Julian: Hey everyone, thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Chris Hill, COO and co-founder of Massdriver. Massdriver lets teams quickly build engineering platforms, enable developer self service, whether you run workloads and containers, VMs, or server lists. Chris, thank you so much for joining the show.

Julian: I'm excited to chat with you, learn more about your background, your experience, what you're doing at Massdriver. But before we get into all that good stuff, what were you doing before you started the company.  

Christopher: Well first of all, thanks. It's good to be here. I'm excited to do this. So my background originally goes back to, I start off as a software developer and it was actually in defense.

Christopher: So I live here in Colorado. There's a lot of defense contractors that, that recruit out of outta Colorado here. So I was at Lockheed Martin for about seven years and mostly doing software development, but I got into some networking and security stuff while I was there as. And I knew I wanted to get out and so I, I found an escape patch and I, I moved out to some adtech.

Christopher: I originally went to do development there as well, but that's where I moved into cloud operations infrastructure and operations. It had, the company had grown big enough that they were looking to build out an actual team to handle that, and so I led that team and. Then I've kind of been doing that ever since I've done it.

Christopher: I did it there and I've done it some other companies, and most recently I was at a company called the Real Reel, and I was helping them get off of Heroku and into the cloud as, as many companies have to do.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I've used the real, real definitely to, to purchase some products, but how is the engineering process different based on the products?

Julian: Is it, is it based on technology? You know, you've, you've, you've done kind of defense engineering, you've done ad tech and, and marketing tech and, and and I'm always curious on how engineering teams are structured and coming from the insight that you have. What makes it different from company to company?

Julian: Or is it the tools they use or is it the product? Is it the environ? What makes that process different when you're building your product and technology?

Christopher: Sure. I think you have to kind of set Lockheed Martin aside. They're they're beast of their own, cuz they are, they're so different. And, and a big part of that is because if you're gonna work on, if you're gonna work on classified programs, they have a very difficult time working with open source products.

Christopher: And so unfortunately that that leaves them so much of modern technology is moving forward through open source that their. You know, like a decade behind. At least they were when I was there. I, I don't know if it's much better, but once you get out, you know, the industry is going to, it's going to shift what the priority is for the business, you know for the ad tech company, it's, you know, the ability to scale and handle a lot of data and handle it as fast as you can because nobody's going to wait for, you know, the ads to show up.

Christopher: And, and you don't want the publishers hosting your ad to be like, Why is, you've made our, our page low time, really slow. When you get to something like eCommerce, it's all about uptime. Cuz if the website's down, they aren't making money. And so, you know, I think it, it shifts you know, kind of what the priorities are and where, where the money's going to get spent in terms of what's I important.

Christopher: And you know, the teams just have to, you know, adjust around them.  

Julian: Yeah. When, when you kind of transition out of, you know, being in an engineering kind of team management mindset as well into the founding kind of capacity where you're kind of iterating and creating product vision and it, it's obviously, you know, different environment, but how was that transition?

Julian: Like, you know, if I was a developer today, you know, and, and, but I had an idea and I had this inclination to follow that passion or idea or what. How is that transition, Like, is, is there anything that in retrospect you would give advice on on, on that transition?  

Christopher: You know, it's, it's very much a it's, it's a shift in mindset. You have to have in terms of. What, when you're working on a task, what finished looks like? You know, it's very easy at these, you know, if you're at a more mature company, the, there, there's, there's a lot more that goes into getting, you know, bringing a feature to, to market. And I think when you're in a startup world, particularly a very early stage startup, you oftentimes are still searching and you can't spend three months working on a feature because you don't even know if this feature's going to be used or if it's going to move the needle on, on, you know, adoption of your product.

Christopher: And so having to shift that down There's a a great book, it's called Lean Startup, which talks about this very, you know, short term iterative method of getting MVPs out very quickly. And then try and get as much feedback on it as you can. And it's very difficult. We engineers, we love, you know, big ideas, a lot of pieces, putting it all together and getting something that works and it's kind of, you have to shrink that down to something that you can execute on and get feedback on very quickly.

Julian: Yeah. How do you go about trimming the process of making the perfect product versus making something that's, you know, minimal has minimum viability?  

