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Don’t Fade and Die in AI Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ Matt Yanchyshyn, VP AWS Marketplace, Rekha Thangelapalita, Elastic GSI Leaders; Allison McFadden, Accenture AWS Leader; and James Kang of Nvidia join Ultimate Partner. In this panel discussion, leaders from Elastic, Accenture, Nvidia, and AWS dissect the urgent shifts in the ecosystem, emphasizing that partners must adapt to AI and agentic co-selling or risk fading away completely. The conversation explores the necessity of deep co-engineering, the power of multi-product solutions in the AWS marketplace, and how automated agents are now replacing traditional human sales pipeline progression. By embracing data readiness and strategic collaboration, organizations can survive the “token maxing” era, effectively scale their enterprise opportunities, and align with NVIDIA’s five-layer strategy to dominate the new cloud landscape. https://youtu.be/zUkL4Wqsa68 Key Takeaways AI agents will automate the majority of AWS partner co-selling attachments and opportunity progressions this year. Partners who fail to embrace agentic workflows and automated governance face the existential risk of fading into obsolescence. Successful multi-product offerings require a “blood to all organs” approach that benefits the client, the ISV, the GSI, and the hyperscaler simultaneously. Nvidia’s “five-layer cake” model emphasizes that successful outcomes at the application layer automatically drive growth for all underlying infrastructure. The “token maxing” phenomenon is forcing enterprises to seek cost-effective, open-model alternatives to scale their generative AI securely. Integrating GSIs and ISVs on the AWS marketplace significantly increases enterprise deal sizes and long-term customer renewal rates. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags strategic collaboration agreement, data readiness engine, agentic co-sell, semantic layer, token maxing, five layer cake, accelerated computing platform, open models, cloud consumption, multi-product solutions, partner central agents, propensity data, automated opportunity progression, generative AI governance Transcript Matt Y and Panel Audio Podcast [00:00:00] Vince Menzione: You have a choice. You can embrace them and figure it out and get governance and, and make your data available. Um, use the partner, central agent, move to Agen Co-sell, or you can fade and die. [00:00:11] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:22] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi. Own your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:44] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because [00:00:46] Vince Menzione: being in the room changes everything. Let’s start. [00:00:51] Vince Menzione: We’ve got some amazing leaders joining us. So I think probably for a little bit of context, maybe just start with Rika. You can introduce yourself, your role and, uh, what, what you’ve been doing at Elastic. Yeah. [00:01:03] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah, sounds great. [00:01:04] Rekha Thangellapalli: Hi everyone. I’m Reka and I lead GSI Alliances at Elastic. Um, for the past 14 years, I’ve had the pleasure of building different kinds of partner ecosystems across companies such as SAP. MuleSoft, Salesforce, Coupa, and now Elastic. Um, I wanna thank Ultimate partner and Vince for having us here today. Thank you and the panel of these incredible speakers for joining me on stage. [00:01:31] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, very excited for the conversation today. [00:01:33] Vince Menzione: We love Elastic, and you’ve had some of your other leaders on stage at other events. As such, the quality of your leadership team is amazing. Thank you. [00:01:42] Rekha Thangellapalli: I wholeheartedly agree. [00:01:45] Allison McFadden: Excellent. Um, hello everyone. Allison McFadden. I lead our North America AWS practice at Accenture. [00:01:52] Allison McFadden: Uh, I’ve been there for five years, and truth be told, it was my first partnership role, my first formal partnership role. Uh, so I can take some tips from all of you in the room here today. Prior to that, I was 21 years with IBM, and I got into partnerships because my last role at IBM was actually trying to build. [00:02:14] Allison McFadden: Linux business on the mainframe, and I had to have partners. I had to have partners to help me with workloads to run there. So I kind of learned, uh, trial by fire. But I’m excited for the conversation today. Excited to be in this room and excited to talk about what we’re doing with, uh, elastic. Thank you. [00:02:34] James Kang: Uh, my name is James Kang. Nice to see and meet everyone here. Vince, thank you for the opportunity. Thank you [00:02:38] Vince Menzione: for being here. [00:02:39] James Kang: Um, I’m with Nvidia, so I help manage the AWS partnership at Nvidia all up. Um, I guess fun fact, I’m former AWS and so I see a lot of very familiar faces here in the front row. Uh, former colleagues and then current friends. [00:02:56] James Kang: And so, uh, looking forward to the conversation. [00:02:59] Vince Menzione: Great. Well, we’ll start with an easy tia. Matt. This is not directed to you, directed to the others. So what does a successful AWS partnership look like from your C? So we’ll start with Eureka. [00:03:09] Rekha Thangellapalli: Sure. So from an ISV perspective, I think we really are looking at three things. [00:03:15] Rekha Thangellapalli: Uh, mutual investment building together. And scaling together. So when we talk about mutual investment, elastic recently signed a five-year SCA or strategic collaboration agreement with AWS. And while that is a significant milestone in our partnership, for us, what matters more is what it represents, and that is really a long-term commitment from both companies. [00:03:39] Rekha Thangellapalli: Towards product engineering, um, and joint go to market initiatives to deliver value to customers over time. And that’s what we see is that the best partnerships really compound and they build upon each other every year. Um, they don’t necessarily kind of reset every year. Um, next we talk about building together. [00:03:59] Rekha Thangellapalli: So, um. When we talk about joint solutions, we want to deliver solutions that are better together and the customers have to see us that way. And so whether it’s search, observability, or security, we’re looking at taking to market solutions that we can’t or necessarily don’t wanna take on our own. And finally we talk about scaling together. [00:04:22] Rekha Thangellapalli: And this is where marketplace, for instance, plays a big role, um, when customers can draw down on their cloud commitments, transact online and go from, you know, pilot to enterprise scale adoption in hours, not days. Um, this is when really everyone wins. Um, and this is also where partners like Accenture play a critical role. [00:04:47] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, you know, the incredible amount of expertise that they bring, uh, the managed services capabilities and, um, their data assets actually play a huge role in having our customers realize that value faster. And, um, like Vince mentioned, at the end of the day, best partnerships are all all about creating kind of that. [00:05:07] Rekha Thangellapalli: Self-sustaining flywheel. And so it starts with investing together, building something unique, and having the customers realize that success faster because that success is really the only thing that’s gonna keep that flywheel going for everyone involved. I [00:05:26] Vince Menzione: absolutely. [00:05:26] Allison McFadden: Okay, amazing. I’m gonna riff off a few things Ika said, but from a GSI perspective. [00:05:32] Allison McFadden: A relationship with a WSA successful relationship with AWS looks slightly different. Um, so I think the first thing that we think of in the GSI Community common thread is that the client outcome and delivering value for clients is what we, what we’re striving for. Um, and so the partnership with AWS in that case, um, um, it has to, it has to. [00:06:01] Allison McFadden: Look like one team in front of our clients. So we have to show up indistinguishable, and that’s with AWS and with an ISV partner, it has to look like one solution in front of the client, especially moments that matter. So board meetings, um, you know, the time we’re gonna sign a deal, like we have to look like one team, uh, and keep our our client outcome, um, first and foremost in mind. [00:06:24] Allison McFadden: The second thing, and this is I think where the magic of all the people in this room comes into play. We can have as many discussions at a CEO level as we want. And if our client teams on the ground are not working together, it falls apart. Falls apart directly in front of the client. Yes. And that is a really hard thing to do. [00:06:45] Allison McFadden: So I’m passionate about the alliance work because that that work is what makes it happen at the corporate level. [00:06:53] James Kang: Cool. Um. I’ll start here. So in Nvidia is a accelerated computing platform company. Um, if you asked. Anyone on the, on the street about a year ago, what is ai? A lot of times they would say AI is, is open ai, or it’s philanthropic. [00:07:12] James Kang: Um, Jensen and I’ll, I’ll reference Jensen a lot today, um, because he is our leader, um, but he also sets the strategy in the direction for Nvidia. He talks a lot about AI in the metaphor of a five layer cake. And in terms of the five layer cake, you start off with the foundational bottom layer being power and energy, which sustains. [00:07:32] James Kang: All of our data centers, you move up the stack in terms of chips. So things think of Foxconn, think of TSMC. Next you have the infrastructure layer. So obvious choice is AWS, and then you get to the models where you do have the philanthropics and the open ais. But finally in at the precipice, you have the application layer. [00:07:53] James Kang: Ultimately, the reason why I mentioned all different stacks of the layers, the five layer cake, is the fact that the application layer is the most important. And so when you think about. Partners like Elastic or ServiceNow Trend, ai, CrowdStrike. Every time you pull from the application layer and you see a success, it pulls all five different components of that layer up. [00:08:13] James Kang: And so ultimately, as I think about success, it’s it’s being able to develop these co-sell wins at the application layer and really demonstrating that through extreme co-engineering and co-design with all the different application. Infrastructure, power and energy layers in mind. Um, Jensen also likes to think of himself not only as the CEO and founder, but also as the, the chief Marketing Officer. [00:08:35] James Kang: We are a very event driven company, and so at our big events like GTC or at big industry events like CES or Computex, he likes to show up on the biggest stage, biggest stages and showcase the partnerships with not only ISVs and GSIs, but also with end customers. And so that’s what I think about when I think of SA success. [00:08:56] Vince Menzione: That’s a really good point. You talked about, Allison, you talked about having an alliance strategy, or at least you teed it up, so I thought maybe we would go there for a second. Right? Like, what does a great alliance strategy look like and why is it important to the success of the partnership? [00:09:11] Allison McFadden: Man, I, uh, I have so many opinions on this. [00:09:13] Allison McFadden: We could probably be up here all day. That’s [00:09:15] Vince Menzione: okay. [00:09:16] Allison McFadden: Um, no, I think. Uh, there, there are a couple things, and the first one that comes to mind is focus. We cannot be all things to all people. Um, so when it comes to think about some of the, the work we’re doing with Elastic, we have a very, very clear point of view on what client problem we’re solving, what clients we want to talk to. [00:09:38] Allison McFadden: It helps if, um, from an ISV perspective, if there’s a very clear fit in. The Accenture portfolio or whatever, you know, SI consulting partner. You’re working with a very clear fit in the portfolio and we know what we’re not gonna go after, what we’re not gonna spend our time on because we have, we have this tendency, there’s millions of people. [00:10:00] Allison McFadden: The ecosystem chart that, you know, Vince, you showed up there, there’s so many connections. There’s probably more connections there than there are atoms in the universe, right? So, um. Defining what we do together and what we don’t do together is the first thing that pops to my mind. [00:10:19] Vince Menzione: Reka, do you have a perspective on it since we’re gonna, we’re gonna talk next about what you’ve done together, but, and I also wanna get mass perspective as a hyperscaler partner here as well. [00:10:29] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah, I mean from my perspective, I, I’m gonna, you know, kinda echo what Allison said is to be just maniacally focused. Yep. Um, because, especially from my perspective, so Elastic has three different solutions, right? We’ve got search, we’ve got observability, we’ve got security that map to completely different business units within Accenture. [00:10:47] Rekha Thangellapalli: And of course Accenture does a lot of things. And so, you know, when we first came together it was like. Okay, what are we gonna focus on? What industries are we gonna go after? Which segments are we gonna go after? Which customers, you know, um, outcomes are we trying to solve? And I think that sort of maniacal focus is the number one contributing factor to, to the fact that I’m like, up here on stage today. [00:11:12] Rekha Thangellapalli: Great. [00:11:14] Vince Menzione: Matt? Perspective? [00:11:16] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, I, I, I guess I was trying to. To add something, uh, additional from an AWS perspective, uh, when it comes to, you know, what does a great alliance look like? Uh, AWS is obsessed with data, you know, in data we trust. And, and so the best, um, and, and this goes sales business problem, and it’s not just the engineering teams. [00:11:34] Matt Yanchyshyn: And so, uh, you know, Accenture does a good job of this elastic, definitely. And if you can come to the table with, um, quantifiable proof of the value of customer outcomes and partnerships. Um, you’ll win all the time and it’ll be a durable relationship with AWS ’cause we really are this data obsessed company and, and even the most senior sales leaders. [00:11:54] Matt Yanchyshyn: Uh, and so what I mean by that specifically is like if you, if you can show like your a RR to land an a RR conversion ratio, like in in numerical format, it’ll light up our sales leaders and, and they’ll be all, and they will co-sell with you all day long. If you can show the, I mentioned this earlier, like the AWS service, uh, whether you’re consulting company or, um, elastic and, and how the shape of customer accounts change positively when we work together. [00:12:15] Matt Yanchyshyn: That type of sort of quantifiable data works particularly well from an alliance perspective. With AWS as a partner, we, we really are like this data in sort of results out company. Um, so I, yeah, that’s just adding to the great points that were already made. I would say specific to AWS that that’s key. [00:12:30] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah. And I’m gonna bring up one more thing. I want to dive in on the, the joint value proposition, but you mentioned something that made a lot of sense and resonated to me about the organizations once you get out of partner, the partner world that we all know and love. Mm-hmm. Once you get down into a field organization or account management organization. [00:12:49] Matt Yanchyshyn: Not as much understanding and really organizations do a bad job here, honestly, in terms of enabling the field organizations. Do you agree? [00:12:58] Allison McFadden: I agree because I, I agree. And, um, you know, I think that’s one of the things, and, and I, I, when I joined Accenture, what we had was a lot of wicked smart architects delivering programs to clients in the field. [00:13:15] Allison McFadden: Very smart, very deep in AWS knowledge. Um, and that was awesome for the 10 clients they were staffed on and to get that understanding of how AWS works and I dream about lar, right? Like, this is a good, you know, but that takes real effort and real work. Yeah. And it’s, it’s um, almost like being a language translator. [00:13:37] Allison McFadden: Yes. For me. Yeah. So, you know, I had to deeply learn AWS so that I could. [00:13:42] Rekha Thangellapalli: Sure. [00:13:42] Allison McFadden: Teach my account teams. My account teams are really smart. They know who they’re selling to. They know their customers. They know what their customers need. They do not know what AWS has to offer always because they’ve got 20 partners lining up to try to tell their stories. [00:13:57] Allison McFadden: Um, they don’t know how to ask of the AWS team or the elastic team or the Nvidia team. Yeah. What they need [00:14:02] Vince Menzione: this co-selling piece. Yeah. [00:14:04] Allison McFadden: And so that is where, um. We had to build that muscle even around our AWS practice, which was a huge practice at Accenture, but we didn’t necessarily surround it with that kind of enablement and um, almost deal coaching layer. [00:14:21] Vince Menzione: So Elastic and Accenture came together. I dunno which one of you wants to lead this part of the conversation, but you will, right? Yeah. So tell us about the genesis of this and why. And a lot of people dunno what Elastic does, but you do some really incredible work. Like I, somebody told me one day was like, oh, you know, Uber, like, that’s elastic, powering all that. [00:14:41] Vince Menzione: Like, we don’t think about that. That the engines that you have and the, the backend to the customers, huge customers. [00:14:48] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so when AWS launched this feature last, um, reinvent where basically it allowed, you know, channel partners such as Accenture to be able to bundle up their services, their data assets with an ISV solution and put it on marketplace, um, you know, Accenture and Elastic immediately saw an opportunity. [00:15:09] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, at the time most customers were doing gen ai. But they were running into the same challenge, which was that their data just was not ready. And by the way, this is a problem we were solving. Outside of marketplace. I think the, the feature that you guys launched just gave us a way to package it up and to be able to create this repeatable solution, which we call data readiness engine for gen ai and put it on marketplace. [00:15:40] Rekha Thangellapalli: And, um, this to me was a success because. Each company had a clear reason to invest. Um, so for Accenture, they were able to, you know, create a very differentiated services led offering. Uh, for Elastic, we were able to expand on our AI story. And for AWS, um, you know, it drives marketplace adoption, increases cloud consumption, all of that great stuff. [00:16:07] Rekha Thangellapalli: And customers, of course get. A solution to a very real problem that, that they were having. Um, and you know, the surprising part for me going through that journey was that, um. The pitching, the idea, getting the budget, getting the executive sponsorship was actually the easy part. The hard part was getting all three companies to come together, uh, to go from idea to launch in a very ambitious timeline of six weeks. [00:16:37] Rekha Thangellapalli: Nice. And so, you know, this was very much like. Doesn’t matter your title. We’re rolling up our sleeves and we are on this outcome together. Um, and so we literally built a RACI matrix, a project plan, and you know, we had daily standup calls for six weeks where literally. At least one person from each three of these companies called in, you know, got rid of any blockers and we made sure we were on target for that timeline. [00:17:07] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, and you know, at the end we had a successful launch. But I think my favorite part about the story is the impact that we’re having and, um. My favorite story comes from a global pharmaceutical company that, you know, had basically nine petabytes of data spread across six different continents. Wow. And by working with Accenture and Elastic, they were able to build that trusted foundation that their AI and their agents can, you know, kind of safely tap into and be accessible at scale. [00:17:41] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, so that’s my version. Allison. [00:17:44] Allison McFadden: Yeah. Well, I don’t have a lot to add. I just, I would say this is a good example of a couple of principles, right? One is having a forcing function is never a bad idea. Sign up for a big event, sign up. I’m like, I’m here with my, you know, Nvidia guys saying, sign up for the event. [00:17:58] Allison McFadden: It’ll make you move quick, right? [00:18:00] Audience Member: Yes. [00:18:00] Allison McFadden: Um, so that is one, but two, one of my mentors once told me, when you’re designing any kind of, you know, offering go to market motion, it has to get blood to all organs. If it does not get blood to all organs, it does not go [00:18:14] Vince Menzione: nice. [00:18:14] Allison McFadden: Um, [00:18:14] Vince Menzione: I love that analogy. [00:18:15] Allison McFadden: Oh, I love it. And I can talk all day. [00:18:17] Allison McFadden: That guy was brilliant. I love him. But, um, no, and, and so Elastic did a really nice job of bringing the tech to the table. Um, our team has to trust in that technology and its ability to scale, right? Um, because at Accenture we have to be able to deploy across 700,000 consultants. Um. And yeah, so I think those are the two, two things that really worked well here is we had, uh, trust in the technology solved a customer need. [00:18:50] Allison McFadden: Um, it drives, we don’t even talk about, like, yes, it drives marketplace revenue, but it unlocks work that we do that drives even more revenue to our AWS Friends. Right. So this is a, this is a, um, product that’s getting your data ready for AG agentic. It’s a messy problem that everyone’s dealing with, and it removes blockers for clients and it unlocks more, you know, ag agentic work on top of that. [00:19:15] Allison McFadden: So, blood to all organs. [00:19:17] Vince Menzione: So, was that the proposal going forward to say we need to have, we need to have trust in the solution. We need to drive significant revenue. It needs to be something all of our, you know, seven, 700,000 people. Can be a part of and help drive? Is that how you think about? [00:19:32] Allison McFadden: Yeah, and for us right now, um, it’s an interesting time for Accenture. [00:19:36] Allison McFadden: Our clients are asking a lot of us, and what it does is it having some of these accelerators helps us deliver cheaper, better, faster to our clients, which is what they’re demanding of us right now. Um, so it’s an accelerator to client outcomes. [00:19:55] Vince Menzione: James, what is NVIDIA’s role and how do, how do you enter the equation here? [00:20:00] James Kang: Yeah, it’s, um, it’s a good question. Um, I, I would say that Nvidia is probably one of the most misunderstood organizations in the world. Um, despite the, uh, the market capitalization in the valuation of the company, we have a very tiny organization. Um, what I mean by that is, um, if you think about. [00:20:20] James Kang: Salesforces and field sales organizations. Um, we’ll take Salesforce as the account or the customer. As an example, we have one account manager at NVIDIA that no, not only covers and is responsible for the relationship with Salesforce, um, but also manages. Automation Anywhere as well as DocuSign. Whereas at AWS, in contrast, like there are full armies and teams Yeah. [00:20:45] James Kang: That are supporting the Salesforce relationship. And so as you think about partnering and working with Nvidia, the focus has to be on really. Extreme co-design, but also being very prescriptive in terms of what are the very specific customer outcomes that we are solving for. And the guidance that I would give is bring in Nvidia into that equation and that conversation as early as possible because that [00:21:10] James Kang: co-engineering and co-design needs to be part of the foundational building blocks in order for you to come out with a end solution that checks all those different requirements. [00:21:20] James Kang: And so I think. Again, like going back to Nvidia, um, we like to talk about two different types of brains. A brain one and a brain two. Uh, brain One you think about the next quarter and making sure that you’re hitting the revenue targets for the next quarter. Brain two, you think about a long-term goals and potentials looking around corners and being very strategic. [00:21:41] James Kang: The saying internally is without Brain one, there is no oxygen, but without brain two, there is no future. And everyone at NVIDIA is trained to think in that brain two mentality. [00:21:52] Vince Menzione: Wow, Matt. [00:21:54] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, I, I was just thinking I love the blood doll organs. Uh, and so just on, on that note, um, and, and, you know, the multi-product solutions that, that you, you built together, uh, that is a really good example of blood do organs because like we all know, that’s how customers buy. [00:22:07] Matt Yanchyshyn: They, they buy solutions and increasingly they’re looking for combinations of ISV, sometimes multiple products from multiple ISVs with services. Uh, often they’re buying it through a resell motion. You know, and they, and, and so that from a customer perspective, they want a single place to go. And so that’s the multi-product solution. [00:22:24] Matt Yanchyshyn: They wanna find everything they need, they need Accenture, they need Elastic to solve a specific solution. And I think where that’s headed is even more specific listings, like with AI powered listing experience, like, you know, elastic Plus Accenture for, I’ll make something up like a manufacturing workload. [00:22:37] Matt Yanchyshyn: And so this solution based. Uh, sort of buying is, is very customer centric. It’s what customers want. We all know that. But that’s, that’s the customer sort of organ, I guess. Um, but then, you know, you all have SCAs and those SCAs have marketplace commits. It helps if that gets transacted through marketplace helps the AWS relationship, you know that that’s an organ. [00:22:55] Matt Yanchyshyn: It’s the relationship. It’s, it’s the commercial construct and that you have, uh, that that’s another organ. You’re marketing people. They, that’s another organ. They don’t wanna land, uh, leads on a static marketing page. They wanna land a lead on a, a storefront with a multi-product solution that can actually convert and that you can actually buy it through that. [00:23:12] Matt Yanchyshyn: So the marketing person’s happy