Transcript
[00:00:00] Victoria Melnikova: Hi everyone, this is Dev Propulsion Labs, our podcast about the business of developer tools. My name is Victoria Melnikova. I’m the head of new business at Evil Martians, and today I have the legend of developer tools. David Cramer, founder of Sentry. Hi David.
[00:00:22] David Cramer: Hey, thanks for having me on.
[00:00:24] Victoria Melnikova: How are you doing today?
[00:00:26] David Cramer: I am good. Good. I’m in, uh, the perpetual state of. As I always am, I would say.
[00:00:31] Victoria Melnikova: So a founder like you, an experienced founder with decades under your belt, do you still feel like you have to work a lot?
[00:00:41] David Cramer: It’s interesting ‘cause like sometimes I, I do very little, I’m not shy about this by the way. Sometimes I, like, I’ll have weeks where I put in very few hours in terms of like hard work, and then other weeks it’ll be like 60 hours or something.
Recently it’s been a lot more, but it kind of depends ‘cause like [00:01:00] it’s not really any different than any other person. If you have something that’s like really interesting and feels high value, you kind of wanna complete the project or you wanna do it, and as a founder there’s like this inherent, like you can see the ROI of the thing you’re doing.
And so if like the thing is like, oh, I have a bunch of emails to respond to or a bunch of meetings to go to, I’m like, it’s not that useful. And so I’m just not gonna do those things. And so it kind of depends. But yeah, it, it’s like, it goes through cycles, but, uh, recently it’s been a lot busier. So
[00:01:29] Victoria Melnikova: And you did by choice?
[00:01:32] David Cramer: Yeah, definitely by choice. I tell people, I tell people at the company even that, like, I am still doing this truly by choice, but also like even Sentry because like, I, I’ve hired the CEO and recently the CTO, and so I, I basically like stepped out of both roles that. I am at the company because I think my equity value effectively grows faster with me at the company than without me at the company.
And so I think it’s one more lucrative for me to be there, but also I’ve like [00:02:00] done this most of my career at this point. So it’s a little bit more than that.
[00:02:03] Victoria Melnikova: Let’s talk about this question of delegation because it, I think it’s a painful moment for many founders, technical founders who are very hands-on just like yourself, hiring A CEO, hiring a CTO.
Those decisions. And you kind of played both roles, right? In the, in the trajectory of the company. What was that like? How does it feel to trust somebody else to run your business and to make technical decisions, especially for, you know, technical product like Sentry?
[00:02:34] David Cramer: Yeah, it is quite complicated. I think a lot of people cannot do it.
For what it’s worth, I think I, I struggle with it and I think you gotta find the right people. It doesn’t mean I agree with everything we do at the company and I think we get in, we kind of get in healthy debates a lot of times at the the highest levels about like, is this the right thing? Should we be doing something else?
And I think the most important thing we have is that we all recognize we are trying to do [00:03:00] well for the business. I think particularly, especially with the CEO and the CTO roles. ‘cause executive hiring is hard in general. I think we found people that really wanted to succeed and, and CTO, because the CTO in our case is effectively also driving the product.
It was really important for me. I, I wanted somebody that was like, kind of like me that would make similar decisions to me. I didn’t want to take risk. I think we nailed that. I would say our CTO is a lot like me. I, they’re less in the weeds, but they’re much sharper in terms of academic background and things like that, and so it’s hard.
You kind of wanna get to a point where like 90% of the decisions they make would be the decisions you would’ve made. And then you gotta accept that some of them wouldn’t be, and that’s okay. And sometimes those will be better decisions. Sometimes they’ll be worse. Sometimes it’s neutral. Most of the time it’s neutral.
It doesn’t matter. But it’s just one of those things. And I, I think a lot of people struggle with that. And like, as soon as you forget about the illusion of control, ‘cause control actually is not that important most of the time. Or rather, [00:04:00] the, the idea of. A title or something being how you have control, like I have immense control at the company.
I don’t need a title to have like influence. Influence is probably a better word than control. And I think as soon as you let go of that, life gets a lot easier. And I let go of that a long time ago. So,
[00:04:16] Victoria Melnikova: and you’re still at center, you’re still shipping things
[00:04:20] David Cramer: More recently? I making moves, shipping things, making, yeah.
Um, I was pretty hands off for a long time. Like you go through these like waves, you get a lot of advice. I would say over the years, a lot of it’s wrong. And early on at some point everybody’s like, oh, you gotta hire people and let them do this stuff. That is absolutely the wrong advice for what it’s worth.
But it’s kind of like the company gets big and you’ve gotta do the thing that is most important for you to do that other people can’t do. Especially as like the sort of, there’s usually somebody that like, is like, it’s the CEO, but it’s also the CEO o founder is like a specific persona. It’s like the buck stops with you kind of thing.
So like work has to get done. So you’re doing that and I’m like, I would love to write code, but I have the other stuff has to happen, you know? [00:05:00] And more recently, I’ve actually had time to build stuff and it’s been fun. I also block off like two thirds of my calendar and so you just can’t schedule stuff.
And so it’s like it’s actually there so I can like work on something or experiment with something. But I will say like that’s the ambition. It still ends up being, I can’t really contribute to the main application that easily because it takes a lot more like sort of focused time than I have.
[00:05:21] Victoria Melnikova: I mean, it’s crazy to think.
I read somewhere that Sentry is used by 4 million plus developers and like 150,000 teams are using Sentry. So it’s really a household name for application monitoring. It’s something that I don’t remember me in my career not knowing about Sentry. So it’s like. It’s a big, big deal, right? Yeah.
[00:05:43] David Cramer: It’s, it’s a thing I’m most proud of.
It’s like the singular goal I’ve had in the company is like, it should be ever present. It should like dominate the industry, but it should do it because like we’ve made the right decisions. We do what’s best for the customer. We don’t try to cheat people or anything. Build a good product and then we make all the decisions around that to support that kind of [00:06:00] thing.
And it’s, at this point, it’s great ‘cause it’s worked. It takes a long time to get here, obviously, and, and it’s been really good. And actually that 4 million number, I don’t know how old that is. I also don’t even know how we calculate that. It’s such a, it, it’s hard to calculate those numbers. Obviously the, the team count is much easier, but it’s basically used by everybody.
It’s kinda like the default, which is cool. It’s like really hard to achieve that. But it’s fun ‘cause we get to do like big brand marketing and stuff and, and people kind of know what Sentry is. And so now we do stuff. Like current agenda is like, take something that’s frankly just boring. Sentry is not an interesting company and just make it fun.
And so, you know, we put out like ridiculous merch and, and stuff like this. And yeah, it’s, and the billboards and whatever marketing campaigns we have is, is really fun
[00:06:39] Victoria Melnikova: right now to people who don’t know. It’s kind of like an, a trip. Like, I don’t know how to put it differently. It’s, it’s kind of like Rick and Morty.
