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shuttle.rs (YC S20) Founder Interview Highlights

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00:00 My name is Nodar. I'm co-founder and CEO at Shuttle, originally from Georgia.

00:04 I moved here to the UK when I was about 16.

00:07 I finished my uni here, went to UCL.

00:09 I did economics and then I did finance for my master's.

00:12 I got introduced to working with software developers at the Quant Hedge Fund,

00:17 which is where I actually met all of my co-founders.

00:19 I had a lot of developer-oriented problems, and that's actually how it all started.

00:24 So initially it wasn't Shuttle, and there was a series of pivots, of course.

00:29 The first problem that we started solving was different.

00:31 It was still a developer tool and it was open source.

00:35 But, you know, while building that, the tool was called Synth.

00:40 While building that in Rust, we encountered a lot of the problems that we're solving with Shuttle now ourselves.

00:47 And we saw a lot of our users facing those problems.

00:50 Platform to build, run, and deploy applications.

00:55 The dream platform, basically.

00:59 And so that became the reason why we started Shuttle.

01:04 It kind of evolved into that

01:07 right we got almost pulled into building that response from the community like the the the

01:13 reviews and everything that we've been getting from people the encouragement and the contributions

01:18 have been amazing and so that kind of culminated in us uh raising uh us raising at the end of last year.

01:26 And now we have a bit more resources to grow a team a little bit more and then do all the

01:31 exciting things that we have planned for this year.

01:33 We're working on our very own framework, which we're going to be introducing quite

01:38 soon.

01:38 And that has some exciting things relating to Wasm in it and still kind of enable people to benefit from some of the

01:48 cool things that tech brings with it. So maybe, you know, they're about to start something new,

01:55 maybe like a startup idea that they want to do an MVP for. It'll save you a lot of time.

02:01 Instead of like dealing with infrastructure for hours and hours, you would

02:05 kind of have everything built out quite quickly. The overarching theme here is we are now at a

02:13 place where we have enough users to listen to, right? And to actually get pretty good signal of

02:18 what we should be doing. So it's all with a frame of, you know, what do users want? What will make them happy?

02:25 And, you know, how do we build an amazing experience that people just want to tell everyone

02:31 about?

02:32 What we're doing from technology perspective is quite new, but in terms of business model

02:40 has been done a few times and in different ways.

02:43 And there's really like two main directions here

02:45 it's like usage-based billing and developer let's say sas fee it sort of becomes this recurring

02:52 billing model this is something that we're still very much figuring out like it's like really a

02:57 conversation we're having right now synergies between shuttle community and and rust communities that um there is this kind of uh focus

03:07 on developer experience and like ergonomics and like how how quickly and how efficiently everything

03:13 is done so we see a lot of people like building rust applications here and like showing them off

03:18 and uh actually you know getting advice on how to do things with rust and so on there are a lot of

03:23 learners and starters, for sure.

03:26 We saw this, well, you must know about this Stack Overflow survey

03:30 that ranks Rust as the most loved developer language

03:35 for, I think, seven years now in a row.

03:38 And so we see that impacts a lot of people's perception of Rust

03:42 and even people who don't know Rust yet.

03:46 And so more and more people want to learn Rust.

03:49 Based on that, we did a workshop, which we call Rust for JavaScript developers.

03:54 We had Stefan, who is pretty famous in that community on YouTube.

04:01 And he did an amazing workshop with us sort of as a collaboration and that got

04:06 really really popular we had like a thousand registrations almost like almost instantly after

04:13 after posting about this a lot of the times when you're like getting into building something with

04:18 a language the things that you end up struggling with are not actually like the language and the

04:23 logic and so on but like how to configure infrastructure,

04:26 how to wire everything together

04:28 and how to actually deploy that thing.

04:30 Make Rust so easy to start with,

04:33 you know, building applications

04:34 with Rust so simple, intuitive,

04:38 that actually the learning curve

04:40 is not steeper anymore, right?

04:42 The next thousand teams

04:44 that go through the motions

04:46 you and your co-founders did,

04:47 which is, you know, learning the ways,

04:49 building product and shipping something to users.

04:51 Having done this the past, these past years,

04:53 are there any, you know, lessons learned

04:55 that you might be able to share?

