Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, born and raised in Silicon Valley, and here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder, the journey they're on, the problems they face, the products they build to help transform industries. I'm excited to have with us today, Jeu, co-founder and CEO of Orkes, a $29 million venture-backed startup. Jeu, welcome to the show.
Jeu George: Hey, Jake. Thanks for having me on the show. Excited to be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well, I'm excited to have you. Um, where are you calling in from today?
Jeu George: I'm here in the Bay Area. I, I live in Cupertino, so in the, in the heart of the Silicon Valley.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love it. I'm from there, too. And not originally um from where I live today, which is in Southern California. But um I, the pulse of technology is where we see a lot of innovation continue to happen and come out of. So, I know you're in the right spot.
Let me give the listeners a little bit more background of you. So Jeu is the co-founder and CEO of Orkes. He's also an alum of Netflix engineering where he is... he was involved in the Conductor project and is now the most popular orchestration and application platform in the market used by over 3,000 enterprise clients worldwide. He also previously worked at Microsoft and Uber while co-founding the company Pinkvilla.com, the world's largest and most popular Bollywood news and media website. You've got a lot of great companies in your background and we'll talk a little bit about those. But before we dive into your current company, Orkes, give us a little bit more about you and your origin story. Where, where did you start? Where did this all kind of play out to get into the technology world?
Jeu George: Yeah. So uh Jake, so I grew up in India um southern part of India. And um I come from a mechanical engineering background. And uh through that I also got a chance to intern early on at the uh Indian Space Research Organization, where I first got introduced to programming at a, at an enterprise, at a company level. And that's where my love for computers and programming started. And uh later on I came here to the US to do my master's. And uh after that I, I got a chance to join Microsoft. Um you know, this were like you know pre-cloud era, right like. And I got a chance to work on uh the Windows operating system. Uh later on went to work uh in the Microsoft Office organizations.
And um after my stint at Microsoft, you know, that was back in Seattle, so I want to move to the Bay Area. And then you know, came here back in you know early 2010, 2011, like you know that's, that's around the, I think late, late 2011 was when I moved here. Got a chance to work in Netflix, back when DVD was still a thing. And, and that's where it all started. But you know, going back, the entrepreneurial bug was always in me. And um, and I was lucky to have done this once before in the consumer phase, but my love for enterprises and uh the things that is you know being done in enterprises, being you know a developer myself for several years, but finding this great idea and problem space that I was truly passionate about and, and a great uh team to actually get together and work with that has really helped this journey right? So, and I'm grateful to whatever has happened before and you know, excited for you know what's in front of us.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, well you know when I grew up in San Jose, California. Um, it was shortly after I left, went off to college and came back, and Netflix was already, you know, the DVD mail-out subscription service, which was, you know, banner ads all over the internet and then eventually got into the streaming that we all love and know today. Um, what a great story Netflix is and to be part of that was amazing. Walk me through a little bit about what your role was at Netflix and how did it really kind of give you insights about the roadmap for what you eventually built yourself?
Jeu George: Yeah. So I started as an engineer at Netflix and you know, being like an individual contributor at Netflix. I think I spent around seven, eight years there. Right. But one of the great things about working at Netflix, I think one is obviously the technology like you know, we, we, we know how great of a company Netflix has been and to 300 million subscribers that they have around the world in the, the streaming space. But you know some of the great learnings like from an engineering standpoint, you know, we kind of revolutionized cloud computing right. And being part of the journey and you know other companies never have you know kind of done this before and the challenges were interesting and new. Um Netflix was also the very first company of its size to operate completely in the cloud right. So and some of the challenges as early adopters, that also led to kind of creation of Conductor, right?
But some of the other big learnings from uh Netflix, and, and these are things that we apply to Orkes as well, is the culture that they built. That was a unique culture in the, in the valley. Um lot of things that came out of Netflix, you know, 10 years later other companies started to adopt it, right. Like, and so that culture, having the right set of people, being lean and mean, you know, having that sense of ownership, right? Uh this whole culture of freedom and responsibility, you know, it, it's hard to kind of look at it and fathom how this can really help the company from the outside. But you know, having lived and you know breathing this like you know day in day out for like you know seven, eight years like you know, that's really helped you know not only helped me grow as a person but also you know technical skills and you know been able to take all of that and apply it to kind of building Orkes as well.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well you know you look at Netflix and you say cloud computing. At that time cloud computing was kind of nebulous. Not a lot of companies even knew what it was.
