"Ship Pricing as Fast as Product" - CEO Alvaro Morales on Orb's Mission to Revolutionize Billing Infrastructure
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Hi, and welcome to Gray Matter, the podcast from Greylock. I'm enterprise partner, Sam Motamedi, and today I'm joined by Alvaro Morales, the CEO and co-founder of Orb. Orb is the modern billing infrastructure powering revenue workflows for the next wave of AI and software companies, companies like Vercel, Pinecone, and Perplexity. And they've just raised a $25 million Series B from investors, including Greylock.

If you prefer to read this interview rather than listen to it, you can find a link to a full transcript in the episode description. There's also a video version on YouTube. Alvaro, welcome to Gray Matter. It's so good to see you. For listeners who haven't heard of Orb before, let's start with just giving them the elevator pitch. What is Orb and what makes the company so special? Sure thing. Thank you for having me, Salma. I'm excited for this conversation. So Orb is flexible billing infrastructure for modern pricing software models.

So if you think about it, we help software businesses experiment with different kinds of monetization strategies, whether this is usage-based pricing, consumption-based pricing, or more of a hybrid strategy, mixing together seed-based and consumption. And really the goal of Orb is to make it really easy for companies to evolve their pricing. I think one thing that's unique about what we do here is that when you think about

When a company's pricing model changes, the billing infrastructure needs to change. And that's where a lot of our software solution is geared towards. But a lot of other things in a company need to change. So everything from how a finance team thinks about the financial health of the business, how they do revenue accounting, how they do forecasting, how many go-to-market teams think about their workflows. So really what we're doing with Orb is we're excited to support companies in the mission-critical areas of revenue workflows with what they do.

Awesome. And completely agree with you on the sort of reengineering of the business that happens around these pricing changes and the power of Orb to help sort of power a lot of that change. What sort of companies have you found get the most out of using Orb?

Yeah. When you think about the broader trend that's going on in software, it's kind of fitting this early adoption market curve pattern. So a lot of the customers that we serve right now are in verticals, such as cloud infrastructure, data, AI, fintech. Think about the kind of software companies that have the most sophisticated business models out there.

And the thing about those companies is they could go and put a ton of engineering investment focus in billing, or they could put that time and effort into building their core products. So a lot of what we do with Orb is we power billing for them and give them a lot of flexibility to evolve what they're doing without them having to put their team towards that.

Well, we're going to talk a lot more about what Orb is doing today, but I want to rewind the clock a little bit and sort of share with our listeners some of the history here. So let's rewind to 2021. You know, you started Orb with your co-founder, Shatej, your co-founder and CTO, and the two of you have known each other for a long time, right? Dating back to Asana, where you worked closely together and built that company through its IPO. Maybe tell the story of how you guys got together and how you realized that this was the problem to go after solving. Yeah.

Yeah. So Shitesh and I met at Asana when we joined pretty early on the team there, and we've been friends for a long time. And both of our backgrounds is in software engineering. So I knew nothing about pricing or billing going into that job. In fact, I remember that when I got asked to support a price change happening early on, I saw that there was a meeting with the finance team and I thought, great, I'm going to walk into this and

look at a bunch of Excel math and models and write three lines of code and move on with my life and that'll be the end of it. Well, in many ways that didn't end up being the case. I think one thing that was eye-opening there was kind of coming to the realization that pricing is about as customer-centric and product-centric as you get. It's about understanding what value you provide to your customers and how to best meet them.

And it's really an exercise of business strategy. So that way of thinking, I think really jived and connected with my engineering brain and got me excited to think about like, here's the impact that it can have on our customers and our business. But then unfortunately it like took us many months to shift a very simple per seat pricing model or like roll out a different tier. So.

Contradictorily or interestingly, those kinds of initiatives were also pretty significantly revenue impacting to the company. So I'm looking at that situation and it has like this mix of a ton of pain and engineering and finance, some really significant revenue impact.

