Ep#143 ProsperOps Journey to $1B in AWS Compute Spend Under Management

Host: Jon

Hi everybody and welcome to the Jon Myer podcast. Today's topic is ProsperOps, the journey to 1 billion in AWS compute Spend under management. Today we're talking with the three co-founders of ProsperOps and how this is even possible. Now, a quick note. Unfortunately, Chris Keel is unable to make it today, but we're going to give him a quick introduction. Chris is also a co-founder and chief technology Officer at ProsperOps, a husband and father of two, and a barbecue connoisseur. I know another person on this podcast is also into barbecue, but we're going to get to that shortly. We're talking with Chris Cochran, who is a co-founder and c e O of ProsperOps, a husband and father of two humans and one great Dane. And last, but not least, Erik Carlin, who is also the co-founder and chief product officer at Prosper Reps, a husband and father of six, and a time-starved outdoorsman, and I think he has some things to say about barbecue. Please join me in welcoming Chris and Erik did a show. Chris, Erik, thank you for joining me.

Guest: Chris

Hey, Jon, good to be with you. Hey,

Guest: Erik

Jon. Great to be back on.

Host: Jon

Yeah, Erik, thanks for joining me again. Chris, you and I had a chance to meet in person in Austin a couple of months ago, so this is relatively back to what you're used to.

Guest: Chris

That's right. The situation was normal. And thankfully it was not 160 degrees in Austin at that point as it is now. So,

Host: Jon

Well, I can't complain. I'm about 80 degrees. I would like a little warmer weather, but you're at 106, so you know what, I'll take mine

Guest: Erik

Virtuous. Yeah.

Host: Jon

All right. Erik, let me ask you the million-dollar questionnaire or billion-dollar question. No, I'm just kidding. How did you guys all meet?

Guest: Erik

That's a great question. So the three co-founders all worked together at a company called Rackspace, and we had worked on OpenStack back in the day. This is sort of like circa 2010 and 2015, we had worked on OpenStack trying to create the open-source public cloud, and the company decided to sort of pivot a little bit and diversify, and we ended up moving into managed sort of hyper-scale public clouds. And Chris Cochran and Chris Keel and I were the three co-founders of Rackspace to start that business. So we had the good fortune of getting to work together, starting something new and seeing each other's skills, and learning to work together. And so when the opportunity kind of arose years later to start a company, we'd already been through the trenches together through starting something new and it was, there's no two other people I'd rather be working together with these than the two Chris's.

Host: Jon

Chris, let me ask you a question. Who came up with the idea for ProsperOps? How did you guys come up with this idea?

Guest: Chris

Oh, well, it's Chris and Erik, we're brilliant technologists and we spent a lot of time back at Rackspace serving customers. And Rackspace's, sort of modus operandi was using humans, arming them with great technology and tools, and putting 'em to work to help customers achieve some outcome. And that's a great strategy and it did a lot of great work for customers using, you know, AWS or many of the different clouds, but ultimately some problems actually can be better solved with algorithms. And the idea that we had when we started ProsperOps was how do you use technology? How do you use algorithms to achieve outcomes that humans couldn't do as well, but maybe more importantly, unlock them to go do things where they were just best in class and were amazing? And I think Erik and Chris understood that, saw that, and that was the company that we started back in 2018, and I have been happy to be in the back seat along for the ride since that time.

Host: Jon

Erik, can you tell me the exact moment that you guys were thinking about and how you thought of the idea of ProsperOps and the solution that you're trying to solve?

Guest: Erik

Yeah, it has to do with the idea of a RoboAdvisor in the personal investing space. Companies have emerged like Betterment, who's a public publicly rep, referenceable customer advisor, a Wealthfront, et cetera, that instead of using human advisors to manage money for customers, they implement algorithms and use computer science to effectively automate the investing strategy. And the impetus for the idea for ProsperOps was can you take that same concept of RoboAdvisor and apply it to cloud spend, right? How do you have customers answer some questions, configure some settings, and rather than the bulk of the work beyond the shoulders of the ops practitioner, how do you transition that to algorithms and automation and allow that to do the work to achieve the savings outcomes? So in fact, in the early days, one of our early tagline ideas was the RoboAdvisor for the cloud. What we found in our testing is that half the people don't know what a RoboAdvisor is, so we had to abandon that tagline and move on to something else. So these are the things you try and learn and iterate on.

