very honest and direct here, like.

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I, I was also intimidated and, and by you and what you were doing, because

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I saw you as sort of the, the, uh, the better version of me who was out

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there able to like, get the jokes going and actually dig deep at this stuff.

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And I think, you know, to the conversation that you and I had.

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Uh, way back then and sort of over the years.

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Um, it's kinda the reason that I, when I left the platform space, I

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got into this, which was technology doesn't really solve the problems.

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There's actually like a whole bunch of cultural learning

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company organizational stuff that like guys like you

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have been doing with those organizations for a long time.

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And so, yeah, when I. Left the platform more.

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It was like, I wanna get closer to guys like you on what you're doing.

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I had no idea.

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I just assumed you're like, oh boy.

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I need to find something more depressing than cloud billing.

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I know nonprofit world.

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We're gonna dive into that and see what happens.

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I did not expect this to go where it, where it went, honestly.

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Yeah.

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I thought it was gonna be like a a side thing while I figured

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out what was next and put a little time into it and the.

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Foundation just kind of grew up really

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quickly.

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History's not yet written.

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It couldn't just be this thing you detoured in for a decade or

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two and as a side project while you figured out what was next.

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Yeah.

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It turned out what was next was retirement and

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okay, we can, we can workshop the narrative.

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It worked out.

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I'm, I'm six years into it now and I see a path for the next

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three to four years, so I, it might just end up being a decade.

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How long have you been in this?

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Oh, dear Lord.

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Uh, I got surprise fired from BlackRock.

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The best way to get fired, uh, in the second half of 2016, I spent some time

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puttering around, but beginning of 2017 is when I really got serious about it.

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Figured it'd be an 18 month side project.

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Uh, wound up after 18 months, taking a few interviews at various places.

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Mm-hmm.

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Got an offer from Amazon.

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I've

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heard about this.

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Yeah.

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The famous offer.

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Yes.

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Yeah, which was, I was, it was weird because I interviewed there twice.

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One was six months beforehand.

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And they're like, he, no, because they do have hiring standards.

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Six months later I interviewed for a different role, got the

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offer, turned it down because of their crappy non-compete.

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But the original hiring manager who is in the space, Keith Jar, for years

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thought that I was just telling lies about like, we didn't hire you.

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What's the deal with this?

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And I told him at a car ride at Reinvent one, he's like, wait.

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You looped a second time.

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He's like, oh wow.

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I had a very different opinion of this.

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It's why would I lie about something so banal?

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Well, this is, I think, maybe vindication for both of us.

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'cause I feel like this whole space that we're in, which,

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by the way, you did not want to say the name of this space.

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I remember you tweeted at some point I was very hurt.

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I think you said.

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I shall not say finops.

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I shouldn't say finops.

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And for the longest time I was like, God

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damn that Cory, he's trying to like cut.

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I hate the term.

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And it won.

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Yes, and I will be fair.

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A lot of this comes from my historical background

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hating the idea of DevOps as a job title.

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Okay.

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Yeah.

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I called it cloud economics, which is very

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intentional because Yeah, it makes sense.

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Like I'm a cloud economist.

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What does that mean?

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Well, it's two words.

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No one understands, uh, cloud is a bunch of other people's computers.

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And economist means I claimed to know a lot

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about money and dressed like a flood victim.

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Put them together and no one knows what the hell I'm talking about.

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Yeah, it makes sense.

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Well, look, I like, I, I didn't create the term ops

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and I didn't, wasn't a big fan of it either when I saw

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it, but when I saw it, it was like, oh, wait a minute.

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Na Naming things as hard as, you know.

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Oh,

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yeah.

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There's all this stuff that people have been doing.

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Like it's, they're, they're like operating in cloud differently.

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They're trying to integrate that into the business.

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Engineers are like, cost, what is this?

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The finance people say cloud, what is this?

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And when it started to kind of like pop in there, I was

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like, okay, this may not be, this may be an annoying name.

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'cause by the way, it's a. It's a Port man tow, right?

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Mm-hmm.

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Just like DevOps.

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It's not actually financial operations.

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It was clear, like it's, it's the short version.

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And I mean, I had a lot of those conversations the early

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days as we were out there talking about this stuff.

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People were like, no, I'm, I'm never gonna say that, bro.

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No, no, I hate that.

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And then by the end of the lunch they'd be,

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they'd be using it 'cause it's just shorter.

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I have pivoted on this even in our marketing now and the thing that changed

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is our customers started calling it that, and I'm not gonna gonna fight that

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particular tide, but I called myself a cloud economist, and I'm sure you

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don't remember this, but back when the finops Foundation originally launched.

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At an event you threw in San Francisco and invited me to February

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19th, 2020.

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2019. 2019. Yeah.

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Yeah.

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I'm like, this is great.

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Like, can I join?

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You're like, well, you're a vendor.

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No.

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It's like, and at the time you were at Cloudability,

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it's like, well, I, I have some opinions on this, but you

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sat me next to Owen Rogers at the time of 4 51 0 4 5 1.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Before he went to, I wanna say s and p acquired those?

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I think so,

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yeah.

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Ancient history, but he apparently had a PhD

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in what he had RET on as cloud economics.

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He's like, oh good, someone else.

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I can talk about the deep academic structures of this.

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And it's like, okay, I have two paths before me.

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I can come clean and.

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Talk.

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I was like, alright, I made the title up because nothing else seemed to fit.

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It's a good title.

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Or I can try and white guy bluff my way through it, where

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at that point I wind up like with a book deal or something.

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And this was before LLM.

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So I came clean rather than over confidently sounding wrong.

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And here we are.

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And here we are.

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Yeah,

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yeah, yeah.

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And here we are right now where we have

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just seen the 2026 State of finops report.

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There were.

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A lot of trends evidenced in it.

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Uh, few surprises, but one that I'm going to hit you on because why not?

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There is, there are two different approaches, AI for finops and finops for ai.

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And some of those, uh, one of them, and I don't remember, which

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was the top of the list of concerns, and one was six items down.

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But in spot checking, talking to folks who are in the

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finops world, people always forget which one is which.

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So I have questions as to how accurate the

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relative placement of those two things are.

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Okay.

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Okay.

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Um, well, I should disclaimer that those rankings vary greatly.

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If you look at what people are doing today mm-hmm.

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What their absolute pain point is like today, Monday

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morning when I walk in, versus what they're being asked.

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To consider and what they're afraid of in the coming 12 months.

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And I would say the thing that everybody wants to talk

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about, 'cause it's super sexy and it's fun and you know, like

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automation, it's gonna take all of our jobs away, is AI for

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finops, which is, how do I use Theis to get better at the finops?

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But the thing that people are actually struggling more with now is

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the finops for ai, which is like, I've got all this ai, I'm not sure.

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What I'm getting out of it.

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I don't know what the value is.

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I can't forecast it.

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I can't allocate it.

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It's very much like, I don't know, Amazon and you know,

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2013 before we had billing data or something like that.

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So we're at that same point.

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So the two sides of the coin are obviously

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connected and I think everybody really.

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Wants to push and from a vendor and practitioner side, like how

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do we use this new technology to, I don't know, even get rid

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of finops, but we're not really seeing that materialize yet.

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We're seeing the, like how do we use the finops principles to apply to a new

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type of spend that we're being asked to manage and the type of spend that is a.

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Going up faster than cloud since, well, probably since 2013.

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Yeah.

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The numbers are smaller, but the growth rate is meteoric,

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which is exactly what we were saying 10 to 15 years ago about cloud.

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Like it's a tiny portion of your it, but the numbers are very

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fast.

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Five to 7% of infrastructure spend right now is on AI ish.

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But it's hard to say 'cause what counts as an AI service.

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I saw an Amazon job ad years ago.

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They called S3 and AI service.

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So we're just, we're just making stuff up now.

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Totally.

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Yeah.

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It is a differentiator.

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Uh, if you, I do all kinds of nonsense with.

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AI because why not?

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I think that there's some whimsy to it that people are

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sleeping on, but I'll use the Anthropic API directly

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instead of using the same model, same cost through Bedrock.

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And the only reason I do that is Anthropic will let you spin out an

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API key for a project and show you what the cost against that API

247
00:09:02,645 --> 00:09:06,844
key is in near real time as opposed to get a good night's sleep.

248
00:09:06,844 --> 00:09:10,324
And then Amazon will tell you the same thing if you set it up correctly.

249
00:09:10,505 --> 00:09:11,285
So when.

250
00:09:11,365 --> 00:09:12,265
This may shock you.

251
00:09:12,445 --> 00:09:14,635
I wrote some crappy code and it started eating

252
00:09:14,635 --> 00:09:17,155
itself and burned through $15 in credits.

253
00:09:17,155 --> 00:09:20,245
I knew what app was doing it and when I thought

254
00:09:20,245 --> 00:09:22,525
I fixed it, but didn't, I found out real quick

255
00:09:22,585 --> 00:09:24,985
one, so that what you're doing right there is exactly what I think

256
00:09:24,985 --> 00:09:27,545
we're seeing people do more today than what's coming is mm-hmm.

257
00:09:28,395 --> 00:09:30,735
We've cut our teeth on how to do this for Amazon.

258
00:09:30,735 --> 00:09:33,885
We cut our teeth on how to do Google and Azure and OCI, wherever we are.

259
00:09:34,035 --> 00:09:35,895
And now it's like, wait, this, this isn't like a

260
00:09:35,895 --> 00:09:37,905
whole new set of concepts we need to come up with.

261
00:09:37,905 --> 00:09:40,245
We just need to, and hopefully it's your Anthropic example.

262
00:09:40,455 --> 00:09:42,585
There's better billing data examples than we had in the early days.

263
00:09:42,585 --> 00:09:44,805
'cause yeah, when we were starting all this, you know, for

264
00:09:44,805 --> 00:09:46,755
you and me, a lot of these people in this a long time, I mean.

265
00:09:47,610 --> 00:09:50,760
Finops didn't really come to be until we had the proper billing data from

266
00:09:50,760 --> 00:09:53,640
the providers that we could do things like allocate down to the resource,

267
00:09:53,640 --> 00:09:56,010
down to the second, you know, figure out what things were applied where.

268
00:09:56,550 --> 00:09:59,189
And we're entering a world where you've got all these AI services

269
00:09:59,189 --> 00:10:01,860
that are consumption based, which makes 'em very cloud-like.

270
00:10:01,920 --> 00:10:05,640
And as a side note, we're getting a bunch of SaaS services now that

271
00:10:05,880 --> 00:10:09,510
through their application of AI models are becoming much more cloud-like.

272
00:10:10,400 --> 00:10:12,470
Everything is now sort of built on what you use,

273
00:10:12,470 --> 00:10:14,870
which is breaking a lot of models, uh, of what has

274
00:10:14,870 --> 00:10:16,970
traditionally been seat based licensing and these things.

275
00:10:16,970 --> 00:10:21,380
But all has to say these are kind of solved problems in finops land, right?

276
00:10:21,380 --> 00:10:23,960
It's like you get the data early into the hands of engineers.

277
00:10:24,020 --> 00:10:27,200
In your example, you try and, you know, forecast that based on

278
00:10:27,200 --> 00:10:29,720
some allocation, you figure out where there's waste inefficiencies.

279
00:10:29,900 --> 00:10:31,760
Like you tie that back to executive priorities.

280
00:10:31,940 --> 00:10:33,530
These are things that company's been doing for years

281
00:10:33,530 --> 00:10:34,940
on the big clouds, and now it's like, let's apply it

282
00:10:34,940 --> 00:10:35,060
to you.

283
00:10:35,060 --> 00:10:36,350
Make sure that the engineers.

284
00:10:36,355 --> 00:10:39,295
Are brought to care about in the proper strategic way.

285
00:10:39,320 --> 00:10:40,000
I, I, yes.

286
00:10:40,005 --> 00:10:41,995
I have this problem myself all the time.

287
00:10:41,995 --> 00:10:42,055
Yeah.

288
00:10:42,115 --> 00:10:43,555
Where left my own devices.

289
00:10:43,555 --> 00:10:45,715
I'll sit here and try and golf 10 bucks a month

290
00:10:45,715 --> 00:10:48,055
off my $50 development account with mm-hmm.

291
00:10:48,055 --> 00:10:49,495
And I'll forget the whole Oh, right.

292
00:10:49,795 --> 00:10:51,235
I cost money, don't I?

293
00:10:51,235 --> 00:10:52,945
I embezzle at in office supplies every week.

294
00:10:52,945 --> 00:10:53,545
It's fine.

295
00:10:53,605 --> 00:10:55,765
It, although with a partial remote office, your

296
00:10:55,765 --> 00:10:57,100
company's a little more just, you can, there you go.

297
00:10:57,205 --> 00:10:57,745
Exactly.

298
00:10:57,745 --> 00:10:59,395
It's just one pocket of the other pocket.

299
00:10:59,395 --> 00:11:00,985
Don't tell the investors they won't mind.

300
00:11:00,985 --> 00:11:05,305
Like, that has been a, a significant shift is watching folks care about it.

301
00:11:05,500 --> 00:11:07,810
The other side of the coin is, oh, I'm gonna build

302
00:11:07,810 --> 00:11:11,020
an AI bot that will optimize your cloud environment.

