 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this episode of Startup Insights. Andrew Lau is here with me. He's the co-founder and CEO of a relatively new company called Jellyfish. They focus on engineering management, which is kind of a new space that we want to present to you. Andrew, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Hey Dave, thanks for having me on. So, when I see co-founder in a title, I always ask, why did you start the company? What's your why? So, the three co-founders, myself, Dave Gorley and Phil Braden, we actually met, geez, more than 20 years ago at a company called Indeka. We had the chance to kind of bring the proverbial band back together just because rare is the chance to work with great people. And for us, Jellyfish really was coming out of our own experiences. All three of us grew our careers running big engineering teams, big product teams. We realized how hard it was to really lead those teams and connecting the business at scale. And that's the problem we just got together to solve. Yeah, so interesting, right? Indeka, another East Coast company, great exit brought by Oracle. And of course, when you say Indeka, I was going to think, okay, Jellyfish, you guys in the search business, but you're not engineering management. What is engineering management? And how does it relate to some of your past experiences? Great question. Well, so engineering management, engineering management sector or the engineering management platform as we talk about really comes down to how we can facilitate the tools to make leading big teams easier, right? We have realized that as you get to larger teams, teams bigger than 50, bigger than 100 engineers, it's really hard to understand what the team is doing. Really hard to make sure that they're working their best and making sure they're pointing in the right direction and even furthermore, how to connect that to the business and how to make sure the business is successful in the effort the team does. And for us, it was really around making tools and processes available that really help accelerate the active leading big teams. So when you think about it, I mean, it's really the problem you're solving is visibility, kind of what's going on in engineering and providing metrics. Is that a sort of a fair high level? I think it's a perfect high level statement. When we actually got together and talked about the problem space, we all saw as we led these big teams, we quickly drew an analogy to, you know, when I started my career in the late 90s, there was a time before Salesforce and CRMs were pervasive, right? And so really quickly we drew a quick analogy that said like, hey, why isn't there a Salesforce for engineering? That is, why isn't there that same leadership and executive visibility into how a team is progressing and to make sure it's aligned with the business? Well, when you think about it, right? Salesforce, 1999, we had the first Salesforce cloud before the real cloud hit. You know, we certainly have marketing clouds now, you know, human capital management clouds, you know, customer service management clouds, why not an engineering cloud, right? Yeah, I think it's probably, if you follow that map there, I think we've seen the last 20 years that clouds actually kind of progressed from sales to marketing to success to HR as you pointed out. I think the last bastion in organizations is the engineering team, right? It just so happens right now that engineering teams probably are the most strategic, if not the most expensive team on most companies roster. So really providing that visibility is really necessary at this time. So I don't run engineering at Silicon Angle. My co-CEO and partner, John Ferrier does, but I'm always like asking him like, hey, what are guys working on? What are the deliverables? When am I going to get it and when? How we do it on quality and so forth. And so I think just scanning your website, reading some of your blogs, these are some of the things that you really focus on. You wrote a five-part series. I think, I don't know if I'm dying to see part five, but four parts are out. I wonder if we could dig into some of those. I think you called it five things that you should present to the board. Yeah, yeah, great question around like, there's a series where we're four or five into it. I'm talking about what are five slides that heads of engineering should be showing to their boards or even their executive management teams, right? Early on in the process, before we actually started the company, we did a ton of research talking with leaders at scale, trying to ask them like, how do you manage your team? How do you connect it to the business? And out of those conversations fell, asking folks like, well, what slides do you show your board meeting? And the answer was there wasn't ubiquitous answer. People were looking for answers. And so we really synthesized a number of different leaders that we thought were really successful in this world and really put together this series to talk about like, what are the metrics that people should be measuring, right? Well, let's talk more about some of those metrics. So, I mentioned this, so what am I going to get when? What are some of the other key things that people have focused on? I mean, obviously quality, where I'm spending my money, but what are some of the ones that you're seeing aligning with business and really driving business outcomes? So, okay. So part one, I think you talked about, right? Which is, what are you getting? What got shipped out the