In-depth, one-on-one conversations with founders, CEOs, and makers. The journey, lessons learned, and the struggles. Let’s do this! Host Adam Stacoviak dives deep into the trials, tribulations, successes, and failures of industry leading entrepreneurs, leaders, innovators, and visionaries.
Refocusing Docker on developer-first and growth
Jun 02, 2023
This week Adam is joined by Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker. Scott shares his journey to the CEO role, how he’s leading the company to not only grow revenue, but to also invest in developer facing features, their shift from a enterprise sales focus to a PLG driven model, and we even talk about Docker Desktop, the competition it faces, and the struggle they face when considering making it open source.
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Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster!
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
This week Adam is joined by Michael Grinich, Founder & CEO at WorkOS. Michael shares his journey to build WorkOS, what it takes to cross the Enterprise Chasm, and how he’s building his sales organization for growth.
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Sentry – Get to the root cause of an error or latency issue faster by seeing all the technical details related to that issue in one visual replay on your web application. Use the code CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months.
Postman – Build APIs together — More than 20 million developers use Postman for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.
DevCycle – Build better software with DevCycle. Feature flags, without the tech debt. DevCycle is a Feature Flag Management platform designed to help you build maintainable code at scale.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
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Sentry – Session Replay! Rewind and replay every step of the user’s journey before and after they encountered an issue. Eliminate the guesswork and get to the root cause of an issue, faster. Use the code CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months.
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at developer.squareup.com to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
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Sponsors:
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
Building the best mountain bikes in the world
Jul 19, 2022
This week Adam is taking the show off the beaten path to speak with Adam Miller, the founder and CEO of Revel Bikes. Yes that’s right, this episode features a founder of a bike brand, not a tech brand.
Adam Miller’s journey to create Revel Bikes is paved with many ups and many downs, a failed partnership, super scrappy weeks and months traveling the world to find the best manufacturing partners, the latest innovations in suspension tech and modern geometry to hit the mountain biking scene, a strong team that’s been with him every step of the way (many of which are as close as family), and truly some of the best premium bikes available on the market today.
BTW, Adam (host) is an owner of a Revel bike — he has a T1000 colorway Rascal that he’s ridden on downhill trails, all-day epics, and everything in-between. If you enjoy this episode, please us know in the comments.
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WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com
Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights
Rewatch – Rewatch gives product and engineering teams async superpowers and helps them move faster with greater clarity. Imagine all of your team’s videos, all in one place. Record, organize, and share the videos that your team needs to ship great work. Get started for free with 14-day trial at rewatch.com.
SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com/video and mention “Go Time” to receive an extra 5,000 video minutes.
Enabling a world where all software is reliable
Jul 15, 2022
This week Adam is joined by Robert Ross founder and CEO of FireHydrant — the glue layer between your tech stack and your teams to mitigate and resolve incidents at scale.
Robert shares his journey to become a software engineer, his time at DigitalOcean, this idea of incident management as a platform and how he shifted his focus from creating courses on incident management to recognizing the value of the software he was creating for the course — what is now known as FireHydrant. We also talk through his first experience in raising capital, what happens when the bar is raised on the reliability of the world’s software, and why their mantra is “Hire great people, who build, sell and market a great product, and you’ll have a great company.”
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Sponsors:
WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com
Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights
Rewatch – Rewatch gives product and engineering teams async superpowers and helps them move faster with greater clarity. Imagine all of your team’s videos, all in one place. Record, organize, and share the videos that your team needs to ship great work. Get started for free with 14-day trial at rewatch.com.
SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com/video and mention “Go Time” to receive an extra 5,000 video minutes.
Adam was invited by our friends at Square to interview Jack Dorsey as part of their annual developer conference called Square Unboxed. Jack Dorsey is one of the most prolific CEOs out there — he’s a hacker turned CEO and is often working at the very edge of what’s to come (at scale). Jack is focused on what the future has to offer, he’s considered an innovator by many. He’s also a Bitcoin maximalist and has positioned himself and Block long on Bitcoin.
What you’re about to hear is the fireside chat Adam had with Jack at Square Unboxed 2022. Jack and Adam discuss the vision Square has for the developer platform and why it’s so central to the company’s strategy.
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Sponsors:
WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.io
Sourcegraph – Transform your code into a queryable database to create customizable visual dashboards in seconds. Sourcegraph recently launched Code Insights — now you can track what really matters to you and your team in your codebase. See how other teams are using this awesome feature at about.sourcegraph.com/code-insights
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Connor Sears, founder and CEO of Rewatch, joins Adam to share the journey of creating Rewatch. What began inside of GitHub to help them thrive and connect is now available to every product team on the planet. Rewatch lets teams save, manage, and search all their video content so they can collaborate async and with greater flexibility. We talk about where the tool’s inspiration came from (spoiler alert, inside GitHub it was called GitHub TV which you’ll hear during the show), how teams leverage video to reduce the constraints of communication, how Connor and his co-founder knew they had product-fit and how they grew the team and product, and of course the flip side of that — we talk about some of Connor’s failures along the way, and knowing when it’s the right time to take a big swing.
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Sponsors:
WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com
Sourcegraph – Move fast, even in big codebases. Sourcegraph is universal code search for every developer and team. Easily search across all the code that matters to you and your organization: find example code, explore and read code, debug issues, and more. Head to info.sourcegraph.com/changelog and click the button “Try Sourcegraph now” to get started.
