David Colebatch, CEO of Tidal, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss Tidal’s recent shift to a product-led approach and why empathizing with customers is always their most important job. David describes what it was like to grow the company from scratch on a boot-strapped basis, and how customer feedback and challenges inform the company strategy. Corey and David discuss the cost-savings measures cloud customers are now embarking on, and David discusses how constant migrations are the new normal. Corey and David also discuss the impact that generative AI is having not just on tech, but also on creative content and interactions in our everyday lives. About David David is the CEO & Founder of Tidal.  Tidal is empowering businesses to transform from traditional on-premises IT-run organizations to lean-agile-cloud powered machines.Links Referenced:
Company website: https://tidal.cloud

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-colebatch/

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, 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.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. Returning guest today, David Colebatch is still the CEO at Tidal. David, how have you been? It’s been a hot second.David: Thanks, Corey. Yeah, it’s been a fantastic summer for me up here in Toronto.Corey: Yeah, last time I saw you, was it New York or was it DC? They all start to run together to me.David: I think it was DC. Yeah.Corey: That’s right. Public Sector Summit where everything was just a little bit stranger than most of my conversations. It’s, “Wait, you’re telling me there’s a whole bunch of people who use the cloud but don’t really care about money? What—how does that work?” And I say that not from the position of harsh capitalism, but from the position of we’re a government; saving costs is nowhere in our mandate. Or it is, but it’s way above my pay grade and I run the cloud and call it good. It seems like that attitude is evolving, but slowly, which is kind of what you want to see. Titanic shifts in governing are usually not something you want to see done on a whim, overnight.David: No, absolutely. A lot of the excitement at the DC summit was around new capabilities. And I was actually really intrigued. It was my first time in the DC summit, and it was packed, from the very early stages of the morning, great attendance throughout the day. And I was just really impressed by some of the new capabilities that customers are leveraging now and the new use cases that they’re bringing to market. So, that was a good time for me.Corey: Yeah. So originally, you folks were focused primarily on migrations and it seems like that’s evolving a little bit. You have a product now for starters, and the company’s name is simply Tidal, without a second word. So, brevity is very much the soul of wit, it would seem. What are you doing these days?David: Absolutely. Yeah, you can find us at tidal.cloud. Yeah, we’re focused on migrations as a primary means to help a customer achieve new capabilities. We’re about accelerating their journey to cloud and optimizing once they’re in cloud as well. Yeah, we’re focused on identifying the different personas in an enterprise that are trying to take that cloud journey on with people like project, program managers, developers, as well as network people, now.Corey: It seems, on some level, like you are falling victim to the classic trap that basically all of us do, where you have a services company—which is how I thought of you folks originally—now, on some level, trying to become a product or a platform company. And then you have on the other side of it—places that we’re—“Oh, we’re a SaaS company. This is hard. We’re g