Ben: Hello, and welcome to PodRocket today. I'm here with Ramiro Berrelleza, who is the founder and CEO of Okteto. How are you? Romero B.: Hi, Ben. Great. Thanks for having me here. Very excited to talk to you. Ben: Yeah. Excited to speak with you and learn more about Okteto. So maybe you could give us a quick overview about what you do. Romero B.: Yeah. So I am the founder and CEO of Okteto. At Okteto we are building a platform to help software teams, launch dev environments into the cloud. Our whole goal is to make it easy for developers to write modern applications by moving all the heaviest stuff, services, databases, deployments into the cloud, while they get to use all the local tools that they love, like their IDEs, their scripts, and all those things. Ben: Got it. So who's the target user, someone who currently has kind of legacy infrastructure on-prem and wants to move that to a cloud provider like Amazon or Google? Is that the right way to think about it? Romero B.: No. The way to think about Okteto is more like our target kind of user is anybody who's building, developing a full stack application. You have a backend, you have a frontend. Once you have multiple pieces, it gets really hard to run all things manually in your local machine. You have to start a database, run your API, get your frontend. So those kind of users, it's kind of our focus and our users love the fact that with Okteto, they get a UI where you click one button, launch, that launches all these services automatically for you in the cloud, so you don't have to run anything locally. And then we give you the tools to pretty much connect your IDE. You like VS Code, you keep using VS Code, your source code is there. You write one line of code, save the file, Okteto sends that to your remote environment almost instantly and you see it there. So it's got the same experience that you normally have writing code locally, but without having to run all these other things that they just get in the way. Ben: I see. So normally if I'm building my full stack application and I have my Postgres database running locally, and whatever other infrastructure I have, those would all be running locally. I'd have my dev server, everything running locally, with Okteto it makes it easy to run all of those pieces of infrastructure in the cloud but then as I'm kind of editing my app, making changes, it's pushing the code to the cloud and continuously kind of integrating it in a cloud dev environment. Is that... Romero B.: Exactly. Perfect. And you would call it sometimes the fastest kind of F5 experience, because one of the things that we like and we use it internally a lot is... You know how when you're writing a React app locally, you write some code and you have this hardware loader, you immediately see the changes, we give you that, but for everything, your database, your backend, your frontend. And especially for kind of bigger cloud, what they call cloud-native applications, they may have not three services, like we have customers with applications that span 20, 30 different components. Romero B.: So that's when it kind of gets super interesting, that you can run all this in the back, have your IDE, have this fast experience because that's kind of fundamental. I want to write my code and I want to see the changes. And we give them that across the entire application. So, you know things work end to end. You're always testing everything. Instead of having to use mocks with your API, you can just use the real thing from day one, and that's something that we hope makes developers go faster. And so far our users love it a lot, and now we're in that process of getting it to more and more people. Ben: And what does it look like to actually define the pieces of infrastructure that a developer needs for their application? Do you sit on top of something like a Terraform Helm like that stack, or can you use other infrastructure as code tools or do you have your own system for doing that? Romero B.: Yeah. So, we sit on top of... From an infra perspective, we sit on top of Kubernetes. But we're building this layer to make that completely transparent to you. So today, if you have a script with Terraform, Docker Compose, Helm, even just a Dockerfile, all those things work with Okteto. And I have been a developer my entire career, so part of our goals with Okteto, and we have it on our website, is it works with your own tools. I don't want people to have to rewrite their applications for them to be able to benefit from Okteto. Romero B.: It's, "Hey, bring your own tools, bring the tools that you love, and we'll make it work with Okteto." And right now Docker Compose and Helm are two of the most popular that people use with Okteto. But we have a few companies that they don't even use containers, but they solve their dev experience of Okteto and they just use it that way and it works well for them as well. So long term, our vision is to build this platform for every type of development. But today, if you go to our website, you'll see that it's very focused on this kind of full stack cloud-native sort of applications. Ben: And do you support any of the major public cloud environments or is that abstracted away from the user? Like my app's hosted with Okteto? I'm sure under the hood you use Amazon or Google, or something, Microsoft, whatever, but, which is the right way to think about it. Do I continue to use my current cloud or Okteto the hosting provider? Romero B.: So we offer both. What we've seen is that most of our users, they do like the fact that they don't have to choose, they don't have to think about it. They just trust Okteto for, "Hey, my DevInfra runs in