Engineering Founders (The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC))

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/

Should I build B2C or B2B? Should we implement top-down or a bottoms up sales strategy? How do we think about pricing? These are many of the dilemmas early founders face in the early stages. We sit down with Abi Noda to explore his experiences co-founding DX and Pull Panda and examine the differences, trade-offs and considerations behind building for consumer vs. B2B, pricing, early sales and product adoption strategies!

ABOUT ABI NODA

Abi Noda is the CEO and co-founder of DX, the world's first developer experience management platform. He was previously the CEO and founder of Pull Panda, which was acquired by GitHub in 2019. At GitHub he led research collaborations with Dr. Nicole Forsgren, McKinsey, and Microsoft Research, which was the impetus for founding DX.

"It's really good to try to sell starting on day one. That's probably, in my opinion, the best way to validate an idea, a B2B idea, is to try and go sell it and by sell it I mean literally go get money for like pre-committed customers. So it really de-risks a huge component of, I think, why these types of businesses fail, which is they just aren't able even identify, reach and successfully convert buyers.”

- Abi Noda   

ABOUT DX

DX is the world’s first developer experience management platform, helping organizations measure and improve top drivers of developer productivity and engagement.

DX is designed by leading software engineering researchers, providing science-backed metrics, workflows, and education that empower teams to improve.

SHOW NOTES:

• Abi's journey founding DX and Pull Panda (1:58)
• Building your business as a side-project for consumers vs. enterprise software (4:58)
• If you just got laid off and want to start a business, you need to hear this (8:52)
• The best way to validate a B2B idea (11:35)
• Differences with how you talk about your product in a competitive vs. uncompetitive market (14:49)
• How to think about pricing for bottoms-up or top-down sales motion (16:08)
• Choosing the right persona to pursue as customers (19:48)
• How experience at large companies can help you understand how to approach enterprise product adoption (22:35)
• Investor expectations with bottoms-up/top-down sales and identifying ICPs (30:57)
• Incentivizing users to adopt new features (33:03)
• Closing deals and getting to the implementation stage (36:42)
• How Abi maximized advisor relationships (38:54)
• Rapid fire questions (44:18)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Lenny Rachitsky’s Newsletter - a weekly advice column about product, growth, and your career.
• 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton Helmer’s comprehensive business strategy guide centered around power and the conditions that create the potential for persistent differential returns.
• Nail It Then Scale It - Nathan Furr and Paul Ahlstrom’s guide to increasing success and reducing risk when launching a high-growth company.

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/

In this episode, we cover bootstrapping & transitioning from side gig to full-time, featuring Darian Shimy, Founder @ FutureFund. He shares the origin story of FutureFund and how his children’s school experience inspired the company’s mission & product goals. He shares valuable tips on dealing with anxiety, betting on yourself, setting expectations, and making decisions as a founder. We also dissect how to iterate on your core marketing message & test pricing strategies throughout the different phases of FutureFund. Plus, considerations for scaling, fractional work engagements, hiring, and organization structure.

ABOUT DARIAN SHIMY

Darian Shimy is the visionary founder and CEO of FutureFund Technology, an innovative platform designed to streamline fundraising and sales for K-12 school groups. With a robust background of over 25 years in web technologies and engineering team management, Darian has held key leadership roles at notable companies including Square, Weebly, and eHarmony.com. He holds an MS in Computer Science from The University of Southern California and maintains a passion for coding in his free time. Outside of his tech career, he dedicates time to coaching youth sports, in both recreational and competitive teams.

"I feel like I'm doing an experiment and the experiment is this, what if you can get a fraction of time from the best people you've ever worked with in your entire life? Some could be 10 hours, some could be 30 hours, some could be 20, whatever it is, but like the best designer, the best product, the best engineer, the best salesperson, the best whomever, and pull them in to help out on a short amount of time. It has allowed us to grow at a pace that I think is sustainable for us and allows us to focus on quality.”

- Darian Shimy   

ABOUT FUTUREFUND

FutureFund streamlines fundraising and selling for school groups! FutureFund is a digital platform that provides powerful tools for K-12 school groups and PTAs for fundraising, growing membership, financial reporting, and communicating with volunteers—all in one clean, user-friendly interface.

Join us at ELC Annual 2024!

ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

SHOW NOTES:

• Staying customer-focused while working toward the future @ Samsara (3:22)
• Merging forward-looking technology & customer-problem-focused product-building conversations (5:54)
• Defining customer success & working backwards from winning (8:38)
• How stage gates can confirm / assess feature accuracy & maturity (10:58)
• What the approval moment looks like while moving from stage to stage (15:29)
• Understanding what stages offer the greatest opportunity for risk / friction (17:11)
• Signals to watch for that allow you to move forward with confidence (19:30)
• Best practices for anticipating & preparing for future possibilities (21:13)
• Using smaller-scale projects to inform future direction of larger-scale products (23:12)
• Communication strategies for working with less technical stakeholders (25:22)
• Methods for effectively communicating complex, technical information (27:59)
• AI / ML team composition at Samsara (30:04)
• Frameworks for aligning & motivating folks to focus on customer needs (32:59)
• Strategies for introducing new technologies & scientific research into your teams (35:06)
• Introducing AI into mission-critical internal tools (36:34)
• Rapid fire questions (39:17)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Holly - Holly Gibney, one of Stephen King’s most compelling and ingeniously resourceful characters, returns in this thrilling novel to solve the gruesome truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town.

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/

Chris Pruett, Co-Founder @ Jam, shares his leadership journey – transitioning from VPE @ LinkedIn to going all-in on Jam’s mission of entertaining curious minds. We also cover marketing & pitching lessons learned while introducing Jam at ComicCon, how audio storytelling creates an authentic, intimate experience for listeners; strategies for building consumer-based products vs. enterprise-based products; and more.

ABOUT CHRIS PRUETT

Chris Pruett (@curthipster) is the CTO and Co-Founder of Jam — a new way to listen to and share bite-sized audio. Delivered daily via text, Jams entertain curious minds in just a few minutes. Prior to Jam, he spent 9.5 years at LinkedIn, leading full-stack teams of 500+ engineers, where he transformed all parts of the consumer product, from the native mobile and web applications to the distributed systems that power the core platforms (feed, messaging, search, profile, notifications).

"That led to me putting on a coffee backpack, and then I started talking to people. And then that was when the magic started happening in terms of what I learned.

So I had to experiment and find different ways to get people's attention and help them understand what we're doing. As a platform, we started to learn to make it much more about the types of content that we had…”

- Chris Pruett  

ABOUT JAM

Jam is a new way to listen, share, inform, and inspire curious minds. It’s a daily playlist of the best content that fits perfectly into your busy day. Whether you’re making breakfast, running errands, or walking the dog – just listen to your Jams, delivered via text at the time that works best for you. Check them out at ListenToJam.com

SHOW NOTES:

• Chris’s leadership journey from VPE @ LinkedIn to Co-Founder @ Jam (1:46)
• Jam’s grand product vision of entertaining curious minds (4:49)
• Why podcasts / listening experiences create intimacy with your audience (6:57)
• How Jam satisfies Chris’s passion for building consumer products (8:17)
• Considerations behind transitioning from LinkedIn to Jam (9:36)
• Take time to explore opportunity costs (13:54)
• Skills & frameworks Chris improved upon as a founder (16:31)
• Marketing, pitching, & go-to-market lessons from Jam’s introduction at ComicCon (19:55)
• The importance of getting the pitch right & communicating concisely (25:54)
• How to bring true authenticity into your product pitch (30:02)
• Using stories / metaphors to connect with potential users (34:01)
• Chris’s approach for building a consumer-based product vs. enterprise-based (38:20
• How Jam models its storytelling philosophy to its creator network (41:09)
• To build a high-quality product, you MUST be using it (43:55)
• Rapid fire questions (46:17)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Grace Hopper Celebration - The world’s largest gathering of women technologists. Hear from our inspiring speakers, connect with peers and mentors, and gain important resources to help you succeed in your career. Created in 1994 and inspired by the legacy of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, the AnitaB.org flagship event Grace Hopper Celebration brings the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront.
• Book Jam with Jeff Matlow - Book reviews with attitude.
• Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid - Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them . . . and what they will leave behind.“I could not recommend Taylor. Jenkins Read more highly if you enjoy fiction.”

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 of Engineering Founders, we discuss something we’ve never covered before – why you SHOULDN’T be a founder! Travis McPeak (CEO & Co-Founder @ Resourcely) joins the pod to share his founder story and questions to ask yourself to truly validate if the founder lifestyle is right for you. We also address how to de-risk your org & understanding the two main kinds of risks; things to consider when raising capital, like going bootstrap vs. VC; balancing the wedge vs. long-term vision; and how to create a lifestyle that supports you as a founder.

ABOUT TRAVIS MCPEAK

Travis is currently Co-Founder and CEO of Resourcely which enables platform, security, and DevOps engineering teams to offer simple self-service to their developers. Prior to Resourcely, Travis served as the Head of Product Security at Databricks. With an extensive background in application and cloud security, Travis enjoys building automated solutions to hard and critical problems. Prior to joining Databricks, Travis led the team at Netflix that automates application security including vulnerability management, asset inventory, and security reviews. During his time at Netflix Travis also built Repokid, a tool that automates least privilege at scale. Previously Travis led large security initiatives at IBM, HPE, and Symantec.