Yeah. And like dashboards Yeah. Goes crazy.
[00:06:51] David Cramer: The, the, the theme was. This started like years ago when we did our first billboard. And I’m like, I just want to do something that’s like shock and awe, [00:07:00] because I think like you’ve got a, the goal of everything is like attention. And I’m like, well, let’s just do something that’s like so preposterous that it doesn’t make sense and then double down on it that it has nothing to do with Sentry, so it makes even less sense.
And so it was like the first concept of this was called Sentry Can’t Fix This. That was the campaign and it was a, a mini tour. Playing beat saber and like knocking things off shelves, you couldn’t really visualize it ‘cause like line art. So it didn’t do the, the illustration. Probably we could have done a better job, but it make, it absolutely makes no sense whatsoever.
And that was like the first advertising campaign we did. And the current one is, it’s supposed to be the concept because the creative team tries to connect it to reality is. We’re like production monitoring, and you look at like, it’s like dashboards and numbers and like the data is like useless most of the time.
It’s like, cool, you have all this stuff, but it’s like it doesn’t actually make a lot of sense. It’s like, why do we have all this? It’s just a bunch of noise. And so the campaign was like, make it make sense kind of thing. And we’re just like, let’s just throw like random things that are just so obscure at them.
And then it just turned into like, oh, here’s these like hideous [00:08:00] face things, which we’ve kind of done something similar to that before. And it’s just fun, you know? Yeah,
[00:08:05] Victoria Melnikova: it is definitely fun. One of the things that I want to note though, with, with this whole AI wave Sentry was able to stay on top of it, right?
So, and internally at Eil Martians, I just want to share this. The CEO of Eil Martians Arena is a big fan of sr. It’s not easy to actually create something relevant, you know, in the, in the current climate and make it work well, right? It’s something that’s like a really fine balance. And Sentry did this thing when it doesn’t.
Only I like, it’s not only identifying the issues, but it’s also proposing the fixes. Right?
[00:08:40] David Cramer: The way I always articulate Sentry is like we just help you debug problems. It’s kinda like simple and it’s like, or bugs and bug is like a loose definition. It’s like, what do we think of as a bug is like users, not developers.
‘cause like you talk to a developer about what’s a bug? And they’re like, well that’s not really a bug. And they have something like annoying definition, right? You’re like, no, it’s broken. It doesn’t work. Right? And so we think of it like it doesn’t work, right? That’s a bug. And so the [00:09:00] idea with Sierra originally was like, well, LMS are really good at pattern matching.
You can actually. Simplify how you reason about bugs, like explain them better. And so it does that pretty well actually. Basically can take all this noise that is the telemetry and make it make more sense. So that’s like, so it does a bunch of stuff and then it can propose patches basically. And that that patch generation is about as good as everything is.
So it works. Sometimes it doesn’t work out other times. And our sort of hypothesis is, and the tech isn’t here yet. And to be fair, like frontier models are, what we’re banking on here is like if we could automatically. Probably not like merge prs, but if you could imagine that you have a queue of proposed fixes that are more or less correct, that’s like the most trivial 10% of your bugs that you’re just not gonna fix.
‘cause they don’t matter that much, but they’re easy fixes that are just ready to go. I would love that and I would actually pay a bunch of ‘em. I’d pay like $200 per bug fix or something. I’m like, we will have that like at some point, I think in the next year or two. But I think models have to get a little bit better before that to become like a real.[00:10:00]
Possibility because like no matter what you try today, it’s not quite there. But you can still do some cool things today. So,
[00:10:06] Victoria Melnikova: so one of the things you guys did is kind of derive that value right away for customers, right? Like, yes, things don’t work a hundred percent of the time, but it’s something very tangible that’s already on their hands and you.
Yourself are very much hands-on with the new experimentation with cps. And can you tell us about that? Like do you vibe, code, do you code? Do you code? Jen, what do you do? Yeah,
[00:10:33] David Cramer: so I like building things and I spent a lot of time just like personal projects and whatnot, and I built our MCP server and, and part of this is.
I have a lot of domain expertise, so I, I would not consider this luck or anything. I have a pretty good sense of what is going to be useful and what isn’t. Doesn’t mean I know everything, but if I think something’s going to be useful, it’s probably going to be useful. I don’t necessarily know how big it’ll be, but when I saw MCP, I’m like very clearly this is a way for me to plug Sentry into a, a workflow that is very obviously [00:11:00] valuable, and it’s like I’m sitting here in cloud code or cursor or something, I’m working on my application.
I’m writing, I’m building new features or I’m fixing bugs. Some of those bugs are in Sentry. I wanna pull in that context. I could copy paste it or I could just like copy paste A URL and have it automatically pull in the best version of everything and I could curate the best version of everything.
‘cause I know better than the customer. ‘cause I am actually the domain expert. And so I’m like, MCP lets me do that. And so I saw that and I’m like, and they had like started doing the authentication protocol and I’m like, this is the time when I can make this possible. And so I, I built that pretty quickly and prototyped it.
And we’ve still been iterating on it. Trying some new novel techniques on it, and it works unbelievably well, so spent a lot of time on that. I, I certainly dog food a lot of our tech and coerce a lot of our team to dog food on my personal projects as well. Does they like it? Yeah.
[00:11:46] Victoria Melnikova: Uh,
[00:11:48] David Cramer: I think it’s useful because it’s a different perspective because when you work at Sentry, we might as well be an enterprise company where it’s a very large application at a very large scale.
You can’t ship quickly. The consequences of breaking names are [00:12:00] serious. The the scale is serious. I have a bunch of zero user apps, effectively, some that are super over-engineered, some that use different technology stacks and so it gives very different perspectives. So it’s useful and some other people at work have similar things and so, so I think the values there, but yeah, and so we spend a lot of time dog food and a lot of this stuff.
But I think the other interesting challenge and, and, and you know, early stage versus late stage companies or startups even have this is like, we’re not early stage. We don’t take blind risks. You know, we can’t be like, yeah, let’s bet the world on some wacky idea. That’s definitely not probable, you know?
And so for us, even like Sierra and Mc P is like, no, these seem plausible outcomes. These seem likely to have strategic value no matter what world it comes to be, you know, kind of thing. And versus like, take vibe coding. I’m like, if you look at, say. Rewind time a little bit. ‘cause lovable and Bolt are a little bit, we know a lot more now.
And then when they came out I’m like, this doesn’t make any sense. Like there’s no world where we’re just generating an app from like a sentence or something. It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s not [00:13:00] possible and it’s much more obvious now to more people, but we would never have bet the future on that kind of thing.
But as a startup, you have nothing to lose so you can do those things. And so we have a little bit different of a strategy where we’re always like. What is valuable no matter what happens kind of thing. And so that’s always incremental from there. And so we spent a lot of time thinking about that. And Sears is the same.
