Ep. #1, Feat. Ilya Sukhar & Fred Stevens-Smith

Ted Carstensen: Hi, I'm Ted Carstensen and I'd like to welcome you to Caveat Founder, a regular series featuring founders sharing their experiences building developer-facing companies. Gain insight into what it takes to build a successful developer-facing company by hearing about big wins and epic fails directly from founders themselves. In this inaugural episode, we're proud to host Parse founder Ilya Sukhar and Rainforest co-founder and CEO Fred Stevens-Smith.

Ilya and Fred talk through several of the pricing challenges developer-facing companies encounter. They discuss the type of investors developer-facing companies should look for, and finally they talk about the sometimes difficult transition from founder to CEO.

To learn more about Heavybit, visit Heavybit.com. And while you're there, check out our library. It's home to over 75 talks from other developer company founders and industry leaders.

Fred Stevens-Smith: Hello, I'm Fred. I'm the CEO of Rainforest and I am sitting across from a excited-looking Ilya who is going to introduce himself.

Ilya Sukhar: Hey everyone. My name is Ilya. I started a company called Parse in 2011. The best way to describe it is cloud services for mobile developers.

And we've had quite the journey. We sold the company to Facebook in 2013 and I ran that there for about two years as one of these semi-independent subsidiaries. Now I'm doing some other things at Facebook, but have generally been in this world of developer tools and developer companies for quite some time.

Fred: Awesome. So Ilya, we're hoping that you have some amazing, amazing lessons learned to share with us. And we had a little conversation before we started recording, but I think a bunch of really interesting things that you've gone through that maybe the next company you do, you would already know, you wouldn't make those same mistakes again.

I think we both have some stories we can share for people that would make their lives easier, compress the amount of time it would take them to build a successful developer tools company. So what do you want to talk about? I think pricing is obviously something that lots of people think about. We talked a little bit about that, the basic kind of playbook of the developer tool kind of customer base and how you monetize.

Ilya: Yeah, I think this is a really common thing that comes up with developer tools companies. I mean, first of all, I think people just delay thinking about this stuff. They build their product, they get their friends to use it, it grows.

And for many people, it's in this beta or free mode for quite a long time. And we did this for a solid eight, maybe even ten months, which in some ways was great, but in other ways caused us a lot of pain down the road.

And a lot of this stuff is very counterintuitive. The people with money actually want to see a real price tag on your website before using your stuff.

In a lot of ways, a lot of the things I do differently if I ever did a developer tool startup again, I'm not sure I will, but would be to think about pricing earlier, to set pricing earlier, to charge from day one, and be more deliberate about this playbook that I think we and companies like Heroku kind of stumbled into, but are now, like you said, more of a playbook of having this wide, broad developer base that more or less pays you nothing, but loves you, evangelizes your product, brings you into their larger organizations and then you really end up making the bulk of your money on the top five or ten percent of what ends up looking like more of enterprise sales.

Fred: Right. And it's interesting, right? Because a lot of VCs don't really understand that model. If you say I'm building a software company selling to businesses and so far we don't make any money, but we have tons of developers using us, for a lot of investors that can be scary, right?

And I think that's probably an obstacle for some people, maybe if you don't have access to the top tier Silicon Valley type investors, the YC network, that kind of thing. That could be a real challenge if you're in the Midwest, you're trying to build a developer tools company and the investor's like, well, where's the revenue, guys?

Ilya: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a pretty tricky thing to pull off; not many companies have. And so the amount of investors who really get this and will fund you through that first, you know, two years where there's really not much coming in and there's a bunch of buzz and a bunch of excitement and a bunch of free smaller people using it. Yeah, the amount of investors who really get that I think are actually few in numbers.

Fred: Let's talk a bit about pricing as well because I think the really fascinating thing that we experienced is that charging for your stuff is an uncomfortable thing. And for most of us, our developer companies, our developer tools companies, whatever we want to call them, have basically come out of us being nerds and wanting to fix a problem that we experienced in a past life when we were working as a developer somewhere.

