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Jon Yoo, CEO of Suger, Joins Ultimate Guide to Partnering
What is the future of B2B sales in the new landscape of marketplaces and AI? Jon Yoo, CEO of Sugar, joins us to discuss the evolution of B2B sales and the rise of hyperscaler marketplaces.
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Jon Yoo shares his insights on how companies like Snowflake are leveraging these marketplaces to drive significant revenue and streamline operations. Discover how Sugar is empowering businesses to embrace a consumer-like buying experience, simplifying complex deployments, and automating workflows for greater efficiency.
Jon also delves into the future of B2B sales, highlighting the growing importance of AI and microtransactions. Learn how Sugar is staying ahead of the curve by investing in AI-driven solutions and catering to the needs of both buyers and sellers in this rapidly changing landscape.
Key Takeaways:
- Hyperscaler marketplaces are transforming B2B sales: Companies are increasingly leveraging these platforms to drive revenue and streamline operations.
- Sugar is simplifying complex software sales: The company is bringing a consumer-like buying experience to B2B by simplifying deployments and automating workflows.
- AI is playing a crucial role in the evolution of B2B sales: Sugar is investing in AI-driven solutions to enhance efficiency and provide valuable insights.
- The mid-market presents a significant opportunity for growth: Sugar is focused on empowering mid-sized companies to leverage the power of marketplaces.
- A unified approach to sales channels is essential: Sugar enables businesses to manage all their sales channels, including direct sales and marketplaces, seamlessly.
- The buyer side of the marketplace is often overlooked: Sugar is addressing this gap by providing tools and insights to empower buyers.
- Partnerships remain crucial in the B2B landscape: Sugar recognizes the importance of collaboration and is working to enhance co-selling and bundled offerings.
- Continuous learning and adaptation are key to success: Jon Yoo emphasizes the importance of staying intellectually curious and embracing new technologies.
Don’t miss this opportunity to gain insider knowledge from industry leaders shaping tomorrow’s digital world. Tune in now for an inspiring conversation that could redefine your business strategy!
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TRANSCRIPT
Transcription:
Jon Yoo Audio Episode
[00:00:00] Jon Yoo: But I think the most untapped potential is in the mid market space where, you know, maybe one of the kind of players who worked at, you know, one of these mega enterprises that we’re doing that has tremendous success goes to work at, you know, a smaller company, as I mentioned before, and they’re bringing that motion, that playbook.
[00:00:18] Jon Yoo: to drive marketplace for them. I think that’s very interesting.
[00:00:23] Vince Menzione: We believe this time is like no other. We believe, we refer to these as the tectonic shifts.
[00:00:29] Intro: All the hyperscalers in the world, if you add them all together, managed services will be one and a half times larger.
[00:00:34] Vince Menzione: Because it is the customer buying behavior that has created the need for all of us to rethink our models.
[00:00:41] Intro: Until we have data quality, the effectiveness of AI cannot be realized, and effectiveness of the partnerships cannot be realized. Can you figure out first what your purpose is and how Microsoft can support your purpose and how you can support Microsoft purpose? Now we have a partnership. It’s the ultimate partnership.
[00:01:01] Vince Menzione: Welcome to or welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzione, your host. And my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. Today, I’m excited to be joined in the studio by a leader who’s leading some of the change we’re seeing in this world of marketplaces and hyperscaler co selling.
[00:01:20] Vince Menzione: John Yu is the CEO and co founder of Sugar, an innovative company that’s helping leading some of this incredible change and growth, and I’m excited to have him here in the studio.
[00:01:31] Jon Yoo: John, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me Vince. And by the way, what a great event last night.
[00:01:36] Vince Menzione: Thank you. The whole day was amazing.
[00:01:38] Vince Menzione: So for those of you who haven’t watched or listened, we have the Ultimate Partner Winter Retreat is on our YouTube channel as well as this. So I encourage you to go there and watch what an incredible session. So many great leaders in the room, including yourself. Well, we, I feel privileged to get to know you a little bit better these last couple of years.
[00:01:56] Vince Menzione: Uh, we met, I think it’s almost two years now. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you were just kind of at the early stage of, of starting up sugar. Right. Yeah. Kind of like two garage kind of thing, but it was really, you were very at the early stage and I really want to spend some time learning about you, your company, your journey, and where you hope to take this market.
[00:02:15] Vince Menzione: So I thought we’d start there. Like what was the inspiration behind Sugar and talk, talk to us about that journey to this role as the co founder and CEO of Sugar.
[00:02:23] Jon Yoo: Yeah, definitely. So I guess if I rewind it back all the way, you know, I, I’ve wanted to be an entrepreneur since I was 16. So my, my first job, I don’t know if I told you this, but, uh, first company was around like led technology of, can you print these like, uh, display chips, so to speak on a pliable surface.
[00:02:42] Jon Yoo: Turns out no one actually wants. Uh, a fricking phone screen on your, like, ski jacket. Uh, so that’s always like, you know, they say a founder is like first, you know, product is, you know, based on technology and then you work your way backwards to the problem. And in this scenario, you know, we really started with the problem.
[00:03:00] Jon Yoo: And part of that came from my time at Salesforce, where we saw just how complex these systems can be and workflows can be when you start to expand to multiple channels. But it’s really my co founder and CTO, Changjun, who had the idea and really felt the pain deeply. So, you know, he worked on, he was at Facebook for a bit, was at, you know, worked on AI at Google for a little bit.
[00:03:20] Jon Yoo: And then he ended up at Confluent, where he was the tech lead of their marketplace product, you know. And they were doing 40, 50 percent of their revenue through, through these hyperscaler marketplaces. I mean, they were feeling the pain. They had roughly 10 engineers and, you know, tens of ops people, whether in the U S or offshore that was actually helping to, to manage this channel.
[00:03:42] Jon Yoo: And so he really felt the pain point, um, deeply and thought, Hey, not everyone has to The, the payroll, you know, to, to go hire 10 engineers and multiple house people to manage this. So why not? It’s very complex. It’s super complex. Yeah.
[00:03:56] Vince Menzione: And for those of our listeners or viewers who don’t understand, tell us a little bit more about what Sugar’s mission is and what you, your organization does.
[00:04:03] Jon Yoo: Yeah. I mean, super high level. It might sound a little, you know, cliche, but we really want to bring a consumer experience to B2B sales. And we see that these hyperscaler marketplaces is really the best wedge. Uh, for us to, you know, kind of see this, you know, marketplace like activities where, you know, I, I always wondered why can I go on amazon.
[00:04:24] Jon Yoo: com and pick up, you know, cameras here or, uh, bed sheets and be able to compare different products, uh, as any consumer does. And, you know, like the, the one click purchase now, and you can have it delivered to your door. Uh, we really want to bring that experience into. You know, if you want to deploy a database, for example, how can you actually do that with one click of a button, uh, where all the procurements, the deployment is, is handled through these marketplaces.
