Edward Barrow, co-founder & CEO at Cloud Capital, on CFOs and the discipline of managing cloud costs

In this episode we're joined by Edward Barrow, co-founder & CEO @ Cloud Capital, and a former finance leader who spent years managing $100Ms in cloud commitments before building the company to solve the problem himself.In this episode, Ed unpacks the rise of cloud and AI compute costs, and why CFOs now face a brand new discipline: a line item that's grown to rival payroll, yet remains the least understood and least predictable on the P&L. We dig into the critical difference between AI costs sitting in OpEx versus COGS, why repricing alone won't rescue gross margins, and the "token treadmill" that keeps consumption outpacing falling unit prices. We also explore why the CFO-CTO relationship has never mattered more, and what it actually takes to build a shared vocabulary between finance and engineering.https://startupcfo.tech/https://www.linkedin.com/in/ebarrow/https://www.cloudcapital.co[Report] Cost of Compute 2026: https://www.cloudcapital.co/the-cost-of-compute