Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast, From the Ground Up, where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their success, challenges, and lessons learned. We hope you'd be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, and here with us today we have Tommy McClung, the co-founder and CEO of Release. Tommy, welcome to the show.
Tommy McClung: Thanks for having me. How are you doing?
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Pretty good. It's great for Friday morning. Sunny Laguna Beach, Southern California. Uh, where are you joining us from today?
Tommy McClung: I'm in Thousand Oaks in LA. Just not too far away from you.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh, that's great. Are you originally from there?
Tommy McClung: No, grew up in uh, Oregon. Um, spent my whole childhood up there, went to Oregon State University. So, I'm from the Northwest originally.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great, I love that area. Well, let me give you a little background of Tommy. Uh, Tommy is the founder of Release uh, in 2019. Um, prior to that, Tommy was a co-founder of a company called Carwoo, which was acquired by TrueCar. At TrueCar, Tommy served as a CTO and CPO for the company, and um, has had experience prior to that in startups. So, Tommy, a lot going on with where your background is and where you're at today. Um, give us a little background of your upbringing and what shaped you into eventually one day becoming an entrepreneur.
Tommy McClung: That's a good question actually. Um, I think ultimately what shaped me to want to go do this was... I'm gonna say this, and it sounds funny: my mother being an alcoholic. Okay. Um, you know, you end up taking a lot of responsibility um as a kid when that happens. My dad was always in startups, um, but I just always had this drive to uh, kind of take care of myself and, and take on responsibility. And uh, get out of a lot of stuff that was going on when I was a kid. And, and I chose to go to Oregon State you know, when all of my friends were going to go to University of Washington, because I just wanted a clean start. And I think I just have always had this drive, drive to you know, make an impact, build something. Um, and I like the excitement of it, you know. It's, it's fun. I've worked for big companies before, and like, prior to this I was at TrueCar. And, and while it's, it's, it's exciting in its own way, it's just different, you know, going out and starting something from the ground up. Um, you know, there's nothing like it. Uh, and it's all under your control. And success or failure is in your hands. You don't have anybody to blame if it doesn't work. You, you just make it happen.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, really cool. I love the story of kind of what inspired you initially just to kind of take ownership and kind of carve out your own world and life. And I had a similar situation in Northern California, I decided I wanted to get away from where I was brought up and to go to school down in San- San Diego. And you know, part of that was just uh you know, kind of restart who you are and have a fresh beginning of what you can be. And all that, you know, kind of shaped me to, to wanting to do what I do today. So kind of similar paths there. Um, in terms of going through an acquisition... a lot of founders try to do it, they don't get there, they try and go public, it doesn't happen. But you had the ability to do it.
Tommy McClung: Yep.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: What was, what were you building at Carwoo, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, and what, what was it that was interesting for TrueCar to acquire you?
Tommy McClung: Yeah, we were uh basically a reverse auction uh for new car buying. So if you were going to buy a brand new car, you would come in, say what car you wanted to buy, and then dealers uh from around the area would bid essentially down um, to get you the best price on a Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla, whatever it might be. Um, long story about why we chose to do that. I think the punchline is we like... and I say we, I always say "we" because my two co-founders and I have worked together for 20 years. Um, we like to solve really hard problems. And car buying just seemed like it was so frustratingly difficult. We were like, "Let's go see if we can do it. We're software engineers, how hard could it be?" Ten years later, um, after... and I think we were acquired in 2015 or 2014, uh, left there in 2019. So we spent five years working on Carwoo and then five years at TrueCar. It's a hard problem. Um, and it's still... and there's lots of reasons for it. But that was what we were building. They, they, they liked us for the team. Um, their, their product was a little bit different, but they also wanted us to build a trade-in product there, um so you could trade your car in kind of like what we were doing on the other side of things. And so it was talent, it was technology, it was a whole bunch of different things. And we were kind of competitors in the market. I think we were nipping at their heels all the time and kind of being annoying. And so bringing us on board was a way to eliminate a competitor and get a really smart group of people to help them out. And you know, we stayed around for five years after that.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great, yeah. Um, cool story there, as you were there 5 years and then transitioned out and, and started to build Release. What, what was the inspiration around Release? What, what was the opportunity or the problem you saw that you felt you could solve?
