The DNA of an Efficient Developer w/ Dan Lines | Ep. 103

In this podcast episode, David and Gary speak with Dan Lines, Co-Founder of LinearB, a fellow software development company, discussing the startup's journey from resignation, to idea to a successful runway and an international business.

Links:

Linearb.io

https://www.linkedin.com/company/linearb/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-lines/

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David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

David: 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome to the biz dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Backes, your host. And I'm joined per usual by Gary Voigt, who I don't have a joke for today. So I'm just going to just let him say something stupid and make fun of a go.

Gary: 0:20

You should have said, I don't have a joke today. But I'm here with Gary void, and he has kind of a joke.

David: 0:26

Oh, that was better. That was better. We should edit that. But we're gonna keep it because it's fine. When you sound intelligent, everyone smile. It's why you pay the big bucks. All the ad dollars coming to me. More important. We are joined by Dan Lyons, who is the co founder and CEO of Linear B. How're you doing, man?

Dan: 0:46

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on today.

David: 0:49

Yeah, glad you're here. Glad you're here. So I'm going to dis ignore the fact that Gary is here all together. And we're just going to nerd out. All right.

Gary: 0:57

I already warned him.

David: 1:00

Well see I have to warn the audience too. There's going to be a much better episode because you're not going to be much in it. So that'd be great.

Gary: 1:05

interject any ideas? Or any thoughts about design at all?

David: 1:10

Yeah, they won't have too many places to skip over. So what I want to talk about so Linear B? Well, first off, give me the 30,000 foot view. What do you guys do?

Dan: 1:20

Yeah, thanks, David. Linear B is a software development management platform. And, you know, actually, for me, I got started as a software engineer many, many, many years ago. I've been in the startup community for a while now. And I kind of made my way from being just, you know, a junior front end developer to a director of engineering to a VP of engineering, all of that great stuff at a company, a former company called Cloud lock in Boston. And when I was the VP of engineering, I was saying to myself, Why do I have data to understand what's going on with my organization? I'm having conversations with my CEO. He's asking me, When are these projects going to be delivered? What are we working on? And you if you go, I'm sure, like, tons of your listeners know, you come on to like, into an executive room. And everybody has data from like sales and marketing and HR and all that stuff. And on the engineering side, oddly, we really don't have too much of that. So I said to myself, and that that company was acquired by Cisco, that last company. So after that is when I found that Linear B. And I kind of just said to myself, why not start a SaaS platform that can show you how efficiently you're delivering on your projects within the DevOps space, whether you're working on and that's what Linear B does for engineering leaders.

David: 2:45

Okay, so here we go, I'm gonna go down the rabbit hole. So we do DevOps and all that good stuff on our side. What do you mean by data? Like, what are you saying? Like, how many commits the nerds are doing? Are you I mean, where what is considered good data for you that the CEO would care about?

Dan: 3:04

Yeah, so there's like three, there's three areas right now that we're focusing on, I'll go into each one of them. But there's a resource allocation. There's your engineering impact metrics, which a lot of the people out there will call like, Dora Dora metrics, we'll talk about what those are. And then you have your DevOps metrics, like your dev experience metrics, usually in like the DevOps kind of world. So when you're talking about resource allocation, it's usually that conversation like your CEO will come to you and say, Okay, you have like 100, engineers, you have 200, engineers, you have 50, engineers, whatever it is, I'm giving you all this money in salary. What are they actually working on? Can you show me in like one view? Are we working on new value for customers? are we fixing bugs? Are we working on like maintenance stuff? Are we delivering on that project that I asked you about? It's like the allocation of like, where is people spending time? That's kind of like the first report that, you know, most leaders are like using our tool for at least to talk to the CEO. Then you get into like the engineering impact metrics. David, you brought up commits, not something that we're gonna be really measuring, like commits or lines of code, or that that type of thing, because that gets into some scary stuff, and like measuring developers and all of that. But really, what it's focused on is, what's your cycle time? Where are the bottlenecks in your, let's say, like your DevOps delivery? Is it in the PR review cycle? Or are you waiting for a PR to review? Is it taking a long time to release? Is it taking a long time to go the staging environment, so it's kind of following the code from when a developer starts working on it all the way out to prod. And all of the stages in between that looking for bottlenecks. That's what we'll call like our impact metrics. And then probably the late latest thing, like you'll see a lot of people talking about developer experience, Dev That's that kind of stuff. What is it like to be a developer at a company? You're, you'll hear like the terminology. Like, there's a bunch of turmoil or like things are getting like, you know, all of that. But what it really means is like, how long are your build times? How long? Are you waiting for your code to get merged? Are you having to like wait a week or something like that? Or can you get a review really fast our builds taking hours and hours, or they minutes. And we'll measure that type of stuff like on the debit side. So those are, those are the three areas that we're focused on.

