Screaming in the Cloud - Cloud Education Made Easy with Katie Bullard
Episode Date: July 30, 2020About Katie BullardAs President of A Cloud Guru, Katie leads the sales, marketing, customer success, and partnership teams for the world's largest and most trusted cloud training platform.Lin...ks Referenced: Main company site: https://acloud.guru/ and https://acloudguru.com A Cloud Guru Twitter: https://twitter.com/acloudguruA Cloud Guru LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a-cloud-guru/
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Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, with your host, cloud economist Corey Quinn.
This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world
of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles
for which Corey refuses to apologize.
This is Screaming in the Cloud.
Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn.
I'm joined this week by Katie Bullard, newfound president of A Cloud Guru.
Katie, welcome to the show.
Hi, Corey. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited.
So, as the time that we're recording this, how long have you been with ACG?
You know what? I think it's been almost exactly three months.
It feels both like three weeks and three years.
Yes, and a sudden surprise, a pandemic showing up in the middle of that
seems to have made our sense of time all go a little bit wonky.
Like, oh, ACG, haven't you been there for eight and a half years by now?
And no, no, March just felt that way.
It is definitely a very interesting time. I was
talking with my team last week, just in general about how we're all feeling. And the word that
we used was just off balance to that point. I think time has taken on a different meaning.
Our routines have taken on a different meaning, but the positive thing is we're literally all
in this together. So A Cloud Guru has been one of those companies
that an awful lot of people not only know about, but have strong positive feelings for. Because
for better or worse, that's how an awful lot of us have learned various things about the cloud.
It's basically taught the world to cloud. And what's always surprising when talking to people
about the company is that, wait, you mean there are people who work there who aren't in front of the camera teaching things eight hours a day? It becomes this weird perception
that when you listen to people who are teaching you things in an instructor setting to forget
that there's actually a company behind this. It's not just the people who are on camera or who are
teaching a particular course, but also there's an entire logistical operation.
Historically, you had the founders,
Sam and Ryan Cronenberg,
who were themselves involved
in various video properties as well.
So it had a very small company feel.
How big is A Cloud Guru?
So we are now approaching 400 employees across the globe.
About a quarter of those are our instructors,
as you mentioned,
but three quarters of them are all of us who are behind the scenes. And what's really kind of funny
is when I first started talking to Sam and Ryan about six months ago, the company had 100
employees. So that gives you an idea of how quickly it's growing and scaling.
It's one of those business problems that there's virtually no one on the other side of.
It's, wow, we're teaching people how to do a thing that is very clearly transforming an entire industry or basically the entire series of industries.
It's hard to name a single sector that is one of those very rare things where there's really no one on the other side of that issue.
Where in some cases, it's a buy this particular product to do monitoring.
No, that person is doing monitoring the wrong way.
Buy this other competing product.
In this case, the story of learned work in this new world more effectively, it really then just comes down to a discussion
of what is the most effective way
for different people to learn.
And an awful lot of folks respond super well
to the idea of video instruction.
Personally, that's never been the way
that I tend to learn things best.
For me, it's I'm going to build something
and get it hilariously wrong.
And through doing that, that's my learning approach.
But I've come to find
that talking to people, both on this show and as I walk through the world, I'm very much in the
minority. There's an awful lot of folks who find the idea of having an instructor-led lab-style
session, here's what we're doing and how, to be a much more appropriate way of learning things
correctly. And looking at my half-baked understanding of a lot of these technologies, I have to think they're right. Well, you know what's really interesting is I
think this notion that we all have different styles of learning, right, covers any sort of
education spectrum, whether it's cloud education or math education. And I've only been here at
three months, but my first month here was the acquisition of Linux Academy.
