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**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, I think you're 100% correct. We attended KubeCon, spoke at KubeCon every year for the last several years, and we have our own conference, GrafanaCon, every year, that we kind of alternated between cities. We had one in New York, we had one in Amsterdam, we had one in Los Angeles... And this year we ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:07:59.22\] Great name. |
**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, I have to hat-tip Scott Fingerhut on that one... But we had the venue booked in Amsterdam, we had our speaker schedule all set, we had our \[unintelligible 01:08:12.07\] all set, and last-minute we totally changed it to an online conference. |
The good news is instead of having 500 people show up in Amsterdam, we had 20,000 register for a virtual conference, so that's a plus... But that's really the only plus. It just wasn't the same. And the team did a really good job trying to transition it to be a virtual conference... But man, it just -- yeah, I totally ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Can we dig into that then? That's a good contrast to consider, is the amount of people that will come in-person versus the amount of people that will at least share their information whether they'll show up or not in a virtual setting. So it was like 2,000 in-person, contrast against 20,000 virtuall... |
**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, 500 in-person was what we were planning for Amsterdam. It was supposed to be in May. So just a couple months ago I was like "It's gonna be in Amsterdam, one of my favorite cities in the world..." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You were looking forward to that travel... |
**Raj Dutt:** Totally. For all the right reasons, of course, Adam. But yeah, so it was gonna be 500 people, and we managed to get about 20,000 registrations; not even close to that showed for any of the live streams. A lot of people watched it on-demand, which was expected. We had some good Q&A on Slack, but that's not... |
We spread out our conference over two weeks. So instead of doing three days, which was jam-packed, like 8-10 hours a day, we've spread it out over two weeks, and did basically a couple of hours a day. It was a learning experience for us, for sure. We'd never really done a virtual conference like that. We actually switc... |
And yeah, we're gonna do it again in October. I was hoping that we'd have a physical conference in October, but that's not gonna happen. So - definitely a learning experience for the team. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I know when I saw All Things Open send an email -- they sent an email saying "We're now virtual, and it's an October conference." Back in May, April even, I was like "I wanna hope that it'll be in-person", but I even called it then. All Things Open - I called it in April - will be virtual. And they ... |
**Raj Dutt:** I think KubeCon just decided a few weeks ago, or something like that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I think even if from a government standpoint and a CDC standpoint or a whomever standpoint it's calling these shots that's advising local governments on what to do and how to handle it - even then, it's just a big risk, I suppose. A lot of work goes into an in-person conference. Not that non-i... |
A lot easier, a lot more conferences are happening because the hurdles of a conference being in-person are down. It's a lot easier to throw a virtual conference than it is a real, face-to-face conference. So many more moving parts; talk about capital-intensive - a lot of capital required. Or at least a lot of commitmen... |
**Raj Dutt:** \[01:11:55.04\] Sure. I mean, the flipside though - I think it's a lot harder to get sponsors for a virtual conference, you know? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that's the truth. That's the thing I'm trying to camp out at. I'm trying to get your wisdom on like "Was it worth it?" essentially. And maybe you can or can't say that, I don't know, but... |
**Raj Dutt:** Well, was it worth it - I mean, we didn't really have a choice. So was it worth it to do it rather than not have a conference at all? Definitely. Was it worth it in the sense that it was better than an in-person conference? I don't think so. |
The only net-positive, I think, of the virtual conference -- well, it was really twofold. One is we definitely got more registrations than we would have at a physical conference, and then the other point of feedback that we got from a lot of people, kind of tied to the registrations point, is a lot of people said "You ... |
The other thing is we've made it free, which made it much more accessible. So the combination of it being free, and it being virtual kind of really widened the audience a lot. That was a positive. But honestly, if I had a choice - definitely physical. So yeah, was it worth it? It was worth it to try to pull off, which ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. So about ten months ago, series A. |
