The following interview is a conversation we had with Jamie Turner, Co-Founder/CEO at Convex, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $30 Million Raised to Build the Future of State Management.
Jamie Turner
Yeah, no problem, happy to be here.
Brett
So, before we begin talking about what you’re building, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Jamie Turner
Yeah, so I think it’s safe to call me a serial entrepreneur at this point. So I kind of caught the startup bug in my early twenty s and was both an early employee and a Founder at several startups, then doing kind of mobile and data startup and lots of different random stuff, some of which is alive and many things which are acquired or dead. And then ten years ago took a break from startup life to join Dropbox, which was I guess by some measures a startup, but was really already a couple of hundred people and helped grow that team and got to work on some pretty different stuff. Worked a lot more on kind of deep backend infrastructure software for a while and while there worked on a great project where I kind of built out dropbox’s in house storage system and met my current co-founders there.
Jamie Turner
So we worked for a number of years on storage and databases at Dropbox and that relationship is kind of what led to when were all kind of about ready to hang it up at Dropbox, deciding to continue that working relationship afterward and that’s kind of what led to Convex. So a history of a lot of startups and then more recently a real specialization in data scale and databases and storage.
Brett
Nice. And I’m sure you walked away with a lot of lessons from Dropbox, but if you had to pick one just from a business perspective, what would be like one big takeaway from your time at Dropbox?
Jamie Turner
Oh, wow, that’s a great question. People always end up mattering more than systems, right? So the larger company gets if the systems are not designed to meet the shape of the talent and the needs of the people in the organization, then nothing else will matter. So technical architecture doesn’t matter, infinite budget doesn’t matter. You really have to make sure that the design of not only the teams, but the actual systems the teams are managing and it’s in software organization are cognizant of the way that the organization will change and what the people inside of it will need.
Brett
And many of our listeners, they come from a similar background. They’re in a technical role and they’re just now starting their first companies. So going from a director of engineering to Co-Founder, CEO, what would you say was that biggest challenge that you faced in making that transition? And would you have any advice for others who are in a similar place and they’re going to be doing a similar transition or already have made a similar transition?
Jamie Turner
Well, I think that if you’ve had some management experience, you have a modicum of experience in gap filling. Like a lot of times managers shape their role around doing lots of random things so that the people that work with them and for them can be effective at doing the main thing, I would say. And when you’re going to transition into, let’s say, being a Founder of a startup, it’s the extreme addition of that. So hopefully that felt good to you because you’re going to spend most of your time doing things that you are not good at. And if you’re the kind of person who finds that thrilling, then you’re probably going to have a good time. And if you’re the person who finds that a pretty scary idea, you need to sort of prepare yourself for some growth or maybe rethink your decision. So I would say that’s the biggest advice I would have is just the classic adage about being good at learning things or even being good at being bad at things.
Jamie Turner
That is probably the key skill that you need to have. It’s just a real comfort level with trying a lot of radically new things that you’re bad at for a while.
Brett
Nice. That’s super valuable. Now let’s dive into a few questions just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. So first one, what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Jamie Turner
I’ve thought about this before and unfortunately, I have to say I’m going to give a pretty cliched answer to this because it’s the truth and so realistically, I still would have to say after all these years, steve Jobs is the Founder and CEO that I admire the most. The real reason for that is the tenacity that Jobs had to be very principled for so long. So there were ideas about what product experience people deserve to what they should aspire to that Jobs held pretty firmly to despite market pressure for many decades and stuff like that. But I think that the tenacity to kind of stick to your vision and hold those principles in mind if you really believe they’re the ones that are going to produce the best outcome and the best experience for your users and then ultimately the business having the patience to wait.
Jamie Turner
In many cases, like in the when the tide kind of turned against jobs for the market to be ready for your ideas. Which I think is kind of when it all coalesced in the late ninety s and two thousand s. I think that’s probably the reason why Jobs is still, to me, kind of the most impressive leader in the commercial world that I’ve looked up to. And it’s a weird way to say it, but I guess that would be the person that comes to mind the most.
Brett
So you mentioned commercial leader. Is there a non commercial leader that you really admire?
Jamie Turner
Yeah, I mean, the token answer would be your parents, obviously, and things like that. So my mom and dad and all that kind of stuff. The people you know deeply, you respond, part of what they give you is a kind of leadership. But I think there are other people that I’ve run into teachers and even some public figures that not very many maybe anymore, but they kind of show impressive consistency and steadfastness about sticking to their beliefs. I think there’s other places you run into great leaders, but the commercial environment requires very specific kinds of decision making and I don’t believe that’s a universal virtue. Right. But when that is the environment you’re in, seeing that executed very well is also something that is worth learning from and in its own way kind of admiring. But it’s not the only kind of leadership that matters.
