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 and I’m the head of new business at Evil Martians. Today I’m excited to introduce my guest, Ivan Burazin, CEO, and founder of Daytona. Hi Ivan.
[00:00:23] Ivan Burazin: Hello.
[00:00:24] Victoria Melnikova: How are you today?
[00:00:25] Ivan Burazin: I’m pretty good. How are you?
[00:00:27] Victoria Melnikova: I’m good as well.
I’m good as well. I am actually very happy to have this conversation today and I just listened to the Open Sourced podcast, uh, that was recently, yeah. By Heavybit and it’s very recent, which makes me excited because there is a lot to unpack. Let’s talk about Daytona. Sure. People see posts from you on various platforms about this skyrocketing growth.
[00:00:53] Ivan Burazin: Mm-hmm.
[00:00:53] Victoria Melnikova: What’s going on?
[00:00:54] Ivan Burazin: Growth. Growth. It’s quite interesting how these posts become [00:01:00] interesting to people and so there is a bunch of growth Daytona right now. What we do try to do, and we do it as much as we can, we try to be as transparent as we can with these posts. Basically, there’s so many people posting so many different graphs without like X and Y axes.
We’ve done some of those, but we’ve done more without, with actually showing them because I think that actually gives, you know, more value and more sort of truth to what you’re doing. Mm-hmm. So like now when you can actually see the numbers and the time horizons of these numbers, then it becomes even more.
I guess interesting to people, right? Mm-hmm. It’s like, oh, you have this like growth trajectory, but it’s also like legitimate, like the numbers that they’re, and so we’ve shared like everything from revenue numbers to sandbox numbers through time, and you know.
[00:01:42] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:01:43] Ivan Burazin: We have shared receipts, as we’ve said.
Yeah.
[00:01:46] Victoria Melnikova: Right now we’re talking about millions, right? Millions of sandboxes.
[00:01:50] Ivan Burazin: Sure. Yeah.
[00:01:51] Victoria Melnikova: What are those sandboxes? Who is spinning them up? What is the reality behind those graphs?
[00:01:57] Ivan Burazin: So basically, Daytona is a [00:02:00] infrastructure company that offers. Compute or computers specifically to AI agents. If you think about any of the legacy clouds or the AWSs of the world or whatnot, they’re all for like app deployment, like deployment outer loop stuff.
What we’re building out is a new type of cloud, which is for the inner loop. So what we humans do on our computers, basically on our laptops. Mm-hmm. Like you have right now, this is what agents need, but at like super scale, because there are so many now agents doing things in the quote unquote. In our loop and the primitive that we have created that that we have is called a sandbox.
That is what the industry has deemed that it is the name. Although I feel it sort of dumbs down the scope of what it does.
[00:02:41] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:02:41] Ivan Burazin: But it is what it is. It is. Someone posted yesterday. It is the new. EC2 or what EC2 equivalent of what EC2 was. It is. Now, for this new agent age, we think about the sandbox as more than just a place where you execute codes safely.
You can think about it as a composable computer for the agent. [00:03:00] So what I mean by composable computer is that the agent can. At the time of need. So let’s say you have an agent, you as a human. Mm-hmm. Or talking to an agent and you give it a task. And for the task, it needs a computer. Mm-hmm. A computer can, you know, clone a GitHub repository, create a website, preview the website, run a browser, do a com, like whatever it needs.
And at that point it can say, oh, I need one, and I will create it. Yeah. And I say composable because. It’s not just like all these, some of these things are pending, some things are in Alpha, but generally the idea behind that is the agent can, at creation time, obviously set the number of CPUs.
[00:03:34] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:03:34] Ivan Burazin: Number like how much gigabytes of ram, how much disc, but also does it need a GPU? Does it need to be a Linux, a Windows a Mac? So I think about these computers as. Everything that humans do. So you have now a MacBook Air, I think, is there? Yeah, this is an old one. Which is, which is, which is great. It is like great for like email and you know, Excel and whatnot.
But if you’re doing like 3D rendering, then you have this big computer [00:04:00] with graphics cards inside of that. Yeah. And we want the agent to have that computer as well. Mm-hmm. And so that’s how we think about this new primitive that we’ve created. And there’s so many companies that are now building agents, and you can use Daytona as.
For your single agent, if you like.
[00:04:13] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:14] Ivan Burazin: But the, the most of the growth comes from these companies that are now creating consumer. Products, but these consumer products are agents. So every time a consumer interacts with the products, it spins up an agent and the agent will potentially spin up a computer to get the task done.
[00:04:31] Victoria Melnikova: So we’re talking about like one organization could have thousands of agents, thousands
[00:04:35] Ivan Burazin: of computers, hundreds of thousands of agents. Exactly. Okay. So let’s take an example. This is not our customer, but just like an example that everyone has known. So chat, GPT is an agent, right? And so chat, GPT has how many millions of users a day.
[00:04:46] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:04:46] Ivan Burazin: Whatever. And then how many interactions is new? Interaction is a new agent. Mm-hmm. And then how many of those interactions actually spin up a computer? Mm-hmm. Whenever you see, like thinking you have, like you can see that’s running a Python script or whatever. Yeah. It’s [00:05:00] spinning up computer. Yeah. Or if you click on agent mode, it’s literally spinning up a full on computer.
