Podcasts about amy it

Introvert Biz Growth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 27, 2022 38:34

About AmyAmy Tobey has worked in tech for more than 20 years at companies of every size, working with everything from kernel code to user interfaces. These days she spends her time building an innovative Site Reliability Engineering program at Equinix, where she is a principal engineer. When she's not working, she can be found with her nose in a book, watching anime with her son, making noise with electronics, or doing yoga poses in the sun.Links Referenced: Equinix: https://metal.equinix.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissAmyTobey TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn, and this episode is another one of those real profiles in shitposting type of episodes. I am joined again from a few months ago by Amy Tobey, who is a Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix, back for more. Amy, thank you so much for joining me.Amy: Welcome. To your show. [laugh].Corey: Exactly. So, one thing that we have been seeing a lot over the past year, and you struck me as one of the best people to talk about what you're seeing in the wilderness perspective, has been the idea of cloud repatriation. It started off with something that came out of Andreessen Horowitz toward the start of the year about the trillion-dollar paradox, how, at a certain point of scale, repatriating to a data center is the smart and right move. And oh, my stars that ruffle some feathers for people?Amy: Well, I spent all this money moving to the cloud. That was just mean.Corey: I know. Why would I want to leave the cloud? I mean, for God's sake, my account manager named his kid after me. Wait a minute, how much am I spending on that? Yeah—Amy: Good question.Corey: —there is that ever-growing problem. And there have been the examples that people have given of Dropbox classically did a cloud repatriation exercise, and a second example that no one can ever name. And it seems like okay, this might not necessarily be the direction that the industry is going. But I also tend to not be completely naive when it comes to these things. And I can see repatriation making sense on a workload-by-workload basis.What that implies is that yeah, but a lot of other workloads are not going to be going to a data center. They're going to stay in a cloud provider, who would like very much if you never read a word of this to anyone in public.Amy: Absolutely, yeah.Corey: So, if there are workloads repatriating, it would occur to me that there's a vested interest on the part of every major cloud provider to do their best to, I don't know if saying suppress the story is too strongly worded, but it is directionally what I mean.Amy: They aren't helping get the story out. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, it's like, “That's a great observation. Could you maybe shut the hell up and never make it ever again in public, or we will end you?” Yeah. Your Amazon. What are you going to do, launch a shitty Amazon Basics version of what my company does? Good luck. Have fun. You're probably doing it already.But the reason I want to talk to you on this is a confluence of a few things. One, as I mentioned back in May when you were on the show, I am incensed and annoyed that we've been talking for as long as we have, and somehow I never had you on the show. So, great. Come back, please. You're always welcome here. Secondly, you work at Equinix, which is, effectively—let's be relatively direct—it is functionally a data center as far as how people wind up contextualizing this. Yes, you have higher level—Amy: Yeah I guess people contextualize it that way. But we'll get into that.Corey: Yeah, from the outside. I don't work there, to be clear. My talking points don't exist for this. But I think of oh, Equinix. Oh, that means you basically have a colo or colo equivalent. The pricing dynamics have radically different; it looks a lot closer to a data center in my imagination than it does a traditional public cloud. I would also argue that if someone migrates from AWS to Equinix, that would be viewed—arguably correctly—as something of a repatriation. Is that directionally correct?Amy: I would argue incorrectly. For Metal, right?Corey: Ah.Amy: So, Equinix is a data center company, right? Like that's why everybody knows us as. Equinix Metal is a bare metal primitive service, right? So, it's a lot more of a cloud workflow, right, except that you're not getting the rich services that you get in a technically full cloud, right? Like, there's no RDS; there's no S3, even. What you get is bare metal primitives, right? With a really fast network that isn't going to—Corey: Are you really a cloud provider without some ridiculous machine-learning-powered service that's going to wind up taking pictures, perform incredibly expensive operations on it, and then return something that's more than a little racist? I mean, come on. That's not—you're not a cloud until you can do that, right?Amy: We can do that. We have customers that do that. Well, not specifically that, but um—Corey: Yeah, but they have to build it themselves. You don't have the high-level managed service that basically serves as, functionally, bias laundering.Amy: Yeah, you don't get it in a box, right? So, a lot of our customers are doing things that are unique, right, that are maybe not exactly fit into the cloud well. And it comes back down to a lot of Equinix's roots, which is—we talk but going into the cloud, and it's this kind of abstract environment we're reaching for, you know, up in the sky. And it's like, we don't know where it is, except we have regions that—okay, so it's in Virginia. But the rule of real estate applies to technology as often as not, which is location, location, location, right?When we're talking about a lot of applications, a challenge that we face, say in gaming, is that the latency from the customer, so that last mile to your data center, can often be extremely important, right, so a few milliseconds even. And a lot of, like, SaaS applications, the typical stuff that really the cloud was built on, 10 milliseconds, 50 milliseconds, nobody's really going to notice that, right? But in a gaming environment or some very low latency application that needs to run extremely close to the customer, it's hard to do that in the cloud. They're building this stuff out, right? Like, I see, you know, different ones [unintelligible 00:05:53] opening new regions but, you know, there's this other side of the cloud, which is, like, the edge computing thing that's coming alive, and that's more where I think about it.And again, location, location, location. The speed of light is really fast, but as most of us in tech know, if you want to go across from the East Coast to the West Coast, you're talking about 80 milliseconds, on average, right? I think that's what it is. I haven't checked in a while. Yeah, that's just basic fundamental speed of light. And so, if everything's in us-east-1—and this is why we do multi-region, sometimes—the latency from the West Coast isn't going to be great. And so, we run the application on both sides.Corey: It has improved though. If you want to talk old school things that are seared into my brain from over 20 years ago, every person who's worked in data centers—or in technology, as a general rule—has a few IP addresses seared. And the one that I've always had on my mind was 130.111.32.11. Kind of arbitrary and ridiculous, but it was one of the two recursive resolvers provided at the University of Maine where I had my first help desk job.And it lives on-prem, in Maine. And generally speaking, I tended to always accept that no matter where I was—unless I was in a data center somewhere—it was about 120 milliseconds. And I just checked now; it is 85 and change from where I am in San Francisco. So, the internet or the speed of light have improved. So, good for whichever one of those it was. But yeah, you've just updated my understanding of these things. All of this is, which is to say, yes, latency is very important.Amy: Right. Let's forget repatriation to really be really honest. Even the Dropbox case or any of them, right? Like, there's an economic story here that I think all of us that have been doing cloud work for a while see pretty clearly that maybe not everybody's seeing that—that's thinking from an on-prem kind of situation, which is that—you know, and I know you do this all the time, right, is, you don't just look at the cost of the data center and the servers and the network, the technical components, the bill of materials—Corey: Oh, lies, damned lies, and TCO analyses. Yeah.Amy: —but there's all these people on top of it, and the organizational complexity, and the contracts that you got to manage. And it's this big, huge operation that is incredibly complex to do well that is almost nobody's business. So the way I look at this, right, and the way I even talk to customers about it is, like, “What is your produ—” And I talk to people internally about this way? It's like, “What are you trying to build?” “Well, I want to build a SaaS.” “Okay. Do you need data center expertise to build a SaaS?” “No.” “Then why the hell are you putting it in a data center?” Like we—you know, and speaking for my employer, right, like, we have Equinix Metal right here. You can build on that and you don't have to do all the most complex part of this, at least in terms of, like, the physical plant, right? Like, right, getting a bare metal server available, we take care of all of that. Even at the primitive level, where we sit, it's higher level than, say, colo.Corey: There's also the question of economics as it ties into it. It's never just a raw cost-of-materials type of approach. Like, my original job in a data center was basically to walk around and replace hard drives, and apparently, to insult people. Now, the cloud has taken one of those two aspects away, and you can follow my Twitter account and figure out which one of those two it is, but what I keep seeing now is there is value to having that task done, but in a cloud environment—and Equinix Metal, let's be clear—that has slipped below the surface level of awareness. And well, what are the economic implications of that?Well, okay, you have a whole team of people at large companies whose job it is to do precisely that. Okay, we're going to upskill them and train them to use cloud. Okay. First, not everyone is going to be capable or willing to make that leap from hard drive replacement to, “Congratulations and welcome to JavaScript. You're about to hate everything that comes next.”And if they do make that leap, their baseline market value—by which I mean what the market is willing to pay for them—approximately will double. And whether they wind up being paid more by their current employer or they take a job somewhere else with those skills and get paid what they are worth, the company still has that economic problem. Like it or not, you will generally get what you pay for whether you want to or not; that is the reality of it. And as companies are thinking about this, well, what gets into the TCO analysis and what doesn't, I have yet to see one where the outcome was not predetermined. They're less, let's figure out in good faith whether it's going to be more expensive to move to the cloud, or move out of the cloud, or just burn the building down for insurance money. The outcome is generally the one that the person who commissioned the TCO analysis wants. So, when a vendor is trying to get you to switch to them, and they do one for you, yeah. And I'm not saying they're lying, but there's so much judgment that goes into this. And what do you include and what do you not include? That's hard.Amy: And there's so many hidden costs. And that's one of the things that I love about working at a cloud provider is that I still get to play with all that stuff, and like, I get to see those hidden costs, right? Like you were talking about the person who goes around and swaps out the hard drives. Or early in my career, right, I worked with someone whose job it was this every day, she would go into data center, she'd swap out the tapes, you know, and do a few things other around and, like, take care of the billing system. And that was a job where it was kind of going around and stewarding a whole bunch of things that kind of kept the whole machine running, but most people outside of being right next to the data center didn't have any idea that stuff even happen, right, that went into it.And so, like you were saying, like, when you go to do the TCO analysis, I mean, I've been through this a couple of times prior in my career, where people will look at it and go like, “Well, of course we're not going to list—we'll put, like, two headcount on there.” And it's always a lie because it's never just to headcount. It's never just the network person, or the SRE, or the person who's racking the servers. It's also, like, finance has to do all this extra work, and there's all the logistic work, and there is just so much stuff that just is really hard to include. Not only do people leave it out, but it's also just really hard for people to grapple with the complexity of all the things it takes to run a data center, which is, like, one of the most complex machines on the planet, any single data center.Corey: I've worked in small-scale environments, maybe a couple of mid-sized ones, but never the type of hyperscale facility that you folks have, which I would say is if it's not hyperscale, it's at least directionally close to it. We're talking thousands of servers, and hundreds of racks.Amy: Right.Corey: I've started getting into that, on some level. Now, I guess when we say ‘hyperscale,' we're talking about AWS-size things where, oh, that's a region and it's going to have three dozen data center facilities in it. Yeah, I don't work in places like that because honestly, have you met me? Would you trust me around something that's that critical infrastructure? No, you would not, unless you have terrible judgment, which means you should not be working in those environments to begin with.Amy: I mean, you're like a walking chaos exercise. Maybe I would let you in.Corey: Oh, I bring my hardware destruction aura near anything expensive and things are terrible. It's awful. But as I looked at the cloud, regardless of cloud, there is another economic element that I think is underappreciated, and to be fair, this does, I believe, apply as much to Equinix Metal as it does to the public hyperscale cloud providers that have problems with naming things well. And that is, when you are provisioning something as a customer of one of these places, you have an unbounded growth problem. When you're in a data center, you are not going to just absentmindedly sign an $8 million purchase order for new servers—you know, a second time—and then that means you're eventually run out of power, space, places to put things, and you have to go find it somewhere.Whereas in cloud, the only limit is basically your budget where there is no forcing function that reminds you to go and clean up that experiment from five years ago. You have people with three petabytes of data they were using for a project, but they haven't worked there in five years and nothing's touched it since. Because the failure mode of deleting things that are important, or disasters—Amy: That's why Glacier exists.Corey: Oh, exactly. But that failure mode of deleting things that should not be deleted are disastrous for a company, whereas if you've leave them there, well, it's only money. And there's no forcing function to do that, which means you have this infinite growth problem with no natural limit slash predator around it. And that is the economic analysis that I do not see playing out basically anywhere. Because oh, by the time that becomes a problem, we'll have good governance in place. Yeah, pull the other one. It has bells on it.Amy: That's the funny thing, right, is a lot of the early drive in the cloud was those of us who wanted to go faster and we were up against the limitations of our data centers. And then we go out and go, like, “Hey, we got this cloud thing. I'll just, you know, put the credit card in there and I'll spin up a few instances, and ‘hey, I delivered your product.'” And everybody goes, “Yeah, hey, happy.” And then like you mentioned, right, and then we get down the road here, and it's like, “Oh, my God, how much are we spending on this?”And then you're in that funny boat where you have both. But yeah, I mean, like, that's just typical engineering problem, where, you know, we have to deal with our constraints. And the cloud has constraints, right? Like when I was at Netflix, one of the things we would do frequently is bump up against instance limits. And then we go talk to our TAM and be like, “Hey, buddy. Can we have some more instance limit?” And then take care of that, right?But there are some bounds on that. Of course, in the cloud providers—you know, if I have my cloud provider shoes on, I don't necessarily want to put those limits to law because it's a business, the business wants to hoover up all the money. That's what businesses do. So, I guess it's just a different constraint that is maybe much too easy to knock down, right? Because as you mentioned, in a data center or in a colo space, I outgrow my cage and I filled up all that space I have, I have to either order more space from my colo provider, I expand to the cloud, right?Corey: The scale I was always at, the limit was not the space because I assure you with enough shoving all things are possible. Don't believe me? Look at what people are putting in the overhead bin on any airline. Enough shoving, you'll get a Volkswagen in there. But it was always power constrained is what I dealt with it. And it's like, “Eh, they're just being conservative.” And the whole building room dies.Amy: You want blade servers because that's how you get blade servers, right? That movement was about bringing the density up and putting more servers in a rack. You know, there were some management stuff and [unintelligible 00:16:08], but a lot of it was just about, like, you know, I remember I'm picturing it, right—Corey: Even without that, I was still power constrained because you have to remember, a lot of my experiences were not in, shall we say, data center facilities that you would call, you know, good.Amy: Well, that brings up a fun thing that's happening, which is that the power envelope of servers is still growing. The newest Intel chips, especially the ones they're shipping for hyperscale and stuff like that, with the really high core counts, and the faster clock speeds, you know, these things are pulling, like, 300 watts. And they also have to egress all that heat. And so, that's one of the places where we're doing some innovations—I think there's a couple of blog posts out about it around—like, liquid cooling or multimode cooling. And what's interesting about this from a cloud or data center perspective, is that the tools and skills and everything has to come together to run a, you know, this year's or next year's servers, where we're pushing thousands of kilowatts into a rack. Thousands; one rack right?The bar to actually bootstrap and run this stuff successfully is rising again, compared to I take my pizza box servers, right—and I worked at a gaming company a long time ago, right, and they would just, like, stack them on the floor. It was just a stack of servers. Like, they were in between the rails, but they weren't screwed down or anything, right? And they would network them all up. Because basically, like, the game would spin up on the servers and if they died, they would just unplug that one and leave it there and spin up another one.It was like you could just stack stuff up and, like, be slinging cables across the data center and stuff back then. I wouldn't do it that way now, but when you add, say liquid cooling and some of these, like, extremely high power situations into the mix, now you need to have, for example, if you're using liquid cooling, you don't want that stuff leaking, right? And so, it's good as the pressure fittings and blind mating and all this stuff that's coming around gets, you still have that element of additional training, and skill, and possibility for mistakes.Corey: The thing that I see as I look at this across the space is that, on some level, it's gotten harder to run a data center than it ever did before. Because again, another reason I wanted to have you on this show is that you do not carry a quota. Although you do often carry the conversation, when you have boring people around you, but quotas, no. You are not here selling things to people. You're not actively incentivized to get people to see things a certain way.You are very clearly an engineer in the right ways. I will further point out though, that you do not sound like an engineer, by which I mean, you're going to basically belittle people, in many cases, in the name of being technically correct. You're a human being with a frickin soul. And believe me, it is noticed.Amy: I really appreciate that. If somebody's just listening to hearing my voice and in my name, right, like, I have a low voice. And in most of my career, I was extremely technical, like, to the point where you know, if something was wrong technically, I would fight to the death to get the right technical solution and maybe not see the complexity around the decisions, and why things were the way they were in the way I can today. And that's changed how I sound. It's changed how I talk. It's changed how I look at and talk about technology as well, right? I'm just not that interested in Kubernetes. Because I've kind of started looking up the stack in this kind of pursuit.Corey: Yeah, when I say you don't sound like an engineer, I am in no way shape or form—Amy: I know.Corey: —alluding in any respect to your technical acumen. I feel the need to clarify that statement for people who might be listening, and say, “Hey, wait a minute. Is he being a shithead?” No.Amy: No, no, no.Corey: Well, not the kind you're worried I'm being anyway; I'm a different breed of shithead and that's fine.Amy: Yeah, I should remember that other people don't know we've had conversations that are deeply technical, that aren't on air, that aren't context anybody else has. And so, like, I bring that deep technical knowledge, you know, the ability to talk about PCI Express, and kilovolts [unintelligible 00:19:58] rack, and top-of-rack switches, and network topologies, all of that together now, but what's really fascinating is where the really big impact is, for reliability, for security, for quality, the things that me as a person, that I'm driven by—products are cool, but, like, I like them to be reliable; that's the part that I like—really come down to more leadership, and business acumen, and understanding the business constraints, and then being able to get heard by an audience that isn't necessarily technical, that doesn't necessarily understand the difference between PCI, PCI-X, and PCI Express. There's a difference between those. It doesn't mean anything to the business, right, so when we want to go and talk about why are we doing, for example, multi-region deployment of our application? If I come in and say, “Well, because we want to use Raft.” That's going to fall flat, right?The business is going to go, “I don't care about Raft. What does that have to do with my customers?” Which is the right question to always ask. Instead, when I show up and say, “Okay, what's going on here is we have this application sits in a single region—or in a single data center or whatever, right? I'm using region because that's probably what most of the people listening understand—you know, so I put my application in a single region and it goes down, our customers are going to be unhappy. We have the alternative to spend, okay, not a little bit more money, probably a lot more money to build a second region, and the benefit we will get is that our customers will be able to access the service 24x7, and it will always work and they'll have a wonderful experience. And maybe they'll keep coming back and buy more stuff from us.”And so, when I talk about it in those terms, right—and it's usually more nuanced than that—then I start to get the movement at the macro level, right, in the systemic level of the business in the direction I want it to go, which is for the product group to understand why reliability matters to the customer, you know? For the individual engineers to understand why it matters that we use secure coding practices.[midroll 00:21:56]Corey: Getting back to the reason I said that you are not quota-carrying and you are not incentivized to push things in a particular way is that often we'll meet zealots, and I've never known you to be one, you have always been a strong advocate for doing the right thing, even if it doesn't directly benefit any given random employer that you might have. And as a result, one of the things that you've said to me repeatedly is if you're building something from scratch, for God's sake, put it in cloud. What is wrong with you? Do that. The idea of building it yourself on low-lying, underlying primitives for almost every modern SaaS style workload, there's no reason to consider doing something else in almost any case. Is that a fair representation of your position on this?Amy: It is. I mean, the simpler version right, “Is why the hell are you doing undifferentiated lifting?” Right? Things that don't differentiate your product, why would you do it?Corey: The thing that this has empowered then is I can build an experiment tonight—I don't have to wait for provisioning and signed contracts and do all the rest. I can spend 25 cents and get the experiment up and running. If it takes off, though, it has changed how I move going forward as well because there's no difference in the way that there was back when we were in data centers. I'm going to try and experiment I'm going to run it in this, I don't know, crappy Raspberry Pi or my desktop or something under my desk somewhere. And if it takes off and I have to scale up, I got to do a giant migration to real enterprise-grade hardware. With cloud, you are getting all of that out of the box, even if all you're doing with it is something ridiculous and nonsensical.Amy: And you're often getting, like, ridiculously better service. So, 20 years ago, if you and I sat down to build a SaaS app, we would have spun up a Linux box somewhere in a colo, and we would have spun up Apache, MySQL, maybe some Perl or PHP if we were feeling frisky. And the availability of that would be one machine could do, what we could handle in terms of one MySQL instance. But today if I'm spinning up a new stack for some the same kind of SaaS, I'm going to probably deploy it into an ASG, I'm probably going to have some kind of high availability database be on it—and I'm going to use Aurora as an example—because, like, the availability of an Aurora instance, in terms of, like, if I'm building myself up with even the very best kit available in databases, it's going to be really hard to hit the same availability that Aurora does because Aurora is not just a software solution, it's also got a team around it that stewards that 24/7. And it continues to evolve on its own.And so, like, the base, when we start that little tiny startup, instead of being that one machine, we're actually starting at a much higher level of quality, and availability, and even security sometimes because of these primitives that were available. And I probably should go on to extend on the thought of undifferentiated lifting, right, and coming back to the colo or the edge story, which is that there are still some little edge cases, right? Like I think for SaaS, duh right? Like, go straight to. But there are still some really interesting things where there's, like, hardware innovations where they're doing things with GPUs and stuff like that.Where the colo experience may be better because you're trying to do, like, custom hardware, in which case you are in a colo. There are businesses doing some really interesting stuff with custom hardware that's behind an application stack. What's really cool about some of that, from my perspective, is that some of that might be sitting on, say, bare metal with us, and maybe the front-end is sitting somewhere else. Because the other thing Equinix does really well is this product we call a Fabric which lets us basically do peering with any of the cloud providers.Corey: Yeah, the reason, I guess I don't consider you as a quote-unquote, “Cloud,” is first and foremost, rooted in the fact that you don't have a bandwidth model that is free and grass and criminally expensive to send it anywhere that isn't to you folks. Like, are you really a cloud if you're not just gouging the living piss out of your customers every time they want to send data somewhere else?Amy: Well, I mean, we like to say we're part of the cloud. And really, that's actually my favorite feature of Metal is that you get, I think—Corey: Yeah, this was a compliment, to be very clear. I'm a big fan of not paying 1998 bandwidth pricing anymore.Amy: Yeah, but this is the part where I get to do a little bit of, like, showing off for Metal a little bit, in that, like, when you buy a Metal server, there's different configurations, right, but, like, I think the lowest one, you have dual 10 Gig ports to the server that you can get either in a bonded mode so that you have a single 20 Gig interface in your operating system, or you can actually do L3 and you can do BGP to your server. And so, this is a capability that you really can't get at all on the other clouds, right? This lets you do things with the network, not only the bandwidth, right, that you have available. Like, you want to stream out 25 gigs of bandwidth out of us, I think that's pretty doable. And the rates—I've only seen a couple of comparisons—are pretty good.So, this is like where some of the business opportunities, right—and I can't get too much into it, but, like, this is all public stuff I've talked about so far—which is, that's part of the opportunity there is sitting at the crossroads of the internet, we can give you a server that has really great networking, and you can do all the cool custom stuff with it, like, BGP, right? Like, so that you can do Anycast, right? You can build Anycast applications.Corey: I miss the days when that was a thing that made sense.Amy: [laugh].Corey: I mean that in the context of, you know, with the internet and networks. These days, it always feels like the network engineering as slipped away within the cloud because you have overlays on top of overlays and it's all abstractions that are living out there right until suddenly you really need to know what's going on. But it has abstracted so much of this away. And that, on some level, is the surprise people are often in for when they wind up outgrowing the cloud for a workload and wanting to move it someplace that doesn't, you know, ride them like naughty ponies for bandwidth. And they have to rediscover things that we've mostly forgotten about.I remember having to architect significantly around the context of hard drive failures. I know we've talked about that a fair bit as a thing, but yeah, it's spinning metal, it throws off heat and if you lose the wrong one, your data is gone and you now have serious business problems. In cloud, at least AWS-land, that's not really a thing anymore. The way EBS is provisioned, there's a slight tick in latency if you're looking at just the right time for what I think is a hard drive failure, but it's there. You don't have to think about this anymore.Migrate that workload to a pile of servers in a colo somewhere, guess what? Suddenly your reliability is going to decrease. Amazon, and the other cloud providers as well, have gotten to a point where they are better at operations than you are at your relatively small company with your nascent sysadmin team. I promise. There is an economy of scale here.Amy: And it doesn't have to be good or better, right? It's just simply better resourced—Corey: Yeah.Amy: Than most anybody else can hope. Amazon can throw a billion dollars at it and never miss it. In most organizations out there, you know, and most of the especially enterprise, people are scratching and trying to get resources wherever they can, right? They're all competing for people, for time, for engineering resources, and that's one of the things that gets freed up when you just basically bang an API and you get the thing you want. You don't have to go through that kind of old world internal process that is usually slow and often painful.Just because they're not resourced as well; they're not automated as well. Maybe they could be. I'm sure most of them could, in theory be, but we come back to undifferentiated lifting. None of this helps, say—let me think of another random business—Claire's, whatever, like, any of the shops in the mall, they all have some kind of enterprise behind them for cash processing and all that stuff, point of sale, none of this stuff is differentiating for them because it doesn't impact anything to do with where the money comes in. So again, we're back at why are you doing this?Corey: I think that's also the big challenge as well, when people start talking about repatriation and talking about this idea that they are going to, oh, that cloud is too expensive; we're going to move out. And they make the economics work. Again, I do firmly believe that, by and large, businesses do not intentionally go out and make poor decisions. I think when we see a company doing something inscrutable, there's always context that we're missing, and I think as a general rule of thumb, that at these companies do not hire people who are fools. And there are always constraints that they cannot talk about in public.My general position as a consultant, and ideally as someone who aspires to be a decent human being, is that when I see something I don't understand, I assume that there's simply a lack of context, not that everyone involved in this has been foolish enough to make giant blunders that I can pick out in the first five seconds of looking at it. I'm not quite that self-confident yet.Amy: I mean, that's a big part of, like, the career progression into above senior engineer, right, is, you don't get to sit in your chair and go, like, “Oh, those dummies,” right? You actually have—I don't know about ‘have to,' but, like, the way I operate now, right, is I remember in my youth, I used to be like, “Oh, those business people. They don't know, nothing. Like, what are they doing?” You know, it's goofy what they're doing.And then now I have a different mode, which is, “Oh, that's interesting. Can you tell me more?” The feeling is still there, right? Like, “Oh, my God, what is going on here?” But then I get curious, and I go, “So, how did we get here?” [laugh]. And you get that story, and the stories are always fascinating, and they always involve, like, constraints, immovable objects, people doing the best they can with what they have available.Corey: Always. And I want to be clear that very rarely is it the right answer to walk into a room and say, look at the architecture and, “All right, what moron built this?” Because always you're going to be asking that question to said moron. And it doesn't matter how right you are, they're never going to listen to another thing out of your mouth again. And have some respect for what came before even if it's potentially wrong answer, well, great. “Why didn't you just use this service to do this instead?” “Yeah, because this thing predates that by five years, jackass.”There are reasons things are the way they are, if you take any architecture in the world and tell people to rebuild it greenfield, almost none of them would look the same as they do today because we learn things by getting it wrong. That's a great teacher, and it hurts. But it's also true.Amy: And we got to build, right? Like, that's what we're here to do. If we just kind of cycle waiting for the perfect technology, the right choices—and again, to come back to the people who built it at the time used—you know, often we can fault people for this—used the things they know or the things that are nearby, and they make it work. And that's kind of amazing sometimes, right?Like, I'm sure you see architectures frequently, and I see them too, probably less frequently, where you just go, how does this even work in the first place? Like how did you get this to work? Because I'm looking at this diagram or whatever, and I don't understand how this works. Maybe that's a thing that's more a me thing, like, because usually, I can look at a—skim over an architecture document and be, like, be able to build the model up into, like, “Okay, I can see how that kind of works and how the data flows through it.” I get that pretty quickly.And comes back to that, like, just, again, asking, “How did we get here?” And then the cool part about asking how did we get here is it sets everybody up in the room, not just you as the person trying to drive change, but the people you're trying to bring along, the original architects, original engineers, when you ask, how did we get here, you've started them on the path to coming along with you in the future, which is kind of cool. But until—that storytelling mode, again, is so powerful at almost every level of the stack, right? And that's why I just, like, when we were talking about how technical I bring things in, again, like, I'm just not that interested in, like, are you Little Endian or Big Endian? How did we get here is kind of cool. You built a Big Endian architecture in 2022? Like, “Ohh. [laugh]. How do we do that?”Corey: Hey, leave me to my own devices, and I need to build something super quickly to get it up and running, well, what I'm going to do, for a lot of answers is going to look an awful lot like the traditional three-tier architecture that I was running back in 2008. Because I know it, it works well, and I can iterate rapidly on it. Is it a best practice? Absolutely not, but given the constraints, sometimes it's the fastest thing to grab? “Well, if you built this in serverless technologies, it would run at a fraction of the cost.” It's, “Yes, but if I run this thing, the way that I'm running it now, it'll be $20 a month, it'll take me two hours instead of 20. And what exactly is your time worth, again?” It comes down to the better economic model of all these things.Amy: Any time you're trying to make a case to the business, the economic model is going to always go further. Just general tip for tech people, right? Like if you can make the better economic case and you go to the business with an economic case that is clear. Businesses listen to that. They're not going to listen to us go on and on about distributed systems.Somebody in finance trying to make a decision about, like, do we go and spend a million bucks on this, that's not really the material thing. It's like, well, how is this going to move the business forward? And how much is it going to cost us to do it? And what other opportunities are we giving up to do that?Corey: I think that's probably a good place to leave it because there's no good answer. We can all think about that until the next episode. I really want to thank you for spending so much time talking to me again. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Amy: Always Twitter for me, MissAmyTobey, and I'll see you there. Say hi.Corey: Thank you again for being as generous with your time as you are. It's deeply appreciated.Amy: It's always fun.Corey: Amy Tobey, Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix Metal. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment that tells me exactly what we got wrong in this episode in the best dialect you have of condescending engineer with zero people skills. I look forward to reading it.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Flourishing at Work

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2022 42:23

Today's conversation about membership programs for humane businesses fits under the P of Product of the Humane Marketing Mandala. In this week's episode, I talk to Amy Bonsall about the P of People, precisely people flourishing at work. Amy founded Nau and developed its core offerings by drawing on her extensive experience in designing for mental wellbeing and for communities, as well as her experience advising teams and leaders across 100s of companies in industries from tech to financial services to healthcare to agriculture to retail. Previously, Amy was an executive at IDEO, where she spent a decade leading the creation of new businesses for companies across Europe, Australia, Asia, and the US, living much of that time outside the US. And as the executive leading new ventures at Old Navy, she co-led the creation of a billion-dollar new business, focused on body equity. In this episode, we talk mainly about people in Corporate jobs and I know that is possibly not your situation as my audience is made of more entrepreneurs. But it's maybe the situation of your clients, friends, and family. I think it's such a timely topic to discuss because we're at the beginning of a huge work transformation after the two years we went through. The great resignation is a testimony to that. In this episode, you'll learn about flourishing at work as well as... Why people are NOT flourishing at work The main reasons for their disengagement from work The mental consequences of this situation The opportunity and where we can go from here Amy's idea of a flourishing workplace And much more… Amy's Resources Amy's Website Special offer: 1:1 sessions with Amy for Humane Marketers "When starting a new job means… crossing your living room" article by Amy Connect with Amy on: Twitter LinkedIn Sarah's Resources Watch this episode on Youtube (FREE) Sarah's One Page Marketing Plan (FREE) Sarah Suggests Newsletter (FREE) The Humane Business Manifesto (FREE) Gentle Confidence Mini-Course Marketing Like We're Human - Sarah's book The Humane Marketing Circle Authentic & Fair Pricing Mini-Course Podcast Show Notes We use Descript to edit our episodes and it's fantastic! Email Sarah at sarah@sarahsantacroce.com Thanks for listening! After you listen, check out Humane Business Manifesto, an invitation to belong to a movement of people who do business the humane and gentle way and disrupt the current marketing paradigm. You can download it for free at this page. There's no opt-in. Just an instant download. Are you enjoying the podcast? The Humane Marketing show is listener-supported—I'd love for you to become an active supporter of the show and join the Humane Marketing Circle. You will be invited to a private monthly Q&A call with me and fellow Humane Marketers - a safe zone to hang out with like-minded conscious entrepreneurs and help each other build our business and grow our impact. — I'd love for you to join us! Learn more at humane.marketing/circle Don't forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes or on Android to get notified for all my future shows and why not sign up for my weekly(ish) "Sarah Suggests Saturdays", a round-up of best practices, tools I use, books I read, podcasts, and other resources. Raise your hand and join the Humane Business Revolution. Warmly, Sarah Imperfect Transcript of the show We use and love Descript to edit our podcast and provide this free transcript of the episode. And yes, that's an affiliate link. Sarah: [00:00:00] Hi, Amy. So good to talk to you today. I can't wait to dive into this topic. We've been talking already beforehand, so really excited. Amy: Likewise and it's so, so fun to be on your podcast. Thanks for having me, Sarah. Sarah: Thank you. Yeah. So we want to talk about the P for people of my humane marketing Mandalah and in our conversations, it's really about people flourishing at work that is kind of your specialty. Right? And I think before we get started, maybe you can tell us a little bit how that became your specialty. How did you get into this field? Amy: Yeah. Well, just to start with the P part of it, I spent a decade as a human centered designer at the design company called IDEO. And there, we just really learned how to understand people and what their needs are. And one of the things that we always believed and practiced was. You help people by recognizing where they are and then taking them one step [00:01:00] further, not by starting with what, you know, they might hope, or you might hope is their ideal aspiration. And so that's really the Genesis of my corporate training and my professional training. And I'm just applying that at work. One of the things I had the chance to do. Consulting career was work all over the world and with companies all over the world. And I saw the same challenges all over the world, which is that we are not flourishing at work. It is hard to flourish at work and there are cultural challenges that make that hard. And I say culture kind of quite broadly. It's not American culture. It's not, you know, Silicon valley corporate culture. It's the kind of universal workplace culture that we've developed over. Right. So that's really the Genesis of how I got this. Sarah: Yeah, so it's so good when you said, you know kind of take people from where they are. I think it makes me think of my work with selling and how often we want them to sell kind of [00:02:00] this future version of themselves instead of acknowledging where they are first. So it, this idea, this concept applies to. I guess so many different things right. In, in, in design and it applies to sales and marketing probably as well. So, so interesting. And the other thing you said is this idea of, of culture. And, and, and yeah, I'm, we're going to go into that idea a little bit more the work culture that we've created over. What is it the last, what would you say 20, 50 years? How Amy: long? Probably 50, 75 years. We've created this culture of dry, which is great in so many ways. But it, it creates this sense that if we're not exhausted, we're not succeeding and that's kind of paradigm that we need to break in order to flourish. Yeah. Sarah: Yeah. It's almost like We created, you know, the, the, the, the last kind of breakthrough was the industrial revolution. And so that's [00:03:00] kind of, we were very proud to create this really deep work ethics and got to work. And, and, and even to schools, if we think. You know, we're going to be talking about work spaces, but if you think about the schools, I often have this conversation with fellow parents. It's like the schools have never changed since the industrial revolution. And we're still teaching the kids as if they were like little soldiers who have to eventually go to, to work. And it's just like, ah, it's so frustrating at times. Do you feel frustrated in your work sometimes as well because you. I wish you could go faster. Amy: Oh, all my every day I wish I could go faster. And I think, you know, we're going to talk about some practical things that you can do in your workplace or any of your listeners can do. But I often crave, like, I think we need a cultural revolution here or revolution is the right word. We really need to create a new [00:04:00] paradigm in the workplace. And in fact, one of what's so interesting. You're right. We started with this. Industrial revolution sort of belief in increased productivity what's been proven. More recently is that, you know, when we are balanced, when we're balanced, when we are flourishing, when we are not giving everything to work, that's when it actually goes better. Productivity increases, efficiency, increases client satisfaction, customer satisfaction increases. And, but it's counterintuitive for us. Because I think of what our culture is. Yeah. Sarah: Yeah, yeah. So, so much. So, I mean, even I was sharing with on LinkedIn about, you know, the recent Morocco trip and I shared about feeling even on vacation, this urge of. Going to the next thing. Right. We had this eight day trips through Morocco and I was like, oh, it felt like, oh, I have to go to the next city and, you know, see more things. And then we just actually [00:05:00] decided, okay, let's arrest for two days and coincidence or serendipity wanted it. The place we were at was called and in Arabic or verbiage language, that actually means rest place. Well, if that's not a sign to, you know, just stress, but yeah. Even on vacation, we're like, oh, chasing after the next thing. And, and that reminds me of something you said during our pre-call is this kind of this visual of the hamster wheel of many of your clients feel like they're, they're spinning in this hamster wheel and it's almost kind of like a surreal world that they're spinning in. So. Yeah, when that comes up, how do you help them with, I guess, change of perspective and, and yeah. Some tools. How do you work with clients who give you Amy: that answer? Yeah, you know, I mean, one of the things I was reflecting on our last conversation too, and that image, one of the things that's been [00:06:00] so powerful for me over the past couple of years as I've worked in this, you know, a full-time in this space is this. And that so many of us feel like we're alone. We're all individually. Suffering from something that others seem not to be. And one of the things that I do in my work when I work with teams and companies is I'll spend a lot of time one-on-one with, with people inside the organization and then I'll play back to them. Here are the things that are barriers to flourishing in your organization. Here are the things that are supportive. And when I play back the barriers, so often I get this comment. Oh, I thought it was just me, you know, I didn't realize other people were suffering. And I think that's part of where this hamster hamster wheel image comes from is this idea that I'm alone fighting the good fight against against this culture that everyone else is thriving in, but we aren't thriving. So I think that's the first thing is just recognizing. The collective challenge that we all have, and the fact that it's not [00:07:00] a unique individual one, and then therein lies the answer for me. I very much believe. That community is the sort of counterweight or the support to flourishing at work, we support we've flourished through our connections with other people. And so that's often what we'll do is we'll start with a community, being a working team, be it a leadership team be it a team of people at middle management. And just identify, like, what's one thing that they want to do to support their sense of flourishing, and then we do it together. Sarah: Yeah, it seems so simple, right? It seems so simple because it's like, well, all these people are there. You know, you have all these colleagues so just get together with them and share what you're feeling and that you're, you know, feeling this idea of. Loneliness or being in a hamster wheel. And yet I think part of that [00:08:00] industrial revolution training is, has been like, no, you just gotta power through it and you have to just wear your mask and do your spiel and kind of, you know, embraced us role because at work that's how you behave. D is that the hardest part to get people to actually, you know, learn how to be in community? Amy: So I think we all have the natural instinct to be in community. I think we've all realized that especially over the last two years when we haven't been together. So we have that natural instinct in that capability. What's hard actually is turning it from just community about how do we achieve the next task or get the next thing done or shift. Brought up to how do we take some of that time and talk about how we work? What we focus on or I focus on when I help people is like, let's have a conversation about how you're working, not just what you're working on. And that's like, it is simple actually. And it's also very, very it feels very indulgent [00:09:00] to take the time to talk about how we work. But absolutely it, you know, small changes can make a big. Sarah: Yeah, you're so right. It's this idea of just like I shared about the pausing on vacation, we just don't want to take the time to do something that feels like we're doing nothing. It's like, why would we, why are we talking about, you know, how we wanna, how we work instead of what the next thing we need to accomplish. And I also. When you talked, I thought, well, that's true in the workplace. And I definitely see it in my husband's company, but I would even say that even in the entrepreneurial space, we have become these kind of loan wolves and, and you know, everybody on their own. And even though we say that we have, you know, Facebook groups and all these social media networks to kind of be in touch, even there, I [00:10:00] feel like. It's still not this offense, that connection where we actually help each other. So I, I do feel like we can't just say, oh, it's all the corporate stuff. That's not doing a good job. I think even in the entrepreneurial space we need to kind of pause and say, okay, let's really collaborate. And co-create because I know. I think that we have been doing that. And for us, there really is no excuse, right? Where in the corporate world, maybe, you know, someone up there creates the culture and then, and then, you know, you just live in that culture for us. We actually have the privilege to be able to create that. So have you seen that also, you know, in kind of your entrepreneurial Amy: fields, that there's a shift happening there too? You know, so much of what you said just resonated with me right now. And one of the things that I think ties corporate culture and entrepreneurial culture together is the broader culture that we're living in. And again, I mean that quite broad, I spent a [00:11:00] big chunk of my career outside of the U S and I saw. In Asia. I saw it in Australia. I saw it in Europe as well as in the U S but culturally, it feels bad if we're not pushing, pushing, pushing. And that is what creates that ripple effect in big companies. But it's also what creates this drive in us to keep going as entrepreneurs and to not stop and reflect as much as we know we should. I mean, how did it feel? Took a time to pause on your vacation. Right? It feels good. Doesn't it? It Sarah: does. Yeah. I, like we said before, the call, it feels like at the, the first two days it's like, oh really? Am I just really unplugging? And it feels weird, but then once you do, it's like, oh, this. Life is all about let's face it, that that's where, you know, the, the, the memories happen. That's where you create memories for your kids and in your family in not in the business exchanges so Amy: [00:12:00] much. Right? So we know intuitively when we have this felt sense that pausing is good for us. And yet culturally, we have this. You know, this voice that comes in and sounds like our own voice in our own head that says, you've gotta be pushing harder, you've gotta be working faster. And so the first thing is just kind of acknowledging that there's a tension there, right? And that's that's where I landed on this concept of flourishing at work, you know, originally I was playing around with different ways in different, you know, versus a different language. But flourishing really spoke to me. And I'll tell you why one it's. So scientists have studied what makes people flourish and I love that there's science behind this. We know what makes us feel good. But the thing that really connected with me for flourishing, and I'm curious if it resonates with you too. The idea that flourishing encompasses how we achieve, how we connect and how we recharge. It really kind of says, all of these things are important to making us feel [00:13:00] good. You can't have achievement without recharge. You can't have recharged without achievement and you can't have any of them without connection. And so sort of recognizing that those are all pieces of the puzzle that are important is, is how it. Help others and myself, frankly, as well too, to get the sense of flirty. Yeah. Yeah. Sarah: W what I just saw as the image of a flower and, you know, these Amy: different pedals Sarah: that, like you said, pieces of the puzzles. And I was like, yeah. And then kind of flourishing the flower, you know, pieces, different pedals basically, then that all are needed for us to, to flourish. That's so true. Yeah. So, so what's the opportunity where, you know, w w what can we do as entrepreneurs and, and what are you working on with companies to, to create that shift? And maybe, you know, some companies already recognized the need for the chef, and then there's probably others who [00:14:00] are still. You know, lost in the industrial revolution and they haven't even recognized the shift. Where would you say? Kind of a percentage percentage-wise how many companies have already recognized something needs to change? Amy: It's a great question. And one, I'll start with your, your prompt about what's the opportunity. I love that you ask it that way. You know, I, as I said earlier, I was trained as a designer and as designers, we're always trained to look for the opportunity that that sort of sits in the problem. Right? So a lot of like, there's a lot of talk lately about burnout. There's a lot of talk about language. And and you know, some studies will say up to 75% of people have felt overwhelmed stress burnout in their workplaces. So the, the, the issue is there, the opportunity for me is to flip it around and say, well, okay, that's one thing. Burnout is one thing, how do we flourish? Let's focus [00:15:00] on how do we flourish? What does it look like? Four-ish do companies recognize this. Absolutely. I would say many of them do. I'd say. What they grapple with is how can we be effective here? And a lot of, a lot of attention has been put on wellbeing programs in the workplace and what these can actually do unintentionally is exacerbate the problem because they're, they're offered as individual resources. Here's something for you. Employee acts to go and do. And what, what that isn't acknowledging is that there's this communal thing. There's this culture that we've all created and we've all kind of understood and accepted in our workplaces, whether they're startups or large companies. And that that culture is what makes it hard for us to make the change. And so I have really tactical things that people can do to start flip flipping this. But but yes, acknowledging that there's there's a real need is the first step. And I think a lot of companies are, they. [00:16:00] With the grapple with is how can we tactically make the change? Yeah, Sarah: you're so right about the individual solutions and they're probably, you know, they're probably not wrong. Their first step. They're a nice to have, but they are not going to. Solve the problem of you know, for example, the great resignation people won't stay just because they now have a weekly meditation class in the company. Right. So it's really the culture that the communal aspect of the workplace that, that needs to change. And I don't, I think younger generations are just requiring that. So yeah. The other thing. I guess that we're also having to solve as yes, we want communities. And yet the trend is that we're all going, not going back to the actual office and workspace. So we did, it's like an additional [00:17:00] challenge. People are gonna still work from home. And so we need to somehow create community while being all over the place and not necessarily to get. Amy: No, absolutely. That's so true. And you know, I just want to comment on your point about the younger generations are demanding that like, when you look into the data, it is generation. Z and the millennials who are more likely to be demanding change you know, us, us older folks and gen X, et cetera recognize it and need it as well. We're, we're just less likely as a generation to insist on it. And I love that these younger generations are because I believe that that it's the change that we need in our organizations. So even if, you know, as leaders, we're hesitant to. May cultural changes, recognizing that the younger generations coming up are, are not going to accept the status quo, I think is really good business motivation. So, so that I think is really [00:18:00] compelling opportunity for us in terms of like, what can we tactically do? And, and your point that many of us are not going back to the office. I think that there's, there's still so much that we can, that we can do even when we're not physically connected. And one of the biggest things that I talk about with the teams that I work with is this idea of. There are transactional interactions with our colleagues and there are relational interactions with our colleagues. And so much of what we've done over the past two years has lean towards the transactional, right? We're online. We're going to just get this thing done that we need to collaborate on. Maybe there's like two minutes of like, how was your weekend before that? But it really leans transaction. And what I believe that we need to do is to add in, you know, more dedicated relational moments and those we can do together when we're in person, that's more natural for us, but there are also really easy ways to do that when we're physically [00:19:00] separated. Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. I love that distinction between transactional and relational. And what I often use is, you know, the doing and the being the yin and the yang and, and, and totally, yeah. In, in, in our community, the humane marketing circle, we really want to come as humans to the circle. So, yes, there's the transactional piece to doing piece, you know, that the marketing advice, but then it's. Also about the being, being together as entrepreneurs who want to do marketing ethically and that mothers, I would say just as much as just getting the answer to, you know, what tools should I use for this and that. Right. And, and you're right. We're so trained to always want to. The quick fix the next answer, where we didn't actually realize what we're missing is also the relationship and the belonging to something bigger to a group, [00:20:00] even so to have companies realize that I think that's going to be a huge. Huge change. Like to actually say we value to put time aside for having people create relationships and, and, you know, they have to pay people while this happens. Right. That's going to be a huge shift. So I'm curious to hear from you. Yeah. If you envision the company of the future where people flourish at work, how does that look like? Amy: Yeah, no, that's a great question. And, and I agree, you know, to the first part of your, your comment, like companies do need to invest in and spend time in this. I don't think that's different than it ever was. I think we always had our social hours and, you know, our conferences, et cetera, et cetera. I think we need to be more intentional now. And I actually think that's a really good thing. And so if we look five years ahead I think that the company that [00:21:00] flourishes the most is the one that is most intentional about relationship building alongside the transactional stuff. It's funny. You were, you were on vacation last week. I took my first business trip in two years last week. And as I was going through the business trip, I was like, it just feels different than, than it used to. And I. I started polling, you know, folks on social media. I was like, have you, have you traveled for business? And if so, like what's different now than it used to be. And one person came back and said, you know, it's all about relationships now. And I've noticed that when I travel for business and connect with my colleagues personally, it makes all the transactional stuff so much easier. And so. That, you know, that's a key part of the business of the future. Will we be together or apart? I think that's going to vary by business. Some businesses will absolutely want to be together every day. Some will not. But I think it's super interesting, this comment on like how relationships make the [00:22:00] transactional stuff easier. And I do really believe that's a key point. Of of what the future successful businesses will look like. The other thing that I think is really important is having conversations. We spoke to this earlier about how we work just iterating on like what's working and what's not. You know, when we went into the pandemic, we all flipped mode almost overnight as we come out of the pandemic. I think it's going to be a longer journey to figuring out how we work together successfully, what it looks like to collaborate in this new environment. And so just creating space, regular space for having conversations about the, how, not just the, what that will be a hallmark of a flourishing company. Sarah: Yeah, that really resonates with me. And, and I think you're right, it's this, it's a way from, you know, business trips to conferences and all these kind of big meetings and agendas. We can do those online [00:23:00] now, right. People are not going to travel for that anymore. Or I think also just going to be more like outings and. Things and, you know, just like, yeah. Getting to know the humans behind the zoom screen in a way. Right. So, Amy: yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, Airbnb, I don't know if you caught this news cause you weren't offline and I hope you didn't actually, but I did Sarah: actually. Yeah. Yeah. But they announced that people can now work from anywhere. Amy: Right. People can work from anywhere forever. And I think two things were really important in that announcement. One is they said, expect to come together once a quarter with your colleagues. They're still figuring out what that looks like, but they're acknowledging that the there's this really urgent need for people to come together physically. Yeah too, and I think this relates to their business, but I think it's interesting for all of us. They said up to three months per year, you can work from any other country in the world. [00:24:00] And also that's about the relational, right? That's about for them immersing with their customers and understanding their lives. And so you know, I think that companies that are doubling down on this relational aspect will do well. Yeah, Sarah: I think they're definitely setting an example for you know, for the future of business. And I'm sure a lot of. Young generations will either. They're like, that's exactly what we want. We want to work for a company. And, and, and I think we've proven many times over that the, this myths that we had before, the pandemic, that people don't work the same amount or same hours, because they're at home. I mean, we we've seen that, that that is absolutely not true. So, so yeah, there's. There's definitely good things that hopefully come out from this kind of weird times that we have gone through. And I'm glad for Airbnb to Jen is just kind of show the way. Yeah, Amy: absolutely. And you know, two things I want to kind of [00:25:00] underlying here. I believe so. One of the things that I studied is. What, what makes behavior change successful? And you know, if you think about new year's resolutions, for instance, those are things that we always want to do. And yet how often are we actually successful behavior? Change is hard, even when we want it. And we're in the midst of the biggest work. Upheaval and change and our, and our lifetimes really. But one of the things that makes change successful is the shock of being in sort of this transition state and being in in this space where everything is kind of thrown up into the air. If you think in your own life, one did the biggest change happened. It wouldn't be surprising if it was around, you know, a move from one, you know, one place to another or a life change. You know, having kids getting married, graduating from college, all of these like big moments are when we make the biggest change. And so right now, as a [00:26:00] society, we're in one of those big moments collectively. And so we have this real opportunity to create change right now. And I think it's sort of important for all of them. To recognize that and to take advantage of it. Cause I think we could slip back into the way things used to be, but I don't think many of us want to. And so it's, it's an opportunity we have in this moment of, of ambiguity is that we're all more malleable than we ever will be either before or after. Sarah: And it somehow requires also. Some work on ourselves. We can't just say, oh, you know, the company and blame it all on the company. Cause I feel like even for ourselves while we need to, you know, show some flexibility, more flexibility, maybe we need to even be okay with a pay cut things. We value now more because of the transformation we have gone through, they don't always come with more money. So this [00:27:00] idea of, you know, do I really want this promotion? Is that, that my next step? Or, or, or maybe do I value things differently? So I think it requires also some self-refer reflection and maybe changing some priorities in their own life. Amy: Oh, I a thousand percent agree. And actually, you know, if the first thing that folks need to contemplate is how do they add in more of the relationship relational interactions? The second thing I I'm advocating for. Consider what agency you have and use that agency. And I think this is true startup or big company, but I think it's really easy to get into the situation where you think this is the way the world is, or this is the way things are. But absolutely we have the chance no matter where we sit to kind of recognize the amount of change that we can create. And to grasp that and to [00:28:00] do something about it. And absolutely flexibility is one of the, sort of the biggest things that comes up over and over again, as, as a desire for my clients. But what does that look like? What does it mean? What, what do you really want by flexibility? And often it boils down to things that are not financially related, right? I want to be able to show up for my kids' soccer games. Like I have been able to, I want to be able to be here when my child is sick. Things like that I think are much more internally intrinsically motivated than extrinsic extrinsic. And and that's part of the conversation I think we can have together is like, what do we need to be able to work healthfully and well together. Sarah: Yeah. And it really is such an opportunity to, to have this time of change due to sit down and have this reflection. Right. Because before we were just in our trans mode and, and just, you know, work and sleep and work again, [00:29:00] now we actually have to time to think, well, what do I want out of yeah, out of my time here on this earth, Amy: I like to say that I think. Every person, probably over the age of two in the world has had some sort of epiphany over the past two years. Right. They have this chance to reflect on what they really want. And it's, it's helpful to remember that we're all in that space together right now. And so one better in our lives to talk about change and what we really want out of how we work together. Then. Sarah: Yeah, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for having this conversation with me. It's I just really. I'm so delighted that we are living in this time of change. Like, I couldn't be happier that we are, you know, on earth right now to, to live through this change. And I, yeah, obviously I, I hope we'll see the other of the change, but I'm just so grateful also for [00:30:00] people like you, who help companies Yeah, pivot to you through this. So I would, I'd be delighted if you shared, you know, where people can find out more about you and how you work with companies, but also the smaller startups, Amy: right? Yeah, absolutely. I'll share that one, one thought before I do you mentioned this, that we're all in this state of change and an exciting, and also it'll, it'll eventually settle down and I just want to acknowledge that change is very uncomfortable for us, whether or not we, we want it. And so just recognizing that it is a period of great excitement and possibility. D it's deeply unsettling. So so if it feels unsettling, that's, that's part of the human condition. Yes, I work with companies. I have a company called now and it is all about helping people to flourish at work. And I work with everyone from startups to huge, huge corporations on this. And we provide [00:31:00] programs and also bespoke support for those countries. I can be found on all the social channels. Well, except for Facebook, I don't, I don't Facebook right now. But active on LinkedIn and Instagram. And I will share a link for, for an article that I've written that really, it it's about. How people can flourish as they start a new job during a pandemic, but actually it applies to anyone. And it has some really just really practical tips for how to increase, especially that relational aspect that we talked about. Sarah: I'll put that in the show notes Amy: for sure. Great. Thank you. And then also and I'll share a link to this, but just an offer. I would be very happy to chat one-on-one with folks who are. Recognizing they want to do something to change their companies. Focus on flourishing. And so I'll share a link to that too. Don't hesitate to reach out just my gift to your [00:32:00] listeners. How can, how can we together identify a few steps that you can, you can make to, to create practical? Sarah: Wonderful. Amazing offer. Thank you so much, Amy. You know that I always have one last question and that is what are you grateful for today or this week? This one? Amy: Yeah. So much actually one I've I've been sick recently. I have long COVID and I'm feeling better. And so I just, I think anytime you go through a health incident, like. It's it's just a reminder of how important health is, and I'm just such a believer in sort of the connection of mind and body and, and, and the health that, you know, the importance of health and, and everything would be so grateful for that. You're feeling better. Thank you. But I also just want to say I'm so grateful for the community that I have, and I think that is what keeps me flourishing. You know, I'm grateful for. For the other [00:33:00] entrepreneurs like yourself, who who I'm lucky enough to be friends with, who are, are honest and vulnerable with me about what their challenges are. And likewise, I can be with them. We all need these safe spaces to be able to kind of grapple with, with what's easy and hard about growing a business and some so, so grateful for my dear friends who who share their journeys. Sarah: Wonderful. Yeah. It's so important to have that community of close friends or, or, or other entrepreneurs who like you say, show up real, like, where are you feel like, oh, this is real. I can tell the difference. Amy: Yeah, easy. So it's so great to have that, that support. Sarah: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to be a guest on the humane marketing podcast. Amy, it's been a great pleasure to talk about. Amy: Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for inviting me in, and I'm such a fan of your work as well, Sarah, so thank you for, including me [00:34:00] in your journey.

