Unleashing your Zilla with Hartley Pike, co-founder of Sitemate

✅ Lessons from the Startmate Accelerator: “The incline on the learning curve was immense”

✅ “Daylighting”: solving issues in the company through radical transparency

✅ “Drafting”: following in the wake of a more established company

✅ Reframing Sitemate’s weaknesses as their biggest strengths

✅ Sitemate’s vision for the future of engineers in the built world

Sitemate builds software for the built world. Its vision is to enable the human race to build roads, bridges and buildings faster than we build software.

Episode Highlights from Hartley:

On traveling to San Francisco for Startmate: “The incline on the learning curve was immense. I remember about halfway through the trip we sat down and processed what we’d learned in the last two days, and it felt like a mini lifetime of learnings crammed into 6 meetings over 2 days.”

“The Zilla analogy comes from… how quickly and how big an individual and the team around them can grow… One day when you grow up you’ll be stomping around, causing mayhem for a bunch of companies you’re scared of right now because you think they’re big and undefeatable, and one day you’ll be their Godzilla tearing down their buildings.”

“We basically had wounds in the business all over the place, and the process to fixing those was sending a monthly update. We started doing it in May 2018, we’re never going to miss a month, and there’s going to be no filter. It’s going to show all the scabs.”

“We went through a really hard hiring stage, there was a period of time where I had to basically become the interim CTO… and we cycled through 3 or 4 failed engineering hires, and we eventually just kept improving and iterating on our process. We now have this quite insane hiring flow, where the first 3 steps of the process are completely automated.”

“Our fundamental belief is that engineers in the built world in the future will operate in a similar way to how technology teams operate today. They’ll all be using best in class tools, real time, highly configurable, fast to deploy, that are seamlessly interconnected.”

Learn more about Sitemate here