The Infra Pod - The Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) tide is coming! Chat with Jon from Nuon

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

Tim from Essence and Ian dive deep into why Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is now getting hot with special guest Jon Morehouse, CEO of Nuon. The discussion traverses Jon's journey to founding Nuon, the significance and complexities of BYOC, and the emerging trends shaping the future of software deployment. Jon shares insights on the shifting paradigms in SaaS, the integration of AI in BYOC models, and the evolving conversations in the boardroom that are driving these changes.00:00 Introduction00:27 John Morehouse's Journey03:14 Understanding Bring Your Own Cloud12:55 Challenges in BYOC Implementation17:40 Pricing and Packaging of BYOC28:33 The Future of BYOC and AI

Welcome back to the Infra Pod. This is Tim from Essence and Ian, let's go. Hey Tim, this is Ian, lover of things that make developers go fast. I always have a new line every podcast that also rhymed. I'm super excited. Today we're joined by John Morehouse, CEO is Nuon and how did you get started? What is the reason, Detroit, that you decided to go start a company? Yeah, thanks for having me on. I appreciate the time. So that's a deep one, actually.

So this is actually company number three or four for me, or some math in there, depending on how you start up some pivots. But I kind of landed in this company, you know, sometimes by accident, I started out building a platform as a service that was designed to run on AWS. I had this kind of obsession for almost the last 10 years at this point of the sort of like software development life cycle for developers built on the cloud. You know, my first kind of like real job I worked at Buzzfeed on the infrastructure team, we built this sort

of infernal Heroku-like experience. I went to Amazon, worked on similar tools there, and along the way, a bunch of startups and contracting and consulting. At the beginning of COVID, I started this company called Power Tools, which is what directly led me here. It was essentially the idea I wanted to build a PAS that ran on the developers cloud account. And, you know, learned a lot of lessons and basically was in the process of like figuring out

what I want to do with the company. And the customer was like, hey, this is really cool. Like you built this awesome experience, but can I use this to run my app and my customer's cloud account? And this is like late 2021 at the time, you know, didn't really have much inside,

like I knew self-hosted software was the thing, on-prem was the thing, but I like immediately stopped that. I was like, what is this? And then I started to look around and, you know, put some pieces together. And so this is late 2021. We're now in, you know, 2025. And in the last three and a half years or whatever it's been, it's it's been, you've seen this emergence of end customers are asking for applications to be deployed into their account. It's a trend that's moving down market. The infrastructure primitives and all the tooling is somewhat in a place where it's possible now.

I think in late 2021, it wasn't necessarily easy. AWS organizations were a little newer, like, you know, practices around like BBC deployments and stuff like it was all emerging. You know, now there's this sort of awareness of like, Hey, like, you know, I'm a customer. I see your software is valuable infrastructure, data, AI products, like, can I have this in my account? Right. Like it's somewhat sort of like double edged sort of tasks, which is, you know, as a, as a SaaS company, you company, you're building a product and like, you want to build something

that's mission critical and valuable for your customers. But if you do get to that point, then all of a sudden your customers start asking for a lot of different deployment models and you know, update models and all these sorts of things. And you know, we're bullish on this movement called Bring Your Own Cloud, which is the name that this trend has adopted over the years. We're building a platform that enables any company to offer Bring Your Own Cloud deployment for the customers. In your parlance, how do you define what is Bring Your Own Cloud?

There's a spectrum, right? The spectrum is like, I buy someone's multi-tenant SaaS to I run it myself. But between those two poles, there's like a thousand different definitions and lots of companies live at different points along that curve for different types of customers. So what's your definition of bring your own cloud? Yeah, my definition of bring your own cloud and like what we're seeing in the market today

is the deployment model where the end customer provides the infrastructure. It's generally like AWS, TCP, Azure account and up to the networking layer at most and the vendor is sort of tasked with like running and operating the application within that confined account. And so it's this sort of like unique kind of like shared responsibility where you know the customer owns like the networking layer and the account and the infrastructure and they have all the benefits of this of the isolated

model they they have sort of the data sovereignty requirements and things that are driving this kind of covered but you know at the same time like beyond the initial setup are not deeply involved they're not doing things like patching pushing security updates like that's really on the vendor and obviously like depending upon the customer there can be different knobs and sort of like doing things like patching, pushing security updates. That's really on the vendor. And obviously, depending upon the customer, there can be different knobs and points where the customer might have an issue and the developer needs to break glass

