How to start a startup as a developer? — interview with Marcin Wyszyński, Spacelift

Today we publish my interview with Marcin Wyszyński, the CEO of Spacelift.

Spacelift is a terraform-compatible continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) platform for infrastructure as code. It’s co-founded by a fantastic duo of Marcin Wyszynski and Paweł Hytry. They created a solution that enables companies to build, package, and test applications in an automated, more reliable way. Inovo partnered with Spacelift in May 2020 — we were a co-lead investor in a pre-Seed round with Hoxton Ventures. Just 7 months later, in December 2020 Spacelift raised yet another round of $6M led by Blossom Capital.

I sat down with Marcin to discuss: building remote teams, becoming a founder with a technical background and the first 12 months of the company.

You can also find this episode on: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spreaker.

Hi Marcin. Thanks for being with us.

Hi Maciek. Thanks for the invitation.

In recent days you’ve managed to collect another round of financing. I thought it would be a nice moment to look back a bit and think what your path looked like. I’ve had a couple of talks recently with the tech guys who are out there somewhere at the start of their journey or just thinking about building their project. Lots of things that you did are really unique, so it would be nice if you could tell us a bit about yourself. How did you end up running your own business?

Thanks Maciek. As Maciek mentioned, my name is Marcin. I am one of the co-founders of Spacelift. I started my professional career at Google as a customer support representative. It turned out very quickly that my soul is technological. At Google, I jumped to technical positions very quickly. I spent most of my time as a so-called SR — Site Reliability Engineer. Today, DevOps is probably a better word for it, while Google, one can say, invented DevOps.

Was it in Poland or somewhere abroad?

I started in Poland, I worked in Poland in a newly opened office in Wrocław, and then I moved permanently to Dublin. I worked in Dublin for the next 7 years. Meanwhile, I switched from Google to Facebook. My job at Facebook was much closer to what I do in Spacelift because I was building cluster management software. It was 2014–2015 when smartphones made their way to developing countries. In Papua, New Guinea people started to connect to the internet. And the first thing you do when connecting to the internet is visiting Facebook. My team had to deal with this great need to build new server rooms, a new website page, add capacity in the weirdest places. This is the software I wrote for Facebook — this turned out to be very, very important many years later when I started working on Spacelift. Then I returned to Poland. For two years I worked at Software House as a CTO. We had a code quality test product internally. It was called CODEBEAT. Two years later I came back because I was very drawn to this infrastructure and jumped as an infrastructure consultant for scaled-up clients. Deliveroo was a big client of mine, it started as a startup in 2017 when I came in, and when I left in 2019 it was a really solid, very valuable corporation. There were also many other clients that I helped scale, build things on the public cloud.

So, first large technology companies in the West, then Deliveroo, then what?

Deliveroo has grown so much that my mission ended there. Later on, I had a very nice client. For them, I implemented an infrastructure management tool. They are delighted to this day, but in the meantime people from Deliveroo started writing to me, calling me, saying: “You know Marcin, it was fun in Deliveroo. Could I use it? Could you turn this into SaaS?”. When the tenth person asked me if I could turn it into SaaS, I figured that I had some savings in the bank, I didn’t have to get paid immediately for consulting…I decided to turn it into SaaS. And that’s how Spacelift was created.

How do you perceive this in terms of the impact that it had on the organization?

It allowed the organization to grow amazingly. It lowered the entry barrier into a great number of external resources that they could use, many external technologies. Suddenly it turned out that integrating with various external websites and various external services is very easy, safe and very, very fast and does not require any thinking, no big strategy, because it is just copy-paste of a few, maybe a dozen lines of code that someone has already written somewhere else. So if you want to build a machine learning model, this would take, let’s say, four lines, and you can plug that into your application. If you need some super scalable database for a marketing campaign, you have it in two minutes.

So you saw that something you did had value. People came to you and asked if they could take it with them. You finished what you’ve been doing at Deliveroo, you’ve been helping various companies all the time, including the top ones, and then what? Was there one thing, one moment when you decided to quit it all and say: “Okay, I’m trying to build it myself based on my savings”?

