 Hello everyone, welcome to our Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here for a digital conversation, part of our new digital events, part of our new structure of bringing people into the studio and also doing remotes. We'd love to do that in the era of the travel bands, but it's always great to have local Silicon Valley executives and startups here on this side. CEO Century IO is here with me, former VMware Industry Executive, CEO of Century IO Hot Startup. Thanks for coming in. Thank you for having me. So you can drive in, you don't have to fly anywhere, it's all good, nowhere en masse, the coronavirus is crazy. So glad we have the studio and get this content acquisition. Thanks for coming in. I want to get your take on your company before we get into the industry things. I think when you look at some of the most successful categories, it just came out of nowhere. You look at AI ops, for instance, in driving observability. What is observability? That became a public pager, the list goes on and on. The cloud has created this agile market where real time, and then a lot of automation is going on. So whether it's error logs, like a Splunk does and that's scaled up, you get to doing something very interesting with software code. That's not just something breaks, a phone rings. There's a lot of going on. You're just really kind of the tailwind here for you with cloud scale. What is Century doing? What's their secret sauce? So the simplest way I would put it is, we help you measure and monitor your code in production in close to real time. So what does that mean? You look at all of the companies that we talk about, whether it's a John Deere on one end or a Spotify on the other, they're all getting more digital in nature, which means they all try to interact with their customers more often, building apps with an interface, with an API. And as we all know, through our own personal experiences, if you don't get a great experience, you simply move on. So you pull up your app, you pull up Uber, it's not working. Let me look at left, right? That's the kind of consumer behavior that's starting to take in. So- Meaning you don't really know as the owner of the app if they're abandoning or not. It's just down sales. Correct. And so what we do is we help developers monitor how their usage is of their code in production. So as users hit errors, a checkout button is not working or a user is having a bad experience on a mobile phone, whereas the same application on a browser looks fine. We, in real time, give a notification saying X number of users on this type of device, on this type of interface are having issues. And not just that, it's an alert. It's an alert that says, this is the issue, this is the line of code where the issue is taking place. This is the potential commit that you did in your Git repository, which is causing it. So it's the full kind of metadata around the issue, which typically would be, what, two days, a ticket is filed, support may look at it, hey, customer has an issue, let's reproduce it while the customer is gone. So this is all done in real time. Or it could be a complete blind spot, too. You don't know, right? This is the thing. This is why I love this whole digital transformation world where instrumentation is reimagining how everything's being done. So for instance, you can see a code push and you go, okay, it's in production. And then why are sales down? Why is usage down? I mean, then you got to do a post-mortem. Correct. No one called, what the hell happened? Thinkors are blaming me, he did it. Here, you're trying to get to the point where you can see that error earlier or before or after, during, as it worked. It's almost in real time, close to real time. As the user has the error immediately through either page of duty, Slack, email, whichever your communication medium is, you get to know a user or a set of users are having an issue. You click it, you go to this portal, all the metadata is right there. So it's in real time. And so to exactly your point, it's not after the fact, right? It's happening. And so the CTO of Tackle.io said it best, it's a startup that helps companies get on to marketplaces. He said, hey, we found issues before our customers even filed an issue against us. So, you know, this helps us deliver true customer experience as a development team. So on the developers, the target profile, you get that, and they're coding away. They don't have time to do research. They'd be like, oh, I got to bolt on some instrumentation here. That's been the success for me. If you look at like what DataDog's done in DevOps, just the easy onboarding, free, use it. Is that the same model you guys are taking, this free land, adopt, then expand? So is it a free medium? Can you explain the business model? So Sentry is open source. And so customers can take the piece of software that we have as is fully functional and run it themselves in their data center on their cloud. Or they can choose a SaaS version from us. And we offer kind of like a free version and then you pay for the plan. So what we typically see is customers turn it on, developers turn it on and they like it. And then the best code I got recently was one CEO who said, hey, you know, I don't send you that many events, but I see the value of what you do. So I decided to pay you, right? So they went from free to paid. And that's kind of a typical pattern that we see. And the best thing about this is, it takes you approximately four lines of code to get started. Four lines of code in your code and you get start getting the benefits of Sentry. Well, it's a good sign for monetization when you got the, you're paying it forward, literally with cash. I want to ask you that there's been the open source version because I saw in the origination story, it's really interesting. They had jobs and they saw this side project grow into a real opportunity. And it's always good to see the open source not die, right? So there's been, maintain the project. When would someone use the open source? Is that the hardcore folks? Or so SaaS obviously makes sense. It's easier if you're doing a lot of extra support and whatnot on top of it. But what's the use case for the folks who are going to bring in a house loaded on their cloud? I think we leave it to our customers to decide that. And we've seen folks who say, hey, you know, we're going to try it out. It's a small, we've got a good DevOps practice. We're