MCP is the same. But then also it’s like, well, what do we control and what don’t we control? And, and then how do we be defensible and all these other little things that go in there. But to go back to your other question of like, I’ve not written code by hand in enough months that I’ve lost count, but it’s six to nine months at this point exclusively via clot code or, or cursor.
Pretty effective at it at this point. A lot of times it’s inefficient, but I, I can get a lot done now, like MCP servers entirely generated at this point. I, I wrote it by hand originally, but everything is generated plans pretty well, and so I, I would consider myself probably forefront expert of how this stuff actually works in reality versus loud opinions on the internet, which are a lot of those, so,
[00:13:59] Victoria Melnikova: so other.[00:14:00]
Tips and tricks that you can share with us as far as code gen goes, like guardrails. I don’t know. What are some things that were life-changing for you in how productive you can be with it and maybe some things that are not obvious that people are not doing and you think they should?
[00:14:16] David Cramer: So I think first and foremost, like people latch onto this idea of new things way too often.
Like the models, it got to a point and I think it was like sonnet three, five or whatever, and then they were good enough and that was it. And they’ve gotten a little bit better, but it’s very incremental now. And so everybody had this idea of like, oh, the new one’s so much better and everybody lashes onto this new model syndrome.
It stopped. It’s done like they are better. But like even the codex versus versus pick any Claude model, it doesn’t actually matter. I can use any of them and be just as effective. I can’t even tell you the difference because it’s so insignificant to me now. I am sure there’s tasks that matter and don’t matter and, and people will go through all these like, almost like voodoo.
It’s like, oh, you gotta like do this and then clear your history to like ritual to have a new context window. And I’m like, [00:15:00] doesn’t actually matter most of the time. And, and there are probably things that are useful here and not useful here, but I can run compactions over and over and be fine. I can run new context windows and be fine.
And so I think you just gotta figure out the workflow. That’s all it is. It’s a workflow. It’s which tool works best for you. Which approach to this works best. I will argue that like. Purely agentic. I, I don’t know if you’d call it vibe coding ‘cause I still, like, I spent a lot of time with systems engineering and in terms of sort of defining how I needed to look and then going back and if it’s not like that, I, I sort of repro it over and over.
I think Cursor is the best tool. I don’t use it as much anymore, but I think it’s the best tool to do this ‘cause you can still kind of like review it as it goes, which is a really good workflow for the real world. But, but again, use the best tool for you. But I think a lot of it is like you have to provide the right constraints.
And I think the hardest part is you need it to basically always look up information. Like you can never just be like, ask it to do something. ‘cause it doesn’t know anything. And I don’t know why people don’t understand this. You can’t train the models like it has [00:16:00] no. It’ll never be smart. It has to have realtime information and to get realtime information has to access the internet.
So you always, so I’m basically, whenever I’m prompting it, I’m like, go look up the information online. Like a hundred percent of the time that’s what I wanted to do. Like look up the latest versions, look up the docs, or do the thing from the shell, you know? And so, so I think trying to force it to do those things is really good.
And there’s like simple things that most people have figured out at this point. Like definitely use planning mode if you haven’t have it generate like specs or something, because those are pretty useful. You can review. And they’re also like a good way to resume work and whatnot. There’s not a lot of magic.
A lot of people, again, they’ll come with voodoo and stuff. It, it literally doesn’t matter. You’ll, you’ll come up with similar results. You just have to have a workflow that that works for you. So
[00:16:40] Victoria Melnikova: my general feeling of the room right now is that the hype cycle is kind of like coming into a close. Can you second that or do you have an opinion on what’s going on right now?
I kind of think
[00:16:52] David Cramer: so, but I. It’s always hard to say ‘cause the image stuff is really cool right now. Like Nana n nano banana. What a ridiculous thing. Pro nano Banana Pro. Yeah. [00:17:00] Very good. I love it. Very, very good. It’s like phenomenal. And I, I love it. ‘cause it’s like, those are things, it’s, it’s pretty easy to write code, don’t get me wrong.
It’s pretty hard to come up with lots of images of random things and, and especially those kinds of things. So like what I want is things that fuel creativity and you cannot like. Image generation is a creative endeavor. At the end of the day, code generation is not a creative endeavor. It kind of needs to be deterministic.
And so I wanna see more of that. Or like the World Lab stuff is really exciting. I don’t know if you’ve seen that, but it No, like look up World Labs. It’s phenomenal, like what the tech’s doing and it basically like, I don’t know how that, I’m not smart enough to understand this, but it’ll generate like a 3D world of an image.
Very cool. And so interstellar
[00:17:42] Victoria Melnikova: style kind of thing, I
[00:17:44] David Cramer: think kind of, yeah. Um, but like you can imagine like if you took this and all of a sudden you could walk around in a virtual world or something just from a snapshot. And so there’s gonna be a lot of really cool things that’ll come. I love Suno. Suno is phenomenal.
Pro tip. You have a significant other, or a family member, or you [00:18:00] want impress them. Go to Chachi pt. Ask it for lyrics to a song. Give them the name, A bunch of funny facts that are kinda like memes almost about them or embarrassing facts. Yeah. And be like, I need lyrics to a song. And give it the genre of music you want.
Plug that into Suno. It’s phenomenal. I need to do that. It’s so much fun. I, I kind of think the programming hype cycle I agree, is like, died down because it’s like you can do a lot, but you know, it, it’s not changed much in recent history, but it seems like there’s a lot more movement elsewhere. Now.
[00:18:29] Victoria Melnikova: I’m smiling a lot because I cannot.
Raised this image from my head. The selfies that everybody did with the, with the girl’s body. It’s it you guys. The eight
[00:18:40] David Cramer: girl selfie.
[00:18:41] Victoria Melnikova: Oh my God, it’s so funny. You should go to David’s Twitter page and look it up. It’s and the enterprise ready hat. Shout out to Michael Greenage. He was just on this podcast as well, is just so funny to me.
[00:18:54] David Cramer: I’m one of the guys at Sentry. Over the weekend, the holiday weekend, he built like a mobile app. It’s, this is not [00:19:00] public, probably because it would empty his bank account. You can basically take like a selfie and then like randomly generate a bunch of nano nano prompts. One of ‘em is the eight girl selfie.
And so that’s what started it. And then you can obviously upload photos to do the same thing. So I’m just like. Cool. Let’s go. It’s hilarious. There’s a bunch of others, obviously. Yeah. But it, it’s, you can almost, uh, like this’ll be the new TikTok generation. Yeah. Or not TikTok, Snapchat. Yeah. Like the filters and everything.
Yeah. And it, it’s super fun.
[00:19:24] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. It’s weird
[00:19:25] David Cramer: and cringe a little bit, but it’s fun.
[00:19:27] Victoria Melnikova: I want to go back in history, right? So. Nebraska. Mm-hmm. Take us to your, like, where it’s all started from, because I know that the story is not straightforward and it didn’t always, you did not always think that you would be this founder of this super successful startup.
