Paul Klein is the founder and CEO of Browserbase - one of the fastest growing DevTools in 2024. Browserbase is a headless browser API focused on helping AI Agent startups. We dig into: Why browser automation? How Browserbase hit "VC-market-fit" Visionary is revisionist-history Tips for hiring your friends Why buying a jacket is like buying a devtool Building an in-person DevTool in San Francisco Making priorities (what Paul doesn’t care about). Where to find Paul and Browserbase: Twitter/X https...
Oct 24, 2024•42 min•Ep. 105
In 2017, Rasmus Makwarth sold his previous APM (Application Performance Managment) startup Opbeat to Elastic for an undisclosed amount. Opbeat became Elastic APM, which became a big part of the Elastic Observability solution and Rasmus became Senior Director of Product Management - with a focus on Developer Experience. Today, Rasmus is the founder and CEO of Bucket.co - a feature flagging tool built for B2B teams. Bucket has raised $5.7m from investors such as Project A and Creandum. We dig into...
Oct 17, 2024•30 min•Ep. 104
Shawn Wang (aka swyx) is the founder of smol.ai (AI news curation), and the cohost of Latent Space (popular AI Engineer podcast). Plus, Shawn started the AI Engineer movement with his essay Rise of the AI Engineer and organized two incredible AI engineer conferences in the past twelve months - AI Engineer World's Fair and AI Engineer Summit And Shawn has angel invested in DevTools like Airbyte , Railway , Supabase , Replay.io , Stackblitz , Flutterflow , Fireworks.ai while running the DevTools a...
Oct 10, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 103
Sagar is the CEO and co-founder of Speakeasy - an API tooling platform. We talk about the journey of Speakeasy. The challenges of startup life. How they developed the product and how they work with influencers in a surprising way. Building relationships with influencers can significantly enhance product development. Importance of listening to customers Fine line between product and consulting The role of documentation in user experience Being responsive to customer needs builds long-term relatio...
Oct 04, 2024•56 min•Ep. 102
In this conversation, Anurag Goel, founder and CEO of Render, discusses the evolution of Render as a cloud infrastructure platform is actually simple to use. He shares insights from his time at Stripe, emphasizing the importance of customer focus, crafting a seamless user experience, and the philosophy of progressive disclosure of complexity. Anurag also highlights the significance of customer support as an integral part of the product and offers advice for aspiring founders on finding their pas...
Sep 26, 2024•41 min•Ep. 101
This is our 100th episode! And we're thrilled to welcome back fan favourite Ant Wilson - the cofounder and CTO of Supabase. They discuss the evolution of Supabase, the importance of open source, and effective marketing strategies. Ant shares insights on community engagement, the significance of developer-centric branding, and the challenges of navigating the enterprise landscape. We also touch on the rise of AI and vector databases, emphasizing the power of open source in development. The conver...
Sep 24, 2024•43 min•Ep. 100
Nick Gomez is the co-founder and CEO of InKeep. InKeep is an AI customer support tool focused on Developer Tools. They discuss the importance of understanding developer needs, the role of AI in technical support, and how community engagement can enhance support efforts. What we discuss AI support for developer tools is different from traditional B2B SaaS support. Developers often seek help through documentation and community forums. Scaling technical support requires understanding the developer'...
Sep 22, 2024•39 min•Ep. 99
Adam Frankl has been VP at four Developer Tools unicorns, including JFrog, Neo4J and Sourcegraph. Adam is the author of the Developer Facing Startup and recently launched the Developer Facing Startup Founders Academy: a program that helps founders launch and grow their developer tools. In this conversation, Adam Frankl discusses the critical role of a Technical Advisory Board (TAB) in the success of developer-facing startups. He emphasizes the importance of understanding developer needs, effecti...
Sep 20, 2024•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 98
In this conversation, with Michael Grinich - founder and CEO of WorkOS. WorkOS helps you start selling to enterprise customers with just a few lines of code. We discuss the challenges and strategies of navigating tough conversations in a startup environment, the importance of understanding engineering leadership, and the role of empathy in user experience. The conversation covers the significance of conferences for startups, the necessity of articulating the 'why' behind a business, and the chal...
Sep 16, 2024•56 min•Ep. 97
In this episode, we're joined by returning guest Colin Sidoti - the cofounder and CEO of Clerk. Clerk is a comprehensive user management platform. What we cover: - The origin story and South Park Commons - Clerk's dramatic growth since the first episode - what changed? What did they do right? - 7% growth per week - Tiny details that improve the developer experience - How to you know if a change is better - watching people's faces as they try it - The difficulties of bringing new joiners up to sp...
