Moisey Uretsky & Mitch Wainer
Co-Founders Digital Ocean
Discussion
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Mitch Wainer
@mitchwainer · Co-Founder of DigitalOcean
Hey everyone! Moisey Uretsky and Mitch Wainer here, co-founders of DigitalOcean, the simple cloud infrastructure provider built for developers. We're honored to be here on ProductHunt and we're looking forward to answering any questions!
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Jacob
@geostyx · IT Support/Programmer
What motivates you to keep improving your product? Any tips for staying focused on a single product?
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Moisey Uretsky
@moiseyuretsky · CPO
@geostyx
Hey Jacob,
For us it was never about building a huge company, it was about scratching our own itch with our product. We got very fortunate that we were able to build a successful company out of that, but our focus has always been on simplicity. It's our second core value after love. So that continuously drives us in our product thinking especially as we continually evolve the product with more features.
Certainly complexity creeps in but when we've been talking about simplicity for years everyone at the company is constantly thinking about it. And it's definitely a huge challenge for our product design team (btw, we're hiring ;) ) - but that's what makes it exciting.
Can you make something of increasing complexity simple by focusing on elegance.
As for staying focused, the best tip I can offer is obsess over everything you add, and always ask what you can remove.
Thanks
DaKnOb
@daknobcs · CEO at IDAspis
How close do you get to new employees? Do you meet each one of them personally?
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Moisey Uretsky
@moiseyuretsky · CPO
@daknobcs
Ben is still the final interview for every single employee. Unfortunately I don't get to meet each new employee personally, but I'm always open to a 1:1 with anyone in the organization at any time. I also run a book club at DigitalOcean where we discuss some of the business books that have really shaped the foundation of DigitalOcean and that's a great opportunity to interact with new employees as well.
Thanks!
Rudrajit Tapadar
@rtapadar · Software Engineer, Symantec
What are some of the services you plan to offer this year? Do you have PaaS in mind? What are your plans for India?
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Moisey Uretsky
@moiseyuretsky · CPO
@rtapadar
Hi Rudrajit,
This year we have some big things coming. We are going to be doing a product release around expanding storage options for customers and also around improving analytics for our customers around how their droplets are running. We also have two teams working on the networking layer to really improve the feature set there. Those should start rolling out in Q2 and from there on we hope that we have a good cadence of releases.
As for india: 😁
Thanks!
Alex Rodriguez
@headhanchoarod · Founder/CEO at WorkMand & Code2040 EIR
Hey Mitch and Moisey! Thanks for taking the time to do this live chat. Have been following Mitch's journey since your call-in on TWIST and big fans of the work DigitalOcean has done and love that you're partnering with 500 startups on a diversity & inclusion summit. A few questions I'd love for you to answer:
1.) Best advice to entrepreneurs who are getting started. What advice would you give to yourself if you were 21 again?
2.) You're a strong co-founded team. What's the best way to build/recruit a strong co-founding team when first starting off
3.) How can we improve diversity and inclusion in other cities such as the Twin Cities?
4.) Best advice for those applying to TechStars?
Thanks guys! :)
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Moisey Uretsky
@moiseyuretsky · CPO
@headhanchoarod
Hey Alex,
1. Read more and get mentors.
- I've always loved reading and education but for the first 8 years of being a cofounder I didn't read a single business book and that was definitely to my detriment. Then I started reading business books voraciously and that made a huge impact and actually is the primary reason for DigitalOcean's success. The second is to get mentors. And as you grow in your career its important to keep expanding that network as the challenges you face evolve. When the mentors aren't available, that's where the books come in.
2. Surprisingly, at the beginning it's very self-selecting. Meaning, there are some people in the world that are willing to take on huge risk, work extremely hard, live and breath something for months and years with no signs of progress. I don't have anything specific here, other than something in your gut just tells you this is the right person. The same is true for many of our early hires.
3. There's no single answer to this question, I think it's a culmination of factors. There was a great blog post talking about how cofounders are often from privileged families and the opportunities that open up as a result of that. So there are macro economic factors like that, access to education, access to mentors, and creating an environment where people can join a company and see other people like themselves being successful. I think the fact that diversity has become such a huge conversation in the industry means that there are a lot of people and companies looking at this problem and it will continue to improve over time. Once a movement like that gets started, I'm positive that it will create positive impact.
4. Here's a quora answer that I wrote about what to expect in a Techstars final interview which really talks to what stands out in the process:
https://www.quora.com/What-to-ex...
