Scaling DevTools

​Samuel Colvin​ - the creator of ​Pydantic​ - the most popular data validation library for Python. Used by literally everyone (Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, NVIDIA, even the NSA). He shares the story behind his startup ​Logfire​ which just raised $12.5m from Sequoia.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Key takeaways:
- You can just build a different product to your open source project and leverage your brand
- Quality of product matters a LOT (if you can build a popular open source project, can probably build a quality paid product)
- Really helps to be part of a movement. Hard to predict but Pydantic benefited from two (types and LLMs)
- GitHub stars are a vanity metric compared to download numbers

Links:
- Pydantic
- Logfire
- Samuel Colvin

Chapters
00:00 The Genesis of Pydantic
02:46 The Evolution of Software Development
06:02 Building a Successful Open Source Library
08:52 The Impact of Community and Adoption
11:51 Metrics of Success in Open Source
15:08 Transitioning from Pydantic to LogFire
17:59 The Vision Behind LogFire
20:50 The Connection Between Pydantic and LogFire
24:05 Navigating the Challenges of Building a Startup
26:56 The Future of Observability and Databases

P.s. thanks to my friend Abeed for making the episode happen!

There are more and more open source DevTools startups. I’ve interviewed dozens. But I am still confused about open source licenses. So I decided to ask questions to two people who actually understand them: my friends Eric and Matt - founders of open source background jobs tool Trigger.dev.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

What we discuss:

• Two Key Questions for License Selection
• What are the benefits of permissive licenses?
• What are the main licenses?
• Why shouldn’t you write your own (open source) license?
• What is Copyleft?
• Post Open Source" Movement

• (00:50) - Open Source Licensing

Trigger:

• Eric Allam - https://x.com/maverickdotdev 
• Matt Aitken - https://x.com/mattaitken
• Trigger.dev https://trigger.dev/
• JSON Hero https://jsonhero.io/ 

Licenses

• MIT License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License - Matt’s “most permissive license”
• Apache-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_License - “Like MIT but with trademarks”
• FSL / Fair Source License https://fair.io/ - created by Sentry
• Heather Meeker - Open Source Licencing expert https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathermeeker/ 
• A practical guide to Open Source Licencing https://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Source-Business-Practical-Licensing/dp/1544737645 

References

• Sentry https://sentry.io/welcome/ 
• Redis https://redis.io/ 
• Valkey https://valkey.io/ 
• Clickhouse https://clickhouse.com/ 
• Background to Continue.dev and PearAI https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/30/y-combinator-is-being-criticized-after-it-backed-an-ai-startup-that-admits-it-basically-cloned-another-ai-startup/ 

John O'Nolan is the Founder and CEO of Ghost.org. Ghost is an open source blog & newsletter platform. We use them for the Scaling DevTools' blog.

Note: this episode was recorded on 17th October 2024.

We talk about:

• How to communicate the benefits of Open Source to non-developers
• How Ghost manages to align open source and money making
• John's thoughts on the Automattic/Wordpress drama
• Advantages and disadvantages of VC funding and open source
• What would John do with VC dollars

Resources:

• Ghost https://ghost.org/
• John's website https://john.onolan.org/
• The WordPress vs. WP Engine drama, explained https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/07/wordpress-vs-wp-engine-drama-explained/ 
• Indie Hackers podcast https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/139-john-onolan-of-ghost
• Cursor cursor.com
• Ben Thompson's blog https://stratechery.com/

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Gonto (Martin Gontovnikas) was the 6th employee at Auth0 and helped them grow fast and sell for $6.5billion to Okta. 

Now he is the founder of Hypergrowth Partners and helps DevTools grow fast.

We discuss:

• What Auth0 did to become so valuable so fast
• What the best founders do (Guillermo Rauch)
• Different is better than better 
• People follow people not brands
• Why bleeding edge matters

Resources

• Why Technical SDRs are the Future of DevTools
  https://playbooks.hypergrowthpartners.com/p/product-advocates-technical-sdrs
• Gonto's website https://gon.to/
• Gonto's Twitter https://twitter.com/mgonto
• Hypergrowth Partners https://www.hypergrowthpartners.com/
• Code to Market https://codetomarket.fm/
• Guillermo Rauch https://x.com/rauchg

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Mike McQuaid and John Britton are cofounders of Workbrew - a tool that gives you the missing features for enterprises running homebrew.