And as we've really dove into the two very different styles, actually, of the two companies and the two online education experiences, what we heard over and over again from customers and students was we really love the video learning, the short kind of 20 minuteminute sessions that Eikad Guru has really become known
for. And, or we love the hands-on labs, sandbox environments, like let me go play focus that
Linux Academy has had. And so from our perspective, what we're trying to do is deliver as much value
to our students in as many different forms,
to your point, because we all have different learning styles, as possible. I think that's
one of the things that I got really excited about in my first week here was the opportunity
to really do that to a level that both A Cloud Guru individually and Linux Academy individually
had not done before. What were you doing before you wound up at A Cloud Guru individually and Linux Academy individually had not done before.
What were you doing before you wound up at A Cloud Guru?
So I was actually the president at Zoom Info, which was previously a company called Discover Org. We acquired Zoom Info. It was a data and content business as well, but we sold to sales
and marketing professionals. And for the last four years, I've been president over there leading, you know, marketing, product, engineering, actually IT.
And got to see that company grow from about 200 employees to 1,200 employees in a four-year period from, you know, content business in a software that delivers a ton of value
to people who, in many cases, are sales or marketing professionals that are entry-level,
that are just trying to figure out how to do their job better.
And that was one of the things I really liked about ACG was so many correlations,
totally different industry, different student profile.
But in many ways, we're all trying to do the same thing, which is figure out how to either be better at the job
that we're doing now or learn a new job. And that's always a scary thing. I learned to speak
publicly insofar as I'm capable of speaking publicly years ago as a traveling corporate
trainer for Puppet, which was an interesting
series of coincidental experiences all wrapped into one. First, it's software, and you're doing
live demos, and software does what software does, by which I mean break. It's also, at that point,
was perceived by the students, who were generally systems administrator types, that this was the
software that was coming to automate them out of a job.
So they were not super thrilled from that perspective.
And when people are paying top dollar for this
and they're already upset and demos break,
they don't have a lot of patience.
So you learn to deal extemporaneously with a lot of stuff.
You get people to,
you have to be able to find a way to build commonality
for people to relate to you
because otherwise you're never going to be able to teach them anything.
And that was a heck of a learning curve that I had – learning cliff, really, that I had to surmount, and I somehow came out the other side somewhat intact. is. Not because the technology or the subject matter itself is hard, though it is, but because
there's so much of a human piece that is built on top of that, that I think gets incredibly
overlooked by folks who've only ever been on the student side of the education system.
It's so true. And like you said earlier, it's scary, right? For somebody who's trying to learn
something for the very first time for any of us,
that's a very vulnerable place to be. And so you want a safe environment to do that in a way that allows you the space and the grace to fail, to succeed. And I think that's what people gravitate
to. Honestly, I'll say for me personally, you know, I don't come from a tech background.
Actually, the first half of my career, I was in architecture and real estate, very different.
And I ended up getting into a real estate software company, which is how I landed here.
But in every job I had, I was having to do something that I had never done before.
I remember when I got first asked to actually lead an engineering department.
Honestly, Corey, like if you would ask me
what API stood for, like I would have no idea.
And it wouldn't have helped if you'd asked the question
at Amazon because presumably they'd pronounce it API
the way they pronounced AMI is AMI, same story, yeah.
I remember when I first got introduced to ACG,
I was like, oh man, I sure wish I had known about this
back when I was first starting to, you know,
take on one of these organizations because I would have felt way more competent talking to
my team at the time. So I have to ask, growing up, one of the seminal moments of my childhood
was my dad, who demonstrates the same sort of impulse control that I do, decided it'd be fun
one day to go out and buy a trampoline for us. And my mom came home and saw this trampoline.
And given that she has relatives who work in emergency rooms, said, absolutely not.
What do you mean this thing just showed up here?
This was not the arrangement we had.
Long, detailed story short, how similar to that story of, wait, you bought what?
Was you showing up and finding, oh,
you know that whole Linux Academy thing? So funny story, we bought that.
Well, to be fair, I did get a preview of it. Not before I said yes, but before I actually started.
Gotcha. It's one of those like, so you'll laugh about this later.
