Asim Razzaq is the co-founder and CEO of Yotascale, which builds Cloud cost management for enterprises like Zoom, Disney and Okta.
Prior to Yotascale, Asim was Head of Platform Engineering at PayPal where he was responsible for all core infrastructure processing payments and logins. He led the build-out of the PayPal private cloud and the PayPal developer platform generating multi-billion dollars in payments volume.
What you will learn
- Why managing cloud costs is a big challenge for companies—and how Yotascale helps solve it.
- How AI is transforming cloud cost management and making it easier to track where money is spent.
- Why cloud costs can spiral out of control—and what companies can do to stay cost-conscious.
- How enterprises can use Generative AI to build smarter tools that reduce friction in finance and engineering teams.
- Why building a great company culture is critical for startup success—especially in tough economic times.
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:06 – 00:00:46
Hi everyone and welcome to the Jeff Bullas Show today I have with me, Asim Razzaq. Now, Asim co-founder and CEO of Yotascale, which builds Cloud cost management for enterprises like Zoom, Disney and Okta.
Prior to Yotascale, Asim was Head of Platform Engineering at PayPal where he was responsible for all core infrastructure processing payments and logins. He led the build-out of the PayPal private cloud and the PayPal developer platform generating multi-billion dollars in payments volume.
Jeff Bullas
00:00:47 – 00:00:59
So Asim welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here. And um we might even talk about cricket and most people in America around the world wouldn’t know what cricket is. Um But because you’re from Pakistan originally.
Asim Razzaq
00:01:00 – 00:01:06
Uh huh Yeah, absolutely. Cricket has all those bugs, right? Those insects that’s different.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:06 – 00:01:32
OK. So I’m gonna tell you a quick story before you tell me your story. My first tweet there ever in 2008 was watching cricket. Uh huh. And I had a comment back from someone and said, what was the cricket doing? And I said that’s not an Englishman. It’s not Pakistan, it’s not Indian. I reckon it’s an American and it was.
Asim Razzaq
00:01:34 – 00:01:36
There you go. There you go.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:36 – 00:01:45
So, Asim, you grew up, um, in your child years in Pakistan and you did an undergraduate degree there. Is that correct?
Asim Razzaq
00:01:46 – 00:01:51
Uh I did my high school in Pakistan and then I came to the US.
Jeff Bullas
00:01:52 – 00:01:58
So how old were you when you came? And why did you leave Pakistan for America?
Asim Razzaq
00:01:59 – 00:02:36
Yes. I mean, I was 18 years old, like any freshman that would be entering college here. And um you know, the, the, the school that I was in, it was a lot of the folks did pursue higher education uh either in the UK or in the US. And we also happen to be in a situation where some of my maternal family had moved to the US as well. So we already had some roots here. And ultimately, it was uh like a lot of people do, right? It’s the uh the uh dream you want to pursue because the US, especially Silicon Valley, is considered the bastion of innovation.
Asim Razzaq
00:02:37 – 00:03:05
Uh, I was starting to get interested in computer science. I mean, obviously I was uh relatively decent at math and sciences and of course, that’s why I ended up pursuing computer science. So I think that was the opportunity to come pursue a degree at a university which is University of Texas at Austin, which is uh one of the top 10 you know, uh computer science departments in the nation too, to kind of learn from the best in the world as to how it’s done. So that was the impetus for me.
Jeff Bullas
00:03:06 – 00:03:19
So, where are the interests for, you know, digital and technology and engineering? Computer engineering. Where did that come from? Was it something that you explored as a teenager? Where did that curiosity come from?
