Season 4, Ep. 43 – Founder to Founder: with Harpreet Singh, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Lauchable

(THE FRONTIER THEME PLAYS)

Bill, via previous recording (00:05):

Welcome to another Founder to Founder interview from Gun.io, your source for hiring world-class tech talent. Today, Gun.io’s CEO and co-founder, Teja Yenamandra, sits down with Harpreet Singh, co-founder and co-CEO of Launchable, a company on a mission to make software testing faster and smarter. Okay, here’s Teja. (THE FRONTIER THEME ENDS)

Teja (00:34):

Do you remember when we thought that like covid came from like, eating bats, or pangolins, or something like this? Maybe that’s still the <inaudible>.

Harpreet (00:42):

I didn’t think that thesis updated, did it? I don’t remember that.

Teja (00:48):

I think now, the majority opinion is that it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Harpreet (00:54):

Oh, it it? Okay.

Teja (00:55):

I think so. I don’t know. I might be speaking out of turn, but <inaudible>.

Harpreet (01:00):

At some point I stopped, you know, I was like, you know, this pulled you into so many negative directions. I’m like, I don’t need this. So I just stopped paying attention to it, and I’m like, I’m going to just focus on, you know, building a company, just being positive, and like, that’s where I’ve like, really directed my attention to. In fact, like, I used to be this voracious, voracious news consumer, and I just completely cut that out, and I’m so much happier for it. It’s like, you know, life is so much better (Teja: Yeah.) not knowing, you know, what’s going on around in the world and focusing on….

Teja (01:37):

Yeah. That’s interesting. I mean, that seems to be like, a viewpoint that a lot of people independently arrive at. You know, I’ve heard that from a lot of my friends who, you know like, when you’re jamming through a lot of information through like, your processor, you can’t afford to have like, things that don’t help you drive business value like, going through your head, and that seems to be like, yeah, something that a lot of people arrive at, and I’m curious like, how you sort of arrived at that. Like, how did you notice that this was taking unnecessary CPU cycles away from things that were important to you <laugh>?

Harpreet (02:17):

It wasn’t unnecessary CPU cycles. It was more the realization. So I meditate a lot, (Teja: Okay.) and so I’m like, this active meditator guy, and I found that, you know, I was unhappy, right, and like, when I went down this thread, I realized it was because I was paying so much attention to the media, and the media is based on this thing where they, you know, they’re sort of constantly rubbing on that wound to keep you irritated, and 90% of those things don’t matter, (Teja: Yeah <laugh>.) right? So I tried this experiment. I was like, on Reddit all the time. I tried this experiment; I’m gonna give it up, and like, you know, three months later I was, you know, much, much happier, and I’m like, I’m gonna just continue with this.

Teja (03:09):

What were your favorite subreddits? Just curious.

Harpreet (03:13):

I was big into nootropics at some point. I was into, you know, some financial subreddits. (Teja: Yes.) Stayed away from politics, but occasionally any top subreddit that came up with the topic of the day, I would just follow up.

Teja (03:32):

Gotcha. Yeah, that’s cool. I was talking to my friends, and just for fun, we were looking at like, you know, like, in your Robinhood account, you just have like, some fun ridiculous trades that you, (Harpreet: No.) just for fun, just to see like, what would happen, and we were looking during the time when like, I think that was around January, February, 2021, and so, you know, yeah, that’s when I started like, looking at like WallStreetBets. (Harpreet: <Laugh>.) Have you ever been to that subreddit? I dunno. They made a movie about this recently. It’s on Netflix. (Harpreet: Oh, really?) Yeah. I forget what it’s called. I’ll send you the name if you’re curious.

Harpreet (04:16):

“Yolo” your earnings. It was like, all right, man <laugh>. (Teja: <Laugh>.) Please go ahead, and then I discovered that they have like, some person on YouTube makes videos of people who “yolo” their earnings, and then you have like, this one line, you know, update coming from them. “Man, I just lost everything. I don’t know what to do.” It’s like, this guy makes these YouTube videos. I found them kind of hilarious, and I was like, oh man, this shouldn’t be hilarious. This is really tragic.

