Founders Talk: Startups, CEOs, Leadership

This week Adam is joined by Joe Percoco — the Co-CEO of Titan, a premier investment manager for everyone. Titan is an investment company, a media, and a tech company, all rolled into one. Mid last year, they closed a $58 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) at a $450 million valuation. They currently have $750 million in assets managed and more than 35,000 clients. Why should Titan exist? In Joe’s words, “Wall Street ignores everyday investors, and caters only to the ultra wealthy. This divide doesn’t sit well with us. So, we built Titan.” On today’s show Joe shares the journey, the why’s, the how’s, and the sequencing it might take to get to a $1 trillion of assets managed. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io PlanetScale – PlanetScale is the only serverless database platform you can start in an instant and scale indefinitely with unlimited connections. Never think about database servers again. Everything you want to control is available through the beautifully designed PlanetScale CLI. Learn more and start your database in seconds at planetscale.com Rewatch – Rewatch gives product and engineering teams async superpowers and helps them move faster with greater clarity. Imagine all of your team’s videos, all in one place. Record, organize, and share the videos that your team needs to ship great work. Get started for free with 14-day trial at rewatch.com. Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io Featuring:Joe Percoco – Website, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes:Adam’s referral link to Titan (because he’s a client) Investing in Titan Titan Strategies Titan Research Titan Articles It’s time to buy the crypto dip Fintech App Titan Adds Actively Managed Crypto Basket Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week Adam is joined by Christine Yen, co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb. Christine and Adam recorded this show late last year, just after their Series C funding round. They talk about the superpower of observability for developers, how she and Charity Majors got to the place to found Honeycomb, the state of their platform today, what exactly observability is, and their goals for the future of Honeycomb. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com Rewatch – Rewatch gives product and engineering teams async superpowers and helps them move faster with greater clarity. Imagine all of your team’s videos, all in one place. Record, organize, and share the videos that your team needs to ship great work. Get started for free with 14-day trial at rewatch.com. FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io Featuring:Christine Yen – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: How Honeycomb Is Using $50M in New Funding to Bring Observability to All The Changelog #356: Observability is for your unknown unknowns with Christine Yen 2020: The Year Bee-hind Us Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week Adam is joined by Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale. Now that PlanetScale is in general availability, Adam had to get Sam on the show to talk about the behind the scenes of building this database platform, how this is the last database you’ll ever need and what that means for developers, why serverless, its open source underpinnings with Vitess, and a preview of what’s to come. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:FireHydrant – The reliability platform for every developer. Incidents impact everyone, not just SREs. FireHydrant gives teams the tools to maintain service catalogs, respond to incidents, communicate through status pages, and learn with retrospectives. Try FireHydrant free for 14 days at firehydrant.io Rewatch – Rewatch gives product and engineering teams async superpowers and helps them move faster with greater clarity. Imagine all of your team’s videos, all in one place. Record, organize, and share the videos that your team needs to ship great work. Get started for free with 14-day trial at rewatch.com. Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com Featuring:Sam Lambert – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: planetscale.com PlanetScale raises $50M Series C as its enterprise database service hits general availability PlanetScale raises $30M Series B for its database service Announcing PlanetScale: The database for developers. Sam Lambert Appointed New CEO of PlanetScale PlanetScale is now generally available PlanetScale’s Changelog Bring your data to PlanetScale Introducing PlanetScale Managed Cloud PlanetScale documentation + source on GitHub Vitess + source on GitHub Vitess on CNCF Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces Vitess Graduation Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week Adam is joined by Zac Smith, Co-Founder of Packet and now running Equinix Metal. They talk about the early days of the internet infrastructure space, the beginnings of Packet, the “why” of bare metal, transitioning Packet from startup to global company overnight when they were acquired by Equinix, and how all this for Zac is 20 years in the making. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com PlanetScale – PlanetScale is the only serverless database platform you can start in an instant and scale indefinitely with unlimited connections. Never think about database servers again. Everything you want to control is available through the beautifully designed PlanetScale CLI. Learn more and start your database in seconds at planetscale.com Fastly – Compute@Edge free for 3 months — plus up to $100k a month in credit for an additional 6 months. Fastly’s Edge cloud network and modern approach to serverless computing allows you to deploy and run complex logic at the edge with unparalleled security and blazing fast computational speed. Head to fastly.com/podcast to take advantage of this limited time promotion! Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io Featuring:Zac Smith – Website, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Equinix Completes Acquisition of Bare Metal Leader Packet Equinix.com - We power the world’s digital leaders Founders Talk #73: Balancing business and open source with Raj Dutt, Founder & CEO of Grafana Labs The Linux Foundation Hosts Open19 to Accelerate Data Center and Edge Hardware Innovation Alex Polvi Power usage effectiveness (PUE) Ask Your Developer by Jeff Lawson Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Today Adam is joined by Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel. They talk about building the platform that’s making the web faster and lets front-enders do their best work, his framework for leading as a CEO, what’s next for Next.js and Next.js Live, and how everything for Vercel is built on “Develop. Preview. Ship.” Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform. Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com Gitpod – Spin up fresh, ephemeral automated dev environments, in the cloud, in seconds. Their free tier is open to every developer with a GitLab, GitHub, and/or Bitbucket account. Learn more at gitpod.io Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com Featuring:Guillermo Rauch – Website, GitHub, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Vercel Making the Web. Faster. Next for Vercel We’ve re-branded as Vercel Next.js Live The Changelog #213: ZEIT, HyperTerm, now with Guillermo Rauch, founder of ZEIT The Changelog #426: What the web could be (in 2021 and beyond) with Guillermo Rauch & Amal Hussein Hack Club Lex Fridman Podcast: Garry Kasparov: Chess, Deep Blue, AI, and Putin Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Today Adam is joined by Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. Evan’s journey to become the CEO was not by way of founder, in this company. Evan has founded several companies in the past, and he’s been in a CEO position for more than 22 years. But InfluxData was founded by Paul Dix, and Paul knew years ago that his role (best role?) was to lead the technical and product direction of the company, which lead him to Evan. Today we share that story as well as a glimpse into operating the business that built the defacto platform for building time series applications with deep roots in open source. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform. Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com Featuring:Evan Kaplan – LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: My Journey to InfluxData The Changelog #429: Community perspectives on Elastic vs AWS - a deep dive on the business of open source Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Today Adam is joined by Quinn Slack, CEO of Sourcegraph. He’s been tracking Sourcegraph for years now and knew one day they would hit Unicorn status, and that happened this year. They’re just off a massive $125M Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $2.625B valuation to bring code search to every developer. The future of code search has never been more clear and we’re excited to share today’s show with you. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform. Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com SignalWire – Build what’s next in communications with video, voice, and messaging APIs powered by elastic cloud infrastructure. Try it today at signalwire.com and use code FOUNDERS for $25 in developer credit. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com Featuring:Quinn Slack – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Announcing Sourcegraph’s Series D The future of code search sourcegraph/sourcegraph on GitHub Sourcegraph quick install Sourcegraph handbook OpenGrok Why I love code (and how I started coding) Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Today Adam is joined by Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Fly.io — a platform for running full stack apps and databases close to users. This conversation with Kurt talks through his journey as a developer and entrepreneur, fundraising, getting into Y Combinator (twice), and how they’ve iterated on the Fly platform since 2017 to get to where they are right now. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform. Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com Featuring:Kurt Mackey – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Introducing the Fly global application platform fly.io/blog Globally distributed Postgres Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

On today’s show Adam is joined by John Nunemaker (an old friend). For some of you listening you might remember John’s appearance on The Changelog #11, which was basically forever ago. Or his company Ordered List — they made Gauges, Harmony, and Speaker Deck which was quite popular in its time — so much so that they attracted the attention of Chris Wanstrath, one of the co-founders of GitHub to acquire Ordered List. The rest as they say is history. Today, John and I go back through that history to see what it was like to be acquired by GitHub and how that single choice has forever changed his life. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform. Auth0 – The for developers, by developers identity platform built for the cloud era that secures billions of logins every year. Security, compliance, and industry standards are always up-to-date, plus devs are free to provide the login options their users want with the security their application demands. Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Learn more at Auth0.com Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com Sendinblue – Take your digital marketing to the next level. Head to sendinblue.com/founderstalk and use the code FOUNDERSTALK to get one month free with 100,000 emails. Featuring:John Nunemaker – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: How to build an app, get acquired by GitHub, buy an app back from GitHub and then sell it again Speaker Deck Fewer & Faster Box Out Sports Flipper Cloud Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week Adam is joined by Eugenio Pace, co-founder and CEO of Auth0. Auth0 is a for developers, by developers identity, access, security, and authentication platform built for the cloud that secures billions of logins every year. Mid 2020 they raised $120 million at a $1.92 billion valuation after being told no several times. Then, earlier this year in March they announced they were being acquired by Okta for $6.5 billion, in a bold and future-thinking all stock deal. This episode is full of wisdom, inspiration, and tactical advice that Eugenio has used to build Auth0. Join the discussionChangelog++ members get a bonus 1 minute at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!Sponsors:Render – The Zero DevOps cloud that empowers you to ship faster than your competitors. Render is built for modern applications and offers everything you need out-of-the-box. Learn more at render.com/changelog or email changelog@render.com for a personal introduction and to ask questions about the Render platform. Snowplow Analytics – The behavioral data management platform powering your data journey. Capture and process high-quality behavioral data from all your platforms and products and deliver that data to your cloud destination of choice. Get started and experience Snowplow data for yourself at snowplowanalytics.com Sendinblue – Take your digital marketing to the next level. Head to sendinblue.com/founderstalk and use the code FOUNDERSTALK to get one month free with 100,000 emails. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. Featuring:Eugenio Pace – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Okta Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Auth0 Okta Completes Acquisition of Auth0 Building Company Culture for Scale Auth0 CEO Eugenio Pace on the $6.5 billion deal with Okta and his advice for entrepreneurs Three Practices For Tranquility Eugenio on infinite game mindset and leadership Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!