Asim Razzaq
00:03:20 – 00:03:56
Yeah, it’s interesting. Um as I said, my original love was physics, right? When I got into my later grades, ninth or 10th grade, right? Uh pursuing a lot of that. And the reason was one of the teachers I had was just phenomenal at teaching the subject, right? I still remember he, he would bring in like uh an actual engine of a car and put it on the table and we kind of walk through it and he would talk about the concepts like electromagnetism and magnetic relay and all that, but he would really bring it to life uh for you. And I uh just naturally had an act for mathematics,
Asim Razzaq
00:03:57 – 00:04:48
right? That’s just how things were, my father is a chartered accountant. No one has CPA here in the US, right? So math was always part and parcel of uh growing up but I fell in love with computer science. I remember there was a magazine uh on basic, which was an original programming language, right? Where you could code something and have it spit out something. So I remember doing simple stuff like uh adding numbers or building a simple calculator. And that was just phenomenal to see because it’s really the, to me it ended up being applied mathematics, right? Uh Because you can make it do things and that just whole, that opened up a whole new um sort of world for me.
Asim Razzaq
00:04:48 – 00:05:21
And on much younger years uh in, in school, I think, I think Windows 95 came out and uh then I also had exposure to an I A computer like um Apple two as well on which uh I, I did a little bit of programming as well. Right. So I think that original love and passion, the seeds were there from a mathematics, science point of view. But that bridging between applied math, writing a program that you can make it do things was what fascinated me the most.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:21 – 00:05:22
Right.
Asim Razzaq
00:05:22 – 00:05:23
Growing up.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:23 – 00:06:11
Yeah. And the thing about me, I tried to do basic programming when I started an accounting degree before I turned to teaching. And um I was crap at it and I realized that I was never going to be a programmer or an engineer. Um I’m, I’m more concrete rather than abstract. OK. So when I joined, when I went into the technology industry, I sold physical things called personal computers. Not, I tried to sell software and that was a terrible experiment as well. But, um, so we’re all wired a different way and it’s trying to find your gift, isn’t it? In other words, why are you here? And obviously you detected that and then leaned into that and went to, uh, you know, the Texas University. What’s the actual name of the university? Was it? Um University of Texas?
Asim Razzaq
00:06:11 – 00:06:12
Austin?
Jeff Bullas
00:06:12 – 00:06:38
Yeah. University of Texas in Austin. So you do the degree? So I’m fascinated by why people do what they do. And also does it make them happy? And just about I would say I ask them a question and I’m gonna ask you at the end of this, um what brings you deep joy and what would you do every day if you had all the money in the world? I’m gonna, that’s, that’s your answer at the end. OK. At the
Asim Razzaq
00:06:38 – 00:06:41
end. OK. I’m glad you’re giving me some time.
Jeff Bullas
00:06:41 – 00:07:05
I’ll, I’ll, I’ll let that uh sort of circulate in the neurons. Um So, so for me, uh after you’ve done your degree, what’s, what are you, what are you thinking? You’re going, I need to get a corporate job. Um, I need to get money to put food on the table roof over my head. Yeah. What, what were you thinking at the end of the degree? What, what was driving you then?
Asim Razzaq
00:07:06 – 00:07:55
So I think the timing is important, right? So I graduated in the year 2000. And so for some of us who are old enough to remember that was quite a time that’s also known as the.com bust, right? The boom bust cycle, at least the very first one of my career if you will. And, but where I’m going with this is that graduating in 2000 with a degree in computer science effectively, if you were any good, would assure you a job, right? Because you had all of these companies that are springing up. Uh Ecommerce was just expanding like wildfire. Like there’s a lot of companies that are getting into the business. I mean, companies like Amazon had formed like three years earlier, 97 or something like ebay and I think paypal around a similar time frame. So
Asim Razzaq
00:07:55 – 00:08:21
uh interestingly, I was going to pursue initially, was potentially going to pursue a phd because I did undergraduate research with, with my, one of the professors there. But I will say the pull of the industry was too much and there was too much excitement in that time that was going around. So I uh I ended up joining an early stage start up because I was always fascinated by the alchemy of entrepreneurship
Asim Razzaq
00:08:22 – 00:08:49
of, you know, building something from the ground up and how does that work? And I was lucky enough to work with a set of people who are veterans. Right. So, they had been around the block. It wasn’t, no offense, but it wasn’t like some 20 something just starting a company and there’s not a lot of experience that I can share with them or learn from. Right. But, uh, these industry veterans, they, they started a company and that’s the one I ended up joining
Asim Razzaq
00:08:50 – 00:09:10
and candidly. That was phenomenal. Right. That the impetus was, hey, I wanna, I wanna learn, right? And that’s one of, one of my philosophies is to have a growth mindset. It’s less about, I want to have this great corporate job with a title at a company that people recognize and it makes you money and you sit there for X number of years, right? It was more around, hey, uh life
Asim Razzaq
00:09:10 – 00:09:44
short, let’s go learn as much as we can and then maybe down the road, I’ll have an opportunity to do something on my own. Right? That was the key piece for it. And I, I have to say, I mean, it was one of the best decisions I made because while the company didn’t succeed, like most companies in that time frame, uh I learned a whole ton because I had to wear multiple hats, software programming, uh lead build person, um had the rotation duty of cleaning the kitchen. Uh So, so a number of those things.
