Listen Here

| |

Conversation
Highlights

Building Trust in the Infrastructure Space: How Spacelift Earned Enterprise Adoption Through Security-First Development

Trust isn’t given; it’s earned. When Marcin Wyszyński first started building what would become Spacelift, he faced a fundamental challenge: convincing enterprises to hand over access to their infrastructure. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, the Chief Product Officer of Spacelift shared how the company turned this trust barrier into a strategic advantage.

The journey began with an unexpected pattern. As a consultant helping companies scale their DevOps processes, Marcin noticed something peculiar: “When people were moving companies, they would come to me and say, Martin, I know you built a number of things at my previous employer, there’s one thing that I really need in my new place.” This recurring request for his infrastructure management tool revealed a clear market need.

But validated demand wasn’t enough. The real challenge came when trying to convince enterprises to trust a new company with their infrastructure. “If you’re a new company that says, oh, we need the keys to the kingdom, we need to manage your infrastructure, everyone is like, what? No, we don’t know you. Who are you? You want to actually have access to our AWS account? You got to be crazy,” Marcin explains.

Rather than viewing this resistance as a roadblock, Spacelift turned it into a core strategic principle. “We went security first,” Marcin notes. “We have a security team that is by comparison, much larger than other companies this size would have. We design things security first and we follow the security practices.”

This security-first approach became part of a broader set of development principles that guide every decision at Spacelift: “Spacelift must be secure, stable, usable, and awesome.” Marcin elaborates on this hierarchy: “If we’re not secure, we’ll take down the application. If we know that there is a leak, we’ll stop everything. We’ll stop the world if no features that you built are worth anything.”

The strategy paid off. Today, Spacelift counts major enterprises among its customers, from cloud-native companies like DocuSign and Figma to traditional sectors like German pharmaceutical companies – “the definition of being conservative,” as Marcin puts it. This diverse customer base validates their approach to building trust through security and stability.

But perhaps most telling is how Spacelift identifies new opportunities for growth. Rather than chasing market trends, they focus on user workflows: “We’re trying to see what did people do before they open spacelift and what did they do after they closed spacelift?” This user-centric approach led them to expand into Ansible automation and Kubernetes support, meeting customers where their needs actually exist rather than where the market hype suggests they should be.

The company’s pragmatic approach extends to their recent decision to launch a self-hosted version. “We couldn’t sign every logo on the SaaS version and there was a lot of demand for an on-prem solution,” Marcin explains, highlighting how listening to customer needs drives their product evolution.

For B2B founders, especially those building infrastructure tools, Spacelift’s journey offers a valuable lesson: when asking customers for significant trust, technical excellence isn’t enough. You need to build your entire company culture and development process around earning and maintaining that trust. As Marcin’s experience shows, this approach not only helps overcome initial adoption barriers but becomes a sustainable competitive advantage in enterprise sales.

This focus on fundamentals over features represents a different path to growth than many startups take. It’s slower, more methodical, but potentially more sustainable – especially in markets where trust is the primary currency. As Spacelift continues to expand, their story suggests that sometimes the best way to disrupt a market isn’t through radical innovation, but through relentless focus on the foundations that matter most to enterprise customers.

Actionable
Takeaways

Identify and Address Verified Market Needs:

Marcin's decision to develop Spacelift was based on a clear demand from his network for better DevOps tooling. For founders, it's crucial to focus on solving problems with verified market needs, which can significantly reduce the risk associated with product-market fit and accelerate adoption.

Leverage Your Professional Network for Early Traction:

Leverage Your Professional Network for Early Traction: In the early stages, Marcin capitalized on his professional network to gain the first set of customers. Founders should not underestimate the power of warm introductions and the trust established through personal connections, which can be key to overcoming initial market entry barriers.

Adopt a Security-First Approach to Build Trust:

Given Spacelift's need to access customers' core infrastructure, a security-first approach was vital in building trust. For B2B SaaS founders, emphasizing and investing in security from the start can be a differentiator, especially when dealing with enterprise clients.

Understand the Customer Journey Beyond Your Product:

Spacelift's strategy involves understanding what users do before and after using their platform. This mindset can help founders identify expansion opportunities and improve the overall user experience by addressing adjacent pain points.

Stay True to Your Founding Principles but Be Prepared to Pivot Roles for Growth:

Marcin's transition from CEO to CPO reflects the importance of founders being flexible with their roles as the company grows. The key takeaway for founders is to remain adaptable and prioritize the company's needs over personal titles or roles, ensuring that you are contributing where you can make the most impact.

