The founder's story: a trip down memory lane

Summary:

In this podcast, the three incident.io co-founders Stephen, Chris and Pete take a trip down memory lane, revisiting the story of how they came to found incident.io and the major milestones of the first 12 months in business.

Notes:

Chris Evans is co-founder and Chief Product Officer at incident.io. In practice, he covers everything from Customer Success to Sales to Product development. Chris has spent his entire career working in Technology. Starting out as a Software Engineer he later transitioned towards Platform work, most recently as Head of Platform and Reliability at Monzo, where he was also responsible for incident management and on-call.

Pete Hamilton is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at incident.io. Most of Pete’s time is focussed on Engineering and Product (although he also covers lots of other areas, including Operations, Legal and Finance). He’s worked in Engineering for start-ups and scale-ups for the last decade, starting his career at GoCardless and later moving to Monzo.

Stephen Whitworth is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at incident.io. Starting his career as a Data analyst, Stephen later moved into Engineering and previously co-founded Ravelin, a fraud detection platform.

Key topics/timestamps:

[01:36] The origins of incident.io

[07:00] Building Response at Monzo

[17:00] The side hustle begins

[22:00] The first demo

[27:00] The first off-site

[34:00] Moving into the old fire station

[41:00] Hiring a team

[47:00] What next?

Where to find Chris Evans

Twitter: https://twitter.com/evnsio?lang=en

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evnsio/

Where to find Pete Hamilton

Twitter: https://twitter.com/peterejhamilton

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterejhamilton/

Where to find Stephen Whitworth

Twitter: https://twitter.com/sjwhitworth

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwhitworth/

Transcript:

Disclaimer: this has been transcribed by machines, so apologies in advance for any mistakes!

[00:00:00] Chris: Pete Stephen, welcome to episode three. You might notice a notable omission from this week's podcast. Charlie, the guy who you normally host it not here, he's off gallivanting around Japan right now. So we figured it would be fun for the three of us to hang out and just, just chat a little bit.

I think, you know, go back through the, the annals of incident io, how we got here, why we're here, all of that kind of fun stuff. Obviously that means this time, a lot less structure, but I think, I think that's gonna be fun. I guess if people are hearing this, it went well enough that we decided to put it out and otherwise this is gonna be 30 minutes of us chatting to each other, , which we do enough as it is.

[00:00:43] Pete: But that's, that's still a nice way to spend a Friday.

[00:00:46] Chris: listen, there are few people I would rather hang out with than you two. So, , so there you go. There you

[00:00:52] Stephen: while the cat's away, the mice will.

[00:00:55] Pete: Yeah, exactly. If nothing else, this will demonstrate why we really need Charlie, so he'll get to feel very valued on his return.

[00:01:03] Chris: Yes. Yes. Well, we said, we said we cover like, origin stories. So maybe, maybe Pete, like you could start with like the, the sort of massive existential question of why are we here?

[00:01:16] Pete: I thought I'd start with my, my moment in the Himalayas where I realized what my purpose was in life, and go from there. I also really like origin story makes us sound like some sort of weird superhero team. I guess we all came at this from slightly different positions.

So like, for me I guess even like pre time at Monzo pre starting incident.io. So my role was very kind of technical or like, it wasn't like only technical, so I worked very across the business, but my role was kind of core at its core, very technical role, right? So it's like I interacted with a lot of other people, legal, marketing, et cetera.

And one of the ways that that happens a lot was in incidents and I still have very fond memories, even though I can't talk about them, all, of all the like fires that we ended up fighting. And I remember sort of that wasn't some incredible inspirational, like, oh, wonder I'm gonna start an instant management company moment.

But like, it had always been a bit of a problem or a process that I always felt was a bit janky. I guess sort of Monzo was the moment that crystallized it for me of just like seeing how this could be done really, really well. And I remember, joining Monzo and seeing how some of the tooling work that you'd done.

We were laughing about this the other day, but like before I even joined Monzo, I remember reaching out to you about that tooling. Cause I was doing a, I was basically like our instant process here. So I was like, it's fine, but it's like a bit janky. It feels like every time I'm like being a robot.

I follow the same blue book every time. I'm like creating Slack channels and I'm like updating the state page and that's fine. That's kind of my job, but it's kind of like, it must be a solution to this. I looked at all the providers. I found three or four that were on the market at the time and was like, you know, in my, in my role, which is sort of a kind of principal engineering type role, I was like, I'm buying on behalf of everyone.

None of these feels great. Like also my intuition of like, oh, maybe I should build something is like, I know that's not good and I remember reaching out to you, I think on Twitter, right? And going, you just tweeted about this Monzo response tool. And I was like, oh, this is cool. Like, you know, why did you build it?

What, are there any vendors that I could just buy? And you were basically like, no, I did exactly the same thing. I looked at all the supplies out there and they were all bit pants and, then actually what happened was I left GoCardless before I could get that set up. So I kind of cheated and just joined Monzo where it was already all installed. But that was my, that was my sort of first sort of run in with incident instant management and incident software, I guess.

[00:03:39] Chris: Yeah, and from my side, I was like, who is this nerd that's DM-ing me

[00:03:42] Pete: there was this weirdo that's reached out, out of nowhere.

[00:03:45] Chris: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

[00:03:47] Pete: I was quite, I was quite impressed that you responded cause I think I had like a hundred Twitter followers and you had like lots. So I was like, he's never gonna reply.

[00:03:55] Pete: Now, now I know you for the, the h an that you are, Chris, you’ve been demoted from, from, you know, SRE God's status in my mind.

[00:04:05] Chris: I remember you being just like, unbelievably polite in your dms, which is, which was just like, you were just like, caveat these things. It was like, you know, did, what did you think about, buying this before building it? Oh, and that's not a leading question and I'm, I'm sorry if you're

[00:04:19] Pete: I was really worried that what it would come across like. Why have you built this? Why didn't you just fucking buy it? You moron. I didn't wanna give that impression, so I, yeah, I did a classic tweet a letter to the Prime Minister vibes.

[00:04:34] Stephen: Yeah.

[00:04:35] Chris: It was an interesting prompt, actually. I remember you reaching out and flagging another tool in this space. And I was like, I'd literally never heard of them.

We were using PagerDuty and it was exceptional at what we wanted it to do at Monzo, which was like, make people's phones, make noises. And it did that and never failed. And it was like, you just buy it and it gets outta the way.

I sort of stand by the decision to build back then, I think, because I think there wasn't a compelling, a compelling thing to go and use. And they all had like, trade offs. And for us, for us at Monzo, like it was the. It was the fact that all the tools that existed were like super engineering focused.