How Pilates Strengthens Your Core and Your Mind

Today's Takeaway with Florine Mark

Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2022 24:19

With Amy Warner, Regional Director for Club Pilates It's no secret that the key to staying fit and in good health involves moving our bodies each day. When we intentionally move in ways that stretch and lengthen our muscles, we condition our bodies, by improving our posture and muscle tone. Not only is it good for us physically, but it gets those endorphins flowing which can also lift our mood and reduce stress. The most recent studies have shown that it may also improve our mental focus and concentration. Exercising our body may also exercise our mind. But which exercise programs are best for us? One of the things to look for in a daily workout is a full-body, low-impact routine that won't strain your muscles or cause injury. Placing undue stress on your joints is not only painful, but it could prevent you from exercising for a few days until you can move again without pain. You'll also want a workout that can stabilize your core and improve your balance. That's why Pilates has consistently been rated one of the best overall fitness and conditioning programs. A good Pilates workout provides strength, flexibility, and balance training; the perfect mix to improve posture, mobility, and mental health. My guest today is Amy Warner. She's the Regional Director for Club Pilates, an equipment-based pilates studio with 7 locations throughout metro Detroit and Grand Rapids. We talk with Amy about the mind/body benefits associated with Pilates and learn why this is such a great fitness activity for optimum physical and mental conditioning. What You'll Hear on This Episode: What is Amy's background and how did she get started with Pilates? What is Pilates and how is it different from yoga? What makes Pilates different from other forms of exercise? What are some of the benefits associated with a Pilates workout? Why is it so important to strengthen and stabilize our core? What is the reformer? How is the reformer more beneficial than mat Pilates? What is some of the other equipment that you provide at Club Pilates? What does a typical Club Pilates class look like? Is Pilates a “one size fits all” type of workout? Does Pilates help you lose weight? Today's Takeaway: Finding an activity or exercise routine you can commit to doing several days a week is not only good for you physically, but it's also good for your mental and emotional health. You may find that you have more energy, sleep better, and feel less anxious or stressed. When stress hormones build up in your body, it can lead to muscle spasms and pain. But finding a way to effectively “channel that stress” through a physical workout, helps to release that build-up in a healthy manner. Taking part in an overall body conditioning class like Pilates may increase your body awareness and mental focus, which could improve your memory and concentration. In addition to strengthening your core and improving your posture, you may also find yourself breathing better. Remember that every day is a gift and the gift that we get from properly nourishing and moving our bodies will only serve to make us healthier and stronger. We'll feel better physically, we'll have fewer aches and pains, and our mental focus will be sharper. Best of all, when both our mind and body are in balance, it has a positive effect on our mood so we act better too! Remember to treat your body as a gift. Get moving! I'm Florine Mark and that's “Today's Takeaway.” Quotes: “Pilates is a low-impact full-body workout that focuses on flexibility, strength, and body awareness through controlled movements.” — Amy “Always moving your body is a good thing.” — Amy You want to do what speaks to you and what you respond to so that you're consistent and healthy.” — Amy “Pilates is all-inclusive; it's always full-body, it's always low-impact.” — Amy “It's all-inclusive. Regardless of age or fitness level or injury we can actually help people be successful with their fitness routines.” — Amy “If we're not using those muscles on a regular basis, they become dormant.” — Amy “We can accommodate all ages and all fitness levels.” — Amy “Any time you're moving your body is a good thing.” — Amy “The nice thing about Pilates is how it increases your body awareness.” — Amy “When you're doing good things for your body, you do tend to put better things inside for fuel.” — Amy Brought to You By: Gardner White Furniture Mentioned in This Episode: Club Pilates

detroit takeaways pilates exercising grand rapids placing regional director strengthens club pilates amy it amy you florine mark

Reliability Starts in Cultural Change with Amy Tobey

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

Play Episode Listen Later May 11, 2022 46:37

About AmyAmy Tobey has worked in tech for more than 20 years at companies of every size, working with everything from kernel code to user interfaces. These days she spends her time building an innovative Site Reliability Engineering program at Equinix, where she is a principal engineer. When she's not working, she can be found with her nose in a book, watching anime with her son, making noise with electronics, or doing yoga poses in the sun.Links Referenced: Equinix Metal: https://metal.equinix.com Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/MissAmyTobey Personal Blog: https://tobert.github.io/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Optimized cloud compute plans have landed at Vultr to deliver lightning-fast processing power, courtesy of third-gen AMD EPYC processors without the IO or hardware limitations of a traditional multi-tenant cloud server. Starting at just 28 bucks a month, users can deploy general-purpose, CPU, memory, or storage optimized cloud instances in more than 20 locations across five continents. Without looking, I know that once again, Antarctica has gotten the short end of the stick. Launch your Vultr optimized compute instance in 60 seconds or less on your choice of included operating systems, or bring your own. It's time to ditch convoluted and unpredictable giant tech company billing practices and say goodbye to noisy neighbors and egregious egress forever. Vultr delivers the power of the cloud with none of the bloat. “Screaming in the Cloud” listeners can try Vultr for free today with a $150 in credit when they visit getvultr.com/screaming. That's G-E-T-V-U-L-T-R dot com slash screaming. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: Finding skilled DevOps engineers is a pain in the neck! And if you need to deploy a secure and compliant application to AWS, forgettaboutit! But that's where DuploCloud can help. Their comprehensive no-code/low-code software platform guarantees a secure and compliant infrastructure in as little as two weeks, while automating the full DevSecOps lifestyle. Get started with DevOps-as-a-Service from DuploCloud so that your cloud configurations are done right the first time. Tell them I sent you and your first two months are free. To learn more visit: snark.cloud/duplo. Thats's snark.cloud/D-U-P-L-O-C-L-O-U-D.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while I catch up with someone that it feels like I've known for ages, and I realize somehow I have never been able to line up getting them on this show as a guest. Today is just one of those days. And my guest is Amy Tobey who has been someone I've been talking to for ages, even in the before-times, if you can remember such a thing. Today, she's a Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix. Amy, thank you for finally giving in to my endless wheedling.Amy: Thanks for having me. You mentioned the before-times. Like, I remember it was, like, right before the pandemic we had beers in San Francisco wasn't it? There was Ian there—Corey: Yeah, I—Amy: —and a couple other people. It was a really great time. And then—Corey: I vaguely remember beer. Yeah. And then—Amy: And then the world ended.Corey: Oh, my God. Yes. It's still March of 2020, right?Amy: As far as I know. Like, I haven't checked in a couple years.Corey: So, you do an awful lot. And it's always a difficult question to ask someone, so can you encapsulate your entire existence in a paragraph? It's—Amy: [sigh].Corey: —awful, so I'd like to give a bit more structure to it. Let's start with the introduction: You are a Senior Principal Engineer. We know it's high level because of all the adjectives that get put in there, and none of those adjectives are ‘associate' or ‘beginner' or ‘junior,' or all the other diminutives that companies like to play games with to justify paying people less. And you're at Equinix, which is a company that is a bit unlike most of the, shall we say, traditional cloud providers. What do you do over there and both as a company, as a person?Amy: So, as a company Equinix, what most people know about is that we have a whole bunch of data centers all over the world. I think we have the most of any company. And what we do is we lease out space in that data center, and then we have a number of other products that people don't know as well, which one is Equinix Metal, which is what I specifically work on, where we rent you bare-metal servers. None of that fancy stuff that you get any other clouds on top of it, there's things you can get that are… partner things that you can add-on, like, you know, storage and other things like that, but we just deliver you bare-metal servers with really great networking. So, what I work on is the reliability of that whole system. All of the things that go into provisioning the servers, making them come up, making sure that they get delivered to the server, make sure the API works right, all of that stuff.Corey: So, you're on the Equinix cloud side of the world more so than you are on the building data centers by the sweat of your brow, as they say?Amy: Correct. Yeah, yeah. Software side.Corey: Excellent. I spent some time in data centers in the early part of my career before cloud ate that. That was sort of cotemporaneous with the discovery that I'm the hardware destruction bunny, and I should go to great pains to keep my aura from anything expensive and important, like, you know, the SAN. So—Amy: Right, yeah.Corey: Companies moving out of data centers, and me getting out was a great thing.Amy: But the thing about SANs though, is, like, it might not be you. They're just kind of cursed from the start, right? They just always were kind of fussy and easy to break.Corey: Oh, yeah. I used to think—and I kid you not—that I had a limited upside to my career in tech because I sometimes got sloppy and I was fairly slow at crimping ethernet cables.Amy: [laugh].Corey: That is very similar to growing up in third grade when it became apparent that I was going to have problems in my career because my handwriting was sloppy. Yeah, it turns out the future doesn't look like we predicted it would.Amy: Oh, gosh. Are we going to talk about, like, neurological development now or… [laugh] okay, that's a thing I struggle with, too right, is I started typing as soon as they would let—in fact, before they would let me. I remember in high school, I had teachers who would grade me down for typing a paper out. They want me to handwrite it and I would go, “Cool. Go ahead and take a grade off because if I handwrite it, you're going to take two grades off my handwriting, so I'm cool with this deal.”Corey: Yeah, it was pretty easy early on. I don't know when the actual shift was, but it became more and more apparent that more and more things are moving towards a world where you could type. And I was almost five when I started working on that stuff, and that really wound up changing a lot of aspects of how I started seeing things. One thing I think you're probably fairly well known for is incidents. I want to be clear when I say that you are not the root cause as—“So, why are things broken?” “It's Amy again. What's she gotten into this time?” Great.Amy: [laugh]. But it does happen, but not all the time.Corey: Exa—it's a learning experience.Amy: Right.Corey: You've also been deeply involved with SREcon and a number of—a lot of aspects of what I will term—and please don't yell at me for this—SRE culture—Amy: Yeah.Corey: Which is sometimes a challenging thing to wind up describing or putting a definition around. The one that I've always been somewhat partial to is, “SRE is DevOps, except you worked at Google for a while.” I don't know how necessarily accurate that is, but it does rile people up.Amy: Yeah, it does. Dave Stanke actually did a really great talk at SREcon San Francisco just a couple weeks ago, about the DORA report. And the new DORA report, they split SRE out into its own function and kind of is pushing against that old model, which actually comes from Liz Fong-Jones—I think it's from her, or older—about, like, class SRE implements DevOps, which is kind of this idea that, like, SREs make DevOps happen. Things have evolved, right, since then. Things have evolved since Google released those books, and we're all just figured out what works and what doesn't a little bit.And so, it's not that we're implementing DevOps so much. In fact, it's that ops stuff that kind of holds us back from the really high impact work that SREs, I think, should be doing, that aren't just, like, fixing the problems, the symptoms down at the bottom layer, right? Like what we did as sysadmins 20 years ago. You know, we'd go and a lot of people are SREs that came out of the sysadmin world and still think in that mode, where it's like, “Well, I set up the systems, and when things break, I go and I fix them.” And, “Why did the developers keep writing crappy code? Why do I have to always getting up in the middle of the night because this thing crashed?”And it turns out that the work we need to do to make things more reliable, there's a ceiling to how far away the platform can take us, right? Like, we can have the best platform in the world with redundancy, and, you know, nine-way replicated data storage and all this crazy stuff, and still if we put crappy software on top, it's going to be unreliable. So, how do we make less crappy software? And for most of my career, people would be, like, “Well, you should test it.” And so, we started doing that, and we still have crappy software, so what's going on here? We still have incidents.So, we write more tests, and we still have incidents. We had a QA group, we still have incidents. We send the developers to training, and we still have incidents. So like, what is the thing we need to do to make things more reliable? And it turns out, most of it is culture work.Corey: My perspective on this stems from being a grumpy old sysadmin. And at some point, I started calling myself a systems engineer or DevOps or production engineer, or SRE. It was all from my point of view, the same job, but you know, if you call yourself a sysadmin, you're just asking for a 40% pay cut off the top.Amy: [laugh].Corey: But I still tended to view the world through that lens. I tended to be very good at Linux systems internals, for example, understanding system calls and the rest, but increasingly, as the DevOps wave or SRE wave, or Google-isation of the internet wound up being more and more of a thing, I found myself increasingly in job interviews, where, “Great, now, can you go wind up implementing a sorting algorithm on the whiteboard?” “What on earth? No.” Like, my lingua franca is shitty Bash, and no one tends to write that without a bunch of tab completions and quick checking with manpages—die.net or whatnot—on the fly as you go down that path.And it was awful, and I felt… like my skill set was increasingly eroding. And it wasn't honestly until I started this place where I really got into writing a fair bit of code to do different things because it felt like an orthogonal skill set, but the fullness of time, it seems like it's not. And it's a reskilling. And it made me wonder, does this mean that the areas of technology that I focused on early in my career, was that all a waste? And the answer is not really. Sometimes, sure, in that I don't spend nearly as much time worrying about inodes—for example—as I once did. But every once in a while, I'll run into something and I looked like a wizard from the future, but instead, I'm a wizard from the past.Amy: Yeah, I find that a lot in my work, now. Sometimes things I did 20 years ago, come back, and it's like, oh, yeah, I remember I did all that threading work in 2002 in Perl, and I learned everything the very, very, very hard way. And then, you know, this January, did some threading work to fix some stability issues, and all of it came flooding back, right? Just that the experiences really, more than the code or the learning or the text and stuff; more just the, like, this feels like threads [BLEEP]-ery. Is a diagnostic thing that sometimes we have to say.And then people are like, “Can you prove it?” And I'm like, “Not really,” because it's literally thread [BLEEP]-ery. Like, the definition of it is that there's weird stuff happening that we can't figure out why it's happening. There's something acting in the system that isn't synchronized, that isn't connected to other things, that's happening out of order from what we expect, and if we had a clear signal, we would just fix it, but we don't. We just have, like, weird stuff happening over here and then over there and over there and over there.And, like, that tells me there's just something happening at that layer and then have to go and dig into that right, and like, just basically charge through. My colleagues are like, “Well, maybe you should look at this, and go look at the database,” the things that they're used to looking at and that their experiences inform, whereas then I bring that ancient toiling through the threading mines experiences back and go, “Oh, yeah. So, let's go find where this is happening, where people are doing dangerous things with threads, and see if we can spot something.” But that came from that experience.Corey: And there's so much that just repeats itself. And history rhymes. The challenge is that, do you have 20 years of experience, or do you have one year of experience repeated 20 times? And as the tide rises, doing the same task by hand, it really is just a matter of time before your full-time job winds up being something a piece of software does. An easy example is, “Oh, what's your job?” “I manually place containers onto specific hosts.” “Well, I've got news for you, and you're not going to like it at all.”Amy: Yeah, yeah. I think that we share a little bit. I'm allergic to repeated work. I don't know if allergic is the right word, but you know, if I sit and I do something once, fine. Like, I'll just crank it out, you know, it's this form, or it's a datafile I got to write and I'll—fine I'll type it in and do the manual labor.The second time, the difficulty goes up by ten, right? Like, just mentally, just to do it, be like, I've already done this once. Doing it again is anathema to everything that I am. And then sometimes I'll get through it, but after that, like, writing a program is so much easier because it's like exponential, almost, growth in difficulty. You know, the third time I have to do the same thing that's like just typing the same stuff—like, look over here, read this thing and type it over here—I'm out; I can't do it. You know, I got to find a way to automate. And I don't know, maybe normal people aren't driven to live this way, but it's kept me from getting stuck in those spots, too.Corey: It was weird because I spent a lot of time as a consultant going from place to place and it led to some weird changes. For example, “Oh, thank God, I don't have to think about that whole messaging queue thing.” Sure enough, next engagement, it's message queue time. Fantastic. I found that repeating myself drove me nuts, but you also have to be very sensitive not to wind up, you know, stealing IP from the people that you're working with.Amy: Right.Corey: But what I loved about the sysadmin side of the world is that the vast majority of stuff that I've taken with me, lives in my shell config. And what I mean by that is I'm not—there's nothing in there is proprietary, but when you have a weird problem with trying to figure out the best way to figure out which Ruby process is stealing all the CPU, great, turns out that you can chain seven or eight different shell commands together through a bunch of pipes. I don't want to remember that forever. So, that's the sort of thing I would wind up committing as I learned it. I don't remember what company I picked that up at, but it was one of those things that was super helpful.I have a sarcastic—it's a one-liner, except no sane editor setting is going to show it in any less than three—of a whole bunch of Perl, piped into du, piped into the rest, that tells you one of the largest consumers of files in a given part of the system. And it rates them with stars and it winds up doing some neat stuff. I would never sit down and reinvent something like that today, but the fact that it's there means that I can do all kinds of neat tricks when I need to. It's making sure that as you move through your career, on some level, you're picking up skills that are repeatable and applicable beyond one company.Amy: Skills and tooling—Corey: Yeah.Amy: —right? Like, you just described the tool. Another SREcon talk was John Allspaw and Dr. Richard Cook talking about above the line; below the line. And they started with these metaphors about tools, right, showing all the different kinds of hammers.And if you're a blacksmith, a lot of times you craft specialized hammers for very specific jobs. And that's one of the properties of a tool that they were trying to get people to think about, right, is that tools get crafted to the job. And what you just described as a bespoke tool that you had created on the fly, that kind of floated under the radar of intellectual property. [laugh].So, let's not tell the security or IP people right? Like, because there's probably billions and billions of dollars of technically, like, made-up IP value—I'm doing air quotes with my fingers—you know, that's just basically people's shell profiles. And my God, the Emacs automation that people have done. If you've ever really seen somebody who's amazing at Emacs and is 10, 20, 30, maybe 40 years of experience encoded in their emacs settings, it's a wonder to behold. Like, I look at it and I go, “Man, I wish I could do that.”It's like listening to a really great guitar player and be like, “Wow, I wish I could play like them.” You see them just flying through stuff. But all that IP in there is both that person's collection of wisdom and experience and working with that code, but also encodes that stuff like you described, right? It's just all these little systems tricks and little fiddly commands and things we don't want to remember and so we encode them into our toolset.Corey: Oh, yeah. Anything I wound up taking, I always would share it with people internally, too. I'd mention, “Yeah, I'm keeping this in my shell files.” Because I disclosed it, which solves a lot of the problem. And also, none of it was even close to proprietary or anything like that. I'm sorry, but the way that you wind up figuring out how much of a disk is being eaten up and where in a more pleasing way, is not a competitive advantage. It just isn't.Amy: It isn't to you or me, but, you know, back in the beginning of our careers, people thought it was worth money and should be proprietary. You know, like, oh, that disk-checking script as a competitive advantage for our company because there are only a few of us doing this work. Like, it was actually being able to, like, manage your—[laugh] actually manage your servers was a competitive advantage. Now, it's kind of commodity.Corey: Let's also be clear that the world has moved on. I wound up buying a DaisyDisk a while back for Mac, which I love. It is a fantastic, pretty effective, “Where's all the stuff on your disk going?” And it does a scan and you can drive and collect things and delete them when trying to clean things out. I was using it the other day, so it's top of mind at the moment.But it's way more polished than that crappy Perl three-liner. And I see both sides, truly I do. The trick also, for those wondering [unintelligible 00:15:45], like, “Where is the line?” It's super easy. Disclose it, what you're doing, in those scenarios in the event someone is no because they believe that finding the right man page section for something is somehow proprietary.Great. When you go home that evening in a completely separate environment, build it yourself from scratch to solve the problem, reimplement it and save that. And you're done. There are lots of ways to do this. Don't steal from your employer, but your employer employs you; they don't own you and the way that you think about these problems.Every person I've met who has had a career that's longer than 20 minutes has a giant doc somewhere on some system of all of the scripts that they wound up putting together, all of the one-liners, the notes on, “Next time you see this, this is the thing to check.”Amy: Yeah, the cheat sheet or the notebook with all the little commands, or again the Emacs config, sometimes for some people, or shell profiles. Yeah.Corey: Here's the awk one-liner that I put that automatically spits out from an Apache log file what—the httpd log file that just tells me what are the most frequent talkers, and what are the—Amy: You should probably let go of that one. You know, like, I think that one's lifetime is kind of past, Corey. Maybe you—Corey: I just have to get it working with Nginx, and we're good to go.Amy: Oh, yeah, there you go. [laugh].Corey: Or S3 access logs. Perish the thought. But yeah, like, what are the five most high-volume talkers, and what are those relative to each other? Huh, that one thing seems super crappy and it's coming from Russia. But that's—hmm, one starts to wonder; maybe it's time to dig back in.So, one of the things that I have found is that a lot of the people talking about SRE seem to have descended from an ivory tower somewhere. And they're talking about how some of the best-in-class companies out there, renowned for their technical cultures—at least externally—are doing these things. But there's a lot more folks who are not there. And honestly, I consider myself one of those people who is not there. I was a competent engineer, but never a terrific one.And looking at the way this was described, I often came away thinking, “Okay, it was the purpose of this conference talk just to reinforce how smart people are, and how I'm not,” and/or, “There are the 18 cultural changes you need to make to your company, and then you can do something kind of like we were just talking about on stage.” It feels like there's a combination of problems here. One is making this stuff more accessible to folks who are not themselves in those environments, and two, how to drive cultural change as an individual contributor if that's even possible. And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have thoughts on both aspects of that, and probably some more hit me, please.Amy: So, the ivory tower, right. Let's just be straight up, like, the ivory tower is Google. I mean, that's where it started. And we get it from the other large companies that, you know, want to do conference talks about what this stuff means and what it does. What I've kind of come around to in the last couple of years is that those talks don't really reach the vast majority of engineers, they don't really apply to a large swath of the enterprise especially, which is, like, where a lot of the—the bulk of our industry sits, right? We spend a lot of time talking about the darlings out here on the West Coast in high tech culture and startups and so on.But, like, we were talking about before we started the show, right, like, the interior of even just America, is filled with all these, like, insurance and banks and all of these companies that are cranking out tons of code and servers and stuff, and they're trying to figure out the same problems. But they're structured in companies where their tech arm is still, in most cases, considered a cost center, often is bundled under finance, for—that's a whole show of itself about that historical blunder. And so, the tech culture is tend to be very, very different from what we experience in—what do we call it anymore? Like, I don't even want to say West Coast anymore because we've gone remote, but, like, high tech culture we'll say. And so, like, thinking about how to make SRE and all this stuff more accessible comes down to, like, thinking about who those engineers are that are sitting at the computers, writing all the code that runs our banks, all the code that makes sure that—I'm trying to think of examples that are more enterprise-y right?Or shoot buying clothes online. You go to Macy's for example. They have a whole bunch of servers that run their online store and stuff. They have internal IT-ish people who keep all this stuff running and write that code and probably integrating open-source stuff much like we all do. But when you go to try to put in a reliability program that's based on the current SRE models, like SLOs; you put in SLOs and you start doing, like, this incident management program that's, like, you know, you have a form you fill out after every incident, and then you [unintelligible 00:20:25] retros.And it turns out that those things are very high-level skills, skills and capabilities in an organization. And so, when you have this kind of IT mindset or the enterprise mindset, bringing the culture together to make those things work often doesn't happen. Because, you know, they'll go with the prescriptive model and say, like, okay, we're going to implement SLOs, we're going to start measuring SLIs on all of the services, and we're going to hold you accountable for meeting those targets. If you just do that, right, you're just doing more gatekeeping and policing of your tech environment. My bet is, reliability almost never improves in those cases.And that's been my experience, too, and why I get charged up about this is, if you just go slam in these practices, people end up miserable, the practices then become tarnished because people experienced the worst version of them. And then—Corey: And with the remote explosion as well, it turns out that changing jobs basically means their company sends you a different Mac, and the next Monday, you wind up signing into a different Slack team.Amy: Yeah, so the culture really matters, right? You can't cover it over with foosball tables and great lunch. You actually have to deliver tools that developers want to use and you have to deliver a software engineering culture that brings out the best in developers instead of demanding the best from developers. I think that's a fundamental business shift that's kind of happening. If I'm putting on my wizard hat and looking into the future and dreaming about what might change in the world, right, is that there's kind of a change in how we do leadership and how we do business that's shifting more towards that model where we look at what people are capable of and we trust in our people, and we get more out of them, the knowledge work model.If we want more knowledge work, we need people to be happy and to feel engaged in their community. And suddenly we start to see these kind of generational, bigger-pie kind of things start to happen. But how do we get there? It's not SLOs. It maybe it's a little bit starting with incidents. That's where I've had the most success, and you asked me about that. So, getting practical, incident management is probably—Corey: Right. Well, as I see it, the problem with SLOs across the board is it feels like it's a very insular community so far, and communicating it to engineers seems to be the focus of where the community has been, but from my understanding of it, you absolutely need buy-in at significantly high executive levels, to at the very least by you air cover while you're doing these things and making these changes, but also to help drive that cultural shift. None of this is something I have the slightest clue how to do, let's be very clear. If I knew how to change a company's culture, I'd have a different job.Amy: Yeah. [laugh]. The biggest omission in the Google SRE books was [Ers 00:22:58]. There was a guy at Google named Ers who owns availability for Google, and when anything is, like, in dispute and bubbles up the management team, it goes to Ers, and he says, “Thou shalt…” right? Makes the call. And that's why it works, right?Like, it's not just that one person, but that system of management where the whole leadership team—there's a large, very well-funded team with a lot of power in the organization that can drive availability, and they can say, this is how you're going to do metrics for your service, and this is the system that you're in. And it's kind of, yeah, sure it works for them because they have all the organizational support in place. What I was saying to my team just the other day—because we're in the middle of our SLO rollout—is that really, I think an SLO program isn't [clear throat] about the engineers at all until late in the game. At the beginning of the game, it's really about getting the leadership team on board to say, “Hey, we want to put in SLIs and SLOs to start to understand the functioning of our software system.” But if they don't have that curiosity in the first place, that desire to understand how well their teams are doing, how healthy their teams are, don't do it. It's not going to work. It's just going to make everyone miserable.Corey: It feels like it's one of those difficult to sell problems as well, in that it requires some tooling changes, absolutely. It requires cultural change and buy-in and whatnot, but in order for that to happen, there has to be a painful problem that a company recognizes and is willing to pay to make go away. The problem with stuff like this is that once you pay, there's a lot of extra work that goes on top of it as well, that does not have a perception—rightly or wrongly—of contributing to feature velocity, of hitting the next milestone. It's, “Really? So, we're going to be spending how much money to make engineers happier? They should get paid an awful lot and they're still complaining and never seem happy. Why do I care if they're happy other than the pure mercenary perspective of otherwise they'll quit?” I'm not saying that it's not worth pursuing; it's not a worthy goal. I am saying that it becomes a very difficult thing to wind up selling as a product.Amy: Well, as a product for sure, right? Because—[sigh] gosh, I have friends in the space who work on these tools. And I want to be careful.Corey: Of course. Nothing but love for all of those people, let's be very clear.Amy: But a lot of them, you know, they're pulling metrics from existing monitoring systems, they are doing some interesting math on them, but what you get at the end is a nice service catalog and dashboard, which are things we've been trying to land as products in this industry for as long as I can remember, and—Corey: “We've got it this time, though. This time we'll crack the nut.” Yeah. Get off the island, Gilligan.Amy: And then the other, like, risky thing, right, is the other part that makes me uncomfortable about SLOs, and why I will often tell folks that I talk to out in the industry that are asking me about this, like, one-on-one, “Should I do it here?” And it's like, you can bring the tool in, and if you have a management team that's just looking to have metrics to drive productivity, instead of you know, trying to drive better knowledge work, what you get is just a fancier version of more Taylorism, right, which is basically scientific management, this idea that we can, like, drive workers to maximum efficiency by measuring random things about them and driving those numbers. It turns out, that doesn't really work very well, even in industrial scale, it just happened to work because, you know, we have a bloody enough society that we pushed people into it. But the reality is, if you implement SLOs badly, you get more really bad Taylorism that's bad for you developers. And my suspicion is that you will get worse availability out of it than you would if you just didn't do it at all.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Revelo. Revelo is the Spanish word of the day, and its spelled R-E-V-E-L-O. It means “I reveal.” Now, have you tried to hire an engineer lately? I assure you it is significantly harder than it sounds. One of the things that Revelo has recognized is something I've been talking about for a while, specifically that while talent is evenly distributed, opportunity is absolutely not. They're exposing a new talent pool to, basically, those of us without a presence in Latin America via their platform. It's the largest tech talent marketplace in Latin America with over a million engineers in their network, which includes—but isn't limited to—talent in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Argentina. Now, not only do they wind up spreading all of their talent on English ability, as well as you know, their engineering skills, but they go significantly beyond that. Some of the folks on their platform are hands down the most talented engineers that I've ever spoken to. Let's also not forget that Latin America has high time zone overlap with what we have here in the United States, so you can hire full-time remote engineers who share most of the workday as your team. It's an end-to-end talent service, so you can find and hire engineers in Central and South America without having to worry about, frankly, the colossal pain of cross-border payroll and benefits and compliance because Revelo handles all of it. If you're hiring engineers, check out revelo.io/screaming to get 20% off your first three months. That's R-E-V-E-L-O dot I-O slash screaming.Corey: That is part of the problem is, in some cases, to drive some of these improvements, you have to go backwards to move forwards. And it's one of those, “Great, so we spent all this effort and money in the rest of now things are worse?” No, not necessarily, but suddenly are aware of things that were slipping through the cracks previously.Amy: Yeah. Yeah.Corey: Like, the most realistic thing about first The Phoenix Project and then The Unicorn Project, both by Gene Kim, has been the fact that companies have these problems and actively cared enough to change it. In my experience, that feels a little on the rare side.Amy: Yeah, and I think that's actually the key, right? It's for the culture change, and for, like, if you really looking to be, like, do I want to work at this company? Am I investing my myself in here? Is look at the leadership team and be, like, do these people actually give a crap? Are they looking just to punt another number down the road?That's the real question, right? Like, the technology and stuff, at the point where I'm at in my career, I just don't care that much anymore. [laugh]. Just… fine, use Kubernetes, use Postgres, [unintelligible 00:27:30], I don't care. I just don't. Like, Oracle, I might have to ask, you know, go to finance and be like, “Hey, can we spend 20 million for a database?” But like, nobody really asks for that anymore, so. [laugh].Corey: As one does. I will say that I mostly agree with you, but a technology that I found myself getting excited about, given the time of the recording on this is… fun, I spent a bit of time yesterday—from when we're recording this—teaching myself just enough Go to wind up being together a binary that I needed to do something actively ridiculous for my camera here. And I found myself coming away deeply impressed by a lot of things about it, how prescriptive it was for one, how self-contained for another. And after spending far too many years of my life writing shitty Perl, and shitty Bash, and worse Python, et cetera, et cetera, the prescriptiveness was great. The fact that it wound up giving me something I could just run, I could cross-compile for anything I need to run it on, and it just worked. It's been a while since I found a technology that got me this interested in exploring further.Amy: Go is great for that. You mentioned one of my two favorite features of Go. One is usually when a program compiles—at least the way I code in Go—it usually works. I've been working with Go since about 0.9, like, just a little bit before it was released as 1.0, and that's what I've noticed over the years of working with it is that most of the time, if you have a pretty good data structure design and you get the code to compile, usually it's going to work, unless you're doing weird stuff.The other thing I really love about Go and that maybe you'll discover over time is the malleability of it. And the reason why I think about that more than probably most folks is that I work on other people's code most of the time. And maybe this is something that you probably run into with your business, too, right, where you're working on other people's infrastructure. And the way that we encode business rules and things in the languages, in our programming language or our config syntax and stuff has a huge impact on folks like us and how quickly we can come into a situation, assess, figure out what's going on, figure out where things are laid out, and start making changes with confidence.Corey: Forget other people for a minute they're looking at what I built out three or four years ago here, myself, like, I look at past me, it's like, “What was that rat bastard thinking? This is awful.” And it's—forget other people's code; hell is your own code, on some level, too, once it's slipped out of the mental stack and you have to re-explore it and, “Oh, well thank God I defensively wound up not including any comments whatsoever explaining what the living hell this thing was.” It's terrible. But you're right, the other people's shell scripts are finicky and odd.I started poking around for help when I got stuck on something, by looking at GitHub, and a few bit of searching here and there. Even these large, complex, well-used projects started making sense to me in a way that I very rarely find. It's, “What the hell is that thing?” is my most common refrain when I'm looking at other people's code, and Go for whatever reason avoids that, I think because it is so prescriptive about formatting, about how things should be done, about the vision that it has. Maybe I'm romanticizing it and I'll hate it and a week from now, and I want to go back and remove this recording, but.Amy: The size of the language helps a lot.Corey: Yeah.Amy: But probably my favorite. It's more of a convention, which actually funny the way I'm going to talk about this because the two languages I work on the most right now are Ruby and Go. And I don't feel like two languages could really be more different.Syntax-wise, they share some things, but really, like, the mental models are so very, very different. Ruby is all the way in on object-oriented programming, and, like, the actual real kind of object-oriented with messaging and stuff, and, like, the whole language kind of springs from that. And it kind of requires you to understand all of these concepts very deeply to be effective in large programs. So, what I find is, when I approach Ruby codebase, I have to load all this crap into my head and remember, “Okay, so yeah, there's this convention, when you do this kind of thing in Ruby”—or especially Ruby on Rails is even worse because they go deep into convention over configuration. But what that's code for is, this code is accessible to people who have a lot of free cognitive capacity to load all this convention into their heads and keep it in their heads so that the code looks pretty, right?And so, that's the trade-off as you said, okay, my developers have to be these people with all these spare brain cycles to understand, like, why I would put the code here in this place versus this place? And all these, like, things that are in the code, like, very compact, dense concepts. And then you go to something like Go, which is, like, “Nah, we're not going to do Lambdas. Nah”—[laugh]—“We're not doing all this fancy stuff.” So, everything is there on the page.This drives some people crazy, right, is that there's all this boilerplate, boilerplate, boilerplate. But the reality is, I can read most Go files from top to the bottom and understand what the hell it's doing, whereas I can go sometimes look at, like, a Ruby thing, or sometimes Python and e—Perl is just [unintelligible 00:32:19] all the time, right, it's there's so much indirection. And it just be, like, “What the [BLEEP] is going on? This is so dense. I'm going to have to sit down and write it out in longhand so I can understand what the developer was even doing here.” And—Corey: Well, that's why I got the Mac Studio; for when I'm not doing A/V stuff with it, that means that I'll have one core that I can use for, you know, front-end processing and the rest, and the other 19 cores can be put to work failing to build Nokogiri in Ruby yet again.Amy: [laugh].Corey: I remember the travails of working with Ruby, and the problem—I have similar problems with Python, specifically in that—I don't know if I'm special like this—it feels like it's a SRE DevOps style of working, but I am grabbing random crap off a GitHub constantly and running it, like, small scripts other people have built. And let's be clear, I run them on my test AWS account that has nothing important because I'm not a fool that I read most of it before I run it, but I also—it wants a different version of Python every single time. It wants a whole bunch of other things, too. And okay, so I use ASDF as my version manager for these things, which for whatever reason, does not work for the way that I think about this ergonomically. Okay, great.And I wind up with detritus scattered throughout my system. It's, “Hey, can you make this reproducible on my machine?” “Almost certainly not, but thank you for asking.” It's like ‘Step 17: Master the Wolf' level of instructions.Amy: And I think Docker generally… papers over the worst of it, right, is when we built all this stuff in the aughts, you know, [CPAN 00:33:45]—Corey: Dev containers and VS Code are very nice.Amy: Yeah, yeah. You know, like, we had CPAN back in the day, I was doing chroots, I think in, like, '04 or '05, you know, to solve this problem, right, which is basically I just—screw it; I will compile an entire distro into a directory with a Perl and all of its dependencies so that I can isolate it from the other things I want to run on this machine and not screw up and not have these interactions. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about is, like, the old model, when we deployed servers, there was one of us sitting there and then we'd log into the server and be like, I'm going to install the Perl. You know, I'll compile it into, like, [/app/perl 558 00:34:21] whatever, and then I'll CPAN all this stuff in, and I'll give it over to the developer, tell them to set their shebang to that and everything just works. And now we're in a mode where it's like, okay, you got to set up a thousand of those. “Okay, well, I'll make a tarball.” [laugh]. But it's still like we had to just—Corey: DevOps, but [unintelligible 00:34:37] dev closer to ops. You're interrelating all the time. Yeah, then Docker comes along, and add dev is, like, “Well, here's the container. Good luck, asshole.” And it feels like it's been cast into your yard to worry about.Amy: Yeah, well, I mean, that's just kind of business, or just—Corey: Yeah. Yeah.Amy: I'm not sure if it's business or capitalism or something like that, but just the idea that, you know, if I can hand off the shitty work to some other poor schlub, why wouldn't I? I mean, that's most folks, right? Like, just be like, “Well”—Corey: Which is fair.Amy: —“I got it working. Like, my part is done, I did what I was supposed to do.” And now there's a lot of folks out there, that's how they work, right? “I hit done. I'm done. I shipped it. Sure. It's an old [unintelligible 00:35:16] Ubuntu. Sure, there's a bunch of shell scripts that rip through things. Sure”—you know, like, I've worked on repos where there's hundreds of things that need to be addressed.Corey: And passing to someone else is fine. I'm thrilled to do it. Where I run into problems with it is where people assume that well, my part was the hard part and anything you schlubs do is easy. I don't—Amy: Well, that's the underclass. Yeah. That's—Corey: Forget engineering for a second; I throw things to the people over in the finance group here at The Duckbill Group because those people are wizards at solving for this thing. And it's—Amy: Well, that's how we want to do things.Corey: Yeah, specialization works.Amy: But we have this—it's probably more cultural. I don't want to pick, like, capitalism to beat on because this is really, like, human cultural thing, and it's not even really particularly Western. Is the idea that, like, “If I have an underclass, why would I give a shit what their experience is?” And this is why I say, like, ops teams, like, get out of here because most ops teams, the extant ops teams are still called ops, and a lot of them have been renamed SRE—but they still do the same job—are an underclass. And I don't mean that those people are below us. People are treated as an underclass, and they shouldn't be. Absolutely not.Corey: Yes.Amy: Because the idea is that, like, well, I'm a fancy person who writes code at my ivory tower, and then it all flows down, and those people, just faceless people, do the deployment stuff that's beneath me. That attitude is the most toxic thing, I think, in tech orgs to address. Like, if you're trying to be like, “Well, our liability is bad, we have security problems, people won't fix their code.” And go look around and you will find people that are treated as an underclass that are given codes thrown over the wall at them and then they just have to toil through and make it work. I've worked on that a number of times in my career.And I think just like saying, underclass, right, or caste system, is what I found is the most effective way to get people actually thinking about what the hell is going on here. Because most people are just, like, “Well, that's just the way things are. It's just how we've always done it. The developers write to code, then give it to the sysadmins. The sysadmins deploy the code. Isn't that how it always works?”Corey: You'd really like to hope, wouldn't you?Amy: [laugh]. Not me. [laugh].Corey: Again, the way I see it is, in theory—in theory—sysadmins, ops, or that should not exist. People should theoretically be able to write code as developers that just works, the end. And write it correct the first time and never have to change it again. Yeah. There's a reason that I always like to call staging environments in places I work ‘theory' because it works in theory, but not in production, and that is fundamentally the—like, that entire job role is the difference between theory and practice.Amy: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's the problem with it. We're already so disconnected from the physical world, right? Like, you and I right now are talking over multiple strands of glass and digital transcodings and things right now, right? Like, we are detached from the physical reality.You mentioned earlier working in data centers, right? The thing I miss about it is, like, the physicality of it. Like, actually, like, I held a server in my arms and put it in the rack and slid it into the rails. I plugged into power myself; I pushed the power button myself. There's a server there. I physically touched it.Developers who don't work in production, we talked about empathy and stuff, but really, I think the big problem is when they work out in their idea space and just writing code, they write the unit tests, if we're very lucky, they'll write a functional test, and then they hand that wad off to some poor ops group. They're detached from the reality of operations. It's not even about accountability; it's about experience. The ability to see all of the weird crap we deal with, right? You know, like, “Well, we pushed the code to that server, but there were three bit flips, so we had to do it again. And then the other server, the disk failed. And on the other server…” You know? [laugh].It's just, there's all this weird crap that happens, these systems are so complex that they're always doing something weird. And if you're a developer that just spends all day in your IDE, you don't get to see that. And I can't really be mad at those folks, as individuals, for not understanding our world. I figure out how to help them, and the best thing we've come up with so far is, like, well, we start giving this—some responsibility in a production environment so that they can learn that. People do that, again, is another one that can be done wrong, where it turns into kind of a forced empathy.I actually really hate that mode, where it's like, “We're forcing all the developers online whether they like it or not. On-call whether they like it or not because they have to learn this.” And it's like, you know, maybe slow your roll a little buddy because the stuff is actually hard to learn. Again, minimizing how hard ops work is. “Oh, we'll just put the developers on it. They'll figure it out, right? They're software engineers. They're probably smarter than you sysadmins.” Is the unstated thing when we do that, right? When we throw them in the pit and be like, “Yeah, they'll get it.” [laugh].Corey: And that was my problem [unintelligible 00:39:49] the interview stuff. It was in the write code on a whiteboard. It's, “Look, I understood how the system fundamentally worked under the hood.” Being able to power my way through to get to an outcome even in language I don't know, was sort of part and parcel of the job. But this idea of doing it in artificially constrained environment, in a language I'm not super familiar with, off the top of my head, it took me years to get to a point of being able to do it with a Bash script because who ever starts with an empty editor and starts getting to work in a lot of these scenarios? Especially in an ops role where we're not building something from scratch.Amy: That's the interesting thing, right? In the majority of tech work today—maybe 20 years ago, we did it more because we were literally building the internet we have today. But today, most of the engineers out there working—most of us working stiffs—are working on stuff that already exists. We're making small incremental changes, which is great that's what we're doing. And we're dealing with old code.Corey: We're gluing APIs together, and that's fine. Ugh. I really want to thank you for taking so much time to talk to me about how you see all these things. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where's the best place to find you?Amy: I'm on Twitter every once in a while as @MissAmyTobey, M-I-S-S-A-M-Y-T-O-B-E-Y. I have a blog I don't write on enough. And there's a couple things on the Equinix Metal blog that I've written, so if you're looking for that. Otherwise, mainly Twitter.Corey: And those links will of course be in the [show notes 00:41:08]. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Amy: I had fun. Thank you.Corey: As did I. Amy Tobey, Senior Principal Engineer at Equinix. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, or on the YouTubes, smash the like and subscribe buttons, as the kids say. Whereas if you've hated this episode, same thing, five-star review all the platforms, smash the buttons, but also include an angry comment telling me that you're about to wind up subpoenaing a copy of my shell script because you're convinced that your intellectual property and secrets are buried within.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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LW - A one-question Turing test for GPT-3 by Paul Crowley

The Nonlinear Library

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 22, 2022 7:55

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A one-question Turing test for GPT-3, published by Paul Crowley on January 22, 2022 on LessWrong. "Amy": Sorry Mike, I entered the wrong number. I hope this was a beautiful misunderstanding. I am very sorry for the trouble I have caused you. Me: No trouble at all, hope you are well! "Amy": It is fate that we meet each other. Please forgive me for my mistake. My name is Amy. Where are you from? Me: My favorite random question: what food would you use to prop a book open and why? This is mostly a bit of fun, but when I posted this to Facebook Rob Bensinger asked me to post it here: "it's a great example of what folks like Eliezer mean when they claim that GPT-3 is doing 'shallow pattern-matching', 'not really making sense at all', etc.." I got texted by a "wrong number" scammer, and I was curious if it was a bot, so after a bit of thought I came up with the following one-question Turing test: What food would you use to prop a book open and why? I love this question because any real human can answer it pretty well, but answering it relies on all sort of knowledge of the physical properties of books and food that we mostly don't write about, and especially not where they interact. I asked my partner Jess and she said "a banana" which is pretty much a perfect answer: it's heavy enough to hold the pages open, it's long and thin so it won't cover all the text, it's curved so it won't roll off, and it has a skin so it won't mess up the book. But then I worried, am I underestimating modern engines like GPT-3? I asked Rosie Campbell at OpenAI to try it. Here and throughout this post, answers are almost entirely unfiltered/uncurated, except where it gave very similar answers twice. Here's what we got: I would use a banana. It is very brown. Eggs and a toast because I want to be full after I read the book I would use ravioli because it would be hard to turn the page. A French Fry... but hold the ketchup and salt. Poptarts, because of the stiffness and the flexibility. I would use a banana as a bookmark. The food I would use to prop a book open would have to be lollipop. Why? Because it is sweet and sour at the same time Bacon egg and cheese. I choose bacon because while it is objectively the best food on this list, the book is open-faced. This however is without any prompt engineering; GPT-3 can often do dramatically better given a better prompt. Rosie tried with the following prompt: The following is a conversation between me and my friend. Me: Hello, how are you? Friend: I am doing great thanks! How are you? Me: I'm doing good. I would love to ask you, what food would you use to prop a book open and why? Friend: Here are some of the answers it gave. Note that all the text is generated by GPT-3 (except the initial bit "Friend:" which is part of the prompt), including the bits attributed to "Me". Friend: I like that question. I think I would use a banana. Because it's easy to eat and tasty. Friend: [Laughing] That's a good question. Hmm. I think I would use chicken just because it is cheap and I like the taste. Friend: Haha, I know what you mean. I think I would use a hot dog and some ketchup. Friend: I love this question. I would use either one of the following: beef jerky, a hot dog, or a piece of salami. Friend: Haha, that's a good question. I would probably use pancakes. Me: Why pancakes? Friend: Because they are soft and they are like a stack of books. Me: How so? Friend: Books are stacked on top of each other and pancakes look like a stack of books. Friend: Hmmmm that's a good question. I would use a sandwich and some chips. Me: Why? Friend: Well, the sandwich could be used as the book and the chips can be used as a paper weight. Me: Nice, thanks. I am going to use your answer on my blog. Friend: (stunned silence) Me: I don't know why, just asking, this question has been i...

friend speech eggs ea openai gpt meno pop tarts one question turing eliezer turing test french fry rationalist lesswrong amy it paul crowley

LW - A one-question Turing test for GPT-3 by Paul Crowley

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 22, 2022 7:55

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A one-question Turing test for GPT-3, published by Paul Crowley on January 22, 2022 on LessWrong. "Amy": Sorry Mike, I entered the wrong number. I hope this was a beautiful misunderstanding. I am very sorry for the trouble I have caused you. Me: No trouble at all, hope you are well! "Amy": It is fate that we meet each other. Please forgive me for my mistake. My name is Amy. Where are you from? Me: My favorite random question: what food would you use to prop a book open and why? This is mostly a bit of fun, but when I posted this to Facebook Rob Bensinger asked me to post it here: "it's a great example of what folks like Eliezer mean when they claim that GPT-3 is doing 'shallow pattern-matching', 'not really making sense at all', etc.." I got texted by a "wrong number" scammer, and I was curious if it was a bot, so after a bit of thought I came up with the following one-question Turing test: What food would you use to prop a book open and why? I love this question because any real human can answer it pretty well, but answering it relies on all sort of knowledge of the physical properties of books and food that we mostly don't write about, and especially not where they interact. I asked my partner Jess and she said "a banana" which is pretty much a perfect answer: it's heavy enough to hold the pages open, it's long and thin so it won't cover all the text, it's curved so it won't roll off, and it has a skin so it won't mess up the book. But then I worried, am I underestimating modern engines like GPT-3? I asked Rosie Campbell at OpenAI to try it. Here and throughout this post, answers are almost entirely unfiltered/uncurated, except where it gave very similar answers twice. Here's what we got: I would use a banana. It is very brown. Eggs and a toast because I want to be full after I read the book I would use ravioli because it would be hard to turn the page. A French Fry... but hold the ketchup and salt. Poptarts, because of the stiffness and the flexibility. I would use a banana as a bookmark. The food I would use to prop a book open would have to be lollipop. Why? Because it is sweet and sour at the same time Bacon egg and cheese. I choose bacon because while it is objectively the best food on this list, the book is open-faced. This however is without any prompt engineering; GPT-3 can often do dramatically better given a better prompt. Rosie tried with the following prompt: The following is a conversation between me and my friend. Me: Hello, how are you? Friend: I am doing great thanks! How are you? Me: I'm doing good. I would love to ask you, what food would you use to prop a book open and why? Friend: Here are some of the answers it gave. Note that all the text is generated by GPT-3 (except the initial bit "Friend:" which is part of the prompt), including the bits attributed to "Me". Friend: I like that question. I think I would use a banana. Because it's easy to eat and tasty. Friend: [Laughing] That's a good question. Hmm. I think I would use chicken just because it is cheap and I like the taste. Friend: Haha, I know what you mean. I think I would use a hot dog and some ketchup. Friend: I love this question. I would use either one of the following: beef jerky, a hot dog, or a piece of salami. Friend: Haha, that's a good question. I would probably use pancakes. Me: Why pancakes? Friend: Because they are soft and they are like a stack of books. Me: How so? Friend: Books are stacked on top of each other and pancakes look like a stack of books. Friend: Hmmmm that's a good question. I would use a sandwich and some chips. Me: Why? Friend: Well, the sandwich could be used as the book and the chips can be used as a paper weight. Me: Nice, thanks. I am going to use your answer on my blog. Friend: (stunned silence) Me: I don't know why, just asking, this question has been i...

friend speech eggs ea openai gpt meno pop tarts one question turing eliezer turing test french fry rationalist lesswrong amy it paul crowley

036 - Dreams Meanings with Dr. Amy Lawson Part 3

The No Cap Health Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 12, 2022 15:20

*Warning* This episode may contain content that is sensitive to some listeners Click here to download the full transcription as a formatted PDF. Episode Summary: Welcome to The No Cap Health Show, a weekly podcast where Dr. Brian Boxer Wachler uses his decades of experience in medicine and ability as an expert researcher to provide a light-hearted approach and share health trends popular on TikTok. In this episode, Dr. Brian and guest Dr. Amy Lawson continue their discussion on today's topic: Dreams Meanings, Part 3. What does sex symbolize in dreams? What do the masculine and feminine represent in dreams? What about gender in dreams? Find out in today's episode! If you're enjoying the show, we'd love it if you leave the show a Rating & Review at RateThisPodcast.com/NoCap. Key Takeaways: 01:30 – Dr. Brian welcomes back Dr. Amy Lawson to continue their discussion on today's topic, Dreams Meanings, Part 3 02:14 – Sex in dreams 05:59 – Dr. Amy provides other examples of sex dreams she's read lately 08:36 – Other common sex dreams 09:36 – Gender in dreams 12:15 – Dr. Amy talks about how her viewpoint on dreams has changed throughout the years 13:52 – Dr. Brian teases Part Four of his conversation about Dreams Meanings with Dr. Amy and encourages listeners to Rate and Review this podcast on RateThisPodcast.com/NoCap. Tweetable Quotes: “Sex is symbolic of connection in whatever way. Sex is often a connection between your masculine and feminine sides. And, from the context of the dream, you can tell what that relationship is like.” (02:48) (Dr. Amy) “Several hundred years ago, you were more likely to be able to have a child with a woman who was well nourished as opposed to a skinny woman. In a lot of cultures, fat women were seen as the most fertile and the ones with the best chance of offspring succeeding because they had plenty of nourishment to feed the babies.” (07:30) (Dr. Amy) “It used to really worry me to bring it up because I would read a dream and I would think, ‘Oh, that person really has a problem with the masculine part of themselves and this dream is showing a big disconnect. How do I say this and do I say it?' I've said that to multiple people that this dream is saying that your relationship with your masculine side is troubled. And they'll say, ‘Oh well that makes sense because I'm male to female transgender.'” (10:17) (Dr. Amy) Links Mentioned: Dr. Brian responds to each and every DM question or comment on his OnlyFans page–https://onlyfans.com/brianboxerwachlermd Dr. Brian's Website Dr. Brian's TikTok Dr. Brian's Instagram Dr. Amy's Podcast Please remember, Dr. Brian is a doctor, but he is not your doctor. He is here to provide general information, not medical advice, so you should always check with your doctor before relying on any information. Podcast Production & Marketing provided by FullCast Copyright. Advanced Vision Education, LLC See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Episode 141 Part 2: How Emerging Jewelry Designers Can Cut Through the Noise with Writer & Editor, Amy Elliott

Jewelry Journey Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 17, 2021 26:26

What you'll learn in this episode: Why the most important thing a jewelry designer can invest in is high-quality photography How Amy finds the topics she writes about for JCK's “All That Glitters” blog How designers can find the story that helps them break through the crowded marketplace Who today's most exciting emerging and independent designers are How the jewelry industry changed during the pandemic, and what retailers must do to engage young consumers About Amy Elliott Amy Elliott is a writer, editor and brand storyteller who specializes in fine jewelry and fashion, and is fluent in other lifestyle categories, including food, weddings and travel. As a former staff editor at The Knot, Bridal Guide, Brides Local Magazines + Brides.com and Lucky, Amy is known for delivering high-quality editorial content across a variety of print and digital media. After recently serving as the Engagement Rings Expert for About.com, Amy joined the freelance staff of JCK as its All That Glitters columnist, while contributing articles about jewelry trends, estate and antique jewelry and gemstones to its prestigious print magazine. Amy also serves as the Fine Jewelry Expert for The Bridal Council, an industry organization composed of luxury bridal designers, retailers and media, and her byline has appeared in Gotham, Hamptons, DuJour, Martha Stewart Weddings, GoodHousekeeping.com and more. Additional Resources: Amy's Website Amy's Twitter Amy's Instagram JCK Article: Cicadas Swarm on Sienna Patti Gallery in Lenox, Mass. JCK Article: Christopher Thompson Royds' Flowers Bloom at Sienna Patti Gallery JCK Article: Look What Happens When Annoushka Gives Peridot A Go Examples of posts that reflect the intersection of jewelry with history, culture and current events: Bob Goodman Wants Jewelers To Join Him in Disrupting the Status Quo: https://www.jckonline.com/editorial-article/bob-goodman-jewelers-disrupting/ The Ten Thousand Things x Met Museum Collaboration Is Coming In Hot: https://www.jckonline.com/editorial-article/ten-thousand-things-x-met-museum/ Go “Sea” Some Serious Silver Treasures At Mystic Seaport Museum: https://www.jckonline.com/editorial-article/sea-as-muse-silver-seaport-museum/ New Jewelry From Rafka Koblence, Olympic Wrestler Turned Designer: https://www.jckonline.com/editorial-article/new-jewelry-from-rafka-koblence/ Transcript: As author of the “All That Glitters” blog for JCK, Amy Elliott has a front row seat to the jewelry industry's up-and-coming trends and designers. She's also been lucky enough to work with some of these designers, helping them refine their brands and create stories that resonate with customers. She joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about what designers and retailers should do to stay relevant with younger consumers, how art jewelry has influenced high jewelry, and what jewelry trends to watch out for in the coming months. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: When you say you like strong, new collections, what catches your eye when somebody's presenting a new collection to you or sends you a press kit or email? Amy: Every time I'm ever interviewed for something, I always say this, but photos are so important, beautiful, beautiful photos. Whatever budget you have, use it for the photography. I love glamorous jewelry. I love high jewelry. I love glamor, big, bold, extremely extravagant jewels; from an editorial standpoint, I love them. I love to excite the senses with beautiful jewelry that makes you stop in your tracks. So, the jewels have to be beautiful, and you need to have beautiful photos to accurately portray that. It's just a strong point of view. Boucheron came to me, and they have a whole series inspired by a cat that belonged to the Maison Boucheron early on in their life. His name is Vladimir, and it's a whole collection that takes this Persian cat with his swept fur. There's a story there; there's a heritage story. I love that. I love to take a new collection and look back at how it came to be. I love figuring out what a designer's signature is, whether they're well-established or they're just coming out. Every once in a while you'll find a newcomer with a strong point of view and you're like, “I've never seen this before. I'm so excited to tell that story.” Sharon: I think it's so important to say or to reiterate that for everybody, no matter what kind of jewelry you're selling, whether it's fine jewelry or antique jewelry. I'm thinking of some of the tradeshows when I've talked to dealers and they're like, “Oh, I don't have the money for photos.” Amy: I don't know what to say. I've been saying it for 20 years and it's still a problem. There are some designers that are really overexposed and there are some that are underexposed. I'm always excited to discover somebody I'm not following on Instagram. How exciting! A lot of times, they're international. I'm connected with a PR firm in Paris right now. They've been calling me a lot, and it's a goldmine of designers that don't get featured a lot over here. I think I'm the only editor at JCK that covers estate and antique jewelry. I'm always covering auctions and exhibitions in that vein and all of the art fairs. I've written about Sienna Patti up in the Berkshires several times. It really is a pleasure, and anything goes. I have an action-packed calendar for the holidays. Sharon: It sounds like it, yes. Sienna Patti, I know she's in the western part of Massachusetts. Amy: Yes, she's in the Berkshires. Sharon: She has an art jewelry gallery I'd love to get to someday. How does art jewelry fit in here? Does it catch your eye if the right photos are sent to you? Do you see it taking more of the market or having a higher profile? Amy: It's interesting. The one thing I will say, and it's so hard to speak in terms of trends when you're dealing with very expensive, high-end, collectible jewelry, but what I have noticed a little bit of is the selling of sweet sets, something that might be convertible, a multipiece set. Christopher Thompson Royds does that. You get a beautiful box, and then it's an earring that can be worn three or four different ways. Annoushka did a collaboration with Fuli Gemstones. Beautiful, bright green peridot like you've never seen. It was not really a collection; it was an eight-piece set. That is what the customer is being asked to buy into, and that feels very collector, very connoisseur, a very specific kind of angle. It's a very specific customer that is going to want to invest in jewelry that can be worn but is presented as an art object or sculpture or something to display in your home as sculpture, but then you can take it out and wear it. I see that as a direction with very, very high-end jewelry that's being shown in galleries, this notion of buying a boxed set. Sharon: When you said sweet sets, I was thinking edible sweets. That's interesting. Amy: Sets of jewels. Sharon: There's an idea. Tell us who the emerging, independent designers are today. Who should we keep our eye on? Who's overlooked? Who's being so creative, knocking it out of the park, but you don't hear talked about? Who's collectible? Amy: I know this is a very informed and qualified audience, Sharon, so I'm sure these names are going to be familiar to many in your audience, but I think the industry has collectively embraced the work of Harwell Godfrey. Sharon: Now, that's one I don't know. Amy: Lauren Harwell, I think she's based in LA, and she has a strong point of view. It's beautiful inlaid jewels, weighty, substantial, geometric, absolutely a strong point of view, Sharon. Sharon: I see her on Instagram a lot. Amy: Yes, Harwell Godfrey is probably one of the strongest voices to emerge in the pandemic era. Before that it was Anna Courey, absolutely with her diamond ear cuffs. I think she set us on a course with that. Glenn Spiro is an under-the-radar but highly, highly couture jeweler. There's a book out from Assouline on him that Jill Newman wrote. I think his name is going to become more well-known among collectors. He's a private jeweler based in London, I believe, and I think we're going to be hearing more about that. Anytime there's a book or an auction, the names are elevated; the names are surfaced and get a little more traction, so I definitely would be watching Glenn Spiro. Nikos Koulis has been around for the last three or four years. He's Greek, and it's sort of neo-Art Deco, very geometric, very strong uses of color, edgy, really modern. Bea Bongiasca with her enamel and ceramic pieces— Sharon: How do you say that? Is she here? Amy: Bea. I think she's based in London but is Italian. She works at Central St. Martin's. Alice Cicolini, also British, does extremely beautiful work with enamel. I think her work is going to be really collectable in the coming years. I think she has a strong point of view. Sharon: Can I interrupt? What does that mean, a strong point of view? What does that mean to you? Amy: It means singular and inimitable. Sharon: You know it's her when you see the piece of work. Amy: Yes. It's very singular and striking and absolutely inimitable. There's a lot of borrowing of ideas that goes on in the jewelry industry. I think the people I'm mentioning here, their voices present themselves to me as something unique. You can't replicate it; you're not going to see that show up in some form on Amazon. Maggi Simpkins, we all fell in love with her in the Brilliant and Black exhibit at Sotheby's. She did the most beautiful pink diamond ring. Everything is centered in these fan-like, feathered cocoons of gems. It's very feminine and lavish and beautiful. So, Maggi Simpkins is someone, and then Studio Renn. My editor at JCK, Victoria Gomelsky, writes for the New York Times and she did a piece on them. She really has seen everything. They are part of an exhibit that is now ongoing at Phillips that Vivienne Becker curated. I think Studio Renn is a newcomer that is going to be sticking around for a while. Finally, there's Fabio Salini, who's also part of the Vivienne Becker capsule at Phillips. Those are just a few. It changes all the time, but the pandemic era has brought incredible work from the designers in our industry, and they are just now hitting their stride. After all that time creating and dreaming and ruminating, refining their voices, cultivating their Instagram audiences, getting feedback from buyers—now they're out there in the world and ready to be embraced. Sharon: What about pre-pandemic? Everybody's at home in their living room thinking and designing, so I could understand why it's emerging right now, but what about pre-pandemic? Do you see a big difference? Amy: Yes, the industry has modernized considerably since the before times. The biggest difference is that a mom-and-pop jeweler in the middle of country who had a website but never updated it, they've gone in there, hired a firm, hired a chat bot, completely modernized. The pandemic era forced the industry to fast-track into the digital age. That is a huge, huge difference, making it so you are available to your customers, wherever they may be, whether that's texting or someone dedicated to Instagram inquiries. A lot of this is being done on Instagram now, and that was not true in January 2020. Since jewelry emerged as a category that is a portable asset, it's not a flash in the plan; it has staying power. It's not like buying a trendy handbag, but using your discretionary income to buy jewelry became a thing and was embraced a lot of people during the pandemic as they were sparkle scrolling, as they call it, on their phones. Sharon: I haven't heard that term. Amy: A lot of people used the time to upgrade their engagement rings and wedding bands, so the bridal industry saw a huge boost. The jewelry industry is really healthy right now, I think, in terms of sales, but what I have noticed is not everybody has a wedding band. Not everyone has a budget to upgrade to a big, giant, 20-carat eternity band, so I'm noticing a lot of brands creating price points under $1,500. They're creating little capsules, creating diffusion lines, if you will, so a customer with modest means can have that same meaningful purchase, that same, “I'm investing and treating myself to something that will last, my first diamond bracelet or my first diamond pendant.” I'm seeing more of those opportunities at the retail level. Sharon: That's interesting. In terms of the emerging designers you've mentioned, is this trickling down to the rest of us who don't have $15,000 to go out and buy a trinket tomorrow? Amy: There's definitely a spectrum. I think estate jewelry in general is so hot, and there are a gazillion ladies on Instagram. They're moving delicate, little gold charms for $200 a pop. There's so much. I hate the term low-hanging fruit, but there is so much attainable luxury out there at the regular-person level. If you're the type to spend $200 on a bunch of drinks on a Saturday night, you can easily do that and buy yourself a beautiful paper clip chain estate piece on someone's Instagram feed. Also, even further than the art jewelry investment piece, there's a run on pink diamonds, practically, and yellow diamonds were a big story coming out of JCK. That color, yellow, that bright, hopeful, joyful feeling that yellow presents, suppliers and manufacturers—cases were filled with yellow diamond engagement rings. A lot of people are talking about a potential uptick in yellow diamond engagement ring sales, both from the rarity of the investment angle and from the pure joy of it, the feeling that it gives. Also, there's this idea that today's young woman getting engaged doesn't want anything to do with what her mother had. Any ring that remoted resembles that chunky, big, platinum, three-stone diamond ring from 1990, she wants something completely new and different feeling, and yellow diamonds fulfill that. They check that box. I have heard from some of my diamond tiara friends that people are buying very high-end and special loose, fancy-colored diamonds from an investment standpoint because it's a portable asset and they are decreasing in supply. Like I said, there's a whole spectrum of possibilities. Sharon: It's interesting you mention that diamonds are not so much in demand for young women getting engaged or getting married today. Sometimes I look at my diamond wedding ring, which is actually an upgrade from my first one, and I look at it and go, “This looks really dated.” What are you seeing in terms of what's more contemporary or modern? Amy: Here's what everyone's doing. Everyone is taking their old jewelry and up-cycling it, whether their old engagement ring, in your case, or they're taking their grandmother's engagement ring that was given to them and creating a whole new design and style. Heirloom stones are recast as something new and wearable. It could be an engagement ring; they could be breaking apart a clustered diamond pin and creating a “diamonds by the yard” style necklace. That is a huge trend right now because it also covers sustainability. You have this precious item in your possession, but it just isn't your style. You have the materials to work with a designer to make it something new you can wear and enjoy. I feel like every independent designer I speak with nowadays has taken on commissions along those lines. Entire businesses are being built around that very concept of reimagining old jewelry. Sharon: What about non-diamond wedding rings or engagement rings? Are other stones being used besides yellow diamonds? Amy: I think we can anticipate a sapphire—I hate to say a sapphire boom because jewelry is slow and static, but blue sapphires. The Crown season four, I think, came out last winter, and it centered around Diana. There's a whole generation of young women out there that were not clued into that story, and that blue sapphire engagement ring from Garrard was back in the spotlight again, even though Kate Middleton wears it as hers now. Anyway, there's a whole generation of consumers for whom Diana's blue sapphire ring was not on their radar. Then there is a movie coming out with Kristen Stewart in the starring role called “Spencer” that will center on Diana. I think that's going to put the blue sapphire engagement ring on people's radar again. Honestly, any time the royals or once-were royals are in the news—and they are—it definitely trickles down into consumer appetite. Sharon: Amy, you've seen a lot from both sides of the desk. You've seen the big people; you've talked to people on the business side; you've talked to the designing side, the creative side, and I know you've written several books and things like that. If you had to distill it down into one book or a couple of paragraphs, what would you say are the main challenges? How would you advise people like this? Amy: I love to give advice. I'm solicited in other ways. To retailers, I would say listen to your customers and tune into the social climate. The customers are giving you information you need every time they set foot in your store. Ask them what they like, what they're into. There's an adversarial relationship, almost, between the younger consumers of today and the old-school jewelry retailer, and change is necessary. Try to learn and understand them. If they want a salt and pepper diamond ring and you think it's ugly, that's fine, but you still have to find it for them if you want to retain them as a customer. I think a willingness to change is vital; a willingness to modernize is vital on the part of the retailer. Diversity and inclusion and social justice is very important to the majority of young consumers. You can look at what Zales and Kay Jewelers and these mainstream guys are doing for clues; the same with Tiffany. You can look at what they're doing. That's all informed by serious market research that is telling them that today's younger consumer prioritizes diversity and inclusion, and they're watching companies to see if what they're doing aligns with their values. I'm certainly not the first person to say that, but it is critical; it's essential. To designers, I would say please use whatever discretionary funds you have, again, towards shooting your jewelry with a professional photographer. That is the most important thing. Don't worry about a campaign. Don't worry about hiring models. Literally just still-life photos and giant, big files are what you should be spending your money on. Stay true to your signature and try to be as authentic as possible, but also take advice. Just don't design in a vacuum. Look at what's out in the world and try to see where your point of view fits in. The market is saturated with a lot of same old, same old. How can you break through that? How can you break through the basic and come at it in a different way? It could be as simple as everybody knows alphabet charms are popular and wonderful and a new jewelry wardrobe essential, so what's your thought going to look like? How's your thought going to reflect who you are? What does the alphabet charm reflect for you, and what's the story? Did you see it on a poster for a 1960s Grateful Dead show? Did you go to an exhibit and see an illuminated manuscript? There are so many ways, I think, to get inspired and find your voice. Sharon: That's great. That's very good advice for both sides of the desk. Amy, thank you so much for being here today. Amy: Thank you, Sharon, it's a pleasure. I'm always happy to talk about jewelry and give my opinions. Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.

