Cloud Architecture That Actually Grows Businesses

AI is moving so fast that most teams feel like they’re drinking from a fire hose, but the real advantage still comes from fundamentals: solid cloud architecture, clear data flows, and a plan that ties technology to business outcomes. We sit down with Will Horn of GDNA, an experienced technologist and AWS partner, to unpack what he calls the Agentic Cloud and how AI agents are changing the way companies build, automate, and scale.

We get specific about what “cloud transformation” means for different organizations. For startups, it’s about nimble prototypes, SaaS unit economics, and architecture that can survive growth. For SMBs, it’s often legacy modernization, operational efficiency, and turning messy processes into digital systems that can be measured and improved. For enterprises, it’s innovation velocity, cost efficiency, and opening new markets without ballooning labor or risk.

Will also shares a powerful framework he calls the Minimal Viable Journey, a way to map how data moves through a business and where value is created or lost. That lens makes AI strategy far more practical: it helps you prioritize the right use cases, understand data readiness for LLMs, and avoid building “cool” tools that never deliver ROI. We close by zooming out to the Charleston tech ecosystem, how to plug in locally, what’s missing, and what could be possible over the next two years.

If you found this useful, subscribe for more conversations like this, share the episode with a founder or operator who’s trying to make sense of AI agents, and leave a quick review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

Welcome To Charleston Marketing Podcast

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Charleston Marketing Podcast, brought to you by the Charleston AMA and broadcasting from our friends at Charleston Media Solutions Studios. Thanks to our awesome sponsors at CMS, we get to chat with the cool folks making waves in Charleston. From business and art to hospitality and tech. These movers and shakers choose to call the low country home. They live here, work here, and make a difference here. So what's their story? Let's find out together.

SPEAKER_03 0:27

So here I am in the studio for Silicon Harbor Hot Take with Will Horn of GDNA. He is a technologist, an entrepreneur, a master of cloud architecture. Welcome, Will.

SPEAKER_02 0:39

Thank you, Stan. Yeah, it's great to be here today.

SPEAKER_03 0:42

Nice. So let's uh let's just dive right into it. Tell listeners, what is GDNA and what do you do?

SPEAKER_02 0:50

Wow, yeah. So uh so that's a fun question. Uh usually I'll answer that question now by saying that we're the transformation company for the Agentic Cloud. Uh there's many terms inside of there that probably require explanation. So uh so we help small to medium businesses and startups. Uh early in our three-year history, uh we help small to medium businesses and startups transform using cloud technology. Uh and we do a lot of that using AI and Agentic practices now.

SPEAKER_03 1:17

So give me an example, like let's pretend someone has heard of the cloud. They understand that your files are stored there and you retrieve them, but they don't know what cloud architecture means to a business. So give us an example maybe of uh both an SMB and an enterprise level company, and then what does what would cloud architecture mean to them?

SPEAKER_02 1:37

Sure. So maybe we can do it uh for three. We'll do it for startups, uh, SMBs, and enterprises. Uh there's uh maybe before we jump into it, just why cloud is always good. Uh so the cloud over the last maybe 10 to 15 years has democratized a huge amount of advanced technology uh for any of those types of businesses, for any type of business or nonprofit uh governmental entity. Uh what the cloud has done is driven um transformation by allowing us to access advanced technologies like machine learning or the strategic use of data inside of an organization, or just providing better user experience like hosting front ends or building uh better user experiences that are more anticipatory of customer needs. So in a startup, when we go to the cloud, you know, that being said, when we talk about why people use the cloud, in a startup, uh another reason for cloud is operational efficiency. We can actually latch the sort of cost of goods sold or per unit cost of a solution. Uh SaaS is a solution that we must sell in some form of per unit. So effectively in the cloud, we're able to use the most efficient version of technology purchasing and procurement to build solutions. So for a startup, it means we can build very nimble, agile, uh lightweight proving prototypes or architectures. Uh for a small to medium business, oftentimes they're looking to transform legacy operations. These are established companies with customers. So they're looking to transform and expand their business. So they want to digitally uh move their operations into technology more. They want to transform and grow their business. So they're able to then do that at a lower cost, oftentimes with assistance uh from the cloud provider. And then the enterprise is a scaled up version of that. The enterprise needs to maintain uh market velocity, they need to innovate to find new new use cases to continue growing. So oftentimes they're looking to the cloud again to make their technology spend as efficient as possible, minimize their labor spend as an input, and then transform technology at the same time to go open new markets or build new products, depending on what their use cases are. So for anyone, uh I'm sorry, I know that's quite a long answer and pretty complex in itself with complex examples, but for anybody going to cloud, usually the advantage is in business growth and velocity, like innovation below innovation velocity, strategic agility, and sort of cost and uh people efficiency.

