How Tembo Reached 30 Paying Customers and 1,000+ Merged Pull Requests in 2 Months (Interview with Founder and CEO Ry Walker)

Introduction and Astronomer Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Our interview today is with this founder of Astronomer. Yes. The code play astronomer. It's Ry Walker. Now Ry launched Astronomer in 2015 and walked away in 2022 during their $213,000,000 series c when the business was doing tens of millions of revenue, and his new company he launched is really special. In the next twenty minutes, he's gonna show you exactly how this serial entrepreneur went from zero to product market fit in sixty days, why he believes that

00:27AI agents will 10x his revenue in the software development market overall, and lastly, how he's gonna land million dollar per year fortune 50 customers. Plus, he'll show you why pull merged pull requests are his North Star metric and the creative way he's actually getting marketers, not engineers, to virally spread his product. Let's jump in. Hey, folks. My guest today is Ry Walker. He is a Cincinnati based entrepreneur and software engineer. He's the founder and CEO of

00:55tembo dot I o. It's an AI developer teammate we're gonna talk about here in a second. It's an before that, though, he cofounded Astronomer, obviously, in the news today. We'll talk about that as well, and differential. He's recognized for his leadership in tech. Ry is also an active investor. Ry, you ready to

01:09take us to the top?

Ry Walker

01:10>> I actually am.

Nathan Latka

01:12Alright. This was so funny when I was preparing for this interview. Was trying to share my screen and show you this. I'm going, man. Ry Ry Ry because your team reached out to me and said, how do I know this guy? And I remember you were one of the OGs on the podcast back in the day. This was literally eight years ago. I don't I think you had just hit 60 k of MRR at Astronomer. Yeah.

01:30The early days.

Ry Walker

01:31>> And that was probably a lie back then too. I don't even know if I told you the truth, but I'm sure you you get that all I get that a lot.

Nathan Latka

01:37Right? That's funny. Yeah. I think you just raised $2,000,000. But, anyways, we have to obviously talk about it, like, at least quickly before going to tembo. Astronomers obviously in the news right now, famous Coldplay concert. What's your involvement now there as a founder?

Ry Walker's History on the Podcast

Ry Walker

01:49>> Well, I I, yeah, I left the company and left the board in 2022. So, yeah, not not super involved. However, you know, I I have some great friends. People I hired are still there, especially a couple of a group of college kids. Their first job was at astronomer, and they're still there from a program called DFA, Venture for America out of New York originally. Yeah. So I've some friends. Obviously, I've I've talked to them a bunch

02:16>> during the which I called the Coldplay Gate situation. And, it was a pretty pretty crazy time. I tried to, you know, siphon a little bit of attention over to tembo during that as well to some success. But, yeah, it was a

Astronomer and the Coldplay Situation

Nathan Latka

02:30People don't give you enough credit. They see you, and they go, oh, he's an engineering founder, but you've got marketing gene too. Yeah. You know? Siphoning off attention. Right?

Ry Walker

02:37>> Yeah. You gotta do something. But I also wanted to support them too. You know? I think companies, been going for a long time. I still have some equity there too, so that's you know? Again, I'm not I I do have, you know, a horse in the game there, but you know? Yeah. So And what prompts I mean,

Nathan Latka

02:55we we do have a lot of second time, third time founders that listen to this show, and it's I'm always curious, you know, what prompts someone like you? I mean, everything we know publicly about Astronomer. I mean, when you left the 2022, this thing is it's doing great. You know, it's in

Ry Walker

03:05>> the dev tech space. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

03:07You know, it's it's it's grown like a weed. Wayne, why decide to sort of leave? Were you maybe just bored or something else? Can you share your story and transition to tembo?

Ry Walker

03:14>> Yeah. I mean, I I tell a lot of people this, especially in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. I was I was I was offered a chance to sell my shares in secondary at our series b, series c rounds. You know, that was this was the ZERP era, and I said yes. You know, as basically, the way I saw it was, you know, I'm a founder, you know, sitting at a at a poker table with a big giant pile

Why Ry Took a Secondary Exit and Left Astronomer

Ry Walker

03:37>> of chips, and I have no no money in my bank account, you know, and someone says, would you like to leave the table? It's like, yeah. Let's let's make this equity real. So I had a rare chance of making that happen without the company being acquired. We just had a lot of interest in our rounds, and I'd been doing that company since 2015, so seven years in. I also had hired a CEO. You know, we hired

04:05>> a CTO. We hired a bunch of leadership. And so, you know, I just wasn't I'm I'm a early stage person. Bigger. I'm a from zero to blank person, you know, not not what they're doing now. It's not my not my talent.

