The SaaS CFO · Ben Murray
podcastplaybookEx-Google Engineer Raises $9M to Tame Snowflake Workloads
Source excerpt
About The SaaS CFOI spoke with Mingsheng Hong, co-founder and CEO of Bluesky. Bluesky, a Menlo Park, CA-based formally launched its first product that provides unprecedented visibility into Snowflake workload usage and costs. He couldn’t start coding his idea due to IP concerns when he was employed. However, soon after launching the idea, he raised funding and started to code the product. Bluesky announced that it raised $8.8 million in seed funding led by Greylock, with participation from angels Ashish Thusoo (co-founder of Qubole), Jeff Hammerbacher (co-founder of Cloudera), and Johannes Gehrke (Microsoft Redmond research director). Founded 2022 $9M Raised 12 FTE’s and hiring more Moved from % savings pricing model to subscription model Closer to $0 than $1M ARR If the founder’s vision doesn’t resonate with the VC, move on (fail fast) Mingsheng Hong’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mingshenghong/…
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Apollo layer
What a founder can learn
Founder takeaway
Treat pricing as a hypothesis, not a permanent choice. Bluesky’s move from percentage-of-savings pricing to subscriptions shows that even a value-linked model may need to change as founders learn how customers prefer to buy.
Why it matters
Early pricing decisions shape sales friction, revenue quality, and how clearly customers understand the product’s value. Testing the model before revenue scales is less costly than correcting it later.