Why An AWS Partner Helps

SPEAKER_03 3:59

Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when it was a big deal that Adobe changed from sending you disks that you uploaded to a cloud-based subscription model or a SaaS platform, and people thought, oh, this is this is this gonna work? And of course it did, but they weren't as familiar with cloud architecture. So let's let's uh dive in for a minute on your specific role as an AWS partner. I know you worked for AWS, you are a partner now. Why why does a business need a consultant to come in and guide them through either the the migration or the transformation internally of their software suite?

SPEAKER_02 4:32

Yeah, yeah, thank you. It's um it's quite complex. The simplest answer to the question is uh these are multidisciplinary problems that require uh a lot of comprehension. You know, the the surface area of transformation or modernization of any business entity that exists is complex. The same as founding a startup. I mean, you and I have had conversations about you know what it takes to get a business from vision to actual commercialized commercialized with customers. So so I think um, you know, as we're cloud architecture lends itself to building very early and scalable patterns uh that become, you know, easy to distribute, easy to get compliance, you know, GRC concerns become uh completely contained inside of there. So a lot of times, I'm sorry, I may have dropped part of your question here.

SPEAKER_03 5:18

Oh no, not at all. I I like this where you're going now. My friend Jack Harvey calls it from sketch to scale. Yeah. You know, and so you're back of a nap and you're here, and I know you you assist with that transformation. Let's dive into a minute. Uh you know, you w before we jumped on the pod today, you were you know explaining of what I thought was a very astute, interesting term beyond minimum viable product. You know, if you want to share with us what that minimum viable journey looks like and how you've you've uh adopted that as kind of a term of art for as your approach.

The Minimal Viable Journey Framework

SPEAKER_02 5:50

Yeah, yeah. Sorry. And and maybe this is a good way for me to tell tell our listeners how how GDNA actually uh goes into action and helps customers find find value, because I think that was your question for me last that I dropped. So so uh the minimal viable journey is uh it's a more explicit concept than say a minimal viable product or say a core value proposition or a core profit formula or something like that. And it sort of emerged from you know my 20, 30 odd years of uh technology innovation here as a way to tie off uh you know technological value generation uh through the use of data to business objectives. And so a lot of times when we envision a solution, whether it's an enterprise modernization effort with you know five to ten years of activity, or it's a simple startup that wants to sell one service like scheduling a meeting uh to people, we can envision that there uh is one or more explicit value propositions in there, and now we can translate that using something like minimal valuable journal journey modeling down to an explicit set of transitions of data through the organization that will either gain or lose value across that. And of course, we always want to gain value for the end customer, for the user uh you know, of that customer. So uh MVJ gave us words and logic in which we could properly segment, but both uh both segment and build architecture and then align that architecture to the actual business outcomes, including scaling formulas or capital inputs or anything else.

SPEAKER_03 7:19

Right. So that value prop could be based around just creating more efficiencies, reducing friction or actual ROI on the end product.

SPEAKER_02 7:27

Aaron Powell Right. And so a lot of times we generalize this type of problem to business outcomes like uh revenue growth or you know cost deflation, you know, these types of outcomes, or just building net new features if we have an innovator's dilemma and we need to reapply or move over into another market. So yeah, the MVJ gives us a way to take uh like a thesis and define that using sources and explicit data progression and business process, and then talk about the potential outcomes for that thesis and then go very easily align it to technology architecture and deployment and understanding.