And I was like, the problems I'm seeing on the ground are I need to, you know, I'm running, running incidents at a bank. And incidents happen quite a lot at banks. And so whether it's your bank or another bank that's down, like there's like constant degradation it feels like. , and so the problems I have were like, I had a team of people who are like, I don't want to be paged and I don't want to be on call because I have literally no idea how to manage the like 50 things I need to do in all the different scenarios that happen.

So it's like, I remember the one that terrified me most when I first joined Monzo was like, if you're paged and it's something to do with card payments, you almost certainly need to call up the MasterCard, operational command center. or they'll call you. So we had a shared n ber that they could dial in on and you just get a phone call and they'd be like, hi.

It's Clive from Operational Command Center, what are you folks seeing on your side? And I'm like, I mean, I'm looking at a Grafana dashboard and I'm not entirely sure right now, but someone else who does know what they're doing is on the way. And we'll get back to you.

[00:06:07] Pete: dunno what this graph means, but it doesn't look good. Clive

[00:06:10] Chris: Clive, do reckon. Do you a red is the right color for this sort of thing?

[00:06:15] Pete: Nice. Out of, out of curiosity, how long did it take you to, I don't think I've ever asked you this, but like say, I know you built the open source thing, but I wasn't sure if it was like a side project at Monzo or whether it was like part of the work that you did at Monzo or whether it was just like a Yeah, I, I know you mentioned that it was kind of like a inspired by some like conference or Slack thing, but like how did, did you knock it up in like a weekend or was…

[00:06:36] Chris:Yeah. So, so it was the first version was like laughably simple. So in the first instance, what I wanted was a way to have a slash command and a channel and an announcement post that goes somewhere so that folks know something's happened. They have a little like thread that takes them through.

And also when I joined Monzo, so Monzo like massive like Golan shop everything written and go. Very, very consistent about that. And I didn't really know go, I'd done my coding challenge for like part of the interview process in go As that was my, literally my first exposure to it. And so I was like, oh, well I want this incident thing and I want to learn a bit of go.

So I did it as like a fun evenings project and it was two evenings and all it was was a Lambda and AWS running some go code. And when the slash command came in, it would just be like, boo, here's a slack post and here's a thing. No state, no nothing so that was first version and then it was actually when I was like, ironically, I was at PagerDuty conference in San Francisco a little while later, and I went to a talk by John spo and he was talking about like all of the like kinds of insights that people could get from incidents if they, if they chose to actually properly invest in those things.

I then in a couple of evenings in my hotel room at that conference, super, super late night, I then rewrote the whole thing in Python and Jango because I didn't wanna have to deal with like RMS and like integrating with like databases from Go. Cause I didn't know any of that stuff.

And I was like, I know Jan go pretty well, so. Bootstrapped an app, built a thing that stored the state and suddenly, like within an evening I had all of the functionality of the previous thing, but then like a record of an incident happening and a thing on a webpage that I could start being like, cool, here's a timeline that we're building.

So yeah, that was, that was like how it all came to be in sort of Monzo days.

[00:08:21] Pete: Yeah. Must be quite satisfying. It's kind of cool, like a lot of people we reach out to, they're like, heard of response, although I'd hope that at some point incident.io is more, more prolific.

[00:08:30] Chris: Well, and it's, we're in that annoying situation, whereas a fair few, fair few people we speak to and we're

[00:08:34] Pete: An own goal.

[00:08:35] Chris: yeah, exactly. It's like, they're like, oh, in there looks great. But we have the thing that's sort of like the very primitive version that we've now extended a zillion times over and we have a team of like five engineers that support it and they don't really want their job to go away.

So we're gonna keep running the thing ourselves. And you know, we've won a few of them over and there's a few more that we need to win over in future.

[00:08:55] Pete: Agreed. Agreed. I guess like, so Stephen wasn't tweeting you and nerding out about incidents before we started incident.io, , but I dunno what, why did you do this, Stephen?

[00:09:08] Stephen: Yeah, good question. So I had always been the kind of recipient to all receiver of incidents in that started, along with a few co-founders, a credit card fraud detection company. So that sat in the kind of synchronous payment flow for a lot of fast growing companies. And as a result, like we are making these decisions in, you know, 300 milliseconds about, essentially whether you should let transactions go through or not.

So high vol e, like low latency like systems need to be fast and working. So whenever you get small hiccups or small outages like you are getting paid to, to go and deal with that stuff. and the sort of distinct memory that I walk away from there is. Why does, why does the software seem to stop as soon as my phone gets paged by?

It was Ops we use there, like, you act the page and then it's kind of on me to do everything else. Like I, I felt like I was gluing together. Dashboards alongside status page updates, alongside, you know, trying to copy whatever. It's like kinda CSI style, reconstitute, what actually happened for a postmortem afterwards.

And it just felt, you know, it wasn't like one of my biggest problems, you know, for example, like this didn't happen incredibly often, but when it did, it just felt weird and awkward. And then coming to Monzo, I saw really, I think a bit of like, oh, this is, this is what I, this is how I would want to solve the problem.

[00:10:49] Pete: Yeah.

[00:10:49] Stephen: absolutely. It's like if I went to a new company, I would want to put a credit card in and like bring some of this stuff with me. So just with like hard, hard nose business hat on as well.

It's like there feels like there's something here. If both Pete wanted to buy something and could not, and Chris did, but had to build his own and I thought it was weird. That feels like compelling evidence for going and for going and sort of doing something together.

[00:11:22] Chris: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. I think, I guess like from, we validated, it was a, it was a thing that was useful, like what was. I tried to like recall exactly what the like trigger was for like being like, we should do this as a bigger thing, as a sort of side hustle.

I think it was that, right? It was you, you two folks actually, ironically, the irony for this whole situation for me is that I have forever wanted to start my own company, right? That has been a lifelong dream to do that and to do, to do it and find this like niche in a product. And so I built the original thing at Monzo, but I actually didn't spot it as a product opportunity.

I think I discounted it and was like, ah, it's not enough in it. That sort of thing. And so it was you two, like how, how did you two, cuz you were the first ones, you sort of were like, we should do a thing. How did that come about?

[00:12:09] Pete: I blame, I blame Stephen. I think it's your fault we're here. I guess like, so, so my, my recollection, Stephen can tell me, or fill in all the gaps or tell me what's wrong, but it's essentially, you know, we were, we were mid pandemic. We'd been doing a lot of hard work, some of which was like writing code, but a lot of which was, you know, working on plans and kind of helping to do urgent projects to stabilize the business, all that kind of stuff.