and update things in the account. But those are really exceptional. The general operating model is that the software's and the customer's account and the vendor's responsible for pretty much everything else. And are there examples of like vendors where this day popularized, like most of the time with infrastructure,

there's not like host vendor, there's a couple of vendors where they got actual success and there's all this model and they build it all first. Like who were the first to come to market with this sort of model and why that worked for them where it didn't work before? Well, one that comes to mind for me is Red Panda. Honestly, like a lot of like what we've built it on is inspired by some of the

lessons that Red Panda has learned out in the world, you know, and for context, like Red Panda is sort of a Kafka compliant streaming system, obviously like a lot richer product at this point. But you know, one of the early bets and I've talked to Alex about this many times, like they're just like, bring your own cloud thing. And I don't know if it was something they set out to do, but there's definitely this inflection where they were able to build these sort of upfront tooling and automation required to make this model work

and then scale it. And, you know, I believe part of the reason that they've been successful is because of that investment and bring your own cloud, you know, generally like infrastructure company, there's a lot of different angles that I think you could argue, like why BYOC works for that type of company. I think there's data sovereignty, there's the sort of like cost aspect. There's also like a latency aspect and you know, the entire streaming space, I think is super interesting. Obviously like the folks at work stream and build an amazing product as well.

Like Richie and his team kind of approached this from first principles for BYOC. And so it's a natural fit. And I think that, you know, it starts to branch out from there because anything that, you know, when you have these sort of infrastructure primitives that move to the customer's account, like the message bus, the streaming system, anything that touches it or integrates with it also is kind of getting pulled and move into the customer account. And so we see that ourselves, right? The types of customers that are asking for BYC.

And when I say customer, I mean like the end user, the company that the SaaS or ISV is selling to, when the customer is asking for the software, it's generally because they have either a pretty large VPC presence already, network presence, and they want to control that. They have data solver B requirements, or there's just the nature of other systems and things that are connected to whatever you're selling them are already in their account. You see trends that follow the graph nature of B2B SaaS

and infrastructure. Everything's connected. And so once one thing gets in the customer account and anything that's connected to it has that pull. And so once one thing gets in the customer account, anything that's connected to it has that pull. So. So I think we're really intrigued because BIOC is nothing new.

We've seen a lot of companies done it all by themselves. Right? I knew that like the War Stream folks obviously has catalyzed even not just the BIOC, but S3 back systems. And I feel like last year to this year, we're seeing so much more BIOC things happening. And so maybe you can enlighten us like what happened the last few years that made BIOC not just more a talked about thing, but I feel like for a certain number of companies, this is like the default option even for

folks to start deploying into our customers, which I feel like has been a debate among infra folks, right? There's blog posts saying, don't do BLLC, you know, or BLLC is so much more work than you need it. The choices people make today aren't truly representing like which ways it is going. So what do you think is happening last few years that made BLLC so much more important or popular? I think it's an awareness thing for end customers, which are driving demand down market. And what I mean by that is I believe, and this is, you know, kind of based on customer

conversations and like living and breathing the space as a company, but there's a perfect storm of different reasons why BYOC makes sense today. You can talk about the data sovereignty governance. You can talk about AI and this idea of LMs and that being the new way to interact with customer data. But I think it's actually an awareness thing. I think that BYOC is becoming popular because more and more companies have now seen the light there's a few of the early kind of. You know big waves that you know i think data bricks is a really good example of this red panda example this is like the spig infrastructure products you were able to make the model work.

That is the market that this is possible and naturally like is any sort of competitive advantage comes around like there's the company is possible. And naturally, like, as any sort of competitive advantage comes around, like, there's the companies who are like, hey, I'm gonna lean in and I'm gonna use this as part of our secret sauce. And I think, you know, you saw this with WarpStream, right? Like leaning into the BYOC model from first principles and using it to sort of build a faster, lower latency system. And I think that as a startup, sort of,

you look at the ecosystem at large, like everybody's looking for competitive advantages and, you know, BY ecosystem at large, everybody's looking for competitive advantages and BYC is really, really hard to do. There's not a lot of good tooling for it. But at the same time, if you're founding a company product, trying to find product market fit, whatever, if you can find any advantage that lets you sell up market or sell to more customers more broadly or simplify operations, you're going to take it. Right. And you know, you saw this with like the sort of open source movement. I always think about like the YSC and I think that there's a chance to see, you know, the B YOC for everything days where I imagine a world where you probably pretty

