The following interview is a conversation we had with Benjamin Wilms, CEO and Co-Founder of Steadybit, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $7.8 Million Raised to Build the Future of Chaos Engineering
Benjamin Wilms
Benjamin, thanks for chatting with me today. Thanks for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So could we just start with maybe a quick summary of who you are and just a bit more about your background?
Benjamin Wilms
Yeah, really? So my background is software developer. I’m still a software developer by heart, even if I’m now not able to do a lot of coding as a founder and CEO of Steadybit. But I started with coding roughly 20 years ago as a software engineer and one of my biggest motivation was, and still is to be an expert for a specific problem, to find the best solution and also to talk about the solution afterwards so that I can share the experience, the solution with other people. Because normally you are not alone with your problem.
Brett
Now talk to us about when you decided to make that transition from being a full time developer to being a startup founder and CEO. What was that transition like for you? And the reason I ask is I think there’s a lot of founders that are listening in who are in a very similar place. Maybe they’re a developer right now, but they’re thinking about starting their own company. But as you’ve probably experienced, making that jump is hard, and making that transition is hard. So what was that journey like for you?
Benjamin Wilms
It’s a very nice story. Maybe I can just share the founding story of Steadybit and why I’m now sitting at Steadybit or why I founded Steadybit. So I was working as a consultant at a former employer, and this was a consultant agency with a very special, unique culture. So at this company I was allowed and was able to spend one day a week it’s like this plus one model we all know from Google and other companies from the old days where you can spend time to train yourself, teach yourself, get more experience and specific development skills, whatever. And also to do public speaking, to do conference talks, to share open source stuff, to create an open source project. And that was doable at my former employer. And this was like a very nice culture because then I was able to start something in my free time.
Benjamin Wilms
And I started it because there was a project and I was joining this project very late. It was like in front of the first release. So to be honest, I’m a paranoid guy. I don’t trust normally everything at the first look. So I joined this project. I was able to take a look at the code base. I was able to take a look at the unit test coverage, about the tests, about the integration, end to end tests, law tests, whatever. And I was not very confident that we will survive the first release in production. So I talked to the team guys, I’m the only one, or is it only me that is so paranoid about this first release? Should we not test maybe the unhappy path? Because normally I was just able to see this happy path testing. Everything is fine, yeah, load test is executed very well.
Benjamin Wilms
Yeah, blah, blah. No, that’s not like production is and production is not like a place where you would spend time because production hates you. Production would like to kill you. And that’s something where I was coming from. But I was not able to convince the team to do it. So that’s where I started with chaos engineering in my plus one time to take a look at chaos engineering, to learn the principles, to see what other people are doing. It like at Amazon, at Netflix and so on. And then I was able to convince my team, okay, guess what? We are doing a load test, the end to end test. And I will inject bad behavior doing the test. And were not very successful because everything was like collapsing. The system was not able to handle the load under specific conditions. And that was my starting point with chaos engineering.
Benjamin Wilms
And it was quite successful because then were able to go out in a couple of weeks later with the first release, and we survived. And this leads to another nice situation where I was able to talk about this approach to my colleagues at my former company. I was able to do public speaking at conferences. I was able to create my own chaos engineering team to do trainings at other companies, to yeah, let’s do chaos engineering at BMW, Volkswagen, whatever. So that was working quite well. And then this took me to a very nice situation because there was a meeting scheduled with my former boss. His name is Merco, Merko Novakovich. He is the founder of Concentric, my former employer, but also he’s the founder of Instana. And Instana is now quite successful company acquired by IBM. And he told me, Benjamin, I was able to see what you have achieved in the last twelve months.
Benjamin Wilms
You should do more. Here’s some money. I will support you with my network. You should create your own company. You should be a founder. And I was, what’s going on here? That’s like the chance of your life. And it was not my plan. So that’s how I would like to answer the question. Follow your passion follow what you would like to do, talk about it, share it with other people, and then there will be the chance that you are successful and you are able to start.