Tommy McClung: Sure, yeah. Um, I started my career in systems management software. Um, this is back in 2000. I'm dating myself here, like before VMs, before the cloud. Uh, the way to get a lot of compute in a small space was, was blade servers, actually. I still think HP and a bunch of companies still sell them. Um, but stack as many you know machines in a rack as you could and give them to developers and help them you know be able to, to do their thing. And back then it was "how do you get a thousand servers up and running quickly, provision them, manage them?" So I actually met Eric and David doing that. So in our DNA was kind of this developer experience you know mindset from, from day one.
Um, we went and started a couple of companies after that, but when we ended up at TrueCar after that acquisition, we walked into a team of about 300 people on the engineering team from a startup that was about 20. And it was, it was pretty eye opening uh at how difficult delivering software there was, um for a lot of reasons, none of them you know, wrong, it was just they'd been working on their problem for 11 years by the time we got there. And with 300 people it just gets complicated. Um and it was, for a startup to come into that, we looked at it and said, "Hey, this is, this is difficult. Like, we should just be able to deploy, get our stuff out. Like, why, why do we have to wait a month for a change that we made to make it all the way through?" And there was a lot of reasons for it. They were in two data centers physically, they hadn't moved to the cloud, they hadn't spent a lot of time on their tooling, they hadn't spent a lot of time on their CI/CD processes, they had like five different source control systems floating around, there was legacy technology of like old database you know, SQL Server instances with stored procedures. All of these challenging things.
And the group, group that came across from Carwoo um was tasked with building a new product. We did that very quickly, in like two months, but it took us like six months to fully roll it out. And I, I, I reported to the Chief Product Officer at the time and I just kind of complained about it and said, "Hey, this is not great, it would be better if we could move faster." And everybody in the company agreed, but they just didn't really know how to do it. And so I raised my hand and said, "Why don't you let me take a, a shot at it?" Um, and I became the, the VP of Software Engineering there and spent probably a good six months just kind of retooling their software practices, getting them on Agile. But what I learned very quickly is it doesn't matter if you're doing Agile if you don't have the infrastructure underneath it to kind of support iterative development and moving very quickly. And so I started complaining about that and they're like, "Okay, great, why don't you go fix the technology side of this too?" So I just kind of kept pushing on being better there um, and they, they kept kind of saying, "go ahead and solve it."
And one of the challenges we had there was environments. Um, a complicated technical stack with a lot of partners. Partners needed um UAT environments, different ways to test what we were building and, and get them to them, and we, we, we needed to solve "how do we quickly spin up environments internally there?" It was a, it was a problem that we had to kind of solve for ourselves. And Eric and David and I kind of looked at ourselves at that point and said, "I wonder if anything exists in the market." So we, as the buyer of something like that, went to see if there was some sort of you know, off-the-shelf way to manage environments, spin them up, spin them down. And in 2016 there really wasn't. Um, and there was a lot of reasons for that. Like, you know, Kubernetes was, wasn't even really a thought yet. Docker had just kind of made its way to the world, it had a lot of issues. AWS and their APIs weren't as good as they are, are now. Terraform didn't exist. So there was real reasons why um there wasn't something off the shelf that you could kind of like buy to do this.
So we, we internally had a, had a team that solved you know the problem in a way that was right for that company. Um, but the opportunity kind of like reared its head and we saw it and had a lot of good conversations with um AWS at the time, with our reps there because we were spending quite a bit of money with AWS, and they told us like, "Hey, everybody, all of our customers have this problem at some level. Like getting developers environments to do their work that look like production so they can ship high quality code." Like, generally speaking companies [have] a staging environment or two and all the trains kind of meet at that station. We thought there's an infinite amount of compute in the cloud. Like, why are we serializing something that you could parallelize with you know an infinite number of environments if you needed them?
