A Dallas County jury deliberated a little over an hour before finding Jaime Jaramillo, 38, guilty in the shooting death last Dec. 3 of Officer Richard Houston outside a Mesquite supermarket.

An arrest warrant affidavit said that Houston, 46, was answering a domestic disturbance report when he arrived at the supermarket parking lot to find Jaramillo, his wife, their daughter and another woman involved in an altercation.

The affidavit says that the daughter told police that she and her mother believed Jaramillo was cheating on his wife with another woman. The affidavit says that when Houston went to talk to Jaramillo, the man pulled out a gun and shot Houston before shooting himself.

Jaramillo recovered from his wound to face trial in the shooting, for which prosecutors were not seeking the death penalty. Defense attorneys tried to show that Jaramillo did not realize that Houston was a police officer, which would render the murder a non-capital crime and eligible for parole. Police video showed that Houston was in uniform and arrived in a marked patrol car.

The company best suited to doing that would be one that understands traditional capital markets deeply, but is also forward-thinking enough to fully grasp the promise of crypto and talented enough to build institutional-grade financial infrastructure needed to connect traditional and emerging markets. Talos is that company.

Our relationship with Talos goes back several years. Arianna first met the team through an introduction from Rachel Meyer, an MIT classmate of Anton’s, when the entire company consisted of Anton, Ethan, and a pitch deck. What stood out then as much as it does today was the exceptional caliber of the team, as both Anton and Ethan have stellar technical backgrounds.

It’s not their first rodeo together either –– Anton and Ethan spent six years working together at Broadway Technologies, architecting financial infrastructure for traditional markets, an incredibly relevant experience given what Talos is building. 

Since that first meeting, they have delivered on their roadmap with phenomenal precision, building an exceptional team with deep engineering and capital markets expertise. Today, Talos powers a wide range of institutions that interact with digital assets — from hedge funds trading cryptocurrencies through the Talos UIs and APIs to asset managers and brokers providing crypto trading services to their clients through Talos’s Dealer offering.

Despite our long history with the company, as part of the diligence process, we set out to understand how customers viewed the Talos team and their technology. The feedback did not disappoint. 

Now, there is a growing awareness of the long-term cost implications of cloud. As the cost of cloud starts to contribute significantly to the total cost of revenue (COR) or cost of goods sold (COGS), some companies have taken the dramatic step of “repatriating” the majority of workloads (as in the example of Dropbox) or in other cases adopting a hybrid approach (as with CrowdStrike and Zscaler). Those who have done this have reported significant cost savings: In 2017, Dropbox detailed in its S-1 a whopping $75M in cumulative savings over the two years prior to IPO due to their infrastructure optimization overhaul, the majority of which entailed repatriating workloads from public cloud.

Yet most companies find it hard to justify moving workloads off the cloud given the sheer magnitude of such efforts, and quite frankly the dominant, somewhat singular, industry narrative that “cloud is great”. (It is, but we need to consider the broader impact, too.) Because when evaluated relative to the scale of potentially lost market capitalization — which we present in this post — the calculus changes. As growth (often) slows with scale, near term efficiency becomes an increasingly key determinant of value in public markets. The excess cost of cloud weighs heavily on market cap by driving lower profit margins.

The point of this post isn’t to argue for repatriation, though; that’s an incredibly complex decision with broad implications that vary company by company. Rather, we take an initial step in understanding just how much market cap is being suppressed by the cloud, so we can help inform the decision-making framework on managing infrastructure as companies scale.