00:12:14 · Will Stewart
[00:12:14] S0: Something like that. Yeah. And I I had to put my I had to put my placement on hold. I had to leave my placement to do this full time. So I had to basically drop out of university, leave the placement to to do this, which was a big call at the time. And, you know, everyone in in my support network at the time was very very supportive. So I'm very fortunate that was that was the thing. And then, well, we just jumped straight head on. Like, this is an opportunity. Let's take it. And then from there, we started to raise the angel around I just mentioned, hire people, trying to go from students to founders, build continue building a product, try and find our first customers, like, shit. This is for real. We actually have to do this. And we actually have a clock because if we don't do this, the money runs out. So then you're on this treadmill that just keeps getting faster and faster and faster, and I think we we had, you know, a very quick baptism of fire going to IC for the first time and essentially not knowing anything about VC or even meeting VCs. And I think in that three month process, we just learned so much so quickly and then grew up very very quickly. But then that was that was still back in early twenty twenty. So when we when we had closed that pre seed round with Kindred Ventures in San Francisco, which we raised that round completely remotely, all on Zoom. And at the time, that was very unusual. This was, like, two weeks before COVID. So then we had to start hiring all of our team and building out this startup in in those first couple of months of of COVID, which was which was, you know, pretty pretty interesting for, like, a 22 year old founder. You just raised this money from people you've never met. You know, like, how are we gonna do this? So that that was fun times.
00:14:06 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:14:06] S1: That's crazy. Wait. That is quite interesting how you even would like manage to make connections and raise money from San Francisco investors like remotely and that was quite unusual as well, isn't it, for European? [00:14:24] S0: At at the time, I think less so now, but we had a lot of folks gave us a lot of time. Larry, one of our angel investors introduced us to Steve Steve Yang, Kindred Ventures. And Steve was happy to chat with us at, like, on a Sunday. He was on holiday in Hawaii or something. Was chatting us at on Sunday. And he he's got other things to do, right? But he was chatting with us asking, well, okay, well, tell me how what's your go to market strategy? Well, tell me more about that product, you know, why why is your better why is your decision there better than someone else? Like, why is this gonna work? What does it look like if this is successful? And that was always the question that we're like, wait, he's he's he's asking us, well, what if this is successful? And that was a mindset change. So we're like, okay, well, is possible. How do we do this? And then that was forever, you know, that was our start, that was our way in that was given to us then. [00:15:20] S1: Mhmm. And then so when you did raise them for like seed around like them, what was the first like you said hiring the like?
00:15:31 · Will Stewart, Jack
[00:15:31] S0: So we had to build, we just kept building build build. As you know, North Frank has, you know, very horizontal developer platform, tons and tons of features, it's about complex workloads. We probably have too many features, but the for us at the time, we thought if we were going to build a highly capable developer platform, and at the time, right, so Heroku, highly successful billion dollars in revenue, and on the other side you had Cloud Foundry with Pivotal and VMware. Multiple billion dollars in revenue, also very successful. But Kubernetes had sort of stolen that golden goose. So at the time we were thinking, well, Norfolk needs to be sort of in the middle, very capable, powerful platform that had some of the deploy in your own VPC characteristics of Cloud Foundry, but also had that self-service developer experience of Heroku, who were trying to build this vision in the middle. So we'd like to say, well, Northlink is if Cloud Foundry and Heroku had a baby, that would be North Flank. And of course at this time, Mesos had been completely dominated by Kubernetes. So we were migrating our platform from Mesos to Kubernetes, we're trying to build for the future, build for okay. Kubernetes is gonna become the default way every enterprise is gonna run their software. Fortunately, that that came out to be the case very very quickly. And started hiring our first engineers, build build build, and then we didn't launch for over two years. Really? No. So you're just building? We were just building [00:16:59] S1: Are you talking to
