The Transaction

Craig Rosenberg: [00:00:00] Did you like the finality of True Detective? Um,

Matt Amundson: I don't want to bring down the energy here. Uh, I was very excited to watch the show, like, uh, I, you know, look, uh, I think one of the hardest things to do is land the plane, right? It had its highs.

It had its lows, you know, I'm excited for another season of True Detective. Cause they greenlit, they greenlit season five. So here we go.

Craig Rosenberg: So the most important thing is that the whole, the overall essence of the show is good enough to get you another season of it. That's right.

Matt Amundson: That's right. That's right.

And I love seeing Jodie Foster. She's

Craig Rosenberg: the best. So that was great. Yeah. I would say that. I thought they did a good job and then the, but the finale let me, was not great. Uh, in my opinion. Uh, so I'm just going to say that, but I, I'm excited like you for another show. But the big thing is I re binged season one.

That is epic TV. Now,

Matt Amundson: now, now, if you want to get me excited about a [00:01:00] TV show, Mr. and Mr. Smith, that show was awesome the whole way through. And they landed the plane in the best way possible. Maybe one of the best season finales I've seen in a decade. So Let me bring the energy back up, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Donald Glover, Maya Erskine, go check them out.

Is that why

Craig Rosenberg: you react when I said I didn't like the finale? Alright, we'll get back to business. Welcome to the transaction. Let's go. I love that. Saying welcome to the transaction. You don't think that's gangster? I can't use that term. I mean, it's, it's, I

Matt Amundson: think it's great, but I'm not sure, I'm not sure, you know.

The transaction. This is a gangster podcast.[00:02:00]

Craig Rosenberg: You're a marketer. That would be the thing we'd have under there. It's a gangster, a gangster's fairy tale. Um, so, uh, uh, so yeah, so the show's off to a great start as we, as we had hoped, and we're having a lot of fun and learning a lot. And one of the things that, you know, you and I wanted to do, we wanted like, As much, uh, practical stories out there with new ideas.

So it's like often practical means to many people, old school. It's like, you know, we, we needed new ideas and new things that are happening. And part of that is like all the amazing things happen in tech. Uh, and so, you know, today's theme is to talk about tech and we have, uh, you know, Scott Brinker, chief MarTech.

He's one of my heroes. He's everyone's hero. I know, man. And then a guy that I introduced you to. Yeah. An unforgettable analyst named Esteban Kolsky. And Sam can agree, our producer, like Esteban, man, this guy is, [00:03:00] he's an epic character. it's funny because years ago when I did Tip It, we had created Focus.

I don't know if you remember that. And like, so my job was to go out and recruit Independent analysts. And there was this whole, with social, there was this whole new thing with like independent analysts. I went to Paul Greenberg, who's like the godfather of CRM. And he had, and Brian Valmier, who's now at Salesforce.

And he's like, here's the list. And I met Esteban. And I'm like, I'll just tell you guys, this is really funny. The first time, so I had Esteban on a panel and it was a killer panel. It was like, I had Paul Greenberg, I had Esteban, I had Mike Fauscette. I had, uh, God, I forget. I, it, maybe Brett Leary was on. And these guys come on and I asked the first question and Esteban says, well, that was a stupid question.

It was amazing. I said, all right, I love this guy. But that's Esteban, you know, he just, he says it the way it is. And part of the reason we brought the two guys on was that, you know, Scott had done a show on our previous podcast. It was amazing. And in the snippets, Esteban had a comment for each. And [00:04:00] so we said, well, why don't we bring you guys on together?

And here, you know, the thing, I don't know if you noticed this in the show, but like, Uh, you know, Brinker's a learner too. And like, you know, so Esteban was sort of talking about Scott's topics. And Scott was writing stuff down and learning. I thought that was fun for me to watch. Um, it is a technical conversation.

Um, and it, there is like broader sort of issues that Esteban brings up, but you know, that's kind of why we wanted to have him on. He's not, you know, like if you asked him, he wouldn't say, well, I'm, you know, a contrarian on purpose. He actually has really strong feelings and has been looking at the market for a long time.

So it's fun to have him come in and look at the things that. You know, like when we talk about our first question is always like, what's surprising? What does the market think is right? They should be thinking about in a different way. Esteban's the epitome of that. So it's like this great combination. Um, and then, you know, the other thing too is just like, I'm not sure in the show [00:05:00] we demystified AI.

I think Esteban's made point is that. If this is AI, then people are going to be disappointed. AI is going to be much bigger than that. I don't think Scott disagreed. I mean, what I would say to Esteban is like, Well, we're just getting started. Yeah, yeah, agreed. Yeah, and so, that, that's, you know, that was kind of the stuff.

But I think the main thing for everyone is, is, is, Like as we think about the transaction and we want to have fun and we want to have interesting guests tell you about topics. I mean Esteban is the epitome of what the market might think is happening and is right. There's another way to look at it and it was fun to have him sort of engaging with Scott along the way.

Well,

Matt Amundson: I totally agree. And the whole genesis for getting him on the show, you know, we posted clips of Scott, he had hot takes right there. Like, that is, that is what we're looking for, right? Like, we want people to have not necessarily contrarian takes, but we want to have, we want people who have unique takes and can, can back them up with, with real statistics and real facts and real experience.

So, um, Hey man, who knows? You see a [00:06:00] clip from this show, you've got an opposite take that might earn you a one way ticket to being a guest. Pretty soon

Craig Rosenberg: we'll have like 20 people on, it's like Brinker, Esteban, and this person. Um, yeah, so, you know, I love having these guys on the show. I have no doubt we'll have them on again as, as things continue to evolve.

Cause they continue to evolve quickly. I was just thinking the other day, man, like how quickly things have innovated and like, uh, you know, you and I were, this is not, this wasn't sort of something we talked about in the show, but like, Uh, you know, the ability to research the customer. I was just thinking about that the other day.

How many people were building apps that weren't AI driven to provide visibility into account information? Sure. They just, they're about to get obsoleted because AI That's incredible. I mean, that's years of building, you know, sales intelligence, the game changed overnight and like, uh, in a good way, but so it's, [00:07:00] it'd be more prepared.

Yeah, for sure. You said, you know, you've said it before how you're, you have this great sales leader and like his team, they come on with hypothesis versus a what keeps you awake at night. And, uh, you know, I was just thinking, but yeah, I was thinking about it more in the context of the market and like how fast you have to move.

And how hard it is to stand in front of the game in like, uh, I've just been seeing a lot of really cool stuff coming out. I think, in particular, by the way, in sales tech. Martek's comment, right? Like, Maria Pergolino today was saying, she's like, it's, it's, it's incredibly exciting to think about how AI is going to, AI is going to affect everything we do in marketing.

