Daddy, What Did You Do in the Browser Wars? Do you remember the browser wars? Did you make a difference? Do you worry what you’re going to tell the grandchildren when they ask? I have great news, I think you’re going to get a second chance! The belle of 2025, the AI land grab, wants YOU! * OpenAI recently declared aspirations to get tight into your workspace. * Google seeks to keep your data safe, implementing stricter gating targeting “sensitive-scope requests” * Unfortunately this gating triggers on OpenAI’s new tooling resulting in blocking. As the bubble contracts, platforms seek a defensible share for the endgame. Gatekeeping rears its head. Are the big players shifting to moat-building and putting the walls up? This won’t be the last “This app is blocked” you see over the coming months. All of the players will shore up consumer data safety and their own market position resulting in rapidly changing behaviours. What did I learn last time? * Fragmentation and isolationism raise your costs, forcing you to pay twice not for capacity, but simply for parity of capability * Big incentives could be coming for vocal supporters of the one true way, but you wont feel proud taking the win. * Complexity spirals as partners and customer start making choices that affects your ability to technically collaborate fast Do you see this coming? What did you learn last time?

The Moneylender This is the uncomfortable one. The one I learned from that CTO. We did several raises. And under the spotlight, velocity matters more than anything. Imagine a company raising $1m, then $10m, then $100m. Each round meant to last a year. Silly numbers. Doesn’t matter. Stay with me. Now picture this. You’re down to the last $100k of the first raise. 25 working days left. You’re not fixing bugs. You’re not building platform stability. You’re borrowing time. Because in those final 25 days, velocity is everything. And yes, you take the payday loan. Fast. Cheap. Unsafe. Terrible interest rate. You will absolutely pay for this later. But right now? That 25 days might deliver 45 days of output, if you burn it right. It’s frantic. Wasteful. Ugly. And if you land the $10m, you buy the time to clean it up. And if you don’t? You die. No one comes looking for the code. Most leaders don’t talk about it. Many of the best have done it. It’s not reckless. It’s calculated risk, made visible. You cut the deal. Make sure the board agree the terms.

Have you recently led cost optimization work? 🤔 Are you open to sharing your insights in a 30 minute chat? I am seeking a few tech platform owners (initially 2 or 3) to discuss their experiences with cost optimization. By combining various perspectives, I aim to enhance the quality and reliability of my advice, while understanding how strategies differ based on unique situations. If you are willing to talk about the approaches you've taken, successes, and challenges faced – whether it's a comprehensive finops initiative or negotiating with a entrenched SaaS partner – please reach out to me or comment below. I am interested in high-level insights, nothing sensitive or attributable. Thank you in advance. Show your interest by reacting with a lightbulb. If there is sufficient engagement, I will share key takeaways from our discussions. 🔍 #CostOptimization #TechPlatforms #FinOps

Really excited to be speaking and learning at the London Cloud Leaders event later in the month. We'll have talks sharing experiences of different moments of the cloud cost optimization journey and some roundtable discussions with an experienced group of industry leaders sharing what they've learned. In preparation, I've been talking to technology leaders about how they've adjusted to the changing financial climate, what helped and what held them back. What's clear to me is that there are key decisions that a company can make inexpensively, early in their journey, that can make a wealth of difference to speed of adjustment later. I should thank Stefan Coetzee, Vince 🐱‍💻 van Daal and Steve Judd for recently sharing their time so freely. I should also point to Steve's teams Finops project https://lnkd.in/eH6-WdqS which really does a great job breaking the back of the work to deploy a finops baseline for a GKE or K8s stack. Thanks Jack Herbert for putting this all together.

Scaling up should mean stabilising. Maturing. That’s what I thought too. But that calm? It slows velocity. You started with the basics: * Core systems? Solid. * Growing niggles? Gone. * Team? Calm. * Scaling? Prepped. You look like a Safe Bet. Investors start watching. The board gets twitchy. They see what they fear. They look at you: “Are they right for the next stage?” You wanted to be steady. You look stuck. The sharpest scale-ups don’t freeze the model. They flex the iron triangle—fast, cheap, safe— not once, but on every release. They: * Speculate with safety * Invest for stability * Borrow for speed One CTO shipped services at wildly different maturities. Side by side. Constantly. It drove me mad. It looked like chaos. It was beautiful. I’m sharing 3 behaviours that help every engineering dollar go further. Join me. Learn to drive someone mad. In the best way.