00:04:02 · Will Stewart, Jack
[00:04:02] S0: We'd already been building and working together for many many years. It's because we like we were kids, we couldn't afford to, you know, get on a flight and meet each other. So originally, you know, were on TeamSpeak. We were working on TeamSpeak. We were working on Skype. Like, literally, there are old Skype conversations of us collaborating, trying to figure out how to build build shit, and and then we obviously graduated to to WhatsApp and Discord and then and then eventually Slack. So so yeah, I think it was in 2019 we decided, okay, if we're gonna do this properly, we need to go and learn how to code. We're gonna have to do this properly rather than just be script kiddies. So we both went off to university. Fred went and did his masters in computer science. [00:04:48] S1: When you'd already when you say like, if we're gonna build this, like, we need to learn how to code, like, as in you'd already had like this, like, specific North Flank idea?
00:04:58 · Will Stewart
[00:04:58] S0: So that in like twenty thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, we were manually deploying game servers on bare metal on like OVH and Hetzner back in the day. Obviously, now Hetzner's now the hottest thing and everyone wants to deploy Well, you were deploying Yeah. We were then, we were like using our pocket money to spawn bare metal machines using, you know, SSH in and then try and run some game servers. And we were doing that in No thirteen, fourteen, whatever it was. And this is when public cloud just wasn't very available or couldn't even run game servers because the CPUs weren't fast enough or or whatever. And also the network was really expensive. So we we we were provisioning these these bare metal servers, we're like, this is crazy, this this needs to change. And of course, every new game came out, and the multiplayer was always offline because game developers didn't know how to build an infrastructure platform. So we thought, okay, well, why don't we try and build this? Why don't we try and build an automation system for these game servers? And then as time went on, we're like, okay, well, we need to deploy a back end. So we needed to go and deploy a database and a microservice. We looked around and the only thing at the time, you know, was Heroku. I had been acquired by Salesforce and it hadn't evolved. Like, I think at the time, you can even deploy a Docker image. So we we thought we needed something more accessible. And of course, at that time, we'd learn containers, we'd learn Docker. And then Ben, sorry.
00:06:22 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:06:22] S1: Just to get a reminder, how old are you at this point? [00:06:24] S0: Oh, I think it's like a levels in The UK. It's a levels. Think [00:06:26] S1: it's 16, like 17. Scaling DevTools is sponsored by WorkOS. If things start going well, some of your customers are gonna start asking for enterprise features. Things like SSO, SCIM provisioning, role based access control. You could spend ages tearing your hair out building these things yourself, or you could use WorkOS. Will, what do you guys do? [00:06:48] S0: My name is Will Stewart, co founder and CEO of Northlink. We're a self-service developer platform, and we help teams deploy their most critical workloads into their VPC. And you guys use WorkOS? We use WorkOS for our SAML and OIDC integrations. It's a pretty exceptional product. It makes everything regarding authentication pretty seamless, and it's been instrumental for us to onboard our enterprise customers much faster. Building integrations with lots of different SAML providers is really challenging. We can do that for cloud providers, that's our job. But we don't wanna do that for the other type of IDP. This is quite interesting because internal developer portal platform and then there's the identity provider. So IDP has three different meanings and we're internal developer platform and WorkOS is IDP for authentication. But yeah, it's a great product. [00:07:35] S1: Thanks WorkOS. Back to the episode.
00:07:35 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:07:35] S1: Thanks WorkOS. Back to the episode. [00:07:38] S0: So we started building a game server hosting platform on top of Mesos. It was open sourced during our our I think we roughly went to school at the same time. Mesos is Mesos was a open source container orchestrator for for Twitter and and a few other folks. And D2IQ, Mesosphere at the time, they open sourced something called DCOS, data center operating system. I was like, oh my god, this is so cool. Remind us. 1918. Yeah. I I took that and then I was trying to make it, you know, brute force it into a game server hosting platform. And then from there, we learned, okay, well, I need to deploy my database, I to deploy my microservice, I need CICD, I need logs, I need metrics. And then suddenly all of the component parts we were like brute forcing and building ourselves to run on top of Mesos. This is like early twenty nineteen and at this point, Fred, who's studying to get his masters at computer science at ETH, I'm in my second For [00:08:42] S1: anyone One of university. University.
00:08:42 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:08:42] S1: anyone One of university. University. [00:08:45] S0: Yeah. We're very lucky to have a number of team members from ETH. And and then I had I finished my second year of university at UE in Bristol, studying IT management for business, so a bit of business, bit of coding. And then I was on my third year, which was an industrial placement at a digital agency called Clock. I chose Clock because they did rugby websites, and they also did riotgames.com. So at the time, that was great for me. That was gaming and sports, and I got to code, which was which was wonderful opportunity. Learned a lot there. And in in in that process, we had to decide, like, do we wanna do this full time or do we need to get real jobs? So we had to make a decision then of, how are gonna do this? So we created a list of every accelerator program in Europe who would let us join remotely, because of course we were in two different places and couldn't really afford to move, and who would give us cloud credits. So, you know, now everyone tries to hunt for those cloud credits. Well, back in 2019, we were stuck ranking all the European accelerator programs who could give us access and also cloud credits. And we joined we applied to join the family [00:10:02] S1: and That's in France.
00:10:02 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:10:02] S1: and That's in France. [00:10:03] S0: It's it was in Paris. Yeah. And pitching Northlink for the first time. And this time we didn't tell them, we'd never met. It was like, you know, no concept of that was possible. So we're trying to hide this thing, and then we we go through a couple of interviews. Some of our earliest angel investors were in that interview process, Pietro from Firedrop and Balthazar. They they were part of that interview process and they thought, okay, we'll give them a chance, let's let them through. And then we get invited to this, like, onboarding event, which is in person. We go, but the the kicker for me was that I had to use my overdraft to buy the train ticket Eurostar to get to Paris. So it was a big investment. It's like, do I spend the £300 on the train ride or do I So I bought the train ticket, went into my overdraft, went to Paris, met Fred for the first time. There's a photo of us on on on some blog post on our meeting for the first time after ten years. And we're we're we're both quite tall, so Fred was quite disappointed to figure out that I was taller. [00:11:10] S1: How tall how tall are you? How tall is Fred?