#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)
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)