Jeu George: Yeah.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: What was the partnership that really got cloud computing off the ground for Netflix?
Jeu George: So this was, I think, so Netflix... so AWS first came out with this thing called the cloud, right. Like u- I think like this term "cloud" wasn't even popular then. I think this category was still getting created in a, in a way. Amazon also was lucky because there was no I think like a direct competitor to the cloud for what, six, seven years after AWS was initially launched. But uh one of the things that AWS also needed as a company was a, a great you know tech-forward company, something that is, has a great brand name and also getting them to use the cloud and operate completely in the cloud. So that partnership, that early partnership between Amazon and Netflix was very critical to both companies. One, in the way that Netflix grew and was able to do a lot of things at high velocity. But also you know, to, to Amazon because now when you had, have some company like Netflix go and operate completely in the cloud like you know every company can look at that and say "hey, if Netflix can do it and they can run their entire business on this, any company can," right? So that partnership was very, very critical for the, for, for both companies, right. And you know, and, and everyone who worked in, in, in Netflix at that time was just, just lucky to just be, and be part of the journey. This is not a, this is like a you know once in 10, 20 year event that happens right? And, and, and then being part of the journey I think uh you know you just have to be lucky right time, right place right? And, and you know that's just what happened with me there.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, well it's an incredible story and even with all the right time and the right place there was still ups and downs and challenges. But I guess that's really just business. Every day you wake up there's new opportunities and new challenges and it's never a straight line to get to the end. You know when we look at businesses we think you know what problem can be solved in the market and then if you can build a product or service that's good enough clients will actually pay for it. When we talk about the problem you're solving today at Orkes, walk us through a little bit about what that is and really what problem are you solving?
Jeu George: Yeah, so the gist of it, we enable developers to build applications right? So applications that are typically distributed, it drives the backend. And more often than not, this is, this is also running of a business, right? And as a platform, we provide everything that a full-fledged application developer needs, right? Including high reliability or high performance or high availability or doing that observability across the stack and combined with a great debugging and developer experience. But if you look at any company um of any size in any space, and generally if you take how the kind of the tech stack is laid out... on the bottom of the stack you would see what is you know fully ruled by the, the big three cloud providers today, which is like "how do you manage your infrastructure," right? So nobody starts about you know, starts today thinking about "hey, let's build a data center first," right? They start with one of the big you know versions of the cloud. So that's the lowest component of that, that stack that you can think about, right.
On the top of the stack is where everyone needs to put their entire focus on. So as a business, you want your best developers, your best people to be in that, because that's what's going to drive the end user experience. That's what is going to take your business and differentiate them from the rest of competition. And you need to go and do things really fast in, in that layer, right? But to do all of that, what happens in the middle is this platform experience. And, and not having that platform experience, like you cannot drive those magical experience in the top right. And that platform experience, a lot of companies you know if you look at 10 years back and how that's evolving, people went and did this themselves. And it's an incredibly hard problem to solve right. Like you know if you start on it today like it's, even with the, the great open-source tools across the thing that you have today and you know it's, it's going to take you three, four years to just, just get it right. Right. And uh it is super critical for every business, but these are problems that have been solved over and over and over again. And that's where we come in.
And you know, we've been lucky. As you know, Conductor is an open source um this has been used by, by you know over 3,000 companies worldwide. Very battle tested product. And that's where we see that big shift in, in the developer experience happening. You know instead of going and building this from scratch, go and build this you know using a great product like, like Conductor, right? So that's really the problem that we are trying to solve. And as a you know, if you want to equate that into another world like you know, if you think of a you know if a, if there's a business that has data needs, you know obviously you want to store data, retrieve data, you know, do all of the things you know with the database. No one's really today thinking about "I need to build this database from scratch." More often than not, it's like there's all of these choices for me, there's different types of databases and each database has its use cases that it's strong at, its you know pros and cons, and then you pick a database for your problem and then go with it. That's the shift that we are seeing right now and, and, and that's what Conductor was built for. And you know, at, at Orkes as a company, that's really the problem that we're trying to solve.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Yeah, there's a lot of platforms out there and there's a lot of different strategies on getting, you know, into the market, but also aligning yourself with the right partners where you have distribution channels and opportunities to really scale. Talk a little bit about your relationships in the, in the business. Are, do you have partnerships that you're aligning with? Is this kind of a direct-to-market strategy on go it alone? Like what's, what's working for you?
