Ep. 18 How Are Tech Partnerships Evolving in the Cloud Era? with Dina Moskowitz

00:12 - Introduction to Dina Moskowitz

Matt
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Cloud Currents podcast, where we navigate the ever-changing seas of cloud computing and cybersecurity. I'm your host, Matt Pacheco from TierPoint. I'm responsible for TierPoint’s Cloud, Data Center, Disaster Recovery and Cybersecurity content strategy. Today, we're thrilled to have with us a true innovator in the world of B2B tech partnerships, Dina Moskowitz. Dina is the CEO and founder of PartnerOptimizer, a cutting-edge platform that's revolutionizing how companies discover and manage partnerships in the cloud ecosystem. With over two decades of experience in tech entrepreneurship, Dina has been recognized as one of the top women in channel Cloud girls trailblazer and was recently named one of the women in Cloud's top 100 Women B2B tech founders.

Today, we'll explore the evolving landscape of partner ecosystems in cloud computing, dive into how AI and data mining are transforming business partnerships, and get Dina's insights on the future of B2B tech channel. Dina, welcome to Cloud Currents.

Dina
Hi Matt. Thanks for having me and thank you all for listening.

Matt
Well, we're really happy to have you and dive into a bunch of different topics, but we can start with your career journey. So can you walk us through your journey from investment banking to becoming a tech entrepreneur? And what sparked your interest in the B2B tech partnership space?

Dina
Okay, I'll try. It's a, you know, everyone who's in the world of channel and partnerships typically started somewhere else and didn't, you know, somehow got here and don't realize how that happened, but yet it's an entire language. It's a whole, you know, just like there's mortgage speak or medical speak, there's channel and partnership speech and speak, and here we are. But I started, like you said, right out of, I went to Wharton undergrad, and I was a major in finance and Mandarin Chinese and somehow ended up in a boutique investment bank in San Diego, California. I grew up in New York, but ended up in San Diego because how could you not when you have an opportunity to have an investment banking office that overlooks the beautiful La jolla sunset and landscape there?

So I ended up there, and that was really my first foray into technology and consumption of technology because it was all using Lotus 123 in Excel and things back then, but learning how to use and consume spreadsheets and really be analytical using technology. And from there, so I was investment banking, and from there I went into medical devices. Hard to explain that, how that happened, but it was startup companies and so I've always been involved in the world of startups and technology in some way, shape or form. So eventually I was in another startup which basically sold it was in the real estate industry, and from there it spurred into another startup and that was called home data guard or critical digital data. And that was one of the first cloud softwares on AWS after it came out of beta.

And so we started to get like the late 2008, 2009, started building a SaaS before it was called a SaaS, and got a lot of experience that way with cloud infrastructure. And when I sold that company, that's when it was very apparent to me that there is a huge amount of opportunity for all sorts of evolving technology and applications that go beyond it to go to market through cloud and through partnerships. And so that led to the first channel marketplace for SaaS to come together with channel partners, and it was called Sasmax, and that was doing that actually over time.

04:12 - Challenges in SaaS Partnerships & the Birth of PartnerOptimizer

Dina
I don't know if this is easy to follow, but what we learned is that in a marketplace online, the solution providers, who are the ones bringing software to and hardware to the end to end main street customers out there in the world, and they're called channel partners, typically, or going to market through the channel that they are busy servicing their customers, and they're coming to find new solutions, but they're doing it at their own pace. And for them to be able to find the right solutions was not an easy thing.

But for the rapid number of software companies that were proliferating and trying to find a way to market, they needed to find these channel partners who are those feet on the street who can package their solution in with other technology so that you have a piece of, you're offering a piece of the puzzle. And so Sasmac's marketplace started to grow. And what we realized, and I don't know if this is too long a story or not, but what we realized is that finding the right solution provider for all of these different types of technology companies, SaaS companies, was really hard to do because were getting people from hr tech and cybersecurity, and marketing and sales tech and fintech all looking for partners. And our team was going like, okay, how are we going to find this one a partner?