Okteto. That's where my dev environments run." And we're talking dev environments for one or hundreds of engineers, right? It could be an entire company. Some of the more traditional enterprises, they want more control. So we also have a version of Okteto that you can install on your own cloud provider. So you can get the same benefits that you get with Okteto but on your own private cloud. And we support, as you said, all the major cloud providers, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Digitalocean, CBO. Anywhere where Kubernetes is available, you can install Okteto and then give your team this kind of high level dev experience that we're building. Ben: And one of the things you talk about on the website as the benefits of using Okteto is it makes it easier to preview kind of a version of your applications under development. So can you tell us a bit more about that? Romero B.: Yeah. To me, one of the reasons why we build Okteto is something that we saw. I have two co-founders, the three of us, we were working on developer tools for a while. And kind of building SaaS, is that when you're writing code is really hard to understand the implications of your changes, once you think of the entire application, right? Because one service, two services, yeah. I know how they interact. I know what's broken. Once you have 10, 20, it's really hard. Even if you look at the code, it's really hard to predict, is this change going to break something four services apart? So our idea here is we're going to give you this capability to with one command, one button, you deploy this realistic environment that has all your services. And now this is something that, because it's running on the cloud, you can share with anybody else. Romero B.: So you can just take the link of your environment that you have live, that your code is synchronized to, and you can send that to anybody in your team to get this really fast feedback. Imagine I'm writing a new feature, I add a new, I don't know, a new image on the frontend, and I have this live link that I can send you and you can check it out. And even before I commit my code, you can say, "You know what? That's not what we meant. It's supposed to be this other thing." And then we can iterate on that. And then once the code is ready and I commit it and I push it to GitHub, we also have an integration, what we're calling preview environments, which is the ability to then create another environment that's kind of attached to your pull request or merge request if you're in GitLab, and then anybody on your team can see these. Romero B.: And this is similar to what Netlify does for frontend. We're doing it for the entire application, and it's really cool because this is enabling lot of our users this cool scenario where people who normally are not part of the feedback loop, people who they might not be comfortable reviewing code. Now they can give you feedback because they can go click on this link, see the entire application running. And then we have customers where they're designers, their QA, their growth team, even the founders, sales people can now give feedback cause they can see the application running end to end. Romero B.: So that's one of those things that we didn't really expect when we started Okteto, but then our customers show us, "Hey, we can do all these cool things." And that really enables a whole new level of collaboration as you write software that before was limited to just developers and just those who were familiar with your code base. So that for me is one of the most exciting, kind of new workflows that we're helping unlock for especially once you go to big companies where you might have multiple teams. Ben: So tell me a bit more about what's on the roadmap. I'm curious first in the shorter term, and then we can circle back to kind of long term, because I'm also curious about that. But short term, what can folks look forward to? Romero B.: Yeah. So short term, we have a lot of really cool things coming up, really short term. So DockerCon is next week. KubeCon, which is the conference for Kubernetes is in a couple of weeks. So we have a lot of really cool new things coming. One of the things that we're going to be focusing a lot on short term is in having a better integration with Docker Compose. We discovered last year, as we talked to customers, that developers really like Docker and Docker Compose as a way to define their applications. So that's something we build, we have a native integration with Docker Compose. And then as we talk to them and as we talk to Docker, Docker is about to launch. They already announced this extension model for Docker desktop. So you're going to be able to install Okteto on Docker desktop. Romero B.: There's going to be a button for you to launch your Docker composed file, and you're going to be able to kind of launch... You're going to be able to choose what containers you run locally, what you want to send remote. And what makes me very excited about this is that this is kind of part of our vision of making all this dev infrastructure completely transparent to you. It's like "Hey, I'm going to run all the heavy stuff remotely. Some of the stuff I need locally, I run it locally and I don't have to think about it. It just runs. Some in Okteto, some in Docker." And you have this amazing experience that was telling you earlier of write code and see the changes. That is something that's coming that I'm very excited about. Romero B.: Other things kind of more long term is, we are building this dev experience that started with cloud-native applications, very focused on microservices and containers. As we learn from our