Christopher: Yeah. You know, step one is, you know, if. If you're far enough along to have customers and people using your, your platform or your product, you, that's talking with them and, and figuring out like what they're saying.

Christopher: And, and it doesn't necessarily mean exactly what they're saying you'll build, but figure out what the pain point is and then figure out the smallest thing that you can possibly build that would start to address. Problem and go out, try building it. We try to keep it to, you know, a week to a couple of weeks and get that thing out there.

Christopher: And if, if it goes out and they like it, now you have feedback that you can go one way or another. Did they, did they like it? Did, Was it, did it solve their problem? And in a small way, can you make it better in certain ways and now you can iterate on it as opposed to trying to build this huge thing that nobody's going to use.

Julian: Yeah. Has anything changed in, in your mind about building engineering teams now that you've, you've done so at a company that wasn't yours and, and now that is a product that, that you're focused on growing and building and iterating on. Has anything changed in, in how you, how you think about building engineering teams in particular?

Christopher: Yeah. You know, for, for one thing, it's, it's a lot easier. It's a lot easier to complain about how everything's being run when when you're one of the engineers and you're looking up and you see all, all the ways that things can be done better. And then once you're you know, in the position of, of leadership and making's decisions, you understand sometimes how those decisions how you can end up in them.

Christopher: Yeah. You know, I think one thing is we have a very good interview process. Yeah. And a lot of this actually came. One of our co-founders, Dave, who's doing he's our cto and so he's doing a lot of the, the tech hiring. And for, for one thing, instead of coming up with these coding assignments that we do or that you hand off to people and say, Go, go.

Christopher: See if you can do what we think you need to do to be able to do this job and do it on your own time, no matter how long it's gonna take, and then come back and we're gonna grade you on whether you could do, do it well. What we do. We, we reach out to the people and we tell them, You go find something you're knowledge knowledgeable about, that you're passionate about, and like an open source issue.

Christopher: And we're gonna come in and we're the ones who don't know anything about it, and you're the expert. And now we get to see one, what you're interested in. We get to see how you work in terms of communication of. Somebody who knows less than you about this, can you communicate it well? And then we get to see how you work through and solve this problem.

Christopher: And it's been, it's worked very well for us. Yeah. And I think it, it also makes it a lower pressure environment for these people to come in and interview. Yeah. Cause nobody really likes these coding assignments.  

Julian: No. Yeah, I we run a company where we connect developers with startups, me and my co-founder, and yeah, the big, the biggest plight is the, the coding assignments.

Julian: Some, some companies it's like, you know, very necessary. There's maybe some component or it's a specialized technology, but for the most part it's this. That's not the point of, of. What they're trying to get at. Mm-hmm. and the companies are having a hard time to understand how to address, you know, someone's knowledge and skill in a way that is, you know, inspiring and, and actually accurate to, to what their abilities are.

Julian: So I love, I love that method. I, I haven't heard that one. And, and I'll definitely share that one with them, with the clients there yet.  

Christopher: Good. The other, the other benefit that you get from that is that when you're bringing people. You know, oftentimes you, you run into this situation where you're trying to shoehorn somebody into a position and you look at their resume and you're just like, ah, they hit about know 50, 75% of what we're looking for.

Christopher: I think they can do it. Whereas if you bring somebody in and you say, What are you good at? What are you passionate about? And, and now I have to find out where can I, We're gonna find a place to fit you in this organization where you're going to provide a lot of value and they're happier. And we're happier because, you know, we had the the right expectations going in.

Christopher: and they are able to now do things that they're good at, that they care about, and it, it, it seems to, we've kind of done different and interview processes with some of our candidates and those mm-hmm. , that process seems to go very well.  

Julian: Yeah. Now that, that's incredible. I love that. I love that creative, the creative thinking around that as well.

Julian: What was, back to back to you know, Massdriver, what was the inspiration from, you know, you were building, you were building product, you were, you were building engineering teams and then you decided to, to go full in on this idea and this product. What was the inspiration behind Massdriver and, and you know, and addressing the problem that you saw in the.

Christopher: Yeah. So this, it actually stemmed out of a a conversation that was between, so there's two other co-founders here. Corio Daniel is our CEO and Dave Williams is our CTO and they were discussing some ideas and everything that they had, and they, they kept coming back to this issue of who is going to do the ops work, who's going to do the cloud work, who's going to spend all day just messing with Terraform?