And how are we going to find this one a partner? Because there was no source of truth for who all these partners were in the world. So number one, how are we going to find those partners and match them with the right SaaS companies so that everyone can go to market together and help them? So we ended up innovating for ourselves what is now the evolution of PartnerOptimizer. And it's our own proprietary data mining that leverages the web to go find all sorts of partners out there, every type, shape, size, that are B2B technology focused, and profile them so that we can profile their DNA, so to speak, their business attributes and make them findable and really pinpointed by the different suppliers and vendors who make the technology.

And that's how we actually morphed into PartnerOptimizer, which is a SaaS platform for partner intelligence and partner discovery, and partner research and partner profiling.

Matt
So let's talk a little bit about PartnerOptimizer. You described it as one of the first data driven partner discovery platforms. Can you explain the concept of partner ecosystems in the context of cloud computing?

Dina
I will do my best. Hopefully, this audience will probably understand it more than most. In the world of B2B technology, about 75% of a typical company's revenues is driven through channel partnerships and 25% direct. And so that's a really important consideration to know as you're building and developing new tools and technology, and especially cloud based, because even if you're building in the cloud, it's not that you will build it and they will come, you build it. And those channel partners need to know about it. They need to consider how to bring it to the end customer, in most cases, as proof that so many companies rely on partners for such a big portion of their revenue.

Now, what's been happening for years and years is that only 20% of the partners, on average, that you recruit are actually the ones driving the revenue. They're driving 80% of the revenue, which means that there's been this real inefficiency for the channel partner organizations who have been recruiting partners and doing everything to engage them and activate them and train them and incentivize them and take them to ball games, anything they can do to stand out and differentiate and get these partners to drive sales. But if only 20% of them are doing that, it means you're recruiting a lot of the wrong partners in the first place. And so that is one of the big challenges, is who are the right partners for your solution and how do you find them.

08:29 - The Changing Landscape of B2B Tech Partnerships

Dina
So that is what PartnerOptimizer's focus has been in terms of our data mining and our partner intelligence, is how do you pinpoint which of the partners are worth investing in, which of the partners are worth engaging to go to market with? They will influence the decision, they will service the customer they will maintain the relationship with the customer and drive revenue.

Matt
How has the landscape of B2B tech partnerships evolved since you first entered the field?

Dina
So that's a really cool question, because it used to be that the B2B tech partners were maybe just companies that call themselves value added resellers, but now it had emerged into managed service provider. Telecom agents are now also technology partners, and you'll see sometimes even cloud solution providers. You've got system integrators are now considered part of the partnership world, and SEC, DevOps and DevOps. So all of these different specializations, who can influence or participate in a sale to an end customer or service to an end customer are part of this ecosystem of partnerships.

Even Martech agencies, managed service providers, SEO consulting firms, anyone who influences a decision on your technology can and should be considered part of your partner ecosystem, because they're going to be the ones to provide that influence and validation to an end customer that they can and should select your product, but also consume it optimally and keep on renewing it. So it has evolved substantially, and not only in terms of the types of partners out there, but also in what they actually are bringing to market. So for example, like I was saying, the Martech well, all of these marketing technology platforms now are being consumed by marketing agencies who then sell services and platform subscriptions to end customers. Well, similarly in cybersecurity, there is a whole world of that.

So domain specific wise as well as vertically specific, you can see how that apple is getting sliced and diced in all sorts of ways. In terms of partner intelligence, it is surfacing in our own data mining because we can see how partners are evolving from in prior years, not talking about Bi and cybersecurity or artificial intelligence and Gen AI. And those things are all starting to surface now too. So by using partner intelligence and data mining, you can also gauge if a partner that you're looking to recruit, are they partner ready? Are they ready for your solution? Are they aligned with the same types of customers as you care to go to market with? And so there's so many insights that you can gain by having this deep dive or a line of sight into who these partners are.

