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?
00:11:10 · Jack, Will Stewart
[00:11:10] S1: How tall how tall are you? How tall is Fred? [00:11:12] S0: I'm like six three, six four, and Fred's pretty much the same. Okay. But slightly slightly smaller. And then we do this event, and then throughout the event, you know, we're trying to keep it quiet, keep them that we've never met. We're thinking this is insane, like we should keep that quiet. And then someone someone finds out and then that really helps us build a relationship with a lot of the people in the accelerator. And [00:11:37] S1: Because you're because it's like kind of a crazy story. [00:11:39] S0: Yeah. I think it's less crazy now, but I think it was very uncommon at the time. Like at that point, remote was not a thing. Raising remotely, working completely remotely from your cofounder, never meeting your cofounder was pretty much unheard of. And then we we raised an angel round through the accelerator. We kept building and then that started to snowball from there. Anyway, sorry. And just so when in 2019 so when you [00:12:11] S1: were doing this, when you're going for the accelerator, you were like twenty twenty one.
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?