Podcast appearances and mentions of corey quinn

Jesse shares the unfiltered story of his time as the founding AE at a seed-stage startup. From landing the role on a mountain bike trail to building sales ops from scratch, it's a raw look at what early-stage startup life is really like.SPONSORS:• ZoomInfo (The GTM Intelligence Platform) - Link for SP extended trial offer: https://try.zoominfo.com/spEPISODE LINKS:• Want to get better at cold calls? Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Get a weekly email from SP: https://www.salesplayers.co/ • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap, Rachit Kataria© Sales Players, LLC

AWS Morning Brief for the week of Tuesday, May 27th with Corey Quinn. Links:Amazon Aurora reduces cross-Region Global Database Switchover time to typically under 30 secondsAmazon MSK adds support for Apache Kafka version 4.0AWS Control Tower releases Enabled controls view for centralized visibility - AWSAWS Cost Anomaly Detection enables advanced alerting through AWS User NotificationsAWS service changesDynamoDB local is now accessible on AWS CloudShellJoin Us at FinOps X 2025: Your Guide to All Things AWSIntroducing the AWS Product Lifecycle page and AWS service availability updatesJoin AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day to learn cutting-edge innovations building global cloud infrastructureHow to secure your instances with multi-factor authenticationCost Optimization for Healthcare on AWSCORS configuration through Amazon CloudFrontIntroducing Strands Agents, an Open Source AI Agents SDK | AWS Open Source BlogAndy Jassy's leadership lesson he practices at work and at home

Jesse breaks down the exact cold call routine he uses daily to drive pipeline. SPONSORS:• ZoomInfo (The GTM Intelligence Platform) - Link for SP extended trial offer: https://try.zoominfo.com/spEPISODE LINKS:• Want to get better at cold calls? Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Get a weekly email from SP: https://www.salesplayers.co/ • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap, Rachit Kataria© Sales Players, LLC

Chris Benton from the UK (Birmingham) was fostered until 2 years of age prior to adoption. He listens to OUATIA podcast while doing landscaping work for his business. He recently transitioned from tree surgery to grounds maintenance (landscaping).He has an adoptive older brother (troubled) and in contact with bio brother who is 4 years younger (also adopted out) who lives in the US (Michigan). Chris has spoken with foster father (foster mother has dementia) and in contact with bio mom (psych issues). He is in contact with a bio paternal uncle and unaware if his bio dad is alive. Chris subsequently submitted DNA through Ancestry. Within his home there was no talking about adoption; “if parents don't, then I won't”.Music by Corey Quinn

AWS Morning Brief for the week of May 19th, with Corey Quinn. Links:Amazon VPC Reachability Analyzer now supports resource exclusionAWS announces new AWS Data Transfer Terminal location in the San Francisco Bay AreaAccelerate CI/CD pipelines with the new AWS CodeBuild Docker Server capabilityAccelerate the modernization of Mainframe and VMware workloads with AWS TransformNew Amazon EC2 P6-B200 instances powered by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to accelerate AI innovationsIntroducing Amazon Q Developer in Amazon OpenSearch ServiceAmazon CloudWatch Database Insights applied in real scenariosCost-effective AI image generation with PixArt-Σ inference on AWS Trainium and AWS InferentiaUnited Airlines implement enterprise-wide resilience program with AWSBringing more to the table: How Amazon S3 Tables rapidly delivered new capabilities in the first 5 monthsUnderstanding Amazon S3 client-side encryption optionsSponsorThe Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/Join us for Office Hours!https://www.duckbillgroup.com/officehours/

How does one manage to simplify the complexities of the NAT Gateway? In this episode of "Screaming in the Cloud," Corey Quinn interviews Malith Rajapakse, a DevOps engineer who has recently received acclaim for his blog post discussing the Managed NAT Gateway. Where AWS lacks in its documentation, Malith is a NATural at breaking things down. He's so great at it that Corey had to invite him on the show! Malith shares the story behind his popular post, his creative process, and his use of interactive diagrams and engaging content. He and Corey also discuss the challenges of documentation and making technical subjects more appealing. Thankfully, Malith has already done that in written form, so enjoy this episode as he speaks it into the world!Show Highlights(0:00) Intro(1:24) The Duckbill Group sponsor read(1:58) Malith's background before his blog post (4:21) Why Malith wrote about the Managed NAT Gateway(5:38) Corey's problems with Managed NAT Gateway and why Malith's blog post impressed him(10:05) The interactive elements of Malith's blog post and how they were made(12:21) Maltih's front-end experience(14:47) Transitioning from front-end to DevOps through JavaScript(16:20) The juxtaposition of Malith's blog post vs. AWS's official documentation(18:05) How AWS's documentation of the managed NAT gateway isn't user-friendly(22:27) Why Malith went all out for his first blog post(23:17) Corey's constructive feedback for Malith(26:05) Where you can find more from MalithAbout Malith RajapakseMalith is a Devops engineer creating visualisations at https://malithr.com/.LinksMalith's blog: https://malithr.com/Interactive AWS NAT Gateway: https://malithr.com/aws/natgateway/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/malith-rajapakse/Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/malithr.comTwitter: https://x.com/malithrajReddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/mdilraj/Sam Rose's blog: https://samwho.dev/Benjamin Dicken's blog post on IO devices and latency: https://planetscale.com/blog/io-devices-and-latencyJosh W Comeau's blog: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/Killed By Google: https://killedbygoogle.com/SponsorThe Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com 

Jesse reminds sellers why understanding the product matters, especially when selling to IT buyers. SPONSORS:• Surfe (LinkedIn Prospecting Streamlined) - SP promo link: https://www.surfe.com/?kfl_ln=jesse-woodbury EPISODE LINKS:• Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Get a weekly email from SP: https://www.salesplayers.co/ • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap, Rachit Kataria© Sales Players, LLC

Stacey Gatlin, a passionate servant leader, is on a mission to transform the lives of children, women, and families through her commitment to personal, professional, and community development. She transitioned her corporate experience in talent management, leadership, and project management into entrepreneurship and advocacy.Stacey was compelled to rewrite the narrative around Black adoption and fostering when she became a mom through adoption. Fueled to counteract negative stereotypes, she created Yes We Adopt in 2016. Through this platform, Stacey seeks to enlighten the Black community on the need for Black adoptive and foster parents. As she further engaged with the adoption constellation, she refined her mission for Yes We Adopt to educate, uplift, and empower Black families with the tools they need to parent with courage while centering adoptees and birth families with care and respect. In 2020, she created the Yes We Adopt: Black Voices Amplified Summit to elevate our voices through community, advocacy, and education. In addition to her work in Yes We Adopt, Stacey also serves on the Board of Adoption Knowledge Affiliates (AKA) and is a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) in New Jersey, advocating for children in foster care.She has conducted workshops at the Concerned Persons for Adoption “Let's Talk Adoption” Conference and Christ Church's “Foster Care & Adoption Seminar.” She has also appeared on Fox Soul TV's “The Book of Sean”; Yes, We Do Adopt! Podcast; The Adoption Journey Podcast, and was also featured in Rolling Out Magazine.Stacey holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from the Rutgers School of Engineering. She is motivated by the scripture, “Don't worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need and thank him for all he has done.” Phillippians 4:6-7 Music by Corey Quinn

AWS Morning Brief for the week of May 12th, with Corey Quinn. Links:Amazon Connect external voice pricing changesAWS Marketplace now supports SaaS products from all deployment locationsAmazon Q Developer elevates the IDE experience with new agentic coding experienceAmazon Q Developer in GitHub (in preview) accelerates code generationIn the works – AWS South America (Chile) RegionMonitoring network traffic in AWS Lambda functionsAnnouncing the end of support for AWS DynamoDB Session State ProviderWordFinder app: Harnessing generative AI on AWS for aphasia communicationAccelerating government efficiency with AWS Enterprise SupportIntroducing the AWS Zero Trust Accelerator for GovernmentSponsorThe Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/Join us for Office Hours!https://www.duckbillgroup.com/officehours/

Jesse shares a real-life look at how he juggles tech sales, content creation, fitness, and family life each week. SPONSORS:• Surfe (LinkedIn Prospecting Streamlined) - SP promo link: https://www.surfe.com/?kfl_ln=jesse-woodbury EPISODE LINKS:• Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Get a weekly email from SP: https://www.salesplayers.co/ • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap, Rachit Kataria© Sales Players, LLC

