Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast From the Ground Up where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their successes, challenges and lessons learned. We hope you 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 Adam, the co-founder and CEO of Stateful. Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam Christian: Thanks for having me, stoked to be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. So a little bit about Adam. Adam has been working with developer tools and open source since 2006, including Sauce Labs and Buoyant/Linkerd. He loves being a dad, noodling on guitar, traveling and building game-changing technology companies like Stateful. Adam, you've done a lot. We've done some research on you. Um but before we really dive into your company and, and what you're all about, give us a little background of where your life started. Where are you from originally?
Adam Christian: Yeah, absolutely. Um I grew up in a, a cool little town called Bellingham, Washington, not far from the Canadian border north of Seattle. And uh went to school across the state in the wheat fields and in the Palouse at Washington State. And uh studied computer science and business there, and then made my way to San Francisco about two days after graduation to start this whole crazy adventure.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Well, it's a crazy adventure for a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of individuals that are in computer science. What kind of a kid were you growing up that eventually led you to have interest in computer science?
Adam Christian: Yeah. Um so let's see. My uh my, my grandfather started a company called Marshall Industries. Um and uh pretty early on I think he donated a computer um to the household. And I, and I uh you know, I grew up with you know smart, well-educated people who are, were pretty up to, up on things with technology. And so I was around that kind of stuff. And I was a pretty curious guy, a little bit mischievous. And um building computers, doing sports, um uh my stepfather wound up installing multiple versions of software to try to keep me out of things on the computers in the house. And uh some point in high school I wound up in a, in a newspaper for uh building a, a web portal for helping people like coordinate finding lost and found pets, uh and that wound up as part of my college application, uh which is fun. So technology's always been a theme.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's great, I didn't know that. Um you know, transparently we did a little research just in general on you and try to get a little background aside from what you see online on LinkedIn and other, other areas. Um so I'm just going to kind of walk through uh some of this information. It may be accurate, maybe not. Um but it says Adam Christian is a prominent figure in software engineering, known for his significant contributions at Sauce Labs where he served as vice president of engineering for five years. Um while there he... oh actually, prior to his tenure at Sauce Labs, was the co-creator of Windmill test framework and worked on the Mozmill testing tool with Mozilla. For those that don't know about Sauce Labs, they're best known for their expertise in providing cloud-based automated testing for mobile and web applications. Looks like a lot of your development tooling experience at least early on was somewhat around testing and applications. Was that something that you were passionate about, got led into? What was your, what was your um experience like and interest diving into that area of technology?
Adam Christian: Yeah, um you know, I like I said, I, I left college and I, I went uh, drove to San Francisco and parked my car across the street on Howard Street from um the Open Source Applications Foundation, which was building um something called Chandler, which was supposed to be sort of an open-source replacement for Microsoft Outlook. And um I was working with a good friend named Michael Rogers, and the team that we were on was actually QA engineering. Um and they just you know sort of realized that there was a big hole in building that application and that um you know we started writing Python scripts and uh and automating that thing. And that turned into a framework. He went to work at Mozilla, we took a lot of ideas for that and morphed into something that could be used with testing Firefox extensions. Um and that was an open source project. And so basically the first sort of, I don't know, a significant thing that I was focused on caring about in my time in the Bay Area was, was test, test automation. So uh in between there I went to work for a company called Slide doing test automation stuff for them, and then some web development. And uh then the Sauce Labs experience uh sort of became a possibility. I met the CEO John Dunham there who's become an incredible mentor for me, but that really felt like where I should be you know at that time and, and, and it goes on from there. It's definitely a theme.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You know, it's interesting, testing uh if you really think about it is really important to anything that we use today. Whether it's a TV or radio or the internet or computer, whatever application you're using. If it's not tested, it doesn't function. If it doesn't function, you don't use it, and ultimately you're unhappy user. So I understand testing. We, we actually provided a testing service you know 10 years ago and uh it was fascinating how much of a demand there was then and still is today. Whether it's browsers or mobile or you know crypto or all sorts of different areas that it's really important to make sure that things function. So a huge value there. And sounds like you are very much in the middle of a lot of innovation, which is, which is great. I want to switch gears a little bit to your company today. Um before we do that, is Stateful your first startup? Kind of walk us through the evolution of building up until where you're at now.
