 Hello everyone, welcome to the AWS Startup Showcase. We're on season three, episode two of the series, and the topic of conversation for this episode is about analytics and cost optimization. For the opening session to kick things off, we're joined by Keeble on Paul Duffy, head of Startup Solutions Architecture at AWS. Paul's here to discuss the magnitude and the impact of the AWS ecosystem and how it complements the AWS ecosystem of services. Paul, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us today. Hi there, it's nice to be back. Yeah, talk to us about what you're seeing in the startup world these days, given your role. So I mean, the most fun thing about the startup world and I'm head of solution architecture for startups at AWS, which means I get to work with a lot of these really exciting companies. I think the thing that's probably very difficult for anybody to miss right now is there's a lot of talk around economic uncertainty, the type of capital market. And what we're seeing there is nothing new. We've seen this story before, hype and market followed by an adjustment period. And the last five years were the largest startup investment years in history just for some stats for 2017. For example, the total venture investment we had was $88.5 billion with 11,300 so deals. And in 2021, that jumped up to $341.5 billion, about 17,600 deals. And we're in this adjustment period in 2022, we're still in it, everyone's readjusting. But let's not lose the perspective that last year was still the second largest investment year in history. And the truth is, even with these conditions, we're so pleased to see investments are continuing to flow, startups have changed the nature of innovation and that's not going to change. Startups are the lifeblood of innovation everywhere. And it's really important to take a long view something that we're really comfortable doing at Amazon. Investors are still investing, they're going earlier, they're building their portfolios but they're really focused on a flight to quality. They're looking at companies like some of those that we'll talk to and you'll hear from today who've built winning teams, they're going after really difficult problems, they're going for really big opportunities. They themselves are taking a long-term view. And then the other thing that's kind of the optimistic view is, if we think back to 2008 and the crisis then, even at that time, some companies that are unicorns today like Airbnb and Stripe and Uber, building on AWS, they were formed during those hard times. So there's a lot of uncertainty out there but we remain optimistic. And then the nicest thing about working with any startups is they themselves are definitely the most optimistic set of people that you could ever find. Definitely, and that's such an important part of their culture is that optimism. What are some of the notable trends? If we look at the startup, you're talking about investments still flowing, the startups being the lifeblood of what we're seeing today, despite the macroeconomic headwinds, what are some of the big trends from this showcase that you want the audience to take away? So I think some of the trends, and you see this, we've got a mix of partners, customers who are on today for both analytics and for cost optimization. And those are two quite different things and the cost optimization thing obviously tends to have a real focus in the current conditions that we're in. But the other thing is just seeing more and more companies doing more and more with data. And a lot of that stuff is enabled by the cloud is putting tools into the hands of data practitioners in every size of company. And the interesting thing about startups that are doing this, they're always trying to build some new offering, some new tool that they're working backwards from their own customers who are often underserved by the existing solution. So the startups are typically trying to do new things to disrupt the status quo. And in the case of data, just enabling customers to do things that they couldn't do before. Generative AI being kind of one of the most amazing things that's so connected to data. And then when we talk about cost optimization, even though it kind of sounds like a dull and dry topic, this time it's particularly important for customers both to help them extend their runway to make the best use of capital and also think about how they can reinvest what they might save from that. So it might sound a little bit more pedestrian, but lots of opportunities enabled by some of these really innovative startups to help our mutual customers. Definitely, one of the keys you were talking about data, every company in this day and age has to be a data company, whether it's a retailer, a grocery store, a manufacturer. So enabling organizations to use that data the most powerfully they can is critical. You also talked about from a cost perspective, everyone's got to do more with less these days. So reinvesting, absolutely critical. As you talked about, we have a great lineup of startups that are presenting immediately after this session. In general, 136,000 plus partners, how do the startups that are in this session compliment AWS and its huge ecosystem of services that it offers? So the nice thing about partners, I'm glad that we have such a large number of those, is all about giving customers more and more choice. Annie Jassy used to say in the early days of him running the interface business, he would talk about people and customers building every imaginable use case. I think having this scale of partners gives customers more choice for the unique use case that they have. We can build a whole bunch of stuff and a whole bunch of core infrastructure. Then we have all of these partners who are innovating on top of that core infrastructure. They have all the unique knowledge of the space that they're going after. They continually impress us and then they continually impress whether their customers are with what they can do. It's really about extending all of those options that the customers can ultimately consume. And we know how customer obsessed AWS is and I think we're going to hear that from a lot of the startups that are in this session. You talked about customer choice, absolutely critical these