Host: Jon

Those are certain things that you test out in the market. Erik, I thought you were going to tell me that you were at a barbecue joint with Chris over some ribs, and you guys came up with this idea of, wow, we could save a bunch of money on these ribs. What about if we did it within the cloud environment?

Guest: Erik

There's been plenty of barbecue that's been woven into our story. I can remember the three founders meeting at Cooper's Barbecue and spending half a day there thinking through some pretty critical strategic decisions we were making. So we can weave barbecue into the story, but unfortunately, that wasn't part of the founding idea.

Guest: Chris

But on that day, we did need office space, and the table at Cooper's was free all day. And so, you know, use what you got.

Guest: Erik

Yeah.

Guest: Chris

For me individually? I think at the time when we started, it was 2018, and I think as a discipline was just getting started. What was sort of interesting to me personally was largely getting to work with Erik and Chris on solving some hard problems. We had been in the AWS ecosystem long enough to know that people needed help, that as good as AWS is, and it's amazing, it was a lot even for good people to be able to get everything done. And so when Chris and Erik sort of understood that there were ways technology could go and accelerate humans and unlock them to do more things, I just saw it as a very interesting problem. And over time, I think as we were growing up, the FinOps discipline was maturing, et cetera. And it's been sort of a fun ride. And what I like is it's great to play in a space where there's a community that's formed where people see FinOps as sort of their vocation and a discipline that they want to become experts in, and the company's been able to sort of grow during that entire pattern. And that's been sort of cool to watch individually, but then also with the community at large.

Host: Jon

Erik, let me ask you the same question. Back in 2018, when you started Prosper s, did you envision that this would be part of your FinOps journey, that it was ultimately going to play a huge part as it does now?

Guest: Erik

As Chris said, when we started FinOps even a concept right there was this idea of cost management, and we named the company ProsperOps because we had this idea of FinOps and we started calling it that even though it wasn't nearly the term that is used today, and DevOps, this idea of sort of automation and ProsperOps kind of, we saw being the bridge between DevOps and FinOps. So that's kind of where the name came from. But when you start a company, you have an idea, but you have no idea if you can, it's going to work, you have no idea if you can build it, and people are going to buy your product. And you do it because you see it in your mind's eye and you believe that this is valuable for customers. And so I think conceptually, we wouldn't have started the company if we didn't think it was going to be successful and had a chance. But when you hit milestones and realize certain goals, it, it's in some ways it's marvelous when that happens because as with each kind of milestone along the way, it's hard to see the next milestone. You don't know how you're going to get there, and then you hit it and you're amazed. And so it's just been a great journey and very thankful.

Host: Jon

Erik, let me ask you the billion-dollar question. What is the differentiating factor of ProsperOps versus the others that are out there?

Guest: Erik

Well, I think there are two answers to that question. I think one is you've got traditional cost optimization tools, which are visibility based. And so their goal, and we kind of refer to these as the V1 tools that the cloud management platforms, and they're very helpful in terms of giving you tens, dozens, hundreds of reports to help give you visibility into your spend, but they don't automate or execute anything on your behalf to achieve savings outcomes. They might give you some recommendations, but they don't do the work and deliver a savings outcome. And so what makes us different from a lot of the cost management tools is that when you subscribe to ProsperOps, we are taking that work off your plate, and our software is executing on your behalf to deliver savings outcomes. And so the FinOps is such a large domain, there's so much work to do.

Guest: Erik

If we can take a piece of that off your plate, use algorithms to achieve outcomes better than any human could achieve, and free you up to go focus on other parts of the FinOps problem space. And I think that's one of the big things that makes this different. I think for other competitors in the automation space, unfortunately, there's a lot of, I call it AI washing going on right now where because AI is such a hot topic, everyone's talking about ai, ai, ai. And what we find unfortunately because as we win customers away from our competitors, we can see the results of what their platform has done. We can see lots of signs of lack of automation, computers do things in a way that's in incredibly repeatable. And so, unfortunately, there are a lot of promises being made about AI and automation that unfortunately behind the scenes are just not what is the reality. And so, I think the fact that we're a true AI automation platform is another differentiator.

