 Okay, welcome back everyone to the live Cube coverage here in Las Vegas for in-person AWS re-invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Two sets, live wall-to-wall coverage. Also, of course, there's a hybrid event as well. Great stuff online. Almost too much information to consume, but ultimately, as usual, a great show of new innovation for startups and for large enterprise. We've got a great guest, Paul Duffy, head of Startup Solutions Architecture for North America for Amazon Web Services. Paul, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. So we saw you last night, we were chatting kind of about the show in general, but also about startups. Everyone knows I'm a big startup fan, I'm a big founder myself, and we talk, I'm pro startups, everyone loves startups. Amazon, the first real customers were developers doing startups, and we know the big unicorns out there now all started on EWS. So Amazon was like a dream for the startup, because before Amazon, you had the provision of server, you put it in the colo, it's just an administrator, welcome to EC2, goodness is there, the rest is history. The legacy in the startups is pretty deep. Yeah, you made the right point. I've done it myself. I co-founded a startup in about 2007, 2008, and before we even knew whether we had any kind of product market fit, we were racking the servers and doing all that kind of stuff, so yeah, completely changed it. And it's hard too with the new technology now, finding someone to actually, I remember when we stood by our first Hadoop, and we ran a solar search engine, I couldn't even find anyone to manage it, because if you knew Hadoop at then, you were working at Facebook or a hyperscaler, so you guys have all this technology coming out, so provisioning it and doing the heavy lifting for start is a huge win. That's kind of known, everyone knows that, so that's cool. What are you guys doing now, because now you've got large agenda prizes trying to beat like startups. You've got startups coming in with huge white spaces out there in the market. Jerry Chen from Greylock was on yesterday, we talked extensively about the net new opportunities in the cloud that are out there. And now you see companies like Goldman Sachs have super clouds, so there's tons of growth. Take us through the white space, how do you guys see startups taking advantage of AWS and to a whole other level? And I think it's very interesting when you look at how things have changed in those kind of 15 years. The old world's horrible, you have to do all this provisioning. And then with AWS, Alamo Salipski was talking in his keynote on the first day of the event where people used to think it was just good for startups. Now, for startups it was this kind of obvious thing because they didn't have any legacy, they didn't have any data centers, they didn't have necessarily a large team. And being able to do this thing with no commitment, spin up a server with an API call was really the revolutionary thing. In that time, 15 years later, startups still have the same kind of urgency, they're constrained by time, they're constrained by money, they're constrained by the engineering talent they have. On one, when you hear some of the announcements this week or you look at what is kind of the building blocks available to those startups, that I think is where it's become revolutionary. So you take a startup in 2011, 2012, and they were trying to build something, maybe they were trying to do image recognition on forms, for example. And they could build that, but they had to build the whole thing in the cloud. We had infrastructure, we had database stuff, but they would have to do all of the kind of stuff on top of that. Now, you look at some of the kind of the AIML services we have, things like Textract, and they could just take that service off the shelf. We've got one startup in Canada called Chisel AI, they're trying to disrupt the insurance industry, and they could just use these services like Textract to just accelerate them getting to their product market fit instead of having to do this under the French use. You know, Paul, you talk about, I remember back in the day when web services, when service-oriented architectures, building blocks, decoupling, APIs, all that's now so real and so excellent, but you brought up a great point. Glue layers had to be built, had to be built. Now you have, with the scale of Amazon web services, things we're learning from other companies. It reminds me of the open source vibe where you stand on the shoulders of others to get success, and there's a lot of new things coming out that startups don't have to do because startups before them did. Yeah, this is like a new, cool thing. It's a whole other level. Yeah, and I think it's a real standing on the shoulders, a giants kind of thing. And if you just on pick, like in Verna's announcement this morning, he was talking about the Amplify Studio kind of stuff. And if you think about the before and after for that, front-end developers have had to do this stuff for a long period of time. And in the before version, they would have to do all that kind of integration work, which isn't really what they want to spend their time doing. And now, they've kind of got that head start. Andy Jassy famously would say, when he talked about building AWS, that there is no compression algorithm for experience. I like to kind of misuse that phrase for what we try to do for startups is provide these compression algorithms. So instead of having to hire a larger engineering team to just do this kind of