How Trunk Technologies Raised $3.25M from Andreessen Horowitz to Help Engineers Land Code Faster (Interview with Cofounder Eli Schleifer)

Introduction and Guest Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Eli Schleifer. He is today working on a company called trunk dot which helps you land code faster. In a previous life, he was a an autonomy staff engine software engineer at Uber, and before that, was a staff technical lead manager at YouTube. Eli, you ready to take us to the top?

What Is Trunk and Who Is the Customer

Eli Schleifer

00:17>> Let's do it.

Nathan Latka

00:17Alright, man. So so what is trunk, and who are who's buying this? Who are you selling to?

Eli Schleifer

00:21>> So trunk is a dev tools 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, landing code gets really hard. It's tedious. I kind of describe it as like death by a thousand paper cuts. Know? Every time you're trying to actually do

00:44>> something, you know, you run into some weird little snag and, you know, trunk is all about, like, smoothing out all those snags and making the flow simple because, you know, have you been at Google? 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 the size of Slack or others that have hundreds of engineers and doing work there is

The Problem at Uber and the Origin of Trunk

Eli Schleifer

01:06>> very hard. We had 600 engineers at Uber ATG. We had 30 engineers supporting them as dev tools, dev experience space. And landing code was really hard. I ran an organization of the Autonomy Systems theme. Part of our goal was to basically assess why are we not landing code faster? Why are we not 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.

01:30>> It was landing my code through the PR gates was too hard. That set off a flag in my head. Like, we should really go address this problem.

What Google Got Right About Dev Tools

Nathan Latka

01:39So 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 do they know that you others didn't?

Eli Schleifer

01:48>> I think it's an investment thing. Right? So building proper dev tools, like, requires a tremendous amount of investment in time and energy and focus. And even talking to people inside Google, that came about over many, many years of work and focus. Basically, every time something stopped working because it got too big, they would go and pour resources at it. And I think that the right way to do this is as a company to take on that

Building Dev Tools as a Product, Not Firefighting

Eli Schleifer

02:09>> responsibility to approach this from a product perspective and not just do firefighting, but to be like, Okay, if we're going to build this as a product and not just as a tool, not just as a set of batch scripts, how would you actually go do this? That's really where trunk started at. We're basically saying, What are the core pieces of repository and a modern organizational repo that everyone should have and everyone keeps building themselves over and

02:30>> over again? How can we do that right that you don't miss all these little edge cases because there are so many edge cases in that space? And it's funny, we were able to hire a lot of engineers really quickly because as we talked to engineers, Oh yeah, I see this problem all the time. I've been at three different companies where it was just a total mess. And I think, you know, we're on to something something here.

Nathan Latka

02:52So so if people are listening going, I wanna try Eli's tool right now, I mean, what are customers paying you on average to use the technology?

First Product: Trunk Check Universal Linter

Eli Schleifer

02:58>> So the product is still, like it's a prelaunch. You know, we're basically, like, we're gonna hit our MVP fairly soon, but you can go and try out our private alpha right now. You can go to trunk.io. We'll take your links to our documentation. You can install it and start running it yourselves. And really, what you're going to see is our first product is what we call trunk check. It's a universal linter that runs on every machine

03:20>> and every user's box. And from our perspective, every single language, every technology in a modern repository should be checked for static analysis, formatting, linting,

03:31>> the same exact way in every single engineer's box. And we see this as a major problem. Often companies will turn on analyzers for a single language, but really they're using ten, twenty different technologies. They have some of their stuff for CloudFormation, they have some of stuff 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

03:53>> where universality for security and formatting and readability and correct approach to software design, should be applied to all those places across the board. And that's what we do. We basically turn on the tool, you're on the 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. And that's like a huge step function compared to what's out there in the market today.

Nathan Latka

04:18When did you write the first line of code for trunk?

Eli Schleifer

04:21>> We started development in January.

Nathan Latka

04:23Okay. This year. So you've been at it for, call it, ten months, eleven months?

Eli Schleifer

04:27>> Yeah.

Funding: $3.25M from Andreessen Horowitz

Nathan Latka

04:28How have you funded yourself to date? Obviously, you're pre revenue.

Eli Schleifer

04:31>> Yeah. So we raised we raised money from Andreessen Horowitz. We closed that round back in January.

Nathan Latka

04:37Okay. How much did you raise?

Eli Schleifer

04:39>> We raised 3.25, I believe.

Why Raise VC Instead of Preselling Customers

Nathan Latka

04:43And and why so I'm gonna make some assumptions about you personally. So, you know Sure. 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 a 100% equity, you know, pay others and do that at the beginning? Why'd you wanna go down the VC route right away?

