Engineering Founders

We deconstruct the recently closed pre-seed fundraising experience of our friends Brian Guthrie & Aaron Erickson (co-founders of Orgspace). Brian & Aaron share their experience finding a co-founder and making the decision to leave their engineering leadership positions at big companies. Plus they share great advice on navigating the fundraising experience and dealing with rejection!Learn more about Orgspace and sign up for their JUST launched beta - http://orgspace.io/elcABOUT BRIAN GUTHRIEBrian Guthrie (@bguthrie) is Co-Founder and CTO at Orgspace. His career spansr 20 years, leading teams at everything from global enterprises to seed-stage startups. Prior to founding Orgspace, he was VPE at Meetup, where he led the organization through their transition out of WeWork. He's worked in software domains as diverse as agile coaching, music hosting and pizza procurement and is a recognized thought leader in continuous integration and delivery. Brian lives and works in Brooklyn.ABOUT AARON ERICKSONAaron Erickson (@AaronErickson) is Co-Founder and CEO at Orgspace. Before Orgspace, he spent 30 years working in leadership roles, most recently as VP of Engineering at New Relic. Over the course of his entire career, he has been an advocate for building better software. He spent a decade at ThoughtWorks, where he drove digital transformation via application of agile and continuous delivery. Aaron lives and works in San Francisco.Aaron: “I remember one person, in particular, saw our slide deck and said, 'Literally, I wouldn't even give you a reference to somebody with this slide deck. It was so bad...'Tough to hear! Right? You know, very, very tough to hear... But was very, very valuable! I mean, it really honed our message and it was precisely the thing we needed to hear, to actually make our pitch a lot better...”Brian: "I actually, I didn't find it that tough to hear. I always presumptively assume that whatever I'm doing is awful so to hear some of the reflected back, I'm like, 'Yes! It is terrible! Tell us more. Give us the worst.'I really, I love that actually.”Aaron: “:Hence why I'm always the optimistic one and Brian always dragged him back to reality.”Brian: “He was so wounded by it! I'm like, 'Yeah, it's a terrible deck!'”ABOUT ORGSPACEOrgspace is a management ops platform for software teams that helps your leaders scale. You can easily create team configurations, propose org charts, visualize cost projects & create headcount plans - so you can spend less time on spreadsheets & more time on humans.If you want to learn more (or sign up for their JUST launched beta!) check them out at orgspace.io/elcSHOW NOTES:Closing a Pre-Seed round of funding (2:09)Brian's decision to leave Meetup (4:42)Aaron's decision to leave Salesforce (8:58)How to choose a co-founder (12:01)Questions to ask potential co-founders (14:38)How to choose an idea (19:19)Navigating the fundraise (24:16)Filtering the feedback you get on your startup (27:05)How to communicate your idea to investors (31:08)Dealing with rejection (34:26)Product > pitch deck (38:20)How to balance building a business and fundraising (41:12)Rapid Fire Questions (44:08)

What do you do when your idea is simply too early to market? Bradley Rothenberg (Founder/CEO @ nTopology) shares his journey from watching 3D printing's potential go unutilized to attracting some of the biggest customers in the world. Plus, how to make customers care about your product, and why you should treat the market like a co-founder.ABOUT BRADLEY ROTHENBERGBradley Rothenberg (@brad_rothenberg) is the founder and CEO of nTopology, an advanced software company based in New York City that focuses on enabling engineers to design, manufacture and ship high-performance products in the least amount of time. nTopology's breakthrough computational-modeling technology unifies geometry and simulation results into finely tuned manufacturing models, supporting engineers as they collaborate to develop lightweight, optimized parts with functional requirements built right in.Bradley studied architecture at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and has been developing computational design tools for advanced manufacturing for the last 10-plus years."Earlier stage founders, they probably hear this all the time... 'Spend a lot of time with your users! Spend a lot of time with your users! Spend a lot of time with your users!But like, for me, it was literally like showing up on-site, not leaving until we had some products that came out of it...(Patrick) I'm so surprised the air force lets you do that though...(Bradley) ...maybe don't tell them.”- Bradley Rothenberg   The ELC Virtual Summit is BACK on April 20th-22nd!We're bringing together engineering leaders from around the world to surface fresh industry insights & help you build peer support.Don't miss out on expert conversations, peer-led roundtables & workshops to help you accelerate your leadership growth.Learn more and register HERE: sfelc.com/summit2022SHOW NOTES:What inspired the idea for NTopology? (02:03)What was the first thing you 3D printed? (6:59)Designing shapes that were impossible to build (11:06)How do you find market validation? (14:06)Why you need to know what type of founder you are (17:24)Hiring people that are better than you (19:46)Making a demo work at all costs (22:28)How to attract your ideal customers (24:01)Hiring the right people for the stage you're in (27:24)How to get certainty on the problem you're solving (30:56)How do you validate your startup idea? (33:27)Using the market to develop your product (36:05)How to make customers care about your product (38:08)Rapid Fire Questions (42:54)