Jeff Bullas
00:09:44 – 00:10:23
So it’s interesting about learning, um and compound knowledge in other words where you continue to build knowledge on top of the knowledge until you turn up 2030 years later and realize, I actually know quite a lot now. Um, because you follow this journey of compounding knowledge over time, lifetime learning, um, which quite often follows curiosity about something or a topic that brings you joy. Um, so, uh, for me, uh, you, I’ve discovered too and I’d be interested in your thoughts that you actually learn more from adversity than you learn from success. I’d be interested in your take on that.
Asim Razzaq
00:10:25 – 00:10:29
Oh, I guess you summed up my start up journey right there.
Jeff Bullas
00:10:29 – 00:10:32
That’s where the inspiration came from. Uh
Asim Razzaq
00:10:32 – 00:11:12
Exactly. Right. So I think I, I absolutely would agree because I think I, I will tell you that can happen when you have the right mindset. Yeah, because a lot of people can look at adversity and just uh have self pity and think about like, why is this happening to me? And you know, why not somebody else? But it’s uh it’s again back to that curiosity that you mentioned, right? You have to have that curiosity to say, OK, there’s adversity, there’s failure. I fell flat on my face. Why? Right. And I think that also comes with some level of humility to have that introspection to say, OK, this happened uh could happen to anybody happened to me and
Asim Razzaq
00:11:13 – 00:11:47
you know, what do I do? Where do I go from here? And that’s been my, uh, experience, uh, the, uh, even in the two thousand.com bust after I kind of lost the job and I had to land another job pretty quickly because I was on a work visa. Right. I was on an H one visa and there were a lot of people who were looking for jobs at the time. Right. So, the, the, the supply was huge and you could, you could say, well, it’s kind of an adverse time and you’re trying to figure out how to navigate through it,
Asim Razzaq
00:11:47 – 00:12:13
but you roll up your sleeve and you say, ok, here’s the situation. What should I do? And I learned right, that we were talking earlier before the podcast about the human connection and you know, that ability to connect with other human beings, the ability to network with people, the ability to have that empathy, even if it is a company that’s offering a job as to how I can solve this problem for them, the ability to, how do you summarize their experience? I had to learn a lot of that stuff fast
Asim Razzaq
00:12:13 – 00:12:39
to be able to land something in the, in the time frame that I needed to because I didn’t have the privilege of sitting there for six months a year or two years or something and you know, going and pursuing some archaic degree and then coming back and seeing the market starts picking back up and then doing that. Right. And I had to, I had to take action fast. So that’s just one example of uh I think I maybe a different topic,
Asim Razzaq
00:12:39 – 00:13:06
Entrepreneurs have to embrace adversity. It’s not just about managing it. It’s about, you almost have to embrace it. Welcome. It’s going to happen and it’s just a matter of when. And in fact, certainly in an early stage start up, a lot of your experience is going to be the majority of it is going to be adversity. So you have a special appreciation for times where it’s not adversity.
Jeff Bullas
00:13:06 – 00:13:15
And that’s the paradox of being human. You don’t really understand, um you know, the good times unless you’ve had bad times and that’s,
Asim Razzaq
00:13:16 – 00:13:16
That’s right.
