Transcript: CTO Therapy: The Risks and Rewards of Vendor Partnerships
0:00 Scott Maybe I need to stop thinking about this like an engineer and start thinking about this like a customer.
0:23 Brad Welcome, everybody,
0:25 Brad to another episode of the How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast.
0:28 Brad I'm Brad Hefta-Gaub,
0:29 Brad and this is my co-host and
0:31 Scott Scott Porad.
0:33 Brad Scott.
0:35 Brad Today,
0:35 Brad what are we going to talk about today? You reached out to me and said you had a very interesting topic to talk about, and I would love to hear about it.
0:44 Scott Well,
0:45 Scott it's interesting because it's actually not an interesting topic.
0:50 Scott In the sexy world of AI,
0:53 Scott it is as dull as it comes.
0:56 Brad Okay, let me hear about
0:56 Scott At
0:57 Brad it.
0:57 Scott a high level, the topic is when you have a vendor who has the point of view that's supporting their customers within their own interests,
1:06 Scott so they offer in different ways to support you,
1:09 Scott how do you make the most of that?
1:11 Scott That's the high level topic.
1:12 Scott And then let me give the most specific example that's happened to me recently.
1:16 Scott As listeners of this podcast know,
1:18 Scott I am currently the CTO at a company called TaskRabbit, and we are primarily an AWS cloud platform customer.
1:29 Scott We also use Google Cloud Platform for some things, but that's less of our workloads,
1:35 Scott so to speak. And so we're a big enough client of.
1:39 Scott AWS that we have an account manager,
1:42 Scott that's the first part.
1:43 Scott And the second part is they organized something for us that they call an EBC or an executive business conference where they invited us to Amazon myself and some people on my team to come to Amazon to their executive briefing center,
2:02 Scott which is.
2:04 Scott you know, basically a floor of one of their buildings in Seattle,
2:07 Scott and to talk to us about the resources that are available at AWS to help us.
2:16 Scott And what I learned, I learned a lot in that meeting, and I can give a little bit of an outline of what was discussed, but I think the most key thing I learned was AWS has a belief.
2:28 Scott which is probably backed up with data, but they have a belief,
2:31 Scott which is if we can help our customers,
2:34 Scott then that will come back and help us.
2:37 Scott And ultimately,
2:38 Scott you know, they're thinking if we can help TaskRabbit grow,
2:40 Scott then TaskRabbit will need more compute and we'll sell them more compute,
2:43 Scott et cetera.
2:45 Scott Or if we can help them solve a problem,
2:47 Scott maybe they'll buy one of the other services that we offer on our platform.
2:52 Scott In reading between the lines, I got the impression.
2:56 Scott that the people in the room,
2:58 Scott their personal annual performance reviews are based on
3:05 Scott did their client meaning password did their client grow not did their client buy more stuff but actually did their client succeed right whatever whatever the client was telling you they had a problem with did they succeed at solving that so we came in they asked us to come in um we brought a group of one two three four about five people um
3:28 Scott And we started by just telling, you know, opening the kimono, so to speak, telling them about the challenges we're facing.
3:34 Scott And for us, that's a lot of, you know, decomposing the monolith kind of challenges.
3:41 Scott That was one part of the meeting. Another part of the meeting really was not about engineering.
3:46 Scott We talked about partnership with Amazon Marketplace, a potential partnership with Amazon Marketplace. I mean,
3:53 Brad Yeah Sure
3:53 Scott it wasn't a.
3:55 Scott that was more of us saying hey we'd love to partner with you and
3:58 Brad Right.
3:58 Scott and they brought a person into the room who was like well okay i'm we'll talk to you about that but that i don't that's not going it might go somewhere but i'm not revealing anything that's a secret of course everybody wants to partner with amazon and then the third part of the day was really talking about ai on their platform and i will say and this is a little bit critical that was actually the least impressive part of the day you
4:20 Scott Day to me.
4:20 Scott Well, actually, the least impressive part of the day to me, there was an hour where the person from professional services came in and I wish I could have recorded that hour because it was a word salad of acronyms and industry
4:35 Brad Yeah,
4:35 Scott bingo
4:36 Brad jargon.
4:37 Scott jargon that's jargon.
4:39 Scott And I was just like,
4:40 Scott if it wasn't me in this room listening to this person,
4:43 Scott this could literally just be.
4:46 Scott NXKCD.
4:48 Scott So,
4:48 Scott um...
4:49 Brad So I have a couple questions about this.
4:52 Brad And maybe I'm just trying to frame it to see if this is kind of what went down is what I imagine what went down.
4:58 Brad I guess this is more of a statement than a question,
5:00 Brad but I think that like this notion of working with a vendor who's motivated to make sure their customers are succeeding while using their software,
5:09 Brad like that's I hope that that's how most all vendors think,
5:12 Brad right? Like I think that like we as software,
5:15 Brad B2B businesses,
5:17 Brad B2B businesses should.
5:18 Brad should be thinking along the lines of the more that my customer is happy with using my software,
5:23 Brad then the more loyal they'll be.
5:25 Brad They'll maybe use more of it. They'll maybe, you know, increase their volume,
5:28 Brad but they'll be more sticky with us as their particular business vendor, right?
