Venture Everywhere Podcast: Matt Biringer with Jenny Fielding
Venture Everywhere Podcast: Matt Biringer with Jenny Fielding
Matt Biringer, co-founder and CEO of North, chats with Jenny Fielding, co-founder and GP of Everywhere VC on episode 50: Cloud Cover.
Episode 50 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Jenny Fielding, Co-founder and GP of Everywhere Ventures. She chats with Matt Biringer, co-founder and CEO of North, a cloud optimization platform designed to democratize cost efficiency for businesses of all sizes. Matt shares his transition from a career in sales to founding North and how it empowers businesses to optimize and reduce cloud costs, especially on AWS. Matt discussed his vision for cloud-based finance management, aiming to transform operations by leveraging AI and innovative automation solutions.
In this episode, you will hear:
The complexities of cloud licensing and why North is starting with AWS.
How North prioritizes customer experience to differentiate from competitors.
Streamlining cloud management with innovative dashboards to eliminate inefficient manual processes.
Addressing misconceptions about the cloud finance market.
Security considerations in product development for tech companies.
Distinction between one-time services and ongoing cloud optimization processes.
Recognizing potential and intangibles in people.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. I hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:21 Jenny: Alright, well, welcome to Venture Everywhere. I'm so excited to be here with our guest, Matt, from a company called North. And I'm very excited about North's mission, although it seems simple, optimizing your cloud spend. There's a lot of nuance that we're going to get into and I think a lot of unknowns.
00:00:39 Jenny: And I guess, especially with our portfolio of 260 companies, this is something that founders really struggle with, but most people don't talk about. Maybe it's not super sexy. Cloud optimization. But you are going to tell us why it is sexy, Matt, and we're going to dive into all things cloud and founder.
00:00:57 Jenny: So I'd love to kick off by just talking a little bit about your background. I noticed as I was doing some stalking that you started off in sales, but now you're running a very technical product. So maybe you can start there… or kind of the evolution and how you got into something that was a little more sales-like and what were the insights from that?
00:01:16 Matt: Yeah, I appreciate it. And thanks for having me on. It's really a pleasure to chat. So I literally started my career as an inside sales rep, cold calling companies, going to events, really doing anything for net new logo generation. And I got very fortunate on a lot of things, but the biggest thing I think I got fortunate on was getting into a great industry.
00:01:34 Matt: So I broke into the data center tech space, probably in the 2010 range, 2010ish. And I come from a super blue collar family. My grandparents were teachers. My dad was an electrician. My mom was a stay at home mom, like very working class type of background.
00:01:52 Matt: And I very quickly figured out that there were people who weren't necessarily miles smarter than me that were making a lot of money. And a few light bulbs went off. At that point, I had done the college route, tried to figure out if I wanted to continue in academia or whatever. And I figured out the college really wasn't for me.
00:02:10 Matt: I wasn't really that engaged in a traditional learning setting, but something about being on a sales floor. And the rush of chasing new customers and the rush of building business from the ground up really resonated with me and I just loved it. It felt a lot like being in a kitchen in a weird way. Like my dad was a chef, I worked in restaurants all growing up.
00:02:28 Matt: So I really loved the rush of Friday night hits and everyone's busy and running around like craziness. And it's just like, there's something so exciting about that. And I found that a little bit in sales, particularly in tech sales. And I just loved it.
00:02:40 Jenny: Do you work at any of those companies where they give you a gong? Or...
00:02:43 Matt: Yeah.
00:02:44 Jenny: …… your quota.
00:02:46 Matt: Yeah. Yeah. My last company before starting North, we had a gong and we also had the ski shooter with everything. So depending on how good of a quarter you did, you left the office the last day of the quarter quite drunk. So I had a great run.
00:02:57 Matt: I was doing sales for 12 years and I really just reached a point where earlier in my career, I thought I want to build this to a point where I feel comfortable enough trying to have my own company.
00:03:06 Matt: I understood that sales is just a great bedrock to jump into entrepreneurship because if you could sell something, you can sell the idea of something to somebody. You can sell the concept of what you're trying to build to people who want to join your company. There's so many uses for having sales skills in entrepreneurship.