Mm-hmm. So just imagine the number of users chat. GBT has the number of agents for those users and the number of computers for those agents. And so that’s just like one, right? And now think of all the companies. Like that are coming out of YC or larger companies doing these things. The number of agents will essentially be the number of humans to the power ven.
Like that will be, that is maybe even today, but it’s like. There will be so many more agents in the world than humans. Mm-hmm. And so they need this new primitive to be able to get their job done.
[00:05:33] Victoria Melnikova: So the autonomous business is to compose those computers.
[00:05:36] Ivan Burazin: Yeah.
[00:05:36] Victoria Melnikova: What is the developer experience looking like for agents?
It, does it matter at all or it’s something different?
[00:05:42] Ivan Burazin: It all matters, and so we work on both the developer experience and the new coin term agent experience. Which the team at Netlify came up with agent experience, and I kind of think as a like new dad, as we talked about earlier, I really think about this as someone, and this [00:06:00] might sound odd at the beginning, like someone creating children’s toys.
And the reason I say this is if you’re creating children’s toys, you sell to the parent and the child.
[00:06:12] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:06:12] Ivan Burazin: Right. So the parent has to be Okay. With that and the child has to like it as well. Yeah. So like there has to be both of that. And in that same vein, we’re not in a place where an agent will autonomously find Daytona, use Daytona, connect to Daytona and do like that whole thing doesn’t exist yet.
[00:06:26] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:06:26] Ivan Burazin: We’re in a place where, where a human, a developer, a parent says, oh, I like this product, or this product, or Daytona or other company or their own thing. And then they choose hopefully us. Then when the agent goes off to do the work, the question is, is it more performant? Is it more able to execute on his task with us versus someone else?
[00:06:46] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:06:46] Ivan Burazin: And so we strongly believe this is a whole nother conversation that using Daytona, your agent is like twice as more performant than using anything else. But that is how I think about it. So you have the agent’s experience, like can the agent do the task inside the context window [00:07:00] time and whatever.
And does the parent, the developer, enjoy the experience? So the DEX, the SDK, whatever the documentation that it chooses, they choose us for someone else.
[00:07:09] Victoria Melnikova: This is so cool. Like this is such a simple way to explain something that like is really hard to wrap your mind around. When we talk about marketing that developers or whoever will be making that call of and data on or not, how do you convey those like agentic
[00:07:25] Ivan Burazin: features,
[00:07:26] Victoria Melnikova: advantages, features?
Yeah. And like in general, what do you bet on when you market to your audience?
[00:07:33] Ivan Burazin: We started this version of Daytona building it nine months ago. Yeah, we launched it six months ago. Yeah, I remember that. So it’s all very, very new. It’s all very new. So the way we position ourselves has evolved across time.
But there was two things that we tried to do really well at the beginning, and that was, we always were thinking about the agent agents experience. Like even on the first version of Daytona, it had all these like. This thing that we call the agent toolbox. Mm-hmm. Which is a bunch of [00:08:00] headless tools for the agent to more easily get its job done.
So we’re always thinking about that. And being someone that’s built developer tools before you were always mm-hmm. We were always thinking about the developer experience, so we were trying to do those two things. As well as we understood at that time, and so we understand better than we understand. Then the other thing is that we really, really emphasize, and I’m sure a lot of our users can attest to this, is the support.
Yeah. So even when we screw up, break doesn’t work. Missing a feature, we’ve really tried to get back to people. ASAP. Yeah. And it’s like literally hopefully minutes, not even hours, let alone days. And so that is a very strong, this is outside the realm of developer experience and agent experience, but I think is very much, it’s all the way, like it’s a customer experience, but I think that, especially as a startup, if you can be in front of your customers whenever thing hits, like whenever there’s something that’s not great.
And I’ve had a lot of conversations, unfortunately, more than I wish I had with other companies where things did not pan out. Yeah. And I would get on the [00:09:00] phone and, you know,
[00:09:01] Victoria Melnikova: yeah.
[00:09:02] Ivan Burazin: Take that face on, which is a very uncomfortable task, but I hope that, and all of them are still with us. Thankfully, that proves a point that we are well aware when we are at fault and, and sort of solve for that.
So I think that, especially as a new startup, there’s a lot of things that you can’t predict. Mm-hmm. And so can you emphasize that part, acknowledging to the human on the other side, the actual human, the buyer, the payer of the thing that you are open to hearing. What they need essentially. I think that’s been one of the key things that we’ve been doing a lot.
[00:09:33] Victoria Melnikova: Let’s talk about this pivot. Okay. Because I think it’s, it’s very brave, first of all, because I remember when Daytona started, it was one thing, right? Yeah. It was dev environment for humans, for engineers. And when I arrived to San Francisco in March, I see this like, it’s a different thing. It’s a totally different product.
You know, it’s, you see banners everywhere. Daytona is where agents run code or something like that. Right. That was like [00:10:00] a leap of faith for you, right? Yeah. Because it was just the beginning of this like huge tide that you kind of like sock. I mean basically, and correct me if I’m wrong here, but you started promoting the product before it it, before it was ready.