door? What's coming down the pipe, right? I think job one for a leader of engineering and product is to talk about what's coming out, right? In the same way that sales job is to actually hit a revenue number and talk about the pipeline coming down the way, it's engineering's job to actually shift new product that you can sell your users can engage with. So that's definitely slide one. Slide two, you already alluded to here too, is about quality, right? I think if you're shipping product that actually can't hold quality in the eyes of your customers, it won't last very long, right? So I think it's really important to show command of quality and actually show metrics that actually measure quality over time in the lens of your customer. Slide three, I think we're really talking about alignment, right? Making sure that your team is spending your dollars, time and effort in the right way that actually aligns with what the business wants to, right? So examples might be if you're a company that splits time between enterprise and SMB efforts, we're making sure that the features the team is working on actually aligns with the strategy of the company, right? And you can't do that if you don't measure that. And then slide four is really around capturing broad level productivity, right? Is the team healthy and moving forward? And then the last of which is really that the preview coming up for the next segment here is going to be about really around the team and hiring, right? How is the team holding up, how's the morale and how's the actual hiring pipeline looking and ramp, right, in terms of new employees, right? It's really the people side of the engineering leadership. Yeah, cool. Thanks for teasing that a little bit. I'm glad to hear it's not just about productivity because there are tools out there that can measure developer productivity but seems like you're taking a broader approach and building a platform to really take a more end-to-end sort of life cycle view. Yeah, I think we really think about it as, look, productive is really important. I think it's necessary but not sufficient, right? You can talk about a boat, you can roll faster but if you're rolling the boat in the wrong direction, who cares, right? So it's as important to make sure the alignment's in place and actually making sure that the rest of communication and context is really in place, make sure that teams exceeds in the lens of the business. Andrew, I'm interested in the market. I mean, my sense is engineering management is sort of new, very new actually, although we talked about productivity being sort of one of the metrics and there are tools out there. But how do you look at this market? Is there a big whale that you're targeting or is this more of a green field? I think really it's a green field opportunity. I think if you were to, you know, people don't wake up right now with a quadrant they look at or a wave that they're actually measuring on at the moment. It doesn't say it isn't coming. I mean, if you look at this as a baseball game, we're probably ending one in defining the market, right? And you can tell because if you look across the vendor space, I think there's a lot of variety of different solutions in these places. And so from my view, you know, there's room right now just to innovate and describe what this platform really is going to be, right? And that's what the next few years are going to look like, right, and defining this market. Did the unknown nature of the market, was that a challenge in terms of your race? I actually think that's actually the opportunity, right? Like I think both as founders and our investors, I think really whenever you have these green field opportunities, it helps you create big opportunities, right? Hey, look, you know this better than anyone, but I think the defined markets are very clear in the box here trying to fill in, it's a race to do that. You know, this space here is a space right for innovation, right? It needs innovation both in product and process and how you go to market. And the story will be told five years from now. So I want to talk about your go-to market before we do. So one of the things you got to do when you're doing your investor pitches, you got to figure out the total available market, your served market. I mean, how did you do that? What can you share with us about the TAM? I mean, okay, there's the quantity of answer, right? You could pick apart all the companies in the world count all the software engineers and I can tell you, it's going to be a big number, right? You can also map it to other large software engineering companies like Atlassian or even Microsoft and talk about the markets there. But I think, you know, the world has moved far enough along that like, what's the word, every company's a software company now? I think it's not a necessary part of the pitch anymore, right? I think everyone intuits the TAM is large because even air conditioning companies now have hundreds of software engineers, right? It's no longer this niche thing like it was 20 years ago. I think literally, you know, every company on the planet could be a potential customer of jellyfish in the future. You know, I feel like sometimes if you can actually size the TAM, it's maybe a negative in your race because if the TAM is just so obviously large, then investors say, hey, okay, check, the market's huge and that's what they want to see. And I think part of it too is like, we've seen the last five years not just has every company become a software company. This also means the