Engineering Founders

Charley Ho (Co-Founder & CTO) & Alexander Embiricos (Co-Founder & CEO) @ Remotion share their co-founder story, along with how they found, lost, and rediscovered product-market fit throughout their journey with Remotion. We cover what it’s like building in public & their decision to be transparent with their co-founder ups and downs. Additionally, Charley & Alexander share strategies for pivoting / iterating and communicating with stakeholders, while keeping your team up-to-date and engaged with pivots. We caught up 4x months after our interview to learn the results of their big pivots and PMF experiments - so this is one you want to listen to all the way to the end.

Charley Ho (@potatoarecool) is the Co-Founder and CTO of Remotion, a virtual office that puts your hybrid-remote team right on your desktop. Before Remotion, Charley was an early engineer at Bebop, a startup that was acquired by Google. Charley has a BS & MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

"There's like a really intoxicating idea of just one more bug fix, just one more critical blocking feature and suddenly everything's gonna change because we know our users love it so much. We fell into that pattern a little like super easily, probably because we're such heavy dog fooders."

- Charley Ho  

Alexander Embiricos is cofounder and CEO at Remotion. Prior to starting Remotion with Charley, he fell in love with desktop software while working as a PM at Dropbox. He studied Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering at Stanford, where he met Charley. Alexander lives in Brooklyn, New York where you might find him exploring new foods or on the badminton courts. He swears by charging your phone outside the bedroom.

"There was this growing dissonance between how we felt about what we were building and how we felt about the progress of the product. There was this tension between stay the course and keep going versus, ‘Hey, the metrics don't lie and they're not good. We're not going quickly enough. One more iteration isn't gonna help it. We need to make bigger changes.

- Alexander Embiricos   

Remotion is a fresh take on Zoom that makes any app collaborative like Figma. It's great for pair coding or debugging, but why stop there? Remotion improves all your engineering team's internal calls, with support for 40 participants on Zoom's video infrastructure. 

Here's a short video of their updated product vision

Check out their change log for the latest core feature releases

If you're interested in joining their closed beta - send us a message at [email protected] and we'll connect you!

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.

• Charley & Alexander’s co-founder story (2:59)
• The discovery process behind & what inspired Remotion (4:45)
• Why they chose to invest in Remotion versus the automation route (7:42)
• How Charley & Alexander identified areas of alignment & misalignment (8:17)
• Frameworks for identifying product-market fit (11:09)
• Iterating your product by incorporating user feedback / honesty (15:09)
• The difference between power users & the rest of your customers (17:34)
• How Remotion pivoted product-market fit to meet its engineering customers (19:18)
• Why Charley & Alexander decided to build in public (22:18)
• Strategies for communicating with stakeholders when making pivots (24:14)
• Being transparent regarding your thought process strategies with your team (26:44)
• Exercises to keep your team engaged in strategy & pivots (28:55)
• How early co-founder work set the foundation for tough commitment / pivot conversations (32:20)
• The latest way Alexander & Charley are structuring the way they build (35:41)
• Tips for refocusing your team when making a pivot (36:46)
• 4 months later (39:55)
• Rapid fire questions (46:50)

• One Year Wiser - Tyler Swartz, former Reddit PM, interviews founders and product makers one year after their product launch to learn how their products and businesses have evolved, their ups and downs journey along the way, and what their experiences over the past year have taught them.
• The Expanse - A series of science fiction novels by James S. A. Corey, the joint pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.
• Why We're Polarized - reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.
• Top of the Rock: Inside The Rise And Fall Of Must-See TV - an absorbing insiders’ account of an incredible time and place in television history: the years when Must See TV—led by Cheers, Seinfeld, Friends, ER, and _Law & Order_—made NBC an unstoppable success.
• Slimed: An Oral History Of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age - tells the surprisingly complex, wonderfully nostalgic, and impressively compelling story of how Nickelodeon began as a DIY startup in the late 70s, and forged ahead through the early eighties with a tiny band of young artists and filmmakers who would go on to change everything about cable television, television in general, animation, and children’s entertainment, proving just what can be done if the indie spirit is kept alive in the corporate world.