How growing up did you find this route? Like how did you start exploring this? How did you find. The strength and maybe even like start believing in yourself that you can do [00:20:00] something like that. And I know it has to do a lot to do with the open source. So take us through this journey.
[00:20:08] David Cramer: Yeah, so I grew up in a small town, Nebraska, and I think sort of key inside I would argue is people sort of need to go through some kind of hardship.
I think a lot about this. Like I’m gonna have kids hopefully soon, and I’m like, how do I force them to work at like a fast food restaurant or something like something, you know, like. They, they can’t just grow up and have everything handed to them. And so, like, you know, I worked at Burger King when I was like 15.
I, I picked the top, we call this detasseling. You walk through a cornfield and pick the tops off of corn stalks. It is miserable. I did this in the summer for a couple weeks, like for a few years. Awful. But I would do stuff. I had a paper route and so I, I had to work for a living to some degree because my parents, my parents are working class.
But I was also obsessed with computers and I didn’t have one ‘cause we couldn’t afford it. And eventually I got one and, but I think I’m also just like attracted to that, which is good. So like I locked into something that is like, fortunately a good career, [00:21:00] but then open source is like a, a cool thing too.
And so, uh, so a little bit of maybe not right time, right place, but like right personality, right kind of opportunity that existed. ‘cause the internet was also a lot smaller back then, the community was a lot smaller, so it was a lot easier to be known. I, I really got into like the, the Python ecosystem way back in the day, the Django ecosystem.
This is when Rails was getting its start two, and I remember looking at Rails and Django and I could not understand anything about Ruby. It was just like a foreign language to me. And Python kind of looked mostly straightforward. And I, I had learned PHP before, actually, no. So I tried to learn Python and I’m like, what do I do with it?
Because this was pre Jengo, so there was no like web. And I learned PHP, but it was like kind of a mess. And then I learned Jengo after that. But I got really big in the Jengo ecosystem. And I, and what I would do is I would just open source everything I built, I didn’t, I didn’t think about it. I’m like, oh, I could just publish it on the internet.
And this was like when Google code was a thing. So it was pretty GitHub era. And I mean, I would just publish everything I built and I, I don’t know [00:22:00] that it was particularly good or anything. I would just do all this stuff. And there were random extensions for Jengo and whatnot. And, you know, one thing led to another and that gave me recognition and that gave me jobs and I gave me speaking opportunities at conferences.
And I would say I was a hard worker, but I actually just like really enjoyed building names and I enjoyed recognition. And so the, the reason Sentry is like the kind of company is, is because I want recognition. I have like this chip on my shoulder forever that like, and I’ll tell you, Aaron. One of our investors like almost certainly fault me for this nonstop.
Like we are entirely self-sufficient. We have never like relied on anybody to get to where we are. Like there’s no partnerships, there’s no nothing. And so that’s always kinda been centuries, like this is like evidence that like we can do this ourselves and we want like, it’s like the proof point that like, like everything is because we have built it in a good way, like the right way, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So I always wanted this like almost like. Validation that we like that I was good or whatever. I don’t know how you describe it, chip on the shoulder. And so open source I think was a way to do that. [00:23:00] ‘cause you also get these feedback loops that make it fun. But this was sort of in parallel ‘cause I was like, I think I was like 15 years old when I started learning to to code.
And I learned through MIRC, which is like a Windows chat client for like a defunct protocol. And it had like this really bad scripting language in it. And I was like one of these like script kitties, if anybody knows what that is. Super fun, questionable part of the internet. I don’t think I understood exactly what it was back in the day.
I think I just took it for granted what it was. You know, I was just experimenting online, learning all these things and I was into video games and all this stuff, and one thing led to another and I got a job with a company that was basically kids my age. It’s hard to call it a real company, where we were building like a, we basically reverse engineering World Warcraft and building content websites out of it, which is not as complicated as it sounds.
There were definitely some people we eventually hired that actually understood how to do it, where I was just like brute forcing things. But that’s kind of like that, that sort of, it enabled me to like kickstart my career. [00:24:00] And I, I don’t know. It it, it’s interesting ‘cause it’s one of those things where like, there’s a lot of people I met in this era where you could turn the hobby into like a career.
And a lot of these people came from games and there was a lot of these, like they built mods for World of Warcraft, or these days it’d be like Minecraft mods or. Roblox, I don’t, I think you can probably do the same thing. So there’s gonna be like a generation of all this, you know, a lot of those people work in the industry now, and they’re actually like, they’re like senior people that like run big things.
And it’s all because I think they actually really enjoyed it, you know? And I would say I arguably enjoyed building the technology more than playing the games. And so I just spent a lot of time doing that as a, as a like a teenager. And I also dropped out. And so I had a lot of time on my hands. One thing led to another and I, I sort of.
Moved to Germany for a period of time to work for this company, quote unquote, and then followed him to San Francisco. I think that like opened my eyes to the industry a little bit more. And I dunno, a lot of this is sort of, I think if you’re ambitious and it’s not ambitious, [00:25:00] like, like Wall Street ambitious, it’s like, I just wanna, like, I, I want like be, I wanna be part of this or something, and you’re hardworking.
Things kind of work themselves out. And so I think I was that. And so like, I, I actually left San Francisco for a couple years to go back to Nebraska. I was gonna move to New York and then I’m like, oh wow, New York is really expensive. Um, and SF was not cheap ever. Yeah. But, um, SF was not New York levels expensive at the time, but I left for a couple years, stayed in Nebraska, and I’m like, this is awful.
There’s, I met one single human in Nebraska my entire life that knew how to write code and I was near Lincoln, Nebraska, if anybody knows where that is. Which, there’s actually like some tech now, there’s a company called Huddle, which does like sports analytics or something. But they were not there at the time.
And so I’m like, I gotta get outta here. And so I, I like found a, I like, basically immediately I’m like, okay, I need to like find a company that’s in sf And turns out it was easy because I had a lot of open source stuff. A lot of people in the Jengo ecosystem used my stuff. And so it was like that I had a job out here.
And I dunno, [00:26:00] the rest is history, I guess. But again, I, I think it was just lots of hard work, lots of ambition. And open source is certainly an enabler. So people, a lot these days will talk about like, well, what’s the, uh, you know, why should I do work for free in open source? It’s like. I dunno, set yourself apart.
It’s a game of attention. Like how do you, how do you become somebody that’s like, of relevance when there’s millions of people in their, in the world? So yeah. So very, very compressed timeline. But uh, and then I’ve been working on Sentry for. I mean, I started full-time in 2015 and Sentry itself is from 2008, long time ago.
[00:26:34] Victoria Melnikova: So let’s talk about that. Socent started while you had a full-time job as an engineer somewhere else. Mm-hmm. At discuss? Yeah. And that’s the
[00:26:41] David Cramer: company I joined when I was leaving Nebraska. So.
[00:26:44] Victoria Melnikova: And you worked at Dropbox, right? Mm-hmm. You worked at different companies and you had Sentri at the same time.