303
00:11:11,350 --> 00:11:13,435
And I have yet to see one of those that was not.

304
00:11:14,250 --> 00:11:14,850
Abjectly.

305
00:11:14,850 --> 00:11:15,510
Terrifying.

306
00:11:15,660 --> 00:11:17,880
It works for the common simple case.

307
00:11:17,880 --> 00:11:18,090
Yeah.

308
00:11:18,120 --> 00:11:20,730
But the edge cases cut you to ribbons.

309
00:11:20,735 --> 00:11:20,814
Mm-hmm.

310
00:11:20,895 --> 00:11:20,905
Mm-hmm.

311
00:11:21,090 --> 00:11:22,500
I have people, a number of people now have

312
00:11:22,500 --> 00:11:24,780
demonstrated them to me and shown demos.

313
00:11:24,780 --> 00:11:25,439
It's like, cool.

314
00:11:25,530 --> 00:11:27,960
Even in your contrived demo, here are the

315
00:11:28,020 --> 00:11:30,495
edge cases where in a certain context it just.

316
00:11:31,245 --> 00:11:32,985
Caused more problems and it fixed

317
00:11:33,135 --> 00:11:33,225
well.

318
00:11:33,230 --> 00:11:36,045
And, and not to like continue to be even more the gray hair guy.

319
00:11:36,045 --> 00:11:40,755
But like I just flashing back to 20 15, 20 16, 20 17, where the

320
00:11:40,755 --> 00:11:44,415
hot sauce and what was to become finops was automating actions.

321
00:11:44,445 --> 00:11:45,555
And people were starting to do that.

322
00:11:45,555 --> 00:11:46,935
And there were a set of tools that did that.

323
00:11:46,935 --> 00:11:48,855
And platforms I worked on did that for a while.

324
00:11:48,855 --> 00:11:52,575
And the actions like were very valuable in theory.

325
00:11:52,605 --> 00:11:55,935
And if they were operating in a perfect, pristine, clean environment

326
00:11:55,935 --> 00:11:58,215
where everything was known and you know, but in the end, like.

327
00:11:58,725 --> 00:12:01,365
People struggled to automate a lot of the things

328
00:12:01,365 --> 00:12:03,765
because there were, I don't know, edge cases

329
00:12:03,855 --> 00:12:04,005
or

330
00:12:04,005 --> 00:12:04,605
perceived edge

331
00:12:04,605 --> 00:12:04,875
cases.

332
00:12:04,880 --> 00:12:06,704
There were perceived edge cases, there were fears, there were trust.

333
00:12:06,704 --> 00:12:07,365
There were security.

334
00:12:07,365 --> 00:12:09,285
And I, and I feel like we're kind of right back there again,

335
00:12:09,285 --> 00:12:12,074
where I will say my mind has been changed in the last 18 months.

336
00:12:12,074 --> 00:12:13,395
A bit on, uh.

337
00:12:14,160 --> 00:12:17,820
LLMs and chat bots even for understanding data because two

338
00:12:17,820 --> 00:12:19,620
years ago people were like, well throw a chat Bott on it.

339
00:12:19,620 --> 00:12:20,250
I'm like, that's dumb.

340
00:12:20,250 --> 00:12:21,510
I don't wanna chat with a chat bot.

341
00:12:21,510 --> 00:12:22,560
But now I'm like, oh shoot.

342
00:12:22,560 --> 00:12:24,450
You can get some really interesting insights out of that.

343
00:12:24,450 --> 00:12:25,290
So I think there are some,

344
00:12:25,290 --> 00:12:27,630
they need to be validated because they're not always correct.

345
00:12:27,630 --> 00:12:30,600
But it gives you interesting, in interesting threads to pull on.

346
00:12:30,600 --> 00:12:30,610
Yeah.

347
00:12:30,610 --> 00:12:31,770
Think is the right way of doing

348
00:12:31,770 --> 00:12:31,830
it.

349
00:12:31,860 --> 00:12:32,460
Exactly.

350
00:12:32,520 --> 00:12:35,220
So I, I think there actually might be some juice that comes.

351
00:12:35,220 --> 00:12:36,690
It is coming now from.

352
00:12:36,785 --> 00:12:39,755
Even that chatbot approach with finops, but there's still a, I mean, are

353
00:12:39,755 --> 00:12:42,725
you gonna throw like agentic, like against managing your infrastructure?

354
00:12:42,785 --> 00:12:46,564
Maybe down the road, but there might be some trust issues in the meantime.

355
00:12:46,745 --> 00:12:48,785
I have always been surprised.

356
00:12:48,995 --> 00:12:51,875
Every time I talk to a customer it, it hits new, a new where.

357
00:12:52,680 --> 00:12:55,890
So much of this is about psychology more than it is about arithmetic.

358
00:12:55,890 --> 00:12:56,010
Yeah.

359
00:12:56,190 --> 00:13:01,740
Uh, my first big customer in 2017, um, they needed to buy back

360
00:13:01,740 --> 00:13:04,980
In those days, our eyes, uh, $18 million was the right buy.

361
00:13:05,100 --> 00:13:06,420
And that's a scary number.

362
00:13:06,450 --> 00:13:08,700
No, no one wants to hit more than they're likely to make

363
00:13:08,700 --> 00:13:11,370
in the course of their career on the buy now button.

364
00:13:11,400 --> 00:13:13,710
So they ham and haw analyze it for four months.

365
00:13:13,710 --> 00:13:14,100
It's look.

366
00:13:14,395 --> 00:13:16,135
You're gonna spend the money one way or the other.

367
00:13:16,135 --> 00:13:17,425
Maybe it's not the right number.

368
00:13:17,425 --> 00:13:17,725
Great.

369
00:13:17,875 --> 00:13:18,564
Cut it in half.

370
00:13:18,595 --> 00:13:19,314
Make the buy.

371
00:13:19,345 --> 00:13:20,365
See what happens.

372
00:13:20,665 --> 00:13:24,084
Also, I know this works with AWS and it works with other clouds as well.

373
00:13:24,324 --> 00:13:24,745
Okay?

374
00:13:24,805 --> 00:13:26,845
Once you figure out what your buy is, they have a

375
00:13:26,845 --> 00:13:29,755
concierge team you can have make the purchase for you.

376
00:13:30,265 --> 00:13:30,505
Well.

377
00:13:30,865 --> 00:13:31,855
Why would I do that?

378
00:13:31,945 --> 00:13:35,275
Because when someone screws it up and they will, you definitely

379
00:13:35,275 --> 00:13:37,705
want it to be on them to fix it and make it right, rather

380
00:13:37,705 --> 00:13:40,585
than you sweating, blood, wondering if, I don't know, you're

381
00:13:40,585 --> 00:13:43,315
about to lose the entire contract and get sued into oblivion.

382
00:13:43,345 --> 00:13:45,415
'cause someone selected the wrong region.

383
00:13:45,535 --> 00:13:47,815
That wasn't me, that was the concierge group.

384
00:13:48,025 --> 00:13:50,365
They fixed it because it was their mess up.

385
00:13:50,485 --> 00:13:51,595
They're the cloud provider.

386
00:13:51,595 --> 00:13:53,215
They can make it work on the backend.

387
00:13:53,215 --> 00:13:55,195
I don't wanna have to call in favors every other

388
00:13:55,195 --> 00:13:57,025
month because I didn't read a spreadsheet properly.

389
00:13:57,290 --> 00:13:59,030
Your story there is super reminded me of one of the

390
00:13:59,030 --> 00:14:02,480
first finops talks I gave in like 2017 to reinvent.

391
00:14:02,480 --> 00:14:06,020
And it was about a giant RI buy with seven figures that went wrong.

392
00:14:06,080 --> 00:14:06,170
Mm-hmm.

393
00:14:06,500 --> 00:14:09,500
And it went wrong because somebody misread the data and they made

394
00:14:09,500 --> 00:14:12,770
a big purchase and they were bringing their own Red Hat licenses,

395
00:14:12,770 --> 00:14:16,190
but they bought like, you know, standard Linux and they bought the

396
00:14:16,610 --> 00:14:18,800
RIS and they sat back and they waited for some number of months and

397
00:14:18,800 --> 00:14:21,110
didn't pay attention to anything and suddenly the bill was twice

398
00:14:21,110 --> 00:14:23,600
because they had the RIS and they had these things still being used.

399
00:14:24,050 --> 00:14:25,850
But that's kind of the point of this stuff is like.

400
00:14:27,000 --> 00:14:28,710
Finops as a discipline.

401
00:14:28,710 --> 00:14:31,200
I like to talk about, not as about technology.

402
00:14:31,230 --> 00:14:34,680
It's a, it's a people cultural discipline, and that's good and bad.

403
00:14:34,680 --> 00:14:37,080
The bad part is people make dumb mistakes, right?

404
00:14:37,140 --> 00:14:37,200
Yeah.

405
00:14:37,200 --> 00:14:38,010
And, and they're hurrying.

406
00:14:38,010 --> 00:14:38,580
And they're rushing.

407
00:14:39,150 --> 00:14:41,820
But the good part is, and I think a lot of the, the

408
00:14:43,020 --> 00:14:45,360
ethos and conversation, the space has shifted is.

409
00:14:45,795 --> 00:14:50,865
It is less about cutting costs, which is like the RI lever.

410
00:14:50,865 --> 00:14:53,055
And it's more about like, well, and AI's a great example of this.

411
00:14:53,060 --> 00:14:55,395
How, how do I get the right value out of this stuff?

412
00:14:55,425 --> 00:14:57,795
And some of that has to, what all of it should

413
00:14:57,795 --> 00:14:59,895
tie back to the business strategy and things.

414
00:14:59,895 --> 00:15:02,145
But some of it has to be like conversations

415
00:15:02,145 --> 00:15:04,365
between teams about like, why are you doing this?

416
00:15:04,365 --> 00:15:06,285
Yeah, well I'm doing this because we're getting

417
00:15:06,285 --> 00:15:08,954
pushed from the board on using in this way.

418
00:15:09,285 --> 00:15:10,995
And that's okay right now.

419
00:15:10,995 --> 00:15:12,314
'cause we're focused on growth, right?

420
00:15:12,314 --> 00:15:14,115
We're not focused on cutting, cutting, cutting.

421
00:15:14,235 --> 00:15:14,415
Yeah.

422
00:15:14,415 --> 00:15:15,135
Optimization.

423
00:15:15,135 --> 00:15:17,175
Lowering the bill is a point solution in many cases.

424
00:15:17,175 --> 00:15:17,265
Mm-hmm.

425
00:15:17,505 --> 00:15:19,275
It's something that people care about at fixed points

426
00:15:19,365 --> 00:15:21,495
and then they go back to the things that they care about.

427
00:15:21,495 --> 00:15:24,675
I think it's a terrible business in many respects, where, oh wow.

428
00:15:24,675 --> 00:15:28,155
Your, your, your tool's knocked 40% off my AWS

429
00:15:28,155 --> 00:15:29,954
bill, which is a weird marketing in itself.

430
00:15:29,954 --> 00:15:34,005
I mean, I cut my AWS bill by 95% by not checking my keys into GitHub anymore.

431
00:15:34,305 --> 00:15:34,665
Who knew?

432
00:15:34,935 --> 00:15:36,495
But mean, which is not even a

433
00:15:36,495 --> 00:15:36,824
joke.

434
00:15:36,824 --> 00:15:38,485
I've heard so many actual stories of that over the years.

435
00:15:39,224 --> 00:15:40,724
But what have you done for me lately?

436
00:15:40,755 --> 00:15:41,114
Oh, wow.

437
00:15:41,265 --> 00:15:43,905
You added a lot of value upfront, but now you're just

438
00:15:43,905 --> 00:15:46,334
sort of maintaining it and people aren't logging into it.

439
00:15:46,574 --> 00:15:48,765
The tool story doesn't work as well.

440
00:15:49,094 --> 00:15:51,734
Also, the, the cloud providers themselves are getting much better at

441
00:15:51,734 --> 00:15:55,334
this, and the baseline level of knowledge that engineering teams have

442
00:15:55,334 --> 00:15:59,864
about the thousand weird pieces of trivia that around cost optimization.

443
00:16:00,135 --> 00:16:00,255
Mm-hmm.

444
00:16:00,495 --> 00:16:00,555
Yeah.

445
00:16:00,555 --> 00:16:01,694
Are better known these days.

446
00:16:01,814 --> 00:16:04,185
I used to wander into large companies and they.

447
00:16:04,420 --> 00:16:07,060
Hadn't bought our eyes in 18 months and they were

448
00:16:07,209 --> 00:16:09,490
passing data back and forth like a hot potato.

449
00:16:09,729 --> 00:16:12,880
I don't see those large misconfigurations anymore.

450
00:16:13,030 --> 00:16:14,170
I see small stuff.

451
00:16:14,170 --> 00:16:15,880
But once you tell them about it the first time,

452
00:16:15,880 --> 00:16:18,310
they internalize it and they start looking for that.

453
00:16:18,370 --> 00:16:22,030
And what my job here has done instead, it's the ongoing, how do we predict it?

