Jeremy Price: When you have those sorts of whale clients, suddenly they have lots
of leverage over your direction, right?
And suddenly you're going to step in line when they say, Hey, here's
this feature request, which again, might not make sense for 99 point,
you know, five nines of our clients.
Um, but they want it.
And so, well, we like our business, so we better actually make it happen for them.
Um, you know, it's, it's again that sort of freedom that we have
with not being beholden to VCs.
We're also not beholden any particular customer.
We certainly take.
Those can, you know, those requests into consideration.
I think we even say, you know, prioritized, you know, feature
requests and that sort of stuff.
But it still goes through the, does this make sense for the product filter?
Uh, and if it doesn't make sense for the product, we say,
Hey, we're sorry, but that.
That just doesn't align with how the direction we wanna go.
Corey : Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud.
I'm Cory Quinn.
Today's guest has been circling me and I've been circling him since long
before any of you had heard of me.
Don't you miss those naive days of innocence.
Uh, Jeremy Price is the VP of technology at enshittification Grokability.
Jeremy, thank you for talking with me.
Jeremy Price: Thank you for having me.
Good, sir. It's, it's been too long.
Corey : This episode is sponsored by my own company, duck Bill, having trouble
with your AWS bill, perhaps it's time to renegotiate a contract with them.
Maybe you're just wondering how to predict what's going on in the wide world of AWS.
Well, that's where Duck Bill comes in to help.
Remember, you can't duck the duck bill.
Bill, which I am reliably informed by my business partner
is absolutely not our motto.
To learn more, visit duck bill hq.com.
It really has.
It used to live in the city and then we had no excuse for never talking
to each other except at conferences.
And now you live out of the city.
And we have better excuses for not talking to each other except at conferences,
except for the part where we don't really go to conferences quite like we used to.
It feels like.
Peak conference time was a Zer phenomenon.
Jeremy Price: Yeah.
Uh, especially in, I think our sort of realm, you know, the peak
DevOps conference meetup times were in those, those teen years.
Uh, well.
The 2010s, not our teen years.
Corey : And it was very quickly getting into DevRel, talking to DevRel, and
it was, this is, it was clear it wasn't gonna be sustainable, but man,
do I miss the days of being able to get on stage five times a month and
just indulge my ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice.
Now I have to do that in a podcast.
Jeremy Price: Yeah.
And it's all yours, so you don't have to ask anybody for permission.
Corey : You would think that?
Yeah.
We, we all have people we have to be held accountable to at, at some level.
So Grokability has always been an interesting company.
I have been keeping an eye on it from the periphery.
I hate what you do, which is open source asset management.
I don't like asset management.
I, if I can't find something close at hand, well, it clearly has fallen
into a, well, I'll buy a new one, but.
That cuts against my entire life philosophy of always
buying new toys with an excuse.
But I like the open source model.
I like the fact that you have been hosting this for customers who don't
wanna run infrastructure themselves and have done, done this going from a just a
few folks to, or 10 person company now.
And your bootstrap, which is a fancy, disparaging term that we use in San
Francisco, uh, for old timey business model that makes more money than it
spends like grandma used to make.
And it's kind of a, a breath of fresh air.
Jeremy Price: Well, thanks.
Yeah.
Um, no, we, we are delighted by it.
Um, the whole thing started when my CEO.
Uh, slash founder slash chief developer or head developer was working as
a CTO at an ad firm in New York.
And, um, they did an office move and lost a whole lot of equipment
and they had no idea, uh, where to even start looking for it.
And they figured out it was, you know, several,
Corey : did they check their trunk?
Jeremy Price: I think it was other people's trunks that were the issue,
but they had no idea who to even go ask.
Uh, and she was given, uh, zero budget to fix that.
Um, and apparently all of the free stuff out there, uh, wasn't particularly good.
Um, and so she said, well, I'll do what I always do.
I'll go write my own solution and did, and put it out in the internet.
Um.
And apparently some people thought it was kind of cool instead
of started contributing to it.
Uh, and years later on a dare, um, she put up a PayPal link on the website and
said, Hey, if you don't wanna run this yourself, uh, we'll run it for you.
