Why we left the cloud

`3:15:20`

— And for the moon includes? — Venture capital. — But also... — And other things in not caring about cost. — But also because AGIs are on the corner, you should have been investing into AI, right? Is this just part of? — Sort of tank ginger? I think it's a bit of a muddy argument, but if we just take it at it's peak ideal, which I actually think is a reasonable point, is that you can get myopically focused on counting pennies when you should be focused on getting, right? That I've optimized our spend on infrastructure by getting out of the cloud and that took some time and I could have taken that time and spend it on making more features that would've attract more customers or spend even more time with AI or done other things. Opportunity cost is real. I'm not denying that. I'm pushing back on the idea that for a company of our size saving $2 million a year on our infrastructure bill, which is about somewhere between half to two thirds

`3:16:22`

goes directly to the bottom line, which means it's return to Jason or I as owners and our employees part of our profit sharing plan, is totally worth doing. This idea that costs don't matter is a very Silicon Valley way of thinking that again, understand at the scale of something maybe, but I also actually think it's aesthetically unpleasing. I find an inefficient business as I find an inefficient program full of line noise to just be a splinter in my brain. I hate looking at an expense report and just seeing disproportionate waste. And when I was looking at our spend at 37signals a while back, a few years back, I saw bills that did not pass my smell test. I remembered how much we used to spend on infrastructure before the cloud and I saw numbers I could not recognize in proportion to what we needed. The fact that computers had gotten so much faster over time,

`3:17:24`

shouldn't things be getting cheaper? Why are we spending more and more money servicing more customers? Yes, but with much faster computers, Moore's Law should be lowering the costs and the opposite is happening. Why is that happening? And that started a journey of unwinding why the cloud isn't as great as the deal as people like to think that. — Yeah, can we look at the specifics just for people who don't know the story and then generalize to what it means about the role of the cloud and the tech business. So the specifics is you were using AWS S3 for... — We were using AWS for everything. HEY.com launched as an entirely cloud app. It was completely on AWS for compute, for databases, for all of it. We were using all the systems as they're best prescribed that we should. Our total cloud bill for Basecamp, our total spend with AWS was I think 3.2 million