 Hi, this is your host, Subhan Bhatia. And welcome to another episode of Dear Let's Talk. And today, we have with us Roy Rabhaan, CEO and co-founder of Finaud. Roy, it's great to have you on the show. Yes, well, thank you for having me, Subhan. Yeah, and today, the focus is going to be more on cost cutting. All the way we look at it is becoming more cost efficient, as you are also aware. A lot of layoffs are happening. Folks are looking at cloud cost. I think initially what was happening was, and I may be totally wrong, was that folks are looking at, hey, you have a problem? Through a hundred developers of that, they'll solve the problem. You have a problem? Just move to the cloud, it will solve the problem. And now things are maturing, and they're realizing, hey, how to properly allocate the sources. So if I ask you, from your perspective, how do you look at this cost cutting or cost efficiency that we are seeing in the market? So I think the macro economy in the next two quarters started to really change the way that we're looking at cloud cost and cloud expense. We moved and migrated a ton of workload to the cloud, especially enterprises expedited their cloud modernization and started to launch a bunch of resources, hoping that it will cost less money than on-prem. And really quickly, everyone started to realize that cloud can be very expensive if it's poorly managed. And cloud costs are often starts to get out of control. And when cash was free and cheap, cost efficiency was not a number one priority. Like everyone wanted to increase their top line. But now when we start to measure our profitability, measure gross margin, suddenly cloud cost became one of the biggest expenses that the company have most often, like even the second one after salaries. And it's not something that companies can ignore no more. And we started to see more companies starts to optimize their cloud cost and starts to focus on efficiency at scale, which can sometimes be harder than it seems. And nobody is in a better position than you folks at FinOut to also look at this problem from a totally different perspective. It is that from outside, we do see layoffs are happening. People are talking about it. But internally, you did touch upon that. But how companies are actually restructuring themselves to once again, as you talked about, to become more efficient. Also, yes, well, the fact that with the recession, like Germany is saying, there may be a mild recession. There may be no recession. Sometimes folks want you to get scared and afraid. But companies are also using that as an excuse also to thin themselves. So what exactly is happening inside the companies, you folks have a lot of clients there, and you do know their pain points. You're like, hey, this is the actual problem they are trying to solve from outside. It may look totally different. Other than just saving money, cutting down 10%, 20% of your cloud cost is great. But it's probably not going to save your business. What is going to save your business is that you're becoming efficient at scale. And companies are now drawing their path to profitability, like everyone is talking about it. And it's okay to spend money to cloud, right? It's admirable. Like if you're spending more money to cloud, it usually means that you're just growing, and growing is good. But you need to make sure that you're spending more money on cloud for growth and not for waste. And we start to see lots of companies start to focus on the unit economics and start to measure their profitability margins and making sure that engineers can run as fast as they can and innovate and release software and type to market is as critical as ever. But we need to make sure that our unit economics remains the same. So it's not just cutting down costs. It's designing for profitability, making sure that we are building a viable business, making sure that economy of scale starts to kick in. And the more that we're selling, the lower the increase that we're supposed to see on our cloud cost. And this means that we have a business that we can operate and is sustainable from the long run. And what you're seeing a lot of companies are trying to do here, I mean, we have had this discussion with Finnaut earlier also. I mean, you folks have been talking about, you know, become more cost efficient. So when you look at it, you're like, this is what we have been talking about. We have been telling, we have been helping companies to become cost efficient. So talk a bit about when you see this change and you're like, this actually perfectly works for us. Yes, you know, we start to see more and more companies throughout the ecosystem start to focus on, you know, their products on cost management. Obviously this is, you know, one of the hottest topic currently in the market because we start to see real demand for this. And, you know, we are gonna have a tough year 2023, probably, you know, it's an industry. But I think that, you know, an economy crisis like that is an educating moment for companies and something to grow on. And I don't think that we're gonna revert to, you know, just spending lots of money and thinking, not thinking about the consequences. So I think cost efficiency is here to stay and there's a lot of opportunities in FinOps and in the cost management market. And, you know, we're super excited that we started two years ago that now we're perfectly positioned in order to really help companies when they