[MUSIC] >> Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders or in the front lines building it. In each episode, we'll speak with a visionary founder who's building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We'll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I'm your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Frontlines Media. Now, let's dive right into today's episode. [MUSIC] >> Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we're speaking with Will Wilson, co-founder of Intithesis, an autonomous testing platform that's raised 47 million in funding. Will, welcome to the show. >> Hey, man, thanks so much for having me. >> No problem, super excited. Let's go ahead and just kick off with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. >> Sure, so my name is Will, my background is I am a software engineer. I've been building complicated computer systems for a very long time. I still actually do write some code, even though I'm now mostly doing sales and talking to people and stuff. But basically, this company was started largely out of the experiences that me and my co-founder had as software engineers. If you've ever written code or tried to develop a software project, you know that debugging it and finding all of the annoying problems that you didn't anticipate that are there is one of the most time consuming, most taxing, and honestly most unpleasant parts of the whole process. Then once your thing is out there in the real world and people are using it and finding more issues that you also didn't know were there and are also causing any problems, that gets even worse. We're basically like, computers are doing everything else, why can't computers do this part as well? That's what this company is trying to accomplish. So what happened then in 2018? What was that aha that made you say? Yep, I'm going to leave this small company called Google and go out and start a startup. Yeah, okay. So actually, I guess the story starts actually even a little bit before that. So me and my co-founder, Dave Share, were previously at a startup called FoundationDB, which made a very cool distributed database. It was like a distributed database that could run on many computers, but it also had all the asset semantics that you're used to from like a single computer, a single database. And it was really cool product and it was really, really hard to build. And people have often asked us like, how do we build that thing? And what was our secret weapon? And the secret weapon basically was that we developed an extremely powerful autonomous testing system, which would just like try running the database in all kinds of configurations and all kinds of possibilities and do all kinds of crazy stuff to it. And by doing this really, really fast in parallel, like it kind of found like all the bugs, I mean, not literally 100%, but like it found the vast majority of bugs that were ever introduced into that product. And it made developing it really easy and like really pleasant because it's like, you know, when you've got this amazing robot assistant that just like tells you whenever you're about to make a mistake, hey, it's actually a lot easier to record. So that was our secret weapon. And that startup got acquired by Apple in 2015 and we all went to Apple and worked on stuff there that I can't talk about. But, you know, suffice to say they did not have this kind of amazing robot assistant for some of the projects that we were looking at. I left and I went to Google and again, like saw that there were lots and lots of really smart people there working on really hard problems without the benefit of powerful tools that could make them radically more productive. And so that was sort of the radicalizing experience, right? Like these are the biggest, richest, coolest companies on earth. And they don't have this technology that like our teeny tiny startup did. Like, why is that? That seems crazy. That seems like a business opportunity. And so that's how we got started. And then when did you start shipping it? When did you start having not just users, but paying customers? How long did that take? You know, it took a few years and that's a lot longer than most startups, right? But the reason is that in order to build what we've built here, we had to sort of go back to the very foundations of how computers work and like change a whole lot of stuff. Like, I don't want to get into all the gory details, but we had to like write our own hypervisor that is able to run virtual machines in a completely different way than anybody else ever has, like lots of crazy stuff like that. So we did actually get early, early design partners and paying customers as early as we possibly could. But for us, as early as possible, was still a few years into the thing. At what point did you start to really gain traction and say, okay, we for sure have a viable product here? I think there were a few things. So one thing that your listeners might not know, like another unusual thing about the trajectory of our company was that we were in stealth for an incredibly long time. Like even after we got that first paying customer, we actually stayed in stealth for like another three years, just like making the thing better, iterating on it, like slowly growing our customer base through word of mouth and just waiting for the right moment to actually properly launch. But long before we did that, we did start to notice that our customers like loved it, couldn't get enough out of it. And like we're putting more and more of their eggs in this basket. And then there was a magical moment when we started using it too. And we started feeling it, really giving us lift and making us go faster. And that was despite the fact that at this stage, what we still had was like still like a very early prototype, like really rough around the edges, really crappy in a lot of ways. And so we're like, wow, if this very primitive, very rudimentary implementation of this thing that we're building is already seriously paying rent for us and for some really big important companies, like we may actually have something here. This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. Now back to today's episode. Talk to us about marketing. How have you approached marketing, especially obviously, as you came out of stealth, what did the marketing strategy look like? And what does it look like today? Yeah. So we were in stealth for a very, very long time. And so for a very, very long time, the marketing approach was don't do any, right? And that's not quite true. We did try to like cultivate like an aura of secrecy, right? We sort of tried