SPEAKER_03 8:01

I like it. So let's geek out on data for a moment. You know, like uh I am a novice in this area, but my understanding and what I've kind of realized lately is that you know data traditionally existed in silos, like across a PDF or a call or an SMS or that sort of thing, and you had to find ways to, you know, understand that data, derive, you know, insights out of it, but it but it was also the architecture of it was in fields or charts or things like that. You know, now we're entering an era where AI and especially LLMs is more about conversational data that's in context and it's kind of a paradigm shift on how we view those sets. Is that is that something that you're excited about, that disruption? Have people not quite figured that out yet? Is it maddening to your clients? What does that look like when they're trying to really understand their data and maybe build a decision matrix around that?

SPEAKER_02 8:50

It's uh contextually I love this question uh because you've you've captured kind of the complexity of the conversation in your question uh because most people are really excited about AI. You know, we're starting to see we're starting to see the first sort of wave of Horizon One solutions coming back and saying, okay, well, people enterprises don't have data that's ready for AI. And we might have heard that seven or eight years ago with machine learning, just pure machine learning process. So it's fascinating to me, a lot of our customers uh starting out in startup and SMB, a lot of our customers have less processes and less complexity, so they have less data requirements. Uh there's so many ways to talk about this. We could talk about data valuation or, you know, strategic data process or, you know, how much data we need to solve a problem is sort of where I'm going. So our customers will find uh they ask us a question, um, you know, sometimes they're very prepared for this. They've had years of history of operating like an RFP response process. So they have a well-defined process and they know the inputs and the various data sources they need. And we can digitalize that very quickly and pretty efficiently and have, you know, six or eight agents work on that as a as an automated new concern. Or sometimes they find that they literally have not even thought about this question. So it so it's stratified probably across customer maturity in terms of uh technology, uh really cloud technology maturity, more than I would say just IT maturity, you know, because most people eventually will rotate into a whole other perspective. What we've done is transform. We had an education customer last year, I think I shared this one with you. It was a transition success planning for special needs students, and that customer gave us a great quote. They told us we moved them from being a curriculum company to being a SaaS company. So we know we can help people transform models, business models, and things like that. Um, in doing that, you know, we found that their understanding of the use of data was like very, very nascent. So we did a lot of education along that way. So as soon as we do that transformation, the next part is the customer will say, Can I scale that and commercialize this as a business? So even uh some of our early SMB agentic customers are now asking, can you platform this and help me scale it? Can you redeploy it in a new geography? Can you help me reapply this on a slightly different use case? So what I find, and sorry, I'll get back on the data point, is that people once they start to understand uh how data works and how the flow of data generates value rather than you know of a sort of notional conceptualization of it, uh then they'll start finding these use cases and the conversation becomes much more valuable and it starts to become more explicit there, you know, and it's it's just fascinating as a pattern to share here today, but it sort of unlocks this strategic data value conversation, and then usually it's like everything, I got a little more, so I want a lot more of that. You know, I had a customer uh yesterday ask me if we could commercialize their application, and then right off of that they asked me to build a data lake just to sell the data, right? And uh and we see that we see that pattern, you know, app into platform uh quite often.

SPEAKER_03 11:50

Let's talk, let's go down the agentic tool rabbit hole for a second. So you know, my understanding of agents is that they're not they're not just bots or something there that's reacting to you, they can actually use tools and deploy those within that environment. Is that is that how you see it?

SPEAKER_02 12:05

So so the agentic uh just to kind of back into this a little bit, the agentic conversation uh became real, say, last year. You know, we started to see the emergence uh in late 23 of you know the agentic language and then the industry and markets started to center around it. Um there's some fascinating things in here. There's not a lot of standards, you know. We still debate how agents will talk to each other. Um, there's not a lot of architectural standards for this yet, you know, like we have TOGAF and other ways to be enterprise architects if we want to be, but uh here in the agentic world, basically you have just open competition between some of the larger uh LLM platform players, some of the larger hyperscalers are you know also making those bets. And so it's kind of fascinating just to watch everybody try to sort this out and develop good architecture. I mean you started your talking.

