>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with all leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this episode of Startup Insights. Andrew Lau is here with me, he's the co founder and CEO of a relatively new company called Jellyfish. They focus on engineering management, which is kind of a new space that we want to present to you, Andrew, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Hey, Dave, thanks for having me on. >> So when I see co founder and a title I always ask why did you start a company? What's your Why? >> So the three co founders myself, Dave Gourley, and Phil Braden,we actually met geez more than 20 years ago, at a company called Endeca. We had the chance to kind of bring the proverbial band back together, just 'cause rare is the chance to work with great people. And for us, Jellyfish really was coming out of our own experiences. All three of us grew our careers running big engineering teams big product teams. We realized how hard it was to really lead those teams and connect them to the business at scale. And that's the problem we just got together to solve. >> Yeah, so interesting right, and Endeca, another East Coast company, great exit, brought by Oracle. And of course, when you say in Endeca, I always think okay, Jellyfish, you guys in the search business, but you're not in engineering management. What is engineering management? And, you know, how does it relate to some of your past experiences? >> Great question, well, so engineering management engineering management sector or management platform, as we talked about, really comes down to how we can facilitate the tools to make leading big teams easier, right, we've realized that as you get to larger teams, teams bigger than 50, bigger than 100 engineers, it's really hard to understand what the team is doing really hard to make sure that they're working their best in making sure they're pointed in the right direction. And even Furthermore, how to connect that to the business and how to make sure the business successful after the team dies. And as for us, is really around making tools and processes available that they really help accelerate the act of leading big teams. >> So when you think about it, I mean, it's really the problem you're solving is visibility, kind of what's going on in engineering and providing metrics is that a sort of a fair, high level? >> I think it's a perfect high level statement. When we actually got together and talked about the problem space we all saw as we lead these big teams. We quickly drew an analogy to you know, when I started my career in the late 90s, there was a time before Salesforce and CRM were pervasive, right And so really quickly, we drew a quick and easy analogy that said, like, hey, why isn't there a Salesforce for engineering? That is, why isn't it that same leadership and executive visibility into how a team is progressing and to make sure it's aligned with the business? >> Well, when you think about it, right, Salesforce, what 1999 we had the first Salesforce clouding before the real cloud hit, you know, we certainly have marketing clouds now capital Management clouds, customer service management clouds, why not an engineering cloud right? >> I think it's probably you follow that map there, I think we've seen the last 20 years, that clouds actually kind of progressed from sales to marketing to success to HR, as you pointed out, I think the last bastion in organizations is the engineering team right? It just so happens right now that engineering teams probably are the most strategic, if not the most expensive team in most companies roster. And so really, providing visibility is really necessary at this time. >> So I don't run engineering it's Silicon Angle by my co-CEO and partner John furrier does. But I'm always like asking him like, hey, what are you guys working on? What are the deliverables? What am I going to get it and when? how we do it on quality, and so forth and so I think just scanning your website, reading some of your blogs, these are some of the things that you really focus on. You wrote a five part series, I think, I don't know if I'm dying to see part five but four parts are out. I want to dig into some of those, I think they're in, I think you called it, you know, five things that you should present to the board. >> Yeah, yeah Like, you know, a great question around like, there's a series were four or five in two, I'm talking about what are five slides that heads of engineering should be showing to their boards or even their executive management teams? You know, early on in the process, I'm aware, before we actually started the company, we did a ton of research, talking with leaders at scale, trying to ask them, like, how do you manage your team? How do you connect into the business? And out of those conversations fell, you know, asking folks like, well, what slides do you show your board meeting? And and the answer was, there wasn't ubiquitous answer. People were looking for answers and so we really synthesized a number of different leaders that we thought were really successful in this world, and really put together this series to talk about like, what are the metrics that people should be measuring? >> Well, let's talk more about some of those metrics so you know, I mentioned so what am I going to get? When what are some of the other key things that people are focused on? I mean, obviously, quality, where I'm spending my money. But what are some of the ones that you're seeing, aligning with business and really driving business outcomes? >> So okay, so part