Jesse shares real strategies for SDRs looking to break into AE roles, drawing from his own journey from SDR > SDR Leader > Enterprise AE.SPONSORS:• Surfe (LinkedIn Prospecting Streamlined) - SP promo link: https://www.surfe.com/?kfl_ln=jesse-woodbury EPISODE LINKS:• Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Get a weekly email from SP: https://www.salesplayers.co/ • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap, Rachit Kataria© Sales Players, LLC

Music by Corey Quinn

AWS Morning Brief for the week of May 5th, with Corey Quinn. Links:Automated HTTP validated public certificates with Amazon CloudFrontAWS Systems Manager launches just-in-time node accessMAP enhancements to accelerate AI customer adoptionAnnouncing SaaS Manager for Amazon CloudFrontAnnouncing second-generation AWS Outposts racksAmazon CloudWatch launches tiered pricing and additional destinations for AWS Lambda logsAWS Launch Wizard automates multi-node SAP NetWeaver deployment on SAP ASE DatabaseAWS Lambda standardizes billing for INIT PhaseSponsorThe Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/Join us for Office Hours!https://www.duckbillgroup.com/officehours/

Jesse gives his take on why you should consider spending the first few years of your career in an office.SPONSORS:• Pre-Order Commission Impossible! - https://www.salesplayers.co/products/ciEPISODE LINKS:• Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap, Rachit Kataria© Sales Players, LLC

Jesse shares his basic process for negotiating compensation as a tech seller.SPONSORS:• Pre-Order Commission Impossible! - https://www.salesplayers.co/products/ciEPISODE LINKS:• Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap, Rachit Kataria© Sales Players, LLC

Leslie Lee at the age of 58, is just beginning to explore what it truly means to be adopted. As a same-race adoptee, she was placed with her family at eight weeks old, according to the transcript she received from the agency (Louise Wise) that facilitated the adoption. For most of her life, she carried this part of her identity in silence—only sharing it with a select few friends and family members. Secrecy, and at times shame, shaped much of her experience.Today, she's married, a proud mother of two adult sons, and grandmother to four beautiful grandchildren. Professionally, she built a meaningful career as a human resource specialist, with over 23 years of experience in higher education. She also holds several professional certifications in her field.Outside of work, she's rediscovering her love for reading as a way to disconnect from the noise of current events. Leslie recently took up knitting—still a novice, but enjoying the learning process through both in-person and online lessons. This season of life is about learning what brings her peace, what pleases her, and what helps manage stress in healthy, fulfilling ways.She's honored to share space within the adoption constellation and to finally connect with a community that understands this journey—people who simply get her, just because.Music by Corey Quinn

AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 28th, with Corey Quinn. Links:Amazon CloudWatch agent now supports Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) Amazon Cognito now supports refresh token rotation Amazon Q Developer releases state-of-the-art agent for feature development AWS Account Management now supports IAM-based account name updates AWS CodeBuild adds support for specifying EC2 instance type and configurable storage size AWS Console Mobile Application adds support for Amazon Lightsail AWS STS global endpoint now serves your requests locally in Regions enabled by default AWS Transfer Family introduces Terraform module for deploying SFTP server endpoints How Smartsheet reduced latency and optimized costs in their serverless architecture In the works – New Availability Zone in Maryland for US East (Northern Virginia) Region CVE-2025-3857 – Infinite loop condition in Amazon.IonDotnet I annotated Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's 2024 Letter to Shareholders 

Jesse talks about mindset shifts sellers can embrace for long-term success. SPONSORS:• Surfe (LinkedIn Prospecting Streamlined) - SP Promo link: https://www.surfe.com/?kfl_ln=jesse-woodburyEPISODE LINKS:• Pre-Order Commission Impossible! - https://www.salesplayers.co/products/ci• Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap, Rachit Kataria© Sales Players, LLC

Veronica is the co-author of "Rooted in Adoption-A Collection of Adoptee Reflections" and the "Rooted in Adoption Journal" now on Amazon. Veronica's Instagram is @rootedinadoption0520 Recommendations: https://www.sdpb.org/2012-07-16/piecing-together-stories-of-families-lost-in-slavery https://growbeyondwords.com/2015/08/screening-questions-when-seeking-an-adoption-competent-therapist/Music by Corey Quinn

AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 21st, with Corey Quinn. Links:AWS simplifies Amazon VPC Peering billingAWS now allows customers in Europe to pay For their usage in advanceAWS Lambda@Edge announces advanced logging controlsAnnouncing new AWS Wavelength Zone in DakarAnnouncing the AWS Well-Architected Generative AI LensAnnouncing General Availability of GitLab Duo with Amazon QRacing beyond DeepRacer: Debut of the AWS LLM LeagueManage budgets efficiently with budget events in AWS Deadline Cloud

Jesse shares ideas for how you can become a more fierce competitor in your deals.SPONSORS:• Surfe (LinkedIn Prospecting Streamlined) - SP Promo link: https://www.surfe.com/?kfl_ln=jesse-woodbury• Fathom (#1 AI Notetaker) - SP Promo link: https://fathom.partnerlinks.io/salesplayersEPISODE LINKS:• Mutual Action Plan: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1br4CrpdOq-3ToypxCTWQ75Ea9DbKtpWSU_bTcKK_TiE/edit#slide=id.p• Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap, Rachit Kataria© Sales Players, LLC

AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 14th, with Corey Quinn.Links:Amazon Route 53 adds public authoritative DNS service to AWS GovCloud (US) RegionsCost Optimization Hub supports DynamoDB and MemoryDB reservation recommendationsLoad Balancer Capacity Unit Reservation for Gateway Load BalancersAnnouncing new AWS Elemental MediaTailor pricing model with lower VOD ad insertion costsHow AWS and Intel make LLMs more accessible and cost-effective with DeepSeekAnnouncing up to 85% price reductions for Amazon S3 Express One ZoneOptimize Amazon VPC Flow Logs analysis with Cribl Stream samplingExploring Data Transfer Costs for AWS Network Load Balancers

Rachit Kataria is the Co-Founder & CEO of Centralize (https://www.usecentralize.com/) an all-in-one deal collaboration platform for enterprise revenue teams backed by Y Combinator. In this episode, Rachit shares his career story, the origins of Centralize, and the AI opportunity for Enterprise Sales. SPONSORS:• Surfe (LinkedIn Prospecting Streamlined) - SP Promo link: https://www.surfe.com/?kfl_ln=jesse-woodbury• Fathom (#1 AI Notetaker) - SP Promo link: https://fathom.partnerlinks.io/salesplayersEPISODE LINKS: • Website: https://www.usecentralize.com/ • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachitkataria/CONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap© Sales Players, LLC

Laura Batt (she/her) was adopted domestically as an infant and raised in a closed adoption. She has been in reunion with her biological family for 26+ years. Laura is also a birth/first parent to her oldest adult son. She is parenting another teenage son and young child with her significant other in Oregon.Laura worked in pregnancy and parenting support for 20+ years. She has a Master's degree in social work, and she has certifications in adoption therapy and perinatal mental health. Laura has experience supporting families with open adoption relationships and providing post adoption support. She is currently a perinatal social worker in a medical setting. Website: https://adoptionmosaic.com/Music by Corey Quinn

AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 7th, with Corey Quinn. Links:Amazon EC2 now supports more bandwidth and jumbo frames to select destinationsAPI Gateway launches support for dual-stack (IPv4 and IPv6) endpointsAWS Lambda adds support for Ruby 3.4Amazon CloudWatch Logs increases maximum log event size to 1 MBAmazon Neptune announces 99.99% availability Service Level AgreementAnnouncing the general availability of Amazon VPC Route ServerUnder the hood: Amazon EKS Auto ModeOptimizing cost savings: The advantage of Amazon Aurora over self-managed open source databasesHow AWS Sales uses generative AI to streamline account planningIssue with AWS SAM CLI (CVE-2025-3047, CVE-2025-3048)

Jesse shares how he is planning to navigate the uncertain times ahead and asks for feedback on what direction to take the show. Please reach out on Slack, InMail, or email jesse@salesplayers.co to share: #1 What keeps you coming back to the show? #2 What topics would you like to hear more about? For a few of you, I'll pay you for your time giving me feedback on how I can make Sales Players better. Thank you!SPONSORS:• Surfe (LinkedIn Prospecting Streamlined) - SP Promo link: https://www.surfe.com/?kfl_ln=jesse-woodbury• Fathom (#1 AI Notetaker) - SP Promo link: https://fathom.partnerlinks.io/salesplayersEPISODE LINKS:• Mutual Action Plan: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1br4CrpdOq-3ToypxCTWQ75Ea9DbKtpWSU_bTcKK_TiE/edit#slide=id.p• Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap

Jesse shares the 10k play for developing a PoV when reaching out to executives at public companies.SPONSORS:• Surfe (LinkedIn Prospecting Streamlined) - SP Promo link: https://www.surfe.com/?kfl_ln=jesse-woodbury• Fathom (#1 AI Notetaker) - SP Promo link: https://fathom.partnerlinks.io/salesplayersEPISODE LINKS:• Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap© Sales Players, LLC

Wondering how AI can help your agency boost efficiency, streamline operations, and scale smarter? In this episode, Corey Quinn welcomes Khushbu Doshi, Chief Operating Officer at E2M Solutions, to explore the real impact of AI on agency growth. You'll learn E2M's proven approach to white label services and how agencies can leverage AI to automate tasks, enhance productivity, and empower teams. They also address ethical concerns around AI and data safety, as well as E2M's new Fractional AI Consultant designed to help you integrate AI effectively. If you're an agency owner ready to embrace AI and scale more efficiently, this episode is for you! Episode Highlights: - White Label Growth Strategies: How E2M helps agencies scale without adding overhead. - AI as a Productivity Booster: Why AI should be seen as an enhancement or advantage, not a job replacement. - Automating the Right Tasks: Identifying redundant processes to streamline agency operations. - Building Objective Task Agents: How AI-driven workflows can improve efficiency and decision-making. - Personalization Through AI: Creating detailed client profiles to deliver tailored experiences. - Empowering Teams to Use AI: How to encourage your staff to explore and implement AI solutions (and who's best-suited to use AI). - Measuring AI Success: Using time-to-value and productivity metrics to track AI impact. - The Importance of Structured Data: Why organizing data correctly is key to AI effectiveness. - Fractional AI Services: How E2M is making AI adoption more accessible for agencies. The resources mentioned in this episode are: - Connect with Khushbu Doshi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khushbu-doshi-bb08a267 - Hire E2M's Fractional AI Consultant: https://www.e2msolutions.com/fractional-ai-consultant-for-digital-agencies - Escape the generalist trap with my best-selling book “Anyone, Not Everyone” and discover how to become the go-to agency in a vertical market https://www.AnyoneNotEveryone.com

Mirella Stoyanova is a therapist, writer and international adoptee from Bulgaria of both Bulgarian and Iraqi origin. Her writing work has appeared in Write or Die Magazine, Business Insider, and HuffPost Personal, among other places. She is a proud member of Adoptee Voices and lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband Jason, her son Milo and her beloved dog, Finn. Find her @mirellastoyanova on Instagram or on her writing website, mirellastoyanova.com. Reference: https://adopteelitfest.com/Music by Corey Quinn

AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 31st, with Corey Quinn. Links:Amazon DynamoDB now supports percentile statistics for request latencyAmazon EKS now enforces upgrade insights checks as part of cluster upgradesAmazon GameLift Servers expands instance support with next-generation EC2 instance familiesAWS CloudFormation now supports targeted resource scans in the IaC generatorAWS adds currency selection to Payment ProfilesAWS Deadline Cloud now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)AWS announces expanded service support in the AWS Console Mobile AppAWS Network Manager and AWS Cloud WAN now support AWS PrivateLink and IPv6Unlocking the power of Splunk with Amazon Bedrock – Build AI assistant using agentsFrom virtual machine to Kubernetes to serverless: How dacadoo saved 78% on cloud costs and automated operationsAccelerating CI with AWS CodeBuild: Parallel test execution now availableAmazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story | AWS News BlogDetailed geographic information for all AWS Regions and Availability Zones is now availableOptimizing network footprint in serverless applicationsSimplifying private API integrations with Amazon EventBridge and AWS Step FunctionsAnnouncing the Developer Preview of Amazon S3 Transfer Manager in RustAWS SDK for Ruby: Deprecating Ruby 2.5 & 2.6 Runtime Supports and Future CompatibilityAnnouncing the AWS CDK L2 Construct for Amazon Cognito Identity PoolsAWS re:Invent 2024 recap for government agencies

Jesse shares thoughts on the current state of the market and some insights on the importance of finding a niche or specialization in your tech sales career. SPONSORS:• Surfe (LinkedIn Prospecting Streamlined) - SP Promo link: https://www.surfe.com/?kfl_ln=jesse-woodbury• Fathom (#1 AI Notetaker) - SP Promo link: https://fathom.partnerlinks.io/salesplayersEPISODE LINKS:• Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap© Sales Players, LLC

How you learn is important. Corey Quinn is joined by Aditya Bhargava, a Staff Software Engineer at Etsy and the author of Grokking Algorithms. They talk about the nuances of technical learning and the contrasting philosophies of "just in time" versus "just in case" learning. In this episode, Aditya emphasizes the importance of effective teaching methods and the value of incorporating fun things like drawings into technical explanations. This approach also bleeds into his illustrated Substack, DuckTypes. As Corey and Aditya discuss, a good, informative book doesn't need to drag on, and this quick, insightful, 30-minute conversation is no different.Show Highlights(0:00) Intro(1:24) The Duckbill Group sponsor read(1:58) Corey's admiration for Aditya's writing(5:40) How Aditya clearly explains AWS networking(8:06) “Just in case” vs. “just in time”(10:15) Why business books don't need to be hundreds of pages long(14:19) Reading for pleasure vs. reading for work(16:57) The Duckbill Group sponsor read(17:24) Explaining Aditya's book on algorithms(20:07) The great editor behind Aditya's book(22:20) DuckTyped and how Aditya got into AWS networking(25:16) Where networking folks fall in the era of the cloud(28:12) The importance of staying up-to-date in your field(31:46) Where you can find more from AdityaAbout Aditya BhargavaAditya Bhargava is a Software Engineer with a dual background in Computer Science and Fine Arts. He blogs on programming at adit.io.LinksAditya's blog: https://www.adit.io/Grokking Algorithms, Second Edition: https://www.manning.com/books/grokking-algorithms-second-editionDuckTyped: https://www.ducktyped.org/Last Skeet in AWS: https://lastskeetinaws.com/SponsorThe Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com 

Maureen McCauley is the adoptive mom of four now-adult children, two sons born in the U.S. and twin daughters born in Ethiopia; she has lived experience with infant adoption, international adoption, older child adoption, U.S. adoption, and transracial adoption. She also has three granddaughters. Her professional background is in social and educational welfare advocacy, including as former executive director of three nonprofits focused on adoption and foster care.With Adoption Mosaic, Maureen co-facilitates Conscious Adoption: Seasoned Parents and Navigating Estrangement, adoptive parent courses for which she also co-developed the curriculum. She is a writer and editor, including co-editor with two Ethiopian adoptees of “Lions Roaring, Far From Home: An Anthology by Ethiopian Adoptees.” Her writing has been published in Slate, Catapult, Focus on Adoption, Adoption Today, Adoptive Families of British Columbia, and others. She blogs at Light of Day Stories.She has a B.S. degree from Georgetown University and an M.A. from the University of Maryland. She is a Certified Sage-ing Leader via Sage-ing International, an organization focused on aging consciously and intentionally with joy and discernment. She also has a certificate as an End-of-Life Doula for Companion Pets, partnering with their humans.Websites: https://adopteesunited.org/ https://www.adopteesforjustice.org/Music by Corey Quinn

AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 24th, with Corey Quinn. Links:AWS Client VPN increases authorization rules and route quotasAnnouncing the New AWS Wickr Admin ConsoleAWS announces the next generation of Amazon Connect where powerful AI improves every customer interactionManage SLO exclusion time windows using CloudWatch Application SignalsHandling billions of invocations – best practices from AWS LambdaVisually build telephony applications with AWS Step FunctionsCorey is speaking at SREcon in Santa Clara!

