SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1215 Cloudability CEO: We're Past $20m in ARR, 11% of Total AWS Spend
21 Nov 2018
Chapter 1: What inspired Mat Ellis to start Cloudability?
It's going to take longer to get to that island than you think. You know, he's doing some consulting work. Then one on vacation, you know, consulting with cloud clients, sending them emails each day, each month, saying what they spent on cloud over the past month and what he thinks they're going to spend. It was working fine until he came back from a vacation and his inbox was totally flooded.
The thing broke. And he realized then there was a massive need here. Launched a company officially in 2011. Now has 130 people helping you spend and really optimize your cloud spend more efficiently so you can handle more. Playing in a space that's obviously growing year over year aggressively. They control about 11 or they have about 11% of total spend that goes through AWS.
It goes through cloudability rates. 32 million bucks in equity. Obviously more than that when you put on Mez and venture debt. 2X in year over year north of $20 million in ARR today, hoping to break $50 million next year over 100% net revenue retention annually as well. Healthy company.
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple of hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs.
We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Matt Ellis. He founded Cloudability in April 2011 and is its current CEO.
Before the company, he held executive positions with four startups and key technology roles at Frito-Lay, Pepsi, Cola, and Goldman Sachs. He currently sits on the boards of Oregon Entrepreneurs Network and the Technology Association of Oregon. Originally from the UK and now residing in Portland, Matt is known as a mentor and advisor to startups across the US.
Matt, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yes.
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Chapter 2: How does Cloudability help optimize cloud spending?
It's filled very early days. So a lot of it's like with SAP in the early days, it's just reporting on what you're buying. But the more advanced users are using, not just to making choices, but getting down to building materials for each individual customer, not an average, but an actual.
Chapter 3: What is the revenue model of Cloudability?
And between 2011 and today, I mean, what have you scaled to in terms of total customers using you?
We have 11% of Amazon's revenue going through our system and a fairly large amount of the other two big guys going through our system too.
Walk me through that metric. You said 11% of AWS going through your system?
When Amazon say their revenue for Q1 is 5.6 billion. Yep. We'll have about a billion dollars of that spending go through. So about half a billion dollars of revenue go through the system.
Is that kind of how you measure your market share? It's amount of spend through your system?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And who are the two other big ones? Rackspace or? Google and Azure. Google and Azure. Got it. Got it. And what percentage of those do you have? I couldn't tell you. Oh, okay. Okay. Got it. But is Amazon your biggest? Yes. Okay. Got it.
I'm the biggest in the market anyway.
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Chapter 4: What competitive landscape does Cloudability operate in?
And how old are you? I'm 46. 46. Last question, Matt. What do you wish your 20-year-old self knew?
It's going to take way longer to buy that island than you think. It's a marathon, not a sprint.
Guys, there you have it. It's going to take longer to get to that island than you think. You know, he's doing some consulting work, then went on vacation, you know, consulting with cloud clients, sending them emails each day, each month, saying what they spent on cloud over the past month and what he thinks they're going to spend.
It was working fine until he came back from a vacation and his inbox was totally flooded. The thing broke. And he realized then there was a massive need here. Launched a company officially in 2011. Now has 130 people helping you spend and really optimize your cloud spend more efficiently so you can handle more. Playing in a space that's obviously growing year over year aggressively.
They control about 11 or they have about 11% of total spend that goes through AWS. It goes through cloudability rates. 32 million bucks in equity. Obviously more than that when you put on Mez and venture debt. Two X-ing year over year north of $20 million in ARR today, hoping to break $50 million next year over 100% net revenue retention annually as well. Healthy company.
Matt, thank you for taking us to the top.
Thank you for having me.
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