Will’s Newsletter

Home
Notes
Archive
About
The gospel of burn and bail
Another exec crash-landed your org—here’s why nobody stopped them
 • 
Will Kelly
You didn’t build culture. You built chaos.
Slack isn’t a strategy—how tech teams replaced execution with emoji
 • 
Will Kelly
AI fluency won’t save you from bad tech leadership
Every failed AI rollout has one thing in common: a C-suite that thinks "GPT" is a strategy.
 • 
Will Kelly
The executive gospel of burn and bail
They gut teams, incinerate roadmaps, and still land keynote gigs. Welcome to the tech apocalypse—brought to you by executive mediocrity in a Patagonia…
 • 
Will Kelly
Your startup didn’t fail because of the market. It failed because of you.
The real post-mortem isn’t about product–market fit. It’s about people–reality misalignment.
 • 
Will Kelly
Why FinOps vendors fear their own surveys
They publish the truth—then build tools to ignore it.
 • 
Will Kelly

June 2025

Slack emojis and soft skills: How Gen Z became tech’s favorite patsy
Entitled, overexposed, and allergic to context—Gen Z brought ego to a systems fight and lost
 • 
Will Kelly
From cost savior to sunk cost: The lifecycle of a FinOps tool
Why your shiny new FinOps platform is just tomorrow’s shelfware in disguise.
 • 
Will Kelly
Analysts aren’t your allies—they’re paid narrators
Why the tech industry’s “trusted advisors” are anything but
 • 
Will Kelly
The most overlooked FinOps role? It’s not who you think.
Before you hire another FinOps analyst, talk to the architect who's been quietly saving your cloud budget for years.
 • 
Will Kelly
The tech industry didn’t lose talent. It deleted it.
They didn’t ghost you because you couldn’t do the work. They ghosted you because you remembered how this ends.
 • 
Will Kelly
Repatriation isn’t the real trend—it’s FinOps finally growing a spine
The cloud waste crisis isn't driving workloads back on-prem. It's forcing a long-overdue shift in who gets to say “no.”
 • 
Will Kelly
© 2025 Will Kelly
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start writingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture