Ep. 43 - Founder to Founder with Harpreet Singh of Launchable

[Music] welcome to another founder to founder interview from gun.io your source for hiring worldclass Tech Talent today gun. I's CEO and co-founder tja yanamandra sits down with harprit Singh co-founder and co-ceo of launchable a company on a mission to make software testing faster and smarter okay here's Tasia do you remember when we thought that like Co came from like eating bats or Pengalin or something like this maybe that's still the pr I didn't think that thesis updated did it I didn't don't remember that I think I think now the majority opinion is that it came from the Wuhan Institute of corology oh is it okay I think so I don't know I might be speaking out of term but this P at some point I stopped you know I I was like you know this this pulled you into so many negative directions I'm like I don't need this so I just stopped paying attention to it and I'm like I'm going to just focus on you know building a company just being positive and like that's where I've like really directed my uh attention to in fact like I used to be this voracious vicious news consumer and I just completely cut that out and I'm so much happier for it it's like you know life is so much better not knowing what you know what's going on around in the world focusing on yeah that's interesting I mean that seems to be like a Viewpoint that a lot of people independently arrive at you know I've heard that from a lot of my friends who you know like when you're put when you're jamming through a lot of information through like your processor you can't afford to have like things that don't help you drive business value like going through your your head and that seems to be like a uh yeah something that a lot of people arrive at and I'm curious like how you sort of arrived at that like how did you notice that this was taking unnecessary CPU Cycles away from things that were important to you um it wasn't uh unnecessary CPU Cycles um it was more the realization so I meditate a lot okay and so I'm like this active meditator uh guy and I found that you know I was I was unhappy right and and like when I went down this thread I realized it was because I was paying so much attention to the media and the media is is based on this thing where um they you know there's sort of constantly rubbing on that wound to keep you irritated and 90% of those things don't matter yeah right so I I tried this experiment I was like on Reddit all the time I tried this experiment I'm going to give it up and like you know 3 months later I was you know much much happier and I'm like I'm going to just continue with this what what were your favorite subreddits just curiously I was uh big into New Tropics at some point um I was into you know some Financial subreddits yes stayed away from politics but occasionally any top subreddit that came up with uh the topic of the day I would just followed up gotcha yeah that's cool I I was talking to my friends and just for fun we were looking at like you know like your Robin Hood account you just have like some fun ridiculous trads that you just just for fun just to see like what would happen and we were looking during the time when like I think that was around January February 2021 and so you know yeah that's that's when I started like looking at like Wall Street bets that subreddit I I don't know I don't know they made a movie about this recently it's on really yeah um I forget what it's called I'll send you the name if you YOLO your earnings it was like all right man please go ahead and then I discovered that they have like some some person on YouTube makes videos of people who YOLO their earnings and then you have like this oneline you know update coming from them man I just lost everything I don't know what to do and and it's like this guy makes these YouTube videos I found them kind of hilarious and I was like oh man this this shouldn't be hilarious this is really tragic yeah it's it's it's like a tragic comedy in some ways you know um there was this so there's this guy he's like a financial like kind of uh I don't know blogger his name is um ramit SEI and I think he has a show on Netflix and one of his first episodes was about a guy and a he and his wife had made like you know I mean a substantial amount of money that would have paid down their mortgage from basically gambling on stocks during the p i mean that's what it is right it's like a casino they had they had gotten the sum of money and instead of paying down the house they were like let's just continue to play like a roulette and they ended up basically going to Zero from they started even you know lower than that and so I don't know this is crazy time and I I it's interesting it's like the high mind is not a good source of investment advice that's my totally totally I agree with you yeah yeah cool okay so do you do you still meditate daily yeah I do I do yeah I so good enough part of my day actually where does that tradition come from is that something that you picked up yourself or something you saw your family do or uh my family did some but I I I generally picked up and I really liked it and I kind of I've now done this for like 20 25 years plus actually so it's been a while and uh yeah it's you know some people run some people bike uh I meditate uh it makes for a much more comfortable hobby U but I generally find the practice pretty good tell us about like how you grew up where you grew up you know what you were interested in growing up how you find your way um into entrepreneurship yeah I grew up in Mumbai India just about the time where computer science was really just about to take off just taking off is where I went to college and I went to a very small small College in city called Pune India small by Indian standards but I think there's still like a few million people at least there and this was a you know computer science you know school it was quite a unique opportunity where like you know you have a small cohort all in like you know doing CS um I graduated and joined a small company called persistent systems there which was a startup and if you were good enough that's where you went and that's where I went and um uh and this you know I got influenced by the amazing founder this company is like listed on the Indian Stock Exchange and I I looked at what he was building and I think that s the seeds of like ah it should be doing something like this and I realized that uh I wasn't good enough and to get good enough I needed to do a master's I looked around and I was like all right us is the place to go do a masters and I landed in Cincinnati of all the places um and did a masters um I came in to do a masters in AI this was 9798 wow um didn't end up doing it for various reasons in AI but did it in data and I joined a company called Sun Microsystems which you know was the Google of its days in a division that was building Java which was you know the place to be in so I landed there as an engineer and U was there for 10 years all through I felt like I need to be in a smaller place I I you know this is too big and then in I think 2010 after 10 years after getting all the green card and all that stuff that you have to do as an immigrant I joined this company called cloudbees um which was founded by uh the founder of U uh J boss which was acquired by red hat and this was the company less than 10 people at that time and I stayed with them for eight years taking this company from 0o to 500 people and then from zero in product to 50 million in AR when I left and then I joined a company called atlassian uh where I kind of went back to a big company worked for the CEO for atlassian bit bucket um and then um decided I needed to go back and do my own startup and I started launchable so that's in short is my journey over the years um to come into entrepreneurship H how did you decide that you weren't good enough and needed to get a master's uh the people that the founder hired there were you know had masters from either mtex that's what it is called there from iits which is a premier school right right uh the CEO himself had a PhD from uh somewhere in Indiana I think and so the people that he had were like you know had masters from us and come back to the to India and that's that's what he was hiring and I was one of the few kids who had a bachelor and I could clearly see the difference between sort of my grasp on the fundamentals and the grasp on the fundamentals with somebody who you know had gone through the mass program and that's where I decided I needed to do this I mean to peel back that decision a little bit more I know it's a long time ago but how did you determine that it was definitely a degree versus maybe some intensive study on your part that was that could be self-directed the time I grew up in degree really mattered so that was one um I also think um in hindsight I also think that people now undervalue the fact that somebody's taken the time to curate these courses and you know you know pacing you through them and the fact that you're sitting in a pressure cooker for two years going through the program versus kind of taking a course here and there right um for some reason that gets devalued now so I actually valued that experience and then I also have a very continuous learning kind of growth mindset mentality I just realized it's called growth mindset now yeah and I was like well you know what uh going to the us is going to be a nice opportunity you know looking at how people learn in a different country it's going to be a nice opportunity and I also grew up at a time where like not a whole lot of resources were on the internet like you couldn't find AI uh courses on the internet you had to go to school so that's all those kind of made their way into the decision gotcha I mean it seems like that that that was like a key decision point and then also an inflection point in terms of like the cascading set of decisions that you took after you came to the US got your Masters here joined Sun joined atlan and so on and so forth I'm curious did you you know as you look through the options in terms of starting your own company H how is your company configured like are you sort of bicontinental or are you guys based mostly in the US do you split time yeah we are a us-based company um and we have Engineering in uh Japan okay so yes it is bicontinental but not in India and us it's India and Japan gotcha and so we in my company like everything is a very intentional thought out decision uh that's one of the cultures that we brought in intentionality is a key word for us uh you have to make a case for everything uh and uh the reason for going to Japan was a my co-founder and coo is Japanese and um he wanted to do something for Japan you know uh bring in the US sort of culture there and two uh we felt we could hire really solid you know technical people out in Japan um you know when we raised it was like crazy times in the US like hiring people in the US as a startup was not that you know appealing yeah so a couple of those decisions kind of all came together