Episode 66
· 33:03
And we learned a lot of ways not to do it. And so I think that because they didn't go through all these things, I see some of them making the same mistakes we did a long time ago.
Jack Bridger:Hi, everyone. You're listening to Scaling DevTools, and I'm joined today by Ivan Barazin who is the founder of Daytona and has had a very very interesting developer tools career, including most recently being the VP of DevX at Infobip. Ivan, thank you so much for joining us.
Ivan Burazin:Thank you for having me. So first, I have to say I'm the cofounder, so not solo founder. I have 2 more founders in DAYTONA. So I just wanted to add that, and thanks for having me here.
Jack Bridger:So, Ivan, could you tell us a bit about Daytona and what you're doing?
Ivan Burazin:Sure. So, Daytona is a development environment, management and orchestration platform, which is a lot of words for saying, basically, Datone enables any developer to clone their repository and instantly start coding. Everything that you'd have to do beforehand, you know, setting up any dependencies, installing anything before that, which usually doesn't work right out of the box, is automatically done. And we do it with a specific focus for enterprise companies.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's really cool. I like how you list out, like, all the things that you do. So, you know, you'll get you'll get your code, you'll clone the repo, check out the branch, study the readme, install tools and dependencies, run the build, resolve environment conflicts, and then you might, if you're lucky, be able to write some code.
Ivan Burazin:Absolutely. But I feel that's so when I was writing code, and this is like 1999, 2000 for the younger, people listening, it might be a long time ago, I remember that you basically opened up your editor, you started coding, and then you sort of just deployed it somewhere to see how it works, or you ran it local host, but there was nothing underlying, there was no issues you needed to solve to be able to start working, right? And so I think that's something that we wanna bring back because from for people trying to get into the industry, it's a huge hurdle to learn to code and to figure out is the code running because or not running because you made an error or because the dependencies or whatever. Underlying development environment isn't set up properly. Right?
Ivan Burazin:But also, if for the senior people as well, it's just a huge waste waste of time. Like, we've seen that engineers waste anywhere from, like, 50 to 70% of their productive time being the time that they would otherwise be coding on, you know, developing environment issues, waiting for tests and builds and stuff like that.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And this is, like, not the first foray that you've had in helping people to code quickly. Right?
Ivan Burazin:Absolutely. This is our second time. So our first time was with Code Anywhere. So Code Anywhere was or is still sort of exists, a browser based IDE. So the idea was I mean, we started this in 2009.
Ivan Burazin:It was called PHP Anywhere, then we renamed it to Code Anywhere. So I think we were basically the first to ever try that or one of the first. I lie. Heroku was the first first. So Heroku started it and then killed it and then made Heroku.
Ivan Burazin:We didn't know that happened and then we started our own thing. A bit of success, but really, really early technology was not there. The market wasn't ready. People weren't ready. People weren't open to it.
Ivan Burazin:So it was very early, and now I feel that the technology and awareness, especially because of Codespaces, the product from GitHub, has very much pushed knowledge and awareness around this type of, solution.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. Do you think there's anything, like, looking back, that you learned, like, from doing that? Because it's it's something that I think now so many people are really excited about this kind of space as well.
Ivan Burazin:Well, I learned how not to do it. So they're like I mean, the quote is from Edison, like, you learned a 1,000 ways not to do it. And so I think that we so we pushed it for a while. So it was 2009 till, I think, 2016 we were pretty active doing that, so quite a chunk of time. And we learned a lot of ways not to do it.
Ivan Burazin:And I think that's sort of we've incorporated that into the new product and we see competitive products because they didn't go through all these things. I see some of them making the same mistakes we did a long time ago. So I think that is our advantage that we've been here just we're just old. That's sort of our competitive advantage, I think.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. You've seen everything. And actually, that leads us on to, like, a really good, trajectory because, one of the things I wanted to do was you've had a lot of stages to your career as I mentioned. So you started out with building, like, founding a couple of companies. It was a very early acquisition that you had, and then you founded Code Anywhere.
Jack Bridger:Right? And then you were, InfoBip and now Daytona. So I wondered if we could kind of walk through those and talk about the things that you learned along the way in each of those steps.