Adam Christian: Yeah. Uh so um you know, the, the Sauce Labs experience was a significant part of my career. That was both you know from a technology perspective as we were you know figuring out how to bring all these ideas to, to mobile stuff and, and open source um communities. Um I, I spent a little time in Germany uh in between there and worked at a company called Babbel for a while. And wound up uh after Germany working at Buoyant, um uh which was a really cool company. They make a service mesh software for Kubernetes called Linkerd. And uh uh you know Kubernetes has seen a, a ton of growth and, and community excitement. Um and during that time uh a good friend of mine, my co-founder now, Sebastian Tieke, um he was dabbling in crypto and dabbling other developer tooling things. And I was in Germany and he was here. And he wound up working at uh Smallstep which uh is my friend Mike's startup.
Um and you know as we were helping these other founders build these companies, we were learning all kinds of really cool stuff about, you know, "at this scale how do you build things, how do you test it, how do you go after product-market fit, what does marketing look like, where does community building fit into this?" And we just got itchier and itchier. You know, the more progress we helped these other uh startups make, the more we felt like, "you know, we have a lot of passion that came out of the Sauce Labs experience and, and maybe it's time for us to do our own thing." And, and there were a lot of different possibilities around what that could be. Um and that's quite a journey. I'm happy to talk about a little or a lot of that.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I mean, there's a lot in there. Um what, what was it that you finally said, "Hey, um you know, I think I've found the right co-founders, I think this is the right time," and what was the idea that really sparked you diving in and saying, "I think we can get this funded, I think we can build something pretty special here"? Walk us through that because it's really, before you start a company, you usually have the idea, then you have a thesis, you think you can raise capital. You go into the market, you start building, it might be totally different once you get down the road a little bit. What was that like for you, that journey?
Adam Christian: Yeah. So you know, uh I think after all this time doing you know developer tooling related stuff um you know, both Sebastian and I had wound up in a place where we were managing... managing and building teams. We were doing some you know product management stuff. We were doing a lot of one-on-ones. And even though like home for us was developer tooling, we kind of got to a place where we're like "you know, we're having a lot of the same discussions every week with the same people," right? Like, "you know, how are you feeling about your productivity? Um you know, do, do you feel like you're, you're spending a lot of focus time or you're really distracted? Does our meeting cadence work? You know, are, are you doing the right stuff with your uh you know, time management and etc., etc.?" And um we both had this problem, not a problem, but we had this experience that we thought could potentially be turned into a, into a company.
At the same time as managers, we were continuing to do some coding on the side. So we built something called Marquee, um which is like it, it's sort of a home screen for VS Code, the, the code editor, and that has this incredible ecosystem and plugin architecture. And so for fun, you know, we were building that together and exploring that ecosystem which has blown up, was blowing up and continues [to] blow up. And we put that in the marketplace and, and a lot of people started to install it and give us feedback and get frustrated with it. And um you know, we wound up getting you know tens of thousands of installs of that, which sort of said to us like "there's a really interesting distribution mechanism here." Uh and so when we brought those two things together, we were like, "okay, how do we help people be better, happier developers and how can we use this VS Code Marketplace distribution mechanism to do that?"
And we came up with the, this concept of "Strava for... like for runners, but for software developers." Where VS Code is your Apple Watch, right? And you get a dashboard and cool metrics and notifications and a feed and collaboration and yada yada. Um and, and we thought, "let's go, let's go try to do this." Um and I, I, I wasn't sure if I was quite ready to do it, so we put together a, a slide deck, a pretend slide deck. Like, "if we were going to do this, what would it look like?" Um and we put the deck together and uh, and we both got pretty excited about that conceptually. And so I sent it to a friend, uh Fred uh, who's at Fly Ventures in Berlin, um which is an awesome firm. And uh, and I, and I basically wasn't trying to pitch him, I said like, "What do you think about this? High- level, how bad is this?" you know basically. Um, and he said "I, I you know it's bad, but I think you, you guys gotta, gotta go for it. Uh you've got a lot of context and um now is a great time to do this and, and we're interested in participating." So uh "iterate a little more and do a pitch," and we did that and they, they decided to go for it. So that was the moment where we jumped.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Right. And I think that's a pretty uniquely awesome way for that to go. I mean, one pitch and you iterate a little and you get funding. That's not the normal. I mean, we've talked to a lot of founders that, you know, they've got a list of 2,000 companies they're going to pitch to. They you know get to 200 before they finally decide "am I really... do I really have what it takes to do this?" And you know eventually they get there, but it's uh, it's a full-time job, you know, until you really get off the ground. So sounds like you had something really good. What was the thesis about what you were building that you started with, and where is it at today?
