Fintech Corner Transcript: An Insider’s Perspective On Migrating to the Cloud, Then and Now

Joseph Drambarean:

All right. Welcome to FinTech Corner. My name is Joseph Drambarean I’m your host. I’m the chief product officer here at Trovata, and I’m joined as always by our fearless leader, Brett Turner, our founder, and CEO. 

I’m really excited about today’s episode. We’ve got a special guest today, Kris Bliesner, and Kris is actually joining us remotely today, so he won’t be joining us in studio, but excited to have you on Kris. And I know that you and Brett have quite a bit of history, so I’m excited to learn a little bit more about your guys’ background and all of the adventures that you’ve had together. But I wanted to start by just welcoming you to our show and I’m excited to have you on. 

And Kris, of course, is the CEO of Vega, a startup that is based out of Washington State. And I’m excited to be a customer of Vega, but also a fan. And yeah, I don’t know if you can give us a little bit of background about Vega at some point soon, but yeah, Brett, I don’t know if I’m getting Kris’s intro right, but I know that you guys have had so much history together. I wanted to make sure that you get an opportunity to give him some props.

Brett Turner:

Yeah, I mean this is a special podcast. I mean, Kris and I go way back in the startup world and he’s a founder of Vega and it’s really a true cloud pioneer. And so it’s going to be fun to reminisce on a few stories a little bit because it’s a big part of my story too, because there’s so many things I’ve learned from Kris around cloud and really this whole transition of what we see is this has made its way and really disrupting of what tech is today, going back at the rise of AWS and all the things that enabled.

So yeah, definitely excited to have Kris on and I think a little bit a part of this whole talking about where cloud was then, where cloud is now with the things that you’re doing now, Kris with Vega is super cool, but I mean just even going back to the early days, I remember a couple of stories of even starting 2nd Watch we’re brainstorming on stuff before even. 

But I remember too, I got to say right out of the gate, I didn’t learn till later, till maybe it was a few years ago that you’d said, because we were meeting in an IHOP every couple of weeks for brainstorming. And then, you know I’m a big breakfast fan, I love breakfast anytime of day. And you were like, “Oh, I never really told you, but man, I hated that place. It gave me stomach pains every time.” And like, “Kris, why didn’t you not tell me? We went there for a year brainstorming on 2nd Watch.” 

But what a cool story of this whole journey to the Cloud back then. And I used to always say, “Really, Kris, a 10-year journey, it’s going to take 10 years?” And here we are year 13, it’s still going strong and here you are on V2 and stronger than ever. So it’s great to have you on and lot to talk about.

Kris Bliesner:

Yeah, no, thanks. And I was laughing, I was reading a post that you had on LinkedIn the other day where you said, this is your seventh startup and you sort of went through this and I laughed and I said, “Well, I think I’m on my sixth and I think at least half of them I worked with you.” [inaudible 00:03:10] a deep background there. Certainly at least half I think, maybe more.

Joseph Drambarean:

So that’s a lot of bad breakfasts.

Kris Bliesner:

Right?

Brett Turner:

It’s taken all those startups to learn that Kris does not IHOP, that’s out of the-

Joseph Drambarean:

Would this be a bad time to say that Snoozes gives me stomach aches every time we go to get breakfast there? I’m just kidding.

Yeah. So I think that the reason we wanted to have you on Kris, we actually had spent some time in the previous podcast just thinking a little bit about the why the industry, the TMS space specifically kind of has it backwards when they think about cloud. We dug a little bit into the topic and it got us thinking it would be awesome to hear the perspective of an insider in the Cloud industry. 

Trovata, obviously we use cloud, we’re native cloud on AWS and we have a lot of expertise in that realm, but no one sees it the way that you see it from a cloud industry perspective because you’re in the thick of it and you’ve been in the thick of it for a long time now, from the really the beginning stages of AWS and how that really took over the market.

And it’d be awesome to hear your perspective just at an aggregate level of what you’ve been seeing in the financial services industry with regards to cloud because there’s so much buzzwordy behavior that takes place from a marketing perspective. And I wonder how much of it is reality, how much of it is actually taking place with regards to data transformation, and I can’t really think of anyone better than you to give that perspective. So just curious to hear your take on whether or not we’re full of it from our take in the previous podcast or if you think that there is something to it.

An Expert Take on Cloud 

Kris Bliesner:

No, I appreciate that Joseph. And I think we’ve got a pretty unique view into financial servicess on a couple fronts. So we typically focus our broader platform on large enterprises, so folks that are consuming at scale. But we do have a channel product that has done really well with smaller companies, smaller mid-market companies, and that particular product is doing quite well in financial services, so community banks and credit unions and so I can talk to it from both angles. 

