Engineering Founders

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

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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/

Paul Dix, Founder & CTO @ InfluxData, joins us to discuss how to handle the emotional aspects of the founding experience, strategies for engaging with developers & using community tools to build a dev-tool company, and recommendations for approaching open-source & licensable business strategies. Additionally, Paul shares advice based on his experience transitioning from the bootstrapping dream to seeking external funding.

ABOUT PAUL DIX

Paul (@pauldix) is the creator of InfluxDB. He has helped build software for startups, large companies, and organizations like Microsoft, Google, McAfee, Thomson Reuters, and Air Force Space Command. He is the series editor for Addison Wesley’s Data & Analytics book and video series. In 2010 Paul wrote the book Service Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails. In 2009 he started the NYC Machine Learning Meetup. Paul holds a degree in computer science from Columbia University.

"Having resources, having capital to hire people and do things and iterate gives you time to potentially come to something that is valuable, right? If you don't actually get that time to iterate, you don't even get to play the game.”

- Paul Dix   

Join us at ELC Annual 2023!

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical proven strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023

SHOW NOTES:

• Paul’s feelings about InfluxData’s 3.0 release (2:15)
• Strategies for handling the emotional aspects of the founding experience (4:38)
• InfluxData’s origin story & what went into Paul’s decision to start the company (8:44)
• Frameworks for navigating early-day founding / funding decisions (11:03)
• What gave Paul the conviction to seek greater funding (16:05)
• Comparing & contrasting the thought process behind Market IO and InfluxData (18:10)
• Perspectives on deciding what is a good idea (21:24)
• How deep technical motivation helps drive innovation as a founder (23:45)
• Gaining interest from developers as your target market (26:17)
• Use community tools as a strategy for building dev-tool specific companies (28:51)
• Lessons learned when designing InfluxData's open-source & licensable approach (32:02)
• InfluxData’s 2016 inflection point (35:34)
• Paul’s advice for deciding on open source or not & how to structure eng teams (39:20)
• Rapid fire questions (44:11)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World - Rachel Love Nuwer tells the unlikely story of how the psychedelic drug MDMA emerged from the shadows to the forefront of a medical revolution -- and the potential it may hold to help us thrive.
• Giannis Antetokounmpo post-game interview

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, Jessica McKellar, CTO & Founder @ Pilot, shares her story as a serial founder and the lessons that can help you become a more impactful, strategic business contributor & eng leader. She reveals strategies for identifying your company’s ideal end state & the steps needed to achieve product-market fit, daily practices that help measure important metrics, business-building disciplines that need to be prioritized long term, and steps for creating positive collaboration between product, eng & design teams.

ABOUT JESSICA MCKELLAR

Jessica McKellar (@jessicamckellar) is a repeat founder and the CTO of fintech unicorn Pilot, an accounting firm powered by software.

Previously, she was a founder and the VP of Engineering for Zulip, a real-time collaboration startup acquired by Dropbox, where she then served as a Director of Engineering. Before that, she was a computer nerd at MIT who joined her friends at Ksplice, a company building a service for rebootless kernel updates on Linux that was acquired by Oracle.

Jessica is a former Director for the Python Software Foundation and PyCon North America Diversity Outreach Chair. For her outreach efforts in the Python community, she was awarded the O'Reilly Open Source Award.

Open source meets criminal justice reform in Jessica’s work with The Last Mile, a job training and re-entry program that has implemented the first computer programming curriculum inside US prisons. She teaches Python at San Quentin State Prison in California, hires formerly incarcerated software engineers, and uses that bridge between the tech industry and prisons to get people activated and acting for decarceration.

"You need to be able to think about the business in a way where you have ideas that inflect the business. What is a gap in the product that needs to be addressed? What's an idea for a way to achieve a step function improvement in margin? How can we save the company money that it is spending via an engineering investment?

- Jessica McKellar  

Join us at ELC Annual 2023!