Matt
That's really interesting, talking about the evolution and getting to the point of AI and data mining. That's what I wanted to ask you about. Next. You sort of just talked about this, but can you break down exactly how partner optimizes? Optimizer uses AI in data mining to match companies with their ideal partners.

Dina
I can try without giving away our secret sauce right?

Matt
Yeah. No secrets, no trade secrets.

Dina
What we really did at the fundamental core is, say, what is the DNA of a partner company? Not a person. But what makes a company really? What business attributes do you need to know about a company to make them an important, you know, to figure out if they're aligned with what you want to recruit and what you want to invest in. And typically that can be broken into things like what kind of company? Or how do they promote themselves? Are they a value added reseller? Are they a managed service provider? Are they a data analyst? Are they an Internet service provider? What are they and how do they communicate that to the world? And how much are they communicating that to the world? Then we look at what their expertise is and their product types that they've got competencies in.

Then we look at things like, what is their ideal customer profile? Because their ideal customer profiles should really align with yours. As a technology company, you don't want to try to get a cybersecurity company, a partner to be selling your martech platform. It's just not going to work. It might be a one and done, might be a nice little referral, but they're not going to be the ones worth investing in and going to market with. Then there are other insights that we take into account, like what are the products? Are they already working with? Are they working already with your competition? How aligned are they? Can you steal them away or can you win them back? Or do you need to stay away from them? Because it just will be a.

A big time suck as well as what else are they selling, what else is in their tech stack? And once you have those ideas, it reaffirms that they have the expertise and the partnerships already in place with others that show that they would be able to take your product to market and do, whether it's service, sell, support, implement any of those things, you can understand where they fit and other things like competencies and certifications that show that they've invested in your area of expertise that they need in order to sell. So that's what we really did is said. What is a genome or the partner DNA that matters when you're doing the data mining and looking for and training your engine to find the partners in a way that matters, that can bring and stack the partners in the right order.

And we never found anywhere else that focuses to that nth degree of deepen b, two b technology attributes to really be able to hone in on these things. And so we've continued to grow and build ontologies. That means it's a fancy word for a dictionary that we're always training our engine to then surface those insights. And so that's the back end, right. The front end is also search algorithms and really testing up front. Are we bringing back the right information, the right partners for the right query, and what needs to be done there, and how do you train it to surface those things? So that's been a lot of what goes into it. Once we got those two things down pretty well. Now it's about bringing the insights even more obviously to the surface so that our customers can have an even smoother journey.

Matt
While we're talking about data mining and Aihdenhe, how do you see the balance between human expertise and AI driven insights evolving in partner ecosystem management?

Dina
It's a great question. I think that hybrid intelligence is critical. The platform the AI will never understand, I mean, I can't say never, but the intent of your search, if you're going online to search for best movies, it doesn't know why. It could assume you're going to find the next movie at the next time based on this type of thing, but it doesn't really know. Maybe you're reviewing movies or maybe you're looking to find out where theater is and go sell it popcorn. So you just don't know. The machines don't always know or predict correctly the reason for why you're making your query. So to be able to be in control of what you're querying for and be able to surface those things along with the data, it's a really important component, especially the more detailed, the more focused you are in an area.

So if you were to go to a generic gen AI platform and try to search for the same types of partners that I just told you about, it might surface very high level. These are all these IT service providers, but it's not going to tell you very specifically which ones are focused more on these types of cybersecurity versus these. That's where our engine comes in and trains and is able to do that. Yeah.

Matt
That kind of specialization is really cool, really interesting.

Dina
That's right. Yeah. I was at the AWS AI women in AI founders event last week actually, and that's what the big conversation was, is that the verticalization of AI is going to be critical for good outcomes, for you to be able to trust the outcomes.

Matt
Yeah. And using, and like you mentioned before, it's using the general tools, the free tools usually give you pretty much whatever's available on the Internet. So tools like yours that have kind of that, I don't want to go into your trade secrets or anything, but have that expertise and that focus can really offer value there. So that's really cool to hear. So I'm going to switch gears. I'm very interested to hear about some of the, I guess, challenges businesses and opportunities that businesses face in B2B tech as it relates to partner ecosystems. So my first question is, what are some of the biggest challenge companies face when trying to build and manage partner ecosystems in the cloud era?