But I will tell you, I will tell you a funny story. So I was actually in Costa Rica when I accepted the job at ACG.
This was back in October.
Oh, vacations.
I remember we used to be able to take those.
I know, I know.
It was like crazy back when we could travel.
So I was in Costa Rica and I remember telling Sam, I'm so excited.
Like, I'm so, so, so excited.
But I've got to move from Portland to Austin.
I'm on vacation. Let me start in
January. So we agreed on this date in January. And it was literally like six days later that
he called me and he was like, so, uh, you can still officially start in January, but there's
this thing that might be happening. And I had actually just gone through a really similar acquisition
with Discover Oregon, Zoom Info, like literally deja vu scenario. He's like, and we would really
just love your expertise. So even if you're not full time, just come help us. Like you don't know
the business yet, but you at least know the questions to ask. So I was like, yeah, yeah,
no problem. I'll do it part time. I'm putting this in air quotes right now. I'll do it part-time. I'm putting this in air quotes right now. I'll do that part-time until
I start in January. Of course, that, you know, it was a full-time job from November on until we
actually announced the acquisition and did it. But yeah, honestly, it was really, really exciting.
I couldn't complain. So one thing that's been interesting to me is Linux Academy has always
been, I guess, the names in the space of learn to Linux,
which again, at one point,
sounded like an awfully good idea.
I should learn to Linux.
And then containerization and serverless took off.
And now it turns out that most people
don't really need to know the intricacies
of a given operating system
to build a functioning application.
This is a good thing.
But looking at this now,
how aligned are Linux Academy and A Cloud Guru before the
acquisition? And what is the reason other than, hey, we found this thing on sale in the impulse
buy aisle? I don't get the sense that that's the kind of purchase it was. What drove that acquisition?
So it's really interesting. It's interesting that you ask that question because that was
the problem that Linux Academy had is that there was a perception that their training was Linux focused, which it had been when the company first started.
But actually the majority of Linux Academy's training is cloud training, AWS, Azure, GCP,
just like a cloud gurus. But they had taken a slightly different approach, I think, because of their underpinnings and their foundation.
They were really, really strong on hands-on labs, cloud playgrounds for those cloud service providers, where ACG was, I would say, more geared toward the novice.
So the, you know, me, new person coming in and trying to learn cloud and maybe get their first job there.
Linux Academy was much stronger with intermediate and advanced DevOps professionals,
but it wasn't actually Linux content focused anymore. And so, you know, it was interesting
as we were talking to the CEO at Linux Academy, he was saying we were probably going to rebrand
anyway this year because we kept running into that issue.
So we look at Linux Academy, and at the time it was founded, that was absolutely the right name because learning Linux was what people needed.
Do you think that there's a future story where a cloud guru suffers the same problem?
Because, oh, cloud, that sounds about as contemporary as mainframe.
At some point,
the terminology changes, the way people view computing and their relationship to it changes.
Do you think that this is going to be one of those enduring brands that lasts a century and
still has high relevance? Or do you think at some point you're going to be looking down
the possibility of a rebrand based upon cultural shifts?
Yeah. I think typically when that happens, two different paths sort of confront a company.
One, yes, is that you rebrand.
And companies rebrand, especially in the B2B space, less so in B2C.
And we're 60% B2B, 40% B2C.
So we have to consider both.
But in the B2B space, a rebranding is relatively common every five to 10
years or as market dynamics change and as those things happen. So certainly that's an option.
The other thing though that can happen is that if you do a really good job, the perception of
a company is not so much tied up in the name of it as it is, right, the value that it delivers.
But there are a lot of consumer brands that have a very specific name that now we just use the name,
even though the name doesn't actually reflect what they...
The Kleenex or a code.
Yes, exactly. Because we have such a strong, there's such a strong, you know,
identity associated with that name. I'm not saying I know which of those is what is going to happen or when or if that's ever the case.