and that's why we hired in Japan that's cool yeah having a multilingual kind of founding um Team allows you to Arbitrage so much right which is amazing that's like such a competitive advantage that people don't appreciate you know so okay intentionality that's interesting what when you say make a case what satisfies the condition of making a good case in terms of driving forward a decision to you um so uh we adopted something called the daisy culture okay I don't know if you know about that no so atlassian has this culture and it's a template in conference called Dy so decisions approval C stands for something I stands for something actually I thought you met daisy as in [Laughter] like yeah I like that's a different culture that's that yeah that would be a very different culture so this framework is called Daisy framework and so what you do is you essentially write up you know a one pager it's a Confluence template you call out the choices right you write the pros the cons and you make a case for it and you recommend uh something right and the fact that you're sitting down and thinking about it and writing it out already you know makes it a much more higher quality decision you know ask than just getting on a call and saying hey T I'm about to do this think this is a good idea yeah it's like no no no tell me why this is a good idea and like um and then you do that and you make somebody an approv whoever that might be and that approver says yes right and then there's a bunch of people who are informed about the decision so it isn't like uh decision by democracy like everybody gets to say something it's like everybody say something but the approver is you know one person whose job is to approve that it might be the CEO it might be the product manager it might be the product marketing manager whoever that is but that's the context you build that and you you know put that in front of your colleague and you know interestingly like between me and kosek even the the name of the company was a DAC that we did together and we put that in like we you know there were tens that we went through and we called out why this what are the criterias that we are looking for and how that should be and I don't remember the specifics but that intentionality kind of came in even before setting up the that's that's amazing two questions then how do you determine what elevates in terms of importance to this type of decision-making framework and then how do you I mean assuming that both of yall are equally invested in what the name of the company is how would you clear and pass the threshold of let's say approval in that situation most decisions are D's okay because creating a DAC isn't too expensive right all I'm asking you is to do is write down your thoughts like that's I think that should be bare minimum right um now a number of new people were not used to this culture go like well like that just seems a whole lot but the advantage ends up being because most decisions are daes you know when three months down the line tja says uh well you didn't do this it's like no no no we actually had a discussion about this you know here's the da it's like okay did something change here because you want us to do something else and then you kind of go back and refresh yourself on that and say like yeah yeah these made sense at that point maybe something's changed now and we have to change their decision that's fine right but what happens organizationally because decisions are being taken sort of on the Fly you tend to forget all the criteria that went into so you know dy's document that nicely to your latter question what makes like you know we both are equally invested um it was a very interesting experience because we both had to make a compelling case on why like you know uh why a particular name right it's like oh you came up with Fu I don't like it it's like no no no why why didn't you like it and it's like because it doesn't sound well okay so one of the criteria it it has to sound well or maybe you know it's not rememberable like I had we had couple of names that were it rememberable and you're like okay remembering rememberable I don't know if that's a word but remember ability yeah was a criteria and like that's how we ended up in launchable it like all right that people can remember yeah well after this call I'm going to do my research on that decision making framework it's it's funny we hired a guy and one of his first things was like why are we not documenting decisions and I was like that's a good point we should probably start doing that so yeah it's it's it's a very good framework I I think that's one and the second thing that we do very well it's a very conference based culture it is we document everything m and and that was also intentional um in primarily uh because I didn't you know when you were bu building a multi-continent team there seems to be an expectation that everybody shows up like you know after work hours on a meeting or before work hours on a meeting then all they're doing is they're just swapping notes right and it's just a wasteful you know time and so we we really focus on a work life kind of balance m um and the idea was like when I write something I have provided enough context for my Japanese colleague to get up in the morning and see my thought process right if if that includes a dayy you can see all the thought process he can see all the comments and so on and then ideally he doesn't have to set up a 30 minute call just to for me to kind of come back as a parot and regurgitate