SPEAKER_03 12:54

Microsoft, Twilio are all right.

SPEAKER_02 12:56

Right, and everybody and every SaaS company has an agentic tool now and you know is promising agentic efficiency, and there's a whole lot of conversation about it, you know, I find fascinating about where the agents operate, about where the agents operate, whether they're in the stack or you know, sitting outside of the stack. So you're saying, is the agent in Salesforce, you know, is agent force doing this, or will I build a custom stack of tools that does this? And so if you kind of look at all that in your question and you say, well, where does the tooling actually matter? Mostly it matters where you need the agents to attach to your data and do magical things uh for your business. And that's what probably matters in this conversation. And so how fast we can get to the right answers for that becomes a matter of business prioritization. Do we have the right processes envisioned or known that we can transform? So you know, there's a lot of assessment and analysis. And then it comes down to how quickly uh can we get to this to this sort of working state of proving that the agents work. Part of your answer was, you know, or part of your question was will the agentic realm, you know, do all the business? Um we're working on like very small, early autonomous business models uh so that we can sort of prove this out for small nonprofits and SMB and startup use cases. Um, you know, one of the problems we see in early stage startup is the founder has like 20% of you know the hundred percent of requirements to get the business to market. So we could envision, you know, uh a lot of people use hubs or you know, business line sort of group line uh functions of agents. So you have a marketing hub or a GTM hub that's doing sourcing and customer acquisition for you, right? And the human is still overseeing that decisioning ultimately. So um we're probably, you know, I have a I have one example that's probably 80% of the way towards being able to make its own choices. Uh it communicates with us in a Slack channel about what it wants to do right now. But but fascinatingly enough, uh I think the point that we're going to here early is can I just transform uh some of my work into better versions of automation? And the agents tend to look like uh these integrations of you know structured data, unstructured data, and a little bit of that intelligence that we get. And I think this was probably a more valuable part of the answer, is like the LLMs have brought us access to general intelligence that now we can attach directly to our data rather than going through a third-party tool always.

SPEAKER_03 15:20

Right. So, you know, say I'm a founder and I I have a you know post-revenue company, I've built some software, but with the models taking dramatic leaps every five, six months and an incredible number of tools being made and released, you know, and I'm drinking from the fire hose of that. How do I kind of get a handle on it and and maybe break that into chunks so I understand what's most relevant to my my business? And I know this this question is heavily dependent on the type of business and you know the product or the service and that sort of thing, but I'm just I'm just trying to get a handle on it. I've got you know 15 e-news in my inbox from everybody on the planet. Right. I'm watching, you know, Lex Friedman and Linny, and I'm like blowing up. How do I understand this? You know, how do you get your head around it?

SPEAKER_02 16:06

Yeah, yeah. I you know, I we all have a version of this. You know, I get uh 10 LinkedIn messages a day from um, you know, uh lead gen companies, right? And and we we have a lead gen engine we built, so the answer is I already we've solved this, why would we do it? But we're all facing this, and so um, you know, it's it's not a matter of um not knowing, but I usually think we need first awareness and and sort of fluency of the common language. Uh this probably more so for me than any other technology I've endured in my life or technological change is is moving faster. I think we all feel that way. You know, everybody talks about the speed and the rate of uh innovation here and learning. And like you said, so models change, we get new functionality, and the functionality mimics our brain, so it's it's quite challenging for us to absorb it all uh that quickly. So I think getting out, uh you know, it's gonna sound kind of pedantic, but getting out and talking to people, you know, we do show and tell, we do meetups, uh, you know, we do things like this. Just getting conversant uh in the language and then understanding where you might use it. I saw somebody with a book uh the other day called like the AI Informed Leader, and and the person was telling me that, you know, the key to the book was that it was informing for them where they might use AI because a lot of people are not thinking about how do I make my business faster and what am I doing? What am I doing on a day-to-day basis? It's I write emails or I write emails I don't want to they're complex or something, you know, or I do these certain things or I plan trips where it can affect every phase of our business. So I think the first thing is just understanding the common language and how you might engage with it, and then quite honestly find a partner. Like after all that conversation and general learning, you still need to know the parts of it that you don't know. And you know, in my business, I tend to be very myopic uh, you know, and I have a lot of experience to lean on, but other people often fill in you know all those gaps. And I think we take a partner-first approach and uh you know it's it's really there for people to come and ask questions. So I know there's other businesses like ours, and I think that's the the key is to find somebody who's done it and ask the question. You know, if it's an independent contractor or you find a partner but say, hey, you've solved a problem like this in my industry, tell me what you saw, tell me if you might help me, even if you don't want to pay them to do that, just try to get the information because the problems are being solved in in so many different ways. Like we all have, we're all kind of working on the same thing in a million different ways right now because of the lack of emergent standards and uh you know language for us.

