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Windmill.dev (YC S22) Founder Interview Highlights

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00:00 So I'm French.

00:01 I did my study at EPFL in Switzerland,

00:03 and then I did some research at Stanford on compilers.

00:06 I joined like a big tech company, Palantir, for two years,

00:09 learned about DevTools there,

00:11 became head of engineering of a small startup called Infer.

00:14 So after two years and a half,

00:16 I kind of had the itch to build Windmill.

00:18 I felt the need for myself to have such solution.

00:23 I started that six months solo founder,

00:27 completely bootstrapped on my own.

00:30 I applied to YC, not thinking I had a chance,

00:34 especially being a solo founder.

00:36 And somehow I got in.

00:38 And three months later,

00:40 I was welcomed by YC to do our fundraise and everything, which went well.

00:49 And then I assembled the team and we're now close to do our 1.0 or 2.0 launch

00:54 because the product, which is very ambitious,

00:57 is now basically good enough for our production system.

01:00 So it's a very exciting time for us.

01:02 It does a lot of things.

01:03 So sharing scripts, workflows workflows and ETLs.

01:06 So for people that know Airflow or Temporal, this is what we do.

01:10 And the last is to build UIs for Admin panels, dashboards.

01:14 So basically everything to build your own internal tools.

01:18 There's like a free open source edition that you can do however you want.

01:23 And that we're never going to put any

01:25 arbitrary restrictions so we have like a hosted solution for small teams a hosted solution for

01:30 enterprise and a self-hosted license for enterprise like the team plan is is pretty

01:36 cheap it's like 10 a month and then enterprise are where we make most of our revenue so we're

01:42 five currently and i think going from five to 10 is going to be a huge milestone.

01:46 I think the, us being like a small team give us a lot of flexibility, flexibility that was

01:51 really required when we were building everything.

01:53 Now we need to basically get more signals from the market to see if basically our team or the size of the team is a bottleneck.

02:00 If that's the case, then we will scale.

02:02 But I think preemptively scale is something that is very

02:05 dangerous especially in the troubled economy that we're in and i rather have focused on like a few

02:12 key people uh that i can trust rather than just kind of like adding more and more people mentioned

02:17 that you're a solo founder and on top of that you bootstrap uh windmill in the beginning so

02:22 would you like to briefly talk about this?

02:31 Yeah. I mean, the beautiful thing about being a software engineer is that you don't need anything else than a laptop and an internet connection to start building software. So you always have

02:37 a ton of reasons not to try and not to kind of like, I don't know you you have a job you have like uh you don't feel confident

02:46 yourself enough it's too hard there's already competition like so many reasons why not to start

02:51 and i think this is something like mostly it's really easy to start a company and like you don't

02:57 need an army of people to actually like do the the part where you look like a legitimate company

03:03 what you have to actually do is like build

03:05 something that people want and build a great product and a software engineers we can try

03:09 will we succeed i don't know but you can try and you can try with just a laptop and internet

03:13 connection and then i here so just do it i think that would be like my advice every morning i wake

03:19 up i know you know what i'm doing and why i'm doing it for. I don't know if it's going to work out, but I think kind of like this is like the, it's

03:28 the kind of like adventure of my life.

03:30 And I'm very grateful to be in this position.

03:33 And I would really encourage people to kind of like try.

03:36 And even if they have to give up after a year or not, but this is something you probably

03:40 want to do once in your life.

03:43 And it gives a lot of a sense of purpose, I think, which is very nice.

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