Gold Fig</a> is going to put an end to embarrassing and costly configuration changes, once and for all.</em></p>\n<p><em>If you’re looking for your next job, visit YC’s <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com//">Work at a Startup</a> to find engineering roles at over 500 funded YC startups.</em></p>\n<hr />\n<p><strong>Ryan: Firebase (S11) is such an integral part of so much internet infrastructure — every developer seems to have done something with it. What was it like being so early on there?</strong></p>\n<p>There’s so much I got to build, it was incredible. In the early days, I started by working on improving our engineering rigor and automating our deployment process. We were thinking about scale from the start — we already had customers, and knew it would be big. At one point, we needed to pick good technology for the infrastructure, and I had lots of experience working with JVMs, so we picked Scala. We also knew Scala would help us attract good candidates, which it did. From there, I got to build the networking layer too, and wrote the first iOS and Android SDKs. At a startup, you get to contribute to just about everything.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan: And what was it like working on such a small team?</strong></p>\n<p>James and Andrew [the co-founders of Firebase] really treated me like a peer. At no point did I feel like Firebase was not mine. In the early days, I would just ship things without asking anyone and they were fine with that. One of the most memorable things was when I added office hours to the app. Any Friday, developers were invited to come to the Firebase office and ask me anything.</p>\n<p>Then about two weeks in, James comes to me and says, “Who are all these people coming into our office?” I told him what I did, and he just said, “Keep it up.” I mean, our customers were developers, and we want them to be super successful. And this was like having office hours in college. It was also a great way to engender trust with our users, and to get feedback on what’s working and what’s not working. And you know, do things that don’t scale.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan: What’s it like building a tool for developers?</strong></p>\n<p>Developer tools have these 2nd and 3rd order effects. It’s really endearing. There are — I kid you not — people who have found out I worked at Firebase and have told me, “Firebase changed my life.” I once met a guy who used to be a waiter at Applebees, went to a hackathon and learned Javascript and Firebase, and then won the hackathon. He ended up sticking with it, getting into tech and now he’s a PM. He never thought he’d be out of the food service industry, and — just to think that Firebase was part of his story — is really amazing. At one point, we had a tweet posted on our wall, “Please marry me, Firebase!”</p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">\n The support from <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/Firebase?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\%22>@Firebase is incredible. I loved them before, but right now I’d almost marry them. Highly, highly recommended. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/hashtag/StartupAUS?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#StartupAUS</a>\n </p>\n<p>— Murray Hurps (@Murray) </p>\n<p> <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/Murray/status/556567564155748352?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\%22>January 17, 2015</a>\n</p></blockquote>\n<p><strong>Ryan: Ridiculous. What do you think helped Firebase turn into such a big phenomenon?</strong></p>\n<p>It’s going to sound cheesy, but really, it’s about the people who worked there. We all wanted to do whatever we could do to help the company succeed, and that meant helping developers succeed. As we grew, we tried to make sure we found people who believed the same thing. Everyone says that hiring the right early employees is extremely important, and it was no different for us.</p>\n<p>Our highest order bit was to hire kind people. Obviously we wanted people with the right skills and ability to communicate, but James and Andrew went out of their way to make sure they didn’t hire jerks. We also made sure we hired people who enjoyed coming to work, and whom we enjoyed working with. That’s really important to look for, because each person you add to the team changes the dynamic — for example, if you hire somebody more introverted, it changes the team’s communication style.</p>\n<p>We were kind of lucky because we got to stay small for the entirety of Firebase. I joined in 2011, and when we got acquired by Google three years later, we were still only 22 people. And only one person ever left during that time, and it was for non-work related reasons.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan: So how early were you?</strong></p>\n<p>When I started, it was just me and the founders and they were going through the S11 batch. The company was actually working on chat APIs, and then realized that their real-time infrastructure was more useful than the chat tools themselves. We pivoted to Firebase a few months after demo day.</p>\n<p>I originally found their job post on Twitter. One of the founders put a description on HackerNews and then tweeted it. I cold emailed them, something like “I saw your post, I’m winding down my startup, and I want to join a good team.” At the time they had customers and revenue — two things I didn’t have with my own startup.</p>\n<p>Anyway, they asked to meet, so we got coffee at the Creamery, and it was pretty casual. We did an onsite about a week later, and then a small take-home exercise. Not as taxing as what we had at Google, and I got to get to know them better in the process. I’m a strong proponent of interviews being bi-directional — candidates should take the time to really get to know the startup, founders, and team. And I vividly remember James letting me list out all the things I expected culturally. That meant a lot to me. And it turned out he was really listening; even on the toughest days, we still took time to take lunch together, walk around SoMa, and enjoyed every step along the journey.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan: And have you been in touch with them?</strong></p>\n<p>Definitely. When I applied to YC for my startup Gold Fig, I reached out to Andrew and James and told them about it. They were both incredulous — “No way you’re getting in.” But they still spent time with me, and gave me strong recommendations. That was key, because I had only done a bunch of mocks and hadn’t written that much code at that point. Getting their input on what I was working on and my YC application was huge.</p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"/blog/content/images/wordpress/2019/11/s19-alumni-demo-day-300x200.jpg/" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-1104068\" srcset=\"/blog/content/images/wordpress/2019/11/s19-alumni-demo-day-300x200.jpg 300w, /blog/content/images/wordpress/2019/11/s19-alumni-demo-day-768x512.jpg 768w, /blog/content/images/wordpress/2019/11/s19-alumni-demo-day-1024x683.jpg 1024w, /blog/content/images/wordpress/2019/11/s19-alumni-demo-day.jpg 1600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" /></p>\n<p><strong>Ryan: And given you were so early on Firebase and have startup experience, why did you choose go through YC?</strong></p>\n<p>Yeah, we thought about that a lot. We have the network, and we feel pretty comfortable building a product. And there were some key things that we thought we really wanted. First, because Gold Fig is a developer tool, we thought that it’d be useful to tap into the YC community to get early users — just like Segment and Stripe did. And second, we wanted to use HN for recruiting engineers, because both me and my co-founder found Firebase that way.</p>\n<p>But the actual benefit we got during YC was something completely different. I mean, we knew we needed velocity, a forcing function to keep shipping, launching, and re-launching. But once got in, we really had to step up our game. Here are all these incredible founders working on amazing ideas, and YC partners pushing you each week. Extremely high-concentrated messaging, like Kevin Hale telling us to focus on the one thing that’s important to our company right now. And Gustav telling us, “You should launch this thing and you should be embarrassed.” It’s not just a figure of speech. If you’re not embarrassed, you don’t care enough. You need to caveat that with what you’re building, but know that you can deliver a ton of value and it can still be janky.</p>\n<p>So yeah, you can read blog posts online or watch the videos [about YC], but hearing feedback in person, and for 3 straight months, is game-changing. It pushed us to code more and launch more than we ever have. And we really didn’t know what was possible in us until we had people pushing us, people who wanted us to be as great as they thought we could be.</p>\n<p><strong>Ryan: And where are you guys now?</strong></p>\n<p>Well… we did it! [Laughs.] I mean, we got through YC, and we just finished fundraising. But we’re just getting started. We haven’t hired anyone yet, and we’re trying to be thoughtful: company values, run rate, in-person or remote, all that stuff. We’re able to stay lean now, and maybe hire 3-5 people in the next year.</p>\n<p>And we’re doing what we did at Firebase: talking to developers, understanding what they need, and building. Just building. It’s great, because we’re back to solving a core problem for developers: working in a sea of different SaaS projects and online software systems, and trying to manage configuration, version changes and compatibility. Gold Fig’s ability to show them all in one place, undo changes, set up environments for new hires on staging vs. production, it’s all based on what we’re hearing from our users.</p>\n<p>I mean, at some point we were concerned that what we were building was too niche: only for people who had been burned by bad configs. We thought maybe it might be just DevOps managers or the security teams. Turns out, just about every developer has been in that situation. And it sucks. So now we have everyday developers to VPs of engineering reaching out to us to find out what we’re up to, and how we can help them.</p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1104060","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/wordpress/2019/11/Screen-Shot-2019-11-22-at-12.58.25-PM.png","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2019-11-22T03:02:22.000-08:00","updated_at":"2022-06-27T08:52:44.000-07:00","published_at":"2019-11-22T03:02:22.