Before, yeah. You know, so, which is also brave, you know, because then you create this like massive pressure on you and your team to deliver what you said to deliver. Walk us through that.
[00:10:25] Ivan Burazin: Oh, sure. So as you mentioned, we were doing something else, dev environment automation for human developers and large enterprises.
But end of last year we had been getting like inbound requests for people, building agents that they need to like run the agent. Mm-hmm. Or runtime for an agent or whatnot. We were very naive at this and we were basically, oh, here’s our product. It works for humans. What is different for agents? And I hear this today, people are like, what’s the difference?
And when you give an agent something for humans, you will feel the difference. Yeah. Back to like the performance. Mm-hmm. Like it will perform better or at all with something [00:11:00] that is made specifically for them. And so we were doing a bunch of research and sort of figuring out what that looked like and ultimately New Year’s Eve, it was actually of this year.
We had made the first beta version of this thing not telling our entire company. It was just me and my co-founder. And when we saw this, we gave it to the few people that were interested in it. And they’re like, oh yes, this is at least directionally, there were so many problems with it, what they wanted.
And we had looked at the market like we were not the first that were doing this. Mm-hmm. But it was not a well known. Fact, like even if you look at, I think it was like AI engineer in April
[00:11:37] Victoria Melnikova: mm-hmm.
[00:11:37] Ivan Burazin: Of this year.
[00:11:38] Victoria Melnikova: Yes.
[00:11:38] Ivan Burazin: Where Anthrop Pick and Open AI came out with, and I mentioned this before, like that in their definition of an AI agent, there’s like a runtime or environment component.
Yes. Like even the labs did not, they may have known, but they have not published. But this was a thing. So this was very much to your point, like a leap of faith.
[00:11:52] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:11:52] Ivan Burazin: We had some signals. There were some other companies doing okay in the market. It seemed like it’s still early on the time horizon.
[00:11:59] Victoria Melnikova: [00:12:00] Yeah.
[00:12:00] Ivan Burazin: And in our previous companies, just as a side note, we had, we had created this company in 2009, the co-founding team called Code Anywhere.
Yes. Which is the very first browser-based Id ever. Mm-hmm. So this is like before rep lit, before code, space, whatever. You learn the hard lesson of timing, like being early does not help you learn. You learn it. And so this seemed to be right on time. Yeah. Like it seemed to be right on, on the cusp. We had to create this decision, right?
Are we gonna do like two products or one product? Yeah. And I had always in my, our entire lives, you come up humbly, you’re very scared to lose revenue, right? Yeah. You want it in of course. And you always do multiple things of course. And then you don’t focus. And so this time we’re like, we have to focus.
And so we ended up revenue going down to zero, thanking all the old customers. As of February 1st starting to rebuild. Wow. It’s essentially a complete rebuild of the product. Like theoretically it’s the same. There’s a lot of learnings we had put from the code anywhere, days, and Daytona V [00:13:00] one, but essentially a new product.
And so we had decided to rebuild that out, but because we had the conviction to. Pull the trigger and say we’re not gonna have this old revenue. We also had that same conviction of like, we’re going all the way. Like it’s like boomer bust. Like boomer bust. There is no middle ground. We had worked together for a long time on multiple companies.
We’re like a cockroach company where you like sort of like exist for a very long time is like boom or bust all the way. Yeah. And so to your point, we’re like GTM team ‘cause everyone was remote at the time and we’re like GTM team flying to San Francisco.
[00:13:32] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah,
[00:13:32] Ivan Burazin: we’re going to sell this thing or educate the market even before exists.
And we were doing that for three months before actually launched the product itself. Mm-hmm. Which all now in hindsight seems like super intelligent. Right. But in the moment it’s like you have no idea.
[00:13:46] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. You did a lot of leg work too. I saw you at a bunch of event. I mean, any event I could, I still do a lot of leg work.
Yeah. Go to, yeah. Any event I can think of, you’re probably there, you know, with a booth or presenting or pitching or doing whatever. [00:14:00] Does that community work help?
[00:14:02] Ivan Burazin: Our go-to-market motion is completely based, almost completely based on in real life.
[00:14:06] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:14:07] Ivan Burazin: Events. Almost completely. I can talk a lot about that.
Uh, and people do ask us about our go-to-market motion, how we became this company that a lot of people now know about out of nowhere. And I think. Or I’ve mentioned to people, I think you have to like play your strengths.
[00:14:22] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:23] Ivan Burazin: So I personally, so I’ve talked to like Swix multiple times. Yeah. I, I feel that his fame came from his writing.
He writes great eloquently, I can’t write for, I’m terrible at this stuff and it takes a long time. And I’m like, good at it and like, ugh. Just not my thing. I had had a conference company which I had built and sold, uh, which had like thousands of people. It still exists. And so doing things in person
[00:14:47] Victoria Melnikova: mm-hmm.
[00:14:47] Ivan Burazin: Is a. Something that we know how to do really well. And two of the people in the go-to-market team came from the old company that we had worked together. Yeah. So like we had created conferences and stadiums, and so doing things like meetups and [00:15:00] hackathon and drinks up is like easy. Mm-hmm. Like really easy for us.