Travis is an extrovert and enjoys sharing ideas and meeting new people. In his spare time, Travis leads the OWASP Bay Area chapter, mentors people getting started in security, and loves to help startups. He is an advisor for four companies including Ermetic and Appaegis. Travis is an angel investor in startups including Temporal, Truffle Security, and AuthZed.

" The stress is going to get you anyway, and your mindset about how you approach that stress is going to make the difference. So you're the one that's like, ‘All right, it's challenge time. Let's do this.’ Or are you like, ‘I'm overwhelmed right now. This feels too hard for me and then you go like hide in your shell.’”

- Travis McPeak   

SHOW NOTES:

• The origins behind Resourcely & Travis’s founder journey (1:52)
• Questions to ask before starting a company (5:07)
• What it was like for Travis to answer these questions for himself (8:00)
• Processes for becoming more self aware (9:06)
• What you should do / think about before starting a company (11:12)
• Methods for de-risking the two main kinds of risks (14:28)
• Resources for better understanding de-risking business risk (16:30)
• Identifying when to go bootstrap vs. VC for funding (19:00)
• Frameworks for differentiating which investor path is the right fit (21:30)
• Presentation strategies & considerations when raising capital (22:48)
• Linking together the wedge vs. long-term vision (28:21)
• How Travis was able to have 45 conversations in the first 45 days (32:31)
• Adapting to the founder lifestyle & increasing your odds for success (34:25)
• Strategies for prioritization & developing discipline (35:39)
• Practice rigorous scheduling (40:23)
• Rapid fire questions (41:49)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Mom Test - 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.
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin's dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.

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/

Tri Ahmad Irfan, Co-Founder & CTO @ Lumina, discusses his journey identifying large-scale problems in the SE Asian market and how they went from a Google form MVP to 1 million+ users! Additionally, we cover how to formulate / test / prove hypotheses about product-market fit, how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs informs product strategy, determining a potential customer’s willingness to pay, resources for researching consumer acquisition strategies, and his favorite lessons for early-stage founders.

ABOUT TRI AHMAD IRFAN

Tri Ahmad Irfan (@irfan3) is the co-founder and CTO of Lumina, a community platform that helps underserved workers in Southeast Asia to upskill and secure better jobs. Launched in early 2022, Lumina has served over a million job seekers and is funded by Y Combinator, and Monk's Hill Ventures.

Before Lumina, Irfan built out the engineering teams at fast-growth startups in Southeast Asia such as GudangAda, a wholesale marketplace, and STOQO, a B2B platform for food and beverage businesses. In college, Irfan interned at Twitter in San Francisco and spent some time doing competitive programming.

"I started with building a Google form and sending it out to a lot of people I know and I met and in return, I received like 10,000 profiles into this Google form. That's when I realized, ‘Okay, this can be something big.’ The app itself only launched six months ago and we have around 1 million users now.”

- Tri Ahmad Irfan   

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To learn more about Jellyfish and how they can help you increase engineering satisfaction and create happier, higher-performing engineering teams.

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Join us for one of our in-person community events!

That's right! We're hosting in-person community events in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago! Break out of your comfort zone and join us in a casual environment to connect, problem-solve, and support each other in our engineering leadership journeys.

Don't see your city on the list? No problem!

Reach out to Tim at Tim@sfelc.com and let's bring ELC to you - and make it happen!

To get involved email our Head of Community Tim at Tim@sfelc.com

SHOW NOTES:

• How Tri’s background inspired him to start Lumina (2:03)
• The motivation behind jumping into Lumina full-time (3:17)
• Challenges faced building the product up from an MVP (7:36)
• Using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to inform product strategy (10:16)
• Frameworks as a founder for identifying a large-scale problem & creating a solution (12:46)
• How Tri formulated & tested his hypotheses about product-market fit (14:00)
• Questions to determine a potential customer’s willingness to pay (17:18)
• How Lumina transitioned from a Google form MVP to its current platform (19:54)
• The market strategy to reach 1 million users & how it shifts to attract the next phase of the business (22:24)
• Tri’s favorite resources for researching consumer acquisition strategies (26:21)
• What happens when you discover a hypothesis isn’t true (27:29)
• Lessons for early-stage founders that Tri learned from past experiences (28:57)
• Who were Lumina’s early key hires to scale up operations (30:59)
• Rapid fire questions (32:33)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• https://irfan.blog/ - Tri’s personal website
• Talent - Renowned economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist and entrepreneur Daniel Gross set out to study the art and science of finding talent at the highest level: the people with the creativity, drive, and insight to transform an organization and make everyone around them better.
• The Witcher - In the Witcher saga, Andrzej Sapkowski introduces his hero, Geralt of Rivia, a witcher. He’s an itinerant mercenary. He kills monsters for money. His strange physique, with white hair and cat-like eyes, distinguishes him from other people, who reject him because of it. He’s an exceptionally powerful mutant who occasionally resorts to magic. Both feared and scorned by the powerless as well as the powerful, who see him as someone dangerous and impossible to retain. His honor code forbids him from killing if he can avoid it, and not to attack monsters unless they pose a real threat. He’s got a strong character, but he still has a human side: he doesn't always emerge from battle unscathed. Set in an imaginary medieval world enhanced with magic and monsters, the Witcher saga will surprise you: the monster isn’t always who you think it is!
• Y Combinator - One of Tri’s favorite founder resources that works intensively with companies for three months, to get them into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors.

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/

James Everingham, co-founder and former VP of Engineering @ Lightspark, joins our podcast to share his best tools for scaling yourself down – not up – as an engineering leader. He discusses his latest career move shifting down in scale and how that impacts your risk tolerance as a leader. We also cover some of James’ favorite leadership methods, including the Socratic method, principle-based decision-making, and creating narratives as a product / eng org goal-setting tool, plus how he’s employed those tools effectively throughout his career. We also address navigating the balance between process & anti-process, approaches to product planning & finding PMF, and adapting your communication style to work within a smaller vs. large org.

ABOUT JAMES EVERINGHAM

James Everingham (@jevering) is co-founder and former VP of Engineering at Lightspark. Lightspark is building core infrastructure on the Lightning Network. Most recently he was Vice President of Engineering for Novi (Meta) and co-creator of Diem. Previously, James was the Head of Engineering at Instagram. James has led many world-class engineering teams throughout his 35-year career as a manager, entrepreneur, and technology developer. At Yahoo, he was Vice President of Engineering for Yahoo media properties after acquiring Luminate, an interactive image technology company he founded. Other previous roles include CTO and founding team member of LiveOps, Senior Director of Engineering at Tellme (acquired by Microsoft), and Senior Director of Engineering at Netscape Communications, where he was responsible for the flagship Netscape browser. Before joining Netscape, James held engineering and management positions at Oracle and Borland International.

"We had a great story in our head of like if we can simply make money flow or value flow fast and free frictionlessly around the world like a lot of good is going to happen but then that's the ending. That's the happy ending. Like, what are the chapters that we're going to write in between to get there? The first one was, 'Well, we're going to build this new infrastructure. Let's start getting it out there and getting it quickened in an area where it's already accepted.' And that's what we did. You know, that was the first one and we worked backwards from that. They're trying to make the story happen. They're not trying to make a list of tasks happen and I think that's a really important distinction.”

- James Everingham   

SHOW NOTES:

• James’ latest experience scaling down in his career (2:45)
• Increasing your risk tolerance as an eng leader (5:20)
• Surprising ways eng leaders operate in a smaller org vs. a larger org (7:21)
• Optimizing communicating patterns when scaling down as a leader (10:28)
• Strategies for creating high-impact conversations within teams at a small org (12:17)
• How to use the Socratic method effectively as an eng leader (14:09)
• James’ framework for anchoring decision-making principles (17:10)
• Why focusing on customer problems before business problems is a key principle (19:35)
• Layering the Socratic method approach & principle-based decision making (21:48)
• Tips for implementing these approaches early on & scaling them up (24:36)
• The trap of “process” & knowing when / where to introduce processes (25:46)
• Navigating the balance between complete process & anti-process (28:04)
• Deconstructing James’ approach to product planning & goal setting (29:55)
• How James introduced the product planning narrative @ Lightspark (34:19)
• Advice for newcomers looking to identify & share a product narrative (36:42)
• Rapid fire questions (38:35)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• How to Scale Yourself Down — Not Up — as a Leader - An article outlining the narrative goal setting framework that James discusses in the episode.
• Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know - Adam Grant’s book about the benefit of doubt and how we can get better at embracing the unknown and the joy of being wrong.

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, Ihar Mahaniok (Managing Partner @ Geek Ventures) lends his expertise from the venture capital / tech startup world to help demystify some of the early fundraising experience. Ihar shares his leadership journey and why he decided to go the VC route over an eng leader or founder path, deconstructs his unique investing angle, what qualities he looks for in founders, tips for transitioning to the pre-seed fundraising round, formulas for implementing SAFE caps when seeking investments, and much more.

ABOUT IHAR MAHANIOK

Ihar (@mahaniok) is the Founder & Managing Partner of Geek Ventures, an NYC-based VC firm investing in early-stage startups by immigrant founders. Ihar is an experienced engineering leader and investor with 20+ years of experience. Ihar has invested in 100+ early-stage startups with exceptional returns, including 5 seed-to-unicorn. His portfolio includes Instacart, Slack, Flexport, Jeeves, PandaDoc, People.ai, Founderpath and more. As an engineering leader, Ihar led teams at Google, Facebook & WeWork; he led engineering at Lightning AI.