How do co-founders know when it's time to pivot? And how do you make sure your team is on board with the new direction? Daniela Miao and Khawaja Shams (Co-Founders @ Momento) join us to talk about their experience pivoting from a consumer Social Fitness app to a B2B SaaS company. The technical co-founders share their story of starting with a team and not a product, how they decided on a new direction, establishing open communication, and getting feedback from the market.ABOUT KHAWAJA SHAMSKhawaja is a technical hands-on leader, passionate about investing in people, setting a bold vision, and execution with his team. At AWS, he owned DynamoDB, a highly available fully managed database service serving at extreme scales! It powers much of Amazon retail, Amazon Video, and control planes of critical AWS Services. Khawaja subsequently owned product and engineering for all 7 of the AWS Media Services, responsible for streaming some of the most visible events in the world, including the Super Bowl and the world's first Live 4K Stream from Space. He was awarded the prestigious NASA Early Career Medal for his contributions to the Mars Rovers.“It took us some time, but we eventually internalized that we're not the domain experts in this. And in some cases, we learned that the investors knew more about the space than we did. And that's a bad sign, right? Like that's a great thing for an entrepreneur... but it's a really difficult position to put the investors in.”- Khawaja Shams   ABOUT DANIELA MIAODaniela Miao is the co-founder of Momento, a serverless distributed caching platform. Previously, she was the Director of Platform Engineering at Lightstep, and tech lead at AWS DynamoDB. Daniela has spoken at many events including re:Invent, QCon, and Kubecon. At Momento, she works on distributed system performance, observability, security, and the intersection of engineering with business."The hardest conversation... I think I can speak for both of us when I say this, was actually with each other. You know, imagine sort of that brewing sense of doubt and wanting to broach the conversation.And this is a BIG pivot, right? It's it has nothing to do with each other. And I think that was really profound. It normalized having a pivot... after that, the rest actually felt a lot easier...- Daniela MiaoSHOW NOTES:How Daniela and Khawaja met (2:35)Starting with a team, not a product (3:56)Choosing the idea for a product (5:02)Pivoting from a consumer fitness app to B2B SaaS (6:41)Getting the team on board with a pivot (13:08)How to establish open communication (16:43)Advice for pivoting a startup (20:34)How to know when to pivot (23:52)Why focus so much on values in the early days? (28:04)Go-to-market tips for technical leaders (32:58)Getting feedback from the market (35:19)Rapid Fire Questions (38:06)

How do you know when—or if—you're ready to start a company? Michel Tricot (Co-Founder & CEO @ Airbyte) talks with us about how he found the confidence to make the leap from engineering leader to launching his own company. Michel provides insight on screening ideas, finding founder-market fit, the most important success factors for early startups, and building trust in an open-source data community.ABOUT MICHEL TRICOTMichel is the co-founder and CEO @ Airbyte. He has been working in data engineering for the past 15 years. As head of integrations and engineering director at Liveramp (NYSE: RAMP), he built and grew the team responsible for building and scaling the data ingestion and data distribution connectors, syncing 100s TB every day.In 2020, he co-founded Airbyte, the new open-source data integration platform, with the vision to commoditize data integration pipelines across all industries and organizations.After just 1 year, Airbyte grew a community with more than 5k members, got deployed over 16k times and raised over 180M from Accel, Altimeter, Benchmark, Coatue and YC.“You want to make sure that the audience you're talking to is an audience that you're very comfortable with, that you deeply understand. So that the product that you build... you don't have to think so much about what do you need to build because you are already one of this person in the audience. You have a sense of what pain they're facing.And that makes a lot of things a lot easier, whenever you do customer discovery, when you do user discovery... You already have a sense and you can put yourself into their shoes.”- Michel Tricot   SHOW NOTES:Airbyte's Origin Story (2:33)Finding founder-market fit (7:15)Why you should invalidate your ideas (10:29)How to know when you're ready to start a company (14:00)Making the transition from eng leader to CEO (16:42)How do founders navigate the fundraising process? (20:03)The most important success factors for an early startup (23:12)Leveraging an open-source community (27:30)The benefit of being transparent with your users (29:18)How to build trust in an engineering community (31:33)Community building is not a side project (33:42)Ways to deal with doubt as a founder (34:39)Everything leads back to your North Star (38:26)Rapid-Fire Questions (39:40)