00:16:59 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:16:59] S1: Are you talking to [00:17:00] S0: Customers and we were having people play around with it, getting free users in in internal alphas and betas. But we have this view that if it's if it's not robust, if it doesn't have certain minimum level of feature set, you can't reliably run your most critical production workloads, whether it be databases, microservices, or Conjobs. So we we spent such a long time building that core horizontal platform, which has now put us in really good stead today, which which, you know, in hindsight, maybe we could have launched sooner. We'll have more users, more hype. But actually, this has helped us build a really robust product for our for our most, you know, critical customers, and and we continue to have that view today is if we keep investing in product platform, teams will just be able to run more and more workloads. That's our job is hunt those workloads, find the most critical workloads, get them running on Northlink no matter where they're running, you know, on public cloud, AWS, GCP, Azure, or or on prem. And then also we have the the self-service users running on our on our PaaS. [00:18:04] S1: Do you have like just on the waiting to launch? Because I think this is something that you see a lot of different opinions on it. If you if someone was asking you for advice like another DevTools founder, how would you think about like whether when it's right to do what you did and when it's right, it's just
00:18:22 · Will Stewart
[00:18:22] S0: Yeah. So I think that developers are very picky now. Right? They expect a much higher developer experience, which is quite right to expect that. But for example, we communicated internally that every UI element in the in the platform has to feel robust, has to feel like it's being designed by a much larger engineering team. It's gotta be very capable, it's gotta feel real time. And that's to build trust in developer tools specifically. You have to build trust over a very long period of time. You can lose trust overnight. So everything we do about customers is empathy for the developer, empathy that we're a critical path software. If we don't do our job properly, they could lose money. Their websites could lose money, they they could be out of business. So whenever we think about what how we build software, it's critical path, we have to do our job properly, and if we don't, people will suffer. So when we think about it like that, and when I talk to other founders is, you know, don't rush things, think about security, think about, you know, production readiness, which is very much against what a lot of teams do. Right? They just YOLO things to prod. Don't have dev environments, don't have staging environments, they just YOLO to prod. Don't necessarily think about security. You know, they I saw a few days ago that someone tweeted out an internal dashboard of someone's data. Right? That's just a no no. Think very carefully about what you're building. I guess for some dev tools, it's much easier to just put it out there, see if you people are interested. That's that's that's one of the benefits of doing so. You build an audience and become build an audience. And when you're stopping people signing up or or not using your product, that's actually sort of shooting yourselves in the foot. So that's what we have, you know, we we you've gotta find that balancing act. So I would also say, actually, don't do exactly what Norfolk did. Release earlier. Write that blog post. Make that YouTube video. Because if you don't, who's gonna make it? So I think if we were to do this again, we just would've written a lot more content much much sooner. We would've tried to get the word out and build an audience. So for example, I I don't really tweet very much, I'm not really on Twitter.
00:20:32 · Will Stewart, Jack
If I was to do this again, I probably would've started being much more public facing earlier on, talking about what we're building. I think you can talk about what you're building much more progressively. For example, on on LinkedIn, I I post product updates on LinkedIn quite frequently, keeps our customers updated and that's generally very very productive. But I think, yeah, to, you know, what we're all trying to do in startups, right, make enterprise value, you've gotta build something robust that's long lasting and that you can build trust over many many months. [00:21:04] S1: The ones where people wait before launching is often like there's a really strong view on. I I I it feels like you are trying to validate that this is a real problem. It was like you believed it in your bones. It's a real problem. [00:21:22] S0: Yeah. I I think that's true because we had experienced ourselves. Like Fred and I were like, why can't we do this? Why can't I deploy a a database in a number of seconds, highly available? Why can't I deploy CICD? Why do I have to meet these, you know, god awful Jenkins pipelines? Why do I have to set up Mesos manually? Why do I have to install this on an e c two node? We thought, well, we could just automate it. Let's let's give it a go. Let's try and do this. And obviously, that's probably naivety. Right? Like we were young. I thought, oh, we can do this. And if we if we knew what we do now, may maybe we would maybe maybe we wouldn't have