Welcome to DevEx Unpacked. I'm Alan Carson, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Cloudsmith. We're solving the challenges of artefact management and are on the path to becoming the software supply chain itself. In this weekly podcast, we share knowledge from Cloudsmith employees, customers, and other great guests from the software industry. Along the way, we'll unpack topics like the cloud security supply chains, and of course the developer experience. Welcome to the podcast. I've been waiting for this. We've recorded about eight or nine of them so far, and it's been really interesting to see the progression of the people that we spoke to. And it's finally great to get the CEO of Cloudsmith and ask some hard questions.

Well, it's an honour to be here, Alan.

So we have known each other now for, I suppose we probably would've started talking about two years ago.

That's right,

Yeah, and it was a pretty quick process to kind of get you in the door. I think. I always remember Jason SLA at Diversa Partners said, if you do everything right, you could get a CEO in four months. And we definitely did not do everything, but we did manage to hit the four month target, and that was a big part that you were just in one of the first original batch of people that we were looking at. So I'd love to just go back to sort of take you back in time and see if you remember anything about the first call that you and I had and the first time you heard CL Smith and sort of what you thought.

Well, I certainly remember it, and it was when one of the Diversa people contacted me, emailed me with a job opportunity, which you get a lot of over time, and the longer you're in this industry. The first thing I thought was, okay, supply chain software. That's SAP. Yeah, I guess that's kind of interesting. I don't know, maybe. Then I googled Cloudsmith and I realised, no, no, no, it's software supply chain. Big difference. And that really got my attention. That really started my interest in love affair with Cloudsmith, which continues unabated.

So after you looked this up on the website, what did you think? What did you see about the company?

Well, the first thing I did was figure out who the competitors were and looked up J Rog and Sona type and a couple of the others, and realised this is a cloud native SaaS play to kind of unseat on-premise legacy vendors, and that is what immediately got my attention. I think that's a winning formula for a startup has been for the last 20 years in this industry. So with that attention, then I said, okay, this is actually a product that does something I am intensely interested in, which is software development. When I went to Twilio, which was my last job before Cloudsmith, one of the reasons I went to Twilio was to get closer to the art of just programming. Just being a developer and Twilio is pretty close to developers. Cloudsmith is dead centre of the bullseye, and I could just really relate to the tool. I remember you and Lee saying, you've said repeatedly actually, you built a tool for yourselves that you wanted to use. And I can't say that I bill smuth, but I can relate to, yeah, I need a tool to help make software development easier. That's something I can really get into.

Yeah. Tell me a little bit about your software development background. Where did you start?

So I read Lee's writeup recently about getting a Commodore 64 when he was a child. I can kind of one up him a little bit. I got a Commodore pet when I was in seventh grade. My dad was a science teacher, and back then, this is early eighties, maybe even late seventies, probably early eighties, I think there was no computer science or computer departments in, certainly not in high schools. It was part of just the science curriculum. And my dad got access to a couple of Commodore pets and he brought one home just to show off like, Hey, kids, look. And I just latched onto that thing. We plugged it into the wall and we realised, oh my God, this is an incredible tool, me and my brother, and started playing with it, and I immediately started writing basic programmes and showing my dad, do you realise what this thing can do? This is super cool. Honestly, the rest is history. From there, I trace a direct line from exploring and figuring out what a Commodore pet does to getting a Commodore 64 to writing programmes, to creating a bulletin board system, to getting my first money for writing a programme all the way up to Cloudsmith. It is a direct line to that first bolt of inspiration.

Yeah. What money did you get for writing software?

The summer before my senior year in high school, my girlfriend's parents ran a ribbon company and they did all the inventory and the ordering on paper, and I said, there's this thing called computers. I could write you a ribbon system on the Commodore 64, I could use my 1541 disc drive and we could print things out, print out orders, and he was like, I'll give you $200 for the summer. And I said, I'll take it. I actually went to live with them in New York City for a couple weeks, wrote the code, brought it to the Ribbon Factory in New York, set up the Commodore 64, taught everybody how to use it. And this is back in the days, there was no application software. You just got the computer. I think the best thing you could buy for a Commodore 64 is maybe some games. But yeah, I created a ribbon inventory system, got my 200 bucks, and I thought it was the most magical thing that you could actually get paid for writing software. It was completely mind boggling.