00:03:23 Matt: So it was just a natural jump for me and I got the end of my 12 years selling and I just thought I've made a decent little chunk of money. I wasn't a millionaire by any stretch of imagination or anything like that. But I thought now is a great time to take a gamble and try and start something for myself, which is what I did.
00:03:38 Jenny: Awesome. Well, I'd love to now talk about the leap from sales and working for other people to starting your own company and being obsessed with cloud optimization.
00:03:47 Jenny: I know that when we first invested, one of the things that really struck me was how passionate you were about the space and how you had this unique insight, not just about what was happening now, but the future and where things are going and we always look for entrepreneurs that have that insight of a world that doesn't exactly exist today, but they're really looking at where things are going.
00:04:08 Matt: Yeah, it's a really good question. So when I was in my sales years, I took a lot of pride in being somebody that treated customers amazingly. And that's still like that type of culture still reverberates with our company. I'm trying to put that in the DNA of our company. We want to be the best customer experience company in our category by a country mile, like not even close.
00:04:28 Matt: And what I've learned throughout the years of selling to tech personas, CTOs, VP of engineering type of folks is they will invest their business with you for a very long time. If you not just build good products, but you treat them really well.
00:04:41 Matt: And that might mean that like, there's a deal or a negotiation where you're helping them do something customized that maybe you don't always do, but you really want to take care of them and make it happen. Right.
00:04:50 Matt: And in the last probably four years selling, I had figured out how complex and how frustrating any cloud licensing really was, but particularly AWS, which is where we decided to start. It's also the biggest market. So it made a lot of sense for us.
00:05:04 Matt: But this just seemed like a perfect place to build a company that looked and felt like a SaaS company, had SaaS revenue and multiples and all of that, and had SaaS growth potential, but also was a customer experience company and was using technology to digitize the operational piece of it as much as it could.
00:05:23 Matt: And if you look at how people traditionally did this. I mean, even now, we talk to customers who are spending millions of dollars per month and they're essentially using spreadsheets to manage us, which is crazy. It's probably the equivalent of somebody going out to raise their Series C or Series D and they run the company books and the company payroll on Excel.
00:05:39 Matt: And it's like, why in the world would you do that at this day and age? And the answer is, there's not a lot of good tooling out there. And there's a lot of tooling out there, but not a lot of it is necessarily good in our category. So I figured out very early in the company that we could build something that was really unique.
00:05:53 Matt: And we could sell it at scale because almost every company at the stage of the game is using the cloud for something. Most companies that we talk to are using the cloud for almost all of their technology. Everything that backends their internal applications, their external application they charge customers for.
00:06:10 Matt: Everything they're doing with AI and machine learning, their development, their experimentation, R&D, like all of that stuff is running in these AWS accounts. And our customers were getting invoices that were 80, 100 pages long.
00:06:21 Matt: And they were trying to sort it out, copy and pasting it in the spreadsheets. It was like, hey, we're going to build this thing that just plugs in. It does 95% of what you want to do from an optimization perspective. And it does it in about five minutes. And it just runs in the background for you.
00:06:35 Matt: And we bet really big on customer experience. We've been really big on making it as simple as possible. And the results have been really great. So really we're just focused on scaling and making sure that we grow in a healthy ecological way, the best that we can.
00:06:47 Jenny: And so just for the audience, it's a dashboard, so you can get rid of those Excel spreadsheets. And for anyone that maybe is not familiar, cloud spend changes month to month and group to group. So maybe you could talk just a little bit about that fragmentation that I think if you're not in the industry, if you're not a CTO, sometimes you don't know.
00:07:06 Jenny: I mean, I know when I was running a company, it didn't logically make sense to me that there would be these variations and that it would be so disaggregated. So...
00:07:15 Matt: Yeah, it's really complex and the simplest way to think of it is almost like a heating bill. At least in theory, it's a heating bill times like a thousand X complexity and a thousand X costs really at the end of the day. So it's really a retroactive bill that comes once a month.