Ivan Burazin:Sure. Absolutely. I mean, the first company was not so much a start up. It was a system integrator company. So, basically, a company that would sell you and implement or set up, Cisco routers and, WiFi networks and things like that.
Ivan Burazin:So clients would be like hotels or office buildings or whatnot. And the reason I started that company was because I was working for this other company doing running IT, basically. And I wanted to well, basically, I was scared to quit for some reason, and I could not progress anymore in the company. And so I told the owner, of the company. I'm like, hey.
Ivan Burazin:Let's split this out into its own company thinking, like, so I can offer services to the, to the rest of the market. Thinking that he'd say no and then that would be my way out. He said yes. I ended up making founding a company. And so I did not know anything about business, so I didn't know the difference between EBITDA or cash flow or all these, like, I did not know anything.
Ivan Burazin:I knew I had to set up, you know, routers and wifi and things like that. So I learned everything the hard way. It was not an easy journey, but when I started understanding things, I understood that I could not create an impact or impactful company, doing that. So I basically sold it to a local competitor. So that was my first little exit.
Ivan Burazin:Made a bit of money, nothing great. And then started on our journey with Code Anywhere and Code Anywhere as mentioned. So we did that for quite a while. We were in Techstars, which was cool then. We lived in Boston for a while.
Ivan Burazin:And so, yeah, we raised a bit of money, about $850,000 for that, but it it sort of plateaued. We didn't know how to scale it further. And so basically, at one point, we, you know, paid our founder our investors back and sort of left that as like an Internet business on the side. And I focused on creating the conference, which is called Shift, which is actually pretty successful now.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Sorry. That was the one of the things I had on my list that I didn't even bring up. It's very successful. That's a huge conference, in Croatia.
Jack Bridger:Right? It's like thousands and thousands of developers.
Ivan Burazin:It's about 5,000 developers now. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And how how did Shift get started?
Ivan Burazin:So Shift got started as a way to give back to the community. So while we were doing Code Anywhere, we went to comp so we went to a lot of we didn't know how to raise money. We didn't know a lot of things, and I guess that's how it is. So I knew that there were pitch competitions at conferences where there were investors. And so the idea was we get in front of investors by going to pitch competitions.
Ivan Burazin:So we applied to all these pitch competitions and so we got in everywhere. So Tokyo, Beijing, London, Vienna, San Francisco, New York. Like, we were on stages everywhere. Like, we always got in. No one ever gave us money.
Ivan Burazin:Not once, of of all those pitch competitions. But I really enjoyed the conferences. Like, the energy in those places were really great and nothing like that existed in Croatia where I lived. And I'm like, why don't I, like, sort of because I met all these people, why don't I try to organize one here? And I have never organized anything larger than a, birthday party, so I had no idea what I was doing.
Ivan Burazin:But, yeah, the first one was pretty bad personally. People enjoyed it, but in a sense I was doing anything. I was being the MC, having a stage fright. I was, like, putting up microphones, like, you didn't have a budget, so you had to do a lot of things. I had help from friends, but still, it was very, it was very hands on.
Ivan Burazin:So, yeah, we built that and I said I would never do it again and then people said, oh, it was great. You should do it again. We'll sponsor you. And I'm like, okay. We'll do it again.
Ivan Burazin:Then I announce it, and then when it comes, like, 2 months to the conference, yo, can you sponsor me? And they're like, no. There's no budget this year. And so I we ended up losing money for the 1st 3 years on the thing, but it kept growing, like, people wise. Like, it was like 250 people, then like 300, then 500.
Ivan Burazin:So it kept growing. And eventually, it started actually, developers became a hot commodity and everyone wanted to hire developers and then sponsors came in to want to actually sponsor because they wanted access to software engineers and that's where it actually really started growing. And we ended up doing 3 conferences a year. It became my full time thing after we sort of, dropped Code Anywhere And I ran that, up until 2020, when we were acquired by Infobip.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That's I mean, there's a lot of things I have that that questions that are like, I've done events before and I know it's I know it's so stressful. Nothing compares
Ivan Burazin:to the
Jack Bridger:night before or the event. So could you talk a bit about, like, what what was it that you that made Shift, you know, popular? Do you think that what what do people like about Shift?