David: 5:33

Okay. So that's a good high level view. So I want to backup. Now that we've talked about who your company is, and what you do, and how you're a lot smarter than I am, let's back up and talk about I'm going to change gears, we're a heart hiring. And I'm saying this because we just finished I are in a dev, and you work with devs. And you're involved in this. How How is hiring for you right now, is I'll tell you a story. This is a true story. And let you see if you have a similar similar thing we just hired, we put out a link LinkedIn is where we typically put our posts just to say, hey, here's what we're doing. within 24 hours now, maybe 3072. Total, we had over 1000 applicants, which is highly unusual, but at least for our little world, right? There's one position, one remote developer front end position. And if we had gone a year ago, that same job post, we would have gotten in the same time period, maybe 200. Now we're up to 1000. You know, a lot of them just immediately get weeded out because they didn't meet our minimum requirements. Like we, one of the cool things, we use LinkedIn boards, you can say, hey, if you don't have X number of years, like in our case, we wanted three to five years of React experience. If you don't have that, you immediately get an email saying thanks. But no, thanks. That's very nice if that's gone. But still, that that was an order of magnitude more than we'd ever seen before. Are you seeing that on your side as well?

Dan: 7:04

Yeah, well, I think first and foremost, the economy's a little rough right now. So there's kind of like, start ticking up ticking applicants all around? But yeah, I would say like, 1000 applicants? That's a lot. It was a lot. Yeah, that's a ton. That's a ton. Yeah. But I think like, kind of getting to the essence of the question or where I would want to take it is like, what type of people? How do you like find someone that's great for your business. And for us, you know, we're hiring developers, we're also hiring all different, you know, positions, not just developers. And the one thing because you're gonna get a lot of those applicants, I don't know, if you're in a remote setting, we're in a remote setting, you can work wherever you want. So you know, you're gonna get people of all over the world. There's so many smart people out there. What I like to look for, is what we kind of call like, developer DNA. And I'll explain what that means. I mean, it's not just for our developer roles. I just said, what Linear B is, yeah, we help engineering leaders, we help engineering teams, we help platform engineers and DevOps, deliver software on time more frequently. Number one question is like, do you care about that? Is that Is that something that you want to work on? Because we'll get developers that come in? And it's awesome, because they're like, Yeah, I just want to help other developers succeed, I want to make sure that like, the engineering processes, working effectively, I like helping, I like that dev x kind of thing, helping other developers have a great experience. Or, for example, you know, like, let's take like, our customer success team or something like that, you know, Hey, I can't, I used to be an engineer. And then I got into support. And then I got into customer success. Like, those are the people that we find our most successful for. For our business. It's like having that right DNA. And I think that's the best thing that we do the find the right person, at least that Linear B.

David: 9:09

So you guys are looking for kind of a developer mentality, regardless of what the position is, just because that's that's your flavor.

Dan: 9:17

It's a passion thing. Yeah. I mean, I think especially like when, when you're in the startup world, it's a grind. There's like, you're you're putting in some serious hours. You know, there's ups and downs, I'm sure you're all aware of like, you know, things are going well, things aren't going as well, hey, maybe we need to like change the product roadmap shipped, you know, change direction, hey, we're going to do something different. And then, you know, on top of all of that, there's a ton of innovation. And so we just find the people that can come with the best ideas, the most innovation for themselves. What's the next natural step we should take? If we are going through a rough Time can kind of get through that are the people that have the passion for the space. And that's, you know, that's that's kind of why I say they gotta get that DNA right for any business.

