Impact Driven Development | Matt Klein (Envoy, bitdrift)
Matt is the creator of Envoy and co-founder of bitdrift
From creating Envoy to co-founding bitdrift to reimagine mobile observability, Matt joins the show to chat about being told to simply “write some proxy in Python” in the early days of building Envoy, early influences from building “shrink wrap” software at Microsoft, the process of spinning bitdrift out of Lyft, and much more.
Ronak & Guang’s Picks
#1 Lessons from spinning bitdrift from Lyft
While it’s common to see either
build a successful open-source project X at Big Co Y, leave, and build a company around X; or
build a successful internal project X at Big Co Y, leave, and start a company that rebuilds X from scratch.
Matt and his co-founders accomplished something rare: they retained the IP as they exited bitdrift out of Lyft, got Lyft on board as an investor, and retained them as a customer. How? Through open and honest communication with the company as early as possible - a strategy that's more likely to succeed than you might think, given today's environment where companies are looking to cut spending on non-core projects.
#2 The trust you earn with the team go beyond your current job.
On paper, it seemed crazy for Lyft to have supported Matt in pursuing the development of Envoy when Lyft was a 300-person company with less than 80 engineers. But, as we learned from the conversation, one key component was that he had the support of the head of engineering at Lyft, who was Matt's manager at Twitter and knew well what Matt was capable of. Startups can be chaotic, so the trust you build with teammates can become a valuable currency, even when you leave that company.
Segments:
(00:03:10) Being a plumber on LinkedIn
(00:05:00) Early influences from building “shrink wrap” software at Microsoft
(00:10:44) Getting diverse work experiences
(00:16:36) Setting high standards for the team
(00:20:42) Lessons from failure of the first startup
(00:22:02) Building a successful open source project vs. running a startup
(00:25:25) Why not start a company around Envoy?
(00:29:54) Why not open source bitdrift?
(00:36:01) Mitigating the risk of big companies building in-house solutions
(00:38:16) Co-founding bitdrift to tackle mobile observability
(00:40:37) Applying lessons from the first startup failure
(00:44:14) Why mobile observability is so hard
(00:50:06) Open source vs source available
(00:53:33) The software licensing strugglebus
(00:58:03) How bitdrift was spinned out of Lyft
(01:03:36) Achieving work-life balance through leverage
(01:06:13) The early days of Envoy
(01:09:20) Impact driven development
(01:13:43) The crazy decision to build Envoy in retrospect
Show Notes:
Matt’s blog posts on why mobile observability is a hard problem: https://mattklein123.dev/2024/04/24/no-one-talks-about-mobile-observability/
The new company Matt is building:
Stay in touch:
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Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en