[00:04:49] Jon Yoo: And so amazing benefits. We want to bring it and democratize it to like every single B2B software company in the world.
[00:04:56] Vince Menzione: Very cool. You know, we talk about at Ultimate Partner, we talk about the tectonic shifts, incredible change and transformation going on in our world, right? Our lives are shifting weekly.
[00:05:05] Vince Menzione: It seems, right. We talked about. Uh, deep seek moment that is already past us and, uh, Stargate and all the investments that are going on. Just, just the way the world is rapidly changing. We also talk about marketplace moment quite a bit. Oh yeah. And the role of the hyperscalers. And I still feel that a lot of organizations come at this thing called partnership at it from the wrong angle.
[00:05:27] Vince Menzione: And they miss the fact that I say three sets of rails, and maybe it’s more than three sets of rails, but the hyperscalers really with the level of investment. The hundred billion dollar type of investments annually that they’re making each in this world and then driving it around marketplaces that this is a moment that I feel that not enough people are embracing the right way.
[00:05:49] Vince Menzione: Would you agree?
[00:05:50] Jon Yoo: I would think so. Um, it’s not like, like, for example, with AI, you know, there’s a chat GPT moment where everyone just saw the value. I mean, I mean, it took you 15 minutes to start playing with it, to realize what the possibilities are. And the tectonic shift was immediate. I think marketplace, um, shift or like adoption has been a lot more gradual.
[00:06:10] Jon Yoo: I mean, of course this exploded over the past couple of years, but these hyperscaler marketplaces have been around for 10, 12 years. Um, but it’s really only in the four, the past four or five years where you start to see, you know, the marketplace moments where you have companies like Confluent, you know, there has been earnings reports of like CrowdStrike doing so much.
[00:06:30] Jon Yoo: I mean, Snowflake, one of our customers was. The first across a billion dollars in AWS marketplace revenue alone. And so I think we’re starting to get to the early majority. Um, we, I’ve seen it personally over the past two, three years where, you know, in the past, it used to be like the, the top, like a hundred companies are doing majority of the marketplace transactions.
[00:06:50] Jon Yoo: And we’re actually seeing a ton of early stage startups, you know, growth stage startups that are actually. Starting to really adopt marketplace and, you know, drive all their upsells and renewals through it for all these benefits. Not just like commit drawdowns, but actually leveraging, you know, the speed of delivery or the fact that you can have flexible billing and you don’t have to worry about, you know, debt collections.
[00:07:11] Jon Yoo: If someone goes out of business or some, you know, or they don’t want to pay. And so. It’s been super exciting to see that gradual evolution, and hopefully we can play a huge part in accelerating that adoption.
[00:07:20] Vince Menzione: I’m glad, I want to tease out what you just said here too, because I wanted to emphasize this. We had this moment where five companies crossed a billion dollars aggregate in transactions, right?
[00:07:32] Vince Menzione: And it looked like we were on a greater path, but when you peel back on some of those, it was really the fulfillment, right? They were private offers, these were big contracts, uh, and they were just taking it through fulfillment, uh, through marketplace. To burn down on the commitments. Yeah. But it wasn’t this organic thing.
[00:07:49] Vince Menzione: Yep. And you, what you’re discussing now is this, like, how do you organically get at it? Yep. How does a company that maybe is just, uh, just got to product market fit? And they’re taking their product to market and it’s a great product. And how do they utilize the marketplace to drive awareness, to drive buying behavior and for that, those customers burn down, I guess.
[00:08:09] Vince Menzione: And I think that’s what you’re talking about.
[00:08:10] Jon Yoo: Yeah. I mean, talk about like the moment of marketplace. I actually think that, um, you can kind of break it up into a couple of pieces. I mean, private offers coming in really led to major adoption. I think you’re starting to see the hyperscalers, uh, really think about the PLG emotion.
[00:08:25] Jon Yoo: How do you actually. You know, drive like trials and POCs and discoverability really through these marketplaces. And, you know, if I pick, you know, a new functionality, for example, AWS came out with like the buy with AWS functionality where, you know, you can actually, um, embed like the little button into your exact website where you’ve already constructed the website to capture all the foot traffic.
[00:08:50] Jon Yoo: And so it’s kind of taking the power of marketplace. Uh, what’s the right word? Like everywhere? Yeah. Extending it. Exactly. Extending it. Instead of actually just curating this storefront where you have to drive for traffic too. And so we get very excited about that. So I, instead of saying like age of marketplace, I’d actually say like age of marketplace PLG, because that’s, that’s the future that I get super excited about.
[00:09:13] Jon Yoo: Not just, you know, draw down on, on, uh, cloud
[00:09:15] Vince Menzione: commitments there. So you just had a seminal moment, I would say. Congratulations. You’ve raised 15 million series. A, uh, how do you plan to utilize the funds and how are you thinking about your growth? Hmm. Uh,
[00:09:29] Jon Yoo: carefully, uh, so that we don’t run, you know, they always say the CEO’s job is to make sure you don’t run out of money.
[00:09:34] Jon Yoo: Um, so I, you know, we’re certainly not just like going out and, you know, Buying you didn’t get a Lamborghini. Yeah, absolutely not. Absolutely. We put it all on Bitcoin. I know. Yeah. Um,
[00:09:45] Vince Menzione: that might’ve been a good thing a few months ago.
[00:09:47] Jon Yoo: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Uh, that’s a whole nother story. I might need a cocktail for that.
[00:09:53] Jon Yoo: But, um, You know, we really think about it as investing in R and D. Um, we’ve, I think we have semblance of product market fit, but that’s costly evolving rates. Competitors catch up. The cloud providers aren’t, aren’t stopping anytime soon around, you know, making their own kind of native experience better.
[00:10:10] Jon Yoo: Um, and so we’re, you know, we’re going to try to hire a ton of engineers and we are already doing so, uh, to invest. Not just in our core product offering around Marketplace and CoSell, but invest in a lot of AI use cases that we’ve been thinking about for the past two years. We just haven’t been able to, you know, there, there’s all these table stake functionalities that we need, we need to like set the foundation for.
[00:10:31] Jon Yoo: Um, and then there’s so many other things around the buyer side of Marketplace because, you know, you talk about, okay, how do we, you know, I think we can shape seller behavior, but it, you know, sellers want to meet the buyers where their budget is and where the ease of transaction is. And I think there’s some level of.
[00:10:48] Jon Yoo: Market disequilibrium, where it’s a lot easier for sellers now that sugar’s around and some of our competitors, you know, but the buyer side is still very ignored, so to speak. Um, you know, when, when we talk to our customers who are trying to sell into a mega enterprise, they always talk about, man, it’s really difficult to find, you know, who the right.
