Founders Talk: Startups, CEOs, Leadership
108 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 1 year ago - ★★★★★ - 48 ratingsIn-depth, one-on-one conversations with founders, CEOs, and makers. The journey, lessons learned, and the struggles. Let’s do this! Host Adam Stacoviak dives deep into the trials, tribulations, successes, and failures of industry leading entrepreneurs, leaders, innovators, and visionaries.
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Episodes
Refocusing Docker on developer-first and growth
June 02, 2023 20:00 - 1 hour - 55.9 MBThis week Adam is joined by Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker. Scott shares his journey to the CEO role, how he’s leading the company to not only grow revenue, but to also invest in developer facing features, their shift from a enterprise sales focus to a PLG driven model, and we even talk about Docker Desktop, the competition it faces, and the struggle they face when considering making it open source.
Selling to Enterprise
May 05, 2023 20:00 - 2 hours - 113 MBThis week Adam is joined by Michael Grinich, Founder & CEO at WorkOS. Michael shares his journey to build WorkOS, what it takes to cross the Enterprise Chasm, and how he’s building his sales organization for growth.
Builder journey to streaming data platform
April 20, 2023 21:30 - 1 hour - 64.6 MBThis week Adam is joined by Alex Gallego, Founder & CEO at Redpanda Data, to share his builder journey to create the Redpanda streaming data platform.
Creating magical software
March 10, 2023 21:00 - 1 hour - 107 MBThis week Adam is joined by Jori Lallo, Co-founder of Linear, to talk about creating magical software and building high-quality software teams.
Building the best mountain bikes in the world
July 19, 2022 20:00 - 1 hour - 97.8 MBThis week Adam is taking the show off the beaten path to speak with Adam Miller, the founder and CEO of Revel Bikes. Yes that’s right, this episode features a founder of a bike brand, not a tech brand. Adam Miller’s journey to create Revel Bikes is paved with many ups and many downs, a failed partnership, super scrappy weeks and months traveling the world to find the best manufacturing partners, the latest innovations in suspension tech and modern geometry to hit the mountain biking scene, a ...
Enabling a world where all software is reliable
July 15, 2022 15:30 - 1 hour - 98.9 MBThis week Adam is joined by Robert Ross founder and CEO of FireHydrant — the glue layer between your tech stack and your teams to mitigate and resolve incidents at scale. Robert shares his journey to become a software engineer, his time at DigitalOcean, this idea of incident management as a platform and how he shifted his focus from creating courses on incident management to recognizing the value of the software he was creating for the course — what is now known as FireHydrant. We also talk t...
Fireside chat with Jack Dorsey
June 03, 2022 19:30 - 43 minutes - 40.3 MBAdam was invited by our friends at Square to interview Jack Dorsey as part of their annual developer conference called Square Unboxed. Jack Dorsey is one of the most prolific CEOs out there — he’s a hacker turned CEO and is often working at the very edge of what’s to come (at scale). Jack is focused on what the future has to offer, he’s considered an innovator by many. He’s also a Bitcoin maximalist and has positioned himself and Block long on Bitcoin. What you’re about to hear is the firesid...
From GitHub TV to Rewatch
May 18, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 105 MBConnor Sears, founder and CEO of Rewatch, joins Adam to share the journey of creating Rewatch. What began inside of GitHub to help them thrive and connect is now available to every product team on the planet. Rewatch lets teams save, manage, and search all their video content so they can collaborate async and with greater flexibility. We talk about where the tool’s inspiration came from (spoiler alert, inside GitHub it was called GitHub TV which you’ll hear during the show), how teams leverag...
Leading GitLab to IPO
May 10, 2022 20:00 - 1 hour - 64.8 MBThis week Sid Sijbrandij, Co-founder and CEO of GitLab, is back talking with Adam about all the details of their massive IPO last October 2021. To set the stage, this episode was recorded on Feb 1, 2022. During the show Adam mentioned they IPO’d at a $13B market cap, but they actually ended their opening day at approximately $15B. That’s a massive win for open source, GitLab, Sid, and the rest of the team. For loyal listeners you know we’ve had Sid on this show before, so of course we had to ...
Making an open source Stripe for time
May 05, 2022 15:00 - 1 hour - 80 MBThis week Peer Richelsen, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cal.com, joins the show to talk about building the “Stripe for Time” — with a grand mission to connect a billion people by 2031 through calendar scheduling. Cal has grown from an open-source side project to one of the fastest-growing commercial open source companies. We get into all the details — what it means to be an open source Calendly alternative, how they quantify connecting a Billion people by 2031, where there’s room for innovation in...
