Software Huddle - First Year as a Startup Founder and CEO with Nucleus's Evis Drenova

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

In this episode, we spoke with Evis Drenova, CEO and co-founder of Nucleus, a Y Combinator graduate from 2022 focused on making it easy to deploy, build, and manage on Kubernetes. Evis left Skyflow, where he was one of the product leads, to build Nucleus. In this conversation, we talked through his first year as CEO of a startup, how he got into Y Combinator, what that experience was like, and how he's been building the company since. This is a really interesting conversation for anyone who's ever thought about starting their own company.

You know, I think the good thing about YC is they put a lot of urgency on you and sometimes more than you probably would have placed on yourself. Urgency to work, to talk to customers, to ideate and to validate if what you're doing is the right thing. Hey, this is something I'm really interested in. I want to see it through and I want to see where it takes me. So I'm willing to sacrifice, you know, the Saturdays and Sundays when I could be doing anything else. And so that was one of the first things I did was as we started to get those customers, really try to galvanize them into being champions for us, not just within their own organizations, but within the broader market. Hey there, this is Sean Faulkner, one of the creators and hosts of Software Huddle.

In this episode, I talk with Evans Dranova, CEO and co-founder of Nucleus, a Y Combinator graduate from 2022, focused on making it easy to deploy, build, and manage on Kubernetes. Elvis and I actually used to work together at Skyflow, where he was one of the product leads, but he left the company over a year and a half ago to build Nucleus. In our conversation, we talked through his first year as CEO of a startup, how he got into Y Combinator,

what that experience was like, and how he's been building the company since, what that experience was like, and how he's been building the company since. I think this is a really interesting conversation for anyone that's ever thought about starting their own company. That's a journey that I took once upon a time. Edvis is a super smart guy with a lot of practical advice. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know at SoftwareHeadle on Twitter. And if you want to know more about Nucleus, you can contact Edvis on Twitter at Edvis Stranova. All right, over to the show. Evis, welcome to the show.

Sean, long time, man. How's it going? Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's going well. Thanks so much for being here. Let's start off by having you introduce yourself since we know each other, but people listening probably don't know necessarily who you are. So who are you?

What do you do? And how did you get to where you are today? Yeah, for sure. So my name is Evis. I'm the founder of a company called Nucleus. We do mainly a Kubernetes developer platform for small to mid-sized companies. So I've been working on that for about a year. My background is sort of a mix. I've kind of done a little bit of everything. Started off doing enterprise sales right out of college, and then went more into a technical developer, but also sort of solutions consulting role. And then most recently worked in product for the last few years before I started at Nucleus. That's actually quite like sort of the perfect combination of skills. You had sales in

there, developer, product management, now founder, essentially. The only piece that you're missing maybe is a little stint in marketing. You're covering essentially all of the major functional areas that you need to operationalize a business. Yeah, it's been cool. It's been sort of a high-level goal of mine. It's just to kind of try a little bit of everything, you know, maybe not be a master of one thing, but be a jack of all trades. And so I've definitely tried to kind of structure my career that way where I've tried a lot of different things and just tried to find partially what I

like and kind of what I'm good at. And I'm sure at some point, you know, maybe I'll try marketing. Maybe that's in the future at some point. All right. You can come work for me. So I want to focus our conversation today on your journey as a founder. And we'll dive into the technology and engineering of Nucleus in a later episode. But I think a lot of people that will listen to this show, even if they're engineers today, you know, they might be thinking about one day starting a company. And I think you're in this unique position where you're still early on this path. So I imagine you have a lot of interesting perspective and lessons learned through your time as a tech founder so far, and that will be helpful to listeners or maybe at least interesting to them. So you, as you mentioned, you've been a founder for a little over a year, around a year, but I think like, you know, speaking for myself, founding years are like dog years. So

how much have you aged in the last year? Um, a lot. Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Um, you know, it's, it's, it's been really interesting. And I think, um, like generally I'm trying to, I'm somebody who tries to be a little bit more reflective and just look back on, you know, how was the last week, the last month. Um, and then definitely we just passed, uh, the one year mark, uh, at the end of June. So my co-founder and I, Nick, you know, we were, we were kind of taking a moment to just reflect on like, what is, what is the last year been like? And it's been really busy. A lot of, you know, even in the last year, a lot of those sort of like proverbial ups and downs of a startup have definitely happened.

