Hello and welcome to the Builders Gonna Build Podcast, where we interview entrepreneurs about how they build their amazing products.
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The guest of today's episode is one and only Corey Quinn, also known as Kinni Pig. Corey is entrepreneur and AWS consultant and all around badass who says amazing snarky things about AWS all over social media.
We interviewed Corey originally for our podcast metacast behind the scenes back in August 2023.
Today we are doing a rerun of that episode because the last few weeks were a bit difficult for us. We were, you know, need deep in work and also I was sick and I was traveling. So we decided to not stress it and just do a rerun.
Without further ado, enjoy.
I don't like big companies because I use Google as an example.
If I went in maliciously as an SRE, I don't think I could take down Google.com for one full hour. So if I can't do that maliciously and intentionally, how much upside good am I going to be able to do in a place like that?
Whereas at a small business like, oh, if I screw this up enough, wouldn't have a company anymore? Right. That's the level of impact I want to have. Not that I'm setting out to screw up, but I want to be able to materially change the fortunes of places I work if I do the right.
Hello, hello, hello, welcome to episode 32 of the Americas podcast. So today we have a special guest with us. Corey Quinn.
Corey is well known in the cloud computing circles. He writes the last week in AWS newsletter. He has a screaming in the cloud podcast and awesome Twitter.
If you don't know, go check it out at Queenie pig. We'll also listed in the show notes. But Corey, before we hand it over to you for a better introduction.
I wanted to tell you so Ilya and I we worked in AWS together for five years and then I was there for about like 12 years overall, right.
So you probably know already in Amazon, there's that culture of the empty chair, which is a symbol in every meeting. The customer not being in the room, but every decision you take is supposed to be considering the customer who is not there in the room. Hence the empty chair.
Yes, and then they move the empty chair to the CMO's office for two years, but that's the side of the point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think for a lot of us when we were building services and thinking about like big customer facing decisions, that chair was personified by you. And I'm not joking.
I would hope so on some level because I think that's something that gets missed is that I'm not coming up with this stuff necessarily out of thin air. I'm also usually not the only person who experiences something and has a certain reaction to it. I just have no filter. That's really all it is.
Yeah, and before I forget we have Ilya my co-host here. Yeah, we were supposed to record yesterday, but thankfully we didn't have to because he would have been recording from a car that would not have been nice for anybody.
Well, I don't mind if you're a car, but could you at least slow down on some of those terms? My God, I'm starting to worry.
Let's do a formal intro of yourself. Let's tell us who you are, what you like doing. Actually, before we go there, I think we have to say that we were looking for words for how to introduce you because I guess a lot of listeners for this podcast will come from you when you hopefully retweet it is, but our listeners who like I'm native to our podcast, not all of them will be familiar with your work and what you do or even AWS because they might be you know Oracle customers.
And they may be on threads, so they may have been missing on your persona altogether, but yes, maybe ask the chat GPT. Do you know who Cory Quinn is and surprisingly, actually, the chat GPT, well, maybe not surprisingly, the chat GPT knew who you were and he gave us a very good answer.
Say that Cory Quinn is a very known figure in cloud computing community, particularly in AWS, yeah, yeah, that was very on point like exactly what you do.
And then we asked it to introduce Cory in Cory Quinn's snarky voice and tone. And that's what came out of it. Are you on the read? Sure. Yeah. Ladies, gentlemen, and all you lovely misconfigured street buckets out there, get around for a dose of sarcastic wisdom that's more cutting than an I am policy gone wrong.
And there is more, but we'll stop there. And I think it's very on point. Yeah, it definitely makes an attempt. I don't know the quite gets there most of the time. Believe me, you're not the first person to try to get it to say things in my voice. It misses some of the nuance. And you know, it's honestly, I think that's probably a fair failure mode.
I am Cory Quinn. I am the chief cloud economist at the Duckbill group. I fix horrifying AWS bills for a living. I write the last week in AWS newsletter and accompanying podcast. I host the Screaming in the Cloud podcast that goes along with it. And all this really stems down from history as an engineer who just finally got tired of not saying what I really thought and getting fired for it. And figured, all right, what if I lean into this and embrace all the things that everyone who's known me for longer than 30 seconds has said would be my ultimate downfall, my personality.
And seven years in, I consistently surprise myself by failing to get it too wrong, but there's always tomorrow. Yeah, but I think your personality is actually and the authentic personality that like you said comes out on Twitter on these blog posts and everywhere. That's actually part of the main draw. I feel on the contrary of like not losing your job.
Partially that is also because I my largest customers, a single digit percentage of revenue. I don't have any external investors and I'm not made WS partners. So really no one can fire me. It's kind of great.
Right. Yeah, maybe let's start with the bit of the background. What do you do, Cory? Yeah, what's that chief cloud economist?
Sure, I talk to large companies that have expensive AWS billing problems, either that the bill is too large or that the bill is inscrutable or that it's hard to predict. And I believe firmly that cost and architecture in the cloud are one and the same. So there are engineering optimizations that get made and for minimal amounts of work can cause significant levels of cost savings.
There's also ways to do allocation between different internal initiatives and figure out what projections are going to look like. And this becomes key not just for your own internal budget purposes, but also for negotiating with AWS on those long term contracts.
That negotiation takes up about half of my consulting day. It's kind of fun.
So is the economist, I guess a bit of a misnomer because you actually do a lot of technical investigation that results in cost savings, right?
When I started doing this, no one else was really in the space in the same way. So I combine two words that are often misunderstood, cloud, meaning a bunch of other people's computers and economists, meaning someone who claims to know a lot about money, but also dresses like a flood victim.
So you smash the two of them together and suddenly no one knows what the hell I do or how to categorize me. And that was convenient for a time when people didn't know what to call you. It became much more difficult to bucket you and thus dismiss you in some ways. And early on, that was important.
Now you've established cloud economists as your own thing because for me, at least a cloud economist, enormous synonymous with Corey Queen, because I don't know any other cloud economists. So well done.
I have found multiple companies hiring for the role with that title. There's now an AWS cloud economics division, which is kind of fun.
I also met someone who apparently had a PhD in very similar aspect from 2012. And he's like, there's another one I thought I was the only one. And if I bluffed just a little bit more, I probably could have wound up with a book deal out of it. But you know, here we are.
So take us back a little bit. Like you said, you started as an engineer. How did you land up in that space? What were you doing? This is I'm assuming before there was a cloud.
Oh, yeah, I started off as a grumpy, unique systems administrator. And the job never really changed. People argue with that like, no, I'm a DevOps engineer or I'm an SRE, you're I'm a platform engineer.
It's all the same job. The tools change. The methodology's changed, but the responsibility doesn't. It's keep the things that plug into the wall, whether it's your wall or someone else's running, keep this site up. And I daily be able to predict the future and not get it wrong.
If you get everything right, no one knows you're there. If you get it wrong, everyone blames you. It's it's really the definition of a no win job. That's infrastructure.
And one thing led to another I focused in different areas at different times of my career. And finally wound up dealing with cloud in my last job. I had yet again to deal with the surprise AWS bill and flipped it on me by other departments.
And I wish there was someone I could pay to make that expensive problem go away. Couldn't find it. So when I decided to hang out my own shingle and figure out what I was doing, this seemed like a decent business problem to take a whack at.
Oh, that's going to be interesting. So what are you employed by somebody in that job?
I asked my last job was a black rock. I'm my personal did not fit in as well as you might think in a large regulated finance company. Well, why did you choose to work here in the first place? Like you bought the startup I worked for. I was not consulted on this. Is it black rock?
Are you the earliest company? Is it the company?
They are a giant finance company with a bunch of different divisions. So the answer to everything is it depends. One of the challenges I've always had with very large enterprises has been the lines of communication internally are challenging at the best of times.
