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Company building with 3 co-founders, delineating roles & finding repeatable sales channels w/ Dylan Etkin, Don Brown & Michael Knighten @ Sleuth
The trio of co-founders from Sleuth – Dylan Etkin, Founder & CEO; Don Brown, Co-Founder & CTO; and Michael Knighten, Co-Founder & COO share their unique experience founding a company with three co-founders & navigating the division of responsibilities with mutual trust / respect. We also cover the challenges & opportunities of moving to a small startup from a large, high-growth org; what Sleuth’s early-day decision-making process looked like; frameworks for avoiding the “at bat” trap while iterating; hidden work elements; paradigm shifts regarding deployment tracking; and more.
ABOUT DYLAN ETKINDylan Etkin (@detkin) is CEO & Co-Founder of Sleuth, the leading DORA metrics tracker. As one of the first 20 employees at Atlassian, Dylan was a founding engineer and the first Architect of Jira. He has led engineering for products at scale in Bitbucket and Statuspage. He has a masters in computer science from ASU. He’s a bit of a space nut and has been seen climbing around inside of a life-size replica of the Mir space station in Star City Russia.
ABOUT DON BROWNDon lives and breathe software - wearing developer, architect, and manager hats for over 20 years. He was an early Atlassian architect for over 10 years working on products including Confluence, HipChat, and Atlassian Cloud. Don is currently the co-founder and CTO of Sleuth, a DORA metrics tracker. He has spoken at conferences including DevOps World, JavaOne, and Devoxx.
ABOUT MICHAEL KNIGHTENMichael built Atlassian’s cloud offerings from the ground up, following stints at Apple and PGP, eventually running company-wide strategy and operations, and helped take the company public in 2015. With a deep background in product and finance, he now runs go-to-market and finance at Sleuth.
ABOUT SLEUTHSleuth is an Engineering Efficiency platform that provides a complete and accurate view of your DORA metrics - giving you visibility into bottlenecks and tools to automate workflows. Sleuth works by integrating with your entire toolchain - from issue tracker, source control, CI/CD, feature flag, incident tracker, to observability tools - to provide the baselines, context, and insights you need to improve efficiency.
Looking for ways to support the show?Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts
If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available.
To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at [email protected]SHOW NOTES:- The story of Michael connecting with Don & Dylan @ Atlassian (3:21)
- Background behind Sleuth & connecting as three co-founders (6:46)
- How Michael, Don, & Dylan identified that they were working on the same problem but from different angles (8:59)
- Don’s key considerations for joining Michael & Dylan (11:48)
- The dynamic of having three co-founders while building Sleuth (14:16)
- How they delineated roles / responsibilities (16:10)
- Why respect is a foundational tenet that avoids overstepping roles (17:18)
- Strategies for navigating the product hand-off to new team members (20:01)
- Hidden work elements Michael identified while clearing the decks (23:03)
- What the early building process / decision making was like (25:50)
- Frameworks for avoiding the “at bat” trap while iterating (29:45)
- Sleuth’s paradigm shift around deployment tracking (32:38)
- Surprising insights / feedback that led to Sleuth’s new direction (34:41)
- How they established a repeatable channel that gets more customers (36:11)
- Mindset shifts when moving from a large, successful company to founding a startup (38:50)
- Rapid fire questions (40:20)
- Game of Thrones - A series of epic fantasy novels by the American novelist and screenwriter George R. R. Martin that chronicles the power struggle for the Iron Throne among the great Houses of Westeros following the death of King Robert.
- The Books of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin’s series of fantasy books set in the fictional archipelago of Earthsea and centers on a young mage named Ged, born in a village on the island of Gont.
Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host
Jerry Li - Co-Host
Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/
Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/
Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/
View all episodes
By The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)The trio of co-founders from Sleuth – Dylan Etkin, Founder & CEO; Don Brown, Co-Founder & CTO; and Michael Knighten, Co-Founder & COO share their unique experience founding a company with three co-founders & navigating the division of responsibilities with mutual trust / respect. We also cover the challenges & opportunities of moving to a small startup from a large, high-growth org; what Sleuth’s early-day decision-making process looked like; frameworks for avoiding the “at bat” trap while iterating; hidden work elements; paradigm shifts regarding deployment tracking; and more.
ABOUT DYLAN ETKINDylan Etkin (@detkin) is CEO & Co-Founder of Sleuth, the leading DORA metrics tracker. As one of the first 20 employees at Atlassian, Dylan was a founding engineer and the first Architect of Jira. He has led engineering for products at scale in Bitbucket and Statuspage. He has a masters in computer science from ASU. He’s a bit of a space nut and has been seen climbing around inside of a life-size replica of the Mir space station in Star City Russia.
ABOUT DON BROWNDon lives and breathe software - wearing developer, architect, and manager hats for over 20 years. He was an early Atlassian architect for over 10 years working on products including Confluence, HipChat, and Atlassian Cloud. Don is currently the co-founder and CTO of Sleuth, a DORA metrics tracker. He has spoken at conferences including DevOps World, JavaOne, and Devoxx.
ABOUT MICHAEL KNIGHTENMichael built Atlassian’s cloud offerings from the ground up, following stints at Apple and PGP, eventually running company-wide strategy and operations, and helped take the company public in 2015. With a deep background in product and finance, he now runs go-to-market and finance at Sleuth.
ABOUT SLEUTHSleuth is an Engineering Efficiency platform that provides a complete and accurate view of your DORA metrics - giving you visibility into bottlenecks and tools to automate workflows. Sleuth works by integrating with your entire toolchain - from issue tracker, source control, CI/CD, feature flag, incident tracker, to observability tools - to provide the baselines, context, and insights you need to improve efficiency.
Looking for ways to support the show?Send a link to the show to your marketing team! https://sfelc.com/podcasts
If your company is looking to gain exposure to thousands of engineering leaders and key decision-makers, we have sponsorship opportunities available.
To explore sponsor opportunities, email us at [email protected]SHOW NOTES:- The story of Michael connecting with Don & Dylan @ Atlassian (3:21)
- Background behind Sleuth & connecting as three co-founders (6:46)
- How Michael, Don, & Dylan identified that they were working on the same problem but from different angles (8:59)
- Don’s key considerations for joining Michael & Dylan (11:48)
- The dynamic of having three co-founders while building Sleuth (14:16)
- How they delineated roles / responsibilities (16:10)
- Why respect is a foundational tenet that avoids overstepping roles (17:18)
- Strategies for navigating the product hand-off to new team members (20:01)
- Hidden work elements Michael identified while clearing the decks (23:03)
- What the early building process / decision making was like (25:50)
- Frameworks for avoiding the “at bat” trap while iterating (29:45)
- Sleuth’s paradigm shift around deployment tracking (32:38)
- Surprising insights / feedback that led to Sleuth’s new direction (34:41)
- How they established a repeatable channel that gets more customers (36:11)
- Mindset shifts when moving from a large, successful company to founding a startup (38:50)
- Rapid fire questions (40:20)
- Game of Thrones - A series of epic fantasy novels by the American novelist and screenwriter George R. R. Martin that chronicles the power struggle for the Iron Throne among the great Houses of Westeros following the death of King Robert.
- The Books of Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin’s series of fantasy books set in the fictional archipelago of Earthsea and centers on a young mage named Ged, born in a village on the island of Gont.
Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host
Jerry Li - Co-Host
Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/
Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/
Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/