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/

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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.

Dylan 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.

Don 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.

Michael 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.

Sleuth 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.

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.

• 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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This episode features Lizzie Matusov, CEO & Co-Founder @ Quotient, who shares her unique founder journey – from Harvard’s dual-degree grad program & Innovation Lab to founding Quotient! She also reveals strategies for fundraising, including utilizing your relationship pipeline, incorporating story arcs into your pitch, overcoming pattern-matching bias, and how fundraising today is different than it used to be. We also cover Quotient’s major pivots, tips for not becoming too attached to your first idea & making space for new ideas, defining idea-mazing & its impact on your product, and developing clarity as a founder.

Lizzie Matusov (@lizziematusov) is the co-founder and CEO of Quotient - a toolkit to supercharge engineering teams. Today, their first tool is an onboarding platform that leverages behavioral research best practices to ramp up engineers more effectively. Quotient’s mission is to democratize access to the best engineering cultures.

Previously, Lizzie built software to improve access to medical-grade genetic testing at Invitae. She was also a software engineering consultant at Red Hat, where she built software applications for companies across various industries, including fintech and biotech. She holds a bachelor of science from UCLA, and an MBA and Masters of Engineering Sciences from Harvard.

"Let's say in a four-month period, you check in with investors or founders that you're working with two or three times. Now what they have is not just one call to base their opinion on, but an entire story arc that they can use to say, 'All right, in August they were doing this and by October they already did this, and then by December they were here. I'm now seeing sort of a preview of what I'm backing.' I think that that really helps founders sort of help investors make decisions, right? You are de-risking for them, you are sharing more of the milestones as you're doing them.”

- Lizzie Matusov   

Quotient is a toolkit to supercharge engineering teams. Their mission is to democratize access to the best engineering cultures.

Today, their first tool is an onboarding platform that leverages behavioral research best practices to ramp up engineers more effectively. With Quotient you can build and deliver a high-quality, research-backed onboarding experience, and get data-driven insights into how your team changes and grows together.

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.

• The backstory behind Quotient (2:47)
• Why the atomic unit is the team, not the individual & how that impacts Quotient (3:50)
• Lizzie’s leadership journey before Quotient (5:11)
• Why Lizzie chose Harvard’s dual-degree grad program as part of her founder’s journey (8:29)
• How Harvard’s program helped Lizzie accelerate founding Quotient (12:29)
• The community aspect of entrepreneurship & Harvard’s Innovation Lab (15:34)
• Lizzie’s favorite grad school hacks (17:45)
• Frameworks behind Quotient’s key pivots (19:58)
• How Quotient pivoted to better support companies & the onboarding process (22:48)
• Tips for making space for new ideas (25:46)
• Defining idea-mazing & how it impacts your product / solution (28:00)
• Where Quotient is in terms of fundraising (30:49)
• How assumptions & expectations around fundraising have changed (32:30)
• Collect data points that show your ability to execute, lead, & grow (33:52)
• Strategies to help overcome pattern matching bias (35:56)
• How Lizzie utilized story arcs while fundraising for Quotient (38:19)
• Why clarity as a founder is vital & frameworks for developing clarity (40:51)
• The renaming process & unveiling the new name “Quotient” (44:38)
• Rapid fire questions (46:24)

• Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts’ novel following an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, the two enter the city’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.
• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis documents the real story of the crash that began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn't shine and the SEC doesn't dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower- and middle-class Americans who can't pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren't talking.
• The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers’ novel following a motley crew on an exciting journey through space—and one adventurous young explorer who discovers the meaning of family in the far reaches of the universe.

