The following interview is a conversation we had with David Siegel, CEO of Glide, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $20M Raised to Power the Future of No-Code Application Development

David Siegel
Hey everyone, and thanks for listening.

Brett
Today I’m speaking with David Siegel, CEO. 

Brett
Of Glide, an air powered no code app. 

Brett
Development platform that’s raised over 20 million in funding. David, thanks for chatting with me today.

David Siegel
Pleasure to be here, Brett, thanks for having me.

Brett
No problem. So, to kick things off, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and just a bit more about your background?

David Siegel
Sure. Well, my name is DavidSiegel. I grew up obsessed with computers. I grew up in the golden age of the early Internet. Everyone getting email knows right before the smartphone, tinkering with your own pc, installing Linux. I’ve always just loved technology and was fascinated by how people use computers. And I decided to pursue a career in computer science and study computer science in university, inspired by when I saw my grandmother get her first computer and start emailing us. I’ve just always been fascinated by computers and technology, how they become relevant in our everyday life. So I studied engineering, but I also studied philosophy in school. I spent the first decade of my career doing open source and designing software development tools. 

David Siegel
So a little bit of a detour away from the concerns of everyday people designing tools for software developers and yeah, then I joined a startup in San Francisco where we were building tools for people to build mobile apps inside of companies. We called these dark apps, but they were custom iPad android and iPhone apps being built by the hundreds within very large companies and for use by their employees, their partners, et cetera. They were not public and Microsoft acquired that startup. I spent two years at Microsoft and then I got the itch with a couple of colleagues of mine to just jump back into the startup world and build something new. And we ended up building Glide. 

David Siegel
And Glide is sort of the culmination of all of that background I described and sort of rejoining my origin story of falling in love with this idea of technology for people made more broadly accessible. And Glide is what we think the future of software development could look like. Software developer tools that anyone can use to create powerful solutions for their business and for other needs.

Brett
What was it like working at Microsoft. 

David Siegel
And being inside such a big company like that. 

Brett
After working at a startup, I think.

David Siegel
I had a pretty atypical experience at Microsoft. I have to say it was overwhelmingly positive. But I was in a Microsoft San Francisco office where they kind of transplanted all the startups that they would acquire in the Bay Area. And because it was San Francisco, you had the snacks, you had the coffee machines, you had the beautiful office. It’s not quite like that at Redmond. They do have free soda, but it was much more of like a startup vibe. And I was working with other people from the startups that Microsoft had acquired, so it was very different. But overall, this was sort of Microsoft on the ascent, the rebound under Satya Nadella, and you would just meet people saying, welcome to Microsoft, we’re so happy you’re here. 

David Siegel
Please help us modernize, please help us learn, in my case, how to design better products, because I was a design leader at the startup that they acquired. So it was a very energetic place with people with a lot of hope and a great leader and many great leaders that he also brought in. So yeah, I couldn’t recommend it more highly spending some time there. If you could go back to the time machine and join then. But yeah, it’s a big company. And while I was there, I started working on some open source projects and I just got that itch to create and ship and iterate and find customers and move more quickly rather than trying to help modernize these very large teams building basically legacy software development tools like visual studio. So it was a bit of a coin pause.

David Siegel
I was really excited about what they were doing. It’s just when they took the GitHub acquisition. But yeah, there’s nothing compared to the speed and the sheer terror of starting an early stage startup and a few follow.

Brett
Up questions we like to ask. And the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. First one, what Founder and CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them? 

David Siegel
I can’t really decide who I admire the most, but I think the ones that inspire me the most are the Founders of Stripe. And just for their focus on design, their technical excellence, their lofty mission, their ability to execute, their ability to hire great people, they’re just, I think, the gold standard for the kind of Founder that I would like to be.

Brett
What about books? Are there any specific books that have had a major impact on you? And we stole this from Ryan Holiday, but he called it a quake book, so he defined a quake book as a book that rocks you to your core and changes your entire worldview and how you think about the world. 

David Siegel
Well, without exaggeration, I would say the beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch changed my worldview and rocked me to my core and made me just so optimistic. And without reading that, I might not have started this company and I probably.

Brett
Need to brush up on it. 

David Siegel
It’s a pretty dense book, but there is something in the book called the principle of optimism. I’m pretty sure this is described as the principle of optimism, and it’s that anything that’s not prohibited by a law of nature is possible, given the right knowledge. So basically, anything that doesn’t violate a law of physics, once you know how to do it, you can do it. And when we were brainstorming ideas before we started Glide and started building software development tools for anyone, we were just going through this inventory of ideas. Some of them were small, some of them were large. And then when we came to this app building for anyone, software development for anyone, at first I just kind of recoiled from the idea for two reasons.