Yeah. But like right now, I think a lot of the sort of, Uh, fun, cool stuff that at least I'm seeing has been on the sales side.

Matt Amundson: Yeah, we're building some pretty cool stuff at census. Uh, and maybe at some point we'll break from the like host. Uh, dynamic that we have to talk about some of the stuff that, that we're doing, uh, with, with data and AI to, to trigger campaigns.

[00:08:00] Uh, so we, we've got some fun stuff in our, uh, you know, kind of up our sleeves, getting ready to come out into the market pretty soon. Not from a product perspective, but purely from a go to market perspective

Craig Rosenberg: using a lot of Right. Well, that's my, yeah. Yeah. But that's, that's how you should think, in my opinion, when I think about you guys.

It's from the go to market perspective. The learnings are across the life cycle visibility and the ability to make moves based on that across the entire life cycle. That's like the thing we've been talking about for a long time. To me, it's like, it's big. It's like a go to market thing. But you're right.

I mean, you guys have, you know, you guys have, you know, You guys are going to create a whole breakthrough sort of different type of movement as well. We will, this is not a show for a sentence, but like, no, no,

Matt Amundson: it's certainly not. And I'm not even talking about what we're doing from a product perspective.

I'm talking about our own implementation of some of the stuff that, uh, that Scott and Esteban are talking about to use it, to trigger marketing campaigns. And that certainly, you

Craig Rosenberg: know, I wasn't on the call with, Oh God, God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That'd be fine. I'm

Matt Amundson: excited to start talking about [00:09:00] how that makes its way into like my go to market.

Not necessarily like what our product

Craig Rosenberg: does. Got it. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. No, that, that's key. It's like when we talk about wanting to give people ideas and examples, you have a ton of them. And by the way, we need them. I, like marketing, sales, CS, all this stuff, everything's back on the table and like, we're going to have new winners and they're going to be doing some really cool stuff.

And so, and we've had a bunch of folks already on the show that are doing novel, novel things. And yeah, you will be one of them. You know what we should do on that one? We should have a different, we'll have, instead of a guest, we'll have a guest host and you'll be the guest and then we'll talk. Yeah, there you go.

All right. We'll go deep. I love it. Let's go to the interview, uh, with, uh, uh, Scott and Esteban. And again, like going forward, the interviews will be all of us together. And this is Use case. We pre recorded this one and that, that, uh, it's, it's, it's going to be amazing. So enjoy. And, uh, again, [00:10:00] welcome to the new show that Matt and I love and is produced by our boys, Sam and Casey, The Transaction.

Kicking Off with a Lighthearted Start
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Esteban Kolsky: I'll be kind. I promised my therapist that I will be a nice person

Craig Rosenberg: Well, there you go., so, um, basically everyone here's the.

Introducing the Experts and Setting the Stage
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Craig Rosenberg: Is Scott and I did our, our most viewed listed episode of all time. And so thank you Scott. Uh, and, um, Esteban had some we, you know, in our LinkedIn shares, he had some pretty cool responses or, you know, we might call it value ads to, um, some of the takes we had.

So we said, Hey, let's, let's go on and let's do a follow up and get some new perspectives. Um, on the, uh, MarTech, SalesTech, Revenutech, GenAI, you name it, topics with my good friend, Esteban Kolsky. So just so everyone gets the layout here, so Scott Brinker, chief MarTech, uh, like all of us have been following 'em for [00:11:00] years and just came out with like, honestly, uh, it was one of the best reports, um, I've seen recently.

Um, on the Martech landscape, and that, um, includes a lot of work that you've done over the years, but Martech for 20 twenty-four was a great piece. Um, and that was sort of, and everyone should, we can, we're going to put in the show notes, everyone should read it, but Scott has been, uh, known for years as, uh, probably the best, one of the best thinkers in Martech.

And, uh, that's why we call him Chief

Esteban Kolsky: I mean, he he basically started the whole movement, if

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah.

Esteban Kolsky: be honest.

Scott Brinker: I, I, I feel like I'm taking a lot of blame for that Then.

Craig Rosenberg: No, that's not,

Esteban Kolsky: it's a you get the good at the bad dude. Live with both of them. You

Craig Rosenberg: I, what did on the last

one? He goes, Okay. Fair

yeah, forget. I forget what you said on the last one, Scott. You said somebody instead of, well, I'm kind of to blame for this with my, you know, with my big slot, you know, my, uh.

Scott Brinker: shoot.

Esteban Kolsky: No, no, no, no. There's no messenger. You, you created the message. There's no messenger here.

Craig Rosenberg: [00:12:00] So, uh, and then so Esteban Kolsky is a independent analyst, uh, with, uh, he's had a company ThinkJar for like, what, 16, 20 years?

Esteban Kolsky: Something since, since, I left Gartner mostly it was it

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah.

Esteban Kolsky: So 16 years. Yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. And he had a brief, he

Scott Brinker: Wow. We've been doing this for the exact same amount of time. I started the, uh, chief Marduk blog

Esteban Kolsky: and, and and one of us is liked and the other one is not.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, I love it. Uh, but, um, and then, you know, spent some time at SEP, but really I've known Esteban for these years as an independent analyst, and I've always, he's one of the guys that I, similar to Scott, guys that I read and listen to and respect opinions of. And as you, you'll, uh, find Esteban and Scott are both have incredible knowledge and, and this should lead to a great conversation.

Uh. I mean, you're in the same club. Let's, let's be honest here. I mean, I, I. I [00:13:00] don't talk to you because, you know, I like the view behind you. You have really great opinions and, uh, you're a very smart analyst or whatever you want to call yourself. I think the, the word analyst is overused, but whatever you want to call yourself, you're a market pundit like no other for the markets that you, that you shine in.

Esteban Kolsky: Actually, I can, to think of it, between the three of us we're like, you know, the, basically the tenants of CRM, we have sales, marketing, and customer service as our core backgrounds. You know,

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah,

Esteban Kolsky: without a CRM would've never happened. I mean, I'm just saying. I said Little side-bed there, you know,

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. And then, uh, by the way, just a fun, a fun anecdote. The first time that I, I was doing a panel with, uh, Esteban in like thousand and nine or something, and like. I get on and I ask him the first question. And so Esteban says, well that's actually a really stupid question. Lemme explain that for you. It's brilliant.

Esteban Kolsky: it was a good conversation afterwards, you

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, that's right.

