CF8: Pricing Transparency for Compute | Carmen Li
simplyblockNovember 20, 202400:46:04

CF8: Pricing Transparency for Compute | Carmen Li

In this episode of Cloud Frontier, we chat with Carmen Li, founder of Silicon Data. Carmen shares her journey from high-frequency trading to launching a platform that brings financial infrastructure and transparency to compute markets. She discusses Silicon Data's first products—SiliconNavigator for GPU price insights and SiliconCarbon for carbon footprint tracking—and how they address key challenges in the compute ecosystem. Carmen also reflects on transitioning to entrepreneurship, the importance of building agile teams, and encouraging more women to pursue startup ambitions.

You can find Rob Pankow (CEO & Co-founder of simplyblock and host of Cloud Frontier) on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertpankow

Cloud Frontier is brought to you by simplyblock. On Cloud Frontier, our Co-founder, Rob Pankow, engages with fellow founders to discuss their entrepreneurial paths, challenges in building software companies, and the innovations shaping cloud infrastructure. For more episodes, visit Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5tqKWgHgbtOQTF0ud7F8Bu

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📔 Chapters:
00:00 - Preview
01:31 - Guest Introduction
07:17 - Why Carmen started Silicon Data
11:20 - Carmen's early go to market approach
16:36 - Collecting data for GPU Prices
22:04 - Data centers and ESG goals
24:47 - The GPU gold rush
29:19 - Silicon Data's early sales & marketing
31:49 - What Silicon Data needs to take off
37:08 - Hiring and building the right team
40:31 - Where does Carmen get knowledge?
44:15 - Carmen's final thoughts
45:29 - Conclusion

📋 Show notes:
Guest links & episode links:
Carmen's LinkedIn: /carmenrli
Carmen's Twitter/X: /carmenli
Silicon Data website: https://www.silicondata.com/
Compute Derivates: https://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/10/02/compute-derivatives-the-next-big-thing-in-commodities/
Nvidia H100: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/h100/
AI's carbon footprint: https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/05/1084417/ais-carbon-footprint-is-bigger-than-you-think/

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Simplyblock is an intelligent database storage orchestrator for IO-intensive workloads in Kubernetes, including databases and analytics solutions. A single system connects local NVMe disks, GP3 volumes, and S3 making it easier to handle storage capacity and performance. With the benefits of thin provisioning, storage tiering, and volume pooling, your database workloads get better performance at lower cost without changes to existing AWS infrastructure.

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