Ivan Burazin:So one thing, there there's multiple aspects of a conference or any event, right? So you have the show, so the speakers, the people that are coming there, that's like one aspect. The other aspects are the attendees, the people that, you know, come there as well. The third part are the people that finance the conference itself, so sponsors and whatnot. And then you have the organization, so basically 4 but 3 outside of your control, right?
Ivan Burazin:And so, and I, we learned this by trying. I didn't understand any of this before. There's very few I actually started buying books about the event industry about a year or 2 before I sold it. Not before that but there's very few books. At one point I was contemplating writing a book.
Ivan Burazin:I had to organize these things because there's not, and it's super stressful. But when you sort of figure out the building blocks, it becomes a lot easier. And so what seems to be, for me, the way to keep getting good speakers is be very good tier speakers. And so we always try to even if we didn't have enough money, we'd have a driver pick them up, we'd get them a flight, like, it was economy class, like, but it's still, like, we take your get your ticket, a driver with your name would be waiting for you, there'd be a dinner for the speakers to get to know each other, And at one point, we also we stopped doing that more because speakers just don't have time, but we used to do, like, sailing and stuff like a day after just for for the speakers. Right?
Ivan Burazin:And so when you do all these things for the speakers, I found that they are very impressed and enjoy that. Even, like, last year or this year, when I was at the conference, speakers like, you guys just take so good care of us. I'm like, don't they do that at other conferences? Like, for me, it's like unheard of. I haven't spoken at that many conferences, so I don't know.
Ivan Burazin:And they're like, no. It's wonderful. And that's sort of on on one side, when you're really good at your speakers, then they are your advocates both for the attendees and both for other speakers. They want to come to speak with you, which I think is really great because essentially the show, the centerpiece of the conference then continually wants to come. Right?
Ivan Burazin:The second part is the we try to create serendipitous encounters for attendees. I remember I was a person that went to a lot of conferences, but I would never go listen to any talk. The idea was, for me, a conference is meeting people. Right? And if I meet good people, then I like the conference.
Ivan Burazin:I'll come back. And so it's like, how do we make things memorable for people and keep it in their mind? And so you'll see things like the soundtrack of the conference will have the same couple of songs repeat the entire time when things are happening so that that gets in your mind and people will talk about it. When they hear the song, 6 months later, they think about the conference. Another thing is that, like, you always like, food and drinks are always for free, but we always have, like, cocktails that are being made at the conference, both cocktails and mocktails.
Ivan Burazin:And people like to stay in line for those cocktails and, like, they're talking about them, and you'll talk with someone in front of in front of you or behind you. Oh, this is good or this is bad. It it gives you sort of like, an icebreaker with people that you don't know. And also so I also like cars, and I was fortunate enough to get Porsche as a sponsor for the last 3 years. And so you can drive Porsches at our conference.
Ivan Burazin:So, like, the first time a person would drive a GT 3 would be at our conference, and that is a memorable event for someone that likes cars. Right?
Jack Bridger:That's a really
Ivan Burazin:memorable event. Right. And then they talk to other people about it, and they're like, oh, I was at this conference. I drove, like, a a sports car. And and there's also there's also simulators, and the winner gets to, a trip every year to Istanbul to race on the actual racetrack.
Ivan Burazin:So, like, we so we also have tried to do very well with the parties, bringing some DJs. It's like, how do we create memorable events around the conference or better yet, events where people have to interact with people that they don't know? And I think that is the key factor of what we do. So it's super laid back, and if you've seen the pictures now, it's in a stadium. So it's like a 360 degree.
Ivan Burazin:I don't have you seen the pictures?
Jack Bridger:No. That's me.
Ivan Burazin:Can I show you here? Yeah. Yeah. Can I show you what it looks like? Really quickly.
Ivan Burazin:I guess we'll share it with other people, somewhere. So this is the this is the stage.
Jack Bridger:Wow. Wow. That is amazing. Let me describe what I'm seeing here. It's like a it's almost like a coliseum of, like, everyone around, kind of a stage in the middle of a huge screen.
Jack Bridger:Lighting looks unbelievable. Yeah. Wow. How how do the speakers engage?
