How Trunk Technologies CEO Eli Schleifer grew to $9.7M revenue with a 66 person team in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is ellie schleifer he is today working on a company called trunk dot io which helps you land code faster in a previous life he was an autonomy staff engine software engineer at uber and before that was a staff technical lead manager at youtube ellie you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right man so so what is trunk and who who's buying this who are you selling to uh so trunk is a devtools company we're basically creating a vertical to the left of github our goal is to help engineers land code faster kind of like the core idea is that being an engineer is not particularly fun once you hit like any amount of scale in your organization uh landing code gets really hard it's kind of tedious i kind of describe it as like death by a thousand paper cuts you know every time you're trying to actually do something you know you run into some weird little snag and you know trunk is all about like smoothing out all those uh snags and making the flow simple because you know having been at google it's like it's amazing you have tens of thousands of engineers landing code all day long in a mono repo and it works and then you have a company of you know the size of uh slack for others that you know have you know hundreds of engineers and doing work there is very hard right we had 600 engineers at uber atg we had 30 engineers supporting them as dev tools they've experienced space and landing code was really hard like the iranian organization of the autonomy systems team part of our goal was to basically assess why are we not landing code faster why are we not you know making greater faster progress and the answer on survey after survey was landing code is hard it wasn't like getting the self-driving algorithms right it was landing my code through the pr gates was too hard and that you know set off uh you know flag you know my my head feel like we should really go address this problem so what did google i mean you mentioned you just spoke nicely of google what did google know that uber and youtube or i guess youtube is google what did they know that you otherwise didn't i think it's an investment thing right so building proper dev tools like requires a tremendous amount of investment time and energy and focus you know and even talking to people inside google that came about over many many years of you know work and focus basically every time something stopped working because it got too big they would go and poor resources at it and i think that the right way to do this is like as a company to take on that responsibility to approach us from a product perspective and not just be through firefighting but to be like okay if you're going to build this as a product and not just as a tool not just a set of bash scripts how would you actually go do this and that's really where trunk started at we're basically saying what are the core pieces of a of a repository and a modern organizational repo that everyone should have and everyone keeps building themselves over and over again how can we do that right so that you don't like miss all these little edge cases because there are so many edge cases in that space um and uh you know it's funny we as we were able to hire a lot of engineers really quickly because as we talked to engineers like oh yeah i see this problem all the time i've been at three different companies where it was just a total total mass uh and uh i think you know we're onto something something here so so if people are listening going i want to try la's tool right now i mean what are customers paying you on average to use the technology so the product is still like uh it's a pre-launch you know we're basically going to hit our mvp fairly soon but you can go and try out our private uh our private alpha right now you can go to trunk.io you can uh we'll take your links to our documentation you can install it and start running it yourselves um and really what you're gonna see is that our first product is what we call trunk check it's a you know universal linter that runs on every machine uh in every user's box and you know from our perspective every single language every technology in a modern repository should be checked for static analysis formatting linting uh uh the same exact way in every single engineer's box and we see this as a major problem like often you know companies will turn on uh analyzers for a single language but really they're using 10 20 different technologies uh you know they have some of their stuff for cloud formation they have some except for terraform they have their core languages and they have a bunch of supporting bash scripts and python scripts and those things all should be checked because all of them are places where um universality for security and formatting and you know readability and the correct correct you know approach to software design all should be applied to all those places across the board um and that's what we do we basically turn on the tool you run initialization we detect all the languages and technologies you use and we turn on all the right tools for you and you're off to the races um and that's like a huge you know step function uh compared to know what's out there in the market today when did you write the first line of code for trunk we started development in january okay oh this year so you've been at it for about 10 months 11 months yeah how have you funded yourself to date obviously your pre-revenue uh yeah so we raised uh we raised money from andreessen horowitz um we closed that round back in january okay how much did you raise we raised uh 3.25 i believe and and why so i'm gonna make some assumptions about you personally so you know you know be