Mm-hmm. I mean, some form of Sentry, the open source version, right? Or was it, so the
[00:26:54] David Cramer: open source version existed when I joined, discuss, and then I started the commercial version when I was leaving, like, like [00:27:00] actually I think it might’ve been a year before I left discuss. It was not like intended to be like a real thing.
It was like a haha, this little side project that maybe it’ll make some money. It turns out like your side project should not be like an infrastructure company, and it just like turns out to be miserable. But yeah, so I had that at the end of discuss, and I, I basically built the, like the hosting thing over a Christmas break one time.
And then when I went to Dropbox, which was my gig after discuss, I still had it there and I was there a little under two years and it was just like, that was sort of peak. Everything is hitting the fan can’t handle this. Like Dropbox was kind of going through this like. Big company grow up moment, which is not, not fun.
It’s like when the startup, the fun times of the startup and the interestingness becomes like politics frankly. And I’m like, this is not me. And Sentry was getting really painful because it was like I’m on call for both jobs and Sentry is like struggling to stay online. And I’m like, one of these has gotta give.
And I didn’t. I don’t care that much about money. I [00:28:00] like money. Money money’s a nice thing. I just don’t optimize for it. I’m like, okay, I’m gonna go do Sentry ‘cause I can pay myself a salary now. And so. But everybody was okay with it at the time. Nobody really cared and, which is good.
[00:28:11] Victoria Melnikova: So when I joined the v Martians, I, I didn’t, I didn’t actually realize how much V Martians create open source for the Ruben Rails community.
I didn’t know, I mean, I did know the sheer amount of it, but I, I didn’t realize the impact it has on the ecosystem. And it’s a, it’s a lot. And one of the things that we talk about, and not just Ruby Rails, like post CSS, and. A bunch of projects by Andres, also super well known, but one of the ideas that really stuck to me is for open source to be sustainable, you need to find ways to commercialize it somehow, either through consulting or custom, uh.
You know, builds on top of it or whatever it is, right? Or open core model, whatever it is. For many technical founders, for engineers who created this open source, it’s not [00:29:00] always obvious and easy to actually monetize your project, you know? And you have to start marketing it. You have to start setting it.
It’s not fun. How was that process for you? Did it come naturally like you were just well known in dj? Python and does just, you know, people came to you for help or how did it work?
[00:29:19] David Cramer: Yeah. One, I think so product market fit for folks who don’t understand, I, I would define as like a set of things. It’s not just like, is the product good?
It’s like, is the product good? Is the way it’s packaged good is, is sort of the customer profile, right? It’s all these combinations. Saints, we had that by default, like right off the right outta the gate. It was there. Pricing and stuff was not scalable. We charged like not enough to survive things like this, but.
Was there, people wanted to pay for it. We had the right business model, basically right outta the gate. And it was just like people wanted it to be a hosted service, right? They wanted a cloud service, didn’t care about the open source like some people did, but they generally didn’t care. We charged per air, that’s great.
They don’t want to, they don’t want errors, you know, et cetera, et [00:30:00] cetera, et cetera. And so I think it just worked really well and I never really did like anything that looked like traditional sales. I never cold called people or anything. I did try to convince people to like pay me money that were like paying less or.
We were using like open source that were like big companies, was not successful at it. It was very easy, but I didn’t spend hard, like it was like no time spent. It was mostly like organic. And so I think that worked really well, but very atypical because it was like what we just happened to be able to have this cloud service thing on top of it.
Whereas like most open source is not that. And so that’s where people struggle. Most of it is actually like there’s a consulting firm or something similar that just maintains a ton of an ecosystem and that’s like, that’s the reality of it, you know?
[00:30:42] Victoria Melnikova: That part was easy. It came naturally, but then you wanted to, at some point when it became a real big business, you wanted to dominate the market, right?
You wanted to be the one monitoring tool, and with that, you need to master enterprise sales. You need to start talking to big guys, [00:31:00] you know? And how do you enable teams to use your project and things like that. So, or your product. How did you tackle that? Like that was already after funding or? Where was it in the C’S lifespan?
How did it happen for you?
[00:31:15] David Cramer: I would say we’ve not yet mastered enterprise sales. Our goal was always, why is a developer that we want to use us not using us? That was the singular focus. And what I mean by that was like, okay, everybody in Jengo defaults a Sentry. Like we were in the official documentation for a long period of time.
I don ’t know if we still are and if we still are, it’s probably ‘cause we like. Contribute financially or something, whatever. Totally fine. But we were originally, ‘cause like we just did so and we’re like, it was good. It was just generally like a good useful thing. It was open source, blah blah blah. And I’m like, we should bring this to more developers.
‘cause I want more people to use our stuff. ‘cause our stuff is really good. It was just out of a desire for adoption and like what, again, for whatever reason that is. But I just wanted more people to use it. And this is when it was just open source, no cloud [00:32:00] service or anything. And so the way I always approach this, it was like not, oh, I want Wells Fargo to use it.
I’m like. I want PHP, Ruby and I would always look at ‘em like, where are the developers that are like me at? And that’d be like Rails people. Or these days it’d be like Laravel people. It was not oh, Java people or T Net people. In fact, it is still not Java people or T Net people. It is still like, okay, where are all the modern like sort of.
If you went to Y Combinator, what programming languages are they using? What frameworks are they using? That’s who we target. And that’s still true to this date. Doesn’t mean we don’t support those other ones, right? But it’s like that is where our priority remains. And so that, that’s always been true. And so we always focus on it from that angle.
As you grow over time, obviously you get bigger and bigger customers, and we have some very large customers in the world. One of our largest is like Disney Plus, which is a tried and true enterprise account. It looks exactly like an enterprise account. Has enterprise needs. It’s probably actually they are less needy, I would say than, I dunno, pick a finance company or an insurance company.
[00:33:00] Those are super needy accounts. We don’t have a lot of like traditional looking accounts. ‘cause even those kinds of companies like Disney, it’s not like, I don’t know what Disney has. It’s like legacy, but it’s not some like old software stack or something. It’s Disney plus, it’s a brand new technology thing.
They build like. I dunno who’s public or not, but we have some banks. It’s not like their old banking software, it’s their mobile apps. It’s their modern technology. It’s their emerging new builds and stuff like that. And so it ends up being a little bit different for us. And they always come to us. We have no outbound that is effective.
Whatever. It’s all inbound. It always has been, I don’t wanna say it always will be. I would love if we could find some way to grow it a little bit more organically, but so far we have been ineffective. We are, we are trying different things now. We’ll see. We put up a billboard in, uh, Illinois, I think it was Illinois.
It’s wherever John Deere is, their headquarters. It, the CTO’s name is on the billboard, and I’m like, maybe this’ll work. Not yet. [00:34:00] Um, and so we’ve not yet figured that out. I saw that
[00:34:02] Victoria Melnikova: he was tagged though. Yeah, he did respond.