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023

SHOW NOTES:

• Jessica’s founder story @ Pilot (3:04)
• How founding Pilot is different from past experiences w/ Zulip & Ksplice (4:07)
• The story behind Pilot’s “power team” of founders (6:44)
• Distinctions between Jessica’s focus as CTO / founder & eng roles (11:14)
• How eng functions can help the exec team hit important metrics (14:18)
• Daily actions that help optimize & monitor metrics like margin (16:11)
• Frameworks for identifying business trajectory (19:24)
• What parts of business-building discipline need to be prioritized long-term (21:07)
• Use market fit & size of market to determine your company’s goal end state (22:26)
• Past lessons the founding team applied while starting Pilot (24:23)
• Things Jessica thinks she & her co-founders do right (25:01)
• Recommendations for exploring potential paths & aligning on the final decision (28:58)
• Steps for becoming a more impactful, strategic business contributor (30:33)
• How eng leaders can identify ideal end state & achieve product-market fit (35:15)
• Create collaboration between product, eng & design teams (37:06)
• Rapid fire questions (39:00)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff - This weekly podcast dives into history to drag up the wildest rebels, the most beautiful revolts, and all the people who long to be—and fight to be—free. It explores complex stories of resistance that offer lessons and inspiration for us today, focusing on the ensemble casts that make up each act of history.
• And Away… - Bob Mortimer’s life was trundling along happily until suddenly in 2015 he was diagnosed with a heart condition that required immediate surgery and forced him to cancel an upcoming tour. The episode unnerved him, but forced him to reflect on his life so far. This is the framework for his hilarious and moving memoir, And Away…

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/

Rick Song, Co-founder & CEO @ Persona, shares the origin story of Persona & what it’s like founding a business in a highly competitive, ultra-regulated environment. He shares early-stage challenges of building an identity-based product, how his company sought to achieve micro goals alongside long-term goals, navigating the logical & emotional factors that influence taking a leap of faith, and building universality within Persona’s user network. Additionally, Rick reveals his best practices for building a scalable business, identifying what’s wrong quickly & pivoting, and how to be an execution-driven founder.

ABOUT RICK SONG

Rick Song is the CEO and co-founder of Persona, the identity infrastructure company offering businesses the building blocks to create a personalized identity verification experience for any use case. Earlier in his career, Rick noticed a fundamental problem with identity verification: providers were taking a one-size-fits-all approach that did not meet businesses' needs and consumers' expectations. In 2018, Rick co-founded Persona with CTO Charles Yeh to tackle this problem with the mission to be the identity layer of the internet. Rick and his team are working toward making the internet a safer place by providing a customized solution that takes into account user base, regulatory requirements, appetite for risk, and unique verification requirements. Persona is backed by Index Ventures and Coatue and serves a wide range of industries with customers including Square, Sonder, Brex, Gusto, Coursera, and Toast.

"The hardest thing in a startup is connecting the dots between a product and a business. There are a tremendous number of products out there. A product solves a problem and everyone has problems, but just solving a problem doesn't necessarily mean building a business and connecting the dots between these two is the most difficult thing.”

- Rick Song   

Join us at ELC Annual 2023!

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023

SHOW NOTES:

• The origin story of Persona & how it addresses identity (2:01)
• How Rick came together with his co-founder, Charles (4:56)
• Rick’s advice for future founders on sticking with an idea & the right people (6:24)
• Early-stage challenges of building an identity-based business (8:45)
• Balancing the rational & emotional aspects behind taking a leap of faith (12:30)
• The benefit of creating / achieving micro goals (15:13)
• Navigating “the valley of death” as a moat in a highly regulated industry (17:10)
• Why Persona went universal with its client base to create a general product (19:53)
• Rick’s advice for building a scalable business & identifying what’s wrong quickly (22:51)
• Recommendations for starting a business in a hyper-competitive market (25:13)
• What it looks like for a founder to be execution driven (29:21)
• Knowing someone is ready to “out-execute” their competitors (31:38)
• How to get top-tier investors in a competitive environment (34:26)
• Rapid fire questions (37:59)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Veritasium - A channel of science and engineering videos featuring experiments, expert interviews, cool demos, and discussions with the public about everything science.
• Mark Rober - Former NASA and Apple engineer. Current YouTuber and friend of science. CrunchLabs founder.
• Coffeezilla - Internet detective exposing scams. I uncover scams, fraudsters and fake gurus that are preying on desperate people with deceptive advertising. If you have to ask... it’s probably too good to be true.
• Wendover Productions - All about explaining how our world works. From travel, to economics, to geography, to marketing and more, every video will leave you with a little better understanding of our world.
• ponysmasher - David F. Sandberg’s YouTube channel where he covers the behind-the-scenes of filmmaking, animation, and much more.