Recommended Founder
Interviews

Matt Butcher

CEO of Fermyon

Matt Butcher, CEO of Fermyon: $26 Million Raised to Power the Future of WebAssembly

Honey Mittal

Co-Founder, CPO & CEO of Locofy.ai

Honey Mittal, CEO of Locofy.ai: $3 Million Raised to Build the Future of Frontend Development

Lukas Gentele

Co-Founder & CEO of Loft Labs

Lukas Gentele, CEO of Loft Labs: $5 Million Raised to Build the Virtual Kubernetes Category

Paul Stovell

CEO and Founder of Octopus Deploy

Paul Stovell, CEO and Founder of Octopus Deploy: Over $170 Million Raised to Build the Future of Deployment Automation

Evan Kaplan

CEO of InfluxData

Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData: Over $170 Million Raised to Build the Leading Time Series Provider

Gary Hoberman

CEO & Founder of Unqork

Gary Hoberman, CEO & Founder of Unqork: Over $400 Million Raised to Pioneer the Codeless as a Service (CaaS) Category

James Evans

Co-Founder and CEO of CommandBar

James Evans, Co-Founder and CEO of CommandBar: $24 Million Raised to Build the Leading AI-Powered User Assistance Platform

Liam Randall

CEO and Founder of Cosmonic

Liam Randall, CEO and Founder of Cosmonic: $8.5 Million Raised to Power the Future of WebAssembly

Egil Østhus

CEO and Co-founder of Unleash

Egil Østhus, CEO of Unleash: $16.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Feature Management

Costa Tsaousis

CEO and Founder of Netdata

Costa Tsaousis, CEO and Founder of Netdata: Over $30 Million Raised to Power the Future of Infrastructure Monitoring

Matthew O’Riordan

CEO of Ably Realtime

Matthew O’Riordan, CEO of Ably Realtime: Over $82 Million Raised to Build the Future of Realtime Experience Infrastructure

Romaric Philogene

CEO of Qovery

Romaric Philogene, CEO of Qovery: $4 Million Raised to Help You Deploy Your Apps on AWS in Seconds

James Hawkins

CEO of PostHog

James Hawkins, CEO of PostHog: $21 Million Raised to Build the Future of Product Analytics

Johnny Dallas

CEO and Co-Founder of Zeet.co

Johnny Dallas, CEO & Co-Founder of Zeet.co: $6M Raised to Power the Future of CI/CD & Deployment

John Li

CEO and Co-Founder of Vimcal

John Li, CEO & Co-Founder of Vimcal: $7 Million Raised to Build the Future of Calendar Productivity

Mike Long

CEO and Founder of Kosli

Mike Long, CEO and Founder of Kosli: $3.5 Million Raised to Deliver Secure Software Changes at Scale and Deploy to Production with Speed

Martin Mao

CEO of Chronosphere

Martin Mao, CEO of Chronosphere: $250 Million Raised to Build the Future of Observability

Kevin McNamara

CEO & Founder of Parallel Domain

Kevin McNamara, CEO & Founder of Parallel Domain: $44 Million Raised to Power the Future of Autonomy

Tom Tovar

CEO and Co-Founder of AppDome

Tom Tovar, CEO and Co-Founder of AppDome: Over $26 Million Raised to Build the Future of Mobile App Security

Mike Malone

CEO and Founder of Smallstep

Mike Malone, CEO and Founder of Smallstep: $26 Million Raised to Build the Future of Certificate Lifecycle Management For DevOps

Prakash Chandran

Co-Founder and CEO of Xano

Prakash Chandran, Co-Founder and CEO of Xano: $5.4 Million Raised to Build the Next Generation of No-Code Backend Development

Holly Tate

CMO of Leadr

Holly Tate, CMO of Leadr: Building the Future of People Development Platforms

Paul Kim

CEO of Notifi

Paul Kim, CEO of Notifi: $12 Million raised to Build the Future of Web3 Communication Infrastructure

Ravi Parikh

CEO and Co-Founder of Airplane

Ravi Parikh, CEO and Co-Founder of Airplane: Over $40 Million Raised to Build Better Developer Infrastructure For Internal Tooling

Zach Lloyd

CEO and Founder of Warp

Zach Lloyd, CEO and Founder of Warp: $70 Million Raised to Build a Better Terminal

Tomas Reimers

Co-Founder of Graphite

Tomas Reimers, Co-Founder of Graphite: $22.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Code Reviews

Stoyan Zulyamsky

Co-Founder of Costimize

Stoyan Zulyamsky, Co-Founder of Costimize: $5 Million Raised to Revolutionize Cloud Finance Management

Robert Whiteley

CEO of Coder

Robert Whiteley, CEO of Coder: $85 Million Raised to Power the Future of Developer Productivity

Hersh Tapadia

Co-Founder & CEO of Allstacks

Hersh Tapadia, CEO of Allstacks: $16 Million Raised to Build the Value Stream Intelligence Category

Gil Feig

CTO of Merge

Gil Feig, CTO of Merge: $75 Million Raised to Help B2B Companies Build Customer-Facing Integrations via It’s Unified API Platform

Sophie Novati

CEO and Founder of Formation

Sophie Novati, CEO and Founder of Formation: $9 Million Raised to Build a Virtual Fellowship Program for Software Engineers

Tom Hacohen

CEO and Founder of Svix

Tom Hacohen, CEO and Founder of Svix: $10.5 Million Raised to Power the Future of Webhooks

Yadhu Gopalan

CEO and Founder of Esper

Yadhu Gopalan, CEO and Founder of Esper: $100 Million Raised to Build the Future of Android Device Management