engineering departments and how they were recruited have been really scrutinized. Everybody needs more, wants more engineers. They're hard to get and expensive. I think everyone's realizing like because of both of those things, everyone cares a lot more, right? It's no longer this, you know, small number of people of low cost. It's actually just an expensive investment and a strategic one and everyone wants to make sure it's pointed in the right direction now. So there's a lot of people in our community, young people either just graduated from college or been out for five, six, seven years working at a company and feel like they want to do their own thing. And they're always interested in how you did it, how you got started, how you funded the company, how you seeded it. I think you guys started in 2017, I think you've raised $12 million, but take us back to the beginning. How did you and your co-founders get launched, you know, how'd you seed the company and bootstrap it? So I mean, I think for us, like we're lucky to have actually been through all three of us through a number of different startups, right? So I think this is for us coming with a lot of awareness of actually how to build the company. We had the chance at the tail of 2016 to actually get the proverbial band back together. We hadn't worked together in probably shy 15 years, but I think we really respected the chance to do so. And so we got together and said, like, hey, let's see if there's an opportunity for us to do something together. And so the entrepreneurial journey, we pushed through a number of different concepts. We largely fell into this one simply because of our backgrounds, right? It is an area that we actually bring some personal expertise to and our networks bring it that way, but also some passion on wanting to actually solve it. So I think it's probably at the end of 16 that we actually said like, hey, this is a space that we might be interested in. We actually spent, I think the first couple months of 17 just interviewing every VPE, CTO, CEO, executive we could find. I think we probably talked in north of 65 technology leaders in that time period. Largely just to actually ask them like, hey, what do you think about this space, this idea? What do you do instead? In fact, tell me not to start the startup. I don't want to invest X years of my life to find out that there's a better solution out there. The part that was I think amazing was that every one of those interviews, everybody kind of stopped at the end of it and leaned in and said, hey, can you do me a favor? Can you write up the, whatever your notes are on this and just send me the actual answer, right? So at that moment, we knew that, we didn't have the solution yet, but we knew there was paying out there an opportunity to actually solve something. We weren't the only ones that actually identified that. And so that became the mission, which is how do we make people in this seat? How do we make their lives better, right? And sliding forward, concurrent with actually, the early checks coming in, we actually called those same folks back and said, hey, can we work with you to build the product, right? So from a philosophical standpoint, we really believe in actually building with our customers, right? And so from the first moment, pre-product, pre-code, we sat down with those same people and said, hey, let's work with you. Let's do things by hand. Let's do it with your data. Just to make sure that we understand what we're building to use case that you care about. Okay, so you co-created really with the customers and you actually started generating revenue, kind of a cell design bill model. Is that right or? Yeah, I would think of it much more as like an alpha product development, right? I think our philosophy on that early on, let's say June of 17, it was look, we'll do your manual, we'll do your board decks for you. We'll do your management team slides. We'll do your metrics. We'll do your capitalization, right? We'll do whatever you need on a manual basis as long as we can work with you and your data, right? And you know, because we always had an eye building the platform there. And so behind the scenes, of course, we're automating all of this, but that helps make sure that the use cases that we're building for or things they actually needed and we're going to use. Did you find you had to leave a lot on the cutting room floor? In other words, a lot of times when you take that approach and you're kind of trying to generate maybe early revenue from customers, you sometimes get, especially in the enterprise, you get sucked into specials and some of your custom work that might not scale across the other organizations. You guys obviously experienced, was that something you guys put a lot of thought into and how did you manage that? Look, I don't think it's magic. I think we were aware, right? To your point, we've done this a few times. So at least we knew the pitfalls, like yeah. So some stuff has been left on the cutting floor in the sense that we probably pushed harder on areas that we pushed less on today. I don't think anything was abandoned. I think part of it is that, there's two sides of it, right? Which is if you're able to think about where you want to go, which is building a platform, you can always take any engagement and trade it off and say like, hey, is this something we want to build? Does this make sense for actually leading us towards the long platform story? You don't have to do every opportunity that comes along, right? So I think you need to thread