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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Embrace Decentralized Leadership:
Jonathan's military experience taught him the value of decentralized leadership, where trust in subordinate leaders to make the right decisions is paramount. For tech founders, creating a culture where team members are empowered to take initiative can lead to greater innovation and agility within the organization.
Visionary Leadership Can Drive Incremental Innovation:
Inspired by Reed Hastings' approach at Netflix, tech founders should aim to have a clear end-state vision but pursue it through pragmatic, incremental steps. This strategy ensures steady progress towards long-term goals while maintaining adaptability.
Solve Pain Points with Existing Technology:
Jonathan's realization of a common industry pain point in code remediation led to the creation of Moderne by repurposing technology developed during his time at Netflix. Founders should look for opportunities to solve widespread problems by adapting and scaling solutions they've developed or encountered in their past experiences.
Leverage Your Network for Initial Customer Acquisition:
Moderne’s first customer came through a reference, underscoring the importance of networking and reputation in the B2B space. Building and maintaining strong professional relationships can be a crucial pathway to early customer acquisition.
Invest Early in Brand Identity:
Despite the cost and the seeming non-immediacy of ROI, investing in a distinct brand identity from the early stages can set a company apart in a crowded market. Jonathan’s decision to invest in branding before having secured funding highlights the long-term value of a recognizable and relatable brand.
Conversation
Highlights
From Violin Performance to Enterprise Software: How Moderne’s Jonathan Schneider Built a Different Kind of Developer Tool
When a mathematics professor dropped a spiral-bound book on Jonathan Schneider’s desk in college, he didn’t realize it would shape his entire approach to building enterprise software. The book, as Jonathan recalls, was “a lie” – an elaborate setup to teach students that even the most basic assumptions can crumble.
This early lesson in questioning assumptions would later influence Jonathan’s unconventional approach to building Moderne, an enterprise software company that’s challenging traditional notions of developer tooling and go-to-market strategy.
In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Jonathan shared how Moderne emerged from his experiences at Netflix, where he encountered a fundamental problem with developer tools. “Back at Netflix, I had worked on engineering tools. They had that freedom and responsibility culture, so you couldn’t impose any constraints of what product engineers did,” he explains. The challenge? Getting developers to update their codebases and address vulnerabilities. Traditional reporting approaches fell flat: “People would just say, nah, you know, I’m not going to do it. Do it for me.”
This pain point wasn’t unique to Netflix. During his subsequent role at VMware, Jonathan kept hearing the same frustrations: “I’m getting stuck on old things, I’m spending a lot of time migrating things.” This recurring theme led to Moderne’s founding in 2020.
But the company’s path wasn’t straightforward, particularly when it came to positioning their go-to-market strategy. In 2020, enterprise sales was decidedly out of fashion. “Firms wanted to hear, bottoms up, plg. Bottoms up, plg. Bottoms up, plg. All day long and if you said enterprise sale, it really had a chilling effect,” Jonathan recalls.
Rather than following the crowd, Moderne carved out a hybrid approach: leveraging open source for user adoption while maintaining enterprise sales for buyer relationships. “We have an open source product that we’re PLG in the open source sense that the open source community helps us reach users, but then the enterprise sale is what we need to use to help us reach buyers.”
This commitment to their strategy was tested early. Jonathan remembers receiving contradictory feedback during fundraising: “I had 230 minutes rejection calls… the first one I’m listening, and I don’t remember even what the criticism was, but it was, you look like a square and you should look like a circle… And in the next call, it was like, you look like a circle, you should look like a square.”
Moderne’s distinctive approach extends to their marketing and branding. Before even securing their pre-seed funding, Jonathan invested $60,000 in developing a comprehensive brand system, paying the first half from his personal savings. The investment reflects his long-term vision: “If you’re thinking from the beginning, you want this to be a lasting brand… establishing that identity early is really important because it takes a while for you to fit.”
The company’s messaging has evolved to focus directly on business outcomes. Jonathan explains, “When you think about mass refactoring, you could think, oh, this is a developer productivity story… but developer productivity is a bit indirect to the business outcome we’re trying to achieve. So now we talk about something like tech stack liquidity, the ability to get off of old systems, to consolidate vendors.”
Looking ahead, Jonathan envisions Moderne transforming how software evolves at scale: “I think about our society being built on this substrate of third party and open source software largely, and it’s easy for that to get really kind of static and ossified over time. If we can mass fix the open source ecosystem upon which we rely, and we can mass fix the applications that depend on them, I think we can solve the technical engineering problems that confront our society more quickly.”
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