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/

As the CTO & Co-Founder @ OctoML, Jared Roesch shares his experience building a ML company in a rapidly changing product market space. Jared also covers shifting from an open-source organization to a more product- and enterprise-focused business. We also discuss product & market strategies for ML businesses, optimizing your product for both high- and low-sophistication users, navigating a fast-paced industry, ML market participation predictions, and strategies for recruiting co-founders from academia.

ABOUT JARED ROESCH

Jared Roesch (@roeschinc) is Co-Founder and CTO of OctoML. He completed his PhD at the University of Washington as part of the PLSE and SAMPL groups. A computer scientist at heart, Jared loves taking insights from the research community and applying them to build intelligent, performant, and powerful systems. Jared's background includes experience in web development, JIT compilers, software engineering, computer architecture, functional programming, compilers, verification, databases, systems, and machine learning.

"I think there are a whole set of problems here that are just unexplored. I don't think there are that many people solving them because they're tricky, they're very user-focused. They're not as much fun as building up the hub or the platform or the ML ops tool and so I think that this is where there's gonna be a lot of room for people to innovate and not just us, but I think in the market, and I think you see some people doing things like this right now, but it's still really early days.”

- Jared Roesch   

ABOUT OctoML

OctoML is on a mission to make AI more accessible and sustainable so it can be used thoughtfully to improve lives. They make AI more sustainable through efficient model execution and automation to scale services and reduce engineering burden. They make AI more accessible by enabling models to run on a broad set of devices and easier to deploy without specialized skills. The OctoML platform brings DevOps-level agility and automation to Machine Learning deployment on any hardware.

Backed by leading venture capital firms, the company is headquartered in Seattle, with an office in San Francisco, CA. OctoML is founded and led by the creators Apache TVM, an open-source ML stack for performance and portability.

Join us at ELC Annual 2023!

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023

SHOW NOTES:

• Jared’s transition from academia to industry (2:53)
• The origin of OctoML (5:31)
• How Jared’s time in academia informed his knowledge of ML / AI trends (8:45)
• Piecing together Jared’s interest in music composition w/ programming (11:07)
• Lessons learned from Jared’s first start-up failure in undergrad (12:05)
• Strategies for recruiting a co-founder from academia (15:03)
• Communicate from a place of intentional curiosity & intellectual honesty (18:28)
• Reviewing the trends within the ever-changing AI / ML landscape (19:52)
• How to remain nimble while navigating fast-paced changes (24:08)
• OctoML’s approach to being dynamic & navigating strategy adjustments (25:46)
• Addressing new iterations of user-encountered problems (28:59)
• Insights around serving both higher- and lower-sophistication users (32:28)
• Jared’s experience transitioning OctoML from a technology to product-focused company (36:58)
• Shifting from open-source to an enterprise- and user-focused model (43:07)
• Challenges when optimizing for various roles / user experiences (46:31)
• Product market strategy lessons learned within an ML business (50:13)
• Jared’s predictions on ML market participation & evolution (55:18)
• Rapid fire questions (58:12)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Complete History & Strategy of Sega - A podcast from Acquired detailing how, in a single console generation, Sega went from ~zero to 50% US market share and dethroned Nintendo’s seemingly invincible global monopoly, then, two console generations later, Sega was out of the hardware game entirely, and the company was sold off for pieces to a pachinko manufacturer.

