Navigating the new fundraising environment, idea-mazing, relationship pipelines, and overcoming pattern-matching bias w/ Lizzie Matusov

Scott Woody, co-founder and CTO @ Metronome, shares the story of how Metronome, a small startup, made the transition to quickly operate at a global scale while working with complex, public companies. He shares the origin story of Metronome and the roadmap of how they went from early-stage engineering to creating highly specialized teams & in-house experts. Additionally, we cover how to navigate the tension between infrastructure & product eng teams, creating a healthy relationship between finance & eng orgs, and recommendations for strategically considering pivoting business models.

ABOUT SCOTT WOODY

Scott (@l3amm) is currently co-founder and CTO of Metronome, the usage-based billing platform built to help software companies accelerate their revenue. Prior to Metronome, Scott was a Director of Engineering at Dropbox where he led the growth and monetization team. He previously co-founded Foundry Hiring, an ATS system, that was later acquired by Dropbox.

"When we were smaller, we had one giant engineering team. What we realized about nine months ago, especially as we started working with these more public companies, was that the needs of the specific personas were so specific that this concept of engineers being able to fit the entire product and need space in their head was impossible. We had to create those experts and decided to have PMs specialize and embed with these teams to become experts on the workflows.”

- Scott Woody   

SHOW NOTES:

• The origin story of Metronome & Scott’s transition from Dropbox (3:00)
• How Metronome gained & maintained its first customers (5:22)
• Metronome’s two products / distinct user personas (7:44)
• Challenges from multiple complex stakeholders and users (10:03)
• The difficulty in solving & prioritizing user problems (12:10)
• Navigating the tension between product eng & infrastructure sides (15:26)
• How Metronome created experts in house & built a retainer of consultants (19:15)
• Roadmap for going from early-stage engineering to specialized teams (20:56)
• Processes for standardizing the knowledge base & communicating the info (23:02)
• Using brown bag talks to onboard new hires (26:02)
• Implications of a usage-based business model for eng leaders (28:12)
• Lessons learned when changing your business model (30:08)
• Making the shift to a consumption-based model (32:30)
• Strategies for rationalizing which pricing model to follow & knowing when to pivot (36:08)
• Developing & testing a value hypothesis (38:05)
• Lead with customer value in mind & communicate that value factor (40:44)
• Rapid fire questions (42:07)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Elon Musk - From Walter Isaacson, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.
• Foundation - The first novel in Isaac Asimov's classic science-fiction masterpiece, the Foundation series.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Quinn Jacobson, Director of the Technical Entrepreneur Coaching Hub (TECH) @ Carnegie Mellon University, joins us to share best practices for implementing a successful execution strategy at deep tech startups. He draws from his own experience as a serial founder & former VPE, sharing strategies for building on technical expertise; driving product evolution from early concept results; finding your “ledge” & thinking of value creation in smaller, incremental steps. Plus we talk about the pitfalls new founders should avoid and the importance of listening! Quinn also shares how & why he transitioned into academia & why these recommendations will help new founders create disruptive, exciting products.

ABOUT QUINN JACOBSON

Quinn Jacobson is a Professor of the Practice at the Information Networking Institute (INI) in Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering. He is based in CMU’s Silicon Valley campus and the Director for the new Technical Entrepreneur Coaching Hub (TECH) initiative. TECH is focused on preparing the next generation of technical founders and strengthening CMU’s engagement with the startup community. Quinn is also part of CMU’s Neuromorphic Computer Architecture Lab.

Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon University, Quinn led engineering efforts at several innovative startups, in high-performance distributed software systems and domain-specific hardware accelerators. Quinn cofounded Vibrado Technologies, a venture-backed CMU spinout that created the first truly smart apparel. Before discovering his passion for startups, Quinn worked on advanced technology development. He developed the world’s first commercially released soft core for FPGAs at Altera, architected the world’s first multi-core SPARC microprocessors at Sun Microsystems, and led the development of one of the first crowdsourced smartphone services at Nokia. Quinn received his PhD in ECE from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and holds over 70 granted U.S. patents. His work has been presented in many diverse forums, from GEOINT to Hot Chips to the NABC Convention at the NCAA Final Four.