soon here, basically every developer tool and infrastructure tool going through YC or starting up from early days, like you're going to see the BYOC data dog, the BYOC century, like those types of developer products sort of rethought for a BYOC first world. And it becomes this really powerful flywheel. Like software is so connected and you know, there's really like the way that you measure systems

or like how easy they connect with everything else. And the nature of it is, is as something moves into the customer account, if you offer BYOC, you can access and integrate with customer data earlier in the lifecycle, you can run better pilots, get into production easier and things like that. I think the other thing that's interesting to me, and this is sort of going back to the post zero interest rate phenomenon, But, you know, founders today are looking to unlock revenue earlier and faster. And the BYOC model is generally cheaper for both sides. It's not always the case. But also with the right tooling in place and

building upfront for BYOC, it's often a much simpler operational and business model. One of the convictions I have is that a lot of the challenges around monetizing open source can be solved with bring your own cloud. With bring your own cloud, you can build these products and run them in the customer account. And you don't have to think about the margins of operating cloud on a cloud service on rent and compute. And done right, if you're deploying everything in your customer's account from day one, you can focus on feature development and you're not spending cycles, you know, prematurely scaling things like you're building your application for, you know, the order

of magnitude of your largest customer versus the aggregate of all of your customers. And that, over time, compounds into a much, much simpler solution. And so I think it's a weariness thing. But, you know, there's a lot of other sort of trickle down things that come out of it. So I think we want to talk about like the specifics of BIOC because I feel like a lot of engineers, including myself, we had to build this because there's really no other options

than just Billy yourself, right? But when you talk, I talked to a lot of developers, maybe startups or building new databases or even some new YC ones, they will say, oh, we built a BIOC option, you know, themselves. So I feel like there's like, when you're simpler as a product, it feels like for a lot of engineers,

they feel like building a BIOC option isn't very difficult for them to just get started. Obviously, when you have have a much more mature product and a lot of different options, BIOC, just the deployment side, feels like it's actually much more hairy. But I feel like it's really just like such a small part of the whole BIOC journey.

So maybe to talk about like, what is really the most difficult part of building a full BYOC product? You know, is it just getting my product to deploy into somebody's accounts? And that's kind of it. Because I feel like a lot of engineers feel like, oh, I could do that myself, you know.

So I think about bringing it on cloud, and I think there's a couple different things that you have to figure out as a team. And, you know, these things are in varying degrees of difficulty depending upon your application, your infrastructure expertise, these things are in varying degrees of difficulty, depending upon your application, your infrastructure expertise and things like that. But generally, like part one is can you get the software package? Like you generally have a SaaS or some type of application.

You have combination of infrastructure, application code, containers, scripts, migrations, all that. Like, can you package the thing and deploy it into a customer account? That's part one. That's the easy part. Part two is, can you support customer configurations? Generally, there's no one sort of size that's all application for customers.

And so, you start to deploy to their account and you're starting to deal with different requirements such as networking stack, maybe auto scaling, like some customers are larger use than other customers, things like that. So it's like part one, can you package it? Part two, can you customize it? And then part three, which I think is the real hard part is how do you make it feel like SaaS?

Right? Part of the reason the customer is asking for BYOC is they want all the benefits of Tel Posted. They want isolation, they want the data sovereignty, peace of mind, lower total cost of ownership, things of that nature. But then on the other side, they want this experience. They don't want to dedicate their engineering time to operating a software that has an operator experience that was designed for the developer who's running it in their own account. Really hard to software that, you know, has an operator experience that was designed for the developer who's running it in their own account. Really hard to do that, actually.

It's hard to operate software that you didn't build yourself. And we all know this, but it's easy to forget it, right? When you're like, Oh, I have a helm chart or a terraform. It's like, even if you package it like that, that's just day one. So then you think about that SaaS experience, like what makes the SaaS experience? It's pushing updates, it's the patches, the sort of security kind of updates, it's the sort of peace of mind that, you know, as a user, if something happens, your database is just not going to be lost. It's that sort of disaster recovery and disaster mitigation. And then you think about it, it's like, well, like this problem is so nuanced because like I want that SaaS experience. But all software today was designed for sort of multi-tenant SaaS, right?

