Hey everyone! My name is Taylor. Over the past several years, I’ve found a unique passion for managing cloud spend, and have gone all-in on trying to become one of the best in the world to do it.
Along the way, I’ve driven over $10M in cost savings, established deep roots in the FinOps community, and built enterprise-scale FinOps programs to bridge the gap between finance and engineering teams.
All of this has led me to PointFive, where I’ve officially joined as the company's first FinOps Specialist. I’m super excited to show you what that looks like.
But first, let me explain how I got here, and what compelled me to leave a $140B+ enterprise to join a Series A startup.
I’ve always been an “optimizer”, especially when it comes to spending money. I’m the type of guy that checks unit costs at the grocery store to save $0.23 per oz of peanut butter.
I’ve also made a career out of operating at the intersection of technology and finance. I’ve worked on both finance and engineering teams. I’ve studied database design and financial modeling.
Imagine how I felt when I discovered the world of cloud billing: where the way that you design that database directly impacts the bottom line. And comparing unit costs can save you not $3, but $300,000.
I found FinOps when I was working as the Business Operations Manager for a software company in the Analytics & BI space. We had recently released our first SaaS offering—hosted on the cloud. Infrastructure costs within our dev accounts were growing quickly.
I was asked to figure out what was driving our spend, and find ways to reduce costs without slowing down our development cycles. I started meeting with our engineering managers to understand which teams owned specific resources and accounts, which enabled me to build a real-time dashboard to report on our spend by team. This helped us identify key drivers of our spend, and where it was growing the fastest.
I examined our high-cost services and identified low-hanging opportunities for our team to start reducing spend. This included things like turning off unused development instances at night and on weekends, downsizing servers that were over-provisioned for their needs, deleting unattached EBS volumes, and implementing automatic purging of resources at the end of every development sprint.
Over the first year, we saved over $2.5M while continuing to release product features and functionality. I remember being so highly motivated to keep learning and finding new ways to save as our costs kept reducing quarter over quarter, over quarter.
We didn’t call it FinOps at the time—but that’s exactly what it was.
Obsessive Google-ing about “How to reduce my cloud bill” led me to the FinOps Foundation. I learned a ton by scouring their website and attending virtual summits. Getting involved in the Foundation opened my eyes to the fact that this wasn’t just a problem that my employer was facing, but tons of people like me at other companies were facing the same issues. I started to realize that I could make a career out of this.
I started to organize FinOps meetups in the DC Area, contributing to (and later leading) Finops Foundation Working Groups, and became a FinOps Foundation Ambassador. I also took my first full-time FinOps role at a leading Media and Entertainment company. There, I drove programs that resulted in millions of dollars of savings, built reporting based on detailed tagging, managed a commitment-based discount strategy, and optimized our software license costs. All while tracking the impact and ensuring our team received credit for the many and meaningful cost reduction opportunities they executed.
I’ve become an expert at identifying opportunities to optimize cloud costs and working with engineering teams to execute them. Along the way, friends and other individuals within the industry started reaching out to me for advice on managing their cloud spend. I started taking on freelance projects during nights and weekends and became the “Cloud Cost Guy.”
Over the years, I’ve learned a ton of methods to reduce spend within a cloud environment. But identifying opportunities has always been a manual process. Sure, I can get a read-only IAM role and identify savings, but that’s not the most scalable solution.
I never saw huge value in the software tools that were marketed to me. I got by just fine with Cost Explorer, Trusted Advisor, and the CUR (native AWS tools). I felt like all the “fancy” FinOps tools were essentially just a wrapper on top of the data that I already knew how to use. They just didn’t add much value for me.
That changed when I was introduced to PointFive. This platform is different.
PointFive’s focus is the same as mine: identify actionable, resource-level opportunities to reduce cost without impacting performance, drive action by working directly with engineering teams to remediate, and track savings. But rather than a manual approach, it’s software that operates at scale.
Imagine if every method I’ve ever discovered to reduce costs—and every method I’ll discover in the future—was captured in a knowledge base. A knowledge base that automatically identifies these opportunities in any cloud environment and seamlessly routes them to the right engineer to validate and act on. That’s PointFive.
It just makes sense, and feels like an inevitable future for the FinOps Industry. It certainly is now - because we’re building it.
PointFive’s one-of-a-kind research team identifies unique opportunities to save money in the cloud—just like I’ve been doing in my previous roles—and then builds their findings into a software product that can be integrated into a user's cloud environment to automatically detect savings.
My background provides me with a unique end-user perspective for PointFive, allowing me to help them build their solutions to be as helpful and valuable as possible to those looking to save costs in the cloud. As the company’s first FinOps Specialist, my role will consist of:
I’m super excited to be a part of this team, and can’t wait to help even more engineering teams get the most value out of their cloud spend.
As I settle into my new role, I’ll be sharing more of my thoughts on the FinOps industry, so keep an eye out for my next blog about where I think FinOps is headed in 2025. Until then, book a meeting with me to talk all things FinOps and learn how the PointFive platform can help you reduce your cloud spend.