The moment when someone from a really big FinTech from London asked me about it. So the moment when someone went from Deliveroo to one of the big FinTechs and said that they really needed it. It was already such a social validation because it was not the first person, but the first who joined a really big company. A really big prestigious company. At that moment, I had a feeling of being overloaded with consulting and I wanted to build products. It just made me very happy that people use what I do, give me feedback — good, bad, average, but I just like to see others using what I have built. However, for a consultant, that is rarely the case. Consultants often either come in for a while and solve a problem or are used for non-crucial things in companies where their impact is minimal. But here I had the feeling that I could do something important and have a lot of fun at the same time.

Often when I talk to founders, in particular tech founders who had a similar career path to yours, in Poland, it is known that we have a lot of people who provide services to others, be it through software houses or even DevOps agencies, it is very often like this: “I would like to build a product. I’d like to build something tangible that people will see”. That puzzled me, because on the other hand, if you think about it, it’s no secret that being a consultant who deals with DevOps, or some other special area, it’s rather a good and safe job. Did you have something like, “No, okay, it’s nice to build products, but it’s too scary, because you give up a steady source of income”? Was that an important aspect of starting for you?

I did a quick examination of my conscience and thought if Spacelift would not go well, how long will it take me to find another job that is equally well paid and equally comfortable. The answer was a week or two weeks. So I made sure I had savings that would allow me to live this week or two weeks and never go below that and that decision at this point became very simple.

You started building Spacelift and you had what you called a social proof, because people came and asked for your product — even from large established organizations. — So you started building the product. How did you verify that what you do, how you do it, is the right way, that it is a good product and people will want to use it?

I showed it to people, asked what they thought. I was taking a round of feedback, iteration. Feedback round, iteration. More and more often this feedback from people was: “Okay, great, I would use it”. People started using it long before we even released any beta, people were using it, and they were using it a lot for quasi-production stuff. It was a kind of a stealth mode with iterating with potential clients who came to me from my network.

Exactly, this is a very interesting topic, because again referring to my experiences from conversations with people who are trying to build something of their own — often reaching the right people is a problem. How did you reach the first people, the people who came before the beta of your product? Were they your friends from previous companies or did you have any other way to encourage them to share their opinion about what you are building?

Exactly, they were friends from previous companies, friends of friends from previous companies. Sometimes it happened that one of my friends did not, let’s say, work in the infrastructure, but had people who worked in it and had such needs, they were passionate, and somehow this opinion about what I was doing was quite positive. In terms of what I was doing as a consultant, there was no problem getting such references.

In this feedback process, was there anything that surprised you, or something that you thought you learned then? However, this was the second time that you built your own product.

When I was a CTO, I generally only dealt with technology. My boss handled the product. However, I learned not to make assumptions in advance, because for example, one thing I assumed in advance was that people would be very interested in feedback on how much their infrastructure would cost them, how much would they pay for what they intended to set now, and it turned out that the feedback from the beginning to the end was that you know what, in fact, the infrastructure is such a small part of our cost that it’s just not important. So what we’ve learned is that people look at tools that solve one particular problem for them. That is if you solve two problems, but on average, it is much worse than if you solve one problem, but very well. So there is no point in searching by force before you build a really strong position in one area. In our case, managing the cost and utilization of infrastructure, which I thought would be a very important side point, turned out to be completely wrong and we abandoned it. That doesn’t mean it will never happen, but that is not a priority. On the other hand, it turned out that people wanted to run it on their infrastructure and it was a big technological challenge that we had to jump over before we released the public beta.

It seems to me that this is a good time to say a bit about what Spacelift really is. If you could say in a few sentences, what is being done in Spacelift today?