5:33 Brad So I feel like...
5:36 Brad I feel like I've seen this sort of play before,
5:38 Brad not just from huge vendors,
5:40 Brad but even, you know, obviously when you're a small startup, you're doing this like crazy. If you're a B2B startup,
5:45 Brad you're trying everything you can to make sure that like the people that purchase your software are successful with it because that's your
5:53 Scott Yeah,
5:53 Scott I would say this had a slightly different tone.
5:56 Scott It wasn't, are you being successful with?
5:59 Scott Our software,
6:00 Scott it was what are the challenges that you are having in your business right now and how can we help you?
6:08 Brad Yeah,
6:08 Scott Could we help you solve them?
6:10 Scott And that might end up with you using more AWS services and it might not,
6:14 Scott but we are here.
6:15 Scott We have a bunch of resources here and we just want to be helpful.
6:18 Scott They're practically begging us. In fact, I walked out of the room thinking after like eight hours of being in this room, I walked out of the room thinking to myself,
6:26 Scott pity isn't the right word, but I was thinking, oh my God,
6:29 Scott we have to find a way to
6:30 Brad to let
6:31 Scott let
6:31 Brad them
6:31 Scott them help help us.
6:31 Brad us.
6:33 Scott I mean,
6:33 Scott they'll be so crestfallen if they don't get to help us.
6:37 Brad Yeah. And I sort of feel like there were there were definitely times at many of the vendors,
6:42 Brad I mean, excuse me, at the companies I've been at over my career where, you know, the big player like the Microsoft or the Amazon or the Apple or something like that is just trying to get you to use their software,
6:53 Brad you know, or the, you know, and so there and it makes sense that it's not just a.
6:59 Brad how can we help you use our software but it's like how can we make sure you're being as successful as possible your business is successful as possible because we look good but I think that what you're speaking to here is this idea that it was clear that these people's you know like their quarterly objectives or annual objectives their review is going to be predicated on the success of your business and that's that's like I think that's pretty cool I agree with you it's not
7:25 Brad It takes a pretty sophisticated vendor to be able to get to that stage where they can have those kinds of incentives for their employees.
7:38 Brad They're clearly in a cash flow positive world and they're doing everything they can to kind of like buttress their lead or to kind of keep the customers happy.
7:51 Brad So I feel like I have seen this before and it tends to be those like large long term, very steady players who are still aggressively fighting other big players in the space.
8:02 Brad to keep market share and to maintain,
8:05 Brad you know, loyal customers.
8:08 Scott And what I walked, that's exactly right.
8:10 Scott And what I walked away with was thinking.
8:13 Scott How would I make the most of this?
8:15 Brad Yeah, totally.
8:16 Brad Yeah,
8:17 Brad because a lot of times it's like how many times have I been brought into a meeting like that where it was like the the biz dev team at,
8:24 Brad you know, mega corp was just trying to do more business with,
8:30 Brad you know, my my little startup.
8:32 Brad And it was like we're brought in as the, you know, the engineering leader,
8:36 Brad you know, CTO or VP of engineering. And it's less like.
8:38 Brad It's like, please find something that we can do to keep the business development people like happy.
8:44 Brad It kind of that can that can definitely turn into a solution looking for a problem,
8:52 Brad right?
8:53 Scott That's right.
8:54 Scott Well,
8:54 Scott certainly there was a solution looking for a problem in this sense.
8:58 Scott You know, they probably put up on the screen,
9:02 Scott so to speak.
9:03 Scott 50 different things they could help us with.
9:07 Brad Right.
9:07 Scott I mean, AWS is such a vast landscape.
9:11 Brad It's huge.
9:11 Scott We can do this, we can do this, we can help with this, we help other partners with this.
9:15 Scott So one of the things I walked out thinking was,
9:17 Scott well,
9:17 Scott we have to get clear on what's important to us. They'll help us with anything we want help with.
9:21 Scott And they'll help us with things we don't want help with too.
9:24 Scott So we need to get clear on what we want help with.
9:27 Scott But I think the other thing I thought,
9:29 Scott and you just touched on it, was this.
9:31 Scott Yes.
9:31 Scott When you said, hey,
9:33 Scott I go into a biz dev meeting as a small startup,
9:37 Scott there's this like mismatch of like our size and scale and how we're thinking about things and their size and scale.
9:46 Brad Yeah.
9:46 Scott And, you know, we are not Nike or.
9:52 Scott I don't know, whole foods, I guess Amazon owns whole foods, but like I was just looking around my space here to see brands that I recognize were not Apple,
10:00 Scott right?
10:00 Scott And so the kind of solution that Apple would want, like, okay, one of our challenges right now is our sort of commerce and payment system.
10:10 Scott We're having to work on that.
10:11 Scott Well,
10:12 Scott the commerce and payment system for a Nike or an Apple or a whole foods is entirely different.
10:18 Scott than one for,
10:20 Scott I think it's entirely different than one for a task rabbit.
10:25 Scott And so sometimes I get afraid that they're kind of bringing,
10:30 Scott I'm going to call it big company solutions when I want small to medium sized company solutions.