Adam Christian: Yeah. Um, thesis was um about flow, about this uh state of being when you're in deep work. In that it's really hard for your brain to be doing or paying attention to anything else while you're in deep work. Um and so that, that sort of it [is at] odds with this concept of being, of what you're doing and how much time you're spending and you know being able to manage that well. Um and so we, we went and built that. And uh I thought it was really cool. But that's because I, I have really limited time to write code, and have for many years. So to be able to say like "during these points of the day, that's when I'm able to be the most productive" was really useful for me.
But it also turns out that um you know a lot of, a lot of developers kind of, they feel like building software is more of an art form and they don't want limitations. They almost don't want metrics about that, that deep flow state. Uh with sort of undercurrents of Big Brother and stuff involved. And so we got people to, to use it and excited about it, but it didn't really get us to a place where we thought "okay, this is where we're going to build, we're going to build you know a venture-backed business on top of this." So we um, we had to pivot.
And um we kind of sat down as a team and we thought about you know building this whole big application with data pipelines and VS Code integrations and yada yada yada, time series data uh and, and all that. And we thought "you know, what, what was hard about that? Right? Like when new people came onto the team, like what was it that kept them from being able to contribute?" Um and the concept sort of was, when you sit down at a repo um, these days it's sort of a veneer over a whole bunch of configuration and then a whole bunch of cloud infrastructure. And so we did some exploring and, and I think our backgrounds and developer tools led us back to this place where we have sort of more depth and intuition. Um and, and we started working on a, a project which is a command line parser for markdown called um Readme, which is now the Runme project. It's an open source project that we're investing a lot in and really cool things are happening there.
And so that's... we kind of wound up back in this place where we still want to help developers and operators be happier and more productive, but we're doing it more through a tool that you know offers them the ability to get to a place where they can do work uh more repeatably and more effectively. And so that's where we are today is uh the open source project's out there and we're building on that. We're also building um software as a service connected to it. That's my, my ramble.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Yeah, no, that's great. I love that ramble. When you talk about open source and you talk about projects, a lot of people think it's free work that's out there for others to collaborate and work, to see what problems you can solve as a community together. What's the business model around bringing products into open source and then taking it and turning a profit? Or you know turning it into something that you know people will pay for. Um your investors certainly want to know you know they're giving you money, what's going to be the return.
Adam Christian: Yeah. So you know, I think the, the way that um the experience that we had at Sauce Labs and, and also uh Linkerd at Buoyant is that you know you build an, a really actually open source licensed project um, which you know, Runme is. It's, it's a couple, it's three repos I think that are you know open source. And, and the reason you do that is because um, first of all, trust, right? You want developers to be able to see what the thing actually does. Um the, the second thing is that like, it's you know, in building developer tooling, it's really important that you have a community of people who um not only are bought in as, as consumers of this but can also give you feedback. And, and a great way of getting feedback is this community: GitHub issues, people joining a Discord. Um you know, even if people aren't putting up PRs and doing the work, which obviously is the dream, um you, you want them to be included in this project and the thing that it's trying to solve.
And the problem that Runme is trying to solve is basically um taking what used to be just flat markdown files uh right with text in them and commands, uh and turning them into sort of uh run books with a configurable uh user experience, right. And, and you know considerably more powerful because you can do pretty cool integrated things with it. And so we've been working hard on trying to build that community. And so to go back to your, your question was like "where do you make money" is um, that project always has to be something people can use for free and trust and contribute to. But there's a lot of things that a standalone piece of software can't solve, right? So then you introduce a cloud service and you probably even give that away, right? But um and, and we [have] done that. And it's you know, it's, it's optional um and it's integrated into the notebooks, but it allows you to you know, push commands and their output into the cloud to debug around them, to do sharing with Slack and um a lot more cool stuff that we're working on there, like analytics.