It was, it was really good. It was really important work, but we, weren't getting to sort of like, Build like a huge amount that wasn't incredibly tightly scoped for really, really good reasons. And so we were like, oh, it would be kind of fun to just, and also we didn't get to hang out together very much, cuz we both had our remits in, in Monzo and kind of had our heads down quite a lot.

So we started having like coffee catchups and we were both in sort of staff engineering roles there. So it was like, cool, we should hang out more and, you know, that would be good for everyone involved. And it was like, oh, why don't we just get some beers in the evening and like build some stuff for fun.

I think your prompt Stephen was like, let's, like, you know, you were like, oh, I'm just kind of trying to think of like fun side projects. And I was like, oh, this sounds good. Like, I'd be well up for that. And then we had a long list which lived somewhere of just like what we thought were like, quite small things we could build, , which is hilarious looking

[00:13:24] Chris: What was the stupidest thing on the list? Pete? I wanna know

[00:13:27] Pete: I, there weren't any stupid things on the list. There's some, there was some interesting stuff. There was like a performance benchmarking tool that was one of them,I remember, working on at one point, Stephen. But yeah. And so we were kind of, Going through this list of fun stuff we could build as little side projects.

And one of them was like, I wonder if there's a kind of turnkey, you know, to Stephen's point earlier, like credit card incident automation thing that would sort of streamline a lot of, I guess some of the value that we're finding with some of the processes and, and tooling here. And like we could just offer it up and people could pay like a few quit a month and it might be like fun evening fodder and beer money material and sort of that.

That's where it started. And then there's like a fuzzy period in the middle. But that, that's, that's what I remember anyway. , and then, and then my next recollection is Stephen going like, yeah, I'll see you at like 6:00 AM and we're working it together. And me going, what the fuck? Why would you get up at six?

Like, could we all do this in like evenings and stuff? But Stephen was a morning person, so I adapted. , but it was actually quite good fun. ,

[00:14:30] Chris: Yeah, I, I remember you, you coming to me? , I think you like WhatsApped me or something. You're like, oh, Stephen and I have started looking at this thing. Would love to get your, your ideas here.

[00:14:42] Pete: so obviously given that you were building this up, Monzo, it would be really weird if we just built it, like built a thing in a corner and was like, never came and talked to you. So I remember chatting to Stephen and just sort of going, like, we were, we were essentially going, what would, what would be the reasons to do this or not do this?

And one of them was like, if Chris essentially says like, I'm not cool with this, then that kills it. And so there was a sort of, I remember debating how we approached this with you for a while, Stephen, of just like, like, do we think he'll say yes? Do we think he'll say no? Should we just pick something else that's like, where there's no risk?

And then yeah, writing you a kind of like, we're doing this. Like, what do you think? I remember your first response was like, yeah, sounds good. And I think in the background, like what you really meant was like, please, can I join in? And I just remember this like hilarious, like us trying to work out what you wanted and, and then, and then at some point, yeah, I can't remember you, you probably remember this better than me, but I just remember a bit of like very Britishness going on of

[00:15:35] Chris: Oh, massive, massive loop. Yeah.

[00:15:37] Pete: Are you cool with it? And you're like, yes, I'm cool with it. And we're

[00:15:41] Chris: Yeah. Well, I spoke to my, I spoke to my wife and I was like, I was like, oh, it's really, really good. It's really validating that like Stephen and Pete have seen, seen what, what I sort of pulled together at Monzo and think there's something really, really good in it. She's like, that sounds like something you'd be really interested in.

I was like, I'm really interested in that. I wanna go and I wanna go play in the, like the fun incident like space

[00:16:04] Stephen: we should give some credit to Jonas, I think busted through the awkward Britishness and was like, just talk to each other.

[00:16:17] Chris: Yeah.

[00:16:19] Pete: Jonas was like, have you talked to Chris? And our response was like, yeah, we chat to Chris. And he was like, yeah, it's all cool. Go ahead. And Jonas is like, I think you should chat to Chris again.

[00:16:29] Chris: Yeah. It, it was, it was, I remember talking to him, I was like, I can't, I can't go and ask them just to like join in. I was like, that, that like, that's really awkward. Like puts a bunch of like pressure on them cuz then they have to say no and he's like, they would be mad not to want you working with them on this.

And I was like, oh, don't, I don't think that's true. Anyway, I remember, I remember being a really hard call and you just being like, yeah, let's do it. Let's give it a trial. Let's just go for two weeks.

[00:16:53] Pete: what did we say we'd do? I think we said we'd do like a one month trial, which, was basically like, do you wanna join us in our ludicrous like early morning, late evening, like hackathons, I think we called it early as well. I think we got, like, we got like a weekend. I've got text somewhere from Stephen being like, this is like, there's is great.

Should we just do it? And I was like, yes, absolutely. , so I think we got a week into our month trial or two weeks or something. We were just like, you know, this is great. Let's fucking go.

[00:17:20] Chris: It is lucky, right? Because the three of us, like whilst we were all at Monzo, like we actually didn't work close. Like I, I think I met Stephen actually on, on a, in like a one-to-one chat. We had one chat ever

[00:17:30] Pete: Yeah. I think you and I. You and I only cross you. We crossed over in incidents. That was basically like, I was like, hi Chris. Hi. Platform person shit's fucked up again.

[00:17:39] Chris: yeah. Exactly, exactly. , yeah, it was, , but it was a little bit like ships in the night, so like, it was, it was totally reasonable. It would be like, let's, let's try this thing. Cuz you know, there's plenty of people who I've worked with in the past who would be like, I would not want to start a company with you

And it's like, it's a big risk, right?

[00:18:11] Chris: Yeah, I, you, , you mentioned Pete, like early days there of like early, early mornings and, and late nights. And I remember, I think this was, there's times now where - building a company is just hard. It's really hard and it's very hard to switch off. I think Stephen describes it as like there is just an infinite amount of work to be done.

So you have to be incredibly militant about sort of having rigorous lines in, in where you should and shouldn't sort of go. Those early days I remember working full time job at Monzo and none of us were in, you know, I can go in and coast type roles. It's like, it's full on. There's a high expectations of that

[00:18:45] Pete: it's also like an integrity point, right, of just like none. Like none of us were in roles where I, a, we could do that, or B, it just felt really shitty

[00:18:56] Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am ,massively motivated in companies by like just wanting to do the best job and be, sort of recognized for that and be seen as someone that people want to go to. Not like any kind of mode of like, cool, we can sort of shift focus a bit.