David: 10:12

I think the reason so our audience, typically is people who are wanting to start a business, or have recently started a business. And one of the things I thought was interesting about when we talking to you is, a lot of these companies these guys want to dive in is people who want to create something new, and a lot of them are going to go into some form of tech, whether they're technical or not, they're going to need to hire developers. Now that might mean an outsourced team like ours, where you hire the entire team, or it means you're hiring your own people. And I was thinking, your your perspective on that is unique in the fact that this is the world you live in, not only just for your own company, but your whole company is about developers and a whole about them delivering and creating a better pathway to deliver code. So when you're hiring a technical minded person, what do you think the top things are? They should be looking for?

Dan: 11:04

Yeah, okay. So, yeah, let's say that we got the DNA, right. And then because you know, all of that, when I look at engineers, the ones that are, let's say, delivering the most frequently and most are on time, they can take a problem, a big problem, and break it down into small chunks. What does that translate to small pull requests, small bits of code, MVPs, that type of thing. So one of the questions that I usually like to ask a developer, especially if you're looking at like a senior developer, or someone that's gonna, like, you know, lead something specific in the product, or, you know, like deliver something for the product, hey, here's the challenge that we have, we need to deliver feature x, y, and z. Let's do a, let's do a session together of how would we break this down into small iterative deliverables, from the architecture from the product standpoint, because the data that we see in Linear B, and this is stuff that we're measuring all the time, the teams are engineers that deliver with the highest predictability with the highest quality, they have small pull requests. And that's that meant that's like, iterative mentality. So yeah, that would be the the advice that I would give, if I was like working with a software shop, like you are like, deciding to go with with someone else or go with myself. It's like, how are you going to iteratively? Deliver this project for me?

David: 12:33

So let me take that a step up. I'm a CEO, Executive, some sort, who has no idea what you just said, right? Because you're talking about prs. And you're talking about things that they have no idea. So how would I would you translate that into non techie speak? What could I look for, you know, I'm hiring my first Dev, let's say, or I'm interviewing my first dev team, let's say, how would I get the answers you're looking for, in a way that I'm going to understand?

Dan: 13:03

I would say it like this, like, let's say that I was a non technical CEO, you probably know at least what you want to deliver from the prom, you know, feature x, y, and

David: 13:11

z, you know, that's know

Dan: 13:12

a feature, you gotta at least know that. So let's start there. And I would ask, I would say, Hey, here's the problem that we're trying to solve. Here's the feature that I think we need to deliver. Okay, how would you deliver this? Okay, so I put that question out there. And I think there's one of two answers that you're gonna get, one of them is good, and one of them is not so good. Okay. The not so good one, I think is? Well, let me do like a big estimate for you. I'm not, you know, it sounds, it seems like it's gonna be a big project, it's probably going to take us months and months and months of time. So I'm not exactly sure, we probably have to start out with like, pretty large architecture, blah, blah, blah, you know, go into some, like very long explanation that doesn't have an outcome and seems like it's going to take a lot of time. That's not a good answer. The answers that I like yours as like a business and the leader is like, Listen, I don't know every single thing about this feature, because we're just talking about it now. But here's the smallest slice that I think that we could deliver. And here's where I think I could do it in like a few weeks. I don't think we have to set up like an enormous infrastructure. Let's get something small running on AWS and let's find out like the first piece of value and let's deliver it in three weeks. Can you tell me what that would be? That's a super cool answer. Like that is like I think like a leet. I think of like a senior senior developer or leadership mindset, that's what I would be looking for. That's fair. That's fair.