Dina
Well, the biggest one, which is the one that we've been trying to tackle. Right, which is finding the right partners in the first place. Okay. If you're looking to build a partner program and you don't know where to start, it's a real challenge. And you might go to Google, you might go out to a conference, you might start going to the industry publications, but it's a really important thing to refine and hone in on what your ideal partner profile is. So just like there's an ideal customer profile in marketing, you need to build an ideal partner profile.

And the ideal partner profile needs to include not just what you want them to do and be, and want them to sell your product and solution, but also what else do they do that shows that they have all that competency and are well aligned to recruit? And a good example of that was a few years ago, an innovative SaaS company came along that does app security and it's called Appsec. And back then, partners didn't know about, and the world didn't know about application security. And so it wasn't talked about a lot. It wasn't visibly surfacing in data mining online. But this company was convinced they wanted to find partners who do app security. Well, the answer that was, well, good luck, because no one really knows about it. You're innovating and pioneering a new industry, so you better look at the adjacents.

What else are they doing? What else are they selling today? That shows you that they would be ready to take on your product and solution. And so when you're bringing new products to market, even existing ones with new features or to compete, you really have to take that into consideration and your experience.

19:43 - Building a Best-in-Breed Partner Program

Matt
On the flip side of that, what are some key factors that make a successful partnership in the B2B tech space?

Dina
So there are a lot of different ones. Number one, you have to make sure that you're aligned with them. You want to like them too. And you do want to do, you know, in partnerships there's a lot of friendships that are developed because you're working closely with them. They really are your sales team, your feet on the street, as they're called. So you do want to bond with them, but it's really important to think about what do they care about most as a business. They're servicing their clients. How do you help them to be a better partner to their clients so that they can and trust you to bring new products and innovation to their customer base and don't question it. And also that you're compensating them fairly.

If you're asking them to bring in a solution that's, you know, $200,000, don't think about just giving them a $200 bonus or something. How do you really build a partner program that's best in breed? And there are many consultants out there who specialize in just building partner programs, and especially in the enterprise. I mean, Tierpoint has, they have an established partner program, and so you have tiers based upon performance. You have active partners. Then you also end up finding out that the inactive ones, you call them a long tail. But many times, partner teams will start to ignore the long tail because they're not transacting. And there's a big opportunity in there. There are lots of, we like to say, diamonds. These companies that are there that could actually be the right partners for you.

And if you can only figure out who they are and which ones to invest in, there's opportunity right there. And they could be already working with your competition because maybe they weren't receiving any love from you. So to be able to figure out who you've already recruited that might be sitting around giving business to other companies is a really important thing, as is figuring out which of the partners you recruited that won't ever be a good partner and to let them go so that you can free up spend and free up your channel salespeople's time and your account manager's time to work on the ones who really have the potential.

Matt
PartnerOptimizer sounds great. And it sounds like a great platform to help build those partner networks for smaller companies, like smaller tech companies looking to leverage platforms like PartnerOptimizer. Would that help them possibly compete with some of the larger enterprises in building partner networks? Because it feels like the bigger enterprises have kind of a leg up in that. How do smaller tech companies kind of gain that advantage?

Dina
And that's a really important question as well. And when I first started building this out, the goal was to democratize partner Discovery and partner intelligence for those emerging technology companies who want to get to market. And so part of what's cool about the platform is you can also do analysis of what your total addressable partner landscape is, so you can use it to assess how many partners are out there that you think you'd really want to recruit. You could look at the different types of partners, you can select just a few and then start. But when you look at the value of one partner, what you have to do is a few things. One is what is your average sale price? And for a partner, if they were to sell it, is it dollar 500 a year per customer?