Host: Jon

Erik, you took the words right out of my mouth, the true AI platform that is not humans behind it doing the work, but the AI that's built into that. Chris, did you ever think back in 2018 that you would end up where you are now relatively so quickly?

Guest: Chris

No, look, when you start, I came from, I've spent a large part of my career in large companies, but I've been working my way down into smaller and smaller entities. But when you finally get the chance to start everything in front of you is a blank page. It's exciting, but it's also pretty scary. And I think along the way, you know, just start one step at a time. Not to be too cliche, but Erik and I were just together earlier today and I had made the comment when we started and we got to our first million a R, you'd say, there's no way we're going to get to five. I can't see it. And then you get to five and you go, there's no way we're going to get to 10. And then you do it and then you just keep going. And I think about it just sort of iterative along the way, but it's been a joy.

Guest: Chris

It's got its ups and downs as you could imagine. But no, you start and you say, do I know that there's a problem to be solved causing customers pain? And am I teaming up with folks that I think are the best in the world? And I think Erik and Chris are some of the best folks in the world at what we do. So I felt like I was handed a deck full of face cards, but every little bit, you know, can't ever see it until you hit it and then you go to the next milestone.

Host: Jon

So, Chris, you're saying that they stacked a deck for you.

Guest: Chris

That's what I think,

Guest: Erik

Where the face cards then Cochran is the ace. So feelings are mutual. There

Host: Jon

You go. Make a complete deck. Erik, same question for you. Back in 2018, did you envision that you would be where you're at in 2023 at 1 billion in computing spend, the man under management?

Guest: Erik

It's hard to believe now much less back in 2018. So as Chris said, you have an idea. I think I knew that this was going to be valuable because we saw the pain and we saw the results. Arguably what we were doing back at Rackspace was incredible. We had some of the best people in the world, we had some of the best technology at the time, and third-party things that we had built. But at the end of the day, we felt like there was a way to rethink it and achieve something that was sort of a step function change that was different than anything that existed. And I just sort of knew at the time that this is something that if we could get it right was going to be extremely valuable, but you just don't know what that can look like. And so the idea of a billion dollars of computing under management is, it's still hard for me to get my head around even today.

Host: Jon

I'm sure it is. Everybody. Real quick, today's topic is prospered journey to 1 billion in AWS compute Spend under management. We're talking with the three co-founders, Chris Keel, who's unable to make it, but we have Chris Cochran and Erik Carlin joining us now. Chris, let me ask you the question, and this is going to be an understanding for the audience, 1 billion in AWS compute under management. Really? What does that mean from the sound of it? It sounds like an astronomical amount that I don't think I could ever see or visualize.

Guest: Chris

Yeah, look, I mean the way that we tend to think about it is on the other end of the service we provide our customers who are trying to figure out ways to get their business moving forward faster, doing more, et cetera. So I think about the billion dollars as more just a proxy for the opportunity that's out there. And there's more work to do. I mean, AWS is climbing towards a hundred billion and we know that there are more needs out there. And so for us, I think it's great, we're going to celebrate it, but at the end of the day, there's more work to be done and there's more people that need help out there and we want to try to get to as many of those folks as possible.

Host: Jon

Erik, you were talking about you couldn't see 1 million in savings for customers. Right now you're at 1 billion and the achievement there, what does that mean to you?

Guest: Erik

Again, it's even hard to wrap your head around a billion is one with nine zeros behind it. And so to me, you don't achieve that unless you have customers that just trust you and that you've been able to deliver value to consistently that remain customers. And so I'm just thankful to our customers for trusting us, some of our early customers for giving us a chance. I can still remember our very first customer that said, let's do it. And I was almost like? Somebody wants to pay us money. And so you have faith, you do all this work, you build it, you believe it's going to be valuable, but when people subscribe and you can deliver value and continue to deliver value, I'm just thankful to our customers for trusting us with their cloud spend so that we can help optimize it for 'em.