Teja (04:47):

Yeah. It’s like, a tragic comedy in some ways, you know? (Harpreet: Yeah.) So there’s this guy, he’s like, a financial like, kind of, I don’t know, blogger. His name is Ramit Sethi, and I think he has a show on Netflix, and one of his first episodes was about a guy. He and his wife had made like, you know, I mean, a substantial amount of money that would’ve paid down their mortgage from basically gambling on stocks during the pan…I mean, that’s what it is, right? It’s like, a casino. They had gotten the sum of money, and instead of paying down the house, they were like, “Let’s just continue to play like, roulette,” and they ended up basically going to zero (Harpreet: <Laugh>.) from where they started even, you know, lower than that. So, I don’t know, it’s a crazy time, and it’s interesting. It’s like, the hivemind is not a good source of investment advice. That’s my <inaudible>.

Harpreet (05:49):

Totally, totally. I agree with you.

Teja (05:52):

Yeah. Cool. Okay, so do you still meditate daily?

Harpreet (05:56):

Yeah, I do. I do. Yeah, it’s a good enough part of my day, actually.

Teja (06:02):

Where does that tradition come from? Is that something that you picked up yourself or something you saw your family do?

Harpreet (06:09):

My family did some, but I generally picked up, and I really liked it, and I kind of, I’ve now done this for like, 20, 25 years plus, actually, so it’s been a while. Yeah, it’s, you know, some people run, some people bike. I meditate. It makes for a much more comfortable <laugh> hobby, but I generally find the practice pretty good.

Teja (06:36):

Tell us about like, how you grew up, where you grew up, you know, what you were interested in growing up, how you found your way into entrepreneurship.

Harpreet (06:48):

Yeah. I grew up in Mumbai, India (Teja: Yeah.) just about the time where computer science was really just about to take off, just taking off, is where I went to college, and I went to a very small college in a city called Pune, India. Small by Indian standards, but I think there’s still like, a few million people at least there. This was a, you know, computer science, you know, school. It was quite a unique opportunity where like, you know, you have a small cohort all in, like, you know, doing CS. I graduated and joined a small company called Persistent Systems there, which was a startup, and if you were good enough, that’s where you went, (Teja: Okay.) and that’s where I went. You know, I got influenced by the amazing founder. This company is like, listed on the Indian Stock Exchange.

Harpreet (07:45):

I looked at what he was building, and I think that sowed the seeds of like, oh, I should be doing something like this, and I realized that I wasn’t good enough, and to get good enough, I needed to do a master’s. I looked around, and I was like, all right, US is the place to go do a master’s, and I landed in Cincinnati of all the places, and did a master’s. I came in to do a master’s in AI. This was ‘97, ‘98. (Harpreet: Wow.) Didn’t end up doing it for various reasons in AI, but did it in data, and I joined a company called Sun Microsystems, which you know, was the Google of its days, (Teja: Yeah.) in a division that was building Java, which was, you know, the place to be in. So I landed there as an engineer, and I was there for 10 years.

Harpreet (08:35):

So all through, I felt like I need to be in a smaller place. You know, this is too big. Then in, I think 2010, after 10 years, after getting all the green card and all that stuff that you have to do as an immigrant, I joined this company called CloudBees, which was founded by the founder of JBoss, which was acquired by Red Hat, and this was a company of less than 10 people at that time, and I stayed with them for eight years, taking this company from zero to 500 people, and then from zero in product to 50 million in the ARR when I left. Then I joined a company called Atlassian where I kind of went back to a big company, worked for the CEO for Atlassian Bitbucket, and then decided I needed to go back and do my own startup, and I started Launchable. So that’s in short is my journey over the years to come into entrepreneurship.