Jeff Bullas
00:13:19 – 00:14:02
And we need contrast in life. You know, I appreciate a sunny day more because we had a rainy day before. And just, you know, for me, I, I love the contrast of life that unfolds around you and it’s, and like you said, I think it’s, it’s welcoming it and welcome with an attitude and the right, you need the right attitude, isn’t it too? What can I learn from this? And how can I actually then move on to? And, you know, the universe is telling me something. Um, and maybe the wrong person for this job, I’m the right person for the wrong job, whatever. But the reality is that, um you gotta bring that attitude to the table and, and the poor me doesn’t cut it really in terms of being resilient and adaptable.
Asim Razzaq
00:14:03 – 00:14:11
Absolutely. Yeah, you have to learn from those experiences and uh you have to also focus on what’s in your control because not everything is in your control.
Jeff Bullas
00:14:11 – 00:14:13
In fact, in fact, very little is in.
Asim Razzaq
00:14:14 – 00:14:15
That’s right. That’s right.
Jeff Bullas
00:14:17 – 00:14:42
So, OK, so you fell on your face, um struck some tough times, just give us a quick thumbnail sketch of how, what happened over those few years and right through to paypal and your and that really um big job at paypal. And then let’s get to Yoda scale after that. But just a quick, so what was the journey like up to paypal? And how was paypal?
Asim Razzaq
00:14:43 – 00:15:33
Yeah. So I think uh I ended up landing a job um after that the the.com phase if you will and I’ll just very quickly talk about experiences, right? Because this was a job at a company that was a start up that was building software for the airline industry. It’s actually one of the best implementations of computer science that I have experienced in my career. So you had a bunch of these phd S in operations research and data scientists at the time who were building uh some amazing software that would help airlines uh really deal with uh challenges. Like if there is a snowstorm that shuts down New York Airport, right? How do you most efficiently and effectively route crew, you know, route uh passengers, route equipment
Asim Razzaq
00:15:33 – 00:16:14
and I can’t tell you how mind bogglingly complicated it is. The problem is because there are FAA regulations, there are airline regulations, there are maintenance equipment. I learned so much about the airline industry through that job. And, you know, whenever in an airplane now they say, well, folks, we have to deep plan because of a technical issue. I kind of know what it is. Right? Because a lot of times it means something went out of warranty or one of the crew uh just overstayed their allotted time by a minute, right? And then they have to fly in somebody else. What have you. So I think I learned a ton there. Uh After that, I followed my prior VPF engineering, my first VPF engineering
Asim Razzaq
00:16:14 – 00:16:47
into another company that did professional services automation. And I’ll say that’s where my journey around uh uh building API S uh building systems where other systems can really connect to uh started in earnest. And web services were a thing at the time. I think IBM was making it really, really popular and now they call it micro services and don’t get me started on all of that stuff, right? But um that, that was an opportunity to really help build software. It was also a turnaround, meaning that there’s a lot of technical debt that had accrued at the company.
Asim Razzaq
00:16:48 – 00:17:37
Uh But one of my main jobs was really making a monolithic legacy piece of software more api centric because it had to integrate with the sales forces of the world, it had to integrate with other enterprise systems. And that taught me a lot about modular design. You know, how do you take legacy software and how are you object oriented? How do you make it api centric? But additionally, a ton about culture and people and processes, right? Because at the end of the day, the technology part tends to be relatively easy, but the part around where you have to motivate people and you have to really align teams and you have to align an organization while the business pressure is on you. Uh, very difficult business pressure, right? Because the company has to still continue to
Asim Razzaq
00:17:37 – 00:18:03
uh produce software that is generating revenue and income while you’re trying to fix the engine of the plane if you will, right? So I think I, as much as that journey was hard, uh It uh it taught me a lot about a number of things and along the journey, I’ve had amazing mentors and advisors and people who can help me. And when I would fall on my face, I mean, I got into leadership. Uh I was director of engineering at the company and
Asim Razzaq
00:18:03 – 00:18:31
as, as a naive first time manager, um I, I started by thinking like, well, I have to be the smartest person in the room every time, right? And to realize that that was a recipe for a complete and utter disaster, right? Uh And that uh I had this uh delusion of being the smartest person where, whereas I had to be more curious and see people’s diversity and thinking and what they bring to the table. So I think a lot of that shaping happened and I think that can bridge to
Asim Razzaq
00:18:32 – 00:19:07
the paypal experience, which is uh circa 2007, 2008. Uh paypal was looking to start a completely new group within paypal. So if you think about paypal, it has had three areas, key areas, right? So one, the first is consumer, we know that right, peer to peer uh you can pay and then was merchant, right? Like businesses can now take Pay paypal. And this third wave of growth that they wanted to embark on was developer, right? Providing payments API S that developers can use in innovative ways.