00:07:28 Matt: And everybody that is running a company or running a tech firm or whatever the case may be is running a bunch of servers and databases and analytics, products and plugins and you name it in these cloud systems and they basically all have pricing per hour.
00:07:43 Matt: And if you're a really small company and you're just running a couple of servers, it's really as simple as that. There's not a lot of complexity. You're like, hey, I'm going to get charged for as many servers I use each month. And when I want to shut them off, I don't have to pay for them anymore. And it's really as simple as that.
00:07:56 Matt: When you get to a scale of venture backed company, that's trying to scale to be a billion dollar company, and which is most of our companies that we work with. They're typically spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a month in these ecosystems.
00:08:10 Matt: And they have to essentially begin to go down the rabbit hole of managing, forecasting, allocation. All these cloud providers have discount commitment programs, for example, that are essentially licensing programs. You commit to a certain product to use it for three years, you get 50 or 60% off somebody who's not committing to use it for three years, right?
00:08:31 Matt: So it's on demand versus committed use discount. So all of these ecosystems have these really, really complex programs and they're all different depending on the product and situation and what data center or region in the cloud ecosystem it's running on, et cetera, et cetera.
00:08:45 Matt: And our platform simplifies that tremendously and also lets customers essentially manage their cloud subscriptions with monthly flexibility. So we automate deep discounting, we automate the FinOps, we automate the cost visibility. So we're reducing costs and we take a chunk of what we reduce.
00:09:02 Matt: So it never feels like there's a capital expenditure for companies, which is really cool, but the program continually turns positive cashflow for our customers every single month. So it's really something that's automated that runs in the background, which is pretty cool.
00:09:14 Jenny: I love it. I love the simplicity of it. And the explanation is really helpful because again, I think a lot of people just assume it's turnkey. You know how much you need and that's consistent, but as we've found as you scale a company, it's really not.
00:09:27 Jenny: All right. So now I'd love to know, give us the inside Matt's brain. You're working in sales. You love the gong and all of this. And starting a company is a big leap. There's a lot of risk that you have to take. There's a lot of uncertainty. So did you always think that you were gonna start a company?
00:09:45 Jenny: Like that founder mindset is something that sometimes people think they're born with it. Sometimes they cultivate it. So where'd that come from? And what was it like taking the leap?
00:09:57 Matt: Yeah, it was pretty crazy. I don't think I was born with a founder's mindset. I commend a lot of really smart people who are starting lemonade stands when they're in kindergarten, stuff like that. That just really wasn't me.
00:10:05 Matt: I was more of like, I want to play video games when I get from school and be left alone. I was much more of like an introvert than that. So maybe I'm not like a traditional founder in that sense, but yeah, it was pretty crazy.
00:10:15 Matt: I mean, for me, I'm not 25 obviously. So I have a house, I have kids, I have a wife, I have bills that have to pay and stuff like that. So essentially go from making a really nice paycheck that is pretty dependable. Working for a publicly traded company to go and start your own thing was, probably I'll look back at the end of my life and be like, that was the craziest thing I ever did, or one of the craziest things I ever did. I will say the first two months, the sleepless nights are very real. You wake up almost every morning being like, what did I just do? I quit my job. My LinkedIn says I'm a founder of a company, nothing really exists yet.
00:10:48 Matt: We're working on prototypes and trying to recruit a CTO at the time. I mean, it was really, really crazy. And what I did to structure it is I was like, hey, I'm gonna save up at least six to eight months of living expenses and just try and live off my savings for a bit.
00:11:03 Matt: And really just give this everything I possibly can for that period of time and just see what happens. If it gets to the end of that period and we almost got there where I didn't make enough progress, that was during our pre-seed. We struggled to raise our pre-seed. I can get into a whole million stories there.
00:11:17 Matt: But I really was like, hey, I'm going to work around the clock on this thing and deal with the sleepless nights and everything and all the anxiety and just see if I can get to the next step. And then, I kept on telling myself this, almost like a mantra of it's not zero, which means that like I didn't have zero dollars in the bank yet. I wasn't officially legally broke yet. Like the company still had a little bit of runway.
