Orchestrate all the Things - Open-source backend as a service Appwrite gets $10M seed funding to commercialize traction. Featuring CEO / Founder Eldad Fux

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

Appwrite, an open source platform that offers a slew of features to developers, aims to capitalize on its grass-roots popularity. Article published on ZDNet

Welcome to the Orchestrate All the Things podcast. I'm George Amadiotis and we'll be connecting the dots together. Upright, an open-source platform that offers SEO features to developers, aims to capitalize on its grassroots popularity. I hope you will enjoy the podcast. If you like my work, you can follow Linked Data Orchestration on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Okay, so thanks, Eldad thanks for making the time for the chat

today and well congratulations as well are in order I guess since the occasion is that you're getting some seed funding for the project you have created and we'll get that but actually before we get to the specifics I just wanted to ask you to do a quick introduction about yourself and your background and the open source project you have created and you know what motivated you to do that basically. Yeah sure so I'm a dad and I'm based in Tel Aviv in Israel. And since I think I was 12, so most of my adult and non-adult life. And coding is my biggest passion. And I started learning how to code basically in the open source community. Back when I was 12, I didn't really have lots of ways to buy stuff or any credit card to buy any servers.

So open source was the only possibility for me to learn how to code and to hack my way around things. And that's how I started coding. I think when I was 16, I already started my first business building online website with small local stores in my hometown. And when I reached the age of 22, I got my first engineering job as a junior engineer at a company called Wallah, which you can think of as the Israeli equivalent to Yahoo, just in Hebrew. I've been a junior engineer and I've also been there and senior engineer got promoted to be an architect and

also the R&D manager responsible on all the media content there and then I finished there my seven years as the CTO and left to open my first startup which was in the human resources world not very related to what I'm doing today but that I think was the initial idea of building the art pipe. And I started art pipe two years ago, mainly to solve my own issues. I felt like software engineering became really, really complex, and I tried to create an abstraction layer that will allow me to basically move faster and enjoy my day-to-day work both as a tech leader and as a software engineer and when we when I released it to the open source

community it basically became viral. I can't really put the finger exactly what made it viral but I guess when you build something to solve your own problem, that's a very authentic way to approach a problem. And lucky for me, it seems like a lot of other developers related to those problems. And our community started going really, really fast and until today. Okay, great. Thanks. That's a good intro. And I already had a few questions lined up for you but your intro gave me a couple of more questions actually. So right thanks for the intro to the project as well so how you started Upright and why and I guess the first topic I wanted to explore with you was kind of definitions, really. So in the

press release that I got about upright, it was referred to under a term which is known as known as bus or backend as a service. And I have to admit that initially, you know, I just scanned the the text, and I had the impression that it was a database really. So I was thinking, well, okay, so why not call it database as a service? And I would argue that in many respects, today's databases run as a service in the cloud, you could argue are somehow different to what, somehow similar, I'm sorry, to what Upright does. And, you know, to bring back another kind of perhaps not so fashionable term today,

but it used to be pretty fashionable up until recently, there's also the so-called platform as a service offering. So how would you say, you know, as a category in general, the backend as a service is similar or different to those two? Well, I think there are a lot of similarities with both. I think backend as a service today is a collective of maybe databases as a service, as long as pass, because you can see a lot of those characteristics inside the solution of a backend as a service. How I view it, I think backend as a service is an abstraction layer that tries to collect a lot of different services and create this unified experience for developers. So unlike database as a service or DBaaS, backend as a service actually contains more than just a database.

It's a collective of a database, an authentication platform, a user management platform, a storage platform, and a cloud functions platform, and many more. Like the limits are probably very blurry where back-end as a service really ends. But I think if you try to compare it to PaaS, I think back-end as a service is trying to bridge a bigger gap than what PaaS initially tried to bridge. Because if you look at services like AWS and GCP today, they've done a really great job abstracting the complexity that used to be in running your own infrastructure or managing servers in general. And Deccan as a service today is basically abstracting

the new complexity that those services created and allow developers to get all those capabilities, those great capabilities of cloud solutions. But in the language and the tools that they already know how to use, meaning AppWrite is giving developers API and SDKs that developers already know how to consume. So there isn't that learning curve doesn't exist, which makes developers use those tools and consume them much faster. And I think that's also a reason why developers are showing so much love to the backend as a service category today. And you see the upright probe and other similar companies are going in the same way

okay so would you say that one of the key features then of backend as a service is this kind of abstract as functioning as a kind of abstraction layer over different cloud vendors so is it also a feature of upright can you use it you know regardless of your cloud backend. Yeah, exactly. That's one of the main features along with some others, but we definitely see ourselves as an abstraction layer on top of classic cloud providers today, such as AWS GCP and others. And we provide those same capabilities, but in language that developers appreciate more, in my opinion and I think