Teja (09:36):

How did you decide that you weren’t good enough and needed to get a master’s?

Harpreet (09:46):

The people that the founder hired there were, you know, had masters, either MTech, that’s what it is called there, from IIT, (Teja: Right.) which is a premier school. (Teja: Right.) The CEO himself had a PhD from somewhere in Indiana, I think, and so the people that he had were like, you know, had masters from US and had come back to India, and that’s what he was hiring, and I was one of the few kids who had a bachelor’s, and I could clearly see the difference between sort of my grasp on the fundamentals and the grasp on the fundamentals with somebody who, you know, had gone through the master’s program, and that’s where I decided I needed to do this.

Teja (10:32):

I mean, to peel back that decision a little bit more, I know it’s a long time ago, but how did you determine that it was definitely a degree versus maybe some intensive study on your part that could be self directed?

Harpreet (10:48):

The time I grew up in, a degree really mattered. (Teja: Mmm <affirmative>.) So that was one. I also think, in hindsight, I also think that people now undervalue the fact that somebody’s taken the time to curate these courses and, you know, pacing you through them, and the fact that you’re sitting in a pressure cooker for two years going through the program versus kind of taking a course here and there. (Teja: Right.) For some reason that gets devalued now, so I actually value that experience, (Teja: Mmm <affirmative>.) and then I also have a very continuous learning kind of growth mindset mentality. I just realized it’s called “growth mindset” now, (Teja: Yeah.) and I was like, well, you know what? Going to the US is gonna be a nice opportunity, you know, looking at how people learn in a different country. It’s gonna be a nice opportunity. I also grew up at a time where like, not a whole lot of resources were on the internet. Like, you couldn’t find AI courses on the internet. You had to go to school. So all those kind of made their way into the decision.

Teja (11:55):

Gotcha. I mean, it seems like that that was like, a key decision point and then also an inflection point in terms of like, the cascading set of decisions that you took after you came to the US, got your master’s here, joined Sun, joined Atlassian, and so on and so forth. (Harpreet: Yeah.) I’m curious, did you, you know, as you look through the options in terms of starting your own company, how is your company configured? Like, are you sort of bicontinental or are you guys based mostly in the US? Do you split time?

Harpreet (12:33):

Yeah, we are a US based company, and we have engineering in Japan. (Teja: Okay.) So yes, it is bicontinental, but not in India and US. It’s US and Japan. (Teja: Gotcha.) So, in my company, like, everything is a very intentional thought out decision. That’s one of the cultures that we brought in. “Intentionality” is a key word for us. You have to make a case for everything, and the reason for going to Japan was, A, my co-founder and co-CEO is Japanese, and he wanted to do something for Japan, you know, bring in the US sort of culture there, and two, we felt we could hire really solid, you know, technical people out in Japan. (Teja: Hmm <affirmative>.) Japan, you know, when we raised, it was like, crazy times in the US. Like, hiring people in the US as a startup was not that, you know, appealing. (Teja: Yeah.) So a couple of those decisions kind of all came together, and that’s why we hired in Japan.

Teja (13:42):

That’s cool. Yeah, having a multilingual kind of founding team allows you to arbitrage so much, (Harpreet: Right.) which is amazing. That’s like, such a competitive advantage that people don’t appreciate, you know? (Harpreet: Yeah.) So, okay. Intentionality. That’s interesting. When you say “make a case,” what satisfies the condition of making a good case in terms of driving forward a decision to you?

Harpreet (14:14):

So we adopted something called the DACI culture. (Teja: Okay.) I don’t know if you know about that. (Teja: No.) So Atlassian has this culture, and it’s a template in conference called DACI. So decisions, approval, C stands for something, I stands for something.

Teja (14:31):

Actually, I thought you meant “desi” as in like…<laugh>. (Harpreet: <Laugh>. Yeah.) I’m like, that’s a different culture. That’s…<laugh>.