I would say from the community bank and credit union side, before the game is even starting, so they’re on maybe Microsoft 365, they have no infrastructure in public cloud, and so it’s super early days. Our workload is one of the first workloads in public cloud for them.

And in fact, we’re going to come out with a case study for University Credit Union in California here just shortly. The CEO is using the tool, they’re really embracing it because their business has changed, right? Before COVID, they didn’t have any of these sort of remote problems, everybody was employed in the state of California and everything was good. And I think now they mentioned they have employees in 12 different states or whatever it is. And so they’ve got folks all over the place, remote and cloud is a fantastic way of solving some of those problems. 

And so I think that was a great use case to introduce them to cloud infrastructure. I don’t think it’s the only one hopefully that they’ll leverage and take advantage of, but I think the small mid-market folks are in financial services are still super, super early. And that’s okay. I think we’re starting to help prove out that really push on the security and optimization front so it’s secure, but also optimize from a cost perspective and that’s going to help drive a lot of folks to move more. So I think that’s good.

I think for the larger enterprises that we talk to, they’re definitely there, they’ve been using, now there’s as you know various folks, like more tech-savvy banks like Capital One that have gone all in, but there are other banks that are definitely using at a scale level. And what we’re seeing now is its question around how do we help them better understand who’s using what so that the sort of visibility side of cloud, I think, and this is not specific to financial services, I think what we see across enterprises as a whole is that visibility is still a struggle because you sort of unlock this different way of doing infrastructure. 

And so we all love cloud because it’s a really cool platform to build on top of, but if you think about it from a financial perspective, it’s a huge challenge because you’ve now given people a toolbox, but there’s no sort of checks or controls in place.

You used to have to be able to generate a PO before you bought a server, all these kinds of things. And now you just light up an account and people are going out and spending and doing different things and there’s no spending limits, there’s no POs. 

And I get asked all the time from enterprise folks like, “Hey, how do we put bounds around this thing and how do we manage this stuff? Because people will just go out and spend crazy and then we can’t forecast it, we can’t budget it, we can’t control costs.” It’s not capital expense anymore. So there’s no smoothness of the spend, so it’s OpEx and so it’s getting big enough now it’s hitting the quarterly numbers. And so people are starting to freak out and go, “Okay, boy, now that we’re outside the early innings and we’re getting into this kind of midway through the adoption cycle, we’re spending millions of dollars a month on public cloud, but we have zero handle on how to manage it.”

Why Are Banking and Financial Services Behind?

Brett Turner:

So you think Kris, right now, the problem you’re solving with Vega too is just a lot of that is this runaway spend. It makes it so easy with AWS, all the advanced services that continues to pile on, it’s a kid in the candy store if you’re in IT and all that is exploding. But for our space in banking, you just mentioned too, an opening with the credit unions and things like that. 

When you think of even customers and you have the SVB meltdown and they’re wondering, you look at APIs and tech and it’s just such in its infancy and as you said, they’re just starting to use cloud for the first time. Maybe a quick question, how can that be? I mean, you think of where everybody else is already talking about, “Hey, we need to control runaway spend.” And yet you have banks who haven’t even started spending. Why is that such a chasm and why is that a 10-year delta when financial services banking is so far behind?

Kris Bliesner:

I remember in the early days of 2nd Watch, and we were local here, there’s some banks here, and I remember presenting to a group of bank CIOs and we were talking about how to run production level apps in the Cloud and what we were doing-

Brett Turner:

This is real quick, this is what year? This is like what, 2011?

Kris Bliesner:

2012, 2011, some time in that 2012 range. And I remember having that conversation with them and saying, look, here’s all these case studies of these really large companies putting production apps in the public cloud, and you can run your ERP system there. You can run your marketing websites, whatever you want to run. 

And I remember to a person that the group was like, “We’re never going to use the Cloud, we’re never going to put our stuff there, we don’t trust it.” 

And I’m like, “Are you kidding me? Why wouldn’t you? It’s a fantastic platform.” “Well, we’re not going to do that, we want to hold tightly to all this stuff.” And it’s sort of a legacy sort of idea around, hey, if I hold tightly to it, I have more control over it, I have this warm and fuzzy feeling in my gut around security and compliance that the reality is we all know that that’s sort of false sort of narrative around that. And I think what helped get people’s brain about it was COVID.

So I’ll tell you a funny story about a credit union, and I won’t name them, but there was a decent sized credit union that we talked to that during COVID to be able to solve the remote user problem, because remember, everybody’s in the bank, they’re in a secure facility, the equipment’s in a secure facility. And then we pushed everybody out to their apartments, their houses, their shared WiFi communities. 