And we saw that working at, at TrueCar, where you know by the time we were done with that project where we migrated to the cloud and then built this bespoke systems management product, uh, well, tool essentially, it wasn't really a product. Um, we were shipping hundreds of times a day you know. And so that really unlocked this large development team's ability to move quickly, kind of like a startup. And it was just obvious to us uh after all of those conversations that, that, that problem was ubiquitous. People all across engineering teams that we talked to all had the problem. And so we said, "Hey, let's go try to solve that." So in 2019 we left, um started hacking on it the next day. And the three of us uh you know all were writing the first lines of code, and Eric and David still write code today. They don't let me really touch it anymore, um, they, I could do it but you know they, they, they're... our engineers are way better than I am at this point.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: How do you go from leaving a paid job knowing that you're taking a big risk, you got five kids, you're going to build another startup, you've had success in the past, you understand there's an opportunity [in] the market, but you still... nothing's foolproof. You could, you know, you may succeed, you may fail. What, what was the process of, of, of leaving and the... how long did it take till you actually started to see traction, revenue, and then went for funding?
Tommy McClung: Yeah, we um, it was the summer of 2019 and the three of us just said, "Hey, let's, let's just hack on this for a few months before we think about getting jobs or whatever, and see if anything happens." Um, and you have to have a little bit of a cushion to be able to do that. Uh, so you know, save your money, do the best you can, or borrow it or whatever you got to do to buy yourself a few months. It doesn't take much longer than that if you really put your mind to it. I think we had our first working you know, something that you could show to a customer, probably in a good month or two. Um, okay, but we were working 12 hours a day sitting in David's living room in Woodland Hills just hacking on this thing relentlessly. Um, and we had a pretty good idea what we wanted it to do, like because we had just come from a place that had the problem. So it was very clear how to like tackle it. But you know, doing something like this generically for anybody to use is very different than building it for one organization. So we had to solve a lot of those problems. Kubernetes became a big part of that for us, but I think from the time that we started hacking on it, we got our first customer in December of 2019 through a friend. Like somebody that we knew um that was close to us, that was a CEO of a company. And we talked to him and said, "Hey, this is what we're building." He goes, "Hey, you should talk to our VP of Engineering." And so we had a good chat with them and [it] turns out that they were suffering from this problem and they agreed to be our first paying customer.
Um, and then we, we piggybacked that into applying to Y Combinator. Um, and if you're an entrepreneur, just do it. Like there's a million reasons to do it. It's... I could spend the whole time here talking about is it worth it or not. But we had done Y Combinator with Carwoo back in 2009. So it wasn't a question, we knew all along that we were gonna, we were going to apply to it. Probably had a good shot of getting in just because we had done it before. But we still had to do all the work, we had to do the application, we had to go do the interview. Um, and we got accepted into YC Winter of 2020. And that was really kind of when it became real. So it took us about 6 months to go from you know, "maybe we're going to do this, let's see if it works, let's put something together," got a customer. Once we got into YC, it was clear this is what we were going to do and the demand for it was there. Um, and we spent the YC uh time building and selling to other YC companies. And, and we got our first probably 10 customers out of the YC cohort that we were a part of.
Um, and this was Winter of 2020. So I think maybe like the program's three months, about eight weeks into it COVID hit, and they told everybody to go home. Um, so it was, that was a pretty disruptive moment. Fortunately for us, uh we had started already having a few conversations with investors um, and started to have some traction. And Sequoia, in the midst of the world falling apart uh, led our seed round. And I'm not kidding, the world was falling apart and we thought it was over. We're like, "Well, that's it, like nobody's writing checks in the middle of all of this uncertainty." But Sequoia had conviction around the problem because our partner at Sequoia, um Bogomil Balkansky, he worked at VMware and had said, "We saw this all the time." Um, so he had kind of already understood the problem space, the issue, and we were fortunate enough to kind of meet him along the way and had some traction with customers. He did his work, talked to a bunch of engineering organizations and engineering leaders, and all got validation that this was a big problem. And, and that was kind of what... that's what really made it real. YC made it real, but that really, really made it real.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really amazing. The timing of that, really uncanny. I mean, so many companies were trying to build, and some made it, some didn't, and uh sounds like you were one that, that got through it. Uh, so for the audience, if, if a customer is interested in building a platform or a technology company, and they come into some challenges, what's the... what, what are you walking into and giving them that they're going to say, "Thank God you built this, because now we're going to be able to release product much faster and run more efficiently." Just give us a kind of a little bit more detail on that.