David: 14:55

One of the things that I've been told over and over again, and I would assume this is A general trait that people look for they like when you dive in quickly, meaning, hey, I'm gonna build this thing I got this thing I don't, I don't know exactly what it is. But I want you to help me build it or maybe potentially make you help you build. When they get excited when you start asking questions about their product, and start breaking it down very similar to what you're saying is, when you dive in there rather than Yeah, don't couch it, oh, well, you know, we're going to talk pie in the sky stuff, they want you to get specific. And I think that's kind of where you're going to get in specific, asking those questions, really helps them understand that you're in this to solve the problem not to just collect some cash. And I think that's,

Dan: 15:45

I think that's combining both answers, right. So one, if they can iterate with you on ideas on the product, that means that they probably have some kind of passion there. Cool. I think your product ideas, awesome. What do you think about this, this first delivery, what do you think about that? What's most important? How is the customer going to use it? That's all the passion side, the DNA side. And then the other side of it, which I think is more like a senior leader, or like a senior developer skill type thing is like, Okay, let me break this down in small chunks for you. What can we do? What does an MVP look like? Let's do something in one iteration. You'd like put those two things together, I think you have like a killer engineering team to partner with.

David: 16:27

I agree. I agree. So let me fast forward, you're that same startup guy. But now, you're five years ahead, you've got some success under your belt, you're doing pretty well, you've got a dev team underneath you. Now you might not be the CTO. But let's just assume now for a moment that you are just for this next question. How, what is a good leader in technology? What does that person look like? What are they looking for in that team? How do they know their team is running? Well? And how do you as leader make sure they are running? Well,

Dan: 16:59

I think that's like, actually breaking down exactly what we're doing with Linear B, which I think the industry is kind of struggling with in some of the data that we're showing. But I'll break it down again, into like three aspects for you. I think a great engineering leader have like, let's say, like substantial size, maybe you have like, let's say like 60, or more developers 40, or more developers, something like that. You can come into that CEO meeting and say, Listen, here is the amount of effort that we're investing into each project. Does this align with what you expect or not? That's like the first thing that sets like the conversation in the right way with the CEO? Are we working on the right things? Yes or no. The second thing, I think that makes a great leader is okay, now that we've identified that we're working on the right things, let's talk about when the delivery will actually be. Is it going to be on time? Is it going to be late? Do you already know? What's your prediction? Whether your risks, that's the great second step to the conversation? And I think the third great step to the conversation is saying, Let me pull the curtain back a little bit for you, and show you a little bit about how engineering is actually operating. Is it efficient or not efficient? And let's face it, like this dev experience, stuff is super popular now. Right? It's hard to retain great developers. So let's talk about that a little bit. saying something like, Hey, here, here's how long it's taking us to deliver a piece of code from end to end. Anyone can can understand that you don't have to be like, come from engineering background. It's like we start coding today. How many days does it take to get that code out into production? And let's say for example, that is taking you 14 days. That's a great time. If I am kind of this, like elite engineering leader to say, Listen, I want to talk to you about that. 14 days is far too long. Actually, industry average is about seven days. And I'd like to talk to you, David, about how we should invest more into our dev pipeline or into DevOps to solve this problem, so I can deliver more projects for you. That's like, those three steps is like an elite engineering back to business CEO conversation. And yeah, that would be my advice and what I look for

David: 19:34

fair enough. So how let me keep saying back that's probably that's my new so there Gary, I this I'm now I'm going back we're going so whatever.

Gary: 19:44

And fair enough is coming in quite a bit too.

David: 19:47

Fair enough. Yeah. Just yeah. You know, I am full of nothing, if not predictable about that. Yeah.

Dan: 19:54

Fair enough. Is like I don't know what you're talking about. Okay, well,

David: 19:57

fair enough for me to argue with you. I think what you've said is nice. And I don't have anything to say after that after that. And I say that all the time. It's not just you. That's why Gary has given me great. I liked the idea. So you were a developer, originally, just a dude on a team slinging some code? Hell yeah. And then you moved up into a leadership team lead kind of position. And then you became a VP of engineering? What does that mean? Exactly? I don't think I've ever been that. I should add that to my title, Gary,

Dan: 20:28

like the VP of engineering?

