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December 22, 2022
That's How They Roll! Bare-Metal HPC For AI with Sushi Cloud | Episode #56
In this episode I talk with Shauna O'Flaherty , Co-Founder and COO at Sushi Cloud. Sushi Cloud is a bare metal cloud computing company that aims to make the cloud more accessible, affordable, and understandable for everyone, ...
In this episode I talk with Shauna O'Flaherty, Co-Founder and COO at Sushi Cloud. Sushi Cloud is a bare metal cloud computing company that aims to make the cloud more accessible, affordable, and understandable for everyone, with no hidden fees or agendas. The company was founded by Shauna O'Flaherty, who has a background in consulting and AI-driven fintech, and Aron Saether Jackson, a 20-year veteran in the hardware industry. Sushi Cloud aims to provide an alternative to the large hyperscale cloud providers, such as AWS, by offering bare metal infrastructure and a focus on customer service. The company aims to serve startups and small to medium-sized businesses and the education market focusing on AI/ML workloads. Shauna and I have a great conversation about how Sushi Cloud want to break the trend of the public cloud hyperscalers exploiting the market while offering no price competition.
Sushi Cloud was founded in 2022 and is head quartered in Mountain View, California.
☑️ Support the Channel by buying a coffee? - https://ko-fi.com/gtwgt
☑️ Technology and Technology Partners Mentioned: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Microsoft, AMD, AI, ML, Service Provider
☑️ Raw Talking Points:
- Company background on founders
- Gaming and Venture Backgrounds
- Aaron parralell the gaming industry
- Problem statement
- Anti AWS and cloud alternatives
- Price Shock
- Egress charges
- bare metal
- Use cases for servers AI/ML
- AMD EPYC
- Antitrust and monopoly
- WASABI link
- Who is using us Vertices
- MIT Advisor
- Tech for good WSJ link
- School Labs Start-ups
☑️ Web: https://www.sushi.cloud/
☑️ $200 Free Sushi Promo: https://www.sushi.cloud/register
☑️ WSJ Article: https://www.sushi.cloud/
☑️ Interested in being on #GTwGT? Contact via Twitter @GTwGTPodcast or go to https://www.gtwgt.com
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☑️ Music: https://www.bensound.com
Transcript
can you hear me all right I can can you hear me yeah finally got here I know took a couple tries but we're here hello and welcome to episode 56 of great things with great Tech the podcast highlighting companies doing great things it's great technology my name's Anthony spiteria and in this episode we're talking to a company that is proudly anti-amazon making cloud computing more accessible affordable and understandable for everyone with no hidden fees no agenda just straight infrastructure with no strings attached
uh the company is Sushi cloud and I'm talking to Sean O'Flaherty co-founder and CEO at Sushi Cloud welcome to the show thanks for having me awesome and look before we get into you know how you guys roll with the sushi which is I've actually waited a while to actually say that we've been wanting to get on the show for a while I love my sushi so you know before that let's talk about um just a little bit of an intro to great things with great Tech this tour is a reminder if you love great things
it's great Tech would like to feature in future episodes you can click on the link on the show notes or go to jtwgt.com and register your interest as a reminder all episodes are on good podcast platforms Google Apple Spotify all hosts are distributed by anchor.fm also go to the YouTube channel and hit the like And subscribe button okay with that let's get uh right into CSC clad Shauna so just as a bit of an intro maybe now talk about yourself um and where you came from and also your co-founder Aaron and just like talk
about what made you guys come up to a you know decision to launch a cloud company company bare metal to basically challenge the might of the hyperscalers yeah so thanks for having me again my background um I started my career at PWC I was doing consulting there um and I ended up joining a very cool Tech startup here in Toronto leading Global sales we were doing AI driven use cases for fintech um the company ended up doing a really cool exit to square um and I left to start my own machine learning Product Company with the one of
the machine learning Engineers over at Dasa and we're doing predictive maintenance algorithms for the heavy Freight rail industry very specific okay yeah so um in both those companies I had The Misfortune of paying for a lot of our Amazon Cloud bills um and you know during covid after we exited neural I started thinking about the future of cloud and how interesting the conversation topic of infrastructure has been I was not as interested getting back into the application and applied side of AI and ml so I felt like a very
natural next step for myself to start thinking and considering the other side of the fence which is infrastructure and I had you know it was almost serendipitous I met my co-founder Aaron Cedar Jackson Aaron was a part of um the founding team for Alienware um and ran Dell APAC for many years so Aaron is 20-year veteran in the hardware industry um so it sort of was the perfect marriage he has extremely close relationships with you know people like AMD and a lot of our hardware and component partners and I was just really
passionate about finding an alternative and something different um seeing how much money goes out the door for these startups um we're really really that's the market and we can get into that who we're focused on but between the two of us we really had a lovely compliment between Aaron understanding the hardware side and myself having spent a number of years now building um and doing Ai and ml in the cloud so it really was the perfect pairing and we you know spent time and came up with sushi it's an interesting parallel