Tommy McClung: Yeah, I mean the platform that we have um, allows you to spin up and down environments, whether that's development, staging, production uh, for your developers um with a click of a button. Uh, or it connects into your SDLC. Like you can do a pull request and you automatically get an environment for the branch you're working on. Um, and that typically is done um by a DevOps team or people. Um, and so if you're a startup, uh we have startups that have worked with us from the very beginning that literally have never had to think about how they deploy, get software out, because Release handles all of that. And we had to handle all of that in order to be able to spin up and down environments. So for early stage startups, we're actually a lot more like a better Heroku, um where it's a PaaS that allows you to not have to worry about CI/CD and you just write your code and you get your environments.
We have customers that use us for production and it all runs in an AWS account that's under your control. So in, like Heroku, you end up having to have this running in their cloud. But with Release it's kind of like a developer experience sitting on top of AWS that handles all of the, the CI/CD. The end result of that is you can spin up environments for anyone whenever you want, but for an early stage startup it allows you to not have to worry about any of that tooling. You literally come in, you bring your codebase, and you'll have stuff in production you know within minutes. And, and we have customers that were startups that started with us in that YC cohort that have been with us for four years, [and] now have become really, really large and are running you know, major companies on top of what we're doing. Our sweet spot is more for you know, 2-300 person orgs and larger, because that's where the complexity of all of these developers working really rears its head. You know, if you have one staging environment and you have 300 engineers, by definition you're stuck. Um you can't move quickly. When you're a startup, the benefit is more like, "Don't worry about hiring DevOps. Like, just worry about your problem. Let us deal with the, get your, your, your stuff out and, and, and use this more like a PaaS."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So if you have hired DevOps, does that mean if they use your platform you can reduce headcount on the DevOps side? Or if you're a startup, does that mean you don't really need to think about hiring DevOps as you scale?
Tommy McClung: Yeah, you don't even need to think about it. A lot of times the, the early startups, it's a founder that's setting all of this stuff up. They get it set up, and there's really not a need for a DevOps team until you get pretty big. Like one of our customers, uh, uh, they're probably Series B now, started with us when they were in YC, probably have 100-plus employees, and they still don't have a DevOps team. So it'll scale with you for a really long time.
A lot of times our bigger customers have DevOps, right? Already. And the value proposition to them is, focus them on value-added things, not this toil that goes along with just getting things out. And so you know, they'll have a DevOps team, but they need less of a DevOps team when they're there. And then for developers, it just makes all of this so much more accessible. Like they have more control over what's going on in infrastructure because all of this is templated. So I call it like environments-as-code. You basically have your, your services that you want to deploy into your environment. If you want to tweak that, it's under your control. You don't need the DevOps team to go do that for you. A lot of times when you get into bigger orgs, a developer, in order to get anything changed in the infrastructure side of things, has to put a ticket into Jira and wait. Like it's just wait till they get it done. Now we've moved all of that, shifted left to the developer so they can take control of it. And the DevOps team still manages and maintains all of those things, but the engineers themselves, software engineers, can do a lot of it themselves.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's amazing. Wow. Cost savings and also getting product to the market faster. That sounds like a no-brainer to me. You know, every company today is, is talking about AI and, you know, you think about your own company, how is Release thinking about AI in terms of building out products and just overall you know, in the company?
Tommy McClung: Yeah, we have a, a product right now. If you go to release.chat, that's up there. Um, it is a way to talk to your infrastructure. I mean, like one of the things that we work on is like how do we make these teams more efficient so you can get code out more quickly. In our core product, what we saw was environments were a bottleneck in and of themselves. But another bottleneck that we've seen in a lot of organizations is there's always like a person who's the person who knows everything about the infrastructure. "You got to go talk to Jim because he knows about how everything's set up." Well, we wanted to see whether or not AI could solve that. Like, you could talk and ask questions like you would to your DevOps expert, that could describe what's going on within your infrastructure. And it was really just a way to get our toe in the water with like, what the heck is going on in AI.