because they, they have less churn. Uh, and then, you know, our reps are happy ’cause guess how they get paid? They retire quota when they sell Marketplace. And they, we also, Jay McMain will tell you, that’s another organ called Jay or on, on you now. Um, [00:23:27] Matt Yanchyshyn: he’ll like that. I’ll call him up and tell him that. [00:23:29] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, [00:23:30] Matt Yanchyshyn: but he, he’ll tell you, you know, don’t believe me. Obviously, never believe Matt, believe, believe the, the data and, and his data shows that. Those deals will close faster and larger if you use marketplace. So that’s, that’s a lot of organs. That’s the whole body. Um, but you know, when you have your customer happy ’cause that’s how they wanna buy your field happy. [00:23:45] Matt Yanchyshyn: Um, and, you know, the relationship happy and you know, your marketing team happy. Uh, and, and Jay happy. Um, and, and you know, I think that multi-product construct and, and the way you kind of use it to model a partnership and the way buyers ultimately wanna buy is, is really powerful. And so I, I think it’s, you know, it’s really a manifestation of how. [00:24:04] Matt Yanchyshyn: We kind of intend and to go to market anyway. Uh, so I think, you know, and thanks for leading the way, by the way. You’re, you’re amongst the very first, so that’s great to see. [00:24:11] Matt Yanchyshyn: So these storefronts are really helping this drive, drive this. Well, [00:24:13] Matt Yanchyshyn: that’s the next evolution. Like we’re talking about the multiproduct solution. [00:24:16] Allison McFadden: I’m JJ Accenture storefront. [00:24:17] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Oh, there you go. I mean, j and j Accenture storefront. [00:24:20] Allison McFadden: We’re gonna talk about that. [00:24:20] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah. I mean, [00:24:21] Matt Yanchyshyn: Accenture also leading the way yet again with storefronts. And so I think the combination of. You know, again, I was talking a lot about conversion. Yeah. And you know, buyers know sometimes they know what they wanna buy and, but if you really wanna convert that lead, you wanna land them again, something that combines, you know, elastic Accenture’s services plus software, but in a storefront that is, you know, surrounding with just the solutions they want so they don’t need to kind of go searching. [00:24:42] Matt Yanchyshyn: So, you know, ultimately reducing that time to close, I guess, really ’cause meeting the customer where they are with what they need. [00:24:51] Matt Yanchyshyn: So we talk about co-selling a little bit. We, Jay and I talk about this all the time. We gotta keep looping Jay in here, even though he is not even in town this week, but Reko, um, what does co-sell look like inside Elastic? [00:25:02] Matt Yanchyshyn: You’ve got, we talked about an incredible leadership team. I’ve gotten meet some of your leaders. Seems like you drive, you do a good job internally driving that. Let’s talk a little bit about it. [00:25:11] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah, and this is something I’m, I’m personally very passionate about. Um, co-sell is. Very much a journey, not a destination. [00:25:20] Rekha Thangellapalli: And I think step one for us is recognizing the different partner types that we have. Because at Elastic we work with, you know, OEMs, MSPs, resale distributors, GSIs, um, and they all bring something very unique. To the customer lifecycle and they all contribute very differently within, you know, our own sales cycle and sales process. [00:25:45] Rekha Thangellapalli: And so, you know, figuring out what is the unique benefit they bring, how do we enable them? So training and enablement is a huge piece of it, and so is making sure we’ve got the right metrics to measure success. Um, I know a lot of companies look at partner sourced as the north star, and that’s great, right? [00:26:06] Rekha Thangellapalli: Because that is undeniable. You can say, Hey, that would not exist if it wasn’t for my partner team. Um, but we’ve also noticed that when we bring in GSIs, it actually increases renewal rates. It significantly increases. Um, a RR over time. Um, it expands deal sizes and so these are very real metrics that we can point to, um, beyond just the co-sell and the partner sourced number. [00:26:32] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, so for us it’s looking at it from a very holistic perspective, but also catering it towards that unique partner and making sure we’re doing everything we can to set them up for success and setting up the partnership for success. [00:26:47] Vince Menzione: So clo close win ratios, deal size and renewal rates? [00:26:52] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yes. For specifically for geos size. [00:26:54] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah. [00:26:55] Vince Menzione: Very interesting. Allison, uh, what had to change internally to produce these co-selling? We talked a little bit about the field organization and enabling a, a group of, and, you know, account sellers that are very customer focused and enabling them on the co-sell side. What had to change internally to drive that? [00:27:13] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:27:14] Allison McFadden: I, I might have already alluded to this a little bit in a previous answer, but, um, creating the capacity to develop, build, and sell these solutions, um, inside of a large GSI, where billable hours is kind of the number one metric on the table. Um. Is part of the investment that we had to make within Accenture to get this done? [00:27:36] Audience Member: Yeah, [00:27:36] Allison McFadden: so expert technology time. So we have technologists that understand the elastic technology. We do similar with Nvidia, by the way, we. We released some of their time to go co-develop the solution because it has to hold technical water, right? It can’t just be a marketing pitch. It can’t just be, it has to be a real, um, what’s the there, there. [00:27:59] Allison McFadden: So in order to actually do proper co-sell, we had to release some of that time. Um, to invest in those partnerships. Um, we’ve also done similar with some industry aligned business development leaders recently, so we have freed their time up to go. Uh. Open new conversations, educate client, account teams, go to clients, have conversations. [00:28:26] Allison McFadden: Um, so that, that’s a new motion that we, uh, have just kind of recently made, um, to allow them, I love this brain one, brain two also, right? So to allow them to focus on brain two, because a lot of our time. Typically spent delivery issues, you know, getting my hours, where am I charging my time? And so just freeing up a little of that capacity to do this work, um, helps get us in this brain two mode where we’re not just living to survive. [00:28:56] Vince Menzione: I. So, Matt, you’ve removed a lot. I mean, one of the things I admire, I admire AWS for being first to market and removing the most friction in marketplace of any of the vendors. Really, truly that. You talked about some of the announcements. How does some of, how does some of this tie PC central agents propensity sales plays, MCP, how does some of this tie to how, how you’re thinking about the future? [00:29:18] Vince Menzione: And how to enable more motions like this. [00:29:20] Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah. Well, I, I think if you know my boss, UBA Borno, uh, you’ll know that she has a maniacal focus on automation. Yeah. Um, and, uh, co-sell is increasingly automated. You know, you were asking earlier about propensity data. You can get that propensity data in addition to sales plays and, uh, opportunity scores through the partner central agents. [00:29:38] Matt Yanchyshyn: So things that used to require multiple calls to A PDM, if you’re lucky to have one. Yeah. Or a p sm. Uh, you, you can now get through, through these agents, you know, uh, tech Systems, TGS, they, they manage what, over 5,500 customer opportunities with agents that they built on top of our partner Central APIs. [00:29:55] Matt Yanchyshyn: Um, and work Span has built a whole product and business that’s right on leveraging, uh, our APIs, our capabilities to sort of tie into your CRM. So, majority of all opportunities will be progressed and managed by agents. This year at AWS, we already have a majority of all customer opportunities, all app have a partner attached and I, I took a personal goal for a majority of those partner attachments, not to happen from a human. [00:30:22] Matt Yanchyshyn: But from our solution matching engine. And how do you get recommended by that solution? Matching engine, having a healthy ACE pipeline, thanks to partner central agents and the integrations you’re doing. And in addition to being the specializations and doing things like multi-product solutions and ultimately closing opportunities, you dream of LAR and so LAR will help that. [00:30:40] Allison McFadden: It’s more like a nightmare. [00:30:41] Vince Menzione: And so, you know, [00:30:42] Allison McFadden: it’s more like a nightmare, but [00:30:44] Vince Menzione: nightmare. Well, it’s, it’s, yeah. Nightmare of Laura and, and. Nice dreams of PRM, but the, um, but that’s the loop, right? I, I think, uh, increasingly co-sell for us, and in my mind, is largely a hundred percent automated. Yeah. Except for what matters most, those most largest, most strategic, most complex deals. [00:31:01] Vince Menzione: Where our highly paid and very skilled salespeople are most effectively used. [00:31:05] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:31:05] Vince Menzione: You know, the days of, you know, this person with 20 years experience selling, clicking, progressing opportunities through a pipeline, uh, should be over. Uh, and, and we need those people out, out selling and, and co-selling. And so that for me. [00:31:19] Vince Menzione: Yeah. That, you know, we talk a lot about co-sell, but I, I’m obsessed with automating as much of the co-sell as possible. [00:31:24] Vince Menzione: I remember going back to the ex Excel spreadsheets and, and that, that seems to be be Viva became spreadsheet jockeys. [00:31:31] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:31:32] Vince Menzione: And, and they stopped selling. They forgot how to sell. [00:31:34] Vince Menzione: Yeah. And people spend all this time doing lunch and learns and things like that. [00:31:36] Vince Menzione: And then, you know. Then the salespeople rotate out after 18 months and, and it, that’s, that’s the old days. Uh, you know, the new days are, are AI powered matching algorithms, uh, ag agentic co-sell, using the partner essential agents to get your data and, and putting that data to use automatically and, and what sounded like magic. [00:31:51] Vince Menzione: 12 months ago is being done, you know, by partners at massive scale across thousands of opportunities. You can do it today. And you know, I, there’s a guy named another Mike, right? Mike another Mike who they have, there’s like a guy who’s doing all this and I’m picking on Mike ’cause I, I know their system really well and I know the guy Mike grew easily built it for them. [00:32:08] Vince Menzione: Um, but, you know, I think, yeah, again, in the days of having 10 people sort of doing lunch and learn could be replaced by one or two people, building agents, uh, managing a massive pipeline. And, and that’s the future. [00:32:18] Vince Menzione: Exactly. James, your perspective on what breaks with co-selling? [00:32:22] James Kang: Oh, what breaks co-sell? Um, I would say. [00:32:25] James Kang: It, it starts and finishes with just misalignment and a loss of trust with the customer, especially when you have multiple partners or stakeholders involved. If you’re trying to do a three-way deal with a end customer and you’re not on the same page, you’re not gonna get to a successful outcome on, on the backend. [00:32:44] James Kang: Uh, the fix is a much more complicated story. I would say that to take a step back, um. We’ve talked about the five layer cake. We’ve talked about where NVIDIA kind of fits within the equation. We are invested in the ecosystem and so as different players and application organizations win and see these outcomes for end customers, we celebrate that success. [00:33:07] James Kang: Um, and as part of that kind of ethos of where NVIDIA fits within the ecosystem, we wanna make sure that not only. Our customers, but our partners like ISVs and GSIs are set up for success. Um, we do not as Nvidia sell hardware or GPUs directly to customers We use. Hyperscalers like AWS as kind of our force multiplier. [00:33:31] James Kang: And similarly we think of ISVs and GSIs as the force multipliers in terms of our extensions of how we, we kind of leverage the relationships and build the trust with our end customers. And so going back to kind of the question, Vince, I would say that it all comes back to trust and being able to build that mutual trust. [00:33:48] James Kang: Um, a lot of what we do when we co-sell with AWS is really on the software layer. Um, we actually have more software engineers at NVIDIA than we have hardware engineers, which is a weird thing to say, um, because everyone knows us for our GPUs. But because of that fact, we are heavily invested in Cuda and making sure that Cuda becomes the foundational layer for how not only our ISVs and GSIs, but also our end customers are building. [00:34:12] Vince Menzione: Very cool. So Reiki, you and James together on this production. Versus pilot with the Gentech ai. Tell us a little bit more about that. Where, where are you in the process? [00:34:24] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah. So I mean, in general, what we’re seeing out in the market in, in relation to sort of AI and, and customer’s journeys is that, um, at least from an elastic perspective, um, we’re seeing people very much in production when it comes to, you know, kind of AI assistant co-pilot use cases. [00:34:42] Rekha Thangellapalli: So, you know, things like, um, software development, customer support is a big one. Um, any sort of employee productivity use cases where there’s. Still a human in the loop somewhere. Um, and there’s a very like, clear path to value. And so we see the customers being in production excelling there. Um, no problem. [00:35:01] Rekha Thangellapalli: Where we’re seeing people still kind of in the pilot phase is those fully autonomous workflows where there is no human involved. The agent is reasoning on its own. Um, accessing multiple systems and taking an action on the user’s behalf. And what we’re seeing is that it’s not the intelligence of the agent that’s holding it back. [00:35:26] Rekha Thangellapalli: It’s more about giving the right context to the agent and having the right. Security kind of governance controls in place for the company to feel comfortable in putting these fully autonomous workflows into production. And that’s really the conversation we’re having is all right, what are the controls you need in place? [00:35:47] Rekha Thangellapalli: For you to release this to your business unit. Um, and what is the context that the agent is needed before we can comfortably let the agent make the decision on the user’s behalf? Um, James, I’d be interested to hear what you’re, what you’re seeing in the market [00:36:03] James Kang: plus one on all things context. I, I would even go so far as to say, um. [00:36:09] James Kang: H how many folks in the audience have heard of token maxing? Like this new term? [00:36:13] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah. Yeah. [00:36:14] James Kang: Um, I’ll, I’ll give a very specific example of, of Uber that went public. With the example of Claude, like they allowed all of their employees to use as many tokens as possible, and within the span of four months, they exhausted their full budget for the year, and so they had to pull back, and now there’s a cap on every employee. [00:36:33] James Kang: I think the number that’s circulating is $1,500 per month per employee, and so I think that is at least. In this multi-phase evolution of where we’re going to be and where we’re today, cost has become kind of the prohibitive force in terms of agentic AI at scale. Um, I think we are working on some very creative solutions in-house and Nvidia. [00:36:55] James Kang: Um. And we saw some really dynamic announcements this week when it comes to all things agent core, um, where we want to focus on very nimble ways for customers to be able to execute and go to market. And one extreme example of that is our investment within our open model strategy. So Nvidia, not only, again, providing GPUs, we actually offer our own op open models, which we call our Nitron models. [00:37:21] James Kang: And through our Nitron models, we are allowing customers to really develop and fine tune their own proprietary models in a cost effective manner. So right alongside the frontier models like OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s not a if then, it’s not an either or statement. It’s a, it’s a permutation, it’s an and So we’re giving you a cost effective alternative to not only bring your AgTech applications at scale by training on Nibo tron, which is open source, but then once you’ve kind of finished and fine tuned that specific training job to be able to. [00:37:53] James Kang: Go ahead and utilize your frontier models, whether it be OpenAI or Claude. And I know there’s other partners here that are providing those kind of different model capabilities. And so I think for us it’s, it’s a matter of choice. We know that this market is dynamic. It’s gonna be evolving over the next coming months as well as the next coming years. [00:38:10] James Kang: Uh, but we believe that we are positioned for a really unique dynamic expansion of AgTech use cases over the, at least the next three to six months. [00:38:20] Vince Menzione: Allison, for the partners in the room who are glazed over right now going, what do I, what do I do over the next 12 months? [00:38:26] Allison McFadden: Should I wake everybody up by saying, yeah, please. [00:38:27] Allison McFadden: Say go hurricanes. [00:38:28] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:38:29] Allison McFadden: Is there anyone, anybody? Everyone’s like, boo. I get to leave the parade today to go home to parade. I live in Raleigh, so we’ve got our parade on Saturday. Nice. [00:38:39] Vince Menzione: Nice. [00:38:40] Allison McFadden: All right. Wake up. Um, all right. So for the $50 million partners in the room, um. $50 million is not small. You have something that works. [00:38:50] Allison McFadden: Right. This is great. What I would be thinking about is, you know, we’ve talked about focus before, but really doubling down on, you know, what is, what is your industry, what is your client like, ideal client that you serve. And build, um, almost that kind of community. You know, the, the clients we have move from firm to firm to firm. [00:39:17] Allison McFadden: And if you’ve done good work at one, you’re gonna follow ’em to the next. Um, so build that client demand in a specific place or specific client profile that is just like really knocking it out out of the park for you. Um. Scale with marketplace, right? So if you, I, I love some of the data that you were sharing in your talk earlier, um, because it’s like no overhead scaling mechanism. [00:39:45] Allison McFadden: I mean, it’s, it’s fantastic. Um, Accenture, other GSIs like us, we are investing in marketplace. So we’re investing in resources, um, to help us. Use marketplace more with our clients and we’re gonna capture, right, those storefronts. And if you’re present on marketplace, you’re gonna be able to catch, uh, yourself in that wheel. [00:40:09] Allison McFadden: So I think those are the, the kind of couple of things I would say is focus, focus, focus to drive that client demand and use scaling mechanisms like marketplace to really kind of, uh, accelerate. [00:40:24] Vince Menzione: Matt, anything to add there on the. [00:40:26] Vince Menzione: Well just, you know, Ja, James, you, I love the token maxing reference in Uber and it reminds me, you remember when cloud came out and everyone was like, oh, all these people are, are gonna use the cloud and costs are outta control and. [00:40:39] Vince Menzione: Um, a lot of people pulled back from the cloud and, and a lot of those companies no longer exist. And it’s similar with, with, uh, token maxing, like, oh, these agents are outta control. You have a choice. You can embrace them and figure it out and get governance and, and make your data available. Um, use the partner, central agent, move to agent to co-sell, or you can fade and die. [00:40:58] Vince Menzione: And, and that’s, that’s where we’re at. Uh, is, is the, the companies sitting here today embraced the cloud years ago and won. Uh, and and there’s a set of companies here today who are gonna embrace agents in the, for both buyers and sellers, and will win. And there are those who won’t and they won’t win. And so for me, it’s like we’re, we’re at a, we’re at a crossroads. [00:41:18] Vince Menzione: And, and if you’re gonna win, you gotta leap into that, you know? I love it. And, uh, and, and, and it’s, it means the cost of experimentation is so much lower now. Development and, and even business development or software development is, is agent enabled. And so you can take risks, you can experiment and, and you have to, it’s, it’s an existential moment. [00:41:37] Vince Menzione: Agreed. We’ve got a couple minutes left over for any questions. What do you think? Sure. Are there any here. I think there are a couple. Yeah, we’ve got, we’ve got a co-sell question I’m sure coming up here. [00:41:51] Audience Member: Um, I’m Cassandra, I’m the CEO of Partner Tap. And one of the questions I had was, I think, you know, the co-selling between the sellers is where things get. Really, really hard when you’re multi-partner. And so when I was listening, um, with, you know, the Accenture and Elastic together, you talked about how you had, you, you had to get these BD business development people. [00:42:22] Audience Member: Um, is this a new team that is over the client team? And how do these teams interact like with the elastic sellers? Are you doing a lot of coaching to the field and then with if AWS sellers are, are involved, like what is that whole picture? What does look like, [00:42:43] Allison McFadden: like [00:42:44] Audience Member: on the ground? I mean, that is the hardest part, I think, and that’s what we hear. [00:42:48] Allison McFadden: It’s so, it’s so, it’s so tough. Um, and I will, I’ll just say, so our business development leaders that we now have kind of. Expanded their capacity. They have always been, they have always been there. Um, but they have not been well resourced. They haven’t, they haven’t had very clear kind of job description. [00:43:12] Allison McFadden: I’m gonna say I, in the past they have been kind of focused on partner relationship. And so like more like an alliance manager and maybe working on some of the data. Right? So when I say I have nightmares about Lars, because we’re always trying to increase the LAR for Accenture and, and they were focused like in those detailed weeds of like trying to pass ACE and trying to call the PDM and all this stuff. [00:43:39] Allison McFadden: What we are doing is really pivoting them to be proper sales, business development focused on client outcomes and focused on. Technical skills to be able to describe what this solution is to the field. So, um, and because we need, I have many, many questions about, I gotta get agents to work with Eurogen co-sell so that that part somehow goes away. [00:44:05] Allison McFadden: So that’s a, that’s the thing we gotta solve still, but, um, so we’re pivoting them to be kind of driving. More of that co-sell enablement with the field, um, and taking that message to the field rather than being there, waiting for questions to come in from the field, waiting for like our field teams to discover, oh, I saw something that we’re doing with Elastic, like on a press release on LinkedIn. [00:44:30] Allison McFadden: Right. So we’re kind of trying to pivot them to be more proactive. [00:44:33] Vince Menzione: Very cool. [00:44:34] Rekha Thangellapalli: Yeah. And uh, Cassandra, that’s an excellent question because I think. Multi-party, you know, sort of tri-party offerings. The hardest part is operationalizing it at scale, right? Yeah. And so for this particular offering, we are basically having three routes to market. [00:44:51] Rekha Thangellapalli: So one is seeing how this offering fits into our existing elastic go to market. And so I am constantly enabling our field sellers to say, okay, within our three field sales place, here’s exactly where this fits in. Here are, you know, uh. Keywords that you hear in customer conversations where you bring up this offering and here’s a process of how it works. [00:45:14] Rekha Thangellapalli: Um, exactly At what sales stage do I bring in Accenture, how, you know, what are the roles and expectations? Right? So that’s on the elastic side. We’re doing the same thing on the Accenture side. So we’re doing a ton of training enablement and lunch and learns, and we’re also looking at how do we fit into. [00:45:31] Rekha Thangellapalli: Uh, Accenture’s AI transformation projects, we are the semantic layer, right, of their enterprise brain. And so it’s a whole different sales motion, um, and, you know, having the right assets, having the right process again to make sure that that goes smoothly. And then finally, we’re going directly to the customer. [00:45:49] Rekha Thangellapalli: So we are launching multiple external campaigns where, you know, if the customer raises their hand. We will, we will line up immediately. Right. Um, and so, [00:46:01] Allison McFadden: I mean, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t say how important that third leg of the stool is. ’cause the second part, she talked about getting into our catalog is the first thing. [00:46:09] Allison McFadden: ’cause my BU business development leaders have the catalog. Right. And that’s what they’re selling. So what Elastic has done has gotten into one of those offerings and then. If we have a customer that asks for it, that is the fastest way to alignment. That is like the number one thing that we respond to [00:46:26] Vince Menzione: customer at the center. [00:46:27] Vince Menzione: This is great. Well, I think we’re up to time. This was a great session. I want to thank you. This is what a great, what a great group. [00:46:34] Vince Menzione: Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated, share it with a partner leader in your network. Subscribe where [00:46:43] Vince Menzione: you listen, and head over to the ultimate partner.com. [00:46:47] Vince Menzione: For show notes related content and the resources for this episode. And if you haven’t already, now’s the time to register for the Ultimate Partner Live Event in Reston, Virginia, October 26th through October 28th. Until next time, keep showing up in the rooms that matter because being in the room changes everything [00:47:09] I.