David Siegel
One, because I’d seen it done before and always terribly, we’re not working on a new idea, but I don’t think anyone’s done it well yet. No one’s created a great product in this category of software development for everyone. And two, it just seemed so hard. All the ideas were brainstorming, I kind of like visualized in my head as a designer, we talk about an idea, and I also have this technology background. I can build the app in my mind and start using it, know, turn it over my hands and judge it. 

Brett
But I couldn’t conjure that image when. 

David Siegel
We were talking about software development tools that anyone could use. It was just massive. And one of my co Founders, Mark, who’s Glide CTO, he actually recommended this book to me, and he had read it himself, and he said, do you think it’s impossible? No, actually, I think he said, do you think it’s possible to make the great product here? Well, certainly it’s not prohibited by the law of nature, and therefore, all we have to do is figure out how to do it, and then we could do it, and then we can fund it and hire great people. There’s a lot more than just getting the knowledge. But yeah, I think that book really changed my worldview at the beginning of infinity, and I’ve heard it recommended by a couple of other ceos as well. It’s becoming more popular in kind of Founder circles.

David Siegel
Nice. 

Brett
I haven’t heard of that yet, but I’ll add it to the Amazon cart right after the interview. Now let’s dive deeper into Glide. So you touched on a little bit, but maybe if we can just go a bit deeper, can you tell us more about what the platform and what the product does?

David Siegel
Sure. So maybe I can start with some simple analogies. We looked at spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are the most successful programming tool of all time. And sometimes people who are spreadsheet enthusiasts will refer to this graph that shows the world’s most popular programming languages, like Java, C, C Plus, Python, JavaScript. And then they have Excel, and the Excel bar is like ten times taller than the most popular programming language. They don’t even look like they should be on the same axis. So you have 2 billion people who use spreadsheets to organize information, to do calculations, to run their businesses. So this is an incredible success story for an accessible programming tool. Glide basically builds on top of that foundation by taking the spreadsheet concept and letting you build a user interface on top of the spreadsheet.

David Siegel
So when you build a Glide app, you actually just take a spreadsheet that you already have, Glide analyzes it, and it constructs a responsive, contemporary looking, well designed app derived from that data and connected to it live. That’s one click in Glide. That’s your first click. And if you don’t use Glide, if.

Brett
You don’t learn it and you don’t.

David Siegel
Customize it, the behavior, the artifact that you get from that first moment is whenever you edit that, let’s say you connect to Google Sheet. Whenever someone edits the Google sheet, the data view in the app updates. So without even doing anything, you could share that app with a thousand people in your company. Maybe you picked a spreadsheet. This is just an easy example. You have a knowledge base in your company and it’s in a spreadsheet and you connect it to Glide and you get this live look into your knowledge base that people can add to their home screen and they get all these patterns for free search, push pop navigation, where you tap on an article and the screen pushes to the side and you see the details.

David Siegel
They can open that app in their browser, they can install it on Windows or Mac, and you can just continue to update that knowledge base spreadsheet. Maybe you add a team in an office somewhere that just keeps that open all the time, and as they get new questions from customers, they add it to the knowledge base, and within seconds all those changes will propagate to everyone who’s looking at the interface that you built with Glide. That’s a very basic description of how Glide works, but there’s a lot of depth.

David Siegel
You can add AI, you can add calculations, you can customize this interface to be interactive so that if you distribute it to 100 people in your company, you could ask them to submit feedback, to vote, to correct mistakes in the knowledge base, contribute new articles, and all of those actions that they take inside of the software you build with Glide are writing back to that source spreadsheet so you can create this very powerful distributed data management phenomenon inside of your company, enabled by Glide.

Brett
And what’s the market category for you here? Is it no code app development? Or how do you think about market categories? 

David Siegel
Great question. So we view ourselves as building the world’s most successful or soon to be most successful software development tools company. I don’t like calling Glide no code app builder. That is something that’s very narrow to me because we’re broadly interested in creating software. App tends to mean mobile app to people. But in Glide, you can build automations, you can build web apps, you build a responsive app in Glide that works across desktop and mobile. We’re not focused on distributing to the App Store. In fact, we don’t support that at all. We’re not interested in public facing consumer apps in the iOS App Store, for example. That’s kind of a staple of the app builder category and why we keep that at arm’s length or further. 