[00:34:04] David Cramer: He, he’s definitely, uh, he knows the billboard exists. It’s on his commute to the office.
I dunno, but like we, we kind of like. We have the luxury that we are so good at what we do and we’ve been able to dominate the market so well, and it’s, you can’t really like contend with us because we charge such a low price point and we have the economy of scale. It’s really hard to make the technology cheaper than what we do.
Like maybe there’s a way I, I highly doubt it. You have to like lower the margins to such a degree that your business will not survive and we will keep our prices at what they are forever. You know, we’ve actually ne not raised prices in like a decade or something almost. Ignoring inflation. We have not touched ‘em.
I think we fixed something, but it didn’t impact any customer, you know? And, and that’s like, we have strong conviction in that in the company. And so we’ve done that so well that we’re like, well, the customers will eventually come and, and we think about things. We’re like, well, where are the next million developers or stuff?
And I’m like, I have no idea where they are. Maybe they, if they’re not gonna show up yet, and we just gotta wait for [00:35:00] them. But we also think about things like, well, should we do, you know, you get, you build a business, right? And we have this thing internally, and we sold this from Atlassian, I think. Where we say we build for the Fortune 500,000 instead of the Fortune 500, which I think is a, it’s, it’s fun, but it’s also like a more realistic way we think about it.
But everybody can do that now because there’s so many businesses in the world and they all actually have money to spend. And it’s, again, it’s way more fun to build that way than like Fortune 500, which is just gonna be everybody super needy, super custom. And then you think about that and you’re like, well, where do I get my next, you know, 10, 20, 30,000 customers?
And I’m like, that’s kind of hard. And you get to the long tail and you’re like, okay, well. Should we do FedRAMP or pick something really annoying? Right? And I’m like, okay, how hard is FedRAMP? What do you gotta do? I’m like, we gotta build like an entirely new business to do FedRAMP. And I’m like, there can’t be that many customers.
Can we just never do that? And the answer is like, yeah, we can literally just never do that. Or China, we could just literally never operate in China. And, and, but like. Some people don’t think that way and they’re like, oh no, no, we gotta do this, we gotta do this. And I’m like, no, you should do the thing That is the scale [00:36:00] mass thing.
Operate for the easy wins, not the hard wins. That’s not every business, mind you, but in dev tools, I think it is. And so we’ve always been about mass marketing, every single decision, but every single decision has a consequence. So for example, you want mass market, the price point has to be accessible. That means you have to give up what is traditional enterprise business in, in the sense of where you charge like.
Charge for value, if you will charge ludicrous price tags for no reason, which I think is, on one hand it’s kind of insane, but also it’s probably deserving for some of those businesses. And so there’s a consequence to everything, I guess, is what I would say. But it’s always just been that over and over.
It’s always like, where are the developers that we want to be our customers? Why are they not our customers? Can we remove those objections over and over and over? And then over time we’ve gotten bigger and bigger Customers that come inbound that have more and more annoying needs is how I would describe them.
And over time we’ve accepted more of those customers. Early on we just rejected them. But I will tell you, many customers came inbound early on. These are like the insurance companies or there’s a couple that [00:37:00] probably public at this point, but it’d be like a, like a blue, I don’t know if this is actually the company, but it’d be like a Blue Cross Blue Shield or like a Best Buy or something.
I, they’d want like an RFC or one of these enterprise processes early on. I’m like, no, we just not do it ‘cause it wasn’t a good spend of time and now they’re our customers. And so like, you know. It’s like, it’s a game of focus, I guess. It’s like if you took one thing away from this, it’s a game of focus and it’s like, find the thing that works and just go after that thing until that thing no longer works.
You know? And if that thing doesn’t work, then find something that does. You know, and it’s, it’s always that balance of like, how long do you spend on the thing that doesn’t work? And how long do you spend on the thing that’s working until, you know, it’s like kind of, you’ve squeezed, I guess all the juice out of it and you need to find the next thing that’s gonna work.
[00:37:42] Victoria Melnikova: So if we summarize this All Center is kind of like the household name. Everybody uses it, right? Mm-hmm. So engineers as champions kind of bring it into their organizations, and that’s how organizations become your clients because e engineers, yeah. It’s all bottoms
[00:37:58] David Cramer: up.
[00:37:58] Victoria Melnikova: Engineers are using it [00:38:00] and engineers use it because it’s convenient, it’s cheap, it’s, it does the job well.
It’s just a great product. That’s, that’s the thesis here. Yeah.
[00:38:12] David Cramer: And what’s wild is like even with that, even with how we are the default, the best in best in class, we have so many shortcomings. Even on the product that is 15 years old, they’re so obvious because technology continues to change like, like outside of us.
It’s interesting ‘cause like most people at our stage would not focus on say yc. We are still agro on focusing on YC and companies like that. It’s like you kind of have to, because like you stop and the entire business will shift. Like most people would go up market and they’d be like, okay, now we gotta focus on six figure accounts.
And we are like the polar opposite. We’re like, no, it’s all about the bottom. Like the, the bottom’s up, the top of the funnel, that is the focus. It’s s and b, it’s mid-market. It’s that forever. Forever being like, I’m exaggerating a little bit here, but it’s like that focus never disappears, at least, you know, kind of thing.[00:39:00]
And it’s super, super important for us. So.
[00:39:02] Victoria Melnikova: And there are ways that you support that marketing through the open source pledge, right? That you Yeah, open source
[00:39:07] David Cramer: pledge. We do a big, like, like yc actually more specifically in, even in recent history, like we’ve spent a lot of time, like we actually launched like a new program there, um, sub six months ago.
We’ve already given out like 5 million in credits or something. And that’s just like a totally new thing for us. We never did it before and we’re like, man, this is probably good. We can do this. We’re big enough. And so we’re just like trying new things and trying to figure it out. But I, I’ll say it’s the bigger you get, it’s like.
So many moving parts and so many more customers, it gets harder and harder. And I think even remembering or realizing that all these things are happening, it gets really hard. So
[00:39:38] Victoria Melnikova: does it get harder when you’re not a CEO or a Ct O, or
[00:39:43] David Cramer: no, none of that changes. My job has not changed hardly at all from when I was CEO or CTO.
And so like I no longer really manage certain things, especially when I, when I change CEO, like I don’t really manage. Anything on the investor side. To be fair, we also don’t really raise money [00:40:00] anymore ‘cause we don’t need to. And so like, but I don’t, I don’t interact with investors unless I want to. Now I don’t really do much on the exec hiring front, which is nice.
I didn’t wanna do these things. But from a strategy point of view, I’m, I’m more or less involved the same way I always have been from an engineering point of view, pretty similar. I’m more or less involved the way I always have been. I now just have a, like a larger peer group, which is super valuable and that, that’s a great thing, is like.
As you grow, you just get more, more people that are sort of you. You’re sort of growing just a total brain power, if you will, versus like, oh, now somebody’s just doing this job so I can do less, or something like that.
