A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:25:22 · Steve Tuck, Pablo Srugo
And, you know, one of the advantages to building in the open, which is, you know, so many companies want to do this build in stealth. Like, build, build, build. Like, don't show anyone your underbelly. And then, you know, like… [00:25:36] S1: Huge launch event. Yeah, exactly. [00:25:38] S0: Yeah, yeah, big launch event. And the problem with that is that now everyone has to come up to speed on what this thing is. Why do I want it? How does it work? And what was the thought process? And who's behind it? And can I trust it? I mean, I trust is probably the most important element that you are trying to establish as you are getting a company off the ground and you are getting closer to market. And so we took the opposite approach. We were like, we're going to share everything about this journey along the way, which, by the way, was a multi-year journey. So, you know, on the one hand, you could argue like, oof, you're going to keep talking about stuff while you're building for three years. Surely folks are going to get tired and are going to move on.
00:25:38 · Steve Tuck, Pablo Srugo
[00:25:38] S0: Yeah, yeah, big launch event. And the problem with that is that now everyone has to come up to speed on what this thing is. Why do I want it? How does it work? And what was the thought process? And who's behind it? And can I trust it? I mean, I trust is probably the most important element that you are trying to establish as you are getting a company off the ground and you are getting closer to market. And so we took the opposite approach. We were like, we're going to share everything about this journey along the way, which, by the way, was a multi-year journey. So, you know, on the one hand, you could argue like, oof, you're going to keep talking about stuff while you're building for three years. Surely folks are going to get tired and are going to move on. Ad[00:26:19] S1: I'm going to ask you for a small favor, a tiny little favor. In fact, it's not even now that I think about it, it's not even really a favor for me. I'm actually trying to help you do a favor for you. If you do, just hit the follow button. You won't miss out on the next episode. You'll see everything that we release. If you don't want to listen to an episode, you just skip it. But at least you don't miss out. This is one of the kind of tactical deep dives that we're going to do. So let's do it now, actually, because it fits in the storyline. When you say build in public, like what specifically did you do? Like a PR, you know, once a quarter? Was it, you know, newsletter to customer? Like what are some of the things that you put in motion as part of this kind of build in public idea?
00:26:19 · Pablo Srugo, Steve Tuck
Ad[00:26:19] S1: I'm going to ask you for a small favor, a tiny little favor. In fact, it's not even now that I think about it, it's not even really a favor for me. I'm actually trying to help you do a favor for you. If you do, just hit the follow button. You won't miss out on the next episode. You'll see everything that we release. If you don't want to listen to an episode, you just skip it. But at least you don't miss out. This is one of the kind of tactical deep dives that we're going to do. So let's do it now, actually, because it fits in the storyline. When you say build in public, like what specifically did you do? Like a PR, you know, once a quarter? Was it, you know, newsletter to customer? Like what are some of the things that you put in motion as part of this kind of build in public idea? [00:27:00] S0: So the first thing was kind of cataloging and documenting everything we did before thinking about how we would share it. And, you know, very, very early on, like going actually back to when we were fundraising, we knew we weren't going to see our families for the better part of three or four weeks. So we went out, which seems a little reckless maybe at the time, but we spent this like a huge amount of money, like 500 bucks on like podcasting equipment. And it was in Jess's garage, actual garage, and set this stuff up. And we would go down to Sand Hill and do meetings all day and then drive back. And at 7 p.m., we would sit there and record the day's events for our families. This is just so we could share with our...
00:27:00 · Steve Tuck, Pablo Srugo
[00:27:00] S0: So the first thing was kind of cataloging and documenting everything we did before thinking about how we would share it. And, you know, very, very early on, like going actually back to when we were fundraising, we knew we weren't going to see our families for the better part of three or four weeks. So we went out, which seems a little reckless maybe at the time, but we spent this like a huge amount of money, like 500 bucks on like podcasting equipment. And it was in Jess's garage, actual garage, and set this stuff up. And we would go down to Sand Hill and do meetings all day and then drive back. And at 7 p.m., we would sit there and record the day's events for our families. This is just so we could share with our... [00:27:42] S1: It's hilarious. I've interviewed like over 300 founders. I've never heard of anything close to that. Pretty unique.
00:27:47 · Steve Tuck
[00:27:47] S0: Highly recommended because you will forget so much. And importantly, when you get home, you don't have to recap everything, which by the way, your spouse, partner, friends, family, they don't want to hear the full recap anyway. But you get it. You get it in a form in which, you know, your parents and your family can kind of keep up on how things are going. So that was sort of the genesis of like why we had the equipment. Then when we had the equipment, all three of us were students of computer history and just fascinated by what we were building and why in the 60s and 70s. And, you know, what transitioned when all of a sudden we, you know, stopped building systems, these like hardware, software, co-designed, mainframe systems. And you had hardware companies go to the left and software go to the right. You know, you had Dells and Compaqs over here. And you've got, you know, Microsoft in kind of the 80s running to the software side. And you wouldn't have those two really important domains come back together again into real systems until it would happen in the data centers of the hyperscalers. That was this arc of like finally going back to systems-based design. And along the way, like dozens and dozens and dozens of dead computer companies. Why? What happened? And so we had reached out to a couple of terrific technologists and asked if they'd be willing to sit down and just tell stories. And tell stories of the past of, you know, Honeywell and Intel. And I mean, just kind of like running the gamut of history. Because it turns out like not a lot of this stuff was documented. It's really hard to find real firsthand accounts of the computer industry evolution of the 70s and 80s and 90s and 2000s and 2010s. And so we, you know, we got Jeff Rothschild. And we called this On the Metal, Tales from the Hardware Software Interface.
00:29:37 · Pablo Srugo, Steve Tuck
[00:29:37] S1: He launched a podcast around this. [00:29:39] S0: It was a podcast, but it had nothing to do with Oxide. Right. It was truly just like stories of the computer industry. And we would just listen to these amazing technologists tell stories that hadn't been told before. And, you know, if anyone wants a taste of it, the very first episode with Jeff Rothschild, who founded Veritas, co-founder of Veritas, was, you know, one of the earliest kind of like senior engineering leaders at Facebook, was at Intel, was, I mean, just very, very, very interesting past in technology that kind of elucidates a lot of the transitions that have happened over the last couple of decades. We just sat there and listened. It was like three hours. It was amazing. [00:30:18] S1: And what did this, I'm curious, like the podcast, like what did that lead to from a business perspective?