Harpreet (14:40):

Yeah. That would be a very different culture. So this framework is called DACI framework, and so what you do is you essentially write up, you know, a one pager, it’s a Confluence template. You call out the choices, right? You write the pros, the cons, and you make a case for it, and you recommend something, and the fact that you’re sitting down, and thinking about it, and writing it out, already, you know makes it a much more higher quality decision. You know, ask than just getting on a call and saying, “Hey, I’m about to do this. I think this is a good idea.” (Teja: Yeah.) It’s like, no, no, no. Tell me why this is a good idea, and then you do that, and you make somebody an approver, whoever that might be, and that approver says “Yes,” right?

Harpreet (15:34):

Then there’s a bunch of people who are informed about the decision. So it isn’t like, a decision by democracy, like, everybody gets to say something, it’s like, everybody says something, but the approver is, you know, one person whose job is to approve that. It might be the CEO, it might be the product manager, it might be the product marketing manager, whoever that is, but that’s the context. You build that and you, you know, put that in front of your colleagues. You know, interestingly, like, between me and Kohsuke, even the name of the company was a DACI that we did together, and we put that in, like, we, you know, there were tens that we went through, and we called out, “Why this? What are the criteria that we are looking for?” and how that should be. I don’t remember the specifics, but that intentionality kind of came in, even before setting up the company.

Teja (16:23):

That’s amazing. Two questions, then. How do you determine what elevates in terms of importance to this type of decision making framework, and then how do you, I mean, assuming that both of y’all are equally invested in what the name of the company is, how would you clear and pass the threshold of let’s say, approval in that situation?

Harpreet (16:50):

Most decisions are DACIs, (Teja: Hmm <affirmative>.) because creating a DACI isn’t too expensive. (Teja: Hmm <affirmative>.) All I’m asking you is to do is write down your thoughts. Like, I think that should be bare minimum. Now, a number of new people who are not used to this culture go like, “Well, like, that just seems a whole lot,” but the advantage ends up being, because most decisions are DACIs, you know, when three months down the line they just says, “Well, you didn’t do this.” It’s like, no, no, no. We actually had a discussion about this. You know, here’s the DACI. It’s like, okay, did something change here, because you want us to do something else? Then you kind of go back and refresh yourself on that and say like, “Yeah, yeah. These made sense at that point. Maybe something’s changed now, and we have to change the decision.”

Harpreet (17:37):

That’s fine, right, but what happens organizationally, because decisions are being taken sort of on the fly, you tend to forget all the criteria that went into, so, you know, DACIs document that nicely. To your latter question, what makes like, you know, we both are equally invested. It was a very interesting experience, because we both had to make a compelling case on why like, you know, why a particular name? Right? It’s like, “Oh, you came up with ‘Fu.’ I don’t like it.” It’s like, no, no, no. Why didn’t you like it? And it’s like, because it doesn’t sound well. Okay. So one of the criteria is that it has to sound well, or maybe, you know, it’s not memorable. Like, we had a couple of names that weren’t memorable, and you’re like, okay, rememberability, I don’t know if that’s a word, but rememberability (Teja: Yeah.) Was a criteria, and like, that’s how we ended up with Launchable. It was like, alright, that people can remember.

Teja (18:30):

Yeah. Well, after this call, I’m gonna do my research on that decision making framework. It’s funny. We hired a guy, and one of his first things was like, “Why are we not documenting decisions?” And I was like, “Oh, that’s a good point. We should probably start doing that,” <laugh>.

