CloudZero is the leader in proactive cloud cost efficiency.
We connected with Scott Castle, Chief Product Officer at CloudZero, to learn about his background, his responsibilities, what drew him to CloudZero, and more.
In this video
Scott answers.
- His Role and Responsibilities
- Scott’s Background
- What attracted Scott to CloudZero
- Why CloudZero should be on your radar
Video Transcript
Here is the updated transcript with the correct spelling of CloudZero.
I’m Scott Castle. I’m the chief product officer here at CloudZero. As chief product officer, what I’m doing is I’m changing how we are designing and building products here at CloudZero. And that means a couple of things. We’re in an agentic era now. And so a lot of the work that I’m doing is figuring out how we apply tools like cloud code and co-work to the software design and development process. I’m also helping us solve the kinds of problems that are showing up for our customers now that it’s not just about cloud cost intelligence. It’s as much or more about AI cost intelligence as anything else.
Some of the projects that we’re working on are really interesting because they change not only what we’re building for and the people that we’re building for, but they also change how we work. So, we’re retooling our product management frameworks, we’re retooling how our engineers write code and orchestrate code implementation. We’re solving some really big data engineering problems around how do we pull all this information together. And we’re solving problems of latency and freshness where we’re taking a PHOPS approach that used to be measured in days and now we’re bringing it to agentic models where outcomes are measured in seconds.
So I’ve been doing this for over 30 years. I started off in software development. I have a masters in computer science. I used to write code for money. I made the shift to product management through a role in sales engineering at one of the startups I worked for. And product management has been my life for the last 20 plus years, last 10 in leadership teams. And I’m really a startup guy. CloudZero is my sixth startup. And I love that process of taking a really great idea, finding and improving product market fit and then helping to drive companies into like where we can make them the biggest impact in the world. Over the last 10 years, I’ve worked in data analytics, data science, business intelligence. I’ve built embedded analytics platforms. I’ve worked in the MLOps stack working on feature stores. CloudZero for me feels like the culmination of a lot of those different ideas all coming together at once. That’s why it’s really interesting to me is it’s bringing together some of the most interesting data science and data engineering with the real world problems of actually trying to figure out how do I make cost legible to users.
What attracted me to the idea of CloudZero is that this is a problem that I’ve actually experienced before. So, in every one of my startups and even some of the big companies I’ve worked in, I’ve had conversations with DevOps teams or finance teams about, hey, the cost of X is too high. We’re spending too much on this cloud service. We’re spending too much on this database. Go fix it. And I’ve turned to DevOps or SR teams or even this core engineering teams and said, can we dig into this? Can we figure out what about those costs is too high? Is it really too high? And what are our options for doing something about it? And that whole process was measured in weeks and months while we’re burning tens of thousands of dollars a day on not solving these kinds of problems. So the idea that CloudZero can help finance teams and engineering teams solve that problem really fast is interesting to me because I’ve actually lived that experience. And I think that now that we’re moving even faster, that just becomes so much more important for our ability to build companies that have positive margin structures and that turn out to be good ideas in practice, not just good computer science ideas.
CloudZero should be on somebody’s radar because we are moving exponentially faster than we ever have before. CloudZero is transitioning to become an AI native company and we’re changing development in our development practices. We’re changing product management. We’re changing our go to market. And it’s not just about throwing things at an LLM and hoping that it works out. It’s about thinking carefully about how can we leverage these new tools to move with more intention and more intelligence and deliver value for people faster. And I know that sounds like corporate positioning, but I see it every day in what our employees are actually doing. We’re able to go from an idea to a solution incredibly fast because of the tools that we’re adopting. And that makes, I think, CloudZero one of the most interesting companies to be watching right now in software development.