because I think from my perspective the people like you know you've obviously you know coming up in that Ai and ml world and what not in consuming that side of it I I very rarely see people jumping across you know what I mean like you're either on one side or the other so what what got I mean apart from I think you laid out the foundations of cost right like obviously you you were very aware of what you were spending when you were running those models in in an AWS or whatever it might be you know you were very aware of how much this was
costing and maybe in the back of your head you're like holy moly this is like a lot of money right and how do we how do we make this scale is it sustainable I'm guessing that's what went through your head but what was what was the jump that made you just interested in going from that sort of modeling AIML kind of like the software side of things to this infrastructure site it's it's not something that's done often so what from your perspective made you do that so as the business side of AI I watch these
brilliant mles and practitioners have to make pretty serious decisions you know especially on the inferencing side but when they start when we start actually looking at which use cases we want to train and what we're actually looking to accomplish there's a bit of a moment where I can consider if you're doing clouder on-prem um you know if you are luck enough to have access maybe through a lab or your you know you fundraise and you can buy an Nvidia dgx like you have access to a100s of course on-prem will always be
extremely performative but from a scalability perspective it's so costly Things become like you see so quickly and so you really only have two choices um so if you've come to the conclusion the cloud is best for you because it's more scalable and it's more approachable and it's best for a dispersed team then you only have three choices so it really is a bizarre Dynamic especially you know facing the startups that have very tight budgets the universities the labs you know unless you're perhaps a major bank
or someone with an unlimited um budget for AI you're extremely Limited in what your options are and I guess I just was really intrigued and really interested in problem solving for this there's a a million amazing people looking at solving from the applied side but I really felt that there was a major Gap in the market that was not being served in terms of understanding what the future of cloud looks like and how has AI continues to progress and machine learning and deep learning gets more and more sophisticated the incumbent clouds
are not keeping up with that demand so if you only have two options on-prem or Cloud but then your cloud is extremely limited I was really excited about trying to problem solve for that and figure out a way that you know there there has to be another option yeah and not only limited but I think for many many startups out there many companies it's almost like just portrayed as the only option I think like obviously the the hyper scars have a multitude of marketing funds to get out there and they're very good at getting to the
right people in the organizations to say hey use us I use this word often the Panacea where the Panacea like when you're never going to get anything better than what we are right and I kind of challenge that a lot and while I do see a lot of value in what you know the hyperscalers bring bring to the market in terms of options and what they've done for the consumption of cloud and the way that we consume Cloud I think they're they're very kind of productive when it comes to you know choice um and I've talked to a lot of people
who blindly just follow that option and go hey we're just going to go to Amazon AWS or Google because you know where else would we go so I this and this is why I'm so interested in you know what you guys are doing and there's others as well that I've seen the last 12 to 18 months of rise and bare metal you know cloud services that are specialized in this sort of area to start to make people aware that you don't just need to go to AWS so yeah I think you guys are coming at the right time and I think
it's a really good way and I think so are you guys focused specifically and obviously you mentioned startups and whatnot and I know that you've got schools and education and whatnot so maybe talk a little bit about you know what where your focus area is um and then you know we'll talk a little bit about actually what goes into you know the sushi infrastructure sure yeah so I think it's kind of twofold because it's another comment on why people naturally gravitate towards say on Amazon what they have done very
well is the software lock-in right you know people become so entrenched you know in the entire G Suite um you know sagemaker you you become so beholden to your tools and your sandbox that you really can't picture a world outside so especially when you look at the corporates that have massive investment from perhaps one of the big three and they have these big Enterprise grade relationships those are the people we're not really interested in I'm not you know I'm not trying to bring Wells Fargo over to Sushi like we get it they
use everything from Gmail up yeah um so for us we're extremely focused on people who are cross-con conscious so that takes us to the startups and people who are a little bit more um a little bit more open to different types of resourcing and opportunities which tends to be the major universities the labs um you know people building very cool Innovative stuff that are not we like to use uh saying like you know bring your own tools we containerize you know any of the classics if you want to deploy a server that's completely pre-configured