454
00:16:22,030 --> 00:16:23,260
How do we understand it?

455
00:16:23,260 --> 00:16:26,530
If we're making a commitment to our, to external or internal,

456
00:16:26,650 --> 00:16:29,170
we're gonna spend how many millions of dollars a year?

457
00:16:29,380 --> 00:16:31,479
What's the right number to commit to?

458
00:16:31,479 --> 00:16:32,650
Mm-hmm.

459
00:16:32,651 --> 00:16:33,040
There are consequences to this.

460
00:16:33,225 --> 00:16:35,145
Well, you're hitting so many things in there.

461
00:16:35,205 --> 00:16:37,725
One of the interesting things that came outta the, the data from the state

462
00:16:37,725 --> 00:16:43,395
of ops this year was that while optimization is still the top like pain point

463
00:16:43,395 --> 00:16:48,825
priority I have today, it was very fur much further down on what people are.

464
00:16:49,070 --> 00:16:51,680
Skilling up and looking ahead on, partly because of, I think

465
00:16:51,680 --> 00:16:53,630
what you're talking about, which is that stuff has become a

466
00:16:53,630 --> 00:16:56,300
required table stake and we've gotten a lot more mature at it.

467
00:16:56,300 --> 00:16:58,915
And, you know, a couple years of the conference we jokingly had, I

468
00:16:58,915 --> 00:17:00,860
think this for you and I, were, were buddies and you were there, but

469
00:17:00,860 --> 00:17:04,250
we jokingly had this, this phrase that was, um, there's no runners.

470
00:17:04,550 --> 00:17:07,010
Because we, we kept hearing from people and fops space, they'd

471
00:17:07,010 --> 00:17:09,710
be like, 'cause we have a crawl, walk, run, model maturity.

472
00:17:09,800 --> 00:17:12,860
Oh, we're, we're runners, we're, you know, we're, we're really advanced.

473
00:17:12,890 --> 00:17:14,990
And it's like, yeah, no, you are really advanced.

474
00:17:15,280 --> 00:17:17,440
All the stuff that we were talking about like two or three years ago.

475
00:17:17,470 --> 00:17:17,560
Mm-hmm.

476
00:17:17,800 --> 00:17:19,329
You have gotten there, great.

477
00:17:19,329 --> 00:17:20,740
You're doing your job right.

478
00:17:20,740 --> 00:17:23,710
But now there's a whole bunch of new stuff that's come and

479
00:17:23,710 --> 00:17:25,750
the current hot sauce, of course example is like, well, how,

480
00:17:25,750 --> 00:17:28,089
how are you applying this stuff to your anthropic spend?

481
00:17:28,240 --> 00:17:29,620
How are you applying it to your opening AI spend?

482
00:17:29,800 --> 00:17:32,080
How are you, are you using MCP in your finance practice?

483
00:17:32,080 --> 00:17:34,750
Like these are things that the bar is constantly being, I

484
00:17:34,750 --> 00:17:37,240
was gonna say moved, but I guess raised in this conversation.

485
00:17:37,330 --> 00:17:40,389
People also are, are of the opinion that their

486
00:17:40,389 --> 00:17:43,300
organization is the only dysfunctional one out there.

487
00:17:43,360 --> 00:17:43,720
Oh, they're all

488
00:17:43,720 --> 00:17:44,110
broken.

489
00:17:44,169 --> 00:17:44,290
Yeah.

490
00:17:44,290 --> 00:17:49,600
Someday I hope to have a customer who will explain their tagging

491
00:17:49,600 --> 00:17:53,770
strategy and coverage without sounding embarrassed while they do it.

492
00:17:54,159 --> 00:17:56,980
Because like, well, this is nowhere near what most of your customers have.

493
00:17:56,980 --> 00:17:58,899
It's like, well, I, I have a surprise for you.

494
00:17:58,899 --> 00:17:59,740
Isn't that such a funny thing?

495
00:17:59,740 --> 00:18:01,629
So we have been hearing you and I respectively, from

496
00:18:01,629 --> 00:18:04,389
different customers that same challenge for over a decade.

497
00:18:04,419 --> 00:18:04,629
Yes.

498
00:18:04,659 --> 00:18:06,429
And everybody says, well, that's.

499
00:18:06,485 --> 00:18:07,385
That's the simple problem.

500
00:18:07,385 --> 00:18:08,254
We'll automate that away.

501
00:18:08,284 --> 00:18:10,475
The AI will take everything, will take care of that, and yet no

502
00:18:10,475 --> 00:18:13,564
one has been able to move to that like perfect allocation model.

503
00:18:13,774 --> 00:18:15,395
I, I will, I will push back on that.

504
00:18:15,395 --> 00:18:17,645
I think that tagging is one of the few areas where there

505
00:18:17,645 --> 00:18:20,975
is strong AI promise, because my, my baseline premise is

506
00:18:21,215 --> 00:18:23,405
you can adjust the number however you'd like, but for.

507
00:18:23,710 --> 00:18:26,230
Conversation's sake, 80% of the time it's gonna get it

508
00:18:26,230 --> 00:18:28,570
right and 20% of the time it's going to get it wrong.

509
00:18:28,570 --> 00:18:29,020
So, mm-hmm.

510
00:18:29,260 --> 00:18:31,900
What areas is this acceptable in?

511
00:18:31,930 --> 00:18:33,790
Like, well, it's gonna handle our security.

512
00:18:33,790 --> 00:18:35,890
It's like, well, that's not gonna work so well.

513
00:18:36,070 --> 00:18:40,540
Uh, but tagging it's, you are already at 0%, so you're starting from nothing.

514
00:18:40,690 --> 00:18:42,070
Go down that path.

515
00:18:42,370 --> 00:18:44,260
It's better than what you have now.

516
00:18:44,260 --> 00:18:46,420
And, oh, we misallocated this one workload.

517
00:18:46,970 --> 00:18:49,910
It was really not the kiss of death and it's better than what you had before.

518
00:18:49,940 --> 00:18:51,620
Ward Cunningham was the invent of Wiki.

519
00:18:51,650 --> 00:18:52,490
He's from Portland.

520
00:18:52,490 --> 00:18:54,800
It's where I started, previous company, and he had a law that

521
00:18:54,800 --> 00:18:57,500
was, it was how Wiki was founded, which was basically the best

522
00:18:57,500 --> 00:19:00,530
way to get the right answer is to propose the wrong answer.

523
00:19:00,560 --> 00:19:01,160
Yes,

524
00:19:01,160 --> 00:19:03,530
it's colloquially known as the the blank page problem.

525
00:19:03,570 --> 00:19:03,780
Right.

526
00:19:03,780 --> 00:19:04,730
And so that's what I make instead of

527
00:19:04,730 --> 00:19:06,540
a second account and, and Aer and uh,

528
00:19:06,870 --> 00:19:08,790
confidently assert something that is incorrect.

529
00:19:08,790 --> 00:19:09,000
Right.

530
00:19:09,000 --> 00:19:10,800
And your PhD's dropping out of the woods correctly.

531
00:19:10,800 --> 00:19:11,310
Exactly.

532
00:19:11,310 --> 00:19:11,550
Yeah.

533
00:19:11,550 --> 00:19:11,730
Yeah.

534
00:19:11,730 --> 00:19:11,939
Right.

535
00:19:12,179 --> 00:19:13,649
I'm not gonna contribute unless you say something

536
00:19:13,649 --> 00:19:14,790
wrong, then I'll tell you how dumb you are.

537
00:19:14,790 --> 00:19:15,000
Right.

538
00:19:15,000 --> 00:19:15,240
That's

539
00:19:15,240 --> 00:19:15,750
exactly,

540
00:19:15,750 --> 00:19:18,120
and so in some ways, I mean, I think that's, yes, that's a great use

541
00:19:18,120 --> 00:19:20,820
case of AI is like, well, why don't you do the 80%, the good enough?

542
00:19:20,825 --> 00:19:23,225
Pass and get us allocated, and then the humans will

543
00:19:23,225 --> 00:19:24,725
come and like, wait a minute, we need to clean.

544
00:19:24,725 --> 00:19:25,925
Well, we're just gonna lean on our engineers

545
00:19:25,925 --> 00:19:27,155
to make sure that they tag things right.

546
00:19:27,185 --> 00:19:27,425
Yeah.

547
00:19:27,425 --> 00:19:29,315
Yelling at them hasn't worked for over a decade.

548
00:19:29,345 --> 00:19:31,475
Uh, why is that suddenly gonna change now?

549
00:19:31,505 --> 00:19:33,545
Okay, so you didn't ask this question, but talking about state

550
00:19:33,545 --> 00:19:35,615
of finops and one of the challenges that has always been the

551
00:19:35,615 --> 00:19:37,985
historic thing is like, can't get the engineers to take action.

552
00:19:39,230 --> 00:19:42,470
I, I think what we're realizing now in today's, like more integrated

553
00:19:42,470 --> 00:19:46,490
finops land where finops reports into the CTO or CIO, we found like

554
00:19:46,490 --> 00:19:50,389
78% of the time now where it's like part of the function of not

555
00:19:50,389 --> 00:19:53,300
just you need to spend less, but like this is part of your job now.

556
00:19:53,300 --> 00:19:55,070
It's part of being a good engineer and the way the security

557
00:19:55,070 --> 00:19:57,409
is, the reliability you need to have, like, I don't know, keep

558
00:19:57,409 --> 00:20:00,050
the company bottom line working so that we can pay your bills.

559
00:20:00,050 --> 00:20:02,149
And as we're getting a better integration of engineering

560
00:20:02,149 --> 00:20:05,149
practices with the finops side of it, that problem of like.

561
00:20:05,380 --> 00:20:07,840
Engineers not taking action was never really a problem

562
00:20:07,840 --> 00:20:10,300
that engineers were being lazy or weren't paying attention.

563
00:20:10,300 --> 00:20:13,000
It was, they weren't being told by their boss to care about this.

564
00:20:13,330 --> 00:20:13,600
Right.

565
00:20:13,600 --> 00:20:16,210
And so we're seeing that I think happen now where finops is getting

566
00:20:16,210 --> 00:20:20,230
positioned in a spot that they're getting guidance down from the C-suite.

567
00:20:20,230 --> 00:20:23,020
There's not like a seat at this executive C-Suite table, but

568
00:20:23,020 --> 00:20:24,910
they're getting guidance about, we need you to do more ai.

569
00:20:24,970 --> 00:20:28,450
We need you to, oh by the way, we used to have one cloud, now we have three.

570
00:20:28,450 --> 00:20:29,095
'cause we've signed deals.

571
00:20:29,430 --> 00:20:32,220
I need you to not only be efficient in those clouds, but make sure

572
00:20:32,220 --> 00:20:34,830
we're hitting the commitments that we've made to these clouds.

573
00:20:34,830 --> 00:20:37,200
Oh, and we've got a data center that we've

574
00:20:37,200 --> 00:20:38,520
kind of just led and been letting sit there.

575
00:20:38,520 --> 00:20:40,650
We should probably like manage that a little more actively.

576
00:20:40,650 --> 00:20:42,030
So we're seeing these things come together

577
00:20:42,270 --> 00:20:43,650
into a much more consolidated practice.

578
00:20:43,650 --> 00:20:43,890
Now

579
00:20:43,980 --> 00:20:47,460
I am going to, uh, take a break here, and this episode is sponsored by.

580
00:20:47,865 --> 00:20:52,755
Well, us over at Duck Bill HQ where we are solving problems

581
00:20:52,755 --> 00:20:56,445
for the large, convoluted enterprise in enterprise environment.

582
00:20:56,715 --> 00:20:58,815
Uh, I'm gonna say that it is strongly endorsed

583
00:20:58,815 --> 00:21:00,375
by the finops Foundation to watch him flops.

584
00:21:00,495 --> 00:21:02,175
Like it's not, how, how do I wind up?

585
00:21:02,175 --> 00:21:04,995
Not saying, not not contradicting him, but No,

586
00:21:04,995 --> 00:21:06,930
it's this, it started off as a consultancy.

587
00:21:07,215 --> 00:21:09,225
We now have a product called Skyway.

588
00:21:09,255 --> 00:21:11,535
Uh, we recently announced a round of funding.

589
00:21:11,535 --> 00:21:12,825
We're actively hiring as well.

590
00:21:13,180 --> 00:21:16,090
If this is something that sounds, huh, I sure wish there were a

591
00:21:16,090 --> 00:21:20,170
solution for large enterprises and also a bit more whimsy in our lives.

592
00:21:20,170 --> 00:21:21,790
When having conversations with the folks

593
00:21:21,790 --> 00:21:25,630
behind it, please reach out duck bill hq.com.

594
00:21:25,780 --> 00:21:27,400
Remember, you can't duck the duck bill.

595
00:21:27,400 --> 00:21:31,390
Bill is absolutely not our motto because my business partner won't allow it.

596
00:21:32,195 --> 00:21:33,455
Corey, we said no sales pitches.

597
00:21:33,455 --> 00:21:34,115
What happened, man?

598
00:21:34,175 --> 00:21:34,774
Exactly.

599
00:21:34,774 --> 00:21:36,965
There we have to pay the bill somehow.