But it's been the funnest thing I think I've ever done. For sure. Every single day, it's something different. And even within a single day, you're doing so many different things. And so that keeps every day interesting. So definitely lots of lessons learned, in the weeds of a company or, you know, a product or whatever it is that you're working on, a lot of times you're only seeing that sort of the problems with what's going on right now. Like, how do I fix this thing? And you're kind of focused on that, but you need to sometimes take a step back and look at, Hey, like we've also accomplished a lot. We've gotten this far. We launched something or we have a customer or whatever it is. There's good things that have happened as well. And you need to kind of remind yourself about those things as well. Yeah. I think that's the thing that keeps you going at

the end of the day. As an early stage founder, you face a lot of friction, right? You're doing a lot of prospecting. Sometimes it's cold prospecting. Nobody really knows who you are, what you're doing. And so you're kind of like climbing this really big mountain. And my co-founder, Nick, has a really good analogy about this. He's like, let's just get to base camp. You know, we don't have to worry about climbing the mountain. Let's just get to the next level. And I think it's so important to have somebody else who, to your point, you know, can sort of balance you where I'm definitely somebody who's in the weeds and just thinking about the problem that's ahead of me. And so it's important to have, you know, a partner in that, but also family and friends who, you know, can kind of

help pull you out of that too and remind you that, you know, what you're doing is important and you're obviously dedicating a lot of time to it, but there's also, you know, a family behind you and a support system behind you to help you through that. And that's been just extremely helpful for me. Yeah, that's awesome. And was this something that you always wanted to do? You know, did you always want to be a founder? Was that sort of like the career path that you saw for yourself? You know, coming out of college, it definitely wasn't. I was very like science focused. I was pretty mad doing biology, thinking I'm going to go to med school. I had that sort of like, that was my line of sight. And then right out of undergrad, I decided I didn't want to do that anymore. And so it's kind of starting from scratch. And at the

time, I just moved out to San Francisco. And I'd come from Boston, where Boston isn't a huge entrepreneurial hub. It's definitely growing, but it's not there, at least not comparatively to San Francisco. And so I started to kind of see like the world of startups and venture capital and all of the sort of the fun ecosystem that happens here. And I was like, wow, this looks really fun and interesting. Maybe I could do this one day. But I definitely didn't have like an explicit goal. Like I need to do this by this time is more of like if it happens and, you know, I think I can do a good job at it. Great. Otherwise, let's just kind of see where this thing goes yeah i do think that there's there's something about sort of working in the bay area there is this pull and also you're

surrounded by other people you're going to run into people silly people who have started companies or interested in starting companies i imagine like it'd be similar if you were living in i don't know like in hollywood then you're going to run into like actors and stuff like that. And it's more part of like your, your lifestyle that you're interacting with on a regular basis. And it can feel like something that you could actually do because you're actually associating with it. Like I grew up in a very small area of, you know, Eastern Canada that was super rural. Like the idea of being like a tech founder was, I might as well be talking about like, yeah, I'm going to go on a spaceship and land on the moon but then moving to the bay area it feels like something is much more tangible and real because you're meeting people who've done it

and yeah you know i think it feels in some ways like a little bit more attainable too because it's it's not this thing you read about in books or you've seen shows or whatever it's like hey no i actually now know people who have done it and they've walked me through how they're able to do it and so it's definitely one of those things where it's like, you know, you kind of like bite off a little piece at a time and just work your way through it. But yeah, I mean, I think probably the best thing I've ever done in my career is just go to a place where, um, you know, the thing that I was interested in was the thing of that city. Like this is what people do in San Francisco, which is, you know, definitely good and bad in some ways. It feels a little bit like

a monoculture at times. Um, but if that's what you're interested in, then there's a great place to do it. You know, if you're interested in finance, like you should probably go to New York and do it there. It's not to say you can't do it anywhere else, but if you really want to immerse yourself into it, I think you have to go to the place where, you know, where the epicenter is. Yeah. And I think there's something to be said about you're, you know, going to probably be surrounding yourself by people who are who have a ton of talent and whatever that speciality is. If you're looking for the best people in finance, you're probably going to be over-indexed in places like New York or maybe London. And if you're looking for the people who are the best in the world of tech, they don't necessarily all exist in the Bay Area, but you're going to have a heavy concentration here. So there's something about sort of leveling yourself up by surrounding

yourself by excellence in one specific area that you're interested in. Yeah. And I think like, you know, to your question earlier about just like, what has it been like a founder? I think it becomes really humbling to, you know, you go to this, you come to the Bay Area or wherever there's, you know, a large epicenter or whatever you're interested in, you kind of realize you're like, wow, there's a lot of really smart, great people doing this stuff. And like, you know, maybe I wasn't as good as I at this thing that I thought I was or, you know, kind of forces you to take like a really like honest look at yourself and say, like, what what what can I be good in?