Diving Deep into MarTech and Marketing Challenges
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Craig Rosenberg: So, um, so I want to talk [00:14:00] more tech, go to market tech landscape. I want to start with the question that we always start with here and like, let's just, you guys should jump in and feel, you know, let's just make this really conversationable. We'll start with Esteban, 'cause Scott and I just did one, which is like, we, I want to figure out like, can we surprise the audience?

Like what's something that the market thinks is happening is right or is, uh, you know, best practice or whatever that might be, and they're actually wrong. And what should they, how should they be thinking about it and what should they do about

Esteban Kolsky: C can we ne, can we narrow that down a little bit? Are we talking about MarkTech or

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, I think we should, well, I mean, we could talk about, you know, the, some of the lead-ins to this, I think are around AI and Gen.AI in the martini stack,

Esteban Kolsky: So, so lemme give you two parts. Uh uh, the, the thing about marketing that the market thinks and the wrong is like. Uh, two things. Number one, they, they still today, what? Forty-some years later. Very few people in this world can define the value of marketing properly. You know, that's the number one thing.

Everybody thinks [00:15:00] they know what marketing is, but it's like high school. You know what, everybody talks about it. Nobody knows how to do it. Everybody's doing it wrong anyways. Right. So that's, that's a big, big, the best part of the, the best way to define marketing. There's, uh. From CMO says, we piece of marketing down to like marketing practitioners, that they're so narrowly focused on the very small piece of the pie that they don't see the big pie.

The marketing is. So that's the number one to gene ai and ai, the, the, the number one thing that the market thinks That, that it, that is wrong is like, you know, there's, there's actual value to Gen AI by itself. Gen.ai is, like I said, in one of the comments to, to the postings you did on LinkedIn. gen AI is a good interface, but that's all it is.

There. There's no solution in Gen AI that, that, that, that really can be applied to anything. It's not ai, it's not AGI. The AGI will probably never exist. AI will probably continue to evolve the next 50, 60 years until we get somewhere half decent. But it's just one small step. This is like putting your shoes on before getting to like a thousand mile journey.

It's not [00:16:00] even like getting started with ai, but. The nice thing is it brings AI into the conversation to a much broader audience that now can go, you know, understand a little better what potentially AI can do. The, bad news is like, you know, man, did we, did we screw the pooch on this one? You know, if we let people think that this is ai.

Did we screw the pooch on this one for expectations?

Craig Rosenberg: Uh, Scott, do you have any reactions to either of his takes there?

Scott Brinker: Well. Yeah. I mean there's a lot there. Um, the whole thing about debating the. Yeah. Um, value of marketing, how marketers think about that. I mean, boy, there's a lot you could cover in on that. I mean, I think. Part of the challenge here is you see failure cases on both ends of the spectrum. Uh, you see failure cases of basically people who are myopic, you know, like they've broken down marketing into so many of these sub silos.

And you can make the case that MarTech has been one of the contributing factors to sort of, you know, this sort of, [00:17:00] you know, hey, I have this tool that does this thing and so I have someone who runs that thing, you know? And while there can be legitimate value in that piece. It's, it's easy to start to lose the big picture of like, okay, that piece isn't in isolation, that is part of a, uh, you know, larger orchestration.

And I think it's absolutely fair to say, yeah, you probably have a lot of marketing organizations that, that larger orchestration of this is, is where the weakness is. That being said, I've seen the other failure case where, you know, folks come in who. It's almost too high level, uh, of a view, uh, of marketing.

And the reality is, I think what makes marketing so difficult right now is you've got like the historic role that marketing played and its responsibility around, I mean, you know, like the four P's and, uh, you know, understanding the customer and, you know, how do we, you know, be the shepherd of a brand. [00:18:00] Um.

None of those things have gone away. Like those are still responsibilities of marketing, but then all this other stuff from an execution perspective, right? It's no longer the world where we just hand it over to the agency. The agency does some ads, does some media buys, you know, and we're done. There's so much operations level stuff here that now has gone incorporated into the marketing department.

And these are kind of two different ends of a spectrum of talents and creativity. And I, I think, yeah, we're still trying to synthesize those pieces together. Anyways, I, we can certainly go down that path. That's a

Esteban Kolsky: No, I think, I think so. A couple things that are telling, right? How many vendors are in your Martek vendor landscape now? I lost track at 18,000, but you know, whatever. There's already enough a big number. Yeah, so, so, so it will be, it will be. It will be. At the very best. It's ingenious to think that with 10,000 plus vendors, [00:19:00] there won't be 10,000 plus people that are very focussily narrow.

Times whatever number of clients each one of them may have. And then you go into the millions of marketers, right? And, and, and I think that marketing as a tactical, uh, uh, operation only fails. And I think that marketing as a strategic operation only fails. And I think that the best marketers that I met in my life, CMO SVP level, are the people that can both manage the, the manage app to the CEO and the board and manage down to the organization to deliver value at the 10,000 plus vendor level.

And to deliver value at the board level that you gotta, you gotta find somebody who understands the objectives of the board and understands the, the, the tactical aspects and tries to bring them together. And honestly, I met very few people that can do that.

Scott Brinker: Yeah, I don't disagree with that. Um, but so lemme ask you this. I'm curious. Um, the relationship between marketers and MarTech, you feel like, okay, one of the things that could be broken there is the fact that there are 10,000 plus solutions on the market. [00:20:00] How do you feel about the relationship between marketers and agencies? Is that broken?

Esteban Kolsky: I think, I think that, uh, agencies fail to adapt to the change in market fast enough. The, the agency model of charging every 15 minutes for doing something that continues to be the ruling model in agencies, it's, it's wrong. And finding something to do in 15 minutes so you can deliver value versus focusing on the outcome regardless of the time that it takes.

Which is the model that most successful consultants and sisters implementation and, and advisors use these days will serve really well agencies if they were to make the change. But having said that, and having a brother that is, that is in an agency himself and having the discussions, very heated discussions with him many, many times, uh, that's not going to change because agencies don't find value.

They think that the value they, they produce is not the outcome, but the actual execution. Right, and this goes back to, we were saying before, tactical versus strategic. Hard. Very, very hard to find strategic agencies, [00:21:00] very easy to find tactical agencies. And when you go to tactical, then the 15 minute increment billing is, is basically king.

So that's, that's the problem. They fail to adapt to the market. The market is moving too fast to have an agency that builds a framework and delivers a framework consistently over two or three years. By the time they get to year three, they're already two, two or three iterations behind. And then they have to go and develop something else again from six months or a year that they're going to do for another two or three years and so forth.