"What will make you successful is if you can actually execute and deliver your technology from a concept to a product. If you're armed with a plan on how to do the execution, it's gonna be much easier to then go raise money. What we see is that there are a lot of great thoughts out there that people don't know how to turn that into a successful execution plan that they can realistically deliver on.”

- Quinn Jacobson   

ABOUT THE TECHNICAL ENTREPRENEUR COACHING HUB (TECH) @ CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

Technical Entrepreneur Coaching Hub (TECH) is a program for mid-career engineers transitioning to a technical founder role. TECH’s curriculum prepares technical experts to launch and run an entrepreneurial (or intrapreneurial) endeavor around a technically innovative idea.

TECH is an entrepreneurship program designed for engineers, by engineers who have launched, led, and advised startups. The program focuses on how to successfully execute the development of a product in a startup environment.

Learn more here: https://www.cmu.edu/ini/tech/index.html

To stay updated on all of our events, content, and resources for engineering leaders - make sure you head to elc.community

Being an ELC member is FREE and is the best way to stay updated on everything that’s going on!

Sign up today at elc.community

SHOW NOTES:

• Quinn’s transition into academia & his passion for entrepreneurship (3:14)
• Focusing on technical expertise & execution strategy (6:35)
• Frameworks for building an execution strategy & initial proof of concept (9:18)
• An example of using early concept results to drive product evolution (11:32)
• Incremental value creation for technically differentiated startups (15:55)
• Strategies for building a roadmap & demonstrating concrete value in early stages (18:59)
• Traps new founders / technical leaders should avoid (20:27)
• How listening can provide opportunities for discovery of the path forward (23:30)
• CMU’s TECH experience & how it supports early-stage deep tech founders (26:27)
• One of Quinn’s most memorable / favorite case studies (27:54)
• Rapid fire questions (30:00)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• *System Collapse* by Martha Wells - Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize, but there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Jon Perl & Scott Wilson share the origin story of QA Wolf & deconstruct their best practices (and what to avoid) for early-stage cold outreach, how to add value to your cold email communications, and why experimenting with your cold outreach is important to early sales! We also dive into the story behind QA Wolf’s strategic move to incorporate services into their business strategy & tangible ways to add accountability measures that will help drive growth in the early days of your company.

ABOUT JON PERL

Jon Perl is the co-founder and CEO of QA Wolf, a startup building the QA solution every engineering leader wishes for. Prior to QA Wolf, Perl led engineering teams in the healthcare and home services space, where he learned firsthand how difficult automated regression testing can be — and how critical it is for teams to have. His interest in software engineering comes from an overarching desire to eliminate boring, repetitive tasks and give people their time back. He has a dog named Finn and enjoys hiking.

"Your goal is simply to book a meeting. You're not trying to close a deal through one email. It's like, 'How can I just get on the phone with somebody?' That's the goal.”

- Jon Perl   

ABOUT SCOTT WILSON

As co-founder and head of growth at QA Wolf, Scott Wilson is trying to upend 20+ years of stagnation in the QA industry. Before this he launched the marketing efforts at Wyze and helped acquire 6 million paying customers. If he’s not working, you might find him backpacking with Frank the dog, or learning a new illusion.

"It's not referencing the weather in Seattle or that you got promoted. Personalization is being contextually relevant to the person. This is how your mind should be thinking. It's like, 'I saw you're a hundred person company with nine engineers on your team and no QA engineers. You're probably going through this and here's a solution for it.'”

- Scott Wilson   

ABOUT QA WOLF

QA Wolf is a hybrid platform & service that helps software teams ship better software faster by taking QA completely off their plate.

Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group?

ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions, and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers.

Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups

SHOW NOTES:

• The origin story of QA Wolf & the desire to build an automated QA system (2:54)
• What got Scott excited about joining the QA Wolf founding team (8:01)
• Scott’s experience as the non-technical cofounder on the team (9:59)
• Learn enough to be dangerous & be willing to persist as a founder (11:35)
• The approach of paying people you can learn from & its impact on QA Wolf (14:58)
• Lessons learned about cold emailing & effective strategies to implement (17:59)
• Cold emailing strategies that don’t work (21:47)
• How to add value to email communication & incorporate experimentation (23:10)
• Why they shifted the focus from coding to sales / outreach / identifying solutions (27:09)
• Make accountability mechanisms a key component of early-stage teams (29:55)
• The false signal of free users & expanding product into services (31:31)
• Identifying a gap in the business & being open-minded to new ideas (34:07)
• What the initial testing for QA Wolf’s services approach looked like (36:09)
• Jon & Scott’s perspective on dealing w/ investors in the automated services space (39:17)
• Rapid fire questions (44:46)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• $100M Offers: How To Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No
• How to Hire a Product-Led Sales Leader – at Every Stage

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Jorge Torres, CEO & Co-founder @ MindsDB, shares how his lifelong entrepreneurial spirit helped encourage him to pursue engineering & why an engineering background is an amazing asset for founders. He also shares valuable insights he has learned along the way, including why it’s important for founders to make plans in order to execute well, tips for creating alignment within your org, and strategically building a community approach within your product strategy.

ABOUT JORGE TORRES

Jorge Torres is CEO & Co-founder @ MindsDB. Jorge is a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley researching machine learning automation and explainability, an advocate for the open source community, and prior to MindsDB he worked with Aneesh Chopra (the first CTO in the US government) building data systems that analyze billions of patient’s records that led to savings for millions of patients.

"Truly there's a lot of things that you don't know when you're starting a company, maybe even things that you don't even know that you don't know, but at least the first steps of risk, which is, 'Can I get something off the ground by myself if I have to?' And that's a very, very, very attractive angle of being an engineer and you learn some skills and then the training of an engineer is how do you take tools are out there and build something?”

- Jorge Torres   

ABOUT MINDSDB

MindsDB is end-to-end AI platform for developers. It connects real-time data and AI/ML models, providing tools and automation that enable developers to build, launch, and maintain AI-powered applications efficiently. The company was founded in 2017 by Jorge Torres and Adam Carrigan and has raised more than $50M in funding from Mayfield, Nvidia's NVentures, Benchmark, YCombinator, and others.

Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group?

ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers.

Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups

SHOW NOTES:

• Why Monday is Jorge’s favorite day of the week (1:55)
• Jorge’s approach to becoming a founder & starting MindsDB (2:32)
• Skills engineers can develop to prepare for being a founder (4:26)
• Benefits of having engineering skills & background as a founder/CEO (6:42)
• The story behind Jorge’s risk assessment strategy & deciding to found MindsDB (8:02)
• Questions to ask to help founders narrow their focus (10:15)
• Why everything founders try that isn’t well planned doesn’t work well (12:08)
• How this insight is leveraged within MindsDB’s open-source community (14:55)
• Building alignment as the team grows (18:08)
• The importance of letting go of things as you build your business (20:15)
• Using intuition in the early days of MindsDB’s product / business approach (23:08)
• The relationship between community & business (24:51)
• Inside Jorge’s approach to modular pieces that drive growth (27:56)
• What the next iteration looks like for the SF AI Collective community (29:45)
• Rapid fire questions (32:13)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Broken Earth Trilogy - N. K. Jemisin’s captivating science fiction/fantasy series that follows the journey of a woman with the power to control earthquakes as she navigates a world on the brink of destruction.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Gaurav Oberoi, CEO & Co-founder @ Lexion shares about the research / EIR path from the Allen Institute for AI to founding Lexion. We talk about finding ideas in areas with poor implementation, how to actually shape “cool tech” into products, and tactical actions you can use to measure progress. Plus how to go from idea to action & optimize for fast time to value. Gaurav also shares how he defines “done” for products, creating a culture of velocity and strategic thinking & why happy customers are engaged customers.

ABOUT GAURAV OBEROI

Gaurav Oberoi is the CEO and co-founder of Lexion. He started his career as an engineer at Amazon, before moving on to found and sell two startups (BillMonk, and Precision Polling), and build a $20M+ ARR business from $0 as a VP of Product at SurveyMonkey. Gaurav co-founded Lexion as the first EIR at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He thrives on building products that customers love, with diverse teams that enjoy working together.