Right. And we understand the, the way people interact and the psychology about building communities around in-person events. Yeah. And so that is what we played. To the max, like we had pushed that as much as we can. There’s more on that, which is still TBD. We can’t announce it yet, but there’s even more in-person stuff to a higher degree than things that we’ve done before, but we’ve, it’s almost completely been our go-to-market on in.
Mm-hmm. In real life. Just a caveat on that before let you, is that this might work and might not work for all people, again, player strengths, but for us, what we understood is that our complete market is almost entirely in San Francisco. Yeah. So people building agents. They’re all over the world, but the vast majority is here.
[00:15:45] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:46] Ivan Burazin: And because they’re here, you can really mm-hmm. Put everything in. If you’re doing something consumer or something different where it’s all over the world, it’s really hard. ‘cause you’re spread out here. The geography is really, really small and so you can like emphasize that a lot.
[00:15:58] Victoria Melnikova: So one of my previous [00:16:00] guests and Russia, we talked about what he calls a genius zone.
Mm-hmm. And this is something that you’re talking about again. For, for different people. It’s a different skill that comes to them. Very easy and it fill their cup. Like it’s something that for you, it’s speaking in person, events, whatever. For someone else, it could be right in, I don’t know, video content.
[00:16:18] Ivan Burazin: Yeah.
[00:16:19] Victoria Melnikova: It’s so awesome to see like, you know, certain pat patterns. Repeat from speaker to speaker. I think that’s, we’re onto something there. So Daytona, okay, let’s talk about the brand for a second. Internally, we have this conversation. Is it a d Daytona Beach or is it Daytona 500 And we are separated.
We’re two different camps.
[00:16:41] Ivan Burazin: It’s not a beach. It’s not a beach. It’s not a beach.
[00:16:43] Victoria Melnikova: So, and if you think of the logotype, it’s, it’s kind of like dominoes. I don’t know how to explain it. Yeah. So it looks like cars, right? Yeah. So is it, is it racing? So
[00:16:52] Ivan Burazin: the idea is the, the original idea was it was supposed to invoke the association with.[00:17:00]
Essentially like speed and racing. Yeah. But the, and we do not use just for trade on purposes. There’s nothing racing about the brand as you’ve seen. It’s just like it doesn’t exist. But what we really thought about was the racetrack itself, because the original vision of Daytona was to create infrastructure that was identical in the inner and outer loop.
Essentially making one loop. Not exactly, but the idea is like it’s all inside of one loop instead of two separate. Yeah. And then my CTO, I think he might hate me, he thought of the idea of like inner, uh, uni loop or whatever mm-hmm. To be called the company. And as a, a, like a very amateur race car driver, I know that the Daytona is a single loop, and so the racetrack is a single loop.
And so that’s where the idea came from. The logo itself presents multiple things, which is like mm-hmm. A single loop loading.
[00:17:51] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:51] Ivan Burazin: Sandboxes or dev environments itself. So multiple sandboxes in different states. Loading or getting to a higher progression while being in one single loop. So there’s a lot [00:18:00] of,
[00:18:00] Victoria Melnikova: yeah.
[00:18:01] Ivan Burazin: Ideas and messagings sort of hidden in, in that
[00:18:04] Victoria Melnikova: mm-hmm.
[00:18:05] Ivan Burazin: Logo and brand.
[00:18:06] Victoria Melnikova: If you look at Daytona, I mean, it aligns very well with what is very typical for dev tools as far as the, the design goes, right? It’s black. Yeah. It has white font. Yeah. It’s very like, you know, alpha energy, whatever. So do you think that that trend is coming to an end?
Like, because I, from my seat, I see a lot of like changes Yeah. Happening across the board. Do you see that too?
[00:18:30] Ivan Burazin: Sure. We are also rebranding the whole thing right now. And so we had to, originally, there was one version that we had started with, it was very dark. It was like black as a primary color, and it was green and blue as secondaries and.
There was much more thought into the first version of that. Mm-hmm. And then when we pivoted, it was like, oh, we have no time. It’s just like, just like reuse what you can as fast as you can. Just pivot. Yeah. So it’s interesting and very much it, it’s hard when you start a company, you think, [00:19:00] oh, this is the thing you’re doing and then you invest so much time in it.
[00:19:02] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:03] Ivan Burazin: You don’t hit PMM F or you don’t feel that’s PMF and then you do this other thing and now it’s the thing you’re on and it’s basically just like patchwork.
[00:19:10] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:19:10] Ivan Burazin: So we had made that. Sort of like ish version of, of what it looks. But I do think that we are seeing, especially in this day and age, the way things are moving, you’re trying to use everything you can to your advantage.
[00:19:25] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:19:25] Ivan Burazin: So there are different things that you can do. I also think about generally decisions of someone choosing a product goes into three categories, which is one awareness. Do they know the product exists? Mm-hmm. Two is preference, so that goes into like brand pricing, features, whatever. Mm-hmm. And three, is there a set of things that you are uniquely able to provide?
Yes. So in the sense of like, I’m making this up EU only version of something. Mm-hmm. And right. If you’re an EU company that has a mandate for EU only, you can use only the providers that can do that. Even [00:20:00] if your preference is someone else. Right? Yeah. So you think about those three things and because of the speed of what’s happening now in AI and the speed of adoption and the competitors mm-hmm.
