Mat Ellis

We've been doing two years of cloud in my last startup.

So I helped them move to the cloud.

They all had problems with their spending.

They complained all the time.

I'd unwittingly help their tech team get around all financial controls.

And because there were three people I worked with before, when they called me up and asked for what they'd spent yesterday on the cloud, I couldn't charge them $400 for a billing analysis.

And it was taking up a lot of my time.

So I wrote CloudAbility to get them off my back.

And I sent a daily email with what they spent yesterday and what I thought they were going to spend for the month.

That was great.

A few months later, it broke.

I was in Iceland at the time.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

A few months of no phone calls, everyone's happy.

And then I come back from Iceland and my voicemail's filled up.

My inbox is filled up and people are threatening to sue me because this thing's not working and they really need it.

And that's when I sat down and thought, hang on, what's going on here?

And that's when I realized that a cloud is simply the maturation of technology.

The way you made technology work before was you had smart people to make it just work.

That Ubuntu server wasn't going to stay working unless it's someone to keep it working.