the needle and actually take advantage of working with customers, but also making sure you have an eye for where you're going, right? The North Star. So you can pick and choose which projects you want to work on and which customers you want to work with, because end of the day, products are really the byproduct of who you work for, who you service, who you actually build for, right? And so we're very conscious along the way that choose the right individuals, the right partners that help shape the product over time. Yeah, and you guys had some engineering chops on your own, and Andy Jassy says there's no compression algorithm for experience. I mean, maybe that's an Amazon thing, but I hear him all the time. So they had that to your advantage. And so, okay, so I got your website, I see you've got customers, so you're well into your journey here. You've got product market fit, I presume. You've got your SaaS model, your pricing down, but where are you in your sort of journey and your phasing? I mean, geez, those words all change quite a bit these days. I would actually say a product market fit is never a binary thing, it's a constant journey, right? So I would say that we're always working on that because the market's always moving, right? We have a market that is changing month on month, quarter on quarter, right? So I never wanted to declare victory on that because that's something you get left behind. I think in terms of our journey, we have, the team right now is 27 people normally based in downtown Boston, right? We're all working from home at the moment. You know, we have a sales team in place now of I think six, seven folks now. So we're in market actually pushing this forward. But I think for us, we're out there really kind of scaling the story right now, right? I think we've had some tremendous customers we had the chance to work with, we have a product that we're really proud of. I think we just need to put more units out there and more customers to actually make them more successful, right? So I think anything, we're really in the act of repeating every function of the organization right now to really kind of build it up. So okay, so I mean, normally when you do a startup, you go to your friends first, the people in your core circles, you get them to, I'm sure you did something similar. You're obviously beyond that phase. Six to seven sales people, you're starting to scale up. You've probably got a good sense as to the types of sales people that you're looking for. And then now you're trying to figure out, okay, it sounds like how much do I spend on marketing? How does that affect sales productivity? And then how do we scale that whole thing up? And then go hyper scale and build the mode and all that other good stuff. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I mean, I think we're the point now where we can actually start making trade-offs, right? Like, you know, like, you know, do we actually add a additional sales person? Do we actually invest in marketing programs? Do we actually build up more strategic product, right? I think, you know, we are still the point where we have to make trade-offs, right? But the business is mature enough that we can make trade-offs, right? That makes sense. So let's talk about customers. I mean, maybe you could give us some examples, some of your favorite examples, how you've impacted their business. Well, I mean, I think if you look at actually our website, I think there's a few case studies up there. I think there's building them up there. There's make Salsify, the folks at Toast. I think all three of those actually really talk about different kinds of use cases around how we actually affect them, right? So one of which we're really helping them actually on alignment, right? Making sure that their team is working on the most important things, right? And in those situations, when you're working on the most important thing, you're really kind of essentially getting opportunity cost of engineers and making sure that they're driving towards things that you really will help the business, right? So if you're looking at that way, you're finding engineers that could help you progress faster, right? So you're building more product faster because you can focus the energy of where the team is going. And so that's case one. I think another case is really is around making sure around quantitative man visibility, right? Making sure that the team is visible and the metrics and their output to make sure that they're performing their best, right? And that might mean everything from automated performance management to just making sure that people aren't left behind and making sure that the team is actually healthy in their function. And then the last of which is really around, you know, capitalization, which is a financial process and really automating that outside of the house, which is, you know, capitalization requires that traditionally engineering leaders have to manually fill out spreadsheets for finance for the, and for the accounting team to make sure that they're actually able to count for where the team is, the effort is going and that they can actually capitalize it correctly when you treat it from a financial perspective. And so we automate that process that just makes everyone's lives easier. So you're no longer manually storing data on a week by week basis. So I mean, I've obviously seen some of your product and some of the outputs, but you're a SaaS based model, you know, cloud pricing, all that sort of modern, you know, approaches and business