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710bf","name":"Ryan Choi","slug":"rchoi","profile_image":"//www.gravatar.com/avatar/36ba914c5f191f813e96db0296154469?s=250&d=mm&r=x","cover_image":null,"bio":"Ryan works with YC companies to find great engineers — from 2-person startups to larger ones like Airbnb, Stripe and Instacart.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/rchoi/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71184","name":"Employee #1","slug":"employee-1","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/employee-1/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71175","name":"Interview","slug":"interview","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/interview/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71171","name":"Work at a Startup","slug":"work-at-a-startup","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/work-at-a-startup/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71178","name":"#jobs","slug":"hash-jobs","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710bf","name":"Ryan Choi","slug":"rchoi","profile_image":"//www.gravatar.com/avatar/36ba914c5f191f813e96db0296154469?s=250&d=mm&r=x","cover_image":null,"bio":"Ryan works with YC companies to find great engineers — from 2-person startups to larger ones like Airbnb, Stripe and Instacart.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/rchoi/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71184","name":"Employee #1","slug":"employee-1","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/employee-1/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/vikrum-nijjar-engineer-1-at-firebase-and-founder-of-gold-fig-labs-yc-s19/","excerpt":" Vikrum Nijjar joined as the first engineer at Firebase, and did whatever it\ntook to help the company succeed: scaling out infrastructure, shipping mobile\nSDKs, hosting 1-1 office hours with developers and even standing in as SRE for\n24×7 hour shifts… for over a year.\n\nIn this interview, Vikrum tells us what he found most valuable about his YC\nexperience, how to build successful developer tools, and why Gold Fig\n[https://www.goldfiglabs.com/] is going to put an end to embarrassing and costly\ncon","reading_time":7,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},"mentions":[],"related_posts":[{"id":"620da5f7d710a50001fba7dd","uuid":"2e869860-9ab1-45e5-9761-e49ec49f7a45","title":"Y Combinator Top Companies - February 2022","slug":"y-combinator-top-companies-feb-2022","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: markdown--><p>We’re excited to share the <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/">2022 YC Top Companies</a>. In addition to the list of top companies, we also launched the <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/breakthrough/">YC Breakthrough Companies</a> list to highlight the fast-growing companies that have received between $15M-$300M <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/continuity//">from YC</a>.</p>\n<p>Both lists include private, public and exited companies valued at $150M or more and are sorted by valuation<sup class=\"footnote-ref\"><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#fn1\" id=\"fnref1\">[1]</a></sup> or market cap as of February 2022.</p>\n<p>Here are some stats about this year’s list:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<p>More than 260 YC companies are valued at $150M+ and more than 60 companies are valued at $1B+.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>99 new companies joined the list since our last update in July 2021.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>More companies are operating remotely</p>\n<ul>\n<li>11% of the top companies are remote first.</li>\n<li>Three of the top ten private companies are remote first (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/opensea/">OpenSea, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/brex/">Brex, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gitlab/">Gitlab)./n/n/n
/n
20 countries are represented</p>\n<ul>\n<li>6 new countries represented: Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, Chile, Brazil, and Singapore</li>\n<li>Of the companies that are new to the list, 28% are outside of the US.</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Top 10 valuation jumps since July 2021:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety/">Flock Safety</a> (jumped 74 spots to #31)</li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/solugen/">Solugen (jumped 74 spots to #51)</li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gem/">Gem (jumped 69 spots to #76)</li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/modern-treasury/">Modern Treasury</a> (jumped 52 spots to #48)</li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/xendit/">Xendit (jumped 49 spots to #37)</li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/captivateiq/">CaptivateIQ (jumped 35 spots to #71)</li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/easypost/">EasyPost (jumped 34 spots to #60)</li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/h1/">H1 (jumped 30 spots to #98)</li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/veriff/">Veriff (jumped 28 spots to #61)</li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/promise/">Promise (jumped 21 spots to #121)</li>\n</ul>\n</li>\n</ul>\n<p>You can read more about some of the featured companies <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/featured/">here.