Harpreet (18:47):

Yeah. It’s a very good framework. I think that’s one, and the second thing that we do very well, it’s a very confluence based culture. It is. We document everything, (Teja: Mmm <affirmative>.) and that was also intentional, and primarily, because I didn’t, you know, when you are building a multi continent team, there seems to be an expectation that everybody shows up. Like, you know, after work hours on a meeting or before work hours on a meeting, and all they’re doing is they’re just swapping roles, right? It’s just a wasteful, you know, time, and so we really focus on a work/life kind of balance, (Teja: Mmm. affirmative>.) and the idea was like, when I write something, I have provided enough context for my Japanese colleague to get up in the morning and see my thought process, right? If that includes a DACI, he can see all the thought process, he can see all the comments, and so on. Then ideally, he doesn’t have to set up a 30 minute call just for me to kind of come back and regurgitate things for him. (Teja: Yeah.) So we managed to kind of get away from a lot of, you know, unintentional meetings or like, regularly scheduled meetings, because we document everything pretty well, (Teja: Gotcha.) and that’s something that you kind of get your head wrapped around when you come into the company. Like, “Well, when they said we document everything, they weren’t joking about it. They do document everything,” <laugh>.

Teja (20:21):

Do people ever complain that the documentation cost is high? I mean, I imagine one or two people do.

Harpreet (20:29):

Yeah, some do, (Teha: <Laugh>.) but very quickly, they come to this place that, well, you know, you are on the other side. You don’t have to get on a call, and you can just read, you know, an update in the morning, and you catch up on most things. The other thing is we actually hire for certain values, (Teja: Mmm <affirmative>.) and one of the things that I do look for is like, your ability to kind of make a cogent case, (Teja: Mmm <affirmative>.) and so you hire for those, those abilities as well. The few that I let that slide, those were the people who had a problem.

Teja (21:05):

I can understand that. Yep. If you violate your values in hiring, then it is not good, (Harpreet: Yeah.) because a little bit of <inaudible> becomes a problem later, for sure. (Harpreet: Exactly.) It does not get solved with time. Yeah, that’s interesting. Well let’s back up a little bit. Like, tell us about your company. Tell us about, you know, how you kind of conceived of the opportunity. All of it would be super interesting to hear.

Harpreet (21:30):

So your audience, since your audience are developers, I’ll just back up a bit. I have been in the DevOps space for now, geez, you know, before DevOps was a term <laugh>, (Teja: <Laugh>.) and one of the most popular tools in there is called Jenkins. Have you heard of them? (Teja: Yes.) Yeah, so my co-founder is actually the creator of Jenkins, right, and so we partnered together over the years, bringing DevOps transformation to various organizations. We worked now 15 years together when this was incepted at Sun Microsystems. So when we’ve been helping people, and the idea is, you know, bring in continuous integration, continuous delivery deployment, we are the leading voices in the market for it, what we noticed was people, like, they spent months to years kind of doing these DevOps transformations to ship faster, (Teja: Yeah.) and they weren’t shipping, still, they weren’t shipping as fast as they thought they would. (Teja: Yeah.) So about four years back, him and me got together and we were discussing about this. It’s one of our usual Friday catchups, and we were like, “There’s a problem here.” The other thing we were looking at is like, seems like people aren’t paying enough attention to AI machine learning.

Harpreet (22:54):

There is some value here, and we could use the data that is coming out from your software delivery lifecycle and use machine learning to actually do something about this problem. (Teja: Hmm <Affirmative>. His insight was that, you know, when people set up these, you know, DevOps transformations, they set up these pipelines. All that gets automated. That’s fantastic, but you know what, like, the biggest problem is testing. You have to run your tests, your tests keep on increasing year after year, you’re running them. It’s like a tax, not in the bad way. You have to do that, otherwise you ship bad quality software, but that is what is adding to the delays in the organization, right, and so we came to this place that we can use AI, and machine learning, and look at tests, and we could do very interesting things, and that sort of became the seed of the problem.

Harpreet (23:55):

The interesting thing that we could do, is we built something called predictive test selection, and what predictive test selection does is it looks at the core changes that are coming in, and it can predict which tests are likely to fail. So if you can predict which tests are likely to fail, you don’t have to wait for the entire test suite to run. You can really go straight to the tests that are likely to fail and run them, (Teja: Mmm <affirmative>.) and if you run them, you can run, you know, 10 or 20% of a test to get the 90% of the signal that you care about, and that reduces your test execution time. That optimizes your test times, and that, you know, drastically cuts down the feedback time to devs, and that improves the iteration, right? Like, you can iterate way, way faster, ’cause you’re getting, guess what? You’re getting feedback much faster. So that’s how we ended up here.