So the, the chat interface we have now is a command line that you can just say, "Hey, like what was my AWS bill yesterday? How was my networking configured?" The questions you would probably ask your DevOps directly, you can now ask to the release.chat system, and it will explain anything and everything you want to know about how your infrastructure is configured, set up. And it was just kind of a way to reduce another bottleneck. Like the knowledge of those folks is another bottleneck. And to be honest it was, it was an experiment on like what's possible, um, but it's really cool. It's up there, it's free, anybody can use it.
In the long run what we see is a bigger opportunity around environments for AI. Um, we think that's as big of an issue on the AI side as it is on the you know, software development side. So the, the same idea of being able to spin up ephemeral environments for software development is going to exist for spinning up ephemeral environments for AI training, fine-tuning, um getting models out, testing them. That problem is the same in AI. It's just a different set of technology underneath. So we see a really, really interesting opportunity there um, that is going to serve data scientists, you know, software engineering organizations to make the AI development and infrastructure for that a lot more uh accessible. Because right now the state of that, if you want to do this on your own, it is incredibly complex. Getting access to GPUs, GPUs are incredibly expensive, they're hard to get, um there's a lot of problems in the infrastructure space of AI that we think is really, really interesting. Um, and we do think there's applicable AI things that we can do to make our products better. But I think that we're going to kind of stick to you know being at the lower level and, and working on those problems.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's fascinating. Lots of opportunities and lots of problems to solve as AI continues to get embedded into systems and applications and new industries. As a company, you, you raised, you, you raised a lot of money. Uh, you're, you built a great company. How big is the market opportunity from what, where you sit today?
Tommy McClung: This is an investor question right? Like, depends on how you count uh the market. Like, you know, I think when I raised money I probably counted up every DevOps person's salary in the world and said, "Hey," you know, some, some calculation right, that it's in the, it's in the high billions you know, it's, it's a very big, big opportunity. Um, we have a way bigger vision that we haven't really talked about publicly that makes the market even bigger. Um, you know, the, the mission of the company is, we exist to help companies release their ideas to the world as fast as possible. Like that is where the name Release came from. We want ideas to be released. We think that so many great ideas are bottlenecked behind the limitations of being able to actually get them to be real. And so what we look at in the long term is like, how do you realize that vision across how software gets made and built?
So if you think about it that way, the market opportunity is massive. Um you know, getting ideas to the world as fast as possible is worth a lot of money. Uh and right now it's, it's slow. Like it is, incred-, with all the advancements of, of DevOps and automation, it still takes a long time to go from what's in your head to like, your customers using it, and trying a lot of different ideas. Because you don't actually know what's going to work until somebody tries it. Um, one of the things that, that bugged me about being in a large company was when you have technical limitations of how much you can produce, what happens is only a number of ideas can ever see the light of day. And those ideas are limited by authority. Right? Like if you can only do five things in a quarter, how do you decide? You'll do all your work, you'll do your background on what the market size is and whether customers want it. But at the end of the day, there's an executive somewhere sitting there making a decision that says, "this is the five, these are the five things we're going to do." And a lot of times they're wrong. A lot of times they're wrong. And so the more ideas that you can try, the better that chance is you're going to solve the problem. And so that was something that Eric and David and I set out on. This is like, "well, how can you limit that, like, political inertia stopping that happens when you've got a room of executives, half of them don't even know technology at all, trying to make decisions?" Well the answer is, try them all. Like, why are we arguing about which of these 50 ideas are the best? Let's just do them all. Well, the reality of doing that is actually it's really difficult technically, it's very difficult to do that. So that's what really got us excited. Um, it wasn't the you know, infrastructure automation stuff that we do today. It was the idea that we could unlock the creativity of all of these people that sit in these companies that can't get things done because they have to you know get in line uh and get approvals and, and let all the politics happen.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's interesting. It's, it's a cultural thing too. Some companies grow into a culture where expectations are just, "Hey, it's going to take us, you know, 12 months to get this new product to release," or "it's going to take us 6 months." But you know with technology, I think you have to adapt not just the company, but the culture and the mindset too of what's, what's reality. And with technology like this, it sounds like the reality is kind of here now. You know, one of the challenges that companies have faced since COVID is this, the decision around hiring people that are going to be on-site versus remote, um making a decision of what your company is going to be for the long term or short term is a lot of complexity from founders having to think through what's the right answer. You've figured out a way how to, how to build a remote-first company and to do it very successfully. What's worked for you? What can you share that others can learn from, that you feel has been very instrumental in building what you have today?