10:35 Brad Sure, totally.
10:36 Scott And so I think that.
10:38 Scott That makes me a little, I just talked to you about some of the things,
10:41 Scott but now we're going to do a little therapy,
10:42 Scott Brad.
10:42 Scott I'm going to talk about some of the things that always makes me think how do I get the most out of this. I think I'm afraid that I'm going to be fed solutions that are not the appropriate scale for my world.
10:53 Scott I'm afraid that I'm going to get.
10:56 Scott direction and advice and opinions about what to do when I've already got a lot of stuff to do and I need actually help getting it done.
11:02 Brad Yep.
11:04 Brad Don't bring me ideas. Bring me hands to get the ideas done.
11:08 Scott Sure.
11:09 Scott I'm afraid that I'm going to get solutions like if I'm afraid that I'm going to get level four solutions and what I mean by that is if I'm just operating like I'm just trying to get the basics right.
11:20 Scott and and they're bringing me stuff that's like they're playing above the rim which is cool like the stuff they're doing that was some of the stuff i saw with ai there like neat stuff but i'm like yeah man i'm just here still working with engineers to like get used to using you know ai and their ide and
11:39 Brad Right.
11:39 Scott we're not we're not yet to where we have a fleet of agents which is you know so
11:48 Scott I worry about you getting those level four solutions that are just like two where it's not there yet.
11:54 Scott Right.
11:54 Brad Yep.
11:56 Scott And so I think about how to, you know, how to tap into what we need. And I guess it all comes back to what do we need? And maybe we don't even know what we need.
12:05 Brad Yeah, totally.
12:06 Brad Yeah.
12:07 Brad Well,
12:07 Brad you know, it's interesting.
12:08 Brad I, you know, as you as you describe this, I'm thinking about, you know, I I've seen this recently. There's a.
12:17 Brad groups that I'm working with where they want to be SOC 2 compliant and so then they were working with a vendor that's an up-and-coming vendor that's that's just like kind of really knocking it out of the park on SOC 2 compliance this company called Vanta and basically what they do is they wire up into all your systems and they kind of do automated automated audits and sort of like
12:41 Brad guide you in a wizard-like way through what do you need to do to further your your security posture or your SOC2 posture and it's like you and I last time you and I worked at a company together where we we had like major compliance um regime around SOC2 and HIPAA and stuff like that and it was a you know it was like
13:03 Brad just a ridiculous number of hours of energy and time that were put in by that organization and and vanta claims to kind of like automate all that away you know just glue right into your dashboards and it's like the company looking at this is super small like it's very very tiny team and i was just like man like this feels like yeah it's like my grandfather used to say something like i can't afford to save 200 on a refrigerator
13:30 Brad Right.
13:30 Brad And so it's like sometimes you can't afford the help that they're offering because
13:35 Scott Right.
13:35 Brad because it actually gives you it puts more more on your plate than if you just don't do the thing.
13:41 Brad Right.
13:42 Brad The help is the help.
13:44 Brad Yes,
13:44 Brad they're helping.
13:45 Brad But even helping me, I still have to do more work.
13:48 Scott Yes, you have to.
13:50 Scott That's another fear,
13:51 Scott right?
13:51 Scott I have to.
13:53 Scott I can't just say come help if there's not someone on our side to actually engage with them.
13:59 Scott unless they're going to do it all on their own and it never seems like they're going to do it all on their own
14:03 Brad Yeah, and, you know, it's interesting because,
14:05 Brad you know, I don't think I'm telling any tales out of school, but Vanta works with a couple different vendors that are like essentially SOC 2 auditors. And one of their claims to fame is that they are able to kind of work with these firms that actually are really motivated to come in and do the work for you. Now you have to pay for it. But.
14:24 Brad You know, that is an opportunity.
14:26 Brad It seems very similar to like the best case scenario where it's like, I don't have the time and energy to do this. But if I have the money to pay for it and that vendor comes with a perspective of we're going to give this to you cheap or we're really good at doing working with people at your scale or our whole point is to make you successful. But if you're successful,
14:46 Brad then you're going to keep coming back to us for business.
14:49 Brad Yeah, I'd like to think that those things exist and there's no such, you know, the adage there's no such thing as a free lunch.
14:55 Brad Well,
14:56 Brad maybe there are such things as a very well-priced value lunch that actually
15:00 Scott Yeah.
15:01 Brad fill you up and, you know, are nutritious and also don't cost you too much.
15:07 Scott Yeah.
15:08 Scott You know, something was said in the last few minutes that made me, that provoked a thought,
15:13 Scott which is.
15:15 Scott Maybe I need to stop thinking about this like an engineer and start thinking about this like a customer.
15:21 Brad totally yes throw it back and say show you know show me what you got like yeah I'm your customer you do the thing for me okay
15:32 Scott Well,
15:33 Scott I actually meant it a little bit different.
15:35 Scott I meant it from the perspective of like.
15:38 Scott I'm sitting here stretching my mind thinking, how do I tap into this? What do I want them to help me with and so on and so forth, as opposed to just expressing,
15:46 Scott here is my need.
15:48 Scott My need is.