Corey : That is such a perfect infrastructure way of thinking,
because it's not, it's just a PHP app.
It's not that hard to run it yourself.
Who the hell would pay us to do that?
Well, almost nobody.
The difference between absolutely nobody and almost nobody as it turns
out, can launch an entire company.
Jeremy Price: Yeah, yeah.
Within the first week, uh, she had lost the bet because three people had signed
up and suddenly she figured out, needed to figure out how to host a thing.
Several years later, um, her CTO and husband was working for
me and she stole him from me.
Um, and then I curse at her and she looked at me and said, you're next.
And six months later, uh, and now almost five years, hence, uh, I
came onto Grokability and took over infrastructure and architecture.
Of the hosting platform.
She still runs the making of the software side of it.
Corey : Yeah.
It's, it's nice to be, that's sort of the dream, but like building SaaS that works.
I mean, I, I would absolutely, if I were running infrastructure or asset
management stuff, I would absolutely pay for something like this even if
I wanted to host it myself, which for something back office like
this, that isn't critical path.
I don't know that I necessarily would, but even if I did host it myself,
there's something to be said by, for changing the nature of your relationship
with the software, going from user to customer by, by the act of giving you a
dollar, I have now triggered an alchemy where suddenly you have to you, you're
sort of beholden to me on some level.
You don't have to build every feature I ask for, but you're inherently
gonna take them more seriously.
Jeremy Price: Yes, we find that, and I think ironically, um, the
people who pay us, the people who are actually entitled to our time,
um, and our services are the most polite, um, and the more understanding
than a lot of our open source.
And don't get me wrong, we have a lot of wonderful open source
users and contributors and whatnot.
But, but, but yes, we've found that, um.
The overwhelming majority of people feeling really, really entitled to
their feature or our time, uh, or our, you know, debugging are the
people who are not in fact paying us.
And the people who are paying us, um, tend to be really, really nice about it.
And I think that's a, a broader trend in open source, but it's been
fascinating to see up close and personal.
Corey : It's, it's hard in that a lot of folks who fall down this well of doing a,
I'm gonna build a open source company, do it by, alright, I'm gonna build a thing,
I'm gonna take a bunch of VC money, which inherently means that there's an expected
return ratio that is not easy to hit.
And uh, there was an era where folks did this and assume that,
well, we wrote the software.
Clearly we are the best folks to operationalize that and run it.
And AWS said, here, hold my tea.
I'm gonna want it back.
We don't give you free anything.
And, and suddenly they're, Hey, that's not fair.
I disagree.
I think that, that people want, on some level the upside of open
source with none of the downsides.
Uh, you have demonstrated that it is possible to make a healthy, sustainable
business by doing exactly this.
Jeremy Price: You know, one of those conversations that we have occasionally
is what happens along if somebody comes along and can do this way better than us.
And, you know, maybe that happens.
That's the risk we take.
I mean, A GPL, they're absolutely, you know, welcome to do that.
Um, but you know, we're, to your point, we, we are not beholden to
VCs and, and, you know, expected returns and all that sort of thing.
Um, we are fans of slow steady growth, um, that lets us.
You know, do what we wanna do.
You know, we don't, you know, fortunately, we're, we're a bunch of folks who
aren't particularly, uh, set on, you know, Lambos and yachts and whatnot.
And so, you know, do we, do we need a hockey stick?
No.
You know, we, uh, we are able to pay ourselves and our employees pretty well.
Things keep going up, and that's really what we want.
You know, we, we, uh.
We, we do seem to have the concept of enough, which is sorely lacking in
a lot of, um, businesses these days.
Corey : So I have to ask, because it seems like everything can give
the, the obvious answer to this.
In the five years you've been there, how, if any has, or the product
that Grokability makes in shit,
Jeremy Price: I don't think that it has.
Um.
You know, again, without having a board or VCs going, oh, hey, you
need to jump on this latest trend, otherwise we're gonna miss out.
Right?
Um, you know, we get to take a really deliberate and sober look at, well, okay,
there is this neat new tech that's out there that can do some really neat things.