Tommy McClung: Well, we didn't really have a choice. Uh, like I said, we did Y Combinator Winter of 2020. It was just... well, there was four of us at the time, we had one engineer Jeremy Cruttsender that worked with us. We were in Palo Alto, Mountain View, and they said, "Go home." Um, we actually thought we were going to have an office, I think everybody thought they were going to have an office, and then we were forced into, "You got to go sit by yourself for the next two years." Like we didn't, we didn't have a plan for that. It just kind of happened. And so we tried a lot of different things. We tried the, the you know, the writing culture, we tried uh different tools to try to simulate what an office would look like. Uh we tried VR. One of the things I did very early I was like, "Oh I'm going to get everybody a VR headset," this was like when we were five people. And then you realize that you get sick after 10 minutes of being in VR, and that's not going to work. So we tried that, like doing virtual meetings and you know Zoom meetings. What we actually found uh the combination that works the best for us is everything in Slack. Like all the company communication is in Slack, um you know, all our documents are in Google Drive.
But we use this tool and I feel like I should get a commission or some sort of like referral bonus for this... we use this tool called Gather. Um and Gather is like a, it's like a 2D game that is an office that you can put together. And you walk around and you have office rooms, you have different um conference rooms. And when you walk in and everybody's in there, video automatically starts. It's really awesome. Um and we've been using it for a couple of years, and it is the closest thing that we have found to like really feeling like you're in that office. And we have employees all over the world, so um we've found that that kind of brings us together.
We still try to do offsites too. Like we try to do like a once or twice a year all-company get together. Because there really isn't a way to approximate being next to each other. Like there really isn't. You know, we've done team building events online all through COVID, like every month we had a team building event where we did like scavenger hunts or, or escape rooms online, or we did these fun activities, we had stuff like sent to our employees like, you know one week we had like everybody got a drink you know of their type that would get delivered, and that stuff was fun and it brought us together. But it still didn't really solve getting to know people really, really well. So we found that the combination of the tools: Slack, Gather, you know Google Drive, the things that we do internally, plus once or twice a year spending the money to get everybody together is worth it. Um and that seems to have been, been working for us. I mean, I think I did my first in-person customer meeting like literally like two weeks ago.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh wow. Yeah, wow. That's amazing. That's great. I, that company Gather, I know you had mentioned that before. I, I got to check it out. So just for the listeners that don't see you or don't understand really what Gather is, what's the visual look like when you're using Gather? What exactly is the experience like that we, we want to know about?
Tommy McClung: It looks like you're in a 2D video game. Like it, you get to design your own office space. So you put all the conference rooms in there. And everybody has a little avatar character, and you run around the office. You go to my desk, you go to your desk, and when you go to their space the video automatically starts um when you get near them. So that's what it is. Uh and our company lives in that thing. We're in it all day long.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's awesome.
Tommy McClung: It's really funny when new people... like we interview people, we invite them to it, and they have to walk to their conference room to do the interview. It's, it's, it's a trip. Like I really recommend it, it's been really great for us.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Well let's switch gears and talk about hiring as a company. Um you know, it's not just about the leader, it's the people that you find and hire and build that really create the magic of the company. What, what, what's been your strategy? What works for you when you kind of turn the filters on to make sure that you get the right people on the bus? What, what are some of the things that you can share that's, that have just over and over proven to be a good success for you?
