SaaS for Developers

There are genuine technical insights around sub-resource attribution as a gap in existing cloud cost tooling, and the event-level observability architecture is explained with reasonable depth. However, a significant portion of the episode is consumed by YC experience rehash, generic startup advice, and host anecdotes that dilute the density.

“where they really fall short is in sub resource attribution. So uh, in a lot of companies, both big and small, you know, say you use the same very large postgres database to serve all of your customers, or you use the same kubernetes cluster for many customers”

“we use agents, uh, and agentless monitoring, uh, to collect per event usage. So in S3 that's like per object, put per object, get, we collect all of it”

The framing of cloud cost as an observability problem and the specific insight about sub-resource attribution being the gap in existing tools is moderately fresh. However, the bulk of the episode relies on well-worn YC tropes and generic startup advice that has been repeated countless times.

“treating it as an observability concern”

“codifying all the kind of byzantine billing rules of the cloud provider for each service is not something you probably want to spend your time doing”

The guest is a recent college graduate (class of 2022) at a very early-stage startup with one known design partner, which limits the depth of at-scale practitioner experience. He has relevant technical knowledge of the problem space but has not operated at meaningful scale himself.

“we graduated college in 20, uh, 22, my co founder, uh, Micah and I”

“we started by working on a social app, you know, as 22 year olds often do”

The episode includes concrete technical specifics - Clickhouse, Kafka, Kubernetes, EBPF agents, per-object S3 event attribution - and names CloudZero as a specific competitor. However, there are no hard metrics on savings achieved, no customer names, and no revenue or cost figures to anchor the claims.

“we use Clickhouse and Kafka and Kubernetes um on the beginning of the ingestion pipeline”

“they're storing petabytes of uh video in Amazon's S3 cloud”

The host asks some technically grounded questions (OpenTelemetry integration, tech stack) and adds relevant personal context from Confluent. However, the host frequently shares extended personal anecdotes that redirect attention from the guest, and the closing question - 'Anything I should be asking you and I forgot?' - is a low-effort punt.

“Do you use anything like open telemetry related? Like if I want to integrate with I have a, I happen to have a database if I want to uh integrate and send metrics in your direction uh is it just about getting an endpoint and open telemetry exporter?”

“Anything I should be asking you and I forgot.”