And the goal is that you know, once we add that value on a day-to-day basis in somebody's development workflow, and then you add value-added uh um features in the cloud that gets teams and other people involved. That then when they go try to take that at work, to work at a big company, there's requirements in order for them to be able to use that thing that they're now dependent on, that they really enjoy using, um due to the nature of an enterprise environment, right? So you know auditing and security and different authentication things and compliance and all these things come into play. And you offer that stuff, and that's what costs money. Because it's, it's maybe it's hard, it's the least fun to build um but also is the, the blocker from, from allowing those people to use that tool that they need to get their job done. And it's the company paying for it probably. So we, we don't know exactly what product, enterprise product we're pitching. We're really hoping that the community helps us get there.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. So you're in the middle [of] building and um evolving as, as we speak really. Um that's, that's really great. You know, 30,000 foot level for the non-technical listeners: what's the problem it solves for a developer? If I'm an investor listening and I hear the value proposition, what... simplify it for the non-technical folks of, of what you're building that's going to help developers that are using your, your, your, your tool, your, your technology.
Adam Christian: Yeah, for sure. So um, I guess maybe this is uh doesn't make it any clearer, but I'm going to say it as a starting point from a really, really high level. Um so developers have an IDE right? An integrated development environment. And sort of what we see is an opportunity for an integrated environment for operating repos, for operators. And the person that we're sort of focusing on... well not sort of focusing on, we are focusing on, but it's a little bit blurry what, what that persona is. Is you're, your person who's leading the kind of operational effort with your, your codebase, right? And so we call it the, you know, we call them the ops lead. Sometimes they can be an SRE.
But the, the most important point is, um this is a person who's responsible for um making it so that the code that you can clone onto your computer uh that interfaces with all this cloud software and environment variables and things... this is the person you go to that helps you get to a place where you can do work, right. They're the operator. And um and there's a lot more of this all the time in our repos because everything is backed by so much cloud structure. And this person right now writes a lot of scripts, uh they try to make experiences reasonably good by prompting people for things and having notes on where to go get those things. And um you know, when, when folks run those scripts they copy paste the output to them on Slack. And you know, we, we see it's a really great opportunity to have these super rich run books um that you open up, you get this notebook experience, you click through the thing and it's been tailored so that it does the right things and asks you for the right stuff at the right time. And kind of augments this experience so that um the lead ops person only has to get involved when something really is, is wrong. And uh, and we are making great progress in that direction. And we're doing it based on you know sort of standard technologies that everybody uses, but just making them more powerful.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Thanks for clearing that up. Um as you built this and you're continuing to build it, you've got um... if I'm... correct me wrong here... is it you and two other co-founders? Just one other co-founder?
Adam Christian: It's uh Sebastian.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Okay. So two of you. Um and, and did you work together? How did you guys meet?
Adam Christian: Yeah. He um, he was here uh from Germany working at a company based in Munich. And uh we met at a, at a meetup, a technical meetup uh in, in Oakland. And I, I hired him. And he spent a number of years working with me at Sauce Labs, and then uh when I left he, he led the team for a while there. And through that whole time we came, became good friends and uh kept that, that connection going.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. It's always so critical. Your partner in marriage or life or business is everything. You know, if it doesn't work, I mean I heard the stat that 50% or maybe higher of startups that don't make it, it's because the partnerships don't make it. And um so that's such a critical... we just had another podcast right before this um founder out of Harvard and they had done some research uh about at Harvard Business School that I think 87% of startups... these numbers I think are accurate... 87% that fail um had only one founder. Not, so it was like solopreneurs fail significantly more than to have at least one other person you're building with. So it's great that you've got a co-founder and, and you can collaborate and solve problems together, which is you know half the battle. Um...
Adam Christian: I think can't stress that enough to be honest with you, how, how important it is to have a partner in crime. Um because it's, it's like such a... yeah, it's an emotional challenge, it's such a marathon. And one of the hardest parts is trying to manage your own psyche, right? And having someone that, that uh when they're up you you know... and you trade off being up and down, try to level each other out. I think there's a whole podcast episode that I could easily do on the marathon of startup's founder relationships for sure.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, well on that note, what, what tooling or strategy do you use as a mental tool that helps you stay positive when you're going through challenging times at, in your journey of a startup? What's, what works for you?