/n
One thing to note is that this is not an exhaustive list of YC’s top companies. We allowed founders to opt out of being listed for any reason. Here's the <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/">full list</a> of YC companies.</p>\n<p>Congratulations to all of the fantastic companies highlighted here. We’re delighted to be part of their stories and hope these lists help potential employees, customers and investors identify companies they’d like to work with as well.<br>\n<br></p>\n<p><em>This list was published in late February 2022, just as the fighting in Ukraine began. We didn’t think it was an appropriate moment to be celebratory, and wanted to take time to turn our attention to <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/supporting-ukraine/">the Ukrainian people</a> and the YC community being impacted by the invasion of Ukraine.</em><br>\n<br></p>\n<hr class=\"footnotes-sep\">\n<section class=\"footnotes\">\n<ol class=\"footnotes-list\">\n<li id=\"fn1\" class=\"footnote-item\"><p>Why do we use valuation? We have always said that valuation is not the best way to measure a company’s value, and we consistently warn our companies not to over-optimize their fundraising for a high valuation. That said, it’s the most commonly available metric to compare companies in the startup world. Other metrics, like revenue, are often kept private. We have a number of impressive companies who would appear on the list or rank even higher if we counted other metrics (revenue, revenue/employee, etc). <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#fnref1\" class=\"footnote-backref\">↩︎</a></p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n</section>\n<!--kg-card-end: markdown-->","comment_id":"620da5f7d710a50001fba7dd","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/yc-top-companies-list-og-image-2.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-02-16T17:33:43.000-08:00","updated_at":"2022-04-19T16:33:56.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-02-28T08:44:00.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":"We’re excited to share the 2022 YC Top Companies. 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Throughout, Jaleh shares advice about acquisitions as a growth strategy and evolving your product with AI. </p><p>You can listen here or on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://open.spotify.com/episode/7dy1qB7XQfOryE4kj4spGS/">Spotify, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/160-yc-founder-firesides-mutiny-on-ai-and-the-next/id1236907421?i=1000583708925\%22>Apple Podcasts</a>, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1yNxaNzAPPnKj/">Twitter.
Notion drives 60% more leads through paid marketing</a></li><li>Example 2: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.mutinyhq.com/blog/the-second-lever-replays#conversion-secret-how-snowflake-runs-abm-at-scale\">Snowflake builds an ABM and enterprise marketing program</a></li></ul><p><strong>12:50</strong> - You recently shared that with data and AI, Mutiny transforms conversion from a niche A/B testing tool to a platform that every go-to-market team can use to drive efficient growth at scale. What does that mean, and how have you leveraged the advances in AI over the last four years? </p><ul><li>When you can give the entire go-to-market team x-ray vision into every visitor and how they are converting – and then pair that insight with the ability to change the website for different segments – every team will make the website a core part of their strategy to drive more revenue. Mutiny uses AI to give teams this insight and answer questions like: What segments should I prioritize? What parts of the website should I change? What copy will resonate? Where should I focus? </li></ul><p><strong>17:00</strong> - At Mutiny when looking at data, when do you know the right questions to ask and when do you say these are not questions we need to optimize now?</p><ul><li>In the early days, one of the most valuable things we did was follow our customers’ growth teams. We would attend team meetings, watch them use our product, and ask questions. It became clear what we should build for our customers. </li></ul><p><strong>20:30</strong> - Since you started Mutiny, what are some of the advances in AI that you’ve leveraged? </p><ul><li>We did things that didn't scale in the early days to solve customers’ problems. As our customers grew, our data set grew and we used AI models and inputs to improve our recommendation engines and service a broader customer base. Today, we can build models that tell a user where on the website they should make changes and write personalized copy leveraging GPT-3. </li></ul><p><strong>29:10</strong> - Did you have moments when you felt Mutiny could be doing more with the advances being made in AI? </p><ul><li>We saw an opportunity to marry our proprietary data set with GPT-3 to produce highly personalized copy. </li></ul><p><strong>32:15</strong> - GPT-3 was an inflection point for Munity. What is the next inflection point? </p><ul><li>There are a lot of opportunities with DALL-E, as visuals are important in marketing.</li></ul><p><strong>36:30</strong> - Do you have cautionary advice on how to think about using technologies like GPT-3 and DALL-E for founders dabbling in AI? </p><ul><li>Think through the ultimate long-term vision of the product and the long-term defensibility of the business. And launch fast, as technology develops quickly. </li></ul><p><strong>38:40</strong> - What advice do you have for founders in terms of leveraging OpenAI, GPT-3, etc. while focusing on the long-term vision? </p><ul><li>Your vision and long-term view is separate from your day-to-day execution. Your long-term vision (i.e. the opportunity and what you’re trying to create over the course of a decade) provides clarity around where you’re trying to go and brings other people along with you, like your investors and employees. Day-to-day, you’re focused and executing quickly – and not always thinking about the ten year vision when you’re building V1.