 Welcome back, everyone, live here at theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a special insertion here off the program. Jerry Chen, Greylock, 10 years with theCUBE coming on. 10 years will go when theCUBE first came here. Jerry, you were in the hallway. We didn't have any guest list. He was like, hey, you want to come up on theCUBE? So much. Now we've got three sets. We're going to do hundreds of interviews already. We're going to have probably over 200 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, or the Cube Cinematic Universe, you know? It's a whole franchise. Congratulations and happy early birthday, John. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. You know, I was described to be at high school when I first came to AWS. Look, I want to give you a thought. So we're going to do a quick segment here before AMD comes on. Got some great interviews with those guys. You've been here 10 years. You're out on the trenches. Just Andy Adams-Soleski 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 market? You know, I think it's a great rebound. The energy's back when it wasn't pre-COVID, right? We're saying last year it was kind of half the size and, you know, be post-COVID, but I think the show, the energy's great. And Amazon is just amazing, right? It's in this economy what'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 to worry about costs, right? Because I think Amazon's 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 be worried about costs. You're on the board of a lot of startups that are in the cloud. Rockset's one we've covered. I think they're going to come on here too the tomorrow or today. What's your advice on the board level? Go to market, dial up, dial down. What's the strategy? What marketplace? I mean, how do you give the advice to startups? What's the north star? What's the advice as the investor? Two or three things. For most startups, hard ROI, like how can you save money? So all the kind of fluffy marketing value, you got to have hard dollar savings, right? Number one, if you save money, you'll do well. Number two, to your point, the marketplace is becoming the channel for startups. These are 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 hard, hard to get approved as a startup. So the marketplace become a bigger, bigger deal. 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, may not. Some of them not making their numbers, they're starting to hear things like maybe they'll be repivoting, people are tooling up, what's the advice for the existing ecosystem partners? Cause they're either going to be like the next date of breaks or kind of like maybe. Everyone's looking for the next date of breaks, right? Yeah, I think for existing partners, you're seeing what's happening, John. Deals are getting smaller, taking it longer to close, right? It's just the reality of what's happening right now. And so for those partners are saying, hey, focus in the heart or I be okay with a smaller land and just expand in 23, 24, 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 play vote. So today, Ruba, the new leader of the partner network, they merged APN with the marketplace. They have now one coherent organization, not fragmented. I was talking to them last night, they have more startups than ever before coming on board. So the velocity of new venture creation is up and up and to the right. Still, even in this economy, and as they always say, best time to invest is in the 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 startups? Narrow, narrow wedge, right? So I think with the 5,000 startups every single year, there's so much noise, John. You look across the Escal floor, a lot of great companies, but a lot of noise. So I think the more focused wedge you have as a startup and how they can land deliver value, the better. Land with a very, 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 on, appreciate AMD for squeezing a couple of minutes out of their hour and the next hour we're going to spend with them for your sage advice. Final kind of new Insta challenge that Savannah put together, a new host. Insta challenge. Insta challenge is if you had to do an 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 who find the first five companies on the list wins the race. 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 Slapsky. It's the solutions and what you call the next-gen cloud. These high-level services, what AWS is doing around these services is super interesting. They kind of, don't say lead the way, but they're responding customers. So they lead the way by kind of following where the customer's going. And when Slapsky and AWS are doing these solutions, lie chain, et cetera, that tells you kind of where the market's headed. Next-gen cloud. Jerry Chen, thanks for coming on. 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 at this short break.