Yeah, that's incredible. I think we all seem to have a story of selling software for money, and that kind of, you're like, you can do that. This is good.

Yeah. Please don't ever figure out that I would've done this for free and just give me the $200.

Yeah, no. I wrote a system for the BBC engineering department in Belfast, was my, I think it might've been my third year of university or college, and it was over the summer, and they brought me in and they wanted a whole system for logging tickets, and I just spent all summer doing that. I think they rewrote it a couple of years later, but I got a good run in there.

You'd hope they'd rewrite it, the Ribbon system, I think it lasted a year, and then they figured out something better.

Yeah, no, it's incredible that software can kind of have that impact, though, can literally change businesses and change the way people work.

Yeah. Well, it inspired me to major in computer science, which I didn't know was a major. It was inconceivable to me that a hobby could be a major, and that became a natural choice for me. Really, it really is just every step in the progression, just it all starts from that spark of inspiration.

And maybe we could cut straight to Aperio. The company that you co-founded, how did you find, well, first, how did you meet Chris and your other co-founders there?

Yeah, there was four of us that started Imperio Singh, Mike O'Brien, Chris Barbin, and myself. We all worked together at a previous software company at Web Methods back in the early two thousands and kicked around any number of startup ideas at the time and discarded them all and never found a good idea. Three of us went on to Borland, Narinda, went to SAP, the other three of us went to Borland, kept talking about startup ideas, and we finally landed on a really good startup idea when the head of sales at Borland, we were using Siebel at the time, and he said, listen, I'm just going to bring in salesforce.com, which nobody ever heard of at the time, didn't ask. Our CIO just did it, and we all helped him, and I was running customer support, and I was so enamoured with the idea of Salesforce multi-tenant cloud. I'm used to three month tickets to add a column to a database and change the customised Siebel. So when we brought in Salesforce to run sales at Borland, I swear to God, three of us had the same idea at the same time, we could implement this probably be more fun than implementing Borland, and that was the genesis of Aperio.

Wow. Yeah, Lee and I had a lot of ideas before we landed on Cloudsmith. They were all good ideas, though. We just didn't have the talent or the wherewithal to figure out how to do them.

Yeah, I think it's hard to find an idea that is strong enough to build a whole company on and won't go out of fashion in a year or two.

Yeah, it really is. It really is. And so at Imperio, you had a great time. How many years were you there?

So we started the company in 2006. We sold it to Wipro in 2016, and I stayed on at Wipro for three years until 2019,

Right, 13 years. It's a long stent,

13 years. I wrote on my internal Wiki page, perio, I wrote about myself, Commodore 64, and I wrote Aerio for Life or until the Day I Die, or something like that. And thinking to myself, is that true? I think it's true. Why would I ever take another job? This is great. But yeah, I learned a lesson there. There's always another chapter in your life.

Just on the Commodore thing, Steve Collins would've interviewed you as part of the Cloudsmith role. Steve is, he's Mr. Commodore 64. In fact, he's I think Steve C 64 on Twitter. But yeah, no, that's amazing.

How do you think I got this job? Steve and I talked mostly about C com 64 in our interview.

Yeah, yeah. I remember him messaging me directly after you'd spoken to him and he just said, I think Glen's the real deal. So that was, thank you, Steve. That was a big thumbs up because Steve's an incredible judge of talent and incredible engineer, incredible CTOI, on our board for many, many years through the early days. It's a good dude. Okay, so you went from Imperio to Twilio,

Right?

Three years in Twilio,

Almost four.

Four, four. I have to admit that when we were looking through the bunch of candidates, when I saw somebody at Twilio, I was like, yes, that's a good company to pull somebody out of because look, in general, we were looking for somebody impressive. I mean, we were looking for somebody who had a long list of criteria, and ultimately I wanted to be able to announce to the rest of the company that we had gotten somebody that fulfilled all those attributes and was coming from a really good company. And I remember thinking Twilio definitely fits that criteria and we made it work. So you travelled over to Belfast as well to meet me and a couple of the team.