00:11:38 Jenny: Oh, what we tell ourselves as founders.
00:11:42 Matt: You like tell yourself these crazy things. And you look back, you're like, I was literally in a one-person cult by myself, telling myself these crazy things. That's just the only thing I kept in mind is, you're not zero yet. Keep fighting and just see what happens. And we got there slowly but surely.
00:11:57 Matt: It took us about six months to build a working prototype. It took us another three or four months to raise some capital after that during our pre-seed. Scraped by a tiny bit of capital during our pre-seed. We signed a couple early customers.
00:12:08 Matt: It was like very tiny dominoes fell very far apart on a timescale and then dominoes started getting slightly bigger and smaller apart on the timescale. So that's kind of what it felt like, but going from zero to around one, like your first time around was really an experience I'll never be able to put myself through again, like in that exact way. So it was really crazy, but it was cool.
00:12:28 Jenny: I love hearing about the timeline because we just read about stuff in TechCrunch and we think like, oh, person comes up with an idea. They get an MVP together and they go raise a pre-seed. And so there's obviously so much more nuance there as you suggested.
00:12:42 Jenny: So tell us a little bit how you met your CTO and how that partnership came together and love to start there with the team.
00:12:50 Matt: Yeah, so I met Yassine, basically I'd started reading job listings for like a couple of different roles, one was co-founder CTO, I was like, let me see if I can get somebody in the door that could be a co-founder CTO. Let me see if I can get somebody in the door that wants to be a founding engineer and maybe we raise capital and we pay this person a little bit for a little bit.
00:13:07 Matt: So I was trying to play with a lot of different ways to do this and me personally, like I can do the sales, I can do a little bit of product design, do the operational stuff, do the investor stuff. I could probably teach myself how to code very badly if I had enough time, but I didn't feel like it was a good investment of time.
00:13:23 Matt: I just felt like at the stage, I really wanted a co-founder and somebody that could really share the day-to-day running of the business. And I just thought it would just be a fourth multiplier if I had a second person that was invested as much as me, even if you're giving equity obviously to that person.
00:13:37 Matt: So I had met Yassine remotely the first time that we met and for people listening, Yassine is my co-founder and CTO. He's still with the company. He's amazing. Love that guy. I just saw him last night.
00:13:47 Matt: Anyway, Yassine ran like a masterclass on how to get in the door at an early stage company. In my opinion is we had a couple of really good conversations on like the third or fourth conversation. He had sent me this really long document and you could tell he spent a few hours on it.
00:14:03 Matt: It wasn't like a work document. It had graphical design with boxes and things connecting and talking to each other. And it was really like his concept of how the guts of the MVP essentially would work everything from like customer connectivity to like where the data gets pulled, what are we doing from a machine learning perspective? It was really technical.
00:14:19 Matt: And he did that without me asking it. He just sent it to me. He was like, hey, what do you think of this? I just put it together. I'm really excited. And the one thing I've learned as an entrepreneur is you can recruit based on skill and hope the intangibles are there, or you can try and find somebody that has intangibles and has some of the skill you're looking for, but like the intangibles to increase their skill set over time.
00:14:43 Matt: So Yassine didn't have any CTO experience prior to jumping into this project. So for me, what I loved about him was he had all the intangibles. He was the nicest person. He was really, really technical. He could code really well. He had the wherewithal to be like, hey, let me do something proactively and send it to Matt. That's going to help.
00:15:01 Matt: He had just all the intangibles and I really knew like, I think this kid could be, I say kid, he's 10 years my junior. So for me, I just felt like he really fit the person I was envisioning at, could be the CTO of this company. So he jumped right into the project.
00:15:16 Matt: He worked basically for free for I think four months while we were fundraising and while we were getting the MVP out the door. So he like really earned his stripes very quickly. He was amazing. There was a handful of times I've gotten very fortunate in the first two years of the company.
00:15:28 Matt: That was definitely one of them was meeting Yassine. There's a bunch of other stuff I can get that talk about where we got lucky, but we put ourselves in a position to get lucky too, but which you obviously have to do.