"We met with a team and when we asked them what intake forms they need, they had really long meetings and it slowed down the whole process and we're like, 'Gosh, we need to kill the intake form. You don't need an intake form.' Like, that shouldn't be a blocker to them getting value. That kind of narrow focus on "time to value needs to be really fast" is something that we've imbued across the whole company. So it's not just product and engineering, but it's also customer success. It's also sales. It's also our marketing materials right up front so that the value of the whole product ties in, all the way to pricing.”

- Gaurav Oberoi   

ABOUT LEXION

Lexion is a powerfully simple operations workflow and contracting platform that helps teams get deals done faster. Lexion streamlines and centralizes the end-to-end contract lifecycle with intuitive email-driven intake and workflows, simple no-code automation, best-in-class AI, and more. Lexion was one of the first AI companies to leverage LLMs in building production-quality applications. The company was founded in 2018 at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, is backed by an iconic Silicon Valley law firm, and recently raised a $20M Series B with support from top-tier VC firms. Learn more about the company at https://www.lexion.ai/

Interested in joining an ELC Peer Group?

ELCs Peer Groups provide a virtual, curated, and ongoing peer learning opportunity to help you navigate the unknown, uncover solutions and accelerate your learning with a small group of trusted peers.

Apply to join a peer group HERE: sfelc.com/peerGroups

SHOW NOTES:

• Gaurav’s experience @ the Allen Institute for AI & how it kickstarted his founder journey w/ Lexion (2:06)
• Research process strategies that helps founders identify business insights (5:50)
• The iterations that led to Lexion’s current product offering (8:23)
• What gave Gaurav the insight to say “no” to ideas (10:39)
• Lessons learned that Gaurav infused into the strategy for developing Lexion (12:56)
• Small, tactical actions to help founders measure progress (15:55)
• Navigating the transition to actually building an idea & taking action (16:48)
• Understand the accolades your product can help customers receive (19:24)
• Designing your org to think strategically & drive insights like a founder (23:59)
• Determining which features to build first in order to achieve PMF (26:20)
• Strategies for identifying / confirming the next big feature opportunity (29:33)
• How to synthesize your learnings & research (32:19)
• Implementing metric tools to analyze insights / confirm hypotheses (34:37)
• What it means for a product or feature to be “done” (36:33)
• Why a happy customer equals an engaged customer (39:24)
• Creating a culture of velocity within elements of your organization (42:32)
• Encourage empathy for customers within your org to fuel velocity (46:43)
• Rapid fire questions (48:45)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Organizing eng by strategic themes / complete units of value & consensus building to drive velocity w/ Emad Elwany #159 - Our episode with Gaurav’s co-founder Emad Elwany!
• goberoi.com - Gaurav Oberoi’s essays on technology and startups.
• The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein’s tale of the rebellion of a former penal colony on the Moon against its masters on the Earth.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

How do you know if you’re actually solving a problem or building a product people actually want? Varun Mohan, CEO & Co-Founder @ Codeium, joins us to share the journey behind Codeium. We talk about determining the right problem / product to pursue. He shares his best frameworks for decision making, determining if it’s time to pivot, and ultimately testing your hypotheses. He also discusses the three main types of risks founders face & strategies to compete on “execution-risk.” Plus Varun shares tips for building your product with the future in mind, even if the technological capabilities aren’t there yet.

ABOUT VARUN MOHAN

After graduating from MIT and working at companies like LinkedIn and Databricks, Varun became a Tech Lead Manager at Nuro leading AI Infrastructure before co-founding Exafunction to run large AI workloads. After hitting 7 figure ARR in the first year, Varun and team decided to drop everything and run their own AI platform with Codeium, first tackling the acceleration of Software Development.

"It's much better for us to invest in things that can give us compounding 10 percent wins. In other words, it gives us a win today, we work very hard and we work on things that can compound rather than them being one off features, we have like a good shot of doing something that that will succeed. We should be cognizant of where the technology is and only build things that build capabilities that we know will provide value today and if we continue doing that, we will be the fastest moving in the space.”