John has previously worked at GitHub and Twilio and is a contributor to Homebrew. Mike has also worked at GitHub as well as being the project lead and longest running maintainer at Homebrew.

 We dig into:

• How Homebrew can trace its origins to a pub in London
• How Apple actually work with Homebrew
• How Homebrew managed to grow and scale up
• How Workbrew are avoiding misaligned incentives so common in open source

Links for Mike, John and Workbrew

• Mike McQuaid https://mikemcquaid.com/
• John Britton https://johndbritton.com/
• Workbrew https://workbrew.com/

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

Paul Klein is the founder and CEO of Browserbase - one of the fastest growing DevTools in 2024.

Browserbase is a headless browser API focused on helping AI Agent startups.

We dig into:

• Why browser automation?
• How Browserbase hit "VC-market-fit"
• Visionary is revisionist-history 
• Tips for hiring your friends
• Why buying a jacket is like buying a devtool
• Building an in-person DevTool in San Francisco
• Making priorities (what Paul doesn’t care about).

Where to find Paul and Browserbase:

• Twitter/X https://x.com/pauljasonklein?lang=en
• LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkleiniv
• Browserbase https://www.browserbase.com/

References

• Mux acquires Stream Club https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mux-acquires-stream-club-to-enable-developers-to-build-live-streaming-studios-into-their-applications-301449407.html
• Levelsio on VPSs https://x.com/levelsio/status/1827308534645572015 
• Charly Poly https://www.linkedin.com/in/charly-poly/?originalSubdomain=fr
• DevTools Pauls: Paul Butler https://x.com/paulgb?lang=en and Paul Copplestone https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulcopplestone
• Solaris office space https://www.solarissf.com/

To support Scaling DevTools, please check out the Enterprise Ready Conf from WorkOS https://enterprise-ready.com/

In 2017, Rasmus Makwarth sold his previous APM (Application Performance Managment) startup Opbeat to Elastic for an undisclosed amount. Opbeat became Elastic APM, which became a big part of the Elastic Observability solution and Rasmus became Senior Director of Product Management - with a focus on Developer Experience.

Today, Rasmus is the founder and CEO of Bucket.co - a feature flagging tool built for B2B teams. Bucket has raised $5.7m from investors such as Project A and Creandum.

We dig into:

• The realities of fundraising on a deadline
• The role of San Francisco in fundraising - do you need to be there?
• How exit opportunities can come from unexpected sources and the importance of showing up 
• The importance of building a great product
• What Rasmus learned at Elastic - one of the biggest DevTools in the world 
• Why Bucket is betting on helping engineers at b2b companies understand how users use their features
• The future of product engineering

Where to find Rasmus:

• LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/makwarth/?originalSubdomain=dk
• Twitter/X https://x.com/makwarth
• Bucket https://bucket.co/

References

• Elastic https://elastic.co/
• Opbeat acquisition announcement https://www.elastic.co/blog/welcome-opbeat-to-the-elastic-family
• Shay Banon - founder of Elastic https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimchy/
• Gregory Tademoto - VP Global Business & Corporate Development https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregorytademoto/

To support Scaling DevTools, check out the Enterprise Ready Conf from WorkOS https://enterprise-ready.com/

Shawn Wang (aka swyx) is the founder of smol.ai (AI news curation), and the cohost of Latent Space (popular AI Engineer podcast).

Plus, Shawn started the AI Engineer movement with his essay Rise of the AI Engineer and organized two incredible AI engineer conferences in the past twelve months - AI Engineer World's Fair and AI Engineer Summit

And Shawn has angel invested in DevTools like Airbyte, Railway, Supabase, Replay.io, Stackblitz, Flutterflow, Fireworks.ai while running the DevTools angels community.

Besides this, Shawn curates DX.tips (DevTools magazine) and in a past life wrote the Coding Career handbook, championed learn in public, cofounded Svelte Society and was previously Head of Developer Experience at Temporal, and a Developer Advocate at AWS and Netlify.