a lot of the game is how do you create a better developer experience at something that our product is really focused on. Yeah and another feature which I think is pretty central actually and definitely caught my eye when reading what Upright was about was I think the fact that you can use it both as a cloud cloud-based installation as well as locally so not only do you abstract over different cloud vendors but you can also develop locally which I think is a pretty important feature yeah I think it's very important for developers to be able to run their own infrastructure locally as

well as on any cloud permits and upright is completely agnostic to any platform. Basically, upright can run on any infrastructure that can docker container including your own local machine or even like that's one of our most interesting feature up, it can run on a Raspberry Pi three or four and that's pretty amazing. You can run it everywhere and it's completely unopinionated. And in the age where data regulation and privacy become more and more central to a lot of companies, organizations, and even governments, this is a key functionality that's probably going to be well used by a lot of companies and teams as it is right now.

Yeah, interesting. I didn't actually know what you just mentioned about the ability to run on Raspberry Pis, for example. And I wonder who came up with it and how come it entered your roadmap, let's say. And I think it's timely because, well, at the moment, it seems like everyone's moving to the cloud, but edge computing is going to be bigger and bigger. And so the ability to run on resource, well, resource-deprived, let's say, environments is going to be more and more important. Yeah, actually, I won't take the credit for that.

I think I was in a conference when I gave a talk about upright and someone told me this solution is awesome. I'm going to run it on my IoT infrastructure. And I was like, oh, that's an interesting idea. I haven't thought about that. And thanks to the fact that upright is an open source project, we really view our community as this secret weapon that always direct us to the right direction. It doesn't really allow us to make anything.

We started getting lots of requests. How can we run upright on ARM-based devices? We want to run it on Pi 4. And we started implementing it. And actually, I think that's one of the features that required most collaborators in our community to get done because we needed to adopt all our infrastructure to work on AI.

And we got it done and we get great feedback from developers all over the world that are using upright on five, four to create some crazy things that initially I've never imagined would be possible with upright. I think that's also the beauty about API that we assume to not assume how people are going to use our solution. It's so vast and diverse that we can see amazing things being created with it. Okay, so what else from your feature list would you single out as

you know something you're really happy to have achieved? And then taking a kind of step back, let's say, how would you say upright compares to other alternatives for backend as a service? Yeah, so first of all, we see a lot of features requested in our community and we really try to follow them up. And we have our public roadmap on our GitHub repository which we try to keep as much as sync as possible with our internal roadmap to be able to be as transparent as possible with our community but looking back at how we differentiate ourselves

I think ApoE differentiates itself in two or three even centralized ways. First of all, we built our solution as an open source solution, which I think is vital to any company who tries to build a developer tool or trying to build a trust and a relationship with developers to be able to use that tool. Secondly, I think we put a lot of emphasis on the concept of developer experience. Upright has been born from the pains of developers such as myself and others and it comes into effect in lots of things. It's not just about how the product looks, it's also about how the documentation is structured, how our SDKs

are accessible for developers, how we integrate with different platforms and how we are platform agnostic. And most of our tech stack has been built from scratch actually, in order to allow us like full control over the developer experience and the developer journey. And I think at the end of the day, this might be even something developers won't always be able to point out, but it's something very, very important in our philosophy of how to develop the product. Okay. And well well you also you have we have referred a lot to well to the origins let's say of upright and how you hit this well virality let's say.

So I was wondering if you could also share a few words about the growth of the community, not just the product. So how has it grown over time and how did you go to the point where you have actually reached a growth substantial enough to facilitate a seed round? Yeah, sure. So every time I get asked this question, it's always hard to answer it. How do you build the community? And some people that I've talked with have referred to it as magic. And, you know, as someone who loves technology from a very young age, I don't really believe in magic, but I believe that something is very complex and have multiple moving parts. It's very hard to really define it very well but i think one major part that helped us at the beginning of the way was the authenticity of the project the project started day one as an open source project we didn't initially knew it's going to be a company and you know i was thinking to myself it might become a company it has potential to be very successful but worst case if it's not it's a really cool open source project and community to be a part of.

And another thing about building communities to be really persistent and work really hard at the beginning. Initially, I remember I had a really long white night that I had to respond to every single message in the community and I had to engage people and I had to get out of my comfort zone and be very social and as it grew it became it started to become self-sustainable and today we have so many active members hundreds and thousands of active members that are part of this big family that all share the same values and the goals of making upright and development much easier for everyone who wants to start

or continue with it. Okay. What about the growth, let's say, from a community-based open source project to an actual company? Because obviously, since you've gotten to the point where you have raised some some capital there must be a commercial entity behind it as well you mentioned sustainability at some point and the fact that you achieved sustainability relatively early on I guess you bootstrapped by offering services and could you also refer to what the business model for for the commercial entities?