Your personal WiFi network is probably the most insecure network on the planet, right? Because everybody knows the default router password, nobody changes it. There’s no IPS or IDS devices or no network protection around your personal network. 

So this credit union decided to buy Cisco ASA firewalls and ship them out to their remote employees, and they’d have this $3,000 device that was sitting in everybody’s house and they’re like, “Oh man, we got to figure out how to remotely manage these things and do all this stuff.” And we just sort of laughed, we chuckled. We were like, “You’re kidding me? You did what? What’s going on here?”

And so we sort of had that conversation and I think banks realized that, that’s probably not the right course to go, but listen, that was the default. When COVID hit, PayPal announced that they just sent out a bunch of laptops to everybody. And I was like, “Are you crazy? Now your data’s on some insecure network in the middle of nowhere. Why would you do that?” 

There’s better tools and technology, we can leverage cloud to do that. And so I think now with us pushing this sort of concept around remote workers and better security and better management in particular, there’s no data that exists on that device, there’s no data that gets transferred back and forth. 

So it is a much more secure way to do it. And I think that’s giving them confidence and clarity around, okay, we can run workloads in the public cloud, here’s how it works. It’s better, it’s cheaper than we thought. And so great, this is an entree to the broader conversation around how to do that. And again, that’s the small, mid-market guys. The bigger guys have been using it for a while, but it took COVID to sort of get people’s brain around, Hey, there’s a better way to do this stuff, you don’t need to ship Cisco ASA firewalls to people’s houses.

Brett Turner:

One maybe kind of early story that was pretty progressive from a bank perspective, and it’s honestly something I mentioned when meeting Joseph, in early days of starting to Trovata and Capital One is telling the story, because I just remember in one of probably the first six figure engagement that we got 2nd Watch.

I say we, but it’s you, it was basically, this is going to be Kris professional services, we need to generate revenue. And it was Capital One because Joseph mentioned, oh yeah, Capital One’s been in the Cloud, really the only bank that does. It’s got redundant clouds and it’s like, “Wait a second, there was an early advisory engagement that you did with Capital One folks to help them on the very early days of AWS.”

Kris Bliesner:

Yeah, well, it was funny, they’d announced, and I can’t remember, Joseph, you probably know better than I do, what year was it they had announced they were all in on public cloud and they’d actually come to re:Invent and said, “We’re hiring these thousands of people.” And I’m like, “There’s not thousands of people that know cloud, so I don’t know how you’re going to find these people. But-

Capital One’s Cloud Transformation

Joseph Drambarean :

It would’ve been, I think 2015, either 2014 or 2015 was when the CEO at least got on the public stage and said, “We’re going to go on a multi-year journey to becoming the first bank in the world that would be on the public cloud.” And it took a really long time. I don’t think they actually finished that journey until 2019 if I’m not mistaken. 

So they progressively were working towards that. And I think that it’s a lot harder than you think it is. And we were jousting the last podcast about, well, all of these companies they claim that they’re in the Cloud, they’re not really in the Cloud, they’re just running a box that is in the Cloud that is still hosting their old software. And nothing has changed really other than they decided to install that Java Stack onto some Azure workload and that’s it, they’re done.

But the reality is that when you adopt a cloud strategy, it’s a big effort and a big commitment because you have to transform the way that you do business in a variety of different ways and cost overrun, one of the things that you guys focus on is one of the unintended side consequences of going down that road. 

Because as you experiment, you try different tools, you try to recreate all of the things that you are depending on in a new workload, new infrastructure. Well guess what? You end up making mistakes and things end up out of control when it comes to cost. 

But one of the things that I remember, especially at Capital One when we were going through iteration three of the Cloud transformation, because the first one that you probably were involved in was the very basics, how could we take our legacy TSIs infrastructure that is driving the ledger for card transactions? How could that be hosted somewhere other than the Richmond Data Center, which is a secure location multimillions in investment to keep that redundant in all of the different things that goes into that. And then trying that, just that nothing else in the Cloud.

And that was an incredible failure, which then turned into iteration 2, which was not an incredible failure. It was a fully productionized version. And then iteration 3, which is the generation I was a part of, was taking all of the constellation services, the APIs, the things that drive the user experience that you see when you’re using an app or you’re using a website or you’re using getting a push notification on your text messages. 