00:15:37 Matt: But I mean, you got really fortunate getting hooked into each other and partnership is great because he's just so tremendous at product building and machine learning and all of the nitty gritty of going, his part of the business, he's like a mad scientist.
00:15:51 Matt: Sometimes he'll start experimenting. So he'll show me, I'll be like, wow, when did you put that together? He's like, oh, I just thought of it a couple weeks ago. I’ll be on the side. I'm like, oh my God, that's amazing.
00:16:00 Jenny: Yeah. I think that one of the things I really liked about you was the ability to see potential in people because as a pre-seed early stage company that's keeping costs down and managing a lot, you can't hire those engineers out of Google or whoever.
00:16:14 Jenny: I mean, it's just the expectations are just too high. And so you have to be scrappy and you have to see potential in people and then be willing to work with them so that they can grow into the potential.
00:16:24 Jenny: I really liked that founding story because it wasn't maybe the classic one.
00:16:29 Matt: Yeah. And to your point earlier, you were speaking a little bit about what startups look like from the outside when you're reading the Forbes article versus what they really are inside.
00:16:37 Matt: It's like every single time you see one of these PR releases of an amazing company and they're all amazing, I'm not saying they're not, but it's always like two Stanford dropouts who are best friends or it's two FAANG engineers drop out and create this thing. And that's a very rare case.
00:16:50 Matt: A lot of times you have to look really, really hard and you have to understand that you're not going to have a huge budget, not just for the CTO piece, but like, you're not going to have a huge budget when you start your sales team and marketing and all.
00:17:00 Matt: You have to find people that are typically a little younger and they have a lot of energy, a lot of passion and people who have that ability to just figure it out and obviously wear many hats, but also people who not just can work a lot, but also have a lot of passion, have a lot of pride in what they do. Have the right intangibles. Intangibles are really, really crucial for us.
00:17:21 Matt: We really think a lot about that when we're hiring, especially now, because we're hiring constantly now. So we get 99% of the way with the candidate and then we get stuck on the making intangibles piece and we have to keep that standard because we think it's really a core value of the company is to have the right intangibles. So yeah, it's crucial, I think.
00:17:38 Jenny: That's great. You talked a little bit about things you got lucky in, and I always say, with my first startup, there was a lot of luck in terms of our timing and those things. But can you talk about maybe a person or something that has been an accelerant for you, someone that kind of helped you along the way?
00:17:56 Jenny: I mean, I think also what's interesting about you is that you don't necessarily come from this startup background and here you are. You didn't go through an accelerator. You kind of just figured stuff out on your own. And so who are some of the people, you don't have to give us the names, but how did you create that community of people to help you?
00:18:15 Matt: I think the other really crucial thing, especially when it's your first startup and you're early that first year or two, for us, you have to realize when you meet people that could really help the company.
00:18:25 Matt: And one thing we were clever with was giving chunks of shares for advisory and just figuring out people who were like that person, not just from a mentorship person, that person's network potentially can really help us. So we've gotten really clever with making some bets on some of them.
00:18:39 Matt: We haven't overdone it. I think we have less than 10 advisors that are co-founders, I think we have seven or eight. But a lot of them have been really, really wildly helpful to us. And one in particular is a gentleman who runs a medical company that basically uses AI in hospitals.
00:18:56 Matt: And he's the CEO and founder of the company, he's a doctor and a surgeon on top of also being a founder and CEO of the company, which is pretty crazy. So he's a really, really smart guy, but he's the nicest guy you'll ever meet in your life. And I met him randomly as a customer early on. I think he was like our fifth customer or sixth customer. And we ended up getting friendly, but not just as like, hey, we could help you guys.
00:19:17 Matt: But also he was like, hey, you're onto something with this thing, just so you know. And he was somebody that during, there's this gray zone in between, in my opinion, at least, in between the pre-seed and the seed that I don't think it's talked about enough where it's kind of a wasteland. It's like, you're not making enough progress necessarily yet.
00:19:33 Jenny: I live in that wasteland, Matt.
00:19:35 Matt: Yes.