David Siegel
And yeah, no code is just a very narrow way to look at inventing the future of software development, which is what we think we’re doing, mostly because successful software is a lot more than code. And as a computer engineer, I think coding is like the easiest and most fun part of creating software. The harder parts is like, what does it do? How does it work? What’s the design, what’s the distribution story? How do you update it? How do you handle data, how do you scale it, how do you handle security, et cetera. So we have this much broader view. So yeah, we are a developer tools company and also we host your app. That’s something that we have to include. We run the back end. 

David Siegel
So even if you pick your own spreadsheet, we’re running back end services to help email your customers and your employees, authenticate them, do the synchronization, host the files you upload. But we also provide our own databases. If you want to scale to millions of rows, spreadsheets can’t do that. So you’ll pick big tables. Is the native database that we offer. So yeah, we view ourselves in a very broad developer tools and services category. 

Brett
And are developers the primary users then? 

David Siegel
No, I mean, we do call them developers. This is where the language gets kind of tricky because these ideas are new and challenging. We technically consider what you do in Glide programming, but not coding. Coding is when you write formal text based language that describes a computer program. What you build in Glide is a computer program. Program and app are kind of interchangeable terms. And when you make a program, you are programming no matter the method, whether it’s dragging visual components around or writing code. So we consider people who make Glide apps to be programmers or developers. But what you meant by that question, I’m guessing, is like, are our main users classic developers, people who write code all day for their job?

David Siegel
No, we mostly see people in IT operations, HR, marketing and sales teams, so that the less technical people in a company, people who would say that they are not comfortable writing code, are hugely successful on Glide.

Brett
What do classic developers think about this then? Do they view this as that’s taking away work they would normally get from it to pull them in and ask for help? Do they view this as a threat? Or what’s like a classical developer’s response. 

David Siegel
To tools like this? I think that great developers are not threatened by these tools because great developers want to work on sort of the innovative breakthrough technologies that their company is building and not the sort of the day to day operation stuff that we want to automate with software. So we are trying to compete with the spreadsheets and the paper and the manual process in the companies of the world. We’re not trying to compete with the product that your company builds. And the developers in your company are often the most expensive employees that you have. They should be working on the thing that sets your company apart from every other company, not the thing that your company has in common with your competitors. For example, you should use tools, encode those common patterns and make them super efficient. That’s Glide. 

David Siegel
So we described knowledge base. You want to create knowledge based software for your company and maybe throw some AI in there to help it, suggest new articles and help your employees find the right answers. If that’s not the product of your company, your developers shouldn’t work on it. You should use Glide and let other people in your company express those skills. So no, I don’t think people who specifically, people who write code, are threatened by this. But if you’re a developer building internal tools at a company, that’s not your product, you shouldn’t be writing custom code for that in the first place. The best example is, do you need kind of a custom employee directory for your business? If you’re writing code to do that, you’re just already using the wrong tools for the job.

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And can you give us an idea of the scale that you’re operating at today? Our audience loves to hear metrics, so if there’s any numbers that you can share that demonstrate the growth you’re seeing. 

David Siegel
That would be awesome to hear. Yeah, we have many thousands of customers across every type of use case and company size and company that you could think of. Because Glide, that’s one of the greatest challenges we face, is Glide is as broad as spreadsheets. You see, these spreadsheets help do planning in the largest companies in the world, and it also plans like your birthday party or your wedding. So we have a huge number of customers, and besides customers, we have also a free tier. You can build incredible amount of software there. We’ve had hundreds of thousands of people, and like I said, we call them developers build. At least, I think we’re over two and a half million apps at this point. I have to check on that precise number, but yeah, hundreds of thousands of developers building millions of apps.

David Siegel
So we’ve seen just incredible and very broad traction. And the challenge for us right now at our stage of the company, as we scale revenue, is really focusing on the best business uses of Clyde. So like I mentioned, it and operations, those are our largest and most successful and highest paying customers fall in those categories. So despite this really interesting broad adoption that we’ve seen, that’s where our next focus goes. 

Brett
Do you wish you had narrowed that focus earlier on in the journey and gone from everything to narrowing it down to a few use cases, or do you think that you had to follow this path that you followed, of kind of doing everything to uncover those in the first place?

