text stringlengths 0 1.46k |
|---|
**Guy Podjarny:** We had some initial market traction, but not really; no revenue to speak of. And then we got acquired by Akamai. And if I was to distill a little bit of learnings here... There's a whole bunch; a lot of things I would have done the same, or differently, and I guess I got the chance to do some of them ... |
We started marketing before we had the product. So we had the product that made the websites faster, and we had a video on the page explaining that we make websites faster, and how we move things around inside the app, frontend optimization; we coined the term frontend optimization. And what we did is we did a video th... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Guy Podjarny:** We had an automated system that would run it through our -- very kind of duct-taped together, but... The core tech was good, but the surrounding was kind of still duct-taped together. It came out with a video that showed a before and after, which was very emotive, a very emotional response, to say "Ye... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right... \[laughs\] Who picks slower, right? |
**Guy Podjarny:** And sent it to people. And that was probably 3-4 months before they could actually start implementing these things on their own sites... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... |
**Guy Podjarny:** And it got us some leadgen. That was good, it got good traction... The other thing we did is we did -- mobile performance was hot at the time; it still is, but at the time you couldn't really measure your mobile performance site, so we outsourced a little agent that would run on mobile apps... I actua... |
\[24:07\] Anyways, we measured -- we opened a service called MobiTest that would measure your website and give you a bunch of visuals and data on a real mobile device. And we did an Android versus iPhone bake-off, and Android came out ahead. The thing made top tech news for like three days. It was a whole experience ar... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Getting upset... \[laughs\] |
**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, we had like three days of -- somewhere between shame and glory, depending on your perspective... But it definitely kind of helped get us on the map. So I think that understanding your market presence early was definitely something we took into Snyk, even if we did things that are very different. |
And then subsequently is an understanding of the importance of biz dev and partnerships. So we built Blaze to accelerate websites, but we weren't delivering the websites. We partnered with the CDNs and the ADCs (application delivery controllers, so load balancers and the like), and we really designed the system to be i... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, yeah. |
**Guy Podjarny:** So we partnered, we worked well with them, it helped locally to get better integrations and get some customers, but it really helped when it came time to the acquisition, because we had a lot of interested parties, because we filled a good hole at the time in the somewhat commoditizing world of perfor... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you ever hear the term "This is a product, not a company"? Is that kind of how you felt about Blaze, like it's a product, not a company? Is that what you mean by that? |
**Guy Podjarny:** I don't know if that's the right term... Maybe. Maybe it's a product, not a company. It was just limited in scope. We had thoughts about how can we transform websites for a variety of other reasons, like accessibility, maybe even visually and such, but we didn't have true conviction. We could have gon... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Which means you would have to build that kind of company... |
**Guy Podjarny:** So either we could compete -- precisely. And there are examples - there were CDNs... There was a CDN called Instart Logic, which to my perception - and again, they might portray it differently - they basically were founded around the same time as Blaze. They built a CDN that had frontend optimization ... |
I ramble a bit, but I think that's my history. The acquisition itself - I think there was a lot to love there, we really picked. We had the advantage of being able to pick the right home for the team, where we thought both the team and the product should live... And the team is thriving; the vast majority of the team i... |
\[28:18\] I took the CTO role, so my role very quickly was broader than just the acquisition that we've made... And I think we -- you know, not all by intent; sometimes we got lucky, but I think that we struck the right balance of that integration versus independence in that acquisition. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You mentioned you moved into the CTO role, which gives you a chance to sort of look wider at Akamai, and potentially even be a good lookout for the team that you're sort of launching within, I suppose... It seems like a proper term there. What was your stint after that? Were you happily at Akamai fo... |
**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, so I stayed at Akamai for 3,5 years. It was a great journey. I really learned a ton, whether it's building business cases inside the company... There are amazing people at Akamai, so I definitely learned a lot from people and built a network. I think it's important when you get acquired to inves... |
To me, at this point, and some time after the Akamai acquisition, I started doing angel investing... And again, I have kind of a good phrasing from a friend, which is that when you're a founder, you learn in serial, and when you're an investor, you learn in parallel. You see different companies, you see how they work, ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And that didn't happen? |
**Guy Podjarny:** ...that didn't happen. When I decided to -- it was probably about a six-month process from the point in time I decided to resign and when I was fully out, because I also had a long notice period... And when I decided to resign, I said I'm gonna take a year off, somewhere sort of mid-way I sort of said... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, so a week... If. Maybe six days. |
**Guy Podjarny:** \[laughs\] And I was mostly off that summer. I got the itch, and I got stuck on the idea. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's pause there... What's the point of taking off then? How do you -- when you take off... Like, you did it before Blaze, right? You were on paternity leave, which is similar to taking off, but you were using that as a position of figuring out your next direction. When you do these kinds of exerci... |
**Guy Podjarny:** It's a really good question. I think my primary goal was not to jump into the first thing that you see. There are a lot of great ideas, and there are a lot of great people that you can partner with, and when you're in one mindset - for instance, you're an executive in a large company - then it's very ... |
\[32:08\] So to me, when I thought about the break, part of it was "Yeah, can I rest on my laurels a bit? Can I recharge?" But in practice, I think for me that six-month period -- I had about a four-month notice period. So from the time it was announced to the team, to the time I was out, I probably had about 3-4 month... |