I'm not entirely getting when I say that half my job these days is introducing Amazonians to one another.
Yes.
People are hard. They are always the hardest part of anything. Computers are at least deterministic, ideally. We often talk about this ourselves now that we are outside that world.
We can see all those like where does shame lines are fractured? Like let's say we're using something. I forget what it was.
I was thinking about something from Google the other day and the sign up form was completely unlike any other Google sign up form that I've ever seen. It was a Google Play store form that could not recognize a phone without dashes.
Yes. If I put the phone numbers with the dashes is like no and I'm like this is Google. It was very strange but it was immediately clear that these are like two completely different divisions. They don't know about each other and all that.
It's normal in a big company. Oh yeah. The forms drive me nuts on all these sites. One of the things that drives me nuts is AWS is on stage all the time talking about the value of data and personalization and understanding and knowing your customer.
But I have to fill out the same giant pile of mandatory fields every time I want to attend an event or a webinar and I've experimented with this. It does not matter at all what I fill out in those forms. I do not get any different outreach or treatment.
I said I was a Swedish VC. I have gotten no startup pitches in Swedish. I don't know what to make of any of this. The problem that I have is not just the annoyance having to fill out the form but it just feels disrespectful of if you're going to ask me a question.
Do me the service of listening to the answer at least acting like it. But no, here we are. Marketing is hard.
It's essentially like data gathering going on right and somebody has probably thought okay we'll end up using this data someday somewhere but nobody has used it yet.
That seems to be a big push by the cloud providers. You need to collect all the data you can't why because you recharge you for gigabyte per month on that. So yeah, store all the data.
That's probably not the actual reason but it's hard to argue against it.
Yeah, so go to one of the topics we like to talk about with our guests is because we recently jumped a big tech corporate ship to do our own thing.
And you get the same thing seven years ago you went from black rock into around your own consultancy. How do that shift happen? And yeah, we'd be curious to understand like how the transition went.
Oh, I got fired because of my personality and at that point I couldn't stomach the idea of doing the same thing yet again for different companies because let's face it.
When you run the systems, it doesn't matter nearly as much as you might think what the company actually does. Are you selling boxes? Are you streaming bits?
That's basically as far as it goes. What are the tolerances and constraints around things? And that problem just started to look the same again and again and again.
What made me a good consultant was the same thing that made me an amazingly great employee for the first three months while I come in and everything's on fire. It's great.
I know how to fix this and sure enough, I would get to a point of a lot of these problems being fixed. And then all right, now maintain it forever.
That didn't work very well. So instead I found myself in this unfortunate place of having to figure out just what the hell to do now.
And then finding the fun problems about me straying into other people's lanes, not recommended.
So did you like find your I think co-founder, right?
Business partner. Yes. Oh, yes. We've been friends for 15 years at this point.
I think that people take the idea of business partners far too lightly. You see this with lightning dating for founders and whatnot.
You realize it's like a marriage in a lot of different ways. You are forming a legal entity together.
You are able to financially just ruin the other person and you don't want it to be too much like you or you basically have two people doing the same thing.
Mike and I are nothing alike in most ways. My first language spoken at home was sarcasm, whereas Mike's love language is Microsoft Excel.
But where we wind up a lining is that there's no daylight between us when it comes to our values. And that's one of those important things.
Because if one of you believes in treating customers well, the other one believes in taking every penny you can get from customers this quarter,
because who knows tomorrow may never come. You're going to have an awful lot of friction. It's important to be aligned on a lot of those baseline things before there's money on the table.
So what was Mike doing at that time? How did you like convince to jump on and start this thing?
He just written a book on a practical monitoring was a title for O'Reilly. And he was an independent consultant focusing on the observability world.
He turns out that if you really want to hate what you do for a living, write a book about it. That convinces you that you want to go find something else.
So I convinced him to come run this place and we wound up merging a new entity and here we are.
What is it in writing a book? You hate what you do because I've just written a book.
Common misconception is that people want to write a book. I don't think that's actually true. I think they want to have written a book.
So I wound up figuring out one day that I want to do about how that kind of attention span of that kind of that number of words in me.
And I believe that for a long time, last December for the holidays, Mike and my wife wound up and a few friends wound up pitching it and buying me a series of books,
Leather Bound called the Complete Works of Corey Quinn. This is just a printout of my tweets from 2021. It's a multi-volume set.
And it's psychotic. It's a list of all the stuff I put out there. It's over a million words. I guess I did write a book. Can you open the random page from the book on your desk and read it?
Oh, we could absolutely do that. It doesn't matter. There are times I wind up putting all kinds of weird pictures up there. They start out the retweets, all the rest.
Everything I put out there, like pick any random day and look at me on Twitter. No, we're not going to call it X.
And that's what it turned into. Weird stuff.
Do you know that book? Shit, my dad says or shit, my dad tweets or something like that.
Oh, yeah, it's funny. Thanks. The picture I just pulled up there was a picture that I captioned that someone had a...
This is back in the early days in the days of pandemic. It was a Rorschach plot on a mask. And my caption was,
Oh, I can buy a mask with an awesome image of my parents fighting on it. Yeah, you know, phone stuff.
Just the psychotic stuff that pops into my head. I never had an outlet for it before. Well, I do now, at least I did, till a jackass bought it.
I love this idea of the book. Is there a great essence? Are there like love, likes and retweets, counts and all that on there?
No, I got no attention to that because my jokes are for me. I care a lot more about, is this humorous to me? Does it work?
It's not for everyone. And I think that's something that a lot of people miss when they're trying to find their voices.
They try to appeal to everyone. In doing that, you're going to appeal to no one.
Also, no matter what you do, some people are going to just flat out not like you. And if you're a people, please, who that gets unfortunate.
But you also can't avoid it. So you have to figure at that point, you want people to dislike you for who you actually are, or who you pretend to be.
For me, it wasn't much of a choice. So do you have a set up like greatest hits there for yourself?
Not particularly. I'm not one of those who sits alone at night, chortling at my own jokes and how clever I've been.
So I'm curious when you set out to write a joke. So first of all, is there a routine, or do you just like randomly do it whenever inspiration comes, or you have like a specific time and day or something?
I tend to take the perspective of just like whenever I wind up working on some particular area, sitting down to write a blog post or whatnot, or coming up with anything.
A blind page is scary. It doesn't give you a whole lot. Most of my best humor comes from riffing off of other people.
My humor, I think, took a bit of a dive during the pandemic, just because I wasn't in social settings with people for a while, where things come up.
Like you say something and someone misunderstands like, sorry, I thought you said that Route 53 was a database. It's like, that's good. It is now.
It's the weird one-off conversations that hit and you just jot the idea down and investigate it later.
That might have been actually one of the first few things where I knew your name before because I was already working at AWS.
But that, the Route 53, like use it as a database post, that got me hooked into the whole like the podcast and all the newsletters and all that. That was awesome.
I mean, at some level, I realized that anything can become a database if you hold it wrong and take a sufficiently liberal view of what a database is.
I mean, how you have information, I can ask you about congratulations to your database.
Yeah, we should link to that episode from our show notes, because I remember that was the very first episode I listened to, because you just kept talking about Route 53 as a database on Twitter.
I'm like, what is your question about that? Yeah, because you were not explaining what it was. You were just using it as a side thing, right?
This was a common problem, by the way, early on, because I started independent consulting seven years ago.
I had something like 1,500 Twitter followers, and it had taken me seven years to get there.
These were mostly people who'd seen me talk at conferences and who I knew. They had the pre-existing context where I could say something and have the implicit assumption that everyone reading this already knew who I was, my stick, and the rest.
