An Interview with Peter Pezaris
Periodically, Team CodeStream will look to interview leaders from around the world of software development to share the latest trends and insights from our fast-changing industry. For this first interview, we figured why not start with our own Peter Pezaris, Founder & CEO of CodeStream.
Peter has been building the future of collaboration for 23 years. A pioneer in social networking, news feeds, and real-time messaging, he now leads CodeStream as we embark on radically improving the software development process.
Q: What are you working on?
A: We are building intelligent team chat right into today’s popular IDEs to dramatically improve software development team collaboration and productivity.
Q: Who will use your product?
A: Our vision is to have software development teams all over the world using our platform. We have demoed the product to over 100 development teams and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. As we discuss CodeStream with potential users, we have found them to be increasingly comfortable with team chat and are looking for stronger collaboration tools. CodeStream is set to provide a dramatically better experience by integrating team chat and other tools directly into the coding environment. Early testers have found a number of powerful collaboration opportunities that can only be done inside the IDE, and they love it.
Q: Why isn’t someone already doing this?
A: Someone had to be first, and it’s us.
Q: What have you learned so far from working on your product?
A: There are about 8 IDEs that matter in terms of market share. We intend to eventually support them all. We’ve learned that the choice of IDE is highly personal. The average software development team has 8 members, and there can be 3 or 4 IDEs in use within each team. We’ve observed over the last couple of months that people are willing to switch IDEs to try CodeStream, which we are really excited about.
Q: What resistance will users have to trying your platform and how will you overcome it?
A: I think there will be three primary challenges to overcome as we rollout CodeStream. 1) Some teams will inevitably resist any new platform and feel “What we use is good enough”. Our job will be to quantify and effectively communicate the dramatic productivity improvements and team benefits achieved by their competitors through our platform. 2) As with any new company, some teams will simply be concerned with working with a new platform and want to wait until we have a larger user base to feel comfortable. This is understandable and we plan to highlight our team’s long history in developing and launching successful collaboration platforms along with a robust onboarding and training program to alleviate these concerns — not to mention the fact that Alpha and Beta customers will get the product free for life. 3) Finally, we expect some resistance from larger IT departments that have not adopted the cloud and insist on keeping all source code materials “in-house”. We see the cloud as the inevitable next step for any company that wants to be truly competitive, so we see this type of objection disappearing over time.
Q: What are the top things your users want?
A: Better code, fewer bugs and less technical debt. Oh, and improved team dynamics that make everyone feel like a rockstar.