And I found it really uncomfortable to be one of the engineering voices in the room having to tell no to the business teams on like, you know, fantastic idea, but it's going to take me six to eight months to re-architect and refactor every assumption we've made around pricing in the business. So I think Shitesh and I really connected on that idea, which was kind of counterintuitive that this essence of a developer platform, that is the ideas around extensibility, flexibility, iteration, right?

Haven't made it to the revenue stack, haven't made it to the design of a building infrastructure system. And what an amazing fit when you think about the kind of software monetization models that Orb is built to support with the kind of flexibility that Orb has as a platform. So I think what was really interesting was almost infusing our engineering DNA and the perspective and outlook that we have.

as engineers into a space that's as cross-functional as you get when at the end of the day, it's finance teams that have to close books and report guidance for a company and whatnot. And our system is kind of a key component towards that process.

Yeah, I remember when we first met and you shared the story of what it took to make that pricing change happen at Asana. I could just feel the pain. And thank God you guys built Orb so no other teams have to deal with that pain firsthand. Orb can handle it all for them. Absolutely, right? Because when you think about it, particularly the kind of business stakeholders that my teams often worked with, it's

These changes sound simple. They are simple. They're like, you're adding a feature to a tier, you're changing a tier, you're changing pricing. Well, this is not rocket science, but unfortunately, this approach that the industry has taken to date where product engineering teams have to deeply embed and hard code and understand the constraints of current pricing today have kind of resulted in us having to...

Just be very stagnant with how pricing evolves. And look, these are very smart individuals, very smart teams thinking about what's in the future outlook of the business. But let me tell you what makes this domain so challenging to go solve. Well, if you think about it, somebody in the company puts together a list of product requirements. Here's what our pricing is today. Here's some ways that we know that this could evolve.

And then three months happen and the business completely shifts direction, or there's something that happens in the market, or there's a new product to go change. So whatever set of requirements you thought you were building towards just changed out from under you. That's why I think when you think about a solution like Orb that has a broad purview across many different types of customers, many different types of monetization models, I think we're structurally a little bit more well equipped to go solve that problem holistically. Yeah, absolutely.

Fast forwarding to where we are now, right? And a lot has happened the last three years since you guys started on this mission. So Orb raised a $14 million Series A just last year. Now, you know, congratulations on raising your $25 million Series B. Tell us about the round. What does the Series B mean for Orb and what's kind of your plan and focus with this new round of funding?

Yeah, it's a really exciting time for the team and at the company. I think this round kind of is falling out of the timing and relevance and what we're doing. I mean, we're really building a business off of what I think is going to be one of the most important and disruptive trends in software. That is the fundamental way that's

values delivered in software has the potential to change, particularly with a lot of the innovations that we're seeing in AI. And that's coupled together with also a very challenging macroeconomic environment for software.

A lot of software businesses that had been growing amazingly through headcount growth really saw a massive deceleration that for some companies is a little bit existential. On this confluence of trends, I think what we're seeing is a really significant acceleration in demand for the flexible monetization that Orb is built to support.

Just in the past year, we've seen over 5FX revenue growth. And since the beginning of the year, we've tripled our customer base. I think that's a reflection of some of this momentum that we're really seeing. So I'm deeply excited that this fundraising round really represents an ability to continue investing in our product, continue investing in our team, to just meet more and more of these customers and really show them that there's a different way and a better way to think about their monetization infrastructure.

One of the things, Oliver, you and I talk about is at any given moment in time, there's one or two trends that really are dominating the software industry. And I think one of the things you've talked about and sort of built the company around is the secular shift that's happening in software pricing and how Orb plays into that. And so let's talk a little bit about that because I think it's something every founder and team is thinking about.

You know, maybe to start, like, can you break down why you think consumption-based pricing is the future? And like, how did we get here? What's driving the shift towards consumption? I can even rewind back to a little bit of what we were seeing in 2021 when we started the company. So

we were seeing some very successful trailblazing public companies like Snowflake and Twilio lead the education of the public markets around, here are the advantages of a consumption-based revenue model in its ability to drive

kind of astounding best-in-class net dollar retention and really efficient growth as a business. So public markets often require sort of these waves of companies to get educated around how do I think through what these businesses are? You know, SaaS very much was a shift in the sense that it kind of took a while for the public markets to really figure out how to value and underwrite SaaS-based public companies.