for you fabulous we have it if you're a lot more um in tune with what you want to use how you want to use it you can pre-load all of your own stuff which is very very rare that's not a service offered by the incumbents um so our our best and most successful areas to date have been startups more mid-market I wouldn't even call them startups anymore um and then yeah edtech education the labs the schools they've been fabulous um and I don't foresee in the near future scaling to a place where we want
to hit the massive corporates um we really we really love the the area that we're in so far yeah and is it is the vertical that you are targeting first and foremost given your background is AI and ml is that like who you're saying this is the best use case for us at the moment and you're you're hitting that particular vertical for right now I would say 95 of our consumption is the Computing the raw bare metal Computing for training um use cases AI machine learning use cases we're doing a bit of web hosting
but I would say the bulk and predominant feature is for AI and ml practitioners um you know and it just very plainly instead of going to spin up an instance on an AWS you're coming to Sushi uh you know no matter what this level of sophistication or you know time required for your use case we we can service everyone yeah because you're going to Market with you like the website you're not you're not shy and kind of getting out against AWS Rod specifically right you know I know you know the anti AWS
it's a big call to make right like because I asked such a juggernaut and you kind of wonder whether they would look at it and go you know I hope you who cares you know but obviously clearly it's successful and you know you've got some certain metrics on there you know in terms of your pricing you know for the instances it's a very simple um sort of approach as well I think you've got maybe four or five type of choices there um you know they're obviously they're leveraging very specific
um compute with the Epic AMD processors the ram starts at 128 gigs you've got nvme you know drives so you're starting at this very very sort of you know we're not talking entry level Services here right we're not talking about a slice of an ec2 instance as an example it's very specifically big bare metal servers at a that are tuned for that use case that you're after exactly um we have a 32 core as our entry level all the way up to a 128 course so again we're and especially being on the bare
metal the 128 core is so performative we've had people do benchmarking against you know their on-prem legacy machines we outperform them you know by a a pretty staggering amount um the the bare metal is such an interesting um piece of infrastructure and it's just so unknown to so many people I find a lot of my conversations are almost educating on the difference between a VM and a hypervisor and the performance of a metal to the point people don't even realize that they're using hypervisors because again it's kind of all they know
so that's it there's yeah there's so many added benefits to the bare metal that um we we want it to be accessible for everyone if you don't have a heavy lift the 32 core will be the place for you and you can use it instead of you know your projected maybe 50 hours of training you can get it done in like 20 to 25 hours so we're cutting training times in half um which again has been extremely well received but yeah the thesis is it's accessible for everyone no matter kind of where you land and level
sophistication of your use case yeah and I think as well I think you know you look at the way that you know the target market is there for for AI and ml but I think obviously it does open it up to to other markets like I think of my background and hosting and I do remember say I want to say about 2010 ish there was a there was a drive for bare metal I remember it back then right but the thing is we weren't ready the tech wasn't there the density of the compute wasn't there the performance wasn't
there right so it was just more logical at the end of the day people providers couldn't make money off bare metal right because it didn't make sense the the the the mats didn't add up right but I think way that the text moved in the last 12 years is obviously allowed it to become you know such you can start to offer these services and and challenge the market so I kind of see while you're targeting a Ai and ml space I look at the the compute that you're offering and I go maybe I could use that
for maybe if I was a service provider let's extend out to Sushi cloud and offer some sort of Hardcore services on there and have it as a Dr site as an example you know or there's all these other options that I can see open up because you do have that bare metal option which you know unleashes the VMS have a have a certain construct to them and a certain use case bare metal it's it's what you want and I think from what I saw in your UI and I'll link to it in the show notes as well is that you offer
certain flavors of os's so you can deploy a bare metal and by itself and I think people can bring their own or you've got the traditional you know most popular sort of you know operating systems as well um and it's all about the consumption of that point um do you guys have do you guys and this is a question I just thought of can people consume of our own API as well is that is it open so can can anyone go in there and just sort of via API Enterprise provision servers or are we kind of not there yet or what do you
want they can they can um yeah that's absolutely uh accessible to them and our team is amazing if there's something that's required um and the end user is having you know difficulty with their own API or their own connectivity we have a full team available to you know either do the connection manually or include it in the pre-configuration so we've yet to come across something that someone's needed um that we haven't been able to provide for them and so obviously at the moment um server locations or locations I guess