Sep 12, 2024•45 min•Ep. 96
David is the CEO of Arcjet. Arcjet is a tool that helps developers protect their apps once they go into production. It offers Bot detection, rate limiting, email validation, attack protection, data redaction. David is also the creator of the console.dev newsletter and podcast. It's where thousands of developers discover developer tools. In this episode we discuss how David thinks about creating content. Why he believes go-to-market is more difficult than product and how he works on creating grea...
Sep 04, 2024•31 min•Ep. 95
Vlad Matsiiako is the CEO and co-founder of Infisical. Infisical is an Open Source Secret Management tool. What we discuss: - The story of Infisical - How the team has made Infisical easy to adopt - How being open source helps you with trust at the beginning stages - How do enterprises adopt Infisical - How do developers at enterprises discover tools like Infisical - The different mini-games at various stages of a startup (Dalton Caldwell) Links Vlad - https://www.linkedin.com/in/vmatsiiako/ Inf...
Aug 29, 2024•40 min•Ep. 94
Andrew Lisowski is the cohost of devtools.fm. In this episode we talk about why Andrew started devtools.fm and what he's learned along the way. Life as an open source maintainer. How the JavaScript ecosystem is different to other developer ecosystems. The importance of dogfooding. The power of DHH. Why obsessing over one problem eventually leads to great results Should DevTools start podcasts and how? Links: devtools.fm - https://www.devtools.fm/ Andrew's Twitter - https://x.com/HipsterSmoothie ...
Aug 24, 2024•35 min•Ep. 93
Robby (Amanda Robson) is the co-host of Open Source Startup Podcast (with Tim Chen). In this episode we discuss: There are many ways to open source success When open source is a good strategy and when it isn't Why open source projects usually need time to brew How to know if your project is venture scale Why Robby believes in the Open Source model Robby is working on a highly mysterious new thing 👀 Links: - Robby's Twitter/X https://x.com/amanda_robs?lang=en - Open Source Startup Podcast https:...
Aug 15, 2024•30 min•Ep. 92
Hamzah Chaudhary is the cofounder of Lightdash, an open source, self-serve BI tool. In this episode, Hamzah shares: Their initial plan to build a consultancy and how it morphed into a product to solve their customer's needs How open source works as a strategy Bringing software engineering tools to the BI domain How they reach their users How they partner with bigger organizations Links: Lightdash https://www.lightdash.com/ Lightdash GitHub https://github.com/lightdash/lightdash Hamzah's Twitter ...
Aug 08, 2024•32 min•Ep. 91
Han Wang is co-founder of Mintlify - modern, out the box documentation. In this episode, Han shares the story of Mintlify and how to make great docs. We even talk about the time Paul Graham told them to change their name. What we cover: - the origin story of Mintlify - what is good documentation - the process of documentation - how AI is affecting documentation - why PG told them to change their name Links: - Han https://han.dev/ - Mintlify https://mintlify.com/...
Aug 01, 2024•40 min•Ep. 90
Kate Holterhoff - an analyst from RedMonk - shares why frontend developers are increasingly dictating the adoption of new developer tools. Kate shares specific examples, including Supabase. Links: Frontend Developers: the Newest New Kingmakers https://redmonk.com/kholterhoff/2024/02/15/frontend-developers-the-newest-new-kingmakers/ Kate's website https://www.kateholterhoff.com/ RedMonk https://redmonk.com/ Kate's Twitter/X https://x.com/KateHolterhoff...
Jul 25, 2024•33 min•Ep. 89
Vivian Dufour is the CEO and co-founder of Meterian. Meterian is an open source vulnerability scanner. In this episode we talk about topics like: Selling to enterprises Why you need to make your product easy to test Hiring and managing salespeople Links: Meterian: https://www.meterian.io/ Vivian Dufour - https://www.linkedin.com/in/viviandufour/
Jul 18, 2024•33 min•Ep. 88
Ellen Chisa is a partner at Boldstart Ventures. Prior to Boldstart, Ellen founded Darklang - a programming language. Before Darklang, Ellen worked in product. What we discussed: Startups should focus on building one SDK and doing it well, rather than trying to build multiple SDKs at once. North Star metrics Developer tooling companies can learn from consumer-facing companies in terms of marketing and creating an identity for their product. Being authentic as a founder and actively engaging with ...
Jul 05, 2024•38 min•Ep. 87
How do you write a developer quick start guide that they will love? That's what we talk about with Amit Jotwani. Amit is the founder of HelloDX and previously worked in developer experience at Retool and Amazon Alexa. This came about because I was reading Amit's fantastic guide on EveryDeveloper. Links: Amit's website https://ajot.me/ HelloDX https://hellodx.co/ Craft Quick Start Guides That Developers Will Love https://everydeveloper.com/quick-start-guides/ Amit's Twitter/X https://x.com/amit T...