600
00:21:37,024 --> 00:21:39,875
What I can say is that uh, Corey and Duck Bill are members in

601
00:21:39,875 --> 00:21:42,485
good standing of the finops Foundation and they focus on an

602
00:21:42,485 --> 00:21:45,185
area of finops, which is contract commitments and negotiation.

603
00:21:45,425 --> 00:21:49,715
That is actually quite unique as vendors go and I'm glad you brought up that.

604
00:21:49,715 --> 00:21:52,115
See how I managed to not say you're great at it or anything I just said you do

605
00:21:52,115 --> 00:21:52,205
it.

606
00:21:52,205 --> 00:21:52,715
Exactly.

607
00:21:52,715 --> 00:21:53,225
Terrific.

608
00:21:53,254 --> 00:21:54,845
We have to upgrade our sponsorship tier for that.

609
00:21:56,129 --> 00:21:56,340
Just

610
00:21:56,580 --> 00:21:58,770
find the foundation brought to you by Duck Bill.

611
00:21:58,800 --> 00:21:58,920
Yeah.

612
00:21:58,920 --> 00:22:00,480
Like one of the post acquisition, like,

613
00:22:00,570 --> 00:22:02,820
like Splunk, a Cisco company at the bottom.

614
00:22:02,879 --> 00:22:03,660
Same approach.

615
00:22:03,660 --> 00:22:05,700
Is this like a hostile takeover that you're gonna be doing here?

616
00:22:05,760 --> 00:22:06,540
Oh, we're all friends.

617
00:22:06,540 --> 00:22:08,010
How hostile could it possibly be?

618
00:22:08,010 --> 00:22:11,100
I'm gonna need to raise a little bit more money first, but yeah.

619
00:22:11,100 --> 00:22:13,500
Turns out we have to buy the entire Linux Foundation to pull it off.

620
00:22:13,590 --> 00:22:15,840
I, I can connect you to some people if you, if you need to talk to somebody.

621
00:22:15,985 --> 00:22:16,065
Um.

622
00:22:16,960 --> 00:22:20,080
So, Jo, joking aside, uh, 'cause I'm not as good at that as you are,

623
00:22:20,140 --> 00:22:22,510
you know, like, so you, you, you've always focused on this contract

624
00:22:22,510 --> 00:22:25,210
stuff, and I, I see you talk about contract negotiations out there.

625
00:22:25,210 --> 00:22:28,180
I see you list three letter acronyms that I, I didn't

626
00:22:28,180 --> 00:22:30,010
think that the cloud providers wanted listed in public.

627
00:22:30,010 --> 00:22:31,690
Of course we don't, we don list those three letter acronyms.

628
00:22:32,080 --> 00:22:34,840
Uh, but I think in today's finops space.

629
00:22:35,135 --> 00:22:37,925
What you're doing is especially relevant because where

630
00:22:37,925 --> 00:22:40,385
it used to be like, yeah, go optimize my AWS bill.

631
00:22:40,805 --> 00:22:43,025
Now to that point of, I've got two or three clouds already.

632
00:22:43,025 --> 00:22:46,535
I've just heard a story from a huge like fortune hundred tech company

633
00:22:46,865 --> 00:22:49,775
where like we've got really good at finops and three clouds and then, uh,

634
00:22:49,775 --> 00:22:54,125
this guy named Larry called our CEO and suddenly we have a fourth cloud

635
00:22:54,155 --> 00:22:58,085
provider and we're being told we need to shift this many workloads to it.

636
00:22:58,085 --> 00:23:00,665
And oh, by the way, don't reduce your, don't miss

637
00:23:00,665 --> 00:23:03,545
your commitments on these other three cloud providers.

638
00:23:03,545 --> 00:23:04,745
And so suddenly people are like.

639
00:23:04,955 --> 00:23:07,264
I'm worried about optimization because if I

640
00:23:07,264 --> 00:23:09,274
miss these numbers, I'm gonna pay for nothing.

641
00:23:09,365 --> 00:23:12,034
And so they need to get really into how do I make sure I'm getting

642
00:23:12,034 --> 00:23:14,074
the contracts at the right time, rightfully, all those things.

643
00:23:14,165 --> 00:23:14,794
Oh, absolutely.

644
00:23:14,794 --> 00:23:17,074
And contracts are always a moving target because these

645
00:23:17,074 --> 00:23:19,145
things don't exist in isolation as you allude to.

646
00:23:19,145 --> 00:23:23,615
It's not a great, we're gonna suddenly triple our use on one cloud provider.

647
00:23:24,420 --> 00:23:26,400
What does that imply for everything else,

648
00:23:26,400 --> 00:23:28,830
because you're not an island usually speaking.

649
00:23:28,835 --> 00:23:28,950
Mm mm-hmm.

650
00:23:29,310 --> 00:23:32,880
Uh, this also gets far more complicated in most of the environments I tend

651
00:23:32,880 --> 00:23:37,110
to work within because what, in all the demos we see of the various products

652
00:23:37,110 --> 00:23:40,200
from the cloud providers themselves, the contrived stories, it's always.

653
00:23:40,430 --> 00:23:43,940
Basically startup or scale up environments where there's

654
00:23:43,940 --> 00:23:47,330
one big workload and that drives the bulk of what you do.

655
00:23:47,660 --> 00:23:48,080
Great.

656
00:23:48,230 --> 00:23:52,730
I have, the majority of my customers have very large cloud estates, but

657
00:23:52,730 --> 00:23:58,760
there is no, uh, majority even plurality of workloads that driving the spend.

658
00:23:58,790 --> 00:23:59,690
It's great.

659
00:23:59,690 --> 00:24:00,530
Our largest workload.

660
00:24:00,725 --> 00:24:02,885
10% of our entire cloud bill.

661
00:24:02,885 --> 00:24:06,064
We just have several thousand workloads that need to be addressed.

662
00:24:06,455 --> 00:24:09,334
It changes the story of how you do these things

663
00:24:09,455 --> 00:24:11,314
when you're running just one big workload.

664
00:24:11,314 --> 00:24:14,735
Well, cost or architecture and optimization are awesome.

665
00:24:14,764 --> 00:24:16,685
We're a giant conglomerate, and each environment

666
00:24:16,685 --> 00:24:18,875
in different clouds runs things very differently.

667
00:24:18,875 --> 00:24:20,885
How do you start optimizing that?

668
00:24:21,155 --> 00:24:22,324
It's a different story.

669
00:24:22,730 --> 00:24:26,120
In many cases, the deep architectural juice isn't worth the squeeze.

670
00:24:26,210 --> 00:24:27,470
I think there's a time and a place for it.

671
00:24:27,470 --> 00:24:27,680
Right.

672
00:24:27,680 --> 00:24:27,950
Of course.

673
00:24:27,950 --> 00:24:30,140
That gets to like, we don't wanna just optimize

674
00:24:30,140 --> 00:24:31,550
or do anything in a, in a, in a bubble.

675
00:24:31,610 --> 00:24:32,900
The consultants or a vacuum rather.

676
00:24:32,930 --> 00:24:33,110
Oh yeah.

677
00:24:33,110 --> 00:24:33,950
The consultants.

678
00:24:33,950 --> 00:24:38,120
Uh, rallying cry, it depends So much is highly contextually dependent.

679
00:24:38,300 --> 00:24:39,740
It's weird because a lot of this stuff is not

680
00:24:39,740 --> 00:24:43,070
as hard as it is made out to be in some cases.

681
00:24:43,070 --> 00:24:43,080
Mm-hmm.

682
00:24:43,080 --> 00:24:43,265
Mm-hmm.

683
00:24:43,965 --> 00:24:47,115
But there is complexity to it, and especially

684
00:24:47,115 --> 00:24:49,965
in large environments, all of it is complicated.

685
00:24:50,325 --> 00:24:53,895
Uh, there are increasingly, even in the stuff that we've built

686
00:24:53,985 --> 00:24:57,435
there, we don't have an optimization component publicly of Skyway.

687
00:24:57,765 --> 00:25:01,755
But on the internal version where I was using it early on for consulting

688
00:25:01,755 --> 00:25:05,835
projects, everything it found that looked like a misconfiguration

689
00:25:05,835 --> 00:25:09,195
or something that could be optimized was listed as a curiosity.

690
00:25:09,285 --> 00:25:11,055
When spend goes up.

691
00:25:11,280 --> 00:25:12,185
It's not red.

692
00:25:12,185 --> 00:25:12,545
Mm-hmm.

693
00:25:12,625 --> 00:25:14,190
We're not presenting a frowny face.

694
00:25:14,190 --> 00:25:17,640
That's because we don't have the context to know whether it's good or bad.

695
00:25:17,700 --> 00:25:18,540
Oh, it's really bad.

696
00:25:18,540 --> 00:25:20,880
Our cloud spent spiked last week when we ran the

697
00:25:20,880 --> 00:25:24,030
Super Bowl at like, maybe that's not terrible.

698
00:25:24,150 --> 00:25:24,390
Wow.

699
00:25:24,390 --> 00:25:25,080
A good news.

700
00:25:25,080 --> 00:25:28,110
We dropped our cloud bill to zero by turning off production.

701
00:25:28,560 --> 00:25:29,880
I'm not allowed to do that.

702
00:25:29,880 --> 00:25:31,050
Effective as it might be.

703
00:25:31,080 --> 00:25:31,170
Yep.

704
00:25:31,290 --> 00:25:34,140
So there's nuance to this, and when you start eroding

705
00:25:34,170 --> 00:25:37,500
your own expertise by, by not appreciating the context.

706
00:25:37,900 --> 00:25:40,930
Complicated customers, which is most of them.

707
00:25:40,930 --> 00:25:42,850
On some level, it erodes trust you.

708
00:25:42,850 --> 00:25:45,430
You cannot, like, this is the consultant approach.

709
00:25:45,430 --> 00:25:48,010
You cannot be wrong, which sounds like

710
00:25:48,010 --> 00:25:50,080
I'm gearing up to be incredibly obnoxious.

711
00:25:50,140 --> 00:25:52,660
But in practice, what it means is, I don't know.

712
00:25:52,660 --> 00:25:56,020
Let's find out is my most common answer to a lot of these things.

713
00:25:56,020 --> 00:25:56,110
Mm-hmm.

714
00:25:56,350 --> 00:25:56,360
Mm-hmm.

715
00:25:56,360 --> 00:25:59,530
Because if I wanna just be confident and wrong, well, AI can do that.

716
00:25:59,850 --> 00:26:01,350
I'm a white guy with a podcast.

717
00:26:01,350 --> 00:26:03,300
I mean, being confident and wrong, you'd think would

718
00:26:03,300 --> 00:26:05,370
be my shtick, but computers have supplanted me.

719
00:26:05,639 --> 00:26:06,300
Yep, yep.

720
00:26:06,689 --> 00:26:09,090
Um, you, I'm gonna go back to you said trust.

721
00:26:09,179 --> 00:26:09,449
Okay.

722
00:26:09,449 --> 00:26:11,159
So, so trust, I think is, is nailing it.

723
00:26:11,159 --> 00:26:15,120
So the, the other perennial problem, uh, allocation aside, I

724
00:26:15,120 --> 00:26:18,000
think in this space is I just need to understand my spending.

725
00:26:18,419 --> 00:26:22,740
And that seems like a solved problem now for folks like you

726
00:26:22,740 --> 00:26:24,389
and your customers, I think, and a lot of people in our,

727
00:26:24,389 --> 00:26:26,850
in our space, but we're, we're back to that space with ai.

728
00:26:26,909 --> 00:26:27,990
There's two sides to this.

729
00:26:28,020 --> 00:26:30,810
There's the, like, everything seems different.

730
00:26:30,810 --> 00:26:31,530
It's all new.

731
00:26:31,530 --> 00:26:35,610
It's it's tokens, it's input, it's output, it's like it's inference.

732
00:26:35,610 --> 00:26:36,780
What training, what is that like?

733
00:26:36,810 --> 00:26:39,720
There's all this new concepts, but then it's all still.

734
00:26:40,465 --> 00:26:44,335
Usage optimization, rate optimization and these basic things.

735
00:26:44,335 --> 00:26:47,485
And what we see happening though a lot of the time with

736
00:26:47,485 --> 00:26:49,945
the trust aspect, and, and this is one of the reasons

737
00:26:49,945 --> 00:26:52,045
that I think you guys are participating in this now.

738
00:26:52,255 --> 00:26:55,105
We, we, we ended up launching that, that focus product, which is the,

739
00:26:55,105 --> 00:26:59,005
the standard for open, what, what was starting as cloud usage and billing

740
00:26:59,005 --> 00:27:02,665
data, but has expanded pretty dramatically in the last few months.

741
00:27:02,725 --> 00:27:02,785
Um.

742
00:27:03,870 --> 00:27:07,440
It's because people don't understand billing data coming outta providers.

743
00:27:07,710 --> 00:27:10,080
And the perennial problem back to the, like brass or the, the

744
00:27:10,080 --> 00:27:12,540
table stakes is everybody wants to talk about optimization.

745
00:27:12,600 --> 00:27:14,100
Everybody wants to talk about automation.