And I think we were starting to see a similar thing and trend happen in the public markets with some of the most trailblazing and successful consumption-based companies. And those companies, I think, were leading the charge on two very important things. Number one was...

best-in-class products that themselves had found a very successful flywheel in strong product market fit, strong product adoption that kept growing and growing in value. If you think about it as a consumer, consumption-based pricing is really around this idea of how do we avoid the shelfware or how do I avoid paying for that gym subscription that I pay for but don't go for and really only pay for what I consume.

It's a more fair model. It's a line to value. If I'm not using it, I'm not paying for it. If I'm using it, I'm paying and continuing to pay more.

I think that's very bold and courageous. I mean, you need an amazing product and a ton of confidence in your product to really stand behind it and tie your revenue growth strategy towards that. But I think those companies were showing us that that was happening. And I think number two, the efficiency of that was amazing. Around Snowflakes IPO, a dollar of revenue acquired could become $1.60 in a matter of a year, and that kept having a tremendous revenue potential.

We were seeing in 2021 a lot more of software, particularly in the infrastructure layer, realizing the capabilities and powers of aligning your value to the value the customer receives.

Now, what changed was two of the things that I mentioned there. You saw a very challenging macroeconomic environment for software, where it didn't matter how amazing your product was, if you charge based on seats and your customer did a massive downsizing, it didn't matter how great your product or service was, they were going to downsize that contract.

And then second, this wave of AI has exploded and we're not that many months from the original launch of ChatGPT, but we're continuing to see on a daily basis some amazing innovation there. And I think that wave is compounding together with some of the macro environment. And here's something that I've been thinking a lot about. When you think about

platform shifts in the software industry. Every major one has not only resulted in just like a generation of companies providing significant innovation, it's also disrupted the software business model. So you think about back to like the PC era, that's where license-based pricing and the real conviction that the marginal cost of deploying software by printing out the next CD-ROM and installing it became a really attractive investment model.

Well, early cloud that coincides with the SaaS-based business model. I think Gen AI has the potential to shifting the value of software away from, do I have a login into a web product that I have access to, into more of an outcome-based orientation? Like what can this agentic software do for me? What results can it achieve? Can I measure what results it's seeking to achieve? So I think there's something really unique about the potential to disrupt not just the

the innovation of software, but also the monetization of software. So when I think about what's to come, honest answer is we don't exactly know, but I think there's a ton of change in the ecosystem and I'm really excited about the role that Orb can play in this.

A lot of what you just said resonates with me. I remember back in 21, we were talking about Snowflake and Twilio and in the private markets, companies like Databricks. And there were like a few really great examples of why consumption base is great for you as a business and great for your customers because it aligns the pricing model with the value that's being delivered. But when you fast forward to like 2024 and to your point now, you know, squarely in the generative AI era,

I feel like there are very few companies that do not have consumption, at least as a part of the way they think about pricing. And, you know, we have a lot of founders who listen to this show. What are your learnings having worked with a lot of these AI companies? Like what are how should people think about pricing around AI? How should they think about kind of monetizing AI? Why is seat based not as good of a fit, it seems, for these AI and agentic companies?

At a high level, we work with a lot of AI companies at Orb, and I think it's a real passion of mine to work with founders on their pricing strategies. One thing that we have observed and we've been noticing is the nature of AI businesses

from one, being very innovative and new and tapping new budgets in enterprises, but second, also being fairly costly to run from a cost of goods sold perspective. The cost of running AI infrastructure is not a small bill. So what we're observing is that founders are thinking about their pricing strategy much earlier in the company building journey than they otherwise would have had to.

