November 2, 2022

Cara Borenstein, Developer, Co-Founder & CEO at Stashpad

Cara Borenstein is a software developer and co-founder and CEO at Stashpad - the developer notepad. She previously was an engineer at Twilio and is an alum of Columbia University and Techstars.

Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. I'm here today with Cara Borenstein, co-founder and CEO of Stashpad, the developer notepad, the fast and easy way to stay organized as you work without breaking flow. Cara, thank you so much for joining the podcast. I'm really excited to dive into your background, especially, you know, always like to interview technical founders who, who kind of view product and the building of it differently and are so involved.

So I'm sure there's some cool stories you have there. Before we get started into all that good stuff, what were you doing before you started Stashpad? .  

Cara: Yeah. Yeah. And thanks so much for, for having me on. It's, it's exciting to be here. So before, before Stashpad, I was working as a software engineer at Twilio, and I still, you say co-founder and ceo.

I still very much identify as an engineer as well. And I was specifically working a bit on their platform team, and then I moved to a product team where I got to work really closely with our end users who are also developers. And I, I really fell in love with, with that, with getting to talk to developers and kind of get to that aha moment of something magical where we've accomplished something.

Yeah. And, yeah,  

Julian: yeah, yeah. What, what was for those who don't know, myself included, what is the difference within a larger company like Twilio? I think it's like mid-market. Well, no, they, I think they iPod, right? So they're technically a larger company now, but what is the difference between the function of a platform versus product team?

The difference in responsibilities, how you view product in terms of technology? What are those differences? Just to illuminate us and the audience?  

Cara: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. So a platform team is usually, and I think it could vary by organization. And I can't even say this is definitely what Twilio is doing now cause I'm not there.

But usually a platform team is building tools to empower other developers within the organization to do their work efficiently. And something really cool about. Being on a platform team is often you have your, your customers kind of held captive as your colleagues . And so when you try different things, right, it's your friends who are gonna be using it.

And so you can get that tighter feedback loop there, which is really cool. For a product team Something that's cool about that is you're basically combining your engineering work with some customer facing thing. And so so for me, what I was working on was Twilio, which makes like SMS APIs and voice APIs and all sorts of communication APIs that you can embed in the stuff that you do.

I was working on a, an API that made it easy to do anonymous communication. So like if you. Drive or take an Uber or Lyft, you're able to text with your driver without giving your phone number. And so we made an API for that and and we would talk to our end users who are, who are engineers, who are building with it and help them to be successful using the API.

Julian: Yeah. What, what do you find particularly, I guess, interesting or exciting or enjoyable about, you know, working on products that you know affect engineers like yourself? You know, it, it's kind of this communal thing from what it sounds like, either on the platform team or even on the product side on Twilio, and now it's Stashpad being that you, you are, are building a, a developer tool with like, what's really exciting to you about, or, or I guess, enjoyable about working with developers?

Cara: Yeah, I think yeah, so, so Twilio, the product team that I was on, it was almost more of a platform team in some ways because we are building for other engineers, right. And, sorry, I love that. But for me, something that motivated me a lot there and also today with Stashpad is that I just love building for other developers and Being able to improve my own workflow by learning from other developers and being able to kind of collaborate together and see how we're able to be more productive, get our stuff done, and also really enjoy the process.

And so to me, there's nothing more, more magical than collaborating with someone who I really relate to because we do the same thing, right? We, we think in some of the same ways and figuring out a way to, to work better and enjoy it. So, yeah, that, that's definitely a big motivation for. me  

Julian: Yeah. I'm always curious, is there like between, I'm sure you've worked with developers who work with different technologies and languages in particular, you know, for a company that I run there's a lot of developers who work with various technologies, react, JavaScript, Python, Jango, No.

Like, there's so many technologies and languages out there. Are there certain types of individuals or archetypes or personality types when, when you, when you meet developers who work on specific. Just as an offshoot question. .  

Cara: Oh, on specific languages. I don't know if I really categorize by language so much, but I think there's definitely I think a lot of developers fall into this, and this is definitely, like, part of why I love love working with developers is you're just really curious, right?

And you kind of like, we have the tools to build stuff. . Yeah. That changes the world, right? As you kind of know how things work, you ask questions, you're usually pretty. Direct, but also positive. And so it just kind of . Yeah. Very, very collaborative and fun. But yeah, that's a little, yeah, little whatever up in up in the air for it.