[00:11:07] Jon Yoo: Like budget owner is, or who the right person who can actually accept the private offer. They struggle with figuring out, you know, let’s say you’re a Walmart and you have. 10 billion committed across the three cloud providers. How do you know which cloud to procure through? Um, if they have 10 different business units, do they have specific, you know, budget for, you know, third party purchases through these cloud commitments?
[00:11:30] Jon Yoo: Um, it was the approval workflow because that also sits outside of, you
[00:11:33] Vince Menzione: know, kind of their direct approval because you have to go through the procurement process that might be very, especially in a Walmart, exactly. A whole different building than the campus.
[00:11:41] Jon Yoo: Exactly. Um, and so we really want to bridge the gap and.
[00:11:44] Jon Yoo: And ultimately, once we are able to fulfill both sellers and buyers, we’re able to provide a lot more data and insights, uh, you know, that kind of fulfills the vision of what we’re looking for, of how do we recommend, you know, what type of products to purchase or bundled offerings, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:11:59] Vince Menzione: Yeah. When you described to me too, you know, this is why co selling is so important, right? Because they become your Sherpas in a way, because if you are a buyer, You’re working with a cloud provider, absolutely relying on your account executives, your account, their account executives are then relying on the partner tech team and their own organization that are then crossing over to the partner and trying to navigate this journey, which can be very complex.
[00:12:25] Vince Menzione: And what you’re saying is you’re going to streamline some of that process.
[00:12:27] Jon Yoo: Absolutely. We’re not, you know, similar to like this whole provocative death of SaaS. We’re not saying death of CoSell, you know, with, with this, we’re really talking about how do we evolve what CoSell looks like, you know, beyond just.
[00:12:38] Jon Yoo: Hey, let me just go share a thousand offs and hope the spray and pray approach that, you know, a lot of people talked about yesterday. How do we actually make it a lot more intelligent, you know, based on some of these buying behaviors and account mapping and whatnot? Yeah.
[00:12:50] Vince Menzione: So provocative question. You’re at the first to market, right?
[00:12:52] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Some people call them enablers or marketplace platforms. Yeah. Uh, you came at the problem after a couple other solutions were out there. How did you think about the problem differently? Yeah. And how do you uniquely solve for it today? I
[00:13:06] Jon Yoo: mean, first and foremost, we Have tremendous like respect for our competitors and competitions get, you know, it deflates prices and it makes us better, makes us move faster.
[00:13:17] Jon Yoo: And I certainly tried to use that to motivate the team around like, Hey, if we’re not moving 10 X the speed of some of our competitors who have a lot more funding, we’re screwed. Um, but you know, I think we have a lot of second mover advantage because. We got started after a lot of these APIs were available and, and, you know, based on changing his experience from Confluent, he knows where a lot of the skeletons are buried, and so we were able to rearchitect it from the ground up to be very API first.
[00:13:42] Jon Yoo: So what I mean by that is, you know, I think about it as, Hey, let’s unify all the channels. So an offer is an offer, regardless of whether it’s through AWS or direct or GCP, et cetera. And what that allows you to do is you can build a workflow on top of it. Where you can trigger a series of actions based on any events from marketplace, regardless of which partner it was.
[00:14:06] Jon Yoo: And so like, you know, if you, if you kind of talk about, Hey, we can do bi directional lead sync or send offers or, you know, recognize revenue. It’s not that hard and a lot of people can do it. And that still requires a ton of manual effort by different teams. And I think about like in the life cycle of a transaction, there’s like, you know, opportunity management.
[00:14:27] Jon Yoo: So like there’s co sell, you know, product that really helps with that. The entire quote to cash process of how do you actually, you know, have an AE that, you know, co sells, but all, or, you know, as part of a co selling motion, but also has to go figure out the account ID, blah, blah, blah. Uh, have a handoff to deal desk or ops or whoever’s managing that process to send an offer.
[00:14:47] Jon Yoo: And then, you know, once the offer is sent, like there’s a level of workflows of, you know, reaching out to the end customer, making sure internal teams are aligned. And then once the offer gets accepted, like there’s a bunch of system things that needs to happen, whether it’s updating a field in Salesforce, uh, sending the metadata to, you know, your ERP solutions like we, or NetSuite a lot, uh, so that they’re not double invoicing the end customer.
[00:15:11] Jon Yoo: And so all this work, all these workflows are things that, um, people do manually today. I was going to say, well, manual process. Yeah,
[00:15:19] Vince Menzione: it’s very, the complexity is astounding. Actually, you described it.
[00:15:22] Jon Yoo: Totally. I mean, it’s, there’s whole like products and companies built around these processes and none of them extended to marketplace.
[00:15:28] Jon Yoo: And so how do we actually, you know, just sending an offer, for example, uh, is really the beginning part of a very. Long, complex process. And so based on that offer, how do we trigger everything so that people don’t actually have to do manual work? And again, just focus on selling and not having these like siloed operations team having to, you know, send a hundred private offers, you know, in the last day of the month or quarter and freaking out because.
[00:15:56] Jon Yoo: You know, we’re having to like enable all of them to even understand what a private offer is and things like that. I think that’s the key to, to removing the adoption and, um, or sorry, removing the barriers to adoption of marketplace.
[00:16:08] Vince Menzione: And then I think I heard you say, like, you streamlined it and it’s sort of like one set of tools and then the APIs and signals all come into the one set of tools versus maybe building out on AWS and building out on Google, then building out on Microsoft app.
[00:16:23] Jon Yoo: Yeah, totally. Um, it’s, you know, we always talk about like unified experience, um, because the experience that I had with Salesforce was just every new channel has different APIs or requirements or policies, or oftentimes different teams working them. And then there’s usually a team that sits horizontally across these channels, whether it’s IT or ops that are just like pissed off, you know, to be frank, you know, and the sales people don’t care.
[00:16:48] Jon Yoo: They just want to close the deal. Absolutely. And so, you know, while we actually serve. Sales and partnership people like frontline, you know, facing customer facing partner facing folks, the, the real power users we found of our product are kind of the, the unsung heroes, so to speak, like deal desk and rev ops.
[00:17:04] Jon Yoo: Yeah.
[00:17:05] Vince Menzione: And those are the people that have to deal with the complexity all day long. Exactly, exactly. The tough jobs. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, a lot of talk about AI and how AI is going to help us. And then also these, uh, microtransactions and AI, agentic AI. What trends do you see or foresee in the future as this world evolves around marketplaces?
[00:17:25] Jon Yoo: Yeah, I mean, couple things. One is, uh, I start with, there’s a lot more self hosted deployments that we’re seeing. So, you know, you think about pure SaaS where it’s all running in your cloud and then like hybrid SaaS or, you know. Uh, whatever else, but we’re definitely seeing a lot more where, you know, the control plane might be running on X cloud, but then they have agents running in the customer’s VPC and because people are very, um, like guarded with their data, you know, we talked a lot about data security and governance yesterday.