Brett
Nice. Yeah, I love that. Now, what about books? It can’t be a Steve Jobs book or the Steve Jobs book. So let’s talk books. Do you have a favorite book? And this could be a business book or it could just be a book that really influenced how you personally view the world.
Jamie Turner
I would say the book that influenced me the most that’s not a business book is The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, which is an incredible book about the way we see each other and for lack of a better word, kind of othering of people that you don’t understand and what that feels like. I learned a lot from that book by reading through the eyes of very different experience than mine. I think the business book that probably was the one that was the most I mean, there’s been so many of them, but really changed my thinking or I really felt like I left different than I began. Was crossing the chasm just about kind of finding markets when you’re making something innovative and how to try to bridge that gap between people that are, let’s say, risk tolerant or risk excited, and then folks for whom a change in the way that they operate, the way that they experience products, is not something that they go embrace.
Jamie Turner
And so I think Crossing the Chasm is probably one of the books that helped to me break down the problem of introducing something new into a first problem that felt a little bit more approachable and then kind of a second and third and fourth problem that each one of which is hard, but feels a little bit more tractable than just imagining kind of taking the whole market on day one.
Brett
Yeah, it’s such a great book, and it’s so fascinating that it’s still so relevant today. I just read it for probably the third or fourth time, probably two years ago, and the relevance is so high, despite the fact that when was it published? Like the 80s or maybe the early 90s. It’s an old book, but still so relevant today, which is amazing.
Jamie Turner
Yeah, it was originally 91, and I realized when I was thinking this through that I haven’t read it in ten years, and I probably should go read it again because it is still incredibly relevant. So it’s probably worth read on my side as well.
Brett
Yeah, I’ve been doing that more and more with books lately, where instead of just going and chasing the next book, I just go back to my bookshelf and say, all right, what book was really interesting and impactful and just reread it again? I’m finding that to be very useful.
Jamie Turner
Yep.
Brett
All right, well, let’s switch gears here, and let’s talk about the origin story. So I know you touched on it a little bit there with the origins at Dropbox and how you and your Co-Founder came together, but can you just take us a bit deeper into that story? And what was it about this company that just made you say, okay, let’s do it, let’s start it up?
Jamie Turner
Yeah, I mean, the three of us that are the Co-Founders of Convex, James, Sujay, and I all worked together at Dropbox in senior technical leadership positions for a long time. And the short version of our jobs was really making sure the infrastructure was capable of meeting the needs of product engineers, people trying to actually make the company’s products. And so, yeah, we ran into a lot of painful lessons about what works and what doesn’t work. And to be honest, a lot of what we had to wrestle with, I would say, is kind of like emergent complexity. Like, just was a product of the time that Dropbox started and the set of choices that were reasonable ones to make in 2007 when the company began. And then years later, you’re trying to figure out how to scale all of these choices. And so when we left Dropbox and were able to kind of reintegrate those lessons, we really started to think about, is there something you could build so that you had just a much simpler platform to begin the building a company on, in particular, through the lens of what we would call, like, backend engineering.
Jamie Turner
So all of the kind of infrastructure engineering databases and storage and queues and servers and containers and all this kind of stuff, there’s a lot of pieces there, but really the set of things that product engineers actually need to do is somewhat simple. If you rethink it, there’s just really kind of a few patterns that they need. And backends are quite sophisticated because backends typically grab a set of preexisting technologies and attempt to kind of like glue them all together to achieve these patterns. And so Convex was really the three of using that experience to design a new set of APIs that could replace all of that back engineering you used to need. The reason why that was a good idea is because there are more and more people entering the software industry every day right now. And a lot of them just want to solve human problems.
Jamie Turner
They just want to solve, they want to make products, they have something in mind, they want to improve about the human experience. And the back end engineering has nothing to do with the human. At best it just allows you to not mess up the front end engineering or the product engineering, right? So for many of these new folks to software, as little time as they can spend on backend engineering is great in their book. And to be frank, that is an extremely practical way to think. And so Convex was basically born to allow them to get their jobs done while spending as little of their time and effort on backend engineering as fascinating.
Brett
And what’s that ideal persona look know? Who is that dream user that you want to see using the platform?