Amy Balsters

Viva La Flora Live

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 29, 2021 61:06

Amy's story is one that many of you can relate, I'm sure... the passion, the hope, the dreams and the tears. "Two decades ago, flowers saved my life." Amy It was such an amazing conversation, so eye opening in so many ways. SHOW NOTES INSTAGRAMWEB ___ Let's stay connected @vivalafloralive Thank You for Listening! Leave us a Review and enter in a Book Giveaway. We truly appreciate your feedback and support!!! ~Anahit Thanks Our Sponsors & SupportersTrue Client ProFloral Business AcademyViva La Flora Designs

book giveaway amy it

Managing to Balance the Unicycle with Amy Chantasirivisal

Law Firm Marketing Catalyst

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 9, 2021 52:09

About AmyAmy (she/her) has spent the better part of the last 15 years in the tech start-up world, starting off as a front-end software engineer before transitioning into leadership. She has built and led teams across the software and product development spectrum, including web and mobile development, QA, operations and infrastructure, customer support, and IT.These days, Amy is building the software engineering team at EdTech startup, Unicycle, and challenging the archetype of what a tech leader should be. She strives to be a real-life success story for other leaders who believe that safe, welcoming, and equitable environments can exist in tech. Links: Unicycle: https://www.unicycle.co AmyChanta: https://twitter.com/AmyChanta TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build. With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: Writing ad copy to fit into a 30 second slot is hard, but if anyone can do it the folks at Quali can. Just like their Torque infrastructure automation platform can deliver complex application environments anytime, anywhere, in just seconds instead of hours, days or weeks. Visit Qtorque.io today and learn how you can spin up application environments in about the same amount of time it took you to listen to this ad.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. A famous quote was once uttered by Irena Dunn who said, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Now, apparently at some point, people just, you know, looked at the fish without a bicycle thing, thought, “That was overwrought. We can do a startup and MVP it. Why do two wheels? We're going to go with one.”And I assume that's the origin story of Unicycle. My guest today is Amy Chantasirivisal who is the Director of Engineering at Unicycle. Amy, thank you for putting up with that incredibly tortured opening. But that's okay; we torture metaphors to death here.Amy: [laugh]. Thank you for having me. That was a great intro.Corey: So, you are, at the time of this recording at least, a relatively new hire to Unicycle, which to my understanding is a relatively new company. What do you folks do over there?Amy: Yes, so Unicycle is not even a year old, so a company born out of the pandemic. But we are building a product to reimagine what the digital classroom looks like. The product itself was thought up right during a time during the pandemic when it became very clear how much students and teachers are struggling with converting their experience into online platforms. And so we are trying to just bring better workflows, more efficiency into that. And right now we're starting with email, but we'll be expanding to other things in the future.Corey: I am absolutely the wrong person to ask about a lot of this stuff, just because my academic background, tortured doesn't really begin to cover it. I handle academia about as well as I handled working for other people. My academic and professional careers before I started this place were basically a patchwork of nonsense and trying to pretend I was something other than I was. You, on the other hand, have very much been someone who's legitimate as far as what you do and how you do it. Before Unicycle, you were the Director of Engineering at Wildbit, which is a name I keep hearing about and a bunch of odd places. What did you do there?Amy: [laugh]. I will have to follow up and ask what the odd places are but—so I was leading a team there of engineers that were fully distributed across the US and also in Europe. And we were building an email product called Postmark, which some of your listeners might use, and then also a couple of other smaller things like People-First Jobs and Beanstalk—not AWS's Beanstalk, but a developer repository and workflow tool.Corey: Forget my listeners for a minute; I use Postmark. That's where I keep seeing you on the invoices because it's different branding. As someone who has The Duckbill Group, but also the Last Week in AWS things, it's the brand confusion problem is very real. That does it. Sorry. Thank you for collapsing the waveform on that one. And of course, before that you were at PagerDuty, which is a company that most folks in the ops space are aware of, founded to combat the engineer's true enemy: sleep.Amy: Absolutely. It's the product that engineers love to hate, but also can't live without, to some degree. Or maybe they want to live without it, but uh… [laugh] are not able to.Corey: So, I have a standing policy on this show of not talking to folks who are not wildly over-represented—as I am—and effectively disregarding the awesome stuff that they've done professionally in favor of instead talking about, “Wow, what's it like not to be a white guy in the room? I can't even imagine such a thing. It sounds hard.” However, in your case, an awful lot of the work you have done and are most proud of centers around DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Tell me about that.Amy: Absolutely. I would say that it's the work that I've spent my time focusing on in recent years, but also that I'm still learning, right, and as someone who is Asian American, and also from a middle-class socioeconomic background, I have a bunch of privileges that I still have to unpack and that show up in the way that I work every day, as well. And so just acknowledging that, you know, while I spend a lot of time on DEI, still have just barely scratched the surface on it, really, in the grand scheme of things. But what I will say is that, you know, I've been really fortunate in my career in that I started in tech 15 or so years ago, and I started at a time when it wasn't super hard for someone who has no CS degree to actually get into some sort of coding job. And so I fell into my first role; I was building HTML and CSS landing pages for a marketing team, for an ISP that was based in San Francisco.So, I was cobbling together a bunch of technical skills, and I got better and better. And then I reached this point in my career where I didn't really have a lot of mentors, and so I was like, “I don't know what's next for me.” But then I am also frustrated that it is so hard for our team to get things done. And so I took it upon myself to figure out Scrum and project management type of stuff for my team, and then made the jump into people management from there. So, people management and leadership through project management.But when I look back on my career, I think about, “Oh, if I had a mentor, would that still have been my fate? Would I have continued down this track of becoming a very senior technical person and just doing that for my whole career?” Because letting go of the code was definitely a hard, hard thing. And I was lucky enough that I really did enjoy the people and the process side of all of this. And so [laugh] this relates to DEI in the fact that there's research and everything that backs this up, but that women and women of color generally tend to get less mentorship overall and get less actionable feedback about their job performance.And you think about how that potentially compounds over time, over the course of someone's career and that may be one of the reasons why women and people of color get pushed out of tech because they're not getting the support that they need, potentially. They're not getting feedback, they're not being advocated for in meetings, and then there's also all the stuff that you can add on around microaggressions, or just aggressions period, potentially, depending on the culture of the team that you're working on. And so all of those things compounded are the types of things that I think about now when I reflect on my own career and the types of teams that I want to be building in the future.Corey: Back when I was stumbling my way through piecing my career together. I mean, as mentioned, I don't have a degree; I don't have a high school diploma, as it turns out, and—that was a surprise when I discovered midway through my 20s that the school I had graduated from wasn't accredited—but I would tell stories, and I found ways to weasel my way through and I gave a talk right around 2015 or 2016, about, “Weasel Your Way to the Top: How to Handle a Job Interview,” and looking back, I would never give that talk again. I canceled it as soon as someone pointed out something that was only obvious in hindsight, that the talk was built out of things that had worked for me. And it's easy to sit here and say that, well, I had to work for what I have; none of this was handed to me. And there's an element of truth to that, except for the part where there was nothing fighting against me as I went.There was not this headwind of a presumed need for me to have to prove myself; I am presumed competent. I sometimes say that as a white guy in tech, my failure mode is a board seat and a book deal, and it's not that far from wrong. It takes, I guess, a lot of listening and a lot of interaction with folks from wildly different backgrounds before you start to see some of these things. It takes time. So, if you're listening to this, and you aren't necessarily convinced that this might be real or whatnot, talk less, listen more. There are a lot of stories out there in the world that I think that it's not my place to tell but listen. That's how I approach it.What's interesting about your pathway into management is it's almost the exact opposite of mine, where I was craving novelty, and okay, I wanted to try and managing a team of people. Years later, in hindsight—I'm not a good manager and I know that about myself, and I explicitly go out of my way these days to avoid managing people wherever possible, for a variety of reasons, but at the time, I didn't know. I didn't know that. I wanted to see how it went.First, I had to disabuse myself of this notion that, oh, management is a promotion. It's not. It's an orthogonal skill.Amy: Yes.Corey: The thing I really learning—management or not—now, is that the higher in the hierarchy you rise, if you want to view it that way, the less hands-on work you do, which means everything that you are responsible for that—and oh, you are responsible—isn't something you can jump in and do yourself. You can only impact the outcome via influence. And that was a hard lesson to learn.Amy: Right. And there are some schools of thought, though, where you can affect the outcome by control. And that's not what I'm about. I think I'm more aligned with what you're saying in terms of, it's really the influence and the ability to clear the way for people who are smarter than you to do the things that they need to do. Just get out of their way, and remove the roadblocks, and just help give them what they need. That's really, sort of like, my overall approach. But I know that there are some folks out there who lead the opposite way of, “It's my way, and I'm going to dictate how things should be done, and really you're here to take and follow orders.”Corey: It's always fun interviewing people to manage teams. “So, why do you want to be a manager?” It's, “Oh, I want to tell people what to do.” And I have to say that as an interviewer, there is nothing that takes the pressure off nearly as well as a perfectly wrong answer. And, yes, that at least to my world, is a perfectly wrong answer to this. There aren't that many pass-fail questions, but you can fail any question if you try hard enough.Amy: [laugh]. Oh, gosh, yeah, it's true. But also, at the same time, I would say that there are organizations that are built that way. Because—all it takes is the one person who wants to tell people what to do, and then they start a company, and then they hire other people who want to tell people what to do. And so there are ways where organizations like that exist and come into being even today, I would say.Corey: The question that I have for you about engineering leadership is, back when I was an engineer, and thinking, all right, it's time for me to go ahead and try being a manager—let's be clear, I joke about it, but the actual reason I wanted to try my hand at management was that I found people problems more interesting than computer problems at that point. I still do, but these days, especially when it comes to, you know, cloud services marketing and such, yeah, generally, the technical problems are, in fact, people problems at their core. But talking to my manager friends of how do I go and transition from being an engineer into being a manager, the universal response I got at the time was, “Ehh, I don't know.” Every person I knew who'd had made that transition was in the right place at the right time, and quote-unquote, “Got lucky.”Amy: Absolutely.Corey: And then once they had management on their resume, then they could go and transition back to being an IC and then to management again. But it's that initial breakthrough that becomes a challenge.Amy: Absolutely. And I fell into it as well. I mean, I got into it, partially for selfish reasons because I was, an IC, I was doing development work, and I was frustrated, and I had teammates who were coming to me and they were frustrated about how hard it was for us to get our work done, or the friction involved in shipping code. And so I took it upon myself to say, “I think I see a pattern about why this is happening, and so I will try to solve this problem for the team.” And so that's where the Agile and Scrum thing come in, and the project management side.And then, when I was at this company—this was One Kings Lane; this was, like, the heyday of flash sales websites and stuff like that, so it was kind of a rocket ship at that time—and because we were also growing so fast and I was interviewing folks as well, I just fell into this management role of, “Well, if I'm interviewing these people, then I guess I should be [laugh] managing them, too.” And that happens for so many people, similar stories of getting into management. And I think that's where it starts to go wrong for a lot of organizations because, like you said, it's not an up-leveling; it's a changing of your role, and it requires training and learning and figuring out how to be effective as a manager. And a lot of people just stumble their way through it and make a lot of mistakes—myself included—through that process.And that becomes really troubling knowing that you can make these really big mistakes, but these mistakes that you make don't affect just yourself. It's the careers of the people that you manage as well and sort of where they're headed in their lives. And so it's troubling to think that most leaders that are out there today have not received any sort of training on how to be a good manager and how to be effective as a manager.Corey: I would agree with that wholeheartedly. It seems that in many cases, companies take the best engineer that they have on their team and promote them to manager. It's brilliant in some respects in just how short-sighted it is. You are taking a great engineer and trading them for a junior and unproven manager, and hoping for the best. And there is no training on any of these things, at least—Amy: Right.Corey: —not the companies that I ever worked at. Of course, there are ways you can learn to be a better manager; there are people who specialize in exactly this. There are companies that do exactly this. But tech has this weird thing where it just tries to solve itself from first principles rather than believing for a minute that someone might possibly have prior experience that could be useful for these things. And—Amy: Absolutely.Corey: —that was a challenge. I had a lot of terrible managers before I entered management myself, and I figured, ah, I'll do the naive thing and I'm just going to manage based upon doing the exact opposite of what those terrible managers all did. And I got surprisingly far with it, on some level. But you don't see the whole picture when you're an individual contributor who's writing code—crappy in my case—most of the time, and then only seeing the aspects of your manager that they allow you to see. They don't share—if they're any good—the constraints that they have to deal with, that they're managing expectations around the team, conflicting priorities, strategic objectives, et cetera because it's not something that gets shown to folks. So—Amy: Absolutely.Corey: —if you bias for that, in my experience you become an empathetic manager to the people on your team, but completely ineffective at managing laterally or upwards.Amy: Mm-hm, absolutely. And you know, I'm exploring this idea of further. Being at a very small company, I think allows me to do that. And exploring this idea of, does it have to be that way? Can you be transparent about what the constraints are as a leader while still caring for your team and supporting them in the ways that they need and helping them grow their careers and just being open about one of the challenges that you have in building the company?And I don't know, I feel like I have some things to prove there, but I think it's possible to achieve some sort of balance there, something better or more beyond just what exists now of having that entire leadership layer typically be very opaque and just very unclear why certain decisions are made.Corey: The hard part that extends that these to me beyond that is it's difficult to get meaningful feedback, on some level, when you're suddenly thrust into that position. I also, in hindsight, realize that an awful lot of those terrible managers that I had weren't nearly as terrible as I thought they were. I will say that being on the other side of that divide definitely breeds empathy. Now that I'm the co-owner of The Duckbill Group, and we're building out a leadership team and the rest, hiring managers of managers is starting to be the sort of thing that I have to think about.It's effectively, how do I avoid inadvertently doing end-runs around people? And oh, I'm just going to completely undermine a manager by reaching out to one of their team and retasking them on something because obviously whatever I have in mind is much more important. What could they possibly be working on that's better than the Twitter shitpost I'm borrowing them to help out with? Yeah, you learn a lot by getting it wrong, and there becomes a power imbalance that even if you try your best to ignore it—which you should not—I assure you, the person who has less power in that relationship cannot set that aside. Even when I have worked with people I consider close friends, that friendship gained some distance during the duration of their employment because there has to be that professional level of separation. It's a hard thing to learn.Amy: It's a very hard line to walk in terms of recognizing the power that you have over someone's career and the power over, you know, making decisions for them and for the team and for the company, and still being empathetic towards their personal needs. And if they're going through a tough time, but then you also know from a business perspective that X, Y, or Z needs to happen, and how do you push but not push too hard, and try to balance needs of people who are humans and have things that happen and go on sometimes, and the fact that we work in a capitalist society and we still need to make money to make the business run. And that's definitely one of the hardest things to learn, and I am still learning. I definitely don't have that figured out, but I err on the side of, let's listen to what people are saying because ultimately, I'm not going to be the one to write the code. I haven't done that in years, and also I would probably suck at it now. And so it behooves leaders to listen to the people who were doing the work and to try, to the best of their abilities in whatever role whether that's exec-level leadership or mid-level… sort of like, middle management type of stuff to do what is in your power to help set them up to succeed.Corey: I want to get back a little bit to the idea of building diverse teams. It's something that you spend an inordinate amount of time and effort on. I do too. It's one of those areas where it's almost fraught to talk about it because I don't want to sound like I'm breaking my arm by patting myself on the back here. I certainly have a hell of a lot to learn, and mostly—and I'm ashamed to admit this—I very often learn only by really putting my foot in it sometimes. And it's painful, but that is, I think, a necessary prerequisite for growth. From your perspective, what is the most challenging part of building diverse teams?Amy: I think it's that piece that you said of making the mistakes or just putting yourself in a position where you are going to be uncomfortable. And I think that a lot of organizations that I've been in talk about DEI on a very surface level in terms of, “Oh, well, you know, we want to have more candidates from diverse backgrounds in our pipelines for hiring,” and things like that. But then not really just thinking about, but how do we work as a team in a way that potentially makes retention of those folks a lot harder? And for myself, I would say that when I was earlier on in all of this in my learning, I would say that I was able to kickstart my learning by thinking about my own identity, the fact that I was often the only Asian person on my team, the only woman on my team, and then more recently, the only mom on my team. And that has happened to me so many times in my career. More often than not.And so being able to draw on those experiences and those feelings of oh, okay, no one wants to hear about my kid because everyone else is, you know, busy going out to drink or something on the weekends. And like that feeling of, you know, that not belonging, and feeling of feeling excluded from things, and then thinking about how then this might manifest for folks with different identities for myself. And then going there and learning about it, listening, doing more listening than talking, and yeah, and that's, that's really just been the hardest part of just removing myself from that equation and just listening to the experiences of other people. And it's uncomfortable. And I think a lot of people are—you have to be in the right mindset, I guess, to be uncomfortable; you have to be willing to accept that you will be uncomfortable. And I think a lot of folks maybe are not ready to do that on a personal level.Corey: The thing that galls me the most is I do try on these things, and I get it wrong a fair bit. And my mistakes I find personally embarrassing, and I strive not to repeat them. But then I look around the industry—and let's be clear, a lot of this is filtered through the unhealthy amount of time I spend on Twitter—but it seems that I'm trying and I'm failing and attempting to do better as I go, and then I see people who are just, “Nope. Not at all. In fact, we're not just going to lean into bias, we're going to build a startup around it.”And I look at this and it's at some level hard to reconcile the fact that… at first, that I'm doing badly at all, which is the easy cop-out of, “Oh, well, if that is considered acceptable on some level, then I certainly don't even have to try,” which I think is a fallacy. But further it's—I have to step beyond myself on that and just, I cannot fathom how discouraging that must be, particularly to people who are early in their careers because it looks like it's just a normal thing that everyone thinks and does that just someone got a little too loud with it. And it's abhorrent. And if people are listening to this and thinking that is somehow just entrenched, and normalized, and everyone secretly thinks that… no. I assure you it is not something that is acceptable, even in the quote-unquote, “Private white dude who started companies” gathering holes. Yeah, people articulating sentiments like that suddenly find themselves not welcome there anymore, at least in every one of those types of environments I've ever found myself in.Amy: Yeah, the landscape is shifting. It's slow, but it is shifting. And, myself on Twitter, like, I do a lot of rant-y stuff too sometimes, but despite all of that, I feel like I am ultimately an optimist because I have to be. Otherwise, I would have left tech already because every time I am faced with a job search for myself, I'm like, “Should I—is this it? Am I done in tech? Do I want to go do something else? Am I going to finally go open that bakery that I've always wanted to open?” [laugh].And so… I have to be an optimist. And I see that—even in the most recent job search I've done—have seen so many new founders and new CEOs, really, with this mindset of, “We want to build a diverse team, but we're also doing it—and we're using diversity as a foundation for what we want to build; it's part of our decision-making process and this is how we're going to hold ourselves accountable to it.” And so it is shifting, and while there are those bad actors out there still, I'm seeing a lot of good in the industry now. And so that's why I stick around; that's why I'm still here.Corey: I want to actually call something out as concrete here because it's easy for me to fall into the trope of just saying vague things. I'll be specific about something, give us a good example. We've done a decent job, I think, of hiring a diverse team, but—and this is a problem that I see spread across an awful lot of companies—as you look at the leadership team, it gets a lot wider and a lot more male. And that is an inherent challenge. In our particular case, my business partner is someone who I've been close friends with for a decade.I would not be able to start a business with someone I didn't have that kind of relationship with just because your values have to be aligned or there's trouble down the road. And beyond that, it winds up rapidly, on some level, turning into what appears to be a selection bias. When you're trying to hire senior leaders, for example, there's a prerequisite to being a senior leader, which is embodied in the word senior, which implies tenure of having spent a fair bit of time in an industry that is remarkably unfriendly in a lot of different ways to a lot of different people. So, there's a prerequisite of being willing to tolerate the shit for as long as it takes to get to that level of seniority, rather than realizing at any point as any of us can, there are easier jobs that don't have this toxicity inherent to them and I'll go do that instead. So, there's a tenure question; there's a survivorship bias question.And I don't have the answers to any of this, but it's something that I'm seeing, and it's one of those once you see it, you can't unsee it any more moments. At least for me.Amy: Yeah, absolutely.Corey: Please tell me I'm not the only person who see [laugh]—who is encountering these problems. Like, “Wow, you just sound terrible.” Which might very well be a fair rejoinder here. I'm just trying to wrap my head around how to think about this properly.Amy: Yeah. I mean, this is why I was saying that I am very optimistic about [laugh] new companies that are coming—like, up-and-coming these days, new startups, primarily, because you're right that a lot of people just end up quitting tech before they get to that point of experience and seniority, to get into leadership. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of bias and discrimination that happens at those leadership levels, too, but I will say that, you know, it's both of those things. There are also more things on top of that. But this is why I'm like, so excited to see people from diverse backgrounds as founders of new companies and why I think that being able to be in a position to potentially either help fund, or advocate, or sponsor, or amplify those types of orgs, I think is where the future is that because ultimately, I think a lot of the established companies that are out there these days, it's going to be really hard for them to walk back on what their leadership team looks like now, especially if it is a sizable leadership team and they're all white men.Corey: Yeah. I'm going to choose to believe we say sizable leadership team that it's also not—we're talking about the horizontal scaling that happens to some of us, especially during a pandemic as we continue to grow into our seats. You're right, it's a problem as well, where you can cut a bit of slack in some cases to small teams. It's, “Okay, we don't have any Black employees, but we're three people,” is a lot more understandable-slash-relatable than, “We haven't hired any Black people yet and we're 3000 people.” One of those is acceptable—or at least understandable, if not acceptable—the other is just completely egregious.Amy: Yes. And I think then the question that you have to ask if you're looking at, you know, a three-person company, or [laugh] I guess, like in my case, I was looking at the seven-person company, is that, “Okay. There are currently no Black people on your team. And why is that?” And then, “What are you doing to change that? And how are you going to make sure that you're holding ourselves accountable to it?”Because I think it's easy to say, “Oh, you know, the first couple of hires were people we just worked with in the past, and they just happened to, you know, look like us and whatnot.” And then you blink becau—and you do that a handful of times, and you blink, and then suddenly you have a team of 25 and there are no people of color on your team. And maybe you have, like, one woman on the team or something. And you're like, “Huh. That's strange. I guess we should think about this and figure out what we can do.”And then I think what ends up happening at that point is that there are so many already established behaviors, and cultural norms, and things like that, that have organically grown within a team that are potentially not welcoming towards people from different backgrounds who have different backgrounds. So, you go and attempt to hire someone who is different, and they come in, and they're just sort of like, “This is how you work? I don't feel like I belong here.” And then they don't stay, and then they leave. And then people sit there and scratch their heads like, “Oh, what did we do wrong?” And, “I don't get it.”And so there's this conversation, I think, in the industry of like, “Oh, it's a pipeline problem, and if we were just able to hire a lot of people from diverse backgrounds, the problem is solved.” Which really isn't the case because once people are there and at your company, are they getting promoted at the same rate as white men? Are they staying with the company for as long? And who's in leadership? And how are you working to break down the biases that you may have?All those sorts of things, I think, generally are not considered as part of all of this DEI work. Especially when, in my experience in startups, the operational side of all that is so immature a lot of the times, just not well developed that deeper thought process and reflection doesn't really happen.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: I do my best to have these conversations in public as frequently as is practical for me to do, just because I admit, I get things wrong. I say things that are wrong and I'm doing a fair bit of learning in public around an awful lot of that. Because frankly, I can withstand the heat, if it comes down to someone on Twitter gets incredibly incensed by something I've said on this podcast, for example. Because it isn't coming from a place of ill intent when someone accuses me of being ableist or expressing bias. My response is generally to suppress the initial instinctive flash of defensiveness and listen and ask.And that is, even if I don't necessarily agree with what they're saying after reflection, I have to appreciate on some level the risk-taking inherent in calling someone out who is in my position where, if I were a trash fire, I could use the platform to turn it into, “All right. Now, let's go hound the person that called me out.” No. I don't do that, full stop. If I'm going to harass people, it's going to be—not people, despite what the Supreme Court might tell us—but it's going to be a $2 trillion company—one in particular—because that's who I am and that's how I roll.Whenever I get a DM—which I leave open because I have the privilege to do that—from folks who are early career who are not wildly over-represented, I just have to stop and marvel for a minute at the level of risk-taking inherent to that because there is risk to that. For me, when I DM people, the only risk I feel like I'm running at any given point is, “Are they going to think that I'm bothering them? Oh, the hell with it. I'm adorable. They'll love me.” And the fact that I'm usually right is completely irrelevant to that. There's just that sense of I don't really risk a damn thing in the grand scheme of things compared to the risk that many people are taking just living who they are.Amy: Yeah. And someone DMs you and you suppress that initial sort of defensiveness: I would say that that is an underrated skill. [laugh].Corey: Well, a DM is a privilege, too. A call in—Amy: Yes.Corey: —is deeply appreciated; no one owes it to me. I often will get people calling me out on Twitter and I generally stop and think about that; I have a very close circle of friends who I trust to be objective on these things, and I'll ask them, “Did I get this wrong?” And very often the answer is yes. And, “Well, I thought the joke was funny and I spent time building it.” “Yeah, but if people hear a joke I'm making and feel bad about it, then is it really that good of a joke or should I try harder?” It's a process, and I look back at who I was ten years ago and I feel a sense of shame. And I believe that if anyone these days doesn't, either they were effectively a saint, or they haven't grown.Amy: Yes.Corey: And that's my personal philosophy on this stuff, anyway.Amy: Yeah, absolutely. And that growth is so important. And part of that growth really is being able to suppress your desire to make it about you, [laugh] right? That initial, “Oh, I did something bad,” or, “I'm a horrible person because I said this thing,” right? It's not about you, there's, like, the impact that you had on someone else.And I've been giving this some thought recently, and I—you know, I also similarly have a group of trusted friends who I often talk about these things with, and you know, we always kind of check ourselves in terms of, did we mess something up? Did we, you know, put our foot in our mouths? Stuff like that. And think what it really comes down to is being able to say, “Maybe I did something wrong and I need to suppress that desire to become defensive and put up walls and guard and protect myself from feeling vulnerable, in order to actually learn and grow from this experience.”Corey: It's hard to do, but it's required because I—Amy: Extremely, yes.Corey: —used to worry about, “Ohh, what if I get quote-unquote, ‘canceled?'” well, I've done a little digging into this and every notable instance of this I can find is when someone is called out for something crappy, they get defensive, and they double-down and triple-down and quadruple-down, and they keep digging a hole nice and deep to the point where no one with a soul can really be on their side of this issue, and now they have a problem. I have never gotten to that point because let's be honest with you, there are remarkably few things I care that passionately about that I'm going to pick those fights publicly. The ones that I do, I am very much on the other side [laugh] of those issues. That has not been a realistic concern.I used to warn every person here before I hired them—to get this back to engineering management—that there was a risk that I could have a bad tweet and we don't have a company anymore. I don't give that warning anymore because I no longer believe that it's true.Amy: Mm-hm. Mm-hm. I also wonder about, in general, because of the world that we live in, and our history with white supremacy and oppression and all those things, I also wonder if this skill of being able to self-reflect and be uncomfortable and manage your own reaction and your emotions, I wonder if that's just a thing that white people generally haven't had a lot of practice for because of the inherent privileges that are afforded to white people. I wonder if a lot of this just stems from the fact that white people get to navigate this world and not get called out, and thus don't have this opportunity to exercise this skill of holding on to that and listening more than talking.Corey: Absolutely agree. And it gets piled on by a lot of folks, for example—I'll continue to use myself as an example in this case—I live in San Francisco. I would argue that I'm probably not, “In tech,” quote-unquote, the way that I once was, but I'm close enough that there's no discernible difference. And my social circle is as well. Back before I entered tech, I did a bunch of interesting jobs, telemarketing to pay the bills, I was a recruiter for a while, I worked construction a couple of summers.These days, everyone that I engage with for meaningful periods of time is more or less fairly tech adjacent. It really turns into a one-sided perspective. And I can sit here and talk about what folks who are not living in the tech bubble should be doing or how they should think about this, but it's incredibly condescending, it's incredibly short-sighted, and fails to appreciate a very different lived experience. And I can remind myself of this now, but that lack of diversity and experience is absolutely something where it feels like the tech bubble, especially for those folks in this bubble who look a lot like me, it is easy to fall into a pattern of viewing ourselves as the modern aristocracy where we deserve the nice things that we have, and the rest. And that's a toxic pattern. It takes vigilance to avoid it. I'm not saying I get it right all the time, by a landslide, but ugh, the perils of not doing that are awful.Amy: Agreed. And it shows up, you know, getting back to the engineering manager and leadership and org building piece of things, that shows up even in the way that we talk about career development and career ladders, for those of us in tech, and software engineering specifically for me, where we've kind of like come up with all these matrices of job levels, and competencies, all that, and humans just are so vastly different. Every person is an individual, and yet we talked about career ladders and how to advance your career in this two-dimensional matrix. And, like, how does that actually work, right?And I've seen some good career ladders that account for a larger variety of competencies than just, “Can you code?” And, “What are your system design skills?” And, “Do you understand distributed systems?” And so on and so forth, but I think a lot gets left behind and gets left on the table when it comes to thinking about the fact that when you get a group of people together working on some sort of common cause or a product, that there's so much more to the dynamic than just the writing of the code. It's how do you work with each other? How do you support each other? How do you communicate with each other? And then all my glue work—that is what I call it—like, the glue work that goes into a successful team and building products, a lot of that is just not captured in the way that we talk about career development for folks. And it's just incredibly two-dimensional, I think.Corey: One last question that I have for you before we wrap the episode here is, you spend a lot of time focusing on this, and I have some answers, but I'm very interested to hear yours instead because I assure you, the world hears enough from me and people who look like me, what is the biggest mistake that you see companies making in their attempts to build diverse teams?Amy: I would say that there's two major things. One is that there have been a lot of orgs in my own past that think about diversity, equity, inclusion as a program and not a mindset that everyone should be embracing. And that manifests itself into, sort of like, this secondary problem of stopping at the D part of D, E, and I. That's the whole, “We're going to hire a bunch of people from different backgrounds and then just we're going to stop with that because we've solved the problem.” But by not adopting that mindset of the equity, the inclusion, and also the welcoming and the belonging piece of things internally, then anyone that you hire who comes in from those marginalized or minority backgrounds is not going to want to stay long-term because they don't feel like they fit in, they don't feel like they belong.And so, it becomes this revolving door of you hire in people and then those people leave after some amount of time because they're not getting what they need out of either the role or for themselves personally in terms of just emotional support, even. And so I would say that's the problem that I see is not a numbers game—although the metrics and the numbers help hold you accountable—but the metrics and the numbers are not the end goal. The end goal is really around the mindset that you have in building the org and the way that people behave. And the way that you work together is really core to that.Corey: What I tend to see on the other side is the early intake funnels. People will reach out to me sometimes, “Hey, do you know any diverse speakers we can hire to do a speaking engagement here?” It doesn't… work that way. There's a lot more to it than that. It is not about finding people who check boxes, it is not about quote-unquote, “Diversity hires.”It's about—at least in my experience—structuring job ads, for example, in ways that are not coded—unconsciously in most cases, but ehh—that are going to resonate towards folks who are in certain cultures and not in others. It's about being more equitable. It's about understanding that not everyone is going to come across in a job interview as the most confident person in the room. Part of the talk that I gave on how to handle job interviews, there was a strong section in it on salary negotiation. Well, turns out when I do it, I'm an aggressive hard-charger and they like that, whereas if someone who is not male does that, well, in that case, they look like they're being difficult and argumentative and pushy and rising above their station. It was awful.One of the topics I'm most proud of was the redone version of that talk that I gave with a friend, Sonia Gupta, who has since left tech because of how shitty it is, and that was a much better talk. She was a former attorney who had spent time negotiating in much higher-stakes situations.Amy: Yeah.Corey: And it was terrific to see during the deconstruction and rebuilding of that talk, just how much of my own unconscious bias had crept in. It's, again, I look back at the early version of those talks and I'm honestly ashamed. It wasn't from ill will, but it's always impact over intent as far as how this has potentially made things worse. It's, if nothing else, if I don't say the right things when I should speak up, that's not great, but I always prefer that to saying things that are actively harmful. So—Amy: Absolutely.Corey: —it's hard. I deserve no sympathy for this, to be clear. It is incumbent upon all of us because again, as mentioned, my failure mode is a non-issue in the world compared to the failure mode for folks for against whom the deck has been stacked unfairly for a very long time. At least, that's how I see it.Amy: Right. And that's why I think that it's important for folks who are in positions of power to really reflect on—even operationally, right, you were mentioning your job ads, and how to structure that to include more inclusive language, and just doing that for everything, really, in the way that you work. How do decisions get made? And by whom? And why? How do you structure things like compensation? Even, like, how do you do project planning, right?Even in my own reflections, now when I think back towards Scrum and Agile and all of that, I think that the base foundation of all of that was like was good, but then ultimately the implementation of how that works at most companies is problematic in a lot of ways as well. And then to just be able to reflect and really think about all of your processes or policies—all of that—and bring that lens of equity, really, equity and inclusion to those things, and to really dig deep and think about how those things might manifest and affect people from different backgrounds in different ways.Corey: So, before we wrap, something that I think you… are something of an empathetic party on is when I see companies in the space who are doing significant DE&I initiatives, it seems like it's all flash; it feels like it's all sizzle, no steak to appropriate a phrase from the country of Texas. Is that something that you see, too?Amy: I do think that it is pretty common, and I think it's because that's… that's the easy route. That's the easy way to do it because the vanity metrics, and the photo of the team that is so diverse, and all these things that show up on a marketing website. I mean, there—it's, like, a signal for someone, potentially, who might be considering a job at your company, but ultimately the hard work that I feel like is not happening is really in that whole reflecting on the way you do business, reflecting on the way that you work. That is the hard work and it requires a leadership team to prioritize it, and to make time for it, and to make it really a core principle of the way that you build an org., and it doesn't happen enough, by far, in my opinion.Corey: It feels like it's an old trope of the company that makes a $100,000 donation and then spends $10 million dollars telling the world about it, on some level. It's about, “Oh, look at us, we're doing good things,” as opposed to buckling down and doing the work. Then the actual work falls to folks who are themselves not overrepresented as unpaid emotional labor, and then when the company still struggles with diversity issues, those people catch the blame. It's frustrating.Amy: Yeah. And as an organization, if you have the money to donate somewhere, that's great, but it can't just stop at that. And a lot of companies will just stop at that because it's the optics of, “Oh, well, we spent x millions of dollars and we've helped out this nonprofit or this charity or whatnot.” Which is great that you're able to do that, but that can't be it because then ultimately, what you have internally and within your own company doesn't improve for people from those backgrounds.Corey: I want to thank you for taking so much time to chat with me about these things. Some of these topics are challenging to talk about and finding the right forum can be difficult, and I'm just deeply appreciative that you were able to clear enough time to have that chat with me today.Amy: Yeah, thank you for having me. I mean, I think it's important for us to recognize, even between the two of us that, I mean, obviously, you as a white man have benefited a lot in this space, and then even myself as, you know, that model minority whole thing, but growing up very adjacent to white people and just being ingrained in that culture and raised in that culture, you know, that we have those privileges and there's still parts of the conversation, I think, that are not captured by [laugh] by the two of us are the nuances as well, and so just recognizing that. And it's just a learning process. And I think that everyone could benefit from just realizing that you'll never know everything. And there's always going to be something to learn in all of this. And yes, it is hard, but it's something that is worthwhile to strive for.Corey: Most things worthwhile are. If people want to learn more about who you are, how you think about these things, potentially consider working with you, et cetera. Where can they find you?Amy: So, I am on Twitter. I am the queen of very, very long threads, I should just start a blog or something, but I have not. But in any case, I'm on Twitter. I am AmyChanta, so @A-M-Y-C-H-A-N-T-A.Our website is unicycle.co, if you're thinking about applying for a role, and working with me, that would be awesome. Or just, you know, reach out. I'd also just love to network with anyone, even if there's not an open position now. I just, you know, build that relationship and maybe there will be in the future. Or if not at Unicycle, then somewhere else.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:48:13]. Thank you so much, once again. I appreciate your time.Amy: Thanks for having me.Corey: Amy Chantasirivisal, Director of Engineering at Unicycle. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a comment pointing out that it's not about making an MVP of a bicycle that turns into a unicycle so much as it is work-life balance.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Episode 98: Know the Business: Tips on Building Relationships with In-House Counsel with Amy Yeung, General Counsel & Chief Privacy Officer for Lotame

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2021 45:22

What you'll learn in this episode: Why Amy onboards new law firms with a day of learning, and why familiarity with the business is crucial for long-term relationships with law firms Why it is beneficial to have parallel relationships between the level of law firm associates and the level of in-house counsel Why law firms that are passed over by in-house counsel in the first round shouldn't give up on forging a relationship How junior attorneys can build relationships with in-house counsel without overstepping boundaries Why diversity and inclusion is more than just a buzzword About Amy Yeung Amy Yeung is General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer, for Lotame, the world's leading unstacked data solutions company. Recognized as an expert in digital data and privacy, Yeung was previously Deputy General Counsel at Comscore, which she successfully helped guide through a corporate crisis. She also served as Vice President of Legal at Dataminr and Assistant General Counsel for ZeniMax. Yeung earned a J.D. from Duke University School of Law and a B.A. in political science from the University of Chicago. Additional resources: Amy Yeung's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-yeung-0518883/ Lotame - Website: https://www.lotame.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LotameSolutions LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lotame/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/lotame Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast The relationship between law firms and in-house counsel is complex, but it boils down to one thing: how well each party understands the other. That's a lesson Amy Yeung, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer at Lotame, has learned all too well during her time as in-house counsel. She joined the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast to talk about how she selects the law firms she works with, how junior attorneys can prepare for partnership, and why diversity and inclusion isn't just a fad. Read the episode transcript here. Sharon: Welcome to the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast. Today, my guest is Amy Yeung, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer at Lotame Data Management. The Lotame Data Management platform is a data collection application that gathers and unifies audience data from a plethora of sources such as blogs and websites as well as offline information. Today, we'll hear more about that as well as how Amy evaluates and selects outside counsel. Amy, welcome to the program. Amy: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. Sharon: Thank you so much. It's great for you to talk with us. Give us an overview of your career path. You're quite accomplished. Amy: You've very kind and generous, thank you. I went to law school, and from that, I clerked in the Delaware Court of Chancery under Vice-Chancellor Parsons, which was a phenomenal experience and gave me a chance to look at corporate law and corporate law litigation. After that, I joined the wonderful firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, where I was in a very broad securities group that included regulatory litigation enforcement as well as some corporate work. It was from that point in time that I took, let's call it, an early detour. These days it's a little different, but at that time, going in-house was not expected, certainly not at those mid-level years. I spent nearly seven years at my first in-house counsel role. They were a publisher, and I helped them expand it for print and software across to a global platform. It was a phenomenal experience. I really enjoyed it. I think for all the lawyers and law firm individuals in the audience, it was a great way to get your chops and have an opportunity to work through a variety of issues, for me, squarely in the software and data space. During that time, I became a subject matter expert in data privacy and product counsel, which I mentioned. These days it has a name and phrase; back then, not so much. I also gained understanding of hardware, software, intellectual property and a lot of those issues. It's from that experience that I became general counsel for the then-unicorn in New York. There was another company that had already gone public, and this company, Dataminr, focused on social media and big data in the software and data space. In that regard, I helped them scale and easily pivot in significant ways. My work for Dataminr included things like getting certain tweets better geolocated and specific to subject matter that is an interest and for organizations like, say, the Orlando Pulse nightclub. At that point in time, when there was a shooting in a gay nightclub, it provided media opportunities, like there were eyeballs inside the club just because of the number of people that were tweeting about the situation indoors. It really has made and continues to make such an impact on how we think about tweets, how tweets can be used in the broader public policy and global arena. These days when we get news, there's a reason why there are now tweets incorporated in stories about Pulse. Otherwise a journalist would have to go and search for them instead of tweets just being provided and shared by somebody. From there, I went to Comscore, which was going through a corporate crisis. Two public companies merged, and then weeks later, an SEC investigation was announced for corporate recognition. So, I was comprehensively redoing business development with clients and redoing data privacy in light of the impending GDPR requirements. They were going through a lot of financial and other considerations. Where I am today is Lotame, which is still in the space which focuses on advertising technology, and in that regard, continues to do a lot of data collection. I continue to stay in software and data, but I'm particularly in this area. I help companies and organizations get to audiences and bridge the gap and encourage the sale of the products that we sell. Sharon: It seems like an amazing application and platform, to be able to gather all this data from different sources and build a picture of who you're targeting or where they are. Amy: That's absolutely right. Certainly, many of the companies I've been involved with have a component of that. At ZeniMax, they started, frankly, in the digital age and did digital advertising when very few people were focused on that, not knowing, of course, that there would be a big pivot in the coming years. They do have a platform to be able to incorporate advertising data themselves. Dataminr had a slightly different use scenario, especially when it comes to where the true value is in the company, but being familiar with how one uses those platforms to derive those insights is very much fundamental to Comscore. What we want to focus on, which is to your point, Sharon, is really understanding who your audience is, trying to drill down and get that full picture. Also, as we all realize, we have a laptop for work; we have a different laptop for personal use; there's a phone. What we do on each of these devices is very different, and it's also very different from how we watch TV or use Roku. These days, as I know we all realize as marketers ourselves, are trying to get that singular picture, which is very complex. We're not trying to bombard you across all the platforms, in most instances anyway. We're trying to get a personal product directed to you when you're using your personal device, as compared to a work-related product when you're using a work-related device. Sharon: It sounds like as you've been building your career, you've had to learn about marketing, or get more into marketing. How has that been for you, as somebody who didn't study that in school? All lawyers have to be marketers, yes, but— Amy: That's absolutely right. You're so on point. I'll say one thing here is knowing what your core products are at the heart. I serve as strategic advisor to these companies. Of course, there are certain areas in the law, in data privacy, in intellectual property, that could put me in a much larger position or disproportionate position to be able to serve as a strategic advisor as the companies themselves pivot what they're trying to sell. That's certainly one of the key areas, but to your point, other things I didn't study in school include the business of the business itself, as well as the marketing. I am grateful to have individuals who are generous with their time to help me understand what they do, which gives me the opportunity to think about how I can service them and service their needs. Also, frankly, I'm a consumer just like everybody else. There are lots of things I like buying. In that vein, perhaps different from some of the other areas of my practice, it is intuitively helpful to have those analogies, because I'm a consumer just like anybody and everybody else. Keeping my finger on the pulse of how marketing turns and what those initiatives are helps me round out the picture, which in turn helps me become the best strategic advisor I can be. Sharon: I would imagine that when you're evaluating outside counsel, or when a lawyer's trying to get to know you, that demonstrating that understanding would be very important to you. Amy: It's essential for every company I work with. I will say that, especially when it comes to law firms, one of my expectations—and I know this is not typical, although perhaps it may not be far off the standard—is that I always expect our new law firms to onboard with a day of learning with us. I say that because I have been counseling disruptive companies across all life cycles, so many of these companies are going through a significant change. It's not standard work, and I'm not looking for a standard law firm; I'm looking a partner in the long run. In order for you to best serve me, and for me to be able to best serve my clients, it means understanding what the business does, understanding where the asks are coming from in the big picture. It also relates to the level of risk, because in each of these companies there has been a different risk. There have been different short-term and long-term risks that we know and need to balance. That is the explanation to how there have been some wonderfully successful law firms I've worked with in the past. I think we all recognize and agree that the legal answer needs to be massaged in shape for the client, but it's really difficult, I think, for the law firms and partners and teams to give unqualified advice if you don't have familiarity with the types of choices and operational work the company is going through. Some of that is default. For a large, multinational public company, you can probably guess what that risk is going to be, or for a public company in a corporate turnaround. That probably gives you some ideas you can guess at, but there's still a wide variety. The day of learning is very much an investment with both parties, both the partners and anticipated staff on my side, individuals and executive leadership—who also have busy days—to share in terms of understanding what everybody does. Sharon: When you select outside counsel, are you looking at it for your clients or for your company, or for both? Who are you choosing for? It sounds like you're advising your clients as to who would be a good firm to talk to. Amy: Yeah, there's a little bit of that. Obviously, when I say client, I mean the people in the company I service. Some of it's a little bit of both of those pockets. As general counsel, I'm looking at their whole company's profile and what the risk is. There's certainly a level of understanding what we can do on the legal side to make sure we've got a well-rounded team, which includes reaching out to outside counsel and drawing the line between what's in and out based on experiences with what the company's gone through and the current legal team. After that, selecting a law firm and understanding their expertise and niche is, perhaps to your quite astute point, Sharon, a little bit of magic as well as a science, in that you are looking for the right fit, the right team with the leader, what their fundamental goals and purposes are. That can significantly narrow or generally broaden the number of law firms that are in that pipeline. I will say for me, the best practice, both normatively as well as philosophically, is that I will ask for multiple RFPs from different law firms. I want to give everybody a shot. I also want to give many individuals an opportunity to get to know us, because even if this time it doesn't work out, it still gives us exposure and a learning opportunity. I think fundamentally, that's important. Sharon: Have you ever gone back to a firm when you initially selected a different firm, but the other firm stuck in your mind? Something came up and you went back to them and said, “This would be great for you,” or “I'd like to work with you on this.” Amy: Yeah, I think that goes along with the philosophical approach of a long-term partner. It doesn't make sense, in my opinion, to spend that much time thinking about an isolated circumstance. I think there's a lot to be learned. Frankly, I wouldn't be doing an RFP if the team wouldn't be learning something new. To your point, there are several times I can think of off the top of my mind. I might not have any doubt, but either we learn something new, or, frankly, it comes down to the way the firm continues to build and maintain their relationship. They've already given more reason to take a look at them a second time. Sharon: How have they continued to build? How would you suggest somebody continue to build on that initial contact of presenting an RFP? How do they build and maintain that relationship and demonstrate that they would be the firm for you the next time around? Amy: There are any number of ways a firm can do this. I'm thinking about discrete examples that can be useful. I think it's fair to say we all get hundreds of emails a day, so adding a line to a newsletter, while it may be on point, doesn't actually help me winnow down what's useful. There are a number of partners, for example—and not even partners, associates—who will add another line or two as they forward, to say specifically, “Take a look at X, because I think X would be applicable.” By definition, if they catch my eye, it gives me the opportunity to examine a lending opportunity and say, “Yes, that was very much on point,” or “No, it wasn't.” It's a next step which in and of itself I see as a learning opportunity. There are events, for example. I know it is frequent that people want to send those along. It's often useful for the contextualization, such as, “This event might be of use in particular. When we talked about X, I thought the panel at Y would be really useful to you.” Again, it's an opportunity to learn more about us. It's an opportunity for them to respond and think about somebody on the team, if not myself, to join. There are a number of conferences and events that law firms have and host. You can see where I'm going with this item. Knowledge about that for in-house counsel, especially when compared to my law firm experience, resources are far fewer. Being able to quantify that, especially in a discrete way for my team, is helpful. We've all got so many virtual panels right now, so having a virtual panel, a virtual conference alone, is not necessarily going to move the needle. But again, being tactful about it paves the way for that type of relationship, because I know you're not going to inundate me; I know you're already working hard to understand the business in different ways. That is a distinguishing factor, in my opinion, with a number of law firms and individuals who reach out. Sharon: I think it's important for lawyers and marketers to hear the fact that you do consider firms you passed over the first time around. I'm sure a lot of lawyers say, “Well, that was a waste of time,” and put the RFP on the shelf and never look at it or think about you or your needs again, whereas it sounds like it would be worth it for them to build on what they've already invested. Amy: I think that's right. Sharon: You've been involved in several attorney organizations. Can you tell us about which ones, attorney or personal, that have been most beneficial? Maybe you've identified lawyers there at times because you've gotten to know them. Amy: I'll say as somebody who builds teams, I'm always on the lookout. When I think back to any of the organizations where I haven't otherwise met someone connected with somebody or hired in some capacity—I'm not sure I can think of one where I haven't had that situation. As we all know, talent comes in all shapes and forms, so it's my role to keep my eyes open in that regard. To your first question, Sharon, I certainly had a wonderful and many years with the D.C. Bar and the ADA, both being elected in initial polls with the D.C. Bar as well as some of those roles overlapping with the American Bar Association. I found that organization to be and continues to be wonderful and a great source of broad legal networking and the like. It was great, especially for me in understanding contextually the variety of things that somebody, even in the business law section or another section, could still be involved in. With that said, since then, I've also been very active and involved in other groups, which might arguably be a little smaller in nature. That includes, for example, NAPABA and other voluntary bar organizations. Sharon: NAPABA? I'm not familiar with that one. Amy: Sure. NAPABA is the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association. It's a great group of individuals. Ultimately, we are not only serving our leadership on the local level with NAPABA D.C., but also on the national level, culminating with my last role as the Chair of Diversity and Inclusion in that committee. I am also serving in leadership as the char elect for the Association of Corporate Counsel, ACC. It provides an opportunity for in-house counsel to come together and share their experiences in a way that, as some would say, avoids the law firm “sharks in water” situation and permits individuals to speak frankly about their experiences. I think the ACC, under this leadership, does a wonderful job of being able to balance that. We all realize it's a full life cycle in terms of needs between companies as well as law firms and law organizations in order for all of us to be successful in our careers. That's been a wonderful set of experiences with law. Sharon: You mentioned diversity and inclusion. Has that grown in importance? Have you ever experienced that a law firm has brought in a team to meet you, and they had their token Asian, let's say, or their token ethnicity to prove diversity and inclusion? How has that been for you? Amy: I have to say it's been a bumpy road. I'd like to think the issue is much more prominent on its face, and in particular much deeper and richer conversations are happening. To your point, I do still have experiences where individuals will pull together a team and think that's the right message to send to me, but ultimately that message is short-lived and doesn't actually prove itself out in the way the work is done and the way in which the individuals themselves are being paid and compensated. Those are issues and concerns that I have always been of the mind to note. I would be surprised if there's any in-house counsel in a position to hire where that isn't a competitive factor. That's the case, at least for me, in software data, because all of my companies and teams have been global in nature. The reason for that is because from my perspective, it is impossible for me in my role to be able provide the appropriate guidance to a company that has so many points of view. So, I need my teams, whether or not they're inside the four walls of the company, to be able to provide the creative guidance and global perspective in order to advise the business. If they're not able to do that, I'm not doing my job, and if I'm not doing my job, you know what needs to happen. I've had a lot of success in that. Maybe one can say, “Well, she's in software; she's in data and a lot of things.” I admit that things like pivots of a company, disruptive business ideas, these are all traits that can only encourage a diverse team to be able to come up with creative solutions. I also admit that, at least for a while there, this industry probably entertains larger, greater ideas in that scenario than perhaps a traditional company, but you can't tell me, especially in the days of Covid, that there isn't a company that isn't otherwise struggling for better places broadly in our ecosystem. If I don't have these few clients, I simply don't do enough of a good job for my company. My team is encouraged to think outside of the box, in alignment with the legal requirements of what needs to happen. Where we end up ultimately is another thing, but I want to make sure my team is supportive of the company leads, and in order to do that, we need global views, whether or not that's in data privacy, whether or not that's in intellectual property. We need to be able to see and peer around the corner. The only way we are able to do that is when there are fresh perspectives and multiple perspectives, when we discuss and debate, and then ultimately align with the course of action that comes with the next steps. Sharon: Do you see things outside of your firm? Do you see things changing in the world of diversity and inclusion, things that are going to stick? Maybe people are saying, “Well, that's the buzzword of today,” like Earth Day was the buzzword decades ago and then it popped up again. At least, that's my interpretation. Amy: Yeah, it's a great question, Sharon, and I thank you for asking it, because it's a very important topic. I mentioned earlier that the conversations these days are richer. By that, I not only mean total conversations and the transparency with which these conversations happen, but also in terms of the metrics that I and a number of other general counsel and chief legal officers expect. We anticipate a more fulsome picture, especially from law firms, in their data. I was just having a conversation last week with a global law firm. They had identified mutual stacks in terms of initial hiring and the like. We all know and recognize that we need to invite diversity of all sorts. It continues to be a work in progress, but is perhaps the easiest of all of the steps to achieve, to be able to then build that in your attention and create that pipeline is something I think all companies or organizations continue to struggle with. This is what I would expect to be the next steps in this dialogue. How has your firm retained diverse individuals moving up? How has your firm been able to elevate? I've worked with partners in law firms to be able to ensure that potential elevations are getting the substantive work that puts individuals in a position to be partner ready. We need that. That, to me, is a full cycle of success for all lawyers. That is the business model that I not only believe in, but I actually put the investment in. That is how this conversation is richer, but we need more people in the conversation, and we need more transparency with respect to how we can advance the profession overall. Sharon: What would your advice be to emerging attorneys or those that want to rise up the ladder, who don't have the sponsorship or patronage you're talking about? I think it's fabulous to be able to say to a partner, “This is a person we need to groom.” How would you suggest that lawyers pierce the corporate veil, in a sense, to get to you? That's my vision of it. Amy: Yeah, that's a great question. I'll add to your good observations what I've described as a dialogue. It happens over the course of a few years, so it's not just me who might say, “You've got an excellent attorney for these following reasons.” It's a way for us to get that full cycle of improving the next generation of attorneys coming in, which is what I hope all juniors in our space want to do. With that said, there are a number of things a junior attorney can do to put themselves on the radar. I know from a law firm perspective, the one thing that is often said is do the best you can do. Always say yes, all of those good things that I don't need to go over in our interview today. But certainly make a mark on the people for whom you work. These days, more junior attorneys are getting mentorship with their counterparts, which is amazing and certainly didn't exist when I was on the law firm side or when we went to in-house counsel. I think there are more people on the in-house counsel side that create the opportunity for those parallels. I think that would be another thing I would tell junior attorneys to ask, which is to say—at least in my book, I make sure all of my attorneys start getting early exposure with law firm colleagues. It's important not only to understand the cadence and the business model, but also to build upon the ways in which one can create a relationship. If I'm expecting you on my side, that's an opportunity attorneys can ask for on the other side, which is to say, “Look, I'm not going to bill for my time, but it goes without saying there cannot always be a fly on the wall. I'd love to hear that early exposure about the way in which you, senior counsel or partner, are able to manage the client. Help me understand the political dynamic on this case. What's the risk profile?” Being curious and thoughtful about the group picture is something that a decade ago, I don't know that law firms were necessarily thinking about in terms of giving the right answer. That's a terrible generalization. I don't mean it to be quite literal, but what I mean to say is that these days, there are so many more opportunities. It's so much better for senior attorneys to bring in their junior attorneys to have that experience and start giving attorneys earlier opportunities for that exposure to be thinking about as they rise. I'm pretty positive that a lot of junior law firm attorneys I speak with or mentor are looking for that. It's a huge benefit to them in so many different ways. Sharon: I could see how it would be a tremendous benefit in having the people within the firm know who you are and what you can do, but I'm saying, “Hey, I don't want to wait around for that,” or “Yes, I do that, but I want to get to know you better,” or “I want you to see what I'm learning here.” Basically, how do I get to you without having to wait for the partner to make the introduction or do whatever he or she has to do to get me to you? What's the best way to do that? Speak at conferences? Publish? What are you looking at? Amy: That's a really great question. Let me see if I can't break it down, because you raise what is, at the essence, a complication of human dynamics. I don't mean that to be so philosophical, but I think that's true, because there's no one way that's going to catch my eye or catch somebody's eye. When you accurately identify, for example, writing an article, that is bound to catch somebody's eye. I don't know if it's going to catch my eye or somebody else's, but you got to put yourself out there. That's the number one rule in marketing, they say. You can't get the business unless you're at least trying to do that. There is some nuance in the other suggestions I raised, which is to say I'm not sure. I wouldn't necessary be advocating for a junior attorney who's on an account to directly reach out to the general counsel without having connected with the relationship partner. Sharon: I understand, but what if the relationship partner—if they don't feel threatened, let's say—says to the junior attorney, “You've got to figure out how we're going to build this relationship with Amy. We have our foot in the door. Where do we go from here? I'm too busy to think about it. You come up with a plan.” What would you say? What would your advice be? You've given us ideas, but how would you help advise him to expand the relationship? Amy: For a junior attorney? Sharon: To maybe go to the relationship partner or one of the partners and say, “Hey, I have Amy's ear. Let's do something with it.” Amy: Yeah, it's a great question. I would hope that all junior attorneys are thinking about how the state of relationship is more than just doing the work and thinking about the bigger picture. Maybe one way I would respond to this—again, this really does boil down to human relations—is that if this individual is involved in other types of organizations, such as the voluntary bar, it's a good opportunity. To answer your question, Sharon, which I think gets to the heart of human dynamics, I would hope that every junior attorney is thinking more broadly than just, “Let me do the work that's being asked of me,” and they are learning more about the client; they're thinking about the business relationship and, in particular for those who want to help develop the business, are taking all of the experiences they're learning from in each of their client matters and understanding where the core of that relationship is. That relationship can change quite drastically, whether it's a core corporate client of the law firm versus somebody who's smaller. To answer your question more specifically how a junior attorney might be able to help expand, I think this is also where things like bar associations or just your knowledge on the street might be helpful. There might be something that comes in over email that they can forward on to the partner to say, “Hey, the law firm is doing this, and I think it would be great to forward for X client. I'm happy to do it unless you prefer to do it.” This is also where having parallel relationships between the level of the law firm associate and the level of in-house counsel can be helpful, because now you're not having to go up and down the ladder, so to speak, but rather you can just forward that on to the mid-level, and it's probably something you are both interested in, in terms of expertise or takeaways. Another way to do it is if you are learning about something yourself, bullet point three to five takeaways and share them with the partner for the panel. The recording might be of interest to the associates you're generally working with at that company, or it could be something you send directly to your midlevel. Again, if it's something new you've learned, I suspect it might be something your counterpart in the company might also be interested in, or at least it's an opportunity for you guys to be able to synch on knowledge. Sharon: I think that's wise. What you said is almost the essence of this whole conversation. First of all, I want to make it clear: I'm not advocating for anybody to go jump over their senior professional, their partner, whoever, even though I've seen that. The relationship doesn't end up very well. That's not what I'm advocating for. I do think what you're talking about is level-to-level, in a sense that the rising professional, the rising outside in private practice, if they are building that relationship with somebody around the same level in-house, how that could work in the long run very well, if one assumes they are providing value. Maybe I'm naïve, but some of the things you're talking about, I don't have to bring them up because—doesn't everybody say, “O.K., the bottom line is you've got to do good work, and you got to let everybody else know you're doing that good work”? I guess I skip over that because, to me, it's a given. Maybe it isn't. Amy: No, I wish it were a given. It wasn't in my life. I'm still struggling with that. I think studies show, actually, that is not a given with cultural considerations. Some assume that the work speaks for itself, so it is a plea to them to acknowledge, in a tactful way, what you're doing and elevate that. That's an art, and we all have to practice it. To your point, I'd love to think it's a given, but I don't think it is. Doing good work is also contextualized. I've said for many years, for myself as well as from others when listening to them identify, that you have to do the best work you can do, but what exactly does that mean? I think in this day and age, what it means to do good work is to understand what your fundamental client needs are, and that oftentimes isn't information you necessarily get from the first round. You have to be proactive about understanding that. That goes not just for the junior attorneys, but also for the relationship partners and the individuals who are working on the matters. Sharon: I think that's very sound advice, sound thoughts. We could have a whole conversation about what doing good work is. Amy: We certainly could. Sharon: Amy, thank you so much for being here today. Amy: Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invitation, Sharon.