And at some point you grow beyond your own sphere when your audience gets big enough and no one has the context. People look at it now and think, this guy's a fool if he thinks that's going to work as a date of, well, no kidding.
I found that out when I had to break character when I saw Reddit post once upon a time and someone saying, yeah, I get these kidding, but this actually doesn't sound like a terrible idea. It's like, hi, let me explain to you exactly why it is, because we did this in 2009 in production to figure out which rack servers lived on.
And which server of the M lived on. There are better tools for this job. What is the problem you're attempting to solve for?
Yeah, I guess basically what happens here, right, is that your early followers who have been with you for years, they know all the context and they know what's joke, what's not.
And they also kind of get the jokes, I guess, at the deeper level. But then some of the newer people, they actually might come to you, almost like a TikTok consumer, right?
You're just like, so it's with laughter, it swiped, go next. Do you think this changed what kind of engagement you have? I don't use a German engagement in that kind of TikTok Instagram way, but more like just to give an example, podcast usually gives a lot deeper engagement with people because they would write you like a very long email.
They get very intimately connected with you, whereas tweets might be more kind of ephemeral. I'm curious. If you see a different level of connectedness with your early fans versus people who came after the first 1500.
Oh, yeah, I've had my DMs open for almost the entire time. And because it's if people are actually curious about something, I am thrilled to wind up entertaining anything. It still surprises me.
Well, you've been talking to Amazonians from time to time, like, I really didn't like that thing you wrote, but I didn't want to say it because I didn't want you to drag me in public. It's like, you've got how many years of history now to look back on and never see me doing that unless you're Larry Ellison.
What exactly? Yeah, that's it. Some random software engineer and some for some service in AWS. Yeah, that's what I'm going to cash all this in for just to make you look like an idiot. Yeah, that's going to go well.
No, the biggest problem I run into with most of the stuff I put out is silence. I don't get a whole lot of feedback on certain things. If you hit reply to my email newsletter that goes to something like 32,000 people now, it goes straight to my inbox because less than a dozen people do it on any given week.
It's easy to work with the podcast. For the first six months that I ran that thing, I was half convinced I've forgotten to turn on the microphone or something.
Then I went to a conference that a lot of people talked about it and it was, okay, that's interesting. My theory is that anyone can send an email. So at least it's easier to hit reply and I send emails to I'll give them a piece of my mind, but writing to someone about a podcast feels different.
It feels like you're calling into a radio show. And who does that? Well, lunatics and most people who aren't on Twitter don't self identify as lunatics. So it wasn't the way to go.
What do you think there are lunatics? Have you listened to AM radio shows? My God, the people who call in sound deranged. I don't want to sound like that. I'm not going to call and I'm just going to roll my eyes and keep on driving down the road.
I think we've seen without a show, but also with some of our previous guests is people who actually do write an email for a podcast host. It's almost like a letter. So it's almost read the book, especially if you listen to multiple episodes.
And then you finally decide, well, I have something to say to this author and I'm going to write a letter and it ends up being like two pages long email full of praise or like some questions and all of that.
And it feels super weird like you're taking a risk to do that as well. Yes. And because no one does it. And there's also the question having before I started this stuff, I used to do that myself from time to time.
And that's the last part of the time I got no answer to it. And it was, well, okay, at least I got it off my chest. I said what I needed to say, always polite. I've never felt the need to reach out to someone and tell them I hate what they're doing.
That just what am I possibly going to achieve by doing that? I'm just going to be a jerk and make someone's day a little bit worse. But I find that it's an effort investment.
And do you wind up getting a response? Oh God, do I sound like a lunatic, sort of parasocial creeper or something if I wind up sending this? And the answer for most people is absolutely not.
One thing I feel in terms of engagement that I have noticed as well is the way that I engage with large brands with the internet, et cetera, is not something I would recommend because I got it wrong a lot when I was starting out down this path.
Failure mode of clever is asshole is John Scalzi is famous for saying. And if you get it wrong in this direction, you're just being mean. I've had a number of times trying to jump in to DM someone like, hey, heads up. I just want you to be aware how this might be coming across and you probably don't see it because I didn't the first time I made a joke very similar.
Let me learn from my experience so you don't have to make these mistakes in your own. And people usually respond to that pretty well.
If you call them out in public, they feel they need to double down and get defensive, which is never the right move. Now we had a few questions like this later on, but let's just like get started here. Did any company or any HR or somebody get back to you saying, like, take this down or edit it or something like that.
If so, like, how did you handle that? No, I don't work for them. If anything, like HR only is focused internally on employees, you know, people who meanwhile, whoever each out and say, I don't know that landed the way you think it will.
But I've never gotten a letter from someone's legal department threatening me for anything that I've said. I have a pretty good sense of where the line is in that respect. And it stops well before we get into the defamation territory.
So instead, it's much more about people reaching out as individuals. I did have, for example, Forester DM me once.
I was talking about some stuff that they put in one of their reports that someone had posted. And they said, well, posting screenshots of this is a violation of the agreement that we have for publishing these. It's great.
One of your customers with whom you have an agreement published this. And I certainly didn't agree to anything you say. It's on the internet.
Screenshots are generally fair view for this. So have a nice day. And they didn't bug me again. Right. Did you ever have to consult legal when you were about to post something like, how do you know where that line is?
Because legal is very complicated. I've noticed that. So I have been for the last 15 years. I have my wife, as I've known her, she's been turning the entire time. She used to be a litigator.
She's now in corporate litigation as well as a lot of contract work. She's one of those high powered lawyers, like much of one of those schools that people like aspire to go to Obama was one of her law professors.
I'm just some schlub with an eighth grade education, but she's actually impressive. So you get a lot of this stuff.
Asmodically, you have a lot of conversations over dinner about a lot of germane topics, assuming you're both interested in that sort of thing. And it helps identify at least a framework to think about these things. For actual questions, I've got on these things there.
We do have attorneys that we wind up paying for this sort of thing, but I almost never need them at this stage because if it's close enough to the edge that I need to get a legal opinion, don't go with it.
Probe the joke is almost certainly not worth it. Find a better one. Right. Let's go back a little bit. You were talking about how before we got here, like how you knew Mike already and he jumped on you decided to I'm really curious about the name duck bill.
So what's that from the duck bill platypus is our as the mascot Billy the platypus for the newsletter and the rest. And I came up with that before I came up with the name for the company because it amused me.
I wanted an cartoon animal I could have fun with and not get yelled at for. And the platypus isn't inherently ridiculous animals. So why not any it is as good as any other when it comes to these things.
And then would Mike and I decided the future might be us joining the company. It's like, well, what do we call it? Like where that kitchen looks up as the duck bill group soul works for me.
Awesome. And where are you at today? Like how many employees do you have? What do various people do?
Number seven, just signed an agreement, Morton, not going to come on that in the near future. We've been as large as 12 or 13, but we're in that fun place where we're completely bootstrap, which means we have this ancient old, tiny business model where we make more money than we spend every month.
And that means that we have to be able to grow organically. And if you build out a services team in the wrong ways, you start having serious concerns.
It comes down to utilization. We never bill our clients by the hour, for example, but there's a certain cycle of time where every month certain things have to be paid like, you know, payroll and R.A.W.S. Bill and whatnot. And at some point you need to be able to project these things and people sitting around idle for too long becomes a problem for the business.
But that also means if you don't have the capacity, you can't take work that suddenly comes thundering and it's a constant balancing act. I think this is part of the reason that people love SaaS so much. Scale is trivial and easy to solve for right until it's very much not. But at least there, there are clear cut solutions.
I would like to ask you a question that you asked Andreas Vittic on your podcast. Did you ever consider going into product space, maybe like automating what you do and making product out of it or eventually into the product area that scales non-linearly compared to services business?
