00:34:39 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:34:39] S1: What do you mean by reduce the friction on the feature matrix? [00:34:42] S0: So if you can't do something, the developer's decision is, okay, well, I've gotta build it then. I'm gonna go and get Terraform, I'm gonna go and get Argo CD, I'm gonna go and build that platform because Northland doesn't support this feature, so we can't adopt So so we have to diffuse that situation. Right? This is everything we do. We do 99.99% of what what you need. So you can start testing dev, import workloads, get get started in, you know, a very short space of time. And then obviously, in these enterprises as well, we need this one feature. We need this one feature. And we start iterating in real time to win the contract. And then you build trust. Ironically, actually having a little bit of bugs means that they have to they have to talk to you and they have to come and talk to you. You have to be on the phone. You have be on Zoom. You have to oh, show me your environment. How does that work? And then they start telling you. And then you start building that relationship and then, you know, a few weeks later, they're running a thousand workloads on you. So so it's it's interesting that, you know, we're talking about bugs earlier. Sometimes that can actually allow you to talk to customers much more efficiently. And they sort of self identify, these are my workloads. This isn't working perfectly. So most of our enterprise contracts, you know, probably have come through support in some way or form.
00:36:00 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:36:00] S1: Okay. Strategic bug. Strategic bug. Exactly. Maybe you should like turn on like a bug. Like something that you could just fix it immediately and see this thing. [00:36:09] S0: We we had a actually talking about this, we we had like a we have a theming system and we built that early. That's controversial to build build a theming system, but we we created some like rogue themes. We were thinking of like just turning them on or like someone would sign up, but we I don't know, we we think he was snooping around the platform or something, let's turn on the pink theme or something. And they say, why is North Link doing this? [00:36:33] S1: Yeah. Wait. So like a capacity meeting? [00:36:35] S0: Oh, something like that. Yeah. We didn't do it in the end. [00:36:38] S1: Wild theme. Yeah. Okay. That's that's brilliant. And actually, so when like you share the road map with someone like I know this maybe it's getting really into the weeds, but it's something that I've started to have to do is like, you know, like what how do [00:36:58] S0: you do that well? So we This is counter to what most people do. Okay. Alright. We do not publish a public road map. Interesting. Because it's never what anyone wants to see. Right? [00:37:10] S1: They just wanna know their future.
00:37:10 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:37:10] S1: They just wanna know their future. [00:37:11] S0: I want my road map. Where's my road map? And like, your future is important. We're working on it. We're prioritizing this. These are the things we're working on that may be relevant to you. And then we're just very honest. Like like, we think we can do it in this quarter, it will be in next quarter. But also, if we we think it's like a highly important, like, this workload makes sense or this feature makes sense, we'll try and get it shipped in twelve hours, twenty four hours. So we may roll out the feature, feature flag, say, oh, hey, by the way, we managed to release that. So recently, we were trying to win a win a a deal that was important to us, and we we made critical changes to improve how we manage custom domains and generation of domains and importing, you know, wildcard certificates, whatever it is. We made some changes. A couple of days later, we win the deal. [00:38:05] S1: That's [00:38:06] S0: cool. So so making these changes, as long as it makes sense and it's in your, you know, wheelhouse and product vision, you should just make the change as quickly as possible because that builds trust, that builds a really important customer relationship. [00:38:19] S1: Okay. So you're basically saying like, don't don't worry about how well you communicate, when it's gonna come [00:38:26] S0: just by Just work on it. [00:38:28] S1: Just
00:38:28 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:38:28] S1: Just [00:38:28] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Like you may you may might spend more time making your roadmap pretty than actually building the feature. Right? So historically, we had a very, you know, weekly change log or whatever. It was very detailed. Now we just do once a month. Mhmm. But this change log, we would get every feature very detailed in there, and then people would send us an an email saying, oh, hey, Northlake. I signed up because of how detailed your change log was. Really? I'm like, okay. Okay. That's interesting. And then if we forget or don't post a release note, users will send us messages saying Really? Hey, is Northlake okay? You you you dying? Do you need money? And we're like, no no no. Just log in, you'll see all the new stuff and blah blah blah. They're like, oh, cool. Great. Great. Yeah. I saw that new feature. I I was curious why you hadn't posted about it. That so so so so very quickly, our users will will figure out, oh, this feature hasn't seen an update in a while or what's going on here? So so all those users you have are always thinking about, what was the last thing this this website changed? Like, this button hasn't moved for a while. This this this feature is is is pretty stagnant. So, yeah, we do have a lot of customers who are very very hard on our heels. Like, you've not updated this feature in a while. What's going on?
00:39:47 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:39:47] S1: I was I've heard this before and it's like blind spot for me because like I never really read someone's change logs unless it's like, oh, okay. I'm gonna make an update to like a package or something and I need to see if it's gonna break everything. I I've heard this before. Was like, someone else was saying, like, just ship a lot of stuff and talk about it and like that's your that is your marketing. Your change log is your marketing. [00:40:10] S0: I think I I think at the time back in 2020 or 2021, whatever it was, Linear had like the the change log and everyone was, yeah, everyone's gonna have a change log. Ultimately, a change log is just released notes, which is is very common as well. So it's been it was important for us, and then that was one way to build trust. And again, it comes back to trust. Does he does he use a trust that you're building the right road map? Are you building a road map for them? Or are you actually focused on someone else? That's that's the real time evaluation that they're making. Yeah. [00:40:46] S1: Okay. Final question, Will. AI obviously has impacted what you guys do a lot. I guess, like everyone's running compute. There's like scramble for GPUs. How how's it changed things?
00:41:01 · Will Stewart
[00:41:01] S0: So I think I think it's quite interesting because obviously it's had a big impact on the software development life cycle. So far, it hasn't really affected infrastructure and DevOps per se. Like, you wouldn't have your AI agent deploying the most critical workloads. Like, that that hasn't happened yet. And also, it's not very good at it so far. Impact for developer platforms like Northland is that historically, there were the terms of, like, ML Ops ML Ops platforms. So it's like a DevOps platform but just for ML engineers. Well, now with Northlink, you can do the same thing. You can deploy your AI workloads, inference training, you know, PyTorch jobs, notebooks, whatever you need to run, you can run that on a developer platform like Northlink. So for us, it it's again extending that polyglot vision, which is the best AI teams, they need to deploy inference, training. They also need to potentially deploy secure runtime. And what's the core pinnacle underpinning of a developer platform in the past? Secure runtime, running untrusted code at scale. Mhmm. So we've been doing this since 2019. And that means that all of these, you know, agent companies who need to do code gen or spin up temporary sandboxes can do so perfectly on Northlank. And then GPUs. Where does the GPU go? It goes on to a VM or or a bare metal machine, and generally, how is that orchestrated Kubernetes? So for North Flank, I think we had a GPU workload support to Northlink, like, two years ago or over two years ago. So slightly before the full AI boom. But, you know, we had startups signing up wanting to orchestrate their their GPUs, we're like, okay. Cool. Okay. Okay. Now these are available in public cloud, so, you know, a few years ago, a small amount of v one hundreds or whatever. But then people say, we want a one hundreds, we want l fours, t fours, all all of these new chips started coming out, And then it was it was great to see. It's like these new types of workloads, great new types of workloads, let's make them run on North Flank. So helping a lot of startups get their, you know, training jobs running and their inference. And for us, it just means more compute, more workloads, more clouds. Right? Now people are looking for near clouds. They wanna be on Callweave. They wanna be on Together AI. They want to be on Lambda Labs.