to make it like a badly kept secret that many people in Silicon Valley whispered about and that when you learned about it, you felt like you were sort of being given access to a special club, that actually worked super well. That made it sort of irresistible to a lot of people. So we were sort of like in stealth, but not in stealth in that sense. That was pretty cool. Once we came out of stealth, our marketing approach has been 100% content driven. We've actually still literally never paid for an ad. We're working on a lot of very cool things and they are cool to our target audience, which fortunately for us is people who are pretty similar to us, right? Other developers. And so we just sort of like write blog posts about cool stuff that we work on and challenging problems that we've overcome and crazy ways we've used our software and like they go viral and people love them. We actually were benefited by a really great decision that Dave, my co-founder made in the very early days of the company. So we make software that tests other software. The very first type of other software that we were testing was actually Nintendo games, like classic 1980s Nintendo games. And that works well for a lot of reasons, like very visual, easy to understand when our software gets stuck and isn't able to make progress. Like why that's happening? It's very efficient to run. It's like cheap to emulate, but then there's this like other whole benefit, which is it's a major source of nostalgia for like millions and millions of people. And so like in the process of testing our own software, we generate these videos of it playing Nintendo games and like utterly destroying them and like finding all kinds of crazy bugs and like exploits and sometimes like beating the games, right? And like basically we've been able to produce an ongoing series of these videos and analyses of how we did this with each individual game and those have really taken off to. How do you make good content? There's so much content out there in the world these days. Obviously chat GPT has created even more content. It's just everywhere. How do you make good content? Yeah. I mean, I don't want to sound too glib, but I actually think it's pretty straightforward, which does not make it easy. The straightforward answer is number one, have something interesting to say, right? And then number two, like say it well and think about who your audience is and think about what kind of motivation and what kind of analogies and what kind of explanation is going to make sense to them. Like that obviously makes it sound very simple and straightforward and it's anything but right. Like just step one, having something interesting to say is like a thing that many people in the world are not able to pull off. But I do firmly believe that the starting point should be having something really cool that you want to share with the world. Not like how do I dupe people into like clicking on my blog post, which is actually just, you know, a bunch of hype makes a lot of sense. What about the market category? How do you think about this? Is it autonomous testing? And if so, is autonomous testing that going to be a new market category that's going to emerge? Is this replacing an existing market category? How do you think about that? Yeah, that's an awesome question. We basically believe that the category doesn't exist yet, right? You know, often when we're talking to investors or potential employees or whatever, they ask us, right? Like, who are your competitors? And the answer is like, we kind of don't think there are any, but people think we're saying that and that's like, ha, ha, look, how great we are. Like, no, no, no, that's like a really scary answer, right? Having competitors is great. If you have competitors, that's like evidence that somebody else thinks this problem is worth solving. That's like other people who are out there educating the marketplace about what you're doing and like creating a budget category for what you're doing. That's other people who are producing collateral and making the world understand what the problem is. Competitors are actually very, very useful. Having zero competitors, having a brand new green field area is like terrifying. It does mean that the potential upside is really big, but I actually think it makes the problem strictly harder. So yeah, in that sense, like we do think that we're basically defining a new category, we call that autonomous testing. Autonomous testing is anything where human beings are not really involved in writing tests at all. All they're doing is saying what their software is supposed to do and not do. And the computers are like doing everything about coming up with the tests and executing them and analyzing the results. And there's like no human intervention whatsoever. There are like a couple of incredibly tiny niche areas that already do something that looks a little bit like this. You know, if you're familiar with fuzzing from the computer security world or like property based testing from the functional programming world, these are like tiny little specks of people doing this kind of thing. But 99.99% of the world has never heard of it or done it. And that's what we're trying to change. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Co, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit global talent.co. Is there anyone who doesn't believe in autonomous testing? When you talk about that, are there naysayers that say, whoa, that's not possible. It needs a human involved. That's actually the most common objection, which is great. We saw this, by the way, with our first company Foundation TV as well, right? There were naysayers who were like that product that you're describing is impossible. And that's the best possible objection to get, I think, as a startup. Because they're conceding that if it were possible, it would be really useful, right? If they thought it was useless, they would just say it's useless. But they're not saying it's useless. They're saying it's impossible. That means, you know, we think you're lying, but implied if you're not lying. Yeah, I do want to buy that. So great. Now all I have to do is convince you that I'm not lying and I'm not. So that actually makes it really easy. So I basically do think this is the best possible objection. And it's one that we're excited about answering today. What do you think spend that most important? Go to market decision that you've made and take us back to the decision, how it was made and what the impact was made. That's a pretty good question. So I think probably here's the answer. Autonomous testing is an insanely broad