days. What are some of the, if you think of maybe some use cases, some of the key benefits that AWS customers are going to get by working with some of these startups in this massive ecosystem? Well, one of the best things I think that customers get by working with startups is these startups themselves, kind of by definition have to be some of the most customer obsessed organizations that exist because they are there. They only exist by nature of trying to disrupt or trying to solve a problem for a customer that hasn't been solved. They're definitely a lot kind of incumbents with legacy products. They are starting fresh. They themselves are working backwards from this customer. And so when you're a customer and you look at this kind of incredible garden with all of these kind of unique flowers that you could think of with these startups, it gives customers lots of choice. Then it also tends to give them super, super innovative and disruptive solutions because that's why these startup founders are making these companies, trying to do different things. If you look at Memento, one of the customers that we've got on now who are doing serverless stuff from a caching point of view, they did that because they saw this challenge that was frustrating and they wanted to make it better for customers. And of those customers, they're getting all these really exciting, really revolutionary and highly impacting solutions that make a difference to their own businesses. And can help them achieve considerable competitive advantage. We've talked about that a lot with customers during this series that we've done as well. So then Paul, walk me through how AWS is helping enterprises with things like cost optimization or accelerating analytics through the partners that are building on AWS. What's AWS's role there? So one of the ways that we can help there is just the way of connecting these things together. So things like the AWS Marketplace that allows customers to find some of these solutions from partners, it allows them to deploy them very easily in their environment. It helps them from a billing point of view. It helps them from an integration point of view. It can help them from a discovery point of view. And then it helps for the startups as well to connect them better to all of these enterprises. There are lots of choices for these enterprises. There are lots of startups found in. So one of the things that we think is very important and as we do as part of our start programs is this kind of connection from a go-to-market point of view that matches those customer needs that are unmet from a large enterprise, for example, with one of these really disruptive startups that's going to be able to make a positive impact to that enterprise's business, whether it's data analytics, whether it's cost optimization or the entire broader set of solutions from the broad set of partners that we have. There's a lot of symbiosis in this ecosystem and it's nice to see that referenced and also shown example after example. What are some of the things that, any teasers that you want to give the audience about some of the partners that are speaking at the event today? Well, I mean, everyone is going to hear in detail from those partners. So I will try not to steal their phone but I think from, you know, we've got a few partners in the analytics space with Hex and Rolestack and Memento who do some really interesting, I used to work with Koadja, one of the founders of Memento who used to work at Amazon. They're doing some really innovative stuff from a serverless point of view from Caching, Hex and Rolestack are doing some really interesting stuff with data and when you just look at their websites you kind of can drool over some of the tea, the tools and the possibilities that they're offering. And then Sedi, Archerra and Ups, Prosper Ops and Peppidata are all helping out with cost optimization which is one of the other really important things that we talked about before. But I will hint at my excitement. I will not steal their thunder given that I know we're going to hear from them in some detail separately too. That's very kind of you. We're seeing though a ton of interest in controlling cloud costs, especially considering you did a great job of describing the headwinds and the macro economic environment that we've been in. Obviously that's not new. Where controlling cloud costs is concerned? What are the trends that you're seeing that the audience needs to be listening for? Well, even before towing trends one thing that I want to make clear about our approach which is to me has always been such an inspiring thing. Adam Slipsky, our current CEO, he used to run our kind of sales and marketing field when I first joined 10 or so years ago. And one thing Adam said is we want our customers to spend the minimum amount possible with us. And that's something that's absolutely embedded in the DNA of us at AWS and also and you see some of these partners offering that. So our approach really hasn't changed during this uncertain period and we've always talked about cost to optimization. We've always talked about how we can have our customers spend less money. And in some ways it's been built into the cloud from day one in that you only pay what you use. You can fail quickly without big financial impact. It's quick to recover from experiments. And we've also been noted for reducing prices. We've done that 129 times since we launched in 2006. And then we've got some tools that help people that are native to the platform like a cost explorer, trusted advisor, budgets and well architected review. But particularly in these times, yes we want to reduce our customers bills in any way that we can. But when we think about our Fugazi leadership principle, it's not just about reducing the bill for the sake of it. It's like if we can help customers spend less money on AWS by optimizing their infrastructure, by doing something serverless, by using a managed service, just by having a well architected review. That also frees up that money that they're spending for them to do more. And in these really hard times, it's super critical for them to do that because if they can invest more into their business, they can do more for their customers. And if they can use the cloud to make that