15:50 Scott My cost of maintenance for my cloud infrastructure is too high.
15:54 Scott I have two full-time people who all they do is keep our cloud infrastructure running.
15:58 Scott And as a CTO,
16:00 Scott I want it to be one person or less so that I can free up that resource to go do something else.
16:05 Scott Can you help me solve that problem? So
16:07 Brad Yeah, that's
16:08 Scott maybe
16:08 Brad great.
16:08 Scott the way to frame this is in the language of a user story.
16:14 Scott as opposed to saying like where my mind is initially going as an engineer like well i wanted to come in here and like redo our networking so that we can blah blah blah and like and that's even a bunch of work for me that or me and my team have to think of right as
16:27 Brad Yeah.
16:27 Scott opposed to just saying
16:29 Scott As a company,
16:31 Scott we want to be multi-region for disaster recovery.
16:34 Scott And right now, because of our networking,
16:36 Scott we can't, and we want you to fix that for us.
16:38 Brad Yeah,
16:39 Brad I mean, that's that's a little example of maybe it's like, you know, when you're when you're presented with one of these.
16:46 Brad So let's let's try to turn this into like advice for other CTOs or other up and coming engineering leaders.
16:53 Brad Right.
16:53 Brad Like one.
16:55 Brad Do not be surprised if sometime in your career you're going to be approached by one of these large vendors with a team just like this and they're going to come in and they're going to basically say we're here to solve whatever problems you have.
17:07 Scott Right.
17:08 Brad And the first thing that's going to happen and you're going to get triggered and the first way you're going to get triggered is just like every time anybody comes to you as an engineering leader there they it's like they got to be asking for me to do something they're just they're they're asking for something that's going to cause my engineers to have to do work and the number one thing I have to do is like figure out how to allocate these precious resources of engineering minutes.
17:33 Brad minutes you know so don't be surprised when you get approached by a big vendor like this and don't be surprised when you're triggered then
17:40 Scott Right.
17:40 Brad instead of being triggered instead of doing the thing that of course as an engineer you're so good at and which is what made you the engineering leader that you are to start to think about oh if I had that tool how would I use it instead of going down that road
17:57 Brad Just say,
17:58 Brad yeah, okay,
18:01 Brad here's my problem.
18:03 Scott Right.
18:04 Brad Will you solve it?
18:06 Scott I think that's right.
18:07 Brad It's just that simple,
18:08 Brad Scott.
18:08 Brad Why didn't you come to that on your own? No, I'm just kidding,
18:11 Brad but it is hard,
18:13 Brad right?
18:14 Scott Well,
18:14 Scott it's because the roles are reversed.
18:16 Scott We
18:16 Brad Yeah.
18:17 Scott are normally in the situation of people coming to us with a problem.
18:20 Scott And so we're all oriented around.
18:23 Scott solutions or sometimes they come with us to a solution and we say no no don't bring us solutions bring us problems
18:28 Brad Good for you, it's your problem.
18:29 Scott and so now the shoe is on the other foot or the glove is on the other foot or the hand is on the shoe or whatever people say and I have to rewire my brain to think about it in fact I have a message here
18:44 Scott One of the people who was in this meeting thought it would be beneficial to have them come in and do some training to help upskill some of our team on some certain new things.
18:58 Scott And that's the solution.
19:00 Scott I want Amazon to come in and do some training for my people to upskill them on this when maybe the way we need to phrase that to Amazon is.
19:10 Scott Our engineering team doesn't have enough experience with X and we want we believe we need more in order to accomplish Y.
19:18 Scott Can you help us solve that problem and see what they come back with?
19:22 Brad Yeah.
19:23 Scott That's what I'm going to say to my team.
19:25 Brad They might come back with,
19:26 Brad hey,
19:26 Brad we've got training programs. We'd be happy to bring you in on that.
19:30 Brad They might come back with they might come back with maybe we can co-pilot with you, like maybe we can sit down and actually.
19:37 Brad put somebody in sight on site with you and have them pair program with you even you know they might they might be able to bring all kinds of stuff to bear right
19:46 Scott Tell them the problems we have and let them propose solutions and then we can decide if we want to take those solutions if they say yeah here we've got some links to some articles in our in tech net you remember Microsoft
19:59 Scott Technet?
19:59 Brad Yes.
20:00 Scott Is that still around?
20:01 Brad I don't know if it's still around,
20:03 Brad but yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking about.
20:06 Brad Yeah.
20:06 Brad Well, happily, here's a solution to your problem.
20:08 Brad We have this $2,000 product that's a bunch of CDs that you can install and read documentation.
20:17 Scott Yeah,
20:18 Scott and I would say to that, yeah, that's not really what we,
20:21 Scott that isn't helpful because my engineers already have a subscription to TechNet.
20:27 Scott I don't know, that's whatever.
20:28 Scott But then that sort of puts us in a position of getting to decide if we think that would be helpful.
20:35 Scott And that forces us to actually think about.
20:38 Scott I feel like I'm having therapy with myself.
20:41 Scott If you're building a great rubber duck breath,
20:43 Scott it forces us to actually think about the outcomes we want.
20:46 Brad Yeah.
20:46 Scott How will we know? That's another part.