one I think you talked about right which is, you know, what are you getting? What got shipped out the door? what's coming down the pipe? I think job one for a leader of engineering and Product is to talk about what's coming out, right in the same way that sales job is actually hit a revenue number and talk about the pipeline coming down the way it's an engineers job to actually ship new product that you can sell your users can engage with so that's definitely slide one. Slide two, you already alluded to here two is about quality, right? I think if you're shipping product that actually can't hold quality in the eyes of your customers, it won't last very long. So I think it's really important to show command of quality and actually show metrics that actually measure quality over time in the lens of your customer. Slide three, I think we're really talking about alignment. Making sure that your team is spending your dollars, time and effort in the right way that actually aligns with what the business wants to right? So examples might be, if you're a company that splits time between enterprise and SMB efforts, well, making sure that the features the team is working on actually aligned to the strategy of the company, right? And you can't do that if you don't measure that. And then slide four is really around capturing broad level productivity. But is the team healthy moving forward? And then the last of which is really the preview coming up for the next segment here is going to be about really around the team in hiring right. How is the team holding up? How's the morale? And how's the actual hiring pipeline looking and ramp? All right in terms of new employees right, it's really the people side of the engineering leadership. >> Cool, thanks for teasing that a little bit. I'm glad to hear it's not just about productivity, 'cause there are tools out there that can measure developer productivity, but seems like you're taking a broader approach and building a platform to really take a more end to end sort of lifecycle view. >> Yeah, I think we really look about, think about it as look productive is really important. I think it's necessary but not sufficient. You can talk about a boat, you can roll faster. But if you're rolling the boat in the wrong direction, who cares? So it's as important to make sure that alignments in place and actually making sure that the rest of communication and context is really in place to make sure that team succeeds and the lens of the business. >> Andrew I'm interested in the market, I mean, my sense is engineering management is sort of new, very new, actually, although we talked about productivity being sort of one of the metrics and there are tools out there, but how do you look at this market? Is there a big whale that you're targeting? Or is this more of a Greenfield up? >> I think really, it's a Greenfield opportunity. I think if you were to you know, people don't wake up right now with a quadrant they look at or a wave that they're actually measuring on at the moment. It doesn't say isn't coming. I mean, if you look at this as a baseball game, we're probably getting one and defining market right now. And you can tell because if you look across the vendor space, I think there's a lot of variety of different solutions in these places. And so, from my view, you know, there's room right now just to innovate and describe what this platform really is going to be right and that's what the next few years are going to look like and defining this market. >> Did the unknown nature of the market? Was that was that a challenge in terms of your race? >> I actually think that's actually the opportunity. I think both as founders and and our investors, I think really, whenever you have these Greenfield opportunities, it helps you create big opportunities, I either grow you know, this better than anyone, I think, define the markets are very clear in the box you're trying to fill in, it's a race to do that. You know, this space here is a space ripe for innovation. It needs innovation, both in product and process and how you going to market and the story will be told five years from now. >> So I want to talk about your go to market but before we do, so one of the things you got to do when you're doing your investor pitches, you got to figure out the total available market your served market. I mean, how did you do that? What can you share with us about the TAM? >> I mean, okay, there's the quantitative answer, right, you could pick apart all the companies in the world count all the software engineers and I can tell you, it's going to be a big number, right You can also map it to other large software engineering companies like Atlassian, or even Microsoft and talk about the markets there. But I think, you know, look, the world has moved far for long with that like, what's the word every company is a software company now? I think it's not a necessary part of the pitch anymore. I think everyone intuits the TAM is large, because even air conditioning companies now have hundreds of software engineers, It's no longer this niche thing like it was 20 years ago. I think literally, you know, every company in the planet could be a potential customer of Jellyfish in the future. >> You know I feel like some sometimes if you can actually size the TAM, it's maybe a negative in your race because if the TAM is just so obviously large then investors say hey, okay, check the markets huge, and that's what they want to see. >> And I think part of it too, is like we've seen the last five years, not just has you know, every company