Adam Christian: Yeah, I mean this has been um, this has been a huge challenge for me, I think since the beginning of this for, three years in, right? And um, um I'd say the first year I was really, really bad at um sort of keeping even keel. You know, it's um somebody says something good about it, you get really up. And somebody says something bad about it, you get really down. And um you know, you do a release and nobody likes it, and you wind up in Hacker News and you get you know... and, and so for me it's been a lot about managing my own like uh state of happiness and mental health. And um, and so the more that I've understood like the things that trigger me and how my anxiety works and all that kind of stuff, um the better I've been able to be at this. And I, and I feel like people don't talk about that enough. Um and so uh I find that spending time in the woods, being away from screens is really important I feel. That um playing with my kids or playing on guitar or um you know going skiing or like take-, getting away from screens and taking my mind off the problem at hand actually is really helpful in me to understand uh where we're at and what I need, if that makes sense.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it does. You know, 80% of business is psychological. You know, and uh I don't think that gets enough attention. You know, the ups and the downs can be devastating depending on what side you're on that day, that week, that year. Uh and so yeah, there's a lot that, that's going on right now. A lot of research and a lot of therapeutic um ways to keep your mind right as you're going through the journey. Uh we all know as founders that you know it's an up and down event and journey, and so uh I think having that mindset of being able to find your own hacker solution, stay focused and stay positive is, is key. Because it's not just how you think also, it's, you know, your energy kind of influences your team. They can feel what you're feeling when you're feeling good and bad, and sometimes that can rub off in a, in a positive or negative way. So I think it's really important. Um as you look at your company today, you've raised 5.7 million. How big is the team size and are you local or international?
Adam Christian: Uh there's two of us in Berkeley. Uh my co-founder was here and he's in North Carolina but will be back at the end of the year so you know they'll be three of us here. Um and then we have uh folks in Colombia, Peru and uh Nigeria. So the international...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love that. International, right!
Adam Christian: And, and a handful of contractors we're also distri-, all over. So in total I think there's about you know 13 people involved on a regular basis.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Um as you look at managing teams remotely, what's worked for you in terms of keeping the team high performing and focused?
Adam Christian: Yeah, that's such a, such a challenge. I think um you know one thing we found is uh after the Sauce Labs days, we had some really great folks that we knew in Europe that we liked working with. And um one of the things is basically that we sort of have taken the stance at this point that having folks that many time zones away is just not good for startups, uh at least for us it's not. So trying to keep people in um what, you know, basically US-compatible time zones is really important. Um we, you know we as founders, we're you know spread pretty thin. And so you know you have to do all the things but also project management. And that means that a lot of time you're probably not doing as good a job as you can communicating with the team what you're trying to get done, right? And keeping track of that. So um we did wind up bringing a product management uh person in, and, and that's you know pretty recent. But that's showing a lot of really great um uh, that's I would say it's smoothing out a lot of the interactions and starting us to, helping us to build momentum in sort of a more consistent way. I feel like without that you do these big sprints where everybody like dedicates you know all this effort to like uh push, right. But that, but after that, keeping up that cadence becomes really hard right. So it's very spurty. So having this sort of consistent cadence I think is really important. And um yeah. And then you know, when, when you have a bad week, just try, start, try to stay positive right. Because this is a marathon and it's you know emotionally pretty challenging.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's good. Thanks for sharing that. Um what's the opportunity or the problem that you, that keeps you up at night in the stage you're at as a company um currently?
Adam Christian: Yeah, um you know I think honestly it, it's always about um getting pro-, product-market fit, right. Uh that's you know in an early stage startup that's what you, you lose sleep over. You, you build cool features, you build functionality, you try to use the right technology, you try to um you know appeal to your, your target audience. Um and it's shocking sometimes things that you imagine are going to be hugely useful and, and uh garner excitement aren't. And other things that you do seem silly and simple and, and it's the thing that makes people really love what you're building. And so you know, for us it's had to be all about baby steps and, and building stuff and talking and integrating feedback and, and, and things like that. But getting to a place where not just uh an open-source tool that solves a problem being um you know adopted. Uh it's what cloud or sort of SaaS functionality can you build that's going to feel like a n- natural value add, that's not going to alienate anybody, but can also lead you to a business? And yeah I, I think that will probably continue for a very long time even after we have revenue.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, gotcha. You know, as you look at um the community of founders and you interact with other founders, um what's one word of advice you got from another founder that you have applied, or you wish you knew earlier that you could share with others?
