Amazon and Microsoft veteran Brian Erickson is bringing legacy tech experience to the early-stage AI developer cloud company Runpod as it looks to expand.
Runpod, which announced the appointment of Erickson as CFO Tuesday, provides cloud GPU infrastructure and tools that developers use to experiment, train, fine-tune, deploy and scale AI models such as large language models, an area that’s “exploding,” Erickson said during an interview.
“Being in a high-growth business where a lot of capital is flowing is extremely attractive,” said Erickson, who previously served as CFO of the market research consumer insights platform Suzy.
Runpod has grown substantially this year with annual recurring revenue jumping from $120 million in January to over $325 million today, the company stated in a press release.
Likewise, the number of developers building on Runpod’s platform has surged from 495,000 a year ago, to more than 1.2 million today.
That includes large corporations such as Sony, Toyota, and Intel, the company stated. It also includes higher education institutions such as Columbia University, Cornell University, and the University of California, Los Angeles, and high-growth AI companies like Deep Cogito, Rendair and Nodalview.
Erickson said he plans to help scale the company financially and operationally to keep pace with growth. His job, he said, is to build out a finance organization and put the right investments in place to help the company expand. He is already on the hunt for new talent: on LinkedIn he said the company is hiring two FP&A managers.
Runpod’s ambitious growth plans are intended to enable the company to serve large enterprises, he said.
“That changes the way we need to operate as an organization. How we forecast, how we contract and commit capacity that we’re buying across the board,” said Erickson. “Those are all going to be very important elements as I think about the financial and operational strategy for the company.”
Runpod, with Erickson, will need to accomplish this in an environment where the supply of GPUs is constrained. AI companies are reportedly scrambling for GPU capacity while CFO Dive sister publication CIO Dive reported recently that tech giant Nvidia warned of supply bottlenecks extending into 2028.
Erickson said he plans to make sure Runpod is “allocating resources in the correct way so that we can be able to supply those infrastructure needs to the demand that’s coming.”
The company will also need to consider its strategy for going after that limited GPU supply and how to pay for it, he said.
Returning to his roots
At Runpod, Erickson will apply his experience as senior finance manager at Amazon Web Services from 2011 to 2015, and finance director for Microsoft’s Azure cloud business through 2017.
At Amazon and Microsoft, Erickson worked in environments that grew rapidly, he said. Conducting due diligence and ensuring processes and tools are in place before making tough investment decisions were critical given the end-result could be costly, he said.
“What’s challenging in some of these businesses is usually the faster you grow, the more money you have to spend, and the more money that you’re draining or burning,” said Erickson. “How do you manage through a very high, fast growth environment, but also try to drive profitability through the operations?”
Beyond the opportunity to help build a business in a “category-defining market,” Erickson said Runpod has an excellent product market with about 1 million developers using its platform. That speaks to the value of what the company is offering, he said.
Runpod’s founders and management team also laid a strong foundation, Erickson added.
When Erickson led financial planning at DigitalOcean from 2017 to 2023, the cloud computing and infrastructure-as-a-service company was similar to Runpod’s current position, he said. It went after developers before transforming the business into a larger enterprise that went public in 2021, he said.
“I’m kind of coming back to my roots in the cloud infrastructure space,” Erickson said.