And, you know, like, what are my skills? And I think as a founder, you do that a lot. You know, you maybe come from like a corporate background or startups like I did. And, you know, in some ways you kind of get told like, hey, like you're great at what you do and you're kind of being brought up all the time. And then you become a founder. You're like, wait, that thing that I thought I was really good at, maybe I'm not that good at it. Maybe I really need to be honest with myself and think about where do I need help and who can I go and ask for that help? And so that's been a really interesting and kind of like fun process to go through is just kind of like level setting, you know, yourself, your expectations and your skill set with, you know, where you're trying

to go and try to figure out what's the delta there. So when did you first start actually working on Nucleus? Yeah, so, you know, I talked to my co-founder Nick about it for a while, for probably like six months, almost to a year. And then towards the end of 2021, I think December 9th, 2021, I remember that day being specific, like sitting in Nick's apartment and kind of getting up our first GCP account. And that's when we said, okay, well, let's actually see what it's like to build a POC or an MVP of this. That was when we first started writing our first couple lines of code, but we had been talking about it for almost a year before then, just thinking about like, what is it

actually that we're trying to solve? You know, what is the first thing that we want to do? And eventually, where does this lead to? Like, we continue to pull on that thread. Where do we think this goes? And you kind of like look at across all these dimensions of, you know, where's the industry going? What are the trends? What are people doing? You know, what are like the headwinds and the tailwinds? And then eventually we kind of came to this conclusion that we were just like, we think there could be something interesting here. We know we're in the ballpark, you know, whether or not we do this exact thing remains to be seen, but at least we're really passionate about the industry. And we think it's something that's growing and moving in the right direction. So let's just get started and

kind of just see where the ride takes us. And were you talking to, you know, other, you know, people in the tech world while you were sort of doing this discovery on your own or having these conversations with your co-founder? Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably one of the most important things before you ever actually start, you know, writing any code or doing anything is you have to go just talk to customers and really try to understand what is it that people are struggling with. I think that is probably the single most important thing you can do. And once you get your head wrapped around, what is it that real people who are in the positions to potentially buy what I eventually hopefully will have, what is it that they want and what is the problem that they're struggling with?

And then you can go back to those folks later on and you know kind of offer them what you already have but you know we spent I spent a couple months just doing that talking to 40 plus CTOs and just trying to understand as you are an early-stage company and as you start to grow you know how do you think about your architecture how do you think about your infrastructure what are some of the challenges you see both from a people and a technology perspective? And then trying to zero in on what are those exact problems and how big of a problem is it really? So yeah, we spent a lot of time doing that.

Yeah, one of the things that the founder of Engineering Capital, Ashmeet Sadana, had said to me was that, in his opinion, basically his best advice for founders that you can't talk to customers enough, or you can't talk to potential people enough because that's how you do discovery. That's how you improve the product. And I think actually one mistake that I made when I was a, was a founder is we did a lot of conversations early and then we're like, okay, we kind of know what we should build now. And we built it. And then we kind of stopped those conversations. And it almost killed the company. And then we basically like had to reboot everything. We went in a disastrous direction.

And then everything started again with talking to people essentially and just having those conversations. And that was something that, you know, we learned that harsh lesson and we kept that up throughout the rest of the journey with that startup. But we made that mistake essentially of this like cutting off the input from prospects and customers.

Yeah. And I mean, I think things change so fast, especially nowadays, like there's just so many tools for to do so many different things. And, you know, people's like sentiment changes about certain tools, certain like groups of tools or categories or solutions or even problems and so you have to kind of keep your pulse on on what's going on and what are people excited about and what are they not excited about um and so we've tried to continue to do that um you definitely i think one of the sort of the traps you can fall into to your point as a founder is like you feel like okay i have a good idea of the problem and i'm just gonna go kind of like in a dark room and build for six months. Because coding is fun and building stuff is fun and getting rejected by people isn't fun.

And so you have to like work really hard to kind of push against that and say, no, like this is the right thing for me to do, even if I want to go do something else. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the skill set as a founder that you, if you don't have that, you have to basically develop or you're probably not going to be successful. So in terms of the problem that you set out to solve, like, what was that problem? And then how has it sort of changed over time? is trying to help developers, but really teams at a high level, become more productive and not focus so much on building infrastructure from scratch and managing it. And the way that we do that is by containerizing applications and being able to deploy those on multiple clouds

and then offering a range of tools and products to be able to manage the lifecycle of those applications and so on. But at sort of the meta level, the idea is still developers, DevOps teams, platform teams still spend too much time working on something that isn't the core product that actually makes you money as a business. And so how do we help refocus those folks and give them the tools they need to be able to automate things that are manual or tedious so they can focus on the thing that actually drives value for the company?