If I could interject a quick thought there, Alan. I actually don't even think of Twilio as one of the defining moments of my career. I loved being at Twilio and I'll be a loyal TWI on, I'll keep my red track jacket forever, and I have tremendous respect for that company and for Jeff Lawson. But to me, the defining portions of my career, and I hope you would've seen in me, I dunno if you did, but our computer science slash programmer, the Imperial experience. And then the third thing, which you didn't mention is being from the Naval Academy and being a naval aviator, the lessons I learned as a military officer, that's kind of the last bit that I see is forming the Glen that you have come to know.

No, they're all attributes. And we definitely did wanted, well, I can go into the list if you want, but No, definitely. I really gravitated towards the you having some command experience in the Navy and we wanted American, we wanted some American optimism. We wanted a founder who had exited a business. We wanted a good track record. I mean, it was interesting. And to go through the list of candidates and see who was they were putting in front of us, and actually the list of candidates that fulfilled all the criteria was very short. In fact, it was you and maybe one or two others. And I may have told this story before on the podcast, but it's worth telling again, we had scheduled all the second interviews for the same afternoon, and I was just like, why did we do that? I'm going to be on calls for four hours talking to these people and trying to figure out who is going to be good. And then I remember looking at my calendar and realising that you were first, and I was like, I can chat the Glenn. That's okay. And that at the time meant something to me. So that was very much the essence of where we took it from there and where we went forward. Tell me about what it was like getting on the plane as the CEO for the first time and coming to Belfast.

Very exciting and daunting. This is the first time I've been a CEO. It's not the first time I've been a leader or I've taken over a team and it felt like a familiar experience from that perspective, but I've always felt a tremendous obligation to put everything I have into this role. I think it's incredibly gutsy for you and Lee as founders of Msmith to bring in an outsider and give him a CEO title. And that just comes with a huge obligation to live up to that. Before I got on the plane to experience my first day as an employee of Cloudsmith, my wife and I really talked this over at some length, are you up for this level of commitment for an unbounded commitment? We don't know how many years this is going to be. It could be rest of my working career, and that could be a long time.
And so we didn't enter this lightly. We're empty nesters. Our girls are all grown up, so we have the flexibility to move around and do what we want, but just the energy that it takes and the full commitment that all kind of proceeded that first day. So I came with a lot of conviction that we worked through the decision and said, yeah, we're in. This is it. This is clearly what I love doing and I have a lot of passion for it, and I'm not done yet, so this is it. And so we're both in, just for the record. And then coming to Belfast, I got an apartment before I ever came for the first day I ever wanted to stay in a hotel and be the CEO of Cloudsmith. I wanted to be essentially a resident of Belfast. And I was on the very, very first day. I've changed apartments a few times, but I don't look at this as I'm visiting Belfast. I look at this, I'm in the corporate headquarters, I'm in my home in Belfast, and I also have a home in New York, and that's really how I see it.

Yeah, I mean, I joke with people that you're more northern Irish than I am. You really have taken to the country and done a great job going around and meeting lots of leaders of other Northern Irish companies and other FBIs that are here. You're much better at networking than I am. So that has served you well I think over the last two years.

That's demonstrably false, Alan, because every person I meet in Belfast says, oh, I met Alan Carson. He's the guy. So everybody, I feel like I'm falling in your tracks. I honestly don't think I've ever met anybody that hadn't already met you. So you're a better networker than you realise.

Oh, maybe. Although I think it was very funny that when you and I went to the ladies who launched Party in PWC, Sarah Friar, who we both know very well and runs ladies who launch with a couple others had invited us and I was wearing a black t-shirt and basically standing behind you and I'm about a fit taller than you, so I just looked like you're security, you were doing all the talking and I'm just standing there. But I was happy enough with that lick to be honest. But yeah, what I have met a lot of people, but I think you do a better job of nurturing those communications and relationships.

I look at it like I have a lot of catching up to do. You're born and bred in Belfast, you have a 25 plus year professional headstart on me. So again, I'm just trying to do the role justice, and I think that means you never know as a CEO of a company, you need a lot of friends. You never know what relationships are going to come in handy or going to make a meaningful difference, whether it's a potential customer partner, just a fellow company going through it, building the Northern Irish tech community, the European tech community image, just so many circles of influence and I just think that's part of the job.

And how have you find the job? You said you worked as CEO before you are now, now I have a couple of years sort of under your belt. How has that been?