going to get it up and running. Here's what happened with one of my teams at VMware. The engineer in charge looked at it and said, it's not worth my time given what the price on SaaS is, right? So like our smallest plan is $29 which satisfies most startups or small software projects. And his point was like, hey, you know, it's almost better for me to start and using that versus- Yeah, well, they were using NSX. I'm sure Pat Gels would get shipped the next product. Well, this is the trade-off, right? I mean, so that's what's beautiful open source. If you want to bring it in and make it work for yourself, that trade-off has to be economically there. Correct. So you have a nice balance of, if you're hardcore, no problem. Please use it. Use it, contribute, be part of the team. But if you want ease of use and all the bells and whistles and the speed. I think it comes down to what we're starting to see which is how much do you care about getting to value faster and where is your value? Is it in kind of running and operating all these pieces of software? Or is it in, you know, getting value to your end customer? So if you're focused on building your business via this value add that kind of gets you there faster. So stop focusing on kind of building the infrastructure. Start delivering kind of the value to the business. I'm going to ask you, so you're the CEO. So the founders who have not met, I'll look before to interview with them. They seem pretty cool. I'm sure they probably said, this guy from VMware is probably the big company. Because they were like, we're going to drop box. Engineers, I could almost imagine what they're like. Probably skeptical. This is VMware guy. How did you get through the interview process? Honestly, you're the CEO. You made it. Were they skeptical? What worked? Why did you go there? You know, the best thing about this transition is Chris and David. So David was the CEO. He's now the CTO. He's the founder creator along with Chris. And it was his decision to bring someone into the company given that we are seeing this, we are now at 20,000 plus customers. And he felt like he wanted to kind of go back to building and creating and bring a partner in crime. So that was the good part. I would say like we started talking and we are at the same energy level. So I think it just worked out in the way we communicated. And you've known me for a bit. I'm kind of hands-on. I like to kind of get into things and build businesses. So I think the profile matched out and both of us took our time. So it was a long dating process where we got to know each other, not just as what we do for work, but how we operate and had coffee and lunch and dinner. Well, it isn't dating. I mean, dating and marriage is always the thing, but founders, it's a tough move to make. I mean, for founders to be self-aware to bring in someone else. But also the fit has to be there. And a lot of entrepreneurs just check the box and try to hire someone too fast that could fail or it gets jammed down by the VCs, you know, someone. So the founders are pretty, pretty kind of reluctant. So that's interesting that you did that. Yeah, he's been thinking, you know, the thing about David is he's super thoughtful. And, you know, hopefully you'll get to see him soon. He's been thinking, he'd been thinking about this for a bit and he took his time and he worked through the process. And that's why I said it was, it felt like we were not just talking about me joining as a CEO as much as us getting to know each other and building this for the long run. And so we really took our time on both ends. He wanted to get back into the engine of the business. He's a developer, right? He's like the code. He doesn't want to, 20,000 customers you got to get hiring people, it's HR issues. He's probably, I don't want to do that. That, and you know, it was kind of the personality thing, right? Grid and grind, you know, we kind of, can somebody come in, have the passion, the same way he believes in what we do. And he saw that and I saw that in him and I'm like, this is a great opportunity that I cannot forgo. So talk about the, I say I love modern, the modern startups because, you know this, you're on the right side of history when you got cloud at your tailwind and the kind of DevOps like vibe you got going on with. I know it's not DevOps, but it's more like cloud scale and the agility. How are you guys organized? You guys have virtual teams. You have a central office. Is there a physical place? Do people come in? What's the, how is the company's philosophy on the work environment? So we actually have three locations. One in San Francisco, which is the headquarters where we are located. And then in Vienna, Austria, where one of the early engineers and pioneers, you know, live. And so we built around that person and that location. No one's complaining about that. No. Vienna is not a bad place to hang out. Not a bad place. I haven't visited yet. I'm looking forward to it. I was supposed to be there in April, but given the circumstances, I'm postponing it. And we recently started this pastor in Toronto. And so we are- So three strong areas for tech talent for sure. And then we do have some employees working from home. So we try and hire the best and then we accommodate. But we do try to kind of cluster around these three locations. So we're going to get your take as the CEO. Obviously we're all grappling with this work at home, COVID-19, the coronavirus is impacting. Everything's being canceled here in Silicon Valley. I would say Seattle's more of a hotspot than our area. Obviously China is China. What's the view that you guys are taking right now? You tell people to work at home. Obviously events are being canceled. Places where people are doing biz dev. KubeCon was canceled. Dell Technology World was canceled. I mean, everything's being canceled. How's that affecting your business and what's your philosophy? How are you guys executing through this tough time? I think as a company, we've kind of taken the step for having people work from home. And we did it on a location by location basis. So for folks in San Francisco, especially because folks were commuting on public transportation and other things, we wanted to make our team feel comfortable. And so we've instituted a work from home policy for, I think we said two weeks, but I think it's going to keep going until we get a clear signal from the government, both locally