📦 Sagar Batchu: Shipping Great API Experiences
Claremont alumnus Sagar Batchu shares his experiences from LiveRamp’s London office, South Park Common’s incubator, and now Speakeasy — the API-first startup he co-founded
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Coming out of Claremont, how did you jumpstart your career, and how did you decide where to take your first job?
My years at Harvey Mudd were an exciting time, and the quality of the Claremont community is so amazing. I have many friends from other schools, and I always brag to them that I have the strongest community, even though it’s the smallest. Quality over quantity. I made amazing connections, built a great work ethic, and learned how to learn.
While at Mudd, I realized that I loved physics and the kind of in-depth thinking that it had, but I didn’t really want to build a career in it and didn’t want to do a Ph.D. As a Physics major, that leaves you scrambling to take CS classes as quickly as possible. I crammed as many as I could my last year and graduated to move up to the Bay Area and enter tech.
The key thing I wanted to optimize for was a high-growth experience where I’d learn quickly. Many friends went into defense, big tech, somewhat more stable, probably very supportive environments. But I always felt that I would get too comfortable there. The CEO of the startup I eventually chose was actually also a Harvey Mudder — Joe Costello. He’d become a household name in the Bay, especially in chip design. That’s how I learned about the company, and I spent a few years there growing very quickly.
After spending a few years as a software engineer at IoT company Enlighted, you then spent four years as an engineer at data and analytics leader LiveRamp. What about LiveRamp attracted you? What takeaways did you come away with that set you up to pursue a more entrepreneurial path today?
I worked at Enlighted for a few years until the company was bought by Siemens. At that point, I decided I didn’t want to be part of a big integration process and a multi-year journey. So, I left and spent some time traveling, exploring, and thinking about where I wanted to live.
I ended up in London and at a company called LiveRamp, where many of my friends and a couple of Harvey Mudders had also gone to work. In a very serendipitous way, I bumped into them and realized they were trying to hire their first engineer in London. I jumped at the opportunity and helped kickstart an engineering team for the company. It was a great four years in London, and I had the opportunity to help support and build a new business line for a rapidly growing company. The team size in London was 10 when I joined — two of us in engineering and a very early business team.
While I was there, I truly got to test the entrepreneurial waters. I went through the product market fit journey with the company and also went through the process of not having a clue about how to hire in a foreign market. That was my foundational experience in building and scaling a team. Starting from just myself and another engineer to about 60 of us all over London. It was like building a business inside a business. Those experiences are the ones that give you the confidence to do something on your own.
I was also fortunate to work at LiveRamp during a period of hyper-growth, where the company scaled from <200 to >1500 people or so when I left. A critical benefit when you get that opportunity to be on that kind of journey is being surrounded by other high-growth, ambitious people. The CEO of LiveRamp then, Auren Hoffman, had a great theory that I think is true: the best startup communities come from companies that do very well but are not amazing.
LiveRamp actually had a good outcome as a company, but not a great outcome. The company certainly did well, got acquired, and eventually listed for a $5B valuation. But, I think we fell short of a higher potential of being more of a household name in the world of cloud. And so eventually, when a company gets to a certain point, many people start to leave because you all go through that hyper-growth phase, but then the next growth phase doesn’t really show itself. You’re left with a very strong network of fellow entrepreneurs, founders, and people who want to get back into the game of early business building.
How would you compare and contrast the technology scene between San Francisco and London?
The critical difference in London is that the tech scene is pretty nascent. Unlike out in the Bay, the engineering talent pool doesn’t only work at VC-backed startups. Many of them work at banks, consulting shops, and media companies, where engineering isn’t necessarily the center of gravity. You tend to have great talent that’s locked up in companies where the opportunity for ownership and high equity just doesn’t exist. When we went out there, we initially thought that maybe we should try to recruit from the other really hot tech companies and VC-backed companies out there. But at the time, there weren’t too many of them.
We learned that there are other great talent pools like banking, where you have engineers who work well under high pressure, in high-stress environments, and shipping quality code for critical systems but unfortunately don’t have ownership of the product. And so when you are able to find those kinds of developers, you’ll also be able to offer them something special. You need to find out how you offer that differentiated experience. That was critical learning for me in team building.
Another difference is that agencies are a big deal In London, so you need to build the right relationships with recruiters and agencies. The first year was actually a bit of a struggle. We didn’t hire anyone and had to rely on sending engineers out from the US from my homebase. Eventually, we built those relationships with the agencies and they understood what LiveRamp wanted and what LiveRamp could offer in London that was differentiated. You need to educate others to sell on your behalf, which is something maybe people are not as used to out in the Bay.