Teja (24:55):

So in terms of timeline, you said that you sort of identified the seed of the problem at Sun.

Harpreet (25:09):

At Sun, he built Jenkins.

Teja (25:11):

Right, okay.

Harpreet (25:13):

We went to a company called CloudBees, which built a business around Jenkins (Teja: Right.) and DevOps. So that’s where, you know, we actually spent eight years sort of helping companies through CI, CD, DevOps transformations, and that fed us enough understanding of like, the problem that engineers face while delivering it, and then I took a hiatus to a, hiatus is [the] wrong word, but I went to Atlassian for a year in to work on Bitbucket, which is the GitHub (Teja: Right.) competitor, and then we both got together and said like, well, you know, geez, the problem is people are still taking oodles of time delivering software. How can we fix this? And this is our right ratio tool to go fix that problem.

Teja (25:59):

That’s cool. So like the, idea was in gestation for like, a long time, and you guys got some reps thinking through and solving it, and then finally came together. (Harpreet: Yeah.) That’s cool. (Harpreet: Yeah.) That’s a cool story. How’s it like running your own business now? Any different than before? I mean, I imagine materially so.

Harpreet (26:20):

Yeah. My role has been VP of product, and you know, in a startup you do what’s required. So I’ve transitioned more into like, sales and go-to marketing. So like, that has been the biggest change for me, where earlier, like, I would be assisting somebody else, now, like, I kind of have to do that.

Teja (26:44):

Yeah. You have to do this <laugh>.

Harpreet (26:48):

I have to do this. I find it enjoyable, actually. That’s one of like, maybe going through growth modality, like, picking different skill sets is something that I really enjoy, and as a CEO, it’s very interesting to get like, a different viewpoint. Like, you know, you are, you’re worried about like, you are running a few months ahead at the same time you are at the same place, and you’re seeing all these pieces going together. So it stretches you in all sorts of directions, even more so than the product role. Product role stretches you quite a bit. (Teja: Yeah.) I enjoy it, actually. It depends on the day as well. Some days are really hard. Some days, you know, if you found me today on one of those days…it’s a grind, but most days it’s just a fun thing to come in and like, pick up, oh, you know, something on the sales side, something on the marketing side, something on the product side. I enjoy it.

Teja (27:48):

How do you maintain your continuous learning posture? What are some resources that like, are your go-tos, or what’s like, your just general learning workflow look like?

Harpreet (28:01):

I don’t quite have a learning workflow. I mean, I tried bolting a few on over the years. I just find that I, I’m like, a voracious reader, and then at some point there’ll be a thread that I want to pull, and that gets me fascinated enough and I just read through it. I tend to read a lot of books. If there’s a course I’m usually signed up to it, and unlikely I’ll finish it, but at least I’ve got my, you know, beak wet to kind of understand that. (Teja: <Laugh>.) So that’s how I tend to do it. You know, there was a point where I would beat myself that I’m, you know, I’m not coding anymore. I’m taking coding courses, but I’m just in this place where like, there’s only a few cycles that I get, and so I maximize them by reading something interesting.

Teja (28:49):

What are some of the interests…like, what are some of the more surprising things that you’ve learned along the way in building your company?

Harpreet (28:56):

It’s not surprising, but it was like, just keeps underscoring. It’s like, we built a problem that was for enterprises, and that you would think is a really good thing. Like, I call it like, a really enterprisey, really meaty problem. Like, you know, we have BMW as customer, we have Sony as a customer, but the sense of urgency that big companies have and the pace that they work with is so much slower than, you know, when you’re sitting on this side, the startup side of the house, right? If you had asked me, “Would I be surprised about it?” I would be like, “No, no, that’s kind of understood.” But no, I’m still surprised on how slow and how long these things take, you know?