</li></ul><p><strong>43:45</strong> - You decided to grow your team by acquiring Intellipse. And now, Mutiny has one of the larger engineering teams with production experience in modern marketing AI technologies. Why did you decide to pursue an acquisition? </p><ul><li>Founders have to look for inflection points where something happens in the market leading to the “old way” no longer being as good. And as a result, a much larger portion of the market is open to a new and better way. We’re in a recession, and this is an inflection point for Mutiny. Companies need to convert every dollar to a customer, and Mutiny has built a product that makes marketing dollars more efficient. We can accelerate our road map with the acquisition of Intellipse</li></ul><p><strong>46:40</strong> - How did you know you wanted to work with the Intellipse team so much that you had to go through an acquisition?</p><ul><li>We were interested in the Intellipse team and the skills the team had developed. Their CTO and senior engineers had a unique experience with marketing AI and newer technologies, like GPT-3.</li><li>The personality and values of the founder spreads in an organization and becomes the company culture. After getting to know the founder and the free am, it was evident the two companies had a similar culture and shared values – and we’d be able to bring this team in and enhance our culture.</li></ul><p><strong>50:15</strong> - How long did it take to assess the culture? </p><ul><li>We spent the same amount of time with each individual as if we were hiring them onto the team through our typical recruiting process.</li></ul><p><strong>51:30</strong> - Do you expect to acquire more companies in the future? And how should founders and CEOs determine whether this strategy is right for their company? </p><ul><li>Be clear about your goals and why an acquisition is the right way to achieve those goals. When a company is working toward a similar goal – building something we would have done ourselves – it is a successful acquisition. With Intellipse, the team shared similar goals and company culture, and could accelerate our timing.</li><li>We want to hire founders onto our product team who are user focused and move quickly. Founders can focus their entrepreneurial energy on building a product and growing that business area within Mutiny. </li></ul><p><strong>54:55</strong> - What are your thoughts about how AI will impact the next ten years? </p><ul><li>There has been enough productization of backend AI technologies that as a founder you can tap into AI to accelerate the product you want to build and the value you give to customers. From a user and growth perspective, AI enables us to automate many of the tasks no one wants to do. 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Today, the fastest growing B2B companies such as Notion and Snowflake use Mutiny to identify ideal customers, determine sections of websites that will increase conversion, and produce copy that converts visitors into customers. ","reading_time":5,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"63fced280ca0ec00016319fa","uuid":"f1d9175c-3d17-4d36-92bf-a65b2362acc3","title":"Announcing Y Combinator's Spring 2022 Tech Hiring Event","slug":"yc-spring-2022-tech-hiring-event","html":"<p>We're excited to host an <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/events/meet-founders-sf/">in-person tech hiring event on Wednesday, March 8th</a> at 5:30 PM at Y Combinator's San Francisco office. This will be the first in-person hiring event we're hosting at YC in over two years, and we have 9 YC-backed startups who are looking to hire engineers and technical talent.</p><p>The event will feature brief founder & company overviews, time to network, and light food and drinks provided by YC. Spots are limited, so <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/events/meet-founders-sf/">apply now</a> to get on the list.</p><p>The companies attending <em>(and what they're hiring for)</em> below:</p><ul><li><strong><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/events/meet-founders-sf/onesignal/">OneSignal (Growth):</strong> Engage customers through personalized omni-channel messaging <em>(Infrastructure and Product Engineers, Product Managers)</em></li><li><strong><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/memora-health/">Memora Health</a> <strong>(Series A):</strong></strong> Helps healthcare organizations digitize and automate complex care workflows</li><li><strong><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/events/meet-founders-sf/seam/">Seam (Series A):</strong> API for IoT Devices <em>(Engineering & Sales)</em></li><li><strong><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/events/meet-founders-sf/slope/">Slope (Series A):</strong> Buy Now, Pay Later for B2B <em>(Backend & Full stack engineers; data; customer success)</em></li><li><strong><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/events/meet-founders-sf/fieldguide/">Fieldguide (Series A):</strong> Automation and collaboration software for audit and advisory firms<em> (ML Engineer, Product Manager)</em></li><li><strong><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/events/meet-founders-sf/agave/">Agave (Seed):</strong> Plaid for