Eli Schleifer

05:01>> I think that with VC, you have great support for partnership. Right? You have the ability to reach out to other companies that will be like your first customers. They are gonna make the you know, to help you also scale the business really quickly. This is not a business that's going to be funded and kind of bootstrapped really small. Because as I described, the problem we're going after is big. As soon as we get the right seed

05:21>> working, it's gonna be about, like, building a whole suite of services and solutions to really make the bring kind of that Google quality dev experience dev tools to everybody. And to build that is not gonna 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 gonna require real capital to build it correctly.

Nathan Latka

05:40Mhmm. I'm just saying, I totally understand the need for capital, but you can get capital from investors or can get them from pre selling customer contracts. Right? So you've chosen to get capital from the the sort of VC world. I'm just, I guess, why couldn't you presale customers on this idea so that you can get some of their money to build this this with this with upfront?

Eli Schleifer

05:56>> I mean, if you're gonna say, what are the different approaches? It's a lot easier to go raise money from VC than it is to go and presale customers on a product. That's, like, you know, a straight up answer on that one.

Nathan Latka

06:06Well, 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 presell customers. So we'll chalk that up to a unique advantage that you have.

Eli Schleifer

06:17>> Fair enough. Obviously, you know, there there's privilege from being a second time second time around.

Previous Company Directr and Sale to YouTube

Nathan Latka

06:22Oh, is this your second business as well? Yes. Oh, what was your first company?

Eli Schleifer

06:26>> My first company is called Directr. We started that back in 2011. I was in the mobile video space and ran that for three years and sold that to YouTube.

Nathan Latka

06:36Oh, super cool. Super cool. Oh, sort of film space. Did you bootstrap that one or raise there too?

Eli Schleifer

06:41>> That one we raised as well. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

06:43Yep. Yep. Yep. Cool. From from from same folks at Andreessen or no?

Eli Schleifer

06:47>> No. No. That was a that was a Boston firm we had from Next View.

Nathan Latka

06:51Okay. Very cool. Alright. So so where does 3,200,000 get you to, you think?

What the Raise Funds: First Two to Three Products

Eli Schleifer

06:56>> I think that's gonna get us, like, to our first, you know, two, three products out the door. Right? So we're gonna have this check tool. We have a couple other products we'll be announcing in q one, and it'll 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

07:14>> 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 it is.

Nathan Latka

07:23What are some of those numbers, Eli?

Team Size and Hiring Plan

Eli Schleifer

07:25>> It's ten months to this first product. Right? And that is, like, basically where we're we're sitting at. Our hiring plan has also, like, been, you know, consistent. Hiring inside this environment is really, really difficult. Right? Any engineers

Nathan Latka

07:36How many how many folks today?

Eli Schleifer

07:38>> We're 11 right now. We'll be 13 in January.

Nathan Latka

07:42I imagine heavy engineering, most almost probably all of them engineers.

Eli Schleifer

07:45>> Everyone is an engineer. Right?

Nathan Latka

07:46Yeah. I mean, it's so

Eli Schleifer

07:47>> fun to work on a dev product as an engineer. Like, you know, you're your own customer and you're and you're building it. So it's it's kind of the most fun gig I've had.

Nathan Latka

07:56So 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?

Eli Schleifer

08:06>> Yeah. I also I mean, also, just like, you know, getting initial customers on board. Right? That's part of this thing. It's like we're gonna we know we're we're hitting the right thing when certain companies come along and are interested. And we have 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. We've been using it for six months.

08:25>> But the truth is, as a dev tool, it's got to work. It cannot fail even once because your customer is going be really upset if they can't land code. So we want to be the thing that's always making things better and not getting in your way. So, you we've a real focus on quality, making sure that thing just works.

Building the Wait List: Discord, Slack and the C++ Community

Nathan Latka

08:41I'm gonna ask the engineer to put on his sales hat for a second, which you've done before, but how are you building that wait list?

Eli Schleifer

08:47>> We are reaching out to the community. Right? We're finding engineers traditional traditional means of just talking about what we're doing to our friends and colleagues, but also going on to Discord channels, Slack community groups, being like, hey. Is anyone running into these problems? Right? These problems are not things we're making up full cloth. These are preexisting issues that have had just poor solutions. So, you know, some of the stuff is inbound. I'm just like, lucky people

09:11>> come across it, but otherwise, I'd never reach out to the community to be like, hey. Look at this situation. We can turn this thing on and make your world a little better. You You wanna give it a try and go from there.

Nathan Latka

09:19Eli, what's the can you name a Discord channel that you think you're gonna get a lot of customers from over time?

Eli Schleifer

09:24>> You know, I don't have good track of it right now on my I it's kind of one of these things I don't keep track of the names. It's more about the technology spaces where we're looking a lot. We have tremendous value in the c plus plus community right now because some of the stuff we do running certain analyzers like Clang Tidy is basically impossible to set up on your own without a tremendous investment of effort and

09:44>> 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. Anyone that's doing machine learning or robotics has a lot of work going on in C plus plus and we are, you know, talking to a lot of those companies early on.

