finops
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David Harding and the orange that never ran out of juice
A bank technology executive heard a joke about an endlessly squeezed IT budget. Years later, David Harding is still working on the arithmetic behind it - now as co-founder and CEO of MagicOrange.
Suresh Mathew Wants to Give You Your Afternoon Back
After years building systems at PayPal, Suresh Mathew set out to spare other engineers the work he had grown tired of doing. Sedai became a test of whether software could earn the right to leave people alone.
Sam Booth and the business of switching off
Sam Booth built Just After Midnight to keep digital businesses running while their teams went home. After selling it, he returned with a different question: which parts of the cloud should be running at all?
Brian Price and the trouble with lending things
A DVD-tracking app, a Maryland coffee shop, and a career spent making complicated systems easier to use. Kion’s co-founder has changed titles, but the practical questions still suit him.
Jim Ryan and the price of not knowing
After nearly 28 years at Flexera, Jim Ryan has handed over the CEO role. His career connects two stubborn problems: companies that cannot see what they spend, and students who cannot see how to pay for college.
Barzan Mozafari and the art of doing less
He learned algorithms before he owned a computer. From database research to Keebo and self-verifying AI, Barzan Mozafari has kept asking how much work a machine can spare its user.
Keith Alsheimer Has Spent a Career Making Complexity Behave
Before he sold software for unruly data systems, Keith Alsheimer trained soldiers, patented a visual method for teaching cleaners, and built a procurement company from scratch. The connecting idea is surprisingly consistent: make complicated work clear enough that people can act.
Juan Pisco Left Travel Hype for Accounting's Hard Parts
After selling a travel app used by millions, Juan Pisco chose a quieter problem: invoices. His bet is that the next useful AI company in Latin America will win by mastering the work everyone else finds too tedious to touch.
Ben Schaechter Made the Cloud Bill Worth Reading
He learned the cloud from both sides of the console. Now the Vantage co-founder is turning its messiest artifact - the bill - into a product engineers and finance teams can use together.
Chuck Tatham’s Two-Decade Bet: Make Waste Visible, Then Make It Actionable
From Lotus and Changepoint to Kubex, the Toronto software executive has built a career around a stubborn enterprise problem: data is only valuable when someone can act on it.
Asim Razzaq Put a Price Tag on the Cloud's Blind Spot
He left PayPal with a stubborn question: if engineers create the cloud bill, why are they the last people given a useful way to read it? Yotascale became his decade-long answer.
Brian Wilson
Brian Wilson is the Chief Executive Officer of Kion, a cloud governance and management software company based in Columbia, Maryland. He was appointed CEO in October 2025 after more than two decades leading SaaS, observability, and customer experience companies, including roles as CEO of Monetate, COO of Kibo Commerce, and Chief Customer Officer at Zenoss. At Kion he is driving a 'FinOps+' strategy that combines cloud cost management, governance, and policy automation for multicloud and AI-driven workloads. He is based in Austin, Texas, and is a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
Rashmi Melgiri
Rashmi 'Rush' Melgiri is the co-founder and CEO of Functional Finance, a San Francisco insurtech building the financial operations platform that automates billing, premium collection, reconciliation, and money movement for insurance operators. An MIT-trained economist, she previously co-founded and ran operations at CoverWallet, the commercial insurance startup acquired by Aon in 2020. She started Functional Finance in 2021 after living the pain of chasing money across email chains inside the insurance back office, and has since raised $36M, including a $20M Series A led by Walkabout Ventures, while growing premium payment volume more than 2,500% year over year.
Aran Khanna
Aran Khanna is the co-founder and CEO of Archera, a Bellevue-based startup that helps companies cut cloud bills by guaranteeing deep discounts without locking them into long-term commitments, backed by insurance and reinsurance capacity. A Harvard computer science and math graduate, he first made headlines in 2015 when his Chrome extension Marauder's Map exposed a location-tracking flaw in Facebook Messenger and cost him a Facebook internship. He went on to research privacy at Harvard, build neural-network tools as an AI engineer at AWS, and co-found Archera in 2019 with his brother Nikhil.
Eric Free
Eric Free is the Chief Growth Officer at Flexera, the IT lifecycle management platform used by enterprises to govern software, cloud spend, and technology assets. With a career spanning Intel, Rovi Corporation, and now Flexera, Free has spent two decades driving growth at the intersection of enterprise software, IoT, and cloud strategy. At Flexera, he oversees corporate strategy, M&A, business development, and go-to-market operations — steering a company with $221M+ in annual revenue and $5.85B in total funding toward what it calls the 'value era' of cloud.
JT Giri
JT Giri is the CEO and Founder of nOps, a San Francisco-based AI-powered cloud cost optimization platform that helps companies manage and reduce their AWS spend. After discovering Amazon EC2 in beta in 2006 and spending years as a hands-on DevOps consultant, he co-founded nClouds in 2012 - which grew into an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. In 2017 he spun out nOps to productize the cloud management tooling he'd built internally. In August 2024, nOps secured a $30M Series A led by Headlight Partners, with the platform now managing over $1.5 billion in AWS spend across a customer base that grew 450% in 18 months.
Maxim Melamedov
Maxim Melamedov is the CEO and co-founder of Zesty, a Palo Alto-based cloud infrastructure optimization platform that has raised $124M to help enterprises slash cloud costs through AI-driven autoscaling. Born in the Soviet Union, raised in Israel, and now operating out of Silicon Valley, Melamedov built Zesty from a 2019 insight - that 30-40% of cloud infrastructure sits idle while companies pay full price. With products spanning Kubernetes optimization, compute rightsizing, and commitment management, Zesty now manages billions in cloud waste across 1,000+ accounts for enterprise customers including Wiz, Armis, and WalkMe.
Vasu Maganti
Vasu Maganti is the founder and CEO of Zelar (formerly Zelarsoft), a Google Cloud Premier Partner and cloud-native consulting firm headquartered in San Francisco. Since founding the company in 2018, he has built it into an ~180-person, $26.6M-revenue enterprise serving Fortune 500 companies, major banks, telcos, and federal governments across North America and APAC. Zelar was named Google Cloud Activation Partner of the Year - JAPAC 2025 and Google Cloud Partner All-Star in Artificial Intelligence 2024 under his leadership. Maganti co-organizes Silicon Valley's cloud-native meetup community and is a vocal advocate for Kubernetes multi-tenancy, GitOps, zero-trust security, and FinOps practices.