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Arya Asemanfar, Co-Founder @ Runway, joins us to share how he transitioned from eng leader to co-founder & strategies for both pre & and post-product market fit! We also cover how to determine if you and your potential co-founder are a good match, core principles & primitives that inform Runway’s product strategy, why you should pay attention to how a product makes users feel, strategies for transitioning with ease throughout your org’s evolutions, and implementing learning loops in your org.

Arya is co-founder and CTO of Runway, a modern, beautiful product funded by a16z to help business and finance leaders truly understand and collaborate together for the first time. Prior to Runway, Arya was Head of Product at Lightstep, Tech Lead at Mixpanel, and was one of 3 Principal Engineers at Twitter where he led engineering efforts on the main Timeline product.

"I discovered this book, The Extended Mind, and this concept of offloading. She describes it as being able to take your thoughts or your ideas and offload them out of your head onto something like paper or a whiteboard. What that does is it actually reduces the cognitive load that you have as a person solving a problem or doing some work.

You offload it onto the products or onto the too and it actually frees your mind to do more. It can be faster, it can come up with new ideas, it can make more connections. The tool or the product can be an extension of your mind and so I was like, ‘Hey Siqi, you should listen to this and see if this is what you meant.’ 

And it was like a light bulb moment. ‘Yes, this is it!’”

- Arya Asemanfar   

Business financials got stuck in the 15th century so Runway is showing them today’s computers 🖥- Runway is a SaaS product that helps you and your team understand your business so you can make better decisions together. Unlike other financial software, Runway is designed to be a consumer-grade product for normal people who aren't accountants, and is fast, intuitive, and social.

Runway reinvents how business financials are presented through modern design and engineering. By bringing clarity, power, and speed to financial data, they help every team become more aligned on the entire business so they can collaborate to make better decisions, faster.

That's right! We're hosting in-person community events in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago! Break out of your comfort zone and join us in a casual environment to connect, problem-solve, and support each other in our engineering leadership journeys.

Don't see your city on the list? No problem!

Reach out to Tim at [email protected] and let's bring ELC to you - and make it happen!

• Arya’s background & the early days at Runway (2:24)
• How Arya & Siqi reconnected to co-found Runway (5:18)
• Determining if you’re a good match as co-founders (6:37)
• What made hiring in the early stages of Runway easy (8:38)
• Why Arya made the jump from eng leader @ LightStep to co-founder (9:52)
• Core principles & primitives that inform Runway’s product strategy (12:01)
• Pay attention to how a product makes you feel (15:14)
• Examples of how Runway imbues feeling into its product (18:23)
• Tips for instilling this paradigm in your team in the early product-building phase (20:03)
• Lessons learned throughout Runway’s product evolutions (21:42)
• How working/building the Runway product has evolved over time (25:32)
• What Arya’s learning process between Runway’s iterations looked like (27:48)
• Arya’s strategies for building out your engineering org (30:43)
• Frameworks for determining pre- & post-product market fit (32:46)
• Runway’s current learning loops (34:40)
• Rapid fire questions (37:16)

• First Round Capital Co-founder Questionnaire - 50 questions spanning across six categories designed to test compatibility with a potential co-founder.
• The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain - Anne Murphy Paul’s book that reveals how we can tap the intelligence that exists beyond our brains—in our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships.
• Ezra Klein Interviews Anne Murphy Paul on The Extended Mind
• No Stupid Questions - Stephen J. Dubner ****and research psychologist Angela Duckworth really like to ask people questions, and came to believe there’s no such thing as a stupid one. So they made a podcast where they can ask each other as many “stupid questions” as they want.
• The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly And Others Don’t - Julia Galef’s book that shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn’t that they’re smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It’s a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world that anyone can learn.

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tri Ahmad Irfan, Co-Founder & CTO @ Lumina, discusses his journey identifying large-scale problems in the SE Asian market and how they went from a Google form MVP to 1 million+ users! Additionally, we cover how to formulate / test / prove hypotheses about product-market fit, how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs informs product strategy, determining a potential customer’s willingness to pay, resources for researching consumer acquisition strategies, and his favorite lessons for early-stage founders.