I considered doing that at the beginning. I thought that's the direction I was going in. But the problem that I've discovered across the board when it comes to at least AWS billing optimization is that it is not something that is nearly as math and API driven as you would think.
It is overwhelmingly dictated by psychology. It's a people problem and there is no API legally that you can install in people that makes them all behave a certain way or you can address them programmatically.
It's things that make logical mathematical sense. This is less of a problem these days, but earlier on we talked to a customer. Great. You should buy $18 million of reverse revidences this month. Go. But they sit there and they'll hesitate because it's more money than they'll likely see in their career. And if they screw it up, that feels like a dangerous thing so they don't. But they should because they're going to be spending that money one way or the other, you might as well do it at a discount. But the psychology of it is fascinating.
One of my personal favorite areas is the sense people have around loss of version. People would much rather have 95% coverage that they spend then 102%.
102% is mathematically going to be better for them regardless. But they are going to freak out about the overspend far more than they will about not having spent enough. It's kind of weird.
Is it the prospect theory that Daniel Kahneman was talking about? I think he got the Nobel Prize for this where it is. People are forget the number, but almost like 10X more prone to be risk averse. I guess the risk affects them 10 times more.
It's more loss of version specifically. Yes, it's partially that. It also flips in its head in some ways for corporate entities. If I told you right now that you need to come up with a thousand dollars for something and you can either make it additionally or you can cut your cost to come up with it. People will buy in large, buy us very heavily as individuals toward cutting costs.
It's easier to cut Netflix and stop eating out. And it is to wind up getting another job or negotiating with your boss for a raise or coming up with a side hustle.
Companies at other hand are optimized inherently towards growing revenue entering new markets, building things and boosting them returns. Cost optimizations, one of those things you feel like you should do on some level, especially when the market turns people suddenly care about it a lot.
But you can spend all your time optimizing costs or working on security or buying fire insurance for your building. But it's not going to move you one inch toward your next actual business milestone.
It might keep you afloat long enough to do those things and you need to do those things, but it doesn't generate value directly on its own.
So don't just say correct you that businesses are inherently optimized for maximize the revenue and growth. Whereas people who work in those businesses, they are wired to be loss of verse. And that creates kind of that problem.
As individuals, yes, for example, there are two reactions and it's differentiated entirely between is this corporate money or is this personal money 50 dollars for a hamburger.
Go screw yourself 50 dollars for a hamburger. I'm going to need a receipt. People treat company money differently as they should.
One of the most toxic pieces of advice I've ever heard people give around expense reporting and all right, you the corporate card. How do I decide what to treat what to spend this?
Treat it like it's your personal money. You understand that everyone comes from the same background, right? There were people on food stamps and there were people with trust funds that you're telling this to and they're going to have very different approaches to how this stuff works.
In my case, it is my money is the question what pocket it comes out of, but you might a building mental frameworks to think about these things and reason about.
So you said that you are fully bootstrapped and we you know we admire that we are fully bootstrapped all of our previous guests were fully bootstrapped. We are more like sucked up right now we're not bootstrapped yet, but we're hoping to be bootstrapped.
Yeah, we have you ever had in your you know seven years running that bill being the dark bill cases where you're like we're not going to make it, but in you still can somehow made it the hardest part of running a company bar none is managing your own psychology.
A lot of people say they want their executives to be very transparent, what everything is going on. They'd be terrified by the end of week one and awful lot of shops if that happened when I was independent just by myself and of other mouse to feed it was in the morning I'd be flipping through benefits services available just in case and then something would happen.
That I've been flipping through our page and they got dealerships just in case and it's the constant peaks and lows one of the things I learned is you can't treat every situation like life or death because you're going to die lots of times if you do very few things are as critical long term as they feel like they are in the moment there's an immediacy tied to it and companies are disturbingly resilient in some way is like if I quit this company is screwed is never true in almost any case.
The only one I'm actually honest of an open question right now is like since so much of our media side of the business is tied up in me if I quit the company that I own the company is going to have some problems on that but that's also always been a bit of a way that I would select roles I don't like big companies because I use Google as an example if I went in maliciously as an S. R. I don't think I could take down Google calm for one full hour.
So if I can't do that maliciously and intentionally how much upside good am I going to be able to do in a place like that whereas at a small business like if I screw this up enough wouldn't have a company anymore right that's the level of impact I want to have not that I'm setting out to screw up but I want to be able to materially change the fortunes of places I work if I do it right which meant that long term infrastructure is probably not for me.
I think it's very good to have framework you guys like become protected from downside but you also don't get any of the upside pretty much unless you're in the sec even then the world of difference between how much founders making exits and employee number one it's a universe apart take a look at founders versus like look at the compensation publicly stated clearly between anti jassy who's making hundreds of millions of dollars spread over 10 years span and Jeff Bezos who was the first time the wealthiest man life and its orders of magnitude difference.
So talking about that you said you focus a lot on the media site what are the other people there who's doing yeah.
Not many people ask that question. I think it's an implicit assumption that despite all the faces on our team's page and whatnot everyone else's job is to sit there in clap as I do all the work that is not true.
We also make extensive use of external contractors and I want to be clear when I say that that is not we just find people in this categorized yet out of them because we don't like laws. No I'm talking companies that do things for example Humblepod does all of our podcast production work start to finish they do a lot of the production of producing work on of the video work that I get involved in from time to time.
And as a result I can finish a recording and then not think about it again because they take everything there and move on with it.
So for me at least the goal has been on media to anything that doesn't need to be me personally doing a thing probably shouldn't have me doing it.
I should not be updating copy on the website I need to write the newsletter but I shouldn't be the one putting in the email system and scheduling the send for 730 Pacific on Monday.
There are a bunch of different things that I've learned to let go of as a result. Yeah. So actually I want to do a bit into how you produce your podcast.
So when you first started did you do everything yourself or did you have someone right away.
Never I started off hiring someone right away because I do going in that I have no background in audio editing and if I was going to learn this for a period of time.
I was not going to be as good as someone who actually love to do this same with graphic design I never designed our own logo either for any of the previous iterations of logos I had for the stuff I was doing.
It's stuff that you can outsource relatively inexpensively and then get back to doing the thing that makes you special your audio engineering is never going to be it as someone who's producing the content.
So in the very beginning once you decided like we're going to start this thing right how did you get the first customers and what were you doing did the podcast already start how are you paying for all these things.
No started off with I had a bit of seed money from severance from being let go great I don't have to work for four months what do I want to do instead.
And first 18 months in business your customers all come from your network word of mouth people screw that up at their peril where they have this idea I'm going to I have this amazing thing I'm just going to go post on hacker news and people come flooding into my website and convert or I'll buy a bunch of Google ads and then people will come torrenting in that's incremental stuff you need to make sure that this is something that resonates with people who already are predisposed to like you will do business with friends first and foremost.
And in time we still find one of our primary generators of business is both recurring customers some of whom who have transferred to other companies or word of mouth people who have said yeah I was wondering how to fix this and everyone tells me to talk to you it works out well so it's hard for me to talk to draw direct line between the newsletter that's out there and people coming into care about AWS billing but people have heard of me as a result there aren't a lot of large personalities in the cloud space let alone the cloud billing space and people don't talk to me.
And people don't talk publicly about problems they have with AWS bills unless they want to get fired if they're a significant portion of billing we've negotiated over four billion dollars of AWS contracts so far and growing all the time that's something that people that scale of problem aren't public about it so I need to be loud enough that I popped the top of the mental SEO stack for that very specific very expensive problem what's the average percentage if you track that of the money that you spend you to save for your customers.