crafty stuff, they can just take the thing and kind of get from 0 to 60. Give some examples today of where this is playing out in real time. What kinds of new compression algorithms can startups leverage that they couldn't get before? What's new that's available? I think you see it across all parts of the stack. I mean, you could just take a kind of a database thing. Like in the old days, if you wanted to start and you had the dream that every startup has of getting to kind of hyperscale where things bursting that seems is the problem, if you wanted to do that, the database layer back in the day, you would probably have to provision most of that database stuff yourself. And then when you get to some kind of limiting factor, you've got to do that work where all you're really wanting to do is try and add more features to your application. And whether you've got services like Aurora, where that will do all of that kind of scaling from a storage point of view. And it gives that style of the way to stand on the shoulders of giants. Or the same kind of thing. You want to do some kind of identity. Say you're doing a kind of a dog walk in marketplace or something like that. And one of the things that you need to do for the kind of the payments thing is some kind of identity verification. In the old days, you would have to have gone pulled all those primitives together to do the stuff that would look at people's ID and so on. Now people can take things like text tracks, for example, to look at those forms and do that kind of stuff. And you could kind of pick that story in all of these different swim lanes, whether it's compute stuff, whether it's database, whether it's this high level AIML stuff, whether it's something like Amplify, that just massively compresses that timeframe for the startup. So first of all, I'm totally loving this because this is just an example of how evolution works. But if I'm a startup, one of the big things I would think about and you're a founder, you know this, you know, opportunity recognition is one thing, opportunity capture is another. So moving fast is what Nimble startups do. Maybe there's a little bit of technical debt there, maybe a little bit of model debt, but they can get beach head quickly. Startups can move fast. That's the benefit. So where do I learn if I'm a startup founder about where all these pieces are? Is there a place that you guys are providing? Is there use cases where founders can just come in and get the best of the best composable cloud? How do I stand up something quickly to get going? That I could maybe refactor later, but not take on too much technical debt or just actually have new building blocks? Where's the, where are all these tools at? I'm really glad you asked that one. So, I mean for us, startups is the core of what everyone in my team does. And most of the people we hire, well, they all have a passion for startups. Some have been former founders, some have been former CTOs, some have come to the passion from a different kind of thing. And they understand the needs of startups. And when you started to talk about technical debt, one of the balances that startups have always got to get right is you're not building for 10 years down the line. You're building to get yourself often to the next milestone, to get the next set of customers, for example. And so, we're not trying to do the perfect enemy of good things. I call it the immaculate conception of startups. Yeah, you don't need that. You just got to get in marketplace. Yeah, and how we try to do that is we've got a program called Activate. And Activate gives startup founders things like AWS credits up to $100,000 in credits. It gives them other technical capabilities as well. So, we have a part of the console, the management console called the Activate console. People can go there. And again, if you're trying to build a backend API, there is something there, this build on AWS capability we launched recently that basically says, here is some templatized stuff for you to go from kind of 0 to 60 in that kind of thing. So you don't have to spend time searching the web. And for us, we're taking that because we've been there before with a bunch of other startups and we're trying to help. Okay, so how do you guys, I mean, there's a million startups. I mean, you and I could be in a coffee shop somewhere, let's do a startup. Do I get access? Everyone gets access to this program that you have or is it an elite thing? Is there a criteria? Is it just you guys are just out there fostering and evangelizing, building tools? Is there a program? How do you guys vet the startups? So it's a program. It has different levels in terms of benefits. So at the core of it, it's open to anybody. So if you were a bootstrap startup tomorrow or today, you can go to the Activate website and you can sign up for that self-starting tier. What we also do is we have an extensive set of connections with the community. So T1 accelerators and incubators, venture capital firms, the kind of places where startups are going to build and via the relationships with those folks, if you're in one, if you've kind of got investment from a top tier VC firm, for example, you may be eligible for $100,000 of credits. So some of it depends on where the startup is at, but the overall program is open to all. And a chunk of the stuff we talked about, like the guidance, that's there for everybody. It's free. Yeah. That's free and that's cool. That's good learning. Yeah. And then they get the free training. What's the coolest thing that you're doing right