Does it make sense for us?
Does it make sense?
Our product, and we, we do this with everything from, you know, crypto to
ai, to, you know, fancy new things.
When our developers go to, you know, a, a conference and see the new whizzbang
features coming out in the framework that we use, and they come back
and go, Hey, what about this thing?
We're like, well, that's cool, but you know, is it actually gonna be
around in three years and we've converted over this thing and hey,
new whizzbang, whatchamacallit.
What value does it actually bring to us, or the product or our customers?
Uh, and if our customers aren't banging down the door asking for the thing,
then why the heck would we build it?
Like, you know, we like our software and we think we do a good job at it.
Um, but we also know that we're not saving the world with it, and
we're not, you know, doing visionary thought leadery work, right?
We're making something that is a utility that serves a purpose
and solves a need for customers.
Corey : Oh, what you built is boring as hell.
And I love boring businesses because what do they do?
They make money.
Jeremy Price: Right, right.
Corey : And there are, and it isn't massively overheated.
Like, I'm going to be the best AI coding company and now
we're going outta business.
'cause I took a day off to take a nap finally, and we got outperformed by
the 17 competitors in our building.
Jeremy Price: Yeah.
It, well, we, you know, boring company.
And, um, you know, we, we've, uh, I don't think we gave the talk of, or
we've given versions of this talk of, you know, choose boring tech.
I think that particular title was somebody else.
Um, but, you know, some of my friends who are still in, you know, Silicon
Valley startup plan, you know, how's, how's working for a PHP shop going?
It's like, what, what my CEO likes to say is, is that, hey, you know, you call
somebody who's still in the codes in PHP.
Employed.
Corey : Yeah.
Also, like, um, you know, the term I like as well is legacy code.
Uh, yeah.
What does legacy mean?
It's a condescending engineering term for, it makes money.
Jeremy Price: Yeah.
And here's the thing, you know, uh, we may use boring tech.
There are still interesting problems to solve.
Um, and we get to focus on them without.
You know, uh, a new objective every month because, you know,
somebody saw an ad in, in an airline magazine or some VC said, Hey,
Corey : I'm gonna dunk on Slack because I can.
At some point, slack was basically feature, complete, and awesome.
And then honestly, what they should have done is given amazing
severance packages, their entire product team, and called it a week.
And instead they just kept iterating and making the product incrementally
worse with every new release.
And it's, it's awful because you have to relearn where things are in the interface.
I just got back from a week and a half away and sure enough,
things have moved around again and it's, it's just obnoxious.
So.
My question for you that I see this in a bunch of open source
quote unquote companies out there.
Have you ever, as a company and as an open source project, rejected
feature enhancements that folks have pull requested on the grounds of it
competes with your paid offering?
Jeremy Price: No,
Corey : because there are legitimate times to do that.
I wanna be clear, I know it sounds like I'm, I'm loading this
up to beat the crap out of you.
The answer is yes, but it's, there are good reasons to do that with transparency.
Jeremy Price: Absolutely.
No, I, and that for some companies and some places that makes sense.
So our paid offering is our open source offering.
We are just the ones running it.
Um, we don't feature gate.
The things that we have service tiers on are things that
cost us more money to host.
You want to handle more requests because you're a huge shop and
you have big API integrations.
Cool.
We'll sell you a dedicated instance.
Um, but we don't care how many users you.
Corey : Yeah, automatic backups, for example, are not available.
If you look at your pricing chart here, if you look at your feature matrix
here, it's, uh, the automatic backups, for example, are not necessarily
there, neither automated upgrades.
Well, if you're self-hosting it, that, that's a one line cr job.
Uh, good luck with it.
But that does not a backup make.
It's easy to look at that and think, oh, you're just, you're obfuscating
it and making it very hard.
Do a restore on it.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Jeremy Price: No, it just, that's just something that you
have to do, that we do for you.
Um, but that is not something that you get as, as a product of a default install.
It's absolutely available.
Like there's, there's a backup command, there's a backup push button.
We do all of that for you and the rotation, all those other things.