- Varun Mohan   

ABOUT CODEIUM

Codeium is the modern coding superpower, a code acceleration toolkit built on cutting edge AI technology. Get free forever access at codeium.com

SHOW NOTES:

• Varun’s leadership journey & founding Codeium (2:22)
• How to decide what to focus on next vs. moving forward with current focus (6:29)
• Determine what problem / product to pursue based on your team’s passions (8:39)
• Process for synthesizing insights to develop the rationale for moving forward (10:26)
• Varun’s assessment framework for making the decision to pivot (12:50)
• Traps to avoid when testing a hypothesis & addressing potential risks (14:10)
• How speed of execution sets a company up for success (17:35)
• Analyzing Varun’s differentiation moment & identifying next steps (21:16)
• Strategies for building / optimizing for an execution mode (25:28)
• Using data to capture user intent (27:42)
• Frameworks for identifying a product’s compounding elements (30:22)
• Determining what capabilities to invest in building early on (33:15)
• Building for future success when the technology isn’t there yet (35:19)
• Rapid fire questions (37:25)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology - Chris Miller’s epic account of the decades-long battle to control what has emerged as the world's most critical resource—microchip technology—with the United States and China increasingly in conflict

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

In this Engineering Founders episode, we sit down with James Campbell, CTO & Co-Founder @ Great Expectations, to discuss his founding journey, considerations for starting open source, making community-driven decisions, and navigating the tension between your product vision & product roadmap. We also cover the phases that Great Expectations has cycled through, balancing the role of personal biases when making product / business decisions, how making an open-source product impacts marketing decisions, and James’ best recommendations for building out the product function as a product-involved founder.

ABOUT JAMES CAMPBELL

James Campbell is the co-founder and CTO at Great Expectations, the leading open-source data quality product. Prior to his life at a startup, James spent nearly 15 years working across a variety of quantitative and qualitative analytic roles in the US intelligence community, ultimately serving as Chief Data Scientist at CIA. He studied Math and Philosophy at Yale, and international security at Georgetown. He is passionate about creating tools that help communicate uncertainty and build intuition about complex systems.

"We had different perspectives and then we found that there were, similarly for every three perspectives that the two of us had, there were three perspectives for every two other people in the community. The process becomes one of developing rigorous ways to capture and synthesize the insights that you're getting from yourself and the community. It means committing to capturing your own perspectives similarly to the way that you would capture those from your users, taking that time to do the analytic process of critically thinking through what that means is the right choice.”

- James Campbell   

We’re hosting the first ELC Annual Watch Party on 11/8!

We’re livestreaming the most popular sessions from the ELC Annual 2023 conference + hosting virtual roundtable discussions to connect you with eng leaders around the globe AND in your city.

Our first topic covers Generative AI & engineering leadership with Wade Chambers… no this isn’t about the tech - it’s about the leadership skills and competencies you need to evolve and adapt to lead in this next generation!

We have different events for Europe, East Coast & West Coast! To RSVP, find your location HERE:

Europe

West Coast & MidWest

East Coast

SHOW NOTES:

• The origin story of Great Expectations & James’ founding journey (2:18)
• Pitching / validating your idea through community (5:14)
• Transitioning from federal government to co-founder of a company (8:11)
• Recommendations when considering the founder / collaboration path (10:20)
• James’ experience starting with open source & getting 10k stars on GitHub (12:05)
• Engaging with your audience to drive growth & share your product’s message (14:07)
• How open source impacts Great Expectations’ marketing / communication (15:49)
• Navigating the tension between product vision & product roadmap (18:11)
• Where that tension showed up in Great Expectations’ early days (21:01)
• Capturing & synthesizing insights from your users (22:44)
• Strategies for removing biases from product-related decisions (24:28)
• Finding the balance between your perspective & community insights (26:03)
• James’ perspective on different levels of product analysis (28:44)
• Lessons learned from Great Expectations’ phase changes (30:13)
• Takeaways from the org’s latest experience / transition (33:42)
• Defining the “Heilmeier Catechism” & how it impacts James’ leadership style (35:57)
• Rapid fire questions (39:30)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• CIA Guide to Analytic Tradecraft - Primer published by the CIA to assist analysts in dealing with the perennial problems of intelligence.
• American Prometheus - Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