Jesse shares a checklist of ideas for de-risking your deals to increase your close rate and drive more predictability in your pipeline and deals.SPONSORS:• Surfe (LinkedIn Prospecting Streamlined) - SP Promo link: https://www.surfe.com/?kfl_ln=jesse-woodbury• Fathom (#1 AI Notetaker) - SP Promo link: https://fathom.partnerlinks.io/salesplayersEPISODE LINKS:• Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players/free • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap© Sales Players, LLC

Jesse shares some ideas for choosing a winning startup by drawing from his own experience working in early startups as a seller. SPONSORS:• Surfe (LinkedIn Prospecting Streamlined) - SP Promo link: https://www.surfe.com/?kfl_ln=jesse-woodbury• Fathom (#1 AI Notetaker) - SP Promo link: https://fathom.partnerlinks.io/salesplayersEPISODE LINKS:• Books Mentioned: Play Bigger, Crossing the ChasmCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap© Sales Players, LLC

In this episode, Corey Quinn is joined by Sara Hardwick, Community Relationship Specialist at the Giftology Group, to discuss the powerful principles from John Ruhlin's new book, "Beyond Giftology." Sara shares insights on building strategic relationships that drive business growth and how to create systems that turn connections into powerful referral sources. Episode Highlights: The Power of ROR (Return on Relationship): Learn how investing in relationships can take your business places traditional marketing can't reach Relationship Partnership Training System: The step-by-step approach to transform connections into champions and referral partners Clarity Conversations: How to effectively communicate what you do, who you serve, and set partners up for successful referrals "Harmless Starters": Techniques to naturally begin conversations that can lead to business opportunities without being pushy DOVing (Demonstrations Of Value): Low-cost, high-impact ways to demonstrate value in relationships TAP Meetings: Implementing systematic "Talk About Partners" meetings to ensure relationship-building becomes habitual Strategic Gifting Principles: Why it's not the thought that counts, but the "thoughtful thought" that makes a difference Gift Personalization: How personalized touches like engraving, videos, and handwritten notes elevate the impact of gifts Scaling Relationship Marketing: How larger organizations can implement these strategies company-wide Gifting Benchmarks: Recommendations on frequency (max 3 gifts per year) and budget (5-15% of net profit from referrals) The resources mentioned in this episode are: - Connect with Sara Hardwick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahardwick - Email Sara: info@giftologygroup.com - GIFT∙OLOGY: https://giftologygroup.com - Beyond Giftology (John Ruhlin's final book): https://www.beyondgiftology.com - Giftology by John Ruhlin: https://www.amazon.com/Giftology-Increase-Referrals-Strengthen-Retention/dp/1732095604/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1542737227&sr=8-1&keywords=GIFTOLOGY - Join R.I.C.H. Relationship Society: https://giftologygroup.com/rich-relationships - Escape the generalist trap with my best-selling book “Anyone, Not Everyone” and discover how to become the go-to agency in a vertical market https://www.AnyoneNotEveryone.com

Brooke Haynes is a business coach, website and marketing system designer, and the founder of Consurgo, a personal development community for visionary entrepreneurs. With a unique ability to see the big picture, Brooke helps small businesses streamline their systems, build engaged communities, and create sustainable growth. Everyone who works with Brooke walks away with renewed passion and clear visions for their entrepreneurial journeys. Connect with Brooke here itssimplyreal.comWebsites: https://consurgo.world/ https://adoptionmosaic.com/ https://frequency500.com/Music by Corey Quinn

AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 17th, with Corey Quinn. Links:Amazon Bedrock now supports multi-agent collaborationAmazon RDS for MySQL announces Extended Support minor 5.7.44-RDS.20250213Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow introduces a new visual editor to improve DNS policy editingApplication Load Balancer announces integration with Amazon VPC IPAMAnnouncing the end of support for Node.js 14.x and 16.x in AWS CDKWatch the recordings from AWS Developer Day 2025How GoDaddy built a category generation system at scale with batch inference for Amazon BedrockFormula 1® unlocks the most competitive season yet with AWSSecure cloud innovation starts at re:Inforce 2025

Are you constantly putting out fires in your agency instead of strategically growing it? In this episode of the Deep Specialization podcast, Corey Quinn welcomes Karl Sakas, known as "the agency therapist" who helps agency owners work less, earn more, and reward their best team members. Karl discusses his new book, "Calm the Chaos: 10 Ways to Run a Better Agency," which offers practical strategies for agency leaders looking to create better work environments, improve team morale, and achieve sustainable growth. Episode Highlights: Transitioning from Doer to Leader: Karl shares insights on how agency owners can effectively shift from being hands-on doers to strategic leaders, explaining the six key agency roles and which ones to delegate first Finding Your #2: Strategies for identifying, developing, and properly compensating your agency's second-in-command The Desire-Competence-Capacity Framework: How to identify potential leaders using this practical Venn diagram approach Streamlining Meetings: Practical tips for reducing meeting bloat and making gatherings more productive The Assistant Effect: Why hiring a reliable assistant is crucial for agency owners and how to find the right one The resources mentioned in this episode are: Escape the generalist trap with my best-selling book “Anyone, Not Everyone” and discover how to become the go-to agency in a vertical market https://www.AnyoneNotEveryone.com Connect with Karl Sakas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karlsakas/ Free resources for agencies from Karl Sakas Calm the Chaos book, including free sample chapter (available via Amazon worldwide) Work Less, Earn More book, including free sample chapter (available via Amazon worldwide) Save $150 on "Control (and Maximize) Your Agency Exit" training, with discount code COREYQUINN at checkout Save $100 on "How to Stop Scope Creep" training, with discount code COREYQUINN at checkout

What's the difference between marketing and BS? On this episode, Corey Quinn is joined by Jonathan Cowperthwait, Duckbill's brand-new Head of Marketing. Jonathan's career path is a bit unconventional. After all, not everyone can say their professional journey was influenced by The West Wing. Even though he's a marketer by trade, Jonathan still has the technical know-how needed to work in the often expensive world of cloud economics. Have you ever wanted to know what The Duckbill Group's relationship with AWS is really like? How fun is it to sit on domains like “oldmanstartup?” Is there a similarity between clouds and butts? This interview is the inside scoop on The Duckbill Group that you never knew you needed. Show Highlights(0:00) Intro(1:11) Duckbill Group sponsor read(1:45) Acquiring the Duckbill Group office post-pandemic(2:52) Keeping your pants on during a pandemic so you can officiate your nanny's wedding(6:07) Jonathan's background prior to joining The Duckbill Group(11:29) What Duckbill was looking for when they hired Jonathan(14:54) When marketing begins to feel like spam(15:40) The fun of having disposable domains and email addresses(18:20) The importance of a good name for a product(19:38) Duckbill Group sponsor read(20:07) The Duckbill Group isn't just Corey Quinn(21:03) The "Cloud to Butt" extension(24:01) Corey's beef with Google's AI search engine(24:57) What can people expect from the Duckbill Group's new marketing effort(30:58) Where you can find more from JonathanAbout Jonathan CowperthwaitJonathan Cowperthwait does positioning, messaging, and go-to-market strategy to maximize awareness and revenue for technology brands of all sizes.He prides himself on being a slow runner, fast talker, and good writer.LinksJonathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cowperthwait/Jonathan on Bluesky: https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/cowp.coEmail Jonathan: offmylawn@oldmanstartup.comEmail Corey: corey@shitposting.monsterSponsorThe Duckbill Group: duckbillgroup.com 

My guest is Stephanie C. Watterson.Originally a shy and awkward biracial adoptee, Stephanie is now one of those people who, as soon as you meet her, you'll feel joy around. She graduated from Langara College (Digital & Print Publications, Dean's Honour Roll) and recently from Simon Fraser University (Editing Certificate). Last summer, she published her first children's book – Septopus.Stephanie's love for literature has lingered and will always be a labour of love. Try saying that ten times fast! Today, she writes, edits, and creates in Victoria, B.C. Never boring, often unconventional, but always engaging, Stephanie enjoys empowering other creatives in various capacities.Websites: https://contentauthoring.com/ https://editors.ca/editor-profile/?id=40fae0c2-35f3-429e-80fe-ab410015866f https://www.bipocadoptees.org/Music by Corey Quinn