read do you call them regions or just just locations it's you're trying to be anti-amazon locations that's it geography that's that is very anti-amazon I like that um because everyone else is like here's our region and here's our availability Zone um so you've got like the US you've got um Canada and Australia because obviously Aaron is is based in Australia's or Adelaide I believe so you've got these these links sort of there so you're servicing where you where you live you've got Americas and
then in Australia so what's your strategy you know on that in terms of those locations is it is it just where the need was to start with or is is some sort of plan to start here and then expand as you know as you as you do grow yeah I mean Global takeover we want to scale and and be everywhere um we were thoughtful in where we began um just kind of looking at customer base we're very conservative um as we scale um you know being a startup ourselves um we count every dollar we we make every single decision with a with a lot
of thought and care so we went into each one of our U.S based markets having customers already lined up we wanted to make sure there was no latency issues and we were very very important right yeah yeah and the three states that we deployed in we are very excited um I can't say yet but we have picked a data center um partner who we're not just you know putting our racks in we have quite an exciting strategy and uh joint marketing and all that great stuff that will be in January so that will automatically put
some additional locations online um and then of course you know um in Canada we have a lot of data sovereignty and a lot of things that we have to extremely mindful of so it only made sense to be here and then of course you know um Aaron being in Australia we have a rather large school we're working with in Australia um and then we really have a lot of lofty goals to expand into aipac um we would love to have our next you know a couple sites in Singapore and you know all over all over there because there's a massive Market need that we're
seeing um so yeah really Global expansion as you know each location comes online yeah and very specific with the and I think there's a bit of a gaming link here with Aaron obviously mentioned Alienware and what he did around there so he's got some actually it's actually quite a fascinating read to have a look and see what he's done and being an ex I don't have time to game this as much these days but being an old school PC Gamer I think when Aaron might have been coming up there you know I'm very interested in that
world as well now my son would love looking at the Alienware stuff just quietly but I think think there's a parallel there like I've there's another couple of companies that I've known about actually one that I hope hopefully getting the show in the New Year who were founded because they got frustrated at what you know what they couldn't do in their particular vertical which was gaming so yeah let's let's make the internet better let's reduce latency to make sure we can gain better let's get
the Nvidia you know GPU clusters in our service to host them to make it better and get it closer to us so there's a bit of parallel here because you've you chose and you landed on the Epic processors from AMD which uh they're ideal for you know AI intensive tasks HPC um and they've got huge memory bandwidth and and memory capacity and IO so I mean was was that obviously from your point of view you you understand why it's important and maybe let's explain why it is so important to get the architecture
right for the use case that you want yeah so we we personally are massive AMD fans we feel that the Epic is the leading CPU based um you know piece of hardware on the market um it's so important because these you know the CPUs become Legacy so quickly and new generations come out so regularly um and we we are the ones that actually configure and set up all of our racks before they get shipped the way we configure them is proprietary to us and we have a number of different manufacturing Partners but picking AMD
as our exclusive partner was a very big decision but a decision that we're absolutely thrilled with and the end of the day we just feel that the you know epic CPUs are the most performative for the AIML function um and Hardware you know it is everything it's just as important as the development of our platform our back-end our software um you know it it's ensuring latent see ensuring you know up time is the best thanks to our data center partner you know ensuring we have sock one sock two HIPAA like over compliant standards all
of that really becomes one cohesive bucket that service is the end user and if you don't have the adequate Hardware what's kind of the point to do a lot of what you're doing um yeah yeah and just as a very very quick tangent it would be remiss because of your background for me to not ask even where we are you know with chat JB team or open AI are doing what's what's your thoughts there very quickly as a very quick side note you know you must be kind of excited that it's a bit of mainstream you know coming into play
with that sort of stuff right of course of course listen I think that the third party I call them third party they're not going to be a third party market for very long I think that there's some incredible new companies that are up and coming that are Paving ways creating opportunities for everyone that you know will will be its own new ecosystem yeah I look at open Ai and I think okay yeah like this is this is really interesting Innovative stuff like yeah it's um there's a lot of really fascinating