Ivan Burazin:So it's a 3 it's a 3 60 stage, so it's very, odd for speakers if they haven't done it. But when they get used to it, I think it's okay. It's a bit disorienting sometimes when I'm on the stage as well. You sort of lose track where you are. Yeah.
Ivan Burazin:But it it we were forced to do it because there was no other venue that could have that many people and the only venue that was close was this circular venue.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Ivan Burazin:And it ended up we ended up using that to our benefits because the outer rim are where the, where the sponsors are, where the lounge area is, and where food and beverages are. And the thing is you can't get lost because you just don't turn around, just keep walking the same direction and you'll get to where you want to go Yeah. Because it's circular.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Ivan Burazin:And so, but anyway, I get back to the conference. It wasn't always this big, but that is sort of what we built it on and people really like it for all these things. And obviously, the content is great because the speakers you've seen that that have been there are awesome. And I thank them for coming and, yeah, we just made a really, really fun event for people. And I did not sleep a lot because of the conference.
Ivan Burazin:True, to your point. And I can talk about that as well, if interesting, but.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. One one of the things I kind of wanted to ask there is, like, about what it was like then going to when Infobip acquired the conference and, like, how I guess, like, they will, like, if they own it, they're, like, they have, like, marketing objectives around, like, the conference. And I wondered, like, how what was that like as well?
Ivan Burazin:So, Infobip, just to give a story, Infobip is a competitor to Twilio. So it's one API for voice, email, SMS, whatnot. And so they're huge. They're a company you've probably never heard of, that started in a village in Croatia, bootstrapped to a 1,000,000,000 in revenue, to 1,000,000,000. No external funding.
Ivan Burazin:They raised a bit, the last couple years, but that was just for m and a. So they're at, like, 2,000,000,000 now. They're still private. They're old they're the they're the only large competitor that's still private, so we'll see, when the IPO window seems to be opening again. So, we'll see what happens.
Ivan Burazin:Good luck to them. And anyway, so what they wanted to do, no one they were a top down wholesale resale company, not a bottom up like Twilio. Twilio started with, like, ask your developer, the famous you know, they have a book about it right now. So they wanted to get to the developer because, their comparable companies, 40 to 50 percent of their revenue originates bottom up and they had no access to that. And so acquiring the conference was like, okay, we have now access to, you know, 5,000 a year, at least.
Ivan Burazin:So they brought me on. I became the chief developer experience officer, and I ran not just the conference, but the DevRel team, the startup team as well. Startup, like, startups are like a startup program that, you know, AWS has or whatever. Like, get the good startups, offer them free credits, they use the service, and hopefully, when they scale, they'll use us, as a customer. And so I basically had to set that up.
Ivan Burazin:The good thing was that Shift in the developer community was a bigger brand than Infobip, so they let it be as is. So the idea is and it still hasn't they're still, very lenient on the team whereas they can do whatever they want, bring whatever they want, and Infobip is sort of just like a backstory sponsor, you know, their flags are in the background. So when you think of the conference, like, oh, Infobip basically sponsors it in that sort of way, but it it gets their attention of developers without marketing them, on anything specific.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. I've met, I've met DevRels from Infovip.
Jack Bridger:Very nice people, actually.
Ivan Burazin:There you go. There there's a lot there's a lot in this neck of the woods. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yes. Okay. So you mentioned that top down versus bottom up. And was that something that when you came in, you were like, we need to be doing more bottoms up or was that So
Ivan Burazin:they their initiative was they wanted it. Yeah. So they acquired the they acquired the conference they brought to mind because they're like, we don't know how to do this. Can you do this? And so it's always hard.
Ivan Burazin:There's a lot of articles about from people. It's like, don't be the 1st ever hire because you're usually not set up for success because if the company is large enough, the company has a completely different way of of working. And this is true, like, when I came into Infobip it was like 2 and a half 1000 people. When I left it was almost 4,000. And so this is like a very top down enterprise focused type of company.
Ivan Burazin:And now you're jumping in and it's like, hey, we have to fly over the world, do meet ups and conferences, and like a lot of people in the company think that you're just spending money and having fun and not working. So there's a lot of, barriers, mental that you had that we had to break inside the company to allow us to do what we wanted to do. But, yeah, I think we're very successful in doing that.