Asim Razzaq
00:19:08 – 00:19:38
And so I was tapped on the shoulder to seed a team, a co-founding member of a team that would build that third wave of growth. And my job was infrastructure right to build all of the tech stack, build some of the key API S. Uh And uh it was a phenomenal opportunity, but it was also a challenging opportunity because doing uh entrepreneurship within a large company is not straightforward and easy, right? Uh And so sorry, go ahead.
Jeff Bullas
00:19:38 – 00:19:52
Yeah, there’s a, there’s a term for that called entrepreneurship, right? Yeah. In other words, you feel frustrated, but so how can you actually act like an entrepreneur within a corporation. And that’s a whole new skill set on its own, which I think you’re alluding to, which is
Asim Razzaq
00:19:52 – 00:20:38
what II I had to learn fast. I had to learn really, really fast. And uh one story I, I like to always mention is that so I was hired on and we had some initial budget and I was trying to build together like the sketch of the tech stock. We’re gonna have to build these API S and whatnot. And I was assigned somebody from uh central architecture because you know, a company like paypal, you’re gonna have a bunch of different centralized groups, which makes sense, right? Because they are at a certain scale. And this person I met from 4 to 445 I think every single day, the first few days of my job uh for 30 days straight because they were the one assigned to me, to my understanding was to approve the architecture and to approve us going forward, moving forward, right?
Asim Razzaq
00:20:39 – 00:21:06
And so every single day, I’m explaining to them, how this is gonna work and how it’s going to be secure and how it’s going to be scalable and how we can operationalize it the whole nine yards. And on day 30 I said, OK, so we covered it all. So, you know, you, you’re gonna give us the approval and the person goes, I’m not the decision maker. So that was the day that I almost wanted to quit. Um But I didn’t back down to adversity and resilience, right.
Asim Razzaq
00:21:07 – 00:21:48
Uh So we had to work through some of the existing setup to try to bring in that innovation because we were bringing a new tech stack. We were bringing a new way of thinking because if you come to a financial payments company like paypal and say, well, you know what, we’re going to make these API S externally available, right? A lot of people scratch their head and say no, no, no, no, that’s not something we do, what have you, but I think it was a really rewarding journey. Uh There’s a lot of things we were able to do through that journey, including a very flexible new age tech stack, uh including some new API S. Uh We actually put on the first developer conference.