Nathan Latka

04:20He's very good at keeping the revenue where it's private. He goes, zero to blank, not quote what they're doing now. Right? I can't get anything out. Yeah. It's a good story. Right? Because a lot of founders, like, they they they don't think about like a poker table, but it is. I mean, you, for whatever reason, you knew you've been around the block for you knew twenty twenty one was crazy. Right? So when you saw the competition,

04:37I think the series b, what was it, 45, 46,000,000?

Ry Walker

04:41>> What? How much we how much the company raised?

Nathan Latka

04:43Astronomer raised. Yeah.

Ry Walker

04:44>> Astronomer raised, like, $300,000,000 in in a few few years. Yeah. That's $380,000,000 now or $390,000,000. Yeah. So they raised $300,000,000 from series a 2021 to

04:56>> 2023, 2022.

Nathan Latka

04:58I guess what I'm getting at here, though, is most folks are gonna be surprised what you just said on the secondary because what they're taught from all the press is when a founder does a secondary, they usually then stay at the company. Now Right? They have some liquidity. They want a second bite at the apple. You took liquidity and then actually left.

Ry Walker

05:12>> Yeah. Yeah. It's because I, you know, I had hired a CEO. You know? Bottom line was I was I was, founder Emeritus. It was my official title and board member at the at that point. And I'm like, I'm too I I basically said I'm too young to have a title that has the word Emeritus in it. I mean, not too too young, but just too young. Yeah. Yeah. I bottom line is, like, I you know, I

05:37>> just we've I was wasn't needed there anymore, and I could I could be more valuable to myself and the world to do it simply. You know?

Introducing Tembo: What It Does

Nathan Latka

05:46Yep. Alright. Let's pivot into tembo. I'd love for you to I wanna get your founding story, but I actually don't wanna bury the lead. I wanna talk about what it is today. Can you tell us a customer that's paying you today, and then we'll go get the backstory?

Ry Walker

05:57>> Yeah. Yeah. Mean, we we're we're basically building a,

06:03>> essentially, a digital software engineer, you know, call it AI agent, whatever you wanna call it, but a teammate that you can assign work to, and it does the work and kind of behaves like a software engineer would, except that it's, you know, awake twenty four seven, three sixty five. It can work in parallel, and it never says no to anything you ask it to do. It never says, can you hold on a minute? It gets started

06:29>> right away. So, you know, there's there's been great advances in AI software engineering tools. Most of those tools, though, today are behind software developers, so there's a human gateway to search for non technical people to access those, and we think that should change. So we're basically trying to build, you know, an agent that in the same way you could ask your CTO to do some work for you, you could also ask tembo to do some work

06:55>> for you, and it gets done well, and it gets done, know, in some ways better than the humans do it.

Nathan Latka

07:03Can you give us two or just so that the nonengineering audience can follow along here? Can you give us two or three of, like, the most popular one liner prompts that folks might use? For example, take linear card and push it via GitHub or whatever. Can you give me three examples?

Example Use Cases for Non-Technical Users

Ry Walker

07:16>> I mean, imagine you have a corporate blog and and you just shipped a new feature. You could say, you know, write me a blog post about this new feature. Look at this, repo to understand what the feature is. So, like, a marketer could literally tell it to inspect source code to find out all the things that just happened in the code base, and the AI is really, really good at that sort of thing, so it'll just

07:41>> generate the blog post, create a pull request in your GitHub, and and, you know, you you can you can tweak it from there. You can actually just prompt it and say, hey. Can you go a little more into this and and remove this piece and and so on? So, you know, it's very like I said, it's very similar to what if you just had a software developer sitting next to you, and they will just do anything

08:02>> you want whenever you want. That's the feeling it is. So so, yeah, we use it to generate you know, if I find a misspelling on this web page that you have pulled up right now, I could just prompt tembo to say You know, linear is misspelled, and and it'll just, like, find that in website and fix it.