A lot of founders try to get all the commits before they start signing papers and wire which means they don't have money in the bank which means they cannot hire people but if you get safes and get wires right away, you get money in the bank and you can hire people.

Obviously, the more you spend on R and D, the more hopefully you can achieve your milestones and show. Right? So it's better to give away kind of 5% of the company at $3 million cap for $150k, but then raised later at higher cap after you have achieved milestones and why you achieved milestones? Because you hire some people!

- Ihar Mahaniok  

ABOUT GEEK VENTURES

Geek Ventures is a tech venture fund investing in immigrant founders building amazing, scalable products.

SHOW NOTES:

• How Ihar became a venture capitalist within the tech startup world (2:14)
• Ihar’s unique angle as a VC (4:11)
• The early-day challenges faced by immigrant founders (6:58)
• Why Ihar chose the investor path over eng management or founding (10:02)
• Criteria Ihar considers before investing in a company (14:36)
• Ideal qualities / characteristics Ihar likes to see in a founder (17:59)
• Ihar’s recommendation for what a successful funding process looks like (20:32)
• Strategies for transitioning into the pre-seed round (23:43)
• Implementing SAFE caps for pre-seed investing, weighing the benefits and risks (28:11)
• Using structural FOMO to encourage VCs to invest before it’s too late (32:47)
• Seek investors’ help beyond simply investing (35:39)
• How to build trust with investors through regular, honest updates (38:00)
• Rapid fire questions (40:29)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

(book) A DANCE WITH DRAGONS (A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, BOOK FIVE) by George R. R. Martin - In the aftermath of a colossal battle, the future of the Seven Kingdoms hangs in the balance once again–beset by newly emerging threats from every direction. In the east, Daenerys Targaryen, the last scion of House Targaryen, rules with her three dragons as queen of a city built on dust and death. But Daenerys has three times three thousand enemies, and many have set out to find her. Yet, as they gather, one young man embarks upon his own quest for the queen, with an entirely different goal in mind.

To the north lies the mammoth Wall of ice and stone–a structure only as strong as those guarding it. There, Jon Snow, 998th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, will face his greatest challenge yet. For he has powerful foes not only within the Watch but also beyond, in the land of the creatures of ice.

And from all corners, bitter conflicts soon reignite, intimate betrayals are perpetrated, and a grand cast of outlaws and priests, soldiers and skinchangers, nobles and slaves, will face seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Some will fail, others will grow in the strength of darkness. But in a time of rising restlessness, the tides of destiny and politics will lead inevitably to the greatest dance of all. . . .Dubbed “the American Tolkien” by Time magazine, George R. R. Martin has earned international acclaim for his monumental cycle of epic fantasy. Now the #1 New York Times bestselling author delivers the fifth book in his spellbinding landmark series–as both familiar faces and surprising new forces vie for a foothold in a fragmented empire.

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/

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/

David Mytton (CEO @ Arcjet & Co-founder @ Console) shares insights on “what makes a great DevTool company!” We unpack lessons on bootstrapping vs. seeking VC funding & why it’s important to stick with one; building prototypes; considerations for selling your company; and his founder journey with Server Density, Console & now with Arcjet. David also highlights GTM practices for finding reliable channels & distribution, why documentation can make a critical impact on dev tool sales, the impact of design, and translating the benefits of dev tools for finance teams vs. developers.

ABOUT DAVID MYTTON

A dynamic approach to tech innovation, security, sustainability, and developer empowerment can be seen in everything David Mytton touches. As co-founder of Console and host of the Console DevTools Podcast, he delights in keeping developers ahead of the curve with the tools they need the most. As the founder of Server Density (acquired by StackPath), he created a product that helped organizations manage mission-critical IT environments. As a sustainable computing researcher at Oxford and a global green tech speaker, he’s brought much-needed attention to the impact of cloud emissions and the water and energy consumption of the data centers that fuel our online lives. Now, as founder and CEO of Arcjet, he’s helping developers and businesses protect their apps with just a few lines of code. His professional career is a direct reflection of his relentless pursuit of making tech smarter and greener. How he invests his spare time showcases his unwavering commitment to mentoring developers and building the communities they need to succeed.

SHOW NOTES:

• David’s founder journey, starting with Server Density (2:31)
• Behind the early decision to start a company & start building a product (4:00)
• Key lessons from bootstrapping, raising funding, and being acquired (7:40)
• How those early lessons shaped Arcjet & Console (9:39)
• Why VC money can make finding experienced engineers easier (12:24)
• Strategies to help early teams build their first product / prototype (14:02)
• Considering company outcomes: Should you build a company just to sell it? (15:17)
• Signals that it’s the right time for a sale / acquisition (17:02)
• The story behind Arcjet (18:54)
• “What makes a great DevTool company” & strategic insights that shaped Arcjet (22:11)
• Key practices that helped shape Arcjet’s GTM plan (24:09)
• David’s approach to experimentation and discovery (26:09)
• The impact of documentation on dev tool companies (30:03)
• How discovery pathways for dev tools impact sales (31:55)
• Making the decision-making process easier for users & buyers (33:30)
• Translating dev tool benefits for finance teams vs. developers (38:18)
• The impact of design on dev tool companies (40:55)
• Rapid fire questions (44:21)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• David’s reading list
• a16z Blog
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times bestselling author, combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times.
• The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World - Niall Ferguson follows the money to tell the human story behind the evolution of finance, from its origins in ancient Mesopotamia to the latest upheavals on what he calls Planet Finance.
• The Lessons of History - In this illuminating and thoughtful book, Will and Ariel Durant have succeeded in distilling for the reader the accumulated store of knowledge and experience from their four decades of work on the ten monumental volumes of "The Story of Civilization." The result is a survey of human history, full of dazzling insights into the nature of human experience, the evolution of civilization, the culture of man.

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/

Today, we’re talking about the intersection between the software eng & hardware eng communities with Jessie Frazelle, Co-founder & CEO @ Zoo. She shares her founder story with us, along with what the early days of building a hardware and hardware-adjacent company looked like. Jessie dissects the differences between building in software & hard tech and what those differences mean when it comes to VC fundraising, identifying building models, and more. Additionally, we speculate on what the future of this world looks like, tips for selling a product in a sector you’re unfamiliar with, and how to identify / address unexpected areas of toil for your customers.

ABOUT JESSIE FRAZELLE

Jessie Frazelle (@jessfraz) is the Co-Founder and CEO at Zoo, the world's only company to develop advanced tools for hardware design Frazelle acts as lead engineer and architect for the Zoo ecosystem alongside other co-founders Jordan Noone and Jenna Bryant.

With an impressive background including over ten years in the tech industry, Frazelle is also a software engineer and advisor to Embedded Ventures – a next-generation venture capital firm investing in early-stage deep tech startups. With a thesis that takes a commercial-first approach to investing in early-stage startups with applications that can serve the Department of Defense, Embedded has a first-of-its-kind partnership with the United States Space Force.

Previously, Frazelle was co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Oxide Computer Company and has also held roles at Google, Docker, and Microsoft, among others, and has spoken at many conferences including CERN, QCon, and LinuxConf AU.

"Chips today aren't optimized for a single-thread. They are optimized for multi-thread. So every time you upgrade your computer, you're going in the opposite direction. You want a computer from 30 years ago to run this thing. I was like, 'This is so messed up. If no one cleans this up, we will be stuck with the coolest technology in 10 years, but still these shitty old computers have to run CAD and it makes no sense.’”

- Jessie Frazelle   

SHOW NOTES:

• Why Jessie made the transition from GitHub to Oxide (1:49)
• Experiences that prepared Jessie to start her first company (4:47)
• The origin story of Zoo & differences between building the two orgs (7:05)
• Strategies for deciding which pathway to pursue when you’re between options (8:55)
• Differences between building a company in software vs. hardware space (11:20)
• Building the first product at Zoo vs. Oxide (13:06)
• How to accelerate when you get stuck in the process during early dev stages (16:09)
• Addressing CADkernel from a first principles approach (17:07)
• Gaining conviction that they could build & ship a product on a faster timeline (20:46)
• Why Jessie wanted to begin with CADkernel as the first product area (22:44)
• Jessie’s perspective on business models in software vs. hardware (25:03)
• Lessons learned while building for / selling to a sector you’re less familiar with (26:55)
• Using the discovery process to identify unexpected areas of toil (30:29)
• Fundraising in the hardware & hardware-adjacent space (31:34)
• Key elements of a pitch to hardware VCs that result in a yes (33:47)
• Emerging opportunities at the intersection of hardware & software (35:50)
• Rapid fire questions (37:54)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology - Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life, how the U.S. became dominant in chip design, how its global military dominance stems from its ability to harness computing power more effectively than any other power, and how China is catching up.

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/

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, we explore the story of Adam Oliner, CEO & Founder @ Graft and discuss his perspectives on building business models, considerations around early business strategy, best practices for activating your network (if you’re anti-networking), and lessons from their recent pre-seed round & product-building bias toward ease of use! Plus, we dive into what it's like to be a founder with young kids, the impact of family on day-to-day operations and company values!