Brett
Wow. So you’re very much an accidental entrepreneur then when you were younger, this wasn’t a master plan of hey, I’m going to build a tech company. You really just kind of fell into this and the opportunity came and you jumped on it sounds like.
Benjamin Wilms
Exactly. And the story continues because it was like six months money for six months on the bank account. So I need to provide something and I need to deliver something. So there are multiple types of startups. There are startups where you are just pitching for an idea or they are startups where you would like to verify and validate for yourself if your idea is picked up by other people. So it was like more a product driven approach at steadybit and still. So we need to deliver something and were able to deliver a first prototype. This was been picked up by people from the States. So our first customer was also located in the States and this was been recognized by our seed investor. Both start because on a Tuesday my phone ringed and there was a number from New York and I don’t have any friends in New York, so, okay, who’s calling me?
Benjamin Wilms
So I picked up the phone and it was like Elliot from Ballstudd. And he told me, Benjamin, I was able to see what you have achieved in the last three to four months. I would like to meet you in person. I will hop on the plane. We will meet on Thursday this week to prepare everything. What’s going on? Who’s calling me? And yeah, at the evening we spent the whole day at the evening. He told me, yeah, we are ready. We would like to be your lead investor for the seed round. Let’s do and yeah, that’s how the Steady Bit story is.
Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B two B 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. And as you made that transition, what was the most difficult thing that you had to overcome as you’ve transitioned from developer to CEO and founder, what was that biggest obstacle and how did you overcome it?
Benjamin Wilms
Yeah, so the biggest obstacle is focused. Focused. Spend your time very efficient. Spend your time with the problems you need to solve right now and also take a lot of decisions a day you have to take care about product decisions, about customer decisions. Is this maybe? For example, one of my hardest learnings was like there was a big company knocking on our door. They are very convinced about the product. They would like to buy a license. But it was like, okay, now I’m dealing an enterprise procurement process and we are just six people at this point in time. So that’s maybe a company you should not handle right now. And so I need to decide, get them as a customer or not. And this was a very tough situation because revenue is not like your biggest value you can get from customers. There’s even more feedback, like working with them very closely on your product to validate new features you have in mind.
Benjamin Wilms
If this is really a feature a customer needs.
Brett
And just to define the term here, could you define chaos engineering in just simple terms? It’s a very cool sounding phrase, by the way, chaos engineering. I really like that phrase.
Benjamin Wilms
Yeah, it’s a very good term. It’s also working quite good in marketing. It really is a pain sometimes in hard conversations with management. But this was like some years ago a big pain. Now it’s more like getting to, let’s say, a standard or the people are able to understand. Okay, yeah, you are talking about chaos engineering.
Brett
Yeah.
Benjamin Wilms
Okay, continue. But what is chaos engineering? So with chaos engineering, you are able to verify if your system is working under specific conditions. Like you need to survive an AWS or Azure or Google cloud zone outage. You have maybe created a very complex distributed system on microservices, whatever. And now you would like to see if there are some fallback patterns implemented in your system. And are they configured right? Is the fallback been triggered because of the condition you have configured? That’s something you can check in a running system with chaos engineering and it’s always like, yeah, of course, if you take a look at the principles of chaos engineering or if you take a look at Netflix, they are doing it in production, but you should do it in a more proactive way. You should do it in a pre production environment to verify if your system can handle specific latency service outages or any kind of bad conditions you can see in the production system.
Brett
Interesting. What types of companies tend to experience these types of challenges? I’m guessing it must be just the massive software companies.
Benjamin Wilms
Yeah, but not only so, it is more like not very dependent on or connected to just one industry. It’s more like companies where they have a direct communication with their customers. So, for example, our biggest customer is Salesforce. They have a very close connection to their customers because they are providing a platform, a central CRM system and additional services. And if Salesforce is not able to deliver to their customers, they are impacted quite heavily. So there’s like not a big of tolerance between an outage and the customers. Or another customer of us is Mano. Mano, they are providing an e commerce marketplace and it’s like Amazon. But if this is not yeah, they are not creating revenue. Their customers are not creating revenue because they cannot sell their own products on this marketplace. And that’s something we can see from the type of customers.