Thanks
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Mitch Wainer
@mitchwainer · Co-Founder of DigitalOcean
@headhanchoarod
Hey Alex - It has been quite the journey to say the least. 😀
1) I would of jumped into the startup ecosystem much earlier in my career. When I graduated college, I spent almost 5 years working at an Ad Agency, consulting the Fortune 500. It was a great experience and certainly taught me about having a strong work ethic and I was able to round out my skills to become "full-stack" marketer. But there is no comparison to the learning experience and the exposure to the limitless opportunities working at a startup. When you're young, especially 21, that is the perfect time to take risks and build something special with a great team.
2) Spend a lot of time networking in your local tech community. I was lucky enough to meet my co-founders on Craigslist (true story). Outside of SF, tech communities are relatively small and its easy to find local incubators, accelerators, meetups and events to meet entrepreneurs with a great idea or MVP.
3) I believe it starts with effort. Create opportunities and new programs/initiatives. This is a hard problem to solve for most tech businesses and to be honest, I'm not sure if I can provide a great answer. What I can say is that over the past couple of years, DigitalOcean has invested a lot time and effort in hosting meetups and sponsoring events to improve diversity and it's been working.
4) Build a great team and product! Also, sales/signups matter. Prove the market opportunity and generate traction.
Weston Burchett
@juscallmewes · CEO, Vantage Innovative Solutions
First, I just want to say thank you for taking the time to answer questions and take the time to engage.
My question for you is: In light of the announcement that DigitalOcean plans to provide $250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups (do.co/1Sgi4Dm). I was wondering if DigitalOcean does anything else to help and/or support start up companies and encourage startup growth?
I also want to take this time to let you know how much easier my life has become thanks to DigitalOcean. My startup relies on your platform to provide the vast majority of the products and services we offer. During our use of your services we have never experienced any downtime or service issues. The ease at which we can create and delete servers and the reliably that comes with is simply impressive.
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Mitch Wainer
@mitchwainer · Co-Founder of DigitalOcean
@juscallmewes Hey Weston - Thank you for taking the time to chat today and glad to hear that you're enjoying your experience DigitalOcean! 😀
To answer your question.. Yes! Very shortly, we're going to begin working on a program to launch a startup program on DigitalOcean.com that would provide large credits to startups around the world. There would be a review process for the startups that apply. We understand that infrastructure is one of the major costs for any young startup getting started and we want to make it accessible and easy for startups to scale without having to worry about receiving an enormous bill from their infrastructure provider. We're hoping to launch the program in Q3/Q4.
Feel free to shoot me an email at mitch@digitalocean.com with any further questions.
Weston Burchett
@juscallmewes · CEO, Vantage Innovative Solutions
@mitchwainer @digitalocean I am really excited to hear that! Do you have any type of timeline or expected launch date for this program?
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Mitch Wainer
@mitchwainer · Co-Founder of DigitalOcean
@juscallmewes @digitalocean hopefully we will launch it in Q3/Q4
DaKnOb
@daknobcs · CEO at IDAspis
@juscallmewes @mitchwainer @digitalocean "Very shortly" is good enough for me.. I just hope it won't be like other providers' "Startup Program" that only helps VC-backed companies. I also hope it's not US-only.
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Mitch Wainer
@mitchwainer · Co-Founder of DigitalOcean
@daknobcs @juscallmewes @digitalocean I don't have all the details yet, but it will be a global program. :)
QueenLear
@queenleariv · ConnectionAgent-Co-Founder @ButtonPoetry
Second question, with such a rapidly growing company in a very competitive environment (industry and HQ city) what do you think the biggest growing pain has been and what has made your growth successful (company culture wise)?
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Moisey Uretsky
@moiseyuretsky · CPO
@queenleariv
That's a great question. =]
I think the biggest growing pain has been that our first startup got up to about 20 people, this one is now over 200. Our experience from the first one carried us well to about 30-40 people and then we started running into a new set of challenges.
Managing an organization of this is very different than when you are 50 people and there's definitely been a tremendous amount to learn.
Focusing on culture, management, alignment, strategy, communication, and transparency at a company of 200 people is very different. There are more layers, more people, more teams, and that has been very interesting to navigate. Luckily we have some great mentors and investors, and of course some very helpful books to help us along the way.
I think the greatest challenge outside of that is an eternal question: "Are you willing to sacrifice good in order for the opportunity to achieve something great?"
Thanks
QueenLear
@queenleariv · ConnectionAgent-Co-Founder @ButtonPoetry
@moiseyuretsky I always like the eternal thought of "Do we slow down now so we can speed up later?"
Do you have some top book recommendations that you've found helpful?
How about the best advice you've gotten from your investors/mentors?
very great information! thanks for sharing and congrats on being able to maintain a great culture with your rapid growth! getting into the 100-500 growth range can be very dynamic!
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Moisey Uretsky
@moiseyuretsky · CPO
@queenleariv
There was a question below around some books that I found super helpful.