Jeu George: Yeah. So it's a multi-pronged approach, right. Like, and as a company, you know, we are still very, very early in the journey right. We like you know a little over two years in, two and a half years in. U- so we are always learning you know what's going to work for us. But I think for every startup it is very critical that you know you always work very, very directly, as much directly as you can with the end customer. Because this is a product that we're building, the space is evolving, uh we are also learning. And getting that firsthand experience working with the, with the developers and companies and getting their feedback, that is very important right. So direct to market is what we really, really focus on right. So you know, come to the website, go do self sign up, uh you know, do a POC and do all of that stuff.
But it is also important to work with a lot of great partners so that it can help accelerate on the adoption right. So that's something that's, that's something that there's also some, some amount of focus on. And we worked with some of the companies like Microsoft and, and, and Amazon and, and other channel partners, system integrators to take this to the next, next level. And primarily think of that as like you know, how can we take all of those things and scale ourselves right? Like use the hyperscalers and scale ourselves as a business, get more customers that way with, with interesting partnerships, right? Like. But again, like I said, the space is rapidly evolving and we can see the shift happening. The last 10 years it's, it's very, very clear like you know where this market is going towards.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Why is this important to you?
Jeu George: You know, being in this developer space and, and being a developer myself for you know 15, 20 years, right, uh I have gone through this journey, you know, back in the day when you know things used to be monolithic in nature and that was just the way to do things right? Like uh you know, we had companies run their entire business on a big Sun Solaris machine backed by sometimes an Oracle DB, and single point failures were, were the way to do things. Uh you know and slowly that has evolved with companies building data centers, with the cloud coming about. And every shift in computing and you know, you know the way people think about building stuff right, that's changed with changing dynamics, right? Some of those changing dynamics involve generally what infrastructure is available right? Like you know internet speeds have just, just gone through the roof. Like if you look at like what we had in the early 2000s to what it is today like... mobile computing has also changed right? Like the power that you have on mobile devices has also changed, right?
And with that like you know the way people think about developing applications also changes. And having been through this journey in, in a lot of these phases, you know, I truly understand what developers need, what they're looking for, right. And um that's really what is passionate for me. Like you know, problems that, that I'm interested in, right. And, and we have built solutions to that ourselves and then you know taken that and then applied that to the open source product Conductor, have that battle tested in Netflix and then over 3,000 companies using it. Now, how do we take it to every developer on the planet, right? That's like the big vision of the company, right? And that's really what kind of drives me. And you know, that's something that we want to do for the next few years.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Yeah. That's always something bigger than yourself that actually motivates you. Oftentimes to build something whether it's a new... figure out on their own that might be too costly, could be just a time band issue. So really excited to, to kind of see where this goes. Um you know, you look in the market and there's a lot of competition. You also see a lot of AI innovation happening. How does your product play into the space of AI?
Jeu George: Yeah absolutely. Um so first thing that we are seeing that this thing is real, right. Like and, and we are seeing this firsthand with enterprises right. And you know when, when, when these kind of things happen again, this is again once in a 10, 20 year event right. Like when you see things like this and we've seen this you know boom right, like. And yes there were a lot of things that went bust during that time, but also that, that paved the way for the next set of companies to emerge right. But one of the things that we seeing is like you know this is, this is real, this is very, very real. And we can, we can see this first time with enterprises.
And, and overall if you look at like you know just the space itself, like how people are envisioning using this and how people are using this, the biggest use case is, is basically assisting humans using AI to, to help humans you know just become hyper-efficient. What humans could do in you know hours and days, now we can do that in you know minutes and seconds. And uh that's how you can use the power of AI you know, and, and, and, and make yourself more super-efficient just as, as a person and then as a business as well, right?
And moving forward, one of the things that you're seeing is when you, when you think of it in that dimension, agents are going to play a really big part and, and that's also going to drive the, the adoption of AI in the market, right? And um and with that, like, that said like AI talent is also very, very hard to find today and there is far less supply for quality AI talent than there is demand. So integrating AI into your new and existing applications without the need of rearchitecting your existing application stacks, without the need of having you know very focused AI-only talent right, like that's very important for companies right. Uh and you want to do this with your existing great engineering talent that you have and, and these are all things that we focus on as a company right.