Julian: Yeah, Yeah, yeah. It seems like a lot of developers have that mindset. It's, it's like having the power to build and knowing, you know, kind of a direction to go, but just the curiosity leads them to, to, you know, find cool new solutions and, and working with developers. It's just so, it's just so fun to collaborate, you know, rather.

And, you know, asking and requesting for something and when you're working with them in the process of it, there's, yeah, there's so much more.  

Cara: You can be creative and try to figure it out. Problem solve. Yeah, like one, one anecdote. I think that that describes part of why I love, like our customers being developers right now is so we, we make a notepad, so it's like for editing text and it doesn't yet have support for images.

That's something we're gonna add soon. And I got a message from one of our, Saying, Oh, your images are looking a little funky. And I'm like, We don't have support for images. What do you mean ? He's like, Oh no, you do. And he had figured out how to put images in the app and sure enough it does. Yeah. If anyone listening who tries it out, you can find a way and soon it will be more native.

But I think it's, it's just really fun when, when someone's not afraid to just kind of jump in and like play around and ask questions. Try to break it. It's just fun. And yeah, I always enjoy that.  

Julian: Yeah, that, that's incredible. I love those stories of, of when an outside developer who, who genuinely enjoys using a product, learns either how to break it or add it at, at a certain feature that, you know, maybe you're already currently working on, and it kinda expedites the process.

It's like, I, I think that's why a lot of companies have like, open source you know, code because it's, it's that collaborative process that, that creates so many Cool. Product or versions of that product or offshoots and things like that. What, what, what initially inspired you to start Stashpad?

Cara: Yeah, so it actually so when we, we first started working on, on a startup, let's say we were actually not working on Stashpad, which is just a notepad as it is today. How it started was so I'm a software. I noticed that there were some kind of knowledge sharing frictions, which I think pretty much every, every every software engineer has run into.

And my co-founder, who's actually my husband, it's also a software engineer, and he had run into a similar thing and we were like, Okay, there's some knowledge sharing issues. We know how to solve this. Let's just make a better wiki, right? And so we started like classic engineers without like much product experience.

We just started building a better wiki, built it, right? It was, this was in Python and Jengo what we were working on and gave it to a bunch of our friends and former colleagues. And what we saw was that everyone was very nice, but no one wanted it . And so, and we were like, Hmm, this is interesting.

Why? Why? And we, we came to realize for various reasons that people didn't, didn't want that kind of better wiki solution, but we were like, Okay, we see that But we see that we are, we are like working and collaborating together and getting stuff done. And so we get that you don't want our Wiki, but what is it that folks really are using?

And that's when just like looking over people's shoulders and doing a lot of conversations and surveys, we started to see that the basic notepad. So like an untitled text file, Apple notes, sticky. Super basic was up on everyone's screen and was actually really important to how they were working.

It was just kind of private and hidden. And so we were like, Okay, we see, we see this wiki nap notepad. Interesting. I think we can make this a lot better. And so that, that was the initial motivation for Stashpad as it is today. Which it's super simple. We're just trying to make the best notepad for developers.

Julian: Yeah, Well, what goes in into making the best notepad? Is there certain like distinguishing features that are important to developers? I'm assuming an untitled, you know you know, text pad. It just, it is that right? It's very simple. It doesn't really do too much. What in Dash padd helps kind of, you know, create this efficient flow process when, when developing?

Cara: Yeah. So we, we think of it in, in two different ways. So the first thing is that the way that it's built, it has like all the features that developers expect out of any of the tools that they use. So like keyboard findings, really performance We're adding some more customizations. So markdown support, that kind of stuff.

So just like things that developers expect out of any tool. And then the second thing, which I find even more exciting is that we've done a lot of research into what developer workflows look like, and one of the most frustrating things is that, To get your job done well, you have to be coding and, and planning and spending time in flow, debugging things, right?

But at the same time, you have this meeting or you have to follow up on a code review or you have these different things that are pulling at your attention. And so something that we try to do is make that context switching just one keystroke so that you can spend less time. Kind of jumping between things or scrambling around and better manage that.

But that being said, we're just getting started. One of the things I'm so excited about that I think are, is really gonna kind of deliver on the next level of being a developer. Notepad is some extensibility and the ability to kind of hack and build your own stuff on top of the base that we've built. So that will be coming, but not yet.  

Julian: Yeah, , I love that. I love, I love, you know, I feel like with most workflows there's such inefficiencies and. Minimizing the amount of time. I think it's like who was it? I think it was, it was the Airbnb founder was talking about just ways to create an 11 out of 10 experience.