Jack Bridger:What do you think was successful? Like, how do you
Ivan Burazin:So you just mentioned that you met people from Infobip. Like, that didn't happen 3 years ago because there was none. Right? So, Infobip now, I think the the teams that I managed, both StartUp and DevRel, did about, you know, 30 conferences last year. They also won.
Ivan Burazin:I had already left, but I'm super proud. They won, like, best DevRel program of last year. And they too and they also won the other category, best community DevRel program of last year. So there's, there was an initiative to do meetups across the African continent. So a colleague of mine, they're in Nairobi actually right now, but they did, I think, 7 or 8 countries around Africa, did meetups all over the place.
Ivan Burazin:Yeah. So, there's been quite a big there's quite a bit of impact been inside the community and we've gotten awards, I guess, to show that there has been. Also, the number of people using the self-service, so actual developers using it, there's always numbers there as well. But yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. But it sounds like you were able to kinda focus on the kind of, like, those real deep engagements, like conferences, events, meet ups.
Ivan Burazin:Absolutely creating content. We're working on we still haven't edited that, but, like, documentation is still not to do. We created these, SDKs to to consume it. We even embedded a version of Daytona inside their doc inside their docs. So if you go to Infobibs documentation, where the code snippets are, you can actually hit run.
Ivan Burazin:It'll open up a browser based editor. It'll spin up the developed environment, and you can send an SMS literally right away. Like, it works automatically out of the box. And the idea is that engineers can actually test the API before checking anything out. They just have to log in.
Ivan Burazin:That's it.
Jack Bridger:Oh, that's very cool. Yeah. Yeah. And was that hard to kind of get, like, you know, implement that as, like, within the organization or everyone was pushing?
Ivan Burazin:Well, you have depends. So for that specific, it wasn't that hard, but for other things, I think when you for anyone and you you see this with companies now. You have companies that are bottom up that are now trying to switch, top down. So you have, like, Notion and Airtable, even Twilio are all bottom up companies that are now trying to convert to enterprise because that is where the expansion is, and that's hard. And the same thing is vice versa when you have an enterprise focused company that is now going or top down, that is now going bottom up.
Ivan Burazin:It's a very hard adjustment because everyone inside the company and when you have large hierarchies have a one mindset and this takes a very these are 2 very different ways of selling, a product. And so it sort of depends on what you're trying to achieve and how that aligns in people's minds. Right? So I think creating a product for self-service or to consume self-service itself was not that hard of a sell versus doing, you know, meetups across, you know, the African continent was a much harder sell.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Ivan Burazin:Because the metrics are fuzzy. Right?
Jack Bridger:Yeah. So because I feel like this is a really kind of, like, key issue because I even have I I know someone who's a user researcher and, you know, there's you get insights and these insights show that you need to make changes, which is great. But that's only such a small part of the job because it's like the big part is actually getting people to get on board with those changes. And I I don't know if it's like it sounds like a lot of your job would be to help push, like push. I don't know if that's the right word.
Ivan Burazin:Negotiation? Negotiation. Negotiation. Yeah. Yeah.
Ivan Burazin:So I
Jack Bridger:don't know if you've got any kind of tips or things that you learned along the way.
Ivan Burazin:So I think you have to have a spot and I've seen people not succeed. And I think the key for us being able to and there were hard moments for sure, there was moments where I was like, you know, screw this I'm out. Like, I don't wanna do this. The good thing was that I because I was acquired by the founders, I really worked hard to keep that relationship with the founders and essentially have them as a sponsor to what we're doing because it's really hard because, you know, you have, everyone has their OKRs in the team, right, in the company and everyone's pushing their agenda. I mean, for the sake of the company, but each one has their own agenda on how they wanna achieve it.
Ivan Burazin:And so there's only finite resources that you can have and so if you can have a high enough sponsor, then they sort of give you quote unquote, I won't say like protection, but they set you up to succeed. It's like, let let them do what they're planning to do because the time to horizon for this because bottom up is not tomorrow, right? Bottom up is not sales. It's not like you have to make a 100 calls today and then close, you know, 1 or whatever it is. It's like it is just like general awareness going to events and then it sort of picks up.