Where you're a developer, you push the first version of your app to like Heroku or Render or somewhere like that. And then all of a sudden, like maybe AWS, but like you as the developer has the permissions to jump into the account and fix things when they go really wrong. As a developer, you're not thinking about disaster recovery all the time or upfront. You're just focused on shipping product and features. And when those things happen, you have that peace of mind and knowing, hey, we can always go into the account, the servers, we can shell into the server and fix things.

When it's in the customer's account, you don't have that same luxury, right? The customer, part of the reason they're asking for it is like, they kind of want their cake and eat it too. They want the self-hosted model, they want the isolation, all that, but they want the SaaS experience. And they want all of that sort of combined experience without basically granting you, you know,

root access to their infrastructure and their account. When you're thinking about VYOC, you have, root access to their infrastructure and their account. When you're thinking about BYOC, you have to think about the unpackaging and configuring and customizing things per customer, but then I'm going to make it feel like SaaS all without having direct access to my customers, AWS or GCP account. Because if the customer just grants you full access,

it kind of beats the model anyway, right? It's not actually more secure. And so the devil's really in the details of how do you sort of have that sort of like modal type of product in the customer account where, setup mode is different from maintenance mode, which is different from like, debug or disaster recovery mode.

And I think that as a developer creating a, today SaaS product like multi-tenant SaaS, you're deploying to your own account, you don't have to think about these modes upfront. But the second you go into the customer's account, all of a sudden you're thinking about, well, hey, I don't want to have to get my customer to jump on a call with me every week to pick something.

These are also like, to be frank, generally like more valuable or larger customers, right? So there's less room for error with them. And you have to think about like, well, what does setup look like? Cool, I'm going to have more permissions there and I can do some manual things if I need to, that's fine. But then it's like, well,

what does maintenance mode look like? What are the types of updates that are allowed? How am I governing and applying policies to ensure that, you know, we're not rotating the database and causing downtime or losing data. And then all of a sudden, hey, when things go terribly wrong and you don't know what's really happening, how do I sort of break glass in a secure way and, you know, make sure that I'm delivering the SAS experience without requiring

sort of, you know, break the world kind of permissions? You know, it's interesting because, you know, there's other companies in this space, like one of them is replicated. It's been around for quite some time. I'm curious, like, what's the pricing and packaging of a BYOC offering, right? And I think this is, in previous generations, people have gone after this problem statement. I'm going to make it easy to deploy in an air gap environment. I'm going to make it easy to deploy in someone else's on-prem.

I'm going to make it easy for you to deploy and think. It's always come down to like a pricing impact and concern. And I'm curious like how you think about that going after this new BIOC space. Because you're basically at this point where it's like, you have to assume that the person you're enabling is going to be able to acquire enough customers with enough contract size,

that you can either make it on volume or that those customers are specialized for that vendor in order for the BIOC platform provider to make money. So how do you think about like that? You have to like increase the fee. And so I'm kind of curious, like how do you think about this problem statement? And is your bet here that like BYOC is a thing that's niche for specific types, or is this like the future of SaaS? In previous generations of software, it's actually more of the latter where like even at Sniq, when I arrived at that company, we had on-prem customers.

Now actually, over time, decided to just abandon on-prem. It was a completely different situation, one with this Enterprise Plus, similar to Slack, Enterprise Plus approach with multi-tenant SaaS. Talked about the pros and cons for days. But it was only a very small number of logos that actually ended up being on-prem. So I'm kind of curious how you view this changing over the next five years and how that impacts the way that you think about pricing and packaging. Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. So the way I think about it is,

and this is how we think about this internally, we're executing against what I call a 17-year vision. And I come up with 17 years because if you think about from the time that AWS launched and you have the EC2 and S3 primitives, to today, it's been a little bit over 17 years generally. And if you think about everything, that moment in software development history made it all of a sudden easy for anybody to operate a SaaS application, right? Like before that, you're thinking about racking servers, capacity planning, all that, and look at every sort of transition as an industry we've done.

We've done like service oriented architecture, like to big data, like AI, and then there's like the observability movement. Like all of these sort of products have been designed to solve needs around SaaS and like make it easier to build and deploy and operate SaaS applications at scale. And so what we think of today as SaaS is customer logs into a web app and everything just kind of works, right?