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/

On Freund, Co-founder & CEO @ Wilco, shares how the value of practice influenced the idea behind Wilco. We also cover what it’s like finding product-market fit within a new category, how to scale seemingly “unscalable” elements in your product, challenges faced while building out human-centric elements, and surprises you may encounter while scaling. On also shares his strategies for pivoting your go-to-market strategy based on evolving market factors or customers and why being able to adapt is one of the most important skills you can hone as a founder.

ABOUT ON FREUND

On Freund (@onfreund) is the co-founder and CEO of Wilco, a startup dedicated to empowering developers to unlock their full potential. Throughout his career, On has managed development teams, most notably as VP Engineering at Handy and WeWork. He is also a proud angel investor and a humble former VC. On is married to an immunologist and is a father of 3. Outside of work, you'll most likely see him playing drums or tinkering with home automation.

"The other lesson that I've learned is that in many cases the barrier to scale is going to come out of left field. So you think you'll know what's the next thing to break, but it's actually going to surprise you.”

- On Freund   

Join us at ELC Annual 2023!

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023

SHOW NOTES:

• The origin stories behind Wilco & its three founders (2:02)
• How On’s value of practice influenced the idea of Wilco (4:56)
• Challenges of scaling “unscalable” elements in an ed tech start-up (7:03)
• Using AI to create and scale community experiences (9:32)
• Lessons learned from scaling out human-centric product elements (10:47)
• Barriers to scaling will come from where you least expect it (13:20)
• Sometimes the time/mental/emotional overhead savings is worth the $10k cost to your cloud provider (15:06)
• Questions to filter which fires to prioritize and which to ignore and accept the trade-offs (17:29)
• Finding product-market fit when you’re inventing a new category (18:37)
• Unique elements of marketing to university / boot camp personas (21:23)
• Questions that On uses during the discovery phase of sales (25:05)
• How Wilco’s go-to-market strategy has evolved & what caused the pivot (27:21)
• Master the ability to pivot your market strategy as a founder (31:38)
• Tips for marketing to your customers on an individual level (33:20)
• Rapid fire questions (35:22)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Rick Beato - an American YouTube personality, multi-instrumentalist, music producer and educator. Since the early 1980s, he has worked variously as a musician, songwriter, audio engineer, and record producer, and has lectured on music at several universities.
• Stratechery - Recommended by The New York Times as “one of the most interesting sources of analysis on any subject”, Stratechery provides analysis of the strategy and business side of technology and media, and the impact of technology on society.

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/

Buchi Reddy Busi Reddy, Co-Founder & CEO @ Levo.ai, joins us to reveal how lessons learned as an eng leader at AppDynamics and other Silicon Valley experiences provided him with the skills & inspiration to co-found Levo.ai. We cover considerations for building security-focused products as a start-up; finding product-market fit & securing your first customers; identifying your product’s champion & finding the data / narratives that support your product; and pricing strategies. Additionally, Buchi shares his personal story of navigating the personal & logistical considerations of attaining an H1-B visa, providing valuable insight for any immigrant founders.

ABOUT BUCHI REDDY BUSI REDDY

Buchi is the CEO and co-founder of Levo.ai, which is on a mission to protect all the APIs and apps in the world to make the digital world more secure. Buchi is a domain expert in APM (Application Performance Management), Observability, distributed tracing and API security areas. He has built multiple enterprise SaaS products in his career. Buchi lives with his wife and son in Bay Area. Loves hiking and dad time.

"Listen to the customers, listen to the companies and that champion will probably make it a bit easier for you to sell to that company. The champion by definition is bought into the concept of they know this problem exists and they can tell inside the company that this problem is there and we need a solution and they also bought into the fact that they like your solution and they would like to buy it. The biggest thing is finding the champion. If you do that, your life becomes a lot more easy.”

- Buchi Reddy Busi Reddy   

Join us at ELC Annual 2023!

