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But to go back to your question about -- so the money that we're raising, we do need to build more things faster. We're going to do that. So it's not just marketing and sales... Actually, a lot of it is going to go towards hiring more engineers, and hiring people who were not accessible to us just because we were an ea... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:05:58.08\] Yeah, how do you pay attention to serious application? |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, yeah. Honestly, the simplest way to tell is they use their work email, and they're not using a Gmail address. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So not a Gmail account, or not an AOL, or ICQ... Something that's just based on that. |
**Anurag Goel:** I don't think ICQ ever had email, but yes. AOL, yes. Is ICQ still around? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't think so... I fumbled that one. It shouldn't have been ICQ, it should have been like EarthNet, or something like that. |
**Anurag Goel:** Or CenturyLink. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, CenturyLink.net. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Or SBC.net. Your ISP's email. Who in the world ever uses their -- |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Precisely. |
**Anurag Goel:** Exactly. Anyway, slight tangent... So yeah, so not having any of those emails, and having a work email makes sense. But we also have a lot of people using Render for specific things while working at large companies. We have people who have signed up with Meta.com, and we have Alibaba.com, and all these... |
But fundamentally, the people who we're most excited about today are early-stage startups, because Render is a great fit for them. When you're a startup, you want to move fast, and you want reliability, and Render gives you both of those things. |
And then the second sort of serious customer segment is what we call tech-enabled businesses. So tech-enabled businesses are those where the core competency isn't actually software. What they're doing is something like they're building a mortgage CRM, or they're a law firm and they need technology to achieve a specific... |
And then I think we're increasingly seeing what I was talking about earlier, where there are these teams within larger companies that end up using Render because it gives them the same speed of iteration, velocity. We also just launched things like SSO, and SCIM... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Finally, huh? Wow. |
**Anurag Goel:** I know, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Crossed that chasm, finally. |
**Anurag Goel:** \[01:09:56.16\] Yes. So every startup wants to change the world, and we're like "We're going to change the world", and then the customer is like "Do you have SSO?" And everyone ends up building it. So here we are. And we actually built it ourselves. We didn't use one of these companies that everyone en... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah \[unintelligible 01:10:53.04\] Well, you're a serious C company now, you have to have this enterprise level feature set. I mean... Right? You have to. Because now you're going to attract these folks, and it's a no unless it's a yes on those two fronts, or those fronts, you know? |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, exactly. And it makes sense, because you don't want to go in and remove -- a lot of SSO is really about offboarding. People don't want SSO for actually single sign on data. Security departments don't care if you use Google to sign on, although, I mean, they might... But fundamentally, it's about ... |
And then you have SCIM, where you add someone, they automatically get added, and you offboard someone in Okta and they automatically get offboarded from Render, and all of that. And you assign roles and permissions... All of that becomes pretty important as you become a serious company. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you built it versus bought it. How did you -- were you personally involved in that choice? What made you build versus buy? |
**Anurag Goel:** I was personally involved to the extent that when they first said they were going to build it, I was like "Why?" That was my first thought. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay... As you should as a CEO, you're like "Why? Because we can buy this right now..." |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, exactly. And our VP of engineering, Mike, was the same. He was also like "Why? Why are you doing this?" But then, actually, when we dug into it - and I didn't dig into it, but other people did... And part of it is also that we're not one of those B2B SaaS companies where you are signing up a few ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** A tremendous amount of people, yeah. |
**Anurag Goel:** And Render's a kind of thing that will require a lot of SSO seats, so to speak, once you get into an organization. So we wanted to make sure that we weren't spending a ton of money. But also, a lot of these things work well. So if you have like Okta, or Auth0, or Stitch, or WorkOS, they work really wel... |
\[01:13:58.27\] And also, again, we're not going to pay them for 110,000 signups a month, or 120,000 signups a month. And so it just didn't make -- first of all, it didn't make economic sense for us. I'm sure it makes economic sense for most companies, which is why a lot of these companies exist, and are doing well. Bu... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Just curious, really... I don't really care about the number necessarily, I'm just sort of curious of - if you saved, which I imagine you did... Was it dramatic? Was it a dramatic savings to build it yourself, and to have control? Because I imagine the reason why you did it was because, as you said,... |
**Anurag Goel:** I think all of those things are true to varying extents. The biggest thing was we had this existing auth system, and we just didn't see enough value in using these things for just SSO... And it was a big risk for us to switch our auth over to the new provider. |
**Break**: \[01:15:43.03\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess what's next? I mean, you're spinning up marketing, you've crossed or are in the process of crossing the enterprise chasm, which is to offer SOC-2 compliance etc. Letting this series C be the financial boom, let's just say, or fuel to the fire, as well as the legitimacy to attract newer types... |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, I think I expect the next year for me personally -- I'll end up spending more time both externally and internally, sharing vision and strategy, and talking about Render. And like I told you, I'm a reluctant traveler, but I've already got business trips lined up this year. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. Are you coming to Austin at all? |
**Anurag Goel:** Not yet, but I'd love to. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** If you're coming to Austin, I'd love to meet up, man. That's where I'm at. |
**Anurag Goel:** I would love to. I absolutely would love to grab a beer. But yeah, I think business travel is in my future. It's that fortune cookie that I got... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go. Oh, yes. |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, I know. But it's also about, as you hire more people, I think talent density is just so critical. And that is how we built the company so far... And we want to make sure that we we keep talent density high. In fact, if anything, our bar should be higher for the next stage. And so that is going to... |
So I think it's going to be thinking hard about that, it's going to be talking to other founders and CEOs who have gone through these stages. That's always incredibly helpful. And yeah, just getting better at my job as a CEO. So nothing changes, right? It's all the same. This is just a milestone, and my goal is to cont... |
Continuing to stay close to the customers, continuing to stay close to all the new people we hire... Because I don't want to become this sort of "Oh, he's the CEO, and you'd never get to talk to him." That's not who I am. I still interview every person we make an offer to. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right? At what point? Early or late, usually? |
**Anurag Goel:** I interview them when we're very close to making an offer, because otherwise I would not get anything done. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Anurag Goel:** \[01:21:54.09\] Yeah. And I don't know how long I will continue -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that your own personal role? Where did that -- |
**Anurag Goel:** Yes, it is. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
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