CloudZero gives engineering, FinOps, and finance teams complete visibility into cloud, Kubernetes, and AI spend, turning complex infrastructure costs into clear, actionable unit economics. By aligning cloud costs directly to business value, it helps teams eliminate waste, protect margins, and scale faster with confidence.
In this episode, we speak with Erik Peterson, the founder and CTO of CloudZero, about cloud cost management and optimization. We discuss how CloudZero helps businesses understand and manage their cloud spending by connecting costs to business value, thus enabling more efficient and profitable operations. The conversation covers the shift from traditional IT spending to cloud-based models, the role of AI in cloud optimization, and the importance of understanding unit economics. Erik shares insights on how CloudZero’s approach allows companies to innovate while maintaining cost efficiency, emphasizing the need for businesses to integrate cost considerations into their engineering decisions.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- CloudZero helps teams understand their cloud spending and its connection to business value.
- Every engineering decision is a buying decision, impacting profitability.
- Understanding unit economics is crucial for cloud cost management.
- Cost management should be a non-functional requirement in software development.
- AI spend is rapidly increasing and will surpass traditional cloud costs.
- Efficient code and systems are critical for startups and established companies alike.
- Cost insights can drive innovation and align technical and business objectives.
- CloudZero focuses on real-time data to provide actionable insights.
- The integration of AI into business strategies is essential for future success.
- Companies must adapt to using AI tools to remain competitive.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to Cloud Spend and Business Insight
02:32 – Understanding Cloud Cost Management
05:38 – CloudZero’s Value Proposition
07:29 – Navigating Cost Challenges
10:18 – Maximizing Efficiency in Cloud Spending
15:10 – Driving Innovation Through Cost Management
19:11 – The Impact of AI on Cloud Costs
23:32 – Incorporating AI into Business Strategies
28:52 – The Future of AI and Cost Management
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:05.774)
Hello everyone. And welcome to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Today’s episode will center around the topic of cloud spend and the question of how to turn these cloud related costs into real business insight. It’s an area where CloudZero has really made a name for itself. So today’s guests, have Erik Peterson, founder and CTO of CloudZero and CloudZero. took the usual kind of cloud cost playbook and they sort of flipped it on its head. So instead of treating cost as this like daunting accounting chore and task CloudZero. They help teams understand what they’re spending in the first place, why they’re spending it and how those dollars actually connect to customers and their products. it’s, it’s given engineering and finance a shared language. And I think it’s helped companies save a lot of money, you know, without slowing down the things that actually matter. So we’re going to get into a lot of different areas on this subject. What makes CloudZero different in the first place, how industries, the industry’s mindset around cloud cost is changing.
We’re going to get into, of course, the AI and what that sort of that boom is doing on the cloud side of things and Erik’s view on just where the sector is headed. So lots of talk about with that said, let me introduce and bring on Erik. Erik, welcome to the podcast. Glad you could join us.
Erik Peterson (01:19.854)
Oh, thank you, Bo. And flip is absolutely the right way to think about it. We are experiencing this flip in so many different ways. We think about this market, this space. have flipped from a world where it used to be the definition of efficiency was to use everything that was given to me. If I had 10 servers in the data center, I better use those 10 servers to a much harder question with on-demand cloud resources where I’ve got to figure out how to use the least number of things to get the job done. And that is a total from where we came.
Beau Hamilton (01:51.18)
Yeah, I often call this era that we’re in the efficiency era because I mean, it just all these automations and AI tools and services really just help kind of take what we have and maximize the value out of it and kind of squeeze it for everything for what it’s got. yeah, I definitely want to talk about kind of the AI side of things and what you’re doing on that front. I think it might be helpful though to start maybe at the beginning and maybe you could help sort of paint a picture of your industry and maybe some of the pain points companies experience in it. For those not familiar with the cloud cost management sector, how would you describe it and break it down?