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023

SHOW NOTES:

• Buchi’s leadership journey throughout Silicon Valley w/ AppDynamics & more (1:41)
• What inspired Buchi to transition from eng leadership to founding (5:13)
• The role of commitment in overcoming founder challenges & building resiliency (7:43)
• Strategies for filtering & focusing your ideas (9:42)
• Consider the personal risks of the H1-B visa journey (12:02)
• Navigating the logistical side of the H1-B visa process (14:05)
• Eng leadership lessons from past experiences that Buchi is manifesting @ Levo (15:57)
• Buchi’s experience releasing Levo & securing its first customers (19:57)
• Insights on identifying & motivating your champion (22:10)
• Data / stories that Buchi provided to support the product (24:28)
• How & why Buchi determined Levo’s pricing models (28:06)
• Questions to help evaluate / organize the pricing model thought process (30:42)
• Tactics for communicating as a founder without technical language & buzzwords (33:51)
• Rapid fire questions (36:17)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Best One Yet - Feel brighter every day with our 20-minute pop-biz podcast. The 3 business news stories you need, with fresh takes you can pretend you came up with — Pairs perfectly with your morning oatmeal ritual.
• The Tim Ferriss Show - Tim Ferriss deconstructs world-class performers from eclectic areas (investing, chess, pro sports, etc.), digging deep to find the tools, tactics, and tricks that listeners can use.
• All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Industry veterans, degenerate gamblers & besties Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks & David Friedberg cover all things economic, tech, political, social & poker.

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/

We cover founder conviction & tips for engaging with investors with Mahima Chawla, Co-Founder & CEO @ Cocoon, who shares the origin story of her company, tips for creating clarity around the type of company you want to build, and how it’s addressing the problem of employee leave. Additionally, Mahima reveals the process behind early research, how she gained early design partners after user interviews, frameworks for collaborating between design & legal, identifying the ideal customer profile, and her method for delegating & determining where to invest her time as CEO & co-founder.

ABOUT MAHIMA CHAWLA

Mahima Chawla (@mahimachawlaa) is the CEO & Co-founder of Cocoon. Before starting Cocoon, Mahima worked at Square building lending products for Square Capital. Prior to Square, she was at Bond Street (acquired by Goldman) and Morgan Stanley. Mahima grew up in Singapore, Thailand, Australia, and the UAE and studied Math & Economics at Brown University. She is based in the Bay Area.

"We did reach out to some of our strongest sort of supporters during the research period and just asked like, 'Hey, would you be willing to pilot this? It's totally new. Like we know we're not an established company, but we do have a vision for how this can be better.' And I think like kind of positioning it as a design partner where truly we were getting their feedback so frequently and they could almost help inform what this product was gonna look like in the future, I think that's a pretty unique position to be in as a customer and so I think a lot of people were actually quite excited to take us up on that.”

- Mahima Chawla   

ABOUT COCOON

Cocoon is a leave management platform that simplifies the complexities of compliance, claims, and payroll for a seamless, more empathetic employee leave experience.

Whether employees are starting a family, recovering from an injury, or caring for a loved one, they can plan their leave in minutes and trust Cocoon to make the rest easy. Cocoon automates the heavy lifting of compliance, claims, and payroll so People teams can focus on what they do best—caring for employees.

Looking for ways to support the show?

Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts

If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available.

To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at hello@sfelc.com

SHOW NOTES:

• What inspired Mahima to start Cocoon (1:48)
• Inside Mahima’s intentional decision to start her company (5:19)
• Mahima & her co-founders’ approach to researching employee leave (7:17)
• Tips for keeping users engaged beyond the initial conversation (10:15)
• How to convert initial user conversations into your first customers (11:31)
• Lessons learned from early user research (12:47)
• Staying committed during your early research phase (14:06)
• An overview of the post-research / early mock ups stage of Cocoon (16:08)
• Strategies for gaining early design partners (17:14)
• Mahima’s approach to finding the right investors & nurturing those relationships (18:44)
• Frameworks for aligning your company with your values (19:59)
• Recommendations for creating clarity around the type of company you want to build (21:31)
• Cocoon’s four core values (23:34)
• How to personalize, achieve & act upon values (25:47)
• Navigating the challenges of building in a highly regulated space (27:31)
• Framework for collaboration between design partners & the legal team (29:55)
• Mahima’s process for identifying the ideal customer profile (31:58)
• Factors for identifying the right customers for the given time (34:11)
• Designing Cocoon’s go-to-market motion now that the ICP is clear (35:23)
• The story behind Cocoon manually stop gapping its product (36:55)
• Mahima’s method for default delegating & identifying where to invest your time as CEO / co-founder (39:29)
• Rapid fire questions (40:48)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Attached. - psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller reveal how an understanding of adult attachment—the most advanced relationship science in existence today—can help us find and sustain love.
• First Round - a venture capital firm that specializes in providing seed-stage funding to technology companies.