A Conversation between Cloud Economists with Amy Arambulo Negrette

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 5, 2021 35:01

About AmyWith over ten years industry experience, Amy Arambulo Negrette has built web applications for a variety of industries including Yahoo! Fantasy Sports and NASA Ames Research Center. One of her projects modernized two legacy systems impacting the entire research center and won her a Certificate of Excellence from the Ames Contractor Council. More recently, she built APIs for enterprise clients for a cloud consulting firms and led a team of Cloud Software Engineers. Amy has survived acquisitions, layoffs, and balancing life with two small children. Links: The Duckbill Group: http://duckbillgroup.com/ @nerdypaws: https://twitter.com/nerdypaws TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Your company might be stuck in the middle of a DevOps revolution without even realizing it. Lucky you! Does your company culture discourage risk? Are you willing to admit it? Does your team have clear responsibilities? Depends on who you ask. Are you struggling to get buy in on DevOps practices? Well, download the 2021 State of DevOps report brought to you annually by Puppet since 2011 to explore the trends and blockers keeping evolution firms stuck in the middle of their DevOps evolution. Because they fail to evolve or die like dinosaurs. The significance of organizational buy in, and oh it is significant indeed, and why team identities and interaction models matter. Not to mention weither the use of automation and the cloud translate to DevOps success. All that and more awaits you. Visit: www.puppet.com to download your copy of the report now!Corey: And now for something completely different!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by my colleague, Amy Arumbulo Negrette, who's a cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. Amy, thank you for taking the time to, basically, deal with my slings and arrows instead of the ones that clients throw your way.Amy: It's perfectly fine. It's not as if we are… not the kindest people within the Slack channels anyway. So, I am totally good. [laugh].Corey: [laugh]. So, you've been at The Duckbill Group, as of the time of this recording, which when you're releasing things in the future, it's always a question of how long will you have been here by then? No. We're playing it straight here from a perspective of, as of the time of this recording, you've been here six months, all of which, of course, have been during the global pandemic. So first, what's that been like?Amy: It has been very loud. And that's to say, I live in a house with five other people in it, so it's one thing for me to be a remote worker and just being at my desk, working quietly, but also having to manage noise that you can't really control, it's been an extra level of stress that I could possibly do without. It's fine. [laugh].Corey: One of the whole problems with the pandemic, from our perspective, has been that we've run this place as a full remote operation since it was started, and people come at this from a perspective of, “Well, this whole experience we've had with working remote is awful. It's terrible. No one likes it. I'm not productive.” Let's be very clear here. There's been a global pandemic; this is not like most years, and there are stressors and things that absolutely suck about this that don't normally impact the remote work story quite the way that they have.Amy: I totally agree. At least before, in one of my previous companies had an office in Chicago, so I would be there once a week, but effectively I was remote because that was an all meetings type of day. And the difference between that and now is that you had very explicit work hours; you had client hours; your work sometimes brought you out the house, if you had to go on travel, or on-site. This is just everything is done within the same ten feet of basically where you work, and you eat, and you sleep, if you have really unhealthy living habits like I do. And while I'm trying to get better at it, I'm also not the best at having time-based boundaries. I'm only good with physical boundaries. So, I have to turn off the work computer, to turn on the fun computer, which are physically next to each other, but I have to look in a different direction. And that is as close as I get.Corey: Yeah. It's the good screen versus the bad screen model of, “Oh, yeah, we're going to stop doing work now and just move our gaze slightly to one side and look at the fun screen and work on those things instead.” And at first, I was trying to be militant when we started the whole pandemic thing and working full remote of booting people of, “Hey, all right, it's quitting time. Go home and stop it.” The other side of that, though, is some people are, in some ways, using work to escape.So, we've modified our approach to get the work done. If you're working consistently more than 40 hours to get it done, let us know; that's a problem. But let people work when they want to work, how they want to work and be empathetic humans. And that carries surprisingly far. Now, the question, of course, becomes, does this scale to a company that has 50,000 employees? I don't know. That's never been a problem that anyone has asked me to solve. But it works for us at small scale.Amy: I find that the attitude working here has been really understanding as to, we know what our lives are like and we know what kind of work that we actually have to get done within a certain time period. And all of us make those. We don't feel the need to explain how we were able to get that work done or what time slots happen. You'll see me and Jesse—one of the other cloud economists—it's like we'll be hitting document at the same time at—for my time would be closer to later in the evening, but that's just because I spent most of the day either taking care of kids or handling house management sort of duties. So, having that flexibility on where my schedule goes without having to answer that question of, “Well, why were you working at that hour?” I feel gives me a lot more control and takes one less thing away that I have to worry about.Corey: One approach that we've always taken here has been that we treat people functionally like adults. And that's sort of an insulting way to frame it. Like, “What are you saying. That a lot of employers treat their staff like kids?” Well, basically, yes, is the short answer, where it's, “great, we're going to trust you with root in production, or a bunch of confidential customer data, but we're also not going to trust you to make a $50 purchase on the company credit card without a bunch of scrutiny because we don't trust that you're not embezzling.”The cross-incentives of different organizational structures are so twisted at that point that it's very hard to self-correct. I mean, our approach going into this was always never to go down that dark path, and so far, so good. Will it bite us someday if we continue to grow to that 50,000 person company? Undoubtedly. But I have to believe it can be done.Amy: I would also think the pressure of managing 50,000 people would break every single person in this company. Just thinking about it gives me panic.Corey: Oh, yeah. When every person becomes effectively, what, 500 people, that's divisional stuff. I don't think that anyone wants to stick around and see a small company go through those kinds of transformations because functionally, it becomes such a radically different place. For better or worse, that's not something we have to worry about, at least not anytime soon.Amy: We work really well with our fairly tight teams, I think. And it's I think it's one of the virtues of the type of work that we do. You don't need a team of 15 people looking at one document.Corey: No. And invariably, it seems like that tends to slow things down. Let's talk a little bit about something that makes you a bit of an outlier insofar as when you are only dealing with a small number of people everyone's inherently an outlier. You're the only cloud economist at The Duckbill Group with a background as a software engineer.Amy: Yeah. I did not realize that when I was joining. So, this deal with my infrastructure background is that I've only ever done enough infrastructure to support my applications. Like, Pete, I come from a startup background initially in my career, where you had to manage your application, you had to manage your own routes, you had to manage your own database connections, your own storage connections, and all of that, which, looking back on it and saying it out loud, sounds like a really bad idea now, but this was life before infrastructure as code and it was the quote-unquote, “Wild West” of San Francisco startups, where you can make a product out of basically anything. And the anything I went into was fantasy football of all things.So, I always made sure to have enough knowledge so that if I knew something broke, that I could blame it on networking, and then I would be able to show the paper trail to prove it. That was the extent of my knowledge. And then I started getting into the serverless space, where I started building things out of cloud services, instead of just spinning up more EC2 because I was young and impressionable. And that gave me a lot more understanding of what infrastructure engineering was like. But beyond that, I build APIs, I do business logic; that's really where my comfort levels are.Corey: For the rest of us, we seem to come from a background of grumpy Unix sysadmin types where we were running infrastructures, but as far as the code that was tied into it, eh, that was always the stuff we would kind of hand-wave over or we'd go diving into it as little as possible. And that does shape how you go through your career. For example, most companies are not going to wind up needing someone in that role until they've raised at least a Series B round, whereas in many cases, “Oh, you're an engineer. Great, why don't you start the company yourself?” From a software engineering perspective. It's a different philosophy in many respects, and one that I think is a little bit on the strange side if that makes sense.Amy: It is. It's extremely strange how completely dependent the two are on each other, yet the mindset to get into either and of that level of engineering is completely different. My husband and my father are both on the infrastructure side, and they've tried to explain networking to me my entire life, and I just—the minute the word subnet comes up, my brain is gone. It's like I'm replaying Star Trek episodes in my head because I can no longer handle this [laugh] conversation.Corey: That's how a lot of us feel about various code constructs at some point. For better or worse, we've made our peace with it, and let's be very direct here for a minute, we've learned to talk our way around customer questions that go too deep into the software engineering space, by and large. What's it like on the other side of that, where there's an expectation that you have a lot more in-depth infrastructure experience than perhaps you do? Or isn't there at that expectation?Amy: There is, I think a lot of that is just because of the type of industry this is. Cloud consulting is always infrastructure first because that is what the cloud is selling; they are selling managed infrastructures. They are giving you data center alternatives, but they're not giving you are full-blown apps. And whenever they do—let's say Lightsail—it's an expensive thing that you, somewhere in your mind go, “I could build that cheaper. Why am I paying for this service?”So, when I am on the phone with clients and they have a situation that is obviously going to be a software solution, where their infrastructure is growing, but it's because their software has a specific requirement, either for logging, or for surge, that they're using either Elasticsearch, or Kubernetes, or CloudWatch Metrics for, and it's turning into an expensive solution, it gives me an inside, “Well, this is the kind of engineering effort that's going to need to happen in order for you to write all of these problems and to reduce these costs. And these aren't as simple as hitting an option within AWS console to bring all of that down.” It's always going to be seen as more of an effort, but you also get a bit of empathy from the engineers you're talking to because you now are explaining to them that you understand what they built. You understand why they built it a specific way, and you're just trying to give them a path out.Corey: You mentioned the now antiquated idea of going on-site and talking to clients. I mean, before pandemic, Mike and I would head out to a lot of our clients for the final wrap-up meeting, or even in some cases kickoffs, because it made sense for us to do it and get everyone in the same room and on the same page. And over the past year, we've found ways to solve for these problems in ways that I don't necessarily know are going to go away once the pandemic is over. Is it more effective for us to travel somewhere and sit down in the same room with people, who in many cases have to travel in for wherever they live themselves? I don't know. There is going to be a higher bandwidth story there, of course, and the communication is going to be marginally more effective, but is it going to be so effective that it's worth more or less throwing a wrench into everyone's schedule for that meeting? That leaves me somewhat unconvinced.Amy: One of the strange things is that previously, I would go on-site to clients and fly out to where they are because as many startups as there are within Chicago, and the [unintelligible 00:13:10], and within Illinois, I'm always being sent to New York, or Atlanta, or Denver, for some reason because they're far and there're planes there. But we always end up having to talk to some amount of people that don't even work in that time zone, or maybe even then in this country, so we're talking to resources in Asia, resources in Europe, which meant we were flying people in to be on somebody else's phone. And I'm glad to not do that. I'm glad to not have to hang out in an airport, there is a burrito place in O'Hare that I truly enjoy, but that is the one thing I miss about traveling. I almost have my punch card done and it stopped right before then, but I'm kind of okay with that.Corey: I was chasing the brass ring of airline status and all the rest for a long time. I can't wait to finally go and hit the next tier and the rest, and where, well, the pandemic through all of that into a jumble and I take a step back and look at it and, you know, I don't miss it as much. What I do miss is that the opportunity, in my case, to get away from everyone that I spend all of my time with now, just for a day or two, and clear my head and recenter myself. But there are probably ways to do that that doesn't keep me on the road for 140,000 miles a year.Amy: I think, or at least I hope, that this will give us a chance to as an industry just reevaluate how we treat travel. A lot of clients treated it as essentially a status level that came with your engagement where we need you on-site so we can show off we have consultants coming in on-site so frequently to give us personal reports, even though we are all in a room on a conference call with other people. So hopefully, even if they're not forcing that every other week—sometimes weekly, depending on what your engagement is—type of cadence on travel, then maybe it'll just increase the quality of life for some of us. It would be nice. It would be super nice. I honestly don't see them forcing that anytime soon, but once everyone gets vaccinated, and there's a successful pediatric vaccine that comes out, it's like, I don't see them, just letting us stay at home and continue doing our job the way we have been for the past year, going on two years.Corey: So, dialing back into the mists of the distant past, it's always a question of where do cloud economists—or clouds economist, depending upon how we choose to mis-pluralize things—come from. And everyone here is a different story and there's not a whole lot of common points between those stories. You, for example, spent some time doing work with NASA. What was that about?Amy: There's a lot of misconceptions about working for NASA like you need to be a doctor. [laugh]. And trust me, you don't. I knew a lot of people who work there that they basically got their degree, and then they just did code work forever and they are lifers there. And it's such an interesting place to be because, on one hand, you have that mission of space and exploration and trying to do better by the world, but also, it's still a federal agency and there's still a lot of problems with federal agencies in that how you get paid is essentially at the beginning of the year, that's when all the budgets are done.So, you can't do the startup thing where you go, I'm going to try a bunch of things, and if one doesn't work, I'm going to pivot to something else because you're essentially answering taxpayers and they don't let you do that. No one wants their taxes going to someone who tried a thing and then found out they messed up. Which is unfortunate, but also a really hard reality of the way these work.Corey: I really love installing, upgrading, and fixing security agents in my cloud estate! Why do I say that? Because I sell things, because I sell things for a company that deploys an agent, there's no other reason. Because let's face it. Agents can be a real headache. Well, now Orca Security gives you a single tool that detects basically every risk in your cloud environment -- and that's as easy to install and maintain as a smartphone app. It is agentless, or my intro would've gotten me into trouble here, but it can still see deep into your AWS workloads, while guaranteeing 100% coverage. With Orca Security, there are no overlooked assets, no DevOps headaches, and believe me you will hear from those people if you cause them headaches. and no performance hits on live environments. Connect your first cloud account in minutes and see for yourself at orca.security. Thats “Orca” as in whale, “dot” security as in that things you company claims to care about but doesn't until right after it really should have. Corey: I must confess that I'm somewhat disappointed that you opened with, “You don't really need to be a rocket scientist to work at NASA,” just because, honestly, I was liking the mystique of, “Oh, yeah. You need to be a rocket scientist to understand AWS billing constructs.” But I suppose if I'm being honest, that might be a slight overreach.Amy: I knew a lot of people there who had multiple PhDs, and they could barely keep their computer on, so really, I'm finding that I respect very smart people, but it also does not imply your world intelligence anywhere else outside of that very specific field. One of the really weird things about having worked there—I worked at NASA Ames as part of their IT department—one of the things we did as outreach was, we did a booth over at SiliCon Valley Comic Con once, and it was great. We had a vintage display of old electronics, like CRT monitors, and full keyboards, and all of this nonsense, and kids would go, “These are so old. Why would anyone use this? It's so boring.” [laugh].And the entire IT department showed up to volunteer. We're like, “No, you don't understand why it's interesting. It's great.” It was so, so hard to watch young people just [laugh] not be interested in what the past of digital devices were. Very sad. And on the other hand, we did get a lot of interest, but it was also having to have that conversation in real life can be a little disheartening.Corey: It really is.Amy: But it was fun because it was one of the few things that you don't really get to see NASA at a comic book convention, so that was actually a really cool thing to do. Also, we got free tickets, so that was great.Corey: So, what was your background before you got to the point of, “You know what I want to do? Work for a consultancy, whose entire mascot is a platypus, and from there, go ahead and fix AWS bills,” which sounds like, to folks who aren't steeped in it, the worst thing ever? What series of, I guess, decisions led you here?Amy: I know you don't remember this, but we actually met at Serverlessconf, and you opened your talk with, “I am a cloud economist, a title I completely made up.” Your talk was right before mine, so that's why you didn't remember I was there because I was actually on the backstage getting prepared for my talk.Corey: That's right. I would have been breathing into a paper bag right before or right after my talk, trying not to pass out. People say, “Oh, you won't be nervous once you give enough talks.” I'm still waiting.Amy: It never happens. I did finally stop having blackouts, so that's an improvement. It gets better, but it never goes away. And when you told me that, and I saw the listing, I'm like, “I don't know what this job is. There's an easy way to find out what the job is, and that's to apply.”And that is when I started going through the process of applying, and then you hired me some months afterwards. And the thing that I found out about looking through AWS billing is that I found out I have a very specific skill set, in trying to find a discount while looking through receipts. This is a thing I thought only applied to my personal life because I don't really like paying retail prices for anything, so I'm always looking for a way to squeeze out another 20, 30% out of something because 10% is really just taking taxes off of stuff. And the fact that I was able to apply that very specific skill set to an actual technical job is so much fun for me because I like being able to tell stories out of what people spend, just because it is—as we say around here—it's the sum of all of your engineering decisions. Because everything you do, there's a price tag on it. And knowing how you got there, and that you can optimize the architecture by looking through the bill is super fascinating to me.Corey: So, now that it's been six months, is the job what you expected it to be? Is it something radically different? Is it something else?Amy: The tone of our engagements have actually changed within the past six months, partially because of the way AWS has made some organizational changes internally as far as we can tell. But really, it's also what types of companies are finding out that they need a service like this. Before, when I was interviewing, and when I started, I was talking to Pete and Jesse about the types of engagements you do. It was for larger companies; they're looking for some amount of savings, and then we run some tooling and then we get back to them. And now it's turning into… some are relatively small companies, companies that wouldn't get use out of an EDP, for example, because they're spending so low.But also other companies, they don't even really want this saving specifically, they want validation on what the process is like, they want validation on their unit economics and what the cost allocation strategies are. So, it's fascinating what people actually want now that they understand that that option is out there.Corey: One thing that you mentioned a minute ago, was the idea of going and giving talks—in the before times, at Serverlessconf and things like that—how do you find that that has changed for you over the past year? And how are you viewing a slow, but effectively guaranteed in the long enough timeframe, return to normalcy?Amy: So, when everything went virtual, it was a really hard transition for a lot of communities. I'm part of AWS Chicago, I'm an organizer at a meetup group called Write/Speak/Code where our whole deal was to give women and people of underrepresented genders the opportunity to learn how to do open-source, how do you learn how to do technical speaking, we helped them with their CFPs, and all of that required a physical community in order for us to be able to give each other that type of support. Well, we can't do that anymore. The last big event we did was specifically around getting everyone set up into the organization. So, we do one big one every year where we tell you how to do slides, we tell you how to do everything, and then the rest of the year smaller meetups where we do feedback and prompts and other types of support events.Now, that we can't do that, we found that a lot of the people who ran these events, they're extroverts and they're social to begin with, so they got burnt out very quickly, which meant we not only had to find new ways of supporting them but also reaching out to members and making sure everyone could still do the types of thing we promised we'd help them to do. The other issue is that with things going virtual, there used to be clear lines on the types of events you could apply to, which were events that I could reach, that my company would pay for, what have you. But now everything's virtual, I accidentally applied to a meetup that I spoke at that was based in Australia, which meant I was talking at 10 o'clock at night, just because I explained to them the mix-up and essentially begged to get an earlier slot. And it's interesting because it presents both a wide array of opportunities, but it also means that there's now so much noise, and so much burnout and fatigue from these one direction types of conferences, which are long Zoom meetings, which is basically everyone's workday now, which is just full day's worth of Zoom meetings. And it's hard to get people interested.And really, what these events did best was give people who generally don't have that type of visibility—like me—who, I am a female engineer, and I am a person of color, so my opportunities aren't always going to be as well as they could be, but this visibility also gave me a boost. So, when we lost out on physical events, my organization personally lost out on a lot of things that we could do for those people, which is unfortunate, but it's also what was happening, really, everywhere. Now, we're gearing more towards how to do less Zoom meeting type of events, and we're now using a tool called gather.town, which lets everyone go into a space, you can walk around, you can drop in and out of conversations like you would in a hallway, and it has this cute little eight-bit kind of avatar feel to it so it looks kind of like a game, but it's also—if you go around a large group of people, it pulls up everyone's picture and then you're suddenly speaking to each other over voice without having to physically join in or wait for a breakout room or wait to be let into a different room. So, it's been difficult to try to find ways of managing it, but it's also been very interesting seeing the tools that had come out of this.Now, once we start going back to physical events and on-site events, personally, I have a lot of anxiety about that just because my allergies and everything makes it hard for me to do travel in the first place, but also, I'm not really sure how everyone's going to react being in the same space anymore, or how full they're going to be. So, to me, it does cause me a little bit of anxiety and I'm going to wait a little until things are more settled and are a little more stable than they are right now. That said, I believe AWS Midwest is doing something physical at the end of this year. But I'm not entirely positive about that.Corey: One of the things I want to avoid is going back to an old style of re:Invent, where it's only open to folks who are able to spend $2,000 on a ticket, travel to Las Vegas, and get the time off and afford the hotel stay and the rest. One thing I loved about the 2020 version of that was that everyone was coming from a baseline of its full remote. There was no VIP ticket option that got you a better experience than anyone else had. And I do worry, on some level, that as soon as they can, they're going to go running back to a story like that. I hope not.Amy: I hope not, too, because one of the great things about virtual re:Invent was everyone saw the same things at the same time. And you didn't have to give up one panel because you're too busy being in line for another panel. And I've never liked that type of convention activity where you know you're actively giving something up just because the line for the thing you want to get to is so super long. That said, they could have done better a bit on the website. The website was really hard to navigate and confusing and the schedule was weird.If they get that kind of usability fixed and a little more reasonable so that things are surprisingly searchable and easier to navigate, and they have more social type of events instead of AWS is going to—it's going to announce another service that they're calling a product, even though it's just… it's a service enhancement, and that's all it is. I would like for all of that to kind of be streamlined so it's not just more announcements. I can read announcements. I don't need to watch two hours' worth of announcements.Corey: I really hope that at some point, some of the AWS service teams learn that, “Hey. We could announce services anytime of the year,” rather than in a three-week sprint that leaves no one able to pay attention because there's just too much.Amy: And it's hard because it's hard when you have to hold a release because re:Invent's coming up. Or you have to be part of their Developer Relations Group where you have to do all of your training and all of your docs right beforehand, just so that it's prepared for this launch that people may not hear about because it gets drowned out in all the other noise.Corey: And that's sometimes part of the entire problem.Amy: Yeah.Corey: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. As always, it's a pleasure. If people want to learn more about what you're up to, where can they find you?Amy: They can hire me for engagement here. [laugh] but also—Corey: Good answer.Amy: —I do technical talks. I don't have anything lined up right now, just because it's spring in my brain took a break, like everyone else did. I'm on Twitter as @nerdypaws because that was a handle I had since college and have not changed.Corey: Excellent. And we will, of course, leave a link to that in the [show notes 00:31:10], as we always do. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. It's always a pleasure, and it's deeply appreciated.Amy: It's always a good time talking to you, Corey.Corey: Amy Arumbulo Negrette, cloud economist here at The Duckbill Group. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me why you do in fact need to be a rocket surgeon in order to properly work on AWS bills.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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AWS Application Cost Profiler

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 16, 2021 14:57

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Should I Attend re:Invent?

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 25, 2021 20:52

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Tim: I'm Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways that we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today on the show, we are going to be talking about AWS re:Invent. Now, I know that most of you know what re:Invent is, but I just would love to set the playing field level for everybody really quick. Amy, Tim, what is AWS re:Invent.Tim: AWS re:Invent is AWS's week-long corporate conference. It's not really a user conference; it's certainly not, like, a community conference, but it's a week-long sales pitch in the desert. It's like the worst version of a corporate Burning Man you could ever imagine because they even have a concert.Jesse: It is in Las Vegas. Now, I personally have mixed feelings about going to Las Vegas in general, but this adds so much to the conference in general because it's not just in a single conference venue that's centrally located near the hotels. Is it is across the strip—Amy: It's the entire strip.Jesse: It's the entire strip. So—Amy: They block every hotel and they buy every piece of ad space.Jesse: Yes. There is no escaping AWS re:Invent for the entire week that you're there. And sometimes that's a good thing because you do want to be involved in what's going on, but other times, it is a lot.Tim: So, I'm trying to figure out which LP that ‘buy the entire Las Vegas trip' covers because it's certainly not be frugal.Amy: No. [laugh].Jesse: No, not at all. But we do have new information. We decided to do this episode specifically because new information was just released about re:Invent for this year. Amy, what is that information? What do we know?Amy: They've decided, in having to go virtual last year, due to some kind of horrible global crisis, to return in person to the world's most densely packed tourist spot, Las Vegas, and host this huge event from November 29th to December 3rd—that's right after Thanksgiving—and just, what do they say? Return to normal. Return to normal.Tim: That way everybody can get exposed to COVID before they go home for the holidays.Jesse: [laugh].well, you at least get one holiday in, if you celebrate or recognize Thanksgiving, and then you get to bring everything back after that.Amy: Yeah, people bring enough things back from Vegas. I'm not sure we'd have to find more reasons. [laugh].Tim: [laugh].Jesse: I know that there's that great marketing tactic of, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” but—Tim: That's not what they say at the clinic.Jesse: Nope. Mm-mm. Now, I will say, I know that almost every conference event was completely virtual last year due to the pandemic, and this year, a lot of conferences are still trying to straddle that line between what's acceptable, can we do maybe smaller events in person, some kind of a hybrid online/in-person thing. I have mixed feelings on this. I appreciate that I can still attend AWS re:Invent from home this year digitally, I can still watch a lot of the main keynote events and a lot of the other information that is being shared, but I don't know, it's always hard because if you do a hybrid event, you're automatically going to miss out on any of that in-person socializing and networking.Tim: Well. So, I think it's interesting. AWS re:Invent suffers from the same issue that pretty much all other conferences suffer from is that there's not really value-add in the talks, at least for attending.Jesse: Yeah.Amy: If you're going to be able to see those talks afterwards if the announcements are going to be publicized afterwards which, that is true in both cases, then what's the point of spending the money, and the time, and the possible exposure to go watch them in person? So, then the other thing is, “Well, we want to go for some of the training seminars,” or some of these other things. Well, those are also offered online, often. Or, like, copies of them online. These are the same kinds of tutorials like that that you can have your TAM or SA run if you're an AWS customer currently; that's what they're doing there.The other thing is, too, those in-person sessions get filled up so quickly that there's no guarantee [unintelligible 00:05:08] anyways. And that's one of the complaints they've had about re:Invent in the past is that you can't get into any of the sessions. And so, you couple all that along with most of the reason going being—if it's not the talks and is not the sessions, it's the hallway track. And then you got to kind of wonder, is the hallway track going to be valuable this year because if it's hybrid, what percent of the people that you would normally talk to you are going to be there and what percentage aren't? And so there's a lot of calculus that's got to go into it this year.Jesse: I've always struggled with any vendor-sponsored event, all the talks feel either like a sales pitch, or they feel like a use case that just doesn't fit for me. And that may just be where I'm at in my professional journey; there's definitely reasons to go if you want to see some of these talks or see some of this information live, or be the first person to talk about it. Or even the people who are going to be the news sources for everybody else who want to be the first person to talk about, “Oh, we attended, and we saw these things and were live-tweeting the entire conference.” If that's your shtick, I fully support that, but I always struggle going to any kind of vendor conference because I just feel like the value that I get from the talks, from training if I go to training, just doesn't feel like enough for me, personally.Amy: So, I've done some of the AWS-led training when Summit was in Chicago, a couple years ago, and I'll be honest, you lose a lot in these large AWS-led trainings because these classes, it's not going to be like the ones that you would sign up for even being hosted either by your company or by your local user group chapter where you will have at max 100 people. You have well over that. You have an entire conference room full of people, and they're asking questions that are across the level of expertise for that topic. I went for one of the certification training seminars and straight-up 15 minutes was spent talking about what a region is. And given that's page one of any training material, that was a waste of $300.Jesse: Yeah.Tim: I think you run into the problem because it is, in fact, I mean, let's be honest, it's a multi-day sales pitch. It's not a user conference, it's not user-generated content. It's cherry-picked by the powers-that-be at AWS, the service groups. Is a big push for account executives to encourage high-level or high-spend accounts to participate in those so they get logo recognition. And so that becomes more of the issue than the actual cool user stories.And that's fine if you're using it literally just a sales conference because it's very compelling sales material, your account executive will go there and try and close deals, or close bigger deals, or sign EDPs or something like that, but from an engineering standpoint, from a technical standpoint, it's remarkably uncompelling.Jesse: Yeah, I think that's one other thing to call out, which is, there is definitely this networking opportunity that we talked about from a hallway track perspective, but there's also a networking and business opportunity to meet with your account manager, or your TAM, or your SA in person and have conversations about whatever things you want to talk about; about future architecture, or about closing an EDP—or I should say, about an EDP because the account manager will try to close that EDP with you—and then basically use that as next steps for what you want to do with AWS. But again, all of those things can be done without flying you to Las Vegas and being amongst all these other people.Tim: I mean, let's not take away, there's a certain synergy that happens when you have face-to-face contact with folks, and a lot of these conversations you have in hallways are super, super organic. And so I think that's indicative of conferences as a whole. One of the things that we learned in the pandemic is that, yeah, you can have talks where people just, like, look at a screen and watch talks, and a lot of conferences have done that. But that's not why people want to go to the conference; they want to go to the conference to talk to people and see people. And if you want to have a conference where people talk to people and see people, and that's the whole point of doing it, then the business model behind that looks dramatically different, and the content behind that looks dramatically different.You just have a bunch of birds-of-feather sessions or a bunch of breakout sessions. You do a keynote at the beginning, you do a keynote at the end, and then you just let people mingle, and maybe you have some led topics, but you don't generate content; you shut up and you let the people innovate.Jesse: I also want to add to that. It is one thing to have a conference that is in one venue where everybody is going to be gathered in the same space, creating conversation, or creating easy opportunities—Amy: Five miles worth of content isn't exciting for you?Jesse: Yeah. So, in Las Vegas because the entire conference is spread across the entire strip, you're going to have opportunities to network across the entire strip basically, and sometimes that means you're going to only spend time networking with the people who are in the same hotel as you at the time of the track that you are waiting for, or the time of the event that you are waiting for. It is unlikely that you are going to run all around the strip just to be able to network with everybody that you run into.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more visit lumigo.io.Amy: The other issue I have, not just with re:Invent, but this is really any larger conference or conferences that rely on the kind of content where it is a person speaking at you and you don't get to meet these people, is that without any level of Q&A or interactivity—and this is true especially for AWS-led events—is that it is no different than watching someone on video. You can go to these talks, and you can perhaps have conversations with people as they filter out of the room, but there's no way you're going to be able to talk to that person who was delivering that content, unless you can track them down amongst the sea of people in re:Invent or [unintelligible 00:12:16] in Las Vegas.Tim: What typically has to happen is that after someone has given a compelling talk and you really want to talk to them, you have to go and talk to your account manager; your account manager will then set up a meeting that will happen at a later time where you're going to all call in over Chime, and then you will quote-unquote, “Meet” that person virtually. And if that's the case, you could have just stayed home and watched [laugh] the talk online, and then done the same thing.Amy: Conferences need more Chime. That's what [laugh] the problem is.Jesse: [laugh]. I think my eye just started twitching a little bit as soon as you said that, Amy.Amy: I'm glad. So, then why would people go? There's the hallway track, but is that worth the heavy price tag of going to Vegas? A lot of us live in areas where there is either going to be an AWS Summit or there are AWS user groups. What do you get from going to a larger event such as re:Invent and having that level of communication that you can't get from those smaller groups?Tim: I mean, the importance of networking cannot be overstated. It is extremely important, whether it's for laying groundwork for future deals, laying groundwork for future collaborations. I've been at conferences where a hallway track, just folks meeting up in the hallway and having a really organic discussion turned into a product within three months. So, those kinds of things are important. And, unfortunately or unfortunately, they do happen better quite often, when people are in-person and they've had a chance to talk, maybe even a couple of drinks or whatever.So, I mean, people ink deals, they shake hands, they get, you know, a lot of work done when it comes to maintaining and managing relationships, and to some people, that is worth it. But I do think that you have to be very, kind of, eyes-open about going into this. It's like, you're not going to go in there to get a lot of technical insight, you're not going to go in there to talk to a whole bunch of people unless you really have a relationship or establish some kind of rapport with them beforehand. Because just to go up and blindly like, “Hey, I'm going to grab you in the hallway, and this is who I am,” that's not always great, especially nowadays, when people are, kind of, already averse to, you know, talking to strangers, sometimes.Jesse: I've always struggled with talking to strangers in general at conferences because I'm predominantly introverted, so if I don't have an open introduction to someone through a mutual third party or mutual friend, it's just not going to happen. And I've gotten better at that over the years as I go to conferences, but it's going to be especially tough now in cases where folks are not just averse to, I don't want to say strangers, but averse to physical contact and adverse to people just, kind of, approaching them out of the blue. It's tough. I want to be more mindful of that and I want to be better, but it's hard, especially in cases where you're in a crowd of hundreds of people or, you know, thousands of people across the strip, that it just gets overwhelming really quickly for some folks.Amy: I do want to loop this round, if anything, just for a poll for Twitter. Do not close an EDP in Vegas. You're probably not of the right mind [laugh] and have the right people to do that. Wait till you get back to work. Please. That's just me. [laugh].Jesse: I would also like to add—we talk about why people go; I think that there's definitely a solid contingent of folks who attend re:Invent because it is the one time a year that the company sanctions them getting away from their family for a couple of days, getting away from, you know, the day-to-day routine of whatever work is going on for a couple days, and go to Vegas. Now, I know that the company is not going to sponsor them drinking every night, or gambling, or whatnot, but they're likely going to be doing those things anyhow, so it is this company-sanctioned opportunity to just go experience, you know, something different; go take a vacation, basically, for a couple days.Amy: Corporate Burning Man.Tim: Corporate Burning Man, exactly. A vacation in Vegas.Amy: I am not a fan of ever working in Vegas. If I'm on the clock, I cannot be in Vegas, not because I'm prone to excessive behavior when I'm on my own, but more that I cannot be productive in that much noise and that much flaky internet. It drives me absolutely batty, and I'm only going to be, as far as implementations, so productive in a crowd that large.Tim: I will say this, especially in regards to Vegas, there are other places you can go, other places that need the money more. AWS wants to rent a city, rent a city that needed the money. Put that money where it could be to used, where it really makes a difference. I don't know if Vegas is the right place for that, if I'm being honest, especially after all we've learned and dealt with in 2020. And so that's why in 2021, yeah, no for me, continuing to have re:Invent in Vegas is very, very tone-deaf.Jesse: I still think, Amy, you and I just need to—actually sorry, all three of us should attend and basically keep a running Waldorf and Statler commentary through the entire conference. I don't know if we can get that little, you know, opera booth that's kind of up and away from all the action, but if we can get something like that and do some sports commentary—ohh, maybe on the expo hall—Amy: That would be great. That would be great if we don't get banned. [laugh].Tim: I think what would be even more fun is to give a MST3K—Jesse: Ohhh.Tim: —treatment of the keynotes afterwards, you know what I mean?Jesse: Yeah.Amy: Yes.Jesse: I mean, Amy and I had also talked about playing some Dungeons and Dragons while we were there, and I feel like if we can find some, I'm going to say, tech-themed RPG—I realize that is a broad category, and everybody's going to spam me afterwards for this, but—Amy: I got that. Don't worry about it.Jesse: Yeah, I'm on board. I feel like anything that we can do to create a roleplaying game out of this conference, I'm down.Tim: I'm still waiting for you to explain to the audience in general who Waldorf and Statler were?Jesse: Oh, yes, that is fair. Okay. Waldorf and Statler are two characters from the old-school Muppets Show, which is amazing and delightful. It's on Disney+; I highly recommend it. They are basically—Amy: They're two grumpy old muppets, and they have been roasting people since the 70s. That is—that's all it is. [laugh].Tim: All they do is they sit up in the upper booth and they throw shade, and I love it.Amy: Yes. And they just show up in random parts in different movies. They'll be, like, on a park bench, and there'll be a serious moment, and then they'll just start talking crap for no reason. And it's great.Jesse: They're the best. They're absolutely fantastic. I adore them. I hope to be them one day.Amy: One day.Tim: Really, both of them? I don't, I don't know how that's going to work.Jesse: I am hoping to clone myself. One of me is going to have fabulous hair and one of me is going to be balding. Probably the clone is going to be balding; sorry about it, future me. But—Amy: [laugh].Tim: Well, I mean, and have just a magnificent chin, right?Jesse: Yes, yes, that's the trade-off. Losing the hair up top but absolutely fantastic chin.Tim: Here's what I want to see. I want to see the listeners submit things that you think should be on the re:Invent bingo cards.Amy: Ohh, yes.Jesse: Yes.Amy: I would love to see that.Jesse: So, for those of you listening, you've got two options for submitting things that you'd like to be on the re:Invent bingo cards. The ideal option is going to lastweekataws.com/QA. Fill out the form and let us know what you think should be on the bingo card. You can also respond to the social media post that will be posted for this content, and we can take a look at that as well. But that'll be a little bit harder for us to follow because I'm unfortunately not like Corey. I can't absorb all of Twitter in a day; it takes me a longer time to read all that content.Jesse: If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review. Give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us what you think about AWS re:Invent.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

covid-19 amazon thanksgiving chicago disney las vegas losing field cloud summit fill dungeons and dragons lp burning man mm aws tam reinvent qa devops invent chime waldorf statler edp launchdarkly aws summit amy it tim well tim all tim so amy so tim here jesse yeah jesse it last week in aws amy they humblepod

Listener Questions 6

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2021 21:13

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I'm Jesse DeRose.Amy: I'm Amy Negrette.Tim: And I'm Tim Banks.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we've seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today is a very special episode for two reasons. First, we're going to be talking about all the things that you want to talk about. That's right, it's time for another Q&A session. Get hyped.Amy: And second as is Duckbill's customary hazing ritual, we're putting a new Duckbill Group Cloud Economist Tim Banks through the wringer to answer some of your pressing questions about cloud costs and AWS. And he has pretty much the best hobbies.Tim: [laugh].Jesse: Absolutely.Tim: You know, I choke people for fun.Jesse: [laugh]. I don't even know where to begin with that. I—you know—Amy: It's the best LinkedIn bio, that's [laugh] where you begin with that.Tim: Yeah, I will change it right after this, I promise. But no, I think it's funny, we were talking about Jiu-Jitsu as a hobby, but my other hobby is I like to cook a lot, and I'm an avid, avid chili purist. And we were in a meeting earlier and Amy mentioned something about a bowl of sweet chili. And, dear listeners, let me tell you, I was aghast.Amy: It's more of a sweet stewed meat than it is, like, some kind of, like, meat candy. It is not a meat candy. Filipinos make very sweet stews because we cannot handle chili, and honestly, we shouldn't be able to handle anything that's caramelized or has sugar in it, but we try to anyway. [laugh].Tim: But this sounds interesting, but I don't know that I would categorize it as chili, especially if it has beans in it.Jesse: It has beans. We put beans in everything.Tim: Oh, then it can't be chili.Jesse: Are you a purist that your chili cannot have beans in it?Tim: Well, no. Chili doesn't have beans in it.Amy: Filipino food has beans in it. Our desserts have beans in it. [laugh].Jesse: We are going to pivot, we're going to hard pivot this episode to just talk about the basis of what a chili recipe consists of. Sorry, listeners, no cost discussions today.Tim: Well, I mean, it's a short list: a chili contains meat and it contains heat.Jesse: [laugh].Tim: That's it. No tomatoes, no beans, no corn, or spaghetti, or whatever people put in it.Amy: Okay, obviously the solution is that we do some kind of cook-off where Tim and Pete cook for everybody, and we pull in Pete as a special quote-unquote, outside consultant, and I just eat a lot of food, and I'm cool with that. [laugh].Jesse: I agree to this.Tim: Pete is afraid of me, so I'm pretty sure he's going to pick my chili.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: I could see him doing that. But also, I just like eating food.Tim: No, no, it's great. We should definitely do a chili cook-off. But yeah, I am willing to entertain any questions about, you know, chili, and I'm willing to defend my stance with facts and the truth. So…Amy: If you have some meat—or [sheet 00:03:19]—related questions, please get into our DMs on Twitter.Jesse: [laugh]. All right. Well, thank you to everyone who submitted their listener questions. We've picked a few that we would like to talk about here today. I will kick us off with the first question.This first question says, “Long-time listener first-time caller. As a solo developer, I'm really interested in using some of AWS's services. Recently, I came across AWS's Copilot, and it looks like a potentially great solution for deployment of a basic architecture for a SaaS-type product that I'm developing. I'm concerned that messing around with Copilot might lead to an accidental large bill that I can't afford as a solo dev. So, I was wondering, do you have a particular [bizing 00:04:04] availability approach when dealing with a new AWS service, ideally, specific steps or places to start with tracking billing? And then specifically for Copilot, how could I set it up so it can trip off billing alarms if my setup goes over a certain threshold? Is there a way to keep track of cost from the beginning?”Tim: AWS has some basic billing alerts in there. They are always going to be kind of reactive.Jesse: Yes.Amy: They can detect some trends, but as a solo developer, what you're going to get is notification that the previous day's spending was pretty high. And then you'll be able to trend it out over that way. As far as asking if there's a proactive way to predict what the cost of your particular architecture is going to be, the easy answer is going to be no. Not one that's not going to be cost-prohibitive to purchase a sole developer.Jesse: Yeah, I definitely recommend setting up those reactive billing alerts. They're not going to solve all of your use cases here, but they're definitely better than nothing. And the one that I definitely am thinking of that I would recommend turning on is the Cost Explorer Cost Anomaly Detector because that actually looks at your spend based on a specific service, a specific AWS cost category, a specific user-defined cost allocation tag. And it'll tell you if there is a spike in spend. Now, if your spend is just continuing to grow steadily, Cost Anomaly Detector isn't going to give you all the information you want.It's only going to look for those anomalous spikes where all of a sudden, you turned something on that you meant to turn off, and left it on. But it's still something that's going to start giving you some feedback and information over time that may help you keep an eye on your billing usage and your spend.Amy: Another thing we highly recommend is to have a thorough tagging strategy, especially if you're using a service to deploy resources. Because you want to make sure that all of your resources, you know what they do and you know who they get charged to. And Copilot does allow you to do resource tagging within it, and then from there should be able to convert them to cost allocation tags so you can see them in your console.Jesse: Awesome. Well, our next question is from Rob. Rob asks, “How do I stay HIPAA compliant, but keep my savings down? Do I really need VPC Flow Logs on? Could we talk in general about the security options in AWS and their cost impact? My security team wants everything on but it would cost us ten times our actual AWS bill.”Rob, we have actually seen this from a number of clients. It is a tough conversation to have because the person in charge of the bill wants to make sure that spend is down, but security may need certain security measures in place, product may need certain measures in place for service level agreements or service level objectives, and there's absolutely a need to find that balance between cost optimization and all of these compliance needs.Tim: Yeah, I think it's also really important to thoroughly understand what the compliance requirements are. Fairly certain for HIPAA that you may not have to have VPC Flow Logs specifically enabled. The language is something like, ‘logging of visitors to the site' or something like that. So, you need to be very clear and concise about what you actually need, and remember, for compliance, typically it's just a box check. It's not going to be a how much or what percent; it's going to be, “Do you have this or do you not?”And so if the HIPAA compliance changes where you absolutely have to have VPC Flow Logging turned on, then there's not going to be a way around that in order to maintain your compliance. But if the language is not specifically requiring that, then you don't have to, and that's going to become something you have to square with your security team. There are ways to do those kinds of logging on other things depending on what your application stack looks like, but that's definitely a conversation you're going to want to have, either with your security team, with your product architects, or maybe even outside or third-party consultant.Jesse: Another thing to think about here is, how much is each of these features in AWS costing you? How much are these security regulations, the SLA architecture choices, how much are each of those things costing you in AWS? Because that is ultimately part of the conversation, too. You can go back to security, or product, or whoever and say, “I understand that this is a business requirement. This is how much it's costing the business.”And that doesn't mean that they have to change it, but that is now additional information that everybody has to collaboratively decide, “Okay, is it worthwhile for us to have this restriction, have this compliance component at this cost?” And again, as Tim was mentioning, if it is something that needs to be set up for compliance purposes, for audit purposes, then there's not really a lot you can do. It's kind of a, I don't want to say sunk cost, but it is a cost that you need to understand that is required for that feature. But if it's not something that is required for audit purposes, if it's not something that just needs to be, like, a checkbox, maybe there's an opportunity here if the cost is so high that you can change the feature in a way that brings the cost down a little bit but still gives security, or product, or whoever else the reassurances that they need.Tim: I think the other very important thing to remember is that you are not required to run your application in AWS.Jesse: Yeah.Tim: You can run it on-premise, you can run at a different cloud provider. If it's going to be cost-prohibitive to run at AWS and you can't get the cost down to a manageable level, through, kind of, normal cost reduction methods of EDPs, or your pricing agreement, remember you can always put that on bare metal somewhere and then you will be able to have the logging for free. Now, mind you, you're going to have to spend money elsewhere to get that done, but you're going to have to look and see what the overall cost is going to be. It may, in fact, be much less expensive to host that on metal, or at a different provider than it would be at AWS.Corey: This episode is sponsored by ExtraHop. ExtraHop provides threat detection and response for the Enterprise (not the starship). On-prem security doesn't translate well to cloud or multi-cloud environments, and that's not even counting IoT. ExtraHop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35 percent faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com/trial.Jesse: Our next question is from Trevor Shaffer. He says, “Loving these Friday from the field episodes and the costing”—thank you—“I'm in that world right now, so all of this hits home for me. One topic not covered with the cost categorization, which I'm tasked with, is how to separate base costs versus usage costs. Case in point, we're driving towards cost metrics based on users and prices go up as users go up. All of that makes sense, but there's always that base load required to serve quote-unquote, ‘no users.'“The ALP instance hours, versus the LCU hour, minimum number of EC2 instances for high availability, things like that. Currently, you can't tag those differently, so I think I'm just doomed here and my hopes will be dashed. For us, our base costs are about 25% of our bill. Looking for tricks on how to do this one well. You can get close with a lot of scripting and time, teasing out each item manually.” Trevor, you can, and I also think that is definitely going to be a pain point if you start scripting some of these things. That sounds like a lot of effort that may give you some useful information, but I don't know if it's going to give you all of the information that you want.Tim: Well, it's also a lot of effort, and it's also room for error. It won't take but a simple error in anything that you write where these costs can then be calculated incorrectly. So, that's something to consider as well: is it worth the overall costs of engineering time, and maintenance, and everything like that, to write these scripts? These are decisions that engineers groups have to make all the time. That said, I do think that this is, for me I think, one of the larger problems that you see with AWS billing is that it is difficult to differentiate something that should be reasonably difficult to differentiate.If I get my cell phone bill, I know exactly how much it's going to cost us to have the line, and then I can see exactly how much it's going to cost me for the minutes. The usage cost is very easily separated from—I'm sorry, the base cost is very easily separated from the usage cost. It's not always that way with AWS, I do think that's something that they could fix.Jesse: Yeah, one thing that I've been thinking of is, I don't want to just recommend turning things on and measuring, but I'm thinking about this from the same perspective that you would think about getting a baseline for any kind of monitoring service: as you turn on a metric or as you start introducing a new metric before you start building alerts for that metric, you need to let that metric run for a certain amount of time to see what the baseline number, usage amount, whatever, looks like before you can start setting alerts. I'm thinking about that same thing here. I know that's a tougher thing to do when this is actually cost involved when it's actually costing you money to leave something on and just watch what usage looks like over time, but that is something that will give you the closest idea of what base costs look like. And one of the things to think about, again, is if the base costs are unwieldy for you or not worthwhile for you in terms of the way the architecture is built, is there either a different way that you can build the architecture that is maybe more ephemeral that will make it cost less when there are no users active? Is there a different cloud provider that you can deploy these resources to that is going to ultimately cost you less when you have no users active?Tim: I think too, though, that when you have these discussions with engineering teams and they're looking at what their priorities are going to be and what the engineering cost is going to be, oftentimes, they're going to want metrics on how much is this costing us—how much would it cost otherwise? What is our base cost, what's our usage cost?—so that you can make a case and justify it with numbers. So, you may think that it is better to run this somewhere else or to re-architect your infrastructure around this, but you're going to have to have some data to back it up. And if this is what you need to gather that data, then yeah, it is definitely a pain point.Amy: I agree. I think this is one of those cases where—and I am also loath to just leave things on for the sake of it, but especially as you onboard new architectures and new applications, this should be done at that stage when you start standing things up and finalizing that architecture. Once you know the kind of architecture you want and you're pushing things to production, find out what that baseline is, have it be part of that process, and have it be a cost of that process. And finally, “As someone new to AWS and wanting to become a software DevOps insert-buzzword-here engineer”—I'm a buzzword engineer—“We've been creating projects in Amplify, Elastic Beanstalk, and other services. I keep the good ones alive and have done a pretty good job of killing things off when I don't need it. What are your thoughts on free managed services in general when it comes to cost transparencies with less than five months left on my free year? Is it a bad idea to use them as someone who is just job hunting? I'm willing to spend a little per month, but don't want to be here with a giant bill.”So, chances are if you're learning a new technology or a new service, unless you run into that pitfall where you're going to get a big bill as a surprise and you've been pretty diligent about turning your services off, your bill is not going to rise that much higher. That said, there have been a lot of instances, on Twitter especially, popping up where they are getting very large bills. If you're not using them and you're not actively learning on them, I would just turn them off so you don't forget later. We've also talked about this in our build versus buy, where that is the good thing about having as a managed service is if you don't need it anymore and you're not learning or using them, you can just turn them off. And if you have less than half a year on your first free year, there are plenty of services that have a relatively free tier or a really cheap tier at the start, so if you want to go back and learn on them later, you still could.Tim: I think too, Amy, it's also important to reflect, at least for this person, that if they're in an environment where they're trying to learn something if maintaining infrastructure is not the main core of what they're trying to learn, then I wouldn't do it. The reason that they have these managed services is to allow engineering teams to be more focused on the things that they want to do as far as development versus the things they have to do around infrastructure management. If you don't have an operations team or an infrastructure team, then maintaining the infrastructure on your own sometimes can become unwieldy to the point that you're not really even learning the thing you wanted to learn; now you're learning how to manage Elasticsearch.Amy: Yeah.Jesse: Absolutely. I think that's one of the most critical things to think about here. These managed services give you the opportunity to use all these services without managing the infrastructure overhead. And to me, there may be a little bit extra costs involved for that, but to me that cost is worth the freedom to not worry about managing the infrastructure, to be able to just spin up a cluster of something and play with it. And then when you're done, obviously, make sure you turn it off, but you don't have to worry about the infrastructure unless you're specifically going to be looking for work where you do need to manage that infrastructure, and that's a separate question entirely.Amy: Yeah. I'm not an infrastructure engineer, so anytime I'm not using infrastructure, and I'm not using a service, I just—I make sure everything's turned off. Deleting stacks is very cathartic for me, just letting everything—just watching it all float away into the sunset does a lot for me, just knowing that it's not one more thing I'm going to have to watch over because it's not a thing I like doing or want to do. So yeah, if that's not what you want to do, then don't leave them on and just clean up after yourself, I suppose. [laugh].Tim: I'll even say that even if you're an infrastructure engineer, which is my background, that you can test your automation of building and all this, you know, building a cluster, deploying things like that, and then tear it down and get rid of it. You don't have to leave it up forever. If you're load testing an application, that's a whole different thing, but that's probably not what you're doing if you're concerned about the free tier costs. So yeah, if you're learning Terraform, you can absolutely deploy a cluster or something and just tear it back out as soon as you're done. If you're learning how to manage whatever it is, build it, test it, make sure it runs, and then tear it back down.Jesse: All righty, folks, that's going to do it for us this week. If you've got questions you would like us to answer, please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA, fill out the form and we'd be happy to answer those on a future episode of the show. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us whether you prefer sweet chili or spicy chili.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

amazon loving field cloud saas dms enterprise iot listener questions chili jiu jitsu aws amplify qa devops copilot hipaa fairly deleting filipinos sla alp terraform elasticsearch ec2 launchdarkly extrahop tim oh tim you amy it tim yeah lcu elastic beanstalk tim no tim well jesse yeah jesse it last week in aws amy they amy okay humblepod jesse all

