The following interview is a conversation we had with Alan Shreve, CEO and Founder of Ngrok, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $50 Million Raised to Help Devs Deploy SItes, Services, and Apps.
Brett
Ingress as a service platform that’s raised 50 million in funding. Alan, thanks for chatting with me today.
Alan Shreve
Thanks for having me, bro. It’s great to be here.
Brett
Yeah, no problem.
Brett
So to kick things off, could we.
Brett
Just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Alan Shreve
Yeah. So my name is Alan Shreve. I’m incontrigable on the Internet. I am the creator and founder of Ngrok. I got my start. I went to the University of Michigan. I studied computer science there. I was developing before that, but got my start kind of, you know, have been doing entrepreneurial things on and off for a long time. The first job that I took out of college was at a small startup at the time called Twilio, where I was one of the first engineers and built the messaging team there. And that kind of got me into the distributed systems and networking world that eventually led to kind of my journey into Ed.
Brett
I’m sure you learned a lot while you were at Plio, but if you had to choose maybe one or two big things that you learned from your time there, what would it be?
Alan Shreve
Well, so many I would say a lot of the things that I learned about building for scale and building distributed systems architecture, a lot of the kind of foundational principles of how you built those systems was certainly a thing that I picked up with that Twilio and really took forward. And the other was really further refining what it means to be and build a developer facing product and developer facing company. That was something that Jeff and the rest of the team at Twilio did really well, and definitely something that I’ve carried forward into NROC and all my projects since.
Brett
And a couple of questions that we like to ask, really, just to better understand what makes you tick as a founder first one, what CEO or founder do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Alan Shreve
I don’t really have a favorite founder or CEO that, like, look up to. I think in general, I tend to admire teams of people and the ones that I maybe unsurprisingly because of how Ngrok has been built and founded. I do really look up to teams that have bootstrapped their companies. Not that it’s any different for better or than raising capital and kind of doing things the venture funded way. But there is something pretty gritty about building a bootstrapped company. And so I do admire those teams for the grit and the focus and the execution required to take something from nothing to a real functioning company, basically just on the packs of focus on customers.
Brett
And are there any specific teams that come to mind there?
Alan Shreve
There are, you know, I think they’re pretty well known stories about some of the major companies that have been bootstrapped companies know Atlas or MailChimp GitHub that folks like to point at, but there are plenty outside of software as well that are interesting too.
Brett
What about books? Are there any specific books that have had a major impact on you?
Alan Shreve
Yeah, one of the books that have an impact on me, I was thinking about that and noticed it wasn’t a question about business books. I would say the book that I go back to and reread the most in my life that kind of has a really profound impact on me is The Little Prince. Have you read it?
Brett
No, I haven’t.
Alan Shreve
Oh, it’s a really lovely story. It’s kind of a children’s book. Kind of not a children’s book about a prince from another planet who comes to Earth trying to really understand the meaning of life and what we’re here for.
Brett
Nice. I’ll have to check that out. And those are the types of books that I love to hear about. As you saw from the questions we sent, I get a little bit burnt out just hearing like, the same old business books over and over again. So love that you pulled an example that I haven’t heard of and would love to follow up on that then too. So how many times a year do you read this? Is this like a yearly book for you? A quarterly book? How often are you rereading it?
Alan Shreve
I think I’ve probably read Little Prince probably like four or five times in my, you know, every couple of years I’ll come back to it. It’s the original title. It’s a French book from the author. Antoine seth. Superie. It’s a really beautiful story about what it means to find yourself in the world and find what’s really important.
Brett
Nice. Yeah, I’ll definitely check that out. Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive a bit deeper into the company. So just for those listening who aren’t familiar with you, could you just provide a high level overview of what the company does?
Alan Shreve
Ngrok is a unified, ingross platform. So when speaking at even higher late person terms. When you build a piece of software like a web application or an API website that you want to put on the internet, you typically put a piece of software between all the things that talk to it and the service itself. And the piece in between delivers your software to all of its customers. Delivers that website or that API and in doing so, it provides acceleration, provides resiliency, it provides observability. It makes sure that your service is up, that it’s fast, that it doesn’t go down, all of those pieces, that you can understand what it’s doing. And so the way that problem has typically been handled is that there are many different pieces that are responsible for that ingress story. There are firewalls and reverse proxies load balancers and caching layers and things like that.