746
00:27:14,400 --> 00:27:16,650
Can we auto automate away the optimization?

747
00:27:16,650 --> 00:27:19,620
But first the thing is like, well, what are we actually spending it?

748
00:27:19,620 --> 00:27:21,300
And more importantly, what are we gonna be spending at the

749
00:27:21,300 --> 00:27:23,490
end of the year or later so we can make this commitment?

750
00:27:23,550 --> 00:27:27,540
And that's where we see this important like underlying, um, you're an

751
00:27:27,540 --> 00:27:31,980
AWS guy as James Greenfield at AWS said like, focus creates a substrate.

752
00:27:32,565 --> 00:27:35,895
Underneath of a consistent billing data so that all you smart

753
00:27:35,895 --> 00:27:38,355
people, whether you be vendors, consultants, practitioners,

754
00:27:38,355 --> 00:27:39,915
can build on top of that and get to the outcomes.

755
00:27:39,915 --> 00:27:42,825
And we are, I I, one of the most impressive things you

756
00:27:42,885 --> 00:27:45,345
either personally or as a foundation have done is driving

757
00:27:45,345 --> 00:27:48,105
adoption of the focus standard across all of the hyperscalers.

758
00:27:48,105 --> 00:27:51,105
Like my, my question always been how did you, how did you do that?

759
00:27:51,315 --> 00:27:53,805
Reminds me of the old saw of every car is an Uber if you

760
00:27:53,805 --> 00:27:57,375
have a gun, but it's the how, what arm twisting did you do?

761
00:27:57,645 --> 00:27:59,475
And it turns out that you have the, the ultimate

762
00:27:59,475 --> 00:28:01,815
arm twist available for providers, which is.

763
00:28:02,025 --> 00:28:05,685
Your members are all customers and they all care about this.

764
00:28:05,835 --> 00:28:06,075
Yeah.

765
00:28:06,075 --> 00:28:09,285
And any provider that does not at least pay some lip service to

766
00:28:09,285 --> 00:28:13,005
caring about the customer experience is not destined for greatness

767
00:28:13,005 --> 00:28:14,590
in my experience.

768
00:28:14,625 --> 00:28:16,935
So yes, you could say it's an arm twist, but like,

769
00:28:16,965 --> 00:28:19,875
okay, so you're a, you're a a startup guy officially.

770
00:28:20,145 --> 00:28:20,565
Uh, sure.

771
00:28:20,595 --> 00:28:21,705
You build a lot of companies.

772
00:28:21,705 --> 00:28:24,135
I've been in that world for a lot of, a lot of worse years too.

773
00:28:24,135 --> 00:28:27,165
And the thing that I've, it's, it's the reason I'm doing the foundation

774
00:28:27,165 --> 00:28:29,385
and the reason it caught me soft guard back to like, how do we start

775
00:28:29,385 --> 00:28:31,845
this whole thing was there's nothing better than product market fit.

776
00:28:32,355 --> 00:28:35,085
There's nothing better than that moment where things

777
00:28:35,085 --> 00:28:37,875
just start to go even when you're like not even pushing.

778
00:28:38,355 --> 00:28:40,695
And I'm really excited, like literally at this

779
00:28:40,695 --> 00:28:43,395
point in time with focus, because this last.

780
00:28:44,085 --> 00:28:46,665
45 days, we've started to see something that is

781
00:28:46,665 --> 00:28:48,615
new for focus, which is we're not twisting arms.

782
00:28:48,615 --> 00:28:48,705
Mm-hmm.

783
00:28:49,004 --> 00:28:54,165
So in the last 45 days, just randomly we find out about new

784
00:28:54,165 --> 00:28:58,965
implementations that neo clouds and, and like AI providing.

785
00:29:00,175 --> 00:29:01,825
The new hyperscalers are doing.

786
00:29:01,825 --> 00:29:04,855
So like neas launch focus support without us,

787
00:29:04,855 --> 00:29:06,775
even we, we heard about it in their blog post,

788
00:29:06,835 --> 00:29:08,635
which means they don't have to reach out for help.

789
00:29:08,635 --> 00:29:10,045
Like, I don't understand the spec.

790
00:29:10,105 --> 00:29:10,765
It, it's,

791
00:29:10,765 --> 00:29:11,755
it's documented.

792
00:29:11,755 --> 00:29:12,655
It's the flywheel source.

793
00:29:12,655 --> 00:29:14,395
It's so, they, they launched it on their own.

794
00:29:14,455 --> 00:29:17,545
Um, you know, we did our summit announcement last week of, of,

795
00:29:17,635 --> 00:29:19,915
uh, various things like the state of ops and our mission changed.

796
00:29:19,945 --> 00:29:22,615
And a few hours after that we hear Versal, uh,

797
00:29:22,645 --> 00:29:24,385
provides, I don't fully understand the services.

798
00:29:24,385 --> 00:29:26,245
I should have my research, but it's another ai.

799
00:29:26,340 --> 00:29:29,580
Provider launch focus support, and they're on the version 1.3

800
00:29:29,580 --> 00:29:32,669
and they're the first provider in the world on the version 1.3.

801
00:29:32,850 --> 00:29:34,470
We haven't talked to them, we didn't know

802
00:29:34,470 --> 00:29:36,000
they were doing it, any of these things.

803
00:29:36,270 --> 00:29:40,110
So this is the beauty of when you find that thing that is the problem.

804
00:29:40,169 --> 00:29:40,470
Right.

805
00:29:40,470 --> 00:29:42,120
And I, and I think you guys might have this

806
00:29:42,179 --> 00:29:43,830
hopefully with what you're building as well, right?

807
00:29:43,830 --> 00:29:47,760
Is is you put it out there and people come to it and the be the fun

808
00:29:47,760 --> 00:29:50,490
part, and this is the challenge also to the nonprofit open source world.

809
00:29:50,520 --> 00:29:52,080
We don't control who uses it.

810
00:29:52,080 --> 00:29:54,330
We don't control who builds it all we can do.

811
00:29:54,780 --> 00:29:57,210
Is hope the spec does the right things, put it out there,

812
00:29:57,210 --> 00:29:59,280
publish it in GitHub and hope people go, you know, that's good.

813
00:29:59,280 --> 00:29:59,850
We're gonna use it.

814
00:30:00,060 --> 00:30:00,270
Right?

815
00:30:00,270 --> 00:30:01,140
And now that's starting to happen.

816
00:30:01,140 --> 00:30:02,580
And that flywheel is really exciting.

817
00:30:02,730 --> 00:30:05,130
And as a nonprofit, you generally don't drop $20 million on

818
00:30:05,130 --> 00:30:09,000
a saturation billboard campaign in airports of focus 1.3.

819
00:30:09,150 --> 00:30:11,730
Now with extra ai, it'll, it'll be awesome.

820
00:30:11,915 --> 00:30:15,185
Uh, at, at finops X last June, but this is the last time I really went

821
00:30:15,185 --> 00:30:17,555
in depth with this, with a number of customers because you get them all

822
00:30:17,555 --> 00:30:19,985
in the room and start talking about things, and eventually you run outta

823
00:30:19,985 --> 00:30:22,415
stories about kids and pets and you start asking substantive things.

824
00:30:22,715 --> 00:30:25,055
Uh, the big complaint they all had was that the, the

825
00:30:25,055 --> 00:30:27,395
major, the, the hyperscalers were doing this, but.

826
00:30:27,565 --> 00:30:31,615
Moving up the stack, the SaaS provider coverage was somewhat dismal.

827
00:30:31,975 --> 00:30:32,125
Yeah.

828
00:30:32,125 --> 00:30:33,535
Is that still the case?

829
00:30:33,565 --> 00:30:35,395
Are there trend shifts there?

830
00:30:35,395 --> 00:30:37,855
I, I have confessed, I have not looked into this since last June.

831
00:30:38,155 --> 00:30:40,285
We need to soon, for obvious reasons.

832
00:30:40,285 --> 00:30:41,635
Turns out you have other things going on.

833
00:30:41,635 --> 00:30:41,785
Yeah.

834
00:30:41,785 --> 00:30:42,055
Right.

835
00:30:42,055 --> 00:30:45,175
Um, so right after we launched Focus, I went, I went on, I went on a bike ride.

836
00:30:45,175 --> 00:30:47,695
I live in San Diego with, uh, I'm not gonna say the company name.

837
00:30:47,695 --> 00:30:48,415
We could probably figure it out there.

838
00:30:48,445 --> 00:30:50,845
There's a, there's a very advanced finops practice down there.

839
00:30:50,850 --> 00:30:50,930
Mm-hmm.

840
00:30:51,010 --> 00:30:51,865
At a big company.

841
00:30:52,090 --> 00:30:54,550
With a guy who worked there has been in ops for like a decade, and I

842
00:30:54,550 --> 00:30:57,790
was like, Hey, you gotta, you gotta check out this cool new focus thing.

843
00:30:57,790 --> 00:30:59,830
You know, like two or three clouds are supporting it.

844
00:30:59,830 --> 00:31:06,010
He was like, I ingest data from 67 different types of spend mm-hmm.

845
00:31:06,250 --> 00:31:07,689
Into our reporting practice.

846
00:31:07,780 --> 00:31:10,689
I got a couple clouds, I got, you know, data clouds,

847
00:31:10,720 --> 00:31:12,820
I got SaaS providers, they're all across the board.

848
00:31:12,820 --> 00:31:14,350
He was like, I have no use for what you're doing.

849
00:31:14,649 --> 00:31:16,090
And I kinda like, oh, bummer.

850
00:31:16,090 --> 00:31:16,629
You know, we're not there.

851
00:31:17,650 --> 00:31:19,360
He was kind of right as to where this stuff

852
00:31:19,360 --> 00:31:20,470
needed to go and what we're seeing happen.

853
00:31:20,470 --> 00:31:24,850
So right now there's um, I don't know, there's 18 people supporting focus maybe.

854
00:31:25,545 --> 00:31:27,525
But a year ago there were like three where we're seeing a lot of the

855
00:31:27,525 --> 00:31:30,315
uptick is not like we're twisting the arms of these cloud providers.

856
00:31:30,345 --> 00:31:36,315
It's all these longer tails of companies, SaaS providers, data cloud providers,

857
00:31:36,915 --> 00:31:40,095
like they're being asked by their customers like, Hey, we've got this great

858
00:31:40,095 --> 00:31:42,585
finops practice is managing our cloud with this really great billing data.

859
00:31:42,705 --> 00:31:45,675
We'd like to do the same with yours so that we can keep giving you more money.

860
00:31:45,855 --> 00:31:47,655
We need to show value from it, you know?

861
00:31:47,760 --> 00:31:49,350
Can you maybe use this spec?

862
00:31:49,379 --> 00:31:51,930
'cause if you use this spec, then we can just start ingesting your data.

863
00:31:51,960 --> 00:31:53,730
We can prove the value and it flows through.

864
00:31:53,850 --> 00:31:55,680
And what we're seeing with these new companies that are popping in.

865
00:31:56,370 --> 00:31:57,840
Rather than what Amazon had to do.

866
00:31:57,840 --> 00:32:01,350
And we talk about this in the, the old finops book, which was like 10 years of

867
00:32:01,350 --> 00:32:04,830
iterations on getting through to the data before the data became the ker file.

868
00:32:04,830 --> 00:32:07,740
And that iterated, they can drop right in with like a blueprint that's

869
00:32:07,740 --> 00:32:10,260
open source that's aligned that they can get on GitHub and use for free.

870
00:32:10,260 --> 00:32:12,990
Oh, Kerr not exist in its current form if the focus back had existed back then.

871
00:32:13,020 --> 00:32:14,879
Well, the Kerr has a lot of stuff that focused doesn't do.

872
00:32:14,910 --> 00:32:15,180
Right.

873
00:32:15,180 --> 00:32:17,310
And it will probably for a lot of years and, and it's not

874
00:32:17,310 --> 00:32:17,940
skipping all this.

875
00:32:17,945 --> 00:32:19,774
Cynical things I could say in response to that

876
00:32:19,774 --> 00:32:21,425
that are accurate, but a little too honest.

877
00:32:21,605 --> 00:32:23,149
Uh, Amazon is embracing it was cut

878
00:32:23,149 --> 00:32:23,855
to two hours later.

879
00:32:23,855 --> 00:32:24,995
They're still talking about the curve file.

880
00:32:24,995 --> 00:32:25,115
Yeah.

881
00:32:25,115 --> 00:32:25,355
Two

882
00:32:25,355 --> 00:32:26,135
hours later.

883
00:32:26,465 --> 00:32:29,225
And finally, Amazon is thrilled to talk about this.

884
00:32:29,225 --> 00:32:31,475
They threw the, your, the Fennels Foundation,

885
00:32:31,475 --> 00:32:33,875
head of the focus spec on Matt Cowert.

886
00:32:33,875 --> 00:32:35,495
They threw the two of us on stage together.

887
00:32:35,524 --> 00:32:35,735
That's Yeah.

888
00:32:35,735 --> 00:32:36,814
At reinvent last year.

889
00:32:36,814 --> 00:32:38,830
And by the way, surprising with a few guard rails.

890
00:32:39,265 --> 00:32:42,175
I I was a little hurt that I didn't get picked to speak with you.