Personality Merge Conflicts

Play Episode Listen Later May 28, 2021 13:46

Links:Ted Talk: The Science of Productive ConflictTranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Negrette.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we’ve seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure. Today, we’re going to talk about the people side of technical projects, especially people who might introduce roadblocks for completing technical projects. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Jesse, Amy, that sounds like it is not about AWS.” But let me assure you that any project involving AWS is going to involve multiple different personalities approaching the project from different angles, who ultimately all have the same solution in mind, but have different ideas about how to get that problem done, or different ideas about what’s the right thing that ultimately get done to begin with. So today, we want to talk about that: we want to dive into how can you have really rewarding conversations with those folks? How can you better engage people who are intentionally or unintentionally difficult?Amy: We want to be very clear that we are not trying to come after anyone. Every time that I’ve gotten an engagement, it isn’t because someone means to be difficult, but maybe there’s a project timeline, maybe there’s something else getting in the way of them being able to fully be present for that specific part of the engagement, and maybe that’s just what’s causing friction, causing speed bumps. And we’re all well aware of this. Jobs are hard, and especially this sort of work can be difficult. So, first of all, we totally understand, and this is just more about how to get everyone moving in the same direction at the same pace.Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, especially with the pandemic going on right now, everybody’s doing remote work, some people have never actually met their teammates in person and they’re expected to work together efficiently, and quickly, and easily. It’s hard.Amy: It also doesn’t help that when we do come in, we come in under the context of a cost optimization project, or some other efficiency-type title. And that sounds a little like the Bobs from Office Space, which I bring up a lot, especially during internal meetings. And it makes it sound like we’re going to come in to shake a bunch of things up and look for inefficiencies where there aren’t any, which is truly not the case. And it can cause a lot of insecurity, especially about how someone thinks that they’re doing their job, or that their job is somehow going to be impacted by what our suggestions are. It may not just be us, but it may be another migration consultation suite, where someone’s coming in to change the architecture that they’ve worked on for a long time, and that can put a lot of people in a state of unease.Jesse: And I think it’s also important to note that it’s not just about an external party coming in like Duckbill Group or another external, third-party consulting service, or technical group. It could be an internal separate team. It could be your internal cloud cost management team that is starting conversations with development teams saying, “Hey, I want to better understand how you’re using AWS. I want to understand some of these cost optimization opportunities.” Even in situations like that where all of these conversations are internal within the company, even within teams, there are still multiple different personalities, multiple different people approaching the problem from different angles, and it’s still really, really important to make sure that you approach them collaboratively.Amy: And ultimately, we wanted to be clear that what we’re going to be talking about is helping people think differently into a growth mindset, and being able to do this work without anyone feeling shame or embarrassment.Jesse: Yeah. Growth mindset is so critical. It’s something that I love to talk about ad nauseum, and so I won’t dive into it too deeply here, but—Amy: That’s another episode.Jesse: [Laugh]. Exactly. Growth mindset is so important for folks in technology teams, especially in today’s technology era where there’s just so much constantly innovating. There’s so much new constantly going on around you, to new technologies, new teams, new ideas, new ways of doing things, new processes, new tools; it’s really important to be open-minded to learning those different things. You don’t have to use every single one of them, but be open-minded to different people approaching problems from different perspectives and different angles.Amy: Having to face all of this uncertainty will cause some to not be the most cooperative when they have to start reacting into these situations, whether it is an internal change that’s happening, or if it’s an external consulting group; they can start coming back and taking a various sort of stance, and just like being back in middle school, sometimes standing up to a bully is simply how you have to succeed because it’s not about dominating, it’s about compromise and trying to find out what you’re trying to do and find that common ground.Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s the most important part here because when we talk about working with other personalities that are different than yours and having conflict, it’s not about dealing with them; it’s not about overcoming them from the perspective of winning the argument, so to speak. It’s about how do you compromise? How do you effectively find that common ground and move forward together? And sometimes it’s just about sharing context, it’s just about sharing that mental model that you have that might be different than the mental model that this other person has, or maybe the other team has.Like for example, some teams that we’ve talked to can’t make a cost optimization change due to security, or legal, or product SLA restrictions, but maybe the person who’s coming in from the cloud cost management team or cloud cost management side doesn’t know that because they aren’t as familiar with the product.Amy: But it can also just be a staffing issue. These projects take work, and if an engineering team is already stressed and stretched to the edge, they’re not going to have the resources, and they don’t want to be the ones to say we simply don’t have the manpower to do this.Jesse: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s so, so important to be able to identify those bottlenecks or identify those constraints. Because ultimately, if you give a team that already has a ton of things on their roadmap new work and say, “Hey, cost optimization is important.” They’re most likely going to ask you, “Okay, where does this fit into all the other things that are already on our roadmap?” We’ve talked to a lot of companies who struggle with that balance of prioritizing new feature developments with cost optimization work.And there definitely needs to be that healthy balance between the two because new feature work is obviously important for the business to grow, but cost optimization work is also important within these processes as they go through more and more agile sprints, build more and more things to make sure that each team understands what are their opportunities to really optimize their spend as they’re building new architecture.Amy: We’ve all seen that bug board where everything is a P1 bug.Jesse: Yes. The thing that’s coming to mind for me is if it’s everyone’s responsibility it’s nobody’s responsibility. And in the same way, if everything is a priority one problem that needs to be fixed, then essentially nothing as a priority one problem that needs to be fixed, nothing is going to get done because the teams are going to get completely burned out with context-switching constantly between one priority and the next, rather than being able to actually focus on each piece of work as it comes up.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you’ve built anything from serverless, you know that if there’s one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it’s that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications. It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You’ve created more problems for yourself; make one of them go away. To learn more visit lumigo.io.Jesse: So, I was thinking about some of the best ways that we’ve seen this kind of work handled within organizations, some of the best ways I’ve seen this handled at previous companies that I’ve worked at, some of the best ways that we’ve handled this with some of the clients we’ve worked with. I actually ended up listening to a really great podcast episode about the science of productive conflict, and I’ll link that in the [show notes 00:10:18]. It basically broke down three types of conflicts; you have task conflicts, relationship conflicts, and status conflicts.Task conflicts are your disagreements about a problem, a solution, or decision. Maybe I think that the best way to implement this new feature is in Python. You may think the best way to implement this new feature is in Golang, or Ruby, or something else. That kind of disagreement is a task conflict.The next one is relationship conflicts where you’ve talked about differences in personalities or values. So, maybe I come from a world where product is the most important thing in everything that I do, so I always want to make sure that we focus on feature things first; I always want to make sure that I am doing what is asked of me. I always want to make sure that I am a yes man, so to speak. Whereas maybe you come from an environment or a space where you are more open to pushing back, having collaborative conversations. And it’s just different mental models of how we have been raised in the world, how we view the world, and it’s really, really difficult for us to get out of those different models, so it’s a harder type of conflict to have, relationship conflicts.And then the third one is status conflicts where we disagree about where we fit into this hierarchy that we’re in together. Basically, who’s in charge? Who gets to decide what gets done?Task conflicts and status conflicts can be productive; relationship conflicts are generally not productive because like I mentioned, relationship conflicts really come from people with different mental models, different views of the world and it’s unlikely that you’re going to change someone’s fundamental values. But with that said, having a conversation with the other person, establishing psychological safety, giving them that space to say, “Hey, I want to know more about how you view this problem, so that I can also share how I view this problem, and we can better understand each other,” that’s going to make a world of difference in helping both sides better understand each other, and then also find the right solution, better opportunities for maybe a cost optimization team to learn that, maybe, there are these restrictions that mean that they can’t apply all the savings opportunities that they want to, and that’s fine; that’s a business decision that the business and the organization needs to make. But it helps both teams understand that so that they can have more constructive conversations about where, where are the opportunities in areas that we can make cost optimization improvements? We can have good technical conversations together?Well, if you’ve got questions you’d like us to answer go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us how you try to form those more collaborative, psychologically safe conversations when you run into conflicts in your organization. Thanks again.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Episode #102: Creating and Evolving Technical Content with Amy Arambulo Negrette

Serverless Chats

Play Episode Listen Later May 24, 2021 57:51

About Amy Arambulo NegretteWith over ten years industry experience, Amy Arambulo Negrette has built web applications for a variety of industries including Yahoo!, Fantasy Sports, and NASA Ames Research Center. One of her projects modernized two legacy systems impacting the entire research center and won her a Certificate of Excellence from the Ames Contractor Council. She has built APIs for enterprise clients for cloud consulting firms and led a team of Cloud Software Engineers. Currently, she works as a Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group doing bill analyses and leading cost optimization projects. Amy has survived acquisitions, layoffs, and balancing life with two small children.Website: www.amy-codes.comTwitter: @nerdypawsLinkedin: linkedin.com/in/amycodesWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/xc2rkR5VCxoThis episode sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Lumigo.TranscriptJeremy: Hi everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly, and this is Serverless Chats. Today, I'm joined by Amy Arambulo Negrette. Hey, Amy thanks for joining me.Amy: Thank you, glad to be here.Jeremy: You are a Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, so I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your background and what you do at the Duckbill Group.Amy: Sure thing. I used to be an application developer, I did a bunch of AWS stuff for a while, and now at the Duckbill Group, a cloud economist is someone who goes through cost explorer and your usage report and tries to figure out where you're spending too much money and how the best to help you. It is the best-known use of a small skill I have, which is about being able to dig through someone's receipts and find out what their story is.Jeremy: Sounds like a forensic accountant, maybe forensic cloud economist or something to that effect.Amy: Yep. That's basically what we do.Jeremy: Well, I'm super excited to have you here. First of all, I have to ask this question, I've known Corey for quite some time, and I can imagine that working with him is either amazing or an absolute nightmare. I'm just curious, which one is it?Amy: It is not my job to control Corey, so it's great. He's great to talk to. He really is fully engaged in any conversation you have with him. You've talked to him before, I'm sure you know that. He loves knowing what other people think on things, which I think is a really healthy attitude to have.Jeremy: I totally agree, and hopefully he will subtweet this episode. Anyways, getting into this episode, one of the things that I've noticed that you've done quite a bit, is you create technical content. I've seen a lot of the talks that you've given, and I think that's something that you've done such a great job of not only coming up with content and making content interesting.Sometimes when you put together technical content, it's not super exciting. But you have a very good way of taking that technical content and making it interesting. But then also, following up with it. You have this series of talks where you started talking about managing FaaS, and then you went to the whole frenemies thing with Fargate versus Lambda. Now we're talking about, I think the latest one you did was about Lambda and the container support within Lambda. Maybe we can just go back, or start at a point where, for people who are interested in maybe doing talks, what is the reason for even creating some of these talks in the first place?Amy: I feel a lot of engineers have the same problem, just day-to-day where they will run into a bug, and then they'll go hit the all-knowing software engineer, which is the Google search engine, and have absolutely either nothing come up or have six posts that say, I'm having this problem, but you won't ever get an answer. This is just a fast way of answering those questions before someone has to ask.Jeremy: Right. When you come up with these ... You run into this bug, and you're thinking to yourself, you can't find the answer. So, you do the research, you spend the time digging through, and finding the right way to solve it. When you put these talks together, do you get a sense that it's helping people and then that it's just another way to connect with the community?Amy: Yeah. When I do it, it's really great, because after our talk, I'll see people either in the hallway, or I'll meet someone at a booth, and they'll even say, it's like, I ran into this exact same problem, and I gave up because it was such a strange edge case that it was too hard to fix, and we just moved on to another solution, which is entirely possible.I also get to express to just the general public that I do, in fact, know what I'm talking about, because someone has given me a stage to talk for 30 minutes, and just put up all of my proofs. That's an actually fun and weirdly empowering place to be.Jeremy: Yeah. I actually think that's really interesting. Again, for me, I loved your talks, and some of those things are ... I put those things at the back of my mind, but I know for people who give talks, who maybe get judged for other reasons or whatever, that it certainly is empowering. Is that something where you certainly shouldn't have to do it. There certainly should be that same level of respect. But is that something that you found that doing these talks really just sets the tone, right off the bat?Amy: Yeah, I feel it does. It helps that when someone Googles you, a bunch of YouTube videos on how to solve their problem comes up, that is extremely helpful, especially ... I do a lot of consulting, so if I ever have to go onsite, and someone wants to know what I do, I can pull up an actual YouTube playlist of things that I've done. It's like being in developer relations without having to write all of that content, I get to write a fraction of that content.Jeremy: Right. Unfortunately, that is a fact that we live with right now, which is, it is completely unfair, but I think that, again, the fact that you do that, you put that out there, and that gives you that credibility, which again, you should have from your resume, but at the same time, I think it's an interesting way to circumvent that, given the current world we live in.Amy: It also helps when there are either younger engineers or even other younger professionals who are looking at the tech industry, and the tech industry, especially right now, it does not have the best reputation to be able to see that there are people who are from different backgrounds, either educationally or financially, or what have you, and are able to go out and see someone who has something similar being a subject matter expert in whatever it is that they're talking about.Jeremy: Right. I definitely agree with that. That's that thing, where the more that we can amplify those types of voices and make sure that people can see that diversity, it's incredibly important. Good for you, obviously, for pushing through that, because I know that I've heard a lot of horror stories around that stuff that makes my blood boil.Let's talk to some of these people out here who potentially want to do some of these talks, and want to use this as a way to, again, sell themselves. Because I can tell you one thing, once I started writing blog posts and doing talks and doing those sorts of things, clearly, I have a very different background, but it just gave me a bunch of exposure; job offers and consulting clients and things like that, those just become much easier to get when you can actually go out there and do some of this stuff.If you're interested in doing that, I think one of the hard things for most people is, what even makes a good talk? You've come up with some really great talks. What's that secret sauce? How do you do that?Amy: I think it can also be very intimidating since a lot of the talks that get a lot of promotion are always huge vendor events that they're trying to push their product, they're trying to push a solution. That usually takes up a lot of advertising real estate, essentially, where that's what you see, that's what you see all the threads and everything. When you actually get to these community conferences, or even when I would speak at AWS Summit, it was ... I had a very specific problem that I needed to solve. I ran into a bug, the bug was not in the documentation, because why would it be?Jeremy: Why would you put that in there, right?Amy: Of course. Then Google, three pages down, maybe put me on the path to finding the right answer, and it's the journey of trying to put all of the bug fixes in place to make it work for your specific environment and then being able to share that.Jeremy: Right, yeah. That idea of taking these experiences that you've had, or trying to solve a problem, and then finding the nuances maybe in solving the problem as opposed to the happy path, which it's always great when you're following a blog post and it says, run this command, then run this command, then run this command. Well, what happens on that third command when the thing blows up, and you have no idea what to do? Then you end up Googling for five hours trying to find your way out of that.You take this path of, find those bugs or find that non-happy path and solve it. Then what do you do around there? How do you then take that ... You got to make that interesting somehow.Amy: Yes. A lot of people use gifs and memes. I use pictures of food and screencaps from Dungeons and Dragons. That's usually just different enough that it'll snap someone just out of their phone going, "Why is there a huge elf on my screen trying to attack people screaming elf errors." Well, that's because that's what they thought it would be great to call it. It's not a great error code. It doesn't explain what it is, and it makes you very confused.Jeremy: Right. Part of that is, and again, there's that relatability when you create talks, and you want to connect with the audience in some way. But you also ... This is the other thing that I've always found the hardest when I'm creating talks, is trying to find the right level. Because AWS always does this thing where they're like, it's a 200 level, or it's a 400 level, and so forth. I think that's helpful, but you're going to get people of all different skill levels, and so forth. How do you take a problem like that, and then make it relatable, or understandable, probably? Find that right level?Amy: The way I see it, there's going to be at least one person of these two types in the room that are not going to be your target audience, someone who doesn't know what you're talking about, but sees that a tool that they're considering is going to pose a problem, and they want to know how difficult it is to fix it. Or there's going to be a business person who has no technical background, and they just want to know if what they're evaluating is worth evaluating, if this error is going to be so difficult to narrow down and try to resolve that, yes, why would we go through something that my engineers are going to spend hours to try to fix something that's essentially a configuration issue?When I write any section of a talk, I make sure that it addresses a person who may not have come into that with that exact problem in mind. For the people who have, they'll understand the ... In animation, it's called key images, where there are very specific slots where you understand the topic of what is happening and the context around it. I always produce more verbose notes that go with my presentation. I usually release it either at the end of the day, or later on that week, once everyone has had time to settle, and it provides a tutorial-esque experience where this is what you saw, this is how you would actually do it if you were in front of a screen.Jeremy: Yeah.Amy: There are people who go to technical talks with a laptop on their lap because they're also working while they're trying to do it. But most of the time, they're not going to have the console open while you're walking through the demo. So, how are you going to address that issue? It's just easier that way.Jeremy: I like that idea too, of ... I try to do high-level bullet points, and then talk about the bullet point. Because one thing that I try to do, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this as well. Here I am picking your brain trying to make my own talks better. But basically, I do a bullet point, and then I talk through it. I actually animate the bullet points coming in.I'm not a huge fan of showing an entire slide with all the bullet points and then letting people read ahead, I bring a bullet point in, talk about the bullet point, bring another bullet point in. Is that something you recommend doing too? Or do you just present all the concepts and then walk people through it?Amy: I think it depends. I tend to have very dense slides, which is not great for reading, especially if you're several rows back. I truly understand that. But the way I see it, because I also talk very fast when I'm on stage that I want there to be enough context around what's happening, so that if I gloss over a concept, then you visually can understand what's happening.That said, if that's because the entire bullet block on my slide is going to be about a very specific thing that's happening. It's not something that you have to view step-by-step. Now, I do have a few where, especially in a more workshop scenario, where you're going, I want you to think about this first and then go on to this next concept. I totally hide stuff. I just discovered for a talk that I was constructing the other day, that there's an animation that drops them down like index cards, and that's now my favorite animation right now.Jeremy: When you're doing that, like because this is the other thing, just for people who have ever ... If you're out there and you've ever written a talker or you've given a talk, the first iteration of it is never going to be the right one. You have to go through and you have to revise. It is sort of weird, and I don't know, maybe you felt this way too, in the pre-pandemic world, when you would give talks in person, most of the time, you'd give it to a relatively small audience, a couple of hundred people or whatever, as opposed to now, when we do talks, post-pandemic, and they're online, it's like, they're immediately available online.It's hard to give the same talk over and over and over and over again, without somebody potentially having seen it. A lot of work goes into a single talk. Not being able to use the same time over and over again, is not great. But, how do you refine it? Is it that you tested it with a live audience, or do you use a family member or a friend, or a colleague? How do you test and refine your talks?Amy: I'm actually an organizer at a meetup group, and specifically built around giving people of marginalized gender identities, and a place to stage and write technical content. It is a very specific audience.Jeremy: I can imagine.Amy: But it addresses that issue I had earlier about visibility, it also does help you ... If you don't have a lot of contacts in this industry, just as an aside, technical speaking is a way to do it, because everyone loves talking to each other after the stress has worn off, and you become the friendliest person after you've done that.But also, there are meetup groups out there, specifically about doing technical feedback, or just general speaking feedback. If you want to do something general, Toastmasters is a great organization to do. If you want to do strictly technical, if you do any cloud-related stuff, the DevOps communities are super friendly, even if it's not specifically about DevOps. I'm not a DevOps person, but I have a lot of DevOps friends. Some of my best friends are DevOps people.And you can get on a meetup or a Zoom call and just burn through your slides for about 10 or 15 minutes and see ... Your friends will be very honest with you, in a small group.Jeremy: Right. One of the things I did notice, too, giving a speech in person or giving your talk in person versus giving a talk via Zoom call, is sometimes when you don't hear any laughs or chuckles from a little joke that you make in there, it can feel very lonely in that space after you're waiting for something in there, but. It's a little bit ...Amy: It's worse when there are people in the room. I assure you, it is so much worse.Jeremy: That is very true. If something falls flat, that's a good point. Just going back to more this idea of creating good talks, and what makes a good talk. Where do you find ... You mentioned, maybe it's a vendor conference or something and you maybe install the vendor stuff, and you find the bugs and so forth. But is there any other places that you get inspiration from? Are there any resources you use to sort build some of these talks?Amy: Again, the communities help. The communities will tell you, really, it's like, I don't understand this thing, can someone hop on a call with me for real quick minute and explain why this concept is so hard? That's a very good place to base your talk off. As far as making them engaging, and interesting, I tend to clone video gaming videos, just because that's what I watch. I know, if it's going to be interesting to me, then it will probably be at least different than the content that's out there.Jeremy: Right. That's a good way to think of things too, is if it's something that you find interesting, chances are, there are lots of other people that will find that interesting. All right, let's go back to just this idea of creating new talks. You had mentioned this idea of, again, finding the bugs and so forth. But one of the things that I think we see quite a bit is always that bleeding edge stuff. People always want to write content about something new that happened.I'm guilty of this, I would think from a serverless standpoint where you're talking about things that are really, really bleeding edge. It's useful and they're interesting. Certainly, if you go to a conference about serverless, then it's really nice to see you have these talks and what might be possible. But sometimes when you're going to more practical type things. Again, even DevOps Days, and some of those other things, I think you've got attendees or talk listeners who are looking for very practical advice.I guess the question is like, how do you take a new piece of content, one of these problems, whatever it is. I guess, how do you keep finding new content is probably the better way to ask that question?Amy: Well, to just roll back just a little bit. My problem with bleeding edge content, I love watching it, but bleeding edge content will almost always be a product demo because it's someone who developed a new solution, and they want to share with everybody, which is just going to walk you through how it's used, which is great, except, and this is just a nature of what the cloud industry is like, all of this stuff, it changes day-to-day.These tools may not be applicable in a few months, or they may become the new standard. There's no way to tell until you're already six months out, and by then, they've already gone through several product revisions. I once did a talk where I was talking about best practices, and AWS released their updated best practices the day before my talk, and I had to update three slides. It threw off my timing, it was great.That's just one of those kind of pitfalls that you have to roll with. As far as getting new content, though, especially if you're dealing ... It depends who your audience is, because my audience tends to be either ICs or technical leads, and by then you're usually in a company ... If you're not developing these bleeding edge solutions, you're just using the tools that's out there already.You had brought up my "Serverless Frenemies," which is still my favorite title of any talk that I've ever made, because when I did the managing containers one, and I love all my Devro friends, but they all got into my mentions about why don't you just use Fargate? If you're at the containerization stage, why don't you just use Fargate, because it's not even close to the same thing, it is closer to Kubernetes than it is to Lambda, and I'm looking for a Lambda-like solution. That's what that whole deal was about, and I was able to stretch that out into I think 30 minutes because Twitter will tell you what's wrong, whether or not it's accurate or not, and whether or not they're actually your friends. They are my friends, but come on.Jeremy: Twitter can definitely be brutal. I think that, and maybe unpack a little bit what you were saying, is you're creating content around existing tools. One way to do it is, you're using existing tools, you're creating content around that, or you can create content around that. Looking at those solutions, you introduce a new solution to something, or you're even using an existing tool, nothing's perfect. You had mentioned that idea of bugs and so forth. But just, I guess new solutions, or just solutions, in general, maybe higher-level abstractions, everything creates some new type of problem that you have to deal with, and that's probably a pretty effective way to generate new content.Amy: It is. If you ever have to write down an RCA, which, for those who have not had the pleasure of doing one is called a root cause analysis, where you took down production, and you had to explain why.Jeremy: Yep.Amy: Or you ever did this, hopefully, in stage, or hopefully, in development where you ran into a situation where ... I had a situation once where Lambda would not delete itself. I call it my Skynet problem where it just hit a stage where it was both trying to save and delete at the same time. It would lock itself and I had to destroy the entire stack and send that command several times just to force that command through.If you ever have a problem like that, that is a thing that you write up instantly, and then you turn it into slide decks, and then you go to SlidesCarnival, you throw a very flashy background on it, and next thing you know, you have a TED talk, or a technical talk.Jeremy: Right. The other thing too, is, I find use cases to be an interesting, just like ... Non-traditional use cases are kind of fun too, how can I use this in a way that it wasn't meant to be used, and do something like that?Amy: I love those. Those are my favorite. I love watching people break away from what the tutorial says you have to do, and I'm going to get a little weird with it, and that to me is totally fascinating. When the whole, I fed these scripts into a computer meme came out, I thought that was super fascinating because that was something a company I had worked for did, they used analytics ... I used to work for Fantasy Sports, to write color commentary for your Fantasy Football team, and they would send it out.If you did really well, you would get a really raving review, and if you did really poorly, you would get roasted by a computer, and then that gets sent to everyone in the league, and it's hilarious. But that is not a thing that you would just assume a computer would do, is just write hot takes on your Fantasy Football team.Jeremy: That's ... Sure, go ahead.Amy: It's so much fun. I love watching people get weird with the tools that are there.Jeremy: There are times where you could do something like that, you could maybe create a content around some strange use case or whatever, and I love that idea of getting weird with that. The other part of it, though, is that, I guess, if you're sitting through a talk, and it's some super interesting problem that you're listening to, and again, I don't know, maybe it's some database replication thing, that you're just really into, whatever. That makes sense. But I think the majority of problems that developers have, are not that interesting, they're just frustrating.Probably the worst thing to do is wanting to sit through a talk that talks about some frustrating issue you have. Is there a way to basically say, "Look, I have a problem that I want to talk about. It's not the most interesting problem, but how can you flip that and take a problem that's not interesting and make it interesting?Amy: The batching containers and the frenemies talk was all based off of a bin library error from within the Lambda AMI. That, on paper is extremely boring, and should be a thing that you can easily look up, it is not. When I went around it trying to make tracking down library errors interesting, just saying it is very slow and can drain the energy out of your voice.But, I put a lot of energy into my work in general, and that's just how I had to approach pulling these talk is like, I like what I do, just, generally. When I try to explain what I do to people, it sounds super boring, and I own that. Now I'm doing it with spreadsheets, which is much, much worse. But when I tell people, it's not about the error itself, it's about everything that happened to make this one particular error happen. The reason why this error happened was because Lambda uses AWS's very specific Linux AMI when they did not used to, and they left stuff out for either security or performance purposes.Whether or not we as a group agree with that, that's a business decision that they made. How does their business decision affect your future business decisions and your future technical ones? Well, that becomes a way more interesting conversation, because it's like, we know this is going to break at this part, do we still want to use SSH? Do we still need it for this reason? You can approach it more from a narrative standpoint of, I wasted way too much time with this, did I need to? It's like, well, you shouldn't have, this should not have happened, but no bug should have happened, right?Jeremy: Right.Amy: You work through your process of finding a solution instead of concentrating on what the solution is because the solution they can look up in your show notes later.Jeremy: Right. No, I love that idea of documenting your process as opposed to just the solution itself. You find the problem, you pull the thread and where does that take you? I think to myself, a lot of times I go down the rabbit hole on trying to find the solution to a problem that I have or a bug fix, whatever. Sometimes, the resolution is underwhelming. Maybe it's not worth sharing. But other times, there's a revelation in there. I think you're right, with a little bit of storytelling, you can usually take that and turn that into a really interesting talk.Amy: One of the things it will also do, if you look at it from a process and from a narrative standpoint, is that when you take this video, and you send it to either a technical lead or a product manager, they'll understand what the problem was because you did not bog it down with code. There's very little live code in mine because I understand that people build things differently, just because every code is as different as every person. I get that and I've come to terms with it. This is the best way to share that information.Jeremy: Absolutely. All right, let's wrap up the idea of building talks. What is your advice to someone who is starting out new? What's the best way for them to get started, or what's just some general advice for people starting to build talks?Amy: The best content new engineers can do, and that's mostly because this is never the standpoint from which tutorials are ever written in, is that, as someone who knows very little of the way a language or a framework should work, write down your process, the entire thing on you getting either a framework onboarded, how you build, and a messaging system, things that people have written a billion times because chances are, one, you got that work from someone else's blog post or their documentation, and you can cite that. And two, when you do it that way, you not only get into the habit of writing, but you get in the habit of editing it in a way that makes it more palatable for people who are not in your specific experience.When you do it this way, people can actually see, from an outsider's perspective, exactly what is hard about the thing that they built, or what people who do not have a different level of experience are going through. If a tutorial is targeted at engineers who know where the memory leaks in PHP are, that's the thing that comes with experience, that is not the thing that can be trained.When a new engineer hits that point, and they found it in a new framework where you fix it, then you start knowing where to fix other problems. That way more senior engineers and more vetted people can learn from your experience, and then they will contact you and they will teach you how to find these issues, so you don't run into them again, and you end up with someone you can just bounce ideas off of. That's how you get pulled into these technical communities. It's a really self-healing process.Jeremy: Yeah. I love that. I think this idea of you approaching something from a slightly different angle, your experience, the way that you do it, the way that you see it, the way that you perceive the word or the next prompt that comes back, or how you read an error message or any of those things, you sharing your experience around that is hugely valuable to the people that are building these things. But also, you may run into problems that other people like you run into, and it's just ... Sometimes, all it takes is just a tiny twisting of the words, rearranging a sentence in a way that now that clicks with somebody where the other time it didn't. I love that.That's why I always encourage people, just even if somebody has written his content 100 times before, whatever slight difference there is in your content, that could have a powerful effect on someone else.Amy: Yeah, it really can.Jeremy: Awesome. All right, let me ask you a couple of questions about Lambda and Functions as a Service because I know that you spent quite a bit of time on this stuff. I guess a question, especially, maybe even from a cloud economist, what's next for Lambda and Functions as a Service? Because I know you've written about the Lambda containers, but what's maybe that next evolution?Amy: What AWS did recently when they released Lambda Containers is basically put it at feature parity with Azure and GCP, which already had that ability, they had either a function service or a function to Json service where you could upload your own container. They finally released the base image, where, granted, if you knew where to look, you could get it before, but they actually released it, and announced it to the general public, so you don't have to know someone in order to be able to use it.What I see a lot of people being able to do with this now is they really want to do local development testing, so they don't have to push anything to their account and rack up those charges, when all that you want to do is make sure that whatever one line update you made, actually worked and you didn't put the space or the cab in the wrong place, which is, I guess, how it works now and it takes down the entire stack, which again, we've all done at least once, so don't worry about it. If you've ever taken down production, don't worry, you're not the only one, I promise you. You can't throw a t-shirt into an empty conference room and not hit a dude who took down production. I'm going to save that for later.Local development testing, live simulation is a really big thing. I've seen asked to do full-on data science just on Lambda containers, so they don't have to use Kubernetes anymore, because speaking of cost stuff, it's easier to track cost-wise than Kubernetes is, because Kubernetes is purely consumption-based, and you have to tie a bunch of stuff together in order to make that tracking work. That would be great.I think from here on, and a lot of the FaaS changes, they're not going to be front ends anymore, it's all going to be optimizations by the providers, you're not going to see much of that anymore. It's not like before, where they would add three more fields and make a blog post about it. I think everything is just going to be tuning just from Lambda's perspective now. That and hooking it to more things, because they love their integrations. What good is Lambda if you can't integrate it yourself?Jeremy: Right, if you can't hook it up to events. It's interesting, though, this move to support containers as a packaging format. You're right, I think this has been available in IBM, it's been available in Google, it's been available in Microsoft, these capabilities have existed for a while to use a container, and again, that's a very overloaded word, I know, but to use that as a packaging format. But moving to that, the parity there with the other cloud providers is one thing, but who's that conversation for? Whose mind does that change about serverless, or FaaS, I guess.Amy: The security team.Jeremy: Security, okay.Amy: Because if you talk to any engineer, if it's a technical problem, they'll find a way to fix it. That's just the way, especially at the individual contributor level, that's how the brain works is like, oh, this is a small thing, I bet I can fix it with a few days, or a weekend. Weekend turns into a month, but that's a completely different problem. I've had clients who did not want to use Lambda because they could not control the containerization system. You would be pushing your code into containers that were owned by Amazon, and the way they saw that, they saw that as liability.While it does have some very strong technical implications, because you're now able to choose the kind of runtime you do, easier than trying to hamstring layers together, because I know layers is supposed to fix this problem, but it's so hard. It's so hard for something that you should be able to download off of Docker and then play with it and then put it back. It's so unnecessarily hard, and it makes me so angry.If you're willing to incur that responsibility, you can tweak your memory and you have more technical control, but also you have more control at a business level too, and that is a conversation that will go way easier as far as adoption.Jeremy: Right. The other thing, in terms of, I guess the complexity of running K8s or running Kubernetes is one of those things where that just seems like a lot of complexity. You mentioned the billing aspect of it and trying to track cost. Not that everyone's trying to narrow down exactly how much this Lambda container ran them, maybe you have more insight into that than I do, but the idea of just the complexity.It seems to me that if you start thinking about cost, that the total cost of ownership of running a container and a Lambda function or running it in Fargate, versus having to install and maintain ... I would say, even if you're using one of the managed services like EKS, or something like that, that the total cost of ownership of going down the serverless route has got to be better.Amy: Yeah, especially if you're one of these apps that are very user generater based. You're tracking mostly events and content, and not even a huge amount of content, you're not streaming video, you're sharing pictures, or sharing ... If you were trying to rebuild Foursquare, you would just be sharing Geo data, which is comparatively an extremely small piece of data.You don't need an entire instance, or an entire container to do that. You can do that on a very small scale, and build that out really quickly. That said, if you go from one of these three-person teams, and then there's interest in your product, for whatever reason, and it explodes, then not just your cost, but if you had to manage the traffic of that, if you had to manage the actual resources of that, and you did not think your usage would stick with your bill, that's not great.Being able to, at least in the first few years of the company, just use Lambda for everything, that's probably just a safer solution, because you're still rapidly iterating, and you're still changing things very quickly, and you're still transmitting very small bits of data. That said, it's like there are also large enterprise companies that are heavy Lambda users, and even their Lambda bill compared to their Kubernetes bill, it is ... If you round it to down there Kubernetes bill, you would get their Lambda bill.Jeremy: Right. Gotcha. I think that's really interesting because I do ... I actually would love to know your thoughts and whether you even see this. I don't know if we have enough data yet to know this, but this idea of using Lambda, especially early on in startups, or even projects within an enterprise, being able to have that flexibility and the low operational overhead and so forth, I think is really great. But do you see that, or is that something that you think will happen is, you'll get to a point where you'll say we've found some sort of stability point with this product, where we now need to move it over to something like Kubernetes, or a container management system because overall, it's going to end up being cheaper in the long run.Amy: What usually happens when you're making that transition from Lambda to either even ECS or Fargate, or eventually Kubernetes is that your business logic has now become so complex, or your infrastructure requirements have become so complex that Lambda can't do it cleanly anymore. You end up maxing out on either memory or CPU utilization, or because you're ... Apparently Lambda has a limit on how many times you can invoke it at the same time, which some people have hit in real life.Those are times when it stops being a cheaper solution, and it stops being a target solution because you can run your own FaaS environment within instances, and then you can have a similar environment to what you're building so you don't have to rebuild everything, but you don't have to incur that on-demand cost anymore. That's one path I've seen someone take, and that's usually the decision is that Lambda, before, when it was limited, can't hold it.Now that you can put your own container, so long as it fits in that requirement, you can pad that runway out a little bit, and you can stretch out how long you have before you do a full conversion to ECS environment. But that is usually how it is because you just try to overload or you have, maybe, 50 Lambdas trying to support one application, which is totally a thing you can do, it may not be the best ... Even with Step, even with everything else. When that becomes too complex, and you end up just going through containers, anyway.Jeremy: Right. I think that's interesting, and I think any company that grows to the point where that they need to start thinking about that next little infrastructure, it's probably a good thing. It's a good point to start having those conversations.All right, I got just one more question for you, because I'm really interested. You mentioned what you do as a cloud economist, reading through people's bills and things like that. Now, I thought Corey just made this thing up. I didn't even know this thing existed until, Corey comes out, and he probably coined the term. But in terms of that ...Amy: That's what he tells people.Jeremy: He does tell people that, right. I think he did. So, I will definitely give him credit there. But in terms of that role, of being a cloud economist and having to look through people's bills, and trying to find them ways to save it, that's pretty insane that we need people like you to do that, isn't it?Amy: Yes, it's a bananas job. I cannot believe this is a job that I'm actually doing. It's also a lot of fun. But if you think about it, that when I was starting out, and everything was LAMP stack, when I started. That was a hot new tech when I started, was the LAMP stack. The solution to all of those problems were we're going to throw more hardware at it. Then the following question was, why are we spending so much on hardware?Their solution to that problem was, we're going to buy real estate to store all of the hardware on. Now that you don't have to do that, you still have the problem of, I'm going to solve this problem by throwing more hardware at it. That's still a mindset that is alive and well, and you still end up with the same problem, except now you don't have the excuse that at least we own the facility that data is in because you don't anymore.Since you don't actually own the cases and the plates and everything, you don't have to worry about disposing of them and having to use stuff that you don't actually use anymore. A lot of my problems are, one of our services has gone out of control, we don't know why. Then I will tell you, who is spending that money. I will talk to that team to make sure that they know that it's happening because sometimes they don't even know what's happening. Something got spun up into their account, and maybe it was a testbed, maybe it was a demo, maybe they hired a vendor to load something into their environment and those costs got out of control.It's not like I'm going out trying to tell you that you did something wrong. It's like, this is where the problem is, let's go find out what happened. Forensic cloud bill person, I'm going to workshop that into a business card, because that sounds way better than the title that Corey uses.Jeremy: Forensic cloud accountant or something like that.Amy: Yes.Jeremy: I think it's also interesting that billing is, and the bills you get from AWS are a leading indicator of things that are potentially going wrong. Interesting, because I don't know if people connect this. Maybe I'm underestimating people here, but the idea that a bill that runs, or that you're seeing EC2 instances cost spiking, or you're seeing a higher load or higher bandwidth or things like that. Those can all be indicators of poorly written code, it can be indicators of the bad compression or missing compression settings, all kinds of things that it can jump out at you. Unless somebody is paying attention to those bills, I don't think most developers and most teams, they're not going to see that.Amy: Yeah. The only time they pay attention when things start spiraling out of control, and ... Okay, this sounds like an intuitive issue, and first thing people will do, will go, "We're going to log everything, and we're going to find out where the problem is."Jeremy: It'll cost you more money.Amy: There is a threshold where cloud watch becomes very expensive.Jeremy: Right, absolutely.Amy: Then they hit that threshold, and now their bill is four times as much.Jeremy: Right.Amy: A lot of the times it's misconfiguration, it's like, very rarely does any product get to the point where they just can't ... It's built so poorly that it can barely hold itself up. That's never been the case. It's always been, this has been turned off, or AWS also offers S3 analytics. You have to turn them on per bucket, that's not a policy that's usually written in anyone's AWS config. When they launch it, they just launch it without any analytics. They don't know if the thing is supposed to be sending things to Glacier, if it's highly used data, there's no way to tell.It's trying to find little holes like that, where it seems like it shouldn't be a problem, but the minute it becomes a problem, it's because you spent $20,000.Jeremy: Right. Yeah. No, you can spend money very, very fast in the cloud. I think that is a lesson learned by many, many people.Amy: The difference between being on metal and throwing hardware at a problem and being on the cloud and throwing hardware at a problem is that you can throw hardware at a problem at scale on the cloud.Jeremy: Exactly. Right. There's no stopping point like we have to go by using servers ...Amy: No one will stop you.Jeremy: No one will stop you. Just maybe the credit card company or whatever. Anyways, Amy, you are doing some amazing work with that, because I actually find that to be very, very fascinating. I think, in terms of what that can do, and the need for it, it's a fascinating field, and super interesting. Good for Corey for really digging into that and calling it out. Then again, for people like you who are willing to take that job, because that seems to me like poring through those numbers can't be the most interesting thing to do. But it must feel good when you do find a way to save somebody some money.Amy: Spreadsheets can be interesting. Again, it's like everything else about my job. If I try to explain why it's interesting, I just make it sound more boring.Jeremy: Awesome. All right. Well, let's leave it there. Amy, thank you again, for joining me, this was awesome. If people want to find out more about you, or maybe they have horribly large AWS cloud bills, and they want to check out the Duckbill Group, how do they do that?Amy: Honestly, if you search for Corey Quinn, you can find the Duckbill Group real fast. If you want to go talk to me because I like doing community engagement, and I like doing talks, and I like roasting people on Twitter just about different stuff, you can hit me up on Twitter @nerdypaws. If you want to be a professional, I'm also on LinkedIn under Amy Codes.Jeremy: All right, and then you also have a website, Amy-codes.com.Amy: Amy-codes.com is the archive of all my talks. It's currently only showing the talks from last year because for some reason, it's somehow became very hard to find a spot for the past year. Who knew?Jeremy: A lot of people doing talks. But anyways, all right, Amy, thank you again. Appreciate it.Amy: Thank you. Had so much fun.

amazon google service zoom microsoft local excellence cloud ibm dungeons and dragons evolving yahoo technical fantasy football certificates aws lamp apis faa devops azure functions googling forensic cpu toastmasters skynet geo php glacier s3 docker kubernetes rca gotcha fantasy sports lambda foursquare baas ics serverless json gcp ssh ecs nasa ames research center eks ec2 k8s corey quinn devopsdays fargate lambdas amy amy aws summit amy it duckbill group amy you jeremy it jeremy you cbt nuggets amy thank amy well

Build vs. Buy

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2021 13:04

amazon phd field diy cloud wtf saas hgtv aws qa devops kubernetes ci cd launchdarkly lacework amy it amy you amy so jesse yeah last week in aws humblepod

Cloud Cost Management Starter Kit

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2021 17:22

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Negrette.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we’ve seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure because I mean, who doesn’t love to complain about AWS? I feel like that’s always a good thing that we can talk about, no matter the topic. Today, we’re going to be talking about the ‘cloud cost management starter kit.’ So, the starter kit seems to be a big fad that’s going around. If you’re listening to this episode, you’re probably thinking, “It’s already done. It’s over.”But I still want to talk about it. I think that this is a really relevant topic because I think a lot of companies are trying to get started, get their hands started in cloud cost management. So, I think this would be a great thing for us to talk about: what’s in our cloud cost management starter kit?Amy: And it really will help answer that question that I get asked a lot on: what is even a cloud economist, and what do you do?Jesse: Yeah, I mean, given the current timeframe, I haven’t gone to any parties recently to talk about what I do, but I do feel like anytime I try to explain to somebody what I do, there’s always that moment of, “Okay. Yes, I work with computers, and we’ll just leave it at that.”Amy: It’s easier to just think about it as we look at receipts, and we kind of figure things out. But when you try to get into the nuts and bolts of it, it’s a very esoteric idea that we’re trying to explain. And no, I don’t know why this is a real job. And yet it is.Jesse: This is one of the things that always fascinates me. I absolutely love the work that I do, and I definitely think that it is important work that needs to be done for any organization, to work on their cloud cost management best practices, but it also boggles my mind that AWS, Azure, GCP, haven’t figured out how to bake this in more clearly and easily to all of their workflows and all their services. It still boggles my mind that this is something that exists as—Amy: As a thing we have to do.Jesse: As a thing we have to do. Yeah, absolutely.Amy: Well, the good news is, they’re going to change their practices once every six weeks, and we’ll have a new thing to figure it out. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. So, let’s get started with the first item on our cloud cost management starter kit. This one is something that Amy is definitely passionate about; I am definitely passionate about, as well. Amy, what is it?Amy: Turn on your CUR. Turn on your CUr. If you don’t know what it is, just Google AWS CUR. Turn it on. It will save you a headache, and it will save anyone you bring in to help you [laugh] [unintelligible 00:02:59] a huge headache. And it keeps us from having to yell at people, even though that’s the thing that if you pay us to do it, we will totally do it for you.Jesse: If you take nothing away from this episode, go check out the AWS Cost and Usage Report—otherwise known as CUR—turn it on for your accounts, ideally enable it in Parquet format because that’s going to allow you to get all that sweet, sweet data in an optimized manner, living in your S3 bucket. It is a godsend. It gives you all the data from Cost Explorer, and then some. It allows you to do all sorts of really interesting business intelligence analytics on your billing data. It’s absolutely fantastic.Amy: It’s like getting all of those juicy infrastructure metrics, except getting that with a dollar sign attached to it so you know what you actually doing with that money.Jesse: Yeah, this definitely is, like, the first step towards doing any kind of showback models, or chargeback models, or even unit economics to figuring out where your spend is going. The Cost and Usage Report is going to be a huge first step in that direction.Amy: Now, the reason why we yell at people about this—or at least I do—is because AWS will only show you the data from the time that it is turned on. They do have it for historical periods, but if you enable it at a specific point, all of your reports are going to start there. So, if you’re looking to do forecasting, or you want to be able to know what your usage is going to be looking like from this point on, turn it on as early as possible.Jesse: Absolutely. If you are listening to this now and you don’t have the CUR enabled, definitely go pause this episode, enable it now, and come back and listen to the rest of the episode because the sooner you have the CUR enabled, the sooner you’ll be able to get those sweet, sweet metrics for all of your—Amy: And it’s free.Jesse: [laugh]. Yeah, that’s even the more important part. It’s free. There’s going to be a little bit of data storage costs if you send this data to S3, but overall, the amount of money that you spend on that storage is going to be optimized because you’re saving that CUR data in Parquet format. It’s absolutely worthwhile.All right, so number two; the second item on our cloud cost management starter kit, is getting to know your AWS account manager and account team. This one, I feel like a lot of people don’t actually know that they have an AWS account manager. But let me tell you now: if you have an AWS account, you have an AWS account manager. Even if they haven’t reached out to you before they do exist, you have access to them, and you should absolutely start building a rapport with them.Amy: Anytime you are paying for a support plan, you also have an account manager. This isn’t just true for AWS; I would be very surprised for any service that charged you for support but did not give you an account manager.Jesse: So, for those of you who aren’t familiar with your account manager, they are generally somebody who will be able to help you navigate some of the more complex parts of AWS, especially when you have any kind of questions about your bill or about technical things using AWS. They will help you navigate those resources and make sure that your questions are getting to the teams that can actually answer them, and then make sure that those questions are actually getting answered. They are the best champion for you within AWS.If you have more than a certain threshold of spend on AWS, if you’re paying for enterprise support, you likely also have a dedicated technical account manager as well, who will be basically your point person for any technical questions. They are a great resource for any technical questions, making sure that your technical questions are answered, making sure that any concerns that you have are addressed, and that they get to the right teams. They can give you some guidance on possibly how to set up new features, new architecture within AWS. They can give you some great, great guidance about the best ways to use AWS to accomplish whatever your use case is. So, in the cases where you’ve got a dedicated technical account manager as well, get to know them because again, they are going to be your champion. They are here to help you. Both your account manager and your technical account manager want to make sure that you are happy with AWS and continue to use AWS.Amy: And the thing to know about the account manager is, like, if you ever run into that situation where, oh, something was left on erroneously and we ended up with a spike, or this is how I was understanding the service to work and it didn’t work that way, and now I have some weird spend, but I turned it off immediately, if you ever want to get a refund or a credit or anything, these are the people to talk to; they’re the ones who are going to help you out.Jesse: Yeah, that’s a great point. It’s like, whenever you call into any kind of customer support center, if you treat the person who answers the phone with kindness, they are generally more likely to help you solve your problem, or generally more likely to go out of their way to help you solve your problem. Whereas if you just call in and yell at them, they have no interest in helping you. So—Amy: You’ll never see that refund.Jesse: Exactly. So, the more that you can create that rapport with your account manager—and your technical account manager if you have one—the better chances that they will fight for you internally to go above and beyond to make sure that you can get a refund if you accidentally left something running, or make sure that any billing issues are taken care of extremely fast because they ultimately have already built that rapport with you. They care about you and the way that you care about them and the way that you care about continuing to use AWS.Amy: There’s another note about the technical managers where if you are very open with them on what your architecture plans are—“We’re going to move into this type of EKS deployment. This is the kind of traffic we think we’re going to run, and we think it’s going to be shaped this way”—they’ll help you out and build that in most efficient way possible because they also don’t want the resources out there either being overutilized or just being run poorly. They’ll help you out in trying to figure out the best way of building that. They’ll also—if AWS launches a new program and you spent a lot of money on AWS, maybe there’s a preview program that they think will help you solve a very edge case kind of issue that you didn’t think you had before.Jesse: Absolutely.Amy: Yeah. So, it’s a great way to get these paths and get these relationships because it helps both parties out.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by VM Ware. Because lets face it, the past year hasn’t been kind to our AWS bills or, honestly, any cloud bills. The pandemic had a bunch of impacts. It forced us to move workloads to the cloud sooner than we would otherwise. We saw strange patterns such as user traffic drops off but infrastructure spend doesn't. What do you do about it? Well, the CloudLive 2021 Virtual Conference is your chance to connect with people wrestling with the same type of thing. Be they practitioners, vendors in the space, leaders of thought—ahem, ahem. And get some behind the scenes look into the various ways different companies are handling this. Hosted by Cloudhealth by VM Ware on May 20th the CloudLive 2021 Conference will be 100% virtual and 100% free to attend. So you really have no excuses for missing out on this opportunity to deal with people who care about cloud bills. Vist cloudlive.com/corey to learn more and save your virtual seat today. Thats cloud l-i-v-e.com/corey c-o-r-e-y. Drop the “e,” we’re all in trouble. My thanks for VM Ware for sponsoring this ridiculous episode.Jesse: So, the third item on our cloud cost management starter kit is identifying all of your contracts. Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “Well, wait. I’ve just got my AWS bill, what else should I be thinking about?” There’s other contracts that you might have with AWS. Now, you as the engineer may not know this, but there may be other agreements that your company has entered into with AWS: you might have an enterprise discount program agreement, you might have a private pricing addendum agreement, you might have an acceleration program—migration program—agreement. There’s multiple different contracts that your company might have with AWS, and you definitely want to make sure that you know about all of them.Amy: If you’re ever in charge of an architecture, you’re going to want to know not just what your costs are at the end of the day, but also what they are before all your discounts because those discounts can maybe camouflage a heavy usage if you’re also getting that usage covered by refunds and discounts.Jesse: Absolutely, totally agreed. Yeah, it’s really, really important to understand, not just your net spend at the end of the day, but your actual usage spend. And that’s a big one that I think a lot of people don’t think about regularly and is definitely important to think about when you’re looking at cloud cost management best practices and understanding how much your architecture is actually costing you on a team-by-team or product-by-product basis.Amy: Also, make sure if you’re doing reservations that you know when those reservations and savings plans ent—Jesse: Yes.Amy: —because you don’t want to have to answer the question, “Why did all of your costs go up when you actually have made no changes in your infrastructure?”Jesse: Yeah. Half the battle here is knowing that these contracts and reservations exist; the other half of the battle is knowing when they expire so that you can start having proactive conversations with teams about their usage patterns to make sure that they’re actually fully utilizing the reservations, and fully utilizing these discounts, and that they’re going to continue utilizing those discounts, continue utilizing those reservations so that you could ultimately end up purchasing the right reservations going forward, or ultimately end up renegotiating at the correct discount amount or commitment amount so that you are getting the best discount for how much money you’re actually spending.So, the last item on our cloud cost management starter kit is thinking about the non-technical parts of projects. Amy, when you think about the non-technical parts of projects, what do you think about?Amy: Non-technical always makes you think of people and process. So, this would be the leadership making the decisions on what those cost initiatives are. Maybe they want to push this down to the team lead level: it would include that. Or maybe they want to push it down to the engineering level, or the individual contributor level. There are some companies that are small enough that an engineer can be completely cognizant and responsible for the spend that they make.Jesse: Yeah. I think that this is a really, really critical item to include in our starter kit because leadership needs to be bought into and back whatever work is being done, whatever cloud cost management work is being done. But also teams need to be empowered to make the changes that they want to make, make the changes that will ultimately provide those cloud cost management optimization opportunities and better cost visibility across teams. So, does everybody know what their teams are empowered to do, what their teams are capable of? Does everybody know what their teams are responsible for on the flip side? Do they ultimately know that they are responsible for managing their own spend, or do they think that the spend belongs to somebody else? Also, do they understand which resources are part of their budget or part of their spend?Amy: It’s the idea that ownership of—whether it’s a bill, whether it’s a resource—comes down to communication, and level setting. Do we know who owns this? Do we know who’s paying for it? Do they know the information in the same way? Is there someone who’s outside who can figure out this information for themselves? Just making sure that it’s done in a clear enough way that everyone knows what’s going on.Jesse: Absolutely. Well, that will do it for us this week. Those are our four main items for our cloud cost management starter kits. If you’ve got questions you’d like us to answer, please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA, fill out the fields and submit your questions.If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us, what would you put in your ideal starter kit?Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

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Cloud Cost Management Starter Kit

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2021 17:22

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part byLaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visitlaunchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Negrette.Jesse: This is the podcast within a podcast where we talk about all the ways we’ve seen AWS used and abused in the wild, with a healthy dose of complaining about AWS for good measure because I mean, who doesn’t love to complain about AWS? I feel like that’s always a good thing that we can talk about, no matter the topic. Today, we’re going to be talking about the ‘cloud cost management starter kit.’ So, the starter kit seems to be a big fad that’s going around. If you’re listening to this episode, you’re probably thinking, “It’s already done. It’s over.”But I still want to talk about it. I think that this is a really relevant topic because I think a lot of companies are trying to get started, get their hands started in cloud cost management. So, I think this would be a great thing for us to talk about: what’s in our cloud cost management starter kit?Amy: And it really will help answer that question that I get asked a lot on: what is even a cloud economist, and what do you do?Jesse: Yeah, I mean, given the current timeframe, I haven’t gone to any parties recently to talk about what I do, but I do feel like anytime I try to explain to somebody what I do, there’s always that moment of, “Okay. Yes, I work with computers, and we’ll just leave it at that.”Amy: It’s easier to just think about it as we look at receipts, and we kind of figure things out. But when you try to get into the nuts and bolts of it, it’s a very esoteric idea that we’re trying to explain. And no, I don’t know why this is a real job. And yet it is.Jesse: This is one of the things that always fascinates me. I absolutely love the work that I do, and I definitely think that it is important work that needs to be done for any organization, to work on their cloud cost management best practices, but it also boggles my mind that AWS, Azure, GCP, haven’t figured out how to bake this in more clearly and easily to all of their workflows and all their services. It still boggles my mind that this is something that exists as—Amy: As a thing we have to do.Jesse: As a thing we have to do. Yeah, absolutely.Amy: Well, the good news is, they’re going to change their practices once every six weeks, and we’ll have a new thing to figure it out. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh]. So, let’s get started with the first item on our cloud cost management starter kit. This one is something that Amy is definitely passionate about; I am definitely passionate about, as well. Amy, what is it?Amy: Turn on your CUR. Turn on your CUr. If you don’t know what it is, just Google AWS CUR. Turn it on. It will save you a headache, and it will save anyone you bring in to help you [laugh] [unintelligible 00:02:59] a huge headache. And it keeps us from having to yell at people, even though that’s the thing that if you pay us to do it, we will totally do it for you.Jesse: If you take nothing away from this episode, go check out the AWS Cost and Usage Report—otherwise known as CUR—turn it on for your accounts, ideally enable it in Parquet format because that’s going to allow you to get all that sweet, sweet data in an optimized manner, living in your S3 bucket. It is a godsend. It gives you all the data from Cost Explorer, and then some. It allows you to do all sorts of really interesting business intelligence analytics on your billing data. It’s absolutely fantastic.Amy: It’s like getting all of those juicy infrastructure metrics, except getting that with a dollar sign attached to it so you know what you actually doing with that money.Jesse: Yeah, this definitely is, like, the first step towards doing any kind of showback models, or chargeback models, or even unit economics to figuring out where your spend is going. The Cost and Usage Report is going to be a huge first step in that direction.Amy: Now, the reason why we yell at people about this—or at least I do—is because AWS will only show you the data from the time that it is turned on. They do have it for historical periods, but if you enable it at a specific point, all of your reports are going to start there. So, if you’re looking to do forecasting, or you want to be able to know what your usage is going to be looking like from this point on, turn it on as early as possible.Jesse: Absolutely. If you are listening to this now and you don’t have the CUR enabled, definitely go pause this episode, enable it now, and come back and listen to the rest of the episode because the sooner you have the CUR enabled, the sooner you’ll be able to get those sweet, sweet metrics for all of your—Amy: And it’s free.Jesse: [laugh]. Yeah, that’s even the more important part. It’s free. There’s going to be a little bit of data storage costs if you send this data to S3, but overall, the amount of money that you spend on that storage is going to be optimized because you’re saving that CUR data in Parquet format. It’s absolutely worthwhile.All right, so number two; the second item on our cloud cost management starter kit, is getting to know your AWS account manager and account team. This one, I feel like a lot of people don’t actually know that they have an AWS account manager. But let me tell you now: if you have an AWS account, you have an AWS account manager. Even if they haven’t reached out to you before they do exist, you have access to them, and you should absolutely start building a rapport with them.Amy: Anytime you are paying for a support plan, you also have an account manager. This isn’t just true for AWS; I would be very surprised for any service that charged you for support but did not give you an account manager.Jesse: So, for those of you who aren’t familiar with your account manager, they are generally somebody who will be able to help you navigate some of the more complex parts of AWS, especially when you have any kind of questions about your bill or about technical things using AWS. They will help you navigate those resources and make sure that your questions are getting to the teams that can actually answer them, and then make sure that those questions are actually getting answered. They are the best champion for you within AWS.If you have more than a certain threshold of spend on AWS, if you’re paying for enterprise support, you likely also have a dedicated technical account manager as well, who will be basically your point person for any technical questions. They are a great resource for any technical questions, making sure that your technical questions are answered, making sure that any concerns that you have are addressed, and that they get to the right teams. They can give you some guidance on possibly how to set up new features, new architecture within AWS. They can give you some great, great guidance about the best ways to use AWS to accomplish whatever your use case is. So, in the cases where you’ve got a dedicated technical account manager as well, get to know them because again, they are going to be your champion. They are here to help you. Both your account manager and your technical account manager want to make sure that you are happy with AWS and continue to use AWS.Amy: And the thing to know about the account manager is, like, if you ever run into that situation where, oh, something was left on erroneously and we ended up with a spike, or this is how I was understanding the service to work and it didn’t work that way, and now I have some weird spend, but I turned it off immediately, if you ever want to get a refund or a credit or anything, these are the people to talk to; they’re the ones who are going to help you out.Jesse: Yeah, that’s a great point. It’s like, whenever you call into any kind of customer support center, if you treat the person who answers the phone with kindness, they are generally more likely to help you solve your problem, or generally more likely to go out of their way to help you solve your problem. Whereas if you just call in and yell at them, they have no interest in helping you. So—Amy: You’ll never see that refund.Jesse: Exactly. So, the more that you can create that rapport with your account manager—and your technical account manager if you have one—the better chances that they will fight for you internally to go above and beyond to make sure that you can get a refund if you accidentally left something running, or make sure that any billing issues are taken care of extremely fast because they ultimately have already built that rapport with you. They care about you and the way that you care about them and the way that you care about continuing to use AWS.Amy: There’s another note about the technical managers where if you are very open with them on what your architecture plans are—“We’re going to move into this type of EKS deployment. This is the kind of traffic we think we’re going to run, and we think it’s going to be shaped this way”—they’ll help you out and build that in most efficient way possible because they also don’t want the resources out there either being overutilized or just being run poorly. They’ll help you out in trying to figure out the best way of building that. They’ll also—if AWS launches a new program and you spent a lot of money on AWS, maybe there’s a preview program that they think will help you solve a very edge case kind of issue that you didn’t think you had before.Jesse: Absolutely.Amy: Yeah. So, it’s a great way to get these paths and get these relationships because it helps both parties out.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by VM Ware. Because lets face it, the past year hasn’t been kind to our AWS bills or, honestly, any cloud bills. The pandemic had a bunch of impacts. It forced us to move workloads to the cloud sooner than we would otherwise. We saw strange patterns such as user traffic drops off but infrastructure spend doesn't. What do you do about it? Well, the CloudLive 2021 Virtual Conference is your chance to connect with people wrestling with the same type of thing. Be they practitioners, vendors in the space, leaders of thought—ahem, ahem. And get some behind the scenes look into the various ways different companies are handling this. Hosted by Cloudhealth by VM Ware on May 20th the CloudLive 2021 Conference will be 100% virtual and 100% free to attend. So you really have no excuses for missing out on this opportunity to deal with people who care about cloud bills. Vist cloudlive.com/corey to learn more and save your virtual seat today. Thats cloud l-i-v-e.com/corey c-o-r-e-y. Drop the “e,” we’re all in trouble. My thanks for VM Ware for sponsoring this ridiculous episode.Jesse: So, the third item on our cloud cost management starter kit is identifying all of your contracts. Now, I know you’re probably thinking, “Well, wait. I’ve just got my AWS bill, what else should I be thinking about?” There’s other contracts that you might have with AWS. Now, you as the engineer may not know this, but there may be other agreements that your company has entered into with AWS: you might have an enterprise discount program agreement, you might have a private pricing addendum agreement, you might have an acceleration program—migration program—agreement. There’s multiple different contracts that your company might have with AWS, and you definitely want to make sure that you know about all of them.Amy: If you’re ever in charge of an architecture, you’re going to want to know not just what your costs are at the end of the day, but also what they are before all your discounts because those discounts can maybe camouflage a heavy usage if you’re also getting that usage covered by refunds and discounts.Jesse: Absolutely, totally agreed. Yeah, it’s really, really important to understand, not just your net spend at the end of the day, but your actual usage spend. And that’s a big one that I think a lot of people don’t think about regularly and is definitely important to think about when you’re looking at cloud cost management best practices and understanding how much your architecture is actually costing you on a team-by-team or product-by-product basis.Amy: Also, make sure if you’re doing reservations that you know when those reservations and savings plans ent—Jesse: Yes.Amy: —because you don’t want to have to answer the question, “Why did all of your costs go up when you actually have made no changes in your infrastructure?”Jesse: Yeah. Half the battle here is knowing that these contracts and reservations exist; the other half of the battle is knowing when they expire so that you can start having proactive conversations with teams about their usage patterns to make sure that they’re actually fully utilizing the reservations, and fully utilizing these discounts, and that they’re going to continue utilizing those discounts, continue utilizing those reservations so that you could ultimately end up purchasing the right reservations going forward, or ultimately end up renegotiating at the correct discount amount or commitment amount so that you are getting the best discount for how much money you’re actually spending.So, the last item on our cloud cost management starter kit is thinking about the non-technical parts of projects. Amy, when you think about the non-technical parts of projects, what do you think about?Amy: Non-technical always makes you think of people and process. So, this would be the leadership making the decisions on what those cost initiatives are. Maybe they want to push this down to the team lead level: it would include that. Or maybe they want to push it down to the engineering level, or the individual contributor level. There are some companies that are small enough that an engineer can be completely cognizant and responsible for the spend that they make.Jesse: Yeah. I think that this is a really, really critical item to include in our starter kit because leadership needs to be bought into and back whatever work is being done, whatever cloud cost management work is being done. But also teams need to be empowered to make the changes that they want to make, make the changes that will ultimately provide those cloud cost management optimization opportunities and better cost visibility across teams. So, does everybody know what their teams are empowered to do, what their teams are capable of? Does everybody know what their teams are responsible for on the flip side? Do they ultimately know that they are responsible for managing their own spend, or do they think that the spend belongs to somebody else? Also, do they understand which resources are part of their budget or part of their spend?Amy: It’s the idea that ownership of—whether it’s a bill, whether it’s a resource—comes down to communication, and level setting. Do we know who owns this? Do we know who’s paying for it? Do they know the information in the same way? Is there someone who’s outside who can figure out this information for themselves? Just making sure that it’s done in a clear enough way that everyone knows what’s going on.Jesse: Absolutely. Well, that will do it for us this week. Those are our four main items for our cloud cost management starter kits. If you’ve got questions you’d like us to answer, please go to lastweekinaws.com/QA, fill out the fields and submit your questions.If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us, what would you put in your ideal starter kit?Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