The vendor is kind of responsible for everything. I believe in what we see and our conviction is that if the right primitives exists to offer BYOC as easily as fast today. Basically every company that is selling to other businesses, every, every software company that's selling software to other businesses, we'll start and we'll default to BYOC. When I think about the origin of, of SaaS and like all the tools we have today, all the early big cloud players were B2C products.

It was Netflix and Google and Facebook. Now I think about the next 17 years and I'm like, well, SaaS is always going to make sense and multi-tenant SaaS is always going to make sense for B2C applications. Apart from the niche hobbyists who want to rack their own server and run things and really care about this, the masses are not going to set up an AWS account or a GCP account and run software. But the average startup who is building a B2B software business, buying and consuming software, even if they're selling to B2C startups who are building B2C applications, they care

a lot about these things. And the conviction I have is that not only will BYOC be the default for every piece of software that's deployed or sold to other businesses, but that as an industry, we're going to see the same shift towards a BYOC world that we saw towards a SaaS-like world. And so I think that means that you're going to see many different sort of infrastructure companies that build the primitives to make it possible to offer

VYOC. You're going to see a data dog for VYOC. You're going to see like century for VYOC. You're going to see your snowflake designed for VYOC first. And then I think you just keep following that and eventually you're going to have like actually compute design for VYOC. And I think that in a world where BYOC is the default, that's the default way that we are consuming business to business software.

And naturally follows that the operator experience of using one of these sort of like public cloud hyperscalers and like doesn't make sense anymore. There's a huge opportunity there to make it easier to build like a sort of verticalized cloud solution that customers who are running their top work and sign up for and run applications on. And that's separate from the sort of like developer, which flips the model today on its head. And so going back to your question around like pricing, like the way that we think about

it is a couple of things. So first, you know, there's the vendor pricing, BYOC. We're seeing BYOC move down market. And I see in the market, there's really like two types of vendors who are offering BYOC models. There's the sort of enterprise on lock BYOC where BYOC comes with a huge price tag, a huge price premium, right? It's starting to high six figure deal or something like that. And then some, some really

large sort of markup. And essentially, the vendor is pushing customers to use the SaaS, right? And so they're only doing BYOC when they're forced to. The other model, and I think this is the really compelling and really interesting approach, is the companies who are thinking about BYOC from first principles and they're realizing, look, if we can sell BYOC to 90% of our customer base, we're pushing our cost of our service to the customer. And we get all the benefits of this lower latency, easier integration time, easier pilots. We have one deployment model that works for everyone versus the sort of sprawl of deployment models today.

And you know, generally it's a much simpler business, but I think there's a growing number of those folks who are thinking about, you know, smaller platform fee to set up BIOC or self-curve BIOC and then they're doing like a usage discount for pricing for the customer. And the way that Nuon thinks about it, to be frank, is like our number one internal value is this developer obsession. I mentioned before, like my history of like building development platforms and past platforms. And a lot of that has influenced how we've approached the product, right? Because if you're building a platform as a service for developers, that's one of the hardest user

experiences to get right, right? I have so much respect for companies like, like Render who have gotten this right. It's so hard to nail that experience, like that original heroic experience. And we've tried to bring some of that into our company and say, hey, how do we make shipping a BYOC app as easy as it is to ship a FATFAT today? And the way that we price the platform is really designed to get as many companies as possible who are broadcasting and selling BYOC to everyone. And the beauty behind our model is that by default, pretty much, we're evolving to run Nuon in our customer's account.

And so that's the vision that we have is we want to basically build Nuon and offer BYOC by building Nuon on top of Nuon. That also means that we get to take advantage of those benefits that I talked about. And so really like the way that we're thinking about pricing and like building these primitives is like, how do we make it as easy as possible to run Nuon in as many vendors accounts as possible so that our vendors can run their software in as many of their customers accounts as possible. And you know, I think there's long-term play, which I'm not sure when you get to, but naturally, there's a lot of value for the end customer as well. We're not quite there yet. But as the

large bank or large infrastructure code on the other side of all this, you start to have all this software run in your account. There's a lot of value in having a single control plane that you can use to manage and have visibility into each of your different installs. And then that naturally leads into, if you can nail that control plane experience, then you can actually sell the computer underneath it. Long story short, with any sort of infrastructure unlock, there is sort of a, hey, how do you make this thing spread like a weed as quickly as possible? And, you know, I feel like