[00:17:57] Jon Yoo: And so that’s certainly a big piece that we’re seeing around marketplace. Like, you know, AWS, for example, there’s a lot more AMIs and containers that were. You know, getting asked to, to help with, for our customers. It’s a lot more complex to be frank with you than SaaS, but we’re also the only player in the market that’s doing it today.
[00:18:12] Jon Yoo: Um, the second part that I’d see is more and more companies earlier on, um, like a lot of these startups. I mean, we came out at Y Combinator and we see AI agents is like 60 percent of every cohort, if not more. And they’re actually having a seminal moment around being able to break into enterprises. So maybe five, 10 years ago, not very common that these.
[00:18:35] Jon Yoo: You know, early stage startups to enterprises. Now you have things like companies going from like 1 to 12, 1 to 50 million ARR, um, selling these eight. We’ll see how sustainable that is. Yeah, that’s wild. Yeah. That’s pretty wild growth. Yeah. But they’re leveraging marketplace earlier and earlier in their journey versus a couple of years ago where.
[00:18:52] Jon Yoo: They might wait until they get to a certain level of maturity, uh, to actually leverage marketplace. So I think it’s very, very, um, it’s just awesome that, that people are deciding, Hey, we’re going to be marketplace forward from the get go. And there’s actually, you know, as adoption of this channel grows and people move jobs here and there, we’re seeing a lot more of, let’s say some grizzled veteran who have seen what marketplace at scale looks like.
[00:19:17] Jon Yoo: They go work at a smaller company. And immediately the first thing is. I want to turn on marketplace because I had such great success. And so this cross pollination across different companies and different segment lines is, I think, a really good thing
[00:19:30] Vince Menzione: overall for the industry. Yeah, it’s good for the growth of all.
[00:19:33] Vince Menzione: Yeah. And I still come back to the 420 billion in durable cloud budgets. And yeah, so underutilized. That helps. It’s a huge number. It’s the TAM is incredible. So you talked about some customers. I was kind of interested from a partner or customer because the partner. We talk about the word partner and partners are actually customers of yours.
[00:19:50] Vince Menzione: And you mentioned Snowflake. I’m just kind of interested on Snowflake because they’re, they’re evolution. They’re a huge player. They’re a platform company. Mm hmm. Like what did they, what did you see from them and what have you seen from the best of the best that you’ve worked with?
[00:20:03] Jon Yoo: Yeah, it’s, they, they certainly invested a lot into the tooling.
[00:20:06] Jon Yoo: So they had a teams like aligned to, I mean, when you get into an enterprise, it’s not just Snowflake, but almost every company that we see verticalized around, around different clouds. So you have an AWS Alliance team, Azure Alliance team, GCP Alliance team, and then separate teams. Yeah. But then there’s a partner ops team that usually sits horizontally across all hyperscalers.
[00:20:27] Jon Yoo: But even then they might have like kind of a business partner relationship. And, you know, what I saw Snowflake do is they invest a lot in automation. Um, so they built a lot of the tooling in house before we came in and just seeing the level of sophistication of like custom objects they created, uh, flows they created, um, is you kind of need that at that scale.
[00:20:49] Jon Yoo: Yeah. And so when we talk to some companies who want to learn, you know, cause they always come in and saying, Hey, I want to learn what. X, Y, Z is doing that’s working out so well, right. I think one advice that I give all the time is just have the right tooling that best fits where you are in the maturity curve of marketplace.
[00:21:07] Jon Yoo: So, you know, I’ll give you an example. Some people, you know, are very mature and they come in and they don’t have any automation set up and they have like 30 ops people. Literally going into the respective cloud portals, uh, which I’m just going to say it sucks. It’s terrible. Uh, no offense. Uh, and yeah, and you know, they have to have these business partner, like kind of subject matter experts, because if you’re very familiar in AWS console, but you’re not very familiar in Azure and GCP, does that mean that they should have to learn like three different consoles and Update everything in their own internal system as well.
[00:21:45] Jon Yoo: So there’s a tremendous stress that it puts on those teams to scale. But then there’s also the flip side where certain companies come in and, you know, they, they see the power of our workflow builder and they’re like, we want to automate this, this, this, this. And I have to kind of, you know, say, hold, hold your horses.
[00:22:01] Jon Yoo: Let’s, let’s get a couple of transactions first. You know, we can do it manually. Uh, and then we can start to automate away each pieces because. The way that I think about kind of, you know, not necessarily the world, but product is it’s a supply chain. It’s like, uh, I think about it as a flow chart of, Hey, um, let’s chart out exactly what the flow is.
[00:22:20] Jon Yoo: And then one by one, we’ll, we’ll automate that away, depending on, you know, the level of impact or how much frictionless this process can get. And some people just want to come in and do the whole thing. And it’s like, it is not worth my time, your time, anyone’s time until we get the initial.
[00:22:36] Vince Menzione: Well, we get, get an old conversation about process and process engineering.
[00:22:41] Vince Menzione: And the fact of the matter is you, if you start inventing the process before you’ve actually taken through and shaking it out, you’re really not, you’re, you’re gonna have to go do it again anyway. Yeah.
[00:22:50] Jon Yoo: It’s a, a lot of people in this industry talk about playbooks. Um, what’s the right co sell playbook or marketplace operate?
[00:22:57] Jon Yoo: Like what does good look like, you know, effectively. And that’s where, you know, right now it does require some discovery, uh, for us to really tease out what is your float today and what’s the ideal state. I think as we evolve our workflow offering, we’ll be able to provide basically like a library or template of plays and temp, uh, you know, yeah, like plays that they can, they can choose, or they can, you know, describe in natural language, what they expect the float to look like, and all these notes can snap into place, or, you know, they can just pick out of.
[00:23:30] Jon Yoo: You know, a list of automation that they want, that’s most common that we see as good looks like, and that hopefully should, um, make not just our own cost of service go down, but also provide a lot quicker time to market around the value offerings that we, we provide.
[00:23:46] Vince Menzione: So you came in as the CEO and co founder, right?
[00:23:49] Vince Menzione: You had a, you had a co founder who had, who understood the problem. What did you do from a startup perspective? Like, how did you think about it as the CEO coming in? What layer did you bring of the observability and change into the process? And then, and then what is the outcome been different maybe than where it was from the beginning?
[00:24:09] Jon Yoo: Yeah, uh, I think the first interesting learning was, Hey, listening is valuable. Cause like with any startup or with any, you know, company just starting, usually starting the S and B space and then you move up markets and. That was kind of a goal from the get go, because when we actually started working with a lot of these earlier C startups, they, they want us to want to use us for listing.