And then you're the CEO and your co-founder, I believe, is the CTO. Is that right? Yep. How did you kind of decide on that role split? You know, in some ways, it was really natural just based on our skill sets. Nick has been a software engineer for the last 10 years. And so he was, yeah, much, much better technically than me and definitely the right person for that role. Whereas I had more experience on the product and the sort of sales side. So naturally, you know, Nick had said, hey, I'm going to take over the

technology and the building and lead that part of it. And I said, I'm going to take over the, you know, the sales and the marketing part of it. And I think, you know, I talked to a number of YC companies and folks were thinking about getting into YC because we'd gone through it. And one of the questions they always ask is, you know, how did you split up responsibilities, especially if the team is entirely technical? And the advice I always give them is you have to have really clear bounds on who makes decisions at the end of the day in what domain area. If you have an entirely technical team, you guys can talk about, you know, architecture and what the right approach is and all of this stuff. But at the end of the day, one person, I really believe this has to be responsible for it. And they have to say,

I'm going to make this decision. I've listed all the inputs, but at the end of the day, it's my decision. I'm going to run with it. So I think if you diffuse that responsibility, you can get really muddy with who's responsible for what. And yeah, that can lead to other potential issues kind of downstream. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. I mean, you need basically the DRI, the directly responsible individual. Exactly. Not every decision can be made by committee, essentially. And arguably, developing software or companies by committee is probably a bad idea.

So you started the early ideas and the early prototyping while also essentially working as a full-time product manager. And it's not like you had some low effort, low responsibility job. You're a product lead at a fast-growing startup. So how did you balance starting a company with leading a full-time job? Yeah, I mean, I think part of it was just the hours, honestly. with leading a full-time job? Yeah, I mean, I think part of it was just the hours, honestly, I don't know if there's a way around it. It was working at Skyflow with you and the team for the majority of the day.

And I think what was interesting was like we had, you know, a big team offshore. And so like the hours were always interesting cause we had like the morning hours then you have the nighttime hours to sync with you know our other team um so trying to find you know maybe an hour or two during the week to talk about it um with nick and anybody else i wanted to have a call with um but really is spending the weekends and just kind of dedicating myself and um and saying like hey this is something i'm really interested and i want to see it through and i want to see where it takes me.

So I'm willing to sacrifice, you know, the Saturdays and Sundays when I could be doing anything else. And so that was tough. You know, I did that for probably about seven months where pretty much every single weekend it was talking to Nick, talking to potential customers, doing just discovery calls, doing some coding, doing some building. And then during the week, you know, going back and focusing on the day job.

And there's, you know, lessons learned there. Like there's a part of me that says like, you know, was that the right thing to do? But it depends, right? It depends on your own personal situation. And for me, I just wasn't in a position where I could say, hey, I'm going to take six to 12 months off and just kind of like play around with some ideas and see where it goes. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a tough choice for, for anybody, especially living in the Bay area. It's not like, uh, the cost of living is, is, uh, is, is low or anything like that. You need

to, you need to be able to eat. But so you mentioned that you were, you ended up, uh, going through Y Combinator. So why was that something that you were interested in doing? And what was the backup plan if you weren't accepted into YC? Yeah, I mean, you know, I think YC has obviously a brand, not just in sort of like Silicon Valley, San Francisco, the Bay Area, but also just generally in the world. And so I think for us, we had said, okay, well, one, it's a really good program, and we're going to get, you know, hopefully really great guidance, which we did. But also there's, you know, there's something to be said about sort of like the signaling of going

through YC and being able to talk to investors, talk to potential customers. And so it felt like it was the right mix of we're still early enough just in our founder journey and our kind of like product and kind of problem journey that YC can help shape that. We're going to get a great sort of founder community, both with the people that we're going through the batch with, but also previous YC founders. And then also it opens doors to be able to talk to investors and sort of have other sort of like connections and channels to go through.

So it made sense to go through it. In terms of the backup plan, I think the backup plan is just continue working on it and just see where it takes us. If we didn't get in that batch, maybe try again and apply. Otherwise, just kind of keep hammering on until it gets to a point where we say, hey, this is working. So great, we're going to go full time and try to get funding from investors. Or this isn't working.

Let's go try something else. So, yeah, it was definitely plan A. But if it didn't work, it's not like we're going to say, hey, we're just done with this. We were only in it to do YC. And then what was that experience like going through YC? It was a very busy three months. But it was fun. But yeah, I think the good thing about YC is they put a lot of urgency on you and sometimes more than you probably would have placed on yourself. Urgency to work, to talk to customers, to ideate, and to validate if what you're doing is the right thing.

And if you actually have a real market in terms of the product that you're selling. And so, you know, there's a lot of like late nights, a lot of weekends worked. You know, I set those expectations and Nick did too with sort of our personal circle. And said, hey, like, this is the thing for the next three to four months. Like we're 100% focused on this. We really can't do anything else. But luckily you don't go through it alone. I think the founder like community that comes out of it is so important

because everybody's in the same boat. You know, some people may be a little bit further on in terms of like their, their company life cycle, some are earlier on. And so you can kind of see like, hey, I can go talk to somebody who's six months ahead of me and I can see like, what are the challenges

and how did you deal with those? How did you think about this? And so it was, you know, really busy and exciting, but you also had a lot of support at the same time. Yeah, it makes sense. So the, and I think that's important because it can be kind of a lonely journey when you're trying to build a company company and you see sometimes a lot of companies that