Plugging Into Charleston Tech Community

SPEAKER_03 18:32

I love how you brought it back home locally. So let's pivot to that for a minute and talk about the Charleston ecosystem. You know, you're very involved with Charleston Hacks and the show and tell event. Um, full disclosure, you're a sponsor of Dig South Tech Summit this year. Thank you very much. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

I'd love to be a part of that this year.

SPEAKER_03 18:48

And we're here on you know the Charleston uh American Marketing Association show as a segment of that with Silicon Harbor Hot Take. So, what's your hot take on how how can people plug in locally? Um, you know, what can they bring to the table, things that they can offer, what can they also receive and get out of this environment? And maybe maybe touch on you know a few things we're missing in Charleston and and how we might address those to enhance that overall ecosystem.

SPEAKER_02 19:16

Yeah, yeah. I I think you know ecosystem building is uh interesting as an activity. Thank you uh for engaging in it. Uh you know, it's it's complex and hard. Um we have a lot of support here now, you know, and I mean I've been here three years. Uh I know there are many other people that you know are more focused and more engaged uh with with building the ecosystem and it and it's beautiful to see. So thank you for Dick South and and you know, I mean others, others in the community for building our home. You know, the Harbor Center is a great place for uh startups and this activity. I mean, we've been fortunate uh, you know, to engage with Doug and Charleston Hacks and find a lot of momentum in bringing people to like how does how does startup work? Like, you know, how does this innovation life cycle really happen? Um, you know, we're always looking for more capital. I know you and I both have contacts, and everybody, I there's probably 12 of us I can name that are thinking about how to bring early stage uh risk capital. A lot of times, you know, we think what do we do after the event? So, you know, if I'm just thinking generally uh to encourage people, you know, there's a ton of events. There's uh our Charleston Hacks events, there's meetup events, there's events uh at the Harbor Center, there's meet there's Dig South, there's large events. You know, we had a large event last fall. Thank you for attending and helping us. Um but you know, ultimately there's a huge amount of uh community interaction inside of the tech community. And then I think one of our opportunities is to bring ourselves into other areas of the community where we're not, right? And I've suggested that with Doug and Charleston Hacks that we attend CWE or the Feud and Wine Festival and we start bringing digital into those realms and because there are people uh people everywhere that want to learn and solve their own problems is probably the easiest thing I can say.

SPEAKER_03 20:57

I love that. I mean we we try that in the early days and and sometimes it was you know a jack-alope. Strange, strange animal is appearing when you or or a or a digital centaur.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

People look at you like you're the Martian. A digital centaur just arro arrived and that's that's probably the you know, I want I want to go back to that now that you gave me the chance.

SPEAKER_02 21:16

Just just be brave and and be humble. Um, you know, probably the whether it's uh whether it's stupidity or a learned habit, you know, I can cast aside my imposter syndrome and self-centered fear and meet anybody and ask for help now, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:29

I love it.

