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
00:21:22 · Will Stewart, Jack
[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 [00:22:02] S1: done that. But But it sounds like you started with gaming where it was like you were like, no one else is doing this and maybe it's like feels like, you know, maybe it feels like you were like, let's just build like an easier way for anyone to build anything. It's like feels big, but at the beginning it was just gaming, right?
00:22:22 · Will Stewart
[00:22:22] S0: I think, yeah, it was incremental. So we started with the game servers, but a game server is just a Docker container, it's a Docker file. Very quickly, we're like, well, we built this software, this capable platform to build and deploy Docker file. That works for Node. Js, works for Java Spring Boot, works for PHP, works for Rust. Like, okay, well, what's what's MongoDB, what's Redis, what's Postgres? Well, it's a Dockerfile, it's a container. Oh, we could potentially allow people to one click deploy Redis Postgres. And now, in today in Northlink, we have highly available managed offerings of, you know, six to seven different databases that you can run-in one click in your in your VPC, and you can also do that for your microservices, And it's now a sort of a consistent vision since, I'd say, 2019. Our PreC decks and everything we'd written then, interestingly, is exactly the same pretty much of what we say today. And that's very unusual, especially in startups that Yeah. Need to pivot for for for for good reason, or, you know, the market evolves, but nothing really has truly changed. Every single company needs to deploy software. The way people build software is changing right now, quite rightly. But the way people deploy software and run infrastructure has not changed. Yes, Kubernetes is a different orchestrator, but before that we had Mesos. Before that we had number of like Ansible or anything else.