So it was definitely like, how do we cram more hours into this day? And I remember, I remember like alarm clock five 30, get up coffee, like work incident, laptop on the stand here, like three of us, like bleary eyed, like what should we build? And it's like, right, let's go.

[00:19:27] Pete: This was like November. So in fact this was almost two years ago at this point. And so what I remember is like when it got light, that was time for my actual job. Cuz the morning was like, I wake up at like 5:36 AM in the dark on a call with the two of you for like three hours or something and then it would get light and then it'd be like right time…

[00:19:46] Chris: Yeah. And then, and then for me it would be like, do that, then go to Monzo for the day. And like, it was such a weird gear change as well. Cause it'd be like just scrapping on code where you're like loads of todos in the, in the like comments in the code. Where it'd be like to do, I remember my favorite one that I found this all over the place was like to do, obviously not this long term, but it's fine for now.

[00:20:05] Pete: What was, what was even better is that that had been added, I think Stephen added that comment to something, which I then copy pasted like nine times around the code base. So then like that, that comment was just everywhere. I think the team have like quite rightly stripped those out now.

[00:20:19] Stephen: I think it was at to do, obviously not. This was the thing that

[00:20:24] Chris: Yeah, it was, but it was, it was that gear change of, it was like 9:00 AM and it was like cool. And now I work for a bank where we have to be really sensible about like the kind of risks that we are taking and how we do things, which means it's like necessarily slower, but just like that pace change.

And then like five o'clock would roll around and for me it would be like, go feed kids, you know, a bit of like family time and it'd be like seven, 7:00 PM it would be like, sorry Joe, I'm back, back at it. I'll see you, I'll see you at like 10:00 PM for bedtime.I enjoyed those days. I think it was just like a lot of fun.

Although there was, I remember there was a fun picture of me, I went out to Joe's, Joe's parents and it was like, must cuz it was pandemic. We were outside. So I was like in like a big coat and like a hat and then there's like, Joe took a picture of me just fast asleep on a bench outside and I'm like, yes, this is what it's like.

[00:21:17] Pete: man, who's lost it. All vibes.

[00:21:19] Chris: There's something very satisfying about, when you're that tired, you can almost fall asleep on command. And it's really like, I dunno, there were lots of places that I'd just be like, you know, I am sleeping and I'm in an awkward position. But it's all good.

[00:21:33] Pete: that picture is in our Memories channel in Slack somewhere.

[00:21:47] Chris: if I can work the magic when we pull this together into a video, I'll see if I can get a screenshot right now. I was just thinking about that spell reminds me of like early days demos. Do you remember the first, first demo we did to like proper, proper one?

[00:22:05] Pete: I dunno if I remember the first, like actual, I remember the first big demo. I'm sure we would've showed this to like some people, but the first big demo, it was Go Cardless, right?

[00:22:13] Chris: It was, I think Stephen, Stephen, you, you were leading it weren't. Was it you or was it

[00:22:18] Pete: I was leading it.

[00:22:19] Chris: Oh, were you lead? Oh, Pete was leading.

[00:22:21] Pete: we had, so at that point we did double demos. So we had two people. So we had like, one of us would sort of be the lead and the other person would be like the chaos monkey who would like, be like, no, the database is down.

And like they'd take actions and they'd do things and we'd, we had, yeah, we had this like sort of double act going on. And I think Stephen, you and my, you and my sort of second, which, which made sense to like GoCardless was my home.

[00:22:45] Chris: Oh no, I think I was on the call. I was on the call just like observing and there therefore like question answering stuff. But I, I remember this distinctly cuz you opened up the slack thing and you're like, it's really simple. You just do, you do a slash incident and it was just like, computer says, no big red arrow type vibes.

[00:23:04] Pete: nothing. Yeah. It was like, yeah, and, made better by like, I think to set the context a little bit, so like, so Lawrence, who was the principal ary at GoCardless and, and now actually works for incident.io, , I'd been showing him, like, we'd been showing him the tool and like getting his feedback and.

Essentially done the, like the big moment of going like, do you think Go Cards would be interested in using this? And we were like, oh, such a big company. Like, you know, this would be like, you know, a huge deal versus like some small mom and pop shop somewhere. And he was like, yeah, like, you know, they talked about it internally and it was like, right, we're gonna do a demo.

I think it was like 40, 50 plus maybe more of their engineering team join the call. So it's like really big. Everyone turned their cameras off. So it was like this faceless crowd of like, you know, 50 people. , and yeah, so it was like, I think the context made like a much bigger difference. Essentially all I was looking at was like 60 black squares while I frantically stalled.

Meanwhile, there's a separate Slack conversation going on where Stephen's going like, I know what it is. I'm on it. Like, still, still, still. Like, the fix is coming and I'm going like, fuck. , yeah. So like, how's everyone doing? ? Like, and then I'm like, oh, I also dunno, half of you, cuz you've all joined since I left.

And it was, yeah, it was absolutely excruciating. , and I'm glad that both of you do all the demos now.

[00:24:25] Stephen: so while, while Pete stalling, I was off the side deep into like a PC console and just, ,

[00:24:33] Pete: I was like, what were you, what went wrong?

[00:24:36] Stephen: I think we had introduced the concept of like roles at this point. So role being like a hat you wear during the incident, like an incident lead or a communications lead or something. We, I think we had shipped with opinionated pre-built roles that you could not configure, and then we had moved from that to like user defined roles.

And we had migrated all the accounts apart from like the demo accounts. So I had to sort of, you know, insert into like x a bunch of just stuff and we're essentially just typing as fast as I possibly could. Whilst Pete had extremely conversations off to the side, , it worked.

[00:25:16] Pete: I think also like I think Hat Tip Lawrence who like j ped in to save me a little bit by like asking me questions that I could answer. , so appreciate that Lawrence that didn't contribute to us wanting to hire you, but it was like you were a very good egg

[00:25:33] Chris: yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's the fun thing is we still have, we still have issues in demos and it's like, so these days we like all of the, like me, anyone sort of doing sales, that kind of thing, we get on like the rapid release. So we get features first, so we get to try 'em out and it means it's great cuz it's like you get to like, show people a little peak of what's coming, not just what they can, you know, get in the product right now.

And the good thing is, is that I've now, I've now sort of nailed the like, Just keep calm. Like we have good processes behind the scenes for this stuff. Like live, live demos, right? It's just always gonna be that way. There's always that slight like sweaty parms moment sort of thing.