Building an investment platform for everyone
February 12, 2022 00:00 - 1 hour - 55.9 MBThis week Adam is joined by Joe Percoco — the Co-CEO of Titan, a premier investment manager for everyone. Titan is an investment company, a media, and a tech company, all rolled into one. Mid last year, they closed a $58 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) at a $450 million valuation. They currently have $750 million in assets managed and more than 35,000 clients. Why should Titan exist? In Joe’s words, “Wall Street ignores everyday investors, and caters only to the ultra...
Bringing observability superpowers to all
January 28, 2022 12:00 - 1 hour - 73.3 MBThis week Adam is joined by Christine Yen, co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb. Christine and Adam recorded this show late last year, just after their Series C funding round. They talk about the superpower of observability for developers, how she and Charity Majors got to the place to found Honeycomb, the state of their platform today, what exactly observability is, and their goals for the future of Honeycomb.
Making the last database you’ll ever need
January 14, 2022 20:00 - 1 hour - 79 MBThis week Adam is joined by Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale. Now that PlanetScale is in general availability, Adam had to get Sam on the show to talk about the behind the scenes of building this database platform, how this is the last database you’ll ever need and what that means for developers, why serverless, its open source underpinnings with Vitess, and a preview of what’s to come.
Building on global bare metal
November 24, 2021 19:30 - 1 hour - 85.1 MBThis week Adam is joined by Zac Smith, Co-Founder of Packet and now running Equinix Metal. They talk about the early days of the internet infrastructure space, the beginnings of Packet, the “why” of bare metal, transitioning Packet from startup to global company overnight when they were acquired by Equinix, and how all this for Zac is 20 years in the making.
Making the Web. Faster.
November 05, 2021 19:30 - 1 hour - 73.3 MBToday Adam is joined by Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel. They talk about building the platform that’s making the web faster and lets front-enders do their best work, his framework for leading as a CEO, what’s next for Next.js and Next.js Live, and how everything for Vercel is built on “Develop. Preview. Ship.”
Journey to CEO, again
October 28, 2021 17:30 - 1 hour - 68.6 MBToday Adam is joined by Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. Evan’s journey to become the CEO was not by way of founder, in this company. Evan has founded several companies in the past, and he’s been in a CEO position for more than 22 years. But InfluxData was founded by Paul Dix, and Paul knew years ago that his role (best role?) was to lead the technical and product direction of the company, which lead him to Evan. Today we share that story as well as a glimpse into operating the business that b...
The future of code search
October 20, 2021 19:00 - 1 hour - 70.2 MBToday Adam is joined by Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph. He’s been tracking Sourcegraph for years now and knew one day they would hit Unicorn status, and that happened this year. They’re just off a massive $125M Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.625B valuation to bring code search to every developer. The future of code search has never been more clear and we’re excited to share today’s show with you.
Iterating to globally distributed apps and databases
September 03, 2021 20:00 - 1 hour - 96.5 MBToday Adam is joined by Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly.io — a platform for running full stack apps and databases close to users. This conversation with Kurt talks through his journey as a developer and entrepreneur, fundraising, getting into Y Combinator (twice), and how they’ve iterated on the Fly platform since 2017 to get to where they are right now.
The acquisition of a lifetime
August 26, 2021 11:00 - 1 hour - 72.3 MBOn today’s show Adam is joined by John Nunemaker (an old friend). For some of you listening you might remember John’s appearance on The Changelog #11, which was basically forever ago. Or his company Ordered List — they made Gauges, Harmony, and Speaker Deck which was quite popular in its time — so much so that they attracted the attention of Chris Wanstrath, one of the co-founders of GitHub to acquire Ordered List. The rest as they say is history. Today, John and I go back through that histor...
Leading Auth0 to a $6.5 billion acquisition
August 13, 2021 11:00 - 56 minutes - 51.9 MBThis week Adam is joined by Eugenio Pace, co-founder and CEO of Auth0. Auth0 is a for developers, by developers identity, access, security, and authentication platform built for the cloud that secures billions of logins every year. Mid 2020 they raised $120 million at a $1.92 billion valuation after being told no several times. Then, earlier this year in March they announced they were being acquired by Okta for $6.5 billion, in a bold and future-thinking all stock deal. This episode is full o...