as a company, you want to exist to make, bring your own cloud the default and the default way that B2B SaaS and infrastructure and AI companies are built. And, you know, we believe that starts with like the developer obsession. Well, I think we're going to move on to what we call the spicy future section. What do you believe that most people don't believe yet? I think the thing I believe today is that software is so much harder than it has to be because we live in a SaaS-centric world. Everything we know today, building an infrastructure, data, AI, like any type of product you sell

to other businesses is such a painful fucking problem to deploy to your customers and like land customers because you have all this baggage that you have to deal with. And software is complex today because everything is designed for multi-tenant sort of, it's B2C sort of inherited design decisions. And I think that we need to rethink SaaS and like what SaaS means for B2B software. And I think that's why BYOC is such an obvious thing

to be the default way. It's cheaper for both sides. It can run natively in the customer account. I think you start to think about like an AI centric world, like LLMs are going to move into the customer account. They become the way that you interact with customer data. And you're going to move your application to the data and infrastructure versus moving everything to the vendor, which is the model today. I think that means that, you know, fast forward 10 years, B2C is going to still sort of be this like multi-tenant fast experience and B2B is going to be a much different way of building software.

And it's going to be designed to be B2C first. And I think what you'll see is that there's going to be an entirely new sort of AWS design for consuming software, not building software. That's the real interesting opportunity. And that's a much better security story, like a vertically integrated data management story for the customers. It just works a lot better and I think you're going to see a broad simplification of how software is built and deployed and managed in a BYOC-first world.

But we have a ton of work to do to get there, because we're basically going up against 17 years of SaaS investment by basically every developer company. So there's a lot of work to do. I'm curious what your view of AI in BYOC is. And I think there's two ways to look at this. One common view today in the market is that the rise of LLMs, what's going to happen to the interface,

moving from clicks to chat, whatever, is going to result in a massive consolidation for two reasons. One is the velocity of co-creation reduces the amount of barriers to entry for people, so it's easier for there to be much more consolidation in the biggest vendors. Then on the flip side, our ability to complexity of apps, which used to be basically like the one at what stops Salesforce from dominating every category

and anything related to CRM. Well, it's the fact that like, it's complex. And so every new thing, you have complexity, but chat kind of reduces it. And so at the end of the day, there's this view that like, we're going to go through a massive SaaS consolidation. And so the amount of SaaS we're buying actually goes down, not up. I'm sort of curious, one, is to get your view on that and two, how do you broadly see how this wave that we're going through, that we're at the early innings of for sure, how does that impact deployment model and everything else going forward? Yeah, totally.

I think the big theme that I think about is that now more than ever data is more valuable to companies. And I think what we're going to see, especially with AI, and then there's obviously like MCP and like self-hosted LLMs and like all these sort of basically like daily kind of industry movements, right? I think you're going to start to see more companies from like the earliest innings think about self-hosting things and basically wanting to get to a point where the foundational models that they're using and taking bets on like they have more control over. I think that's a pretty large theme. And I think that inherently means like running LLMs and managing their sort of fine tuning and

making those sort of bets, which means that the application layer and the infrastructure layer has to come and meet you where the foundational model is. So I think we're going to see more and more of this. If I were to think about what is the next couple months or year look like, I think that the next stage is going to be MCP is going to push a lot of companies to think about how to deploy the customer account so you can interact with more internal systems. And I think this also creates this flywheel where, once you have one thing in the customer account, you want everything in the customer account.

Then you start thinking about, hey, what does our VPC networking strategy look like? And I think you're going to see a lot more sophisticated network strategies moving down market. We already kind of see that actually. And all this is to say that more and more applications are going to be designed to be running the customer account. I personally think AI and BYOC are sort of like joined at the hip in a sense where they're very kind of interconnected. I think there's this AI sort of future where LLMs are in the customer

account and everything that's talking to any sort of customer data is going through like the foundational models in the customer account. And so there's like sandboxing that happens there. There's also like how do you isolate these apps, running them in customer VPCs, like all of that. Like I think it's just it moves it all down market, which means that much more VYOC software has to exist. And by definition, that means a lot more VYOC infrastructure to make it possible to do these things has to exist. And what do you think the conversations