And so we're not the guys who are going out there and doing the lemonade stand. We're not that Richard Branson type story, right? The Mark Cuban type story of always making money everywhere.

We more think of, or in my experience, most of our cohort tends to more think of the product first. And they think of the craft of building the product. And they think of building this beautiful experience that will solve this problem and really money is secondary to that, if even in mind at all.

Have you managed to repress that? Do you now have a different way of seeing kind of charging for things?

Ilya: Certainly. I mean, I think the process and some of the pain of building Parse up and realizing what it takes to make money has absolved me of that background.

I would add to kind of your points is that a lot of the folks who build these kinds of companies were engineers who weren't likely lifelong entrepreneurs and were just writing code for most of their days for years in prior jobs and probably haven't seen huge checks being signed, themselves had never bought very expensive products necessarily, or even if you evangelize something that your company eventually adopted, you probably don't quite know how much your VP of Eng is actually paying for that thing across your team of maybe a hundred developers. And so it's almost this thing that you end up discovering.

Fred: Right. And that's absolutely a great point. And that's something that we've come across time and time again at Rainforest is each time coming out of YC or coming out of the lean startup movement, it's all about listening to your customers and all about iterating on feedback.

But the counterintuitive thing about pricing is no one is going to tell you to increase your prices. Except from other entrepreneurs.

And something that you touched on earlier, which I think is a point worth just drilling down into a little bit, is that actually for some people they want to see a price tag. And the more expensive something becomes, the more they're like, oh, this is an actual solution I could present to my VP. I could present to my CFO and below a certain yearly price tag, it's like, well, these guys must just be fucking around. This is just a joke.

Ilya: Of course. Yeah. I mean, I think we had much better success once we got over the uncomfort of throwing out big numbers that we seemed were ridiculous to be charging for our product.

And that's the way the world works. And I think that a lot of people get it, but developer tools companies fall prey to this difficult transition from this wide, pay as you go, cheap user base to when the serious guys want to buy your product, you better come prepared with a high price tag, with an enterprise contract that has an SLA, that has support, that has all these things that you've never really thought about, you might not value much yourself, but at the end of the day, the buyer on the other end really wants to see.

Fred: Right. And I think that's absolutely key for everybody who's listening to this and maybe going through the same kind of struggle in their own head of like, well, what would I pay for this? Here's the answer. It doesn't fucking matter what you would pay for this because you're not your own customer.

We would struggle to pay for Rainforest because it's such a high price point. But that's good because I don't want us as a customer. We are an annoying customer who has extremely high support demands and wants a ton of product and doesn't have clearly defined processes or management hierarchies, doesn't have a budget assigned for this.

And I think that's the key to understand, is you are not your customer for these large enterprise deals. And I think a point that you touched on which was absolutely worth repeating is that most of us have never been in a purchasing department at a Global 2000 company. And these are the guys who are giving us whatever, n percent of our revenue, the majority of it.

Every single company who reaches that kind of scale, the Herokus, the GitHubs, the Parses of the world, most of their revenue is coming from Fortune 500 companies, right? Or SMB or enterprise. And that is a very rarefied set of people who really understand how those kind of purchasing decisions get made.

And I think that's something that both of us will take to whatever companies we bring next. And I know for sure that the enterprise pricing model for whatever I do next is going to be six figures. I don't know what it's gonna be, but it's gonna be six figures as the minimum entry starting point because otherwise people don't take you seriously.

Ilya: Yeah, and I think some useful things to think about are at the end of the day, you built this company because you had this expertise and the people on the other end are interested in buying your product because they don't have anywhere near the expertise in building this thing.

And so there's this wide gap where you often feel like, or developers in general, there's a sentiment that a lot of people could build this themselves. It's something you put together from a bunch of different open source tools.

And there's just so much value in not having to hire the team, not having to manage the development process, not having to do all these things that is effectively the value of your product being packaged up. And the price tag is actually much higher than anyone expects.