That's actually a really great thing. It's a great thing for the ecosystem. It means that we can build stronger and more efficient businesses from the get-go. And actually, there are some interesting considerations with pricing in AI. But by and large, I think I like to start by saying AI pricing is just...

great pricing strategy and goes back to the fundamentals. So there it's really about like one, can you keep it simple? At the end of the day, whatever pricing strategy you come up with can't live in like an Excel model math spreadsheet. It needs to be communicated to a customer in a sales oriented conversation. So it needs to be kind of simple, understandable and aligned. Second, I think you should be aware of your cost structures. You should have an understanding of what drives your costs. What's your margin profile?

You rarely, when it comes to sort of value-based pricing, you rarely want to like directly tie your pricing strategy to your cost structure. But particularly when that open AI or anthropic bill is so high, you want to have some awareness and understanding of where directionally that is headed.

And then I think number three, it's about flexibility and iteration. You're not going to get it right in the get go. You have to try out some things, learn in the market and evolve from there. So when you think about that, one really tying to value, second, it's understanding of margins and third, it's about testing various pricing strategies. There's very little AI to do there and much more about how do we build great software pricing models.

Yeah, that was some really good learnings and advice from the customers that you've partnered with and sort of the role AI is having on how they think about pricing. Maybe one question, do I as a customer need to sort of be usage-based or fully switched to usage-based to be a good fit for you at Orb? No. And actually, if you think about it, there are many businesses for which a pure play Paisio consumption bottle is just not a great fit.

And that's because I think I shared this a little bit when I was telling you about my experience into this world. I used to think about that pricing was about math. It's not about math. It's about understanding the specifics of your customers and your market, which means that maybe more of a seats plus consumption hybrid strategy might be better for you. Or maybe it's like, you know, you use usage based limits in your feature tiering to drive up sales through what you're doing.

I think the common denominator in all of this though is flexibility. I think too many existing approaches to billing just rely on pricing as like a one and done, you set it and forget it, and you miss on the fact that you have to kind of keep evolving it. So I think to be a great fit for Orb,

You as an organization, you need to be seeking more flexibility in your monetization. And I think that's something that every software company today and tomorrow is going to need to really stay competitive, evolve, and get more efficient. I want to move to the sort of billing landscape. But before we do that, I have one more question just around pricing and pricing themes.

Based on your vantage point, working with a lot of these leading companies, you get to see around the corner on what are the most innovative people doing around pricing. And so I want to ask you to now fast forward three years into the future. What's coming? What sort of trends should we expect to see in the world of pricing over the next several years?

I am deeply fascinated about the early experimentation that we're doing as an industry around an outcome-based pricing model. Let me get a little bit mathematical here. If you think about a hypothetical value curve where you're charting out the true value that a software solution is delivering to a customer, its ROI and whatnot, pricing strategy is about trying to approximate that curve as much as you can.

And there's a few ways that you can do it. You can think about it as a license-based pricing where you're trying to just draw a line somewhere and say, my approximation of value is a particular cost for a license. Seat-based, try to make it a little bit more of a closer approximation where maybe you're approximating based on the number of seats that you're provisioning what that value is. But at the end of the day, you're still kind of

chasing around this idea of like, this is the ROI that I get out of software. The idea behind outcome-based pricing is what if you price based on a measurable outcome that you are seeking to get out of a software solution?

I think we've seen some really interesting early experiments around this, particularly around the customer service help desk software space. So solutions like Zendesk AI have a way for an agent that's answering a question on behalf of a customer. You can, at the end of that interaction, ask the customer, "Did you get your question answered or do I need to kick you up to somebody else?"

