Rosie: Hello and welcome to this episode of Trident Talks. I'm Rosie, a senior consultant over at Trident, and I'm delighted to be joined by the founders of Fluid Cloud.

Shahed: Yeah, sure. No, absolutely. I'm Shahed. I'm the CEO and the co-founder at Fluid Cloud.

Harshett: My name is Harshett. I'm co-founder and CTO at Fluid Cloud. This is practically our third company and second startup together.

Harshett: When our previous startup exited, we were acquired by Tenable. It took us a couple of months to move from one AWS account to another, and that's where we realized this problem needed solving.

Harshett: That's how the idea of Fluid Cloud started, and then we began building the product together.

Rosie: So you had firsthand experience of the problem—that aha moment from living it yourselves.

Shahed: Prior to Fluid Cloud, I co-founded a company that was acquired by Tenable. Before that, I worked at Pulse Secure, which spun off from Juniper Networks, and earlier at Cisco and WebEx.

Harshett: I've been an individual contributor most of my career. I was a founding engineer in the last startup, writing most of the early code and building microservices from scratch.

Harshett: By acquisition, we had around 19 microservices and had re-architected the system multiple times. I've worked extensively with AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Harshett: The acquisition experience and infrastructure changes in 2023–2024, including VMware and Terraform licensing changes, highlighted the need for alternatives.

Rosie: What were the biggest challenges transitioning from idea to product launch?

Harshett: The problem was new—most solutions were manual or consultancy-based. We initially tried AI