Erik Peterson (02:32.142)
Yeah, it’s a great place to start. You know, this is a industry that’s gone by a lot of names. We talk about cloud cost management, cloud cost intelligence, cloud cost optimization. Now increasingly it’s AI and cloud optimization, but the common thread is pretty simple. How do we optimize the resources, the efficiency of these systems that we’re building, whether they’re in the cloud or in some future AI, you know, invented world. It’s, how can we get the most out of that, the most bang for our buck? And the interesting thing about this space that I love to highlight to people is it’s not just about saving money, it’s about driving value, right? When I spend money on the cloud, we want folks to think about it in terms of what am I getting in return for that? Is it worth it building that? What’s the value behind all these things? The traditional world of IT in the data center was about spending money and then forgetting about it. In the cloud, every engineering decision is a buying decision, and CloudZero exists to make those buying decisions as efficient and as valuable as possible.
Beau Hamilton (03:39.246)
Got it, so yeah, you make sense of why maybe a SaaS company running a bunch of different microservices, maybe with AWS, for example, I don’t know, why their bill continues to go up month after month. You connect some of those totals, the costs, and the spend to the value that it’s giving businesses, right?
Erik Peterson (03:58.538)
Absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s important to think about it this way that if you have built a well-architected system in the cloud and your business is growing month over month, your cloud spend is actually congratulations. Your cost spend is going to go up. There’s really no way around that because it is an on-demand resource, more customers, more usage. That’s going to cost more. The key element in this world is to understand for every dollar am I spending? Am I getting money back?
Erik Peterson (04:28.854)
And that’s where we see the drive to really push people towards thinking beyond just how much I spent on EC2 and AWS to what are the unit economics of my system? What does it cost to do the thing that it is that I do? And if I’m spending less money than what I make in return, then I’ve got a really profitable business. And sometimes we like to describe CloudZero as in the business of engineering profit, right? We turn every aspect of your software and engineering organization into a profit organization. And I think that’s a very powerful way to think about cloud in the modern era and its necessity in the AI era.
Beau Hamilton (05:07.652)
So you’re helping companies extract the most value out of their microservices and various costs and things they’re paying for. And I think that’s self-explanatory for what the value you offer. But I’m curious, maybe you can expand on your value proposition and maybe the key differentiators that make SaaS companies maybe choose you guys over the other options. What are you guys doing differently that listeners maybe should take note of?
Erik Peterson (05:38.402)
Yeah. So CloudZero was founded on really two very, very direct, very straightforward points of view. One, that the engineers are the ones making the buying decisions. This idea that every engineering decision is a buying decision. And so we have to drive data insights, the observability of what it costs to do things to those individuals.
And that cloud costs are very often very hard to rationalize and understand that the connection between the business objectives and the technical decisions. And CloudZero has found that the best way to accomplish that is through the unit costs or unit economics. So we can tie those business objectives. We want to build a more profitable company. We want to bring this product to market. We want to drive some new value or launch some new feature or build some new innovative capability directly to the technical decisions that are gonna support that. And then as those systems evolve, gain traction, grow, we’re driving all that cost insight directly to the engineers so that they are, like I said, engineering.
Beau Hamilton (06:45.336)
Now, I imagine you’ve had and come across all sorts of different sort of maybe nightmare scenarios, various levels of organization. I’m curious when new customers come to you, what kind of mess are they usually dealing with?
Erik Peterson (06:59.168)
Yeah. You know, a lot of times people are in this period, what we sometimes call the trough of lost innovation, right? They, they were going full bore, running down the road, let’s build in the cloud, let’s create, let’s go. And then at some point it’s like they knocked over the record player, the CFO typically walks into the room and says, okay, party’s over. What is going on here? We just looked at the latest bill and it’s out of control. You got to cut this thing. And that’s, this period of kind of like dark days for some folks, right? You look at that and you go, all right, we’re gonna have to stop building new features, we’re gonna have to stop working on stuff, we’re gonna have to go spend a bunch of time trying to save money. And we try to move people out of that space or that head space pretty quickly because what we’ve seen is when you treat cost as a non-functional requirement, right? You use it to drive some of the constraints of your engineering organization.