Tri Ahmad Irfan (@irfan3) is the co-founder and CTO of Lumina, a community platform that helps underserved workers in Southeast Asia to upskill and secure better jobs. Launched in early 2022, Lumina has served over a million job seekers and is funded by Y Combinator, and Monk's Hill Ventures.

Before Lumina, Irfan built out the engineering teams at fast-growth startups in Southeast Asia such as GudangAda, a wholesale marketplace, and STOQO, a B2B platform for food and beverage businesses. In college, Irfan interned at Twitter in San Francisco and spent some time doing competitive programming.

"I started with building a Google form and sending it out to a lot of people I know and I met and in return, I received like 10,000 profiles into this Google form. That's when I realized, ‘Okay, this can be something big.’ The app itself only launched six months ago and we have around 1 million users now.”

- Tri Ahmad Irfan   

To learn more about Jellyfish and how they can help you increase engineering satisfaction and create happier, higher-performing engineering teams.

That's right! We're hosting in-person community events in San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, and Chicago! Break out of your comfort zone and join us in a casual environment to connect, problem-solve, and support each other in our engineering leadership journeys.

Don't see your city on the list? No problem!

Reach out to Tim at [email protected] and let's bring ELC to you - and make it happen!

• How Tri’s background inspired him to start Lumina (2:03)
• The motivation behind jumping into Lumina full-time (3:17)
• Challenges faced building the product up from an MVP (7:36)
• Using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to inform product strategy (10:16)
• Frameworks as a founder for identifying a large-scale problem & creating a solution (12:46)
• How Tri formulated & tested his hypotheses about product-market fit (14:00)
• Questions to determine a potential customer’s willingness to pay (17:18)
• How Lumina transitioned from a Google form MVP to its current platform (19:54)
• The market strategy to reach 1 million users & how it shifts to attract the next phase of the business (22:24)
• Tri’s favorite resources for researching consumer acquisition strategies (26:21)
• What happens when you discover a hypothesis isn’t true (27:29)
• Lessons for early-stage founders that Tri learned from past experiences (28:57)
• Who were Lumina’s early key hires to scale up operations (30:59)
• Rapid fire questions (32:33)

• https://irfan.blog/ - Tri’s personal website
• Talent - Renowned economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist and entrepreneur Daniel Gross set out to study the art and science of finding talent at the highest level: the people with the creativity, drive, and insight to transform an organization and make everyone around them better.
• The Witcher - In the Witcher saga, Andrzej Sapkowski introduces his hero, Geralt of Rivia, a witcher. He’s an itinerant mercenary. He kills monsters for money. His strange physique, with white hair and cat-like eyes, distinguishes him from other people, who reject him because of it. He’s an exceptionally powerful mutant who occasionally resorts to magic. Both feared and scorned by the powerless as well as the powerful, who see him as someone dangerous and impossible to retain. His honor code forbids him from killing if he can avoid it, and not to attack monsters unless they pose a real threat. He’s got a strong character, but he still has a human side: he doesn't always emerge from battle unscathed. Set in an imaginary medieval world enhanced with magic and monsters, the Witcher saga will surprise you: the monster isn’t always who you think it is!
• Y Combinator - One of Tri’s favorite founder resources that works intensively with companies for three months, to get them into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors.

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/

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, Ihar Mahaniok (Managing Partner @ Geek Ventures) lends his expertise from the venture capital / tech startup world to help demystify some of the early fundraising experience. Ihar shares his leadership journey and why he decided to go the VC route over an eng leader or founder path, deconstructs his unique investing angle, what qualities he looks for in founders, tips for transitioning to the pre-seed fundraising round, formulas for implementing SAFE caps when seeking investments, and much more.

