One of the great things about listening to start-up stories is that it makes anybody
feel like it's possible for them, they can do it too.
It puts belief into all of us that we can do what we really want to do with our lives.
We're tracking like a half a billion dollars of cloud spending right now for over 7,000
companies.
Our story starts in Cloudy, Portland, Oregon.
It was the height of the depression.
I knew there weren't any jobs.
I called around a bunch of friends and got some consultancy work to help them get on
the cloud and as each of my friends' companies got on the cloud, they faced the same problem
how to manage their usage and spending.
So I wrote Cloudability to get them off my back and forgot about it and it wasn't called
Cloudability, it wasn't paid and when it broke they all complained and within a few weeks
their bosses were called.
Some of them emotional and threatening to sue me and that's when it woke me up to the
idea that Cloudability was solving a really compelling problem.
Cloudability helps companies manage their spending on cloud services.
It shows them where the dollars are going, where there's waste or inefficiency and gives
both engineering and finance a better view into their expenditures on the cloud.
I met Matt at a meetup group in Portland a couple years ago.
I just felt that JR stood out as a real talent.
It was like if I could apply this guy to some of the things I'm doing, this is going to
be awesome.
I was instantly blown away by sort of the breadth of his experience.
I had that funny accent and everyone thinks I have a higher IQ because of it.
I translate for him.
He said I have a funny accent and everyone thinks he has a higher IQ.
Thank you.
We work well together.
Was it an expression?
You're the gas on the brakes?
Yeah, yeah.
I was pregnant with twins and that was coming up into March.
So as soon as JR was home with his twins, literally the next day, I turned up with a bottle of
champagne on the pretence of congratulating them.
He showed up at my house and I was like, hey, so that cloudability thing we've been talking
about, I think we should go all in on it.
I think that was the first time I met your wife as well.
Yeah, yeah, right.
She was like, okay.
JR's response in the moment of extreme endorphin rush was like, yeah, totally, let's do that.
Cloudability is five days younger than my children.
We dove in and Matt moved up John, our third co-founder from San Francisco.
John actually ended up living in Matt's house the first seven months.
I was excited to build a startup with Matt, like even though we all had new babies and
my wife's in med school and all these things were happening, that it was this is an opportunity
we had to take.
So we went for it.
I knew so many very talented people that I felt like I would be the servant with the
talent of silver bearing it in the ground if I didn't pull some of these incredibly
talented people together to do this.
I asked JR to have a look at it and he quoted what five hours.
This is a shoestring budget.
We were starting an idea basically.
We worked some of the techs to maybe make the graphics a little better.
So Alex, who's now our creative director, we put a lot more than five hours into it
and I kept saying to Alex, I know this is the way of the time, but I think there's something
here and I think we're going to build something cool and let's make this really special.
Cloudability was formed April 5, 2011.
There's not a single company we've invested in that's not using the cloud in some way.
This is transformative technology.
This is why entrepreneurs don't have to raise $5 million anymore.
The cloud is democratizing the entire startup ecosystem.
It's massively important and these guys are providing unparalleled insight to where your
money is going, how it's being used, all the analytics.
We were lucky enough to get selected to present our product on stage at Gigatome Structure
Conference in June of 2011, but at that point it was still just a set of screenshots and
at that event I promised that we'd release the product the next month.
It got us a lot of publicity, Gigatome or an article that ended up getting syndicated
in the New York Times and seeing in money and we suddenly had even more people saying,
I want to use this.
As we were building out the product, I still wasn't happy with what they call the minimum
viable product and I kept putting off the release and we kept doing more and more work
and then in August they came to me, JR and John and said, we've got to get this out there.
We came to a point where we really felt we were in an impasse.
We needed to get the product out the door and we needed to put it in front of people.
If we weren't going to do that right away, I felt like we were really going to be in
trouble.
And I'm like, no, no, no.
And it all came to a head on lunchtime.
John and JR told me this isn't working.
We've got to get this stuff out the door and against all my instinct, I said, okay, let's
do this.
And we went out.
It was great and we found out a lot of people really liked the core of the product and there
were three or four different things that we were certain we needed to build before it
actually needed, you know, before it was ready for prime time.
