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• Customers' ability to connect their services securely and privately between cloud providers |
• Discussion of potential future collaboration between the guest and the host |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, Anurag, I'm glad to have you here... It's been, I would say, such a journey for this conversation, because I've known of you and I've known you for many years, and just have not had you on this show... Now here you are, $155 million deep raised, $80 million recently announced last month... You... |
**Anurag Goel:** Thank you. Yes, it has been a journey, but I'm really happy that we're finally having this conversation. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, I'm such a fan of the boldness it must require, and the courage it must require to take on Goliaths. And not just one, but many. Render is in the shadow, and maybe now above the shadow of the days of Heroku... GCP is obviously still there... We'll talk about your infrastructure. I think yo... |
**Anurag Goel:** Thank you. I really appreciate that. It is not how I think about it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** No? How do you think about it? |
**Anurag Goel:** Well, I think this is a large and important problem. And maybe I can give you some background on how I ended up doing what I do now. So before Render - I won't go too far back, but I joined Stripe as the fifth engineer in 2011, and I left in 2016. And the company did well, and so I had this opportunity... |
I mean, even at Stripe, I had seen our infrastructure team that was managing AWS grow from when I was there one person out of five was fully focused on AWS... That number, that percentage, about 20%, stayed about the same as Stripe continued to grow, at least when I was there, 2011 through 2016... And all these people ... |
\[08:22\] And so the dichotomy between Heroku and AWS when I started Render was Heroku was easy to get started on, but it stopped scaling beyond a certain point. And if you needed more than 14 gigs of RAM, you couldn't have it. You just couldn't. Your applications were restarted every -- and a lot of this is still true... |
And then AWS was AWS. Just even logging in and looking at the dropdown of the 300 plus services... They have a search in their dropdown. Who has a search in a dropdown? AWS does. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** AWS does. Yeah. |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, AWS does. And it comes down to the culture of AWS. They were built around two pizza teams, and two pizza teams do really well when they are focused on a small surface area that can be deep, but then it doesn't -- it's not broad. And they end up building really amazing primitives, that are stable,... |
And it wasn't about taking on AWS, it was about solving the problem that I had seen, and in a way that made sense to me from a product standpoint. And AWS is always going to be very, very, very, very successful. Even when Render is a large public company, AWS will still be making a ton of money. And that's because the ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, it makes sense hearing that backstory why you didn't agree with my thing of taking on Goliath. I still think you're facing some sort of imminent threat, at least not so much today, but in the early days... Because the threat isn't necessarily the technology, it's the ability to attract a devel... |
**Anurag Goel:** \[12:02\] It was great. For the time, for 2005, it was magic. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And you followed in those footsteps to take that magic to a new level, because as you said, there's limitations. And I know many friends who have launched their applications there successfully, smaller shops, smaller applications for a small business, so to speak... But then once you get to a certai... |
**Anurag Goel:** And at the same time, AWS kept launching service after service... Because AWS launched in some ways after Heroku did, right? Because we're talking about Heroku launching in -- I guess that's not entirely true. Heroku was on the scene in 2007, and then they got acquired in 2010. So they've now been part... |
So fundamentally, the way developers build applications changes every few years. And frameworks come and go, databases come and go, the way we do async processing comes and goes... And these days it's all about calling out to ChatGPT or cloud APIs, and then managing all this data that you're feeding to these models, an... |
So I think the cloud - any cloud - should be constantly thinking about the primitives that developers need, that every company ends up building themselves. And when Render started, it wasn't just about Heroku, it was also about Kubernetes... Because every company ends up building a sort of internal Kubernetes cluster t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that an uncommon thing, that amount? Or is that a high number? I know it's big, but is that a peak for you? |
**Anurag Goel:** It's been a steady increase over time... But to give you some sense of where we were in July of 2022, we signed up 5,000 developers. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, yeah. That's some excess. |
**Anurag Goel:** So in January 2025 we're at 110,000, so that's a pretty big ramp up. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Anurag Goel:** \[16:13\] And by the way, all of that is through word of mouth. It's all organic. We don't have a marketing team. I'm looking -- by the way, if you're hearing this and you're a great marketing leader, please come and join Render and build out your team to help grow us faster. We're already growing pret... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. So no marketing. That's great. |
**Anurag Goel:** No marketing. It's all word of mouth. And that's the thing about developers... If you build something that really appeals to them, that really solves the problems that they're running into every day, you get the benefit of developers telling other developers about it. This doesn't happen as much in oth... |
And so we've really focused on the product, really focused on the look and feel, but also the kind of features that people want, especially as they grow. And our whole thing is, look, we're differentiated in two big ways. One, we're not opinionated... Well, obviously, it depends on who you're comparing us to, but we're... |
The second way in which I think we're very different is what I was talking about earlier, which is we allow you to scale on the platform. Both in terms of cost, but more importantly, in terms of the features that you're looking for as you grow. And so we've continued to focus on those features as companies on Render ha... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** One thing you said that I had not actually heard of before is this idea of two pizza teams. Can you explain that? What is a two-pizza team? |
**Anurag Goel:** So this is something that came out of Amazon, where back in the day Bezos or someone at Amazon was like "Look, team sizes should not exceed the number of people who can consume two pizzas." And so if you have a team of 50 people, they'll require way more than two pizzas. That's not great. We want your ... |
\[19:45\] And it's true that you ship your org chart, right? You've heard that one before, I'm sure. And when you think about it that way, that's why AWS isn't able to do an end-to-end application stack well. That's why they falter. And it's not something that they're going to be able to change. But when you think abou... |
So that's how we think about it, and that leads fundamentally to very different products. And I think it's pretty evident in how AWS has tried to build these products at the top level. We've all heard of Elastic Beanstalk, we've all heard of other attempts that AWS has made at building these higher-level products... An... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. You want the entire application to be there, and you want it to use cron jobs, you want it to use managed Postgres... |
**Anurag Goel:** Exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...you want it to use different services to enable that application developer to have the autonomy to deliver their application and not have to go through an intermediary... Which is really the DevOps world, right? You're cutting that out, not so much because you don't like it, but because you're tr... |
One thing you said, actually, in your acquisition -- sorry, not in your acquisition; in your announcement, I should say, of this $80 million funding that you just announced back in January... Congrats, by the way. |
**Anurag Goel:** Thank you. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You said "Most struggle to maintain focus today because they face an impossible choice with cloud infrastructure." And you go on to say "They can either use legacy simplistic cloud platforms that fail to scale and constrain their technical choices, or they could dedicate substantial resources", a.k.... |
**Anurag Goel:** \[24:31\] Chill out? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, chill out. Why not? Why go back to work, and -- I'm sure you work hard, right? You probably work 50, 60 hours a week, or more, I don't know... Why? You don't have to. You didn't have to. |
**Anurag Goel:** So I often ask myself that question... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right? I bet you do. You're like "Gosh, did I really have to do this...?" |
**Anurag Goel:** There are days. There are days when I ask myself that question. But no, I think -- first of all, we were both young when this happened. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Eight years ago? |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, a little over eight years ago. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[unintelligible 00:25:07.24\] |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, but -- so we still had our lives ahead of us. And I think for me, at least, it came down to who I am fundamentally. And I am driven by impact. I get bored when I am not doing stuff. And I'm also just fundamentally somewhat boring. And by that I mean -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** As a person, you mean? |
**Anurag Goel:** As a person, in that I don't have these sort of Renaissance hobbies that I could spend a lot of time on, and I could go sculpt, or be a carpenter... A lot of people try that. That's almost like a meme in the valley, where "Okay, well, now I made this money through this whatever company, and now I'm goi... |
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