I don't believe so much in regretting the time that you've invested. Both in the company and in my personal life I believe in big vision, small steps. You want to aim somewhere, and that somewhere needs to be worthy of accomplishing; it doesn't have to be a life ambition, it can be temporary, but you want to have some ... |
And what you don't want to do is to do steps that you really regret. So you either win or you learn. You make a step, and if it's learning something that you didn't care to learn, then could you have avoided doing that in the first place? So I take that stance with family life as well; while I work hard, I don't sacrif... |
For instance, now it's Snyk, and since the beginning of Snyk, with all the massive intensity that Snyk has, I have a block in my calendar from 6:30 to 9 PM, and I make sure that I'm home to have dinner with my kids. So I have breakfast and dinner with my kids. |
I do have some travel which I can't avoid, and that sometimes gets a bit heavy, but I try to do it. And look, oftentimes at 9 PM I'm back at the computer and I'm having calls with the West Coast from London... But that's okay for me. That's a balance that I strike. I've always been good at taking time off; even when I'... |
So I work really hard, but I have lines that I try to be very diligent about, to not cross. I don't want to be in a place in which I've, just for a few years, sacrificed family for -- now, there are balances; these things are ranges, they're not black and white... But anyways, all that said, I don't think I needed a lo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** When it comes to family, as you mentioned there, the way I'd see what you're describing for me is I can make a choice for a season. So if I'm gonna -- not so much sacrifice my family, to be so brash like that, but if I'm gonna trade off some of the time, I have to give myself a time period. I could ... |
The point is just I do it as a season, knowing the beginning and the end. And if I'm gonna do it, it's gonna be for a very purposeful reason, and not just for the sake of sacrificing my life, my wife, my family for something that in the end, for your life -- later on your life, once Snyk is done, or this is all through... |
**Guy Podjarny:** \[35:50\] Yup. I think that's a great way to put it, to talk about a season. And I also think you have to think about the aspects that are in your control. When you're in a downturn - you know, like where we are right now, there's a certain amount of investment I need to do when you look at the Corona... |
So there's definitely elements that are outside of your reach, and you have to make sure that you jump off and do what you need to. And I think when you do these presses, then yeah, they have to be time-bound. I guess that's the thing about the startup. A startup is not a short journey; it's not a season. A conference ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, the opposite of a sales acronym, ABC, I like to do ABL - Always Be Learning. Always Be Learning is my key. I can see personally for me, and similarly I can see it for you - my entire journey, everything I've learned... This isn't about my story, but I'll give you a short snippet... I had been ... |
But there's so many things I've done over my career that I can see that have layered on Always Be Learning, to get me to where I'm at today... And then not only get me here, but enable me to be the best me in the position I am to do what I'm doing. And it's just interesting that people don't always see today as their l... |
Sometimes people get caught up in the what-if and the future and they kind of forget to take stock of today and what they've done. It seems like you've done a very wise maneuver through your career to sort of understand your position today, where you're trying to eventually go... I'm sure way back when you didn't maybe... |
**Guy Podjarny:** Yeah, absolutely. You have to use the opportunity you have right now. If you're not growing, you're falling back. Also, it's just about -- you only have so much time on this planet, so you want to take advantage of it. |
**Break:** \[39:08\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, let's talk about sales. When organizations (I guess) decide to become adopted by a large user base, or provide an on-ramp, so to speak, for new users, there's often "Let's give it away for free. We get mass adoption. Everyone will use it because there's no barrier", and you've got two differen... |
**Guy Podjarny:** I'm actually quite passionate about the freemium vs. free trial type model... So what I feel is that people conflate them. Snyk is a freemium model. And what does that mean? I'll extrapolate beyond Snyk for us... Which is we actually serve a use case for users that would never pay us. And we serve tha... |
For us, for instance, we support individual developers who want to secure their applications, as well as small teams, within our freemium tier. And there's no buts, there's no exceptions. We also support open source users. That's maybe even the first profile, or people protecting open source platforms... And those user... |
\[44:00\] Free trial is really about a chance to explore the capabilities of your product. And what people do is they call it freemium because they think of free trial as something that is only limited by time. So they say "Well, no, if it's not a time-limited thing, it's not a trial." But in practice, they don't solve... |
So you find yourself not really solving a problem, and in earnest, you don't actually want people that are five-person teams to use it. What you want is you want the 100-person team or the 1,000-person team to start with five people. But for those people, you never started, you never solved an actual use case, an actua... |
And so they start from that, and they reduce it back down. Or they now say "Okay, I will only allow up to five developers." If I was to do that, and I would say "Well, it's only teams of up to five developers", then basically none of those is probably going to be that significant kind of a customer. If it's organizatio... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.