Don’t let the AI wave crush you. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX: https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ Dive into the seismic shifts happening within the AWS Marketplace and discover how AI, self-service product-led growth (PLG), and advanced co-selling strategies are redefining partner success. Matt Yanchyshyn, VP of Marketplace at AWS breaks down the recent announcements from the summit, illustrating how agility and adaptation are crucial to surviving the new agentic future. From lowering professional services fees to the explosion of business applications like ServiceNow, this conversation reveals the hidden mechanics of modern cloud procurement and how you can position your organization to capture massive enterprise opportunities before your competitors do. https://youtu.be/gaWxU1kgCLk Key Takeaways Adapting to the new agentic future requires agility rather than fighting the influx of AI tools. Lowering the listing fee for professional services from 2.5% to 0.5% drastically improves partner economics. Organizations without a self-service or PLG motion on the marketplace are literally leaving money on the table. Millennial buyers increasingly initiate complex enterprise procurements through self-service and AI-driven research. New AI-powered opportunity scoring empowers partners to prove their value internally and to AWS. Marketplace success hinges on optimizing metadata for AI agents, not just traditional SEO. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags: AWS Marketplace, agentic workflow, med pick scoring, phoenix.ai, Cara Cloud, branded storefronts, product-led growth strategy, intrinsic value boost, SaaS evolution, self-service motion, Databricks credit model, Trend Micro companion app, MCP servers, opportunity score tracking, PPA drawdown, concurrent agreements, AAMI structural debt, CXML procurement Transcript: Matt Y Audio Podcast [00:00:00] Matt Y: The ability to adapt with change and kind of roll with punches. ’cause a lot of people are saying like, agents are gonna destroy everything. And, and the opposite has been true. [00:00:08] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. [00:00:19] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host. And each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology, partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:42] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. [00:00:46] Matt Y: Let’s start. [00:00:50] Vince Menzione: And now on to the really important stuff. So, Matt, I don’t wanna butcher it ’cause I, a couple people have told me how to pronounce your last name and they said use the word magician and you’ll get close to it. But I’m just gonna introduce you as Matt Wy and I’m gonna ask you to pronounce your name on stage, but I want to have you join us. [00:01:08] Vince Menzione: So excited to have Matt wy. After a super busy day and night last night, come over from Brooklyn and join us today. Matt, so great to have you. Thanks. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Alright, so pronounce your name for us. [00:01:23] Matt Y: Anyone wanna guess? Ian’s? It’s like magician. [00:01:27] Vince Menzione: It’s not that hard, [00:01:28] Matt Y: it’s not that [00:01:28] bad, [00:01:28] Vince Menzione: but I don’t wanna butcher. [00:01:29] Vince Menzione: I wanted to let you do it. Good. [00:01:30] Matt Y: What calls me Matt White. [00:01:31] Vince Menzione: That’s great. [00:01:32] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:01:32] Vince Menzione: So 13 years. [00:01:34] Matt Y: Four coming up on 14 next month. Yeah. [00:01:36] Vince Menzione: Wow. Congratulations. Yeah. So you’ve been there, you’ve been there since the early days. And we, we had a conversation. I had some Microsoft, former Microsoft colleagues. Uh, Theresa Carlson, for those of you who knew the public sector business. [00:01:48] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Who started, I mean, Andy came out, it was so funny because I was there and she was hosting Andy for a dinner and with all the CIOs of the federal government. [00:01:57] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:01:58] Vince Menzione: And she was still at Microsoft and it was actually kind of an interesting time. And she came over and did a lot of great things for a number of years. [00:02:04] Matt Y: Yeah. She [00:02:05] Vince Menzione: and a lot of great [00:02:05] Matt Y: business. [00:02:06] Vince Menzione: Yeah. She really like, it went from employee number one to 7,000. [00:02:09] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:02:09] Vince Menzione: And you, you were, you’ve been there all that whole time. Pretty much. [00:02:12] Matt Y: Yeah, I guess when I started in New York, just down the road, we were, uh, in a Regis facility. There were like 11 of us in, uh, just sitting around a table and we had to speak quietly sometimes because there was a, um. [00:02:21] Matt Y: Some type of a financial services organization down the hall and they’d listen to try and get stock tips on Amazon. Yeah, [00:02:28] Vince Menzione: I love it. [00:02:29] Matt Y: Never leaked. That’s [00:02:29] Vince Menzione: good. I love it. [00:02:30] Matt Y: Yeah, [00:02:30] Vince Menzione: you probably got some great stories and, um, we won’t have time for today ’cause I wanna leave some room for conversations on marketplace end questions. [00:02:38] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:02:38] Vince Menzione: But I would love to invite you back for a real, like, in-depth podcast and I would love to get the whole genesis story. [00:02:44] Matt Y: Let’s do it. [00:02:45] Vince Menzione: We’ll do it. Okay, so let’s talk about, let’s talk about yesterday for you. Uh, some, some really big announcements as well. I thought maybe you could recap a little bit of what’s been going on in the marketplace business and it’s an, it’s been an exciting time. [00:02:58] Matt Y: Yeah. Yeah. You know what’s, I think what was really nice yesterday is it was sort of the combination of bringing, uh, our partner services like Partner Central and all those other services together closer to marketplace. We’ve been doing that over, over several years. So Marketplace has some of its own. [00:03:12] Matt Y: Big announcements, like, uh, we have a, we formalized our list and sell initiative. For example. We have a new, so it we essentially reducing the cost, uh, to list on marketplace through a partner program. [00:03:22] Vince Menzione: Yep. [00:03:22] Matt Y: And incentives associated with that. We have a new AI powered listing experience, which I think is particularly important ’cause I think many of you are like me and watching your SEO numbers go down and watching your agent traffic go up. [00:03:33] Matt Y: And so having, uh, an AI assistance in marketplace to optimize your listings for not just to, you know, retain what you can of your SEO, but prepare for the newent future and improve your GEO as we’re calling it. So that, [00:03:45] Vince Menzione: so it’s GEO now? [00:03:46] Matt Y: Yeah. You know, there’s a little debate right now in the acronym Moral A A EO versus GO I’m going, I’m on the G team, so, yeah. [00:03:52] Vince Menzione: Alright. GEO [00:03:54] Matt Y: It’s like the, the, yeah, they’re gonna win. They’re like the Knicks, but the, um, [00:03:57] Vince Menzione: yeah, yeah, exactly. [00:03:57] Matt Y: But yeah, so AI assisted, uh, I mean, making. The most of, like, essentially marketplace is an excellent conversion engine. And so using AI to help improve that conversion engine in the form of your PDPs for both humans and agents. [00:04:08] Matt Y: So that was an exciting launch. Um, I got the most applause when I announced that. We lowered, we made the economics better for, uh, consulting offers professional services, nice to marketplace. We lowered the listing fee from 2.5 to, to 0.5% and wow, it goes even lower in certain circumstances. So just improving the economics. [00:04:24] Matt Y: I’m really excited to. Really partner with a lot of you to reinvent services through, through the marketplace like we did with SAS and other areas. Uh, and we’re doing with agents right now. So that was a big one. And then a whole series of announcements around, um, how we’re making it easier and more cost effective and more efficient to partner with AWS. [00:04:41] Matt Y: So using AI to, uh, using med pick scoring to automatically progress opportunities so you don’t have to kind of wait on a human. To, to click and progress, you know, that that can take days. And, uh, if you, if you wanna have an opportunity and have that be cos sold with AWS, that can be through a mix of agents for the long tail and with humans in the, in the sort of top end and more complex. [00:05:00] Matt Y: And allowing AI to help all the partners improve their opportunity quality so that we can better co-sell together. So. Yeah, I said AI a lot intentionally. Um, [00:05:09] Audience Guest: yeah, [00:05:10] Matt Y: AI sort of in the whole cycle for buyers, for sellers, uh, for operational efficiency, cost of sales. So a lot of announcements. I think I hit the big ones, so yeah. [00:05:18] Matt Y: I’m Might have missed something there. There we go. [00:05:21] Vince Menzione: George. [00:05:21] Matt Y: Oh, and storefront. Yeah. Thanks George. See, I look at George to see what I missed. Uh, we, we acquired a great company called phoenix.ai late last year. Okay. And you, you actually were said Caresoft and Yeah. Be down. Uh, [00:05:30] Vince Menzione: yeah. [00:05:30] Matt Y: So if you’re familiar with Cara Cloud, they have a procurement portal. [00:05:33] Matt Y: It’s heavy use by the US government, and they, um. Uh, we, we acquired them, uh, the really great growth company. They have over 70 logos now, and they help you build a branded storefront on marketplace, which obviously is important in the government space. If you’re procuring on a certain contract with a certain reseller, um, you know, there’s a certain set of products you’re allowed to buy. [00:05:51] Matt Y: But what we’re finding is even down on Wall Street, you hear, um, enterprises are, are using storefronts for internal procurement and they wanna have a curated collection of, of partner products and, and your own ecosystems internally. So we’re selling to both customers. And also to channel partners to build custom storefronts, branded storefronts for, and [00:06:07] Vince Menzione: it makes total sense, right? [00:06:08] Vince Menzione: Yeah, because you wanna li you wanna limit the, the viewing and, uh, and get, because I mean, how many different listings do we have? Like over 30,000? [00:06:16] Matt Y: Yeah. Yeah. There’s, I think the official numbers over th we have over 36,000. I was checking from over 6,000 vendors. Um, it’s a lot. And, and that’s gonna explode with the AI powered, uh, listing, uh, experience that we launched. [00:06:26] Matt Y: We’re gonna make it easier. And I guess what I’ve been telling partners is. You know, customers aren’t clicking through categories anymore. They’re using AI to search. And so it doesn’t matter how big our catalog is, what matters is being found. And what matters is converting that buyer. So if you have a. [00:06:39] Matt Y: If you’re running a demand gen campaign for say, like, you know, life sciences in, in Jersey and there’s a specific buyer at j and j, you wanna capture, that person doesn’t wanna be just dropped onto a generic marketplace, 30,000 listings. They wanna be dropped in a very specific place where they’re seeing like life sciences offers from Accenture, for example, coupled with a life sciences power thing with Elastic, you know, like, but a solution. [00:07:00] Matt Y: And that they want to land in a curated place where that highly intention buyer can be converted effectively. So that, that’s what we’re doing with all this. [00:07:06] Vince Menzione: And that’s where the GEO comes in because [00:07:09] Matt Y: Yeah. ’cause that buyer might be an agent That’s right. With, and that agent has is even more fickle, honestly. [00:07:14] Matt Y: And you know, what used to be milliseconds for the human before they kind of click away is, is now perhaps microseconds. Yeah. And so, uh, you know, having the right metadata and, and the right positioning, uh, the right story that an agent or a human can pick up to ultimately. Uh, complete their product research and choose your product is, is critical. [00:07:30] Vince Menzione: Very cool. Very cool. So before I, I, I’ve been asked to ask you this because I, I’ve had this con, people have brought come to me and said, you gotta ask Matt about music. He’s a big music guy. And, uh, so what are your favorite bands? [00:07:49] Matt Y: So, I mean, the, the real answer is, uh. I, I go to about a show about every week. [00:07:54] Matt Y: As, as Mike Trill knows, uh, we heard a show last night. Um, we were, uh, just a few hours ago, really? And, uh, um, favorite band, uh, well, I’ll tell, I’ll tell a story. I, I had a side hustle with MTV for years. Um, I used to run a music website. Um, oh, that’s cool. I didn’t know that. It got, it got kind of popular. It got sponsored by, if, if anyone’s into like early hip hop. [00:08:16] Matt Y: It got sponsored by a group called Jurassic Five. ’cause he, one of them reached out to me and said, nice. Hey, uh, you know, I’ve been, I like your website. And he ended up paying for a web, hosting a Dream host, if you remember, of cost back then. [00:08:26] Vince Menzione: Oh, Jesus. [00:08:26] Matt Y: Because I was broke and couldn’t afford it. And then, uh, and then this band sent me like a, a single and said, Hey, you know, trying to get the word out about our little band, can you help us out? [00:08:35] Matt Y: And I put their, uh, I put their, you know, single up on my, on my website and it blew up. And that band is Vampire Weekend. So they’re kind of big now. Wow. Yeah. Um, and uh, that got picked up by like Vanity Fair and all these other guys. And then I got sponsored by MTV to essentially write. Music reviews for years on the side. [00:08:51] Matt Y: So I was working for the Associated Press, laying cable in sports and war and, and, uh, yeah. So Vampire Weekend was good to me that, that they, they kind of paved a way to go to a lot of free shows over the years and a lot of bands and see a lot of great music. But yeah. [00:09:03] Vince Menzione: That is very cool. And that, and how did that get your day? [00:09:05] Vince Menzione: WS It was just a, it was just the technology path that was like, [00:09:09] Matt Y: I mean, it’s a, it’s a, I guess it’s a bit of a long story, but, um, the. There’s many versions of this story. I’ll tell the, tell the one quickly. I was living for free in a Fulbright scholarship house in West Africa. You, we can talk about how that happened another time. [00:09:23] Matt Y: And, uh, a guy had sort of fallen down on the floor ’cause he’d had too much to drink. And I, I sort of lay down beside and be like, Hey man, are you all right? And, um, he, uh. He worked, he, he worked for the Associated Press and next day I had the job, um, being West Africa, head of technology for West Africa. [00:09:37] Matt Y: And because of that, um, and as I learned years later, the AP didn’t have dr they had no disaster recovery. Yeah. And I, I can tell you that now ’cause um, you know, 16 years since I worked there, but they, uh, I put the DR in, um, on AWS and we’re talking like, yeah, 16, 17 years ago. This is early. It was early days. [00:09:56] Matt Y: And I, I swear to God, I paid for. Uh, our AWS bill using, um, taxi receipts, fake taxi receipts that I bought in on Nigerian market, um, because there was no budget and so, you know, it was like 30 bucks. [00:10:08] Vince Menzione: I was gonna say swipe a credit card, but they didn’t [00:10:09] Matt Y: knew that this is the entire press this before. [00:10:11] Vince Menzione: This is before, yeah. [00:10:12] Matt Y: Yeah, like the entire ap. Um, and, uh, so AWS called me like, who are you? Like, why, why are you paying on like this like low limit credit card for like the ap? Like, who are you? And, uh. Next day I had the job. Well, a week later I had the job with aw WS. That so cool. So that’s the story’s [00:10:29] Vince Menzione: cool thing. [00:10:29] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:10:30] Vince Menzione: Very cool. [00:10:31] Vince Menzione: Uh, sports teams. So Knicks fan. [00:10:34] Matt Y: Yeah, I mean, I like the Knicks. Um, they’re h hockey, I’m not allowed to say anything different. No. I appreciate them. Uh, I’m a Raptors fan. I grew up in Toronto mostly. Yeah, yeah. Uh, so, and you know, when they won, uh, that was very exciting as well. So no, Nicks are great. I like the Knicks. [00:10:49] Matt Y: Nothing against the Knicks. Um. They’re fine. Yeah. [00:10:54] Vince Menzione: Hockey, hockey fan. Favorite hockey teams? [00:10:56] Matt Y: Oh yeah. Itron. Maple leaf. Maple leaf. Yeah. They’re gonna, they’re gonna win. Of course. Of course. Yeah. Um, like every year they’re actually, we [00:11:02] Vince Menzione: have some Canadians laughing in the sand. [00:11:03] Matt Y: Well, the leaf are, are, are the Knicks of hockey? [00:11:05] Matt Y: Like Yes, they are. You know, it’s 67 years out, coming up on 68 since they won, so That’s crazy. 53 is nothing. I know. Pain. So. Yeah, definitely the least. Yeah. [00:11:15] Vince Menzione: I love it. I love it. It’s so cool. Yeah. So what was the, uh, what was the, what was the last concert you went to? [00:11:22] Matt Y: Well, literally last night. Oh, it was last, [00:11:23] Vince Menzione: oh, that [00:11:24] Matt Y: was actually concert were my favorite bar in the world. [00:11:26] Matt Y: This place called Sunny’s. Uh, it’s, you know, I, I took Mike and, and Matt from, from Texas and from TGS down there to sort of see my neighborhood and they’re like, where are we? And I’m like, yeah, I live here. Uh, sort of an industrial part of Brooklyn. And, and we went to see, um, I dunno what you would call it, like. [00:11:40] Matt Y: I guess it’d be like roots music. There was a woman with an accordion and a guy with a big cowboy hat. Yeah, it was, it was fun. Yeah. [00:11:47] Vince Menzione: That is so funny. Alright, we’re gonna shift back years. Um, important time right now for partners. What, what should partners be looking out for the most? What would you say to them in terms of what’s the, what’s their real headline for them? [00:11:59] Matt Y: Well, I, I, you know, to borrow from you actually, you know, I liked, uh, the, the principles you had up there and, and with agility, um, you know, there’s a lot of fud flying around right now. You know, people. People were like, oh, it’s the demise of sis with the arrival of ai, you know, everyone’s gonna be using agents. [00:12:13] Matt Y: And then it turns out it’s been a huge boon for most, uh, you know, system integrators and consulting companies that I work with. They all have, you know, the, the good ones especially have vibrant consulting practices now, and everyone is deploying fds, uh, you know, um, the new, the new cool acronym. But it’s, it’s essentially created a huge opportunity for the consulting space. [00:12:31] Matt Y: Uh, and similarly, uh, you know, there there’s this narrative around the sa sa apocalypse, which I really hate, you know, ’cause it was, uh, premature and kind of a trigger reaction from the stock market. And, you know, just look, look what Snowflake did. And, you know, they did what a lot of SaaS companies are doing, but they, they added a nice sort of glaze of positioning and, and, you know, their stock popped and they did pretty well. [00:12:50] Matt Y: And so I think the ability to adapt with change and kind of roll with the punches. ’cause a lot of people are saying like, agents are gonna destroy everything. And, and the opposite has been true. For the more successful consulting companies and software companies who have become agentic. But SaaS hasn’t gone away, you know? [00:13:05] Matt Y: No. Look at our own marketplace. We have this agent marketplace, but people aren’t buying atomic agents at scale. They’re buying ified SaaS solutions with sort of agent sidecars, which has created new opportunities for candidly additional licenses, [00:13:16] Vince Menzione: right? [00:13:16] Matt Y: Um, as customers sort of want to consume more AI services on top of their. [00:13:20] Matt Y: On top of their SaaS solutions. So I think being agile, you know, you see like ServiceNow as part of our billionaires club. Yes. They’re not going anywhere. They’re, yeah. They’re gentrifying. You know, Salesforce has pivoted to this headless model, um, along with Asian Force and using sort of Slack as the operating system. [00:13:34] Matt Y: And, you know, you said like a lot of companies from the seventies aren’t around anymore. They’re gonna be winners and losers. Yeah. Um, but the winners are gonna win even more. And so I, I think what’s so important right now for partners is to not, not bite too hard at the, the latest trend. You know, models are changing and everyone’s like, oh, you know, philanthropics really in the world and they’re wonderful, great to work with, amazing technology. [00:13:55] Matt Y: That’s what people are saying about open AI six months ago. That’s right. And before that, you know, and it, I, I was with Fireworks AI yesterday, a great company and they have some really cool stuff with sort of, um, they believe in more cost effective, uh, open source models essentially, that you can find tune. [00:14:08] Matt Y: Maybe that’s gonna win. I don’t know. Um, is it gonna be sort of domain specific models? Is it gonna be highly capable LLMs? Are LLMs gonna level off as soon as Fable and Mythos are allowed to launch? Maybe. I, I don’t think anyone can predict the future right now. So you have to be agile and you have to kind of seize the opportunities and take a couple punches. [00:14:25] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:14:26] Matt Y: You know, and marketplace too, like we’re, you have to be unafraid to experiment right now. Um, you know, that’s hard if your stock’s taking a beating. Um, but this is, it’s a, it is a disruptive time, uh, but it’s creating actually enormous opportunities for growth for partners and, and we really see that, you know, in marketplace specifically within AWS. [00:14:45] Vince Menzione: It, it, it does still feel like the deer in the headlights moment. Right. Would you agree? Like you’re probably taking a lot of meetings and, and calls from ISVs specifically? [00:14:54] Matt Y: Well, [00:14:54] Vince Menzione: that are still trying to figure it out. [00:14:56] Matt Y: Yeah. But it’s everyone. Yeah. I think what’s really interesting, I had a meeting [00:14:58] Vince Menzione: with, it’s not just one. [00:14:59] Matt Y: Yeah. I, well, I had a meeting with one of the leading AI companies, like one of the biggest ones. And they, uh, they demonstrated how they work and they were really proud. They were like, you know, look at our agentic workflow. And I came out at me. I’m like, that’s it. Ours is way better. Like really like, you know, ’cause we we’re, we’re using quick desktop with MCP servers and connectors and all this, and you know, we, we have our own sort of ecosystem of partners, a mix of homegrown software and third party. [00:15:20] Matt Y: And I kinda walked out there and, and looked at, you know, my phone, which has been populated by agents this morning with all the, and I was like, I have a way better agent workflow than this world’s leading supposedly AI company. And I think, um, that really, so during, I, I would, during the headlights, you can call it deer in the headlights, I call it chaos. [00:15:36] Matt Y: And in times of chaos there are people who create. Opportunity again. And so, yeah, there are some people who are stuck and who don’t know what to do, who are over worried about token costs, um, who are not experimenting. But there are a lot of companies, uh, taking this opportunity to kind of pivot their business. [00:15:53] Matt Y: Um, I think, I think we’re in a moment and, uh, yeah, I, I candidly I see more of the latter. I see more experimenting. [00:15:59] Vince Menzione: You mentioned ServiceNow. Any other great examples of that? Organizations that really embraced it? [00:16:04] Matt Y: Uh, yeah. Well, you know, ServiceNow is part of this business applications category, as we call it, in marketplace. [00:16:09] Matt Y: That outside of AI, I think is the fastest growing category in marketplace, which is wild when you think about it. ’cause we’ve historically been an infrastructure partner marketplace with security and data and analytics and, you know, security with channel partners, et cetera. But Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, Adobe, you know, I could go on. [00:16:23] Matt Y: They, they are actually. You know, our fastest growing category and yeah, ServiceNow, obviously reinventing itself for ai, Salesforce, but Workday, you know, the workday’s done some, who knows if it’s gonna work, but they, they’re experimenting with essentially like a Databricks, uh, credit style model for like, units of work, uh, which I think is fascinating. [00:16:41] Matt Y: Like everyone’s talking about value-based, outcome-based pricing and meter. And, and you have companies that are ERP companies, you know, like traditional business applications, experimenting with effectively like a metered pay as you go, value based credit model. Again, like who knows if it’s gonna work. [00:16:54] Matt Y: But I think that’s really amazing to see and we need more ISVs experimenting. I, I was talking about trend ai and I know they’re, they’re, they’re one of the sponsors yesterday. You know, many of you know them as Trend Micro back in the day. They’ve successfully reinvented themselves. They built that companion app. [00:17:10] Matt Y: Um, you know, that I think we’re seeing. Just a ton of experimentation in the market across categories. Uh, I could go on and on about partners. Um, yeah, there, I I wouldn’t pick a winner right now. Yeah. [00:17:24] Vince Menzione: You, you, we’ve talked about ai. We’ve talked, talk more about the buying journey and how that’s changing, because again, it feels, it feels like that’s also [00:17:33] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:17:33] Matt Y: So, you know, one of, one of the core, uh, strategic objectives, or we’ll say like the philosophy marketplace is that. Um, financial incentives are important, you know, EDP or PPA drawdown, uh, credits. Like we need to act as an efficient and effective vehicle for allowing buyers to exercise their discounts for, and, and sort of partners to exercise their credits, et cetera. [00:17:55] Matt Y: That, that’s actually important. But what, what a lot of people over rotate on that, and we’re really, one of the things we say a lot inside at Amazon or at AWS marketplace is we want to continue to boost the intrinsic value of marketplace beyond the financial incentives. And well over a quarter of all private offers, private pricing, private, uh, custom terms, et cetera. [00:18:14] Matt Y: Um, begin with a self-service or PLG motion. And partners who don’t have a PLG or self-service motion are literally leaving money on the table. Like if you look at like a Databricks for example, and they did a good job integrating buy with a WS within their SaaS application. They have free trials, they have really strong pego and, and, uh, and PLG motion. [00:18:33] Matt Y: They’re making, I can’t share their numbers obviously, but they’re making a ton of money. On purely self-service motions. And importantly, they’re acquiring new business, new logos that they nurture, you know, really like not just leads but closed opportunities, right? That they lead, they’re growing, uh, at a reasonable conversion rate or or success rate into the next big logos. [00:18:50] Matt Y: And these are over multi-year horizons. They’re patient, you know, they bring in these new logos with PLG, and they’re also bringing banking, a lot of large enterprises. Through self-service. I, I was with data Mask. There’s this great little startup from New Zealand. They’re a New Zealand based company. Um, super nice guy. [00:19:06] Matt Y: And, and, uh, they, they got huge logos. I think they got, what was it? A DP and some huge American logos. Okay. And this like logo in, I think it was Chile, or no, it was Peru. They’ve never been to Peru. They don’t have sales in Peru. Um, and they. Buyers were discovering them self-service and they, they, I think they got something like 13 logos entirely through a self-service motion. [00:19:26] Matt Y: One password will tell you the same thing. I was just with them in Toronto and companies big and small startups and the largest are getting enterprise wins in addition to net new small logos through that PLG. Buyer motion. And that’s because you have a whole generation of CFOs, CTOs, CROs, whatever. The C is [00:19:43] Vince Menzione: millennial [00:19:43] Matt Y: who grew up on their phones. [00:19:45] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:19:45] Matt Y: And, and it sounds like, you know, hyperbole, but it’s true. They, they want immediate apps, immediate access. And that actually, you’re like, oh, that never translates to business applications. Turns out it does. It does. And they might not be buying on their phone, but what they are doing is researching and we see the numbers, the amount of customers who are doing their research, and then eventually landing on the page from chat, GPT. [00:20:06] Matt Y: From major financial, like Fortune 500 companies is extremely high. Yeah. Uh, you have procurement team, sourcing team, uh, developers who are starting the research increasingly, like in clawed in chat, GPT, and then, you know, building a proposal and then handing it to their enterprise procurement team. Yeah. [00:20:22] Matt Y: Which is still largely unchanged. So buyer behavior is on the front end, on the research side is really changing. So the [00:20:29] Vince Menzione: discovery is happening through PLG. [00:20:32] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:20:32] Vince Menzione: And then the backend work on private offers and things like that sometimes still happens the old way. [00:20:36] Matt Y: Yeah. Well, and so, you know, it’s [00:20:37] Vince Menzione: fax machine, [00:20:38] Matt Y: some people Yeah, sure. [00:20:39] Matt Y: They’re bringing the deal directly to Marketplace last minute. But even if that deal goes direct, sometimes they’re still beginning their research journey and increasingly using Marketplace as a research vehicle, which is why we launched Agent Mode, um, to help you sort of help you and agents do research. [00:20:51] Matt Y: But that I think if, if I have one piece of device for any partner consulting or ISV is. Don’t leave those leads and that money on the table by not having a PLG self-service strategy like you’re fooling yourself. Uh, and it’s, it’s a huge, it’s a huge, huge business for us. The, the majority of all customers by far on marketplace don’t even have a PPA, uh, and a huge percentage of even those with PPA spend beyond the p. [00:21:17] Matt Y: And so if you’re just think if you’re just using marketplaces as like BPA retirement, you are literally losing money. [00:21:22] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:21:22] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:21:23] Vince Menzione: We have a session with Vinod. We’re gonna talk a little bit about that right after. Great. So good. Um, so I, yeah, I think, um. We talked about, we talked about agents, we’ve talked about the millennial buyer, the change in buying behavior. [00:21:40] Vince Menzione: What other, what other areas of aspect I, I, I, I do wanna think about like opening it up though for a second. I think that maybe with maybe nine minutes left. Sure. I just want to get a read from the people in the room. People have questions for Matt that we weren’t able to ask them. Yeah, I think, I think we probably have a few of those. [00:21:57] Vince Menzione: I think that would probably be great. [00:21:58] Matt Y: I can sense the hardball coming. [00:22:00] Vince Menzione: You’ve known each other [00:22:00] Matt Y: a long time. [00:22:01] Vince Menzione: Yeah. No, no. Hardball. We have a mic back here. Okay. I’ll just, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll get you a mic as we are recording. So good. Thank you. [00:22:11] Audience Guest: Uh, Boris Geller with a, a Click PLG is near and dear to my heart. [00:22:17] Audience Guest: We’ve been doing a lot of business in marketplace and I’m still struggling to sell my vision internally on, on, uh, on PLG. Uh, I think. Ag Agent AI is gonna be one of the drivers, and we are already on, uh, agent Marketplace, but I would appreciate guidance on, uh, best practices. How do we kind of, uh, operationalize it? [00:22:41] Audience Guest: It’s, it’s on us, not on you. [00:22:43] Matt Y: Well, no, I think it’s on both of us. You know, we, uh. One thing that we’re trying to do is give you more data to, to sell to your internal stakeholders in your executive suite. The value of co-sell with AWS all up, like finally with what we launched at, uh, the summit yesterday, you now get an opportunity score. [00:23:02] Matt Y: You, you get a number. People have been asking for this for years, so, so you can say when we do this and we, when we give AWS this information. The score goes up and we have a higher propensity to be cos sold by humans or agents before you had to kind of, it was like this mystery you had to guess. And similarly with marketplace, um, we, we have new dashboards that you can use to sort of, you used to have to sit down with us and go through spreadsheets to trace sort of lead to trace the funnel to sort of a close opportunity. [00:23:28] Matt Y: And we’re gonna continue to launch more there. But you now have more data that you can show. You can be like, listen, these are our inbound leads, this how’s converting, and now we have PRM, the partner revenue measurement where we can say like, this is what it’s translating into in terms of. AWS service revenue driven by our product. [00:23:41] Matt Y: And so that being able to tie from that inbound lead from your demand gen campaign through to a converted opportunity to what you actually drive from an AWS impact perspective, so you can, and then what your opportunity score is that data you can use to sell. Not only internally, but to us as well. Yeah, to a skeptical sales team or whatever who’s not maybe, you know, hype on partners in the, in the US West. [00:24:03] Matt Y: You can be like, listen, I don’t care what you think about my business. This is what I’m gonna drive for you with your quarter retirement from an AWS perspective, and this is how the shape of your customer accounts are gonna change. And this is why you should pay attention to my opportunities. ’cause my opportunity score is, is crazy high and I’m giving you insights into business that AWS would not otherwise have. [00:24:19] Vince Menzione: That’s your brand story we’re talking about. [00:24:21] Matt Y: Yeah. [00:24:22] Vince Menzione: Building your story up with within [00:24:25] Matt Y: So it’s, it’s about the data, I guess. And, and you should, you know, you should all actually be [00:24:28] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:24:29] Matt Y: Asking me for more data, so, you know, and tell me like, what do you need to sell to your internal stakeholders? ’cause if I can draw a clear line. [00:24:35] Matt Y: From your demand chain campaign that lands on a marketplace, which I know is a conversion machine, it has way better than industry levels of, of conversion rates. And then you can show, hey, if we have a PLG strategy and we land those leads on marketplace, we will convert them with high efficiency, low cost of sales and, and, and have sort of a bifurcated where we can close some through self service, some through express private offers and some through private offers, depending on deal size. [00:24:57] Matt Y: Like you tell A CFO that, and they’re my number one customer now and they love it ’cause they see cost of sales going down, cost of operations going down and business going up. Um, so I think we have more data than we used to use that data. And let me know what other data do you need to make that pitch and make that pitch to the CFO go around the head of sales, all those other people. [00:25:15] Matt Y: Honestly, the CFO is where we get the best leverage. [00:25:18] Vince Menzione: Awesome. Great question. [00:25:23] Matt Y: Gonna bring your mic. [00:25:23] Vince Menzione: We’re, we’re gonna get your mic here. There you go. Oh, [00:25:25] Audience Guest: thank you. So my name’s Jody Cheval and I’m a consultant now, but I was at Workday during when they adopted AWS and it, a sales organization needs propensity to buy data. [00:25:34] Audience Guest: To really drive the sales team to realize the opportunity kind of makes them visualize it. We didn’t struggle, but it was challenging to get that data because at that time we’re getting spreadsheets. So does AWS have a vision of making that API based data that our client, my clients, can get at and bring into a tool to start building account hypothesis based on that data? [00:25:57] Audience Guest: ’cause it really is important to an enterprise sales guy to have the sense that OAWS can help me close this deal. [00:26:03] Matt Y: Yeah. I mean. Part of that. So we, we launched, we’ve been launching part of that in stages and we’re not done. There’s, there’s more coming. Um, part of that is embedded really within the new, uh, partner agent workflows. [00:26:13] Matt Y: We are giving sort of more, uh, information back to you, not just about like what funding programs you’re eligible for, but like, you know, and when, when we will co-sell this deal with you, which is effectively a signal like we, we see this as a high value opportunity, that you have a likelihood of winning internally. [00:26:28] Matt Y: We, we have this solution matching engine that we’re using and we announced. That, that that ties you the partner to a customer specific opportunity that you have a high propensity or the partner has a high propensity to assist with and ultimately win. And now we’ve tied that to our express private offers, which we announced this week. [00:26:44] Matt Y: So it’s an indirect answer to what you’re asking, but a rep can essentially say. Send a private priced offer to the customer on behalf of the partner without having to ring up the partner because they have a high propensity to win this deal with the customer. So we’re progressively launching features like that. [00:26:59] Matt Y: In addition to the propensity to buy data that we do now share. It used to be kind of, again, manual magic depending on who you knew we could share. Now we do share that programmatically, and there’s more to come specifically in that space. Uh, I’d say watch that space. In the next few months, there’s gonna be more data coming away, but we do have the APIs, we have the agent. [00:27:16] Matt Y: We have things like express private office solution matching, and we have been sort of in that space progressively launching features over the last six to 12 months. And, and you should expect to see some more there soon, not just from us or from our partners. [00:27:27] Vince Menzione: Nice. Any announcement dates? [00:27:30] Matt Y: I can’t commit to a date or else my engineers will get mad at me. [00:27:33] Vince Menzione: It looks like we Another question number. Is the mic still back there? Okay. There’s a gentleman over here [00:27:40] Audience Guest: first Go leaves. Um, it’s awesome. I’m right next to. I was right next. [00:27:46] Vince Menzione: We’ve got a lot of great plants here, so, [00:27:49] Audience Guest: um, so this may be a little bit myopic or, or a challenge that we run into, but I love a lot of the innovation that’s looking forward and all the future things that we’re doing. [00:28:00] Audience Guest: One of the things that we’re struggling with is a little bit of almost like tech or structural debt. How do you think about bringing flexibility to the core pieces that underpin all of the innovation, which is. We are self-hosted. So one of our listings is an a MI. You can’t amend an a MI, you have to cancel and start over. [00:28:18] Audience Guest: So a lot of the building blocks, when you think about PLG, if somebody wants to add to that in an a MI listing, it’s, it’s sort of broken. So how are you thinking about taking all of the, the rapidly changing buyer behavior and then looking back at the structural foundation that underpins all of those things, like offers and, and amendments and changes and all of that? [00:28:39] Matt Y: Yeah. I, I promise I didn’t seed that question, but that, that’s a great one. Um, so not to get too in the weeds, but fundamentally, marketplace was built up, um, a bit like AWS like a set, a series of services somewhat independently. And each product type was effectively its own service, SaaS, server images, ais. [00:28:59] Matt Y: Um, what we’ve done recently is now we, we have, we got rid of product types basically on the backend. You, you don’t see it, but what that means, for example, like another thing AAMIs don’t support today, future data agreements. Um, or concurrent agreements, uh, they will all be supported by amis before the end of the year. [00:29:14] Matt Y: ’cause what we’re doing, this fundamental thing that you won’t even see called product offer decoupling. Uh, and it’s a fundamental piece of things that we need to unwind. ’cause we built up, we were moving very quickly over the years. We had a distributed engineering model and we built each product type independently. [00:29:28] Matt Y: And so yeah, if you’re a seller and you’re selling containers, agents, SaaS, amies, um, we’re breaking down the silos between those so that each of them will get the same benefits. And, and by the way, we’re taking the same approach to international. Hopefully you’ve noticed now that. It’s not like a feature launches in the US only and then takes five years to launch in either public sector or another country. [00:29:48] Matt Y: We, we’ve taken a global approach to feature launch and increasingly a product type neutral approach to feature launches. Uh, that’ll be largely resolved before the year’s out. We’re working on it right now. So again, it’s, it should be transparent to you, like you shouldn’t actually see any difference in the, in the experience. [00:30:05] Matt Y: Except that all of those features will be available. So, so that is, uh, actively under work. And that’s actually something if you’d like to try, um, you’re, you’re welcome to. So, yeah, [00:30:17] Vince Menzione: we have time for maybe one more question and we we’re actually gonna have you up here with a couple partners. [00:30:24] Matt Y: Sounds [00:30:24] Vince Menzione: good. Kind of fun. [00:30:32] Audience Guest: Hey, Matt, uh, met Natasha from Dondo. Uh, quick. So great announcements. And you know, you talked about the million, multi-billion dollar, uh, club, and, uh, that’s all great. Uh, in terms of the. Propensity data. I think that’s coming at the center of a lot of things, right? You know, for enterprises, oh, there’s an investment and you tap into that investment. [00:30:53] Audience Guest: But also there’s the other side of the procurement where a lot of customers, sometimes we work with, they’re like, they still wanna go direct for whatever reason, right? So I think there’s an education piece there, but also trying to understand like how we can work together to, you know, get some of that side of the things sorted out as well. [00:31:11] Audience Guest: You know? ’cause a lot of times it’s not about. Just, you know, retiring the, uh, the, the spend comets, but also like, Hey, I’m used, I’m already used that for something else. So maybe that’s not an, uh, something that applies here. And in also in tying that the PLG motion, uh, you know, for the customers you said, you talked about, you know, if there is. [00:31:34] Audience Guest: Leads on the TA table, like where the, it’s not the enterprise, but you know, the others. Um, I feel like it’s more to do, changing the business model at some times. Like with the enterprises, you have the revenue stream coming through, say large deals, right? And all of a sudden you tap into this, you know, PayGo. [00:31:51] Audience Guest: Where it flips the whole equation with, you know, the financing and the, and the, and the revenue measurement. So I think there’s two aspects of how do you kind of cons reconcile those things in terms of, you know, the revenue measurements going forward. [00:32:05] Matt Y: Yeah. So, so two things real quick on the procurement. [00:32:07] Matt Y: Um, yeah, like, yeah, I sort of alluded to this earlier, but, uh. Procurement is a bit late to the AI ag agentic transformation. They’re trying, and there’s a lot of great new incumbents in this space. And the big leaders like, you know, Coupa and Ariba and Oracle are, are, are evolving their products, albeit a bit slowly. [00:32:26] Matt Y: Um, but the, I think, uh, it’s still the long pole in the tent. You know this. And so like, there are two reasons why deals tend to go direct, because it kind of hits a wall of. Legal, uh, you know, procurement, governance, like all that kind of after the selection’s been made, et cetera, or, or they’re, you know, we can’t change. [00:32:44] Matt Y: People are gonna optimize for, for finance, you know, they’re, they’re going to, if they’re getting big discounts. I mean, that is life. I always say it’s like sellers at the most agented company are still gonna chase quota no matter how, you know, crazy. Uh, your, your company is, and it’s the same with, um, with the chief, uh, financial officer and chief procurement officer. [00:33:01] Matt Y: They are going to, they’re literally. Paid to find discounts. And so we’re not, we’re not gonna get rid of financial engineering. That’s a, that’s a thing. What we can do is reduce the friction for procurement. So we launched, for example, like mandatory purchase orders. That was a big thing. We, we have buyer notifications, now we’re making other procure to pay enhancements. [00:33:17] Matt Y: I mean, procurement systems still use like CXML. It’s like, that was, that was cool when I worked for the ap. And like I, I have teenagers that are old, like older than, so they, I, I think, um. Procurement needs to evolve and we’re gonna help it evolve. We’re gonna push it forward and, and we need to make it more seamless for procurement teams so that we remove those objections. [00:33:38] Matt Y: Uh, I can’t remove the financial engineering objection, like, you know, that’s just life. Um, but I can make it irresponsible not to use marketplace ’cause it’s so easy to use. And, uh, that, that’s kind of the approach we’re taking on, on the front end. Uh, you, you know, I think you, you, again, I didn’t see this question. [00:33:52] Matt Y: You, you stepped into a trap. Un unwittingly, um, PLG is not just is for enterprise. And, and PLG doesn’t necessarily mean pego or self-service. Uh, doesn’t necessarily like, uh, most of our self-service efforts are actually focused on private offers. And not necessarily for pego. Uh, when, when I say self-service and, and PLG, uh, it, it can mean all kinds of things like it. [00:34:14] Matt Y: We have requested private offer, requested demo call to actions, buttons that you can put on your listing. For example, you don’t necessarily need a free trial or a metered pay as you go listing to take advantage of those inbound self-service leads. So, and those inbound self-service leads are often massive enterprise deals, like I mentioned specifically, uh, the data mask. [00:34:31] Matt Y: Those giant enterprise deals that they launched came from an enterprise like Fortune 1000 Enterprise in the US that organically discovered their solution on the marketplace using our AI search. And that was a massive enterprise. And so I, I think yes, there is the long tail, you wanna capture a new logo acquisition, but you should think of your product like growth in your self-service strategy as a way to, um, acquire all kinds of leads, including large enterprise. [00:34:54] Matt Y: And so when I say leave money on the table, I’m not just talking about things that are gonna mature over two years or tiny little deals. These could be massive deals. Uh, and, and you’ll accelerate those deals by accelerating their discovery and, and research so that I think that, so, and my advice is don’t, you don’t have to go all in if you don’t have, if you don’t have metering, if you don’t have PayGo, that’s cool. [00:35:13] Matt Y: Start with something simple. Start with a public listing, with a request to private offer like that. That is a, a huge step. That doesn’t take much, and, and it kind of blows my mind still that a lot of companies aren’t doing that yet. [00:35:25] Vince Menzione: Great answer. Well, it’s now time we’re gonna bring, we’re gonna bring, it’s time. [00:35:29] Vince Menzione: We, we’ve got some great partners coming up here, Nvidia Elastic, Accenture gonna all join us for a conversation. Great. And I’m glad that you’re gonna stay with us. And let’s, let’s, well, let’s thank Matt, by the way, for that session. [00:35:41] Matt Y: Thanks. [00:35:42] Vince Menzione: And [00:35:42] Matt Y: thanks for listening to the Ultimate [00:35:44] Vince Menzione: Partner Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated, share it with a partner leader in your network. [00:35:51] Vince Menzione: Subscribe where you listen. And head over to the ultimate partner.com. For show notes related content and the resources for this episode. And if you haven’t already, now’s the time to register for the Ultimate Partner Live Event in Reston, Virginia, October 26th through October 28th. Until next time, keep showing up in the rooms that matter because being in the room changes everything.