Fred: Exactly. And to put a cap on it, I think that's a really great way to see it. Traditionally we price things, we think about pricing in terms of cost kind of plus and actually that's like a business book thing, but it's really true, you should think about it as value minus. That's the key paradigm shift of going from well, it costs this much and these are our infrastructure costs and this is roughly what we think it's costing us to develop this stuff, to well no, but how valuable is this to like a Fortune 500 company?

Ilya: Oh yeah, and also I've given this advice to some folks who are like, oh, I don't know how to price my products. Open up your own payroll, your ADP or whatever it is you're using. How much are you paying your engineers? Well, these other companies are probably paying their engineers a lot more. And so for them to be able to recreate what you've done, just imagine that.

The last thing I'll say about this pricing stuff is that often what I see when these companies take this broad starting point with a big self-serve product, it can be really interesting to see which use cases or verticals emerge from that.

So in our case, we built Parse and we were generally targeting mobile developers who wanted to focus on the front end, the native code, and not on all the back-end stuff. But we weren't exactly sure for whom that would be most valuable to start.

And it turned out that this whole world of agency-built apps for big brands was a massive market. There are lots of apps being built out there for Ferrari and Home Depot and Sesame Street and all these things that you maybe don't have on your phone, but parents have on their phones, or in general the companies building them ascribe a ton of value to them, have huge budgets, and care a lot about them.

And that turned out to be a perfect market for us. The developers there were evaluated based on their front-end experience, not their back-end stuff.

I guess my larger point is that I thought we were primarily building for people just like us, but it turns out we made money from verticals that were still developers, but fairly far removed. These were people building stuff in agencies in New York. They weren't startups, they really couldn't do it themselves in a lot of ways. And going through that customer discovery process is really interesting.

Fred: Right. And the point to make it even more explicit is that if you hadn't have been charging for that and you hadn't been charging serious money, you wouldn't have even noticed that signal possibly. You would have followed the confirmation bias of like, we're our own customer. Which everyone thinks until you start to realize like, well actually the people who are paying for this, like we've said, aren't necessarily you.

Ilya: Yeah, we had this amazing moment where the Food Network had hired an agency to build their flagship app. They built it on Parse. They looked just like any other sign-up. It was like some unknown email.

And at some point I got an email from the parent conglomerate Scripps, which I didn't really have any clue about, but they own a ton of media properties. And they were like, hey, we're about to launch this app, or maybe they had even launched it at that point.

And they were like, we need an enterprise contract. We have no one to call, we have no SLA. These things getting advertised on national TV and I was like, holy crap. What's an enterprise contract? Yeah, and to some degree I was surprised that they had gone all this way and that there's this world that, they were ready to pay and they were almost astonished that we hadn't asked them to pay already.

Fred: Which is the ideal situation, right?

Ilya: It certainly was ideal, but if I had to do it all over again it sure would have been awesome to figure that out much sooner rather than later. Because we ended up making pretty good money on that whole vertical, but we didn't really realize this until maybe a year in.

Fred: And not to beat this pricing thing to death, but how would you, next time around, how would you figure that out? Do you think there are ways you could compress that? Is it more about being sensitive to the signals, when you start to see patterns emerging? How do you think you could have done that faster?

Ilya: I think so. I think it's not losing the forest for the trees in some sense, where I think we spent a lot of time growing our numbers, which was great. It was great for fundraising. It was great for a lot of things.

But we were growing just like the amount of signups, the amount of active users, just like the amount of developers we had exposure to, and we built a good brand. And there's good in a lot of ways.

But I think if we had gotten earlier to the process of like, who's really using this? Who's actually launching good standalone apps on this? And can we go talk to them as fast as possible? I think we would have discovered these use cases that were really, in the end, the winners.

Fred: Fascinating. And that's funny because that's something that I've been thinking about a lot recently as well. And I think for us, and so to be clear what we're talking about here, we're talking about thinking about and focusing on the right kind of metrics. And I think, specifically engagement in this case.