And at some point it just takes one action to do everything, you know, check into your, your you know, the house or apartment or whatever you're renting, and then everything's kind of laid out for you in some type of way. But getting there is. It's kind of the trick, you know, it's like you create this, this fantasy world where, you know, it's one key stroke or one click to, to getting what you, you want out of that experience.

How are you diving into that process? Which type of research are you doing to give you a better insight into how developers either the workflows broken down into? I'm always curious about the questions that founders ask and how they go about the research process. That, I mean, that's, that's the meat and potatoes of, of creating a great product is just understanding your customers that much better.

So what are some strategies you're using to understand your customers and ask questions and, and research workflows and things like that?  

Cara: Yeah, yeah, that's a really good question. So, so I would say before, before we had a product, what we would do. And this is always really fun to see, is like we would take a look at how people are, Well, first you'd say, Oh, what, what do you use for your notes?

And usually people would just talk about like a public note and not their personal notes. And so like, No, no, I'm talking about your personal notes. And so then they'd pull something up and we'd kind of see like, Oh look, it's like in a chunk. at the top and then below. How did you do that? Oh, I hit enter a couple times in this file.

Oh, interesting. You bolded this. So just kind of looking at, at how people are annotating their existing notepad, and that's, that's gone into inspiring the mechanics of how a Stashpad works. And then within Stashpad Some of the things we've been doing most recently are looking at some of the the workflows that people have started using that they're finding they've been able to stick with for like several months.

And it's really helpful and trying to make sure that those are really natively supported so that we can then advise other devs to try it out too. So like one of the things we had seen a little while ago that we liked a lot is, This idea of using a status dump when you're, and you could do this in any tool.

Basically when you're done with a task, you dump what you did and what's next. And sometimes you may not be done with the task, but you might be done for now cuz you have a meeting. So similarly dump what you did and what's next. And just by doing that, you're able to like, keep your momentum. And so something that we've done in the product is make sure that's really natively supported with the right types of like timestamps and like flow of the notes you're writing.

Yeah, but it's really just looking at how people use it and asking them why they did something that you weren't expecting. That's probably really smart. And then, and then building from there.  

Julian: Yeah. No, that's incredible. What tell us a little bit about the traction that you've seen with Stashpad. How many developers are using it? What are kind of the measurables that you're excited about and the milestones that you've achieved so far?  

Cara: Yeah, so we're, so we just launched in August and we've gotten a couple thousand downloads. And something that's been really exciting to see is that we have a number of developers who are super, super engaged and constantly like requesting different things and hacking things and doing crazy stuff.

And a lot of them work at these really awesome companies. Often kind of platform type companies like AWS or of course my former colleagues at Twilio or Algolia. And so just something that's been really fun for us is now that we've gotten it out there since August. Kind of seeing, seeing the crazy ideas people have for how they wanna go further with it.

Julian: Yeah. No, that's incredible. What's what's the biggest risk that Stashpad faces today?  

Cara: The biggest risk you face today? So, to me, something that always scares me as a founder is . It's so exciting when you hear about all the different, like problems and things people are doing and like the, the opportunities are endless of ways that you can expand and help people better solve problems better.

But if you get. Too excited and you start scattering yourself across different things, then you may end up finding, kind of like we did when we did the wiki, that you actually built something for nobody by trying to build something for everybody. And so something that my co-founder and my my colleagues and I are always checking in on is like, , Is this necessary?

Can we reduce scope? Can we reduce scope, reduce scope, reduce scope, reduce scope, because only by narrowing the scope as much as we possibly can do we like stand a chance of making an awesome product for the developers who are trying to serve. So just. Trying to not get distracted by the exciting, shiny things that keep popping up.

The little ideas that like our users tell us that are really exciting, and making sure that we stay focused and focus on those ideas instead of expanding expanding our focus too early.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. What's you, you, you mentioned this concept, which I've, I've heard time and time again with founders, which is like, building for everyone versus building for something that, that people will use.

Is that amongst just like transitioning from being a software developer to, you know, a co-founder and ceo? Is that one of the hurdles that you faced and, and amongst others? Like what are some of the biggest transitions. That you've had to go through as, as an engineer then, then to a ceo, which, you know, I feel like engineers are really in the nuts and bolts kind of really building product.

And, and, you know, kind of affecting the end user. Whereas the ceo, you know, they have to have this grander vision and, and kind of work with multiple parts. And being that you're, you're both technically now but also have been, you know, both in both roles. Like, I'm just curious about your experience and how that transition was for any software engineers that are looking to start their own.