While everyone is now repeating that 2025 is the “Year of the Agent”, OpenAI is heads down building towards it. In the first 2 months of the year they released Operator and Deep Research (arguably the most successful agent archetype so far), and today they are bringing a lot of those capabilities to the API:* Responses API* Web Search Tool* Computer Use Tool* File Search Tool* A new open source Agents SDK with integrated Observability ToolsWe cover all this and more in today's lightning pod on YouTube!More details here:Responses APIIn our Michelle Pokrass episode we talked about the Assistants API needing a redesign. Today OpenAI is launching the Responses API, “a more flexible foundation for developers building agentic applications”. It's a superset of the chat completion API, and the suggested starting point for developers working with OpenAI models. One of the big upgrades is the new set of built-in tools for the responses API: Web Search, Computer Use, and Files. Web Search ToolWe previously had Exa AI on the podcast to talk about web search for AI. OpenAI is also now joining the race; the Web Search API is actually a new “model” that exposes two 4o fine-tunes: gpt-4o-search-preview and gpt-4o-mini-search-preview. These are the same models that power ChatGPT Search, and are priced at $30/1000 queries and $25/1000 queries respectively. The killer feature is inline citations: you do not only get a link to a page, but also a deep link to exactly where your query was answered in the result page. Computer Use ToolThe model that powers Operator, called Computer-Using-Agent (CUA), is also now available in the API. The computer-use-preview model is SOTA on most benchmarks, achieving 38.1% success on OSWorld for full computer use tasks, 58.1% on WebArena, and 87% on WebVoyager for web-based interactions.As you will notice in the docs, `computer-use-preview` is both a model and a tool through which you can specify the environment. Usage is priced at $3/1M input tokens and $12/1M output tokens, and it's currently only available to users in tiers 3-5.File Search ToolFile Search was also available in the Assistants API, and it's now coming to Responses too. OpenAI is bringing search + RAG all under one umbrella, and we'll definitely see more people trying to find new ways to build all-in-one apps on OpenAI. Usage is priced at $2.50 per thousand queries and file storage at $0.10/GB/day, with the first GB free.Agent SDK: Swarms++!https://github.com/openai/openai-agents-pythonTo bring it all together, after the viral reception to Swarm, OpenAI is releasing an officially supported agents framework (which was previewed at our AI Engineer Summit) with 4 core pieces:* Agents: Easily configurable LLMs with clear instructions and built-in tools.* Handoffs: Intelligently transfer control between agents.* Guardrails: Configurable safety checks for input and output validation.* Tracing & Observability: Visualize agent execution traces to debug and optimize performance.Multi-agent workflows are here to stay!OpenAI is now explicitly designs for a set of common agentic patterns: Workflows, Handoffs, Agents-as-Tools, LLM-as-a-Judge, Parallelization, and Guardrails. OpenAI previewed this in part 2 of their talk at NYC:Further coverage of the launch from Kevin Weil, WSJ, and OpenAIDevs, AMA here.Show Notes* Assistants API* Swarm (OpenAI)* Fine-Tuning in AI* 2024 OpenAI DevDay Recap with Romain* Michelle Pokrass episode (API lead)Timestamps* 00:00 Intros* 02:31 Responses API * 08:34 Web Search API * 17:14 Files Search API * 18:46 Files API vs RAG * 20:06 Computer Use / Operator API * 22:30 Agents SDKAnd of course you can catch up with the full livestream here:TranscriptAlessio [00:00:03]: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another Latent Space Lightning episode. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel, and I'm joined by Swyx, founder of Small AI.swyx [00:00:11]: Hi, and today we have a super special episode because we're talking with our old friend Roman. Hi, welcome.Romain [00:00:19]: Thank you. Thank you for having me.swyx [00:00:20]: And Nikunj, who is most famously, if anyone has ever tried to get any access to anything on the API, Nikunj is the guy. So I know your emails because I look forward to them.Nikunj [00:00:30]: Yeah, nice to meet all of you.swyx [00:00:32]: I think that we're basically convening today to talk about the new API. So perhaps you guys want to just kick off. What is OpenAI launching today?Nikunj [00:00:40]: Yeah, so I can kick it off. We're launching a bunch of new things today. We're going to do three new built-in tools. So we're launching the web search tool. This is basically chat GPD for search, but available in the API. We're launching an improved file search tool. So this is you bringing your data to OpenAI. You upload it. We, you know, take care of parsing it, chunking it. We're embedding it, making it searchable, give you this like ready vector store that you can use. So that's the file search tool. And then we're also launching our computer use tool. So this is the tool behind the operator product in chat GPD. So that's coming to developers today. And to support all of these tools, we're going to have a new API. So, you know, we launched chat completions, like I think March 2023 or so. It's been a while. So we're looking for an update over here to support all the new things that the models can do. And so we're launching this new API. It is, you know, it works with tools. We think it'll be like a great option for all the future agentic products that we build. And so that is also launching today. Actually, the last thing we're launching is the agents SDK. We launched this thing called Swarm last year where, you know, it was an experimental SDK for people to do multi-agent orchestration and stuff like that. It was supposed to be like educational experimental, but like people, people really loved it. They like ate it up. And so we are like, all right, let's, let's upgrade this thing. Let's give it a new name. And so we're calling it the agents SDK. It's going to have built-in tracing in the OpenAI dashboard. So lots of cool stuff going out. So, yeah.Romain [00:02:14]: That's a lot, but we said 2025 was the year of agents. So there you have it, like a lot of new tools to build these agents for developers.swyx [00:02:20]: Okay. I guess, I guess we'll just kind of go one by one and we'll leave the agents SDK towards the end. So responses API, I think the sort of primary concern that people have and something I think I've voiced to you guys when, when, when I was talking with you in the, in the planning process was, is chat completions going away? So I just wanted to let it, let you guys respond to the concerns that people might have.Romain [00:02:41]: Chat completion is definitely like here to stay, you know, it's a bare metal API we've had for quite some time. Lots of tools built around it. So we want to make sure that it's maintained and people can confidently keep on building on it. At the same time, it was kind of optimized for a different world, right? It was optimized for a pre-multi-modality world. We also optimized for kind of single turn. It takes two problems. It takes prompt in, it takes response out. And now with these agentic workflows, we, we noticed that like developers and companies want to build longer horizon tasks, you know, like things that require multiple returns to get the task accomplished. And computer use is one of those, for instance. And so that's why the responses API came to life to kind of support these new agentic workflows. But chat completion is definitely here to stay.swyx [00:03:27]: And assistance API, we've, uh, has a target sunset date of first half of 2020. So this is kind of like, in my mind, there was a kind of very poetic mirroring of the API with the models. This, I kind of view this as like kind of the merging of assistance API and chat completions, right. Into one unified responses. So it's kind of like how GPT and the old series models are also unifying.Romain [00:03:48]: Yeah, that's exactly the right, uh, that's the right framing, right? Like, I think we took the best of what we learned from the assistance API, especially like being able to access tools very, uh, very like conveniently, but at the same time, like simplifying the way you have to integrate, like, you no longer have to think about six different objects to kind of get access to these tools with the responses API. You just get one API request and suddenly you can weave in those tools, right?Nikunj [00:04:12]: Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're going to make it really easy and straightforward for assistance API users to migrate over to responsive. Right. To the API without any loss of functionality or data. So our plan is absolutely to add, you know, assistant like objects and thread light objects to that, that work really well with the responses API. We'll also add like the code interpreter tool, which is not launching today, but it'll come soon. And, uh, we'll add async mode to responses API, because that's another difference with, with, uh, assistance. I will have web hooks and stuff like that, but I think it's going to be like a pretty smooth transition. Uh, once we have all of that in place. And we'll be. Like a full year to migrate and, and help them through any issues they, they, they face. So overall, I feel like assistance users are really going to benefit from this longer term, uh, with this more flexible, primitive.Alessio [00:05:01]: How should people think about when to use each type of API? So I know that in the past, the assistance was maybe more stateful, kind of like long running, many tool use kind of like file based things. And the chat completions is more stateless, you know, kind of like traditional completion API. Is that still the mental model that people should have? Or like, should you buy the.Nikunj [00:05:20]: So the responses API is going to support everything that it's at launch, going to support everything that chat completion supports, and then over time, it's going to support everything that assistance supports. So it's going to be a pretty good fit for anyone starting out with open AI. Uh, they should be able to like go to responses responses, by the way, also has a stateless mode, so you can pass in store false and they'll make the whole API stateless, just like chat completions. You're really trying to like get this unification. A story in so that people don't have to juggle multiple endpoints. That being said, like chat completions, just like the most widely adopted API, it's it's so popular. So we're still going to like support it for years with like new models and features. But if you're a new user, you want to or if you want to like existing, you want to tap into some of these like built in tools or something, you should feel feel totally fine migrating to responses and you'll have more capabilities and performance than the tech completions.swyx [00:06:16]: I think the messaging that I agree that I think resonated the most. When I talked to you was that it is a strict superset, right? Like you should be able to do everything that you could do in chat completions and with assistants. And the thing that I just assumed that because you're you're now, you know, by default is stateful, you're actually storing the chat logs or the chat state. I thought you'd be charging me for it. So, you know, to me, it was very surprising that you figured out how to make it free.Nikunj [00:06:43]: Yeah, it's free. We store your state for 30 days. You can turn it off. But yeah, it's it's free. And the interesting thing on state is that it just like makes particularly for me, it makes like debugging things and building things so much simpler, where I can like create a responses object that's like pretty complicated and part of this more complex application that I've built, I can just go into my dashboard and see exactly what happened that mess up my prompt that is like not called one of these tools that misconfigure one of the tools like the visual observability of everything that you're doing is so, so helpful. So I'm excited, like about people trying that out and getting benefits from it, too.swyx [00:07:19]: Yeah, it's a it's really, I think, a really nice to have. But all I'll say is that my friend Corey Quinn says that anything that can be used as a database will be used as a database. So be prepared for some abuse.Romain [00:07:34]: All right. Yeah, that's a good one. Some of that I've tried with the metadata. That's some people are very, very creative at stuffing data into an object. Yeah.Nikunj [00:07:44]: And we do have metadata with responses. Exactly. Yeah.Alessio [00:07:48]: Let's get through it. All of these. So web search. I think the when I first said web search, I thought you were going to just expose a API that then return kind of like a nice list of thing. But the way it's name is like GPD for all search preview. So I'm guessing you have you're using basically the same model that is in the chat GPD search, which is fine tune for search. I'm guessing it's a different model than the base one. And it's impressive the jump in performance. So just to give an example, in simple QA, GPD for all is 38% accuracy for all search is 90%. But we always talk about. How tools are like models is not everything you need, like tools around it are just as important. So, yeah, maybe give people a quick review on like the work that went into making this special.Nikunj [00:08:29]: Should I take that?Alessio [00:08:29]: Yeah, go for it.Nikunj [00:08:30]: So firstly, we're launching web search in two ways. One in responses API, which is our API for tools. It's going to be available as a web search tool itself. So you'll be able to go tools, turn on web search and you're ready to go. We still wanted to give chat completions people access to real time information. So in that. Chat completions API, which does not support built in tools. We're launching the direct access to the fine tuned model that chat GPD for search uses, and we call it GPD for search preview. And how is this model built? Basically, we have our search research team has been working on this for a while. Their main goal is to, like, get information, like get a bunch of information from all of our data sources that we use to gather information for search and then pick the right things and then cite them. As accurately as possible. And that's what the search team has really focused on. They've done some pretty cool stuff. They use like synthetic data techniques. They've done like all series model distillation to, like, make these four or fine tunes really good. But yeah, the main thing is, like, can it remain factual? Can it answer questions based on what it retrieves and get cited accurately? And that's what this like fine tune model really excels at. And so, yeah, so we're excited that, like, it's going to be directly available in chat completions along with being available as a tool. Yeah.Alessio [00:09:49]: Just to clarify, if I'm using the responses API, this is a tool. But if I'm using chat completions, I have to switch model. I cannot use 01 and call search as a tool. Yeah, that's right. Exactly.Romain [00:09:58]: I think what's really compelling, at least for me and my own uses of it so far, is that when you use, like, web search as a tool, it combines nicely with every other tool and every other feature of the platform. So think about this for a second. For instance, imagine you have, like, a responses API call with the web search tool, but suddenly you turn on function calling. You also turn on, let's say, structure. So you can have, like, the ability to structure any data from the web in real time in the JSON schema that you need for your application. So it's quite powerful when you start combining those features and tools together. It's kind of like an API for the Internet almost, you know, like you get, like, access to the precise schema you need for your app. Yeah.Alessio [00:10:39]: And then just to wrap up on the infrastructure side of it, I read on the post that people, publisher can choose to appear in the web search. So are people by default in it? Like, how can we get Latent Space in the web search API?Nikunj [00:10:53]: Yeah. Yeah. I think we have some documentation around how websites, publishers can control, like, what shows up in a web search tool. And I think you should be able to, like, read that. I think we should be able to get Latent Space in for sure. Yeah.swyx [00:11:10]: You know, I think so. I compare this to a broader trend that I started covering last year of online LLMs. Actually, Perplexity, I think, was the first. It was the first to say, to offer an API that is connected to search, and then Gemini had the sort of search grounding API. And I think you guys, I actually didn't, I missed this in the original reading of the docs, but you even give like citations with like the exact sub paragraph that is matching, which I think is the standard nowadays. I think my question is, how do we take what a knowledge cutoff is for something like this, right? Because like now, basically there's no knowledge cutoff is always live, but then there's a difference between what the model has sort of internalized in its back propagation and what is searching up its rag.Romain [00:11:53]: I think it kind of depends on the use case, right? And what you want to showcase as the source. Like, for instance, you take a company like Hebbia that has used this like web search tool. They can combine like for credit firms or law firms, they can find like, you know, public information from the internet with the live sources and citation that sometimes you do want to have access to, as opposed to like the internal knowledge. But if you're building something different, well, like, you just want to have the information. If you want to have an assistant that relies on the deep knowledge that the model has, you may not need to have these like direct citations. So I think it kind of depends on the use case a little bit, but there are many, uh, many companies like Hebbia that will need that access to these citations to precisely know where the information comes from.swyx [00:12:34]: Yeah, yeah, uh, for sure. And then one thing on the, on like the breadth, you know, I think a lot of the deep research, open deep research implementations have this sort of hyper parameter about, you know, how deep they're searching and how wide they're searching. I don't see that in the docs. But is that something that we can tune? Is that something you recommend thinking about?Nikunj [00:12:53]: Super interesting. It's definitely not a parameter today, but we should explore that. It's very interesting. I imagine like how you would do it with the web search tool and responsive API is you would have some form of like, you know, agent orchestration over here where you have a planning step and then each like web search call that you do like explicitly goes a layer deeper and deeper and deeper. But it's not a parameter that's available out of the box. But it's a cool. It's a cool thing to think about. Yeah.swyx [00:13:19]: The only guidance I'll offer there is a lot of these implementations offer top K, which is like, you know, top 10, top 20, but actually don't really want that. You want like sort of some kind of similarity cutoff, right? Like some matching score cuts cutoff, because if there's only five things, five documents that match fine, if there's 500 that match, maybe that's what I want. Right. Yeah. But also that might, that might make my costs very unpredictable because the costs are something like $30 per a thousand queries, right? So yeah. Yeah.Nikunj [00:13:49]: I guess you could, you could have some form of like a context budget and then you're like, go as deep as you can and pick the best stuff and put it into like X number of tokens. There could be some creative ways of, of managing cost, but yeah, that's a super interesting thing to explore.Alessio [00:14:05]: Do you see people using the files and the search API together where you can kind of search and then store everything in the file so the next time I'm not paying for the search again and like, yeah, how should people balance that?Nikunj [00:14:17]: That's actually a very interesting question. And let me first tell you about how I've seen a really cool way I've seen people use files and search together is they put their user preferences or memories in the vector store and so a query comes in, you use the file search tool to like get someone's like reading preferences or like fashion preferences and stuff like that, and then you search the web for information or products that they can buy related to those preferences and you then render something beautiful to show them, like, here are five things that you might be interested in. So that's how I've seen like file search, web search work together. And by the way, that's like a single responses API call, which is really cool. So you just like configure these things, go boom, and like everything just happens. But yeah, that's how I've seen like files and web work together.Romain [00:15:01]: But I think that what you're pointing out is like interesting, and I'm sure developers will surprise us as they always do in terms of how they combine these tools and how they might use file search as a way to have memory and preferences, like Nikum says. But I think like zooming out, what I find very compelling and powerful here is like when you have these like neural networks. That have like all of the knowledge that they have today, plus real time access to the Internet for like any kind of real time information that you might need for your app and file search, where you can have a lot of company, private documents, private details, you combine those three, and you have like very, very compelling and precise answers for any kind of use case that your company or your product might want to enable.swyx [00:15:41]: It's a difference between sort of internal documents versus the open web, right? Like you're going to need both. Exactly, exactly. I never thought about it doing memory as well. I guess, again, you know, anything that's a database, you can store it and you will use it as a database. That sounds awesome. But I think also you've been, you know, expanding the file search. You have more file types. You have query optimization, custom re-ranking. So it really seems like, you know, it's been fleshed out. Obviously, I haven't been paying a ton of attention to the file search capability, but it sounds like your team has added a lot of features.Nikunj [00:16:14]: Yeah, metadata filtering was like the main thing people were asking us for for a while. And I'm super excited about it. I mean, it's just so critical once your, like, web store size goes over, you know, more than like, you know, 5,000, 10,000 records, you kind of need that. So, yeah, metadata filtering is coming, too.Romain [00:16:31]: And for most companies, it's also not like a competency that you want to rebuild in-house necessarily, you know, like, you know, thinking about embeddings and chunking and, you know, how of that, like, it sounds like very complex for something very, like, obvious to ship for your users. Like companies like Navant, for instance. They were able to build with the file search, like, you know, take all of the FAQ and travel policies, for instance, that you have, you, you put that in file search tool, and then you don't have to think about anything. Now your assistant becomes naturally much more aware of all of these policies from the files.swyx [00:17:03]: The question is, like, there's a very, very vibrant RAG industry already, as you well know. So there's many other vector databases, many other frameworks. Probably if it's an open source stack, I would say like a lot of the AI engineers that I talk to want to own this part of the stack. And it feels like, you know, like, when should we DIY and when should we just use whatever OpenAI offers?Nikunj [00:17:24]: Yeah. I mean, like, if you're doing something completely from scratch, you're going to have more control, right? Like, so super supportive of, you know, people trying to, like, roll up their sleeves, build their, like, super custom chunking strategy and super custom retrieval strategy and all of that. And those are things that, like, will be harder to do with OpenAI tools. OpenAI tool has, like, we have an out-of-the-box solution. We give you the tools. We use some knobs to customize things, but it's more of, like, a managed RAG service. So my recommendation would be, like, start with the OpenAI thing, see if it, like, meets your needs. And over time, we're going to be adding more and more knobs to make it even more customizable. But, you know, if you want, like, the completely custom thing, you want control over every single thing, then you'd probably want to go and hand roll it using other solutions. So we're supportive of both, like, engineers should pick. Yeah.Alessio [00:18:16]: And then we got computer use. Which I think Operator was obviously one of the hot releases of the year. And we're only two months in. Let's talk about that. And that's also, it seems like a separate model that has been fine-tuned for Operator that has browser access.Nikunj [00:18:31]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the computer use models are exciting. The cool thing about computer use is that we're just so, so early. It's like the GPT-2 of computer use or maybe GPT-1 of computer use right now. But it is a separate model that has been, you know, the computer. The computer use team has been working on, you send it screenshots and it tells you what action to take. So the outputs of it are almost always tool calls and you're inputting screenshots based on whatever computer you're trying to operate.Romain [00:19:01]: Maybe zooming out for a second, because like, I'm sure your audience is like super, super like AI native, obviously. But like, what is computer use as a tool, right? And what's operator? So the idea for computer use is like, how do we let developers also build agents that can complete tasks for the users, but using a computer? Okay. Or a browser instead. And so how do you get that done? And so that's why we have this custom model, like optimized for computer use that we use like for operator ourselves. But the idea behind like putting it as an API is that imagine like now you want to, you want to automate some tasks for your product or your own customers. Then now you can, you can have like the ability to spin up one of these agents that will look at the screen and act on the screen. So that means able, the ability to click, the ability to scroll. The ability to type and to report back on the action. So that's what we mean by computer use and wrapping it as a tool also in the responses API. So now like that gives a hint also at the multi-turned thing that we were hinting at earlier, the idea that like, yeah, maybe one of these actions can take a couple of minutes to complete because there's maybe like 20 steps to complete that task. But now you can.swyx [00:20:08]: Do you think a computer use can play Pokemon?Romain [00:20:11]: Oh, interesting. I guess we tried it. I guess we should try it. You know?swyx [00:20:17]: Yeah. There's a lot of interest. I think Pokemon really is a good agent benchmark, to be honest. Like it seems like Claude is, Claude is running into a lot of trouble.Romain [00:20:25]: Sounds like we should make that a new eval, it looks like.swyx [00:20:28]: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and then one more, one more thing before we move on to agents SDK. I know you have a hard stop. There's all these, you know, blah, blah, dash preview, right? Like search preview, computer use preview, right? And you see them all like fine tunes of 4.0. I think the question is, are we, are they all going to be merged into the main branch or are we basically always going to have subsets? Of these models?Nikunj [00:20:49]: Yeah, I think in the early days, research teams at OpenAI like operate with like fine tune models. And then once the thing gets like more stable, we sort of merge it into the main line. So that's definitely the vision, like going out of preview as we get more comfortable with and learn about all the developer use cases and we're doing a good job at them. We'll sort of like make them part of like the core models so that you don't have to like deal with the bifurcation.Romain [00:21:12]: You should think of it this way as exactly what happened last year when we introduced vision capabilities, you know. Yes. Vision capabilities were in like a vision preview model based off of GPT-4 and then vision capabilities now are like obviously built into GPT-4.0. You can think about it the same way for like the other modalities like audio and those kind of like models, like optimized for search and computer use.swyx [00:21:34]: Agents SDK, we have a few minutes left. So let's just assume that everyone has looked at Swarm. Sure. I think that Swarm has really popularized the handoff technique, which I thought was like, you know, really, really interesting for sort of a multi-agent. What is new with the SDK?Nikunj [00:21:50]: Yeah. Do you want to start? Yeah, for sure. So we've basically added support for types. We've made this like a lot. Yeah. Like we've added support for types. We've added support for guard railing, which is a very common pattern. So in the guardrail example, you basically have two things happen in parallel. The guardrail can sort of block the execution. It's a type of like optimistic generation that happens. And I think we've added support for tracing. So I think that's really cool. So you can basically look at the traces that the Agents SDK creates in the OpenAI dashboard. We also like made this pretty flexible. So you can pick any API from any provider that supports the ChatCompletions API format. So it supports responses by default, but you can like easily plug it in to anyone that uses the ChatCompletions API. And similarly, on the tracing side, you can support like multiple tracing providers. By default, it sort of points to the OpenAI dashboard. But, you know, there's like so many tracing providers. There's so many tracing companies out there. And we'll announce some partnerships on that front, too. So just like, you know, adding lots of core features and making it more usable, but still centered around like handoffs is like the main, main concept.Romain [00:22:59]: And by the way, it's interesting, right? Because Swarm just came to life out of like learning from customers directly that like orchestrating agents in production was pretty hard. You know, simple ideas could quickly turn very complex. Like what are those guardrails? What are those handoffs, et cetera? So that came out of like learning from customers. And it was initially shipped. It was not as a like low-key experiment, I'd say. But we were kind of like taken by surprise at how much momentum there was around this concept. And so we decided to learn from that and embrace it. To be like, okay, maybe we should just embrace that as a core primitive of the OpenAI platform. And that's kind of what led to the Agents SDK. And I think now, as Nikuj mentioned, it's like adding all of these new capabilities to it, like leveraging the handoffs that we had, but tracing also. And I think what's very compelling for developers is like instead of having one agent to rule them all and you stuff like a lot of tool calls in there that can be hard to monitor, now you have the tools you need to kind of like separate the logic, right? And you can have a triage agent that based on an intent goes to different kind of agents. And then on the OpenAI dashboard, we're releasing a lot of new user interface logs as well. So you can see all of the tracing UIs. Essentially, you'll be able to troubleshoot like what exactly happened. In that workflow, when the triage agent did a handoff to a secondary agent and the third and see the tool calls, et cetera. So we think that the Agents SDK combined with the tracing UIs will definitely help users and developers build better agentic workflows.Alessio [00:24:28]: And just before we wrap, are you thinking of connecting this with also the RFT API? Because I know you already have, you kind of store my text completions and then I can do fine tuning of that. Is that going to be similar for agents where you're storing kind of like my traces? And then help me improve the agents?Nikunj [00:24:43]: Yeah, absolutely. Like you got to tie the traces to the evals product so that you can generate good evals. Once you have good evals and graders and tasks, you can use that to do reinforcement fine tuning. And, you know, lots of details to be figured out over here. But that's the vision. And I think we're going to go after it like pretty hard and hope we can like make this whole workflow a lot easier for developers.Alessio [00:25:05]: Awesome. Thank you so much for the time. I'm sure you'll be busy on Twitter tomorrow with all the developer feedback. Yeah.Romain [00:25:12]: Thank you so much for having us. And as always, we can't wait to see what developers will build with these tools and how we can like learn as quickly as we can from them to make them even better over time.Nikunj [00:25:21]: Yeah.Romain [00:25:22]: Thank you, guys.Nikunj [00:25:23]: Thank you.Romain [00:25:23]: Thank you both. Awesome. Get full access to Latent.Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 10th, 2025 with Corey Quinn. Links:Amazon Bedrock launches Session Management APIs for GenAI applications (Preview)Announcing Amazon GameLift StreamsAmazon Q Developer announces a new CLI agent within the command lineAWS Secrets Manager increases the API Requests per Second limitsAWS Transfer Family announces reduced login latency for SFTP serversIAM Access Analyzer now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)Streamline your AWS Marketplace renewalsIntroducing an enhanced local IDE experience for AWS Step FunctionsEnd of support notifications and enhanced discoverability for Amazon EKSThe end of an era: the final AWS DeepRacer League Championship at re:Invent 2024Securely onboarding countries to the AWS Cloud