Feel like I had the best possible human preparation to be the CEO of a software company. It really does all go back to the Naval Academy being a naval officer, a naval aviator, a mission commander, those skills are very reminiscent of what it takes to get the most out of a company, out of a leadership team, out of relationships. So that's the foundational underpinnings. And I learned under Chris Barbin at Imperio how to be the CEO of a startup. Chris in my mind is a legendary CEO and a legendary leader, and he's just got so many leadership traits that are admirable, that are worthy of emulation. And I got to study him up close as a very close friend, a great friend, and a professional colleague for 12 of those 13 years plus the time before that. So what a golden opportunity now meant I didn't become CEO until pretty late in life, but I'm perfectly okay with that.
Working under as a Chris calls 'em lieutenants as a lieutenant to Chris, there's no money in the world that could buy a diploma like that. So I actually felt incredibly prepared and in the two years, roughly two years that I've had this job, I feel like it's everything I had hoped it would be. It's everything I expected it to be and more so, yeah, it's actually been great. It's exceeded my wildest expectations. I thoroughly enjoy it. And I've talked to a lot of former friends and colleagues from uper, including one literally yesterday afternoon, and they all say the same thing, God, you seem so energised. What are you doing? What have they done with you? It just shows when you're doing something you almost feel like you were born to do

Great. I mean, it absolutely shows up at the company offsites and we're just off and offsite and week, and I was sitting in the audience looking up at you, do your initial speech and run through the day. And I was just thinking, I don't have that much energy. I was very impressed with your sort of ability to kind of bring it all together and make sure that how inclusive the whole thing has become, how military regimented the whole thing is in terms of timings. And I know we have Lauren to thank for a lot of that. She does a lot of the heavy lifting in the background. But yeah, no, it was a very impressive couple of days to kind of watch the company work and come together. And I suppose I would love to hear what you thought about the couple of days.

So you're highlighting a lesson I learned from Chris, which is that when you do events even for a 10 person company, there's a human instinct, I think, to look to a leader to frame the event. Why are we here when, okay, we're starting, okay, we're done. To sort of put bookends on it, provide a little context, a little reminder. I think people look forward to, okay, we're starting now. What's this all about? What's the most important thing to hear first? What's the most important thing to hear second? And there's an obligation there. So I think it's just a matter of, I put a lot of preparation into events like this and just in terms of not scripting what I'm going to say, but just thinking, okay, how do we want to start? What do we want to do next? Why do we want to do that next? When are we done? Just giving people a feeling of there's some thought put into this, you're in the right place, you're here for a reason. And I try not to start meetings with a rambling like, Hey everybody, how was that breakfast? So let's see here, where are we going to start? Chris never did that. Chris always created a sense of production. This is a big deal. We're here and this is the most important thing in the world to be doing right now. And I try to emulate what I learned from Chris.

Yeah. What was your favourite part of the week?

Oh, Alan. I live for these weeks. I think I said somewhere in my kickoff that my favourite six days of the year are the three Cloudsmith two day offsites. And I really believe that. I really feel that I look forward to them, I miss them when they're done. It's a big let down. I love giving out the awards. I think peer nominated awards are a big deal in any company. We have our jokey awards, best Slack background or whatever, and we don't take those too seriously, but for peers to vote you the Cloudsmither of the year, I mean, I don't know if you could tell in the audience, but I just get choked up reading the nomination. I looked, our winner this year was Patty Carey, and just looking at Patty on the stage, and I have so much respect for him and being in a position to tell Patty, Hey, your peers voted you the cloud, smither the year. Like, oh, ooh, just gets me even now talking about it. I love that stuff.

No, so we also did an ask me anything where you and me and Leo stood or sat on the stage and got questions from the audience. I mean, it was kind of unbelievable to sort of sit in front of 90 plus people and sort of see what we have created and cultivated. And that was an amazing moment for me. But I completely agree. I think the awards went down very well this year. It's good to see Dan Esteban, David, these are all really experienced engineers all getting peer review, the ultimate peer review,

Right? And it gives me great pleasure to deliver that to you and Lee to show you a company that is built in your vision, started with your idea and it's coming to fruition all the things that you hope to Cloudsmith would be. I almost kind of keep looking over at you and Lee like, Hey, can you believe this? It's a pretty big company so far, and also in the back of my mind is thinking it's going to get even better than this hanging in there. There is a natural ceiling. You can't do offsites once you get to a certain size. There's no offsites with 25,000 it looks like. This is the fun part. The fun part is watching a company go from 20 to 50 to a hundred to 200 to 500, you reach a certain point where you just, there's just not all in the same room anymore. So we're in the fun part.

