Tech Talk: The Business Of Developer Tools With Lee Edwards

How do you build a business around tools for software engineers? Adam talks to Lee Edwards, a VC who spends a lot of time thinking about this question.

"When I think about is this a good business, I think about is there value Accruing. The question is just how much.

The question about is it a venture-backed business? The very, very oversimplified answer is do you believe you can get $100 million in revenue within 10 years? And those numbers are kind of fudgy. But if you can do that, you can IPO a company and it's kind of amazing that PagerDuty and Twillio each do one thing well and they're multibillion-dollar companies. "

"Another interesting thing that venture capitalists talk about behind closed doors and probably never tweet about or say publicly because it makes them look bad. But you do often wonder if the founder of a dev tool company, a lot of times they're really altruistic and you know, I feel this way too, right? But venture capitalists are like, wait, don't give your stuff away for free. And it can sometimes be kind of like a conflict. I think when you're looking for an open-source founder, you need to look for someone as a VC that actually does want to make everyone money."

Show Notes:

• Root VC
• The Business Value of Developer Relations - Mary Thengvall
• Code Climate
• Particle.io
• FlexPort