This interview is with Oscar Moncada, Co-founder and CEO, Stratus10.
For Featured readers, how do you introduce yourself and the work you lead at Stratus10 and with Kalos?
I am the Co-founder and CEO of Stratus10 and Kalos. We help companies migrate to the cloud and take advantage of innovative cloud services.
What key moments or choices most shaped your journey from consultant to founder building a cloud product?
After years of working with clients and using various third-party tools, we realized that nothing really worked as it should. So, we decided to build our own cloud cost and compliance platform to meet the specific requirements of customers like our SMB clients.
What specific gap in SMB cloud operations convinced you to build Kalos?
The market is filled with cloud visibility tools, but none focus on the most pressing issues relevant to SMBs. With lean teams focused on building products, SMB teams lack the dedicated resources to manage cloud infrastructure costs and security. While the market has many tool options in this space, we have found them to be too niche, too complicated, or too expensive.
Before writing code, what single validation step had the biggest impact on Kalos’s early success?
Working with our clients day-to-day was the biggest validation step before building Kalos. Our clients would constantly ask us for information that they couldn’t get from their existing tools.
When modernizing a legacy application, what decision framework do you use to determine what to rebuild versus retain?
I use a simple lens: value vs. friction. We retain components that still deliver business value and aren’t blocking change. We rebuild what creates drag, including:
- Tight coupling
- Scaling limits
- Security gaps
- High operational toil
Then we map each piece to the “6 Rs” and ask one hard question: Does this help us move faster next year? If not, it’s a rebuild candidate.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?
I’m passionate about cloud computing and could talk about AWS, AI, and cloud management all day. I’m happy to connect and exchange ideas.
Connect with me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oscarmoncada1