And I think the interesting thing that we definitely have seen at Rainforest is that we kind of try to, I think driven mostly by fear, actually. Fear of the unknown, fear of failing or whatever it was. I think we tended to focus on those kind of top line metrics, how much money are we making, how many new customers are we adding, what's all of our sales funnel look like, what does our activation funnel look like?

Those kind of things. Without necessarily, like you say, drilling into, okay, who is actually deploying great apps on this? Who is actually creating value?

Because you know in your gut, right, when you look at an account, you're like, oh, this is just some joke thing that someone paid fifty bucks when they forgot and it's 24 months later, right? Versus, okay, this is a real serious user. For whom is it really critical?

And drilling into those numbers, that for us was something that we postponed probably twelve months. We pushed it out twelve months longer than it should have taken us to really drill down into, okay, we should actually pre-churn this customer. We should actually say to this customer, hey, it doesn't look like you're getting a lot of value out of this because you're not running your tests anymore.

Whereas for us it was like, oh damn, don't look at usage, shit. We don't want to necessarily know that fifty percent of our customer base is not really using the product, right? Which is where we basically were a year ago.

And it took a lot of hard conversations and a lot of fear and unhappiness to get to that point now where we're very brutally honest about that with ourselves. If three months in a customer is decreased usage at any point in any seven-day period, they are going to basically churn and they are not going to be a good customer. And really it's better for us and better for the business to say, hey, look, it looks like it's not working out. Here are some other options.

So on the hiring side, I think that's also something that for people like us who create companies like ours, that's something that we tend to really get wrong, I think, in terms of maybe focusing too much on the product without necessarily thinking about the other supporting functions, if we want to call them that, that can really turbocharge your growth or your revenue or your leads or whatever.

Do you have some thoughts on that? If you were doing the whole thing again, would you hire certain roles earlier on? Would you not hire certain roles? Is there kind of fundamental lessons you've learnt there?

Ilya: Yeah, I'm a little bit of two minds here. I can name a lot of instances where I wish we had hired someone much sooner.

I wish we had hired our first operations person much sooner. I wish we had hired our marketing person much sooner. In some ways, I wish we had spun up our sales team much sooner.

On the other hand, I'm a pretty big believer in the founders doing the jobs themselves first. And I think a lot of our success in hiring those roles was that we had done it ourselves.

We felt the pain of carrying a pager, or I learned to be a salesperson for a long time. For a while I was just doing sales and marketing.

And so I think I learned what it takes to be good at the job and I got better at evaluating these candidates and really being able to ramp them up and all this stuff.

So I don't think there's any optimal answer here, but certainly that moment when you stop having to carry a pager and when you're not the first person to pick up the phone when someone calls and when you're not tweaking every little newsletter that you send out yourself. Those are great moments because you can start to really transition into that CEO or real leader where you're always focused on that next thing.

You're focused on what's the most important thing for your company. And in a lot of ways you're doing the things that aren't yet covered by an amazing team member.

Fred: Which is a fascinating point and that is a very hard trade-off to make, right? Because I think on the flip side, one, and I completely agree with you, I also, that's what we've done, and every time we've tried to make the hire before me or my co-founder has really internalized what it takes to be good at that, not great, but just good, or maybe even mediocre.

Ilya: Yeah, you're never gonna be great, but you might as well get to at least mediocre.

Fred: Right. And every time we've tried to make that hire before we've managed to be mediocre ourselves, it hasn't worked out. Sales is the perfect example of that. We tried to hire way ahead of us doing sales basically because of our fundamental discomfort with the idea of selling to people, and of getting money from people.

But I guess the interesting thing, and I think the other thing that I would be very cautious of next time I do a company is spending too much time with the kind of I think the risk on the other side is spending too much time in the kind of busyness lie, where it's like I love doing marketing because I actually get to see my numbers go up every day and I get to go in and I get to do this stuff that is, I really just have a list of to-dos and at the end of the day they're done and all of my time is spent doing actual work.

Whereas being a leader, the other side of the kind of defining strategy for the company, coaching your team, trying to find who are gonna be the next key hires who are really gonna change things, that can feel like not work a lot of times. You can spend a whole day and you can come back and be like, what the hell did I even achieve?