Christopher: And they were fighting over it and. There's like seasoned professionals who, you know, they're in a similar boat to me where they've done both ops and development for, you know, you know, a decade and a half, and they're fighting over doing this work. And it almost kind of pushed all of these other ideas aside and said, Wait a second, like this.

Christopher: This is very clearly an issue. Yeah. And, and maybe, maybe this is the issue to, to solve. And so yeah, that's kind of where the original, I think, inspiration for Master Driver was born of recognizing that, that, This world of DevOps that we're in right now is just it, it's, it's very much a struggle and not just for, for us and not just for engineers, for organizations.

Christopher: And there's there's gotta be a better way to do it. And and we decided to try to build something that would be a better way to, to solve all these problems.  

Julian: Yeah. How, how is it changing the way products are being built?  

Christopher: Sure. So for, for one, if you go and you look at that, the DevOps, where, where it's currently at, I mean, just go pull up the CNCF landscape.

Christopher: Yeah. And it is, it is just littered with, with products. And on one hand that's, that's great because there's innovation going on and, and people are doing new things and thinking differently and that's fantastic. But unfortunately the, the bad side of it is there are. 70, 80 different monitoring and observability products.

Christopher: Yeah. Go choose one. There's, there's 50 different under C I C D there's another 50 under, you know, application like packaging and, and deployment. So it's, It's, it's becoming very, very fragmented. And the original promise of DevOps was that, you know, it was going to tear down these silos. There's gonna be harmony between the two teams.

Christopher: Everything was going to go faster. But what's kind of happened for most teams as they try to do this DevOps thing, is either they go out and they build a DevOps team, which ironically is the antithesis of DevOps. Right? It's supposed to be an methodology, not a team. Yeah. But they go and they build this.

Christopher: With very expensive talent. The, the DevOps roles are very expensive. And now you're stuck in these silos and you're passing work back and forth and it's, it's, it's not great. That's played out many times. It doesn't work great. The other option is you just go find, you know, one of your probably most experienced software engineers and you tell 'em, Go learn the cloud.

Christopher: and go learn all these tools and now you've taken one of your best assets in terms of product development, software development, and you've shifted them off to this thing that really isn't increasing the value of your, your company. You're just preventing outages. Yeah, for the most part. Yeah. And so, The industry, I think, is shifting more towards this idea of platforms, mm-hmm.

Christopher: and having a, a platform where your operations teams can come and encode knowledge and your developers can come in, in, in a sense, consume, you know, self-service, consume that knowledge. Another name for it is internal developer platform. Yeah. And that's kind of where we're trying to go. We're trying to build a platform that particularly for early stage teams, you can very quickly get in provision get your infrastructure and your applications both up and running.

Christopher: but then it scales with you, It deploys into your environment. So it's not like Heroku. We run in your cloud and any of the three major clouds, aws, gcp, Azure, you own it from that point on. And it's extensible. Our, our spec is all open sourced, and so you can, if you don't like the way that we're provisioning, perhaps, perhaps like a vpc.

Christopher: You can rewrite it and, and make your own vpc. And so now your developers can be deploying that instead. And so it's fully customizable for these more advanced teams. And now you have a platform where everybody's speaking the same language. It's visual. You can all see what's going on. We get metrics and alarms and everything in it.

Christopher: And we hope it's a platform now where collaboration can really happen but not the way it's going. Right.  

Julian: Yeah, what's the challenge? I talked to a lot of I've talked to some crypto companies and obviously a lot of that's open source information and, and code and, and things along that nature.

Julian: What's the challenge of managing that open source information? Because I'm assuming it's not all, you know, it's not all the best solution to implement and, and recode your platform. But a lot of it, if you need, pull in different ways. How do you manage that information? How do you implement that?

Julian: What are the challenges and what are the benefits of having something that's open?  

Christopher: So, I mean, the, for us, one of the things about the, the benefits of open sources that for, so, and to be clear, the pieces that we've opensourced on our platform are going to be what, what we call the bundles or infrastructure bundles.