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/

Charley Ho (Co-Founder & CTO) & Alexander Embiricos (Co-Founder & CEO) @ Remotion share their co-founder story, along with how they found, lost, and rediscovered product-market fit throughout their journey with Remotion. We cover what it’s like building in public & their decision to be transparent with their co-founder ups and downs. Additionally, Charley & Alexander share strategies for pivoting / iterating and communicating with stakeholders, while keeping your team up-to-date and engaged with pivots. We caught up 4x months after our interview to learn the results of their big pivots and PMF experiments - so this is one you want to listen to all the way to the end.

ABOUT CHARLEY HO

Charley Ho (@potatoarecool) is the Co-Founder and CTO of Remotion, a virtual office that puts your hybrid-remote team right on your desktop. Before Remotion, Charley was an early engineer at Bebop, a startup that was acquired by Google. Charley has a BS & MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

"There's like a really intoxicating idea of just one more bug fix, just one more critical blocking feature and suddenly everything's gonna change because we know our users love it so much. We fell into that pattern a little like super easily, probably because we're such heavy dog fooders."

- Charley Ho  

ABOUT ALEXANDER EMBIRICOS

Alexander Embiricos is cofounder and CEO at Remotion. Prior to starting Remotion with Charley, he fell in love with desktop software while working as a PM at Dropbox. He studied Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering at Stanford, where he met Charley. Alexander lives in Brooklyn, New York where you might find him exploring new foods or on the badminton courts. He swears by charging your phone outside the bedroom.

"There was this growing dissonance between how we felt about what we were building and how we felt about the progress of the product. There was this tension between stay the course and keep going versus, ‘Hey, the metrics don't lie and they're not good. We're not going quickly enough. One more iteration isn't gonna help it. We need to make bigger changes.

- Alexander Embiricos   

ABOUT REMOTION

Remotion is a fresh take on Zoom that makes any app collaborative like Figma. It's great for pair coding or debugging, but why stop there? Remotion improves all your engineering team's internal calls, with support for 40 participants on Zoom's video infrastructure. 

Here's a short video of their updated product vision

Check out their change log for the latest core feature releases

If you're interested in joining their closed beta - send us a message at hello@sfelc.com and we'll connect you!

Looking for ways to support the show?

Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts

If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available.

To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at hello@sfelc.com

SHOW NOTES:

• Charley & Alexander’s co-founder story (2:59)
• The discovery process behind & what inspired Remotion (4:45)
• Why they chose to invest in Remotion versus the automation route (7:42)
• How Charley & Alexander identified areas of alignment & misalignment (8:17)
• Frameworks for identifying product-market fit (11:09)
• Iterating your product by incorporating user feedback / honesty (15:09)
• The difference between power users & the rest of your customers (17:34)
• How Remotion pivoted product-market fit to meet its engineering customers (19:18)
• Why Charley & Alexander decided to build in public (22:18)
• Strategies for communicating with stakeholders when making pivots (24:14)
• Being transparent regarding your thought process strategies with your team (26:44)
• Exercises to keep your team engaged in strategy & pivots (28:55)
• How early co-founder work set the foundation for tough commitment / pivot conversations (32:20)
• The latest way Alexander & Charley are structuring the way they build (35:41)
• Tips for refocusing your team when making a pivot (36:46)
• 4 months later (39:55)
• Rapid fire questions (46:50)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• One Year Wiser - Tyler Swartz, former Reddit PM, interviews founders and product makers one year after their product launch to learn how their products and businesses have evolved, their ups and downs journey along the way, and what their experiences over the past year have taught them.
• The Expanse - A series of science fiction novels by James S. A. Corey, the joint pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.
• Why We're Polarized - reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.
• Top of the Rock: Inside The Rise And Fall Of Must-See TV - an absorbing insiders’ account of an incredible time and place in television history: the years when Must See TV—led by Cheers, Seinfeld, Friends, ER, and _Law & Order_—made NBC an unstoppable success.
• Slimed: An Oral History Of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age - tells the surprisingly complex, wonderfully nostalgic, and impressively compelling story of how Nickelodeon began as a DIY startup in the late 70s, and forged ahead through the early eighties with a tiny band of young artists and filmmakers who would go on to change everything about cable television, television in general, animation, and children’s entertainment, proving just what can be done if the indie spirit is kept alive in the corporate world.