Jun 27, 2024•40 min•Ep. 86
James Hawkins is the cofounder and CEO of PostHog. PostHog is a platform to analyze, test, observe, and deploy new features. This is the second time James has been on and the episode is mostly about how they run PostHog. It's a pretty unconventional approach - probably because James thinks very deeply about how organizations should operate. What we discuss: How PostHog hire His approach to one-on-one meetings The role of engineers in product development The impact of open source projects on Post...
Jun 20, 2024•40 min•Ep. 85
Greg Lazarus and Matt Althauser are two of the cofounders of Polychrome - a company that buys small to medium sized B2B software businesses: with a focus on Developer Tools. Their portfolio includes the feature flagging tool Flagsmith (we recorded an episode with them last week) and the browser automation tool Browserless. In this episode we cover the ins and outs of buying developer tools. Links: - Polychrome https://www.polychrome.com/ - Matt Althauser https://x.com/malthauser?lang=en - Greg L...
Jun 13, 2024•46 min•Ep. 84
Ben Rometsch is the founder of Flagsmith. Flagsmith is a Feature Flag & Remote Config Service that recently reached $3m ARR. Ben candidly shares exactly how they started, how they got enterprise customers and how they worked with Polychrome to take Flagsmith to the next level. Links: Ben's Twitter https://x.com/dabeeeenster Flagsmith https://www.flagsmith.com/ Polychrome https://polychrome.com/ This episode is sponsored by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, Wo...
Jun 06, 2024•50 min•Ep. 83
Aaron Francis is someone who needs little introduction. Especially if you've ever used Laravel or MySQL. Aaron built up the highly acclaimed PlanetScale YouTube channel and now publishes content on his own channel and founded Try Hard Studios to help developer tools make amazing video content. Here are some quotes from Aaron's viewers: hey man your videos kick ass and i cannot thank you enough for your approach with these. your videos can be watched once and understood... every single one of the...
May 30, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 82
Dani Grant is the founder of Jam.dev - bug reporting that developers love. In this episode we discuss: Product development & user retention Iterating to product market fit Branding - what it is/why it matters Prioritising product features based on feedback AI powered debugging Links: Jam.dev https://jam.dev/ Dani’s Twitter https://twitter.com/thedanigrant This episode is sponsored by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise feature...
May 23, 2024•35 min•Ep. 81
Chris Bell is the founder of Knock.app - flexible, reliable notifications infrastructure. In this episode we discuss: Designing APIs The importance of champions when selling to enterprise How do you justify cost of a developer tool? Selling to platform teams Links: Knock https://knock.app/ Twitter https://twitter.com/cjbell_ This episode is sponsored by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit log...
May 16, 2024•42 min•Ep. 80
Jason Bosco is the founder of Typesense. Typesense is the Open Source alternative to Algolia. Typesense is a batteries-included Search API. We discuss how Jason built Typesense to be a hugely successful company without VC funding. We talk about what revenue-funding means and why it should be considered as a viable option for founders. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and...
May 09, 2024•42 min•Ep. 79
An interview with Igor Zalutski & Utpal Nadiger from Digger.dev. Digger is an Open Source Infrastructure as Code management tool that helps orchestrate Terraform and OpenTofu within your CI/CD system. We talk about: What changed since Jack worked with Digger How they pivoted four times to find PMF How do you know you have something OpenTofu & ThePrimeagen This episode is sponsored by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise fea...
May 02, 2024•34 min•Ep. 78
Dana Oshiro is a General Partner at Heavybit. Heavybit is a VC that invests exclusively in developer-first startups. What we discuss: One sharp thing. Finding an addressable chunk of a bigger opportunity. Thinking big & small Are 5 people seriously going to support our migration from DataDog? At Facebook you had a lot of support people/systems you're forgetting Finding the sidedoor Stepping up as a founder Fear of hitting up the people you respect. Best founders build for themselves Do found...
Apr 25, 2024•48 min•Ep. 77
Alex Bouchard is the cofounder of Hookdeck. Hookdeck is an event gateway for asynchronous applications. What we discuss: - What is Hookdeck? - Category vs pivot - Gartner categories Links: - Alex: https://twitter.com/AlexBouchardd - Hookdeck https://hookdeck.com/ This episode is sponsored by WorkOS . If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs....
Apr 19, 2024•36 min•Ep. 76