[00:24:33] Jon Yoo: But then, you know, we realized like we’re not getting the best feedback because they use our tool like once a month if they need to do a transaction. And yeah, you know, yeah, they give me a call and he’s like, well, a few a year. Yeah, exactly. And so then we, we. You know, went over to kind of the mid stage, late stage startups and, you know, volume starts to take up and they start to use our product more.
[00:24:55] Jon Yoo: But it’s really when we started to work with like fivetrain, for example, that was doing not just a ton of, you know, marketplace private offers, but a ton of public offers, which we always shared a vision around like, Hey, this PLG motion, but also like billing and metering because they, you know, bill on a consumption based model.
[00:25:12] Jon Yoo: And, you know, they had like a 10 tack Google sheets, uh, to. Like massage the usage of ads to, to actually convert to the right billable metric or billable output. Um, and so I’d say that that’s one, just kind of the decision to move up market. The second piece was coming from Salesforce. I, you know, one of my projects briefly was to kind of be the internal PM or like a PM for the internal business tools.
[00:25:38] Jon Yoo: Um, like North America, like, like, uh, sales tooling initiative or whatever. And. I realized that people just do not want to ever leave like Salesforce, or, you know, if you use HubSpot HubSpot, um, those are not just a system of record, but it’s also where people like have all the reporting, they really operate their entire business out of.
[00:25:59] Jon Yoo: And so the, the first like immediate action that we took outside of CoSell, which is what we learned from our space. Like everyone that does marketplace also CoSells. is we have to have the best native app experience, um, you know, so that people can work the way that they like, where they work. And so we immediately came out with a Salesforce app and we’ve just been iterating on that since the, the last.
[00:26:20] Jon Yoo: Do direct interaction or. Exactly. And, and the last, you know, kind of piece that we learned was we thought that having just these being API first, like these unified APIs would. Um, be really helpful for a company like Confluent that has all these engineers who want to leverage these APIs. Turns out no one actually wants to use our APIs.
[00:26:41] Jon Yoo: They just want us to do the work for them, which is why we actually, it was painful, but you know, for about six months actually worked on building the workflow refactor entire backend so that I can actually support this. Uh, that was painful, but you know, frankly, we kind of called it initially the improvisation tool because.
[00:27:01] Jon Yoo: When we started working with these larger volume, you know, players, they would just come to us with XYZ features and Change and I are just like, holy shit. Like if we just keep building these features for these customers that all vary depending on their Salesforce setup or workflows, we’re screwed. Like it’s going to be a Frankenstein product.
[00:27:19] Jon Yoo: Um, and so let’s build something that can abstract all that away and make it customizable to, you know, each respective custom, uh, companies and their very specific
[00:27:28] Vince Menzione: workflows. So I have a pyramid, we don’t have the slide here, but I have a pyramid slide. And I talk about the very top of the pyramid being some of the largest software companies in the market.
[00:27:39] Vince Menzione: And you can recognize some of the snowflakes up there and Google, uh, Cisco and some of the other real super giants. Yeah. And then there’s kind of the next layer down, which is sort of like the 750 to a thousand software companies. And then there’s sort of this mid market. Where do you see the growth? And then this down below, obviously the digital natives and some startup organizations, but where do you see the growth in that period?
[00:28:04] Jon Yoo: Mid
[00:28:04] Vince Menzione: market. Mid market.
[00:28:05] Jon Yoo: Yeah. I mean, enterprise is not going anywhere, but I mean, if they’re already doing 30 to 50 percent of their revenue through these hyperscaler marketplaces. It’s kind of hard to grow that much more beyond that, but I think the most untapped potential is in the mid market space where, you know, maybe one of the kind of players who worked at, you know, one of these mega enterprises that we’re doing that has tremendous success goes to work at, you know, a smaller company, as I mentioned before, and they’re bringing that motion, that playbook, uh, to drive marketplace for them.
[00:28:35] Jon Yoo: I think that’s very interesting. Um, and then. My, my, my hope is that as, you know, there’s a gentic AI and, you know, as companies start to convert to more of like a consumption outcome based billing model where, you know, cloud marketplaces have historically been very powerful in, and a lot of these consumption, you know, pricing models, uh, that they’re going to adopt it more and more, both in SMB and mid market.
[00:28:59] Jon Yoo: Um, and so very optimistic about that future. But of course, we’re still, I think our product generally does best with companies with high volumes.
[00:29:09] Vince Menzione: And you mentioned you’re putting a lot of the money investment into engineering. How do you think about the go to market strategy? What are you doing there to build awareness around sugar, uh, you know, deliver the right outcomes, revenue perspective for the company.
[00:29:22] Jon Yoo: You know, we’ve been super fortunate to have just tremendously talented people join our company. Um, not just on the engineering front, um, but on the go to market side as well. So. You know, they’re all in on kind of sugar and this vision for the future. And it’s funny, like I was saying, like CS is actually the hardest role to, um, enable customer success.
[00:29:48] Jon Yoo: Customer success is so hard to enable because, and we have, in my opinion, the best in the industry, but they. Have to learn so much across three clouds, across all the different modules, not just within our product, but like, you know, different programs that are going on at these respective clouds that are also always changing, you know, but from a go to market perspective, it’s really about like selling the vision around like workflows, we just help you accelerate revenue because you can access this amazing marketplace, um, with all these benefits and we help that, that access be very seamless and embedded into your core workflows that you already have today.
[00:30:25] Jon Yoo: Um, but the other piece is like cost efficiencies. So it’s not just top line, but bottom line of, you know, do you want to go down this like complex path of a confluent where they have 10 plus engineers working on this, uh, for multiple years and it’s not like a one time set up and go. Um, and so we’re certainly investing a lot more there as well.
[00:30:43] Jon Yoo: And not just around awareness of like sugar, but awareness of our space. Um, because I think. You know, we really want to become a thought leader, like, you know, some of the incumbent players out there who have been paving the way for us in many aspects. And, um, we can’t just make it all sugar, sugar, sugar.
[00:31:00] Jon Yoo: It has to be about, you know, the cloud partnerships and marketplace.
[00:31:04] Vince Menzione: So where do you see this going? Like the journey has been amazing. Uh, the next few years, is it, is it three years? Is it five years? Like what, what are the outcomes you hope to achieve? What’s the vision?
[00:31:16] Jon Yoo: Well, this is getting recorded. So, you know, we want to IPO, uh, you know, and, and do this for 10 plus years.
[00:31:21] Jon Yoo: Okay. Um, you heard it here. Yeah. Uh, it’s not about calendars. We’re not trying to, you know, be like a cashflow positive or of course we want to be cashflow positive and profitable, but. Um, we’re really reinvesting all of our growth back into the product, um, because we, we don’t want to just stop at marketplace and co sell.
[00:31:38] Jon Yoo: Um, we want to make it like interoperable across every channel. Um, so that could be direct channel as well. Um, and what is unique about us is twofolds. Like one is we’re not just about us, but the space. Uh, one is we have the chance to work across. Every persona that touches, you know, uh, a stage in the life cycle of a transaction.