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.io
SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com/video and mention “Go Time” to receive an extra 5,000 video minutes.
This week Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO of GitLab, is back talking with Adam about all the details of their massive IPO last October 2021. To set the stage, this episode was recorded on Feb 1, 2022. During the show Adam mentioned they IPO’d at a $13B market cap, but they actually ended their opening day at approximately $15B. That’s a massive win for open source, GitLab, Sid, and the rest of the team. For loyal listeners you know we’ve had Sid on this show before, so of course we had to get him back on the show post-IPO to get all the details of this new journey.
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Sponsors:
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.io
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
Rewatch – Rewatch gives product and engineering teams async superpowers and helps them move faster with greater clarity. Imagine all of your team’s videos, all in one place. Record, organize, and share the videos that your team needs to ship great work. Get started for free with 14-day trial at rewatch.com.
SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com/video and mention “Go Time” to receive an extra 5,000 video minutes.
Making an open source Stripe for time
May 05, 2022
This week Peer Richelsen, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cal.com, joins the show to talk about building the “Stripe for Time” — with a grand mission to connect a billion people by 2031 through calendar scheduling. Cal has grown from an open-source side project to one of the fastest-growing commercial open source companies. We get into all the details — what it means to be an open source Calendly alternative, how they quantify connecting a Billion people by 2031, where there’s room for innovation in the scheduling space, and why being community first is part of their secret sauce.
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Sponsors:
WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com
Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust. There is a massive opportunity for developers to support Square sellers by building apps for today’s business needs. Learn more at changelog.com/square to dive into the docs, APIs, SDKs and to create your Square Developer account — tell them Changelog sent you.
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Small teams up to 10 people can get started for free with all FireHydrant features included. No credit card required to sign up. Learn more at firehydrant.io
SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com/video and mention “Go Time” to receive an extra 5,000 video minutes.
Building an investment platform for everyone
Feb 12, 2022
This week Adam is joined by Joe Percoco — the Co-CEO of Titan, a premier investment manager for everyone. Titan is an investment company, a media, and a tech company, all rolled into one. Mid last year, they closed a $58 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) at a $450 million valuation. They currently have $750 million in assets managed and more than 35,000 clients.
Why should Titan exist? In Joe’s words, “Wall Street ignores everyday investors, and caters only to the ultra wealthy. This divide doesn’t sit well with us. So, we built Titan.” On today’s show Joe shares the journey, the why’s, the how’s, and the sequencing it might take to get to a $1 trillion of assets managed.
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Sponsors:
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io
PlanetScale – PlanetScale is the only serverless database platform you can start in an instant and scale indefinitely with unlimited connections. Never think about database servers again. Everything you want to control is available through the beautifully designed PlanetScale CLI. Learn more and start your database in seconds at planetscale.com
Rewatch – Rewatch gives product and engineering teams async superpowers and helps them move faster with greater clarity. Imagine all of your team’s videos, all in one place. Record, organize, and share the videos that your team needs to ship great work. Get started for free with 14-day trial at rewatch.com.
Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io
Bringing observability superpowers to all
Jan 28, 2022
This week Adam is joined by Christine Yen, co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb. Christine and Adam recorded this show late last year, just after their Series C funding round. They talk about the superpower of observability for developers, how she and Charity Majors got to the place to found Honeycomb, the state of their platform today, what exactly observability is, and their goals for the future of Honeycomb.
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Sponsors:
WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com
Rewatch – Rewatch gives product and engineering teams async superpowers and helps them move faster with greater clarity. Imagine all of your team’s videos, all in one place. Record, organize, and share the videos that your team needs to ship great work. Get started for free with 14-day trial at rewatch.com.
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io
Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io
Making the last database you’ll ever need
Jan 14, 2022
This week Adam is joined by Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale. Now that PlanetScale is in general availability, Adam had to get Sam on the show to talk about the behind the scenes of building this database platform, how this is the last database you’ll ever need and what that means for developers, why serverless, its open source underpinnings with Vitess, and a preview of what’s to come.
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Sponsors:
FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io
Rewatch – Rewatch gives product and engineering teams async superpowers and helps them move faster with greater clarity. Imagine all of your team’s videos, all in one place. Record, organize, and share the videos that your team needs to ship great work. Get started for free with 14-day trial at rewatch.com.
Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
This week Adam is joined by Zac Smith, Co-Founder of Packet and now running Equinix Metal. They talk about the early days of the internet infrastructure space, the beginnings of Packet, the “why” of bare metal, transitioning Packet from startup to global company overnight when they were acquired by Equinix, and how all this for Zac is 20 years in the making.
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Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com
PlanetScale – PlanetScale is the only serverless database platform you can start in an instant and scale indefinitely with unlimited connections. Never think about database servers again. Everything you want to control is available through the beautifully designed PlanetScale CLI. Learn more and start your database in seconds at planetscale.com
Fastly – Compute@Edge free for 3 months — plus up to $100k a month in credit for an additional 6 months. Fastly’s Edge cloud network and modern approach to serverless computing allows you to deploy and run complex logic at the edge with unparalleled security and blazing fast computational speed. Head to fastly.com/podcast to take advantage of this limited time promotion!
Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io
Today Adam is joined by Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel. They talk about building the platform that’s making the web faster and lets front-enders do their best work, his framework for leading as a CEO, what’s next for Next.js and Next.js Live, and how everything for Vercel is built on “Develop. Preview. Ship.”
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Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform.
Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com
Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Today Adam is joined by Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. Evan’s journey to become the CEO was not by way of founder, in this company. Evan has founded several companies in the past, and he’s been in a CEO position for more than 22 years. But InfluxData was founded by Paul Dix, and Paul knew years ago that his role (best role?) was to lead the technical and product direction of the company, which lead him to Evan. Today we share that story as well as a glimpse into operating the business that built the defacto platform for building time series applications with deep roots in open source.
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Sponsors:
Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform.
Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com
Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Today Adam is joined by Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph. He’s been tracking Sourcegraph for years now and knew one day they would hit Unicorn status, and that happened this year. They’re just off a massive $125M Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.625B valuation to bring code search to every developer. The future of code search has never been more clear and we’re excited to share today’s show with you.
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Sponsors:
Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform.
Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com
SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com and use code FOUNDERS for $25 in developer credit.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Iterating to globally distributed apps and databases
Sep 03, 2021
Today Adam is joined by Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly.io — a platform for running full stack apps and databases close to users. This conversation with Kurt talks through his journey as a developer and entrepreneur, fundraising, getting into Y Combinator (twice), and how they’ve iterated on the Fly platform since 2017 to get to where they are right now.
Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform.
Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com
Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
On today’s show Adam is joined by John Nunemaker (an old friend). For some of you listening you might remember John’s appearance on The Changelog #11, which was basically forever ago. Or his company Ordered List — they made Gauges, Harmony, and Speaker Deck which was quite popular in its time — so much so that they attracted the attention of Chris Wanstrath, one of the co-founders of GitHub to acquire Ordered List. The rest as they say is history. Today, John and I go back through that history to see what it was like to be acquired by GitHub and how that single choice has forever changed his life.
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Sponsors:
Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform.
Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com
Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com
Sendinblue – Take your digital marketing to the next level. Head to sendinblue.com/founderstalk and use the code FOUNDERSTALK to get one month free with 100,000 emails.
Leading Auth0 to a $6.5 billion acquisition
Aug 13, 2021
This week Adam is joined by Eugenio Pace, co-founder and CEO of Auth0. Auth0 is a for developers, by developers identity, access, security, and authentication platform built for the cloud that secures billions of logins every year. Mid 2020 they raised $120 million at a $1.92 billion valuation after being told no several times. Then, earlier this year in March they announced they were being acquired by Okta for $6.5 billion, in a bold and future-thinking all stock deal. This episode is full of wisdom, inspiration, and tactical advice that Eugenio has used to build Auth0.
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Sponsors:
Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform.
Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com
Sendinblue – Take your digital marketing to the next level. Head to sendinblue.com/founderstalk and use the code FOUNDERSTALK to get one month free with 100,000 emails.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
From open source to commercially viable
Aug 09, 2021
This week Adam is joined by Asim Aslam, the founder of Micro - a new cloud platform entirely focused on the developer experience of consuming and publishing public APIs. Asim’s journey spans many years of open source work on Micro. His sole focus right now, is evolving that work into a commercially viable business. This episode is jam-packed with stories of great timing, grit, resilence, success and failure, and, of course, lessons learned.
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This week Adam is joined by Mitch Wainer, previously CMO at DigitalOcean and a member of the founding team. They talk about his journey as an entrepreneur and marketer, the early days at DigitalOcean, and everything that went into disrupting the cloud with blazing fast SSDs. Back in March (2021), DigitalOcean started trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) — this obviously earned Mitch and many others a very large payday. They also talk about the work Mitch is doing now with Welcome and Sponsored.
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GitLab – You are invited to attend GitLab Commit 2021 (it’s free) — GitLab’s upcoming user community event, August 3rd & 4th. Learn more about modern DevOps, and how it transforms companies of all sizes and pushes teams to drive innovation to market. Get ready to Innovate Together during this free event designed to help you commit to better DevOps. Register and learn more at gitlabcommitvirtual2021.com.
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The journey to massive scale and ultra-resilience
Mar 26, 2021
This week Adam talks with Spencer Kimball, CEO and Co-founder of Cockroach Labs — makers of CockroachDB an open source cloud-native distributed SQL database. Cockroach Labs recently raised $160 million dollars on a $2 billion dollar valuation. In this episode, Spencer shares his journey in open source, startups and entrepreneurship, and what they’re doing to build CockroachCloud to meet the needs of applications that require massive scale and ultra-resilience.
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LaunchDarkly – Ship fast. Rest easy. Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users.
Intensely focused on building a software company
Feb 23, 2021
This week Adam talks with John-Daniel Trask, co-founder & CEO of Raygun. Raygun is an award-winning application monitoring company founded by John-Daniel Trask (better known as JD) and Jeremy Boyd in Wellington, New Zealand. They have revenues in the 8 digits annually, and have done it with very little funding (~1.7M USD). Today’s conversation with JD shares a ton of wisdom. Listen twice and take notes.
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Grafana Cloud – Grafana Cloud is our dashboard of choice – Grafana is the open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
LaunchDarkly – Test in production! Deploy code at any time, even if a feature isn’t ready to be released to your users. Wrap code in feature flags to get the safety to test new features and infrastructure in prod without impacting the wrong end users.