Jesse shares insights on the current state of tech sales hiring with ideas for how to ace your next interview. SPONSORS:• Surfe (LinkedIn Prospecting Streamlined) - SP Promo link: https://www.surfe.com/?kfl_ln=jesse-woodbury• Fathom (#1 AI Notetaker) - SP Promo link: https://fathom.partnerlinks.io/salesplayersEPISODE LINKS:• Book FREE 1:1 Coaching Intro with Jesse: https://calendly.com/jessewoodbury/1-1-coaching-overviewCONNECT WITH JESSE: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessewoodbury/ • Website: https://jessewoodbury.com/HELP GROW SP: • Join Sales Players Slack Community: https://www.launchpass.com/saas_sales_players • Subscribe! • Leave a rating, write a review, and share • Check out the above sponsors, it's the best way to support the showGUEST HIGHLIGHTS:Morgan J. Ingram, Chris Orlob, Ian Koniak, Jeb Blount, Brandon Fluharty, Scott Leese, Sarah Brazier, Jamal Reimer, Jen Allen-Knuth, Andy Paul, Collin Mitchell, Tim Zielinski, Christian Banach, Rajiv 'RajNATION' Nathan, Belal Batrawy, Christine Rogers, Chris Beall, Patrick Baynes, Jeroen Corthout, Nate Nasralla, Gabe Lullo, Vince Beese, Brandon Bornancin, Girish Redekar, Guillaume Moubeche, Lloyed Lobo, Corey Quinn, Danny Delvecchio, Tom Slocum, Todd Busler, Richard Harris, Krysten Conner, Dan Goodman, Kris Rudeegraap© Sales Players, LLC