[00:40:37] Victoria Melnikova: Actually, Paul Costone said the same thing. It gets easier when you hire great people and they can take part of the pie and like focus on that domain.
So let’s, let’s stay on the fundraising part just, just a, just a tad. So from what I understand, you have been profitable since like, you know, for
[00:40:56] David Cramer: not profitable, but we burn very, very little.
[00:40:58] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. [00:41:00] So. If you’re profitable as a dev to startup Sentry is Series E, but even smaller, let’s say series B, if you’re profitable, does it still make sense to fundraise?
Like is there a pressure to fundraise or, it really varies by case.
[00:41:15] David Cramer: So Sentry 2015, we were profitable as myself and my co-founder. We’d hired one person, we still had slim profit line, but then what? We had no more money and so we couldn’t hire anybody else. Did we need somebody else maybe? We couldn’t do everything we wanted.
So I think it just comes down to like, what are you trying to do and do you have enough money? Do and, and what’s the risk profile? And so I think you gotta, you gotta run that math. I will say our last fund raise was 2223. I’m not sure we spent any of that money. Did we need to raise that money? Maybe it was like it was a Zer, so Sure, why not?
It’s cheap money. Might as well. You should raise when the money’s cheap. You shouldn’t raise when the money’s not cheap. That’s the rule of thumb. So I think it’s [00:42:00] fine that we raise the money. We make a ludicrous amount of money on the, the cash sweep every month. So it’s fine and we burn very little, but the burning is not good.
It’s not good to raise money and not spend it. So that is a thing, but it’s not good to. To spend money that you don’t need to spend either. So there’s a balance to it, and I think you gotta find that balance. But I, I don’t think it has anything to do with profitability or not. So like, people will of like often like, flex, it’s like, ha, we’re profitable.
We don’t need to raise money. I’m like, that’s cool. Who cares? Like, my goal is to build like a, like a humongous business. I don’t care what it takes to get there, because one day, like we could be profitable very aggressively, very fast if we wanted to be, but the goal is not to be as profitable as quickly as possible.
It doesn’t matter. It’s like an irrelevant fact, right. So like my goal is how do I become the biggest player in my market? Like we, I have a singular North Star I focus on at Sentry, and so we have two core metrics that we drive internally, 250,000 teams, we call ‘em companies or organizations, but 250,000 of those.
And we’re at paid, by the way, paid, I don’t know what our number is, but it’s somewhere around 75,000. So it’s like [00:43:00] 150 total, but like 75 paid. So we’re a long ways from this. This is not a short term goal. 250,000. Those customers might not even exist yet today. So that’s a long-term goal and a billion in revenue.
Those are our two targets that we talk about. Right now, I only care about that quarter million customer goal. And so that’s what I think about every day. That’s all I’m trying to accomplish. Doesn’t matter how I get there, if I get there, I’ve created something that like nobody touches ever of all time and I’ve already basically like helped create something and is already like so significant that very few people in the world have ever achieved something at this level.
Right, and it’s, that’s already cool. So again, profitability, et cetera, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just like how you sort of achieve the goal is, is mostly irrelevant. And especially when you talk about like these, you uh, the internet is a thing. People like to bootstrap things, whatever, it doesn’t matter.
I would take the money any day of the week versus risking my own money or whatever, but it’s gotta be a business that can be big. And so there’s a lot of variables that go into it, but. [00:44:00] Venture’s, great. It’s an unfair advantage if you can get venture funding. Not all businesses make sense to take it. It’s great if you’ve got a lifestyle business, but I’ll give you a good analogy of like, tailwind is a bootstrapped business right now.
I bet I, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about their business. I don’t know any of them personally. I bet right now they’re like, Ooh, what’s business gonna look like in five years? That’s a very different beast than like, we are building a very, we are already a large enterprise company, right. And we’re trying to build it into like a titan, right?
And so we are just, it’s a different thing. We live in entirely different worlds. And so, I don’t know, it, it’s really hard to contrast the things when you see these conversations because like, I’m just not trying to accomplish the same thing as some of these other people. And so it just really depends on what you’re after.
There’s always the right thing. But like we bootstrapped, we were profitable. We were profitable going into our Series A, we’ve never been profitable since. Then some years we burned like $2 million and we had a hundred million in the bank. And so it’s like, I don’t know. It’s
[00:44:52] Victoria Melnikova: like, yeah. Yeah. That’s interesting.
Today was the news that Banja has joined Anthropic. Yeah. And you know, [00:45:00] people talk about, it’s, it’s interesting, right? The ecosystem is shape shifting. Something is happening and what happened with Sentry 10 years ago, 15 years ago is hardly repeatable as a case. Yeah. Right? Like it’s, things really need to.
You know, coincide for, for it to happen. So it’s very unlikely. So if you were to give advice to somebody who is building today, what would you say are like, a couple of things they should keep in mind? Yeah. As they build.
[00:45:32] David Cramer: That’s tough because I think even in like open source, it’s, it’s wildly different.
Like if you look at open source now, open source is dead. Like there is no new open source. It’s all corporate funded. Like, like people might not like to hear, but it’s true. Is that a good thing? I don’t know. Does it matter? I don’t know. Like, and so it’s, it’s complicated. It’s probably not a great thing, but it’s like, does it actually end up mattering in a long period of time?
I’m not like, religious about this, so I don’t know. But it’s like, so a [00:46:00] lot of things are different and I, I do think it’s like, yeah, everything’s like timing. So there’s, there’s often very little you can learn from success, in my opinion. You can learn a lot from failures and things that you’ve experienced that are done wrong or you’ve done wrong.
But I think you can, you can learn about like how some people think about things and like, and what I find most interesting, so Sentry is like we’ve done a lot of things that are counterculture, and I love counterculture and I’m a big fan of the acquired podcast, which a lot of the stories you’ll hear ‘cause they’re like, they ’re just like the legends of business and stuff that they talk about.
They’re all counterculture, they’re also all right time, right place. And they’re also all like outlier humans, you know? And so I think. I would just go to basics. It’s like everything is about like hard work. Yeah. Some people get lucky. That’s, that’s just life. Whatever, you know? I would love to get lucky.
We’d all love to get lucky, you know, if we do, cool. But you can’t optimize around luck, right? So it’s like work hard. I think there is like a network thing. If you can get to sf, despite what people would like to tell you, SF is unfair. Just do [00:47:00] it. Who cares? Who cares about what the internet means? Say like, SF is like, it’s like a network game, right?
Like especially if you want to like do the founding thing or, or the venture thing. Like it is so unfair if you have access to sf and so SF is really good. It’s obviously a little bit better now elsewhere, but it’s still, it’s wildly different, but I think it’s like work hard. I, I think the problem is like people struggle.