Raj Dutt is the founder and CEO of Grafana Labs. Grafana has become the world’s most popular open source technology used to compose observability dashboards (we use Grafana here at Changelog). Raj and team are 100% focused on building a sustainable business around open source. They have this “big tent” open source ecosystem philosophy that’s driving every aspect of building their business around their open source, as well as other projects in the open source community. But, to understand the wisdom Raj is leading with today, we have to go back to where things got started. To do that we had to go back like Prince to 1999…
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LaunchDarkly – Power experimentation at any scale. Fast and reliable feature management for the modern enterprise.
Grafana Cloud is a fully managed observability platform for your applications and infrastructure. Metrics, logs, and dashboards at scale.
Grafana Enterprise includes access to enterprise plugins that take your existing data sources and allow you to drop them right into Grafana.
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Jeff Sheldon is the founder and creator of Ugmonk. Jeff is a designer by trade, and an entrepreneur by accident. I been following Jeff’s journey for the better part of Ugmonk’s existence. I’m also a customer. Jeff and I hold several similar values near and dear to our hearts. In addition to my appreciation for Jeff’s product design abilities, and how he leads his business, I also appreciate Jeff’s awareness and focus on the long hard path.
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Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Science is our new podcast exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to transform our lives.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Guy Podjarny is the Founder of Snyk, a security platform that empowers software-driven businesses to develop fast and stay secure. Prior to Snyk, Guy founded Blaze which was acquired by Akamai and became CTO. We talked through the topic of acquisition — the sale, the merge, the learnings, and why Guy might not be planning for Snyk to be acquired anytime soon. We started the conversation with Snyk’s recent raise of $150 million dollars.
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Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Science is our new podcast exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to transform our lives.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Sid Sijbrandij is the Co-founder and CEO of GitLab — an all-remote company and complete DevOps platform. As a company, they have their eyes set on taking the company public to IPO and they’re very outspoken about their culture, open handbook, and how they work as an all-remote company. We talk through where Sid came from, the early days of GitLab, why IPO vs a private sale (like GitHub), what it means to put “family and friends first, work second,” how we should view work, and his biggest fear — the company failing.
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Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Science is our new podcast exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to transform our lives.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
The role of a father plays a pivotal role in a child’s life. Ian Bernstein is a former Founder of Sphero and is now the Founder and Head of Product of Misty Robotics — they’re building the first programmable robot for the home and business. It’s called Misty II. The journey of building Misty II started when Ian was 5 years old and his dad bought him an Apple IIe.
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Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Science is our new podcast exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to transform our lives.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Mike McDerment is the founder and CEO of FreshBooks. Believe it or not, Mike became a founder by accident. Like many of us, Mike had an itch that he just had to scratch. One thing led to another and soon enough FreshBooks became a key tool in the belt of many freelancers and agencies looking for an easy way to send invoices and get paid quickly online. We talk through the early days of FreshBooks and how things came to be, why they created a secret competitor to iterate on a bold idea for the future of FreshBooks, and we also cover what keeps Mike excited.
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Brain Science – For the curious! Brain Science is our new podcast exploring the inner-workings of the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation, mental health, and being human. It’s Brain Science applied — not just how does the brain work, but how do we apply what we know about the brain to transform our lives.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Lynne Tye is the founder of Key Values, a platform where developers find engineering teams that share their values. To be more precise, Lynne is a solo-founder. She’s also a team of one. Lynne’s path to becoming a founder was anything but typical. She had plans to follow in her parent’s and sister’s footsteps to go into academia, and got two years into pursuing her PhD in Neuroscience before she made one of the best choices in her life — she quit. Lynne has mastered the art of quitting, at the right time of course, and she’s used that art as her secret weapon in her quest to become a founder.
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Failing to build a billion-dollar company
Jun 14, 2019
Sahil Lavingia is the founder and CEO of Gumroad, a platform for creators to sell the things they make. Since 2011 Gumroad has sent over $200 million dollars to creators. That’s a big number. Sahil’s ambitions lead him to believe that Gumroad would become a billion-dollar company, have hundreds of employees, and eventually IPO. That didn’t happen.
We talk through Sahil’s journey with Gumroad, why it failed to meet his goals, the path he’s on today and the things he now values…but to understand why Gumroad didn’t live up to his expectations, we really have to understand the backstory of Gumroad.
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Saron Yitbarek is the founder and CEO of CodeNewbie — one of the most supportive community of programmers and people learning to code. Saron hosts the CodeNewbie podcast, Command Line Heroes from Red Hat, and she’s also the creator of Codeland Conference taking place on July 22 this year in New York City. We talk through getting started, lessons learned, mental health, developing and running a conference…but our conversation begins with a pivotal question asked of Saron…“What are you optimizing for?”
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Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
In the latter part of the show, Adam mentioned to Saron that we will buy five “Pay it forward” tickets to Codeland, so that we here at Changelog can help support 5 people to attend the conference who otherwise could not afford to attend. Learn more about “Pay it forward” tickets to Codeland.
Also, listen to the end of the show for a special preview of our newest podcast BRAIN SCIENCE!!
Building a hardware/software product company
May 23, 2019
Colin Billings is the founder and CEO of Orro where they’ve built the first truly intelligent home lighting system. It knows when you’re in the room, and adjusts the lights automatically for you. But Colin’s path to starting this company wasn’t a straight line. Like most innovative products, Orro has an interesting beginning — after-all, they’re going up against the giants.