Host: Jon

Erik, I feel the same way when I'm like, wait? You're going to pay me money to do this? I love doing this. This is awesome, let's keep doing it. And that shows true customer obsession and passion for what you're doing. Chris, lemme ask you the question, in managing 1 billion, you've collectively saved hundreds of AWS organizations over 550 million. First of all. Wow, that's a number that I can envision myself on the amount of savings. But what is Prosper Abs doing with that 1 billion to generate massive savings for customers?

Guest: Chris

Well, there are lots of different types of ways to optimize the cloud, and to be candid, the companies that are just crushing it are dividing and conquering and doing all things. So if you're doing, many companies are doing usage optimization and finding ways to use the right things, we're helping them deliver rate optimization so that for whatever they use, they pay the best price. And many companies are engaging the cloud providers directly and generating enterprise discount programs or private pricing agreements that provide additional savings. And so the way that we tend to think about it is that's a lot of work to do. The companies that are most successful in using the cloud are doing all three concurrently, and our job is to focus today on that middle one rate optimization and how we use technology to take it off their plate, allow them to focus on using optimization or any of the contract work they have to do directly with AWS, but we'll handle the rate optimization piece.

Guest: Chris

And no matter what the customer does, no matter if they're spinning things up or spinning things down, our service is just up sort of passively watching behind the scenes. And as things change, adapting their commitment portfolio to generate the best amount of discounts that are possible at that moment. And if something changes five minutes later, we'll adapt and generate savings in that new environment. And so that's really how we think about when the customers are doing great, is when we are doing our part that frees them to solve some of the other parts of the optimization problem set that they might not get to otherwise.

Host: Jon

Nice. Erik, let's talk a little bit about ProsperOps and your capabilities. What is the capability of ProsperOps? So you do handle RI savings plans, what are your capabilities to help customers out?

Guest: Erik

Yeah, I mean you pretty much just nailed it there. So in the world of aws, which is our current focus today, there is this world of usage optimization, which might be things like right sizing. It's using less stuff, and then the world of rate optimization, which is making sure you're paying the best price possible for the things you are using. And so we're focused on that rate optimization space of our eyes and savings plans. And that's a complex, particularly when you've got a very dynamic environment as the cloud is increasingly becoming more and more dynamic, this is sort of what makes it difficult for a human with a report and a recommendation tool to actually sort of achieve a world-class outcome. Not that humans aren't smart, it's just that the cloud is so complex and so dynamic, it necessitates a system that is watching in real-time.

Guest: Erik

So we ingest real-time telemetry from our customers, we're continually checkpointing that and we're building a picture of what their environment looks like. And then we look at the RI and savings plan portfolio and we say, can this be adapted at this exact moment in time to optimize cost? And if so, it's adapted. And then we just do that over and over and over again 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And so if auto an all audio scaling group changes in the middle of the night at 2:00 AM our platform will adapt while our customers can happily and soundly sleep at night so

Host: Jon

They can focus on what matters to them. Erik, talk to me quickly about esr the effective savings rate, because I know you're passionate about it. There's a website link that I'll put in the description below, but I want to educate our audience on the esr.

Guest: Erik

So when we started ProsperOps, we said we were going to try to convince people that our platform can do a better job. How do we make this a quantitative discussion with data versus a qualitative discussion? And at the time, no metric allowed you to measure the effectiveness of your rate optimization efforts. So a lot of the clouds will use metrics like utilization and coverage as a way to describe how much of your spend is covered or how much of your commitments are generating discounts. But really at the end of the day, what people care about is, well, how much did I save? And so nothing existed and we said we have to have a way, an objective way that's not, that allows you to measure when all is said and done, and we measure it net of what we call our savings share charge.

Guest: Erik

We take a percentage of savings, but at the end of the day, if you create an apples-to-apples comparison, which option generates the highest effective savings rate? And a lot of times sales discussions with vendors can be subjective. And the wonderful thing about FinOps is that it's quantifiable. And our sales process is largely us running a savings analysis for customers, overlaying our algorithms on top of their data, and presenting them with data that says, if you subscribed, you're doing a great job today. But Prosper Bot, which is kind of what we loosely refer to our service as, can achieve something that excuses our charge and has a higher effective savings rate. And so you can think of it as like the ROI of cloud savings. Just like in the investing world, you might measure two different options and say, which one delivers the higher R oi? You can think of ESR as the ROI of cloud savings.

