$4M sounds low. Example. Let's say someone in accounting is responsible for combing through invoices, extrapolating data from them, and entering those extrapo

$4M sounds low. Example. Let's say someone in accounting is responsible for combing through invoices, extrapolating data from them, and entering those extrapolations into a spreadsheet, perhaps with some calculations. That someone is earning $75,000/year (not including benefits and other costs) to do this job. $75,000/year is the market rate for someone experienced enough to do this correctly, and since this is accounting, outsourcing this would be difficult because of US tax law. This task consumes approx. 10 of their 40 hours/week. There are 261 working days in the 2021 fiscal year. This means that this $75,000/year person costs the company $288/day. Of that $288, it costs $231/day to do this particular task. $231/day * 261 days = $60,291. You come along. You discover this madness and write a script to do it. You are paid $150,000/year (not fully loaded). Since you're subject to capital-A Agile, you do this in the very little downtime you get between playing stories. You write the script (with no tests, because you ain't getting time for that) in six hours, or about 3/4 of a day. Since you cost $575/day ($150,000/261 days), this work "cost" the company $431. However, the script does what the person in accounting did in 30 seconds and does so completely automatically. In essence, the company "paid" $431 to automate what cost them $60,291 to get done. _Per person_. That's where the real savings comes from. Tech can scale so much more efficiently than people can. If this task needed 10 people worth $75,000/year to accomplish, it would have still "cost" the company $431 to automate what is now a $600,000 annual job! If you were an entrepreneur selling this as a solution, you would probably sell this to the company at, say, $100/month. ($9.99/mo would be too low, and you do have to charge a "throat to choke" premium). That's $1,200/year of super sticky recurring revenue that you can sell to multiple companies with minor refactoring (because big companies generally don't abandon things, especially not things this cheap). Not a bad return on something that took six hours to write! If you were working for this CEO, you would get scolded by a PM for working on an item that didn't have a story, which would percolate up to a negative mark on your yearly review that shunts your chance at a raise. Sure, you'll still get your 5% bonus of $7,500...but your six hour BS project literally saved the company over $59,000! PER PERSON! See why what this CEO said is incredibly insulting?