It's just a, the very narrow focus in like one specific product they do is a problem. I think it's broken. I think it's fixable, but not, not as an agency. I think it's fixable as an advisor, as a fractional person that comes in and manages a team to get to the thing. And I think it's fixable by the organizations reclaiming a lot of the ownership they give to the agencies or things that the agency has no, no, no place, uh, own it.

Scott Brinker: Okay. There's a lot there I agree with. I think the point I was trying to get at is. Um, boy, if you think there's a lot of MarTech companies in the world, um, the number of like agencies, service [00:22:00] providers, advisors, consultants, completely dwarfs the number MarTech companies out there.

Esteban Kolsky: well, every, every guy, every guy who's ever worked in marketing and get, get laid off, it's going to go and put an agency, bring through a, see three or four friends together, build a one to 2 million revenue stream. I call it an agency. So, yeah, I agree with you

Scott Brinker: yeah. Okay. So.

Esteban Kolsky: they don't deliver value.

Yeah.

Scott Brinker: Because I think we're in a world now where abundance of options for people is insane, and I don't think that's unique to MarTech now at this

Esteban Kolsky: We, we, we live, we live in our core, you know, in our core backgrounds. Right. My core background is customer service. I won't deny that I, I build customer service for the last 30 plus years. Uh, you know, but, uh. We live in different worlds customer service. We narrowed it down to like, you know, the very, very, very bare number of vendors we can actually do to completely destroy an infrastructure that nobody knows how to handle.

Right Martech. Yeah. We go big. We got agencies of vendors. We [00:23:00] make the biggest, broadest infrastructure ever. And then we figure out, you know, what, how to like keep Burley alive and deliver value some way that keeps us alive. So that's, that's the biggest difference, me in our core backgrounds there. But I think that there's value to marketing, which I would've never said this 10 years ago.

I think there's value to marketing when it's done as a balance between a strategic and tactical. I think there's no value to marketing when it's just do it as tactical or strategic without worrying about anything else.

Scott Brinker: Yeah, I mean, I, I do feel like I should, uh, you know, defend the challenge of marketers a bit here because. Because. You know, again, the customer, like by the time someone is in customer service and customer success, you know, there's a relatively well-defined box. Like, well, a, they're a customer. Um, you know, marketing has this challenge of trying to like, bring.

New people into the organization and I mean, that's always been their responsibility. Like that's not a big, it's a big deal, but like that isn't what's changing. The challenge has been [00:24:00] like the variety of touch points and the evolution of the expectations, uh, you know, of prospects along the way. I mean, it is hard to keep up with, I mean, you were just saying this right now.

If you were an, you know, one of the reasons an agency can't keep up, uh, you know, often with marketers is 'cause if they come up with a framework, like things keep changing so rapidly that that framework, if it isn't evolving more rapidly, like it gets lost. That sort of environment where the pace of change, not, not even necessarily in the MarTech itself, but like the channels, but touchpoints, the expectations.

That just feels like that changes at such a crazy rate that it's, I, I think it's a very broad span and it's very hard for people to keep track of all of those things.

Exploring the Dynamics of MarTech Growth and Consolidation
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Esteban Kolsky: By the way, you, you said something, you said something that is the, the core of the second part of the show, which is you said. We can define and we know who a customer is, and I would challenge that because when it goes down to like data terms, not a single organization can [00:25:00] define in data terms who the customer is or what a customer is.

And I know this because I've been to so many boards and C-level and executive team leadership teams were, they say, oh, we know who our customer is. I say, great, show me your data, who your customer is. And they go like. What do you mean in the data? I said, don't tell me who your customer is. Show me what's the data that defines who your customer.

And it goes nuts. So from there it goes way, way, way, way faster than you think downhill. And then they know what the problem is. The problem is not defining the customer. It's the problem is like, what data do you have to define and manage the customer? And that's, that's one of the. Problems that we have for the ai, you know, evolution, but that's, that's our later part of the show.

I agree with you that, that, you know, there's a huge challenge and it needs to be overcome. I, I don't agree that technology is the solution yet. Uh, you know, a little bit from, from legacy and a little bit from, uh, Clouded thinking, marketers decided that if we can give agencies things to do, we can give vendors things to do, and then I don't worry about it as soon as I get my [00:26:00] numbers.

And thus the 10,000 plus vendors grew from that, and thus the agency overpopulation grew from that. And, and thus the, the thinking that distributed work is great, which I totally agree. It is where it is great, but it, it, it needs to be managed differently and I think that that's the biggest challenge that marketing is facing today is how to manage the distributed workload.

Scott Brinker: I, I do agree with that. Uh, and that kinda goes to what I was thinking about earlier here of just like, again, the, the operational responsibilities of marketing have just grown and I. Historically, this has not been a department that's had the capabilities, uh, or had to have the responsibilities of operations at that scale.

The thing about the explosion in the number of vendors, and I really do find this very interesting. It may have been the case that MarTech was maybe the first place we saw this, or maybe it was just because that was the first place we did this crazy landscape.

But I mean, this is.

All of these categories, right?

I mean, like hundreds of thousands of, I mean, like Martek [00:27:00] is small compared to, I don't know what people call FinTech these days, but Oh my goodness. Like the range of like software solutions out in FinTech is insane. Now you might say like, okay, that's, that's broken for a whole bunch of reasons too, but I'm like, if, if something is broken about this explosion in the number of software apps, I don't think it's something that's unique to marketing at this point.

Esteban Kolsky: Actually, it, it is funny you said that because when I first joined Gartner, I came to cover customer service and uh, my first report for Gartner was called eService, which was an electronic version of customer service. In 2000, we did, we didn't have online, for the most part, it was just barely beginning and not for the enterprise.

So we called it eService. Anybody who do like things like email and chat and whatsoever. Right. And my first report for Gartner was like, eService will be decimated over the next two years. And that's what actually brought me a lot of notoriety. 'cause as opposed to promoting so many vendors. I said, 90% of you won't be here in two years.

And I was wrong. It was only a year and a half. But, but you know, same idea. [00:28:00] They, they all disappear just like, like you're going to see hopefully with Martek. The difference is back then vendors were floppy and, and tape vendors, right? You, you buy a floppy OCD or a tape and you put it in your, in your own premises and then you run it on premises.

Now it runs some online. Uh, on the web and it's easy to replace. It's also easy to get new ones, but to, to your point, it happened before and it will happen again. We start with thousands and thousands of vendors and they start narrowing. We start narrowing down as we focus in what matters, and then we get to the point where we get like, you know, 10, five, 10% that they survive.

That's just the way, the way that any market goes. I'm just the, the part that Mart Ticket surprises me a lot and it's because probably was the first one that had the full. Use of the cloud for distribution and competition is like how long it's taken to go from the thousands to to, to the myriad field that are worth it, you know?

Craig Rosenberg: Scott, I wanted to give you your own data from your report. So you, the current total number of solutions in Scott's market map is [00:29:00] 13,080. That's a net increase of 18.5%. But wait, there's a really interesting nugget right below the picture, which is. Generative AI is responsible for at least 73% of the increase.

So we might have seen more attrition had we've not had this massive sonic boom on the gen AI side. Um, but anyway, sky just wanted to, uh,

Scott Brinker: No, that actually plays in exactly what I was going to say here, which is, you know, and this has always been the, uh, the challenge of that MARTECH landscape and talking with people about it is the forces of consolidation. Absolutely have been happening here for the past 15 years, right? I, I've seen it. The vendors that have come, they've grown.

They either get acquired or they go away. Um, you know, and so if we just like picked a starting point at 2008, you know, and there was a cohort and you narrow, in fact, I've done this right? If you look at the cohort of who the vendors were in [00:30:00] 2008 and how many of them are still around now, you see this massive consolidation.

The problem has been like, it's, it's not the, the outflow. The outflow is actually working the way people would normally expect rational markets to work. The problem is like the inflow just hasn't ceased. You know, and I know we've been saying like, okay, well this will be the year that it will cease. But we've been saying it's going to be the year, it's going to cease for like over a decade now.

And so maybe this is the year where it ceases. I can't predict, but it.

Esteban Kolsky: A, any, anybody with an idea, a weekend and an Amazon account can become a vendor. You know, why would it cease? You have, you have $5,000 in the bank doing nothing, and you have an Amazon account and you have three developer friends in a garage. You're a vendor today. In the old days to get there, you had to go through like years of developing.

Now it's just go online, grab a few, you know, grab an Azure or, or, or, or, you know, CGP, I mean a [00:31:00] GCP or, even an AWS account. Tap into the libraries, put some like things together. Even, even with no code or low code interfaces. And you have something that works and then you put it out there, and then you refine it over the next six months after you get money from VCs and you're a vendor.

Well, there's no point in ceasing because there's, there's an environment that is created for that, that wasn't available at the turn of the century And that's, that's one of the huge things that we have, you know, in, in this industry, you can come up with any idea and go from nothing to a successful vendor.

The, the difference is a lot of these people are overcommitted in their, in their funding, uh, obligations. And they're not going to survive past the four, five year mark because they, they cannot develop a market big enough to develop, to deliver on their, on their commitments.

Scott Brinker: Yes, but here's the thing, and this is where it just gets into like weird territory. I. The vast majority of the products on that MarTech landscape have taken no institutional capital whatsoever.

Esteban Kolsky: I know that's, that's, possible now, by the way, which I, I totally appreciate how that's possible now, because before it [00:32:00] was more expensive, but now literally with $25,000, you can run six months

Scott Brinker: yeah.

Esteban Kolsky: That would get you a market fit and will tell you whether you can make it or not, and then re, re either pivot, recommit, and then go get funding.

I totally agree. Yeah.

Scott Brinker: This is why we've kind of, in some ways I feel like gone off the map where those dynamics of consolidation, um, and by the way, I completely agree with you that boy, there were a set of vendors who raised institutional capital on a set of like anticipated valuations that. For any one of them you could have had some questions about, but the fact that there were so many of them all vying for the same addressable market.

Yeah.

The New Normal in Software Development
---

Scott Brinker: That is not going to be a pretty situation and we're probably just starting to come to the window in which that's going to be crazy. But the side of having, yeah. These folks who basically don't take large amounts of institutional capital at crazy valuations. Will this be a momentary blip in the world of just like, oh yeah, but we'll try a bunch [00:33:00] of this stuff and then after a few years we'll realize, okay, no, that that's, that's not the way to go.

Or is this starting to be a shift into what the new normal is, where just everyone creates software And the scarcity that we used to have around the concept of like software vendors actually instead starts to look a lot more like the world of agencies, service providers, advisors, consultants, where.

Yeah, there's an infinite number of them. There's different ones of different size. There's different ones who develop different reputations of, you know, great delivery or crappy delivery. But the world of like, oh yeah, there will be 10 software vendors for a category. Are we going to get back to that?

Esteban Kolsky: No, and, and both Craig and I were nodding when he said, uh, this is a new, a new normal, because I think we agree on this.

The Rise of Ecosystems and Platform Providers
---

Esteban Kolsky: It's like we we're entering the world of ecosystems where like Azure, uh, Google and, and Amazon, sorry, Microsoft, Google and Amazon will own the infrastructure. [00:34:00] I. Uh, you know, I'm platform world for the most part.

A few large vendors will become platform providers because they need to, you know, think about my former employer, SAP, your current employer, HubSpot, uh, think about, you know, maybe even an Oracle, but potentially a Salesforce, potentially a, uh, you know, some of the other service now. And then on top of that, you're going to have like a freaking million things running, like, like little nuts buzzing all over, providing like very limited value, which look if I, if it cost me.

A hundred thousand dollars a year to run a company and I make a million dollars, dude, I'll do it for the rest of my life without a problem. Seriously, not only will I do it, but I, I'll do 10 of those because once do one, you can do five easy, and 10 is, it is nothing. Yeah, I, I rent a small apartment, a small complex here with like, you know, 20 offices, get 20 kids outta college to start developing whatever I want.

Just, you know, teach 'em Azure, teach him teaching GCP NWS if you want to, but no need, no need for that since they're going outta business soon. But, you know, uh, you know, teach [00:35:00] shit and then have the, have them come up with ideas and put it into like code and then spend a hundred thousand dollars to run a million dollar business.

How bad is that? Seriously, you

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah

it is the new Dora.

The Future of AI and Its Impact
---

I Think that's part of what's contributing to this is okay, even if you say the gen.ai co-pilots for development or some of the new Gen.ai, no-code tools, even if you say, [00:36:00] yeah, they're still pretty immature today.

Scott Brinker: It does feel like, okay, that direction is improving and accelerating and all that is going to do is further contribute. It's going to further lower the barriers to people creating things that are

Esteban Kolsky: Yeah. I agree with you that it's going to lower the barrier. I think that we need to redefine what software is then because. It cannot be that any guy with an open AI account in the ability to produce a GPT will become a vendor. There's no way Oracle pilot would become a vendor.

There's no way that any company can manage co-pilots and vendors of the Gazoo. You know, we don't need another eye chart of co-pilots and vendors for like how to, how to take the trash out on Tuesday nights versus have to take the trash out on Wednesday nights. You know, it's like we need, we need value, not just sheer generation.