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Discover.bot – A digital space for bot developers and enthusiasts of all skill levels to learn from one another, share stories, and move the bot conversation forward. Want to learn more about building bots? Get started with their Guide to Bot Building Frameworks.
Zero up-front costs for a CS education
Apr 19, 2019
What would be the impact on the world if a Computer Science education was available to you completely free of charge until you get a job in that field paying $50,000 or more? That’s the question that drives Austen Allred and the team behind Lambda School. Lambda School is a revolutionary new school that invests in its students and they completely align their interests with their students. Seems like a novel idea, right? But Austen’s path to Silicon Valley was where things began for him, so that’s where we’ll start today’s conversation.
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Discover.bot – A digital space for bot developers and enthusiasts of all skill levels to learn from one another, share stories, and move the bot conversation forward. Want to learn more about building bots? Get started with their Guide to Bot Building Frameworks.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Isaac Schlueter on building npm and hiring a CEO
Jan 25, 2019
With JavaScript in every corner of software development and npm in every corner right along with it, the rise of npm can be drawn as a hockey stick up and to the right with Isaac Schlueter at the top grinning ear to ear. After reading their recent announcement to hire a CEO, I knew it was time to talk one-on-one with Isaac about building npm and the journey of hiring his successor.
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GitPrime – Ship faster because you know more. Not because you’re rushing. GitPrime helps software teams accelerate their velocity and release products faster by turning historical git data into easy to understand insights and reports.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Rollbar – We move fast and fix things because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes. Deploy with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Leading data-driven software teams and products
Dec 21, 2018
For the final show of 2018 I’m talking with Travis Kimmel, the CEO of GitPrime. Travis has spent years as an engineering manager. Travis’s mission at GitPrime is to bring crystal clear visibility into the software development process and bridge the communication gap between engineering and stakeholders. This communication gap is often an ongoing plague in product development lifecycle. We talked through focus, tech debt, leading teams, predictability, and more.
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Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
How $3.8M in seed funding started Gatsby as an open source company
Nov 30, 2018
Kyle Mathews is the founder and CEO of Gatsby, a new company he’s building around an open source project of the same name. Gatsby as a project describes itself as a flexible modern website framework and blazing fast static site generator for React.js. At the macro level — Kyle’s career has been focused on a better way to build and ship websites. It seems he’s done just that with Gatsby’s launch in late May 2015…since then he’s taken on a co-founder and a seed round of $3.8M to form Gatsby Inc.
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Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Tidelift's mission is to pay open source maintainers
Sep 21, 2018
Donald Fischer and the team at Tidelift are on a mission of making open source work better — for everyone. To pay the maintainers of open source software they are putting a new spin on a highly successful business model that’s a win-win for the maintainers as well as the software teams using the software. In this episode we dig into that backstory and Donald’s journey.
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Hired – Salary and benefits upfront? Yes please. Our listeners get a double hiring bonus of $600! Or, refer a friend and get a check for $1,337 when they accept a job. On Hired companies send you offers with salary, benefits, and even equity upfront. You are in full control of the process. Learn more at hired.com/changelog.
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
From dropout to CEO of Sentry and taking on New Relic
Sep 16, 2018
David Cramer dropped out of high school AND college, but that didn’t stop him. He ended up teaching himself programming and eventually landed his first job as the webmaster of a World of Warcraft community website. What a beginning… We talked through “the rough slog” period of Sentry and how David powered through to traction and enough profit for him and his partner to go full time, raise three rounds of funding, and take on New Relic.
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Vettery – Vettery helps you scale your teams by connecting you with highly qualified tech, sales & finance candidates. Download their tech salary report for 2018 with insights from tech hiring activity in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. Download at vettery.com/founderstalk.
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
BONUS: Growing a successful sales team at Sentry
Sep 14, 2018
Here’s a bonus segment from episode #57 of Founders Talk with David Cramer, co-founder and CEO of Sentry. Check the feed for the full length episode (later today). We talked about sales in the full length episode, but this BONUS segment is a completely isolated conversation that’s not included in the full length episode — so don’t gloss over this thinking it’s just a teaser.
I’m thinking about doing short series focused on founders building their sales teams to grow and handle the demands a startup requires. If you have any feedback you’d like to share about the idea, or if you know someone with a sales team story to tell — get in touch, email me at adam@changelog.com.
Eric Berry is funding open source with CodeFund
Aug 28, 2018
Eric Berry started Code Sponsor a year ago because of his passion for finding ways to sustain and fund open source developers. He ultimately had to shutdown due to potential legal issues with GitHub, but was given new life as CodeFund when he went to work for ConsenSys and Gitcoin. We talked through the backstory of this idea, why he’s so passionate about funding open source, ethical advertising, being unapologetically focused on your mission, the value of honesty and openness, and the future direction of CodeFund.
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Vettery – Vettery helps you scale your teams by connecting you with highly qualified tech, sales & finance candidates. Download their tech salary report for 2018 with insights from tech hiring activity in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. Download at vettery.com/founderstalk.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Bryan Helmig, Wade Foster, and Mike Knoop started Zapier in 2011 as a side hustle. They ultimately applied to Y Combinator, twice. And this year they hit $35 Million dollars in annual revenue. I talked with Bryan Helmig (CTO) through the backstory of starting this company, being 100% distributed, the flexibility as well as the constraints of being remote-only, how they reached product market fit, growth, scaling their teams, and how they bring everyone together for company wide retreats.