How do you find the right thing? And I actually think the biggest mistake people make is starting a company versus just joining one. And so I worked at a lot of early stage companies. Sentry is the first company I started, but I, I worked at two gaming companies early life. Then I worked at Discuss, I worked at another company briefly and I worked at Dropbox.
So Sentry is my sixth job and I started full-time. I think I was 30 years old. And I learned a lot from those experiences. And then you have like 20-year-old starting companies. I’m like, you just don’t know anything yet. You haven’t experienced enough. You haven’t, you haven’t seen everybody else mess it up yet.
And, and so I would just say like, stop starting companies and go learn some stuff, but be ambitious. Stop asking for permission to do things like take some ownership of things. [00:48:00] But I think it’s like if you, if you don’t try really hard, like if you watch movies like the, especially like all the stereotypes like Wall Street or like anything that’s finance related, you see this and everybody’s like hustling and trying really hard and it’s like that is actually how it works.
Um, people do spend time, especially when you’re young ‘cause you have less going on. Yeah. People, I spent all my time working on my open source and stuff in the evenings, like Sentry, early days, every evening, every weekend because it was fun. Not because. Like I was pretending to hustle. I actually wanted to spend that time.
I enjoyed it. It felt rewarding at some point. It felt rewarding ‘cause I, the business was growing and stuff, and so you just gotta spend the time get better. But I do think, like, find people you can learn from. Find teams that are fun to be on, find, you know, challenges. You know, I’m, I’m sure like half the people in the city work on boring problems like uninteresting companies and it can be hard to get like on a really exciting team, but I.
I guarantee you half the problems that say open AI are extraordinarily uninteresting and people should not seek those teams out. [00:49:00] And so like you can go to small companies and still find these really interesting problems, you know, and, and all of my teams outside of Dropbox were like uninteresting tiny companies.
But I worked on such interesting problems and that allowed me to do the cool open source stuff. It allowed me to operate at like an interesting scale of problems. And so, I don’t know, you, you kind of gotta just be willing to do these things. I, I don’t know. It, it’s, it sounds like kind of like fluffy advice, but it’s like, it’s almost like just ignore the advice and like find interesting stuff to work on and don’t over optimize.
I didn’t optimize for anything. Early career. I just wanted to work on stuff and I only left my job at discuss ‘cause I was annoyed by some coworkers and I only left Dropbox because like Sentry was like too much pressure and the politics of Dropbox, it was big company growth mode and, and, and there was always like a forcing function that I was just like mad that I left, which is the right reason to leave for what it’s worth.
It’s never, I’m like, oh, I like, I must have more money. I’m gonna go like, join this. And then two years later I, I didn’t have like a five year plan, you know? So, so I, I would like worry less about these kind of optimizations, [00:50:00] like everything works itself out in the end, so.
[00:50:02] Victoria Melnikova: Nice. Speaking of Fluffy, we’re approaching our final question, and it’s called warm fuzzy question.
And it goes like this, what makes you feel great about what you’re doing today?
[00:50:14] David Cramer: There’s some things that are really fun, so I, I think about like what we’re able to do. Like I, I love that we build a product that everybody, like a lot of people use and, and most people like it, but there’s other things that we’re able to accomplish that I actually like.
It’s really fun. I think about like, you know, things like the open source pledge, they’re not really successful yet. Like we’ve, we’ve managed to coerce some people and like we’re probably like six, 7 million Sentry alone, gives almost a million dollars a year. That’s cool. Feels good. That helps some people.
I think things like that are actually like pretty rewarding. I think personally, I’m trying to find more ways to like, get involved in like programs and, and personally helping people, which is like rewarding. And so I, I think it’s, it’s tough to say because I’ve not yet entirely figured out what like, is like the almost like repeatable thing.[00:51:00]
Honestly, half the time. What’s like really fun and rewarding for me is like building something interesting that people like, it’s still the same thing that’s always been there. So MCP was really fun because one. I felt like my skills finally were relevant again with this AI thing. ‘cause I’m like, oh, tech is changing again.
I can finally build stuff. All of a sudden I am now relevant and I can teach people and and do something. So that’s been really fun. I do find it fun to like kind of give back. And it’s interesting, I had this one heartwarming moment where, like a kid, so this is, there’s this program called Hack Club, which is like high schoolers and I’m a big, so when diversity in tech was like a big subject like a decade ago or whatever, I’m like a big proponent of like, you can’t fix the problem without fixing the funnel.
Like you’ve gotta like educate, like you gotta develop people earlier in life, right? You can’t like take. Somebody that’s 40 years old out of a customer support job and pretend they’re gonna be successful, like out of a bootcamp. It just, we try this, it was a failed program. And so I’m like, how do we get involved early?
And so like early on I’m like, okay, maybe I can help some of these. And I tried some different programs, but one of ‘em was [00:52:00] Hack Club. I just gave like a small cash gift, whatever, didn’t matter. But they gave laptops that people, and one of the kids like messaged me at one point and he is like, I had this laptop forever, blah, blah, blah.
And it was just like a nice random message. And I’m like, oh, this is so nice. Like, it just, I, it was like a hi for like a weekend. And so like, things like that are really, really nice. And, and so I am constantly kind of looking for like, what are these, like early stage, like high school to college programs I could get involved, that could like push people in more of like what I would consider the good direction of life, which is more of like.
Kind of like the hacker mentality. Like you can build things, you can get access to thing. ‘cause access is half the problem. Right. And a lot of people don’t have access, especially outside of like the US or outside of like Silicon Valley. So
[00:52:40] Victoria Melnikova: maybe Nebraska can be a good camp for that, you know? ‘cause it, I thought about it, but I’m also like very few programmers.
Yeah. I’m
[00:52:46] David Cramer: like, ah, I just don’t want to go back there. It’s like, so interesting. But, but yeah.
[00:52:50] Victoria Melnikova: Finally, I want to provide you a stage to invite people to use Sentry. I’m sure all of our listeners know what it is, but if they don’t. How can they [00:53:00] find it when it is useful for them?
[00:53:02] David Cramer: If you Google Sentry, we better be number one.
There’s an insurance company that owns the.com that one day we will acquire, but they’re, I dunno, something like a billion in revenue. So we got a little ways to go. Sentry.io. When your app crashes, we tell you about it. That’s the TLDR. We do a bunch of stuff these days, but um, you probably already use it works everywhere.
That’s mostly straightforward. If you need anything, I am. I think I am Z-E-E-G-Z. Don’t ask on Twitter, reach out or X, sorry, X. I’m always happy to help. I’m a founder, not an executive as I tell people. So super low key. But
[00:53:38] Victoria Melnikova: yeah,
[00:53:39] David Cramer: I don’t know. I never shill, so
[00:53:41] Victoria Melnikova: thank you. Thank you for catching yet another episode of Deaf Propulsion Labs.
We at Evil Martians transform growth stage startups into unicorns. Build developer tools and create open source products. If you a developer tool needs help with product design [00:54:00] development or SRE, visit evil martians.com/devtools. See you in the next.