Ihar (@mahaniok) is the Founder & Managing Partner of Geek Ventures, an NYC-based VC firm investing in early-stage startups by immigrant founders. Ihar is an experienced engineering leader and investor with 20+ years of experience. Ihar has invested in 100+ early-stage startups with exceptional returns, including 5 seed-to-unicorn. His portfolio includes Instacart, Slack, Flexport, Jeeves, PandaDoc, People.ai, Founderpath and more. As an engineering leader, Ihar led teams at Google, Facebook & WeWork; he led engineering at Lightning AI.

A lot of founders try to get all the commits before they start signing papers and wire which means they don't have money in the bank which means they cannot hire people but if you get safes and get wires right away, you get money in the bank and you can hire people.

Obviously, the more you spend on R and D, the more hopefully you can achieve your milestones and show. Right? So it's better to give away kind of 5% of the company at $3 million cap for $150k, but then raised later at higher cap after you have achieved milestones and why you achieved milestones? Because you hire some people!

- Ihar Mahaniok  

Geek Ventures is a tech venture fund investing in immigrant founders building amazing, scalable products.

• How Ihar became a venture capitalist within the tech startup world (2:14)
• Ihar’s unique angle as a VC (4:11)
• The early-day challenges faced by immigrant founders (6:58)
• Why Ihar chose the investor path over eng management or founding (10:02)
• Criteria Ihar considers before investing in a company (14:36)
• Ideal qualities / characteristics Ihar likes to see in a founder (17:59)
• Ihar’s recommendation for what a successful funding process looks like (20:32)
• Strategies for transitioning into the pre-seed round (23:43)
• Implementing SAFE caps for pre-seed investing, weighing the benefits and risks (28:11)
• Using structural FOMO to encourage VCs to invest before it’s too late (32:47)
• Seek investors’ help beyond simply investing (35:39)
• How to build trust with investors through regular, honest updates (38:00)
• Rapid fire questions (40:29)

(book) A DANCE WITH DRAGONS (A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, BOOK FIVE) by George R. R. Martin - In the aftermath of a colossal battle, the future of the Seven Kingdoms hangs in the balance once again–beset by newly emerging threats from every direction. In the east, Daenerys Targaryen, the last scion of House Targaryen, rules with her three dragons as queen of a city built on dust and death. But Daenerys has three times three thousand enemies, and many have set out to find her. Yet, as they gather, one young man embarks upon his own quest for the queen, with an entirely different goal in mind.

To the north lies the mammoth Wall of ice and stone–a structure only as strong as those guarding it. There, Jon Snow, 998th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, will face his greatest challenge yet. For he has powerful foes not only within the Watch but also beyond, in the land of the creatures of ice.

And from all corners, bitter conflicts soon reignite, intimate betrayals are perpetrated, and a grand cast of outlaws and priests, soldiers and skinchangers, nobles and slaves, will face seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Some will fail, others will grow in the strength of darkness. But in a time of rising restlessness, the tides of destiny and politics will lead inevitably to the greatest dance of all. . . .Dubbed “the American Tolkien” by Time magazine, George R. R. Martin has earned international acclaim for his monumental cycle of epic fantasy. Now the #1 New York Times bestselling author delivers the fifth book in his spellbinding landmark series–as both familiar faces and surprising new forces vie for a foothold in a fragmented empire.

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Sean Stavropolous, Co-Founder & CTO @ Boulevard, shares his founder journey and Boulevard’s unique role as a vertically integrated SaaS product! He reveals how he navigated the problem discovery phase early on & decided which features the company should prioritize based on financial impact. We also cover navigating company milestones, strategies for convincing investors to buy-in to your vertically integrated SaaS product, and the impact of COVID on Boulevard.

Sean Stavropoulos (@SeanStavro) is co-founder and CTO of Boulevard, provider of the client experience platform used by more than 25,000 professionals in more than 2,000 salons, spas, and other self-care businesses across the US. In his role as CTO, Sean leads the company’s various technical teams while establishing its strategic product vision. Prior to co-founding Boulevard in 2016, Sean was vice president of engineering at Fullscreen, where he oversaw the technical design and development of the company’s core technology and payments products. His career also includes a stint as a systems engineer for Honeywell Aerospace. A resident of Los Angeles, CA, Sean holds a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

We would need to build baseline functionality in all of these different areas to even get in the door. It's like as we started to learn more and more about what truly would be a viable product in this market... that became demotivating at times.