If that customer marks that question as resolved, that is an outcome. So solutions like Zendesk AI are seeking to price based on that outcome. And one thing that I think is going to be really interesting is thinking about like a pay for performance type strategy that perhaps we saw in

ad pricing and ad campaigns. So if you think about it, marketing campaign at Orb, we are setting aside a budget and that budget is a proxy for the kind of results that we want to get out of this campaign. Look, I'm going to put $10,000 to write towards this campaign because I'm expecting to get some sort of return against lead generation. If I put less budget, I expect a

less performance, if I put more budget, more results. I think we're perhaps going to start seeing software adopt a similar model where maybe you can pay less and you get like a little bit less of a sophisticated foundation model or a less sophisticated agent to run your task. You can pay more and you can get higher results. So I don't know, perhaps we're going to kind of start thinking about value delivered as a lot more

granular and tight to budgets than we are right now. I think another thing that I just want to add in this space is to give the audience a little bit of a sense of how quickly this is changing. I saw a tweet from Jamminball on Twitter last week that was really, really interesting to me. So since the launch of the GPT-4 model family of OpenAI, the price per token has dropped

nearly 90% since its release. If you think about less than 12 months ago, you're starting to, as an AI company, leaning on OpenAI's models, you're trying to come up with a monetization structure based on those cost models. And months in, it's dropped nearly 90%. In that example, Jamin also showed how the cost of S3 on AWS has dropped 97% since 2013. So think about that kind of massive drop

That's opening up a whole new set of business models that were before not even possible. But that timeline is not happening in 11 years, it's happening in months. And that's the ecosystem that we're living in today. It's one that's just evolving way faster than any of us would have expected. - I love those examples. It feels like just zooming up

The point you're making is we're on this arc, you know, dating back to the PC era to now where we are with the AI and outcome-based pricing to get pricing to be as close to possible to actual value delivery and recognition. That's just a really good arc for us to be on as an ecosystem. And then that arc requires really fast iteration experimentation and sort of dynamic data-driven pricing. And it feels impossible to do without a platform like Orb.

That's the thing. I mean, honestly, I don't think it's hyperbolic to say if the industry is changing that fast and your engineering team, much like me, is going to tell you it's going to take a year to shift pricing, maybe you're not going to stand up to the competition. Yeah.

So, Alvaro, you guys are not the first people to build a billing company. Billing is a tried and true category, important category of software, maybe one of the most since it's what truly powers businesses. Let's talk a little bit about the landscape. I'm curious, like when you talk to customers, what do you think is the most important thing

What do people tell you about their existing sort of more traditional solutions and what sort of pain points do they share with you? I think the overall blocker and pain point here is lack of flexibility and agility. So I'm up against a new product launch, an important price change or like 10x significant growth that's like breaking everything that we have in place.

And the billing vendor or billing infrastructure I have in place is just not built for the evolution and change that I'm expecting it to. So specifically, it's either built really around this idea of a more subscription seat model that just does not jive with the kind of more flexibility that a consumption or usage-based pricing model requires.

and/or it might support the pricing from yesterday, but now I'm going in a different direction. I get no help to actually make that shift.

At the end of the day, I have contracts and customers with rolling start dates on old pricing models. And if I want to change how I'm doing business, I'm going to have to run some price changes and get customers over to new pricing. That's really hard. And I'd say that the fundamental gap here is that a lot of previous approaches to billing focused on just the automation piece of the value delivered.

There's a manual invoicing process that somebody on the finance team would have to one by one issue invoices to customers. So software comes in and we're going to automate that and make it take way less time and be more precise. That's great, but...

when you think about the life cycle of a company, pricing evolution is often not considered. So I think we kind of saw these pain points. We saw these problems at our previous company. And when founding Orb, we kind of started with what would it look like to build an extensibility first billing system? One that

is designed not just to be possible to represent new and different kinds of monetization strategies, but actually help you get there, make it really kind of possible and easy to get there. So when I think about some of the results that we've driven for our customers, I'm super proud of we helped the Vercel team launch billing for vZero, their generative UI product. We helped the Pinecone team launch billing for Serverless, their sort of innovative architecture towards the vector database space.

We have many results like that. And at the end of the day, I think that's what we're here for, which is how can we make things happen for our customers without billing getting in the way? We're more than happy to take that problem from their hands. I'm curious, like when you have these conversations and people talk about these pain points that they have from some of the more legacy vendors, how do they compare you to some of the large incumbents out there, ranging from a Stripe to a Zora? And it feels a little bit like a David and Goliath story. So I'm curious how you navigate that.

