Gonto (Martin Gontovnikas) was the 6th employee at Auth0 and helped them grow fast and sell for $6.5billion to Okta.  Now he is the founder of Hypergrowth Partners and helps DevTools grow fast. We discuss: What Auth0 did to become so valuable so fastWhat the best founders do (Guillermo Rauch)Different is better than better People follow people not brandsWhy bleeding edge mattersResources Why Technical SDRs are the Future of...

Mike McQuaid and John Britton are cofounders of Workbrew - a tool that gives you the missing features for enterprises running homebrew. John has previously worked at GitHub and Twilio and is a contributor to Homebrew. Mike has also worked at GitHub as well as being the project lead and longest running maintainer at Homebrew.  We dig into: How Homebrew can trace its origins to a pub in LondonHow Apple actually work with HomebrewHow Homebrew managed to grow and scale upHow Workbrew are...

Paul Klein is the founder and CEO of Browserbase - one of the fastest growing DevTools in 2024. Browserbase is a headless browser API focused on helping AI Agent startups. We dig into: Why browser automation?How Browserbase hit "VC-market-fit"Visionary is revisionist-history Tips for hiring your friendsWhy buying a jacket is like buying a devtoolBuilding an in-person DevTool in San FranciscoMaking priorities (what Paul doesn’t care about).Where to find Paul and Browserbase: Twitter/X...

In 2017, Rasmus Makwarth sold his previous APM (Application Performance Managment) startup Opbeat to Elastic for an undisclosed amount. Opbeat became Elastic APM, which became a big part of the Elastic Observability solution and Rasmus became Senior Director of Product Management - with a focus on Developer Experience. Today, Rasmus is the founder and CEO of Bucket.co - a feature flagging tool built for B2B teams. Bucket has raised $5.7m from investors such as Project A and Creandum. We dig...

Shawn Wang (aka swyx) is the founder of smol.ai (AI news curation), and the cohost of Latent Space (popular AI Engineer podcast). Plus, Shawn started the AI Engineer movement with his essay Rise of the AI Engineer and organized two incredible AI engineer conferences in the past twelve months - AI Engineer World's Fair and AI Engineer Summit And Shawn has angel invested in DevTools like Airbyte, Railway, Supabase, Replay.io, Stackblitz, Flutterflow, Fireworks.ai while running the DevTools...

Sagar is the CEO and co-founder of Speakeasy - an API tooling platform. We talk about the journey of Speakeasy. The challenges of startup life. How they developed the product and how they work with influencers in a surprising way. Building relationships with influencers can significantly enhance product development.Importance of listening to customersFine line between product and consultingThe role of documentation in user experienceBeing responsive to customer needs builds long-term...

In this conversation, Anurag Goel, founder and CEO of Render, discusses the evolution of Render as a cloud infrastructure platform is actually simple to use. He shares insights from his time at Stripe, emphasizing the importance of customer focus, crafting a seamless user experience, and the philosophy of progressive disclosure of complexity. Anurag also highlights the significance of customer support as an integral part of the product and offers advice for aspiring founders on finding their...

This is our 100th episode!  And we're thrilled to welcome back fan favourite Ant Wilson - the cofounder and CTO of Supabase. They discuss the evolution of Supabase, the importance of open source, and effective marketing strategies.  Ant shares insights on community engagement, the significance of developer-centric branding, and the challenges of navigating the enterprise landscape.  We also touch on the rise of AI and vector databases, emphasizing the power of open source in development. The...

Nick Gomez is the co-founder and CEO of InKeep. InKeep is an AI customer support tool focused on Developer Tools. They discuss the importance of understanding developer needs, the role of AI in technical support, and how community engagement can enhance support efforts. What we discuss AI support for developer tools is different from traditional B2B SaaS support.Developers often seek help through documentation and community forums.Scaling technical support requires understanding the...

Adam Frankl has been VP at four Developer Tools unicorns, including JFrog, Neo4J and Sourcegraph. Adam is the author of the Developer Facing Startup and recently launched the Developer Facing Startup Founders Academy: a program that helps founders launch and grow their developer tools. In this conversation, Adam Frankl discusses the critical role of a Technical Advisory Board (TAB) in the success of developer-facing startups. He emphasizes the importance of understanding developer needs,...

In this conversation, with Michael Grinich - founder and CEO of WorkOS. WorkOS helps you start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code.  We discuss the challenges and strategies of navigating tough conversations in a startup environment, the importance of understanding engineering leadership, and the role of empathy in user experience.  The conversation covers the significance of conferences for startups, the necessity of articulating the 'why' behind a business, and...

In this episode, we're joined by returning guest Colin Sidoti - the cofounder and CEO of Clerk. Clerk is a comprehensive user management platform.  What we cover:- The origin story and South Park Commons- Clerk's dramatic growth since the first episode - what changed? What did they do right?- 7% growth per week- Tiny details that improve the developer experience- How to you know if a change is better - watching people's faces as they try it - The difficulties of bringing new joiners up to...

