Intro to Coder with CEO Rob Whiteley

This is Text Drunk tv. Hey everyone, welcome back here to Text Drunk tv. Our next guest is Rob Whiteley.

Rob is the CEO of Coder, and if you are a text drunk TV junkie, you probably, you, you may remember we, we interviewed Rob in Vegas, just a few, well, it's still a few months ago. And, um, now of course we have him here on Text Drunk tv and it's a pleasure to have you on. Rob.

Welcome to Text Drunk tv. Yeah, thank you so much Alan. Happy to be here.

Pleasure to have you. So Rob, you're the CEO of of coder, right? And, um, you know, people always wanna understand who's the person behind the, the desk who, or I don't, we don't really have desk anymore, but, um, but you know, how, how did you get to be CEO Co-founder?

What, what's the story? We're going to, of course, jump into who, what coder is and what coder is about. But let's understand a little bit about Rob, if you don't, if, if you're not shy.

Yeah, no, No. Ha. Happy to do it.

Uh, thanks for asking. Um, I would, I think I have a non-traditional path to, to how I got here, but I guess, uh, you and the audience can be a judge of that. So, um, I graduated with an engineering degree, computer engineering, so, um, the last one, it's Not unconventional.

Yeah, well wait until you hear the rest. Okay. So I think, so I, you know, came Love computers came through it.

I, I actually came through it with the last language I programmed in was assembly, uh, for those who are familiar. Okay. So I was kinda at the machine code level Mm-Hmm.

Um, and I interviewed with, uh, a large tech company outside of Boston. Uh, I'm choosing to remain nameless 'cause they're now a customer. Uh, but I, uh, was not Well, They're still around.

That's good. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They, they make computer parts.

Mm-Hmm. And what I would say is, look, great company, but when I showed up, I was in a room that I swear was so long you could see the curvature of the earth and It was just the horizon Far. Yeah.

It was just cubicles as far as you could see. And, um, at the time, the movie, the Matrix was very popular and I thought, oh boy, I feel like I'm just getting plugged in like a battery. So I said, I, I don't, I don't think I want to be an engineer.

Uh, which was sort of an existential crisis for me 'cause that's all I had trained to be. Uh, and so I did what any person in doubt does. I became a consultant and I just Mm-Hmm.

Started going into to management consulting. Uh, and that was fun. Did that for a few years.

I eventually stumbled across the industry analyst market, um, with a company called Forrester. Sure. So I had a great 10 year run, um, really talking to companies about their technology and that set me up for a good kind of empathy around what customers want.

And then from there, I, I decided, okay, this is great, but I, I wanna put my money where my mouth is and jump onto the other side of the fence. So I went over to kind of a series of different technology companies, um, brands that the audience may think of are Riverbed F five Networks. Mm-Hmm.

Sure. And I started doing some startups and that was the fun part. And so eventually that's what brought me to Coder.

I was running, uh, the Nginx business, which is a open source web server, uh, and reverse proxy. And I was doing that, um, inside of a bigger company, F five loved running it. But the team came and said, Hey, we, we like your background.

We'd like you to, to, to come join us here at this very early stage company. Uh, and I can get into it, but let's just say very similar markets, very similar audiences. So I, it gave me confidence that my skillset was transferable.

Um, and like any young entrepreneur, they were willing to give me my first shot at a CEO gig. So how can I turn that down? Right.

Give me an opportunity to jump over. Absolutely, man. Absolutely.

Good. That, that's an interesting journey. You know, I, I think a lot of people, so I I know a lot of analysts from Forrester and Gartner, you know, the big guys to the smaller guys, the kinda, you know, the EMGs and the ROS of the world, if you will.

And, um, I think what a lot of people don't realize is there's, there's many paths to becoming an analyst. Sometimes you get people who have almost lifetime career time experience in a given field and now move over to the analyst side. But then you get people who just have really good analytical skills and, you know, a decent knowledge of this space.

But they're really good analysts, so they're, they're really good analysts and they perform an analysis on a given area of technology. Yep. Then you have people who are really good in a given area of technology, but kind of have to learn to be analysts.

Right. So, you know, what side of the house did they come from? Then the other thing is, there are some people who are lifers.

Right. Uh, and I'm trying to think, my friend from Lawrence, Lawrence Pedigree for instance, I don't know if you know Lawrence, you probably do. You know, Lawrence actually f flew the nest there for a couple years and flew back home Right.

It to Gartner and, and clicked his heels three times and he's back. And, uh, and got, you know, good for him. That's his path.

Yeah. Others are like, they, they take that badge of honor and the t-shirts and scars that come from it and set forth to become CEOs of companies and stuff like that. And, and in all, you know, everybody marches to their own, to their own beat.