Spacelift is an infrastructure management platform, especially in the so-called infrastructure-as-code paradigm. So instead of clicking something in the interfaces or writing scripts to build some infrastructure, I declare that my infrastructure should look like this and that. Spacelift jumps in at this point and sets this infrastructure for me and makes sure that in the future this infrastructure will look exactly as I declare it will look like. We also add a layer of policy over this here, that is, we make sure that this infrastructure will look exactly how the organization wants it to look. No matter what anyone declares. So if I would declare to myself that I want the largest possible database, but my boss said that I can only have a small one, I will always have at most a small one. I won’t set myself a big one.

Is this a product for everyone, big and small companies?

We solve the problem for the medium and large companies, that is, if a company can afford its own team or even a dedicated DevOps role, they probably already have such a developed infrastructure that it is worth automating it, it is worth auditing. In particular, if someone intends to go through any compliance, audit-type, at this point the infrastructure as code and managing this infrastructure makes it incredibly easier to perform such continuous compliance, which is required with this type of frameworks.

I remember when we started talking and we met for the first time. I started to dig a little deeper into what is going on with the global IT infrastructure, this shift to treating infrastructure like code is one of the biggest technological waves that is happening today. In what year did you found Spacelift? Was it the end of 2019?

When I started working, it was the end of 2019, yes.

Two or three months later — the pandemic. You’re a solo founder building your technology product, and suddenly one of the biggest shocks in business in the last decade. How did it affect you? It had a good impact, bad impact or you didn’t care at all?

At the time when it was going on, it was definitely a lot of stress, because there was a lot of uncertainty, but if I look at it from the perspective of a few months, soon it will be a year since this pandemic started haunting us, it turned out great, perfect. Before the pandemic, if you wanted to meet and talk to someone who can give you funding, or who might be your client, you needed to get on a plane and go. Suddenly this pandemic comes and we are all in the same situation. You can be in Mountain View, you can be in San Francisco, you can be in Palo Alto, you can be in Berlin, but you can also be in Kraśnik (small town in Poland), because the only communication is through Zoom. The pandemic has put a question mark on many business models that previously received funding, and it was massive funding. In my opinion, this also had a positive impact on the way the funds currently view such B2B businesses, SaaS for enterprise like Spacelift.

The key is that it is hard to make a name for yourself by building a solution like you without big customers, and it’s hard to get big customers working from Poland. It is hard to get tier-one US technology companies as clients, and in a situation where you want to validate whether what you are building is really needed by organizations that are at the highest level, you need to have access to them, you have to verify it, because it is something different to sell something to a customer in Poland, and it is different to sell something to a technology customer that works somewhere in California, or even in London.

It’s true. As the CTO of a startup three years ago, we were also looking for financing in the Polish market and I must say that it is like day and night what it looks like now, and what it looked like then.

Okay, but we are at this moment — you start a business, there is a lot of uncertainty, but you keep moving forward. It also has a very operational impact, people stop going to the office, most organizations — we are one of them — go 100% remote. Remote work is becoming the new norm. Was it something that you assumed from the beginning or is it something that life forced upon you and how is it with this setup today?

I have worked remotely for clients for many years. After all, I worked for Deliveroo while being in Warsaw and visiting London once every two months. So I was used to it and I knew what the organization of remote work looks like. At the moment, life has decided that this is how we will build the organization, or we are already building it, because one of those problems that are related to remote work is that if you have a central office and, say, freelancers all over the world, people in the central office are in a completely different position because communication takes place differently, there are personal relationships between employees, which are not necessarily the same as those with people working remotely. However, at the moment we assumed that we would be remote-first and we employ people all over Europe at the moment.

What criteria do you have? Because when you start hiring remotely, on the one hand, you open up to global talents, to people who are simply unique in what they do, and who may not live in Poland or Warsaw. And that’s a very cool element. Piotrek Pisarz in one of our previous podcasts in an interview with Tomek, said: “This is one of the greatest values, regardless of whether it is Portugal, South America, whether it is Australia, Germany, Berlin, you can choose the best people who are needed at the moment. You’re not limited.” Do you have any rule of thumb on how to recruit remotely, how to choose people for the team?