[00:26:12] Pete: think we, I think we span it in the early, I mean like, obviously everything's a lot more stable now, but I think in the early days we'd span it a few times as well of like, we'd literally be on a demo and like post duty would go off on my phone, mid demo and I'd be like, mm, that's interesting.

I have apparently triggered an instant by giving this demo, like, I'm gonna carry on. But like in the background, Stephen and Chris will be doing almost exactly what I'm about to show you. So like, you can imagine, do you know what I mean? It was like, , imagine this being done for real.

[00:26:38] Chris: Yeah. I had one demo where Slack went down as well, which was really fun, which is just like, oh, here's a little error. And I was like, and you do the next thing. And it's like, well that doesn't work either. And I'm like, well, we're definitely up and running and Yeah. Fun. It's all good. , do you remember, do you remember the first offsite that we did? , I think it was Y Valley wasn't.

[00:26:59] Pete: I do

[00:26:59] Chris: That was like early days had had a handful of like, I dunno, like we're 10, 15 customers, something like that. , yeah. And, and so it was just the three of us still building, supporting the app, doing all the things, and we decided, I mean, in retrospect, what a ridiculous idea to go to the middle.

So Y Valley is where, and like Wales is, is that right? Yeah, so as in Wales, possibly one of like the most, I mean the remote places in the context of like, you know, United Kingdom, , terrible internet signal. The worst broadband I think, I think I've, I've had in like a house and we were like, yeah, yeah, this would be fine.

We'll go and do some, like, some stra strategic thinking about the future. And then had, had, I remember there was like an issue with one of our integrations with a customer who was in San Francisco because of Slack timeouts and stuff like that. And yeah, just that was a bit of carnage, wasn't it?

[00:27:55] Pete: Yeah.

[00:27:57] Stephen: Yeah, I think it was the, , to me it was like the beautiful, , clash of like thinking that you, like when you do these early stage companies, they're so fragile and like you have customers that are betting on like 10% the product and 90% you as people. So you're sort of just got this little fragile thing that is starting to, to take shape and it's just the kind of, , you can't just take a few days to go and like discover yourself in the forest and chat about like what this thing is and could be because at the same time, People are trying to use your, you know, pretty scrappy, unstable, like first skeleton of a product, so you need to support that at the same time.

And it was just such like a beautiful image of us walking along, like this picturesque, , meadow in the s mer.

And then, and then page duty, you know, the phone goes off as we are like one bar of signal, try and ssh into like the machine and fix it, I think on like a, a 30 degree hill as well.

[00:29:06] Pete: There's a, there's a picture somewhere of, I took a selfie of where we were, and it was, it was like, the hill was so steep. I think we were halfway up and also like sweating like crazy. It was really h id. Like we'd, we'd massively underestimated this hike generally. So it was already like a bad call had been made.

Pager went off, PagerDuty reached us in the middle of a fucking, like, you know, halfway up a hill in the middle of nowhere. I don't think we, I don't think we sshd in. I think it was a, I think it was like we could spot the code change or like, we, we did it all, it was all on, I did it all on my phone.

[00:29:43] Chris: You reverted with GitHub or something,

[00:29:45] Pete: It wasn't a revert. I made a code change. I edited directly in GitHub on my phone. The, the piece of broken code.

Then, like, it ci ran, it got approved, I pressed go. And because we had like C I C D, it just deployed to prod and then messaged in Slack on my phone being like, this is now fixed. And it was like, this is, this is horrendous, but also quite cool.

[00:30:06] Stephen: PSA to all of our current and future customers. We do not do that anymore. Pete does not just, Pete does not just essentially like text code into our, into our hub repository and deploy code.

[00:30:19] Pete: It went through ci. This wasn't like a YOLO deploy, but Yeah, no, to be clear, we have a much, we have a very rigorous call radar and we have very stand good standard practices, et cetera. But early

[00:30:28] Stephen: Legal notice

[00:30:29] Chris: Yeah. Chill out. Chill out. No one's listening to this.

[00:30:33] Pete: Someone's lawyer is listening to this and you, like, you guys are gonna get the calls about it.

[00:30:39] Chris: I do remember that holiday though. I remember, I remember like a couple things from that, which was like, that was our first time. Of actually spending time as like individuals outside of like a working context. And I think there's always massive risk with those kinds of things because there's people who I really like, like there's friends who I really like going to the pub with or going out for dinner with and the prospect of going and spending a week with them.

I'd be like, they would drive me absolutely mad. And I think when you live in close quarters and cooking food and cooking is always the thing that is just like the pressure point. And , no, I remember, I remember that just being like, I, I know we're onto something good here with the three of us because I came away being like, I'd happily go and do that again.

And we have done it again. And it's like, I dunno. It makes a big difference, I think. I

[00:31:23] Pete: yeah. And we know that Chris is, Chris's primary strength is making poached eggs and like that's a thing we can rely on.

[00:31:29] Chris: yeah. Post eggs and a bo I made a bolognese whilst you two were fixing one of the things that was going on. And I think bolognese is actually a really serious meal to cook because I've had a lot of very average bolognas. And I think it's one of those ones where it's like, you know, simple on the surface, but it's like, what's your, what's your bit of flare that you, you know, you put in there kind of thing.

[00:31:50] Stephen: and, and what's yours, Chris? I mean, you just laid that up perfectly.

[00:31:55] Chris: that would be telling, that's secret. I don't wanna give it away, you know, it's, but, but people do, people do have their little things, so like, things that I think might be a bit contentious, and this is not really a cooking podcast, but I will go, there is celery

You know, you, like, you, it's like, so your onions at the beginning, celery in, at that point, chopped up really fine. I hate celery. I'll be honest. I hate celery, but it adds a little, little peppery depth to the, to the source. So that's, that's one I'll give you.

[00:32:27] Pete: This is what the listeners are here for is like BAM instance. Bam. Origin stories and then snuck in on the side.

[00:32:38] Stephen: Mine is whole milk.

[00:32:40] Chris: Oh, that's mental.

[00:32:46] Chris: I'm, I'm just so glad I cooked now cuz it sounds like this, this company might not exist if Stephen had done it.

[00:32:52] Pete: well, no, it would just be me and Stephen enjoying our creamy bottles, and you'd have like rage quit and walked off to the, you know,

[00:32:58] Chris: that's, that's the clip for the podcast. Me and Steve are enjoying our creamy.

[00:33:04] Stephen: I, the hordes of Italians that descend on any kind of Italian cooking, you know, YouTube video. I can safely say that they will agree with me, not with your random celery crap that you've decided to add.