Yeah, no, there was somebody, I think it might've been Ralph said he had been part of kind of growth quite quickly, I think at Rapid seven. And he had sort of seen it. He had sort of seen it before and kind of said that he kind of could see what it looked like and was sort of experiencing the same sorts of feelings. My thing is that I haven't, probably the closest in my background was at Wombat, which got bought by the New York Stock Exchange, and I think I was employee number 137 in Wombat. And I remember there being not an offsite, but a large group of us went over to, I think it was the Europa and all sat in a room, and I think Danny came and gave a bit of a talk. And that was impressive at the time. And in many ways we've been just trying to emulate and get to there as quickly as possible, but it is incredible. Yeah. So between day one and where you are now, when did you get comfortable? Are you comfortable?

I've always been comfortable. I do want to say I felt at home the first day as a clout. Smither put my sweatshirt on, joined you and Lee and Lauren in the office, and I felt comfortable here From day one. I will say I have a healthy paranoia As the leader of a startup, you have to earn every day and we spend more than we take in from customers. We're fundamentally in a growth mode. So that's not comfortable. Are we going to make the next quarter? Are we going to make the next year? Are we going to earn the next investment round? I have not gotten a lot of eight hour nights of sleep, I'll tell you that. But that's what you sign up for. That's part of the fun. I mean, it would be boring to get eight hours of sleep every night. I know I should, by the way. That's not a point of pride. But the uncomfortable part isn't Cloudsmith, it's nothing internal. It's just we are in a fierce market as every startup is, and you have to constantly question your assumptions

And your assumptions. Which ones do you question the most?

So I think any leader of an organisation can relate to this. You have to project an air of confidence in public, in front of your team. You have to have reasons for that confidence, but you're also allowed to secretly harbour doubts and nobody wants to hear those doubts. Maybe just a few people, but actually this is why I think the relationship that the three of us have, me, you and Lee is so critical with you guys. I can kind of air it out a little bit and say, I'm not so sure about this, but when we leave the room and are in front of other Smithers, you project an air of confidence and it's not bs. That confidence is a hundred percent real. But I guess that's the perpetual challenge of anybody trying to lead any team of more than a handful of

People. I have to admit, I think I struggled with that. So I struggled with that when it came to relationships where I didn't know the person well. So it was easier for me when it was 10 or 20 people and I could make sure that I had a personal relationship with everybody that they kind of knew me enough to know when I was struggling or wasn't able to keep up the kind of confidence thing, which I have to admit, there were times where I just could not keep a confident face on. And it was kind of at that point that I was like when we started to grow a bit beyond that, that was when it got uncomfortable for me. And that was when I sort of felt like we needed to bring in somebody who does a better job of that. And that's what really was one of the reasons why we went out to try and find you.

Well, I appreciate their comments, Alan, but you're way too humble and I don't think they're accurate actually. I think we all can do whatever role we want, and the way I look at it is are and Lee's talents are immense and they're being put to the best use to the furtherment of Cloudsmith in the roles that you're in. And I'm playing the part that I've been given, and it's just about maximising everybody's contribution. I have said this to you many times, Alan, and I really believe this with my heart. There is nothing I've tried with Cloudsmith that you haven't tried twice. So you are a brilliant founder and CEO of Cloudsmith, and I appreciate you handing me the baton and I'm just trying to do the role justice.

Yeah, well there's doing something twice and then doing it, so

I just maybe have a little more persistence.

I have to admit, I was very impressed with Kane's SDR talk last week because we have tried the SDR motion a couple of times before and it didn't really find fit, just didn't really work. We tried it with a local team, we tried it with a remote team, and just the motion on whatever we were doing just wasn't working. You have said that about sort of the two times, but I'm like, go again. I've always been like, go again. It's a different market. It's different people, it's different leadership. Everything is worth trying multiple times until we figure out how to do it right. And key's talk I think really highlighted that you bring in somebody that can find that fit, and I thought it was just sort of a very impressive way of looking at things.