Jamie Turner
Well, I think that user would probably identify themselves as an app developer or a web developer. So it really would be someone who their primary and favorite language is JavaScript or maybe TypeScript. And they are making websites, maybe they’re making mobile apps and they have product experience in mind that they start to craft and then all of a sudden they realize, oh, well, I guess I need to store stuff somewhere and then I need to get it back later. And there’s going to be multiple users so they probably all need to share parts of that stuff with each other. And that’s the moment where things like backend engineering and DevOps and AWS accounts and consoles and telemetry and logging and all this kind of stuff suddenly comes into the picture. And again, none of that stuff really has anything to do with their origin story, right, why they made the product.
Jamie Turner
And so that person that really started is like, I am a web developer, I want to make something that has a surface on it that speaks to human and does something that helps them. That is the person that we want to serve. And that person right now is typically going to be a web developer. So maybe someone using a technology like Versaille or Netlify, they want a pretty seamless way to get their web app out to the world. And if that web app has a backend to it, then they can use Convex and save themselves a lot of time and headaches when it comes to all of that kind of traditional backend engineering stuff.
Brett
And when you say time savings, do you have any estimates on what that time savings looks like on average, or is that hard to average out?
Jamie Turner
I mean, it depends a lot on what they’re building, but at this point, our team has enough experience doing things kind of the old way and doing things on Convex, and then our customers have similar kind of feedback for us. I think most things you would build, you can get done three to four times faster on Convex than on other stacks. So it does not take very much code to solve a lot of problems that used to take quite a lot of boilerplate and configuration and coupling one code base to another and stuff like that. So, yeah, I would say that’s reasonable to say that a ramped up Convex developer can get things done maybe three times faster than someone that’s not using Convex.
Brett
Wow, that’s super impressive. This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast, I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now, back today’s episode. Now, what about traction and adoption? Are there any numbers that you’re okay with sharing that just demonstrate the growth you’re seeing?
Jamie Turner
Well, so right now we just started our kind of paid accounts in late November, so we’ve just onboarded our first batch of paying customers the number of teams kind of, for example, building on Convex in the last I think I just ran the numbers this morning or something. So it’s a few hundred teams that are building on Convex over the last few weeks. That number changes every month and has been growing recently. Right, which is great. So it’ll probably be different next month. But we’re still definitely in those early phases where the adoption is just starting to really pick up and we’re starting to just have our first batch, I would say, of truly passionate teams that are building interesting stuff on Convex and really pushing the system.
Brett
And in terms of crossing the chasm, then, are you still at the very early adopter phase or where are you on the line there?
Jamie Turner
I would say absolutely, yeah. And in particular because Convex is a pretty new way of working at this point and we’re still learning so much about how it is conceptualized by the people that are passionate about it and better ways to communicate what they find exciting about it, to, let’s say, to a more mainstream audience one day. We absolutely are still in the fraction of the curve that are sort of like innovators or people that are just very excited about finding novel new ways to work that can make them more productive or whatever. So, yes, this is still the early adopter phase for sure, when it comes to Convex.
Brett
And so far, what would you say you’ve gotten, right just to rise above the noise and capture the attention of developers? Because as I’m sure you’ve seen in the market, there’s just a lot of developer tooling, there’s a lot of funding that’s gone to developer tooling. So are there any, I don’t want to say secrets, but are there any unique insights that you’re doing on your end or applying on your end to stand out and convince developers to really just give the platform a shot even?
Jamie Turner
Well, no short answer. No, I would say I think the thing that you’ve just highlighted is probably like one of the hardest things right now. Right? There is a lot happening and developers, pretty understandably, have been new products have been marketed to developers so much in the last five to ten years because I think there’s been a simultaneous recognition by a lot of entities that developers are a really fantastic customer in many respects. So I think there’s a little bit of a wariness and the cynicism that sometimes developers have about so many new things showing up all the time. I think that what we found the most effective has just been to really focus on what things that they’re trying to build and just show them how you would solve those problems with Convex. So just to maybe articulate why that is even worth saying, the alternative is hitting them with a bunch of copy about how great Convex is.
Jamie Turner
And we’re developers ourselves, so this makes sense, right? We found that developers hate that. So if you say it empowers you to do XYZ and you hit them with tables of bullet points and all the kinds of things that a lot of, I would say enterprise sales often will do, you kind of lose them very quickly. So I think there’s a kind of truth to the approach that instead of saying what you have is great, just show them what it does and then let them judge if it’s great or not. The more we’ve leaned our outreach to that, the more effective it’s gotten. So just get a little bit more literal, let them be the judge of it and show them the product as early as possible instead of just describing it to them or using solutions language or whatever. I think developers, very understandably, don’t have a lot of patience for that.