**Raj Dutt:** Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And we talked about your hires... I don't know - how many did you hire in the last ten months? What did that series A enable you in the last ten months? Where are you going? What is that allowing you to do? |
**Raj Dutt:** It's allowing us to really just go faster. Both in terms of the products that we're developing, the investment in open source, our general hiring plans... I think in the last ten months we've gone from about, I wanna say 80 people, maybe 70 people, to about 160(ish) today. So pretty much doubled the compa... |
We're working on a lot of cool projects. We've kind of transitioned from being more than just about Grafana. We're very involved in the Prometheus project, which obviously isn't our project - it's a CNCF project - so I think we're kind of like the... We're definitely a top contributor to Prometheus, which not a lot of ... |
We've launched Loki, we're working on some cool stuff around tracing, which we'll have some announcements about pretty soon... We're trying to make Grafana Cloud a lot better, we're hiring more people on the go-to-market standpoint, we've got some really long-range bets that we're placing, that won't see anything as fa... |
But we think we've got a really good -- you know, back to the window of opportunity. This space is a really interesting space right now. Everyone is building internet infrastructure, and that internet infrastructure is kind of in transition, and observability is a really interesting problem to solve right now, because ... |
\[01:15:59.13\] And open source is also a really interesting time from a window of opportunity, because we've gone from being like the cheap and cheerful alternative to the rail tools, to now this is where all the truly cutting-edge stuff is actually happening. You look at projects like Prometheus or Grafana - customer... |
So yeah, we're just investing across the board, and we're lucky enough to have some good investors who also believe in what we're doing, and support us, and also get out of the way... Or I should say, in some cases support us by getting out of the way, if that makes sense. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, yeah. |
**Raj Dutt:** And since the series A, we have a board; we have one board member who's not a founder. So our board is the three founders, plus our new board member, Gaurav Gupta from Lightspeed. He's a product guy, he came from Elasticsearch, so he's got a really good perspective... And we'll actually have an announceme... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Hm. Okay... I like that tease there. |
**Raj Dutt:** Yeah. \[laughter\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I won't hold you to that. |
**Raj Dutt:** I'm not sure where this is airing, so I don't know how much I should say. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We have a small backlog, so at least a couple weeks. So if you could say it in the next couple of weeks... It might be three weeks till this is out. |
**Raj Dutt:** Alright... Well, then I'll say it now, and if you air it too early, you're gonna scoop our news; but please don't, at least not for a couple of weeks, or two weeks from now, shall we say. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We can schedule it, there's no problem. |
**Raj Dutt:** Yeah. Basically, we've just raised our series B, so that's a 50-million-dollars series B... So we're really just trying to accelerate that trajectory even more. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Let's talk about that then. So 24 million ten months ago, 50 million - let's just say today, for a lack of better terms. I'm sure it's fuzzy numbers there, but... Recent. Super-recent. |
**Raj Dutt:** Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Why does it make sense to raise more money now? |
**Raj Dutt:** I think two main reasons. One is we're really kind of -- I'd say they're both equal in importance. It's not like ordered. But one reason is we're kind of sitting here, looking at the global macroeconomic situation, and there's a lot of uncertainty and potential clouds on the horizon. So for us, this is a ... |
Going back to not wanting to make the same mistakes - at Voxel, we were always running out of money, struggling to buy more servers, struggling to make payroll... So the reality is we haven't even-- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That sucks. |
**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, that totally sucks. That's totally stressful. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a drain on culture. All the things you've talked about on this show - it sucks for everybody. It's not fun at all. |
**Raj Dutt:** Absolutely. We don't wanna be in that situation again. And the reality is we haven't really had to spend hardly any of our series A. So this just really kind of strengthens our overall position. So that's one reason. |
And the other reason is we really wanna invest even more in our community and our products. We've started to build a really good sales team - you know, what I told you about the last year-and-a-half - and we'll continue to build that out organically. |
\[01:20:05.25\] The second reason and the other main reason behind this new series B is we really wanna make some big bets and start some initiatives around both open source projects, as well as enterprise and cloud products... And a lot of this won't even be announced for another 6-9 months. Basically, we feel that wi... |
Because back to the foundational element of that - it would be easy for us to basically say like "Okay, now we wanna focus on just building commercial software. We do wanna do that, but we also wanna put most of our efforts into open source, because that's the foundation; adoption and the health of the community is the... |
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