All of that was driven through cloud services that were natively built in AWS. And at the time it was the wild West, it was really scary because none of it was figured out, none of it from a monitoring perspective, from a redundancy perspective, from a security perspective, all of the requirements with regards to SOC with PCI, everything that you could imagine was then now all of a sudden back to square one because you have to do it on brand new assumptions and all the things that you may have done to get approved for that in your private cloud or in the data center that you hosted, now it’s out the window because you have this brand new way of doing things and you have a partner dependency that you have to rely on.

And I remember going through those exercises as one of many in a large organization that had a role to play in all of that. And it was crazy. Just the amount of red tape was insane. So I have a lot of respect for what it means to go from concept of we want to be in the Cloud to then executing that vision. It’s not easy. It’s actually one that is massively transformational. And that’s why I think that we really kind of set this tone in the previous episode of we have so much confidence at Trovata with regards to our cloud strategy because we know that our competitors will have to go through that and it’s not easy.

Cloud-Native’s a Secret Weapon

So that’s where the irrational confidence comes from. It’s because it’s not irrational. We know exactly how difficult it is to go from, hey, we are a cloud first company, to actually being a cloud first company. And the benefit of Trovata that we’ve been kind of preaching all along and Vega as well is in the same boat, is that we started life on that footing. 

We never had to conceive of, well one day, hopefully we will be a cloud company. And it was no, day one, we were a native cloud company and we conceived of everything from that footing. And I think that that’s something that is a real differentiator in the industry. It’s not something that you can just snap a finger and then that’s it, all of these problems are solved. You have to be an expert in building companies in this way. And I think that that’s something that I’m curious, as you guys were bringing Vega to life and you’ve seen other companies go through similar transformations over the years, how important is this? Are we crazy and thinking that this is a differentiator?

Kris Bliesner:

No, no, not at all. And in fact, I agree with you. Obviously we’ve been through a lot of this. There’s a couple points I was thinking about when you were talking about, I think lift and shift is what a lot of people do early on, that certainly the big enterprises will sort of try that and the dirty little secret there is that you might get some early cost savings, but that’s not really a cloud migration. And we did a lot of that stuff at 2nd Watch, people were like, “Well, we’ll optimize when we get there.” Okay, well when is that?

Because the reality is yes, you can run to your point a Cox application or whatever on an EC2 instance or on an Azure Virtual Machine or whatever. And yes, you’ll technically be in the Cloud, but the reality is you’re not cloud native, you’re not cloud optimized, and you’re going to continue to have the same problems you had on-prem around patching the operating system or doing all the other things that you don’t want to mess with having moved to the Cloud. And so you’re not getting all the benefits. And I think that’s definitely a piece of it. And I think there’s still some movement in the industry that needs to happen. I remember one of the things I was most proud about at 2nd Watch was we were able to get a SOC 2, type 2 certification.

SOC 2 existed way before the public cloud was around. It was a data center specific certification. Well, we never had a data center, and that was what I was most proud about, is we could show auditors that were following all these best practices while never owning a data center. And so that’s part of the challenge. That sort of stuff has to keep up with what’s the next gen of cloud to be able to think about that stuff differently because nobody’s going to have a data center at some point, so you don’t have to worry about that as much anymore. But I think that the cloud native piece is definitely there.

And then I think for us, we as a manager team just ended up finishing Frank Slootman’s new book that Amp It Up. And if you haven’t read it, I’d highly recommend it. One of the things he says that I totally agree with is you can’t change architecture midway, right? It’s not just about having a great business and having motivated smart people. 

You have to think about your architecture. You have to have great architecture and you have to think about the things you want to go do. And in our industry, a lot of the tools, or I would say the majority of the tools were focused on observability. So the Datadog, the New Relics of the world, the Cloud House, cloud abilities, all these folks built based on observability. Well, that’s not an architecture for what you need to have happen for cost optimization.

 You actually need to be able to operate and make changes to the infrastructure. Well, you can’t go from looking at stuff to actually making changes infrastructure without the right architecture. And so they didn’t architect up front for that stuff. It’s why they never got there.

For us, we architected upfront to actually make changes to the infrastructure and organize your assets and be able to think about those things differently. And I think that sort of thinking around not just cloud native to be cloud native, but thinking about how to architect to do the things that you want to do as a business and then leverage cloud native fundamentals to be able to do that. That’s huge.

What Happens in Vegas

Brett Turner:

One quick sec. Let’s shift gears maybe to a fun story. How’s that? Get a little less serious. So nothing scandalous, nothing salacious, but Kris, when I say the words V Bar in Vegas, what’s the story that comes to mind?