[00:33:21] Chris: Incidentally, this reminds me, as per tradition of the podcast, we need a secret word and it feels only fitting that we need, it should be creamy bologne. So if you reply underneath the YouTube video with Creamy Bolognese, the first reply will get an incident io like gift pack, which will have some lovely socks, lovely water bottle, and maybe some t-shirts in it as well.

There we go.

[00:33:46] Chris: Yes. Right first holiday covered other seminal moments, I think, in any his in like company history is like first office. It was the old fire station in, in Old Street. Awesome office. Very, very fond memories. Do you remember, do you remember going and like picking it out?

Pete, I know you went and did a lot of scouting early days.

[00:34:09] Pete: I do. I don't do any office management anymore, but I feel like this is one of the, the parts of my role that I genuinely enjoyed the most, and that it made, it made everything feel incredibly real. And I remember, yeah, opportunistically, we decided that, so we were like, should we stay remote? , and then we were like, no, actually, like, let's find like a little office somewhere where we can essentially hold ourselves up.

So at this point we, we, we had some conversations with Monzo and we'd agreed we were gonna leave. We had like plenty of notes periods and stuff. So we had like a three month period where we were kind of like in wind down mode. And we said like, when we're done, let's, you know, get in a room. It'll be way more fun than this remote job.

I did like an opportunistic found this like old fire station felt very fitting. I remember I think WhatsApp video calling both of you or some subset of the two and sort of doing a, like, doing a tour felt like one of those kind of virtual guides,

We saw like three or four different offices, I think. And then, yeah, found one that was like four pe it was for four people and it had like a, an adjoining annex that you could like extend into that could fit like another three. And we were like, oh yeah, one day we might, we might get to like seven people.

So let's, this is like a good investment in the future, which is hilarious. Looking back that, that's, that's the scale of ambition at this stage in the company's life. ,

[00:35:31] Chris: it's also where, where we painted it as well. Right. So it was like a white, white blank box originally

[00:35:37] Pete: totally bare. , had some desks in the middle and Yeah, like first, first weekend it was, it was great. I managed to rope, , and my wife into essentially letting me troll around like plant shops and paint shops and then, and then like, yeah, manually painted the, we had a, we had a feature wall.

It was incredibly fancy.

[00:35:55] Chris: The farrow and bull ha blue. Right.

[00:35:58] Pete: I can't remember why, why

[00:36:01] Chris: Is your, hang on, have you got it in your, stu your study there, Pete Cuz Stephen's got

[00:36:05] Pete: I don't have, I don't have a ha blue wall in my, in my office.

[00:36:08] Stephen: He had it in his old office and he's now since abandoned it, which I think is poor effort.

[00:36:13] Pete: Yeah. Maybe I should, yeah, maybe I'll

[00:36:15] Stephen: This, this just makes us sound like the most middle class kind of British out of touch company ever.

[00:36:24] Pete: , but I dunno, at the same time, like brand, brand colors were born from me perusing, like, and picking slightly at random.

[00:36:31] Chris: The alternative positioning is that we are a design led company that cares about the details.

[00:36:44] Pete: the difference between when we moved in and it was like this white box and even the landlord came round and they were like, this is amazing. And it was like we'd done. I'd done a little like, , what done A little geometric pattern on the wall that felt really fancy.

We got like vinyl logo. It felt a bit like a jungle cuz I went a bit overboard on the plants. ,

[00:37:03] Stephen: I remember, , walking back from Liverpool Street, the plant shop in the middle of Liverpool Street, and essentially buying two A too many plants, b one particular plant that acted a little bit like a sail. So when I was walking back in a very windy day, I essentially had this huge plant that was trying to constantly push me backwards as I was like,

[00:37:28] Pete: It was one, it was like a massive fe but like . So, so, so Stephen did this to himself in that like, we left this plant shop with this massive fucking plant and then like another small plant and Stephen was carrying the big plant and I was like, should we just, should we get an Uber?

Cuz it's, it's like, you know, 15, 20 minute walk and this plant's quite large. And Stephen was like, nah, it's fine. It's a lovely day. We'll just walk it. Remember was going halfway, like neither of us can feel our arms. We've had to swap like three times. Stephen is repeatedly getting blown around like a sort of napkin in the wind.

Just like Yeah. Oh man. And, and everyone walking past, so like, I'm in front and so all I can see is people do it like sort of walking along and going, like looking really weird at him. I apologize for listeners with the podcast. You can't see the expression that I'm pulling, but like clocking this walking fern just getting blown all over the pavement and it was, yeah, it was great.

[00:38:21] Stephen: How are we paying for all of this stuff at this point? I can't

[00:38:24] Pete: man. Like this is, this was like, I felt really proud at this point. Like, we so no investment. I, no, that's not true. We all invested a hundred pounds a month at this point.

[00:38:34] Chris: That was how we paid. That was how we paid the early days. Heroku Bill

[00:38:37] Pete: And then, and then the office rent was like our first big like investment. And so we've, we've made, I think we've made 3000 pounds of revenue or something, which is actually pretty legit at this point.

And the office was seven 50 a month or like a thousand a month or something. And we were just like, dunno, we've got three months of runway. Should we just, should we go for it? , yeah.

[00:39:00] Chris: Yeah, it was good. That office did look beautiful. By the way, Pete, I don't know if I've actually told you this, but like I remember, I remember coming in the day, the weekend after and it was just like, it was all the little details, like the little like wooden like monitor rises with the little drawers and like you'd taken like a very, very anemic, bland box and I was, This feels, this feels like home.

And it makes, I genuinely think it makes such a difference because like, it's not just, it's not just like the, you know, working in proximity, but it's like the, the vibe you get from a place makes a massive, massive difference. And I used to just, so like, I remember this time, so I was still working at Monzo and I would, I would take like a day off every, every few weeks to do like full day of incident stuff.

And then I'd often be like early mornings before going into Monzo, I just remember being like, this feels so good. I'm so happy to be in this place. And I think it's something we've, we've tried to like carry through, like our offices have often been quite blank canvassy and it's, it's like our current one, like I will put some photos in the show notes or whatever, but like our current office now, very, very blank canvas, like big white, empty box.

[00:40:13] Pete: yeah. I think it's, I think we talked about this a lot in the early days, right? Of like, especially when we're doing the remote onsite debate and sort of. Essentially took the principle of like, if you're gonna ask people to come into the office, there has to be some advantage, ideally, in addition to like spending time with your colleagues.