Brett
Yeah, another guest who was on a few weeks ago described it as just being allergic. So developers are allergic to marketing and allergic to positioning and they just don’t fall for the stuff that normally works when it’s enterprise sales or just any other industry besides targeting and developers, which I thought was a pretty fun way to describe it.
Jamie Turner
Yeah, that sounds right to me.
Brett
Now, what about categories? Do you view your market category as very important or does that not matter because it’s being adopted and sold through the developers?
Jamie Turner
I think it matters for the simple reason that you’re going to get asked a very reasonable question a lot, which is what is your product? What is convex? Right? And so people want to hear back convex is and then there’s a word after a right because it really quickly lets them kind of pattern match against things they know and then therefore they can say, well, I’m looking for a widget or whatever. So I think it does matter because it makes the onboarding experience easier when you’re trying to say, why is this for me? If you have a category, then you can fast forward some of the conversation about why they might want it and they can also fast forward their own evaluation about am I looking for a new one of these right now? Convex’s category. It’s pretty hard actually. It is another one of the trickier things we’re running into.
Jamie Turner
You could cite Innovators Dilemma or one of these other things, but what we have is something between a database and a backend as a service. But both of these kind of preexisting categories have problems for us a little bit. The problem with database is its role is a little too narrow. So Convex actually wants to solve a broader set of problems for you than a traditional database will solve. Backend as a service in some respects is a kind of apt name, but it became more associated with things like Heroku, which ended up just being kind of a place you can run servers, basically. So category finding is something we’re still kind of doing, I would say category creation. We’ve heard enough about that to know it’s a pretty difficult problem to tackle. And so I think we’d like to be able to take a category like database and say convex is a programmable database or it’s a more advanced database.
Jamie Turner
The short answer is that the category side. I think it does matter a lot. I think that it’s one of the things we think about the most right now is the best way to answer category kind of questions. And right now the category we’re probably closest to is the database category. But we really need to find a way to imbue that category with a broader set of capabilities in order to communicate what we can do for a customer.
Brett
Super interesting. Most founders that come on when we ask about categories, I would say 80% of them say it’s a category creation play and they’re very excited about that idea of creating a category or designing a category. But as you had mentioned there, category design is very hard. It’s very difficult to get right, it’s very easy to talk about it, but it’s very difficult to execute on. And if you actually look through the history of software companies, there’s not really that many companies that have even created a totally new market category. So I like your approach a lot, and that makes a lot of sense.
Jamie Turner
Yeah, they are braver than me. So I think it’s a good litmus test for all of us, including it’s one we do internally here at Convex to say the default answer to, is this a new category? It’s almost without consequence or accountability to say yes to that. Right, because then you don’t have to tether it to anything that definitely has value. Right. Like, oh, it’s a whole new thing, and now we need to teach them why they want it. So that definitely is an appealing idea until you try to implement it, and then you realize that is very difficult and you actually may be avoiding answering a hard question, which is making a decision about what category you’re actually in. And if you can’t find that, then maybe you’ve built something no one wants yet. Yeah. So I think it’s a great question to ask founders, because wrestling with what category we’re in when you’re doing something innovative is one of the harder questions that you struggle with.
Brett
Yeah, absolutely. And yet hearing your thinking and how you approach that is going to be super helpful. So I think our listeners will be very excited to hear that. Now, let’s talk about challenges. So I’m sure in your journey so far, you’ve encountered a couple of challenges. If we had to choose the greatest challenge you’ve faced so far and overcame, what would that be?
Jamie Turner
The greatest challenge we’ve faced so far is understanding the best way to reach and onboard our users. The reason for that is I think this is classic. Like, really good product designers will preach this over and over again, right. So you are probably not your customer in many cases, right. So the Convex team in particular has a ton of experience with solving the kinds of problems that Convex solves. But we almost know too much about how Convex works. Right. And so I think that there’s analogy here I’ve used a couple of times that helps explain this a little bit, which is like, I feel like sometimes when you’re trying to introduce someone to something new and this has been true of Convex, you’re on this kind of journey through the forest and you’re like, hey, there’s this path. And then I want you to come with me.
Jamie Turner
And there’s a pot of gold at the end of the path. And they kind of say, okay, all right, well, let’s go look. And then so you get there and you wind through the trees and you reach the pot of gold and you point at it and you just circulate wildly and you say, there it is. Isn’t it amazing? And then they’ll politely nod a little bit, but they look a little confused. And then you say, Isn’t it great? And they say, I guess. I mean, you seem excited about it, but there was this really cool tree back there. Can we go back there and talk about that tree? And so I think a lot of times the thing is that the core idea you might have, and I think it’s true, maybe of not all of our ideas, but hopefully many of our ideas, it’s still like a good idea.
