How to Build in AI, Lessons From Early Days of Snyk with Founder Guy Podjarny
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 10 October 2024
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Guy Podjarny is the founder of Blaze, Snyk, and now Tessl. He’s spent decades building at the center of developers and security. His newest company Tessl is reimagining software development, helping shape a new paradigm he calls AI Native Development.
We talk through his four quadrant framework for building and investing in AI, plus go into the early days of Blaze and Snyk. He shares lessons on marketing to developers, hiring when no one wanted to work for him, overcoming multiple difficult funding rounds, and lessons from multiple M&A processes.
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(02:21) The four quadrants of building and investing in AI
(14:59) Why AI startups are riskier than non-AI startups
(19:42) When to sell your company vs keep building
(24:57) Why hiring the early team is so hard
(26:32) Early marketing tricks from Guy’s first company, Blaze
(29:09) Strategies for using conferences to grow your brand
(33:33) Getting three days of free PR
(38:04) Moving to Ottawa
(42:11) Why Sales Engineer is an underrated founder stepping stone
(45:49) What he learned as CTO of Akamai
(48:31) Starting his third company Tessel, and why there’s no satisfaction without struggle
(50:41) How Snyk got started
(54:10) Creating developer-first security
(59:59) Secrets for developer marketing
(01:02:31) Why podcasts work so well for marketing
(01:06:26) Snyk’s failed Series A
Referenced
Tessl: https://tessl.io/
Snyk: https://snyk.io/
Charting Your AI Native Journey: https://www.tessl.io/blog/charting-your-ai-native-journey
Secure Developer Podcast: https://snyk.io/podcasts/the-secure-developer/
AI Native Dev Podcast: https://www.tessl.io/podcast
We didn’t mention it in the podcast, but Guy just announced the AI Native Dev Conference, a virtual conference on Thurs, November 21st. Join him + many others here https://ai-native-devcon.heysummit.com/
Follow Guy
Twitter: https://x.com/guypod
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/guypo
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You can plot any AI solution across these two dimensions. |
| 0:03.2 | One is a dimension of change. |
| 0:05.9 | How much do I need to change in order to use this tool? |
| 0:09.4 | And then the other dimension is how much do I need to trust it to get it right for it to be useful? |
| 0:15.4 | And so if you sort of imagine these two by two and you think about the quadrants, then the bottom left has... |
| 0:20.2 | Welcome to the Peel. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Banda Capital. Today's guest is Guy Pajarni, co-founder of Blaze, Sneak, and most recently, Tesla. He gives us a crash course on building and investing in AI and why he started a new company, despite Sneak's success. There's no satisfaction without struggle. |
| 0:38.0 | And if you're unwilling to put yourself in a place in which you're trying something hard, |
| 0:41.7 | you don't get satisfaction. |
| 0:42.7 | Why AI startups are riskier than non-AI startups. |
| 0:45.9 | The challenge with AI is there are no incumbents. |
| 0:49.3 | You basically don't know who your competitors are and you might only find out when you're |
| 0:52.9 | already fairly deeply into your journey, there are 15 other companies doing exactly the same. You should assume that's the |
| 0:58.0 | case. And the incumbents are more aware and more active. I think the counterargument is... |
| 1:03.7 | We go inside the early days of his first company Blaze and then sneak. |
| 1:07.1 | What I saw was the opportunity to apply the playbook from these DevOps companies to the world of security. |
| 1:13.6 | I almost didn't go into it because... |
| 1:15.6 | Struggling to hire the first few employees. |
| 1:18.6 | I asked almost everyone I know whether they want to come board for me and literally all of them said no. |
| 1:23.6 | Navigating Sneaks failed Series A. |
| 1:25.6 | Two years in, we had about $100,000 ARR. |
| 1:29.3 | We looked very compelling from the outside, and so a lot of DCs were circling. |
| 1:34.3 | Everybody looks behind the scenes and they realize there's no revenue. |
... |
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