ABOUT ADAM OLINER

Adam is the CEO & Founder at Graft, which aims to make the AI of the 1% accessible to the 99%. Before that, he led machine learning teams at Slack and Splunk. Adam was a postdoctoral scholar in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, working in the AMP Lab, which specialized in cloud computing and Big Data. He earned a PhD in computer science from Stanford University and a MEng in EECS from MIT, where he also earned degrees in computer science and mathematics.

“I would kind of scoff at the like, ‘Oh, it's not what you know, it's who you know,’ because I was an academic. Of course it's what you know. That's the whole point.

Now of course I understand that it is in fact both. If you only have a network, then your only power is to inspire that network, but if you also have the knowledge and the skills and can activate a network of people by inspiring them to help come solve that problem with you, then I think you have the ingredients to really solve hard problems and build great companies.

I don't think either one is sufficient by itself, and that was not a perspective I had before.”

- Adam Oliner   

SHOW NOTES:

• Three questions to determine if this company will be successful and the origin story of Graft (2:25)
• How Graft identified the problem in AI/ML infrastructure for the 99% (6:58)
• When should you make introduction and customer discovery calls? (13:01)
• Co-founders, scaling, self-sufficient infrastructure and other lessons Adam learned from his first start-up (16:35)
• Clarifying questions for your product-building strategy and business plan (23:38)
• The biggest founder lessons from earning a PhD (25:34)
• Dissolving the barrier between ego and craft (30:18)
• Internal and external challenges from Adam’s founder experience (32:50)
• Activating your network (even if you’re “anti-networking”) (36:48)
• The importance of amplifying and praising your network (41:31)
• Why you should bias your products to be easy-to-use (43:36)
• Rapid fire questions (45:42)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• The Books of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin’s critically acclaimed series of high fantasy novels about mages and sorcerers set in on a fictional group of islands called Earthsea.

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/

Vidya Raman, Partner @ Sorensen Ventures, shares her best practices for developing a strong enterprise GTM strategy & why this is such a challenging thing to do as a new founder. We also dive into blindspots that highly technical founders may possess, balancing the technical aspects of founding with the anthropological side, product considerations when building for enterprise, timing new product releases, developing & articulating your product roadmap. Plus how to identify and build your “wedge,” & avoid becoming simply a point solution. We also cover how to tackle a common founder concern – honing your sales skills – and when to know it’s time to bring in a non-technical co-founder.

ABOUT VIDYA RAMAN

Vidya Raman joined Sorenson Ventures in 2019 from Cloudera, where she led the ML platform, the fastest-growing product line in the company’s history at the time. There, she was responsible for making ML at scale a reality for customers spanning industries such as autonomous driving, biotech, banking, and government. Before that, she led engineering and product teams at venture-backed enterprise startups, including eMeter (Sequoia-funded, acquired by Siemens) and Silver Spring Networks (Kleiner funded, IPO exit).

Throughout her career, Vidya has worked with teams that have taken more than a dozen products from mere ideas to many millions in revenue and eventually to product-market fit. She draws on her rich set of successes and failures, helping founders navigate the journey to product-market fit while at the same time being an eternal student in the constantly evolving world of go-to-market techniques.

Vidya is passionate about partnering with technical founders who think in first principles, dream big, and are keen to build businesses that stand the test of time. Vidya’s primary focus is on startups that build for the builders, i.e., tools used by engineers.

Working with companies in their earliest stages is her passion. She believes that the opportunity to have the most meaningful and direct impact is at that stage.

Outside of work, she loves spending time in nature and reading. Her favorite genre includes biographies (all-time favorite: Nelson Mandela), behavioral economics, and psychology (favorite: Thinking fast, slow). She is a die-hard Harry Potter fan, and her favorite spell is Wingardium Leviosa.

"There is something about selling to enterprises that goes beyond what's on the surface of what you offer as a product. To me, that became about how do you enable the people first and foremost and then the business. It's not actually the other way around. Oftentimes, I've seen that products which get embraced within enterprises have enabled someone to become a hero, oftentimes a superhero. That is how human doing business is actually. Even for very, very technical enterprise products.”

- Vidya Raman   

SHOW NOTES:

• Vidya’s background & passion for the enterprise GTM world (2:54)
• Strategies for enabling people first, then the business (7:29)
• Vidya’s perspective on why GTM is challenging for first-time technical founders (10:06)
• Vital considerations for founders when building a product for enterprise (14:53)
• What to do (& not to do) when discussing your product roadmap to sell (18:23)
• What’s the wedge? Product / Platform / Timing considerations to get you in the door of enterprise companies (22:05)
• Optimizing locally vs. globally (23:42)
• Signs that indicate that the timing is right for expansion (25:27)
• Recommendations for founders to hone selling skills (27:33)
• Why good sellers have more than just an extroverted personality (29:33)
• Train your social & emotional antenna (30:53)
• Considerations for having a non-technical co-founder (32:37)
• Rapid fire questions (34:57)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat - A gripping and vivid narrative of adventure and derring-do that is also, perhaps, the last great untold story of the Second World War.

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/

ABOUT STEPHEN WHITWORTH

Stephen is the co-founder and CEO of incident.io, where they're building incident management tooling that's so good, people will break things on purpose. A software engineer by training, he previously led engineering teams at Monzo, and co-founded Ravelin, a fraud detection startup.

ABOUT INCIDENT.IO

Incident.io provides a platform to help you better respond to and learn from incidents. Helping you seamlessly orchestrate incident response from start to finish.

This episode is brought to you by Clipboard Health

Clipboard Health is looking for the next generation of exceptional software engineering leaders, not just managers. They’re a profitable unicorn, backed by top-tier investors, and they take the craft of engineering management seriously.

Clipboard Health matches highly qualified healthcare workers with nearby facilities to fulfill millions of shifts a year - revolutionizing healthcare staffing with a fast, flexible, and user-friendly platform.

Learn more & browse their open roles at clipboardhealth.com/engineering

SHOW NOTES:

• The early days of incident.io (2:45)
• Transitioning from working on incident.io part-time to full-time (5:32)
• Tactics that helped the co-founder team decide on incident.io over other ideas (8:21)
• How incident.io received 750 demo requests right away (11:07)
• incident.io’s product-market fit cheat code & identifying internal PMF (12:24)
• How incident.io landed major logo companies like Netflix, Airbnb & Etsy (14:32)
• Strategies to differentiate yourself from competitors in the B2B space & why execution and responsiveness can beat technological advantage (17:30)
• Stephen’s perspective on “inflicting software” on people & how that changes your product, org & GTM strategy downstream (21:14)
• Enterprise sales insights that surprised Stephen (23:56)
• Why GTM is infinitely harder than product & how founders can start to scale themselves out of sales activities (27:21)
• What incident.io’s GTM team looks like now (32:12)
• Differentiating in B2B enterprise on customer support & the strategic role of support at incident.io (34:20)
• Why a culture of responsiveness and support can be your hidden advantage (37:03)
• Rapid fire questions (39:26)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Billion Dollar Whale - Tom Wright and Bradley Hope’s epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history.

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/

ABOUT MICHAEL GRINICH

Michael is the founder and CEO of WorkOS, a developer platform that enables companies to become Enterprise Ready through features like Single Sign-On (SAML). Their customers include many of the fastest-growing startups including Webflow, Drata, Loom, and +200 others. Before WorkOS, Michael co-founded Nylas and studied CS at MIT.

This episode is brought to you by Clipboard Health

Clipboard Health is looking for the next generation of exceptional software engineering leaders, not just managers. They’re a profitable unicorn, backed by top-tier investors, and they take the craft of engineering management seriously.

Clipboard Health matches highly qualified healthcare workers with nearby facilities to fulfill millions of shifts a year - revolutionizing healthcare staffing with a fast, flexible, and user-friendly platform.

Learn more & browse their open roles at clipboardhealth.com/engineering

SHOW NOTES:

• Michael’s first journey as a founder @ Nylas (2:21)
• Great product experience happens in the margins (6:09)
• Why prioritizing the details of the last 3% of your product is key (7:17)
• How obsession, taste, care, and the intangible wow factor impact your product experience (9:24)
• Study and design the business model like you would the product experience / system architecture (12:59)
• Designing WorkOS’s early business model & prioritizing early product decisions (16:39)
• The Philosophy of 'You Pay When We Create Value For Your Business' and Why It Works (20:04)
• ”Pricing is the API between your business model and your customer” (22:10)
• Why you should iterate on pricing the same way you iterate your product (24:18)
• How to navigate making a pricing decision - and think through options like public pricing, tiers, usage, etc. (27:21)
• Questions Michael asks to determine pricing of different WorkOS products (30:54)
• Pricing is all about considering trade-offs - start with “what’s the ideal buying experience and pricing structure for your consumer?” (32:53)
• Factors to consider when changing prices or revisiting pricing assumptions (34:00)
• Rapid fire questions (36:28)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• ACQUIRED - Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.
• The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation - The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades.
• Founder-Led Sales: Sales Simplified for Startup Founders - Founder-led sales can be challenging, as it requires expertise and charisma to sell a product or service. Potential customers may be skeptical of the founder's intentions. However, founder-led sales can also be rewarding, providing valuable feedback and insights to improve the product or service, building strong customer relationships, and leading to repeat business and positive recommendations. It's a powerful tool for business growth.