Also, before this, Shawn had a very successful career in investment banking, trading, building data pipelines and performing quantitate portfolio management. I think this brings him a very unique perspective - I've always admired his ability to zoom out and see the big picture and the trends.

Even though Shawn is now all-in on AI, he's still one of the go-to authorities on DevTools go-to-market.

As you can tell, Shawn is someone I deeply admire. So I'm glad he came back.

What we discuss:

• Organizing the AI Engineer Conferences
• Rise of the AI Engineer
• Intentionality and principles (yes we even talk about Alcoholics Anonymous)
• The AI CEO
• Invisible deadlines
• Ilya believing in AGI more than most people at OpenAI
• Are developers going to be obsolete? 
• Thor convinced swyx to invest in Supabase
• Building DevTools that work well with LLMs
• Angel investing in DevTools - why and how
• Is DevRel dead?
• How to hire DevRel
• Why DX.tips exists

Links:

• Rise of the AI Engineer https://www.latent.space/p/ai-engineer
• Latent Space Podcast https://www.latent.space/
• swyx's Twitter https://x.com/swyx
• swyx's website https://www.swyx.io/
• swyx's LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnswyxwang/
• smol.ai https://smol.ai/
• DevTools Angels https://github.com/sw-yx/devtools-angels
• DX.tips https://dx.tips/
• DevRel's Death as Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon https://dx.tips/zirp 
• AI Engineer Summit https://www.ai.engineer/summit/2023
• AI Engineer World's Fair https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair
• Coding Career Handbook https://www.learninpublic.org/
• Shawn's previous appearance on Scaling DevTools https://podcast.scalingdevtools.com/episodes/swyx 
• Eisenhower Matrix https://asana.com/resources/eisenhower-matrix
• Thor from Supabase https://x.com/thorwebdev
• Solaris AI coworking space in SF https://www.solarissf.com/
• Browserbase https://www.browserbase.com/
• Indent https://indent.com/ and Fouad https://x.com/fouadmatin
• How to do hackathons https://dx.tips/hackathons
• How to do conferences https://dx.tips/conf-guide
• How to hire DevRel https://dx.tips/mailbox-first-devrel-hiring
• Climbing the ladder of abstraction with Amelia Wattenberger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAy_GHUAICw

Check out the Enterprise Ready Conf from WorkOS https://enterprise-ready.com/

Sagar is the CEO and co-founder of Speakeasy - an API tooling platform. We talk about the journey of Speakeasy. The challenges of startup life. How they developed the product and how they work with influencers in a surprising way.

• Building relationships with influencers can significantly enhance product development.
• Importance of listening to customers
• Fine line between product and consulting
• The role of documentation in user experience
• Being responsive to customer needs builds long-term relationships.
• The startup journey requires patience and adaptability.

Links:

• Sagar Batchu 
• Speakeasy https://www.speakeasy.com/

Check out the Enterprise Ready Conf from WorkOS https://enterprise-ready.com/

In this conversation, Anurag Goel, founder and CEO of Render, discusses the evolution of Render as a cloud infrastructure platform is actually simple to use.

He shares insights from his time at Stripe, emphasizing the importance of customer focus, crafting a seamless user experience, and the philosophy of progressive disclosure of complexity.

Anurag also highlights the significance of customer support as an integral part of the product and offers advice for aspiring founders on finding their passion and maintaining empathy in their work.

This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're thinking about selling to enterprise customers, WorkOS can help you add enterprise features like Single Sign On and audit logs.

What we discuss:

• Building in special details enhances customer experience.
• The delicate balance between simplicity and capability. 
• How the power of sensible defaults. and progressive disclosure of complexity improves usability.
• Focus on customer needs drives product development.
• Customer support should be treated as a product.
• Finding founder market fit is crucial for success.
• Empathy for users is essential in product development.

Links

• Anurag's Twitter https://x.com/anuraggoel
• Render https://render.com/
• Stripe https://stripe.com/

Keywords
Render, developer experience, cloud infrastructure, customer support, startup culture, Anurag Goel, Stripe, product development, user experience, technology