In all segments growing so fast, you have to try to win at as many of these things as you can. Yes. Right? And brand is one of those things mm-hmm. That you’re trying to do. And you’ll see now when we end up launch, relaunching Daytona. It’s a quite. I feel unique, unlike things that are out there and you see others that do this as well.
I mean, I’ll take an example. Fly is a very nice and unique brand.
[00:20:33] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:34] Ivan Burazin: And so it’s a certain preference and certain type, but it’s very unique and they put a lot of thought in into that brand itself, so that like modal is closer to Versal, but it looks really nice. Mm-hmm. And applaud the team and model.
I think it looks really, really well, those things. Are definitely something that I think we’re gonna see more and more people diverging from the mm-hmm. You know, Versal template as they sort of hit the PMF, hit the point of [00:21:00] PMF, and then have to invest in that preference stack mm-hmm. To get people over.
[00:21:03] Victoria Melnikova: So we first connected, I wanna say 2023. You were just
[00:21:09] Ivan Burazin: starting. Yeah.
[00:21:09] Victoria Melnikova: You were just thinking about Daytona. You were, I don’t think you were even starting yet. And one of the things that we talked about is open source component to Daytona.
Yep.
[00:21:19] Ivan Burazin: With
[00:21:20] Victoria Melnikova: agents, is there still room for open source?
[00:21:23] Ivan Burazin: Yeah. People have asked this me, uh, I don’t know if I’m the, so when we talked I was like very new about this.
Like I had no idea and I was trying to figure things out and we had a pretty good open source strategy. Mm-hmm. Especially on the regional product. Again, the second one, the second version was like, you know, move super fast. So not ideal, not as well thought through as the original, but less. Of a go-to-market strategy.
Mm-hmm. For this as well, they told us, someone said the other day, we’re too open source, like everything’s out there. It is an A GPL license, but like most of the stuff is out there so you can take [00:22:00] a look. There are surely benefits to doing that trust. This was the preference, like trust, security. Mm-hmm.
All these things. You can kind of see what you’re doing. That’s great. You get. People that can use your tool completely, you know, for free and try it out and build on that. I think all of that is good, but I don’t know, at this point in time, we’ll see sort of when the quote unquote bubble pops, if that is important afterwards or not.
But because people are moving so fast, people don’t really care that much.
[00:22:32] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:22:32] Ivan Burazin: I don’t know. I, I don’t know how to explain it, whereas. Daytona V one, pre ai, pre all this happening, people really like the ability to have open source and run it on their own. Today everyone just wants an API key.
[00:22:42] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah,
[00:22:42] Ivan Burazin: gimme an API key and I’m out.
I don’t care.
[00:22:44] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:45] Ivan Burazin: That’s it. And that is very much our, what we’re feeling in the market. So it could be very subjective, but that’s what we’re saying. So the answer is pro, obviously. No, like open source will always have a place, but I feel it’s at the moment in time, it’s way less important.
[00:22:59] Victoria Melnikova: And [00:23:00] let’s talk about your co-founders.
So you are a Croatian, basically startup. Yes. At this point. Yeah. And you with your co-founders have built for years? Yes. Like over a decade? I’m talking 19 years. Almost two.
[00:23:12] Ivan Burazin: Almost two, yeah. Almost two years or two decades. Yeah.
[00:23:15] Victoria Melnikova: How does it feel like, why do you choose them again? You know, how does it feel to build again at this speed.
[00:23:23] Ivan Burazin: Way better. Way better. I think that especially when you’re young, and again, this is all very personal, like people have personal ways in that I think the conversations were not as clear before. Mm-hmm. We’re trying to be nice to each other. We didn’t explain to each other very well. You could get angry, very well resentful, very different expectations.
Mm-hmm. Life expectations, and so we went through all these things together. We had broken up at some point in time. Done different things, but now when we come back together, like, because we know each [00:24:00] other so well and also we’ve gone through like most of all of us have like kids and you know, partners and married and all these things, your priorities sort of are much more aligned.
Yeah. I’m not saying that they’re exactly the same, but like you all, we all have the same stresses. Oh, you need a bigger house. You need like, all our kids are small, but like. You will need, you need a bigger car. You have to think about, you know, college, you have to think about, yeah, like there’s so many things and all these things incur definitely way more cost than Yeah.
When you were, when you were a single and alone. And so even if you weren’t essentially didn’t have these needs, you do have ‘em. Now, on the other hand, we’re all generally financially stable, even outside the startup. So what that sort of proves is like, we’re not doing this to make a quick buck ‘cause we already have it in that sense.
You’re not going to exit like tomorrow, which also investors really like. Yeah. ‘cause like getting double of what we have now doesn’t move the needle.
[00:24:55] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:24:56] Ivan Burazin: And obviously there’s, there’s other things why you do these, but it’s like we have to [00:25:00] now make a new world for our children, as corny as that sounds.
And so like between already being okay and what we can achieve, we’re both, we’re all, the three of us are directionally all on that same path. So I think that’s really good. The other thing is. Which is not specifically for the co-founders, but for the rest of the team for sure, is that when we started Daytona, we, we had this idea that we wanted to hire the best people we could for the job, which we all want to do, but also we didn’t have, I dunno if we had the connections or were those right people or not, but we went through some people through the company, in and out.