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Vettery – Vettery helps you scale your teams by connecting you with highly qualified tech, sales & finance candidates. Download their tech salary report for 2018 with insights from tech hiring activity in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. Download at vettery.com/founderstalk.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Algolia – Our search partner. Algolia’s full suite search APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences across all platforms and devices. We’re using Algolia to power our site search here at Changelog.com. Get started for free and learn more at algolia.com.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
From side project to $7.25M for Unsplash
Jul 06, 2018
When Mikael Cho started Unsplash from its small beginning as a Tumblr blog and side project, he had no idea it would have such a huge impact and ultimately disrupt the photography industry. In this episode, Mikael shares the backstory of Unsplash, how it got started, keeping things focused, levers of growth, flipping the marketing funnel, turning free into a business, raising $7.25 million to build a new economy for photography, and the impact of an API.
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Hired – Salary and benefits upfront? Yes please. Our listeners get a double hiring bonus of $600! Or, refer a friend and get a check for $1,337 when they accept a job. On Hired companies send you offers with salary, benefits, and even equity upfront. You are in full control of the process. Learn more at hired.com/founderstalk.
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Danielle Morrill joined the show to talk about how she’s starting over from zero after the recent acquisition of Mattermark to FullContact where she held the role of CEO and co-founder who walked away with “zero dollars and a job”. We talked through the details of the company, the acquisition process, the deal — which she brokered herself — as well as her outlook on the startup grind and silicon valley today, and what she’s planning to do next.
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Sponsors:
Hired – Salary and benefits upfront? Yes please. Our listeners get a double hiring bonus of $600! Or, refer a friend and get a check for $1,337 when they accept a job. On Hired companies send you offers with salary, benefits, and even equity upfront. You are in full control of the process. Learn more at hired.com/founderstalk.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Pia Mancini joined the show for the first episode back from a nearly 5 year hiatus. We talked about her work at DemocracyEarth, being a mother, her new role as CEO of Open Collective, their focus, supporting ad-hoc community formation all around the world, their revenue and growth plans, and their path to sustainability.
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Hired – Salary and benefits upfront? Yes please. Our listeners get a double hiring bonus of $600! Or, refer a friend and get a check for $1,337 when they accept a job. On Hired companies send you offers with salary, benefits, and even equity upfront. You are in full control of the process. Learn more at hired.com/founderstalk.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
It’s been just shy of 5 years since I’ve published a new episode to this podcast. The break was planned actually. Long story short, I had to focus. If you want to hear the slightly longer explanation, you should listen.
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.
Rollbar – We catch our errors before our users do because of Rollbar. Resolve errors in minutes, and deploy your code with confidence. Learn more at rollbar.com/changelog.
Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
I’m so excited to bring this show back! It’s been too long and I truly miss these conversations. If you’d like to suggest someone to be on the show, get in touch.
Could this be Sam’s final appearance on Founders Talk? Only time will tell. Sam says he’s moving onward. New things await. The future is bright and he’s wearing shades. Follow along.
Adam talks with Kevin Delaney, the founder of Charity Hack - a simple concept that takes 5 amazing charities and the most talented people you can find to create innovative fundraising campaigns for those charities.
Adam talks with Tim Smith, the creator of The East Wing, Tim Likes to Teach, Lustra and more. Tim is a master of the art of design and UX and loves hacking on front-end web codes.
Adam talks with Drew Strojny the founder of The Theme Foundry and Memberful. Drew is back again to talk about his latest product, Memberful - a membership as a service site that lets you create a membership in minutes and start selling monthly or yearly subscriptions.
Adam talks with Dalton Caldwell the Founder of App.net. Since we barely scratched the surface of the planned conversation around what he’s doing with App.net in part 1, Dalton agreed to come back on the show for a part 2 to discuss the back story of App.net!
Adam talks with Robert Sha, the founder of CAPSULE and the maker of Minimalist - a super slim wallet for minimalists popularized by its successful project on Kickstarter.
Daniel Genser & Jamie Smyth / TypeEngine
May 23, 2013
Adam talks with Daniel Genser and Jamie Smyth, the makers of TypeEngine, to talk about their “beautifully simple” solution to publishing a magazine to Newsstand and the future and democratization of digital publishing.
Adam talks with Dalton Caldwell the Founder of App.net. This is a hefty part 1, mainly focusing on the road traveled by Dalton to get to App.net. We barely scratched the surface of the planned conversation around what he’s doing with App.net. We end this call by teeing up the topic of discussion for part 2.
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DaltonCaldwell.com This is my personal blog. Currently: CEO of App.net Previously: CEO of imeem
imeem | CrunchBase Profile imeem was an online music service founded in 2003 by Dalton Caldwell that gives fans instant access to almost any song they want, for free.
Garrett Dimon the Founder of Sifter and writer of Starting + Sustaining joins Adam to share his history with becoming a founder and the wisdom he’s gained by bloodying his knuckles over the years with lessons learned.
Sam Soffes the Founder of Nothing Magical and NOW the VP of Engineering at Seesaw joins Adam Stacoviak to share some of the most recent details and changes for him in the finale part 3 show.