Round Terms, Dilution and Four Equal Cofounders

Nathan Latka

10:00Mhmm. Were you able to do something nonstandard in terms of valuation on the 3.2 you raised? You know, most people are selling 20% in a pre seed round like this pre revenue, but you have an interesting track record. Were you able to basically raise that at less dilute in a less dilutive round?

Eli Schleifer

10:12>> I don't think we'd talk to those numbers specifically, but I think we did very well.

Nathan Latka

10:16Can you say sub 20% dilution or no?

Eli Schleifer

10:19>> I wouldn't talk to those numbers, but I would say we did great.

Nathan Latka

10:23What do you define as great? Maybe not your own, but if someone else told you, hey. We did this. What would you define as great?

Eli Schleifer

10:30>> Yeah. I'd say, like, under, you know, the target where you're looking for. I I think, you know, we are we're four founder cofounders that put the thing together.

Nathan Latka

10:36There's four of you?

Eli Schleifer

10:37>> Four of mackerel.

Nathan Latka

10:38Okay. Wow. You guys just say, you know what? We don't wanna debate this. We're just gonna do 25 each and move on?

Eli Schleifer

10:45>> That's, yeah, that's how we did it. We're an equal team of 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 altogether. That's really, like, how we operate our engineering folks as well.

Nathan Latka

10:58Mhmm. Did you have cofounders at your first company?

Eli Schleifer

11:00>> I did. Yes.

Nathan Latka

11:01Yeah. Yeah. Four?

Eli Schleifer

11:03>> No. That was just one.

Nathan Latka

11:04Okay. And it was all smooth the whole way, or did you or he get less or she get less engaged in?

Eli Schleifer

11:10>> No. Like, we I mean, it's a startup. Right? It's hard. You know? So they're, like, there are bumps in the road with any startup. Right? It's, like, the best and worst job you could ever have, I would say. But I'm so glad to be doing it again. And, yeah, I think that, you know, with anything, you know, there was a good friend of mine from high school. We started the company together. We ran it together. We

11:28>> ran it inside YouTube after we sold it. So, you know, long history together.

Pricing Philosophy and Go-to-Market Approach

Nathan Latka

11:33Alright. Last question, sir, before we wrap up with the famous five. Obviously, you have to figure out and you gotta 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?

Eli Schleifer

11:42>> Really looking at what what our competitors looking at in a similar space. I'd say we don't have any direct competitors, but there are definitely price points of, like, what is it gonna cost per seat for the service? What do we think we're offering? And when do we actually, like, start to charge money for the service as well? Right? I think that, GitHub and other companies before us have led pretty good models of show that the value

12:04>> is really there before you're trying to extract money from customers. I think that there is so in a lot of cases, we'll be offering companies very, very generous trial periods, just to make sure that they're getting the value out of it. And I think the stats and the SaaS offering and the web that will kind of show you how things are getting better and better in your repositories will just lead companies down the road that they'll

12:26>> be willing to pay. Engineers are insanely expensive. Right? 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 paid your way easily.

Famous Five: Books, Sleep, and Life Lessons

Nathan Latka

12:39Alright, Eli. On that note, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?

Eli Schleifer

12:44>> Well, right now, I'm thinking about Dune because I just watched through the movie, and I thought it was beautiful. So I'll go with that one, but I have no particular favorite book.

Nathan Latka

12:51Number two, is there a CEO or founder you're following or studying?

Eli Schleifer

12:56>> 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, you know, I can't say for him as a person or whatever, but I like, from changing the world, amazing.

Nathan Latka

13:12Number three, what's your favorite besides your own, what's your favorite online tool for building trunk?

Eli Schleifer

13:16>> Linear.

Nathan Latka

13:17Linear?

Eli Schleifer

13:19>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

13:19Very cool. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Eli Schleifer

13:24>> Five and a half.

13:25>> Five and a half.

Nathan Latka

13:26Okay. And situation, married, single, kids?

Eli Schleifer

13:28>> I'm married. I have three kids.

Nathan Latka

13:30Holy mackerel. You're very busy then. Alright. And how old are you?

Eli Schleifer

13:35>> I am 42.

13:36>> 42.

Nathan Latka

13:37Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Eli Schleifer

13:42>> All the all the things you're gonna build, a lot of them are just gonna get thrown away. That's okay.

Nathan Latka

13:49Guys, it's okay to throw stuff away. He's building trunk. To solve his own pain point he experienced at Uber, experienced at Google, experienced at his first startup Directr, now building us 3,200,000 raised earlier this year now with team eleven, helping to go to market here in the next call it two to four months with a technology again called trunk. I'm not an engineer, so I'm not gonna act I like know exactly what it is. But what

14:09I would tell you is it sounds like it makes engineering teams significantly more effective. Check it out at trunk.io. Eli, thanks for taking us to top.

Eli Schleifer

14:15>> Yeah. Thanks for talking to me today. Had a great time.

Nathan Latka

14:20One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM

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