Construction <em>(Founding Engineer in PHP/Typescript/React)</em></li><li><strong><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/events/meet-founders-sf/mintlify/">Mintlify (Seed):</strong> Developer-first documentation that converts users <em>(Full Stack Engineer)</em></li><li><strong><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/events/meet-founders-sf/replo/">Replo (Seed):</strong> Visual development for React, starting with e-commerce <em>(Engineers & Designers)</em></li><li><strong><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/events/meet-founders-sf/oneshop/">OneShop (Seed):</strong> Operating system for reselling online <em>(Backend, Frontend and Growth Engineers)</em></li></ul><p>If you're an engineer interested in working at a fast-growing startup, this is an opportunity to meet founders and hiring managers in person to learn about their companies and products, understand their technology stacks and challenges, and get a sense of their culture and what it's like to work there.</p><p>This is a unique chance to engage with multiple companies at once, and to potentially find your next role at a leading tech startup. We hope you'll join us for what will be an informative and worthwhile evening.</p><!--kg-card-begin: html--><center>\n<a class=\"ycdc-retro-btn ycdc-retro-btn-gold mt-[-10px] ml-[13px]\" href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/events/meet-founders-sf/" style=\"text-decoration: none;\" title=\"Apply to YC Event\" target=\"_blank\">Apply to Join</a>\n</center><!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"63fced280ca0ec00016319fa","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/02/BlogTwitter-Image-Template--5--1.png","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2023-02-27T09:49:28.000-08:00","updated_at":"2023-03-06T12:57:26.000-08:00","published_at":"2023-02-28T09:00:00.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710bf","name":"Ryan 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Vikrum Nijjar: Engineer #1 at Firebase and Founder of Gold Fig Labs (YC S19)
Vikrum Nijjar joined as the first engineer at Firebase, and did whatever it took to help the company succeed: scaling out infrastructure, shipping mobile SDKs, hosting 1-1 office hours with developers and even standing in as SRE for 24×7 hour shifts… for over a year.
In this interview, Vikrum tells us what he found most valuable about his YC experience, how to build successful developer tools, and why Gold Fig is going to put an end to embarrassing and costly configuration changes, once and for all.
If you’re looking for your next job, visit YC’s Work at a Startup to find engineering roles at over 500 funded YC startups.
Ryan: Firebase (S11) is such an integral part of so much internet infrastructure — every developer seems to have done something with it. What was it like being so early on there?
There’s so much I got to build, it was incredible. In the early days, I started by working on improving our engineering rigor and automating our deployment process. We were thinking about scale from the start — we already had customers, and knew it would be big. At one point, we needed to pick good technology for the infrastructure, and I had lots of experience working with JVMs, so we picked Scala. We also knew Scala would help us attract good candidates, which it did. From there, I got to build the networking layer too, and wrote the first iOS and Android SDKs. At a startup, you get to contribute to just about everything.
Ryan: And what was it like working on such a small team?
James and Andrew [the co-founders of Firebase] really treated me like a peer. At no point did I feel like Firebase was not mine. In the early days, I would just ship things without asking anyone and they were fine with that. One of the most memorable things was when I added office hours to the app. Any Friday, developers were invited to come to the Firebase office and ask me anything.
Then about two weeks in, James comes to me and says, “Who are all these people coming into our office?” I told him what I did, and he just said, “Keep it up.” I mean, our customers were developers, and we want them to be super successful. And this was like having office hours in college. It was also a great way to engender trust with our users, and to get feedback on what’s working and what’s not working. And you know, do things that don’t scale.
Ryan: What’s it like building a tool for developers?
Developer tools have these 2nd and 3rd order effects. It’s really endearing. There are — I kid you not — people who have found out I worked at Firebase and have told me, “Firebase changed my life.” I once met a guy who used to be a waiter at Applebees, went to a hackathon and learned Javascript and Firebase, and then won the hackathon. He ended up sticking with it, getting into tech and now he’s a PM. He never thought he’d be out of the food service industry, and — just to think that Firebase was part of his story — is really amazing. At one point, we had a tweet posted on our wall, “Please marry me, Firebase!”
The support from @Firebase is incredible. I loved them before, but right now I’d almost marry them. Highly, highly recommended. #StartupAUS
Ryan: Ridiculous. What do you think helped Firebase turn into such a big phenomenon?
It’s going to sound cheesy, but really, it’s about the people who worked there. We all wanted to do whatever we could do to help the company succeed, and that meant helping developers succeed. As we grew, we tried to make sure we found people who believed the same thing. Everyone says that hiring the right early employees is extremely important, and it was no different for us.