00:19:36 Jenny: I live in the wasteland.
00:19:38 Matt: Nobody talks about it enough, but it definitely exists. And it's very scary. And you definitely don't want to live there all the time. Many of you guys are specializing in that wasteland. I don't know if wasteland is the right word, but whatever. But it's a very tough transition pre-seed to seed.
00:19:53 Matt: Pre-seed is like idea a little bit. Seed is like you have to get the numbers figured out. How are you pouring capital into certain things to get where you're going or unit economics work, all that. And I had no experience in this, obviously.
00:20:05 Matt: And this gentleman that I met, has just raised, I think, a $40 million Series B. And he had a great network. He had obviously raised a bunch for his company. And we spent probably two or three months on everything from how to talk to investors. Something I talk about, like you've probably seen a little bit of difference between maybe our first conversation and like, maybe even now is, I like probably didn't really know exactly what I was talking about with investors early on.
00:20:28 Matt: I probably screwed up tons of investor conversations. But you have to have hundreds of them to get to where you're going. ‘Cause it's all practice. I pitched customers a million times, but pitching investors and even talking the language and the acronyms and all that is totally different. I'm not from that world. So I had to learn that from scratch and this guy helped me a ton, not just in investor conversations, also how to get investors excited, how to actually build defensibility in a product and think about defensibility, how to recruit people, how to manage the capital of the company.
00:20:57 Matt: Really almost everything in the day to day running of the company. A lot of it I've learned from him over the last year. We're in Slack together. Like I can literally call him at 10 o'clock in Slack. He's working on his company. I'm like, yo, man, what's going on? And we're like, we'll chat about what's going on. And so there's a real friendship there. So I definitely got lucky with that. And there's been a million other stories, but that's been one where it's, force multiplier, a hundred percent.
00:21:18 Jenny: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I feel like advisors can go either way. Sometimes people have very high expectations and they maybe deliver for a few months and then peter out. I think in your case, what's interesting again, cause you don't come from the startup world necessarily and you didn't necessarily have all of these resources.
00:21:35 Jenny: You knew where your gaps were and fundraising was maybe one of them and surrounded yourself with people that were a little bit ahead of you that could give you some tips and tricks. So super smart.
00:21:45 Jenny: Going back to cloud optimization and where you think the industry is going. I know that when you were raising capital, one of the pushbacks that you got was market size of your business. Where does this all go? And I thought your answer was quite compelling and the vision that you kind of articulated. So can you just talk about the opportunities and maybe the challenges as well to scaling a business like this in your particular industry?
00:22:09 Matt: I think a lot of the competitors that have been in this industry for a few years and some of the folks that have been in here before us, they think of it too much as like a SaaS tool, almost as a one-time thing. And we think of it a bit bigger. And it kind of goes outside of just cloud optimization.
00:22:24 Matt: If you look at company finance, personal finance, anytime you have numbers involved, even like trading, high-frequency trading, that's been defined by machine learning for like a decade. Anytime you have really advanced computation and anything in finance, it's just such a wonderful place to inject AI and machine learning.
00:22:41 Matt: And what we've seen is that there's some very obvious entry paths, you could look up that are all over the web. We got roughly 30-ish percent of all cloud spend, is wasted. It's wasted on a variety of stuff. There's financial mismanagement, not turning machines off when you're not using them, over-provisioning of resources, you get charged for what you provision on what you use in the cloud, right?
00:23:00 Matt: So if you're using this super big server, but it's running at 10% capacity all month long, you're essentially wasting 90% of your dollars. So there's a million use cases for this. The limiting factor has always been that these machines are really complex. And what I mean by that is not just like the way these machines work, but everybody's business is very, very, very different.
00:23:21 Matt: So you'll talk to a company that has a totally different strategy on cloud optimization, and that strategy might be totally right for them. And you're going to talk to somebody else that's totally different for them. So that's really been like one of the limiting factors in building really advanced systems in cloud optimization and why a lot of companies have focused on being a little bit more, I don't want to say one-trick pony, but very focused on maybe doing one thing out of the 50 things you could do for a company.