04:57 One of the people who watches this

04:58 will kind of hear it and be like,

05:00 okay, you know, I'll learn this finally.

05:02 Yeah, it's like, you know,

05:04 we've done the solution in

05:06 search of problems so like too many times to to not highlight that it's like the idea that you

05:11 know the the problem um comes first and and then solution um it shouldn't be the other way around

05:19 before a few pivots that we also went through, we also made a mistake. So yes, I second that.

05:25 It's great advice and it hasn't been covered actually here before.

05:27 So thank you for nailing that message.

05:30 Community can act as a funnel and just bring someone to you without you actually even doing

05:35 anything.

05:35 Our head of DevRel right now, even he's, let's say, initially just appeared at our and started like following what we're doing.

05:47 And then eventually just sent us a deck saying like how excited he is about working with Shuttle

05:53 and, you know, why we should definitely hire him. And, you know, when you see that level of

05:58 excitement from someone like about working with you, it's very hard to resist and then just sort of you know even though

06:05 we weren't actually hiring for that position at that time um it it was just okay you know we we

06:13 were going to create a role for for this person because um just makes makes a lot of sense any

06:18 ways for you to be more proactive about it right and kind of um that's that's what we've tried to

06:24 do there's the shuttle

06:25 heroes program you mentioned which we just recently launched there's also like uh batches

06:30 like shuttle batches which we so the first batch we actually ran in august um and we hired odbjorn

06:36 one of our software engineers from that batch um so the way it was structured is it was very much inspired by the experience from YC.

06:46 We had weekly events where we would all get together on a call, talk about shuttle's plans,

06:52 talk about what projects we could be working on.

06:55 And then we had office hours where our engineers would basically mentor and unblock other engineers.

07:02 The outcome was, you know, pretty much amazing because we ended up

07:06 putting odbjorn onto our paid open source program which is basically like a contributor plus almost

07:12 it's like when you've shown a lot of enthusiasm you we we start paying you because well hey you

07:19 know you're you start to do so much work for shuttle that it makes sense for us to also pay you um and so initially he

07:26 started kind of part-time because the program is part-time and then we sort of rolled him into the

07:33 full-time uh position and now he's he's the maintainer of shuttle repo uh and doing a pretty

07:41 good job at it uh so yeah we're super happy to have him so i would say community

07:46 is an amazing funnel for sure for talent and we're still seeing now that as you said we're hiring

07:51 by the way if anyone watching this is interested you can check that out on our website contributing

07:57 it does not just mean code contributing can mean so many different things like contribute

08:02 contributing could mean engaging the community helping to produce content so many different things like contribute contributing could mean engaging the community

08:05 helping to produce content and many different things like helping organize events and we've

08:12 seen people contribute in many different ways also we're we're quite excited actually to work

08:16 with you guys to to have some bounty programs the way i'm starting to see now our open source

08:22 community is almost like extension of our team.

08:25 All of it together comprises all of Shuttle.

08:29 Building your company and startup becomes almost like a community building exercise,

08:34 which I think is quite amazing as a frame of mind in this game.

08:40 I think it's the most persistent, right?

08:42 The person who is the most resilient and I can like

08:46 whatever happens can keep pushing and going towards the vision and the goal so I think

08:52 like keep cultivating those um those qualities and then the other thing that's helped me personally

08:58 is taking care of myself and like for me taking care of myself also actually means taking care of

09:06 like others around me because I think in that way you actually end up kind of taking care of

09:11 yourself in the best way by you know serving others and and kind of taking care of your family

09:16 of your loved ones and people around you mentioned persistence and I agree with that it's very

09:21 important and it's kind of like you know let's check back in five years. We're still going to be around just bigger and stronger.

09:26 Making sure that you have that support group, right?

09:30 Or at least one person who you can share anything with.

09:34 And that will listen and you can vent.

09:39 Sometimes you need to vent as well.

09:41 That's the super important.

09:48 as well um that's the super important i'd say like a lot of the work of founder and leader essentially is working with your mindset right and making sure that you kind of come out stronger

09:57 on the other side of all the challenges that come your way i think getting yourself like a group of

10:03 people and if if you if you can find, then reach out to me and we'll

10:07 be starting that group soon.

10:08 So you can find me on discord or LinkedIn or whatever you want and can become

10:14 part of the conscious founders group.

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