pissed off at me if you want but or correct me but i mean these are like big jobs you had i assume you had some savings why couldn't you just put it on the line keep 100 equity you know pay others and do that at the beginning why do you want to go down the vc route right away i think that with vc you have great support for a partnership right you have the ability to reach out to other companies that will be like your first customers they are going to make the uh you know and help you also scale the business really quickly right this is not a business that's going to be uh funded uh and kind of bootstrapped you know really small because as i've described the problem we're going after is big right uh as soon as we get the right seed working it's going to be about like building a whole suite of uh services and solutions to really make that bring kind of that google quality dev experience dev tools to everybody and to build that is not going to be a five engineer project right it's not you know five engineers and done this is a large large-scale project and it's going to require real capital to build it correctly i'm just saying i totally understand the need for capital but you need capital from investors you can get them from pre-selling customer contracts right so you've chosen to get capital from the sort of vc world i'm just i guess why couldn't you pre-sell customers on this idea so they can get some of their money to build this this with this with upfront i mean if you're going to say what are the different approaches it's a lot easier to go raise money from bc than it is to go and pre-sell customers on a product that's like you know a straight-up uh answer on that one well you would argue that i think there's a lot of people listening who do not have experience at google and uber and youtube who would say it's much more difficult to raise than it is to pre-sell customers so we'll chalk that up to a unique advantage that you have fair enough obviously you know there's privilege from being a second time a second time around oh is this your second uh business as well yes oh what was your favorite company my first company was called director we started that um back in uh 2011. i was in the mobile video space um and ran that for three years and sold that to youtube oh super cool super cool oh sort of film space huh did you bootstrap that one or raise there too that one we raised as well yeah yep yep yep yep cool from from same folks at andreessen or no no no that was uh he's that was a boston firm from nextview okay very cool all right so so where does 3.2 million get you to you think i think that's gonna get us like to our first you know two three products at the door right so we're gonna have this check tool we have a couple other products we'll be announcing um in q1 and it will give us the real like you know the beginnings of something really cool these tools like are really synergistic and they start to work together as we kind of our roadmap is quite long what i love is that we're actually like if you look at our original pitch deck and where we actually are today we're actually hitting all of our timeline numbers which is crazy right because in software everything should be slower than what are some of those numbers ellie yeah it's 10 months to this first product right then that is like basically where we're sitting at our hiring plan has also like been you know consistent hiring inside this environment is really really difficult right yeah how many how many folks today we're 11 right now we'll be 13 in january i imagine heavy engineering most almost probably all of them engineers everyone is an engineer right yeah i mean it's so fun to work on a dev product as an engineer like you know you're your own customer and you're uh and you're building it so it's it's kind of the most fun uh gig i've had so you had in that slide deck where you raised 3.2 you had a goal sort of get the first product out hire a certain number of quality of people any other metrics you put in that deck that you're you know beating yeah i also i mean also just like you know get uh initial customers on board right that's part of this thing it's like we're good we know we're hitting the right thing when certain companies come along and are interested and we have uh just started that process over the last maybe two months where we thought the product is good enough to move forward and actually put this in other engineers hands right we've been using it for six months but the truth is like as a dev tool like it's gotta work it cannot fail even once because uh your customers are gonna be really upset uh if they can't line code right so we wanna be the thing that's always making things better and not getting in your way so you know with a real focus on quality making sure that thing just works i'm going to ask the engineer to put on his sales hat for a second what you've done before but how are you building that wait list um we are reaching out to the community right we're finding uh engineers uh traditional means of just like you know talking about what we're doing to our friends and you know colleagues but also going on to discord channel slack community groups being like hey is anyone running into these problems right these problems are not things we're making up well you know old cloth these are pre-existing issues that um have had just poor solutions so um you know some of the stuff is inbound and just like lucky people come across it but otherwise i know we're reaching out to the community to be like hey look at this situation we can turn this thing on to make your world a little better you know you want to give it a try and go from there ellie what's the can you name a discord channel that you think you're going to get a lot of customers from over time uh you know