Yeah, sure. So obviously the transition from being an open source project to an open source company is a very delicate transition that we needed to take. And one thing or multiple things that were very important to us is to build this open source company behind the project on the same core values that make open source communities so great, such as being open, being transparent and collaborate with our community. And those values are very, very important to us. On top of that, we have multiple plans how to monetize the open source project.

The first one of them is the upcoming upright cloud solution where we will offer upright as a service and try to reduce some of the hassle of managing your own servers and deploying it

in different environments. But we also believe that because the solution is so diverse, we can work out in the future and find even more new and innovative open source business models.

And one thing that is very important to us is to continuously work with our open source community and make sure that our solutions doesn't hold the open source community and don't create those weird disabilities that sometimes open source companies are forced to. But we believe we have the potential

to find new and other ways to build that sustainable business and community. And another thing is that I think today open source communities appreciate much more the need for a company to back those communities because if the upright company will succeed, the upright open source community will succeed. And that's what we want to see all together. Yeah, I have to say that, well, even though I wasn't, you know, particularly familiar with

the project and the offering myself, I was not too surprised to see that you managed to get this funding because, well, it's true that from, you know, an open source contributor perspective, the project has been growing, you been growing quite impressively, actually. The first time I came across it was in a list. But since you're into open source and you just got funding, you may as well know the one I'm in. So it's the ROS open source index. It's an index that's published by some open source investors in Runa Capital and they keep track of open source projects. And you were, I think, number three

in this one, in its last issue. Yeah, we were also number one a few times, but we're working hard to keep striving forward okay well i i didn't know you also got to number one but i thought you know number three is already uh quite quite good actually yeah it is uh just giving aside we appreciate the ranking and we we want to do our best for us for our community and i think one thing that thing that really distinguished us is that our team, all our team members actually came from our open source community. Every co-member of AppRite started as contributor to the product or even as a user.

And we're all really passionate about the solution and we can see where we take it forward. We want to build stuff with it on our own. We don't always have enough time to do it because we need to build it, but we are very excited about where this project community and business are going to go next. That's interesting. I was also wondering and I was going to ask you about, well, who your co-founders are, basically.

But I guess you just answered. So my follow-up question would be, OK, fine. It's great to have people that know the product and have actually developed and used it. But I guess your investors would probably think that it's good to have some people with business backgrounds and business expertise in your board. So I wonder if they provided you with those. Yeah, well, being a sole founder is very different than working with a co-founder.

And my previous startup, I was actually with a co-founder. It's very different. But unlike most opinions out there, there are actually a lot of advantages. And thanks to our amazing investors, and this is also an opportunity to thank them and be appreciative about the fact that we have some of the top investors in the world they help us with everything that we need and we have a top world-class team together to compensate on anything that i might not be an expert in and we're striving to to go forward okay since you actually mentioned your your your investors, again, for the benefit of people who may be

listening, we haven't, I mean, both you and I know who your investors are, but not necessarily everyone who's listening. So if you would like to just mention them for completeness as well as the total funding round and how you're going to use it, basically? You know, what's your area, the area that you want to invest internally, let's say, for growing the company? Yeah, sure. So our investors are Destino Venture Partners,

Flybridge, Ibex Investor and Sitgem. Those are the VC that have led the round or participated in our recent round. We've raised a total of $10 million. And we also have some other amazing angel investors, including Uri from Elastic, the co-founder in Elastic, and James, the co-founder of Heroku. And yeah, and how are we going to use the money? Initially, we're going to expand our team

and double down our efforts, both on our efforts on the open sourcing and also to see how we're going to create those initial paid services, the forced monetization model of our price. Okay, great. I think you've been quite efficient and we covered lots of ground in a relatively short time. So I'm good. I think I got my questions answered. So unless you want to add something to what we discussed, I think we can wrap up here. I think we're pretty much good. If it's interesting,

we're going to announce probably tomorrow that we're officially going to be partners of this year's Hacktoberfest, which is the biggest developers event worldwide in the month of October, encouraging developers from all over the world to contribute, to start contributing to open source. And we're really proud of that. We feel like that's very much complementary

to our company values and the things that we believe in as a team. Okay, great. Yeah, I don't know if you want this part to be published since you said it's going to be officially announced in November, but if you don't have a problem with that, I'm happy to cover it as well. I don't have a problem.

I think we can do it. It's already signed and sealed, so we're good to go. Okay, great. So congratulations once again and thanks for your time. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thanks. Same here. Enjoy the rest of your day. Bye-bye. Thanks, George. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. If you like my work, you can follow Link Data Orchestration on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.