Nathan Latka

08:18Yeah. Really interesting. It's almost like how people use, like, Lovable today, but Lovable, you're you're coming up with a brand new landing page and talking to it. This is basically a marketer or a CMO or CRO could actually talk to it without having to bug an engineer. It should do something simple like a spelling change.

How Tembo Pricing Works

Ry Walker

08:32>> Yeah. But the the beautiful thing about it is it doesn't actually make the change. It creates a PR, a pull request that your that your technical team has to review, and and so you can't break anything with tembo. You just queue up work for your technical team to review and accept.

Nathan Latka

08:47All your CTOs love that. They don't want the marketers breaking stuff. This is cool. Yeah. Alright. No. No. Yeah. Everyone's trying to figure out how to price these things. Right? Is it number of minute saves? Is number of API pings? Is it number of whatever? You've priced successfully at many past companies. How are you pricing this thing?

Ry Walker

09:02>> We started with just pay as you go. We don't want a subscription to get in the way of, usage. You know? Like, the challenge right now is big behavior changes are coming with these tools. And if you're paying $200 a month and don't feel like you're using it, you're gonna cancel it. Now it's gone. So we just decided to say, like, this is sort of a revolutionary idea and just buy credits. You know? And it's very

09:27>> similar to how you would pay, again, like a contract developer. You pay them when you use them, and you don't have to pay when you're not using them.

Nathan Latka

09:34Mhmm. One of the hardest parts about hiring a contract developer is if you're paying on a per project basis, you have to do a really good job explaining the specs so you know what you're paying for. I'm looking at your credit page right now, never having looked at this before. I'm going, okay. Well, what does a 100 credits plus 25 credits actually mean for a $100? Yeah.

Ry Walker

09:50>> And and it's, you know, the way I like to describe it is it costs usually about $5 to $10 per pull request. So if if you ask for a a spell change, it might only cost one credit or even less, you know, so a dollar. And you say like, oh, man. A dollar for fixing a typo, that seems expensive. And I say, how much would you have paid your developer to do the same thing? You know?

10:12>> Probably more than a dollar. If you're paying them $30 an hour, you know, can they get that done in two minutes? You know?

Nathan Latka

10:19So is that the best analog here is the price page we're looking at right now? If I'm paying 200, should assume kind of like that's 200 pull requests I'm getting?

Ry Walker

10:26>> No. I would say it's more like I would say it's more like a I I'd like to say an average of five credits. It's on the high side, but sometimes you ask it to do something that might spend 20 credits. So we don't know. Like, the you know, these LLMs are sort of mysterious. You asked it to do something hard. We use Claude Code inside. Maybe you've heard of Claude Code, and, you know, Claude Code will

10:46>> keep working at solving the problem until until it's done. And so it's to me, the more the more money you're spending on tembo, the more value you're getting out of your engineering team because you're getting them work to approve. You know? So Mhmm. Yeah. We a lot of companies are having this attitude with their engineers. They winning means spending lots of credits on engineering, not less credits.

Nathan Latka

11:11Yep. Interesting. Can you give us some sense of product behavior today? Are people paying on average a thousand bucks a month divided by five per PR? So that's 250 PRs per month, or what's, like, your sweet spot?

Ry Walker

11:23>> But, yeah, we're we're gonna we're we're in the process of rolling out some some plans where you know? So let's say that you've decided you like this. You know, maybe we'll have a thousand dollar a month subscription. Everything's, you know, bespoke right now, but we plan to have subscription plans that you can't really give people, like, unlimited use because there's just too many ways to to abuse that. But, yeah, we're we wanna we wanna give you

11:50>> the ability to hire us and pay us a salary as well as, you know, pay us hourly, which is respectively what this is right now.

Nathan Latka

11:58Interesting. Int okay. But what's your vision, though? SMB mid market enterprise, you think your average customers are be paying a thousand bucks a month going forward, a 20,000,000 a year?

Ry Walker

12:06>> No. We'll we'll have million dollar a year customers. We have Fortune 50 prospect right now that, you know, they have nothing like this. There's no product really like this in the enterprise space. There are tools for engineers. That's what the current current state, but there's no tools inside of, say, a Fortune 50 company for anybody in the company to to find any typo anywhere on any of their web stuff, they could just, like, type type a

Tembo's Founding Story and Pivot Timeline

Ry Walker

12:30>> message to to an agent, and it'll figure out the right repo, create a PR, get it to the right person to approve it Yep. Without without having to know the the ins and outs. So I think it's a huge basically, the more developers, the more people you have, the more powerful this tool gets.

