This month, I made the decision to join CloudZero as their new chief revenue officer — a choice I’m incredibly excited about.
In the past week, a number of colleagues have asked me to share why I joined the company. After answering the question a few times, I decided to take a minute to collect my thoughts and explain why this incredible company is the next step in my career.
First, a bit about me: I’ve spent over 25 years in B2B software sales at companies ranging from startups to the biggest names out there. Most recently, I ran a sales team at AWS, followed by a series D SaaS startup.
Solving a Big Problem
The first thing that drew me to CloudZero is that they’re solving a big problem.
I’ve learned that the most compelling problems are complicated and messy — and affect everyone from the CEO down. They require organizations to change the way they think and work, but lead to vastly greater outcomes when done right
The shift to the cloud was transformative in a lot of ways — mostly for the better — and the autonomy that it gave to engineers helps them move fast and scale. It also means that engineers are making decisions every day that impact a company’s operating margins — and most of them aren’t consciously considering it.
Meanwhile, the C-suite wants predictability and answers to questions like, “How much is our new machine learning initiative going to impact our margins?” or “Which enterprise customers are our least profitable?” — and engineering just gets a bill that tells them how much they spent on AWS.
CloudZero has a big, bold vision to fundamentally change the way engineering teams work, not to simply save them money, but help them achieve resilient growth.
An Engineering Platform for Cost
CloudZero is an engineering-first platform that aligns cost with key business metrics — like product features, dev teams, customers, and more — and delivers cloud cost intelligence to engineers about the products they build, so they can build cost-effective architecture and introduce less tech debt.
This alignment on cost metrics — and granular, relevant cost visibility — from the C-suite down to an individual engineer doesn’t just help them do their job better. It makes their companies more resilient and profitable.
In good times, it gives businesses an edge against their competitors.
“How can we price this feature?”
“How should we approach this enterprise renewal for maximum margin?”
In an unusual year like 2020, it can mean survival.
“Our free tier users tripled in a month — how do we get our unit cost in check?”
“Our business is on hold for six months — what levers can we pull to cut costs without hurting our customer experience?”
I spoke with my former teammates at AWS and they shared with me how transformative CloudZero has been for their customers. CloudZero shares the same customer obsession as AWS — and it shows.
Fantastic Company Culture
Lastly, I’m passionate about building and scaling high-performing sales teams — and I saw CloudZero as a place I could do that. I knew right away that CloudZero is made up of determined and innovative people — the type of people who sign up to disrupt a market and create a category.
With the combination of great people, an incredible partnership opportunity with AWS, and a market that’s ripe for disruption, I believe CloudZero has all of the ingredients for a rocket ship.
With that note, I’m hiring. Come join our team.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