Because what you thought was your discipline and your very concrete idea of where you're gonna be spending your time starts to expand. And you're like, ‘Well, shoot... I'm gonna have to do a lot more than I initially thought.’

And you know, while that can be demotivating, there's still a real opportunity here. It's just gonna be a little bit bigger than we thought.

- Sean Stavropolous  

Boulevard is a business management platform developed to help streamline the operations of appointment-based businesses.

What started as an idea for a modern appointment scheduling solution for salons and spas has evolved into an innovative client experience platform, complete with seamless scheduling, intuitive business management, automated email marketing, and reliable payment processing – all in one convenient place.

Developed in collaboration with industry-leading owners and operators, their scheduling and point of sale platform-as-a-service was carefully designed to drive revenue, automate workflows, and convert customers from visitors into valuable, long-term clients. By facilitating a better, personalized experience across every transaction and interaction, Boulevard’s technology not only helps businesses survive, but thrive.

• Boulevard’s early days & why it became a vertically integrated SaaS product from the start (2:08)
• The problem discovery phase & expanding Boulevard’s feature scope (4:18)
• How Sean navigated which opportunities to pursue early on (9:49)
• Frameworks for deciding which features to prioritize while considering the financial impact (13:30)
• Tools for validating the ideal customer persona (16:51)
• Balancing between being realistic & optimistic regarding your product (17:47)
• Navigating both feature release & customer growth milestones (20:13)
• Sean’s experience fundraising as an eng leader for a vertically integrated SaaS platform (22:00)
• Strategies for convincing investors that your product is worth investing in (26:01)
• Identify & seek advice from experts who can help grow your product (29:28)
• The impact of COVID on Boulevard & how they navigated its challenges (32:11)
• Rapid fire questions (39:00)

• (book) The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch - Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them.When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.
• (book) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir - Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone. Or does he?

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Chris Pruett, Co-Founder @ Jam, shares his leadership journey – transitioning from VPE @ LinkedIn to going all-in on Jam’s mission of entertaining curious minds. We also cover marketing & pitching lessons learned while introducing Jam at ComicCon, how audio storytelling creates an authentic, intimate experience for listeners; strategies for building consumer-based products vs. enterprise-based products; and more.

Chris Pruett (@curthipster) is the CTO and Co-Founder of Jam — a new way to listen to and share bite-sized audio. Delivered daily via text, Jams entertain curious minds in just a few minutes. Prior to Jam, he spent 9.5 years at LinkedIn, leading full-stack teams of 500+ engineers, where he transformed all parts of the consumer product, from the native mobile and web applications to the distributed systems that power the core platforms (feed, messaging, search, profile, notifications).

"That led to me putting on a coffee backpack, and then I started talking to people. And then that was when the magic started happening in terms of what I learned.

So I had to experiment and find different ways to get people's attention and help them understand what we're doing. As a platform, we started to learn to make it much more about the types of content that we had…”

- Chris Pruett  

Jam is a new way to listen, share, inform, and inspire curious minds. It’s a daily playlist of the best content that fits perfectly into your busy day. Whether you’re making breakfast, running errands, or walking the dog – just listen to your Jams, delivered via text at the time that works best for you. Check them out at ListenToJam.com