Teja (29:42):

So are you involved in the BD side of the business right now?

Harpreet (29:47):

Yeah, I am.

Teja (29:48):

How do you, okay, this is maybe like, a tactical question, but how do you hold in your head like, the urgency that you have in terms of like, needing to get, you know, let’s say progress in a sales cycle with an enterprise customer, but not so much that it becomes obvious and maybe scary to the person or to the, you know, company that you’re trying to work with and like, respect their processes for decision making. Like, how do you hold those two things in your head and still get a deal done?

Harpreet (30:20):

I don’t think you have as much control as you like to think you have, (Teja: <Laugh>.) because getting their attention is problematic, right? (Teja: Yeah.) So like, you kind of do what you need to do. You reach out to them, and you do that, but you know, for them, you’re a small vendor. You are, you know, they will run the cycle that you are running. At best, what I’ve seen work, is you be transparent, right, and treat the other person on the side as not, you know, the sale that you’re closing, but you call out, like, as a startup, you have x, y, z challenges, and you would appreciate if you got a signal, right? (Teja: Yeah.) I have found that to work quite a bit. You know, people go outside your norm and they’ll tell you like, you know, this might not be coming or this might be coming, and like, they provide you that intel, and they respect you for that. So transparency and honesty I think is a, you know, is a bar that is something that I tend to use.

Teja (31:21):

We have a deal right now that’s in motion where we’re helping a big company hire a bunch of devs, and the reps on that deal are like, very frustrated that this company is not performing exactly how we need them to, to be able to close the components of the <inaudible> (Harpreet: Yeah.) faster, and like, I can see our team getting frustrated, and it’s like, well, they have a lot of things on their plate. They might not exactly behave the way that we need them to or expect them to, and like, okay. Like…<laugh>. Yeah.

Harpreet (31:55):

Yeah. as a vendor, I don’t think you have a whole lot of levers, right? So relationship building is one that you can lean into, and I think honesty is one that you lean into and more primarily to set your own expectations, right?

Teja (32:11):

Yeah. Yeah. That’s so true. What advice would you have, knowing what you know now, let’s say, for yourself, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, as you’re getting started?

Harpreet (32:27):

Well, I think I could have done this much earlier in my career by myself. (Teja: Hmm <affirmative>.) I started the company in my forties. So that’s something that I could tell myself that, you know, going and starting a company is not as huge of a risk as you normally would like to, you know, like to think. That’s, that’s primarily it. The second one I think is going to a smaller company than a bigger company, right? So I stayed at Sun for 10 years. I passionately loved that company. It’s like, as an engineer, [it] was the best thing, but I knew I had the entrepreneurial mindset and you either have it or you don’t. If you have the entrepreneurial mindset, go to a smaller company as early as possible, primarily to pick different roles and get to know people in different roles, because when you go build your own company, you’re likely going to hire those people and having that network is important, right? Understanding how a different function works is really, really important, ’cause as a CEO, I think every person you hire does that job that you hire them for better than you do, (Teja: Yep.) but you are the one person who could literally sit in each of these rooms and pass off for like, a person in that, you know, organization. (Teja: Yes.) So if you are able to plant yourself in different organizations and different teams and get their mindset, that’s the most valuable thing you can do on the journey to a bigger entrepreneur.

Teja (34:05):

That’s powerful. Awesome. Okay, so since this is going out to like, a bunch of engineers, how can people onboard themselves onto your product and just get a sense of, you know, how it works?