Nathan Latka

12:46Mhmm. Why are you comfortable sharing today? When did you what what what month did you write the first line of code for tembo, and when did you land your first paying customer?

Ry Walker

12:55>> Yeah. So we pivoted from a previous thing. I won't talk about the old business too much. It was a managed postdress. Very technical and boring. We launched this company in 2022, November 2022, which is essentially the same time that ChatGPT came out. So, you know, we were building a Postgres startup at the same time that, AI was coming coming of age, and it was early this year, just just in April that we started pivoting towards this

13:23>> and made the full jump over back in May, so literally just a couple months ago. Okay. You know, we've had, you know, 200 companies create pull requests with well, I don't know if they're companies. 200 People. Organizations. Yeah. Create pull requests with this. You know, we've had, you know, maybe 30 customers paying us something. You know, it's all, again, pay as you go, but I would say we definitely have thematics, and that's good.

Early Traction: Customers, Signups, and Merged PRs

Nathan Latka

13:50Right. How do you it's so fascinating for me to get in your head because, like, look. I'm guessing what astronomer's revenue is today. I'm assuming it's well over $80, $90, $100,000,000 ARR. And you, like, are talking with such excitement about, man, I'm I'm looking at my 30 users every day. People are getting addicted. I'm getting excited. This is, like, so different. This is, one one hundredth of what the largest enterprise customer Astronomer is probably paying. What are

14:09you sort of obsessing over in these early days? This is good stuff.

Ry Walker

14:12>> Yeah. Well, I mean, zero you know, to get to a a 100,000,000 in revenue, you have to pass through 10. You know? You have to pass through a 100. You have to pass through a thousand. So this is what early stage is all about, you know, building something that people want. You're doing it quickly, you know, in two months to get to build something that people will pay for is is a hard thing. You know, we're

14:32>> in a very competitive space again, but, yeah, I don't know. This is just this is what what is fun. If if don't enjoy this stage, this is the good old days. I always like to say we we knew it going in through an astronomer. Like, the good old days are now. Everything gets worse from here in terms of, like at least for me. That's probably my own bias, but I you know, I'm not a big big

14:54>> company fan. So, this is the this is the best time I could have.

Nathan Latka

14:58That's funny. And do you do you I imagine you look at this.

15:02How many total pull requests have gone through the system? I guess, is it is this a total lifetime today? That's probably the right question. Yeah.

North Star Metric: Merged Pull Requests

Ry Walker

15:09>> Yeah. So I the big the the one metric that matters to me is merge pull requests. You know? So, basically, when a developer accepts it, that's that's the end of the value chain. So, yeah, we've had 1,000 or more merged pull requests so far. We've had 2,000 people sign up, so that's a pretty good ratio, I think. The product was really pretty bad for the first month. It's gotten a lot better lately. But, yeah, I would

15:35>> just basically say if you have any company that has at least one real developer on their team should also use tembo because it's an amplifier. Yep. Even if it's just times 1.05, you know, and you spend $200 on it, just take their salary. We have a calculator on our website and an ROI calculator. You know, if you just take if you're spending $200,000 on on someone

ROI Calculator and Enterprise Value Proposition

Nathan Latka

15:57Let's look at let's look at it together because I love marketing things like this where you can help basically give your sales team a tool to Yeah. Talk about attribution immediately. So where is it?

Ry Walker

16:06>> Tembo.io/roi. Okay. We're on it.

Nathan Latka

16:12Say it again.

Ry Walker

16:15>> Tembo.io./roi.

Nathan Latka

16:17No. No. You explained it privately.

Ry Walker

16:18>> Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So here's the example. It's like you have if you have one developer,

16:24>> can you change that to one? Yeah. And let's say let's say we're just gonna increase it by 10% or 15%. That's fine. Cost $200,000. You know? If you're paying tembo just just $3,000 a year, what's that? $500 a month? No. That's $250 a month. Mhmm. You know, you're getting $30,000 more developer work, you know, so you should be willing to do that. So, you know, anyone who has one developer and you start changing the math here,

16:53>> I think we can get to 50% of the code being written by tembo. We're seeing that ourselves. Obviously, we're the biggest addicts of all, but it's pretty simple. Says, If you can get a multiplier on your most expensive set of employees, you should really look hard at that.

