a16z Infra #6: The Cost of Cloud vs. Repatriation

a16z Live

This conversation centers on the arguments and findings of the a16z piece The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox.

• The Core Findings of The Cost of Cloud piece [5:22]
• Cloud is a significant part of COGS for public SaaS companies [8:38]
• Should you allocate engineers to reduce cloud cost or just focus on growth? [12:06]
• How much of a problem is not knowing cloud spend? [15:56]
• The tradeoff between focusing cost and engineering resources [19:33]
• Should large public SaaS companies repatriate? [23:41]
• Performance matters -- it's not all about cost [31:55]
• Is all the talent for running data centers at the Google, AWS, and Azure? [37:46]
• Will the cloud feature set become commoditized? [44:57]
• Cloud oligopoly and market dynamics [50:39]

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