I was born and raised in Seattle, and my entire upbringing was around technology. Both of my parents worked at Amazon and Microsoft in the early days, and my first tech job was at Azure. So you could say I have come full circle.
AITech Interview with Aran Khanna, CEO and Co-founder, Archera.ai
1. Tell us a bit about yourself. What drove you to start Archera?
I was born and raised in Seattle, and my entire upbringing was around technology. Both of my parents worked at Amazon and Microsoft in the early days, and my first tech job was at Azure. So you could say I have come full circle.
Later, in college, I worked as a researcher with the former FTC CTO, Latanya Sweeney, on various privacy and technology related projects. I then moved on to researching ML, working on the Deep Learning framework MXNet, which was adopted by Amazon, leading to me joining AWS.
I had the idea for Archera during my time as an engineer at AWS. I was part of the original Sagemaker team and was tasked with driving customer adoption for its very expensive GPU compute product. Essentially, all customers had difficulty making comparisons. They didn’t know what they’d be paying for services, and many were too uneasy about predicting usage to commit to services for a year-plus in order to get a discount. Visibility into who spent what was getting better, but using that to drive predictability and then optimize for usage and costs in a low-risk way was out of reach for most engineering teams. This goal was a big part of the inspiration for Archera and also a large motivation for the emergence of FinOps—which some might call IT finance—a new practice area dedicated to cost-optimizing cloud contracts, commitments and service deployments, against technical & business requirements.