Building great software is a discipline of constraints. That actually drives innovation. It actually leads companies to build things that are way more capable or achieve kind of things that they wouldn’t necessarily think is possible. And that drives new pricing models, new features that they can push out to market. Ultimately puts them back into the good graces of the CFO because they can go and say, hey, for all the things that we’re doing right now, did you know…
For every dollar you’re giving us on all the technology that we’re building, we’re giving you back $10. And that is a really powerful message. You shift from talking about speeds and feeds and Kubernetes to we’re increasing the margins, we’re building a more profitable business. And now you have the business side of the house and the technical side of the house fully aligned on what they’re trying to achieve.
Beau Hamilton (08:47.012)
Right. My mind’s going to like picturing an electrical box and trying to flip the switches and trying to figure out, all right, I’m trying to get my electrical bill down. I need to conserve power. And so you’re flipping switches and, you know, as a result, you’re shutting off power, different parts of your home. And for a of a business standpoint, you’re almost thinking like, okay, how can I cut my bill without sacrificing, you know, the ability to deliver my product, deliver my service? And, it sounds like you can do that without necessarily shutting off the power to every, you know, every area.
Erik Peterson (09:21.326)
Yeah. I mean, look, we’ve all, yeah, I mean, we’ve all been in that place, right? For anybody who’s built in the cloud, we’ve left the lights on, so to speak, over the weekend or purchased that extra super mega sized, you know, EC2 instance and then forgot about it. There’s always a little bit of that waste. We typically see, you know, the kind of industry average being around 30 % waste. Important thing is to think about compared to what? Right? You know, typical data center utilization and costs are actually way higher than that. So you think in the broader sense, the cloud still is more efficient, but it’s great when you can turn those things off or you find those, you know, kind of like coins in the couch, so to speak. The big, big improvements come from when you really get into like the core parts of your business. If you’re, if you’re in the business of delivering a meal and you don’t really know what it costs to deliver a meal, you have a digital app and a mobile app to like order, you know, meals.
If you don’t really understand what it costs to do that, and you’re not really understanding how all the components within your system are driving those costs, you really don’t know where to start when it comes to making that more efficient. So when we can guide the engineers directly to those areas, then sometimes it comes down to a single line of code could be saving you millions of dollars and make your application more efficient just by changing that one line of code, moving it or removing it or getting it just more focused on how your system is working and using resources because cost, architecture, performance, these are all intertwined concepts. And you typically get all three when you focus on different parts of the equation together.
Beau Hamilton (11:04.226)
Yeah, that makes sense. I, I know, I just keep thinking, I mean, as someone with my own, you know, collection of digital costs, have streaming services, you got editing platforms, I’ve got AI, you know, ChatGPT costs and the like. it can be overwhelming. So, and I can only imagine what it’s like on a much larger scale on a business side of things. and I think also, I think what you’re doing here is, is just great for the industry, right? Like.
You’re helping kind of obviously make sense of the costs, but you’re helping, think one of the related sort of aspects of what, of your service, what you’re doing and helping clients is like, you’re, you’re helping them kind of shop around and see maybe better options in some cases, right? Which I think is great for the, the, overall kind of industry. And I think that’s just kind of worth, worth pointing out is like, you know, you’re helping the whole industry kind of become more competitive and really like, you know, maybe bring down their costs and maximize what services they’re offering B2B companies to.
Erik Peterson (12:08.312)
Well, and we’re also helping them understand the kind of like, this is paradox of choice. There’s so many different services out there. You know, you get back from the latest cloud conference and there’s like a hundred other new things that you’ve got to go focus on. And all these things are marching forward in time. You often don’t know where you’re going to spend your time. Should I even adopt these things? Maybe it’s not broken. Why should I even mess with it? If you can bring it back to the, into the context of the business, it actually can take teams who are maybe struggling to modernize or migrate systems and give them the rationale to go invest in these things and actually give teams who like to play with the new stuff the incentive to go do that. For me and for CloudZero in the very early days, even before I started the company, that was actually my incentive. I wanted to play with the cool stuff. My CFO was telling me, I’m not going to let you go spend a ton of money.
And I was like, well, if I keep this thing as efficient as possible, then I’m going to get to play with all the toys. And I see that repeated over and over again. If you’re deep in the tech and you’re, you know, consider yourself, you know, really focused on the top of your craft, building great, great software, building great applications in the cloud. If you’re making costs, that non-functional requirement, you’re really building amazing stuff. That’s, that’s really at end of the day, really true. And.