Kris Bliesner:

It was funny, we were a part of this inaugural class of premier partners with Amazon, and it was probably even before they sort of had real fresh criteria around what it meant to be a premier partner because they were sort of letting people in that they liked and they may or may not have had a cloud practice or whatever. I think for us it was all about how do we establish a relationship with the people that were selling and we’re out talking to customers so that we could extend our reach and be able to go get some of these great customers and projects that we wanted to work on. And so the very first re:Invent conference, we decided to be a sponsor, and our genius marking idea was to rent out the V Bar, which used to be sort of in the Sands Convention Center between all the different areas. There’s a Starbucks there now, and I can’t remember what the bar is that they called it, because they always rebuild restaurants or whatever.

But they had this small little bar that held, I don’t know, maybe 60 people, 70 people. And we sort of rented out the bar. And this is back when the very first re:Invent had maybe 3000 attendees. So there’s not a ton of people. We went to the very first sales kickoff that Amazon did. There was three vendors that supported it. This is another sort of side tangent, but funny story in SoDo in Seattle and Microsoft didn’t even show up, they were one of the sponsors, they didn’t even show up. And so there were two vendors, we were one of, somebody else. 

So we had established these relationships with the sales teams and those kinds of things and there was maybe a hundred people in the sales org at that point. And so key players, and so we invited them all to the V Bar and we said, “Listen, why don’t you guys come? We’ll do a hosted bar here. We’ll have appetizer food and just get to know you guys better.” Well, back in the day, and Brett, you can attest to this, having been at Amazon, Amazon had a very frugal culture. They didn’t do that kind of stuff. They didn’t throw parties.

Brett Turner:

They still don’t.

Kris Bliesner:

And so these guys were all like, “Whoa, there’s free food and free booze. Yeah, we’re in.” And so we sort of rented this bar, we served all this food and booze and had a great time and we’re talking about cloud and how we could go to market together and build something really cool. 

And it went over really, really well. The funny story about it was that this is early days at 2nd Watch and so we’re like, “Oh boy, we’re still raising funds and it’s angels and all this stuff, and we’re writing checks, we’re trying to figure out how to pay the bill.” And I think we went through three or four different credit cards to pay the bill [inaudible 00:23:58].

Brett Turner:

My thing was, I think it was right, maybe it was halfway or right in the middle of the action, credit cards are getting maxed out. And now the first re:Invent, I didn’t go to that one. I went to the second one because he was in the Venetian V Bar right off the main floor. But we did the same thing and we’ll tell that in a minute, but I just remember getting this crazy call and it’s like, “Brett, give me your credit card. I need your credit card.” Like, “I’m not giving you my credit card are you kidding me?” 

And I’m supposed to be the finance person, got to hold some account over here. I’m not. And you’re like, “This place is packed, we’ve got Andy Jassy in here, we’ve got all the… And it was just this great moment for 2nd Watch.

And then to follow up with that, I just remember the other story that was so kind of legendary in those days with 2nd Watch in that early days was, I still remember the story of, remember Terry, he’s kind of running the partner program, it launched, and then Andy, he and a few other folks on the enterprise side along with Andy Jassy, were riding up that elevator and we had rented out in the elevator the space, which nobody was thinking about, but basically just bought up all the spots, so it’d say 2nd Watch in the internal elevator of the Andy’s riding up. 

And Andy Jassy, of course, CEO of Amazon now was head of AWS then. So I remember they told us that he had turned and all of a sudden there’s 2nd Watch on the wall and he is like, “Man, 2nd Watch. Those guys are everywhere. I love those guys.” But I think it was the V Bar and all that, that was probably one of the greatest marketing spends, in terms of returns, it was amazing.

Kris Bliesner:

For sure, for sure. And listen, you got to get in the trenches with the folks you’re working with, and I think that’s key, anytime you’re partnering with folks is to just get in the trenches. And one of our values is work hard, play hard, so be able to have fun while you’re doing it, and you got to be able to do that with the folks you’re working with too. So we didn’t realize how powerful that was until afterwards, but it was definitely a powerful gesture for sure.

Joseph Drambarean:

I have this thought of Brett sitting down poolside in Vegas with just a pile of receipts just going one by one going like, “Oh God, all right, that’s approved. Who did this? A tiger? Come on.” Okay [inaudible 00:26:14].

Brett Turner:

Back in those days it’s like, man, there needs to be a Trovata to manage this. I mean, we got to get on top of this. I mean, there’s got to be some cash flow management.

Kris Bliesner:

Yes, for sure.