Ilya: Right. You could have spent all day having recruiting coffee meetings. And you're super caffeinated at the end of the day and you're like, well, are any of them gonna join? I don't think so.

Fred: Exactly. And the thing is though, the perverse thing is that that can actually push the company forward more than you spending all day looking obsessively at Google Analytics.

So it's a definitely interesting balance, right, to figure out when that moment is where, okay, I'm getting diminishing returns in this role, I'm starting to become a bottleneck. Now is the time to make that hire.

Do you remember any key moments where you realised you were making that transition from being a founder, right, which is wearing all the hats, doing all of the stuff, essentially as a CEO being the janitor in some ways, doing all the stuff that no one else wants to or can do, to being the kind of leader, the CEO?

Ilya: I don't think it happens all at once. I think when you can land those key hires and then kind of move on to the next area, that sort of starts to feel like true leadership and true strategic thinking.

I think when you can start to plan projects and push through initiatives that would not otherwise get done because things are working. Everything's in place. We make money, customers are coming in.

But when you start to spend your time thinking like, well, we really could do ten times more here. Or if we really changed the way we structured our product offering, we could split out these different use cases and suddenly we can make a bunch of money on, in our case, push notifications.

At first, push notifications for us were just like this one, one of ten features that our whole thing offered. It turns out for us that a huge amount of the people who signed up for Parse really just wanted push notifications because they had other back ends in place, they were more established companies, but this was a thing that tons of companies struggled with and really just wanted to bolt on and get it over with and pay someone else to handle for them.

And one of those moments for me was when I spent a ton of time rearranging our product offerings so that it was very clear that you could only use push and you could only pay us for push. And that was a first-class product for us.

And it required rearranging marketing, rearranging our pricing plan, rearranging all these things that I don't think the team would have done. In the day-to-day it wouldn't have really gone with this massive effort, but it takes the CEO or one of the founders to push it down and make everyone do their part to do this very long kind of big project.

Fred: Absolutely. So I guess the other stuff that I think was interesting that you touched on in the little chat we had before we started recording there was on kind of setting up expectations around support, around responsiveness, around always having the CEO's phone number, whatever it may be, going from this do things that don't scale to no, do things that fucking scale.

And I think that that's something that I've given a lot of advice to people who are maybe 12 months behind us, the founders, is like, I think a lot of people take that maybe too far, to do things that don't scale. And they start to bottleneck their own growth or the company's own success because they are still the main support point of contact or they are still on every single sales call or whatever.

Do you have thoughts around that, around doing things slightly differently next time? Any lessons learned on that?

Ilya: So yeah, this has definitely been a challenge for us. I don't know what the latest numbers are, but at some point we crossed like five hundred thousand developers. We have these massive numbers these days.

And rewind back four years, it's like everyone had my cell phone. We would answer emails just instantly. In a lot of ways, we would build people's apps for them.

If they asked us a question and we were like, this isn't really a question about Parse. They're just struggling to build some other part of their app. We would just say, heck, we're just gonna help them. We're gonna just be helpful because I think we can get this done for them.

That just didn't scale. How to avoid it in another iteration is a tricky question. I think one of the things you have to do, similar to what we just talked about, I think you have to get the CEO and the founder and everyone else out of the critical path by hiring sales, by hiring customer success.

We call them developer advocates. Different people call it different things. For some time, they're probably going to carry the burden of the same expectations even as you scale.

And then you really have to kind of do some projections. I think that's where we really struggled, is growth in some ways sneaks up on you, right? And at some point you're like, oh, we just can't answer all the emails. We can't possibly ever keep up with this stuff.

And I think if we had been more confident about our growth trajectories and thought about it a bit earlier, we would have figured out, hey, we really need to reset expectations here and we need to do a better job communicating with people and setting up a more scalable community in terms of the forums that we have, the incentives for people to help themselves, the types of documentation we have, the just outset expectations we set, that we, sorry, we can't really build your app anymore for you.

