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**Anurag Goel:** Yeah. I love doing it because I want to -- it's very personal to me who we bring onto this journey... So I want to talk to them before we bring them on. And I don't go and tell the team to not hire them. There has been maybe a couple of times when I have done that, but I rarely do it. Almost never. But... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, for sure. I want to dig in a little bit, because I'm looking at your -- at least what I can tell your org chart based on your About page... I don't see a COO, I don't see a CTO; those two particular roles in particular. I do see VPs of people, product, finance, engineering, and maybe a VP of e... |
**Anurag Goel:** That's a great question. So I don't know if we need either of those roles right now. I'm not acting COO, for what it's worth. And I am also not necessarily playing CTO. And I'll tell you -- the reasons are different in each case. |
For the COO role, I think typically what ends up happening is marketing, finance, sales... Everything that is not EPD - engineering, product and design - they end up reporting to a COO. And I am very comfortable, and would actually prefer to have the leaders of these functions report directly to me, because I want to b... |
I also think -- it might not always be true, but I also think that we can attract more senior executives that way, because they're reporting directly to the CEO, and they're part of the day to day executive decision-making. And I haven't felt the need for it. So yes, I'm hiring a marketing leader right now, but then th... |
On the CTO side, I think it does come down to the kind of engineers you hire, and then obviously your VP of engineering, of course... But we have generally hired engineers who have very strong points of view on what technology can do, and what else is out there in the market, and where technology is going, and it's a t... |
\[01:26:24.16\] Our VP of product was previously an engineer at Heroku back in the day, a very long time ago. And then she was at Slack, and she was at Figma, and then she was at Webflow, and then she joined Render. And so she's -- but then our VP of engineering was previously the VP of product engineering at Discord. ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. |
**Anurag Goel:** So it's just a thing. And so that's how I think about both of those roles. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. I imagine as you keep reinventing -- like you had said, you want to maintain... You're calibrating, to use your words back at you. You're calibrating your involvement in particulars; in particular innovations, products etc. and how you hire, and whatnot. I think that's so cool that you meet ... |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah. And people have lots of choices. Great people have lots of choices. And when you want to hire great people, it's more them doing you a favor than anything else. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah. So it just becomes really important for me to know that I can talk to them directly, and that we can have a one-on-one conversation that feels genuine, natural, and honest. And again, we want to hire people who are low ego, no drama, want to do great work, are ambitious, but not like blindly so, ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Tell them to listen to this podcast. They'll learn, right? |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, exactly. Exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For the next little bit, this is your introduction to who we are, is listen to this podcast. |
**Anurag Goel:** Do you want me to talk about -- sorry. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean, I was joking, but I think it's true, because... |
**Anurag Goel:** Oh, you're joking. Okay. Yeah, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:29:54.20\] No, no, no. I was joking but being serious at the same time. I don't know how you describe that... Actually, I'll give you the frame of reference, because a while back I had interviewed Sid Sijbrandij, who's famous for founding GitLab. And he and his team loved the way I conducted th... |
So I think clarity would be just simply like "Wow, Render's focus is on app developers. Not DevOps, not this particular discipline... It's application developers, people who are building and shipping the actual application. And if it doesn't serve them, is it truly something we should be doing?" So I think that's why I... |
**Anurag Goel:** Obviously, I've really enjoyed the conversation so far, and I think you're at the top of your game. You know what you're doing, so I'm not surprised. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I try. It's just talking... It's just talking. |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah. I love -- I was listening to the chat you had with Kurt at Fly, and you're like "Dude, how are you?" |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, man. How's life? I almost pulled that part out. |
**Anurag Goel:** No, I thought it was great. I'm glad that you left it in. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, because it was -- to give some context to those who might be catching up (we'll link it up in the show notes, of course), I asked Kurt how his life is, and he recently went through a divorce that sort of changed his entire life. And he was happy to share that. And so in the moment, I was... |
**Anurag Goel:** No, I think Kubernetes is great for a lot of reasons. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yes, but that's because he's a DevOps engineer. He's not an application developer. Application developers don't really care that much about orchestration. They care about applications in production. So yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate that. |
**Anurag Goel:** And I think that's interesting that you bring up Kubernetes, because another way to think about Render is often Kubernetes, the good parts. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, because you get the things that -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:34:09.03\] The small book versus the big book. |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, exactly. The stuff that you actually want from Kubernetes, without ever having to learn Kubernetes... But I think Kubernetes actually is a great piece of technology. Obviously, massive ecosystems, so much value that has been created... Also, just unbearable complexity. And there's all these vendo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And it will. I mean, that's just -- I mean, it's entropy. That's how it works for them. I mean, it makes sense to do so. |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, it makes sense for a certain market. But actually, going back to your interview with Kurt, I'm glad that you left it in, and also that Kurt was open to talking about it... Because I like Kurt. Yeah, Kurt and I have chatted in the past. I like him. I think he's a great human being. And I think, ag... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, knowing what I know about both of you as individuals, and then also Render and Fly, I would say you're very similar, but also very, very different. Very, very different. When I play with Render versus Fly -- you're solving similar problems for the same developer type, application developer... |
But we really try to keep an open mind, because similar to your ethos, our ethos is that we want to share what could be and should be given attention to to developers across the globe. So it's not like "Oh, this exists and nothing else exists, so use only that." It's more like "If you're a developer, whatever your chal... |
**Anurag Goel:** Oh, I know the founder... Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Fantastic. I mean, I always -- I come to that conversation sometimes, I'm like "Do you know what Zulip is? Because if you don't, let me tell you. But if not, now you know." But in our Zulip, we're talking to individuals. We're talking to developers. And we have friends and loyal fans and listeners o... |
**Anurag Goel:** \[01:37:59.00\] That's awesome. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm pretty excited to have you on the show, I'm pretty excited about this new raise for you... I'm excited for this legitimacy., that I don't think you necessarily needed... But obviously, a new label, series C, is going to change some people's minds, so to speak. |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah. I remember back in -- I think it was 2020... We emailed some folks who were on Heroku. And we were like "Hey, you should maybe consider Render. And one of them was like "Dude, I'm not going to switch over to this startup." |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They were honest with you. Yeah. |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, he was pretty honest with me, which I appreciated. And I think it's true. I wouldn't do it if I were in their position. I'd be like "I don't know if Render is going to be around. They're just like a series A company", or whatever. And back then we also didn't have all the features that we do... A... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Coming up. |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah, coming up. I don't know if -- here's the other thing about figuring out what to build and what not to build. The way we think about product is that a no is temporary, and a yes is forever. And you can keep saying no to stuff, but as soon as you launch something, now you're stuck with it. As soon ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Good point, yeah. |
**Anurag Goel:** Yeah. You have to support it, you have to figure out how to deal with pricing, you have to make sure it works with the rest of your stack, your API surface area, your infrastructure as code, your whatever, your SDKs... You just have to keep doing that work over and over again as soon as you build somet... |
Our managed Postgres has come a long way... So this was another thing that we were pretty far behind Heroku on, and now we're actually better than them, and they're switching over to Aurora, saying "Oh, we're not going to build our own Postgres anymore." It's just like "Alright... Well, that's your call." |
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