You you asked that question earlier about some of the unique things that CloudZero really gets into. We’ve got to do more than just bring cost to the equation. We also bring usage, right? It’s not enough to just say, what am I spending my money on? But why am I spending my money on that? What is going on here? So we’ll bring in user activity, customer activity, access patterns, those kinds of things, because we’ve got to be able to answer really three questions really, really well. How much did it cost? Why, what’s driving those costs. And then the third piece here, which is if I don’t like it, what am I going to do about it? And CloudZero really focuses in those three areas by bringing together lots of data. We have more in common, think, with an observability platform than traditional BI driven cost management systems. That was where the industry was a decade ago. Today, it’s a very real time interactive engineering focused activity. That’s really been where CloudZero has been at the forefront of all of this.
Beau Hamilton (14:36.302)
So you’ve mentioned this, the cloud conference and some of the like the industry events. And you’re constantly and you’re constantly talking with customers. And I mean, that’s the, that’s the whole, you know, that’s your, your business in a nutshell is you’re just like working with clients closely to help them solve their, their issues. And, and, um, I’m just curious, like, do you have a particular, maybe a favorite customer story that really kind of shows how, how you guys helped help them save money, maybe without slowing down their, their workflow.
Erik Peterson (15:10.574)
Yeah, my favorite stories are always where we drove innovation, right? I think great software companies, the engineers, the folks who work there, they get out of bed to drive value and growth. And when you can make that happen, it’s pretty amazing. So my favorite examples really tie back to, know, companies coming in and saying, gosh, you know, we’re in trouble. We got to cut our bill. We really don’t understand what we’re spending our money on. It’s a very, you know, like I said, dark place to be for some folks and then helping them understand, wait, for every dollar you were spending, actually you were making money back. So I’ll give you a kind of a concrete example here. You know, we work with one customer where they had a lot of great components out there, but like many, you have a product led growth strategy and you’ve got a freemium model. And so maybe you have a free part of your technology. That was exactly where we were with this customer.
Because we’re able to break spend out, one of our superpowers is allocation and attribution. This is a really hard problem. Most companies just say stick with tags. The problem is tags don’t cover everything, right? We can get even deeper than tags to really break apart that spend. I can tell you exactly your cost down to the penny of how you might break up an S3 bucket, for example. And we can do that by product, by feature, by customer, by transaction. So here we are looking at this customer bar spend and showing them exactly what it costs by product for the first time ever. And what they realized was that the freemium product, the product that they were giving away for free, that they had millions of people accessing it because it was free, actually was the least efficient, most expensive part of their infrastructure. And it was stealing value and profit from all the other components in their environment that were actually paying the bills, right? And, of course, because it was free, they had ignored this part of the business. They got in there, they saw the opportunity to optimize it. And this like had a demonstrable like material effect on their profitability and margins that that very quarter, right? It paid for itself in a heartbeat. And it gave them the insight to go out there and build something that they wouldn’t have done otherwise if they hadn’t had that visibility.
Beau Hamilton (17:32.708)
That’s a great example. Yeah, I love that. think that’s what it’s all about though, is just kind of helping them realize, zoom in and kind of realize that issue and then just help them build the things that they want to build and deliver on their services. It goes back to what you’re saying about, you you set out with this goal of like wanting to test out these shiny new things and that’s kind of like, that was in your focus. And a lot of these like, you know, the engineering teams and like, they just want to focus on building the best product, delivering on the, on the best service. and you’re, know, helping kind of tackle some of the, the, the, the daunting part of the financials.
Erik Peterson (18:16.394)
Well, and I would say, you know, we’ve moved from a place where this is a nice to have to this is essential, right? You these are real dollars. are, these are real. That could mean the difference between adding, you know, 10 more people to the head count or, or going after that customer base. You know, one of my favorite quotes of all time when I think about margins is what Jeff Bezos said a long time ago, your margin, my opportunity, right? Which if you have real strong command over your margins and you understand where that line is, you can grow and build products that reach such a wider audience. And that can mean the difference between success or failure today, honestly. know, margins are getting even more razor thin when we start to think about the world of AI in particular. And that’s where, you know, in a matter of years, I think we’re actually going to see more spend in AI than we are going to be in cloud. It is growing unbelievably fast, right?