Gross Margin and Claude API Costs

Nathan Latka

17:13Yeah. You know? Yeah. Let me ask you a question. A lot of the I don't know if you wanna call it NOx or not NOx, but the gross margin landscape of people building software where SaaS is 80% gross margin versus you guys. You said you sit on top of Claude Code. I won't ask you for total, like, monthly revenue right now. You're in the early stages. But if you do it on a percent basis, if you

17:31take a 100% of your revenue last thirty days, how much of that went to Claude?

Ry Walker

17:35>> Yeah. It's a good question. I actually don't even have the math on that.

Nathan Latka

17:38It was definitely more than

Ry Walker

17:39>> a 100% of our revenue is going to Claude right now. Yeah. But that doesn't matter. This is, like, at prescale. You know, you you don't have to look at you're you're really trying to figure out at scale. At scale, our biggest customers will bring their own keys most likely. So Oh, so you're gonna offset that, you think? Yeah. Yeah. So at at scale, we're gonna be selling software. How do we you know, again, think I we

18:02>> could price it based on value too. I think I can get a Fortune 500 to pay me the equivalent of one developer if I can amplify a 100 developers, you know, by 10%, if not more. So so, yeah, I think we can get value based pricing on our product, and now the other risky thing in this space is it's so easy to make software. It's so easy to knock off someone else's product. I think yeah. So

GTM as the New Moat

Ry Walker

18:27>> I think GTM's, like, the new the new moat. You know? Like, if I had a squad of, you know, 200 sellers selling our product, I don't care how good your product is. It's hard to hard to beat us, you know, if they're you know? I think we're gonna have a lot more,

18:43>> you know? Like, to me, it's like the equivalent of, like, restaurants or car brands. You know? Like, they're all cars. They all look a little different. They're all pretty good. They get the job done, and that's how software is gonna be, I think, here. It's gonna be hard to be truly differentiated and have a big moat.

Nathan Latka

18:58Yep. Ry, before we wrap up here, you know, Facebook was famous when they were getting going to saying, listen. We know the activation metric is seven friends in seven days. If we get or something like that. We're gonna do that. They're gonna pay long term. Right? Or the ARPU is gonna go up. For you, you've had 2,000 sign ups live today, you launched about, I think, four months ago the pivot was done.

Ry Walker

19:17>> Two months ago, really. It's two months ago.

Nathan Latka

19:19So you had 2,000 sign ups of users representing 200 logos or brands, of which 30 have converted to paid. And together, they've had a thousand merged PRs, which is your definition of that value loop. Yeah. What what what usage metric do you want your users to say where you go, man, they're gonna be a long term customer. I can upsell their whole company. Can We get from one engineer to a thousand engineers. Is it one merged

19:40PR per like, what is it?

Ry Walker

19:41>> Oh, yeah. It's a good question. I don't I don't have the answer to that yet, but I I definitely think it's more than one. You know, I think that, you know, if you did 10, for example so we give away 50 credits, by the way, when you sign up. So that's the equivalent of about 10 PRs worth of credits. So I think after about 10, you're gonna find a couple that you were like, oh, man. That

20:00>> was a game changer. And, you know, we hope that yeah. There's so many tools to experiment and play with right now, but, you know, we're trying to just build the the most dead easy, simple user experience that people will come back to, embedding it in their own tools. So you can from linear, you can assign work to tembo. From Jira, you can assign work to tembo. So Mhmm. Yeah. We're we're just trying to make it as

20:23>> just natural as as asking a real developer to do to do work for you.

Nathan Latka

20:28Mhmm. And how many folks you gave a marketing example earlier of a blog update. How many folks, like, I'm on your sign up flow right now, are engineers signing up versus, like, people who are nonengineers signing up?