But I think as business leaders, you're always looking at that and thinking about that.
And the good thing is, is you have options.
One thing that I find a little bit perplexing that you just mentioned is that it seems that you have two very different target customers.
One is the B2B or business-to-business story, where you're selling training services to
companies and building out a training program with them. And the other is the B2C, the typical
consumer, or as I sometimes disparagingly think of some of them, the angry children of Reddit.
And it seems like those are two very different constituencies. Despite the fact you're teaching the exact same material
with the exact same curriculum style to both of those groups, how you approach them and how those
businesses look winds up being something very different. I mean, I think originally when I
first started talking to the ACG folks years ago, there was no real story that was beyond
just selling directly to individuals. That has very clearly changed. How is the company, I guess,
differentiating between those two groups? And is there a target future in which one of those
constituencies gets left behind? Yes. Originally, A Club Guru started really directly to the
student, right? Selling individual licenses,
courses directly to the student. Over time, what we found was we would find multiple students who
worked at the same company and who were, you know, using their own funds to learn, let's say, AWS or
Azure because it would help them at their current job. And from that sprung
the idea of the business product. So the first part to your question is actually that they are
two different products. So our B2B product and our B2C product are actually different.
The courses are the same, but the features, the functionality, and the ability to use that content in a different
way is different. If let's say I'm a CTO of a large organization that's trying to understand
across the board, you know, all of the skills across my team, where I'm strong, where I'm weak,
and where they should focus learning. Those are features and functionality that we have for our
business customers that we don't necessarily need for an individual student. So that's the first part to your question, which is it's actually
two different products that we're selling for two different audiences. The second though,
is I think at the end of the day, the goal is the same. And I think that's what allows us to
have a consistent message and brand in the market, which is whether I am an individual
trying to better myself or I am a CTO trying to upskill my team, what I am trying to do is improve
my modern tech skills for some different purpose, but that's it. I'm trying to improve my modern
tech skills. And so as we have grown, as we've gone from, as I mentioned, 100 to 400, what we're starting to think about is not only how does
the product become specialized, which is already in place, but how do our teams actually become
specialized around each of those audiences? How does the messaging become specialized for each
audience, but also under the single umbrella of teaching the world to cloud? And it's actually, it's really exciting to me. There are a lot of companies who've done this
really well. Atlassian has done this really well. Twilio has done this really well.
There are companies out there that forever maintain a really strong B2C and B2B base.
And from our perspective, it's actually the student, the B2C consumer that is the foundation of any business product that we have, because
that's the core person, the core individual who is benefiting and getting value from the
specific content.
So I want to talk about New Relic.
I know you're probably thinking I should talk about other monitoring companies
these days that are a bit more in the news, and a month ago I would have agreed with you.
But NewRelic did something a little out there. They reworked basically everything. They went
open source, they made it so you could monitor your whole stack in one place, and they simplified
their pricing dramatically. There's even a free tier with one user and 100
gigabytes per month, totally free. Check it out at newrelic.com. Observability made simple.
Enterprise software says a lot, but none of what that says generally is positive experience. So
coming at it from the student first perspective and then finding something that scales upward is,
I would argue, at least from my perspective, the right direction. In the interest of full disclosure, I feel like I
should point out that at the Duckbill Group, we offer ACG subscriptions to all of our staff who
want them to learn how all of these cloud things we're talking about works all the time. I
personally haven't sat through most of the lectures because A, of my attention span issues, and B,
again, as mentioned, my preferred way of learning is to build something hilariously wrong, authoritatively state that it's
correct, and then wait for the internet to correct me and teach me what I should do instead.
That's not as scalable as one might hope. We'll work on that. We'll work on that next. Hey,
you know what? Have you tried Linux Academy's platform as well as ACG's?
Not yet. To be honest, it comes down to the entire model of
the constrained environment, which again, I appreciate, but my approach has always been a,
I pieced together 15 different blog posts, some of which were last updated in 2008.