891
00:32:42,175 --> 00:32:42,835
I was like, dang it.

892
00:32:42,835 --> 00:32:43,585
They wanted Matt,

893
00:32:43,730 --> 00:32:47,305
I, I lobbied for it, but at the same time, it's, I don't

894
00:32:47,305 --> 00:32:48,625
know, like I, I don't know how they picked, that's why

895
00:32:48,625 --> 00:32:50,185
you've been very kind to let me come on your podcast

896
00:32:50,185 --> 00:32:50,755
so I get stay with you.

897
00:32:51,250 --> 00:32:51,570
Exactly.

898
00:32:51,570 --> 00:32:52,555
This is the consolation prize.

899
00:32:52,555 --> 00:32:52,675
I

900
00:32:52,855 --> 00:32:53,785
always, it, it totally is.

901
00:32:53,785 --> 00:32:55,435
It's like a dedicated hour with, with Corey.

902
00:32:55,435 --> 00:32:55,495
Now

903
00:32:56,095 --> 00:32:58,375
what I found though is that Amazon has, they

904
00:32:58,405 --> 00:33:00,805
do legitimately care what customers say.

905
00:33:01,045 --> 00:33:01,165
They

906
00:33:01,165 --> 00:33:01,570
listen and.

907
00:33:02,264 --> 00:33:05,385
The smaller providers, which is basically everyone else have to,

908
00:33:05,445 --> 00:33:08,355
so how legitimate that customer obsession focus is, and those

909
00:33:08,355 --> 00:33:11,504
other focus is almost irrelevant because they have to do it where

910
00:33:11,535 --> 00:33:14,235
the, where you have, you've reached a tipping point where it is

911
00:33:14,235 --> 00:33:18,524
absolutely driving what needs to happen for serious enterprises.

912
00:33:18,555 --> 00:33:18,675
Mm-hmm.

913
00:33:19,035 --> 00:33:21,045
Uh, the, the coverage is increasing across the board.

914
00:33:21,075 --> 00:33:22,815
I think that we're now.

915
00:33:23,160 --> 00:33:25,710
At a point where what version of the focus spec are they supporting,

916
00:33:25,710 --> 00:33:28,005
is the good conversation to have instead of what's focus.

917
00:33:28,005 --> 00:33:29,460
That's the the problem right now too.

918
00:33:29,550 --> 00:33:29,970
Yes.

919
00:33:29,970 --> 00:33:33,420
Is what version, because the problem we've realized in the space, and you've

920
00:33:33,420 --> 00:33:36,240
probably heard it, and it was in the state of ops data, is now there's so many

921
00:33:36,240 --> 00:33:40,470
different priors and so many different versions that people are unclear how to

922
00:33:40,470 --> 00:33:44,610
put that data together and not everyone was conformant to the actual versions.

923
00:33:44,610 --> 00:33:47,490
And so we are, we had just announced, and we're working on the, the larger

924
00:33:47,490 --> 00:33:50,970
process, but a conformance program for this because Amazon's on 1.2.

925
00:33:51,345 --> 00:33:53,085
And they did, they did good stuff with 1.2,

926
00:33:53,085 --> 00:33:55,095
which is they launched documentation for it.

927
00:33:55,335 --> 00:33:58,395
They, they kept 1.0 around, in case you're using it.

928
00:33:58,395 --> 00:34:01,335
There's now some one provider, 1.3 we here.

929
00:34:01,335 --> 00:34:03,045
There's a bunch more coming as part of that.

930
00:34:03,045 --> 00:34:04,515
So one of the things we need to reconcile in the

931
00:34:04,515 --> 00:34:06,165
coming years is how to put that all together.

932
00:34:06,165 --> 00:34:08,175
Now I'm gonna do the twisting of the arm of the provider

933
00:34:08,175 --> 00:34:09,409
thing, which I think aligns with what you guys are doing.

934
00:34:09,800 --> 00:34:13,040
The coolest thing about 1.3 is actually most closely aligned to what I

935
00:34:13,040 --> 00:34:16,370
understand your company does, which is it gets into contract commitments.

936
00:34:16,400 --> 00:34:16,490
Mm-hmm.

937
00:34:16,730 --> 00:34:19,820
Both allocating spend against them, helping you figure out burn

938
00:34:19,820 --> 00:34:23,570
downs, giving just a vehicle a format to align what is basically

939
00:34:23,570 --> 00:34:26,660
rack rate costs and uses data to some form of negotiated agreement.

940
00:34:26,660 --> 00:34:28,010
I'm not gonna say the three liter acronym, of

941
00:34:28,010 --> 00:34:28,310
course,

942
00:34:28,310 --> 00:34:29,840
some form of negotiated agreement.

943
00:34:29,840 --> 00:34:33,350
So right now none of the major cloud providers support that 1.3.

944
00:34:33,695 --> 00:34:35,945
Think I don't know the data well enough and not speaking to anyone.

945
00:34:35,975 --> 00:34:38,345
I don't know if any of the major cloud providers currently make

946
00:34:38,345 --> 00:34:43,895
available a programmatic way to get access to that often complex and

947
00:34:43,895 --> 00:34:48,095
negotiated three letter agreement, pricing agreement that they have.

948
00:34:48,275 --> 00:34:52,355
In looking at large customer bills, I periodically have seen.

949
00:34:52,800 --> 00:34:57,300
Errors in the discounted pricing that looks suspiciously like you would

950
00:34:57,300 --> 00:35:01,110
get if you type out something in Microsoft Excel, which tells me they

951
00:35:01,110 --> 00:35:04,410
don't have a whole lot of programmatic, uh, wisdom on the other side too.

952
00:35:04,650 --> 00:35:08,310
And this compounds, uh, one of our customers said, uh, that

953
00:35:08,580 --> 00:35:13,920
their team negotiates 300 SaaS contracts every quarter.

954
00:35:14,525 --> 00:35:17,195
It is, there is a massive explosion of this.

955
00:35:17,195 --> 00:35:18,905
So it's a target rich environment.

956
00:35:19,175 --> 00:35:19,235
Yeah.

957
00:35:19,235 --> 00:35:21,275
And they all have different pricing models,

958
00:35:21,275 --> 00:35:22,625
some of which are weirder than others.

959
00:35:22,745 --> 00:35:24,995
I do see usage based and consumption based pricing.

960
00:35:25,115 --> 00:35:25,235
Mm-hmm.

961
00:35:25,475 --> 00:35:28,925
Uh, taking over at some point, providers like it and customers.

962
00:35:29,420 --> 00:35:31,220
We'll accept it on some level.

963
00:35:31,250 --> 00:35:33,230
There is a lot to dislike about it, but I wanna

964
00:35:33,230 --> 00:35:35,420
be clear that all pricing models are terrible.

965
00:35:35,570 --> 00:35:37,640
You have to find the one that sucks the least.

966
00:35:37,759 --> 00:35:37,970
Yeah.

967
00:35:38,090 --> 00:35:38,270
Yeah.

968
00:35:38,360 --> 00:35:40,670
Like it, it's every time I would talk to people about my consulting

969
00:35:40,670 --> 00:35:44,930
work over years, they would think about it for half a second and

970
00:35:44,930 --> 00:35:48,170
then bust out with, you should charge a percentage of savings

971
00:35:48,470 --> 00:35:51,860
to which my response was, oh my God, I hadn't considered this.

972
00:35:52,070 --> 00:35:54,170
This is gonna change everything.

973
00:35:54,285 --> 00:35:55,694
Years of that conversation for me too,

974
00:35:55,785 --> 00:35:57,944
the least painful part we found there.

975
00:35:57,944 --> 00:35:58,815
Flat rate.

976
00:35:58,904 --> 00:36:01,964
Everyone knows in advance what they're going to pay and they love it.

977
00:36:01,964 --> 00:36:03,884
It's like the exact opposite of an AWS bill.

978
00:36:03,915 --> 00:36:06,285
Well, um, companies like predictability, right?

979
00:36:06,285 --> 00:36:08,024
And that's where we go back to ops and this whole

980
00:36:08,024 --> 00:36:10,305
space is about predictably understanding your costs.

981
00:36:10,395 --> 00:36:12,375
And sometimes they'll take predictability over,

982
00:36:12,375 --> 00:36:14,444
I might be able to get a little less spent,

983
00:36:14,535 --> 00:36:16,185
and it's counterintuitive, but the larger an

984
00:36:16,185 --> 00:36:17,955
environment gets, the more predictable it becomes.

985
00:36:17,984 --> 00:36:21,075
You tell me you're spending $80,000 a month on AWS.

986
00:36:21,455 --> 00:36:24,365
That could be anything in the universe more or less.

987
00:36:24,365 --> 00:36:27,755
You tell me you're spending $400 million a year on AWS.

988
00:36:27,935 --> 00:36:30,215
I can tell you what your top five services are and what

989
00:36:30,215 --> 00:36:32,825
your architecture generally looks like without a whole lot.

990
00:36:32,855 --> 00:36:34,865
'cause yeah, maybe you have some skunkworks group

991
00:36:34,865 --> 00:36:37,595
that's doing something bizarre with document db.

992
00:36:38,240 --> 00:36:41,870
Yeah, that's not gonna be the number one driver of of spent.

993
00:36:41,870 --> 00:36:44,390
It's gonna be EC2 RDS, the usual suspects.

994
00:36:44,390 --> 00:36:44,450
Yeah.

995
00:36:44,480 --> 00:36:46,400
The challenge there is that when you do have weird

996
00:36:46,400 --> 00:36:49,130
things, misconfigurations, it gets lost in the noise.

997
00:36:49,490 --> 00:36:51,680
Like if I steal your credentials and mine a hundred

998
00:36:51,680 --> 00:36:54,440
thousand dollars a resource worth of Bitcoin or whatnot.

999
00:36:54,995 --> 00:36:56,105
That gets lost there.

1000
00:36:56,105 --> 00:36:58,865
Whereas on my $80,000 bill that stands out from Orbit.

1001
00:36:58,955 --> 00:37:00,395
Well, and I think that's hitting the point.

1002
00:37:00,395 --> 00:37:02,435
I know you're are, are you just focused on a

1003
00:37:02,645 --> 00:37:04,025
s now or are you doing other cloud providers?

1004
00:37:04,025 --> 00:37:05,135
We are doing other cloud providers.

1005
00:37:05,135 --> 00:37:07,445
So you're gonna have like last week in Oracle Cloud

1006
00:37:08,075 --> 00:37:10,835
newsletter, last week in Huawei Cloud newsletter.

1007
00:37:10,895 --> 00:37:11,225
Uh.

1008
00:37:11,450 --> 00:37:13,700
I do have last week in azure.com.

1009
00:37:13,730 --> 00:37:13,760
Okay.

1010
00:37:13,760 --> 00:37:15,170
I have for years, I'm shocked that hasn't come

1011
00:37:15,170 --> 00:37:15,320
out

1012
00:37:15,320 --> 00:37:15,470
yet.

1013
00:37:15,470 --> 00:37:16,040
We've waiting for years.

1014
00:37:16,040 --> 00:37:19,700
We're a sign up sheet, and I have one for last week in Oracle Cloud.

1015
00:37:19,730 --> 00:37:19,970
Okay.

1016
00:37:20,000 --> 00:37:22,910
Which is written in the form of a cease and desist, because of course it's

1017
00:37:24,680 --> 00:37:24,950
okay.

1018
00:37:25,130 --> 00:37:27,020
Hey Annie, Jack as can start a law firm.

1019
00:37:27,020 --> 00:37:29,600
But it takes talent for that law firm to also make databases.

1020
00:37:29,750 --> 00:37:31,700
Now, the Larry Ellison slander is necessary.

1021
00:37:31,700 --> 00:37:32,930
It's, it's, it's my brand.

1022
00:37:33,215 --> 00:37:34,750
I, I, I dunno what you're talking about.

1023
00:37:34,960 --> 00:37:35,500
Exactly.

1024
00:37:35,530 --> 00:37:37,840
I was profiled many years ago in the New York Times,

1025
00:37:37,900 --> 00:37:40,120
and the closing comment, like, it was like, what?

1026
00:37:40,150 --> 00:37:40,690
Who is this?

1027
00:37:40,690 --> 00:37:42,820
Wackadoo was the premise of the entire article.

1028
00:37:42,820 --> 00:37:44,680
You've had some amazing press over the years, by the way.

1029
00:37:44,740 --> 00:37:46,330
Honestly, it's amazing because I don't dunno when to shut up.

1030
00:37:46,420 --> 00:37:47,770
It's, it's very impressive.

1031
00:37:47,775 --> 00:37:47,815
Yeah,

1032
00:37:47,815 --> 00:37:48,015
yeah.

1033
00:37:48,015 --> 00:37:48,335
Well, thank you.

1034
00:37:48,335 --> 00:37:48,345
Yeah.

1035
00:37:48,370 --> 00:37:48,790
Yeah.

1036
00:37:48,880 --> 00:37:51,130
And at the end, it's like, I, I try, I don't punch individuals.

1037
00:37:51,175 --> 00:37:52,525
Because it feels like it's punching down.