things for him so we managed to kind of get away from a lot of um you know unintentional meetings or like regularly scheduled meetings because we document everything pretty pretty well gotcha and that's something that you kind of get your head wrapped around when you come into the companies like well when they said we document everything they weren't joking about it they do document everything yeah do people ever complain that the that the documentation cost is High I mean I imagine one or two people do but it's not yeah some do but very quickly um you come they come to this place that well you know you are on the other side you don't have to get on a call and you can just read a you know an update in the morning and you catch up on most things uh and the other thing is we actually hire for certain values and one of the things that I do look for is like your ability to kind of make a cogent case and so you hire for those those abilities as well the few that I let that slide those were the people who had a problem I can understand that yeah if you violate your values in hiring then it is not good yeah because a little bit of daylight becomes a problem later for sure exactly it does not get solve with time yeah that's interesting um well let's let's back up a little bit like tell us about your company um tell us about um you know how you kind of conceived of the opportunity um all yeah super interesting to hear so your audience since your audience is develop are developers um I'll just back up a bit um I have been in the devops space uh for now gez you know before devops was a term and one of the most popular tools in there is called Jenkins uh have you heard of them uh yes yeah so my co-founder is actually the creator of Jenkins right and so we part partnered together over the years uh bringing devops transformation to various organizations we've worked now 15 years together um when this was incepted at some Microsystems as harson and um so when we um we've been helping people and the idea is you know bring in continuous integration continuous delivery deployment we are the leading voices in the market for it what we noticed was people like they spend months if not are kind of doing these devop transformations to ship faster yeah and they weren't shipping still they weren't shipping as fast as they thought they would yeah uh so about four years back him and me got together and we discussing about this you it's one of our usual Friday ketchups and we were like there's a problem here and the other thing we were looking at is like seems like people aren't paying enough attention to AI machine learning there is some value here and we could use the data that is coming out from your software delivery life cycle and use machine learning to actually do something about this problem and his Insight um was that you know when people set up these you know devops Transformations they set up these pipelines U all that gets automated that's fantastic but you know what like the biggest problem is testing you have to run your tests your tests keep on increasing year after year you're running them it's it's like a tax not in a bad way you have to do that otherwise you ship bad quality software but that is what is adding to the delays in organization right and so we came to this place that we can use AI in machine learning um and look at tests and we could do very interesting things and that sort of became the seed of the the problem and the interesting thing that we could do is we could could we built something called predictive test selection and what predictive test selection does is it looks at the core changes that are coming in and it can predict which tests are likely to fail right so if you can predict which tests are likely to fail you don't have to wait for the entire test Suite to run you can really go straight to the tests that are likely to fail and run them right and if you run them you can run you know 10 or 20% of the test to get the 90% of the signal that you care about and that reduces your test execution time that optimizes your test times and that you know drastically cuts down the feedback time to devs and that improves the iteration right and like you can iterate way way faster because you're getting guess what you're getting feedback much faster that's how we ended up here so in terms of timeline you you said that you sort of identified the the seed of the problem at Sun at Sun he built Jenkins right okay and we went to a company called cloudbees which built a business around Jenkins right devops so that's where you know we actually spent eight years sort of helping companies through CI CD OB Transformations and that fed us enough understanding of like the problem that Engineers fa while delivering it and then I took a HST to hius is wrong word but I went to atlassian for a year in to work on bit bucket which is the GitHub uh right competitor and then we both got together and said like well you know gez the problem is people are still taking Oodles of time delivering software how can we fix this and this is our iter two to go fix that problem that's cool so like the idea was in gestation for like a long time and you guys got some reps and thinking through and solving it and then finally came to get build a company around on it that's cool yeah that's a cool that's a cool story um how's it how's it like running your own business now any different than before I mean I imagine materially so yeah um yeah my role has been VP of product and you know in the startup you do what's required