Brett
And can you give us just an idea of some of the metrics about growth and adoption? Our audience loves to hear metrics. If you could share any numbers, that’d be awesome.
Benjamin Wilms
Yeah. So it’s always like the same kind of story. So our core persona is located in the SRE Performance Q, a testing area in this kind of organizations. And they are the people who are responsible for if a system is not working properly. So, for example, the SRE is sitting in front of production and if production is not working, they are in a very unpleasant situation and they are getting a lot of pressure. But on the other side, the SRE or Performance groups are very limited by resources. So there are not so many people inside. And on the other hand, you can see developers. And developers are like 300, 405,000 of developers who are pushing into production as fast as possible because they are measured on feature, how fast they can get features into production. So this group, their job is to keep production up and running.
Benjamin Wilms
But how they are doing it is not like in a proactive way. They are more like hunted by their own system. So what they are doing, what our customers are doing is like they are able to see all the outages, the incidents and they are recreating outages from the past and they are doing it in a kind of here’s the experiment created with steadybit and then they are rolling it out into their own organization to the product engineering teams. Okay, that’s something you need to survive for later, let’s call it. This incident is now your regression test and you need to develop against it. You need to handle this condition we have prepared for you and then you are safe to go into production.
Brett
Super interesting. And you talked to us about the competitive landscape. So are there a bunch of other Chaos Engineering platforms out there today or is this more emerging and those platforms are just starting to be built and rolled out.
Benjamin Wilms
So of course there are competitors on the market and to mention the lost implantation. So, like, Kremlin is like the first competitor. They have created a lot of bus around Chaos engineering. They have started this some years ago, I guess six to seven years ago with a lot of marketing activities. They have created a community around Chaos engineering. And later in time, there are more companies coming up, like Litmus. Litmus is now owned by Harness. They have created on Kubernetes based chaos engineering platform. Then there are a lot of open source tools. They are sadly not sadly, but they are more focused on specific elements or specific areas to do chaos engineering. And then there is also like steadybit.
Brett
Got it. Makes a lot of sense. Now we’re into the final questions here. So one of the last questions that we always like to ask is based on your journey, what’s the number one piece of advice you would have for yourself if you were just starting the company again from scratch today?
Benjamin Wilms
Focus. If you have taken a decision, yeah, follow this decision, but also learn from your failures. You will fail a lot and you need to learn from it. That’s the important part. That’s what I’m doing since day one. But sometimes to learn from a failure is quite hard because maybe you are so covered by this failure or maybe you are not trusting this kind of decision because you need more data or whatever. So it’s like focus. Take care about your decisions. Follow sometimes not always your gut feeling because you have it inside your mind that’s what is the best decision right now.
Brett
And final question, let’s talk about the future. So maybe let’s go out three to five years from today. What does the company look like then? What’s that high level vision that you’re trying to build?
Benjamin Wilms
So the vision of Steadybit, also the vision for the future is we have a very strong focus on usability to make it so easy to start with chaos engineering. And we don’t would like to be an expert only tool. We would like to be a tool where people without any knowledge about chaos engineering or complex systems are able to start easily save and to get value out of it as fast as possible. How we are doing it and what is the vision for the future is to integrate even more as today. So you need integrations into load tests, you need integrations into monitoring solution, into your whatever post bank collections, whatever you are using in your daily life as the engineer and SRE. And that’s something where Steadybit is getting more and more placed.
Brett
All right, Benjamin, 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, where should they go?
Benjamin Wilms
Of course, Steadybit.com is the first place to be and you can follow me on LinkedIn and still until today on Twitter. But I will not promise anything.
Brett
Benjamin, thank you so much for coming on, sharing everything that you’re building and really sharing some of those lessons that you’ve learned along the way. I really enjoyed this episode and I know our audience is going to as well. So thank you so much for taking the time, really appreciate it.
Benjamin Wilms
Thanks a lot for having me. It was really a pleasure.
Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a b two B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast.
Brett
And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you.
Benjamin Wilms
On the next episode.
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