Host: Jon

Chris, I'm going to let you jump in and kind of comment on the esr. The last time I had a conversation with Erik, he educated me on esr. I went through and promoted the website and the link because the value that I see of it doesn't come from a ProsperOps perspective, it comes from an education, it comes from the knowledge, but it's not like you're selling something. You're like, Hey, this is how the metrics should be valued at it. What are your thoughts?

Guest: Chris

Yeah, look, it's just math. So the definition, the equation, it's not ours. It's just, as Erik said, it's un gameable numbers out of the AWS system of record where we're just calculating an ROI. And earlier you had asked Erik about differentiation. I think one of the things that we hang our hat on is that we focus on our customer's SR, as the core measure for what we're doing. Because at the end of the day, that's what they care about. So if we can do things that consistently raise their e sr net of our charge, and we can compare that to the ESR that they were generating while they were doing it on their own, and you could see that there are quantifiable dollars, that means that customer, not only do they get the time back, but the DO incremental dollars that are saved are dollars that they can reinvest in other projects that they otherwise wouldn't be able to fund. And so everything we do is oriented around how do we get that ESR as high as possible and how do we keep moving it up into the right over time.

Host: Jon

Chris, let me ask you, how do you educate customers on the E sr? Say, I'm a new customer coming in, I never even thought of esr, I never saw thought of the value. Is that done within ProsperOps? Do you do a little education thing and you can visualize your current, what you're doing, here's what we're able to do and achieve, and here's your ESR and the value of understanding it?

Guest: Chris

Yep, we do it a couple different ways. Number one, other players and vendors in the space have adopted E sr, which we think is outstanding. The FinOps Foundation has been involved with it, and we want to continue to put it out there. Once again, it's not ours, it's just math, but it ultimately tells you as a customer all the things you need to know. So when we start our sales process, we want to make sure that we're grounded in data. We start and talk about the ESR concept, and then we say, let's move it out of the conceptual into the reel. And the way we do that is we'll generate a savings analysis on your behalf and it'll take a couple of hours and we can review it with you. And as part of that, you can learn the concept and see how it translates into actual numbers to drive it home.

Guest: Chris

And that's all part of the journey that we go on with our customers. And our customers are awesome. They're all generally sophisticated FinOps practitioners. So they come to the discussion with a lot of knowledge. And what we try to do is show them, if they're not familiar with sr, how they can take their existing heuristics, tweak them a bit, and gain a whole new understanding of what performance could be and should be so that we can get them motivated about saying, let's go get it. Let's go make it happen. And then we could focus on other items that take our company forward.

Host: Jon

Erik, Chris mentioned that the FinOps Foundation has adopted D E S R. How's it make you feel when others are adopting something that you've put a lot of thought into it and educating people about E SR and what it means?

Guest: Erik

So they are in the process of embracing effective savings rates. Just a small plug for anyone who's going to be at FinOps X, which is the FinOps Foundation conference, I'm, I'm giving a talk on the effective savings rate, and there's a working group that is in the process of sort of embracing SR and would love for anybody interested to join that. But I think it's, again, we don't view this as anything, Chris Chris said this before, it's just math like ProsperOps created an effective savings rate, but it's just math. And in my view, every organization, whether you're a ProsperOps customer or not, should know your effective savings rate. Just like anybody who's investing money, you should know what your return is, otherwise, you have no way to quantify the effectiveness of your efforts. And so it's an incredibly beneficial metric for the industry at large.

