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2024-03-21 - Lawrence Guillory

Jul 06, 2024, 4 min read

Date: 2024-03-21 Name: Lawrence Guillory Title: CEO, RealTheory Type: Interviews

Processed Notes

  • Should group the information/advice by stage not series
    • Pre-seed/Seed
    • Growth Stage
    • Scale stage

Raw Notes

  • Serial founder. Had experience founding companies, worked with accelerators, advised numerous startups
  • Swap Chapter 5 and 6. Start with the startup perspective first, VC second, Private Equity third
  • As i come up with other chapters, keeps chapters 5-7 towards the end
  • Don’t think in series (ie series A-D)
    • Pre-seed/Seed
    • Growth Stage
    • Scale stage
    • The entrepreneur will place themselves, rather than me trying to tell them where they are. funding rounds can vary widely in terms of amounts raised
  • Benefits and downsides to using what’s on FinOps.org: ie crawl, walk, run & observe, operate, etc
    • The more i borrow that stuff, the more I don’t sound like i have a unique perspective. Just regurgitating the same content in a different way. For a book you want your own opinions and viewpoint
  • Stages
    • Pre-revenue
      • #1 priority, 2k-10k credits
        • Advertise up to $150k
        • This is huge. This is what enables startups to start
      • Tagging
    • 1M
  • Once you start spending money in the cloud, it’s harder to participate in these “free credit” programs
    • Order: set up LLC, set up operating agreement with founders, get credits
  • Entrepreneurs are usually super distracted. talking to customers, talking to vc. Tell them just do x y and z otherwise you’re going to mess up the next state
  • it’s note crawl walk run, it’s a methodical way to know you swam in the right direction. no run, you either made it and it’s expensive or not
  • Enterprise is different because you’re inheriting someone else’s stuff. Startups are different
  • You’re going to grow, and you’re going to regret not doing x. regret not doing x.
  • every dollar you save buys another engineer, sales dev person, pays for FB and LI ads that drive your funnel. Stupidest thing to do as a startup is to burn money you don’t have in the cloud.
    • the best way to prioritize this: look at it as: as you’re growing, do these things
  • I need to know the critical stuff that i must must do. what will save the most money with the least amount of engineering pain.
  • think in must haves, nice to haves, and always linking the why (an engineering mindset). you’re building a house, have the electrical done first. because if you build first and have to do electrical next, it’s way more complicated and expensive.
  • VC due diligence
    • put yourself in the boardroom with VCs. they’ve hired me as an expert to coach them on 1) how to spot problems with companies they’re investing in 2) how to enforce better FinOps in existing portfolio
    • VCs hate burning money that’s not returning. Write chapter: hey look, you have two different types of situation (see above)
    • from a DD standpoint: yellow, red, green flags.
    • Don’t have tagging that’s fine. don’t have committed discounts, yellow flag or red flag
    • If it’s your portfolio, start asking questions. maybe make it as a check list. Give it to all your portfolio companies and get an electronic scorecard.
  • Private equity is buying the business, and it’s at such a scale: where is Cloud Cost on the P&L. Where do cloud costs get hidden in the P&L.
    • It’s unlikely they’re in the run phase.
  • There’s a tribal language in the startup communities. talking to 1000 people founders and VCs, and you talk FinOps language, you’ll be the first person they heard that from. so speak their language rather than coming up with a new one

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