What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Telecom/5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Innovative Software Solutions: Bridging Local and Cloud Development Challenges
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
But that's not all. Discover how Coder's solutions, rooted in their open-source initiative Code Server, cater to teams of all sizes—from small groups to large enterprises—without monetizing individual developers. Imagine having the tools to support AI and Gen AI development right at your fingertips, all while maintaining governance. Rob also touches on the unexpected advantage of significant cost savings through on-demand cloud infrastructure, eliminating the need for peak capacity costs. Whether you're a developer or part of a DevOps team, this episode promises to deliver actionable strategies to streamline your development process and keep your team in flow.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everyone, fascinating company and guest today from Coder dedicated to keeping developers in flow. Rob, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm doing very well, Evan. How are you?
Speaker 1:I'm well, Thanks for joining. Really intrigued by your mission and vision. Really interesting work. Maybe talk about that. A little bit about your background and bio really interesting work.
Speaker 2:Maybe talk about that a little bit about your background and bio. Yeah, sure, so, rob Whiteley. I'm the CEO here at Coder. I joined a little over a year ago. Coder was founded by two young gentlemen. Happy to get into the backstory if it's interesting. But a little bit about me is I've been in tech for about 25 years, really excited at the opportunity we have here at Coder. I joined from a similar, an open source project called Nginx that got acquired by F5. And to me the parallels between the two are very strong and so it's great to have another crack at the startup.
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic to have another crack at the startup. Oh, fantastic. And you know, talk about the background here the evolution of remote development and developers.
Speaker 2:What's the focus there? Enabling these remote work environments for devs, yeah, so maybe I will tell the founder story real quick because it speaks directly to that.
Speaker 2:So we are a almost comically common startup story, and what I mean by that is we were started by two, actually three, young gentlemen. They were about 15 years old when they were met online playing Minecraft yes, minecraft, the video game and they had built up quite a nice little side business monetizing plugins and hosting servers for Minecraft. And there was Kyle in Northern Canada, there was Amar in Alabama and there was John Andrew in Austin, texas, and they were remote and they were opining how difficult it was to collaborate with the three of them kind of scattered about North America, and that idea kind of stuck with them. So they all went off to separate colleges but decided you know what, let's drop out and make sure, make a go of this. And so at 18, they started Coder with the mission to try to simplify remote development. So that was always their guiding philosophy, with interesting roots in video games.
Speaker 1:I love it. Well, it's such a great story, so fun. And you mentioned those challenges. What were they specifically? Teams collaborating remotely, developing software. What were the challenges they saw? And I guess we'll talk about solutions too at some point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the way I would best describe it, and I'll start non-technical, and I can always get technical if desired. But if you're a software developer, a coder, you ship your code to the cloud, you build that code in the cloud, you run that code in the cloud, but you still write it on a local editor, on a local laptop, and there's benefits to that. You have a very high performance machine right in front of you that doesn't require constant connectivity. But the downside is all that source code, all that intellectual property, sits on the machine. You can develop it on a machine that does not resemble the environment it's going to run in, so you could have lots of it worked fine.
Speaker 2:For me problems where it doesn't, when it goes to compile. So there's sort of a fraught challenge between this disconnect of develop local but run in the cloud, and so really the vision was let's try to shift the development environment to the cloud, let's try to run it natively right next to the very environments where it's ultimately going to compile and run, and that way I get rid of all of the compatibility, the toil, the cognitive load of a developer having to constantly maintain their environment, because now it's all just an easy environment managed by a central team in the cloud. So in its broadest sense that's the problem we solved kind of shifting development from local laptops to more of a cloud-native environment.