Like it has to, it has to feel good. You can't be like, you must come into the office because something, something collaboration, and then sit everyone in like shit cubicles. It's like, you know, it's like, what, what's the, what's the point in that? Like if you're gonna do it, do it properly. We spend a lot of time thinking about that stuff and yeah, I care a lot about it.

[00:40:44] Chris: Let's not open the count of worms of, you know, asking people to come into an office. We don't ask people to come into an office. We, we find people who want to come into an office.

[00:40:54] Stephen: It's a dangerous, dangerous topic.

[00:40:59] Chris: Move on. Move on. I guess next thing, the next like big milestone for us then. Hiring our first people, which felt, that felt like a, I remember, I remember feeling a very, very strong sense of responsibility at that point, cuz between the three of us early days, you're like, if this doesn't work, like we can go and find jobs.

Like we are pretty confident in that. But you suddenly now got, you know, so we hired our first like two engineers sort of very close together. And I remember just being like, oh shit, like this now has to work and we now have to go down that, that route. I don't remember, do you remember exactly how we sort of, those conversations went Pete?

I know there were like people you knew previously, right?

[00:41:38] Pete: So I knew, I knew Lisa and Lawrence and both of them had separately said like, you know, if you ever start a company like, or you're gonna start a company, like, let me know. I'd be quite interested. And so this wasn't like, you know, I felt really nervous cause it's like saying to someone like, I think you should quit your job and come join me on this like, crazy endeavor.

I dunno it's a big ask, right? I think I did a more tentative, Hey, you know, that thing you said, like where if I start a company, like you'd be interested, like kind of think we're gonna do one. Like are you interested? And I think, yeah, I think the response from both of them was basically just like, absolutely like, yes.

I don't think there was a huge amount of deep, hard selling needed from our side, which almost made it worse cuz it was like that level of trust of like, yeah, like let's go, let's do this. I was like, oh God. But, and then I think what I did was like a massive anti sell where I essentially went like, it was partly trying to make sure that they really wanted this and partly trying to absorb myself of some responsibility.

Go. Like, to be clear, this will almost certainly fail. This will almost certainly go like horribly wrong at some point. I don't even have any money to pay you. Like you will not have contracts at some point we will give you some equity, I promise. Like all this kind of stuff. And, and, and both of them were like un unfazed.

I still are still with us and doing an amazing job. And I remember like, this was the same time that we were raising our seed round. And so like obviously Stephen's spending a lot of time on that and working with investors and sort of me going like, please work. Please work.

Please work. Please work. We had a dinner with them right. Where we like officially kind of, cause it is basically, I think what I'd said to them is like, let's wait until, or like, don't, don't quit until we've raised the money. And I think they quit anyway and so there was this limbo period where I was like, right, well now if we don't raise any money, like we can't pay these people and we can pro, like, they might be cool with that for like a few months.

It's the early start of journey, but like, this really needs to work. And then, yeah, I can't remember quite the timings, but I remember there was like a, a dinner where we like got

[00:43:44] Chris: An infamous, infamous dinner

[00:43:47] Pete: Yeah. It was your, it was your favorite place, right, Stephen? It was like a, a Stephen special restaurant.

[00:43:53] Stephen: Yeah, this was a, so there's a restaurant in Faringdon Park Andwell in London, which is called the Quality Chop House. It was the Ravelin, sort of local hang, used to get lunch from there, but it's kind of this old. Simple, basic food, but cooked really well. There's like a little private small room upstairs that you can rent to six to eight people around the table.

So, you know, we've just, I think we signed a time sheet at this point, so, you know, we had extremely high likelihood of money in the bank. We were going through the legal side of the, so it felt like a nice book bookmark to start. We are a company, we can pay you money and you'll have contracts, ands, and all of these things that,

[00:44:48] Pete: Lawrence literally said, do I get holiday? Because we just hadn't talked about any of it. It was like, yes, you get holiday, Lawrence.

[00:44:56] Chris:People are getting a holiday at this company. What?

[00:44:58] Pete: Employees, founders don't.

[00:44:59] Chris: Oh, right. Yeah, that makes sense.

[00:45:02] Stephen: Then what happened then? , so we had this meal, and I don't think so, Chris and I had not spent tons of time with Lawrence and Lisa, who are the first engineers we're talking about. So there was a little bit of like, trying to build the relationship side of the world, but it was like a feel good meal, you know, everyone was spending some time together.

The problem was that Chris had lost his voice about an hour and a half before this dinner. So it was essentially, you know, me, Pete, Lisa Lawrence, very enthusiastically, like happily discussing, you know, what happened, our plans for the future, and then just like Chris smiling and like nodding, and then occasionally forgetting that he had lost his voice and then trying to talk.

And then immediately after doing so, being really sad that he had lost his voice. And then everyone kind of

[00:45:58] Pete: passing things to Chris and going like, yeah. And then going, oh yeah, no, you can't answer that question. It's like

[00:46:04] Chris: It was, it was so rough. Cuz I'd, I'd had like sore throat, all the,

[00:46:08] Pete: ill as well, right?

[00:46:09] Chris: i'd, I'd sore throat leading up to it. Yeah. Not been feeling super great. And I was like, I've got, got a bunch of stuff to do. And so, yeah, I remember, I think it was actually, I lost my vo I, I was able to have a, just about conversation with Lisa on the way to the restaurant.

I was talking to her and I was sort of, you know, scratchy. Scratchy and then yeah. Got into the place and it was just like absolutely gone. Tried to make any noise and it was like a squeak would come out. This has only ever happened to me like twice in my life. But I think there was, , I think the, the fun thing for me was like we were, it was though, we were like, listen, we've had a chat as well as founders around like roughly what our areas of responsibility are gonna be in the early days.

And so it was like, you know, Stephen CEO thinking about money in the bank and like that sort of side. Pete's, you know, our sort of best technical person put him on that. Chris will be doing sales and cs. So doing a lot of like talking to our customers and I just remember being like, yes, talking, I remember what that, what that was like, you know,

yeah, so I guess that's like a nice little, trip down memory lane of where we've been. , Stephen. Where, where are we at now? What's going on? What's in what's front of mind for you?

[00:47:15] Stephen: Yeah. So to put timeframes in perspective, the earliest of days we were talking about was November, 2020. So that was the sort of, you know, Just getting this thing off the ground, Chris sleeping on a bench was probably April, 2021. And then we are now recording this in November 22.