And what I ended up discovering is, as someone, as a. Serial co-founder, you’ve done multiple companies, you know a bunch of people that are really good and you know their traits and they know your traits and the context is super high. The fidelity of communication is super high. And so we ended up going back and sort of rehiring people that we had done [00:26:00] historically.
And so the team is now 18 people. I think 12 of them. We’ve all worked with like six to 20 years almost. Right? Yeah. So it’s like. It’s super easy conversation with us. Mm-hmm. Now we’ve sort of hit the border of the amount of people we want to bring in. There’s a few more, but now we’re starting to add other people.
But my hope is that now because we have this like
[00:26:21] Victoria Melnikova: no
[00:26:21] Ivan Burazin: high fidelity mm-hmm. No bullshit. Like conversations and speed and working together that the people that are added on either like either assimilate or, or don’t assimilate into that. And that helps us, I think, move really, really fast. It’s like really fast.
Like, uh, like my co-founder will call me and like he’ll say like, stop talking shit. This is a dumb idea or whatever. Or Right. Vice versa. Right. Or this is great. And so there’s no fuzziness around. It’s very direct. Yeah.
[00:26:48] Victoria Melnikova: Is there still room for friendship?
[00:26:51] Ivan Burazin: I think so. I think they’re the only friends I have.
I don’t have any friends outside of work anymore, so yeah.
[00:26:56] Victoria Melnikova: Something that we talked about because we’re young parents, [00:27:00] you’re. Twice young parents now, less young. Congratulations.
[00:27:03] Ivan Burazin: Less young. But parents, yes.
[00:27:04] Victoria Melnikova: Something that comes up often is the, the work-life balance. You know, when you build something this fast at this speed, there’s certainly some sacrifices you need to make.
Do you feel like there is room for work-life balance or it’s like a, you know, I don’t believe worklife balance
[00:27:20] Ivan Burazin: at all. There is no work life balance. The point. Of life in general is to find a point in life, like basically you have to find something that fulfills you and that feels like sort super. Like when people, when I say that, some people are like, oh, that sounds like bullshit.
But basically like again, the meaning of life is to find meaning in life. And we see this like with some of the raw reports you see, you see like people that are quite old and have, you know, a good community in like a city or village live longer. People that have a reason to live. Like even entrepreneurs, like you have people that are really old and still killing it every single day and living that long.
And so the idea also, I have an acquaintance that said like, what about like the [00:28:00] monks that they ’re, you know, their point of life is to have none. I’m like, that is a meta point. Like you have to like try to do nothing. Like it’s a very hard thing. And I think that is sort of how you should essentially yeah.
Live out your life. And then. What we’re doing, what we’re building. Like the most valuable thing that I can, that I’m capable of creating at this point in time is this thing. And that is my point of life. Obviously now there is family. Mm-hmm. And you know, kids, and we talked about this earlier, like hoping to see them in the morning and least put them at night.
There’s offs and sacrifices with that. ‘cause you don’t see them all the day. I travel a lot and then they, they grow. But going into this, I hope I won’t be sad when I’m super old, is that I understood that trade off. Yeah. Going into this right away. Right. And so between me and my wife, she’s doing a great job of like just like taking care of that.
And she’s definitely sacrificing more on the career path than I am on the career path. But I [00:29:00] feel that when we had these conversations that ultimately she would be sadder if she was not that much with the kids. Yeah. In her life. She’s more content. Being longer, as long as she can with, with the kids. And I don’t, this might sound like I do not want to, it’s not, I’m trying, really trying not, trying not to say that, but rather that all of life is sacrifices and all of life is pain.
And I, I strongly believe that like the more you have pain, the better it is, essentially. Um, that’s a whole different topic you can get into. But yeah. I’m not sure if I answered that pretty well, but Yeah,
[00:29:32] Victoria Melnikova: you did. You did. And you made the pivot nine months ago. Basically starting from scratch.
[00:29:38] Ivan Burazin: Yes.
[00:29:39] Victoria Melnikova: You know, because you walked away from a RR of what?
Three? 300,000 thousand. Yeah. That’s a solid A RR, you know, especially
[00:29:46] Ivan Burazin: pre ai. Not terrible.
[00:29:47] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. Yeah. It sounds great. You walked away from that. You started from scratch. Now looking back at it, are you happy about that move?
[00:29:55] Ivan Burazin: Absolutely. Should done it sooner. Yeah. It’s always like, you should have done that sooner.
[00:29:59] Victoria Melnikova: I mean, sooner would be [00:30:00] too early.
[00:30:00] Ivan Burazin: I guess maybe, maybe two months before would’ve been better, but yeah, you can never predict. Of course it is definitely one of those things that, uh, is similar with like letting someone go, leaving a job. Yeah. Breaking up whatever. When you feel that it’s ready, you should probably do it.
Yeah. As soon as you, you feel it, and now again, you know, it’s like bias of looking back. We ended up making the right decision, so we ended up hitting that a RR in like the first month.
[00:30:24] Victoria Melnikova: Do you feel like you found product market fit?
[00:30:26] Ivan Burazin: I think so. Like we are, we’re definitely at the point where I, I, you never know what product market fit it is.