category, right? And the technology we've built fundamentally could be used to test anything, right? Like I told you, we did a lot of our initial research testing computer games. You could also use this to test websites or test smartphone apps or test whatever, but we didn't want to go to market trying to sun and the earth and the moon and the universe, right? Like we wanted to try and be really focused and pick one particular area to target. And so the one we chose was specifically reliability and fault tolerance testing for big backend systems. I think that was a really, really good choice. We made it for a couple of reasons. One, our founding team has a background of that stuff. Two, everybody's kind of got one. And so it's a pretty large niche as niches go. And then three, the existing tooling and existing solutions for this problem are insanely bad. It's like not a crowded market at all. The bar is very, very low, right, which makes it easier to blow people away with something that's rough and prototyping. So for all those reasons, like we decided to start out by focusing on that area. And I think that that has paid off, like they've totally been challenges with it. Right. These systems are actually quite hard to test. Well, these systems, they're also quite slow to operate. And so that means that they're a little bit more expensive to test very effectively. But I think in terms of keeping our go to market energy focused on a particular customer profile and keeping our product focused on a very particular problem domain, it's really paid off. Talk to us about the domain. I have to imagine that wasn't an easy domain to get. How did you get the domain? Oh, that's so quite. Yeah. So we did have to buy it. This is a service selling story. Somebody had the domain. You know, we made them an offer. And they said, no, absolutely not. You know, because I think probably suspected we had a company or whatever. And they asked us for a completely outlandish amount of money, you know, and X more than we were willing to pay. And, you know, I tried to negotiate with them and they were willing to come down a little bit, but not very much. And finally, I was like, OK, fine, we won't do it. And I instead registered antithesis dot, I don't know, AI or I don't even remember what it was, but some other TLD. And I just sort of gave up on it and started ignoring their emails. And then, you know, three months later, they came back and offered it to us for the original price that we asked for. So then we got it. That's awesome. Yeah, I found that there's always funny stories. Whenever someone has a great domain like this, it was never a straightforward process to get it. So that's why you like to ask. Yeah, somebody was totally squatting it. Single word English domain is definitely hard to get these days. Yeah, for sure. That's why we're stuck with a dot IO. We tried to buy frontlines.com and it was, yeah, I don't think we'll ever have the budget of what they were looking for there. Now let's talk about fundraising. So as I mentioned there in the intro of 47 million to date, what have you learned about fundraising? I think the single most important thing, honestly, is having investors who really understand what you're trying to do and really understand what the plan is and our body and on the plan and are well aligned with you and who understand what you want from them. And that can take many different forms, right? That can be an extremely active investor. You'd knows all about what you're doing and is really bought in on it and is going to help you a lot or it can be an extremely passive investor who never bothers you and never calls you and doesn't reach your emails. So long as you're both clear that that's what you want and that's what the plan is. With our investors, we told them from very early on, look, this is a moonshot. It's probably not going to work. You're probably going to lose all your money and it's going to take a very long time to find out whether it's working or not. You're not going to know in a year whether this is taking off or not. So buckle in for the long haul because that's what it's going to be. I think the fact that we were just totally upfront about that from the very first meeting, you know, and never shied around that issue is like, is the foundation of us having a good relationship with our investors, right? Like they really appreciated that we weren't bullshitting them on that. And then when indeed things took a long time to figure out if it was working or not, they weren't surprised or upset. What advice would you have for founders who are trying to market and sell to a similar audience? Sure. My number one piece of advice is developers are incredibly cynical people, right? They by nature assume that everything has a catch. And so if you make your pitch like paradoxically, I think if you make your pitch too good, they're not going to believe it and they're just going to think that they can't spot the catch and they're going to spend all their time trying to think of all the reasons your thing might not work well. Whereas if you just tell them what the catch is or like tell them what the weaknesses of your approach are or like, what situations you might not want to use it in or be a little self-deprecating and a little humble and be like, look, my thing is great in this situation totally won't work in this one. Which situation are you in? You know, I think that actually smooths the sale process tremendously. Final question for you. Let's zoom out three to five years into the future. What's the big picture vision here? Right. The big picture is that almost all manual human software testing effort is completely eliminated and developers can produce software much more quickly. They produce much higher quality software that works better in more situations and everybody has more fun doing it. Amazing. I love it. All right. We are up on time. So we're going to have to wrap here before we do. If there's any founders listening in that want to fall along with your journey, where should they go? They should go to our website antithesis.com or they should follow us on Twitter where we are Twitter.com slash antithesis HQ. Amazing. Well, thanks so much. Take good time. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you. This episode of category visionaries is brought to you by frontlines media. Silicon Valley's leading podcast production studio. If you're a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io slash podcast. And for the latest episode, search for category visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you on the next episode. [inaudible]