And, and making it easy for businesses, for developers to use, build the generative AI stuff that the, the big foundational models like the OpenAIs and the Geminis of the world have come out with into the new and existing stacks right. And um and, and focus on things that drive the business, use that AI to you know differentiate your business and, and move it far, far ahead of competition right. That's our general focus on, on, on AI. Make it very easy for companies to use AI in their existing stacks, into what they're building on right. Like and, and that's, that's really what our focus on as a company with our, with our AI offerings.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. Yeah. Tell me about it. When it comes to AI talent, I mean, you know, a couple years ago that was 10% of our customer base. Today, it's 100%. And it's, you know, AI companies growing, scaling, trying to find the right people. And it's not easy. And there's a lot of, now you know training is a priority to get existing engineers up to speed on machine learning or different aspects of technology that they can be valuable at. So there's yeah, this is uh I think a global problem now. It's not necessarily just in the US but it's also you know everywhere we're, we're working with companies and it's pretty fascinating. It is very similar to the dot com boom from the perspective that there's a lot of companies. I think the number I heard was something like 1500 AI startups launching every week right now, and um just the, the ideas behind what's going to happen is I think very real. I mean, you know, co-pilots across every industry, if you want to look at it that way, or just technologies that are helping optimize, you know, your business, um, do more with less, use computers to really help automate a lot more than we've done in the past. So, we see a trend and we see real business opportunity behind it. This is that next big transformation and excited to kind of hear where you're at and how you're contributing to that. Um...
Jeu George: Yeah and then you know talking about that, like you know we also have a great relationship and partnership with Microsoft. And you know earlier this year we also got a chance to meet Satya Nadella and privately demo on what we are doing right. And he was super excited to look at and, and all the agent work that we're doing and you know very well aligned with Microsoft's vision as well. So that was like a great testament coming from him and also that "hey, the, the industry is kind of generally moving in this direction, that's also what they are seeing" right.
But that said like you know you just talked about talent right, like you know Ilya from OpenAI right, and most of the work that has been out today like you know obviously ChatGPT was the first thing that was you know exposed to the world and you know the world got a chance to kind of use firsthand of how LLMs and AI work and generative AI stuff right. Like most of the work was you know by one paper that was kind of written by him in 2017 around work around transformers and you know that's how hard like you know AI talent is right. Uh and this is going to be a challenge moving forward right. Like so I believe like hey foundational models like you know that's going to be ruled by two or three or four big companies right. And you know what happens on the top of that is kind of where other leading AI startups in Africa, that's really what we are focused on as well.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well we're also seeing a lot of uh acquihires where it's not necessarily just the product, it's "we can't hire those people, those three engineers that are founders and their 10 other engineers they were able to bring on board. So let's just buy that company and now we have that talent," and we're seeing a lot of that start to happen too. So whether you're a small startup and you know thinking and you're you know it's you against the world and you've got these behemoths that are helping you know shape the world but also maybe not give you an opportunity. There could be an opportunity of a easy acquisition. We're hearing this, you know, within months of starting companies and getting pretty large buyouts. So, kind of crazy what we're seeing. It's very similar to the .com boom that we also did go through. Um, if you look at your company today, I know you're two years in and you're, you're growing. If you succeed in what you're building, who's going to be the biggest benefit or benefactor from this?
Jeu George: That's 100% going to be the, the developer, right? Um developers who are focused on building the applications that drive the backend. And sometimes it would be developers that, that is building stuff what we call as it the backend for your front ends right. Like that's really the biggest benefactor from an individual perspective right. But, but the business itself, right? Like now you can, you can put your best developers on your end user facing problems right. U- um so moving fast right like, the developers and then generally the business itself, right?
That's, and you can, you can draw parallels that with what happened in the cloud, right? Because the cloud made it so easy for people to go and deploy stuff. It helped it in two ways, right? Capital investment was not needed for taking a startup off the ground, right? Because you didn't have to think about building data centers anymore and you could, you could start with one of the big three cloud providers. And uh the tooling that came on the top of that that enable developers to build and deploy new applications right, you know you didn't have to think about doing this yourself all the time. Like you know the basic constructs came from uh you know come in today from the cloud providers, you just use that and build that. And, and you know just like that, just like how they build the and manage infrastructure layer, we are just solving the exact same problem but one layer above that, which is building applications, application platforms right. Like so really that's, developers [is] what really, really is going to be the biggest benefactor.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. How big is this market when you think about the total addressable market, the TAM?