At the time, there was also a lack of visibility and awareness of startups and what a startup can offer. Also, how to think about things like equity, options, and RS units. We had to do that kind of education in the beginning. I will say, though, that the scene has completely evolved in the last few years with the pandemic, at-home work, and then an explosion of companies that help you deal with and hire externally. Suddenly, a little leveling of the playing field is happening. And so I would say for folks trying to hire out in London or in Europe, expect the level of awareness to be much higher now.
After LiveRamp, you then left for South Park Commons — an incubator community of technologists and builders. What were the most impactful learnings or skillsets you gleaned from this community, and how important was that experience as you made the leap to start your own company?
South Park Commons is a fantastic community, and they have built something unique in the world of communities, not just startups.
We all know about YC and the process of going from zero to one. But what about going from minus one to zero? Going from not knowing what you want to do to get to a place of starting? I think that’s where South Park really shines. My biggest takeaway from working with different folks in the community is that you have to have real, meaningful convictions in your founder journey. There’s no certainty, and understanding the difference between conviction and certainty is critical to getting started and scaling the mountain in front of you.
To give you an example, as a developer in a big company, you build a feature, you ship the product, and there’s some certainty that ten customers are going to use this product. This is when you’re building for an existing customer base. But when you’re building a new product and trying to get new customers, there’s no certainty in it. You have to find the right data and signals to convince you that people will use this. And so, how you go about that is an interesting challenge where community support is crucial.
Also, being surrounded by other folks going through the same journey is a big deal. The empathy you get is very meaningful. Everybody can get empathy from friends and family, which is always really important. But getting empathy from folks who are also going through it means they can really relate to the anxieties and the day-to-day struggles of being a founder. There was also some fantastic structuring within the community around building accountability with each other and actually making progress week to week. Builder squads and forums help you all look at different things. You need a little bit of that push as a founder.
These days, you’re building something new in Speakeasy, a Zero Ops API tool. Can you share the company’s origin story?
While I was at LiveRamp, many companies in the industry were transforming to be API-first, and there was a lot of buzz in the ecosystem around this. There was an old generation of API companies like MuleSoft with a more closed ecosystem and then a modern set of more open ecosystem API-first companies that were coming up. At the same time, there was also the popularization of API as a business model. You had Stripe, Twilio, and probably 100 companies that do API for X.
All of this was happening, and at LiveRamp, we were a massive data platform essentially and wanted to become API-driven as a way to expand revenues and also serve customers better. I spent a lot of time doing developer tooling and data infrastructure in my role. This meant focusing on setting up the frameworks technically and also teams to build out these products — things that really give developers higher leverage.
While we were there, a whole team focused on API platform building, and the goal was to make it easy for every other company in the organization to ship API’s very quickly. When you work with API’s as a developer, you realize there’s a ton of operational burden that you take on which are actually major business concerns. Like how do your customers interact with you? APIs are a kind of critical product surface area that recently have not gotten nearly as much attention as some of the other spaces like modern data, stack, and cloud. But I think the tailwinds around the explosion of API’s and developers using them means that you need a much better developer experience while using them.
So, a lot of companies like LiveRamp, transitioned from having different customer personas as the target customer to having developers as the target customer. But, the moment devs are your target customer, you have to ship a lot of tooling for them. All of these thoughts were swirling in my mind while I was at LiveRamp. Seeing other companies invest in platform engineering plus the explosion of other platform engineering companies, helped me see a large opportunity. An opportunity for a GitHub site or to go build out something that every company could use to ship great API experiences.
That’s where Speakeasy started, and we set out wanting to build something that would let every company have a Stripe-quality API experience for their customers. That was the origin story for Speakeasy. Over the last couple of months, we’ve brought on a couple of customers, built a team, and really gone deep into product thinking around how we build developer experience products. At the end of the day, Speakeasy is a developer experience product and we really want to be that kind of platform team for you on demand.
How did you build trust and know when you were ready to take the leap with your co-founder Simon?
A lot of people going through the early journey always think about if you don’t have a co-founder, how do you find one? I will say it was something I was definitely worried about coming out of LiveRamp. I didn’t have an obvious co-founder at first.
I eventually met my co-founder Simon through a mutual friend. It turns out that he was an early employee at another company within the LiveRamp ecosystem called SafeGraph, which was founded by the same founder. That definitely helped build a lot of mutual trust because we had a lot of mutual connections there. I think the most important thing in finding a co-founder is that you really want someone with the same level of conviction. From the first day I started working with him, he went super deep into what I was doing. I had a Notion space with myriads of notes I had been keeping on my thoughts and ideas, and he consumed the whole thing in just one night. That was a sign that he really saw the value and had the conviction to figure out the value here.
