Building Tools Devs Love, with Erica Brescia (Redpoint) - S04E02

In this episode, we speak with Erica Brescia, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures, and previously COO at GitHub. We discuss what's changed since she started her first DevTools company back in the mid-2000s, how to build tools developers love, whether open source is just a marketing strategy, and what she looks for in software investments. She also sheds light on how to get a new product in front of developers, whether or not more people should be bootstrapping their companies as she did, and how to scale your marketing team as you grow.

Hosted by David Mytton (Console) and Jean Yang (Akita Software).

Things mentioned:

ABOUT ERICA BRESCIA

Erica Brescia is the managing director at Redpoint Ventures, an early-stage venture fund, investing in primarily, enterprise software with a focus on DevTools and open source. Notable developer-first companies that they have invested in include HashiCorp, Snowflake, Stripe,  Twilio, and LaunchDarkly, among others. Prior to this, she spent close to 20 years as a founder and operator. She founded a company called Bitnami where she bootstrapped $1 million in funding. She was also the chief operating officer at GitHub.

Highlights:

[Erica Brescia]: If you look at the very early days of software development and open source in particular, we've gone from this real DIY kind of bespoke, “The cool thing to do is compile your own kernel,” to a focus on time optimization and “How can you build the best thing possible the fastest?” If I had to look at a theme, that's a theme that I think about a lot. It's no longer about doing everything yourself. Instead, it's about really open source and building on the work of others, right? Over 90% of software developed today is built on top of open source, and most things that you need, from a building blocks perspective, to build a new app already exist in many cases. So now it's about, “Hey, what tools are out there? How can I engage with the community? How can I learn from others? How can I participate in things whether it's Stack Overflow, or building and sharing code on GitHub, or discussing things and issues?” It's much more collaborative and intertwined. I think that allows people to build new things much more quickly.

— [0:02:51 - 0:04:10]

[Erica Brescia]: I think a lot of companies underestimate the amount of effort that is required in building a true open-source community, where you're getting folks contributing to the core of that project. That's a material investment. A good way to think about it is you're actually taking a lot of what you might traditionally spend on marketing and instead investing that in your team that supports the growth and health and engagement of this community, which is no small feat. Then you can use that to build awareness and a bottoms-up adoption of your software in a way that just sheer traditional marketing would never allow you to do. Then you can layer a sales motion on top of that.

— [0:16:23 - 0:17:12]

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