Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:01:44 · Dan Lorenc, Alexa von Tobel
[00:01:44] S0: Yeah, thanks for having me on. [00:01:46] S1: I'm thrilled. All right, Dan, I want to start from the beginning. I always like to ask, especially founders who have built multi billion dollar companies, you've raised $600,000,000 valued at north of $3,500,000,000 in every way, you are a true outlier founder. I wanna start with your childhood. And if you had to say one or two things that really stands out that you think has contributed to you being able to be an an original thinker, what is it? [00:02:15] S0: Yeah. So I grew up in the nineties, which... Crazy, crazy to think about how long ago that was. But yeah, the world has changed a lot since then. In my childhood, I was always building things with my hands, was just running around outside playing with tools, my dad and my grandmother's garages that I probably shouldn't have been playing with as a, you know, eight or nine year old kid. Amazing. I didn't lose any fingers or anything in in any of that time. [00:02:37] S1: Amen. Thank god for that.
00:02:37 · Alexa von Tobel, Dan Lorenc
[00:02:37] S1: Amen. Thank god for that. [00:02:39] S0: Yeah. Building everything. Like, you know, it was pre Internet, so it was just... You know, we we would get magazines and find things in those to build, and, it was everything from potato cannons to race cars to go karts. And it... When you're figuring all that stuff out on your own and you get to kinda see the result of doing that with your hands and putting things together and getting to use them and falling off and getting hurt and doing it again, I think it's it's a different kind of experience, I think, than a lot of kids have today pre... With social media and all that stuff where you don't see that anymore. People are more scared of that. [00:03:11] S1: I think that's exactly right. If you were to think about any... Like, what has given you comfort to take risk, what would that be? You know, obviously, you spent time at MIT studying mechanical engineering. You spent a decade at Google working on infrastructure and open source, which obviously gives you a lot of of sort of background for this. But where do you think that comfort with, like, branching out on your own really came from?
00:03:11 · Alexa von Tobel, Dan Lorenc
[00:03:11] S1: I think that's exactly right. If you were to think about any... Like, what has given you comfort to take risk, what would that be? You know, obviously, you spent time at MIT studying mechanical engineering. You spent a decade at Google working on infrastructure and open source, which obviously gives you a lot of of sort of background for this. But where do you think that comfort with, like, branching out on your own really came from? [00:03:37] S0: Yeah. I think it's just being willing to try something you haven't done before, and that, you know, got to do a lot of that in college. I switched switched careers too. Right? My background was actually mechanical engineering at MIT. Half halfway through that, I took my first programming class, and we had to learn MATLAB, to do simulations and that kind of thing. And I thought I hated programming before this, but I'd never really done it. And I realized it was actually not as bad as I thought it was gonna be, and it was a lot faster. You could, you know, create things on your laptop in a dorm room instead of having to get time in the machine shop and order parts and wait for those to show up and screw up and then have to reorder more parts. You know, it kinda condenses that cycle of weeks and weeks to actually get something built to hours, and there's kinda no limit there.
00:03:37 · Dan Lorenc, Alexa von Tobel
[00:03:37] S0: Yeah. I think it's just being willing to try something you haven't done before, and that, you know, got to do a lot of that in college. I switched switched careers too. Right? My background was actually mechanical engineering at MIT. Half halfway through that, I took my first programming class, and we had to learn MATLAB, to do simulations and that kind of thing. And I thought I hated programming before this, but I'd never really done it. And I realized it was actually not as bad as I thought it was gonna be, and it was a lot faster. You could, you know, create things on your laptop in a dorm room instead of having to get time in the machine shop and order parts and wait for those to show up and screw up and then have to reorder more parts. You know, it kinda condenses that cycle of weeks and weeks to actually get something built to hours, and there's kinda no limit there. [00:04:17] S1: That's awesome. So you you enjoyed the speed. Yeah. Well, so let's go back to 2021 when you started Chainguard. What was the moment? Obviously, as I said, you'd spent almost a decade at Google. You had really been deep in open source. Where did the idea come from?
00:04:35 · Dan Lorenc
[00:04:35] S0: Yeah. It's a it's a funny story. There was no real idea or plan. You know, I was at Google for a long time. I was doing this open source security stuff for a while. No one really cared about it until the attack on SolarWinds happened. And then all of a sudden, everyone was like, oh, wow. We have to secure our build systems and our dependencies and all of that too. And so the space started blowing up, my cofounder Matt, who's our CTO, he left and took a bunch of time off during the pandemic. So I'd worked with him forever at Google, and he just took a break. And I kept trying to get him to come back to work because the whole space was heating up, and my team was hiring. I hugged him every day for six months. I was texting him, come back. Come back. And one day, he finally said he was ready to work again, but how about I quit and restart a company instead of him coming back? And, you know, I thought about it for a couple days, put a notice the following Monday, and I, you I knew, yeah, I knew if I thought about it too much, I'd talk myself out of it. But it seemed like a good idea that we... And, you know, we didn't really know what we were gonna do when we started. So, you know, we got the company started and spent a lot a long time figuring it out. But this space made sense. We tried things in a lot of different spaces. And I think it's sort of a strength. And I talked to a lot of early stage founders. I'm sure you do too. But if you go in with one idea and you have so much conviction in it, that's great because that can give you the confidence to go get started. But you can't also be wedded and tied to that first idea. The chances of that first idea actually being the right one, pretty low. But being willing to try a couple different things, experiment, and then really double down and invest when you're sure that you that you have the right one, I think it's better in some ways. You know, it's a slower start, but when we had that conviction, we were really ready to go.
00:06:03 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:06:03] S1: Absolutely. I mean, I think being adaptable is, like, the the vital trait of founders where you can follow your nose to where things are working and and where value could be created. For everybody out there listening, what is Chainguard in plain English? And and and maybe for people who are less familiar with it, give us give us a a decent full overview.