Ivan Burazin:But the good part about bottom up and, you know, scaling any we're talking dev tools now. Once you have that bottom up motion done, it it it starts growing by itself. It's it's scalable. You don't have to add head count to scale the amount of people learning about you. Right?
Ivan Burazin:So, you know, everyone knows I'll take the example again, Twilio. Everyone knows about Twilio, every developer. They don't have to keep scaling DevRel people. They've actually cut back on it for people to know about Twilio, but if you're top down, you have to scale sales and customer success people as you scale the number of customers, right? So it's a very different ball game and if you can have that sponsorship sort of, I think that will help you.
Ivan Burazin:If you don't, it is very very hard. I've seen a lot of people sort of just leave, quit, get fired because it just doesn't work out.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. That makes sense. I and I I think it's like a pattern I've seen among companies I've spoken to is it seems to be if company focuses on something, it's because the founders or the top people care about it and it's very very hard to be good at something that they don't care about.
Ivan Burazin:Absolutely. And so if you go to a company so I'll make this up. A company that's 500 people and the founders did not say we want this we're gonna say top down switching to bottom operating and they want a DevRel person. If the people have decided it are lower down, and you don't have that sponsor higher up, you're probably gonna fail because you don't because they'll see the investment in the sense of cost on the excel sheets at the end of the month or year, but they won't see the, you know, inbound effect yet because it takes a long time to get there and then that's when the friction
Jack Bridger:arises. Yeah. That's, I think that's a really really important point. So we are in a very interesting studio where we had to do all the production ourselves. So I think we're running out of time a little bit.
Ivan Burazin:Okay.
Jack Bridger:Even though I have so many more questions for you, Ivan. So could you tell us a bit about how you're thinking about DAYTONA and how you're thinking about learning taking what you've learned from Infobip and and Shift and kind of thinking about growth for DAYTONA?
Ivan Burazin:Sure. Absolutely. So, one of the things that was interesting with Shift is that organizer conference, it's a developer conference, it it was both top down and bottom up sales in the sense sales, if we can call them that. Because top down, the sponsorships are large enterprise. So Microsoft, Docker, Red Hat, whatever.
Ivan Burazin:So it's it has the same sales motion as the top down sales. And then you have people that buy tickets, which is bottom up. Right? You have to have that community that wants there. So we were we were building that conference.
Ivan Burazin:We're doing both at the same time. Before that, when I was at Code Anywhere, I was doing just bottom up because I didn't know about enterprise sales. And then when I was at Infobip, I was working on bottom up, but I was the purchaser as a top down. So I was an enterprise person, right, buying things. So I was now, for the first time, in that seat and I could finally understand what that buyer was like and what what they needed.
Ivan Burazin:And so now going into Daytona, we looked at the market and we're saying looking at who's doing what, and we see Codespaces doing a great job, GitHub's product, but they're bottom up. They're a SaaS product. They're only they're focused mostly, although companies can use it. The way they're set up, they're focused on a bottom up motion and individual developers. What we learned at Code Anywhere is that this type of product will succeed only, and this is our thesis, if it's a top down motion.
Ivan Burazin:And so learning that at Code Anywhere, that's where we decided to push our initiatives now with Daytona. And the the learnings, again, being at Infovip of how people think in the position of our company has helped a lot. Because I think when you start a new company, a lot of us don't have that sort of corporate experience or never will be. And it's sort of hard to do a top down notion because you don't understand these things. They're like beyond me that someone would pay a $100,000 a year or $1,000,000 a year for a contract for software.
Ivan Burazin:I think, like, that would be insane, like, but now I know that that's not insane and that people do buy these things. And so, when going for, Daytona, again, there was a couple learnings, but also we firmly believe that, you know, code GitHub's Codespace is doing great and they're telling the world it's a great product, but they don't offer an enterprise solution. So what we're looking for is, like, we'll we're basically encouraging them to keep doing what they're doing, which is preaching that this is a good thing. And then going out we're going out and offering it to enterprises with very specific needs of the enterprise. Security, stability, on prem, and stuff like that.
Ivan Burazin:But yeah.