Jeu George: Yeah. So, if you think about how, and I think I talked earlier on about the, thinking about the technical stack, right? Like part of the layer, the infrastructure management completely ruled by cloud providers today. You know primarily the big three. And you know a layer above that, platform, application platform building, enabling developers to build this great applications is what really that, that we are focused on the orchestration space. And, and a very easy way to look at it is you know if you look at any company's cloud bill, 20% of that is for infrastructure right. Like you know the barebones, the bare metal you know machines that you're kind of you know getting you know, your, your database infrastructures, your, the very low-level stuff, right? Memory, compute, networks, right? That's 20% of your cloud bill, right?
On the top of that is two more layers, and, and the, the platform layer, the application building layer, that's like 40% of cloud spends, right? And, and then obviously the end user facing that's another 40%. So, so this opportunity when you look at it that way, this is as big as the cloud itself, right? And you know it's been close to 20 years right since the cloud came out, like 15, 20 years, and there are tons of companies that are still in data centers working through that cloud migration journey right. Like and uh so that, that is just going to grow and grow. So this is, this is as big if not much bigger than the cloud itself. And, and that's also what is like very, very exciting because as a startup to be successful you want to solve a problem that is relevant to the industry. You wanted that problem space to be really big and you want to have this TAM also that's like huge right. Like and we are just lucky to have all of this come together for us and now the onus is on us to go and execute right. So that's, that's you know super sick and exciting space for us to be in.
So I would say see for any startup right, like especially early phase you know two years in, three years in right, like a lot of companies are focusing on product-market fit. And, and that's where they're thinking about investing more, scaling up like. But product-market fit is a sign that people, people always look for like "where is that going to come from" like you know. And, and what you think is the right solution or where, where you think or how you think that the market is going to be using you is, is probably not, not the way that you have probably started doing this right. So but we've been just lucky because we have seen product market in open source, and replicating that in our enterprise offering is the challenge that we constantly work on, right? And, and you can see that when you're going to, you see this wild hockey stick growth, right? And when I talk about growth, it's not, not the uh 3x or 4x growth that you think that like a really well uh managed SaaS companies think about today. But this is like as growth as big as the cloud itself, right? Like and that's where we really want to be and we, we aspire to be um something that AWS started to see maybe 2, 3 years after they initially launched right. Like so that's, that's one thing that we are constantly trying to find where that thing is right.
The other thing I would say is um you know obviously as building company like you know, you know people in the company, especially the founding team, we are doing this thing for the first time sometimes right. And so working through distractions and keeping the focus on the company's vision, that is very, very critical and that's also been a constant challenge and you know distractions could come from anywhere right. It could be stuff like, like people, like competition or, or funding or it could be a multitude of things. So but working through the distractions, but, but helping the company keep that focus on that long-term company vision, that's, that's a constant challenge right.
And you know building a great uh team is another one I would say right, like and at every stage in the company like you know you need a different kind of skill right. So hiring the right kind of people that's, that's a constant, constant challenge that we, that, that we're going to have I think all startups are going to go through this right. Like so I would say you know not one single challenge but like you know these are the few things that, that's been coming up all the time, right? Like but you know keeping focus on that vision, keep the distractions aside, like you know I think that's something that, that, that's probably going to be the biggest challenge and that's really what you know takes like you know companies forward right. Like you know if you get distracted in things that are not important in the company like you know you're, you're wasting your time and money and resources like you know keeping, keeping that focus on that long-term company vision right that's, that's very, very important.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I 100% agree with that. You know, who are your customers and is it driving revenue opportunities? And as you're focused around those two areas, you know, going to market, making sure your message is right, getting buy-in from the customer, and then being able to sell a product that actually is profitable for the company. At the end of the day, it's how you survive. So, you got to be, got to be able to do those things. When you go into the market, who are you selling to? Is it the developer teams? Is it the VP of engineering, the CIO, the CTO? Who, who's getting your ear when you, when you pitch your product?
Jeu George: Yeah. So, I think what you're also asking, another way to put this is also like, you know, what's our ideal customer profile? Like, whom do we focus on? What's the messaging, right? So, you know, I've talked about the space and the problem that we are trying to solve in general. And there is three interesting personas for us, right? One is our end user and that's the software developer, right? Like the programmer who kind of uses this day in day out, right? So that's one interesting persona. So there our messaging is like you know what's the value add to the developer? What do they get out of this like, and how does this help make them super efficient and you know get them to focus on solving problems that is most important in the business right, like, and then leverage tools like Conductor which has already seen this before right. So that's, that's one interesting persona right.