20:48 Scott How would we know if we were successful with this thing we're asking you to do?
20:56 Scott All of our engineers will know how to do X or our network will be such that we can open another region and it'll work whatever.
21:05 Brad So, yes,
21:06 Brad I, by the way, I think that you're pulling on exactly the right threads at this point, right?
21:10 Brad Like really understand,
21:11 Brad like, what do you want to accomplish?
21:13 Brad Get really clear with yourself about like, what are your goals, right?
21:18 Brad What are the actual problems you have as opposed to, you know, don't just have people bring you solutions if you don't know what the problems are.
21:24 Brad So that's that,
21:24 Brad that sounds great.
21:26 Brad I want to, I want to ask you.
21:29 Brad um what are the so so what are the downsides to kind of working with this vendor in this case so you you like the immediate downside the thing of like well we don't really know what we're doing or want so it's just going to be a waste of our time like that that feels like a kind of obvious downside what are some of the other potential downsides
21:54 Scott Well,
21:54 Scott of course, there's the risk that they would steer us towards solutions that cost money or that we don't need to be spending because it's in their interest.
22:05 Scott There's the risk, as I mentioned,
22:07 Scott that they steer us towards solutions that are not appropriately sized for our problem.
22:14 Scott There's a risk that...
22:17 Scott On our side, as we engage with them, we forget a little bit about what we're trying to accomplish and we start to get like whose parade are we marching in?
22:25 Brad Yeah,
22:26 Scott So we get a little diverted and all of a sudden we're heading down a rabbit hole.
22:32 Scott There's a scope creep risk.
22:35 Scott Oh,
22:35 Scott you guys want us to fix your network? Well, you're going to really need to refactor your whole infrastructure,
22:40 Brad yeah,
22:40 Scott actually.
22:40 Brad well I already told you that I told you my problem was the monolith
22:45 Brad Oh, all we got to do is put if you just break this into a bunch of lambdas you'll be fine
22:49 Scott Oh, actually,
22:50 Scott that's a risk, too.
22:53 Scott I don't know if our listeners know this.
22:56 Scott I used to own the domain name.
22:58 Scott the Luddite CTO because in I
23:02 Brad why is it past tense you let it you let it expire what
23:05 Scott had to let it go like I've had to let hundreds of other domain names go because I've thought of here's the thing I'm going to do and the first thing I do is I go buy the domain name and then after about five or seven years I say to myself am I really ever going to do this
23:20 Brad was the luddite ccto going to be
23:22 Scott It was going to be a blog back in the blog days. Remember what blogs were?
23:25 Brad Yeah,
23:26 Brad it
23:26 Scott Can you believe there's kids who don't even know what blogs are?
23:29 Brad goes kids these days newfangled
23:31 Scott A blog was a newfangled thing for a while.
23:35 Brad just
23:35 Scott It went by the way of the CD.
23:36 Scott Look,
23:37 Scott I am not a CTO who is inclined to embrace the latest technologies about things.
23:45 Brad for the sake of it
23:47 Scott Just for the sake of it,
23:48 Scott I am more comfortable being.
23:51 Scott a step behind the cutting edge.
23:53 Scott I want to embrace the most progressive cutting edge development software and development practices,
23:59 Scott software engineering practices,
24:00 Scott those things, but the technologies.
24:03 Scott Let me, let's let somewhere out, let's let someone else prove this out and let's let the community decide, you know, when these technologies all start, there's always a bunch of them competing and then one of them ends up being a victor, right?
24:14 Scott So let's let the community decide.
24:16 Scott what the industry standard is going to be before we get on it and all of a sudden we're running angular and everyone else is on react but we've invested a bunch of this in the community figured out that react is the way to go right so i'm more comfortable with just a little bit behind the line and so a risk is you get put on some cutting edge thing that
24:38 Scott they move you they encourage you to embrace the sort of cutting edge technology which maybe is overkill and doesn't necessarily end up being the industry standard what was the thing before Kubernetes I think it was called mesos or mesos you
24:53 Brad Oh, I don't know.
24:55 Scott know Kubernetes has kind of been you kind of become the industry standard right there were competitors right
24:59 Brad Yep,
24:59 Scott that's if
25:00 Brad true.
25:00 Brad Yeah.
25:01 Scott you if you had your whole system remember chef
25:04 Brad Yeah, chef.
25:05 Brad Yeah.
25:06 Scott Right.
25:07 Brad Wow.
25:07 Scott So remember Ansible?
25:11 Brad Yeah.
25:12 Brad Wow.
25:13 Brad Yes.
25:15 Brad Yeah.
25:16 Scott So that's why I had to let ICTO is it was, you know, I was kind of blogging at the time I was speaking.
25:22 Scott I used to do a lot more public speaking conferences,
25:24 Scott that kind of stuff.
25:25 Scott I'd like to do it again, actually, but it just died with the pandemic and then I just haven't got to it.
25:32 Scott I wanted to talk for a little while about how like we're doing I felt like as people in consumer oriented internet companies we were doing ourselves a little bit of a disservice about embracing the latest technologies because it was as engineering teams we were getting distracted from what we were trying to do which was make the experience better for our customer because we were goofing around with
25:56 Scott Yet another friend in framework.