experience for their customers even better, it's great for everybody involved. Right, and tremendous potential for innovation. Let's pivot a little bit on infrastructure management. Talk to me a little bit about where the startups play a role in that, where AWS is helping as well. So from a management point of view, we have, and this is similar to the things you see across the whole platform, we have some things built in, but then this is where we have. And it's so great to have some of the partners that we've got on the show today who are focused on cost optimization, who each are taking a slightly different approach to how they do that. Some are using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. And for us, it's great to have all of those different offerings for customers, whether it's managing Kubernetes clusters in a better way, whether it's using these AI or ML techniques to look at the infrastructure for a customer, a workout, what can be turned off, what is not needed. All of those things coming together combined with just trying to give basically customers the best architectural advice, trying to give them the best options for price performance. Those are all the kind of things that come together from an infrastructure point of view to make sure that we can do what Adam said, have our customers spend the smallest amount possible on AWS. From a best advice perspective, when's the right time for an organization, whether it's healthcare or financial services, to think about cost optimization? For us, it's like a healthy eating thing. It's not a kind of a one-time thing, go on a diet and then leave it for another year or kind of develop unhealthy habits. It's a kind of continuous thing. And I think we see it best when it's embedded into the kind of the DNA of a customer's operating procedures or by using one of the tools that our partners are going to talk about today. That's another thing, it's a continuous thing that if you're going to do some new projects, some new infrastructure project, one key part of that is you don't just do it and stop. You do it and always our advice would be like the healthy eating, like taking vitamins every day. It's something that should be a part of a rep, repetitive and continuous procedure that would be useful for any customer. I love that thinking of it, analogous to a healthy lifestyle. All right, Paul, so you kind of teased what some of the things are that the audience is going to see in here during the showcase session. What's next? What are some of the things that have you really fared up right now? So I think, you know, I've asked this question to a number of people I work with recently via interviewing and it's kind of a, it's kind of an unsurprising answer which is Gerative AI. And I think we are all living through an inflection point right now when it comes to technology, which will offer an opportunity for every customer experience, every startup. We're betting big on it via things like Amazon Bedrock which is a new service we announced that's going to allow developers with pre-trained foundational modules from us, AWS, from Anthropid, Coheir, Hugging Face and Stability via an API, Code Whisperer, which is a tool, a companion that can develop us and you can use when they're coding to help their efficiency, take their comments and help them as they're coding. And then some of the custom silicon stuff we do with EC2 instances provided by our Inferentia 2 chips to provide the best performance, high energy efficiency, a lowest cost for some of these inference workloads here. And with these tools, with the experience we have, we really want to provide these developers all of these startups with the flexibility to include this in their business. And this is going to be something that affects every startup, that affects every enterprise. It's such a fundamental shift. And from a startup perspective, we're making these technologies available to a select group of startups in our Generative AI accelerator, which is a 10 week program that provides a small set of startups with access to a whole host of technology, business, go-to-market assistance, up to $300,000 in AWS credits as they're building their products and services. We were overwhelmed, we got more than 1,200 applications for our initial cohort, which was 10 that we had to expand to 21. And then even with that, and then I think this is an optimism thing for every startup, and it gives a signal to every customer in a way that the numbers show the optimism. Despite all the pressure and the things that we're seeing outside, money is pouring into these Generative AI startups. About 1.7 billion was generated across 46 deals in the first quarter of 2023 with an additional 10.6 billion of deals which have been announced, but have not closed. And then even today showing how important this is, the UAE's Technology Innovation Institute, they launched Foggle LLMM, which was a foundational model with 40 billion parameters. It's the top ranked open source model in the public hugging face open LLM leaderboard. It's available on Amazon SageMaker Studio, and that's just an announcement that was today. So I think all of the companies that you'll hear from today, all of the startup companies that you'll see that are founded, all of the companies that are growing right now, Generative AI is just gonna be such an important thing for them and it is something that we're investing in very, very deeply and we're really excited about what our startup customers can do with it. No doubt, I share in your excitement, I think we all do. The opportunity, the impact that can be made is really limitless. Paul Debbie, thank you so much for joining us and kicking off the show. We really appreciate your time and your insights. Great, thank you. My pleasure. Coming up next, we have an exciting lineup of partners from the AWS ecosystem. It is split into two breakout tracks between analytics and cost optimization. Next up to present is Memento and EnOps, followed by more awesome companies like Hex, Archera, Rutterstack, ProsperOps, Sadi and Pepperdata. Our analysts and expert guests are gonna share the latest advancements when it comes to the two themes of this showcase. Stay tuned for more CUBE coverage of the AWS startup showcase coming up next.