become a software company. This also means the engineering departments and how they recruit have been really scrutinized. Everybody needs more wants more engineers, they're hard to get and expensive. I think everyone's realizing like, because of both of those things, everyone cares a lot more, It's no longer this, you know, small number of people have low cost. It's actually just an expensive investment, a strategic one. And I want to make sure everyone wants to make sure it's pointing in the right direction now. >> So there's a lot of people in our community, young people get, you know, either just graduated from college or been out for, you know, 567 years working at a company and feel like they want to do their own thing. And they're always interested in how you did it, how you got started, how you ascended the company where you know how you seated it, I think, I think you guys started in 2017, I think you've raised $12 million. But take us back to the beginning, how did you and your co founders get launched, you know, how did you see the company and bootstrap it? So I mean, I, I think for us, like we're lucky to have actually been through all three of us through a number of different startups. So I think this is for us coming with a lot of awareness of actually how to build the company, we had the chance, you know, in at the talent 2016 to actually get the proverbial band back together. We hadn't worked together in probably shy of 15 years. But I think we really respected the chance to do so. And so we got together and said, like, hey, let's see if there's an opportunity for us to do something together. And so that was a real journey, you know, we pushed through a number of different concepts, we largely fell into this one simply because of our backgrounds, right, it is an area that we actually bring some personal expertise to and our networks bring it that way, but also some passion around wanting to actually solve it. So I think it's probably at the end of 16 that we actually said, like, hey, this is a space we might be interested in. We actually spent I think the the first couple months of 17 just interviewing every VPE CTO CEO, exactly we could find I think we probably talked to north of 65 technology leaders in that time period. Largely just actually asked him like, hey, what do you think about this space, this idea? What do you do instead? In fact, tell me not to start the startup, I don't want to invest x years of my life to find out that there's a better solution out there. The part that was I think amazing was that everyone was interviews, everybody kind of stopped at the end of it and leaned in and said, "hey, can you do me a favor? Can you write up the, whatever your notes on this and just send me the actual answer? So at that moment, we knew that, you know, we didn't have the solution yet. But we knew there's pain out there an opportunity to actually solve something, we weren't the only ones that actually identified that. And so that became the mission, which is how do we make people in this seat? How do we make their lives better, right? And, you know, sliding forward that you know, concurrent with actually, the early checks coming in, we actually call those same folks back and said, hey, can we work with you to build the product? So from a philosophical standpoint, we really believe in actually building with our customers, right, and so, from the first moment, you know, pre product, you know, pre code, we sat down with those same people and said, hey, let's work with you. let's do things by hand, let's do with your data, just to make sure that we understand what we're building a use case that you care about. >> Okay, so you co-created really with the customers as you actually started generating revenue, kind of a sell design build model, is that right, or? >> Yeah, I want to think of a much more of a, as an alpha product development, right, I think, you know, our philosophy on that early on, let's say June of 17. It was, look, we'll do your manual, we'll do your board decks for you, we'll do your management team slides, we'll do your metrics will do your capitalization, right. We'll do whatever you need on a manual basis, as long as we can work with you and your data. And you know, because we always had an eye on building the platform there. And so behind the scenes, of course, we're automating all of this. But that helps make sure that the use cases that we're building for were things they actually needed, we're going to use. >> Did you find you had to leave a lot on the cutting room floor? In other words, a lot of times when you take that approach, and you kind of try to generate maybe early revenue from customers, you sometimes get sick, especially in the enterprise, you get sucked into specials and some of your custom work that might not scale across the the other organizations. You guys obviously experienced, was that something you guys put a lot of thought into and how did you manage that? >> Look, I don't think it's magic, I think we were aware. To your point we've done this a few times, so at least we knew the pitfalls, like yeah, so some stuff has been left on the cutting for in the sense that we probably, you know, pushed harder on areas that we push less on today. I don't think anything was abandoned. I think part of it is that, you know, there's two sides of it, right, which is, if you're able to think about where you want to go, which is building a platform, you can always take any engagement and trade it off and say like, hey, is this something we want to build? Does this make sense for