Like they say, you know, when you hit it mm-hmm. Like you hit, it’s very hard to explain. Yeah. And so for us right now, it is like all our problems are the good type of problems. Yeah. It’s like, oh, can you get enough servers? Can, are you replying to support on time because there’s so many of them. Are you like the last two weeks have been just like.
Master service agreements, which we’ve never had till about a month ago. And you have people like left and right and, and legal and writing these up and redlining ‘em and like using up so much of your time, which is not core product. So you, you think you’re wasting your time, but you’re not. [00:31:00] And essentially the market is now pulling you and you’re not pushing the market anymore.
Yeah. I feel that, I guess is pmm f. Mm-hmm. And so we definitely are in that direction where every day you wake up and you’re just pulled. Yeah. Like it’s just like new customer, new good problem. Not, not bad problems, but, but still problems. Right?
[00:31:16] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. Are you scared of the, the speed? It is
[00:31:20] Ivan Burazin: uncomfortable.
It’s very uncomfortable. It’s like, oh, I have to like hire these people. Do we really need them? What if it’s just like a bump? Like you always question yourself, like, is a bump? Is a glitch? Is a fluke. Is it whatever?
[00:31:30] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:31:31] Ivan Burazin: But it is, it, it is uncomfortable.
[00:31:33] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:31:33] Ivan Burazin: Like the speed that things are happening and the decisions you have to make and the, so like quotas on servers, like the amount that we have bought over the last two weeks, like, we’re definitely not open ai not buying that many, but it’s like, it is a very large number and so like just doing these things.
But if you don’t do it, you’ll get, you’ll, you’ll hit
[00:31:51] Victoria Melnikova: yeah
[00:31:52] Ivan Burazin: somewhere, and then you’re, you won’t be able to serve customers then you have all these problems. So it is slightly uncomfortable. Yeah.
[00:31:57] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. It’s not just you, right? It’s the whole [00:32:00] market that’s moving. Exactly. So it’s like. You’re on a moving train, you know, just like gliding through universe or spaceship, whatever it is.
‘cause it’s moving very fast. Very
[00:32:10] Ivan Burazin: fast, yeah.
[00:32:11] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:32:11] Ivan Burazin: But the thing that you have to think about and like everyone building these products right now, because there are a lot of competitors.
Mm-hmm.
[00:32:16] Ivan Burazin: So let’s say we’re, let’s just do the train analogy, whatever. We’re on a mission impossible movie. Like it’s on a train.
It’s moving very fast.
[00:32:22] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:32:22] Ivan Burazin: But you’re racing your competitors on that train.
[00:32:24] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:32:25] Ivan Burazin: You’re running on the train to grow faster than the market.
[00:32:28] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:32:28] Ivan Burazin: Because the only way you survive once. The market like goes down. Yeah. Is that you have to be the number one. So that means you can’t just grow and we try to benchmark this every month.
Yeah. Is like, how much did we grow this month and is that equal to or faster than the market is actually growing, which is hard to benchmark, but we try to figure it out and we try to that That’s interesting. Even though we’re pulled. It’s also, can you keep pushing while pulling, if that makes sense? Yeah.
Like so the market pulls you and you don’t have any time, but you can’t stop [00:33:00] pushing because you want to make sure that you can,
[00:33:02] Victoria Melnikova: yeah.
[00:33:02] Ivan Burazin: Get as much of the market as you
[00:33:03] Victoria Melnikova: can. So what’s an estimate of how fast you’re growing? Like,
[00:33:08] Ivan Burazin: I mean like double every month.
[00:33:10] Victoria Melnikova: That’s wild.
[00:33:11] Ivan Burazin: Yeah.
[00:33:11] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. Well, that’s a good problem to have, right?
Yes. What is your biggest cost right now? The cloud,
[00:33:17] Ivan Burazin: the biggest cost. We have a great gross profit margin, so like cloud or, or machines, servers. We build our own clouds so we don’t rent out clouds. So machines obviously are a big, uh, uh, uh, significant section, and headcount is mostly, and then marketing is probably in a sense of like.
The events, the billboards, the whatever, the billboards, the whatever. We weren’t doing billboards a very small part, just to be clear. But it’s still there. I just, people are surprised. And so that is how we break it down. But we are really, we from revenue already cover most of our costs right now, so it’s
[00:33:54] Victoria Melnikova: That’s awesome.
[00:33:55] Ivan Burazin: Yeah.
[00:33:55] Victoria Melnikova: So as a person who is like in the middle of the ocean, seeing everything [00:34:00] that’s going around you. What would you say is an area that’s not covered yet that is a good opportunity to hop on?
[00:34:08] Ivan Burazin: I don’t, I think I think about a lot and it’s just like our positioning, I guess, is that again, we think, and I look at all these other founders, which are doing great jobs, they like really good and I see like their predictions of the future and their writings of the future.
All of them to me, the vast majority again. Seem as though they’re written and they are through the lens of a human. And what I am thinking about every day, and we as a company collectively is can we look it through the lens of an agent? I don’t think people like push their imagination that far. Mm-hmm.