It depends because it also assumes a few things that aren't necessarily true in many cases companies aren't looking to actually save money by these optimization projects they're looking to understand what is going on in their environment they're looking for ways to think about it and there's a reason I talk about optimization not cost cutting there have been times I've advised companies to spend more okay you say that that s three bucket is the one true source of all the companies data but it's not being backed up anywhere doesn't have multifactor delete turned on and you say that's not the same thing.
If you turn on and you say if it's gone then there's isn't a company anymore spend more and this is also why I only ever do it on a fixed fee basis otherwise backups what are you some kind of coward delete those and I add that up to the tally of what I'm saving them I want to give the advice that I would want someone to give me or what I would do in their situation and that's all they all it is.
Part of your like problem solving you also do all sorts of configuration auditing of the rate of the city sounds like in some ways yes usually with an I toward cost I've got the hell out of the security space just because the teams that
tends to derail things though I still periodically discover problems in the security realm as a part of the bill analysis it's a weird party trick but I can take the PDF exploded bill of someone's month on AWS and then describe their architecture to him it's a sad party and it's winding down at that point but still it can be done architecture and cost are the same.
We also have no partners in the space which is intentional and by design which also means if I recommend a product or service to a company they listen because they understand that oh this is something that I believe in and not just something I'm recommending because I get money if I do it.
So what are some of these huge architecture like anti patterns if you will that you very often see people come in and like okay that's the one thing go change that and you'll save like X percent immediately.
There are remarkably few that I can say that about definitively there's a reason that we classify these things as curiosities it's a lot of tooling and approaches that do assume oh you have duplicate cloud trail management trails in place that's a bug fix it 95% of the time you're right it is but there's also that edge case where security as an organization wants to have its own on adulterated trail that has not been touched by anything else and then they won't share that onward so okay that is a position to take here is a lot of time.
So take here is the actual cost of that decision now you have context at to figure out how you want to make that decision going forward what we do is purely advisory we make no changes to customer accounts for a variety of excellent reasons but it's almost always a mistake when you see it data transfers often right with misunderstanding the generalized advices oh buy so the AWS comes up with is buy some savings plans or reserve instances go ahead and write size your instances usually in that order to is the way they recommend it which is not how you want to do it.
And third we are completely out of ideas oh wait switch to gravaton and or serverless and the reason they love giving that advice is because those three are really the only three things that it can apply almost universally everything else is contextual and it's nuanced and it's not something that is going to lend itself to just blindly run this script and it'll be fine like our internal tool suite we consider to be sort of power tools in that these are the tools a professional would use with context but that's not the right thing to do is to do it.
So we're going to do a lot of context but that doesn't mean you necessarily want to give it to someone who has no idea what they're looking at because they're going to take whatever the tool says is gospel and get themselves a trouble.
Ilya do you want to move on to like the media side of it we had a lot of questions about that.
I'm really interested in tracing how your media and content evolved so I guess let's take a step back so today you have Twitter slash X. I think the wish one you use anyway so you're on Elon Musk's ground.
That's just plain fun that's not actually revenue driving I've never monetized Twitter.
Yeah right so let's see what it's like it helps a lot that's probably many people discovered you then you have two podcasts last week in AWS and also screaming the cloud we have a newsletter and maybe two.
One newsletter comes out three times a week Monday is the roundup of AWS news Thursday is the same thing with the security focus.
It's a different releases and Wednesday is usually long form thoughts and it's also a blog post the AWS morning brief podcast is just the spoken word version of those because not everyone wants to read some people want to listen.
I'm not like that but I'm there for other people in the way they want to consume content not the way I would want to consume content and the screaming in the cloud show is different that's something else and we'll get to that in a bit.
But this all started off as just the newsletter by itself because I was already having to pay attention to everything AWS put out notice that there was a tremendous amount of nonsense.
When it came to the sheer number of things that they cared about versus what customers needed to think about and I wanted someone to still it down to the interesting things and they really have anything out there like that.
So I figured I was already having to look through this stuff the comma 80% of the way there to catch it all and then I figured I just write some stuff and send it out.
I would give it a few weeks and at some point if I didn't have at least 50 people reading it who I didn't know then I would go ahead and shut it down because that would just be sad.
Then charity majors tweeted about it when I pre-announced by two weeks and the first issue went to 550 people and it's been growing ever since.
Oh wow. So what year was it that was 2017 so well she said charity major was that popular even back then.
Oh charity's been great she in the space that I operate in yes very much so we knew who she was long ago and that historically was the space that I wound up focusing myself on because it's the field I come from though those are my people for lack of a better term.
Yeah so those listeners who don't know who she is I think we should link one of her info queue talks about testing code and production I think that's what it's called that's an amazing talk about observability.
So today like do you do all of you write the newsletter the weekly one you said right the in depth one what else what else are you doing for the media site or is it all you all the content is me I don't have anyone else writing any of this I do even editor who helps once I put out the rough draft who then winds up helping with structure and then I go back and incorporate those changes but that's writing everyone else's operation side or sales side for example that's what sort of happened next is company data dogs that turned out reached out after I've been doing this for about six weeks.
And said can we sponsor your newsletter it's like can you give me money to talk about you of course you can give me money how much money it sort of grew from there and it was surprising given to me the relatively small scale the audience versus the revenue it commanded but it makes sense when you realize that this is a specialized audience that has tremendous influence over purchasing decisions.
And if one prospect becomes a customer it sponsors everything I do for a decade and change just because the dollar figures are so ridiculous and it was a surprising source of revenue I treated it like its own PNL so I was able to then take that and basically sell finance investment the media side of the business my total upfront investment for the newsletter I decided I'd give it 2500 bucks because that's what it cost back then to join the AWS partner network and is that the best way to grow my business I don't know if I had that money.