Alan Shreve
And Ngrok is a product that unifies all of those separate pieces that are typically operated by separate teams into a single piece of software that someone who is not specialized infrastructure software can use. So your application developer doesn’t have to understand all those deep pieces to build something that they can deliver to their millions of customers or complex corporate customers without needing that additional infrastructure.
Brett
And can you take us back to 2015 when you were first launching, and just talk us through the origin story?
Alan Shreve
Yeah, ngrok’s origin story is certainly an interesting one. It really started before 2015 because Ngrok started before it kind officially became the company. Ngrok was originally an open source project that I built and operated a service for in the very early days. And when I built that service and offered it very immediately, it had a lot of folks who started using the service, and they really started pouring in with different requests and feature asks. And the origin of Ngrok as a company was really on the back of that open source project, really finding a lot of fit and really taking that and saying, like, wow, I think this is really something that’s pretty meaningful, and then doubling down and continuing to invest in that product.
Brett
And can you just give us an idea of any metrics or numbers that highlight the scale that you’re operating at today?
Alan Shreve
Yeah, I mean, over the lifetime of Ngrok, we have signed up over 6 million developers who have used ngrok’s platform. So Ngrok is used if you know a software developer, they likely have heard of or have used Ngrok. It’s used in countries all around the world, in all the different industries. It really has a pretty global adoption.
Brett
And I think founders listening in who have DevTools are probably extremely jealous as they hear that number 6 million. That’s incredible. What do you think you got right? How were you able to attract that many users?
Alan Shreve
There are a couple of things. One, for founders who are in that space, thinking about it. Remember that I started this, like, ten years ago, some of it a lot of people like to think of these things as overnight successes, and they very much are not. They are years and years in the making. And so part of that is time, and part of it is continuing to stick with it and build and build and listen to your customers. In the early days, what anagroc got right was a couple of things. One was that Angrok has focused pretty ruthlessly on developer experience and making a tool very much for developers. And there were two other things that have really contributed to its growth. One is that Ngrok has a bit of the developer tool, has a bit of a viral spread component, that when you use Ngrok by default, if you’re not paying for it gives you a URL that is branded Ngrok that you might offer to someone else.
Alan Shreve
And so that viral spread definitely helped increase its visibility. And the second was that Ngrok originally started off as a developer tool. It was specifically designed to test webhooks and allow you to demo projects without deploying them, which is a good ways away from where we are today, which is running production infrastructure to deliver production APIs to folks. But in those early days, one of our kind of major customers or one of the most early adopters of Ngrok were developer evangelism teams at major tech companies who were building very, you know, where I came from, being one of them, but folks at many other companies, like Slack and GitHub as well. And so those developer evangelists would often incorporate Ngrok into their presentations as they went out and spoke at conferences and things like that, which also has a viral and adopting spread. So not a lot of that is replicable if you’re looking for things to take away.
Alan Shreve
But some of it is right in terms of thinking about what your angles are for creating a viral spread component. And the other bit of being, like, really building something that people love to use.
Brett
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Brett
I’d love to also ask a little bit about funding. So you were bootstrapped there for seven years, and then it looks like you did your raise there at the end of 2022. So what happened there? Did Code Two and Lightspeed just make you an offer that you couldn’t refuse? Did you say, hey, we’re ready to scale and go big, and you sought out an investor? Or what happened there at the end of 2022 that led to you taking that first round of capital so late into the journey?
Alan Shreve
Yeah, like you said, Ngrok was fully bootstrapped up until 2022. There is absolutely no investment. I really started Ngrok on a credit card, paying like $20 a month for an instance to host it, and quickly paid for itself with its first customers and really grew the business entirely as a bootstrap business for those intervening seven years. What we kind of came into in 2022 is just increasing demand for the product and increasing the ambition for what we wanted to build and tackle. Ngrok, the developer tool, was something that we talked about just a few moments ago. But Ngrok, the production infrastructure tool, is something that is much more ambitious. It requires a lot more investment both on a product and marketing side. It doesn’t have quite the viral spread that something like a developer tool that can be shared does. And so really, the scope and size of that ambition and the scope and size of the customer demand really is what the fundraise was about.