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/

The trio of co-founders from Sleuth – Dylan Etkin, Founder & CEO; Don Brown, Co-Founder & CTO; and Michael Knighten, Co-Founder & COO share their unique experience founding a company with three co-founders & navigating the division of responsibilities with mutual trust / respect. We also cover the challenges & opportunities of moving to a small startup from a large, high-growth org; what Sleuth’s early-day decision-making process looked like; frameworks for avoiding the “at bat” trap while iterating; hidden work elements; paradigm shifts regarding deployment tracking; and more.

ABOUT DYLAN ETKIN

Dylan Etkin (@detkin) is CEO & Co-Founder of Sleuth, the leading DORA metrics tracker. As one of the first 20 employees at Atlassian, Dylan was a founding engineer and the first Architect of Jira. He has led engineering for products at scale in Bitbucket and Statuspage. He has a masters in computer science from ASU. He’s a bit of a space nut and has been seen climbing around inside of a life-size replica of the Mir space station in Star City Russia.

ABOUT DON BROWN

Don lives and breathe software - wearing developer, architect, and manager hats for over 20 years. He was an early Atlassian architect for over 10 years working on products including Confluence, HipChat, and Atlassian Cloud. Don is currently the co-founder and CTO of Sleuth, a DORA metrics tracker. He has spoken at conferences including DevOps World, JavaOne, and Devoxx.

ABOUT MICHAEL KNIGHTEN

Michael built Atlassian’s cloud offerings from the ground up, following stints at Apple and PGP, eventually running company-wide strategy and operations, and helped take the company public in 2015. With a deep background in product and finance, he now runs go-to-market and finance at Sleuth.

ABOUT SLEUTH

Sleuth is an Engineering Efficiency platform that provides a complete and accurate view of your DORA metrics - giving you visibility into bottlenecks and tools to automate workflows. Sleuth works by integrating with your entire toolchain - from issue tracker, source control, CI/CD, feature flag, incident tracker, to observability tools - to provide the baselines, context, and insights you need to improve efficiency.

Looking for ways to support the show?

Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts

If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available.

To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at hello@sfelc.com

SHOW NOTES:

• The story of Michael connecting with Don & Dylan @ Atlassian (3:21)
• Background behind Sleuth & connecting as three co-founders (6:46)
• How Michael, Don, & Dylan identified that they were working on the same problem but from different angles (8:59)
• Don’s key considerations for joining Michael & Dylan (11:48)
• The dynamic of having three co-founders while building Sleuth (14:16)
• How they delineated roles / responsibilities (16:10)
• Why respect is a foundational tenet that avoids overstepping roles (17:18)
• Strategies for navigating the product hand-off to new team members (20:01)
• Hidden work elements Michael identified while clearing the decks (23:03)
• What the early building process / decision making was like (25:50)
• Frameworks for avoiding the “at bat” trap while iterating (29:45)
• Sleuth’s paradigm shift around deployment tracking (32:38)
• Surprising insights / feedback that led to Sleuth’s new direction (34:41)
• How they established a repeatable channel that gets more customers (36:11)
• Mindset shifts when moving from a large, successful company to founding a startup (38:50)
• Rapid fire questions (40:20)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Game of Thrones - A series of epic fantasy novels by the American novelist and screenwriter George R. R. Martin that chronicles the power struggle for the Iron Throne among the great Houses of Westeros following the death of King Robert.
• The Books of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin’s series of fantasy books set in the fictional archipelago of Earthsea and centers on a young mage named Ged, born in a village on the island of Gont.