Ry Walker

20:37>> Yeah. Those questions are being added right now to our onboarding, but I I would say it's mostly all developers except for when we talk to our sales team is basically talking to the non you know, a lot of nontechnical members of the team, and they're the ones that get the most excited about this. You know? Like, people don't love bugging developers for little things, but yet little things need to get done. So it's a nice alternative

21:03>> to to trying to distract your developer or yeah. You're Like, I would get stuck here as

Nathan Latka

21:09a nonmarketer person signing up. Right? I'm like, crap. I have no idea what this is.

Ry Walker

21:13>> Yeah. Yeah. Do you even have a GitHub account? You know? So I'm sure.

Nathan Latka

21:16Probably, but I have no idea how to do an integration.

Ry Walker

21:19>> Yeah. So so one of the things I talk about is you know? By the way, I'm having tembo write a book about itself.

21:27>> I'm like nine prompts into that, but one of the things that we're we're gonna say is like, in order for this in order for you to be valuable in this world, you need to understand what GitHub is. If you're if you're building software, there used to be a time where you could sit on the other side of the wall, but I'm base this tool allows you to to come you know, the wall is dissolved, and so

21:46>> you're gonna have to learn about GitHub and PRs and all that. It's not that hard. Yeah. So, yeah, I would just say if you have a website, if you own a website, ask ask your dev team to give you an account. And, yeah, you you might get, you know, you might get a a look, but at the end of the day, we're just trying to help them, you know, get more done and and focus their energy

22:11>> on the stuff they wanna do versus the stuff they have to do.

Nathan Latka

22:14Yeah. I mean, I'm in. I got past the thing, and I'm like and now when I I know what a repo is, but There you go. Someone like, maybe my engineers, they label the marketing when marketing. So maybe it's the marketing I'm just seeing how far I can get here with Yeah.

Viral Coefficient and Onboarding Walk-Through

Ry Walker

22:24>> Cool. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

22:24No engineer. Okay. 50 credits free, which is great, which is basically 10 PRs. Are you test as I'm going through this, are there any steps you're sort of testing here actively?

Ry Walker

22:33>> No. No. We we've decided to simplify onboarding. We used to have if you click on integrations tab up there in the top left

Nathan Latka

22:39On top left.

Ry Walker

22:40>> See that? There you go. You got it. Like, we have integrations with Sentry and Linear and Jira and and, you know, and actually, the database, we can watch your database, and if there's bad slow queries, we can fix those automatically. So but we we took all that out of the onboarding and and just say, like, right now so you have your marketing website, so you could type right now any change to your marketing website, and it

23:02>> should create a PR for that, you know? Yeah. That's really cool. So so that

Nathan Latka

23:07will drive my engineers crazy if I just wrote a test. But I could basically type here, hey. You know you know Yeah. Change the metadata on the blog to a headline that says Founderpath is the AI builder.

Ry Walker

23:19>> Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. That was the description for the meta tag, for example. Yeah. You could just do that. Yep. Very

Nathan Latka

23:26cool. This makes a ton of sense. Really exciting. What's what do you hope happens over the next year? I mean, what's your target?

Ry Walker

23:32>> Click create. Let's do it.

Nathan Latka

23:34Click create. Okay.

Ry Walker

23:34>> They're not gonna be mad at you. They're gonna be like, what the hell did you just do? But it's good. Now you're gonna basically they're gonna have to look at us, and now they're gonna have to sign up too. So It's good.

Nathan Latka

23:43Oh, smart. So you have a nice viral coefficient there to look at giggles. This is a founder that's done this before. Right? He's like, viral coefficient, baby. Let's go.

Ry Walker

23:51>> That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And we have a lot more planned, by the way. We have, like, a phase two that I'm not talking about yet, but it's like a 10xer on top of everything we've done, so we think this is a huge space. Software development is a giant market, giant market that's only gonna I think it's gonna 10x just because now that it's easier to make software, we're gonna make 10 x the the amount of software.

Nathan Latka

24:13Mhmm. Yeah. Alright. This is good stuff. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, is there a founder or CEO you're studying right now?

Ry Walker

24:20>> No. Not really.

Nathan Latka

24:21Alright. Be honest.

Famous Five and Wrap-Up

Nathan Latka

24:24Number number two, is there a what's the most recent book you read, whether it's on business or just for personal fun?

Ry Walker

24:31>> It's cute. I read I read I and now I'm kind of basically going back on my first answer, but one of the books from the snowflake guy, I can't think of the name of it. I can't think of the name of the guy or the name of the book, but snowflake CEO.

