Hey, this is Paris. I hope you enjoyed the Data Vampire series that we did back in October. It's had a fantastic response. And for that series, I spoke to a bunch of experts, and now we're releasing the full-length versions of those interviews for our supporters over on Patreon.com. And I wanted to give you a preview of what those interviews sound like so you can consider whether to go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, become a supporter yourself, so you can learn even more about the important topics that we dug into in that special series. So enjoy this clip from my interview with Dwayne Monroe. One of the things I found really interesting in your writing, and you know, I should say I'm looking forward to us starting our energy futures uh platform company now. But uh it was also how you talk about that aspect of it, right? Where there are these new companies forming or whatever, and they can build themselves on top of the cloud now, and they don't need to worry so much about this infrastructure build-out that would have been required in the past for them to basically make this company, right? And so then you have this big capital expense up front that now you don't need to worry about because you're going on to the cloud. But you also talked about how there was this transition in existing companies, in large organizations or medium-sized organizations who had some infrastructure of their own and slowly started taking advantage of the cloud and moving over to the cloud, and how in some cases it wasn't like the boards and the management who were open to this, but rather it was more like you know, some of the workers and people doing that kind of network work. Can you talk about that aspect of it as well?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this was my experience because you you have problems to solve and you often don't have a budget to solve those problems. You know, I mean, the way that I got into cloud was that I was working for a firm. We were having some difficulties meeting demand when people were ordering books from the organization's website. Our request to leadership was listen, we we need to buy more. It's always more servers, more storage, more servers, more storage. Every year they're hearing this, right? And then, well, how much do you need? Oh, maybe 8 million. And then it turns out that you maybe should have spent 10 million, or you spent the 8 million and you overestimated this is also a problem. That technical problem was solved by building on AWS and then using an elastic service on AWS, which could expand and contract in terms of its capacity to meet demand or to respond to demand. And you can take my particular story from 10 years ago and spread that story out to thousands upon thousands upon hundreds of thousands or millions of tech workers trying to solve problems. And there's a difference between how this technology is deployed, say in Silicon Valley, and how it's deployed in what I will call companies that actually do things. And you know, in companies that actually do things that are using the technology to provide other services, yeah, the solving of problems without having to keep going back to the till for money and also making mistakes that could damage your reputation because you in a big company you're you're you're asking for lots and lots of money.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's so interesting to think about how that actually works. What was the big appeal of the cloud, right? Like what was the sales pitch that these companies were making? And you know, obviously we've talked about that a bit, but how did you know the Amazon, Microsoft's, and Googles of the world make this something that was particularly attractive to other companies to use?
SPEAKER_01So if we were to step into a time machine and go back to around oh, five years ago or so, what you were hearing from these companies was you will save money. And of course, every corporation, every organization wants to hear that, that you're going to save money. And they would have like, you know, these beautiful, beautifully presented, you know, scenarios in which, oh, ABC Capital used to spend 80 million per year on its IT and refresh cycle for servers, in which you have to replace because everything breaks down eventually. Entropy always wins. And this was your budget before, but now thanks to cloud, you can spend much less. And so this was the pitch. Now it hasn't turned out that way, um, which is why now saving money is a huge, huge area of cloud usage, like trying to find ways of saving money. And that was after, of course, the market was captured, right? Like you've moved everything to one of these cloud providers. Now your bill is, I mean, uh some of the bills I've seen are eye-watering much more than companies were spending on premises, much, much more. And uh, because it's a an operational expenditure model as opposed to a capital expenditure model. So people could just spin things up and but anyway, cost savings was the original. That was the thing that actually got the foot in the door.
SPEAKER_00If you found that clip intriguing, go to patreon.com slash techwon'save us, where you can become a supporter, support the work that goes into making the show, and get the full length version of that interview. Thanks so much.