Beau Hamilton (19:11.906)
Right. Well, I mean, yeah, if you look at the margins of for Amazon, for example, with the Bezos example, I mean, that’s that is how the Amazon is able to do what they’re doing, right. Maximizing those margins. And yeah, the A.I. of things is is fast. And we should get into that now, because I think it’s it makes perfect sense for what you’re you’re tackling. I know that A.I. I mean, the consumer facing A.I. that we’re all familiar with is so good at taking, you know, large swaths of information and making the most out of it and dissecting it and translating it in the way that you’re able to, you know, understand. And it’s able to pinpoint, you know, certain issues that like, look at a privacy policy, or for example, or like some large, like, really just technical document, you can upload the ChatGPT and it’ll, it’ll spit out, you know, the concerning areas with a matter of seconds. And I think that sort of, you know, value I think could apply to what you’re doing with extrapolating the miscellaneous costs and fees associated with cloud costs.
Erik Peterson (20:18.03)
I mean, there’s an enormous amount of data flying through the systems these days and in particular our system. And you see all this very transactional activity calling these APIs, pulling in data from OpenAI or Anthropic or directly from the cloud providers. There’s a new service launched almost every week. We’re building agentic systems now. We’re trying to understand how those things are interacting. They’re having, you know, LLMs having conversations with LLMs. All of that has one thing in common. It all costs money, right? And it’s all very transactional and sometimes those transactions are stuck in loops that cost even more money.
And if you’re to get visibility into what’s going on or even do proper AB testing when the next, you know, frontier model comes out and you go and say, ChatGPT, you know, six, just whatever it is. You need to answer a question like, okay, did it improve quality? But did it also make this more cost effective or is this just put me out of business as I like start to adopt all these things. And I have to understand that at a really kind of transactional level, who’s calling these APIs? What services are they feeding into? What features are they feeding into? I’ve seen so many AI projects that are stuck, like trapped in limbo, business is afraid to pull the trigger because they don’t understand the ROI or the total cost of ownership of these systems. And they’re afraid that once they get out there. They’re going to put them out of business. might be their most popular feature, but it also might be their most expensive, but it is crazy exciting.
Right now at this point, when we see the data that CloudZero is pulling into our platform, AI spend is growing way faster than cloud spend. In fact, we’re right now on track to be probably the most, the first company to reach a billion in AI spend under management, which is something I’m really excited about because it just, proves that AI world is really kind of absorbing the cloud world. And 2025 was an interesting year in itself. Almost every CEO of every AI company out there was telling us that this is the year that all the code was going to be written by AI. Now, we may not exactly be there just yet, but it’s pretty clear that we really got pretty far this year in terms of just how much code can be written.
Today, engineering decisions made by engineers, those buying decisions being made by engineers. Tomorrow, I think we’re getting really close to where some of these buying decisions are going to start being made by AI. And CloudZero aims to be the control plane and the governance layer to drive those business, unit economic, margin objectives into that equation, either through MCP or through different APIs that we can feed this data directly into the LLMs that are going to be making these development operational coding decisions.
Beau Hamilton (23:17.058)
Yeah, what are you, what is CloudZero doing to incorporate AI into the way you help businesses? what, what, are you utilizing it today? And then where do you see this, this going and the next handful of years?
Erik Peterson (23:32.334)
Yeah, I, you know, I, there’s a number of ways to think about it. You know, one, one kind of term that’s used quite often is, know, to discuss the space also is to think of it as the, the FinOps space, for example, like FinOps is in itself a movement that’s been growing pretty quickly. And the conversation on top of mind for a lot of people is this, are we talking about AI for FinOps or is this FinOps for AI, right? Both sides of the equation. We’ve got to make use of this technology to find new and, you know, interesting things and deliver new value. It’s, essential. It’s unlocking, like, like you said earlier, like all that data that’s flung to the system. can we find things that will drive people to build more efficiently as quickly as possible with the right context?