25:58 Scott Hamill, you remember Hamill?
26:01 Brad Hamel. Jesus.
26:04 Brad Okay,
26:05 Brad so those all sound like legitimate risks, and they all kind of have a similar flavor to them, which they're effectively technology risks.
26:18 Brad One of the things you didn't mention that I also think is a very real risk is,
26:22 Brad especially when the vendor is a bigger vendor,
26:25 Brad right,
26:26 Brad is they go to school on you and they see what you're doing and you're just a little small fry and they're big and they decide to suck in what you're doing and take over.
26:41 Scott Yes, and it's a great question.
26:45 Scott I've actually had that experience.
26:48 Scott I don't know if it's a risk with this vendor.
26:51 Brad Maybe not in this particular scenario,
26:54 Brad but if we're just looking at this generically for other CTOs or other VP engineering leaders who have this presented to them, this offer presented to them.
27:03 Brad when
27:03 Scott Gotcha.
27:03 Brad you wear your business part of your c hat you know something you got to ask you got to ask the rest of your business team this
27:10 Scott Yeah.
27:11 Brad is a huge thing with the ai models the frontier models right now right like a whole bunch of um you know people that are building people that are building on top of the ai models are you know building mostly on um
27:25 Brad you know on anthropic because anthropic's agreement is like we don't we will not be scraping any of your stuff to go build apps we are only building frontier models we are not we promise we will never build apps off of your what you're doing and open ai not so much like explicitly don't carve that out so
27:45 Scott Mm-hmm.
27:45 Brad you know that's a really that's a really good example of the same
27:50 Brad Same dynamic, bigger vendor, smaller customer,
27:54 Brad how much do you open the kimono to use your language?
28:03 Scott Yeah,
28:03 Scott there's some competitive risk. They learn your business and then they expand into your business. That's for sure a risk.
28:11 Scott I don't think it's a risk in this case.
28:13 Scott Frankly, they already do what we do.
28:15 Scott So Amazon has a home services offering.
28:18 Scott It's not as robust as in some ways it's more robust than TaskRabbit and in some ways it's not.
28:23 Scott So that risk is already there.
28:26 Scott Here's another risk.
28:28 Scott The vendor lock-in risk.
28:30 Brad Yeah, yeah,
28:31 Brad I was about to say, that's what my Lambda joke was,
28:34 Brad but you didn't get it.
28:36 Scott Oh.
28:37 Scott which
28:37 Brad Like
28:38 Scott is
28:38 Brad lambdas
28:38 Scott my guess so
28:38 Brad are just like lambdas are a great example of like AWS lock-in.
28:43 Brad I mean, you can sort of do lambdas and you certainly can do edge functions in the other clouds,
28:47 Brad but it's like your code is barely reusable,
28:51 Brad you know.
28:52 Scott yeah i i am more i tend to not i tend to discount vendor lock-in risk because
29:01 Scott Once you've gone a little ways,
29:03 Scott like how you're working on still startup, how far along are you a year, year and a half?
29:07 Brad Yeah.
29:08 Scott Nine months.
29:09 Brad Yeah, we're... It
29:11 Scott How many months would it take you to switch to another cloud platform,
29:15 Scott all your stuff?
29:17 Brad would be an effort.
29:18 Scott It'd be an effort,
29:19 Scott right?
29:19 Brad Yeah.
29:20 Scott So I tend to think.
29:24 Scott You know, the only reason to switch platforms,
29:29 Scott what are the reasons to switch platforms?
29:31 Scott They're offering you cheaper cost.
29:34 Scott They've got some capabilities that maybe you want.
29:38 Scott That could be some like sort of like political reasons,
29:40 Scott like I don't want to do business with this vendor and I want to do business with this other vendor.
29:44 Scott I don't know.
29:44 Scott But I guess my feeling is like once any startup gets past more than a hot minute, you're kind of locked in from the economics of switching aren't worth it.
29:52 Brad The number one reason that a small startup would want to be flexible and be able to work on any vendor would be the potential of an exit where the larger company decides to.
30:03 Brad to acquire the startup and you it sucks if it's like you're on AWS and Microsoft comes knocking and says we'd like to acquire you right
30:12 Scott Well, let's flip that around for a second. If you went all in and embrace the capabilities of the AWS platform in order to accelerate your business.
30:25 Scott Like, it seems like the risk of lock-in,
30:28 Scott the consequences of vendor lock-in are less than the benefits you could potentially get from, you know, taking full advantage of all the capabilities in the platform.
30:39 Brad Yeah, I mean, maybe, but the one thing I'd say about that is.
30:44 Brad I would say that all of the if we're just focused on cloud vendors right now right like they're pretty they're all pretty good they all pretty much have all the the same basic functionality to them they're different enough the flavors are different enough that you kind of can't you know it's it's pretty hard to code once and deploy everywhere although
31:06 Brad you know with kubernetes and you could you know if you want to have your whole thing basically be you know open containers then you probably you can pretty much you can deploy those almost anywhere at this point but i i don't know i i it's funny i agree with your point about maybe uh vendor lock-ins overblown i kind of agree with that point and also
31:27 Brad I don't really think there's that much benefit of like deeply embedding with a vendor resulting in much faster velocity than anything else, right?