feel much more successful than you. And it's easy to get into a place where you're like, you know, what are they doing that we're not doing? And, you know, uh, and, and getting to this like comparison game essentially. But if you're actually, you know, networking with some of these people, I think you get the inside track and the reality is like the the like instagram version of every startup looks way more polished than the reality behind the scenes like it's always a disaster behind the scenes uh but you just don't see that unless you're actually talking to to the founders and

the people who help build it yeah i couldn't agree more and i think like at least what i found generally is that a lot of founders are pretty open about their own founder journey, especially ones, at least in my like, yeah, this took us, you know, three years to get this point. We were pivoting every six months or whatever the challenges were. And it's really cool to get that honest feedback from them and say like, hey, this challenge that we're going through or that we're trying to figure out, we're not alone in. And founders, I found, are generally pretty open to helping other founders. You just have to kind of be the one to ask. And so I think as long as you're willing to kind of be the one to ask. And so I think as long as you're willing to kind of like put yourself out there and just try and get some of

that honest feedback, I think there's a community out there that can help. Yeah, I feel that as well. And I think partly that is, you know, most founders, presumably, they didn't really do it alone, right? There was other people who mentored and helped them along the way. So a lot of times they want to kind of pay that back because they got that experience and they remember, you know, so-and-so helping them. So why aren't they going to take, you know, 30 minutes to talk to somebody over coffee or something like that to help them on their journey? So besides essentially some of the network that you built and also the opportunity to pitch investors and the profile that you get from being part of YC. Can you share any specific examples of how you were able to utilize some of the feedback or

mentorship that you received from the program to help actually build your startup? Yeah, you know, I think probably the main thing that comes to mind is, you know, YC is really good at getting you to distill what you do and the value that you bring to like a very very concise almost sentence or two sentences and it focuses you to be very clear on what it is that you exactly do and i think like definitely this was our case um in like the very very early like the first couple months you kind of have an idea even if you're like okay i know this is the problem i want to go after but like how do i actually communicate that to someone and you know i

remember towards the end of yc we were going through demo day and demo day was 60 seconds. You had 60 seconds to summarize what you do, you know, your market, how you help that market, your traction, all of these things. And you're kind of like, you know, when you're coming up to it, you're like, wow, this is really, really hard. And then once you actually get something down, you're like 60 seconds is actually kind of a lot of time when I know exactly what I want to say. And so I think that's, in my mind, what YC was really helpful for us for was just really helping us distill and kind of organize our thoughts and our value prop and all of those things that help you communicate about what it is that you exactly do. And, you know, you have meetings with partners every single week to help through this. You have sort of like more group meetings.

You do a lot of like practice pitching. You do a lot of just practice when it comes to that. I think that's one thing that's been really surprising as a founder. I never expected to be doing so much like pitching, practice pitching, you know, like you obviously pitch to customers, but you're doing a lot of video recording and you're doing a lot of like pitching to a group of people who are going to give you feedback. Um, but it's really helpful at the end of the day because they can really help guide you with like, Hey, this is resonating, but you know, this isn't so much that you probably want to work on that.

Yeah. I'm sure it's super painful in the moment, but it's also like, it's the only way to get better. Uh, and it's much better to like stumble or have challenges in that context. Then you're in the context of you're in front of the partners at a venture capital firm and you, you know, you just screw up the pitch or you're in front of, you know, potentially your first customer and you screw that up. Yeah. Cause I mean, I think like, you know, YC and the community there, like they're, they're pretty, pretty honest. Yeah. Maybe in some cases, brutally honest, but I found that that's the best way to get real feedback. So you don't like, not everybody's going to give you real

feedback, especially if you go in front of, you know, some investors, they're going to say, Hey, yeah, they're going to give you every other reason of why they're not investing other than like, we just don't believe in this. And I think as a founder, you eventually get to the point where you're like, just give me the no, like, I want that. I don't want the hope, you know, I want you to tell me no, so that I know it's a no, we can keep moving forward. I think YC does a really good job of that. But you don't always get that in the real world. So once you graduated from YC, you raised some money, sort of what was the first step or sort of the first order of business to really like start to build this thing? Yeah, you know, I think the first thing we did as soon as we had raised most of our round was really start thinking about the team,

start thinking about like, who do we want to hire? What does this person look like? What does the position look like? What are the skills that we want them to have? Where do we want them to be? We had made a decision really early on that we wanted everybody to be in San Francisco because we just believed in person was so important. And that was a really painful decision because we came across a lot of