Sam Soffes / Nothing Magical, Cheddar - Part 2
Aug 07, 2012
Sam Soffes the Founder of Nothing Magical and the maker of Cheddar joins Adam Stacoviak to share more details about the rise of Cheddar, its revenue, metrics, numbers and more. Sam shares lessons learned, his dreams as well as his thoughts on those who build with only the hope of winning what he calls “the acquisition lottery” as their goal - plus so much more.
Sam Soffes / Nothing Magical, Cheddar - Part 1
Jul 14, 2012
Sam Soffes the Founder of Nothing Magical and the maker of Cheddar joins Adam Stacoviak to share all the details of his wild ride as an indie software developer and designer. Sam has worked at Hipstamatic, built YouTube ripoffs, gotten offers from some of the most respected names in the business (some accepted and some turned down) all to circle back around to start Nothing Magical and build his own products. He shares the highs, the lows and all the things he’s learned along the way - plus so much more. And, check out “After Dark” for a short extended chat with Sam.
Sarah Hatter the Founder of CoSupport, joins Adam for part 2 of 2 to go back in time and dig deep into her history, we learn about “the early days” and how she got started, her passions for TV and her podcast TVBFF, the early days of blogging and “dramaville”, what inspires her, being a crafts-person, how she learned that “you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do”, how TM meditation changed her life, as well as the challenges she’s faced as a female founder - plus so much more.
Sarah Hatter the Founder of CoSupport, joins Adam for part 1 of 2 to share her passion for great customer support for web products, being a woman in a man filled industry, her thoughts and history with potentially selling her company and getting aqui-hired, how Allan and Steven of LessEverything have become partners in CoSupport - plus so much more.
Steve Espinosa, the Founder of AppStack, joins Adam to tell his story of hustling his way to the top, gaining the trust and friendship of Jason Calacanis, Dave McClure, Eric Schmidt and the awesome team behind Google Ventures, what it means to focus and much more. This is a jam packed episode with tons of energy and lots to learn from Steve. Also, check out “After Dark” for an extended chat with Steve.
Jon Crawford, the Founder of Storenvy joins Adam to talk about how everything began for Storenvy, his road from Kansas to Austin, TX to SF, how he got kicked out of Y Combinator the same week he was accepted then raised $1.5M for Storenvy, and how he’s living the startup dream! Also, listen to After Founders Talk #34 for an extended chat with Jon.
Nate Peretic & Jay Fanelli, the Founders of Full Stop and United Pixelworkers join Adam to talk about plotting and planning to leave old jobs, being outspoken and opinionated, having a core set of principles and not deviating from them, reaching out to people they admired (regardless of popularity) and their side project that has turned into something that could eclipse their entire client revenue in 2012. Also, check out After Dark for an extended chat with Nate and Jay.
Nathan Ryan, the Co-founder of Proxart joins Adam to talk about what to do when you’re bored in Santa Clarita, team development, keeping everyone motivated and on track, and his globalized local focus on art and how artists relate to, react to, and change their environment.
Kyle Bragger, the Founder of Forrst joins Adam to talk about how everything got started for him, how he met Gary Vaynerchuk - which ultimately led Gary and his brother Aj to provide the initial angel funding that helped Kyle work full-time on Forrst. Kyle also shares lots of knowledge on product design, his focus on community and what it means to say no and focus. Be sure to also stay tuned to his great advice at the end of the show.
Peter Cooper, the Founder of Cooper Press joins Adam to talk about all the stops along the way on his path to where he is today. Peter shares an immense amount of knowledge on tech publishing, what he’s learned about marketing, email newsletters done right, setting and accomplishing goals, as well as some very good advice at the very end.
Francisco Dao, the Founder of 50 Kings (an invitation-only, private community of thinkers and doers) joins Adam to talk about the importance of building relationships, doing only what interests you, entrepreneurship, all sorts of “insider” knowledge around the tech event planning space and more. If you’ve been dying to get invited or referred to 50 Kings, this show will give you all you need to know.
Andrew Wilkinson, the Founder of MetaLab (an interface design studio) joins Adam to talk about how he started as a one-man band and learned to delegate to succeed. Andrew started MetaLab in 2006 and quickly built the company into a multi-million dollar interface design and products company with over 30 employees. Andrew shares his thoughts on happiness, some crucial advice from his father, Steve Jobs, good design, developing products, leading a team to success and even a teaser to something super secret.
Bryan Zmijewski (Shme-yes-key), Founder and Chief Instigator of ZURB, joins Adam to talk about his path to starting ZURB, what sharing code and design patterns has done for their business, product, culture and team development, and what it takes to make awesome stuff on the web.
Dan Martell, Co-Founder of Flowtown, joins Adam to talk about his road to success with Flowtown, getting acquired, how he met his Co-Founder Ethan Bloch on Twitter, angel investing and being an advisor, giving back to charity and customer development and how to get traction. Dan also shared something super secret (a new project) … as well as much, much more.
Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett / Dribbble
Nov 10, 2011
The founders of Dribbble, Rich Thornett and Dan Cederholm, join Adam to talk about how Dribbble came to be, the 3rd edition of Bullet Proof Web Design, product development, new and existing features of Dribbble as well as focusing on revenue producing features … and much, much more.
Vitaly Friedman, Founder of Smashing Magazine, joins Adam to talk about the beginnings of Smashing Magazine, taking chances, not being copyable, experimenting to find what works, supporting the community, developing content, paying writers, developing publishing principles and philosophies and also shares a bit about what’s next on the horizon for him and his team.