Because when, what I see right now is we offer infrastructure for agents, right? Like it’s just like, here’s a computer, here’s some tools from whatever. As we work with these agent builders, we are discovering that there’s new, like there’s new tools. They’re essentially versions. [00:35:00] Most of them are like versions of something that we already have in the world for humans.
Yeah. But they’re actually different enough that it can be its own product. And so what are those new products that are specific for agents to be able to do, like execute on their tasks? I’m being kind of vague because I don’t know the answer to these things. Yeah. But they seem to be shaping for us anyway, because as we work with agent builders every single day
[00:35:23] Victoria Melnikova: mm-hmm.
[00:35:23] Ivan Burazin: We see patterns where like, one day someone will come, oh, I need this thing. Mm-hmm. Uh, a simple example is like, we need, we need firewalls inside the sandboxes. Yeah. So, ‘cause an agent can be there, what, who can, what can it see outside the sandbox who can see inside the sandbox? When we got that request, we got five requests in three days.
[00:35:41] Victoria Melnikova: Wow.
[00:35:42] Ivan Burazin: And so we, we have like these types of patterns where people are like, we need this new tool or new function. We haven’t served all of them, but some of them are easier, some of them are, are, are harder. But it, it comes in waves where it seems that either there’s a new technological breakthrough or a new model or something, and then agents sort [00:36:00] of like, step up and they need this new thing.
I think there’s gonna be more and more of these things being built. So much so that there will be actual products full on product suites created specifically for agents. And I don’t think people think about that that much. And I might be too ahead of the curve. It might be timing. You might go out and build it and there’s not enough of ‘em.
Yeah, not sure. But that’s sort of directionally where I don’t see enough people thinking about that.
[00:36:20] Victoria Melnikova: What was the kind of like the best advice you got? From someone.
[00:36:25] Ivan Burazin: I, I don’t think I, I never got this advice personally, but I’ve heard this and as a founder we kind of mentioned it is like the train, the analogy was a river and the tide.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Or, or the, which direction it’s going. And so, and I’ve experienced this multiple times, it, it is like a okay, founder in a great market is still gonna have a good outcome.
[00:36:46] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:36:47] Ivan Burazin: Just the market takes you if you’re a fantastic founder and. There is no, like the river is not going anywhere. It’s just very still, it’s gonna be really, really, really hard.
And I didn’t want to believe [00:37:00] that when I was much younger. It’s like, oh, I don’t want to be in the trend or in the wave. Like whatever.
[00:37:04] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:05] Ivan Burazin: I wanna do my thing. ‘cause I think this is super valuable to the world. It may be, but the trend is there because the trend is valuable to the world, right?
[00:37:12] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:37:13] Ivan Burazin: Regardless of how much trend is hype versus actual. The world or the market wants that and that gives it value. And so you should definitely jump on those. And I, I really did think of people formally as like deserters when they would like jump from one to the other. But as you sort of, as I’ve done more and more companies, you really understand, I was talking to my CTO about this as well.
You really understand that you can work really, really hard and be the best if the market is not good. It’s just like an extreme uphill battle. But on the other hand, you apply all that effort to a market that is moving fast and you just have this like great growth, right? And so definitely try as many hits at bat as you can.
Mm-hmm. And then, you know, go to that if that one doesn’t work out. [00:38:00] If you don’t have pmm f you know that you don’t have pmm F. And then just go to the next thing. I guess
[00:38:05] Victoria Melnikova: my final question is called warm fuzzies question.
[00:38:08] Ivan Burazin: Warm fuzzy.
[00:38:09] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. And it sounds like this. What makes you feel great about what you’re doing today?
[00:38:13] Ivan Burazin: The thing that we are making is going to serve so many people and so many things is actually so interesting to me. It’s like that’s fulfilling. Take one step back, like I think the most valuable like asset in the world is time. Time. As far as we know, we cannot replicate or extend, like there’s people working on like living longer and whatnot.
I cannot build that or do anything on that. So being the catalyst of offloading things from yourself, essentially buying time is something that we’re building and that’s the fuzzy feeling. So if we’re not building the agents, but we’re empowering the agents, so if agents can’t exist to relieve you of your work and you can be more with your kids or more, whatever, that is the thing that [00:39:00] we’re trying to basically achieve.
[00:39:01] Victoria Melnikova: Now I want to provide you a space to invite people to try. Daytona.
[00:39:05] Ivan Burazin: daytona.io is the website. Feel free to sign up, log in, try it out. Obviously there’s like Slack and GitHub and, and LinkedIn and, and X and whatnot. But yeah, daytona.io happy to have them a hundred credits right away. And also, if you have a startup, please apply for our credits.
We give anywhere from like 10,000 to $50,000 of free credits to startups that are eligible, no strings attached. So yeah.
[00:39:29] Victoria Melnikova: Thank you so much, Ivan. It was a pleasure chatting with you. I love how we meet at random points in time and you’re just like,
[00:39:38] Ivan Burazin: I love that we meet of the church as well. I appreciate that.
[00:39:41] Victoria Melnikova: Thank you. Thank you for catching yet another episode of Deaf Propulsion Labs. We at EvEvil Martians transform growth stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source. Product. If you are developer tool needs help with product [00:40:00] design development or SRE, visit evEvil Martians.com/dev tools.
See you in the next.