• Chris’s leadership journey from VPE @ LinkedIn to Co-Founder @ Jam (1:46)
• Jam’s grand product vision of entertaining curious minds (4:49)
• Why podcasts / listening experiences create intimacy with your audience (6:57)
• How Jam satisfies Chris’s passion for building consumer products (8:17)
• Considerations behind transitioning from LinkedIn to Jam (9:36)
• Take time to explore opportunity costs (13:54)
• Skills & frameworks Chris improved upon as a founder (16:31)
• Marketing, pitching, & go-to-market lessons from Jam’s introduction at ComicCon (19:55)
• The importance of getting the pitch right & communicating concisely (25:54)
• How to bring true authenticity into your product pitch (30:02)
• Using stories / metaphors to connect with potential users (34:01)
• Chris’s approach for building a consumer-based product vs. enterprise-based (38:20
• How Jam models its storytelling philosophy to its creator network (41:09)
• To build a high-quality product, you MUST be using it (43:55)
• Rapid fire questions (46:17)

• Grace Hopper Celebration - The world’s largest gathering of women technologists. Hear from our inspiring speakers, connect with peers and mentors, and gain important resources to help you succeed in your career. Created in 1994 and inspired by the legacy of Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, the AnitaB.org flagship event Grace Hopper Celebration brings the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront.
• Book Jam with Jeff Matlow - Book reviews with attitude.
• Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid - Malibu Rising is a story about one unforgettable night in the life of a family: the night they each have to choose what they will keep from the people who made them . . . and what they will leave behind.“I could not recommend Taylor. Jenkins Read more highly if you enjoy fiction.”

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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.

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  

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.

• 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)

• 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.

Want to learn more about ELC Angels? FAQs about the community here: https://voltaic-pickle-4a4.notion.site/ELC-Angel-FAQ-5d7d0d82565a4b0b8638c496641d7ca0

Also find them on AngelList - https://venture.angellist.com/elc/syndicate

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Should I build B2C or B2B? Should we implement top-down or a bottoms up sales strategy? How do we think about pricing? These are many of the dilemmas early founders face in the early stages. We sit down with Abi Noda to explore his experiences co-founding DX and Pull Panda and examine the differences, trade-offs and considerations behind building for consumer vs. B2B, pricing, early sales and product adoption strategies!

Abi Noda is the CEO and co-founder of DX, the world's first developer experience management platform. He was previously the CEO and founder of Pull Panda, which was acquired by GitHub in 2019. At GitHub he led research collaborations with Dr. Nicole Forsgren, McKinsey, and Microsoft Research, which was the impetus for founding DX.

"It's really good to try to sell starting on day one. That's probably, in my opinion, the best way to validate an idea, a B2B idea, is to try and go sell it and by sell it I mean literally go get money for like pre-committed customers. So it really de-risks a huge component of, I think, why these types of businesses fail, which is they just aren't able even identify, reach and successfully convert buyers.”

- Abi Noda   

DX is the world’s first developer experience management platform, helping organizations measure and improve top drivers of developer productivity and engagement.

DX is designed by leading software engineering researchers, providing science-backed metrics, workflows, and education that empower teams to improve.

• Abi's journey founding DX and Pull Panda (1:58)
• Building your business as a side-project for consumers vs. enterprise software (4:58)
• If you just got laid off and want to start a business, you need to hear this (8:52)
• The best way to validate a B2B idea (11:35)
• Differences with how you talk about your product in a competitive vs. uncompetitive market (14:49)
• How to think about pricing for bottoms-up or top-down sales motion (16:08)
• Choosing the right persona to pursue as customers (19:48)
• How experience at large companies can help you understand how to approach enterprise product adoption (22:35)
• Investor expectations with bottoms-up/top-down sales and identifying ICPs (30:57)
• Incentivizing users to adopt new features (33:03)
• Closing deals and getting to the implementation stage (36:42)
• How Abi maximized advisor relationships (38:54)
• Rapid fire questions (44:18)

• Lenny Rachitsky’s Newsletter - a weekly advice column about product, growth, and your career.
• 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton Helmer’s comprehensive business strategy guide centered around power and the conditions that create the potential for persistent differential returns.
• Nail It Then Scale It - Nathan Furr and Paul Ahlstrom’s guide to increasing success and reducing risk when launching a high-growth company.

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