David Siegel
We definitely picked a few areas to focus on early where the product wasn’t ready yet, and we learned what it would actually take to win those customers. But I think it was all part of a necessary learning process. And ultimately, we want to have solutions and be a relevant product in many different verticals and different types of company. So I think it’s always a balance between our ultimate ambition to be something broad and work along spreadsheets in any type of business and how to show specific, measured progress against specific types of customers that are successful early on. I think we’re meeting the right balance.

Brett
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Brett
And I think I read on the website it was 85,000 companies have used it so far. What do you think you’ve gotten right to rise above the noise and to attract such a large customer base? I think that’s something that every Founder would love to be able to say. They had 85,000 companies using their product. What do you think you’ve gotten right?

David Siegel
So I definitely think the ease of use is a major focus of ours. You can get this aha moment in Glide. You want it in your products, you have a moment of delight for your customer where they kind of see a breakthrough and they see the promise. And the earlier you can have that funnel, the better. And our decision to let you just pick a Google sheet or an airtable based or an excel file and not using AI, using very dumb rules, in fact, generate an app for you as a starting point, I think is why we’ve had that level of success so far is that in the first couple of minutes of clicking around our product, you get something so promising, and that just creates energy and it creates momentum and people want to, okay, what’s next? 

David Siegel
How do I send this to someone? How can I show this to someone in my company? I get the idea. I think that really was the breakthrough of that kind of book. And in the early days, the header of our website was, I think it was build an app from a spreadsheet in five minutes for free, or build an app from a Google sheet in five minutes for free. Just very clear. 

Brett
Telling people that they could start for. 

David Siegel
Free, that it wasn’t going to be a big investment of time, and then actually fulfilling that promise with that simple onboarding flow where they could see something quickly. I think that did it. 

Brett
How long did it take until you felt like you had reached product market fit? Was that three months in? Was it day one that you just felt like you had product market fit? Or was it three painful years until you got there? 

David Siegel
I think, well, one of the big moments was when Glide was just a prototype and we did y combinator. We got a question that we didn’t know the answer to in our interview, and they said, why do you think people who aren’t already software developers would be interested in creating software? Well, the answer was, because software is so valuable to business, and it’s one of the best tools humanity has ever created. It just seems like unqualified. Good that more people would have access, but we didn’t really know for sure. We didn’t have real evidence. And when we launched Glide immediately, it’s like February 19 of 2019, I think we got an article in TechCrunch and we had a very simple version of Glide back then, and the response was just explosive. 

David Siegel
I think it was at that time, maybe like hundreds of people a day just creating, creating, sharing. So that was a moment when we thought that the idea had legs. I wouldn’t call that product market fit. Maybe that’s like a sign of product fit. But yeah, I think the product market fit on a horizontal and ambitious developer tool like ours. This very much work in progress. We have public companies running significant operations on apps built by people who can’t write code in their operations team running on Glide. And then we have people who still struggle to figure out how to use the tool or how to apply it. So I wouldn’t say that we’ve nailed it anywhere, but we’ve seen really promising signs of success to a varying degree across many different customer types and companies. 

Brett
And with those early customers or the early paying customers, what else did you do to really build that trust and credibility? And maybe let’s focus on the first enterprise customers. So I see you have woes on there. Whirlpool, the PGA. How do you build trust with companies like that and get them to give you a shot? I think that’s something else that every Founder really struggles with.

David Siegel
Well, all of those companies started by just signing up for free and building their app. So we’ll have a first conversation with the customer and they’ll say, yeah, hi, I built an app on Glide, and 200 people at my company are using it. We’re running x, Y and z function on it. So the product is selling itself. That’s the product led growth motion. And I think some of those customers, especially when you see a logo like PGA, sign up and start using the product, we just jump in early and we say, how can we help? We really want to get their story and we want to make a video and just in key sort of lighthouse customers.

David Siegel
And one thing I did at an early age, and I still do, it, is just make myself accessible, sort of join the call, hand out zoom links, meeting links, get a lot of FaceTime with those customers, and walk them through problems when they get stuck. And in the case of PGA, I was on site at the Ryder cup, the first tournament where they were running seat management. That was the major use case when I went to Ryder Cup. I think they were running three different Glide apps to run the operations for that tournament. And one of those apps was developed on site. On the first day when they discovered a problem, they made software right there on site and deployed it. That was incredible to see. But, yeah, I was just there to make sure things went well.

David Siegel
And if there was a problem with a server or there was some sluggishness, or they needed a feature change, were there to just make it happen. And that’s definitely kind of like the do things that on scale ethos that you hear in the startup ecosystem. And YC is very adamant about that. Just like doing whatever it takes to make sure they get the experience that’s going to get them to expand and stay with you.