We limit the number of time zones that we consider for people who join the so-called core team, i.e. for people who work on product functionalities daily. When it comes to people who will work with clients, i.e. the so-called Solutions Engineers, i.e. people who will work on content, it does not matter. It is even better if someone is further away from us because then we kind of increase the coverage of the world with our employees’ working hours. However, when it comes to, let’s say, key roles of key employees over the product, we are limited to Europe and its vicinity.

What is the key when you recruit people? Now you have a lot of open positions and if anyone is curious they can look it up in the career tab on your website. What is important to you? What do you pay attention to?

Our recruitment process should take up to 5 hours and this is one of those things. We do not want to bother people and prolong this process. One thing we do is give a small task that shows more or less representatively what kind of tasks someone will face in our daily work. Then we review what someone has done. We say: “If you liked and we liked what you did, let’s keep going. Otherwise, we’re done”. Thanks to this, in the next round we are aware that someone who has gone through it is aware of what they will be doing and wants to do it and is positively excited about it. In the next round, we work together on the problem that we previously asked, i.e. we make some extra time for ourselves, and instead of asking this person to do it for us, we work on it together. At this point, we know how to work with this person and this person knows how to work with us. So we have these dynamics validated on both sides and this is the end of the process. In the end, there are only technical details: how do you want to work, will we agree on the conditions? On the other hand, the fact that someone will be passionate about what they will be doing, that we will enjoy working with this person, and on both sides, is, in my opinion, the most important thing in this entire recruitment process. Whether it’s business recruiting or technology recruiting, it doesn’t matter to me.

People in the beginning, both founders and first employees, they are the key element in the success. There is an approach in Poland that no matter what the problem is, there is always a finite number of interns who can solve this problem. I was curious — how you look at it. What are your thoughts on the development of your team?

We are completely different. In general, the number of people, especially in technology products or engineering projects, is the amount of communication that grows, even exponentially as more people are added. It is not worth it. That is, people who are junior or who need a lot of support are not good for remote work at all. The engineer who delivers in the office is completely lost when he changes to remote work. It seems to me that, especially in a startup, it is much more important that we will have people who understand the product, eat bread from more than one oven and can point this product in the right direction or question wrong directions or potentially dangerous decisions than to have an army of nods, claquers, who will do it thoughtlessly, chaotically.

A certain lack of critical thinking. I am laughing of course, because I remember it was one of the first lessons, one of our first five investments. The founder came to me after he hired a person who had 8 years of experience in what the person was doing and we talked, and he is so delighted he says to me: listen, but he costs us as much as 3 junior people I had before and he does 10 times as much and even takes things off my head. So it makes sense to pay someone good and experienced more money, because hiring entry-level people, and now I’m not saying not to hire them at all, but building an organization based on them is a bit of a false saving.

Absolutely, I agree 100%.

There is an interesting topic that I would like to discuss with you. You started Spacelift as a solo technical founder and you were alone in it at first. You came to me and I thought to myself: “What Marcin says has great potential. But there are so many business questions, in the sense of how to put it all together”. Usually, when we invest, statistically, when we look at our historical investments, it turns out that there is more than one person, responsibilities are spread among different people. After we met, we had an idea: “Okay, let’s think about whether we can support you in this somehow, can we connect you with someone who might take some of those business responsibilities off of your head”. Then we connected you with Paweł Hytry. How did it look from your perspective?

I always try to keep an open mind, especially when I enter a territory that I do not know. I always try to do many things, especially those that are completely new to me, to be patient and humble. I had a big question mark about what was actually going on here, but when it is time for me to study, I find that I will listen to everyone and talk to everyone, and get something out of it for myself. Even if it is a negative experience, nothing builds a person more than a negative business experience. I did not deceive myself that I am a business Elon Musk and that I have a great business vision, because I neither have nor had it.