Any advice that you'd give?  

Cara: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, I think the first thing was like the big major mistake at the beginning, and I'm sure there'll be many more happen. But was that we kind of, we were like, Oh, knowledge sharing is a problem I've experienced. Solution, fix it. . Right. Okay. And we didn't really, like, we just kind of trusted that because we had experienced it, we, we jumped straight into the solution before exploring the problem long enough.

Yeah. And so even now that we're focused on something that's pretty simple and, and not that glamorous, but I think very exciting. Like we still are constantly trying to like, make sure that we don't, you, you need to stay really, really grounded. Even if you're building for yourself, it, it's hard to be, it's impossible, I would say, to be completely unbiased, by your own experience towards your product.

So just making sure that you're really staying grounded in reality of what people actually want to do. That was the biggest mistake and that I would I would recommend to other devs founders to make sure you do a lot of customer interviews before you start building. Yeah. And then a second thing that's just been interesting for me is like, I love coding.

I've been coding since I. 14. Right. I'm like, that's always been my happy place. I love that. With this company we're building for developers and so I just talk to developers all the time. But I definitely do try to find like little moments for me when I'm not really coding so much cause I'm doing customer development and stuff like that.

Mm-hmm. To still do a little bit . Yeah. Cause it's just, it's kind of my happy place. So, So being okay with like making a little time for that. Yeah. Even though that's not like my core, core thing at the. Yeah,  

Julian: What, what? Right now, what it currently makes your job hard?

Cara: Prioritizing. Yeah, , ruthlessly, , that's always the hardest thing cuz there, like I said, kind of with the scope, there are so many different ways that you can can spend your time.

And so you see like this really cool use case and then you see like, Oh, someone really liked this part, or they really don't like this. And so just kind of taking all of that user feedback and deciding what we're gonna focus on. And then next and kind of trying to see, okay, I see a bunch of people said this problem.

Is it really an issue with markdown or are they trying to do something we're not supporting well enough? And so trying to just kind of make sense of, of user feedback and see how we can best address it. That's a new skill for me. Yeah, and it's, it's always very, important.  

Julian: Yeah. Kind of a selfish question for me.

I had a, you know, me and my co-founder he's been kind of experienced and so I was fortunate enough to, you know, fall into an experience where I had a partner who was, you know, kind of already shredded his way through a few startups. But I'm always curious about founder and co-founder relationships, being that, you know, I'm always working and adjusting through mine.

What are some of the key ways that you and your co-founder kind of delineate responsibilities or communicate kind of. Distinguishes. Cause I know a lot of times things can get blurred because everyone's focused on the success of the product and the company. But I'm always curious about the, the co-founder to co-founder conversations and how that kind of evolves.

And, and you kind of set boundaries and parameters around what you kinda work on. I don't know any insights you can, you can give me any advice that you would, you would share or any experiences that you think were super valuable to, to learn from and, and this whole co-founder, co-founder you know, relationship and process..

Cara: Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good question. We, so one thing is, so my co-founder's, my husband, so that's a little different from other people . But then starting from there, So one, one thing that we have a little bit different in our working styles is I'm like very action oriented. Like I will just jump in and boom, I might be in the bushes.

Right? And he is a lot more thoughtful, like just by default before he jumps in, he makes sure of things and so, so, That's something I've learned from him to do better. And that we tend to usually start pretty much every day with what we call like an intention setting where we just are like, we both have a list of the things that we feel are most important for the day, the week, the month what we need to make sure we're following up on and kind of like thinking about.

And we just spend time going through that so we can make sure we're really aligned on what's most important to be working on right now. Mm-hmm. . And so that, , that's number, number one of just like constant communication and being really aligned. And like getting, I shouldn't have things on my checklist that matter a lot, that Theo has, has no idea their, their top of mind for me.

We should both know what's going on. Yeah. And then a second thing that we think about is so I'm ceo, he's cto. That's one way to put it, but usually what we think of it more as is like how a restaurant operates, that basically I'm front of the house and he is back of the house. So I'm out there talking to users all the time, which I love doing talking to you so we can share our story and stuff like that.

And he's more like behind the scenes strategizing making sure like the engineering work is, is properly laid out and the velocity is good on that front. Involved with product too, but kind of front and back. That's, that's a lot of how we think about it.  

Julian: Yeah. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. I, I love the restaurant comparison cuz I can visually see you know, the, the comparison there. If everything goes well, what's the long term vision for a Stashpad?  