I think it is. One thing that I've come to admire over and over again is as an entrepreneur, as a technologist,

I thought this business was really about kind of innovative technology, and it is. But more and more, we find that it's kind of table stakes to have a best-in-class innovative product. And what enterprises are looking for is a partner to help them get from point A to point B and do so in a way that's best practices oriented and that sets them up for success. So I think when you think about the landscape, Orb stands out, number one, being very native to the kind of modernization models that...

are needed today. So you're not going to find kind of like a very static subscription or widget based pricing approach to our features. It's really oriented around the flexibility that our customers need. Two, it's very developer first. It's oriented around how can we get you to value quickly, help you have a fast implementation and enable change from you.

And then thirdly, and I think this is part of the special sauce of the company, what we're really building is a data platform that can uniquely connect every unit of product usage to revenue. And when you think about that kind of end-to-end system, it's immediately useful for billing. And what we've done with a lot of our customers is enabled some of their complex billing needs through our platform.

But it's also immensely powerful for finance. When you think about how do I view the health of my business, I need to have an ongoing real-time view of my revenue. And that's something that we're uniquely able to do because from a data perspective, our system has that close loop between product usage and revenue. So let's talk a little bit more about Orb the company and Orb the team. Tell me about the team and the team that you all have built.

I think we have an amazing team and I'm really proud of the team that we've built in our building together. Out of all the things you can work on, it's worth asking, why would somebody choose to work on billing? It's not going to be the flashiest or the most headline filling areas to work on, but I think

The team at Orb brings a uniquely infrastructure lens to the outcomes that they drive for customers. What do I mean by that? It's like, we're not front and center necessarily, but we're enabling others to achieve their results better and faster. We have four core values as a company. One is customer centricity. So one thing that I find amazing is how everybody at the company is really excited and eager to jump in, get on the phone with customers and help drive outcomes for them.

In a previous life, one of the roles that I had was in growth engineering, and my customers were these numbers on a spreadsheet that would go up and down as we ran different metrics and experiments.

Contrast that to Orb where we have shared Slack channels with our customers. I've been building relationships with them for over three years and know them well. I think customers are at the heart of what we do. Second, this is a little bit of an ode to billing. Minutes matter is one of our values because we think that it's not only important to drive to a quality outcome, but it's important to do it quickly. I think that compared to maybe some legacy players in the space,

What we're able to achieve in the timeline that we're able to achieve is kind of unique. There's an element of ownership and attention to detail that are important at the end of the day.

We work on billing where it comes down to literal dollars and cents. On the accounting side, there are people that can go to jail if their accounting is not controlled and correct. If we get our systems wrong, we can charge customers incorrectly. So again, that attention to detail, I think, is a little bit important. So I find that we've put together a unique crew that really models and cares about these areas.

Yeah. And I think billing is one of these problems where the more you think about it and like you peel back the layers of the onion, you realize how big of a problem it is and how critical it is to companies. Like,

You know, a little bit of an analogy when you first explained it to me is to Shopify, where like when Shopify got started, it's like, OK, cool. Yeah, you help me put up a web storefront. Useful. But turns out like, no, Shopify becomes the operating system in which you run your business. And like, that's why it's a, you know, 90 billion dollar company with the impact that it has today and sort of similarly with billing. Yeah.

When you think about billing as an infrastructure problem and you think about all the downstream go-to-market functions that are built on a foundation of pricing and billing, you realize that getting it right sort of becomes the operating system for our customers. And there's so much to then go build on top of that sort of database foundation. It's actually one of the most interesting things you could go work on, but it requires a little peeling of the onion.

Absolutely is. And to that point, I mean, our product today has some really rich capabilities around revenue reporting. So how do we help finance teams close the books? We're going to continue working on areas like revenue forecasting, where I want many of the board meetings that our customers run to include a little slide share from Orb that shows kind of a real-time ongoing pulse of NDR and a lot of the metrics that folks care about.