I remember that we invited you and Paweł to one meeting, so that you would get to know each other in front of us, to see if it made any sense at all and how did it happen that from that moment on, at some point, you said to each other: “Yes, it’s good for us, we want to do it together”.

You know what, we went for lunch after we left your office, we chatted. It was a very hot moment for Spacelift because we were collecting the seed round. Paweł offered to help in this seed round and thus a bit validate the value that he could bring to the company. It turned out to be an amazing help back then. He showed skills that impressed me incredibly, and with skills from a completely different field than where I saw myself, and at that moment I was convinced that if we combine our skills, we complement each other perfectly.

Someone comes with a complementary set of competencies and life experiences, but we are still talking about something that you were building for six months. You put money into it, time, you took a chance. What was going on in your head then? It seems to me that it is very difficult and this is something that founders, especially solo founders, who are just looking for a co-founder, always have to face, some kind of internal boxing.

Of course, it was difficult to let someone into the organization on an equal footing when I invested in this product for the last few months of my life. I do not even count savings there. If my wife does not listen to me, it must have been half a million. Hope she’s not listening. In the end, I was convinced by the argument that we are just getting started. In a few months, we’ll both have exactly the same amount of work put into it, so why not be partners at this stage. Especially if we somehow lower the risk on my part. And it turned out to be true because Paweł is a titan of work. He is very good at what he does and this argument from the perspective of one year turned out to be true.

Before you were on your own and you could make all the decisions. Now there are two of you and I know what it’s like to make decisions when there are several partners. We have hot sessions with Tomek and Michał, during which we have to make some important decisions. How does it look like with you?

Unlike you, each of us specializes in something different. We respect that each of us has certain skills, knowledge and experience, and certain knowledge, experience and skills that we don’t have. We try not to get in each other’s way in places where we know that the other person has a better understanding of things. I will not go into legal or financial matters for Paweł, where Paweł has the experience, knowledge and curiosity, and he will not go into technical issues where he does not have the experience. Besides, it seems to me that both of us are open to not knowing something. We do not have a sense of omniscience or such strong beliefs that you should do certain things in a certain way, but we both approach unknown things with an open mind, a desire for more data and humility. I think it is very important.

It’s true. I knew Paweł personally before we introduced you. As I think to myself, you have very similar views on life. I remember one of you telling me that one of your values ​​in the company is “no BS”. And that’s what I think in the world of “fake it till you make it”, where people just stretch reality to the limit, “no BS” suits you like nothing else. Both of you are very rational and logical. Is it that this philosophy translates into everyday operations as you work today at Spacelift?

We look at the data. If we do not have the data, we decide to collect it. We give ideas a chance, collect data, validate whether this idea makes sense or not. However, we try to give a chance, if the idea is cheap to implement and gives us data, then we only make the final decision based on this data. Neither of us seems to have an exaggerated ego, so we like to hear what Datadog or HubSpot tell us.

What was so difficult about this process from your perspective? What were you afraid of when you thought that someone else from another world would join you?

I was very afraid that someone would have their visions and would want to implement these visions regardless of what the data says, what the market says, that someone who joins will join with a thesis and it will be very hard to work if these theses will be different from mine. I try not to have a thesis. There’s a nice word for it: “Strong Opinions, Weakly Held”. So let’s say I have a thesis, I act according to this thesis as an operational plan. If it turns out, the reality is not what I thought it was, I am trying to adapt to this vision. I was afraid of a guy who would go and die on the barricades.

Was there a moment or something that made you believe that: “Okay, Paweł is not that type of person”. In the sense that this is the kind of person who will look for and at data. Was it one particular thing or was it the sum of the little things?

One specific thing that convinced me a lot about Paweł, is that, firstly, he admitted that he didn’t know anything about the market, and secondly, he started reading incredible amounts of documentation and studies. He started asking questions to really understand the market, and at that moment I had the feeling that he was a guy who approached life and reality with an open mind, curiosity and humility.

Coming back to business. Let’s say it’s 12 months since you took off. What do you think you’ve managed to do during this time? What are you proud of?