Asim Razzaq
00:21:49 – 00:22:33
Uh We were given an extremely tight timeline, it was about nine months from zero to launch. The launch was going to be uh at the time. It seems like a ton of people, 3000 developers are going to show up, right? And we met that deadline and I think the most phenomenal feeling I had uh standing there just observing and taking it all in as all these developers coming in and we were all doing these sessions and putting the show on was the internal paypal folks. Uh how they turned from being jaded and Nair to like they saw like, yeah, you guys were able to do it and this can be done. And I think that was a phenomenal feeling uh to, to have
Asim Razzaq
00:22:33 – 00:22:53
uh and, you know, we continued to iterate on it. I think there was a lot of stuff on the mobile side. We built a mobile tool kit. Uh, the second conference that we put together was bigger than tens of thousands of people, right? Uh And I think it was the first time in the history of ebay Inc, which is what was the parent company at the time of paypal that the stock actually
Asim Razzaq
00:22:54 – 00:23:20
correlated directly back to us doing that conference. So the stock moved by about 10% that day because of the announcements that were made at that conference, right? Um I think the impact was quite a bit and, and again, I just want to be clear. It wasn’t me, right? It was the amazing team that we had and a lot of support from the rest of the paypal teams who wanted this to
Asim Razzaq
00:23:20 – 00:23:56
succeed. So I learned a ton about scale. I learned to talk about security. I learned a ton about building alliances. I initially failed at it in my initial part in paypal where I thought we were breaking too much glass and alienating people. And then because the timeline was way too aggressive, right? And then we realized, like, look, you know, we have to work a different way and take people along with us even if it’s going to take a little longer for this to have long term success and longevity. Yeah. And I was going to say at paypal, I ended up taking on multiple rules beyond that, which we can talk about if you’re interested.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:57 – 00:24:24
So maybe because it’s, we’re a bit short on time here. Can we, was there a problem within paypal? What, what was the call or the challenge that inspired you to start Yoda scale? Because you were working at paypal? And where did you, what was the inspiration for you to cross the threshold from being a corporate engineer if you like to uh starting your own company? What was that?
Asim Razzaq
00:24:25 – 00:25:11
Yeah, I mean, I think in my, in my uh career in my journey, II, I try to start something once or twice before, but I chicken out, you know, it’s not easy and the right confluence of things has to be there. I think this particular one was more around the advent of cloud computing, which had happened in 2007, 2008. Aws came out with S3 and then you had follow ons from later on uh Azure and GCP started becoming players in the ecosystem. And um I had obviously a role at paypal, but some of the companies as well where I had my brush with public cloud computing, right? And uh especially at paypal, I built out the private cloud and there was manageability challenges with the private cloud and
Asim Razzaq
00:25:11 – 00:25:55
things that nature, which my team focused a lot on filling those gaps. But the crux of it is this realization that while public cloud computing gives you a lot of flexibility, a lot of agility, right? This challenge of fiscal responsibility as a head of platform engineering is a difficult spot to be in, right? Because as a head of platform engineering, what your teams are doing is they’re building the foundational stuff that other teams are going to use, right? So these are tools and logging services and log in services that other teams end up using and they leverage the foundation to build their applications, right? So a normal um
Asim Razzaq
00:25:56 – 00:26:37
uh response when you end up spending this money in public cloud is well, you’re spending all this money as a head of platform engineering is saying, well, I’m not the one spending all this money, all these other teams are consuming all of this, right? So this creates this friction between finance and engineering and application engineering and the exact types as to. Ok. Why on earth are we spending all this money? Right. And if we are, where is it going? Who is accountable? And what do we do about it? Yeah. Right. And um in that journey to paypal, like one of the stops I had uh in my career was at a start up a mid to late stage start up where uh
Asim Razzaq
00:26:37 – 00:27:04
You know, I realized very early on when I joined that 60% of the entire company spent was in the data center, right? So they leveraged storage quite a bit. Uh And the mandate was given to me as somebody who is cloud centric right to go and fix this and take the infrastructure into the cloud and make us more efficient and you know, we’re going to win and it was like you got six months to do it. Right.
Asim Razzaq
00:27:05 – 00:27:24
When I dug into that, I realized that it would be very, very hard for us to do because the cloud providers were not really giving you the tools, right? I would have to uplevel the skill set of my team who did not understand cloud computing that well, right? And when we did the modeling, it turned out believe it or not, that it would end up being more expensive
Asim Razzaq
00:27:24 – 00:27:52
than running it in the data center that we currently did, which was phenomenally insanely expensive because as soon as you move the data, they charge you an arm and a leg, right? Storing the data was not that easy, but storing the data was not that expensive but moving it, right. So I think that moment, as you said, was this moment of realization that the cloud is not going to save the company. We just don’t have enough time, the skill set, the tooling
Asim Razzaq
00:27:52 – 00:28:18
that the cloud provider is saying that you should go develop that tooling that they don’t have that tooling out of the box. And I think things have improved over time. So I think I had to go back with the hard message that sorry, we can’t take this path, but we solve the problem differently using commodity hardware, right? Because we had a, we had a time of 66 months to solve it. And I think that was the point in my career where you, you see the promise of the cloud and you see the fulfillment of that promise, not really being met.