So, you know, it, it is just a matter of, um, these things are
some, not something that happened.
With the default install script, but they're absolutely available.
I, I think we, we've actually had the reverse.
Um, I, and speaking of the enshittification part, um, we have a very
serious tension, um, between things that will make it easier for us to run, um,
that have no utility for anyone else.
Um.
And, uh, Allison, our, our CEO, known as Snipe Head Online, um, is very,
very, it is very hard to convince her to put something in the software.
Where that is the case.
You know, if I come and go, Hey, you know, for letting users know that,
you know, there's, you know, some storage limit or something, right.
You know, we, we, I wanna put in this thing.
She's like, okay, but who the hell else is gonna use that
notification system for anything?
Corey : This episode is sponsored in part by my day job Duck.
Bill, do you have a horrifying AWS bill?
That can mean a lot of things.
Predicting what it's going to be, determining what it should be,
negotiating your next long-term contract with AWS, or just figuring
out why it increasingly resembles.
Phone number, but nobody seems to quite know why that is.
To learn more, visit duck bill hq.com.
Remember, you can't duck the duck bill.
Bill, which my CEO reliably informs me is absolutely not our slogan.
So much of the stuff I have built, like this is where I found Jet AI coding
assistant's been super useful for.
It's a bunch of the glue code that solves specific problems that are
unique to my workflow and environment.
Uh, people say, well, people's workloads are not as specific as you think.
Really?
You mean that every other people are using this hack to death newsletter,
publication system That also integrates into my podcasting system and recording
stuff so that I have to basically fire off a bunch of stuff that orchestrates it and
I just push a button on my stream deck.
Really?
Where can I download that repo?
Turns out it's not a thing.
Jeremy Price: Right?
And, and there is, there is a whole lot that goes into
running this system at scale.
We actually, we don't run a system.
We run 6,000 individual installations of this system because it's not, we didn't
build it to be a cloud service, right?
We built it to be something that you download and you run.
Um, and that certainly.
Creates some difficulties for us in how we have to host it, but it
also, uh, creates a whole bunch of really natural security boundaries
around it, which we really like.
Uh, and so in a lot of ways, we're not even inclined to ever make it a single
application cloud service, um, because it.
Well, again, it helps us keep us honest around what's going into the product,
that make sure that what's going into the product is makes sense for the product.
Um, you know, you know, we.
Allison, um, her husband slash CCO Brady and I, um, less so, you know, some of the,
the, the younger folks at the company, um, or the folks in less technical roles.
But we all owe an awful lot of our careers to the open source world.
Um, and so we have.
You know, real part of the reason that it is open source
is because we want to give back.
Like we, we could totally go, Hey, this is a great business and let's, you know,
relicense the thing and close it off and do what so many companies have, you know,
made, uh, horrific mistakes about doing.
Um, but, but we don't want to because we like that we can give
back to this community and be a part of that community and.
As part of that, we don't want to inify the product any more
than absolutely necessary.
I think the last thing that we did was we allowed a bare metrics integration
so that we could, you know, let people know, Hey you, you really need to pay us.
Corey : Don't worry.
It shut down.
Jeremy Price: What's that it?
Corey : Bare metrics died.
Jeremy Price: No, no.
I logged into them.
Corey : He sold it.
I didn't, I didn't realize.
Oh, yeah.
I guess it does still exist.
That's right.
The founder, the founder started it.
I, okay.
I instantly can't load it, which tells me that it, uh, basically
is using the same domain as the tracking beacons of my DNS filter.
Killed it, but still.
Okay.
It's just dead to me.
Problem solve.
Jeremy Price: Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Corey : Uh, Josh Pigford was the guy who did it.
Yeah.
He would engrave tweets on a wood burn between a wood burner onto pieces of wood.
I have a few of my bangers slapped around the office.
Jeremy Price: Fantastic.
Uh, but yeah, no, we, you know, we, we, we use them for tracking and whatnot.
We, you know.
They're fine.
Corey : No, it's fine.
I just haven't used it.
I forgot they were around, but it's stuff like that.
That's terrific.