And we are seeing sheer generation right now. We see all these people and all these. Uh, you know, smart people and, and vendors that are creating stuff that is non-defensible over the long run. I mean, making a decision on whether it's Tuesday or [00:37:00] Wednesday to take out the garbage, doesn't require two different agent, two different avatars or agents working in the background, you know?

Scott Brinker: No, but see, this is the thing. It's like the, and again, I really do take the parallel of the world of agencies, service providers, consultants, advisors is, I mean, we don't need. The a hundred thousand plus, uh, companies out there who, who do that, but we have them. And in some ways, while there's a lot of disadvantages to that, one of the advantages I would argue of it is it is an incredibly competitive space, uh, and other things being equal, right?

This should be the benefit the buyer. You know, the buyer gets challenges when having to deal with so many choices. I won't disagree with that, but one of the advantages that should accrue to buyers when you have that much competition is they should be able to get to a place where like the cost, um, you know, is a competitive cost.

Um, I mean, we've seen the opposite in previous decades where when there is so much [00:38:00] consolidation in an industry and, you know, uh, a very large vendor gets a significant lock-in. Generally that doesn't end well for the buyers. Uh, that becomes, uh, yeah, a, a rent extraction exercise.

know so like competition is, is challenging, but I, I, I think it probably does more to benefit buyers than it harms

Esteban Kolsky: So, so those who know me would be shocked by what I'm going to say. But I was listening to, to the, uh, GM for the Forty-Niners in an interview yesterday. Right. And they were asking him about, uh, what his thoughts were on obviously the Super Bowl, but like overall, how the Forty-Niners came on the last four years for being, what was it like 10 and two?

I mean, 10 and six. Uh, you know, to, to actually get in the Super Bowl. And he said the, the, the key to everything that happens in a football team, and he may be right or wrong, and I don't know because I don't know shit about sports and I never will, but he goes in the, the key to what happens in, in, in, in a, in a football team comes down to the quarterback and say, this is the hardest job in the world.

Because if [00:39:00] you're going to see all the pressures that are put in the quarterback, all the expectations and everything, it is a remarkable individual, I said, and there's no way, there are thirty-two of those people in the world available so that every team has a top-level talent. He said, there's only one Mahomes.

There's only one Purdy. You know, and that's, that's what he had to understand. I mean, the, the thing happens with ai the same, there's no thirty-two AI experts that can take this to the next level. But there's like, you know, a hundred thousand kids running around in Stanford and Berkeley and MIT, you know, creating AI magic or whatever you want to call it, that have ideas that will go somewhere.

It's just finding the Mahomes on the party. That, that will make a difference in AI over the next, you know, couple decades. It's not going to be like, you know, 1, 2, 3, 5 years, it's going to be decades in the making. This is the next, you know, this is going to like, you know, be the end of my career, going to be talking about AI by the time I'm like rocking in a, in a chair, in a, in a rocking chair in the porch of the nursing home, you know, but you need to find those, my house and those pro to like, you know, [00:40:00] take it Gen AI or even AI further.

You can't just keep. Looking, working a lot of these guys that are like, you know, doing okay, but not really getting to the top level. So, and, and that was a sports metaphor that anybody who who who knows me is still trying to figure out where did I come out with that from. So,

just so you know,

Scott Brinker: Well, for what it's worth, this is apparently something we have a common, uh, uh, dimension to

Esteban Kolsky: I can say that quite like.

Scott Brinker: of football than I have, so, um, yeah, kudos.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, normally you'll see Scott's processor start and he getting ready to say so on that.

Esteban Kolsky: Okay,

Scott Brinker: Like now I feel a common bond

Esteban Kolsky: so forget forget football, but let, let's talk about the reality, which is said you need to find those AI people that have truly innovative ways to do it, that you want to promote to take this to the next level versus the people that are just doing the job because. They got certain degree of success, but they're not really going to change the way that we do things.

And that's what's going to change Gen AI and take it to the next level, right? The the six to 12 people that are out there that [00:41:00] are working on stuff that is really going to be differentiated and innovative in the AI world. You know,

Scott Brinker: So there's a pattern here, which I think you're right about, but I'm curious, yeah. What, how people should like approach this, which is what you're describing. There sounds actually very similar to where we started, you know, in the discussion about marketers and like, okay, how many marketers out there.

Really, truly get, you know, like, Hey, I can have this level of the strategy discussion with the board, you know, and the models for that. And I understand what's going to be required to actually operationalize that. You know? And you made the point that you've met relatively few people who you think like, yeah, run that balance now.

I don't think you're wrong. I think that's a really extraordinary person. And it's that same thing here with ai. And so it, it, it's almost like, okay, so we we're going to be in this world where the distribution curve has these incredibly long tails. Or at least maybe it's, maybe it's a skewed, you know, but there's like this really long tail of like, okay, who are the best at this sort of stuff.

[00:42:00] And for the vast majority of everyone else, they're way back here. You know, in some sort of like left-skewed distribution. What are those people in that big left skewed distribution? What should they do? How should be they be approaching this?

Esteban Kolsky: That. See, and that, that is a like, you know, billion dollar question, right? I mean, that's, that's always been the thing. It's like, how do you, how do you take something that is highly academic, which AI still remains? And make it commercial, commercial available and make it like, you know, sellable and com and, and able to help the organization.

I mean, we, we did this at the turn of the century with knowledge management and NLP's, right. AI back then was called NLP. I know it's shocking, but you know, that's what it is. I mean, we, we figured had to manage language naturally when figure has to go from, from. Spoken word to like text in a way that could be recognized by computers.

I mean, the, the technology was available and when we did this, we had the same conversation, the exact same conversation. I, I had vendors when I was a gardener that were fantastic and they could never make the transfer from [00:43:00] academia to to, to commercial. Right. Incredibly evolutions, but the product was too complex.

They couldn't figure out how to tell the story. They couldn't figure out how to go forward. And again, there's a, there's a overlap here between marketing and ai. Again, if, if you make an incredible, uh, you know, evolution, like for example, mixture of experts, right? I mean, we, we could keep talking about the, the limitations of LLM as a large language model.

How to reduce them. How do you actually reduce the cost of tokenization? How do you reduce the cost of operation, mixture of experts? It was a great innovation mixed trial. Mr. Rall is, is doing some fantastic things there, but. A few people know about it because they're talking in terms and like, most people don't really, I mean, I say talking in session and in a, in a executive leadership meeting, and they go like, I don't know what you're talking about and I don't care to know what you're talking about.