audience, as we learn from our users, people want this for other types of applications. So we're going to start building towards this vision of dev environments that cover everything you need as a developer; microservices, third party services, cloud services. We've been talking to some other companies to do integrations with other developer tools. For us, our vision is one click, you launch your dev environment and that's going to include everything. Imagine that it will provision a Stripe account for you and set up your webhooks. Romero B.: It will create a database on MongoDB's Cloud service on Atlas and give you the credentials. It will integrate with something like Vault for secrets and give you this kind of holistic experience where it's one click, everything is running, you don't have to think about it. And you can just focus on building value and this kind of high level... Whatever it means for your business. Some of our users are kind of already doing this, building it themselves, which is the most exciting thing for me to see people building things on top of what we're building. So we're going to take some of those ideas and bring it into us. Romero B.: And the other thing is, Okteto is built on top of open source. We are all contributors to open source. We use open source every day. So we're going to push harder for Okteto to be a better fit in open source. Like our CLI you can use with any Kubernetes cluster now, fully open source so we'll be doing a lot more of that. And it's all about engaging with developers, learning from them, helping them in ways we can and together build this next generation of what we believe a dev experience for modern applications should be like. Ben: I'm curious, taking a step back, what led you to found this company and why work on this problem space? Romero B.: Yeah. That's a funny question because it's one of those things that, as I was going through my career I didn't plan for this, but as I look back, it's like, "Hey, it kind of makes sense that I ended up here." So I started my career... I'm from Mexico. I went to school in Mexico and then I moved to the US once I got my CS degree. I was lucky enough that Microsoft used to recruit in my school so I got a job. I moved to Redmond in Washington state. And by sheer luck ended up working on the team that was building Azure, before it was called Azure kind of the early days. Romero B.: So from kind of the beginning of my career, I was exposed to kind of this challenge of, hey as you build cloud native applications, as you build, I call it this kind of a data transition when you go from something that runs on your laptop to something that's much bigger. I was kind of exposed to it early on, so I kind of saw all these problems. Internally my team was building some tooling that looks a lot like Okteto, but very focused on the needs of the Azure team. So it kind of gave me that first taste of, "Hey the world is changing. The way we're building applications is changing. We're no longer building things that run on a single machine. We're building things that are meant for cloud scale." Romero B.: So it gave me that early taste of that, but also in parallel how important tools are to empower teams and allow them to do a lot, go faster, build bigger things. So Microsoft happened, I met two really good friends of mine there, still friends to this day. They moved to Bay Area to start a company, a startup called Elastic Box. I moved with them. I was one of the first engineers. Funny enough I met my two now co-founders there became really good friends. Back then we were kind of building more like a DevOps kind of solution, but that also kind of gave us this experience on why automation is important. Romero B.: So after that, I went to Atlassian was part of a big team. Internally we saw all of the challenges of, "Hey, as you scale software teams you need better tools. You need abstraction." So if you put together those kind of three experiences, when I decided to leave Atlassian and Pablo, Ramon, and I decided, "Hey, let's go work together and build something fun." It kind of became an obvious choice of, "Hey, we've been seeing this problem for the last five, eight years. We've all lived it. It's very obvious it's there." And it just felt natural for us to build this. It was kind of cliche, but we were building it for ourselves. Romero B.: We were kind of building this tool that we all wished existed five years ago that would've helped us in different teams. And it was good friends and a space that I was very passionate about, building something that we knew it had legs. And it's been three years since then we went through Y Combinator, we got that initial funding and that initial support, and that really help us kind of make this transition from this idea to this, "Hey, there's a business here. There's a product. There's an audience." And that's been the case since then, and I'm super happy about this. Romero B.: I'm very passionate about the developer tools and team productivity. It's what I've done all my career so it just felt like that. And it's been a great experience so far and the company's growing, we raised our Series A back in January, so a few months ago and now things are going pretty well. Big team. Now we have 30 people all over the world and it's an exciting time for developer tools. Developers are everywhere. Every company's building software as I'm sure in LogRocket, and it's just amazing. Ben: Yeah. Certainly can attest to the fact that every company on earth is either a software company already or becoming a software company or building software in some capacity. So I'm always excited to see the folks that sign