There’s also all of that consumption, right? So we’re calling those APIs. We’re making these, you know, AI decisions. We’re building this into our code. Every organization I’m working with, they’re launching new AI features and they’re trying to understand what did it cost to build that new AI capability? How efficiently are we using it? Who’s using it? What usage metrics are driving all of these elements here? And we’re surfacing all that. It started with like a simple thing like cost per prompt or cost per inference or cost per token. Now it’s evolving to the business metrics like I have a system that analyzes that document and tells me the challenges that I have in my policy document. Well, what does it cost to do that? And can I build a profitable business around it? this conversation is raging. Is everything just a wrapper around something else? That makes it even more important to understand the layers and the economics of that whole thing. If I’m building on top of these systems, I’ve got to understand where my core value is and what it costs to use all of these services as well.
Beau Hamilton (25:29.26)
Absolutely. I mean, I know it’s moved to like this paper usage cost, know, paper token, you know, model as opposed to like a flat rate model that we’ve seen in the past. And then, you know, before that, it was just like a one-time fee. You’d pay for, you know, your software and then you don’t have to worry about it. so that’s kind of ushered in the kind of changing economics. But I think it really is an exciting time and there isn’t, you know, a company and that I’ve talked to where they’re not incorporating AI, seriously looking into how they’re able to automate more of their processes. So I think it sounds like most of your focus is on, it’s maybe less about you guys utilizing AI on your side of things. It’s more of like how you’re helping companies utilize and maximize the most out of.
Erik Peterson (26:23.682)
Well, I mean, to be true, we’re using AI to help our customers analyze their AI, right? So this year we launched a number of capabilities, specifically in our platform around this, just to surface more insights, drive more data to the screen, give people that ability to extract more context. know, a common question that our customers have to deal with quite often is they’re looking at some data in front of them and they have a very simple question. What does this mean? Why did the chart go up, now they can just go into CloudZero and simply say, hey, can you explain this to me? Can you tell me what this is? And we have all the context in there to explain that very clearly, give people the insight. Yeah, this went up because your usage increased and marketing ran a marketing campaign or your margins are decreased because you released this new feature, but you’re not charging additional pricing for it. There’s always a lot of details to correlate together.
And it was always a challenge to bring all that stuff to the screen. Incorporating AI capabilities into CloudZero itself has unlocked that and unlocked it for our customers who, course, are doing the same thing with these technologies. And they’re trying to understand how they’re using these technologies. And tomorrow, it’s going to be an entirely new set of things. This space is moving unbelievably fast. And you asked a really interesting question earlier, like how is it changing it for us, the engineers, the FinOps practitioners, the DevOps folks who are in this space, you know, the leaders who are trying to make decisions. I always tell my team that it’s not that AI is necessarily coming for your job, but somebody who is using AI is definitely coming for your job, right? We’ve got to adopt these tools. There was a time where we thought, ah, you’re cheating if you’re using a calculator.
Now, nobody does the work without a calculator. You don’t see a finance person taking it as a point of pride that they don’t use Excel. No. They use the tools and we have to evolve in that same sense. We’re a intelligent species. One of the definitions of that is we use tools. So every time, somewhat here at CloudZero says, I, I use ChatGPT to this. I’m like, stop apologizing. Don’t be an AI apologist. Use the tool, be proud of it and then stand proud about that because if you, if you weren’t using these tools, I guarantee you somebody using them is coming for your job.
Beau Hamilton (28:52.74)
100 % agree with that. Yeah, I think the best, I mean, I’m talking with family and friends who are not necessarily working in the tech industry and they kind of view some of these, the AI advancements with this kind of weary doom and gloom sort of lens. And I think that there’s definitely some very valid concerns about where things are going, to not utilize it and not take advantage and at least get your feet wet with testing and, and figuring out what it can do and if it offers any value in the first place, I think you’re just, you’re just setting yourself, you know, you’re hurting yourself in the long run because like you said, there’s other people that are competing against, maybe who want the job that you want, who are going to be utilizing these tools and they are tools, you know, and it’s like, you gotta, yeah, I think that you also should still read, read long form content, read the books, research, check your sources.