I don't know if I have any key advice. I think it's more like, realize it early and then be deliberate about what you really do want to be doing.

And so now we have fairly rigid protocols for support, different tiers of customers get different levels. You can't just call us in the middle of the night unless you're paying us a ton of money.

Getting on that earlier and in some ways being a bit more optimistic about the way the curve is going. Because I think we always thought that the growth wouldn't last and then we'd get ahead of it because we'd be able to finally hire enough people to really provide the same level of service. But if you're really truly growing, you just end up having to segment your customers and doing more to set expectations with the ones that really aren't paying you much money.

Fred: So in the remaining time we've got left, I'd like to go off script a little bit and get a bit philosophical. So something that I've been thinking about a lot recently is kind of strengths and weaknesses in founders. And I think there's basically two schools of thought.

One is make yourself a, you know, action man machine, Paul Graham, Marc Benioff, Mark Two, all of the stuff that you're not good at, you've got to relentlessly focus on it. If you're scared of spiders, go and buy a pet tarantula type thing.

The other side is focus obsessively on your strengths, the strengths of the others in your founding team, and try and hire for the areas that you don't have.

Do you have thoughts about this? Have you experienced some sort of journey on that front, in terms of kind of strengths and weaknesses? What do you think about someone who is maybe a five person team, they've just raised a seed round.

They're really, really uncomfortable with selling. They don't like asking for money. They're the CEO and they're like, well, does this mean I can't ever be a successful company?

Ilya: I think it's interesting. I think there's this kind of middle phase. I think certainly when you're still in like, hey, we just raised a seed and we're five folks, then I think the best companies are the ones where the founder frankly sucks it up and gets good enough at just about everything that's necessary to build a great company, such that again, they can manage those people, identify those people that are truly great at each function, and build an organization around themselves.

Or you do have a great sales leader, you have a great marketing leader, you have a great engineering leader, all of that.

I think if you don't get there, then at least in our types of companies, there's plenty of others, the founder's gonna end up coding all day because that is their strength, right? That's what got them into this in the first place.

That's super tempting. Just sitting and writing more code and building more features. That's super tempting to just do that. But if you never get out of that mode and actually build an organization that can scale everything else that you're doing, you're gonna be stuck.

That said, I think once companies get more mature, I think again the best CEOs end up really being careful with their time and focusing on what really matters.

So I think for example at Facebook, one of the amazing things about Mark is that he's done this really, really well. He's still very, very involved in the product. And in all the places that he's involved in, he's really just really good.

And I think for the things that he cares a little bit less to do, he's found great leaders to do those things and he trusts them and obviously has oversight and is involved, but he spends most of his time doing the things that he really loves to do and is really best in the world at.

Fred: Right. And that's an amazing point that you make about it's really these two modes, right? It's very much the early stage, wear all the hats, get great at all of the stuff that doesn't yet exist in the company, relentlessly fight against the temptation to just bury yourself in the product and be a craftsman and just believe in the total fallacy of one more feature will move us to ten percent month-on-month growth or week-on-week growth or whatever.

And then also very much realizing when you've gone beyond that, you've hired excellent people, give them room to grow, give them true ownership and authority, and then focus in on the stuff that you are actually really naturally talented and excited about because that's really what's going to make the difference for the company.

Ilya: Yeah. And at the end of the day, things like motivating people, managing people, and recruiting people, you're always gonna have to be good at that, or at least getting better at it all the time.

Fred: And I think one kind of little piece of advice I would have for an early stage founder who's thinking, but shit, I don't know anything about marketing or I don't want to do sales or it's scary to me to do customer success and look at spreadsheets all day.

One thing I'd say to them is you already have a huge advantage because you built your product and you came up with the idea. And you had the key insight.

And this is something that I think people who haven't, for example, raised a reasonable amount of money in the past also tend to really discount. When you're sitting across from a VC, right, you have spent the last two, three, four years, whatever years, obsessing over this problem. They've spent the last ten minutes thinking about it.