Right. Yeah. It's great.

It's, It, it's funny you should say that. So I was at Forrester and I was there for exactly 10 years and 10 days. Uh, and the reason why is, uh, I made a promise to myself that if I made it past 10 years, uh, I would be a lifer.

I was gonna be an analyst that went 20, 25, 30 years, which you see a lot of Mm-Hmm. I would have to kind of leave. It was one of the best jobs I've ever had.

Uh, and so I loved it, but I decided I, I, I needed to not just give advice, I needed to actually, you know, put some skin in the game and try some of the things I was advising. Uh, and if it worked, I could always go back to becoming an analyst with that operator experience. Um, but then I kind of just got hooked on the, on the drug of, of running a company as opposed to advising it.

So to me it's fun, different sides of the same coin. Excellent. Very cool.

So let's talk coder a little bit. Rob, tell us what's coder about. Yeah, so I'll tell you a little about what Coder is, but it's probably more interesting about how it came into existence.

So what is, we're a developer productivity, right? We are a way to help developers. What we say, uh, we, we call Stay in Flow.

So if you're a software developer, your enemy is distraction and you wanna stay in that flow state. Uh, all of us do it for a, for a programmer, it's keys, uh, on a keyboard typing away. Uh, for me it's writing, you put me in a good browser and I'll start writing.

That's kind of my flow state, but we're really about just how do we help developers do that. Um, the reason why I said I would do a quick background, and I won't, I won't bore you with the history of Coder, but Coder was started by, uh, three young gentlemen. Uh, they were actually, uh, 18 years old.

Uh, and they had met playing games online, um, specifically Minecraft. Mm-Hmm. And they had built up a little business, uh, running Minecraft servers and monetizing these different plugins for, for Minecraft.

Uh, and they were pretty distributed. Um, there was Amar and Alabama, there was John, Andrew and Austin, and there was Kyle up in Northern Canada, and they were sort of opining that it's really difficult for the three of them to collaborate remotely. And so they continued to do it, but when they got to college, they just couldn't get rid of that bug.

And so they decided to drop out and do something about it. And so, like any good entrepreneurs, they set about trying to solve the problem. How do you, how do developers collaborate remotely in a, in a more productive way?

And so that's actually what gave Birth to Coder. And our first product was really born out of them kind of wishing they had had something like this, uh, so that they could work from a more distributed, and, you know, I hate to say the, the Pandemic was a fortunate circumstance. I don't think it was for anyone.

But as with any good founding story, there's always a little bit of serendipity. And I think what happened is every developer quickly found themselves remote. And here were these, uh, kids who'd been working on a technology that helped that.

And so I think it's a, a really interesting inflection point and, and, uh, you know, right time, right place and the kind of, the technology took off. And I can get into more of it, but that's sort of the origin story. That's great.

You know, I, I often tell people, especially younger people who ask me, I've been around in startups and helped take companies public. I've taken them up and I've taken them down, uh, which is why I'm still working. But, you know, definitely sometimes it's better to be lucky than smart.

It's good to be both. Yeah. But timing is everything.

Right? And, and that is a big piece of it. I mean, hey, the whole reason we do Tech Drunk TV is because of Covid.

Right? Everybody started working from home. I didn't know if we were gonna have conferences again, I didn't know if they'd be in the virtual conferences.

I had to do something. And so we started doing these videos with the idea of piping them in via Zoom at back in the Covid times, we were actually putting them out on OTT, so you could watch it on Amazon and Apple TV and Fire Stick and, and Roku. And because I didn't even know if people would be able to watch on computers only.

Um, so it, it really has shaped us. But, you know, COVID ISS in the rear view mirror now. Why don't we jump to today and talk about, you know, what co coder is about?

Yeah. And so, so far I've just vaguely called us a developer productivity tool. If I'm a little bit more specific.

The problem we're trying to solve today is that most developers need big, beefy workstations, right? They need a lot of compute, a lot of memory sometimes, especially now in the world of ai, they need this thing pulled a GPU that helps with more intense kind of calculations. Sure.

And so for most companies, that means a three to $5,000 MacBook Pro for every developer. Um, and I think if, if you're a, a small company or if you have a handful of employees, that's one thing. If you're a Fortune 50 company and you have 25,000 developers, 50,000 developers, which are not made up numbers, um, then, you know, the math becomes just, uh, almost impossible.

The the economics of running a development team is, uh, and I exaggerate not billions of dollars, it's usually five to $7 billion between salary and computer costs. And so what we wanna do is enable that power, but shift it to the cloud, right? If you think of development today, it's done locally on laptops.

We want to give developers a high fidelity experience working on any machine because they're actually remote accessing a cloud workstation, a cloud hosted computer that has for as far as they're concerned, infinite compute. Um, so it's much more pop. It's actually a better experience.

