Arvatz: Cloud cost optimization must be an engineering problem, not finance
Alon Arvatz · He exited for $335M—& felt "emptiness". So he quit, gave up millions in earnout, & grew to $1M AR... · PMF Show · Feb 10, 2025 · at 30:22
Alon Arvatz, founder of cloud cost startup PointFive (.5) and former VP at Rapid7, explains why traditional financial tooling fails to reduce cloud spend.
0:00 / 0:30exact quote · 30.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Essentially the main gap in making it happen today is how you create this engineering experience that get them engaged and lead to action. Because in the end of the day, The finance team, they cannot make changes to the cloud infrastructure. They don't have the knowledge, they don't have the access, they don't have the capability to do that. In the end of the day, it has to be an engineering job. And how you make this transition from financial problem to an engineering problem and enable the engineers to do that is exactly the problem that we tackle.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alon Arvatz
Arvatz: Governments are rarely on the cybersecurity cutting edge due to air-gapping
“It's not that governments are in the cutting edge of doing cybersecurity. They typically aren't. Why? They don't need to, because they're not connected to the internet. So the risks are very different than the risks of the average company.”
Arvatz: Build the UI and do backend work manually before automating
“That's what we did because we said, okay, we want to start engagement. We want to start selling. It will take us time to build a software. Let's in the meantime, build a UI. We'll do it manually behind the scenes. We'll learn how to do it right through the man…”
Arvatz: Only fake backend workflows if they are automatable within four months
“I would only do something manually. If I know I can automate within three, four months, I wouldn't do something manually that I know it will take me at least a year to automate, which is something we did in insights and eventually it slowed us down.”
Arvatz: Cybersecurity startup seed rounds today are no less than $6 million
“Today, seed round for a cybersecurity company is no less than six million dollars.”
Arvatz prefers 8% in a market leader over 15% in third place
“And I also think there is a huge merit to being number one in your market. I prefer I don't know. I prefer eight percent in a company that is number one in its market than 15% in a company that is number three or four.”
Arvatz: First-time founders with market pull shouldn't settle for quick exits
“Don't think I need to, you know, do the exit and cash out and my next one will be a lot better because you might, you know, hit huge pain, huge market. You need to go full force. There are amazing companies that were built by first time founders. I don't need …”