#GlueCon 2014 Notes: What Makes a Great Developer Company? – Ethan Kurzweil, Bessemer Venture Partners
Keynote: What Makes a Great Developer Company? – Ethan Kurzweil, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Why the time is now for the developer-driven business
- Developers traditionally have been at the bottom, but now at the top of companies (tech and non-tech)
- Microsoft has 2X the cashflow of Google today due to a focus on developers (servers and tools division growing)
- Estimated 18 million developers, half in the US
- Developers are now making spending decisions (The New Kingmakers), not just IT decision makers
- PayPal is now focusing on developers
- “Developers are a market” – Jeff Lawson
- Developer business models are strong. Why? A good customer acquisition cost (CAC) -to- lifetime value ratio (LVR)
- What makes a great developer-driven company?
- The seven commandments of building the biggest business possible (or at least most of them)
- 1. Deliver a metered service – lowers the barrier to adoption (pennies to try), bill goes up based on value provided (e.g. Twilio)
- 2. Your revenue grows with their business – if their revenue goes up, they spend more with you (e.g. DropBox on AWS)
- 3. Replaces something that companies already pay for (e.g. AWS, Heroku)
- 4. Offers an amazing experience (the developer experience/”DX”)
- 5. Developers love it and express their love across their communities – Twilio opens every board meeting with 5-6 tweets about staff
- 6. Exhibits strong network effects – doesn’t have to be viral, but does have a feedback loop or economies of scale when the network grows (e.g. StackOverflow)
- 7. Eliminates the need for non-core skillset that no one enjoys (e.g. Stripe removing the need to build out the whole payment processing workflow)
- 8. (Bonus!) Democratizes development to those without development skills (e.g. Optimizely)