Adam Christian: It's really been insightful advice from other founders, and this is a funny topic because I've received and ignored so much incredibly good advice. Um all of the stuff around um "build things in small increments," um "spend more of your time having meetings uh with potential users," uh "ask for introductions," um you know, "you're, you're going to get you know really stressed out and, and you're going to have to focus on like taking breaks to keep your motivation up." I've received a lot of great feedback from folks, but I think the point is is that until you're in there, in that experience, it's really hard to like really understand it. And uh you know, three years into a startup with, with all those ups and downs, all of a sudden it's like "Yeah, okay, of course having people in the t- same time zone is really great for productivity. Of course you need to really focus on avoiding burnout by like building in breaks and getting away and not completely obsessing 24/7 about what you're doing, right?" All that stuff, when you tell it to somebody who's not in it, was like, "Yeah of course, you know uh cry me a river right? Like you get to live your dream, but it's so stressful, right." But when you're in it, you know it really is true. So I don't have a single piece, but it's all right, you just don't get it until it's, it's happening to you.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, makes sense. Um yeah, very cool. Um I'm going to ask you uh a few questions here. This is just, you know, I guess three questions. Some call it a you know, lightning round. I just, these are just three questions that I'm interested to know your thoughts on. Where do you go to think big or to brainstorm?
Adam Christian: Where do I go to think big? I think I don't... I uh it's not really for me about going anywhere. I think it's more about um if I'm going to do a construction project or I'm going to dig a hole and plant something or I'm going to do some sort of physical manual labor, is, is the place that allows me to digest the stuff that's behind the, you know, the, the cerebral thinking. Um and, and every time I wind up doing a hike or, or I'm doing a house project that involves carrying heavy stuff around, um I usually end that by having some really amazing thought processes that can come back and contribute to the state of the company. So I have to force that stuff to happen.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Uh what activity helps best, helps you best solve problems?
Adam Christian: Yeah, I think you know I think everybody's answer is probably the shower or sitting in the hot tub. Those, those are both really good. I think, I think the other thing though is um group discussions where a lot of perspectives that I wouldn't have myself are like able to be freely contributed, right? Like uh people don't need to preface with "maybe this is irrelevant, but here's this interesting way of thinking." I've just always found those sort of open forums to be really help- um. And the other thing is you know, if Sebastian and I can get away from our screens um and have a little fun but also talk about the company in a very unstructured way, really cool stuff comes out of that. Right? And I think in this remote world it's hard to have those interactions in the way that we used to. I think what the primary thing I miss about office is, to be honest.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Um you kind of already answered one of the questions um which was you know, "how do you stay mentally positive during challenging times?" And um I think you did a pretty good job of kind of going through that. It's such an important aspect you know, in good and bad times um to kind of psychologically just be able to keep yourself energized and, and, and, and, and positive. Um so uh you're, you're, you're, you're, to me you, you're doing all the right things from others we've talked to as well. I think everyone's kind of has their own way of going about it, there's no right, one right or wrong way. But just find a way um and uh yeah you hope for the best as you keep...
Adam Christian: I would add one thing to maybe what I said. I'm not sure, I can't remember exactly, but um there was kind of a mantra uh from the CEO of Sauce Labs, which was "avoid attachment to outcome." And uh I think if you combine uh that concept of "anything could happen, there's nothing you could do about it, all you can do is focus on doing great stuff today," and, and you combine that with "we're so lucky to be able to get to do what we do" (you know you've got people to give you money to build cool things and be creative, how amazing is that?), if you add those two things together and are able to get yourself to stay in the moment, um you know, that's... it's, it's only positive, right? I mean, in, in a lot of ways right, it's going to be okay right? Like if the company doesn't survive, like I won't... that's not great. But you're learning so much in every step of what you're doing and, and we're so lucky to be able to do it that those things will yield positive things I believe in one way or another ultimately.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well said. Uh many people become entrepreneurs for different reasons. What's the main reason you wanted to become an entrepreneur?