The second one is the, is the buyer. And because this is a very developer focused product, more often than not like this, this a buyer comes from the engineering org. You know, and depending upon the size of the org, that persona is either a CTO, VP of Engineering or Senior Director of Engineering and so on and so forth. But we also play into the whole process orchestration space right. So instead of general application building, application orchestration, sometimes people look at this as you know for example our you know if you look at the verticals that we are focused on or, or where a lot of customers have come in, it's also uh the financial world. And, and for example payment processing is, is a really, really big use case for us right, and, and that's a solution that people uses to solve problems right. So and, and when you think about it that way or modernizing your tech stack for example, so some of these things are which the business have to say that "hey, this is something that as a business that we are focused on, we have this budget approved." And some of those things could come even from the C, CIO level, CISO level or the, or the you know CEO level directly. Right. So it depends on what, what the consumer eventually uses us for, but more often than not engineering side.
The third and also very important persona is the enterprise architect. So this product, like I said it's, it's used by the developer, but this is a very collaborative product that we have built, which means that this is not like a you know developer uses this for himself or herself. This is also a product that people are collaborating with. So it's a product that is sold into the company, it's a license, and everyone in the company goes to, goes a chance and gets a chance to go and use this right. Which means there is one or two people in the company sometimes, or in an organization, who is actually putting their neck on the line to say that "I'm going to be using Conductor. I'm going to be using Orkes to solve this solution. This is going to run the core of my business and this is an important decision that we probably not going to change for two, three, four, five years." And, and that persona is the enterprise architect, right? Like and you know, and the value add that, that we sell to them is also very different from the value add that goes to a developer or, or to a buyer, right? So as persona wise, these are the three interesting ones that, that comes to mind, you know, more often than not.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. How easy is the product to install or implement? Oftentimes we just try and understand high level like visually. Walk us through what, what you're, what you're going through if you can. And I know it's probably fairly complex, but maybe uh in the simplest terms, is it a dashboard you're logging into that's connecting to different data sets? Or like what, just walk us through really what it is, look, what it's like?
Jeu George: Yeah. So, let me maybe take a kind of a real world example, right? Um so, if you're trying to build like a retail company, right? Um and as a company grows bigger, there probably different orgs, right? There's one company or there's one organization within the company that's uh listing a bunch of products. There is, there's probably another team that is working on pricing that is focused on you know cost-based pricing or value-based pricing or competitive-based pricing. So there's something, some services that manage pricing. Then there is some other services that probably you know do the, make the sale happen, do the payment processing, and then finally the shipping and returns and stuff like that right. And uh all of these services have to come together to give that excellent end-user experience right, and that's typically driven by an API if you are a, if you are a B2B company, or if you are a you know consumer-facing company like Amazon, that's probably through an app or through a website. And uh now you have this multiple services within the company. Now, how do you stitch all of these things together? And that's where a thing like a platform like an orchestrator comes in, right? And that's where we really play into right now.
So, there's, there's few steps here. One is you as a company, you are trying to pick the right language for the right problem that you're trying to solve. Right? So, within a company itself, you might see multiple language stacks. You might have a combination of Java or Golang that you use for building a backend applications, Python for doing ML related or data related stuff, right? And, and, and then you might have multiple different uh you know language stacks that you have right, and that's where as a developer you're writing your core business logic. And that's where all developers in the company should be focused on, writing business logic that is really driving your business. Right now. And there's this whole concept of stitching things together. Back in the pre-orchestrator days, in the pre-Conductor days, these are all written by some other team which build their own service, and all the service was doing is calling into the other services that you built in the company. And then very often you, you would hit this very interesting problem very early on where you have more, more services and people in the company. And all these services were solving the exact same kind of problems. Like how do you deal, how do you deal with failures? How do you deal with you know high reliability right? You know, if one service fails whose responsibility is to take it to completion right? Like that's where this product like Conductor really comes in right.
So you know think about how as a business or as a, as an engineering process how that end to end looks like, build that out in Conductor. The pieces in that becomes a services that you write code for in whatever language of your choice, connect that to, to the orchestrator. And then when the orchestrator gets involved the get, gets, gets invoked, the right kind of, the right service gets called in at the right time. Failure handling, all of the other common problems that I talked about you know which, which you use right services before, now it's completely taken care of by Conductor right. So that's the your day one proposition.
