We talk with Sagar Batchu (Co-Founder @ Speakeasy) about his transition from engineering leader to founder, what it means to be a devex company, how he navigated finding a co-founder, and more! Co-hosted by Emma Tang & Roger Luo @ ELC Angels, we also cover shipping a product before funding and the ensuing pivots, building a developer-led startup, and attracting top talent for early-day hires.

ABOUT SAGAR BATCHU

Sagar (@sagar_batchu) is a hands-on engineer leader focused on developer and data infrastructure. Previously he was Director of Engineering at LiveRamp. As the first engineering hire for LiveRamp in London he scaled the team to 50+ over a few years and established the group as a center for privacy and analytics. Sagar enjoy's building teams from scratch, focusing on the strategic impact of technical choices and working at the cross section of engineering, product and corp dev. He's currently CEO and co-founder of a new startup in the developer infrastructure space. Sagar loves dev tools and chicory in his coffee!

"As an engineer, one of the things that you can rely on the most in the early days is this ability to prototype super quickly. And when we did all of our early user interviews, we were able to do an interview, immediately jump, prototype, think about it, work on something actually tangible. And there's nothing quite like being able to build something immediately and see how it does.”

- Sagar Batchu  

ABOUT SPEAKEASY

Speakeasy is developer experience for your API - Their vision is to be the simplest and most reliable way to consume an API. Speakeasy enables companies to offer a world-class API Developer Experience and finally move beyond docs -- driving user adoption, decreasing troubleshooting time, and reducing support costs. Day 0 they provide reliable, language-idiomatic, type-safe client SDKs that reduce developer friction in a range of languages and runtimes. Day 1 developers self service all aspects of API usage through a developer dashboard that includes key management, usage dashboards, logging & troubleshooting, request replay, and more. Speakeasy is the easiest way to consume an API whether internal or external.

SHOW NOTES:

• The inspiration & backstory behind Speakeasy (1:36)
• Speakeasy’s mission & Sagar’s transition from LiveRamp to Speakeasy (4:25)
• How Sagar felt transitioning from eng leader to founder (8:50)
• What was easier or harder than expected, when you became a founder? (11:34)
• What it means to be a developer-first company (12:39)
• The early-day experience of building developer-led companies (16:50)
• How Sagar found his first founding engineer (19:17)
• The “secret sauce” to attracting top talent & early founders (21:08)
• How to navigate “co-founder dating” (25:28)
• Strategies for building a product that satisfies customers & investors (27:32)
• Frameworks for approaching potential investors & working with stakeholders (30:01)
• Sagar’s approach for maintaining momentum as his company’s chief evangelist (31:54)
• Rapid fire questions (35:04)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell - “Tony led the teams that created the iPod, iPhone and Nest Learning Thermostat and learned enough in 30+ years in Silicon Valley about leadership, design, startups, Apple, Google, decision-making, mentorship, devastating failure and unbelievable success to fill an encyclopedia. So that’s what this book is. An advice encyclopedia. A mentor in a box.”
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - “An irresistible interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir could deliver, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian —while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.

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