Tommy McClung: Yeah, the technical stuff is pretty straightforward, right? Like they can either do the job, so we have like two different things that we worry about. Technically, can you do the job? Like, whatever the team that needs somebody to hire, they're responsible for putting together like, "Okay here is what we need to see in order to have confidence that this person can do the job."
The other part of it is a full um values uh day, actually, that we, we have with our... not a day, it's a couple hours. But it's one day of their interview, they do the interview, the technical interview one day and then they do the values interview the next day. And the values interview is you know, we created core values for the company um that we've been, that have been around forever. And they're, they're not your typical like "Integrity, Synergy." One of them is called "Ride the Ostrich." Um that's one of our values. And what that means is, you always have that visual of an ostrich sticking his head in the sand. You don't want to stick your head in the sand for, for problems, you want to get on the ostrich and ride it around. Um, and so you want to have problems out in the open, you want to talk about them. And then we put together you know, for each one of our core values, um a bunch of questions that we think help us understand whether the individual can exhibit that value.
Um because what I've learned is, technically a lot of people can do the job, a lot of people don't fit together. Like they just, it's oil and water. Like you could hire somebody that's like this brilliant person but for whatever reason they can't mesh well with the team. And so we ask, for all of our values, a bunch of questions um that kind of give us a sense of "Can this person live within this framework of these values?" And we, we're really good at that. Like we end up being able to determine pretty quickly whether the person is going to thrive or not in the org just based on how they you know, talk about you know how they ride the ostrich or have done that in other jobs, and or whether they care about it, right? Like whether it's something that motivates them.
Um I think that is incredi-, and I, I say like it is almost the second most important thing you do in your company. First is make sure you built something people want. Second is make sure you understand the values that you're gonna, you're gonna, you're going to live by in your organization. And when new people come in, really focus on those because it is so incredibly easy to hire somebody, it is so incredibly hard to let them go. It's so hard. Hiring is like, "come in the door, here's your check," right? Letting them go is a whole thing. It's so difficult, it's emotionally tiring, it's legally troublesome, that it's just hard. So the, the, the gate to get in is "be able to do your job well, and then also fit within the values that we have in the company." I, I, it's just something that we you know, the second thing we did after we started the company, we, we started talking about that stuff.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really cool. It's, it's, it's... you don't think about the, the having to let people go part of it when you're building a company because it's all, you know, the, the glass is half, or you know, full. And uh you know, we're never going to go south of our business plan and things are going to be rosy all the way through. And it's, yeah, getting rid of people is not easy and it's certainly not fun, and it's something you kind of have to do as a leader, that's part of your job. Is you have to make those hard decisions and that, that comes with the territory. So if you're not making those decisions, you're really, you're not making your investors happy. They expect you to be able to filter through. You're not going to get it right every single time. Um and we see some, a lot of companies hold on just a little bit too long sometimes with people they know it's not the right fit. They just can't quite get there to say, "you gotta move on."
Tommy McClung: Yeah it's really hard, you know, it's not easy to do that stuff. I mean the way that we have you know, one of the other questions that we'll ask every once in a while is "What would it be like if we had to let this person go?" you know.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Tommy McClung: What would that experience be like, cuz it can be hard, it can be really, really hard. So it's something that we don't take lightly. Um you know, getting the right people in, I would rather have everybody do more work, suffer a little bit with that, than hire somebody and have it be wrong. Because the downside of that is really hard. It's really hard.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Tommy McClung: Especially when you're small, you don't have a lot of, you don't have a lot of um room for error there, you know. Like one person that doesn't do their job and causes a whole bunch of problems can like really slow you down when you're only like 10 people.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, no doubt. I love that phrase, "ride the ostrich." God, it's got a mental note in my mind about what that looks like. As you ride that ostrich into 2024, what's, what's on the horizon for Release? What are you excited about on the roadmap?
