"I have never met a real customer at Microsoft.." | Max Lang, CTO of Ambient скачать в хорошем качестве

"I have never met a real customer at Microsoft.." | Max Lang, CTO of Ambient

Max Lang helped Blend get their first set of customers that was instrumental for their IPO. At Blend, he flew out to meet customers in person, something he never did at Microsoft or Amazon. The founders were ex-Palantir and followed the playbook of speaking to customers and building the first version with software instead of just words. He built a dashboarding tool with Sankey diagram functionality for cashflow analysis, and customers came back with a PowerPoint presentation featuring a hand drawn Sankey diagram. That visceral feeling of making an impression became something he actively seeks out. At Cockroach Labs as one of the first 10 engineers on the 1.0 release, Max learned a tough lesson about customer discovery. He thought they needed to talk to MongoDB-type users and bring them to Postgres, but the reality was different. The best early customers were database operators and experts who hit technical limitations of Postgres or needed data stored in specific locations like the EU, US, and Australia. Cockroach enabled that capability, and those people were willing to pay instead of being free users. The first user of the dashboard he built with Matt Tracy wasn't external customers but Cockroach developers themselves trying to debug clusters. At Ambient, users email support saying the product was really helpful, and the team is building fully private inference with end-to-end encryption. When you're burning through startup money, how do you balance building what you think customers want versus discovering who your real early customers actually are?