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/

How do you know when—or if—you’re ready to start a company? Michel Tricot (Co-Founder & CEO @ Airbyte) talks with us about how he found the confidence to make the leap from engineering leader to launching his own company. Michel provides insight on screening ideas, finding founder-market fit, the most important success factors for early startups, and building trust in an open-source data community.

ABOUT MICHEL TRICOT

Michel is the co-founder and CEO @ Airbyte. He has been working in data engineering for the past 15 years. As head of integrations and engineering director at Liveramp (NYSE: RAMP), he built and grew the team responsible for building and scaling the data ingestion and data distribution connectors, syncing 100s TB every day.

In 2020, he co-founded Airbyte, the new open-source data integration platform, with the vision to commoditize data integration pipelines across all industries and organizations.

After just 1 year, Airbyte grew a community with more than 5k members, got deployed over 16k times and raised over 180M from Accel, Altimeter, Benchmark, Coatue and YC.

“You want to make sure that the audience you're talking to is an audience that you're very comfortable with, that you deeply understand. So that the product that you build... you don't have to think so much about what do you need to build because you are already one of this person in the audience. You have a sense of what pain they're facing.

And that makes a lot of things a lot easier, whenever you do customer discovery, when you do user discovery... You already have a sense and you can put yourself into their shoes.”

- Michel Tricot   

SHOW NOTES:

• Airbyte’s Origin Story (2:33)
• Finding founder-market fit (7:15)
• Why you should invalidate your ideas (10:29)
• How to know when you’re ready to start a company (14:00)
• Making the transition from eng leader to CEO (16:42)
• How do founders navigate the fundraising process? (20:03)
• The most important success factors for an early startup (23:12)
• Leveraging an open-source community (27:30)
• The benefit of being transparent with your users (29:18)
• How to build trust in an engineering community (31:33)
• Community building is not a side project (33:42)
• Ways to deal with doubt as a founder (34:39)
• Everything leads back to your North Star (38:26)
• Rapid-Fire Questions (39:40)

How do co-founders know when it’s time to pivot? And how do you make sure your team is on board with the new direction? Daniela Miao and Khawaja Shams (Co-Founders @ Momento) join us to talk about their experience pivoting from a consumer Social Fitness app to a B2B SaaS company. The technical co-founders share their story of starting with a team and not a product, how they decided on a new direction, establishing open communication, and getting feedback from the market.

ABOUT KHAWAJA SHAMS

Khawaja is a technical hands-on leader, passionate about investing in people, setting a bold vision, and execution with his team. At AWS, he owned DynamoDB, a highly available fully managed database service serving at extreme scales! It powers much of Amazon retail, Amazon Video, and control planes of critical AWS Services. Khawaja subsequently owned product and engineering for all 7 of the AWS Media Services, responsible for streaming some of the most visible events in the world, including the Super Bowl and the world’s first Live 4K Stream from Space. He was awarded the prestigious NASA Early Career Medal for his contributions to the Mars Rovers.

“It took us some time, but we eventually internalized that we're not the domain experts in this. And in some cases, we learned that the investors knew more about the space than we did. And that's a bad sign, right? Like that's a great thing for an entrepreneur... but it's a really difficult position to put the investors in.”

- Khawaja Shams   

ABOUT DANIELA MIAO

Daniela Miao is the co-founder of Momento, a serverless distributed caching platform. Previously, she was the Director of Platform Engineering at Lightstep, and tech lead at AWS DynamoDB. Daniela has spoken at many events including re:Invent, QCon, and Kubecon. At Momento, she works on distributed system performance, observability, security, and the intersection of engineering with business.

"The hardest conversation... I think I can speak for both of us when I say this, was actually with each other. You know, imagine sort of that brewing sense of doubt and wanting to broach the conversation.

And this is a BIG pivot, right? It's it has nothing to do with each other. And I think that was really profound. It normalized having a pivot... after that, the rest actually felt a lot easier...

- Daniela Miao

SHOW NOTES:

• How Daniela and Khawaja met (2:35)
• Starting with a team, not a product (3:56)
• Choosing the idea for a product (5:02)
• Pivoting from a consumer fitness app to B2B SaaS (6:41)
• Getting the team on board with a pivot (13:08)
• How to establish open communication (16:43)
• Advice for pivoting a startup (20:34)
• How to know when to pivot (23:52)
• Why focus so much on values in the early days? (28:04)
• Go-to-market tips for technical leaders (32:58)
• Getting feedback from the market (35:19)
• Rapid Fire Questions (38:06)

We talk with Sagar Batchu (Co-Founder @ Speakeasy) about his transition from engineering leader to founder, what it means to be a devex company, how he navigated finding a co-founder, and more! Co-hosted by Emma Tang & Roger Luo @ ELC Angels, we also cover shipping a product before funding and the ensuing pivots, building a developer-led startup, and attracting top talent for early-day hires.

ABOUT SAGAR BATCHU

Sagar (@sagar_batchu) is a hands-on engineer leader focused on developer and data infrastructure. Previously he was Director of Engineering at LiveRamp. As the first engineering hire for LiveRamp in London he scaled the team to 50+ over a few years and established the group as a center for privacy and analytics. Sagar enjoy's building teams from scratch, focusing on the strategic impact of technical choices and working at the cross section of engineering, product and corp dev. He's currently CEO and co-founder of a new startup in the developer infrastructure space. Sagar loves dev tools and chicory in his coffee!

"As an engineer, one of the things that you can rely on the most in the early days is this ability to prototype super quickly. And when we did all of our early user interviews, we were able to do an interview, immediately jump, prototype, think about it, work on something actually tangible. And there's nothing quite like being able to build something immediately and see how it does.”

- Sagar Batchu  

ABOUT SPEAKEASY

Speakeasy is developer experience for your API - Their vision is to be the simplest and most reliable way to consume an API. Speakeasy enables companies to offer a world-class API Developer Experience and finally move beyond docs -- driving user adoption, decreasing troubleshooting time, and reducing support costs. Day 0 they provide reliable, language-idiomatic, type-safe client SDKs that reduce developer friction in a range of languages and runtimes. Day 1 developers self service all aspects of API usage through a developer dashboard that includes key management, usage dashboards, logging & troubleshooting, request replay, and more. Speakeasy is the easiest way to consume an API whether internal or external.

SHOW NOTES:

• The inspiration & backstory behind Speakeasy (1:36)
• Speakeasy’s mission & Sagar’s transition from LiveRamp to Speakeasy (4:25)
• How Sagar felt transitioning from eng leader to founder (8:50)
• What was easier or harder than expected, when you became a founder? (11:34)
• What it means to be a developer-first company (12:39)
• The early-day experience of building developer-led companies (16:50)
• How Sagar found his first founding engineer (19:17)
• The “secret sauce” to attracting top talent & early founders (21:08)
• How to navigate “co-founder dating” (25:28)
• Strategies for building a product that satisfies customers & investors (27:32)
• Frameworks for approaching potential investors & working with stakeholders (30:01)
• Sagar’s approach for maintaining momentum as his company’s chief evangelist (31:54)
• Rapid fire questions (35:04)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell - “Tony led the teams that created the iPod, iPhone and Nest Learning Thermostat and learned enough in 30+ years in Silicon Valley about leadership, design, startups, Apple, Google, decision-making, mentorship, devastating failure and unbelievable success to fill an encyclopedia. So that’s what this book is. An advice encyclopedia. A mentor in a box.”
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - “An irresistible interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir could deliver, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian —while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.

Want to learn more about ELC Angels? FAQs about the community here: https://voltaic-pickle-4a4.notion.site/ELC-Angel-FAQ-5d7d0d82565a4b0b8638c496641d7ca0

Also find them on AngelList - https://venture.angellist.com/elc/syndicate

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/

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/

Jake Schwartz (Co-Founder @ Endorsed) joins us to talk about de-risking the co-founder relationship! We cover how they built in stress-tests to validate co-founder fit, how to host a hackathon to stress-test your partnership, and why reference calls are an important component of finding a co-founder. Plus the story behind Jakes's transition from Life360 to co-founding Endorsed, prioritizing which projects to focus on, early-stage product strategy considerations around AI, and why you need to approach your customers with a genuine sense of curiosity.

ABOUT JAKE SCHWARTZ

Jake is an engineering leader, entrepreneur, and technology investor based in San Francisco. From building his first website at age 8 to shipping large-scale software at Apple and overseeing the development of the flagship Life360 app, Jake has tackled engineering challenges at every scale. At Life360, he jump-started the European engineering office, helping scale the company from 50 to 500 people and reaching an audience of 70M users worldwide. He is now the co-founder of Endorsed.com, an AI recruiting platform that helps teams hire better and faster.

SHOW NOTES:

• The origin story behind Endorsed (1:59)
• What inspired Jake to dive into the world of hiring (6:05)
• The whiteboarding conversation between Jake & his co-founder (7:12)
• Jake’s transition from Life360 to starting Endorsed (9:24)
• Insights on experimentation & stress-testing the co-founder relationship (11:23)
• Deciding what experiments to pursue further or toss (13:16)
• Strategies for de-risking the co-founder relationship & transition to a startup (14:30)
• Organizing a hackathon to test the co-founder relationship (16:50)
• What Jake learned from the co-founder hackathon & tips for trying your own (18:07)
• Main objectives for co-founder reference calls (19:59)
• Dissecting Jake’s decision-making process behind the different pivots (21:27)
• Why they decided to commit to selling direct vs. building an API layer (24:38)
• Recommendations for sorting through problems & deciding which to solve (25:57)
• Approach your customers with curiosity (29:31)
• Early-stage considerations for AI in terms of product strategy (30:33)
• Rapid fire questions (33:34)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Steve Jobs “Keeper of the Vision” quote
• The Three-Body Problem - Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion.

