I've been off for a couple of weeks, enjoying vacation, but still keeping one eye on tech news, and it's a little unbelievable how much happened in two weeks in July, a time when news is supposed to slow down. Consider that over the last couple
Hi everyone. I've been on vacation this month, but I had an itch to write, so I decided to send out an abbreviated newsletter this week without news of the week. If you like my newsletter, please share this week’s edition with a friend, and encourage them
I caught up with Jai Das, co-founder of Sapphire Ventures, in April at HumanX, the conference devoted to all things AI. He's been investing in enterprise startups for more than two decades, and while he recognizes that AI is transforming his business, he's not getting
Abby Kearns has spent more than a decade in the open source world, starting at Pivotal before going on to lead the Cloud Foundry Foundation and later serving as CTO at Puppet. Today she is CEO at ActiveState, a company that focuses on keeping the open source software library supply
At Pega World earlier this month, the company announced it was ditching tokens in favor of outcome-based pricing, a system where the company only gets paid if an AI agent produces a favorable outcome. What's driving this change? Don Schuerman, CTO and head of marketing at Pega,
As many of you know, I'm a Boston sports fan, especially the Red Sox. This year they are among the worst teams in the league, and it seems their story is a case study in how difficult transformation around AI can be. Ownership brought in a hardcore stats
Hi everyone. Thanks for reading. I appreciate each and everyone of you. Just a heads up, that I'm headed on vacation at the end of next week, so there will be no FastForward for the next couple of weeks. Just a reminder, if you need a professional moderator
The following piece is the result of a collab with my long-time friend, occasional colleague, and forever writing partner Alex Wilhelm. Alex is the author at Cautious Optimism, which I both enjoy and recommend. As with many of our collabs, I handles news and context, and Alex closes with
Disclosure: I was paid by Zscaler to moderate a video interview with Zscaler executive Swamy Kocherlakota at the company's Zscaler Zenith Live 2026 earlier this month. The quotes from Jay Chaudhry come from two interviews, one in April and one in Las Vegas at the conference. Both were
Back in 2021 when money was still cheap and interest rates were low, companies weren't all that concerned with controlling cloud costs, but as the economy worsened in subsequent years and interest rates rose, management became more interested in finding ways to save money. Enter FinOps tools, which
Disclosure: I was paid by Pax8 to moderate a fireside chat with CEO Scott Chasin at the company's Beyond 2026 conference, and some of his comments from that conversation are quoted in this piece. Pax8 had no input into or review of this piece before publication. My editorial
Hi everyone. There was no newsletter last week as I was moderating a CEO fireside at Pax8 Beyond in Salt Lake City on Monday, then flew to Vegas on Tuesday for the Zscaler Zenith conference where I recorded a video interview with their EVP of the Agentic AI Security Startup