people in our network, people that we had worked with that we knew that were like, hey, we work really well with this person and we know that they do great work, but they were not based here. And if they're not willing to move here, we unfortunately, like, we just had to make that decision to say, are we willing to do this? Yes or no? And we said, no, we're not willing to do it. So that, you know, creates sort of a profile of, okay, we need somebody here. We know we needed somebody who is going to be sort of a founding engineer, founding backend engineer. And then we started doing a lot of interviews. And I think one of the interesting things that happens when you try and hire

your first person or your first teammate is you kind of figure out like, how do you interview well? And how do you actually look for those signals that you're like okay this person could be a really good fit for us and we made a ton of mistakes along the way we changed our interview process like a bunch of times with doing technical interviews up front then doing more cultural after that flipping that around and just trying to figure out for our own styles, how do we try and find the right person for us? So that was sort of order of business number one. And we spent a lot of time on that. I think you have to do it to hopefully get the right person. Yeah. Had you had much experience with actually interviewing for engineering roles previously?

Not so much, to be honest. I think definitely Nick had more experience, but I'd always been more on the sort of like product side. So I'd talked to a lot of engineers, but I was never the one responsible for hiring them. And I think when you have the responsibility on you, it kind of changes the game a little bit. It changes how you think about the interview, how you approach it, the questions that you ask.

So that was definitely a big learning process for me. And I relied a lot on Nick to kind of help, help me and help guide me through that. So that was, that was fun to go through. And I think, you know, I'm a little bit better at it now, but yeah, definitely still a lot more to learn. And then how do you, how did you essentially, you know, generate or, you know, like candidate pipeline or actually go about recruiting? Cause I think that's one of the hardest things to do when you especially as an early stage company there's only a very subset small group of people who are avian you know willing to entertain that but then you're just such an unknown quantity or right that you know like it's a big leap of faith to move from maybe a job that's

somewhat secure to something that's like at a seed stage? Yeah, I mean, I think we did it in a couple different ways. You know, YC has like this internal job board that you can apply to work at a startup. We got some leads or inbounds through that. We relied really heavily on our network because we wanted to try and hopefully find somebody that we had worked with in the past. And, you know, really luckily we did. And she's incredible. And then we also explored other things too like we explored posting on linkedin we explored posting on the normal job boards we explored using a recruiter and you know some of

those things worked for us and some of those didn't i think in some ways like when you post out to you know indeed and linkedin and you kind of have some of these initial interviews like you're also like i mentioned you're also kind of like some of these initial interviews, you're also, like I mentioned, you're also figuring out the kinks and trying to figure out what is your own interview process like. And so our kind of thought process was, let's just have a lot of interviews to start with

to see one, who's out there and who's interested in what we're doing, but then also two, to refine our own process and just get better at it. So we did that for the first couple of months and eventually we found a really good person to join us. Yeah, I guess it's similar to like being on the flip side as a candidate, you might wanna burn a few interviews

before you go and you interview with your top choice or something like that because you need a little bit of practice. And I think that's true for people who are interviewing candidates and trying to figure out, especially at your stage, like trying to figure out like, what does cultural fit mean for our company and, you know, what values are we looking for?

And what were some of the things that you were looking for in a founding engineer outside of, you know, just the pure engineering skills? Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that Nick and I always talked about was somebody who had a really high slope. Like if you didn't know all the tools we used, we were willing to say that's okay. You know, we can teach you Kubernetes. We can teach you how to write in Golang. We teach you these like engineering skills.

But you need to be able to pick that up fairly quickly and then continue to grow and continue to have like a high aptitude for learning. And so, you know, we were much more willing to take somebody who was hungry than somebody who was kind of like this rock star, superstar engineer from whatever company. So we were looking for those kind of characteristics, somebody who knew that working in an early stage startup is going to be hard and you're going to have to put in a lot of work, but wanted to learn. And we felt like if we can find somebody who has that high ceiling and has that high slope, we can teach the skills because those are fairly easy compared to somebody who has the right attitude and has the right approach to working. So we tried to really over index, I think more on what is like the personality of the person and what, what kind of like, what gets them excited? You know, is it working on a hard problem? Is it working on a particular industry? And really trying to like, you know, not psycho analyze, but kind of psychoanalyze

kind of who they are and try to figure out like based on what they want and what we want is it a good fit and really early on we and even honestly to this day i still tell people i'm like you have to like us like you're going to be working a lot with us and we may love you but if you don't like us like you know it's not going to be a good fit and so we really want to find a place or find somebody who is a good fit both ways and really try to be respectful of like their time and kind of what they want, their motivations. Yeah, I absolutely a hundred percent agree with that. I mean, a lot of ways you're, you're building, it's, you know, like dating, you're, you're building a, like a relationship with this person. They're going to have a relationship with

you and be spending a lot of time together. So they hopefully like you if they're going to commit at that level. And in terms of, you know, beyond hiring, what are some of the other big challenges that you faced over the first year as a founder? You know, I think one of the hardest problems that I think we continue to face is just like we're an unknown quantity. We're just new. And I never really knew how to frame it and how to actually say it. But I think recently I've kind of come to this, the term, which I called like, it's like a cold start problem. It's like for what we do, you know, we deploy infrastructure into your cloud account. And that takes a lot of trust that comes with that.