Brett
Being there on site, that must have been very high stakes for you. Just hoping that nothing goes wrong, I’m guessing. 

David Siegel
Yeah, I mean, it was high stakes. There were highs, there were lows. We couldn’t believe we pulled it off. There were all these devices joining the LTE systems. We were just worried, like, is the network connection going to stay stable enough for them to do the row counting and to update all the information? And, yeah, it was wild because were actually contending with sort of real world physical problems that interface with our software. So they had a Glide app distributed to 85 volunteers who were in charge of counting people as they went in and out of stands and scanning their tickets to save their seat. And on the first day, the people who had the Glide app just inundated by tens of thousands of attendees walking past them. 

David Siegel
And they said they had a plus one and a minus button, minus one button they were using to count people. So they’re like, all right, we need a plus five button. So right there on site, I made sure that everything went well. They made an adjustment to the app, they added a new user interface element that connected to the data model. And then the next morning, they said, okay, we deployed an update to the application. You guys can all press plus five as these crowds walk past you. And that was just wild to see in person. I’m really happy I went, that’s super cool. 

Brett
Do you have any other cool stories like that, like in the field, in person? Apps that you’ve seen built. 

David Siegel
Some of our wildest stories are this is not our business, but it is interesting to share. We never thought of emergency software as a category, and we’ve seen because Glide is so quick to develop, we’ve seen this class of emergency apps, and emergency apps are apps that are made in response to an emergency that sort of critically is just. This is kind of the lore of Glide and one that we actually saw while were still NYC. And again, this is not a business use case, but it’s kind of just a testament to the power of what were building and sort of the promise of software made more accessible to everyone and simplified. 100 x was in Moran county, where I live. 

David Siegel
There was some storm and the actual sheriff made an app in two days that got distributed to 45,000 people and it had all the up to date storm information. So that happened very close to home. It was a nontechnical person, someone who doesn’t write any code, probably couldn’t write HTML. Building a novel, never before conceptual. I never thought of like a storm app that just materializes while the pods are forming, distributed to thousands upon thousands of people who got that information and could have added it to their home screen. So that was another one of those mind blowing moments. Again, that’s not our business. We don’t hope there are more storms in the world so that we get more customers. But definitely a fun story for a podcast.

Brett
Yeah, that’s not the total addressable market there. There’s this many sheriff offices, there’s this many storms. So huge business line. So I want to ask a little bit about PLG. So it sounds like you were doing PlG before it was cool. So it seems like in the last two years, everyone’s talking about PLG. I think the benefits of PLG are widely discussed. Are there any downsides that you’ve encountered of PLG or any specific challenges to having a PLG go to market motion?

David Siegel
Yeah, there are many challenges. I think the reason we picked PLG was just because it’s what were accustomed to from our favorite products. And like I said, Glide’s not a new concept. We’ve seen hundreds of companies build sort of non technical app builders or software development tools aimed at business, and we just thought that none of them were winning on the strength of the product. And we wanted to make a breakthrough product in this category that would speak for itself so it know PLG wasn’t the acronym we had in mind. We were just like, let’s build just a breakthrough high quality product here that stands far and above its competition. 

David Siegel
But yeah, I think one of the difficulties with PLG so our activation metric on Glide, we don’t consider someone who signed up for Glide to be active until they’ve built published, shared an app that has two or more monthly active users. So I don’t know. In PLG SaaS, I haven’t looked for one, but I haven’t casually encountered an activation metric that is more stringent than that. I’m sure they exist. I’m not saying we have the most stringent one, but it’s just a high bar. So that is a challenge when you have a product that is so complex. And sometimes I have this acronym, ByopMF, it’s just bring your own product market fit. 

David Siegel
That’s what our customers need to find within their own companies is product market fit for the solutions they’re building on clients, it’s difficult and they need all kinds of help from how do I structure the data and build the product, and how do I add the right features to how do I even make sure I’m building the right solution for my colleagues? So yes, I think PLG on a b to b product, especially developer tool, is extra challenging. So we supplement that with sales assist. So our sales team assists are standing by when people inquire about our enterprise tier or we see a very special customer getting traction on our business tier. So we’ll reach out, help them and try to give them even some more momentum. And I also think that PLG is also difficult. 