1038
00:37:52,525 --> 00:37:54,205
But I make a special exception for Larry

1039
00:37:54,205 --> 00:37:56,065
Ellison because quote, nobody likes him.

1040
00:37:56,125 --> 00:38:00,295
An Oracle spokeswoman did not respond to an email requesting comment on Mr.

1041
00:38:00,295 --> 00:38:04,015
Ellison's popularity is how they closed the article, and that

1042
00:38:04,015 --> 00:38:06,655
is one of my favorite things I have ever read in the newspaper.

1043
00:38:06,660 --> 00:38:06,670
So.

1044
00:38:07,299 --> 00:38:11,410
As fun as it is though, what we have seen happen in the last couple years

1045
00:38:11,470 --> 00:38:14,380
is that there are four legitimate cloud providers selling Oh, Oracle.

1046
00:38:14,384 --> 00:38:15,165
Oracle Cloud itself

1047
00:38:15,165 --> 00:38:15,765
is an amazing product

1048
00:38:15,944 --> 00:38:17,529
and But selling into big companies, right?

1049
00:38:17,529 --> 00:38:17,620
Yes.

1050
00:38:17,620 --> 00:38:19,540
And this, this is, this is the challenge, I think where the

1051
00:38:19,540 --> 00:38:22,120
contract stuff comes and where I was kind of asking about your.

1052
00:38:22,280 --> 00:38:24,710
Scope and purview now because we're finding

1053
00:38:24,710 --> 00:38:27,110
that yeah, you need the specialists in the area.

1054
00:38:27,140 --> 00:38:27,230
Mm-hmm.

1055
00:38:27,620 --> 00:38:30,110
But there's a rolling up that's happening not just of your cloud

1056
00:38:30,110 --> 00:38:33,170
providers, but with your SaaS providers, with your data center costs,

1057
00:38:33,170 --> 00:38:36,440
with your AI spend, your open AI anthropic that's occurring, which

1058
00:38:36,440 --> 00:38:39,170
is kind of the reason that, I mean, the focus spec is covering all

1059
00:38:39,170 --> 00:38:41,600
these things, but we're also seeing, I think an elevation, and this is

1060
00:38:41,600 --> 00:38:43,160
actually one of the question I had view as well, about your practice.

1061
00:38:43,160 --> 00:38:44,330
Two part when, how are you looking at other

1062
00:38:44,330 --> 00:38:46,280
areas, but also how are you starting to get.

1063
00:38:46,370 --> 00:38:48,890
More integrated into the executive conversations when you're

1064
00:38:48,890 --> 00:38:51,740
going in to talk about a $400 million bill negotiation.

1065
00:38:51,799 --> 00:38:51,890
Mm-hmm.

1066
00:38:52,130 --> 00:38:53,089
So is it a, yeah, two part.

1067
00:38:53,089 --> 00:38:55,069
Is it a cross cloud and, and what are the execs thinking?

1068
00:38:55,069 --> 00:38:58,100
Yes, it's cross cloud and the trick, it's, we're still coming at it from

1069
00:38:58,100 --> 00:39:01,609
the old consulting approach where we have demonstrated expertise and value.

1070
00:39:01,609 --> 00:39:04,790
And for us, the measure of successful consulting engagement is the end of it.

1071
00:39:05,150 --> 00:39:06,920
They say, hell yes, can we do it again?

1072
00:39:07,220 --> 00:39:10,940
So we help them with an AWS negotiation or whatnot, and then like, Hey.

1073
00:39:11,500 --> 00:39:15,370
We're doing one with GCP or Azure, or we're thinking about using

1074
00:39:15,370 --> 00:39:17,920
Oracle, but I don't know if I can provide the physical security

1075
00:39:17,920 --> 00:39:20,620
for my kids necessary for that negotiation, et cetera, et cetera.

1076
00:39:20,860 --> 00:39:23,710
And there's a, can you help us with this?

1077
00:39:23,890 --> 00:39:25,750
And initially the answer was, well, that's

1078
00:39:25,750 --> 00:39:27,160
not really what we focus on, turned into.

1079
00:39:27,160 --> 00:39:29,350
Well, let's take a look and see what happens.

1080
00:39:29,440 --> 00:39:29,500
Yeah.

1081
00:39:29,650 --> 00:39:31,150
And that turned into, oh.

1082
00:39:31,725 --> 00:39:32,925
There are patterns here too.

1083
00:39:32,955 --> 00:39:36,195
Well, as a bootstrap company, we were always, uh, let's, let's stay

1084
00:39:36,195 --> 00:39:38,655
on our, stay in our lane and focus on the thing that we are best at.

1085
00:39:38,655 --> 00:39:38,985
It is smart.

1086
00:39:39,045 --> 00:39:39,435
It's smart.

1087
00:39:39,705 --> 00:39:41,535
As a product, we have the option to expand that.

1088
00:39:42,015 --> 00:39:43,815
Congratulations on your fundraising, by the way.

1089
00:39:43,845 --> 00:39:44,505
I appreciate that.

1090
00:39:44,510 --> 00:39:44,745
You, that was cool

1091
00:39:44,745 --> 00:39:45,045
to see.

1092
00:39:45,045 --> 00:39:45,345
Yeah,

1093
00:39:45,430 --> 00:39:48,765
I, I am, I'm a little, I am confident in the future of Oracle Cloud.

1094
00:39:48,830 --> 00:39:51,650
To some extent and the, all the existing hyperscalers, I'm a

1095
00:39:51,650 --> 00:39:55,819
little more reticent on the path of a lot of the neo clouds.

1096
00:39:56,000 --> 00:39:56,090
Mm-hmm.

1097
00:39:56,090 --> 00:39:59,450
Because in every case where they're providing GPU to these companies,

1098
00:39:59,870 --> 00:40:03,470
folks aren't reaching for a neo cloud as Option A. They're doing

1099
00:40:03,470 --> 00:40:06,799
it when, well, AWS claims that there's cloud scales forever.

1100
00:40:06,799 --> 00:40:08,390
It doesn't source tried it.

1101
00:40:08,600 --> 00:40:08,690
Mm-hmm.

1102
00:40:08,930 --> 00:40:12,080
And okay, we need to go wherever the GPUs can be had.

1103
00:40:12,080 --> 00:40:13,970
That feels like a temporary inflection

1104
00:40:13,970 --> 00:40:14,750
supply and demand.

1105
00:40:14,750 --> 00:40:14,960
Sort

1106
00:40:14,960 --> 00:40:16,610
of 10 years from now, you're telling me that

1107
00:40:16,940 --> 00:40:18,740
all the majors are not gonna have access.

1108
00:40:18,755 --> 00:40:20,375
Has to enough GPUs for stuff.

1109
00:40:20,555 --> 00:40:20,825
Mm-hmm.

1110
00:40:21,065 --> 00:40:21,755
I, I question that.

1111
00:40:21,755 --> 00:40:22,025
Yeah.

1112
00:40:22,145 --> 00:40:25,205
I mean, brass tacks on the additional vendors though, as well.

1113
00:40:25,205 --> 00:40:25,295
Sure.

1114
00:40:25,295 --> 00:40:28,235
I mean, adding additional vendors into that mix also

1115
00:40:28,505 --> 00:40:30,635
often helps with negotiation with existing vendors.

1116
00:40:30,875 --> 00:40:31,085
Right.

1117
00:40:31,085 --> 00:40:34,655
So I I have to imagine there's a lot of that happening with the companies as

1118
00:40:34,655 --> 00:40:34,865
well.

1119
00:40:34,865 --> 00:40:35,015
Yes.

1120
00:40:35,015 --> 00:40:36,575
And people get that wrong a lot.

1121
00:40:36,575 --> 00:40:36,585
Mm-hmm.

1122
00:40:36,640 --> 00:40:39,305
Where they think the right way to negotiate is to pound the table and

1123
00:40:39,305 --> 00:40:43,385
threaten to move your all in on AWS 15 year estate to another cloud

1124
00:40:43,385 --> 00:40:47,375
provider, to which Amazon's corporate response is the version of.

1125
00:40:47,625 --> 00:40:50,055
Bet because everyone threatens that.

1126
00:40:50,060 --> 00:40:50,200
Yeah.

1127
00:40:50,205 --> 00:40:50,325
Yeah.

1128
00:40:50,355 --> 00:40:51,645
If you, they will fight for, it's

1129
00:40:51,645 --> 00:40:53,295
like when you walk into the used car lot and you're like,

1130
00:40:53,295 --> 00:40:55,005
I'm gonna give you, and they're like, nah, we're just,

1131
00:40:55,005 --> 00:40:55,214
yeah.

1132
00:40:55,214 --> 00:40:55,424
Right.

1133
00:40:55,485 --> 00:40:58,634
You, they, it has to be a credible argument if you're gonna play that path.

1134
00:40:58,785 --> 00:41:02,025
I, I can feel both of us getting pulled though into the like, all in oh,

1135
00:41:02,025 --> 00:41:05,685
one cloud thing or, and or the like, you know, is there a best cloud all?

1136
00:41:05,685 --> 00:41:07,305
Maybe you're not, but I, my mind is going to this Oh.

1137
00:41:07,305 --> 00:41:10,065
Constantly in the sense that I think what the reality has

1138
00:41:10,065 --> 00:41:12,585
happened to the, it depends thing you said earlier is that

1139
00:41:12,585 --> 00:41:15,464
we're in this super multi-cloud world, not because like.

1140
00:41:16,090 --> 00:41:19,300
Brighter A, B, or C has like the better offering or better deals, better rates.

1141
00:41:19,600 --> 00:41:21,970
But because business is complex and what we hear most of the time,

1142
00:41:21,970 --> 00:41:24,640
where this complexity comes from is m and a activities, right?

1143
00:41:24,640 --> 00:41:27,040
Somebody goes and buys some company, I had two clouds, now I have three.

1144
00:41:27,040 --> 00:41:28,210
I buy a company they come with.

1145
00:41:28,300 --> 00:41:30,550
And then with that brings the people and skill sets,

1146
00:41:30,580 --> 00:41:33,070
but it also then brings the integration of the concepts.

1147
00:41:33,070 --> 00:41:33,700
And this is where.

1148
00:41:33,945 --> 00:41:36,675
To the naming things is hard and the reason we're doing focus

1149
00:41:36,705 --> 00:41:39,885
and the reason we kind of started the foundation was getting all

1150
00:41:39,885 --> 00:41:42,195
the people managing the different types of technology together to

1151
00:41:42,195 --> 00:41:45,435
talk and use the same language is what you need to get the trust.

1152
00:41:45,435 --> 00:41:47,505
Because even in Amazon, like a dollar is not a dollar.

1153
00:41:47,685 --> 00:41:49,275
You got blended rate, you got unblended rate, you're

1154
00:41:49,275 --> 00:41:51,435
gonna amortize unamortized or you all these things.

1155
00:41:51,735 --> 00:41:54,315
And so I think you know the magic of what all this is and where

1156
00:41:54,315 --> 00:41:57,405
I, I hope to see a lot of what you guys do and as it intersects

1157
00:41:57,405 --> 00:42:00,435
with focus and we're seeing the community is people just agreeing.

1158
00:42:00,560 --> 00:42:02,900
On the terms and terminologies and hopefully even pro

1159
00:42:02,930 --> 00:42:04,940
against the providers between that I said against.

1160
00:42:04,940 --> 00:42:09,170
See that's Freudian between the providers because what I don't

1161
00:42:09,170 --> 00:42:12,320
think anybody's differentiating things should be is like,

1162
00:42:12,440 --> 00:42:15,500
are we best at finding the optimization opportunity, right?

1163
00:42:15,620 --> 00:42:17,870
It should be like, are we the best at providing the service?

1164
00:42:17,870 --> 00:42:19,730
So like we want to hopefully normalize a lot of that.

1165
00:42:19,759 --> 00:42:21,770
The bill is going to be what the bill is going to be, and

1166
00:42:21,770 --> 00:42:24,200
by and large, the economic drivers, people are not picking

1167
00:42:24,200 --> 00:42:27,110
a provider because it's 8% cheaper than another provider.

1168
00:42:27,509 --> 00:42:28,680
Generally there.

1169
00:42:28,680 --> 00:42:29,460
I hear some of that.

1170
00:42:29,490 --> 00:42:29,609
Yeah.

1171
00:42:29,609 --> 00:42:29,790
There

1172
00:42:29,790 --> 00:42:30,390
are exceptions.

1173
00:42:30,395 --> 00:42:30,524
Everything.

1174
00:42:30,524 --> 00:42:32,850
It's more commoditized gen, but Yes.

1175
00:42:32,850 --> 00:42:33,660
And it's not about which.

1176
00:42:33,660 --> 00:42:34,410
Yeah, exactly.

1177
00:42:34,470 --> 00:42:37,049
I mean, honestly, I went from being running my, uh, front end of my

1178
00:42:37,049 --> 00:42:41,520
newsletter production system on AWS Amplify to ELL as a paying customer.

1179
00:42:41,759 --> 00:42:43,404
And the single reason I know Ell.

1180
00:42:43,785 --> 00:42:45,225
I do, I over ell very well.

1181
00:42:45,225 --> 00:42:46,065
I'm not nerdy enough to know.