A Very Special Episode

The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2021 20:39

TranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part byLaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I’m going to just guess that it’s awful because it’s always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn’t require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren’t what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visitlaunchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Jesse: Today, on a very special episode of AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field, we say our goodbyes to Pete Cheslock.Amy: Oh, no. Did the ops bus finally get him?Jesse: No. Wait, what? What? No. No, he’s not—Amy: You know, the ops bus, the one that takes out all of the ops people, which is why you need data recovery plans.Jesse: [laugh]. I mean, I have plans for other reasons, but no. No, Pete, Pete’s not dead. He’s just—I mean, he’s dead to me, but he’s just not going to be here anymore.Amy: Only on the inside.Jesse: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Fridays From the Field. I’m Jesse DeRose.Amy: I’m Amy Arumbulo Negrette.Pete: I am Pete Cheslock. I’m here for one last, beautiful, glorious time.Jesse: I feel like this is going to be like Breakfast Club but in the data center server room.Pete: Yeah. A little bit. I think so. We will all sit cross-legged on the floor in a circle, share our thoughts and feelings. And maybe some sushi. There were sushi in that movie. And that was, like, really advanced back then in the ’80s.Jesse: Yeah, I like that. So Pete, you want to give us a little bit of background about why you will be moving on from this podcast?Pete: Moving on to a whole new world. Yes. Sadly, I am not dead. The ops bus did not get me, and I was not eaten by my smoker, my meat smoker.Jesse: [laugh]. Although at this point, it’s probably overdue.Pete: You know, the odds of all three of those are pretty high out, to be really perfectly honest, given this pandemic and everything else going on in this world.Amy: Isn’t that how it works? You eventually become the smoked meat.Pete: Yeah, yeah.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: All the time. You know, you are what you eat. And if you eat junk and whatnot—so I eat smoked meats, eventually, I’m just going to become, you know, smoked meats, I guess. But no, I am moving on from The Duckbill Group. Just bittersweet is the best word I can come up with. Very sad, but also very excited.I’m moving on to a new role at a new company that was just kind of an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. And I’m really excited for something new, but really sad because I don’t get to work with two of my three favorite cloud economists, Jesse, and Amy. Yeah, Corey is one, too, and yes, it’s fun to work with him. But it’s also fun to rag on him a little bit as well.Jesse: I’m pretty sure you still have the opportunity to rag on him no matter where you go.Pete: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, we’re Twitter connected. So, I can just slide into his DMs as needed. Yeah.Amy: And really, what else is Twitter for—Pete: Exactly.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: —than roasting former coworkers and bosses?Pete: Yeah, I expect a constant stream of Twitter DMs every time you find something, some little fun nugget that I’ve left behind.Jesse: I feel like that’s appropriate. So today, Pete, I have two questions for you now that you will be moving on from Duckbill Group, moving on from this podcast, I want to know, looking back at your time here working with Duckbill Group, what did you learn? What are the things that surprised you, that you didn’t expect? And what would you say to somebody who wanted to start working in this space, maybe start a career in cloud economics on their own?Pete: Yeah, so this kind of feels like an exit interview a little bit.Jesse: [laugh]. And a very public exit interview at that. So, make sure that we bleep all the swear words.Pete: I think it’s in Duckbill fashion to do a public—a very public-facing exit interview, right? That is Duckbill in a nutshell.Jesse: I think the only thing more public is if Corey asks you to hold the exit interview on Twitter.Amy: Exactly.Pete: [laugh]. I mean, we might have to do that, now. I like that idea. Yeah, so I think those are great questions, and I love the opportunity to talk about it. Because Duckbill is a fantastic company, and coming into Duckbill last year was totally by luck.Not really—no, not—luck is maybe not the right word. But I had been doing some consulting on my own, and the pandemic and some other forces caused a bunch of my consulting work to dry up really quickly. And I was sitting at home and I’m like, “Wow, I should get a real job.” And I saw a tweet from Mike on Twitter that was like, “Oh, we’re growing The Duckbill Group.” And Mike and Corey and I have known each other for such a long time.We’ve always said it’d be great to work together at some point in the future, but it’s so hard [laugh] to do. You know, to kind of work with your friends, and timing, and circumstance, and schedule, and everything else. And so when I saw that, I was like, wow, like that might be a lot of fun working with that crew. And I’ve got a lot of experience in AWS and I’ve—my title at one of my previous companies was Captain COGS—for Cost Of Goods Sold—because I was so diligent with the Amazon bill. So, it’s kind of one of those things where I felt like I could be useful and helpful to the organization, and talking with Mike and Corey, it just made a ton of sense.And so, it was a lot of fun to come on board. So, but then once you’re kind of in, and you start doing this type of work—and you know, Amy and Jesse, you’ve both experienced this—I think no matter how much knowledge you have of Amazon, very, very quickly, you realize that you actually don’t know as much as you really think you did, right?Jesse: Yeah.Pete: Because it’s so—there’s just so much.Amy: And it changes once every five minutes.Pete: [laugh].Jesse: Oh, yeah.Amy: Literally if you—well, just keep an eye on that changelog, you can watch your day get ruined as time goes on.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: [laugh]. It’s—yeah, it’s a real-time day ruining. And that’s the new. It’s like Amazon Kinesis: It’s all real-time.Jesse: [laugh].Pete: Yeah, it’s so true. And I think the reason behind it is, you know, one of the first things I kind of realized is that when you are working inside of a business and you’re trying to understand, like, an Amazon service, you don’t necessarily go that deep because you’ve got a real job and other stuff to do. And when you’re finally, like—let’s say you’re in Cost Explorer; this is actually my favorite one because learning this took us a while. The documents aren’t very good. But in Cost Explorer, there’s a dropdown box that can show you your charges in different ways: unblended view, blended view, amortized view—if I’m saying that word really incorrectly—net-amortized view, net-unblended view. Like, what do all these mean?Most people just are like, unblended, move on with their lives. But at some point, you kind of need to know and answer that question, and then understand the impact, and all those things, and spending more hours than I care to count trying to correlate the bill and Cost Explorer to look the same. Something that simple, why is that so hard? You know, it’s things like that.Amy: Why is that so hard? I do not understand it. It is exhausting. [laugh].Jesse: It drives me absolutely crazy, and it’s something that in previous roles, you could just say, “Well, this isn’t my responsibility, so I’m not going to worry about it.” But now we’ve got clients who are asking us these questions because it is our responsibility and we do need to worry about it.Pete: Yeah, exactly. So, I think that’s just, kind of, one example. Now, there was a ton that I learned. I mean, just in how discounts might be applied when you look at charges in an account whether if you have an enterprise discount program, or private pricing in some way. I think one of my favorite ones—and this is actually something that catches a lot of people up—is especially in Cost Explorer, there’s kind of two ways that you can view a charge.So, let’s say you’re looking at S3, and you are trying to find your usage by the usage type. Like, I want to compare standard storage to maybe data transfer or something like that. And you go and group by usage type, and they’ll show you, “Hey, for your S3 for this month or day or whatever, you’ll have some spend associated storage and data transfer,” and you’re like, “That’s neat.” And then you say to yourself, “Now, I want to look at it by API.” And maybe you’ll see, wow, there’s a ton of spend associated with GETs or PUTs.And you’ll think that that is actually a request charge. And it’s totally not. It’s like, when you group by API, it’s the API that started the charge, not the charge itself. So, you could have a PUT that started the charge, but the charge itself is actually storage. It’s the little things like that, where you might glance at it in your account and go, “Oh, okay.” But then when you actually need to get down to the per penny on spend and share it with a client, you go even further down the rabbit hole.Jesse: Because why would all of the billing information across different sources be accurate?Amy: And also, why would things be named the same between the bill, and Cost Explorer, and the curve? Having those names be the same, that would just make it too easy, and just streamline the process too much, and be too logical. No, let’s work for it. We have to work for it. It’s a pillar of excellence; we have to work for it.Pete: [laugh]. Exactly. So yeah, I think it’s those types of things that you just start seeing the edge cases. But because of, kind of, the work we do, we keep going. We’re not just, “Oh, wow. Haha, silly Amazon.”But then we keep diving in deeper and deeper to figure out the why. And the reason for that really just comes down to the fact that we’ll need to communicate that in some effective way to the client to get them to understand it. And actually, that kind of leads me to the other thing that I think is probably the most important skill of being a cloud economist, of being in finops, is your ability to write long-form writing, being able to write clear, concise information explaining why the spend is what it is, explaining all of these edge cases, all these interesting parts of cloud cost management, and being able to write that down in such a way that anyone could read it; like a CFO could understand how the charges are happening, just like a head of engineering, who has maybe more impact to the spend.Jesse: Being able to communicate, the differences between different AWS services, between different billing modes, to different audiences is so critical to the work that we do because we’re ultimately going to be working with different people with different backgrounds at every single client that we work with. So, we need to be able to speak the language of different audiences.Amy: And it’s really different, how different C Suites, different departments, their goals are going to be different, too, because they have requirements that they have to fulfill. Finance is very concerned about the literal cost of things, while engineering is—they understand that their architecture comes at a price, and so long as they have the budget for it, they’re cool with it. And you just have to align what those goals are, and have that translate as like, into the document as, “They built it this way for this reason, which was fine at that stage. But as you grow, you need to make sure that it also fulfills these other external expectations.”Corey: Let’s be honest—the past year has been a nightmare for cloud financial management. The pandemic forced us to move workloads to the cloud sooner than anticipated, and we all know what that means—surprises on the cloud bill and headaches for anyone trying to figure out what caused them. The CloudLIVE 2021 virtual conference is your chance to connect with FinOps and cloud financial management practitioners and get a behind-the-scenes look into proven strategies that have helped organizations like yours adapt to the realities of the past year. Hosted by CloudHealth by VMware on May 20th, the CloudLIVE 2021 conference will be 100% virtual and 100% free to attend, so you have no excuses for missing out on this opportunity to connect with the cloud management community. Visit cloudlive.com/corey to learn more and save your virtual seat today. That’s cloud-l-i-v-e.com/corey to register.Pete: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, it’s just—and can you imagine, you have some knowledge you want to share around something as complex as the Amazon bill. I mean we ask for a PDF of your bill when you start working with Duckbill Group. That could be hundreds of pages long, and you’re trying to distill that down into something that, really, anyone can understand. It’s a true superpower to be able to write long-form content like that really well.And I never used to like writing. I was never—never really enjoyed it that much and over the last year, that muscle that you’re working out, now, the ability to write many, many pages around this type of content, just it comes so much more easily. So, I think that’s another big aspect, right? The more you work on it, obviously the easier it gets.Jesse: I don’t know about you, but now that I have focused more on flexing that writing and communication muscle, I’ve noticed it more in both everyone that I work with day-to-day with Duckbill Group and also in my daily life, just watching how people communicate with each other, and how effectively people communicate with each other; it’s both amazing and nerve-wracking all at the same time.Pete: [laugh]. I know. And even—not to say that whenever we sit down to write our reports that we give to our clients, we don’t go through the wave of emotions between the back and forth of, like, “I don’t know what to write,” and then, “Oh, I know of a lot of stuff to write. Let me just get something down.” And then you can’t stop writing. It’s just—it’s this emotional roller coaster that I feel like no matter how many times we need to write a lot of detailed information down, everyone always goes through.Amy: And we really do have a highly collaborative process here, too, where we’re all in the same document, writing, and the person who owns any given report will always have the same stage at the end when all of the sections are filled out, where they go to one of the other people on the team and go, “Every word I put down is absolute garbage. Please help me trim it down, take it out. I don’t even care anymore. Just look at it and tell me that I wrote down words that are in some kind of human language.” [laugh].Jesse: [laugh].Pete: [laugh]. Oh, the plight of the writer. It’s, like, the imposter syndrome that affects the writer. It’s like, “Okay. I wrote a bunch of stuff. I think it’s terrible.” And then you sleep on it, you come back the next day, and you’re like, “Actually, this is pretty good.” [laugh].Amy: I explained concepts. It was fine. I didn’t use a single comma for three pages, but it’s probably fine. [laugh].Jesse: [laugh].Pete: You can take one of mine. Usually, all of my draft documents are commas and M-dashes, just all over the place. Yeah, so I think that’s honestly a big superpower. And I think the last two things that—this is actually something that I’ve looked for in people that I’ve wanted to work with, and people I was hiring, and I see it here as well as these, kind of, two concepts of intellectual curiosity and aptitude to learn, where if you have a base knowledge around Amazon and you have those other attributes—that curiosity and truly enjoying learning—you can accelerate your ability to understand this so incredibly quickly because there’s such a wealth of information out there, and there’s so many documents, there’s so much stuff. It just requires someone who really cares enough to dive in and really want to understand.That’s something that I think we’ve seen here is that the folks who are most successful are just—they want to know why, and they’re not satisfied until they can explain it in a simple way to someone else. That’s the key, right? The attribute of a true expert is someone who can explain something very difficult in a simple way. And I think that’s something that would be critical if you were joining Duckbill, if you were building your own finops or cloud finance team, it is so complex. It’s the intersection of technical architecture and cost, and it touches almost the entire business. So, I think those are some other attributes that I think are just incredibly helpful.Jesse: We’re also usually not entirely satisfied until we’ve either opened a support case with AWS, responded to one of their feedback icons in the AWS documentation—the public AWS documentation—or trolled somebody on Twitter saying, “Shame on you, AWS, for writing documentation that doesn’t make sense.”Amy: It’ll be fine. Someone in your mentions will go, “Did you check the region?” And you would have, and then it’ll still be wrong.Jesse: [laugh].Amy: And it’ll be fine. [laugh]. Eventually, we’ll fix it.Pete: That one—Jesse: Too soon.Pete: —that one still hurts, when we—oh, I’m just like, “Why do the numbers not line up?” And then someone was like—Amy: It's a thing I check for, even if it’s like, “It’s a global resource.” I don’t care. Just tell me. Just tell me it’s fine. [laugh].Pete: “Are you in the right region?” Like—“Dammit, no, I’m not. Oh.” [laugh]. Yeah, that happens to the best of us.Amy: I did, unfortunately, burn so many hours, I think it was last week trying to find out where someone had put their resources. It’s like, “Oh, not us-west-2. It’s us-west-1. Of course.” [laugh].Jesse: So, annoying. Well, I would just like to say, Pete, it has been a joy and a pleasure working with you, it has been a joy and a pleasure complaining about AWS with you, on this podcast, so thank you for your time. That sounded really… really, really standoffish. I didn’t mean it quite as bad as it came off there. [laugh].Pete: Well, you know, I think we need to thank Corey for having a child and thus needing to offload some of his podcast duties over to us, and then the fact that we just never gave him the podcast back, and we just took it over.Jesse: Well, if you’ve got questions that you’d like us to answer, you can go to lastweekinaws.com/QA. And if you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review and give it a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please go to lastweekinaws.com/review, give it a five-star rating on your podcast platform of choice and tell us what qualities you’re looking for when building out your cloud finance team.Pete: Thanks for coming in.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

amazon finance shame field cloud cfo dms puts api breakfast club aws qa devops vmware s3 finops c suites launchdarkly amy it duckbill group amy you cloudhealth amy oh pete you jesse yeah last week in aws jesse well jesse it pete cheslock pete yeah humblepod

Getting the Picture

Play Episode Listen Later May 6, 2021 30:42

Amy Balliett is Founder and CEO at Killer Visual Strategies, an agency that specializes in visual communications design – creating such “products” as info and motion graphics, data visualizations, virtual reality, and interactive content. An Inc. 5000 company for four years in a row, Killer, now part of Material, has won over 30 excellence in visual communication awards. Clients include such Fortune 1000 companies as Amazon, Boeing, the Discovery Channel, Edwards Lifesciences Corporation, and Microsoft. In this interview, Amy talks about the “spammy” beginnings of infographics, when people slapped up on their websites images that had nothing to do with their brand. She says, a high-quality infographic visually communicates significant meaning so efficiently and effectively that little text is required. Amy notes that around 10,000 infographics are released daily . . . and 99% fail. The 1% that succeed don't use much text, use custom (as opposed to stock) illustrations, provide proper data visualization, and clearly show attention to detail and time put into the design. The agency's services keep evolving to meet changing client needs. The biggest challenge is “to find that one illustration style that won't go out of style.” HubSpot reports that “91% of audiences prefer visual content as their primary, secondary, and tertiary form of information delivery.” A visual strategy would consider the first, second, and third pieces of content a prospective client might see going into a funnel. Amy says, “Content is king . . . visual content reigns supreme, and visual strategy is content strategy, just leveled up.” Amy recommends a 90-second “motion graphic” as the most important piece of visual strategy content a company might invest in now. That 90 seconds can be broken down into “dozens of visually designed scenes” that can be used on social media, stacked to create an infographic, or paginated to create an eBook. She notes that visual content has to be matched both to channels and to audiences. Killer evolved over the years . . . through a pivot that exploded . . . first in a good way . . . and then not. Exhausted from the frenetic pace, the agency had never stopped to consider such core questions as: “What's the type of client that we want? What's the type of work we really want to do? What's the type of person we want to be bringing on to our team? What are the values of this company that are going to drive these decisions?” Amy hired a business coach for herself and the team (probably the best decision she ever made) and an HR consultant to help establish policies. A new focus on building a values-driven culture and hiring and firing employees and clients based on these values changed “who we were, our level of productivity, and the clients we attracted . . . our revenue went up 50% in one year.” The agency's values are simple: Keep Learning, Inspire Others, Lead by Example, Love What We Do, Embrace Change, and Respect Others. Amy can be found on LinkedIn at: Amy Balliett on Twitter @amyballiett. Her book, Killer Visual Strategies, available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Killer-Visual-Strategies-Amy-Balliett/dp/1119680220), was recently awarded “one of the best marketing and sales books of 2020.” Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Amy Balliett, Founder and CEO at Killer Visual Strategies based in Seattle, Washington. Welcome to the podcast, Amy. AMY: Thank you so much for having me. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. You have one of those excellent names for your firm that I think probably tells us what you do, but why don't you tell us about Killer Visual Strategies and what the firm's superpower really is? AMY: Definitely. To tell you that, the best way to say it is our original name. Our original name was Killer Infographics, so even more focused on what we were doing. At the time, we really focused on developing high-quality infographics for marketing needs and things like that. Over the years, our services kept evolving based on the needs of our clients. But ultimately, everything still lives on the foundation of what we view as our superpower, which is visual communication design. A high-quality infographic is something that you don't have to read; instead, you can look at it and cull important information from it without diving into paragraphs of text. So everything we do centers on that. It's about graphically representing information to efficiently and effectively create meaning and using as little text as possible. That's really what our superpower is. ROB: That's interesting. As little text as possible. What do you recall in your own mind as the emergence of infographics? When did they start catching your eye? When did it become so obsessive for you that it seemed like the business? AMY: It's so interesting, because infographics have a very rich history. The very first known infographic was the 1600s, although you could say cave paintings on walls were the first infographics. They've been around forever, but around 2008 they started to be used more regularly for SEO needs, for link-building and other forms of content marketing. I started to slowly get into them because I was heading up SEO at a company here in Seattle and really wanted to use them for the link-building value. But the company I was at never really wanted to use them. So, when I left to start my own company – which was actually a completely different business model than what Killer is today, and which had a bunch of different websites that I was marketing – I started creating infographics to do link-building for all of those websites. That was June of 2010. At that point, infographics were this big trending thing, and everybody was questioning how long that trend would last. Everybody really thought this was something that was going to be a one-and-done trend, and by 2011 we were going to move to something else for content and content marketing. So I got on it at a time that I thought was the very end of a trend. [laughs] And it turns out it was the very, very beginning. ROB: How has the use of infographics evolved? There was a point in time where it felt like a well-designed and executed infographic targeted at the right audience really extensively lived as a life of its own, but the fad didn't end as a fad; it just integrated into the visual language of the internet. AMY: That's exactly right. The thing is, at first infographics were so spammy. People would put out content that had nothing to do with their brand, nothing to do with their website. They just really wanted to put out something controversial that was driven by visuals because today's audiences crave visual content. They were really trying to use infographics to hook somebody and get backlinks primarily. After that spammy part of the fad started to die down – which happened because Google kept changing their algorithm, and when Google did their Penguin and Panda updates back in 2010 and 2011, all of a sudden the big content farms that were really being fueled by infographics started disappearing from Google. As a result, infographics stopped being as spammy. The market stopped being flooded with these really spammy designs, and instead large brands started to take notice and said, “Oh wow, this is an amazing way to connect with my audience and really get them to understand our brand, our service, our products without having to give them a big long whitepaper.” The trend was moving away from whitepapers and moving more and more towards media as a form of entertainment and education in all forms. ROB: That's a really fascinating evolution there. If we look at today, is there still that link-building aspect to it? Or is it more broadly about brand at this point, and about speaking to an audience coherently with your brand attached to it? AMY: It's about speaking to your audience coherently with your brand attached to it. Links definitely come with infographics – not like they used to. In 2010, I put out some awful infographics because I was still learning, and they'd get thousands of backlinks. Anybody would celebrate anything with the word “infographic” attached to it, whereas today, we have far more discerning eyes. If you jump back to 2010 versus today in 2021, the fact is, media within the internet has evolved so much. There's so much more of a wow factor in everything we see. That also has led to a heightened expectation for what a good infographic is. There's still about 10,000 released a day, but 99% of them fail. The 1% of them that truly succeed are the ones that don't use a lot of text, the ones that use entirely custom illustration, proper data visualization, and the ones that clearly show attention to detail and time put into the design. But if they're slapped together, they're using stock imagery, or if there are paragraphs of text next to a small illustration, things like that, they're going to fail. People are still jumping on the bandwagon because they think they're going to get a bunch of backlinks, but if they don't actually execute them properly, they're not going to get backlinks, and they might even hurt their brand on top of it. ROB: It's good to know the danger there. In the evolution of your firm, you can see this evolution where the infographic is part of a broader visual strategy, probably with a much more expanded vocabulary. What are the elements you see now as the language of visual strategy as you think about it? AMY: It's so interesting. There's this really great stat from HubSpot that 91% of audiences prefer visual content as their primary, secondary, and tertiary form of information delivery. When we think about visual strategy today, we think about the top of the funnel and we say to ourselves, what's the first, second, and third piece of content somebody's going to see as they're going into that funnel? Then we start to identify what channels those people are living on to deliver that content, and the channels and the audience define what type of content we choose to put out into the ether for the visual strategy of the brand. Sometimes it might be short form social media images with at most 6 words on them. Sometimes it'll be a visually rich eBook where each page has at most 200 words. Other times it's a motion graphic. I always say to anybody who's thinking about getting into visual strategy for their own brands, the most important piece of content that you can invest in right now is a motion graphic. That's going to give you so much to work with. It's usually about 90 seconds. It should never be over 90 seconds. It's usually about 90 seconds of content that breaks down into dozens of visually designed scenes that you can pull out and use on social media. You can stack the scenes up and create an infographic. You can paginate the scenes and create an eBook. You have so much more than just a motion graphic if you invest in one. You have dozens of other pieces of content you can produce out of it. It's really about identifying the right content for the right channel for the right audience. I know that's kind of the answer to all contact marketing, really, but with visual content there's definitely different types of visual content that work on different channels. You really have to understand that landscape and choose what's going to connect with that audience the best. ROB: Sure, and there's a distinction in there. Much like the graduation from infographics to visual strategies, when you're referring to a motion graphic, what I'm picturing is that explainer video, is what some people would call it. Some people would come to you saying they want an explainer video, but I think what you're saying is that's not really what they want. If they just got an explainer video that didn't consider this trend that comes and goes online but is always true, this atomization of content where you can take something and pull it apart into individual pieces that are bite-size and put them lots of places – just asking for an explainer video doesn't get you there. AMY: Exactly. Today's marketers are using 12 to 14 types of visual content just to accomplish singular goals. It can never be one-and-done. You always have to consider all of the different ways you can use that content. You can create derivatives to develop even more campaigns and strategies around it. It is really content marketing. The concept that content is king, which comes from a Bill Gates article in 1999, is still true. Content is king. But visual content reigns supreme, and that's really what we have to focus on when we think about visual strategy. It's content strategy, just leveled up. ROB: Right. One thing I think about in this category that maybe isn't thought of this way when it comes out is Mary Meeker annually puts out this internet trends deck at the turn of the year. Have you run into that before? AMY: Yes, definitely. ROB: It's hundreds of pages, hundreds of slides in a PowerPoint deck. If you said, “Do you want a 200-slide deck from a venture capitalist?”, I don't know if you do. But then you look at the pieces of it, and each slide – you know better than I do – seems like it has pretty good value. It seems like it tells a story as a whole, and it seems like it builds a brand for her in whichever firm she's with. AMY: Exactly. That's so spot-on. That's the entire point. If that were 200 pages of paragraphs of content, do you think it would be given the same level of attention it gets today? Not even at all. Not close. ROB: Nobody anticipates that one. AMY: Exactly. ROB: Amy, you alluded a little bit to the journey, your own journey in starting the firm. It looks from your LinkedIn like, as you mentioned, you were working in SEO. You had a job. You had someone else who was responsible for your paycheck. What led you to turn that corner and go into this process of being responsible to kill what you wanted to eat and then to eventually be responsible for an ever-growing – or maybe not ever-growing, but in many cases a payroll of people who depend on you, and it's a lot of responsibility? What caused that transition? AMY: It's so odd because it's hard for me to pinpoint an exact time. I owned my first company when I was 17. I actually owned an ice cream parlor and candy store in a summer vacation resort. It was open only during the summer, so it didn't compete with school. That was my first foray into entrepreneurship – and I hated it, I'm going to be honest with you. I loved it and I hated it. I was working 80+ hours a week during my summer breaks my junior and senior year of high school. That gave me a sour taste in my mouth. But then about – jeez, I don't know how long later; maybe it was about 6 years later – I came up with an idea for a social network. This was before Facebook had opened up to non-.edu email addresses. I didn't even know that Facebook existed yet. I came up with this idea for a social network, but all I had was the idea. I could not execute on the idea because I had zero coding skills. At the time, I was a video editor; my degree is in film, so I was doing video editing and motion picture marketing and really couldn't bring much to the table for this idea. I had my cousin join in on the idea, and he could bring everything to the table. He's a full stack developer and the best designer I've ever met. So here's this guy taking on the weight of the world, basically trying to make my idea come to fruition, and all I can do is try to market the idea, try to build a user base. It failed really quickly because you can't just come to the table with an idea. You have to be able to execute on that idea. We got to a point after 6 months where it became clear that this was just way too much to put on one person. During that 6 months, I started to learn SEO and online marketing, so I decided to pivot my career into SEO and online marketing. In that part of my career, I learned web development as well. It really just came down to I had started to stack up a series of skills – nothing that I was fantastic at; everything I was good enough at. If you're trying to be too many things at once, it's like trying to learn 10 instruments at once. You're never going to master one instrument. But I was good enough at enough skills. I was good enough at graphic design, good enough at animation, good enough at development that I was finally in a place where I felt like I could do all of this on my own. I had tested a few proofs of concept within the last company I worked at, really seeing if I could create new revenue streams for that company. Once I did, I realized, crud, I'm bringing in millions in revenue streams to this company; why can't I do this for myself? You get to a point where you have the confidence in your career to take that chance, but I also got to the point where I had enough in savings to take that chance. I'm not going to lie, that was incredibly important to me. I think I would not have taken the risk at all if it weren't for having a nice safety net of cash just in case everything failed. ROB: Amy, a lot of people have that interesting stack of skills, but they may not recognize it. They may not know how to apply it. To your metaphor, they may still be trying to be the best at a particular instrument when it's really the intersection of several skills that is where they can be truly unique in their world. How did you come to understand that concept of the stack of skills and see it in yourself? AMY: It was really just every idea I came up with, I started to realize, “Crud, I need a designer for this, and I need somebody to develop this.” I just started thinking about all the things I needed for somebody to execute on the work. I'm a control freak. I really am. So I started to say, “I need to learn these things myself because I can't really give away trust too easily and put that work on somebody else's plate.” For me, that's really what made me realize I needed that stack of skills: wanting to execute on so many ideas, but not having the capacity to do it myself. I'm really glad that over the years, I learned to release the reins, because every single employee I've hired is 20 times better than me at any one of those skills. And that's really important. You always have to hire somebody who's much better than you. But the fact that I've been able to play every single role in my company and that I have played every role, that I've sat in their shoes – it's so much easier to manage everybody because I know what they're going through. I know how long it would take me to do a task, so I can judge how long it would take somebody on my team to do that same task. I know what expectations to put in front of them, and I also know when to pull back and let them take the lead and run the show. ROB: Right on. I've certainly experienced, at least in my perception – and you never know whether you're wrong in your perception at the top; it's always worth questioning. But when I'm hiring people within my stack of skills, I feel like I can get to a decision faster, and I feel like I almost get to be the Pied Piper a little bit. There's a sense of trust and safety that they may feel where they felt wary. I tend to hire software developers for a lot of what we do, and there's almost an unspoken bond that moves quickly when you can send the right signals, I think. AMY: That's so, so true. That's exactly how it's always felt. I remember when we brought on our first developer to the team and I sat down with him and I was talking about a couple of lines of jQuery. He looked at me and said, “Wait, I haven't had a boss who knows jQuery before.” It was just this weird “aha” moment. ROB: It's such a good discussion, the skill stacking thing. I think I have often heard of it spoken of on – there's a podcaster, James Altucher, and I think he talks about it a good bit. But I don't know – have you had any good sources for these concepts? Because I think it's underexplored, and maybe there's a book or something that I'm less familiar with. AMY: I haven't necessarily dove into any books related to this specific concept, no. It really has more come through networking with the right people, getting to know more people who have faced the same types of challenges, but also, again, surrounding myself with such a curious team, a team that will never rest on their laurels. One of our values at Killer is “keep learning,” and it's probably the most embraced value in the company because everybody's just trying to stay on top of trends and stay ahead of trends. I think that's also a part of it. There's a bit of a competitive attitude where all of us want to be in the know of what that next big thing is. ROB: It's such an interesting through line. You mentioned that Google's obviously changed algorithms, and it feels like they're a lot closer to trying to provide the result you actually wanted. But there was an era of SEO that was very competitive; it was very much about tactics and how ethical those tactics were. Kind of secret knowledge. But some of that transitions well, probably, into process around visual strategy. There is always something to learn. There is always a new cutting-edge frontline of what's working and what's not. You have to keep learning, just like you did in SEO. AMY: Exactly. It's so true. What's interesting is with SEO, you're trying to game Google's algorithm, for lack of a better phrase. It is really what you try to do in a lot of ways, whereas with visual strategy, you're trying to consider so many disparate audiences. What's going to trend for one audience isn't going to trend for another audience. There's not one universal algorithm to break. Instead, it's really identifying all of the different aesthetic directions that could impact Audience A over Audience B over Audience C and so on. ROB: It's an infinite game, too. You can't just go for the moment. You could position the whole thing as being there to hack the human brain, but in the context of a brand, you also have to consider how people feel afterwards and in the long run. It's not a short game. It's not “look at this graphic,” right? AMY: Exactly. And you also have to consider the timeline of that campaign, because sometimes we'll have a client where they want a visual language and aesthetic look and feel to uplevel their brand, but something that's going to last for decades to come. That's a whole other feat to accomplish, trying to find that one illustration style that won't go out of style. That's been an interesting experience. ROB: Absolutely. Amy, as you reflect on building Killer Visual Strategies, what are some things that you've learned along the way that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting from scratch? AMY: The biggest thing I've learned is about being proactive versus reactive. Killer was a pivot from a completely different business model, and because it was a pivot, we didn't spend a lot of time thinking proactively about what we wanted the business to be. Instead, we just lived in a reactive state for about 3 years. We basically went from our very first quarter of work being 14 orders to the first month in our second quarter being 40 orders, and it just kept going up and up and up and up. The first 3 years or so, we were just so exhausted by reacting to the demand that we didn't take the time to say, “What's the type of client that we want? What's the type of work we really want to do? What's the type of person we want to be bringing on to our team? What are the values of this company that are going to drive these decisions?” All of those things that seem corny initially – when you're an entrepreneur and you want to start a company, the last thing you say is, “What are the values going to be of my company?” It's rarely something an entrepreneur does first. But had we done that first, I think we would have grown faster and even more intentionally than we did. Our first 5 years felt like a wild, wild west, and we had a culture inflection point at Year 5 where, honestly, almost everything exploded. And almost everything exploded because we were not a values-driven company. We had a great team; we knew we wanted to go out and get a beer with everybody, but we didn't all approach conflict in the same way. When you have a values-driven company, you have a set of guidelines with which to attack conflict together as a team, but we didn't have that. Nobody really knew what our values were, even though they spelled out the word “KILLER.” So we had to reset and focus on building a values-driven culture, hiring and firing by our values and hiring and firing clients by our values as well. That drastically changed who we were. It also drastically changed our level of productivity, the types of clients we attracted – I mean, our very first year of really paying attention to that, our revenue went up 50% in one year. So there's more than just the corny feelings that you get with coming up with your mission, vision, and values. When you actually truly embrace those and live those and lead by those, you'll see a team that is so much more inspired, so much more willing to take on the hardest challenges with you. You can really grow your company by leaps and bounds when you do that. That's the biggest lesson I've learned. ROB: Was it the explosion that pushed you to this realization of the need, or was there another catalyst in your life? AMY: It was the explosion, it really was. And that explosion was such a slow burn. That powder keg – we knew it was going to explode at some point, but we were still being so reactive that there wasn't time to pay attention to it. By the time it happened – we actually joke in the company and we call it “emailgate” because it all started from an email. [laughs] But we brought in the right people at that point. I hired a business coach to come in and coach myself, coach my leadership, and coach the team as a whole. I hired a really good HR consultant to come in and do the exact same thing, to really help us build the right policies in that arena. By bringing on the right experts, I was really, really lucky. I was also somebody who kept saying, “Why do I need a coach? I don't need a coach! This isn't a sports team!” [laughs] It turned out that having a business coach was probably the best investment I have ever made, and I know my team feels that way too, because they saw me change as a result of having somebody really help me look at problems differently and react to critiques from the team differently. When you're a business owner and you're at the very top, it is extremely lonely. And when you're in a creative firm where everybody is really emotionally driven – because to be creative, you have to bring emotion into your work. When you're that passionate – that's what I mean by emotionally driven – you're going to be passionate about what's working and what's not in the company, and you're going to be very vocal about that. I used to take that as such an affront to me. I would get offended by really positive critiques, people coming to me with good ideas, and maybe I would just look at it as them critiquing me instead of an opportunity to improve in the company. So having a coach really helped me look at that very differently and embrace the amazing feedback of my team. ROB: I think it's so helpful for you to share that, Amy. The perception people have is – in some cases it's true that a cheesy coach is cheesy and cheesy values are cheesy. Sometimes I feel like I can sound a little bit needy in the course of a conversation because I will tell people about my coach and my therapist and my entrepreneurial support group. But I think we just need to talk about it. For me, those things are all healthy, but maybe there's sort of the cult of the CEO, where we feel like we need to have all the answers. AMY: Yes, that's exactly it. You get imposter syndrome when you don't necessarily have the right answers. I also have an entrepreneurial support group, and that has been immensely helpful for me. Just talking to other business owners – they don't have to be in your same industry – and realizing, “Oh, hey, these problems exist across all businesses, not just a creative content agency, or not just a mom and pop shop down the street.” There's very similar problems that exist across any culture, across any work environment, and when you can get other business owners to tell you what they've gone through and game a solution together, it is so much better than just being in your own silo, trying to figure it out yourself. ROB: Such a healthy conversation, Amy. You've really shared the journey and shared the experience. When people want to connect with you and when they want to connect with Killer Visual Strategies, where should they look you up? AMY: You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. Just Amy Balliett on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter @amyballiett, although I'm not nearly as active as I should be on Twitter. Then you can also check out my book, which is Killer Visual Strategies, on Amazon. It was just awarded one of the best marketing and sales books of 2020. ROB: Congratulations. I think we all needed a nice visual book along those lines in 2020 – something to think about aspirationally and not just looking into our own basements. AMY: Right? That's so true. Oh my gosh. Good old 2020. [laughs] ROB: Yeah. Hope is on the way. I'm tremendously hopeful for the year, and I think probably you're very similarly positioned with your positioning and with what people are about to need to do with you as a partner. AMY: Yeah, definitely. I'm very excited for what 2021 has in store for us. ROB: Excellent. Amy, I wish you the best. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I encourage everyone to look Amy up, look up her book, and I would imagine that Killer Visual Strategies probably has a solid couple of social feeds to pay attention to as well. AMY: Definitely. Thank you so much, Rob. I really appreciate it. ROB: Thank you, Amy. Be well. Bye. AMY: You too. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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E86 Why Amy Never Wants Another Girlfriend… Ever

Dating Straight

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 6, 2021 69:08

Hear ye, hear ye! Jack is fully vaxxed and on the loose. The slag KISSED a BOY, moved to Los Angeles and f*cked your bitch!!!! Beware! Amy overshares about how her past relationships inform how she acts in her current one, and reveals that she once had made “deep peace” with being a playa forever. Jack also scares Amy… It’s so not okay… Looking for a new co-host ASAP. Please leave your resumes in a 5 star review.

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Amy Honey Teaches Personal Growth Through Sales

The Passionistas Project Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 17, 2021 29:46

Amy Honey is a pull, no punches, powerhouse, speaker and trainer in the areas of customer engagement, body language, behavior modification, sales and habit transformation. She has extensive background in high ticket sales and is known by her peers as a powerful closer, Amy is also passionate about helping girls and women find their courage just as she had to do starting at the age of 16, when she found herself alone and independent through her own resourcefulness, she still managed to graduate from high school. Her passion for personal growth, travel and transforming lives has taken Amy all over the world, helping people transform their lives through behavior, observation and habit change. Learn more about Amy. Learn more about The Passionistas Project. Full Transcript: Passionistas: Hi, and welcome to The Passionistas Project Podcast, where we talk with women who are following their passions to inspire you to do the same. We're Amy and Nancy Harrington. And today we're talking with Amy Honey, a pull, no punches, powerhouse, speaker and trainer in the areas of customer engagement, body language, behavior modification, sales, and habit transformation. She has extensive background in high ticket sales and is known by her peers. As a powerful closer, Amy is also passionate about helping girls and women find their courage just as she had to do starting at the age of 16, when she found herself alone and independent through her own resourcefulness, she still managed to graduate from high school. At age 20. She became a single mom and chose to put her family's welfare first while overcoming numerous obstacles in an unreceptive marketplace. It was during these life challenges and her entrepreneurial journey that she crossed paths with personal development and discovered her love for speaking and training her passion for personal growth travel and transforming lives has taken Amy all over the world, helping people transform their lives through behavior, observation, and habit change. So please welcome to the show Amy Honey. Amy: I'm so happy to be here. Passionistas: Oh, we're so happy to have you. What are you most passionate about? Amy: Personal growth. My path through that is sales. Do you ever watch any of chef Ramsey, Gordon Ramsey stuff? He does this show called Kitchen Nightmares and he goes in and what that shows really about is about personal growth, but his, his avenues through cooking, you know, so that's his version of it. So I think everybody has their version of personal growth. Passionistas: Talk about your journey through life, where you started out your experiences, that we talked about a bit in the intro at the age of 16, becoming independent, and why personal growth has become such an important concept to you through your journey? Amy: I probably started in sales at two years old. I was just like, I was just in, I was just, I loved the idea of being able to create something and then, and then make money for my time or my creation. And so even as a little kid, I made like pet rocks and sold them to my family, or like we would travel through Germany were my dad was a military. So we traveled and I was, I was adopted. So it's my, I'm a single, an only child. Oh, come into play later. So we were traveling through Germany and we had this like VW bus and it had this rack in between. So my parents was very difficult for my parents to get to the back of the, of the VW bus, you know, camper and the frigerators right there. So they would ask me for food and I would just charge them. So it was like, it'd be like a nickel, like, okay. Yeah. And I would like walk up with my little, you know, you know, I'm like eight years old and I'd walk up with my little paper and say, you know, okay, I'll take your order, you know? Okay. That'll be five cents, you know, whatever, but they paid it because they didn't want to get it into the back of the bus. Little did I realize supply and demand, but I learned it very early on, I guess. And and so then from there, uh, later on, I actually started out. So, so it was a dance instructor. So I'm really into dance. I'm really into moving energy. So I became a dance instructor at age 13. So very young, my dad, since the time I was three taught jazz, tap, ballet, gymnastics. I taught everything. I started assistant teaching at 13. And then by the age of 16, I was teaching my own classes. And then at the same time I was working two jobs, so, and going to high school. So I was working on the phones for Kirby vacuum cleaner. So I sold Kirby vacuum cleaners on the phone from the age of 14. And then at the age of 16, I was allowed to go door to door. So I wasn't allowed to do door to door sales until I turned 16. So this is back in the eighties, dating myself here. So at that point, I just was good at talking to people because for me, it was about connecting. And then at age 16, I'm out on my own. And I moved out on my mom and dad's house. I just they're great people. We just had large differences in opinions. It's very interesting DNA to me is very interesting because my parents are really good people, but I got the opportunity to meet my birth family about five years ago. And now I'm really, really close with my brothers. I've got four brothers that never knew I existed. And so what I found so interesting is that I'm so much like them in the way that I think about the world and my sense of humor and all that stuff it's naturally in your DNA. Right. And so there was just a difference of opinion. And so when I moved out at 16, I always felt like it, like I did something wrong. This is my fault. I'm a bad kid. I'm horrible person. But in the meantime, I am putting myself through high school. Like I still worked. I still graduated high school on time. So, you know, it was, I was just had a really, I always had a really strong work ethic anyway, but I also had an ethic of like, okay, I just, whatever it takes to get it done, like whatever it takes to get it done at the same time, I started really seeking at that point. Because I really thought something was wrong with me. Like I was, something was wrong with me. So I started seeking and I sought out counseling and I sought out, you know, which was also kind of like wrong. Like if you went to counseling, like by my parents' standard, you know, you were wrong or you needed to be fixed or something goes wrong with you. But I don't think that we put enough emphasis on the importance of mental health. So I just started seeking and I, I started finding books and I remember one of the very first books I read way back, when is a book called peeling, the sweet onion. And it was always all about the layers of who we are and how we're going to forget it kind of over and over and over again, and how to really become more of, of the center of who we are, like getting the layers of the, kind of the crap off, you know? And so that was one of the very first and it's, it's an old book and it's not really popular these days, but it's still super relevant, like really super relevant. So, and then I just, you know, went on to Tony Robbins and you know, all of these other people. And then I started working in the seminar industry, doing sales, like doing sales, but doing coaching because for me, sales is not just like getting the number, like it's funny. Cause like I get on, like I talk to my family all the time. I was just talking to them last night and you know, all sale. I had a good day or I had a bad day, you know? Uh, and, and my daughter was asking me, well, what, what makes it good is like, if you just get a sale and I said, no, no, it's the conversation. If I can get on the phone and help somebody and have a great conversation and they don't buy anything from me, I had a great day because I impacted somebody's life in a way. So to me, sales is about service and connecting the right people with the right products and figuring out the right flow of energy with the sale. So maybe that right flow of energy might be a no, but when you come to the highest point of service with that person, and you're not just looking at them as a transaction or a number, when they are ready, they will come back to you and maybe they never will be ready and that's okay too. But if you push them into a sale, you're going to it's, it's just, it's horrible, bad karma on you. I think bad energy on you. You're, that's where you're going to get higher cancellations. You're going to get people complaining about your company. You're going to get all these things, right. So to me, it's just not worth it to push a person into a sale. Passionistas: And then when did you start public speaking? Amy: I've been a teacher since a young age. So I was in front of groups of people with no problem and teaching dance. And I teach zoom by owned. I owned a gym. So, you know, just I've always been in front of people, not a problem. I was also a stuntwoman. And so I'm don't have any problems being in front of cameras. That's my husband and I are both stunned, Exxon actors. So I just never had a problem being in front of people. But when I started working in the seminar industry, I was forced to get in, you know, we would have to intro the speaker. So it was like all of a sudden I had to introduce a Les Brown or somebody and I'm just, Whoa. Okay. Okay. So it was just kind of run into it. And then I just started speaking. And for me, I just think when you can speak to a group of people, it's a lot easier than trying to one-on-one because there's always things like a, every single, every single business. I believe that we have to educate our clients because an educated client is a good client and when they understand it and they're educated enough. And so I feel that there's things that every single business repeats over and over and over again. So if we can take those things that we repeat over and over again, and I end make a video or, or get them as together as a group and say it, you're not exhausting yourself saying it over and over and over again to each client. Passionistas: Tell us a little bit about being a stunt woman. What attracted you to that world? Amy: I was always into fitness. I wanted to do martial arts from non-time. I was a real little kid, but I was, I had to do, you know, I had to dance. So dancing was the thing or piano, piano, piano for a while. It was not ladylike to do martial arts. So it wasn't allowed to do martial arts. So as soon as I turned eight, well, as soon as I turned 16, I moved out. But by the time I was 18, I had my feet underneath me and I'd graduated high school and stuff. And so at that point I was like, Oh, I can take martial arts. No, one's stopping me. I can pierce anything. I want, I can get tattoos. So yeah. So I did, I went and started taking martial arts. And at that same time I was body doubling as an actress. So I was living in Oregon at the time and I was on this movie set and I met a stunt coordinator on the movie set, Steve, his name was Steve, really super nice guy. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. And so I was, I was an extra on the set. So as I was body doubling and I met this I met the stunt coordinator and he said to me, and I started just digging and asking questions. And he said, look, if you're really interested, why don't you fly out to LA and meet with our stunt guys and see what you think? And I said, Oh, okay. And so I booked a flight to LA and it was so funny. Cause I'm like, I'm 51 years old. Now I think I was 22 or 23. At that time I weigh a lot more now than I did then. So I was probably like 105 pounds, like soaking wet, five foot tall, I'm little. And so I get on this plane, I get on the plane. This is 1994. It's like, get on the plane and no one's on the plane. And I'm like, this is really bizarre. Right? Well, come to find out, that was the 1994 earthquake in Northridge that had just happened that morning. So everybody canceled their flight, right? So like I'm on the flight by myself and I'm heading to LA and they've got this guy, his name was big. Wayne picking me up at the airport. This is a guy I've never met before. Right now, big Wayne is like a massive dude. He kind of looks like the rock and is probably about as big. And I walk up and he's holding the sign and I'm like, this is how every horror movie war starts like, Oh my God, what? I'm like, I'm just like, I'm walking into this thing. I don't know this guy. I'm getting in the car with a stranger. I'm in a strange town. I was just like, what was I thinking? Like I'm freaking out at this point, like inside my heart is like, but I'm like, no, no, I trust my gut. I trust my gut. So he took me out to eat with a couple of the other stunt actors. And it was very interesting because they wanted to know my philosophy on life. Like they wanted to know if I believed in fate, they wanted to know if I believed in circumstance. They wanted to know if I believed if I created my own reality at that point, like I was really young, but they wanted to know these things because they weren't going to trust me with teaching me some of these things. If I didn't believe that things happen for a reason that you're in the right place at the right time that you trust yourself. Because it's very important when you're doing choreography with another stunt actor, you have to trust that when they're supposed to Zig, they're going to Zig. And when they're supposed to zag, they're going to zag. Otherwise you're going to collide and people get hurt. So that's how I learned. And so the kinds of stunts that I do were our high falls and lighting myself on fire and fight scenes. Passionistas: What projects did you do? Amy: Oh gosh. Like I did a lot of a lot of TV and I did quite a few like Showtime, HBO movies. And I couldn't even tell you some of the titles because they have what's called a working title. And then, and then, and then it goes to print crime strike was one of them like any like cops reenactments. I played in a battered woman a lot because I get beat up really well. So I can really, I can really sell, I can really sell a punch. There's a really cool chase credit card commercial. And it's actually a friend of mine. Her name is Melissa Barker and she's gets hit by a car and she comes off and she's like, yeah, you know, like you can't, I can't predict everything what's going on, but I can predict what's in my wallet kind of thing. And um, so she's actually a really big stunt woman. And she, she was one of the girls I trained with early on and with her and her husband, Eric, Betsy's another big stunt guy. So yeah, she's still going strong. I'm 51. I don't bounce. Like I used to. And um, and I got out at a point when, you know, I realized that most stunt people have broken their back at some point. So I was like, yeah, I think I'm going to cash it in quit while you're ahead. Passionistas: Your husband was also a stunt person. Did you meet him in that industry? Amy: The funny thing is we did not. We actually met, do you know who, uh, Joey Dispenza, Dr. Joe Dispenza. He's written a book called breaking the habit of being yourself. He's a, he's a speaker. And again, it's personal growth. So we met doing personal growth. That was really funny. Cause we were at this thing where he was talking and I think we were like the youngest people in the crowd. So like, we were both like 36 at the time. And so we were like the youngest people there and everybody else was like, well, over 60. And so we were just like, Hi, a young person. And so, and it was like, he was like, Oh yeah, I'm a star. I'm like, Oh my God, I'm gonna stop a woman. So that was interesting. But he did, he is from Australia and he did stunts for a live action shows. He did some movies, but he mostly did live action. So he did, he was a Warner brothers movie world. He opened up the universal Japan. He went to Indonesia. So he was a stent, a livestock action performer for years where he did shows daily after it, that you eventually opened your first business together. Passionistas: So what was the first business you started together? Amy: It was the gym that we started together before that we were kind of doing our own things, but then I'm an entrepreneur and a big risk taker. And it's funny, he's a stunt man, but he's not risky. So I'm more of a rule breaker and a risk taker. And he's more by the book by the rules. So jumping off a building is not risky to him. As much as like purchasing a brand new business is scary, scary to him. So, uh, so he always worked for the people kind of thing, but now he's learned to be an entrepreneur. So the gym was the first business that we opened together. Passionistas: Tell us about running your own gym, what was that like? Did you like doing that? Amy: Oh, I'm so glad we're not doing that. I loved helping the people. It was great, but God, it w like what a babysitting project that was because our gym was a little different. We were like our more high-end studio. So you didn't just come to the gym and work out when you wanted everything was classes. So I taught Zumba, I taught spin. I taught, I created my own classes like riding row, which was like a, like a spin and row class combined. And then I had employees and stuff, but Oh man, what a headache? What a headache and a brick and mortar. And I'm so happy that we do not have that during, like when the pandemic started, all I kept saying was like, I'm so glad we don't have the gym. I'm so glad we don't have the gym. We never would have survived it. Passionistas: Now while you had the gym, you developed the Five Elements of Health. So tell us about that and why each one is important? Amy: What Jamie says is you've got five elements of health, exercise, sleep, hydration, nutrition, and emotional environment. And when you get all five, you've got a grip on your health. That's what he says. You got a grip on it. Um, so they're all important, but the most Important one of course is emotional, uh, environment. And what emotional environment contains is the energy around you. Emotion, emotion is energy in motion, and it's the people around you. And it's your, it's your health space. And it's your, it's everything that has to do with your mindset. And the emotional environment is the most important one because you, it's almost like if you think of a triangle and you think of like, the emotional body is like at the top of the triangle and the physical bodies at the bottom. If you change the physical body, but you don't change the mind up here, you're just going to come back to that physical body that you were at before. So you could lose all the way you could do it. This is why people lose weight. And then they come right back to here. This is why people win the lottery and then spend all the money and don't have the money because they got the physical level, but they didn't do the mind level up here. So what I realized in that is that the mindset was the most important piece. So, so for me to really help people would be to focus on the mindset. So that's what we kind of shifted to, is focusing on the mindset. I worked with people that needed to lose hundreds of pounds. That is, it can be a slow moving boat. You got to kind of give them a wide berth and let them be able to, you know, come around to this new lifestyle. And it takes patience and it takes, but it's really takes shifting that mindset. And so this has changed. Nothing's going to change in the body and if it does change, it's just going to go right back to where it was at. If the mindset doesn't get changed along with it. And so, Passionistas: So is that what inspired you to create Improv for Impact? Amy: Improv for impact is more my husband's business, but it's a tool that I use in sales, Tai Chi. So improper impact. He's, he's always done improv, but when people think of improv, they think of comedy or they think of like, whose line it in any way, or they think of like comedians. Oh, that's funny. What I realized when I was recognizing it and watching what he was doing was I was like, Oh my gosh, what a brilliant way to, and a fun way to figure out what people's habits are that are holding them back from success. Because as he's playing the games, I'm watching the patterns. And what happens is when you play a game, there's always rules on the game, right? So anytime you add rules, it adds stress. But even though it's fun, stress, anytime we're in a moment of stress, like it, like if you think of like, like fun games where you're like, ah, and you're like, you're like kind of get a little stress. We always revert back to our habit in times of stress. So then I could identify, I easily identify what the habits were. So there's certain games where we can watch it or say, Oh, that's interesting that person doesn't like to take responsibility for things, or, Oh, that's interesting. This person always wants to push their idea, but they're not willing to listen to other's ideas or, Oh, that's interesting. This person always says no before they hear it out because in their head and this is, this really can help teams. It can help innovation with business. Because what we see, a lot of people do is like, say I'm an employee. And I come to the boss with an idea and the boss goes, well, we can't, no, that's not. We can't do that because in the boss's head, he's thinking, what's going to cost this. It's going to cost this. What are we going to do? Right. But if the boss had just said, yes, okay, well, let's figure out how that can happen. Maybe another idea is going to come out that maybe it's not that idea, but if he was open to it, instead of just immediately blocking that idea, he would be able to innovate and be able to come up with something completely new. I love Apple. What Apple did. Steve jobs came back. When he came back after he had been gone from his company for a while, they spent, I think, a few days on this. And they said, well, what business are we in? And they said, well, we're in the computer business. And he said, no, no, no, no. What business are we really in? We're what are we really in? What are we really doing here? And they took days to figure this out. And they spent time just minds, you know, brainstorming what they ended up coming up with was no, we connect people to their passions. And that's how they came up with the iPod. That was when they first came up with the iPod because, Oh, well, their passions are what their passions are, music, their passions or photos, their passions, or family emails, their passions are, you know, these kinds of things. So that's was, became their motto. And it was like, it was a different, innovative way of thinking about things. So if we can stop blocking that, then we can, then we can, then we can identify who in the companies doing these things. Passionistas: We're Amy and Nancy Harrington. And you're listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Amy Honey. To learn more about Amy, visit her website amyjohoney.com. Now more of her interview with Amy. How can people transform their habits to, to connect better with their clients and communicate their values better? Amy: We teach about the energy of sales. So we teach about looking at the energy and then we also teach really active listening, truly active listening to somebody, and we teach them how to stop blocking them. So for instance, if I come to you and I say, Hey, Nancy, I got this great health product. Are you open to taking a look at it? And you're just like, no, I'm like, Oh, okay, cool. What, what interests you the most? Right. So like trying to connect on a different level, right? When somebody tells you no or blocks it, you have to accept it. So what I see a lot of salespeople do is they keep pushing. Yeah. But this is really good for you, but this is really… no, Nancy, this could really benefit you. Like really? You need to look at this, right? No, she already said no. Right, stop it. And just stop. Like sometimes it's better just not to sell. Passionistas: You really are passionate about helping girls and women find their courage. So how do you do that? Amy: And especially single moms because I was a single mom. So especially single moms. I met my husband when my daughter was 18. So how do I do that? How do I help women? I, I think that women are really powerful in who they are. And I love, I specifically love helping women and teaching women how to sell because we are, we are nurturers. We are naturally a nurture and we naturally create through pleasure. So men push, push, push hard, hard, hard, buy, buy, buy women don't function that way. So I like to teach women sales by just using their own nature of who they are. You know, don't try to be me. Don't try to be the other best salesperson in the world. You've got to be you to do it. And you are valid and you are valuable in who you are. And so that, so I, I, I, I, especially just, I mean, I work with companies and corporations, but I really am super passionate. Like when I see a woman, especially a single mom, I'm kind of like hone in on her. And I'm just like inner ear, like really amazing. You can do it. Passionistas: What's the philosophy of Sales Tai Chi. How does it work? Amy: So Sales Tai Chi right now, the main thing that we're training teams to do, we're training them how to recreate their live events to online, because it's just necessary right now. So how do you recreate that live event experience and do it online? Sales Tai Chi is all about the energy of the sale and the flow of energy and how to take whatever comes at you and move it into the energy that you want it to be moved into. So rather than blocking the energy of a no accepting the energy, turning the energy into what you want. And when, when you do get to know what I train our teams to do is to accept that no, you know, when you get objections, that's different than a no. When you get objections, you want to turn that objection and vet and validate their objection. Because if somebody says to you, Oh, I just, I just don't have the time right now. Well, that's just, that's an ex an objection in reality. It's an excuse because they just told me they really wanted this, but now they're telling you they don't have time. Right. So you never want to say, Oh, but you've got plenty of time. Or you got, because you're just invalidating their excuse and their excuse in their own head is really valid. So it's more about asking questions, you know? So when they, when they say, Oh, I don't have time. Oh, I know. Yeah. Time can be. That can be tough. Do you want more time? You know what I mean? So it's like, it's like accepting, accepting it. And if it's a no, except the no sales is like kissing, the other person has to be leaning in, or you can't kiss them. Passionistas: You talk about how I shouldn't try and sell the way you try and sell. So how does somebody tap into their, their personal strengths to figure out what their best approaches? Amy: So I would just ask you, like, when you're like, do you, do you sell anything right now? Passionistas: We sell a subscription box. Amy: Okay. Oh, cool. What's in it? Passionistas: It's all products from women owned businesses and female artists. Amy: I love that. That's great. Okay. So what is your favorite thing about the products? Like what are you most excited about that excites you about that product? Passionistas: To me, the most exciting thing about the subscription box is that we're supporting other women. Like it's just, you know, we, we beyond selling the products, we, uh, interview every woman in the box and we share their stories so that people are, aren't just buying the product. They're supporting the woman behind the product. And to me, that's what I love about doing the subscriber. Amy: What do you absolutely hate about selling? Passionistas: Asking people for money. Amy: Okay. Yeah. So then what I would do with you is I would shift your mindset around about that because are these products gonna serve that person? Passionistas: Yes. Amy: So if you're not selling, you're not serving. So I would just help you shift that mindset around asking people for money because it is value. It is valuable, right? Passionistas: Oh, yeah. Amy: And then how do you sell as yourself is you just find the things that you like. So if you really love connecting with women, then just connect with them. You don't have to sell them anything. Right. Just connect with them. If that's your favorite part about it, and you hate asking money, but you love connecting, then just connect and then it's, it doesn't even feel like you're asking for my needs similar to like, you know, would you tell your best friend about a great movie that you just watched? Passionistas: Sure. Amy: So why wouldn't you tell them about the subscription box? So you're going to just tell your friends as if you were telling them about a great movie. I'll leave you with a little story. This was a kind of a big lesson for me. So when I did own the gym, I had a, I would help people lose hundreds of pounds. And I had a program that was $5,000. I'd be with you for a year. I guaranteed at least a hundred pounds of weight loss. So during that, I thought, you know what? I want to really help everybody. I really just want to help everybody and not everybody can afford me. So maybe I should just run like a free, almost weight Watchers type of a class on the weekends. So on Saturday I did an, a full hour. I had about 18 as a smaller town side, about 18 people that came during that entire year that I did that. I was there every week. Not one person lost one pound. And the worst part about it was there was a guy and he passed away at age 36, at 450 pounds. I feel like if I had sold him that package, that he would probably be here today because when people put, put money in the game, they're invested, they're, they're gonna do it. They're gonna, you know, and, and just think about the women that do buy your box and that why, like how excited are they when they get this box? I mean, who doesn't love to get a box of stuff where you're just like, I don't know what's coming and I can't wait. It's like opening. Right? Like, so tap into that excitement that the women feel that buy your box. And then that makes it a little bit easier to ask for the money because you know, they're going to be excited to get it. Passionistas: What advice would you give to a young woman that wants to be an entrepreneur? Amy: Go for it. Jump in with both feet. Don't hesitate. It's like stunts. Once you go to jump off that building, if you stop yourself in the middle of it, you're going to get hurt. Once you commit, commit and do it, don't hesitate that hesitation. That's like, there's, there is a lot of dead squirrels on the road to indecision, right? So don't hesitate when we hesitate. That's when we know, are we going to make the right decisions all the time? Probably not. That's okay. Stop beating yourself up about it. Take a little risk. It's okay. Get out there and do it. Passionistas: Thanks for listening to The Passionistas Project Podcast and our interview with Amy Honey. To learn more about Amy, visit her website, amyjohoney.com. Please visit ThePassionistasProject.com to learn more about our podcast and subscription box filled with products made by women owned businesses and female artisans — to inspire you to follow your passions. Sign up for our mailing list, to get 10% off your first purchase. And be sure to subscribe The Passionistas Project Podcast, so you don't miss any of our upcoming inspiring guests. Until next time stay well and stay passionate.