David: 20:30

Yeah. Like, what is that? That's the guy in charge of all engineers is that generally,

Dan: 20:34

yeah, so So usually, the VP of Engineering is reporting directly to the CEO, oftentimes, either the CEO or the CTO. In my case, I was reporting to the CEO. And at the end of the day, all of engineering reports up into you. And you are responsible for the delivery of any and all code, products, projects, features. Yeah, you are

David: 20:59

sure you're the architect as well? Or is there an architect under you, that's reporting to you.

Dan: 21:04

Typically, you'd have an art architect that's reporting to usually like some super genius, you know, person that's like, amazing at, you know, architecting a system, but they report up. So

David: 21:14

the VP is not necessarily the world's greatest coder, the VP is the guy who does leads the greatest coders.

Dan: 21:20

It doesn't have to be, to be honest, I wasn't the world's greatest coder, which is probably why I went more on the management track. But there's two things and this is something that I think it's like, interesting for for the industry right now. When I first became a VP of engineering, with a, you know, it's like a ways back. Now, oftentimes, your job would just be like, the CEO, or the product person tells you to deliver a feature. And all they asked you to do is, when does that feature gonna be delivered? And that's true. So that's kind of like the classic VP II, you know, like, the buzzword around is like operating excellence, like how fast can deliver my stuff? Okay, well, we still need to do that. What's changed now in the industry, which I think is pretty cool. Is a lot of the most successful companies in the world, actually, now are software companies, even behind the scenes. If you think about like a Netflix even, or you think about like a Spotify? Why is Netflix amazing? It works when you click on the video, it's super, like amazing streaming. Actually, Netflix is like one of the greatest engineering organizations in the world. And these VPs of engineering, which I think is great for the industry have changed now from just being, Hey, are you going to deliver this thing on time, to more of that, like business alignment stuff that I talked to you about of like, okay, let's say you have 500 engineers, and the CEO is coming to you and saying, Hey, Dan, like, we have a mission to increase our Arr, like our revenue, or like, we're Netflix, we really need to like, retain customers, we need to retain users. How is what we're doing aligning to that. And that's where I think like, I just want to say that I think VPs of engineering or engineering leaders, like I'm really happy to see them take a step towards that business side, get involved in the business conversation, kind of not just be that delivery monkey, but actually, like, be strategic with the executive team. And that's one of the biggest shifts that I've seen in the last like six years.

David: 23:37

Changing gears again. You went from VP to start in your own business. So now you've been working as your VP of engineering, I'm assuming you have a lot of guys underneath you.

Dan: 23:49

Yeah, so I had like, like, 100 on my team. 100 100 guys and girls.

David: 23:53

100 people underneath you. So you went from that to a team of how many? When you went start on your own as you and your co founder are a couple of people, two people

Dan: 24:02

to me and my co founder. That's it. Tell me

David: 24:05

about that shift. I mean, that's, that's a paradigm shift. Massive, right, you're now you had 100 people doing things for you. Now you're back again, responsible for everything. How was that? Yeah.

Dan: 24:19

It was, it was super fun. I'll tell you a little story about it. So I think one thing, at least for me, and I can kind of speak to my my career and give as much advice as I can. But when I had those 100 people on me, like under me, in that previous company, it was called Cloud lock. I was actually the second employee hired there. So there was the founders. And then there was the first two it was like two engineers and I was one of them like junior engineers. And so one thing that you know, I highly recommend or that worked well, for me is like growing your career through a startup First, so I can remember what it was like when there was only five people. Yeah, you know, at the end of the journey after seven years, and there was an outcome and all of that, and we were acquired, and I had 100 people under me. And a lot of other people, you know, during doing the work, that's much different. But when I went and founded my own company, with my partner, or who we work together at that previous company with, it was more so just like remembering. It was it didn't feel like new, it was more just like, hey, this feels amazing. I remember when I got to do all this hands on work. I remember when I got to code, something I remember when I got to kind of like, invent something with my hands. And I was like, saying that I like early on to my partner, or he actually felt like refreshing, I would say, because sometimes when you get a little bit too high level, it feels like you're not doing anything. And I kind of missed that dopamine hit of like, hey, like my job today is to create, like, one feature or my job today is like, go pitch the company and see if it works like that felt awesome. How was

David: 26:13

your first year being in business? That's almost always I've told the story many times of our first year and how difficult it was, it was just me. I didn't have a co founder. So how was your first year? Was it? Awesome? Was it scary? Was it? Did you have a runway? How did you guys do your first year?