Speaker 1:Wow, such an ongoing topic and many development teams rely on so many different tools and platforms, rely on so many different tools and platforms and everyone has their favorite tech stack and setup. How do you integrate with existing tools and workflows and sort of integrate that experience?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question, because I think therein lies how Coder maybe distinguishes from its peers a little bit. So, first of all, the emerging category is called cloud development environments CDEs. I think it's sort of a play on IDEs or integrated development environments, but it's this concept that the development environment can be spun up in the cloud with all of its associated infrastructure, and there's really kind of two ways that companies are going about solving this problem. One is I host that environment in my cloud and your developers connect to my cloud, and so I've abstracted all the complexity, but it's very, very opinionated, meaning you're going to get whatever I serve you, and those tend to be more SaaS-based solutions. And then the view that we took that was quite novel in 2019 when we released it was actually we're going to be self-hosted software, so it's sort of a bring your own cloud right.
Speaker 2:You deploy the software, but as a result, we can support any back end, any ide, any git repository or developer stack, and so the the way we do it and this is where I'll kind of come down, one click in detail is we have sort of two abstractions in the product Southbound, if you will, out of the product, we have something called a template, it's our configuration language and it's based on Terraform, and so that allows us to support all that heterogeneity on the back end, all these different environments environments, because there is a Terraform provider for everything.
Speaker 2:We can support that snowflakiness of an individual customer without having to hard code that into the product. That gives that DevOps team, that platform team, flexibility and then northbound out of the product to the developer. We expose something called a workspace and that's kind of your virtual desktop, your virtual development environment, and that's where we give the developer autonomy, where they can select their tools, their libraries, their Git repositories to lock that down if you don't want to give that autonomy. But really we're trying to balance, giving developers choice and freedoms, because that is the trend in the industry is to stop telling no to developers and just let them develop, and so that second abstraction allows them to do that. And because it's essentially decoupled from the underlying machine, you don't have to worry about compatibility issues you don't have to worry about compatibility issues.
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic. And how do you think about scale and performance? You know we see teams go from three or four to 300 pretty quickly in today's world with these applications going globally. What does that mean for performance?
Speaker 2:and the impact, especially for these large distributed teams, offshore, onshore, et cetera. Yeah, and I think therein lies the power of the cloud, the near kind of infinite compute resource you can throw at a problem. But it's really interesting. This is a developer mind shift, because the way we've always treated developers in the past is they typically have their own spec of desktop or laptop. It's usually a power user and they're always getting the latest Mac, the latest M4, whatever it is. It's always more and more and more power because you're doing pretty computationally intense tasks. But that pales in comparison to elastically scaling in the cloud. Right, I can spin up more cores, more GPUs, more memory, more storage than any single machine could possibly realistically hold, and so you actually get a step function increase in power when you move to the cloud.
Speaker 2:And so, to kind of translate this, one of our customers is Palantir. They reduced the amount of time it takes for a developer to run a build, which is basically them compiling the code and then being able to see if it performs as expected, by 78%. So, even though they have the world's most powerful laptops, once they shifted to the cloud they took something that used to take 45 minutes and kind of brought it down to the sub couple minutes range. And what that means is before, if I was a developer and I had to go run a 45 minute task, I'd get up and go get coffee or check my email. I would get out of flow, so to speak, like I would just stop that task. When you can get it down to that seconds and minutes, it becomes an iterative loop where I never leave that workflow, I never leave that work state.
Speaker 1:And so it's a much more productive environment for a developer to be in. Fantastic, and you know you talk about things like productivity and satisfaction of the developer experience. Those are kind of intangible. How do you think about measuring those?
Speaker 2:you know, practically speaking, yeah, so great question. So a lot of our customers measure productivity and I was really shocked when I learned this. So one of the large investment banks here in the US measured and found out that their developers only spend 5% of their time actually writing code. They employ 7,500 developers and that's not to say 95% of the time is wasted. They're doing coding, adjacent things like writing documentation, squashing bugs, reviewing pure code but that 5% is far below a theoretical 20,. 25% of their time should be spent writing code, and so what was interesting about their use of Coder is that 5% was quantitatively derived. They actually because everything's in the cloud and everything could be instrumented and logged they can definitively tell when a developer is using coding, their IDE, how long they're in it, what kind of results they're getting. They can correlate those results with things they're seeing like number of bugs, build times, check-ins, and so it kind of takes productivity and demystifies it a little bit.
