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>> Welcome back everyone, live here at theCUBE,
I'm Jon Furrier, host of theCUBE.
We've got a special insertion here,
(Chen laughs)
And off the program, Jerry Chen, Greylock.
Ten years with theCUBE.
Coming on ten years ago when theCUBE first came here.
Jerry, you were in the hallway,
we didn't have any guests listed,
you were like Hey! You want to come up on theCUBE?
Now we got three sets,
we're going to do hundreds of interviews already.
We're probably going to have two hundred.
Streaming live, shorts, Instagram Reels,
data lake.
TheCUBE's expanded, you've been there from the whole time.
>> It's like the MCU,
the Marvel Cinematic Universe,
There's theCUBE cinematic universe, you know?
There's a whole franchise.
Congratulations and happy early birthday, John!
>> Thank you very much.
>> Chen: Thank you for having me.
>> Yeah I mean, I just graduated high school
when I first came to AWS.
Look I want to get your thoughts on,
we're going to do a quick segment here before AMD comes on.
Got some great interviews with those guys.
You've been here ten years, you're out in the trenches,
Adam Selipsky just talked to the VCs,
the investment thesis, Economy,
there's headwinds, tailwinds,
depending on which side you're on,
you're going to have a tailwind or a headwind.
What's the outlook? What's your take of re:Invent this year?
AWS, the ecosystem, and the investment, and market.
>> You know, I think it's a great rebound,
the energy is back where it was pre-COVID, right?
We're saying last year was kind of half the size
and you know post-COVID,
but I think the show, the energy is great.
Amazon is just amazing, right?
In this economy that's going on right now in the world,
they're still growing, still kicking butt.
I think you're going to see
a lot of both enterprise customers and Start-ups
start to worry about cost, right?
Because I think Amazon is going to focus,
like hey, how can they help the customers?
But the economy for the next year
I think we're going to see some headwinds.
So I think a lot of startups,
a lot of customers are going to worry about cost.
>> You're on the board of a lot of startups
that are in the cloud, RockSet's is one we've covered,
I think they're going to come on here too,
either tomorrow, or today.
What's your advice on the board level? Go to market?
Dial up, dial down? >> Sure.
>> John: What's the strategy? What marketplace?
I mean, how do you give the advice to start?
What's the north star,
what's the advice for this as the investor?
>> 2 or 3 things, for most start ups, hard ROI.
Like, how can you save money.
So all the kind of fluffy, marketing value,
you've got to have hard dollar savings, right?
Number one, if you can save money, you'll do well.
Number 2, to your point,
the marketplace is becoming the channel for startups.
Because a lot of large customers have deals
with Amazon through the marketplace,
so startups can sell through the marketplace to customers.
Because a lot of CFOs are doing no new vendors, right?
It's getting harder and harder to get approved as a startup,
so the marketplace is becoming a bigger and bigger deal.
>> John: What about existing ecosystem partners
that have been around for the past 10 years,
they're independent,
they may have their toe in the marketplace
>> Yeah. >> May not.
Some of them not making their numbers,
they're starting to hear things like,
maybe they'll be re-pivoting.
People are tooling up,
what's the advice for the existing ecosystem partners?
Because they're either going to be like the next Databricks,
or kind of like maybe uh-
>> Everyone is looking for the next Databricks, right?
(John Laughs)
>> You know I think for existing partners
you're seeing what's happened, John.
Deals are getting smaller, taking longer to close, right?
It's just the reality of what's happening right now.
And so for those partners are saying,
hey, focus on hard ROI, be okay with a smaller land
and just expand in '23, '24.
So just get kind of creative
of how you're working with customers.
And I, like you said,
I think marketplace is kind of a go-to (indistinct).
>> John: So today Ruba the new leader of the partner network
they merged APN with marketplace
they have now one coherent organization, not fragmented.
I was talking to them last night,
they have more start-ups
than ever before coming on board,
so the velocity of new venture creation
is up into the right.
Still, even in this economy as they always say,
the best time to invest is in a down market,
that's like VC 101, Entrepreneurship 101.
What's your advice right now for builders out there
looking for that round, trying to get some traction.
The agility with the cloud still is there,
you can still get time to value,
you can still get traction fast,
That doesn't go away.
What's your advice for the start-ups?
>> Now we're a wedge, right,
so I think with the five thousand of these start-ups
every single year,
there's so much noise, John.
Look across the Expo floor,
there's a lot of great companies but a lot of noise.
So I think the more focused wedge you have to start-up
and how you can land deliver value the better.
Land with a very sharp wedge, expand over time
but just be very specific how you land.
>> Awesome. Jerry, Great to have you on,
I know we want to make some room,
I want to appreciate AMD
for squeezing a couple minutes out of their hour.
And in the next hour we're going to spend with them.
For your Sage advice,
final kind of new Insta-challenge
that Savannah put together, our new host.
>> Insta-challenge.
>> The Insta-challenge is if you had to do a Instagram reel
right now, about re:Invent this year,
what would that Instagram reel be, right now?
>> I would do the expo scavenger hunt. Right?
We would have a race of different VCs,
you give me a list of five companies,
the VCs that find the first five companies on the list,
wins the race.
(John chuckles)
I think that would be a great challenge.
>> All right, what's the most important story this year
at re:Invent that you could share with the folks
that you could share in terms of what's important
what they should pay attention to,
or what's not being told.
>> Well I think you talked about
your interview with Adam Selipsky,
is the solutions and the, what you call the next gen cloud.
These higher level services,
what AWS is doing around
these services is super interesting.
They kind of, don't want to say lead the way,
but they're respondent customers.
So they lead the way by kind of following
where the customers are going and if,
when, Sleipsky and AWS are doing these solutions
blockchain, etc that kind of tells you
where the market is headed.
>> Next gen cloud. Jerry Chen, thanks for coming out.
You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high-tech coverage.
I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back
with more CUBE coverage.
Day two-
Day three, here at re:Invent after this short break.
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