actually leading us towards the long platform story? you don't have to do every opportunity that comes along. So I think you need to thread the needle and I should take advantage of working with customers, but also making sure you have an eye for where you're going the North star so you can pick and choose which project you want to work on or which customers you know you want to work with because end of the day products are really the byproduct of who you work for who you serve as who you actually build for. And so we're very conscious along the way to choose the right individuals, the right partners that helps shape the product over time. >> And you guys had some some engineering chops and your own Andy Jassy says there's no compression algorithm, the algorithm for experience and then maybe that's an Amazon thing, but I hear him all the time. So you know, they had that to your advantage. And so, okay, so i got your website I see you've got customers so you know, you're well into your journey here. You've got product market fit, I presume you've got you know, your SaaS model your pricing down, but where are you in your sort of journey and you're phasing? >> I mean, geez, those words all change quite a bit these days, I would actually say product market fit is never a binary thing, that the constant journey, right so I would say that we're always working on that because the markets are always moving. And we have a market that is changing month on month and a quarter on quarter, right, so I never want to declare victory on that. Because that's going to get left behind. I think in terms of our journey, like we have on the team right now is 27 people normally based in downtown Boston, We're all working from home at the moment. You know, we have, you know, a sales team in place now of I think six, seven folks now. So we're in market actually pushing this forward. But, you know, I think for us, we're out there really kind of scaling the story right now. I think we've had some tremendous customers we had the chance to work with, we have a product that we're really proud of. I think we just need to put more units out there and more customers to actually make them more successful. So I think anything we're really in the act of repeating every function of the organization right now. It's really kind of build it up. So okay, so I mean, normally when you do a startup, you go to your friends, first the people in your core circles, you get them to that's I'm sure you did something similar. You're obviously beyond that phase of six to seven salespeople, you're starting to scale up, you've probably got a good sense as to that types of salespeople that you're looking for. And then now you're trying to figure out okay, it sounds like how much do I spend on marketing? How does that affect sales productivity? And then how do we scale that whole thing up and then go hyper scale and build a moat and all that other good stuff. >> Yeah, I think you're exactly right, I mean, I think we're at the point now where we can actually start making trade offs, right, like, you know, like, you know, do we actually add a additional salesperson? Do we actually invest in marketing programs? Do we actually build out more strategic product? I think you know, we are still the point we have to make trade offs, right, but the business is mature enough that we can make trade offs right, that makes sense. >> So let's talk about customers, I mean, maybe you could give us some examples, some of your, your favorite examples how you've impacted their business. >> Well, I think if you look at actually our website, I think there's a few case studies up there, I think there's building them up there, there's like salsify books at toast. I think all three of those actually really talk about different kinds of use cases around how we actually affect them. So One of which will we're really helping them actually on alignment, right and making sure that their team is working on the most important things, And, and in those situations, when you're working on the most important thing, you're really kind of essentially getting opportunity cost of engineers and making sure that they're driving towards things that you really will help the business, right so if you're, if you're looking at it that way, you're finding engineers that can help you progress faster, but you're building more product faster, because you can focus the energy where the team is going. And so that's case one, I think another case is really is around, making sure around quantitative management visibility, right, making sure that the team is visible in the metrics and in their output to make sure that they're performing their best, right, and that might mean everything from automated performance management to just making sure that people aren't left behind and making sure that they're the team is actually healthy in their function. And then the last of which is really around capitalization, which is a financial process and really automating that, that's out of the house which is, you know, capitalization requires a traditionally, engineering leaders have to manually fill out spreadsheets for finance, and for the accounting team to make sure that they're actually able to account for where the team effort is going, and then it can actually capitalize it correctly when we treat it from a financial perspective. And so we automate that process that just makes everyone's lives easier. So you're no longer manually data on a week by week basis. >> So I may have obviously seen some of your product and some of the outputs