And at the end of it, I have something that, let's not kid ourselves, monstrous,
but it kind of works. And then I show it to people and their response is, oh, I'd love to see what you've built. Oh my God, where did you come up with this?
And they come up with a variety of euphemisms for who hurt you. And that's how I tend to learn best.
I don't recommend this to anyone. In fact, I would recommend doing anything other than this approach,
which does bring me to a somewhat interesting point. I talk to a lot of
folks who are eyeing, not just A Cloud Guru, but learning cloud in general from a perspective of
not so much wanting to learn the underlying fundamentals of how it works and why it works
and what makes this good, but rather their outcome and the goal they have in mind is to get
certifications from one or more providers. And that's a world that I've never spent much time in. Whenever I see certifications, it's down to
people trying to qualify for the next tier of partner status by having enough certified staff,
or alternately, people relatively early in their career looking for ways to demonstrate that they
know this technology and get a jump on things. But once there's a certain level of baseline knowledge
and experience and a piece of paper that says
that you are experienced with these things
is less of a certification and more of a resume
showing a bunch of similar projects
that you've worked on historically,
it feels to me like the value of certifications
becomes a little bit oversold.
I don't know that I'm right on that at all,
but I'm curious to get your
thoughts on it. I think you're right in that the value of certifications varies depending on your
stage, both your stage in your career, but also the stage of the company. So in one of the examples
you said, right, let's say, and this is an actual example of a student we had. I was somebody who used to work in a
bowling alley and I realized that I want a new career. I see a path, you know, tech is the place
of the future for me to go, but I don't know where to start. And I need to learn and to position
myself to get that first job in the industry. Certifications, right, have a very different and very important value
in that scenario. Now, let's say I work for, you know, a Fortune 100 company. I'm a senior
architect at a Fortune 100 company, and we are migrating, and, you know, don't take any of this
personally, from AWS to Azure, right? Or we're bringing on Azure as one of our providers. And so now I've got to learn a new cloud technology
that I didn't know before.
In that scenario, the certification
isn't really in and of itself,
like what I'm after or what's valuable.
It might be a symbol that I've learned this,
but when we're selling into enterprises like that
who are trying to skill their teams,
certification is actually not
the primary thing we're focusing on. For me, certifications have always been useful in so far
as the actual test, pass, fail, whatever, for me at least, didn't make much difference. But the
things you had to learn to make a serious attempt at that certification was where the value lied.
The challenge too is in some cases,
you see people teaching to the test, which means, okay, now you're entirely going to succeed or fail
based upon how adequate a job that certification itself does of encapsulating the knowledge someone
needs. Yep. I totally agree. Something you just touched on is the idea of expanding into a variety
of different cloud providers, which from a training institution like you're doing is absolutely the right move
of being able to address whatever it is in the world of cloud someone wants to do,
you being the de facto place to go to learn that, makes sense.
I personally don't have a strong opinion as far as which cloud provider someone should use.
This is an entire show, and most of what I do tends to be more agnostic
than people are led to believe.
I just have been drawn in a business sense
to where the expensive billing problem is.
And that's historically always been AWS.
Now, as that changes, that may change on my side too.
But right now my approach is, and it remains,
pick a single provider, I don't care which one,
and go all in, whether that's you learning something,
whether that's a company deciding what to build on top of.
And there are some exceptions to that, but that's the general course I tend to take.
What are you seeing as you look at both the individual learners expressing interest in multi-cloud and companies as well going down that path? What is the actual state of what people are
interested in learning today? So it's very dependent on the maturity of the organization
as it relates to cloud adoption.
So if I am a legacy enterprise software company,
I'm trying to get everything
from an old on-prem software to the cloud,
I'm typically going with a single provider.
I'm going all in, right?
It's a brand new skillset for everybody to learn.