Drew Strojny joins Adam to talk about his path in life, playing in the NFL, marrying your business partner, web design and pursuing the unknown, developing digital products and themes for WordPress and the 5by5 logo.
Mark Jardine and Paul Haddad / Tapbots
Sep 30, 2011
Mark Jardine and Paul Haddad join Adam to talk about Tapbots, their side project turned business, designing and developing mobile applications on iOS, establishing and building trust and much more.
Drew Wilson joins Adam for part 1 to talk about his journey as an entrepreneur, the lows, the highs and the in-betweens. Drew talks with Adam about digital projects, how to chase your dreams and more.
Matt Mickiewicz, Co-Founder of SitePoint, 99 Designs, and Flippa talks with Adam about becoming an entrepreneur at a young age, building marketplaces, finding talented people, and using community development and a forum as the spring board for 99 Designs and Flippa.
Niel Robertson, Founder and CEO of Trada, talks about crowd-sourcing, crowd mechanics, leveraging “the stealth mode”, raising 52 million dollars, community engagement, as well as thoughts on whether or not crowd-sourcing commoditizes freelance expertise.
Avner Ronen talks about his vision of the “Future of TV,” the role Boxee plays in today’s internet video/audio content on the big screen, the backlash of “big media” against Boxee and how they’ve changed their tune and much more.
Noah Kagan, Founder of App Sumo talks with Adam about his journey to success. Send an email to noah@appsumo.com for more details about something special for 5by5 listeners.
Adam talks with Bill Boebel, VP Strategy/Corp Dev at Rackspace and Founder of Webmail.us about staying the course, keeping the team motivated during turbulent “cash strapped” times, getting acquired by Rackspace and staying on to continue building the company post-acquisition.
Adam talks with Chris Nagele, Founder of Wildbit about his 11 year journey of building Wildbit and ultimately some awesome web products like Beanstalk, Postmark, and Newsberry.
Adam talks with Eric Kuhn, Founder of Founders Card about the ups and downs of building an online business during the era of the “dot com” bubble, managing hyper growth, getting listed and de-listed on the NASDAQ and building an exclusive benefits program, coined as “The Amex Black Card for the Entrepreneur”, exclusively aimed at Entrepreneurs and Founders. If you want an invite, get in touch with Adam.
Adam talks with Rick Perreault, Co-Founder & CEO of Unbounce about entrepreneurship and solving your own pain, sticking to an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) launch strategy, becoming an authority by blogging/marketing before you launch, listening to customers and knowing when to take funding.
Adam talks with Ryan Holmes, Founder of Hootsuite entrepreneurship, establishing and leveraging their relationship with Twitter, from “free” to “freemium” with a plan, and growing to well over 1 Million users in 2 years.
Adam talks with Maciej Ceglowski, Founder of Pinboard about turning this side project into the next Delicious, handling a massive in-flux of Delicious users when they announced its “sunset”, keeping the technology and architecture simple and more.
Adam talks with Alex Hillman, Co-Founder of Indy Hall and co-conspirator/creator of many things, about all things Coworking, people helping people, how to hustle, get unstuck and more. Alex also mentions something “super secret” that’s sure to please. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Adam talks with Henk Rogers, Founder of The Tetris Company, Blue Planet Software and Blue Planet Foundation about the beginnings of and the evolution of Tetris, over-coming brick walls, social and mobile gaming, never giving up, changing the world, getting the planet off carbon-based fuels, ending war, creating a backup of Earth and the power of love!
Adam talks with Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs, Founders of Slash7 about product development, profiting from Open Source, the key to happiness, living a Unicorn-Free lifestyle and how Amy and Thomas met and ultimately fell in love.
Allan Branch and Steven Bristol / Less Everything
Dec 07, 2010
Adam talks with Allan Branch and Steven Bristol, Founders of Less Everything about how things got started, why they hate QuickBooks, what it takes to create a successful partnership and more.
Adam talks with Ryan Carson, Founder of Carsonified about the “lessons learned” in creating their latest product, Think Vitamin Membership - the biggest being the need to rename the product and go through a re-branding process. In Q2 of 2011 Think Vitamin Membership will transition to the name “Level Up”, a better suited name and far more “tweetable”.
Lance Jones and Joanna Wiebe / Page 99 Test
Oct 22, 2010
Adam talks with Lance Jones and Joanna Wiebe, Founders of Page99Test.com. People in bookstores often read page 99 of a book to get a taste for the writing - to determine if they’d buy the book. Lance, Joanna and technical Co-Founder, Steven Luke took that time tested idea and have built a brand new platform for book enthusiasts, authors, agents and publishers to get excited about.
Adam talks with Ted Roden, Founder of Fancy Hands, a team of personal assistants in the cloud ready to work for you right now. For those of you who have an over flowing todo list, get back to focusing on what’s important and give Fancy Hands a try.
Adam talks with Geoffrey Grosenbach about his quest for greatness as Senior Visionary in building PeepCode Screencasts. Complete with the signature voice that Geoff delivers, he walks us through the various aspects of building Peepcode from scratch, adhering to the Minimal Viable Product methodology (MVP), starting on “the cheap” and the reason he says “no” to DRM to reduce piracy on his digital products.
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