From open source to commercially viable
August 09, 2021 21:00 - 1 hour - 110 MBThis week Adam is joined by Asim Aslam, the founder of Micro - a new cloud platform entirely focused on the developer experience of consuming and publishing public APIs. Asim’s journey spans many years of open source work on Micro. His sole focus right now, is evolving that work into a commercially viable business. This episode is jam-packed with stories of great timing, grit, resilence, success and failure, and, of course, lessons learned.
From disrupting the cloud to IPO
July 12, 2021 20:30 - 1 hour - 64.7 MBThis week Adam is joined by Mitch Wainer, previously CMO at DigitalOcean and a member of the founding team. They talk about his journey as an entrepreneur and marketer, the early days at DigitalOcean, and everything that went into disrupting the cloud with blazing fast SSDs. Back in March (2021), DigitalOcean started trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) — this obviously earned Mitch and many others a very large payday. They also talk about the work Mitch is doing now with Welcome and...
The journey to massive scale and ultra-resilience
March 26, 2021 18:00 - 1 hour - 64.3 MBThis week Adam talks with Spencer Kimball, CEO and Co-founder of Cockroach Labs — makers of CockroachDB an open source cloud-native distributed SQL database. Cockroach Labs recently raised $160 million dollars on a $2 billion dollar valuation. In this episode, Spencer shares his journey in open source, startups and entrepreneurship, and what they’re doing to build CockroachCloud to meet the needs of applications that require massive scale and ultra-resilience.
Intensely focused on building a software company
February 23, 2021 20:30 - 1 hour - 74.4 MBThis week Adam talks with John-Daniel Trask, co-founder & CEO of Raygun. Raygun is an award-winning application monitoring company founded by John-Daniel Trask (better known as JD) and Jeremy Boyd in Wellington, New Zealand. They have revenues in the 8 digits annually, and have done it with very little funding (~1.7M USD). Today’s conversation with JD shares a ton of wisdom. Listen twice and take notes.
Balancing business and open source
November 23, 2020 22:00 - 1 hour - 87.2 MBRaj Dutt is the founder and CEO of Grafana Labs. Grafana has become the world’s most popular open source technology used to compose observability dashboards (we use Grafana here at Changelog). Raj and team are 100% focused on building a sustainable business around open source. They have this “big tent” open source ecosystem philosophy that’s driving every aspect of building their business around their open source, as well as other projects in the open source community. But, to understand the ...
Slow and steady wins
August 03, 2020 19:30 - 1 hour - 66.1 MBJeff Sheldon is the founder and creator of Ugmonk. Jeff is a designer by trade, and an entrepreneur by accident. I been following Jeff’s journey for the better part of Ugmonk’s existence. I’m also a customer. Jeff and I hold several similar values near and dear to our hearts. In addition to my appreciation for Jeff’s product design abilities, and how he leads his business, I also appreciate Jeff’s awareness and focus on the long hard path.
From acquisition to full conviction
July 03, 2020 18:15 - 1 hour - 84.1 MBGuy Podjarny is the Founder of Snyk, a security platform that empowers software-driven businesses to develop fast and stay secure. Prior to Snyk, Guy founded Blaze which was acquired by Akamai and became CTO. We talked through the topic of acquisition — the sale, the merge, the learnings, and why Guy might not be planning for Snyk to be acquired anytime soon. We started the conversation with Snyk’s recent raise of $150 million dollars.
Leading GitLab to $100M ARR
June 09, 2020 21:00 - 1 hour - 56.8 MBSid Sijbrandij is the Co-founder and CEO of GitLab — an all-remote company and complete DevOps platform. As a company, they have their eyes set on taking the company public to IPO and they’re very outspoken about their culture, open handbook, and how they work as an all-remote company. We talk through where Sid came from, the early days of GitLab, why IPO vs a private sale (like GitHub), what it means to put “family and friends first, work second,” how we should view work, and his biggest fea...
Building a real programmable robot
May 08, 2020 21:00 - 1 hour - 71.1 MBThe role of a father plays a pivotal role in a child’s life. Ian Bernstein is a former Founder of Sphero and is now the Founder and Head of Product of Misty Robotics — they’re building the first programmable robot for the home and business. It’s called Misty II. The journey of building Misty II started when Ian was 5 years old and his dad bought him an Apple IIe.
Becoming an accidental founder
January 24, 2020 21:30 - 41 minutes - 56.6 MBMike McDerment is the founder and CEO of FreshBooks. Believe it or not, Mike became a founder by accident. Like many of us, Mike had an itch that he just had to scratch. One thing led to another and soon enough FreshBooks became a key tool in the belt of many freelancers and agencies looking for an easy way to send invoices and get paid quickly online. We talk through the early days of FreshBooks and how things came to be, why they created a secret competitor to iterate on a bold idea for the...