00:23:44 Matt: I think that with AI and machine learning and just with how much this industry is exploding, of course we're still running into companies that we're not fit for like every company runs into. But what we're doing is we're taking the 70 or 80% of the things that almost every company does, but we're automating it with ML and code so that somebody can have two real value propositions using our platform.
00:24:06 Matt: The first is just, reduction in costs. That's so convenient. That's table stakes. If I can't bring your bill from 100K a month to 70K a month, I don't deserve to charge you anything for a product. So that's like table stakes right off the bat. The second that we've actually seen, been really impactful is a lot of our companies that are using us are like, hey, just so you know, we used to spend 10 to 20 hours a month probably, or maybe even more than that managing this and making the decisions.
00:24:32 Matt: So comparing our cost tables or started usage tables, talking to engineering, doing forecasting, they would literally have teams of people that meet once a week to discuss optimization strategy and what we should do. And they're finding that using a platform like ours eliminates the need to even do that.
00:24:50 Matt: So I think for us, the exciting thing is we think that this is essentially almost an untapped market in many ways from an AI perspective, meaning that like in 10 years, nobody really will be manually managing cloud finance at all. It will all be done with AI. So I think the big thing that we're trying to think about in building is what is the Tesla Autopilot of Cloud FinOps, look like 10 years from now. Let's build that.
00:25:14 Matt: So we're trying to go piece by piece and not just the customer experience, the customer journey, but also in our own development. We saw that the summer released three or four new features. Two of them literally didn't exist in the market. They're brand new features. We have a couple more coming.
00:25:27 Matt: So we're always constantly thinking about, when meeting with customers, being, talking to them about what are you doing manually? Like what do you want our platform to do if it could just do anything magically for you?
00:25:35 Matt: And then we'll go build that and go backwards and try and fit something in and then take that to hundreds of companies. So that's really our strategy is not just being some fool that somebody uses to reduce costs, but really something that can augment the company's need to even really think about this problem at all, which I think is pretty cool.
00:25:53 Jenny: And customer driven, which is really cool and definitely part of your whole DNA, it sounds.
00:25:58 Matt: Yeah, we have a really customer-centric DNA, partially because I'm a salesperson and I have so much experience, dealing with customers’ fire drills and everything else because there's many products in our category.
00:26:09 Matt: And I think some categories are probably like this too, but there's many products in our category that I can tell are built by people who either just don't really care that much about the customer or aren't sitting down and talking to them very much.
00:26:19 Matt: Maybe it's bigger companies and the people that were making the decisions on what to build in the product or they haven't actually taken a customer call in six months. It's like, yeah, I don't know what to tell you. Like some of these dashboard tools aren't really great.
00:26:30 Jenny: I don't think it's just big companies. There's a lot of real product-driven people that or technical people that love building product and they hate talking to people. So, it's tough. It’s tough.
00:26:42 Matt: Yeah, I kind of like both. And that's the thing I love about my role now is it really is mostly both. It's like, I'm either selling the product or I'm meeting with customers who use it and chatting about how they're doing, what do they need from us. And we're still small, now we're like, I still handle a bunch of our order fulfillment. I'm still doing a lot of our customer onboarding.
00:27:02 Matt: I want to stay like I have a term of being in the mud that I really like, and it just basically means that. I don't want to be in an office directing people to go do things. I want to be working with customers and being as close to customers I can, as long as I can. So I think that's given us a competitive advantage, certainly.
00:27:19 Jenny: That's awesome. With respect to North, not your children, what's one thing that keeps you up at night?
00:27:24 Matt: Security always keeps me up at night. I think most people that have tech driven companies, either that does keep them up or should. We put a lot of thought and there's a lot of things that we say no to doing because at scale, it's not that secure to do it, not to get too deep into like the guts of our platform, but there's things that we could automate that we still don't because it takes 10 seconds of work if it's not automated.
00:27:49 Matt: And it's just better and more secure if we don't. So there's little things that we will pass on. There's features that we’ll pass on. Cause we'll just say, hey, like, I love the idea. It's just not a secure idea long-term. If we get compromised and this can happen, that's just not. So security keeps me up at night a lot and I have to think about it a lot.