Um, but it also gives the the company a lot of benefit because now their development environment is hosted behind their firewall. It is secure, it has access controls, it has, uh, different things I can do from an automation perspective. So I think we're in this rare world where developers get a better experience and DevOps teams get a better experience because it's all now native to the cloud.

And I'm not managing 25,000 laptops out in the wild and trying to manage every combination of software permutations that would that exist out in that wild. Excellent. Um, I mean, what you're saying is so right.

You know, there was a point, I guess it was when, when Apple first going off Intel a couple years ago, I said, wow, every developer in the world is gonna want to use the M1, right? Because this is the horsepower we need. And of course, they came out with the M1 max, and then I think it's m now there's M two and there's M two plus and all these things.

It's an arms race that never ends, Rob. I mean, I've been in technology 30 years. It's the same old, same old.

Wow. I got so much storage. How am I gonna fill that up?

Oh, don't you worry. We'll fill up every megabit of your storage, you know, my CPU and my floating points and my onboard cash and, and all of these things, man, it flies not fast enough, right? We always need more and more and more.

And so, you know, and, and what we've done is we've, we've tried to maximize software to leverage hardware because hardware's expensive. Um, and that really is kind of, you know, a little bit of the Coda story there. Let, let's talk about, you know, we have plenty of developers out here.

Maybe they see themselves and say, well, I, I I I'd like to try that. What, what, what's the on-ramp form? Yeah, so, um, coder is based on an open source technology.

So like a lot of developer centric, we believe you should be able to try it free and it should always be free and open. com if that's easier to remember and it'll redirect you. And so I would say the vast majority of people experience our open source.

And, and one thing I'm really proud of, of a decision that kind of predates me here, but uh, I think it was the right one, is we never want to feature gate the developer. Uh, so what I mean by that is, look, we're a commercial company. We have to make money.

And so we have an enterprise version, but we will never charge for a feature that we believe a developer needs, developer experience is always free and open. What we do is we, uh, charge for the features that help secure and operate coder at scale inside of a company. Mm-Hmm.

So think of the DevOps team is kind of more the customer, the developer is their customer. Sure. Great.

So yeah, so it's easy to get started. Um, and then one other quick thing, Alan, that I'm, I'm really proud of is we launched something called the Registry. com and it's basically a marketplace of templates and modules.

And so what you can do is you can go in and, and, and pick the environment that most closely or exactly matches yours and you can get up and running in seconds. So, so love Coder, coder is just a blank canvas. You gotta paint something on it.

Uhhuh, you think of those as the brushes and paints that help you get up and running a lot faster. Uh, and so I think it's actually you can get up and running in minutes. Sounds almost more like paint by numbers.

Yeah. I mean, that's the one we already have the picture and you just got to fill in the colors, number one, number two, and yeah, I still remember those. Um, Rob, sounds great man.

I wanna wish you a lot of success. I know as I mentioned, we last saw you as AWS reinvent, so it was November, we're in February. Uh, are you guys doing any other shows coming up?

Oh yeah. I think we'll be at all the DevOps and DevSecOps events, um, that for the rest of the year. So you'll see us, I think the next one will be like, um, CubeCon in Paris would be a good example.

Oh, you, we'll be there streaming live. Excellent. We should have someone reach out to you.

Yeah. If we have, I we might have had someone reach out to you already, but, so, but if not, we'll, we'll, uh, actually you are. Yes.

And, and so we will see you in Paris. How about RSA, you guys doing RSA at all? Yeah, I, I'm based in San Francisco, uh, so I love RSA was always right in my backyard, right there at the Moscone.

Love going. Sure. Yeah.

So we're, we're doing our DevSecOps thing there Monday at Moscone Center, you know, like we do every year. Of course this year it's DevSecOps and ai 'cause you gotta have ai. Yeah.

Um, if we get some great speakers to that. But if you're there, we're also gonna be on broadcast Alley all week. Okay, great.

Uh, doing live. So maybe we could p you pop in. Yeah.

We're also, we're gonna be on the show floor too, doing kinda giving people a taste of what it looks like streaming live from the floor. Yeah. So There's actually a lot we're doing around AI and specifically helping secure AI for developers.

So, so maybe we can get into a little bit of depth on that. You know what, you've got an open invitation, my friend. Anytime you wanna come back on and talk, let me know.

Yeah, that would be super exciting, Alan. All right. Rob Whiteley, CEO coder here on Text Drunk tv.

com or is it cod dot GitHub? com? Was that what you mentioned?

I, yeah, You can go to GitHub. Easiest probably. com.

com, C-O-D-E-R. Taking a break here on Text Drunk tv. We'll be back in just a minute.