now that startups should know about around, obviously the passion for startups, I know for a fact at AWS, I can say that I've heard Andy and Adam both say that it's not just enterprise anyway. They still love the startups. That's their bread and butter too. Yeah. What's new? No. And I think to me that, you know, if someone, we were talking about the keynote, you see some of these large customers in Adam's keynote to people like United Airlines, very, very large, successful enterprise. And if you just look around this show, there's a lot of startups just on this expo floor that we are now. And when I look at these announcements, to me, the thing that just gets me excited and keeps me staying doing this job is all of these people, all of these little capabilities make it in the environment right now with a good funding environment and all of these technical building blocks that instead of having to take a few, you know, basic compute and storage ones, you have all of these higher and higher level things, you know, the serverless stuff that was announced in Adam's keynote earlier, which is just making it easy because if you're a founder, you have an idea, you know the thing that you want to disrupt and we're letting people do that in different ways. I'll pick one startup that I find really exciting to talk to. It's called Steady. It's run by a guy called Zack Cancer. And he started that startup relatively recently. Now, if you started 15 years ago, you were going to use EC2 instances building on the cloud, but you were still using compute instances. Zack is really opinionated and a kind of a technical technology visionary in this sense that he takes this serverless approach and when you talk to him about how he's building, it's almost this attitude of, if I've had to spin up a server, I've kind of failed in some way or it's not the right kind of thing. Why would we do that? Because we can build with these completely different kind of architectures. What was revolutionary 15 years ago and it's like, okay, you can launch a server with an API and you're going to pay by the hour. But now, when you look at how Zack's building, you're not even launching a server and you're paying by the millicentry. This is a huge history lesson slash important point. Back 15 years ago, your alternative to Amazon was provisioning, which is expensive, time-consuming, lagging, and probably causes people to give up, frankly. Now you get that in the cloud. You either roll your own custom domain, I remember EC2 before they had custom domains was so early, but now it's about infrastructure's code. Okay, so again, evolution, great time to market, buy what you need in the cloud. Adam talked about that. Now it's true infrastructure's code. So the smart, savvy architects are saying, hey, I'm just going to program. I don't have to, if I'm spinning up servers, that means that's a low level primitive that should be automated. Right, that's the new mindset. Yeah, no, and that's why the fun thing about being in this industry is in just in the time that I've worked at AWS since about 2011, this stuff has changed so much. And what was state of the art then? And if you take it's funny, when you look at some of the startups that have grown with AWS, like Airbnb, Stripe, Slack, and so on, if you look at how they built in 2011, because sometimes new startups will say, oh, we want to go and talk to this kind of unicorn and see how they built. And if you actually talk to the unicorns, some of them would say, we wouldn't build it this way anymore. We would do the kind of stuff that Zack and the folks that study are doing right now, because it's totally, totally different. And the one thing that's consistent from then to now is only one thing, has nothing to do with the tech, it's speed. Remember Rails front end with some back end, Mongo, you're up on EC2, you got an app. In a week, hackathon, weekend. And that time thing that just goes, it gets smaller and smaller. Like the Amplify thing that Verna was talking about this morning, you could have gone back 15 years and it's like, okay, this is how much work the developer would have to do. You could go back a couple of years and it's like they still have this much work to do. And now this morning, it's like they've just accelerated them to that kind of thing. Well, we'll end on giving Jerry Chen a plug in our chat yesterday. We put the playbook out there for startups. You got to laser focus on the beach head and solve the problem you got in front of you and then sequence to adjacent positions, refactor in the cloud, take that approach. You don't have to boil the ocean over right away. You get in the market, get in, get automating. Kind of the new playbook. It's just make everything work for you, not you just stay modern. Yeah. And the thing for me there, one line, I can't remember if it was Paul Graham or Sam Altman I stole it from, but it's just encouraging these startups to be appropriately lazy. Like, let us do the hard work. Let us do the under-differentiated heavy lifting so people can come up with these super cool ideas. Yeah, just plug in the talent, plug in the developer. You got a modern application. Paul, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Head of startup, solution architecture, North America. Amazon Web Services is going to continue to birth more startups. That will be unicorns and Deca-corns now. Don't forget the Deca-corns. Okay, we're here at theCUBE bringing you all the action. I'm John Furrier theCUBE. You're watching the leader in global tech coverage. We'll be right back.