practices. But what else can you tell us about sort of your pricing model and how you're going to market? Yeah, so I think, you know, we are a SaaS hosted application. We also have, you know, open source agents that have been deployed on-premise to actually, you know, whether to work with complex network architectures or deal specific redaction concerns, right? So we're going to operate in on-premise environments in that way. You mentioned our pricing is SaaS based. We broadly price annually, you know, from broad strokes perspective, it's relative to the size of the engineering team, right? Very simply, like an engineering team of 300 people is a lot more complicated than an engineering team of 30 people, right? Put it that way. And the pricing reflects that. And then to your question around like, what else I can talk about? Well, you know, I made the analogy earlier around like we're trying to do for engineering what Salesforce did for sales. You know, what I mean by that really is providing that executive and leadership visibility to the department, right? If you look at the innovation that Salesforce brought in the early aughts, it was really getting stuff out of notebooks into the cloud through manual data entry, right? And in contemporary sales, I think there's less of that these days. It's all through plugins and voice recognition and stuff. And in the same way, in the engineering side, we're not in the business of actually asking for a new data entry. In fact, we connect with the systems the engineers are already using, you know, the Jira's, the GitHub's, the Git Labs, you know, that they're testing tools and their CI tools. And, you know, all of those things really, emit what we call engineering signals, right? So the engineers don't do anything differently. We collect that data, we connect to those systems, we clean that data, normalize it and contextualize it with respect to business data, right? And that's actually where the insight actually comes from. Because if you just look at the raw engineering data by itself, there's not a lot you can do with it, right? You know, I joked with you in our kind of earlier conversation, which is, you know, you might look at, you know, your 300 Git pull requests your engineers are produced like it doesn't really help you figure out if you're going to do great this quarter or not, right? And so for us, we really bring that in, contextualize it and make sure that you understand it in a business context to talk about, like, hey, is the team accelerating and being successful in the ways that we need the businesses that needs them to do? Yeah, you're so right. I get to stream of those every day, every week. And I open them up and I go, okay, I don't know. There's people are working. Last sort of topic areas is I want to understand where you want to take this thing. I think I'm right in that you've raised about $12 million. You obviously got a big market. Seems like you got a great product. I mean, if I'm you, I'm throwing gasoline in the fire. I want to run the table. You got to create the market. So that's sometimes kind of expensive. Where do you want to take this thing? I mean, look, this may sound hubrisful, but our ambitions are to build a large multi-billion dollar standalone software company, right? And I think, you know, part of the reason why I say it that way is that I think it's important to have a North Star, right? It's important to have a North Star to make sure that we're all headed in the right direction. We get the right team members, actually as we grow the team and then we actually capitalize it accordingly, right? I think if you look at the analogy we started out earlier around sales and marketing, every time someone's actually cracked that leadership visibility for each function, there has been a multi-billion dollar opportunity there, right? If not a multi, you know, multi-multi-billion dollar opportunities out there. So I don't think it's a overly naive versus say that's where we're going, but I think there's a lot of work to get from here to there. Yeah, I mean, I didn't ask you directly about the competition. I did ask you if there's a big whale, is there a big enemy? You know, like a lot of database guys just they want a target Oracle, for example. And I looked around and I really didn't see it. It looks, it really does look like a green field opportunity, which is absolutely enormous. I mean, I think I'm getting that right. Yeah, no, I think you're right on. And look, I think there are going to be more small players actually entering the market. Like I think whenever you look at new markets and as they actually kind of build momentum that always happens. And so of course, you know, in that sense, I want competition to be here, but right now we really don't focus on that, right? I think it's for us, it's really about our product in the hands of our customers, how we make them successful. And then let's rinse and repeat that over and over again to more and more companies. Yeah, you don't have to compete. You guys have to create. Andrew, great to have you on. Thanks so much for sharing your insights on your company. Good luck with jellyfish and come back anytime. You know, in the future, we'd love to track your progress and see how you're doing. Right, Dave. Thank you so much for having me here. And I hope you, your family, your team are staying healthy and all of this. And I look forward to next time. Yeah, I did know. Okay. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and startup insights. We'll see you next time.