[00:31:59] Jon Yoo: And so whether that’s at the opportunity stage with sales and partnership people, uh, throughout the whole quote to cash process, deal desk and rev ops, and the finance gets very involved around rev rec. And so there’s going to be different parts where we can go horizontal across all channels, not just marketplace and co sell, which we get very excited about.
[00:32:15] Jon Yoo: But as I mentioned, um, the buyer side is the part that is super exciting to me because it’s untapped. There’s no one really playing that space. Uh, I’m sure competitors will rise, but that’s honestly good for the entire industry, so we welcome that. But the ultimate like, you know, vision that I see that, that I get very excited about is, um, that consumer experience to B2B sales.
[00:32:39] Jon Yoo: And if you talk to any CIO of a company, they don’t buy the ROI analysis that sellers are putting in front of them. Or if they do buy it, it’s kind of murky, you know, and if you want, I’m a data nerd, so how do you actually bring a very data? Oriented approach, a very programmatic approach to procuring software.
[00:32:56] Jon Yoo: Well, you know, if similar to how I can like buy or like be able to compare different products and all the feature specs, et cetera, where I can do a free trial and get like six different sheets, test it out and then return it with 30 day policy, I would love to be able to do that for a B2B where, you know, the business owner, their unit owner, um, is able to outline a PRD or the requirements that they want.
[00:33:23] Jon Yoo: Uh, set a budget for POC across X, Y, you know, and we were able to provide the insights around, Hey, these are the couple of products that, you know, uh, people have purchased that fit these requirements and they can actually set a budget, you know, against those, you know, and that’s part of the things that we’ll, we’ll uncover with the buyer side.
[00:33:39] Jon Yoo: Very cool. And, you know, once they actually trial it using our metering engine, they can actually define the outcome that they want to see and meter against that outcome to determine what is the product they should choose the best. And then we can send all this data. Around the outcome to price, you know, ratio to the CIO, CFO, CEO, so that they can make the best decision.
[00:33:57] Jon Yoo: Um, and that’s super cool in my opinion, but we’ll see if we can get there. And I think it’s really about sequencing the product lines versus trying to do it all at once. How
[00:34:07] Vince Menzione: do you layer in the partner ecosystem into this conversation? Cause I also, as, as you were describing this to me, I was thinking about the different partners along the journey that are part of the, you know, Jay likes to talk about the 28 moments.
[00:34:20] Vince Menzione: And you know, you have partners on the front end, maybe doing consulting work. You have other organizations that are coming in as trusted, maybe it’s an SI, maybe it’s some other partners. And then there’s the solution, which in effect, isn’t usually just one solution. Totally. A lot of times it’s like grass security.
[00:34:35] Vince Menzione: I’ve got data. Uh, I’ve got Kubernetes, other things I’m layering like Kubernetes and other things that I’m providing here. And maybe two or three. Yeah. And then I’m stitching it all together. Maybe I have an MSP on the back. How do you think about that layering into that discussion you just described?
[00:34:53] Jon Yoo: Yeah, partnerships are not going anywhere and they are going to be the tip of the spear in driving this. So just because we provide any recommendation doesn’t mean that that’s it. You have to actually drive that outcome with the hyperscalers, for example, or, or, uh, You know, one of the big things that we see kind of trend or, you know, trend in this industry is like bundled offerings.
[00:35:12] Vince Menzione: Yeah, that’s
[00:35:12] Jon Yoo: right. So all the, you know, different cloud providers are realizing, okay, how do we factor in services or how do we have two different ISVs go to market together, you know, in this motion with these bundled offerings? And so partners are always going to be kind of at the intersection across. I think someone yesterday mentioned like, uh.
[00:35:31] Jon Yoo: Partnerships, the intersection of like tech and relationship or something like that. Yeah. And I, I think that’s so true. Um, and if you see that this bundled offering of X and Y are going really well together, you’d expect the partners to be at the forefront of actually driving a, a joint go to market together.
[00:35:47] Jon Yoo: Yeah. And of course with, uh, the top providers as well. Yeah. It’s exciting times we live in. Yeah, totally. Uh, it’s hard to see. What the future will look like completely. And I think every week to week, as we’re talking about before it changes, but, um, it’s super exciting.
[00:36:03] Vince Menzione: So for our viewers and listeners today, they want to learn more about working with you, partnering with you, or maybe.
[00:36:09] Vince Menzione: Uh, deploying sugar as a solution for their company. How do they do so?
[00:36:14] Jon Yoo: Yeah. You know, reach out to me, you know, John at sugar. io, you know, John, without the H sugar with an E, uh, it’s like, say classy San Diego now, um, you can go to our website and, you know, just reach out to us, but, but truly I am all over my email, so reach out to me directly if you want to, uh, to join the growing team or of course, uh, leverage our
[00:36:33] Vince Menzione: product.
[00:36:34] Vince Menzione: And we have some rapid fire questions. I had some questions I want to ask you today before we, before we break. Uh, so what book is most influenced your work? Hmm.
[00:36:44] Jon Yoo: Um, I do two pieces. Um, one is, um, like hard things about hard things. I think it’s a title with, by Ben Horowitz, you know, that’s kind of a very well known startup book, but.
[00:36:59] Jon Yoo: You know, it kind of details the, the story of how everything can go wrong at a startup. And, and it does usually, it does, it, you know, the power might go out. Yeah. But you know, it’s painful. And when I think oftentimes, like when you’re from the outside looking in, everything seemed like it’s going smoothly, but internally it sometimes freaking sucks.
[00:37:26] Jon Yoo: And, and you have to have uncomfortable conversations or handle crises or. You know, everything seems to be breaking. And so how do you actually keep a level head around it all? Um, and not, you know, lash out or be bannock or, or all these things. And just realizing like, this is part of the journey and this is not anything new.
[00:37:45] Jon Yoo: Like every other company goes through some of these hardships. And also when you see some of the crazy stuff that happens in that book, it really tames what we’re going through in some regards. And so I’m like, okay, I always have a saying with the team. Uh, The toughest challenge is always ahead of us. So I’m not even worried about this at the moment.
[00:38:03] Jon Yoo: Um, the, the second book is another cliche one a little bit, but atomic habits. Atomic habits. Yeah. It’s, uh, James Cleary. I have a tendency to just want, my eyes are bigger than my stomach in many regards. And I have all these like grandiose plans for myself and how to operate, but, you know, really thinking about how do I create this compounding behavior and.
[00:38:26] Jon Yoo: That’s also very similar to building a culture at a company. You know, if, if you have a view on this is what greatness looks like and being a well oiled machine, like it, that doesn’t happen overnight. And so how do I set some of the structure and cadence in place so that we can start to build on that culture by, you know, building block by building block, same thing goes for product development, right?