Erik Peterson (29:53.302)
I yeah, just because I use a calculator doesn’t mean I’m not responsible for being accountable for my work, right? You know, I still have to be accountable for the math. I may have used tools to make sure that it’s more accurate. Same thing is true. If I use AI to write a document, I better make sure that that document is not just some slop. It’s on me. And that doesn’t change. I don’t think that ever really changes, right? We’re always going to be accountable for these things. But the fact that I can now produce 10x what I could do before at a greater quality, that’s huge. And that gives us a lot of time back to go focus on even cooler things. it really, there’s no argument for not kind of going forth. Sometimes it’s hard because we feel like we’re taking credit for something, but we’re thinking about it all wrong. You got to lean in on that and just go for it. It’s truly amazing once you do.
The thing that I challenged everyone here at CloudZero this year to do is take what I call the AI challenge. said, go spend at least an hour. And in that hour, do not do a single thing where you don’t use AI to do it. Write an email, great. Write an email, write code, use AI. Do this, use AI, whatever it is. Figure it out. Just one hour will actually unlock the creativity in your brain to get in there and start realizing, wait, this actually makes my life better. And I ask everybody when they’re in that on the fence to just give that a shot because it will change your perspective.
Beau Hamilton (31:25.026)
And then understand, what’s working, what doesn’t. mean, some things AI is not going to be able to replace. And then obviously you’re going to not use it for that service. And if it slows you down, don’t use it. But chances are you’re going to find that it speeds things up and it makes you more efficient. So you might as well use it. Now you’ve given a lot of great kind of messages and you’ve surfaced a lot of interesting quotes, insights, all of which I really appreciate it.
But I want to give you one more opportunity maybe to surface one takeaway message for folks who want to get smarter about this stuff, who want to learn more and just leave with a nice message to ponder. So I’m curious, maybe what’s one piece of advice you’d give a growing tech team before they dive into the cloud cost management sector?
Erik Peterson (32:18.412)
Yeah. I would tell anyone that it is never too early in the development cycle when you’re, if you’re a new startup or you’re a mature organization to think about how building efficient code, building efficient systems is not, you know, it’s critical at all stages. Even if I am in the early days is that I’m not necessarily trying to save money. It’s really important to understand how I’m still spending that money. It’ll create a more nimble team. It’ll create a more cost conscious culture, it will build ultimately a more efficient company. And it could mean the difference between success or failure. And we know startups everywhere, it’s a hard business. Most startups fail. The data that I’m seeing, it’s pretty clear. Startups who think this way have a greater chance of success than not. Just that alone should give people the rationale for why it’s so important. Later in life, it’s absolutely critical. You cannot function without understanding these things. you’re not thinking about where you’re spending your money, well, somebody’s spending it for you, and that’s not a good place to be. So think early, think often, and if you want to be at the top of your craft, cost has to be a non-functional requirement. It has to be part of how you think about it and everything that you build.
Beau Hamilton (33:38.852)
Amazing, very well said. It’s great takeaway. think, yeah, start with the clarity, not the assumptions. The assumptions kind of end up saving people a ton of time and pain in the long run if you focus on trying to get that clarity. So I appreciate that takeaway. Now, one last thing for those curious about CloudZero, they want to get in contact with your team. Where should they go?
Erik Peterson (34:13.646)
Should absolutely hit us up on the web, www.cloudzero.com. We’re out at almost every conference. You’re always welcome to follow up with me. Personally, it’s easy to find me, erik@cloudzero.com. I love to get out there and talk with customers, prospects, folks who are just building and trying to innovate, but please find us. We’re always ready to give a demo, show you how the tools work, get a free trial. It’s out there, it’s easy to use, and we’re here to help you get started right up the bat.
Beau Hamilton (34:44.78)
All right, that’s cloudzero.com and that is Erik Peterson, founder and CTO. Erik, thanks again. It’s been a pleasure and thanks for all the insights.
Erik Peterson (34:53.358)
Yeah, Beau, pleasure is all mine. Thank you very much.
Beau Hamilton (34:54.808)
Thank you all for listening to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts. I will talk to you in the next one.