Asim Razzaq
00:28:19 – 00:28:55
Yeah, and I think that was the key seed in my head as to OK, something needs to be done about this, right? Because a lot of companies are going to get into this and if you’re not one of these big high flying tech companies who can throw money at talent at it, right? You’re gonna need something. And that was the genesis of Euro scale because when we scoured the market, we talked to a lot of people. Uh the existing tools are very finance centric. It’s all about reporting and analytics and they were insulting the intelligence of a lot of the engineering teams, right? Um So I think that’s how your skill concept came about.
Jeff Bullas
00:28:55 – 00:29:04
OK. In other words, you were working within a company that had this problem where there was a gap between um what you wanted to do and managing it and what was being done and you filled that gap,
Asim Razzaq
00:29:06 – 00:29:29
right? Yeah, you fill that gap by uh giving people standing where the money is going and also optimizing it for them and uh helping them make their uh cloud footprint efficient because they, they, they can be very sprawl easily in cloud. You can end up spending a ton of money, but you only realize at the end of the month, how much money you end up spending.
Jeff Bullas
00:29:29 – 00:29:33
Ok. So did you still fund yours?
Asim Razzaq
00:29:34 – 00:30:05
Uh We self funded for a short period of time just because we didn’t feel comfortable going and raising money until we had our own conviction. Uh just to do it in that manner. So we self funded for 6 to 9 months just to make sure we do the right customer discovery, have a good understanding of what we need to go build out, show some proof of concept and uh then go raise money. So that’s what we ended up doing. And then of course, subs subsequently, we ended up raising venture money.
Jeff Bullas
00:30:06 – 00:30:31
So let’s fast forward to today. Um You’ve been running it now for how long? I think it’s about eight years. Is it? Ok. So you’ve obviously built it out. Did you create a minimal viable product? And the other question I want to ask is how is A I affecting you in terms of being able to solve problems. And how are you using A I within your organization? I’d be intrigued about that too.
Asim Razzaq
00:30:32 – 00:31:13
Yeah. Yeah. So I think answering that question is two fold. One is we are leveraging it internally, which is when you talk about fin S or cloud cost management, uh We built a copilot of our, of our own. It’s called the copilot, right where we’re trying to minimize the friction, right? So if a CFO wants to come into a product and ask a question about, hey, why did the bill spike last month? What can I do about it? Right? You can ask that question and it will understand a lot of the nuances, it will understand the domain, it will give you the right data. It was not going to hallucinate all that good stuff, right? And so I think our goal number one is where can we remove this friction in most places in the organization
Asim Razzaq
00:31:13 – 00:31:35
where they don’t have to come run reports and click on a bunch of stuff, right? They just conversationally ask a question and they get a very precise answer. The other part of the A I piece is that it’s just an extension of the problem space that we’re already solving for, which is that now you have the advent of things like open A I, you have LL MS and they cost a ton of money
Asim Razzaq
00:31:35 – 00:32:00
the end of the day. And I think Roy is a lot of times, not clear. And the ownership is not clear like who, which cost center should this go to? And is this an efficient way of leveraging the A I? Right. And I think we’ve done things in that realm where we do support some of these A I providers and vendors so we can show customers the total cost,
Asim Razzaq
00:32:00 – 00:32:29
right? Not just a cloud and hypercar costs and the cost of other pieces of software like Snowflake and data dog and others, right? But also uh what is your open A I cost? Right? And who’s leveraging it? And how much is it costing you? And what can you do about it? And I think that’s going to dwarf uh as you can imagine the cost of cloud at some point. Now, if the cost of the cloud is bundled with like, OK, you know, this is running in the cloud, that’s different. But I’m just saying,
Asim Razzaq
00:32:30 – 00:33:00
uh you know, these things are going to run up a huge and massive bill for a lot of companies and especially in the next 12 to 18 months. Uh as more and more of these uh are deployed in production because we still see a lot of R and D proof of concept things going on. Uh The problem is gonna get a lot worse and that positions us well to help these companies to say, ok, you know, now you need to, you need to reel this in, you need to have fiscal responsibility and you need to make a self service for teams to understand why they’re spending so much money.