Mastering the art of quitting
July 05, 2019 11:00 - 1 hour - 135 MBLynne Tye is the founder of Key Values, a platform where developers find engineering teams that share their values. To be more precise, Lynne is a solo-founder. She’s also a team of one. Lynne’s path to becoming a founder was anything but typical. She had plans to follow in her parent’s and sister’s footsteps to go into academia, and got two years into pursuing her PhD in Neuroscience before she made one of the best choices in her life — she quit. Lynne has mastered the art of quitting, at th...
Failing to build a billion-dollar company
June 14, 2019 17:00 - 1 hour - 99 MBSahil Lavingia is the founder and CEO of Gumroad, a platform for creators to sell the things they make. Since 2011 Gumroad has sent over $200 million dollars to creators. That’s a big number. Sahil’s ambitions lead him to believe that Gumroad would become a billion-dollar company, have hundreds of employees, and eventually IPO. That didn’t happen. We talk through Sahil’s journey with Gumroad, why it failed to meet his goals, the path he’s on today and the things he now values…but to understan...
What are you optimizing for?
May 31, 2019 11:00 - 1 hour - 101 MBSaron Yitbarek is the founder and CEO of CodeNewbie — one of the most supportive community of programmers and people learning to code. Saron hosts the CodeNewbie podcast, Command Line Heroes from Red Hat, and she’s also the creator of Codeland Conference taking place on July 22 this year in New York City. We talk through getting started, lessons learned, mental health, developing and running a conference…but our conversation begins with a pivotal question asked of Saron…“What are you optimizi...
Building a hardware/software product company
May 23, 2019 11:00 - 1 hour - 91 MBColin Billings is the founder and CEO of Orro where they’ve built the first truly intelligent home lighting system. It knows when you’re in the room, and adjusts the lights automatically for you. But Colin’s path to starting this company wasn’t a straight line. Like most innovative products, Orro has an interesting beginning — after-all, they’re going up against the giants.
Zero up-front costs for a CS education
April 19, 2019 14:00 - 45 minutes - 62.7 MBWhat would be the impact on the world if a Computer Science education was available to you completely free of charge until you get a job in that field paying $50,000 or more? That’s the question that drives Austen Allred and the team behind Lambda School. Lambda School is a revolutionary new school that invests in its students and they completely align their interests with their students. Seems like a novel idea, right? But Austen’s path to Silicon Valley was where things began for him, so th...
Entrepreneurship in medicine
March 27, 2019 17:00 - 1 hour - 90 MBDr. Steve Hotze is the founder and CEO of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center in Houston, TX where they’ve helped more than 30,000 patients to take charge of their health. But Steve Hotze is more than just a doctor — he’s an entrepreneur and a pioneer who has spent his career pushing back on the HMO’s, PPO’s, insurance companies, and big-pharma to build a medical practice that’s focused on one thing…the patient’s health.
Isaac Schlueter on building npm and hiring a CEO
January 25, 2019 12:05 - 1 hour - 93.8 MBWith JavaScript in every corner of software development and npm in every corner right along with it, the rise of npm can be drawn as a hockey stick up and to the right with Isaac Schlueter at the top grinning ear to ear. After reading their recent announcement to hire a CEO, I knew it was time to talk one-on-one with Isaac about building npm and the journey of hiring his successor.
Leading data-driven software teams and products
December 21, 2018 22:30 - 1 hour - 122 MBFor the final show of 2018 I’m talking with Travis Kimmel, the CEO of GitPrime. Travis has spent years as an engineering manager. Travis’s mission at GitPrime is to bring crystal clear visibility into the software development process and bridge the communication gap between engineering and stakeholders. This communication gap is often an ongoing plague in product development lifecycle. We talked through focus, tech debt, leading teams, predictability, and more.
How $3.8M in seed funding started Gatsby as an open source company
November 30, 2018 18:00 - 1 hour - 99.1 MBKyle Mathews is the founder and CEO of Gatsby, a new company he’s building around an open source project of the same name. Gatsby as a project describes itself as a flexible modern website framework and blazing fast static site generator for React.js. At the macro level — Kyle’s career has been focused on a better way to build and ship websites. It seems he’s done just that with Gatsby’s launch in late May 2015…since then he’s taken on a co-founder and a seed round of $3.8M to form Gatsby Inc.