This is the first episode of our new series “Engineering Founders” featuring software pioneer Anna Patterson (Founder & Managing Partner @ Gradient Ventures) who shares with us emerging trends & opportunities in AI/ML! We cover how to spot emerging trends, typical mistakes AI/ML companies & founders make, how product-market fit/scaling is different vs. traditional software companies AND how to test and validate ideas in the early stages. Plus long-time listener Theo Gervet (ML Lead @ Relyance AI) joins us as a guest co-host!ABOUT ANNA PATTERSONAnna is the Founder & Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures, overseeing the fund's global activities.Anna is an accomplished leader in the field of artificial intelligence, a serial entrepreneur, with a long history at Google. Prior to starting Gradient Ventures, Anna was Google's Vice President of Engineering in AI - integrating AI into products across Google. She also serves on the Board of Directors at Square, Inc.Early in her career at Google, she helped launch and scale Android to over a billion phones, launched Google Play, and led the search, infrastructure, and recommendations horizontals. Anna was the principal architect and inventor of TeraGoogle, Google's search serving system, which increased the index size over 10X at the time of launch. She also helped lead search ranking efforts through Google's IPO to determine the top ten search results.Anna co-founded Cuil, a clustering-based search engine, and wrote Recall.archive.org, the first keyword-based search engine and the largest index of the Internet Archive corpus. She wrote “Why writing your own search engine is hard” in the ACM Queue detailing this experience. Prior to that, Anna co-founded and co-authored a search engine Xift.Recognized for her technical contributions as well as her commitment to championing women in tech, Anna was awarded the Technical Leadership ABIE Award in 2016. Anna received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. Then she became a Research Scientist at Stanford University in Artificial Intelligence, where she worked with Carolyn Talcott and one of the founders of AI, John McCarthy. For her undergrad, she double-majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington University in St Louis.Anna resides in the Bay Area, where she wrangles her 4 kids, 2 horses and her Irish husband."When you set out your plan, you can't miss all of your sales targets and make all of your hiring targets." Those kinds of things have to be inline.What people do is they just say, "Here's my plan. I'm going to march towards the plan. And it was super optimistic on the sales front and on the revenue front. And then maybe more realistic and achievable on the hiring front. And so they still kind of march ahead with the plan.I think that you need to constantly reevaluate where you are and on what direction you're going in and whether the growth is appropriate or even the plan was appropriate..."- Anna Patterson   SHOW NOTES:Anna's background scaling complex systems (4:00)Emerging trends and opportunities in AI/ML (9:19)The biggest fallacy in AI/ML right now (15:03)The pendulum swing between model-first and data-first (16:14)What's after deep learning? (18:14)Machine learning and source code (20:06)What will be the most valuable companies with ML as the core value proposition? (25:04)How to spot emerging trends in the AI/ML space (27:43)Typical mistakes AI/ML companies & founders make (31:16)How product-market fit is different for AI/ML companies (34:30)Differences in scaling between trad-software and AI/ML (35:20)How to test and validate ideas in the early-stages of an AI/ML company (37:49)Rapid-Fire Questions (39:38)LINKS AND RESOURCESGradient Ventures (Website)Streamlit.io (Website) - collaborative Python-based app-sharing platformBuilding Your AI A-Team (Link) - Anna and Adrien Treuille's talk from the ELC 2020 Summit discussing how managing an AI team is different from traditional engineering teams & how to think about the collaboration between AI and engineering when scaling

This is the show for engineering leaders making the leap to start their own company! We dive into the stories, pivotal moments and critical insights from former eng leaders turned founders, that helped them take those early leaps to launch their own company! The leap from engineering leader to founder can be intimidating, filled with unknowns & requires almost a completely different mental model & skill set… But you don't have to do it alone! If you want to connect with other engineering leaders who are interested in starting their own companies… (or who've already made the leap!) We're building an engineering founders community where we'll host virtual meetups, share resources & lots of other fun things to support your founder journey… To get notified once that's open for early access - sign up (free) at elc.community!Thanks for climbing aboard our engineering founder's pirate ship!