SPEAKER_02 21:29

And that's the thing that um my very personal mission. Uh we have a nonprofit that we've instantiated, we have a community leader, Brian Rowe, who's a great person. I hope everybody can meet, but uh, you know, global digital access collaborative, because um we need to bring more after uh after effect to our events. So that my personal thing here this year is that we won't just have events, that we have events that we take away and do more work from with each other, right? And so I think that's probably the encouragement. Yeah, we need a platform, we need something to glue together and I think many people are are contributing so we just all need to keep keep doing it right we'll I love it. We'll build that intensity and and all those other capital, all those people uh people are here, capital will come, right?

SPEAKER_03 22:12

Yeah. So like you know breaking out the magic eight ball or your crystal ball, you know, what what does this community look like in terms of um the technology sector like say two years from now?

SPEAKER_02 22:23

Yeah, it's it's crazy. I it's uh it feels very different. I don't know how this is for you. I should flop this question back at you, but uh it feels different for me just uh you know I mean probably my first year here I was just kind of bobbling around you know probably six months in we started so you know it feels so different for me in terms of intensity we've got multiple AI startups out of here now we've got good good SaaS companies we're starting to see capital come in and help early stage companies so that's all positive but you know my hope is within uh you know two to three years we have um multiple sort of centers here I think you've got three or four geographies where you know there's early stage startups so we at least have one or two of those as merge as real sort of locus of this activity and there's capital you know there's a convergence of of you know commerce like capital and startup activity and government in there. I mean I think uh you know we have the tech we have the tech hubs grant that's coming in to sort of spark industry I just want us to continue to see investment both in capital and and digital here you know that's kind of the big thing uh if we continue to see the capital come and we make the investments in digital I guess as we'll have uh you know between the MUSC MUV innovation district and the other emergent things here that we're gonna have a really good time. We'll have big events my hope is that tech week rivals you know some of the bigger ones uh you know in in these kind of in these tier cities you know I mean I'll go to Philly Tech Week this year you know we'll do an event there as well so um I I think we're you know I've I've I've understood there how you know that one grew and and you know what happened between you know Drexel and and Wharton there. So I think you know we have all the pieces you know we just need to keep keep going.

Charleston Tech Week And How To Reach Will

SPEAKER_03 24:02

Yeah for any of our listeners Charleston Tech Week will be June 8th through 12th this year. Go to Charlestontechweek.com or dot org and submit your event it is free to submit an event it's a decentralized festival think of it that way. So um Will how do people get in touch with you and and why should they get in touch with you? What are some of the big reasons that you're you're kind of a a first point for them.

SPEAKER_02 24:24

Yeah yeah so um a lot of times people will come to us to help understand uh what might be helpful in digital technology for their business and I know that is probably its own definition uh itself but you know if you're wondering how to how to grow your business using AI if you're wondering how to transform a legacy business using any form of technology uh that doesn't involve you know operating on-premise data centers uh is one way to think about it um if you have general you know I have an idea and I need to turn that into a reality and you know people are you know you have people amassing around you as a startup founder uh but you know people can reach us gdna.io uh gdna.ai uh I am just will at gdna w-i-l l at gdna.io uh but you know we're we're on LinkedIn uh we're on the internet I enjoy going to a million cups now you know we've started to to bridge out you know we'll be at Dig South and and Tech Week we're super excited about that. Uh any Charleston hacks event uh I'm at we do show and tell now we plan to do that monthly. Uh show and tell is great for people if you're just vibe coding or thinking about something and want to come out and see how this happens uh come on out. Uh we'll do one of those next Wednesday at the Starlight Lounge at 6 p.m uh on Rivers Avenue and uh but yeah I mean get in touch if you have technology ambiguity and you want to build a growing business that's probably the uh the right answer there.

Closing Thanks And Sign Off

SPEAKER_03 25:47

I love it. Well Will Horn, founder of GDNA, thank you so much for being on Silicon Harbor Hot Take. I'm your host Danfield Gray we're very honored to be here thank you to Charleston AMA for welcoming us into the fold of their their pod city pod environment what do you guys think? I mean what what is this pod universe? Pod universe podverse there we go I like that end of the the comma podverse anyway thank you so much for having us thank you Will thank you Stan uh thank you AMA and uh the Charleston uh chapter of the AMA and uh I look forward to more of this thank you all so much