Brett Turner:

But in those early days too, I think the other thing, Kris, I mean you’re a true pioneer in this space, one of the first people that are really showing up on the scene and to figure out in the enterprise side what cloud even was and how to leverage it and the story of 2nd Watch and really talk about executing on vision. And I think just seeing how that played out, just getting a chance to work together but just sort of ride shotgun in that, in front row seat to all that and kind of learning that journey, how that kind of parlayed to Trovata, because that was the only way we were going to build.

And I think one of those early stores, I think what was fun is shout out to our good friend Tim Casey was like, “Hey, we need to move someone into the Cloud.” It’s like, “Hey, let’s move Tim. He’s got a couple of servers in his closet at his dental practice, and I think he’s paying some IT outsource provider like two K a month for that. That’s ridiculous. So let’s see if we can move him to the Cloud.” And we were going, “Tim, hey Tim, moving you to the Cloud.” He’s like, “You guys better not screw it up.” And then it’s like I look at Kris, I’m like, “Yeah, Kris, you better not screw it up.” But I just remember that first bill that he gets was something like, Kris wasn’t like $19.25 And from the 2000 he was spending a month and there’s like, yeah, this cloud thing has got legs.

Building Bulletproof Infrastructure

Kris Bliesner:

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, well, and there was a number of those sort of small business stories we started out with where, because you have to go find customers and meet them wherever they are. And we’ve done a couple of different dental offices and things.

I remember one in a town called Wenatchee, Washington where Jeff and I drove out and did, it’s part of the deal when you’re growing a company, you just take what you can get and the folks that are willing to move, you go out and move them. And so I think we learned a lot in those early days, and I think we had a lot of fun. We were able to do some groundbreaking stuff.

And I think I remember one story, this is back when Amazon, and Brett, you probably remember this because it was probably happening when you were there. Amazon had this no travel policy to what they called red states. And red states were places that they hadn’t established a nexus for taxes yet. 

And so they didn’t want anybody from Amazon stepping off the plane in Georgia because the minute that happened, Georgia could say, “Well no, now you need to collect Georgia sales tax and pay us.” And so before they had negotiated with all the states and figured all that stuff out, there was literally places Amazon couldn’t go. 

And so I remember we were having this conversation and with an enterprise rep on the East Coast, and they were like, you know what? And Coca-Cola and IHG, who were both based in Atlanta, they really want to know more about Amazon, but we can’t go down there and talk to them. And this is before Zoom and everybody else came out, so it wasn’t as commonplace as it is today. And so you had to go meet people.

And so I said, “Listen, I’ll go down, I’ll do this seminar in a Marriott convention center and I’ll call it Building Bulletproof Infrastructure on top of Amazon Web Services.” And there was probably half dozen Coca-Cola folks that came and half dozen IHG folks that came. And I just spent two hours sort of talking through how to build these things, production grade infrastructure on top of Amazon. 

And then after that, the IHG guys were like, “Wow, this is really cool.:” And then they split, but the Coca-Cola guys came up and said, “Hey, this is awesome and we want to work with you guys.” And so it started a big partnership for us. And I think what was really interesting about that was they knew they wanted to go there, they just didn’t know how. And so they needed that help, they needed that extra step, and that was all about us just enabling them and helping them through the journey. And that was hugely rewarding and a ton of fun in the process too.

Joseph Drambarean:

Adventures and data transformation. I feel like there are so many stories to swap. I mean, you got to have to take on the dentist shops and all of that. And I guess in our world at Trovata, it’s the harder cases where there’s an impossible bank in some random country that doesn’t have an API and that has only one specific type of file, that file was made 20 years ago and it doesn’t work and we have to figure out a way to connect. 

And you just kind of connect the dots, that’s the moral of the story that we’ve always had even here at Trovata, is that there’s a way to find that connectivity to get that infrastructure up and running. And it’s always in the interest of painting a picture for that customer because of course when they’re looking at the possibilities, they have a very boxed view. They don’t see the possibility from a processing perspective, from an ML, what even is ML at that point to a customer?

But the little by little you would tear down those walls. You show the possible, the art of the possible through connectivity, through the capabilities of cloud, through all of the services and features that we bring to life. And then suddenly that customer that might have been super closed-minded, now they’re an evangelist, they’re like, “What do you mean you’re not on the Cloud?” 

And they’re all on the conference speaking tour going and winning awards and having a perspective that kind of transforms the industry. And it starts with providing that yes. Providing that, hey, there’s a way, there’s a, and you can trust us and you don’t have to listen to everybody that’s been saying that no, there’s only one way of doing things. There’s only one piece of software and it has to take a year to build it and to get it up and running.