We spent a good half a year almost working together before we officially incorporated, went fundraising, and went through that process. We didn’t rush that. That’s something I would pass along to folks who are on that journey — take your time doing co-founder dating. Even the ones that you feel strongly about founding something with, spend time working with them. It’s going to be a large part of what you spend your time on and you really want someone you trust and can grow with. Even if you’ve worked with this person before, this environment is going to be different and it’s going to push you in different ways.
Could you educate us a bit about APIs. What are they, and why are they important? Why build a picks and shovels tool for the API space today?
An API is basically a programmable interface to which two parties are able to exchange information. That’s the most abstract way to think about it. Companies today use API’s in a variety of settings, such as a way to do internal communication, external communication, and even really just ship products altogether. It gives them the ability to scale out usage of a product very quickly, and have the product be deeply integrated into other people’s environments. So building a kind of stickiness and loyalty on the usage of the product. And then finally, it’s also a very common way for developers to interact with the product — something that you can actually import into your codebase, plug into your other systems, like that’s the kind of hooks that it gives you.
We’ve decided to go after this because we saw that companies who invested in their API developer experience have grown a lot more quickly than everyone else. At the end of the day, we wanted to build a product that helps other companies grow very quickly, and helps them with their customer growth and their problems. We really wanted to be that high leverage product growth lever for other folks out there. So today, some of the problems that we’re going after in the API space are that API’s are fantastic in the ways we’ve talked about, but are very difficult to use and consume. There’s a lot of tooling behind the scenes that is happening and we’re trying to bring that to the forefront to things like great client SDKs, and client libraries, developer portals, and experience products. We want to have a suite of products that help make consuming APIs very easy.
It’s an even bigger problem today with the explosion of languages and runtimes. Previously, you would just have an API. Now you need to support the API being used in TypeScript, Go, Java. Rust is like a big hot space. And then within JavaScript, you have like multiple runtimes. Now you have Node and Dino and people can consider things like TerraForm as a runtime as well. And so the number of developer communities that are going to interact with your API when you put it out there is no longer one or two. It’s more like 10. There’s a longtail problem that we realized is an opportunity to help folks tackle. So as a company building and shipping an API, you should just have to worry about building your business and building your API. We’ll take care of actually helping distribute it to your customers.
Today, we’re starting with client SDKs and a platform around that to help you self-service all of the parts of the API so you can actually focus on just building the API.
What has been the single biggest unexpected challenge you’ve encountered in your new role as a founder? What’s been easier than expected?
One of the hardest things in early startup building and probably the highest points of risk, is building a founding team. When you’re trying to search for product market fit, you need a team with high conviction, a team that moves quickly, and just brings a lot of passion every day to the job. A lot of folks I think de-risk this by hiring in their network — hiring folks you have worked with and already built relationships with. The double edged sword of working at LiveRamp where there’s a lot of startups coming out of the cohort, was that a lot of the folks that I would have loved to have as early founding members were working at other companies and startups already. There was an explosion of ex-LiveRamp startups. That made it pretty challenging to hire in my network, so we started to hire out of network, which is always a lot harder in any scenario. But in a founding scenario, bringing on and building trust with someone to be a founding team member when you’ve never worked with them is quite challenging.
Despite the challenge, you and your team have done an excellent job quickly recruiting talented engineers at a very early-stage business. What has been your secret?
We had to develop a whole hiring model. I should preface by saying after several weeks of failing and figuring it out, we had to develop a model around essentially having folks contract with us for a couple of weeks, and then turning that into full time engagements. So to date, we have not run an interview, so to speak, at Speakeasy. We know this won’t scale forever. We will have more formal interview processes at some point. But for the team size we’re at, everyone has been someone who kind of naturally found fit and grew into being part of the company. That’s something we’ve all really enjoyed. It’s helped de-risk hiring for us, and also, hopefully built stronger bonds between our early team.
I also highly recommend communicating the vision and team values early on during any hiring process. When founding team members are evaluating you and you’re evaluating them, it’s not just skill sets that matter. I would actually almost rank the skill set as furthest on the stack rank of things to look at.
The YC quote of slope over intercept, right? You want people growing quickly, but you have to think about how you communicate the value prop and the growth at working in a startup to someone. Part of it is obviously selling them on the product vision, but also the vision of what kind of team this is going to be. I think on an early version of our website, we actually had team values. We had a little snippet of our shared vision that we put out there. So for folks reading, we wanted them to be able to read that as much as actually read about the product and what we’re building. I definitely encourage founders to think deeply about how to communicate what kind of team you want it to be early on. It matters!
What is the best way for the community to be in touch, follow, and potentially get involved with your work at Speakeasy?
Sign up for the product waitlist and get changelog emails here. You can also learn more about the product here or email me directly!
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