I am proud that we managed to build a product that customers like to use, that customers recommend to each other and that my team likes to build and maintain. This is very good because the only thing I was afraid of is that customers will ask us for some features, we will grind our teeth, raise our eyes to the sky and we will do it with disgust. It turned out that we managed to build a product that we like to make and customers like to use. If our clients ask us for some features or some minor changes, we nod our head and say: ”Yes, you are exactly right, it is very good”. It helps a lot that we work with technical people, that these people are actual practitioners. People we would normally like to work with as collaborators. I did it. I am proud that we can do it from Poland, that we can work with global clients in virtually any time zone at the moment and we are building a technology company here in Poland based primarily on our innovation and not on copying other solutions or not as subcontractors to someone who makes the decisions. The fact that we can do it with Paweł as founders is an amazing adventure for me, but I also have a great sense of pride that I enable people in my team to make such decisions, work with such matters, such a level of innovation. And the fact that I can provide this to my technical team at the moment makes me very happy.

I must say that I am also very proud that there are more and more people in Poland like you. There are ambitious technology projects that can make some sort of mark on technology globally. It is a super cool thing for me as an investor that such things are happening and that there are people who want to do it. This is not a small thing. When I asked people what I should ask you, the overwhelming answer was: “How did you know Spacelift was it?” Or: “How to build a second Spacelift?” We talked about this a moment earlier. Could you share your background a little? Do you have any framework, any tools? How do you think that “these are customer opinions that need to be incorporated into the product” and “these are things that don’t make sense after all”. What are your thoughts on the development of Spacelift?

I think that the strategy is determined by us, the tactics are determined by the clients. The company’s strategy is that at the moment we mainly do SaaS, we do not focus on on-premise installations, which eliminates some of the customers. On the other hand, those customers for whom we have a product, tactics, i.e. features that they would like to see, determine what our backlog, the closest, looks like. So we make strategic decisions but then listen to customers to operationalize them into product decisions tactically. This is probably the whole philosophy I can share here. It is rather trivial.

On the one hand, it is easy to say that customers are satisfied with the product, but do you have any way in which you confirm it?

I talk to people, then I look at what they asked us for. In the conversation, I try to check if their problems can be solved with the current solution. Honestly, in 80% of cases, a person comes to me with a problem, and I give them a solution to this problem using existing features. Sometimes a very small thing is missing and that customer becomes satisfied. One thing that I try to do personally as a product manager here is not to look at what feature the client wants, but to look at what problem they have to solve, because a feature is only a function of a problem that we have to solve, and the problem is part of our product-market fit. I try to look at whether we are solving the problem, and not whether it is that feature or another. In every conversation where the client says: “I’d like to…” that’s what I’m trying to do.

How much time do you spend with your clients on average per week now?

40%.

You spend 40% of your time talking to clients? Wow!

You know — not only talk. Those are sales talks, sales speeches, support for existing customers, or some work on organizing the feedback we get? It does not have to be work on the phone, video, chat, it can be work with, say, the client’s data.

This is super important. The ability to talk with clients — this is something that we too often see more broadly in the market, it seems to be missing in Poland. We probably even talked once about the fact that in Poland it is very difficult to find a good product manager or someone you could think of as a CTO. People who have experience in this field, to build mass products, complex ones with people around the world. It seems to me that this is your superpower. From the beginning, systematically, you spend a lot of time with clients, being critical of what they say.

It makes it easier for us, because we are our own clients. We are making a product that we use. The people we work with are potentially our associates. We would like to hire many of them, many of them would be happy to hire us. Everything is in the family. I can imagine that if I had to do work for a bank as a product manager on credit cards or bars, we would talk completely differently.

This is also an interesting aspect, making a product that you use yourself changes the perspective of what you are actually building. Is there anything you have failed in? Any mistake in the last 12 months, that in retrospect you would like to do differently now?