David is the CEO of Arcjet. Arcjet is a tool that helps developers protect their apps once they go into production. It offers Bot detection, rate limiting, email validation, attack protection, data redaction. David is also the creator of the console.dev newsletter and podcast. It's where thousands of developers discover developer tools.  In this episode we discuss how David thinks about creating content. Why he believes go-to-market is more difficult than product and how he works on creating...

Vlad Matsiiako is the CEO and co-founder of Infisical. Infisical is an Open Source Secret Management tool. What we discuss:- The story of Infisical- How the team has made Infisical easy to adopt- How being open source helps you with trust at the beginning stages- How do enterprises adopt Infisical- How do developers at enterprises discover tools like Infisical- The different mini-games at various stages of a startup (Dalton Caldwell)  Links Vlad -...

Andrew Lisowski is the cohost of devtools.fm.  In this episode we talk about why Andrew started devtools.fm and what he's learned along the way.  Life as an open source maintainer.How the JavaScript ecosystem is different to other developer ecosystems.The importance of dogfooding.The power of DHH.Why obsessing over one problem eventually leads to great resultsShould DevTools start podcasts and how?Links: devtools.fm - https://www.devtools.fm/Andrew's Twitter -...

Robby (Amanda Robson) is the co-host of Open Source Startup Podcast (with Tim Chen). In this episode we discuss: There are many ways to open source successWhen open source is a good strategy and when it isn'tWhy open source projects usually need time to brewHow to know if your project is venture scaleWhy Robby believes in the Open Source modelRobby is working on a highly mysterious new thing 👀Links:- Robby's Twitter/X https://x.com/amanda_robs?lang=en- Open Source Startup Podcast...

Hamzah Chaudhary is the cofounder of Lightdash, an open source, self-serve BI tool. In this episode, Hamzah shares: Their initial plan to build a consultancy and how it morphed into a product to solve their customer's needsHow open source works as a strategyBringing software engineering tools to the BI domainHow they reach their usersHow they partner with bigger organizationsLinks: Lightdash https://www.lightdash.com/Lightdash GitHub https://github.com/lightdash/lightdashHamzah's Twitter...

Han Wang is co-founder of Mintlify - modern, out the box documentation. In this episode, Han shares the story of Mintlify and how to make great docs. We even talk about the time Paul Graham told them to change their name. What we cover:- the origin story of Mintlify- what is good documentation- the process of documentation- how AI is affecting documentation- why PG told them to change their name Links:- Han https://han.dev/- Mintlify https://mintlify.com/

Kate Holterhoff - an analyst from RedMonk - shares why frontend developers are increasingly dictating the adoption of new developer tools. Kate shares specific examples, including Supabase. Links: Frontend Developers: the Newest New Kingmakers https://redmonk.com/kholterhoff/2024/02/15/frontend-developers-the-newest-new-kingmakers/Kate's website https://www.kateholterhoff.com/RedMonk https://redmonk.com/Kate's Twitter/X https://x.com/KateHolterhoff

Vivian Dufour is the CEO and co-founder of Meterian. Meterian is an open source vulnerability scanner. In this episode we talk about topics like: Selling to enterprisesWhy you need to make your product easy to testHiring and managing salespeople Links: Meterian: https://www.meterian.io/Vivian Dufour - https://www.linkedin.com/in/viviandufour/ 

Ellen Chisa is a partner at Boldstart Ventures. Prior to Boldstart, Ellen founded Darklang - a programming language. Before Darklang, Ellen worked in product. What we discussed:  Startups should focus on building one SDK and doing it well, rather than trying to build multiple SDKs at once.North Star metricsDeveloper tooling companies can learn from consumer-facing companies in terms of marketing and creating an identity for their product.Being authentic as a founder and actively engaging...

How do you write a developer quick start guide that they will love? That's what we talk about with Amit Jotwani. Amit is the founder of HelloDX and previously worked in developer experience at Retool and Amazon Alexa. This came about because I was reading Amit's fantastic guide on EveryDeveloper. Links: Amit's website https://ajot.me/HelloDX https://hellodx.co/Craft Quick Start Guides That Developers Will Love https://everydeveloper.com/quick-start-guides/Amit's Twitter/X...

James Hawkins is the cofounder and CEO of PostHog. PostHog is a platform to analyze, test, observe, and deploy new features. This is the second time James has been on and the episode is mostly about how they run PostHog. It's a pretty unconventional approach - probably because James thinks very deeply about how organizations should operate. What we discuss: How PostHog hireHis approach to one-on-one meetingsThe role of engineers in product developmentThe impact of open source projects on...

Greg Lazarus and Matt Althauser are two of the cofounders of Polychrome - a company that buys small to medium sized B2B software businesses: with a focus on Developer Tools. Their portfolio includes the feature flagging tool Flagsmith (we recorded an episode with them last week) and the browser automation tool Browserless. In this episode we cover the ins and outs of buying developer tools. Links:- Polychrome https://www.polychrome.com/- Matt Althauser https://x.com/malthauser?lang=en - Greg...