In this episode of Deep Specialization, host Corey Quinn sits down with Ned McPherson, Chief Growth Officer at Power Digital and founder of Endrock Growth and Analytics. Ned shares how he turned a side hustle into a 120-employee agency, scaled it organically through conversion rate optimization (CRO), and sold it to a private equity-backed firm in just four years. Discover the secrets to his rapid growth—zero salespeople, 100% referrals, and a laser focus on delivering results. Ned also reveals why he rolled equity into Power Digital, the power of product-market fit, and his top advice for agency owners eyeing an exit. Packed with insights on specialization, client retention, and navigating acquisitions, this episode is a must-listen for agency leaders ready to scale smart. Episode Highlights: - Scaling Through Specialization: How focusing on conversion rate optimization helped Endrock Growth scale to 120 employees before acquisition. - Winning with Data: Why analytics-driven marketing is the key to improving conversion rates and optimizing performance. - The Power of Responsiveness: How organization and quick client communication set agencies apart in competitive markets. - Strategic Acquisitions: What agency owners need to know before selling—and how to ensure cultural fit in M&A deals. - Providing Value for Free: How offering complimentary audits and insights can accelerate agency growth and client trust. Key Insights: - Use Data to Drive Growth: A strong analytics foundation helps agencies make informed decisions and improve client results. - Stay Financially Vigilant: Keeping a close eye on profitability and cash flow is essential for long-term agency success. - Client Experience Matters: Fast response times and clear organization can make or break your agency's reputation and retention. - Prepare for the Future: Whether scaling or selling, having a clear vision and strategy ensures your agency stays on the right track. The resources mentioned in this episode are: - Become the go-to authority in your perfect vertical market - Corey's 3-Month Intensive Program: http://coreyquinn.com/dsa - Check out Power Digital Marketing: https://powerdigitalmarketing.com - Check out Endrock Growth & Analytics: https://endrock.software - Connect with Ned on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ned-macpherson-3029a120 - The Evolution of Agency M&A: Why Specialists Command Higher Valuations with Todd Taskey: https://www.coreyquinn.com/podcasts/the-deep-specialization-podcast/episodes/2148948977