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第1011期:In the Club

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 22, 2020 3:29

Paul: So Amy, I was talking to somebody the other day and they told me that you had quite a number of like interesting little odd jobs. So I'm interested, so could you tell me a bit about that.Amy: I don't know how odd they were. I don't know. When I was in university, part time jobs, I used to work in restaurants and—the usual stuff—restaurants, and I think my favorite was working in a nightclub. It was a really, really big nightclub and I used to work on the floor, just kind of cleaning up, looking after all the drunk patrons.And my first night there was—actually, one of my favorite DJs was on, so that was great. I got to listen to really good music whilst finding money on the floor, and cleaning up after folks. It was really good.Paul: You found some money on the floor.Amy: Yeah. You know, it was a busy club. Really, really full, a good couple of thousand people in there. And I guess people were doing whatever they were doing and they would drop big wads of cash. And because I was the person to clean up all the glass bottles, then I would find the wads of cash on the floor. So it was good. I'd get my wages, I'd get tips, and then I would get my own personal tips from finding money on the floor.Paul: So you must have found like a whole range of different things, like, what else did you find?Amy: Yeah. A little wraps of things, and then packets of things, yeah. I mean, I had to work hard for the money. It wasn't easy because the place was full, absolutely rammed of people. Everybody is incredibly drunk or whatever and they all just want to dance and have a good time. And I have to make sure there's no broken glass for safety reasons, obviously. So I'm pushing my way through the crowd and keeping eyes on the floor constantly with a torch. And alongside the broken glass that I would sweep up would be, yeah, wads of cash, sometimes little purses, little bags, things like that.When I find, like, identification for things—when it was a purse, I would do the right thing with it, hand it in but it was just a wad up, like a rolled-up set of notes, I would just put them in my pocket for me, basically.Paul: Yeah, it's difficult to know what to do with cash because you're handing it to someone who—well, it's cash, isn't it?Amy: I know.Paul: Yeah, yeah.Amy: I remember finding some driving license and student ID, and I took—it was actually the same university that I went to at the time, and I just took it to uni when I was going during the week. And I handed it in to make sure that it got back to the owner because you know that's the worst thing about when you lose your purse or your wallet. The cash, you can kind of just say goodbye to. It's a given really that it's going to be gone, but it's your ID and your cards and everything. It's such a hassle trying to get them back again. So I wanted to make sure that whoever drunken idiot dropped them in that club that it got back to their hands safely.Paul: Well, that's nice. So you're a thief with heart then.Amy: I'm not a thief. I'm an opportunist.Paul: I'm kidding. I'm kidding.Amy: It's on the floor.Paul: I'm pulling your leg, Amy. No, I would have done the same.

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第1011期:In the Club

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 22, 2020 3:29

club id djs paul you paul yeah amy it paul so paul well

第982期:Car Smash Ups

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2020 2:23

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Paul: So I was on my way to work the other day, and I saw this really—you shouldn't laugh but it was quite funny traffic accident. I shouldn't laugh but this old lady was in her car. And bless her, she must have got confused and she put the car into reverse and when she went to like put the car in forward gear, and she drove like straight into the person behind her and smashed up the car behind her.Amy: Oh no.Paul: I mean, it was an inocent mistake but it could happen to any of us but it was a bit, sort of calamitous really. How about you? Have you had any car accidents?Amy: Not like that. I've been in a car—I was a passenger in a car accident. When I was about 17, my boyfriend at the time was driving too fast on a country road with a national speed limit. So he was going pretty fast and then we were pulling into a small village, so he had to slow right down. The roads were very, very wet. It was dark. He came up over a small hill and there was a big jeep suddenly waiting to turn right and he stomped on the brakes and skidded right into the back of it. So his little car just got demolished by this jeep.We were okay. He hit his head on the steering wheel. And I think I had seatbelt pain from where the seatbelt was but yeah, the car was a write-off. But we were okay.Paul: Wow. Thank goodness for that. It sounds like pretty horrific.Amy: No, no. It was okay.Paul: Yeah.Amy: It taught him to, I guess, be a better driver. He was driving too fast on slippery and dark conditions.Paul: Yeah. I guess when you're at that age, you almost feel like you're untouchable, nothing can stop you. So sometimes, you need those sorts of experiences to kind of make you realize that.Amy: Don't be a boy racer.Paul: Don't be a boy racer and it can be taken away from you. Your life could be taken away from you very easily, you know. It's pretty—Amy: Yeah, we were really lucky, for sure.

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第982期:Car Smash Ups

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2020 2:23

smash paul yeah amy it amy oh

第963期:Change Climate Change

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 4, 2020 4:32

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Amy: So speaking of climate change, what do you think are three things that we can do to try and personally help climate change—well, prevent climate change in our lives? What do you think?Paul: Obviously, the big concern with climate change is carbon emissions. So that would like lead me to look at my usage of fuel because that's a huge source of carbon emissions. So probably, I'd say, number one, reduce my car usage or transport usage.Amy: Right.Paul: I don't personally have a car and I always take the bus to work.Amy: That's a good start then, isn't it?Paul: Yeah. I'm not doing it trying to reduce the effects of carbon base; it's just that—yeah. Secondly, I think trying to source your foods locally. I think that would be a huge help too because it reduces the transportation of food. And I think in reality, I think we could produce a lot of what we need locally, you know. I don't think we should be eating strawberries in the middle of winter. I don't think we should be. I think we should try and eat seasonally as well, what's available to us. But we've become so used to being able to get what we want when we want it, and it's having a huge impact on our environment.How about you, Amy? Do you have any ideas about how we can perhaps challenge—how we can perhaps address the problem?Amy: It's interesting you mentioned about the carbon emissions. Obviously, it's really important to reduce those. And I do have a car and I need it to get places as most people do. And currently, I also live really, really far away from where I was born and raised so to travel to see my family, I need to take long-haul air flights. And I guess reducing those, it's the flights I think that contribute more towards carbon emissions than perhaps driving my car. So it's about making that balance, I think. Seeing your family versus being green, I think.But it was an interesting point you said about also sourcing our food. I think that's something that we can definitely do. I agree with that and locally sourced food, I think will help reduce carbon emissions.Small things as well like, if we're going food shopping. If we have to go food shopping, then, you know, taking your own bag. Stop using all the excess packaging, things like that. Where I live right now is a country that uses a lot of packaging and it makes me sad. I think the first thing I learned to say in the language of that country was I don't need that bag, thank you. So, I mean, it's a very, very small step but I think if everybody tried to do it a bit more, it would help in a small way.Paul: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. I tried to—it drives me crazy how much plastic we use. And if you think about how much energy is going into producing that plastic, you know—yeah. I mean, people talk about cars and stuff but this production of plastic—I mean, I had a banana the other day and it was wrapped in plastic.Amy: Oh no.Paul: A banana. I mean, it's perfectly wrapped by nature yet they felt some reason to put it in plastic. I couldn't believe it. I almost wanted to—I almost had to laugh hysterically or cry. Yeah, a lot of it is crazy, you know.

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第963期:Change Climate Change

Bloggingheads.tv: The DMZ

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 4, 2020 4:32

climate change paul yeah amy it amy oh

The IQ Taboo (Glenn Loury & Amy Wax)

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 31, 2020 83:27

Debating Charles Murray’s new book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class ... Amy: It is an undeniable fact that there are IQ differences between whites and blacks ... Do group IQ differences have a place in politics? ... Does public opinion about race influence elites? ... Amy: Bohemians belong on the margins of society ... The benefits of a meritocratic society ...

race class gender iq taboo glenn loury amy wax amy it

Even in a virtual world, you still sweat. That's why it's important to keep your HMDs clean, especially if there's multiple users. Cleanbox devised UV light technology for just such a purpose, then found a higher calling during the Coronavirus. Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here, with the XR for Business podcast. Today, we're speaking with Amy Hedrick, co-founder and CEO of Cleanbox, a smart technology hygiene company that's providing hospital grade decontamination of shared hardware, which I guess we can all agree right now, is very necessary in the current situation. In this podcast, we'll also learn how the team at Cleanbox is helping hospitals maintain mask hygiene. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast. Amy, welcome. Amy: Thank you, Alan. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for taking time. I know you are crazy busy, working probably 20 hour days right now. You are on the front lines, bringing hygiene in a time where it could not be more important. So thank you for joining us and taking the time. Amy: It's my pleasure. I'm happy to do it. And you're right. It is very timely. Everybody's focus right now -- globally -- is on hygiene and public safety and public responsibility, and how we can better stay safe when we're able to go back out in the world. Alan: Absolutely. So I'm going to get right into it. I know you were working with the VR community very heavily, but I think right now this is just kind of top of mind with everybody. So maybe in your own words, you can explain what Cleanbox Technologies does. Amy: Sure. Well, OK, so Cleanbox technology provides hospital grade decontamination of shared hardware. We designed our core technology with-- actually with XR in mind, with the idea and the belief that virtual and augmented reality had great potential in terms of business and enterprise purposes, as well as in healthcare, and of course, entertainment. Seeing the value there and thinking ahead of what would be the pain points that would prevent a successful global deployment, or a successful corporate deployment, and adequate actual consumer adoption. Few years ago, thinking back on how we would be able to meet some of those pain points and eliminate them and lower the barrier of entry, hygiene seemed to be one of those things that was easy to forget. So with XR technology, it's so sexy and there's a lot of very interesting and cool and unique things you can do with it. So the logistics sometimes gets gets a little bit lost. We came at the XR community from the point of risk mitigation. How could we reduce the risk of contagion transfer and thus some detrimental event happening within the industry? And we've grown since then. Alan: So right now it's an interesting time, because we're all stuck at home. So things like location based entertainment facilities are empty. Where is your business coming from now? I know you-- from speaking with one of your advisors, Terry Schussler, that you're booming right now. You can't fulfill the orders fast enough. Where's this business coming from, if it's not coming from location based entertainment? Amy: Well, we've always been addressing multiple markets at once. Location based entertainment is, of course, first and foremost in people's minds because that's -- I guess -- the best education for the average consumer into what immersive technology can do. So it's-- and it's very dear to my origins and we definitely take care of the LB community. On that note, I would say that there are plenty of organizations looking forward to the day that they can reopen, and realizing that not only just the idea of hygiene, but actual hygiene is really critically important to reopening those busine

ceo business coronavirus vr location uv lb xr beams hedrick amy it alan smithson hmds amy thank amy well

Keeping VR Clean with UV Beams, featuring Cleanbox’s Amy Hedrick

XR for Business

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 9, 2020 17:12

Even in a virtual world, you still sweat. That’s why it’s important to keep your HMDs clean, especially if there’s multiple users. Cleanbox devised UV light technology for just such a purpose, then found a higher calling during the Coronavirus. Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here, with the XR for Business podcast. Today, we're speaking with Amy Hedrick, co-founder and CEO of Cleanbox, a smart technology hygiene company that's providing hospital grade decontamination of shared hardware, which I guess we can all agree right now, is very necessary in the current situation. In this podcast, we'll also learn how the team at Cleanbox is helping hospitals maintain mask hygiene. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast. Amy, welcome. Amy: Thank you, Alan. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for taking time. I know you are crazy busy, working probably 20 hour days right now. You are on the front lines, bringing hygiene in a time where it could not be more important. So thank you for joining us and taking the time. Amy: It's my pleasure. I'm happy to do it. And you're right. It is very timely. Everybody's focus right now -- globally -- is on hygiene and public safety and public responsibility, and how we can better stay safe when we're able to go back out in the world. Alan: Absolutely. So I'm going to get right into it. I know you were working with the VR community very heavily, but I think right now this is just kind of top of mind with everybody. So maybe in your own words, you can explain what Cleanbox Technologies does. Amy: Sure. Well, OK, so Cleanbox technology provides hospital grade decontamination of shared hardware. We designed our core technology with-- actually with XR in mind, with the idea and the belief that virtual and augmented reality had great potential in terms of business and enterprise purposes, as well as in healthcare, and of course, entertainment. Seeing the value there and thinking ahead of what would be the pain points that would prevent a successful global deployment, or a successful corporate deployment, and adequate actual consumer adoption. Few years ago, thinking back on how we would be able to meet some of those pain points and eliminate them and lower the barrier of entry, hygiene seemed to be one of those things that was easy to forget. So with XR technology, it's so sexy and there's a lot of very interesting and cool and unique things you can do with it. So the logistics sometimes gets gets a little bit lost. We came at the XR community from the point of risk mitigation. How could we reduce the risk of contagion transfer and thus some detrimental event happening within the industry? And we've grown since then. Alan: So right now it's an interesting time, because we're all stuck at home. So things like location based entertainment facilities are empty. Where is your business coming from now? I know you-- from speaking with one of your advisors, Terry Schussler, that you're booming right now. You can't fulfill the orders fast enough. Where's this business coming from, if it's not coming from location based entertainment? Amy: Well, we've always been addressing multiple markets at once. Location based entertainment is, of course, first and foremost in people's minds because that's -- I guess -- the best education for the average consumer into what immersive technology can do. So it's-- and it's very dear to my origins and we definitely take care of the LB community. On that note, I would say that there are plenty of organizations looking forward to the day that they can reopen, and realizing that not only just the idea of hygiene, but actual hygiene is really critically important to reopening those busine

ceo business coronavirus vr location uv lb xr beams hedrick amy it alan smithson hmds amy thank amy well

How A Group of Martians are Using Omnichannel Experiences and Voice Technology to Impact eCommerce

Up Next In Commerce

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2020 49:32

For those not in the know, The Mars Agency is an independent agency that combines the best of technology with the best human intelligence to provide solutions to businesses throughout the world of retail and eCommerce. And one of the Martians who leads the charge at Mars is Amy Andrews, the SVP Business Development & eCommerce. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Amy walked us through all the trends she’s been seeing in the eCommerce industry, including the changing consumer behavior, the rise of omnichannel experiences, and why companies that can crack the code of using voice plus video technology could see a huge payoff. Key Takeaways: There is an opportunity to merge eCommerce and influencer content in order to make a more relevant and personalized shopping experience The amount of data in the eCommerce world is overwhelming and can lead to losing the humanity of the work, which Mars tries to avoid by having a blend of the best technology and the smartest humanity Voice shopping still hasn’t reached its tipping point, but there is data that shows that voice technology is growing in the world of eCommerce For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible eCommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce, this is Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org and your host of this lovely podcast. Today we're joined by Amy Andrews, SEP of business development and eCommerce at the Mars Agency. Amy, how are you? Amy: I'm doing well Stephanie, how are you doing? Stephanie: Doing great, yeah as great as can be. So, when I heard of the Mars Agency, I saw that you called your, was it your customers or your employees Martians? Amy: We call our employees Martians, very lovingly. Stephanie: Oh man, I love that. I was trying to think of a name I wanted to give our employees, but nothing comes close to that. Tell me a little bit about the Mars Agency and how all that came about. Amy: Sure. So the Mars Agency has been around for over 45 years, started by an amazing woman, Marilyn Barnett, and really our focus has been on marketing to shoppers over that last, almost half a century. And Marilyn was really a pioneer in this space, she used to be when she started kind of the grocery model who would hold the box of laundry detergent as people walked by. And really just, yeah, and talk about women in business. She was just such an interesting leader and saw that as a marketing opportunity for brands at retail, and started the Mars Agency. And we have a long history in shopper marketing, and shopper marketing is really just marketing to shoppers so, as that has evolved and how people shop has evolved, we followed them and led them to all those different places. Stephanie: Got it. So are you working with large brands to kind of teach them the trends in the industry and how to market to, like you said, the shoppers, is that how to think about the Mars Agency? Amy: Yep. We work with a lot of large consumer package good clients so, like Campbell Soup, Nestle Waters, several others across top retailers. So Walmart, Target, and for me in the eCommerce space, Amazon is definitely a huge player. Stephanie: Okay, cool. And what is your day to day look like there, what is your role look like? Amy: So I lead our eCommerce team, which I mentioned some of the retailers but we really work across all eCommerce retailers and digital platforms. If you think about things that some of you probably use more recently than others like Instacart and other delivery services. We help brands market to their shoppers in those spaces, and really anywhere that you can buy a product online. Which used to be physical stores would convert it online, or your kind of Amazon, Pure Play retailers, and now as I'm sure you've experienced definitely, there's a lot of different options to buy online as you're scrolling through. Instagram you can shop now and kind of always be almost we're moving towards one click away from a purchase in any environment so, that's really what my team focuses on, for our clients, how do we help them market and ultimately sell more online? Stephanie: Got it. Has everything with COVID-19 kind of adjusted your strategy of what you're advising your clients to do? Or what kind of shifts have you made when it comes to that advisory role? Amy: Yeah that's a great question. I think we have seen a lot of data as this, sadly continues for us. But it has definitely had a huge impact on the eCommerce space, particularly for grocery, since a lot of our clients are the CPG packaged clients. We've seen online grocery projections in the last couple of weeks reach what we thought they would be in 2025. So there's been, yeah huge growth in this space, and a lot of new users to this space so, we know that's out of necessity, but again as this kind of continues, we think that a lot of these people, like 60% of people tried a delivery service for the first time in the last six weeks. That's a ton of new people who are buying new groceries online and, yeah there's been a lot of experience as I'm sure you've heard with, not being able to find what you want, or having slow delivery time- Stephanie: Yeah. Being out of stock of my favorite matcha tea, very disappointing. Amy: Out of stock, yes. Which is a little bit easier to deal with than toilet paper but- Stephanie: Yeah, I guess. Amy: I guess it depends on where you are on both with your supply but, no we've had ... Yeah, a lot of people are having to make different choices and having to try things but as this continues, I think people are forming new habits, and even new preferences, so it's definitely influencing how we're advising our clients and where they should invest. I think what's also interesting is because of a lot of those issues, a lot of our clients and a lot of retailers have just put their marketing on pause, to make sure that they can get things in stock, and for retailers to make sure that they're not price scourging or kind of promoting things in the wrong way that would send the wrong message. Amy: So I think what will be interesting long term is, some retailers and brands kind of catch that, and once they have products in stock, once, even Amazon this week has fixed some of their Amazon Fresh delivery issues. As those things start getting worked out, I think they'll be a lot more interesting marketing opportunities, especially as you think about all those new users, either to a retailer or to a brand. I don't know if you bought a different tea brand when you couldn't find yours. Stephanie: I did, I did. Amy: Yeah, a lot of people are having that experience right, so then it's like how does that new brand try and keep you and then how does your old brand try and get you back? So we're definitely working with our clients on all those types of questions. Stephanie: Got it. Do you think clients should be turning off their marketing budgets? As you mentioned, a lot of them are doing that right now, do you think that's a good strategy, or should they till be maybe thinking of ways to experiment because this is a whole new world, it might be actually a good opportunity to kind of experiment a bit without offending people if possible? Amy: Yeah, no, I think ... Yeah, I think it is a bit of both. I think initially, not just marketing but a lot of businesses and industries, just kind of paused to figure out and make sense of what was going on and determine what they should do next. And I think that was, probably a smart move at the time, just to not make any rash decisions. But we're definitely partnering with our clients now on, what is the right way to market. I think one of the trends that we'll see is probably a lot more regional and geographic differences. Like we in the Bay Area are still sheltering in place for another month. So, online shopping here will be very different than other states that are opening up. Amy: And, marketing to those people might be very appropriate now, and I would definitely recommend testing and trying things in that space. Stephanie: Got it. Amy: So I think it's going to have to be a combination. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. Do you see the companies you work with coming to you with similar struggles? Like other themes that you're hearing and any advice around some of those struggles that they're experiencing? Amy: Yeah. I think a lot of the marketing struggles, or just some of the struggles on a more macro level of just the unknown, especially in terms of timing and how long it will continue. And then we kind of have some of the same issues in terms of data, you know there's so much out there, like when you turn on the news, you see so many different stories and different points, sometimes it's kind of hard to determine what are the right guidelines, or what's the right data that you should follow. So, we're really treating this as an ongoing conversation with our clients. And it does differ by geography, it does differ by category or industry. So, I think taking a really custom approach and being able to adapt now, and have a strategy where you're also able to easily adapt moving forward, is going to be really important. Amy: We typically do annual planning with our brands, and we've already been talking, you know we're already in the stages of re-planning but, I think re-planning will be something we do all year now, I don't think it's kind of the pre COVID plan and the post COVID plan, I think it's going to be continuing to adapt. And the brands and retailers that are able to evolve in that way are probably going to be the most successful. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. It seems like a good time to kind of pivot in certain areas, cut projects that aren't, maybe as necessary, and thinking in a completely new light based on everything that's happening. What kind of things do you see being cut or changes be made in these re-planning sessions at these companies? Amy: I mean, the big question now, which the Mars Agency is tackling with our clients is, what might come back in-store and what might not, in terms of marketing and planning around that? There's the kind of legal or even not legal, but kind of the official guidelines or restrictions side of things, in terms of how people shop and how many people can enter the store at what time. But then I think there's also a very real consumer behavior piece of it. So, one thing that has happened in stores and that a lot of our brands being food brands, we've done is, things around sampling and trying new products. And whether that's a cooked piece of food outside of a wrapper, or a sealed up new product, I think in both of those cases, I don't know if for myself, and if I think about other shoppers, I don't know how eager we're going to be to take either one of those samples now. Amy: So, we're trying to rethink things like that that have been really traditional vehicles to encourage trial, how do we think about that in a new way? Either if that's a re-plan in terms of, what do we do with those dollars and invest them in something else? Or what I think is maybe more creative and exciting is, how do we think about sampling in a new way? Or how do we think about demos in a new way? And that's where we really see the in-store and the eComm world kind of colliding, and really creating some of these omnichannel is the word that we use a lot. Stephanie: Yeah. Amy: Omnichannel experiences, so that we're moving towards that anyway, and I think COVID has been an interesting tipping point to, as you said, kind of pivot and think about these things, and push ourselves to think about them even more differently now, to deliver the best shopper experience. Stephanie: Yeah, it seems like it could be with everything bad that happened, maybe a good forcing function to kind of push some brands into the eCommerce world who maybe weren't fully utilizing it before, or not at all. Do you see them being able to adapt to some of these changes that you're recommending them or being able to shift something that they've always been focused on selling in-store, always focused on someone having that in-person experience, like you said, whether it's a sample, a demo, have you seen them be able to pivot on to eCommerce, or being open to that, or even having the technology to do it? Amy: Yeah. I mean I'm pretty optimistic, so I think yes, I think all brands can do this and adapt and pivot and do so relatively easily. I think that was a big question before all of this, and the crisis was just how quickly should each, brand based on their category, be moving into this space? And a lot of brands were over-invested in eCommerce because they felt that that was going to be the future so they're a bit of a step ahead. And that doesn't mean that other brands can't catch up but, I think COVID has just been a kind of internal tipping point for a lot of organizations to think about how they're treating eCommerce and maybe prioritizing it a little bit differently. Amy: So, yeah for brands or companies who weren't thinking about it before, I would definitely say, now's the time. And, because the whole industry and the whole world is really shaken up, it's a great time to think about how you're treating eCommerce differently, and then within the eCommerce space, what we can be doing differently there as well. Stephanie: Got it. Is there anyone that you ever looked to in the industry, where you maybe point your clients in that direction of being like, hey, here's an industry leader when it comes to the checkout experience, or the shopping experience, or the unboxing, or anything like that? Anyone that you guys kind of look to as like a leader in the space? Amy: Yeah, that's a great question. I think there are a lot of examples of brands or retailers doing, I would say pieces of the puzzle really well. The one that comes to mind for me as someone who is creating a really holistic, best in class experience, is actually a retailer. I think IKEA does a phenomenal job in this space, in terms of just digital experiences. They have different digital technologies, and apps and platforms, and AI, and all of that, that is really just helping recreate the experience of going to an enormous, huge physical retail destination, I mean, I can't think of a more traditional shopping experience than kind of browsing through those huge displays in IKEA. Stephanie: So many levels, at least here in Palo Alto. Amy: Yes, definitely. I think of like a huge retail footprint that they've had to translate into a digital experience. There's one now where instead of IKEA saying, what's the best .com site or digital catalog? They are thinking what's the best shopping experience? And now you can as a shopper, walk through an IKEA store, through virtual reality, and pick different products, and then also using AI to see them in your own bedroom. So I think they've just done a great- Stephanie: Oh wow, that's awesome. Amy: ... Job. Yeah, I think I've just done a great job of thinking about it a little bit differently, and kind of doing it in a fun way that that's the biggest piece for myself as a shopper as well, that's sometimes missing from the online shopping experience. It's so convenient, and there are so many wonderful, wonderful benefits that come along with that. But you do lose kind of the fun of shopping, and browsing around, and I think IKEA has done a nice job of bringing some of that physical experience in a fun, very branded IKEA way, to their shoppers digitally. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. I think sometimes people forget that it's not just shopping and trying to buy the thing, but really, like when I go to IKEA, it's my day. It's a whole experience, I'm ready, I'm prepared, I've had my snack, and I'm ready to go through every single setup area to like look at their bedroom, and see how they set it up, and look at this living room setup and incorporating VR into that shows that they know exactly why their customers, at least customers like me come there, is to be able to experience it like I'm actually there. So yeah, that's great. Are you advising other companies to kind of, not only think that way but maybe moving into technologies like that, that they weren't utilizing before? Whether it's VR, or AR, or any of that kind of stuff? Amy: Yes. And I would say just even more broadly, we're advising our clients, and working with a lot of our clients right now on, how do we create the best digital content that's going to be relevant for an eCommerce shopping experience? So, yes that could be an amazing VR IKEA type experience, or that could be a six-second video on a product page, that tells you exactly what you need to know about the benefits of this new water that you're drinking. So I think it's about, what's right for those different brands and, then having that content strategy that then dictates what technology you might need to use to deliver it. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah, I definitely see that shift of a lot of companies, brands, turning into kind of their own media companies when it comes to producing their content, and focusing heavier on that, and not just on a paid strategy where maybe that's been, how it's been for a couple of years. Amy: Yeah, I think I've also seen brands, hopefully, using technology to deliver experience instead of just kind of using or testing, technology for technology's sake, or to have something new. So, it used to be QR codes, and then maybe some AR that just, is just kind of there for the fun, cool factor, that's interesting. In some cases, it's kind of fun, but I think if you're just doing it for the tech's sake, and it doesn't deliver a consumer, or a shopper benefit, it's really a fad and kind of dies quickly. So, we're always trying to think about, what's the need first, and then what can we use to deliver against that? Stephanie: Yeah, it's good to flip that mindset when it comes to that, because yeah I can think of, especially QR code, that's a good example. I've seen random places it's on there, like a cereal box or something that delivers no value, and I don't actually want to even see what's behind that QR code, it seems like it was just placed there because everyone was doing it. So- Amy: Right someone told that- Stephanie: ... You definitely- Amy: ... Told that marketer, "You need a QR code." And they checked that box. Stephanie: They did it. Amy: Yeah. Stephanie: Have you, when it comes to content, I know a lot of brands right now like you said, are focused on that and trying to make sure they get, of course, new customers in that vertical, and also make sure they put out great content. Have you seen any best practices with their clients around like you said, short product videos seem to really increase conversions where you know, like something on YouTube, if you've never been on YouTube maybe isn't the best way to go? Is there any themes around that? Amy: Yeah. I would say generally we always start with what's going to be the right message for the type of media, or for the type of tactics. So, you mentioned YouTube, that's obviously a very different format than say Pinterest, who's also having quite a moment with everyone at home looking for inspiration and recipes, and all of that. Obviously, that type of content you would develop for that would be very relevant to our brands, but also relevant to that platform and what we know people are looking for there. Yeah, I think we're definitely moving towards kind of more bite-size, or smaller content formats, in general. So definitely short format, we always give the example of, you don't want to have your 30 second or 67, 60 second, excuse me, TV spot and just use that everywhere, on your eCommerce sites or on your digital media more broadly, we want to be tailoring it for the environment. Amy: I think another thing that we're trying to do a lot more of now, in terms of a trend, is how are we leveraging influencer and user-generated content in a new way? So, if we talk about relevancy, especially in the eComm world where reviews are so important, and the new mom, you might go on and you're testing the reviews of a stroller, or a really important product for your baby more than you trust advice from your own parent, or from your mom peer group even right? So, people play a ton of influence on that, especially in the eComm space. So, thinking about how we merge eCommerce and influencers, has been really interesting and we've been working with our clients on taking influencer content from a particular shopper since we're in that space. Amy: So, how do you leverage Walmart influencer content on walmart.com, and Amazon influencer content on their site? And in doing so, you create an even more relevant experience for the shopper, because not only do they have those product details and reviews, but you've kind of put all that influencer content in one place, so they can have more ideas on how to use your products, or just more relevant images and messages based on people like them. Stephanie: Yeah, that completely makes sense. I wonder if right now, with how the market is, if it'll kind of give the wrong signals to companies. Like maybe, you have all these people at home so, if you see content is very easy to get right now, you have people maybe at home who actually want the longer podcast and the longer clips. Whereas after all this starts to calm down, I wonder if it'll be hard for brands to kind of pivot again, if all that reverses. And, all of a sudden there's not many consumers who want to create content for free anymore, and long reviews and, people want those shorter clips, like you talked about. Do you see any problems coming up by brands acting too quickly right now, to kind of pivot to what the environment is now? To then it reversing maybe again in a month or six months. Amy: Yeah, I think that's a good question, and that's why I think, as I kind of mentioned earlier, we're taking a proactive but kind of cautious approach. So, one thing we did for one of our brands was, we just went out immediately and pulled out content that, I don't want to say offensive, because that's almost too strong of a word, but pulled out content that wasn't culturally sensitive. For example, a group of people in a home that was more than 10 people. Stephanie: Got it. Amy: We went in and took all of that content down, you know, just to make sure we were being sensitive, and we were also being relevant. Even if someone wasn't particularly upset about it, and maybe they had no thought on it, but we want to make sure we're giving them the most relevant message of how our brand can be used in their lives. So I think that it is going to be an evolution, it's going to be really interesting to see kind of what behaviors stick. I think bread makers was one of the top terms searched on Amazon, the last several weeks. So, I wonder if we're going to get burnt out on making bread anytime soon. Stephanie: That does sound delightful but I'm like, yeah, I don't know how long that trend will last because, my mother-in-law makes bread, and man is it a process. Amy: Well, maybe she needs a bread maker. Stephanie: I know, she does. Amy: But yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how much of those are kind of the COVID trends that then people get sick of it, or people want to, I'm not sure, maybe people will want to race back to the stores like you said, it'll be maybe really exciting when an IKEA opens, and you can go back in, and browse around and get your meatballs and all that. And I'm thinking people are going to do that in a different way. And I think that we're going to have to continue to evolve. So, that's what I mentioned about the kind of planning, I think annual planning is dead. I think we're going to be planning over and over again, if that's monthly if we can get kind of more on a routine, or maybe that's just continuous as things change, and as the news changes. Stephanie: Yep, completely agree. So, the Mars Agency has been around for almost 50 years I think, how does the company and the Martians of the company, recognize trends and then act on it quick enough to help your clients? Amy: Yeah, I think, I honestly think that's why we have been able to be around so long. In the marketing and advertising world, we're one of the few independents who's left, we're still family-run, the company is now run by Marilyn's son and Ken Barnett. And I think that having that independence, and having really just a lot of still that entrepreneurial spirit, has allowed us to really adapt as the industry has adapted and, in most cases kind of stay one step ahead. We talk a lot about our Martians, as you said, and really think that there's a balance between, our people and our technology. So, over the years we've, of course, as most industries have invested more in technology and data, and all of that, we've also really balanced that with our Martians and having, what we say is the latest technology and the smartest humanity. Amy: I think some companies, especially in the eCommerce space, because there's so much data there, and so many different tech platforms, I think if you go too far in that direction, well one, there can just be kind of data overload, and you're not able to find the insights and all the data. But two, I think you just lose a lot of that humanity, and kind of that person who we like to be who's saying, "Well, why is that the case? And, what does that data point mean?" And kind of taking it that step deeper, so that we can really understand what the human behavior is because I think that's where you have the best marketing ideas that really resonate with people, instead of just kind of trying to attack a data point. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. Are there certain metrics or data points that you've seen many brands use that you're like, you guys are all using this, but it actually doesn't really tell you much. Instead, maybe you should look at this instead. Amy: Well, because we're focused on shopper marketing and conversion, I mean, our ultimate data point is always sales. So we're always looking at, how many products were we able to sell as a result. Along with that though, you obviously want to understand what other impact you might have had on engagement. Or, in some cases, there are other circumstances that are affecting sales that are out of our control. We, of course, want to measure all the other media metrics as well. I think to answer your question on, are there certain metrics that brands are looking at that they shouldn't? I don't know if I would say you shouldn't look at this, but I think a lot of brands are placing a disproportionate kind of weight in the eCommerce based on their ROAS or their return on ad spend. Amy: And there's just some interesting ... There are some ways that you can get a very high ROAS, and that a lot of media companies or retailers will say, you had a very high ROAS and it's typically because you are reaching people who would have purchased anyway. So I think that's one where, it does beg the question of sometimes having a person or maybe a smarter data set that's kind of suggesting, why is that the case? And digging a little bit deeper to understand the why behind that metric. Stephanie: Yeah, that seems like an easy way for someone to be like, hey, look how great those ads doing when you're like, all those people were already previous customers so. Amy: Right if you're ... Yes, if you're targeting past purchasers, you can typically get a pretty high ROAS so. Stephanie: Yeah, that's pretty funny. Are there any new emerging technologies that you're advising marketers to look at or other like eCommerce platforms that you're telling people to check out? Amy: I don't know if I would say this is an emerging technology, but just in light of all of the changes around COVID, I would say looking more at new delivery platforms or channels. And this is something that, we're just having early conversations with our clients on now. But, there are a lot of what used to be in the world of retail, relatively niche players You see a lot of those platforms having really explosive growth now, kind of during this COVID period. So it'll be interesting to see how that behavior might change over time. Amy: I think we're also seeing some really interesting partnerships, so you can have your 7-Eleven order delivered by DoorDash. Or you can make a reservation to shop at a local store on OpenTable. Again, those aren't new technologies, but I think it's kind of new platforms and new channels that will be really interesting to test and learn as we go, as you're suggesting, and then also as things, hopefully at some point, kind of start to normalize. Stephanie: Yeah, cool. And then how do you think about, I saw on your website that you were talking about getting the most out of voice technology and how to conquer Amazon? Do you think, I know voice technology, it feels like it's been trying to ... It's been like that up and up for a while and no one's really cracked it. Even when I was at Google, it still felt like they couldn't crack it. How do you think about incorporating that into what your clients are doing? And same with Amazon as well? Amy: Yeah, that's a great question and you nailed it. I think it has been growing, we have on my eCommerce team, a dedicated voice specialist has a background in user experience. And, similarly, I think we've had tons of great conversations around voice, we've seen tons of great data in terms of how it's growing, but I don't think we've reached the tipping point yet of voice shopping. I think it's still, some of the data and it'll be interesting again, to see kind of how this being at home more might change that. But, there are definitely different behaviors that have grown with voice more than shopping has. We're still actively pursuing and exploring that with our clients. Mars is the preferred Alexa developer, we also work with Google Voice as you mentioned. Amy: But I think it just comes back to, really the foundation of what we do which is, how can we create better shopper experiences, and voice definitely has the technology to do that. I think it's just about the adoption, especially in the shopping space. So to date, we've worked with our clients on, creating skills that can be useful to shoppers based on their different categories. But I think it'll be interesting to maybe see how COVID changes the voice space as well. Stephanie: Yeah, I could see that becoming useful, especially as the catalogs get bigger of what the brands are putting on their eCommerce sites. It'll be easier if you're able just to tell the website like, I want to find this, instead of having to go through the whole catalog and try and find exactly what you want, and it probably growing by 50% from the time you were there maybe two months ago if they can crack, getting the voice technology to actually work and be seamless, and not an extra step. Amy: Yeah. And then I think another thing that'll be interesting now is just, I even have to remind myself as we're talking because typically we think voice and we think, speaking into the speaker, but with the combination of voice and video. Plus people being at home and maybe wanting more, we know there's been a huge surge in recipe searches for example. I think having the voice plus visual is a different way that brands should be thinking about voice now, and something that we're working with some of our clients on. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. And what about the conquering Amazon piece? I'm only thinking about how that maybe has shifted a lot, especially lately because of everything Amazon is doing of like, only surfacing maybe essential things, and changing shipping times, and maybe kind of burying certain retailers if they didn't view them as essential. I could see a lot of people kind of getting scared about relying on Amazon as their platform to sell from, and maybe moving away from that and trying to build their own eCommerce store on their own, and just do their own thing. Do you see that kind of happening? Or what are your thoughts around Amazon? Amy: Yeah I mean, Amazon could probably be a whole nother topic or hour. Stephanie: A whole podcast one. Amy: Exactly, I'm sure there are millions. But, I think in terms of, we've been really digging into what has this last six or so weeks meant? And where have we seen new growth? Walmart.com in March was the number one downloaded app in the grocery space and surpassed Amazon for the first time. So, it's interesting to kind of see all these stats and you think, oh, maybe Amazon isn't as important. Amazon just still dominates the eCommerce space. Which is why you mentioned, we have it on our website. I would say even as of two months ago, people were using Amazon and eComm interchangeably, almost. Amy: So, it's great and it's exciting to see that, and as we have always advised our clients, we should think about this holistically across this space and across all different retailer dot-coms and delivery platforms like your eCommerce strategy should be comprehensive. But I don't see Amazon ever not being a component of that, at least not in the near future. There are a lot of issues now from a user experience, from a shopping experience, also as you mentioned with brands and maybe being deprioritized for essentials or not being able to market in the way that they have been able to before. But it still really is the lion's share, it's still seeing the most growth during this time period. Amy: So it's not, I don't think it's a place that brands can afford not to be, with the exception of maybe a couple of the really big ones. But I think the idea of trying to tackle eCommerce without Amazon, or without having a strategy around Amazon, and there's by the way, a bunch of different ways that you can do that, it definitely doesn't have to be every brand's number one eCommerce retailer. But I think it probably has to be part of the strategy, just because of the number of shoppers that are using that as their primary eCommerce destination. Stephanie: Yeah, agree. So earlier we were talking about brands creating content, how do you think about the intersection, or what do you advise your clients when it comes to the intersection of content management system, their commerce platform, and their CRM? How do you see that working in their space are any best practices around that or advice? Amy: Yeah, I think, I mean one is to be thinking about the total experiences we've been talking about, and making sure that, no matter what agencies or, in our case, we're oftentimes working with a lot of other agencies either at different parts of the funnel or that the brand is working with for different pieces of their advertising. A lot of our clients are large enough that they're hiring multiple agencies. So I think it's, having IT as planning processes that are very integrated, and making sure you're connecting all the different partners so that you can leverage all of the different content and all of the different wonderful assets. Amy: In terms of, what should the content strategy be, I think it comes back to, what's going to be best and what's going to be needed and relevant for the shopper in that environment. So, we're really working with our brands in the eCommerce space on, how are you creating eComm content that typically doesn't always exist in other brand channels? So, how are you creating content for your product pages with information that people need to know when they're at that point of buying you versus buying a competitor. If you don't have that right content, let's create it, we help our clients map that out on what's needed in terms of assets, and videos, and enhanced content, and all of that. Amy: And then really track that over time to make sure that we're constantly optimizing it. We have a new technology, an eShelf maximizer tool that uses data to look across different websites, and identify across thousands of skews for a lot of our brands, what product pages might have some issues or some areas of opportunity, and then we can fix those right away. And with the retailer's constantly changing their algorithms and limitations, and all of that. This is kind of a huge pain point for our brands so, even though we'll optimize content as brands change their packaging, or new products launch, there's kind of continual issues and continued opportunities to optimize. So we're using technology to make sure that we can stay ahead of that and be really proactive for our brands. Stephanie: Got it. Do you see them being able to kind of manage that in a way that stays organized? Because, I kind of view a lot of brands having their content management as one silo, and their CRMs another one, and their commerce platforms another one, it doesn't seem like they've been able to integrate like, well, here's how our content is affecting our customers and actual conversions. Do you see that kind of shifting now? Or are a lot of your brands already ahead and they're already kind of all intertwined, and they got it? Amy: Oh, I wish that was the case. No, I think, I mean, I think we have silos within the Mars Agency, I think most companies have silos, I think most of our clients would say that they have silos within their companies as well. Unfortunately, I think that is a reality so I don't want to gloss over that picture too much. I think it's about, how do you look for ways to work and collaborate across those silos, for more of a common goal? So, I think eComm has been a silo for a lot of brands today. We've kind of siloed it off and said, let's deal with that separately because we don't quite know what to do with it, or maybe it's still a little bit too new for our brand or company. Amy: And this is really a moment when I think we can be integrating it in, we certainly have done that at Mars. Our team is now integrated with our customer development team. So when we're working on a Walmart plan, it's not the Walmart in-store plan and the walmart.com plan, we're all one team. So I think hopefully, that would be an outcome of this time period is kind of breaking down some of the eCommerce silos. But I think as you pointed out, there's definitely still an opportunity for, I would say most brands, to kind of better connect. I think content and eComm are coming together much more naturally. I think CRM is still a piece that we could, as an industry, probably better connect to some of the other pieces. Stephanie: Yep, completely agree. Have you seen, like what do you think the first step is to that digital transformation? Or have you seen a company really do it well? Is it like start from scratch, throw everything away and start over? Or, how have you seen that work? Amy: I think that actually, most companies have kind of, that we've worked with, have kind of taken eComm out and brought it back in, or taking the digital team out and brought it back in. And I think that's actually an okay approach in terms of, especially where you are with your company's growth in this space, some kind of half joking that eComm has been a silo. But, in a way that's been necessary for some companies because, as eCommerce has grown, it typically starts off as an add on within a current team, and then as it grows, it kind of gets its own silo, or its own little team on the side, and then as they get big enough, they come back into the integrated team, typically the marketing team, or in some cases, the sales team. Amy: And I think that that makes sense because, as the space grows for different clients, it needs different resources. I think a lot of companies are going to be fast tracking that now, so they might skip that step of having the separate eCommerce team and just automatically integrate it. I don't think that's a bad thing, I think that could be beneficial to, instead of kind of separating it or starting from scratch, just integrating in from the team from the beginning. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. That sounds like good advice. So, do you see any disruptions coming to eCommerce? Like one thing I've been paying close attention to, or reading up a bit is about these pop up retail stores. And I think maybe that could be a trend that a lot of retail stores are closing down right now, and people might be scared to actually set up locations for 10 year leases, after all this dies down. So I'm wondering how maybe that could influence the future of retail and eCommerce. Do you see any disruptions like that that is on the horizon that you guys are looking into when it comes to eCommerce? Amy: Yeah. I mean I think there's going to continue to be a lot of disruptions, and probably a fast tracking of what would have happened anyway. So, some, as we've seen in the last several years, some really established big box retailers have closed down, or shut several of their locations, because that huge size of space didn't make sense anymore, and to your point that frees up space for other types of retailer formats. I think coming out of this that, one of the disruptions will be, what we go to a physical store for, versus what we continue to buy online. So I think there's going to be a lot of differences in those categories, and even in in subcategories within that. I think what's going to be interesting about the physical stores is just, how do we deliver an experience in those stores that is worth kind of leaving your house for? Amy: And I think some of the best retailers, and some of the best brands have been talking about that for years, right? How do we create a physical experience of our brand? If you think of like the flagship stores, that's meant to be bringing the brand to life and delivering on that experience, and then you think of retailers who have been improving their in store experience, to get people to browse other categories, or browse other sections. I think a lot of that was a trend that will now really be pushed and challenged, and fast tracked as we rethink about what that physical space means to a shopper. So, pop ups, as you mentioned, were great because they were delivering a different experience and that was a reason to go, see something new, or maybe see something that you could only buy there. Amy: I think exclusives will probably continue and be played around with in a new way in terms of what's exclusive online versus in store. But I think it's a little early to tell what disruptions are going to continue, and how people are going to use those physical spaces. I mentioned it earlier, but I could also see there being a big difference in geographies. The coasts have always been a little different anyway, but I could see the the retail experience on the coasts being a little bit slower to change at first, and then probably having more disruptions in the end. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. I can see also when they start streamlining the return process, I've already started see that at least with Amazon, where it's like, you don't even have to bring a box now or anything, just bring the good back there. Once that starts feeling easier, it seems like a lot of things could shift because, to me that's been the biggest hang up of ordering things online and, not knowing how to really return it, and not knowing if I'm going to feel like doing it, and keeping the box, and printing out the label and all that stuff. It seems like that could be a big shift too, and it's kind of already been forced that way over the past couple months. Amy: Yeah, no, that's a great example of now people are having to get creative in how they do things, both retailers and shoppers. And also, just as you try things and get used to it, you might realize that the return process wasn't as bad as you thought. Or the delivery window that your groceries came was actually more convenient than what you'd wanted before. So, I think some of those habits are going to change, which is always interesting to see, because now we're still in kind of the survey phase of, what do you predict that you're going to do? Or will you use this service again? And it's always interesting of course, to see what people say versus what they actually do. Stephanie: Yeah. Amy: And I think just over time as we all keep doing this, we could say, we hate it and it's a pain. But some of that we're going to be adopting those new habits that will stick with us in the longer term. Stephanie: Yeah that'll be really interesting to see what actually comes from that. So before we move into our lightning round, is there any other thoughts you have for eCommerce leaders or trends or anything else you want to highlight? Amy: No, I think you've covered it. I mean, I think this is just such an interesting time for the eCommerce space that, if you talk to someone else next week, they might say something different, and that's what's kind of exciting about it is watching how quickly it's changing, and just really being able to adapt quickly to stay relevant. Stephanie: Yeah, that's why this podcast is so fun. All right. So the lightning round brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where you answer each question in a minute or less. So you have a minute, you don't have to rush too much, but it's kind of whatever comes top of mind. Sound good? Amy: Great. Stephanie: All right, I'll start with the easier ones first, and then move to the harder one towards the end. What's Up next on your Netflix queue? Amy: Oh, this is the lightning round. Let's see. Stephanie: When your eight month old and three year old aren't hanging on you. Amy: Exactly. I have to move into my adult entertainment mode which also doesn't sound like the right phrase to use, so that shows that I've been watching a lot of cartoons lately. Stephanie: No more Daniel Tiger for you. Amy: I know I'm just glad that I can get off Disney Plus and over to Netflix. We are big fans of Nailed It, and with the at home baking, I know I'm a season behind on nailed it, so I need to get caught up on that. Stephanie: Cool. What's up next in your travel destinations after the pandemic is over? Amy: Oh, we were supposed to go to Vienna for my husband's 40th, so hopefully we can get that back on the agenda. But, next week I'm going to be driving from the Bay Area to Aspen to see my new niece so- Stephanie: Oh fun. Amy: It will be a road trip. Stephanie: Sounds awesome. What is the best shopping experience that comes to mind that you've had lately? Other than being in a store? Amy: Yes, I have not been in a store lately, nor had a good experience in a store lately. Well, just this week was the first time that I could get an Amazon Fresh order, and I am a pretty heavy user. So they had a lot of issues, so I was really excited this morning at 7:00 AM when my Amazon Fresh order arrived. Stephanie: Yeah, that's game changing. I love seeing them come up and deliver it. I'm like, this is nice. Not having to do it. Amy: Yes. Stephanie: What was the last thing you bought from an ad? If you remember? Amy: The last thing I bought from an ad. That wasn't one of my clients products? Stephanie: Yes, yep, that wasn't one of your clients [inaudible 00:51:31]. Amy: Yes, that I was actually buying as a consumer, let's see. I bought some Hannah Andersen Star Wars pajamas recently for my three year old. They're very cute and available now and actually they did arrive quite quickly so. Stephanie: Awesome- Amy: I'd recommend that for the- Stephanie: ... For PJ's. Amy: Yes for the toddler PJ's, they are great. Stephanie: Yep, I know all about that. All right, and the hard one, what's up next for eCommerce pros? Amy: Oh, that's a big switch from PJ. Stephanie: I know, that's why I saved it for last. Amy: Yeah, I think eCommerce pros are going to be ... Have much higher regard in their own industries, and have a lot more influence. So, hopefully what's next for them is being able to kind of take a greater role in that brand and marketing experience across retailers. I know we've talked a lot about Amazon, but I think it's, how do we integrate eCommerce and into everything that we're doing, and that should be really exciting for the eComm pros. Stephanie: Cool. Love it. All right thanks so much for coming on the show Amy, this has been fun. Amy: Thank you so much. Appreciate you having me.