Which really wouldn't be that interesting for a partner. But if it's 5000 a year per customer or 50,000 a year per customer, then that partner has a business opportunity to make some good money with you. And so let's say that one partner can sell a $25,000 transaction to four customers a year and do that year after year. Well, that one partner can drive $600,000 worth of revenue over three years, which is a substantial amount of revenue. And so what is the value of a partner to you? Right. And when you look at it that way, if you're starting out and you realize that 75% of tech is sold through partners, and that if you spend the time upfront understanding how to work with and find those right partners, that you're going to accelerate your growth trajectory.

Even PartnerOptimizer as a company has many of our own partners who are referring us their clients.

Matt
Very interesting. Next, I want to ask you a little bit about the industry as a whole. We've seen some shifts in this industry specifically such as Broadcom and VMware's change in their partner program. How do these changes impact the channel ecosystem?

Dina
They create some insecurity and they shuffle things up, but they create market opportunities for the competitors. Who can say, well, if those partners are feeling insecure and they need to find a new home for their clients to have the right technology infrastructure, then you can use a tool just like PartnerOptimizer to figure out in real time who are those partners that might be feeling insecure, that are already partners to broadcom or VM and figure out what they, you know, which ones really match your own ideal partner profile and start to hit them up at a point where they feel vulnerable because you can offer them a funk. So there are lots of opportunities like that constantly. And when you have visibility, you can be much more curious and much more responsive and reactive to market conditions. So that is whats happening right now.

There are so many changes in technology, from partner programs dissolving or getting rebuilt, to big companies shifting their business models, which impacts the pricing structure of products and solutions, or how you can buy in that world, like cloud infrastructure, like the hyperscalers of AWS or Azure or Google, have a different way of transacting that is forcing partners to adopt new business models. So there's a constant shuffling and I don't think it'll ever just be static. So it's about keeping up with the times and paying attention and not falling behind the curve.

Matt
Yeah, that's great. Great advice. That was going to be my next question. How do you navigate these disruptions? And I think you answered that really well. Another major disruptor is AI. So we talked a little bit earlier about how to leverage AI in the PartnerOptimizer product, but I'd like to switch it from the business perspective. So how do you see the role of AI evolving in business decision making, especially as it relates to the cloud?

Dina
Yeah, it's a conversation that I think everyone is having right now in B2B tech, because it's evolving from do you let your own company and your own team consume AI? And are you basically leaking proprietary information by letting your people use anything external? So it's about understanding what the risks are and how to contain them, but still be able to leverage the value of the efficiencies of AIh. So that's one aspect of what's getting shifted. The other is everybody's roles are in some way either threatened or also face opportunities from the consumption and use of different types of AI tools. And so there's a fine balance because there's a fear that you might become irrelevant.

But if you embrace it and are the first to embrace it can actually, on a personal level, be excellent for your own career when others are not as quick to adopt.

Matt
And you mentioned, I want to ask you a little bit about the pitfalls companies should be aware of. You already mentioned the putting your proprietary information out there too. What are some other potential pitfalls companies should be aware about when relying heavily on AI tools?

Dina
Well, obviously getting the wrong piece of information back. AI is known to have certain hallucinations. That's why the training of the engine, if you're doing an internal communication tool, has to really be trained on your company's information and data sources versus just the broad world. And so you have to, you do have to watch out for the hallucinations. It's important, I think, to train your people, or for anyone individually thinking about it, to get some training on prompting. Prompting is how you enter in data in order to get back the best optimal responses, but also how to continue to prompt until you get answer that you feel that is comfortable. One of my biggest concerns or fears in general, is that as we grow to rely so much on AI, we won't challenge the response. We won't think, is that right or wrong?

Is there a better answer? And so there's a bit, for me anyway, a personal fear that people's critical thinking skills might get desensitized or, I don't know, reduced or whatever that right word is, because they can just so quickly get answer and be satisfied with the answer versus thinking beyond and looking for the best possible response.