“Questions, concerns, queries?” Lets chat!On this week's episode of The Growing Season, the McFarland's say hello to yellow.One of the most divisive colours, Jack, Lynne, and Matt discussed using yellow in landscape, designs and installs.Matt details and interesting estimating exercise that he's been doing with his students at Humber College.From the design perspective, yellow can overwhelm a space if used in copious amounts.Black Eyed Suzie's, Yarrow and Marigold‘s are just some of the plants that the trio dive into off the top of the show.Evergreens carpet bomb when they pollinate. And that bombing, is just about to begin.What is the purpose of the yellow and black colouration on wasps, hornets, yellow jackets and bees? Matt tells a hilarious story about his wife's classifications for these types of insects.Are yellow peppers the same as green peppers?Matt asserts that the dandelion crop in 2026 was smaller than its 2025 counterpart.Why do dandelions stems stand straight up despite being cut with the lawnmower? You'll be surprised to learn.Lynn sings. Uh-oh.Is there such thing as a deciduous conifer? How could that be?The McFarland‘s don't use golden chain tree all that much. Why is that? They investigate.A rundown of the top yellow fall colour happens.Not many people know what a Ligularia is. It deserves some recognition.Have you ever heard of Evening Primrose? You'll want to listen in if you haven't.The TGS crew discuss a perennial that is virtually impossible to find.Matt hates Forsythia. But could there be a way that those feelings change? You'll find out. Lemon Princess Spirea gets her time in the spotlight.Why don't more growing season designs feature Rhododendron and Azaleas?Tuberous begonias cap the show off in style.Tune in. Looking to book a consult for your property?  We'd love to help.  CLICK HERE.