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/

This episode features Lizzie Matusov, CEO & Co-Founder @ Quotient, who shares her unique founder journey – from Harvard’s dual-degree grad program & Innovation Lab to founding Quotient! She also reveals strategies for fundraising, including utilizing your relationship pipeline, incorporating story arcs into your pitch, overcoming pattern-matching bias, and how fundraising today is different than it used to be. We also cover Quotient’s major pivots, tips for not becoming too attached to your first idea & making space for new ideas, defining idea-mazing & its impact on your product, and developing clarity as a founder.

ABOUT LIZZIE MATUSOV

Lizzie Matusov (@lizziematusov) is the co-founder and CEO of Quotient - a toolkit to supercharge engineering teams. Today, their first tool is an onboarding platform that leverages behavioral research best practices to ramp up engineers more effectively. Quotient’s mission is to democratize access to the best engineering cultures.

Previously, Lizzie built software to improve access to medical-grade genetic testing at Invitae. She was also a software engineering consultant at Red Hat, where she built software applications for companies across various industries, including fintech and biotech. She holds a bachelor of science from UCLA, and an MBA and Masters of Engineering Sciences from Harvard.

"Let's say in a four-month period, you check in with investors or founders that you're working with two or three times. Now what they have is not just one call to base their opinion on, but an entire story arc that they can use to say, 'All right, in August they were doing this and by October they already did this, and then by December they were here. I'm now seeing sort of a preview of what I'm backing.' I think that that really helps founders sort of help investors make decisions, right? You are de-risking for them, you are sharing more of the milestones as you're doing them.”

- Lizzie Matusov   

ABOUT QUOTIENT

Quotient is a toolkit to supercharge engineering teams. Their mission is to democratize access to the best engineering cultures.

Today, their first tool is an onboarding platform that leverages behavioral research best practices to ramp up engineers more effectively. With Quotient you can build and deliver a high-quality, research-backed onboarding experience, and get data-driven insights into how your team changes and grows together.

Looking for ways to support the show?

Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts

If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available.

To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at hello@sfelc.com

SHOW NOTES:

• The backstory behind Quotient (2:47)
• Why the atomic unit is the team, not the individual & how that impacts Quotient (3:50)
• Lizzie’s leadership journey before Quotient (5:11)
• Why Lizzie chose Harvard’s dual-degree grad program as part of her founder’s journey (8:29)
• How Harvard’s program helped Lizzie accelerate founding Quotient (12:29)
• The community aspect of entrepreneurship & Harvard’s Innovation Lab (15:34)
• Lizzie’s favorite grad school hacks (17:45)
• Frameworks behind Quotient’s key pivots (19:58)
• How Quotient pivoted to better support companies & the onboarding process (22:48)
• Tips for making space for new ideas (25:46)
• Defining idea-mazing & how it impacts your product / solution (28:00)
• Where Quotient is in terms of fundraising (30:49)
• How assumptions & expectations around fundraising have changed (32:30)
• Collect data points that show your ability to execute, lead, & grow (33:52)
• Strategies to help overcome pattern matching bias (35:56)
• How Lizzie utilized story arcs while fundraising for Quotient (38:19)
• Why clarity as a founder is vital & frameworks for developing clarity (40:51)
• The renaming process & unveiling the new name “Quotient” (44:38)
• Rapid fire questions (46:24)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts’ novel following an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, the two enter the city’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis documents the real story of the crash that began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn't shine and the SEC doesn't dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can't pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren't talking.
• The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers’ novel following a motley crew on an exciting journey through space—and one adventurous young explorer who discovers the meaning of family in the far reaches of the universe.

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/