31:40 Brad Like it's not like one vendor is going to make you go way, way faster.
31:45 Brad It's like whatever vendor you're on,
31:46 Brad you're going to go as fast as your team's able to go.
31:50 Scott Well, unless you're apprehensive about using any of the features and capabilities they offer because you're thinking,
31:56 Scott well, maybe we'll want to switch vendors.
31:57 Scott You talked about Lenovo a few minutes ago.
32:00 Scott That might be a bad example.
32:01 Scott Let's talk about, I don't even know what to call it anymore,
32:05 Scott the databases that Amazon offers and the databases that Microsoft offers.
32:10 Brad Sure.
32:11 Scott Azure database and AWS database,
32:13 Scott they've got different names now,
32:14 Scott right?
32:14 Brad Yeah.
32:15 Scott You know.
32:16 Scott i've worked with somebody in the not all that distant past that they were running their own database locally and i was like why are you doing that and they were like well you know just running it just running it on an ec2 instance we're just running a version of mongo on an ec2 instance i'm like why aren't you using document db oh we don't want to be locked into amazon in case we want to switch vendors we can just move this stuff over and i'm like yeah you're going to maintain a mongo database like that's not free and
32:44 Scott In fact, it's complicated and
32:46 Brad Yeah.
32:46 Scott it just seems like you're preparing for this very small eventuality and
32:54 Brad Yeah.
32:54 Scott you're giving up a lot in order to get there.
32:58 Brad Yeah, that's fair.
32:59 Brad How do we tie this back into the when a vendor comes knocking to help you? What do you do?
33:04 Scott May I ask you one other question about vendor lock-in before we do that?
33:07 Brad Yeah.
33:08 Scott Have you ever been locked into a vendor where it caused a problem?
33:11 Brad I don't think so.
33:12 Brad No,
33:13 Scott I don't think so either.
33:14 Scott I'm trying to think about that.
33:15 Scott I can't think of a time where the fact that we used a given vendor presented us a problem where we wanted to change something.
33:25 Brad yeah,
33:26 Brad that's why I think you're it's fair that you're you're kind of challenging that like how big a deal is vendor lock in. Right.
33:34 Brad But here's what I have seen. I have seen that when.
33:37 Brad Your team is used to working with one, you know, shape of a vendor and then.
33:47 Brad for whatever reason you're forced to use another vendor like a new person like like how much now that he's like when you're hiring people because you guys are based on aws if somebody comes in and they have no if you know they're like a developer or devopsy type person that has no experience on aws and they only have experience on you know gcp you're going to kind of be like how confident are you that you're going to be able to like transfer all your gcp skills to aws and
34:11 Scott Right.
34:11 Brad then
34:12 Brad That's a little bit like to me the vendor lock-in that happens is people who only expose themselves to one vendor get really get only good at that.
34:22 Brad And then they it's harder for them to go to an organization that is not using that vendor.
34:28 Scott Well, some people pride themselves on that.
34:30 Scott They get all the certifications. I'm a Microsoft certified solution expert or whatever.
34:35 Scott I don't know if that program's around anymore, but like
34:38 Brad Oh
34:38 Scott they
34:38 Brad yeah,
34:38 Scott actually,
34:38 Brad it is for sure.
34:41 Scott you know, I'm sure Amazon has a similar program kind of thing.
34:46 Scott They go the other way. They say, look, this is the thing I do. In fact, I have a cousin who is an independent software consulting firm and they.
34:55 Scott and they um his firm does one they work on like one little piece of oracle like there's probably like three of these firms in the whole world and that's all they do if oracle ever shuts this thing down i guess they'll have to shut their firm down but like if you need i can't remember what it's called if you need some help with that thing
35:16 Scott That's
35:16 Brad Here's
35:16 Scott what these guys do.
35:17 Scott And he's just like, I mean, I don't know if he's a world's expert,
35:20 Scott but it's just like, yeah, we've just decided to attach our horse to this wagon or attach our wagon to this horse.
35:25 Scott And that's how we're going to roll, right?
35:28 Scott Just like a SharePoint consultant or a WordPress consultant or whatever.
35:31 Brad Yep,
35:32 Scott okay got it. well you are trying to bring us back because i'm sure the 39 people by now we're probably down to like seven people who are on this podcast but seven of you for the seven of you who are left we were trying to get back to how do we take best advantage of these opportunities and the one thing i think we got to was hey think like a user and frame your needs don't try and design the solutions let the vendor
35:59 Scott use their expertise to design the solutions for you and then you can decide if you want to take them
36:04 Brad Yeah, I think that's an excellent piece of advice. I think another sort of corollary to that is don't over function,
36:16 Brad right?
36:17 Brad Like let the vendor, the vendor is claiming to come here and make your life easier.
36:25 Brad you know set appropriate boundaries that don't over function and let the vendor do the work especially
36:30 Scott Mm-hmm.
36:31 Scott Let them
36:31 Brad especially
36:31 Scott do the work.