En el capítulo 1.128 de este jueves, 4 de junio, @franaldaya les comenta que el BCRA cumplió la meta anual de compras, el Tesoro habría empezado a comprar dólares en el mercado y TGS avanza con financiamiento para su proyecto de US$3.000 millones. Además, la industria automotriz sigue en caída, y Wall Street corta su racha de nueve ruedas mientras Dalio advierte sobre una burbuja de IA. @espinamariano con lo último de la política en Recintos del Poder.

Listen and subscribe to Money Making Conversations on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, www.moneymakingconversations.com/subscribe/ or wherever you listen to podcasts. New Money Making Conversations episodes drop daily. I want to alert you, so you don’t miss out on expert analysis and insider perspectives from my guests who provide tips that can help you uplift the community, improve your financial planning, motivation, or advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Keep winning! Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Ryan Wilson. Co-founder and CEO of The Gathering Spot (TGS), joins host Rushion McDonald to discuss his entrepreneurial journey, the creation and expansion of The Gathering Spot, and the broader mission of building community, economic opportunity, and cultural pride for Black professionals and creatives. Wilson explains that while TGS officially opened in Atlanta in 2016, the idea began years earlier when he was a law student in Washington, D.C. What started as a reimagining of the traditional private city club became a national platform combining community, collaboration, events, workspaces, and eventually fintech tools. Despite major obstacles—most notably being rejected by 97 potential investors—Wilson persisted, driven by a clear sense of purpose and belief in the unmet needs of Black and minority communities. The conversation highlights Atlanta’s importance as the launch city, the power of community-driven spaces, and the need to move beyond performative diversity efforts toward sustainable, scalable Black-owned businesses. Purpose of the Interview The primary purpose of the interview is to: Inspire entrepreneurs, especially young and underrepresented founders, to pursue their ideas despite resistance. Explain the mission and impact of The Gathering Spot as more than a coworking space—positioning it as a cultural, economic, and social hub. Encourage long-term thinking about Black business growth, community wealth, and access to financial tools. Provide real-world lessons about fundraising, resilience, leadership, and community building. Key Takeaways 1. Success Is a Process, Not an Overnight Event Wilson emphasizes that The Gathering Spot took years of planning, pitching, and rejection before launching. The popular narrative of “instant success” hides the real work required. Takeaway: Consistency and belief matter more than early validation. 2. Rejection Can Be a Signal You’re Early—Not Wrong Wilson was told “no” 97 times before securing his first investor. Instead of discouragement, he saw rejection as proof that he was pursuing something others couldn’t yet see. Takeaway: If everyone understands your idea immediately, you might not be pushing far enough. 3. Atlanta Was a Strategic and Cultural Choice Atlanta was selected because of its Black leadership, business ecosystem, cultural influence, and sense of communal support. Wilson describes the city as both big and intimate—ideal for relationship building. Takeaway: Location matters, especially when building community-centered businesses. 4. The Gathering Spot Is About Belonging and Pride TGS intentionally celebrates Black culture while remaining open to all. The experience is designed to feel warm, affirming, and professional—something many members had never encountered in adult spaces. Takeaway: Spaces are never neutral; design should be intentional about who feels welcomed and valued. 5. Community Is the Product While TGS offers buildings, events, restaurants, and workspaces, Wilson is clear that the network is the real value—introducing people who otherwise may never meet. Takeaway: Relationships create opportunity faster than resources alone. 6. Fintech Is About Real Access, Not Just Education Wilson explains that after years of hosting conversations about money and wealth, TGS realized the next step was providing actual financial tools, not just dialogue. Takeaway: Empowerment requires both knowledge and access. 7. DEI Without Results Is Performative Wilson and McDonald discuss the post-2020 slowdown in corporate DEI efforts. Wilson challenges organizations to focus less on optics and more on outcomes—specifically business scale and job creation. Takeaway: The goal isn’t to “look good losing,” but to win sustainably. Notable Quotes On rejection: “It was 97 people that told us no in a row before we got to our first yes.” On purpose: “My mission is to connect people. I’m a community builder.” On fear and timing: “I didn’t want to have any regrets about not trying.” On intentional design: “I was thinking about Black folks when we were building The Gathering Spot.” On DEI efforts: “Do you really want to win or look good losing?” On scale and impact: “It’s not enough to start Black-owned businesses—we have to watch them grow.” #SHMS #BEST #STRAWSupport the show: https://www.steveharveyfm.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen and subscribe to Money Making Conversations on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, www.moneymakingconversations.com/subscribe/ or wherever you listen to podcasts. New Money Making Conversations episodes drop daily. I want to alert you, so you don’t miss out on expert analysis and insider perspectives from my guests who provide tips that can help you uplift the community, improve your financial planning, motivation, or advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Keep winning! Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Ryan Wilson. Co-founder and CEO of The Gathering Spot (TGS), joins host Rushion McDonald to discuss his entrepreneurial journey, the creation and expansion of The Gathering Spot, and the broader mission of building community, economic opportunity, and cultural pride for Black professionals and creatives. Wilson explains that while TGS officially opened in Atlanta in 2016, the idea began years earlier when he was a law student in Washington, D.C. What started as a reimagining of the traditional private city club became a national platform combining community, collaboration, events, workspaces, and eventually fintech tools. Despite major obstacles—most notably being rejected by 97 potential investors—Wilson persisted, driven by a clear sense of purpose and belief in the unmet needs of Black and minority communities. The conversation highlights Atlanta’s importance as the launch city, the power of community-driven spaces, and the need to move beyond performative diversity efforts toward sustainable, scalable Black-owned businesses. Purpose of the Interview The primary purpose of the interview is to: Inspire entrepreneurs, especially young and underrepresented founders, to pursue their ideas despite resistance. Explain the mission and impact of The Gathering Spot as more than a coworking space—positioning it as a cultural, economic, and social hub. Encourage long-term thinking about Black business growth, community wealth, and access to financial tools. Provide real-world lessons about fundraising, resilience, leadership, and community building. Key Takeaways 1. Success Is a Process, Not an Overnight Event Wilson emphasizes that The Gathering Spot took years of planning, pitching, and rejection before launching. The popular narrative of “instant success” hides the real work required. Takeaway: Consistency and belief matter more than early validation. 2. Rejection Can Be a Signal You’re Early—Not Wrong Wilson was told “no” 97 times before securing his first investor. Instead of discouragement, he saw rejection as proof that he was pursuing something others couldn’t yet see. Takeaway: If everyone understands your idea immediately, you might not be pushing far enough. 3. Atlanta Was a Strategic and Cultural Choice Atlanta was selected because of its Black leadership, business ecosystem, cultural influence, and sense of communal support. Wilson describes the city as both big and intimate—ideal for relationship building. Takeaway: Location matters, especially when building community-centered businesses. 4. The Gathering Spot Is About Belonging and Pride TGS intentionally celebrates Black culture while remaining open to all. The experience is designed to feel warm, affirming, and professional—something many members had never encountered in adult spaces. Takeaway: Spaces are never neutral; design should be intentional about who feels welcomed and valued. 5. Community Is the Product While TGS offers buildings, events, restaurants, and workspaces, Wilson is clear that the network is the real value—introducing people who otherwise may never meet. Takeaway: Relationships create opportunity faster than resources alone. 6. Fintech Is About Real Access, Not Just Education Wilson explains that after years of hosting conversations about money and wealth, TGS realized the next step was providing actual financial tools, not just dialogue. Takeaway: Empowerment requires both knowledge and access. 7. DEI Without Results Is Performative Wilson and McDonald discuss the post-2020 slowdown in corporate DEI efforts. Wilson challenges organizations to focus less on optics and more on outcomes—specifically business scale and job creation. Takeaway: The goal isn’t to “look good losing,” but to win sustainably. Notable Quotes On rejection: “It was 97 people that told us no in a row before we got to our first yes.” On purpose: “My mission is to connect people. I’m a community builder.” On fear and timing: “I didn’t want to have any regrets about not trying.” On intentional design: “I was thinking about Black folks when we were building The Gathering Spot.” On DEI efforts: “Do you really want to win or look good losing?” On scale and impact: “It’s not enough to start Black-owned businesses—we have to watch them grow.” #SHMS #BEST #STRAWSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen and subscribe to Money Making Conversations on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, www.moneymakingconversations.com/subscribe/ or wherever you listen to podcasts. New Money Making Conversations episodes drop daily. I want to alert you, so you don’t miss out on expert analysis and insider perspectives from my guests who provide tips that can help you uplift the community, improve your financial planning, motivation, or advice on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Keep winning! Two-time Emmy and Three-time NAACP Image Award-winning, television Executive Producer Rushion McDonald interviewed Ryan Wilson. Co-founder and CEO of The Gathering Spot (TGS), joins host Rushion McDonald to discuss his entrepreneurial journey, the creation and expansion of The Gathering Spot, and the broader mission of building community, economic opportunity, and cultural pride for Black professionals and creatives. Wilson explains that while TGS officially opened in Atlanta in 2016, the idea began years earlier when he was a law student in Washington, D.C. What started as a reimagining of the traditional private city club became a national platform combining community, collaboration, events, workspaces, and eventually fintech tools. Despite major obstacles—most notably being rejected by 97 potential investors—Wilson persisted, driven by a clear sense of purpose and belief in the unmet needs of Black and minority communities. The conversation highlights Atlanta’s importance as the launch city, the power of community-driven spaces, and the need to move beyond performative diversity efforts toward sustainable, scalable Black-owned businesses. Purpose of the Interview The primary purpose of the interview is to: Inspire entrepreneurs, especially young and underrepresented founders, to pursue their ideas despite resistance. Explain the mission and impact of The Gathering Spot as more than a coworking space—positioning it as a cultural, economic, and social hub. Encourage long-term thinking about Black business growth, community wealth, and access to financial tools. Provide real-world lessons about fundraising, resilience, leadership, and community building. Key Takeaways 1. Success Is a Process, Not an Overnight Event Wilson emphasizes that The Gathering Spot took years of planning, pitching, and rejection before launching. The popular narrative of “instant success” hides the real work required. Takeaway: Consistency and belief matter more than early validation. 2. Rejection Can Be a Signal You’re Early—Not Wrong Wilson was told “no” 97 times before securing his first investor. Instead of discouragement, he saw rejection as proof that he was pursuing something others couldn’t yet see. Takeaway: If everyone understands your idea immediately, you might not be pushing far enough. 3. Atlanta Was a Strategic and Cultural Choice Atlanta was selected because of its Black leadership, business ecosystem, cultural influence, and sense of communal support. Wilson describes the city as both big and intimate—ideal for relationship building. Takeaway: Location matters, especially when building community-centered businesses. 4. The Gathering Spot Is About Belonging and Pride TGS intentionally celebrates Black culture while remaining open to all. The experience is designed to feel warm, affirming, and professional—something many members had never encountered in adult spaces. Takeaway: Spaces are never neutral; design should be intentional about who feels welcomed and valued. 5. Community Is the Product While TGS offers buildings, events, restaurants, and workspaces, Wilson is clear that the network is the real value—introducing people who otherwise may never meet. Takeaway: Relationships create opportunity faster than resources alone. 6. Fintech Is About Real Access, Not Just Education Wilson explains that after years of hosting conversations about money and wealth, TGS realized the next step was providing actual financial tools, not just dialogue. Takeaway: Empowerment requires both knowledge and access. 7. DEI Without Results Is Performative Wilson and McDonald discuss the post-2020 slowdown in corporate DEI efforts. Wilson challenges organizations to focus less on optics and more on outcomes—specifically business scale and job creation. Takeaway: The goal isn’t to “look good losing,” but to win sustainably. Notable Quotes On rejection: “It was 97 people that told us no in a row before we got to our first yes.” On purpose: “My mission is to connect people. I’m a community builder.” On fear and timing: “I didn’t want to have any regrets about not trying.” On intentional design: “I was thinking about Black folks when we were building The Gathering Spot.” On DEI efforts: “Do you really want to win or look good losing?” On scale and impact: “It’s not enough to start Black-owned businesses—we have to watch them grow.” #SHMS #BEST #STRAWSteve Harvey Morning Show Online: http://www.steveharveyfm.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“Questions, concerns, queries?” Lets chat!POP QUIZ TIME!!!Matt McFarland is about to teach a course on turf at Humber College and decided that his students' first assignment could be incorporated into this week's episode of The Growing Season. The McFarland's dive into some wonderful, and unknown, facts regarding that green carpet that covers your lawn. Jack kicks off the show with a "new age" discussion that sends the start off on a tangent. What is "No Mow May?"  Its a popular idea and the TGS trio dive into it. The pros and cons of this little event are highlighted. When is the proper time to start cutting your lawn?  The ins and outs of fertilizer become a topic of focus.  What do the various numbers mean?Slow release is only for nitrogen.  WHAT!?Photosynthesis...ROIGHT!  Gypsum is an industry secret that is revealed to y'all.A pH reset! What is an aerator?  What is a dethatcher?Grass takes in carbon and expels oxygen.  Its a pretty beneficial plant. Everything plus the carbon sink is highlighted. Comparisons and contrasts between artificial turf and natural turf come into focus.Can we eliminate the use of fertilizer altogether?What are the wildflowers that grow in your lawn that are the first foods for our pollinators? Matt RANTS.  Nematodes to the rescue...Tune in. Looking to book a consult for your property?  We'd love to help.  CLICK HERE.What is a TGS Tiny Garden? CLICK HERE.