Christopher: And it's going to be the idea of like an AWS vpc or an AWS RDS database or a gcp. Memory store. Red is cluster. And so the open source part for one is that everybody can actually see what it is that we're doing. We're not trying to hide, we do not want to be a black box so everybody can see exactly what it is that we're doing.

Christopher: We can also accept contributions, but. , the, you know, one of the things you kind of mentioned, the scoping of it is that we, I've been doing this, all, all of the co-founders here have been doing this long enough. We've seen it's fairly similar patterns for the run, how most companies are running this infrastructure.

Christopher: And so we're going for the 80% solution on all of these bundles. We try to make sure we get security. And compliance in these things. And we try to build it, you know, to, to be able to scale. But obviously there's going to be customization that has to happen, particularly for, you know, the more mature companies that might have very specific needs.

Christopher: And so, yeah, even from there now they have a, a, a point that they can fork our, our bundle, our, our infrastructure repository bundle, and they can now go, you know, modify and do it on their own. Yeah. And so this allows. Companies to self-serve in building their own things. We also want to, you know, get partnerships with a lot of these other, you know, organizations, you know, like Elastic and Mongo, so that they can now provision their things to our platform.

Christopher: And it just, it allows the, the platform to be much more extensible and community driven, which is, is something that we're looking for.  

Julian: Yeah. How do you go about you know, obviously you said the traditional sense of of building an engineering team and, and working through the DevOps processes to then go and either grab a you know, your most senior engineer, tell them to learn the cloud, or hire an entire DevOps team, but then that kind of silos the information.

Julian: How do you go about communicating? The this kind of disruptive product and I use that word cuz it, I think, I think it's true to its nature in terms of disruption. It is creating a new pathway that is different from the incumbent. How do you go about communicating and, and helping companies transition, because I'm sure it's not, not easy to te tell them that you can do what you're doing maybe more efficiently, but with less resources. With this piece of technology, how do you communicate that value?  

Christopher: You know, Well, one of the things we try to do is, you know, we try to set up a proof of concept. We, you know, when we go in with, you know, one of these, one of our prospective clients, we ask for a POC and we try to take them through that whole process in a short of amount of time as possible.

Christopher: And so just you know, a couple weeks ago we had somebody who came online. Fresh, you know AWS environment. And we were able to get a vpc, a Kubernetes cluster, a database, and one of their own custom applications all up and running in it was an hour and six minutes. And so, and, and, and with that, then there was also the observability part of it.

Christopher: So, you know, in, in our bundles we put alarms around failure conditions. So on this database, they'll now be notified when CPU or memory or disc or any of these things. Failure thresholds. And so seeing that of how quickly they were able to build best practice infrastructure in their own cloud, have it all connected.

Christopher: And we also handle like security. So like IAM rules and things like that and, and firewall rules. We handle that for them. So it's, it's secure, it's best practice and it's provision. Yeah. And they didn't have to do significant research on this thing, and it was up and going in an hour and six minutes.

Christopher: And so yeah, that's, it's very easy to see the value pro. there, particularly for these early stage companies. And then as we grow for some of the more mature ones, we'll see, you know, companies that have a massive DevOps team, but they're, they're slowed down to a grind because they're dealing with a whole lot of these just little tasks of creating S3 buckets you know, modifying some terraform, doing all this.

Christopher: And when that, when developers can self serve and they can visualize the environment and understand the dependencies, cuz it's a visual tool. It's, it's, it frees up your operations engineers to now actually be. SREs now, they're not just SREs in title, where they get to get paid more for doing the same work.

Christopher: Now they can actually focus on how do I add value to the business? Because making the new S3 bucket doesn't really add value to the business. It's something that this product needs. But now you can focus on how do we actually scale this thing? How can I build things that will help the product And mm-hmm.

Christopher: that's what you can do. So you're maximizing even the, the value you're getting out of your existing, you know workforce of, of operations.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense and, and I. Products that, that kind of create this, this expedited process. And it allows the current teams to, to function at a higher level.

Julian: And, and just by enabling them to do processes more quicker. Especially, you know, one thing that you said that, that I think resonates with a lot of. You know, successful products is that if something is fairly standard across multiple organizations when they're building product, then there should be something to expedite.