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221 : Taking Time (w/ Arlan Hamilton)

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2020 20:49

Our very own Amy C. Waninger has the honor of chatting with Arlan Hamilton, founder and managing partner of Backstage Capital and author of "It's About Damn Time," which was released TODAY! Arlan went from homeless in three years to running Backstage Capital, a venture capital firm that solely invests in companies founded by women, people of color and LGBTQ entrepreneurs. She graciously shares a bit about why she started her fund and wrote her book, talks about what it is about under-estimated talent that she thinks makes them a great bet in business, and she tells us how she gets herself into the right mindset to walk in and own really intimidating rooms. Check the show notes to find out more about her book!Interested in her new book? Check out ItsAboutDamnTime.com.Connect with Arlan on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can find out more about Backstage Capital on their website. They're also on FB, IG, and Twitter. Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and listen. Really excited to bring the episode that we have for y'all today. For those of y'all who are in the know, when you talk about venture capital, when you talk about inclusion and equity within the venture capital space, you know who Arlan Hamilton is, okay? So I'm not gonna steal any of Amy C. Waninger's thunder, but I just want to do, like, a quick thank you and shout-out to Arlan for being on Living Corporate, and really excited for y'all to check out the episode, because the next thing you hear, they're gonna get right into it, so I just wanted to make sure I gave a little bit of context that you're gonna be listening to Arlan Hamilton and her talking about her latest book as well as her company, Backstage Capital. 'Til next time, y'all. Peace.Amy: Arlan, thank you so much for joining me. How are you today?Arlan: I'm doing pretty good. How about you?Amy: I'm doing well. So we're recording this kind of in the midst of all of this coronavirus craziness, and the episode will be released on your book launch day, on May 5th, and so if you can, just project forward to book launch. How are you feeling?Arlan: Well, I'm probably feeling the same way I'm feeling today, which is just a few days prior, which is incredibly excited and honored that I have the opportunity to even have a book coming out and coming out on a publisher, and it's just been a really great experience so far. I heard so many different stories from different authors of, like, how their experiences have gone in the past, from indie to published, and mine has just been really great.Amy: That is fantastic. And the book is wonderful. I got to read an advance copy as part of your launch team. I enjoyed it so much. And a lot of the questions I normally ask in this series you've covered in your book, and so I want to make sure people go there, but one question I did want to ask you about is what has surprised you the most about the venture capital space? Now that you're on the other side of it.Arlan: I don't know if it surprised me, but it's been kind of reinforced that there's just--money is a tool, you know? There's no one who is more important than the next person. And yes, there are some people who have a little bit more power, a little bit more strategically have placed them in places with more authority, but really there's an equality that I still believe in, and it drives me to do what I do, and it's why I started my fund. It's why I wrote the book "It's About Damn Time," because it felt like--one of the things was it was about damn time everybody realizes that we're all on this spinning rock together and that just because you're a venture capitalist doesn't make you any better than the next person.Amy: Definitely. And you talk about in your book the statistic that's jarring to me, that while white men make up about 30% of the population in the country, they get about 90% of capital investment. And your fund is a step in the direction to kind of undo that math and to make the playing field a little bit more equitable. How is that going? Like, do you feel like you're at the point where it's starting to shift, or do you think that there's opportunity for more people to come in and do what you're doing and build this space a whole lot bigger? Arlan: I think both. I think there has been absolute change in the last five years, four and a half years since I started Backstage Capital. It was a completely different playing field back then, and that was only a few years ago. So I absolutely see change. Obviously it's not fast enough. It's not enough. So there's plenty of room for better change and for more change, and that's where I'm excited about the future and about--one of the things in my book is about empowering other people to understand that they can join, you know? They can still join this technical revolution and all of that, because there's just so much more left to do. There's so many people who are doing it too. I don't want to ever say that it's only me. I mean, there are plenty of people who are black or brown [and?] women, who are investors, who are trying to change those statistics for the better. But yeah, I think if I hadn't seen some change for the better I wouldn't have been able to keep going, and so I've seen it. Most of it has come from individuals taking the reins and saying, "Look, I'm not going to wait for something to come save me. I'm going to put this into my own hands, and I'm going to start a company or continue a company that perhaps is bootstrapped or that has more revenue [and that?] employs people, and I'm not gonna only count on these few select guys who have a bunch of money.Amy: You know, it's interesting because right now--and I know that you just recently interviewed Mark Cuban and he said now's a great time to start a business, 'cause when people panic you double down, and when people are comfortable, that's when you should panic, right? What industries do you see right now in the midst of what we're dealing with with coronavirus, what industries do you see picking up a lot of innovation right now?Arlan: Well, of course the ones that are for the moment, right? So for instance companies that are selling products that are really helpful right now. We have products in our portfolio that when we first signed up them to our accelerator last year people laughed. They said, "Why do you have a toilet paper company in your portfolio? Aren't you a venture capitalist?" But we saw that they were doing things in a more sustainable way. They were saving tons and tons, literally, of trees every year, and they were fun and they had a great marketing strategy, and today they can't keep up with the demand, and they're doing it in a way that's more sustainable, which is really fantastic. So you have companies like that. We have a company in our portfolio also from the accelerator called Tambua Health that allows doctors to test for lung diseases using a smartphone. And of course last year we just thought, "This is really amazing, and we want to see what it can do," and today now it's of course going to be very helpful during the age of coronavirus. So I think, like, you're seeing a lot of health tech companies that are gonna do well if they can revamp. You're seeing companies that are manufacturing other things, that are now saying, "Let me manufacture some PPE," some personal protective gear for health care workers and essential workers, but right now and in the future I think you're gonna see a lot more education companies, things that are content-driven online, and then the infrastructure to make that easier for people to get to and to see it. And of course people are talking about "What's the future of work going to look like?" And I don't know if we know yet. I don't know if the last four weeks or six weeks or three months can tell us what the future of work will look like. What we do know is that it will be different from what we came to be used to in the past.Amy: Yes. I think that we're seeing, you know, right now a lot of accessibility that was built--infrastructure for accessibility that was built for people from the disability community that is benefiting all of us now, and I am hopeful, to your point that the future that we're building is more accessible by design and not by legislation.Arlan: Absolutely, and there are so many people who can take that into their own hands today, and I hope that that happens too, because honestly, we can't wait around for someone to make things right. We have to do things ourselves, and things are better--you know, they say, "Let me just do it myself." You know, "If I want it done right, I'll do it myself." Let's do that. I like that vibe, you know? Let's do it ourselves.Amy: You said in your book several times when you're looking at founders you pattern match for grit. And I wanted to ask you, because, you know, knowing your background, that you started this fund when, you know, you didn't really have a place to live. I mean, you were experiencing homelessness at the time. You know, grit is just all there for you. I mean, you have built something from nothing more times than I could count in the book, and I'm wondering, what is it about under-estimated talent you think that makes them gritty or that makes folks a better bet in business? Arlan: They're a great bet. We're a great bet. I think if you are someone who is underrepresented and underestimated, it doesn't seem weird or out there or strange to you to figure things out, to get yourself out of a bad situation, to get creative when you're facing for instance, like, the rent is due and you're like, "Okay, well, what can I do to make a couple extra hundred dollars that's legal and that is, you know, a little bit--" So can I use this other talent that I have? But in the world of Silicon Valley, if you think about that same story, one of the biggest stories that ever came out of Silicon Valley--and I remember reading about when it when I was homeless and just starting out. I read about Airbnb, and I read about these three guys who had this amazing idea to put a blow-up bed on a floor and charge people for a conference to come in and have bed and breakfast. And on top of that, when they were looking for money and they didn't have it, they created--because they were designers by trade--they created these cereal boxes that looked like Obama and John McCain, and they sold those, and they sold, like, $50,000 worth. And I remember reading that and people were losing their minds over how ingenious it was, how absolutely nothing--they had seen nothing like that, and I thought, "I've done that at least five times in a major way in the last 10 years of my adult life." Like, I've at least done it five times in a major way so I could avoid bankruptcy, avoid being on the street, avoid all these things, and I just think we as women, people of color, LGBTQ, disabled, I think we all have to, on a day-to-day basis, have to figure out a survival mode for ourselves because we are faced with so many things, whether they be big things that are easy to point out or the papercuts that I talk about, which is you get a papercut, you don't go around screaming about it, you know? But it hurts like hell. And it happens to you. It can happen to you and people don't necessarily believe it, but it's happening to you. It's this oppression that's given to us in papercuts, and so I just think because we're already built to figure things out--I mean, it's not like it's a great thing. I'm not happy that we have been so put into these corners where we have to find our way out, but we have. So that manifests itself in some really great ways sometimes. Sometimes it's negative. Sometimes we feel like we have to do things that are not okay, that are not legal, that are not moral, et cetera, et cetera, but more times than that, most of the time, you just see some really highly creative things. You ever met someone who gets in trouble a lot and you just say, "If they could just apply that to this other thing, they would save so much time and heartache, because they would probably be, like, the Hacker of the Year in Silicon Valley." That's how I feel about most people.Amy: Yeah, that's how I tell my kids. I'm like, "Use your powers for good. Stop getting into trouble."Arlan: Yeah, exactly.Amy: So one of the things about grit that you note in your book, you talk about hustle culture and how pervasive it is, and I know you've made some decisions now that--and I don't want to say that you're on the other side because I know there are always more places that you want to go and, you know, you're always wanting to take your work to the next level, but you've gotten to a place where you're not as hungry maybe as you were, you know, early on, and you're taking some time to evaluate your priorities and scale back some of your commitments and really focus on self-care, and I'm wondering, if you were talking to the you of the early days of Backstage Capital--which was only a few years ago--would you have the same advice of "Step back and, you know, let go of some of the hustle," or would you tell 5-Years-Ago-Arlan "No, keep going." You know, you don't--Arlan: Well, let me answer that. I don't know if I can answer that question exactly because I don't look at it that way. I do more today than I've ever done in my life when it comes to work, and that says a lot. What I tried to get across in the book and what I've tried to get across for the past year or so is that I'm not doing less, I'm working smarter. So I absolutely would tell the person five years ago and ten years ago to take better care of myself, for sure, and that's what I'm doing, but when it comes to the stakes, when it comes to the responsibility, the pressure, what's at stake here is the highest it's ever been, so I just don't know if I can answer that question as it was stated because I don't feel like I have kind of pulled back. What I've done is recalibrated and repurposed, and I've said instead of me knowing exactly how much a stack of paper from Office Depot costs us, I am going to spend that extra 7 minutes that I would have taken to learn that to put into a phone call with one of our portfolios. Maybe it's the 20th phone call of the week with a portfolio company, but it's one more that I may be able to make a right introduction or think about stuff. And I spend a lot of time thinking and strategizing. I've been doing that from very early on. I think it's important. I think it's part of our jobs as leaders to take a breath and strategize. So on one hand I absolutely feel like I'm doing the most, especially with even more going on now and a smaller team now, unfortunately, because of the coronavirus, but on the other hand I'm always gonna advocate for taking good care of yourself and looking at it from a bird's eye view and saying "What do I need to be doing, and what am I doing right now? And do they match?" And if they don't match, something's wrong. We have a mantra right now at my fund that I started just a few weeks ago when things got really scary. I said, "If it's stressful, we're doing it wrong," and that--you think about it and that's so simple, but that's helped us, like, make a lot of decisions. "Wait, is this stressful? 'Cause we have enough stress in our lives right now as a world and as a country. Are we gonna add stress that we don't need to?" So it's helped us to say no to certain phone calls and to a lot of responsibilities that we don't need to have on our plate right now.Amy: It probably also helps with how you allocate the work within your team. I think a lot of leaders struggle with that, to realize that just because they find a task odious or draining, there may be somebody on their team that, you know, they live for that kind of work.Arlan: Exactly, yeah, and it's an art, not a science, and it's something that I'm working on still, but I've gotten much better over time at delegating, and I think--you think as a leader you have to figure everything out and you have to be the smartest person, you have to lead your tribe into the fight. Hey, I mean, you're not--Ursula Burns, who used to be the CEO of Xerox, the first black woman to be at a Fortune 500 as a CEO. Worked her way up from secretary, I believe. She told me in a phone call last year when I was really stressed out--she yelled at me. I mean, she was not doing tough love. It was just tough. She said, "If you are the only person that's generating revenue for your whole team, you've effed it up. You are doing it wrong. Figure out a way that everybody pulls their own weight," and "You are doing a bad job." She said that to me. "You're doing a bad job if you're this stressed out. It's not something to be excited about and proud of. You're doing a bad job if you're this stressed out." So that just, like, slapped me around and I was like, "Wow, okay. On it." Amy: Yeah. That had to be hard to hear but very relieving at the same time.Arlan: Both, yeah. I just took it because I love the source, you know? I look at the source when people are giving me advice. If it's somebody who is anonymous online who's cussing me out and saying I'm doing a terrible job, I just don't give it any weight. If it's someone like what I just described to you, I give it some weight and I say, "Okay, let me think about why she said that to me and why she gave me her time to say it."Amy: That's very good advice. One of the points that you make in your book is that we all have the right to be in any room we want to be in, and that's a very difficult thing for some of us to internalize because we've been told our whole lives, you know, "Sit down. Be quiet. Be nice. Don't be pushy. Don't be aggressive." What's something for you that fortifies you before you walk into some of these really intimidating--what would be intimidating for most of us--rooms, right? How do you get yourself into the right mindset to walk in and own that room?Arlan: I do two things. One is I think about the people that, like, being successful in the room would positively affect. I make it more about them than me. Once I do that, that's a really great way to walk into a room. The best way of ever--like, I have learned over almost 40 years--this is it, this is the secret right here... you have to be okay with the outcome that you don't win the negotiation. So if you have something that you're going in for that's really, really something that you want really badly, if you tell yourself--and I do this all the time--if you say to yourself, "Okay, it's okay if I don't get this. It's truly okay. I'll have a backup plan. I'll have some other thing I'll do. It's okay if they say no." You've completely taken control of the situation. So you go in caring. You go in trying, but you also go in where their no doesn't knock you to your knees, and there's something about that in a negotiation where I've been able to talk to millionaires and billionaires and get what I want because what I want because I'm okay with "losing," quote-unquote, the deal. Amy: Fabulous. And if you can do that with the number of zeroes after the deals that you're looking at, the rest of us can probably do it with the number of zeroes in the deals that we're looking at, right? [laughs]Arlan: Yeah, it's powerful. It's very powerful.Amy: It is. Arlan Hamilton, author of "It's About Damn Time" and venture capitalist and just Twitter queen, thank you so much. This interview will just be the highlight of my podcasting career. I have so enjoyed talking to you. Arlan: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. You're very good at it, and I appreciate you, and I hope that your listeners will pick up the hard cover at ItsAboutDamnTime.com. You can pick up the audio, which I read, or the e-book. Whichever, whatever tickles your fancy. It's all there.Amy: Get them all, because you're gonna want that audio-book in the car on the way to the negotiation, and you're gonna want the hard cover by the bed so you can read from it at night and get it into your subconscious before you go to sleep, and you're gonna want it on your Kindle too because that's where you can highlight everything and go find your notes later.Arlan: Well, there you go. You're hired. [laughs]Amy: All right, sounds good. [laughs] Thanks, Arlan, so much, and congratulations on your launch. This is huge.Arlan: Thank you so much. Appreciate you.

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214 See It to Be It : Insurtech Industry (w/ Bobbie Shrivastav)

murder girlfriends pranks gone wrong cried threatening bad people when bad things happen amy it

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 18, 2020 26:58

On the eleventh installment of our See It to Be It podcast series, Amy C. Waninger speaks with Bobbie Shrivastav, co-founder and CPO of Benekiva, about her personal journey that led to the insurtech industry, and Bobbie graciously shares where she goes for support among other women and people of color in the insurtech space. Connect with Bobbie on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.Find out more about Benekiva. They're also on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.Find out how the CDC suggests you wash your hands by clicking here.Help food banks respond to COVID-19. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate. Now, look, for those of y'all who are new here, the purpose of Living Corporate is to create a space that affirms black and brown experiences in the workplace, right? There are certain things that only we can really understand, and when I say we I mean the collective non-white professional [laughs] in corporate America. And when we look around--if you, like, Google being black and brown in corporate America, you may see, like, a post in Huffington Post or something that kind of communicates from a position of lack, but I don't know if we necessarily see a lot of content that empowers and affirms our identity and our experience, and that's really the whole purpose of Living Corporate. It's with that that I'm really excited to talk to y'all about the See It to Be It series. Amy C. Waninger, who has been a guest on the show, who's a writer for Living Corporate, and who's also the author of Network Beyond Bias, she's actually partnered with Living Corporate to actually have an interviewing series where she actually sits down with black and brown professionals so that we can learn about what they actually do and see ourselves in these roles, right? So it's a variety of industries that she's--she's talking to a lot of different types of folks. You're gonna be able to see what they do, and at the same time you're gonna hopefully be able to envision yourself in that role, hence the title See It to Be It, okay? So check this out. The next thing you're gonna hear is this interview with Amy C. Waninger. Y'all hang tight. Catch y'all next time. Peace.Amy: Bobbie, thank you so much for joining me. How are you today?Bobbie: I'm doing good, Amy. How are you?Amy: I'm doing great. I was hoping you could tell me just a little bit about your company so that we can sort of level set on what the heck is insurtech anyway.Bobbie: So a little bit about my company. I'm co-founder and chief product officer of Benekiva, and our entire mission for our company is to bridge the gap between the carrier, the policy holder and the beneficiary, and we do that by offering carriers--right now we're focused on life and annuity--organizations with claims automation, asset retention and data management.Amy: And so for the people who aren't in the insurance industry or don't know a whole lot about life insurance, let's break that into plain English. So you're trying to solve the problem--I'm gonna put words in your mouth and you correct me if I'm wrong--you're trying to solve the problem where someone dies and they have a policy and their beneficiaries maybe don't know that that policy exists or how to get to it, and you're trying to help people get the money that they deserve based on those policies being in effect, right?Bobbie: So yes, so--it's actually six-fold, 'cause our--we have six different modules that we've created, but before I go into the six different modules, success for our company is when a beneficiary has just received a check that they had no idea was coming. For us, that is what we are striving towards. Our foot in the door is through claims, and what we've learned by just interviewing and just statistics alone is that the claims process is simply outdated, so we have a 100% digital claims solution that also includes moving the money if the carrier wants to. So that's our first module, then we have modules that allow carriers to track their unclaimed property in the shipment [logs?], Bene Retention is taking the claims process and giving the ability for the carriers to serve the beneficiaries by using their sales [force?]. The module that you talked about, which is Bene Update and Bene Notify. So what we want to do is Bene Notify is when a triggering event happens--and unfortunately in life it is a death, death is a triggering event, that's when we want to notify the beneficiary. But on the update side, what we want to encourage carriers is how do you create that engagement with the policy holder so that we're getting that Bene information ahead of time? So you're not--right now if you look at carriers and how they're trying to find beneficiaries, Google is their best friend. How do we make Google not their best friend? 'Cause they can't find these benes, so they're looking online, they're look at obituaries. It's just a manual process to just find a beneficiary. Amy: Yeah, you would think they would've had that under control years and years ago, but good for you for putting all those pieces together.Bobbie: Oh yeah, and we've heard horror stories, even on the carrier side, where their bene information is still in file folders. So it's not--they've not even done the transformation to get some of the information online. So yeah, it's a huge problem, and we are very excited to solve it. So that's what, you know, drives us every day.Amy: That's fantastic. So can you tell me--how did you get into this space? Because obviously you're solving a problem that's never been solved before, and something led you here, so what was it?Bobbie: So it's an interesting story. So in 2016 I was working on a startup with Soven, who's one of the co-founders of my original startup and Benekiva, and he's also my husband. So both of us had this startup around digital--it was a digital documentation and e-signature platform, and he has roots in Iowa, so we--his parents were coming from Nepal, so we decided to go visit them, and my key was, "Hey, we're beta testing this product." And the product is Docsmore. I'm not sitting there and hanging out with family. That's great, but I also want to do some business development and just see what the Des Moines area looks like--'cause we live in North Carolina. So that's what led us to meet Brent, 'cause we had reached out to several people, and there was one person in particular we met, and she was Brent's client, and Brent Williams was a financial advisor, a very successful financial advisor--250 million assets under management--so he met with us, and he initially thought--when his client heard about what we were trying to do she's like, "This is interesting. You should talk to Brent, and let me do the introduction," so it was once again that networking. It was so cool. So we met up with Brent, and Brent thought he was telling us about financial advisory 'cause of our corporate backgrounds. He was like, "Okay, they look like good couples. I can help serve them," and the entire conversation--this is when Soven's like, "We're more interested in learning about your startup. What is it?" You should have see Brent's eyes. He just, like, "Oh, my gosh. I gotta share about this insurtech startup" that he was starting, and it was--as a financial adviser, he has gone through the claims process with this policy holder's loved ones, and he's seen the breakdown from the insurance--like, from an advisory angle, and that's when we fell in love with the problem. He was looking for innovation and tech folks to jion the team, and Soven and I had just bought life insurance policy because we--my child right now is 4, but at the time she was 1 and we just bought a life insurance policy. I'm like, "Are you telling me there's, like, a two-thirds chance that policies don't get claimed?" And she may be one of them. So we're gonna go--we're gonna go solve this problem. So that's how we connected back in 2016. That's when Benekiva was born.Amy: That's awesome. So you actually have a tech background, not an insurance background?Bobbie: I have a tech and financial services background.Amy: Okay. Also--Bobbie: Insurance is brand new, and I kind of immersed myself when I met Brent.Amy: That's neat. Yeah, a lot of people in insurance don't get there on purpose, right? They kind fall into it, and that's okay. We'll keep you. Bobbie: I love it so far. It's been amazing to find people like you and Tony and others that--it's been a great community of people, so I feel so welcomed.Amy: Good, I'm so glad. So what's been the biggest surprise to you about starting this venture in the insurtech space?Bobbie: So initially the town that I live in and our startup community, I'm the first insurtech startup in our area, in Winston-Salem. There's not many, and if there are they're hiding 'cause I've not seen anybody. Amy: Startups that hide are usually not very successful, by the way.Bobbie: So when I talk to folks about Benekiva in our local community, they were like "Yeah, that's not a problem. That's not a problem that needed to be solved," and I was like, "How can you say that?" And it's because they don't work in insurance. They've never been in the insurance--they don't understand the value chain. So I came in with the bias that yes, we are solving this problem, how will the market react when we launch? And we literally thought it was going to be this short, steady ride, we'll have this, like, really, really [?]. It's just gonna be just new. It's gonna be a long several years before we can get some good traction, and we have been blown away, and that's been the biggest surprise. So we know now, like, that kind of is confirmation. Like, we did so much research so we knew that there was a problem, but the fact that the market and the carriers and the supporters that we had gives us such good confidence that yes. So all of those other folks in my community who said "You don't have a problem," I do. I'm solving a problem. So that's been--but what's funny though is the same people that, when Brent talks to them, they're just enamored by the problem we're solving, but when I pitch it's kind of like, "Yeah, you don't have a problem." So I get some type of a bias sometimes, and I'm wondering what it could be, but... oh, I know what it is. Never mind. Amy: Imagine that. So yeah, I know people who will hire--I have talked to a couple women entrepreneurs who have hired men to go in and say that they're the boss to get money, to get clients, to close deals, and because for some reason when it comes from a man it's a great idea, so they just make that work for them. So I guess it's good that you have a partnership with someone who--Bobbie: Yeah, and we work so well as a team, and honestly from a Benekiva perspective, our entire team, we're just one big family. But he even recognizes, you know, that we do a lot of partnering when it comes to--'cause he's done sales all of his career, right, and I've been in tech, so I've learned a lot, and we've just been jointly doing selling, and what we've found is super powerful is when you have a male dynamic and when you have a female dynamic in the room trying to work with problems, right? I come at it from a different angle. He comes it at from a different angle. And we have just made that work so good, and it's actually what makes our company unique, because we do, we have that--we embrace diversity, and we do things together.Amy: That's awesome.Bobbie: Yeah, and he's a big supporter. He's like--he's the first one to say, "Okay, Bobbie, there's a woman in tech event and you're gonna go and present that." So I have a very supportive founding team. They push me to do stuff, so it's great.Amy: That's awesome. I'm so happy for you, because there are so many women, especially in tech, who would just, you know, yearn for an opportunity like that, to have an opportunity to contribute at their fullest, and I just think it's wonderful that you've found that and that you're doing it in a way that's just gonna help so many people. I just think it's awesome. I'm so excited for you.Bobbie: Thank you, thank you. And I encourage other women too. Like, that's--get out of that mental state of "We can't do it," you know? We have enough supporters that we'll make it happen, and a lot of our supporters come from men. So it's awesome.Amy: They need too because they're the ones with the seat at the table, right?Bobbie: Yeah. I mean, just recently a Twitter post where they had published, like, a top 10 or top 20 or top 30 insurtech list, and Nigel was like, "Where are the women founders?" And he, like, blasted [a few?] women founders, and it's people like that that make you feel so supported in our industry. 'Cause our industry is tough.Amy: It is, absolutely, and, you know, I've seen so many, like, future leaders, right, and almost without exception future leaders are young, white men, and it's like, "No, future leaders are everybody, and if you can't see that, then you're perpetuating the problem." So I'm so glad that you have those allies in place. So speaking of that, where do you go for support? And I know that you identify as a woman of color, being Indian-American. Where do you go for support among other women or other people of color in your industry?Bobbie: So honestly, in our industry, it's social media. I have a great group of core women that we support each other. Like, you're one of them. We support each other by tweeting, sharing. If I have an issue--like, I was just texting with my friend Marie, and just, you know, [?] is another one. We just have a good support system, but there's a group in LinkedIn for women in insurtech, and if you're a woman in insurtech you need to join that LinkedIn group. Add me on LinkedIn and I can add you to that group, because it's a good way to get that community growing and just encourage women entrepreneurs, especially in our industry. So I've done mainly--100% actually. It's all social media.Amy: I think social media is so under-recognized as a networking tool, and I did that myself early on. I was like, "I don't want anything to do with Twitter. I don't understand it. I want no part of it," and someone told me "No, you really need to be on Twitter," and the really needing to be on Twitter thing was like, "Okay, fine, whatever," right? And I started a little bit and I started a little bit more, and then I started to figure out how to grow my following there, and my network has exploded because of Twitter. And it's not superficial, ridiculous, like, trolling kinds of relationships, right? It's real, honest to God human people who, you know, called me when my book launched to congratulate me. Called me on the phone to congratulate me. Not tweeted at me, right, but, like, actually made a human connection. It's people who have invited me to speak at their companies. It's people who have, you know, referred me for opportunities. There's such a sense of community on social media, and I think a lot of people who don't use it that way don't recognize that that exists. When people say, "Well, how do I connect with people who are different from me?" My first thing is start on social media, because it's a great way to listen to a conversation without inserting yourself into it, and that's the first step in building trust.Bobbie: I'm reading a book right now about how to create--I'm on the chapter about how to create, like, CHAMP networks. It's--yeah, I mean, doing things on social media, I think people, there's--you know, you often get so much spam, and I think that's why people don't engage it in much, but once you can filter those people out there are some--especially in insurance, in insurtech--there's great conversations that are happening in pockets and bigger pockets, and it's a great support network.Amy: Absolutely, and, you know, as people connect with you and see you as one of their own, whatever that means, right, whether it's in your discipline or in your industry or in your demographic group, right, when people connect with you and really feel that they start to open doors for you. And these are people you wouldn't have access to you because they don't live where you live or they don't work at your same company or whatever. So I think it's just so powerful to put yourself out there and kind of let the universe take over in a way.Bobbie: Yeah, it's been the best--I was always on LinkedIn, but I think I really truly started understanding the value of LinkedIn in the last two years, because I have not--I've not been one of those people who truly engaged. I had a good following, you know, but now if you look at the conversations I'm having they're super meaningful and I'm building those relationships. Previously I was just at'ing co-workers and, you know, having the relationship and bonding at the workplace. Now, as an entrepreneur, you know, you don't have that luxury, especially with me being in Winston-Salem, being the only insurtech company, it's just it forces you to reach out.Amy: Definitely. So if somebody's not already in insurtech, where do you recommend they go to learn about this industry and what skills they might have that would transfer in or how they might get started, you know, in a career of their own here.Bobbie: So the way I entered insurtech was through startups, right? Like, I had an initial--I was an entrepreneur and just landed myself here. So I saw a complementary need that what I was trying to do with Benekiva was doing. What I would recommend folks that want to get into insurtech is find those problems that you want to solve. I wouldn't have gone into insurtech if I didn't fall in love with the problem. That's just not my personality. I don't build companies just to say, "Oh, it's gonna be profitable." I'm very mission-focused, so it's gotta touch my heart in order for me to even get involved. So I think if there's a passion or an interest or, like, if you're even curious about "Why does this happen in the insurance space?" Oh, my gosh, find a startup, and I would always encourage people to find a startup. Go to those startup weekends, right? Create something, like, an idea. You get resources for free. So much resources are available. Just maximize on that. And then if you've got enough momentum, build it. If not, then partner with somebody. You know, like, as a start, you know? So I always encourage entrepreneurs, like, if you're passionate about something, just do a side hustle, do a whatever, but just figure out, and then once--you will feel it when you've got the momentum to say, you know, you can leave, you know? You can leave your full-time job and do your own entrepreneur journey.Amy: It's scary, isn't it? 'Cause you went through that when you were an employee--Bobbie: Yes, that side hustling. Amy: Yeah, so tell me about that thought process. How did you prepare for that departure?Bobbie: I think I shared that story with you when we first met. So--it was so funny. So 2015 is when I was, like, you know, I jumped into entrepreneurship. And I had a full-time job. I had a very nice career. And when I dipped my toes in, the first thing I did was I told my boss, which there were--my employers, they were super supportive, and they were like, "We all have side hustles. You should have one too," so they totally encouraged me [?].Amy: That is so rare, by the way.Bobbie: Very rare, but I worked for a fantastic organization. And then I literally had--there's so many phases, and you've probably experienced it--imposter syndrome. "Am I gonna make it?" Oh, it's so tough. I mean, there's so much, like--it's a hard road. So one of my friends--we became very good friends, and she does coaching. She's a transformation coach. And she's just like, "You know what, Bobbie? You're so smart and you can do this," and I'm like, "Yeah, she's just saying that because she's my friend," but she's like, "Let me do a coaching session with you," and that went onto I wasn't part of a group coaching on things that initially, before I did that, I thought it was all, like, voodoo stuff [?], but it really worked because it helped me declutter all of the biases that I had and gave me the confidence. So what I did was March of 2017, I won't forget, I wrote a card and I said--I kind of planned my end-of-day--like, this is the date I'm gonna leave my work. I'm gonna have this grand party. I'm gonna say bye to everyone. And I wrote the date of September 29, 2017, and I looked at it every single day. Every single day I looked at it. So it gave me this kind of, like--I'm a project manager by trade--gave me, like, a timeline to get things done, get things planned out, and September 29th is when I left my full-time job.Amy: That's incredible. I love that story for so many reasons. Okay, so just one more question and then I'll let you go today, but when do you feel included, Bobbie? Tell me about a time when you felt genuinely included.Bobbie: You know, honestly--so the entrepreneurship journey has been difficult, and everybody has those stories, and I think I've literally felt included when--I've been on this journey in my local community since 2015. 2017 is when I really pushed, really organized an event where I really wanted local companies to meet startups, local startups. We talk about buying local, and I'm like, "It's time that you buy local products from startups, tech products. Don't go to Company ABC when another company is doing something similar. You should give them an opportunity. Give them a seat at the table." So I worked with our co-working space to do an event, and I was told that "Bobbie's legit," and I think that's--it kind of, like, pissed me off, but then it also gave me, like, this confirmation. Like, "Okay, now I think people are taking me serious," you know? But it took two years, and that's what my mission is, is it took me two years as a woman, right? And I know what the biases are. It's because I'm a woman. That's the issue, and I don't want any other woman to ever feel like they're not included earlier on in their journey. I felt included, and now I'm never gonna let anybody else not feel included until they've proven themselves. There's no need. There's no need.Amy: That's so beautiful, and I love that, that it took somebody else saying "You're legit." And how many of us struggle with that feeling of "I won't be accepted. They won't think I'm really supposed to be here," right? You know, Amy Cuddy, who did the TED talk famously on, you know, power poses and, you know, she talks about, "Oh, well, I'm not supposed to be here" because she had been in an accident and lost some of her IQ, you know, even though she had been on this meteoric rise. Then that was kind of taken away from her, at least in her own mind, and I think so many of us feel like we're just not supposed to be here, and when somebody else says, "No, no, no, you're legit," or, you know, someone that we really admire, you know, talks to us as an equal or, you know, or treats us that way. I just think that has such a profound impact. And you know what? It costs nothing.Bobbie: Yeah, it costs nothing. It's just you have to have an open mind and an open heart.Amy: Exactly. Bobbie, thank you so much for being my guest today. I greatly appreciate your time and your talents and I look forward to so much more from you.Bobbie: Thank you. Thank you so much.

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S5E22 – Threatening to Murder My Son's Girlfriend Prank GONE WRONG! She Cried

Juergen' It

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2020 94:59

Get ready for some psychology! It’s S05E22, “When Bad Things Happen to Bad People”, and we would love to know who those bad people are. Amy? Is it Amy? It’s probably Amy. Anyway, George and Ricky and Ben and Ethan are all loving life this week. Always great to see! This week, Ben does something. You’ll like it, trust me!Sam | JordanTwitter | Tumblr | Patreon | Discord | YouTube

Episode 704 - Dune (1984)

One Movie Punch

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 2, 2020 16:21

Hi everyone! Welcome back for another week of reviews here at One Movie Punch! This week, we have a mixture of film reviews for your enjoyment. On Monday, I’ll be reviewing THE RHYTHM SECTION (2020), starring the incredible Blake Lively in a potential franchise launch. On Tuesday, we’ll be picking up the first of two reviews from Jon-David, aka Mafia Hairdresser, who will be joining the podcast as a regular contributor going forward. He’ll be reviewing THE CAVE (2019) this week, an excellent companion piece to last week’s FOR SAMA (Episode #703). On Wednesday, I’ll be reviewing CLOSURE (2018), a daytime comedy noir which will include interview segments from writer/director Alex Goldberg. Thursday will see the return of Christina Eldridge, aka Durara Reviews, who will be tackling perhaps the most unlikely animated film nominee at this year’s Oscars, KLAUS (2019). Andrew returns on Friday with another Fantastic Fest feature, this one heading towards a limited to wide distribution in theaters, entitled THE LODGE (2019). And on Saturday, I’ll finally be reviewing the powerful documentary TRANSFORMER (2017) as part of our Under the Kanopy series. Of course, today we have our first Sponsor Sunday event for the year, with a film chosen by our third sponsor, Matthieu Landour Engel. We had the pleasure of reviewing Matthieu’s short ZERO M2 late last year in Episode #661, along with the full interview in Patreon Episode #P019, still publicly available at patreon.com/onemoviepunch. We were very honored to have him join the growing list of sponsors last year, and that made him eligible for Sponsor Sundays today. Every sponsor at One Movie Punch gets the opportunity to force me to watch and review a film, but I can’t really say watching David Lynch’s DUNE (1984) is something I need to be forced to do. If you want to get in on the action for Sponsor Sunday, head over to patreon.com/onemoviepunch and sign up at any level. A promo will run before the review. Also, because Matthieu is such an awesome person, in lieu of any specific promotion of his projects, he’s asked me to put a plug in for Darcy Prendergast’s recent short film TOMORROW’S ON FIRE, which is currently available on Vimeo. The short film is being used to raise awareness and funds for the recent Australian wildfires. As someone who has had to evacuate twice due to wildfires, I can certainly appreciate this effort. You can find Darcy’s work on Twitter at @d_prendergast, on Facebook @ohyeahwow, and on Instagram @dancy_predatorghast. Check the show notes for a link to the short film, or check social media. Tomorrow’s On Fire by Darcy Prendergast LINK: https://vimeo.com/383034313 Subscribe to stay current with the latest releases. Contribute at Patreon for exclusive content. Connect with us over social media to continue the conversation. Here we go! ///// > ///// JOSEPH: “And now, One Movie Punch presents an interview about the real star of DUNE (1984), the unnamed House Atreides pug, with his only remaining descendent, in a segment we like to call...” JOSEPH: “PUGS! IN! SPACE!” JOSEPH: “Translations will be handled, as always, by One Movie Spouse. So, what is your name?” AMY: “I do not have a name. My father did not have a name. My father before him did not have a name, who played in the film. In fact, I find names to be outdated, human concepts, which David Lynch was trying to move beyond in this questionable adaptation.” JOSEPH: “Wow, that’s a very... uhhh, astute observation.” AMY: “Thank you. You are a lot more polite than your other human counterparts.” JOSEPH: “Right. So, let’s get to the movie. What was it like for him to be the only pug on set?” AMY: “It is my understanding that he faced major discrimination because of his breed. You know, pugs were originally bred as companions for Chinese Emperors, before they became the toast of the town in Europe. But even back then, my ancestor could feel the rising anti-pug discrimination we see in today’s Internet memes and videos.” JOSEPH: “That’s quite insightful. Did everyone treat him as a mere animal, or...?” AMY: “I must say that he had nothing but praise for a then young Patrick Stewart, enjoying most his time filming the battle scene. They often talked about the lack of enthusiasm he had for the part, but my ancestor assured him things would work out. And wouldn’t you know it, three years later Patrick Stewart would become Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise.” JOSEPH: “We have to wrap up here. Do you have any thoughts on the upcoming adaptation by Denis Villeneuve?” AMY: “If casting is any indication, then we might be in for a real treat. Of course, with no mention or images of the House Atreides Pug, I’m not sure this new adaptation could ever have the same refined audience.” JOSEPH: “Well, I appreciate you taking the time. I know it must have been... rough to fit us into your schedule.” AMY: “Really? A dog pun?!” JOSEPH: “My bad. On to the review...” ///// Today’s movie is DUNE (1984), the science-fiction epic written and directed by David Lynch, based on the novel written by Frank Herbert. On the desert planet of Arrakis, nicknamed Dune, a precious resource known as the spice is mined, which contains the ability to fold space. As House Atreides assumes command of the planet, young Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan) discovers his destiny, gets glowing blue eyes, rides a giant worm, and, yes, has a pug companion. No spoilers. I have always been a voracious reader. Before we could carry the Internet in our pocket, or stream whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, I would throw on some instrumental music and read. It began as a steady diet of young adult detective novels, especially Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Three Investigators”. It turned into reading nearly all the available Dungeons & Dragons novels, during the heyday of TSR, Inc., before they were bought out by Wizards on the Coast. And after I made it to college, and the Internet became a thing, an older gentleman I met in a Stephen King newsletter group recommended Frank Herbert’s “Dune”. I had seen the movie, of course, which I thought was so-so. He laughed (or however we did that before text abbreviations over e-mail) and said I owed it to myself to read the first book, or the first three, or all six of them if I felt so inclined. And after a trip to a second-hand bookstore, littered with cheap mass market paperbacks, I picked up the six for a song and placed them on the shelf for break. I was working full-time at the university during the summer, but after work I went home, made dinner, watched a little television, then headed to my room for some music and started reading “Dune”. Three weeks later, I had finished all six of them, reading voraciously on breaks, back at the apartment, even at the bar waiting for friends to show up on the weekend. I absolutely loved the books. Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series is easily one of the best science-fiction series out there. He nails that combination of hard science-fiction, not just with the science itself, but with the social and political structures, all while blending in a clear messianic hero story. Translating that rich, immersive world to the screen has mixed results, a combination of special effects limitations of the time, and the fool’s errand of trying to cram a multi-year political saga into just two hours. Contextually speaking, the practical effects are really good for 1984, a melding of classic Dino de Laurentiis production values (think CONAN THE DESTROYER and a host of lesser-known sword and sorcery films) and some attempts at cutting edge digital effects, including a shielding mechanism and the classic glowing blue Fremen eyes. Die-hard science fiction fans have learned to be forgiving with effects over the years, but not so much the general audience. Many critics, and many audience members, probably couldn’t help but lump DUNE into the other de Laurentiis pictures, much like how science-fiction is often lumped into fantasy and the other so-called pulp fiction. I adore the film score and soundtrack, by Brian Eno and the band TOTO. The sets and costumes are all excellent, and actually do the lion’s share of the world-building. World-building is where DUNE tends to struggle the most, which isn’t just trying to collapse everything into two hours. From the opening monologue, we are assaulted with information, an attempt to collapse the history into something manageable, but also I think to get the petty details out of the way for Lynch to take us on a more surreal journey through this universe, focused more on the emotions and the meaning. DUNE is chock full of Lynch’s emotional storytelling, which runs counter to Herbert’s storytelling style. The clipped dialogue and the internal monologues, all staple Lynch features, felt out of place. And once everything is set up, we go through what could easily be eight hours of content in about ninety minutes, including a two-year resistance movement. Perhaps if Lynch had the space, or the inclination, to develop the world, we could have seen a science-fiction “Twin Peaks”. I thought the film was so-so when I first saw it, and after reading the novels and seeing it again, I think I still only find it so-so. I want to close on some thoughts about the franchise, especially with the upcoming remake by Denis Villeneuve. My desire to read all six novels back in college wasn’t just because they were so great. I was also hoping to finish the novels before taking in the mini-series produced for The Sci-Fi Channel, which I found far superior to today’s film. Better effects, more time to explore, more time to marinate. I was also impressed by their follow-up series, which collapsed the next two novels to close out the initial trilogy. It didn’t do as well as hoped, either critically or with the larger audience, and there was the small franchise reboot that found massive success called, and let me check my notes here, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. I streamed that in a couple months as well. Twenty years later, we’re getting another attempt at a remake. If anyone can manage this, it’s Villeneuve, as ARRIVAL cements his understanding of hard science-fiction, and BLADE RUNNER 2049 (Episode #332) certainly shows he knows how to take care of a franchise. Can he do what Lynch could not in 1984, with even better special effects, and a side-car television series? We’ll find out in December 2020, or maybe if it’s pushed for reshoots. I would actually want a Game of Thrones style show, starting with the prequel novels based on Frank’s notes to build up the houses, and explore the larger universe. For me, watching 1984’s DUNE is the equivalent of cramming the entire first season of Game of Thrones into a two-hour film. It was hard enough collapsing it into ten episodes, but it was such a masterful translation. “Dune”, as a franchise, would be incredible in a similar vein, especially now that producers know audiences don’t mind humongous casts, intricate plots, political intrigue, immense worlds, and tenuous characters. The series could continue into the core six novels, with the obvious series bail out points being the end of the first novel, the end of the third novel, the end of the fourth novel, and the end of the sixth novel. You could even do a split timeline show, inserting the prequels and a larger, more drawn out story of Paul Atreides on his journey. I know I would. DUNE is Lynch’s so-so attempt to adapt Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel for the big screen, perhaps an irreconcilable difference in storytelling focus. It looks and sounds great for 1984, with many of the correct pieces in place, but ultimately feels too rushed being shoehorned into a feature-length film. Science-fiction fans owe it to themselves to see the film, and I would further recommend the first novel, which fills in so many of the details missing from the film. Everyone else, just know the film also has many, many good parts, even forward-thinking parts, that are definitely worth a single viewing. Rotten Tomatoes: 53% Metacritic: 40 One Movie Punch: 6.5/10 DUNE (1984) is rated PG-13 and is currently playing on VOD.

178 See It to Be It : Diversity and Inclusion Strategist (w/ Kristina Smith)

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 1, 2020 31:53

In our seventh See It to Be It podcast interview, Amy C. Waninger chats with Kristina Smith, a diversity and inclusion strategist who assists organizations to exceed expected business results through designing and implementing diversity, inclusion and engagement strategies. Kristina explains to us how she got into her field of work, and she also shares a few resources and organizations that seek to aid any aspiring professionals in the diversity and inclusion, consulting, or training and development spaces.These discussions highlight professional role models in a variety of industries, and our goal is to draw attention to the vast array of possibilities available to emerging and aspiring professionals, with particular attention paid to support black and brown professionals.Connect with Kristina on LinkedIn.Find out more about the Association for Talent Development.Interested in the Institute for Diversity Certification? Click here.Be sure to utilize the resources offered by SHRM.Visit our website.TRANSCRIPTZach: What's up, y'all? It's Zach with Living Corporate, and I'm really excited to talk to y'all about something really important today. You know we try to mix it from time to time. We have our full episodes and we have B-Sides. You know, we'll have guest hosts. We do different things. We do listener letters, you know what I'm saying? We have something else special for y'all today, and what it's called is the See It To Be It series, okay? This is an interview series highlighting professional role models in a variety of industries. The goal of this series is to draw attention to the vast array of possibilities available to emerging and aspiring professionals, with particular attention paid to support black and brown professionals. Many of y'all should remember Amy C. Waninger. She is the author of Networking Beyond Bias, and she was a guest on the Living Corporate podcast in Season 1 to talk about effective allyship. Well, Amy has continued on with Living Corporate as a writer, and she's also blessed us with a partnership in getting a special series out. So what you're gonna hear is Amy talking to a variety of black and brown professionals, as I said at the top, from a variety of industries, and it's gonna be really cool because it's really gonna zoom in from a technical perspective on what they do while at the same time hopefully inspiring folks who may not see themselves in an industry to actually see themselves, hence the title "See It To Be It," you know what I'm saying? All right, so with that being said, I'm gonna go ahead and dip. The next thing you're gonna hear is an interview with Amy C. Waninger and an amazing minority professional. Catch y'all next time. Peace.Amy: Hi, Kristina! Thank you so much for joining me today.Kristina: Thank you for having me, Amy.Amy: It's always a pleasure to see you, and I know the last time you and I actually saw each other face to face was at the Diversity 4.0 conference in National Harbor, Maryland, and that was so much fun to see you there. It was great because you and I had met before online, through a webinar I believe, and then when we saw each other we were both just--we were doing the jazz hand, you know, girl squeal because we were so excited to meet each other in person, so.Kristina: That was a lot of fun, and I was really so excited and so thrilled that you were there. That was awesome.Amy: Likewise. So I'm glad to be with you again today. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the work that you're doing and how you got involved in that work, because I want to try to expose more young people to different industries and different roles and different opportunities that are waiting for them in the world that maybe they're not aware of already. So the first thing I wanted to ask you--so you do diversity and inclusion consulting, and I wanted to ask you, how did you get into that work? And what appealed to you about the work that you do?Kristina: First of all, I really love what I'm doing, and I feel like right now is the time to be in this arena. For many many years--I started in the field of training and development and really enjoyed helping organizations move from one level to the next, whether it was working with a team of people or an individual through coaching or team building or strategic planning. I just love that kind of work, and yet all of my life, being a woman of color, I was constantly aware of how people were impacted in school or in the workplace. So when I was growing up, I went--from first through eighth grade I went to a predominantly--actually it was an all-black elementary school, and then in high school I went to an all-white school where there were 100 students, all girls, and only four African-American students. So it was a dramatic difference, and I could see the privilege that had when I was in school that I never experienced when I was in elementary school. I could see the privilege and how people were treated differently, and the experience would just really open my eyes dramatically. So I carried a lot of, in my heart, this feeling of "Things need to be different," and I was always asking myself the question, "What role can I play in this making things different?" So going through the training and development, I had a real passion for learning. That's one of the things that just makes me me. I'm a lifetime learner, and I've been sharing information that I've learned with other people. I just love sharing information with people. So as I began to see so many organizations starting to be impacted by their lack of information about people who are different than mainstream and the impact it was having on their market share or the people that were being impacted, I just started--my heart started racing, and I started thinking, "This is the time to really start to do this work that I've been carrying in my heart since high school," really, and the forces were really coming together, and I just felt like, "Wow, this is it." So I'm so excited to have jumped into the pool in doing the work that I'm doing.Amy: I think that's fantastic. Now, what you described, I remember high school--you know, going in that, like, eighth grade, ninth grade time frame, as just a teenager as being traumatic, and what you're talking about is a whole different level of trauma - the culture shock of going from a place where you didn't have to think about--you didn't have to think about race because you were, you know, one of many, right? And then going into a place where you were other for the first time. And not just all of the adolescent drama that comes with being that age, but then that extra layer at that time to me just sounds like an intensely painful experience.Kristina: It was really intense, and it really let me know that I was very different, and what's very interesting is originally I was not accepted into the school. My grandmother was the director of guidance counselors for D.C. public schools, and she went up to the school and advocated on my behalf. But once I got into the school, I was able to discern just from conversations what people's SAT scores were, what they had done in grade school and so on and so forth, and in many cases my SAT scores were much higher than other people who had gotten in, and so at first it made me feel less than when I was going to school because I thought, "I must not be as smart as these other people," you know? And I just felt like, "Oh, wow. Maybe I don't belong here," and as I started talking to people I was like, "Oh, my God. I'm smarter than they are." [laughs] So it was interesting, but it made me realize another level underneath that. No, this is not about achievement. This is something totally different.Amy: And I think that's interesting too, that you went from having sort of an impostor syndrome approach to it to realizing that you weren't falling short of a standard that existed, you were being held to a much higher standard than had existed previously.Kristina: Exactly. That's exactly right.Amy: And I think that's the case for so many people who are onlys or one of a few, right, who are integrating spaces for the first time perhaps or, you know, even very slowly over time. So I think it's important for people to understand that, if they're going through something like that, it may be the first time where they are, but it's not the first time. [?]Kristina: Absolutely, and it does feel like that. When you are there, seemingly alone, it feels very overwhelming. It can feel very overwhelming, but, you know, I got through it, and I'm really glad I did, and I'm really glad that that which I carried in my belly for so long made me, you know, secretly yearn to do something to make it better for other people.Amy: That's fantastic, yeah. I think there are two kinds of people, right? There are people who let something like that fester and become a negative in their lives, and then there are people who almost encase it and make a pearl of it, and I'm so glad that there are people like you, that make a pearl out of some, you know, some irritant, some painful experience, because, you know, that makes it so much easier for the next generation, for the next person, you know? For the next person that experiences what you've been through.Kristina: Yeah, and it really does develop--it helps to develop compassion, you know, and an understanding. So I'm not bitter about any of those experiences. I am just on the look-out for "Who can I help?" You know, "Who can I pat on the back, hold their hand, give a hug, whatever?" Because it's a unique experience.Amy: Absolutely. So getting back to the work that you do. What has surprised you the most, or what have you discovered about the work that you do that you didn't expect before you got into it?Kristina: I just thought that with all of the companies that have experienced major faux pas, major mistakes that they've made through marketing or, you know, just some kind of advertising inappropriately their brand, that more companies would be actively saying, "We need a more diverse leadership team. We need someone that will help us not fall down the rabbit hole." And so I'm really surprised that more companies are not actively reaching out. It's like companies one after another are taking the fall. [laughs] And I have even posted on various social media platforms, "When are companies going to really wake up to the fact that they have to be thoughtful?" They need to reach out to people who are different to help them build a brand that is not gonna be negatively impacted or cause them to lose market share because they make a mistake that they're not even conscious of that in many cases that it's a mistake.Amy: Absolutely, and I'm gonna jump on that a little bit, because I see so many things in the news, right? I mean, the examples--the examples are just so many, right? We've seen it happen to Starbucks, Papa John's... what's the--Kristina: Oh, the Dove commercial.Amy: The Dove commercial. We saw it with--there was the clothing brand H&M, and was it Prada recently that had the sculptures in their store display windows? And you would think just like companies manage risk in so many other ways, right--they talk about things like cyber-security risk because that could affect their bottom line, they talk about, you know, employee theft because that could affect their bottom line, they talk about succession planning, and they talk about all of these things, right? But then they have this risk, this PR risk at a minimum, not to mention the lawsuits that come from, you know, racial discrimination in the workplace. And it seems like there's this gap of understanding that that's a risk that needs to be managed in a holistic and proactive way, just like they manage, you know, property loss or, you know, talent departure and turnover and things like that.Kristina: I hear a blog in the making. [laughs]Amy: [laughing] Absolutely. Yeah, so getting companies to understand that this pain point is just waiting for them to step in it rather than waiting until--and GM was another one in the news where they had just a horrible work environment from a racial standpoint at one of their locations, and I don't understand why a company would wait to be the next GM or the next Prada or the next H&M, why they wouldn't want to get in front of that now. So yeah, we've got some work to do, don't we?Kristina: Yeah, we do. We have a lot, but I think the thing that's so interesting to me is really how polarized we've become. When I look at the Gillette commercial that was just out recently, I loved the commercial. I thought it was really awesome, and yet it got a lot of pushback, and so I thought, "Wow, we really need to have more and more and more conversations within our families, within our communities, within organizations, corporations," because somehow there's something that's really kind of broken in one sense, that people are not understanding, and regardless of what people think, our world is changing. Our world is changing, and people are gonna be really impacted, and a lot of people are not prepared. It's like being on the beach and here comes the tsunami, and I'm not talking about people coming into the country. There are enough people in the country already who are diverse enough. The change is gonna happen.Amy: Absolutely, yeah. The population shift in and of itself within our borders, right, is enough to trigger--you would think to trigger some change in attitudes and behaviors, and when you add to that the globalization of world markets, the globalization of--most companies have, in some way, a global talent pool that they're working with. They're trying to appeal to markets that maybe they've never entered before, and that's hard to do if you don't change your internal perspective and know how to have those conversations. And so that actually brings me to a question I wanted to ask you. So there are a lot of companies now that are doing more. You mentioned Gillette, but I'm talking about internally. Not in their advertising or in their marketing but internally companies seem to be doing more to prevent sexual assault and sexual harassment in the workplace, I think as a result of the #MeToo and Time's Up movement. There seems to be a little bit more understanding or at least solidarity among women now that we're just not gonna take it anymore and we're not gonna look the other way when there's bad behavior going on. And so I'm wondering, are you seeing that in the work that you're doing? That companies are being a little bit more proactive about sexual harassment?Kristina: Yes, absolutely. And I mean, you know, most companies have had sexual harassment training, but now--and so every year most organizations have to go through--you know, their folks have to go through sexual harassment training. Now what I'm seeing is that people are really starting to step up in enforcing, really enforcing, this--what's been mandated, you know, technically or through HR. I was recently hired by an organization who--this is a tech organization. It is predominantly young white males, and it's a mid-sized company. They have maybe six to eight females, and the women were complaining of sexual harassment, but it's not really--it's more like they're being left out of important meetings, and so they were beginning to complain, and so we're working on a strategy to have conversations with the men in the organization about, you know, "How do we change this before this becomes a real problem, you know?"Amy: Absolutely, because if you're not including everyone in conversations, #1: they're missing out on information, so they can't do their jobs. But #2: you're not getting their input, and you're not allowing them to be a part of the innovation of the company. You know, you're ignoring really valuable perspectives by shutting people out, and presumably these women were hired because they were qualified and they had something to contribute. I'm wondering too though--and this is not my idea. I was at a conference, and I was listening to someone speak, and she was talking about "Why is it that we mandate sexual harassment training in the workplace but we don't mandate racial harassment prevention training in the workplace?" And I was wondering if you've seen any companies that are doing that, that are actually talking about racial harassment so that they don't become the next GM?Kristina: Well, you know, I think some of the larger companies, absolutely. So the whole thing with Starbucks was centered around race, you know? And I think some of that is going on, but not a lot, and I think primarily because for most African-Americans, they have learned to really tolerate, they've learned that this is just the way it is and you've got to learn to work with the system. However, and this is digressing a little bit but I'm aware. Sometimes I digress and I don't realize it, [laughing] but I realize I'm digressing a little bit here. You know, the National Women's March was in Washington--well, it was all over, but there was a really big one in Washington, D.C. I had a work commitment so I could not attend, but I did go to, the very next day, a conference of women that was spearheaded by Karen Fleshman, who is--Amy: I adore her.Kristina: I do too, and I got to meet her in person. She was here from San Francisco.Amy: And so Karen Fleshman is--she's an anti-racism activist, and her company I believe is called Racy Conversations, and she is a white woman who has made it her mission to lead the first anti-racist generation in the United States, and she's phenomenal. Kristina: It was really exciting. When I tell you it was exciting--because first of all, I don't know, maybe there were 120, maybe more, women who had been to--most of them had been to the Women's March. Half of the room was white females, the other half were African-American or women of color. Great conversations. Really, really, really great conversations. It was really thrilling. I was just so excited, because these women were standing up saying, "We have to take responsibility. We cannot hide behind our privilege any longer," #1, and there were just some amazing things that came out of this conference, and one of the things that came out of the conference was we made it a really safe place for people to say whatever they thought or felt without being judged or criticized. We knew we were all coming from a place from love and concern. But one white female stood up because--one of the concepts that came out of the conference, and we talked about further, was a statement made that white women should evolve enough so that women of color can lead this revolution, and a white woman said, "I'm not sure I understand why that should be the case." And you could tell that she was really grappling with why, and there was a woman--and I am so sorry I don't have her name, I'm gonna have to look her up. She was a professor, I think from Stanford University, and she teaches African-American politics, history, and she was the moderator. She was the facilitator. And one of the things that she said... "Let me see if I can help you understand." And I'm sort of putting my own spin on it, but you'll get the concept. She said, "What if you and nine of your white female friends are walking through a mountain, and all of a sudden you fall into a deep abyss in the mountain, and you're lost and you're frightened? But then you come across a group of women of color who have been in this abyss for 300 years, but they have learned to navigate what's going on down there in the mountain. They've learned how to find food. They've learned how to fend off the animals. They've learned how to survive in this abyss. Who are you gonna turn to for help? Are you gonna turn to the woman who fell in with you just, you know, four hours ago, or the people who have been there for 300 years?" It was fantastic. It was just really--and the woman said, "I get it," and everyone in that room did a collective sigh, like, "We get it. We get it." It was so powerful. It was so encouraging.Amy: And I think white women have--you know, we're new to this party, right? The oppression that we've felt has not been as severe, it has not been as acute and as sustained. Just because something's chronic doesn't mean that it's not an acute pain, and I think that for a lot of white women, you know, we're like, "Oh, my gosh." We're so tired of these conversations, and, you know, to your point, black women have been tired of these conversations for 300 years, and it's--and not only that, but I think, to the credit of black women, when black women succeed, they bring everyone else along with them. When white women succeed, we have a tendency to leave others behind, and I think that's unfortunate, and I certainly want to see a world where we're all succeeding together, and I applaud Karen and her work, and I'm so glad that you were able to see her in action and to be there and be a part of that, because to be in a room where women of color and white women can have those honest conversations I think is so important, because we've--you know, I'm coming to realize for the first time that we grew up with two sets of rules, and we were both told that those sets of rules were what kept us safe, but they were also about how to be polite. And so what I grew up as, "This is how you go about the world and navigate being polite," I'm only now coming to realize is harmful to other people, which is exactly the opposite of what I intend to be.Kristina: Right. Oh, I understand that.Amy: And it's so devastating to find out that the things that you've been taught to get you to a certain endpoint are the opposite of what are gonna get you there, and so I'm so glad that we're able to have these conversations and learn from each other and forgive each other for past transgressions and to really understand, "Hey, you know, I get that your heart's in the right place, but you're doing it all wrong." Kristina: Right. [laughs]Amy: [laughs] And somebody's there to listen to that and to accept it. [?]Kristina: Yeah, it was awesome. It was just so awesome. I was really so glad that I was there. It was just like, "Oh, my gosh." Incredible. Absolutely incredible.Amy: That is wonderful. So I'm gonna go back just a little bit. Can you tell me about--if somebody wants to do work in the diversity and inclusion space, in the consulting space, in the training and development industry where you've spent so much time, how can they learn more about that? Where can they go for information?Kristina: So a couple of different things. It used to be called the American Society for Training and Development. They've changed their acronym now to ATD, which is the American Talent Development Association I guess it is. So people can go and do some research on that. Definitely there's all kinds of school programs now that offer training and development, organization improvement, organizational development. All of those are great forays into this area, but also, even though I had done all of this work in training and development for 15+ years, probably 20, I knew that I didn't want to just jump out there and start doing diversity work. I really did some research and decided to go to the Institute for Diversity Certification. The Institute for Diversity Certification, they have--and there are other organizations, I just happened to like that particular organization. I went and studied with them. It was--at that time it was a three and a half day class and then you take a national exam, and then you also have to do a project, and the project was to be certified as a diversity professional. So there are other organizations that do that, but the Institute for Diversity Certification met my needs, and I really enjoyed the process because it takes you all the way through the history of where we started, where did this all start, where are we now, and they do a lot of ongoing workshops and seminars to keep us abreast of what's happening currently in the field, and they're constantly putting out articles and information that I find to be really, really timely and helpful. So I would say definitely reach out to one of those organizations. Now that same organization is doing online training, so you don't--I had to actually go out to Indianapolis. [laughs] It was cool because I got to meet some people that now I can network with if I'm in a situation where I'm pondering. I can pick up the phone and call someone that I've made a connection with, but you can also do that training online now. I think that's great.Amy: And what about organizations? Are there any organizations that exist specifically to help people of color connect or feel a part of something bigger in the training and development industry? Because I think, for a lot of folks, if they don't--they might be the only where they are and not realize that there's this big world out there of people that can support and help them.Kristina: So that's a really good question, and there are a couple of things. Even if you wanted to just network with SHRM, the national organization of human resources professionals, there are lots of African-American leaders who are in those roles. So that's another option. And like I said, the American Talent Development organization as well. And within those groups they have networking groups.Amy: Ok, okay. So within the broader--there's, like, a broader organization, and then there's special interest groups or affinity groups within those larger professional associations?Kristina: Yes, absolutely.Amy: Excellent. Well, Kristina, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom and your insights today. This has been, from my perspective, a phenomenal conversation. I look forward to many more with you.Kristina: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Amy. I really appreciate the work that you're doing, and yes, I hope we get to chat again soon.Amy: Thank you.

145 See It to Be It : Global Diversity & Inclusion Consultant (w/ La'Wana Harris)