Cara: So, We're really excited that the notepad is super basic and overlooked usually cuz it's just some, some hack together file or something like that, that people are using. But to us it's, it's really where a lot of work begins.

So like, if you think of where what's written on like your basic note podd today, it's actually like an indexing. Most important to you. And it often is something that kind of is integrating with other tools, right? Like, Oh, I need to follow up on this on this doc or on this code review. Or, there was this interesting thing I wanted to check out in our code that maybe I could, I can make it better.

And so something we're really excited about is longer term, or really not that long term, we're gonna, we're gonna open an API and seeing how you can use the notepad as a starting place for. kind of like getting your thoughts together and your work together, but then also integrating with other things so that it actually is more of this like at home base or, or dashboard for developer work.

Julian: Yeah. What, what's gonna be on the APIs side? What's gonna be the exciting plugins that you are, you have on your horizon if, if you're able to share?  

Cara: Yeah, so some of them are, are kind of more straightforward ones. If you're debugging stuff and opening a bunch of Stack Overflow tabs, you should be able to just kind of save that with a web clipper.

Some other ones are like, if you if there's like some conversations happening in a tool, you should be able to see those updates ideally in your notepad. And then honestly, what I'm most excited about, That, like, those are things we've thought of based on seeing what people are doing and what's kind of pulling them out of their flow or like kind of weighing on their head.

Mm-hmm. , but that's just what we've seen in some conversations. I feel like something, kind of getting back to why it's so fun working with developers, I feel like once we open up an API that's hopefully really easy to use people are gonna surprise us with some crazy things that are gonna make my workflow better too.

And so that's, to me, like the, the unknown is actually a lot of what's so exciting.  

Julian: Yeah, no, that's, that's incredible. And it's so exciting to have the opportunity to chat with you at, at the early stage of stpa because, you know, I feel like this is a mutual exchange of information and knowledge. You know, we have a developer community that could definitely benefit from the tools you're using, and I think that community could also you know, help with some, some strong and honest feedback on, on the product.

So I'm really excited about, you know, where the, the company's going and, and how it's really. Any product that, that is able to decrease the amount of time to complete certain tasks or make it more efficient or keep people in flow. Because I know how many times I break my flow just on, on one task to another is exciting because it kind of creates a way to expedite, you know, progress with any, you know, any application or product or anything like that.

Bonus question for selfish research reasons and also for my audience as well. What books or people have influenced you the most either now or, or in your career overall?  

Cara: Yeah, that's a great question. So I'll give, I'll give a people thing and then also a quick Books one. So for people, I would have to say that the two things.

One is my computer science teacher in high school who kind of forced me to study it and then I fell in love with it. But the second thing is, I won't name all of them, but the initial like 20 or so people who are just willing to talk to me and are developers and share their workflow. I think that learning to build with people . Yeah. And really solve a problem that they have and kind of figure out that puzzle together. That's just been really rewarding and Definitely very influential on, on the company and also just on me personally. And then as far as books go, I'm always very into things around like flow and different ways to kind of improve your mindset.

So I'm gonna have to say the book flow as one of the first ones for that, which I definitely recommend people actually check out. I feel like a lot of people read little excerpts of it, but it has a lot of gold nuggets. deeper within. So yeah, . Yeah.  

Julian: I love that. Yeah. Is there kind of another bonus question, I guess, but is there anything that I didn't ask you that I should have?

Cara: I, I don't think so. Yeah. It's so, so awesome to be on here. I love what you're doing. I I think it's, it's really special to be get to share my story and get to learn from other, other founders and stuff too.  

Julian: So Thank you. Yeah, of course. And last little bit. I always like to give my guests time to give us your plugs, to help us support your product, your idea, get involved.

So let us know where can we find you? What are your LinkedIns, your Twitters, your whatever handle, your Discord channels. Where can we find and support St. Pad and get involved in, in working on the product for, you know, myself and. .  

Cara: Awesome. So main thing is just stashpad.com. You can download it for free.

And we'd, there's a link to the Discord community on there and, and Twitter and stuff like that. But we'd love to hear your feedback as we, as we do the next stages.  

Julian: I love that. Well, thank you Kara, so much for being on the show. I'm really excited to share this with my audience, especially a big, a lot of them are our developers themselves, but also founders who are enabling their teams to be, you know, more successful and they're always looking for cool tools and new ways to do so.

So I'm really excited where your product's gonna go and I hope you enjoyed yourself and yeah, thank you again for,  

Cara: Yeah, thanks so much, Julian.

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