For startups, growth still trumps cloud cost control

There’s room for startups to cut their cloud costs, even if they have to balance the implicit costs of doing so, such as the time required and the potential for slower development. The question then becomes: How much of a priority is finding incremental savings for young tech companies?

A recent survey of founders by TechCrunch+ indicates that a change in investor expectations is spurring startups to take a closer look at their cloud spending and move away from a position more focused on speed than cost efficiency — just not too much.

The changing economy and the resulting impact on both venture capital availability and the price of money keeps showing up in our investigative work. Put another way, rising interest rates are having a knock-on effect on cloud spending at tech companies, and therefore, slowing growth at public cloud incumbents.

TechCrunch+ also recently asked startup founders if new startups should pursue a multicloud strategy. They answered mostly in the negative, with some caveats regarding edge cases.

This morning, we have a sheaf of perspectives to digest, building off our work in late 2022 aiming to understand how startups picked their first major cloud provider and why.

Finding fat to trim

Last year, Boldstart Ventures partner Shomik Ghosh told TechCrunch+ that for startups still “in early product or go-to-market stages, optimizing cloud spend should be the last thing on a founder’s mind besides utilizing as much cloud resource credits as possible.”