Brett
And were you nervous about taking that first round of capital? It sounds like you were very focused on being a bootstrapped company and you made that change pretty late. Was that hard to make that shift?
Alan Shreve
No. The raise of capital is really about taking Ngrok and bringing it to meet the existing, to meet the demand that we’re seeing. And that’s something that it’s not scary, it’s exciting really about really taking Ngrok to the next stage and increasing the number of ways that we can help accelerate developers and help accelerate new software to market.
Brett
Makes sense. Yeah. The reason I ask, because I see online there’s kind of like two camps right? There’s like the bootstrappers and then there’s the venture backed folks. And typically those two don’t get along. The bootstrappers tend to talk crap about the VC backed companies and vice versa. So was curious if you were very tied to bootstrapping and you felt like a trader when you raised venture capital. That’s how we had someone who came on who had a pretty similar journey. That’s how they said they felt. In the end, when they switched from being bootstrapped to raising venture capital, they said they felt like they betrayed the bootstrapper community a little bit.
Alan Shreve
I am familiar with this sentiment in those two different camps. It reminds me of the sentiment in different programming languages, having opinions about each other. Ultimately we are all business builders and that if you’re sitting in one camp thinking that bootstrapping is better than venture funding or vice versa, I would encourage you to think that maybe you’re thinking about it a little bit too dogmatically. That they are both tools for the right time and place in a business’s life and perhaps even for a business as a whole. That some may be the right fit for some and some may be the right fit for others, but neither is superior to either in any particular way. So no, definitely didn’t feel like a trader. Really felt as a choice that we chose and opted into. And so if you made that step, you really got to feel excited about it, which I absolutely was.
Brett
And if we look at your go to market challenges. I’m sure you’ve experienced a couple of them since you launched. But if we had to pick one major go to market challenge that you experienced and overcame, what would that challenge be?
Alan Shreve
That’s a good question. I’ll give you a challenge. I’m not sure that we’ve overcome it yet, but it’s certainly one that we’re making progress on, which is know. Ngrok spent many first years of its life at a developer tool, something that software engineers used while they were building new software, but that when it came time to go to production, they brought in a new technology to take them to production.
Brett
Right?
Alan Shreve
And so the go to market challenge right now is about telling the story of running Nbrock in production and being production infrastructure the way that we do ourselves, like we dog food and rock for our own software delivery and have many customers who run and rock in that kind of production infrastructure way. So big challenge for us is really just taking that awareness that doesn’t have that same viral spread, that same product kind of organic spread that the original tool did, and building a go to market emotion that brings that message out to everyone who already has a conception about what Angrok does and really expanding that vision to include what it has become.
Brett
All right, final question here. Let’s zoom out into the future. So if you could just paint a picture for us what’s that three to five year vision look like.
Alan Shreve
So that three to five year vision is really expanding on what we’ve talked about earlier. Is Ngrok being a unified ingress platform? At Ngrok, we are excited about increasing the pace of innovation on the Internet, about lowering the barrier to entry to building and shipping and delivering new software. And right now, to build and deliver software requires, especially in our particular domain, often requires a tremendous amount of infrastructure expertise, both in small startups but also in large companies. You’re coordinating everything from firewalls to Caching proxies, reverse Proxies, load Balancers Application, firewalls, API, Gateways that all have to be webded together, usually by many different teams. And our three to five year vision is that application developers are able to really self serve that functionality and deliver the application experiences that they want to their customers within the rules and policies set for them by other teams in a much more streamlined and effective way.
Alan Shreve
And that three to five year vision is really about the pace of innovation on the Internet increasing by making these problems smaller and easier to approach and more developer oriented.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. All right, Alan, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build and execute on that vision, where should they go?
Alan Shreve
Feel free to check out our website, ngrok.com. We have a blog which is ngrok.com slash blog. You can also find us on Twitter. We are Ngrokhq on Twitter and I personally am incontriable on Twitter, so those are all of the places on the Internet that I would encourage you to follow along and come join us on the journey.
Brett
Amazing. Alan, thank you so much for coming on and taking the time. Really appreciate it and really enjoyed this conversation.
Alan Shreve
It’s been a pleasure speaking to you, bret, thanks for having me on the show.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. Keep in touch.
Brett
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Brett
And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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