and at the federal level. So that's kind of where we are as a team. And then what we noticed was the Austrian government kind of had similar regulations. So everyone's working from home. Slack, Google Hangouts. We're spending a lot of time on video making sure we are connected as a team. And just that spirit of how we operate and talk to each other continues. As a business, we are a bottoms up business. So what I mean by that is folks sign up. They use the product and developers are right now globally, still fully functional. The only difference being they're now working from home. So we feel like as a business, we will be fine. And we are ensuring that our customers through this transition and through this period of kind of unknowns, are able to continue to be successful for their customers. I was talking with someone, it's like there's going to be some Aussie sectors, like events that are going to take a big hit. South Africa canceled, Coachella's being canceled. All the tech events are being canceled. Also we're going to be doing our stuff at the studio with virtual events with the Cube. But certain things are going to be different. You're going to see pregnancy boom. You know, nine months later, people are going to be having kids because they're home alone or divorces, depending how you look at it. But productivity, developer wise, has been talked about as actually developers want to just crank out some code. They don't have to come into the office. You can still be productive. Developers have been doing this for a decade. At least, if not more. You know, I think there might be scenarios of adjustment, a period of adjustment, and then folks will get comfortable. So it's super important to create that engagement model, whether you know, do you have the tooling to keep that team engaged? And there are companies that are completely remote. And so we're making sure we learn from their best practices around that. But I do believe that for tech companies or even for manufacturing companies focused on building software, developers are going to be productive. Okay, so a baby boom's coming. Divorce rate's going to go up and productivity is skyrocketing. For developers. For developers. Well, I mean, it's a good time. Okay, I've got to get your check on the industry now. Okay, honestly, putting all the coronavirus aside, we saw a surge in public cloud check done. And actually when you have VMware with NSX coming in and becoming the engine with the software to find networking as part of the Sierra piece, you're starting to see hybrid clears day. It's going to happen. Multi-clouds on the horizon. So you now have a three wave cloud game going on. Wave one done. Wave two is hybrid. Wave three may be bigger than them all with multi-cloud. Do you agree with that trend analysis and what's your take on that? So this is where I'll probably kind of look back at my time at VMware. I think, you know, definitely see the multi-cloud wave catching on, but I would use the word multi-cloud as in not a app spread across three clouds as much as, you know, a company choosing to have certain assets in AWS, certain assets in Azure, certain in Google. So I don't see yet this idea of an app being stretched across the three clouds, but definitely while I was at VMware. You more tried that. While I was at VMware and talking to customers, we definitely saw adoption of multiple clouds. And that's where, you know, when I was working with the cloud health team, this idea of managing cost and security across three clouds became very common as a pattern that came up. You definitely see that as a kind of directional thing that a lot of organizations are doing. Yeah, the idea of just rapidly shifting app workloads based on pricing, all that stuff, I think is aspirational at best because development teams are now just getting their groove on with hybrid and cloud operations so I can see a day where if you can manage the latency network issues, maybe someday, but I mean, come on, really, and think about how hard that is, just latency alone. And the issue is like architecturally, you have to make really good choices to get there. So I think you might see that in like kind of tech software firms who are thinking about how do I stay cloud neutral, but for the most part, if you want to take the full value of AWS, the full value of GCP, you want to go deeper in there and use all their services. Yeah, I think that's a great insight. Let's riff on that a little bit because one of the things I was talking to Dave Vellante and it's too minimum about was if you look at the multi-cloud, I don't think it's going to come from a vendor. I think if you look at the success of the Facebooks of the world, even Dropbox where your founders came from, early on, they had to just basically build it from cloud native from ground up and all the hyperscalers used open source, they built all their stuff. No one was selling them anything, they just did it. So I think you'll see smart architectural moves, but that'll be the unicorn, that'll not be the standard, that'll be the exception, not the rule. I don't think you can sell multi-cloud in my opinion yet, or I don't think that'll be possible, but I think someone will come out and say, make those architectural decisions saying, I have an architecture that works multi-cloud because we architect it that way. Yep, yep. And I think that's kind of the more kind of from an engineering standpoint, I think you'll see more of that. I think from a kind of solution standpoint, you will see folks saying, I will help you manage or secure or build into each of the clouds and give you kind of a common pattern versus the ladder where an engineering team says, here's a way to architect for multi-cloud. You know, we pay a lot of attention to the next gen, kind of psychologies, obviously we do a lot of coding with our cube cloud that's coming out now, but how would you see the founders you're working with and that in this new peer group that's developing, I call it the next gen entrepreneur, technical entrepreneur, as they look at the vast resources of cloud and all of the data opportunities there and mobility, internet of things and all this stuff going on, what is the general mindset right now of these kinds of entrepreneurs from a technology perspective? How are they looking at the problem space? What's your take on this new landscape as an entrepreneur? Yeah, I mean, I'll give you kind of what got me super excited about Sentry, like how, why did I think about that? Which is if you look at 2000 to 2010, we did software-defined infrastructures. Things started moving into software. 