up for LogRocket. It ranges from kind of the typical software companies to companies that I'm like, "Wow, I had no idea you had hundreds of developers building software, and you're more of a legacy company or a government agency or things like that." Romero B.: Yeah. That feeling of when you get this email from a company that you had no idea they had a big team building software. And they're like, "Yeah, we have 500 people in this government place." "Oh, that's really cool." We are LogRocket users by the way. We love the tool, we use it every day. It's one of those tools that's like, we could not do any.. If we didn't have it would be so much harder to figure out when we have issue with the frontend. So it's definitely a testament to all these companies building tools for all types of developers. That's not easy, and it's a challenge that we have today, but I think it's something worth fixing because we're going to have more and more developers and they're going to need tools. Ben: Yeah. Certainly. I'm curious, you mentioned you went through, Y Combinator, what was your experience there? Is it something you would recommend for other folks building companies particularly in the developer tool space? Romero B.: Yes. Our experience was great. We got... Like everything, right, you need a mix of being ready, but also good luck. We got admitted to YC, we joined YC very early in the life cycle of our company. We had an open source project. We had some interest, couple of customers but nothing serious. We didn't really think about Okteto as a company back then. It was more like this idea. So YC really helped us as first time founders to make that transition from this idea to, no, what you're building is this something that could be gigantic. And kind of have that ambition, have that mentality and kind of show it to you that it's possible. Romero B.: One of the coolest things of YC is that I think now you also get it through a Startup School and through the YouTube channel is, you get access to all these people who have done great things before. And you get to talk to them and asking questions and kind of helps normalize the fact that, hey, it's people working hard. They have vision, they have dreams, they have to learn the skills. But that was great. Especially, I've been in the Bay Area for a while, but my co-founders didn't have that much experience living in San Francisco. So I think it helps kind of get into the culture of iterate fast, build quickly, try new things. It was great. I mean, I've heard mixed experiences. Romero B.: Definitely, this is my one time I've gone through YC. So my experience was very positive. I do recommend it for especially people who are not from the startup ecosystem. If you're making a transition from a big company to startup to be a founder, if you don't have a big network of founders on the VC world, it's definitely worth it. Just the founder network, it's amazing. Being a founder, especially a CEO, sometimes it can feel lonely because it's one role you've never done before. You're always figuring out things as you go. And having access to other people who are going through the same, and even if it's just to kind of have dinner and kind of complain about the same things, it helps a lot from the emotional aspect of it and also from the function of asking for advice. Romero B.: I learned and it's one of those hacks that knowing how to ask for advice and having access to people who've done what you did before is practice. It saves you months of decision making and getting it wrong. And YC from my experience excels, that community really excels at that. Everybody is super available and that's something that just by joining YC, it kind of unlocks that community, and it is an unfair advantage. I think beyond the money and the brand recognition, just kind of having access to that knowhow, it makes it a little bit easier than the competition. Emily: Hey, this is Emily. One of the producers for PodRocket. I'm so glad you're enjoying this episode. You probably hear this from lots of other podcasts, but we really do appreciate our listeners. Without you there would be no podcast. And because of that, it would really help if you could follow us on Apple podcasts so we can continue to bring you conversations with great devs like Evan You and Rich Harris. In return, we'll send you some awesome PodRocket stickers. So check out the show notes on this episode and follow the link to claim your stickers as a small thanks for following us on Apple podcasts. All right. Back to the show. Ben: I'm curious, how you're thinking about, or how do you currently approach finding customers and users. It sounds like you're maybe using open source community a bit as part of your strategy, but curious to hear a bit more around the details of your acquisition strategy. Romero B.: Yeah. So from day one, it was very clear to us as developers that developers learn from other developers, they learn from content from open source. So it was natural to us to start Okteto as an open source project. The first thing we did was we went to the GitHub, created the repo, it was open source from the beginning. We didn't do the, let's be shy out it. We just put it there. At the beginning, nobody cared. We leveraged a lot, the community. One of the things that... Before Okteto both Pablo, my co-founder and I, our CTO, were very involved in the Docker and kind of Kubernetes community. So that helped, because we knew people there, we had people. We went to meet ups and talk about the idea of Okteto even before we had anything, just to see if, "Hey, is this something that makes sense?" Romero B.: So building open source helped a