It's the, it's the ability to solve some of these backend business
problems and it's, I like your pricing.
It is.
It caps out the enterprise support and the biggest tier you've got, I think it's
7,500 bucks a year, which is terrific.
Great.
That also what I like about that top tier pricing is it's very
clear that you're not one of those disastrous businesses that has, well,
one company is 80% of our revenue.
So it's basically like we're a division of them without the upside.
Jeremy Price: And when you have those sorts of whale clients, suddenly they
have lots of leverage over your direction.
Right.
And suddenly you're going to jump, uh, you know.
Step, step two, hop two, jump two, you're, you're gonna step in line when they say,
Hey, here's this feature request, which again, might not make sense for 99 point,
you know, five nines of our clients.
Um, but they want it.
And so, well, we like our business, so we better actually make it happen for them.
Um, you know, it's, it's again, that sort of freedom that we have
with not being beholden to VCs.
We're also not beholden to any particular customer.
We certainly take.
Those can, you know, those requests into consideration.
I think we even say, you know, prioritized, you know, feature
requests and that sort of stuff.
But it still goes through the, does this make sense for the product filter?
Uh, and if it doesn't make sense for the product, we say,
Hey, we're sorry, but that.
That just doesn't align with how the direction we wanna go.
Corey : Not, not that you're under active development or anything, but
uh, when I clicked the demo page, I got a pop, it's a down for maintenance.
The site is down for maintenance, will be back up asap, which is
normally the rallying cry of things that are busted and don't work.
But I clicked it again 30 seconds later and suddenly it works again.
It's, oh, the website didn't lie to me.
What?
Concept.
Jeremy Price: Yeah.
You know, I, I feel bad for the folks that that happened to hit that.
Um, so we, it is a, um, almost.
Entirely fully active demo of the site.
There are certain things that, like, we don't allow you to send emails because,
Corey : or create a API keys.
I just tried, so yeah, no free database for me today.
Jeremy Price: Uh, you can create users and you can create products, and you can
create, you can do all of these things.
Um, but there are other people logging into that same demo site
and so, uh, a few times a day, it just resets all of the databases
because, uh, people are horrible.
Um, and I think there was actually a product demo one time with a,
a. Client whose name everybody listening to this would know.
Um, and we took them into the demo site and somebody on the other end of the call
went, why is the first user in that ass blaster 3 0 1 or something like that?
And we were like, oh.
Corey : Because the first 300 were taken.
Jeremy Price: Exactly.
Exactly.
But yeah, no,
Corey : you know, would confronted with that nonsense.
You've gotta be quick.
Someone once asked, on the first time I brought out an, I trotted out a, uh,
my, a new slide template for a talk that I, it designer got me the day before.
I was in such a rush.
There were three ends in my Twitter username.
And so first question in q and a NIK conference was, uh, so why is there an
extra n in your username at the bottom?
Well, n plus one redundancy obviously.
Amazing.
Did you go out and register that one real quick?
Right?
No, I fixed the slide deck.
It was easier.
Jeremy Price: Okay, fair enough.
Yeah.
Again, you know, demo site, same as what you're gonna get, same as what
you're gonna get if you download.
Um, we just take away the pain for you.
Corey : I've used a bunch of real asset stuff back in my SMB days,
uh, you know, 20 years ago, and this is better than those things.
It's, it feels like, oh, asset management database.
You mean a shared Google sheet?
And, yeah.
That'll work until you wanna do other things.
It, this is one of those things where, oh, I'll just have
Claude Vibe code one for me.
Oh, this weekend.
Jeremy Price: And you know what?
You can have Claude Vibe code one for you, uh, and then,
Corey : or you could just get clone and run it yourself if that's your bent.
Jeremy Price: Right?
Well, and you know, it's one of those things, you know, to your point, we're
still under active development and here we are, you know, I think 11 years in
since the, the start of the product.
I think it was about a year later that Allison started a company for it.
But, you know, it, it turns out that, um, there are a lot of weird use cases that.
Various companies have that.
Various people have, um, and a whole lot of features and a lot
of places do different things.