Matt
That's kind of like when Google became the. So easy to access. Everyone said something similar about Google. Now you don't have to memorize anything or remember anything because you could just go and google it. So it's interesting how the AI piece and on the prompt thing, that's an interesting one. The advice I typically give to other marketers, whether on my team or I'm sharing on LinkedIn, is prompting at least three to five times. Like, you don't want the first thing AI gives to you. You want to make sure you can formulate and never use exactly what it gives you. Like, yeah, try to. Try to use it as a jumping off point. So.

Dina
Absolutely. I mean, especially in the content generating area, if you just accept it, then everything you write is going to be game changing, right? Because that word game changing shows up all the time. We're revolutionary delve.

Matt
There's certain keywords that are big tells, and I see it on LinkedIn a lot.

33:50 - Crucial Skills for Success in the Partner Ecosystem

Dina
You know, that actually brings up a really interesting point. So the use of it, people are. I'm already seeing people rely on it. Like someone wrote me a few days ago that they want to become. They want to join our team and become one of our business development reps. And the pitch to me was obviously written by chat, GPT, or one of the others, because nothing about it was anything unique or anything that showed me that person really wanted to work for us and why they were uniquely qualified. But it was very complimentary of our company. So it was obvious that he was assuming that this was a really well written outreach and that I would be impressed. But I saw this and it was just, I was like, I would never want this letter to go out to a prospective customer of ours.

Matt
I've gotten those emails from bdrs in the past in my inbox that are like, oh wow, those even down to the rocket ships. That's chat GBT copy. So I completely understand. And then you get into the area of, after a while, the AI who scours the Internet eventually comes across AI generated content and creates a loop of answers. I thought that was, I always think that's interesting. So we talked about changes in the industry and all these things going on in the world. As someone deeply involved in the partner ecosystem, how do you stay informed on industry trends and changes?

Dina
So I belong to several different associations. One of them is partnership leaders, which is a growing organization of all sorts of people in partnerships and channel and tech alliances. And there's a great, very active channel, Slack channel community, as well as a big annual conference and really approachable people always having interesting dialogues. There's also quite a few other industry organizations around channel specifically, and they're called channel Futures and Channel partners conference and channel pro and lots of things with the word channel in them. I'd be happy to share and provide a list of those if anyone is interested. But then also I'm in other types of groups.

I'm always trying to stay on top of the latest research and just, I subscribe to a lot of e newsletters and try to, on a regular basis, review what's going on in the news that morning and maybe that evening. And so that's how I try to keep up. And then I'm fortunate to be invited to things like the AWS female entrepreneur AI event, where I get to really meet innovators and entrepreneurs who are on the edge of the future.

Matt
Excellent. So looking forward a little, because we're talking about the future. What skills do you think would be most crucial for people looking to succeed in this space, this partner ecosystem space within the next five years?

Dina
People skills, communication, insight, empathy. The soft skills that you cannot replace with the technology. Because when it comes to partnership, you're ultimately wanting to find those companies that you can trust and build rapport with and go to market with and collaborate on to get deals done and to build happy customers. So, you know, you can use all the tools to keep you managed and get you ahead of the curve and accelerate the right partnerships. But ultimately, just like I think in anywhere in business, you want to have and surround yourself with people that you can, you like working with.

Matt
Excellent. And what emerging trends do you see shaping the future of cloud partnerships?

35:00 - The Role of AI in Partner Ecosystems

Dina
So AI, obviously, it's everywhere. So that's one of the big things. Are you AI ready? Are you partner ready to be able to incorporate AI into your emotions with your clients and stay ahead of your clients when they come to you and say, how are we incorporating AI into our businesses? So for partnerships, it's critical. And even for the cloud companies and any cloud software applications, I think it's something like over 70% of software applications today are building AI into their platforms, and if not, they'll be irrelevant soon. So there's a huge initiative going on right now. And if you're not already, don't be afraid of it, embrace it. There are some simple ways to get started. Simple ways like getting a chatbot on your website or a chatbot to do customer support within your platform.