Now as your business evolves, you're, you're you know you're going to launch in multiple geos and multiple states sometimes like you know the business is probably going to be slightly different right. So how do you version your, your process over time right? Like these are all things that kind of the orchestrator itself builds on. But then at scale, on your day 100, your operational excellence is very, very key. Like you now you have you know thousands of customers, billions of customers like you know making so many orders every day. Even a very tiny .01% failure rate can be a lot of money you know, lot of debugging overhead for your, for your engineers. Um it's very critical for your operation. That's where the end-to-end observability thing comes into play. And you know, having that out of the box with a system like Orkes right, uh that's something that we provide as well. So think of this as "I'm building a great platform, I'm building something for the end user, give me the end to end developer experience right," and, and that's, that's really what like something, something like Orkes really provides.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great and I know that there's a really good uh overview of that too on your website which is an animation and kind of walks you through exactly how it works which I think you know paints a really good picture there too. What's the biggest breakthrough so far that you've had as the company whether it's yourself or as an organization two years into the business?
Jeu George: Yeah, I would say like uh the, the opport- personally for me I think like the opportunity for something like this is, is very, very hard to get. First of all like a great product that's, that's already battle tested with, with the open source. Then having a great team to work with, right, on a vision that we are all aligned on. And, and then the next big thing is like hey this is all great, but the, the industry also should be looking for this uh as a solution and, and that you want, that, that problem space to be really large as well. So the TAM should be really big. So having all of these things come together uh that's something that I'm you know, and having the opportunity to work uh and lead that effort like I'm really, really grateful for that and what we have achieved for so far. But again this is very, very early on as a company right, and, and super excited about the opportunity in front of us right.
But as a company you know it was very surprising to see and also great uh and lucky also to see large enterprise companies come in early on when we just launched, come in early on and buy and use Orkes much before we had our PLG motions in place. And for most of the SaaS companies it's the other way around. Like they try to build a PLG motion, take that you know, try to put your you know sales folks on it and you know figure out the value adds and you know, you know put the value propositions and convert them into large enterprises. We had the reverse problem right. Like you know we, we started to get really large enterprises very, very early on. That's really hard for a lot of companies to break through, and, and I believe the open source platform had a lot to do with that, but more importantly I think the problem space that we are solving for has had also a lot to do with that right. So that I would say was probably the single biggest breakthrough.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's amazing. Talk a little bit about the open-source strategy because a lot of companies start with just taking an idea and they built the product, go to market going the open-source pathway. What's, what should others can be thinking about if they were to go down that route?
Jeu George: Yeah. So, I don't think there's a one solution fits all, right? And the open source strategy has also changed uh from you know the early Linux days to what it is today. So, if you look at like a company like Red Hat, their strategy was very simple, right? Like Linux is a great operating system. It is free. It is reliable. It does a lot of great things, but no enterprise is going to be using it without awesome support. And Red Hat just focused on that. Like you know, they built some great tooling on the top of Linux and, and provided end-to-end enterprise support right. That was a business model, provide support right um.
Moving on, the you know, as, as more and more open source projects came into play. And then there was this big I would say I think in the 2000s, 2010 to 2015 a ton of great open source projects came out in the industry. A lot of them were under the Apache 2.0 to license uh you know moving into bash foundations and the whole idea of that... a ton of them came from Netflix itself right like, and companies around the world. And there it was like "hey, how do you get... here's a great open source product started by a company, give that to the world because these are problems that everyone wants to solve for um, get a lot of contributions from the community and take it to the next level." And then have a foundation model um maybe to take that to the next level, get a lot of participants from that. And think of this as either as a support model, like it make it easy for you to deploy and that's what companies focused on. "Hey here's an open source we worked on, now it's out, open up in the world, we know this product really well, we will help you operationalize that" right.
And, and the last few years that's changed one more level. We're saying it is not just about taking and operationalizing this and taking off that heavy lifting of you know getting this operational overhead from your, from your engineers and DevOps. This is basically also saying "hey, you know what is that differentiator that you're going to create on an enterprise level uh that, that is really going to take your company forward," right. Um so there's a challenge between... and that you talked about strategy... there's a challenge between "this came from open source, there's a lot of developer community that contributed to that, now as you're building more and more stuff, how do you give back and what do you give back to the community," right?