companies out there and I think that it's crucial and critical to pick the right Partners the right integrators and you know continue scaling on the right path um and be very careful right there's a lot of new stuff out there that's it yeah it's exciting and scary at the same time I had a I didn't I've got and I've got another sort of podcast that I run which is more of a quick little thoughts on X and I gave a little bit of a thought about that and while it was very exciting there was also an element of oh
whoa this is there's some you know potential implications here that could pop up and I think everyone is diving into it there's a little bit of that I was just interested in your thoughts on that but yeah no okay so yeah go ahead yeah just to finish that thought I think that's maybe why I'm so excited about the infrastructure piece and stay away from the build piece like people have gotten so Advanced and you know we we we want to be there to be the champion behind the people right and give them
access to build really cool stuff I've had a lot of deep conversations in my career about ethical and you know and ethical AI um and and we we want to just live on the other side of the fence and and help those Innovative companies build and you know um yeah it's an interesting time that's for sure yeah actually it's interesting Rob because I I'm not exactly the same as what you're saying there but I you know having been on the other side of the hosting game where I would build the infrastructure and keep it running and I
was always worried about you know the scale of it and keeping it up and it was always fun of Sinner but I I much enjoy looking at it from the other side where I don't have you know the actual responsibility so to speak so not exactly the same as what you're talking about but I thought you know it paralyzed a little bit sometimes it's good to be on the other side and see something that you're close to just grow and develop and you know kind of respect it from afar hey I wanted to talk about um it's funny because obviously um so I
had Wasabi on the show um early actually their episode 50 I was really that was a really great episode one of my favorites of all time so it was the only natural that I get sushi and wasabi because I definitely that's a favorite of mine the big thing about Wasabi that parallels you guys is really the egress charge isn't the fact that you know you guys are in charge for egress which is one of the biggest things that people just kind of accept with AWS and the hyperscalers it's like if you want to get your data out you can
but it's going to cost you an arm and a leg like literally and you guys have got your sliders on on the site to show you exactly how much you know 10 terabytes will cost to pull out of AWS you know like so maybe and I know there's not an official sort of Link there but talk a little bit about you know that as a and also the Anti-Trust and the Monopoly that that goes into that as well that's part of it at the same time yeah so I mean we're big fans of the Wasabi team Dave friend you know their
incredible yeah what they're doing and they were ahead of their time you know they found it a little over five years ago and they've had a very interesting journey and I think that's the most exciting thing is getting to me and you know understand companies like Wasabi doing what we're doing in their space um you know the what they've developed with helping to move data out at such a discounted price and then the the you know the prices they're charging it's really Innovative and super cool
and it's something that really you know has paved the path forward for us and gets us excited to think about then the infrastructure side of things um as you had mentioned we have a ton of um storage preloaded on our servers themselves but we are um in January going to announce a storage partner um so stay tuned yeah I mean like those yeah companies like Wasabi are are Paving the way forward and helping have the conversations about antitrust um because I feel that a lot of companies attempt to emerge onto the market to be a
competitor and they get squashed very very very quickly you need to have a lot of capital to do this you have to have some great connections it's unfortunately not a space you can wake up and say I'm going to start a cloud company um there's there's too many components you know between Data Center and having you know power to storage to compute to you know like that's why we all are creating our own companies and then the hopes is that we all come together to create an actual you know a company that
can compete against companies of this size and magnitude um I think that it's the right time and you know we were very fortunate to have a fabulous shout out in the Wall Street Journal I saw that yep I'll link to that in the show notes yet yeah a very cool Journal journalist's name Aaron Tilley you know writes a lot about antitrust and the the reality of the situation is when a market has owned this much and this predominantly by three companies with you know really having their elbows up we've had some bizarre calls from all
three trying to dig in and sneaky sneaky understand what we're doing interesting so that tells me they threatened right well you yeah I would think that we're just a little tiny blip on the radar but we've had some interesting calls and I mean that that really does lend concern um yeah it's it it's going I I feel like in 2023 this conversation of antitrust and how do we go from here and where do we go from here is going to be a very dominating conversation in the whole sphere of AI yeah I think you know you