This episode is dedicated and in tribute to Ricky Lamont Boone. August 7, 1962-January 2, 2025.Music by Corey Quinn

Dr. David McCarty-Caplan (PhD) is a researcher, educator, writer, and consultant whose professional experience focuses on issues of identity development, support of underserved populations, racial equity, and pursuit of social justice. David was born in Bogota, Colombia but adopted and raised in a white Jewish family in the United States. This lived experience has profoundly shaped his personal and professional interests and he is increasingly involved in work dedicated to adoption consciousness and education, through research on and consulting with organizations, families and individuals working to explore adoption-related issues. He is particularly passionate about helping adoptees and their families navigate race/racism, religious identity, and sense of belonging.Websites: https://www.davidmccartycaplan.com/_files/ugd/0bdc61_f4e764d3d33e4ebb9f5f215bf0418cb5.pdfhttps://www.nuroots.org/davidMusic by Corey Quinn

AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 3, with Corey Quinn. Links:Amazon Connect reduces telephony pricing in VietnamAmazon EC2 announces Time-based Copy for AMIsAmazon Location Service now supports AWS PrivateLinkAnthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet is now available in Amazon BedrockAWS Batch now supports resource aware schedulingAWS Chatbot is now named Amazon Q DeveloperAWS CodePipeline introduces new console experience for viewing pipeline releasesYou can now use your China UnionPay credit card to create an AWS accountAccelerate Security Incident Response and Recovery with AWS Security Incident Response PartnersAmazon Web Services named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration ToolsMigrate very large databases to Amazon Aurora MySQL using MyDumper and MyLoaderAnnouncing CDK Garbage CollectionGenerate Code Documentation Using Amazon Q DeveloperByteDance processes billions of daily videos using their multimodal video understanding models on AWS Inferentia2Unlock deeper insights and faster investigations with AWS CloudTrail Lake

AWS Morning Brief for the week of February 24, with Corey Quinn. Links:Amazon ECS increases the CPU limit for ECS tasks to 192 vCPUsAmazon Q Developer now supports upgrade to Java 21AWS announces Backup Payment Methods for invoicesAWS CodePipeline adds native Amazon EKS deployment supportAWS Price List API supports AWS PrivateLinkAWS CloudFormation: 2024 Year in ReviewCost optimize your Minecraft Java EC2 ServerImproving Security in Amazon WorkMail with MFAUpdate on Support for Amazon ChimeBest practices to respond to security risks across your AWS OrganizationsReduce IT costs by implementing automatic shutdown for Amazon EC2 instancesHow to restrict Amazon S3 bucket access to a specific IAM roleIntroducing the AWS Trust CenterIs AWS Delivering on Its 3-Layer Approach to AI?