If you were to walk around Silicon Valley these days, you’d find nary a negative word about AI. It’s advancing fast. It’s powerful, so powerful we should be afraid of it. And if you’re not all in, you’re going to be left in the dust
Hi everyone. My working vacation continues, so I decided to send out another abbreviated newsletter without the news of the week. I'll be publishing normally again starting next week. If you like my newsletter, please share this week’s edition with a friend, and encourage them to subscribe.
Pega CEO Alan Trefler founded his company back in the 1980s when the enterprise world was very different than it is today, but he's been around long enough and seen enough shifts to speak with an authority that few others can when it comes to enterprise software. His
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
article
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
Commentary
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
Newsletters
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
Analysis
In 2023, Salesforce was reeling. The company was under attack from activist investors with as many as five different firms circling the CRM giant. As activists do, they felt the stock was undervalued and among their demands was to stop spending money on acquisitions. The company had made a slew
Commentary
The headlines have been full of the craziness of tokenmaxxing as employees compete to burn the highest number of AI tokens to top AI spending leader boards. Microsoft got so fed up with the high cost of developer's use of coding agents, it cut off access to Claude
Newsletters
Hi everyone. I'm writing from the west coast this week. The enterprise AI picture keeps getting more more complicated. Everyone's doing it, but not many companies are seeing results. I dig into why this week. Just a heads up that next week is a work week,
Dropbox CEO and co-founder Drew Houston announced he intended to step down as CEO last week, ending a 19-year run with the company he helped found. In 2007, Houston was a recent MIT grad frustrated with the challenge of keeping files synchronized across multiple devices. The story goes
Commentary
When Mark Twain popularized the phrase 'lies, damned lies and statistics,' he was referring to the practice of using statistics to unduly influence public opinion. These days, you can swap statistics for AI. That’s because tech's big AI execs have been trying to convince the
Newsletters
Welcome back to the latest issue of FastForward, and thanks for reading. If you like my newsletter, please share this week’s edition with a friend, it really helps.💌 Sign up here. ForwardThinking 🤔 Lies, damned lies and AI When Mark Twain popularized the phrase 'lies, damned lies and statistics,
article
You've probably heard about how many big company AI executives have been preaching gloom and doom when it comes to AI replacing jobs, but not everyone feels that way. Box CEO Aaron Levie thinks the math actually works in the favor of workers, and not just because it&
Profiles
When Jay Kreps was working at LinkedIn in 2010, the industry was just beginning to grapple with what at the time was being called big data. How could you reliably move massive amounts of event data — user activity, system logs, operational metrics — between a growing number of internal systems in
Commentary
I watched this week’s unveiling of Google’s latest smart glasses with a sense of déjà vu. I was among the early participants in the Google Glass Explorer program back in 2013, an initial experiment in smart glasses that in hindsight was well ahead of its time. I ended