Jamie Turner
But maybe the thing that you think is great about it isn’t what they’re going to recognize as great about it right away. And you have to spend, I think, a lot of time and have a really open mind with the kind of people that you’re bringing something to market, to serve, to really understand, wait, where are they beginning from? Because you have all these assumptions you’re making about maybe where things are going or where they might go, about why your thing is the right fit and you might still have a great idea. But actually, the waypoint that they’re going to recognize as solving the burning problem that they have right now is not the one you’re anticipating. It’s actually maybe it feels obvious to you, but it’s not obvious to them. It’s quite interesting to them. And so I think that’s been the thing that if we’ve made progress on something, it’s getting better at that, getting better at being open minded about, hey, what are you really listening to?
Jamie Turner
What are you contending with right now? And yes, that is still somewhere along this path toward where convex goes. It maybe wasn’t our original conception, but, hey, that is fantastic. It’s great that is something that we can do for you and let’s take that very seriously and figure out how to maximize that opportunity to help you in that way. So that’s kind of a long answer, but that’s the best way I can explain it is just being a little bit more open to like, you may still have a good idea, but their understanding of how it’s valuable to them is you probably will not anticipate it very well, and at least we did not.
Brett
Hey, we like long answers. Typically, the longer the answer, the more insightful is what we’ve seen. So appreciate that one. Now, two other questions here before we wrap. First one is what excites you most about the work you get to do every day?
Jamie Turner
Well, maybe other founding teams do this, but Sujay, my Co-Founder, had this idea right before we kind officially started the company to make this. We called it like a Founder marriage document, right? So it was like, let’s all write down why we want to do this and let’s do that independently. Let’s bring those together and let’s just make sure there’s the right compatibility. There’s the right overlap between what all of our reasons were and for all three of us. We had some variation a little further down the list, but the number one answer was the three of us had been very lucky to work together on a really talented, positive team that supported each other, that learned a lot from each other, that took on something really difficult and then felt the joy in pulling it off. And the number one thing was like, let’s make that room again, right?
Jamie Turner
So it was, let’s recreate that energy again. The joy of working with people that trust each other and support each other and are talented and inspire each other and challenge each other to do great work and to take on something very difficult and see if collectively you can create a kind of unit, create a team that achieves it. It’s such a thrilling experience, right? That a lot of the high points in our careers were those kinds of situations. So that is the thing now, two years later, that I do anticipate the most every day. But a positive part about my job is I’m currently in one of those rooms where I’m surrounded by a lot of people that really impress and inspire me and support each other and try to make each other successful in a pretty selfless way. And that’s what were going for, right?
Jamie Turner
So that’s it really. Being in that experience is the most rewarding thing at the moment.
Brett
Nice. I love that. Now let’s zoom out. So, three years from today, what does the future of the company look like? And what’s that vision?
Jamie Turner
Convex believes that front end engineers are taking over the world. Product engineers are taking over the world and also it’s about time. And so in some ways, Convex is kind of a backend engineer’s penance, right? Like backend engineering really is there to serve the product at the end of the day. And so the vision we see three years down the road is there will be an even more dramatic shift to the vast majority of people that are making software, are making the product facing human facing side of software. And Convex wants to be one of the key solutions that allows those folks to focus as much of their time as possible on the part of software making that interests them and that actually adds value to the human experience for their users or customers or whatever problem they’re solving. So I guess making that more concrete, right?
Jamie Turner
Convex is aiming to be a pretty dominant platform, like three years down the road. Probably still an emerging platform, but one of the major platforms that is acting as the foundational layer behind a lot of the internet companies in the future that are being built. Internet companies, internet projects, open source nonprofit, but all sorts of aspirational new things that are being built in software that utilize the internet are using Convex to allow those teams to stay laser focused on the part of software that really has anything to do with humans.
Brett
Wow. Super cool. Jamie, I’d love to keep you on and ask you another 20 or 30 questions here, but we’re going to have to save that for part two and we’re going to have to wrap here before we wrap up. If people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go?
Jamie Turner
So if they want to follow with me personally, they can go to Twitter and I’m jamwit J-A-M-W-T if they have any interest in writing software. I would just love them to go to Convex Dev and try us out. Try to build a website on Convex. But, yeah, thanks for having me on, it’s been a lot of fun.
Brett
Yeah, no problem at all. Thanks for taking the time to share your story and talk about your vision and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision in the coming years.
Jamie Turner
All right, thanks.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
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