In terms of investors and mentors we've found a great deal of them. Certainly our investors have been extremely helpful, Brad from IA Ventures, Peter Levine from a16z, and Pueo from Access Industries. We've also been fortunate to go through Techstars and get a lot of great mentorship there from Nicole and Jason Seats (who is also on our board now), as well as Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson, JP O'Brien, Alex Iskold, David Tisch, I mean the list just goes and on.
We've also been very fortunate that our investors through their networks have provided so many intros for us to so many other individuals both on the East and West Coast.
In terms of the specific best advice, that's hard to quantify. There have been so many issues and challenges so I don't think it comes down to any specific item, as it does feeling supported and knowing that no matter what issue we run into they can always find someone for us to talk to that has dealt with it in the past.
Baptiste Jamin
@baptistejamin · CEO, Crisp.im
How your referral system improved your business?
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Mitch Wainer
@mitchwainer · Co-Founder of DigitalOcean
@baptistejamin
Hey Baptiste,
At the time, we built out our referral program because it was the third highest requested feature on our UserVoice forum. People were referring so many friends and they asked us to build one so that they can get some account credit in return. So for us it's been very successful and it has become one of our largest channels for driving growth, but only because of our amazing customers. :)
Thanks!
Mitch
Alexander Trapp
@thegermanalex · Web Designer, Unotek
I wanted to ask if you have any plans on creating a cloud storage based service similar to Amazon s3, Google Cloud Storage or Azure storage? I would really be interested in this kind of product.
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Moisey Uretsky
@moiseyuretsky · CPO
@thegermanalex
Hey Alex,
Our first focus on improving storage for customers is around how it is tied to their droplets and we have something that is going to be hitting a private beta very shortly. That will then take some time for us to roll out across all of our regions.
We're definitely interested in an S3 service for our customers, but based on the feedback that we received from customers we realized that we need to focus on this storage solution first. However, the work for one very much parallels the other, so we definitely have that on our roadmap, but have to see how this first new product rolls out to really gauge resourcing to work on an object store.
Thanks
Alex Rodriguez
@headhanchoarod · Founder/CEO at WorkMand & Code2040 EIR
Okay last two questions, I promise ;)
What's the best marketing strategy to gain users to your site if you're a newly launched product?
If you started digital ocean from scratch today, what are the three most important things you'd focus on in the beginning?
Thanks again for doing this guys!
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Moisey Uretsky
@moiseyuretsky · CPO
@headhanchoarod
Hey Alex,
I think today's world has so much virality built in to it that we almost take it for granted. But eight years ago Facebook was tiny, as was twitter, the iPhone didn't exist and we weren't sending URLs via text. I think in todays super connected world building a great product really allows for virality to just take over.
So really I would focus around building an amazing product that customers love. Not just like, but love. I think that's really the biggest signal. We like a lot of things, but we aren't attached to them. And we love few things, but those that we love, we just can't shutup about them. So if you look at it from a love angle, you realize that in today's world love does scale. Because there are so many platforms for people to share what they love that everyone now benefits from that virality, where in the past you had to build it in to your product. And if your product didn't have a natural tie in for that virality, like hotmail, that became a huge challenge.
As for doing DigitalOcean all over again, unfortunately there's nothing I would do differently, because all of the mistakes that we made got us to this point. I think if we did do it all over again we would be able to execute faster, because we know those mistakes. And there were maybe a couple that we could have spotted sooner, but it never works that way does it? =]
But if we did, I'd find product market fit sooner, lol =]
Thanks!
Alex Rodriguez
@headhanchoarod · Founder/CEO at WorkMand & Code2040 EIR
@moiseyuretsky what could you have done to get to product market fit sooner? :) Lol @mitchwainer
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Mitch Wainer
@mitchwainer · Co-Founder of DigitalOcean
@headhanchoarod
Build a strong content marketing strategy. Interview your early adopters, get to know your customers on a personal level, build your buyer personas. Here are my favorite 3 questions to ask customers:
1 - How would you describe our product/business to your friend? (this becomes your marketing message/position)
2 - What events and conferences do you attend?
3 - What do you read (websites, blog, podcasts, etc.)?
The 3rd question is probably the most important because it will help guide your content strategy. Become a thought leader in your space and create an inbound growth engine for your business. It all starts with content!
Our amazing community team has written over 1,300 tutorials to-date and we've become the go-to resource for system administrators and developers who need help deploying and configuring their infrastructure environment.
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Moisey Uretsky
@moiseyuretsky · CPO
@headhanchoarod @mitchwainer
Read the right books, and thought about it until I arrived at the answer. But I would have spent more time focused there, then everywhere else. =]