And so you have this fundamental informational advantage which predisposes you to be great at convincing a VC that you have a great idea, to be great at selling your product, right? To be great at marketing your product. And because someone else who comes in, even if they have this long kind of brilliant history in that particular area, they still are coming fresh to this idea.

Our head of sales always says to me and my co-founder, you guys will always be the best sales engineers in the company. There will never be anyone like you who knows the product like you, who knows the benefits of the product like you, the shortcomings.

And so I think that's something that should give people listening to this a bit of confidence, and actually, it's not such a daunting task to be able to sell your own product well. You just have to really just face the scary things.

And I think that's exactly what it comes down to, is can the founder suck it up to the extent that they can really just grind through the painful things, not get obsessively stuck in the corner focusing on the craft of products.

Ilya: Yeah, I mean this is the Andreessen Horowitz way of thinking, is like the technical founder who built the product. That's the hardest thing, is to build a great product. And the best CEOs come out of the ones who then make that transition into everything else.

There's certainly some companies that go in the reverse direction where there's a non-technical sales-focused leader who starts, but imagine their quandary, right? How do I build a good product? Or how do I evaluate and lead an engineering team? And how do I keep the innovation going?

And so in a lot of ways, another encouraging thing is you're actually in a great position. Building things is very, very hard. Everything else is also hard, but you at least have a product that you believe in, that you care about. Taking that out to the world is really the next step.

Fred: A bonus question on philosophy, and then I think unless you have anything else you want to add, we're probably done here. Something that a number of investors that I really respect and other people who are in a position to have seen many success stories within the world of startups that we live in, right, have said is basically the people who were ultimately successful never really doubted that they were gonna succeed. Is that something that you've seen?

I put it another way, something that they say in the introductory meeting to Y Combinator, used to be at least, great founders are formidable. And if you don't feel formidable today, you can actually in some ways fake it until you make it. You can try and become formidable.

Have you seen that yourself? Have you gone through any kind of journey on that?

Ilya: Yeah, totally. I think if you hear the inside story of the world's greatest startups, everyone at some point doubts if they can make it to that next hump.

I think one of the most interesting things is that as soon as you conquer one challenge, there's just another huge daunting challenge coming up right in front of you.

And I think that this process of kind of making it over the first few and getting comfortable with that, you really do have to have some kind of innate level of formidability, but then it builds on itself. And I think you end up in this state where yeah, you don't know if you're gonna really pull off the next thing, but you know that you've pulled off a bunch of other stuff and you've really grown and done interesting things.

So why not try it? Why not go out there? And so yeah, it's a really interesting journey for people. I think there is some base level of formidability that I think is required to do something crazy like build a tiny startup and get it going.

But every amazing founder that I've ever met can mention a hundred or a thousand times where they were like, oh my God, I can't sleep at night. I don't know if we're gonna make it to next month or to next week. And they just push through it. And then they get more and more confident. They push through and they push through and they push through it.

Fred: Awesome. Well, thank you very much to Heavybit for hosting this. Ilya, if people want to harass you online with questions about what we've talked about, are there any channels?

Ilya: Sure. I guess Twitter.

Fred: Who are you on Twitter?

Ilya: Ilyasu. I-L-Y-A-S-U.

Fred: Ilyasu on Twitter. I will be tweeting you inappropriate GIFs. Or GIFs, I should say.

I am at fredsters underscore S on Twitter. That was the handle that I chose when I was twelve years old, first experiencing Hotmail. And back then there was a lot of giggling about Hotmail because we thought it was some sort of naughty email service. And I remember it took us three hours to find a valid US zip code when I signed up for it. So we've come a long way.

Ilya: Yeah, indeed.

Fred: Thank you, Ilya.

Ilya: Thank you for having me.

Ted: Thanks for listening to this episode of Caveat Founder, brought to you by Heavybit. Head over to Heavybit.com to sign up to be notified when the next episode is available.

And while you're there, check out our library. It's home to over 75 talks from other developer company founders and industry leaders.