Dan: 26:35

Yeah, great, great question. I think everyone's first year can be a little bit different. But here's how ours went. So first and foremost, I guess you could say we were self funded, we did not have any, you know, investment or backing or, you know, angel investment or anything like that. So neither of us were taking a salary. And we were a little bit fortunate that both of us, you know, had worked for that previous startup. And we weren't, you know, let's say like super well off or anything like that. But we have a little bit in the savings. And what we did is say, hey, let's say that combine, you know, together as a partnership, we have like eight months of runway, or 11 months of runway, something like that. And in that sense, the runway was like how long you can can you survive without a salary. That's what I remember the most. And I remember being super excited for that first, like eight to 10 months. But also, it's a little bit scary, because at least for me, it was the first time in my life that every day my net worth was like kind of like getting less and less and less and less. And I'm watching my bank account drain out, you know, kind of from that previous previous, like decent accomplishment. But it's scary to see yourself lose money, like personally not for the business, but personally every single day. And so it was kind of like for me, I can only speak for myself battling against time of like, okay, I have this like eight to 10 months. I'm going all out to make it happen. I'm working, you know, as many hours as I physically can. I want it to succeed. But there is kind of like that cut off point where we said to ourselves, hey, after 10 months, let's have another conversation, see where the business is at and decide if we, you know, go forward or not.

David: 28:29

So you had did you build the company? Like you guys quit your job, or it sold however that were? And day one you start building? Or were you doing this as a side gig building it up while you're still employed? And then you went live started selling it? How did that work for you?

Dan: 28:46

Yeah, so we were both working at Cisco Systems at the time, which was the larger company that acquired that startup that I had been talking about. So we were both working there. And I resigned. So I had been there for about a year I made sure like my 100 People got settled and made sure that they had good careers they were all taken care of. But for me, I did not want to work for like a super large enterprise. It was the exact opposite with what I was used to. And I didn't want want to do that anymore. So I resigned. I was living in Boston at the time. And I had a girlfriend at the time and we said and she had gotten into school in LA. So we were living in Boston she got into school in LA it was kind of like that time period in the relationship but it was like hey, I'm gonna go to school in LA. Do you want to come are we like ending this like relationship? I said, You know what? I'm gonna come so we did a two and a half week road trip across the US saw you know, all of our friends that we hadn't seen in like 10 years from college stopped at all these cities landed in LA without a plan I was living we were bouncing from Airbnb, the Airbnb. And that's when Ori who was Like my co founding partner called me and said, Hey, man, I saw I heard that you resigned. I also want to resign, and I want to start a company with you. Can we talk? And I said, Absolutely, man, I'd love to start a company. I'm living Airbnb, the Airbnb in LA. And that's when we started idea generating. And we started thinking, Okay, what should we do, and we had a wide range of ideas, we only knew two things we knew we wanted to do something about with people. And data. Those were the things that we felt like we were strongly we felt like like, we really loved people and want to help people succeed. And we also like data. And so we had a ton of different ideas ranging from like the Linear B that everyone knows today with a software delivery management and stuff, all the way to like stuff of like HR analytics, and that type of thing. And so one of the most important decisions that we made those happy that we made it is to like not go with the HR stuff, because we didn't know how to do that wasn't like our domain, we stuck with what we knew that was the first good decision that we made. We stayed in engineering, we stayed in software delivery, we really knew it. And the way that we run it ran is that already coded, the first, let's say back end piece of software that collected all of these analytics. And I took those analytics and put them into a slide deck, the results of them. We so I was kind of doing the sales side, he was doing the engineering side. And all we did was go on LinkedIn, I reached out to as many engineering leaders, as as I could find and say, Hey, we have this amazing what we think is a really good idea. We can measure some of the analytics about your engineering organization. Would you like to see data about your engineering team? And they said, Yeah. And so that was actually our first delivery that we did for free, at that time, was just to show a presentation based on a back end piece of software that showed all of engineering analytics for VPS that I met on LinkedIn.