Julian: I mean, we talk about it from a small scale in my company where it's like, if you're doing something five times similar, then let's create some kind of templatize or automated process right? To, to make that process more efficient because that amount of time you. You know, it, it compounds on itself. You know, thinking about, you know, the transition, and I love that your three founders splitting the, the responsibilities to do three different roles.

Julian: What's particularly challenging about your role? And, and I guess splitting it, you know, the responsibilities with your, your founders.  

Christopher: Yeah. So so Corey being the ceo, he's, he's kind of responsible for just the, the vision and luckily he has a very, he has a exponentially larger, you know, social media presence than either Dave, we've, we've kind of hidden ourselves for years, and now we're asking to get out and and show our faces on, on all these places.

Christopher: So he's, he's out kind of communicating where we're going in the vision for this platform and setting. You know, Dave is working a lot on the, the technology. So early on I kind of handled one whole piece of the, of the tech stack, and I'm at a point now where I'm moving a little bit more out of that role and I'm going much more into kind of sales and analytics to try to understand, because I'm kind of out doing a lot of the interfacing with the customers and getting them on the platform.

Christopher: And yeah, first there's the challenge of, that's there's a very new role and, you know, to, to all. Other founders out there, This, this is where you're going to be challenged is that, you know, engineering is where all of us just wanna fall back to because this is what we're good at Yeah. And what we know how to do, and forcing yourself to get out of that and you know, go out and, and be talking to customers, understanding what they're doing, communicating that into requirements.

Christopher: And in some, it's having to let go of a lot of the, the technology to focus on things that the, that the business actually needs, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's been the tough part is is yeah. Distracting myself from, from engineering. Yeah. When,  

Julian: when you, And I love, I love that your, your kind of customer focused and right now in terms of the onboarding process is there, is there a couple of favorite questions that you like to ask customers that help you, you know, guide the product vision or, or guide your, your onboarding process with them?

Julian: I always like to ask that, just, just to see if there's anything I can take from it. .  

Christopher: No, it's honestly, that's, first of all, that is a great question. If you're out and you're talking with customers, the first thing that you should be trying to find out is what is the pain that they're experiencing? So that our, our product can be the, the pain reliever to that.

Christopher: And so that's something we usually ask particularly early in the calls is, you know, what, how is, how is this DevOps journey going for you guys? And most of the time it's very, very rare that we. Somebody's saying it's going well. There's something that the companies are struggling with. Either they don't have the expertise or they have the expertise, but communication is an issue.

Christopher: Or they even have people on the team, but they're trying to use technologies that they aren't familiar with because now, you know, if you look at your operations folks, , they're having to know, you know, the cloud. So if you're using serverless things, you know, sn, sqs, s3, you have to learn Aurora and those databases, if you're running in containers now they have to know EKS and ECR and all of these pieces, and there's just a massive amount.

Christopher: And so finding the right people that know all of this stuff is very, very hard. And so just asking that question of, you know, what is difficult and it's, it's, it kind of depends on the stage of the. The early stage companies, they just don't have the expertise. They're either fumbling through the cloud or they're on a pass and they know, they know eventually they're gonna have to get off.

Christopher: And, and that's very intimidating to them. Or it's, you know, these larger companies that just don't have the efficiency or the productivity they would like out of the teams. And ironically, that's what DevOps promised them, was that everybody's gonna be more productive. And now that they're introducing DevOps, everything is a lot slower.

Christopher: Yeah. And that they're trying to figure out what to do  

Julian: with that. Yeah. Do you have a percentage in terms of like the, the percentage of productivity you gain as a company if, if you adopt something like Massdriver?  

Christopher: Yeah, there's you know, there's gonna be upfront, there's a you know, there's, there's the, the migration time, which particularly for some of our, you know enterprise or larger clients, we white glove you know, some of that for them to help them get on the platform.

Christopher: And once they're on the, particularly the productivity for their operations teams goes up I would say drastically because now they're, they're able to focus just on you know, the, the self-service sort of things that, that, that their developers need and especially for their development team, because now they're not sending.

Christopher: Tickets over. Instead of sitting and waiting for two weeks on that S3 bucket that you asked for to get provisioned, you can go drag that onto your canvas and let the op sky know and say, Hey, does this look good? Or you can even just provision it yourself and then tear it down after you're done if it's just an ephemeral environment.