36:32 Brad if they're like we do this we do this for free for you right then let them do it but don't don't get yourself sucked into um you doing the work
36:46 Scott But I still think you have to have someone on your side to partner with them,
36:50 Brad Oh, for sure.
36:51 Scott at least one person.
36:52 Brad Yeah,
36:53 Brad for sure.
36:54 Brad But I think that like, you know, again,
36:56 Brad like I'm willing to say like,
36:58 Brad have you ever had this happen before where you took advantage of them and it was a and it was a big win?
37:06 Brad In other words, were you, you know.
37:12 Brad Do we have success stories that we can look to?
37:15 Scott Great question.
37:16 Scott I'd have to think back about that.
37:17 Scott I'm sure there are some.
37:20 Scott I mean, I know, for instance,
37:22 Scott recently we engaged with AWS. Our account manager hooked us up with some people. They did something called a well-architected review.
37:32 Scott They basically just looked at our cloud infrastructure.
37:36 Scott Essentially, I think they just gave us a report which said, you know, here's what you're doing right and here's what you're doing less right because
37:43 Brad Yeah.
37:43 Scott they have expertise in cloud infrastructures and,
37:48 Scott you know, we have some expertise certainly.
37:51 Scott So I think we thought that was successful, but then the next step is, but who's going to do this work or even more deeply.
38:03 Scott Well,
38:03 Scott it's this way for a reason.
38:05 Scott That reason might be some weird dysfunctional, strange reason for our company,
38:10 Scott but like it's a much deeper thing. It isn't just about redoing our cloud infrastructure.
38:14 Scott We have to go redo a bunch of other stuff upstream in order to fix
38:19 Brad Yeah,
38:19 Scott that thing.
38:19 Brad totally.
38:19 Scott You have to think about success stories.
38:21 Scott Do you have any success stories?
38:23 Brad No,
38:24 Brad honestly,
38:24 Brad I don't think so.
38:26 Brad I can't think of any.
38:27 Brad I know that it's interesting.
38:29 Brad I think my answer is going to be a hard no.
38:32 Brad I have no success stories.
38:33 Brad And maybe the reason for that is one,
38:35 Brad the places where I could have used the most help from a bigger vendor,
38:43 Brad that vendor ultimately decided to compete with us, right?
38:52 Brad You know,
38:52 Brad like back in the early days of real networks,
38:55 Brad Microsoft was the 800 pound gorilla and they had, you know, customer success organizations and we interacted with them, but they very much decided to,
39:06 Brad you know, no surprise that streaming audio and video needed to be a core component of the operating system.
39:13 Brad So and so that was that was a fraught relationship.
39:17 Brad I mean, so much so that there was,
39:18 Brad you know, antitrust lawsuits and things like that, you
39:21 Scott I
39:21 Brad know.
39:21 Scott was going to say, those lawyers get involved.
39:24 Brad And so that would be an example where no success was had in the Microsoft offering to help.
39:33 Brad And, you know, again,
39:34 Brad like.
39:36 Brad Yeah, the people on those orgs, the people in those teams, they certainly were as helpful as possible,
39:40 Brad right?
39:40 Brad They were motivated to be helpful,
39:42 Brad but it doesn't mean that the, you know, sort of the general,
39:47 Brad you know, winds of time are going to blow in that direction,
39:51 Brad right?
39:51 Scott Yeah.
39:52 Scott Was that the same organization or a different part of the organization that caused that, you know, did that?
39:59 Scott Was it the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing?
40:02 Brad Probably.
40:04 Scott Yeah, I mean,
40:05 Scott yeah,
40:05 Scott that's what you I think that's what you would see in any of these large organizations like the team that's the customer success team there, they're they're a little bit further away from the strategic,
40:14 Scott you know, it's not the customer success team that's going to come out and try to compete with you that's that's a totally it's a product, it's a product line or in in the other other half of the organization that's right it's actually competing with you.
40:28 Scott Okay.
40:30 Scott Well, let's leave it at that today,
40:32 Scott Brad.
40:32 Scott Yeah.
40:32 Scott Be wary when the vendors come and knock in, but if it sounds legit,
40:39 Scott then, you know, I
40:42 Scott I'm going to tell you that this time around,
40:44 Scott I'm really going to lean into it and I'm going to try to learn how to make it work.
40:47 Scott think that sounds great.
40:48 Scott I want to hear you.
40:50 Scott You'll have to come back on the pod and tell us of your success.
40:53 Scott I think if I can learn how to make it work,
40:55 Scott it could be a real asset.
40:57 Scott Totally.
40:58 Scott Yeah.
41:00 Scott Nice.
41:01 Scott Well,
41:01 Scott there you go.
41:02 Scott How many CTOs does it take to work with a vendor who wants to make your life easier?
41:10 Scott Maybe three or four.
41:12 Scott Right.
41:13 Scott Rate review,
41:14 Scott smash that subscribe button,
41:16 Scott and we'll see you all next week.
41:18 Scott Right. Bye,
41:19 Scott Brad.
41:19 Scott Bye.
41:20 Scott This episode of How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast was edited by Saffron Epigow.
41:25 Scott Our theme song was AI generated by Brad.
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