Our highest order bit was to hire kind people. Obviously we wanted people with the right skills and ability to communicate, but James and Andrew went out of their way to make sure they didn’t hire jerks. We also made sure we hired people who enjoyed coming to work, and whom we enjoyed working with. That’s really important to look for, because each person you add to the team changes the dynamic — for example, if you hire somebody more introverted, it changes the team’s communication style.
We were kind of lucky because we got to stay small for the entirety of Firebase. I joined in 2011, and when we got acquired by Google three years later, we were still only 22 people. And only one person ever left during that time, and it was for non-work related reasons.
Ryan: So how early were you?
When I started, it was just me and the founders and they were going through the S11 batch. The company was actually working on chat APIs, and then realized that their real-time infrastructure was more useful than the chat tools themselves. We pivoted to Firebase a few months after demo day.
I originally found their job post on Twitter. One of the founders put a description on HackerNews and then tweeted it. I cold emailed them, something like “I saw your post, I’m winding down my startup, and I want to join a good team.” At the time they had customers and revenue — two things I didn’t have with my own startup.
Anyway, they asked to meet, so we got coffee at the Creamery, and it was pretty casual. We did an onsite about a week later, and then a small take-home exercise. Not as taxing as what we had at Google, and I got to get to know them better in the process. I’m a strong proponent of interviews being bi-directional — candidates should take the time to really get to know the startup, founders, and team. And I vividly remember James letting me list out all the things I expected culturally. That meant a lot to me. And it turned out he was really listening; even on the toughest days, we still took time to take lunch together, walk around SoMa, and enjoyed every step along the journey.
Ryan: And have you been in touch with them?
Definitely. When I applied to YC for my startup Gold Fig, I reached out to Andrew and James and told them about it. They were both incredulous — “No way you’re getting in.” But they still spent time with me, and gave me strong recommendations. That was key, because I had only done a bunch of mocks and hadn’t written that much code at that point. Getting their input on what I was working on and my YC application was huge.
Ryan: And given you were so early on Firebase and have startup experience, why did you choose go through YC?
Yeah, we thought about that a lot. We have the network, and we feel pretty comfortable building a product. And there were some key things that we thought we really wanted. First, because Gold Fig is a developer tool, we thought that it’d be useful to tap into the YC community to get early users — just like Segment and Stripe did. And second, we wanted to use HN for recruiting engineers, because both me and my co-founder found Firebase that way.
But the actual benefit we got during YC was something completely different. I mean, we knew we needed velocity, a forcing function to keep shipping, launching, and re-launching. But once got in, we really had to step up our game. Here are all these incredible founders working on amazing ideas, and YC partners pushing you each week. Extremely high-concentrated messaging, like Kevin Hale telling us to focus on the one thing that’s important to our company right now. And Gustav telling us, “You should launch this thing and you should be embarrassed.” It’s not just a figure of speech. If you’re not embarrassed, you don’t care enough. You need to caveat that with what you’re building, but know that you can deliver a ton of value and it can still be janky.
So yeah, you can read blog posts online or watch the videos [about YC], but hearing feedback in person, and for 3 straight months, is game-changing. It pushed us to code more and launch more than we ever have. And we really didn’t know what was possible in us until we had people pushing us, people who wanted us to be as great as they thought we could be.
Ryan: And where are you guys now?
Well… we did it! [Laughs.] I mean, we got through YC, and we just finished fundraising. But we’re just getting started. We haven’t hired anyone yet, and we’re trying to be thoughtful: company values, run rate, in-person or remote, all that stuff. We’re able to stay lean now, and maybe hire 3-5 people in the next year.
And we’re doing what we did at Firebase: talking to developers, understanding what they need, and building. Just building. It’s great, because we’re back to solving a core problem for developers: working in a sea of different SaaS projects and online software systems, and trying to manage configuration, version changes and compatibility. Gold Fig’s ability to show them all in one place, undo changes, set up environments for new hires on staging vs. production, it’s all based on what we’re hearing from our users.
I mean, at some point we were concerned that what we were building was too niche: only for people who had been burned by bad configs. We thought maybe it might be just DevOps managers or the security teams. Turns out, just about every developer has been in that situation. And it sucks. So now we have everyday developers to VPs of engineering reaching out to us to find out what we’re up to, and how we can help them.