lot in the kind of getting those first end customers or users, they're main customers. These people are willing to try your solution and tell you "This makes no sense." Or, "Hey, there's promise here. I kind of get what you're trying to do." That was really cool. The first couple of years for us, three co-founders all engineers, technical background, not that much in marketing and sales, kind of made us focus a lot on content. Content I think for developer tools is great. I'm so glad that we spent all those hours in the early days just writing blog posts, tutorials on Hacker News, on Reddit, on Dev2, just talking about Okteto and our vision. Because even though we didn't got that much kind of traction in those early days, those things are still there and people find them and people find them later on. Romero B.: I went on talks, gave meetups, and then years later, someone be like, "Oh yeah, I remember you were talking about Okteto two years ago and it didn't make sense but now it does." So that helped a lot. As we understood the problem better as we wrote better content that draw, I think our first 10, 20 serious customers, five, six figure customers came from just content. Now, as we raised more money as we're building now kind of going to our bigger companies. Now we're moving into also doing motivational marketing and sales, enterprise sales, outbound. But definitely we will always have content and developer outreach because for anybody building developer tools, it's fundamental. Developers will not use something they don't see value in. Romero B.: The world of having this salesperson, just go to CTO and then the CTO force a tool on an entire team. They're gone. It's all about influence. You put the tool, developers see it. They try it. If they like it, they will adopt it. And if they like, it's spreads like wildfire. Developers love new tools and when they see something that's valuable... Like we've seen some of our customers and it's super exciting when you see them go from, there's five people in this company. And then the next week there's 20. And then two months later there's 200 people using Okteto or whatever you're building, right? Romero B.: That only happens if they see value. So definitely content, onboarding, making it clear what problem you solve, making it easy to use, it's key. For us one of our initial hacks was, it was important for us that anybody could use our open source CLI without asking for permission. Which meant Okteto needs to work with regular user level access. You don't need to be an Infra admin to install Okteto. Because if you do that, then you have to do extra step where your user needs to go and talk to the... And it works for different tools. It's a different process. Romero B.: But for us, we felt like the single binary, you can download, you run Okteto app and as long as you have a common disclosure somewhere, it works. Helped a lot with those kind of first... And those first customers are super passionate. They would write blog posts about it, talk about it with their friends. So, we kind of stumbled into it, we didn't know better and it worked well for us. And now as I talk to peers and other founder friends, definitely I do advise talking about your product dev tools, writing blog posts, putting them on Twitter, Reddit. It pays multiple times. Ben: So you recently spoke at the DevX Conference actually earlier this week. And I know this is a topic you're passionate about, developer experience, so I'm curious from your perspective. What does developer experience even mean? Why is it important? How should people be thinking about it? Romero B.: Yeah, you're right. That's a topic that I'm very excited about even before Okteto. And kind of why? It lines up what we were discussing before of how there are more and more developers. I think that our industry is going through this transition where in the early days there was certain pride in things being hard, right? If you go back to the Linux days, you had to compile everything yourself and figure out things in forums and obscure commands. And that was kind of the way things work, because it was early adopters and people kind of almost a trial by fire kind of thing of being an engineer. I think as more and more people joined the workforce, especially people who are a lot more focused on hey, using software to solve problems and not just for the fun of writing code, I think that's driving this emergence of what now it's called dev experience, which is really focusing on how do you set up the tooling, the process to make developers effective? Romero B.: The world where... For instance with Git, I've been using Git for like 15 years. And to this day, every time I need to do a merge, I have to search online for all the different options and parantheses. I cannot... And I've done it every day for years because it has a bad experience, but then you go to GitHub and it's very easy to merge a pull request. There's a flow that gets you there and you click merge and there might be an option and a pop-up. That I think is what's changing is this concept of we want developers to be effective, we want it to be easy and obvious for them to do their job. And that's what developer experience encompasses. Romero B.: I think there's a lot of companies. It's been going for a while, but I think that between the emergence of remote work, COVID, and kind of developers realizing that, hey, they can look for better places if they don't like where they're working, it's kind of pushing the market into, hey, you have to care a lot more about the tools you give your developers. Before it was almost a joke that you will join a company, "Okay, well, welcome