In this episode, Karan Talati (Co-founder & CEO @ First Resonance) joins us to discuss strategies for identifying a market opportunity and some of his favorite perspectives on product building. We cover what it’s like identifying something that may not be necessary now but will be in the future; how to assess / validate a hypothesis; frameworks for assessing emerging trends & pain points in order to develop a product; and navigating the balance between offering your customers breadth vs. depth with your product offering. Additionally, Karan shares how he approached building First Resonance’s product and recommendations for closing on customers who work in a mission-critical space.

ABOUT KARAN TALATI

Karan Talati is Co-founder & CEO @ First Resonance. Previously he built data and automation systems to enable rocket reusability at SpaceX and engineering consumer electronics at Motorola. At First Resonance, they’re solving manufacturing’s biggest challenges. Organizations use their factory operating system, ION, to accelerate and optimize their production processes from prototyping to production.

"If people are going to be equally ambitious on the next generation of whatever needs to be solved in the world, let's say next generation satellites. Well, then how are they going to do it? The following our gut was like, 'Hey, what would the world have looked like or what would our experience have been like if the kind of that digital connectivity layer that we had to build was actually available for us? And what could it look like if we bring something out to market that does that? Does that actually allow for new types of hardware to be created, new types of companies to be formed, so on and so forth?'”

- Karan Talati   

SHOW NOTES:

• Karan’s Friday & Sunday cadences as a founder (2:02)
• The origin story of Karan founding First Resonance (4:49)
• Karan’s time @ SpaceX & experiencing his first rocket launch / landing (8:14)
• How First Resonance celebrates its customers & successes (10:36)
• The moment when Karan saw a market opportunity for First Resonance (12:10)
• Understanding that something may not be necessary yet, but will be in the future (15:47)
• Questions that helped form Karan’s early hypotheses & how to validate a hypothesis (19:10)
• Strategies for assessing emerging trends & validating pain points (22:47)
• Ideating data / software solutions for the manufacturing space (25:48)
• Karan’s framework for first approaching the First Resonance product (28:15)
• Navigating the balance between offering 10x vertically vs. 10x breadth (30:35)
• An example of when Karan had to make an inclusion vs. exclusion decision (32:33)
• Customer relationship considerations & gaining your first customer (37:04)
• Recommendations for closing on the first customer in a mission-critical industry (39:54)
• Rapid fire questions (41:10)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons from a Five Time CRO - John McMahon provides enterprise software sales leaders and their sales reps proven methods to sell more by quantifying business value for the customer and selling major company solutions to C level executives. No tricks, no shortcuts, just simple ways in which sales leaders can help their sales reps sell more software by closing more deals.
• Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Esteemed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s modern classic about the political genius of Abraham Lincoln, his unlikely presidency, and his cabinet of former political foes.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

Ramiro Berrelleza, Founder and CEO @ Okteto, shares how his company transitioned from an open-source project to a category-creating commercial product and repeatable sales model. He reveals the benefits & opportunities of open source and the potential for community buy-in. Plus strategies for creating a repeatable sales model, how open source projects can guide early-stage decisions, when to begin identifying / building customer personas, prioritization strategies for engineering resources, and recommendations for early-stage hiring, especially for your first marketing hire.

ABOUT RAMIRO BERRELLEZA

Ramiro Berrelleza is the CEO and Co-founder of Okteto, the leading platform for Development Experience Automation. With over 20 years of experience in engineering, Ramiro is a seasoned professional with a passion for building developer tooling.

A visionary, Ramiro is always looking for ways to improve the software development process. He firmly believes that building modern applications is a team sport and understands the importance of removing friction from the development process. He is also a passionate advocate for building a more inclusive tech industry. With Ramiro at the helm, Okteto is well-positioned to continue to grow and shape the way companies architect development experience for their teams.