L'info du matin - Ce matin, Grégory Ascher et Justine Salmon ont expliqué que le secret du bonheur serait d'avoir sept amis. Le winner du jour - Deux octogénaires sont exclus d'une plage car jugés trop âgés. - À 31 ans, il refuse de quitter la maison familiale, sa mère le fait expulser. Le flashback du jour - Août 1987 : sortie du premier film de la saga "L'Arme fatale". - À la même période, Aerosmith sort son album "Permanent Vacation". Les savoirs inutiles - La première année après une naissance, les parents perdent l'équivalent de plus de deux mois de sommeil. La chanson du jour - Gorillaz "Clint Eastwood" 3 choses à savoir sur Jean-Paul Belmondo Qu'est-ce qu'on fait ? - À Montpellier, le TGS rassemble fans de gaming, manga et cosplay au Parc des Expositions. - À Lille, le Video Mapping Festival propose des projections monumentales sur des bâtiments et structures en relief. Le jeu surprise (c'est qui le plus fort) - Patricia de Nesmy, vers La Roche-sur-Yon, gagne une semaine de vacances tout compris pour deux adultes et deux enfants dans un village Club Miléade. La Banque RTL2 - Claire de Rouen repart avec la box Flow de Morphée. - Élodie de Saint-Chéron, vers Arpajon, repart avec la box Flow de Morphée. Hébergé par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

“Questions, concerns, queries?” Lets chat!DON'T EAT THOSE CHOCOLATE RAISINS. Its that time of year that chocolate raisins, aka Bunny Poop, comes into focus horticulturally. The largest bunny of them all appears this weekend - The EASTER BUNNY.Jack, Lynne and Matt McFarland detail what Easter means to their family.  Jack and Lynne have an especially important event tied to the Easter weekend. The tree that gives chocolate is the first in line at the horticultural party. The TGS trio highlight its history. The "midge fly" has a major role in chocolate and Matt asserts that Easter's prototypical creature needs to be reassessed. Easter and Australia is discussed.  What is a Nelly White? Why are we talking about Komodo dragons?Where are Easter Lily's grown? How do you care for them when they find their way into your home?  Lynne details the how-to.A brand new gadget could be the key to perfect tropical plant watering.Lynne eats.  Matt vomits. Forced air and radiators in homes tie into the care of your Easter plants. Chrysanthemum, poinsettias, deciduous trees and soya beans factor into a discussion. A brand new hydrangea variety is created on the fly.  Speaking of hydrangeas, getting all sciency with their bloom colour caps the show off.How do you "harden off" an easter hydrangea to allow it to be transplanted into your flower beds.Can you plant dahlia bulbs right now?Tune in. Looking to book a consult for your property?  We'd love to help.  CLICK HERE.What is a TGS Tiny Garden? CLICK HERE.Subscribe to The Growing Season podcast.  CLICK HERE.

Over one million people have now participated in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Traveler-Based Genomic Surveillance. The purely voluntary program helps to detect and respond to emerging public health threats. To learn more about the scope of the program and what this milestone means, Federal News Network's Eric White spoke with Heather Reese, who leads the TGS program at the CDC.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Bret Tollgaard from Sunrez joins to discuss UV-curing prepreg that cuts blade repair time by up to 90% and has recently received OEM approval. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Brett, welcome back to the program.  Bret Tollgaard: Thanks for having me again.  Allen Hall: So a lot’s happening at sunrise at the moment. Uh, there’s, uh, activity with sunrise materials on a lot of blades this year. Over the last couple of years actually, ISPs, operators, OEMs, are realizing that UV curing is a huge advantage.  Bret Tollgaard: Turns out there’s a lot of value added, uh, to the entire process when utilizing UV cure, uh, pre-req.  Allen Hall: So the, the pre pres are, have been available for a couple of years. The qualification though was always the concern. Has the OEM qualified this material? Are they gonna give you the blessing? Does this show up in the manual? If I call the OEM, are they gonna say they have talked to you guys? A lot of those hurdles have been cleared at this point.  Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, great question. And we are happy to announce that we have finally been approved by a large OEM for use on the epoxy blade for now all general kind of repairs. We have several more OEMs that have already passed their phase one mechanical testing, and we’re iterating through now [00:01:00] their, uh, secondary and tertiary kind of tests. And so we do expect to be fully qualified by several OEMs before the end of the year, which should make the ISPs integration and utilization of our materials much, much easier. Allen Hall: So the, the, the problem you’re solving is repairs in the field for the most part, or sometimes in the factory. Mm-hmm. But a lot of times in the field that those repairs. It happened quite a bit. They’re the same repair, the same area, the same kind of thing over and over and over again. And wetting out fabric on site takes time. Particularly if you’re using standard materials, you have to bag it. You have to apply heat in some cases to get it to kick, and then you have to wait several hours for it to cure. So in the repair cycle time, most of your time is waiting.  Bret Tollgaard: It sure is. Uh, and on top of all that, we all know that there aren’t enough technicians in this industry to even do all the repairs, uh, that would like to be done. Yeah. And so to really kind of streamline all of that, [00:02:00] uh, we’ve rolled out a couple of new things and we’ve had a lot more interest in some pre consolidated preki patches for customers. Uh, if a particular blade model has an issue that is a standardized kind of repair. We’re actually now building custom prepregs, or we will build the appropriate width length, stack it, consolidate it, uh, wrap it between our films. So then all the customer has to do when they get on site is, uh, you know, do do the appropriate surface prep. Scarfing, apply a little bit of our UV surface primer to the backside of that patch. But now they can go up tower, single peel, stick, roll out, and then they’re cured.  Allen Hall: And that’s a. How many hours of saving is that? It’s gotta be like six, 12 hours of saving, of, of  Bret Tollgaard: labor. It’s upwards of 80 to 90% of the labor that’s gonna actually need to be done to apply that. Otherwise, and then same thing too. We’ve had a couple instances where we took a several day repair down to one, to two to three hours. And these are multi-meter long repairs that were fast tracked because we pre consolidated preki [00:03:00] everything. Some were in flat sheet forms, some were much longer on rolls, where you’re actually then rolling out with a team. Um, and so we’ve been able to demonstrate several times, uh, over the last 12 months, uh, the, the value that a UV cure preprint.  Allen Hall: Well, sure, because that, that would make sense. The issue about wetting out fabric in the field you just done in the back of a trailer or something, somewhere like that. Usually it is, it’s that you’re never really sure that you got the fabric wetted out. The experienced technicians always feel like, have done it enough that they get very consistent results. But as you mentioned, getting technicians is hard and, and there’s so many repairs to do. So you’re doing those wetting out composite things takes practice and skill. Just buying it, preki it, where you have control over it. And you guys sell to the military all the time. So that, and you’re, are you ass 91 qualified yet? You’re in the midst of that?  Bret Tollgaard: So we, I mean, a, we just got ISO certified, uh, at the end of last year in December. So our [00:04:00] QMS system and everything like that’s up to date, that’s huge. Another big qualification for the OEMs that want to see, you know, true quality and output.  Allen Hall: That’s it. I, if I’m gonna buy a preki patch, so, uh, uh, that would make sense to me, knowing that. There’s a lot of rigor as a quality system. So when I get out the the site and I open that package, I know what’s inside of it every single time. Bret Tollgaard: Well, and that’s just it. And like we got qualified based on the materials that we can provide and the testing that’s being done in real world situations when you’re wetting out by hand and you’re vacuum backing and you’re trying to cure. It is a little bit of an art form when you’re doing that. It is, and you might think you have a great laminate, you got void content, or you haven’t properly went out that glass ’cause humidity or the way the glass was stored or it was exposed. The sizing and the resin don’t really bite. Well. You might think you have a great repair, but you might be prematurely failing as well after X cycles and fatigue. Uh, simply because it’s not as easy to, to truly do. Right? And so having the [00:05:00] pre-wet, uh, pre impregnated glass really goes a long way for the quality, uh, and the consistency from repair to repair. Allen Hall: Well, even just the length of the season to do repairs is a huge issue. I, I know I’ve had some discussions this week about opening the season up a little bit, and some of the ISPs have said, Hey, we we’re pretty much working year round at this point. We’re, we’ll go to California. We’ll go to Southern Texas. We’ll work those situations. ’cause the weather’s decent, but with the sunrise material, the temperature doesn’t matter.  Bret Tollgaard: Correct. And I was actually just speaking to someone maybe half hour ago who came by and was talking about repairs that they had to do in Vermont, uh, in December. They could only do two layers of an epoxy repair at a time because of the amount of the temperature. Allen Hall: Yeah.  Bret Tollgaard: Whereas you could go through, apply a six or an eight layer pre-reg cure it in 20 minutes. Uh, you know, throughout that entire length that he had and you would’ve been done. That’s, and so it took several days to do a single repair that could have been done in sub one hour with our material.  Allen Hall: I know where those wind turbines are. [00:06:00] They weren’t very far from, we used to live, so I understand that temperature, once you hit about November up in Vermont, it’s over for a lot of, uh, standard epoxy materials and cures, it is just not warm enough.  Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, we, we’ve literally had repairs done with our materials at negative 20 Fahrenheit. That were supposed to be temporary repairs. They were installed four or five years ago. Uh, and they’re still active, perfectly done patches that haven’t needed to be replaced yet. So,  Allen Hall: so, because the magic ingredient is you’re adding UV to a, a chemistry where the UV kicks it off. Correct. Basically, so you’re, it’s not activated until it’s hit with uv. You hit it with uv that starts a chemical process, but it doesn’t rely on external heat. To cure  Bret Tollgaard: exactly. It, it is a true single component system, whether it’s in the liquid pre preg, the thickened, uh, the thickened putties that we sell, or even the hand lamination and effusion resin. It’s doped with a, a variety of different food initiators and packages based on the type of light that’s [00:07:00] being, uh, used to, to cure it. But it will truly stay dormant until it’s exposed to UV light. And so we’ve been able to formulate systems over the last 40 years of our company’s history that provide an incredibly long shelf life. Don’t prematurely gel, don’t prematurely, uh, you know, erode in the packaging, all those  Allen Hall: things.  Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. Like we’ve been at this for a really long time. We’ve been able to do literally decades of r and d to develop out systems. Uh, and that’s why we’ve been able to come to this market with some materials that truly just haven’t been able to be seen, uh, delivered and installed and cured the way that we can do it. Allen Hall: Well, I think that’s a huge thing, the, the shelf life.  Bret Tollgaard: Mm-hmm.  Allen Hall: You talk to a lot of. Operators, ISPs that buy materials that do have an expiration date or they gotta keep in a freezer and all those little handling things.  Bret Tollgaard: Yep.  Allen Hall: Sunrise gets rid of all of that. And because how many times have you heard of an is SP saying, oh, we had a throwaway material at the end of the season because it expired. Bret Tollgaard: Oh, tremendously  Allen Hall: amount of, hundred of thousands of dollars of material, [00:08:00] Bret Tollgaard: and I would probably even argue, say, millions of dollars over the course of the year gets, gets thrown out simply because of the expiration date. Um, we are so confident in our materials. Uh, and the distributors and stuff that we use, we can also recertify material now, most of the time it’s gonna get consumed within 12 months Sure. Going into this kind of industry.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Bret Tollgaard: Um, but there have been several times where we’ve actually had some of that material sent back to us. We’ll test and analyze it, make sure it’s curing the way it is, give it another six months shelf, uh, service life.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Bret Tollgaard: Um, and so you’re good to go on that front  Allen Hall: too. Yeah. So if you make the spend to, to move to sun, you have time to use it.  Bret Tollgaard: Yes.  Allen Hall: So if it snows early or whatever’s going on at that site where you can’t get access anymore, you just wait till the spring comes and you’re still good with the same material. You don’t have to re-buy it.  Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And with no special storage requirements, like you mentioned, no frozen oven or frozen freezer, excuse me, uh, or certain temperature windows that has to be stored in, uh, it allows the operators and the technicians, you know, a lot more latitude of how things actually get  Allen Hall: done. And, and so if. When we [00:09:00] think about UV materials, the, the questions always pop up, like, how thick of a laminate can you do and still illuminate with the UV light? And make sure you curate I I, because you’re showing some samples here. These are,  Bret Tollgaard: yeah.  Allen Hall: Quarter inch or more,  Bret Tollgaard: correct. So  Allen Hall: thick samples. How did you cure these? Bret Tollgaard: So that was cured with the lamp that we’ve got right here, which are standard issued light, sold a couple hundred into this space already. Um, that’s 10 layers of a thousand GSM unidirectional fiber. Whoa. This other one is, uh, 10 layers of, of a biox. 800 fiber.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Bret Tollgaard: Uh, those were cured in six minutes. So you can Six  Allen Hall: minutes. Bret Tollgaard: Six minutes.  Allen Hall: What would it take to do this in a standard epoxy form?  Bret Tollgaard: Oh, hours,  Allen Hall: eight hours maybe?  Bret Tollgaard: Yeah. About for, for the, for the post cure required to get the TGS that they need in the wind space, right? Absolutely. And so yeah, we can do that in true minutes. And it’s pre impregnated. You simply cut it to shape and you’re ready to rock. Allen Hall: And it looks great when you’re done, mean the, the surface finish is really good. I know sometimes with the epoxies, particularly if they get ’em wetted out, it doesn’t. It [00:10:00] doesn’t have that kind of like finished look to it.  Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And the way that we provide, uh, for our standard, uh, you know, pre pprs are in between films and so if you cure with that film, you get a nice, clean, glossy surface tack free. But as more and more people go to the pre consolidation method down tower, so even if they buy our standard prereg sheets or rolls, they’re preki down tower, you can also then just apply a pre, uh, a peel ply to that top film. Oh, sure. So if you wet out a peel ply and then you build your laminate over the top. Put the primer and the black film over when they actually get that up on tower, they can then just remove that fuel ply and go straight to Sandy or uh, uh, painting and they’re ready to rock.  Allen Hall: Wow. Okay. That’s, that’s impressive. If you think about the thousands and thousands of hours you’ll save in a season. Where you could be fixing another blade, but you’re just waiting for the res, the cure,  Bret Tollgaard: and that’s just it. When you’re saving the amount of labor and the amount of time, and it’s not just one technician, it’s their entire team that is saving that time. Sure. And can move on to the next [00:11:00] repair and the next process. Allen Hall: So one of the questions I get asked all the time, like, okay, great, this UV material sounds like space, age stuff. It must cost a fortune. And the answer is no. It doesn’t cost a fortune. It’s very price competitive.  Bret Tollgaard: It, it really is. And it might be slightly more expensive cost per square foot versus you doing it with glass and resin, but you’re paying for that labor to wait for that thing to cure. And so you’re still saving 20, 30, 40 plus percent per repair. When you can do it as quickly as we can do it.  Allen Hall: So for ISPs that are out doing blade repairs, you’re actually making more money.  Bret Tollgaard: You are making more money, you are saving more money. That same group and band of technicians you have are doing more repairs in a faster amount of time. So as you are charging per repair, per blade, per turbine, whatever that might be, uh, you’re walking away with more money and you can still pass that on to the owner operators, uh, by getting their turbines up and spinning and making them more money.  Allen Hall: Right. And that’s what happens now. You see in today’s world, companies ISPs that are proposing [00:12:00] using UV materials versus standard resin systems, the standard residence systems are losing because how much extra time they’re, they’re paying for the technicians to be on site. Bret Tollgaard: Correct.  Allen Hall: So the, the industry has to move if you wanna be. Competitive at all. As an ISP, you’re gonna have to move to UV materials. You better be calling suns  Bret Tollgaard: very quickly. Well, especially as this last winter has come through, the windows that you have before, bad weather comes in on any given day, ebbs and flows and changes. But when you can get up, finish a repair, get it spinning, you might finish that work 2, 3, 4 later, uh, days later. But that turbine’s now been spinning for several days, generating money. Uh, and then you can come back up and paint and do whatever kind of cosmetic work over the top of that patch is required. Allen Hall: So what are the extra tools I need to use Sunz in the kits. Do I need a light?  Bret Tollgaard: Not a whole lot. You’re gonna need yourself a light. Okay. You’re gonna need yourself a standard three to six inch, uh, bubble buster roller to actually compact and consolidate. Sure. Uh, that’s really all you need. There’s no vacuum lights. And you sell the lights. We do, we, [00:13:00] we sell the lights. Um, our distributors also sell the lights, fiberglass and comp one. Uh, so they’re sourced and available, uh, okay. Domestically, but we sell worldwide too. And so, uh, we can handle you wherever you are in the world that you wanna start using uv, uh, materials. And yeah, we have some standardized, uh, glass, but at the same time, we can pre-reg up to a 50 inch wide roll. Okay, so then it really becomes the limiting factor of how wide, how heavy, uh, of a lamette does a, a technician in the field want to handle?  Allen Hall: Yeah, sure. Okay. In terms of safety, with UV light, you’re gonna be wearing UV glasses,  Bret Tollgaard: some standard safety glasses that are tinted for UV protection. So they’ll  Allen Hall: look yellow,  Bret Tollgaard: they’ll look a little yellow. They’ve got the shaded gray ones. Sunglasses, honestly do the same.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Bret Tollgaard: But with a traditional PPE, the technicians would be wearing a tower anyways. Safety glasses, a pair of gloves. You’re good to go. If you’re doing confined space, work on the inside of a, a, a blade, uh, the biggest value now to this generation of material that are getting qualified. No VOC non [00:14:00] flammable, uh, no haps. And so it’s a much safer material to actually use in those confined spaces as well as  Allen Hall: well ship  Bret Tollgaard: as well as ship it ships unregulated and so you can ship it. Next day air, which a lot of these customers always end. They do. I know that.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Bret Tollgaard: Um, so next day air, uh, you know, there’s no extra hazmat or dangerous goods shipping for there. Uh, and same thing with storage conditions. You don’t need a, a flammable cabinet to actually store the material in.  Allen Hall: Yeah.  Bret Tollgaard: Um, so it really opens you up for a lot more opportunities.  Allen Hall: I just solves all kinds of problems.  Bret Tollgaard: It, it really does. And that’s the big value that, you know, the UV materials can provide. Allen Hall: So. I see the putty material and it comes in these little tubes, squeeze tubes. What are these putties used for?  Bret Tollgaard: So right now, the, the existing putty is really just the same exact thickened, uh, resin that’s in the pre-print.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Bret Tollgaard: And it’s worked well. It’s, it’s nice we’re kind of filling some cracks and some faring, some edges and stuff if things need to be feathered in. But we’ve [00:15:00] been working on this year that we’ll be rolling out very, very soon is a new structural putty. Okay. So we’ll actually have milled fibers in there and components that will make it a much more robust system. And so we’ve been getting more inquiries of, particularly for leading edge rehabilitation. Where Cat three, cat four, even cat five kind of damage, you need to start filling and profiling before any kind of over laminates can really be done properly. And so we’re working on, uh, rolling that out here very, very soon. Um, and so that will, I think, solve a couple of needs, um, for the wind market. Uh, and then in addition to some new products that we’re rolling out, uh, is gonna be the LEP system that we’re been working on. Uh, the rain erosion testing showed some pretty good results. But we’re buying some new equipment to make a truly void free, air free system that we’re gonna it, uh, probably submit end of April, beginning of May for the next round, that we expect to have some very, very good, uh, duration and weather ability with,  Allen Hall: because it’s all about speed,  Bret Tollgaard: it’s durability. Allen Hall: All about e  Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And ease of use by someone in the [00:16:00] field. Yeah. Or OEMs on, you know, in the manufacturing plant. Um, there has yet, in my opinion, to be a true winner in the LEP space. That is just the right answer. And so by applying our materials with the really high abrasion resistance that we expect this to have and be as simple to do as it really appeal, stick and cure, um, we think it’s gonna be a bit of a game changer in this industry. Allen Hall: Well, all the sunrise materials, once they’re cured, are sandal  Bret Tollgaard: correct.  Allen Hall: And I think that’s one of the things about some of the other systems, I always worry about them like, alright, they can do the work today, but tomorrow I have to come back and touch it again. Do I have a problem? Well, and the sun rests stuff is at least my playing around with it has been really easy to use. It’s, it’s. Uh, things that I had seen maybe 20 years ago in the aerospace market that have they thought about using the material not only [00:17:00] in the factory, but outside the factory. How easy is it to adapt to, how easy to, to paint, to all those little nuances that come up? When you’re out working in the field and trying to do some very difficult work, uh, the sunroom material is ready to go, easy to use and checks all the boxes, all those little nuances, like it’s cold outside, it’s wet outside. Uh, it’s, it’s hot outside, right? It’s all those things that, that stop ISPs or OEMs from being super efficient. All those parameters start to get washed away. That’s the game changer and the price point is right. How do. People get a hold of you and learn about the sun rose material. Maybe they, you can buy through fiberglass or through composite one. Mm-hmm. That’s an easy way to do, just get to play with some samples. But when they want to get into some quantity work, they got a lot of blade repair. They know what they’re doing this summer or out in the fall or this winter come wintertime. How do they get [00:18:00] started? What do they do?  Bret Tollgaard: Well, one of the first things to do is they can reach us through our website. Um, we’re developing a larger and larger library now for how to videos and install procedures, um, generating SOPs that are, you know, semi, uh, industry specific. But at the same time too, it’s a relatively blanket peel and stick patch, whether it’s a wind turbine blade, a corroded tank, or a pressure pipe. Um, and so yeah, www.suns.com Okay, is gonna be a great way to do it. Uh, we’re actively building more videos to put on, uh, our YouTube channel as well. Um, and so that’s kind of gonna be the best way to reach out, uh, for us. One of the big things that we’re also pushing for, for 26 is to truly get people, uh, in this, in industry, specifically trained and comfortable using the products. At the end of the day, it’s a composite, it’s a pre impregnated sheet. It’s not difficult, but there are some tips and tricks that really make the, the use case. Uh, the install process a lot easier.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Bret Tollgaard: Uh, and so just making sure that people are, are caught up on the latest and greatest on the training techniques will [00:19:00] go a long way too. Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s only as good as the technician that applies it  Bret Tollgaard: e Exactly.  Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s great. Uh, it’s great all the things you guys are doing, you’re really changing the industry. In a positive way, making repairs faster, uh, more efficient, getting those turbines running. It’s always sad when you see turbines down with something that I know you guys could fix with sun. Uh, but it does happen, so I, I need the ISPs to reach out and start calling Sun and getting in place because the OEMs are blessing your material. ISPs that are using it are winning contracts. It’s time to make the phone call to Sun Rez. Go to the website, check out all the details there. If you wanna play with your material, get ahold of fiberglass or composite one just. Order it overnight. It’ll come overnight and you can play with it. And, and once you, once you realize what that material is, you’ll want to call Brett and get started.  Bret Tollgaard: A hundred percent appreciate the time.  Allen Hall: Yeah. Thanks Brett, for being on the podcast. I, I love talking to you guys because you have such cool material. Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, no, we’re looking, uh, forward to continuing to innovate, uh, really make this, uh, material [00:20:00] splash in this industry.

The Glorious Sons' frontman, Brett Emmons, rejoins us on this episode of The Adamantium Podcast. We discuss his new solo project under the moniker of John Shambles, the debut album, Cabin Fever, and we dive into the songs “Gameshow,” “Landmines,” and “New Friends.” We also discuss the support of the TGS fanbase, his very first band, The Ranchers, and Oscar predictions.

The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported. If you're not yet a full subscriber and want access to livestreams, Q&As, commenting, and other good stuff, click below to support TGS. We can't do what we do without you. Click here to become a full subscriber. Video Links 0:00 Chloé's theory of enchantment 3:54 Can a […]

Lucy Valentine (Boonta Vista, Savant-Garde) and the lads hop in their Gummi Ship and make for Hollow Bastion as they cover the infamous Square and Disney RPG crossover of 2002: Kingdom Hearts. Topics include Tetsuya Nomura's incredible character designs, the dated gameplay, and what it means to create a game where Donald Duck is seduced by a gorilla. Lucy Valentine: Bluesky Boonta Vista: The least consequential news from around the world from the least informed minds in Australia. Andrew, Theo, Lucy and Ben bring you the week's stories that conveniently fit into one of their countless, concerningly specific segments. Keep up with the latest news from Nature Corner, Paging Dr. Lucy, Planely Speaking, Omens and Portents, The Hole Report and many, many more. Patreon // Website // Merch // Spotify // Apple Podcasts Savant-Garde: Hosted by Lucy Valentine (Boonta Vista) and Jesse Black (Sludgefest). Savant-Garde is almost certainly the world's only podcast where one autistic ex-wife and one OCD ex-husband unpack the disgracefully disordered worlds of Adrian Monk and the Good Doctor, Shaun Murphy, through the lens of two very normal brains. Patreon // Instagram // Spotify // Apple Podcasts Media Referenced in this Episode: Kingdom Hearts. Dir. Tetsuya Nomura. 2002 The Collaborative History of Disney & Square Enix to the Development of Kingdom Hearts by Evan “ScooterNape” Phillips. Reddit. TGS 2004: Tetsuya Nomura Q&A by Anoop Gantayat. IGN. Updated June 30th, 2016. Iwata Asks: Nintendo 3DS Vol. 12: Dream Drop Distance. TWOAPW theme by Brendan Dalton: Patreon // brendan-dalton.com // brendandalton.bandcamp.com Interstitial: “Kingdom Hearts 4.3 Prologue: A Maritime Fragment: H(earts). M(inds). S(ora). Titanic Trailer (Version 1.5)” // Written by A.J. Ditty // feat. A.J. Ditty as “Sora/Donald/Goofy/Billy Zane/Mickey/Announcer”, David Armstrong as “Winnie the Pooh/Eeyore/Fabrizio/Shipmaster/Jack”, and Eleanor Philips as “Rose/Margaret”

Ready to approach your goals differently after a difficult year? This episode of The Grit Show is your invitation to rethink success, healing, and partnership. Host Shawna Rodrigues is joined by her husband Robie Lawrence as they use their personal experiences with illness, role reversals, and uncertainty to ask: How do you truly support each other when the usual rules no longer apply? Discover a taste of their 20-question framework designed to prompt honest conversations about gratitude, strength, and future visioning. This episode is filled with glimpses of what it takes to build a thriving future when life has knocked you sideways. If you are searching for inspirational yet practical advice on building resilience, improving your relationships, or finding hope in the messy middle, let this engaging discussion plant the seeds for your best year yet.The 20 Questions for a Year Well Loved are meant as a tool for you to use as well - get your copy at - https://bit.ly/YrWellLoved ($20 OFF for listeners- only $7 until the end of January 2026 with coupon code TGS). Every partnership deserves more connection.Interested in the conversations (The Grit Show Episodes) that started it all?Listen here -->20 Questions for a Year Well Loved -115Couple's Questionnaire... continued -116Shawna Rodrigues has been hosting the The Grit Show, since 2022 and has loved every minute of it. She has an award winning career in the government and non-profit industry, an LCSW, and a passion for making a impact. She is currently facing her biggest plot twist yet—a breast cancer diagnosis in early 2025—this year is about her fight, victory, and healing. Join her warrior community Being Honest and check out the podcast episode where she shares more.Connect with her journey: Instagram @Shawna.Rodrigues | Everything else: https://linktr.ee/37by27Stay Connected to The Grit ShowFollow on Instagram: @The.Grit.Show or Shawna @Shawna.Rodrigues.Grab your copy of our Self-Care Coloring Pages & as a bonus, you'll get weekly email reminders when episodes come out!https://ColoringPages.TheGritShow.comYou can also purchase the full-size gift worthy Color of Grit Adult Coloring Book here bit.ly/TGSMermaidReally love us and want to show it??Give us a review on your favorite platform and copy the link to this episode to share on social media! Tell folks what you got out of it!Be sure to send this episode to someone who would want to hear it. They'll appreciate you and we appreciate your support!!

“Growth on purpose” isn't always easy—as Shawna Rodrigues and Robie Lawrence share in this episode of "The Grit Show." They tease out the highs and lows of their past year: a breast cancer battle, uprooting moves, shifting priorities, and the power of communication exercises to keep love thriving. Are 20 questions enough to set up a year of deeper connection and better communication? Maybe not every answer gets fulfilled, but the process itself delivers plenty of surprises. If you're looking for authentic relationship stories, practical communication tips, or ways to support a loved one through adversity, you'll find valuable nuggets here. Consider this your invitation to ask yourself—and your partner—the right questions for a more meaningful year ahead. Don't miss this episode if personal development, emotional connection, and relationship advice are on your search list.Interested in the conversations (The Grit Show Episodes) that started it all?Listen here -->20 Questions for a Year Well Loved -115Couple's Questionnaire... continued -116Download the questions ($20 OFF for listeners- only $7 until the end of January 2026 with coupon code TGS) and start your own journey toward a more connected partnership and a year well loved. - https://bit.ly/YrWellLovedShawna Rodrigues has been hosting the The Grit Show, since 2022 and has loved every minute of it. She has an award winning career in the government and non-profit industry, an LCSW, and a passion for making a impact. She is currently facing her biggest plot twist yet—a breast cancer diagnosis in early 2025—this year is about her fight, victory, and healing. Join her warrior community Being Honest and check out the podcast episode where she shares more.Connect with her journey: Instagram @Shawna.Rodrigues | Everything else: https://linktr.ee/37by27Stay Connected to The Grit ShowFollow on Instagram: @The.Grit.Show or Shawna @Shawna.Rodrigues.Grab your copy of our Self-Care Coloring Pages & as a bonus, you'll get weekly email reminders when episodes come out!https://ColoringPages.TheGritShow.comYou can also purchase the full-size gift worthy Color of Grit Adult Coloring Book here bit.ly/TGSMermaidReally love us and want to show it??Give us a review on your favorite platform and copy the link to this episode to share on social media! Tell folks what you got out of it!Be sure to send this episode to someone who would want to hear it. They'll appreciate you and we appreciate your support!!

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com This is a free segment from a two-hour livestream of The Glenn Show. To watch the whole thing, become a full subscriber. You'll get access to all TGS content, including video of livestreams, audience Q&As with me and John McWhorter, and lots of other great content. The Glenn Show […]

“Your nomination might be the only way their work is recognized at the level it deserves. The Honors and Awards program is powered by our members and only succeeds when we take the time to lift up one another.” Maurice Nessim explains why SEG Honors and Awards are essential for recognizing scientific, professional, and social contributions in applied geophysics. He shares how member nominations ensure a diverse and meaningful set of candidates and encourages everyone to participate before the January 1 deadline. He also highlights the value of attending the IMAGE '26 ceremony to celebrate the awardees and learn from their achievements. Nominate a colleague by 1 January, 2026 at https://seg.org/resources/honors-and-awards/. KEY TAKEAWAYS > SEG Honors and Awards rely on member nominations to recognize impactful scientific, professional, and humanitarian contributions. > Recognition strengthens careers, elevates organizations, and encourages innovation across applied geophysics. > Attending the IMAGE '26 ceremony supports awardees and helps the community learn from their work. GUEST BIO Maurice Nessim is the Founder, CEO, and Chairman of Greener Cleaner Cooler Globe and currently serves as Chair of the SEG Honors and Awards Committee. He brings several decades of leadership in earth science and energy, applying that expertise to advance medical imaging through his work with Ultrasound Associates. His career includes serving as a Board Director at TGS, where he guides strategy and innovation across the geoscience and energy sectors. With more than thirty years in geophysics, he has consistently championed excellence and forward‑looking solutions. His work reflects a deep commitment to using scientific progress for societal benefit. Complete show notes at https://seg.org/podcasts/episode-280-the-awards-that-shape-geophysics-and-why-they-need-you/.

Bethany Hall is Creative Director of Comedy Initiatives at the Center for Media & Social Impact. Additionally, she serves as the Co-Creator and Executive Producer of GoodLaugh at CMSI where she leads the Comedy ThinkTanks and is the comedy architect for creative comedy initiatives. Hall is also proud to be the Creative Director of the Yes, And...Laughter Lab. She is a writer, producer, and comedian who spent years as a cast member on ‘The Chris Gethard Show' on TruTV. She co-created and EP'd the series, ‘Thanksgiving' now on Amazon Prime. In 2023 Hall made her staged works directorial debut at the Kennedy Center in DC. She Executive Produced ‘By Us For Us,' an original comedy by Color of Change, has performed at Bonnaroo, SXSW, ‘Late Night with Conan O'Brien' and as the TGS writer, Bethany, on NBC's ‘30 Rock'. She has done so much and has a great story to tell. Don't miss this one!This episode, like all episodes of If This Is True, brings forth what drives creatives to do what they do. For more of this content and interaction, you can also go to my substack, coolmite25.substack.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Just in time for the end of October, the Famicrew are back and are joined once again by Will from Raccoon City Cinemas for another action packed episode. New Business sees the guys discussing Cronos: The New Dawn, Obakeidoro 2, a Metal Gear on MSX and some leftovers from TGS 2025. After a quick break, the guys break down the upcoming "Street Burger" Street Fighter campaign at McDonald's Japan and the upcoming Game Trials for Nintendo Switch Online members in Japan. Ty shares some of his latest pulls from the UFO catchers in Anime Trash before closing out the show.00:00:00 Intro00:03:35 Will - Cronos: The New Dawn00:19:42 Danny - Obakeidoro 200:32:12 JC - TGS 2025 Wrap-up00:44:41 Ty - Metal Gear (MSX Version)01:06:45 Now Playing at TheFamicast.com01:08:50 JAPANews - Street Burgers01:13:39 JAPANews - Game Trials & GCN Update01:17:49 JAPANews - Kirby Air Riders Direct 201:21:14 OutroBe sure to check out Will on his YouTube channel, Raccoon City Cinema!Thank you so much for subscribing, listening and for your support! Website: www.thefamicast.comEmail: thefamicast (at) gmail (dot) comPatreon: patreon.com/thefamicastYouTube: youtube.com/thefamicastBluesky: @thefamicast.bsky.socialX: @thefamicast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jamie and Tommy discuss the Game Pass price increase and games from TGS and IGN Fan Fest.

C’est le retour du TGS pour Daniel et de Hawaï pour Benjamin, on parle essentiellement de A Battle after Another, le dernier PTA (comme on dit), mais on évoque aussi The Long Walk, un peu de rétro gaming, Starfox 2 et Silksong. Ah oui, on a enregistré au moment de l’annonce du gouvernement qui a démissionné le matin suivant, donc un épisode ancré dans l’actualité, à tout jamais. Les recommandations (0:51:00) Daniel :  Final Fantasy Tactics qui ressort Benjamin: Le groupe Totorro (bientôt en concert !), et son album Sofa So good Montage: Baptiste Bertrand Et on remercie comme toujours chaleureusement nos généreux Patreotes !

In this not-episode, Madelyn and Emma talk about their last six weeks of gaming and also some other random stuff like TGS. It's gaming related. Also featuring driving good, getting scared, and some overall gender stuff.

Giga Bytes Podcast #381: Hoy hablamos de todo lo que jugué en TGS 2025 y Mucho más!!! •       Lanza Ghost of Yotei •       Mario Galaxy 1-2 llega a Switch •       Gamepass Aumenta Hands on Tokyo Game Show 2025:” o       Onimusha Way of The Sword o       Resident Evil Requiem o       Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls o       Ninja Gaiden 4 o       PRAGMATA o       ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X o       REANIMAL o       Nioh 3 o       Phantom Blade Zero o       Professor Layton and The New World of Steam o       Double Dragon Revive Sigueme y Suscribete: Facebook.com/elgiga Youtube.com/elgiga947 Instagram.com/elgiga947 Twitch.tv/elgiga947 Twitter.com/elgiga947 Giga Bytes Podcast #monsterenergypr @monsterenergy @Stephreyesmarketing @caribbeanxsports @eriberto213 #gigabytespodcast #NintendoSwitch2 #PS5 #MarvelTokonFightingSouls #COD #Beta #Wolverine #Saros #GhostofYotei #MarvelTokonFightingSouls #ResidentEvilRequiem #NinjaGaiden4  #GhostofYotei #Switch #Xbox #PSSR #PS5Pro #Xbox #Switch2 #Review #Playstation #Switch2 @tiendasmesalve #gigabytespodcast @HectoursPR #tokyogameshow #ProfessorLayton #Reanimal #DoubleDragonRevive #OnimushaWayofTheSword #Nioh3 #PhantomBladeZero

Nesse episódio, Edu Aurrai, Felipe Mesquita e Rodrigo Cunha falam sobre a aquisição da Electronic Arts por um grupo de capital privado, liderado pelo PIF da Arábia Saudita; a Tencent acusando a Sony de tentar "monopolizar a cultura" no caso de plágio envolvendo Light of Motiram; os eventos de Kojima, Playstation e Xbox na TGS 2025; e muito mais. Duração: 130 min Comentados: Imagens do logo de Physint da Kojima Productions Poster de Physint da Kojima Productions Poster de Physint da Kojima Productions em outro formato COMPRE O MARS 2120, METROIDVANIA BRASILEIRO: PC (STEAM) PLAYSTATION 4, PLAYSTATION 5 XBOX ONE, XBOX SERIES S|X NINTENDO SWITCH Vídeos: Trailer de Palfarm - Jogo spin-off de Palworld! KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS and Niantic Spatial: A New Dawn DEATH STRANDING MOSQUITO（Working Title）| Teaser Trailer OD - KNOCK Teaser Trailer State of Play | September 24, 2025 Annapurna Direct From Tokyo RGG DIRECT 2025 New VIRTUA FIGHTER Project Tokyo Game Show Special Stage (battle system) [4K] Xbox Tokyo Game Show 2025 Broadcast

Essa semana, recebemos Caio Corraini para disputar um drift em Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, discutir a surpreendente compra da Electronic Arts, os anúncios que rolaram ao redor da TGS 2025, como o primeiro gameplay de Marvel's Wolverine, o anúncio oficial de Forza Horizon 6, o intenso trailer de OD e muito mais! 00:10:45: Compraram a EA 00:31:05: Brasil proíbe loot boxes para menores de idade 00:40:28: Tokyo Game Show 2025 00:42:49: Playstation State of Play 24/10 01:18:29: Xbox na TGS 01:26:27: Capcom na TGS 01:36:04: Anúncios do Kojima 01:55:45: Doug Bowser deixa o cargo de presidente da Nintendo of America 02:01:39: Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds 02:35:27: Perguntas dos ouvintes Contribua | Twitter | YouTube | Twitch | Contato