Same work at Skyflow. It's like Skyflow handles your PII data. Well, people need to trust you in order to be able to do that. But you need people. You're trying to sell something and you're saying, hey, trust me, but you don't know who I am. You don't really have a lot of references. By the way, we're going to ask for a lot of permissions. We're going to ask for a lot of these things and we'll try to do our best and like you're asking a lot right for somebody who

who doesn't know anything about you and it becomes this kind of like chicken and the egg problem you try to solve it in all these different ways and try to have a brand and you know as you get customers you kind of like publish case studies and put their logo on your website and i think for a lot of companies you kind of have this problem where it's like you know i want you to use my product but on the other side you also have to you kind of have this problem where it's like, I want you to use my product. But on the other side, you also have to be cognizant and self-aware that it's a person making this buying decision. And depending on what your product is, it can be really, really critical and in the hot path. Or maybe not so.

But either way, it's still somebody buying it. It was investing in you. And that's something I think a lot about is like, how do I reduce the risk of, you know, sort of like reduce the risk that this person has to think about when they go to make a decision on if they want to buy us or not. And there's, you know, different ways that we can do that. But I think that's probably the hardest thing is how do you build that trust within the market, within the industry. And it's really hard in the beginning and, you know, slowly kind of probably get better at it. Yeah. I mean, I think that's something that a lot of companies struggle with, especially companies that are building sort of like technical lead to either customers or at least people engaging in conversation with you?

Yeah, there's been a couple of things that we used. One is as we've started to acquire customers, just talking about those customers and having them be reference calls. And our first few customers, I kind of always told them, I was like, you guys are really investing in us. And I'm totally aware of that. And I'm hoping that you can be available for reference calls to other customers and at least just talking to them about your thought process that you went through when you decided to use us. And those early customers are your biggest advocates at the end of the day. And some of our customers have been just incredible with taking

reference calls from other customers, from investors, and just really, really kind of like fighting for us. And so that was one of the first things I did was as we start to get those customers, we really try to like galvanize them into being champions for us, not just within their own organizations, but like with within the broader market. You know, outside of that, I think as an early stage company, like in the early days, all you have is the team. And you really have to be able to put your own personal brand forward and say, us as a team, we have this many years working on these problems. And this is how we've solved them in the past.

And if you're talking to somebody, they can typically pretty quickly decipher if what you're saying is legit. And if if kind of like if if you are legit in some ways too right like you're able to use the industry terms and talk about like these edge cases that oh hey this is how we solve this by the way we have to think about all these other things they'll say okay well i know that you know these people are you know they've thought about this problem at depth and that starts to maybe reduce that risk a little bit versus somebody who is maybe brand new in an industry has never worked in it and just doesn't really understand it. I think that becomes a little bit of a tougher challenge.

So I think just like leveraging just our own experience and our own kind of like personal brand and just saying like, we know that we're young and being upfront about it. But here's how we've kind of solved these problems in the past. And hopefully here's why you can trust us. Yeah. So part of this, like building trust essentially through expertise and being knowledgeable about the area and the things that you're talking about, you know, I imagine at some point, and I don't know if you've reached this point yet, but it's no longer going to be sort of, you know, founder led sales. And then you need to depend on like salespeople to be able to translate that message and be able to translate that message and be able to meet, you know, potential customers at the level that they want to be met at. And then

it becomes a whole other challenge around like, how do I essentially enable someone who maybe is not an expert to show that the company has this expertise to solve these problems? Yeah, a hundred percent. You know, we're%. We're not quite there yet, partially because I just like doing sales, so I continue to do it. But I think at some point, yeah, it becomes a real challenge. And there's a lot of advice out there of when do you hire your first salesperson and who you hire, what position do you hire them for? But yeah, it's like, how do they sort of like, by osmosismosis or like get some of the trust that you built with the customer, you know, with customers and sort of like push that back out? And it becomes a real problem. I'm sure we'll face it at some point.

Yeah. And, you know, what are some of the key achievements or milestones that you're most proud of that you've been able to achieve in this in the first year of operating as a business? Yeah, you know, I think our the first one and probably the most important one was, you know, when we launched, we launched our product back in January. So January 17, we kind of went out to the world. And within the first quarter, you know, we sort of had had booked over $100,000 in revenue, we had closed a number of customers. And that was really cool. That was really validating to know that you know people are investing in us and they're taking a risk on us um but we're still providing a lot of value back to them so it's been really fun to kind of just continue to see our growth from from a revenue perspective from a customer perspective but also from like a usage perspective and just try to help people solve really interesting problems i think

that's one of the funnest parts is kind of watching how people use your product and just say like, wait, why are you doing that? That's like, I never expected you to do that. And then you ask them about it. They're like, oh, well, I was trying to do this other thing. Like, oh, that's really interesting. We hadn't thought about that as a product. Like, what would that mean to you if we could do this?