Two things come to my mind. The first thing is that I applied for European funding and wasted many months waiting for any decision to come up. In the end, I even got this grant and I didn’t take it. It was a terrible waste of time, focus, and luckily I didn’t take it, because now it would be a waste of my time on all the paperwork associated with it. It seems to me that if I was looking at how to raise funds now, I would go to the VC market much faster. The second mistake I made was a too liberal disposition of shares in the company. In the beginning, it seemed to me that even 5% of 0 is still 0, so it is good if someone promises to help me, I can give him a lot of stock, and maybe help will come. And in fact, I gave shares to people who promised a lot, and then the reality verified these promises very brutally because it turned out that someone who promised operational commitment for a very large part of the time has such obligations in 17 companies, and already had a stocks from me without any restrictions. It’s not even that one should not give people shares . Give them, because it’s very good, but also introduce vesting. If this value that was expected does not materialize, we say what the value was and we vest.

Each of us, when we start something new, needs help and there are people who can get more involved sometimes. But when you are a founder, who is just staring, you don’t know much. You don’t know exactly what you need. It’s hard to do full due diligence sometimes. Something we advise people, for example, before they take our investment, we say that they should talk to our founders and understand how we work. What we say is one thing, and the reality may be a little different. The people who own shares in your company are important. They have some decision-making power. You have to settle some things with them. It’s good to be prepared for this. Checking your partners is one thing and the second is to ensure some vesting. This seems to solve the problem a bit.

Yes, because it seems that let’s say you give someone 5% and it’s such a small piece of cake. Except this is a piece of cake that you will be working for for the next X years just because someone connected you with a friend of theirs. Of course, it’s valuable, but it’s not worth 5%.

And what is the biggest challenge for you today in building Spacelift?

The biggest challenge in building Spacelift is to keep the division between the strategy and tactics I talked about, i.e. how not to be reduced to the role of a servant of our biggest, best clients. How not to be fooled, like that kitten that chases a bunny that is being played on the floor. How not to be that kitten, how to satisfy the one who lets this bunny go and sometimes jump on this bunny so that he has fun, and at the same time go in the direction chosen by yourself, i.e. build the best possible products for the largest possible number of customers.

How to balance it?

We’ll talk in 10 years, I’ll tell you!

What is your way of thinking today? Today you also need to make these decisions -how do you make them?

You know what, if something works within our framework and it is enough to add some small adjustments that do not change the rules of the structure of the application, application flow, I think that these are features. If they do not adversely affect the quality of the product, we are prepared to prioritize and implement them. But we try to separate these from the things that would make Spacelift a completely different product and that’s where we set the line.

The context for our conversation is that you recently announced that you have collected another round of funding. The second one in a fairly short period. It seems that collecting the capital is not a problem for you today. Assuming this continues, what is the goal? What do you want Spacelift to be?

The goal is as it has always been, to build a product that will solve real problems for people and that they will use. The goal is the same, just like it was 12 months ago. Funding doesn’t change anything. Money is just a tool.

We talked about this once. We said that money is not an end in itself, only that it is a tool. It imposes certain obligations on you, because not only that you share your company, you also have the feeling that you took the money and you have to do something with it and that is also pressure that has to be managed. It is quite interesting because, for example, from my perspective as an investor, if there are any projects there, the last thing I would like to do is put pressure on founders. When I think about what we are doing, we try to help people who have ambitions to build something cool. For me, it is obvious that some of these projects will not come out or will not come out as planned, but what is important to me is to have this ambition and try to implement it. I see a lot of people in the market who see funding as a success in itself. The goal in itself — to attract an investor. I think this is completely upside down.

It’s as if I considered it a success that my friend lent me ten buckswhen I ran out. I still have to give it back or lose a friend. This is not success. I used to work at Google before Google became the Google we know now because I joined in 2007 and the thing that inspired me during onboarding at that time was that Google’s motto was: “Focus on the user and the rest will follow”. Focus on delivering value to your customers, and everything else will go along. If the customers are satisfied with what we do, with the product, if they want to use it, I think all the rest will follow. Will it be an acquisition or will it be an IPO. It doesn’t matter anymore. This value does not result from the fact that someone will say that this company has such and such valuation, this is only a function of what customers will say about us, what our engagement will look like, what our pipeline will look like, and our product will be like, so that’s my only goal. This does not mean that we will not try to keep this machine well oiled, because Paweł puts a lot of work into it.