Guest: Erik

It's a complete cloud-agnostic metric. And so while we today are supporting us, there's nothing unique to AWS about this metric. You can measure ESR on Google, you can measure ESR on Azure. And so we think this is a metric that is useful in the sense of assessing your relative savings performance, which for us is important as an automated service in sort of making the case. But apart from that, it's just useful for the industry at large and for folks to understand what their effective savings rate is. And it's the cool thing too is it's marketable. And so part of us donating this to the FENOs Foundation is also submitting all of our benchmarking data so you can know if you're achieving a 30% effective savings rate, well, is that an A plus? Is that a B? Is that a D? How do you know? Effective savings rate allows you to not only understand your savings rate but then say, okay, where do I sit relative to peers in the industry and how do I continue to push that higher if there's more to be had?

Host: Jon

Well, Erik, you were talking about FinOps X and you have a session that's happening Wednesday at two 30 at FinOps X, though it kicks off on the 27th. I encourage everybody to sign up for Erik's session. Don't worry. I'm sure it's going to be recorded and shared later. There's also a prosperous booth. Erik, can you share some of the features that you're working on or that you just released?

Guest: Erik

Well, I can't reveal what we're working on, but I can tell you some of the recent features may be that we've launched. And so just to give you a couple of examples of some recent launches, one feature we recently launched is called Advanced cyclical optimization support. And so I mentioned earlier that the cloud is just more and more dynamic. And generally what we find is that customers, apart from an automated solution that can continually evaluate and adapt end up covering when you have cyclical usage, they end up covering at the trough of usage and the actual optimal savings point is higher than the trough. And it takes a lot of complex sort of math and forecasting, et cetera to figure out that point and continually maintain it. And so this is an interesting feature that we launched completely free for our existing customers, no extra charge, but it just increases their effective savings rate because it finds the more optimal coverage point.

Guest: Erik

And that's just an example of us working to continually drive effective savings rates higher and higher and create that gap that exists between sort of D I Y approaches versus what a sophisticated algorithmic automated solution can achieve. One other feature I'll mention is something we call dynamic prepay amortization tracking DPA for short, but a lot of our customers are prepaying their commitments. And so if you prepay Amazon gives you an incremental discount. This is also another way to drive effective savings rates higher. But in a very dynamic world of spend where our service is changing commitments and moving them around, it becomes very difficult for finance and accounting teams to properly amortize their prepayments. And so this became a problem that no other solution on the market is solving. And so our customer said, this is something that would be valuable if we had a solution to. So we built a capability in our platform that allows our customer accounting and finance teams to simply log in at the end of the month. We track all of that and we show them how their prepayment is amortized over time. And we have multiple customers today that use that to close their monthly books. And so that's just a taste of some of the recent features that we've launched for our customers.

Host: Jon

All right, Erik, thank you for the insight on some of the recent features that you launched. Hi everybody. My name's Jon Myer and you're watching the Jon Myer podcast. Today's topic is ProsperOps, the journey to 1 billion in AWS Compute Spend Under Management. We're talking with the three co-founders. Now, Chris Gil could not make it, but we're going to give him a shout-out in this. We're talking with Chris Cochran and Erik Carlin. Now, Chris, I want to wrap things up and talk about your channel partner program. Recently I had the pleasure of working hand in hand with Joe Henderson on a very collaborative creative video, which was fun around the rocky theme with your team and announcing your expansion of the partner program. It sounds like there's a massive opportunity for cloud partners. What technology partners, resellers, MSPs, and consultants can they do with ops?

Guest: Chris

Yeah, we serve many AWS distributors, resellers, managed service providers, and even consultants. And we love to partner. We find in general that a lot of those service providers end up solving sort of a very broad set of problems for our customers. And we're always very complimentary because we slide right into that sort of automated rate optimization spot that compliments all the other things that they do for customers. But one of the things that we learned back in our prior life was that when you're a service provider and you're delivering your value to end customers, in many cases, humans can be the hardest thing to scale in the equation. Even if you're good at hiring, even if you're good at training, even really if you're arming them with tools, they're always hard to scale and you're always trying to deliver a very consistent level of quality. And one of the benefits of an automated service like us being used by msp, et cetera, is that they get this automated delivery. It's infinitely scalable. It delivers a very consistent sort of optimization outcome to customers and allows our partners to focus on other things that they do very well. So we love to work with folks and we can add a lot of value together for our customers. And I'm glad you filmed that video with Joe in the Rocky Montage. It was awesome.