um so I've transitioned more into like sales and goto marketing so like that has been the biggest change for me where earlier like I would be assisting somebody else now like I kind of have to do that yeah um you have to do this I have to do this uh I find it enjoyable actually um that's one of like maybe going to growth mentality like U picking different skill sets is something that I really enjoy and um as a CEO it's very interesting to get like a different Viewpoint like you know you you're worried about uh like you're running a few months ahead at the same time you're at the same place and you're you're seeing all these pieces going together so it stretches you in all sorts of directions um even more so than the product role product role stretches you quite a bit Yeah I enjoy it actually um it depends on the day as well some days are really hard some days you know if you found me today on one of those days you I me it's It's a Grind but most days it's just a fun thing to come in and like pick up oh you know something on the S side so think on the marketing side so think on the product side I enjoy it how do you maintain um your continuous learning posture what are some resources that like are your go-tos or what's like your just General learning workflow look like I don't quite have a learning workflow um I mean I tried bolting a few on over the years I I just find that I I'm like a voracious reader and then at some point there'll be a thread that I want to pull and that gets me fascinated enough and I I'll just read through it um I tend to read a lot of books if there's a course I'm usually signed up to it and unlikely finish it but at least I've got my you know beak wet to kind of understand that so that's how I did to do it you know there was a point where I I would beat myself that I'm you know I'm not coding anymore I'm taking coding courses but I just in this place where like there's only few cycles that I get and so I maximize them by reading something interesting yeah what what are some of the interest that like what are some of the more surprising things that you've learned along the way in building your company it's not surprising but it was like just keeps underscoring it's like we built a problem that was for Enterprises and that you would think is a really good thing like I saw like a really enterpris really meaty problem like you know we have BMW's customer um we have Sony as a customer um but the sense of urgency that big companies have and the pace that they work with is is so much slower than you know when you're sitting on this side on the startup side of the house right and it you if you had asked me would I be surprised about it I would be like no no that's kind of understood but no I'm still surprised on how slow and how long these things take you know so are you involved in the BD side of the business right now yeah I am how do you okay this is maybe like a tactical question but how do you hold in your head like the urgency that you have in terms of like needing the get you know let's say progress in a sales cycle with an Enterprise customer but not so much that it becomes obvious and maybe scary to the to the person or to the you know company that you're trying to work with and like respect their processes for decision making like how do you hold those two things in your head and still get a deal done I don't think you have as much control as you like to think you have because getting getting their attention is problematic right yeah so like you kind of do what you need to do you re reach out to them and you do that but you know for them you're a small vendor you're you know they they will run the cycle that you're running um at best what I've seen work is you be transparent right um and treat the other person on the side as not you know the sale that you're closing but you call out like as a startup you have XYZ challenges and you appreciate if you got a signal right yeah and I have found that to work quite a bit you know people go out outside your norm and they'll tell you like you know this might not be coming or this might be coming and like they provide you that Intel and they respect you for that so transparency and honesty I think is a you know is a bar that is something that I tend to use we have a a deal right now that's in motion where we're helping a big company hire a bunch of devs and the um the Reps on that deal are like very frustrated that this company is not performing exactly how we need them to to be able to close the components faster and like I can see our team getting frustrated and it's like well they have a lot of things on their plate they might not exactly behave the way that we need them to or expect them to and like okay yeah yeah I as a vendor I don't think you have a whole lot of levers right so relationship building is one that you can lean into and I think Honesty is one that you lean into and more primarily to set your own expectations right yeah yeah that's so true what advice would you have knowing what you know now let's say for yourself you know 10 years ago 15 years ago as you're getting started one I think I could have done this much earlier in my career by myself um I started the company in my 40s um but so that that's something that I could tell myself that you know uh going and starting a company is not as huge a risk as you normally would like to you know like to think uh that's that's primarily it and the second one I think is uh going to a smaller company than a bigger company right so I stayed at Sun for 10 