- Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine ordered teams to examine the company's cloud budget.
- Employees found a lot of unused space with providers like AWS and Snowflake.
- The company has cut its monthly AWS budget nearly in half.
When Tony Stubblebine became CEO of Medium in 2022, he was tasked with making the online publishing platform profitable for the first time in the company's decadelong history.
Stubblebine expects Medium to hit that milestone sometime this year, thanks in part to a somewhat unexpected strategy — scrutinizing the company's budget for cloud storage and services.
Stubblebine's mandate to cut costs across the company began when he joined two years ago. He soon realized that cloud computing was the most bloated part of Medium's budget.
"What's ended up happening is that probably about half of our path to profitability came from cost-cutting and a quarter of that is in cloud costs," Stubblebine told BI.
When he initially directed teams to examine their cloud spending, Stubblebine expected to find instances of inefficient usage that might require the advice of an outside expert before shutting down.
Instead, employees found lots of space the company simply wasn't using, and that no one had bothered to check.
"These weren't hard costs for the existing team to cut," said Stubblebine. "As soon as we gave them permission to go looking, then they found a ton of stuff immediately and they could fix all of it."
It's not just Stubblebine who plans to continue cutting cloud costs. A Barclays survey found that 83% of CIOs plan to "re-patriate" or remove certain workloads from the cloud in the first half of 2024, up from 43% four years ago.
In Medium's case, the most bloat came from the biggest providers. That's meant cutting back significantly on Amazon Web Services and Snowflake. Savings on AWS, Stubblebine said, is "trending north of $500,000 a month" — nearly half of what Medium used to spend.
The cloud industry refers to cost-cutting as "cloud optimization." Last year, cloud providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft cited cloud optimization as the reason cloud sales growth had slipped to historic lows. As growth has crept back up in recent months, these same companies have declared the days of cloud optimization to be over.
But Stubblebine thinks that cloud optimization is part of a broader mentality shift sweeping the pre-IPO startup world. With investor money harder to come by, he said, companies are focused on profit — and cost-cutting is part of that.
"I just told the team that cost-cutting and growth are the same," said Stubblebine. "We're not saying that one is better than the other."
Cutting cloud spend has also allowed Medium to move faster.
"To have less is better for development," said Stubblebine. "And that's why people call it tech debt. It's not just a financial cost, it's a cognitive load for the product teams."
Got a tip for this reporter? Contact Ellen Thomas on Signal at 929-524-6964 or ethomas@insider.com.