Harpreet (34:21):

Yeah. So I’ll just answer a little more extensively than you would expect. (Teja: Please.) So when I was telling you the story where we came to this place where we built this engine called predictive test selection. (Teja: Yeah.) What we found was the reason people were using us was to triage issues. (Teja: Hmm <affirmative>.) You know, it’s that workflow that happens when you run these tests, and then you get this fire hose of these test failures, and you are trying to figure out, shit, what do I do? (Teja: Yeah, yeah.) I have 500 failures. Is there like, one underlying issue? (Teja: Yeah.) Like, my database is disconnected or there are 500 independent issues, which is a big problem, right? So people were like, reducing their test time to kind of get a sense of that, and as we looked at that, we realized, oh shoot, we can do something very interesting here. There seems to be a problem that nobody in the market is looking at. So we, you know, we built something where we can now use GenAI and all the stuff that is happening in the recent years to actually intelligently classify your test failures and get to the root cause faster, right? So if you ask me what we do now, it’s really use AI machine learning to intelligently classify your test failure so that you get to root causes faster and reduce test execution time, right, and provide insights like flakiness and so on, right?

Harpreet (35:51):

If your tests are unhealthy, we can tell that to you. So what I’m actually doing today is you can go to our website; you can sign up. It’s likely going to come to me or somebody in my CS organization. We are onboarding people. We have a beta going for this particular feature set that I think individual contributors, devs, and QA teams, and manager engineering leaders will find very useful. So just go [to] LaunchableInc.com; sign up. If quality is of focus, you have light integration tests, then you are dealing with fire rules of failures and trying to figure things out. We, you know, AI can be a copilot to helping there. So that’s where we are today. You sign up, it comes to a couple of people, and we reach out, and get you onto the beta program, and get you to try the product. (Teja: Gotcha.) If you want predictive test selection, again, we’ll sign up on the website, and we’ll kind of get you to use a predictor test selection.

Teja (36:53):

That’s cool. So sort of agnostic to team size, like, an individual can sign up that they’re working on product? (Harpreet: Yeah.) Okay, awesome.

Harpreet (37:03):

Yeah. It’s agnostic. It’s usually done by…yeah, it’s agnostic. It’s a very horizontal solution. We brought in the ethos from Jenkins, which works across various tools across, you know, it doesn’t matter what tool there is in your DevOps pipeline, Jenkins works with it. So we brought that on. So if you have any testing framework any, you know, UI tests, integration tests, lightly tests, we just work across, that’s like, one third key approach that works across things.

Teja (37:36):

That’s cool. Okay, awesome. Alright, you heard it here guys. Sign up, and we’ll know whether you signed up or not, ’cause It’ll be a <inaudible>, so I’m pressuring everybody to do it. Sweet, so where can people find you on the interwebs? Where can they get in touch if they just wanna pick your brain?

Harpreet (37:57):

For Launchable, you can come to LaunchableInk.com, and that’s the place to come to me. I’m not on Twitter, I prefer not to be there as much, so I’m on LinkedIn, so if you reach out to me on LinkedIn, that’s a place. I do like, my own personal blogs occasionally, which is on AwakenWithHarpreet.com. (THE FRONTIER THEME FADES IN) I’m about to start an interview series of entrepreneurs, myself, and (Teja: Okay.) record them. So yeah, AwakenWithHarpreet.com would be a place to come in and, you know, hopefully <inaudible>.

Teja (38:30):

Gotcha. Sweet. Well, I will check that one out. That sounds interesting. (Harpreet: Okay.) I’m not only a producer, but a consumer of these types of interviews, so…<laugh>.

Harpreet (38:39):

Alright, okay. Well I’m about to kick off. I just ran through my first couple of interviews this week.

Teja (38:44):

<Laugh>. Yeah, awesome. Alright. Thanks, Harpreet.

Abbey, via previous recording (38:47):

You’re listening to the Founder to Founder podcast, powered by Gun.io’s Frontier Network. We release a new episode every Thursday morning, so be sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you stream your music. Please leave us a review and share with your friends. You can follow us online at the Frontier Pod or drop us a line at team@gun.io to get in touch about hiring world class tech talent.

(THE FRONTIER THEME ENDS)