Nathan Latka

24:45You're talking about CEO.

Ry Walker

24:46>> Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

24:47It was called, wasn't it, like, from zero to billions or something like that?

Ry Walker

24:51>> No. No. No. No. It wasn't that. It's a CEO.

Nathan Latka

24:55I know what you're talking about, though. If you guys just Google Fred Lutman CEO book. Right?

Ry Walker

25:00>> Frank. Yeah. Frank. Slootman. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

25:02Frank. Yeah. There we go. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Well, that's oh, amp it up. Amp it up.

Ry Walker

25:06>> Amp it up. Yeah. That's that's pretty important for us. That's think we're in an amp it up era right now. You know? Like, all the stuff that they did, they they did it in an era that it I mean, it it helped them become who they are. But I think now if you don't do what they're talking about in that book, you're dead. You know? You're gonna be lost in a sea.

Nathan Latka

25:25Alright. Number three, is there a favorite online tool that you have for building the business?

Ry Walker

25:29>> Oh, yeah. I forgot to say GitHub. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm in that all the time. But Linear I think Linear is my probably my favorite SaaS ever, just how, you know, exquisitely designed it is and perfect in virtually every way.

Nathan Latka

25:46It's just it's it's and it's almost like you wouldn't be impressed if you just hit linear as if someone doesn't use it, but we also use it. It's it's just how simple everything is. It's the right things at the right moments with a lot of white space.

Ry Walker

25:56>> Yeah. So if you're using linear and you have like a backlog of things, you can just you can install our linear integration and just assign stuff to to tembo and it'll do those tasks. So And why I guess

Nathan Latka

26:07that's a good question. Right now, when I pass a task to my engineering team, I'll record a Loom video, and I'll create my own linear card and assign it. Why is that better or worse than just going through tembo?

Ry Walker

26:16>> Well, why first of all, like, if it's late at night and you want it to be done now, you know, you could you know, if you're if you have the ability to test the the PR that's created, like, in other words, if you're semitechnical, it's just it's a way to, like, basically get you can do this stuff on your phone. Like, you could be like, oh, this linear issue. Sign to tembo. You get a preview link.

26:36>> You open it. You're like, oh, that's right. Merge. And, like, you can, like, kinda, like, build stuff on your phone, you know, while you could be at the beach and, make progress.

Nathan Latka

26:46So I

Ry Walker

26:47>> love that Alright.

Nathan Latka

26:49Number four. What situation today? Married, single, kids?

Ry Walker

26:52>> I'm married with three children. Yes.

Nathan Latka

26:53Wow. Okay. And how old are you, Ry?

Ry Walker

26:55>> I am 53. So, yeah, they're they're getting to the age where someday they'll have kids, but not yet.

Nathan Latka

27:00That's awesome. Alright. Last question. What's something you wish you knew back when you were 20 years old?

Ry Walker

27:05>> When I was 20. Wow. Gosh. Well, when I was 20, I wish I wish I would have known to to register. There was a time when it was free to register domain names. I don't know if you were around when that happened, but I wish I would have registered a bunch of domains back then. Like, were a lot of squatters, and and they were breaking the rules, but, man, it's a great benefit. I followed the rules

27:28>> and just got the only the domains I needed. But, man yeah. We're actually trying to get tembo.com right now, and it was registered in 1997 and and, like, barely ever used. So we'll see.

Nathan Latka

27:39Buy more domain names. There you go. I'll use Yeah. There. Buy more domain names. Yeah. Well, guys, there you have it. Ry Walker from tembo.io. I love that he's not sort of on the coast. He's actually building great companies in Cincinnati. Most recently, founder of astronomer back in 2015. Yes. The astronomer in the news. That thing scaled. He took a nice secondary in their series b, series c, surrounds and said, you know what? I'm gonna go

28:00jump into this new idea. He launched the business, tembo, but then pivoted actually just two months ago. So that would have been we're recording this 07/30/2025. Just recently pivoted already has 2,000 sign ups users across 200 logos. His value chain is how many merged PRs has tembo enabled, especially non marketers to process. Right? This is a massive unlock in terms of productivity. He's got 30 paid customers on a on a credit model right now. We'll see

28:22what happens next. Ry, thanks for taking us to the top. Thank you.