A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:12:21 · Anurag Goel, Pablo Srugo
[00:12:21] S0: Yeah. However, there are counterexamples where time to value was actually really high, but word-of-mouth was awesome. And, you know, the canonical example here is superhuman, the mail app, where you actually had to go through an interview before you got access to it. And I I don't think you have to do that anymore, and the app has been acquired or merged with someone else anyway. But the point was everyone was raving about superhuman at one point, but then you to get in, you had to get on a call with someone and spend thirty minutes to actually get access to superhuman. So that's a very different kind of setup. [00:13:03] S1: Very counterintuitive. Yes. That's true. I mean, for every startup rule, there's there's a lot of exceptions to it. So now let's let's go now that we know kind of where where that moment was, where you where you felt like things were working. You know, we'd love to to go through this story a little bit, especially the before. I mean, why do you decide to start a company? And what what was kind of the original the idea? What's the origin story here?
00:13:03 · Pablo Srugo, Anurag Goel
[00:13:03] S1: Very counterintuitive. Yes. That's true. I mean, for every startup rule, there's there's a lot of exceptions to it. So now let's let's go now that we know kind of where where that moment was, where you where you felt like things were working. You know, we'd love to to go through this story a little bit, especially the before. I mean, why do you decide to start a company? And what what was kind of the original the idea? What's the origin story here? [00:13:25] S0: So having been that early at Stripe, and, you know, I stayed there for almost five years, I was at a point in my career where, you know, I didn't really have to do anything. I didn't have to work. Stripe had done really well. And so I asked myself, how can I best spend the rest of my life? And it wasn't just me. My wife and I both sort of asked this question of us together. And I think the answer was we would like to contribute back to the world in a way that we're excited by. And for me, building things and building teams and organizations was and remains incredibly exciting in the service of solving a large problem. And I spent almost a year and a half thinking through fairly deeply which problems would appeal to me enough so I could spend ideally the rest of my career on them. And I looked at health care. I looked at real time infrastructure.
00:13:25 · Anurag Goel, Pablo Srugo
[00:13:25] S0: So having been that early at Stripe, and, you know, I stayed there for almost five years, I was at a point in my career where, you know, I didn't really have to do anything. I didn't have to work. Stripe had done really well. And so I asked myself, how can I best spend the rest of my life? And it wasn't just me. My wife and I both sort of asked this question of us together. And I think the answer was we would like to contribute back to the world in a way that we're excited by. And for me, building things and building teams and organizations was and remains incredibly exciting in the service of solving a large problem. And I spent almost a year and a half thinking through fairly deeply which problems would appeal to me enough so I could spend ideally the rest of my career on them. And I looked at health care. I looked at real time infrastructure. [00:14:26] S1: I'd love to go deep on this year and a half because it's often skipped, and it's exceptionally important because then a lot of things come out of that. Like, where you start is the end point of that year. So we'd love to kind of go through that in in a good amount of detail, just how you thought about it, how you broke it down, why you look to the space that you looked at, and so on.
00:14:45 · Anurag Goel
[00:14:45] S0: Yeah. So one of the ways in which I started exploring these domains was, okay. Well, what are the big problems out there right now? And what can I do to help? Right? Like, it has to be the intersection of my talents and skills and interests and what the problem means to be solved. And, you know, by some measures, solving world peace is perhaps one of the biggest problems there is. But I'm not the right person. I just didn't think I was the right person to do that given everything that I'd done. And it wasn't interesting in a way that I would, I think, find, like, personally fulfilling on a day to day basis, even when things are not going well. And so that's what you have to think about. Okay. Are you working on something that you are excited by and will continue to work on even when things are not going well? And are you going to get up every day for years? Like, in the best case, many decades. But in the worst case, at least a few years, assuming you raise funding for enough of those years. It doesn't matter how successful they are on the outside. Pretty much every company is chaos on the inside when they're growing. Lots of chaos all the time. I saw this at Stripe. I see it at Render. You ask any hyper growth company right now, there's tons of chaos. I love how from the outside,
00:16:09 · Pablo Srugo
[00:16:09] S1: from the headlines, you always just think it's like a smooth especially if you haven't done it or you're just starting, like smooth up into the right, would love to be that and you would love to be that. But when you're in it, it feels very different. And sometimes when you grow so fast, your runways get tight and, you know, the the difference between making it really big and actually just failing might be closer than you think. It's it's a pretty crazy world inside there.
00:16:29 · Anurag Goel
[00:16:29] S0: Oh, yeah. When you look at all these companies that eventually make it, there are several times during their journeys when things could have gone very differently and they would have shut down. So going back to what I was doing in the year and a half, I was really trying to find that problem domain that was big enough, ambitious enough. Because if it's not big or ambitious, then you don't have to spend a lot of time on it. Right? Like, you you build it and you you're done. You sell the company, whatever. And if it is big enough, ambitious enough, then then actually spending more time on it can get you outsized rewards because your work compounds. And so every new thing, for example, that we add to render, now it's there. And now it's there for the next decade of or the next several decades. Everyone who uses Render will have every new feature we add. Right? Like, it's something that we keep building, and it there's a lot to build because also the way people develop applications keeps changing. And how do we help them regardless of how they're building their apps? Earlier, it was traditional apps. These days, it's AI apps. And we want to continue to enable the platform to support application developers no matter what it is that they're building. And not just application developers. These days, it's also agents. How do we make the platform work really well with the coding agents that every developer is using so they can do whatever it is that they're trying to do much faster? But anyway, so I was going through this. I looked at health care for a while, learned everything that I could about health care, and then realized that I was not gonna help solve health care through technology. And I wasn't really the kind of person who was happy to have, like, three year deal cycles with large hospitals. I just wanted people to start using the product immediately and get feedback and iterate on it and, like, continue to build great products and win on the basis of that. Healthcare is not that.