And so like, that's also been really rewarding as well. And I think that drives a lot of our roadmap is just trying to talk to customers and say, what is it that you're exactly trying to accomplish? And how can we help you do that? So like, that is the first thing I think outside of that, you know, building the team has been really, really fun. It's been a big learning process for both Nick and I. I'm super proud of that. I think, you know, we spend so much time together. We just got a new office and it's like four of us sitting in one big conference room effectively. And so just having a team that you really get along with personally, but also professionally and you enjoy spending time with and you work together well has been great. And then of course, building or raising our round and giving us a little bit of firepower to try and take this challenge on. Yeah, that's awesome. And then for anybody who's listening and thinking about starting a company,

what advice would you give them? That's a great question. I think the first one is just get out there and just start talking to customers and start asking the right questions. I think, Sean, maybe you had recommended this to me. I thought it was you. You had said you should read The Mom Test, that book. And I remember reading it and I was like, this is great. And it really shows you how to ask questions in the right way. And so I think being able to go out there and say, I need to go talk to a customer, a real customer, somebody who doesn't

know me, who has no incentive to effectively lie to me and tell me that my idea is great and they're definitely going to buy it. And ask them like, hey, what problems do you have and how impactful are those problems and what would it mean to you if we could solve that? I think that's by far the most important thing and really starting to zero in on what is the right problem space I want to be in. So I think as long as you start doing that, I think you're doing the right thing. And then along the way, starting to maybe start to put something together that you can actually show somebody and say, hey, what do you think about this? Yeah. And we talked a little bit about that earlier.

I think you just you can't talk to potential customers or prospects enough, especially in the early days of just trying to figure out what problem do we need to solve? And are people actually willing to pay for this thing? Is the pain point big enough that they're willing to pay you to essentially remove that pain? And that's such a foundational part of building any successful product. So I think you just can't emphasize that enough. And if that's something that doesn't fall into your skill set because you because like hey i'm a i'm a builder i'm an engineer i don't want

to have to talk to people you need to either get over that or team up with someone who has that skill set essentially because it's just you can't really you know whiteboard build something like that uh you know build a successful product in a vacuum. And I think like, yeah, the way I think about it is like the inverse is so much worse. Like imagine spending three or four years doing something that like effectively will have no value and nobody really cares about. Like that sounds awful. And so like you can think about it one of two ways, you know, it's either like what's going to motivate you? Is it going to be like, hey, I want to work on something really fun? Or is it going to take the inverse of it and be like, wow, like what if I start building something and nobody cares about i just spent six months

maybe a year maybe two years and i could have kind of foregone all of that if i had just gone and talked to people about it and so like that you know i remember somebody telling me that once and i was like i never thought about it that way but like it's so true you know like your time is so precious right like what's the opportunity cost of doing anything in the world? And the opportunity cost of spending two years doing something nobody cares about is so high that it's like, that should scare you enough where you're like, I need to go talk to people about this and get some real feedback and real perspectives and see if this is something that makes sense for me to like dedicate, you know, potentially seven to 10 years of my life to. Yeah. And there's a lot of things that you can do to get feedback on a product idea without

actually like building anything, you know, low fidelity prototyping can be even just, you know, things on a piece of paper that you're showing people and sort of doing that, you know, user experience testing, or you can get to a place where you're mocking things up. And even as something as simple as like PowerPoint, there's lots of ways to kind of like fake it to test an idea before you invest, you know, months or years into a project. Yeah. And I think like, you know, people generally love talking about their problems. You kind of just have to let them talk and you have to ask the right questions. And yeah, that's definitely a skill in itself. But I think if you can just approach it by being really humble and just saying

like, look, I have nothing to sell you because I literally don't have anything. I'm just trying to understand what is it that you struggle with. And if you're willing to spend 15 minutes with me, I'd really appreciate it. And just taking that approach, I think, can lead you pretty far. And, you know, I've definitely like I think if you just put yourself out there, I've definitely had been really surprised with who has responded to me and who has been willing to share their time with me. Well, awesome. Thank you. I think that's a great place to start to wrap up. Evis, I want to thank you so much for being here and, you know, sharing essentially your journey through your first year as a founder and also, you know, experience with YC and some of the lessons that you learned along the way. And I think you provided some great advice to anybody out there,

even considering the idea of starting a company. And we'll definitely have to have you back to do some more engineering, deep dive into everything that's going on behind the scenes of your product. Definitely, yeah. Thanks for having me, Sean. It's been great to catch up. Good to see you again. Cheers.