Well if I had that money what I do with it instead well I do have that money let's see I have a theory and here we are the podcast came a few months later screaming in the cloud specifically I just recorded the 500 episode of that so it's been going reasonably well but it started off as basically an excuse to talk to people I had no business speaking with and because if you historically
I used to my mind wanted to talk to someone their response me how do you get into my office but if you invite them on your podcast they'll clear an hour off their schedule to make that happen and at least that was my opinion at that point it gave me an excuse to reach out rather than just I find what you're doing
interesting can we talk about it and those authentic conversations with people about things they're excited about whatever that happens to be every episodes different I enjoy the ebb and flow of mall and you get to see an awful lot of the industry in a very short period of time
just by talking to people who are innovating in various corners of it yeah you know at least in the multiple of your episodes I think they tend to be pretty short kind of intense and focused on one or two topics max roughly half an hour we expect
to an hour and do a half hour recording on it because it's it depends on the topics and where we're going with it but a lot of people can be interested in engaging for
or almost anything for that period of time but if you do an hour two hour three hour long podcast well that's a big time investment you're asking for people to listen to it and two people start running out of steam and the things they're really passionate about right around that point as well
there are times I've done episodes that crossed into an hour and a half or so but it's a typical how do you think about sourcing the guests are you the person reaching out how do you go about I am it turns out that it's not that hard to see someone doing something interesting
or they make a great point you hadn't considered just drop them a line and say hey can you would you actually chat about that on the podcast and if it any of the answers yes great here's a link to the booking page it asks the stuff I need to care about I don't think about it again the time rolls around I wind up
oh in 10 minutes I have to go do a recording about this person cool and I suck up preparing for things I made a HD personified when that's your failure mode you've got to be good at improv so great we spend about 10 to 15 minutes beforehand talking about what it is
that we're going to cover anything I should avoid talking about their sense of about it right let's dive in and for the rest of that we have to end about 40 to 45 minutes most times on the recording side of it and then we wind up cutting that down as a result
so before you start the recording you talk to them right away for before you hit the record button that's how it works yes I warm up yeah because otherwise we have a pre meeting a weekend advance great I'm not going to remember what the hell we talked about in that level of context and depth
and once you get people there it's good to at least figure out the direction even if they say there's nothing in particular I need to talk about great I'll take it from there and then you throw it over the wall for the editing and all that you said you outsource all that I wind up closing the browser tab
I don't think about it again because we've automated an awful lot of this even the publishing and scheduling and all of that well some of the people some of it is automated systems behind the scenes the line is sort of blurry and these days
I'm not sure where it starts and stops because I'm not building those systems anymore I did originally is one of my failure modes before that was I do recording and then it would just sit there for months before I remember to copy it over to the editing folks can get to work on what tools do you use to records a microphone and a keyboard generally speaking it's a there's not a lot of magic that goes into it I'll use remotely dot FM as the browser platform that I've been using now I was using Zencaster for a bit but they got kind of weird and I had some audio artifacting issues
and there's nothing perfect but they all tend to use larger the same APIs most of them are as good as any other I'm not a big fan of doing it over zoom the compression gets weird but it works out yeah just when you said that you know you can forget to copy things I just wanted to insert a plug for squad cast it
they're using right now for recording we're not sponsored by them but we had their founders on the show it was episode eight really nice guys bootstrap company so there you can actually add people to your organization and then once you record they can just go and download the files themselves so which makes things easier if you outsource you don't have to pay for extra users
they don't have much of an R back story going on over at remotely we value it is about squad cast back and we periodically review all of our vendors and as our needs change because we're still using this thing because it solves a problem that we had four years ago we haven't thought about since as a bad reason to keep doing something and we want to passing on squad cast but I don't for the life of me recall exactly why some of it has to do with the reason we pick these things is mostly not me I'm not an audio file I do not have the ear for that sort of thing so in someone's
says oh the audio quality terrible can't you tell no I can't I also believe people over index on tools where they want to make sure that their production value is stratospheric that secondary it takes at a seat because it has to to content people will suffer through an awful lot of crappy production value if the content is compelling and if it's not it doesn't matter if your production value is Oscar winning no one is going to care
I think you said that right there is a minimum bar it's easy to like get over that minimum bar for the quality the audio quality of it beyond that yeah you could make it like a movie but most people wouldn't care or know the difference between those two depends on what I'm doing too if I don't have a chat with someone a side bar in a re-invent for example I want to have something portable on my person that I can flip up and say go and we start recording and on some level with you have certain production quality requirements well yeah you've to convince it to come back to a state of mind
and you can convince it to come back to a studio and schedule time for that and a lot of opportunities get lost as a direct result so tell us like how all of this the newsletter and all that you said you have a separate like PNL line for that how does it feed into the business how do you tell that attribution effectively it's one of those
rarities in the world a marketing department that turns a profit right but how do you attribute like is there a customer acquisition or something like that sort of thing that you can attribute to a podcast episode or a newsletter no not
directly it's almost impossible to pull that off because people don't reach out to us because they heard an ad for us somewhere it's something that has to sit with them for a while there needs to be a recurring
acknowledge painful problems also very fixed point in time today you might not care tomorrow you will and in three days you won't care again people put in the word you hear about us the overwhelming answer is the
nonsense that I do very often like I don't know I've just always sort of known that Corey was there that's kind of the point I also don't trust podcast download statistics for crap but I do know that for no other reason then I've had some guests who absolutely have huge platforms of their
own and the numbers don't really move even when they promote it themselves versus what I see as a standard baseline so okay whatever on that front a lot of the sponsors definitely want to do attribution and that
podcasting in particular and also to some extent newsletters are not the way to get there the only way to get their reliably is to have an in-depth conversation with the person who reached out and that's hard to do there are some things that you can never
do attribute of value to what is the ROI on having your companies advertisement for twenty minutes on the New York Times and the square and the Times Square billboard New York
and the answer is I don't know what it's cool so you should do it anyway people love to be able to measure these things about what's working and what's not but an old song marketing is half of your marketing budget is wasted you'll go broke trying to figure out which
is half right and I think you made an important point on one of your episodes that your advertisers so big companies who provide enterprise services so the customer lifetime value there is huge and their clients are mostly
companies so the person who heard your podcast they're out in your podcast and maybe decision might not actually be the person who is buying right they come to the
thing is it gets discussed internally and then someone decides to reach out for a trial I had one sponsor that decided after a couple months that they weren't going to continue because they weren't
seeing value okay cool two months later they came back and bought everything I'd sell them and it turned out they sat down and interviewed their largest
customers and think two of the top five or three of the top five for her about them on the podcast like oh it works I'm just surprised they were able to figure out that those
companies came through the podcast most people just don't know where it came someone in a meeting brought you up so with the time you
launch the podcast you already had the platform of the newsletter so your podcast essentially didn't have to be bootstrapped from zero in terms of the audience sort of I mean just
you're going to read about newsletters it means you're automatically down on the podcast a lot of that doesn't convey but it gave me a platform from which talk about
the launch of it so on the actual like the billing side of your business right is that like a recurring model or do I come to you when I have a problem and I know that
there's Corey fixed point in time depending on what it is you're looking to do which is a lot of the challenge he feels like it's a bit of a treadmill story we have to run to keep up all the time
but there's something reassuring about recurring models but the way that we approach it at the moment we have not yet found a way to serve our customers well
that doesn't turn into just rent extraction and that doesn't sit well with me we actually had the episode a couple of episodes ago on subscription pandemic
that's what we call it so it's a global phenomena that everybody wants to charge you a subscription on personal level you know enterprise I guess retainers for companies also come to that space so I'm curious what do you think about usage based pricing versus subscription pricing for cloud services
people like to do consumption or usage based pricing because they believe that it is transparent and that it's fair and that it's predictable and in truth it is none of those three things
is not at all clear if I'm going to charge you for every second that something runs at that works out to this monthly fee and what you need is going to scale up and down
you run your application for a month and then figure out what it costs it's an after effect thing the fact that it's transparent doesn't mean it's easy to predict and predict is the hard part on this
and as far as it being fair I don't know what's fair I don't think that necessarily means much into business context I do know that most of my customers would pay 10 to 20% more than they're paying now for AWS in a heartbeat
if there was some magic way to be able to predict to the penny what it was going to cost them for the next three years especially to flatten the spikes make it predictable even spikes are fine even seasonal but they want to be able to predict and then reason around it
and as a result then inform the rest of their business decision making process so for your own business because it's not like a recurring revenue kind of story right in the beginning
when did you decide that okay we're ready to like hire one more person we need for this role and because it's not a recurring revenue it's a bit harder to kind of reason about that
it became a bit easier it started because the start we hired someone to do sales for media and it made sense because I didn't want to spend all my time wooing sponsors and that's wound up justifying itself super easily
the next problem was okay now that that's done what do we figure out with what we figure out as far as having other people can have in service these things and if so what does that mean for our ability to focus on the business as well
there's no easy answers in any of this it comes down to what makes sense what doesn't make sense hiring is always harder than people give it credit for being managing people is incredibly challenging