David Siegel
With novel concepts like Glide developer tool for non developers, it’s tricky to find the audience that’s going to connect to that. So one thing we do is we have a lot of templates for all of our different use cases. So a lot of people will find Glide. They either not searching for creating apps without code, they’re searching for the field sales app, customizable knowledge base pickup and drop off custom app. And then they find our landing pages for templates where they can preview a pre built solution. So that’s been really important to make the PLG approach work. And we’re not dogmatic about are. I’m very proud that I think we’re a quite practical company. 

David Siegel
Besides the fact that we picked what I consider to be the first or second most challenging software company to build, which is not technical software tools, we also have a sales approach we experimenting with outbound at this stage, and I think it’s going to take all hands on deck and a hybrid approach to make something like Glide really scale. 

Brett
And last couple of questions for you. If you were starting the company again today from scratch, what would be the number one piece of advice you’d give yourself? 

David Siegel
One mistake I’ve made is we started all together. Then Covid happened, and I kind of let a diaspora happen. I didn’t think we had another choice, but people moved out of San Francisco. I moved north of the city. So now we’re a fully remote company. And I don’t quite regret that. I don’t know how it could have gone differently. I think we made the best choices for ourselves, given the extraordinary circumstance of the pandemic. But I realized just in the last six months or so that I’ve been sort of half hearted about operating as a remote company. I would describe myself as regrettably remote, but weren’t on the cusp of getting back together. I really needed to commit to making the company operate, well, remotely. So that’s one thing I would change. 

David Siegel
When Covid scattered us to the winds, I would have said, okay, you are a remote company now. That is the reality. What’s it going to take to keep people energized, keep them engaged, keep communicating, keep innovating? And we did that. We get together a lot, and every Friday we have an all hands where I present for a while. I tried creating a Monday morning kickoff video that just would announce in our general channel at  a.m. So everyone could get even an extra boost starting out their week. We have a chat bot that every day at  a.m. Announces KPIs to the company. So there are these touch points and we get the team together. 

David Siegel
But that’s one thing I would have changed, is I would have taken more seriously how to be excellent as a remote company versus being sort of 1ft in the remote category, 1ft out. 

Brett
What do you think is the most important skill for a b to B Founder to have to succeed in this environment?

David Siegel
Well, grit. I think grit is the ultimate skill for any Founder. And when you’re just day to day operating a startup, there are highs, there are lows. You don’t make as much progress as you expected to. Sometimes you make more progress than you expected to, but you don’t know why. 

Brett
So you don’t feel super confident about it. 

David Siegel
It doesn’t always feel super dialed in at an early stage. So I think just committing and just not second guessing your commitment to your own vision and just always making incremental progress and celebrating the wins is really important. I think even the companies that we view as there are some companies that just were extraordinarily successful very quickly, it almost seemed inevitable. And then there are other companies that we, from the outside, they seem to have had these very quick rise to success. But I think the reality is it’s very hard in most cases. So sort of being determined and always moving forward and showing that to your company and inspiring them and bringing them with you and keeping that energy going is the most important thing. 

Brett
And final question, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. 

David Siegel
What’s the vision? 

Brett
What are you trying to build right now? I mentioned it before today. 

David Siegel
When you ask a random person in a company, what tool would you use to create a presentation? They can say PowerPoint or Google Slides. If you ask them, okay, you need to create a document word, you need to design a flyer. They might say canva. Okay, you need to create software, you need to create an automation, you need to create a user interface, you need to create some software to solve problem x. They would either say, oh, you need to go hire a human expert who will do that for us at great expense and time, or they’ll say, oh, we have to go through some long procurement process and buy something off the shelf that’s quite expensive. I want there to be a brand that everyone has in mind, and it’s Glide. When you need to create software, it’s Glide. Everyone reaches for that. 

David Siegel
Unless this is highly differentiated, if you’re creating some sort of autonomous drone swarm that’s going to build habitats on Mars, Glide is not going to have the patterns that express that use case. These are these fringe use cases where you’re going to write custom code. But I think we have these brands in mind that we reach to when we want to solve problems. You need to edit a photo, use Photoshop. But I think the normal people who aren’t super technical inside of businesses just don’t have that brand in mind for when they want to create software. And our vision is just to be the answer to that question. Amazing. 

Brett
I love the vision. All right, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If Founders want to following with your journey as you build and execute on this vision, where should they go? 

David Siegel
Glideapps.com. Nice and easy.

Brett
David, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation and I. 

David Siegel
Know the audience is going to as well. 

Brett
So thanks so much for taking the time.

David Siegel
Cheers. Bread. Thank you. 

Brett
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