2010 to 2020 was, as you correctly wanted, our cloud, hybrid, everything became kind of as a service. I think this next decade will be about data. So companies using the data to get a competitive advantage or figuring out, you know, how to stay ahead, whether it's competitively or even to win a market. And the other aspect of this is because everything is so, as a service, API-centric, I think it's going to explode how we develop things. And I think this is going to be truly now the decade for the developer, who's going to make deeper choices, greater choices, buying decisions. And so with data kind of exploding and the management of it and getting insights out of it is one aspect of it. And, you know, as somebody who's looking at Sentry, we do a lot of that, right? Which is how a customer's using it, what are they using it, what language is, and everything else that goes with that. But on the other end, developers are going to start kind of using things and create a whole new set of use cases that's going to change the way we think about it. So I think there's a whole set of elements around how to use this infrastructure to build new applications or creative products that is going to be a massive boom. I think that's a great point. I think that's great insight because you think about observability, which I was just joking earlier on about. But I think the relevance of observability is network management applied to value real time, right? Because if you can instrument everything, the smart people are going to say, hey, I could just instrument this and get the data I need rather than dealing with this hassle process we had before. So it brings up that kind of philosophy of kill the old to bring in the new, or something new that kills the old. So it's an interesting phenomenon. I think it's very relevant. But I want to get your question as a CEO now. You're at the helm. The helm of a company is technical. I'm talking about architecture. What's your architecture for the venture? What's your plans? How do you see the, you said you're going to come and build this next level growth. What's your architecture look like? Are you going to do more of the same? Any new things that we see? What are you going to, what's your plan? Fundamentally, we as a kind of set of users in the world today have spent a lot of time monitoring, as I told you earlier, machines, systems and applications. And so there's a lot of successful companies doing that. But if you fundamentally believe that this is the decade where you're going to write more code than we've ever before or refresh more applications than we've ever before, our focus is code and how it does, whether it's in a staging environment and a canary deployment or in production. How do we measure code and monitor code in production? And the impact of that code to the end user. So it could be errors and now increasingly code performance. So you will see us kind of venture into this idea of helping developers not only find issues that they run into production like we talked about before, but also be able to say, looks like over the past three releases, our logins per second have gone down progressively 10% per, you know, by 10%. Why is that happening? Where is that happening? Which team made that change? So you will see us kind of really, you know, double down on this idea of measuring and monitoring code going forward, complimenting how we measure, monitor systems, machines and applications today. I mean, code has got to be managed. People contribute. It's like a compiler for the compiler, you know? It's like if code fails your business. Code for the code. Yeah. Meta, it's very meta, meta as they say, but code for the code. But that's, it's basically code management in a way, right? It's the code data, you're leveraging that code relationship to the application. And so we talk about applications a lot and so we write code, we store code, you know, and I get repository. Now there's a whole set of elements around securing it. We deploy it. What about measuring and monitoring it? That is the element where we focus and kind of bring that whole cycle together, helping that application developer be successful. What's it like for you going from VMware to the startup? What's the biggest, coolest thing that's happened? It's been a great transition. You know, and I always say this to folks who ask me for career advice. They say, always choose the people you work with and your people you work for. And I've been fortunate enough to do that. And I think this transition has been great for that reason alone, which is I've had the time to get to know the team at Sentry, they got to know me. And it's just been, it's been fantastic. I think the velocity of, and the pace at which I can make changes has been the most fun part of it. And you get like 20, 20,000 paying customers, 50,000 total customers roughly in that range, pretty sizable. Employee count, how many employees you have? A hundred plus employees. It's small, still small. Still small. And we're going to probably double this year, give or take. And you know, it's 20,000 customers from every startup. You know, I've spoken to startups over a hundred startups in two months. And it's amazing to see their reaction and their love for Sentry. And funding, how many rounds of funding have you guys done? We just finished CDC in September of last year, 40 million NEA Accel growth. So we feel really good about where we are with the revenue ramp that we are seeing. We're in great shape. And pretty good numbers in terms of headcount too. Very leveraged SaaS model, get the developers. Yes. Well, we're going to be entertaining a lot of developers at DockerCon this year. DockerCon used to be an event for Docker. Now they sold half the business to Mirantis. They're focusing on Docker developers. We have an event here. We're doing a virtual event. So a lot more developer action coming. We'll talk more about that. Let them meet your founders, have them come in too. Milan, thank you for coming on. Thank you. Milan Desai, CEO of Sentry.io, former VMware executive with a great hot startup, Siri C funded, growing here in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and in Austria, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.