David: 32:10

Nice. And so that was free, right?

Dan: 32:13

So that was free. So okay, yeah, that was free. So we said to ourselves, let's just justify the idea. Let's just see if it's a good idea or not, not a good idea. And we got, you know, let's say 10 for free. 1112 13. So we got past that 10 marker, and we started to say, Wait, people are really liking this, we're literally reaching out to random heads of engineering. They're saying this looks really cool. I would like to see analytics about my engineering org. We're delivering them in a PowerPoint, not even like a SaaS application. And they're saying, This is dope, can you give me more. And that was the point that we said, I think we're really onto something. Let's hire our first engineer. So we hired a contractor with like, the little money that we have, and turn this into a SaaS application. And as we were turning into a SaaS application, all of those early adopters came over to it. So that you know, those 10 to 15 to 20 that we had with just like the slide deck. Yeah, for sure came over. And we started making our first deals for like a really small amount of money. And that's when, you know, we kind of got our first investor who is an amazing guy. His name is Arielle. He's kind of like a serial entrepreneur has had like some amazing successes and now helps, you know, other founders. And he's the one that said, we pitch them, we show them what we created. And he said, Guys, I'm putting like, like on the spot. He just said, I'm putting 1 million into this right now. Go hire an engineering team and make this happen. And we did. That was how we launched.

David: 34:02

Nice, man. That's yeah, that's a sweet story right there. Yeah. And so now how long has Linear B been around? So that story

Dan: 34:13

that I was just telling you was in the 2018 timeframe. Okay. And that was when that was like our first eight months where again, we were going to say like, let's, you know, go all out, let's use our own money. And right when we got that in investment was just like, I'm thinking back, but let's say coming into that 2019 period, and that's where we started and hiring a development team and landing customer deals. So 2019 is where I would say it really took off in 2018. Was that experimental idea generating phase? Yeah. Okay.

David: 34:50

So how Where are you guys at now in your life cycle? Are you making money and self sufficient? Are you still living off of a runway where you guys said

Dan: 35:00

So here's, here's where we're at today. Now we actually have 1000s of users and customers, we've taken $70 million in investment. So we've got in, you know, amazing, you know, VC investment from some of the top tier VCs. We have over 100, you know, employees. And we have a very, let's say, healthy runway. And we are growing rapidly in our arr. You know, 10s of millions plus. Yeah,

David: 35:38

that is, man, that's exciting. Yeah, that is, it's cheesy to say, I'm proud of you, because that makes no sense at all. But it's still very, very cool. Not sure the right way to answer that. But I mean, success is always fun to see, right? When someone takes an idea out of nowhere and execute on that. Well, it's an exciting story. It doesn't matter what the industry is, it doesn't matter what you're doing. It's always exciting. And because it's rare, right? It doesn't happen a lot. That's the people who find out that big pixel was 10 years old. And they're like, shocked, because I should have gone out of business 37 times by now. That's the statistics, right? Yeah. And so when you when you find someone who's done that it sounds easy, especially, you're surrounded by Silicon Valley, and whatnot over in LA. But for every story you hear on TechCrunch, there's 1000, that just never even got past their first year. And so, very cool. Very cool. I always love to hear good six success.

Dan: 36:33

Thank you. I appreciate that. And I hear where that vibe is coming from. Because I what I found during my timeframe is there's really like this entrepreneurship community, and everybody's rooting for each other. You know, that's the other other thing that I do want to say there's, it's hard to say, and just like stories, but there's so many people early on, and we were all together, you know, some some companies made it some didn't. But yeah, I think it's kind of just like the entrepreneurship community is while you're like saying you're proud, that's what makes me proud of other people that make it to for sure.

Gary: 37:06

Speaking of other people making a dent, what would you say from your journey you've experienced? What would you what would your top three pieces of advice be for any new entrepreneurs or new business starting up?