mentioned the timing and I think you're right like I I know that there is I wouldn't call it a mass Exodus but there's certainly the thought that okay the public cloud and the hyperscalers we've been told for the last the best part of the last 15 or so years that it's just it is what it is there's an inevitability about it so you might as well just put all your eggs in those baskets right and then taking that a step further the basket is basically threefold you know as such but I know
through my you know commit through my connections through who I talk to historically knew that there's so many good providers out there you know doing some really cool things like you know and there's a there's a i it is sort of leveled up so you've got the hyperscalers I then see the the T1 you know the workloads those level ones which which are basically the telcos and then then you've got the then you've got you guys coming in in between them and then the service providers who are the
traditional guys that maybe were doing virtual servers or hosting or web websites in the 90s that have evolved into virtualization infrastructure service you know they do hosted applications but where I see you guys and others slitting in it's just basically even level potentially with those Telco clouds offering these bare metal services to challenge them right and effectively everyone's gotten used to consuming the cloud as the cloud and that's what it's all about now so I think that's the education that we've
gone through over the last sort of 10 years is that okay the cloud as itself is not just about hyperscale it's a way of consuming and if you can consume it in that same way but maybe make things more efficient and not accept the price gouging will say or just the expectation that you'll just pay whatever you want to pay or maybe you don't even know how much you're going to pay but you'll pay it anyway because it's just what it is then I think that has a lot of runway for the next let's call it the rest of
the decade right in terms of you know where you guys are going to come into play now being realistic like you you know that Amazon and Google and Azure are still going to do pretty well like we know that like that's that's a given right because of what it is right and then I look on the Asian market and I see you know these clouds like um Alibaba we've got 10 cent Huawei have a cloud these Asian clouds which are huge actually in their own right um which actually to be fair I feel like AWS especially just kind of writes those
guys off at the same time so it's just a really interesting space where you've got the Amazon way of thinking and again I just went to reinvent great event tons of people there was a certain cult though that is definitely in that community and they definitely just see AWS and nothing else and I think we need more people to sort of break that mindset and get into it and I think that's what you guys are doing really well yeah we're trying we're trying our best I think that to be completely developed
from the ground up for high performance cloud computing on bare metal is a very unique value proposition a very unique business um we are not trying to convert Legacy we're not trying to build our own data centers like we're being so hyper focused on just delivering the best version of bare metal cloud computing that the market can possibly offer um and so I think that makes us very unique and it offers us a very interesting place to play in the market and I think the reality is you really can't even do an Apples to Apples
comparison on any three of the incumbents cloud against a sushi server because you know an ec2 is virtualized you can't get your access on a bare metal by the hour and the consumption and we're 78 cheaper it's just simply not even comparable and the business model would not you know it just doesn't AWS doesn't support that business model they are a volume business they want people to use their machines by the minute by the second at volume we are not interested in that business whatsoever we're completely single
tenant we afford people in even higher levels which is very important right and what you're doing and maybe you need to almost guarantee that sort of stuff because even though you know you mentioned that you know you're targeting your vertical is the startups and the schools and whatnot privacy and data starter security is still super super important so the fact that you're offering that as well I think is a massive tick yeah single Tenon and then the highest level of security that you could possibly have with a data center
um so those were massive principles and and areas we needed we knew we needed to get right um because again if you don't have Hardware sitting in the safest cages with the utmost level of software security and added features you don't really have a business no that's right so just talk a little bit about where you see yourselves going like obviously I think the problem statement is you've laid it out I think you know in terms of where you came from where Aaron came from and what you're trying to do so the problem statement is
set it works so what are you looking to how have you how did you feel you've managed to get your legs in and disrupt the market to start with was was it organic or did you leverage certain anchor customers or what was that initial sort of level of disruption that got you going and start started that wheel to earning yeah it was a lot of Blood Sweat and Tears just your hustle uh cold Outreach like the classics just rolling up your sleeves and getting out there um I've been very fortunate to be quite involved in the AI Community
um I'm an advisor at MIT in the in the design X lab um I'm an advisor and Mentor at entrepreneur first which is a global incubator um for you know brilliant entrepreneurs looking to start businesses so I've been very fortunate in my career to do um a lot of things outside of my core business and through my network um you know of amazing people um it's it's been a lot of great introductions and getting those core anchor customers and then using them as case studies to be able to Market and it's it's been it's been very very