years I passionately LED that company it's like as an engineer was the best thing but I knew I had the entrepreneurial mindset and you either have it or you don't if you have the entrepreneurial mindset go to a smaller company as early as possible primarily to pick different roles and get to know people in different roles because when you go build your own company you're likely going to hire those people and having that network is important right understanding how a different function works is really really important because as a CEO I think uh every person you hire does that job that you hire them for better than you do yeah but you are the one person who could literally sit in each of these rooms and pass off for like a person in that you know organization yes so if you're able to plant yourself in different organizations and different teams and get their mindset that's the most valuable thing you can do on the journey to being an aprene that's powerful awesome um okay so since this is going out to like a bunch of Engineers how can people onboard themselves onto your product and just get a sense of you know how it works yeah so um I'll just U um answer a little more extensively than you would expect so when I was telling you the story where we came to this place where we built this engine called predictive test selection yeah what we found was the reason people were using us was to triage issues you know it's that workflow that happens when you run these tests and then you get this fire hose of these test failures and you're trying to figure out what do I do yeah right yeah I have 500 failures is is there like one underlying issue like my database is disconnected or there 500 independent issues which is a big problem right so people were like reducing their test time to kind of get a sense of that and as we looked at that we realized oh shoot we can do something very interesting here there seems to be a problem that nobody in the market is looking at so we um you know we've um we building some we built something where we can now use gen and all the stuff that is happening in the recent years to actually intelligently classify your test failures and get to the root cause faster right so if you ask me what we do now it's really uh use AI machine learning to intelligently classify your test failure so that you get to root causes faster and reduce test execution time right um and provide insites like flakiness and so on right if your tests are unhealthy we can tell that to you so what I'm actually doing today is uh you can go to our website you can sign up it's likely going to come to me or somebody in my CS organization we are onboarding people we have a beta going for this particular feature set um that I think individual contributors devs and QA teams and manager engineering leaders will find very useful so just go up launchable in.com sign up if you quality is a focus um you have nightly integration tests um you're dealing with fires of failures and trying to figure things out we you know AI can be a co-pilot to helping there right so that's where we are today you sign up it comes to a couple of people and we'll reach out and get you on to the beta program and get you to try the product gotcha if you if you want predictive test selection again go sign up on the website and we'll kind of get you to use predictor test selection that's that's cool so are so sort of agnos to team size like an individual can sign up that they're working on okay awesome yeah it's a it's usually done by yeah it's it's agnostic it's it's a very horizontal solution um we brought in the ethos from Jenkins which works across various tools across you it doesn't matter what tool there is in your DeVos pipeline Jenkins works with it so we brought that on so if you have any testing framework um any you know UI tests integration test nightly tests we just work across that's like one turn key approach that works across things that's cool okay awesome you heard it here guys sign up uh and we will know whether you signed up or not because it will be a track so I'm pressuring everybody to do it um sweet so working people find you on the interwebs um where can they get in touch if they just want to pick your brain and for launchable you can come to launchable link.com and that's the place to come to me uh I'm not on Twitter I prefer not to be there as much so I'm on LinkedIn so if you reach out to me on LinkedIn that's a place uh I do like my own personal blogs occasionally which is on awaken with her.com uh I'm about to start an interview series of entrepreneurs myself okay record them so yeah awaken with our would be a place to come in and you know hopefully gotcha sweet well I will check that one out that sounds interesting um I'm a not only a producer but a consumer of these types of interview so all right okay well I'm about to kick off I I just ran through my first couple of interviews awesome all right thanks for you're listening to the founder to founder podcast powered by gun.io Frontier Network we release a new episode every Thursday morning so be sure to subscribe on Spotify Apple podcasts Stitcher or wherever you stream your music please leave us a review and share with your friends you can follow us online at the frontier pod or drop us a line at team gun.io to get in touch about hiring worldclass Tech [Music] Talent

Channel: Gun․io

Views: 1,446

Keywords: Gun.io, Frontier, Podcast, Developer, Hiring

Id: 1wmCx_QzOxw

Length: 39min 26sec (2366 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 15 2024