I mean, I, I know that's should be obvious, but a lot of times it's not.
Right.
It sounds like a very defined space and it turns out there's just.
A, a zillion ways to do asset management.
It turns out, and we have our opinions about those and you know, we, we stick
to the ones where it makes sense, but sometimes you just get enough people
going, no, but actually we wanna do this kind of thing that you don't understand.
But that's just how we are.
And we're like, well, okay.
And again, sometimes that leads to.
Well, that just doesn't make sense for how this product works, and
we don't get those customers, and that's unfortunate, but that's why
there are other products out there
Corey : just flipping through your customer testimonials, like this
place, like Triple H Group, uh, a bunch of smaller companies, Microsoft,
like, okay, these, these are serious companies that are using this stuff.
Jeremy Price: Yeah, we have, we have, um, a whole bunch of companies that
have not given us permission to put their logos on the site yet, but we,
you know, we want to reach out to them, um, and do that because, yeah,
no, there are a lot of companies that you would know, um, who use our stuff.
Uh, either our service or some of them run it themselves.
Um, Linus Tech Tips is, has called us out a few different times
for, oh yeah, we run Snipe It.
Corey : We talk about earlier about engineering brain, but
I have the exact same thing.
Like, oh, what, what the hell good is having testimonials like that.
But as soon as I put a few big company logos on the duck Bills
site years ago, the, the sales calls changed basically instantly.
From who are you people again and what do you do to, do you think you can help us?
It's, it was suddenly a mark of credibility that completely got
rid of a whole class of objection.
Once it became clear that this was not our first rodeo and they would not be the only
big company we'd ever worked with before.
Jeremy Price: Right?
Do we wanna be the first people to take a risk on you?
And if that's.
If they don't have to be that, then suddenly to your
point, it lends credibility.
Corey : Yeah.
And now of course with the big companies, you never get that.
So every year at finops X, for example, we'll Introdu, we'll have
a dinner or we'll uh, host introduce some of our customers to each other.
And it's fun 'cause you can see the same process go through where.
Each company thinks they're sort of our only really big customer, but
you know, insurance company, meet bank, meet airline, and suddenly
they're realizing, oh, oh, these are this, these are my people.
There's, but without those logos, it sounds like, oh, yes.
Uh, we have solved AWS bills for, we're spending hundreds of dollars a month.
Jeremy Price: Right, right.
And, and well, and you know, we're, we're not a, I mean, it
apparently asset management stuff was asset management space we're
actually a decently known name.
Um, I didn't really exist in the asset management space before, so I
knew about it because I knew Allison.
But like, we have a whole subreddit and we get recommended on asset management.
Places and, and this and that.
Um, but, but yeah, if, if, uh, you know, if you just come to our
webpage, like, I love our webpage.
I think it's a lot of fun, but it doesn't exactly scream, you know,
enterprise corporate when you've got a, you know, cartoon mohawk lady on
your, on the front page of your website.
Corey : It's funny you mention that.
We're in the middle of a website redesigned for duck.
Where we are attenuating some of the branding over there that I use a lot for
last week in AWS because something we have found over the years has been that
final stage when we wind up doing a deal, we, it's usually a bank shot off someone
in engineering, which is who I talk to in my podcast newsletters, et cetera.
I don't, there's not a lot of you listening to this
that work in procurement.
For example, if you, if you, that is you and I'm wrong, please reach out.
I would love to talk to you.
I'm not trying to sell you anything.
I, I just want to talk and.
So instead, so there's always a series of introductions during the enterprise
sales process and very often at the end there's some C-level has to sign
off on it that has never heard of anything, uh, that I've said or done.
And they go to the site and back when it was a lot more
like the last week in AWS sites.
Why, why is there a platypus and why is he still angry?
And it was a like, are these people serious?
And it took a bit of getting past that.
So we have, we're, we're dialing it down now, probably years after.
We should have.
But for what we do with the scale we operate at, that makes sense.
For what you do.
The fact that you don't have any of these offerings that are too commas in
the annual price every year, it's okay.
Well, we don't think this is professional.
Terrific.