You know? So, you know, so, so there's, there's, you know, there's a need to transfer the, the academia to commercial. There's a commercial. This, I need to tell a better story, which is where marketing can come in. At least at the strategic level, if not the tactical level, and take [00:44:00] over. And there's a need to take the, the, those innovations in on AI that will make it different and tell the story in a way that people can get behind it.

This is what OpenAI did really well. You know, I was actually writing this in, in response to some, uh, some, a friend's email last night. What OpenAI did really well, they said, we are not going to have an impact that we want to have in the, in the world. If we just focus on a small set, so let's go and fuck it.

Let's go and take the whole internet, you know, let's, let's tokenize the whole internet and put it in a place that can create responses for everything that existed on the internet in 2021. And let's create a very simple interface to that. And let's see what happens. And people go like, oh my God, this is magic.

Look at how he knows everything, you know. But it's worthless because nobody has needs that much knowledge. I mean, you need reduced model sets. You need the ability to like, you know, uh, use taxonomies and things like that. But kudos to OpenAI and, and kudos to, to Microsoft for realizing the marketing value they could get from, from [00:45:00] investing in them.

But there, there's no value there. There's no, there's no solution there. I mean, we're, we are seeing that today. You know, the, the, the only value in there is like getting the conversation forward, but the real value that open ai, I mean, I, I, I wrote a book on OpenAI yesterday with six prompts. You know, literally I have an eighteen-page book on the value of data that I didn't do anything other than prompt.

OpenAI has to narrow, narrow and continue to narrow everything, and then at the end said, write a book with all the questions that I asked before, and come up with a title. Come up with three chapters come up. Everything formatted. I took it out, put it in a Word document. I have a book in the value of data that I never even like, you know, worry other writing six prompts.

It's garbage. It's absolute garbage. But I promise you that if I were to publish that as a research that I did, people will be shocked at how n how thorough it is and how much research went into it and all that deals write six, six stupid prompts, man. There's no value

Scott Brinker: Well, okay.

Democratizing Data with GenAI Interfaces
---

Scott Brinker: So as a, uh, as a writer myself here, um, yeah, I, I'm not going to pooch back on, uh, [00:46:00] the, the what is being generated, like the use case of basically using. Gen.ai to do the writing for us. I know a lot of people are doing that. There's actually, I think a lot of use cases where it's acceptable. It doesn't thrill me because I appreciate. Writing at a different level. Where I genuinely get excited though, is the other direction. Um, I mean even these cases, like I know one of the common cases you see in, you know, um, you know, not just more tech, but like more like even customer service tech is like, okay, hey, I need to bring in my manager on. You know, this, uh, long open ticket with a particular customer. There's been, you know, dozens of messages back and forth. You know, now you could have the, you know, rep try and go back and properly summarize all those things into the quick thing. These GPTs are actually pretty good at taking that and like bring that down to a decent summary.

Um. It is like the [00:47:00] same sort of thing where, you know, like folks are trying to do the, um, you know, you, you, you described it as an interface. I think it's a very, like, to me that's actually the use case that I get most excited about is like, okay, I want to report, you know, I'm not talking about data science or something super.

I'm like, oh, I just want to report that does X, you know, instead of having to like learn for any given particular tool, what are all the different menu choices and options I get to get down to that report. If I can just say, I'm looking for a report with this. It actually then generates support, even if it's like ideally not a black box.

Like it's not just giving me the report, it's showing me the config options too. So I know what it is. Like those use cases, I mean, they're not rocket science, but I, it feels like, okay, this actually is making life a little bit more productive for a broader set of people.

Esteban Kolsky: Yeah, I mean, go, go, go to your favorite customer database, point your LLM training module to that and say, go through this database and build out, uh, you know, look at all the [00:48:00] information and then come back and tell me. Uh, what are the, like, you know, the six priority items that I need to know, you know, the six priority, uh, uh, labels that, that you think apply to all this database.

Uh, tell me how you would cross-staff that to like, you know, my strategic growth initiatives, which are the following, and then tell me what the data is. And literally in, in 20, 20 minutes with a few prompts that like narrow bound and all, and, and like, you know, digress this in different versions. You will have the report that you need to provide to the board that tells you exactly what's in your database and, and even growth strategies.

If you want that, take that information in there and tell you what, what you can actually pounce on. That's analytics. We've been doing this forever. The difference is the interface, which is, you know, GenAI or GPT, which is great. It's a fantastic thing. Like you said, low code, no code, you know, GPTs, uh, gen ai, you know, this interfaces are fantastic.

This is the way we democratize access to data, which is what we need. To move ai AI forward. I have no qualms on that. I have a qualm when you tell me that, like, you know, the stupid chat [00:49:00] GPT is AI in the future of the world, where if you ask him, if you ask a question, it will, it will give you an answer that is so canned and so prepared 10 year, 10 years ago, that it has no value.

That's my problem with, with the, the way it's being used, right? So, yes, it's an interface and it's a fantastic interface. And anything that lets people that don't understand how to go through, you know, come up with a model, it is, is, is incredibly good. And if you know what your job is and if you know the data you're looking for and you understand how to like Interface with, with the machine, you can get an incredible amount of value in charts and reports and, and, and, you know, tables and whatnot.

And you can cut and paste into Excel and you have like, you know, the rest of your life worked out and that's fine, but it's an interface. You know, that's the bottom line.

Scott Brinker: Well, that is at least one part of the Venn diagram where you and I are aligned because, um, yeah.

Craig Rosenberg: The, but Esteban, what you described for someone in with years of watching ops, rev ops, marketing ops is hugely valuable

Esteban Kolsky: it is [00:50:00] I, I don't disagree. Yeah. Do you remember when Salesforce did it? Do you remember when Salesforce did the, uh, Einstein, I think it was like five, six years ago. They, they bubble head and they did the, uh, natural language, uh, interface to us for reports, which is basically what Chad, you know, Jenny. I can do that.

What you could actually say, uh, you know, showed me, you could actually speak, show me the, show me the revenue broken down by regions and quarters and point out to me the top three, you know, potential opportunities based on growth in other areas. And then Einstein, you know, hologram bubble head would be like, of course, you know, and then he would like produce a report and give you the report in like, you know, printed format for you to look at.

That was a precursor to this stuff. And there's huge value in this. I mean, how many rebuffs, how many Rebuffs leaders do you know that they have no idea? What are the potential markets based on like the growth in other areas, right? They don't have the ability to go and look at the growth here, the growth there, then compare the regions.

But you give me A-A-A-A-A spreadsheet that has everything put together. I know, and the data keeps on [00:51:00] updating weekly or monthly or whenever, and I can bring my entire career on this spreadsheet without making many changes to it. I don't disagree that there's value to that.

Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. Because like, you know, something Scott and I talked about, I talk about all the time is, and by the way there's still a label on my classes I just noticed is, uh, you know, for Rev, like I'm just Scott, not marketing ops and I know they're in pain too, but like for them to do any kind of analysis today can be, if it's outside of what we've sort of set up to look at in the analytics, can be really painful just 'cause of all the different.

Data sources, etc. So for me, like what, when you were describing, describing that was huge. That's huge for a lot of, we can rev ops and even more strategic than they have been in the past, just from what you described.

Esteban Kolsky: So, so here, here's a challenge slash value proposition for any vendor that produces data today. Make it easy to be accessible by a, a, a processor, by a [00:52:00] GPT, or any processor. Make it easy and available to be accessible by any ecosystem. You do that and you got 90% of the world in and out of your, out of your hand without a question.

Seriously, it doesn't matter who you are. The 10,000, 13,800 plus vendors that you have MarTech. Make it easy. Don't make it like, oh no, my database is very complicated. You'll never get understand anything. You gotta define a customer, define a customer in a way that is easy, that we use metadata so that the companies that buy your product can actually merge your metadata with their metadata and have like one common definition for customers.

So when I go and ask the CEO, show me the data that defines your customers. So then go like, well, you know, I, I think we have six customers if you define it that way. I say, no, you have 18 customers. If you define it that way. 'cause they have 18 different product use metadata. I mean like create an ecosystem, use metadata.

All these things are, you know, I, I love these interfaces, but I also think that the more work to be done in the background is going to be the most important part of it.

Scott Brinker: Yeah. Well, man, I asked Ron, I feel like, uh, you and I are like, yeah, the, [00:53:00] the, the Venn diagram overlap keeps getting more and more. Like I completely agree on this thing of, um, this has been, it's interesting we approached this from originally the challenge of just integration more broadly, where it was more of these like point-to-point integrations between

different Products in the MarTech stack. And at the end of the day, it's like, listen, you need to treat integration as a first class capability because if people can't integrate this stuff with the rest of their stack, they're not going to get the value out of you. And what's exciting to me is like, I mean, there's still a long way to go.

I mean, I'd like to think vendors are making more progress on APIs than they have been for a while, but there's still a long road to go. That being said, what's exciting about the GenAI stuff and then even at some of this level of like where you see people, um. You know, having more bi-directional ways of just sharing their data to things like a, you know, data warehouse or whatnot.

You know, again, we could argue about the pros and cons of the data warehouse architectures, but the reality of saying like, listen, I need everything that's in my stack to [00:54:00] be able to get data in and data out. I don't want this stuff like siloed or blackboxed and I want to make sure that I have APIs that open up so that if someone wants to be able to like access some capability, you know, in my product, I can do that with an API.

And before it was like, well who's going to take advantage of that? You know, a developer, Okay, fine. But it's now with things like these LLMs and some of these like no-code automation tools and whatnot, where those things like they can have the nicer interface to the end user of like, yes, present me with, a nice prompt environment.

And then they translate that down into executing those API calls. I mean, again, I'm doing a lot of this, this is very hand wavy, uh, but it's like, it feels like that's a direction where, okay, we could actually really improve. How all this software works together.

Esteban Kolsky: there was a concept that we use in knowledge called, uh, at least that I use. I don't know if anybody else did, but I don't care because I am the marketer anyways. [00:55:00] But there's a concept in the knowledge management that we use called knowledge in storage versus knowledge in use. Right? And, and we, we spend all our time and resources in creating knowledge in storage.

We, we capture the data, we index it, we put it in the right place. We made it accessible, but it's stored, it doesn't do anything. Right. And the same, we are doing the same with thing with data. We, we have data and storage and we don't have data in use I think those interfaces are starting to provide the entry-level, part of what data in use becomes, there's a million, million freaking challenges and, you know, stemming from that, but.

Man, if we get to use the data that we're storing at some point, what was it? Somebody said that we create like five petabytes of data every single day. You know, if you consider all the noise and everything created and need to go and find the right thing, extract value. But man, if you were to like find a way to use that, I mean first narrow it down, bound it, and then, and then use it.

And this is where like, you know, the processes do a good job. They take all the data and then they find the common components and then they, they cut through the noise. [00:56:00] They find the signal and then they provide you the signal. What you do with it is still your problem. Not the, not the, not the computer's problem, but at least you have a much more clear signal.

You have a lot, a lot more wheat and a lot less, less chaff or whatever it's called. You know, I'm not good at like agriculture either, by the way.

Scott Brinker: Well, I'm going cite you on the data and storage versus data and use because

Esteban Kolsky: uh, you, I'll send report that I wrote. Uh, I wrote a report on the knowledge and stories versus knowledge and news. And I could literally go and do a global search and replace the knowledge and data and publish it to them. People would be like, oh my God, this is exactly the problem. But that's because it's all data knowledge was, you know, overly structured form of data.

It's all data. At the end of the day, everything's digital. This is why we undergo the digital, the post-digital world. In a digital revolution world, it's all data. It's all ones and zeros. That's it. Once you understand the computers that make decisions that are one and zero decisions, so based on one and zeros that are stored.

The world is a lot simpler to go through, you know? Then it's just go play poker. It's like, no, whatever.

Craig Rosenberg: we're hitting [00:57:00] the, uh, buzzer here on timing, so this was amazing, you guys. But before we go, I just. Scott was drinking a liquid death. I just, I don't know if you guys heard about this. Uh, I, I was drinking one earlier. I don't have it. Yeah. I don't know if you guys saw this, but Liquid Death is auctioning off on eBay the opportunity to have a company's ad on 500,000 cases of liquid death distributed throughout the country.

So, um, I thought, Scott, I'd let you know and you could go tell Kip that there's, you can go on eBay and try and

Esteban Kolsky: uh, this will be, this will be incredibly hard to, incredibly hard to gain that these days with the existence of bots everywhere for everything.

Craig Rosenberg: Oh gosh. Can't feel like, I mean, I got, we'll, we'll see the final price. When the tweet came out, it was like 61,000. That thing's going to be huge by that, you know, with the bots, et cetera. So anyway. Okay, great. So guys like this is awesome. I guess it's fun to watch, uh, you know, two of the smartest people I know just sort of have this conversation and, uh.

It was, uh, for me it was, I [00:58:00] mean, I, I'm sure it would be for the audience as well. This is incredibly enjoyable. So I just want to thank you guys for doing this and uh, we will, uh, do it again sometime. We will do this again sometime when the next, uh, big news comes out. We'll come on, bring you guys on for your take.

So thanks guys, and uh, thank you everyone. [00:59:00]