Adam Christian: Hm. Hm. It's an interesting question. Um so I was always really happy um being VP of Engineering or an Engineering Manager because I really liked helping other folks sort of be the best version of themselves in their job, right? And offering them that sort of moral support uh and encouragement but also coaching. Um and I feel like being a founder is like the ultimate version of that, right. If, if, if you see brilliance in people and you want to do something about it, you can go do something about it, right. You can, you can remove blockers from those people, you can change the circumstance, you can encourage them in ways. You can you know, if you want to... and, and there's something that is in their way from being great, you can pay for that thing a lot of the time too, you know, to remove the blocker, to help them improve. And I think uh that's really satisfying for me. I, I also think that in a way, if you have somebody feeding you what the company should look like and what the product should be, um it limits the kind of thought that you can have. And so one of the cool things is, is this, uh if you start from "we could blow this whole thing up and completely reorganize and change everything about this company" (we're not going to probably, but we could)... that kind of thought process allows you to reel it back into a place where there are some things that you want to do that may not be the norm, but you think could have a powerful impact on your company. And so there's this amount of freedom and learning and experimentation that is involved in being a founder that I haven't seen in any other place, in any other way, and I love that.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, the key word that I took from that is freedom. And it seems to be in line with a lot of reasons why people become entrepreneurs and founders, is you know, you have the autonomy to, to make the decision, good or bad, but you also have the freedom to decide when to do things and, and how to do them. And so there's um, there's a lot of that that's maybe not the first thing you think about, but a really good byproduct of, of going out and innovating and being on the hook when it doesn't work, but also being on the hook when it does work. So uh that's great. As you look to 2024, what's on the road map um for Stateful?
Adam Christian: Yeah, so we're you know we're, we're building like crazy. Um uh Runme.dev uh you know is, is in a state where it's very useful and it's very cool, but there's a lot of functionality we want to be, we want to add based on sort of the patterns that we're seeing in our, in our user base. Um we, we want to build out um more around debugging and collaboration uh for those run books that you have. We want to, we want to uh... we've done some experimentation but we want to do more into helping folks discover uh the, the run books and, and sort of keep the tribal knowledge that an organization has. Encourage that to also be part of the codebase instead of off in a wiki and things, and, and, and, and give developers a way to have their documentation stay, stay part of this living codebase and relevant through testing, testing documentation.
Um we also think there's a cool opportunity around analytics, right. You have a codebase full of documentation or many codebases full of these, these markdown files that turn into run books. Um you know, how many of them are being used, and by who? And, and what is the quality of them? And what are things that, that uh could be done to make them more powerful and useful? And so this, this, this... we want to sort of fill out the rest of this road map from discovery to quality to analytics uh on, on top of just the you know raw utility of building tools. And I'd love to see us you know come out of next year with a ton of um clarity around a product that you know u- adds to the, the open source project in a way that companies and, and teams inside of companies are, are finding it incredibly valuable. And so we're going to be laser focused on you know "what are you using it for and how do we make it better for your specific use case if you're this lead ops person?" Um and generally speaking just getting the word out because we think it's a movement um that's important to the you know developer, operator community.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love that it's a movement. If people want to be part of the movement, if they want to find you or find your company, Stateful, or the product Runme.dev, where do they go?
Adam Christian: Yeah, so Stateful uh is the company, it's the entity, right, that, that we work for that backs u- Runme. But most of our effort has gone into Runme.dev and the open source repos on GitHub. So if you go to runme.dev you can join us on Discord, um you can join our mailing list, you can go star and, and check out the code. Um and we would love to have your participation. Even if it's just saying you know, "this, this feature annoyed me" or "if you added these two things I would, I would you know show it off to my company." Uh we want to hear everything.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. And just lastly, what are the platforms you're most on that other developers can find you on or just in general can communicate?
Adam Christian: Yeah, I mean you, you get direct access to us if you join the, the Runme Discord channel. Uh we're active on there. We're trying to put in all of our updates um when we release new stuff or fix issues or, or you know whatever it is to try to get feedback. So if you want to talk to us about something there, um jump on. Um otherwise you know, log a ticket on uh GitHub on one of the repos and we'll be on top of it.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Adam, to you for joining. Appreciate your time. Uh it's been a lot of fun learning about your journey and look forward to catching up with you in the future to see where things go and the progress you make. Um and to all the listeners for listening, appreciate you joining. It means the world to me. My name is Jake Aaron Villarreal, uh I'm the host of the podcast. I look forward to catching 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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