What does it really take to build a scalable, impactful FinOps practice from the inside out? In this episode of FinOps in Full Bloom, host Thalia Elie is joined by Larry Advey, aka Fred FinOps, Director of Cloud Platform & FinOps at CloudZero. From his work on the FinOps Foundation’s TAC to his leadership at companies like Twilio and CloudZero, Larry shares what it means to align teams, deliver quick wins, and go from “zero to value” with cloud cost data.
Key Takeaways
- Zero to value is the goal: Start with small wins that deliver quick insight and long-term trust.
- Relationships matter: Cultural integrity and trust fuel data integrity and team activation.
- Explorer is your superpower: The ability to slice and iterate on dimensions helps every team speak the same language.
- FinOps is cross-functional by design: Success comes from uniting engineering, finance, and product around common context.
- Customer success isn’t optional: Great tooling only works if you have partners who help make it usable and impactful.
About the guest
Larry Advey, known in the FinOps community as Fred FinOps, is a veteran technologist with over 25 years of experience across infrastructure, engineering, operations, and platform strategy. He currently leads FinOps and Cloud Platform at CloudZero, while also serving on the Technical Advisory Council of the FinOps Foundation. A practitioner and thought leader, Larry is driven by one core idea: help organizations go from zero to value — faster, smarter, and with people at the center.