Christopher: And so for like, for developers, It's, it can drastically lower the amount of time that you're spent waiting on your ops teams, like 90%, you know? Wow. And then, yeah, for ops teams, they're able to just focus on, you know, it can be similar work if they're customizing a lot of their bundles, but otherwise they could focus on now.

Christopher: Not even any of, of, of like the Terraform or, or your cloud stuff, it's now how do I help our product actually get better? And so that's, it's almost a complete shift in what they're working on. It's not even a increase in, in, in productivity.  

Julian: Yeah. No, that, that's incredible. I, I think, you know, one thing that's not spoken a lot, but, but I've learned through experiences.

Julian: Once you're able to. You know, understand where your company's at, and, and readjust or, or redistribute responsibilities to make it either more efficient or have people focus on you know, things that they specialize on. It really does affect the productivity in an exponential way. With, Go ahead.  

Christopher: What you mentioned, the specialization there, and that's what's interesting is that so many companies are focused on tearing down silos and, and oftentimes the way the companies go about tearing down silos is, is trying to create an army of generalists, of like, everybody's gonna share all of this knowledge and, and look, I understand there is a benefit of having knowledge spread out across some of your team members, but. Specialization, like, and this is kind of one of the things we've started saying, it's, this is a, this is a feature. If you're building, if you're building a team and you can only have five engineers, you don't want five generalists. What you want is, you know, two or three just dope developers who understand your, your domain and the language that you're in.

Christopher: You want an awesome, if you're an ad tech, you want an awesome big data. And maybe you want another guy who's in, you know, working with databases or, you know, Yeah. You want specialization across those. You just need a, something that allows them to communicate and, and collaborate together effectively. And that's, that's where we think this movement towards, you know, platforms is going to come in, is it's that ground now where collaboration happens and you can, you can have specialization and, and actually benefit from it.

Julian: Yeah. No, I, I agree. I, I, it's, it's so funny the timing of this. I just chatted with a with another founder and they were focusing on the QA process and, and creating a platform that enables companies to, to, you know, utilize and, and you know, this QA automation system, but at, at a different level where they don't have to have a whole built out QA team.

Julian: And it sounds like It is mo moving towards those platforms because developers need to focus on what they're really good at versus things that are a necessity, but, you know, can be replaced by something that, that you see as similar across the board. What are some of the biggest risks that Massdriver faces today?

Christopher: You know, well, I'll tell you what, when very early on when we were just talking about. Like this whole product and what we were doing. Yeah. You know, the, I think it actually is that Lean Startup book, or it was another one I read. They talk about what are the miracles that you need for your product to be successful?

Christopher: And if you haven't found any, then you need to think harder because there are, right, there's, there's, there's a certain number of miracles or big things, and what we identified was that this is a, a shift in mindset that, that we, that we are hoping and kind of trying to encourage these companies to make in terms of how they go about managing, you know, embracing the idea of, of platform engineering more so than this, than what DevOps was.

Christopher: Cuz DevOps is kind of taken over the industry and is this, is the industry going to shift to this? And I absolutely think the value proposition is there. And I can tell you from, from talking with a lot of the customers, they're very, very excited about what we're. You know, one of my big concerns when I was getting out there talking to people is that we were gonna face a lot of resistance of people that are gonna say, What is this thing you're building?

Christopher: It's, this isn't useful. And it's exactly the opposite. There's a lot of excitement and people are like, Yes, we, this is what the industry needs. And so that has been, that has been probably, as we were just kind of building the first POC of this, this was always in the back of our minds, like, is this gonna even work or are people gonna do it?

Christopher: And the good news. The, it appears it's the perfect time that the industry is starting to recognize that we need to move beyond DevOps into something else that's better. Yeah. And, and if this adoption of platform engineering continues, and I think it should, I think it's better for the industry that I think that's gonna be huge.

Julian: Yeah. If everything goes well, what's the long term vision for Massdriver? .  

Christopher: That's a, that's a great question. We, we would love to be a, a. , our, our CTO or Dave talks about the platform in terms of we want this to be your, like headquarters that you leave up all day long to understand your system and, and what's going on.