We want to make this as low risk as possible,
and we will tend
to see those go with a single provider. For larger and more mature organizations, what we're actually
seeing is much more of a move to multi-cloud. So specific cloud technologies have specific
strengths in different areas. And as the infrastructure is being built out, they're
leveraging each provider.
And so we're seeing demand from our students go up across all cloud providers.
And we're seeing demand, especially in the enterprise space, for multi-cloud training going way up.
What is driving that?
Is that for workloads that are going to be spanning multiple providers? Is it for different divisions or different groups are using different providers? In other words, is this the same people that they want trained on multiple clouds,
or is it different teams that they want trained on different clouds?
It's a little bit of both. So in some cases, yes, it's different teams being trained on different
clouds. In other cases, what they're finding is one cloud provider is really exceptional at one
thing and another cloud provider is really good at another thing, right?
Whether it's like machine learning and AI versus kind of core infrastructure.
And so they're leveraging pieces of the various clouds to build a best-of-breed solution.
That tends to be a relatively reasonable approach to take.
Different cloud providers do specialize in different things.
Some specialize, for example, in giving things terrible names.
Others specialize in turning things off when you become dependent upon them.
But none of these things are immune from sarcasm and snark.
But at some point, you have to put the jokes away and actually get down to work.
One last topic I want to talk to you about.
What was it like to come in as the president of a company that until now has been founder-led?
The people who envisioned this, dreamed it up, spent all the sleepless nights building this.
Now, suddenly, you've come in and you are effectively running an organization that,
until now, has been this organically grown thing. What is that like from a cultural perspective?
Well, it was not quite as black and
white as that. You know, Sam and Ryan obviously founded the company back in 2016, I think now,
but they actually opened their U.S. operations in late 2017 in Austin and brought a COO on at that
point in time to really build out the U.S. operations. Sam's based out in Melbourne,
Australia, and Ryan's up in London. And so to be honest, they had really started to think through how to blend
their exceptional passion and understanding and entrepreneurial spirit that created ACG
with bringing in some of the outside expertise for things that they hadn't done previously.
So I cannot say that I am the first
one who has come in and done that in any way, shape, or form. What I love about working with
Sam and Ryan, and this was really why I agreed to come on board for, well, there were lots of
reasons I came on board, mainly because the customers love the product and that's a special
place to be. But the other reason was, I think we all really understood what our strengths were.
Like I'm never going to be an instructor.
Like you will never see me teaching somebody Kubernetes.
I'm never going to be developing the software itself.
But when you can work with a team that are really egoless in every situation and understand
where strengths are, like that's really amazing.
And I could not imagine coming into a company and being able to be as successful as I can be
if I didn't have a CEO or founder who had that passion for the business that they had built.
That's an interesting perspective to take on it. And it's absolutely something that resonates with me.
I mean, I am much, much, much earlier slash smaller
in the scale of running a small business.
I went from being just me to taking on a business partner.
Now we have a number of staff,
but we are nowhere near the scale of bringing in entire,
basically executive teams to run these things.
It's one thing that's always been extremely obvious
just in the interactions
I've had with ACG was that Sam and Ryan were very clearly running around with their hair on fire at
every possible opportunity. I don't think I've ever been to a conference with one of them where
there wasn't a line of 200 people waiting to get a selfie with Ryan and shake his hand.
He's the Mr. Rogers of cloud is the expression I've heard. Oh my gosh. Can I just tell you, I went to reinvent before I had
officially started. Sam said, you have to go to reinvent and just like watch the Ryan phenomenon.
And I did. And it was insane. There's nothing quite like it. He's the Mr. Rogers of cloud.
Everyone loves him because he's the person that taught them the thing. Yeah. Which is so special.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
And it's nice to see them actually taking a step back because it was either
that or be dead of a heart attack in five years because there was,
there's so much work that was going into this a while back.
