You have already been a VC, founder and an AI operator in your career. Why Vultr right now?
Joining Vultr was the culmination of various experiences in my career, which allowed me to recognize a unique opportunity in the market. My journey started at Walt Disney, where I worked in corporate development. That experience led me down the path of becoming an investor, working in corporate VC, a family office, and later at a growth equity firm. Over time, I developed expertise in digital infrastructure, working with data centers, fiber businesses, and early managed services companies.
Through these roles, I met David Ananowsky, the founder of this company. His success in building a bootstrapped, public-scale business with no external equity and zero salespeople was astounding. This company reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) without conventional sales or marketing teams, something only a few companies like Slack, SolarWinds, and Atlassian have achieved. This efficiency, combined with my background, made joining Vultr a perfect fit.
Vultr seems to be more community-led compared to industry giants like Azure and AWS. How does that community-driven approach set Vultr apart, especially with infrastructure being such a capital-intensive business?
Vultr has built a software platform to manage and optimize physical infrastructure, but doing so in this sector requires an enormous investment in capital expenditures (capex), which is unique compared to software businesses. Building an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company demands a relentless focus on efficiency, particularly when capital is such a limiting factor.What makes Vultr exceptional is its obsession with automation and efficient infrastructure management. That's the only way a bootstrapped IaaS company could reach the scale we have. In contrast, many competitors grow solely by burning through massive amounts of capital, with profitability often taking a back seat. Our ability to grow sustainably without external capital while maintaining cost efficiency is what sets it apart from other players in the industry.
Cost is such a major factor in cloud infrastructure. How does Vultr maintain a competitive cost structure against giants like AWS or Azure?
The key to our competitive cost structure is focus. Unlike the hyperscalers, who optimize their services for the world’s wealthiest companies and governments, we focus on delivering the best price-to-performance for efficiency-driven enterprises. The hyperscalers’ solutions are often overbuilt and too complex for many businesses, making them inefficient for those seeking leaner infrastructure.
We deliver infrastructure services with a relentless focus on efficiency. While AWS and others offer thousands of products spanning everything from platform-as-a-service to software-as-a-service, we focus solely on infrastructure.
We partner with the best-in-class software providers for complementary services, but our core is delivering infrastructure as efficiently as possible. Our streamlined approach ensures that we stay highly competitive in terms of both price and performance.
You are expanding into edge computing, and the opportunity in front of Vultr seems vast. What is the next chapter for Vultr, especially with AI infrastructure becoming so important?
One of the most significant shifts in the infrastructure market in the last 20 years has been the rise of AI infrastructure. When I ran an AI startup, the only part of the cloud infrastructure we couldn’t buy as a service was GPUs because, at the time, the economics didn’t make sense. However, the performance and price of GPUs have improved drastically, enabling infrastructure providers like us to deliver them as a service at competitive rates. We have been early movers into AI infrastructure, launching our cloud GPU platform in 2022. It's now the fastest-growing part of our business. Our extensive global footprint and history of efficient operations uniquely position us to support the rollout of AI infrastructure, not just in the U.S. but globally. It is an exciting frontier, and we’re fully committed to growing in this space as AI continues to reshape the infrastructure market.
Looking ahead, what do you see in the future for AI applications, and how will Vultr support this growth in infrastructure demand?
AI's potential is vast, and I believe we’re just scratching the surface. The broad application of AI, especially in vertical-specific areas like healthcare, legal, and diagnostics, will drive immense demand for infrastructure. For example, AI can drastically improve diagnostics by analyzing patient data and predicting outcomes more accurately than traditional methods. Applied AI is already making significant impacts, and those impacts will become more pronounced as more businesses integrate AI into their processes. The infrastructure demands for these applications will be enormous. The lead times to bring new data centers online are lengthy, so there is a growing recognition that we are going to need much more capacity to support future AI applications.
