My guest for Episode 127 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was the Co-founder & CEO of Buildkite, Lachlan Donald.

Lachlan has been a technologist for over 20 years. In addition to building companies, he is drawn to building products that change how people think and work.

Before Buildkite, he was the founding CTO of 99designs, the world’s largest online graphic design marketplace. 99Designs connects businesses looking for design work with more than 220,000 graphic designers from 192 countries around the world.

Lachlan is now the Co-founder and CEO of Buildkite, the fastest way to reliably test and build software at any scale.

Buildkite is one of Australia’s best keep secrets. They raised AUD$200,000 in seed funding when the company was first founded in 2013 and over the last 7 years have turned away investor interest to focus on profitability of the business.

However, Buildkite recently announced an AUD$28M Series A funding round led by Openview, providing a 42x return to it’s early investors.

In this interview we discussed:

• Being intentional with focus
• The craftsmanship behind enduring products
• Buildkite’s unique approach to sharing CEO roles between the founders
• The importance of equity over ego
• Buildkite’s fundraising process for it’s $28M Series A funding round after 7 years of bootstrapping
• & much more!

Full interview below!

Show notes:

• Buildkite
• 99Designs
• Tim Lucas (Co-founder at Buildkite)
• Keith Pitt (Co-founder at Buildkite)
• Patrick Llewellyn (Startup Playbook Podcast – Ep085) 
• Paul Annesley (99Designs)
• Mark Harbottle (Co-founder of Sitepoint, 99Designs and Flippa)
• Matt Mickiewicz (Co-founder of 99Designs and Hired)
• Sitepoint
• Accel
• John Barton (CTO of Amber Electric)
• GitHub
• Heroku
• REA
• Envato
• MYOB
• DHH (Founder & CTO of Basecamp and HEY)
• Basecamp
• DHH (Startup Playbook Podcast – Ep119)
• Doug English (Co-founder & CTO of Culture Amp)
• Culture Amp
• Didier Elzinga (Co-founder & CEO of Culture Amp)
• Didier Elzinga (Startup Playbook Podcast – Ep101)
• Matt Allen (Co-founder & GP of Pick and Shovel)
• Matt Allen (Startup Playbook Podcast – Ep028)
• Openview Partners
• General Catalyst
• ESOPs
• The deal Jeff Bezos got on Basecamp (blog)
• Ashley Smith (Openview)
• Trevor Oelschig (General Catalyst)
• Foreign Investment Review Board

Special Thanks:

Special thanks to John Barton, Doug English and Matt Allen who helped with research for this interview.

Next interview:

Join our next live podcast interview with Holly Cardew, the Founder of Pixc and Co-founder of Vop.
Date: 8th September 2020
Time: 8-9am (AEDT)
Registration link: https://tinyurl.com/Ep128Holly

Feedback/connect/say hello:

Rohit@startupplaybook.co
@RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)
/rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
@rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
My Youtube Channel

Credits:

Music: Joakim Karud – Dreams

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