So let's say this is like a year and a half of full time effort on this company. So we're about 40 people, with about 35 in London, five in New York. We've raised three rounds of funding at this point as well, so close to 40 million, and really in this like strong initial growth phase. So that looks like working with a ton of interesting companies, across the world so, that kind of looks. In terms of what we are, the problems we're solving for them, I think it kind of buckets up into two things. So the first one is like when stuff is really going wrong, solving the acute pain that people are seeing during that. So this looks like coordinating response efforts, communication, just generally like trying to put the fire out, so to speak.

The people that are most interested in this side of the world end up being, kinda the end users, the folks that get paged, the people that are having to actually sort of support, but the fire out. And then you have this kinda secondary group of, you know, maybe leadership or compliance or customer support, people that need to be informed but don't necessarily need to be, as involved as the rest.

So, you know, this is like the response side of incidents and then you have like, yes, but what about many incidents? So this is, , for example, like. How much time are we spending on incidents? Like, which parts of our infrastructure are more unreliable than others? Like how much of my total engineering capacity is being spent on reactive work?

So this generally tends to skew a bit more like leadership, cto, VP engineering, CPO style. We've spent really the past year I think trying to build the best product in the world to solve both of those problems and, in my opinion, at least, very far along, very far along doing that.

I think we're now in this phase of working with some amazing companies and trying to find, trying to find more really, like we are, I think we are one of the best products you can buy in the world to solve this problem. But everywhere we go, no one has a product to do this. When they use it, they love it.

So we are now in the phase of like, cool, well let's get some more people to, let's get some more people to use it cuz we know they're gonna love it.

[00:50:02] Chris: Yeah, I think, I think the turning point for me on, like the point you made around like execs and the value to those, cuz originally this product started as a, like we are engineers, we had an acute problem of like, resolving, resolving incidents. Responding to them is like I, with the, with the recent like insights launch, I've, I've actually like, for a long time we had some graphs and I was like, you know, oh these are really useful if you are the CTO and this and that.

And honestly there's a little bit of like salesmanship in that and like selling ahead of where you are. But the recent, recent round of things that the folks have been working on, like legit, genuinely useful looking at like on a weekly basis, like things like where's our engineering time going? Is is incredible and like what, what are the things that are causing us to, so we, I think maybe we're a bit unique as a company because we have every single paging alert that we get.

Every time an engineer is paged, it translates into an incident. So we have like century fires for any kind of error. Any kind of error goes to page duty, page duty plugs into incident io auto creates you a channel, pulls you in, gets you off on, on that ground. So it means we have like high fidelity like ability to see what, what's coming in and then tagging of all these things.

So we know like what the shape of it is. And it's, it's fascinating. I think I, I can go in and be like, why, why was this this massive spike in like response, like time spent reacting to things and it's like, oh, well we shipped the new feature that allows us to plug into Jira and automatically keep Jira tickets up to date with what's happening in incident.

And surprise, surprise, JIRA is a nightmare to build against them. We had all manner of like errors under these different, different situations. So yeah. I'm, I'm feeling, I think, I think, I think that like interesting. Like turning point in any company when you're developing product is when you go from sort of selling a little bit ahead of where you are to being able to incredibly authentically and genuinely say, this is actually solving problems.

Not for just for me, but for like a whole bunch of folks. And you can stand behind that, , with all of your weight. It's, , makes, makes selling a lot easier. , and so yeah, contrasting that to the early days where stuff's breaking in demos, , these days it's rock solid and it's really, really good.

[00:52:07] Stephen: I think, , I think that that for me has been one of the most fun parts of the past year is just the customers that we get to work with and the people at those, at those companies. , I, so I had never really sold stuff before this, and my mental model of like selling software to people was this somewhat arms length transaction where you had to convince like this big scary group of people that your product was worth anything.

And I think the reality couldn't be more different. It's ended up being like a set of close partnerships between like genuinely lovely people that have helped us shape and build the product. And one of the most common. . One of the most common comments I got from investors, , when we were raising the round was like, you work with a list of amazing companies and to honest, like in the days, every company that we signed up, we just them if could their logo on the website and as a result,

[00:53:05] Pete: in the early days, but it's like, it was literally, so we put every logo on like the first, I think we didn't, we were too ashamed to put any logos on until we got to like five. And then we were like, yeah, that's like a row of logos. Let's have like a row. And then I remember having conversation with you when we reached like 10, being like, cool, what's the short list of logos?

Cuz we can't have like loads. And you're like, Nope. All the logos go on the home page. At which point it's like, cool. 15. And I remember us like every time we had a new customer land, I'd have to do this weird maths of. Is it like, do we do, it's like a four by six and then you add one and you're like, oh fuck.

Like, okay, so now we're gonna do like a five by like, how do we structure the Legos so it doesn't look horrendous? But on the flip side, what we had was all these people reaching out, being like, oh my God, you have so many customers. And you're like, but no one puts all their customers on the homepage, but it works really well.

It's like a strategy. , and then,

[00:53:57] Chris: thing. Now though, the really sad thing is it's now, it's now not that. Cause it turns out the bigger the customer, you go to the, the bigger the legal team and the less likely the legal team are to approve use of customers. So I have this, like, this is, this is fun. So I do a lot of lot, spend a lot of time talking to customers, like either from like customer success or like sales angles and like the thing things that you, you often get the comment of like, oh my gosh, the logos you have on your website.

And I'm just like, please, like if you could see the ones that we, if you could see the ones we can't put there. Like you would literally, you'd be like, oh my goodness. So, , yeah, we'll, we'll get 'em eventually, it's fine. I'm gonna just keep badgering them once we become like, you know, give it like a few months after you've onboard and you're like, oh my gosh, this software is amazing.

It's like, that's when you go, Hey, , cto, , your legal team weren't so keen originally, but now that we've solved all these problems, could we please use your logo? So expect some.

[00:54:48] Pete: It's such, it. I, think a lot of people will let us use them eventually and it's kind of, yeah, it's frustrating not, not being able to talk about it, but it's cool. It's like name. Yeah. A lot of the customers really now that like all of my family have heard of, like, that's really cool. Cuz up until then it was like a lot of them were kind of, you know, very technical companies or really kind of specific niche companies.

[00:55:30] Chris: Right. Stop. Everyone, stop. There's a risk. This is gonna get editing heavy, so I think we should call it, we are about an hour anyway. , so I think, I think this has been a lot of fun. I haven't like, we haven't like, like reminisced on this sort of stuff for a very long time.

But yeah, we should definitely do this again. I think, I think maybe we gearing ourselves up for like a year in review, maybe in a few, in like before the end of the year. Like what do we ship? What are our favorite features? Bit more product centric.