The AI landscape is akin to the Wild West right now. There are so many solutions on the market, and it can be hard for SMBs to know which ones are secure and which can best support their internal systems. Many SMBs need an experienced guide that can navigate this rapidly evolving industry. I'm joined by Dustin Holub, Director of Solutions Architecture at Technology Group Solutions, a Cisco Partner. He helps us cut through the noise by dispelling common fears surrounding AI and providing practical tips that enable SMBs to maximize the benefits of the latest LLM technologies. Learn more about Cisco's solutions for SMBs: www.cisco.com/site/us/en/solutio…usiness/index.html Check our TGS's offerings here: https://www.tgs-mtc.com/

Support The Glenn Show at https://glennloury.substack.com Normally, I release TGS episodes to full subscribers on Mondays and then to the general public on Fridays. But this conversation is a repost from my conversations with Bob Wright at his Nonzero podcast, so I figured I'd make this one an early public release. If you like starting […]

Giga Bytes Podcast #380: Hoy hablamos de lo Mejor de State of Play, Xbox, TGS 2025 y Mucho más!!! Aumenta Gamepass Precios y Preorders de ASUS ROG Xbox Ally State of Play Xbox Showcase TGS 2025 Marvel Zombies Silent Hill f COD Next Tokyo Game Show PS x Reebok Fechas Podcast Me Salve: Sabado 4 de Octubre 2PM (Plaza del Sol) Sabado 18 Octubre 2PM (Plaza Guaynabo) Sigueme y Suscribete: Facebook.com/elgiga Youtube.com/elgiga947 Instagram.com/elgiga947                                                                                                                                    Twitch.tv/elgiga947 Twitter.com/elgiga947 Giga Bytes Podcast   #monsterenergypr @monsterenergy @Stephreyesmarketing @caribbeanxsports @eriberto213 #gigabytespodcast #NintendoSwitch2 #PS5 #DeathStranding2 #Multiplatform #MarvelTokonFightingSouls #SpidermanBrandNewDay #Battlefield6 #Beta #Switch #PS6 #Capcom #Wolverine #Saros #GhostofYotei #MetalGear #MarvelZombies #GhostofYotei #Switch #Xbox #PSSR #PS5Pro #Xbox #Switch2 #Review #Playstation #Switch2 @tiendasmesalve #gigabytespodcast @HectoursPR #tokyogameshow

Welcome back! After only having a couple games to talk about last week we have quite a bit this week, including the new Silent Hill, Hades II, and catching up on recent presentations by Sony, Nintendo, RGG, and more!00:00 Mad Max, Dorito flavor10:42 Final thoughts on Chrono Gear: Warden of Time, Wanderstop27:14 Gothic Remake, LISC43:55 Cyberpunk is real fun, isn't it? Shinobi: Art of Vengeance (Justin's turn)52:09 Hades II, Final Fantasy Tactics remaster woes01:18:37 The Void, Hell is Us, Silent Hill f01:40:51 Justin's move round up (Jacob's Ladder, every Mad Max movie)02:09:33 Catching up on recent gaming events (007: First Light, Nintendo Direct, Sony State of Play, TGS)02:42:14 CQC (Comments, Questions, Concerns)Theme song and interstitial music by Megan McDuffee: https://meganmcduffee.comLogo and artwork by John GholsonAnnouncer: John GholsonJoin our Discord, learn about how you can support the show, and more: https://linktr.ee/TheStageSelectEmail: thestageselectpod@gmail.comTheme song lyrics:What could this possibly be?Seems a lot like a podcast… Wonder what specifically?Talkin' bout video games,With your hosts, you're in good hands.Not more of the same!Now we'll jump right in,So expect the unexpected and more. Now we'll get groovin,'Never know who's gonna walk through the door!There just might be some treasure in this chest,Having fun with our special guests,Time for Stage Select!Copyright 2024 Space Monkey Mafia Productions

This week the gang talked about the ST05 events, Cucuruz Doan's Island, Takopi's Original Sin, Baby Steps, One Battle After Another, and more!Follow us on Instagram Leave us a voicemail at (804) 286-0626 and consider supporting us through our Patreon Check out the Discord! News Links:Metal Gear Collection Vol 2 New DS Anbernic device Doug Bowser stepping down at NOA Rog Ally gets price announcement State of Play announcements TGS announcements Kojima event announcements 

In this episode of the Day 0 Update: We talk about the big TGS news around new Yakuza releases, the rumored EA purchase, and the PlayStation State of Play. All this and more, up next!Producer's Note: We had some technical issues during recording that made some of the chatter a bit garbled, so we apologize for that and will work to make sure the next episodes hopefully record in a better state.Full show notes can be found ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

We give our full rundown of the latest Sony State of Play including new trailers for Saros and Marvel's Wolverine plus we also touch on some other TGS news and discuss Borderlands 4, Mafia: The Old Country, Baby Steps and Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.

Hey, everybody! Sid and O'Dell are back this week to discuss the new upcoming Ghost of Yōtei merch, TGS, and recapping this week's State of Play. This episode also includes an interview with Gabe Cuzzillo, one of the three developers of the PS5 title Baby Steps.

Happy ten years to CORE! Plus, Beau reminds us about a Kojima credit card coming soon. Highlights from TGS like Kojima's new horror game OD and Capcom announcements including C. Viper in SF6, Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection, Pragmata, and Onimusha: Way of the Sword. PlayStation's State of Play brought a bag of goodies: Saros, Zero Parades for Dead Spies, Flight Simulator 2024, a Deus Ex remaster, Mega Man in Sonic Racing, Dynasty Warriors 3 Complete, Code Vein 2, Let it Die: Inferno, Chronoscript, new Pulse speakers, and Wolverine. (Which looked REALLY good.) Plus all the usual fun times at CORE.SHARED PLAY THIS WEEKScott and Jon both spent time in Megabonk, which is far better than its looks suggest.Sonic Racing CrossWorlds was played by Scott and Jon.Hades II saw time from all of us, with Beau having already played in Early Access and a bit more today.Borderlands 4 continued, mainly Beau.More No Man's Sky, though not much new to report, Beau included.SCOTTPlenty of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.Three hours of Metal Gear Solid Delta — very Kojima.Tried the demo for Slots & Daggers, which will be a day-one buy.JONFortnite remains a regular, especially the Blitz mode.BEAUSkate in Early Access.More Hollow Knight: Silksong.Some Heroes of the Storm, though waiting on the new patch. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Happy ten years to CORE! Plus, Beau reminds us about a Kojima credit card coming soon. Highlights from TGS like Kojima's new horror game OD and Capcom announcements including C. Viper in SF6, Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection, Pragmata, and Onimusha: Way of the Sword. PlayStation's State of Play brought a bag of goodies: Saros, Zero Parades for Dead Spies, Flight Simulator 2024, a Deus Ex remaster, Mega Man in Sonic Racing, Dynasty Warriors 3 Complete, Code Vein 2, Let it Die: Inferno, Chronoscript, new Pulse speakers, and Wolverine. (Which looked REALLY good.) Plus all the usual fun times at CORE.SHARED PLAY THIS WEEKScott and Jon both spent time in Megabonk, which is far better than its looks suggest.Sonic Racing CrossWorlds was played by Scott and Jon.Hades II saw time from all of us, with Beau having already played in Early Access and a bit more today.Borderlands 4 continued, mainly Beau.More No Man's Sky, though not much new to report, Beau included.SCOTTPlenty of Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor.Three hours of Metal Gear Solid Delta — very Kojima.Tried the demo for Slots & Daggers, which will be a day-one buy.JONFortnite remains a regular, especially the Blitz mode.BEAUSkate in Early Access.More Hollow Knight: Silksong.Some Heroes of the Storm, though waiting on the new patch. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week's episode features my random TGS thoughts, Frostpunk 2, Next of Kin: Fidelity, Rally Arcade Classics, Tiny Lands, King of Ping Pong: MEGAMIX, Psycho Dream, Sky of Destruction, and Candylands Journey. Anyway and as always, thank you for watching or listening, I hope you enjoy this here episode, and I hope you have a wonderful wonderful rest of your day. (And if you haven't already, or are a listener and not a watcher, please like, subscribe, hit the bell, and all that jazz; it may not seem like much, but it goes a long way in helping support the show and site in general. I would appreciate it greatly.)

Sony and Microsoft had their showcases this week for TGS 2025. We dive into what's exciting, what's confusing, and what is just plain bad. Join us for some musings on the next six months in gaming!

Our friend Austin Walker stops by to join us for an absolutely jam-packed conversation about new and upcoming games we've been playing, including Ghost of Yotei, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, Baby Steps, Metroid Prime 4, Kirby Air Riders, and Super Mario Galaxy 1 + 2 for Switch. Also, pre-TGS updates on Yakuza Kiwami 3 and Kojima Productions' Physint and OD, the GDC rebrand, college courses about games, an update on Austin's tabletop RPG Realis, import tariffs on human flesh, and more! CHAPTERS (00:00:00) NOTE: Some timecodes may be inaccurate for versions other than the ad-free Patreon version due to dynamic ad insertions. Please use caution if skipping around to avoid spoilers. Thanks for listening. (00:00:35) Austin Walker is here! (00:02:30) An update on Realis (00:03:24) Sorry, we're importing what now? (00:10:03) Ghost of Yotei  |  [PlayStation 5]  |  Oct 01, 2025 (00:33:14) Recent firing at Sucker Punch (00:39:58) First Break (00:40:03) Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles  |  [PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Steam]  |  Sep 30, 2025 (01:14:04) Baby Steps  |  [PlayStation 5, Steam]  |  Sep 23, 2025 (01:31:40) Second Break (01:31:45) Metroid Prime 4  |  [Nintendo Switch, Switch 2]  |  Dec 04 2025 (01:38:26) Kirby Air Riders  |  [Nintendo Switch 2]  |  Nov 20 2025 (01:45:23) Super Mario Galaxy 1 + 2  |  [Nintendo Switch]  |  Oct 02 2025 (01:48:43) Supergiant interlude (Hades II, Pyre) (01:50:41) That Virtual Boy add-on (01:54:29) News (01:54:48) Kojima Productions' pre-TGS news (Physint, OD trailer, Death Stranding movie) (02:02:49) Yakuza Kiwami 3 announced (02:09:21) The Game Developers Conference has rebranded (02:19:08) Email! (about teaching games in college) (02:26:55) Thanks again Austin! (02:31:14) Mysterious benefactors! (02:32:45) Content and bye!

Hi! The channel is dying. It's us. We're killing it. ALSO: Today we're talking about VIDEO GAMES that we predict that will be at TOKYO GAME SHOW, which we might call "TGS" for short, but we're absolutely talking about Tokyo Game Show, and not any other kind of company or brand or anything. I will be predicting the kinds of RPGs, especially the Japanese kind, that I think we'll see at Tokyo Game Show. Got that, YouTube?

Get your canned beverage of choice and your ticket for the green car -- it's time to board the bullet train for TGS! For the ride over, we've got a Tight 60 filled with Silksong impressions and a breakdown of all the big news out of last week's mega-sized Nintendo Direct. Time — Topic Discussed 00:48 – Nicknames 07:37 – Hollow Knight: Silksong 24:43 – Earthion 27:23 – News: Nintendo Direct, TGS leaks, and more!

Giga Bytes Podcast #379: Hoy hablamos del Nintendo Direct, Mario Galaxy y Mucho más!!!  • Super Mario Galaxy Movie, regresa el cast,  • Super Mario Galaxy 1+2 oct 2, y amiibos  • Mario Tennis Forever, fever rackets (hablidades extra, 30 disponibles), trial tower, mix it up mode, swing mode (motion), adventure mode con baby characters, feb 12 • Super Mario Bros Wonder Switch 2 edition, nuevos modos, coop, bellabell park, spring 2026 • Talking flower spring 2026 •  •  • Pelicula Bioshock se enfocara en el primer juego • Nintendo Direct sept 12 (60min) 9am • Xbox tendrá anuncios, contenido en TGS 2025, presentación sept 25 6am EST • Rumor: PS6 tendrá lector de discos opcional (Similar a Slim/Pro) • Panzar Dragoon II Zwei: Remake Anunciado PS5, XB Series, PS4, XB1, Switch, PC ($24.99) en TGS     • Serie de God of War (Amazon) a comenzar a filmar en 6 meses • Keanu regresaría a Cyberpunk • Play Acclaim Sept 10 2:30pm EST • PSX cumple 30 en US 9-9-1995 • Dreamcast cumple 26 9-9-99 • 007 First Light • Fechas Podcast Me Salve: o Sabado 13 de septiembre 2PM (Trujillo Alto) o Sabado 4 de Octubre 2PM (Plaza del Sol) o Sabado 18 Octubre 2PM (Plaza Guaynabo) • TGS 2025: o Koei Tecmo: Nioh 3, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, Ninja Gaiden 4 o Capcom: PRAGMATA, RE Requiem, Onimusha: Way of The Sword, MH Stories 3, MH Wilds, SF6 years 1-2 Fighters Ed, MH Outlands, RE Survival Unit o PS: Astrobot, Ghost of Yotei, Marvel TOKON: Fighting Souls o Xbox: ROG Ally (ASUS Booth), Ninja Gaiden 4 Sigueme y Suscribete: Facebook.com/elgiga Youtube.com/elgiga947 Instagram.com/elgiga947  Twitch.tv/elgiga947 Twitter.com/elgiga947 Giga Bytes Podcast #monsterenergypr @monsterenergy @Stephreyesmarketing @caribbeanxsports @eriberto213 #gigabytespodcast #NintendoSwitch2 #PS5 #DeathStranding2 #Multiplatform #MarvelTokonFightingSouls #SpidermanBrandNewDay #Battlefield6 #Beta #Switch2 #Switch #PS6 #Capcom #HellisUs #FantasticFour #GhostofYotei #MetalGear #Contrabands #GhostofYotei #Switch #Xbox #PSSR #PS5Pro #Xbox #Switch2 #Review #Playstation #Switch2 @tiendasmesalve #gigabytespodcast

Time Stamps:00:00:00 Community Guest Intros00:05:00 The XBOX ALLY X Vs The Legion Go 2 Who Is Better Priced?00:40:00 You Don't Want To Miss Xbox's TGS 2025, Says Executive Producer!01:34:00 Outros and Special Message to the Community

Giga Bytes Podcast #378: Hoy hablamos Tokyo Game Show, PS6, números, GOW y Mucho más!!! Nintendo Direct sept 12 (60min) 9am Xbox tendrá anuncios, contenido en TGS 2025, presentación sept 25 6am EST Rumor: PS6 tendrá lector de discos opcional (Similar a Slim/Pro) Panzar Dragoon II Zwei: Remake Anunciado PS5, XB Series, PS4, XB1, Switch, PC ($24.99) en TGS   Serie de God of War (Amazon) a comenzar a filmar en 6 meses Keanu regresaría a Cyberpunk Play Acclaim Sept 10 2:30pm EST PSX cumple 30 en US 9-9-1995 Dreamcast cumple 26 9-9-99 007 First Light Fechas Podcast Me Salve: Sabado 13 de septiembre 2PM (Trujillo Alto) Sabado 4 de Octubre 2PM (Plaza del Sol) Sabado 18 Octubre 2PM (Plaza Guaynabo) TGS 2025: Koei Tecmo: Nioh 3, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, Ninja Gaiden 4 Capcom: PRAGMATA, RE Requiem, Onimusha: Way of The Sword, MH Stories 3, MH Wilds, SF6 years 1-2 Fighters Ed, MH Outlands, RE Survival Unit PS: Astrobot, Ghost of Yotei, Marvel TOKON: Fighting Souls Xbox: ROG Ally (ASUS Booth), Ninja Gaiden 4 Sigueme y Suscribete: Facebook.com/elgiga Youtube.com/elgiga947 Instagram.com/elgiga947                                                                                                                                    Twitch.tv/elgiga947 Twitter.com/elgiga947 Giga Bytes Podcast   #monsterenergypr @monsterenergy @Stephreyesmarketing @caribbeanxsports @eriberto213 #gigabytespodcast #NintendoSwitch2 #PS5 #DeathStranding2 #Multiplatform #MarvelTokonFightingSouls #SpidermanBrandNewDay #Battlefield6 #Beta #Switch2 #Switch #PS6 #Capcom #HellisUs #FantasticFour #GhostofYotei #MetalGear #Contrabands #GhostofYotei #Switch #Xbox #PSSR #PS5Pro #Xbox #Switch2 #Review #Playstation #Switch2 @tiendasmesalve #gigabytespodcast

Welcome to Xbox On, a podcast with one host, about one console, Xbox. I am said host, Jesse DeRosa, and on today's episode we'll be talking the latest Xbox news for the week of September 11, 2025 including, Xbox teases big reveals for TGS, MachineGames teases a third entry in their modern Wolfenstein series, you don't need to buy a ROG Xbox Ally to get the half-assed Xbox handheld experience, and more! New episodes every Thursday! ______________________________________________________________ Main YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UCtW7KhvTGMgYnR6HvsY12Qg ______________________________________________________________ Twitch: www.twitch.tv/lightningmcstream ______________________________________________________________ Time stamps: 00:33 Opening Banter 04:04 New Game Releases 08:20 News 37:27 What I've been eating 50:18 What I've been playing 54:26 Cronos The New Dawn Impressions 1:03:07 Listener Comments 1:16:35 Outro (Music by BB Murder Case

Go to http://shadyrays.com and use code FUNNY for 35% off polarized sunglasses. Go to http://factormeals.com/kindafunny50off and use code kindafunny50off to get 50 percent off plus free breakfast for a year. Silksong is getting easier, Xbox is doing a TGS stream, and Sega is teasing 4 mystery titles. Thank you for the support! Run of Show - - Start - Housekeeping Today after, KFGD, you'll get: If you're a Kinda Funny Member: The Roper Report   - - Silksong's first patch will make early game easier - Xbox confirms TGS live stream - Ad - Sega's Tokyo Game Show line-up teases 4 mystery titles - Xbox is coming to cars thanks to an LG and Microsoft partnership - A Bunch Of Resident Evil Games Are Reportedly Getting Switch 2 Ports - Wee News! - SuperChats & You‘re Wrong Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Giga Bytes Podcast #377: Hoy hablamos de rumores PS6, Twisted Metal y Mucho más!!! State of Play: 007 First Light este miercoles Rumores: PS6 y sus rumoradas diferentes versiones Twisted Metal S2 Review Jackie Chan tarabajndo en Spider-Man Brand New Day Fechas Podcast Me Salve: Sabado 13 de septiembre 2PM (Trujillo Alto) Sabado 4 de Octubre 2PM (Plaza del Sol) Sabado 18 Octubre 2PM (Plaza Guaynabo) Peacemaker Eps 1-2 Shinobi Art of Vengance Atrasada Mortal Kombat 2 de Octubre 24 a Mayo 15 2026 Ghost of Yotei Limited Edition Preorders Sept 4 (lanzan Oct 4): TGS 2025: Koei Tecmo: Nioh 3, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, Ninja Gaiden 4 Capcom: PRAGMATA, RE Requiem, Onimusha: Way of The Sword, MH Stories 3, MH Wilds, SF6 years 1-2 Fighters Ed, MH Outlands, RE Survival Unit PS: Astrobot, Ghost of Yotei, Marvel TOKON: Fighting Souls Sigueme y Suscribete: Facebook.com/elgiga Youtube.com/elgiga947 Instagram.com/elgiga947                                                                                                                                    Twitch.tv/elgiga947 Twitter.com/elgiga947 Giga Bytes Podcast   #monsterenergypr @monsterenergy @Stephreyesmarketing @caribbeanxsports @eriberto213 #gigabytespodcast #NintendoSwitch2 #PS5 #DeathStranding2 #Multiplatform #MarvelTokonFightingSouls #SpidermanBrandNewDay #Battlefield6 #Beta #Switch2 #Switch #PS6 #Capcom #HellisUs #FantasticFour #GhostofYotei #MetalGear #Contrabands #GhostofYotei #Switch #Xbox #PSSR #PS5Pro #Xbox #Switch2 #Review #Playstation #Switch2 @tiendasmesalve #gigabytespodcast