We have teams that we're working with that are excited about helping power their seller compensation through the data that's in Orb or their customer success trend prevention and renewals. Again, to your point, you've got to peel the onion. It's sitting under the tip of the iceberg, but we're really after a shift in how the go-to-market stack needs to be built in a modern enterprise. And I think I'm excited about the role that Orb can play in this.

So, over as we begin to wrap up our conversation, I want you to, again, go back to when you started Orb in 2021. What have been some of the biggest surprises since then? How has the company evolved? Perhaps in some ways it's different than what you originally envisioned. Maybe the thing that stands out the most is just like,

the faster time cycles. I recently was looking up at our early pitch decks and the deck that we first showed you, Sam. You look at it, the diagrams have gotten prettier over time, but a lot of the sketch of the vision has remained. I could not have imagined the speed that this transformation is happening in the software industry. That saying of it's slowly at first and then it happens all at once, I think that's really happening because we're

Real talk, maybe our message of revenue efficiency in 2021, the boom of Zerp and whatnot was seen as a little bit more of a nice to have, or like, "We'll get to that when we grow up and when that really matters." Whereas now it's become an urgent priority overnight. And I think that the outcomes that Orb drives is really important for any software business. Yeah, I would plus one to that. And I think the other thing that was probably hard for anyone to anticipate in 2021

was just how quickly we'd get catapulted into the ai era and the downstream impacts of that again i think you talked about this but 2021 there were a couple examples of really good usage-based pricing businesses businesses like soflake and twilio that really aligned the way they priced with the way value was delivered and you would talk to you know in my role i would talk to their founders like yeah we got to get there right we got to get there like we have to give our customers something that's aligned and makes sense for them and has you know built-in ndr and all the rest for us

But again, it wasn't like a must do existential. And like you fast forward to 2024 with the rise of agents. And it's like, you know, if you're still thinking about things primarily through a seat based lens, like you're toast and there is no future. And, you know, I'm just struck by, you know, I get pitched by tens of entrepreneurs every week and, you know, pick a percentage 80, 85, 90 percent of these companies are

are usage-based or consumption-based or outcome-oriented in the way they price. I don't want to speak for you, but from my perspective, that's really happened. I knew that would eventually happen, but it happened much more quickly than I thought it would. Exactly. And I think it just means that there's a real element of like right place, right time that we're building this business in. And I'm just excited to accelerate into this even more so that we can kind of deliver this value to many more customers with what we're doing at Orb.

And so as you think about sort of the next couple of years, what do you want Orb's impact on the software industry to be? And like, how do you think sort of this developer-first usage-based billing infrastructure can sort of unlock or accelerate broader innovation in business models and in software? I want us to be like known for helping create more innovation in this ecosystem and reduce this innovation tax. Because if you think about it,

If you're putting engineers towards supporting billing and monetization of your product, you're doing so from having done an assessment and realized like, sure, that makes sense. That's ROI positive. But it's so painfully taxing to what other things you could be achieving. It leaves a huge opportunity cost on the table where you could redirect that investment towards core product innovation. So I want Orb to be known for enabling companies to ship their pricing as quickly as they've shipped their products.

Aldo, is there anything else you'd like our listeners to know before we wrap up here? Yeah, if you're looking for more flexibility in your monetization stack, come check us out. We actually, as part of this announcement, made a trial available on our website. So if you go to withorb.com slash trial, you'll be able to get right in the platform and start experiencing what it looks like to bring this kind of product-oriented thinking to the world of pricing infrastructure.

Excellent. Well, thank you again for coming on Gray Matter. I love this conversation. I'm excited to get it out to our listeners. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Grey Matter. For more great conversations like this one, please follow or subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find a link to our YouTube channel in the description. Finally, we'd like to thank the people who helped make this podcast happen, including Elisa Schreiber and Fitz Barth. This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from lightningpod.fm. This is Grey Matter. See you next time.