Brett Turner:

Well, so Kris, we went on a little bit of a rant, maybe we’ll call it a rant cast, can we trademark that one, Joseph? Last time, last episode, and it was really on cloud and one of the things that we’re seeing too, because obviously Joseph feels this way, he knows this because he’s architect and everything and he’s the technologist, but it’s also just having the early days and learning from you and through the whole journey at 2nd Watch what cloud is and native cloud architecture versus just lift and shift or just moving stuff in there. 

I was having a conversation with a senior executive at a treasury management system, one of the TMSs, and they’re all in our space, the treasury management systems are all like 25 to 45 years old. They’re just all legacy. And we’re sort of disrupting that as we kind of start to move up market now. But the senior executives said something like, “Oh yeah, we’re fully in the Cloud, we’re fully in Azure, and therefore that’s all done and we don’t have any more tech debt.” And I’m like, “Oh man, where’s Kris? Where’s Joseph?” 

So Joseph and I were having fun with that, but also I’d love to get your take. You hear that, how would you respond to that?

With Cloud, There Are No Shortcuts

Kris Bliesner:

Yeah, no, it’s funny. There’s two things we commonly hear. One, we’re either already in the Cloud or what on-prem is cheaper or whatever, we leave our stuff on-prem and I always sort of respond back and we do it a little flippantly, but it’s like, “Okay, if you think it’s cheaper, you’re not doing it right.” That’s the reality. And likewise for, “I’m in the Cloud.” If you are, then great, your customers are going to benefit from the scale and the agility and all the things that come along with it. 

But to your point, a lot of folks believe just moving a virtual machine or something else from VMware to Azure hosting or Amazon hosting is sort of checking that box for them and listen, hey, it’s a good first step. We all got to go through that. And I think that was Joseph’s point earlier about the journey.

I don’t think there’s ways to shortcut this stuff. 

And I think part of the challenge, and I will say what I’ve learned over the last decade is that this stuff is complex. There’s a lot of moving parts. You can’t shortcut experience here. You need to go through your learning curve. You need to get those learnings going to understand what works and what doesn’t because if you don’t, then you’re going to end up building it wrong. Because the reality is, I was looking the other day that, and this changes almost every month. There’s 616 distinct types of EC2 instances you can implement without even picking operating system, just different levels of hardware. It’s more likely you’re going to get that wrong, then you’re going to get it right. And that’s just a virtual machine. There’s a thousand other services. When do I use this service instead of something else? 

And so just being able to think through those things and be able to think about, okay, what do I use from a hyperscale provider versus what do I use from a third party? Because obviously the hyperscale guys don’t always get it right as well. So there’s a lot of people that use Snowflake because Redshift and some of those other things are still really hard and I want something a little bit more functional and have more enterprise features to it.

And so I think that whole process of going through and thinking through this shift in tech from, hey, I’m just doing things on servers and building my code and deploying it to, no, no, there’s this massive toolbox of stuff here that you have to think about and you have to be thoughtful about, okay, what are you going to use for this service? Or what are you going to use for this service and how do you tie those things together? That takes time and effort. And again, I don’t think there’s any way to shortcut it. 

And so to your point, Brett, earlier about the bank not doing it, they haven’t because they haven’t gone through that journey, they haven’t gone through the years of building this stuff out, learning what works and what doesn’t. And I think that’s the benefit of Trovata and of Vega is we can get you there faster if you use our service because we’ve been through that. And so we’ve built tools and technology to get you there faster so that you don’t end up having to do some of those learnings on your own.

You’re still going to have to figure out some of it, but hopefully with cloud native tool sets like Trovata and Vega, you can move faster. You can get things done faster and shortcut some of those things. And I think that’s the piece that’s important, but it is a huge benefit and Joseph, you’re spot on. It’s a definite advantage for us to be thinking about that stuff and you’re not going to be able to do it overnight.

You can’t just say, “Well, we moved a server so we’re in the Cloud.” You’ve got to go through that iteration.

Joseph Drambarean:

Well, I think that the other part of it is that we assume that we have a moat around our kind of technology kingdom, if you will, but at the end of the day, any tech company can be displaced. And the only way that you can stay nimble is by having that kind of philosophical approach to architecture and to building technology that allows for you to scale and nimbly change your mind when there are moments that matter and it starts at the top. 

You have to be willing as an organization and as a leadership team to say, “Hey, we are in this spot right now and we want to be over there.” And I don’t know what that over there might mean. 

We’re all obsessing over AI and ChatGPT right now, and let’s say that a vision for all of us, right, Vega or Trovata, is we need to be a part of that wave in some way, shape or form.

Well, you have to have a pathway to getting into that. You can’t just get on a marketing website and say, we have GPT4 or GPT4.5 capabilities at Trovata because everybody will know that it’s just a load of crap. 