I no longer manage people for that exact reason I let my business partner handle that back the only person I can actually fire at this company is my business partner is also the CEO so it's kind of fun and so are there like other technical people in the company of the seven that you said oh yes
and what are they doing consulting delivery is always been fun I'll say everyone in some of those technical just it's hard to wind up viewing technical through a narrow lens of oh they write code they they are very technically proficient at the areas that they focus on
one of the challenges as well is when you hire for someone to do the kind of consulting we do as we do it it's basically unicorn hunting you need someone with the background of a senior s re because there's no way to teach scale
for someone doesn't have that you need them have the consulting skills which look like a lot of varied things they need to be comfortable presenting to clients basically every level of the work up to and including the board
and then when you get all that done a lot of the work starts to look repetitive from certain points of view then these people are often bored and then they decide what do they want to be doing instead so there are challenges in this space we don't believe that we've managed to solve them all yet
we're getting closer so as a founder and the business owner you're probably more tolerant to do the repetitive things because it brings you money it's oh person I can't stand when too many days look alike
but there's a reason the types of engagements that I work on look very different than the type that other folks work on here the long term deep dive into every aspect doing cost analysis doesn't interest me my attention span trips out
but let's sit down for two days and tear through one side of your bill down the other and find the optimization opportunities there in a quick first pass that's always fun I want to get back to that point you made about your first 18 months of customers being from your network
and I'll ask a selfish question because you know we are a bootstrap business so we will launch our product maybe two three months I would say in the very best case scenario because it takes time to build it publicly launched yeah we may run out of money in terms of our own savings
and we don't necessarily want to take VC funding unless we really have to so we were thinking about doing consulting maybe some product consulting maybe consulting people like on the process like product development because of our experience
actually what would you recommend to folks like us like how do you find your first customer in your network people do consulting in a lot of ways and I think a lot of them are misguided at best
never charged by the hour you're going to spend at least 70% of your time on client development finding new clients so unless you want to work 120 hours a week I don't recommend that there's also the idea of being very narrow and very focused
because it's much easier when you can speak directly to someone who hears himself in the description of what you do and address the expensive problem with which they wrestle effectively I started off with the SRE skill set when I started off with was great I am a great solutions architect
cool swing a dead cat you're going to hit 15 people in a room who look like that and when you're trying to be all things to all people and going broad you're now competing against Accenture
who has a bigger marketing budget than you do instead become more and more narrowly niche because that's marketing positioning is marketing and ideally you should be able to trigger roll attacks moments where people
at a party ask what you do you tell them like oh my god I know someone you need to talk to that happened a lot specificity and being the leading expert in a very narrow space is the way to be able to charge top dollars for a lot of these things
so basically you were in the niche of your own for a while you established the niche when you first started oh yes so I listened to an episode of your podcast which was probably six years ago or so
I probably don't remember the specifics but I'll take it at face value yeah I can't find it unfortunately it was with some vcs who invest in enterprise software or like cloud software and you made the point that GCP has the best tech
of all of the cloud providers but they have kind of the worst enterprise sales the worst customer service and that triggers a lot of people away from from that so I spent I mean I spent I mean GCP I kind of have seen some of that internal stuff
going on what you said that really resonated with me in terms of how these companies operate I'm curious have you seen much change I guess in Google specific in GCP specifically over the years Google's gotten much more proficient at speaking enterprise
I think that is Thomas Koreans influence and it's done tremendous things you no longer have the same trope of the sales person from GCP who shows up at your office and insults you that happened in several occasions I can recommend personally
it's a they don't do that anymore they buy they realize that the decision makers are not always engineers but a lot of the people driving the decision are that's an natural evolution that works I also think that Google continues to be technically excellent
I think where they completely miss the ball is understanding just how much damage product constellations do to them in the conversations to which they are not a party at this point after they killed Google Cloud domains how do I recommend a Google product and not look like a clown in the process
if it's something that a cancellation is going to cause a problem with is there is no database in the know genus so exactly now they start like they sold the domain to square space next where they're going to do sell the database is the oracle
I mean we we ourselves we use Firebase right now we have Google don't have those dynamic links word treating you I see by the time we got to Firebase it was already that we did use that yeah so you're safe for this one it's just the next cycle that will catch you yes exactly yeah
but it is a hard thing yeah with Google domains too I think all the emails and all that Ilya and I have set up we don't know what's going to happen and there's no clarity we don't know exactly when what is going to get deprecated is there alternative to it or not
let's take on this because this was a big decision I suppose there's like the repercussions of that is pretty big because there are I think 10 million domains registered to Google domains
it's both people like small like individual people just been the main squatting to like large enterprises who register domains to Google domains and especially some features go away like let's say if email forging goes away and stuff like that
people will be really pissed at Google I'm curious because I cannot explain it like I've not been there long enough to like really and how do they make a decision like what's your take on this every single Google that I've spoken to about this
and many of these people are remarkably senior has expressed that they found out about it at the same time the rest of us did Wow corporate communication chains are hard that's crazy yeah I think coming back to the other side Amazon as a company and AWS
one part of it big part of it one of the best things about it is the customer service Google we haven't had the opportunity or the misfortune to like talk to their customer support yet what's your take on like is that a typical
because Google the company doesn't have a good name for customer service is GCP similar or I have to defer to what other people have to say about this one of the side effects of being known in the space is that when my name comes in attached to a
question I have it tends to get action very effectively it is almost unheard of these days for me to have a poor customer service experience with a cloud provider and I'm not asking for special treatment but it also is the natural evolution
of these things I'm also at a point technically where when I start having problems it is invariably not something that I've gotten wrong on my side I've solved more problems in the course of my career than I
care to name by starting off trying to draft an email to a newsletter mailing list on this or to or write a ticket where I distill the problem down into a skeleton reproduction case and then I find the problem
rubber duct debugging is great so at least my issues are complicated can you attribute any product changes directly to your feedback oh absolutely I've we're talking in terms of AWS Google or both AWS like we know I think
ourselves so we'll just talk about Google yeah my personal favorite and I'm not going to name the service but the GM was super excited meet me and and brief me on the service week before re-advent and they asked if I had heard of it yet and I said well I did write the original PR FAQ and their
response was no you didn't it's in your inbox let's see how far it's fallen for my original vision four years ago and they just had no idea again they they weren't true to life on all this I'm an outsider what does it matter but yeah there's a bunch of stuff that I've seen that I've caused to get
fixed that I've been noisy about that I have asked for on Twitter and then get granted later and there are also very good reasons why some of the things I asked for don't get done no one shows up at work hoping to a crappy job today unless apparently work on Microsoft security so it's one of those
areas where it's just there are constraints the scale of what they do is monstrous and it has to work for every customer the service has and that means that corner cases become common cases at that scale so looking at these three organizations AWS Azure and GCP internally where would
you say they're doing a great job each one Microsoft has the ecosystem stuff working for it but I think that they're having serious problems right now with their lack of attention to security on that to the
point where I think that we're going to start seeing a lot of brand name customer references going to ask to not be references anymore as a result because if you see your bank as an Azure reference customer
what does that really say about you and that is reaching a fever pitch Google is doing surprisingly well in a lot of these things where where I don't necessarily see that there is a whole lot hold in the back except Google themselves and AWS has focused on some level toward revenue protection
and honestly just being crappy to customers and ways that I would not have expected years ago I don't know what the trip freshers are that are driving it but it's unfortunate and I'm not given the same benefit of the doubt or assuming the same good intent that I would have three
years ago I wonder if it's AWS because I left AWS when Andy Jesse was still the CEO of AWS and he was the founder of AWS even though he was an employee of Amazon but he was the founding figure right and Bezos was still the CEO of the company and I think what in 2021 basically AWS CEO has
changed so it was no longer led by the founder by by hired executive I wonder I mean I can only speculate of course if that might have played a role because founder figure might think a bit different about certain issues it's entirely possible I don't know at some level what that is and I think
that a lot of these factors are incredibly complex and trying to distill it down into simple talking points from the outside is a fools errand it's oh what they're doing is easy all they have to do is just no no no no no none of this is easy but I do know that historically customer obsession
was their guiding star and it feels like that has been lost as a customer that that is what I am feeling and that was the thing that may a AWS special and if you take that away there's not that much difference between them and Oracle if we're being perfectly direct and I
know a lot of Oracle customers but I don't know anyone who likes Oracle what has taken that space the customer obsession piece of it that's missing now I don't know that anyone has yet I mean at least small companies it's easy to do because you know you're a small scrappy startup and
you want to obviously be great and you have a lot of attention to your early adopters and the rest but somewhere between that and a trillion dollar publicly traded company a lot happens right right no I mean like in AWS you said the North Star the focus used to be customer obsession
now it's no longer that so what is it that's taking that space inside AWS Well lately it seems like it's generative AI because the market's excited about it so we had to spill that all over everything we've gotten we're an AI company we're totally not behind
it's like we think the lady doth protest too much because you're awfully insecure sounding about that and you haven't shipped anything really significant in that space and you're rebranding a bunch of stuff it's been around for a while is generative AI and I don't want
the underlying platform behind all of my infrastructure to be hype chasing.