1182
00:42:46,065 --> 00:42:46,095
I

1183
00:42:46,149 --> 00:42:50,174
feel bit the, and the single reason I did it is simultaneously makes no

1184
00:42:50,174 --> 00:42:54,495
sense in all the sense at once is that I got tired of fighting with my AI

1185
00:42:54,495 --> 00:42:58,365
assisted developer in Claude Code to convince it that I was using Amplify.

1186
00:42:58,365 --> 00:43:01,365
It kept assuming I was on Versel and I got tired of that

1187
00:43:01,365 --> 00:43:04,185
sissy and push the Boulder back up the hill task every week.

1188
00:43:04,190 --> 00:43:04,350
Okay.

1189
00:43:04,424 --> 00:43:04,754
Okay.

1190
00:43:05,085 --> 00:43:07,845
Which is probably a silly reason, but I'm probably not the only one either.

1191
00:43:07,980 --> 00:43:09,495
I, I just do what the robot tells me.

1192
00:43:09,615 --> 00:43:09,855
Yeah.

1193
00:43:10,095 --> 00:43:11,655
And Billing's always the last thing that people wanna

1194
00:43:11,655 --> 00:43:12,945
pay attention to when they're building a product.

1195
00:43:13,005 --> 00:43:13,125
Oh.

1196
00:43:13,125 --> 00:43:13,875
They pay a lot of attention to it.

1197
00:43:13,875 --> 00:43:14,685
Right after they should have.

1198
00:43:14,745 --> 00:43:16,395
And the last thing we looked at was how to build our own billing

1199
00:43:16,395 --> 00:43:18,045
system, even though we were looking at other billing systems.

1200
00:43:18,045 --> 00:43:18,225
Right.

1201
00:43:18,315 --> 00:43:19,395
That's, that's how it goes.

1202
00:43:19,515 --> 00:43:19,695
Ugh.

1203
00:43:19,725 --> 00:43:22,785
So, uh, are you gonna come back to San Diego in June?

1204
00:43:22,815 --> 00:43:23,475
Oh, I'll be there.

1205
00:43:23,595 --> 00:43:24,675
I'll be there at FedEx Ops X this year.

1206
00:43:24,705 --> 00:43:25,725
I assume you will too.

1207
00:43:25,725 --> 00:43:27,195
It's for you as sort of a command performance.

1208
00:43:27,200 --> 00:43:29,415
I'm, I'm debating we'll see this year when I Yeah, sure.

1209
00:43:29,415 --> 00:43:30,495
No, it's, it's, it's great.

1210
00:43:30,495 --> 00:43:33,105
It's, it's our, uh, we, we kind of align our whole.

1211
00:43:33,675 --> 00:43:34,635
Calendar year around it.

1212
00:43:34,635 --> 00:43:37,005
We don't, I, I informally call it our fiscal year 'cause it's like

1213
00:43:37,005 --> 00:43:39,195
everything is leading up to X and everything's a before and after.

1214
00:43:39,195 --> 00:43:39,645
Unfortunately.

1215
00:43:39,645 --> 00:43:41,385
That's how I feel about reinvent and I wish I didn't.

1216
00:43:41,535 --> 00:43:41,715
Yeah.

1217
00:43:41,715 --> 00:43:43,305
Some year I'm going to skip reinvent.

1218
00:43:43,305 --> 00:43:43,965
It'll be amazing.

1219
00:43:44,055 --> 00:43:46,695
I've been promising that to myself and my family for like 12 years now.

1220
00:43:46,695 --> 00:43:49,425
And I, yeah, but it's, every time I go, we end up getting value.

1221
00:43:49,425 --> 00:43:50,565
So it's, it's tough.

1222
00:43:50,625 --> 00:43:52,575
If, if people want to learn more or ideally and

1223
00:43:52,575 --> 00:43:55,365
they should attend finops X, where should they go?

1224
00:43:55,485 --> 00:43:56,175
There's a website.

1225
00:43:56,810 --> 00:43:57,830
X ops work.

1226
00:43:58,069 --> 00:44:00,980
Uh, but I think, you know, the thing that I always want to, for

1227
00:44:00,980 --> 00:44:04,430
folks who've not been there before, well, ironically first, uh,

1228
00:44:04,430 --> 00:44:06,830
the first reinvent when we were starting our conference, I went and

1229
00:44:06,830 --> 00:44:09,890
watched the first keynote from the first Reinvent and Jassy sit on

1230
00:44:09,890 --> 00:44:14,060
stage and he goes, this is not a sales and marketing conference.

1231
00:44:14,865 --> 00:44:16,005
That was in his opening keynote.

1232
00:44:16,065 --> 00:44:17,835
And so I've actually adopted that phrase,

1233
00:44:17,835 --> 00:44:19,845
but I mean it, I think a little bit more.

1234
00:44:19,875 --> 00:44:21,075
Well, they meant it at the time.

1235
00:44:21,075 --> 00:44:21,165
They

1236
00:44:21,165 --> 00:44:21,555
meant it.

1237
00:44:21,555 --> 00:44:22,290
They meant it.

1238
00:44:22,875 --> 00:44:24,705
And then the economics sort of got away from it.

1239
00:44:24,705 --> 00:44:27,495
And one on an earnings call during the pandemic, they mentioned it was a

1240
00:44:27,495 --> 00:44:30,735
down quarter because they didn't have the boost of reinvent ticket sales.

1241
00:44:30,735 --> 00:44:31,965
It was Oh, my stars.

1242
00:44:31,965 --> 00:44:33,855
But, but that's, that's what I like to say is, is, is a

1243
00:44:33,855 --> 00:44:36,135
little bit special about our conference, which is, um.

1244
00:44:37,319 --> 00:44:40,830
We're, we're not trying to get you to buy more cloud or anything else there.

1245
00:44:40,860 --> 00:44:44,250
We're trying to get you together with your peers to like, not just

1246
00:44:44,250 --> 00:44:47,220
get better at your job, but to be able to talk about the thing

1247
00:44:47,220 --> 00:44:49,470
that, I mean, I mean, we just nerded out on some stuff Oh, yeah.

1248
00:44:49,470 --> 00:44:50,700
That most people could care less about.

1249
00:44:50,700 --> 00:44:51,240
This is what I love.

1250
00:44:51,240 --> 00:44:51,540
Have this

1251
00:44:51,540 --> 00:44:52,319
conversation.

1252
00:44:52,319 --> 00:44:52,650
Right.

1253
00:44:52,950 --> 00:44:53,220
Yeah.

1254
00:44:53,279 --> 00:44:55,589
During the raise, one of our hard problems talking to some investors

1255
00:44:55,650 --> 00:44:59,370
was the fact that, their question was, why is this a hard problem?

1256
00:44:59,370 --> 00:45:01,529
It just, the bill says what it says, and then you pay it.

1257
00:45:01,770 --> 00:45:02,580
It's, yeah.

1258
00:45:02,640 --> 00:45:04,020
Hasn't Amazon just solved this?

1259
00:45:04,020 --> 00:45:05,154
Exactly.

1260
00:45:05,154 --> 00:45:05,740
It's, they're gonna solve it.

1261
00:45:05,875 --> 00:45:08,484
It's an entire problem that so much the world doesn't know exists.

1262
00:45:08,484 --> 00:45:11,515
And if you start talking about this at a cocktail party, you're asked to leave.

1263
00:45:11,545 --> 00:45:11,904
Oh yeah.

1264
00:45:11,904 --> 00:45:13,975
I hate it when people ask me what I do at cocktail parties.

1265
00:45:14,004 --> 00:45:14,634
Oh, I just lie.

1266
00:45:14,634 --> 00:45:15,085
It's faster.

1267
00:45:16,315 --> 00:45:16,545
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1268
00:45:16,645 --> 00:45:17,245
Okay, great.

1269
00:45:17,245 --> 00:45:17,995
Oh, that's, that's nice.

1270
00:45:17,995 --> 00:45:19,045
But what do you do for a day job?

1271
00:45:19,045 --> 00:45:19,285
No, no.

1272
00:45:19,285 --> 00:45:20,605
I, I'm, nevermind.

1273
00:45:20,665 --> 00:45:22,285
We're, we're saving the cloud whales.

1274
00:45:22,375 --> 00:45:22,555
You do?

1275
00:45:22,555 --> 00:45:22,705
Yeah.

1276
00:45:22,734 --> 00:45:23,154
Yeah.

1277
00:45:23,214 --> 00:45:25,795
I really wanna say, like, and I, from bottom of my heart mean this.

1278
00:45:25,795 --> 00:45:28,795
Like, I'm, I'm honored that, that you had me here and that you actually.

1279
00:45:28,995 --> 00:45:30,674
Come and participate in our conference.

1280
00:45:30,674 --> 00:45:32,955
'cause I'll let you know, I, uh, at one

1281
00:45:32,955 --> 00:45:35,595
point I thought of you as a, as a nemesis.

1282
00:45:35,685 --> 00:45:35,805
Mm-hmm.

1283
00:45:36,255 --> 00:45:38,895
And you through our good friend Rick Oaks.

1284
00:45:39,075 --> 00:45:39,525
Oh, I love

1285
00:45:39,525 --> 00:45:42,645
Rick came to me at reinvent and sat down and broke the ice.

1286
00:45:43,065 --> 00:45:45,345
And, uh, if you haven't, have you heard the Infinite Game by Simon Sinek?

1287
00:45:45,705 --> 00:45:46,185
Not yet.

1288
00:45:46,185 --> 00:45:48,645
So he talks in there about moving people from.

1289
00:45:49,580 --> 00:45:53,360
Nemesis to worthy rivals and a worthy rival is one who has a bunch of

1290
00:45:53,360 --> 00:45:57,020
skills that you don't have who's probably in the same space, who makes you

1291
00:45:57,020 --> 00:46:00,860
better because you watch them go and operate and you're like, gosh dang it.

1292
00:46:00,860 --> 00:46:03,950
And I was like, Dak Corey's so good at getting the press and doing these things.

1293
00:46:03,950 --> 00:46:07,790
And you know, he, he's smart and he's funny, but I shifted my thinking around

1294
00:46:07,790 --> 00:46:11,570
you and you've like, turned out to be like a lovely, sweet human being who,

1295
00:46:11,570 --> 00:46:15,860
well, I like being, has a great public snark, you know, persona, uh, into that.

1296
00:46:15,860 --> 00:46:16,670
And, and so I'm.

1297
00:46:16,875 --> 00:46:19,005
I'm honestly like grateful that you've had me here

1298
00:46:19,005 --> 00:46:20,505
and I'm, I'm looking forward to, you know, getting

1299
00:46:20,895 --> 00:46:20,975
to you better.

1300
00:46:20,975 --> 00:46:22,635
No, thank you again, where we stand in different spaces in the

1301
00:46:22,635 --> 00:46:25,425
universe, like there is zero chance of me starting a nonprofit.

1302
00:46:25,425 --> 00:46:26,895
I assure you that

1303
00:46:26,895 --> 00:46:28,755
I would've said that seven, eight years ago too.

1304
00:46:28,755 --> 00:46:28,815
Oh,

1305
00:46:30,045 --> 00:46:30,285
yeah.

1306
00:46:30,285 --> 00:46:34,125
I, at some point when I, when my actions start casting aspersions on

1307
00:46:34,125 --> 00:46:37,965
groups larger than me and causing problems for others, okay, this, I

1308
00:46:37,965 --> 00:46:40,605
need to be a little more careful at how I say these things these days.

1309
00:46:40,605 --> 00:46:42,465
It's at some point of scale.

1310
00:46:42,700 --> 00:46:46,390
I'm no longer a fit and I start transitioning over to the liability side.

1311
00:46:46,509 --> 00:46:48,040
So it, it, it keeps things interesting, but

1312
00:46:48,040 --> 00:46:49,360
I'm looking forward to seeing what's next.

1313
00:46:49,600 --> 00:46:50,800
My, which is finops X in June.

1314
00:46:50,860 --> 00:46:51,430
It is.

1315
00:46:51,430 --> 00:46:54,340
And yeah, I'm excited to see you there and uh, hear

1316
00:46:54,340 --> 00:46:56,860
what happens with Skyway and your everything else

1317
00:46:57,160 --> 00:46:58,720
more to come and watch this space.

1318
00:46:58,810 --> 00:46:58,960
Alright.

1319
00:46:58,990 --> 00:47:01,450
Thank you so much for taking the time Jr. Appreciate it.

1320
00:47:01,720 --> 00:47:01,795
Thanks.

1321
00:47:01,795 --> 00:47:05,380
JR Storm executive director of the Ops Foundation.

1322
00:47:05,710 --> 00:47:08,740
I'm Cloud economist Co Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud.

1323
00:47:08,980 --> 00:47:11,860
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please, we have a five star review on your

1324
00:47:11,860 --> 00:47:15,490
podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please,

1325
00:47:15,700 --> 00:47:19,300
we have a five star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an

1326
00:47:19,300 --> 00:47:23,200
angry comment, but make sure it's focused, it's written in the right focus

1327
00:47:23,200 --> 00:47:27,100
standard so that we can internalize it and maybe take action on it someday.