i don't have good track of it right now on my uh i it's not one of these things i don't keep track of the names it's more about the technology spaces right we're looking a lot we have a tremendous value in the c plus plus community right now because some of the stuff we do uh running certain analyzers like clang tidy is basically impossible to set up uh on your own uh without a tremendous investment of effort and time and we just basically do it straight out of the box so those are some of the cool communities and that really leads us a lot to robotics companies uh anyone that's doing machine learning or robotics is has a lot of work going on in c plus plus uh and uh we are you know talking to a lot of those companies early on were you able to do something non-standard in terms of valuation on the 3.2 you raise you know most people are selling 20 in a precedent round like this pre-revenue but you have an interesting track record are we able to basically raise that at less to less dilutive around i don't think we'd talk to those numbers specifically but i think we did very well can you say sub 20 dilution or no uh i would wouldn't talk to those numbers but i would say we did great what do you define as great maybe not your own but if someone else told you hey we did this what would you define us great um yeah i'd say like you know the target what you're looking for uh i think you know we are four founder co-founders that put the thing together there's four of you the first one okay wow you guys just say you know what i want to we don't want to debate this we're just going to do 25 each and move on that's yeah that's how we did it we're an equal team of uh group because i think you know what we're going to build is so large so interesting that i'd rather do it you know as a team all together that's really like how we operate our engineering focus as well did you have co-founders at your first company i did yes yeah yeah four no that was just one okay and it was all smooth the whole way or did you or he get less or she get less engaged and no like we i mean it's a startup right it's hard so they're like they're bumps on the road with any startup right it's like the best and worst job you could ever have i would say uh but i'm so glad to be doing it again and yeah i think that you know with anything uh you know there was a good friend of mine from high school we started the company together we ran it together we ran it inside youtube after we sold it so um you know long history together all right last question sir before we wrap up with the famous five obviously you have to figure out and you got to throw up some kind of pricing paywall to get your first customers how do you think about what price point to go to market with uh really looking out there what uh what our competitors looking at in a similar space right i'd say we don't have any direct competitors but there are definitely price points of like what is the debt going to cost per seat for the service what do we think we're offering and when we actually like start to charge money for the service as well right i think that um you know github and other companies before us have led pretty good models like show that the value is really there before you're trying to extract money from customers um i think that there is uh so a lot of cases will be offering you know companies you know very very generous you know trial periods just make sure that they're getting the value out of it i think the stats and the sas offering and the web will kind of show you how things are getting better and better and your repositories uh we'll just you know lead companies down the road they'll be willing to pay right engineers are insanely expensive right uh they're only getting more expensive and if you can return even like two hours of productivity per engineer per month you've you know paid your uh paid your weight easily all right elliot on that note let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book um well right now i'm thinking about dune because i just uh watched through the movie i thought it was beautiful so i'll go with that one but i have no particular favorite book number two is there a ceo or founder you're following or studying um i you know i probably follow the work of like elon all the time i'm just like fascinated by someone who can hit multiple industries and really like conquer them and really think about those things i know i can't say for him as a person or whatever but i like from changing the world amazing number three what's your favorite besides your own what's your favorite online tool for building trunk linear linear yeah very cool number four how many hours of sleep to get every night uh five and a half five and a half okay and situation married single kids i'm married i have three kids holy mackerel you're very busy then all right and how old are you i'm 42 42 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um all the uh all the things you're going to build a lot of them are just going to get thrown away and that's okay guys it's okay to throw stuff away he's building trunk.io to solve his own pain-pointing experience at uber he experienced at google he experienced at his first startup director now building us 3.2 million raised earlier this year now with team 11 hoping to go to market here in the next call it two to four months with the technology again called trunk i'm not an engineer so i'm not gonna act like i know exactly what it is but what i would tell you it sounds like it makes engineering teams significantly more effective check it out at trunk dot io ellie thanks for taking us to the top yeah thanks for uh talking to me today had a great time one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and 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