Yeah it makes a lot of sense they don't need to do everything and I think that they've lost that.
So with that we actually have a question what's your opinion on producing content with chat GPT which a lot of people seem to be experts in these days at least if you trust your LinkedIn feed.
Oh I've been doing it for a while now part of what I'll do is I'll tell it to write a blog post about a particular topic with talking points I provided in the style of core equipment and then it'll spit something out and I usually despise everything that it wrote.
So I copy that into a text editor and then I spend 20 minutes mansplain correcting the robot on these things and at the end of it I've got a serviceable first draft and it's easier than staring at the blank page and it comes with a structure it comes with misunderstandings
around points in some cases that I wouldn't have occurred to me that someone would believe that to be true we'd better make sure they don't and at the end of it I maybe have like three words in a row that were originally in the thing and I can live with that for one and two I'm perfectly
fine with plagiarizing from the thing that's plagiarizing from me it feels certain poetic
justice to it. Okay by the way about you wouldn't publish whatever it output as is.
My god no without review and looking at these things hell no I do have a colleague who has what I have affection refer to as the asshole and email problem who will take a message that normally they would have sent and put it through chat jippity and say great turn this
into a business email and that works super well and I'm sure some of the other side is like
a five paragraph email. Hey chat jippity tell me what this person wants me to do. Yeah it's
like basically it's an API for human interaction. There are certain niceties an etiquette that a
business email has to convey that a slack message doesn't. So I accidentally did this yesterday where I asked chat jippity to like give me how to make a my tie there were some friends over but I had my system bronze and everything set up to always say you're a software developer
always responding like technical and precise instructions and what came out was hilarious. I mean
it was awesome but hilarious. I had that too when I was trying to get it to explain I forget the exact concept to six year old because she was curious but being snide and sarcastic as a
default tone does not work well with six year olds in case you weren't aware of that. So like
oh let me fix that right now. Twitter I've done a bit of content with chat jippity just in terms of response to the prompts I've given it cyber bullying it into ranking the US presidents by
absorb and see was a good one. It's like that's not a respectful way to or effective way to rank
US presence. It is if I have a spill and it is select the US president to mop it up with like oh here you go all kinds of fun stuff you can ask it like if the purpose companies are doing a
terrible job of marketing this stuff in fun ways. Here's a transcript of a meeting pick out
the action items for everyone. No here's a trans here to a meeting find the most unpleasant son of a
gun to work with because we're trying to build a layoff list. Cool so only funny note you
just have a couple of parting questions. So Corey do listen to podcasts or do you read books?
Can you recommend something that you content that you can see or this is a weird confession?
I don't listen to podcasts and I don't watch videos. The way that I ingest that I learn things
are twofold. One I can read astonishingly quickly so I absorb and retain information
through reading very well. But if I want to learn something technical the best way I found
is to build something with it. That is what really seers it into me. So it's weird that I produce
podcasts but don't listen to them but it's absolutely true. There's a reason it all might have transcripts so that you can just you get the written version if that's what you're into.
I can absorb things a lot more quickly there. There are a wide variety of different things
that you can read that puts into different ways. There's trash reading you do for fun.
There's technical stuff that comes out and then there's the occasional book that changes
the way you think about things. Never eat alone was one of them.
But I think it was a canarchy for Aussie. It talks about the value of how to build connections
and network effectively. I mean some of it is obvious like just go to lunch and people
do you favor no no no no no. Do favors for people. It comes back around again in weird ways and the way that you do this is you always make it a point to go out and be social with people.
Like some of the best money I ever invested in my entire life was at various jobs that I had when I would take anyone who wanted to at any time out for coffee and buy coffee
and just had a talk of what they were working on. I must have spent thousands of dollars on coffee a year and it was worth every penny because sometimes it turns into weird stuff,
weird ways of seeing the world, weird opportunities. They talk about the problems that they have and that gives you an idea or hey I know someone who's focusing on that have you to met.
It's a small thing for you but in some case it can change everything for them.
And that's indicated every time that I wind up getting a Rando DMing me which still happens from time to time about something I said years ago about job interviewing or having ADHD or any of the other stuff that I rant about sometimes really change their perspective
and then they credit that with changing how they approach something.
I don't think I did much. All I did was just made an observation.
They did the rest of the work. But it's gratifying to know that hearing the right thing at the right time can affect people's lives.
In years since I read it I should definitely read it again.
Cool, yeah we'll think the show notes.
Now before we close I had a side question from what you said.
You mentioned that basically the mode that you learn things is ingest things is to try them out.
How do you keep up with the insane volume of stuff that's coming out from AWS as your GCP like all the time?
Because AWS putting out something does not mean that it is for you.
Okay that's interesting. Maybe I'll use it for something maybe I won't.
I don't try the majority of things that come out.
But there are things that I go very deep on.
But if I have a spare afternoon to kill and I build slack into my schedule for this sort of thing.
All right let's try spinning up something with amplify and let's see what I'm going to learn.
What did I learn? I learned I'm not a front end developer and that was fine.
But even just kicking the tires on those gives you an exposure to it.
But for a lot of the in-depth stuff talking to people, this is the value of talking to people.
I might think that already Aurora serverless is crappy for a use case or great for a use case.
But I'd rather talk to people who've been building production applications on top of it.
What do you think?
Because if you love it or hate it, that's going to tell me something.
And there's also a circle of people I trust on a lot of those things who are working in certain areas.
I don't necessarily trust randos like like me as well trust Amazon reviews.
I don't care.
But people that I know in certain spaces who have opinions that are considered and worth hearing.
I listen twice to those people.
Yeah so Corey where can people find you?
Last week in AWS.com there's a newsletter subscribe here thing.
Put your email address in and send and hit that that.
You will likely enjoy what comes out over the next few weeks and once you do that.
We have like a fun onboarding drip campaign that explains some of what we do.
But honestly it's my thoughts every week on what is going on in the industry delivered in my native language of sarcasm.
And that is probably the best exposure to what I do these days.
How about Twitter? What's it with your handle?
I try to avoid driving people to Twitter unnecessarily.
But if you're there it's Quinney Pig, QUI, Double NY Pig.
What does Pig reference to?
Oh because what I changed my name to Corey Quinn in 2010.
All of the usual domain stuff we're taking and Quinn has a great last name to pun with.
My wife and I for example don't engage in hanky.
We have Quintimacy so you know keep rolling with it.
And it was an experiment.
So instead of being a guinea pig I'll be a Quinney Pig and it just sort of stuck.
That's very cool.
Alright Corey thanks.
It was a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
And I think I need to close this with if you like this episode give us a five-star review.
Let's go you and do your podcast every time right?
I do and then also leave an insulting comment and then I throw it back to something that was said during the episode.
Again this is like how I keep it fun and engaging.
And I generally don't know what I'm going to say until about halfway through the sentence introducing it.
It's but great like you better have something.
Go for it.
It games I play with myself to keep myself engaged.
Alright. Yeah. Thank you so much. You've got awesome.
Yeah.
Thank you so much. You've got awesome. Yeah.
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Thank you.