Episode 40: Wave of Innovation Breaking Ahead of the Bow of the Ship that is Amazon

You can't make money selling to developers! The bottleneck of getting business requirements and creating business value used to mean waiting for the next waterfall release. That’s not the case anymore in the venture community. There’s programmatic access to infrastructure and DevOps/agile developments that offer super-fast cycle times. Now, the bottleneck is about how fast your developers can move and how much they can get done.

Today, we’re talking to Joseph Ruscio, general partner at Heavybit Industries, which is an accelerator for seed-stage companies and focuses on developer-first products. Tools and products that get you more leverage out of your developers are incredibly valuable.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Measuring maturity of startups’ engineering teams by looking at SaaS list - what products they have in place and how many are using out-of-house vendors
• Customers don’t care how curated or artisan a piece of your stack is, they only care that it works
• Not all claims (scales infinitely or never fails) are true when it comes to products on the market, so people are skeptical
• Heavybit focuses on helping businesses build a bottoms-up, grassroots community around its products and a disciplined inside/direct sales motion
• Build vs. Buy: Whatever people try to do themselves is a costly, pale imitation of something they can buy
• Advice for New Entrepreneurs: Never compete with AWS on hosting compute because it will obliterate and Amazon is great at plumbing, terrible at painting
• AWS’s version of your product won't be as sophisticated; continually work on it to deliver a more seamless product and customer success experience
• Measure downtime/outages in terms of dollars by using monitoring tools that deliver more holistic, integrated, comprehensive experience than CloudWatch
• Starting a company is easier; even if you're the 800-pound gorilla in the category you created, keep innovating and building or Amazon’s coming after you
• Azure, unlike GCP, has ability to meet customers where they are, rather than telling them where they should be
• Understand the problem your customer is trying to solve and understand how far out of their current comfort zone they're willing to go to solve that problem
• Software exists to create business value; it doesn't matter what it's written in or how it's hosted, so some systems will be around for a long time

Links:

• Joseph Ruscio on Twitter
• High Leverage Podcast
• Heavybit Industries
• Heavybit Library
• Serverless Framework
• Pagerduty
• Stripe
• Circle
• Lightstep
• LaunchDarkly
• Treasure Data
• Replicated
• AWS
• Twilio
• Librato
• re:Invent
• MongoDB
• Kubernetes
• Rackspace
• New Relic
• SolarWinds
• CloudWatch
• GCP
• Azure
• SimpleBB
• Datadog
• Digital Ocean