Yvonne Wassenaar joins the Finout board. Thank you, Mat.
Finout was built to solve one of the hardest problems enterprises face: seeing, allocating, and governing cloud spend at scale. Over the last five years, we've grown into the FinOps platform trusted by teams at companies like Lyft, SiriusXM, and The New York Times. As we push into the next phase of that growth, I'm proud to share that Yvonne Wassenaar is joining the Finout board of directors, and Mat Ellis, who has served as a director since November 2022, is stepping down.
Yvonne has led at a level most of us are still climbing toward. She was CEO of Puppet, where she led the company through transformation and the sale to Perforce. Before that, she was CIO at New Relic, and held senior leadership roles at VMware and Accenture. She currently sits on the boards of Braze, JFrog, Arista Networks, Rubrik, Alation, and more. More than 25 years running and building at the level our customers operate at.
What made me want her on our board wasn't the résumé, as remarkable as it is. It was how she thinks.
Yvonne asks the questions you wish someone had asked you six months earlier, and she asks them with the precision of someone who's been on every side of the table. In one of our early conversations she stopped mid-sentence, corrected her own question, and said "I didn't ask that the right way, my apologies." That small moment told me everything about how she works. She cares about getting the question right before the answer.
She's clear-eyed about enterprise execution at scale. She thinks in market signals rather than buzzwords. And she has strong views on the platform question, on partners, on how categories mature. These are exactly the conversations we need to be having right now.
Yvonne, welcome. I'm grateful, and I'm ready to get to work.
Mat has been part of this industry from the very start. He founded Cloudability and helped shape the conversation that eventually became FinOps, long before most of us had a word for it. When he joined our board in 2022, he didn't show up to lend his name. He showed up to do the work. He pushed us on product. He pushed us on go-to-market. He sat with us through the calls that shape a company: pricing, positioning, the kind of team we wanted to be as we scaled.
What made Mat different is that he had actually been where we were. A year ago, when we were wrestling with one of the hardest questions in front of us, Mat was the person I thought out loud with. He didn't hand us the answer. He asked the questions that forced us to find one. That's the version of board work most people never see, and it's the kind that actually matters.
Mat, thank you. You made us sharper, calmer, and a lot less alone in the hard moments. You're not going anywhere as a friend of this company and me, and we plan to keep bugging you.
And one more thing worth saying out loud: it was Mat who introduced us to Yvonne. Of course it was. That's the kind of board member he's been.
Finout was built for the moment cloud cost became too complex to ignore. AI spend is now doing the same thing, faster. Who owns it, what it returns, how it scales, these are becoming the operating questions of this decade, and they land across finance, engineering, and the boardroom at the same time. That's the work we're built for.
Mat helped us lay the foundation. Yvonne joins us for what's next. To our team, customers, investors, and partners, both of those things deserve to be said clearly, and both are true today.