[00:38:49] Jon Yoo: Like, yeah, here’s the ideal state, but if you try to do it all at once, you’re. You’re, you’re usually going to come out with a pretty crappy product. Right. And so changing really believes in iteration, like little by little and just shipping it, you know, without like too much, like hand wringing. And, and, you know, we’ll learn pretty quickly and we’re going to iterate and fix any bugs or, or things like that.
[00:39:10] Jon Yoo: So John, what’s one ABI you can’t live without? Honestly, uh, maybe it’s advice, but coffee, I have to have coffee when I wake up in the morning where I am just, you know, cause during the week I’m averaging like four hours of sleep and I just need, we have Celsius in the office, but I’d say, um, two, two real habits.
[00:39:30] Jon Yoo: One is I try to get some exercise in, even if it’s 10, 15 minutes, I’ve been, I haven’t been the best about it over the past couple of years. Um, but I, I found that the, my, my mood and. My ability to think clearly does fluctuate a lot based on whether I just get my body kind of moving somewhat active. And so I try to bike to the office, I bike back, and so that’s, you know, 45 minutes to an hour.
[00:39:53] Jon Yoo: Um, just You’re exercising. Somewhat. Yeah. Yeah, trying to. What about the sleep? Let’s talk about the four hours. Does it feel like that’s enough? Uh, but I try to catch up on sleep on Fridays and, uh, the weekend. As long as there’s not like a wedding or something. But, uh, it’s a The second piece, by the way, I’m pretty good at operating, you know, without sleep, but it’s certainly something where, uh, I can be a little bit more cranky, you know, if I’ve had like consecutive nights of, of, uh, pretty late nights of work and say the second habit, I always need to do this of, um, the night before the next day, I always review kind of my calendar, figure out what’s really important, figure out what I want to get accomplished that day.
[00:40:37] Jon Yoo: If I just wake up and I have to go immediately into a call with like, One of our European customers and I’m like foggy and you know, you’re just in back to backs over and over again by, by, by like 4 PM you’re just like, I have no idea what I actually did. Uh, I was just a zombie work, uh, working through, so I’m trying to be very deliberate by reviewing that same thing with like going into a new week, right?
[00:40:58] Jon Yoo: Uh, on a Sunday night, just making sure I know exactly, you know, what the, the goal for that week is. Um, and I try to, we’re trying to set better, you know, similar cadence with all of the leadership team on our team, uh, as well. Yeah.
[00:41:11] Vince Menzione: Well, by reviewing the night before your subconscious mind works on it.
[00:41:15] Jon Yoo: Oh, yeah.
[00:41:16] Vince Menzione: They say that that helps. It helps in terms of like thinking through the problem and getting a solution before you start.
[00:41:22] Jon Yoo: Totally. Or like, you know, if I know I’m walking into an important meeting, I have to do some mental prep of like, what are the three things that I really want to get accomplished out of this meeting?
[00:41:31] Jon Yoo: If I just walk into it without having even like two minutes to think about it,
[00:41:35] Vince Menzione: you’re, you’re, you’re just lost. You’re cold. Yeah. So is there a quote or a mantra that you, that inspires you?
[00:41:43] Jon Yoo: Yeah, I, you know, I, I, there is a lot of moments from my days at Salesforce that was, I was so lucky to work with some phenomenally talented folks.
[00:41:56] Jon Yoo: Um, and each kind of manager or boss that I’ve had have imparted some wisdom. So I remember, uh, my first manager was Mackenzie. Uh, I was probably a pain in the ass to, or a pain in the butt to, to, uh, deal with this angsty kid who, who wanted to accomplish a lot and do cool things. But she always said, John, like, I think she got frustrated at just all the different products I wanted to work on.
[00:42:19] Jon Yoo: She goes. It’s, it’s a Venn diagram, you know, there’s a Venn diagram of what the company and the team needs. And then there’s a Venn diagram of like, or the circle of what you think is cool. You have to play in that little overlap or what the company needs and suck it up, you know? And I try to bring that type of mentality to our team as well, because we, you know, our chief of staff for him, for example, is incredibly ambitious and incredibly talented.
[00:42:41] Jon Yoo: And so I always say two things for me, one thing for you, uh, but all three needs to be something that helps the company move forward. Um, I had another manager, Nick, who then this, I think about this every day of, um, you know, motivation is incredibly powerful, uh, and, but it comes and goes and discipline is what gets you through the day.
[00:43:01] Jon Yoo: Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, even if you don’t want to do something just like. You know, being disciplined about doing it is, is, and, and setting that like muscle memory is something that is incredibly important. And then finally, sorry, I know you asked for one quote, but I’ll do the whole chronology.
[00:43:20] Jon Yoo: My old boss at Salesforce also was Denise Dresser, who is now like the CEO of Slack to have done amazing things, uh, since then. And, uh, you know, she said, uh, she really preaches radical candor. And so I’ve seen her just be incredibly. Like straightforward, uh, and honest with her direct reports around, Hey, this is what, you know, good looks like and asking very tough questions of why this has been done or not been done.
[00:43:51] Jon Yoo: And it’s never emotional. It’s very like facts based object, uh, objective. And so I try to bring some of that into, man, into the team as well.
[00:43:59] Vince Menzione: It’s good, especially in the startup world. Right. We have to quickly get to the solution to the problem. Yeah. Dilly dally in it. And you talked about like powering through the problem.
[00:44:08] Vince Menzione: Like just power through, I think you talked about motivation, but that also helps with motivation, right? Cause when you power through an issue, like even when you don’t, when you don’t want to go do it, you get to the outcome and that kind of propels or helps motivate you to, to continue to do those things.
[00:44:24] Jon Yoo: Oh yeah. It’s just a muscle memory. And I always say like, we have to get more at bats. And once you do, once you solve like one very problem, um, the next problem doesn’t seem as hard. Or. It doesn’t seem as daunting if the challenge is higher. So very cool.
[00:44:39] Vince Menzione: So I have a favorite question. Okay. I asked this of almost all my guests.
[00:44:42] Vince Menzione: It’s a favorite of mine and, uh, you’re hosting a dinner party, John. Okay. Um, you can host this dinner party anywhere in the world. We could talk about locations. It’d be very interesting to hear your point of view on that. And you can invite any three guests from the present or the past, this amazing dinner party.
[00:45:00] Vince Menzione: Whom would you invite and why?
[00:45:04] Jon Yoo: There are so many. Um, when I was young and I would answer this, or I guess I’m still young, but you know, in my teenage years, yeah, in my teenage years, I’d always joke like Kim Jong-un because yeah, it’s such a interesting character around, um, fascinating. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. In some ways, , but in reality, I’d say number one would be my, um, my, my grandfather and my mom’s side, who, who, who passed away, uh, my grandfather.