00:28:06 Matt: Other than that, just general founder anxiety of it all falling apart tomorrow for no reason and where are the other shoes gonna drop and all that. But really it's just those two things keep me up at night. And if that's the only thing keeping me up at night and nothing with my kids or anything, it's probably, usually a good night.
00:28:22 Jenny: Excellent. We often find that many of our founders are moving against the grain a bit. And so can you talk about an idea or concept that many experts or people working in your field say that you actually disagree with where you think the world is actually going in a different direction?
00:28:39 Matt: Yeah. I think that FinOps in general in our industry, cloud finance and short for FinOps for users who are not DevOps people, that's basically what I'm talking about is cloud finance. But FinOps in general, there's just a lot of, I'll say consulting noise about, I don't want to be disparaging, but there's a lot of consulting noise about cost isn't the most important thing.
00:29:03 Matt: And it's really all about figuring out how the company makes money and all this. And I find a lot of it to kind of be a little bit of hot air in some cases. So unapologetic when I tell customers our job is to have you pay less for your cloud, everything else that happens, how you're going to architect your machines and your application layer and all that. Of course, we can help you if you want, but we're probably not the company that is going to charge you a hundred grand to come in and do, like an audit of your application.
00:29:32 Matt: Like that's just not really what we do. We want to be focused on licensing, automation to cloud, FinOps layer, optimization of the architecture as much as we can, making your life easy from a visibility and, or cost intelligence perspective, all of that. That's really what we're focused on. We're not apologizing with that at all. And I think there's some people in our industry that might piss them off a little bit. They might say that they're too simplistic, too naive about what they're doing.
00:30:00 Matt: But for us it's, if you want to spend less on your cloud, you talk to us. If you want somebody that's going to charge you a lot of money to talk to you in a conference room for six months, maybe that's not us, but that's probably the number one thing that we fight a little bit in our industry.
00:30:15 Jenny: Yeah, the consultants have a different version of this. And then we'll just let them have their—
00:30:20 Matt: You’ll have to do an episode of one of them. As a follow-up.
00:30:24 Jenny: All right, we are going to go into our final speed round. So just very quick answers. Is there a book, a blog, or a podcast that you're enjoying right now?
00:30:34 Matt: Work-related, no. But I just started reading a book about Vincent van Gogh's Letters to his brother during his final few years of life. And I love Vincent van Gogh. I think his whole story is super interesting and just lots of fun. So I'm really enjoying that. I'm also finishing the Dune books. So I like alternate, certain times a year, I'm doing stuff that is not due to work. And then other times I'm reading machine learning and sales books and all this stuff.
00:30:57 Jenny: I love it. You've got your sci-fi and you've got your art. So perfect. If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?
00:31:06 Matt: I love Iceland and Norway, but I will say that I think it's London. I was there a few times the last couple of years. I'm a New Yorker by heart, but I don't know, I just… every time I go to London, I just love it more and more. So I think it would be London.
00:31:20 Jenny: It's the best. Favorite productivity hack.
00:31:23 Matt: Oh, saying no.
00:31:26 Jenny: Excellent.
00:31:26 Matt: Just no is a complete sentence.
00:31:28 Jenny: I love it. And well, thanks for saying yes to doing the podcast. Where can listeners find you? What platforms are you on?
00:31:35 Matt: I am most active on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, obviously Matt Biringer or North.cloud is our LinkedIn company page. I do have a Twitter slash X. I don't use it as much as I should, but you can find me there, just Biringer_ is the handle for my Twitter.
00:31:52 Jenny: Perfect. All right, Matt, it was such a pleasure to talk to you. I'm really excited about what you're doing. And I love the passion and optimism that you bring to North. Even your website, I see your logo. It's purple. It's like cloud optimization should have a purple logo. It's so festive. So—-
00:32:08 Matt: Love that.
00:32:08 Jenny: Congrats on everything and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks.
00:32:12 Matt: Thanks, Jenny.
00:32:14 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we'll catch you on the next episode.