Tidelift's mission is to pay open source maintainers
September 21, 2018 19:00 - 1 hour - 94 MBDonald Fischer and the team at Tidelift are on a mission of making open source work better — for everyone. To pay the maintainers of open source software they are putting a new spin on a highly successful business model that’s a win-win for the maintainers as well as the software teams using the software. In this episode we dig into that backstory and Donald’s journey.
From dropout to CEO of Sentry and taking on New Relic
September 16, 2018 19:00 - 1 hour - 99.8 MBDavid Cramer dropped out of high school AND college, but that didn’t stop him. He ended up teaching himself programming and eventually landed his first job as the webmaster of a World of Warcraft community website. What a beginning… We talked through “the rough slog” period of Sentry and how David powered through to traction and enough profit for him and his partner to go full time, raise three rounds of funding, and take on New Relic.
BONUS: Growing a successful sales team at Sentry
September 14, 2018 19:00 - 10 minutes - 14.9 MBHere’s a bonus segment from episode #57 of Founders Talk with David Cramer, co-founder and CEO of Sentry. Check the feed for the full length episode (later today). We talked about sales in the full length episode, but this BONUS segment is a completely isolated conversation that’s not included in the full length episode — so don’t gloss over this thinking it’s just a teaser.
Eric Berry is funding open source with CodeFund
August 28, 2018 11:00 - 1 hour - 112 MBEric Berry started Code Sponsor a year ago because of his passion for finding ways to sustain and fund open source developers. He ultimately had to shutdown due to potential legal issues with GitHub, but was given new life as CodeFund when he went to work for ConsenSys and Gitcoin. We talked through the backstory of this idea, why he’s so passionate about funding open source, ethical advertising, being unapologetically focused on your mission, the value of honesty and openness, and the future...
Side hustle to $35M ARR at Zapier
August 17, 2018 11:00 - 1 hour - 95.3 MBBryan Helmig, Wade Foster, and Mike Knoop started Zapier in 2011 as a side hustle. They ultimately applied to Y Combinator, twice. And this year they hit $35 Million dollars in annual revenue. I talked with Bryan Helmig (CTO) through the backstory of starting this company, being 100% distributed, the flexibility as well as the constraints of being remote-only, how they reached product market fit, growth, scaling their teams, and how they bring everyone together for company wide retreats.
From side project to $7.25M for Unsplash
July 06, 2018 19:00 - 1 hour - 111 MBWhen Mikael Cho started Unsplash from its small beginning as a Tumblr blog and side project, he had no idea it would have such a huge impact and ultimately disrupt the photography industry. In this episode, Mikael shares the backstory of Unsplash, how it got started, keeping things focused, levers of growth, flipping the marketing funnel, turning free into a business, raising $7.25 million to build a new economy for photography, and the impact of an API.
Starting over from zero
June 28, 2018 17:00 - 57 minutes - 78.6 MBDanielle Morrill joined the show to talk about how she’s starting over from zero after the recent acquisition of Mattermark to FullContact where she held the role of CEO and co-founder who walked away with “zero dollars and a job”. We talked through the details of the company, the acquisition process, the deal — which she brokered herself — as well as her outlook on the startup grind and silicon valley today, and what she’s planning to do next.
Danielle Morrill on starting over from zero
June 28, 2018 17:00 - 57 minutes - 78.6 MBDanielle Morrill joined the show to talk about how she’s starting over from zero after the recent acquisition of Mattermark to FullContact where she held the role of CEO and co-founder who walked away with “zero dollars and a job”. We talked through the details of the company, the acquisition process, the deal — which she brokered herself — as well as her outlook on the startup grind and silicon valley today, and what she’s planning to do next.
Growing Open Collective
June 15, 2018 11:05 - 1 hour - 98.8 MBPia Mancini joined the show for the first episode back from a nearly 5 year hiatus. We talked about her work at DemocracyEarth, being a mother, her new role as CEO of Open Collective, their focus, supporting ad-hoc community formation all around the world, their revenue and growth plans, and their path to sustainability.
Pia Mancini is now CEO and growing Open Collective
June 15, 2018 11:05 - 1 hour - 98.8 MBPia Mancini joined the show for the first episode back from a nearly 5 year hiatus. We talked about her work at DemocracyEarth, being a mother, her new role as CEO of Open Collective, their focus, supporting ad-hoc community formation all around the world, their revenue and growth plans, and their path to sustainability.
🔥 Founders Talk is back!
June 15, 2018 11:00 - 3 minutes - 4.57 MBIt’s been just shy of 5 years since I’ve published a new episode to this podcast. The break was planned actually. Long story short, I had to focus. If you want to hear the slightly longer explanation, you should listen.