DeVaris Brown

CEO and Co-Founder of Meroxa

DeVaris Brown, CEO and Co-Founder of Meroxa: Over $19 Million Raised to Empower Engineering Teams with Better Stream Processing

Derric Gilling

Co-founder & CEO of Moesif

Derric Gilling, CEO of Moesif: $15 Million Raised to Build the Future of API Analytics

David Siegel

David Siegel of Glide

David Siegel, CEO of Glide: Over $20 Million Raised to Power the Future of No-Code Application Development

Lasse Andresen

CEO and Founder of IndyKite

Lasse Andresen, CEO and Founder of IndyKite: $10 Million Raised to Empower Teams to Move Beyond Legacy Identity and Access Management

Suresh Mathew

Founder and CEO of Sedai

Suresh Mathew, Founder and CEO of Sedai: $18 Million Raised to Automate Cloud Management for Critical Decisions

Pascal Weinberger

CEO of Bardeen

Pascal Weinberger, CEO of Bardeen: $18 Million Raised to Build the Future of No-Code Automation

Omri Gazitt

CEO & Co-Founder of Aserto

Omri Gazitt, CEO & Co-Founder at Aserto: $5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Authorization

Harpreet Singh

Co-Founder and CEO of Launchable

Harpreet Singh, Co-Founder and CEO of Launchable: Over $12 Million Raised to Build the Future of Software Testing

Eden Full Goh

Founder & CEO of Mobot

Eden Full Goh, Founder & CEO of Mobot: Over $17 Million Raised to Power the Future of Mobile App Testing

Benjamin Wilms

CEO and Co-Founder of Steadybit

Benjamin Wilms, CEO and Co-Founder of Steadybit: $7.8 Million Raised to Build the Future of Chaos Engineering

Casey Rosenthal

CEO of Verica

Casey Rosenthal, CEO of Verica: $17 Million Raised to Build the Future of Chaos Engineering

Yingjun Wu

CEO and Co-Founder of RisingWave

Yingjun Wu, CEO and Co-Founder of RisingWave Labs: $40 Million Raised to Make Stream Processing Simple, Affordable, and Accessible

Alan Shreve

CEO and Founder of Ngrok

Alan Shreve, CEO and Founder of Ngrok: $50 Million Raised to Help Devs Deploy SItes, Services, and Apps

Ramiro Berrelleza

Founder and CEO of Okteto

Ramiro Berrelleza, CEO of Okteto: $18 Million Raised to Build the Future of Cloud Development

Ori Keren

CEO and Co-Founder of LinearB

Ori Keren, CEO and Co-Founder of LinearB: Over $70 Million Raised to Build the Future of Software Delivery Management

Jacob Moshenko

CEO & Co-Founder of Authzed

Jacob Moshenko, CEO & Co-Founder of Authzed: $15.9 Million Raised to Build the Future of Authorization Infrastructure

Dylan Etkin

CEO and Co-Founder of Sleuth

Dylan Etkin, CEO and Co-Founder of Sleuth: $25 Million Raised to Make Engineering Teams More Efficient

Chetan Venkatesh

CEO of Macrometa

Chetan Venkatesh, CEO of Macrometa: $38 Million raised to Build the Hyper Distributed Cloud for the Next Generation of Applications

Tim Kraska

Co-Founder of Einblick

Tim Kraska, Co-Founder of Einblick: $6M Raised to Build the Visual Data Computing Category

Ron Efroni

CEO and Co-Founder of Flox

Ron Efroni, CEO & Co-Founder of Flox: $28 Million Raised to Empower Developers with Reproducible Environments That Span the Enterprise SDLC

Will Wilson

Co-Founder of Antithesis

Will Wilson, Co-Founder of Antithesis: $47 Million Raised to Build the Future of Autonomous Testing

Joshua Aaron

CEO of Aiden

Joshua Aaron, CEO Aiden, $3 Million Raised to Build the Future of Software Packaging and Deployment

Paolo Fragomeni

CEO of Socket Supply

Paolo Fragomeni, CEO of Socket Supply: $3.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of P2P Computing

Andrew Wolfe

Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Bloomfilter

Andrew Wolfe, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Bloomfilter: $7 Million Raised to Power the Future of Process Mining

Michael Corr

Founder and CEO of Duro Labs

Michael Corr, CEO of Duro Labs: $4 Million Raised to Power the Future of Hardware Engineering

Tommy Dang

Co-Founder & CEO of Mage

Tommy Dang, CEO of Mage: $6.3 Million Raised to Build a Modern Replacement For Airflow

Yana Welinder

CEO and Founder of Kraftful

Yana Welinder, CEO and Founder of Kraftful: Over $3 Million Raised to Help Product Builders Create Better Products and Communities

Anish Dhar

Co-Founders of Cortex

Anish Dhar and Ganesh Datta, Co-Founders of Cortex: Over $52 Million Raised to Improve Developer Productivity

Ben Kliger

CEO and Co-Founder of Zenity

Ben Kliger, CEO and Co-Founder of Zenity: $21.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Security and Governance for AI, Low-Code, and No-Code Development