Host: Jon

I love doing that video. Joe came up with the idea and we just ran with it. Thankfully, he and I are relatively close to each other. We went down to Philly and went to all the famous Rocky things. If you haven't seen it, don't worry. The link will be in the description. You got to go to ProsperOps.com/partners for more information. Erik, I'm thinking startups have an interesting story to tell. Do you have one that you could share with us?

Guest: Erik

Yeah, there's one that always comes to mind, and I think you're right, startups all tend to have just a story. And I was, as I mentioned earlier our very first customer that I was just amazed that someone was going to pay us. But a little bit later, we landed our first kind of big customer. And in the early days of startups, you're building the plane sort of in real-time as you're going. And so our first big customer hit some edge cases and pushed us in ways that we weren't completely ready for. And I remember that it happened when I was visiting my brother who lives in Central Virginia and didn't have great internet at the time. And so I just remember being up working late, and he didn't have good internet. So I had to go to McDonald's in Lynchburg, Virginia, working at McDonald's on their wifi until they closed at 11, and they're mopping the floors, and I'm still working on McDonald's wifi.

Guest: Erik

And finally, they kicked me out at midnight, I went back to my brother's house, went to his basement, and tethered my laptop to my phone. I had one bar, and I remember working until, I think it was four o'clock in the morning, my brother has five cats that all sleep in the basement. So cats are walking on my shoulders and walking on my laptop, and I'm working in the basement with these five cats around me, tethered to my phone in Central Virginia with one bar. So we could get this customer online and start saving them money. So I don't know, you never, every startup's going to have some moment like that where it's, it's just stuck in your mind as part of the journey. So

Guest: Chris

That's Carlin. If we hit a billion in AWS compute usage under management, I think we're going to spring to move you up from that. Dial-up to a full t1, and see where it goes. You deserve it, man.

Guest: Erik

Yes, my brother, I'll upgrade. My brother has since upgraded his internet, but at the time it was rough.

Host: Jon

True customer obsession and the journey to it. So, Erik, I want to end it with you and I want to know what's next for ProsperOps. Where are you guys going? What events are happening?

Guest: Erik

Yeah, look, I think Jon, the way that I think about what's next for ProsperOps is taking a step back and thinking about the current problem. So if you look at the three big public clouds, right? AWS is about an 80 billion run rate. Azure is about 60, and Google's about 30. So altogether that's about 170 billion a year growing to half a trillion to a trillion dollars. And it's estimated that about 30% of all cloud spending is waste. That is, there's inefficiency that exists somewhere in customers' use of the cloud. And of course that's not intentional. But in the course of all of the agility and all of the power that exists, there is inefficiency and traditional solutions are not effective at removing that waste. If it was, the waste wouldn't exist. And so to remove that waste requires automation. It requires complex algorithms.

Guest: Erik

And our mission is one of public cloud waste removal. And we've attacked sort of a specific problem set today that we think is kind of the biggest lever that you can pull right now in removing waste. But there's a lot more to do in this space. And so if I think about what's next for ProsperOps, it's really about continuing to innovate in ways that our customers, our platform, will remove more and more inefficiency, more and more waste so that they can keep more money and use that to invest in and further projects or whatever they want to do with those funds.

Host: Jon

Chris, I got to thank you so much for joining the show. Jon, it's a

Guest: Erik

A pleasure to be here. It's good to see you again.

Host: Jon

Yeah, likewise, Erik. Thank you so much for joining the show.

Guest: Erik

Yeah, same. Still looking forward to getting some barbecue in Austin. So

Host: Jon

Every day my hunger grows more and more for that barbecue. We we'll have to all get-together and have a nice sit down over some ribs. I'm already thinking about those beef ribs. Yeah, I got to stop talking about it. Getting a little hungry. All right, everybody. My name's Jon Myer, and you've been watching the Jon Myer podcast. Today's topic was ProsperOps, the journey to 1 billion in AWS Compute Spend under Management. Now, we've been talking with the three co-founders. Chris Gill couldn't join us today, but we have Chris Cochran and Erik Carlin joining us. Don't forget to hit that, like subscribe and notify, because we're out of here.