Jack Bridger:So, yeah, you're kind of making sure to do hit both kind of categories, but the top down is, like, kind of probably the
Ivan Burazin:So we're letting GitHub do the bottom up Yeah. And the marketing to the developer community, and then we sell to the top down that they cannot offer.
Jack Bridger:So you won't at all really worry about bottoms up at all?
Ivan Burazin:Not for the so bottoms up in the sense of there you will be able to download a version of, Daytona and set it up on your server cluster or whatever it be. That will be there. There'll be that motion. But the individual developer as a SaaS product, we're not gonna launch that in the foreseeable future for now. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Okay. That's awesome. Yeah. Which is really interesting because a lot of startups I speak to, you know, it's kind of like gospel that it's it's always bottoms up. But I I mean, I mean, I've told you everyone on the podcast, I worked in sales at Stack Overflow and it was kind of everyone's always astonished that they even had a sales team.
Jack Bridger:And, yeah, it works. It can work, which is surprising to a lot of people. Yeah. And it's so it's really cool that that's actually like where you're you're planting the flag. Like, this is
Ivan Burazin:Absolutely. I think it's counterintuitive. Like, most dev tool companies are bottom up and I think that's the way to do it. The specifics of this type of company is that as a bottom up, it usually requires a lot of compute, which comes at a very, very high cost. And so yesterday, I think Replit, which Replit is very similar to Code Anywhere, just a decade later and, you know, they're now worth 1,200,000,000.
Ivan Burazin:So they came sort of at a better time than we did, but they're cutting out free hosting and all these things because there's a huge amount of compute cost that is incurred because of this. Right? And you have to even out as a SaaS product. So, that's one of the reasons why a Codespaces, which is owned by Microsoft, which has Asia, is someone or an AWS can do that very well because they own basically the cloud. Right?
Ivan Burazin:And you as a startup is not where I want to be. That's not the fight I wanna pay. Yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. So if you had, like, 1 or 2 kind of, like, very kind of quick takeaways that you think founders should take away, from your experiences, what would they be?
Ivan Burazin:So the way I'm setting up the company now is I it's really hard to do, but I really think that everyone should be essentially DevRel, partially. So as you mentioned before, like everyone should be singing the gospel of the company and I feel that people have, you know, different takes on this. There's engineers that don't wanna do it at all. They feel very, like, shy or that it's not important, but there's ways to do it that are very easy on them. So, like, our colleague will you know, set up just video calls with the team or just audio calls and then just record them and transcribe that and then create that into a post or whatnot.
Ivan Burazin:And so the reason why I think everyone in the team should be partially DevRel is that the people that make the product are the ones that can tell the story the best, I think, and are the most believable, right? You have great DevRel people and you can hire them and bring them into the company, but the people that have actually built it, I think are the most believable and if you can create what I'm trying to do, if you can create a culture of your company while you're small, that it's everyone's job to do just a bit, like, you don't have to jump on planes and go to conferences. You can do, like, a Zoom call with someone or or just be, insider Discord or Slack, whatever it would be. Just, like, be part of the community and sort of tell that story. I think that you can get a much greater impact or, to the audience.
Ivan Burazin:I think it'll be more believable to the audience, audience being potential users, and it will help you orchestrate your mission as a company if you build that early in. I mean, that's my thesis right now and I was I was talking to a couple of people. I think we'll do a Twitter space about this as well. Do you sort of like outsource it to a DevRel team or do you do it, like, have everyone do that right now? I'm currently in the boat of like trying, when you're a small company, we're 11 people, trying everyone to be part of that right now.
Ivan Burazin:So that's what I would try.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Everyone should be DevRel?
Ivan Burazin:A bit. A bit.
Jack Bridger:Okay. Awesome. So if people want to, learn about Daytona or hear more from you, where can they,
Ivan Burazin:So daytona.io is the website. Not much there yet, but there will be. Actually, there's a pretty big blog there. You can read with a lot of stuff. But also, first name, last name, Twitter, LinkedIn, anywhere, at Gmail.
Ivan Burazin:It all works. So, I'm pretty transparent.
Jack Bridger:Ivan Barazin.
Ivan Burazin:Ivan, Ivan b u r a z I n.
Jack Bridger:Thanks everyone for listening, and we'll see you again soon.
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