Christine Yen (Honeycomb.io) - Creating a Buzz Around B2B Software
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)
Stanford eCorner
4.5 • 740 Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2019
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Honeycomb co-founder and CEO Christine Yen spent a decade as a software engineer before creating her own company. She describes how her deep domain knowledge and relationships with like-minded software developers propelled her startup’s launch, and shares how she built an energetic human architecture around a highly technical B2B product.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Who you are defines how you build. |
| 0:06.7 | This is the entrepreneurial thought leader series. |
| 0:10.7 | Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner. |
| 0:17.4 | On this episode, we have Christine Yen, co-founder of Honeycomb, a tool to assist product development |
| 0:23.3 | teams understand and debug complex software systems. Prior to Honeycomb, Christine was an engineer |
| 0:30.1 | at Parse, which was acquired by Facebook in 2013. |
| 0:46.2 | So, Honeycomb is a tool for helping you understand your complex software systems. What does that mean? |
| 0:52.4 | What does that look like? Well, right now, if your software engineer in the industry, maybe some of you have experienced this at internships, when you're trying to figure out what's happening in production, you |
| 0:57.8 | typically have two types of tools. |
| 0:59.8 | You have monitoring tools, which give you graphs, which give you dashboards, where you |
| 1:04.3 | scroll through lots of things until you find maybe a graph that spikes in an interesting |
| 1:09.6 | way, and then you can kind of look for other graphs that like you, that spike in an interesting way, and then you can look for other graphs |
| 1:11.8 | that spike in an interesting way. |
| 1:14.0 | Or you have logging tools, which deal with kind of all |
| 1:16.4 | the text output from your normal applications. |
| 1:21.4 | And you go hunting for that needle in the haystack |
| 1:25.6 | that will tell you what went wrong. |
| 1:28.3 | Honeycomb's thesis is that these are two things that have sort of evolved in a direction that made sense |
| 1:37.3 | from the constraints that we had in the 90s. |
| 1:40.3 | When you had grip, when you had counters, when we were like, all right, well, you know, CPU and memory are very, very expensive, so we're going to do everything very cheaply. |
| 1:48.0 | It is now 2019. It is terrible to be constrained by the things that people decided 20 years ago, 20 plus years ago. |
| 1:55.0 | So with Honeycomb, we're saying, you can have both. You can have not only these graphs that we're used to, |
... |
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