I was doing periodic release reviews whenever every month there would be a
video for ACG of some release Amazon did. And I
would, in my typical fashion, make fun of it. And for the first one, Sam flew out here to San
Francisco for the day and we wound up having a video crew and we wound up getting it dialed in
just right. And it was, how do you have time to do this? And he said, well, it's busy, but we make
it work. This was over lunch afterwards. And midway through that question, we were interrupted
by someone who had walked up and said, excuse me, this is going to sound bizarre. Are you Sam
Kronenberg? And yep, here we go. It was the recognized in public problem.
And they're so humble and they're so meek. I love it. But you know what? You think about
whether it was like your third grade teacher or somebody, somebody liking it. It's like your Peloton trainer that you watch every day. Like you become so connected, emotionally connected
to these people that, you know, through a screen who, who honestly like change your life or help
you reach some goal, whatever that goal is. And I think that's what honestly makes this company
so special. I think that's probably something that I would not question in the least.
Normally, whenever someone says, and that's what makes this company special, my immediate response is, well, let's go ahead and snark on it.
But there's so little to snark about with respect to ACG.
It's a positive mission.
I've never met an unhappy ACG customer.
And I don't disagree with anything I've ever seen come out of you folks.
It's absolutely aligned with something the world needs, especially right now in this time of
pandemic. And that's one last topic I want to hit before we call this an episode. Obviously,
no one wants to turn the pandemic into a marketing story, but what have you seen as far
as business changes to ACG since suddenly no one's allowed to go outside anymore?
We're not allowed to hire video crews to come into these places.
So surprise, everyone's their own one-person video crew.
What have you seen on the production side?
And what have you seen from the customer demand side?
Well, first, let me just say that I think, you know, as a company, ACG, we're dealing with all the same stuff that every company is dealing with.
You know, there's so many things that are all the same stuff that every company is dealing with.
You know, there's so many things that are just literally not in any of our control right now.
We are all trying to find balance in a very off-balanced world where we don't see our coworkers the same way we did. We don't see our family. We don't have the same outlets that we
have. So that is a struggle for everyone. I think where we have tried to focus
is there are a lot of people who right now for terrible reasons are in a position that they
either have more time because they either don't have a job or they have more time because they
aren't commuting into their job. And we can offer something to them in that time period that will help them
be positioned for an even better opportunity when we all get through this. And I was talking to my
sales team last week because honestly, like we all have this discussion, right? It's a really
weird time to try to sell. It's a really weird time to try to like tell somebody to spend any money at all.
And so what we've really tried to focus on is how do we have empathy for what our students are going
through and what the businesses are going through? And how do we simply provide value in an even more
important way now? So you asked, what did we see? I will say right when everyone had to start working
from home, to be honest, like we saw a big spike in demand because one either had the time or in the case
of businesses, they couldn't do in-person trainings anymore at all even. And so they
needed to get some sort of online training for their students. What that is going to be down
the road and what the ripple impacts of all of this is, I think none of us
really know. And so what we're trying to do is just to make sure that for our customers and for
our students, we're continuing to be there. We're continuing to give them an education that is going
to help them when we all get through this. These are scary times and having ways to upskill remains important.
So if people want to learn more about what you're up to, what you folks are doing, or basically hear
your thoughts on a variety of things, where can they find you? Sure. The website for the company
is acloud.guru. If you put in acloudguru.com, you'll also get to the same place. But acloud.guru
is the best place to get information.
We've got a really active Twitter account, LinkedIn account, and Instagram account.
So I encourage everybody to check us out on social media.
I did not know you had an Instagram account.
Yes, we do.
That one's definitely new.
I will put links to all of those in the show notes.
Sounds great.
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.
I appreciate it. Thank you, Corey. I really appreciate it. Katie Bullard, president of
A Cloud Guru. I'm cloud economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've
enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. If you hated this
podcast, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and a comment telling me which cloud service I should learn next.
This has been this week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud.
You can also find more Corey at screaminginthecloud.com
or wherever Fine Snark is sold.
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