Speaker 2:Now we're not trying to be a developer productivity measuring tool. It's more just a byproduct. What we're trying to do is just equip the team with insight so that you can constantly say, okay, how can I remove a point of friction? So that developer is a little bit more productive. So that's to answer your question. That's sort of the productivity.
Speaker 2:But what's been really fascinating for me is I kind of say, people buy us for productivity but love us for cost savings. And what I mean by that is no, no one goes to a CDE because they're trying to save money. But in today's environment, especially when the economy is a little uncertain, you need to have an ROI story and to have that solely based on soft dollars, labor savings, procurement. People don't love that. And so what we have found is that we can actually, because we're in the cloud and because we're ephemeral, spun up and spun down on demand, we can be really smart about how much central compute, power, memory, really expensive, so that you're no longer kind of building for peak capacity. You're just as soon as the developer logs in and determines what task they're doing, we can match that to the infrastructure needed for that task and then, when they don't need that task anymore, we give them a lighter weight uh machine or image or container, whatever it is, and so it provides uh signals, usually about 90%. So another customer, skydio drone manufacturer they reduced their.
Speaker 2:AWS bill. Oh yeah, it's amazing what they do if you've ever seen how they can circle a bridge, but I digress. So they got about a 90% cloud cost savings, just to kind of give you an idea of this. We're not talking small magnitude.
Speaker 1:I bet. So when it comes to onboarding and adoption, what does that look like from a two-woman startup to a thousand-person enterprise? What are the considerations there and what's involved?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm going to betray our gaming roots a little bit here, because the term our founders use is single-player and multiplayer. So what they mean by that is we're an open source project at heart. It's called Code Server and there is a corresponding solution called Coder, which is kind of more of the superset, where it includes all this cloud capabilities. We refer to those as the single player mode, meaning they're meant for individuals or small teams. They're completely free and open. We don't try to monetize individual developers. In fact, one of the things we did was make a decision early on. We don't try to monetize the developer at all. The developer experience should always be open and free.
Speaker 2:We are looking at how does the backend infrastructure team, the platform team, what are their needs, and that's what we charge for. So for the small startups, for the individual, as long as you're comfortable, kind of spinning up your own software, you can, beyond just the cost of running the infrastructure, freely create everything we just talked about, of running the infrastructure freely create everything we just talked about. As you scale into the hundreds or even thousands of developers, you end up needing high availability, auditing, logging, access controls, all the things an enterprise would need. That's what we charge for. It's just a license key upgrade. It's the same product, it's just we unlock some of the capabilities. So it's kind of an inline upgrade, if you will. And so the vast majority of our customers start an open source and then we only find out about them when they contact us and say okay, we'd like to try some of these other features now.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So, given the AI and Gen AI hype cycle we're in, how has that impacted your vision and roadmap? What ideas big ideas might be on the horizon that you're looking at?
Speaker 2:Yeah, ooh, this is going to get. I don't know how much time we have. I hope you have an hour. I'll break it down into a couple different categories. So the most so there's coder for Gen AI and coder with Gen AI. I'll explain what I mean by those two.
Speaker 2:A lot of our customers are developers who are building AI into their own applications, and so what they need is to train large language models. They need access to either some of the tooling that's out there Some are beginning to host their own, and so what that typically means is you need access to large data sets, gpus and really sophisticated software. That all tends to be centrally hosted in the cloud centrally hosted in the cloud. So when I look at a customer, the first team to adopt us and do this kind of behavioral shift from laptop to cloud is almost always the AI ML team. They're data scientists, they're developers who are building AI into their enterprise application. So that's interesting. We've been doing that for years, but I don't think it's the heart of what people think about when they say gen AI. And so the second area where we tend to get so that's the four we're helping them build. For that the width is okay.
