Building Companies that Devs & DevOps Teams Love, And Avoiding Expensive Mistakes

Heavybit by Jesse Robbins · June 25, 2013 · Video · 20:00

Jesse Robbins shares hard-won lessons on the expensive mistakes developer-tools founders make, and what separates companies that developers and DevOps teams actually adopt from those they ignore.

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This talk covers the expensive mistakes I made founding Chef and the patterns I keep seeing developer-tools founders repeat. The gap between building something technically impressive and building something teams adopt at scale is where most companies die. Great technology does not sell itself.

The lessons cover product positioning, developer experience, pricing, and the go-to-market traps that catch technical founders. I made most of these mistakes firsthand building Chef from an open-source project into an enterprise infrastructure company. Learn a dollar’s worth of lesson for every dollar spent in failure.

Also Mentioned

Jesse Robbins

Cofounded Chef and the DevOps movement. Pioneered GameDay at Amazon. Investor in AI developer tools.

Heavybit

Developer-focused venture capital firm

Chef Software

Infrastructure automation company (formerly Opscode)

Amazon

Developer Tools DevOps Engineering Culture Venture Capital Seed Stage Investing

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