And uh so our strategy has been very simple. Anything that is developer facing right, that is of immense value to the developer, that helps go and developer create like great applications with ease, solving their day-to-day problems... that's really what goes back into open source all the time. And that strategy I don't think is going to change for the next few years. Um the operational points that we have at the top, like you know "what does it take to give this high reliability stuff," like you know... and there are things which customers are focused on because sometimes customers are a data center. Sometimes they are in one version of the cloud. How do you make, give a great operational experience for, for, for these companies right? Like anything that is operational in nature, helps some run you know think about security and governance, compliance um and, and sometimes really high performance stuff right? Like and, and focused on "hey, I'm, I'm not really interested about open sourcing the components that make that but I just want to use that," right. And that's really what our enterprise play is, um and the set of differentiating factors that enterprises really need when they need to run, not really the developer needs when they're building this application. So that's been our focus on how we differentiate that out, right? And there's, you know, some companies sometimes think about this from the licensing perspective and there are sometimes small gray areas and those gray areas are, are subject to change. And as the industry evolves, we'll also adapt and evolve, but giving back to the developer that's generally been our focus uh from, from a, from a strategy perspective.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. Really cool to hear that. I have a couple more questions here and we're going to wrap up. But, uh, what do you know now that you wish someone would have told you when you started the company that you think would be valuable for the listeners to hear?
Jeu George: Yeah, I think this, this thing is never easy. In fact, there's a lot of hurdles and hard work that goes into this. Um, a lot of them can be, and they are non-technical. Um and, and as, as, as founders and as people who want to build and do startups, like you know a lot of what you see in the news are usually the happy path stories. A lot of startups fail um you know multitude of reasons right? Like focusing on the wrong problems, you know, maybe sometimes it's, it's founders not getting along well, sometimes it's just not aligning together as a company and sometimes not doing pivots and shifts that's important. But, but uh startups are just extremely challenging to take off, you know. And, and every day it's a different day with a new set of challenges, much more that you can ever think of right. And um so startups are not for everyone. And it's a, it's a very, very long, long journey that you're signing up for. And, and you will need a lot of help and support from the people around you and the team that you're building will, will all also have to do a lot of, they'll have to do a lot with the success of the company as well. But having said that, there is nothing more exciting that I would want to than the thing that I'm doing today right. Like uh the problems that we are trying to solve um and, and every day is a new day. As a startup every day is an exciting Okay. But, but you know if this is something that it will fall like you know startups you know think there's anything better that I would want to do.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Really cool to hear that. Uh we hear that a lot actually and it's, it's exciting to see the ones that make it and even the ones that don't, learnings that come out of it. You know I've heard that even if you don't make it as a startup founder uh probably the worst failure you could have is not apply that to your next startup. You know, you get knocked down, you get back up, and you have a new idea, you try again. Until then. So, that's one thing that we've seen, others that have gone through that have made a couple uh failures come out and really they know exactly how to do it differently. And that's a real value there. You're, you're not going to get from a school. Um, as you look uh into 20- before the second half and going into 2025, anything exciting on the road map that uh you can share?
Jeu George: Yeah. So I think this is also feedback that we are getting from the industry is in today's world everyone wants to use AI into their existing applications. So first of all you know we have this awesome platform Conductor that people are able to leverage and we are seeing some great early evidence right. So there's, there's one focus that we're going to focus on that and, and, and getting every company on the planet to go and use this thing right. Primarily because the TAM is really, really big. Um and the, the other big revolutionary stuff that you want to do as a startup like you know you also don't want to do like you know incremental changes like you know what's going to take you to the next level is this big revolutionary changes that you want to kind of build and, and give to the world. And, and uh in today's world everyone wants to use AI right. So the whole thing about building agents like you know helping companies build this stuff with ease, leveraging the power of Gen AI into their applications. But you know using the foundational models that the great companies provide, but integrating that very, very easily into, into your existing applications or as you're building new applications. That's really one of the big focuses that we have and there's a bunch of exciting things that's going to come out very, very soon so look forward to that.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah really cool. Well J it's uh, it's been great to talk with you and understand a little bit more about not just your origin story but the company that you're building Orkes and where it's going. If anyone wants to find you or find Orkes, where do they go?
Jeu George: Yeah, so go to orkes.io. That's our website. There's several ways on the, you know, listed at the bottom of the, you know, of the, of the page to just how to reach us, but you can connect to me on LinkedIn directly if you want to reach out and, you know, happy to talk more.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Very cool. All right. Well, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story and to all the listeners for listening. Means a lot to me that you spent your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now but can't wait to catch up with you all 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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