I agree that's probably a Silicon Valley trait. You talked about bringing in an American optimist and you see enough startups succeed, including my last startup, and you just know the inside story of every company is messy. You try something, it fails. You tried a different way, it fails again for a different reason. You tried a third way, you just keep chipping away at it. If you know you're in a great market, you have a great product, eventually it's going to fall into place. And I think I do have the one advantage maybe of having come from the US technology and ecosystem. I've just seen it work a lot. I've seen it grow to a massive scale. So I just have this total conviction that, hey, I don't care if it takes 10 tries, we are going to get it right eventually. So yeah, I have a little grit that says if your SDR team fails twice, that doesn't mean don't have an SDR team. It means get it right, keep doing it until you get it right.

It's interesting that you've mentioned Silicon Valley. I remember in 2019 I was there with Cloudsmith for a couple of months to try and get into the network and meet some people. And I was interviewed by Ian Brown who the takeaway for me was that Silicon Valley is no different than Belfast, really, right? There's loads of talented people all trying to do their best, be innovative, but what we don't have as a pool of people who have done it before in Belfast, that's one of the key things that I realised is that a lot of people in Belfast don't really know. I should say it has changed quite a bit over the last five years, but back in 2019, there was not a lot of people knew what a share option was. Not a lot of people had exited a startup or gotten a windfall from going in, doing something really quickly for a couple of years, working out how to fail and how to succeed, and then taking all of that knowledge and taking it into the next startup and doing it all again. And that's typically what I think of Silicon Valley is like.
And we've always wanted to try and do that as best we could in Belfast, and I think did bring some of that sensibility to those early days. But it's been tough. I think the industry here is just maybe not as sharp on some of those traits, but I do hope it is changing and I do hope that we will, we'll see that grow more and more in Belfast.

I think that can be one of the great legacies of Glad Smith is proving that a great global enterprise, massive scale software company can and does and will come from Belfast. It certainly comes from around Europe. The other thing I want to say about Silicon Valley, and you realise this pretty quickly when you go there, is it's an idea. It's not a place. Very few people in unquote Silicon Valley are from California or from the Bay Area. Everybody's a New Yorker mean, and everybody's from Pennsylvania. I'm from here, I'm from Great Britain, I'm from India. It's not a place, it's more like the major leagues or the Premier League or something like that. It's just if you really want to do something big and grow a great company, you go to Silicon Valley, wherever the heck that is, and you tap into other like-minded people.

And I think this was the thing that Ignite did really well, which is the accelerator that we did in 2018. I think they just showed us that they gave us the opportunity to go to San Francisco, meet some people. This is the year before my earlier story, but I think that made a big difference. I remember sitting at a breakfast and somebody was saying, you can choose a lifestyle business or you can choose the VC route. And I was like, oh, there's a difference and there's a choice. And I was like, well, we are definitely going to choose the VC route for the thing that we are doing because it took a lot of time to build it and a lot of infrastructure and a lot of effort, and yet we could see this really important business and really important being an important part of the ecosystem in the future. But it was really hard to build and see that at the beginning. So I mean, that was one of the things that was part of my thinking at the very, very beginning. And it played out that way. And I saw other people choose the other writ, choose the lifestyle business, and they're still Abbott. I was driving in a car park two weeks ago and there was a car in front of me trying to very badly parked into a space and I was waiting and getting annoyed, and then I realised it was a couple of people from that thing. So oh geez.
I think when they got out of the car, I had put the window down. I think they were worried that I was going to shout at them, but I was like, no, hey, how are you? But I think they think their business was going well, but they didn't go the VC route like we did.

Well, that's a proven formula and it's basically a growth company. Cloudsmith is a VC backed company, and I've said this to our employees from time to time. Once you start taking outside investments in significant proportions, we have, it's kind of like a go big or go home mentality. And I like what you just said on, Hey, back in 2018, it's pretty early in the history of Cosm Smith. You and Lee decided this is a big idea. And for Klaus Smith to stay small and local and just sort of homegrown funded would just not be fulfilling the full potential of what this product can do, what it can change in software development globally. So you were right to take some money, grow the company faster and see if we can pay all that back. And we've doubled and doubled and doubled that down a bunch of times. So we're on a kind of go bigger die right now. And yeah, we're going big.