Jeff Bullas
00:33:01 – 00:33:16
In other words, you’re providing visibility with your tools of where the money is being spent. And then using A I, you can look at different ways to maybe solve that as well as the, I suppose, the expertise and experience of the team as well as the tools. So um
Jeff Bullas
00:33:19 – 00:33:32
just to wrap it up, um what have you learned along the way in your entrepreneurial journey? What are two or three things you’d like to share? Uh, your biggest learnings from being an entrepreneur at Yoss go.
Asim Razzaq
00:33:33 – 00:34:22
Yeah. So I think the first and most critical one is that it’s about the people, right? That’s the equation that a lot of people don’t focus on enough. And I have certainly made that mistake. So you have to have the right people with the right attitude who are a good fit for your situation. That’s what I say, right? So not everybody is built to last in a start up, right? So you have people who can wear multiple hats. That’s number one. Uh Number two is something that I keep telling and professing to technical founders like myself, which is product building is not the same as company building, right? Do very, very, very different things. And so think hard before you start a company and especially if you’re going to be the founder. CEO. Uh,
Asim Razzaq
00:34:22 – 00:35:04
Do you have what it takes to continue to learn to be a company builder? Not just a product builder? Right. And I think a lot of technical founders, unfortunately, they aren’t that challenge of like, they just build the product. And I think that’s what building the company is about. Right. But the reality of it is it’s, uh, it’s, it’s across the board. And the third one I will share uh is you have to really uh surround yourself with amazing mentors advisors. Uh A founder hood is a lonely, lonely, lonely place to be especially a CEO founder because not that many people you can really talk to and there’s going to be, we spoke about adversity, a lot of challenges along the way and so
Asim Razzaq
00:35:05 – 00:35:54
have mentors who are even killed. So people can be of a couple of different types, right? They can be, they’re always rooting for you regardless of what the situation is, which is not healthy either or they’re always criticizing you or the ones that are always rooting for you. And they will give you positive feedback when you need it. They will give you positive criticism when you need it and they will be celebrating your successes, right? So you need, you need uh somebody that, that can do that. And I think I’ve been absolutely fortunate to have some amazing mentors advisors uh who have been extremely generous with their time and their advice and I can never ever thank them. I can only pay it forward or try to pay it forward based on some of my failures that I’ve come across.
Jeff Bullas
00:35:56 – 00:36:03
Thank you for sharing with us straight. Final question. If you had all the money in the world, what would you do every day? That brings you deep joy?
Asim Razzaq
00:36:05 – 00:36:12
Um, I would just spend more time with my family. I think that’s what it’s
Jeff Bullas
00:36:12 – 00:36:14
about. It’s about people again, isn’t it?
Asim Razzaq
00:36:15 – 00:36:21
It is about people. Um, I think that’s what brings me deep joy. It would be the human connection aspect of things.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:22 – 00:36:41
Well, you just confirmed the 80 year old uh Harvard University about the, the, the site says that it is people and community that give us the, bring us the most happiness. And you’ve just, actually, you’ve just revealed 90 years of research. That’s
Asim Razzaq
00:36:41 – 00:36:51
right. Yeah. 50 spending $50 million on an amazing airplane uh gets old fast and then you want two of these and then you want four of those. And so it’s a never ending game.
Jeff Bullas
00:36:51 – 00:37:11
Exactly. Yeah. The, you know, the game of materialism is never ending. And um yeah, so Asim thank you very much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure and um I would like to have a longer conversation uh in the future. So, um thank you very much for your time and uh it’s been a blast.
Asim Razzaq
00:37:11 – 00:37:13
Absolutely. Thank you, Jeff.