"Once you're building something commercial, the person that buys your product is not the same person that's gonna use your product and is not the same person that's gonna approve the purchase for your product. So that's already something that when it comes to distribution, when it comes to how you price it, when it comes to like how you talk about the product, that's one of the earliest things that you have to understand because if you don't understand this then you're going to start hitting all these walls.”

- Ramiro Berrelleza   

SHOW NOTES:

• Ramiro’s founder journey & the origins of Okteto (1:49)
• Why Okteto’s founders started it as an open-source project (4:06)
• The benefits & opportunities of starting as Okteto open source project (6:19)
• Transitioning from open-source to commercial (8:39)
• Embrace the community aspect of open-source (11:30)
• How the open-source community can guide early-day founder decisions (13:17)
• Ramiro’s method for identifying Okteto’s personas & its impact on GTM strategy (16:08)
• Using personas to determine what your product is lacking & how to package it (19:04)
• Building a product with the developer persona in mind (21:32)
• Which stage of the founder journey is best for identifying personas (24:30)
• How to prioritize engineering resources in the org’s early days (27:08)
• The importance of shipping a complete experience (29:39)
• Ramiro’s thoughts on the sequence of early-stage hiring (31:58)
• Qualities to look for in your first marketing hire (34:46)
• Tips for hiring someone who is transitioning from big tech to a startup (37:15)
• Why it’s worth hiring folks who can pull their own weight (39:28)
• Rapid fire questions (41:59)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Founders' Paradox - Aishwarya Khan Bhaduri’s book that shines a light on the illusion of progressiveness, the daunting challenges of exploitation, and the cutthroat competition that defines the start-up landscape.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

In this episode, Roni Dover, CTO @ Digma, shares the customer communication models and user interview tactics that can help shape your product, how to minimize biases from entering these conversations, the advantages of incorporating critical feedback alongside positive feedback, and how to leverage in-person conversations with your product’s audience. Roni also shares his experience as an introverted eng leader who needed to develop more extroverted traits as CTO and the frameworks that helped him find his voice. Additionally, we address how to grow your product for a specific audience, gaining more users, expanding your product, and more.

ABOUT RONI DOVER

Holistic developer and builder with a passion for development processes and practices. Afflicted by an acute Product Manager/Developer split personality disorder that was never treated. Currently, CTO and co-founder of Digma (digma.ai), an IDE plugin for code runtime AI analysis to help accelerate development in complex codebases. A big believer in evidence-based development, and a proponent of Continuous Feedback in all aspects of Software Engineering.

"Get your first 10 users. That's the first thing you need to do. Why? Because if you don't have currently, right now, a user on your platform, you have no feedback. You don't know anything. You did your idea validation. You created a product. Until a user uses that product and tells you, 'Oh my God, this is crap.' or 'Oh my God, this is the best thing since sliced bread.', you don't have any real perspective on what you've done.

- Roni Dover   

SHOW NOTES:

• The origin story of Digma AI & Roni’s journey as a developer (1:49)
• How Digma tackles a gap in the DevOps cycle (3:33)
• Approaches for introverted eng leaders who need to develop extroverted qualities (6:29)
• Roni’s process for finding his voice through writing (8:25)
• Tactics for communicating with your audience (10:52)
• What Roni’s customer conversation model looks like (13:29)
• Use an external party to minimize biases from entering conversations (16:25)
• Frameworks for overcoming biases / preconceptions about your product (18:32)
• The importance of balancing positive & critical feedback (21:06)
• Taking advantage of conferences for face-to-face conversations (23:04)
• Avoid making a product for a general audience & embrace specificity (26:04)
• Best practices for growing your user base & gathering initial feedback (30:17)
• Strategies for expanding your product & getting more users (32:54)
• How building community interacts with PLG strategy (36:09)
• Navigating good customer communication w/ the fear of being too pushy (38:43)
• Rapid fire questions (41:38)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you. - Rob Fitzpatrick’s quick and easy handbook about how to get more learning and more sales out of your customer conversations. Even when everyone is lying to you.
• CI/CD/CF? — The Devops Toolchain’s “Missing-Link” - Roni’s blog post about continuous feedback.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/