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/

Sean Stavropolous, Co-Founder & CTO @ Boulevard, shares his founder journey and Boulevard’s unique role as a vertically integrated SaaS product! He reveals how he navigated the problem discovery phase early on & decided which features the company should prioritize based on financial impact. We also cover navigating company milestones, strategies for convincing investors to buy-in to your vertically integrated SaaS product, and the impact of COVID on Boulevard.

ABOUT SEAN STAVROPOULOS

Sean Stavropoulos (@SeanStavro) is co-founder and CTO of Boulevard, provider of the client experience platform used by more than 25,000 professionals in more than 2,000 salons, spas, and other self-care businesses across the US. In his role as CTO, Sean leads the company’s various technical teams while establishing its strategic product vision. Prior to co-founding Boulevard in 2016, Sean was vice president of engineering at Fullscreen, where he oversaw the technical design and development of the company’s core technology and payments products. His career also includes a stint as a systems engineer for Honeywell Aerospace. A resident of Los Angeles, CA, Sean holds a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

We would need to build baseline functionality in all of these different areas to even get in the door. It's like as we started to learn more and more about what truly would be a viable product in this market... that became demotivating at times.

Because what you thought was your discipline and your very concrete idea of where you're gonna be spending your time starts to expand. And you're like, ‘Well, shoot... I'm gonna have to do a lot more than I initially thought.’

And you know, while that can be demotivating, there's still a real opportunity here. It's just gonna be a little bit bigger than we thought.

- Sean Stavropolous  

**ABOUT BOULEVARD

Boulevard is a business management platform developed to help streamline the operations of appointment-based businesses.

What started as an idea for a modern appointment scheduling solution for salons and spas has evolved into an innovative client experience platform, complete with seamless scheduling, intuitive business management, automated email marketing, and reliable payment processing – all in one convenient place.

Developed in collaboration with industry-leading owners and operators, their scheduling and point of sale platform-as-a-service was carefully designed to drive revenue, automate workflows, and convert customers from visitors into valuable, long-term clients. By facilitating a better, personalized experience across every transaction and interaction, Boulevard’s technology not only helps businesses survive, but thrive.

SHOW NOTES:

• Boulevard’s early days & why it became a vertically integrated SaaS product from the start (2:08)
• The problem discovery phase & expanding Boulevard’s feature scope (4:18)
• How Sean navigated which opportunities to pursue early on (9:49)
• Frameworks for deciding which features to prioritize while considering the financial impact (13:30)
• Tools for validating the ideal customer persona (16:51)
• Balancing between being realistic & optimistic regarding your product (17:47)
• Navigating both feature release & customer growth milestones (20:13)
• Sean’s experience fundraising as an eng leader for a vertically integrated SaaS platform (22:00)
• Strategies for convincing investors that your product is worth investing in (26:01)
• Identify & seek advice from experts who can help grow your product (29:28)
• The impact of COVID on Boulevard & how they navigated its challenges (32:11)
• Rapid fire questions (39:00)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• (book) The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch - Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them.When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.
• (book) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he?

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/

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/

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/

Arya Asemanfar, Co-Founder @ Runway, joins us to share how he transitioned from eng leader to co-founder & strategies for both pre & and post-product market fit! We also cover how to determine if you and your potential co-founder are a good match, core principles & primitives that inform Runway’s product strategy, why you should pay attention to how a product makes users feel, strategies for transitioning with ease throughout your org’s evolutions, and implementing learning loops in your org.

ABOUT ARYA ASEMANFAR

Arya is co-founder and CTO of Runway, a modern, beautiful product funded by a16z to help business and finance leaders truly understand and collaborate together for the first time. Prior to Runway, Arya was Head of Product at Lightstep, Tech Lead at Mixpanel, and was one of 3 Principal Engineers at Twitter where he led engineering efforts on the main Timeline product.

"I discovered this book, The Extended Mind, and this concept of offloading. She describes it as being able to take your thoughts or your ideas and offload them out of your head onto something like paper or a whiteboard. What that does is it actually reduces the cognitive load that you have as a person solving a problem or doing some work.

You offload it onto the products or onto the too and it actually frees your mind to do more. It can be faster, it can come up with new ideas, it can make more connections. The tool or the product can be an extension of your mind and so I was like, ‘Hey Siqi, you should listen to this and see if this is what you meant.’ 

And it was like a light bulb moment. ‘Yes, this is it!’”

- Arya Asemanfar   

ABOUT RUNWAY

Business financials got stuck in the 15th century so Runway is showing them today’s computers 🖥- Runway is a SaaS product that helps you and your team understand your business so you can make better decisions together. Unlike other financial software, Runway is designed to be a consumer-grade product for normal people who aren't accountants, and is fast, intuitive, and social.

Runway reinvents how business financials are presented through modern design and engineering. By bringing clarity, power, and speed to financial data, they help every team become more aligned on the entire business so they can collaborate to make better decisions, faster.

Join us for one of our in-person community events!

That's right! We're hosting in-person community events in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago! Break out of your comfort zone and join us in a casual environment to connect, problem-solve, and support each other in our engineering leadership journeys.

Don't see your city on the list? No problem!

Reach out to Tim at Tim@sfelc.com and let's bring ELC to you - and make it happen!

To get involved email our Head of Community Tim at Tim@sfelc.com

SHOW NOTES:

• Arya’s background & the early days at Runway (2:24)
• How Arya & Siqi reconnected to co-found Runway (5:18)
• Determining if you’re a good match as co-founders (6:37)
• What made hiring in the early stages of Runway easy (8:38)
• Why Arya made the jump from eng leader @ LightStep to co-founder (9:52)
• Core principles & primitives that inform Runway’s product strategy (12:01)
• Pay attention to how a product makes you feel (15:14)
• Examples of how Runway imbues feeling into its product (18:23)
• Tips for instilling this paradigm in your team in the early product-building phase (20:03)
• Lessons learned throughout Runway’s product evolutions (21:42)
• How working/building the Runway product has evolved over time (25:32)
• What Arya’s learning process between Runway’s iterations looked like (27:48)
• Arya’s strategies for building out your engineering org (30:43)
• Frameworks for determining pre- & post-product market fit (32:46)
• Runway’s current learning loops (34:40)
• Rapid fire questions (37:16)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• First Round Capital Co-founder Questionnaire - 50 questions spanning across six categories designed to test compatibility with a potential co-founder.
• The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain - Anne Murphy Paul’s book that reveals how we can tap the intelligence that exists beyond our brains—in our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships.
• Ezra Klein Interviews Anne Murphy Paul on The Extended Mind
• No Stupid Questions - Stephen J. Dubner ****and research psychologist Angela Duckworth really like to ask people questions, and came to believe there’s no such thing as a stupid one. So they made a podcast where they can ask each other as many “stupid questions” as they want.
• The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t - Julia Galef’s book that shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn’t that they’re smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It’s a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world that anyone can learn.

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/

What do you do when your idea is simply too early to market? Bradley Rothenberg (Founder/CEO @ nTopology) shares his journey from watching 3D printing’s potential go unutilized to attracting some of the biggest customers in the world. Plus, how to make customers care about your product, and why you should treat the market like a co-founder.

ABOUT BRADLEY ROTHENBERG

Bradley Rothenberg (@brad_rothenberg) is the founder and CEO of nTopology, an advanced software company based in New York City that focuses on enabling engineers to design, manufacture and ship high-performance products in the least amount of time. nTopology’s breakthrough computational-modeling technology unifies geometry and simulation results into finely tuned manufacturing models, supporting engineers as they collaborate to develop lightweight, optimized parts with functional requirements built right in.

Bradley studied architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and has been developing computational design tools for advanced manufacturing for the last 10-plus years.

"Earlier stage founders, they probably hear this all the time... 'Spend a lot of time with your users! Spend a lot of time with your users! Spend a lot of time with your users!

But like, for me, it was literally like showing up on-site, not leaving until we had some products that came out of it...

(Patrick) I'm so surprised the air force lets you do that though...

(Bradley) ...maybe don't tell them.”

- Bradley Rothenberg   

The ELC Virtual Summit is BACK on April 20th-22nd!

We’re bringing together engineering leaders from around the world to surface fresh industry insights & help you build peer support.

Don’t miss out on expert conversations, peer-led roundtables & workshops to help you accelerate your leadership growth.

Learn more and register HERE: sfelc.com/summit2022

SHOW NOTES:

• What inspired the idea for NTopology? (02:03)
• What was the first thing you 3D printed? (6:59)
• Designing shapes that were impossible to build (11:06)
• How do you find market validation? (14:06)
• Why you need to know what type of founder you are (17:24)
• Hiring people that are better than you (19:46)
• Making a demo work at all costs (22:28)
• How to attract your ideal customers (24:01)
• Hiring the right people for the stage you’re in (27:24)
• How to get certainty on the problem you’re solving (30:56)
• How do you validate your startup idea? (33:27)
• Using the market to develop your product (36:05)
• How to make customers care about your product (38:08)
• Rapid Fire Questions (42:54)

This is the show for engineering leaders making the leap to start their own company! We dive into the stories, pivotal moments and critical insights from former eng leaders turned founders, that helped them take those early leaps to launch their own company! 