really need us the most. And we can make sure that everyone are getting their, you know, their unit economics aligned and understandable profitability margins and really can start to grow their FinOps operation and perception without having to wait for the industry to react and start to produce anything. How can FinOps actually help? You know, just talk a bit about how you help folks in, you know, taming their, you know, expenses and cost. So when company starts to embrace FinOps and start to operate that FinOps framework, one of the first things that started is let's optimize, right? Let's reduce down the cost. Let's make sure that we're turning off all unused resources. We're right sizing wherever we can. We're adopting to new technologies. We're utilizing the cloud as we should. That's the first aspect of it. And obviously, FinOps can help with that. And then we need to start to really measure our business and to make sure that we identify our unit economics. We are aligning cloud costs with business value. And eventually we need to, you know, change the perception of cloud spend into cloud investments. And this is something that FinOps can really help with. So we're investing money in AWS in order to generate more revenue. And this is the only way that we can look at it, you know, to make sure that we can continue to grow. We can continue to, everything will make sense. And we're not just overspending and there should be a clear ROI from those expenses. And FinOps can help, you know, take both the cloud cost and the usage and the actual business and really make sure that we can tie it all together. So everyone understands why we're spending that money. And if it's money spent well and how it's actually contributing to our business goals. You also talked about, of course, the cost associated with cloud was salaries as well. With these layoffs, last year we, well, last year for a while we have been talking about a huge gap in supply and demand of tech folks who are, you know, and we're like, hey, they're not enough people. Now with these layoffs, I mean, when we looked at it, the problem was the big companies they can afford. So they were like sucking up all the talent that was coming out of the colleges and universities. And so a lot of startups, smaller companies, they could not afford them. Now we have these folks who have actually been working in production. These are not Greenhorn developers. They have been working in production. And now these developers are in the market. So do you also feel that it will actually help companies, you know, actually also hire people that they needed because sometime a lot of areas were getting compromised because they were not enough people? Yes, so 100%, you know, economy crisis and layoffs of one company is an opportunity for the other. And I think, you know, younger companies really suffered the past couple of years. Like we needed to increase our salaries or burn rate getting, you know, severely upper than what we, when we had dissipated and budgeted for. And now I think, you know, smaller companies have the ability to, you know, to hire amazing talents, starts to invest with getting the best folks. And we see, you know, throughout the market that the companies are firing amazing people just because they, you know, whether it's less one to come in or the shut off in the project that they were working for. And it has nothing to do with their capabilities. And I think it really generates a vast amount of opportunities and companies that are adapting fast and making sure that they can react to 2023. And their product is not niche is something that is in the core business of the companies can not only, you know, survive this economy but actually get on the other side significantly stronger than what they get in because, you know, we just need to take those opportunities in our hands. What advice do you have for companies who want to become cost efficient? So when we'll, as you said, you know, cost cutting can also be seen as, you know, more resources for a different department altogether. Nothing can be changed without a company, you know, decision. And if there is a change in culture that is gonna, you know, accompany every process that you run, this is something that really can, you know, really create value. But just buying a tool, just optimizing costs, just firing people is not enough. It's, you know, just, we're gonna revert to the same kind of old habits. We continue to grow at cloud costs without any experts and whatever. But if engineers are understand that, you know, cloud costs suddenly has like significant meaning and they start to be responsible for what they're doing. And it's really, you know, the same with, as we construct DevOps just a few years ago that engineers understand that now operationally they are responsible for the code. So now they're responsible financially as well. And if, you know, company can really get that shift in motion, then tools are gonna help. And, you know, companies can be significantly, you know, better at what they're doing. But first and foremost, it's a decision that the company need to make. You need to back it up. You need to, you know, change the way that they're thinking about cloud costs and everything will flow from there. Roy, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this topic. And as usual, I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's something I'm always happy to be here.