Dan: 37:18

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I'll try to limit it to three. And there are, there are three that come to mind. And there's some of them that I've already been talking about and sprinkle them in. But let me try to be concrete with it. The first tip that I have, I think it's highly advantageous Tejas to choose a direction, or a product direction that you really know, or you have personally experienced yourself. And that goes back to that DNA because there's so many decisions early on, and you don't have data and you're like going by intuition. And you might not know which direction there's a million decisions to make. But if you can say like, at least for us, we can say wait, I've been ahead of engineering before, I know what they would want in the product, I know what they might want to see from like a marketing thing. So that's my first piece of advice. Go in the direction that you've experienced before, I think it will increase your odds from going to zero, the one makes sense. My second piece of advice actually relates back to your hiring question. Hire people that have the same or similar passion, or background as you do. And again, like my example was, hey, let's try to get you know, success people or salespeople or marketing people. Like for us right now I'm leading the product organization. And one of the greatest things is, a lot of them have been engineers before and then moved into product. So hire people with that same DNA, and that allows for innovation to happen outside of just yourself as a founder so you can start relying on other people. And then my third piece of advice is in a little bit of a different direction. Like David, I know, you know, because you said you've been doing this for 10 years, and there's a lot of ups and downs. There'll be like a lot of good days, there'll be a lot of bad days. There'll be days where you think this is amazing. I'm in the total right direction, you know, we're gonna make it's gonna be awesome. There's gonna be days that you're like, I don't even know what I'm doing. Maybe I just completely you know, pick the wrong thing or I'm not good enough or whatever. And so like, what's worked well for me is to try to stay level headed every day. Don't get too high when things are going well. Don't get too low when things are going bad. And have like a mental mental health and physical health plan for yourself. Which it took me a while to realize. But now for example, I've like invested into like, you know, personal trainer and make sure that I'm at least taking a little time to say like mentally well, I will be my third piece of advice.

Gary: 40:17

That's good advice he had David has a little metaphor. What was the metaphor you had with the two songs playing in your head?

David: 40:26

Oh, yeah, the, I've said this a million times, there was a speech I heard years ago, I take no credit, even though I can never remember the person said that. They said every founder has two songs in their head, everything is awesome by the Lego people. And everything is broken by Bob Dylan. Those are both playing. And that is 1,000%. True. And when the reason that stuck with me, and I think it resonates so well is because you feel alone, most of the time when you're doing this. And it is nice to hear that everyone thinks they're a failure, at least to a certain degree. And because all it's just like any social media or whatever, when people post about their startup or whatever, it's only the absolute best. It's only the magical rainbows and unicorn moments. And when you see enough of those, and you don't have that rainbow moment you're in, you're in the doldrums. And you your biggest client just left you or whatever, right, a bad day. You feel alone. And I thought it was really powerful to hear this guy was really successful who was given the speech, obviously. And he had that same ups and down craziness that I was having. And that that was just that's why it runs those true to me.

Dan: 41:40

Yeah, totally makes sense. I love those two songs. Because yeah, I feel that I still feel it today. Yeah, good days and bad days. Yeah,

David: 41:49

for sure. For sure. So if anybody wanted to get in touch with you, and learn more about Linear B and learn more about you, in particular, how would they get in touch?

Dan: 41:58

Yeah, I mean, if you want to learn more about Linear B, you can check out linear b.io You know, all of the normal stuff there. But if you're like, entrepreneur trying to make your way, you know, you can hit me up on LinkedIn, you know, message me or whatever. And, yeah, that's the best way to get in touch.

Gary: 42:15

We'll make sure those links are in the show notes as well. Now, if anybody wants to reach out to us has any comments or questions about the show? You can put the comments below this video or you can email us at Hello at the big pixel.net You can also reach out to any one of our social media channels.

David: 42:32

Dan, this has been a blast. Thank you so much for your time, man.

Dan: 42:36

Yeah, same back. Thanks for having me on, guys.

Gary: 42:38

Yeah, I really enjoyed your story, man. Nice to meet you.

David: 42:41

Alright, everybody. Well, thank you so much. We will talk to you all next week.