So completed series BA couple of months ago, how do you feel about that?

I feel great about the investors that we brought her into the room. So first of all, the series B, we kept the loyal support of all of our existing investors. That was a wonderful show of confidence in Cloudsmith. But we also had the chance to bring in two firms and insight partners in TCV in particular. They just are, they're able to help Cloudsmith envision a bigger outcome for the company. And I think it's been infectious. Some Claude Smithers wouldn't know TCV from A B, C, but I think people that are paying attention to the industry realise the bet that others are making on K Cloud. Smith It'ss kind of a sign of intention to our customers too that we intend to create in Cloudsmith, a historically important company that will be here for the long term. And I think if you're an enterprise buyer, I mean if you're the CTO or the head of a platform engineering at a Fortune 500 company, Cosmo may have a great product, looks better than the other products, but you're not going to put your confidence in what seems to be like a smallish company with smallish ambitions.
That doesn't work. I need a company that's going to be here for the next 20, 30 years or longer. I need a company that's going to grow its ambitions to cover more areas of solutions that we need and so forth. You can only have so many partners or vendors. So taking on the series B, I think as important as anything was a signal to our future customers and our current ones that Kmu is for real and we are going to be here for the long term, and we're probably going to be here honestly longer than the legacy competitors that we're looking to displace. I don't know how you'd send that message if you just kind of keep the funding to a minimum, keep the ambitions low, lower all the risk, grow nice and slow and steady. That just doesn't add up to a story that can make a buyer like that confident.

My goal was to get the company to the A that for four years, I think my goal was to get a round completed and then obviously after that it was using that money to scale. But I always remember thinking my career highlight was closing a series A round. And I have to admit, before that happened, I did not think that we would ever get to the B. It just was like this sort of black void beyond after the money had hit the bank. I think Lee and are incredibly proud that we've managed to close a series B from Belfast in the way that we did it. And with the investors that we've brought in, we're very impressed with TCV and Insight. It's an incredible story. And I had dinner with a group of founders a couple of weeks ago, and it's funny because I walk in and they all know who I am and I don't know who any of them are because they are following our story. They don't know me, but they have definitely seen us do it and see us move up that route.

Well, getting a company to a series, the metrics on that are, the odds are vanishingly small, but a startup makes it to series A and that's an incredible achievement and a tonne to be proud of. You talk about the void, well, what happens after an A, I guess a BI think that's how a lot of people think of IPO. Also, we talked, always talked about IPO is the ambition of the company. Well, I've been in post IPO companies. IPO is the beginning. Then you get to really scale and really serve the market, really change the market. So there's always a next act. And yeah, I think our next big milestone is probably IPOing the company, but there's life after IPO,

And yet when we started the company, the only thing we cared about was developers used it. That's the dichotomy of some of that I found really interesting is that we had ambition. We didn't know how we were going to get there, but we did know how to build the product and we did know how to build it in such a way that would make developers happy, and we tried to interact with them in the best way that we could and make it as easy as possible to use the product and everything. It feels like there are opposing forces where you're trying to also build this big company in the background. So I just find the whole thing fascinating. I'm amazed at all the trials and tribulations that we've been through and all the good times to get to where we've gotten to, but I'm very happy that we are where we are.

I don't see a conflict in that actually. And I think serving developers, creating a product that we would want to use is exactly what enterprises want. I mean, what is an enterprise? Just a bunch of people. And it's a bunch of developers at the end of the day that are just trying to build software, deliver something great, build something. Same spark that I talked about with my Commodore pad and that you've talked about. That's what every enterprise developer wants. We're just helping them. Microsoft's a pretty big company, but they create great tools that developers love to use, and they've made developers more productive. And I think especially the early employees at Microsoft have time to be proud of, and same feeling that I hope all cots feathers have.

Yeah, amazing. Well, look, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. It's been a pleasure talking to you. We'll definitely have you back and we can discuss more about the trials and tribulations at Cloudsmith.

That'd be great, man. Yeah, I enjoyed being here, Alan. You run a good podcast. Thank you.