The leap from engineering leader to founder can be intimidating, filled with unknowns & requires almost a completely different mental model & skill set… But you don't have to do it alone! 

If you want to connect with other engineering leaders who are interested in starting their own companies… (or who’ve already made the leap!) We’re building an engineering founders community where we’ll host virtual meetups, share resources & lots of other fun things to support your founder journey… 

To get notified once that’s open for early access - sign up (free) at elc.community!

Thanks for climbing aboard our engineering founder's pirate ship! 

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/

This is the first episode of our new series “Engineering Founders” featuring software pioneer Anna Patterson (Founder & Managing Partner @ Gradient Ventures) who shares with us emerging trends & opportunities in AI/ML! We cover how to spot emerging trends, typical mistakes AI/ML companies & founders make, how product-market fit/scaling is different vs. traditional software companies AND how to test and validate ideas in the early stages. Plus long-time listener Theo Gervet (ML Lead @ Relyance AI) joins us as a guest co-host!

ABOUT ANNA PATTERSON

Anna is the Founder & Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures, overseeing the fund’s global activities.

Anna is an accomplished leader in the field of artificial intelligence, a serial entrepreneur, with a long history at Google. Prior to starting Gradient Ventures, Anna was Google’s Vice President of Engineering in AI - integrating AI into products across Google. She also serves on the Board of Directors at Square, Inc.

Early in her career at Google, she helped launch and scale Android to over a billion phones, launched Google Play, and led the search, infrastructure, and recommendations horizontals. Anna was the principal architect and inventor of TeraGoogle, Google’s search serving system, which increased the index size over 10X at the time of launch. She also helped lead search ranking efforts through Google’s IPO to determine the top ten search results.

Anna co-founded Cuil, a clustering-based search engine, and wrote Recall.archive.org, the first keyword-based search engine and the largest index of the Internet Archive corpus. She wrote “Why writing your own search engine is hard” in the ACM Queue detailing this experience. Prior to that, Anna co-founded and co-authored a search engine Xift.

Recognized for her technical contributions as well as her commitment to championing women in tech, Anna was awarded the Technical Leadership ABIE Award in 2016. Anna received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. Then she became a Research Scientist at Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence, where she worked with Carolyn Talcott and one of the founders of AI, John McCarthy. For her undergrad, she double-majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington University in St Louis.

Anna resides in the Bay Area, where she wrangles her 4 kids, 2 horses and her Irish husband.

"When you set out your plan, you can't miss all of your sales targets and make all of your hiring targets." Those kinds of things have to be inline.
What people do is they just say, "Here's my plan. I'm going to march towards the plan. And it was super optimistic on the sales front and on the revenue front. And then maybe more realistic and achievable on the hiring front. And so they still kind of march ahead with the plan.
I think that you need to constantly reevaluate where you are and on what direction you're going in and whether the growth is appropriate or even the plan was appropriate..."

- Anna Patterson   

SHOW NOTES:

• Anna’s background scaling complex systems (4:00)
• Emerging trends and opportunities in AI/ML (9:19)
• The biggest fallacy in AI/ML right now (15:03)
• The pendulum swing between model-first and data-first (16:14)
• What’s after deep learning? (18:14)
• Machine learning and source code (20:06)
• What will be the most valuable companies with ML as the core value proposition? (25:04)
• How to spot emerging trends in the AI/ML space (27:43)
• Typical mistakes AI/ML companies & founders make (31:16)
• How product-market fit is different for AI/ML companies (34:30)
• Differences in scaling between trad-software and AI/ML (35:20)
• How to test and validate ideas in the early-stages of an AI/ML company (37:49)
• Rapid-Fire Questions (39:38)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Gradient Ventures (Website)
• Streamlit.io (Website) - collaborative Python-based app-sharing platform
• Building Your AI A-Team (Link) - Anna and Adrien Treuille’s talk from the ELC 2020 Summit discussing how managing an AI team is different from traditional engineering teams & how to think about the collaboration between AI and engineering when scaling

We deconstruct the recently closed pre-seed fundraising experience of our friends Brian Guthrie & Aaron Erickson (co-founders of Orgspace). Brian & Aaron share their experience finding a co-founder and making the decision to leave their engineering leadership positions at big companies. Plus they share great advice on navigating the fundraising experience and dealing with rejection!

Learn more about Orgspace and sign up for their JUST launched beta - http://orgspace.io/elc

ABOUT BRIAN GUTHRIE

Brian Guthrie (@bguthrie) is Co-Founder and CTO at Orgspace. His career spansr 20 years, leading teams at everything from global enterprises to seed-stage startups. Prior to founding Orgspace, he was VPE at Meetup, where he led the organization through their transition out of WeWork. He’s worked in software domains as diverse as agile coaching, music hosting and pizza procurement and is a recognized thought leader in continuous integration and delivery. Brian lives and works in Brooklyn.

ABOUT AARON ERICKSON

Aaron Erickson (@AaronErickson) is Co-Founder and CEO at Orgspace. Before Orgspace, he spent 30 years working in leadership roles, most recently as VP of Engineering at New Relic. Over the course of his entire career, he has been an advocate for building better software. He spent a decade at ThoughtWorks, where he drove digital transformation via application of agile and continuous delivery. Aaron lives and works in San Francisco.

Aaron: “I remember one person, in particular, saw our slide deck and said, 'Literally, I wouldn't even give you a reference to somebody with this slide deck. It was so bad...'

Tough to hear! Right? You know, very, very tough to hear... But was very, very valuable! I mean, it really honed our message and it was precisely the thing we needed to hear, to actually make our pitch a lot better...”

Brian: "I actually, I didn't find it that tough to hear. I always presumptively assume that whatever I'm doing is awful so to hear some of the reflected back, I'm like, 'Yes! It is terrible! Tell us more. Give us the worst.'

I really, I love that actually.”

Aaron: “:Hence why I'm always the optimistic one and Brian always dragged him back to reality.”

Brian: “He was so wounded by it! I'm like, 'Yeah, it's a terrible deck!'”

ABOUT ORGSPACE

Orgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. You can easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans.

If you want to learn more (or sign up for their JUST launched beta!) check them out at orgspace.io/elc

SHOW NOTES:

• Closing a Pre-Seed round of funding (2:09)
• Brian’s decision to leave Meetup (4:42)
• Aaron’s decision to leave Salesforce (8:58)
• How to choose a co-founder (12:01)
• Questions to ask potential co-founders (14:38)
• How to choose an idea (19:19)
• Navigating the fundraise (24:16)
• Filtering the feedback you get on your startup (27:05)
• How to communicate your idea to investors (31:08)
• Dealing with rejection (34:26)
• Product > pitch deck (38:20)
• How to balance building a business and fundraising (41:12)
• Rapid Fire Questions (44:08)

Nancy Wang, Venture Partner @ Felicis and Former GM @ AWS, joins us to discuss strategies & considerations for scaling costs, becoming enterprise ready on Day 1, maintaining business health, and more. We cover Nancy’s journey as a founding product manager at AWS and how those lessons have guided her throughout her career & how she coaches founders. We address why it’s paramount to prioritize scaling costs early on as a founder, how to make design decisions with cost considerations in mind, and what tools you can employ to identify the features that most benefit your customers. Finally, Nancy & Patrick talk about how to land on your V1 while being enterprise-ready from the get-go and trends / growth opportunities that founders should be aware of today.

ABOUT NANCY WANG

Nancy is a product & engineering executive, advisor, and investor who is passionate about creating seats at the table for women, especially within engineering and technical roles. Most recently, as General Manager of Data Protection at AWS Nancy scaled her engineering teams from 18 to 100+, all while averaging over 45% female and delivering triple-digit YoY growth businesses that delivered over $1B+ ARR including its integration into Amazon’s suite of AI products.

Previously, Nancy launched Rubrik’s (NYSE: RBRK) first Cloud SaaS business, growing their company valuation to over $4B in less than 2 years. Rubrik IPO’ed in Q22024, as one of the fastest-growing enterprise SaaS businesses. As Founder and Board Chair of the non-profit Advancing Women in Tech since 2016, Nancy helps prepare women and underrepresented minorities for leadership roles. She is currently a Venture Partner at Felicis, looking after their infrastructure and cybersecurity investments.

SHOW NOTES:

• Nancy’s journey as the founding product manager for AWS (2:57)
• Why AWS was launched & how it scaled (5:31)
• How to build a successful business within the confines of your org (7:41)
• Insights into the people side of scaling your business (10:25)
• Understanding the cost component of scaling / founding (13:12)
• Ensure your processes aid the overall health & mission of the company (15:43)
• Why founders need to prioritize scaling costs early (17:15)
• Breaking down different cost scenarios founders may face (20:08)
• Avoiding design decisions that create exponential cost but linear revenue (22:51)
• Considerations for being enterprise-ready from Day 1 (28:10)
• Think of hyperscalers like a T-rex (32:31)
• Nancy’s lessons learned on landing your V1 while being enterprise-ready (34:05)
• Questions founders can ask to help identify their market & where to start (39:24)
• Current trends / growth opportunities for founders to consider (40:59)
• Rapid fire questions (43:31)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• CEO Excellence - McKinsey & Company led a research effort to identify those CEOs whose companies grew demonstrably healthier during their tenures, looking across more than 20 years’ worth of data on 7,800 CEOs from 3,500 public companies across 70 countries and 24 industries to further identify those whose actions have led to breakaway success.