but your your SaaS based model, you know, cloud pricing, all that sort of modern, you know, approaches and business practices. And but what else can you tell us about sort of your, pricing model and how you're going to market? >> Yeah, so I think, you know, we are a SaaS hosted application. We also have, you know, open source agents that have been deployed on premise to actually, you know, whether to work with complex network architectures or deal specific redaction concerns, so we got to operate an on premise environments in that way. You mentioned our pricing is SaaS base we broadly price annually, you know, from broad strokes perspective, it's relative to the the size of the engineering team. Very simply like a, an engineering team of 300 people is a lot more complicated than engineering team of 30 people, right, put it that way. And the pricing reflects that. And then to your question around, like, what else I can talk about? Well, you know, I made the analogy earlier around like they were trying differentiating what Salesforce did for sales. What I mean by that really is providing that executive and leadership visibility to that department, right, if you're looking at the innovation that Salesforce brought in the early aughts, it was really getting stuff out of notebooks into the cloud through manual data entry, and in contemporary sales, I think there's less of that these days, it's all through plugins and voice recognition and stuff. And in the same way, in the engineering side, we're not in the business of actually asking for new data entry. In fact, we connect with systems engineers already using You know, the JIRA is the GitHub to get labs, all they know that their testing tools and their CI tools and then all of those things really we emit what we call engineering signals. So the engineers don't do anything differently. We collect that data, we connect to those systems, we clean that data, normalize and contextualize it with respect to business data. And that's actually where the insight actually comes from. Because if you just look at the raw engineering data by itself, there's not a lot you can do with it, right you know, I joked with you in our kind of earlier conversation, which is, you might look at, you know, your 300 get or request your engineers are produced thing. Like, it doesn't really help you figure out if you're going to do great this quarter, right? And so for us, we really bring that in contextualize it and make sure that you understand it in a business context, to talk about like, hey, is the team accelerating and being successful in the ways that we need the business needs them to do. >> Yeah, you're so right I get a stream of those every day every week and I open them up and I go, okay, I don't know. There's people that work in sort of last sort of topic areas is I want to understand where you want to take this thing. I think I'm writing that you've raised about $12 million, you obviously got a big market seems like you've got a great product. I mean, if I'm you, I'm throwing gasoline on the fire, I want to run the table, you got to create the market . So that's sometimes kind of expensive. Where do you want to take this thing? >> I mean, look, this may sound hubris bowl, but our ambitions are to build a large multi billion dollar standalone software company. And and I think, you know, part of the reason why I say it that way is that I think it's important to have a North star, right. It's important to have a North star to make sure that we're all headed in the right direction. We get the right team members, actually, as we grow the team, and then we actually capitalize it accordingly. I think if you look at the analogy, we started out earlier around sales and marketing. Every time someone's actually cracked that leadership visibility, for each function, there has been a multi billion dollar opportunity there, if not, a multi, you know multi multi billion dollar opportunity out there. So I don't think it's a overly anim facies that where we're going. But I think there's a lot of work to get from here to there. >> Yeah, I mean, I didn't ask you directly about the competition, I did ask you if there's a big whale, is there a big entity, you know, like a database, guys, is they want to target oracle, for example. And I looked around and I, I really didn't see it. It really does look like a Greenfield opportunity, which is absolutely enormous. I mean, I think I'm getting that right. >> Yeah, I think you're right on, and look at I think there are going to be more small players actually entering the market. Like I think whenever we look at new markets, and as they actually kind of build momentum, that always happens. And so of course, I you know, in that sense, I want competition to be here. But right now, I really don't focus on that. I think as for us, It's really about our product in the hands of our customers, how we make them successful. And then let's rinse and rinse and repeat that over and over again to more and more companies. >> Yeah, you don't have to compete you guys have to create. Andrew, great to have you on thanks so much for sharing your insights on your company, good luck with Jellyfish and come back anytime you know, in the future would love to track your progress and see how you're doing. >> Right Dave, thank you so much for having me here and I hope you, your family or team are staying healthy and all this and I look forward to next time. okay, and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and startup insights. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)