Please keep walking.
Service Meow.
Would love to wind up working with you.
Uh, it's like ServiceNow for cats.
Jeremy Price: Right.
And, you know, I mean, I wouldn't mind some of those companies,
you know, paying us that much.
Um, but again, we don't even have the offering for it because it just,
that's, that's, I I think we're too reasonable about things at times.
But again, you know, slow, steady growth.
Um, but no, that, that's absolutely a thing.
I mean, there's a famous story of some, some bank, I don't remember, which bank,
um, got asked, you know, well, why did you go with, you know, Microsoft Cloud when,
you know, Amazon was clearly superior?
And they said, oh, well, because, you know, Amazon sent.
You know, people in hoodies and, and you know, Azure sent people in
suits or something like that, right?
It's like, for better or for worse, the appearance matters.
And, and just like, like not actually relevant appearance, but to some
people, boy, boy, that's relevant.
Corey : There's more psychology in the buying process than I ever would've
believe possible until, so when I started doing this myself, like I, I
did have the advantage on some folk in that before I entered tech properly, I
did telesales and then I did marketing and then actual enterprise sales.
And I was never great at the process and the follow up with a lot of these things.
And I hated cold calling with a passion, which isn't really a
thing anymore Anyway, and then.
But, but I always remembered that aspect and how hard that freaking job is.
I know that talking smack about salespeople is basically the
engineering national pastime, but I have no patience or tolerance for it.
It's like, excuse me, not for nothing.
But, you know, those inflated salaries you get for basically
slapping GitHub around, uh, where do you believe that money comes from?
Just, just, just humor me here.
Where, where exactly does that come from?
Venture capitalists.
Oh, right.
Wrong company style.
Jeremy Price: But, but to your point, and not only does the money come from there,
but to your point, right, like you hated cold calling you, you know, like sales is
a hard fucking job that I do not wanna do.
Um, but for the people who do.
Corey : It turns out I do a lot of it now, but I, my, I don't do outbound at all.
I wind up doing my shit.
Posting performance like this, people hear about, oh, AWS bills.
That sounds like an expensive problem that suddenly we have, maybe he can help us.
And the conversations I have when I, uh, do our, the sales engineering role for
actual salespeople is I, I just spend the entire time asking questions because
I wanna learn how they see these things.
There's a, there's a curiosity.
That drives all of it.
I'm not pitching what we do.
My job on that is to understand what their circumstance is.
Ask if they've tried a few things, and suddenly when you demonstrate, you know
what the hell you're talking about, that that is sales people tend to assume that
sales or marketing is they, they, they paint with a broad brush that's informed
by the worst examples you can ever find.
Like, I remember that guy who sold me my used car, so I hate salespeople.
Yeah, maybe that's not the same thing there, professor.
Jeremy Price: No.
No.
And I, you know, I, I also think that depends on the company, right?
Some, some companies go after that sort of marketing tactic, sales tactic, et cetera.
And, and, but an awful lot don't.
And an awful lot are just, you know, hardworking people trying to
do a job and trying to make money for the company that they're in.
And that's completely valid.
Like, that's how our system works, are all facets of our system.
Great.
No, but like.
I don't think that's uncommon.
Corey : But you do like food from time to time.
I do like to eat, uh, my dogs very much like treats.
I, I really wanna thank you for taking the time to speak with me.
If people wanna learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?
Jeremy Price: Uh, to find me?
Uh, well, my LinkedIn isn't great, um, but it's a good start.
Um, you can also find me at Jerm ops, J-E-R-M-O-P-S, on
most of the social places.
Some of them I frequent more than others these days.
If you're, if you are passionate about asset management, you wanna
learn more, come to snipeitapp.com.
I'm there and I'm gonna be there.
'cause, uh, it's a, it's a great place and I'm proud of what we do and how we do it.
Corey : And we'll of course put links to that in the show notes.
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.
I appreciate it.
Jeremy Price: Thanks for having me.
Cory.
Be well.
Corey : Jeremy Price, VP of Technology at Grokability.
I'm cloud economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming In the Cloud.
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