[00:45:31] Jon Yoo: Um. You know, many years ago and I, you know, growing up in the U S I didn’t get a chance to spend too much time with him, but I later learned after he passed of some of the crazy stories that he’s dealt with. So, you know, when, when Japan, like colonized Korea, for example, you know, it was in Japan, he got shipped to Japan for a little bit and then actually had to go to a concentration camp up in Serbia or, uh, yeah, or no, not Serbia.
[00:45:57] Jon Yoo: Um, what’s the tundra, the frozen tundra. I don’t know the, oh, uh, yeah, Russia where they said, yes, I need to Siberia, Siberia. Yeah. Siberia. And he actually walked back from Siberia, uh, barefoot back to Korea. It took him like many, many months and just showed up in my grandmother’s doorsteps, like thin as a stick with long hair.
[00:46:20] Jon Yoo: Uh, I would love to just learn about what type of will it took and how that shaped them as a person for any like hardship down the road. Um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I want to write like an autobiography about, or not a biography about that. Very cool. Um, I think one of my favorite people is, uh, Jon Stewart.
[00:46:38] Jon Yoo: Yeah. I think he’s a, uh, has such a wide range of, of expert, you know, not expertise, but just topics that he can engage in incredibly intellectually curious. And I think I’d be able to. Like ask so many questions or you know, so witty. I want to be Jon Stewart. He’s a funny guy. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly and then Final one is it’s kind of a funky one, but Jim Carrey.
[00:47:06] Vince Menzione: Yeah
[00:47:06] Jon Yoo: he’s I saw an interview where he talked about how there’s this face that you put on for everyone and there’s who you are internally and And when you’re an actor or like people kind of pigeonhole you into a specific image, you know, there’s such a hard pressure to live up to that image or be that person when they meet him in person.
[00:47:26] Jon Yoo: Um, and not saying I have, I have, I’m like two face where there’s like me, personal John, and then there’s like professional John, but you know, that’s definitely converged more and more as work has become more of my life. And so, you know, one of the things I want to talk to him about is just how do you maintain kind of your self identity and who you are?
[00:47:46] Jon Yoo: Even if it clashes with what you need to be in a professional setting, um, or as a CEO of a company. And so I think those are pretty
[00:47:54] Vince Menzione: interesting topics. Yeah, because we do have to have a persona in the business world. It might be different than our kind of personal.
[00:48:00] Jon Yoo: Yeah, that’s
[00:48:00] Vince Menzione: right.
[00:48:01] Jon Yoo: Well, everyone has it.
[00:48:01] Jon Yoo: Everyone has like the phone voice. Yeah. Or the podcast voice. Yeah. Yeah. It’s very nice by the way. Yeah. I feel your battle voice.
[00:48:09] Vince Menzione: Where are we hosting
[00:48:09] Jon Yoo: this
[00:48:10] Vince Menzione: dinner?
[00:48:11] Jon Yoo: Ooh. Um. I mean, anyone that’s gone out with me knows, uh, I’m a big Korean barbecue guy. Okay. So we’re going to be in Seoul at one of my favorite Korean barbecue spots.
[00:48:22] Jon Yoo: It’s a little dingy hole, hole in a wall. And, uh, we’re just going to grill some pork belly and, and, uh, you know, beef and have some soju and just talk about life. All right. I’m kind of
[00:48:33] Vince Menzione: come join you. Yeah, absolutely. That’d be, that’d be a lot of fun. Meet your granddad, uh, Jim Carrey and Jon Stewart are two amazing individuals.
[00:48:40] Vince Menzione: Yeah. So it’s really cool. So, you know, we are living through an amazing time of change and transformation. And we are in 2025 and really the early first quarter of the year. What would you say to our viewers and listeners to help them optimize for their success this new year? How do they need to lean in?
[00:48:57] Jon Yoo: Specific to marketplace or just in general,
[00:49:00] Vince Menzione: just
[00:49:01] Jon Yoo: in
[00:49:01] Vince Menzione: general.
[00:49:03] Jon Yoo: I’d say, uh, just being intellectually curious and tinkering around. So we’re going through such a rapid evolution in technology and a lot of the. Adoption in like your day to day work setting, for example, uh, because enterprise adoption generally is much, much slower than consumer adoption.
[00:49:25] Jon Yoo: And so tinker around with all these different tools that are out and figure out like what the art of the possible is. And just being very curious about that mentality, I think is super important for you to understand what the value of this technology and how it can change the world, um, like me, myself, like I play around all the time with like chat, GPT, clod, like, you know, perplexity to figure out like.
[00:49:47] Jon Yoo: Where does the system break? How can it actually enhance my productivity? Um, I mean, just the other day, this is such a stupid use case, but I wanted to like recreate a slide and, you know, I didn’t want to go ask someone on our team to do it. So, and I haven’t written Python in like years, but like just asking Chachapik exactly how I do it, was able to do it in 20 minutes.
[00:50:07] Jon Yoo: And now any other kind of work that, you know, I want to be able to do that with, I can leverage this like little snippet of code that, you know, GPT gave me. Or like creating images, for example, for LinkedIn, then there’s so many different applications and you have to tinker around with it to understand what’s possible and what’s not.
[00:50:23] Vince Menzione: So I recently downloaded cloud and perplexity. I’m kind of curious. Cause I’ve been using chat GBT, which is your favorite. Chat GBT. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty cool. I
[00:50:32] Jon Yoo: think partly cause I just use it for most. Um, but yeah, they’re all pretty good. You know,
[00:50:38] Vince Menzione: you can’t go
[00:50:38] Jon Yoo: wrong.
[00:50:40] Vince Menzione: John, so excited to have you here today.
[00:50:43] Vince Menzione: Thank you for making the trip from San Francisco all the way here to Boca Raton, Florida. And, uh, so glad you get to spend time with our viewers and listeners. I want to thank you for your support and partnership. Thank you for joining the Ultimate Guide Department.
[00:50:54] Jon Yoo: No, thanks for having me. It was such a blast.
[00:50:57] Jon Yoo: Um, I always, as I mentioned, learn something new at all these events and It helps that Boca Raton is phenomenal, you know, and the venue and everything was phenomenal. So I really appreciate your partnership. Appreciate you. Yeah. Thank you so much. Perfect. Appreciate
[00:51:10] Vince Menzione: you. Thank you. Thank you, John. And thank you to our audience at ultimate partner.
[00:51:15] Vince Menzione: We strive to bring you great leaders like John to help you achieve more. If you like our podcast and like watching us on YouTube. Please tell your friends about us and hit the subscribe button on either Spotify, Apple, or our YouTube channel. You can also follow along on TheUltimatePartner. com to learn more about our events, our podcasts, and our community.
[00:51:40] Vince Menzione: Together, let’s spark the ecosystem.know. It’s incredible. I know, I just gotta find, you know, block out some time to be able to visit it, but that’s probably where I would hold it.