Christopher: You know, and this was something early on, you know, or investors would kind of talk to us and, and ask us, you know, why wouldn't somebody just come and provision their stuff and then leave your product? And it's like, well, if we want to add so much value in terms of. Understanding what you're running, being able to visualize it, being able to, Cause we also handle parody so you can design out what you want and then you can clone that to another environment, whether that's, you know, staging to production.

Christopher: And so then this can turn into ephemeral environments. This can also turn into deploying, like the enterprise SAS model. And so we want this to be a place where, It is so easy for engineering teams to, to work well together to understand what their, the health of their system, what they are running, how it's connected.

Christopher: That it would be very, very painful for them to do business without it. Yeah, and not because it's hard to, hard to get off, but because it's, there's so much value added by. What our platform does for you? The, the tedious stuff. Badass.  

Julian: Yeah, badass man. It's awesome to see products like yours that are enabling these teams to build quicker you know, design and design and, and build products.

Julian: Communicate more easily because, you know, if, if we're, if we're in this. Mindset where we're enabling people to build cooler things faster. And it just, it, it opens up the opportunity to to, to just even lower level consumers on a day to day basis because companies are able to, you know, connect with them and, and build the things that they care about in a timely manner.

Julian: Which is awesome to see. And I know, I know we're coming close to time and, and I can continue talking to you about, you know, developer and development environment. But before we get off, I, I do wanna. What books or people have influenced you the most? One for selfish research, but two for my audience to, to gather some cool new new research or gems from, from information out there.

Julian: But yeah. What books or people have influenced you? The.  

Christopher: Particularly for the, the, the startup life that I'm going through right now, I've really liked the Lean Startup has been fantastic. That's kind of about the, the short development cycles and developing these POCs. And the hard thing about hard things, and I'm probably giving you the same ones that everybody gives you.

Christopher: Those were both really, really good books that I, I recommend if you're, if you're starting off on this journey of of, of creating a company. Both of them are were very useful in, in in giving some perspective and also giving some kind of tips for how to, how to, how to manage the chaos of this world.  

Julian: Yeah. Any, any people that, that you, you, you particularly find inspiring or, or kind of shared knowledge with you that, that you were like, Oh man, whatever they say, or, It's extremely actionable and I don't know if anybody comes to mind, but like to make the. ,

Christopher: You know, that I, I, I'm , I don't tell him this, but I would actually, Corey or Daniel, our ceo, he's been very, very influential, even for me in my career.

Christopher: And so I've been, I've been working with him now for like eight years I think. And so he I really enjoy working with him. Obviously I follow Kelsey High Tower and a lot of the stuff that he's doing, I think he has a very good. Pulse on the, the industry and, and where it's growing.

Christopher: And I'm, I'm a Kubernetes guy, man. Yeah. . So I, I, I, I love it. And so I'm a big fan of his as well.  

Julian: Awesome, man. Awesome. Well, I, I, I love where the company's going, the, the product that you're building, how you, how you think about you know, enabling your customers and, and the, the, the process in which that you've done.

Julian: So I think, you know, a lot, a lot of people can learn from, from your experience. And last little bit. I always like to give my founders an opportunity to give me their plugs. What's your Twitters? What's your LinkedIns? Where can we find the support math driver and the mission and, and the product that you're, you're builkding.

Christopher: Absolutely. So website is www.massdriver.cloud. Please go check us out. We also have you can find us on LinkedIn. There's Choreo Daniel. There's me, Christopher Hill, and there's Dave Williams. We also have master driver on there. I forget on LinkedIn if it's Massdriver.cloud or just Massdriver, but those are probably the big ones.

Christopher: You can also check us out on GitHub. Please go take a look at some of our open source repos for, for infrastructure. Even if you're, even if you're not looking into the, the platform itself, you can see how, how our Terraform works and maybe that'll help you as well.  

Julian: I love that we have a huge community of developers that list to this podcast along with founders as well.

Julian: So I'm, I'm excited to share that with them and, and get them involved. But Chris, thank you so much for being on the show. Yeah, I hope you enjoyed yourself. I, I, I love learning about your background experience and and I'm really excited about where the platform's gonna go. So thank you again for being on the show.

Christopher: Thanks. It was a great talking to you. Yeah, .

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