At the end of the day, it’s fluff. The way that you create a way for you to be nimble in those approaches are when your technology is portable, when you have ways to take an idea that you may have had from a database or an idea that you may have had from an actual user experience, and you can say, “Hey, look, with a little bit of a tweak and a little bit of investment, we can get to that outcome because we set ourselves up to do that.”

And I think that that’s the difference between the older companies, the older tech companies that they were established years ago, decades ago, and new tech companies is that, that huge division is one that is philosophical. 

It’s not just technology. And I think that’s the point we’re trying to make is that at the end of the day, we’re built differently. We can react to GPT, we can react to some random technology that comes our way because we don’t even need to know what it is, we know that we have the philosophical mindset to adapt to that because of how we’re built. 

And that’s I think at the end of the day, the thing that the main reason why you would want to work with a Vega or with a Trovata, it’s not just a technology that we have today. It’s the promise of how we do business, how we build things that will in the future even continue to yield benefits that you don’t even see right now.

Kris Bliesner:

Yeah, well no, I totally agree. And I think cloud has been this great sort of leveling of the playing field, so you can now compete with the SKALE guys. It used to be SKALE was a thing that you had to have money to catch up with. I remember talking to a CEO back in the early 2000’s where he is like, “Whoa, we got this big SAN and that’s why nobody can keep up with this.” Well, now you’ve got access to the biggest SAN on the planet. 

You can store petabytes of information and you didn’t have to build out anything and what you do with it and how you process it, again, those things are all built in. And so I think the capabilities of somebody who’s leveraging cloud native tech, it just levels the playing field. So now you can compete with anybody on the planet, and it’s to your point, you have to be thinking about other things beyond just tech.

You have to think about the business process. We think a lot about technology as a cornerstone, but then people on process on top because it’s all about how do you get an outcome and for us, tech is a piece of that puzzle, but boy, anybody else can just show it tomorrow and build the same tech. They’re using the same parts and pieces that we are. It’s really about thinking about the process and how you want to do it. 

And to your point, being nimble is a key part of that, and then having the right people around the table to actually get that stuff done. And it’s definitely an awesome time in the world to be a startup because there’s no limit to what you can accomplish if we want to go support these large enterprises as a small startup, that was unheard of back in the day, you would’ve had to go hire a thousand people and build out this massive data center and go do all this stuff before you could go support a large enterprise and today you don’t have to do that.

So I think it’s really leveled the playing field and allowed a lot of companies to be innovative and go out and test things and try different things and fail fast and be able to just get things to market much faster. And that’s super exciting. I see that, and I know this happens too, because for a little while I was sitting on the board with you guys and it was fun to see the pace of change, right? 

If you think about how fast things can change in public cloud, that’s your previous point, what we’ve done in this last quarter with Vega has been nothing short of amazing. And it’s like that would’ve taken three years back in the day if we didn’t have all these tools and technologies to build on top of. And so it’s fantastic to see that ability to innovate and roll things out fast.

Brett Turner:

All right, final most serious question of the entire podcast, all right? It’s hard to grow a startup, I know that, you guys know that, Kris, you’re doing that again here with Vega. How do you balance that, it’s a full-time contact sport, with the days getting a little longer, boating season is coming up, when’s the boat going in the water?

Kris Bliesner:

We try and get more customers and partners to come so that we have a reason to get out on the boat. So that’s to leverage it a little bit more for sure.

Brett Turner:

That’s probably going to be your most biggest challenge now with starting Vega is, “Oh man, I got to get out there, it’s really nice.”

Kris Bliesner:

I know, I was telling somebody the other day getting through that, this is my second hyperscale startup and we’re getting that phase where I’m on the road 24/7 and so I think I’ve been home three weeks this entire calendar year. And so it’s been a bit crazy from that perspective, but also super fun. Thankfully the kids are all out of the house now, so it’s a totally different dynamic. The dogs hate us because we’re never home for them, but we did take the little two with us to New York last week and that was fun. But it’s a different world for sure, and you just have to manage that and figure out how to pace yourself. And I’m sure hopefully there will be great weather this year and we’ll be able to get it out, but we’re going to be on the road a lot too.

Joseph Drambarean:

Well, this was an awesome conversation, Kris. Really appreciate you coming to our podcast. Swapping stories is always fun. I feel like this is a good vibe for us, Brett, we should keep doing this guest interview stuff. This is awesome.

Kris Bliesner:

Love it.

Brett Turner:

Let’s keep doing it. Thank you, Kris. Great to connect.

Kris Bliesner:

Yeah, thanks for having me.