positive the market response um and yeah we're looking at you know reseller programs and a lot of fabulous things for 2023 we just hired our first official salesperson there you go awesome Yep yeah so yeah lots of growth and you know growth strategy for 2023. yeah so well actually the question I haven't asked a company for a while I used to ask this at the start was you know what how what's the size of the company at the moment like what sort of people are you got to run 11 people full time and then you know contractors and
people circling you know in and around us but we're 11 people full time okay so yes it's still very tight but efficient that's better yes yeah everyone has their role and where as many hats and uh yeah it's exciting that is exciting and I guess the one thing I didn't talk about was the fact that you and Aaron bootstrapped this didn't you so effectively yeah so then that actually is a huge tick as well when you when you're a masters of your own destiny at that point in in this world and I I
understand exactly what that means to completely bootstrap it that's huge as well because you're not really then you know at the moment anyway I mean theoretically things might change but at the moment you're not behest to any outside investor or anything like that so you're completely on your own path and trajectory yeah listen fundraising I know firsthand is the most difficult challenging thing a Founder can do it's time consuming we are so fortunate to have dumped our own money into this Venture and I can stay a
hundred percent focused on scaling the business and not going out and begging people for money absolutely awesome all right just a couple of questions to finish off like I think what's your what do you see where do you say Sushi cloud and I won't say the two to five years but how are you going to basically continue to disrupt the market moving forward because obviously you've come in with a bit of a bang you've got your particular vertical so how do you then you mention sales and maybe resellers
and whatnot so that's obviously a method of further disruption but in your own mind where do you see yourselves being the next 12 to 24 months yeah I I think that as we expand our geographies and one of our big big core focuses is scale through Partnerships we are very excited to announce two major major Partnerships in q1 of next year um we're going to bring a few new locations online so I think that the core Focus really is reaching a larger audience we have a very limited marketing budget you know so really the
the big focus is Market reach ensuring that we are expanding and and reaching new geographies and then through our partnership networks and and our new reseller Partnerships we're really excited we think that we'll be able to make quite a dent um going through those channels awesome well yeah I'm looking forward to seeing where you guys are going and Beyond the writer and I'm sure people listening to the podcast as well will be interested to see you know exactly where you're going I know a lot of my a lot of my
traditional sort of you know Network up traditional infrastructure guys in the cloud and service providers by case and this sort of stuff is super super interesting for anyone looking into that that world and you know we touch a lot of different organizations as well so I'm sure they're going to look at this and go hey you know let's try this out on that I noticed that you've got like a bit of an offer um you know the Miami so just mentioned that and then you know I'll also link to it in the show notes
yeah we were sending we're essentially buying you lunch if you want to sign up for you know minimum a month commitment for a server we're going to send you a 200 Sushi voucher you let me know where your local sushi place is and I'm throwing it in order for you and your team for to enjoy a sushi lunch on Sushi Cloud hey there you go that's awesome if that's not like enough incentive to get it going I don't know what it is and that's like 200 worth of sushi as well which depending on where you are you can
get a fair amount of sushi for that so that's pretty awesome yeah exactly all right Shauna hey this is a really great conversation I love the fact that we dive into a lot of different areas you know some of my favorite topics around infrastructure cloud and a little bit of you know what's hot around AI so thank you very much for being on this episode my last one of the Year episode 56 um and then you know I think I like I said we'll put links in the show notes and yeah really looking forward to seeing what CG cloud is doing in the
future and we'll definitely are keep up so thanks for that thanks for having me Anthony it's a pleasure awesome just to finish off once again thank you everybody for listening throughout the year it's been a really successful year again I can't believe we are officially at the end of 2022 and going to go into season 2023.
once again if you aren't subscribed or new to the show please head to jtwjt.com register your interest there is a form where you can actually register to get your name down on the list and to be fair I'm actually booked until March next year already which is super exciting right so get your bookings in for next year if you want to be on the show but head to there find me at Anthony on Twitter Twitter is still operating which is awesome and gtwgt podcast as well so with that Shauna thanks for that and we'll catch you next time on great
things with great Tech awesome [Music]
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