This allows you to crawl, walk, run, and I don't need to talk to any of the ctos or product engineers out here that are, I'm sure, already thinking about these things, but it's a really important component to stay relevant. And when you're doing that, also, you have to think about the cloud consumption that's going to occur as a result. Do you know what those numbers are? How it's going to affect your monthly spend? Can you control it and keep it managed? Or will it be a surprise when all of a sudden you launch something and boom, everything has doubled or tripled or something? Pay attention to not only incorporating it, but what you're going to pay on the back end. And will it impact your margins and.

Matt
You got into consumption? That's a good point. I'm also interested in the role you see sustainability playing in future partner ecosystem strategies, because we're talking AI, but there's also when you talk AI and these AI powered data centers and all these data centers trying to power AI with these, the GPU's and the new cooling techniques, how does sustainability play into that?

Dina
I'm not the expert on it, but it's going to play into our margins. That's really what's going to happen if you're consuming the AI, and even if you're charging that through to your customer, plan for increased expenses and plan for learning about that impact. If you're really socially conscious, you may want to find those hosting providers and cloud providers who care about that as well and align with those companies.

Matt
Excellent. Getting to my final two questions for you. We're almost there. What is your vision for the future of PartnerOptimizer and its role in shaping B2B tech partnership landscape?

Dina
Yeah, I love that question because obviously I'm always trying to think ahead of what it means for us. But I see an envision PartnerOptimizer being sort of the foundational partner intelligence platform that helps companies basically grow, manage, accelerate, strategize and keep enriched their entire partner ecosystem into the future. And the sooner they learn how to incorporate it, the sooner it's your competitive advantage. But in the future, it's basically going to become a point of parity, because as more and more of your competitors are adopting a tool like PartnerOptimizer, if you don't have that information, you are going to behind the curve and lose opportunities to drive revenue with partners. They're going to be going to those places or being approached by your competitors who are taking a data driven approach to being successful in their channel.

It allows them to do less with more. So the biggest channel organizations that have hundreds of channel sales and marketers in them are going to get more efficient and more aggressive because they will know what to do with which partners and who to invest in. And even the ones with the smallest partner programs can more specifically pinpoint and cherry pick who they want to go to market with and prove their technology out and then find those lookalike partners who they can then replicate that success with.

39:58 - Advice for Aspiring Tech Entrepreneurs

Matt
Excellent. And I really appreciate you coming on here and talking about PartnerOptimizer and channel and partnerships. My last final question for you. So there might be a lot of people watching this podcast who are aspiring tech entrepreneurs or people in the tech industry. What advice would you give them to help make their mark in the cloud and B2B tech industry.

Dina
You have to be a little crazy. You do. I mean, you have to have that focus and determination, but also with an understanding of what is possible and what might be the roadblocks. And so it's having grit, it's having patience, it's having the determination and resourcefulness to build your first minimum viable product, even if it's not everything you expect it to be. But figure out what are those bells and whistles that will best communicate its value to your customer base, your prospective customer base, so that you can start somewhere and go from there and you won't always hit the mark. It's why we started out in one way and ended up with PartnerOptimizer. We didn't realize that when we started that this was going to be the path that we took.

But had we not started in one place, we would not be where we are today. You also have to be paying attention to what your prospective customers and the industry and the needs are. Rather than just being stubborn, you have to be flexible to do those pivots that will sort of take you in the direction ultimately typically, it's a fairly straight direction, but you're kind of going like this to get there.

Matt
Excellent advice. We really appreciate you coming on and talking with us today. I learned a lot, and I'm sure our audience learned a lot, too. Thank you so much.

Dina
I hope so. I really appreciate you having me and hearing what I've got to say. You know, if your audience has any questions or would like to reach out to me directly, you can find me on LinkedIn or, you know, happy to through you reach out or give my email address out to those who have questions.

Matt
Will do. For our listeners, thanks for listening in and stay tuned for another episode of Cloud Currents…coming soon!