We actually put landing pages in the app that had screenshots of those of the three or four
things and said, hey, do you want these?
They're not available yet, but vote for it to get into the private beta for those.
So we joined Pi in September 2011.
We was in here for about a year totally, I did almost all of our private beta calls
in those phone booths for all, I think the first three to 400 customers we had, but that
was a private beta early November of 2011.
We did a big launch during that morning.
We were having a new sunup.
I think every 90 seconds, that was the first time that investors and journalists and users
started to talk about this thing called cloudability.
So after our launch, we used that to raise more money.
We went on to raise another million dollars, including our first VC money.
And about the same time we were approached by Jason Seats with this new thing called
Textiles Cloud.
They wanted to do big things and Matt really struck me as the man with the plan.
Textiles was a big unknown to me.
I mean, everyone was raving about it, but as an entrepreneur, you know, know that it's
good, you want to sit with your own eyes.
And of course, the best thing I think about Textiles is some of the intangibles is the
relationships, the focus.
Cloudability was destined to be in Textiles Cloud.
There were too many ways for them to arrive at San Antonio and too few ways for it not
to happen.
The biggest challenge that these guys had to come into Textiles was that they had actually
raised money from establishment or capital firms.
And they're like, well, doesn't that mean we're too late stage to come to Textiles?
We just raised the million dollars and we're growing pretty quickly.
It turned out that our investors were like, that's pretty bullsy of you saying you can
do even better with these guys.
Go do it.
The VCs are getting all this free help to make their investment worth more, right?
I mean, the Textiles Network is much larger than any one VC firm.
During the Textiles program, Cloudability executed like mad.
It was extremely impressive how much they could accomplish in a really short period
of time.
It was definitely different than most Textiles companies.
We kind of had to split our time between San Antonio and Textiles Cloud in Portland.
One of the great things about Textiles, I think it's just the chance encounters that
happen, the people who drop in.
Cloudability really leveraged the Textiles Network.
And what they learned was it didn't actually matter the stage of business that they were
in, because no matter what stage, they were able to leverage that network.
We now had money in the bank.
We needed to grow the company.
And so we embarked on the next journey, which was scaling up engineering, scaling up product.
Just over 30 days after Demo Day, we signed a term sheet with Foundry for our Series A.
And that was huge.
Our VCs are literally rock stars.
Like, they literally play rock music.
We were able to build out the rest of the product that we wanted to build out.
That product really took us off before we were at about $150 million of spending in
the system.
And we ended the year with over a quarter of a billion dollars of spending.
We grew the company to about 21 people.
And it was around that time that we had to do one of the more challenging things.
We had to part ways with one of our co-founders, John.
He's really a start-up guy.
He's called himself the Booster Rocket.
I think that's his real passion.
You know, it was a difficult experience to sort of part ways, but it was the right timing.
He was ready to go on to something different.
My husband is doing something that he has always wanted to do.
I think that it's great that he's doing something from the ground up.
I've been really excited about where we are and the milestones we've accomplished.
I've got a great office downtown Portland.
Two years ago, we started Cloudability with Matt's vision for what this could turn into.
And it was just three guys, you know, with borrowed office space and writing some quick
code and hacking together some bootstrap marketing.
And now, two years later, we're actually a company.
We've got, you know, 20-some people building out a bigger platform and 7,000 companies
are using it to track like a half a billion dollars of cloud spending now.
We're no longer in a sprint.
We're now going into a marathon.
And we really need to focus on making sure that we don't pay too much attention to little
ups and downs.
People always ask, what's the best way to be successful?
It's like you have to have that hunger, otherwise you're not.
And they legitimately have it.
There's this big pushback.
Like there's a resistance when you're starting a company.
It's like the entire world is telling you, no, and you just kind of have to keep leaning
into it.
And you just got to have a little bit of blind faith.
And you got to have every day wake up, you know, seeing like the next hill that you need
to conquer and like running for that hill.
You really got to push hard to stand out and to say, hey, I'm here and I'm real.
And you know, you should pay close attention to what I'm doing.
Take me back to the mountain I'm sure.
Our impression still lays there on its floor.
On these marks we will be.
Get back to work.