Speaker 2:I'm just a developer. I like VS code or I like jet brains and whatever my favorite IDE is. But I want access to one of these coding assistants like Copilot or Gemini, because we own the environment and we establish it. We can become a provisioning engine to make sure that not only is Gen AI provisioned in that development environment, but it's the right version, it's patched to the right level. So we actually act as almost a governance layer and I'll be clear we do not want to get into the Gen AI race, meaning we will not supply that coding because, a our roots are being unopinionated, but B I really think for us to allow developers choice.
Speaker 2:Our main value prop is you may want multiple Gen AI tools and you may want them attached to different projects at different times. Well, in our world, every environment is just a tab on your browser so you can be tabbing back and forth different environments, different AI tools, different projects. It's all about just quick context shifting and kind of keeping that developer in flow. So for us, the value to the enterprise is we give you some governance controls and the value to the developer is you don't have to think about Gen AI, it's just there. The opposite is, if you want to use, like, say, copilot and VS Code, you got to download the plugin, you got to update it, you got to make sure it's patched. You probably are going to get bugged by your desktop team because they're going to want to know how you're using it, and so we just remove all that friction.
Speaker 1:Wonderful, what a great approach. And finally, you're in growth mode, to say the least. Just raised a Series B2. I assume that's going to invest in the product and the team, probably not. Wall Street Journal ads and billboards. Right, but what are your? What are your plans for this year in terms of growth?
Speaker 2:Yeah, my dream is to have a billboard on 101 outside of San Francisco, which is where I'm based. I think all the cool startups get one. But you're right, that's not our current state. So we just raised thirty five million. It was an extension of our B round, so it brings our B to a total of $65. We've raised $80 to date just to round that out.
Speaker 2:But really we're at a point where our primary customer base are large enterprise, usually heavily regulated entities. Enterprise usually heavily regulated entities, ones where compliance and running an error gap or getting source code off laptops is a driving need. And because we're sort of in that large enterprise, we really want to make sure that we were funded to give the best customer experience possible. Right, like we need a lot of high touch services to help those customers get up and running, be productive. So that's really, for the next year or so, is just really doubling down on the cloud development environment in kind of the larger enterprise space, and so that's what triggered us to go out and want to raise money.
Speaker 2:I think once we got into it we realized, ok, but we do want to go mid market, we do want to capture those more mom and pops where it's probably dozens of developers max, and so we want to create and release a SaaS-based version of the product.
Speaker 2:It was always designed with SaaS in mind. In fact, the decision to open source it and make it self-hosted was actually sort of towards the very end of its development life cycle. It was always thought of as we should run this as a SaaS service, but our primary competitor is GitHub, codespaces, and they're SaaS based, and so we just said let's not be SaaS for now, but we'll go there. So that's probably the second major investment. And then the third thing which is so fun about kind of startups at this stage and growth is we get to globalize. So we need to enter EMEA, we need to enter Asia, so a big part of the funding was also so that we can start getting local resources kind of feet on the street, if you will, in some of these other regions, so that we can provide better customer experiences there too.
Speaker 1:Wow, such a great opportunity. Fast growth markets overseas, for developers for sure. What about you personally, the rest of the summer? You've been on the road a lot, I think, but any R&R in store, or are you just pushing through the summer?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I just was able to take some R&R. In fact, we closed the funding round while I was overseas in Europe, which was sort of an interesting experience. And I think only in the post-pandemic world is that even available, because it's a DocuSign and things like that are now acceptable. But I digress, so I've had plenty of R&R, I think for me. I'm looking forward to spending some time here in California while the weather is beautiful. Then we're all systems go. Once our customers are back from vacation, we're going to put a big push on to end the year strong.
Speaker 1:Well, congratulations on that and all the success and onwards and upwards, what a great environment for developers these days. It's truly a new era. Thanks, Rob, Thanks for sharing your vision and mission and thanks everyone for watching. Yeah, thank you so? Much. Take care everyone, Bye-bye.