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 of Engineering Founders, Archetype AI’s Ivan Poupyrev, Ph.D. (CEO & CTO), and Jaime Lien, Ph.D. (Head of Hardware & Signal Processing), join us to discuss insights on transitioning as a larger-scale founder team, inspiring big ideas / questions, communicating your product’s thesis as a founder, and how to ensure your actions are tracking toward your ultimate goals & questions. Jaime and Ivan also break down smaller steps founders can take toward answering the big question, how to adapt your product’s narrative as you iterate, communicating complicated theses in a way people can easily digest them, and what the next big ideas at Archetype AI look like.

ABOUT IVAN POUPYREV

Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Archetype AI where he leads the team in developing a physical world foundational AI model, a direction known as 'Physical AI.' An award-winning inventor, engineer, and technical leader, he has 20+ years of experience in research and product development, as well as interaction design, advanced sensors and natural interaction, mobile and wearable devices.

Prior to Archetype AI, Ivan spearheaded technology development for Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects, Walt Disney Imagineering, Sony, and others. He holds over 100 US patents, has over 100 scientific publications, and has been recognized with the National Design Award, Cannes Lion Grand Prix, and SXSW Innovation Award. Ivan was named 'one of the best interaction designers in the world' by Fast Company, and his work has been enshrined in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum.

ABOUT JAIME LIEN

Head of Hardware & Signal Processing, Jaime Lien, Ph.D., holds a wealth of experience in research and hardware product engineering. A visionary leader with a proven track record in inventing, developing and shipping radio frequency sensing technology and techniques for human perception and interaction, Jaime has an extensive background in radar systems design and signal processing.

Prior to Archetype, Jaime was the Radar Research Lead of Project Soli with Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects and a Communications Engineer with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Jaime received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, where her research focused on interferometric synthetic aperture radar theory and techniques.

SHOW NOTES:

• Ivan & Jaime’s co-founder story & founding Archetype AI together (3:45)
• What it was like transitioning collectively as a larger-scale team (6:56)
• How to inspire big ideas & what tackling ambitious projects looks like at Archetype AI(9:36)
• Learn how to embrace “crazy” ideas / questions without constraints (11:41)
• Creating a founder team with a diverse set of interests & experiences (13:14)
• Deconstructing Archetype AI’s early-stage big questions (14:27)
• Strategies for finding the right metaphor to describe what you’re trying to build (16:52)
• Why the iterative process is like archeology (18:52)
• The inspiration behind & conversations that led to Archetype AI (20:25)
• How to communicate the thesis of Archetype AIin a way people understand (21:45)
• Unlocking your vision around the core technologies available (24:18)
• Where to start when working toward answering the big question (26:07)
• Use prototypes to see if you idea makes sense in the real world (27:56)
• Frameworks for deconstructing & re-synthesizing your big ideas (30:10)
• What it means for AI to understand physics (32:41)
• Tracking tools for ensuring your actions align with your big question (34:17)
• Archetype AI’s next big ideas (37:29)
• Rapid fire questions (40:24)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Normal People - Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.
• The Overstory - A sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of - and paean to - the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
• What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics - Adam Becker’s gripping book following the battle to understand the meaning behind quantum physics.

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/

Mariane Bekker, Founder & CEO @ Founders Bay, joins us to discuss the power of building your distribution channel and network within the startup community. She shares best practices for community building based on her own experiences developing Upward Recruiting and Founders Bay & why being able to articulate / communicate your company’s mission (the “why” of it all) is instrumental. Mariane shares her favorite networking conversation starters, tools for staying organized as your community expands, and pitfalls to avoid. She also dissects strategies for building an MVP in eight weeks and the role of distribution/community in accelerating that process.

ABOUT MARIANE BEKKER

Mariane is a tech executive and the founder & CEO of Founders Bay, a venture studio in Silicon Valley, where she works closely with early-stage founders to build their products from the ground up with her team of engineers and designers. She also runs the most active community of female tech founders in the Bay Area on a mission to increase funding for women founders.

"Do you have an audience or do you have a channel where when you have a product, you can easily reach out to and convince them to use your product? When I started my community, I already had the audience. I already had the distribution channel. So all I had to do was send a few messages and within a month, I had already a hundred startups in my community. So that's when distribution comes to play, when you have the audience and the channels where you can distribute your product effectively.”

- Mariane Bekker   

ABOUT FOUNDER’S BAY

Founder’s Bay is a leading venture studio dedicated to empowering women-founded startups in Silicon Valley by providing them with the engineering resources to build their product.

Recognizing that only 1.9% of funding goes to women-led startups, they are committed to bridging this significant gender and funding gap in the tech industry. As part of this commitment, Founder’s Bay runs the largest and most active community of female founders in the Bay Area providing resources, mentorship, and support.

Join us at ELC Annual 2024!

ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.

Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!

Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024

And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount

SHOW NOTES:

• Mariane’s founder origin story with Upward Recruiting (2:52)
• Transitioning from Upward Recruiting to Founders Bay & recent milestone events (5:09)
• Strategies for articulating your mission & avoiding common pitfalls (7:48)
• How knowing & communicating your “why” impacts early hiring decisions (11:13)
• Becoming good at hiring functions outside of engineering (13:12)
• Defining distribution & what this means for startups (16:13)
• Tactics for building your initial audience & testing what content works (18:04)
• Distribution’s impact on community, sales, marketing, etc. (22:44)
• Common networking / community building challenges while starting your own org (26:04)
• Mariane’s favorite networking questions & conversation topics (28:03)
• How Mariane’s technical background benefits community building activities (30:50)
• Tools for staying organized as you expand your network (32:55)
• What building an MVP in eight weeks typically looks like (35:15)
• Leveraging your distribution network to accelerate your MVP’s launch (37:01)
• How your distribution & community can provide access to traction capital (40:07)
• Rapid fire questions (41:46)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Holly - Holly Gibney, one of Stephen King’s most compelling and ingeniously resourceful characters, returns in this thrilling novel to solve the gruesome truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town.

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/

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/

Lee Edwards, General Partner @ Root Ventures, shares insights on identifying your competitive edge, recommendations for differentiation, and how to make sure your business is venture-aligned. He discusses his transition from eng leadership into the venture capital world, sharing advice on ideation for early-stage founders who are still developing their product & deciding which version of an idea to pursue. Lee also shares how to navigate risks as a founder, tips for expanding your product’s niches, how generative AI growth will impact DevTool development, and how to maintain conviction when faced with discouragement head on.

ABOUT LEE EDWARDS

Lee Edwards (@terronk) is an Olin College alum from the Class of '07 majoring in Engineering with a focus in Systems Design. After a brief role as a mechanical engineer at iRobot in Bedford, MA, Lee's career became focused on building software and team at startups - Pivotal, SideTour (which was acquired by Groupon), and Teespring. After a few years investing as part of Bloomberg Beta's Open Angels program, he joined Root Ventures as a partner, investing venture capital in early stage deep technology startups. Lee also co-founded Parcel B, a loose organization of Olin alumni who invest in Olin entrepreneurs and run programs for Olin students interested in learning more about the startup ecosystem.

"If you can create something with enough value where people are gonna start paying for it, that can de-risk in your mind like, 'Okay, I might be onto something…' but it doesn't always have to be revenue. It's not, 'Is someone willing to pay X dollars a month?' It's actually a higher bar than that. It's like, 'Is someone gonna switch from VS Code or Vim or Emacs or TextMate and use your editor a few hours a day?' That's a really high bar. You have to really love the product and watching that number go up. It's a really good indicator that what is being built is the right thing.”

- Lee Edwards   

SHOW NOTES:

• What inspired Lee to transition from eng leadership to the world of venture (2:06)
• Factors that led to a successful transition from side project to full-time work (4:11)
• Recommendations for gaining conviction when facing discouragement (6:04)
• Considerations during pre-product phase conversations with founders (8:52)
• Questions to help founders begin testing which ideas are worth pursuing (12:46)
• Navigating risks as a founder & what qualities VCs are looking for (15:34)
• Insights for founders having to expand their niches right away (17:19)
• Questions to ask to define the context & identify GTM strategy (24:05)
• Business models that are inherently misaligned with venture (26:30)
• Identifying differentiation in the era of generative AI (29:14)
• How the DevTool landscape will evolve with the rise of AI (34:08)
• Lee’s perspective on how AI will impact programming & coding (35:50)
• Rapid fire questions (37:53)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• [Most Startups Should be Deer Hunters by Mark Suster](https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-deer-hunters-7fdecf58f4f6#:~:text=Deer are right-sized for,to your standard terms %26 conditions.))
• 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Drawing on his decades of experience as a business strategy advisor, active equity investor and Stanford University teacher, Hamilton Helmer develops from first principles a practical theory of Strategy rooted in the notion of Power, those conditions which create the potential for persistent differential returns. Using rich real-world examples, Helmer rigorously characterizes exactly what your business must achieve to create Power. And create Power it must, for without it your business is at risk.

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/