The thing that stuck in my memory when we started talking about the investment (it was one of the fastest processes that I can remember), we also did a background check on you. We talked to the people you worked with, some common connections. Something I can really remember is that they said that you are an exceptional developer. There is a concept of 10x developer. I know it may be hard to think of yourself this way, but this is the feedback we got. It deepened my thinking that this is a guy who can build something if the people who worked with him those things about him. They gave us such unsolicited feedback. How to be such a 10x developer? What do you think you are doing well or what do you think you are doing better than others?

I can connect you with someone I consider a great developer because I don’t think about myself that way. I don’t think I’m a very good developer. If I’m good at something as a developer, I’m a fairly fast developer. I quickly translate things into code. But when I say good developers, I mean people who can think at higher levels of abstraction than I do. My happiness in life and my career was that I did things that I liked, and it is known that if you do things that you like and understand well, your output and your commitment may make someone think of you that way. Rather, I think if you like something, you try to do it well. You need to hit a niche you like and just start doing it right. If programming is your passion, and often programmers are people who do it not because it is well paid, but because they like it. So if you like what you do and work in a field that you have a good grasp of and experience in, then ultimately the effect may be from outside that you look like you are the 10x developer. I don’t think of myself in this way and I know my limitations as a developer. However, I do know people who can think at levels of abstraction that are inaccessible to me, and these are the guys who are 10x developers to me. If I write 10,000 lines of code in a certain period of time, such a guy will write 100 lines of code, and those 100 lines of code could be thousand times the value of all the things I’ve produced in the meantime.

The purpose of this conversation was to show people who are like you were 12 or 18 months ago: who have an idea of ​​starting something of their own. Do you have any last tips for them?

Don’t be afraid of investors, don’t be afraid of VCs. Even if you bounce back, you will hear very valuable feedback. One thing I probably didn’t mention to you, because there was no opportunity, is that before I started applying for these European funds, I went to a fund called Blossom. I went to Blossom because the partner there was Mike Hudack, ex-CTO at Deliveroo. The Blossom guys told me it’s a very nice product, but there are a few things that will keep us from investing. Firstly, the stage you are at, secondly, geography — you’re in Poland, and thirdly, you don’t have a team. I took it to heart. In the beginning, I was mad, but who wouldn’t be if they heard something like that, that’s life. I got over it and started realizing these points. We currently have Delaware C-Corp, we are not in Poland, even though we are in Poland. We have a team that is business-technical, so that’s another thing that is dropping off this list. We have a product because we have customer validation. I have customers who have stayed with us when the product was not so good. They still stick with us until this product is perfect. We already have such a large validation that what we build makes sense, the product exists. If I hadn’t gone or listened to what they had to say — it was Mike and Imran from Blossom then, I’d be blissfully ignorant or offended at the world that I do such great things and no one wants to buy it. Nobody wants to invest in it. On the other hand, the fact that I went, listened and tried to address all of these points step by step, I think that has largely made us sit here today and talk.

It was very fun to talk to you.

Thanks, Maciek! Same here!

Inovo Venture Partners is a first-choice VC for ambitious founders from Poland and the CEE region. We back early-stage, post-traction startups with up to €3M of initial investment, and help them build global brands, while driving growth of the local startup ecosystem. We take great pride in being close to top founders who think big. We’re investors in: Booksy, Restaumatic, Sotrender, Infermedica, Spacelift, Tidio, AI Clearing, Zowie, Jutro Medical, Intiaro, Packhelp, Preply, Eyerim, Allset. Our second fund reached a total of €54M. For more information visit: https://inovo.vc/

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