with the executive, like what are the pressures that result in this? You know, like oftentimes, you know, when I think about SaaS software enterprise and like buying things, I think about like the boardroom with all the executives and buying things, I think about the boardroom with all the executives and who says what to create what forces that actually result in change in the market. What's your view of how that plays out? You must have some view of how the conversation is changing

it in the executive level to then change buying behavior in the mid-market and above. Oh, yeah. I think from the end customer and the executive level to then change buying behavior in the mid-market and above? Oh yeah. I mean, I think from the end customer or the executive level, they're thinking about, you know, essentially like the network and the network boundary is golden. Like that's really the security perimeter that you can guarantee as an organization. And there used to be a lot of these sort of one-offs, like, you know, exceptions to, hey, you know, large enterprise wants everything in their account, but we'll make an exception for A, B or C. But all of a sudden, like

when A, B or C is also connecting and interacting with your foundational model, making that exception is a lot more risky, right? And so I think that's that part from the customer perspective. I also think the customer perspective is looking for more valuable software that can solve bigger business needs sooner and earlier. And so I think we're going to see a lot of a lot more competition for pilots. But I think historically, you get a pilot with like a Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000 company. It's

like you're not really competing a lot. Ultimately, you're able to iterate with the team and whatnot. But I think now with AI, so many companies have such more aggressive budgets for trying these things that all of a sudden the company who can get into the customer's account, the product they can get into the customer's account earlier and interact with more data has a huge competitive advantage over the company who is running a pilot without that, right? And so I think that also creates the urgency

on the vendor side, where the YOC is actually not even just a CEO level or board level. It's like, it's a product thinking perspective that every product leader on the developer vendor side is thinking about. And basically the API that you're thinking of is like, how fast and easily can we get into the customer account and interact with all this data? And it's just going to continue down this path.

It used to be that you'd have the infrastructure team where the sales team is the one pushing for BYOC. I actually think the enterprise story around BYOC is the least interesting. Sure, you can use bring your own cloud down, lock the large bank code, but that's not the BIOC model that works best, right? The BIOC model that works best is the BIOC model that you can offer to 90% of your customer base and build a self-serve version of. And I think that on the vendor side, that's a product strategy question. And that's like first principle thinking from early in the company.

And it is very hard to undo the momentum of a large multi-tenant SaaS four or five years in. And so I think that companies are starting to be a lot more proactive around this. It seems to me that the writing is very much on the wall around BYOC for B2B application infrastructure. And it's just a matter of like, how do we get the tools that we need as an industry to make this easier? And honestly, like that's our like, not so secret plan in Newon. Like, you know, we built an end-to-end platform today that lets you offer BYOC.

It's developer first, API first, package your app, deploy it to customer accounts, manage the day two operations. But then, you know, step two is take it a step further, right, like we want to go into the infrastructure as code layer, the sort of orchestration layer. I think there's a new infrastructure as code solution designed for BYOC, it's multi-cloud at first, it's for application developers,

not just to sort of throw over the fence world that I think IAC is today. There's a Kubernetes orchestration, like the way to run containers that's designed for BYOC. And then there's the sort of step after that is like, well, once you build those primitives, like what is the data dog? What is the snowflake? Like what is, what does the cloud and compute layer look like for BYOC? The more product companies that are thinking about bring your own cloud, they're going to drive much more demand for all these things. And you're going to see this hopefully some flection point as an industry where no longer is it SaaS first, it's BYOC first and then SaaS.

And once we get to the BYOC first world, that's where all these really interesting capabilities and all this really interesting infrastructure is basically required. Again, it's a 17 year vision. There's a lot of stuff to undo. And, you know, it's exciting though. And I think if you look at like the ubiquitousness

of SaaS today, like that's the opportunity for BYOC. Awesome. So given your developer products and you have technical audiences as your focus, where should people look to learn more about Nuon? Like how do people look at how your product works and stuff like that? Where can people find you?

Yeah, nuon.co so you can find everything there. Go to our community. We have sort of a growing community around Bring Your Own Cloud. We're here based in San Francisco, doing meetups in San Francisco, Seattle soon, coming to UTem and New York City. Also, like if you're just a founder thinking about bringing your own cloud,

like you can find me on Twitter or X or whatever it's called these days. And yeah, join our community, go to our website and find me on Twitter. Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure to learn about the future of BYOC.