to company X. There's a source code. Here's your laptop. There's a backlog. Bye." Right? And then now, no, you need a good onboarding. Romero B.: You need to give things in an orderly way and a way they are obvious. And I really like it because I think the last five... I think probably Heroku and then Docker were two of the first tools I saw where there was a lot of care put into making them easy to use. They didn't invent any of these things. You could push to git and deploy before, but Heroku made it this very natural Heroku push. I still remember it, Heroku push. I haven't used in years, but it's kind of iconic moment of like, "Oh wow, it just works. It's so easy." Docker run. And that's what we're trying to do with Okteto. Okteto App, Okteto Deploy is this very easy way. Romero B.: And I like that more and more companies care about this. Because I think this transition we're making, we need to make software development more inclusive. It's happening already. Now bootcamps, I think was a great thing to kind of get more people in the workforce that have a different kind of background. We're happy people with changing careers into software that I think also fantastic because it's like different point of view, different skills. You see people who were trained as teachers, as philosophers, as... I had a coworker, actually that was an arborist and then became a software developer. Romero B.: It's really cool because they have all these different points of views and it makes their software better. But you can't expect the alt tools to work for new people. So all these companies are now thinking of new tools, easier to use, more productivity that I really like. I like this transition of software as something you did for fun to software as a tool to solve problems and they can be business problems, they can be personal problems. If you like to hack on a home automation, it's like I do. So I like to have a button to turn the lights downstairs. It's valuable to me and just to me, but it's fun that now all these tools take into consideration and you don't have to spend three years reading manuals to learn how to compile something, to then get it to work. So I think this is the evolution of software thing. Romero B.: As you said before, as more companies build software, software is now a normal thing to do. It's no longer this kind of niche. Everybody knows a server developer and tools need to account for that. And, and software is now a profession like many others. And I like being part of that. I like being part of this companies. We pushing into this, I think saner vision of software development of Hey, it has to be obvious. It has to work. It has to be easy onboarding. And you know, the same thing that other like consumer has been doing this forever. Like you don't have to read a tutorial on how to use Instagram or TikTok. You just use it and it's obvious and we need to get software that way. And I think Figma is doing a good job at did. I think, I think LogRocket has a good job. I think we're trying to get there and many others are there. So it's exciting. See, it's definitely a change from like 10 years ago, like it changing so fast and what's even better as a business is that companies are realizing that and companies now have budgets for this kind of tools. Romero B.: Five years ago. It was very hard. If you were a developer in a big company to get money for like an IDE for like a certain tool. It's not so easy, but it's getting easier. We talked to a lot of companies and now you're seeing companies with like seven figure budgets for dev experience. And they're like, yeah, we're going to have to spend millions on tooling because we want our developers to be effective, to be comfortable to like their job. So it's a, it's a very welcoming change. It benefits us because we're in that space. But I think as, as a software developer professional, it's something good to see. It was always counterintuitive that it's so hard to hire developers and then you don't give them good tools. It's like why am I here? It took a while, but we're there. We're getting there. So it's very exciting. Ben: Well, Ramiro, thanks so much for joining us today for anyone out there who's interested in learning more about Okteto it's okteto.com. We can probably put a link in the episode description and for anything else you'd recommend, if people want to learn more. Do you have a YouTube channel or any kind of tutorials or you mentioned some blog posts. Should we?- Romero B.: Yeah. I mean, Okteto.com is kind of like the gateway to everything, but we have a YouTube channel with a bunch of tutorials. We have our, our blog Okteto.com/blog. But if you just go to our website, you can try out Okteto for free. I hope that the onboarding will be enough to show you the value of what we do, but check it out. It's free to try for the developers. All you need to have is that you have account no credit card required and you can try it out. And see this value of remote environments. And if it's something that you're passionate about we are hiding and we also have a ton of projects and we're always looking for collaborations, maintainers. I'm going to be at DockerCon, at KubeCon and all those conferences. So always looking to connect with more people who are passionate about dev experience, dev environments, and dev tools. So yeah, just yeah. And you can find on Twitter as well. Ben: Awesome. Well, thanks again, Ramiro. Romero B.: Thanks man. It was fantastic being here. Kate: Thanks for listening to PodRocket. You can find us at PodRocket pod on Twitter, and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review on Apple podcasts. Thanks.