Tommy McClung: I talked a little bit about it. A lot of the AI stuff that we're working on um that's pretty exciting. You know, being able to support larger and larger customers. Um you know I think that is something, like getting into Enterprise. Like really getting into that space. Right now we're kind of mid-market where we work with companies up to I don't know a 1000, 1200 uh employees, large you know 300, 400 person engineering orgs. There's a whole other layer of complexity when you start dealing with really large companies, lots of microservices. Like if you have hundreds of microservices, that's a problem that we're, we're tackling next year. Integration with um IDPs. So you know if you're on Backstage or, or Cortex or some of the you know internal developer portal um products, I think there's some really interesting things that we will mix well with there. Um yeah, lots of stuff. I mean there's never a, a never-ending stream of things that we could be working on here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Well we're going to switch gears here. We call this uh Three Personal Questions, they're just simply that. Three questions, three answers. So for you, where do you go to think big or to brainstorm?
Tommy McClung: Uh there's this hill near my house called Tarantula Hill. Um and I walk to it uh it's about 3 to 4 miles from my house. And I just go outside, put my headphones in, I walk to the top of that hill, and I just kind of sit there. Um, and it also helps my step count. Like I think there was a point in time where I was walking like 12 miles a day. Wow. I like to walk, walking really does it for me. Um and then when you finish that walk at the top of the hill and you can see everything, it's pretty awesome. So I'm fortunate to have that nearby.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great, gives you a good perspective I'm sure on life and, and business. Um what advice have you gotten from another founder that you felt is worth sharing with the listeners?
Tommy McClung: Uh it's about hiring, it kind of comes back around to what I was talking about. Like be really picky. Like be picky. Don't go as fast as... you know, the times where I've made mistakes hiring is when we go too fast. Um I never regret going slower. I never regret going slower and being picky.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, really cool. How do you stay positive on the journey of the roller coaster of a startup?
Tommy McClung: Take care of yourself. Like it is really important to take care of yourself. Go to the gym, meditate, um take breaks, uh do things for yourself. I mean I, I can't underestimate how important it is in business and in life that all of this startup stuff is... it feels like there's a lot of pressure, a lot of um demand. But none of it matters if you're not healthy through the journey. I, I, and I have done it the wrong way before, where literally I immersed myself completely in you know 16-hour days. I, I didn't take care of myself, my health went sideways, and I was not as good as I am now. When I go to the gym, I go on walks, I meditate, I you know have a spiritual sense in my life. Uh that stuff makes a huge difference.
And it allows you to weather the storm. Like when things aren't going well, and they will not go well all the time, you're going to have challenges personally, professionally. And I, and I always say that the, the, the suffering and the hard times are where you grow. So you got to lean into it. It's not bad to have things go wrong. Things going wrong is telling you you got to make it right, and it's showing you what you need to do to grow. So embrace that, embrace the, the downward roller coaster. That is actually the moment that you really need to lean into because that's where the opportunity exists. Like if things are going well and you're just blowing it out of the water, you're not actually learning all that much. You just kind of caught lightning in a bottle and it's going, and you won't be as prepared down the line when something does go south because you're not ready for it. So I don't know, it just, lean into it. Don't, don't be afraid of the, the, the down, the downward turns. Like that's where, that's where all the growth is.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it can be fearful at times too when you're not sure where you're going to end up, but you know experience is the best teacher and certainly you, you learn so much more in those times where you have to be resourceful and innovate and try new things that you didn't have to try before. And ultimately you find your way again. Which is I think one of the, one of the fun parts about the journey, even though it's not always fun, you end up at the place that you hoped to be if you just keep moving forward and don't give up. If, if, as we wrap up here Tommy, if, if, if people want to find you or want to find Release, where do they go?
Tommy McClung: Just release.com. It's simple. I spent three years trying to get that domain name, so I'm super proud of the fact you can just go to release.com. Uh yeah, that, that it, it, it says everything about what our company's about, so it's perfect.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, very cool. All right, great. Well thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story, really appreciate it. And for all the listeners listening, appreciate you spending your time with us on this beautiful Friday. Hope you enjoy your holidays as they come up here. My name is Jake Aaron Villarreal, the host of the show, and can't wait to connect with everyone else again on the next episode. Until then, take care.
Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.
This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market and they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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